will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
Let me remind people here that this is, in the long run, a good thing (TM). Machines putting people out of work enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week and a society where people are majoritarily middle class.
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England and leadto asinine ideologies such as fascism, luddism and socialism elsewhere. These ideologies were misguided attempts to compensate for this momentous labour force disruption by addressing the wrong aspects of the industrial revolution (democracy, machines and capital respectively).
who misuses his column to push his own political agenda.
He writes a column in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times. Pray tell how exactly he's misusing them by pushing his own political preferences in the opinion section?
Your comment would have some validity if he were writing in the Science or Economics section, but he ain't. And this is even before we go into the fact that most of his political opinions are the logical consequence of his economic beliefs to the best of his academic ability.
As the GP said, you are really taking issue with his opinions not matching yours and simply trying to disguise them as a high level objection on non-existent grounds.
The $200 and $2500 donors are for the Obama and Romney campaigns directly, the rest of the figures are for their Super PACs as stated in the original posting. Here goes the relevant part again.
The four biggest Obama Super PAC donors combined gave less money than the top (or second) Romney Super PAC donor alone. Donor 58 by highest amount for Obama gave as much money as the 217 highest donor for Romney. Yeap, Romney had approx. four times as many 1%ers giving money to this campaign.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating.
Exactly and this happened because the suits took over at Word Perfect. If you think about it, they were charging customers nearly thousand dollars per head in today's dollars for a freaking word processor. This left the door wide open for a competitor to undercut them heavily in price and still make a mint.
Which is exactly what Microsoft did to Word Perfect, just like Borland had done to Microsoft in the compiler market a few years earlier. So it wasn't like this was a novel (no pun intended) move. But back then suits just didn't understand the concept of lower prices.
Ironically today they seem incapable of understanding the reverse concept of higher-quality-at-higher-prices which left the door open to Apple's revival to the tune of $500 billion market cap, but I digress...
you are a complete idiot. He got as much of his funds from 1%ers as Romney did.
Luckily this is something one can look up. It is not an opinion but a matter of facts. So let's have a look at them:
57% of Obama donations were under $200
24% of Romney donations were under $200
11% of Obama donations were for the max $2500
39% of Romney donations were for the max $2500
The four biggest Obama Super PAC donors combined gave less money than the top (or second) Romney Super PAC donor alone.
Donor 58 by highest amount for Obama gave as much money as the 217 highest donor for Romney. Yeap, Romney had approx. four times as many 1%ers giving money to this campaign.
So who's the idiot now?
p.s. Not that this data was needed. Your signature gives it away. Only a simpleton cannot see through the fallacies of Atlas Shrugged,
You are wrong. Check the data. Wall Street was for Obama in 2008 but in 2012 it definitely backed Mitt.
Moreover the 10-2% which lives majoritarily in NY, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington state was for Obama.
Mitt got the backing, of the 1% (no surprises there) and the surprisingly enough form the welfare and pork-barrel receiving poor white people from the Red States. Again check the data, is all out there.
There is an easy fix for this: donate money yourself. Usually the amounts donatd by corporations are piddling---oil companies and the NRA excepted. A few concerned citizens donating money can easily outmatch the oligarchs spending power. Don't believe me? Just have a look at the last election where Obama whipped Mitt-and-the-1%ers collective behind.
I'd turn it on, wait a couple minutes for it to fully boot up, connect to the router and Windows informs me an imperative, 'end of the world' update is needed.
Lessee, open laptop (also running Windows 7) press "Get Mail" in Thunderbird and start reading my email.
Time: 10 seconds from the moment I pressed the latch til the new email arrived (I just timed it).
For starters, why are turning your laptop/tablet off? haven't you heard of sleep mode?
But does that mean they filed for this patent in 1995? If so, it's wasn't all that obvious then.
Push email got introduced in 1986 in IMAP if not earlier. Was the Motorola enhancement that much different that deserves a patent? the judge which look at the specifics of the case believes it is not.
However there was a big leap in the sophistication of known solutions with the invention of the printed press. Now all these ancient people could work om improving each other's state of the art inventions rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again.Seriously, this is a known and well studied effect.
i.e. support a similar range of features to a built-in python object
Yes, I should have said something like "heavily restricted to straightforward overloads" such as straightforward extensions comparators and iterators with no unexpected side effects. Any other use is heavily discouraged.
