The sugar daddies are the likes of Sun, Nokia, IBM, and so on, who donated millions to Mozilla. And of course AOL which put a lot of money into the project initially. Opera has not been able to rely on donations from other companies
Sure. But why do you think all of those companies were willing to donate time and money to Mozilla, but not to Opera?
My guess is that they assumed or were told that the electronic machines would allow them to go "paperless" as in "paperless office" and they failed to consider the ramifications wrt. voting
Or, more cynically, they did consider the ramifications, and liked them...
Yes, let's. Here is an email from Vint Cerf (who has as good a claim towards "inventing the Internet" as anyone) describing exactly what Al Gore did and did not do regarding the development of the Internet.
Why should you tax people because they're smart enough or lucky enough to do a good job at making money? That's called jealousy.
There's no need to bring inflammatory psychological speculation into it. We tax the rich for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that's where the money is. I won't try and argue whether it's morally justified or not, but I will note that the top 0.5% of US citizens hold 25% of the US's wealth. If you were a politician and wanted to be re-elected by popular vote, who would you hand the bills to?
Actually, this is a pretty clever decision on Bush's part: he saves a bit of cash for more war and tax cuts, and furthers one of his administration's major goals -- propogation of widespread ignorance about the state of Earth's climate -- at the same time.
Of course, I don't see how this jibes with his talk earlier about promoting science, but I suppose that was just empty PR anyway. You don't need fancy satellites to tell you about the world when ID can explain anything for free.
When the subject is political, however, the modding seems based on bias
That's just the problem with politics, isn't it? People have very different world views, and what seems "objectively obvious" to you may seem "blatantly biased" to someone else, and vice versa. It's just the nature of the beast.
Evenly spread at 1 person per sq. meter, we could only cover about 0.0012 percent of the surface area.
Your mistake is that you are assuming each person needs only 1 square meter of land to survive. I think you should look up the actual minimum footprint of land necessary to feed/clothe/house a person, then recalculate.
Thank you for the in depth explanation.:^) However, I think your sig is slightly off -- it would be better to say "Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading is very likely to be buggy". As is, it sounds like you have come up with a halting-problem style mathematical proof that no multithreaded program above a certain complexity could ever be correct, even theoretically -- which is not the case.
I agree with most of your arguments -- multithreading is strong juju and shouldn't be used unless there is a very clear benefit offseting the inevitable extra complexity. When it is used, its best if the multithreading can be "hidden" inside the implementation of a single-threaded-style API, so that the vast majority of the code doesn't have to worry about multithreading issues. That way the amount of "critical" code that must be crafted "just so" to work reliably is minimized.
As far as speedup and number of processors goes, you're right -- but I think you will be less right in the future. Now that we've (apparently) hit the 4GHz cycles-per-second limit, the only way to continue to get performance increases in the future will be through parallelization. That means that you can expect to see more and more dual-core, quad-core, 64-core, etc CPUs in the future. If people are to actually see the performance gains promised by those machines, at least some multithreading will be necessary. Hopefully a lot of the multithreading complexity can be hidden inside clever libraries written by the code wizards, however, so that Joe Programmer doesn't have to deal with the nasty details so much.
In the long run, I think what is really needed is a new programming language/paradigm (functional programming, perhaps?) that handles multithreading issues gracefully by design, so that the traditional multithreading pitfalls simply don't come up. Dunno how/when that will actually happen though.
By that logic, why shouldn't the rich want to keep their higher standard of living by outsourcing our jobs?
No doubt they do, and it is their right to want whatever they want, just like anyone else. However, in a democracy one would hope that government policies would reflect what is best for the majority of the people, not what is best for the minority composed of rich people.
Well, why do you think we inherently deserve a higher standard of living? Because we were born with it?
It has nothing to do with what we "deserve", but rather what we have and would like to keep. Why shouldn't we want to keep our higher standard of living?
Do I understand correctly that there are actually eight cells per chip, but they want to be able to handle production errors without throwing too many chips away, so they assume that one of the cells will be defective and therefore disabled?
