If FTL travel is not possible then we are stuck on this rock and they on theirs and it doesn't really matter much if we discover another civilization 1000 light years away as interaction will be minimal.
That's not really true. While you're right that two-way communication would be quite minimal with that kind of lag, it's still quite possible to communicate in a one-sided fashion. Suppose that many millenia ago, some advanced ET civilization 1000 ly away decided to build a probe packed with the equivalent of their Wikipedia and send it to us. When it arrives to us, we analyze it and learn not only that we're not alone, but all about an alien culture. That would have profound implications for our society and our view of the universe, even if we never bother to send anything back.
Anyone sufficiently advanced to communicate in any meaningful way we should be very very scared of because that means they are far far more advanced than we are.
I don't see why we should fear any such civilization. A highly advanced civilization would have no need to harm us. Invasions happen because one party has something the invading party wants. An FTL-capable civilization would not be resource-constrained, so it'd have no need to invade us as it could get whatever it wants at some more convenient location; the only reason it'd want to establish contact is for peaceful communication.
Yes. Because someone has to maintain that box, and they're probably maintaining many many others. Someone has to deal with it when it doesn't work the way it is supposed to, or has to treat it in special ways because it doesn't fit in with the rest. You've apparently never come across "identical" computers or hardware that was different in subtle yet significant ways. I have.
And this is worth paying many times the normal price?
Somehow, every other corporation in the country gets along just fine buying regular white-box computers, or typical Dell stuff, and not some overspecced overpriced crap. Their IT departments manage just fine with the normal-priced stuff. Even the defense contractors that supply all this expensive highly-tested stuff to the military manage to do just fine with Dell's regular offerings. But somehow, random government agencies absolutely need something special? I call bullshit.
Writing C applications on Linux (or *BSD) has no connections to anything proprietary. You can also do C++, though there you might have to be careful about some toolkits (e.g., you can use Qt, but only if your application is GPL, otherwise you need to buy a license. BSD-licensed toolkits won't have this problem.). I believe Python is also safe for avoiding anything proprietary.
Qt has a languange: C++ (or at least a certain subset of it). The OP is obviously implying that Google should switch to C++/Qt. He could also mean Python since there's Qt bindings for that, but generally "Qt" implies C++.
The ruling means that any library in any language can be shut down. It means that public interface declarations can be copyright. It means it could be impossible for anyone to reproduce a public interface.
No it doesn't. Any interface declarations published under an open-source license will be completely safe (provided you meet the terms of that license of course). It's only proprietary licenses that will be a problem.
"Refugee" doesn't equal "I'm poor and want to live in a rich country", it means you're coming from a war-torn country and will probably be killed if you don't leave. Random poor people from a 3rd-world country are not "refugees", otherwise why aren't you sending planes to bring all poor people worldwide into your countries as immigrants?
"and that we shouldn't discriminate based on education or skills like you Europeans do." what does that even mean?
Go look at the immigration laws for Canada or any western European country. They don't want you there unless you have something to contribute, and aren't going to take a job away from someone there. In short, highly-skilled tech workers have a fairly easy time getting in, and uneducated farm hands and landscapers don't. They also generally require you to learn to speak the national language (or one of them in multilingual countries like Canada or Switzerland) in short order.
The cost of removing people who are here illegally is huge, mind numbing large. It's a waste.
That's bullshit. All you have to do is make it very difficult for them to live here by denying them employment and they'll leave on their own.
Over in Denmark, if you're caught as an illegal immigrant, they actually make you pay for your own deportation. Why don't we do that?
Then there is the issue of people dragged here as children. Deporting them is uncivilized and, frankly, just mean.
Why is that? They're still illegal immigrants. Do you think European countries give them any special privileges? Do you know how many European countries have birthright citizenship? Zero. So getting there illegally and dropping a baby isn't going to help you over there either.
Again: Find better news sources.
It sounds like you need to find some better news sources. You might want to start with the actual governmental websites of various nations.
