It is of course fairly obvious the home was only purchased to game the transplant waiting list system in place in the U.S. That he was placed ahead on the list in that state by the doctor in question is pure conjecture, though.
Not everyone can receive every organ that comes up for being transplanted. AFAIK, you need a fairly complex match of genetic compatibility for an organ to be actually useable for a given patient - and even in case of a "match", you need to keep taking fairly heavy immunosupressants during the rest of your life to keep your body from rejecting it. And since I would assume that there is a separate list for each (for lack of a better word - IANAMD) genetic category that donor organs come in: maybe SJ was indeed the front of the waiting list for the liver he ended up with? Without access to the relevant medical records that question is absolutely impossible to answer.
What does surprise me is that he got a transplant at all in the first place. In Europe, advanced stage cancer patients usually are not eligible to receive any transplants whatsoever, due to the general scarcity of donor organs, and the low expected benefits of transplantation in such a patient. This seems to be different in the U.S., though, otherwise someone else would already have commented on that?
This is probably what he was thinking of in comparison. Go, take a look at that site, it's really worthwhile - and no, I'm not related to the author. And compared to that sort of Sci-Fi, his stuff *is* gloomy. But still.:-)
On the one hand, this looks like a typical ambulance chaser lawsuit, with fairly ridiculous demands being made, given the amount of "damage" that was actually inflicted. $200 vs. $5m - come on?
On the other hand, enabling the kid to easily (?) waste that much money via an iOS app is of course not o.k. on the part of Apple, given that nowadays you cannot expect that a commodity article like a smartphone will not end up being extensively used by minors. So the OS has to have reasonable safeguards. And, to be fair to them, it does have quite a number of them. Just apparently not enough of them.
Apple has also been accumulating quite a lot of bad karma for the heavy-handed, intransparent and sometimes downright brainless way they run their iOS walled garden. It stands to reason that quite a lot of people are probably trying to get "even" with them nowadays, just out of spite. So this lawsuit is just one of many, I would guess.
Unrelated (but then again, not *so* unrelated) example of how minors are "protected" in the walled garden:
Apps are apparently flagged as 17+ if they meet a variety of criteria. One of these is apparently price - anything above a certain $$$ is automatically 17+. Fair enough... except that there is only one 17+ category. And the more common reason for something being 17+ is of course... well, you guessed it.
This has led to iGlide Pro, the more expensive pro version of a very nice moving map application for soaring from Butterfly Aero, being classified as 17+. So the info tab for that app in iTunes now reads "frequent nudity" as one of the characteristics of the app. WTF? Nudity? In a moving map application that you use in a glider during flight? Sometimes, it's the little experiences like that which have the potential to ruin the reputation of a company for being capable of doing things properly. If they visibly don't care about things that make them look like asses, what about the other things you can't see?
Right, except that we are talking about fairly static images of (for all practical purposes, randomly placed) stars and galaxies billions of light years away. How exactly does one figure out gravitational effects between the stars and galaxies in such an image?
Remember in the age of iCloud, saving is continuous.
Good point. But I would wager that the jury is still out on whether such a continuous saving without any form of distinction on the part of the user whether the continuously saved changes are actually worth being saved is a good idea.
It's perfectly o.k. to continuously save stuff in the background all the time. But in the semantics everyone has gotten used to during the past 20 or so years of widespread GUI usage, things already have a somewhat different meaning. And, if you look at it right, all the "new" functionality is already there, only with somewhat different semantics. Point in case w/r to the continuous saving: so far, unless I press "save", all changes that I make in a document are to be considered tentative (automatic backups of the ongoing work notwithstanding). Pressing "save" is, if you will, a "commit" operation for what has been going on in that editor window. No explicit "save", no commit. This whole angle seems to be missing from the new Apple concepts, or did I miss something?
Because in this regard, continuous saving is a fairly asinine concept, since it screws up the usage case of editing a document, and then figuring that the changes were not worth it. So far, you just closed the window in that case, and these changes were intentionally lost. Now, you have to explicitly revert them. Which is not terrible, but... why? As with the duplicate vs. save as thing, these changes feel like someone at Apple was feeling under-appreciated, and wanted the world to see what a smart kid he is. But the rule #1 in UI design is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". Which Apple seems to have sinned against big time in this case.
Namely, that they could have had all the nice new versioning things underneath anyway, but should have kept the names in the menus? And that it was asinine for Apple to do it the way it did?
Your explanation, and in particular your "fixed" version of the workflow, actually helped me to understand this mess better. So at least for me, this exchange helped to clear things up - thanks!
The thing that got me started to reply in the first place was not anything you said, but the whole "paradigm" statement by the other poster. Once I hear the p-word, my canines suddenly extend some extra 10cm, and the urge to verbally slap people becomes very large...:-)
You have a point there. An in that modified form you describe, the whole thing would be much, much more intuitive (the form we have now is horrible). But I still don't really see the point of making the change to the "Duplicate" semantics in the first place, even in the fixed form. The issue is not the manual saving as such - I agree with you that this is obsolete in a well-built versioning file system.
But still. See, if I have a file "letter_template.foo", and want to use it for a letter of mine... propeller-shift-s is my way of duplicating stuff, and has been for the last two decades. Either you already have a mental model of what is going on when you interact with a file system (in this case: having to save the template under a different name, lest you overwrite it), or you are not going to "get" the new semantics, either.
Especially in the modified form you describe, the "Duplicate" semantics of file interaction are not bad - but I would not call them significantly more intuitive than what we had so far. So why bother with upsetting everyone except a few purists?
Oh my. So much fanboi-ness in such a short sentence. Plus the condescending attitude of the True Believer in All Things Fruity.
