That's not a very compelling analogy. OOP has turned out to be a tremendous resource hog, unnecessary in most cases, and leads to code that is extremely hard to parallelize. Now functional programming with immutable data structures is en vogue - not saying that it's better, you've got to choose the right tool for the right job anyway, but if your analogy held then systemd would correspond to Java and I surely don't want to have it.
robots will replace 1/3 of workers in 20 years [...] Of course, people fear change [...]
I'd rather say they fear loosing their job. Originally the idea of the robotic revolution was that everyone would have his own robot who does all the hard work for him. That didn't work out so well now, did it?
As long as 1% of the population owns 35% and the top 20% of the population own 85% of a nations wealth, it is not very surprising that people oppose to change that gives the richest 1% even more money - money which according to their own theory (Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility) should be pretty much useless to the them but would be very useful to the poor.
Well, there are international extradition treaties, trade agreements, (applications) of law, etc. If the US DOJ continues down this path, they will have a hard time getting useful cooperation in legal matters with other countries in the future. Good luck enforcing your treaties and copyright claims abroad. There is only so much injustice and double standards that other countries and their voters will accept, and the legal systems of most countries explicitly prohibit the application of foreign law and law enforcement procedures on their home soil.
Moreover, hopefully, foreigners conducting business within the US or residing in the US are protected by the constitution and national laws as well, or otherwise companies from abroad would be crazy to deal with your country at all. The USA is not North Korea.
In my opinion, the problems are even bigger. No fly lists and other terrorist lists are completely beyond and above law and due process. There is no way you can appeal them or challenge them in court, except possibly, under very exceptional circumstances, at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
And as you rightly mention, there are more and more national "rubber laws" not just in Britain but all over the EU (not to speak of US, who seem to have them traditionally). These are laws that leave it nearly open what exactly constitutes the respective criminal ofense, making it possible to prosecute just about anyone for just about anything if somebody feels a need for it. They violate a basic rights principle, namely that an informed and educated citizen has to be able to tell exactly, from the text of the law, when he would transgress the law.
Last but not least, the biggest problem is that there is a strong tendency to make laws stronger rather than abolishing them or making them weaker, because this is always the safe route for a politician to go (unless he has reasons to believe the law might affect him, so this tendency does not concern anti-corruption and tax evasion laws). Who wants to be held accountable for not having signed this 'anti-terrorist' or 'child protection' law when the something bad happens? And something bad will always happen, that's for sure.
The long-term effect of these processes is increased legal uncertainty for common citizens, much more power for rich citizens who can afford excellent legal council, and an overall fascist society.
Compare Pinochet, who stepped down on his own, and left his country as Latin America's top economy,
You're kidding, right? We're talking about the Pinochet regime, with American-trained death squads, extensive torture, people 'disappearing' etc. Oh wait a minute, I get it... you're just some random asshat troll.
Well, if I don't see a picture I'll assume she's ugly. In fact, even if I see a nice picture my first suspicion will be that it's an exceptionally good one (the "Myspace angle") and that in reality she's too fat or too skinny and in any case too ugly. And if she's really beautiful, as proven by dozens of hot pictures and thousands of "likes", hearts, or whatever, then it is very likely that she's in the beginning of her 30s, extremely frustrated by men (viz., her own choices based on repeating the same mistakes again and again), and has all kinds of romantic wishes and unrealistic fantasies that will annoy you to no end.
Moreover, it is virtually guaranteed that there are no hot women on dating sites that *also* like helictoper simulations, and for that reason alone I don't use those sites.
Finally: Women want all kinds of things from men, whereas men want only one thing from women. That's all there is to say about the "battle of sexes".
What I find most annoying is that Spinger publishes this in a "Popular Astronomy" series. At least they could have classified it under religious studies, speculative philosophy, or put it in a "Popular Astrology" series.
This seems to be based on a common misunderstanding, based on confusing education with wisdom and/or intelligence. Just because we all have color TVs in the industrialized world now doesn't mean that we have gained one grain of wisdom.
