You do not understand evolution well enough. There are many possible reproductive strategies which can be successful. One is to spread one's genes far and wide, in hopes that others will care for the offspring. But another is to supervise all your offspring yourself: you'll have fewer of them, but you can better ensure that they all reach adulthood.
In the case of creatures which reach adulthood quickly, such as cockroaches, the first strategy is obviously a much better one. But in the case of humans, who reach adulthood slowly and are highly vulnerable until then, the second strategy may work as well as -- or better than -- the first in some cases.
The notion that there is "one best" strategy for all species in all ecosystems is, speaking from an evolutionary perspective, overly simplistic.
When our daughter was little, we muted commercials as they came on. When she was old enough to ask, she wanted to know why. I always said the same thing: "They're just trying to trick you into buying something you don't need."
A few years later, her kindergarten teacher told me that she was doing a test for
Conservation
of Number, and put 4 blocks close together and then 4 blocks far apart, and asked which row had more in it. My daughter replied "But that's silly; all you did was spread them out. Are you trying to trick me?"
The teacher said that many kids have conservation of number by kindergarten. But none before had ever accused her of intentional deception.
Her mother and I were so proud. Our kids don't even trust their schoolteachers, and they'd learned the lesson at age 5!
I'm not so sure that's a good idea; Eliot Spitzer went after prostitution, possibly in part so as to
appear like someone who'd never go to a prostitute.
Maybe a judge who uses BitTorrent will throw the book at you, and opine from the bench about how bad it is and so on, just so to make himself appear a
paragon of virtue.
Roman Catholics believe God is responsible for everything. Including random chance ( which everyone knows is seldom all the random.)
IIRC, some RC theologian/philosopher argued that
God was not the efficient cause of anything except explicit miracles. (I've heard "efficient cause" also rendered as "proximal cause".)
St Augustine (I think) proposed that God created the universe in its primitive elements and gave it an initial motion which would cause the elements to come together in a finished form. Note here that the coming together of the elements would happen according to established Laws, and God's direct participation would have stopped after he had made the stuff and given it a push. He could, of course, stick his fingers in again later for whatever reason(s) he may have, but could also let the universe run on its own most of the time.
Evolution, random events, and so on constitute no serious problem for Roman Catholic theology, at least none that I am aware of.
What I don't understand is this: there are already things on iTunes which are listed as "Album Only", so you can't buy just one song but have to get the whole set.
It seems strange that Apple has that in place and then refuses to let somebody like Radiohead use it. How do they decide?
[I]f you apply for a patent and get [it] you
have 12 months to produce a "product" based on the
IP otherwise it goes into public domain.
This is a disastrously stupid time limit, unless you want only mega-corporations to be able to patent
anything. I know someone who came up with an
invention; not an algorithm or program, but a
physical device the likes of which is not available
on any market at present. So far, he's spent
nearly $700,000 on research for the manufacturing
technology, including prototypes, salaries, legal
fees, and so on. He got that money from investors, most of whom would never have invested if his idea wasn't patented. Right now, he's
more than 10 years in, and hopes to be selling
in another 2 or 3.
Turning an idea into an invention can take years of hard work, and much of that work is raising money from investors. With no patent, it would be crazy to invest, since a big company could just steal the thing outright. (His initial investors
even required that he get patent insurance, so as to
cover legal fees involved in suing people who stole the idea.)
A one-year limit would make it impossible for the home inventor to turn an idea into a business, because he'd never have enough time to raise money and develop the idea into a product. And he can't raise the money first, because nobody would invest without a patent.
Your idea amounts to "Only people who are already rich -- and don't need to raise money -- can
make lots of money from here on out", which
would essentially destroy what made the US economy powerful in the first place.
I was going to say "I guess the B Ark hit the
ground a bit harder than anticipated."
Re:It is not just the language
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think that any strongly typed language with lots of compile time and link time checks would be about as good (e.g., Java).
