Actually you are completely right. The equivalent would be people from, say, the UK, calling themselves "European" in exclusion of everybody else in the same continent. Even more curious since America's name come from an Italian cartographer, Amerigo Vespucci, who only visited South America.
I think you nailed it. It is curious to look at a whole discussion over process and "Agile services including certification and training" when the idea is to keep in mind a set of guidelines promoting better adaptation, and, especially, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
False, as a duck-taped object can either have or not have methods or variables according to run-time flow. When you write the code you have no guarantees and code-completion can only show things that can "maybe" be there. No guarantees, you still need to check everything with extra code on risk doing nothing since "this method should be there since I added it before" and solve issues while debugging.
Ok, debugging is time-consuming but doable. The main issue is that you run-time tests will never be complete enough, and you always risk obscure use patterns were your bugs come to life. The one to find them is almost always the final user.
Duck-typing of course allows more introspection. But introspection is an expensive feature in terms of performance, skipped or severely limited by design on some languages because of it, as most of what can be achieved by introspection can also be done faster with polymorphism.
As most things, the choice involves a trade-off. You eliminate type safety to make a language easier to learn and a little more flexible. In return you make programs slower and buggier (as you need to check manually for errors and any mistakes get moved to runtime). Programming time I have found is a little faster for small stuff, but severely slower for larger things, as you need to be thinking of many more border conditions. Script programs tend to also have high coupling and bad modularity.
All things considered, the whole thing seems to be targeting mass adoption with minimal understanding. IMHO, a big step backwards.
Actually, they are a few more options to explain it. To be able to observe current reality and past history, god either...
- is not omnipotent (can't fix everything)
- is not paying attention (thus not omniscient)
- is continually wronged by the devil being actually more powerful/smarter
- doesn't care
- is an actual sadist
- died a long time ago
- is encumbered by too much celestial bureaucracy
That's basically every logical option that I can think about that explains all the suffering. And no, "has his own plan" is not one of them. He could have, if nothing was there to stop him, change it to a better plan from the very beginning, for example by making us humans incapable of greed or violence or with a similar sense of social belonging as bees or ants.
I take your background isn't in physics.:-)
I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. No such thing as "energy produced by the car while running", energy has to be SPENT continuously in order to keep it running and that energy is taken from the engine. The confusion seems to arise from the fact that gas cars increase the load of the engine slightly to produce some electric energy (for lights, etc), hence "charging the batteries", but those are very small batteries and we don't feel it when we drive.
You CAN take energy from the moving car instead of spending it, but only if your plan is to slow down. It's called "regenerative braking" since it also helps to brake faster. You can find reference to this tech on the articles or wikipedia.
Sure, my point is that many of the expenses we take for granted (a car, varied food, air conditioning, etc.) are not the norm. There are probably people making many times what you make that say they barely manage, yet other with half manage may say they are ok and live happy. As you pointed out, the definition of "comfortable" varies, and can probably go from "enough food to live" to "a yacht to take my family to Europe every year". A lot seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
My example was also to point out that, while it may be insufficient on your area, those benefits involve a significant amount of money you get for "free":-)
Wow. I live with $US 1500 a month, with my wife and 1 kid, renting a small but comfortable apartment here in Pittsburgh.
I consider myself to be pretty rich. You clearly have a vision of wealth far from universal, probably part of the 0.1% richest guys on this planet.
Off course, as they are less developed. Are you honestly proposing that your metric, which basically states that those who have more money should get to pollute more, is more useful and fair that pollution per capita? Just WOW.
It should tell you that no-for-profit piracy should be legal. At least if you believe that it's not a natural law but a social contract (with specific trade-offs) that a majority of the people living in democratic countries seem not to want.
You are completely right. Better yet, having a central register would greatly help others to avoid using copyrighted items by mistake and to be able to verify if something is in the public domain or not. As things stands today IP is a minefield. The best would be to have the same (or hopefully better) "infringement detection tools" open for the people instead of as a method for discovering potential lawsuits...
Moreover, with "possession" meaning just having files on your hard drive it becomes way too easy to destroy the life of an innocent. If I hate you (or if I'm bored), nothing easier than to put something on your drive and denounce you. I remember a case like that where a student almost ruined a teacher. Also, in the hands of a teenager a camera become as dangerous as any gun.
I was referring to the Hadoop File System, although it seems that the correct acronym is HDFS (all people I work with seem to drop the D for brevity). My mistake:-)
Not to mention many other innovative papers studied in academia. Sure, "the little box were you type a query" doesn't seem special, but you are discounting Map-Reduce (from which Hadoop was copied), Google File System (HFS copies it), PageRank, the push to use redundancy on of-the-shelf cheap disks and other components, etc etc etc
A bunch of their techniques are never seen by the end user, but they have GREAT innovations on the back end.
