The real problem here is the internet I think. Because you're right. In the 90s a kid could get a CD and make cassett copies for his/her friends on a standard stereo. After that, maybe he could even make a perfect copy of the CD on a computer. But, that kid probably only gave the CD/tape to 1-5 friends. And not everybody made copies at all. Add it all up, and piracy might have been rampant but the legitimate copies may have made up for 75% of all copies on the market.
Now, one kid can buy a CD and put it online for literally thousands to download. It's just too easy.
What content providers really need to be looking for is a way to make massive piracy hard while actually encouraging more limited piracy (because in small enough quantities it can actually serve as advertising). I just don't know how you can capture such disparate goals in an internet world...
How did this get modded insightful? It's a non sequitur at best and an intentionally misleading comparison at worst.
The GP never claimed a company can go to any ends to protect its profits, only that protecting it's profits is not in and of itself evil. If a company slaughters children to protect its profits, its the slaughter not the profit aspect of it that is evil. From the examples above, Goldman Sachs is evil because they use collusion with the federal government, insider information, and privileged access to markets to gain an unfair advantage over smaller competitors and generally transfer wealth from regular people to themselves. Monsanto is evil because they are trying to use patent law to steal unowned genetic information from the public. BP is evil because they took shortcuts which lead to a massive ecological disaster.
In contrast, a large company may have tens of thousands of employees and millions of shareholders. If a corporation can ethically protect its profits, it benefits all those people, which is a good thing.
And 200% isn't wrong. Well it is, but there's a grain of truth behind it. I speced out a 15" macbook pro with a regular pc laptop, matching the components as close to identically as I could. The macbook was almost exactly double the price.
No you didn't. You speced out something you thought was comparable to a 15" macbook. Maybe it had comparable memory, processors, harddrive space, and video drivers, but it still wasn't really comparable. You were giving up something. Case quality, battery life, keyboard quality, screen quality, weight, or maybe proper configuration on sale. Just because you don't value such things as much as "ZOMG look at this framerate!" doesn't mean they have no value.
I know because 3 months ago I did essentially the same thing. I didn't buy a macbook (lenovo), but what I found was that the baseline price for comparable laptops from other makers aren't even 10% lower. The main difference is that most other manufacturers occasionally have massive discounts and routinely have small discounts. E.g. I got over 40% off my laptop. You'll rarely find such a discount on Apple products, but you probably can't get the same discount on my laptop now either.
Wait, so now we have a duty to prop up businesses that don't have a profitable setup? How dare we fire the buggy whip makers just because new technology came along?
Congrats on misunderstanding the GP's point. If a corporation is highly profitable, and they make those profits by abusing the system, which abuses everyone in the system, then it's alright for the rest of us to say this is not right and change the equation so society and not only corporations can benefit. That's all the GP was arguing.
Can't people appreciate what others do even if it ain't their pet project?
Do people need to appreciate what others do for hobbies? Personally, every time I see a story on/. about resurrecting some ancient hardware I wonder why. The whole "I'm rocking old hardware" hobby barely more valuable to society than if someone spent a week playing solitaire.
I don't see a problem with putting the story on/. Some people will appreciate seeing the story. And I don't think there's a ton of value in posting to the story that you think they wasted their time (like the GP did). But even granting all that, why should I be inclined to appreciate something I have no personal interest in?
Gee, I don't know. Wouldn't it be a major boon in a way. I mean, nerd obesity isn't on the same level as malaria in Africa, but the fact that computers take so little physical movement is actually a major problem with them.
Would I be able to start off at 8 hrs a day using hand gestures exclusively? Of course not, but wouldn't that transform the image of a nerd if they had the physical stamina to gesture for so long? Really, it's not so different than doing Tai Chi every day at work. If I were an employer I might view this as a way to reduce insurance premiums as well.
It would also cause the price of products like dairy to skyrocket, it may even become totally uneconomical, in which case rather than saving these animals, you may just drive them extinct.
