A phased millimeter-wave radar array with sufficient range would not only let you find a sniper in a building, but it would let you know what kind of rifle he was holding and for that matter whether he was circumcised or not and what parts of his body were pierced.
It would also let you know if he had a radar-seeking countermeasure. You would be able to tell by the tunnel with the light.
I don't think bears would know the difference between a cruise missile and, say, a 747.
But what if they were bears that could shoot lasers out of their eyes. That would be so frickin' AWESOME.
It's a great thing to be able to know where the threat is, first off. It's a huge improvement over knowing nothing.
Second, the stuff I've read from milblogs and the like leads me to believe that there are rules about what they will hit. This doesn't change that. It's not like the robot has a missile launcher on it's back that it can autonomously respond with. This makes it easier to have a measured response because you know exactly where the threat is.
If you were really concerned about decreasing collateral damage, I think you would consider this a huge benefit. But hey, don't let me stop you from thinking with your political platform!
You are repeating conventional wisdom without making a single logically defendable point. Just because a particular advance was made by gov't funded research doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been made some other way if the gov't wasn't taking your money from you to do it instead. There is no point in a company doing anything that the gov't is doing, because the gov't can force people to invest.
Have you looked into the history of the amendment that supposedly authorizes the income tax? There is a question as to whether it was even legitimately passed. You pay it without questioning it just like you repeat these arguments without questioning them.
The tuberculosis vaccine was created by a private foundation. I can't find a source saying that gov't funding led to aspirin--Bayer was a private company, wasn't it? In any case, it's noteworthy that you bring up things invented in Germany and France in a discussion about American income tax. I think you just grabbed those out of the air to make your point sound valid.
People would pay to use highways--highways are completely achievable with private money. Insured bank deposits are probably also doable privately, but it's unlikely that anyone will want to step up to do that when the gov't is in the business.
Don't try to say "hey, but look at all the really good things we did with the money we stole from people!". I would be very surprised to find that the gov't effectively used half of what it took--maybe you should be asking yourself what else we would have cured by now if the money that would have done it wasn't going into bureaucrats' pockets.
There's nothing legitimate for them to spend tax money on when the tax money itself is not legitimate. If a large number of people want to get together and do that with their money, they should be able to choose to do so. A large number of people should not be allowed to take money from me by force and then decide what causes they think are deserving/promising. That's just theft by the majority, it doesn't make it right.
The interview you posted paints him as nothing of the sort you are implying. He very humbly states what he learned and where he ended up even though what he did was not what he hoped to contribute to the field. It looks to me like you went off looking for evidence to condemn the man and "found it" because you wanted to interpret it that way.
His statements about homework all focus on the fact that doing homework didn't make sense to him. He did not condemn it outright as a stupid idea that wouldn't work for anyone. He just said that it would never be something he would do personally, and that that was why _he_ didn't go on in traditional education, but instead wrote an open source product.
He did describe something that he was willing to do for a real project and as an aside said he would never have done it for a class--so without knowing you were going to misrepresent him here, he countered your argument in advance. You imply that he hypocritically derides homework while supporting the "homework of coding". But he lays out plainly that he wouldn't do the tedious stuff precisely when there is no point in doing it. So he clarified his position on the fact that he sees the importance of tedium but only when it applies to a real product you are working on.
He didn't claim that tedium will never help anyone. Maybe that's how other people learn, ok for them. All he said was that _he_ wouldn't have wanted to do stuff like that for a class.
I have no idea if he committed the crime or not. But it's a damn poor time in this person's life for you to be taking a few statements from an interview completely out of context and disparaging hime when he has no time to defend himself.
I was wondering why some guy smart enough and sane enough to develop a filesystem would go and murder his wife.
I'm just wondering why someone smart enough and sane enough to be posting on slashdot would assume that someone murdered his wife just because the police arrested him on circumstantial evidence which hasn't been divulged. Oh, wait...
I would be interested to know how many of the people commenting have been personally acquainted with a murder suspect. I was, once. Air Force guy, he was deployed, his wife fooled around on him. She ended up shot one night. He had taken the kids to a party that night, but I don't think he had any witnesses to account for how he was spending his time at the time of the murder.
