I think he was saying that the push buttons stopped working because the computer system crashed.
I have seen nothing in any of the reports that talked about any computer system malfunction. All reports of malfunctions were mechanical: mats and stuck pedals.
What formal safety and reliability requirements and testing are required for drive-by-wire systems in cars?
Don't you think that the threat of huge recalls is enough of an incentive? And why regulate anything if there is no evidence that there is a problem?
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
College mostly is what you make it. Yes, you can go through MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, learn little, and still get a degree. But if you do that, that's your own fault. Many people do get useful skills out of those institutions.
Or does it? Since experience and personal contacts mean much more than degrees, the earlier you can get a job, the better.
Except, of course, that college is an excellent place for getting to know people that you can later network with. You may have missed this opportunity when you were in college and grad school, but other people take advantage of it and it helps them a lot.
I spent a lot of time to get my advanced degrees, but I have no illusions about their actual value.
Value in what sense? If your goal is to maximize your wealth, then it's no secret that you shouldn't get advanced degrees; it's something many graduate schools tell you explicitly (college, however, does pay off).
But not everybody lives in this world to maximize their wealth anyway. People who get advanced degrees don't do it to do well in the workforce, they do it because they are interested in the subject.
So except for the need to use AT&T (which, again, I'm not interested in), there seems to be _less_ vendor lock-in with the iPad
By buying the iPad, you're locked into Apple's products: apps you buy on the iPad will only work on Apple products, books you buy for the iPad will only work on Apple products. That's what "vendor lock-in" means.
You seem to be trying to argue that you get more content for the iPad, but that's not true either. Among other things, Android, Flash, and J2ME don't run run on the iPad or iPod. All you get is pretty Apple re-makes of some of them, but not others.
All Macs come with XCode and an extensive set of developer tools = for free!
That's not "free", you pay for it as part of the hardware and software.
I'd love to see some development tools actually on the iPad.
Why not just get an Android-based pad? The development tools are free, nobody needs to give you permission to load things onto it, it's easier to program, and it's cheaper.
And I hear people talking all the time that OS X is a joy to program for, and not particularly hard.
To each their own. It is a 25 year old programming language and library design, however.
The iPod/iPhone/iPad is in the form factor that's best suited to appliance. That is, most (90+%) just want them to work.
Yes, and lots of other people realized that as well, which is why they have been developing tablets too.
Do we complain how the Kindle or past Nokia phones are essentially closed to the average person the same way? Why is this reserved for Apple?
"We" do complain about the Kindle. Nokia phones, on the other hand, have allowed installation of software with far fewer restrictions than iPhone/iPod.
At least in one case, the brakes failed, the accelerator stuck, and the person didn't know how to turn the car off because it was a rental and used a push-button ignition
Accelerators frequently get stuck no matter what the technology and you need to know what to do in that case before you get behind the wheel. If you don't know how to turn off the car, you are responsible for the consequences, not the car company.
Also, they couldn't put it into neutral because it had a push-button shifter as well.
So? Why couldn't they put it in neutral with a push-button shifter?
but this is a monumental fuck-up on the part of Toyota. I think that we can do the push-button stuff CORRECTLY, but this isn't the way to do it.
No, it's not. You are responsible for the car you choose, not Toyota. That guy chose a 250hp car with a complicated user interface and he killed himself and other people. He was the guilty party, not Toyota.
When I bought a car, I looked for one with traditional mechanical controls because I find them easier to use. But I don't want a world in which every single design decision is prescribed by the government or case law.
The Vatican says that aliens are not incompatible with catholicism (and they were created, like us, by the same God).
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Catholicism is responsible for the the destruction of the civilizations of South America (among others), so Europe and Catholicism are a prime example of destruction of other civilizations based on religious motives.
If Europe and Catholicism are models, then aliens may simply send us gray goo that tries to convert us to the flying spaghetti monster and ends up killing anybody who refuses.
Not sure, but I think there are many amino acids, and at least 2 isomers of each, and it's just arbitrary that we happen to use the ones we do
It's probably not arbitrary. And we actually use both to some degree.
This is what makes the alien disease/alien predator idea unrealistic--highly unlikley that they'd be able to get all the nutrients they need from our biochemistry.
There's at worst a 50/50 chance that they use the same amino acids as us. Furthermore, even terrestrial organisms can digest D-amino acids already and may just need a little boost. They might have bacteria to help them with the digestion. Or they might simply not need protein in their food and live off the sugars and lipids.
