A single copy of Harry Potter costs on the order of $10. The *copyright* to Harry Potter would cost a billion or thereabouts. The two aren't the same. Nevertheless, you *bought* a single copy of Harry Potter. What happens in the following scene is called a sale, not a "licensing"
Customer: I would like to buy a copy of Windows-Vista for my computer please.
Sales-rep: That'll be $599 then.
Customer: (pays)
Sales-rep: (Hands over a copy of Windows-Vista)
Notice that nobody signed or agreed to anything. Also notice that the customer explicitly said he wanted to *buy* a copy of Vista, if that wasn't what he got, he was befrauded.
Now, with that particular copy of Vista, you can do anything not prevented by law. You can chew on the CD. You can re-sell it to a friend if you decide you don't want to use it afterall. You can put it in the microwave to see sparks fly. You can do all of these things even if some text on the DVD claim that you cannot. (I have no idea what the text says)
It is very easy to have profits grow exponentially. Recipe:
1) Put money in the bank.
2) Wait.
The growth is exponential, the problem is that by the time you're a billionaire, you'll be long dead.
If you start with $100K, at age 30, and want to make a billion by age 50, that's equivalent to growing by a factor of 10.000 in 20 years, which requires you to make on the order of 60% profit every year, even ignoring taxes and inflation.
That's not possible without insane luck. Plain and simple. Average decently good luck will however turn the 100K into $1.5million by the time you're 60, and that's no bad either. It's not enough to be rich, but it's more than enough to enjoy a comfortable life.
Actually, *every* business carries with it the risk that you'll go bankrupt. Nothin in life is risk-free.
If we're talking investing though, the correct statement is that you have to have a positive expected future worth for something to be properly labeled an investment. It is possible, afterall, to earn a million by playing the roulette. Doesn't mean that betting on the roulette-wheel should be seen as an investment.
But even high-risk ventures can be legitimate investments, if the payoffs are worth it. A venture that has 90% chance of going bankrupt, and 10% chance of earning 100 times the initial investment is a good investment -- assuming the numbers hold up. Just as if I offered you 7 times the bet if you correctly guess how a dice will land it's smart of you to bet (assuming it really is fair and no cheating)
Actually, the world was always like that. Most places and times where *more* like that than USA in the 20th-21st century. The most common way of being well-off is simply having parents that where well-off.
The odds that you'll have your first million by 30 are a lot better if your parents are rich than if theire poor. It's not just the cash. It's living in the right neighbourhood. It's being surrounded by the right people. It is being able to afford going to the right schools. It is getting invited to the right parties. A thousand little things.
It adds up. It's possible to beat the odds and come out on top even if you start at the bottom. But it's a lot easier to stay on top if you always started out at that position.
It depends though, the closer you are to a pole, the shorter a distance you need to fly to go troug all time-zones.
I wonder if anyone has been flying for like a week in northern latitudes during midnight-sun. It should help a lot to have 24 hours of sunshine, but the problem is that sunshine comes in almost horisontally, so it's a lot harder to make use of it if your solar-cells are mounted ontop of the wings as is customary.
True, but you're less maneuvrable. A compromise may be worthwhile, building a plane like this, but seal it and fill it with helium. Dunno if the volume is enough that the added lift would outweigh the extra mass for sealing it though.
Your hunch is correct; the plane is charged prior to take-off, which it needs to be because on the first day it has *two* tasks, one is to charge the batteries, the other is to gain 15-18000 meters of altitude. It would be unable to do both, but manages to do one of the two.
And that's why *2* nights is interesting -- on the first day/night cycle the plane demonstrates that it can climb to altitude without using the batteries, and that it can survive the night on batteries-only.
On the second day/night cycle it demonstrates that in one day it can recharge the batteries sufficiently to survive another night.
Nothing prevents that. But a battery doesn't contain even nearly enough energy to fly for 2 nights and 3 days. So if you did this, your plane would come back down once the battery was empty, after a few hours at best.
The endurance-record for not-collecting-energy is the Global Hawk, it uses jet-fuel which has a lot more energy relative to weight compared to batteries, and it still manages "only" max 30 hours.
I'm guessing the max for a batteries-only plane would be in the single-digit-hours, indeed for this and similar planes the challenge is to survive the night on batteries-only. They don't quite manage, but additionaly they gain altitude at daytime and lose it at nigth-time, which also serves as a energy-storage of sorts.
