That is not what he's arguing at all. He is saying:
1.- Current (very abundant) evidence and testing have not demonstrated any negative effects (unlike smoking).
2.- It is logically impossible to "prove" that something has no effect. There could always be (potentially) hidden effects that your tests do not measure. While reasonable efforts should be made to test potential effects, "reasonable" will never be "infinite", as that would prevent us from using any new technology whatsoever.
True. Nevertheless, using it for databases when data is cached seems like a neat idea. Lots of "_same operation_" for let's say, selecting all tuples with a specific value on a huge table.
Sure, but they grow to be the stable ones over time. The question becomes how do you produce something of value for the new businesses that they want to stay with you over time.
I quite agree to some of the things you say, I'm not a believer myself. That said, I do think evolution is far from random. The role of mutation that you mention is indeed, but you are ignoring important factors: mating (genetic exchange), adaptation and selection. Those have specific goals and processes (far from random) and are extremely important for evolution to function properly. A truly random evolution would probably not result in complex organisms. Plus, once intelligence happens the role of evolution becomes pretty secondary, as our social and technological development happens much, much faster.
philosophy tells us that something random cannot create something concrete, so since we are created randomly without purpose, we cannot actually create our own purpose, only the illusion of purpose.
Now, I don't know what logic you used to derive that. I could conceive the random creating the concrete. We would have to narrow a definition of "purpose" to begin with. But, without getting too philosophical, I would say that there is no practical difference. I believe I can choose and that my choices affect outcomes. I can also imagine. Hence, I don't need to receive purpose, I can create it on my own.
So? You should notice that people that believe in evolution (which is far from random BTW) are not completely devoid of purpose nor committing mass suicide. You are probably right that it does not matter much in the grand scale of the universe if we live or not. But it matters to ME, and I would very much like MY children to live too. If enough people think the same, then WE certainly care and should do something about it. Importance and purpose, you will find, is completely in the eye of the beholder.
It may be worth it to spend a little time thinking in peculiarities of you data that may greatly reduce scalability problems. For instance:
1.- If your data or user base can be easily partitioned
2.- If you can get away with low consistency semantics
If you can find a nice architectural design that has any of these characteristics, many bottlenecks can be removed and scaling up in the future may prove easy. In those cases, there are abundant technology solutions that you could pick up in the future.
So don't try to solve the whole issue before it is actually an issue, but at the same time try to future-proof your architecture. It is true that many well-known companies started small and did a full transformation later on, when they had more resources, but then again they did pay a steep cost for doing so.
This world can't afford to be held back just because America chooses to sell itself out to moneyed interests.
The United States, please. The majority of America chooses nothing of the sort. I'm not sure if people intent is to summarily dismiss all other American countries or to put us into the same bucket as the US outright, but I like neither and I'm kind of tired of it. Would it be fair for me to say things like "Europe chose Hitler".
"The most unethical people through history has been highly educated."
cherry picking aka anecdotal evidence aka "any number of examples" do not prove any theory.
Also when there are trivial explanatory factors: how many of the people that recent history remembers have not been highly educated?
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. When I moved to the US one of the things that I immediately noticed is how violence seem a valid approach to conflict solving (at both the individual and nation scale) and is constantly defended and praised. It's not about guns, it is about the social context of the people using them. In some places desperate people might kill themselves, here if you think life has wronged you you might as well take as many as possible with you. It's your right. You are a hero.
Also a bad analogy, the property tax is not a piece of your land.
He clearly meant owning land in the same sense as you own a pair of shoes, you pay for them, and they don't come with secondary strings attached. Those extra constraints and responsibilities are what we usually see in licence agreements, so he has a very valid point.
Actually, I know from a very reliable source that data historians are looking to virtual machines to solve this specific issue. It is a viable way to store complete, working computing environments for the future including not only the files but the programs able to work with them.
