But if you remember that a brain is nothing else but a network of trigger-no [lots of pseudoscientific drivel]
Yes, flashing red lights can cause epilepsy. How does that relate to this case?
What matters is what that person believes. Because that will cause a feedback loop of self-fulfillment, that makes it true anyway (for the inner model in her brain).
Her psychological problems are her own responsibility.
Reality is irrelevant for fixing such a problem. What counts is if that person believes it in her inner model, and if it makes her life bad from that point of view.
Fixing her problem is her problem; neither the supermarket nor I should have to pay a dime for it.
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group". It is the arbitrariness of these criteria that makes it genocide.
Genocide is a result of one group of people bullying another group of people to death on a massive scale. Race is just used as an excuse, as is religion, to empower bullies to act.
So race does have something to do with genocide: it is used as the "excuse" for killing people.
This is why I said it's more accurate to consider the bullies a separate race than to consider people with different physical appearance a separate race because honestly it's the bullies who are going around doing the violent acts.
Then you're part of that "race of bullies", just like me and 99% of all other human beings: we all are prewired for racism and violence. Human beings wouldn't have survived as long and evolved as much if we hadn't. If you aren't prewired for racism and violence, there's something wrong with you. We can control it through compassion, practice, education, reason, and logic, but we can't deny it.
Actually, your diatribe against bullies really shows you to be quite normal in your aggressive and racist tendencies yourself: you simply draw lines between people in a way that you think is socially more acceptable
Looking at people today, you might conclude that nobody benefits from obesity. But the physiology that makes us obese probably allowed us to survive where other hominids died out.
It's not like your enemy is going to hire the mercenary that is of the opposite race to kill you.
"Mercenaries" and "hiring" are fairly new concepts. People used to lived in small social groups and fought and killed each other over scarce resources. Trusting people based on similarity of appearance may have been a good heuristic indeed.
Racism is just not a good security policy
Probably not today. But it probably was for most of human evolution.
but will run Linux... which is a server or desktop OS
Linux is a kernel. And it's widely used on embedded devices. Linux has been tuned far more for embedded devices than iPhone OS.
Apple didn't use their desktop version of Mac OS X on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad for a good reason: portable, touch devices need customized interfaces otherwise it just sucks
And that's why WePad uses a customized interface: Android.
I tried using a Blackberry and was shocked to see the tiny cursor that I had to control with a tiny trackball.... Seriously, WTF?
Laugh if you like, but those interfaces work pretty well on non-touchscreen devices. And many people like non-touchscreen devices for messaging phones.
Obviously competitors have realized that it's worth it to come out with clone or me-too products much faster than they did in the past with the iPhone
Lightweight tablets like this have been in development for years. Apple neither invented the category nor the technology. Ditto with touch screen phones like the iPhone.
Apple's game is for Jobs to push his people to get out a well-engineered product a little faster than competitors. And Apple can also beat competitors to market because they are willing to charge a premium.
None of that has anything to do with "innovation", it's just a market segment and business strategy.
The bandwidth google uses is paid for: by ISP customers. Those customers just happen to choose to go to Google. Furthermore, there is additional accounting of bandwidth done at the point where large ISPs interconnect; any imbalances are negotiated and paid for there. But, of course, ISPs don't have any leverage there either, because if the throttled connections to Google, their customers would go elsewhere.
What these ISPs want is to impose additional costs on Google (which Google somehow has to recoup) so that their services become more attractive in comparison. These companies want government to intervene to give their uncompetitive offerings a boost in the market.
And they are right: Google turns them into dumb pipes. And why not? These companies are there to provide cheap connectivity. We don't want them in the content business and we should actually pass laws preventing telecom companies from doing anyhing with content.
Of course, that's crazy talk. I'm certain of this, though: there's not a single powerful Leftist anywhere to be found in the US government.
And there never has been. The US has always been rather conservative and libertarian.
The only new element is a certain degree of corporatism. You are not going to get rid of that by putting "powerful Leftists" into government. If you are seriously concerned about corporatism (and you should be), then the way to oppose it is by making people realize that corporatism is anti-free market, anti-liberty, and anti-American.
US presidents aren't kings, they have to play by a lot of rules and make compromises.
Bush bought his ability to alienate the media by starting two ill-conceived wars and tax reductions that have nearly bankrupted this country. He left an economy in shambles, and a US that was hated around the world and had become known as a hotbed of human rights abuse.
Obama is buying his ability to pass health care legislation, financial reform, and international agreements by being nice to big media interests.
That's the nature of political compromise. Now, which of the two compromises do you prefer?
