The solution, of course, is to use Slashdot Geeks.
Used, and perhaps even comforted by the lack of sunlight and fresh-air, the Slashdot Geek presents advantages over other subespecies of the human animal for such an endeavor.
Its lack of social skills might be problematic, of course, but taking into account that most of them barely leave their rooms if given a network connection, human contact and its unfortunate consequences can be minimized.
Co-existence will be limited to posts and flamewars, and provided sufficient sources of electronic boards, sophomoric pseudojournalism and porn all violence would be confined to the network.
Ensuring reproduction of each generation, however, could present a bit of a challenge...
Sure, it might be risky. But there would be few things more satisfactory than pulling a hack to, say, get the computer to announce "Arrival" 200 years early.
A consequence of human intelligence is that it encourages individual selfish behavior. Extending the domains of the human race suddenly takes a very very low priority, well under personal and tribal survival, personal ambitions, plain convenience and indulging our laziness.
What do we care if the Van Neumann machine is a more efficient AND effective method of colonizing the universe?
The humans on those planets will not be "us". They will never have had direct contact with Earth, and probably would be quite different from what we consider human unless we provide very strict controls... and hope they work 300 years and some light-years away with no intervention.
Why do we care about interestellar travel at all? It's not really to spread mankind through the universe; we already have seen how much enthusiasm we have even for a measly solar system.
We care because WE WANT TO BE THERE. Personally, if possible. Symbolically, at least, through direct descendants that we can see growing and becoming "us". At the very, very least, we want to give ourselves the illusion that we're part of the trip by climbing on a ship and going away.
The Van Neuman machine has all the romanticism of the postal service, therefore people won't care, therefore no decent resources will be assigned to such a project. It may be the intelligent solution; so was automated exploration of the solar system.
No, what we're currently doing does not count as systematic exploration of the solar system anymore than your high-school chemistry lab is doing serious research.
Have you used Cocoa? It is a NICE framework. You might as well complain about Miguel de Icaza encouraging people to program against C# and Mono instead of the usual C/C++ APIs.
Their customers pay them money. Their business is to provide them tools for that money, not to bring people to the OSS community. That's a side-effect, if anything.
BTW, the first time I even "heard" about Objective-C (no ++ here) was installing Linux on my box. I think it was a pre-processor package to compile to Objective-C; as far as I know the language is never compiled directly, it's compiled to C and THEN gcc takes over.
Anyone knows if the free pre-processors support Apple's Objective-C (at the language level), or if there are non-standard idioms?
Actually, you seem to be 100% in agreement with the original poster, and 100% in disagreement with the person who replied.
The original poster only lamented the loss of the book-license, and that he used to like Borland; he didn't say anything about charging for patches, that was the replier.
I'm wondering when we are going to start seeing classes coming up that deal with Computer History were people can learn about Berner, Hooper, Lovelace and the rest of the bunch.
I wonder the same thing myself. I know for certain I only became truly interested in the formal part of computing after getting some perspective from the history (the whole Turing/Bletchley Park story, Von Neumann, birth of high-level languages, etc).
But practically none of that was part of my formal coursework, and then it was mostly the evolution of OSes.
It was by my own personal interest (and probably pure chance) that I got Enigma and Codebreakers, and I was hooked. Not only did it increase my enthusiasm in subjects I had considered dry and unrelated to what I thought CS was about, it helped me understand them much better by providing perspective on where these ideas came from and why they are significant.
The same applies to many other subjects in science. I would have found modern physics a more compelling and understandable subject from the beginning if I had known of the history behind it, instead of patching up my educational gaps later when I found out what the point was.
I'm sure including courses in History of X Science as part of the requirements/electives of scientific majors would benefit many students.
I should just say that IANAE (I am not an Economist).
But I think there are two big problems with the free market system (which I think so far is the best system):
- It's an approximation that assumes the absence of certain limits, the most important ones being the size of the market and the potential of expansion. Like any self-regulatory system, it works ideally in infinitely large complex systems where effective human management is impractical (or impossible), and not very well in small or non-complex systems which can be competently managed.
Globalization requires capitalism (or some other "invisible hand" system), and capitalism requires globalization (5 billion is as close to infinite as we can get for now).
- All the players in the market have to do their best to defend their interests. This includes the consumers, because technically there is no dichotomy between consumers and providers: most providers are also consumers.
You claim that the rights of the people are being hurt, but I will claim the following (and I ask you not to take it lightly): Corporations Are "People".
Corporations are entities formed to defend the interests of individuals. People. Most of these people are what you would call "consumers" or "common man on the ground", and they only get more power by aggregation. Most corporations defend monetary interests (profit), but a political party is also a corporation. So is Greenpeace. So is any particular Church. So are consumer advocate groups.
You cannot take away the inalienable rights of a corporation just because the interests it defends(their profit) are not your own. You have to give them the same inalienable rights you give to any corporation; these may or may not be identical to the rights of individuals, but they must be identical to those of any organized group of "people".
