I'm not paying for the gold account, if I get an Xbox One (probably, due to circumstances too boring to describe). Didn't get one for the Xbox 360 either. Apparently about half of 360 users have gold accounts, which implies about half are like me, and don't.
People had offline-only consoles for a long time before the Dreamcast was the first (?) to have an online mode, and pretty much failed. That market hasn't disappeared, even though some people have transferred allegiance to online-only play once it became viable.
Just because something is the way the world works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon.
Your post is honestly confusing. Equal Opportunity != Equal Outcomes, I agree. But Equal Opportunity = everyone starts the race at the same point. Those things have the same meaning! It feels almost like you wrote most of the post before realizing Gothmolly specifically contrasted finishing the race the same and starting it, then did some edits to include some notion of starting in the same place.
Yep, you won't be NBA material, and that's not fair but we can't reasonably fix that so that's tough. However your other examples are weak. There really is no reason that a random person born in the middle of nowhere to parents with a low-paying low-status job who don't believe in education and whose only available high school lost accreditation a couple years before graduation, shouldn't have just as much of an opportunity to educate themselves as the dim stoner born to rich parents who can buy their way into a good school. If the former person doesn't have that opportunity in a given society, then society is taking away from somebody who is potentially more successful and actually more talented and more motivated, and giving to the less deserving. The relative opportunity has nothing to do with the immutable nature of their Selves, or with their own choices. It has to do entirely with society.
It doesn't necessarily have to be government that enforces this, though that's one path that I think so many slashdotters dismiss out of hand almost supersititiously. I'm not selling a magic bullet solution here, but I do hope to get agreement that there is a problem we can think about solving. There are scholarships set up by charitable foundations for the poor but bright kid from the sticks, and there's the fact of sufficient marks being required to graduate to filter out the stoner; neither of these are perfect mechanisms but they are aimed at addressing the issue and they are not actually government-provided.
It's not really possible to have 100% equal opportunity, but that's not a good reason not to try to get reasonable equal footing to begin with.
Canada has had exactly that sort of "captcha" for decades without computers, called a "skill testing question". It is a a legal workaround to gambling laws that has been tolerated (and it's typically slightly more complicated than 5+8, but only slightly).
Really doesn't stop stupid people from using calculators.
Average household size is 2.55, so no, 30 million households is about 75 million people; roughly a quarter of the US.
Nobody who isn't disabled needs their mail delivered right to their door, as opposed to a lockbox within an easy walk. Disabled people aren't guaranteed to live in one of those 30 million households.
I guess the implication is that you want something that compromises between Windows PCs and XBox on some points. Which raises the question of what is the right compromise position?
It was 40 out of 8000 people that died. That's a 0.5% death toll in 7 years, which annualizes to 0.07%. That's way higher than most Flus (2009 was relatively deadly at 0.03%). And those Flus are worldwide averages, not localized to prisons in developed countries.
I don't think I've ever seen somebody argue that physics is the base of math. I mean, I might have seen people propose measuring Pi physically but in the abstract, doesn't *everybody* agree that math is a tool used by physics?
Physics might *motivate* the development of math, but that's not the same thing.
Almost. So long as racist / bigot institutions are not furthered by this racism/bigotry. Profit for a racist/bigot author who uses his means to spread racism and bigotry is one way to spread those institutions. Shakespeare doesn't*.
*Well, you can argue that it does, but it's a relevantly different argument than the Orson Scott Card profit one to the point where a reasonable human being could come to a different conclusion.
Myself, I'll probably not see the movie in theatres (I just don't see many movies that way) and will probably catch it when it comes on a channel I'm already subscribed to. Stopped buying his books because they stopped being good, or maybe I just grew out of them, not sure which.
EG was my favourite thing of his, but it has to be accepted that Speaker for the Dead is often considered better by critics (I don't have stats but I've seen that claim often enough). The later ones, not so much.
Windows isn't really a generic self-descriptive term for an operating system, so I don't think a Windows trademark dispute has any bearing on this issue.
I don't know about the 70s but I do know killer app was a term whose peak popularity predated the iPhone.
eBook prices are mediated by the supply of good writers, which is not infinite. Same goes for everything digital. Replication costs going to 0 isn't sufficient to remove supply to 0 as long as the cost of the initial thing you're replicating is nonzero.
