Well, making it clear to me would mean tightening much more: if( (foo=bar) )
but that just screams for two lines: baz = (foo=bar) if( baz )
as for compiler noise, it's been twenty-two years since I've seen compiler output. Either I'm in an interpreted language, or I've rolled my own compiler. I don't do "noise"
but really, foo and bar is all crap when it comes to legibility. I can't make the following any more legible than it already is. I'm arguing that you can't either: if( record = getNextRecord() ) if( line = ) if( frame = animation.nextFrame ) if( constituent = constituent.pop() ) if( names = fullname.split() ) if( div = div.nextSibling )
That last one is probably my favourite, because it's incredibly clear if you assume that it's intentional, and incredibly unclear if you think it's a mistake -- like most linked-list algorithms.
It's still that way. Even if you discount third-world countries, war-torn countries, natural-disaster areas, and acts of god, and just focus on big cities.
But instead of "looking for food", which is easily found, they are "looking for work", which isn't. I'll wager that in any affluent city bigger than 100'000 persons, you'll find 25-50% struggling to afford food, housing, insurance, and medicine because they can't get enough hours of work.
If you're having trouble noticing them, look for those that work at night, hand out flyers, take the bus at extreme hours of the day, commute very long distances, and buy less than $20 of groceries at a time.
Just because food is readily accessible -- and free in big cities -- the struggle remains the same, it's just at a different abstraction level.
Ah "better". I think you mean "cheaper" and more "consumerist". I know that you don't mean more "time with family", nor more "time swimming in the lake". That $3'000 shirt, assumes 400 hours of labour. But 400 hours spent working hard with family and friends as a team, might very well be considered "better" than working today to earn the money for that same shirt. Let's say such a shirt costs $25. At minimum wage less taxes and expenses that can be as much as 10 hours of work. A day of working, nay, a day of being forced to work in a factory with people you hate, might not be any better than 40 days with family.
I'll remind you how many $25 shirts you buy today, contrasted with how long a shirt lasted back then, and you'll note the balance shift even further. Most of today's shirts cannot be repaired at all.
Look, there's absolutely no doubt that today's shirt is better, and more easily acquired. But it also costs way more than $25. Consider the fabric softener, the shipping pollution, the child labourers.
But this is all terribly irrelevant. I'm a big fan of cradle-to-grave. I'm pretty certain that the average person today spends far more time working where they'd rather not be, and far less time with family and friends where they would prefer to be, compared to "back then".
Quality-of-life is completely independent from quality-of-clothes, but it is pretty well aligned with time-spent-away-from-family, inversely so.
And, as to my original point, "life got better" fifty years later -- so not for the people who suffered through the change. Only for their children. And then those children chose to make things better again, so they suffered for their children, and so on. If each generation chooses to suffer, in yet a new and wonderful way, to make things better for the next generation, then no one actually ever enjoys life. It really doesn't matter why they could. They aren't.
Historical story-telling, like Kursweil does here, often forgets about time. A hundred years later, the missing old jobs aren't a problem. Great. But that's a hundred years of suffering first. You're absolutely right.
But I think there's something much more significantly wrong that's being overlooked here.
I'm not interested in having 100 different careers. I'm not interested in learning one skill, throwing it out and learning another skill every five years. That's insane. I don't want to keep learning and keep working harder and harder throughout my life.
I want what I think most people expect. I want to learn, get good, make it easier on myself, use that experience to evolve once or twice, get bored, get a new career once mid-life, derived out of side-skills that I already have, use my experience to skip a few steps as I learn, then retire with a minimal side-job, probably consulting in my first career's industry.
That requires the same industry to have the same values (not the same equipment, but the same priorities) for a fifty-year period, minimum.
I'm not joe sixpack, but there is good news for joe sixpack on the horizon. Humanity is currently approaching a major growth spurt. You can't colonize another planet with 1'000 scientists. You need 100'000 labourers to colonize another planet.
Robots and industrial equipment and big machines, and fancy techniques are all built using existing infrastructure. Another planet has no such infrastructure. Humans with hammers require very few resources -- no fuel transport, no solid ground, no sewer system, no roads. Just raw materials.
So, I'm predicting that at some point in the next two hundred years, we start shipping joe sixpack to the moon, 100'000 joes at a time, with 100'000 hammers at a time, and build a city out of nothing. There are many such cities to be built.
And just like with all the joes working in remote areas today, to build the first sewers or the first roads in northern Alaska, or southern Africa, or crab fishing in northern atlantic, or drilling on oil rigs in the middle of the ocean, it'll be one of the most high-paying jobs in history.
And yeah, you'll be sending their families with them. And yeah, you'll be sending the most religious families first -- because if you want to colonize a new world, you'll need ten children per family per generation.
But, just like my initial point, that wonderful future for joe sixpack is a hundred years away.
Goddammit, if I tell my child to grab the hammer and open the car door, he'd better smash the window mighty quick!
In case of fire, break glass.
King's Quest says: "I'm sorry, you can't do that here, at least not now.".
I said open the door. I said use the hammer. I am the lord thy god. You do it. You don't refuse me.
As for perl, I've always said that a blank perl script doesn't do nothing, it does EVERYTHING. Programming in perl is all about reducing its freedom until it does only what you want. Java is certainly the opposite. It does nothing until you give it a tome of direction.
You won't. Most of it has already lasted in production for over twenty years. Long-since proven to not need you.