It's not about any particular single device. The reality is that the average household owns on the order of a dozen devices broadcasting in RF, and tend to carry perhaps half of them with them wherever they go.
These devices are from literally dozens of different manufacturers and of thousands of different types.
In addition, there's the stationary sources. Have you heard of radio, or television ? Or mobile-phones ? Well, the base-stations for these services broadcast around-the-clock at high power-levels, and there's no way to get rid of their interference other than living in a faraday-cage.
So medical equipment has no choice: It has to work as reliably as possible in a noisy environment. Sure, they can *wish* that the environment would be less noisy, but wishing doesn't make it so. There's a few limited situations where you can control devices in the *immediate* surroundings, but those are the exceptions, not the rules.
At my local hospital normal patient-rooms have wifi-coverage and patients are allowed to use mobile-phones to chat with family and friends. A low number of critical areas they try to limit rf, while still trying to have rf-safe equipment. For example, the room where prematurely born babies stay, you're encouraged not to bring a mobile phone. Still, even there they made tests and where unable to cause malfunction so it's really just a precaution.
There's no saying you can't do both: Discourage rf-sources in the most critical areas, *and* shield the gear as well as practical.
Also, forbidding everything everywhere is likely to be counterproductive. People will (rightly!) conclude that lots of the restrictions are arbitrary and unjustified, and proceed to ignore them. It's better to have a *few* restrictions that people respect instead of *many* restrictions that people ignore.
Actually, they're not encrypted. What is stored (well, was, these days they're in shadow or any of a dozen other alternatives) was a null-string encrypted with a hash of the password as a *key*. Well, and some details about a salt.
The difference matters. When things are *encrypted* they can then be *decrypted*, if you have the right key. In this case that's not so though, all one could do was brute-force guess. Which was bad enough as many people had and have lousy passwords.
Don't know. But I can offer the following true examples;
I've got a battery-charger, the type that accepts common aa-batteries. It has printed on it, in big red letters: "Do not microwave!"
I've got a wifi-antenna, directional type, consists of a 15" parabolic metal reflector-surface and a pickup at the focus-point. It has in huge yellow/red print a skull, and the word "DEATH!" in capital, huge letters. The danger, explained in smaller red letters ? The thing is made of metal. If you where to stand on your roof, hold the antenna, and let some other point of the antenna touch uninsulated electric wires, this would be bad. I'm not making this up.
We've got a childrens-pool, one of them inflatable things, 10 inches deep, aprox 3 feet across. It comes with warnings printed on in 7 languages. 6 of the languages, including "british english" simply say: "Use only under competent supervision". The last, "US english" is 20 lines long and includes such gems as "Do not use this pool for diving-practice".
You're wrong. Including old ways of doing things for backwards compatibility can be fine. Though in that case you should:
a) Specify what exactly the tag means, not just "like word95", but put down in words what exactly that was.
b) Mark that particular tag as deprecated, meaning new implementations should *read* it correctly, but never *write* that particular tag, unless it was already there in an opened document.
Actually, it's worse than that. So horrible as that seems, the reality is worse.
It's actually "Table_like_word95_on_NT4_on_alpha"
So to even figure out aproximately what that means you'll need a ancient OS, an ancient copy of word, and a piece of hardware that is no longer in sale. And even then, you're only going to be able to come up with a guess.
Actually, the main thing we need to do to enable this is *always* to develop a page as a set of pretty self-contained modules that are then fit together into one whole page on full page-refresh, but which can also be called individually for ajax-refresh.
If you've got, for example, a query that then loops over the resulting comments, and applies a given template for each of them, then that very same template can be run only once with 1 comment to do an ajax-refresh without much extra code.
I've done my homework:-) Prior to choosing to standardise on jQuery we evaluated YUI and Prototype. Neither where bad, but YUI had focus on something else than what we where interested in (user-interface-widgets for example), and prototype just plainly was a worse fit for our development-methodologies.
The rest I've heard of, but never seriously investigated.
Thing is, serverside can be made to work for everyone, which is a plus. But the flipside is it can be *slow* for everyone, because serverside you often have no other choice than redraw the entire page (which can be expensive sometimes) even for a tiny change.
So, the way we tend to do it is graceful degradation.