There's an interesting question about how to economically model that, of course. DRM is one way, extremely unpopular on Slashdot, but certain forms have had market successes (Steam, eBooks). There are others, many of which are more radical departures from the current model -- one is to assume that enough people will have the desire to do art for its own sake to supply worldwide demand and thus rely on "donated" art (free supply) and then infinitesimal replicated costs. Another is product placement, which isn't nearly as common in books as in TV and movies but could be done. Closely related is using the books as a platform to sell things that aren't reproducible, like kid's toys (Transformers and He-Man in book form). There's individual / corporate patronage. There's a model where the government (or a charitable foundation or something) sponsors a fixed amount per year, and distributes books for free and unencumbered by anything save a counter that tracks the number of downloads (or perhaps aggregate time spent reading the book or similar), distributing their money according to these stats. They could be written in less-common languages by companies that control professional high-quality translations, and kickstart a translation effort into English, Spanish, and Chinese. Lots of others.
But there must be some model, whether it's explicit or implicit. Because the supply is restricted.
Mainly for resources. How is that not obvious? The fur trade, silver, gold, timber, arable land, hoped-for trade routes to get far-east spices, etc..
There's a secondary effect where it was more about leaving Europe than coming to North America -- in that case, the resource was land not occupied by opposing European forces.
The extension here would be to assume that Earth was as colonisable to an alien race as North America was to Europeans, and any place at least as colonisable is already occupied or otherwise inconvenient. Which comes down to resources, once again.
Let's turn this around. Approximately what population do you think is sustainable for the Earth at a high-quality lifestyle given reasonable advances (and are there lifestyle concessions that you think should be made)? Eg. is it about 100 billion? A trillion? Surely there is some point at which we have to trade off significant quality of life at a given tech level and societal stability level to double the population.
All this said, I'm more in agreement with you than with the GP. What's the point of keeping the population down by keeping "quality of life" down? If this truly reduces the carrying capacity of Earth, then over time we'll have to have less humans -- not by artificially reducing their lifespan, but things like birth control. Being able to extend human health is worth it in its own right. But you lose me when you start sneering at "Malthusians" and being self-congratulatory about your "shock therapy". That sort of confidence needs to be supported by positive claims of the carrying capacity of Earth, not just negative claims on a few facts that the GP posted.
False dichotomy. Can't you think of any alternatives?
In Canada (not sure about other places) they often contrast the tossed salad with the melting pot. In a tossed salad, there is distinction without separation (no ghettos yet no assimilation).
Of course these are both metaphors and we can argue about reality, but surely you can at least conceptualize two distinct cultures living together without race riots. Realistically, swathes of the US are like that, regardless of the melting pot metaphor.
It's the fact that it's full screen that is the problem. I intensely dislike modal interfaces for tasks that are not logically modal, and I hate the context switch, and I really hate that I need to either memorize or use a multi-monitor system to be able to follow instructions on an email message I have opened that include "hit start and type foo". I do think the start screen is better for touch on tablets but when I use a mouse I want something that is not a context switch. It really is my biggest complaint with Windows 8 that does not appear to be addressed by 8.1. The start screen is the one thing that won't even go into the 50/50 splitscreen view.
My biggest complaint which is addressed is that search wasn't unified by default -- I don't want to have to memorize whether something is an "application" or a "setting". There's clearly still work to be done on search results though.
Your first paragraph is a definition of the spirit of a legal document. It's the rules that reflect the goals of those who drafted the GPL, including both seen and hithertofore unforeseen situations. If every situation was foreseen, then there could be no legal loopholes, and therefore nothing could ever could fulfill the letter of the law but not the spirit.
Do you have a problem with the word spirit or something? This isn't a new concept and it doesn't need scare quotes.
Nothing you said made any sense. You took a physics problem and called it equivalent to two computational problems that are unrelated to the physical problem, related to each other, but not in any way equivalent.
"whether relativity settles FTL (it doesn't)" is word soup.
No, you pretty much made that up. Or you're defining "major advancement" such that it cannot be a major advancement unless it's contradictory to current wisdom.