See, it boils down to this: if it works for people (by and large, at least), and they like it, it's a success. If most people hate it, it was a stupid idea.
That simple line of reasoning has been at the core of Apple's success all those years. M$' various OS always let you see and interact with all sorts of $COMPLICATED_CRAP that no-one should have been seeing in the first place, and that exposed way too much of the inner workings of the OS and filesystem. On the other hand, OS X (and arguably both its predecessors, System [1..9] and NeXT) were always designed with the end user in mind. As in: they were designed so they would make life easy for the average guy in front of the screen, and not for the guy with a degree in CS. Of course, over time Apple has made its share of blunders w/r to usability as well. But by and large, they profited enormously in this department by being guided by a choleric monomaniac who seemingly accepted nothing short of perfection.
That having been said, the whole idea of me having to re-adjust to a "new paradigm" to make full use of a versioned filesystem is horseshit. You can have a versioned filesystem underneath, and retain exactly the old semantics for saving and copying. There is *zero* reason to alter this. And if you do, you fall into exactly the same trap as M$ has so many times over: you end up exposing something to the user level that no-one except for us CS geeks gives a rat's ass about. And even I (being one of them) don't want to see this sort of stuff close up and personal. I want my propeller-shift-s back. And don't want to do "Duplicate-Save" for exactly the same operation.
So what would have been wrong with keeping "Save as...", and making that action count as a branch?
After all, the beauty of Apple products lies in making things simple. And after using it for some months now, the whole "Duplicate" thing still seems like a major screw-up in terms of usability. With no clear semantic gain in sight?
Because we know for sure that said agencies have to go through the usual legal channels to get information, and sometimes they are not obliged. It is well documented.
If you look at the history of WW2, and in particular the Enigma/Ultra story, you will find the part where the Brits had people working on the problem how many freighters they had to let the Germans sink, so they would not come to the conclusion that their codes had been broken. They could have saved most of their convoys, but if they had done this, the Germans would have cottoned onto Enigma being broken fairly soon. So they had to play a game of "pretend", in which they succeeded admirably. Even though it was a fairly ghoulish thing to do, letting lots of your own people die so the secret of Enigma being broken remained safe.
It might very well be that a similar consideration applies here. What sort of impression would it make if the various *** agencies stopped making "proper" requests for information altogether? That would make it bloody obvious that they have reliable other means of accessing said information anyway. So the presence of such requests unfortunately does not say much about the existence (or non-existence) of any systematic backdooring attempts in modern consumer hard- and software.
We also know that one of the reasons Google pulled out of China was the government making unreasonable demands for access to data, which Google refused.
Or so the official story goes. And even if it were true - you can only be in bed with so many secret services at once. Just because Google gives Uncle Sam preferential treatment does not mean they would not balk at doing likewise with the Chinese government.
The Stasi is a very interesting example. That deserves a closer look, to dispel any notions that any of the current *** outfits is remotely comparable.
First, the Stasi might not have been all that well paid in monetary terms. But the sum total of what a full Stasi employee in good standing had access to (by local standards very nice holiday opportunities for the family, better housing, sometimes even a car, and whatnot) arguably pretty much made them a separate class within the East German state. Not as well off as the actual party apparatchiks, but far ahead of any normal citizen. In a communist society, money couldn't buy you all that much anyway, so one has to look at the broader picture to assess how "well off" someone was in that sort of society.
Second, the Stasi was never the same thing as the regular police of East Germany. They were always a separate entity that was tasked with things such as (counter-)espionage both at home and abroad (by all means, including dirty ones), and the silencing of political dissenters (again by all means deemed necessary) - but never with regular policing as such. This distinction, and in particular their refreshing openness about "any means necessary for the job" being acceptable, is, at least in my opinion, an important point to note. The Stasi never had any pretensions about being an organisation that deemed itself entirely above the law. They were the "sword and shield of the party" (that was actually their official motto) - and to them, no moral or legal standards applied, except their own.
Which is a *huge* difference from even a very corrupt U.S. police department, or the bad parts of, say, an alphabet soup agency. Nowhere in the U.S. will you find members of the intelligence community who are openly contemptuous of the rule of law. Corrupt and evil things unfortunately do happen in law enforcement circles, but they are never an *accepted part of the organisation's official culture* like they were with the Stasi.
And by extension, there is also a third point that follows from what I just said. The Stasi was an organisation which actively recruited persons who were, well, fairly "special" in that they felt right at home in that sort of environment. The only really valid criticism of the (otherwise fantastic) film "The Lives of Others" that I have head so far is that someone like the protagonist (a Stasi officer who develops second thoughts about his "work") would never have been recruited in the first place, because the Stasi was very good at avoiding anyone who might be liable to start asking questions later. During the entire existence of the DDR, there were practically no defections worth mentioning of anyone within the Stasi. Which is a pretty impressive track record, given the huge size of that organisation.
This has implications for the existing U.S. intelligence services insofar as running an outfit like the Stasi apparently required active psychological monitoring to seed out dissenters, in order to build up the very special cadre of people you need for such a psychopathic organisation. For instance, the Stasi reputedly had an extremely anti-intellectual "work culture", which, amongst many other things, helped to get rid of anyone who was likely to think too much on his own.
The existing U.S. intelligence services are all *not* built on such psychopathic foundations. Recruitment happens pretty much from the general population (pending security clearance, and all that, but still), so the personnel base of the *** agencies is nowhere near the kind of pathological personality mix you would need to run a Stasi. Or, even more importantly, to transform an existing *** agency into a Stasi. Even with the more or less scary developments of the past few years, this should give some consolation to those of you who worry where all this will lead to. Something like the Stasi does not happen easily, and not overnight. And it does *not* grow out of the institutions of a normal society. The *** agencies might not all be very nice and cuddly, but fortunately, there is a world of difference still.