If so, what happens when they get lucky and all eight cells function properly? Do they still disable one, just for the sake of uniformity, or do you get a slightly-more-powerful-than-normal cell chip in that case?
maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?
That seems unlikely to me... people would have to be willing to trade away their spare bandwidth for... what, exactly? Being able to watch movies/TV on their computer? They can do that now if they want, without having to run any "industry-approved" p2p clients (and all that that implies).
And what's to keep the programmer from tampering with what gets printed on the receipt?
Each voter examines the printout and rejects it if it is not correct, so there is little to be gained by tampering with it. The only thing tampering with the receipts would do is expose the voting machine company as dishonest.
This is not a magic bullet.
Nothing is a 'magic bullet', so of course this isn't. What it is is a good common-sense measure that makes widespread election fraud much more difficult to get away with.
It seems it's getting more and more popular to criticize the US and accuse them of being a totalitarian faschist state, yet any time they do anything even remotely in line with those accusations the critics act shocked and distraught. Here's a tip: pick your viewpoint and stick with it.
So you are saying that it's hypocritical to criticize the US for acting like a fascist state after it acts like a fascist state? I must confess I don't follow your logic at all. Why not call a spade a spade?
So if you truly beleive that the US has become one, it might behoove you to either STFU, or move away and criticize them from a distance.
Oh, I see, you are trying to perpetuate a climate of fear and quash dissent. Carry on...
everybody who has a receipt showing who they voted for gets into the union hall tonight
You misunderstood how it works: people are required to turn in their paper at the polling place. Ideally, the person does not have physical access to the paper at all, they only view it from behind glass. They are not allowed to take it home with them, for precisely the reason you describe. (incidentally, that's why I think calling the paper a 'receipt' is a bad choice of words -- it gives people the wrong impression of how it is to be used)
"This receipt is wrong. That's not who I voted for." What are you supposed to do now?
The vote doesn't get counted in the electronic database until after the voter has looked at the printout and clicked the "yes, this printout matches what I wanted" button. If the user clicks "no, that's wrong", the machine writes VOID at the bottom of the printout and the user is allowed to go back and try again.
And why couldn't the paper receipt be similarly compromised by the hack?
Because the voter can read it and verify that it properly reflects who he wanted to vote for. If it's wrong, the voter can then notify the election officials that there is a problem.
Alternately, who is to prevent a fraudster from forging thousands of receipts and adding them to the paper receipt pile?
The election officials who are in charge of the ballot box can do that. It's true that the election officials might be dishonest, but a dishonest election official can only skew the results in a single polling location. A dishonest programmer could skew results nationwide. (and if that's not good enough for you, then you could do what is currently done with old-fashioned paper ballots: print out special ballot sheets and keep careful track of how many are distributed to each polling station. At the end of the day, count them up and compare the number of ballots submitted with the number of people who voted at that poll. Any non-trivial shennanigans would become apparent at that point)
That the voting machine was messed with or the paper trail? What breaks the tie?
The tie goes to the paper trail, because it was (a) double-checked by each voter, and (b) much harder to surreptitiously modify than some bits on a flash chip.
Folks might want to consider the more mundane potential causes of these problems before heading for their tinfoil hat drawer
I generally agree with you, but until the voting machines are open and the results easily verifiable by any layman, there is always going to be paranoia and speculation of this sort. That's why a voter verified paper trail is so critical: unless everything can be hand-verified, even if every voting machine maker is 100% honest and the machines all work perfectly 100% of the time, there will always be the lingering suspicion that shennanigans could have been pulled. That suspicion will trigger expensive lawsuits, and worse will further erode the public's faith in democracy.
Before, all you had to do was catch some seamy-looking people with a cache of software CDs, and you could safely presume that they were selling them illegally.
I'm not sure that was ever really a safe presumption. There are plenty of people who burn and sell CDs containing software that they themselves hold the copyright to. If the CDs are marked "Microsoft Office", you might have a point, but if they contain an app the officer has never heard of, then more research is required.
