I don't see any reason to exonerate either of those, but you need to widen your focus. You should include numerous governments (or their agents, perhaps acting without authorization). You should also include groups of criminals, like the Russian Mafia. Then there's folks just out for lulz. etc.
Some of these may be more likely than others, but don't narrow your focus too much. Not without reasonable evidence.
My guess is that the digital gains haven't nearly topped out, but that the additional gains will only benefit those with worse hearing. Think "cochlear implant" and imagine it being equivalent (or superior?) to the original. This will require direct nerve connections, very finely and carefully attached. So it won't be something that you consider removing. This means that it will need to be able to derive energy from body movements. (Work is being done in the labs, but I'd be surprised if it shows up in this decade, or in the early part of the next. And show up doesn't mean "available for general use", it means "first stage field tests".)
OTOH, "All I know is what I read in the papers", and I'm relying on popular science articles.
So. There's clearly a limit to how much improvement you can get by stimulating the ear drum. Or the oval window. So those approaches have clear limits. In fact, even the main audio nerve sometimes is damaged, so one might need to go even higher (forget what that's called). So expect to hit limits this decade that take awhile to overcome. But not hard limits.
You sound like you know what you're talking about. But what's an "Extended Validation cert."? To me it sounded like a browser problem, but I'm NOT informed in that area.
Good art has always required both skill and luck. And even then much of the best art was not at first accepted by those who experienced it as art...and definitely not as good art.
So don't rush to judgment. I'm not sure I consider this art, but I'm also not sure that it isn't.
Remember, art is not craftsmanship. They are orthogonal concepts. This clearly isn't craftsmanship, but it might be art. It might even be good art. Another concept is involved her, design, which is separate from both art and craftsmanship, but has overlaps with both of them. It's not evident how much design was involved. (The calling of the piece "Art 404" and the sizing of the file at 40.4 KB indicates that more than some design was involved. But it's not evident how much.)
P.S.: IANA art critic. So I'm not going to say whether it is good art or not. And I'm not going to judge that either, even privately. Snap judgments along those lines while quite normal, are also often wrong.
Assuming that you're serious (though doubting it):
Copper is malleable, and melts at a reasonable temperature. So you can take a piece of copper wire and melt it or cold work it.
Sapphire is brittle, and doesn't melt easily. (I forget whether you need a vacuum, an atmosphere of inert gasses, or whether nitrogen is required. But in any case it's not at a reasonable temperature.) So if you steal a piece of sapphire cable, what you have is a piece of sapphire cable. It's quite unlikely to be a pretty as a piece of cut glass. It is, of course, hard enough that you can use it to cut things. But the effort required isn't minor, and I doubt that your prices would be lower than that commercially available. And this omits the problem of getting at it through the liquid nitrogen. ("Are those your fingers shattered on the ground there?")
I don't expect cable theft to be a sizable problem. Small pieces of sapphire aren't that expensive, and there isn't a large market for them. And you would probably ruin the cable for it's original use in the process of getting it, so you can't even hold it for ransom.
But the USPS is constitutionally mandated. It'll be interesting to see how they deal with that. My expectation is that they'll ignore it, and let the system collapse, but I'd only give that about a 60% probability, perhaps slightly lower.
The trouble with MSWindows 8 on ARM (if you even consider MS an option) is software from other companies. It won't run. It won't even install. (That's a prediction, not tested. But a reasonable bet.)
I don't expect MSWindows8 on ARM to have ANY effect on desktop sales, even at the extreme low end. It may be fine for phones, where there *aren't* any legacy problems. (Not the way I'd bet, but a possibility.) But I don't see any possibility for it on a general purpose computer. Going to run an X86 emulator on your low end ARM? Even then, what to you do about system calls.
I can think of decent arguments in favor of that, as long as you weren't bound to any of their rules unless you interacted with those who were signatory. Could end up with governments based around the idea of insurance companies, with some people opting for a more tightly controlled one and others opting for a looser one. And a few just not signing up.