All the major languages have operator overloading these days.
Right, like Java... oh wait!
Operator overloading reached its peak in the mid-80s at the time of Ada and C++. Since then most languages have pulled back from there and today it is considered mostly a source of bugs and heavily discouraged even in languages that allow it, e.g. Python.
Easy, if I as an individual purport to sell you item X and instead substitute item Y, you can easily win a claim against me in court. If, on the other hand, I'm a large corporation and sell you a beverage that contains 0% lemons as "lemonade" I'm perfectly allowed to do this.
You need a citation you say? purchase Minute Maid lemonade and look at the ingredients list. My bottle here says in small print "contains 0% lemons".
Unions are still strong in Europe and they too have labor saving robots. The key difference is that both union and management philosophies seem to be different there. Managers have a social conscience and unions do not oppose every effort to increase productivity.
I agree with the other two, but when it comes to beer more civilized societies skipped the rotten grains part and went straight to "tea" (boiling water) when trying to obtain a cleaner source of drinking water.
I'm impressed by the automated landing. Granted you don't have to be quite as careful as there are no meatbags inside, but it's still a damn cool feat.
The technology for automated landing was there 30 years ago when the shuttle was being built. The astronauts complained and demanded they pilot the craft, so changes were made. If not for those the shuttle would have already been 100% automated landing.
That they did not approach the subject on a scientific manner. I believe there is likely to be some exaggeration around GW, as it often is the cases for crises e.g. Y2K which was both a real threat and vastly exaggerated.
However enough evidence has been amassed from sufficiently disparate sources including some former skeptics to leave no doubt that there is some AGW going on.
If at this time you flatly deny GW you are not being a skeptic, you are being a denier.
Braces work in a completely different way than white space.
Say, if I have a C block between braces, and cut and paste something inside it, I'm guaranteed to have that new code be part of the braced block.
Now let's repeat the same exercise with Python. You cut and paste some code but said code happens to be indented shallower than the larger block because it is brought in from a different nested depth, and what happens? your original block and any others indented to the right of the cut and paste code now end where that inserted code begins.
You can write unmaintainable code in any language.
This is a non-sequitur. It's like saying you can kill someone with paper and with a gun. Sure, I can believe it is possible to fashion a lethal weapon out of paper, but facts are that it is much easier to kill someone with a gun than with a piece of paper.
Same goes for languages. You can write non-readable code in any language, but it is much easier in certain languages than in others.
This much should be obvious unless you are none too bright.
If the code is well factored, you won't have any problem keeping track of where the indentation should be.
GW deniers give a bad name to skeptics. Let's pause for a moment and remember the times where skepticism has proven to be perfectly justified:
- Paul Ehrlich's malthusian predictions, which at the time were widely shared - WMD in Iraq - String theory - Artificial Intelligence promises in the late 1970s
A good scientist should be, by nature, a skeptic. However a good scientist should also be ready to bow before the evidence and put skepticism aside. Particularly given that in most cases the prevailing scientific theory is generally correct.
I used to be a big fan of white spaces and for small projects it is easy to keep in your head the nesting level at which code should be, but when you are editing someone else's code in a 1000 KLOC project it is much more difficult to remember where it should be. As I said it is an inordinately common source of bugs.
But in java you are spending so much time mucking around with interfaces, casting etc. that it becomes a big mess quite soon,
That a consequence of improper polymorphism, not static typing. Again once you get past 100 KLOC it gets very hard to keep types and names straight. You need the compiler/interpreter to flag you went you write ParetoOptimizer instead of ParetoOptimized or some similar type error.
Slashdot Mirror
will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
Let me remind people here that this is, in the long run, a good thing (TM). Machines putting people out of work enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week and a society where people are majoritarily middle class.
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England and leadto asinine ideologies such as fascism, luddism and socialism elsewhere. These ideologies were misguided attempts to compensate for this momentous labour force disruption by addressing the wrong aspects of the industrial revolution (democracy, machines and capital respectively).
who misuses his column to push his own political agenda.