Those are pretty much the only places with "reasonably-good public transportation systems", and they only service a very small fraction of the country's population. Moreover, those systems actually really suck outside of the city centers and certain routes. For instance, NYC's subways system is pretty good--in Manhattan. There's a bunch of other boroughs in that city where it sucks. Staten Island has no subways at all, only some buses, and they suck. The Bronx has very poor public transit too, and so does Queens. Things aren't too hot on the New Jersey side either; there are some NJ Transit train routes that'll get you into Manhattan in a reasonable time, but if you don't live near one of those train stations, it's not that useful. There's also buses, but they're horribly slow, and frequently get stuck for (literally) hours at the Lincoln Tunnel.
You Europeans don't like open-borders immigration though, but the liberals here in the US keep telling us we should open our borders and provide free government services to anyone who wants them, and that we shouldn't discriminate based on education or skills like you Europeans do.
Windows 8 is the flagship UI from the flagship of all proprietary software companies in the world. It isn't just some random selection, it's the foremost example of commercial UIs, on the operating system that powers over 90% of all desktop machines.
That guy's an idiot, and is the one famous for trying to put the 10 Commandments in a courthouse. I don't think he's representative of Republicans at all. Got any better examples? Especially any in the federal government (namely Congress)? This guy isn't even a politician really, he's a judge (though apparently an elected one), and not a legislator at all.
Sorry, but I can't recall ever seeing conservatives opposing free speech. They'll happily shout down opinions they don't like, but I've never seen them advocating laws restricting free speech. They do take the Constitution a little more seriously than the liberals. Their big problem with the 1A is they don't like the idea of separation of church and state, so while they won't usually advocate outright adoption of religion by the state (since that's against the literal wording of the 1A), they do get mad when they're restricted from putting the 10 Commandments in courthouses, for example.
The 2A is really a different issue; let's look instead at the First Amendment. The only people who want to revoke that are the liberal Democrats, who bitch and complain that the US didn't censor some crappy anti-Islamic video because it angered Muslims in the middle east and "incited" them to riot, and use things like this to insist we need to eliminate freedom of speech because some people may be offended.
The Republicans have their problems to be sure, such as being in the pockets of the oil companies and being generally against any kind of regulations on big established businesses (but regulating non-established businesses OK so you can prevent competition from new upstarts like Tesla!), but to be fair I never hear them complaining about freedom of speech.
MacBooks are definitely hipster accessories, as proven by their idiotic flat-key keyboards. Any serious user would not have such a keyboard on their laptop.
Given what we've seen in the drug war, perhaps. Sadly, merely building a thicker door wouldn't stop them, and you'd have to come out sometime.
I don't think this is really a problem actually. If the police get the wrong house, they'll send in a SWAT team to bust into your house and terrorize you, perhaps shoot you. One thing SWAT teams do not ever do is simply wait for people to leave their house, even though you'd think that would be a simple and less-violent way of apprehending suspects. They don't do this because it doesn't give them the giant testosterone rush they get from donning military gear and breaking into peoples' private homes.
I'd say that if you're worried about SWAT teams terrorizing you, you're least safe inside your own home, and safest anywhere outside it. Sitting in your yard is perfectly safe; they won't bother you there, because that's just too easy for them. They'd rather wait until you go inside and lock the door, so they can get a battering ram and bust it down with guns drawn.
he is spot on with cell phones. the chip that communicates with towers can currently only be turned off, by physically altering the hardware, or by removing the battery. both of which violate the EULA you agreed to with your carrier.
Not all phones have non-replaceable batteries. I replace the battery in my phone fairly frequently (I have a spare for when it gets low and I'm not able to charge it).