Implementation, of course, would probably be a nightmare. But in theory it sounds nice.
Sorry, your "universal cure" is so much more difficult that I don't see it as even worth working on right now.
Problems are: 1) Different cells do different things, and have different genes active at different times. 2) We are rather dependent on lots of micro-organisms that aren't human. So much so that they usually add up to around half our weight (I'm quite uncertain of the exact percentage, but it's hugely more that is commonly believed.) So you'd need to identify and exclude all of the necessary microorganisms from the "cure". And even then it's more complicated, as most of the microorganisms are only allowed to exist in certain parts of the body. So you've got to map micro-organism against location in your exclusion list.
No, that's just accessory after the fact. This isn't as bad as someone who conceals that they are planning to commit a misdeed (acessory before the fact) which *IS* just as bad.
I never knew anyone who ever desired the DHS or anything similar to it. I knew several people who thought that airplanes should have doors to the pilot's cabin that were locked during the entire flight, but that's a rather different matter.
The DHS was created by those who wanted to increase the "police state" nature of the country, and they were successful. The fact that all it's approaches are security theater is just what it was designed to do, not happenstance or bad management. Security theater keeps people feeling threatened, so that they are easier to manipulate.
Since it was "his work laptop" I don't even know that it was running Linux.
That said, no system is proof against trojans. And no system that runs flash in its browser is proof against viruses. You can't really call a flash virus a Linux virus, anymore than you could call a java virus one.
That said, Linux hasn't been proof against that kind of infection since tar files were able to unpack things already set to be executable. Highly resistant, yes, but not immune. What it SHOULD be immune to is privilege escalation attacks. Even there it occasionally fails. (And on most systems saying "You can only compromise your own account" is the same as saying you can compromise the machine...though not quite, since you only need backups of the stuff that is mounted with write privileges. But in such cases it's generally better to be safe and re-install everything.)
Have you noticed how many reports are out about attacks against Androids? That's essentially Linux. But almost all of the attacks only affect user-space. But that's about all anyone cares about, too. And generally you *can't* write native mode applications for those phones, so the attacks all have to come in through a mediated attack surface. Generally either flash or Java.
Sorry I can't take this quite as lightly as you do, but too many believe what you (spoofily) pretend to believe. So I feel it deserves a serious answer, even though *you* don't need one.
Nonsense. Airplanes could be redesigned to run quite nicely on a mixture of Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen. Many of the problems have already been solved.
More practically, it is quite possible to turn hydrogen into liquid fuel by reacting it with carbon. Butylene might not be a good fuel, but it's an excellent starter for making good fuels. And you can start with even simpler molecules. *IF* you are willing to pay the cost in energy.. (And there's the rub.) Remember, during WWII Germans converted coal into "gasoline", and our chemistry is quite a bit more advanced than theirs was.
If we have enough energy, we can synthesize the fuels we need. Getting the energy is the trick, and no one answer is likely to suffice. It's likely to require a fair number of different sources. AND THIS IS GOOD!!!
If it's tolerant enough, we could feed it garbage from the waste collection. Not enough energy would be produced that way, but it would be a healthy trickle, and get rid of things we don't otherwise want too boot. (But lots of things can't stand a garbage dump, so this is just a "perhaps".)
E.g., yard clippings are often contaminated with weed killers, fertilizers, etc. Many bacteria can't stand the stuff.
Maybe you could fix that with a temperature cycle. Warm it up "during the day" to improve fermentation, and then cool it down "at night" to get the butanol to rise to the top & be skimmed. Can't guess what the proper rate of temperature cycling would be, but most things are already used to a 24 hour cycle, so you might even heat it with sunlight.
Generics are quite useful. C++ style generics are much less so, as they rapidly become too complex to sensibly debug. There are, however, other approaches taken by other languages. Both Ada and Eiffel had(have?) generics that were(are?) superior to those of C++. Even Common Lisp appears to have done better, though I've not used it enough to be certain.