Regardless, the summary is clearly wrong, because there has been no breakthrough that lets information travel faster than light. If there were, we probably wouldn't be talking about transistors, we'd be talking about that breakthrough.
And the scientific wisdom is almost always right -- that's why it's so impressive when it's wrong. You absolutely should treat any claim of FTL with the same extreme skepticism as hollow Earthism. Especially since it is relatively easy to show (eg. to those with approx. an undergraduate education in a related field, or a precocious high-schooler) that FTL implies the possibility of backward time travel, barring a few really, really conceptually unlikely and unsatisfying scenarios.
In my experience, this notion of "major scientific* advances are always people who don't accept conventional wisdom" only ever seems to come up in discussions about the speed of light, in discussions about global warming, and in discussions about Young Earth Creationism. I might be forgetting a couple. But I think the unifying feature is that people really, really *want* the truth to be different from what all the evidence points to, because that would be so awesome. Well, the awesomeness is debatable in terms of YEC, but it would be really cool if global climate change were something that'll sort itself out without us, or if the speed of light turned out to be just a trivial matter and all the stupid scientists were just dribbling their lips with their fingers instead of pressing harder on the gas pedal. It's just not what anything points to and we should demand extraordinary evidence of claims to the contrary just like we would demand extraordinary evidence of a machine that resurrects people hundreds of years dead with their memories intact. Okay, maybe that latter claim is even more unlikely to be true -- but then again the extraordinary evidence should be a bit easier to produce if it is true, so I think that balances.
*For political advances people say this all the time. It's often how they defend people like Stallman for being an asshole, or Gates or Jobs or Torvalds etc..
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not paying for the gold account, if I get an Xbox One (probably, due to circumstances too boring to describe). Didn't get one for the Xbox 360 either. Apparently about half of 360 users have gold accounts, which implies about half are like me, and don't.
People had offline-only consoles for a long time before the Dreamcast was the first (?) to have an online mode, and pretty much failed. That market hasn't disappeared, even though some people have transferred allegiance to online-only play once it became viable.
Just because something is the way the world works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon.
Your post is honestly confusing. Equal Opportunity != Equal Outcomes, I agree. But Equal Opportunity = everyone starts the race at the same point. Those things have the same meaning! It feels almost like you wrote most of the post before realizing Gothmolly specifically contrasted finishing the race the same and starting it, then did some edits to include some notion of starting in the same place.
Yep, you won't be NBA material, and that's not fair but we can't reasonably fix that so that's tough. However your other examples are weak. There really is no reason that a random person born in the middle of nowhere to parents with a low-paying low-status job who don't believe in education and whose only available high school lost accreditation a couple years before graduation, shouldn't have just as much of an opportunity to educate themselves as the dim stoner born to rich parents who can buy their way into a good school. If the former person doesn't have that opportunity in a given society, then society is taking away from somebody who is potentially more successful and actually more talented and more motivated, and giving to the less deserving. The relative opportunity has nothing to do with the immutable nature of their Selves, or with their own choices. It has to do entirely with society.
It doesn't necessarily have to be government that enforces this, though that's one path that I think so many slashdotters dismiss out of hand almost supersititiously. I'm not selling a magic bullet solution here, but I do hope to get agreement that there is a problem we can think about solving. There are scholarships set up by charitable foundations for the poor but bright kid from the sticks, and there's the fact of sufficient marks being required to graduate to filter out the stoner; neither of these are perfect mechanisms but they are aimed at addressing the issue and they are not actually government-provided.
It's not really possible to have 100% equal opportunity, but that's not a good reason not to try to get reasonable equal footing to begin with.
Canada has had exactly that sort of "captcha" for decades without computers, called a "skill testing question". It is a a legal workaround to gambling laws that has been tolerated (and it's typically slightly more complicated than 5+8, but only slightly).
Really doesn't stop stupid people from using calculators.
Blactivision is troll-feed though.
Just search the comments in this thread. The trolls ate it up.
Fortunately, it's also not a good portmanteau. Although I think most portmanteaus of names are stupid.
Deficit is not debt. If a deficit is reduced, the expected effect on the debt is that it increases.