If there's something to click on that'll rely only change a small part of a big page (say clicking a link to expand a comment-tree) this is what will happen:
The link is a normal a href= link, fully standards-compliant, should work even in ancient lynx.
We then use a standards-compliant well-documented library, jQuery, to add an onclick-handler to the link. The handler returns false, which supresses normal link-following for browsers with javascript turned on. The benefit is that those with javascript saves a lot of bandwith and time, they'll only load the ~500 bytes for the extra comment, not the ~20kb for the entire page.
The only way someone would be screwed with this solution would be if their browser *did* support javascript (and had it turned on), yet *wasn't* correctly supported by jQuery *AND* doesn't support the relevant standards for javascript. I am not aware of even a single example where this is true, if I became aware of such an example, a single "return true" for that browser would instantly enable all functionality.
Now, if someone has a browser with javascript, and with a faked browser-header so I can't tell it apart from browsers with a working javascript-implementation, and the javascript-interpreter doesn't understand standards-compliant javascript, then they're screwed. (well, they need to disable javascript to get the site to work...) but in that case they've spent rather a lot of energy for getting screwed....
I think this solution is a fair bit better than "only serverside everything" actually. But yeah, it is extra work, because you really offer both alternatives for these functions.
You're right, in principle. But in practice you're exxagerating. Being better at adjusting some desires isn't the same as having none whatsoever.
Infact being able to postpone reward is one of the larger differentiators of success in life. There's a famous experiment:
Give a close envelope containing $10 to each student in a class of schoolchildren, aged aproximately 8.
Tell them that they can spend it if they want, however if they don't and deliver the sealed envelope back in 2 weeks later, they'll get $20.
This is a situation where everyone with over room-temperature IQ recognizes that the smarter choice, barring exceptional circumstances, is to wait. Waiting 2 weeks to get double reward is in most cases a no-brainer. (and if you did the experiment on adults, 98% would wait, like I said, being able to control yourself is part of being adult)
With kids this age though, control is less developed. Aproximately 20% of the kids will spend the money, rather than waiting. The interesting thing is, if you re-visit the same group of kids 5, 10 or 15 years later, they success in life corresponds *very* strongly with if they waited or not.
No, you wouldn't want to generally shut off desires and motivations.
But it sure as hell would be useful to be able to dial them according to circumstance. To some degree the body does this automatically, but it'd be useful to be able to extend that.
For example, if you are in a really life-threathening situation. (or if your body *thinks* you are) then your pain-treshold can be significantly different. The body is capable of going into "I need to survive the next 60 seconds, I can worry about that pain-signal coming from my left leg later" mode.
There are several situations for most of us where we are perfectly aware of what we *should* do, but we still don't do it, because of desires and motivations. Being able to over-ride that would be useful.
Perhaps you *should* turn of the tv and go swimming for an hour.
Perhaps you'd be better off with an apple, rather than that bag of chips.
You should probably go to the dentist regularily, despite it being unpleasant. While there, it'd be useful to be able to ignore pain-signals coming from your mouth.
Yes, mature human beings are able to do some of this, some of the time. Doing what is *right* rather than what is convenient or pleasant. But it'd be useful to be able to do that somewhat more often.
That being said, the existing biological mechanisms for acomplishing same are damn impressive as they are. People are capable of much more than they think, if the body decides it is important.
I have a friend that got a baby sometime back. 3 weeks prior to the birth she was at the hospital, was shown around, including where to go in to get directly to the rigth place etc.
When the time came, it turned out someone had forgotten to tell her that actually, at 2am *that* particular gate is closed. With 3 meters (10 feet) of steel-fence, topped by barbed wire. (don't ask me why, seems a silly thing)
So, what does she do ? 9 months pregnant, in labour, at 2am ? Toss jacket over, climb, jump. Male partner stands flabberghasted, up until that moment he hadn't realised that he had married at top-fit commando. He goes around to the main entrance, enters 5 minutes later.
Turns out, in the rigth circumstances, 3 meters of steel fence with barbed wire on it, is a minor detail compared to what matters: getting in *that* door *NOW*.
I don't know what planet you live on. But on mine, people host weddings in combat-zones all the time.
It is true that crashing the party doesn't have to be a bad thing in this setting, it'd require knowing more details and an actual bit of human sensitivity to discover if the people consider this fun or annoying.