That said, if you can't read the equal sign that's plain-as-day, then you really aren't skilled enough to understand the system as a whole, so you wouldn't be the best person for the job.
And, since you aren't willing to put your name to your comments, you wouldn't be a good fit for any team.
"if (foo = bar)" isn't a bug in the code. It's only a bug in your brain.
bar = ; if( foo = bar ) {
foo += 2; }
so foo is bar+2 if bar is true, otherwise foo is the same false as bar, be it undef, zero, null, or blank. And if you add some local scoping, being able to manipulate foo without manipulating bar often makes a lot of sense, especially with complex objects, and especially with functional logic like if(foo = dclone(bar)) -- or the much more routine if( record = dbgetrow(statement) ) which I'm absolutely certain you've done more than 100 times.
The bug in your brain is actually not a programming one. It's a visual one. Why are "=" and "==" so visually similar when they are functionally different? I might suggest using instead of == in perl, although the boolean would be reversed. At least cmp covers you for strings. .
The article shows javascript as buggy and untyped with 3 + "0" = "30" -- the classic stupid example. Everyone likes to say that Perl is weekly typed, because "1.5" + 1 = 2.5.
Everyone is incorrect. Perl is very very very very strongly typed. Not the variables, the operators. Not the nouns, the verbs. Developer says "add these two variables", and perl adds them. Because the developer said so. If the developer said "concatenate these two variables" then perl will concatenate them. Every time.
That sounds strongly-typed to me. "3" + "1" = 4; 3 . 1 = "31". Every time.
I dare you to find out what perl does with 3 + "information". Go ahead. I dare you.
My point is this. Human beings don't care about type. An apple is an apple, and an orange is an orange, and I can eat them together, cook them into a sauce, bake a pie, cut them up, juice them, or put them into a basket. Whatever I tell you to do with them, you'll never respond with "but apples can't do that because they aren't oranges". Just bake the g.d. pie, because I told you to.
Now, if you can explain to me why any language would ever use the same symbol for "add" and "concatenate", then you're smarter than I am. For the life of me, I've spent 30 years trying to understand that one. What idiot makes one symbol do two things, and then builds the language to guess which one to do based on the values themselves, at the language-level no less? Idiotic.
Comparing the salary of a coder with a degree, to the salary of a coder without a degree, is apples to oranges. You want to compare the salary of an unemployed person to a coder without a degree. Most people go to school to learn the skill. A degree is nothing more than one type of proof-of-skill. Not every industry needs proof-of-skill to be hired.
You can't say "unless programmers have an incentive to work for long periods" and " benefit developers who introduce mistakes or delay features" at the same time.
OSS might take advantage of the free contributions that developers are willing to give, but that's where the free ends. If you want to create a product that requires more contribution than you can get for free, that's the very part that you need to charge for -- by definition.
There's no "morally questionable" surrounding needing to get paid to give away more free stuff. Welcome to the concept of remuneration and free lunch and mortgages.
So, as a direct answer to your question, you charge for whatever aspect is costing you money to build.
If you get free hosting, you give free hosting. If hosting costs you money, you charge for hosting. It's that simple.
If advanced features cost money to build, the advanced features get charged down the line.
And, if premium efforts are donated, then they ought to be donated at the same rate as the donations that you receive.
In all cases, you don't pay for it. The users pay for it. How much they pay, and for what, is, quite simply, tit-for-tat exactly the same as what you pay for and how much you pay.
By the way, that's the opposite of how most businesses run. It's more profitable to charge more for things that cost you little, and it seems more valuable to charge less for things that obviously cost more. It's also more profitable to lower the costs of the things that you sell a lot, and ignore the costs of the things that you sell only little.
In theory, sure. But in practice, I can buy a better computer, I can buy a quieter computer, I can keep it in the next room. And yeah, I can pay for everything via my electrical bill. Ok. Instead paying for things with money, I can pay with electricity -- sounds like the future to me.
This is what I was going to say. I'm happy if the web is free, and my computer works to pay for it. I don't need to work, and I don't need to look at ads and be convinced to buy products. Instead my computer just works for the site owners for a few minutes.
This is the direct equivalent of not being able to pay a restaurant check, and "washing dishes" instead.
It's the perfect future. Offer a service for free, and get paid by your "customers'" computers instead. What a perfectly-direct and causal relationship between popularity and profit. Imagine if twitter got a penny-worth of profit from each user-minute.
One day, someone will explain to me why a completely public piece of information, distributed freely to everyone everywhere, needs to be delivered securely.
In a world where FedEx drops packages at my front door, and leaves them there when I'm away. In a world where the only thing stopping my speeding car from hitting an on-coming speeding car is a line of yellow paint. In a world where my front door is locked with a deadbolt, right next to a glass window.
Can anyone say "overboard"? I don't need to encrypt something, and then give everyone the key.
And before someone says something technically valid like "man-in-the-middle", remember that https doesn't stop the man-in-the-middle, it only stops some of the men-in-the-middle, and not most of them.
...and not a single one of those things has improved my life with my family. The credit that I give to them is that they've profited from all of it, a lot.
...that anyone can implement? Like I said before, wait a week. I'll bet Google provides a "free" tool to watermark your images -- so you send every image you have to them, for free.
So, decades gone by, and I've never heard anyone complain about watermarks being ineffective. Google uses enormous resources to crack watermarking, and here's betting they invent watermark 2.0 next week.
