Hey a sale is a sale. Balance sheet rarely have a "Why?" column. In fact when you write it like that, its absolutely brilliant:
-> Sell OEM a standard license. -> Sell customer a Pro license. -> Probably sell them a Win7 license as well (though I'm not sure on this one maybe the upgrade is no extra charge on top of Win8 Pro? I'd be unsurprised either way.)
So 2 and maybe 3 licenses sold based on the product sucking. Most companies would love that sort of market capture.
Its actually better than that as they will NOT be losing the largest chunk of the Windows licensing fees -- OEMs will still be paying to put pre-installed versions on every PC you buy whether you want it or not.
All this will affect is retail sales of boxed/digital copies and given how much love people have for Win8, I don't imagine that they're selling a huge number of copies through that channel anyway.
It didn't "beat" WoW therefore it no longer exists! Never mind the practically constant stream of updates and such that they're still putting out. Anything less than WoW's what.. 60-80%? MMO market share isn't worth considering right?
The problem with these claims isn't usually the games themselves -- its that people bill them as WoW-killers in the first place. -No- single game will ever "kill" WoW in the sense of having more users. WoW will continue to bleed off users as it goes along of course (its a 10 year old game after all!) but the market is saturated by now so the chances that ALL of those users are going to move to the same new game is practically non-existent. (Well perhaps for a few weeks here and there when something new and flashy is just released and before the hype dies. See Diablo 3 -- not coincidentally, also a Blizzard product.)
By the time some other MMO finally exceeds WoW's user count, we will probably be several years past caring about "WoW-killers" because WoW's market share will have dipped to a level where "killing" it won't be considered with quite the same awe that we seem to expect currently.
A true "WoW-killer" is not impossible of course but there's a huge difference between WoW coming in at a time when MMOs were just getting off the ground and taking the cake, and a "WoW-killer" coming in when WoW already exists, a handful of other big names such as GW2 exist and countless tiny MMOs are all competing for your time and money. Not to mention the mass exodus from sit-and-play games to play-on-the-go mobile games sucking up MMO players in general.
Because there's no possible way that both a public and a private entity could exist at the same time.
I wonder which reality I'm living in today, the one where UPS exists or the one where USPS exists?
Just to address your "1 sucky provider answerable to no one" scenario though.. I've generally found in my life that in situations where, for whatever reason, only one provider exists, publicly run entities are almost universally better at service the public interest than private entities.
Damned near any example you can find of a natural monopoly being privatized ends up with higher costs and lower service for their customers -- sure the stock price goes up which is great for shareholders and the C*O's who talked their way into the job usually get a nice cushy salary, but it sucks balls for basically everyone else.
Maybe you've had a better experience somewhere along the line?
Public entities are answerable to their government overseers and (in theory at least) therefore answerable to voters. Private companies are answerable only to their shareholders and to fuck with the rest of the world. Generally speaking, the set of "shareholders of company X" is going to be closer to "no one" than the set of "all voters in the jurisdiction."
Huh. Reviewing the Wikipedia page, it seems we actually have surmounted some of those challenges and actually landed a few probes on the surface. Doesn't sound like any of them survived for very long but its more than I'd thought!
Trouble is that Venus is almost unreachable between the dense cloud cover the extremely high surface temperature.
So we can't really see much from above other than lots and lots of clouds.. we can't really determine what's down there in terms of landing locations and whatnot (they can get mass and composition and whatnot from external readings but specific topology is a lot harder when you can't see!)
And even if we find a landing spot, we've got the dual problems of making a rover capable of surviving and operating at over 700K and then not really being able to communicate with it because again, dense cloud cover.
I'm sure enough cleverness COULD solve all of those problems.. but I imagine the costs would be phenomenal.
Mars was chosen because its "easy" compared to pretty much everywhere else in the universe. Its still relatively close, there's not a whole lot of atmosphere to block vision/communication and most of our modern electronic gizmos tend to work better in cold than they do in hot (though the mechanical components might be a different story..? I don't know enough mechanic engineering to judge that aspect.)