That's not fair. They have made lots of innovations, it's just that, as innovation normally goes, not everything sticks. Remember Google Wave? Google Health? As far as I see it, they still support (internally or externally), pretty weird stuff, like self-driving cars and mining asteroids.
They also have established products that try to cater to known markets, so what? Seem sensible to me...
You want me to repeat what everyone here knows and has been saying for a long time? Coal and oil ARE the worst alternatives.
Sorry but I'm kind of amazed at your example and how little you read between the lines (especially by your "burning people" argument).
Why not? As long as its not coal or oil, anything is an improvement. Japan seems to be going on the opposite direction, which is a sad thing to see.
Also, stopping to do research and improvements seems like a bad idea to me, even if there are alternatives. Are you THAT confident in any other technology that you can rule out all potential improvement on nuclear energy as irrelevant? This is science, you never know where the breakthrough are going to come from, and exploring options is the way to move forward. Abandoning a young and promising technology (especially one some mind-blowing in terms of human knowledge and achievements) seems to me ill-advised.
I agree with 80% of what you said. Except that I don't know what you pretend to do with another gazillion MBAs. IMHO, education means simple things like knowing your rights, undertanding money, understanding democracy. That should be free for all.
Specific careers and titles? No. A country needs more balance than that and at the current education prices you will get a system more bankrupt that healthcare. I say equal opportunity and access to higher education, but with cheap credit, high requirements for entry and top quality.
Greed is always an issue, but that doesn't mean is an unsolvable one. There is just too much fear about nuclear. Take airplanes for instance:
Were the first-generation planes secure? Certainly not.
Are high standards required to make them secure? Yes.
Is there corporations, greed and corner-cutting in aviation? Sure, as anywhere else.
Is it useful technology nevertheless? Yes
Do terribly accidents happen now and then? Yes
So all answers for aviation seem the same than for nuclear, maybe worse in some aspect. What do we do with aviation? We innovate, we create standards and procedure, we accept a certain amount of inherent risk. What do we do with nuclear? We stagnate, we create FUD and make it a political issue, and we try to eliminate its use altogether. Shame, since it's IMHO the most amazing (and dammed useful) technology ever created and a true testament to mankind.
(The car analogy would probably go along the same lines)
Curious that the conversation centers in if the thread are real or not instead of how easily is to completely disrupt normal activities and cause incredible spending. Reminds me a lot of the statement by Al Queda that for every dolar they spend the US loses thousands. Makes me wonder how much of US economic activity (jobs/money) now resides with security and vigilance of all sorts.
If I remember correctly from my quantum computation courses, that is not exactly so (if the explanation were that easy, all this common confusion would not happen). Quantum state CAN be manipulated to alter the probabilistic outcome of observing a specific quantum state to a degree were you are effectively setting that state. Of course, it can only be done BEFORE observing it (and thus collapsing the wave function). But you can do this if you hold only one side of the entanglement, so you can basically remote-paint your marbles instantaneously at any distance! The problem is that there are more than one possible state that you could have set for me to observe another state (it's not a 1-to-1 map), thus I still need additional information that needs to come in a standard channel (at less than the speed of light). So no faster than light transmission of information, but nevertheless teleportation does happen. The basics of quantum criptography for instance are supposed to use this fact by mixing quantum and normal communications.
Of course, if somebody knows more, I'm happy to be corrected.
That is completely true. But you fail to mention that life quality would gradually decrease as people can't buy those resources. It's not about the total number of people you can fit into the world, is what share of resources each one gets. I remember from a BBC's documentary called "How many people can live on earth" (or something like that) that you could easily fit 15 billion people on earth, each one with the life quality of current India's slums. What about the everyone getting the current rate of consumption in the US? 1 billion total (so we need to kill 6 billion somehow).
Of course the issue is as you mention that *some* will have good lives, but *most* wont. It's already here, is just that averaged predictions are not a good fit for the enormous inequality growing rampant in this world.
...and I'm not going to even get into issues like increased longevity and old age needs, unemployment and inequality increasing due to automation, etc.
Yes, It{s a terrible measure to take, but I believe the chinesse are capable of such hard, drastic measures with a very long-term look that is totally alien in the west. (just look at how the great wall was built).
So china is going into a crisis on the next generation and maybe one more, but then it'll stabilize. Without the policy China avoided over 300.000.000 million births so far (actually the figure was bigger than the entire US population), and the unsustainable growth would also probably create a huge crisis. Only in 40 more years historians will be able to discuss if China got it right or if the west (or India) got away with not doing much at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you are completely right. The equivalent would be people from, say, the UK, calling themselves "European" in exclusion of everybody else in the same continent. Even more curious since America's name come from an Italian cartographer, Amerigo Vespucci, who only visited South America.