You have a valid point of sorts there - unfortunately.
However, I would still contend that the relationship between the "genuine" spooks and the wall street crooks is not as bad as the extremely unhealthy "revolving doors" world which exists between certain industries, and the federal agencies that are supposed to monitor them.
Rather, a large part of investment banking of course depends on having up-to-date intelligence, and having it preferably faster than your competition does. Which has led to some of these outfits developing minor (and actually not so minor) "secret services" in their own right, just to gather that sort of data. These outfits are of course highly geared and specialised towards the sort of knowledge that comes in handy for economic matters - and by extension, economic warfare.
In times of crisis, it would arguably be fairly stupid of the "classical" *** agencies to *not* make use of these additional resources, if they happen to exist within the U.S. already. So talking to JP Morgan et al., and using the information they provide in intelligence reports (and providing some pieces of information in return), is not automatically a sign that *** are particularly intensively connected on an organisational level. Which would indeed be a reason for deep concern, given the personnel structure of the Wall Street outfits, their personal ethics, and their personal backgrounds.
How can anyone be so naive to assume that any system that is commercially produced in large numbers these days does *not* have in-built backdoors for the alphabet soup agencies? Living under a rock much, are we?
Because of the huge lawsuit that will follow once it backfires.
Which of course is only a valid objection if said backdoors are reliably traceable to the perpetrators. But if one of the *** agencies orders a company X to place such a backdoor in a product, you can bet that every last bit of discussion about this activity is an official secret, removed from public scrutiny for at least several decades. Good luck with "proving" anything in this regard, even in court.
And without any proof, good luck with having this publicly backfire on the *** agencies in any measurable way. It's not like these chaps are so stupid to put encryption keys that actually start with "NSA_" in shipping OS releases anymore.
How can anyone be so naive to assume that any system that is commercially produced in large numbers these days does *not* have in-built backdoors for the alphabet soup agencies? Living under a rock much, are we?
Same goes for Google, Facebook and all the rest. If you, even for one second, assume that the three letter agencies do not have permanent liaison staff at the HQs of these companies, and are not free to browse the data accumulated by these companies at will (including specially built data mining apps that cater for their needs, and their needs alone), you are seriously deluded.
Sorry to put it this bluntly, but reality can be a bit harsh at times.
The only real question is what to do about this status quo, and whether it is both possible, or realistic, to ever change it. All things considering, our society is arguably (still) the most free society on the planet. "They" are listening to everything, which is most definitely not the way it should be. But then, "they" have also not been hugely disruptive of discourse within society so far - mainly, I would wager, because "they" are mostly fairly normal citizens who work for the *** agencies. In particular, "they" are not a pampered, segregated elite of any sort, e.g. like the IT minions of the investment banking crooks^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrowd, or the secret service bastards of the former communist countries (who enjoyed considerable privileges beyond what normal citizens ever got). Rather, due to the never-too-stellar payment schemes of government services, the people in charge of all this are, by and large, fairly normal people. Most of them, at least. To quite some degree, I would wager that we can fairly safely count on that sort of people not being all too willing to cooperate in the creation of an actively evil 1984-ish state (as opposed to the passively listening one we have at the moment).
This is not to say that these developments are in any way positive. Nor is it to say that we should just roll over, and stop fighting developments like that. No way. We need to sharpen our instincts for (as it were) "digital freedom" much, much more. But as a part of this, we also need to be realistic about the status quo. Which is currently... odd: theoretically fairly evil, but in practice, apparently still fairly manageable.
Your comment made me feel old. A bit, at least.:-)
Because I have to agree with you. It's been 20 years since I last programmed Pascal, and have gotten so extremely used to C that it took your posting to make me reconsider what both look like from a novice's view. Point taken, is all I can say. With the addendum that C isn't all that bad, given how many people, myself included, managed to get perfectly fluent in it (so to speak).
In my opinion, the Pascal syntax for pointers was less intuitive because the chaps who developed Pascal were not the sort of people who actually liked to have pointers in a HLL - or at least, who liked to use them there. Nikolaus Wirth was more interested in higher level concepts, but pointers had to be there for the language to be more of a plaything (remember LOGO?), so they were added. Without much love being lost on them in the process.
For DMR, on the other hand, pointers were part of a proper language ecosystem right from the get-go. It's no surprise that they feel more natural in C (the world's favourite macro assembler) than they do in Pascal...:-)
You have a point about him probably being a celebrity. But a case can be made that he was probably "only" a local celebrity during his life, which together with his totally non-threatening stance vis-a-vis the Roman occupation would have made him someone who still did not show up on the radar screen of the occupying forces. These had other stuff to worry about - real rebels and bandits, for instance.
As far as the attendance at these events go, you have to factor in that as far as we can tell, most (if not all) of his major outdoor gatherings took place in the countryside around the Sea of Galilee. Which was, by the standards of the day, a reasonably populated area. Apparently, Jesus lived in Kapharnaum at the start of his ministry, which according to the archaeological record could have been a town of several thousand inhabitants. And there were other comparable towns in the area (Tiberias, for instance, which still exists, and is within approx. two hours walking distance from Kapharnaum), and of course lots of smaller villages. Even if the figure of 5000 was to be taken literally, you would not have had to completely empty all human settlements in a hundred mile radius to achieve this sort of turnout.
But as someone else pointed out already, the figure is most likely meant as a figure of speech for "a huge crowd" - whatever that meant, back in the day.
Wasn't he out in the country when he did the loaves/fish miracle? Fed 5,000 people who hadn't been home to eat, IIRC.