Luckily, he had good enough luck/lawyer/whatever that he remained free. I was at a cafe near the base one time and I heard a couple of deputies/cops discussing the case. Their take? They knew it was him, they just couldn't get enough evidence together to convict.
Fast forward a year later, they found the guy that really did it.
Moral of the story--if she's sleeping around, her husband is likely not the only person she's pissed off. Oh, and cop "instinct" is why we need very picky, painstakingly applied laws about collection and use of evidence.
In this case, it's probably not so much a question of support (at least for the QT example). This guy and his buddies are probably not high maintenance, they don't really need the support, they just want the ability to produce commercial software. What should probably happen is that the vendors should create a royalty agreement on a percentage of the sale price (with a bottom value--never do a straight percentage. Microsoft negotiated with SpyGlass to give them a straight percentage of IE sales, then started giving it away for nothing).
That way a small, smart developer who doesn't need help from the vendor, but just wants to make money, but doesn't know yet how much money they can make, can get in, and the vendor still gets a return.
What I'm saying (poorly) is that the vendor is hurting itself here, by placing the barrier to trying to get a commercial product going too high for a small developer.
(b) It's possible that this kid's life is better because he has some electronic distractions than it would be without him. This kid is in a horrible situation, and if you could somehow "help" him by making all of his options for electronic entertainment go away it could very well increase his suffering. In other words, it's a sad story, but it probably argues for the opposite of your conclusion (gp post's conclusion I mean) rather than for it.
Just wanted to share a humorous tidbit with you. When I got notification via email that you had responded, this was the in-email ad:
Ever wonder why HP has seven consecutive years of Linux market share leadership? Maybe it's our portfolio of best-of-breed partner products, or HP value-add in management, high availability, and virtualization. Maybe it's the integrated, consolidated infrastructure of HP BladeSystem, single-source accountability and solution support from HP Services in 160 countries, or just our unwavering commitment to the open source community. See: http://showcase.linux.com/hposms.tmpl
Pretty funny given the context of this thread.
Also, just wanted to say, in case it wasn't clear, that I wasn't trying to attack you or your role, just pointing out a fact that was basically generally in agreement with what you observed. As I was writing it, I thought the tone of my post a bit ambiguous, just wanted to clarify that I was basically just vigorously agreeing.
I work for a company that has the mulitple-class stock setup. The family of the founder still owns 90-something percent of the voting stock. We give reports and such to Wall Street but don't have to do what they say. Seems like the best of both worlds to me. Instead of "direct" public control, you have sort of a vote by the public on whether they like the way it's being run/prospects, without them having the power to force it to their version of stable mediocrity.
In the pop business book "Built to Last" they talk about companies with highly visionary founders and the struggle to create a company that can last beyond the founder's departure. It's pretty interesting. Makes you wonder if Apple has any hope of staying great post-Jobs (especially given the historical record:).
Anyway. Thanks for your comments, it was interesting to read. Do you have it blogged/described in more detail anywhere?
Go public, be run by the public. You don't get all that money for free. Companies that go public should understand that they are selling their souls to the same people that brought us our current gov't, laws, etc. Once you get big, the large majority of people involved want stability, and having an innovator at the top doesn't give them that.
"While the kibbutzim lasted for several generations as utopian communities, most of today's kibbutzim are scarcely different from the capitalist enterprises and regular towns to which the kibbutzim were originally supposed to be alternatives."
That's funny. Throw off the yoke of the capitalist pigs, become pigs yourselves. Reminds me of a book.
I think the GP was joking, but supposing we take the first part about it being obvious that this is a Slashvertisement seriously (and that is, I agree, ambiguous), we can go to the link that the guy provided to find that there is, indeed, a person by that name listed on koffice.org as maintainer of Krita, and he is not one of the authors of the book. So if GP wants to come back with some conspiracy theory about how the authors are in it with the Krita guy and he's willing to risk his OSS cred on the cut he would get off a deal with the book's authors, we're all ears.
Otherwise, the fact that it sounds like a Slashvertisement would more appropriately be viewed as evidence that either (a) the book is so good, merely describing it accurately sounds like an advertisement, (b) the Krita maintainer was so in need of this exact book that merely describing his experience accurately makes it sound like a Slashvertisement or (c) everything that has happened so far on this is a highly improbable result of gamma radiation-induced errors in various routers and computers throughout the world.
