That would include the Zen masters that told people that the secret of the good life is to overcome your training, experience things for yourself and "just be natural"? Or the Hebrew prophets who told anyone who would listen that God was not interested in temples, altars and sacrifices, but wanted people to live ethically and at peace with their neighbours?
The sad truth is that religions become centres of power, and centres of power attract criminals. It's interesting to see how even the green movement is being plagued with criminals selling people massively uneconomic wind and solar systems, because people's desire to do good often exceeds their ability to see through bullshit. But some religions - Zen, Quakers, Reform Judaism, the liberal wing of the Episcopalian Church - have proven very resistant to criminal infiltration. That's possibly because they attract mainly very educated people. To be blunt, one reason Scientology is so successful might be because it has targeted the rich and gullible.
For those who don't know, this is nothing new. Heston Blumenthal, who runs The Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, for those of you with a few hundred euros to spend on dinner, has been doing this for years. Blumenthal uses laboratory equipment because it gives better, more consistent results than standard cooking equipment and is designed to stand up to the workloads of a commercial kitchen, but he has extended this a long way to develop new ideas. I'm assuming that this guy knows about him and his work and decided to try to go one better (possibly because of his connection to a company famous for doing precisely that?)
Dick had already pissed the money away to Halliburton and the Industrial-Military Complex, remember? It cost an awful lot to donate all that expensive depleted uranium to the Iraqis.
Take a look at Nature, or the bibliographies in Scientific American, and see the number of Chinese names. Whereas the caste structure is just as bad in most places in the US I've been in, with VPs not wanting to hear anything about boat-rocking technology. I worked for one company where a junior engineer came up with an idea that would save $40 million per year. He was nearly sacked, because the VP was selling the board an unproven technology to do the same job that would save $20 million. The only reason he wasn't sacked was that the week before the new company President had delivered a staff lecture about how the "culture of fear" of the management had to stop.
Pot, kettle. Creativity is universal in the human race, so is blind conservatism, it just affects different individuals.
That advertising is, if not desirable, at least neutral. The people likely to want such a service are people with little disposable income, i.e. poor people. We already know which advertisers queue up to sell to them. Mortgage scammers, loansharks, job adverts that turn out to be for sex work, cheap junk food. Your suggestion looks all right at first, but targeted ads of the sort you propose are mainly aimed at the sort of people who would be happily able to afford an ad-free phone, and have the nous to be predisposed to ignore targeted advertising. And one ad per half hour of talk time is ridiculous: at current phone rates, and given the value of an individual listening to an ad over the phone network, it would be more like half an hour of ads for one minute of talk. This won't be used for making calls.
There is often a psychological gulf between US and UK advertising. Often US advertising is based around insecurity and fear: if you don't buy this you will continue to smell/have bugs grow in your crotch/put off the opposite sex/have your neighbors laugh at you/be unAmerican. One can imagine all too well that a sizeable part of the population, forced to view such ads, will react as desired. It is less likely to work in Europe, where there is far more distrust of corporations and official-sounding messages (partly because of our bad history in the first half of the 20th century.)
I know several civil engineers, and I can tell you your response is rubbish. This exploit requires a reboot. That is a temporary interruption of service. How often do bridges have to be closed because of unforeseen weather conditions, cracking, design errors (London Millennium bridge an example of that)? The answer is, of course, all the time. The closures are needed because of the likelihood of collapse or severe structural damage. A friend of mine is currently sorting out a major dispute between two engineering companies and a government over alleged design errors in a major infrastructure project. I think, to be honest, you are the one who sounds stupid - sounding off with a counter example from an industry you know nothing at all about.
Oh dear. The HP Linux Printing System is excellent, and Samsung's support for Linux allows you to use really cheap laser printers on a home Linux box. Because HP's Windows drivers often involve installing something larger than some operating systems, and because the Windows printer installer really isn't much good (for ordinary users it's only really usable for installing USB printers or connecting to shares) HP's Linux support is real-world better than their Windows support. Of course, if your idea of a printer is some piece of GDI crap from the high street, you may expect problems, not least of which will be expensive consumables.
"Under all conditions" for a piece of complex code is often far from easy. I am still smarting from a problem we had recently (not a vulnerability) where the system was sporadically failing to output messages, a problem never seen before. Unit testing was no good. We spent a week reviewing the code: found a bug, fixed it. Now there were fewer sporadic missed messages, but the number was nonzero. We used a simulator to test under every condition we could think of: no errors. Back on customer site, missed messages. It turned out there was a tiny corner case in an algorithm that was being occasionally triggered by two devices on the network that had a firmware error.
