I know scientific research _is_ a grind. You do it for the rare moments where you have a brilliant breakthrough. But then, though I program, I am not the whipping boy:)
Again, the issue is that the level of compensation in banking is disproportionate to the value created (but then, it is the other fields which underpay, not the reverse). Which is bad because: - it does not cause better outcomes in banking - causes worse outcomes in the rest of the economy.
Of course, if we were to discover that the paying scale in the rest of the economy was imposed by the (banker) investors, then you would be the first against the wall the week after. But clearly, you would not advise another human to try and impose the equivalent of indentured servitude to his employees to improve the bottom line. Especially since you believe that paying well attracts the best employees.
How can I say... Basically, working 100 h weeks is stupid. Odds are, by the end of the first one, you are in a haze or on drugs. And it's all downhill from there.
The only work one can accomplish with such a load is utterly uncreative and repetitive. Or a videogame, which is pretty much the same thing. If your work necessitates no lateral thinking nor creativity and you are paid more than living wage, you are overpaid. And this terrifying power-hunger and delusions of grandeur you are exhibiting: this is what caused the crisis.
A CEO of a company which requires advice from a guy who hasn't even got a PhD must be rather clueless...
Your feelings are hurt? Didn't you know: your salary is not proportional to your social utility. No one thinks that the "invest in companies" part of banking is wrong. The "create useless products which cause the world to crash" is what people object to. Oh, and the "hold the public to ransom instead of going bankrupt, like honest business do" is pretty bad.
Also the "think your salary is deserved" attitude -- especially after the crisis -- is particularly grating. You do not work so hard, nor are so clever that the salaries in the banking industry can be deserved. But this is not particularly relevant.
What is, is that perfectly good engineers go and pursue essentially fruitless careers instead of advancing the lot of mankind because of the salaries offered. This means that people selected for their greed, as opposed to a love for forward looking investments, are concentrated in an industry were they can cause maximum damage. This means that there is a dearth of very good engineers in the technical fields, which destroys the potential investments you would like to make!
Actually, this is what is Pigouvian tax is. The problem is that if we taxed the banking industry to compensate the externality they generate, I don't believe there would be much profit left in it...
Wealth redistribution is another issue. And for the sake of it, yes, it is both fair and necessary. The point is this: whether you earn 1 million a Year or 2 millions a year, your lifestyle is pretty much identical. However, that second million can cause 20 paupers to be middle-class. Or 10 great teachers to be paid, or kilometres of road to be maintained, or a couple research projects to be run. All these are much more necessary for society than you keeping you second million.
And the fact is that the odds that you will invest it in anything as remotely necessary (not useful, people are rather good at useful) but necessary are vanishingly small. You keeping this second million actually hurts society, because it is not spent on vital infrastructure or common goods. Paying the papers is in fact probably the most necessary of those expenses: the alternative is that they will either end in the emergency room and cost a lot, or commit crimes and cost a lot, or end up in prison and cost a lot. In the best case, they will be on the street begging, inconveniencing people and propagating unhappiness.
You should like paying taxes: this is the way you pay for civilisation.
Look, it's ok. You feel guilty of having sold out, but really, it's alright: we are all free. There is nothing reprehensible in deciding that you need money to support your family/loves/drug habits (bar useless mentions).
However.
Money for research overwhelmingly comes from government and industries. Not the financial sector. And the point of research is that all of Humanity benefits: ideas created/crafted/refined there benefit all. Only in theory is the investment baking industry responsible for better investment. Because as it happens, they are way too much into short-term (crazy short) benefits for that. And they sustain themselves through fees, meaning that they have a strong incentive for the creation of opaque products no-one really knows how to price (but the fees are charged anyway:) ).
If Nash had been a quant, a couple billions would have been added to the bottom line of some Wall Street firm, and the Nash equilibrium would have been called the Smith (or Jones) equilibrium. And been invented later. And game theory would have lost a couple decades. And the whole of Humanity would be a couple decades back in that respect.