As far as I always understood this, the 5000 had gathered from the surrounding countryside (say, from villages up to a day's march away - hence the motivation to offer them dinner), after word had spread that he would be preaching. Which would imply that they just came there for the event, and went home afterwards. Which would be much less conspicuous (or out of the ordinary) than 5k people actually following Jesus through the countryside for any length of time. That would indeed get complicated - you'd need infrastructure for a camp, and all that.
However, if some populist prophet really had been leading several thousand followers around the countryside in First Century Judea, the Romans would have come down on them like a ton of bricks, and we'd probably be hearing about how 5000 people were crucified for sedition in 30 AD.
Although the bible does not really give an extremely clear timeline of the last two, three years of Jesus' life, it can be inferred with some certainty that he did not actually roam about the countryside with a couple of thousand followers at any point. If he did, it is certainly not mentioned at all, which would be odd in and by itself. There were several isolated events where a large number of people congregated to listen to him (e.g. the sermon on the mount), but mostly he was wandering around with a small-ish number of followers during his ministry (if you want to call the religiously "active" phase of his life that).
And such a small group would not necessarily have attracted the attention of the Romans, especially since he did not incite people to "get rid of the Roman swine who defile our country", or anything like that. He usually talked and lectured about totally different things - so why should any Romans, if they had even noticed them, bother to send a cohort to chase them? To most of them, Jesus and his disciples were probably just the sort of dime-a-dozen itinerant religious nutters who simply did not warrant further attention. That he occasionally held large spontaneous gatherings would not have altered this perception, since that a) probably happened not that infrequently elsewhere along the countryside either, b) the gatherings were peaceful, and c) probably happened far from Roman army bases. In a thinly populated country, with a - compared to the size of the country - fairly small presence of regular Roman army units. They probably never noticed most of his activities that happened outside Jerusalem.
So IMHO, it is fairly safe to assume that the Romans had other fish to fry than to chase Jesus and his disciples. Especially since it is highly likely that at all times during the occupation there was an actual, militant Jewish resistance movement which was directly dangerous to them. That sort of thing would have captured their attention, and not someone preaching forgiveness.
Well, yes, of course - the planet itself is apparently not the same thing (although little is said about the size of Solaris in the book, if I remember correctly).
However, Tatooine orbits a close binary, while the planet in the novel Solaris orbits a much more widely spaced system that (sort of, at least) resembles the system this planet belongs to.
Recently, we hosted a small-ish academic conference here at the university where I work, and I was one of the local organisers. Since we are in CS, potential sponsors are all the big name computing companies - Intel et. al.
Intel was very nice (it helped that we knew some researchers who work there, but still - everyone else was genuinely nice as well), and sponsored us. And interestingly, they have one non-negotiable condition for sponsoring academic conferences: the authors of presented papers *must* be allowed to put pre-prints of the papers (i.e. PDFs of the paper) on the web free of charge.
And that is a seriously cool think to ask for, because it prevents any sponsoring to go to the sort of conference which has papers disappear from general sight after publication, and only stores them behind a paywall of some sort. This is almost as important for research as the whole patents thing - *huge* kudos to Intel overall, someone has a major clue there!
Let me guess: you've never actually worked at a university, at least not in a tenure-level job?
Sure, they can't (easily) fire you personally if you go after vested industry interests once you are tenured - but your life becomes fairly difficult regardless. See, your own job is only part of the story when working at a uni these days: practically all meaningful research tasks require some sort of collaboration, either with other research groups, or with your PhD students. For the latter you need third party funding, and for the former, connections to other research groups.
Neither of which will be there anymore once you are ostracised by "the community" (via pressure from Big Money). Also, even if you do manage to pull in some third party money regardless, you will have a hard time finding good PhD students in your field, if you are the odd one out who is publicly at loggerheads with some powerful industry lobby. PhD students are typically not interested in associating with someone whose name on their resume as PhD supervisor would be a career death sentence for themselves in their chosen field.
So in a very large number of cases, even tenured professors just keep their mouths shut to avoid trouble. Sorry if I just ruined your idealised view of universities, but unfortunately, they are much more down to earth in this regard than is good for our society.
You apparently do not really understand what Objective-C is about yet. Yeah, I know, "you don't know what you are talking about" is the classical ad hominem attack in any programming language flamewar. But in my opinion, it is hard to see how anyone who has actually taken the time to look at Objective-C closely could ever refer to it as being a "poor man's C++".
Now calling it a "poor man's Smalltalk", well, you might have a point there. But C++? ObjC and C++ are both in some way descended from C, but that is where the conceptual similarities end. The ObjC runtime is dynamic, which is IMHO a blessing, compared to the strict typing and template system of C++. But I'll grant you any day that Obj-C could do with some modernisation, in particular w/r to namespaces.
But even the other thing you mention, operator overloading... that is absent for a reason, simply because software design works differently in ObjC. You don't really need it in the same way that you do with C++. Same with multiple inheritance. You have protocols for that, amongst other things.
So please give ObjC another, more in-depth look, some time. You might be surprised in a positive way, once you look past the admittedly rather weird syntax.
Done: enter the Antares of Lange Flugzeugbau, Germany
And in that case, the electric system is actually mounted in a proper glider - in terms of gliding performance, the Antares is currently one of the hottest ships that money can buy. This is the rig that most glider pilots drool over these days... EASA certified, and ready for ordering. It's been in production for some years, actually. The only thing you have to worry about with such a rig is your electricity bill...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It is of course fairly obvious the home was only purchased to game the transplant waiting list system in place in the U.S. That he was placed ahead on the list in that state by the doctor in question is pure conjecture, though.
