When science gives us a self-deacivating minefield, or one that can distinguish a combatant from a civillian from a cow, then we'll have real progress.
Self-deactivating is probably doable. Cow-friendly land mines would only result in the deployment of militarized cows...
I'm sure that the vast majority of humanity would prefer that the world wasn't a place where bombs, guns and land mines are necessary. But getting rid of them will only empower despots to commit far greater evils. It's naive to think otherwise.
I'll agree with you as far as weapons in general go. The question is, is the above statement true for land mines specifically? Or should we put land mines in the "too nasty to be allowed" category, along with nerve gas, anthrax, etc?
Most of the world thinks so, too bad the Bush administration doesn't.:^(
I must have missed the part of the discussion where tabs/spacing became intimately interwoven into human culture and society.
They became interwoven into the computer-programming subset of society back in the 60's and 70's, if not earlier.
But even beside that, a lot of things are set semi-arbitrarily in the tech world. So why not the length of a tab?
Because the proposal isn't to define a new standard, it's to re-define a very well-entrenched (if crappy) existing standard. All 60 million people who are already happily accustomed to doing things the old way will simply ignore the new "standard", and a standard which nobody uses is worthless.
I think this is the wrong kind of solution to the problem. A standard would be easier. Just have someone say "Tabs are now officially SOME_NUMBER spaces long, so fuck you."
You might as well tell the world "Earth's official language is now officially Esperanto, so fuck you". The effect would be about the same.
Until I can walk outside of my house and immediately jump on a train or bus that will take me exactly where I want to go without any lengthy stops or detours in between, I will not use public transportation.
You forgot to add "as long as I can drive my car instead". If (for whatever reason) driving a private vehicle becomes impossible or impractical, you'll end up either taking public transit, biking, walking, or staying home.
But how do we ever determine a program that learns and is subject to varying, uncontrolled data inputs is bug free?
We can't, of course, but the thing is that the same problem applies to human drivers. How do we ever determine that a human that learns and is subject to varying, uncontrolled data inputs won't suddenly black out, go crazy, fall asleep, etc?
We can't do that either, so in both cases it just comes down to doing lots and lots of exhaustive testing until we are comfortable that all the reasonably likely failure modes have been found and accounted for. You won't catch me in a computer-driven car this year or next year, but maybe in 10 or 20 years after they've put a few million miles of real-world testing under their collective belt, I'll consider it. But even then I'll be aware that I'm taking a calculated risk, just as I am whenever I do the driving myself.
where as people on the left tend to be paranoid about sexual preditors and school violence
I think people paranoid about those things are called "parents", and they come from all parts of the political spectrum. Us people on the left tend to be paranoid about the abuse of power by large corporations and the government... with a good deal of justification. After all, if you had walked up to me 10 years ago and told me the American government would openly condone torture, or invade a foreign country for no rational reason, I would have said you were nuts...
But it's not government's job to determine who needs money and in what amount.
Ah, but it is the government's job to collect taxes, which necessarily implies figuring out deciding who it should take money from and in what amount. You may disagree with how it does this, but it is still the government's job to do it. Note that this is different from a centrally planned economy, since in a centrally planned economy the government would make all economic decisions, not just collect taxes.
When someone dies, they have been removed from society entirely, and are no longer receiving any benefit from government, so government has even less rationale for taking their money.
Or perhaps there is actually more rationale -- the deceased person is dead, so they clearly don't need the money. Therefore it is better to take money from them than from someone else who is still alive, who would be harmed by its loss. Of course the person's heirs may still be living, but if we are going to take them into consideration, we are back to square one: they are still part of society, and thus subject to taxation like everybody else.
Where do you get the ludicrous idea that there's no taxation in Afghanistan or Sudan?
Okay, technically I'm sure they do. But if the central government is too weak to actually be able to collect taxes, then in practice it's the same as not having taxes.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
Using a VM doesn't give you good compatibility, it gives very poor compatibility. As the example of OSX/Classic showed!
I've been running WinXP under Linux (via VMWare) this way for over a year, and it works fine. Are you saying that Microsoft, who has near-unlimited resources and access to all the Windows source code, couldn't accomplish something that small third parties were able to do without the benefit of any source code access?
