I call BS. Michelangelo's David does not require you to think.
Thinking as part of art is a XX century affectation. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a piece of art that makes you go hmmm, but it should not in anyway be a requirement.
What is worse, there is a lot of really bad modern art out there that tries to cover this fact by making you think a lot. A good piece of art moves you aesthetically. Some pieces of art have no underlying message beyond that, others do. Granted a deep message can enhance the aesthetic experience, but it is not a requirement.
Overpopulation will kill us all before anything else...
Except for one minor problem: the population of the world is slated to go down starting around 2060 if not earlier. Really. Have a look at the population projections by the United Nations, which if anything have over the years proved to be overly pessimistic.
and Pronovost estimates the cost of doing that at $3 million.
Right there is your problem. If it were $3 billion Congress would readily do the appropriations and call a press conference where even the guys who opposed the bill would take credit for spending large amounts of money in "saving lives".
But 3 million dollars? Not a chance in hell that it will ever be supported.
The majority of the top 1% do not have millions of dollars of capital gains income, they have millions of dollars of earned income.
I seriously doubt that. Rich people make most of their money by either owning a business or by stock options (ISOs) if employed high up in a corporation. Both of these are taxed as capital gains.
You are only looking at income tax rates. Rich people derive a big portion of their income from capital gains, which is taxed at a much lower rate. The best known example is Warren Buffet, who is taxed a lower rate than his personal secretary (he uses this to support higher taxes on himself).
Wasn't this exactly the problem with IPv6? Back when it was proposed it was very early in the life cycle and we could afford to inconvenience current users, while at the same it gratuitously ignored (ii). By the time the powers that be agreed on the final version, the net was too large to justify a switch that inconvenience current users. Nowadays people are fast at work in patches that make IPv6 compatible in the sense of (ii).
I agree. The point is that the number of current users is a non-negligible percentage of the universe of future users. It is in that sense that it is "near the tail end".
For languages which are very early in their life cycle, such as Python, the number of users inconvenienced today are negligible compared to the total number of users that it will have and benefit from the changes.
Backward compatibility is (i) over-rated and (ii) misunderstood.
It is over-rated in the sense that the number of current users which are inconvenienced is a very small percentage of the total number of users of the language (unless the language is in the tail end of its life, like Fortran and Cobol).
It is misunderstood in that with the use of a simple header or import declaration it is possible to have two different versions co-exist while the transition happens. This is done in HTTP where the first thing that clients exchange is the version of the protocol they'll use. It is also done in LaTeX, where the first declaration informs the compiler which major version is being used (pre-2e or 2e).
Kudos for Python for not being afraid to rock the backwards compatibility boat.
the Oort cloud, hypothesized to be the source of all comets.
Actually the very existence of the Oort cloud is hypothetical. While it provides a reasonable explanation for the existence of comets in our system there was no further independent confirmation until 2000, when more powerful telescopes identified one object that could belong to the cloud. Given that the number of comets could be into the trillions, having found a handful does not constitute definitive evidence, so it remains a mere hypothesis until more data is gathered.
For a foreign body to enter the system, it would have to pass through the Oort cloud and that would be highly unlikely. It's most probably an Oort cloud comet of a new type.
Comets in the Oort cloud are tens of millions of kilometers apart. An exo-solar comet would have no problem "sneaking" in.
Was there anything reality-based in that, or was he just stubbornly insisting that these abstract equations just had to have solutions?
If you take a system that is natural and applicable to physical reality in all of its known domain and extrapolate it in a sensible way using physics inspired rules of logic, is it such a surprise that the extrapolation is also natural and applicable to physical reality? I think not.
A huge amount of math had nothing to do with describing reality at the time of its invention, and much still doesn't today.
Too late. By now the foundations have been laid on physics inspired math, and hence even the supposedly abstract concepts end up being not so much.
What aspect of reality were mathematicians trying to describe when they came up with imaginary numbers?
The generalization of the natural concept of square root to the natural concept of negative numbers. So even though the generalization was abstract it was generalizing reality based concepts and hence it shouldn't surprise any one that this is not so useless after all.
FWIW I've been running AV software on my PC for over then years. This PC is is connected to the internet using a fixed IP address. It has found three viruses in that time, one in a USB key, another inside a shareware utility and the last one on an email message that was never oppened.
Microsoft rewrites of Word and Excel are common and rather successful. They just can't understand why this doesn't work when it comes to the OS. From what I hear they attempted to develop a database engine and the search engine using the same MS Word model, with equally unsuccessful results. The database engine was scratched, the search engine which was supposed to be a google killer is losing market share faster than Yahoo.