This is precisely why it is particularly bad that the financial industry hires the brightest: if they were into banking for the love of it, chances are, they would be indeed be interested in better investment strategies. But most of them hate their jobs, and compensate by loving their lifestyles and trying to be extra-clever for the sake of their egos. Thus the mess we are in.
Did you know? Monetary incentives prevent people from lateral thinking and seeing the big picture. Doesn't it explain a lot?
Yes, but if you wanted to use the code, and make sure people could not use your contributions -- which you intend to distribute? Then the GPL is bad;)
Basically, the GPL forbids you from benefiting from someone else's work if you are not contributing symmetrically. That people try to make the _moral_ point that this is bad boggles the mind. It is like whining because people don't let you steal from stores -- which is clearly unfair as all the items are on display.
This is called the "invent your rules as you go" license. It works like that: I'm a company. Some internal code happened (coders are a commodity). But as is, I can't cash in, because: a) no one uses it b) it is not so good anyway
Now what to do? simple: disseminate the code by "giving" it to people. Say something about how it's alright, we don't use it anyway. Now wait until someone does something with it.
Sue. Get their work as a settlement. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
The GPL protects the original author and the users. You, as a coder, because it ensures that your contributions will never go towards helping someone do something with your code such that your code is not yours anymore. And yet you get to disseminate it/collaborate. You as a user, because if you depend on the code being available, it will be. Because of the above.
Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to make money. It is wrong to make money from someone else's work while making sure they can't even benefit from it. Sadly, this is what a typical company wishes: that way their competitors cannot benefit, and their users are locked.
The politics exist because although humans tend to be nice and cooperative, corporations behave like non-iterated-game-theoretical optimal entities (good ones, anyway). And such are Not Nice (TM).
Because there is no such thing as "radiation". A bit like there is no such thing as "cancer". It is a whole bunch of phenomena all packed together because of historical reasons.
When unstable isotopes decay, they can emit protons, neutrons, neutrinos, photons, antineutrinos, etc., etc. The stuff emitted, depending on its nature, its speed, its energy, interacts (or not) with the environment in very different ways. Since a measure is a measure of an interaction, there are necessarily many units.
And then you have those units used to have an idea of the health effects. And again, this is an amazingly complicated issue: damage from "radiation" will come from cells dying or genetic material being altered and not repaired. Killing cells is easy to understand, but DNA damage is much more complicated.
It may have no consequence at all. It may have beneficial consequences. It may trigger a chain of events which will eventually lead to illness. It may start a cancer right away.
That was a peak reading. It must have lasted in the order of a second. And then decreased exponentially. Chernobyl, on the other hand sustained its rate for hours, days, years...
A single particle of aluminium will spontaneously ignite. However it is rare for a slab to do so. This is because the surface is very large compared to the volume (in the particle case), and therefore the interactions with it can be very energetic compared to the volume considered, and cause combustion.
I suspect it is the same thing with a nanotube. A single strand might ignite, but a cable not.
Because we never make ships, planes, buildings out of conductive metals... You know, there are solutions, and no-one says the cable will not be isolated.
Distro? It is for the app to implement the thing. But pretty much all text editors (including vi!) will track changes in the documents... even after a system crash I have had kmail relaunched with the mail I was currently writing -- so clearly it had been tracked, along with the window size and position.
The first time I saw that (a couple years ago) I was amazed. But hey, opensource does not have a large marketing budget, so no one knows about it. But it nevertheless has been like that for a long time.
KDE ioslaves. I always could access the files on another UNIX computer provided I had access. simply typing fish://theComputer/foo in my file manager. Yes both computer had to be on connected networks. But at that time, that would have been the always case.
Now I should hope that selecting the files to share is as complex as adding a user (which might have been required). Because otherwise, this screams "security hole".
Ad hoc networking is not common, but it clearly is a feature of OLPC. Which is a free platform.
Finally, this feature is one I had not mentioned, because I have no idea either way. But I do think that providing free marketing for one of the largest corporation is dickish. And the app store thing is an outrage.
