The evil in this is the police know there is no merit at all to the charges.
Actually the "thinking" involved is closely parallel to that cited to justify the continuing attacks on Libya by NATO. The UN passed a resolution allowing nations to intervene in Libya, but only to save civilian lives threatened by the civil war there.
Within a week or two, top military decision-makers were freely admitting to the media that the UN resolution was just a convenient pretext; the true purpose of the attacks was to overthrow the government of Libya and replace it with the rebels who started the civil war. So there was nothing surprising when NATO began bombing the capital, Tripoli, which is firmly in government hands and which is hundreds of miles away from any fighting that would threaten civilians.
Oh, and in the process NATO has so far killed well over 1,000 civilians in Tripoli.
Sorry if anyone thinks this is offtopic or a troll - but I see exactly the same pattern of official behaviour. Say one thing, then do something entirely different, and hope citizens who feel compelled to "SHUT UP AND OBEY" will raise no objections.
Hang on, with that reasoning, why do those Teaparty folk get away with trolling soldiers funerals in RL?
Same reason most citizens don't (and can't) participate significantly in government.
Money.
If you have enough of it, as Garry Trudeau noted, congresspeople are surprisingly affordable. If you don't, you are welcome to carry on voting for whichever of the interchangeable "parties" you want. Practical effect: zero.
If a police officer gives you an order, YOU SHUT UP AND OBEY. No complaining, no resisting. It doesn't matter who is right, just stay quiet and save it for the judge..
That's what certain German soldiers did. They did what they were told, kept quiet, and saved it for the judge. Who unhesitatingly sentenced them to death, establishing the granite precedent for all future times that "I was just obeying orders" is never an acceptable excuse. As a human being you have a brain and a sense of morality, both of which you should use early and often.
Now if a disciplined private soldier, in a desperate war against a ruthless enemy, dare not obey an order unthinkingly and unquestioningly - why would a civilian, in peace time (Shrub to the contrary notwithstanding) dare to obey a police officer's order unthinkingly and unquestioningly?
Before you start attacking what I didn't say, please note that it doesn't matter that the soldiers carried out orders to shoot defenceless people, or that the policeman may just be ordering you to give him your phone or leave the area. Because you yourself chose the exact words "YOU SHUT UP AND OBEY. No complaining, no resisting. It doesn't matter who is right..."
In fact, it really does matter very much indeed who is right. And you cannot "shut up and obey" and let the judge sort it out later. As a citizen and a human being, you owe it to yourself, the state, and all your fellow-citizens to decide for yourself at all times what is right and what is wrong.
Unlike modern computers, which have unlimited memory.
The "limited memory" apologia doesn't fly any better than the choice of two-digit year fields that led to the Y2K problem. At the time, DEC saw the advantage of string descriptors and made them available on exactly the same PDP11 computers (sometimes as an option, as suggested by other comments in this thread).
I think the key to this is that BT and Virgin are "the two biggest ISPs" in the UK. While the equipment may be the same for most ISPs, the really big ones like BT and Virgin have the worst customer service and the most uncaring attitude. Huge, soulless profit machines.
As a long-term ADSL user living about 4 km (about 2.5 miles) from the nearest telephone exchange, I get a little over 3 Mbps download on a good day. The copper wires and the exchange belong to BT, so no matter what ISP you go with you will always get similar performance as long as you employ ADSL. I started out with Demon, then when that got big and fat and uncaring I shifted to Nildram, and then a few years later to fast.co.uk, a very small ISP with superb customer service. They still can't get me much more than 3 Mbps, though, until BT gets its finger out and lays on FTTC to my house.
All this time, I could have got much faster performance by going to Virgin. Indeed, a few years ago I was a Virgin customer for TV and phone - back then I was using ISDN over cable. But even though I could get up to 50 Mbps within a few days, without paying much more, I refuse to exchange fast.co.uk's excellent and knowledgeable service for Virgin's clowns.
I doubt if this is a distinction between British and American English, anyway. It's more a common colloquialism. As an editor, I am for ever asking authors not to write "Microsoft are doing..." because I prefer to see organizations referred to as single things - distinct from their employees, directors, shareholders, etc.
Books of English usage have always pointed out that both forms are permissible. A standard example is "The Cabinet was united in its decision" versus "The Cabinet were arguing about the matter all day". In the first case, the Cabinet is being treated as a single body, whereas in the second the writer wishes to stress the separate people who are members of it.
Personally, I think this rule would favour "BT is crap", on the grounds that it is the company that is crap rather than its individual employees. Indeed, it is one of the unfathomable mysteries of big corporations that they manage to prefrom so badly when they employ so many talented and hardworking people.
