Truth be told, you *are being an idiot. That is, you're using arguments that you wouldn't make about other substances. There are dozens of OTC drugs that you could fatally overdose on (probably more easily than marijuana), yet they're considered safe enough to pass out to anybody who wants them, in any quantities they choose to buy.
Instead of accepting the clear evidence of science, which says that you cannot lethally overdose on marijuana, you start talking about smoke asphyxiation. By those standards, you could overdose on tobacco, corn cobs, firewood... basically anything combustible. People don't die in house fires, they overdose on their homes. It's idiotic to single out marijuana for a property that it shares with both your cigarettes and your armchair.
It's also idiotic to make up a conspiracy theory to explain the lack of reports of a medical impossibility. Why would "shame" over a child's THC overdose compel so many parents into silence, when overdoses on other substances like cocaine cause them to take out ginormous "This is what happened to our Billy, so don't let it happen to you" billboards? You've offered no explanation, but the fact that you think marijuana use is so incredibly shameful does say a lot about why you're so keen to fight this losing battle.
Yes, smoking marijuana increases the risk of lung cancer. But marijuana can be consumed in all sorts of ways (smoking just being the most convenient and the one that requires no baking skills), and even with smoking, you're not coming close to the risk incurred from a pack-a-day cigarette habit. Alcohol is also a known carcinogen. If you're going to maintain that marijuana should be illegal, you should be arguing just as vehemently for making tobacco and alcohol illegal.
The people currently making huge money off of selling marijuana are able to do so precisely because it's illegal. It's not like growing or preparing it is rocket science. Why the hell would "Big Marijuana" as it currently exists, want it to be legalized?
Time after time, your reasoning has shown gaping holes. How's that cognitive dissonance working out for you?
Do you really hate the poor and the sick so much that you want to inflict government medicine upon them?
What a stupid question. If government health care was going to make the poor worse off than they already are, don't you think Bush would have implemented it by now?
No, conservatives aren't blocking universal health care out of love for the poor. They just don't want them clogging up the waiting rooms and making health care less convenient for them. We've already got rationed health care in this country; it's rationed by income.
Typical American response, indicating that the poster clearly doesn't believe that he will ever be "some poor guy". He will never become too sick or injured to work. He will never have his business fold beneath him, or his employer collapse above him. If the unwashed masses need more assistance than the wealthy see fit to voluntarily give, then they are leeches.
Economics isn't a zero sum game. It doesn't matter how rich someone is...
Economics isn't an infinite sum game either, and it is certainly possible for one person to take more of the available wealth than he actually created. Given that the incomes of the richest 1% have basically tripled over the last 30 years, while people outside the top 20% have seen very little increase at all (mostly due to two-income households and more hours worked per person), I believe this is exactly what is happening.
Also, it certainly does matter how rich other people are. Do you think it matters to a member of America's working poor that they have access to more food, better shelter, and more effective medical care than anyone in the Bronze Age? If you think they take a moment's comfort in the thought, you don't understand human psychology. People don't compare themselves to people distant and invisible to themselves. What they do see is how much better other people live, which causes all sorts of dissatisfaction and stress. Now, if the person is convinced of his ability to close the gap, it can lead him to work hard. But if opportunities are frustratingly few, and the gap is huge, it can lead to hopelessness and resentment.
For any given amount of objective wealth, the person who has it will be much happier if the bulk of the people around him are somewhat poorer than him, and much less happy if he's sitting at the bottom, looking up at the lifestyles of the richer and famouser.
There is a strong correlation between wealth equality and life span. Beyond a certain, surprisingly low threshold, there is a very weak correlation between per-capita GNP and lifespan. Even in a society where most everyone is paid exactly the same (Cuba), many people still choose to undergo the taxing training required to become a doctor, simply because of the social prestige attached to the position. Cubans have nearly as long of lifespan as Americans (despite spending about a tenth what we do on health care), and cross-cultural studies seem to indicate that Cubans are pretty damned happy (not quite as happy as Americans, but it's a worryingly narrow gap given that our competition lives in a third-world dictatorship).
So absolute wealth is neither as motivating or as fulfilling as American common sense notions would indicate. If they passed a law tomorrow saying that nobody could make, say, twelve times minimum wage, I don't think we'd see an economic collapse as all the "productive people" withheld their labor from the economy. I don't think Tiger Woods would stop playing golf, or that all those talented CEOs would stop managing their companies. In fact, I think such a law would lead to more managerial talent available for CEO positions, since there would be less incentive to rig hirings in favor of cronies. Studies have shown that high CEO compensation has negligible effect on the performance of the companies they manage. Maybe capping their pay would disabuse them of the notion that their keen, infallible insight must warrant such outlandish salaries.