Here, pay me protection money, and I won't destroy your retail store.
By the way, serial numbers can be filed off of guns and car parts too. The watermarks were never meant to be perfect -- in fact, it was always easy for a graphic artist to manually remove them -- about ten minutes. But it made obvious that you were crossing the line in doing so.
Wrist-Watches. The only reason wrist-watches exist at all is because they were presented in movies by male roles.
It's not always women. It's definitely men too. But it's not men's bodies. It's men's wallets, and cars, and watches, and jewelry. All of these men's wares are ridiculously expensive. We're not talking about $100 shoes. We're talking about $40'000 watches and $400'000 cars and $4'000'000 jets and $40'000'000 penthouses.
But isn't that exactly the point. Yes, you might as well just kill everyone you meet. You might as well use resources to your own benefit. You might as well take that job promotion even though it screws over the other guy who won't get it because you got it.
The point is that what's right-vs-wrong is a person choice, and not something that can be dictated, simply because no such dictation can be logical or consistent with any practical solution.
Your house likely has wood framing. You killed well over a hundred trees to make it. You could have built your house out of mud, and killed nothing.
The only point is that you can't tell someone else what's right and wrong, because you really don't have any concept of it yourself.
Ah, but that line of thinking opens you up to a very different direction. See, if someone's rights/protection is based on their similarity to your idea of pain. . .
There's the prove-to-me-that-a-carrot-feels-no-pain argument. That you cannot measure it, or don't know how, is very different than that it has no consequence.
Obviously, black slaves spent centuries being described as they-don't-feel-pain-the-way-you-and-I-do justification.
But what about the he's-in-a-coma-and-won't-feel-pain-so-I-can-cut-him-with-a-knife argument?
Or, she's drunk, so I can rape her since she won't feel any pain, nor even remember it.
Or, he's an advil, and won't feel any pain from me punching him in the head.
I don't think you can tolerate violent abuse based on familiar reactions. There are simply too many problems.
I certainly believe that life starts at conception, and most of science agrees. I absolutely think that an abortion, even seconds later is definitely murder. And I believe that murdering an unborn infant is perfectly acceptable. And I think that's important. Can you imagine if killing an unborn baby were a capital offence? Every miscarriage would be the mother murdering her child. The fact that she doesn't know how she did it -- maybe she didn't eat right, maybe she was too skinny or too fat, maybe she was too stressed at work -- she still killed her child. It's terrible. But it certainly must be acceptable, or we'd be in for a huge world of hurt.
But more to the point, you said "lesser extent" and "meh" to harming fish and invertebrates. So then if you can draw your line arbitrarily, you must be okay with others drawing their lines arbitrarily. So you'd be accepting of a person who thinks killing cows is "meh".
I think it's very difficult to draw any line in this space, simply because the line either becomes purpose-defining, or becomes wildly inconsistent all by itself.
I don't think it's pretty. But I don't think yanking and skinning and chopping a carrot is, in practice, any less horrific from the carrot's perspective.
This is very much a case of we-feel-that-every-carrot-is-the-same and hence we-feel-that-we-can-always-create-another-carrot and therefore a-carrot's-life-is-valueless. Whereas we can't create a cow's life -- it's still a big mystery to us.
So, let's you and I try to bridge the gap between carrot and cow. Let's go with worm. You fish? You dig up a worm, yank it from it's happy soil-eating life, pierce it with a hook, drown it in a river, and force it to get eaten by a fish.
Then you take that fish, skin it, chop it up, and eat it, often raw.
Or maybe you use that fish as bait, to catch a bigger fish.
That smaller fish, was one of your vertebrate animals too, was it not? Of course it was. But again, you don't see fish life as having value, because it doesn't kiss you.
The truth is -- and this truth is clear from insects all the way through to humans of different colours, humans of different geographies, humans of different sizes, humans of different diseases and humans of different genders -- that the only life we value is life that has fought back to earn our physical respect. It'll be the same with robots, drones, or the next term for a machine that means "slave" in yet another language.
So, I'll ask again: what makes a cow's life any more deserving of protection than a fish, a worm, a slave, a terrorist, a robot, or a carrot? We destroy forests and mountains and rivers (with dams). We destroy life of all kinds. Think viruses, bacteria. We have abortions and we step on ants on the sidewalk every hour.
When was the last time you sat on the grass and didn't kill at least six tiny lives?
Isn't a vaccine genocide? Ought we not fight for the lowly malaria?
There are people who work to protect everything -- included major diseases.
My only point is that EVERYTHING has value. All life has value. All life has significant value. But that's doesn't, in and of itself, make killing it evil.
Much as Alan Watts famously said, what we see as a healthy system, magnified, is a war of smaller creatures. And what we see as a war, zoomed out, is a healthy system. Our choice to choose sides is an arbitrary perspective in the middle of greatness, and is thus just as meaningless.
So, if you want to protect the cow's life, and not the carrot's life, then you ought to say: "I want to have more cows in the world, and fewer carrots". To which, I'll respond by saying that you'll actually have fewer cows, because no one will breed them. Leading you to rephrase: "I want carrots to have a more challenging existence than cows do", which will be correct.
You aren't forced to kill cows. You aren't forced to eat cows either. But you should know that the paint on your walls has cow bone dust in it. Obviously most of your leather comes from cows -- the rest comes from eels, by the way, usually the hagfish.