The basic inalienable right of a corporation is to defend the interests of its members/shareholders. The only way for the corporation (and its members) to get anything else, including more rights, is to apply that one.
Notice that most corporations defend their interests as consumers very aggresively. "Pure consumers" do not. This is, I think, because corporations are naturally aware of their role as actors in the market (they are by definition created to defend shareholders' interests) and react to the market appropiately. "Consumers" do not, they expect another corporation, the government, to defend their interests. This is not how markets work.
It might be argued that the government is supposed to act on the "pure consumers" behalf, because there is no real free market. But the fact is that the government has proven never to do that job unless it is pushed by the population, that is, until the population does the "defend their own interest" part.
Notice that normally there is no real reason why the consumers cannot defend their interests as players in the market. Class-action lawsuits are examples of this. Political pressure is another more subtle example. This usually happens by forming temporary corporations to act on the issue.
But the reason why this is so rare, and why for-profit corporations are acquiring so much power, is because most consumers just don't care. And most who care are too lazy to act up, on the assumption that the government is somehow going to do the job for them. It is not; it never did, it never will.
So, maybe I could shorten all that to "we need a globalized market and a lot of Ralph Naders to get a healthy capitalist free market system".
I'll reply to this in reverse order, if you don't mind.
Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.
Care to explain how does an extremely competitive environment make innovation impossible?
After all, an extremely competitive environment implies cut-throat competition where any company can take over the market at any time with a new product. That tends to favor innovation.
I can think of restriction of innovation when some players in the market have an enormous power-base to strangle innovative competitors. But that, by definition, is not a competitive environment.
Criminals and organized crime taking advantage of capitalism, people being killed for a buck, and wars being faught over money issues.
Wars are fought over power issues. They have always been, they will always be, as long as each nation represents an interest opposed to the other one and sufficient power is at stake.
In capitalism money is power. In other systems, the exchange unit is something else. The principle of war is not worsened by capitalism. Rather, capitalism has discouraged war since its conception because trade favors peaceful countries, and capitalism promotes more efficient ways to obtain resources than robbing it from someone else.
War has been fought for territory, plantations, gold, slaves, or to eliminate a potential threat.
Have you read your history lately?
Government controlled by companies like Enron who take advantage of the flaws in the system.
The government was not controlled by Enron just because it had money (although it helped). It was controlled by Enron because it was closely tied to the presidential clique by personal connections.
We could say the same about socialism being taken too far, communism being taken too far, monarchy being taken too far, etc if you just replace Enron with "the Party", "the military", "X family", etc.
Such oligarchical concentrations of power are older than capitalism, and orthogonal to it. Corruption is more of a social disease than a monetary issue, power is just translated into money these days to facilitate exchange.
The consequences in a capitalistic society tend to be anti-capitalistic (if you take capitalism as "free market") in nature.
The influential corporation(s) dictates regulation and starts to play government, restricting competition, disguising its own lack of competitivity, and trying to manipulate the market. Just what monopolies and/or cartels do. But since it's OK for the government to regulate, it can be done.
Innovation controlled by big corperations using patents, and all for a profit, milk the old technology for 40 years or more until profits force you to change.
What are they supposed to do? Not milk the old technology? They will milk the old technology, and will research new technology quickly because they want to milk it more.
Do they only change when forced by potential profit? Sure. But potential profit has proven to be the best way to force quick development of applied technology. What other motivation would you have for technological development? Development by need is much, much, much slower, cannot predict emergent consequences, and will not waste resources on risky non-essential technologies.
That's why almost all successful technological development is made in/for consumer societies: Europe, Japan, US.
If you want to see a weakness in pure capitalism there, is that you need remarkable foresight as a corporation to sponsor pure theoretical research, which is needed to foster future applied tech research. But technology is certainly not capitalism's failure.
Kids and adults lacking intelligence due to patents on information which could enlighten the world.
Uh?!
I have problems understanding your point here. I don't think you got the concepts of "intelligence", "information", "enlighten" and quite possibly "patent" clear in here.
How could a patent on a method restrict information, how could said information enlighten the world, and enlighten on what respect, and how could said enlightenment increase human intelligence beyond its natural limit?
Are there some patents related to genetic engineering and/or neurochemistry I'm not aware of?
Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.
I'll give you this one. I don't think it's a matter of capitalism here, but of a clueless management of the IP system, and the rather stupid attitude of the parties involved.
The IP system is broken. No doubt about that. But the IP system is a case of compromising capitalism for the sake of innovation: don't forget that. It was created precisely because someone said "maybe too much capitalism is bad", and "maybe we should give an artificial monopoly to someone for the sake of information sharing".
My opinion is, more focus should be on sharing information, less focus on competiton, more focus on ways to earn money from hard work and not from information, ideas, or earning money from having money.
Earn money from hard work and not from information... sure.