So, if the most valuable skill you can bring to the table is the ability to make tables in Word, or the ability to snap together car parts in a factory, or follow a tech support script, then your pool of competition has grown massively. You're not in competition with the other folks in your neighbourhood for jobs. You're in competition with everyone in the world, and they have lower costs and standards of living.
If, on the other hand, you've learned skills that are rare and valuable worldwide, then, well, you face less competition and a worldwide economy that is growing massively every day. So you'll do well.
You are apparently falling into the trap of believing there is some inherent reason why Americans (or, at least, some Americans) should find it easier to acquire "rare and valuable" skills than, say, Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, or South Africans.
There isn't. And there are a whole lot more of them, so - once access to knowledge is evened out - they will probably turn up far more exceptionally gifted individuals than the USA or Europe.
It's reasonable, and interesting, to ask whether well-off people living in California should worry about their fellow-citizens elsewhere in the USA who are much worse off. After all, you are all citizens of the USA, which has certain values and aspirations.
But it does suggest taking the same argument a little further, and asking whether Americans - on average the wealthiest nation in the world, perhaps with a few limited exceptions - should worry about their fellow human beings in countries where many or most people go hungry, and $100 is a small fortune.
It's one of the big paradoxes of modern politics that the politicians who run the national governments of relatively rich countries (mostly "the West", whatever that may be) feel compelled to make frequent comforting noises about international aid and their duty to the poor abroad. While at the same time, they and the voters who elected them know damn well that "it's the economy, stupid" - that is, the politician's first and foremost duty is to increase (or at least maintain) the standard of living of their voters. If they do that, everything else can be forgiven. If they fail to do that, nothing else can redeem them.
Yet to make Americans relatively better off, the US government must strive mightily to deprive other nations of natural resources and other forms of wealth. Hence the tendency to appear with weapons in hand, bestowing things like "democracy" and "freedom" that cost nothing, while quietly abstracting things like oil and scarce minerals, which are extremely valuable. While "foreign aid", when examined closely, either doesn't materialize at all, or turns out to be tightly linked to purchases of American goods and services, or political and economic policies that suit the USA.
(I use the USA as the most obvious example; however everything I have said applies to other rich nations such as the UK, France, Germany, Japan, etc.)
Anyone who doesn't save enough to maintain themselves for long enough to find themselves another job is financially illiterate.
Doesn't that depend on how long it takes to find another job? Suppose there are no remotely desirable jobs within a couple of hundred miles? And in case you think unemployed people should be grateful for any job at all, don't forget that there are plenty of minimum-wage jobs that use up all of one's time and energy. That, and the lack of any "extra" money, are liable to prevent people who accept such jobs from ever getting better ones.
Then again, that describes most of America, unfortunately.
It must be nice to know that you are so very much superior to most of your fellow citizens. Unfortunately, events beyond our control do sometimes happen, and almost anyone could (with the right combination of bad luck) find themselves on a one-way slide to Skid Row. Try reading some of Barbara Ehrenreich's books, such as "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch". They contain some absolutely heartbreaking true stories of people who received glowing performance reviews, only to find themselves unemployed, pennyless, and hopeless a year or two later.
Does anyone know exactly what Microsoft's patents involve? Without knowing that, it's hard to make sense of any of these stories.
Based on the published newspaper articles so far, though, I must say it looks as if patent law is being used to accomplish the exact opposite of its supposed intent. Rather than guaranteeing an inventor the sole enjoyment of revenue from its innovations for a period, it is being used by a company that is not a serious player in the market to impede others from selling their products - and to give it a substantial stream of wholly unearned revenue.
Not only is market regulation compatible with capitalism; it is essential for it. Just as rules and a referee are essential for boxing. Without any rules at all, capitalism quickly devours itself, and destroys the (somewhat) free market that spawned it. Microsoft is (or at least used to be, for a while) a fairly good example of what happens to a market that is insufficiently regulated: pretty soon there is only one serious player.
Stop and think for a moment of all the laws, regulations, and other rules that prevent you from being absolutely free - even in your economic behaviour. How many agencies does the US federal government maintain to control business activities? Yet it's all ultimately in vain, because to accomplish anything the regulators must be in contact with the companies they regulate. Then the "money gradient" comes into play: many of the people who are supposed to be regulated find ways of influencing those who are supposed to be regulating them. In a culture that values money above all, people with very little money are supposed to control the actions of people with far more money. It's as obvious as a simple circuit diagram that money changes hands (in some shape or form) and the regulation becomes, let's say, milder and more congenial.