So you can decide what you kill, and what you don't kill.
You can cut your grass, and pull your weeds, even though both do a fine job of being groundcover beneath your feet.
You can pet your puppy and step on your ants, even though both harmlessly clean up your crumbs (the ants in my geography are harmless).
You can swat your flies and squash your spiders, even though your spiders catch your flies way better than you ever could.
You can drink pro-biotics and anti-biotics in the same day, and feel good knowing that you've taken sides in a daily feud of thousands of generations of thousands of species all at once.
But if you're going to bring some sort of moral compass to the conversation, then you're going to need to answer my original abstract question: what makes the carrots, trees, bugs, insects, spiders, forests, rivers, fishes, and viruses, less deserving of your protection than the cows, dogs, cheetahs, elephants, and pandas.
"protecting the welfare of farm animals" -- there won't be any farm animals. Some will call it "ironic" that cows went extinct after we stopped killing them. Do you think there will be wild cows roaming free? Chickens too?
"will be delicious, environmentally friendly, and be indistinguishable" -- someone seems to have forgotten the only important adjective: what about nutritious?
Every time we "take control" over a process, especially a consumer process, we've made things MUCH worse for the environment. Humans used to kill animals to make clothing. They'd go out into the forest, kill 25 animals, and make a fur coat. But good news everybody! Now we can make synthetic coats from nylon and plastics and never need to kill an animal to do it! Let's just cut down six acres of forest, build a factory, ship raw materials from china by ship polluting the oceans, run our factory 24/7, polluting the air and the ground-water, we've already destroyed the forest so ain't no 25 animals a'gonna be killed here, and we can produce coats that degrade within three years so we can sell more!
Habitat loss from clothing factories has been far worse than my soon-to-be 80-year old racoon fur coat made by one hunter and one furrier and 25 racoons.
The point is that we value things that we use, and we save things that we value. Cheetahs are endangered because most of us don't value them. So there are movements to save the cheetah, and no one cares. Chickens are arguably the most successful species on this planet. I eat close to a hundred each and every year -- plus another 100 of just the wings, plus another three-hundred eggs, five-hundred if you include chocolate cake and grand marnier soufflés.
I know that it takes a while for a cow to eat enough grass to make the meat nutritious for me to eat. I know that the cow converts the nutrients within the grass (which I cannot digest) into beef that I can digest -- so I'm getting the nutrients from the grass, which itself absorbed the minerals in the soil.
I don't know where lab-grown meat gets its nutrients. Let's see if I can guess. The lab sprinkles magic pixie dust onto the stem cells. Obviously. A powder called nutrient-42b. It's basically a protein-powder I'm sure. Now I wonder where the protein-powder comes from? Let me guess, it's produced in a factory. So, we'll start by clear-cutting this forest over here, then we'll build a factory. I'll bet the factory grows plants from which to produce the powder too. So it'll be a factory, and grass, and no cows. We'll have successfully replaced cows with factories.
Doesn't sound cheaper. Doesn't sound better for the cows either.
Anyone else hearing a Amanda Marshall singing "Save-The-Cows"?
So, vegans, riddle-me-this. How come the cow deserves your protection but the carrot does not? I'm sure the carrot species would prefer to not be slaughtered also.
This seems to have become a pseudo-religious issue, which is absurd in a free-country.
For the record, I vaccinate the hell out of my family -- cats and dogs and birds included. My puppy drinks from every puddle in the dog park, which is value in-and-of itself.
But I would never say that anyone, myself included, should be forced to take a given vaccine!
Think about it. As Slashdot readers, how many science fiction (and non-fiction, and actual history) have we read about faulty vaccines (or propaganda or security patches, or feature updates) pushed to unwitting masses only to create more peril and doom?
There's got to be a line drawn between "educating and encouraging" and "obligating and forcing". I think that line-of-invasion is quite correctly drawn at the skin. Invasive is invasive, mind body and spirit.
A parent's simply got to be able to make their own educated decision about whether or not their children should be subjected to something. That freedom, as an adult and as a parent, is paramount to freedom.
Of course we're talking here about a population that includes dumb adults and irresponsibly parents. But hasn't that always been the price of freedom? Simply put: that everyone gets that freedom?
How long until there's a vaccine that you think is unsafe? Would you want to be forced to take it? To give it to your children? Would you want to explain to them why you're giving them something that you think is terrible? And what about the vaccine that's 99% safe, and seriously injures the other 1%? Would you want someone else to draw that line for you?
In this case, we're definitely fighting against stupid people. 100% Agreed. But they are actually the ones fighting for our future right to be smarter-than-the-system.
So, let's see, since streaming ain't new, why have devices been downloading update packages in-advance of executing them forever? Oh yeah, because anything can happen and stability matters.
So, I see this resolves the stability issues, but having SystemB separate from SystemA. Wonderful.
So where does SystemB sit? Oh yeah, a whole 'nother partition . . . that takes up zero space?
Not quite, I'll bet.
So, let's create a big huge partition, hide it from the user, and then say that our updates require zero space.
Welcome to dedicated resources; nothing new.
Or, and here's a thought, you could give the user the benefits of that extra space, for the 90% of the time that they aren't updating anything.
