This is all irrelevant anyway because what you are doing is claiming that all these researchers are simply lying. Maybe the Nobel spurred some (a lot?) funding in research but from that to claiming that they are all lying or committing fraud is preposterous. And please don't mention the pathetic sham called "climategate".
I'm not proposing that all scientists are lying. I never stated that. I believe they act in good faith. Please don't put your words on my mouth.
The funding effect -- and the funding effect is undeniable, even if you request an argumentum ad autoritam -- is much more pernicious than plain old lying. Naturally, if you point every scientist towards proving a theory, and none towards disproving it, no one is finding faults in analysis, and everyone is reaching the same conclusion. Heck, it took two decades for the effects of civilization advance towards temperature measuring stations to be recognized and accounted for (even if in the end the conclusion is that warming is still happening).
My problem is not with number-tampering or such other accusations of the climategate. I ignore that. My problem is much more pervasive. Its with everyone stating that the sun orbits the earth, and anyone who is stating that the earth orbits the sun gets tarnished as lunatic.
This kind of scientific environment was as wrong five centuries ago as it is today.
On the other hand, when the warming models were seriously questioned, in the mid 00s, suddenly we weren't suffering from "Global Warming" anymore and started suffering from "Climate Change". See, your logic works both ways.
This is a serious issue, where opinions have become extreme, and where I really don't trust most participants (everyone is religious on the matter).
In the end, I think it's a shame that the global warming subject was hijacked by dumb^H^H^H^Hextremist ecologists, leading to good solutions being thrown out of the window [1], and stupid solutions being implemented (taxing carbon).
[1] No politician is discussing the possibility of mimicking the eruption at Mount Pinatubo which, because of being large and extremely recent, was very well studied. A global warming solution of this type costs 2.5Billion US$ (on a world scale, it's peanuts). Unfortunately, it's "messing with the planet" so it irks all kinds of ecologists. Newsflash: We mess with the planet from the day we're born. There's a decent article on the solution here http://www.livescience.com/901-scientist-inject-sulfur-air-battle-global-warming.html (shooting balloons with artillery is not the most efficient solution, the best one is a lightweight "hose", supported by balloons, which was already tested on a smaller scale, but the article gives the general idea).
(...)They don't have any agenda. They won't make more money either way and they aren't any different from any other researcher I know.(...)
Sorry, but the moment a Nobel was handed out based on global warming, research grants were definitely handed out preferably to those trying to prove global warming instead of disproving. That's where climate researchers' agenda comes from. It's not evil, just egoistic.
I don't blame the amoled. I blame Sense, or whatever mix of software HTC puts in there. I like Sense, in terms of user interaction, but I made the effort of switching to CM7. Friends told me that battery life is much better. I just switched a week ago, and battery life does seem to be much higher (lower than double lifetime, but much higher than normal). A full work day, and I'd get home with the Desire at ~20% battery level. Now, the same conditions yield 50% battery level. Again, it is still a short sample, but I'm positively impressed.
Bad for who? The developers who make over 17x more money on the Apple app store than the Google app market
That argument is a double edged sword. If the developers make 17x more, and Apple does not have 17x the market, then consumers are hurting by paying 17x more for the same content. You know, fixed high prices is a sign of a non-efficient market.
I concur with the OP. You did follow the easiest route, and it does seem the feeble willed attitude. You both overestimate the work to maintain an Android install (similar to iOS), the existing malware (again, similar) and underestimate the evil that lurks in Apple's management of the market (removal of apps competing with Apple itself, namely).
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing", Edmund Burke
Now, you either: a) Disagree with Burke; b) Defend that Apple is not evil in any way; c) Defend that you can make business with Apple and still pressure towards betterment, or; d) Concede that you don't care and then it's perfectly OK to say fuck you all to those people that took the high road and are now expressing their feelings towards your position (but at least man up and really assume your position).
That said, as an American living in Europe, I admit to having a bit of a preference for the US model: it seems that the European mobile companies (or at least those I've used in Switzerland and Germany) charge significant rates for a mobile user to call a number on other domestic mobile carriers (on the order of $0.40 USD per minute in Switzerland depending on carrier, a bit less in Germany), and lower-but-still-steep rates (about $0.20-$0.30 USD per minute) to call landlines. Landline-to-mobile calls are about $0.35/minute.