You're confused about depression. It doesn't motivate anyone to do squat but stay in bed and veg out in front of the TV.
Hell, I've read some speculations from evolutionary psychology, hazarding that depression is nature's way of (to grossly oversummarize) getting people around you to do stuff for you.
The problem there: even if a closed source vendor goes out of business, a lot of businesses won't have the resources to switch over. They'll more likely try to hobble along with unsupported software than to put resources into a big IT overhaul.
Your reasoning explains why a business running open source software might have an advantage during a recession, but it may not lead to increased uptake of OSS.
It's called the law of supply and demand. It is working for all 49 other states without the government telling how I live in my own home!
You have a strange definition of "working", or maybe you think global warming is a hoax.
Price may be a better solution in theory, but in practice energy consumers only get feedback on their consumption once a month, and they probably don't have a clear idea of how their decisions affect the overall grid. Certainly, they don't know if turning on their AC *right now* will overload the grid. But the utilities do know, and simply being able to coordinate the activities of the most power-hungry devices is more efficient. Your proposal seems to involve jacking up prices until poor people turn off their AC altogether, so that more deserving wealthy people can access all the electricity they want when they want it.
I know, I know. The "free market" is signaling like crazy for the creation of more belching coal plants. But the market isn't accounting for CO2 production, and isn't accounting for the limited supply of non-renewables. It never does, until the limited supply starts affecting the extraction rate. What I'm saying is, the free market shouldn't be the sole arbiter of how much electricity we produce, or the sources of that electricity.
This technology is the leading edge of a new class of technologies, which will allow devices connected to the grid to gain knowledge of the state of the grid. Ultimately, I think it will lead to a sort of auction system, where appliances bid on the energy they use in realtime. If the energy being offered by the utility costs $0.40/kwh, you might have your AC set to shut down until the cost goes back down to $0.20. Efficient allocation of resources, free-market mechanisms, greater consumer control. It might even allow for multiple utilities to share the same infrastructure, reducing the need for utility monopolies. You may adopt a "you can pry my AC from my cold, bloody hands" attitude towards this particular proposal, but I don't think the overall trend is anything for you capitalistas to fear.
When did I say that it was bad for the federal government to mandate driver's license requirements? I'm just a bit confused about why you've brought this up. Unless I've said something inadvertent, it seems like a transparent attempt to change the subject.
Which would surprise me, since none of my points are incontrovertible.
Would you feel differently about this plan if your power company decided, as a private entity, that this plan was more sensible than building a mammoth upgrade to the grid to handle the day or two every year when demand overwhelmed supply? If installing such a device was just part of the terms and conditions of being their customer? If so, why the difference? It seems that, whether this is a public or a private move, this is a reasonable reaction to the situation.
The best way to control demand for a limited resource is to increase the price during peak periods.
Which doesn't really work when the consumers have almost no idea what they're being charged at a given moment.
The problem is, your solution basically involves setting one "peak rate" for everyone, that covers a broad swath of the midday. That's a very coarse tool for controlling demand. Among the many problems: what if people just choose to "pay for it"? Except, what they're really doing is underpaying, since the peak rate hasn't done what it was intended to do (push demand below the utilities' ability to supply).
Say you have an infrastructure that has just barely enough capacity to give everyone enough (say 20 minutes) of AC every hour, if everyone uses the electricity in a coordinated manner. But they don't; they just turn on when the thermostat says to turn on, so there are often more systems running than the infrastructure can handle, causing brownouts.
But if the thermostat is getting information about the state of the grid, then you can implement variable pricing. Electricity is cheap when demand is slack, allowing AC and refrigeration units to stagger their demand so as to not overwhelm the supply.
Real-time feedback from the grid will make the market for electricity more fluid and responsive. That's where this technology is headed, so I'm laughing at all this doom and gloom from the right wingers.
1) They stayed the hell away from the south western US.
Honestly, what the hell were we thinking, building multi-million person cities out there? If things take a real downturn, I expect Phoenix to shrivel up and blow away. But the era of cheap energy led to a lot of design decisions that would be impossible to sustain in an era of expensive energy.
