Wow, you say all that with such certainty as if all of that were known.
Fact is that nobody can say even with any confidence what happened around the big bang, how the universe is going to end, or whether any information survives the/a big bang/crunch. Even non-big-bang models of the universe can't be excluded based on what's known.
No, it's not you or your mojo, it's the games. They are getting better and better 3D graphics, and the gameplay is getting more and more boring. In many of the games, you can't really die anymore, you get arrows pointing where you need to go, and often if you just twitch fast, you win.
The part I question is "our rules". Who are you to make the rules as to which foreign government is legitmate and which one isn't?
I'm not making any rules, I'm saying your logic is flawed: our rules do not require us to do this. Who are you to impose such a requirement?
This is the dilemma you still haven't solved. If the majority vote is not what determines right or wrong, then what is ?
Right and wrong, I can't answer. But for something to be a democratic decision, it has to be reached under democratic principles and conditions: free and fair elections, free political speech, and a guarantee of basic human rights, among other things. Majority vote is neither necessary nor sufficient.
I'm not dissing that. I do it myself all the time. But I find it dishonest to claim that there is anything else at work here than personal judgement.
Well, you'd think that because evidently you lack a definition of democracy and are unwilling to use the definition that political science and philosophy actually uses.
Fact is that there are accepted requirements for a democracy; decision by majority vote isn't one of them, but protection of basic human rights and free and fair elections are a couple of them (among others).
No, Belial is right: ejection, window management, menu bars, and iTunes all have serious usability problems on OS X. Apple engineers do violate standard usability principles constantly, so they don't walk on water. Their only saving grace is that Microsoft's software is even shoddier.
That's nonsense. iOS is a full desktop OS that just happens to have some power-related tweaks, a UI adapted to tablets and some restrictions on how many apps can run simultaneously. The idea that iOS has some deep design features in it that make it intrinsically better at conserving battery life on tablet is an Apple marketing fiction, as anybody with a battery usage meter on other operating systems can easily determine for themselves.
I think at this point you just keep modifying your definition of "democracy" to suit whatever argument you are making at the time. Clearly define what you mean by democracy, then we can continue this discussion.
Google does care about the local area it operates in, the area that nurtured it and that it relied on for much of its talent: the Bay Area.
Ireland, on the other hand, is just a place that offered itself cheaply a few years ago. If it's not cheap anymore, it's time to pack up and leave. It's unreasonable for Ireland to expect loyalty given how Google ended up there in the first place.
There are tons of nations interested in having Google present. If Ireland wants to keep them, it needs to be competitive on taxes and working conditions.
Given Ireland's location and condition, in fact, they really need to be cheaper than other European nations. If Google is going to have to pay high taxes, they might be better off doing it in a place like France, Britain, or Germany.
No, it wasn't cost. It was weight and battery life. I had a couple of tablet-style computers over the years. They were nice machines and not all that expensive.
But at over 1" thick and weighing 6 pounds, you simply couldn't comfortably carry them around. They also took too long to turn on and off. You couldn't build a powerful lightweight tablet at the time at any price.
Now that we have the processors, batteries, and screens that make lightweight, long-lasting tables possible, they are appearing from many companies.
You would criticize NeXT for adopting a widely supported open operating system foundation?
I didn't "criticize" NeXT for adopting any of these technologies. I pointed out that most of them didn't come from NeXT to begin with. If IBM had wanted those technologies, it could have gotten them elsewhere, but they actually had better technologies.
Visual Age Smalltalk never went anywhere and never provided anything like NeXTstep/Openstep/Cocoa
VisualAge Smalltalk did something much better: it gave people a good environment to develop custom apps that actually ran on Windows. It always remained a niche player, but so did NeXT. IBM then switched to Java and has been spectacularly successful with it in the corporate market.
NeXT were brilliant at selecting the right technologies to integrate into a system. Mach, BSD Unix, Display Postscript, Objective-C, the precursor to Cocoa frameworks,... It was and remains a dream come true software development environment.
NeXT was a failing company when Apple bought them; IBM betting on them would have been madness and IBM would have gotten screwed.
And NeXT didn't select "the right technologies" at all. DisplayPostscript was a total failure, not just at NeXT, but also at IBM and Sun (all of which tried it); Apple got rid of it. Objective-C never caught on as a mainstream language until Apple shoved it down their developers' throats. Mach's microkernel approach was an architectural disaster and Apple just rewrote it and turned it into a monolithic kernel.
Are you out of your mind?
No, I just know what's going on, unlike you apparently.
Apple has good advertising, and a willingness to be an early adopter on new trends. Everything else is pretty mediocre.