Eventually you reach a situation where - to cite an extreme instance - the SEC goes through the motions of investigating allegations against Bernard Madoff, and claims that it found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
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· Score: 1
Why did you need to memorize it? I just ran through them in my head really quickly.
There is no Firefox OS because the premise is completely wrongheaded. Just because a single piece of software handles HTML5 across all apps does NOT make that piece of software an OS. Off the top of my head, an OS needs to have a really fast, efficient, highly optimized kernel; control all the peripheral devices that the system has (or that might reasonably be connected to it some day); synchronize all the different activities, many of them vital or highly time-sensitive, that must be carried out; create, manage, and terminate processes and threads; manage memory, including virtual memory and multiple layers of storage with different access time versus capacity tradeoffs; impose and administer a security regime; support networking; etc., etc., etc.
You can certainly make compromises, by limiting the tasks a given system will undertake. That way you end up with either a minimal "hobbyist" user interface, like MS-DOS (which "was relatively fast because it didn't have the overhead of an operating system"), or a walled garden setup which will only do a fixed, immutable set of things and cannot be altered or extended. But a "walled garden" militates against most of the characteristics that define a modern computer; if you can't write code for it, add new applications, or add on new hardware, it's not a computer but a consumer appliance.
The whole merit of browsers like Firefox and Opera is that they are Web browsers, complete Web browsers, and nothing but Web browsers. That complies with the Unix tools philosophy, which requires that each software tool should do exactly one thing and do it really well - ideally, so well that no one ever considers writing an alternative solution. It was Microsoft that decided to blur the borders between Web browser and file system browser (as witness the choice of names "Internet Explorer" and "Windows Explorer"), but that was originally done for legal and business reasons, not for technical ones.
Nowadays we expect a PC to be more or less portable, but that's not of the essence. The key point is that the PDP-1 was intended for dedicated use by a single person. Others could gather round and offer advice, feed paper tape, etc.; but one person sat in the chair and operated the machine in real time.
It's almost impossible, in our day and age, to imagine how different the PDP-1 was from any previous computer.
First: who is 'despised' and 'abused' by non-geeks? Are you talking about school children? I don't believe the school children are doing most of 'tend to invent useful stuff and practical things done reliably', and I don't believe that the reason that non-geeks in schools hate geeks for reason, that geeks are unselfish.
Look at any corporation you know well. Don't the people who pull down really big salaries have "people-oriented" jobs? Sales, marketing, board-level wheeling & dealing? And don't they, overtly or otherwise, look down on the "mere techies" who do the useful work? Maybe you don't recognise this scenario: in which case, thank your lucky stars. Most of us do, I think.
I also don't believe that geeks are unselfish (or at least that all or a large majority of them are).
I compressed my statement, because I didn't want to post an essay with footnotes. The word "unselfish" has connotations as well as its intended denotation. Consider the tragedy of the commons. What I was saying is that a group of geeks/nerds (for lack of a better word) are peculiarly able to recognise the benefits of working together to the advantage of all. That's because they are more capable than non-techies of taking an objective view of things. They aren't necessarily being unselfish in deciding to pool their efforts. But the outcome is still a desirable one.
Precisely. But the fact that the ability to reason *evolved* as a way of winning arguments does not mean we cannot use it for more socially useful purposes today. Actually, I would interpret the evolutionary mechanism as being a lot broader than just winning arguments (although technically that is a sufficient description). For instance, winning an argument over whether X will mate with Y rather than Z. Winning an argument over who should be the leader. Or just winning the ongoing popularity contest to be seen as an interesting, attractive person for whom others would like to do favours.
Alexander Pope summed it up accurately, concisely and poetically in his "Essay on Man", nearly 300 years ago (the 'card' being the compass that shows direction at sea):
"On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale".
We can use logic to reach reliable conclusions only when we agree on the premises and the conditions of argument. In everyday life - which includes business - different people argue from different premises, seeking to persuade other people of the validity of their own conclusions instead of listening to the other people's arguments, which may be just as important if not more so. That's largely because life in our society rewards the selfish individualist far, far more than the unselfish team player. (Although selfish individualists often successfully disguise themselves as unselfish team players).
That's why geeks, nerds, and suchlike types (a) tend to invent useful stuff and get practical things done reliably; (b) are despised and abused by non-geeks. The geek prefers to use language and logic to accomplish concrete tasks, in cooperation with others of like mind (even if only through the media of books, the Internet, etc.) Whereas non-geeks can only use language in the way they instinctively do: to try and get their own way. They are astonished that geeks are so unselfish, but don't (on the whole) admire them for that.