Heh--speaking of googling names, my name is Mike South. I was starting the interview process with a well respected member of the perl community. The first thing he says in the phone screen is something like "you might have mentioned to me about the _other_ Mike South before I started googling for you...".
So what will happen when the following common and inevitable scenarios arise? 1) A security vulnerability that requires an update 2) The OS is unsupported and needs to be updated 3) The harddrive is filling up and more space needs to be added 4) All their data needs to be backed up in case of a hardware failure
1) The computer lets you know that there is a security update and you type in your password to install it. 2) (a) It will probably still do whatever you were doing with it the day before it officially became unsupported. (b) If I recall correctly, my wife did the installation when we updated OS X last time. Have you ever installed a new version of OS X? I'll bet my mom could do it. 3) (a) Get an external drive. Remember that by choosing a proprietary operating system, we've already agreed that convenience is more important than doing everything as cheaply as possible. You could grab a firewire drive, plug it in, and it would just work. Problem solved. (b) Novice computer users typically don't use space as fast as we do. My mom's last computer (also an iMac, but OS 9, and yes, we did have to help out with that one a lot more) only had like 7 gigs and she never had more than a couple full if I remember right. 4) Typically we have just lived on the edge, because my parents don't have a bunch of stuff that they care about--they are using the machine mostly for web browsing and email. So I have no experience with getting their stuff backed up. However, I'll bet in less than an hour of searching we could find a solution that would give you a complete backup system that a novice could use. Even if they wanted to do a DIY solution for that, they could pop in a blank dvd (which will open for them in the Finder), drag their important folders to it and click burn.
As far as this particular comment goes:
...I switched her to Ubuntu. I have been fairly pleased since then and most of the calls these days are dealing with ISP outages. I am not sure how your suggesting of throwing out all her hardware and moving to a Mac would help.
In the first place, I was responding to this:
In reality, no OS has achieved the status of so simple yet so useful that grandma/sister/computer-novice can use without assistance.
You didn't say "no OS that will install on my mother's current hardware."
All I'm saying is that it doesn't sound like you have tried OS X. It isn't problem free, but, like I said, my mom and dad are up and running and none of us ever had to lift a finger to help. That sounds a lot to me like the solution you were claiming didn't exist.
Also, in your previous post you sounded like you were still unsatisfied with the solution you had (something about "just as many problems"), and now suddenly it's all fine. If it's all fine, fine. I was only suggesting that you try OS X because you sounded like you were still unhappy with what you had. It is not perfect, but in my opinion it solves the problem you posed.
In reality, no OS has achieved the status of so simple yet so useful that grandma/sister/computer-novice can use without assistance.
My mother and father bought an iMac last year and as far as I know none of us helped them set it up. Neither of them have any background with computers. To put it succinctly, I don't think your comment is true about OS X. If you are tired of being the family IT guy, I would seriously recommend you get them an entry level mac and let them go.
We may be told that we want results fast, but really we want them accurate.
We think we want election results fast, because we get most of our information from the media, who are the ones that have a vested interest in getting them fast--they want "the result" quickly so that they can explain to us the correct opinion of the result. (And if you consume anything that the national media in the US produce, you should really read Bias--independent of what side of the fence you are on.)
One thing I have noticed watching Asian films is how much emphasis there is on characters who are of ambiguous morality. There are also pure good/evil characters, and typically the good characters will have to work with the people in the gray area in order to accomplish the good that they are trying to achieve.
I think it is possible that Taiwan is merely following this delicate balancing act--they have to allow themselves to be somewhat in bed with the mainland even though there are parts of that deal they may not like. You seem to me to be suggesting that they should play strictly and overtly pro-democracy strategy all the time. I think it may not be that easy in Taiwan when you're right next to the giant.
I haven't RTFSRITS (read the site referenced in the sig), though, so caveat lector.