A few weeks ago I saw a demonstration of the first version of the mosaic web browser (the first that ever existed) and the first Macintosh. This last one by running it in a VM that run on a hardware emulator, that run in another VM that run in a VM. Don't ask me to remember the detailed chain of OS and such, but the point is that you are good as long as you can emulate a pretty recent version of something, and that version can emulate the previous one, and so on...
A weak, dumb populace that is also trained to believe, not to question. Add a few creationism v/s evolution fights, a lot of propaganda on patriotism and some generated fears... perfect recipe for a schema where a few control the many, and rip the benefits. For a great example of such forces in action, look at a country called USA.
In particular, I have a friend who IS a good, honest, thoughtful lawyer, and HIS opinion after working in the field is that lawyers, in general, should be pushed in front of a bus.
My astonished question was: Hey man, that includes you, you know.
His answer was: Nevertheless, it would be for the common good.
No matter how you look at it, $250.000 is more than what some people will be able to save in a lifetime. Having a kid should be accessible, or we are no better than in the middle ages. So I'm not sure the point is how do you add things to get that price, is that something is wrong either with the way we do thing on the way we price them to begin with. My wife just took a routine blood and urine test, the base price pre insurance was $1600. In my own country, you get a blood test for about $50, before any kind of insurance kicks in. I really, REALLY have no idea what do they do with the blood that costs $1600.
So, in sum, the problem is that health is supposed to be accessible, while there is too much a gap between what people make (minimum wage in the US is $0.12/minute for example) to what is charged (your "$30-100 per minute"). Even considering insurance and stuff, there is way too many orders of magnitude involved here...
No, it WOULD be stupid to retaliate with nukes, even if you have them. As many other post mention, it would be overkill, not particularly humanitarian and a bad diplomatic move. In such a scenario, the US should FOR ONCE, take the high road and retaliate only with conventional weaponry, which in this case would be low risk and enough.
No matter if you have a gun, you don't start shooting all over your house if a mosquito bites you, right?
More serious enemies will still fear retaliation, as most individuals in power care only about themselves anyway, not the large innocent population, and also, as more serious damage may still have a nuclear retaliation. The official discourse is fine as discourses go though.
Think of things like metadata. Even if you don't modify the file, things like "last access timestamp" is still altered, and need to be saved in persistent memory. So your HDD drive will blink at least a little.
Probably not. Robots/Computers are good at information processing and physical assembly. I would expect medical diagnosis and other fields like that (involving correlation and statistics based on facts) be replaced much sooner.
For creative work, involving design, creation, etc, we are not even close.
We are in a really bad spot if you think wars are "fun". Wars are bad and are supposed to stay that way. Just give one country a disproportionate budget to build battle robots and human being on the other side will die like flies... without even the inconvenience of pulling the trigger, no risk, nor seeing the blood, nor living with the remorse (don't have to worry about war crimes either right? We can at most talk about a regrettable malfunction). Just a permanent, very profitable war industry fighting wherever for no real cause and people comfortable at home, oblivious to the real suffering. Sounds familiar?
So, war as either as a commodity, as a business or as entertainment, I can't even tell which one is more wrong.
Of course demos decrease the number of copies sold. It a kind of consumer choice protection. I mean, I bet stores would sell more shoes if they didn't allow you to try them on first, didn't allow you to resell them and didn't give you a refund. Most times they would not fit and you would quickly have to try again. And several times you would find that what the seller told you is not close to reality.
The fact that gamers put up with all these market conditions, when they would probably NEVER do so for other kinds of goods, definitely tells us something. Me, I only risk to buy a game I have not tried (demo, beta, pirate version, a friends house, etc) if the price is $8 or less and I feel like gambling.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not what he's arguing at all. He is saying: 1.- Current (very abundant) evidence and testing have not demonstrated any negative effects (unlike smoking). 2.- It is logically impossible to "prove" that something has no effect. There could always be (potentially) hidden effects that your tests do not measure. While reasonable efforts should be made to test potential effects, "reasonable" will never be "infinite", as that would prevent us from using any new technology whatsoever.
