How is this insightful? It's just plain wrong. Arguably, there was a brief period of time between 1960 and 1980 where the press considered unbiased reporting to be the gold standard (or at least claimed it did), but for the vast majority of human history this has not been the case. The revolutionary (as in American Revolution) idea of an informed public was based on the premise that the government would encourage a variety of press, and thus the public would be reasonably informed.
If you are convinced that the press used to be unbiased, then it was probably some facet of mainstream media or another that did the convincing.
But the point remains. Some of these people, I suspect many to be young, idealistic (and I respect that - I was young once, too), but misguided folks, resorted to "appeal to authority" and "truth by popularity". Now that WSJ put up an opposing opinion by some prominent members of science/tech community, they are going after WSJ ad-hom, instead of attacking the arguments put forth.
When an argument is raised, ad hominem attacks are inappropriate, because it is the argument that should be attacked or defended, not the arguers. However, there does come a point where the argument has been so thoroughly litigated that if a participant attempts to argue from thoroughly discredited lines of inquiry, it's appropriate to question their motivations. For instance, Kent Hovind and Ken Hamm should at this point be discredited as sources of information in addition to their individual arguments for creationism being clearly false.
I don't think that climate change has reached the point where every counter argument is discredited, but it has certainly reached a point where it's valid to question the motivations of publishing such a clearly falsified letter.
I see way too many comments on here suggesting that antibiotic resistance is caused entirely by misuse of antibiotics. This might be nitpicking, but that argument is not really correct. Misuse of antibiotics exaggerates bacterial evolution towards solving the problem of resisting those drugs. But, bacteria reproduce at incredible rates. Even if everyone took their antibiotics for the entire 10 day cycle (or whatever it is for a given drug), it's not inconceivable that they could spread germs midway through their treatment, and that the spread germs were among those weakened but not killed. The bacteria would still form resistance, it just might take much longer. E.g. instead of it taking say 20 years for a bacteria to develop resistance, with proper use it might take 200 years. When you consider all the lives that are bettered over that hypothetical 180 years, it's a real tragedy that people misuse drugs, but that doesn't mean bugs would stop evolving if only people were properly educated.
I don't really understand why the parent here is modded insightful. In GPs scenario, your spouse and children are in the act of being raped. It's unclear what GPs options are in the hypothetical, but the one option he makes clear is that slaying the rapists is an immediate option, and that it will (obviously) stop their continued violation of his family. And Ps response to that is, "you are not in the proper emotional condition under such circumstances to make that decision."
I'm sorry, but WTF? And several people agreed? Think about it for just a second. Your daughters are being raped in front of you. Pretend your two options are lethal force and dialing 911. Keep in mind that nonlethal force is not always an option (exactly how hard must you hit a guy in the back of the head with a baseball bat to knock him out but not kill him) and if you are in doubt and either your lives or the intruders are at stake, it is better to error on the side of too much force than too little. Depending on where you live, it will take the police between 2 and 15 minutes to arrive at your home, during which time your daughters will continue to be raped.
This isn't an eye-for-eye situation, like the P suggested. This is a question of what intervention is appropriate at an exact violent moment in time. The GP is completely correct. The right thing to do is anything necessary to stop the assailants. It's a completely different story if the rape happened yesterday, and the rapist was just picked up at a bus stop. That's when the justice system can act. GP is clearly too eager to dehumanize felons, but P is too eager to claim that the justice system is the proper response under all circumstances. There is a middle ground.
Metrics aren't bad in themselves, but bad metrics are terrible.
I don't know. All metrics have a dehumanizing effect; even the appropriate ones. I mean, as a factory you definitely want a metric of "how many widgets can we produce per month". That's totally appropriate. But, it's not a long step from the metric to viewing the humans on the floor as factory worker-bees, whose only value is in how well they fulfill that metric. It's even worse when the metric spans multiple cities or states or continents. At that point, you can't even look down at a single factory floor to see the humans down there. The people in Foxconn or wherever are little more than their metrics to the rest of the world.
Arguably, MTV was terrible for music. Prior to MTV, the physical appearance of a band was of minor importance. After MTV, physical appearance took on an increasingly important role, and in many cases (ahem, ahem, Brittany Spears) completely replaced musical talent as the reason for an artist to go national.