I hate Microsoft with the best of them, but give their software engineers credit where it's due: how often have you delivered completely bugfree networking software?
Read Genesis carefully and literally. There are at least 3 creation myths referenced in it. In one, quite separately from Adam and Eve, human women have sex with "angels" and give birth to giants. You could argue that Genesis (and the Book of Daniel) posit visitors from other worlds. (personally I believe that magic mushrooms trump flying saucers 9 times out of 10)
We evolved like this and it seems to work relatively well. Human design is obviously pretty good so long as you are a hunter-gatherer living a littoral existence in a warm climate, where you can expect a life expectancy over 50 years without medicine. The error you are objecting to is self-referential; it denies evolution, so has to posit that things were designed like that in the first place since they could not have evolved.
(from a plaque in a small German town whose name I now forget - in the late Middle Ages the local landowner tried to enclose common land and sent his soldiers to stop any local men who tried to demolish it. The wall was demolished by the local women: the soldiers were barred by their personal honour from fighting women.)
My point here is that in the longer run what will destroy the Wall is that there are now going to be three Linux based phone OSes, Android, Maemo and Samsung's Bada. To get developer traction these must all offer developer features that the iPhone does not. The ability to run FOSS applications without DRM is what developers want to hear.
You insensitive clod. Just thinking about being under the Arctic ice in a metal tube makes me think that perhaps there is a case for encouraging global warming after all.
My father is 85, retired from the law. His Ubuntu install told him that an upgrade was available. So he followed the instructions and upgraded. I think that Linux distributions work well with older people who are used to reading and understanding written instructions and advice. Not nearly so good for the sort of people who have to have things "shown to" them.
Would that be because their employer, Mr. Sauron, had a few problems with the authorities? In Terry Pratchett's latest book, there's an indirect swipe at JRRT: there are only a few surviving orcs after the Dark Wars, and (plot spoiler) the authorities are trying to integrate them back into society.
Meanwhile in the real world, Acer is the largest manufacturer of laptops, HP of desktops, and Samsung is a huge consumer electronics company. The US is not longer the majority of the IT goods market. Outside the US, the iPhone is just one of a number of high spec phones. The consumer market has lots of competition and Apple is just one player. Your statement is like saying "BMW sews up lines in the car market". Just because many US geeks prefer BMWs to Mercs doesn't actually mean that BMW is the market leader.
The point about freedom of speech in the Constitution was that Americans wanted the right to criticise their government. They had had enough of repressive Anglo-German Governments. And they were right.
The Founding Fathers never for one moment imagined that the Constitution would be used as a charter to allow bullying, or to allow corporations for force feed you with advertisements and unwanted phone calls. One reason the UK does not have a written constitution is that generations of legislators have worried about generic laws being overtaken by social change, or misused. They have always regarded it as essential that Parliament should be able to make laws as required to deal with new situations.
In fact "freedom of speech" is limited by laws of libel and slander, by laws relating to official secrecy, by local laws relating to the treatment of minors, and by the power of media owners. I'm not saying the US is wrong and the UK is right; the UK has far too little protection of the individual, and both countries have legal systems intended to benefit the rich and disadvantage the poor. But simplistric referring to the US Constitution is to deny or ignore what actually happens in the real world.
Chrome is based on Webkit and optimised for Javascript, which is Google's delivery tool of choice. OOO was never going to be suitable for running as a cloud application. The Google OS seems to be tight integration of Linux and Chrome. Go seems to be basically the start of an improved version of C, rather than an improved version of C++.
You seem to be complaining because Google is working on technologies which are not your technology of choice. But far from an NIH, they seem to be giving serious traction to existing technology which best suits their needs.
Nobody deserves anonymous abuse unless it is a matter of serious public concern. Assuming that your statement is correct, if the kid is already a "mommas boy" then online bullying would only make things worse. And in your post you have clearly identified yourself as a supporter of online bullying of the less socially able ("deserved"). Consider what this says about you, because it isn't very nice.
This is surely the correct decision. In order to decide whether to sue, the mother needs to know who she might be suing. If the poster is autistic, disturbed or perhaps already in the court system for other offenses, the mother might decide to leave well alone. If the only way that she can obtain the identity is to file a suit, then there is no escape from legal proceedings.