Look! we've done the impossible! We don't need any of your space! Because we stole half of your space from the very beginning!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, making it clear to me would mean tightening much more:
if( (foo=bar) )
but that just screams for two lines:
baz = (foo=bar)
if( baz )
as for compiler noise, it's been twenty-two years since I've seen compiler output. Either I'm in an interpreted language, or I've rolled my own compiler. I don't do "noise"
but really, foo and bar is all crap when it comes to legibility. I can't make the following any more legible than it already is. I'm arguing that you can't either:
if( record = getNextRecord() )
if( line = )
if( frame = animation.nextFrame )
if( constituent = constituent.pop() )
if( names = fullname.split() )
if( div = div.nextSibling )
That last one is probably my favourite, because it's incredibly clear if you assume that it's intentional, and incredibly unclear if you think it's a mistake -- like most linked-list algorithms.
It's still that way. Even if you discount third-world countries, war-torn countries, natural-disaster areas, and acts of god, and just focus on big cities.
But instead of "looking for food", which is easily found, they are "looking for work", which isn't. I'll wager that in any affluent city bigger than 100'000 persons, you'll find 25-50% struggling to afford food, housing, insurance, and medicine because they can't get enough hours of work.
If you're having trouble noticing them, look for those that work at night, hand out flyers, take the bus at extreme hours of the day, commute very long distances, and buy less than $20 of groceries at a time.
Just because food is readily accessible -- and free in big cities -- the struggle remains the same, it's just at a different abstraction level.
Ah "better". I think you mean "cheaper" and more "consumerist". I know that you don't mean more "time with family", nor more "time swimming in the lake". That $3'000 shirt, assumes 400 hours of labour. But 400 hours spent working hard with family and friends as a team, might very well be considered "better" than working today to earn the money for that same shirt. Let's say such a shirt costs $25. At minimum wage less taxes and expenses that can be as much as 10 hours of work. A day of working, nay, a day of being forced to work in a factory with people you hate, might not be any better than 40 days with family.
I'll remind you how many $25 shirts you buy today, contrasted with how long a shirt lasted back then, and you'll note the balance shift even further. Most of today's shirts cannot be repaired at all.
Look, there's absolutely no doubt that today's shirt is better, and more easily acquired. But it also costs way more than $25. Consider the fabric softener, the shipping pollution, the child labourers.
But this is all terribly irrelevant. I'm a big fan of cradle-to-grave. I'm pretty certain that the average person today spends far more time working where they'd rather not be, and far less time with family and friends where they would prefer to be, compared to "back then".
Quality-of-life is completely independent from quality-of-clothes, but it is pretty well aligned with time-spent-away-from-family, inversely so.
And, as to my original point, "life got better" fifty years later -- so not for the people who suffered through the change. Only for their children. And then those children chose to make things better again, so they suffered for their children, and so on. If each generation chooses to suffer, in yet a new and wonderful way, to make things better for the next generation, then no one actually ever enjoys life. It really doesn't matter why they could. They aren't.
Historical story-telling, like Kursweil does here, often forgets about time. A hundred years later, the missing old jobs aren't a problem. Great. But that's a hundred years of suffering first. You're absolutely right.
But I think there's something much more significantly wrong that's being overlooked here.
I'm not interested in having 100 different careers. I'm not interested in learning one skill, throwing it out and learning another skill every five years. That's insane. I don't want to keep learning and keep working harder and harder throughout my life.
I want what I think most people expect. I want to learn, get good, make it easier on myself, use that experience to evolve once or twice, get bored, get a new career once mid-life, derived out of side-skills that I already have, use my experience to skip a few steps as I learn, then retire with a minimal side-job, probably consulting in my first career's industry.
That requires the same industry to have the same values (not the same equipment, but the same priorities) for a fifty-year period, minimum.
I'm not joe sixpack, but there is good news for joe sixpack on the horizon. Humanity is currently approaching a major growth spurt. You can't colonize another planet with 1'000 scientists. You need 100'000 labourers to colonize another planet.
Robots and industrial equipment and big machines, and fancy techniques are all built using existing infrastructure. Another planet has no such infrastructure. Humans with hammers require very few resources -- no fuel transport, no solid ground, no sewer system, no roads. Just raw materials.
So, I'm predicting that at some point in the next two hundred years, we start shipping joe sixpack to the moon, 100'000 joes at a time, with 100'000 hammers at a time, and build a city out of nothing. There are many such cities to be built.
And just like with all the joes working in remote areas today, to build the first sewers or the first roads in northern Alaska, or southern Africa, or crab fishing in northern atlantic, or drilling on oil rigs in the middle of the ocean, it'll be one of the most high-paying jobs in history.
And yeah, you'll be sending their families with them. And yeah, you'll be sending the most religious families first -- because if you want to colonize a new world, you'll need ten children per family per generation.
But, just like my initial point, that wonderful future for joe sixpack is a hundred years away.
didn't eat a thing. all characters are there. you can't read neutered code.
Goddammit, if I tell my child to grab the hammer and open the car door, he'd better smash the window mighty quick!
In case of fire, break glass.
King's Quest says: "I'm sorry, you can't do that here, at least not now.".
I said open the door. I said use the hammer. I am the lord thy god. You do it. You don't refuse me.
As for perl, I've always said that a blank perl script doesn't do nothing, it does EVERYTHING. Programming in perl is all about reducing its freedom until it does only what you want. Java is certainly the opposite. It does nothing until you give it a tome of direction.
You won't. Most of it has already lasted in production for over twenty years. Long-since proven to not need you.