In Ada, you can declare a variable to be an integer in the range 1..100, and if it goes outside that range at any point during its lifetime, an exception is immediately thrown. In most languages, you'd have to check it every time you assign it.
Also, you can declare subtypes which not only define ranges but wall themselves off from each other. If you declare "MonthType" and "DateType" as types, and then ThisMonth and ThisDate as
variables, you can't say assign ThisMonth to ThisDate (or vice-versa) without an explicit cast,
even if the value stored is within range.
I programmed in Ada more-or-less exclusively for a year, with all the warnings possible turned on, and it did change a bit how I think about programming. I always know, instantly, what type any object is and what its limits are, because I got so used to thinking about those things when using Ada.
Not that it's perfect, or the ultimate, or anything. I had a job where I wrote C only for about 2 years, and that definitely changed how I thought about programming too. When writing C++
I have sense of what the computer is going to have to do to actually run the code.
There's a quote that any language which doesn't change how you think about programming isn't worth knowing. Ada built up my mental macros for making sure my types and values were in order, and for that alone it was worth learning and using for a year.
In my state, Catholic pharmacists cannot legally practice their religion - they are forced to dispense birth control, even abortifacients, or face legal penalties.
Pharmacists only exist because of government interference in the free market: the
only place you can buy birth control pills is a pharmacy. If it wasn't for the government making such rules, you could probably buy them from vending machines or
just get them at the MegaMart.
For pharmacists to benefit from government interference which creates their business, and then complain that the government is interfering in their business, is idiotic. Live by government interference, die by government interference.
As with previous examples, it's not that they fear a chilling effect on candid
advice, it's that the advice they gave wasn't for the good of the country. They
advised the EPA to do what was good for their industries, and that's bad press.
What I learned about that was, first of all, that power exercised in secret is frequently exercised in the stupid... most stupid possible way.
If people knew that their malfeasance was going to go public some day, and be
exposed to the light, they would be less comfortable tell all the lies they
tell in the dark.
Create a butt-ugly program where every feature is easy to find and compare it with a beautiful interface where every button is hidden behind layers of hoops. Most people will claim the beautiful one is more usable.
This happens in many fields. In education it's known as the
Dr. Fox Effect, after a study
in which a "Doctor Fox" gave an expressive and interesting lecture and was rated higher than another professor who gave a less entertaining lecture with more content.
Imagine Diebold going to NASA/Air Force and trying to peddle their sub-standard hardware for mission-critical situations. I'm sure they would be given the boot faster than they can cry in pain.
Also of interest is the NewsHour's report on body armor, in which
it turned out that the colonel in charge of approving the armor
retired from the military and went to work for the company that
he'd just signed a huge contract with:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec07/armor_09-21.html
No politician will die if body armor is poor, and the old men
at the Pentagon won't die, and the owners of body armor companies
won't die either. What makes you think they care about the people
who will die?
[T]hat'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders
to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for
compatibility. Anything that's Vista-only is
explicitly forbidden, because Vista uptake has been so slow.
Economically speaking, if Vista can run XP programs, your market for writing
something that runs on both is vastly larger than your market for writing something that only runs on Vista. If you sold software for money, would you write anything
Vista-only?
Lucy promises to placehold the football so Charlie can kick it. He falls for it
every time and she never fails to pull it away at the last second (I keep hoping
there's one strip where she doesn't pull it away, but I never saw it.... anyone?).
There was an episode of American Masters on PBS a couple weeks ago about
Charles Schultz, and his wife said that some time after he'd finished the final
cartoon he'd said something to the effect that "Drat! I ended the strip and he
never did kick that football!"
Preventing people from doing literary criticism and background is Death Eater stuff.
It sounds like they're not doing any sort of criticism, so I don't think this applies.
I wrote a book that two different (and very successful) NYC lit agents loved, which
failed to make it all because pubs fear Rowling, WB, Bloomsbury/Scholastic, and
their lawyers. So now it's rotting away on lulu.com, and whatever merit it contains
is lost.