Why do people like you have this idiotic dualistic thinking? Obama was the lesser of two evils, and most people who voted for him understood that. That's the way US elections work. It's a compromise. Get used to it and stop whining.
In the US, even the election pressure is largely blunted by the nature of the winner-takes-all system. In Europe individual votes matter far more to the politicians.
Yeah, the kind of system that allowed the Nazis to come to power. The kind of system that allowed military dictatorships to exist in Europe until the 1970's and has caused democracies in Europe to collapse again and again. Thanks, but I'll take the US system any day.
Most progressive legislation in modern history has originated in the US, and I expect copyright overhaul will be the same. At some point, the US is going to realize how stupid something like ACTA is and US legislators will blow it away. And then there will be much chest beating from European governments and companies. It may take another decade, and we need to fight for it politically, but it's going to happen. And, as usual, Europeans are going to follow suit a few years later, whining and complaining all the way, until they have convinced themselves that they invented it all.
Most of the world don't choose to have Ferraris. That doesn't mean they wouldn't want one were price not a consideration.
A Ferrari is something an middle aged male with an inferiority complex uses to pick up tricks in. You drive one of those and people just laugh at you. On normal roads, it's a horror to drive, and on the test track, most people wouldn't know what to do with it.
But it's more obvious that people are in love with Apple when it comes to iPods and iPhones. They're everywhere!
So when Windows is everywhere, it's because it's cheap (except, of course, when people like you argue that it's not any cheaper than Mac), but when iPhone is everywhere it's because people love it? Geez, can you make up your mind?
In fact, most people buy iPhones and iPods for the same reason they buy Coca Cola and McDonalds: it's a brand name they know and they often don't know any better.
And, yeah, you're right: if they become nouveau riche, it is the same kind of person who rushes out and buys a Ferrari.
And what exactly does that mean? The iPhone has a comparatively small number of simple widgets that developers don't even bother using consistently. It has a fairly limited set of libraries and some synchronization frameworks tied to Apple's crappy desktop apps and services.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on
Many of the iPhone games already fall into that category, and often it makes no difference whether people write it in Objective-C or anything else: they still use the touch screen and multi-touch wrong.
It's a mobile phone with an already iffy battery life and a tiny screen. Are you really going to play games on that? I'm not. I bought a bunch of games for my iPhone and hardly ever played them. Same with Android.
In terms of the things that count, productivity apps, communication, media, etc., Android beats iPhone hands down; iPhone is too locked down. Look at some of the gyrations that iPhone and iPad apps have to go through just to get PDF and Office files up/downloaded. It's ridiculous and it's not going to get fixed in iPhone OS 4.0.
You overestimate how much the world is in love with Apple. The vast majority of computer users, by choice, don't use Apple. And many of the remaining Apple users have at best mixed feelings about the company.
So you're saying that implementing a rendering engine according to existing specs constitutes "innovation" for Apple? Sadly, you're right. I think most people would call that "programming" though,
This means that there's no way to write an efficient program to beat the game, unless P=NP.
All these games are small finite size in practice, so asymptotic complexity results tell you nothing about how difficult it is to solve them. In addition, the idea that "P = efficient program" is utter nonsense; for large problems, even quadratic complexity is a serious problem. A realistic notion these days is that a reasonable asymptotic complexity for "efficient programs" is no worse than n log^k n for small k. Anything larger than that and it won't scale. The converse is also nonsense. Just because a particular problem is NP hard in general doesn't mean that the problem instances you encounter in practice are hard cases. Furthermore, the assumption that you need to find an optimal solution is also wrong. In fact, in any competitive game, all you really care about is beating the other guy.
P=NP is a neat theoretical issue in computer science, but its practical significance has been completely overstated.
IBM sent a list of patents that the emulator potentially infringes. That's not the same as "asserting" those patents. Asserting them would mean going to court of them. You can talk to them, remind them of the pledge, and ask them not to assert the patents that fall under the pledge. However, since the emulator may infringe dozens of other patents, that may not solve your problem.
Also, IBM isn't a monolithic entity. Parts of IBM may dislike the pledge and try to undermine it; they will only stop if high-up management calls them off. So, it's good if you make this a public relations issue for them, but let's not jump to conclusions. They haven't broken the pledge yet.
The iPad is good for reading and some type of games. But Apple didn't figure out how to make a simple user interface, they just limited the device to only being able to do simple things well. Being simplistic is not the same as being simple.
Yes, Apple, there is a reason other systems have buttons and UI standards for things like Menu and Cancel; on the iPad, every app does this differently. And although file systems and explorers suck, what sucks even worse is if every application on the machine has to implement it's own file browser and network file system interface because the OS doesn't. And although one can live without multitasking, it really is a pain.