No, it really is that simple. Exercise helps, but you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. The reason we have so many fat people is that eating is pleasurable, so people in the west do too much of it.
My guess is you are just waiting for charging stations to be rolled out in sufficient quantity. I'm already noticing them at local parks. If you drive 60 mph and have 300 mile range, that's 5 hours of driving. With the exception of road trips and heading off to college, that's probably about as far as anyone really wants to drive in a single day. If you can quick charge to 80% battery (240 mile range) in 45 minutes and if you know the restaurant you stop at for lunch/dinner is likely to have a charging station, then it probably covers the vast majority of use cases.
There will always be situations like teenage road trips or long-haul trucking where you plan on going over 1000 miles a day, where EVs might not work. And, even where they do work, they might alter the way people behave (e.g. going into a restaurant to eat, while the car charges instead of getting drive-thru). But at this point, I think it's just a matter of time until reasonable cases like yours are sufficiently supported.
It's simple really. Many on/. are car geeks. They are proud of the fact that while other people go to Jiffy Lube for their oil changes, they are part of the privileged class who know how to change their own oil. It makes them very angry that those skills will become essentially worthless in the future because of EVs.
At least, that's what I see as the epitome of the hate.
How is this insightful? We have a major wealth gap developing in the States, and in the midst of the latest recession it was the working class, not the wealthy who cut spending. Have you forgotten all the reports about how luxury brands have done just fine, while everybody else tanked?
For most buyer's that's even better. Finance your car at 4% over 3-5 years (or whatever ridiculously low rate it is now), and get a cash rebate only 6 mos (on average) later for 12%-15% of the purchase price. You literally get the money before you need to make the payment, and if well invested you could lower the actual price of your car even more.
$1.5B is what, about 2 days worth of spending on the Iraqi war? And we all know we were only there because we need to keep the flow of oil secure. EVs are quite literally a national security initiative, and if $1.5B in subsidies would be enough for EVs to build up enough economies of scale that they can replace a significant portion of all automobiles without subsidies in the future, then it's a bargain.
You've got it completely wrong. The first Tesla was aimed at the high-end sports car market (Lamborghini, Ferrari). This second round is aimed at the upscale market (Lexus, Acura, etc). The Lexus GS starts at $47,000 and the LS starts at $67,000. Both are sedans. These Tesla cars are right within that price range, except if you are going for attention you will probably get more from the Tesla than from the Lexus.
We have a Tesla showroom in our local mall (it's an upscale one) and they definitely do look like sleek cars when you see them. Anyone who's already in the market for a $40,000-$60,000 sedan will want to consider these cars. And, that market is significantly larger than the one for $100,000 sports cars. Tesla is doing something very good and very smart here, regardless of whether or not you can afford it or would want if even if you could.
Absurd. 15 years ago that might have been the case, but since Y2K, C++ is pretty stable between versions and compilers. Most incompatibilities are warnings and not compiler errors. And, if you're doing it right you can write a C++ application without too much trouble and make it portable as well. It's not 1993 anymore.
Seriously I'm sick and tired of defending new languages like Clojure, Go, Dart, Ruby, etc. I'm just going to shut up and let the dinosaurs stagnate and get stuck maintaining all the old code for the rest of their unenjoyable never changing ruts.
Your criticisms seems to be based solely on whether or not code is old. If the code works, why is that even a consideration for you? Does it have to be new code to be any good? I hope you're aware of how silly that sounds.
As for languages like Clojure, Go, Dart, and Ruby, those languages have deficiencies that warrant legitimate criticism. If you're sick and tired of defending them, don't read anything on the internet, because you'll never completely avoid criticism of things you like.
Not only that, but there are certain obvious advantages to using a really fricking old language. Perl is old, and I don't like it, but if you want to do something scritpy it's probably already implemented in Perl. If you want to be hip, use Clojure. If you want to get some work done, use a language that has been popular for at least a decade (I don't care very much which one).