It's a little far-fetched to go all fear-mongery about the government cutting off our AC. First, there is the little detail of the California power utilities not being "the government." Then there is the thing where it will probably be a voluntary program where people install the thermostats in exchange for a lower rate. Then there's the thing where not being able to turn the thermostat below 80 is unlikely to kill anybody. Then there is the thing where building more fecking power plants carries its own boatloads of problems, which far surpass the inconvenience of the occasionally slightly warm room.
Cali's per-capita energy consumption has stayed flat for decades, because they push themselves and their utilities to look for conservation solutions first. Would that the rest of the country were more like them.
To the extent that it's their project and their time, they aren't obligated to listen to your complaints, much less fix them.
To the extent that the creators claim that other people should use their project for some purpose, then their reputation ought to be influenced by how well it lives up to those claims. But they're still not under any obligation to fix your issues or add missing features.
To the extent that criticisms are made in abusive, insulting ways, then the developers are big damned heroes if they can sift through it for any kernels of truth.
Nobody is saying that we can't criticize, but your criticism should be tempered by the fact that it's not your project, and the developers might not share your vision or care about your opinion.
Re: speed. Rails is slowly being rewritten in Ruby 1.9, which will make it several times faster. 1.9 integrates a new virtual machine called YARV. It won't magically solve everything, but it will help some.
A lot also depends on your deployment setup, which is one of the trickier things about Rails in my mind.
Re:"[Open-source project] owes you nothing" argume
on
Rails May Not Suck
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· Score: 1
Absolutely correct. You can criticize an open source program all you want, and good criticism can be a boon to a project. But there are some lines that you don't have a right to cross. One is when you say, "so hurry up and fix it!" Unless you're willing to front the money or do the coding, you're not in a position to make demands.
Another line is the thin line that separates constructive criticism from mere douchebaggery. It's easy for frustration with a framework to bleed over into personal attacks against its authors or its fans.
Lastly, the article is right to point out that a lot of criticisms about any project are simply false as a matter of fact. Those can be especially frustrating for the people working on a project.
Just expect people to be emotionally invested in their favorite projects, and to know it too well to see your objections as major obstacles. So they may not take your complaints as seriously as you'd like.
I don't believe we have ever been a force for stability in Iraq.
Also, show me the candidate who doesn't believe in the "eventual" withdraw from Iraq? Well, McCain said he wouldn't mind a permanent troop presence in Iraq, much as we have in Germany or South Korea. But they'd be there as a hammer to wield against Iran, not to promote internal stability.
The point is, everyone (excluding a few neocons who seem to think we have a holy mandate to occupy every country everywhere until the end of time) claims that, if the country ever becomes able to "govern itself", we should massively draw down our presence in Iraq. But I don't believe we should wait nearly that long, and I think our presence in Iraq promotes violence and makes the Shia-run central government unwilling to make the compromises necessary to get the Sunnis involved in the political process.
If you decide to respond, please start off with a definition of "eventual".
You're still thinking of the old presidency. Pre-9/11 mentality and all that. Under the new presidency, the President can have anyone, anywhere detained, tortured, executed, spied upon, or forbidden from using any mode of transport more advanced than Greyhound. He can funnel substantial fractions of our ginormous military budget to private contractors run by the President's political contributors. He can use the Justice Department to fight "political corruption" among the opposing party. He can exonerate those who broke the law while doing his bidding. He can use the military against any target in the world, without further Congressional approval.
Knowing what Republicans think of Hillary, I can only imagine what they think of her getting super-invincibility power-up that comes ewith being a "War President."
I'll be deeply disappointed if the next President of the United States does not immediately divest him/herself of all these newfound powers. So far, Ron Paul is the only candidate who seems like he would, which in my mind makes up for the fact that most of his other proposals are a bit nutty.
Do you also criticize game developers for starting their development cycle by targeting machines they expect to be common in three years, when they expect to release? Or should they do the honest thing and only talk about how their game would run on the machines of today?
Negroponte's targets weren't unreasonable. He couldn't have forseen the plummeting dollar. He probably should have figured that a lot of the handshake deals he'd made with foreign leaders would fall through, reducing sales volume and driving up the price per unit. But it was reasonable to assume that, given those predicted volumes, the OLPC would have actually reduced the costs of its own hardware.