And then they do.... what, exactly? If we're talking about economic incentive, they still need to send massive ships here
Not necessarily. They might simply want to replicate their civilization here. Or they might want to use earth to build a massive computer and send back data. Maybe they are religious extremists.
Throwing a magical "nanotechnology" thingy into the mix doesn't really change anything.
Well, it greatly lowers the cost of getting to another planet. And there are many reasons for doing that that don't involve sending any physical object back.
Poisons don't "target". A poison is just a compound.
Chemical poisons are "just compounds". Biological poisons, on the other hand, are usually highly evolved and specific.
This "alien species" that's walking around with the poison might call it "spit" or "blood" or "that crap in my eye in the morning", but its probably gonna kill us all the same.
That's a possibility, but it's not all that likely. Most biological organisms are poisonous only because they evolved specialized poisons.
We don't know what Abraham's view of god's instruction was, so it's not fair to assert that he considered it moral because it was a command from his god.
Well, then Abraham wasn't a moral person even though he is portrayed as such as Christianity. No matter which of the possibilities you choose, none of them amount to moral behavior.
Of course, as it's a fairy-story, it's as useful an argument as one about whether Cinderella considered corsets moral or not.
Since nearly a billion Christians derive their morality and their day-to-day behavior from these kinds of fairy tales, discussing their morality is important.
My personal view is that in the early formation of societies, one had to codify for-the-common-good (apparent good, not always actual good) in whatever ways would work. [...]
Well, that's a nice view, but a billion Christians and a billion Muslims want to impose their anachronistic "whatever works" rules on modern societies. So we have to deal with these people. Many of them are, in fact, capable of rational discourse and understanding, so asking these questions is reasonable.
Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones?
That analogy doesn't work. Among other things, aliens can't mate with us and they're probably not going to carry pathogens that can infect us, and those two factors strongly influenced the outcome of European colonization.
(Like Europeans, aliens may be religious nuts bent on destroying our religion and replacing it with their own, but that seems somewhat unlikely.)
I think it's a pretty ignorant statement to presuppose that any other civilization in the universe will necessarily irreparably rape and exploit their planet for resources as badly as we humans have.
I think it's a pretty safe bet. Nor is it necessarily as negative as you make it out to be. Europe "raped" its continent, radically altering the ecology, exterminating and introducing species, and mining natural resources to near depletion. Is Europe a barren desert now? Is it populated by impoverished nomads? No.
Progress requires using the resources you have, even at the planetary level. Altering the environment isn't intrinsically bad, as long as you don't kill yourself.
What's nearly impossible is finding one with a biosphere that we can survive in without basically obliterating it and dropping down earth biologicals. Most things on such a planet would poison us.
Most biological poisons are highly evolved and specialized. It's unlikely that any alien species would have developed poisons that target humans. Other than that, life throughout the universe probably uses mostly the same sugars, amino acids, and DNA. There may be some unusual compounds, but they would just be indigestible.
The cost of an interstellar colonisation flight would be small compared to the value of another solar system
Value to whom? Investors get no ROI.
and the cost of not expanding to other solar systems would be the death of our species.
Sufficiently advanced civilizations may not care. Remember that even at the individual level, many people choose not to procreate and don't fear death. An advanced civilization may realize that a good few million years on their own planet, maybe even without a lot of technology, is valuable enough in its own right.
the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simple: there aren't any...
That's not the answer to the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox is the question of why there aren't any. I think you are implying that they haven't evolved, but that is statistically nearly impossible.
So if aliens invade, it will be for solely their own entertainment, not for economic reasons.
You're thinking "Mars Attacks". But an invasion might consist of a bit of nanotechnology together with some retroviruses and parasites. That's possibly only a gram of payload.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he was saying that the push buttons stopped working because the computer system crashed.
I have seen nothing in any of the reports that talked about any computer system malfunction. All reports of malfunctions were mechanical: mats and stuck pedals.
What formal safety and reliability requirements and testing are required for drive-by-wire systems in cars?
Don't you think that the threat of huge recalls is enough of an incentive? And why regulate anything if there is no evidence that there is a problem?
Tell you what: you provide evidence that "Apple gets interfaces nearly perfect", and then I'll pick it apart, OK?
Alternatively, put some computer novice or even Windows-only user in front of a Mac and watch them fail; you'll find numerous usability problems.
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
College mostly is what you make it. Yes, you can go through MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, learn little, and still get a degree. But if you do that, that's your own fault. Many people do get useful skills out of those institutions.
Or does it? Since experience and personal contacts mean much more than degrees, the earlier you can get a job, the better.