First problem. They just doubled their system requirements, because now everybody who spends all day inside Word and Excel need to have two completely different operating systems loaded at once.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but their current solution does the same thing. Have fun running Vista on your old PC....;^) Seriously, you are right, but Microsoft could rely on Moore's Law to take care of that, like it always does....
Second problem. Users hate it. They don't like having their apps appear in a "screen in a box"
Agreed. So they'd have to be a bit more clever and figure out how to get the VM's windows and the "native" windows to both appear as windows in same desktop. Since they have complete control over the source code of both old and new OS's, that should be doable, if non-trivial.
Third problem. It doesn't get you anywhere.
It does get you somewhere -- to an OS where you can add new features without being constantly 'gotcha'd by 20+ years of backwards compatibility. You're right, it would be years before most existing apps got "ported" to the new APIs (if ever!), but that's okay -- the old apps would run fine in the VM, and new apps could use the new environment, and in the long run (10-20 years) things would cycle through, and eventually nobody would use the virtual machine bits much anymore. At some point in the far future, the virtual machine could be removed and nobody would notice. It's not a quick fix, but then nothing is... what it gets you is an orderly transition away from the current mess.
Fourth problem. It's too expensive. Apple nearly went bust trying to do this
Yes, but the key is that Apple succeeded this way, and did it with a tiny fraction of Microsoft's budget. I'm not saying it would be easy, only that it would be doable in the long term. It's not clear that Microsoft's current strategy is.
OS X is not revolutionary, it's just a prettier form of what came before, so there were no fundamental shifts required.
Eh? Compare the architecture of MacOS "Classic" and MacOS/X. They are completely different, it's like comparing a bicycle to a BMW. About the only thing they have in common is some GUI look&feel conventions.
Throwing away Windows would be like throwing away cars....
I didn't suggest throwing away Windows, only divorcing it from itsaccumulated backwards-compatibility cruft and complexity. The "magic new OS" could be made from the simplified best parts of the current Windows code base, with support for the older parts removed. This would be more like introducing flying cars, but making sure that they could still operate as ground cars, so that people who didn't have a pilot's license yet could still use them.
Ah well, it's just an idea. Microsoft is free to pursue any course they like, I don't care. But it does seem like they have built their own special version of hell for themselves.
And the death tax is nothing but a money grab by politicians who want more money for their pet projects.
You could say the same thing about any tax. And yes, there is a lot of pork out there, but there are also things that are genuinely necessary and useful to fund via taxes (I'm sure you can think of a few). If you want to live in a society without taxes, try Afghanistan or Sudan... of course you will still end up paying taxes, only to the local warlord instead of any kind of representative government.
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
Indeed they should. But that doesn't have any bearing on whether there should be an estate tax, or even taxes in general.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
So why couldn't Microsoft do the same? Well, people use Windows for the apps. There is no market of people who weren't buying Windows before who suddenly would if they started from scratch with crappy compatibility
Of course nobody would buy it if it had "crappy compatibility". It would have to have "very good, almost perfect compatibility". Fortunately for Microsoft, programs like VMWare have shown that this is a solved problem.
Nobody would use this magical new OS for the same reason that statistically so few people use MacOS X - they have businesses, workflows and even game characters all based on Win32 based software.
Again you have missed the point: this "magical new OS" would run all Win32 apps just as well as any other Windows OS, because it would in fact contain a copy of the previous version of Windows, running in a virtual machine. Done well, people wouldn't even know the virtual machine layer existed. So backwards compatibility would not be an issue; all old programs would "just work". The advantage to Microsoft would be that new features would no longer be tied down by the requirement of backwards compatibility with 20 years of pre-existing poorly designed APIs -- they could add new features much more quickly and cleanly and only have to support the "new" APIs. This is what Apple does now (OS/X's precursors may have many years of history, but Apple doesn't have to support 90% of that history, only the versions that were released under the Apple name) and it provides Apple with a big technical advantage. This would be one way for Microsoft to get that same freedom. I'm not saying it would be easy to do, but in the long run it's probably easier than continuing to try to shoehorn more and more new things into an increasingly creaky old and insecure OS.
