That's AN issue, but to me it's not the main issue.
To me the main issue is that the companies that build them don't trust them enough to build them unless the government limits the liabilities that they can be made liable for.
I don't mind that the government is giving them loan guarantees. I mind that the government is saying "if you explode and destroy not only the town, but most of the rest of the state, the people you damaged can't sue you to your eyeteeth."
If the people that build them don't trust them, why should I?
P.S.: AFAIK, there's no reasonable probability of any US plant doing the Chernobyl, much less a "China Syndrome". But why should I trust them more than the companies that build them?
SPSS (solar space power satellite) is a potentially viable competitor. We didn't develop it when we had time and a viable NASA, though.
Well, somebody will, eventually. Then we may find out if it's as viable as it appears. Possibly when China becomes an energy exporting country.
I'll admit that the first SPSS would be expensive and it SHOULD be small and underpowered. The follow on systems, however, needn't be small at all. With enough electricity you can eliminate rocket fuel while in the atmosphere. (Jets and rockets both work by heating the reacting medium so that it can be expelled at a high velocity. With enough electricity you don't need any normal fuel.)
P.S.: Just how that should be done is a bit iffy. One way that COULD work is to use a ground based laser to heat the tail of the rocket, but I'm hoping that a development of the jet engine could also be used. And I'd rather use just air than use water, as was done in the only demonstration project of which I am aware. (Using just air means that you don't need to lift the fuel....or at least not the part that you're going to use at lower elevations.)
If it had been extensive study they wouldn't wast the heat that it was generating in the "cooling ponds". That could be used as a useful preheat. It's probably too hot to handle safely, so it would need to be converted to pellets for safe handling, but that's something that may have been done earlier. If not, it could be done at that point, but earlier would be better.
Also, (to grandparent) we aren't talking about encasing the lumps of radioisotopes in glass, we're talking about melting them together, homogenizing them, and then cooling the homogenized mixture. You don't get significant leaks out of something like that. It's basically a from of obsidian.
And that just STUPID. The individual cylinders should each be treated to improve water hardness, and then they should be used as pre-heaters for hot-water sources.
That way: 1) The waste is dispersed. Even if one leaks it's nothing major. 2) Not only is stealing it and re-processing it into a weapon dangerous, it also doesn't net you much each time. 3) You cut your energy needs. 4) When we eventually get around to building a fast breeder, the waste can be reclaimed and used as fuel.
N.B,.: That "secure for 100,000 years (or whatever his number was) is just stupidity. The high level radiation falls off quickly, and background radiation is always with us. 1,000 years is reasonable, though. But the degree of security that you need falls off logarithmically. For the first decade it would be reasonable to use the cylinders for pre-heating water for the reactor. For the second decase they could be used as industrial heat sources at secure facilities. By the third decade they could be used to heat any industrial process. By the fourth decade...they probably don't have enough energy left to use them to heat bathtub water. At that point maybe it makes sense to just bury them somewhere. Somewhere reasonably safe, but no need to be frantic about it.
P.S.: You will have noticed that I talk about even amounts of time. This is blatantly silly. The cylinders will be sources of low levels of heat for a lot longer than they are sources of high levels of heat. I pulled the numbers out of a hat. The process, however, is about right. And I'd be surprised if a cylinder stayed usefully hot for over a century.
Actually, for me, yes, it does. I don't purchase DRM. (Well, I haven't in the last 10 years.)
I can imagine the Kindle being good enough that I might purchase it for it's non-DRM uses...but then I consider how they removed books that people had already bought.
So, for me, the Kindle is totally out of the game. I'd rather skip an e-reader entirely than to buy one. I consider it that bad.
One could make an argument on a base twelve measure system...but then everyone would need to learn a new set of multiplication tables.
Still...it would have advantages. But you'll never convince everyone to change the way they count. You'd need to have started back in Babylon, and convince them that base 60 was too complicated to catch one.
And then when you install a different distribution, you blow away your home directory. Sorry, bad idea./home should be in a separate partition from the rest of the stuff..
Also, since I usually have several distributions installed at the same time, I have several partitions...but that's a less common problem.
A better solution would be to have a boot partition snuggled up against the MBR that automatically adapts so that the boot + MBR is an appropriate size, say 32 MB. (My current boot directory is 14MB, so that shouldn't be a problem. These aren't, after all, small drives, so it doesn't hurt to allocate a bit of extra space. Maybe even make that 64MB.)
Perhaps one could rearrange the system tables a bit so that the MBR was counted as a part of the/boot partition, and so was the partition table. They'd need to be an a position guaranteed by the OS, but that's not a real problem.