Also, even if your phone's battery is non-replaceable, it does not have an infinite amount of charge. When it goes dead, the phone shuts down, and so do its radios.
turning the phone off does not disable the radio chip, nor does airplane mode
This is absolutely incorrect. Turn your phone off for a week, then turn it back on, and see how much charge your battery has lost. Now charge the battery to the same starting point, take it out of the phone (yes, disassemble it if you have to), set it aside for a week, then put it back in, and see how much charge your battery has lost. The loss will be almost the same (lithium-ion batteries have a significant, though not large, self-discharge rate). What does this mean? Your phone really doesn't use any power when it's off, except the little bit of circuitry needed to monitor the power button and maybe a few other things. Radios use a lot of power; if they were still running when the phone is off, then your battery would be dead in short order, and turning your phone off would have no effect on this.
You're brushing off what is, by far, the maker of the most-popular OSes on the planet. At least 90% of PCs run Windows, and their UI (on their newest version) is shit. If any company has money to employ UI designers, it's MS, and look at the gigantic failure they're produced.
You haven't even named any examples to support your contention.
Funny. With a single click on the Metro/Modern UI you can get back to the familiar desktop and use the same workflow as per Windows 7.
Last I heard, you can't get away from Metro if you need to launch a new program (basically, Metro is the "start menu"), unless you purchase some extra third-party add-on program.
Plus, let's also not forget that Microsoft seems to be listening to opposition (finally)
How many years have users had to put up with the current system?
GNOME keeps removing options and changing things despite complaints. Microsoft have more to lose, hence ultimately will listen after enough time has passed.
But the big difference is that in Linux, users have choice. I think GNOME sucks, so I simply don't use it, and use KDE instead, which works great for me. Other people choose one of the many alternatives, like XCFE, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. In fact, MATE is little more than a forked version of Gnome2. Can Windows users fork Windows (or parts of it) and keep using it when MS goes in a different direction you don't like? Nope. With Free software you can, and people do on a regular basis.
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If FTL travel is not possible then we are stuck on this rock and they on theirs and it doesn't really matter
much if we discover another civilization 1000 light years away as interaction will be minimal.
That's not really true. While you're right that two-way communication would be quite minimal with that kind of lag, it's still quite possible to communicate in a one-sided fashion. Suppose that many millenia ago, some advanced ET civilization 1000 ly away decided to build a probe packed with the equivalent of their Wikipedia and send it to us. When it arrives to us, we analyze it and learn not only that we're not alone, but all about an alien culture. That would have profound implications for our society and our view of the universe, even if we never bother to send anything back.
Anyone sufficiently advanced to communicate in any meaningful way we should be very very scared of
because that means they are far far more advanced than we are.
I don't see why we should fear any such civilization. A highly advanced civilization would have no need to harm us. Invasions happen because one party has something the invading party wants. An FTL-capable civilization would not be resource-constrained, so it'd have no need to invade us as it could get whatever it wants at some more convenient location; the only reason it'd want to establish contact is for peaceful communication.
Yes. Because someone has to maintain that box, and they're probably maintaining many many others. Someone has to deal with it when it doesn't work the way it is supposed to, or has to treat it in special ways because it doesn't fit in with the rest. You've apparently never come across "identical" computers or hardware that was different in subtle yet significant ways. I have.
And this is worth paying many times the normal price?
Somehow, every other corporation in the country gets along just fine buying regular white-box computers, or typical Dell stuff, and not some overspecced overpriced crap. Their IT departments manage just fine with the normal-priced stuff. Even the defense contractors that supply all this expensive highly-tested stuff to the military manage to do just fine with Dell's regular offerings. But somehow, random government agencies absolutely need something special? I call bullshit.
Writing C applications on Linux (or *BSD) has no connections to anything proprietary. You can also do C++, though there you might have to be careful about some toolkits (e.g., you can use Qt, but only if your application is GPL, otherwise you need to buy a license. BSD-licensed toolkits won't have this problem.). I believe Python is also safe for avoiding anything proprietary.
Qt has a languange: C++ (or at least a certain subset of it). The OP is obviously implying that Google should switch to C++/Qt. He could also mean Python since there's Qt bindings for that, but generally "Qt" implies C++.
The ruling means that any library in any language can be shut down. It means that public interface declarations can be copyright. It means it could be impossible for anyone to reproduce a public interface.