I can just as easily argue that you give humans too little credit. I agree that we are animals, and that there are very powerful influences on our decisions that we have inherited from millions of years of evolution. But we are also a hell of a lot more than animals, and it is only extreme self-induced blindness that could lead us to believe otherwise. You are right, there are people who choose not to partake merely due to an unthinking acceptance of the "marketing" in the other direction. But you are still missing the fact that we can make intelligent, informed, and dispassionate choices. Even if there are only one in a thousand that choose to do it, it proves that it is possible, and emphasizes that all of the 999 who truly have a choice have still chosen the hole they are in.
"And they choose to bend to this pressure and indulge in unhealthy food."
You remember the concept--free will? Choice? Think back before your socialist professors conviced you that every problem in society was the fault of institutions/businesses/government. You'll remember back when you thought you could make choices, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It would also let you know if he had a radar-seeking countermeasure. You would be able to tell by the tunnel with the light.
But what if they were bears that could shoot lasers out of their eyes. That would be so frickin' AWESOME.
In case you've been living under a rock and haven't seen it: http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/archives/mordor.gif
It's a great thing to be able to know where the threat is, first off. It's a huge improvement over knowing nothing.
Second, the stuff I've read from milblogs and the like leads me to believe that there are rules about what they will hit. This doesn't change that. It's not like the robot has a missile launcher on it's back that it can autonomously respond with. This makes it easier to have a measured response because you know exactly where the threat is.
If you were really concerned about decreasing collateral damage, I think you would consider this a huge benefit. But hey, don't let me stop you from thinking with your political platform!
"Journalism"? New here?
You are repeating conventional wisdom without making a single logically defendable point. Just because a particular advance was made by gov't funded research doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been made some other way if the gov't wasn't taking your money from you to do it instead. There is no point in a company doing anything that the gov't is doing, because the gov't can force people to invest.
Have you looked into the history of the amendment that supposedly authorizes the income tax? There is a question as to whether it was even legitimately passed. You pay it without questioning it just like you repeat these arguments without questioning them.
The tuberculosis vaccine was created by a private foundation. I can't find a source saying that gov't funding led to aspirin--Bayer was a private company, wasn't it? In any case, it's noteworthy that you bring up things invented in Germany and France in a discussion about American income tax. I think you just grabbed those out of the air to make your point sound valid.
People would pay to use highways--highways are completely achievable with private money. Insured bank deposits are probably also doable privately, but it's unlikely that anyone will want to step up to do that when the gov't is in the business.
Don't try to say "hey, but look at all the really good things we did with the money we stole from people!". I would be very surprised to find that the gov't effectively used half of what it took--maybe you should be asking yourself what else we would have cured by now if the money that would have done it wasn't going into bureaucrats' pockets.
There's nothing legitimate for them to spend tax money on when the tax money itself is not legitimate. If a large number of people want to get together and do that with their money, they should be able to choose to do so. A large number of people should not be allowed to take money from me by force and then decide what causes they think are deserving/promising. That's just theft by the majority, it doesn't make it right.
That's funny. Being as close as you were to the Soviet Union, I would think you would be glad you're still free to gripe about us.
Sorry to hear that, dude, but please thank your pants for taking one for the team.
The interview you posted paints him as nothing of the sort you are implying. He very humbly states what he learned and where he ended up even though what he did was not what he hoped to contribute to the field. It looks to me like you went off looking for evidence to condemn the man and "found it" because you wanted to interpret it that way.
His statements about homework all focus on the fact that doing homework didn't make sense to him. He did not condemn it outright as a stupid idea that wouldn't work for anyone. He just said that it would never be something he would do personally, and that that was why _he_ didn't go on in traditional education, but instead wrote an open source product.
He did describe something that he was willing to do for a real project and as an aside said he would never have done it for a class--so without knowing you were going to misrepresent him here, he countered your argument in advance. You imply that he hypocritically derides homework while supporting the "homework of coding". But he lays out plainly that he wouldn't do the tedious stuff precisely when there is no point in doing it. So he clarified his position on the fact that he sees the importance of tedium but only when it applies to a real product you are working on.
He didn't claim that tedium will never help anyone. Maybe that's how other people learn, ok for them. All he said was that _he_ wouldn't have wanted to do stuff like that for a class.