That's *also* not different from real life. What is a hilarious practical joke to one person, is highly annoying to another.
I don't see the problem. The internet is just a communication-medium. Sure they've got the right to be pissed.
Nobody was physically harmed, but quite possibly somone had their fun spoiled. Purposefully destroying the fun of others is rude, regardless of how it happens.
Similarily, if you're sitting in a park and having a quiet talk with someone, you'd be annoyed at someone who decided to leave their ghetto-blaster, playing the soundtrack of a porn-movie at full volume 2 meters away from you. This action too, hurts noone physically (aslong as it's not loud enough to be hearing-damaging) but nevertheless I think you'd find most people would be annoyed at it.
Is it ridicoloous for an amateur theatre-group to have a play where a wedding is part of it ?
And if not, why would it be more or less ridicolous if the players use online avatars rather than their own physical bodies ?
Does the ridicolousness change if some of the players involved have a crush on eachothers ? It's not as if it's unheard of for actors who *play* a couple to also *be* a couple. (or to become one during the period of the play)
I guess I just don't get it. Are relationships that depend in part or in whole on letters, telephones or any other method of communication not "real" ? Why'd it make a difference if your messages go trough the internet rather than trough the telephone-network ?
In all cases you're talking to real people. In all cases there's a real chance that one of the involved persons are less than completely honest. That's part of life, nothing new about it.
Maybe I'm biased. My first girlfriend I learned to know to a significant part trough writing old-fashioned letters. We had 2-3 wonderful years together. My wife I met trough exchanging email. I find the two situations to be very similar, and don't see what's so special about one being "online" and the other being in "real life" at all. If we'd been chatting or role-playing together online, I don't know what the fundamental difference between that and telephone should be.
It's inherently dangerous because very high energy-densities nessecarily mean that there's a lot of energy there to be released. Also, everything for that reaction to occur, must be contained inside the battery. (well, if you exclude air-breathing batteries)
It can be made more or less safe, but normally at a cost of reduced energy/pound. This ain't just so for batteries, but for literally *anything* storing large amounts of energy.
Natural gas has certain failure-modes that are ahem, unpleasant. The failure-modes become more likely as you increase the pressure and/or decrease the mass of the container used to hold the gas.
A flywheel used to store a large amount of energy would be unpleasant if it where to ever disintegrate, get out of balance, or somehow drop out of the bearings. All of which become more likely the higher the energy stored and the less material used for securing against these possibilities.
And yeah, batteries, especially those with high energy-densities, have unpleasant failure-modes. If you where willing to accept a twice-as-heavy battery with the same energy-content, these could be made less likely. Hell, even if you where willing to pay more for an equal-capacity battery, the failures could be made less likely. Still, they're always gonna be there.
That's actually an overstatement for many cars. But yeah, the first 100 meters you drive with a new car are expensive ones.
That isn't because of anything the car-company does though, but because most people would rather buy a new car for $20K, rather than a used one for $19K, even if "used" is claimed to mean only literally a few days use.
There's rational reason for that. One is the added uncertanity. Second is the fact that with new you can choose everything freely. Engine, seats, colors, accessories, a hundred things. With used you're lucky to find a car that has *aproximately* the features you would otherwise choose.
As an aside, many people *do* on principle buy cars that are lightly used, rather than new, because they consider the price-drops to be more than the fair value-drop. That's anybodys free choice.
If however you buy a new car for $20K, and the day after the factory lowers the price for new cars of that type to $14K, you're fairly screwed if you where planning to say use that car for 2-3 years and then sell it. That's an expensive thing to do anyway, but now it suddenly got even more expensive.
The $20K car that you used for a year migth be worth $16K.
The $20K car that is now available new for $14K, and that you used for a year, might be worth $11K, so the car-company cost you an additional $5K.
Still, *EVERYONE* knows that hot-new-electronics gear fall in price like a lead brick. And the price *after* you bought something only matters to you if you're planning to sell the object. Anyone who buys a hot-new electronics object, and *doesn't* from the get go expect the price to fall sharply is out of their mind and deserves everything they get.
Sure. But expressing non-support is speech too, and just as deserving of being aired as the original statement. It'd be better if the non-supporters would say: "Those people are in our opinion wrong because...." rather than "Those people should be tossed out, otherwise..."