Sigh. You do know that dairy cows are not generally slaughtered for meat, right? Usually, beef cattle and dairy cattle are not even raised on the same farm.
Leather, on the other hand, you could make a valid case for causing trouble if everyone stopped eating beef tomorrow.
Speaking as a scientist... What science? Climate change occurs over decades and e.g. temperature changes per year are fractions of a degree. Show me a model which can accurately predict climate over a couple of decades with 0.1 degree precision for all available weather stations and we would have an informed discussion.
Wow, what an arbitrary and divorced from reality idea for testing climate science. Why 0.1 degree precision? Why every single station? There are obviously a number of complex variables to be considered (like, for instance the subject of fluxuations in solar output). Here's a quick science lesson for you. To be legitimate science, something just has to be predictive of future findings. That means if climate scientists make a much simpler prediction, "the average temperature at all stations will be higher for a given year than it was 20 years ago with some statistical probability (say 9 times out of 10)" then that's a valid scientific hypothesis. If future results mesh with that prediction, then you have to give some credence to what they are saying.
What kind of science do you study anyways? Political Science? HA!
At this point in time, Liberal is just the recent word to describe Marxism, all the previous words having developed a bad reputation because of their results. Marxist, socialist, communist - they've all fallen into disrepute. Liberal is going the same way, so now you hear liberals trying to revive the word "progressive" because they think it sounds better and has less baggage.
Wait, I'm confused now. If everybody knows that a liberal, Marxist, socialist, communist, and progressive are all synonyms, then why do conservative commentators even resort to calling the president a Marxist or a socialist?
Either you're trolling, or you're just too confused to realize that these terms are in fact semantically different even if conservative yaks use them interchangeably.
Meh, you're completely misunderstanding the gp. When we give the poorest welfare or food stamps, it encourages them to stay poor. If, however, we gave everyone just enough for food, then it would be very clear to everyone that for no work you get to eat canned food and for just a little work you get to eat nicer food and for a lot of work you get a house.
GP was postulating that more socialism would be better than what we have now, not that communism is likely to work. And he's probably right. Oh, but you called him a communist claimed you were lazy. +Insightful for you!
Maybe I misunderstood, but you seemed to imply that rare earth elements are in scarce supply. Actually, they aren't so rare and they're more of a metal than "earth".
The average gamer is something like 35 years old and I'm pretty sure most 35 year old males don't live with three or four roommates and have a lot of occasions or desire to have this kind of gaming experience.
Ah yes, the average gamer. 35 and mostly male.
How does (s)he compare with the average movie watcher, who also happens to be about 35? Or the average sleeper (just over 35)? Point is, when your population lives to 78 on average, the average for any activity that has broad general appeal will be somewhere north of 30 and south of 40.
While there may be way more adult gamers today than 15 years ago, it's ridiculous to argue that the 5-25 population is now such an insignificant portion of the market that trivial to implement features like screen have no value. What's next? "Unlike 10 years ago when people were willing to carry their hurking desktop to LAN parties, nowadays nobody wants to pack up their 5 lb laptop and wireless mouse, so the group who might make use of LAN features is trivial."
It's unclear from your post exactly what you did, but from your poor grammar I take it you were not someone doing actual research and writing proper papers. Perhaps you were a janitor? Or a security guard?
Logic failure.. So what if we rounded up all the homeless people; it wouldn't be cruel to painlessly kill them too? I'm sure lots of homeless people wouldn't mind you killing them because you believe they are suffering just as I'm sure the cats and dogs that are homeless wouldn't mind too.
Oomph, Logic fail yourself. If you feel strongly about this, I would suggest you look into what Peter Singer has to say on the topic. I think his argument could be summarized as ethics is behaving such that you produce no suffering. He specifically discuss the issue of whether or not you can ethically eat any animals, and his answer is: yes, but only the ones with no sense of feeling.
The GPs argument is fairly compelling actually. If you raise a cow in an ethical manner (giving the cow a good life by cow standards), and if you could press a button that instantaneously turned the cow into hamburger, at least from the cow's perspective I think you could say you acted with no cruelty.