Not enough people ask questions like this, so I'd like to congratulate MouseR for raising the whole issue. When you start a project, all too often "architecture" is understood to mean the design (look and feel) and perhaps what underlying software frameworks and servers you'll use. It's very easy to overlook the fact that development tools are mostly shifting sands - not ideal for building your imperishable monument on top of.
For a start, please note that "classic" HTML is pretty austere. It doesn't really cater for visual design at all, partly because the wise decision was taken to focus on communicating information, and let the client tweak the look-and-feel to his own desires and needs. Thus, the same page of HTML could look entirely different to someone with very short sight, who might choose to make everything look a lot bigger. That philosophy didn't sit well with the commercial brigade who presently set out to extract mountains of money from the Web - nor with artists and all sorts of other folk who want to achieve specific visual effects. But the very simplest way of making sure your Web content remains immune to bitrot is to stick to the simplest possible look-and-feel, which in turn allows you to adopt the very simplest (and thus cheapest and most lasting) toolset.
No blood for oil? Then what will you shed blood for?
So you do actually believe it's fine to kill foreigners so you can keep your higher standard of living? That sounds an absurd question to ask anyone, but I can't see how your post doesn't imply that you do believe it's fine. It's not ethical, though.
Another thing that bothers "foreigners" (i.e. the approximately 6.7 billion, or over 95% of the human race, who are not citizens of the USA) is the inconsistency of a government that loudly insists that all people are equal, while working as hard as it can to make Americans much more equal than others.
Mark Twain summed up the central problem of journalism with his epigram, "Get your facts first... then you can distort 'em as much as you please". But, amusing as it is, this completely misses the point! In the very process of "getting your facts" you have the opportunity - indeed, the obligation - of selecting them from among the infinite number of facts that you could choose. Having selected the facts that you think are most important, there is no longer the slightest need to distort them. The work is already done.
Suppose you are the New York Times, and you are reporting on events in Afghanistan. You have a certain amount of space, so do you write up the IED explosion which killed a couple of NATO soldiers and put a few more in hospital - or do you describe the NATO helicopter raid that killed a dozen villagers and wounded another few dozen? Well, your readers are far more interested in the fate of NATO people (especially if they are from the USA); moreover, they don't particularly want to read about how their glorious forces have accidentally (or otherwise) killed a lot of civilians. So it's a no-brainer - you write up the IED event. After a few years of such a policy, consistently followed, readers get the idea that all that happens in Afghanistan is that NATO soldiers occasionally get blown up. Yes the NYT has accurately reported the facts. It hasn't reported all of them, but its editors could argue that such an attempt would be physically impossible. The only practical way of giving a more balanced impression would be to read, as well as the NYT, a newspaper that takes an anti-NATO, pro-Afghan point of view. But no such newspaper can survive commercially in the US market, because it wouldn't sell enough copies (even if it were allowed to go on operating for long).
Indeed, the Wikileaks documents currently under discussion are subject to such a filtering effect too. Remember, all those documents were written by American officials, for US government consumption. You won't find many mentions in there of atrocities by our forces - even if the US authorities in Afghanistan or Washington were aware of such atrocities, they wouldn't put them into messages with such a low level of security. What you can expect to find is a fairly high level of unguarded opinions - either honest or carefully angled to make a particular desired impression.
The BBC certainly is massively biased (in an institutional way). It's less a matter of overt censorship than of a pervasive worldview that makes censorship unnecessary. Presumably they don't even hire people who might be members of the "awkward squad", or who don't appear to share the standard politically correct establishment values.
As a result, I think it's very inaccurate to describe the BBC's bias as "left wing". I would call it "establishment", which of course does beg the question of whether the British establishment itself nowadays is left wing. Certainly not in the old-fashioned sense of fighting to improve the lot of the working classes. Britain doesn't have a left wing or a right wing any more - certainly anyone who falls under those descriptions can only be on the fringes, without much influence. The Labour and Conservative parties are both very similar - middle-of-the-road, managerial, bien-pensant bourgeois. (Many people describe themselves as working class who obviously aren't, on cursory inspection of their financial means and chosen way of life).
If I had to sum up the BBC's political orientation in a single word, it would have to be "smug". Turn on almost any program, and you can practically hear the journalists, newsreaders, and producers thinking "O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican". (Or, as it might be, "O God, I give thee thanks that we are enlightened Westerners, and not as the rest of men - nasty dictators like Assad or Qadafi, religious fanatics like the Muslims, repressive communists like the Chinese, bigoted sexists/racists/elitists...")
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The evil in this is the police know there is no merit at all to the charges.
Actually the "thinking" involved is closely parallel to that cited to justify the continuing attacks on Libya by NATO. The UN passed a resolution allowing nations to intervene in Libya, but only to save civilian lives threatened by the civil war there.