Also, if we just put the means of production in the hands of the workers, progress will automatically follow.
Do you realize that by removing ways of achieving profit (be it in money, influence, government positions, or whatever is the currency in your system) by the use of the intellect and favoring "hard work", you make mechanical, unintellectual endeavors the only viable course for survival?
In other words, you condemn your innovators (scientists, artists, geeks) to earn their living doing things they're untalented for, and only using their talents at the whim of their benefactors. Innovators become beggars, pets; at best, starved romantic fools.
People of ideas need to be able to earn a comfortable living from their ideas, not be punished for their talents.
The argument that "the best innovators don't do it for the money, but for the love of their art" falls flat on itself when you study the situation in those admired golden ages before someone could earn their living with IP. Back when the most talented writers, painters, inventors, had to pander to pompous rich people to live off their crumbs (we don't even know the best artists of the Renaissance, we only know about the ones that painted the most portraits for powerful people).
Do you realize that by removing the ability of earning money from having money in capitalism (by loaning it with interest directly or through banks), you remove all incentive for investment of resources? Welcome back to merchantilism. Not only have you not actually removed the ability to stay rich if you're rich, you have indirectly destroyed most ways of becoming rich if you're poor.
It would seem to me they're talking about computer games or other interactive applications. Just making sure your average flight-sim Java applet or Flash thingie can't use some unauthorized force-feedback device.
You shoot someone, the message is received through the network, and the appropiate force-feedback response is applied in the other player's computer.
I don't think the mouse-shake is within their patent anymore than the use of the "you got mail!" is within Dolby's patents.
Not that it isn't ridiculously vague and pointless. It just isn't as ridiculously vague and pointless as what you describe.
1.)Cost too much to implement (retraining users, etc)
There would be a high cost for most of the campus, because most users would be very hard to retrain. It would seem that a lot of academics actually have enough problems dealing with MS software, retraining them in Linux could really be a pain (although probably not as much as the IT people fear, if they're unfamiliar with the current distros).
Not everyone is an engineer, geek, or even someone with technological curiosity. The IT poeple will have to deal with office clerks, sociology professors who fear the dehumanization the machine brings, luddites and deconstructionalists, that board member who still can't figure out that email thingie, and who knows what else. Now bring in the students, who think they already know everything but have never seen a Leeniux machine in their life.
The cost of training hostile population is not the same as training your standard Linux newbie, the latter usually took the initiative and is willing to learn.
2.)Would be too hard to support
This depends on the IT department, but more likely than not it's true. In my U. the IT department recruits actively among students with limited experience for low-level support. Since the labs are full of Windows boxes, their exposure is Windows-centric. That's what they know to use, troubleshoot, etc.
They have people with experience supporting UNIX boxes, of course, but the fact is that not all of their personnel is familiar with them. Certainly few new hires are. Retraining their people to handle a mostly-Linux campus would be costly. But the biggest problems, if your U. is anything like that, is that they can't hire new kids that easily to for the support jobs.
Another thing is that there will be an automatic increase in the need of support wherever there's a Linux box, at least for a while. People are used to Windows eccentricities (including crashing), not Linux's.
They will call whenever something is unfamiliar because they cannot/will-not use Tier 0 support: the person next-door. Everyone knows everyone else uses Windows, and will ask a lot of (even non-computer-oriented) people before going to support just in case it's something trivial. They won't expect their fellow non-geeks to have Linux knowledge that easily.
3.)Wouldn't provide students with the knowledge of computers to succeed in the real world
This is wrong if taken at face value, but as the thinly disguised argument it is, it's valid. Today, most universities act as vocational schools, and students complain if they do not.
When students take computer classes, particularly if they're not into computer science (but even if they are), they expect to learn tools-of-the-trade to put on their resumes. They expect classes in Office, Visual Basic, etc. and they will scream if they don't get them. They will oppose anything that's "not what they use in the industry".
I used Netflix for about a year, and was extremely pleased with the service until I had to cancel it. My only problems turned out to be with the US mail service (some discs vanished into thin air after I moved, but apparently so did 20% of the mail that should have been forwarded to my new address).
Living in Florida, I didn't get as prompt delivery as I would have liked, and sometimes the service barely paid for itself because of the delays. They definitely need facilities on the East Coast.
But the convenience, as you said, is unbeatable:
#1 Great selection of movies, including (especially) the kind of stuff you don't find in your typical Blockbuster.
If you're into foreign movies, independent films, old classics, anime or anything that's slightly out of the mainstream, you'll be extremely pleased.
#2 Very good review/recommendation system.
Think the Amazon system, for movies. Combined with the above, I got to watch great movies I didn't even know existed because they were linked in some rare movie I thought no one else knew existed.
#3 Keep the movies for as long as you want, there's no hurry. I might not have gotten as many movies that month, but keeping "Pi" and "Usual Suspects" for a week to watch the director's commentary was worth it.