Those are caused by "termination fees", which are fees charged by a telecom operator to any other operator that wants to call a subscriber on its network. They are unjustifiably high in Europe, and the root cause for the large roaming costs between EU countries. Fortunately, the European Commission has already put out a plan to almost eliminate these fees, gradually until, I believe, 2015. These are being passed into national law at EU countries, at each parliament's own rate.
I don't know how it is in Brazil, but in Europe it's indicated by the prefix on the phone number. Say, all numbers starting with 9 are mobile phone numbers, all numbers starting with 600 are added-value calls (think sex hot lines), and so on... In Europe the concept of paying for *receiving* calls sounds strange and frankly, ludicrous.
It is more flexible, can handle certain situations that cannot be handled elegantly in class-based inheritance
like what?
You have to try hard not to see good examples out there in use. The most common case is the prototype version of the Decorator pattern, seen in the uniformization of DOM support across browsers done by jQuery (and similar libraries). Decorator patterns with multiple-class subclassing gets ugly fast, and is trivial with JS.
Rubbish attitude - this is why software is regarded as a 'hobby' for inexperienced and generally poor developers - you're too busy 'learning something new' all the time and not focussing on getting things done.
You can't possibly be a top-notch developer. Any good coder out there is just a bit hampered by the use of a new language in a new project. Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax. APIs are more difficult, but then again, the slowness in developing against a new API wears off in a week of work.
Unless some new unknown paradigms are introduced, in the language and/or in the API, it's like dancing the tango to a new tune: You make it up, just like you made it up before.
Not to support the loonies here, but your test could fail even if the effects are valid. Simple example, happens with me and some people I know: I am able to hear the very high-pitch sound emitted by old CRTs. I can clearly distinguish some of them being switched on or off immediately (I'm looking at you Sony Black Trinitron), some I can't hear ever, but some are on the threshold of conscious hearing: i.e. I get a sense of relief once the TV is shut-off, but wouldn't have picked up it being switched on.
I would fail a blind test testing for the ability to hear CRT TVs, and I know for sure that I can hear them.
I'll take a language that has strong support for subclassing, thanks.
Given that javascript is a classless object-oriented language, your comment really makes it sound like you haven't yet reached that A-HA moment about javascript.
Prototype-based inheritance is much much more powerful than any kind of subclassing I've seen on any class-based OO language.
I installed 11.04 this week, and I totally disagree. I absolutely love top-level navigation taking over horizontal space instead of vertical space, as well as other vertical-space saving features, such as moving the menu onto the title bar. Naturally, I appreciate this more because my laptop has a 12" display. Were I on a 24" desktop LCD and I could spare space for the menus. However, if you are so inclined, this is just a gtk option. It's easy to move menus to their standard location, Unity does not bind you to that decision.
As for readability with icons on the left, just maximize your windows or move them to the left of the screen. It will push the icons away.
Sometimes, I think people criticize ANY change. I'm not involved with Unity and have not accompanied its development. The final result was a total surprise to me this week. I like it. There are corners to be polished, for sure, but it's an excellent first version.
You can go as long as needed. I did LASIK a few years back, and with corneal surgery you can't rub your eyes for what amounts to eternity (I guess it was a couple of months). Anyhow, past the initial couple of weeks, when you must keep that standing order forever present in your brain, it falls out of habit and you never ever do it (except when asleep, a situation that requires special protection).
It's all a matter of perspective. You don't have to be the richest of the rich to access telecommunications, and this would be considered part of any paradise ancient people would design. The same can be said for self-powered movement (engines of any kind), computing, or fast long distance transportation. Are we in a paradise yet? Not by a long shot. Are we -- the average human on earth -- better than a thousand years ago? Of course!
You are probably referring to Hubbert's Peak. His prediction was for peak production in the US, and was mostly on target (which is admirable for a prediction 50 year ahead). The curve has been adapted to several regions, with correct predictions. The peak global production, using Hubbert's curve, is predicted for 2005, and it seems to have indeed ocurred.