Except, of course, that college is an excellent place for getting to know people that you can later network with. You may have missed this opportunity when you were in college and grad school, but other people take advantage of it and it helps them a lot.
I spent a lot of time to get my advanced degrees, but I have no illusions about their actual value.
Value in what sense? If your goal is to maximize your wealth, then it's no secret that you shouldn't get advanced degrees; it's something many graduate schools tell you explicitly (college, however, does pay off).
But not everybody lives in this world to maximize their wealth anyway. People who get advanced degrees don't do it to do well in the workforce, they do it because they are interested in the subject.
So except for the need to use AT&T (which, again, I'm not interested in), there seems to be _less_ vendor lock-in with the iPad
By buying the iPad, you're locked into Apple's products: apps you buy on the iPad will only work on Apple products, books you buy for the iPad will only work on Apple products. That's what "vendor lock-in" means.
You seem to be trying to argue that you get more content for the iPad, but that's not true either. Among other things, Android, Flash, and J2ME don't run run on the iPad or iPod. All you get is pretty Apple re-makes of some of them, but not others.
All Macs come with XCode and an extensive set of developer tools = for free!
That's not "free", you pay for it as part of the hardware and software.
I'd love to see some development tools actually on the iPad.
Why not just get an Android-based pad? The development tools are free, nobody needs to give you permission to load things onto it, it's easier to program, and it's cheaper.
And I hear people talking all the time that OS X is a joy to program for, and not particularly hard.
To each their own. It is a 25 year old programming language and library design, however.
The iPod/iPhone/iPad is in the form factor that's best suited to appliance. That is, most (90+%) just want them to work.
Yes, and lots of other people realized that as well, which is why they have been developing tablets too.
Do we complain how the Kindle or past Nokia phones are essentially closed to the average person the same way? Why is this reserved for Apple?
"We" do complain about the Kindle. Nokia phones, on the other hand, have allowed installation of software with far fewer restrictions than iPhone/iPod.
But let me tell you, it's no myth: usually Apple gets interfaces near perfect.
Let me tell you, it is a myth: Apple has numerous usability problems.
In Soviet Russia, ACTA fucks you. Oh, also in Europe and the US.
it's a very simple and reliable steel cable.
Actually, mechanical accelerators do get stuck fairly frequently, and as a driver, you need to know what to do.
If your car is so complicated that you can't figure it out, get a simpler car. You are responsible, not Toyota.
At least in one case, the brakes failed, the accelerator stuck, and the person didn't know how to turn the car off because it was a rental and used a push-button ignition
Accelerators frequently get stuck no matter what the technology and you need to know what to do in that case before you get behind the wheel. If you don't know how to turn off the car, you are responsible for the consequences, not the car company.
Also, they couldn't put it into neutral because it had a push-button shifter as well.
So? Why couldn't they put it in neutral with a push-button shifter?
but this is a monumental fuck-up on the part of Toyota. I think that we can do the push-button stuff CORRECTLY, but this isn't the way to do it.
No, it's not. You are responsible for the car you choose, not Toyota. That guy chose a 250hp car with a complicated user interface and he killed himself and other people. He was the guilty party, not Toyota.
When I bought a car, I looked for one with traditional mechanical controls because I find them easier to use. But I don't want a world in which every single design decision is prescribed by the government or case law.
Any browser has to support sending requests to arbitrary ports; any browser that doesn't is broken.
The problem is with services that accept such requests as valid on ports that aren't intended to run http.
I would reconsider if I were you.
Reconsider what exactly?
The Vatican says that aliens are not incompatible with catholicism (and they were created, like us, by the same God).
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Catholicism is responsible for the the destruction of the civilizations of South America (among others), so Europe and Catholicism are a prime example of destruction of other civilizations based on religious motives.
If Europe and Catholicism are models, then aliens may simply send us gray goo that tries to convert us to the flying spaghetti monster and ends up killing anybody who refuses.
Did you guys totally lose it finally? OS X _IS_ Mach/Objective C/NeXTSTep/BSD Lite for God's sake.
Whichever way you want to put it, it's 25 year old technology and it shows: it's quite primitive.
If you crash your data is gone.
Yes, in Objective-C, when you crash, your data is gone. That's a serious problem with Objective-C. In C# and Java, when you crash, you can recover.
And of course OS X is beautifully designed, none of the back compat cruft that makes one want to stay away from Win32.
OS X has all the backwards compatibility cruft with C, Mach, and NeXTStep--and the backwards compatibility with C is a real problem.
Where C# wins over ObjC though is its similarity to Java (which in turn is fairly comfortable to C++/C programmers).
