The question is not between airing a bunch of deceptions by Moore or keeping Bush in office -- if it was, keeping Bush in office would be the only right choice, since the only evidence against him was deceptive. The real choice is whether anyone can campaign against Bush on real issues.
Kerry seemed to only be interested in Vietnam (at his convention).
Care to explain how it's a dereliction of duty? The President's duty is deliniated by regulation and custom; Bush, unlike many previous presidents (but like his father), has been very succesful at meeting both.
Charges of dereliction of duty have to be backed up by specifics of what the duty WAS. By that definition, Bush was NOT committing dereliction.
Now, charges of irresponsibility don't have the same standard -- but without ANY standard, all you have is armchair quarterbacking. Yes, I'm sure Kerry says he would have done better; but WHAT would he have done? How would the results have differred? And how many of those "I would have done this" statements are based on after-the-fact knowledge?
The fact is, seven minutes more of reading did not make any difference in the outcome. There WERE actions that could have changed things, but if anyone (including Bush) had taken them and thereby changed things, the changed state would be seen as worse than the old state of things.
You just read this article, and you're/still/ asking why someone would want to homeschool their children?
they get no interaction with other kids and are far too sheltered.
This is the only problem you identify with home schooling, and you don't even seem to see that it's bogus. Public schools have a problem with insufficient interaction, not home schools; at a public school you interact only with a group artificially designated as "your peers". In every school the pressure is to interact only with students your own age; in large schools the number of students grows to the extent that interactions can be only with the students most like you (and thus the LEAST likely to teach/show you anything that can stretch you).
I can't totally dismiss the danger of antisocialization at home schools, though. I've seen it, and it's no more pretty than the millions churned out by the public schools. But the solution is so much easier -- involve your kids in a social life! Join community sports teams and training programs. Make sure the larger extended family gets involved (even Uncle Fester). Have the entire family volunteer -- that "old crazy homeless" guy has a story to tell, and isn't so old and crazy once you hear the story (but keep an eye out, of course; he might BE both old and crazy after all).
It think it is a big mistake and many times its becuase the parents are scared of the world
Bah. Even if that claim were true (I claim it's not), you'd STILL have to demonstrate that the parents that were homeschooling merely out of fear were unjustified in their fear.
Homeschooling isn't the only way to raise a healthy adult; you're not a bad parent if you choose something else. But remember this: the best predictor of educational success (measured in terms of the highest degree awarded) is the time the parents spend with the child. Nothing else makes anywhere near the impact. (I know, "highest degree" isn't a precise measure of learning, but it does correlate to eagerness and capacity for learning, with a large enough sample size, and it's amenable to being measured by a study.)
This behavior (paying off all loans) wouldn't be "financial responsibility"; rather, it would be a total change in people's evaluation of the future value of money. You get a loan if the money NOW is worth more to you than the money THEN.
Quite simply, it couldn't happen; the market interest rate would go to 0%, and it's ridiculous to suppose that anyone's going to pass up loans with anything close to that rate.
However, ignoring the math, there's another detail you've missed. The problem with a lot of people paying back loans is that most loans now are made through the fractional reserve system, which means the money being loaned didn't exist before the loan was made. Thus, when the loan money was spent, inflation happened; then, when the debtor saved up money to pay the loan back, deflation happened. The actual payback causes a minor hiccup as the money is "destroyed" (since it most likely had been in the debtor's saving account earning interest for the bank), but the major adjustments are already made.
There is a problem here, but it isn't with paying back loans or with debt-based economies. It's with fiat money.
The Fed doesn't create value; they create money. Every dollar they print (or otherwise produce) is paid for by lowering the price of all the other dollars, and that process happens automatically, whether they want it to or not.
So your accounting is wrong.
Now, the Fed profits by billing the gov't; the gov't profits by being the first to spend the new money, and since the value of all money doesn't go down until after the new money is on the market, the gov't not only gets to spend nearly free money, it even gets to spend free money that's worth more now than it will be after it's spent.
Fiat isn't there to prevent counterfeiting; it's to legitimatize it. That's the entire meaning of "fiat": it's the creation of money that's money just because someone said so. It's usually opposed to a market currency.
Counterfeiters are people who imitate the stamp of the official money; with fiat money, that's all they have to do, since only the stamp gives it value. With a market currency they also have to imitate the economic value of the money-good (such as the properties of gold).
I'm trying to see that, and I just can't. He does say that unit tests allow you to test various inputs, and I can see how that might be understood to mean "test whether the inputs are correct", but it could also be understood to mean "test the function with various input values". Given that the second is the definition of "unit test", I don't see why one should choose to read the second way.