One reason freedom of speech needs to be protected is because it takes away an argument for anonymity - that anonymity is necessary for protection from the powerful. The only reason that anonymity should be permitted is when wrongdoing is being exposed and there is a possibility of extra-legal repercussions, or when a person with a public position needs to be able to express a view not representative of their public persona - as when, for instance, a politician wishes to contribute to a rational debate on drugs or abortion in a way that is not in accordance with the opinions of Rupert Murdoch. Civil society does not convey to teenagers an automatic right to post offensive, anonymous graffiti and that needs to be clearly understood.
This simply exposes the extreme lameness of allowing common words in product names. I have very limited sympathy for Mr. McCabe: naming your language with one of the most common verbs in the English language was always going to be at risk of a namespace clash. (The game is a different matter, as English was not the language of its originators.) If you work for a Bell Labs you can get away with calling a language 'C', if you are an academic you do best to use a name less likely to be taken, such as Pascal, Smalltalk.
Unfortunately, in the real world, Google is huge, the "Go..." bit is going to ring immediate bells. Mr. McCabe made a bad choice of language name and he should stop complaining to Google and instead change it to something else and ask them to publicise the change - which I am sure they would do, and would get him more attention.
No, I'm neither pro nor anti Google, but this is a case where realism is in order. To use the essential car analogy, suppose i was a custom builder and for years had made 10 cars a year with the model name "530". Then BMW come along with their long established 5 series and also release a 530. Is it realistic to expect BMW to change their model designation? I'm sure a lawyer would take on the case if his client had deep pockets, but his expectation of winning would be diddley squit.
Enterprise means something. It means that an application is either capable of scaling beyond a single machine, or is capable of using the resources of a large multi-CPU server, and can support many users across a large company. The design challenges are quite different from optimising an application to run efficiently on a single machine. I constantly encounter this issue, with end users and marketing not understanding why, for instance, you do not want an enterprise application to have the pretties and feature set of Word or Powerpoint.
I too get annoyed by database luddites, especially the ones who are in there because they have no social skills, no desire to co-operate with others, and who know all the MS latest terminology but don't, for instance, actually understand how indexes work because they have never really learnt system programming. But valuable corporate data does need to be protected; its loss or corruption costs profits and jobs. SQL is a proven language with a strong track record that is largely portable and, except when queries are generated by some hopeless automated query generation engine, can be made human readable and checkable. Way to go for corporate data.
If you had a nickel as you suggest, you probably wouldn't have enough to buy lunch in a decent restaurant. If you had a nickel for every swear word uttered by every dba or IT manager sweating blood trying to overcome data loss or corruption, you might be able to retire as you suggest.
Remember: social networking applications are not mission critical business processes, and they do not have significant SLAs to meet.
Another person who has never been to the Third World. Try it before sounding off with nonsense. All your approach of sending second hand equipment does is to provide medical facilities for third world elites living in cities where there is enough electric power, and enough technicians to be able to service the old equipment. I think it could be described as the worst possible approach. Third world medical research facilities require the latest and best equipment, just like everywhere else, because it is more reliable, requires less skill to operate, and can be serviced with available parts.
Others have posted on your missing the point of this idea of using computing power as a substitute for human power. I nearly took a job in the mid 80s working in a medical research company trying to automate an optical system for detecting cell abormalities. The problem was that mid-80s affordable computing power was not nearly sufficient. A mobile phone now has a 400MHz 32 bit processor rather than a 12MHz 16 bit processor. It is NOT a second-best solution; it is a hardware platform that would have been regarded as a near-supercomputer in the 80s.
It's OK, I improved my school French with Tintin too. We don't have to avoid the T-word. We know nowadays it's stereotypical racist and all the rest...but so is a lot of French literature. And with Asterix...my French teacher was convinced I would fail French Lit O level (this is the distant past, folks) because I really didn't think much of the set books. I took it a year early and got a grade A. I went on to read Rabelais in the original. And I agree with everything you write.
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The sad truth is that religions become centres of power, and centres of power attract criminals. It's interesting to see how even the green movement is being plagued with criminals selling people massively uneconomic wind and solar systems, because people's desire to do good often exceeds their ability to see through bullshit. But some religions - Zen, Quakers, Reform Judaism, the liberal wing of the Episcopalian Church - have proven very resistant to criminal infiltration. That's possibly because they attract mainly very educated people. To be blunt, one reason Scientology is so successful might be because it has targeted the rich and gullible.