That said, if you can't read the equal sign that's plain-as-day, then you really aren't skilled enough to understand the system as a whole, so you wouldn't be the best person for the job.
And, since you aren't willing to put your name to your comments, you wouldn't be a good fit for any team.
"if (foo = bar)" isn't a bug in the code. It's only a bug in your brain.
bar = ;
if( foo = bar )
{
foo += 2;
}
so foo is bar+2 if bar is true, otherwise foo is the same false as bar, be it undef, zero, null, or blank. And if you add some local scoping, being able to manipulate foo without manipulating bar often makes a lot of sense, especially with complex objects, and especially with functional logic like if(foo = dclone(bar)) -- or the much more routine if( record = dbgetrow(statement) ) which I'm absolutely certain you've done more than 100 times.
The bug in your brain is actually not a programming one. It's a visual one. Why are "=" and "==" so visually similar when they are functionally different? I might suggest using instead of == in perl, although the boolean would be reversed. At least cmp covers you for strings. .
The article shows javascript as buggy and untyped with 3 + "0" = "30" -- the classic stupid example.
Everyone likes to say that Perl is weekly typed, because "1.5" + 1 = 2.5.
Everyone is incorrect. Perl is very very very very strongly typed. Not the variables, the operators. Not the nouns, the verbs. Developer says "add these two variables", and perl adds them. Because the developer said so. If the developer said "concatenate these two variables" then perl will concatenate them. Every time.
That sounds strongly-typed to me. "3" + "1" = 4; 3 . 1 = "31". Every time.
I dare you to find out what perl does with 3 + "information". Go ahead. I dare you.
My point is this. Human beings don't care about type. An apple is an apple, and an orange is an orange, and I can eat them together, cook them into a sauce, bake a pie, cut them up, juice them, or put them into a basket. Whatever I tell you to do with them, you'll never respond with "but apples can't do that because they aren't oranges". Just bake the g.d. pie, because I told you to.
Now, if you can explain to me why any language would ever use the same symbol for "add" and "concatenate", then you're smarter than I am. For the life of me, I've spent 30 years trying to understand that one. What idiot makes one symbol do two things, and then builds the language to guess which one to do based on the values themselves, at the language-level no less? Idiotic.
Comparing the salary of a coder with a degree, to the salary of a coder without a degree, is apples to oranges. You want to compare the salary of an unemployed person to a coder without a degree. Most people go to school to learn the skill. A degree is nothing more than one type of proof-of-skill. Not every industry needs proof-of-skill to be hired.
You can't say "unless programmers have an incentive to work for long periods" and " benefit developers who introduce mistakes or delay features" at the same time.
OSS might take advantage of the free contributions that developers are willing to give, but that's where the free ends. If you want to create a product that requires more contribution than you can get for free, that's the very part that you need to charge for -- by definition.
There's no "morally questionable" surrounding needing to get paid to give away more free stuff. Welcome to the concept of remuneration and free lunch and mortgages.
So, as a direct answer to your question, you charge for whatever aspect is costing you money to build.
If you get free hosting, you give free hosting. If hosting costs you money, you charge for hosting. It's that simple.
If advanced features cost money to build, the advanced features get charged down the line.
And, if premium efforts are donated, then they ought to be donated at the same rate as the donations that you receive.
In all cases, you don't pay for it. The users pay for it. How much they pay, and for what, is, quite simply, tit-for-tat exactly the same as what you pay for and how much you pay.
By the way, that's the opposite of how most businesses run. It's more profitable to charge more for things that cost you little, and it seems more valuable to charge less for things that obviously cost more. It's also more profitable to lower the costs of the things that you sell a lot, and ignore the costs of the things that you sell only little.
In theory, sure. But in practice, I can buy a better computer, I can buy a quieter computer, I can keep it in the next room. And yeah, I can pay for everything via my electrical bill. Ok. Instead paying for things with money, I can pay with electricity -- sounds like the future to me.
This is what I was going to say. I'm happy if the web is free, and my computer works to pay for it. I don't need to work, and I don't need to look at ads and be convinced to buy products. Instead my computer just works for the site owners for a few minutes.
This is the direct equivalent of not being able to pay a restaurant check, and "washing dishes" instead.
It's the perfect future. Offer a service for free, and get paid by your "customers'" computers instead. What a perfectly-direct and causal relationship between popularity and profit. Imagine if twitter got a penny-worth of profit from each user-minute.
One day, someone will explain to me why a completely public piece of information, distributed freely to everyone everywhere, needs to be delivered securely.
In a world where FedEx drops packages at my front door, and leaves them there when I'm away.
In a world where the only thing stopping my speeding car from hitting an on-coming speeding car is a line of yellow paint.
In a world where my front door is locked with a deadbolt, right next to a glass window.
Can anyone say "overboard"? I don't need to encrypt something, and then give everyone the key.
And before someone says something technically valid like "man-in-the-middle", remember that https doesn't stop the man-in-the-middle, it only stops some of the men-in-the-middle, and not most of them.
...and not a single one of those things has improved my life with my family. The credit that I give to them is that they've profited from all of it, a lot.
...that anyone can implement? Like I said before, wait a week. I'll bet Google provides a "free" tool to watermark your images -- so you send every image you have to them, for free.
So, decades gone by, and I've never heard anyone complain about watermarks being ineffective. Google uses enormous resources to crack watermarking, and here's betting they invent watermark 2.0 next week.