So don't claim it to be technically superior (to anything, really). It is an okay implementation of UNIX on a very restricted set of hardware. Even windows is more worthy of technical admiration.
And don't claim it is "innovative" or "ground-breaking" when it barely starts doing things available under linux since forever. It is like some primitive in a tribe living just outside a megalopolis saying: "look, WE got snazzier looking arrows". It's sad.
And BTW, you can get tech support for linux distros. This is how redhat et al. make their dough.
If you have lost your CD, you need to download xcode -- and go through an obnoxious registration process. To update said software from an older version of OSX, same thing.
Which BTW is completely orthogonal to the fact that apple is proudly boasting that they have implemented session management. Which is amazingly lame.
And that they are still not capable of implementing a WM with such basic features as magnetic borders and a not-brain-dead maximise. Oh and let us not forget the most amazingly useless minimise.
Think about it: if OSX was a linux distro, people would rip it apart as thoroughly below standard. Why would a corporation be held to lower standards than something I can get free on the Internet? I will praise apple the day their software is as good as they claim it is. Which is impossible as they are clearly pathological liars.
The cult of Mac is just a sad avatar of the Stockholm syndrome.
No, I don't need everything to be GPLed. I simply despise the propaganda apple and its fans spout about. Rave all you want about integration, shininess and whatnot. Do not pretend apple has any merit introducing features available 15 years ago on free platforms. This is something to feel shame about, not smugness. Don't tout features you should be ashamed not to have had when 10.0 came out.
Most users don't need a compiler? Themselves, no. The guy helping them (aka poor me) sometimes. You'd be surprised at the rather advanced requests one may have from users, some of which might require the installation/modification of Free Software. Which in turn requires a compiler. Of course, I could just tell them to give up -- but maybe I like a challenge. What I don't like is the insulting registration process I have to go through. Insulting because it exists at all.
Also, I have come to the conclusion the "mac is simpler" meme is a myth. A lie. Like the "photoshop is simpler". It is just uniquely and differently brain-dead. And the absence of features which is touted as simplicity one version becomes "new features you must upgrade for" at the next. I am not hating: apple is. They think I am stupid and cannot remember the lies they served me last time.
So for some hard-earned dollars, mac users might get an autosave feature of dubious value. Oh, and session management, which I had in KDE 1 some 10 years ago, and some feature which is comes free with proper networked multi-user operating systems.
Oh. And and an "app" "shop", aka half-arsed package management not nearly on par with what linux had 15 years ago. But shinier. And you need to register to get the bloody compiler. For the record, an "OS" without a compiler is not an OS.
And their desktop/WM is still not up to par. Presumably because it is too hard for the devs to implement proper window management (let us not talk about the multi-screen disaster)
Basically, mac users are suckers. The wonderful Mac propaganda machine is really just huge (and I mean huge) balls for professing the most blatant bald-faced lies. I cannot understand how they were not sued for the "we have the fastest processorsnow with Intel we have the fastest processors". Presumably, truthful advertising is only for non-apple companies. Apple and MS are the same to me in that they produce great hardware, but their company politics and software make me angry.
It makes me angry because it lowers the expectation of people. And this should never be tolerated. Ignorance is not a valid point of view.
No. You _can_ find subsidised phones. But this is in general a bad deal. Only people who think they "get the iPhone for free" sign up to those things... The norm is unlocked phones paid upfront, as this is typically a much better deal.
On the other hand, the UK is always somewhat the odd one out in the EU (you are clearly more European than American, but...) I strongly suspect that there is a strong correlation between ridiculously high household debt and people thinking the "phone for free" is a good deal.
Slashdot Mirror
You are defencive, for a happy guy...
I know scientific research _is_ a grind. You do it for the rare moments where you have a brilliant breakthrough. But then, though I program, I am not the whipping boy :)
Again, the issue is that the level of compensation in banking is disproportionate to the value created (but then, it is the other fields which underpay, not the reverse). Which is bad because:
- it does not cause better outcomes in banking
- causes worse outcomes in the rest of the economy.