Note that what I'm proposing is a major redesign, so there's about zero chance of it being adopted. But it's a better choice than scrapping partitions, and probably has a better chance of being adopted.
I don't really see anything that can be done to fix the problem, except live through it. Eventually I expect OOo to take over even those places, but it might be measured in decades.
(I.e., I expect that somewhere along the way MS will break something that every single customer depends on...though not every customer at the same time. At that point the choices are: 1. don't upgrade. Usually the optimal choice if you can manage it. 2. upgrade to MS. This perpetuates your feeding the vampire. 3. switch to OOo.
Each time this happens I expect some fraction to switch. Those will have no reason whatsoever to ever go back [after the switch is complete]. Which is the best choice will change with your circumstances.)
No question, Open Office macros are different from MSOffice macros. In fact, OOo "macros" are often python programs. Definitely not inferior, but also unfamiliar.
OTOH, I'll admit I know almost nothing about MSOffice macros. I did only one application using them. It was quite successful with it's target audience (in house), and was in use for years after I retired...but that doesn't mean I know much about them. I'm just a programmer, so I picked up the "language" for one application, and immediately dropped. (That was the last time I had anything to do with any software from MS. I read the EULAs before I install...and then I often won't. You should try a few times to see what you're promising, and legally liable for.)
So...you can do a lot with MSOffice macros. I won't, but that doesn't change the fact that you can. But you can do just as much just as fast with Python. And probably with Python scripting in OOo. (I've never tried, so I have to say "probably". But I definitely wasn't any too impressed by the power of MSOffice macros.)
P.S.: The comparison between languages has to be on the basis for speed for a task, as all complete languages are equivalent in power if you don't consider speed & size of the program.
P.P.S.: Yes, I'll agree that the "power users" of MSOffice wouldn't like OOo. They'd need to learn a new set of habits. I agree that this is a drawback. We appear to disagree on the size of the drawback. (I consider that what the "power users" have learned is usually trivial, and could be re-learned to a new syntax in a couple of days with instruction, or a month or two of occasional trial and error [the way they originally learned].)
I think you're probably right... about appearing to be a troll, but not actually being one. I think you're really expressing what you actually believe. I may believe you're being silly, but you obviously don't believe that.
Personally, I *prefer* Open Office to any version of MSWord I've used since MSWord 5.2a for the Mac. Now that *was* a better word processor. It allowed you to embed markup in the text and hand edit it until it did what you want. (Word Perfect also had that extremely important feature.) It was missing a lot of bells and whistles that have been added since, but I rarely use most of those bells and whistles. When I want a spreadsheet, I want a spreadsheet, when I want a word processor, I want a word processor. But these are MY preferences.
Note that you didn't tell us what your preferences were, or why you didn't like OpenOffice. This is a part of what makes your post appear a troll. Just about everything you said is a generality with no substance. Could be true, could be false. Without substance there's no way to tell.
I believe that you are serious, but that *IS* giving you the benefit of the doubt. (You did mention speed, but I don't know what you're comparing it against on what system. So it's without substance. And besides, one of the announced benefits of this upgrade is that it's faster, so that *IS* one of the things that they're working on.)
On the one hand, you're right, their jab at Limbaugh was unfair. But it got them headlines. And it could also have been spun to be pro-Limbaugh.
On the other hand, I see no reason to presume that their opinions on either music or politics are in any way less knowledgeable than yours. They may not agree with you, but that doesn't mean that they don't have reasons as valid as yours.
E.g., to you it may be important to distinguish between Guns & Roses and Heavy Metal, but to someone primarily interested in Gamelan they may just be an example of a form of western music that they find offensive, Synechdoche is a valid form of speech & writing, even if it tends to be uncommon.
Yeah, but the code being described was in FORTRAN. I may not remember what the rule was in FORTRAN, but I *do* remember that it was defined. (It could have been even that the variables are added together as bit patterns without conversion. Yuck, but that would be a defined result, and so would fit my memory sufficiently to be reasonable.)
P.S.: I have a vague memory that said that automatic conversion only happened across the equal sign. This would have been FORTRAN IV, around 1965. I don't have any memory that said what happened if you multiplied or added an integer and a float. Perhaps it threw an error. I *DO* remember using an equivalence statement to flip bits in a float by treating it as an int. (This would have been on either an IBM 7094 or a CDC 6600, because floats and ints were the same length, and nobody bothered with double precision. Except numerical analysis people, astronomers, etc. Variable size ints didn't come in until byte addressed computers [i.e., the IBM 360] became common.)