Here, pay me protection money, and I won't destroy your retail store.
By the way, serial numbers can be filed off of guns and car parts too. The watermarks were never meant to be perfect -- in fact, it was always easy for a graphic artist to manually remove them -- about ten minutes. But it made obvious that you were crossing the line in doing so.
Wrist-Watches. The only reason wrist-watches exist at all is because they were presented in movies by male roles.
It's not always women. It's definitely men too. But it's not men's bodies. It's men's wallets, and cars, and watches, and jewelry. All of these men's wares are ridiculously expensive. We're not talking about $100 shoes. We're talking about $40'000 watches and $400'000 cars and $4'000'000 jets and $40'000'000 penthouses.
But isn't that exactly the point. Yes, you might as well just kill everyone you meet. You might as well use resources to your own benefit. You might as well take that job promotion even though it screws over the other guy who won't get it because you got it.
The point is that what's right-vs-wrong is a person choice, and not something that can be dictated, simply because no such dictation can be logical or consistent with any practical solution.
Your house likely has wood framing. You killed well over a hundred trees to make it. You could have built your house out of mud, and killed nothing.
The only point is that you can't tell someone else what's right and wrong, because you really don't have any concept of it yourself.
Ah, but that line of thinking opens you up to a very different direction. See, if someone's rights/protection is based on their similarity to your idea of pain. . .
There's the prove-to-me-that-a-carrot-feels-no-pain argument. That you cannot measure it, or don't know how, is very different than that it has no consequence.
Obviously, black slaves spent centuries being described as they-don't-feel-pain-the-way-you-and-I-do justification.
But what about the he's-in-a-coma-and-won't-feel-pain-so-I-can-cut-him-with-a-knife argument?
Or, she's drunk, so I can rape her since she won't feel any pain, nor even remember it.
Or, he's an advil, and won't feel any pain from me punching him in the head.
I don't think you can tolerate violent abuse based on familiar reactions. There are simply too many problems.
I certainly believe that life starts at conception, and most of science agrees. I absolutely think that an abortion, even seconds later is definitely murder. And I believe that murdering an unborn infant is perfectly acceptable. And I think that's important. Can you imagine if killing an unborn baby were a capital offence? Every miscarriage would be the mother murdering her child. The fact that she doesn't know how she did it -- maybe she didn't eat right, maybe she was too skinny or too fat, maybe she was too stressed at work -- she still killed her child. It's terrible. But it certainly must be acceptable, or we'd be in for a huge world of hurt.
But more to the point, you said "lesser extent" and "meh" to harming fish and invertebrates. So then if you can draw your line arbitrarily, you must be okay with others drawing their lines arbitrarily. So you'd be accepting of a person who thinks killing cows is "meh".
I think it's very difficult to draw any line in this space, simply because the line either becomes purpose-defining, or becomes wildly inconsistent all by itself.
I don't think the argument itself is attainable.
I don't think it's pretty. But I don't think yanking and skinning and chopping a carrot is, in practice, any less horrific from the carrot's perspective.
This is very much a case of we-feel-that-every-carrot-is-the-same and hence we-feel-that-we-can-always-create-another-carrot and therefore a-carrot's-life-is-valueless. Whereas we can't create a cow's life -- it's still a big mystery to us.
So, let's you and I try to bridge the gap between carrot and cow. Let's go with worm. You fish? You dig up a worm, yank it from it's happy soil-eating life, pierce it with a hook, drown it in a river, and force it to get eaten by a fish.
Then you take that fish, skin it, chop it up, and eat it, often raw.
Or maybe you use that fish as bait, to catch a bigger fish.
That smaller fish, was one of your vertebrate animals too, was it not? Of course it was. But again, you don't see fish life as having value, because it doesn't kiss you.
The truth is -- and this truth is clear from insects all the way through to humans of different colours, humans of different geographies, humans of different sizes, humans of different diseases and humans of different genders -- that the only life we value is life that has fought back to earn our physical respect. It'll be the same with robots, drones, or the next term for a machine that means "slave" in yet another language.
So, I'll ask again: what makes a cow's life any more deserving of protection than a fish, a worm, a slave, a terrorist, a robot, or a carrot? We destroy forests and mountains and rivers (with dams). We destroy life of all kinds. Think viruses, bacteria. We have abortions and we step on ants on the sidewalk every hour.
When was the last time you sat on the grass and didn't kill at least six tiny lives?
Isn't a vaccine genocide? Ought we not fight for the lowly malaria?
There are people who work to protect everything -- included major diseases.
My only point is that EVERYTHING has value. All life has value. All life has significant value. But that's doesn't, in and of itself, make killing it evil.
Much as Alan Watts famously said, what we see as a healthy system, magnified, is a war of smaller creatures. And what we see as a war, zoomed out, is a healthy system. Our choice to choose sides is an arbitrary perspective in the middle of greatness, and is thus just as meaningless.
So, if you want to protect the cow's life, and not the carrot's life, then you ought to say: "I want to have more cows in the world, and fewer carrots". To which, I'll respond by saying that you'll actually have fewer cows, because no one will breed them. Leading you to rephrase: "I want carrots to have a more challenging existence than cows do", which will be correct.
You aren't forced to kill cows. You aren't forced to eat cows either. But you should know that the paint on your walls has cow bone dust in it. Obviously most of your leather comes from cows -- the rest comes from eels, by the way, usually the hagfish.