Moore's law should have made the $100 laptop a reality by 1993. I base this on the fact that, in 1985, my parents bought a 286 laptop for $2000. Five price-halvings at 1.5 years each, and there you go. But the market never asked for $100 laptops. The people demanding laptops at that time wanted ever more powerful machines in the $2000-$4000 range, so improvements in miniaturization led to advances in capability, not affordability. If chip makers were committed to building the chips in that 1985 laptop using today's tech, the relevant parts might cost a buck. These days there is more computing power in a Tickle-Me Elmo.
Cost of "a computer" has fallen much more slowly than the cost of any given model should predict, because manufacturers stopped producing older parts in large quantities, and relegated those parts to older fabs. So I think it's crap to say that Negroponte was just taking advantage of underlying trends. Some form of the OLPC has been conceivable for a very long time now. Somebody just had to make the huge demand for functional, low-cost hardware apparent (that "someone" being the world of cell phone and other portable devices, not Negroponte).
It's also notable that one of the jumps in the expected cost of the XO came with the addition of a couple of new features (including the integrated camera). Without those features, the stripped down version would probably cost around $150.
It's hard for me to understand the people who claim that Negroponte should be happy at the success of the Classmate. The goal was never to get "a laptop" into the hands of each child. The OLPC was designed from the ground up not as a "cheap laptop." The Classmate was, which I consider to be its biggest failing. Apparently Intel's concept was to build the cheapest possible machine that could run Windows and Office.
XO, by comparison, was designed from the ground up to be rugged, low power, useful even without access to the wider Internet, collaborative, human-chargeable, and child friendly. Yet it's got all the power of a full-fledged Linux distro under the hood, and it comes with everything a kid would need to write applications that run on it. As a cheap laptop, I'm sure that the two are running neck in neck. As an educational tool, the XO blows the Classmate away, even at the $200 price point (which is still far cheaper than the Classmate).
When Intel tries to take sales away from OLPC, I think they're doing a disservice to kids. While I don't consider them 'evil' in any sense, Intel has a very different -- and I believe, inferior -- vision of education in developing countries.
If the "reputation economy" ever manifests, the currency is going to need some sort of expiration date.
Google is never going to let this guy live it down. I don't know if the new state of affairs will be more or less fair than the old one where people could avoid punishment by simply moving, but it will definitely be unfair in a very different way.
Interesting, indeed. Shocking? Not sure, without context.
I'd like to hear more about it, but given that Rails processes are basically independent and interchangeable, such a state of affairs might not have affected the app performance significantly. Nor do we know whether the cause of this instability was a single, well-placed bug, or broader proof of a rickety code base.
Hell, we don't even know if Zed's characterization was remotely accurate. I'm having trouble finding him believable.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you compare and contrast the health effects of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, to show what makes marijuana uniquely dangerous among the three?
I'm curious, because I'm not sure there is a compelling case to be made.
Truth be told, you *are being an idiot. That is, you're using arguments that you wouldn't make about other substances. There are dozens of OTC drugs that you could fatally overdose on (probably more easily than marijuana), yet they're considered safe enough to pass out to anybody who wants them, in any quantities they choose to buy.
Instead of accepting the clear evidence of science, which says that you cannot lethally overdose on marijuana, you start talking about smoke asphyxiation. By those standards, you could overdose on tobacco, corn cobs, firewood... basically anything combustible. People don't die in house fires, they overdose on their homes. It's idiotic to single out marijuana for a property that it shares with both your cigarettes and your armchair.
It's also idiotic to make up a conspiracy theory to explain the lack of reports of a medical impossibility. Why would "shame" over a child's THC overdose compel so many parents into silence, when overdoses on other substances like cocaine cause them to take out ginormous "This is what happened to our Billy, so don't let it happen to you" billboards? You've offered no explanation, but the fact that you think marijuana use is so incredibly shameful does say a lot about why you're so keen to fight this losing battle.
Yes, smoking marijuana increases the risk of lung cancer. But marijuana can be consumed in all sorts of ways (smoking just being the most convenient and the one that requires no baking skills), and even with smoking, you're not coming close to the risk incurred from a pack-a-day cigarette habit. Alcohol is also a known carcinogen. If you're going to maintain that marijuana should be illegal, you should be arguing just as vehemently for making tobacco and alcohol illegal.
The people currently making huge money off of selling marijuana are able to do so precisely because it's illegal. It's not like growing or preparing it is rocket science. Why the hell would "Big Marijuana" as it currently exists, want it to be legalized?