One language can be better than another for a variety of reasons; expressiveness, conciseness, coherence, readability, safety, and standard library support are the first reasons that come to my mind. You're trivially right that if the only difference between two languages is that one provides an additional confusion/nonsensical keyword, then the subset might arguably be superior for reasons of correctness and safety. But then, that's a strawman argument. For proof, how much does the existence of the ridiculous "goto" construct harm the average C/C++ program? I don't know that I've seen it used once in the last 10 years, so it's hard to argue that a C-- that is just like C, but without that nasty goto would be a great boon. GPs point is correct that C is clearly not better than C++ on the grounds that it is a subset. I'm willing to argue whether or not C++ is actually better than C, but it's certainly not "worse".
I don't know if that's right. Most schools are required to teach state history. If somebody very bright moved from Kabul to South Dakota, and had essentially no knowledge of SD state history, you wouldn't want to disqualify them.
Rather, I'd be content if school board members just showed a modicum of humility, which this particular school board member clearly doesn't possess. Or, even some shame. I mean, who would go on record as saying that despite (what sounds like) at least 7 years of college/university education, they cannot perform arithmetic with the aid of a calculator? Clearly not somebody who realizes that total ignorance in a fundamental domain of study is something an "educated" person should be ashamed of.
If you can't travel from New York to London without an airplane or a ship, you should not be doing it! If you can't join two pieces of steel without a welder, you shouldn't be doing it! If you can't change a car's wheel without a jack, you shouldn't be doing it!
I know nerd superiority is awesome, but we have tools for a reason: they make us better at doing the things we want to do. If a person would struggle to sum up a list of purchases and then tack on sales tax by hand, I want them using a calculator. It improves all of our lives.
It's the price you pay for newer versions of things. You want a browser that does a nice job of running HTML5, and a fair job at security, and you probably are used to not even paying for it. We already get so much, that to then complain because FireFox8 is slower on older hardware is a real pity. The fact is, no market exists for modern web browsers which are tuned to run on a 486. The cost would look exorbitant (say $100), and even if you produced such a browser, web pages use so much flash or video today that it still probably couldn't run ESPN.com.
Considering the hardware you can purchase for $500, it's really not worth anyone's time (at least in the first world) to focus on supporting old hardware. At least for things we want done. If you are playing with old hardware as a hobby, then it's a different but irrelevant story.
And you totally missed the GPs argument. GP never claimed that writing assembly isn't awesome, simply that it is almost never cost effective today. Specifically, it's pointless to complain when enterprise applications are not optimized, because it's not a simple trade off.
There's no programmer sitting at his desk saying to himself, "should I make this code rock solid, or would it be better if I released a half-baked piece of garbage". Instead, there's a project team somewhere saying to themselves, "we can sell this half-baked piece of garbage today for $X, or we can work really hard on it for the next two years and sell it for $X * 1.2. Of course, that's assuming our competitors don't release their own version in the meantime, in which case we won't be able to sell it at all..."
The reality is that optimizing and aggressively testing code costs both time and money, and in many cases it's not worth doing. Here's an example. Skyrim just came out, and Bethesda is notorious for releasing buggy games. People will buy the game for $60 and then complain about how buggy it is, knowing in advance that it will be buggy. Now, ask those people would they rather get it as is for $60, or would they rather wait another 18 months for the bugs to be (almost) all fixed, and pay $90 for it. That is all.
I know this is/. and all, but Michael Jordan is the marque owner of an NBA team. He's not playing, but in the recent labor agreement his name certainly came up a lot.
So, you had a negative experience, but that doesn't mean that sports are bad. When the goal of sports participation is to get those children to the professional level, it's clearly ridiculous. However, we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic; getting children off the couch and onto a practice field at least a few months a year is a noble objective. Likewise, sports are one of the few organized environments where we as a society teach that failure is OK. Missed a goal, basket, hit, or catch (even in a game)? That's alright so long as you practice and improve.
I wouldn't really want to live in a country where those kinds of lessons aren't worth teaching. There's definitely a problem with the level of competition we apply to children in this country, but reactions like yours never improve anything.
Rule of thumb here. Anyone, I repeat anyone, predicting exponential growth forever is wrong. Your scenario in particular is clearly nuts. In the first world, populations are either stagnant or shrinking. Wealthy people just don't have that many children. If we had the technology to travel at the speed of light and round up half the earth's population in massive ships, nobody would be living in the kind of poverty seen in parts of Africa or Asia. By that time the earth's population will definitely not be growing exponentially.