Quantum theories may be able to explain how it is that three weeks after wondering about something, the answer just pops into my head
Perhaps, but I think there are quite plausible theories that can explain that without having to invoke anything so exotic as quantum mechanics. For example, there are large portions of your brain that operate without you having any conscious perception of their operation (e.g. the part of your brain that regulates digestion, as a very simple example). So it's entirely possible that there are parts of your brain that operate on parts of your problem without you knowing it, and it's only at the end that they "signal you" with the result, which seems to come from nowhere. Or perhaps you just happened to see or hear something that (combined with your previous thoughts) served to jolt your thought process in a productive direction. etc.
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If the existing batteries in your laptop leak and destroy your laptop, are they covered by a warranty that replaces your laptop?
Mozilla. And of course AOL which put a lot of money into the project initially. Opera has not been able to rely on donations from other companies
Sure. But why do you think all of those companies were willing to donate time and money to Mozilla, but not to Opera?
Or, more cynically, they did consider the ramifications, and liked them...
Yes, let's. Here is an email from Vint Cerf (who has as good a claim towards "inventing the Internet" as anyone) describing exactly what Al Gore did and did not do regarding the development of the Internet.
There's no need to bring inflammatory psychological speculation into it. We tax the rich for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that's where the money is. I won't try and argue whether it's morally justified or not, but I will note that the top 0.5% of US citizens hold 25% of the US's wealth. If you were a politician and wanted to be re-elected by popular vote, who would you hand the bills to?
Fighting constant border skirmishes (and occasional wars) across the Union/Confederate border? Probably not a world superpower, in any case.
Of course, I don't see how this jibes with his talk earlier about promoting science, but I suppose that was just empty PR anyway. You don't need fancy satellites to tell you about the world when ID can explain anything for free.
How do you know? Just because they didn't notify you doesn't mean they didn't investigate you.
That's just the problem with politics, isn't it? People have very different world views, and what seems "objectively obvious" to you may seem "blatantly biased" to someone else, and vice versa. It's just the nature of the beast.
Once the planet is completely breaded, they deep-fry it in canola oil until it is a crispy golden brown, and then serve it with cocktail sauce. Yum!
Your mistake is that you are assuming each person needs only 1 square meter of land to survive. I think you should look up the actual minimum footprint of land necessary to feed/clothe/house a person, then recalculate.
I agree with most of your arguments -- multithreading is strong juju and shouldn't be used unless there is a very clear benefit offseting the inevitable extra complexity. When it is used, its best if the multithreading can be "hidden" inside the implementation of a single-threaded-style API, so that the vast majority of the code doesn't have to worry about multithreading issues. That way the amount of "critical" code that must be crafted "just so" to work reliably is minimized.
As far as speedup and number of processors goes, you're right -- but I think you will be less right in the future. Now that we've (apparently) hit the 4GHz cycles-per-second limit, the only way to continue to get performance increases in the future will be through parallelization. That means that you can expect to see more and more dual-core, quad-core, 64-core, etc CPUs in the future. If people are to actually see the performance gains promised by those machines, at least some multithreading will be necessary. Hopefully a lot of the multithreading complexity can be hidden inside clever libraries written by the code wizards, however, so that Joe Programmer doesn't have to deal with the nasty details so much.
In the long run, I think what is really needed is a new programming language/paradigm (functional programming, perhaps?) that handles multithreading issues gracefully by design, so that the traditional multithreading pitfalls simply don't come up. Dunno how/when that will actually happen though.
Okay, I'll bite -- why? (I'll assume you aren't just being tautological and defining any non-buggy multithreaded program as "trivial"!)
No doubt they do, and it is their right to want whatever they want, just like anyone else. However, in a democracy one would hope that government policies would reflect what is best for the majority of the people, not what is best for the minority composed of rich people.
It has nothing to do with what we "deserve", but rather what we have and would like to keep. Why shouldn't we want to keep our higher standard of living?
Do I understand correctly that there are actually eight cells per chip, but they want to be able to handle production errors without throwing too many chips away, so they assume that one of the cells will be defective and therefore disabled?