As another poster pointed out, the homeless person example might differ if they knew you were going to off them. Also, presumably with the cow, nobody is going to mourn them. With a homeless person, they may still have family or friends who would mourn their passing. That's another level of harm you need to consider.
Personally, I think the real answer to the question of how equal to humans are other animals is far more complicated than most people want to consider. Their suffering often isn't equal to ours, because they lack certain mental capabilities which can actually exaggerate suffering. At the same time, animal suffer is something we are able to contemplate, and perhaps we should think on it more than we do currently.
In the end namespaces are very little more than appending more characters on a name.
In C++ perhaps, but languages like Java and C# provide levels of encapsulation within namespaces which can be very valuable. Also, it provides a language supported method for conveying to other developers that two classes are related.
Mac: I'm a Mac PC: and I'm a PC Mac: You're looking a little sluggish PC. PC: Yeah, my Dr. says I should stop using this Intel processor, but I just can't quit. Mac: That's too bad, because now that I use half the power I can run an entire day without recharging. PC: Sure, but who would want... [PC slumps over]. Mac: PC, are you OK? PC: [picking back up] Sure, I'm just demonstrating how I can go a day without recharging by using sleep mode. Mac: How much of the day will you be sleeping then? PC: About 20 hours [PC slumps over again].
---------
If we reach a point where ARM chips are available that match x86 on two of price, performance, and power usage and beat x86 by say 20% on the other factor, you can bet that the only platforms which will remain using x86 are those that can't make the leap. And any platform that can't switch over will be obsoleted pretty soon.
I don't know why this one piece of software evokes such illogical responses. Oh well.
Please let me enlighten you then. When it comes to almost any other decision, the group that needs to buy into the choice is more limited. When picking a language, for instance, the program leads might get a say and first level management, but anyone above that just wants a bullet chart that proves those guys made the right choice. When it comes to version control, a lot more people are going to have their say. The developers will try to vote. The configuration management team will have a say. Management up to near the top will want proof that nothing will ever be lost. Shoot, I bet even the lawyers get involved.
Throw into this mess that the most common corporate version control systems do suck, and you've got a bunch of people who have had it proven to them a couple times that ALL available solutions are bad. They just kind of assume that yeah clearcase is terrible, but all versioning is bad so let's stick with what we know.
All that means that unlike any other tool, version software is almost impossible to change within an organization.
And now Slashdot compares Go to Java. Go is certainly interesting, but it's not in the same space as Java. Java is a portable, networked, object-oriented *application* language. It removes a lot of hassles not necessary to tinker with when writing applications. It has useful, established APIs (servlets, EJBs) for building large-scale enterprise applications. Go compiles to machine code and is therefore not portable. Go doesn't allow inheritance. Go is a language that tries to solve a different problem than Java has solved. Go is no replacement.
Let's ignore a few of the differing language features for a minute, because I don't think generics or even inheritance are that important (there's a philosophical debate you can have that interfaces are superior to class inheritance, perhaps some other time). And let's ignore the rather large platform and set of APIs that Java has, because that's a measure of the languages maturity rather than its potential.
Given that, I want to talk about the JVM issue some people are bringing up. I have a crazy gut feeling that the real story Google has internally about Go is that it will replace the need for runtime virtual machines. The reason for that is because it compiles so darn quick. Why else would they emphasize compile time so much? Java and C# compile pretty quickly, but I've never seen anyone brag up those languages due to it. Same with Perl and Python. Every other language is talked about based on its runtime performance rather than its compile-time performance.
So, why talk up Go's compile time? Because, if it's fast enough you can deploy the code and not bother with a JVM. Imagine a program that compiles faster than it can be deployed. If C++ compiled as fast as an application wizard could setup the application, you could release your code with GCC, a makefile, the source code, and a setup.exe which just called the makefile. To a user it would be no different than something already compiled, just drastically slower. There might be similar stories about Go in the world of webpages. Finally, if your a closed source company, you could just release compiled Go programs and feel as obfuscated as C++ programmers.