Mind you, peak production isn't the same as "running out". There's still a lot of oil out there. It's just that now it's clear we must find an alternative, and we have a couple of decades left.
All of those affirmations without quoting a single stat. I've done the legwork before, in all comments up to here. I'm not doing it again. Stay ignorant all you want. Just note that I picked up the last 26 years. It was not random.
This is the other main flaw in Kurzweil's argument, that Moore's law somehow translates to software. Hardware has been following Moore's law, but software hasn't.
Please provide some metrics. It is expectable that better hardware leads to better software, and I lean to believe software follows a similar exponential curve unless proven otherwise. Remember that humans are notoriously poor at naturally spotting exponential curves.
We can now model plastics much better than before, and that leads to all kinds of new materials in use. Software. Car engines had tremendous evolution in efficiency in the last decades, mostly because we can now model with increasing accuracy the chemical process of fuel ignition in the confined chamber of the cylinder. That's software (the physics theory is over 50 years old). We have finer resolution MRI scans, using lower and lower radiation, due to better software.
Are these advances caused by better hardware or better software? Both, but don't discount software here.
If you are referring to our ability to model the transformation process between DNA and cells, there's a lot of legwork to be done, yes. However, this legwork is to be helped by an increasing amount of tech. Heck, if MRI scans get another resolution jump we'll be able to spot firing of individual neural units -- now, that'd help understanding how brains work!
Test your theory against US data. Infant mortality rate in '80 was 13 per thousand births. In '06 was 6 per thousand births. In a thousand people set, you had seven datapoints that lived zero years (worst scenario case) and now show up as living 80 years (again, worst case scenario). The effect of better infant mortality rates comes down to 80*7/1000 years=7 months (average scenarios produce 5 months). Meanwhile, in the same period, life expectancy went from 74 to 78 years.
Better infant mortality rates explain 14% of the increase in life expectancy. Where does the rest come from? Better car safety? Perhaps, but certainly with lower effect than infant mortality. The rest? Medical technology.
It hasn't happened decades later because the singularity date isn't past yet. You may criticize Kurzweil, which I do, but you should read what he says before criticizing vaguely. As it is, you sound like a misinformed radicalist. Just so you gain something from this post: a) I think he predicts the singularity to happen near 2030; b) He predicts humans will 'fuse' with machines, not that machines will replace humans.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not proposing that all scientists are lying. I never stated that. I believe they act in good faith. Please don't put your words on my mouth.
The funding effect -- and the funding effect is undeniable, even if you request an argumentum ad autoritam -- is much more pernicious than plain old lying. Naturally, if you point every scientist towards proving a theory, and none towards disproving it, no one is finding faults in analysis, and everyone is reaching the same conclusion. Heck, it took two decades for the effects of civilization advance towards temperature measuring stations to be recognized and accounted for (even if in the end the conclusion is that warming is still happening).
My problem is not with number-tampering or such other accusations of the climategate. I ignore that. My problem is much more pervasive. Its with everyone stating that the sun orbits the earth, and anyone who is stating that the earth orbits the sun gets tarnished as lunatic.
This kind of scientific environment was as wrong five centuries ago as it is today.
On the other hand, when the warming models were seriously questioned, in the mid 00s, suddenly we weren't suffering from "Global Warming" anymore and started suffering from "Climate Change". See, your logic works both ways.
This is a serious issue, where opinions have become extreme, and where I really don't trust most participants (everyone is religious on the matter).
In the end, I think it's a shame that the global warming subject was hijacked by dumb^H^H^H^Hextremist ecologists, leading to good solutions being thrown out of the window [1], and stupid solutions being implemented (taxing carbon).
[1] No politician is discussing the possibility of mimicking the eruption at Mount Pinatubo which, because of being large and extremely recent, was very well studied. A global warming solution of this type costs 2.5Billion US$ (on a world scale, it's peanuts). Unfortunately, it's "messing with the planet" so it irks all kinds of ecologists. Newsflash: We mess with the planet from the day we're born. There's a decent article on the solution here http://www.livescience.com/901-scientist-inject-sulfur-air-battle-global-warming.html (shooting balloons with artillery is not the most efficient solution, the best one is a lightweight "hose", supported by balloons, which was already tested on a smaller scale, but the article gives the general idea).