There is strong evidence to suggest that it is not properly architected. While the rest of the OSes has moved towards a more Unix-like system, when it comes to graphics no OS (Windows, OSX, BeOs) has gone the X-windows way. Why? because the X system was a flawed proposal that somehow become adopted (just like Microsoft Windows).
X windows was built under the wrong assumptions with the wrong model. It creates an artificial distinction between the toolkit and the windows manager, it is too low level, it is a bandwidth hog, it assumes the terminal is dumb but ends up demanding a powerful CPU and lots of memory, and the list goes on.
The tax rate is way higher in California than in Canada. Sure, when you look at percentages alone it seems to be the other way around, but for a few measly more points Canadians get free health care, decent and safe free public schools, much higher welfare and unemployment insurance benefits, lower tuition fees at the University level and public infrastructure that isn't crumbling.
The way I see it, Californians are getting royally screwed.
Every model is just an approximation. In the words of the statistician George Box: "All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others" (or to be pedantic and give the exact quote "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.")
Newtonian Mechanics is useful at slow speeds and hence a correct model at this rate. Special Relativity is correct at macro scale**, while at the quantum scale it doesn't quite mesh too well. So in that sense SR is also wrong, but it remains useful at very large scales and hence the correct model in that realm.
**with the possible exception of the voyager shift, which remains to be explained away.
It usually takes several years before people start to understand what he is saying, but eventually everyone comes around.
I call BS. He has been proposing OSS and as a percentage of software in use out there it remains darn close to zero. So, no people have not come around to what he's saying. Slashdotters have, but that is not a representative sample of the user-world.
I understand the desire to sell your product and keep the source code a secret, but no other aspect of human technology works that way.
Really? How about Coke's secret formula? how about a zillion trade secrets out there. Just watch "How is it made?" and see how often they describe parts of a process as "secret".
Every switch, nail, screw, and device is documented and open to public inspection.
No they aren't. It can be really hard to learn the exact alloys and temperatures of a given nail. The only thing that is open is the specs: tensile strength, weight, dimensions, etc.
Currently special interest groups have an inordinate amount of power. A couple dozen well organized and active city residents can stop a development that is supported by the majority of the population that yet can be bothered to do anything (NIMBY is an example of this). This is before we even speak of a well funded lobby proposing a similar change.
Using Web 2.0 we can give Joe 888 (aka Joe sixpack) the power to lobby on this issue by allowing them to contribute, say $1 cents in the name of their pet project. Around here a hotel chain was denied permission to build anywhere within the city thanks to a small but organized "environmental" effort.
The average person on the street favored the development but this didn't matter. The way things are currently, those eldermen would lose the election next time around when running against opponents funded by the "environmental" lobby group. The $1 contribution would negate the effects of those lobby groups.
The end result is that the hotel got built a few miles out of town and now tourists drive into the city. Talk about a win for the environment (not!).
Look, someone with a video camera in the theater is likely not a high-school kid making copies to file share with his classmates. In all likelihood this person had done it before, many times which is why they were waiting for him with cops and all (yes Virginia, movies have theater-specific watermarks).
The only reason people here are supporting this guy is reflexive anti-RIAA sentiment, nothing else.
On this case, they seem to have landed a professional criminal who makes it a business to record movies and sell them for distribution, in which case jail time is not out of the question.
I've worked for successful world-class organizations and I've worked for mediocre corporations just trying to survive.
The number of opportunities that came by were not that different for either. The difference is that the world-class organizations jumped in and ran away with them while mediocre organizations either flat out rejected them or striked committees which spent months trying to come up with a response.
I can give you a list of hair-pulling plain-dumb decisions by those mediocre organizations. For example a not-for-profit organization declined a donation of tens of millions of dollars because it had some very minor strings attached!
Gates was a visionary in the PC era. His skills as businessman then were unequaled and solely his.
All the failures you cite are in the new internet era, which clearly he doesn't get. This doesn't make him a bad businessman, it simply means that the internet is not his line of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Good art requires the viewer to think.
I call BS. Michelangelo's David does not require you to think.
Thinking as part of art is a XX century affectation. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a piece of art that makes you go hmmm, but it should not in anyway be a requirement.
What is worse, there is a lot of really bad modern art out there that tries to cover this fact by making you think a lot. A good piece of art moves you aesthetically. Some pieces of art have no underlying message beyond that, others do. Granted a deep message can enhance the aesthetic experience, but it is not a requirement.
Nope, GP is right and you are wrong.