I did see years ago a suggestion (how tongue-in-cheek I'm not sure) to geo-engineer Venus by seeding it with a shit ton of carbon-hungry microbes to oxygenate the planet. It would be humorously awesome if it could work but I doubt its been given enough credence to warrant the cost investment (and no idea how long it would take to achieve useful results even if it DID work. It could be on the scale of millennia or perhaps even millions of years?)
Since I'm assuming the average UK citizen is relatively similar to those of us in the rest of the world when it comes to things like copyright infringement, it would probably be easier to select a few square miles in some unpopulated area, fence it in and just declare everything outside of your fence as "jail."
The problem with harsh penalties to online copyright infringement is that there's just so damned much of it! I'd be surprised if the percentage of people in the developed world under about 25 who haven't downloaded at least one song or watched an unauthorized youtube video in their lifetime is above the single digit range.
if you go with it "Well educated Muslim" is an oxymoron
Not really. They could have thought rationally about their religion and decided that their faith was well-based. "Well educated" means you've been given the tools (and presumably have the intelligence) to make choices for yourself -- it does not put any requirements on the actual choice you end up making.
Everyone (including atheists) like to assume that their group has made the right choice and that anyone with enough brains would do the same, when in fact there is no "right" choice. At least not until one of these deities gets around to revisiting our planet and showing up all the people who chose a different deity.
Nobody has measured what a photon looks like even at 1 AU, much less at a light year.
We collect photons from millions of light years away every night -- they're called stars. Not to mention we've collected pictures of the outer planets (all are well more than 1 AU from us) both at distance via telescopes and up close via probes -- and yep.. photons still look like photons out there.
Now you could go ahead and try to claim that we have no 100% proof that those stars and planets are as distant as they appear to be but your argument would have to be strong enough to counteract standard candles, gravitational lensing measurements and even simple triangulation (the earth's orbit around the sun is wide enough to triangulate plenty of the nearer stars' distances) and any other distance measurement techniques I'm not thinking of. Oh, and you'd have to account for the probes managing to go where we told them in the case of the outer planets having different photons.
"gee, the experiment doesn't match our prediction, so our prediction was wrong."
That's exactly what they do say. But its generally preferred to modify an existing somewhat working theory to match the new data over dumping it all and starting from scratch. In this particular case, adjusting certain factors in the less well known areas of our theories (expansion rate of the universe) was a hell of a lot simpler than trying to rebuild things that are fairly well measured experimentally (the speed of light, for example.) Not that it doesn't happen (string theory isn't a direct take off from quantum mechanics for example -- they share properties of course because they're trying to describe the same things but the math of strings is pretty different from that of points) but outright replacement is not usually the first choice.
Overall, its absolutely true that cosmology still has a long way to go. But to claim that they're total crap for not having figured out 100% of everything yet is kind of missing the whole point of research.
Small scale farming is about the least efficient method. Big farms aren't big for the sake of being less efficient. If farming could be done more efficiently, you can bet that the big farming companies would be jumping on the new techniques as fast as possible.
The benefit of small/local farms is health and better -- many of the techniques used to make those big farms as efficient as they are often degrade the quality of the food, either in terms of taste or nutrients (or more often both.) Throw in some of GMO scare and local farms appear to have a lot of things going for them. Efficiency just isn't one of those things.
Ahh the blind spot in the American dream! Every person who works hard and gets themselves above average by definition shifts the average and some other person is now below.
People espousing the "everyone could be rich if they work harder" idea seem to forget that its not logically possible for everyone to be above average. (It also ignores several other factors but that's the one most relevant to your post.)
is it too much to ask for them to give something back such as working at the...
Yes. As many others have pointed out, lots of the food stamp recipients are already employed! You'd ask them to essentially take on a second (or more likely third) "job" on top of that?
And even the ones who are unemployed -- you'd want them to be able to (in theory) be out looking for work. Not rounding up stray grocery bags that they can't even afford to fill themselves.
it is immoral to tax some people to provide subsidized food to others.
It certainly goes against capitalist propeganda, but its only immoral if we've decided to include "wealth" as a fundamental human right. Taxation is a contract of society and not theft, no matter how much rhetoric the rich like to spew.
Or if you want to twist their own words.. "If you don't want to be taxed then just don't be rich." Its probably easier for them to get rid of all their money than it is for most poor people to earn it, so they've got no excuse! They've chosen to be taxed by remaining wealthy!