I have no idea if he committed the crime or not. But it's a damn poor time in this person's life for you to be taking a few statements from an interview completely out of context and disparaging hime when he has no time to defend himself.
I'm just wondering why someone smart enough and sane enough to be posting on slashdot would assume that someone murdered his wife just because the police arrested him on circumstantial evidence which hasn't been divulged. Oh, wait...
I would be interested to know how many of the people commenting have been personally acquainted with a murder suspect. I was, once. Air Force guy, he was deployed, his wife fooled around on him. She ended up shot one night. He had taken the kids to a party that night, but I don't think he had any witnesses to account for how he was spending his time at the time of the murder.
Luckily, he had good enough luck/lawyer/whatever that he remained free. I was at a cafe near the base one time and I heard a couple of deputies/cops discussing the case. Their take? They knew it was him, they just couldn't get enough evidence together to convict.
Fast forward a year later, they found the guy that really did it.
Moral of the story--if she's sleeping around, her husband is likely not the only person she's pissed off. Oh, and cop "instinct" is why we need very picky, painstakingly applied laws about collection and use of evidence.
In this case, it's probably not so much a question of support (at least for the QT example). This guy and his buddies are probably not high maintenance, they don't really need the support, they just want the ability to produce commercial software. What should probably happen is that the vendors should create a royalty agreement on a percentage of the sale price (with a bottom value--never do a straight percentage. Microsoft negotiated with SpyGlass to give them a straight percentage of IE sales, then started giving it away for nothing).
That way a small, smart developer who doesn't need help from the vendor, but just wants to make money, but doesn't know yet how much money they can make, can get in, and the vendor still gets a return.
What I'm saying (poorly) is that the vendor is hurting itself here, by placing the barrier to trying to get a commercial product going too high for a small developer.
(a) Mod parent up.
(b) It's possible that this kid's life is better because he has some electronic distractions than it would be without him. This kid is in a horrible situation, and if you could somehow "help" him by making all of his options for electronic entertainment go away it could very well increase his suffering. In other words, it's a sad story, but it probably argues for the opposite of your conclusion (gp post's conclusion I mean) rather than for it.
Pretty funny given the context of this thread.
Also, just wanted to say, in case it wasn't clear, that I wasn't trying to attack you or your role, just pointing out a fact that was basically generally in agreement with what you observed. As I was writing it, I thought the tone of my post a bit ambiguous, just wanted to clarify that I was basically just vigorously agreeing.
I work for a company that has the mulitple-class stock setup. The family of the founder still owns 90-something percent of the voting stock. We give reports and such to Wall Street but don't have to do what they say. Seems like the best of both worlds to me. Instead of "direct" public control, you have sort of a vote by the public on whether they like the way it's being run/prospects, without them having the power to force it to their version of stable mediocrity.
In the pop business book "Built to Last" they talk about companies with highly visionary founders and the struggle to create a company that can last beyond the founder's departure. It's pretty interesting. Makes you wonder if Apple has any hope of staying great post-Jobs (especially given the historical record
Anyway. Thanks for your comments, it was interesting to read. Do you have it blogged/described in more detail anywhere?
Go public, be run by the public. You don't get all that money for free. Companies that go public should understand that they are selling their souls to the same people that brought us our current gov't, laws, etc. Once you get big, the large majority of people involved want stability, and having an innovator at the top doesn't give them that.
That's funny. Throw off the yoke of the capitalist pigs, become pigs yourselves. Reminds me of a book.
...to pay taxes in Oregon!
I think the GP was joking, but supposing we take the first part about it being obvious that this is a Slashvertisement seriously (and that is, I agree, ambiguous), we can go to the link that the guy provided to find that there is, indeed, a person by that name listed on koffice.org as maintainer of Krita, and he is not one of the authors of the book. So if GP wants to come back with some conspiracy theory about how the authors are in it with the Krita guy and he's willing to risk his OSS cred on the cut he would get off a deal with the book's authors, we're all ears.
Otherwise, the fact that it sounds like a Slashvertisement would more appropriately be viewed as evidence that either (a) the book is so good, merely describing it accurately sounds like an advertisement, (b) the Krita maintainer was so in need of this exact book that merely describing his experience accurately makes it sound like a Slashvertisement or (c) everything that has happened so far on this is a highly improbable result of gamma radiation-induced errors in various routers and computers throughout the world.