UN population growth rates:
Period Population growth rate
1965-1970 2.02
1970-1975 1.94
1975-1980 1.76
1980-1985 1.74
1985-1990 1.73
1990-1995 1.54
1995-2000 1.37
2000-2005 1.24
2005-2010 1.17
2010-2015 1.10
2015-2020 1.00
2020-2025 0.88
2025-2030 0.75
2030-2035 0.64
2035-2040 0.54
2040-2045 0.45
2045-2050 0.36
Nothing exponential there.
Overpopulation will kill us all before anything else...
Except for one minor problem: the population of the world is slated to go down starting around 2060 if not earlier. Really. Have a look at the population projections by the United Nations, which if anything have over the years proved to be overly pessimistic.
http://esa.un.org/unpp/
and Pronovost estimates the cost of doing that at $3 million.
Right there is your problem. If it were $3 billion Congress would readily do the appropriations and call a press conference where even the guys who opposed the bill would take credit for spending large amounts of money in "saving lives".
But 3 million dollars? Not a chance in hell that it will ever be supported.
Oh the poor lad, it is enough to make you cry. He might have dropped as low as number three in the list of richest men in the USA.
Someone should give that man a tax break, I tell you.
</sarcasm>
The majority of the top 1% do not have millions of dollars of capital gains income, they have millions of dollars of earned income.
I seriously doubt that. Rich people make most of their money by either owning a business or by stock options (ISOs) if employed high up in a corporation. Both of these are taxed as capital gains.
You are only looking at income tax rates. Rich people derive a big portion of their income from capital gains, which is taxed at a much lower rate. The best known example is Warren Buffet, who is taxed a lower rate than his personal secretary (he uses this to support higher taxes on himself).
Wasn't this exactly the problem with IPv6? Back when it was proposed it was very early in the life cycle and we could afford to inconvenience current users, while at the same it gratuitously ignored (ii). By the time the powers that be agreed on the final version, the net was too large to justify a switch that inconvenience current users. Nowadays people are fast at work in patches that make IPv6 compatible in the sense of (ii).
Fortran will continue to thrive for many years.
I agree. The point is that the number of current users is a non-negligible percentage of the universe of future users. It is in that sense that it is "near the tail end".
For languages which are very early in their life cycle, such as Python, the number of users inconvenienced today are negligible compared to the total number of users that it will have and benefit from the changes.
Backward compatibility is (i) over-rated and (ii) misunderstood.
It is over-rated in the sense that the number of current users which are inconvenienced is a very small percentage of the total number of users of the language (unless the language is in the tail end of its life, like Fortran and Cobol).
It is misunderstood in that with the use of a simple header or import declaration it is possible to have two different versions co-exist while the transition happens. This is done in HTTP where the first thing that clients exchange is the version of the protocol they'll use. It is also done in LaTeX, where the first declaration informs the compiler which major version is being used (pre-2e or 2e).
Kudos for Python for not being afraid to rock the backwards compatibility boat.
the Oort cloud, hypothesized to be the source of all comets.
Actually the very existence of the Oort cloud is hypothetical. While it provides a reasonable explanation for the existence of comets in our system there was no further independent confirmation until 2000, when more powerful telescopes identified one object that could belong to the cloud. Given that the number of comets could be into the trillions, having found a handful does not constitute definitive evidence, so it remains a mere hypothesis until more data is gathered.
For a foreign body to enter the system, it would have to pass through the Oort cloud and that would be highly unlikely. It's most probably an Oort cloud comet of a new type.
Comets in the Oort cloud are tens of millions of kilometers apart. An exo-solar comet would have no problem "sneaking" in.
Was there anything reality-based in that, or was he just stubbornly insisting that these abstract equations just had to have solutions?
If you take a system that is natural and applicable to physical reality in all of its known domain and extrapolate it in a sensible way using physics inspired rules of logic, is it such a surprise that the extrapolation is also natural and applicable to physical reality? I think not.
A huge amount of math had nothing to do with describing reality at the time of its invention, and much still doesn't today.
Too late. By now the foundations have been laid on physics inspired math, and hence even the supposedly abstract concepts end up being not so much.
What aspect of reality were mathematicians trying to describe when they came up with imaginary numbers?
The generalization of the natural concept of square root to the natural concept of negative numbers. So even though the generalization was abstract it was generalizing reality based concepts and hence it shouldn't surprise any one that this is not so useless after all.
FWIW I've been running AV software on my PC for over then years. This PC is is connected to the internet using a fixed IP address. It has found three viruses in that time, one in a USB key, another inside a shareware utility and the last one on an email message that was never oppened.
But the definition of a recession is two quarters of negative growth,
Not the definition of a recession, but a definition of a recession, and a pretty dumb one at that.