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You're confusing two completely unrelated things.
One, buying a single copy of a creative work.
Two, buying the *copyright* to a creative work.
A single copy of Harry Potter costs on the order of $10. The *copyright* to Harry Potter would cost a billion or thereabouts. The two aren't the same. Nevertheless, you *bought* a single copy of Harry Potter. What happens in the following scene is called a sale, not a "licensing"
Customer: I would like to buy a copy of Windows-Vista for my computer please.
Sales-rep: That'll be $599 then.
Customer: (pays)
Sales-rep: (Hands over a copy of Windows-Vista)
Notice that nobody signed or agreed to anything. Also notice that the customer explicitly said he wanted to *buy* a copy of Vista, if that wasn't what he got, he was befrauded.
Now, with that particular copy of Vista, you can do anything not prevented by law. You can chew on the CD. You can re-sell it to a friend if you decide you don't want to use it afterall. You can put it in the microwave to see sparks fly. You can do all of these things even if some text on the DVD claim that you cannot. (I have no idea what the text says)
It is very easy to have profits grow exponentially. Recipe:
1) Put money in the bank.
2) Wait.
The growth is exponential, the problem is that by the time you're a billionaire, you'll be long dead.
If you start with $100K, at age 30, and want to make a billion by age 50, that's equivalent to growing by a factor of 10.000 in 20 years, which requires you to make on the order of 60% profit every year, even ignoring taxes and inflation.
That's not possible without insane luck. Plain and simple. Average decently good luck will however turn the 100K into $1.5million by the time you're 60, and that's no bad either. It's not enough to be rich, but it's more than enough to enjoy a comfortable life.
Actually, *every* business carries with it the risk that you'll go bankrupt. Nothin in life is risk-free.
If we're talking investing though, the correct statement is that you have to have a positive expected future worth for something to be properly labeled an investment. It is possible, afterall, to earn a million by playing the roulette. Doesn't mean that betting on the roulette-wheel should be seen as an investment.
But even high-risk ventures can be legitimate investments, if the payoffs are worth it. A venture that has 90% chance of going bankrupt, and 10% chance of earning 100 times the initial investment is a good investment -- assuming the numbers hold up. Just as if I offered you 7 times the bet if you correctly guess how a dice will land it's smart of you to bet (assuming it really is fair and no cheating)
Actually, the world was always like that. Most places and times where *more* like that than USA in the 20th-21st century. The most common way of being well-off is simply having parents that where well-off.
The odds that you'll have your first million by 30 are a lot better if your parents are rich than if theire poor. It's not just the cash. It's living in the right neighbourhood. It's being surrounded by the right people. It is being able to afford going to the right schools. It is getting invited to the right parties. A thousand little things.
It adds up. It's possible to beat the odds and come out on top even if you start at the bottom. But it's a lot easier to stay on top if you always started out at that position.
17% sounds about right. That doesn't sound like rejection to me though, it's not long ago that only typical nerd-sites could even top 10%.
It depends though, the closer you are to a pole, the shorter a distance you need to fly to go troug all time-zones.
I wonder if anyone has been flying for like a week in northern latitudes during midnight-sun. It should help a lot to have 24 hours of sunshine, but the problem is that sunshine comes in almost horisontally, so it's a lot harder to make use of it if your solar-cells are mounted ontop of the wings as is customary.
True, but you're less maneuvrable. A compromise may be worthwhile, building a plane like this, but seal it and fill it with helium. Dunno if the volume is enough that the added lift would outweigh the extra mass for sealing it though.
Your hunch is correct; the plane is charged prior to take-off, which it needs to be because on the first day it has *two* tasks, one is to charge the batteries, the other is to gain 15-18000 meters of altitude. It would be unable to do both, but manages to do one of the two.
And that's why *2* nights is interesting -- on the first day/night cycle the plane demonstrates that it can climb to altitude without using the batteries, and that it can survive the night on batteries-only.
On the second day/night cycle it demonstrates that in one day it can recharge the batteries sufficiently to survive another night.
Nothing prevents that. But a battery doesn't contain even nearly enough energy to fly for 2 nights and 3 days. So if you did this, your plane would come back down once the battery was empty, after a few hours at best.