Of course, if we were to discover that the paying scale in the rest of the economy was imposed by the (banker) investors, then you would be the first against the wall the week after. But clearly, you would not advise another human to try and impose the equivalent of indentured servitude to his employees to improve the bottom line. Especially since you believe that paying well attracts the best employees.
Oh, no. Worse than that: they actively work towards creating hell if it helps them be on top.
How can I say... Basically, working 100 h weeks is stupid. Odds are, by the end of the first one, you are in a haze or on drugs. And it's all downhill from there.
The only work one can accomplish with such a load is utterly uncreative and repetitive. Or a videogame, which is pretty much the same thing. If your work necessitates no lateral thinking nor creativity and you are paid more than living wage, you are overpaid. And this terrifying power-hunger and delusions of grandeur you are exhibiting: this is what caused the crisis.
A CEO of a company which requires advice from a guy who hasn't even got a PhD must be rather clueless...
Your feelings are hurt? Didn't you know: your salary is not proportional to your social utility. No one thinks that the "invest in companies" part of banking is wrong. The "create useless products which cause the world to crash" is what people object to. Oh, and the "hold the public to ransom instead of going bankrupt, like honest business do" is pretty bad.
Also the "think your salary is deserved" attitude -- especially after the crisis -- is particularly grating. You do not work so hard, nor are so clever that the salaries in the banking industry can be deserved. But this is not particularly relevant.
What is, is that perfectly good engineers go and pursue essentially fruitless careers instead of advancing the lot of mankind because of the salaries offered. This means that people selected for their greed, as opposed to a love for forward looking investments, are concentrated in an industry were they can cause maximum damage. This means that there is a dearth of very good engineers in the technical fields, which destroys the potential investments you would like to make!
Actually, this is what is Pigouvian tax is. The problem is that if we taxed the banking industry to compensate the externality they generate, I don't believe there would be much profit left in it...
Wealth redistribution is another issue. And for the sake of it, yes, it is both fair and necessary. The point is this: whether you earn 1 million a Year or 2 millions a year, your lifestyle is pretty much identical. However, that second million can cause 20 paupers to be middle-class. Or 10 great teachers to be paid, or kilometres of road to be maintained, or a couple research projects to be run. All these are much more necessary for society than you keeping you second million.
And the fact is that the odds that you will invest it in anything as remotely necessary (not useful, people are rather good at useful) but necessary are vanishingly small. You keeping this second million actually hurts society, because it is not spent on vital infrastructure or common goods. Paying the papers is in fact probably the most necessary of those expenses: the alternative is that they will either end in the emergency room and cost a lot, or commit crimes and cost a lot, or end up in prison and cost a lot. In the best case, they will be on the street begging, inconveniencing people and propagating unhappiness.
You should like paying taxes: this is the way you pay for civilisation.
WTF?
Look, it's ok. You feel guilty of having sold out, but really, it's alright: we are all free. There is nothing reprehensible in deciding that you need money to support your family/loves/drug habits (bar useless mentions).
However.
Money for research overwhelmingly comes from government and industries. Not the financial sector. And the point of research is that all of Humanity benefits: ideas created/crafted/refined there benefit all. Only in theory is the investment baking industry responsible for better investment. Because as it happens, they are way too much into short-term (crazy short) benefits for that. And they sustain themselves through fees, meaning that they have a strong incentive for the creation of opaque products no-one really knows how to price (but the fees are charged anyway :) ).
If Nash had been a quant, a couple billions would have been added to the bottom line of some Wall Street firm, and the Nash equilibrium would have been called the Smith (or Jones) equilibrium. And been invented later. And game theory would have lost a couple decades. And the whole of Humanity would be a couple decades back in that respect.
This is precisely why it is particularly bad that the financial industry hires the brightest: if they were into banking for the love of it, chances are, they would be indeed be interested in better investment strategies. But most of them hate their jobs, and compensate by loving their lifestyles and trying to be extra-clever for the sake of their egos. Thus the mess we are in.
Did you know? Monetary incentives prevent people from lateral thinking and seeing the big picture. Doesn't it explain a lot?