You have to let people know you've got your definitions right, ESPECIALLY if you're going to make a post critical of unit tests in general (and not just the wrong concept you think someone else has).
Also needless to say that unit tests become exponentially useless when the complexity of the code doubles.
This is hardly "needless to say". You'll have to justify it if you're going to get me to believe it; I don't have data (so I'm vulnerable to any studies you post), but you'll have to at least counteract these reasons:
Unit tests always verify the leaf nodes well (the primitives and the functions that only call primitives), by a constant amount independant of the overall complexity.
Branch nodes (functions that call the leaf nodes) benefit from being able to call verified code. Debugging the branch nodes is easier when you have some level of confidence in the leaf nodes.
The unit tests for the branch nodes also test the leaf nodes. As the complexity increases, confidence in the low level nodes must also increase.
The unit tests for each branch node will be as complex as the new functionality added by that branch node. If the node is complex, the test will be complex -- but if the node is complex, its design is BROKEN, and perhaps having that problem show up in the test is a good thing. If the test is that complicated, think of how complex the use case must be, and the documentation, and the actual code that has to call the function?
Unit tests make code modification much simpler and more testable. Without a unit test, you can't know whether your change preserves even the simplest of the properties of the old code. With unit tests throughout the code, you can be certain that every programmer's old expectations are met by your new changes.
They also tend to 'pollute' the code obscuring actual logic and making it hard to follow.
No, they don't. Are you under the impression that unit tests have something to do with conditional debug statements? They have NOTHING to do with each other.
Unit tests sit outside the code. They, in fact, should be written as examples of correct and expected use of the code in question. Whenever you want to reuse some code, you can scan through that code's unit tests, and imitate the use you see there. If you don't see any use that's like what you're planning, you know the code doesn't support what you want; you should either add some new unit tests to the old code (and expect to have to modify the code to satisfy your new tests), or decide to write new code after all.
In any case I guess I would have to vehemently disagree with Graham's contention that great hackers don't use Java. I suspect that is more a matter of which circles you run in, as that certainly doesn't hold true in my experience. There are fewer using it today than three or four years ago, but I surmise that that is mostly a matter of language maturity; the best programmers tend to sit on the bleeding edge, and that's not Java anymore.
Sounds like you agree with the point of his article, but his headline was a little too sensationalistic to allow you to "get" the point of the article:-). He's making the point not that good programmers don't ever program in Java, but rather than good programmers learned Java, got good at it, and moved on because there are now other leet things.
I have some respect for his position, partially because that's how I myself behave (so I want to believe that this makes me a good coder); OTOH, I know many good coders who learned one language and stuck with it. They're good in a different sense.
I don't know which group I would hire from in which situation. My manager hired me, so I guess he agrees with Paul. But then I'm also an expert in C and very good in C++, so perhaps he disagrees.
I myself know how to take this essay -- it's not directed towards me. I'm not going to learn any more languages because of it; I'm already learning languages constantly. I hope some managers read it and see me in it.
Philosophers have been debating this for a LONG time, and I'm finding myself more on the side that says that it's possible to be ethical/unethical without a "free will".
NDI means one of two things: either the mind's reasoning isn't determined by the mind's history (temporal determinism), or the mind comes to conclusions without any use of logical data (logical determinism). The second meaning is absurd; therefore NDI must refer to the ability to reach conclusions independantly (or at least not entirely dependantly) of prior states of mind. This is a quite reasonable thing to require of someone; for example, an alcoholic deciding whether to have another beer is failing to have NDI, because regardless of the evidence and laws of logic, his decision is entirely determined by his brain's prior state.
But the alcoholic is making just as unethical of a decision as any other; in fact, the alcoholic is perhaps worse, since because he's no longer free to make the right decision he's in some way intrinsically unethical.
He didn't say that, though -- he said that the death rate multiplied (or something to that effect). I agree with the previous poster in wanting to see the numbers he got that from, because they don't match anything I've ever seen.
And another thing -- what do you mean "in typical US fashion... make everybody drive SUVs?" I don't understand either half of the sentance -- neither the "typical US fashion" nor the coercion. (I certainly haven't been forced to drive an SUV -- I drive an old Pontiac.)
Me too. I hunted for quite a while to try to prove that SUVs were at risk for certain types of crashes (i.e. even though they're safer to run into small cars with, they might be riskier in rollovers) -- but the numbers I found, although not broken down by type of accident, clearly showed that the more massive your vehicle, the fewer passenger/driver fatalities per accident. So I had to give up -- my thesis might have been technically right, but the overall facts were in favor of the SUVs.
If you're right, though, and I honestly find it hard to believe that you are, that's a whole new argument that I'd LOVE to have.