The endurance-record for not-collecting-energy is the Global Hawk, it uses jet-fuel which has a lot more energy relative to weight compared to batteries, and it still manages "only" max 30 hours.
I'm guessing the max for a batteries-only plane would be in the single-digit-hours, indeed for this and similar planes the challenge is to survive the night on batteries-only. They don't quite manage, but additionaly they gain altitude at daytime and lose it at nigth-time, which also serves as a energy-storage of sorts.
It's not about any particular single device. The reality is that the average household owns on the order of a dozen devices broadcasting in RF, and tend to carry perhaps half of them with them wherever they go.
These devices are from literally dozens of different manufacturers and of thousands of different types.
In addition, there's the stationary sources. Have you heard of radio, or television ? Or mobile-phones ? Well, the base-stations for these services broadcast around-the-clock at high power-levels, and there's no way to get rid of their interference other than living in a faraday-cage.
So medical equipment has no choice: It has to work as reliably as possible in a noisy environment. Sure, they can *wish* that the environment would be less noisy, but wishing doesn't make it so. There's a few limited situations where you can control devices in the *immediate* surroundings, but those are the exceptions, not the rules.
At my local hospital normal patient-rooms have wifi-coverage and patients are allowed to use mobile-phones to chat with family and friends. A low number of critical areas they try to limit rf, while still trying to have rf-safe equipment. For example, the room where prematurely born babies stay, you're encouraged not to bring a mobile phone. Still, even there they made tests and where unable to cause malfunction so it's really just a precaution.
There's no saying you can't do both: Discourage rf-sources in the most critical areas, *and* shield the gear as well as practical.
Also, forbidding everything everywhere is likely to be counterproductive. People will (rightly!) conclude that lots of the restrictions are arbitrary and unjustified, and proceed to ignore them. It's better to have a *few* restrictions that people respect instead of *many* restrictions that people ignore.
Actually, they're not encrypted. What is stored (well, was, these days they're in shadow or any of a dozen other alternatives) was a null-string encrypted with a hash of the password as a *key*. Well, and some details about a salt.
The difference matters. When things are *encrypted* they can then be *decrypted*, if you have the right key. In this case that's not so though, all one could do was brute-force guess. Which was bad enough as many people had and have lousy passwords.
Don't know. But I can offer the following true examples;
I've got a battery-charger, the type that accepts common aa-batteries. It has printed on it, in big red letters: "Do not microwave!"
I've got a wifi-antenna, directional type, consists of a 15" parabolic metal reflector-surface and a pickup at the focus-point. It has in huge yellow/red print a skull, and the word "DEATH!" in capital, huge letters. The danger, explained in smaller red letters ? The thing is made of metal. If you where to stand on your roof, hold the antenna, and let some other point of the antenna touch uninsulated electric wires, this would be bad. I'm not making this up.
We've got a childrens-pool, one of them inflatable things, 10 inches deep, aprox 3 feet across. It comes with warnings printed on in 7 languages. 6 of the languages, including "british english" simply say: "Use only under competent supervision". The last, "US english" is 20 lines long and includes such gems as "Do not use this pool for diving-practice".
You're wrong. Including old ways of doing things for backwards compatibility can be fine. Though in that case you should:
a) Specify what exactly the tag means, not just "like word95", but put down in words what exactly that was.
b) Mark that particular tag as deprecated, meaning new implementations should *read* it correctly, but never *write* that particular tag, unless it was already there in an opened document.
Microsoft did neither.
Actually, it's worse than that. So horrible as that seems, the reality is worse.
It's actually "Table_like_word95_on_NT4_on_alpha"
So to even figure out aproximately what that means you'll need a ancient OS, an ancient copy of word, and a piece of hardware that is no longer in sale. And even then, you're only going to be able to come up with a guess.
Actually, the main thing we need to do to enable this is *always* to develop a page as a set of pretty self-contained modules that are then fit together into one whole page on full page-refresh, but which can also be called individually for ajax-refresh.
If you've got, for example, a query that then loops over the resulting comments, and applies a given template for each of them, then that very same template can be run only once with 1 comment to do an ajax-refresh without much extra code.
I've done my homework :-) Prior to choosing to standardise on jQuery we evaluated YUI and Prototype. Neither where bad, but YUI had focus on something else than what we where interested in (user-interface-widgets for example), and prototype just plainly was a worse fit for our development-methodologies.