Is it a one-for-one replacement for Java? Of course not. The only thing that could be is a duplicate effort to Java (C# pretty much), and even that would lack the sheer API size of Java for a significant time (C# again). What makes Go interesting is how it differs.
No offense, but this kind of technology takes enough R&D that they need much bigger buyers. The global population of custom built legacy arcade cabinets isn't likely to change their fortunes much one way or the other. That said, if you wait 5-7 years and this technology has taken off, then custom displays for enthusiasts may be a market they'd explore, assuming they don't have business agreements with their most important customers.
It's actually not the same because oil specifically and carbon generally play such a huge role in modern economies. Any significant change in oil prices causes markets to either panic or celebrate.
Also, if you think that wood->coal is the same as oil->???, you haven't thought very hard. Coal can replace wood for heating, but not for building stuff. Likewise, coal burns hot enough to run steam engines much better. They aren't fungible, and there's no reason to think oil will be completely fungible with whatever comes next (natural gas right now). And all that ignores the renewable nature of forests.
Finally, if England had burned every tree, they could have still imported lumber from their empire to build ships and furniture. If we burned every last ounce of hydrocarbon, we wouldn't cheaply be able to import them from another world.
I believe it's more of a tax on desperate people. Those people who're doing pretty well tend to look at it as a waste of money. For those working two jobs just to keep the light on...it's value is a few minutes of dreaming they had an easier life.
You had a reasonable argument going until you tried to break the categories up and rank them in terms of preferred prevalence. First off, I don't care for the term 'liberal' in this context, because I think it ends up being misleading, so I'm going to replace liberal with radical.
Classically, we had conservatives, moderates, and radicals. And, moderates most certainly could still care. If you're an American, you might appreciate that many signers of the Declaration of Independence were in fact moderates.
Moderates are the people who will look at their lot in life, and if someone offers them a gradually better solution, they will accept it. E.g these people buy a cell phone when they see a little evidence that the benefit outweighs the cost.
Of course, not all change can be gradual or is an obvious next step. That's where the radicals are usually required, because if you are in a monarchy and a democracy is better, you need some group of people to go live on a hippy ranch and come back with the idea that a representative democracy might just work. Note, this mindset isn't limited to politics any more than the moderate one is, because it takes a certain kind of radicalism to embrace new technology or science or societal measures (the most avant garde dress).
Conservatives serve, I think, a much different purpose. They're the reflective portion of our society who rather than trying to halt things where they are, this group wishes to push society backwards. It could mean going back to times when abortion was illegal or when only one parent in the household worked. The importance of this group is that if we head down a path that is a true disaster, the conservatives are the ones who are supposed to remind everyone else that we had a previous way of doing things and it actually was better. One note though, I think conservatism is limited to an individuals own lifetime. That's why a lot of conservatives hate the health care law (it's new enough they can all compare to previous times) but are surprisingly acceptable of social security (the only American entitlement which actually has socialism in the name). Social Security was created so long ago that only those in their late 80s can well remember a time without it.
In case you haven't noticed by now, I suspect all of us exhibit aspects of each dynamic depending on the context. You might be politically conservative but technologically radical (first to get a new game system even when there are no good games yet). Others might be radical tree-huggers who resist new technology. If you're baseline acceptance of new ideas is truly expressed in one gene, it's likely that your individual variation from that is where nurture and nature meet.
Finally, I think it's important to realize that this doesn't tell you anything at all about who's right in the culture wars.
That's closer to the truth than you might realize.
If you live in a rural temperate area, you might find that your water comes from a pump and that the pump house freezes in the winter. Even a small amount of extra ambient heat can be enough to keep the pump house above freezing. Pump houses do not usually come installed with central heating, but they usually do have a functioning light socket. It's extremely common under those conditions to leave an incandescent bulb on through the winter in the pump house so your water lines don't freeze (or worse, burst).