Really, the C++ generics are a miserable botch of an excellent idea. Don't blame the idea for the particular implementation. That's as bad as blaming overloading of functions because some people misuse them. Stupid. It's quite possible to create incomprehensible sentences in English that are quite legitimate and yet totally impenetrable, if you know what I mean, when there's really nothing in English itself that is there for the express purpose of rendering the sentence unintelligible. (Well, OK, that sentence wasn't a good example. But it CAN be done, and this doesn't make English a bad language. [Now the word "is", that's another matter.])
Realize the extent to which your possession of your property, and even the definition of what it yours, derives from the state. it defines who "owns" the land. it defines what it is legal for you to own, and how much you must pay in what currency to maintain that ownership.
If you say "but it shouldn't!", what grounds do you have for claiming that except simple justice? The only other one that I can think of is force. I'd prefer to argue on the basis of justice, at least when arguing against someone stronger than I am, or even nearly equal in strength. I do accept, however, that this is a matter of preference, and you may feel otherwise. Or perhaps you just feel sufficiently stronger that you don't think you need to claim justice.
(I guess that last paragraph ended on a bit of a snarky note, but I can't think how else to say more clearly how your argument appears to me.)
To be fair, there probably are conservatives who believe in assisting the poor. They just aren't represented by the politically powerful conservatives. And there are definitely liberal programs that are misguided. Some of them are startlingly repressive, to the point where I really doubt their right to the name liberal. And I'm not a liberal.
FWIW, there is *NO* political party that represents my views. I favor decentralization, but not at all costs. I favor less control by the Feds of the States, and less control by the States of the cities. (Cities generally aren't currently oppressive, though they appear often corrupt.) I favor a linear income tax with a high offset and NO deductions. (y = mx + b, with be adjusted so that someone who does nothing could marginally afford food and shelter. And there is no age limit on that equation, but you don't get the benefit if you're living with relatives. And various other unaccepted notions, like a requirement that all lobbying be made public knowledge. E.g. limiting the power of the FDA to control things, but NO additional limit on their power to approve or disapprove of things, and require that their approval or disapproval be listed. (Perhaps the labeling requirement should even be strengthened.)
But *IS* it easy for them to do? Would *you* want to work there?
It seems quite likely that they no longer have the capability of innovating. That requires skilled engineers, and managers that those engineers respect. And a modicum of trust between the employees and the management. And skilled designers. And somebody, in some position, who has the right and the power to focus on a project and drive it through to completion....or to eventually decide that this is a bad idea and see what parts can be saved into another project.
When the managers aren't trusted by the employees, then you can't innovate. When the managers have no knowledge of either the current possibilities, or the current problems, then you can't innovate. I suspect quite strongly that HP can no longer innovate. Just looking on from outside, *I* wouldn't trust that management. And it seems notably ignorant of both the possibilities and the problems with current tech. OTOH, I haven't needed to make a close study of them. So I could be wrong. But I know how I'd bet.
Notice that afterwards even John Sculley said that he was the wrong CEO to choose. He's an excellent manager, but not of a technical company.
Managers are often taught that they don't need to know about the product, just how to manage. I don't know about other lines of business (though I have my doubts), but in the tech field this is a recipe for disaster.
Shops here generally open somewhere between 7 AM and 10 AM, with a few exceptions. Most are open for over eight hours, a few for over 12 hours, and some never close except on holidays.
I understand your concern, but don't worry, by the time this happens your concerns will be irrelevant. Your portable electronic whatsit will have expanded it's capabilities, and be able to tell you when and where you can get what you want, if it doesn't order it delivered.
There may be legitimate reasons why this would be a bad idea, but I haven't heard them. And this is partially because it's not going to happen anytime soon.
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I don't see any reason to exonerate either of those, but you need to widen your focus. You should include numerous governments (or their agents, perhaps acting without authorization). You should also include groups of criminals, like the Russian Mafia. Then there's folks just out for lulz. etc.