It's not just iWork that suffers: PDF viewers and annotators, offline web pages, split browser windows, blogging tools, sticky notes, etc. -- all of them have confusing and messy workarounds for the limitations of the iPhone OS and still don't work quite right.
The iPad is actually a great device for a limited set of functions. But Apple needlessly screwed up usability and the OS. Maybe iPhone OS4 will fix sone of these problems.
Of course it's mostly the application programs and libraries that get hacked. But the Windows kernel is ultimately responsible for those vulnerabilities because it defines the security and protection model that application programmers have to use. A well-designed kernel should make it hard to write software that is vulnerable.
If it's anything like Singularity, then the point is to exploit static memory safety analysis (which is possible for sandboxed managed code) to avoid the overhead of virtual memory protection.
That's been tried many times before, including with runtimes like Java, with signed code, and even with program analysis.
It's going to fail. Most of the commercial processors have virtual memory hardware. Even if eliminating it would result in speedups, no processor without virtual memory hardware is going to be optimized as much as the mainstream processors that have it. As a result, in practice, this is going to be slower. And even if they succeed in that, we would have to throw away most of the software and compilers we already have; it's not going to happen.
A much more sensible way is to add some kind of pointer verification to our processors. That way, existing programs could run more safely without a rewrite. In fact, that's already feasible for many programs even just using existing hardware, and hardware changes would be minimal.
These Microsoft projects are just academic; they are not going to lead anywhere. But even as academic interests, they don't really deliver much innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you remember that a brain is nothing else but a network of trigger-no [lots of pseudoscientific drivel]
Yes, flashing red lights can cause epilepsy. How does that relate to this case?
What matters is what that person believes. Because that will cause a feedback loop of self-fulfillment, that makes it true anyway (for the inner model in her brain).
Her psychological problems are her own responsibility.
Reality is irrelevant for fixing such a problem. What counts is if that person believes it in her inner model, and if it makes her life bad from that point of view.
Fixing her problem is her problem; neither the supermarket nor I should have to pay a dime for it.
Race has nothing to do with genocide.
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group". It is the arbitrariness of these criteria that makes it genocide.
Genocide is a result of one group of people bullying another group of people to death on a massive scale. Race is just used as an excuse, as is religion, to empower bullies to act.
So race does have something to do with genocide: it is used as the "excuse" for killing people.
This is why I said it's more accurate to consider the bullies a separate race than to consider people with different physical appearance a separate race because honestly it's the bullies who are going around doing the violent acts.
Then you're part of that "race of bullies", just like me and 99% of all other human beings: we all are prewired for racism and violence. Human beings wouldn't have survived as long and evolved as much if we hadn't. If you aren't prewired for racism and violence, there's something wrong with you. We can control it through compassion, practice, education, reason, and logic, but we can't deny it.
Actually, your diatribe against bullies really shows you to be quite normal in your aggressive and racist tendencies yourself: you simply draw lines between people in a way that you think is socially more acceptable
Race does not have any impact on evolution
That's such a broad statement that it's meaningless.
What is true is that "race" isn't a well defined evolutionary concept like "species".
But "race" has had plenty of effect on evolution because millions of people have gotten killed based on their race.
Because the enemy is going to come in a beautiful form that you'll accept and slowly poison you.
Have you had relationship trouble recently??
Nobody really benefits from racism
Looking at people today, you might conclude that nobody benefits from obesity. But the physiology that makes us obese probably allowed us to survive where other hominids died out.
It's not like your enemy is going to hire the mercenary that is of the opposite race to kill you.
"Mercenaries" and "hiring" are fairly new concepts. People used to lived in small social groups and fought and killed each other over scarce resources. Trusting people based on similarity of appearance may have been a good heuristic indeed.
Racism is just not a good security policy
Probably not today. But it probably was for most of human evolution.
Is it going to be multi-touch capable
I don't see why not. Android supports it in places where Apple hasn't grabbed iffy patents.
and actually responsive, rather than barely touch aware and laggy?
Bullshit. Android devices are responsive and use touch extensively. Like iPhone and iPad, they're improving every generation.
Try some of the software turds running on iPad and you'll see that Apple developers don't walk on water either.
but will run Linux... which is a server or desktop OS
Linux is a kernel. And it's widely used on embedded devices. Linux has been tuned far more for embedded devices than iPhone OS.
Apple didn't use their desktop version of Mac OS X on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad for a good reason: portable, touch devices need customized interfaces otherwise it just sucks
And that's why WePad uses a customized interface: Android.