I think you nailed it. It is curious to look at a whole discussion over process and "Agile services including certification and training" when the idea is to keep in mind a set of guidelines promoting better adaptation, and, especially, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
False, as a duck-taped object can either have or not have methods or variables according to run-time flow. When you write the code you have no guarantees and code-completion can only show things that can "maybe" be there. No guarantees, you still need to check everything with extra code on risk doing nothing since "this method should be there since I added it before" and solve issues while debugging.
Ok, debugging is time-consuming but doable. The main issue is that you run-time tests will never be complete enough, and you always risk obscure use patterns were your bugs come to life. The one to find them is almost always the final user.
Duck-typing of course allows more introspection. But introspection is an expensive feature in terms of performance, skipped or severely limited by design on some languages because of it, as most of what can be achieved by introspection can also be done faster with polymorphism.
As most things, the choice involves a trade-off. You eliminate type safety to make a language easier to learn and a little more flexible. In return you make programs slower and buggier (as you need to check manually for errors and any mistakes get moved to runtime). Programming time I have found is a little faster for small stuff, but severely slower for larger things, as you need to be thinking of many more border conditions. Script programs tend to also have high coupling and bad modularity.
All things considered, the whole thing seems to be targeting mass adoption with minimal understanding. IMHO, a big step backwards.
That's basically every logical option that I can think about that explains all the suffering. And no, "has his own plan" is not one of them. He could have, if nothing was there to stop him, change it to a better plan from the very beginning, for example by making us humans incapable of greed or violence or with a similar sense of social belonging as bees or ants.
I take your background isn't in physics. :-)
I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. No such thing as "energy produced by the car while running", energy has to be SPENT continuously in order to keep it running and that energy is taken from the engine. The confusion seems to arise from the fact that gas cars increase the load of the engine slightly to produce some electric energy (for lights, etc), hence "charging the batteries", but those are very small batteries and we don't feel it when we drive.
You CAN take energy from the moving car instead of spending it, but only if your plan is to slow down. It's called "regenerative braking" since it also helps to brake faster. You can find reference to this tech on the articles or wikipedia.
Could somebody please run it on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lAQQWpFN8I
Sure, my point is that many of the expenses we take for granted (a car, varied food, air conditioning, etc.) are not the norm. There are probably people making many times what you make that say they barely manage, yet other with half manage may say they are ok and live happy. As you pointed out, the definition of "comfortable" varies, and can probably go from "enough food to live" to "a yacht to take my family to Europe every year". A lot seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
:-)
My example was also to point out that, while it may be insufficient on your area, those benefits involve a significant amount of money you get for "free"
Wow. I live with $US 1500 a month, with my wife and 1 kid, renting a small but comfortable apartment here in Pittsburgh. I consider myself to be pretty rich. You clearly have a vision of wealth far from universal, probably part of the 0.1% richest guys on this planet.
Lessig gives some examples on this talk: http://blip.tv/lessig/republic-lost-my-favorite-version-5697728 I'm not sure they represent regulation that can be reduced, but they DO illustrate how corporate money influence the agenda. Just my 2 cents
Since you are obviosly talking about the US, I would recommend seeing "Republic Lost" by Lessig: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CHEQtwIwBA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIk1AK56FtVc&ei=PkLFT5ulHsaO6gGDp6G2Cg&usg=AFQjCNEv39wgSpN2l7e04sZCIfKsh4_mPw
Off course, as they are less developed. Are you honestly proposing that your metric, which basically states that those who have more money should get to pollute more, is more useful and fair that pollution per capita? Just WOW.
It should tell you that no-for-profit piracy should be legal. At least if you believe that it's not a natural law but a social contract (with specific trade-offs) that a majority of the people living in democratic countries seem not to want.
You are completely right. Better yet, having a central register would greatly help others to avoid using copyrighted items by mistake and to be able to verify if something is in the public domain or not. As things stands today IP is a minefield. The best would be to have the same (or hopefully better) "infringement detection tools" open for the people instead of as a method for discovering potential lawsuits...
Moreover, with "possession" meaning just having files on your hard drive it becomes way too easy to destroy the life of an innocent. If I hate you (or if I'm bored), nothing easier than to put something on your drive and denounce you. I remember a case like that where a student almost ruined a teacher. Also, in the hands of a teenager a camera become as dangerous as any gun.
I was referring to the Hadoop File System, although it seems that the correct acronym is HDFS (all people I work with seem to drop the D for brevity). My mistake :-)
Not to mention many other innovative papers studied in academia. Sure, "the little box were you type a query" doesn't seem special, but you are discounting Map-Reduce (from which Hadoop was copied), Google File System (HFS copies it), PageRank, the push to use redundancy on of-the-shelf cheap disks and other components, etc etc etc
A bunch of their techniques are never seen by the end user, but they have GREAT innovations on the back end.