I read that, but I ignored it. Intentionally. It seems to me a stupid argument. (Note my comment about how IRV changes things.)
Tell me, do you buy lottery tickets? Do you expect to win? Do you buy more to increase your chance of winning? That would make as much sense as your argument, and is roughly analogous.
What's wrong with adding a floating point to an integer? Isn't the resul a floating point? And if you store that result in an integer, then the result is a truncation to integer, isn't it?
It's been a long time since I used FORTRAN, but that's how I remember it as working, and (in my memory) that was standard practice...except when you wanted to retain the extra precision of the floating point. (And even then there wasn't anything wrong with adding a floating point to an integer. That was, IIRC, standard in computing a moving average, e.g.)
Now I'll admit that I'm not absolutely certain. I moved from FORTRAN to PL/1 to C...and when I got to C I was appalled as how stupid it was about conversions. But FORTRAN might be equally stupid, I suppose, and it was just the detour through PL/1 that accustomed me to automatic conversions. (But that's not the way I'd bet.)
Note also that in Python explicit conversions are rare. Also in Smalltalk, LISP, Scheme, and, I believe, Ruby. Those are the only current languages that I['m informed enough to have an opinion. If C requires explicit conversions to add a float to an integer, I'd be surprised, as I don't remember that as being necessary. OTOH, I haven't used C much in a long time, and I don't use floats (or doubles) often, so I wouldn't be that surprised. (Appalled would be closer than surprised.)
Sorry. Somehow the 've must have been skipped after "And I". (Yeah, it's still not literally true, as it's not currently time for an election.)
Sometimes I vote for a minority candidate, but I know how the voting system works. The fix is in, so I might as well not vote as vote for a minority party. (And in any case, the minority party candidates are often as bad as the majority party candidate, and almost none of them mention exports of software.)
OTOH, local elections are going to start being instant runoff. It's not Condorcet, but it's a lot better than the current system. So locally it might start to count to pay attention to who I actually want to vote for.
Right. And I got two choices who have a reasonable chance of winning. Sometimes they both back this kind of law, the rest of the time one backs it, and the other doesn't mention it. Or occasionally neither mentions it.
I can't even recall a time that one lied, and said he was opposed to it.
In the above two paragraphs, "it" refers to "export conditions and controls on software". And the normal case is that nobody will tell you their position on it.
Well, when you need to choose between a stupid candidate and an abominable one, sometimes stupid is the better choice. Usually, though, they aren't *actually* stupid. They're just cleverly disguising their goals. But they *aren't* experts in any field except getting elected, and, possibly, law. So they make decisions that look stupid to anyone expert in ANY other field. And that's almost everybody. (They just disagree about which decisions were stupid.)
Sort of. It would actually be: If expressing this kind of thing was already common, then expressing it using an alphabet wouldn't be patentable. (Except that patents aren't supposed to cover mere expression.)
That's only consistent if you also consider printing money to be counterfeiting. (A reasonable argument if you believe in the gold standard.)
I offer a definition for your consideration. I wouldn't assert that it was true, but I'd be willing to defend it in debate:
Government is the monopoly on the use of force. Most governments sub-license this to various other entities (e.g. states, municipalities, police departments, armies).
You don't remember the postal service we had before it was privatized. It was much better. It's true there are advantages in parcel delivery now, but UPS already existed. It's just that almost nobody was willing to pay their higher prices. Now that their prices aren't higher (because postal rates are higher, they and their competitors do a better job.
If you're going to privatize something, you must ensure that the barriers to entry are low, and the rewards for quality are high. Otherwise you're better off not privatizing it.
So... I've just described being a doctor as a suitable field for privatization. But I've also described being a hospital as a field that's NOT suitable.
Next we come to the matter of essential access. Were access is nice, but not something essential, then it's better if the government doesn't do it. (N.B.: This is independent of the prior argument. Things can be better along one dimension and worse along another.) If the thing can determine the quality of your life, then it's better if the government ensures that it's available to everyone. Examples here are safe food & water, shelter, and health care. This is where the situation gets complex:
Food safety is supposed to be regulated by the FDA. It "sort of" is, but the FDA does a lousy job. Unannounced inspections rarely occur. Unsafe practices are tolerated, and safe (on a small scale) but inexpensive practices are forbidden. OTOH, most water utilities do a good to excellent job. And ensure that anyone can get enough water. (Partially this is because water is cheap enough that people don't guard it, even though they do pay by the gallon.)