There's no certainty that a diesel/electric hybrid would be better than a gasoline/electric or a pure diesel. It may be true, but then it may not.
The problem is that hybrid technology introduces complexity into the powertrain, which reduces efficiency in certain cases. They win over gas engines because the gas engines are only optimally efficient at a narrow power band, and elsewhere they're very inefficient; so the hybrid system can afford to lose some nominal efficiency in return for helping the gas engine stay in its powerband. The overall result, obviously, is a much higher total efficiency.
But the same result isn't certain for other engines. Diesel is already very good at handling normal driving demands; can hybrid improve on it?
I don't know. I'm not even guessing -- but I just wanted to mention that it's not as obvious as it seems.
When they were saying "We don't believe Linux infringes on any IP rights, and we're so sure of it, we're willing to sell insurance to that effect", they were singing a very different tune than they appear to be now.
This is true, but from what I'm reading in your post and others this is the most offensive thing to many people. I don't completely understand this taking of offense.
This company, and most of the community, have always believed that free software/open source/Linux is in danger from patent suits, and is relatively safe from copyright suits. One reason for this is that copyright suits almost *have* to be brought against profitable companies in order to be profitable; and such companies have resources and reason to defend themselves, while patent suits can be brought against anyone.
Regardless of reasons, though, this has been the consistent position. This company brought out an insurance product based on the position, actually did the research on both parts of the claim, and released the summary of both parts of the research -- yes, copyright is safe, and yes, patents are a danger. The fact that they're still offering insurance clearly indicates that they don't think it's a showstopper; this probably means that they agree with the conventional wisdom that most or all of those patents are invalid, and the ones that aren't won't be excercised offensively.
If this company really wanted to be helpful, they would start acquiring or filing for patents of their own.
Tell IBM this, not an insurance company. If IBM's really behind Linux, let it license its patents under the GPL.:-)
Seriously, though, one step at a time. Patents aren't free; you have to be able to afford the lawyers. This insurance lets you take the first steps toward doing what you propose.
You need two things: first, people who are dedicated to testing and aren't concerned merely to uphold their pride in the code they wrote (this is a long way to say that you need a dedicated testing team that doesn't report to the coding team); and second, testable code. The best way to get the second needed item, in my experience, is to have your developers write their automated unit tests BEFORE they write the unit they're developing.
This is generally called "test-first" development. If you follow it, you'll find some nice characteristics:
1. Each unit will be easily testable. 2. Each unit will be coherent, since it's easier to test something that only does one thing. 3. Units will have light coupling, since it's easier to express a test for something that depends only lightly on everything else. 4. User interface layers will be thin, since it's hard to automatically test a UI. 5. Programmers will tend to enjoy writing tests a bit more, since the tests now tell them when they're done with their code, rather than merely telling them that their code is still wrong.
You can go a step further than this, and in addition to writing your tests before you write you code, you can even write your tests as you write your design. If you do this, your design will mutate to meet the needs of testing, which means all of the above advantages will apply to your large-scale design as well as your small-scale units. But in order to do this you have to be willing and able to code while you're designing, and many developers seem unwilling to combine the two activities in spite of the advantages.
Out sourcing is an evil plain and simple. Why should a company's profit be at the expense of an individuals welfare?
That's a fair question, but it's not about offshoring. Offshoring gives a MASSIVE boost to the well-being of a lot of people who need it desperately, has a positive effect on consumers (and ALL of us, from CEO to janitor, are also consumers), and can help a company expand or survive. It has a measured short-term negative effects, possibly... The studies I've read show almost no negative effect, and didn't even attempt to consider any compensating positive effect (such as prices going down due to more effective competition yielding more money for consumers to spend thereby creating more demand for the same product).
Who has the most votes after all.. the individual or the company? Government should serve you and me before the MD
This is a little frightening to me -- how do votes come into this? And government?
That's a harsh way to put things. I think the saying applies here: "When you steal from one author, it's plagarism; when you steal from many, it's research."
Tolkien deliberately researched many mythologies, attempting to get at some underlying common factors. The languages he invented definitely show that research.
Mythologies, in general, "plunder" from each other liberally, so it's unsurprising that Tolkien's work would partake of a similar plundering; nor is it surprising that he'd find enough similarities to make his project a success.
But Tolkien also added a lot of value, which is why he gets the credit for inventing the genre we now know as 'fantasy'.
So what - I don't care about any single email being exposed to someone's eyes. But I do worry if someone has access to ALL of my email all the time - I even wouldn't care if they would read it, but I do not like to be analyzed and profiled via content of my email.
This is his point -- almost anyone who wants can have all this and more. You're trying to block Google from it simply because they're the first company that has publicly admitted that it's possible and useful, and offerred promises about how they're going to use it for Good and not EEEvile.