He writes a column in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times. Pray tell how exactly he's misusing them by pushing his own political preferences in the opinion section?
Your comment would have some validity if he were writing in the Science or Economics section, but he ain't. And this is even before we go into the fact that most of his political opinions are the logical consequence of his economic beliefs to the best of his academic ability.
As the GP said, you are really taking issue with his opinions not matching yours and simply trying to disguise them as a high level objection on non-existent grounds.
The $200 and $2500 donors are for the Obama and Romney campaigns directly, the rest of the figures are for their Super PACs as stated in the original posting. Here goes the relevant part again.
The four biggest Obama Super PAC donors combined gave less money than the top (or second) Romney Super PAC donor alone. Donor 58 by highest amount for Obama gave as much money as the 217 highest donor for Romney. Yeap, Romney had approx. four times as many 1%ers giving money to this campaign.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating.
Exactly and this happened because the suits took over at Word Perfect. If you think about it, they were charging customers nearly thousand dollars per head in today's dollars for a freaking word processor. This left the door wide open for a competitor to undercut them heavily in price and still make a mint.
Which is exactly what Microsoft did to Word Perfect, just like Borland had done to Microsoft in the compiler market a few years earlier. So it wasn't like this was a novel (no pun intended) move. But back then suits just didn't understand the concept of lower prices.
Ironically today they seem incapable of understanding the reverse concept of higher-quality-at-higher-prices which left the door open to Apple's revival to the tune of $500 billion market cap, but I digress...
Did you even look at the link I provided? You see, there are limits to how much an individual can contribute.
Limits to the campaign directly. I'm quoting figures from the Obama and Romney Super PACs.
So what they do is strong arm all their buddies into giving some.
Correct, and who is more likely to have the power to strong arm someone? a business executive. And who do they majoritarily favor? Romney.
Just follow your arguments to their logic conclusion. Big money backed Romney this time around.
Yup. I'm the simpleton.
You've got it.
you are a complete idiot. He got as much of his funds from 1%ers as Romney did.
Luckily this is something one can look up. It is not an opinion but a matter of facts. So let's have a look at them:
57% of Obama donations were under $200
24% of Romney donations were under $200
11% of Obama donations were for the max $2500
39% of Romney donations were for the max $2500
The four biggest Obama Super PAC donors combined gave less money than the top (or second) Romney Super PAC donor alone.
Donor 58 by highest amount for Obama gave as much money as the 217 highest donor for Romney. Yeap, Romney had approx. four times as many 1%ers giving money to this campaign.
So who's the idiot now?
p.s. Not that this data was needed. Your signature gives it away. Only a simpleton cannot see through the fallacies of Atlas Shrugged,
Imagine when the copyright on Star Wars runs out - you think it won't get extended forever?
While it is true the industry has deep pockets, you are wrong about the conclusion. Otherwise SOPA would not have died in congress.
You are wrong. Check the data. Wall Street was for Obama in 2008 but in 2012 it definitely backed Mitt.
Moreover the 10-2% which lives majoritarily in NY, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington state was for Obama.
Mitt got the backing, of the 1% (no surprises there) and the surprisingly enough form the welfare and pork-barrel receiving poor white people from the Red States. Again check the data, is all out there.
There is an easy fix for this: donate money yourself. Usually the amounts donatd by corporations are piddling---oil companies and the NRA excepted. A few concerned citizens donating money can easily outmatch the oligarchs spending power. Don't believe me? Just have a look at the last election where Obama whipped Mitt-and-the-1%ers collective behind.
I'd turn it on, wait a couple minutes for it to fully boot up, connect to the router and Windows informs me an imperative, 'end of the world' update is needed.
Lessee, open laptop (also running Windows 7) press "Get Mail" in Thunderbird and start reading my email.
Time: 10 seconds from the moment I pressed the latch til the new email arrived (I just timed it).
For starters, why are turning your laptop/tablet off? haven't you heard of sleep mode?
But does that mean they filed for this patent in 1995? If so, it's wasn't all that obvious then.
Push email got introduced in 1986 in IMAP if not earlier. Was the Motorola enhancement that much different that deserves a patent? the judge which look at the specifics of the case believes it is not.