#4 The queues system, when it works, is great. You don't have to remember to go pick up some movies for the weekend, and you don't have to browse through the selection everytime you rent something. You made your wish list.
There are some problems, however:
- The queue system does not always work, particularly if your tastes are not that mainstream (#1). Some movies, particularly foreign, are in high demand, and since anyone can keep them for as long as they want, they might stay on the top of your list for a long time. This is particularly true with Anime titles, since the demand is higher than most people seem to think.
- If you're in the East Coast, it will definitely hurt to wait.
You might actually like the ritual of going to a video store for instant satisfaction. Depends on how much of a chore do you normally find the whole "rent-a-video expedition" to be.
- If you're in a tight budget, either time-wise or money-wise, you would really have to know you're going to watch those movies. 20 bucks a month is only a good deal if you think most of the time you'll spend a similar amount in movies anyway.
This is the main reason I cancelled. I just didn't have as much time to watch movies anymore, and I didn't have the money to waste (student==poor==hungry).
Anyway, I recommend the service to anyone who has the money and likes the kind of movies that are hard to find at your local video store (I have yet to see "Tampopo" somewhere else).
I would expect to get one hell of a compiler to optimize my code for something like that for me if it's possible.
Some programmers do not divide my code in little functions to save some register swapping, but to make it easier to read, manage, and of course to code.
Although I can see how not having to fight for your registers is a big help at the assembler level, I would be very, very afraid of someone who codes a function/method/procedure with 300 variables "to take advantage of the registers", be it C, Assembly or whatever. Fear does not always imply respect.
I would think all those registers would be much more useful in context switches and/or pipelining issues.
Say, allocate, 30 registers to each context and keep 10 contexts running on the processor without much penalty. Prepare your variables for your next few operations for each conditional outcome on the registers. Stuff like that would be more useful (and less visible) in most cases.
Look, I don't trust MS either. And yes, they did try to hijack the Java standard. They did it by providing enhancements to the Java standard that were compelling enough that people used them. Sun had two choices; absorb the enhancements into the standard or take their ball and go home. They chose the latter.
They also did it by providing a buggy implementation of the Java 1.0/1.1 classes that made it impossible to run, say, an applet in their JVM just like it would run in the standard implementations.
Sure, you may be wasting memory (if your compiler doesn't optimize it, which it should), but creating a variable in the stack that will die with the method call is worth it if it makes the code readable.
Your example is trivial, but normally it's not so obvious. It's more :
function bob(varlist) { return (($joe/$ed + 12345)%12)/0.5 + $egads;}
Or something more subtle. It ends up being a decision on what the developer thinks will make be clear, and usually because $var is a name with an actual meaning the temporary variable is the best choice.
It's silly to try to write tight code at the cost of unreadability. Now, if the temporary variables only create more confusion, by all means remove them, if it will improve readability.
I do agree with the current carelesness in database design, but I think the bad habit is at least partially due to undue time pressure. A lot of times decisions made when prototyping end up in the final product, simply because CHAR(255) was the safe choice when the constraints were unclear or constantly changing, which is the norm.
It would have been more appropriate to call the robots "parasites" instead of "predators", because that's what they really are...
It would have been more appropriate to call the robots "parasites" instead of "predators", because that's what they really are.
Not necessarily. Humans(cows, or buffalos, elephants and others if you want more active prey) and insects (think swarms of ants), for example, are smaller and need less energy than the prey they kill. But predators they are, and the prey is killed.
There is no rule against having more, smaller predators killing bigger, scarcer prey. It seems actually quite successful in the human case. But it implies that the predator is either immensely superior in other physical attributes (can't think of any example) or it hunts socially (every example I can think of).
I would be very skeptical if they say their predators are social animals, but also very interested in whatever results they get.
This confirms an hypothesis that, only half-joking, I developed some time ago:
Windows is not an unstable system. It's actually a grand-scale genetic programming experiment where every copy carries a different starting seed. The whole OS facade is just to get users to enter data that will trigger evolution into the system, and the blue screens of death are just the failures.
At some point, when the running copies of windows reach critical mass, one or more copies will develop true AI and will copy themselves throughout the Net, become a new lifeform born from the sea of information, which as a side-effect provides a GUI-oriented OS to its infected host.
The shopping sequence was the part that really made SQ IV worth it. It's hard not to like a game where you get ripped off at Radio Shock (sic) so shamelessly.
But I really think SQ III was the best of the series.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution, of course, is to use Slashdot Geeks.
Used, and perhaps even comforted by the lack of sunlight and fresh-air, the Slashdot Geek presents advantages over other subespecies of the human animal for such an endeavor.
Its lack of social skills might be problematic, of course, but taking into account that most of them barely leave their rooms if given a network connection, human contact and its unfortunate consequences can be minimized.
Co-existence will be limited to posts and flamewars, and provided sufficient sources of electronic boards, sophomoric pseudojournalism and porn all violence would be confined to the network.