Oh, I agree; I was speaking relative to the rest of the PC industry, which is even worse. For every idiotic thing Apple has done in the OS X UI, and for every bug and crash in iTunes, Microsoft has two or three in their equivalent software.
At this point, actually, some of the best UIs and engineering are in FOSS.
NeXTStep was really just Mach, Objective-C, Display Postscript, and a clone of Xerox's UI and UI architecture, all technologies NeXT copied or licensed from somewhere else. It would have died a well-deserved natural death if Apple hadn't wanted Steve Jobs, the person, back.
IBM already had better technology in-house. Instead of NeXTStep, they created a kick-ass Smalltalk development environment that allows much more rapid application development than NeXT ever did and allowed them to deliver apps on Windows. It addressed the niche market NeXT was addressing much more effectively and probably was far more widely used than NeXT ever was.
Even if IBM could have foreseen that Jobs moved to Apple and resurrected NeXT technologies, not buying into NeXT would still have been the right business decision for IBM given how Apple ended up handling NeXT licensing and evolution.
Sure, it was "a deal"; that's not the issue. That doesn't change that Apple has been wrongly claiming to have invented much of this technology, not just in their PR, but also in lawsuits. And it doesn't change the fact that Apple has a tendency to misrepresent where their ideas come from.
In fact, Apple simple doesn't have a research lab. They have good software developers, UI designers, and engineers. They get most of their idea either by copying others or by buying companies.
Google wins with Android simply because Microsoft and Apple can't hold up app approvals for a year and a half or mess with Google's web sites. If they get any revenue out of Android, that's icing on the cake.
No, that doesn't hold "for the main decisions"; "the main decisions" in democracies tend to be made by elected representatives.
In real life, it is possible to do away with those barriers. Do you think the Weimar Republic did not have seperation of powers or a constitution?
And that's my point: contrary to your claims, the West doesn't have to respect any majority decision. The West didn't have to respect the democratic decision of Germans to hand over power to a genocidal maniac, and neither does it have to respect majority decisions in Muslim nations supporting religious intolerance. The contradiction you postulated doesn't exist.
Well, you're changing your tune. A few messages back, you were saying:
Democracy gives people what the (sometimes slim) majority (of voters) wants
Also, your understanding of constitutional change is wrong:
A 2/3rd majority may decide to institute minority protection, plus the need of a 2/3rd majority to change it.
If we take the original US Constitution, it wasn't approved by a majority of the people, it was approved by representatives. Furthermore, amendments to the Constitution are also decided on by representatives and not majorities of the people.
Furthermore, constitutions often also recognize natural, inalienable, and/or self-evident rights that cannot ever be taken away by a vote. The judicial and executive branch would basically simply not enforce any laws that contradict such inalienable rights.
Obama should worry about fixing our economy, stopping wasteful military spending, and getting our soldiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he seems to be instructing TSA agents to stick their fingers up our butts and mess with our cell phones. At some point, the people who voted for him may just not give a damn anymore at the next election.
So, you agree then a majority of the people cannot decide to kill a minority of the people in some democracies because the constitution won't let them, and you also realize that this restriction on the majority derives from the people themselves and not any external force.
That's my point: in a democracy, a majority does not always get to decide.
The Linux kernel architecture is creaky, but so is everybody else's. And it doesn't matter. The kernel's job is to shuffle bytes between devices and processes and manage memory. The Linux kernel does that pretty efficiently, people seem to be able to write good drivers for it, and that's pretty much all there's to it. It's the same with window systems: X11 gets the job done as efficiently and well as anybody, and even though there's some legacy stuff in there, there is no point in rewriting it.
And it's not like anybody else has something better. The NT kernel is full of complicated functionality that nobody actually uses. The OS X kernel is a microkernel that has been turned into a monolithic kernel and has had a BSD brain transplant. The one recent OS that really tried to shake things up a bit is Plan 9, but it crashed and burned.
Anti-protons have about the same mass as protons but negative charge. And anti-electrons (positrons) have about the same mass as electrons. Anti-copper is expected to behave very similar to copper. Any differences responsible for the imbalance in the universe are likely small.
(The imbalance is also only presumed; nobody knows for certain, since we just can't tell.)
The gravitational properties of anti-matter are unknown. People assume that antimatter and matter all attract. However, it is possible that antimatter and matter repulse each other, or even that antimatter repulses antimatter gravitationally. Until it's measured, we won't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you say all that with such certainty as if all of that were known.
Fact is that nobody can say even with any confidence what happened around the big bang, how the universe is going to end, or whether any information survives the/a big bang/crunch. Even non-big-bang models of the universe can't be excluded based on what's known.