However there was a big leap in the sophistication of known solutions with the invention of the printed press. Now all these ancient people could work om improving each other's state of the art inventions rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again.Seriously, this is a known and well studied effect.
i.e. support a similar range of features to a built-in python object
Yes, I should have said something like "heavily restricted to straightforward overloads" such as straightforward extensions comparators and iterators with no unexpected side effects. Any other use is heavily discouraged.
All the major languages have operator overloading these days.
Right, like Java... oh wait!
Operator overloading reached its peak in the mid-80s at the time of Ada and C++. Since then most languages have pulled back from there and today it is considered mostly a source of bugs and heavily discouraged even in languages that allow it, e.g. Python.
Underground you say? How about flooding, or is that something that tends not to happen to underground structures during hurricanes?
Easy, if I as an individual purport to sell you item X and instead substitute item Y, you can easily win a claim against me in court. If, on the other hand, I'm a large corporation and sell you a beverage that contains 0% lemons as "lemonade" I'm perfectly allowed to do this.
You need a citation you say? purchase Minute Maid lemonade and look at the ingredients list. My bottle here says in small print "contains 0% lemons".
Unions are still strong in Europe and they too have labor saving robots. The key difference is that both union and management philosophies seem to be different there. Managers have a social conscience and unions do not oppose every effort to increase productivity.
beer
I agree with the other two, but when it comes to beer more civilized societies skipped the rotten grains part and went straight to "tea" (boiling water) when trying to obtain a cleaner source of drinking water.
I'm impressed by the automated landing. Granted you don't have to be quite as careful as there are no meatbags inside, but it's still a damn cool feat.
The technology for automated landing was there 30 years ago when the shuttle was being built. The astronauts complained and demanded they pilot the craft, so changes were made. If not for those the shuttle would have already been 100% automated landing.
That they did not approach the subject on a scientific manner. I believe there is likely to be some exaggeration around GW, as it often is the cases for crises e.g. Y2K which was both a real threat and vastly exaggerated.
However enough evidence has been amassed from sufficiently disparate sources including some former skeptics to leave no doubt that there is some AGW going on.
If at this time you flatly deny GW you are not being a skeptic, you are being a denier.
You'll need to correct the indentation in any case.
Actually you don't. Any good IDE will do it automatically for you. This is easy in C, impossible in Python.
Braces work in a completely different way than white space.
Say, if I have a C block between braces, and cut and paste something inside it, I'm guaranteed to have that new code be part of the braced block.
Now let's repeat the same exercise with Python. You cut and paste some code but said code happens to be indented shallower than the larger block because it is brought in from a different nested depth, and what happens? your original block and any others indented to the right of the cut and paste code now end where that inserted code begins.
You can write unmaintainable code in any language.
This is a non-sequitur. It's like saying you can kill someone with paper and with a gun. Sure, I can believe it is possible to fashion a lethal weapon out of paper, but facts are that it is much easier to kill someone with a gun than with a piece of paper.
Same goes for languages. You can write non-readable code in any language, but it is much easier in certain languages than in others.
This much should be obvious unless you are none too bright.
If the code is well factored, you won't have any problem keeping track of where the indentation should be.
Right, blame the user for the software flaws.
GW deniers give a bad name to skeptics. Let's pause for a moment and remember the times where skepticism has proven to be perfectly justified:
- Paul Ehrlich's malthusian predictions, which at the time were widely shared
- WMD in Iraq
- String theory
- Artificial Intelligence promises in the late 1970s
A good scientist should be, by nature, a skeptic. However a good scientist should also be ready to bow before the evidence and put skepticism aside. Particularly given that in most cases the prevailing scientific theory is generally correct.
I think the white space is mainly a red herring,
I used to be a big fan of white spaces and for small projects it is easy to keep in your head the nesting level at which code should be, but when you are editing someone else's code in a 1000 KLOC project it is much more difficult to remember where it should be. As I said it is an inordinately common source of bugs.
But in java you are spending so much time mucking around with interfaces, casting etc. that it becomes a big mess quite soon,
That a consequence of improper polymorphism, not static typing. Again once you get past 100 KLOC it gets very hard to keep types and names straight. You need the compiler/interpreter to flag you went you write ParetoOptimizer instead of ParetoOptimized or some similar type error.