There's a reason for it though. Most of the people who are obviously on welfare are "obvious" because they're living a welfare lifestyle.
The people who have their shit together in terms of how to live and are just running under hard times.. don't typically look a whole lot different from anyone else.
(The converse is probably also true -- there's likely no shortage of people who you'd think are on welfare at first glance but are actually self-sufficient.. just because of how they dress, how/if they do comb hair, etc.)
I don't recall that definition ever being made. Its entirely possible that as our understanding of the universe evolves, we may discover that some of these currently unproven theories will turn out to have trace observables in our universe.
In the same way that we've gotten a hell of a lot of information about subatomic particles by examining their decay chains since examining the particles directly is often impossible, there's nothing saying we won't come up with a way to detect side effects of other universes. If we stop looking because we arbitrarily decide its a waste of time though, then we've just ensured that it will never happen.
Also, there's a huge difference between accepting an unproven theory as the closest match to available evidence and what we commonly think of as "faith" (frequently defined as mild religious zealotry) where you believe despite evidence.
Uhhh no. There's no serious cosmologist in the world who thinks we know even close to everything about the universe yet. The 14b year timescale works just fine as "the furthest we can see" because its well the furthest we can see. Nobody in their right mind claims that there's nothing beyond our ability to see.
And no the photons don't get "old" -- they get too far away. If your max speed is 100mph and I'm 150 miles away, there's no way you'll ever get to me in one hour. Same thing goes for photons. They have a maximum speed so if we see one, we know with absolute certainty that it can't have traveled more than a certain distance or it simply wouldn't be here yet. Short of discovering wormholes or other such objects that could somehow let light break c.
Though that's not quite right either. We actually can see a type of "edge" of the universe which is closer than the theoretical maximum range of a photon. Its the point in time when the CMB was hot enough that it was opaque to photons. Its essentially like looking at a wall of fog and not being able to see much more than an inch through it (though of course for different physical reasons!) If they ever manage to detect gravity waves to any great extent, its theorized that they could be used to gather information beyond the CMB wall (though gravitons would have their own version of the CMB wall at some point even further in the past.)
So yes, they do say "yep, that is as far as we can see" but there is definitely no "it must be the edge of everything!" conclusion drawn from that. There's all sorts of theories around regarding what was before / outside of the big bang. Trouble is, they're all unprovable because yeah.. its beyond what we can see or could ever see (again, barring the discovery of some way to break c.)
Even with gravity telescopes its pretty likely that we're just going to find a more detailed version of what we already know. Not guaranteed of course (there may be monsters out behind the CMB wall after all) but pretty likely -- still leaving the main "what came before time existed" question fundamentally unanswerable.
The main reason Linux doesn't catch on more is because its got a piss poor marketing department.
Aside from that, a well-setup Windows machine is nearly as secure as a well-setup Linux machine these days. The main difference being that Windows generally doesn't come well setup out of the box.
Of course that gap is closing. Mostly because Linux distros are becoming easier to use and well.. decent security isn't easy, so there's some tradeoff happening.
If Linux ever gets to whatever critical mass of desktop users (ie: the type of users who will blindly click untrusted email links and other stupidity) then we'll start seeing uncaring companies releasing insecure software, virus writers targeting the platform, etc just like we see in Windows.
I would suggest holding on to those claims of security prowess until such time that there's a real justifiable security threat on the scale of botnets. A company's server center locked down by a security expert is not a valid comparison to old Aunt Marge who thinks Uncle Jim could use some of them there V1aGr4 pills.
Be a lot harder to pull them over though when the "swerving" is not a viable reason (or well it would be a viable reason still -- it just wouldn't happen anymore.)
Roadblocks would still work I suppose but while the lawmakers wouldn't perhaps like it, the judges deciding the cases might take a different definition of what exactly "driving" means.
If 5 seconds is "generous," chances are there's not too many human operators who would make a correct reaction in the given time frame even if they were alert so the point is fairly moot.
If your only possible reactions are "slam on the breaks" and/or "swerve to avoid something," there's not really much point letting a human take over. We might like to think we're smart enough to deal with those sort of situations but really the computer is going to be able to make the calculations to avoid or minimize the problem hundreds or thousands of times faster than the driver would (and it can incorporate things like say swerving while breaking without taking the risk of rolling your car and making the problem even worse.)