More importantly, C# has runtime safety, something that Objective-C lacks. Lack of runtime safety is a very serious limitation.
Not sure, but I think there are many amino acids, and at least 2 isomers of each, and it's just arbitrary that we happen to use the ones we do
It's probably not arbitrary. And we actually use both to some degree.
This is what makes the alien disease/alien predator idea unrealistic--highly unlikley that they'd be able to get all the nutrients they need from our biochemistry.
There's at worst a 50/50 chance that they use the same amino acids as us. Furthermore, even terrestrial organisms can digest D-amino acids already and may just need a little boost. They might have bacteria to help them with the digestion. Or they might simply not need protein in their food and live off the sugars and lipids.
And then they do .... what, exactly? If we're talking about economic incentive, they still need to send massive ships here
Not necessarily. They might simply want to replicate their civilization here. Or they might want to use earth to build a massive computer and send back data. Maybe they are religious extremists.
Throwing a magical "nanotechnology" thingy into the mix doesn't really change anything.
Well, it greatly lowers the cost of getting to another planet. And there are many reasons for doing that that don't involve sending any physical object back.
Poisons don't "target". A poison is just a compound.
Chemical poisons are "just compounds". Biological poisons, on the other hand, are usually highly evolved and specific.
This "alien species" that's walking around with the poison might call it "spit" or "blood" or "that crap in my eye in the morning", but its probably gonna kill us all the same.
That's a possibility, but it's not all that likely. Most biological organisms are poisonous only because they evolved specialized poisons.
We don't know what Abraham's view of god's instruction was, so it's not fair to assert that he considered it moral because it was a command from his god.
Well, then Abraham wasn't a moral person even though he is portrayed as such as Christianity. No matter which of the possibilities you choose, none of them amount to moral behavior.
Of course, as it's a fairy-story, it's as useful an argument as one about whether Cinderella considered corsets moral or not.
Since nearly a billion Christians derive their morality and their day-to-day behavior from these kinds of fairy tales, discussing their morality is important.
My personal view is that in the early formation of societies, one had to codify for-the-common-good (apparent good, not always actual good) in whatever ways would work. [...]
Well, that's a nice view, but a billion Christians and a billion Muslims want to impose their anachronistic "whatever works" rules on modern societies. So we have to deal with these people. Many of them are, in fact, capable of rational discourse and understanding, so asking these questions is reasonable.
It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes,
Seems to me Apple is pulling the s*** with iTunes, resulting in price hikes, more DRM, and even less availability.
Anyway, maybe we'll get lucky and Amazon and Apple destroy each other.
Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones?
That analogy doesn't work. Among other things, aliens can't mate with us and they're probably not going to carry pathogens that can infect us, and those two factors strongly influenced the outcome of European colonization.
(Like Europeans, aliens may be religious nuts bent on destroying our religion and replacing it with their own, but that seems somewhat unlikely.)
I think it's a pretty ignorant statement to presuppose that any other civilization in the universe will necessarily irreparably rape and exploit their planet for resources as badly as we humans have.
I think it's a pretty safe bet. Nor is it necessarily as negative as you make it out to be. Europe "raped" its continent, radically altering the ecology, exterminating and introducing species, and mining natural resources to near depletion. Is Europe a barren desert now? Is it populated by impoverished nomads? No.
Progress requires using the resources you have, even at the planetary level. Altering the environment isn't intrinsically bad, as long as you don't kill yourself.
What's nearly impossible is finding one with a biosphere that we can survive in without basically obliterating it and dropping down earth biologicals. Most things on such a planet would poison us.
Most biological poisons are highly evolved and specialized. It's unlikely that any alien species would have developed poisons that target humans. Other than that, life throughout the universe probably uses mostly the same sugars, amino acids, and DNA. There may be some unusual compounds, but they would just be indigestible.
The cost of an interstellar colonisation flight would be small compared to the value of another solar system
Value to whom? Investors get no ROI.
and the cost of not expanding to other solar systems would be the death of our species.
Sufficiently advanced civilizations may not care. Remember that even at the individual level, many people choose not to procreate and don't fear death. An advanced civilization may realize that a good few million years on their own planet, maybe even without a lot of technology, is valuable enough in its own right.
the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simple: there aren't any...
That's not the answer to the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox is the question of why there aren't any. I think you are implying that they haven't evolved, but that is statistically nearly impossible.
So if aliens invade, it will be for solely their own entertainment, not for economic reasons.
You're thinking "Mars Attacks". But an invasion might consist of a bit of nanotechnology together with some retroviruses and parasites. That's possibly only a gram of payload.