True. Nevertheless, using it for databases when data is cached seems like a neat idea. Lots of "_same operation_" for let's say, selecting all tuples with a specific value on a huge table.
And, for better or worse, the validity of patents is not determined until a court challenge is made.
For worse, definitely for worse.
Better yet, look at the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
Sure, but they grow to be the stable ones over time. The question becomes how do you produce something of value for the new businesses that they want to stay with you over time.
I quite agree to some of the things you say, I'm not a believer myself. That said, I do think evolution is far from random. The role of mutation that you mention is indeed, but you are ignoring important factors: mating (genetic exchange), adaptation and selection. Those have specific goals and processes (far from random) and are extremely important for evolution to function properly. A truly random evolution would probably not result in complex organisms. Plus, once intelligence happens the role of evolution becomes pretty secondary, as our social and technological development happens much, much faster.
philosophy tells us that something random cannot create something concrete, so since we are created randomly without purpose, we cannot actually create our own purpose, only the illusion of purpose.
Now, I don't know what logic you used to derive that. I could conceive the random creating the concrete. We would have to narrow a definition of "purpose" to begin with. But, without getting too philosophical, I would say that there is no practical difference. I believe I can choose and that my choices affect outcomes. I can also imagine. Hence, I don't need to receive purpose, I can create it on my own.
So? You should notice that people that believe in evolution (which is far from random BTW) are not completely devoid of purpose nor committing mass suicide. You are probably right that it does not matter much in the grand scale of the universe if we live or not. But it matters to ME, and I would very much like MY children to live too. If enough people think the same, then WE certainly care and should do something about it. Importance and purpose, you will find, is completely in the eye of the beholder.
It may be worth it to spend a little time thinking in peculiarities of you data that may greatly reduce scalability problems. For instance:
1.- If your data or user base can be easily partitioned
2.- If you can get away with low consistency semantics
If you can find a nice architectural design that has any of these characteristics, many bottlenecks can be removed and scaling up in the future may prove easy. In those cases, there are abundant technology solutions that you could pick up in the future.
So don't try to solve the whole issue before it is actually an issue, but at the same time try to future-proof your architecture. It is true that many well-known companies started small and did a full transformation later on, when they had more resources, but then again they did pay a steep cost for doing so.
Those who are not old enough to be either. New or growing small buseness IMHO.
This world can't afford to be held back just because America chooses to sell itself out to moneyed interests.
The United States, please. The majority of America chooses nothing of the sort. I'm not sure if people intent is to summarily dismiss all other American countries or to put us into the same bucket as the US outright, but I like neither and I'm kind of tired of it. Would it be fair for me to say things like "Europe chose Hitler".
"The most unethical people through history has been highly educated." cherry picking aka anecdotal evidence aka "any number of examples" do not prove any theory.
Also when there are trivial explanatory factors: how many of the people that recent history remembers have not been highly educated?
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. When I moved to the US one of the things that I immediately noticed is how violence seem a valid approach to conflict solving (at both the individual and nation scale) and is constantly defended and praised. It's not about guns, it is about the social context of the people using them. In some places desperate people might kill themselves, here if you think life has wronged you you might as well take as many as possible with you. It's your right. You are a hero.
22.5kHz, dangerously close to the upper range of human hearing of around 20kHz
Man, we clearly have very different definitions of "danger" :-)
Also a bad analogy, the property tax is not a piece of your land.
He clearly meant owning land in the same sense as you own a pair of shoes, you pay for them, and they don't come with secondary strings attached. Those extra constraints and responsibilities are what we usually see in licence agreements, so he has a very valid point.
Actually, I know from a very reliable source that data historians are looking to virtual machines to solve this specific issue. It is a viable way to store complete, working computing environments for the future including not only the files but the programs able to work with them.