There is very very little regarding operating a vehicle that the computer couldn't (in theory at least) do better than a human. Its purely sensory input, physics calculations and reaction time. The computer can do the latter two far faster than even a professional driver and probably do the first one as well (computer vision might not be 100% but then neither is human vision)
The computer can also make up for its lacks and then some by incorporating all sorts of sensors that humans don't have access to -- most modern cars already have some form of skid control because the cars can detect and compensate for individual wheels slipping for example. Add in things like IR cameras to catch the kid hiding behind that van up ahead.. wireless communication linking other cars and being able to get an even better picture of the surrounding area.. it could potentially link in with the traffic signalling systems so that it will know exactly when the lights will change (and for less busy roads, the reverse could also happen so that the lights can change just in time for your car to approach if there's nobody coming through the other way.)
Really, there's not much downside to these things in terms of pure driving ability. All of the downsides are going to be in human terms (aren't they always!) People who drive because they like driving.. people who are concerned with privacy.. and of course the biggest one being the inevitable bugs introduced by people who develop the software (and the non-bug problems caused by people who don't understand the limitations of the software, whatever those may end up being!)
StringBuilder exists because the string data type is immutable. It has nothing to do with GC. String concatenation without StringBuilder is a painter's algorithm as it has to keep re-copying the working version of the string for every piece added.
As for proper clean up with exceptions -- that's what using() and finally{} are for. If you're using an object that implements IDisposable and not properly disposing of it when it goes out of scope (for any reason) then you're doing it wrong.
Finalizers are also usually the wrong thing to do in C#. The very definition of the language states that they will be called whenever the hell the GC feels like and you definitely should never rely on them being called in a timely fashion. Generally speaking, you can leave managed objects to take care of themselves and unmanaged objects taken care of in a Dispose() method. 99% of the time, the only thing you should use the finalizer for is forcing a call to Dispose() in case whoever is using your class doesn't bother properly disposing of it.
Yes, Dispose() smells a lot like C++'s delete. That's the way of life -- if you want a guaranteed cleanup then you're going to have do it yourself. There's only so much guessing the GC is capable of. But most of the time you're dealing with regular managed objects and the GC does its job just fine, leaving you to worry about the logic of your program rather than whether or not its leaking memory.
And yes, there are of course situations where the GC outright doesn't suffice. And the language designers gave us utilities for dealing with those situations when they occur. But I have yet to run into one that didn't turn out to be me just doing something dumb (I came from a C/C++ background myself.)
You're right -- GC isn't a silver bullet. But its still a hell of a lot easier to write safe code when you only have to worry about object destruction 10-20% of the time. And if you're really stuck, you can force the GC to collect whenever you feel like (of course you take a performance hit for doing that so its generally not recommended.)
(I suppose the C# team could implement a class attribute to force finalization when an object goes out of scope but I have no idea if that would be a huge performance hit or they just never thought of it or they thought of it and decided they didn't like it or what. Still only solves one small part of the problem in any case though.)
Crowdfunding is a very different beast from selling shares. You never expect a ROI on a crowdfunded product and therefore its pretty hard to run an investment scam on one.
Of course other types of scams could be run via crowdfunding (namely, coming up with a product idea that sells well but you have no intention to deliver) but that's not anything close to the same as gaming the stock market either in scale or method.
Crowdfunding is a bit of a gamble of course (even if its not a scam, the creator may well just fail) but its significantly more in line with a commissioned work than a stock offering.
No, but there's no problem with the original logic. It would be more akin to the purchaser signing the painting and claiming that they created it while the artist fades into obscurity.
Of course equating a physical work such as a painting with a digital work such as a software program is a giant, much-derided fallacy in itself. If the artist comes and takes his painting back, he's deprived the purchaser of it. If they take a copy of the source code they created, the worst they can do is become a competitor and you have to fight it out in that whole free market thing everyone's been talking about lately.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey a sale is a sale. Balance sheet rarely have a "Why?" column. In fact when you write it like that, its absolutely brilliant:
-> Sell OEM a standard license.
-> Sell customer a Pro license.