That's not fair. They have made lots of innovations, it's just that, as innovation normally goes, not everything sticks. Remember Google Wave? Google Health? As far as I see it, they still support (internally or externally), pretty weird stuff, like self-driving cars and mining asteroids.
They also have established products that try to cater to known markets, so what? Seem sensible to me...
You want me to repeat what everyone here knows and has been saying for a long time? Coal and oil ARE the worst alternatives. Sorry but I'm kind of amazed at your example and how little you read between the lines (especially by your "burning people" argument).
Why not? As long as its not coal or oil, anything is an improvement. Japan seems to be going on the opposite direction, which is a sad thing to see.
Also, stopping to do research and improvements seems like a bad idea to me, even if there are alternatives. Are you THAT confident in any other technology that you can rule out all potential improvement on nuclear energy as irrelevant? This is science, you never know where the breakthrough are going to come from, and exploring options is the way to move forward. Abandoning a young and promising technology (especially one some mind-blowing in terms of human knowledge and achievements) seems to me ill-advised.
I agree with 80% of what you said. Except that I don't know what you pretend to do with another gazillion MBAs. IMHO, education means simple things like knowing your rights, undertanding money, understanding democracy. That should be free for all.
Specific careers and titles? No. A country needs more balance than that and at the current education prices you will get a system more bankrupt that healthcare. I say equal opportunity and access to higher education, but with cheap credit, high requirements for entry and top quality.
Greed is always an issue, but that doesn't mean is an unsolvable one. There is just too much fear about nuclear. Take airplanes for instance:
Were the first-generation planes secure? Certainly not.
Are high standards required to make them secure? Yes.
Is there corporations, greed and corner-cutting in aviation? Sure, as anywhere else.
Is it useful technology nevertheless? Yes
Do terribly accidents happen now and then? Yes
So all answers for aviation seem the same than for nuclear, maybe worse in some aspect. What do we do with aviation? We innovate, we create standards and procedure, we accept a certain amount of inherent risk. What do we do with nuclear? We stagnate, we create FUD and make it a political issue, and we try to eliminate its use altogether. Shame, since it's IMHO the most amazing (and dammed useful) technology ever created and a true testament to mankind.
(The car analogy would probably go along the same lines)
Curious that the conversation centers in if the thread are real or not instead of how easily is to completely disrupt normal activities and cause incredible spending. Reminds me a lot of the statement by Al Queda that for every dolar they spend the US loses thousands. Makes me wonder how much of US economic activity (jobs/money) now resides with security and vigilance of all sorts.
If I remember correctly from my quantum computation courses, that is not exactly so (if the explanation were that easy, all this common confusion would not happen). Quantum state CAN be manipulated to alter the probabilistic outcome of observing a specific quantum state to a degree were you are effectively setting that state. Of course, it can only be done BEFORE observing it (and thus collapsing the wave function). But you can do this if you hold only one side of the entanglement, so you can basically remote-paint your marbles instantaneously at any distance! The problem is that there are more than one possible state that you could have set for me to observe another state (it's not a 1-to-1 map), thus I still need additional information that needs to come in a standard channel (at less than the speed of light). So no faster than light transmission of information, but nevertheless teleportation does happen. The basics of quantum criptography for instance are supposed to use this fact by mixing quantum and normal communications.
Of course, if somebody knows more, I'm happy to be corrected.
That is completely true. But you fail to mention that life quality would gradually decrease as people can't buy those resources. It's not about the total number of people you can fit into the world, is what share of resources each one gets. I remember from a BBC's documentary called "How many people can live on earth" (or something like that) that you could easily fit 15 billion people on earth, each one with the life quality of current India's slums. What about the everyone getting the current rate of consumption in the US? 1 billion total (so we need to kill 6 billion somehow).
...and I'm not going to even get into issues like increased longevity and old age needs, unemployment and inequality increasing due to automation, etc.
Of course the issue is as you mention that *some* will have good lives, but *most* wont. It's already here, is just that averaged predictions are not a good fit for the enormous inequality growing rampant in this world.
Yes, It{s a terrible measure to take, but I believe the chinesse are capable of such hard, drastic measures with a very long-term look that is totally alien in the west. (just look at how the great wall was built).
So china is going into a crisis on the next generation and maybe one more, but then it'll stabilize. Without the policy China avoided over 300.000.000 million births so far (actually the figure was bigger than the entire US population), and the unsustainable growth would also probably create a huge crisis. Only in 40 more years historians will be able to discuss if China got it right or if the west (or India) got away with not doing much at all.