Shelter is insufficiently available. Only in case of disaster does the government even attempt to ensure that everyone has a place to get out of the weather. This has it's good and bad aspects, and I haven't been able to decide among them. But it clearly undermines any assertion that the government is caring for the people. (N.B.: Undermining doesn't prove it false. It just raises questions about it that are difficult to answer.)
Then there's health care. U.S. health care is, frankly, lousy. Even if you can pay you are likely not to get the service you need in an emergency. (Sometimes not even after a planned surgery, but that I lay at the foot of the surgeon rather than on the system. But the time I waited in an emergency, raving out of my mind [much of this I never remembered and had to be told about], because my leg was inflamed with infection for over 12 hours I lay on the system. And I had health coverage.) P.S.: They didn't take me out of the public waiting area until after a few hours I started vomiting. Then they still didn't show me to a doctor, they just moved me to a screened off waiting area with a bed.
FWIW: I had much better health care during the 1950's as a military dependent than I do in an emergency room today. Only NOW I'm paying for it...but to a health insurance company that wouldn't even listen to any complaints I made about the quality of hospital service.
That is, indeed a problem. And trustworthy sources of information are needed. It's just that the journals have betrayed their trust. (Not all of them, but how can one tell. Being authoritative doesn't seem to work.)
Probably the only solution is multiple sources and experiments being repeated to validate the results (and published in a DIFFERENT journal) before they can be accepted as reliable. This was, if you'll recall, approximately the original procedure for validating results.
When those journals were outed it turned out that they'd been published for several years (I want to say decades, but I'd need to research). And the articles in them had been used to justify governmental decisions on what drugs to allow to be used, etc.
So why should a trust a new journal that Elsevier publishes? They've proven that they are seriously corruptible. I may trust some particular author that they publish, but can I trust that the article published in their journal hasn't been "edited" to conform with some hidden agenda? That would seem to be a rather iffy decision for me to make.
In particular, in the case of a reputable publisher, one can be fairly certain that they will only lie either by accident or for fairly substantial gains. Like changing government regulations. Blogs are much more likely to reveal their reliability (or lack of same) at times with trusting them has a much lower cost when they deceive.
That's not a function that they've been performing very well. Just last year Elesevier was found to be publishing what can only be called fake science journals, where the editorial staff and most of the contributors worked for major drug companies. (Possibly only one. I forget the details.) They aren't the first, but they're the most reputable company to have published this kind of thing under their own name.
Trusting authority hasn't become only a logical fallacy. It's become a statistical one. Authorities lie too often to place much trust in someone merely because he's a well known authority.
(The difference: A logical fallacy: That's not proven. A statistical fallacy: That not the way to bet.)
Yes, we seill need publishers. I'm not totally clear about how publishers should change. (Optimality from the views of the author, publisher, and reader are very different!)
I'm much less sure we need Amazon. Amazon is like a large department store, but if you've been watching, that kind of store is either doing poorly or depending on what is essentially slave labor.) They could be replaced by a combination of Google and the publishers/vendors. Currently their existence is subsidized by the trust they people put in them to handle credit cards honestly. (My personal perspective + projection of my views onto others. I could easily be wrong here.) It's also subsidized by the credit card companies charging big companies lower rates.
There's a lot of inertia in the market, but I suspect that Amazon is obsolete. I give them 10-15 years unless they radically re-invent themselves. (That may be a part of what this bit about the Kindle and monopolization of e-book sales is about. But it could just be greed.)
P.S.: I also think the publishers need to radically re-invent themselves. Or perhaps the author's agents could become micro-publishers. They don't need to handle the printing, that could be done by Lulu or some such, with a deal so that to a visitor over the web, or ordering or receiving the merchandise it looks like an old-style publisher.
N.B.: These are wild proposals as to how things should change. Just options of the top of my head. But some kind of change is mandatory.
Traditional publishers don't LIKE e-books. They wish they'd just go away. So they aren't about to do anything to make them attractive.
N.B.: Part of the reason that they don't like the e-book is that they don't get much money out of it. Never think that $14.99 is what Amazon pays them.
P.S.: This same reason is why lots of authors don't like e-books either. They don't get very much of the publishers share, which is already pretty small.
------ P.P.S.: Ever hear of the luddites? Guess why they were anti-technology? Right! That technology was being used to put them out of a job and throw them out to starve in the streets. It wasn't about technology at all. It was about money. But the technology story makes the guys who pay to have the histories written sound nicer. (And it's not exactly false. The luddites *did* smash machinery. But it was because they didn't want to starve to death.)
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That's AN issue, but to me it's not the main issue.