-> Probably sell them a Win7 license as well (though I'm not sure on this one maybe the upgrade is no extra charge on top of Win8 Pro? I'd be unsurprised either way.)
So 2 and maybe 3 licenses sold based on the product sucking. Most companies would love that sort of market capture.
Its actually better than that as they will NOT be losing the largest chunk of the Windows licensing fees -- OEMs will still be paying to put pre-installed versions on every PC you buy whether you want it or not.
All this will affect is retail sales of boxed/digital copies and given how much love people have for Win8, I don't imagine that they're selling a huge number of copies through that channel anyway.
It didn't "beat" WoW therefore it no longer exists! Never mind the practically constant stream of updates and such that they're still putting out. Anything less than WoW's what.. 60-80%? MMO market share isn't worth considering right?
The problem with these claims isn't usually the games themselves -- its that people bill them as WoW-killers in the first place. -No- single game will ever "kill" WoW in the sense of having more users. WoW will continue to bleed off users as it goes along of course (its a 10 year old game after all!) but the market is saturated by now so the chances that ALL of those users are going to move to the same new game is practically non-existent. (Well perhaps for a few weeks here and there when something new and flashy is just released and before the hype dies. See Diablo 3 -- not coincidentally, also a Blizzard product.)
By the time some other MMO finally exceeds WoW's user count, we will probably be several years past caring about "WoW-killers" because WoW's market share will have dipped to a level where "killing" it won't be considered with quite the same awe that we seem to expect currently.
A true "WoW-killer" is not impossible of course but there's a huge difference between WoW coming in at a time when MMOs were just getting off the ground and taking the cake, and a "WoW-killer" coming in when WoW already exists, a handful of other big names such as GW2 exist and countless tiny MMOs are all competing for your time and money. Not to mention the mass exodus from sit-and-play games to play-on-the-go mobile games sucking up MMO players in general.
Because there's no possible way that both a public and a private entity could exist at the same time.
I wonder which reality I'm living in today, the one where UPS exists or the one where USPS exists?
Just to address your "1 sucky provider answerable to no one" scenario though.. I've generally found in my life that in situations where, for whatever reason, only one provider exists, publicly run entities are almost universally better at service the public interest than private entities.
Damned near any example you can find of a natural monopoly being privatized ends up with higher costs and lower service for their customers -- sure the stock price goes up which is great for shareholders and the C*O's who talked their way into the job usually get a nice cushy salary, but it sucks balls for basically everyone else.
Maybe you've had a better experience somewhere along the line?
Public entities are answerable to their government overseers and (in theory at least) therefore answerable to voters. Private companies are answerable only to their shareholders and to fuck with the rest of the world. Generally speaking, the set of "shareholders of company X" is going to be closer to "no one" than the set of "all voters in the jurisdiction."
And lack of regulation tends to lead to monopolization. Pick your poison.
At least in those kind of massive-barrier-to-entry fields like national telecom.
Huh. Reviewing the Wikipedia page, it seems we actually have surmounted some of those challenges and actually landed a few probes on the surface. Doesn't sound like any of them survived for very long but its more than I'd thought!
Trouble is that Venus is almost unreachable between the dense cloud cover the extremely high surface temperature.
So we can't really see much from above other than lots and lots of clouds.. we can't really determine what's down there in terms of landing locations and whatnot (they can get mass and composition and whatnot from external readings but specific topology is a lot harder when you can't see!)
And even if we find a landing spot, we've got the dual problems of making a rover capable of surviving and operating at over 700K and then not really being able to communicate with it because again, dense cloud cover.
I'm sure enough cleverness COULD solve all of those problems.. but I imagine the costs would be phenomenal.
Mars was chosen because its "easy" compared to pretty much everywhere else in the universe. Its still relatively close, there's not a whole lot of atmosphere to block vision/communication and most of our modern electronic gizmos tend to work better in cold than they do in hot (though the mechanical components might be a different story..? I don't know enough mechanic engineering to judge that aspect.)
I did see years ago a suggestion (how tongue-in-cheek I'm not sure) to geo-engineer Venus by seeding it with a shit ton of carbon-hungry microbes to oxygenate the planet. It would be humorously awesome if it could work but I doubt its been given enough credence to warrant the cost investment (and no idea how long it would take to achieve useful results even if it DID work. It could be on the scale of millennia or perhaps even millions of years?)