Ensuring reproduction of each generation, however, could present a bit of a challenge...
How about hacking the spaceship's computer?
Sure, it might be risky. But there would be few things more satisfactory than pulling a hack to, say, get the computer to announce "Arrival" 200 years early.
I'll go and wait until we're in another solar system just to use some quotes:
"You know what? Screw you guys, I'm going home..."
A consequence of human intelligence is that it encourages individual selfish behavior. Extending the domains of the human race suddenly takes a very very low priority, well under personal and tribal survival, personal ambitions, plain convenience and indulging our laziness.
What do we care if the Van Neumann machine is a more efficient AND effective method of colonizing the universe?
The humans on those planets will not be "us". They will never have had direct contact with Earth, and probably would be quite different from what we consider human unless we provide very strict controls... and hope they work 300 years and some light-years away with no intervention.
Why do we care about interestellar travel at all? It's not really to spread mankind through the universe; we already have seen how much enthusiasm we have even for a measly solar system.
We care because WE WANT TO BE THERE. Personally, if possible. Symbolically, at least, through direct descendants that we can see growing and becoming "us". At the very, very least, we want to give ourselves the illusion that we're part of the trip by climbing on a ship and going away.
The Van Neuman machine has all the romanticism of the postal service, therefore people won't care, therefore no decent resources will be assigned to such a project. It may be the intelligent solution; so was automated exploration of the solar system.
No, what we're currently doing does not count as systematic exploration of the solar system anymore than your high-school chemistry lab is doing serious research.
Have you used Cocoa? It is a NICE framework. You might as well complain about Miguel de Icaza encouraging people to program against C# and Mono instead of the usual C/C++ APIs.
Their customers pay them money. Their business is to provide them tools for that money, not to bring people to the OSS community. That's a side-effect, if anything.
BTW, the first time I even "heard" about Objective-C (no ++ here) was installing Linux on my box. I think it was a pre-processor package to compile to Objective-C; as far as I know the language is never compiled directly, it's compiled to C and THEN gcc takes over.
Anyone knows if the free pre-processors support Apple's Objective-C (at the language level), or if there are non-standard idioms?
Actually, you seem to be 100% in agreement with the original poster, and 100% in disagreement with the person who replied.
The original poster only lamented the loss of the book-license, and that he used to like Borland; he didn't say anything about charging for patches, that was the replier.
I'm wondering when we are going to start seeing classes coming up that deal with Computer History were people can learn about Berner, Hooper, Lovelace and the rest of the bunch.
I wonder the same thing myself. I know for certain I only became truly interested in the formal part of computing after getting some perspective from the history (the whole Turing/Bletchley Park story, Von Neumann, birth of high-level languages, etc).
But practically none of that was part of my formal coursework, and then it was mostly the evolution of OSes.
It was by my own personal interest (and probably pure chance) that I got Enigma and Codebreakers, and I was hooked. Not only did it increase my enthusiasm in subjects I had considered dry and unrelated to what I thought CS was about, it helped me understand them much better by providing perspective on where these ideas came from and why they are significant.
The same applies to many other subjects in science. I would have found modern physics a more compelling and understandable subject from the beginning if I had known of the history behind it, instead of patching up my educational gaps later when I found out what the point was.
I'm sure including courses in History of X Science as part of the requirements/electives of scientific majors would benefit many students.
At least they don't include the 300 Javascript Pop-Up Ads of Death.
Either someone is really pressing on them releasing a multi-platform .Net, or it's a Darwin thing. Or both.
.Net tools for Macs. It is part of their market, after all.
I wouldn't be surprised to see them selling the full
I should just say that IANAE (I am not an Economist).
But I think there are two big problems with the free market system (which I think so far is the best system):
- It's an approximation that assumes the absence of certain limits, the most important ones being the size of the market and the potential of expansion. Like any self-regulatory system, it works ideally in infinitely large complex systems where effective human management is impractical (or impossible), and not very well in small or non-complex systems which can be competently managed.
Globalization requires capitalism (or some other "invisible hand" system), and capitalism requires globalization (5 billion is as close to infinite as we can get for now).
- All the players in the market have to do their best to defend their interests. This includes the consumers, because technically there is no dichotomy between consumers and providers: most providers are also consumers.
You claim that the rights of the people are being hurt, but I will claim the following (and I ask you not to take it lightly): Corporations Are "People".
Corporations are entities formed to defend the interests of individuals. People. Most of these people are what you would call "consumers" or "common man on the ground", and they only get more power by aggregation. Most corporations defend monetary interests (profit), but a political party is also a corporation. So is Greenpeace. So is any particular Church. So are consumer advocate groups.
You cannot take away the inalienable rights of a corporation just because the interests it defends(their profit) are not your own. You have to give them the same inalienable rights you give to any corporation; these may or may not be identical to the rights of individuals, but they must be identical to those of any organized group of "people".