To me the main issue is that the companies that build them don't trust them enough to build them unless the government limits the liabilities that they can be made liable for.
I don't mind that the government is giving them loan guarantees. I mind that the government is saying "if you explode and destroy not only the town, but most of the rest of the state, the people you damaged can't sue you to your eyeteeth."
If the people that build them don't trust them, why should I?
P.S.: AFAIK, there's no reasonable probability of any US plant doing the Chernobyl, much less a "China Syndrome". But why should I trust them more than the companies that build them?
SPSS (solar space power satellite) is a potentially viable competitor. We didn't develop it when we had time and a viable NASA, though.
Well, somebody will, eventually. Then we may find out if it's as viable as it appears. Possibly when China becomes an energy exporting country.
I'll admit that the first SPSS would be expensive and it SHOULD be small and underpowered. The follow on systems, however, needn't be small at all. With enough electricity you can eliminate rocket fuel while in the atmosphere. (Jets and rockets both work by heating the reacting medium so that it can be expelled at a high velocity. With enough electricity you don't need any normal fuel.)
P.S.: Just how that should be done is a bit iffy. One way that COULD work is to use a ground based laser to heat the tail of the rocket, but I'm hoping that a development of the jet engine could also be used. And I'd rather use just air than use water, as was done in the only demonstration project of which I am aware. (Using just air means that you don't need to lift the fuel....or at least not the part that you're going to use at lower elevations.)
If it had been extensive study they wouldn't wast the heat that it was generating in the "cooling ponds". That could be used as a useful preheat. It's probably too hot to handle safely, so it would need to be converted to pellets for safe handling, but that's something that may have been done earlier. If not, it could be done at that point, but earlier would be better.
Also, (to grandparent) we aren't talking about encasing the lumps of radioisotopes in glass, we're talking about melting them together, homogenizing them, and then cooling the homogenized mixture. You don't get significant leaks out of something like that. It's basically a from of obsidian.
And that just STUPID. The individual cylinders should each be treated to improve water hardness, and then they should be used as pre-heaters for hot-water sources.
That way:
1) The waste is dispersed. Even if one leaks it's nothing major.
2) Not only is stealing it and re-processing it into a weapon dangerous, it also doesn't net you much each time.
3) You cut your energy needs.
4) When we eventually get around to building a fast breeder, the waste can be reclaimed and used as fuel.
N.B,.: That "secure for 100,000 years (or whatever his number was) is just stupidity. The high level radiation falls off quickly, and background radiation is always with us. 1,000 years is reasonable, though. But the degree of security that you need falls off logarithmically. For the first decade it would be reasonable to use the cylinders for pre-heating water for the reactor. For the second decase they could be used as industrial heat sources at secure facilities. By the third decade they could be used to heat any industrial process. By the fourth decade...they probably don't have enough energy left to use them to heat bathtub water. At that point maybe it makes sense to just bury them somewhere. Somewhere reasonably safe, but no need to be frantic about it.
P.S.: You will have noticed that I talk about even amounts of time. This is blatantly silly. The cylinders will be sources of low levels of heat for a lot longer than they are sources of high levels of heat. I pulled the numbers out of a hat. The process, however, is about right. And I'd be surprised if a cylinder stayed usefully hot for over a century.
Actually, for me, yes, it does. I don't purchase DRM. (Well, I haven't in the last 10 years.)
I can imagine the Kindle being good enough that I might purchase it for it's non-DRM uses...but then I consider how they removed books that people had already bought.
So, for me, the Kindle is totally out of the game. I'd rather skip an e-reader entirely than to buy one. I consider it that bad.
One could make an argument on a base twelve measure system...but then everyone would need to learn a new set of multiplication tables.
Still...it would have advantages. But you'll never convince everyone to change the way they count. You'd need to have started back in Babylon, and convince them that base 60 was too complicated to catch one.
And then when you install a different distribution, you blow away your home directory. Sorry, bad idea. /home should be in a separate partition from the rest of the stuff..
Also, since I usually have several distributions installed at the same time, I have several partitions...but that's a less common problem.
A better solution would be to have a boot partition snuggled up against the MBR that automatically adapts so that the boot + MBR is an appropriate size, say 32 MB. (My current boot directory is 14MB, so that shouldn't be a problem. These aren't, after all, small drives, so it doesn't hurt to allocate a bit of extra space. Maybe even make that 64MB.)
Perhaps one could rearrange the system tables a bit so that the MBR was counted as a part of the /boot partition, and so was the partition table. They'd need to be an a position guaranteed by the OS, but that's not a real problem.