Deficit is to debt as velocity is to position. Turn the deficit into a surplus, and then the debt goes down.
Average household size is 2.55, so no, 30 million households is about 75 million people; roughly a quarter of the US.
Nobody who isn't disabled needs their mail delivered right to their door, as opposed to a lockbox within an easy walk. Disabled people aren't guaranteed to live in one of those 30 million households.
That's basically what an xbox is.
I guess the implication is that you want something that compromises between Windows PCs and XBox on some points. Which raises the question of what is the right compromise position?
It was 40 out of 8000 people that died. That's a 0.5% death toll in 7 years, which annualizes to 0.07%. That's way higher than most Flus (2009 was relatively deadly at 0.03%). And those Flus are worldwide averages, not localized to prisons in developed countries.
Do you honestly think that the make or break aspect of the Linux Kernel vs. other FOSS kernels is how much of a dick Linus Torvalds is?
You didn't make the big spherical yellow apparatus.
I don't think I've ever seen somebody argue that physics is the base of math. I mean, I might have seen people propose measuring Pi physically but in the abstract, doesn't *everybody* agree that math is a tool used by physics?
Physics might *motivate* the development of math, but that's not the same thing.
Almost. So long as racist / bigot institutions are not furthered by this racism/bigotry. Profit for a racist/bigot author who uses his means to spread racism and bigotry is one way to spread those institutions. Shakespeare doesn't*.
*Well, you can argue that it does, but it's a relevantly different argument than the Orson Scott Card profit one to the point where a reasonable human being could come to a different conclusion.
Myself, I'll probably not see the movie in theatres (I just don't see many movies that way) and will probably catch it when it comes on a channel I'm already subscribed to. Stopped buying his books because they stopped being good, or maybe I just grew out of them, not sure which.
EG was my favourite thing of his, but it has to be accepted that Speaker for the Dead is often considered better by critics (I don't have stats but I've seen that claim often enough). The later ones, not so much.
False dichotomists are bums.
Windows isn't really a generic self-descriptive term for an operating system, so I don't think a Windows trademark dispute has any bearing on this issue.
I don't know about the 70s but I do know killer app was a term whose peak popularity predated the iPhone.
eBook prices are mediated by the supply of good writers, which is not infinite. Same goes for everything digital. Replication costs going to 0 isn't sufficient to remove supply to 0 as long as the cost of the initial thing you're replicating is nonzero.
There's an interesting question about how to economically model that, of course. DRM is one way, extremely unpopular on Slashdot, but certain forms have had market successes (Steam, eBooks). There are others, many of which are more radical departures from the current model -- one is to assume that enough people will have the desire to do art for its own sake to supply worldwide demand and thus rely on "donated" art (free supply) and then infinitesimal replicated costs. Another is product placement, which isn't nearly as common in books as in TV and movies but could be done. Closely related is using the books as a platform to sell things that aren't reproducible, like kid's toys (Transformers and He-Man in book form). There's individual / corporate patronage. There's a model where the government (or a charitable foundation or something) sponsors a fixed amount per year, and distributes books for free and unencumbered by anything save a counter that tracks the number of downloads (or perhaps aggregate time spent reading the book or similar), distributing their money according to these stats. They could be written in less-common languages by companies that control professional high-quality translations, and kickstart a translation effort into English, Spanish, and Chinese. Lots of others.
But there must be some model, whether it's explicit or implicit. Because the supply is restricted.
Mainly for resources. How is that not obvious? The fur trade, silver, gold, timber, arable land, hoped-for trade routes to get far-east spices, etc..
There's a secondary effect where it was more about leaving Europe than coming to North America -- in that case, the resource was land not occupied by opposing European forces.
The extension here would be to assume that Earth was as colonisable to an alien race as North America was to Europeans, and any place at least as colonisable is already occupied or otherwise inconvenient. Which comes down to resources, once again.
Let's turn this around. Approximately what population do you think is sustainable for the Earth at a high-quality lifestyle given reasonable advances (and are there lifestyle concessions that you think should be made)? Eg. is it about 100 billion? A trillion? Surely there is some point at which we have to trade off significant quality of life at a given tech level and societal stability level to double the population.