Microsoft rewrites of Word and Excel are common and rather successful. They just can't understand why this doesn't work when it comes to the OS. From what I hear they attempted to develop a database engine and the search engine using the same MS Word model, with equally unsuccessful results. The database engine was scratched, the search engine which was supposed to be a google killer is losing market share faster than Yahoo.
X11 is a HUGELY powerful system
There is strong evidence to suggest that it is not properly architected. While the rest of the OSes has moved towards a more Unix-like system, when it comes to graphics no OS (Windows, OSX, BeOs) has gone the X-windows way. Why? because the X system was a flawed proposal that somehow become adopted (just like Microsoft Windows).
X windows was built under the wrong assumptions with the wrong model. It creates an artificial distinction between the toolkit and the windows manager, it is too low level, it is a bandwidth hog, it assumes the terminal is dumb but ends up demanding a powerful CPU and lots of memory, and the list goes on.
The tax rate is way higher in California than in Canada. Sure, when you look at percentages alone it seems to be the other way around, but for a few measly more points Canadians get free health care, decent and safe free public schools, much higher welfare and unemployment insurance benefits, lower tuition fees at the University level and public infrastructure that isn't crumbling.
The way I see it, Californians are getting royally screwed.
Newtonian Mechanics is wrong at any speed.
Every model is just an approximation. In the words of the statistician George Box: "All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others" (or to be pedantic and give the exact quote "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.")
Newtonian Mechanics is useful at slow speeds and hence a correct model at this rate. Special Relativity is correct at macro scale**, while at the quantum scale it doesn't quite mesh too well. So in that sense SR is also wrong, but it remains useful at very large scales and hence the correct model in that realm.
**with the possible exception of the voyager shift, which remains to be explained away.
What if he doesn't have any assets to pay for his crimes, since he spent all his profits? Do we let him walk free then?
How about someone who breaks into your house, should we also make him pay a fine instead of going to jail?
It usually takes several years before people start to understand what he is saying, but eventually everyone comes around.
I call BS. He has been proposing OSS and as a percentage of software in use out there it remains darn close to zero. So, no people have not come around to what he's saying. Slashdotters have, but that is not a representative sample of the user-world.
I understand the desire to sell your product and keep the source code a secret, but no other aspect of human technology works that way.
Really? How about Coke's secret formula? how about a zillion trade secrets out there. Just watch "How is it made?" and see how often they describe parts of a process as "secret".
Every switch, nail, screw, and device is documented and open to public inspection.
No they aren't. It can be really hard to learn the exact alloys and temperatures of a given nail. The only thing that is open is the specs: tensile strength, weight, dimensions, etc.
it is tyranny.
So closed source software is tyranny? Puuleeeeze.
Currently special interest groups have an inordinate amount of power. A couple dozen well organized and active city residents can stop a development that is supported by the majority of the population that yet can be bothered to do anything (NIMBY is an example of this). This is before we even speak of a well funded lobby proposing a similar change.
Using Web 2.0 we can give Joe 888 (aka Joe sixpack) the power to lobby on this issue by allowing them to contribute, say $1 cents in the name of their pet project. Around here a hotel chain was denied permission to build anywhere within the city thanks to a small but organized "environmental" effort.
The average person on the street favored the development but this didn't matter. The way things are currently, those eldermen would lose the election next time around when running against opponents funded by the "environmental" lobby group. The $1 contribution would negate the effects of those lobby groups.
The end result is that the hotel got built a few miles out of town and now tourists drive into the city. Talk about a win for the environment (not!).
Look, someone with a video camera in the theater is likely not a high-school kid making copies to file share with his classmates. In all likelihood this person had done it before, many times which is why they were waiting for him with cops and all (yes Virginia, movies have theater-specific watermarks).
The only reason people here are supporting this guy is reflexive anti-RIAA sentiment, nothing else.
On this case, they seem to have landed a professional criminal who makes it a business to record movies and sell them for distribution, in which case jail time is not out of the question.
I've worked for successful world-class organizations and I've worked for mediocre corporations just trying to survive.
The number of opportunities that came by were not that different for either. The difference is that the world-class organizations jumped in and ran away with them while mediocre organizations either flat out rejected them or striked committees which spent months trying to come up with a response.
I can give you a list of hair-pulling plain-dumb decisions by those mediocre organizations. For example a not-for-profit organization declined a donation of tens of millions of dollars because it had some very minor strings attached!
Gates was a visionary in the PC era. His skills as businessman then were unequaled and solely his.
All the failures you cite are in the new internet era, which clearly he doesn't get. This doesn't make him a bad businessman, it simply means that the internet is not his line of business.