Note that what I'm proposing is a major redesign, so there's about zero chance of it being adopted. But it's a better choice than scrapping partitions, and probably has a better chance of being adopted.
Now *THAT*'s a valid argument.
I don't really see anything that can be done to fix the problem, except live through it. Eventually I expect OOo to take over even those places, but it might be measured in decades.
(I.e., I expect that somewhere along the way MS will break something that every single customer depends on...though not every customer at the same time. At that point the choices are:
1. don't upgrade. Usually the optimal choice if you can manage it.
2. upgrade to MS. This perpetuates your feeding the vampire.
3. switch to OOo.
Each time this happens I expect some fraction to switch. Those will have no reason whatsoever to ever go back [after the switch is complete]. Which is the best choice will change with your circumstances.)
No question, Open Office macros are different from MSOffice macros. In fact, OOo "macros" are often python programs. Definitely not inferior, but also unfamiliar.
OTOH, I'll admit I know almost nothing about MSOffice macros. I did only one application using them. It was quite successful with it's target audience (in house), and was in use for years after I retired...but that doesn't mean I know much about them. I'm just a programmer, so I picked up the "language" for one application, and immediately dropped. (That was the last time I had anything to do with any software from MS. I read the EULAs before I install...and then I often won't. You should try a few times to see what you're promising, and legally liable for.)
So...you can do a lot with MSOffice macros. I won't, but that doesn't change the fact that you can. But you can do just as much just as fast with Python. And probably with Python scripting in OOo. (I've never tried, so I have to say "probably". But I definitely wasn't any too impressed by the power of MSOffice macros.)
P.S.: The comparison between languages has to be on the basis for speed for a task, as all complete languages are equivalent in power if you don't consider speed & size of the program.
P.P.S.: Yes, I'll agree that the "power users" of MSOffice wouldn't like OOo. They'd need to learn a new set of habits. I agree that this is a drawback. We appear to disagree on the size of the drawback. (I consider that what the "power users" have learned is usually trivial, and could be re-learned to a new syntax in a couple of days with instruction, or a month or two of occasional trial and error [the way they originally learned].)
I think you're probably right ... about appearing to be a troll, but not actually being one. I think you're really expressing what you actually believe. I may believe you're being silly, but you obviously don't believe that.
Personally, I *prefer* Open Office to any version of MSWord I've used since MSWord 5.2a for the Mac. Now that *was* a better word processor. It allowed you to embed markup in the text and hand edit it until it did what you want. (Word Perfect also had that extremely important feature.) It was missing a lot of bells and whistles that have been added since, but I rarely use most of those bells and whistles. When I want a spreadsheet, I want a spreadsheet, when I want a word processor, I want a word processor. But these are MY preferences.
Note that you didn't tell us what your preferences were, or why you didn't like OpenOffice. This is a part of what makes your post appear a troll. Just about everything you said is a generality with no substance. Could be true, could be false. Without substance there's no way to tell.
I believe that you are serious, but that *IS* giving you the benefit of the doubt. (You did mention speed, but I don't know what you're comparing it against on what system. So it's without substance. And besides, one of the announced benefits of this upgrade is that it's faster, so that *IS* one of the things that they're working on.)
On the one hand, you're right, their jab at Limbaugh was unfair. But it got them headlines. And it could also have been spun to be pro-Limbaugh.
On the other hand, I see no reason to presume that their opinions on either music or politics are in any way less knowledgeable than yours. They may not agree with you, but that doesn't mean that they don't have reasons as valid as yours.
E.g., to you it may be important to distinguish between Guns & Roses and Heavy Metal, but to someone primarily interested in Gamelan they may just be an example of a form of western music that they find offensive, Synechdoche is a valid form of speech & writing, even if it tends to be uncommon.
Yeah, but the code being described was in FORTRAN. I may not remember what the rule was in FORTRAN, but I *do* remember that it was defined. (It could have been even that the variables are added together as bit patterns without conversion. Yuck, but that would be a defined result, and so would fit my memory sufficiently to be reasonable.)
P.S.: I have a vague memory that said that automatic conversion only happened across the equal sign. This would have been FORTRAN IV, around 1965. I don't have any memory that said what happened if you multiplied or added an integer and a float. Perhaps it threw an error. I *DO* remember using an equivalence statement to flip bits in a float by treating it as an int. (This would have been on either an IBM 7094 or a CDC 6600, because floats and ints were the same length, and nobody bothered with double precision. Except numerical analysis people, astronomers, etc. Variable size ints didn't come in until byte addressed computers [i.e., the IBM 360] became common.)