So you can decide what you kill, and what you don't kill.
You can cut your grass, and pull your weeds, even though both do a fine job of being groundcover beneath your feet.
You can pet your puppy and step on your ants, even though both harmlessly clean up your crumbs (the ants in my geography are harmless).
You can swat your flies and squash your spiders, even though your spiders catch your flies way better than you ever could.
You can drink pro-biotics and anti-biotics in the same day, and feel good knowing that you've taken sides in a daily feud of thousands of generations of thousands of species all at once.
But if you're going to bring some sort of moral compass to the conversation, then you're going to need to answer my original abstract question: what makes the carrots, trees, bugs, insects, spiders, forests, rivers, fishes, and viruses, less deserving of your protection than the cows, dogs, cheetahs, elephants, and pandas.
The only answer that I'
wow, that's a great point. my vote here.
"protecting the welfare of farm animals" -- there won't be any farm animals. Some will call it "ironic" that cows went extinct after we stopped killing them. Do you think there will be wild cows roaming free? Chickens too?
"will be delicious, environmentally friendly, and be indistinguishable" -- someone seems to have forgotten the only important adjective: what about nutritious?
Every time we "take control" over a process, especially a consumer process, we've made things MUCH worse for the environment. Humans used to kill animals to make clothing. They'd go out into the forest, kill 25 animals, and make a fur coat. But good news everybody! Now we can make synthetic coats from nylon and plastics and never need to kill an animal to do it! Let's just cut down six acres of forest, build a factory, ship raw materials from china by ship polluting the oceans, run our factory 24/7, polluting the air and the ground-water, we've already destroyed the forest so ain't no 25 animals a'gonna be killed here, and we can produce coats that degrade within three years so we can sell more!
Habitat loss from clothing factories has been far worse than my soon-to-be 80-year old racoon fur coat made by one hunter and one furrier and 25 racoons.
The point is that we value things that we use, and we save things that we value. Cheetahs are endangered because most of us don't value them. So there are movements to save the cheetah, and no one cares. Chickens are arguably the most successful species on this planet. I eat close to a hundred each and every year -- plus another 100 of just the wings, plus another three-hundred eggs, five-hundred if you include chocolate cake and grand marnier soufflés.
I know that it takes a while for a cow to eat enough grass to make the meat nutritious for me to eat. I know that the cow converts the nutrients within the grass (which I cannot digest) into beef that I can digest -- so I'm getting the nutrients from the grass, which itself absorbed the minerals in the soil.
I don't know where lab-grown meat gets its nutrients. Let's see if I can guess. The lab sprinkles magic pixie dust onto the stem cells. Obviously. A powder called nutrient-42b. It's basically a protein-powder I'm sure. Now I wonder where the protein-powder comes from? Let me guess, it's produced in a factory. So, we'll start by clear-cutting this forest over here, then we'll build a factory. I'll bet the factory grows plants from which to produce the powder too. So it'll be a factory, and grass, and no cows. We'll have successfully replaced cows with factories.
Doesn't sound cheaper. Doesn't sound better for the cows either.
Anyone else hearing a Amanda Marshall singing "Save-The-Cows"?
So, vegans, riddle-me-this. How come the cow deserves your protection but the carrot does not? I'm sure the carrot species would prefer to not be slaughtered also.
This seems to have become a pseudo-religious issue, which is absurd in a free-country.
For the record, I vaccinate the hell out of my family -- cats and dogs and birds included. My puppy drinks from every puddle in the dog park, which is value in-and-of itself.
But I would never say that anyone, myself included, should be forced to take a given vaccine!
Think about it. As Slashdot readers, how many science fiction (and non-fiction, and actual history) have we read about faulty vaccines (or propaganda or security patches, or feature updates) pushed to unwitting masses only to create more peril and doom?
There's got to be a line drawn between "educating and encouraging" and "obligating and forcing". I think that line-of-invasion is quite correctly drawn at the skin. Invasive is invasive, mind body and spirit.
A parent's simply got to be able to make their own educated decision about whether or not their children should be subjected to something. That freedom, as an adult and as a parent, is paramount to freedom.
Of course we're talking here about a population that includes dumb adults and irresponsibly parents. But hasn't that always been the price of freedom? Simply put: that everyone gets that freedom?
How long until there's a vaccine that you think is unsafe? Would you want to be forced to take it? To give it to your children? Would you want to explain to them why you're giving them something that you think is terrible? And what about the vaccine that's 99% safe, and seriously injures the other 1%? Would you want someone else to draw that line for you?
In this case, we're definitely fighting against stupid people. 100% Agreed. But they are actually the ones fighting for our future right to be smarter-than-the-system.
So, let's see, since streaming ain't new, why have devices been downloading update packages in-advance of executing them forever? Oh yeah, because anything can happen and stability matters.
So, I see this resolves the stability issues, but having SystemB separate from SystemA. Wonderful.
So where does SystemB sit? Oh yeah, a whole 'nother partition . . . that takes up zero space?
Not quite, I'll bet.
So, let's create a big huge partition, hide it from the user, and then say that our updates require zero space.
Welcome to dedicated resources; nothing new.
Or, and here's a thought, you could give the user the benefits of that extra space, for the 90% of the time that they aren't updating anything.
Look! we've done the impossible! We don't need any of your space! Because we stole half of your space from the very beginning!
Moohaha!