Not everyone can receive every organ that comes up for being transplanted. AFAIK, you need a fairly complex match of genetic compatibility for an organ to be actually useable for a given patient - and even in case of a "match", you need to keep taking fairly heavy immunosupressants during the rest of your life to keep your body from rejecting it. And since I would assume that there is a separate list for each (for lack of a better word - IANAMD) genetic category that donor organs come in: maybe SJ was indeed the front of the waiting list for the liver he ended up with? Without access to the relevant medical records that question is absolutely impossible to answer.
What does surprise me is that he got a transplant at all in the first place. In Europe, advanced stage cancer patients usually are not eligible to receive any transplants whatsoever, due to the general scarcity of donor organs, and the low expected benefits of transplantation in such a patient. This seems to be different in the U.S., though, otherwise someone else would already have commented on that?
"Tales of a Future Past":
http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm
This is probably what he was thinking of in comparison. Go, take a look at that site, it's really worthwhile - and no, I'm not related to the author. And compared to that sort of Sci-Fi, his stuff *is* gloomy. But still. :-)
On the one hand, this looks like a typical ambulance chaser lawsuit, with fairly ridiculous demands being made, given the amount of "damage" that was actually inflicted. $200 vs. $5m - come on?
On the other hand, enabling the kid to easily (?) waste that much money via an iOS app is of course not o.k. on the part of Apple, given that nowadays you cannot expect that a commodity article like a smartphone will not end up being extensively used by minors. So the OS has to have reasonable safeguards. And, to be fair to them, it does have quite a number of them. Just apparently not enough of them.
Apple has also been accumulating quite a lot of bad karma for the heavy-handed, intransparent and sometimes downright brainless way they run their iOS walled garden. It stands to reason that quite a lot of people are probably trying to get "even" with them nowadays, just out of spite. So this lawsuit is just one of many, I would guess.
Unrelated (but then again, not *so* unrelated) example of how minors are "protected" in the walled garden:
Apps are apparently flagged as 17+ if they meet a variety of criteria. One of these is apparently price - anything above a certain $$$ is automatically 17+. Fair enough... except that there is only one 17+ category. And the more common reason for something being 17+ is of course... well, you guessed it.
This has led to iGlide Pro, the more expensive pro version of a very nice moving map application for soaring from Butterfly Aero, being classified as 17+. So the info tab for that app in iTunes now reads "frequent nudity" as one of the characteristics of the app. WTF? Nudity? In a moving map application that you use in a glider during flight? Sometimes, it's the little experiences like that which have the potential to ruin the reputation of a company for being capable of doing things properly. If they visibly don't care about things that make them look like asses, what about the other things you can't see?
Right, except that we are talking about fairly static images of (for all practical purposes, randomly placed) stars and galaxies billions of light years away. How exactly does one figure out gravitational effects between the stars and galaxies in such an image?
Remember in the age of iCloud, saving is continuous.
Good point. But I would wager that the jury is still out on whether such a continuous saving without any form of distinction on the part of the user whether the continuously saved changes are actually worth being saved is a good idea.
It's perfectly o.k. to continuously save stuff in the background all the time. But in the semantics everyone has gotten used to during the past 20 or so years of widespread GUI usage, things already have a somewhat different meaning. And, if you look at it right, all the "new" functionality is already there, only with somewhat different semantics. Point in case w/r to the continuous saving: so far, unless I press "save", all changes that I make in a document are to be considered tentative (automatic backups of the ongoing work notwithstanding). Pressing "save" is, if you will, a "commit" operation for what has been going on in that editor window. No explicit "save", no commit. This whole angle seems to be missing from the new Apple concepts, or did I miss something?
Because in this regard, continuous saving is a fairly asinine concept, since it screws up the usage case of editing a document, and then figuring that the changes were not worth it. So far, you just closed the window in that case, and these changes were intentionally lost. Now, you have to explicitly revert them. Which is not terrible, but... why? As with the duplicate vs. save as thing, these changes feel like someone at Apple was feeling under-appreciated, and wanted the world to see what a smart kid he is. But the rule #1 in UI design is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". Which Apple seems to have sinned against big time in this case.
But isn't that my original point? ;-)
Namely, that they could have had all the nice new versioning things underneath anyway, but should have kept the names in the menus? And that it was asinine for Apple to do it the way it did?
Your explanation, and in particular your "fixed" version of the workflow, actually helped me to understand this mess better. So at least for me, this exchange helped to clear things up - thanks!
The thing that got me started to reply in the first place was not anything you said, but the whole "paradigm" statement by the other poster. Once I hear the p-word, my canines suddenly extend some extra 10cm, and the urge to verbally slap people becomes very large... :-)
You have a point there. An in that modified form you describe, the whole thing would be much, much more intuitive (the form we have now is horrible). But I still don't really see the point of making the change to the "Duplicate" semantics in the first place, even in the fixed form. The issue is not the manual saving as such - I agree with you that this is obsolete in a well-built versioning file system.
But still. See, if I have a file "letter_template.foo", and want to use it for a letter of mine... propeller-shift-s is my way of duplicating stuff, and has been for the last two decades. Either you already have a mental model of what is going on when you interact with a file system (in this case: having to save the template under a different name, lest you overwrite it), or you are not going to "get" the new semantics, either.
Especially in the modified form you describe, the "Duplicate" semantics of file interaction are not bad - but I would not call them significantly more intuitive than what we had so far. So why bother with upsetting everyone except a few purists?
You haven't adjusted to the paradigm yet.
Oh my. So much fanboi-ness in such a short sentence. Plus the condescending attitude of the True Believer in All Things Fruity.