I really have no idea where you are getting this doomsday scenario from. If anything, all the other discretionary spending is what will ruin us, not the under 50% we spend on the military. In the 60s, over 70% of the federal budget was spent on the military.
Yeah, okay, the USSR/insolvency scenario was a prediction of what would happen if we continued to look to the military as our sole method of enforcing world policy indefinitely. More likely we will revert to a saner (and much more cost-efficient) policy of diplomacy and international co-operation, with the military only used as a last resort.
Also, do you think that the money spent on an aircraft carrier just disappears? The dollars go to workers and owners, which then go back into the economy. It's not like the dollars just get burnt up
Sure, the salary money gets recycled, but if those workers and owners are producing aircraft carriers (etc) that aren't actually necessary or useful, then they might as well just be moving rocks from one pile to another and back and calling it 'productivity'. What we lose is opportunity cost: all of their time and effort, as well as the energy and materials that went into making the white elephant, could have been expended elsewhere in a way that would give society more benefit than just providing make-work/welfare for military personnel. The fact that the government can print money as it sees fit serves to cameoflage the subsidisation of military waste somewhat, but you can't really get something for nothing: the effects are eventually felt elsewhere, either as inflation, increased debt, or lack of resources for other things. If our primary goal is to help the economy, why not spend the money on civilian infrastructure, or better health care, or social services, or even just tax breaks? Any of those would be better than (mis)using the military as a kind of social employment program.
Do all hippies think that we don't need a military?
Yes, because hippies are merely a convenient straw-man caricature for you to mock. So they'll believe any dumb-ass thing you want them to in order to make you look like you're winning the argument.
I'm not a hippie myself though, so my view is that we do need a military: one about one tenth the size of what we have now. The reason our military keeps growing year and year and STILL can't keep up with our demands on it is that it generates its own demand: the more military we have, the more we rely on it as our primary means of getting things done (whether it is the right tool or not), and the more other nations (rightly) fear our military power, and build up their militaries in response, and so the more we have to build up our own military to stay ahead. A classic arms race, but the end of this little game is that America will bankrupt itself, USSR style, by going into massive debt to support its military. Cool as high-tech weaponry may be, you can't eat it, and you can't house your citizens with it. At some point the whole economic edifice will come tumbling down under the weight of all that non-productive military spending, and the USA will cease to be a global superpower -- ironically not because of too little defense, but because of too much.
The current group of fanatics we are fighting feels anyone who is not a member of their culture/religion is not worthy to live and must be killed. They would be trying to destroy us even if we stood in the corner with our hands in our pockets, and they are doing this even to people who sympathize with them.
Your statement is correct as far as it goes, but what you've failed to realize is that "the current group of fanatics" is not a fixed set of people. Like the particles of water vapor that form a cloud, there are constantly individuals entering and leaving the "set of fanatics", and its appearance as a fixed object is an illusion. Like a cloud, its size will grow or shrink depending on the environment around it. Which is why so much of the USA's recent actions have been not only ineffective but counterproductive: if a military operation kills N terrorists, but inspires (more than N) people who were previously non-combatants to become terrorists, then our effort in that operation has actually harmed us more than doing nothing would have.
The "War On Terror" is not some video game where you can win simply by killing until there are no 'baddies' to kill. It is a political struggle for the hearts and minds of humanity. The terrorists know this, and use it to their advantage. It's time we did the same. When the bulk of the world can't tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" anymore, the terrorists are winning.
When people criticize Americans for driving SUVs to the grocery store, they should remember that it means Americans can afford SUVs.
Hurry for America! Sure, we may not have affordable health care, but at least we have what really matters: the freedom to drive a tank to the grocery store.
Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I think Microsoft may have reached the limits of their competence, at least as far as the Win32 platform goes. They no longer seem very capable of making significant improvements to the Windows platform. Perhaps the Jenga pile is just too tall now, and they're running out of ways to add more pieces without it all crashing down on them?
Not that I'm blaming them -- all software designs have limits, past which they can't be stretched any further and still be made to work. But perhaps Microsoft should be looking at starting over with a fresh new OS design (with backwards compatibility provided via virtual machine emulation only, a la MacOS Classic running in MacOS/X)?
I'm ideologically aligned with the Green party, but they strike me as a bunch of disorganized hippies who wouldn't know what to do with the country if we turned it over to them.