I'd rather leave Google alone, and go after the companies that have the same ability, but don't admit it.
When will people realize that it is FAR WORSE that AI bots "read" (analyze, parse, whatever) your email because: a) they don't "forget"
This is the only important point in what you said. People don't forget; bots are safe precisely because they DO forget. The big reassurance Google is trying to send is the promise that their bots WILL forget; they will store NO information, but will instead scan each message every time it's displayed to associate an ad with it (and the association will be lost after the ad's served).
And think about it -- why would they do anything else? They'd lose money if they served the same ad every time they displayed a given email; they make money if they serve a fresh ad.
-Billy
Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ads aren't inserted into messages -- they're displayed alongside them, and can be different every time the message is displayed. If Google is actually recording which emails get which ads, they're wasting disk space and risking subpoenas like the one you describe, for NO reason.
So no, I don't think that what you're saying is a possible result. All you could subpoena from Google is the emails they hold, the ads they're currently serving (with no connection between the two, because there IS none), and the number of times each ad has been served; and I don't see ANY way a judge would allow that kind of shotgun subpoena.
-Billy
Re:What is google gaining from your personal life?
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 1
Pardon, but this is completely bogus.
Except for a few lone voices, I haven't seen any serious discussion about why this huge corporation is spending so much resources on providing these services for free.
So you haven't read Slashdot? Seriously, that's been the single biggest topic, here and in a number of other sites! Heck, it's so big a senator is trying to pass a law.
The advertising revenue couldn't possibly amount to a significant fraction of the costs involved with these services. The value must lie in the personal information that people are donating to Google, Inc.
This is insane. What do you think the personal information could be used for -- invasion? It's for advertising.
It is troublesome that it seems to be popular and hip to be totally unconcerned about privacy.
No, it's not -- it's popular and hip to be totally obsessed about a false model of privacy, one that believes that we have to protect, at all costs, good people from gaining information that bad people already have.
The comment lists here are FULL of people wondering about "privacy" impacts of everything. Most of them are highly protective of privacy, to the extent that they guard things that are public knowledge anyhow.
That's STUPID.
Attitudes like "we have none anyways" seem to prevail,
Not true. The correct attitude/analysis is that email is NOT PRIVATE, ever; and people who think GMail is threatening are simply not thinking about the way email works.
We DO have privacy, and we should protect it. But we can't waste our efforts protecting something that isn't privacy. Unencrypted email CANNOT be made private. Webmail cannot be made private.
and its funny to criticize those who voice some concern as tinfoil-hat-black-helicopter-seeing schitzos.
No, it's simply the most tolerable way to deal with the incredible problems you people create. I know you don't wear tinfoil hats; but you DO hold entirely false beliefs which are easily and repeatedly shown to be false, and yet you amazingly keep posting. And then you spread your personal problems by making your hallucinations the subject of state laws.
It looks like people have forgotten that privacy matters.
Some have. Others, like yourself, don't seem to know what privacy means.
Like many other companies that try to collect personal information, Google's privacy policy is subject to change at any time. This makes it almost meaningless! It is effectively the same as saying, "We respect your privacy right at this moment, so have complete trust in us. Tomorrow we might change our minds."
Google is making money hand over fist for one simple reason: it's one of the few online companies that people trust. They make money from advertisers because the advertisers trust that Google will show their adverts to many willing eyeballs; people keep coming to look at the ads because they trust that Google will maintain the usefulness of their service.
If Google betrays ANYONE, their uniqueness goes away; they become just another fly by night company. Once that happens, I'll encourage you to say the things you're saying now; I'll join you in shouting them from the rooftops. And every word we say will reduce Google's strength. It won't be just unfocussed worry; it'll be real.
But it's not happenning now; it's utterly random and bizzare to punish a company for merely being able to do something it has promised not to do.
Remember how you mentioned, truly, that neutrinos go through everything? Well, the bad news is that if they go through everything, they also go through your neutrino detector. So even if you DO manage to invent your molecule that emits neutrinos, you can't detect the neutrinos at the other side of the invisibility cloak.
I am sure there's a "mathematical expression" to express the above description too (though it still remains hard to calculate it:)
It remains _impossible_ to compute it, since the question of whether or not an arbitrary program will halt is uncomputable. The shortest program that can compute/n/ bits of Omega is the program that has/n/ bits of Omega explicitly encoded in it.
Read the book -- it's free, and proves all of this VERY beautifully (much easier than Turing's original proof).
And it also proves that most real numbers are even worse than Omega -- not only can you not compute them, you can't even name them in ANY WAY. Omega can at least be named; it's "the halting probability."