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How is this insightful? It's just plain wrong. Arguably, there was a brief period of time between 1960 and 1980 where the press considered unbiased reporting to be the gold standard (or at least claimed it did), but for the vast majority of human history this has not been the case. The revolutionary (as in American Revolution) idea of an informed public was based on the premise that the government would encourage a variety of press, and thus the public would be reasonably informed.
If you are convinced that the press used to be unbiased, then it was probably some facet of mainstream media or another that did the convincing.
But the point remains. Some of these people, I suspect many to be young, idealistic (and I respect that - I was young once, too), but misguided folks, resorted to "appeal to authority" and "truth by popularity". Now that WSJ put up an opposing opinion by some prominent members of science/tech community, they are going after WSJ ad-hom, instead of attacking the arguments put forth.
When an argument is raised, ad hominem attacks are inappropriate, because it is the argument that should be attacked or defended, not the arguers. However, there does come a point where the argument has been so thoroughly litigated that if a participant attempts to argue from thoroughly discredited lines of inquiry, it's appropriate to question their motivations. For instance, Kent Hovind and Ken Hamm should at this point be discredited as sources of information in addition to their individual arguments for creationism being clearly false.
I don't think that climate change has reached the point where every counter argument is discredited, but it has certainly reached a point where it's valid to question the motivations of publishing such a clearly falsified letter.
I see way too many comments on here suggesting that antibiotic resistance is caused entirely by misuse of antibiotics. This might be nitpicking, but that argument is not really correct. Misuse of antibiotics exaggerates bacterial evolution towards solving the problem of resisting those drugs. But, bacteria reproduce at incredible rates. Even if everyone took their antibiotics for the entire 10 day cycle (or whatever it is for a given drug), it's not inconceivable that they could spread germs midway through their treatment, and that the spread germs were among those weakened but not killed. The bacteria would still form resistance, it just might take much longer. E.g. instead of it taking say 20 years for a bacteria to develop resistance, with proper use it might take 200 years. When you consider all the lives that are bettered over that hypothetical 180 years, it's a real tragedy that people misuse drugs, but that doesn't mean bugs would stop evolving if only people were properly educated.
I don't really understand why the parent here is modded insightful. In GPs scenario, your spouse and children are in the act of being raped. It's unclear what GPs options are in the hypothetical, but the one option he makes clear is that slaying the rapists is an immediate option, and that it will (obviously) stop their continued violation of his family. And Ps response to that is, "you are not in the proper emotional condition under such circumstances to make that decision."
I'm sorry, but WTF? And several people agreed? Think about it for just a second. Your daughters are being raped in front of you. Pretend your two options are lethal force and dialing 911. Keep in mind that nonlethal force is not always an option (exactly how hard must you hit a guy in the back of the head with a baseball bat to knock him out but not kill him) and if you are in doubt and either your lives or the intruders are at stake, it is better to error on the side of too much force than too little. Depending on where you live, it will take the police between 2 and 15 minutes to arrive at your home, during which time your daughters will continue to be raped.
This isn't an eye-for-eye situation, like the P suggested. This is a question of what intervention is appropriate at an exact violent moment in time. The GP is completely correct. The right thing to do is anything necessary to stop the assailants. It's a completely different story if the rape happened yesterday, and the rapist was just picked up at a bus stop. That's when the justice system can act. GP is clearly too eager to dehumanize felons, but P is too eager to claim that the justice system is the proper response under all circumstances. There is a middle ground.
Metrics aren't bad in themselves, but bad metrics are terrible.
I don't know. All metrics have a dehumanizing effect; even the appropriate ones. I mean, as a factory you definitely want a metric of "how many widgets can we produce per month". That's totally appropriate. But, it's not a long step from the metric to viewing the humans on the floor as factory worker-bees, whose only value is in how well they fulfill that metric. It's even worse when the metric spans multiple cities or states or continents. At that point, you can't even look down at a single factory floor to see the humans down there. The people in Foxconn or wherever are little more than their metrics to the rest of the world.
Arguably, MTV was terrible for music. Prior to MTV, the physical appearance of a band was of minor importance. After MTV, physical appearance took on an increasingly important role, and in many cases (ahem, ahem, Brittany Spears) completely replaced musical talent as the reason for an artist to go national.