I have a copy of The Gospel According to Harry Potter right here, and Amazon
lists dozens of books on HP themes: The Wisdom of Harry Potter, The
Psychology of Harry Potter, and bunches more. Those publishers don't seem to
have been sued. Maybe your
agents need to find a publisher who's not an idiot?
I never really understood the whole thing with Shakespeare...the guy was a one-trick pony.
His plots were usually recycled from other stories, but that was what was expected at
the time. Remaking an old hit movie in hopes of getting a new hit movie is just the
modern Hollywood version of a practice that's been around for a very long time.
Shakespeare stands out not for the plots but for the language. If you get a copy of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and flip through to Shakespeare, he's got over
1500 entries, lots of them things people say every day and have no idea of their
origin. "Good riddance", "give the Devil his due", "jealousy is a green-eyed monster",
"more in sorrow than in anger", "foregone conclusion", "a sea change", "a sorry sight",
"brevity is the soul of wit", and literally dozens of other common expressions weren't
common until Shakespeare put them together.
Isaac Asimov once wrote that coming up with something totally new is far harder than
you imagine until you actually try to do it. Shakespeare came up with new phrasings
so perfectly worded so often that they've become part of the language, and he did it
hundreds of times. You may know that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
comes from Shakespeare, but did you know it was true of "discretion is the better part
of valor", "eaten out of house and home", "exceedingly well read", "wear your heart
on your sleeve", and "lay it on with a trowel"?
It wasn't Shakespeare's plotting that made him famous; his stories were usually based
on some earlier story, because that's what investors were willing to put money in:
something that had already been a success. (Modern sequels exist for the same reason.)
Shakespeare's ability to use the exact right words in the exact right way is what makes
him such a big deal. Mark Twain once wrote that the difference between the right word
and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a
lightning bug. Shakespeare gets props because he was able to deliver lightning so
often.
In 1963, CDC released a computer called the 6600, which was far better than the
machines being made by IBM at the time.
Thomas Watson, IBM's CEO, wrote a memo saying "Last week, Control Data [...] announced the 6600 system. I understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are only 34 people including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers[.] Contrasting this modest effort with our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer." To which
Seymour Cray replied: "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question."
If you haven't already, you might like to read The Mythical Man-Month, available at a bookseller
near you.
One thing this does is solve the problem that people want to
share in community something from The Daily Show that they found
really funny, but there's no legal way to do it. Now, you can just link
to the right clip from your blog, and put your comments, and welcome
others.
There may be less need to sue YouTube, because there will be far
less reason for anyone to grab a clip and upload it to YouTube in the first
place.
It's like the old "common-sense-test" question: if you go into the bathroom
and the tub is overflowing, what do you do first? Answer: shut off the water.
So they should stop making The Daily Show, and there'd be no problem.
Wait, that wasn't my point at all. This common sense question has nothing to
do with the problem. Drat, my analogies never work out!
As I remember, the TI-88 was actually made as a prototype (I saw pictures
of it), but was later cancelled for some reason I never found out what it
was.
Maybe they just decided the educational market was more lucrative, or would
be a better place to focus their efforts? They
do make lots of calculators for schools.
Some time ago I saw TI calculators used in math classes, and they can do
much more than I had expected. One of the graphing calculators has a plug
which can be used for real-time data collection; the teacher demonstrating
it hooked up a small sonar unit, held it in the air, and dropped a
basketball. The calculator drew a graph showing the ball's distance from
the sensor every 0.1 seconds. Apparently what they do in class is break into
groups of 3 or 4, each group does this with a couple of different balls with
different amounts of air in them, and looks to see if the same formula with
different constants really applies based on their experimental data.
They had a fancier one in which you could enter things such as "X2-1" (bold instead of superscript because superscript not allowed), and it
would think a couple seconds and come back with "(X+1)(X-1)".
Compared to what my old calculator from high school could do, that was impressive.