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem here is the internet I think. Because you're right. In the 90s a kid could get a CD and make cassett copies for his/her friends on a standard stereo. After that, maybe he could even make a perfect copy of the CD on a computer. But, that kid probably only gave the CD/tape to 1-5 friends. And not everybody made copies at all. Add it all up, and piracy might have been rampant but the legitimate copies may have made up for 75% of all copies on the market.
Now, one kid can buy a CD and put it online for literally thousands to download. It's just too easy.
What content providers really need to be looking for is a way to make massive piracy hard while actually encouraging more limited piracy (because in small enough quantities it can actually serve as advertising). I just don't know how you can capture such disparate goals in an internet world...
How did this get modded insightful? It's a non sequitur at best and an intentionally misleading comparison at worst.
The GP never claimed a company can go to any ends to protect its profits, only that protecting it's profits is not in and of itself evil. If a company slaughters children to protect its profits, its the slaughter not the profit aspect of it that is evil. From the examples above, Goldman Sachs is evil because they use collusion with the federal government, insider information, and privileged access to markets to gain an unfair advantage over smaller competitors and generally transfer wealth from regular people to themselves. Monsanto is evil because they are trying to use patent law to steal unowned genetic information from the public. BP is evil because they took shortcuts which lead to a massive ecological disaster.
In contrast, a large company may have tens of thousands of employees and millions of shareholders. If a corporation can ethically protect its profits, it benefits all those people, which is a good thing.
And 200% isn't wrong. Well it is, but there's a grain of truth behind it. I speced out a 15" macbook pro with a regular pc laptop, matching the components as close to identically as I could. The macbook was almost exactly double the price.
No you didn't. You speced out something you thought was comparable to a 15" macbook. Maybe it had comparable memory, processors, harddrive space, and video drivers, but it still wasn't really comparable. You were giving up something. Case quality, battery life, keyboard quality, screen quality, weight, or maybe proper configuration on sale. Just because you don't value such things as much as "ZOMG look at this framerate!" doesn't mean they have no value.
I know because 3 months ago I did essentially the same thing. I didn't buy a macbook (lenovo), but what I found was that the baseline price for comparable laptops from other makers aren't even 10% lower. The main difference is that most other manufacturers occasionally have massive discounts and routinely have small discounts. E.g. I got over 40% off my laptop. You'll rarely find such a discount on Apple products, but you probably can't get the same discount on my laptop now either.
Wait, so now we have a duty to prop up businesses that don't have a profitable setup? How dare we fire the buggy whip makers just because new technology came along?
Congrats on misunderstanding the GP's point. If a corporation is highly profitable, and they make those profits by abusing the system, which abuses everyone in the system, then it's alright for the rest of us to say this is not right and change the equation so society and not only corporations can benefit. That's all the GP was arguing.
Can't people appreciate what others do even if it ain't their pet project?
Do people need to appreciate what others do for hobbies? Personally, every time I see a story on /. about resurrecting some ancient hardware I wonder why. The whole "I'm rocking old hardware" hobby barely more valuable to society than if someone spent a week playing solitaire.
I don't see a problem with putting the story on /. Some people will appreciate seeing the story. And I don't think there's a ton of value in posting to the story that you think they wasted their time (like the GP did). But even granting all that, why should I be inclined to appreciate something I have no personal interest in?
Gee, I don't know. Wouldn't it be a major boon in a way. I mean, nerd obesity isn't on the same level as malaria in Africa, but the fact that computers take so little physical movement is actually a major problem with them.
Would I be able to start off at 8 hrs a day using hand gestures exclusively? Of course not, but wouldn't that transform the image of a nerd if they had the physical stamina to gesture for so long? Really, it's not so different than doing Tai Chi every day at work. If I were an employer I might view this as a way to reduce insurance premiums as well.
It would also cause the price of products like dairy to skyrocket, it may even become totally uneconomical, in which case rather than saving these animals, you may just drive them extinct.
Sigh. You do know that dairy cows are not generally slaughtered for meat, right? Usually, beef cattle and dairy cattle are not even raised on the same farm.