Within a week or two, top military decision-makers were freely admitting to the media that the UN resolution was just a convenient pretext; the true purpose of the attacks was to overthrow the government of Libya and replace it with the rebels who started the civil war. So there was nothing surprising when NATO began bombing the capital, Tripoli, which is firmly in government hands and which is hundreds of miles away from any fighting that would threaten civilians.
Oh, and in the process NATO has so far killed well over 1,000 civilians in Tripoli.
Sorry if anyone thinks this is offtopic or a troll - but I see exactly the same pattern of official behaviour. Say one thing, then do something entirely different, and hope citizens who feel compelled to "SHUT UP AND OBEY" will raise no objections.
Hang on, with that reasoning, why do those Teaparty folk get away with trolling soldiers funerals in RL?
Same reason most citizens don't (and can't) participate significantly in government.
Money.
If you have enough of it, as Garry Trudeau noted, congresspeople are surprisingly affordable. If you don't, you are welcome to carry on voting for whichever of the interchangeable "parties" you want. Practical effect: zero.
If a police officer gives you an order, YOU SHUT UP AND OBEY. No complaining, no resisting. It doesn't matter who is right, just stay quiet and save it for the judge..
That's what certain German soldiers did. They did what they were told, kept quiet, and saved it for the judge. Who unhesitatingly sentenced them to death, establishing the granite precedent for all future times that "I was just obeying orders" is never an acceptable excuse. As a human being you have a brain and a sense of morality, both of which you should use early and often.
Now if a disciplined private soldier, in a desperate war against a ruthless enemy, dare not obey an order unthinkingly and unquestioningly - why would a civilian, in peace time (Shrub to the contrary notwithstanding) dare to obey a police officer's order unthinkingly and unquestioningly?
Before you start attacking what I didn't say, please note that it doesn't matter that the soldiers carried out orders to shoot defenceless people, or that the policeman may just be ordering you to give him your phone or leave the area. Because you yourself chose the exact words "YOU SHUT UP AND OBEY. No complaining, no resisting. It doesn't matter who is right..."
In fact, it really does matter very much indeed who is right. And you cannot "shut up and obey" and let the judge sort it out later. As a citizen and a human being, you owe it to yourself, the state, and all your fellow-citizens to decide for yourself at all times what is right and what is wrong.
"...their PDP computer had limited core memory."
Unlike modern computers, which have unlimited memory.
The "limited memory" apologia doesn't fly any better than the choice of two-digit year fields that led to the Y2K problem. At the time, DEC saw the advantage of string descriptors and made them available on exactly the same PDP11 computers (sometimes as an option, as suggested by other comments in this thread).
On the contrary, you will find that the Economist Style Guide to which you linked says the same as I did.
But thank you for your delightful and pleasantly worded contribution.
OK, FTTC to the cabinet 20 metres from my house. Sometimes one doesn't spell everything out in full, to avoid tedium.
I think the key to this is that BT and Virgin are "the two biggest ISPs" in the UK. While the equipment may be the same for most ISPs, the really big ones like BT and Virgin have the worst customer service and the most uncaring attitude. Huge, soulless profit machines.
As a long-term ADSL user living about 4 km (about 2.5 miles) from the nearest telephone exchange, I get a little over 3 Mbps download on a good day. The copper wires and the exchange belong to BT, so no matter what ISP you go with you will always get similar performance as long as you employ ADSL. I started out with Demon, then when that got big and fat and uncaring I shifted to Nildram, and then a few years later to fast.co.uk, a very small ISP with superb customer service. They still can't get me much more than 3 Mbps, though, until BT gets its finger out and lays on FTTC to my house.
All this time, I could have got much faster performance by going to Virgin. Indeed, a few years ago I was a Virgin customer for TV and phone - back then I was using ISDN over cable. But even though I could get up to 50 Mbps within a few days, without paying much more, I refuse to exchange fast.co.uk's excellent and knowledgeable service for Virgin's clowns.
I doubt if this is a distinction between British and American English, anyway. It's more a common colloquialism. As an editor, I am for ever asking authors not to write "Microsoft are doing..." because I prefer to see organizations referred to as single things - distinct from their employees, directors, shareholders, etc.
Books of English usage have always pointed out that both forms are permissible. A standard example is "The Cabinet was united in its decision" versus "The Cabinet were arguing about the matter all day". In the first case, the Cabinet is being treated as a single body, whereas in the second the writer wishes to stress the separate people who are members of it.
Personally, I think this rule would favour "BT is crap", on the grounds that it is the company that is crap rather than its individual employees. Indeed, it is one of the unfathomable mysteries of big corporations that they manage to prefrom so badly when they employ so many talented and hardworking people.