See, it boils down to this: if it works for people (by and large, at least), and they like it, it's a success. If most people hate it, it was a stupid idea.
That simple line of reasoning has been at the core of Apple's success all those years. M$' various OS always let you see and interact with all sorts of $COMPLICATED_CRAP that no-one should have been seeing in the first place, and that exposed way too much of the inner workings of the OS and filesystem. On the other hand, OS X (and arguably both its predecessors, System [1..9] and NeXT) were always designed with the end user in mind. As in: they were designed so they would make life easy for the average guy in front of the screen, and not for the guy with a degree in CS. Of course, over time Apple has made its share of blunders w/r to usability as well. But by and large, they profited enormously in this department by being guided by a choleric monomaniac who seemingly accepted nothing short of perfection.
That having been said, the whole idea of me having to re-adjust to a "new paradigm" to make full use of a versioned filesystem is horseshit. You can have a versioned filesystem underneath, and retain exactly the old semantics for saving and copying. There is *zero* reason to alter this. And if you do, you fall into exactly the same trap as M$ has so many times over: you end up exposing something to the user level that no-one except for us CS geeks gives a rat's ass about. And even I (being one of them) don't want to see this sort of stuff close up and personal. I want my propeller-shift-s back. And don't want to do "Duplicate-Save" for exactly the same operation.
So what would have been wrong with keeping "Save as...", and making that action count as a branch?
After all, the beauty of Apple products lies in making things simple. And after using it for some months now, the whole "Duplicate" thing still seems like a major screw-up in terms of usability. With no clear semantic gain in sight?
Because we know for sure that said agencies have to go through the usual legal channels to get information, and sometimes they are not obliged. It is well documented.
If you look at the history of WW2, and in particular the Enigma/Ultra story, you will find the part where the Brits had people working on the problem how many freighters they had to let the Germans sink, so they would not come to the conclusion that their codes had been broken. They could have saved most of their convoys, but if they had done this, the Germans would have cottoned onto Enigma being broken fairly soon. So they had to play a game of "pretend", in which they succeeded admirably. Even though it was a fairly ghoulish thing to do, letting lots of your own people die so the secret of Enigma being broken remained safe.
It might very well be that a similar consideration applies here. What sort of impression would it make if the various *** agencies stopped making "proper" requests for information altogether? That would make it bloody obvious that they have reliable other means of accessing said information anyway. So the presence of such requests unfortunately does not say much about the existence (or non-existence) of any systematic backdooring attempts in modern consumer hard- and software.
We also know that one of the reasons Google pulled out of China was the government making unreasonable demands for access to data, which Google refused.
Or so the official story goes. And even if it were true - you can only be in bed with so many secret services at once. Just because Google gives Uncle Sam preferential treatment does not mean they would not balk at doing likewise with the Chinese government.
The Stasi is a very interesting example. That deserves a closer look, to dispel any notions that any of the current *** outfits is remotely comparable.
First, the Stasi might not have been all that well paid in monetary terms. But the sum total of what a full Stasi employee in good standing had access to (by local standards very nice holiday opportunities for the family, better housing, sometimes even a car, and whatnot) arguably pretty much made them a separate class within the East German state. Not as well off as the actual party apparatchiks, but far ahead of any normal citizen. In a communist society, money couldn't buy you all that much anyway, so one has to look at the broader picture to assess how "well off" someone was in that sort of society.
Second, the Stasi was never the same thing as the regular police of East Germany. They were always a separate entity that was tasked with things such as (counter-)espionage both at home and abroad (by all means, including dirty ones), and the silencing of political dissenters (again by all means deemed necessary) - but never with regular policing as such. This distinction, and in particular their refreshing openness about "any means necessary for the job" being acceptable, is, at least in my opinion, an important point to note. The Stasi never had any pretensions about being an organisation that deemed itself entirely above the law. They were the "sword and shield of the party" (that was actually their official motto) - and to them, no moral or legal standards applied, except their own.
Which is a *huge* difference from even a very corrupt U.S. police department, or the bad parts of, say, an alphabet soup agency. Nowhere in the U.S. will you find members of the intelligence community who are openly contemptuous of the rule of law. Corrupt and evil things unfortunately do happen in law enforcement circles, but they are never an *accepted part of the organisation's official culture* like they were with the Stasi.
And by extension, there is also a third point that follows from what I just said. The Stasi was an organisation which actively recruited persons who were, well, fairly "special" in that they felt right at home in that sort of environment. The only really valid criticism of the (otherwise fantastic) film "The Lives of Others" that I have head so far is that someone like the protagonist (a Stasi officer who develops second thoughts about his "work") would never have been recruited in the first place, because the Stasi was very good at avoiding anyone who might be liable to start asking questions later. During the entire existence of the DDR, there were practically no defections worth mentioning of anyone within the Stasi. Which is a pretty impressive track record, given the huge size of that organisation.
This has implications for the existing U.S. intelligence services insofar as running an outfit like the Stasi apparently required active psychological monitoring to seed out dissenters, in order to build up the very special cadre of people you need for such a psychopathic organisation. For instance, the Stasi reputedly had an extremely anti-intellectual "work culture", which, amongst many other things, helped to get rid of anyone who was likely to think too much on his own.
The existing U.S. intelligence services are all *not* built on such psychopathic foundations. Recruitment happens pretty much from the general population (pending security clearance, and all that, but still), so the personnel base of the *** agencies is nowhere near the kind of pathological personality mix you would need to run a Stasi. Or, even more importantly, to transform an existing *** agency into a Stasi. Even with the more or less scary developments of the past few years, this should give some consolation to those of you who worry where all this will lead to. Something like the Stasi does not happen easily, and not overnight. And it does *not* grow out of the institutions of a normal society. The *** agencies might not all be very nice and cuddly, but fortunately, there is a world of difference still.