For all it's worth, a space-faring civilization could be a a couple of dozens or hundreds of years ahead of us in terms of engineering and science, and still they might be a complete bunch of morons. They could be more intelligent than us, but they could also be much less intelligent than us. They could be more religious than us or less religious than us. It might have taken them 100 times longer than us to have come up with Newtonian mechanics, they might all be mindless religious zealots, could have the strangest religious views about the universe, might love to kill or torture aliens (=us) for fun or in order to bring us their 'wisdom', and so forth. We simply don't know, and almost nothing can be inferred from the level of technical development about these matters.
I've come to think about this a lot recently, as I'm currently writing a science fiction novel that plays in the near future after the US has been torn apart by a civil war. (BTW, I'm writing in German, so it is unlikely that any American will ever read it.)
With modern sattelite surveilance, DNA sampling, automated biometric scanning, fighting robots, and the total information awareness of the federal government, I find it increasingly improbable that any (legitimate or illegitimate) freedom fighters/rebels/terrorists could stand a chance against the whole power of the federal miltary apparatus in a high tech country like the USA. Drone strikes alone would probably eliminate most of the resistance very quickly, no matter how many small handguns they have, and social network analysis would allow them to decapitate the leadership of the movement in targeted assassinations. This is one of the reasons I'm personally against surveillance and advocate privacy, because I find it hard to imagine a democracy that could never ever turn into a totalitarian oligarchy or dictatorship by an unfortunate sequence of events. There should always be a balance of power between the people and the force of the state.
The only scenario I find credible and that is perhaps not so unlikely is that large parts of the army and national guard would split off and join the resistance movement and at the same time the rebel controlled territory has plenty of high tech weapons manufacturing companies, too. EasySurface to air missiles and anti-tank weapons would be crucial. Anyway, without a halfway even division of the professional military force, a modern civil war in the US would not last long.
Well, isn't it ironical then that Apple has a long history of bloating their operating systems and runtime environments in order to be able to sell new hardware?
The lesson to learn from this is that GC runtime efficiency is the very least of an issue in light of horrendous operating system, supporting library and application bloat. Not to speak of the #1 performance problem: using inadequate algorithms and data structures.
Besides, these performance arguments are mostly moot anyway. I'm not claiming that performance is totally irrelevant, I wouldn't use a GCed language for DSP programming either, but I've yet to see things other than pointless tech demos that anyone computes on his mobile phone that could never have been achieved on a phone that is only half as fast. An occasional GC will not do any serious harm to your fart apps and web page wrappers.
All of these elaborated arguments are primarily valid for companies such as Apple only, who want to save as many costs on hardware as possible in order to be able to rip off their customers even more. Apple has exorbitant profit margins in the mobile sectors.
I take a language with built-in GC used on a platform with hardware that is fast enough and has enough RAM anytime over a language with inferior memory management on slow hardware. Ditto for applications written in it. With today's hardware it's just plain stupid to do do manual memory management except in high integrity systems that are not allowed to use dynamic memory allocation anyway.
I've used it a lot for many years, starting from the very first version on until I became appalled by Apple a few years ago. I even still actively develop and sell an application for it. Unfortunately, based on my extensive experience with OS X, I have to say that it is a big pile of shit. Your mileage might differ, though. In the end it doesn't matter. It's just an operating system among many, providing a basic hardware abstraction layer for end-user applications, so who would care anyway.
They can remotely reprogram just about any phone on the market, whether a smartphone or not, and Apple is not going to (be able to) change anything about that. Surveillance is based on traffic analysis and, if necessary for targetted surveillance, on controlling the endpoints.
Remember when the police claimed to have so many troubles in the 90s because criminals were allegedly using "hard to trace" cell phones with throwaway sim cards, whereas in reality they could pinpoint their exact location and turn the phones into bugs at any time? Well, this situation hasn't changed at all.
In my opinion the main usability problem of GNU/Linux is that practically all programs violate the #1 human interface guideline: Always give the user immediate and clear visual response to input action.