All of your points are perfectly good and correct, but there is something worth
mentioning: the state of the alternatives.
In the current situation, for many people, it's either the Porsche or the Yugo.
You can't get a Porsche for your company car, so you're stuck with the Yugo.
Since you can only use the company car for company business, you can't even buy
the Honda to use instead.
People in that situation might look at their IT department, realise that the
"try to reboot it" goofs in IT won't ever support Linux or BSD, and say "You know,
if Apple would make a run at corporate customers I might be able to get something
besides a Yugo to use at work all day long."
Incidentally, I know a guy who admins a couple thousand machines, and recently set
up a pilot project of Sun Rays. He loves them. If he could buy 1000 iMacs
that ran stateless, in a similar manner to the Sun Rays, he'd do it without thinking twice.
I will not, however, partake in ceremonies that have their roots in organized religion. So no, I would not consider getting married.
Marriage went on for centuries (maybe millenia) without organized religion's involvement. The early Christian church had no marriage services, and did not keep records of who was married to whom. That
was a civil job.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, the church took over registering of marriages and births because there was nobody else to do it. (That's
also how the Pope ended up administering so much of Italy: the job needed to be done and no one else was around.)
The notion that Christianity (or Judaism, or whatever) invented marriage
is silly. Marriage (at least here in the USA) serves explicit legal
purposes that have nothing to do with religion. There has been more than
one case wherein I have gotten a mindless paper-shuffling droid to shut up and do his job by saying "I'm her husband", which cuts through rubbish like nothing else.
I dunno what the legal situation is where you are, but I'd be astonished if there's a quicker way to establish in people's minds that two people go together than to say "We're married". Why do you think so many gay people want to get married? To get official recognition for their rights.
That's a really good thought. I'll add that to my web page right now.
Obviously it would be best if 100 people tried it various ways and reported
on how balanced it seemed.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried one which, from the moment I first heard it, I wanted to know what Google would have made of it one day earlier.
Today, it gives 885,000 hits.
You do not understand evolution well enough. There are many possible reproductive strategies which can be successful. One is to spread one's genes far and wide, in hopes that others will care for the offspring. But another is to supervise all your offspring yourself: you'll have fewer of them, but you can better ensure that they all reach adulthood.
In the case of creatures which reach adulthood quickly, such as cockroaches, the first strategy is obviously a much better one. But in the case of humans, who reach adulthood slowly and are highly vulnerable until then, the second strategy may work as well as -- or better than -- the first in some cases.
The notion that there is "one best" strategy for all species in all ecosystems is, speaking from an evolutionary perspective, overly simplistic.
When our daughter was little, we muted commercials as they came on. When she was old enough to ask, she wanted to know why. I always said the same thing: "They're just trying to trick you into buying something you don't need."
A few years later, her kindergarten teacher told me that she was doing a test for Conservation of Number, and put 4 blocks close together and then 4 blocks far apart, and asked which row had more in it. My daughter replied "But that's silly; all you did was spread them out. Are you trying to trick me?"
The teacher said that many kids have conservation of number by kindergarten. But none before had ever accused her of intentional deception.
Her mother and I were so proud. Our kids don't even trust their schoolteachers, and they'd learned the lesson at age 5!
I'm not so sure that's a good idea; Eliot Spitzer went after prostitution, possibly in part so as to appear like someone who'd never go to a prostitute.
Maybe a judge who uses BitTorrent will throw the book at you, and opine from the bench about how bad it is and so on, just so to make himself appear a paragon of virtue.
Roman Catholics believe God is responsible for everything. Including random chance ( which everyone knows is seldom all the random.)
IIRC, some RC theologian/philosopher argued that God was not the efficient cause of anything except explicit miracles. (I've heard "efficient cause" also rendered as "proximal cause".)