So, if the most valuable skill you can bring to the table is the ability to make tables in Word, or the ability to snap together car parts in a factory, or follow a tech support script, then your pool of competition has grown massively. You're not in competition with the other folks in your neighbourhood for jobs. You're in competition with everyone in the world, and they have lower costs and standards of living.
If, on the other hand, you've learned skills that are rare and valuable worldwide, then, well, you face less competition and a worldwide economy that is growing massively every day. So you'll do well.
You are apparently falling into the trap of believing there is some inherent reason why Americans (or, at least, some Americans) should find it easier to acquire "rare and valuable" skills than, say, Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, or South Africans.
There isn't. And there are a whole lot more of them, so - once access to knowledge is evened out - they will probably turn up far more exceptionally gifted individuals than the USA or Europe.
It's reasonable, and interesting, to ask whether well-off people living in California should worry about their fellow-citizens elsewhere in the USA who are much worse off. After all, you are all citizens of the USA, which has certain values and aspirations.
But it does suggest taking the same argument a little further, and asking whether Americans - on average the wealthiest nation in the world, perhaps with a few limited exceptions - should worry about their fellow human beings in countries where many or most people go hungry, and $100 is a small fortune.
It's one of the big paradoxes of modern politics that the politicians who run the national governments of relatively rich countries (mostly "the West", whatever that may be) feel compelled to make frequent comforting noises about international aid and their duty to the poor abroad. While at the same time, they and the voters who elected them know damn well that "it's the economy, stupid" - that is, the politician's first and foremost duty is to increase (or at least maintain) the standard of living of their voters. If they do that, everything else can be forgiven. If they fail to do that, nothing else can redeem them.
Yet to make Americans relatively better off, the US government must strive mightily to deprive other nations of natural resources and other forms of wealth. Hence the tendency to appear with weapons in hand, bestowing things like "democracy" and "freedom" that cost nothing, while quietly abstracting things like oil and scarce minerals, which are extremely valuable. While "foreign aid", when examined closely, either doesn't materialize at all, or turns out to be tightly linked to purchases of American goods and services, or political and economic policies that suit the USA.
(I use the USA as the most obvious example; however everything I have said applies to other rich nations such as the UK, France, Germany, Japan, etc.)
Anyone who doesn't save enough to maintain themselves for long enough to find themselves another job is financially illiterate.
Doesn't that depend on how long it takes to find another job? Suppose there are no remotely desirable jobs within a couple of hundred miles? And in case you think unemployed people should be grateful for any job at all, don't forget that there are plenty of minimum-wage jobs that use up all of one's time and energy. That, and the lack of any "extra" money, are liable to prevent people who accept such jobs from ever getting better ones.
Then again, that describes most of America, unfortunately.
It must be nice to know that you are so very much superior to most of your fellow citizens. Unfortunately, events beyond our control do sometimes happen, and almost anyone could (with the right combination of bad luck) find themselves on a one-way slide to Skid Row. Try reading some of Barbara Ehrenreich's books, such as "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch". They contain some absolutely heartbreaking true stories of people who received glowing performance reviews, only to find themselves unemployed, pennyless, and hopeless a year or two later.
Does anyone know exactly what Microsoft's patents involve? Without knowing that, it's hard to make sense of any of these stories.
Based on the published newspaper articles so far, though, I must say it looks as if patent law is being used to accomplish the exact opposite of its supposed intent. Rather than guaranteeing an inventor the sole enjoyment of revenue from its innovations for a period, it is being used by a company that is not a serious player in the market to impede others from selling their products - and to give it a substantial stream of wholly unearned revenue.
Not only is market regulation compatible with capitalism; it is essential for it. Just as rules and a referee are essential for boxing. Without any rules at all, capitalism quickly devours itself, and destroys the (somewhat) free market that spawned it. Microsoft is (or at least used to be, for a while) a fairly good example of what happens to a market that is insufficiently regulated: pretty soon there is only one serious player.
Stop and think for a moment of all the laws, regulations, and other rules that prevent you from being absolutely free - even in your economic behaviour. How many agencies does the US federal government maintain to control business activities? Yet it's all ultimately in vain, because to accomplish anything the regulators must be in contact with the companies they regulate. Then the "money gradient" comes into play: many of the people who are supposed to be regulated find ways of influencing those who are supposed to be regulating them. In a culture that values money above all, people with very little money are supposed to control the actions of people with far more money. It's as obvious as a simple circuit diagram that money changes hands (in some shape or form) and the regulation becomes, let's say, milder and more congenial.