I tried using a Blackberry and was shocked to see the tiny cursor that I had to control with a tiny trackball.... Seriously, WTF?
Laugh if you like, but those interfaces work pretty well on non-touchscreen devices. And many people like non-touchscreen devices for messaging phones.
Obviously competitors have realized that it's worth it to come out with clone or me-too products much faster than they did in the past with the iPhone
Lightweight tablets like this have been in development for years. Apple neither invented the category nor the technology. Ditto with touch screen phones like the iPhone.
Apple's game is for Jobs to push his people to get out a well-engineered product a little faster than competitors. And Apple can also beat competitors to market because they are willing to charge a premium.
None of that has anything to do with "innovation", it's just a market segment and business strategy.
The bandwidth google uses is paid for: by ISP customers. Those customers just happen to choose to go to Google. Furthermore, there is additional accounting of bandwidth done at the point where large ISPs interconnect; any imbalances are negotiated and paid for there. But, of course, ISPs don't have any leverage there either, because if the throttled connections to Google, their customers would go elsewhere.
What these ISPs want is to impose additional costs on Google (which Google somehow has to recoup) so that their services become more attractive in comparison. These companies want government to intervene to give their uncompetitive offerings a boost in the market.
And they are right: Google turns them into dumb pipes. And why not? These companies are there to provide cheap connectivity. We don't want them in the content business and we should actually pass laws preventing telecom companies from doing anyhing with content.
Of course, that's crazy talk. I'm certain of this, though: there's not a single powerful Leftist anywhere to be found in the US government.
And there never has been. The US has always been rather conservative and libertarian.
The only new element is a certain degree of corporatism. You are not going to get rid of that by putting "powerful Leftists" into government. If you are seriously concerned about corporatism (and you should be), then the way to oppose it is by making people realize that corporatism is anti-free market, anti-liberty, and anti-American.
US presidents aren't kings, they have to play by a lot of rules and make compromises.
Bush bought his ability to alienate the media by starting two ill-conceived wars and tax reductions that have nearly bankrupted this country. He left an economy in shambles, and a US that was hated around the world and had become known as a hotbed of human rights abuse.
Obama is buying his ability to pass health care legislation, financial reform, and international agreements by being nice to big media interests.
That's the nature of political compromise. Now, which of the two compromises do you prefer?
Why do people like you have this idiotic dualistic thinking? Obama was the lesser of two evils, and most people who voted for him understood that. That's the way US elections work. It's a compromise. Get used to it and stop whining.
In the US, even the election pressure is largely blunted by the nature of the winner-takes-all system. In Europe individual votes matter far more to the politicians.
Yeah, the kind of system that allowed the Nazis to come to power. The kind of system that allowed military dictatorships to exist in Europe until the 1970's and has caused democracies in Europe to collapse again and again. Thanks, but I'll take the US system any day.
Most progressive legislation in modern history has originated in the US, and I expect copyright overhaul will be the same. At some point, the US is going to realize how stupid something like ACTA is and US legislators will blow it away. And then there will be much chest beating from European governments and companies. It may take another decade, and we need to fight for it politically, but it's going to happen. And, as usual, Europeans are going to follow suit a few years later, whining and complaining all the way, until they have convinced themselves that they invented it all.
I didn't say anything about Windows.
You wrote: "Now I find that when PC owners see my Mac, they are interested and often say they'd like a Mac"
Not every product sells for the same set of reasons.
Indeed not. But that doesn't mean that you get to make up things as you go along either.
In fact, most iPhone users are first-time buyers; they didn't know whether they would love it, they just acted based on recommendations.
Most of the world don't choose to have Ferraris. That doesn't mean they wouldn't want one were price not a consideration.
A Ferrari is something an middle aged male with an inferiority complex uses to pick up tricks in. You drive one of those and people just laugh at you. On normal roads, it's a horror to drive, and on the test track, most people wouldn't know what to do with it.
But it's more obvious that people are in love with Apple when it comes to iPods and iPhones. They're everywhere!
So when Windows is everywhere, it's because it's cheap (except, of course, when people like you argue that it's not any cheaper than Mac), but when iPhone is everywhere it's because people love it? Geez, can you make up your mind?
In fact, most people buy iPhones and iPods for the same reason they buy Coca Cola and McDonalds: it's a brand name they know and they often don't know any better.
And, yeah, you're right: if they become nouveau riche, it is the same kind of person who rushes out and buys a Ferrari.
He wants apps written for the iPhone
And what exactly does that mean? The iPhone has a comparatively small number of simple widgets that developers don't even bother using consistently. It has a fairly limited set of libraries and some synchronization frameworks tied to Apple's crappy desktop apps and services.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on
Many of the iPhone games already fall into that category, and often it makes no difference whether people write it in Objective-C or anything else: they still use the touch screen and multi-touch wrong.