If you press a button, it must highlight immediately, if you select a menu it must show up immediately, if you select a menu entry, it should blink several times without blocking, if you launch a program, the operating system should immediately tell you that it is about to be launched (no matter how long it takes), if you put a USB stick in a USB port, the OS must inform you about it immediately, and so forth. All of this visual feedback must be immediate and also long enough to be clearly visible - and if an action *usually* takes only milliseconds, the OS must automatically show some progress feedback in case it incidentally takes longer.
This problem cannot be fixed by a desktop or window manager alone, it's also an application problem. But the GUI APIs do not seem to help much either. On a side note, Apple started to violate this and many other of their own guidelines since the introduction of OSX, so you could say that GNU/Linux is in "good" company.
I currently use XFCE for daily work, too. However, I'm not very happy with it and am looking for an alternative. XFCE's panel menus suck (both whisker and the old one), they take almost 30 seconds to load the entries for the first time, even if the icons are switched off. At least they should have an option for preloading the menu entries. (Or perhaps the developers should use slower, older machines, because XFCE does not seem to be fast and snappy at all to me on my 4 year old i7 920 6GB, particularly not when it is under some minor disk load).
Other things I don't like about XFCE is that it is relatively complicated to switch off the tumbler thumbnailing service, and that swappable media take a long time to open in the file manager and if they finally do so, four windows pop up at the same time. (What kind of stupid bug is that?) Also, the panel used to crash so often that I had to put a "Repair Panel" button on it - but this problem is gone with latest updates.
Minor quirks in an overall nice desktop manager but enough for me to (probably) switch. The only thing that kept me with XFCE is that I'm used to start everything with one click and I'm too lazy to make new custom panels for another environments.
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Precaution. They can carry the virus but no dog -> human transmission is known.
I tend to mess around with them so much that it doesn't really seem to matter with which one I started anyway.
That's not a very compelling analogy. OOP has turned out to be a tremendous resource hog, unnecessary in most cases, and leads to code that is extremely hard to parallelize. Now functional programming with immutable data structures is en vogue - not saying that it's better, you've got to choose the right tool for the right job anyway, but if your analogy held then systemd would correspond to Java and I surely don't want to have it.
robots will replace 1/3 of workers in 20 years [...] Of course, people fear change [...]
I'd rather say they fear loosing their job. Originally the idea of the robotic revolution was that everyone would have his own robot who does all the hard work for him. That didn't work out so well now, did it?
As long as 1% of the population owns 35% and the top 20% of the population own 85% of a nations wealth, it is not very surprising that people oppose to change that gives the richest 1% even more money - money which according to their own theory (Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility) should be pretty much useless to the them but would be very useful to the poor.
Well, there are international extradition treaties, trade agreements, (applications) of law, etc. If the US DOJ continues down this path, they will have a hard time getting useful cooperation in legal matters with other countries in the future. Good luck enforcing your treaties and copyright claims abroad. There is only so much injustice and double standards that other countries and their voters will accept, and the legal systems of most countries explicitly prohibit the application of foreign law and law enforcement procedures on their home soil.
Moreover, hopefully, foreigners conducting business within the US or residing in the US are protected by the constitution and national laws as well, or otherwise companies from abroad would be crazy to deal with your country at all. The USA is not North Korea.
What you describe is very similar to the future in Gattaca, a nice sci-fi movie worth watching.
Why don't you just use AdBlock?
In my opinion, the problems are even bigger. No fly lists and other terrorist lists are completely beyond and above law and due process. There is no way you can appeal them or challenge them in court, except possibly, under very exceptional circumstances, at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
And as you rightly mention, there are more and more national "rubber laws" not just in Britain but all over the EU (not to speak of US, who seem to have them traditionally). These are laws that leave it nearly open what exactly constitutes the respective criminal ofense, making it possible to prosecute just about anyone for just about anything if somebody feels a need for it. They violate a basic rights principle, namely that an informed and educated citizen has to be able to tell exactly, from the text of the law, when he would transgress the law.