The rest I've heard of, but never seriously investigated.
That's almost, but just almost, true.
Thing is, serverside can be made to work for everyone, which is a plus. But the flipside is it can be *slow* for everyone, because serverside you often have no other choice than redraw the entire page (which can be expensive sometimes) even for a tiny change.
So, the way we tend to do it is graceful degradation.
If there's something to click on that'll rely only change a small part of a big page (say clicking a link to expand a comment-tree) this is what will happen:
The link is a normal a href= link, fully standards-compliant, should work even in ancient lynx.
We then use a standards-compliant well-documented library, jQuery, to add an onclick-handler to the link. The handler returns false, which supresses normal link-following for browsers with javascript turned on. The benefit is that those with javascript saves a lot of bandwith and time, they'll only load the ~500 bytes for the extra comment, not the ~20kb for the entire page.
The only way someone would be screwed with this solution would be if their browser *did* support javascript (and had it turned on), yet *wasn't* correctly supported by jQuery *AND* doesn't support the relevant standards for javascript. I am not aware of even a single example where this is true, if I became aware of such an example, a single "return true" for that browser would instantly enable all functionality.
Now, if someone has a browser with javascript, and with a faked browser-header so I can't tell it apart from browsers with a working javascript-implementation, and the javascript-interpreter doesn't understand standards-compliant javascript, then they're screwed. (well, they need to disable javascript to get the site to work...) but in that case they've spent rather a lot of energy for getting screwed....
I think this solution is a fair bit better than "only serverside everything" actually. But yeah, it is extra work, because you really offer both alternatives for these functions.
You're right, in principle. But in practice you're exxagerating. Being better at adjusting some desires isn't the same as having none whatsoever. Infact being able to postpone reward is one of the larger differentiators of success in life. There's a famous experiment:
This is a situation where everyone with over room-temperature IQ recognizes that the smarter choice, barring exceptional circumstances, is to wait. Waiting 2 weeks to get double reward is in most cases a no-brainer. (and if you did the experiment on adults, 98% would wait, like I said, being able to control yourself is part of being adult)
With kids this age though, control is less developed. Aproximately 20% of the kids will spend the money, rather than waiting. The interesting thing is, if you re-visit the same group of kids 5, 10 or 15 years later, they success in life corresponds *very* strongly with if they waited or not.
No, you wouldn't want to generally shut off desires and motivations.
But it sure as hell would be useful to be able to dial them according to circumstance. To some degree the body does this automatically, but it'd be useful to be able to extend that.
For example, if you are in a really life-threathening situation. (or if your body *thinks* you are) then your pain-treshold can be significantly different. The body is capable of going into "I need to survive the next 60 seconds, I can worry about that pain-signal coming from my left leg later" mode.
There are several situations for most of us where we are perfectly aware of what we *should* do, but we still don't do it, because of desires and motivations. Being able to over-ride that would be useful.
Yes, mature human beings are able to do some of this, some of the time. Doing what is *right* rather than what is convenient or pleasant. But it'd be useful to be able to do that somewhat more often.
That being said, the existing biological mechanisms for acomplishing same are damn impressive as they are. People are capable of much more than they think, if the body decides it is important.
I have a friend that got a baby sometime back. 3 weeks prior to the birth she was at the hospital, was shown around, including where to go in to get directly to the rigth place etc.
When the time came, it turned out someone had forgotten to tell her that actually, at 2am *that* particular gate is closed. With 3 meters (10 feet) of steel-fence, topped by barbed wire. (don't ask me why, seems a silly thing)
So, what does she do ? 9 months pregnant, in labour, at 2am ? Toss jacket over, climb, jump. Male partner stands flabberghasted, up until that moment he hadn't realised that he had married at top-fit commando. He goes around to the main entrance, enters 5 minutes later.
Turns out, in the rigth circumstances, 3 meters of steel fence with barbed wire on it, is a minor detail compared to what matters: getting in *that* door *NOW*.
I don't know what planet you live on. But on mine, people host weddings in combat-zones all the time.
It is true that crashing the party doesn't have to be a bad thing in this setting, it'd require knowing more details and an actual bit of human sensitivity to discover if the people consider this fun or annoying.
That's *also* not different from real life. What is a hilarious practical joke to one person, is highly annoying to another.