(Yes, I know; the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.)
Slashdot Mirror
The question is not between airing a bunch of deceptions by Moore or keeping Bush in office -- if it was, keeping Bush in office would be the only right choice, since the only evidence against him was deceptive. The real choice is whether anyone can campaign against Bush on real issues.
Kerry seemed to only be interested in Vietnam (at his convention).
-Billy
Care to explain how it's a dereliction of duty? The President's duty is deliniated by regulation and custom; Bush, unlike many previous presidents (but like his father), has been very succesful at meeting both.
Charges of dereliction of duty have to be backed up by specifics of what the duty WAS. By that definition, Bush was NOT committing dereliction.
Now, charges of irresponsibility don't have the same standard -- but without ANY standard, all you have is armchair quarterbacking. Yes, I'm sure Kerry says he would have done better; but WHAT would he have done? How would the results have differred? And how many of those "I would have done this" statements are based on after-the-fact knowledge?
The fact is, seven minutes more of reading did not make any difference in the outcome. There WERE actions that could have changed things, but if anyone (including Bush) had taken them and thereby changed things, the changed state would be seen as worse than the old state of things.
-Billy
You just read this article, and you're /still/ asking why someone would want to homeschool their children?
they get no interaction with other kids and are far too sheltered.
This is the only problem you identify with home schooling, and you don't even seem to see that it's bogus. Public schools have a problem with insufficient interaction, not home schools; at a public school you interact only with a group artificially designated as "your peers". In every school the pressure is to interact only with students your own age; in large schools the number of students grows to the extent that interactions can be only with the students most like you (and thus the LEAST likely to teach/show you anything that can stretch you).
I can't totally dismiss the danger of antisocialization at home schools, though. I've seen it, and it's no more pretty than the millions churned out by the public schools. But the solution is so much easier -- involve your kids in a social life! Join community sports teams and training programs. Make sure the larger extended family gets involved (even Uncle Fester). Have the entire family volunteer -- that "old crazy homeless" guy has a story to tell, and isn't so old and crazy once you hear the story (but keep an eye out, of course; he might BE both old and crazy after all).
It think it is a big mistake and many times its becuase the parents are scared of the world
Bah. Even if that claim were true (I claim it's not), you'd STILL have to demonstrate that the parents that were homeschooling merely out of fear were unjustified in their fear.
Homeschooling isn't the only way to raise a healthy adult; you're not a bad parent if you choose something else. But remember this: the best predictor of educational success (measured in terms of the highest degree awarded) is the time the parents spend with the child. Nothing else makes anywhere near the impact. (I know, "highest degree" isn't a precise measure of learning, but it does correlate to eagerness and capacity for learning, with a large enough sample size, and it's amenable to being measured by a study.)
-Billy
This behavior (paying off all loans) wouldn't be "financial responsibility"; rather, it would be a total change in people's evaluation of the future value of money. You get a loan if the money NOW is worth more to you than the money THEN.
Quite simply, it couldn't happen; the market interest rate would go to 0%, and it's ridiculous to suppose that anyone's going to pass up loans with anything close to that rate.
However, ignoring the math, there's another detail you've missed. The problem with a lot of people paying back loans is that most loans now are made through the fractional reserve system, which means the money being loaned didn't exist before the loan was made. Thus, when the loan money was spent, inflation happened; then, when the debtor saved up money to pay the loan back, deflation happened. The actual payback causes a minor hiccup as the money is "destroyed" (since it most likely had been in the debtor's saving account earning interest for the bank), but the major adjustments are already made.
There is a problem here, but it isn't with paying back loans or with debt-based economies. It's with fiat money.
-Billy
The Fed doesn't create value; they create money. Every dollar they print (or otherwise produce) is paid for by lowering the price of all the other dollars, and that process happens automatically, whether they want it to or not.
So your accounting is wrong.
Now, the Fed profits by billing the gov't; the gov't profits by being the first to spend the new money, and since the value of all money doesn't go down until after the new money is on the market, the gov't not only gets to spend nearly free money, it even gets to spend free money that's worth more now than it will be after it's spent.
-Billy
Fiat isn't there to prevent counterfeiting; it's to legitimatize it. That's the entire meaning of "fiat": it's the creation of money that's money just because someone said so. It's usually opposed to a market currency.
Counterfeiters are people who imitate the stamp of the official money; with fiat money, that's all they have to do, since only the stamp gives it value. With a market currency they also have to imitate the economic value of the money-good (such as the properties of gold).
-Billy
I'm trying to see that, and I just can't. He does say that unit tests allow you to test various inputs, and I can see how that might be understood to mean "test whether the inputs are correct", but it could also be understood to mean "test the function with various input values". Given that the second is the definition of "unit test", I don't see why one should choose to read the second way.