Leather, on the other hand, you could make a valid case for causing trouble if everyone stopped eating beef tomorrow.
My vote is political science.
Speaking as a scientist... What science?
Climate change occurs over decades and e.g. temperature changes per year are fractions of a degree.
Show me a model which can accurately predict climate over a couple of decades with 0.1 degree
precision for all available weather stations and we would have an informed discussion.
Wow, what an arbitrary and divorced from reality idea for testing climate science. Why 0.1 degree precision? Why every single station? There are obviously a number of complex variables to be considered (like, for instance the subject of fluxuations in solar output). Here's a quick science lesson for you. To be legitimate science, something just has to be predictive of future findings. That means if climate scientists make a much simpler prediction, "the average temperature at all stations will be higher for a given year than it was 20 years ago with some statistical probability (say 9 times out of 10)" then that's a valid scientific hypothesis. If future results mesh with that prediction, then you have to give some credence to what they are saying.
What kind of science do you study anyways? Political Science? HA!
At this point in time, Liberal is just the recent word to describe Marxism, all the previous words having developed a bad reputation because of their results. Marxist, socialist, communist - they've all fallen into disrepute. Liberal is going the same way, so now you hear liberals trying to revive the word "progressive" because they think it sounds better and has less baggage.
Wait, I'm confused now. If everybody knows that a liberal, Marxist, socialist, communist, and progressive are all synonyms, then why do conservative commentators even resort to calling the president a Marxist or a socialist?
Either you're trolling, or you're just too confused to realize that these terms are in fact semantically different even if conservative yaks use them interchangeably.
Meh, you're completely misunderstanding the gp. When we give the poorest welfare or food stamps, it encourages them to stay poor. If, however, we gave everyone just enough for food, then it would be very clear to everyone that for no work you get to eat canned food and for just a little work you get to eat nicer food and for a lot of work you get a house.
GP was postulating that more socialism would be better than what we have now, not that communism is likely to work. And he's probably right. Oh, but you called him a communist claimed you were lazy. +Insightful for you!
Maybe I misunderstood, but you seemed to imply that rare earth elements are in scarce supply. Actually, they aren't so rare and they're more of a metal than "earth".
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/15/are_rare_earth_minerals_actually_rare
The average gamer is something like 35 years old and I'm pretty sure most 35 year old males don't live with three or four roommates and have a lot of occasions or desire to have this kind of gaming experience.
Ah yes, the average gamer. 35 and mostly male.
How does (s)he compare with the average movie watcher, who also happens to be about 35? Or the average sleeper (just over 35)? Point is, when your population lives to 78 on average, the average for any activity that has broad general appeal will be somewhere north of 30 and south of 40.
While there may be way more adult gamers today than 15 years ago, it's ridiculous to argue that the 5-25 population is now such an insignificant portion of the market that trivial to implement features like screen have no value. What's next? "Unlike 10 years ago when people were willing to carry their hurking desktop to LAN parties, nowadays nobody wants to pack up their 5 lb laptop and wireless mouse, so the group who might make use of LAN features is trivial."
It's unclear from your post exactly what you did, but from your poor grammar I take it you were not someone doing actual research and writing proper papers. Perhaps you were a janitor? Or a security guard?
Logic failure.. So what if we rounded up all the homeless people; it wouldn't be cruel to painlessly kill them too? I'm sure lots of homeless people wouldn't mind you killing them because you believe they are suffering just as I'm sure the cats and dogs that are homeless wouldn't mind too.
Oomph, Logic fail yourself. If you feel strongly about this, I would suggest you look into what Peter Singer has to say on the topic. I think his argument could be summarized as ethics is behaving such that you produce no suffering. He specifically discuss the issue of whether or not you can ethically eat any animals, and his answer is: yes, but only the ones with no sense of feeling.
The GPs argument is fairly compelling actually. If you raise a cow in an ethical manner (giving the cow a good life by cow standards), and if you could press a button that instantaneously turned the cow into hamburger, at least from the cow's perspective I think you could say you acted with no cruelty.