If so, what happens when they get lucky and all eight cells function properly? Do they still disable one, just for the sake of uniformity, or do you get a slightly-more-powerful-than-normal cell chip in that case?
You joke, but Real Programmers start writing code well before the hardware becomes available...
That seems unlikely to me... people would have to be willing to trade away their spare bandwidth for... what, exactly? Being able to watch movies/TV on their computer? They can do that now if they want, without having to run any "industry-approved" p2p clients (and all that that implies).
Each voter examines the printout and rejects it if it is not correct, so there is little to be gained by tampering with it. The only thing tampering with the receipts would do is expose the voting machine company as dishonest.
This is not a magic bullet.
Nothing is a 'magic bullet', so of course this isn't. What it is is a good common-sense measure that makes widespread election fraud much more difficult to get away with.
So you are saying that it's hypocritical to criticize the US for acting like a fascist state after it acts like a fascist state? I must confess I don't follow your logic at all. Why not call a spade a spade?
So if you truly beleive that the US has become one, it might behoove you to either
STFU, or move away and criticize them from a distance.
Oh, I see, you are trying to perpetuate a climate of fear and quash dissent. Carry on...
You misunderstood how it works: people are required to turn in their paper at the polling place. Ideally, the person does not have physical access to the paper at all, they only view it from behind glass. They are not allowed to take it home with them, for precisely the reason you describe. (incidentally, that's why I think calling the paper a 'receipt' is a bad choice of words -- it gives people the wrong impression of how it is to be used)
"This receipt is wrong. That's not who I voted for." What are you supposed to do now?
The vote doesn't get counted in the electronic database until after the voter has looked at the printout and clicked the "yes, this printout matches what I wanted" button. If the user clicks "no, that's wrong", the machine writes VOID at the bottom of the printout and the user is allowed to go back and try again.
Because the voter can read it and verify that it properly reflects who he wanted to vote for. If it's wrong, the voter can then notify the election officials that there is a problem.
Alternately, who is to prevent a fraudster from forging thousands of receipts and adding them to the paper receipt pile?
The election officials who are in charge of the ballot box can do that. It's true that the election officials might be dishonest, but a dishonest election official can only skew the results in a single polling location. A dishonest programmer could skew results nationwide. (and if that's not good enough for you, then you could do what is currently done with old-fashioned paper ballots: print out special ballot sheets and keep careful track of how many are distributed to each polling station. At the end of the day, count them up and compare the number of ballots submitted with the number of people who voted at that poll. Any non-trivial shennanigans would become apparent at that point)
That the voting machine was messed with or the paper trail? What breaks the tie?
The tie goes to the paper trail, because it was (a) double-checked by each voter, and (b) much harder to surreptitiously modify than some bits on a flash chip.
I generally agree with you, but until the voting machines are open and the results easily verifiable by any layman, there is always going to be paranoia and speculation of this sort. That's why a voter verified paper trail is so critical: unless everything can be hand-verified, even if every voting machine maker is 100% honest and the machines all work perfectly 100% of the time, there will always be the lingering suspicion that shennanigans could have been pulled. That suspicion will trigger expensive lawsuits, and worse will further erode the public's faith in democracy.
I'm not sure that was ever really a safe presumption. There are plenty of people who burn and sell CDs containing software that they themselves hold the copyright to. If the CDs are marked "Microsoft Office", you might have a point, but if they contain an app the officer has never heard of, then more research is required.
Perhaps, but I think there are quite plausible theories that can explain that without having to invoke anything so exotic as quantum mechanics. For example, there are large portions of your brain that operate without you having any conscious perception of their operation (e.g. the part of your brain that regulates digestion, as a very simple example). So it's entirely possible that there are parts of your brain that operate on parts of your problem without you knowing it, and it's only at the end that they "signal you" with the result, which seems to come from nowhere. Or perhaps you just happened to see or hear something that (combined with your previous thoughts) served to jolt your thought process in a productive direction. etc.