I read that, but I ignored it. Intentionally. It seems to me a stupid argument. (Note my comment about how IRV changes things.)
Tell me, do you buy lottery tickets? Do you expect to win? Do you buy more to increase your chance of winning? That would make as much sense as your argument, and is roughly analogous.
What's wrong with adding a floating point to an integer? Isn't the resul a floating point? And if you store that result in an integer, then the result is a truncation to integer, isn't it?
It's been a long time since I used FORTRAN, but that's how I remember it as working, and (in my memory) that was standard practice...except when you wanted to retain the extra precision of the floating point. (And even then there wasn't anything wrong with adding a floating point to an integer. That was, IIRC, standard in computing a moving average, e.g.)
Now I'll admit that I'm not absolutely certain. I moved from FORTRAN to PL/1 to C...and when I got to C I was appalled as how stupid it was about conversions. But FORTRAN might be equally stupid, I suppose, and it was just the detour through PL/1 that accustomed me to automatic conversions. (But that's not the way I'd bet.)
Note also that in Python explicit conversions are rare. Also in Smalltalk, LISP, Scheme, and, I believe, Ruby. Those are the only current languages that I['m informed enough to have an opinion. If C requires explicit conversions to add a float to an integer, I'd be surprised, as I don't remember that as being necessary. OTOH, I haven't used C much in a long time, and I don't use floats (or doubles) often, so I wouldn't be that surprised. (Appalled would be closer than surprised.)
Sorry. Somehow the 've must have been skipped after "And I". (Yeah, it's still not literally true, as it's not currently time for an election.)
Sometimes I vote for a minority candidate, but I know how the voting system works. The fix is in, so I might as well not vote as vote for a minority party. (And in any case, the minority party candidates are often as bad as the majority party candidate, and almost none of them mention exports of software.)
OTOH, local elections are going to start being instant runoff. It's not Condorcet, but it's a lot better than the current system. So locally it might start to count to pay attention to who I actually want to vote for.
Right. And I got two choices who have a reasonable chance of winning. Sometimes they both back this kind of law, the rest of the time one backs it, and the other doesn't mention it. Or occasionally neither mentions it.
I can't even recall a time that one lied, and said he was opposed to it.
In the above two paragraphs, "it" refers to "export conditions and controls on software". And the normal case is that nobody will tell you their position on it.
Well, when you need to choose between a stupid candidate and an abominable one, sometimes stupid is the better choice. Usually, though, they aren't *actually* stupid. They're just cleverly disguising their goals. But they *aren't* experts in any field except getting elected, and, possibly, law. So they make decisions that look stupid to anyone expert in ANY other field. And that's almost everybody. (They just disagree about which decisions were stupid.)
Sort of. It would actually be:
If expressing this kind of thing was already common, then expressing it using an alphabet wouldn't be patentable. (Except that patents aren't supposed to cover mere expression.)
Sounds right to me.
That's only consistent if you also consider printing money to be counterfeiting. (A reasonable argument if you believe in the gold standard.)
I offer a definition for your consideration. I wouldn't assert that it was true, but I'd be willing to defend it in debate:
Government is the monopoly on the use of force. Most governments sub-license this to various other entities (e.g. states, municipalities, police departments, armies).
You don't remember the postal service we had before it was privatized. It was much better. It's true there are advantages in parcel delivery now, but UPS already existed. It's just that almost nobody was willing to pay their higher prices. Now that their prices aren't higher (because postal rates are higher, they and their competitors do a better job.
If you're going to privatize something, you must ensure that the barriers to entry are low, and the rewards for quality are high. Otherwise you're better off not privatizing it.
So... I've just described being a doctor as a suitable field for privatization. But I've also described being a hospital as a field that's NOT suitable.
Next we come to the matter of essential access. Were access is nice, but not something essential, then it's better if the government doesn't do it. (N.B.: This is independent of the prior argument. Things can be better along one dimension and worse along another.) If the thing can determine the quality of your life, then it's better if the government ensures that it's available to everyone. Examples here are safe food & water, shelter, and health care. This is where the situation gets complex:
Food safety is supposed to be regulated by the FDA. It "sort of" is, but the FDA does a lousy job. Unannounced inspections rarely occur. Unsafe practices are tolerated, and safe (on a small scale) but inexpensive practices are forbidden. OTOH, most water utilities do a good to excellent job. And ensure that anyone can get enough water. (Partially this is because water is cheap enough that people don't guard it, even though they do pay by the gallon.)