As another poster pointed out, the homeless person example might differ if they knew you were going to off them. Also, presumably with the cow, nobody is going to mourn them. With a homeless person, they may still have family or friends who would mourn their passing. That's another level of harm you need to consider.
Personally, I think the real answer to the question of how equal to humans are other animals is far more complicated than most people want to consider. Their suffering often isn't equal to ours, because they lack certain mental capabilities which can actually exaggerate suffering. At the same time, animal suffer is something we are able to contemplate, and perhaps we should think on it more than we do currently.
In the end namespaces are very little more than appending more characters on a name.
In C++ perhaps, but languages like Java and C# provide levels of encapsulation within namespaces which can be very valuable. Also, it provides a language supported method for conveying to other developers that two classes are related.
Exactly. How could they pass it up?
Mac: I'm a Mac ... [PC slumps over].
PC: and I'm a PC
Mac: You're looking a little sluggish PC.
PC: Yeah, my Dr. says I should stop using this Intel processor, but I just can't quit.
Mac: That's too bad, because now that I use half the power I can run an entire day without recharging.
PC: Sure, but who would want
Mac: PC, are you OK?
PC: [picking back up] Sure, I'm just demonstrating how I can go a day without recharging by using sleep mode.
Mac: How much of the day will you be sleeping then?
PC: About 20 hours [PC slumps over again].
---------
If we reach a point where ARM chips are available that match x86 on two of price, performance, and power usage and beat x86 by say 20% on the other factor, you can bet that the only platforms which will remain using x86 are those that can't make the leap. And any platform that can't switch over will be obsoleted pretty soon.
I don't know why this one piece of software evokes such illogical responses. Oh well.
Please let me enlighten you then. When it comes to almost any other decision, the group that needs to buy into the choice is more limited. When picking a language, for instance, the program leads might get a say and first level management, but anyone above that just wants a bullet chart that proves those guys made the right choice. When it comes to version control, a lot more people are going to have their say. The developers will try to vote. The configuration management team will have a say. Management up to near the top will want proof that nothing will ever be lost. Shoot, I bet even the lawyers get involved.
Throw into this mess that the most common corporate version control systems do suck, and you've got a bunch of people who have had it proven to them a couple times that ALL available solutions are bad. They just kind of assume that yeah clearcase is terrible, but all versioning is bad so let's stick with what we know.
All that means that unlike any other tool, version software is almost impossible to change within an organization.
It's good that the singular of anecdote is now data. Just saying.
And now Slashdot compares Go to Java. Go is certainly interesting, but it's not in the same space as Java. Java is a portable, networked, object-oriented *application* language. It removes a lot of hassles not necessary to tinker with when writing applications. It has useful, established APIs (servlets, EJBs) for building large-scale enterprise applications. Go compiles to machine code and is therefore not portable. Go doesn't allow inheritance. Go is a language that tries to solve a different problem than Java has solved. Go is no replacement.
Let's ignore a few of the differing language features for a minute, because I don't think generics or even inheritance are that important (there's a philosophical debate you can have that interfaces are superior to class inheritance, perhaps some other time). And let's ignore the rather large platform and set of APIs that Java has, because that's a measure of the languages maturity rather than its potential.
Given that, I want to talk about the JVM issue some people are bringing up. I have a crazy gut feeling that the real story Google has internally about Go is that it will replace the need for runtime virtual machines. The reason for that is because it compiles so darn quick. Why else would they emphasize compile time so much? Java and C# compile pretty quickly, but I've never seen anyone brag up those languages due to it. Same with Perl and Python. Every other language is talked about based on its runtime performance rather than its compile-time performance.
So, why talk up Go's compile time? Because, if it's fast enough you can deploy the code and not bother with a JVM. Imagine a program that compiles faster than it can be deployed. If C++ compiled as fast as an application wizard could setup the application, you could release your code with GCC, a makefile, the source code, and a setup.exe which just called the makefile. To a user it would be no different than something already compiled, just drastically slower. There might be similar stories about Go in the world of webpages. Finally, if your a closed source company, you could just release compiled Go programs and feel as obfuscated as C++ programmers.