Eventually you reach a situation where - to cite an extreme instance - the SEC goes through the motions of investigating allegations against Bernard Madoff, and claims that it found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Why did you need to memorize it? I just ran through them in my head really quickly.
John von Neumann? We thought you were dead!
There is no Firefox OS because the premise is completely wrongheaded. Just because a single piece of software handles HTML5 across all apps does NOT make that piece of software an OS. Off the top of my head, an OS needs to have a really fast, efficient, highly optimized kernel; control all the peripheral devices that the system has (or that might reasonably be connected to it some day); synchronize all the different activities, many of them vital or highly time-sensitive, that must be carried out; create, manage, and terminate processes and threads; manage memory, including virtual memory and multiple layers of storage with different access time versus capacity tradeoffs; impose and administer a security regime; support networking; etc., etc., etc.
You can certainly make compromises, by limiting the tasks a given system will undertake. That way you end up with either a minimal "hobbyist" user interface, like MS-DOS (which "was relatively fast because it didn't have the overhead of an operating system"), or a walled garden setup which will only do a fixed, immutable set of things and cannot be altered or extended. But a "walled garden" militates against most of the characteristics that define a modern computer; if you can't write code for it, add new applications, or add on new hardware, it's not a computer but a consumer appliance.
The whole merit of browsers like Firefox and Opera is that they are Web browsers, complete Web browsers, and nothing but Web browsers. That complies with the Unix tools philosophy, which requires that each software tool should do exactly one thing and do it really well - ideally, so well that no one ever considers writing an alternative solution. It was Microsoft that decided to blur the borders between Web browser and file system browser (as witness the choice of names "Internet Explorer" and "Windows Explorer"), but that was originally done for legal and business reasons, not for technical ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1
Nowadays we expect a PC to be more or less portable, but that's not of the essence. The key point is that the PDP-1 was intended for dedicated use by a single person. Others could gather round and offer advice, feed paper tape, etc.; but one person sat in the chair and operated the machine in real time.
It's almost impossible, in our day and age, to imagine how different the PDP-1 was from any previous computer.
First: who is 'despised' and 'abused' by non-geeks? Are you talking about school children? I don't believe the school children are doing most of 'tend to invent useful stuff and practical things done reliably', and I don't believe that the reason that non-geeks in schools hate geeks for reason, that geeks are unselfish.
Look at any corporation you know well. Don't the people who pull down really big salaries have "people-oriented" jobs? Sales, marketing, board-level wheeling & dealing? And don't they, overtly or otherwise, look down on the "mere techies" who do the useful work? Maybe you don't recognise this scenario: in which case, thank your lucky stars. Most of us do, I think.
I also don't believe that geeks are unselfish (or at least that all or a large majority of them are).
I compressed my statement, because I didn't want to post an essay with footnotes. The word "unselfish" has connotations as well as its intended denotation. Consider the tragedy of the commons. What I was saying is that a group of geeks/nerds (for lack of a better word) are peculiarly able to recognise the benefits of working together to the advantage of all. That's because they are more capable than non-techies of taking an objective view of things. They aren't necessarily being unselfish in deciding to pool their efforts. But the outcome is still a desirable one.
Precisely. But the fact that the ability to reason *evolved* as a way of winning arguments does not mean we cannot use it for more socially useful purposes today. Actually, I would interpret the evolutionary mechanism as being a lot broader than just winning arguments (although technically that is a sufficient description). For instance, winning an argument over whether X will mate with Y rather than Z. Winning an argument over who should be the leader. Or just winning the ongoing popularity contest to be seen as an interesting, attractive person for whom others would like to do favours.
Alexander Pope summed it up accurately, concisely and poetically in his "Essay on Man", nearly 300 years ago (the 'card' being the compass that shows direction at sea):
"On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale".
We can use logic to reach reliable conclusions only when we agree on the premises and the conditions of argument. In everyday life - which includes business - different people argue from different premises, seeking to persuade other people of the validity of their own conclusions instead of listening to the other people's arguments, which may be just as important if not more so. That's largely because life in our society rewards the selfish individualist far, far more than the unselfish team player. (Although selfish individualists often successfully disguise themselves as unselfish team players).
That's why geeks, nerds, and suchlike types (a) tend to invent useful stuff and get practical things done reliably; (b) are despised and abused by non-geeks. The geek prefers to use language and logic to accomplish concrete tasks, in cooperation with others of like mind (even if only through the media of books, the Internet, etc.) Whereas non-geeks can only use language in the way they instinctively do: to try and get their own way. They are astonished that geeks are so unselfish, but don't (on the whole) admire them for that.