Since I'm assuming the average UK citizen is relatively similar to those of us in the rest of the world when it comes to things like copyright infringement, it would probably be easier to select a few square miles in some unpopulated area, fence it in and just declare everything outside of your fence as "jail."
The problem with harsh penalties to online copyright infringement is that there's just so damned much of it! I'd be surprised if the percentage of people in the developed world under about 25 who haven't downloaded at least one song or watched an unauthorized youtube video in their lifetime is above the single digit range.
I don't think we really understand nutrition well enough to hack it.
And we never will if people like this guy weren't willing to experiment. Somebody's always got to be first.
if you go with it "Well educated Muslim" is an oxymoron
Not really. They could have thought rationally about their religion and decided that their faith was well-based. "Well educated" means you've been given the tools (and presumably have the intelligence) to make choices for yourself -- it does not put any requirements on the actual choice you end up making.
Everyone (including atheists) like to assume that their group has made the right choice and that anyone with enough brains would do the same, when in fact there is no "right" choice. At least not until one of these deities gets around to revisiting our planet and showing up all the people who chose a different deity.
Nobody has measured what a photon looks like even at 1 AU, much less at a light year.
We collect photons from millions of light years away every night -- they're called stars. Not to mention we've collected pictures of the outer planets (all are well more than 1 AU from us) both at distance via telescopes and up close via probes -- and yep.. photons still look like photons out there.
Now you could go ahead and try to claim that we have no 100% proof that those stars and planets are as distant as they appear to be but your argument would have to be strong enough to counteract standard candles, gravitational lensing measurements and even simple triangulation (the earth's orbit around the sun is wide enough to triangulate plenty of the nearer stars' distances) and any other distance measurement techniques I'm not thinking of. Oh, and you'd have to account for the probes managing to go where we told them in the case of the outer planets having different photons.
"gee, the experiment doesn't match our prediction, so our prediction was wrong."
That's exactly what they do say. But its generally preferred to modify an existing somewhat working theory to match the new data over dumping it all and starting from scratch. In this particular case, adjusting certain factors in the less well known areas of our theories (expansion rate of the universe) was a hell of a lot simpler than trying to rebuild things that are fairly well measured experimentally (the speed of light, for example.) Not that it doesn't happen (string theory isn't a direct take off from quantum mechanics for example -- they share properties of course because they're trying to describe the same things but the math of strings is pretty different from that of points) but outright replacement is not usually the first choice.
Overall, its absolutely true that cosmology still has a long way to go. But to claim that they're total crap for not having figured out 100% of everything yet is kind of missing the whole point of research.
Failure to preview.. "The benefit of small/local farms is health and better quality"
Small scale farming is about the least efficient method. Big farms aren't big for the sake of being less efficient. If farming could be done more efficiently, you can bet that the big farming companies would be jumping on the new techniques as fast as possible.
The benefit of small/local farms is health and better -- many of the techniques used to make those big farms as efficient as they are often degrade the quality of the food, either in terms of taste or nutrients (or more often both.) Throw in some of GMO scare and local farms appear to have a lot of things going for them. Efficiency just isn't one of those things.
Ahh the blind spot in the American dream! Every person who works hard and gets themselves above average by definition shifts the average and some other person is now below.
People espousing the "everyone could be rich if they work harder" idea seem to forget that its not logically possible for everyone to be above average. (It also ignores several other factors but that's the one most relevant to your post.)
is it too much to ask for them to give something back such as working at the...
Yes. As many others have pointed out, lots of the food stamp recipients are already employed! You'd ask them to essentially take on a second (or more likely third) "job" on top of that?
And even the ones who are unemployed -- you'd want them to be able to (in theory) be out looking for work. Not rounding up stray grocery bags that they can't even afford to fill themselves.
it is immoral to tax some people to provide subsidized food to others.
It certainly goes against capitalist propeganda, but its only immoral if we've decided to include "wealth" as a fundamental human right. Taxation is a contract of society and not theft, no matter how much rhetoric the rich like to spew.
Or if you want to twist their own words.. "If you don't want to be taxed then just don't be rich." Its probably easier for them to get rid of all their money than it is for most poor people to earn it, so they've got no excuse! They've chosen to be taxed by remaining wealthy!