You have to let people know you've got your definitions right, ESPECIALLY if you're going to make a post critical of unit tests in general (and not just the wrong concept you think someone else has).
-Billy
This is hardly "needless to say". You'll have to justify it if you're going to get me to believe it; I don't have data (so I'm vulnerable to any studies you post), but you'll have to at least counteract these reasons:
They also tend to 'pollute' the code obscuring actual logic and making it hard to follow.
No, they don't. Are you under the impression that unit tests have something to do with conditional debug statements? They have NOTHING to do with each other.
Unit tests sit outside the code. They, in fact, should be written as examples of correct and expected use of the code in question. Whenever you want to reuse some code, you can scan through that code's unit tests, and imitate the use you see there. If you don't see any use that's like what you're planning, you know the code doesn't support what you want; you should either add some new unit tests to the old code (and expect to have to modify the code to satisfy your new tests), or decide to write new code after all.
BUT -- I think code reviews are important.
-Billy
In any case I guess I would have to vehemently disagree with Graham's contention that great hackers don't use Java. I suspect that is more a matter of which circles you run in, as that certainly doesn't hold true in my experience. There are fewer using it today than three or four years ago, but I surmise that that is mostly a matter of language maturity; the best programmers tend to sit on the bleeding edge, and that's not Java anymore.
:-). He's making the point not that good programmers don't ever program in Java, but rather than good programmers learned Java, got good at it, and moved on because there are now other leet things.
Sounds like you agree with the point of his article, but his headline was a little too sensationalistic to allow you to "get" the point of the article
I have some respect for his position, partially because that's how I myself behave (so I want to believe that this makes me a good coder); OTOH, I know many good coders who learned one language and stuck with it. They're good in a different sense.
I don't know which group I would hire from in which situation. My manager hired me, so I guess he agrees with Paul. But then I'm also an expert in C and very good in C++, so perhaps he disagrees.
I myself know how to take this essay -- it's not directed towards me. I'm not going to learn any more languages because of it; I'm already learning languages constantly. I hope some managers read it and see me in it.
-Billy
Philosophers have been debating this for a LONG time, and I'm finding myself more on the side that says that it's possible to be ethical/unethical without a "free will".
NDI means one of two things: either the mind's reasoning isn't determined by the mind's history (temporal determinism), or the mind comes to conclusions without any use of logical data (logical determinism). The second meaning is absurd; therefore NDI must refer to the ability to reach conclusions independantly (or at least not entirely dependantly) of prior states of mind. This is a quite reasonable thing to require of someone; for example, an alcoholic deciding whether to have another beer is failing to have NDI, because regardless of the evidence and laws of logic, his decision is entirely determined by his brain's prior state.
But the alcoholic is making just as unethical of a decision as any other; in fact, the alcoholic is perhaps worse, since because he's no longer free to make the right decision he's in some way intrinsically unethical.
-Billy
He didn't say that, though -- he said that the death rate multiplied (or something to that effect). I agree with the previous poster in wanting to see the numbers he got that from, because they don't match anything I've ever seen.
... make everybody drive SUVs?" I don't understand either half of the sentance -- neither the "typical US fashion" nor the coercion. (I certainly haven't been forced to drive an SUV -- I drive an old Pontiac.)
And another thing -- what do you mean "in typical US fashion
-Billy
This seems quite obvious. Of course diesel hybrids burn diesel. Why do you mention it?
I'm sorry, I just don't understand your point.
-Billy
Me too. I hunted for quite a while to try to prove that SUVs were at risk for certain types of crashes (i.e. even though they're safer to run into small cars with, they might be riskier in rollovers) -- but the numbers I found, although not broken down by type of accident, clearly showed that the more massive your vehicle, the fewer passenger/driver fatalities per accident. So I had to give up -- my thesis might have been technically right, but the overall facts were in favor of the SUVs.
If you're right, though, and I honestly find it hard to believe that you are, that's a whole new argument that I'd LOVE to have.
-Billy
There's no certainty that a diesel/electric hybrid would be better than a gasoline/electric or a pure diesel. It may be true, but then it may not.
The problem is that hybrid technology introduces complexity into the powertrain, which reduces efficiency in certain cases. They win over gas engines because the gas engines are only optimally efficient at a narrow power band, and elsewhere they're very inefficient; so the hybrid system can afford to lose some nominal efficiency in return for helping the gas engine stay in its powerband. The overall result, obviously, is a much higher total efficiency.
But the same result isn't certain for other engines. Diesel is already very good at handling normal driving demands; can hybrid improve on it?
I don't know. I'm not even guessing -- but I just wanted to mention that it's not as obvious as it seems.