Is it a one-for-one replacement for Java? Of course not. The only thing that could be is a duplicate effort to Java (C# pretty much), and even that would lack the sheer API size of Java for a significant time (C# again). What makes Go interesting is how it differs.
No offense, but this kind of technology takes enough R&D that they need much bigger buyers. The global population of custom built legacy arcade cabinets isn't likely to change their fortunes much one way or the other. That said, if you wait 5-7 years and this technology has taken off, then custom displays for enthusiasts may be a market they'd explore, assuming they don't have business agreements with their most important customers.
It's actually not the same because oil specifically and carbon generally play such a huge role in modern economies. Any significant change in oil prices causes markets to either panic or celebrate.
Also, if you think that wood->coal is the same as oil->???, you haven't thought very hard. Coal can replace wood for heating, but not for building stuff. Likewise, coal burns hot enough to run steam engines much better. They aren't fungible, and there's no reason to think oil will be completely fungible with whatever comes next (natural gas right now). And all that ignores the renewable nature of forests.
Finally, if England had burned every tree, they could have still imported lumber from their empire to build ships and furniture. If we burned every last ounce of hydrocarbon, we wouldn't cheaply be able to import them from another world.
I believe it's more of a tax on desperate people. Those people who're doing pretty well tend to look at it as a waste of money. For those working two jobs just to keep the light on...it's value is a few minutes of dreaming they had an easier life.
You had a reasonable argument going until you tried to break the categories up and rank them in terms of preferred prevalence. First off, I don't care for the term 'liberal' in this context, because I think it ends up being misleading, so I'm going to replace liberal with radical.
Classically, we had conservatives, moderates, and radicals. And, moderates most certainly could still care. If you're an American, you might appreciate that many signers of the Declaration of Independence were in fact moderates.
Moderates are the people who will look at their lot in life, and if someone offers them a gradually better solution, they will accept it. E.g these people buy a cell phone when they see a little evidence that the benefit outweighs the cost.
Of course, not all change can be gradual or is an obvious next step. That's where the radicals are usually required, because if you are in a monarchy and a democracy is better, you need some group of people to go live on a hippy ranch and come back with the idea that a representative democracy might just work. Note, this mindset isn't limited to politics any more than the moderate one is, because it takes a certain kind of radicalism to embrace new technology or science or societal measures (the most avant garde dress).
Conservatives serve, I think, a much different purpose. They're the reflective portion of our society who rather than trying to halt things where they are, this group wishes to push society backwards. It could mean going back to times when abortion was illegal or when only one parent in the household worked. The importance of this group is that if we head down a path that is a true disaster, the conservatives are the ones who are supposed to remind everyone else that we had a previous way of doing things and it actually was better. One note though, I think conservatism is limited to an individuals own lifetime. That's why a lot of conservatives hate the health care law (it's new enough they can all compare to previous times) but are surprisingly acceptable of social security (the only American entitlement which actually has socialism in the name). Social Security was created so long ago that only those in their late 80s can well remember a time without it.
In case you haven't noticed by now, I suspect all of us exhibit aspects of each dynamic depending on the context. You might be politically conservative but technologically radical (first to get a new game system even when there are no good games yet). Others might be radical tree-huggers who resist new technology. If you're baseline acceptance of new ideas is truly expressed in one gene, it's likely that your individual variation from that is where nurture and nature meet.
Finally, I think it's important to realize that this doesn't tell you anything at all about who's right in the culture wars.
That's closer to the truth than you might realize.
If you live in a rural temperate area, you might find that your water comes from a pump and that the pump house freezes in the winter. Even a small amount of extra ambient heat can be enough to keep the pump house above freezing. Pump houses do not usually come installed with central heating, but they usually do have a functioning light socket. It's extremely common under those conditions to leave an incandescent bulb on through the winter in the pump house so your water lines don't freeze (or worse, burst).