Hm, you say that like it's a bad thing.:^) For contrast, it appears the Bush administration knows exactly what to do with the country, and they're doing it good and hard. Bend over America, here comes another war and another tax cut for the rich!
What I don't understand is how people can choose the lesser evil to try to just slow the downward spiral. It's still a downward spiral even if it's a bit slower - the result is the same.
It's pretty easy to understand: imagine you have terminal cancer. You can either take some drugs which will slow the growth of the cancer and let you live a bit longer, or not take them and die sooner. Most people will take the drugs, even if it is only forestalling the inevitable.
The problem isn't that people aren't choosing the best option, the problem is that they don't aren't given any good options to choose. They can vote Republican, or they can vote Democrat, or they can vote Present (aka third-party, but since in a winner-take-all election voting third-party has either no effect or is actually counterproductive to your goals, it's the same thing). The only way to change this is through electoral reform, so that when people go to vote, they can vote outside the Demopublican duopoly and still have their vote do some good. Without that we'll always be stuck with just two significant parties, and we'll only get government that is as good as those two parties agree to make it. If they agree that mediocrity is good enough for them, then that's the best we'll get.
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Self-deactivating is probably doable. Cow-friendly land mines would only result in the deployment of militarized cows...
I'll agree with you as far as weapons in general go. The question is, is the above statement true for land mines specifically? Or should we put land mines in the "too nasty to be allowed" category, along with nerve gas, anthrax, etc?
Most of the world thinks so, too bad the Bush administration doesn't.
They became interwoven into the computer-programming subset of society back in the 60's and 70's, if not earlier.
But even beside that, a lot of things are set semi-arbitrarily in the tech world. So why not the length of a tab?
Because the proposal isn't to define a new standard, it's to re-define a very well-entrenched (if crappy) existing standard. All 60 million people who are already happily accustomed to doing things the old way will simply ignore the new "standard", and a standard which nobody uses is worthless.
You might as well tell the world "Earth's official language is now officially Esperanto, so fuck you". The effect would be about the same.
You forgot to add "as long as I can drive my car instead". If (for whatever reason) driving a private vehicle becomes impossible or impractical, you'll end up either taking public transit, biking, walking, or staying home.
Convenience is all relative.
We can't, of course, but the thing is that the same problem applies to human drivers. How do we ever determine that a human that learns and is subject to varying, uncontrolled data inputs won't suddenly black out, go crazy, fall asleep, etc?
We can't do that either, so in both cases it just comes down to doing lots and lots of exhaustive testing until we are comfortable that all the reasonably likely failure modes have been found and accounted for. You won't catch me in a computer-driven car this year or next year, but maybe in 10 or 20 years after they've put a few million miles of real-world testing under their collective belt, I'll consider it. But even then I'll be aware that I'm taking a calculated risk, just as I am whenever I do the driving myself.
Or at least when they try to stop the countdown and management refuses to do so, they'll resign in protest...
Finally, we have the Internet equivalent to "pull my finger".
I think people paranoid about those things are called "parents", and they come from all parts of the political spectrum. Us people on the left tend to be paranoid about the abuse of power by large corporations and the government... with a good deal of justification. After all, if you had walked up to me 10 years ago and told me the American government would openly condone torture, or invade a foreign country for no rational reason, I would have said you were nuts...
Of course it did. Educate yourself before posting any more pointless snide remarks.
I, for one, would have headed for the hills. I know all about the pie apocalypse
ps Hi Beryllium
Ah, but it is the government's job to collect taxes, which necessarily implies figuring out deciding who it should take money from and in what amount. You may disagree with how it does this, but it is still the government's job to do it. Note that this is different from a centrally planned economy, since in a centrally planned economy the government would make all economic decisions, not just collect taxes.
receiving any benefit from government, so government has even less rationale for taking their money.
Or perhaps there is actually more rationale -- the deceased person is dead, so they clearly don't need the money. Therefore it is better to take money from them than from someone else who is still alive, who would be harmed by its loss. Of course the person's heirs may still be living, but if we are going to take them into consideration, we are back to square one: they are still part of society, and thus subject to taxation like everybody else.