A few weeks ago I saw a demonstration of the first version of the mosaic web browser (the first that ever existed) and the first Macintosh. This last one by running it in a VM that run on a hardware emulator, that run in another VM that run in a VM. Don't ask me to remember the detailed chain of OS and such, but the point is that you are good as long as you can emulate a pretty recent version of something, and that version can emulate the previous one, and so on...
Related research about this is being done here: http://isr.cmu.edu/
A weak, dumb populace that is also trained to believe, not to question. Add a few creationism v/s evolution fights, a lot of propaganda on patriotism and some generated fears... perfect recipe for a schema where a few control the many, and rip the benefits. For a great example of such forces in action, look at a country called USA.
In particular, I have a friend who IS a good, honest, thoughtful lawyer, and HIS opinion after working in the field is that lawyers, in general, should be pushed in front of a bus. My astonished question was: Hey man, that includes you, you know. His answer was: Nevertheless, it would be for the common good.
No matter how you look at it, $250.000 is more than what some people will be able to save in a lifetime. Having a kid should be accessible, or we are no better than in the middle ages. So I'm not sure the point is how do you add things to get that price, is that something is wrong either with the way we do thing on the way we price them to begin with. My wife just took a routine blood and urine test, the base price pre insurance was $1600. In my own country, you get a blood test for about $50, before any kind of insurance kicks in. I really, REALLY have no idea what do they do with the blood that costs $1600. So, in sum, the problem is that health is supposed to be accessible, while there is too much a gap between what people make (minimum wage in the US is $0.12/minute for example) to what is charged (your "$30-100 per minute"). Even considering insurance and stuff, there is way too many orders of magnitude involved here...
No, it WOULD be stupid to retaliate with nukes, even if you have them. As many other post mention, it would be overkill, not particularly humanitarian and a bad diplomatic move. In such a scenario, the US should FOR ONCE, take the high road and retaliate only with conventional weaponry, which in this case would be low risk and enough.
No matter if you have a gun, you don't start shooting all over your house if a mosquito bites you, right?
More serious enemies will still fear retaliation, as most individuals in power care only about themselves anyway, not the large innocent population, and also, as more serious damage may still have a nuclear retaliation. The official discourse is fine as discourses go though.
Think of things like metadata. Even if you don't modify the file, things like "last access timestamp" is still altered, and need to be saved in persistent memory. So your HDD drive will blink at least a little.
Thus the pool of overseas low-cost employees builds while the number of positions that *have to go* to US Citizens decreases.
So, you are saying that global redistribution of income/wealth is a bad thing? The more time goes by, the less I think about country boundaries... ;-)
Probably not. Robots/Computers are good at information processing and physical assembly. I would expect medical diagnosis and other fields like that (involving correlation and statistics based on facts) be replaced much sooner.
For creative work, involving design, creation, etc, we are not even close.
We are in a really bad spot if you think wars are "fun". Wars are bad and are supposed to stay that way. Just give one country a disproportionate budget to build battle robots and human being on the other side will die like flies... without even the inconvenience of pulling the trigger, no risk, nor seeing the blood, nor living with the remorse (don't have to worry about war crimes either right? We can at most talk about a regrettable malfunction). Just a permanent, very profitable war industry fighting wherever for no real cause and people comfortable at home, oblivious to the real suffering. Sounds familiar?
So, war as either as a commodity, as a business or as entertainment, I can't even tell which one is more wrong.
or 2 people wearing "glass" ignoring each other while having a skype conversation with each other .........
Just one more time that I have missed the "+1, sad but true" moderation.
Of course demos decrease the number of copies sold. It a kind of consumer choice protection. I mean, I bet stores would sell more shoes if they didn't allow you to try them on first, didn't allow you to resell them and didn't give you a refund. Most times they would not fit and you would quickly have to try again. And several times you would find that what the seller told you is not close to reality.
The fact that gamers put up with all these market conditions, when they would probably NEVER do so for other kinds of goods, definitely tells us something. Me, I only risk to buy a game I have not tried (demo, beta, pirate version, a friends house, etc) if the price is $8 or less and I feel like gambling.