Some of these may be more likely than others, but don't narrow your focus too much. Not without reasonable evidence.
My guess is that the digital gains haven't nearly topped out, but that the additional gains will only benefit those with worse hearing. Think "cochlear implant" and imagine it being equivalent (or superior?) to the original. This will require direct nerve connections, very finely and carefully attached. So it won't be something that you consider removing. This means that it will need to be able to derive energy from body movements. (Work is being done in the labs, but I'd be surprised if it shows up in this decade, or in the early part of the next. And show up doesn't mean "available for general use", it means "first stage field tests".)
OTOH, "All I know is what I read in the papers", and I'm relying on popular science articles.
So. There's clearly a limit to how much improvement you can get by stimulating the ear drum. Or the oval window. So those approaches have clear limits. In fact, even the main audio nerve sometimes is damaged, so one might need to go even higher (forget what that's called). So expect to hit limits this decade that take awhile to overcome. But not hard limits.
You mean this story is about Apple deciding that you can't decide that you don't trust someone who you can identify?
That's grotesque! I frequently decide that someone in particular (rather than someone I can't identify) is untrustworthy.
You sound like you know what you're talking about. But what's an "Extended Validation cert."? To me it sounded like a browser problem, but I'm NOT informed in that area.
Which particular time are you thinking of?
Good art has always required both skill and luck. And even then much of the best art was not at first accepted by those who experienced it as art...and definitely not as good art.
So don't rush to judgment. I'm not sure I consider this art, but I'm also not sure that it isn't.
Remember, art is not craftsmanship. They are orthogonal concepts. This clearly isn't craftsmanship, but it might be art. It might even be good art. Another concept is involved her, design, which is separate from both art and craftsmanship, but has overlaps with both of them. It's not evident how much design was involved. (The calling of the piece "Art 404" and the sizing of the file at 40.4 KB indicates that more than some design was involved. But it's not evident how much.)
P.S.: IANA art critic. So I'm not going to say whether it is good art or not. And I'm not going to judge that either, even privately. Snap judgments along those lines while quite normal, are also often wrong.
Assuming that you're serious (though doubting it):
Copper is malleable, and melts at a reasonable temperature. So you can take a piece of copper wire and melt it or cold work it.
Sapphire is brittle, and doesn't melt easily. (I forget whether you need a vacuum, an atmosphere of inert gasses, or whether nitrogen is required. But in any case it's not at a reasonable temperature.) So if you steal a piece of sapphire cable, what you have is a piece of sapphire cable. It's quite unlikely to be a pretty as a piece of cut glass. It is, of course, hard enough that you can use it to cut things. But the effort required isn't minor, and I doubt that your prices would be lower than that commercially available. And this omits the problem of getting at it through the liquid nitrogen. ("Are those your fingers shattered on the ground there?")
I don't expect cable theft to be a sizable problem. Small pieces of sapphire aren't that expensive, and there isn't a large market for them. And you would probably ruin the cable for it's original use in the process of getting it, so you can't even hold it for ransom.
Good point. I'd misremembered that.
But the USPS is constitutionally mandated. It'll be interesting to see how they deal with that. My expectation is that they'll ignore it, and let the system collapse, but I'd only give that about a 60% probability, perhaps slightly lower.
The trouble with MSWindows 8 on ARM (if you even consider MS an option) is software from other companies. It won't run. It won't even install. (That's a prediction, not tested. But a reasonable bet.)
I don't expect MSWindows8 on ARM to have ANY effect on desktop sales, even at the extreme low end. It may be fine for phones, where there *aren't* any legacy problems. (Not the way I'd bet, but a possibility.) But I don't see any possibility for it on a general purpose computer. Going to run an X86 emulator on your low end ARM? Even then, what to you do about system calls.
I can think of decent arguments in favor of that, as long as you weren't bound to any of their rules unless you interacted with those who were signatory. Could end up with governments based around the idea of insurance companies, with some people opting for a more tightly controlled one and others opting for a looser one. And a few just not signing up.