Okay, technically I'm sure they do. But if the central government is too weak to actually be able to collect taxes, then in practice it's the same as not having taxes.
I've been running WinXP under Linux (via VMWare) this way for over a year, and it works fine. Are you saying that Microsoft, who has near-unlimited resources and access to all the Windows source code, couldn't accomplish something that small third parties were able to do without the benefit of any source code access?
First problem. They just doubled their system requirements, because now everybody who spends all day inside Word and Excel need to have two completely different operating systems loaded at once.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but their current solution does the same thing. Have fun running Vista on your old PC....
Second problem. Users hate it. They don't like having their apps appear in a "screen in a box"
Agreed. So they'd have to be a bit more clever and figure out how to get the VM's windows and the "native" windows to both appear as windows in same desktop. Since they have complete control over the source code of both old and new OS's, that should be doable, if non-trivial.
Third problem. It doesn't get you anywhere.
It does get you somewhere -- to an OS where you can add new features without being constantly 'gotcha'd by 20+ years of backwards compatibility. You're right, it would be years before most existing apps got "ported" to the new APIs (if ever!), but that's okay -- the old apps would run fine in the VM, and new apps could use the new environment, and in the long run (10-20 years) things would cycle through, and eventually nobody would use the virtual machine bits much anymore. At some point in the far future, the virtual machine could be removed and nobody would notice. It's not a quick fix, but then nothing is... what it gets you is an orderly transition away from the current mess.
Fourth problem. It's too expensive. Apple nearly went bust trying to do this
Yes, but the key is that Apple succeeded this way, and did it with a tiny fraction of Microsoft's budget. I'm not saying it would be easy, only that it would be doable in the long term. It's not clear that Microsoft's current strategy is.
OS X is not revolutionary, it's just a prettier form of what came before, so there were no fundamental shifts required.
Eh? Compare the architecture of MacOS "Classic" and MacOS/X. They are completely different, it's like comparing a bicycle to a BMW. About the only thing they have in common is some GUI look&feel conventions.
Throwing away Windows would be like throwing away cars
I didn't suggest throwing away Windows, only divorcing it from itsaccumulated backwards-compatibility cruft and complexity. The "magic new OS" could be made from the simplified best parts of the current Windows code base, with support for the older parts removed. This would be more like introducing flying cars, but making sure that they could still operate as ground cars, so that people who didn't have a pilot's license yet could still use them.
Ah well, it's just an idea. Microsoft is free to pursue any course they like, I don't care. But it does seem like they have built their own special version of hell for themselves.
You could say the same thing about any tax. And yes, there is a lot of pork out there, but there are also things that are genuinely necessary and useful to fund via taxes (I'm sure you can think of a few). If you want to live in a society without taxes, try Afghanistan or Sudan... of course you will still end up paying taxes, only to the local warlord instead of any kind of representative government.
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
Indeed they should. But that doesn't have any bearing on whether there should be an estate tax, or even taxes in general.
Of course nobody would buy it if it had "crappy compatibility". It would have to have "very good, almost perfect compatibility". Fortunately for Microsoft, programs like VMWare have shown that this is a solved problem.
Nobody would use this magical new OS for the same reason that statistically so few people use MacOS X - they have businesses, workflows and even game characters all based on Win32 based software.
Again you have missed the point: this "magical new OS" would run all Win32 apps just as well as any other Windows OS, because it would in fact contain a copy of the previous version of Windows, running in a virtual machine. Done well, people wouldn't even know the virtual machine layer existed. So backwards compatibility would not be an issue; all old programs would "just work". The advantage to Microsoft would be that new features would no longer be tied down by the requirement of backwards compatibility with 20 years of pre-existing poorly designed APIs -- they could add new features much more quickly and cleanly and only have to support the "new" APIs. This is what Apple does now (OS/X's precursors may have many years of history, but Apple doesn't have to support 90% of that history, only the versions that were released under the Apple name) and it provides Apple with a big technical advantage. This would be one way for Microsoft to get that same freedom. I'm not saying it would be easy to do, but in the long run it's probably easier than continuing to try to shoehorn more and more new things into an increasingly creaky old and insecure OS.