St Augustine (I think) proposed that God created the universe in its primitive elements and gave it an initial motion which would cause the elements to come together in a finished form. Note here that the coming together of the elements would happen according to established Laws, and God's direct participation would have stopped after he had made the stuff and given it a push. He could, of course, stick his fingers in again later for whatever reason(s) he may have, but could also let the universe run on its own most of the time.
Evolution, random events, and so on constitute no serious problem for Roman Catholic theology, at least none that I am aware of.
What I don't understand is this: there are already things on iTunes which are listed as "Album Only", so you can't buy just one song but have to get the whole set.
It seems strange that Apple has that in place and then refuses to let somebody like Radiohead use it. How do they decide?
[I]f you apply for a patent and get [it] you have 12 months to produce a "product" based on the IP otherwise it goes into public domain.
This is a disastrously stupid time limit, unless you want only mega-corporations to be able to patent anything. I know someone who came up with an invention; not an algorithm or program, but a physical device the likes of which is not available on any market at present. So far, he's spent nearly $700,000 on research for the manufacturing technology, including prototypes, salaries, legal fees, and so on. He got that money from investors, most of whom would never have invested if his idea wasn't patented. Right now, he's more than 10 years in, and hopes to be selling in another 2 or 3.
Turning an idea into an invention can take years of hard work, and much of that work is raising money from investors. With no patent, it would be crazy to invest, since a big company could just steal the thing outright. (His initial investors even required that he get patent insurance, so as to cover legal fees involved in suing people who stole the idea.)
A one-year limit would make it impossible for the home inventor to turn an idea into a business, because he'd never have enough time to raise money and develop the idea into a product. And he can't raise the money first, because nobody would invest without a patent.
Your idea amounts to "Only people who are already rich -- and don't need to raise money -- can make lots of money from here on out", which would essentially destroy what made the US economy powerful in the first place.
I was going to say "I guess the B Ark hit the ground a bit harder than anticipated."
I think that any strongly typed language with lots of compile time and link time checks would be about as good (e.g., Java).
In Ada, you can declare a variable to be an integer in the range 1..100, and if it goes outside that range at any point during its lifetime, an exception is immediately thrown. In most languages, you'd have to check it every time you assign it.
Also, you can declare subtypes which not only define ranges but wall themselves off from each other. If you declare "MonthType" and "DateType" as types, and then ThisMonth and ThisDate as variables, you can't say assign ThisMonth to ThisDate (or vice-versa) without an explicit cast, even if the value stored is within range.
I programmed in Ada more-or-less exclusively for a year, with all the warnings possible turned on, and it did change a bit how I think about programming. I always know, instantly, what type any object is and what its limits are, because I got so used to thinking about those things when using Ada.
Not that it's perfect, or the ultimate, or anything. I had a job where I wrote C only for about 2 years, and that definitely changed how I thought about programming too. When writing C++ I have sense of what the computer is going to have to do to actually run the code.
There's a quote that any language which doesn't change how you think about programming isn't worth knowing. Ada built up my mental macros for making sure my types and values were in order, and for that alone it was worth learning and using for a year.
Ron Hubbard - the founder of Scientology - has been quoted as saying that if you want to get rich, you start a religion.
Well, it's worked for Steve Jobs . . .
In my state, Catholic pharmacists cannot legally practice their religion - they are forced to dispense birth control, even abortifacients, or face legal penalties.
Pharmacists only exist because of government interference in the free market: the only place you can buy birth control pills is a pharmacy. If it wasn't for the government making such rules, you could probably buy them from vending machines or just get them at the MegaMart.
For pharmacists to benefit from government interference which creates their business, and then complain that the government is interfering in their business, is idiotic. Live by government interference, die by government interference.
As with previous examples, it's not that they fear a chilling effect on candid advice, it's that the advice they gave wasn't for the good of the country. They advised the EPA to do what was good for their industries, and that's bad press.
In an interview on the Newshour http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june01/schorr_5-29.html in 2001, Daniel Schorr was asked what he'd learned about government after years of covering it, and he answered:
If people knew that their malfeasance was going to go public some day, and be exposed to the light, they would be less comfortable tell all the lies they tell in the dark.