No, it really is that simple. Exercise helps, but you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. The reason we have so many fat people is that eating is pleasurable, so people in the west do too much of it.
My guess is you are just waiting for charging stations to be rolled out in sufficient quantity. I'm already noticing them at local parks. If you drive 60 mph and have 300 mile range, that's 5 hours of driving. With the exception of road trips and heading off to college, that's probably about as far as anyone really wants to drive in a single day. If you can quick charge to 80% battery (240 mile range) in 45 minutes and if you know the restaurant you stop at for lunch/dinner is likely to have a charging station, then it probably covers the vast majority of use cases.
There will always be situations like teenage road trips or long-haul trucking where you plan on going over 1000 miles a day, where EVs might not work. And, even where they do work, they might alter the way people behave (e.g. going into a restaurant to eat, while the car charges instead of getting drive-thru). But at this point, I think it's just a matter of time until reasonable cases like yours are sufficiently supported.
It's simple really. Many on /. are car geeks. They are proud of the fact that while other people go to Jiffy Lube for their oil changes, they are part of the privileged class who know how to change their own oil. It makes them very angry that those skills will become essentially worthless in the future because of EVs.
At least, that's what I see as the epitome of the hate.
How is this insightful? We have a major wealth gap developing in the States, and in the midst of the latest recession it was the working class, not the wealthy who cut spending. Have you forgotten all the reports about how luxury brands have done just fine, while everybody else tanked?
For most buyer's that's even better. Finance your car at 4% over 3-5 years (or whatever ridiculously low rate it is now), and get a cash rebate only 6 mos (on average) later for 12%-15% of the purchase price. You literally get the money before you need to make the payment, and if well invested you could lower the actual price of your car even more.
Where's the eye-roll smiley in this editor?
$1.5B is what, about 2 days worth of spending on the Iraqi war? And we all know we were only there because we need to keep the flow of oil secure. EVs are quite literally a national security initiative, and if $1.5B in subsidies would be enough for EVs to build up enough economies of scale that they can replace a significant portion of all automobiles without subsidies in the future, then it's a bargain.
You've got it completely wrong. The first Tesla was aimed at the high-end sports car market (Lamborghini, Ferrari). This second round is aimed at the upscale market (Lexus, Acura, etc). The Lexus GS starts at $47,000 and the LS starts at $67,000. Both are sedans. These Tesla cars are right within that price range, except if you are going for attention you will probably get more from the Tesla than from the Lexus.
We have a Tesla showroom in our local mall (it's an upscale one) and they definitely do look like sleek cars when you see them. Anyone who's already in the market for a $40,000-$60,000 sedan will want to consider these cars. And, that market is significantly larger than the one for $100,000 sports cars. Tesla is doing something very good and very smart here, regardless of whether or not you can afford it or would want if even if you could.
Absurd. 15 years ago that might have been the case, but since Y2K, C++ is pretty stable between versions and compilers. Most incompatibilities are warnings and not compiler errors. And, if you're doing it right you can write a C++ application without too much trouble and make it portable as well. It's not 1993 anymore.
Your criticisms seems to be based solely on whether or not code is old. If the code works, why is that even a consideration for you? Does it have to be new code to be any good? I hope you're aware of how silly that sounds.
As for languages like Clojure, Go, Dart, and Ruby, those languages have deficiencies that warrant legitimate criticism. If you're sick and tired of defending them, don't read anything on the internet, because you'll never completely avoid criticism of things you like.
Not only that, but there are certain obvious advantages to using a really fricking old language. Perl is old, and I don't like it, but if you want to do something scritpy it's probably already implemented in Perl. If you want to be hip, use Clojure. If you want to get some work done, use a language that has been popular for at least a decade (I don't care very much which one).
One language can be better than another for a variety of reasons; expressiveness, conciseness, coherence, readability, safety, and standard library support are the first reasons that come to my mind. You're trivially right that if the only difference between two languages is that one provides an additional confusion/nonsensical keyword, then the subset might arguably be superior for reasons of correctness and safety. But then, that's a strawman argument. For proof, how much does the existence of the ridiculous "goto" construct harm the average C/C++ program? I don't know that I've seen it used once in the last 10 years, so it's hard to argue that a C-- that is just like C, but without that nasty goto would be a great boon. GPs point is correct that C is clearly not better than C++ on the grounds that it is a subset. I'm willing to argue whether or not C++ is actually better than C, but it's certainly not "worse".