For those who don't know, this is nothing new. Heston Blumenthal, who runs The Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, for those of you with a few hundred euros to spend on dinner, has been doing this for years. Blumenthal uses laboratory equipment because it gives better, more consistent results than standard cooking equipment and is designed to stand up to the workloads of a commercial kitchen, but he has extended this a long way to develop new ideas. I'm assuming that this guy knows about him and his work and decided to try to go one better (possibly because of his connection to a company famous for doing precisely that?)
Dick had already pissed the money away to Halliburton and the Industrial-Military Complex, remember? It cost an awful lot to donate all that expensive depleted uranium to the Iraqis.
Pot, kettle. Creativity is universal in the human race, so is blind conservatism, it just affects different individuals.
That advertising is, if not desirable, at least neutral. The people likely to want such a service are people with little disposable income, i.e. poor people. We already know which advertisers queue up to sell to them. Mortgage scammers, loansharks, job adverts that turn out to be for sex work, cheap junk food. Your suggestion looks all right at first, but targeted ads of the sort you propose are mainly aimed at the sort of people who would be happily able to afford an ad-free phone, and have the nous to be predisposed to ignore targeted advertising. And one ad per half hour of talk time is ridiculous: at current phone rates, and given the value of an individual listening to an ad over the phone network, it would be more like half an hour of ads for one minute of talk. This won't be used for making calls.
There is often a psychological gulf between US and UK advertising. Often US advertising is based around insecurity and fear: if you don't buy this you will continue to smell/have bugs grow in your crotch/put off the opposite sex/have your neighbors laugh at you/be unAmerican. One can imagine all too well that a sizeable part of the population, forced to view such ads, will react as desired. It is less likely to work in Europe, where there is far more distrust of corporations and official-sounding messages (partly because of our bad history in the first half of the 20th century.)
I know several civil engineers, and I can tell you your response is rubbish. This exploit requires a reboot. That is a temporary interruption of service. How often do bridges have to be closed because of unforeseen weather conditions, cracking, design errors (London Millennium bridge an example of that)? The answer is, of course, all the time. The closures are needed because of the likelihood of collapse or severe structural damage. A friend of mine is currently sorting out a major dispute between two engineering companies and a government over alleged design errors in a major infrastructure project. I think, to be honest, you are the one who sounds stupid - sounding off with a counter example from an industry you know nothing at all about.
Oh dear. The HP Linux Printing System is excellent, and Samsung's support for Linux allows you to use really cheap laser printers on a home Linux box. Because HP's Windows drivers often involve installing something larger than some operating systems, and because the Windows printer installer really isn't much good (for ordinary users it's only really usable for installing USB printers or connecting to shares) HP's Linux support is real-world better than their Windows support. Of course, if your idea of a printer is some piece of GDI crap from the high street, you may expect problems, not least of which will be expensive consumables.
I hate Microsoft with the best of them, but give their software engineers credit where it's due: how often have you delivered completely bugfree networking software?
Read Genesis carefully and literally. There are at least 3 creation myths referenced in it. In one, quite separately from Adam and Eve, human women have sex with "angels" and give birth to giants. You could argue that Genesis (and the Book of Daniel) posit visitors from other worlds. (personally I believe that magic mushrooms trump flying saucers 9 times out of 10)
We evolved like this and it seems to work relatively well. Human design is obviously pretty good so long as you are a hunter-gatherer living a littoral existence in a warm climate, where you can expect a life expectancy over 50 years without medicine. The error you are objecting to is self-referential; it denies evolution, so has to posit that things were designed like that in the first place since they could not have evolved.
My point here is that in the longer run what will destroy the Wall is that there are now going to be three Linux based phone OSes, Android, Maemo and Samsung's Bada. To get developer traction these must all offer developer features that the iPhone does not. The ability to run FOSS applications without DRM is what developers want to hear.
You insensitive clod. Just thinking about being under the Arctic ice in a metal tube makes me think that perhaps there is a case for encouraging global warming after all.
My father is 85, retired from the law. His Ubuntu install told him that an upgrade was available. So he followed the instructions and upgraded. I think that Linux distributions work well with older people who are used to reading and understanding written instructions and advice. Not nearly so good for the sort of people who have to have things "shown to" them.
Would that be because their employer, Mr. Sauron, had a few problems with the authorities? In Terry Pratchett's latest book, there's an indirect swipe at JRRT: there are only a few surviving orcs after the Dark Wars, and (plot spoiler) the authorities are trying to integrate them back into society.