Time after time, your reasoning has shown gaping holes. How's that cognitive dissonance working out for you?
No, conservatives aren't blocking universal health care out of love for the poor. They just don't want them clogging up the waiting rooms and making health care less convenient for them. We've already got rationed health care in this country; it's rationed by income.
True. I hear that the answer to border control is "Chuck Norris".
All in all, a pretty good plan.
Typical American response, indicating that the poster clearly doesn't believe that he will ever be "some poor guy". He will never become too sick or injured to work. He will never have his business fold beneath him, or his employer collapse above him. If the unwashed masses need more assistance than the wealthy see fit to voluntarily give, then they are leeches.
He is America Man!
Also, it certainly does matter how rich other people are. Do you think it matters to a member of America's working poor that they have access to more food, better shelter, and more effective medical care than anyone in the Bronze Age? If you think they take a moment's comfort in the thought, you don't understand human psychology. People don't compare themselves to people distant and invisible to themselves. What they do see is how much better other people live, which causes all sorts of dissatisfaction and stress. Now, if the person is convinced of his ability to close the gap, it can lead him to work hard. But if opportunities are frustratingly few, and the gap is huge, it can lead to hopelessness and resentment.
For any given amount of objective wealth, the person who has it will be much happier if the bulk of the people around him are somewhat poorer than him, and much less happy if he's sitting at the bottom, looking up at the lifestyles of the richer and famouser.
There is a strong correlation between wealth equality and life span. Beyond a certain, surprisingly low threshold, there is a very weak correlation between per-capita GNP and lifespan. Even in a society where most everyone is paid exactly the same (Cuba), many people still choose to undergo the taxing training required to become a doctor, simply because of the social prestige attached to the position. Cubans have nearly as long of lifespan as Americans (despite spending about a tenth what we do on health care), and cross-cultural studies seem to indicate that Cubans are pretty damned happy (not quite as happy as Americans, but it's a worryingly narrow gap given that our competition lives in a third-world dictatorship).
So absolute wealth is neither as motivating or as fulfilling as American common sense notions would indicate. If they passed a law tomorrow saying that nobody could make, say, twelve times minimum wage, I don't think we'd see an economic collapse as all the "productive people" withheld their labor from the economy. I don't think Tiger Woods would stop playing golf, or that all those talented CEOs would stop managing their companies. In fact, I think such a law would lead to more managerial talent available for CEO positions, since there would be less incentive to rig hirings in favor of cronies. Studies have shown that high CEO compensation has negligible effect on the performance of the companies they manage. Maybe capping their pay would disabuse them of the notion that their keen, infallible insight must warrant such outlandish salaries.
Ooooh... you punched the tar baby.
Prepare to be dragged into the surrealistic acid trip that is dada21.
You're confused about depression. It doesn't motivate anyone to do squat but stay in bed and veg out in front of the TV.
Hell, I've read some speculations from evolutionary psychology, hazarding that depression is nature's way of (to grossly oversummarize) getting people around you to do stuff for you.
The problem there: even if a closed source vendor goes out of business, a lot of businesses won't have the resources to switch over. They'll more likely try to hobble along with unsupported software than to put resources into a big IT overhaul.
Your reasoning explains why a business running open source software might have an advantage during a recession, but it may not lead to increased uptake of OSS.
Wise use of credit is not in the best interests of lenders, especially not in the short term.
Neither is it in the interests of business for people to simply be happy with what they have.
Put these two things together, and you have a recipe for many of our economic ills.
Price may be a better solution in theory, but in practice energy consumers only get feedback on their consumption once a month, and they probably don't have a clear idea of how their decisions affect the overall grid. Certainly, they don't know if turning on their AC *right now* will overload the grid. But the utilities do know, and simply being able to coordinate the activities of the most power-hungry devices is more efficient. Your proposal seems to involve jacking up prices until poor people turn off their AC altogether, so that more deserving wealthy people can access all the electricity they want when they want it.
I know, I know. The "free market" is signaling like crazy for the creation of more belching coal plants. But the market isn't accounting for CO2 production, and isn't accounting for the limited supply of non-renewables. It never does, until the limited supply starts affecting the extraction rate. What I'm saying is, the free market shouldn't be the sole arbiter of how much electricity we produce, or the sources of that electricity.