Create a butt-ugly program where every feature is easy to find and compare it with a beautiful interface where every button is hidden behind layers of hoops. Most people will claim the beautiful one is more usable.
This happens in many fields. In education it's known as the Dr. Fox Effect, after a study in which a "Doctor Fox" gave an expressive and interesting lecture and was rated higher than another professor who gave a less entertaining lecture with more content.
The single greatest financial regret of my life is buying a vehicle from Ford Motor Company.
Let me guess: you work for GM?
Imagine Diebold going to NASA/Air Force and trying to peddle their sub-standard hardware for mission-critical situations. I'm sure they would be given the boot faster than they can cry in pain.
You might be interested in reading up about the use of Microsoft Windows by the US Navy, which you can read about at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987.
Also of interest is the NewsHour's report on body armor, in which it turned out that the colonel in charge of approving the armor retired from the military and went to work for the company that he'd just signed a huge contract with: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec07/armor_09-21.html
No politician will die if body armor is poor, and the old men at the Pentagon won't die, and the owners of body armor companies won't die either. What makes you think they care about the people who will die?
[T]hat'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for compatibility. Anything that's Vista-only is explicitly forbidden, because Vista uptake has been so slow.
Economically speaking, if Vista can run XP programs, your market for writing something that runs on both is vastly larger than your market for writing something that only runs on Vista. If you sold software for money, would you write anything Vista-only?
Lucy promises to placehold the football so Charlie can kick it. He falls for it every time and she never fails to pull it away at the last second (I keep hoping there's one strip where she doesn't pull it away, but I never saw it.... anyone?).
There was an episode of American Masters on PBS a couple weeks ago about Charles Schultz, and his wife said that some time after he'd finished the final cartoon he'd said something to the effect that "Drat! I ended the strip and he never did kick that football!"
So no, it never did happen.
Preventing people from doing literary criticism and background is Death Eater stuff.
It sounds like they're not doing any sort of criticism, so I don't think this applies.
I wrote a book that two different (and very successful) NYC lit agents loved, which failed to make it all because pubs fear Rowling, WB, Bloomsbury/Scholastic, and their lawyers. So now it's rotting away on lulu.com, and whatever merit it contains is lost.
I have a copy of The Gospel According to Harry Potter right here, and Amazon lists dozens of books on HP themes: The Wisdom of Harry Potter, The Psychology of Harry Potter, and bunches more. Those publishers don't seem to have been sued. Maybe your agents need to find a publisher who's not an idiot?
I never really understood the whole thing with Shakespeare...the guy was a one-trick pony.
His plots were usually recycled from other stories, but that was what was expected at the time. Remaking an old hit movie in hopes of getting a new hit movie is just the modern Hollywood version of a practice that's been around for a very long time.
Shakespeare stands out not for the plots but for the language. If you get a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and flip through to Shakespeare, he's got over 1500 entries, lots of them things people say every day and have no idea of their origin. "Good riddance", "give the Devil his due", "jealousy is a green-eyed monster", "more in sorrow than in anger", "foregone conclusion", "a sea change", "a sorry sight", "brevity is the soul of wit", and literally dozens of other common expressions weren't common until Shakespeare put them together.
Isaac Asimov once wrote that coming up with something totally new is far harder than you imagine until you actually try to do it. Shakespeare came up with new phrasings so perfectly worded so often that they've become part of the language, and he did it hundreds of times. You may know that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" comes from Shakespeare, but did you know it was true of "discretion is the better part of valor", "eaten out of house and home", "exceedingly well read", "wear your heart on your sleeve", and "lay it on with a trowel"?
It wasn't Shakespeare's plotting that made him famous; his stories were usually based on some earlier story, because that's what investors were willing to put money in: something that had already been a success. (Modern sequels exist for the same reason.) Shakespeare's ability to use the exact right words in the exact right way is what makes him such a big deal. Mark Twain once wrote that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Shakespeare gets props because he was able to deliver lightning so often.