-Billy
When they were saying "We don't believe Linux infringes on any IP rights, and we're so sure of it, we're willing to sell insurance to that effect", they were singing a very different tune than they appear to be now.
:-)
This is true, but from what I'm reading in your post and others this is the most offensive thing to many people. I don't completely understand this taking of offense.
This company, and most of the community, have always believed that free software/open source/Linux is in danger from patent suits, and is relatively safe from copyright suits. One reason for this is that copyright suits almost *have* to be brought against profitable companies in order to be profitable; and such companies have resources and reason to defend themselves, while patent suits can be brought against anyone.
Regardless of reasons, though, this has been the consistent position. This company brought out an insurance product based on the position, actually did the research on both parts of the claim, and released the summary of both parts of the research -- yes, copyright is safe, and yes, patents are a danger. The fact that they're still offering insurance clearly indicates that they don't think it's a showstopper; this probably means that they agree with the conventional wisdom that most or all of those patents are invalid, and the ones that aren't won't be excercised offensively.
If this company really wanted to be helpful, they would start acquiring or filing for patents of their own.
Tell IBM this, not an insurance company. If IBM's really behind Linux, let it license its patents under the GPL.
Seriously, though, one step at a time. Patents aren't free; you have to be able to afford the lawyers. This insurance lets you take the first steps toward doing what you propose.
-Billy
You need two things: first, people who are dedicated to testing and aren't concerned merely to uphold their pride in the code they wrote (this is a long way to say that you need a dedicated testing team that doesn't report to the coding team); and second, testable code. The best way to get the second needed item, in my experience, is to have your developers write their automated unit tests BEFORE they write the unit they're developing.
This is generally called "test-first" development. If you follow it, you'll find some nice characteristics:
1. Each unit will be easily testable.
2. Each unit will be coherent, since it's easier to test something that only does one thing.
3. Units will have light coupling, since it's easier to express a test for something that depends only lightly on everything else.
4. User interface layers will be thin, since it's hard to automatically test a UI.
5. Programmers will tend to enjoy writing tests a bit more, since the tests now tell them when they're done with their code, rather than merely telling them that their code is still wrong.
You can go a step further than this, and in addition to writing your tests before you write you code, you can even write your tests as you write your design. If you do this, your design will mutate to meet the needs of testing, which means all of the above advantages will apply to your large-scale design as well as your small-scale units. But in order to do this you have to be willing and able to code while you're designing, and many developers seem unwilling to combine the two activities in spite of the advantages.
-Billy
laugh if you want, but it's true -- ever cleaned up after one? Would you like to clean up the I-5 heading towards San Diego after rush hour?
-Billy
Out sourcing is an evil plain and simple. Why should a company's profit be at the expense of an individuals welfare?
That's a fair question, but it's not about offshoring. Offshoring gives a MASSIVE boost to the well-being of a lot of people who need it desperately, has a positive effect on consumers (and ALL of us, from CEO to janitor, are also consumers), and can help a company expand or survive. It has a measured short-term negative effects, possibly... The studies I've read show almost no negative effect, and didn't even attempt to consider any compensating positive effect (such as prices going down due to more effective competition yielding more money for consumers to spend thereby creating more demand for the same product).
Who has the most votes after all.. the individual or the company? Government should serve you and me before the MD
This is a little frightening to me -- how do votes come into this? And government?
-Billy
Well said!
I'll also add that working for slave-labor wages is better than not getting wages at all, which is too often the choice.
Here's an analysis of the actual short-term effects of outsourcing -- even the harshest study can only find a tiny negative effect, and that only by totally disregarding any positive effect. You obviously recognise the positive effect.
Just thought you might like the info. And the site, factcheck.org, is fun too; it's apparently very nonpartisan.
-Billy
That's a harsh way to put things. I think the saying applies here: "When you steal from one author, it's plagarism; when you steal from many, it's research."
Tolkien deliberately researched many mythologies, attempting to get at some underlying common factors. The languages he invented definitely show that research.
Mythologies, in general, "plunder" from each other liberally, so it's unsurprising that Tolkien's work would partake of a similar plundering; nor is it surprising that he'd find enough similarities to make his project a success.
But Tolkien also added a lot of value, which is why he gets the credit for inventing the genre we now know as 'fantasy'.
-Billy
So what - I don't care about any single email being exposed to someone's eyes. But I do worry if someone has access to ALL of my email all the time - I even wouldn't care if they would read it, but I do not like to be analyzed and profiled via content of my email.
This is his point -- almost anyone who wants can have all this and more. You're trying to block Google from it simply because they're the first company that has publicly admitted that it's possible and useful, and offerred promises about how they're going to use it for Good and not EEEvile.