No, it's not you or your mojo, it's the games. They are getting better and better 3D graphics, and the gameplay is getting more and more boring. In many of the games, you can't really die anymore, you get arrows pointing where you need to go, and often if you just twitch fast, you win.
The part I question is "our rules". Who are you to make the rules as to which foreign government is legitmate and which one isn't?
I'm not making any rules, I'm saying your logic is flawed: our rules do not require us to do this. Who are you to impose such a requirement?
This is the dilemma you still haven't solved. If the majority vote is not what determines right or wrong, then what is ?
Right and wrong, I can't answer. But for something to be a democratic decision, it has to be reached under democratic principles and conditions: free and fair elections, free political speech, and a guarantee of basic human rights, among other things. Majority vote is neither necessary nor sufficient.
I'm not dissing that. I do it myself all the time. But I find it dishonest to claim that there is anything else at work here than personal judgement.
Well, you'd think that because evidently you lack a definition of democracy and are unwilling to use the definition that political science and philosophy actually uses.
Fact is that there are accepted requirements for a democracy; decision by majority vote isn't one of them, but protection of basic human rights and free and fair elections are a couple of them (among others).
No, Belial is right: ejection, window management, menu bars, and iTunes all have serious usability problems on OS X. Apple engineers do violate standard usability principles constantly, so they don't walk on water. Their only saving grace is that Microsoft's software is even shoddier.
That's nonsense. iOS is a full desktop OS that just happens to have some power-related tweaks, a UI adapted to tablets and some restrictions on how many apps can run simultaneously. The idea that iOS has some deep design features in it that make it intrinsically better at conserving battery life on tablet is an Apple marketing fiction, as anybody with a battery usage meter on other operating systems can easily determine for themselves.
I think at this point you just keep modifying your definition of "democracy" to suit whatever argument you are making at the time. Clearly define what you mean by democracy, then we can continue this discussion.
Google does care about the local area it operates in, the area that nurtured it and that it relied on for much of its talent: the Bay Area.
Ireland, on the other hand, is just a place that offered itself cheaply a few years ago. If it's not cheap anymore, it's time to pack up and leave. It's unreasonable for Ireland to expect loyalty given how Google ended up there in the first place.
There are tons of nations interested in having Google present. If Ireland wants to keep them, it needs to be competitive on taxes and working conditions.
Given Ireland's location and condition, in fact, they really need to be cheaper than other European nations. If Google is going to have to pay high taxes, they might be better off doing it in a place like France, Britain, or Germany.
When I travel to Estonia, every transaction that I make gets recorded electronically? I don't think so.
Eamets may or may not know something about economics, but he apparently knows nothing about privacy or liberty.
No, it wasn't cost. It was weight and battery life. I had a couple of tablet-style computers over the years. They were nice machines and not all that expensive.
But at over 1" thick and weighing 6 pounds, you simply couldn't comfortably carry them around. They also took too long to turn on and off. You couldn't build a powerful lightweight tablet at the time at any price.
Now that we have the processors, batteries, and screens that make lightweight, long-lasting tables possible, they are appearing from many companies.
You would criticize NeXT for adopting a widely supported open operating system foundation?
I didn't "criticize" NeXT for adopting any of these technologies. I pointed out that most of them didn't come from NeXT to begin with. If IBM had wanted those technologies, it could have gotten them elsewhere, but they actually had better technologies.
Visual Age Smalltalk never went anywhere and never provided anything like NeXTstep/Openstep/Cocoa
VisualAge Smalltalk did something much better: it gave people a good environment to develop custom apps that actually ran on Windows. It always remained a niche player, but so did NeXT. IBM then switched to Java and has been spectacularly successful with it in the corporate market.
NeXT were brilliant at selecting the right technologies to integrate into a system. Mach, BSD Unix, Display Postscript, Objective-C, the precursor to Cocoa frameworks, ... It was and remains a dream come true software development environment.
NeXT was a failing company when Apple bought them; IBM betting on them would have been madness and IBM would have gotten screwed.
And NeXT didn't select "the right technologies" at all. DisplayPostscript was a total failure, not just at NeXT, but also at IBM and Sun (all of which tried it); Apple got rid of it. Objective-C never caught on as a mainstream language until Apple shoved it down their developers' throats. Mach's microkernel approach was an architectural disaster and Apple just rewrote it and turned it into a monolithic kernel.
Are you out of your mind?
No, I just know what's going on, unlike you apparently.
Apple has good advertising, and a willingness to be an early adopter on new trends. Everything else is pretty mediocre.
Oh, I agree; I was speaking relative to the rest of the PC industry, which is even worse. For every idiotic thing Apple has done in the OS X UI, and for every bug and crash in iTunes, Microsoft has two or three in their equivalent software.