I don't know if that's right. Most schools are required to teach state history. If somebody very bright moved from Kabul to South Dakota, and had essentially no knowledge of SD state history, you wouldn't want to disqualify them.
Rather, I'd be content if school board members just showed a modicum of humility, which this particular school board member clearly doesn't possess. Or, even some shame. I mean, who would go on record as saying that despite (what sounds like) at least 7 years of college/university education, they cannot perform arithmetic with the aid of a calculator? Clearly not somebody who realizes that total ignorance in a fundamental domain of study is something an "educated" person should be ashamed of.
If you can't travel from New York to London without an airplane or a ship, you should not be doing it!
If you can't join two pieces of steel without a welder, you shouldn't be doing it!
If you can't change a car's wheel without a jack, you shouldn't be doing it!
I know nerd superiority is awesome, but we have tools for a reason: they make us better at doing the things we want to do. If a person would struggle to sum up a list of purchases and then tack on sales tax by hand, I want them using a calculator. It improves all of our lives.
It's the price you pay for newer versions of things. You want a browser that does a nice job of running HTML5, and a fair job at security, and you probably are used to not even paying for it. We already get so much, that to then complain because FireFox8 is slower on older hardware is a real pity. The fact is, no market exists for modern web browsers which are tuned to run on a 486. The cost would look exorbitant (say $100), and even if you produced such a browser, web pages use so much flash or video today that it still probably couldn't run ESPN.com.
Considering the hardware you can purchase for $500, it's really not worth anyone's time (at least in the first world) to focus on supporting old hardware. At least for things we want done. If you are playing with old hardware as a hobby, then it's a different but irrelevant story.
And you totally missed the GPs argument. GP never claimed that writing assembly isn't awesome, simply that it is almost never cost effective today. Specifically, it's pointless to complain when enterprise applications are not optimized, because it's not a simple trade off.
There's no programmer sitting at his desk saying to himself, "should I make this code rock solid, or would it be better if I released a half-baked piece of garbage". Instead, there's a project team somewhere saying to themselves, "we can sell this half-baked piece of garbage today for $X, or we can work really hard on it for the next two years and sell it for $X * 1.2. Of course, that's assuming our competitors don't release their own version in the meantime, in which case we won't be able to sell it at all..."
The reality is that optimizing and aggressively testing code costs both time and money, and in many cases it's not worth doing. Here's an example. Skyrim just came out, and Bethesda is notorious for releasing buggy games. People will buy the game for $60 and then complain about how buggy it is, knowing in advance that it will be buggy. Now, ask those people would they rather get it as is for $60, or would they rather wait another 18 months for the bugs to be (almost) all fixed, and pay $90 for it. That is all.
Yeah, life is swell as a lowest common denominator.
The lowest common denominator would actually be games targeted for Netbooks, or something similar. But hey, hateraid tastes great.
I know this is /. and all, but Michael Jordan is the marque owner of an NBA team. He's not playing, but in the recent labor agreement his name certainly came up a lot.
FUD was my thought as well.
So, you had a negative experience, but that doesn't mean that sports are bad. When the goal of sports participation is to get those children to the professional level, it's clearly ridiculous. However, we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic; getting children off the couch and onto a practice field at least a few months a year is a noble objective. Likewise, sports are one of the few organized environments where we as a society teach that failure is OK. Missed a goal, basket, hit, or catch (even in a game)? That's alright so long as you practice and improve.
I wouldn't really want to live in a country where those kinds of lessons aren't worth teaching. There's definitely a problem with the level of competition we apply to children in this country, but reactions like yours never improve anything.
Rule of thumb here. Anyone, I repeat anyone, predicting exponential growth forever is wrong. Your scenario in particular is clearly nuts. In the first world, populations are either stagnant or shrinking. Wealthy people just don't have that many children. If we had the technology to travel at the speed of light and round up half the earth's population in massive ships, nobody would be living in the kind of poverty seen in parts of Africa or Asia. By that time the earth's population will definitely not be growing exponentially.