Because undefined (as in changing depending on the circumstances) complexity is worse than "always the same but depending on the implementation".
Yes, but if you wanted to use the code, and make sure people could not use your contributions -- which you intend to distribute? Then the GPL is bad ;)
Basically, the GPL forbids you from benefiting from someone else's work if you are not contributing symmetrically. That people try to make the _moral_ point that this is bad boggles the mind. It is like whining because people don't let you steal from stores -- which is clearly unfair as all the items are on display.
This is called the "invent your rules as you go" license. It works like that: I'm a company. Some internal code happened (coders are a commodity). But as is, I can't cash in, because:
a) no one uses it
b) it is not so good anyway
Now what to do? simple: disseminate the code by "giving" it to people. Say something about how it's alright, we don't use it anyway. Now wait until someone does something with it.
Sue. Get their work as a settlement. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
The GPL protects the original author and the users. You, as a coder, because it ensures that your contributions will never go towards helping someone do something with your code such that your code is not yours anymore. And yet you get to disseminate it/collaborate. You as a user, because if you depend on the code being available, it will be. Because of the above.
Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to make money. It is wrong to make money from someone else's work while making sure they can't even benefit from it. Sadly, this is what a typical company wishes: that way their competitors cannot benefit, and their users are locked.
The politics exist because although humans tend to be nice and cooperative, corporations behave like non-iterated-game-theoretical optimal entities (good ones, anyway). And such are Not Nice (TM).
Because there is no such thing as "radiation". A bit like there is no such thing as "cancer". It is a whole bunch of phenomena all packed together because of historical reasons.
When unstable isotopes decay, they can emit protons, neutrons, neutrinos, photons, antineutrinos, etc., etc. The stuff emitted, depending on its nature, its speed, its energy, interacts (or not) with the environment in very different ways. Since a measure is a measure of an interaction, there are necessarily many units.
And then you have those units used to have an idea of the health effects. And again, this is an amazingly complicated issue: damage from "radiation" will come from cells dying or genetic material being altered and not repaired. Killing cells is easy to understand, but DNA damage is much more complicated.
It may have no consequence at all.
It may have beneficial consequences.
It may trigger a chain of events which will eventually lead to illness.
It may start a cancer right away.
That was a peak reading. It must have lasted in the order of a second. And then decreased exponentially. Chernobyl, on the other hand sustained its rate for hours, days, years...
There is a good graph of the readings on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
A single particle of aluminium will spontaneously ignite. However it is rare for a slab to do so. This is because the surface is very large compared to the volume (in the particle case), and therefore the interactions with it can be very energetic compared to the volume considered, and cause combustion.
I suspect it is the same thing with a nanotube. A single strand might ignite, but a cable not.
And yes, I meant insulated.
Because we never make ships, planes, buildings out of conductive metals... You know, there are solutions, and no-one says the cable will not be isolated.
I don't know. I don't follow the field, but not long ago, 1 cm was science fiction. So progress is made at an amazing rate.
spontaneous combustion aside, conductive is a feature, not a bug...
Really? If you are right, then so is he. At 18.5 cm, you can start meshing the things...
Distro? It is for the app to implement the thing. But pretty much all text editors (including vi!) will track changes in the documents... even after a system crash I have had kmail relaunched with the mail I was currently writing -- so clearly it had been tracked, along with the window size and position.
The first time I saw that (a couple years ago) I was amazed. But hey, opensource does not have a large marketing budget, so no one knows about it. But it nevertheless has been like that for a long time.
KDE ioslaves. I always could access the files on another UNIX computer provided I had access. simply typing fish://theComputer/foo in my file manager. Yes both computer had to be on connected networks. But at that time, that would have been the always case.
Now I should hope that selecting the files to share is as complex as adding a user (which might have been required). Because otherwise, this screams "security hole".
Ad hoc networking is not common, but it clearly is a feature of OLPC. Which is a free platform.
Finally, this feature is one I had not mentioned, because I have no idea either way. But I do think that providing free marketing for one of the largest corporation is dickish. And the app store thing is an outrage.