You have a valid point of sorts there - unfortunately.
However, I would still contend that the relationship between the "genuine" spooks and the wall street crooks is not as bad as the extremely unhealthy "revolving doors" world which exists between certain industries, and the federal agencies that are supposed to monitor them.
Rather, a large part of investment banking of course depends on having up-to-date intelligence, and having it preferably faster than your competition does. Which has led to some of these outfits developing minor (and actually not so minor) "secret services" in their own right, just to gather that sort of data. These outfits are of course highly geared and specialised towards the sort of knowledge that comes in handy for economic matters - and by extension, economic warfare.
In times of crisis, it would arguably be fairly stupid of the "classical" *** agencies to *not* make use of these additional resources, if they happen to exist within the U.S. already. So talking to JP Morgan et al., and using the information they provide in intelligence reports (and providing some pieces of information in return), is not automatically a sign that *** are particularly intensively connected on an organisational level. Which would indeed be a reason for deep concern, given the personnel structure of the Wall Street outfits, their personal ethics, and their personal backgrounds.
How can anyone be so naive to assume that any system that is commercially produced in large numbers these days does *not* have in-built backdoors for the alphabet soup agencies? Living under a rock much, are we?
Because of the huge lawsuit that will follow once it backfires.
Which of course is only a valid objection if said backdoors are reliably traceable to the perpetrators. But if one of the *** agencies orders a company X to place such a backdoor in a product, you can bet that every last bit of discussion about this activity is an official secret, removed from public scrutiny for at least several decades. Good luck with "proving" anything in this regard, even in court.
And without any proof, good luck with having this publicly backfire on the *** agencies in any measurable way. It's not like these chaps are so stupid to put encryption keys that actually start with "NSA_" in shipping OS releases anymore.
How can anyone be so naive to assume that any system that is commercially produced in large numbers these days does *not* have in-built backdoors for the alphabet soup agencies? Living under a rock much, are we?
Same goes for Google, Facebook and all the rest. If you, even for one second, assume that the three letter agencies do not have permanent liaison staff at the HQs of these companies, and are not free to browse the data accumulated by these companies at will (including specially built data mining apps that cater for their needs, and their needs alone), you are seriously deluded.
Sorry to put it this bluntly, but reality can be a bit harsh at times.
The only real question is what to do about this status quo, and whether it is both possible, or realistic, to ever change it. All things considering, our society is arguably (still) the most free society on the planet. "They" are listening to everything, which is most definitely not the way it should be. But then, "they" have also not been hugely disruptive of discourse within society so far - mainly, I would wager, because "they" are mostly fairly normal citizens who work for the *** agencies. In particular, "they" are not a pampered, segregated elite of any sort, e.g. like the IT minions of the investment banking crooks^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrowd, or the secret service bastards of the former communist countries (who enjoyed considerable privileges beyond what normal citizens ever got). Rather, due to the never-too-stellar payment schemes of government services, the people in charge of all this are, by and large, fairly normal people. Most of them, at least. To quite some degree, I would wager that we can fairly safely count on that sort of people not being all too willing to cooperate in the creation of an actively evil 1984-ish state (as opposed to the passively listening one we have at the moment).
This is not to say that these developments are in any way positive. Nor is it to say that we should just roll over, and stop fighting developments like that. No way. We need to sharpen our instincts for (as it were) "digital freedom" much, much more. But as a part of this, we also need to be realistic about the status quo. Which is currently... odd: theoretically fairly evil, but in practice, apparently still fairly manageable.
Just my 0.2$
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Your comment made me feel old. A bit, at least. :-)
Because I have to agree with you. It's been 20 years since I last programmed Pascal, and have gotten so extremely used to C that it took your posting to make me reconsider what both look like from a novice's view. Point taken, is all I can say. With the addendum that C isn't all that bad, given how many people, myself included, managed to get perfectly fluent in it (so to speak).
In my opinion, the Pascal syntax for pointers was less intuitive because the chaps who developed Pascal were not the sort of people who actually liked to have pointers in a HLL - or at least, who liked to use them there. Nikolaus Wirth was more interested in higher level concepts, but pointers had to be there for the language to be more of a plaything (remember LOGO?), so they were added. Without much love being lost on them in the process.
For DMR, on the other hand, pointers were part of a proper language ecosystem right from the get-go. It's no surprise that they feel more natural in C (the world's favourite macro assembler) than they do in Pascal... :-)
You have a point about him probably being a celebrity. But a case can be made that he was probably "only" a local celebrity during his life, which together with his totally non-threatening stance vis-a-vis the Roman occupation would have made him someone who still did not show up on the radar screen of the occupying forces. These had other stuff to worry about - real rebels and bandits, for instance.
As far as the attendance at these events go, you have to factor in that as far as we can tell, most (if not all) of his major outdoor gatherings took place in the countryside around the Sea of Galilee. Which was, by the standards of the day, a reasonably populated area. Apparently, Jesus lived in Kapharnaum at the start of his ministry, which according to the archaeological record could have been a town of several thousand inhabitants. And there were other comparable towns in the area (Tiberias, for instance, which still exists, and is within approx. two hours walking distance from Kapharnaum), and of course lots of smaller villages. Even if the figure of 5000 was to be taken literally, you would not have had to completely empty all human settlements in a hundred mile radius to achieve this sort of turnout.
But as someone else pointed out already, the figure is most likely meant as a figure of speech for "a huge crowd" - whatever that meant, back in the day.