Meanwhile in the real world, Acer is the largest manufacturer of laptops, HP of desktops, and Samsung is a huge consumer electronics company. The US is not longer the majority of the IT goods market. Outside the US, the iPhone is just one of a number of high spec phones. The consumer market has lots of competition and Apple is just one player. Your statement is like saying "BMW sews up lines in the car market". Just because many US geeks prefer BMWs to Mercs doesn't actually mean that BMW is the market leader.
The Founding Fathers never for one moment imagined that the Constitution would be used as a charter to allow bullying, or to allow corporations for force feed you with advertisements and unwanted phone calls. One reason the UK does not have a written constitution is that generations of legislators have worried about generic laws being overtaken by social change, or misused. They have always regarded it as essential that Parliament should be able to make laws as required to deal with new situations.
In fact "freedom of speech" is limited by laws of libel and slander, by laws relating to official secrecy, by local laws relating to the treatment of minors, and by the power of media owners. I'm not saying the US is wrong and the UK is right; the UK has far too little protection of the individual, and both countries have legal systems intended to benefit the rich and disadvantage the poor. But simplistric referring to the US Constitution is to deny or ignore what actually happens in the real world.
You seem to be complaining because Google is working on technologies which are not your technology of choice. But far from an NIH, they seem to be giving serious traction to existing technology which best suits their needs.
Nobody deserves anonymous abuse unless it is a matter of serious public concern. Assuming that your statement is correct, if the kid is already a "mommas boy" then online bullying would only make things worse. And in your post you have clearly identified yourself as a supporter of online bullying of the less socially able ("deserved"). Consider what this says about you, because it isn't very nice.
One reason freedom of speech needs to be protected is because it takes away an argument for anonymity - that anonymity is necessary for protection from the powerful. The only reason that anonymity should be permitted is when wrongdoing is being exposed and there is a possibility of extra-legal repercussions, or when a person with a public position needs to be able to express a view not representative of their public persona - as when, for instance, a politician wishes to contribute to a rational debate on drugs or abortion in a way that is not in accordance with the opinions of Rupert Murdoch. Civil society does not convey to teenagers an automatic right to post offensive, anonymous graffiti and that needs to be clearly understood.
Unfortunately, in the real world, Google is huge, the "Go..." bit is going to ring immediate bells. Mr. McCabe made a bad choice of language name and he should stop complaining to Google and instead change it to something else and ask them to publicise the change - which I am sure they would do, and would get him more attention.
No, I'm neither pro nor anti Google, but this is a case where realism is in order. To use the essential car analogy, suppose i was a custom builder and for years had made 10 cars a year with the model name "530". Then BMW come along with their long established 5 series and also release a 530. Is it realistic to expect BMW to change their model designation? I'm sure a lawyer would take on the case if his client had deep pockets, but his expectation of winning would be diddley squit.
I too get annoyed by database luddites, especially the ones who are in there because they have no social skills, no desire to co-operate with others, and who know all the MS latest terminology but don't, for instance, actually understand how indexes work because they have never really learnt system programming. But valuable corporate data does need to be protected; its loss or corruption costs profits and jobs. SQL is a proven language with a strong track record that is largely portable and, except when queries are generated by some hopeless automated query generation engine, can be made human readable and checkable. Way to go for corporate data.
If you had a nickel as you suggest, you probably wouldn't have enough to buy lunch in a decent restaurant. If you had a nickel for every swear word uttered by every dba or IT manager sweating blood trying to overcome data loss or corruption, you might be able to retire as you suggest.
Remember: social networking applications are not mission critical business processes, and they do not have significant SLAs to meet.
Others have posted on your missing the point of this idea of using computing power as a substitute for human power. I nearly took a job in the mid 80s working in a medical research company trying to automate an optical system for detecting cell abormalities. The problem was that mid-80s affordable computing power was not nearly sufficient. A mobile phone now has a 400MHz 32 bit processor rather than a 12MHz 16 bit processor. It is NOT a second-best solution; it is a hardware platform that would have been regarded as a near-supercomputer in the 80s.
"Micro" is Greek. That Latin root for very small is "pusill.." so I think you mean "Pusillmolle" -
It's OK, I improved my school French with Tintin too. We don't have to avoid the T-word. We know nowadays it's stereotypical racist and all the rest...but so is a lot of French literature. And with Asterix...my French teacher was convinced I would fail French Lit O level (this is the distant past, folks) because I really didn't think much of the set books. I took it a year early and got a grade A. I went on to read Rabelais in the original. And I agree with everything you write.