Shelter is insufficiently available. Only in case of disaster does the government even attempt to ensure that everyone has a place to get out of the weather. This has it's good and bad aspects, and I haven't been able to decide among them. But it clearly undermines any assertion that the government is caring for the people. (N.B.: Undermining doesn't prove it false. It just raises questions about it that are difficult to answer.)
Then there's health care. U.S. health care is, frankly, lousy. Even if you can pay you are likely not to get the service you need in an emergency. (Sometimes not even after a planned surgery, but that I lay at the foot of the surgeon rather than on the system. But the time I waited in an emergency, raving out of my mind [much of this I never remembered and had to be told about], because my leg was inflamed with infection for over 12 hours I lay on the system. And I had health coverage.)
P.S.: They didn't take me out of the public waiting area until after a few hours I started vomiting. Then they still didn't show me to a doctor, they just moved me to a screened off waiting area with a bed.
FWIW: I had much better health care during the 1950's as a military dependent than I do in an emergency room today. Only NOW I'm paying for it...but to a health insurance company that wouldn't even listen to any complaints I made about the quality of hospital service.
That is, indeed a problem. And trustworthy sources of information are needed. It's just that the journals have betrayed their trust. (Not all of them, but how can one tell. Being authoritative doesn't seem to work.)
Probably the only solution is multiple sources and experiments being repeated to validate the results (and published in a DIFFERENT journal) before they can be accepted as reliable. This was, if you'll recall, approximately the original procedure for validating results.
When those journals were outed it turned out that they'd been published for several years (I want to say decades, but I'd need to research). And the articles in them had been used to justify governmental decisions on what drugs to allow to be used, etc.
So why should a trust a new journal that Elsevier publishes? They've proven that they are seriously corruptible. I may trust some particular author that they publish, but can I trust that the article published in their journal hasn't been "edited" to conform with some hidden agenda? That would seem to be a rather iffy decision for me to make.
In particular, in the case of a reputable publisher, one can be fairly certain that they will only lie either by accident or for fairly substantial gains. Like changing government regulations. Blogs are much more likely to reveal their reliability (or lack of same) at times with trusting them has a much lower cost when they deceive.
That's not a function that they've been performing very well. Just last year Elesevier was found to be publishing what can only be called fake science journals, where the editorial staff and most of the contributors worked for major drug companies. (Possibly only one. I forget the details.) They aren't the first, but they're the most reputable company to have published this kind of thing under their own name.
Trusting authority hasn't become only a logical fallacy. It's become a statistical one. Authorities lie too often to place much trust in someone merely because he's a well known authority.
(The difference:
A logical fallacy: That's not proven.
A statistical fallacy: That not the way to bet.)
Yes, we seill need publishers. I'm not totally clear about how publishers should change. (Optimality from the views of the author, publisher, and reader are very different!)
I'm much less sure we need Amazon. Amazon is like a large department store, but if you've been watching, that kind of store is either doing poorly or depending on what is essentially slave labor.) They could be replaced by a combination of Google and the publishers/vendors. Currently their existence is subsidized by the trust they people put in them to handle credit cards honestly. (My personal perspective + projection of my views onto others. I could easily be wrong here.) It's also subsidized by the credit card companies charging big companies lower rates.
There's a lot of inertia in the market, but I suspect that Amazon is obsolete. I give them 10-15 years unless they radically re-invent themselves. (That may be a part of what this bit about the Kindle and monopolization of e-book sales is about. But it could just be greed.)
P.S.: I also think the publishers need to radically re-invent themselves. Or perhaps the author's agents could become micro-publishers. They don't need to handle the printing, that could be done by Lulu or some such, with a deal so that to a visitor over the web, or ordering or receiving the merchandise it looks like an old-style publisher.
N.B.: These are wild proposals as to how things should change. Just options of the top of my head. But some kind of change is mandatory.
Traditional publishers don't LIKE e-books. They wish they'd just go away. So they aren't about to do anything to make them attractive.
N.B.: Part of the reason that they don't like the e-book is that they don't get much money out of it. Never think that $14.99 is what Amazon pays them.
P.S.: This same reason is why lots of authors don't like e-books either. They don't get very much of the publishers share, which is already pretty small.
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P.P.S.: Ever hear of the luddites? Guess why they were anti-technology? Right! That technology was being used to put them out of a job and throw them out to starve in the streets. It wasn't about technology at all. It was about money. But the technology story makes the guys who pay to have the histories written sound nicer. (And it's not exactly false. The luddites *did* smash machinery. But it was because they didn't want to starve to death.)