At this point, actually, some of the best UIs and engineering are in FOSS.
NeXTStep was really just Mach, Objective-C, Display Postscript, and a clone of Xerox's UI and UI architecture, all technologies NeXT copied or licensed from somewhere else. It would have died a well-deserved natural death if Apple hadn't wanted Steve Jobs, the person, back.
IBM already had better technology in-house. Instead of NeXTStep, they created a kick-ass Smalltalk development environment that allows much more rapid application development than NeXT ever did and allowed them to deliver apps on Windows. It addressed the niche market NeXT was addressing much more effectively and probably was far more widely used than NeXT ever was.
Even if IBM could have foreseen that Jobs moved to Apple and resurrected NeXT technologies, not buying into NeXT would still have been the right business decision for IBM given how Apple ended up handling NeXT licensing and evolution.
Don't patent your idea at company A if you're going to create startup B to make the idea really happen.
Sure, it was "a deal"; that's not the issue. That doesn't change that Apple has been wrongly claiming to have invented much of this technology, not just in their PR, but also in lawsuits. And it doesn't change the fact that Apple has a tendency to misrepresent where their ideas come from.
In fact, Apple simple doesn't have a research lab. They have good software developers, UI designers, and engineers. They get most of their idea either by copying others or by buying companies.
Google wins with Android simply because Microsoft and Apple can't hold up app approvals for a year and a half or mess with Google's web sites. If they get any revenue out of Android, that's icing on the cake.
For the main decisions, that holds true.
No, that doesn't hold "for the main decisions"; "the main decisions" in democracies tend to be made by elected representatives.
In real life, it is possible to do away with those barriers. Do you think the Weimar Republic did not have seperation of powers or a constitution?
And that's my point: contrary to your claims, the West doesn't have to respect any majority decision. The West didn't have to respect the democratic decision of Germans to hand over power to a genocidal maniac, and neither does it have to respect majority decisions in Muslim nations supporting religious intolerance. The contradiction you postulated doesn't exist.
Well, you're changing your tune. A few messages back, you were saying:
Democracy gives people what the (sometimes slim) majority (of voters) wants
Also, your understanding of constitutional change is wrong:
A 2/3rd majority may decide to institute minority protection, plus the need of a 2/3rd majority to change it.
If we take the original US Constitution, it wasn't approved by a majority of the people, it was approved by representatives. Furthermore, amendments to the Constitution are also decided on by representatives and not majorities of the people.
Furthermore, constitutions often also recognize natural, inalienable, and/or self-evident rights that cannot ever be taken away by a vote. The judicial and executive branch would basically simply not enforce any laws that contradict such inalienable rights.
Obama should worry about fixing our economy, stopping wasteful military spending, and getting our soldiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he seems to be instructing TSA agents to stick their fingers up our butts and mess with our cell phones. At some point, the people who voted for him may just not give a damn anymore at the next election.
So, you agree then a majority of the people cannot decide to kill a minority of the people in some democracies because the constitution won't let them, and you also realize that this restriction on the majority derives from the people themselves and not any external force.
That's my point: in a democracy, a majority does not always get to decide.
The Linux kernel architecture is creaky, but so is everybody else's. And it doesn't matter. The kernel's job is to shuffle bytes between devices and processes and manage memory. The Linux kernel does that pretty efficiently, people seem to be able to write good drivers for it, and that's pretty much all there's to it. It's the same with window systems: X11 gets the job done as efficiently and well as anybody, and even though there's some legacy stuff in there, there is no point in rewriting it.
And it's not like anybody else has something better. The NT kernel is full of complicated functionality that nobody actually uses. The OS X kernel is a microkernel that has been turned into a monolithic kernel and has had a BSD brain transplant. The one recent OS that really tried to shake things up a bit is Plan 9, but it crashed and burned.
If we did that, it wouldn't be Haskell anymore.
Indeed. Decent error messages in Haskell are likely impossible, given the language definition and syntax.
Those of us who prefer Haskell have our reasons for wanting its unique features.
And believe me, those of us who prefer not to use Haskell have our reasons for not wanting its unique features.
Anti-protons have about the same mass as protons but negative charge. And anti-electrons (positrons) have about the same mass as electrons. Anti-copper is expected to behave very similar to copper. Any differences responsible for the imbalance in the universe are likely small.
(The imbalance is also only presumed; nobody knows for certain, since we just can't tell.)
The gravitational properties of anti-matter are unknown. People assume that antimatter and matter all attract. However, it is possible that antimatter and matter repulse each other, or even that antimatter repulses antimatter gravitationally. Until it's measured, we won't know.