The state. I would be annoyed if my IDE only reopened the files and did not also scroll to where I left them opened.
At least this is how it works under KDE.
So don't claim it to be technically superior (to anything, really). It is an okay implementation of UNIX on a very restricted set of hardware. Even windows is more worthy of technical admiration.
And don't claim it is "innovative" or "ground-breaking" when it barely starts doing things available under linux since forever. It is like some primitive in a tribe living just outside a megalopolis saying: "look, WE got snazzier looking arrows". It's sad.
And BTW, you can get tech support for linux distros. This is how redhat et al. make their dough.
Under KDE4, at least, the whole UI is scalable. Fonts, widgets, everything.
As for font display, the patents expired, and it suddenly got better ;) You should try something recent.
Of course, the fonts themselves are not great, but if you could afford OSX, you can afford some real fonts.
If you have lost your CD, you need to download xcode -- and go through an obnoxious registration process. To update said software from an older version of OSX, same thing.
Which BTW is completely orthogonal to the fact that apple is proudly boasting that they have implemented session management. Which is amazingly lame.
And that they are still not capable of implementing a WM with such basic features as magnetic borders and a not-brain-dead maximise. Oh and let us not forget the most amazingly useless minimise.
Think about it: if OSX was a linux distro, people would rip it apart as thoroughly below standard. Why would a corporation be held to lower standards than something I can get free on the Internet? I will praise apple the day their software is as good as they claim it is. Which is impossible as they are clearly pathological liars.
The cult of Mac is just a sad avatar of the Stockholm syndrome.
No, I don't need everything to be GPLed. I simply despise the propaganda apple and its fans spout about. Rave all you want about integration, shininess and whatnot. Do not pretend apple has any merit introducing features available 15 years ago on free platforms. This is something to feel shame about, not smugness. Don't tout features you should be ashamed not to have had when 10.0 came out.
Most users don't need a compiler? Themselves, no. The guy helping them (aka poor me) sometimes. You'd be surprised at the rather advanced requests one may have from users, some of which might require the installation/modification of Free Software. Which in turn requires a compiler. Of course, I could just tell them to give up -- but maybe I like a challenge. What I don't like is the insulting registration process I have to go through. Insulting because it exists at all.
Also, I have come to the conclusion the "mac is simpler" meme is a myth. A lie. Like the "photoshop is simpler". It is just uniquely and differently brain-dead. And the absence of features which is touted as simplicity one version becomes "new features you must upgrade for" at the next. I am not hating: apple is. They think I am stupid and cannot remember the lies they served me last time.
So for some hard-earned dollars, mac users might get an autosave feature of dubious value. Oh, and session management, which I had in KDE 1 some 10 years ago, and some feature which is comes free with proper networked multi-user operating systems.
Oh. And and an "app" "shop", aka half-arsed package management not nearly on par with what linux had 15 years ago. But shinier. And you need to register to get the bloody compiler. For the record, an "OS" without a compiler is not an OS.
And their desktop/WM is still not up to par. Presumably because it is too hard for the devs to implement proper window management (let us not talk about the multi-screen disaster)
Basically, mac users are suckers. The wonderful Mac propaganda machine is really just huge (and I mean huge) balls for professing the most blatant bald-faced lies. I cannot understand how they were not sued for the "we have the fastest processorsnow with Intel we have the fastest processors". Presumably, truthful advertising is only for non-apple companies. Apple and MS are the same to me in that they produce great hardware, but their company politics and software make me angry.
It makes me angry because it lowers the expectation of people. And this should never be tolerated. Ignorance is not a valid point of view.
No. You _can_ find subsidised phones. But this is in general a bad deal. Only people who think they "get the iPhone for free" sign up to those things... The norm is unlocked phones paid upfront, as this is typically a much better deal.
On the other hand, the UK is always somewhat the odd one out in the EU (you are clearly more European than American, but...) I strongly suspect that there is a strong correlation between ridiculously high household debt and people thinking the "phone for free" is a good deal.