Pretty sure it's (c).
Um, could we add a "-1, full of himself" moderation category? :)
Heh--speaking of googling names, my name is Mike South. I was starting the interview process with a well respected member of the perl community. The first thing he says in the phone screen is something like "you might have mentioned to me about the _other_ Mike South before I started googling for you...".
1) The computer lets you know that there is a security update and you type in your password to install it.
2)
(a) It will probably still do whatever you were doing with it the day before it officially became unsupported.
(b) If I recall correctly, my wife did the installation when we updated OS X last time. Have you ever installed a new version of OS X? I'll bet my mom could do it.
3)
(a) Get an external drive. Remember that by choosing a proprietary operating system, we've already agreed that convenience is more important than doing everything as cheaply as possible. You could grab a firewire drive, plug it in, and it would just work. Problem solved.
(b) Novice computer users typically don't use space as fast as we do. My mom's last computer (also an iMac, but OS 9, and yes, we did have to help out with that one a lot more) only had like 7 gigs and she never had more than a couple full if I remember right.
4) Typically we have just lived on the edge, because my parents don't have a bunch of stuff that they care about--they are using the machine mostly for web browsing and email. So I have no experience with getting their stuff backed up. However, I'll bet in less than an hour of searching we could find a solution that would give you a complete backup system that a novice could use. Even if they wanted to do a DIY solution for that, they could pop in a blank dvd (which will open for them in the Finder), drag their important folders to it and click burn.
As far as this particular comment goes:
In the first place, I was responding to this:
You didn't say "no OS that will install on my mother's current hardware."
All I'm saying is that it doesn't sound like you have tried OS X. It isn't problem free, but, like I said, my mom and dad are up and running and none of us ever had to lift a finger to help. That sounds a lot to me like the solution you were claiming didn't exist.
Also, in your previous post you sounded like you were still unsatisfied with the solution you had (something about "just as many problems"), and now suddenly it's all fine. If it's all fine, fine. I was only suggesting that you try OS X because you sounded like you were still unhappy with what you had. It is not perfect, but in my opinion it solves the problem you posed.
My mother and father bought an iMac last year and as far as I know none of us helped them set it up. Neither of them have any background with computers. To put it succinctly, I don't think your comment is true about OS X. If you are tired of being the family IT guy, I would seriously recommend you get them an entry level mac and let them go.
We think we want election results fast, because we get most of our information from the media, who are the ones that have a vested interest in getting them fast--they want "the result" quickly so that they can explain to us the correct opinion of the result. (And if you consume anything that the national media in the US produce, you should really read Bias--independent of what side of the fence you are on.)
One thing I have noticed watching Asian films is how much emphasis there is on characters who are of ambiguous morality. There are also pure good/evil characters, and typically the good characters will have to work with the people in the gray area in order to accomplish the good that they are trying to achieve.
I think it is possible that Taiwan is merely following this delicate balancing act--they have to allow themselves to be somewhat in bed with the mainland even though there are parts of that deal they may not like. You seem to me to be suggesting that they should play strictly and overtly pro-democracy strategy all the time. I think it may not be that easy in Taiwan when you're right next to the giant.
I haven't RTFSRITS (read the site referenced in the sig), though, so caveat lector.
I can just as easily argue that you give humans too little credit. I agree that we are animals, and that there are very powerful influences on our decisions that we have inherited from millions of years of evolution. But we are also a hell of a lot more than animals, and it is only extreme self-induced blindness that could lead us to believe otherwise. You are right, there are people who choose not to partake merely due to an unthinking acceptance of the "marketing" in the other direction. But you are still missing the fact that we can make intelligent, informed, and dispassionate choices. Even if there are only one in a thousand that choose to do it, it proves that it is possible, and emphasizes that all of the 999 who truly have a choice have still chosen the hole they are in.
you forgot to add:
"And they choose to bend to this pressure and indulge in unhealthy food."
You remember the concept--free will? Choice? Think back before your socialist professors conviced you that every problem in society was the fault of institutions/businesses/government. You'll remember back when you thought you could make choices, too.