Wasn't he out in the country when he did the loaves/fish miracle? Fed 5,000 people who hadn't been home to eat, IIRC.
As far as I always understood this, the 5000 had gathered from the surrounding countryside (say, from villages up to a day's march away - hence the motivation to offer them dinner), after word had spread that he would be preaching. Which would imply that they just came there for the event, and went home afterwards. Which would be much less conspicuous (or out of the ordinary) than 5k people actually following Jesus through the countryside for any length of time. That would indeed get complicated - you'd need infrastructure for a camp, and all that.
However, if some populist prophet really had been leading several thousand followers around the countryside in First Century Judea, the Romans would have come down on them like a ton of bricks, and we'd probably be hearing about how 5000 people were crucified for sedition in 30 AD.
Although the bible does not really give an extremely clear timeline of the last two, three years of Jesus' life, it can be inferred with some certainty that he did not actually roam about the countryside with a couple of thousand followers at any point. If he did, it is certainly not mentioned at all, which would be odd in and by itself. There were several isolated events where a large number of people congregated to listen to him (e.g. the sermon on the mount), but mostly he was wandering around with a small-ish number of followers during his ministry (if you want to call the religiously "active" phase of his life that).
And such a small group would not necessarily have attracted the attention of the Romans, especially since he did not incite people to "get rid of the Roman swine who defile our country", or anything like that. He usually talked and lectured about totally different things - so why should any Romans, if they had even noticed them, bother to send a cohort to chase them? To most of them, Jesus and his disciples were probably just the sort of dime-a-dozen itinerant religious nutters who simply did not warrant further attention. That he occasionally held large spontaneous gatherings would not have altered this perception, since that a) probably happened not that infrequently elsewhere along the countryside either, b) the gatherings were peaceful, and c) probably happened far from Roman army bases. In a thinly populated country, with a - compared to the size of the country - fairly small presence of regular Roman army units. They probably never noticed most of his activities that happened outside Jerusalem.
So IMHO, it is fairly safe to assume that the Romans had other fish to fry than to chase Jesus and his disciples. Especially since it is highly likely that at all times during the occupation there was an actual, militant Jewish resistance movement which was directly dangerous to them. That sort of thing would have captured their attention, and not someone preaching forgiveness.
Well, yes, of course - the planet itself is apparently not the same thing (although little is said about the size of Solaris in the book, if I remember correctly).
However, Tatooine orbits a close binary, while the planet in the novel Solaris orbits a much more widely spaced system that (sort of, at least) resembles the system this planet belongs to.
Tatooine? Would that thing not be much more like Solaris (the planet from the novel, not the OS), especially since it's density is that of water?
Recently, we hosted a small-ish academic conference here at the university where I work, and I was one of the local organisers. Since we are in CS, potential sponsors are all the big name computing companies - Intel et. al.
Intel was very nice (it helped that we knew some researchers who work there, but still - everyone else was genuinely nice as well), and sponsored us. And interestingly, they have one non-negotiable condition for sponsoring academic conferences: the authors of presented papers *must* be allowed to put pre-prints of the papers (i.e. PDFs of the paper) on the web free of charge.
And that is a seriously cool think to ask for, because it prevents any sponsoring to go to the sort of conference which has papers disappear from general sight after publication, and only stores them behind a paywall of some sort. This is almost as important for research as the whole patents thing - *huge* kudos to Intel overall, someone has a major clue there!
A.
Let me guess: you've never actually worked at a university, at least not in a tenure-level job?
Sure, they can't (easily) fire you personally if you go after vested industry interests once you are tenured - but your life becomes fairly difficult regardless. See, your own job is only part of the story when working at a uni these days: practically all meaningful research tasks require some sort of collaboration, either with other research groups, or with your PhD students. For the latter you need third party funding, and for the former, connections to other research groups.
Neither of which will be there anymore once you are ostracised by "the community" (via pressure from Big Money). Also, even if you do manage to pull in some third party money regardless, you will have a hard time finding good PhD students in your field, if you are the odd one out who is publicly at loggerheads with some powerful industry lobby. PhD students are typically not interested in associating with someone whose name on their resume as PhD supervisor would be a career death sentence for themselves in their chosen field.
So in a very large number of cases, even tenured professors just keep their mouths shut to avoid trouble. Sorry if I just ruined your idealised view of universities, but unfortunately, they are much more down to earth in this regard than is good for our society.
You apparently do not really understand what Objective-C is about yet. Yeah, I know, "you don't know what you are talking about" is the classical ad hominem attack in any programming language flamewar. But in my opinion, it is hard to see how anyone who has actually taken the time to look at Objective-C closely could ever refer to it as being a "poor man's C++".
Now calling it a "poor man's Smalltalk", well, you might have a point there. But C++? ObjC and C++ are both in some way descended from C, but that is where the conceptual similarities end. The ObjC runtime is dynamic, which is IMHO a blessing, compared to the strict typing and template system of C++. But I'll grant you any day that Obj-C could do with some modernisation, in particular w/r to namespaces.
But even the other thing you mention, operator overloading... that is absent for a reason, simply because software design works differently in ObjC. You don't really need it in the same way that you do with C++. Same with multiple inheritance. You have protocols for that, amongst other things.
So please give ObjC another, more in-depth look, some time. You might be surprised in a positive way, once you look past the admittedly rather weird syntax.
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Done: enter the Antares of Lange Flugzeugbau, Germany
And in that case, the electric system is actually mounted in a proper glider - in terms of gliding performance, the Antares is currently one of the hottest ships that money can buy. This is the rig that most glider pilots drool over these days... EASA certified, and ready for ordering. It's been in production for some years, actually. The only thing you have to worry about with such a rig is your electricity bill... :-)