So, you're saying, don't get married in the real world then ? *grin*
I don't see how marriages and armed combat are mutually exclusive, given the world we actually do live in.
I don't see the problem. The internet is just a communication-medium. Sure they've got the right to be pissed.
Nobody was physically harmed, but quite possibly somone had their fun spoiled. Purposefully destroying the fun of others is rude, regardless of how it happens.
Similarily, if you're sitting in a park and having a quiet talk with someone, you'd be annoyed at someone who decided to leave their ghetto-blaster, playing the soundtrack of a porn-movie at full volume 2 meters away from you. This action too, hurts noone physically (aslong as it's not loud enough to be hearing-damaging) but nevertheless I think you'd find most people would be annoyed at it.
Is it ridicoloous for an amateur theatre-group to have a play where a wedding is part of it ?
And if not, why would it be more or less ridicolous if the players use online avatars rather than their own physical bodies ?
Does the ridicolousness change if some of the players involved have a crush on eachothers ? It's not as if it's unheard of for actors who *play* a couple to also *be* a couple. (or to become one during the period of the play)
I guess I just don't get it. Are relationships that depend in part or in whole on letters, telephones or any other method of communication not "real" ? Why'd it make a difference if your messages go trough the internet rather than trough the telephone-network ?
In all cases you're talking to real people. In all cases there's a real chance that one of the involved persons are less than completely honest. That's part of life, nothing new about it.
Maybe I'm biased. My first girlfriend I learned to know to a significant part trough writing old-fashioned letters. We had 2-3 wonderful years together. My wife I met trough exchanging email. I find the two situations to be very similar, and don't see what's so special about one being "online" and the other being in "real life" at all. If we'd been chatting or role-playing together online, I don't know what the fundamental difference between that and telephone should be.
It's inherently dangerous because very high energy-densities nessecarily mean that there's a lot of energy there to be released. Also, everything for that reaction to occur, must be contained inside the battery. (well, if you exclude air-breathing batteries)
It can be made more or less safe, but normally at a cost of reduced energy/pound. This ain't just so for batteries, but for literally *anything* storing large amounts of energy.
Natural gas has certain failure-modes that are ahem, unpleasant. The failure-modes become more likely as you increase the pressure and/or decrease the mass of the container used to hold the gas.
A flywheel used to store a large amount of energy would be unpleasant if it where to ever disintegrate, get out of balance, or somehow drop out of the bearings. All of which become more likely the higher the energy stored and the less material used for securing against these possibilities.
And yeah, batteries, especially those with high energy-densities, have unpleasant failure-modes. If you where willing to accept a twice-as-heavy battery with the same energy-content, these could be made less likely. Hell, even if you where willing to pay more for an equal-capacity battery, the failures could be made less likely. Still, they're always gonna be there.
That's actually an overstatement for many cars. But yeah, the first 100 meters you drive with a new car are expensive ones.
That isn't because of anything the car-company does though, but because most people would rather buy a new car for $20K, rather than a used one for $19K, even if "used" is claimed to mean only literally a few days use.
There's rational reason for that. One is the added uncertanity. Second is the fact that with new you can choose everything freely. Engine, seats, colors, accessories, a hundred things. With used you're lucky to find a car that has *aproximately* the features you would otherwise choose.
As an aside, many people *do* on principle buy cars that are lightly used, rather than new, because they consider the price-drops to be more than the fair value-drop. That's anybodys free choice.
If however you buy a new car for $20K, and the day after the factory lowers the price for new cars of that type to $14K, you're fairly screwed if you where planning to say use that car for 2-3 years and then sell it. That's an expensive thing to do anyway, but now it suddenly got even more expensive.
The $20K car that you used for a year migth be worth $16K.
The $20K car that is now available new for $14K, and that you used for a year, might be worth $11K, so the car-company cost you an additional $5K.
Still, *EVERYONE* knows that hot-new-electronics gear fall in price like a lead brick. And the price *after* you bought something only matters to you if you're planning to sell the object. Anyone who buys a hot-new electronics object, and *doesn't* from the get go expect the price to fall sharply is out of their mind and deserves everything they get.
Sure. But expressing non-support is speech too, and just as deserving of being aired as the original statement. It'd be better if the non-supporters would say: "Those people are in our opinion wrong because...." rather than "Those people should be tossed out, otherwise..."