Not enough people ask questions like this, so I'd like to congratulate MouseR for raising the whole issue. When you start a project, all too often "architecture" is understood to mean the design (look and feel) and perhaps what underlying software frameworks and servers you'll use. It's very easy to overlook the fact that development tools are mostly shifting sands - not ideal for building your imperishable monument on top of.
For a start, please note that "classic" HTML is pretty austere. It doesn't really cater for visual design at all, partly because the wise decision was taken to focus on communicating information, and let the client tweak the look-and-feel to his own desires and needs. Thus, the same page of HTML could look entirely different to someone with very short sight, who might choose to make everything look a lot bigger. That philosophy didn't sit well with the commercial brigade who presently set out to extract mountains of money from the Web - nor with artists and all sorts of other folk who want to achieve specific visual effects. But the very simplest way of making sure your Web content remains immune to bitrot is to stick to the simplest possible look-and-feel, which in turn allows you to adopt the very simplest (and thus cheapest and most lasting) toolset.
No blood for oil? Then what will you shed blood for?
So you do actually believe it's fine to kill foreigners so you can keep your higher standard of living? That sounds an absurd question to ask anyone, but I can't see how your post doesn't imply that you do believe it's fine. It's not ethical, though.
Another thing that bothers "foreigners" (i.e. the approximately 6.7 billion, or over 95% of the human race, who are not citizens of the USA) is the inconsistency of a government that loudly insists that all people are equal, while working as hard as it can to make Americans much more equal than others.
Mark Twain summed up the central problem of journalism with his epigram, "Get your facts first... then you can distort 'em as much as you please". But, amusing as it is, this completely misses the point! In the very process of "getting your facts" you have the opportunity - indeed, the obligation - of selecting them from among the infinite number of facts that you could choose. Having selected the facts that you think are most important, there is no longer the slightest need to distort them. The work is already done.
Suppose you are the New York Times, and you are reporting on events in Afghanistan. You have a certain amount of space, so do you write up the IED explosion which killed a couple of NATO soldiers and put a few more in hospital - or do you describe the NATO helicopter raid that killed a dozen villagers and wounded another few dozen? Well, your readers are far more interested in the fate of NATO people (especially if they are from the USA); moreover, they don't particularly want to read about how their glorious forces have accidentally (or otherwise) killed a lot of civilians. So it's a no-brainer - you write up the IED event. After a few years of such a policy, consistently followed, readers get the idea that all that happens in Afghanistan is that NATO soldiers occasionally get blown up. Yes the NYT has accurately reported the facts. It hasn't reported all of them, but its editors could argue that such an attempt would be physically impossible. The only practical way of giving a more balanced impression would be to read, as well as the NYT, a newspaper that takes an anti-NATO, pro-Afghan point of view. But no such newspaper can survive commercially in the US market, because it wouldn't sell enough copies (even if it were allowed to go on operating for long).
Indeed, the Wikileaks documents currently under discussion are subject to such a filtering effect too. Remember, all those documents were written by American officials, for US government consumption. You won't find many mentions in there of atrocities by our forces - even if the US authorities in Afghanistan or Washington were aware of such atrocities, they wouldn't put them into messages with such a low level of security. What you can expect to find is a fairly high level of unguarded opinions - either honest or carefully angled to make a particular desired impression.
The BBC certainly is massively biased (in an institutional way). It's less a matter of overt censorship than of a pervasive worldview that makes censorship unnecessary. Presumably they don't even hire people who might be members of the "awkward squad", or who don't appear to share the standard politically correct establishment values.
As a result, I think it's very inaccurate to describe the BBC's bias as "left wing". I would call it "establishment", which of course does beg the question of whether the British establishment itself nowadays is left wing. Certainly not in the old-fashioned sense of fighting to improve the lot of the working classes. Britain doesn't have a left wing or a right wing any more - certainly anyone who falls under those descriptions can only be on the fringes, without much influence. The Labour and Conservative parties are both very similar - middle-of-the-road, managerial, bien-pensant bourgeois. (Many people describe themselves as working class who obviously aren't, on cursory inspection of their financial means and chosen way of life).
If I had to sum up the BBC's political orientation in a single word, it would have to be "smug". Turn on almost any program, and you can practically hear the journalists, newsreaders, and producers thinking "O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican". (Or, as it might be, "O God, I give thee thanks that we are enlightened Westerners, and not as the rest of men - nasty dictators like Assad or Qadafi, religious fanatics like the Muslims, repressive communists like the Chinese, bigoted sexists/racists/elitists...")
And then you complain that rich people behave badly!
What *do* you like?
Oh yes, of course - money.
You Americans are funny.
You don't like monarchy.
You don't like aristocracy.
You don't like socialism.
What *do* you like?