No it doesn't. Any interface declarations published under an open-source license will be completely safe (provided you meet the terms of that license of course). It's only proprietary licenses that will be a problem.
A thing not being sued by Microsoft.
Not yet.
If you want to be safe, you have to avoid proprietary vendor-owned platforms and languages altogether.
The ones here in the US pay thousands of dollars to coyotes to bring them here.
"Refugee" doesn't equal "I'm poor and want to live in a rich country", it means you're coming from a war-torn country and will probably be killed if you don't leave. Random poor people from a 3rd-world country are not "refugees", otherwise why aren't you sending planes to bring all poor people worldwide into your countries as immigrants?
You post made it look like you didn't get the OP's sarcasm at all.
"and that we shouldn't discriminate based on education or skills like you Europeans do."
what does that even mean?
Go look at the immigration laws for Canada or any western European country. They don't want you there unless you have something to contribute, and aren't going to take a job away from someone there. In short, highly-skilled tech workers have a fairly easy time getting in, and uneducated farm hands and landscapers don't. They also generally require you to learn to speak the national language (or one of them in multilingual countries like Canada or Switzerland) in short order.
The cost of removing people who are here illegally is huge, mind numbing large. It's a waste.
That's bullshit. All you have to do is make it very difficult for them to live here by denying them employment and they'll leave on their own.
Over in Denmark, if you're caught as an illegal immigrant, they actually make you pay for your own deportation. Why don't we do that?
Then there is the issue of people dragged here as children. Deporting them is uncivilized and, frankly, just mean.
Why is that? They're still illegal immigrants. Do you think European countries give them any special privileges? Do you know how many European countries have birthright citizenship? Zero. So getting there illegally and dropping a baby isn't going to help you over there either.
Again: Find better news sources.
It sounds like you need to find some better news sources. You might want to start with the actual governmental websites of various nations.
Whoosh!!!
Your username really says it all.
Those are pretty much the only places with "reasonably-good public transportation systems", and they only service a very small fraction of the country's population. Moreover, those systems actually really suck outside of the city centers and certain routes. For instance, NYC's subways system is pretty good--in Manhattan. There's a bunch of other boroughs in that city where it sucks. Staten Island has no subways at all, only some buses, and they suck. The Bronx has very poor public transit too, and so does Queens. Things aren't too hot on the New Jersey side either; there are some NJ Transit train routes that'll get you into Manhattan in a reasonable time, but if you don't live near one of those train stations, it's not that useful. There's also buses, but they're horribly slow, and frequently get stuck for (literally) hours at the Lincoln Tunnel.
You Europeans don't like open-borders immigration though, but the liberals here in the US keep telling us we should open our borders and provide free government services to anyone who wants them, and that we shouldn't discriminate based on education or skills like you Europeans do.
Windows 8 is the flagship UI from the flagship of all proprietary software companies in the world. It isn't just some random selection, it's the foremost example of commercial UIs, on the operating system that powers over 90% of all desktop machines.
That guy's an idiot, and is the one famous for trying to put the 10 Commandments in a courthouse. I don't think he's representative of Republicans at all. Got any better examples? Especially any in the federal government (namely Congress)? This guy isn't even a politician really, he's a judge (though apparently an elected one), and not a legislator at all.
Sorry, but I can't recall ever seeing conservatives opposing free speech. They'll happily shout down opinions they don't like, but I've never seen them advocating laws restricting free speech. They do take the Constitution a little more seriously than the liberals. Their big problem with the 1A is they don't like the idea of separation of church and state, so while they won't usually advocate outright adoption of religion by the state (since that's against the literal wording of the 1A), they do get mad when they're restricted from putting the 10 Commandments in courthouses, for example.
The 2A is really a different issue; let's look instead at the First Amendment. The only people who want to revoke that are the liberal Democrats, who bitch and complain that the US didn't censor some crappy anti-Islamic video because it angered Muslims in the middle east and "incited" them to riot, and use things like this to insist we need to eliminate freedom of speech because some people may be offended.