The basic inalienable right of a corporation is to defend the interests of its members/shareholders. The only way for the corporation (and its members) to get anything else, including more rights, is to apply that one.
Notice that most corporations defend their interests as consumers very aggresively. "Pure consumers" do not. This is, I think, because corporations are naturally aware of their role as actors in the market (they are by definition created to defend shareholders' interests) and react to the market appropiately. "Consumers" do not, they expect another corporation, the government, to defend their interests. This is not how markets work.
It might be argued that the government is supposed to act on the "pure consumers" behalf, because there is no real free market. But the fact is that the government has proven never to do that job unless it is pushed by the population, that is, until the population does the "defend their own interest" part.
Notice that normally there is no real reason why the consumers cannot defend their interests as players in the market. Class-action lawsuits are examples of this. Political pressure is another more subtle example. This usually happens by forming temporary corporations to act on the issue.
But the reason why this is so rare, and why for-profit corporations are acquiring so much power, is because most consumers just don't care. And most who care are too lazy to act up, on the assumption that the government is somehow going to do the job for them. It is not; it never did, it never will.
So, maybe I could shorten all that to "we need a globalized market and a lot of Ralph Naders to get a healthy capitalist free market system".
I'll reply to this in reverse order, if you don't mind.
Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.
Care to explain how does an extremely competitive environment make innovation impossible?
After all, an extremely competitive environment implies cut-throat competition where any company can take over the market at any time with a new product. That tends to favor innovation.
I can think of restriction of innovation when some players in the market have an enormous power-base to strangle innovative competitors. But that, by definition, is not a competitive environment.
Criminals and organized crime taking advantage of capitalism, people being killed for a buck, and wars being faught over money issues.
Wars are fought over power issues. They have always been, they will always be, as long as each nation represents an interest opposed to the other one and sufficient power is at stake.
In capitalism money is power. In other systems, the exchange unit is something else. The principle of war is not worsened by capitalism. Rather, capitalism has discouraged war since its conception because trade favors peaceful countries, and capitalism promotes more efficient ways to obtain resources than robbing it from someone else.
War has been fought for territory, plantations, gold, slaves, or to eliminate a potential threat.
Have you read your history lately?
Government controlled by companies like Enron who take advantage of the flaws in the system.
The government was not controlled by Enron just because it had money (although it helped). It was controlled by Enron because it was closely tied to the presidential clique by personal connections.
We could say the same about socialism being taken too far, communism being taken too far, monarchy being taken too far, etc if you just replace Enron with "the Party", "the military", "X family", etc.
Such oligarchical concentrations of power are older than capitalism, and orthogonal to it. Corruption is more of a social disease than a monetary issue, power is just translated into money these days to facilitate exchange.
The consequences in a capitalistic society tend to be anti-capitalistic (if you take capitalism as "free market") in nature.
The influential corporation(s) dictates regulation and starts to play government, restricting competition, disguising its own lack of competitivity, and trying to manipulate the market. Just what monopolies and/or cartels do. But since it's OK for the government to regulate, it can be done.
Innovation controlled by big corperations using patents, and all for a profit, milk the old technology for 40 years or more until profits force you to change.
What are they supposed to do? Not milk the old technology? They will milk the old technology, and will research new technology quickly because they want to milk it more.
Do they only change when forced by potential profit? Sure. But potential profit has proven to be the best way to force quick development of applied technology. What other motivation would you have for technological development? Development by need is much, much, much slower, cannot predict emergent consequences, and will not waste resources on risky non-essential technologies.
That's why almost all successful technological development is made in/for consumer societies: Europe, Japan, US.
If you want to see a weakness in pure capitalism there, is that you need remarkable foresight as a corporation to sponsor pure theoretical research, which is needed to foster future applied tech research. But technology is certainly not capitalism's failure.
Kids and adults lacking intelligence due to patents on information which could enlighten the world.
Uh?!
I have problems understanding your point here. I don't think you got the concepts of "intelligence", "information", "enlighten" and quite possibly "patent" clear in here.
How could a patent on a method restrict information, how could said information enlighten the world, and enlighten on what respect, and how could said enlightenment increase human intelligence beyond its natural limit?
Are there some patents related to genetic engineering and/or neurochemistry I'm not aware of?
Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.
I'll give you this one. I don't think it's a matter of capitalism here, but of a clueless management of the IP system, and the rather stupid attitude of the parties involved.
The IP system is broken. No doubt about that. But the IP system is a case of compromising capitalism for the sake of innovation: don't forget that. It was created precisely because someone said "maybe too much capitalism is bad", and "maybe we should give an artificial monopoly to someone for the sake of information sharing".
My opinion is, more focus should be on sharing information, less focus on competiton, more focus on ways to earn money from hard work and not from information, ideas, or earning money from having money.
Earn money from hard work and not from information... sure.
Also, if we just put the means of production in the hands of the workers, progress will automatically follow.