Last but not least, the biggest problem is that there is a strong tendency to make laws stronger rather than abolishing them or making them weaker, because this is always the safe route for a politician to go (unless he has reasons to believe the law might affect him, so this tendency does not concern anti-corruption and tax evasion laws). Who wants to be held accountable for not having signed this 'anti-terrorist' or 'child protection' law when the something bad happens? And something bad will always happen, that's for sure.
The long-term effect of these processes is increased legal uncertainty for common citizens, much more power for rich citizens who can afford excellent legal council, and an overall fascist society.
Compare Pinochet, who stepped down on his own, and left his country as Latin America's top economy,
You're kidding, right? We're talking about the Pinochet regime, with American-trained death squads, extensive torture, people 'disappearing' etc. Oh wait a minute, I get it ... you're just some random asshat troll.
WTF, how does that invalidate at all what the OP said? It even directly confirms it!
Well, if I don't see a picture I'll assume she's ugly. In fact, even if I see a nice picture my first suspicion will be that it's an exceptionally good one (the "Myspace angle") and that in reality she's too fat or too skinny and in any case too ugly. And if she's really beautiful, as proven by dozens of hot pictures and thousands of "likes", hearts, or whatever, then it is very likely that she's in the beginning of her 30s, extremely frustrated by men (viz., her own choices based on repeating the same mistakes again and again), and has all kinds of romantic wishes and unrealistic fantasies that will annoy you to no end.
Moreover, it is virtually guaranteed that there are no hot women on dating sites that *also* like helictoper simulations, and for that reason alone I don't use those sites.
Finally: Women want all kinds of things from men, whereas men want only one thing from women. That's all there is to say about the "battle of sexes".
You've been modded funny but unfortunately what you've said is true. :-(
What I find most annoying is that Spinger publishes this in a "Popular Astronomy" series. At least they could have classified it under religious studies, speculative philosophy, or put it in a "Popular Astrology" series.
This seems to be based on a common misunderstanding, based on confusing education with wisdom and/or intelligence. Just because we all have color TVs in the industrialized world now doesn't mean that we have gained one grain of wisdom.
For all it's worth, a space-faring civilization could be a a couple of dozens or hundreds of years ahead of us in terms of engineering and science, and still they might be a complete bunch of morons. They could be more intelligent than us, but they could also be much less intelligent than us. They could be more religious than us or less religious than us. It might have taken them 100 times longer than us to have come up with Newtonian mechanics, they might all be mindless religious zealots, could have the strangest religious views about the universe, might love to kill or torture aliens (=us) for fun or in order to bring us their 'wisdom', and so forth. We simply don't know, and almost nothing can be inferred from the level of technical development about these matters.
Every country has good food - except for Finland, of course. ;)
As if Gordon Ramsey could cook...
I've come to think about this a lot recently, as I'm currently writing a science fiction novel that plays in the near future after the US has been torn apart by a civil war. (BTW, I'm writing in German, so it is unlikely that any American will ever read it.)
With modern sattelite surveilance, DNA sampling, automated biometric scanning, fighting robots, and the total information awareness of the federal government, I find it increasingly improbable that any (legitimate or illegitimate) freedom fighters/rebels/terrorists could stand a chance against the whole power of the federal miltary apparatus in a high tech country like the USA. Drone strikes alone would probably eliminate most of the resistance very quickly, no matter how many small handguns they have, and social network analysis would allow them to decapitate the leadership of the movement in targeted assassinations. This is one of the reasons I'm personally against surveillance and advocate privacy, because I find it hard to imagine a democracy that could never ever turn into a totalitarian oligarchy or dictatorship by an unfortunate sequence of events. There should always be a balance of power between the people and the force of the state.
The only scenario I find credible and that is perhaps not so unlikely is that large parts of the army and national guard would split off and join the resistance movement and at the same time the rebel controlled territory has plenty of high tech weapons manufacturing companies, too. EasySurface to air missiles and anti-tank weapons would be crucial. Anyway, without a halfway even division of the professional military force, a modern civil war in the US would not last long.