I'd rather leave Google alone, and go after the companies that have the same ability, but don't admit it.
When will people realize that it is FAR WORSE that AI bots "read" (analyze, parse, whatever) your email because:
a) they don't "forget"
This is the only important point in what you said. People don't forget; bots are safe precisely because they DO forget. The big reassurance Google is trying to send is the promise that their bots WILL forget; they will store NO information, but will instead scan each message every time it's displayed to associate an ad with it (and the association will be lost after the ad's served).
And think about it -- why would they do anything else? They'd lose money if they served the same ad every time they displayed a given email; they make money if they serve a fresh ad.
-Billy
Ads aren't inserted into messages -- they're displayed alongside them, and can be different every time the message is displayed. If Google is actually recording which emails get which ads, they're wasting disk space and risking subpoenas like the one you describe, for NO reason.
So no, I don't think that what you're saying is a possible result. All you could subpoena from Google is the emails they hold, the ads they're currently serving (with no connection between the two, because there IS none), and the number of times each ad has been served; and I don't see ANY way a judge would allow that kind of shotgun subpoena.
-Billy
Pardon, but this is completely bogus.
Except for a few lone voices, I haven't seen any serious discussion about why this huge corporation is spending so much resources on providing these services for free.
So you haven't read Slashdot? Seriously, that's been the single biggest topic, here and in a number of other sites! Heck, it's so big a senator is trying to pass a law.
The advertising revenue couldn't possibly amount to a significant fraction of the costs involved with these services. The value must lie in the personal information that people are donating to Google, Inc.
This is insane. What do you think the personal information could be used for -- invasion? It's for advertising.
It is troublesome that it seems to be popular and hip to be totally unconcerned about privacy.
No, it's not -- it's popular and hip to be totally obsessed about a false model of privacy, one that believes that we have to protect, at all costs, good people from gaining information that bad people already have.
The comment lists here are FULL of people wondering about "privacy" impacts of everything. Most of them are highly protective of privacy, to the extent that they guard things that are public knowledge anyhow.
That's STUPID.
Attitudes like "we have none anyways" seem to prevail,
Not true. The correct attitude/analysis is that email is NOT PRIVATE, ever; and people who think GMail is threatening are simply not thinking about the way email works.
We DO have privacy, and we should protect it. But we can't waste our efforts protecting something that isn't privacy. Unencrypted email CANNOT be made private. Webmail cannot be made private.
and its funny to criticize those who voice some concern as tinfoil-hat-black-helicopter-seeing schitzos.
No, it's simply the most tolerable way to deal with the incredible problems you people create. I know you don't wear tinfoil hats; but you DO hold entirely false beliefs which are easily and repeatedly shown to be false, and yet you amazingly keep posting. And then you spread your personal problems by making your hallucinations the subject of state laws.
It looks like people have forgotten that privacy matters.
Some have. Others, like yourself, don't seem to know what privacy means.
Like many other companies that try to collect personal information, Google's privacy policy is subject to change at any time. This makes it almost meaningless! It is effectively the same as saying, "We respect your privacy right at this moment, so have complete trust in us. Tomorrow we might change our minds."
Google is making money hand over fist for one simple reason: it's one of the few online companies that people trust. They make money from advertisers because the advertisers trust that Google will show their adverts to many willing eyeballs; people keep coming to look at the ads because they trust that Google will maintain the usefulness of their service.
If Google betrays ANYONE, their uniqueness goes away; they become just another fly by night company. Once that happens, I'll encourage you to say the things you're saying now; I'll join you in shouting them from the rooftops. And every word we say will reduce Google's strength. It won't be just unfocussed worry; it'll be real.
But it's not happenning now; it's utterly random and bizzare to punish a company for merely being able to do something it has promised not to do.
-Billy
Remember how you mentioned, truly, that neutrinos go through everything? Well, the bad news is that if they go through everything, they also go through your neutrino detector. So even if you DO manage to invent your molecule that emits neutrinos, you can't detect the neutrinos at the other side of the invisibility cloak.
-Billy
I am sure there's a "mathematical expression" to express the above description too (though it still remains hard to calculate it :)
/n/ bits of Omega is the program that has /n/ bits of Omega explicitly encoded in it.
It remains _impossible_ to compute it, since the question of whether or not an arbitrary program will halt is uncomputable. The shortest program that can compute
Read the book -- it's free, and proves all of this VERY beautifully (much easier than Turing's original proof).
And it also proves that most real numbers are even worse than Omega -- not only can you not compute them, you can't even name them in ANY WAY. Omega can at least be named; it's "the halting probability."
(Yes, I know; the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.)
-Billy