Yeah, okay, the USSR/insolvency scenario was a prediction of what would happen if we continued to look to the military as our sole method of enforcing world policy indefinitely. More likely we will revert to a saner (and much more cost-efficient) policy of diplomacy and international co-operation, with the military only used as a last resort.
Also, do you think that the money spent on an aircraft carrier just disappears? The dollars go to workers and owners, which then go back into the economy. It's not like the dollars just get burnt up
Sure, the salary money gets recycled, but if those workers and owners are producing aircraft carriers (etc) that aren't actually necessary or useful, then they might as well just be moving rocks from one pile to another and back and calling it 'productivity'. What we lose is opportunity cost: all of their time and effort, as well as the energy and materials that went into making the white elephant, could have been expended elsewhere in a way that would give society more benefit than just providing make-work/welfare for military personnel. The fact that the government can print money as it sees fit serves to cameoflage the subsidisation of military waste somewhat, but you can't really get something for nothing: the effects are eventually felt elsewhere, either as inflation, increased debt, or lack of resources for other things. If our primary goal is to help the economy, why not spend the money on civilian infrastructure, or better health care, or social services, or even just tax breaks? Any of those would be better than (mis)using the military as a kind of social employment program.
Yes, because hippies are merely a convenient straw-man caricature for you to mock. So they'll believe any dumb-ass thing you want them to in order to make you look like you're winning the argument.
I'm not a hippie myself though, so my view is that we do need a military: one about one tenth the size of what we have now. The reason our military keeps growing year and year and STILL can't keep up with our demands on it is that it generates its own demand: the more military we have, the more we rely on it as our primary means of getting things done (whether it is the right tool or not), and the more other nations (rightly) fear our military power, and build up their militaries in response, and so the more we have to build up our own military to stay ahead. A classic arms race, but the end of this little game is that America will bankrupt itself, USSR style, by going into massive debt to support its military. Cool as high-tech weaponry may be, you can't eat it, and you can't house your citizens with it. At some point the whole economic edifice will come tumbling down under the weight of all that non-productive military spending, and the USA will cease to be a global superpower -- ironically not because of too little defense, but because of too much.
Your statement is correct as far as it goes, but what you've failed to realize is that "the current group of fanatics" is not a fixed set of people. Like the particles of water vapor that form a cloud, there are constantly individuals entering and leaving the "set of fanatics", and its appearance as a fixed object is an illusion. Like a cloud, its size will grow or shrink depending on the environment around it. Which is why so much of the USA's recent actions have been not only ineffective but counterproductive: if a military operation kills N terrorists, but inspires (more than N) people who were previously non-combatants to become terrorists, then our effort in that operation has actually harmed us more than doing nothing would have.
The "War On Terror" is not some video game where you can win simply by killing until there are no 'baddies' to kill. It is a political struggle for the hearts and minds of humanity. The terrorists know this, and use it to their advantage. It's time we did the same. When the bulk of the world can't tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" anymore, the terrorists are winning.
I have, however, seen a few systems that could benefit from such an API...
Hurry for America! Sure, we may not have affordable health care, but at least we have what really matters: the freedom to drive a tank to the grocery store.
Not that I'm blaming them -- all software designs have limits, past which they can't be stretched any further and still be made to work. But perhaps Microsoft should be looking at starting over with a fresh new OS design (with backwards compatibility provided via virtual machine emulation only, a la MacOS Classic running in MacOS/X)?
Hm, you say that like it's a bad thing.
It's pretty easy to understand: imagine you have terminal cancer. You can either take some drugs which will slow the growth of the cancer and let you live a bit longer, or not take them and die sooner. Most people will take the drugs, even if it is only forestalling the inevitable.
The problem isn't that people aren't choosing the best option, the problem is that they don't aren't given any good options to choose. They can vote Republican, or they can vote Democrat, or they can vote Present (aka third-party, but since in a winner-take-all election voting third-party has either no effect or is actually counterproductive to your goals, it's the same thing). The only way to change this is through electoral reform, so that when people go to vote, they can vote outside the Demopublican duopoly and still have their vote do some good. Without that we'll always be stuck with just two significant parties, and we'll only get government that is as good as those two parties agree to make it. If they agree that mediocrity is good enough for them, then that's the best we'll get.