Well, isn't it ironical then that Apple has a long history of bloating their operating systems and runtime environments in order to be able to sell new hardware?
The lesson to learn from this is that GC runtime efficiency is the very least of an issue in light of horrendous operating system, supporting library and application bloat. Not to speak of the #1 performance problem: using inadequate algorithms and data structures.
Besides, these performance arguments are mostly moot anyway. I'm not claiming that performance is totally irrelevant, I wouldn't use a GCed language for DSP programming either, but I've yet to see things other than pointless tech demos that anyone computes on his mobile phone that could never have been achieved on a phone that is only half as fast. An occasional GC will not do any serious harm to your fart apps and web page wrappers.
All of these elaborated arguments are primarily valid for companies such as Apple only, who want to save as many costs on hardware as possible in order to be able to rip off their customers even more. Apple has exorbitant profit margins in the mobile sectors.
I take a language with built-in GC used on a platform with hardware that is fast enough and has enough RAM anytime over a language with inferior memory management on slow hardware. Ditto for applications written in it. With today's hardware it's just plain stupid to do do manual memory management except in high integrity systems that are not allowed to use dynamic memory allocation anyway.
I've used it a lot for many years, starting from the very first version on until I became appalled by Apple a few years ago. I even still actively develop and sell an application for it. Unfortunately, based on my extensive experience with OS X, I have to say that it is a big pile of shit. Your mileage might differ, though. In the end it doesn't matter. It's just an operating system among many, providing a basic hardware abstraction layer for end-user applications, so who would care anyway.
Actually, no.
Isn't it phantastic when science and engineering can profit from stupidity and narrow-minded nationalism? If only that were always the case!
They can remotely reprogram just about any phone on the market, whether a smartphone or not, and Apple is not going to (be able to) change anything about that. Surveillance is based on traffic analysis and, if necessary for targetted surveillance, on controlling the endpoints.
Remember when the police claimed to have so many troubles in the 90s because criminals were allegedly using "hard to trace" cell phones with throwaway sim cards, whereas in reality they could pinpoint their exact location and turn the phones into bugs at any time? Well, this situation hasn't changed at all.
In my opinion the main usability problem of GNU/Linux is that practically all programs violate the #1 human interface guideline: Always give the user immediate and clear visual response to input action.
If you press a button, it must highlight immediately, if you select a menu it must show up immediately, if you select a menu entry, it should blink several times without blocking, if you launch a program, the operating system should immediately tell you that it is about to be launched (no matter how long it takes), if you put a USB stick in a USB port, the OS must inform you about it immediately, and so forth. All of this visual feedback must be immediate and also long enough to be clearly visible - and if an action *usually* takes only milliseconds, the OS must automatically show some progress feedback in case it incidentally takes longer.
This problem cannot be fixed by a desktop or window manager alone, it's also an application problem. But the GUI APIs do not seem to help much either. On a side note, Apple started to violate this and many other of their own guidelines since the introduction of OSX, so you could say that GNU/Linux is in "good" company.
I currently use XFCE for daily work, too. However, I'm not very happy with it and am looking for an alternative. XFCE's panel menus suck (both whisker and the old one), they take almost 30 seconds to load the entries for the first time, even if the icons are switched off. At least they should have an option for preloading the menu entries. (Or perhaps the developers should use slower, older machines, because XFCE does not seem to be fast and snappy at all to me on my 4 year old i7 920 6GB, particularly not when it is under some minor disk load).
Other things I don't like about XFCE is that it is relatively complicated to switch off the tumbler thumbnailing service, and that swappable media take a long time to open in the file manager and if they finally do so, four windows pop up at the same time. (What kind of stupid bug is that?) Also, the panel used to crash so often that I had to put a "Repair Panel" button on it - but this problem is gone with latest updates.
Minor quirks in an overall nice desktop manager but enough for me to (probably) switch. The only thing that kept me with XFCE is that I'm used to start everything with one click and I'm too lazy to make new custom panels for another environments.