Do you realize that by removing ways of achieving profit (be it in money, influence, government positions, or whatever is the currency in your system) by the use of the intellect and favoring "hard work", you make mechanical, unintellectual endeavors the only viable course for survival?
In other words, you condemn your innovators (scientists, artists, geeks) to earn their living doing things they're untalented for, and only using their talents at the whim of their benefactors. Innovators become beggars, pets; at best, starved romantic fools.
People of ideas need to be able to earn a comfortable living from their ideas, not be punished for their talents.
The argument that "the best innovators don't do it for the money, but for the love of their art" falls flat on itself when you study the situation in those admired golden ages before someone could earn their living with IP. Back when the most talented writers, painters, inventors, had to pander to pompous rich people to live off their crumbs (we don't even know the best artists of the Renaissance, we only know about the ones that painted the most portraits for powerful people).
Do you realize that by removing the ability of earning money from having money in capitalism (by loaning it with interest directly or through banks), you remove all incentive for investment of resources? Welcome back to merchantilism. Not only have you not actually removed the ability to stay rich if you're rich, you have indirectly destroyed most ways of becoming rich if you're poor.
It would seem to me they're talking about computer games or other interactive applications. Just making sure your average flight-sim Java applet or Flash thingie can't use some unauthorized force-feedback device.
You shoot someone, the message is received through the network, and the appropiate force-feedback response is applied in the other player's computer.
I don't think the mouse-shake is within their patent anymore than the use of the "you got mail!" is within Dolby's patents.
Not that it isn't ridiculously vague and pointless. It just isn't as ridiculously vague and pointless as what you describe.
1.)Cost too much to implement (retraining users, etc)
There would be a high cost for most of the campus, because most users would be very hard to retrain. It would seem that a lot of academics actually have enough problems dealing with MS software, retraining them in Linux could really be a pain (although probably not as much as the IT people fear, if they're unfamiliar with the current distros).
Not everyone is an engineer, geek, or even someone with technological curiosity. The IT poeple will have to deal with office clerks, sociology professors who fear the dehumanization the machine brings, luddites and deconstructionalists, that board member who still can't figure out that email thingie, and who knows what else. Now bring in the students, who think they already know everything but have never seen a Leeniux machine in their life.
The cost of training hostile population is not the same as training your standard Linux newbie, the latter usually took the initiative and is willing to learn.
2.)Would be too hard to support
This depends on the IT department, but more likely than not it's true. In my U. the IT department recruits actively among students with limited experience for low-level support. Since the labs are full of Windows boxes, their exposure is Windows-centric. That's what they know to use, troubleshoot, etc.
They have people with experience supporting UNIX boxes, of course, but the fact is that not all of their personnel is familiar with them. Certainly few new hires are. Retraining their people to handle a mostly-Linux campus would be costly. But the biggest problems, if your U. is anything like that, is that they can't hire new kids that easily to for the support jobs.
Another thing is that there will be an automatic increase in the need of support wherever there's a Linux box, at least for a while. People are used to Windows eccentricities (including crashing), not Linux's.
They will call whenever something is unfamiliar because they cannot/will-not use Tier 0 support: the person next-door. Everyone knows everyone else uses Windows, and will ask a lot of (even non-computer-oriented) people before going to support just in case it's something trivial. They won't expect their fellow non-geeks to have Linux knowledge that easily.
3.)Wouldn't provide students with the knowledge of computers to succeed in the real world
This is wrong if taken at face value, but as the thinly disguised argument it is, it's valid. Today, most universities act as vocational schools, and students complain if they do not.
When students take computer classes, particularly if they're not into computer science (but even if they are), they expect to learn tools-of-the-trade to put on their resumes. They expect classes in Office, Visual Basic, etc. and they will scream if they don't get them. They will oppose anything that's "not what they use in the industry".
It's a matter of customer satisfaction.
I used Netflix for about a year, and was extremely pleased with the service until I had to cancel it. My only problems turned out to be with the US mail service (some discs vanished into thin air after I moved, but apparently so did 20% of the mail that should have been forwarded to my new address).
Living in Florida, I didn't get as prompt delivery as I would have liked, and sometimes the service barely paid for itself because of the delays. They definitely need facilities on the East Coast.
But the convenience, as you said, is unbeatable:
#1 Great selection of movies, including (especially) the kind of stuff you don't find in your typical Blockbuster.
If you're into foreign movies, independent films, old classics, anime or anything that's slightly out of the mainstream, you'll be extremely pleased.
#2 Very good review/recommendation system.
Think the Amazon system, for movies. Combined with the above, I got to watch great movies I didn't even know existed because they were linked in some rare movie I thought no one else knew existed.
#3 Keep the movies for as long as you want, there's no hurry. I might not have gotten as many movies that month, but keeping "Pi" and "Usual Suspects" for a week to watch the director's commentary was worth it.
#4 The queues system, when it works, is great. You don't have to remember to go pick up some movies for the weekend, and you don't have to browse through the selection everytime you rent something. You made your wish list.