All this said, I'm more in agreement with you than with the GP. What's the point of keeping the population down by keeping "quality of life" down? If this truly reduces the carrying capacity of Earth, then over time we'll have to have less humans -- not by artificially reducing their lifespan, but things like birth control. Being able to extend human health is worth it in its own right. But you lose me when you start sneering at "Malthusians" and being self-congratulatory about your "shock therapy". That sort of confidence needs to be supported by positive claims of the carrying capacity of Earth, not just negative claims on a few facts that the GP posted.
False dichotomy. Can't you think of any alternatives?
In Canada (not sure about other places) they often contrast the tossed salad with the melting pot. In a tossed salad, there is distinction without separation (no ghettos yet no assimilation).
Of course these are both metaphors and we can argue about reality, but surely you can at least conceptualize two distinct cultures living together without race riots. Realistically, swathes of the US are like that, regardless of the melting pot metaphor.
It's the fact that it's full screen that is the problem. I intensely dislike modal interfaces for tasks that are not logically modal, and I hate the context switch, and I really hate that I need to either memorize or use a multi-monitor system to be able to follow instructions on an email message I have opened that include "hit start and type foo". I do think the start screen is better for touch on tablets but when I use a mouse I want something that is not a context switch. It really is my biggest complaint with Windows 8 that does not appear to be addressed by 8.1. The start screen is the one thing that won't even go into the 50/50 splitscreen view.
My biggest complaint which is addressed is that search wasn't unified by default -- I don't want to have to memorize whether something is an "application" or a "setting". There's clearly still work to be done on search results though.
Your first paragraph is a definition of the spirit of a legal document. It's the rules that reflect the goals of those who drafted the GPL, including both seen and hithertofore unforeseen situations. If every situation was foreseen, then there could be no legal loopholes, and therefore nothing could ever could fulfill the letter of the law but not the spirit.
Do you have a problem with the word spirit or something? This isn't a new concept and it doesn't need scare quotes.
If you're not in the top 1%, you're in the bottom third
You are hurting math.
Nothing you said made any sense. You took a physics problem and called it equivalent to two computational problems that are unrelated to the physical problem, related to each other, but not in any way equivalent.
"whether relativity settles FTL (it doesn't)" is word soup.
No, you pretty much made that up. Or you're defining "major advancement" such that it cannot be a major advancement unless it's contradictory to current wisdom.
Regardless, the summary is clearly wrong, because there has been no breakthrough that lets information travel faster than light. If there were, we probably wouldn't be talking about transistors, we'd be talking about that breakthrough.
And the scientific wisdom is almost always right -- that's why it's so impressive when it's wrong. You absolutely should treat any claim of FTL with the same extreme skepticism as hollow Earthism. Especially since it is relatively easy to show (eg. to those with approx. an undergraduate education in a related field, or a precocious high-schooler) that FTL implies the possibility of backward time travel, barring a few really, really conceptually unlikely and unsatisfying scenarios.
In my experience, this notion of "major scientific* advances are always people who don't accept conventional wisdom" only ever seems to come up in discussions about the speed of light, in discussions about global warming, and in discussions about Young Earth Creationism. I might be forgetting a couple. But I think the unifying feature is that people really, really *want* the truth to be different from what all the evidence points to, because that would be so awesome. Well, the awesomeness is debatable in terms of YEC, but it would be really cool if global climate change were something that'll sort itself out without us, or if the speed of light turned out to be just a trivial matter and all the stupid scientists were just dribbling their lips with their fingers instead of pressing harder on the gas pedal. It's just not what anything points to and we should demand extraordinary evidence of claims to the contrary just like we would demand extraordinary evidence of a machine that resurrects people hundreds of years dead with their memories intact. Okay, maybe that latter claim is even more unlikely to be true -- but then again the extraordinary evidence should be a bit easier to produce if it is true, so I think that balances.
*For political advances people say this all the time. It's often how they defend people like Stallman for being an asshole, or Gates or Jobs or Torvalds etc..
They fished the ship out from Ellesmere island, which is way in the arctic off the northwest coast of Greenland.
Non-arctic Canada doesn't look like that or have temperatures like those quoted.