(...)They don't have any agenda. They won't make more money either way and they aren't any different from any other researcher I know.(...)
Sorry, but the moment a Nobel was handed out based on global warming, research grants were definitely handed out preferably to those trying to prove global warming instead of disproving. That's where climate researchers' agenda comes from. It's not evil, just egoistic.
Oh, if you just want one link of a climatologist going all apocalyptic, that's easy enough: Hurricane Irene’s dangerous power can be traced to global warming
Now, please stop shouting and swearing. It does make you look like a dumbass.
I don't blame the amoled. I blame Sense, or whatever mix of software HTC puts in there. I like Sense, in terms of user interaction, but I made the effort of switching to CM7. Friends told me that battery life is much better. I just switched a week ago, and battery life does seem to be much higher (lower than double lifetime, but much higher than normal). A full work day, and I'd get home with the Desire at ~20% battery level. Now, the same conditions yield 50% battery level. Again, it is still a short sample, but I'm positively impressed.
That argument is a double edged sword. If the developers make 17x more, and Apple does not have 17x the market, then consumers are hurting by paying 17x more for the same content. You know, fixed high prices is a sign of a non-efficient market.
I concur with the OP. You did follow the easiest route, and it does seem the feeble willed attitude. You both overestimate the work to maintain an Android install (similar to iOS), the existing malware (again, similar) and underestimate the evil that lurks in Apple's management of the market (removal of apps competing with Apple itself, namely).
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing", Edmund Burke
Now, you either: a) Disagree with Burke; b) Defend that Apple is not evil in any way; c) Defend that you can make business with Apple and still pressure towards betterment, or; d) Concede that you don't care and then it's perfectly OK to say fuck you all to those people that took the high road and are now expressing their feelings towards your position (but at least man up and really assume your position).
Those are caused by "termination fees", which are fees charged by a telecom operator to any other operator that wants to call a subscriber on its network. They are unjustifiably high in Europe, and the root cause for the large roaming costs between EU countries. Fortunately, the European Commission has already put out a plan to almost eliminate these fees, gradually until, I believe, 2015. These are being passed into national law at EU countries, at each parliament's own rate.
I don't know how it is in Brazil, but in Europe it's indicated by the prefix on the phone number. Say, all numbers starting with 9 are mobile phone numbers, all numbers starting with 600 are added-value calls (think sex hot lines), and so on... In Europe the concept of paying for *receiving* calls sounds strange and frankly, ludicrous.
You have to try hard not to see good examples out there in use. The most common case is the prototype version of the Decorator pattern, seen in the uniformization of DOM support across browsers done by jQuery (and similar libraries). Decorator patterns with multiple-class subclassing gets ugly fast, and is trivial with JS.
You can't possibly be a top-notch developer. Any good coder out there is just a bit hampered by the use of a new language in a new project. Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax. APIs are more difficult, but then again, the slowness in developing against a new API wears off in a week of work.
Unless some new unknown paradigms are introduced, in the language and/or in the API, it's like dancing the tango to a new tune: You make it up, just like you made it up before.
Not to support the loonies here, but your test could fail even if the effects are valid. Simple example, happens with me and some people I know: I am able to hear the very high-pitch sound emitted by old CRTs. I can clearly distinguish some of them being switched on or off immediately (I'm looking at you Sony Black Trinitron), some I can't hear ever, but some are on the threshold of conscious hearing: i.e. I get a sense of relief once the TV is shut-off, but wouldn't have picked up it being switched on.
I would fail a blind test testing for the ability to hear CRT TVs, and I know for sure that I can hear them.
Just so you know...
Given that javascript is a classless object-oriented language, your comment really makes it sound like you haven't yet reached that A-HA moment about javascript.
Prototype-based inheritance is much much more powerful than any kind of subclassing I've seen on any class-based OO language.