There's a reason for it though. Most of the people who are obviously on welfare are "obvious" because they're living a welfare lifestyle.
The people who have their shit together in terms of how to live and are just running under hard times.. don't typically look a whole lot different from anyone else.
(The converse is probably also true -- there's likely no shortage of people who you'd think are on welfare at first glance but are actually self-sufficient.. just because of how they dress, how/if they do comb hair, etc.)
I don't recall that definition ever being made. Its entirely possible that as our understanding of the universe evolves, we may discover that some of these currently unproven theories will turn out to have trace observables in our universe.
In the same way that we've gotten a hell of a lot of information about subatomic particles by examining their decay chains since examining the particles directly is often impossible, there's nothing saying we won't come up with a way to detect side effects of other universes. If we stop looking because we arbitrarily decide its a waste of time though, then we've just ensured that it will never happen.
Also, there's a huge difference between accepting an unproven theory as the closest match to available evidence and what we commonly think of as "faith" (frequently defined as mild religious zealotry) where you believe despite evidence.
Uhhh no. There's no serious cosmologist in the world who thinks we know even close to everything about the universe yet. The 14b year timescale works just fine as "the furthest we can see" because its well the furthest we can see. Nobody in their right mind claims that there's nothing beyond our ability to see.
And no the photons don't get "old" -- they get too far away. If your max speed is 100mph and I'm 150 miles away, there's no way you'll ever get to me in one hour. Same thing goes for photons. They have a maximum speed so if we see one, we know with absolute certainty that it can't have traveled more than a certain distance or it simply wouldn't be here yet. Short of discovering wormholes or other such objects that could somehow let light break c.
Though that's not quite right either. We actually can see a type of "edge" of the universe which is closer than the theoretical maximum range of a photon. Its the point in time when the CMB was hot enough that it was opaque to photons. Its essentially like looking at a wall of fog and not being able to see much more than an inch through it (though of course for different physical reasons!) If they ever manage to detect gravity waves to any great extent, its theorized that they could be used to gather information beyond the CMB wall (though gravitons would have their own version of the CMB wall at some point even further in the past.)
So yes, they do say "yep, that is as far as we can see" but there is definitely no "it must be the edge of everything!" conclusion drawn from that. There's all sorts of theories around regarding what was before / outside of the big bang. Trouble is, they're all unprovable because yeah.. its beyond what we can see or could ever see (again, barring the discovery of some way to break c.)
Even with gravity telescopes its pretty likely that we're just going to find a more detailed version of what we already know. Not guaranteed of course (there may be monsters out behind the CMB wall after all) but pretty likely -- still leaving the main "what came before time existed" question fundamentally unanswerable.
The main reason Linux doesn't catch on more is because its got a piss poor marketing department.
Aside from that, a well-setup Windows machine is nearly as secure as a well-setup Linux machine these days. The main difference being that Windows generally doesn't come well setup out of the box.
Of course that gap is closing. Mostly because Linux distros are becoming easier to use and well.. decent security isn't easy, so there's some tradeoff happening.
If Linux ever gets to whatever critical mass of desktop users (ie: the type of users who will blindly click untrusted email links and other stupidity) then we'll start seeing uncaring companies releasing insecure software, virus writers targeting the platform, etc just like we see in Windows.
A quick Google shows Windows at somewhere around 90% market share http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0. Even Macs with their cultural popularity haven't reached any useful critical point to be a major target by either companies or virus writers.
I would suggest holding on to those claims of security prowess until such time that there's a real justifiable security threat on the scale of botnets. A company's server center locked down by a security expert is not a valid comparison to old Aunt Marge who thinks Uncle Jim could use some of them there V1aGr4 pills.
Be a lot harder to pull them over though when the "swerving" is not a viable reason (or well it would be a viable reason still -- it just wouldn't happen anymore.)
Roadblocks would still work I suppose but while the lawmakers wouldn't perhaps like it, the judges deciding the cases might take a different definition of what exactly "driving" means.
If 5 seconds is "generous," chances are there's not too many human operators who would make a correct reaction in the given time frame even if they were alert so the point is fairly moot.