The Republicans have their problems to be sure, such as being in the pockets of the oil companies and being generally against any kind of regulations on big established businesses (but regulating non-established businesses OK so you can prevent competition from new upstarts like Tesla!), but to be fair I never hear them complaining about freedom of speech.
Even better, have you noticed that both "Obama" and "Putin" have 5 letters? I don't think this is a coincidence.
MacBooks are definitely hipster accessories, as proven by their idiotic flat-key keyboards. Any serious user would not have such a keyboard on their laptop.
Given what we've seen in the drug war, perhaps. Sadly, merely building a thicker door wouldn't stop them, and you'd have to come out sometime.
I don't think this is really a problem actually. If the police get the wrong house, they'll send in a SWAT team to bust into your house and terrorize you, perhaps shoot you. One thing SWAT teams do not ever do is simply wait for people to leave their house, even though you'd think that would be a simple and less-violent way of apprehending suspects. They don't do this because it doesn't give them the giant testosterone rush they get from donning military gear and breaking into peoples' private homes.
I'd say that if you're worried about SWAT teams terrorizing you, you're least safe inside your own home, and safest anywhere outside it. Sitting in your yard is perfectly safe; they won't bother you there, because that's just too easy for them. They'd rather wait until you go inside and lock the door, so they can get a battering ram and bust it down with guns drawn.
he is spot on with cell phones. the chip that communicates with towers can currently only be turned off, by physically altering the hardware, or by removing the battery. both of which violate the EULA you agreed to with your carrier.
Not all phones have non-replaceable batteries. I replace the battery in my phone fairly frequently (I have a spare for when it gets low and I'm not able to charge it).
Also, even if your phone's battery is non-replaceable, it does not have an infinite amount of charge. When it goes dead, the phone shuts down, and so do its radios.
turning the phone off does not disable the radio chip, nor does airplane mode
This is absolutely incorrect. Turn your phone off for a week, then turn it back on, and see how much charge your battery has lost. Now charge the battery to the same starting point, take it out of the phone (yes, disassemble it if you have to), set it aside for a week, then put it back in, and see how much charge your battery has lost. The loss will be almost the same (lithium-ion batteries have a significant, though not large, self-discharge rate). What does this mean? Your phone really doesn't use any power when it's off, except the little bit of circuitry needed to monitor the power button and maybe a few other things. Radios use a lot of power; if they were still running when the phone is off, then your battery would be dead in short order, and turning your phone off would have no effect on this.
You're brushing off what is, by far, the maker of the most-popular OSes on the planet. At least 90% of PCs run Windows, and their UI (on their newest version) is shit. If any company has money to employ UI designers, it's MS, and look at the gigantic failure they're produced.
You haven't even named any examples to support your contention.
Funny. With a single click on the Metro/Modern UI you can get back to the familiar desktop and use the same workflow as per Windows 7.
Last I heard, you can't get away from Metro if you need to launch a new program (basically, Metro is the "start menu"), unless you purchase some extra third-party add-on program.
Plus, let's also not forget that Microsoft seems to be listening to opposition (finally)
How many years have users had to put up with the current system?
GNOME keeps removing options and changing things despite complaints. Microsoft have more to lose, hence ultimately will listen after enough time has passed.
But the big difference is that in Linux, users have choice. I think GNOME sucks, so I simply don't use it, and use KDE instead, which works great for me. Other people choose one of the many alternatives, like XCFE, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. In fact, MATE is little more than a forked version of Gnome2. Can Windows users fork Windows (or parts of it) and keep using it when MS goes in a different direction you don't like? Nope. With Free software you can, and people do on a regular basis.
Any software with a UI tends to be worse when it's FLOSS.
Windows 8 proves you wrong. As bad as GNOME is, it's got nothing on Windows 8.
There's always some third-party candidate on the ballot who'd be better. No one ever elects him/her because they want to keep "the wrong lizard" out.