I installed 11.04 this week, and I totally disagree. I absolutely love top-level navigation taking over horizontal space instead of vertical space, as well as other vertical-space saving features, such as moving the menu onto the title bar. Naturally, I appreciate this more because my laptop has a 12" display. Were I on a 24" desktop LCD and I could spare space for the menus. However, if you are so inclined, this is just a gtk option. It's easy to move menus to their standard location, Unity does not bind you to that decision.
As for readability with icons on the left, just maximize your windows or move them to the left of the screen. It will push the icons away.
Sometimes, I think people criticize ANY change. I'm not involved with Unity and have not accompanied its development. The final result was a total surprise to me this week. I like it. There are corners to be polished, for sure, but it's an excellent first version.
You can go as long as needed. I did LASIK a few years back, and with corneal surgery you can't rub your eyes for what amounts to eternity (I guess it was a couple of months). Anyhow, past the initial couple of weeks, when you must keep that standing order forever present in your brain, it falls out of habit and you never ever do it (except when asleep, a situation that requires special protection).
It's all a matter of perspective. You don't have to be the richest of the rich to access telecommunications, and this would be considered part of any paradise ancient people would design. The same can be said for self-powered movement (engines of any kind), computing, or fast long distance transportation. Are we in a paradise yet? Not by a long shot. Are we -- the average human on earth -- better than a thousand years ago? Of course!
You are probably referring to Hubbert's Peak. His prediction was for peak production in the US, and was mostly on target (which is admirable for a prediction 50 year ahead). The curve has been adapted to several regions, with correct predictions. The peak global production, using Hubbert's curve, is predicted for 2005, and it seems to have indeed ocurred.
Mind you, peak production isn't the same as "running out". There's still a lot of oil out there. It's just that now it's clear we must find an alternative, and we have a couple of decades left.
All of those affirmations without quoting a single stat. I've done the legwork before, in all comments up to here. I'm not doing it again. Stay ignorant all you want. Just note that I picked up the last 26 years. It was not random.
Except he predicted it would be 40 years in the future and the due date was never postponed.
By all means, feel free to disregard all other metrics that are non-hardware and are on schedule.
His speculations, ten years after they were made, are right on the money. So, he's a few grades above sci-fi.
This is the other main flaw in Kurzweil's argument, that Moore's law somehow translates to software. Hardware has been following Moore's law, but software hasn't.
Please provide some metrics. It is expectable that better hardware leads to better software, and I lean to believe software follows a similar exponential curve unless proven otherwise. Remember that humans are notoriously poor at naturally spotting exponential curves.
We can now model plastics much better than before, and that leads to all kinds of new materials in use. Software. Car engines had tremendous evolution in efficiency in the last decades, mostly because we can now model with increasing accuracy the chemical process of fuel ignition in the confined chamber of the cylinder. That's software (the physics theory is over 50 years old). We have finer resolution MRI scans, using lower and lower radiation, due to better software.
Are these advances caused by better hardware or better software? Both, but don't discount software here.
If you are referring to our ability to model the transformation process between DNA and cells, there's a lot of legwork to be done, yes. However, this legwork is to be helped by an increasing amount of tech. Heck, if MRI scans get another resolution jump we'll be able to spot firing of individual neural units -- now, that'd help understanding how brains work!
Test your theory against US data. Infant mortality rate in '80 was 13 per thousand births. In '06 was 6 per thousand births. In a thousand people set, you had seven datapoints that lived zero years (worst scenario case) and now show up as living 80 years (again, worst case scenario). The effect of better infant mortality rates comes down to 80*7/1000 years=7 months (average scenarios produce 5 months). Meanwhile, in the same period, life expectancy went from 74 to 78 years.
Better infant mortality rates explain 14% of the increase in life expectancy. Where does the rest come from? Better car safety? Perhaps, but certainly with lower effect than infant mortality. The rest? Medical technology.
It hasn't happened decades later because the singularity date isn't past yet. You may criticize Kurzweil, which I do, but you should read what he says before criticizing vaguely. As it is, you sound like a misinformed radicalist. Just so you gain something from this post: a) I think he predicts the singularity to happen near 2030; b) He predicts humans will 'fuse' with machines, not that machines will replace humans.