If your only possible reactions are "slam on the breaks" and/or "swerve to avoid something," there's not really much point letting a human take over. We might like to think we're smart enough to deal with those sort of situations but really the computer is going to be able to make the calculations to avoid or minimize the problem hundreds or thousands of times faster than the driver would (and it can incorporate things like say swerving while breaking without taking the risk of rolling your car and making the problem even worse.)
There is very very little regarding operating a vehicle that the computer couldn't (in theory at least) do better than a human. Its purely sensory input, physics calculations and reaction time. The computer can do the latter two far faster than even a professional driver and probably do the first one as well (computer vision might not be 100% but then neither is human vision)
The computer can also make up for its lacks and then some by incorporating all sorts of sensors that humans don't have access to -- most modern cars already have some form of skid control because the cars can detect and compensate for individual wheels slipping for example. Add in things like IR cameras to catch the kid hiding behind that van up ahead.. wireless communication linking other cars and being able to get an even better picture of the surrounding area.. it could potentially link in with the traffic signalling systems so that it will know exactly when the lights will change (and for less busy roads, the reverse could also happen so that the lights can change just in time for your car to approach if there's nobody coming through the other way.)
Really, there's not much downside to these things in terms of pure driving ability. All of the downsides are going to be in human terms (aren't they always!) People who drive because they like driving.. people who are concerned with privacy.. and of course the biggest one being the inevitable bugs introduced by people who develop the software (and the non-bug problems caused by people who don't understand the limitations of the software, whatever those may end up being!)
StringBuilder exists because the string data type is immutable. It has nothing to do with GC. String concatenation without StringBuilder is a painter's algorithm as it has to keep re-copying the working version of the string for every piece added.
As for proper clean up with exceptions -- that's what using() and finally{} are for. If you're using an object that implements IDisposable and not properly disposing of it when it goes out of scope (for any reason) then you're doing it wrong.
Finalizers are also usually the wrong thing to do in C#. The very definition of the language states that they will be called whenever the hell the GC feels like and you definitely should never rely on them being called in a timely fashion. Generally speaking, you can leave managed objects to take care of themselves and unmanaged objects taken care of in a Dispose() method. 99% of the time, the only thing you should use the finalizer for is forcing a call to Dispose() in case whoever is using your class doesn't bother properly disposing of it.
Yes, Dispose() smells a lot like C++'s delete. That's the way of life -- if you want a guaranteed cleanup then you're going to have do it yourself. There's only so much guessing the GC is capable of. But most of the time you're dealing with regular managed objects and the GC does its job just fine, leaving you to worry about the logic of your program rather than whether or not its leaking memory.
And yes, there are of course situations where the GC outright doesn't suffice. And the language designers gave us utilities for dealing with those situations when they occur. But I have yet to run into one that didn't turn out to be me just doing something dumb (I came from a C/C++ background myself.)
You're right -- GC isn't a silver bullet. But its still a hell of a lot easier to write safe code when you only have to worry about object destruction 10-20% of the time. And if you're really stuck, you can force the GC to collect whenever you feel like (of course you take a performance hit for doing that so its generally not recommended.)
(I suppose the C# team could implement a class attribute to force finalization when an object goes out of scope but I have no idea if that would be a huge performance hit or they just never thought of it or they thought of it and decided they didn't like it or what. Still only solves one small part of the problem in any case though.)
Crowdfunding is a very different beast from selling shares. You never expect a ROI on a crowdfunded product and therefore its pretty hard to run an investment scam on one.
Of course other types of scams could be run via crowdfunding (namely, coming up with a product idea that sells well but you have no intention to deliver) but that's not anything close to the same as gaming the stock market either in scale or method.
Crowdfunding is a bit of a gamble of course (even if its not a scam, the creator may well just fail) but its significantly more in line with a commissioned work than a stock offering.
No, but there's no problem with the original logic. It would be more akin to the purchaser signing the painting and claiming that they created it while the artist fades into obscurity.
Of course equating a physical work such as a painting with a digital work such as a software program is a giant, much-derided fallacy in itself. If the artist comes and takes his painting back, he's deprived the purchaser of it. If they take a copy of the source code they created, the worst they can do is become a competitor and you have to fight it out in that whole free market thing everyone's been talking about lately.