It's a mobile phone with an already iffy battery life and a tiny screen. Are you really going to play games on that? I'm not. I bought a bunch of games for my iPhone and hardly ever played them. Same with Android.
In terms of the things that count, productivity apps, communication, media, etc., Android beats iPhone hands down; iPhone is too locked down. Look at some of the gyrations that iPhone and iPad apps have to go through just to get PDF and Office files up/downloaded. It's ridiculous and it's not going to get fixed in iPhone OS 4.0.
everyone else is in love with Steve's Apple.
You overestimate how much the world is in love with Apple. The vast majority of computer users, by choice, don't use Apple. And many of the remaining Apple users have at best mixed feelings about the company.
In-app ads are nothing new; most other platforms have them.
What is new is that Apple is trying to grab this market for themselves instead of leaving the choice up to the application developers.
So you're saying that implementing a rendering engine according to existing specs constitutes "innovation" for Apple? Sadly, you're right. I think most people would call that "programming" though,
This means that there's no way to write an efficient program to beat the game, unless P=NP.
All these games are small finite size in practice, so asymptotic complexity results tell you nothing about how difficult it is to solve them. In addition, the idea that "P = efficient program" is utter nonsense; for large problems, even quadratic complexity is a serious problem. A realistic notion these days is that a reasonable asymptotic complexity for "efficient programs" is no worse than n log^k n for small k. Anything larger than that and it won't scale. The converse is also nonsense. Just because a particular problem is NP hard in general doesn't mean that the problem instances you encounter in practice are hard cases. Furthermore, the assumption that you need to find an optimal solution is also wrong. In fact, in any competitive game, all you really care about is beating the other guy.
P=NP is a neat theoretical issue in computer science, but its practical significance has been completely overstated.
IBM sent a list of patents that the emulator potentially infringes. That's not the same as "asserting" those patents. Asserting them would mean going to court of them. You can talk to them, remind them of the pledge, and ask them not to assert the patents that fall under the pledge. However, since the emulator may infringe dozens of other patents, that may not solve your problem.
Also, IBM isn't a monolithic entity. Parts of IBM may dislike the pledge and try to undermine it; they will only stop if high-up management calls them off. So, it's good if you make this a public relations issue for them, but let's not jump to conclusions. They haven't broken the pledge yet.
Ipads are intended for mobile computing. Are you going to carry an Airport extender... to the airport?
iPad wifi reception is objectively considerably worse than other systems side by side. Let's hope the can fix that in firmware.
The iPad is good for reading and some type of games. But Apple didn't figure out how to make a simple user interface, they just limited the device to only being able to do simple things well. Being simplistic is not the same as being simple.
Yes, Apple, there is a reason other systems have buttons and UI standards for things like Menu and Cancel; on the iPad, every app does this differently. And although file systems and explorers suck, what sucks even worse is if every application on the machine has to implement it's own file browser and network file system interface because the OS doesn't. And although one can live without multitasking, it really is a pain.
It's not just iWork that suffers: PDF viewers and annotators, offline web pages, split browser windows, blogging tools, sticky notes, etc. -- all of them have confusing and messy workarounds for the limitations of the iPhone OS and still don't work quite right.
The iPad is actually a great device for a limited set of functions. But Apple needlessly screwed up usability and the OS. Maybe iPhone OS4 will fix sone of these problems.
Of course it's mostly the application programs and libraries that get hacked. But the Windows kernel is ultimately responsible for those vulnerabilities because it defines the security and protection model that application programmers have to use. A well-designed kernel should make it hard to write software that is vulnerable.
If it's anything like Singularity, then the point is to exploit static memory safety analysis (which is possible for sandboxed managed code) to avoid the overhead of virtual memory protection.
That's been tried many times before, including with runtimes like Java, with signed code, and even with program analysis.
It's going to fail. Most of the commercial processors have virtual memory hardware. Even if eliminating it would result in speedups, no processor without virtual memory hardware is going to be optimized as much as the mainstream processors that have it. As a result, in practice, this is going to be slower. And even if they succeed in that, we would have to throw away most of the software and compilers we already have; it's not going to happen.
A much more sensible way is to add some kind of pointer verification to our processors. That way, existing programs could run more safely without a rewrite. In fact, that's already feasible for many programs even just using existing hardware, and hardware changes would be minimal.
These Microsoft projects are just academic; they are not going to lead anywhere. But even as academic interests, they don't really deliver much innovation.