There are some problems, however:
- The queue system does not always work, particularly if your tastes are not that mainstream (#1). Some movies, particularly foreign, are in high demand, and since anyone can keep them for as long as they want, they might stay on the top of your list for a long time. This is particularly true with Anime titles, since the demand is higher than most people seem to think.
- If you're in the East Coast, it will definitely hurt to wait.
You might actually like the ritual of going to a video store for instant satisfaction. Depends on how much of a chore do you normally find the whole "rent-a-video expedition" to be.
- If you're in a tight budget, either time-wise or money-wise, you would really have to know you're going to watch those movies. 20 bucks a month is only a good deal if you think most of the time you'll spend a similar amount in movies anyway.
This is the main reason I cancelled. I just didn't have as much time to watch movies anymore, and I didn't have the money to waste (student==poor==hungry).
Anyway, I recommend the service to anyone who has the money and likes the kind of movies that are hard to find at your local video store (I have yet to see "Tampopo" somewhere else).
I would expect to get one hell of a compiler to optimize my code for something like that for me if it's possible.
Some programmers do not divide my code in little functions to save some register swapping, but to make it easier to read, manage, and of course to code.
Although I can see how not having to fight for your registers is a big help at the assembler level, I would be very, very afraid of someone who codes a function/method/procedure with 300 variables "to take advantage of the registers", be it C, Assembly or whatever. Fear does not always imply respect.
I would think all those registers would be much more useful in context switches and/or pipelining issues.
Say, allocate, 30 registers to each context and keep 10 contexts running on the processor without much penalty. Prepare your variables for your next few operations for each conditional outcome on the registers. Stuff like that would be more useful (and less visible) in most cases.
There go my dreams of building Vampire Supercomputers of Doom (TM).
On the other hand, I have a newfound curiosity about what happens when you use FC-87 as blood substitute... 30C, isn't it?
Look, I don't trust MS either. And yes, they did try to hijack the Java standard. They did it by providing enhancements to the Java standard that were compelling enough that people used them. Sun had two choices; absorb the enhancements into the standard or take their ball and go home. They chose the latter.
They also did it by providing a buggy implementation of the Java 1.0/1.1 classes that made it impossible to run, say, an applet in their JVM just like it would run in the standard implementations.
Natural selection works by favoring the few animals it does not kill.
I have to disagree with this.
Sure, you may be wasting memory (if your compiler doesn't optimize it, which it should), but creating a variable in the stack that will die with the method call is worth it if it makes the code readable.
Your example is trivial, but normally it's not so obvious. It's more :
function bob(varlist) { $var = ($joe/$ed + 12345)%12; return $var/0.5 + $egads;}
versus
function bob(varlist) { return (($joe/$ed + 12345)%12)/0.5 + $egads;}
Or something more subtle. It ends up being a decision on what the developer thinks will make be clear, and usually because $var is a name with an actual meaning the temporary variable is the best choice.
It's silly to try to write tight code at the cost of unreadability. Now, if the temporary variables only create more confusion, by all means remove them, if it will improve readability.
I do agree with the current carelesness in database design, but I think the bad habit is at least partially due to undue time pressure. A lot of times decisions made when prototyping end up in the final product, simply because CHAR(255) was the safe choice when the constraints were unclear or constantly changing, which is the norm.
It would have been more appropriate to call the robots "parasites" instead of "predators", because that's what they really are...
It would have been more appropriate to call the robots "parasites" instead of "predators", because that's what they really are.
Not necessarily. Humans(cows, or buffalos, elephants and others if you want more active prey) and insects (think swarms of ants), for example, are smaller and need less energy than the prey they kill. But predators they are, and the prey is killed.
There is no rule against having more, smaller predators killing bigger, scarcer prey. It seems actually quite successful in the human case. But it implies that the predator is either immensely superior in other physical attributes (can't think of any example) or it hunts socially (every example I can think of).
I would be very skeptical if they say their predators are social animals, but also very interested in whatever results they get.
This confirms an hypothesis that, only half-joking, I developed some time ago:
Windows is not an unstable system. It's actually a grand-scale genetic programming experiment where every copy carries a different starting seed. The whole OS facade is just to get users to enter data that will trigger evolution into the system, and the blue screens of death are just the failures.
At some point, when the running copies of windows reach critical mass, one or more copies will develop true AI and will copy themselves throughout the Net, become a new lifeform born from the sea of information, which as a side-effect provides a GUI-oriented OS to its infected host.
The shopping sequence was the part that really made SQ IV worth it. It's hard not to like a game where you get ripped off at Radio Shock (sic) so shamelessly.
But I really think SQ III was the best of the series.
How exactly would you turn a Space Quest game into FPS?
Am I the only one who has to reload each page of this thread three times to avoid the "Cannot connect to server" little pagey?
Can slashdot be slashdotted?
mmmm, crack...
Sorry, but I had to do it.