Implementation, of course, would probably be a nightmare. But in theory it sounds nice.
Sorry no mod points. But +5 insightful.
But as you indicate, that's decades away.
Sorry, your "universal cure" is so much more difficult that I don't see it as even worth working on right now.
Problems are:
1) Different cells do different things, and have different genes active at different times.
2) We are rather dependent on lots of micro-organisms that aren't human. So much so that they usually add up to around half our weight (I'm quite uncertain of the exact percentage, but it's hugely more that is commonly believed.) So you'd need to identify and exclude all of the necessary microorganisms from the "cure". And even then it's more complicated, as most of the microorganisms are only allowed to exist in certain parts of the body. So you've got to map micro-organism against location in your exclusion list.
Much easier to just tackle one problem at a time.
No, that's just accessory after the fact. This isn't as bad as someone who conceals that they are planning to commit a misdeed (acessory before the fact) which *IS* just as bad.
I never knew anyone who ever desired the DHS or anything similar to it. I knew several people who thought that airplanes should have doors to the pilot's cabin that were locked during the entire flight, but that's a rather different matter.
The DHS was created by those who wanted to increase the "police state" nature of the country, and they were successful. The fact that all it's approaches are security theater is just what it was designed to do, not happenstance or bad management. Security theater keeps people feeling threatened, so that they are easier to manipulate.
Since it was "his work laptop" I don't even know that it was running Linux.
That said, no system is proof against trojans. And no system that runs flash in its browser is proof against viruses. You can't really call a flash virus a Linux virus, anymore than you could call a java virus one.
That said, Linux hasn't been proof against that kind of infection since tar files were able to unpack things already set to be executable. Highly resistant, yes, but not immune. What it SHOULD be immune to is privilege escalation attacks. Even there it occasionally fails. (And on most systems saying "You can only compromise your own account" is the same as saying you can compromise the machine...though not quite, since you only need backups of the stuff that is mounted with write privileges. But in such cases it's generally better to be safe and re-install everything.)
Have you noticed how many reports are out about attacks against Androids? That's essentially Linux. But almost all of the attacks only affect user-space. But that's about all anyone cares about, too. And generally you *can't* write native mode applications for those phones, so the attacks all have to come in through a mediated attack surface. Generally either flash or Java.
Sorry I can't take this quite as lightly as you do, but too many believe what you (spoofily) pretend to believe. So I feel it deserves a serious answer, even though *you* don't need one.
Nonsense. Airplanes could be redesigned to run quite nicely on a mixture of Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen. Many of the problems have already been solved.
More practically, it is quite possible to turn hydrogen into liquid fuel by reacting it with carbon. Butylene might not be a good fuel, but it's an excellent starter for making good fuels. And you can start with even simpler molecules. *IF* you are willing to pay the cost in energy.. (And there's the rub.) Remember, during WWII Germans converted coal into "gasoline", and our chemistry is quite a bit more advanced than theirs was.
If we have enough energy, we can synthesize the fuels we need. Getting the energy is the trick, and no one answer is likely to suffice. It's likely to require a fair number of different sources. AND THIS IS GOOD!!!
If it's tolerant enough, we could feed it garbage from the waste collection. Not enough energy would be produced that way, but it would be a healthy trickle, and get rid of things we don't otherwise want too boot. (But lots of things can't stand a garbage dump, so this is just a "perhaps".)
E.g., yard clippings are often contaminated with weed killers, fertilizers, etc. Many bacteria can't stand the stuff.
Maybe you could fix that with a temperature cycle. Warm it up "during the day" to improve fermentation, and then cool it down "at night" to get the butanol to rise to the top & be skimmed. Can't guess what the proper rate of temperature cycling would be, but most things are already used to a 24 hour cycle, so you might even heat it with sunlight.