In 1963, CDC released a computer called the 6600, which was far better than the machines being made by IBM at the time.
Thomas Watson, IBM's CEO, wrote a memo saying "Last week, Control Data [...] announced the 6600 system. I understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are only 34 people including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers[.] Contrasting this modest effort with our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer." To which Seymour Cray replied: "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question."
If you haven't already, you might like to read The Mythical Man-Month, available at a bookseller near you.
One thing this does is solve the problem that people want to share in community something from The Daily Show that they found really funny, but there's no legal way to do it. Now, you can just link to the right clip from your blog, and put your comments, and welcome others.
There may be less need to sue YouTube, because there will be far less reason for anyone to grab a clip and upload it to YouTube in the first place.
It's like the old "common-sense-test" question: if you go into the bathroom and the tub is overflowing, what do you do first? Answer: shut off the water. So they should stop making The Daily Show, and there'd be no problem.
Wait, that wasn't my point at all. This common sense question has nothing to do with the problem. Drat, my analogies never work out!
As I remember, the TI-88 was actually made as a prototype (I saw pictures of it), but was later cancelled for some reason I never found out what it was. Maybe they just decided the educational market was more lucrative, or would be a better place to focus their efforts? They do make lots of calculators for schools.
Some time ago I saw TI calculators used in math classes, and they can do much more than I had expected. One of the graphing calculators has a plug which can be used for real-time data collection; the teacher demonstrating it hooked up a small sonar unit, held it in the air, and dropped a basketball. The calculator drew a graph showing the ball's distance from the sensor every 0.1 seconds. Apparently what they do in class is break into groups of 3 or 4, each group does this with a couple of different balls with different amounts of air in them, and looks to see if the same formula with different constants really applies based on their experimental data.
They had a fancier one in which you could enter things such as "X2-1" (bold instead of superscript because superscript not allowed), and it would think a couple seconds and come back with "(X+1)(X-1)". Compared to what my old calculator from high school could do, that was impressive.
All of your points are perfectly good and correct, but there is something worth mentioning: the state of the alternatives.
In the current situation, for many people, it's either the Porsche or the Yugo. You can't get a Porsche for your company car, so you're stuck with the Yugo. Since you can only use the company car for company business, you can't even buy the Honda to use instead.
People in that situation might look at their IT department, realise that the "try to reboot it" goofs in IT won't ever support Linux or BSD, and say "You know, if Apple would make a run at corporate customers I might be able to get something besides a Yugo to use at work all day long."
Incidentally, I know a guy who admins a couple thousand machines, and recently set up a pilot project of Sun Rays. He loves them. If he could buy 1000 iMacs that ran stateless, in a similar manner to the Sun Rays, he'd do it without thinking twice.
I will not, however, partake in ceremonies that have their roots in organized religion. So no, I would not consider getting married.
Marriage went on for centuries (maybe millenia) without organized religion's involvement. The early Christian church had no marriage services, and did not keep records of who was married to whom. That was a civil job.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, the church took over registering of marriages and births because there was nobody else to do it. (That's also how the Pope ended up administering so much of Italy: the job needed to be done and no one else was around.)
The notion that Christianity (or Judaism, or whatever) invented marriage is silly. Marriage (at least here in the USA) serves explicit legal purposes that have nothing to do with religion. There has been more than one case wherein I have gotten a mindless paper-shuffling droid to shut up and do his job by saying "I'm her husband", which cuts through rubbish like nothing else.
I dunno what the legal situation is where you are, but I'd be astonished if there's a quicker way to establish in people's minds that two people go together than to say "We're married". Why do you think so many gay people want to get married? To get official recognition for their rights.
Or make it so you can only attack like a King?
That's a really good thought. I'll add that to my web page right now. Obviously it would be best if 100 people tried it various ways and reported on how balanced it seemed.