Generics are quite useful. C++ style generics are much less so, as they rapidly become too complex to sensibly debug. There are, however, other approaches taken by other languages. Both Ada and Eiffel had(have?) generics that were(are?) superior to those of C++. Even Common Lisp appears to have done better, though I've not used it enough to be certain.
Really, the C++ generics are a miserable botch of an excellent idea. Don't blame the idea for the particular implementation. That's as bad as blaming overloading of functions because some people misuse them. Stupid. It's quite possible to create incomprehensible sentences in English that are quite legitimate and yet totally impenetrable, if you know what I mean, when there's really nothing in English itself that is there for the express purpose of rendering the sentence unintelligible. (Well, OK, that sentence wasn't a good example. But it CAN be done, and this doesn't make English a bad language. [Now the word "is", that's another matter.])
Realize the extent to which your possession of your property, and even the definition of what it yours, derives from the state. it defines who "owns" the land. it defines what it is legal for you to own, and how much you must pay in what currency to maintain that ownership.
If you say "but it shouldn't!", what grounds do you have for claiming that except simple justice? The only other one that I can think of is force. I'd prefer to argue on the basis of justice, at least when arguing against someone stronger than I am, or even nearly equal in strength. I do accept, however, that this is a matter of preference, and you may feel otherwise. Or perhaps you just feel sufficiently stronger that you don't think you need to claim justice.
(I guess that last paragraph ended on a bit of a snarky note, but I can't think how else to say more clearly how your argument appears to me.)
To be fair, there probably are conservatives who believe in assisting the poor. They just aren't represented by the politically powerful conservatives. And there are definitely liberal programs that are misguided. Some of them are startlingly repressive, to the point where I really doubt their right to the name liberal. And I'm not a liberal.
FWIW, there is *NO* political party that represents my views. I favor decentralization, but not at all costs. I favor less control by the Feds of the States, and less control by the States of the cities. (Cities generally aren't currently oppressive, though they appear often corrupt.) I favor a linear income tax with a high offset and NO deductions. (y = mx + b, with be adjusted so that someone who does nothing could marginally afford food and shelter. And there is no age limit on that equation, but you don't get the benefit if you're living with relatives. And various other unaccepted notions, like a requirement that all lobbying be made public knowledge. E.g. limiting the power of the FDA to control things, but NO additional limit on their power to approve or disapprove of things, and require that their approval or disapproval be listed. (Perhaps the labeling requirement should even be strengthened.)
But *IS* it easy for them to do? Would *you* want to work there?
It seems quite likely that they no longer have the capability of innovating. That requires skilled engineers, and managers that those engineers respect. And a modicum of trust between the employees and the management. And skilled designers. And somebody, in some position, who has the right and the power to focus on a project and drive it through to completion....or to eventually decide that this is a bad idea and see what parts can be saved into another project.
When the managers aren't trusted by the employees, then you can't innovate. When the managers have no knowledge of either the current possibilities, or the current problems, then you can't innovate. I suspect quite strongly that HP can no longer innovate. Just looking on from outside, *I* wouldn't trust that management. And it seems notably ignorant of both the possibilities and the problems with current tech. OTOH, I haven't needed to make a close study of them. So I could be wrong. But I know how I'd bet.
Notice that afterwards even John Sculley said that he was the wrong CEO to choose. He's an excellent manager, but not of a technical company.
Managers are often taught that they don't need to know about the product, just how to manage. I don't know about other lines of business (though I have my doubts), but in the tech field this is a recipe for disaster.
And the connection speed would be less than 300 baud. You're talking about sharing one connection with an entire town.
Shops here generally open somewhere between 7 AM and 10 AM, with a few exceptions. Most are open for over eight hours, a few for over 12 hours, and some never close except on holidays.
I understand your concern, but don't worry, by the time this happens your concerns will be irrelevant. Your portable electronic whatsit will have expanded it's capabilities, and be able to tell you when and where you can get what you want, if it doesn't order it delivered.
There may be legitimate reasons why this would be a bad idea, but I haven't heard them. And this is partially because it's not going to happen anytime soon.