This technology is the leading edge of a new class of technologies, which will allow devices connected to the grid to gain knowledge of the state of the grid. Ultimately, I think it will lead to a sort of auction system, where appliances bid on the energy they use in realtime. If the energy being offered by the utility costs $0.40/kwh, you might have your AC set to shut down until the cost goes back down to $0.20. Efficient allocation of resources, free-market mechanisms, greater consumer control. It might even allow for multiple utilities to share the same infrastructure, reducing the need for utility monopolies. You may adopt a "you can pry my AC from my cold, bloody hands" attitude towards this particular proposal, but I don't think the overall trend is anything for you capitalistas to fear.
When did I say that it was bad for the federal government to mandate driver's license requirements? I'm just a bit confused about why you've brought this up. Unless I've said something inadvertent, it seems like a transparent attempt to change the subject.
Which would surprise me, since none of my points are incontrovertible.
Would you feel differently about this plan if your power company decided, as a private entity, that this plan was more sensible than building a mammoth upgrade to the grid to handle the day or two every year when demand overwhelmed supply? If installing such a device was just part of the terms and conditions of being their customer? If so, why the difference? It seems that, whether this is a public or a private move, this is a reasonable reaction to the situation.
The problem is, your solution basically involves setting one "peak rate" for everyone, that covers a broad swath of the midday. That's a very coarse tool for controlling demand. Among the many problems: what if people just choose to "pay for it"? Except, what they're really doing is underpaying, since the peak rate hasn't done what it was intended to do (push demand below the utilities' ability to supply).
Say you have an infrastructure that has just barely enough capacity to give everyone enough (say 20 minutes) of AC every hour, if everyone uses the electricity in a coordinated manner. But they don't; they just turn on when the thermostat says to turn on, so there are often more systems running than the infrastructure can handle, causing brownouts.
But if the thermostat is getting information about the state of the grid, then you can implement variable pricing. Electricity is cheap when demand is slack, allowing AC and refrigeration units to stagger their demand so as to not overwhelm the supply.
Real-time feedback from the grid will make the market for electricity more fluid and responsive. That's where this technology is headed, so I'm laughing at all this doom and gloom from the right wingers.
You don't know California, then. California utilities don't get paid based on how much electricity they sell. Search Wikipedia for "decoupling".
It's a little far-fetched to go all fear-mongery about the government cutting off our AC. First, there is the little detail of the California power utilities not being "the government." Then there is the thing where it will probably be a voluntary program where people install the thermostats in exchange for a lower rate. Then there's the thing where not being able to turn the thermostat below 80 is unlikely to kill anybody. Then there is the thing where building more fecking power plants carries its own boatloads of problems, which far surpass the inconvenience of the occasionally slightly warm room.
Cali's per-capita energy consumption has stayed flat for decades, because they push themselves and their utilities to look for conservation solutions first. Would that the rest of the country were more like them.
To the extent that it's their project and their time, they aren't obligated to listen to your complaints, much less fix them.
To the extent that the creators claim that other people should use their project for some purpose, then their reputation ought to be influenced by how well it lives up to those claims. But they're still not under any obligation to fix your issues or add missing features.
To the extent that criticisms are made in abusive, insulting ways, then the developers are big damned heroes if they can sift through it for any kernels of truth.
Nobody is saying that we can't criticize, but your criticism should be tempered by the fact that it's not your project, and the developers might not share your vision or care about your opinion.
Re: speed. Rails is slowly being rewritten in Ruby 1.9, which will make it several times faster. 1.9 integrates a new virtual machine called YARV. It won't magically solve everything, but it will help some.
A lot also depends on your deployment setup, which is one of the trickier things about Rails in my mind.
Absolutely correct. You can criticize an open source program all you want, and good criticism can be a boon to a project. But there are some lines that you don't have a right to cross. One is when you say, "so hurry up and fix it!" Unless you're willing to front the money or do the coding, you're not in a position to make demands.
Another line is the thin line that separates constructive criticism from mere douchebaggery. It's easy for frustration with a framework to bleed over into personal attacks against its authors or its fans.
Lastly, the article is right to point out that a lot of criticisms about any project are simply false as a matter of fact. Those can be especially frustrating for the people working on a project.
Just expect people to be emotionally invested in their favorite projects, and to know it too well to see your objections as major obstacles. So they may not take your complaints as seriously as you'd like.
I don't believe we have ever been a force for stability in Iraq.
Also, show me the candidate who doesn't believe in the "eventual" withdraw from Iraq? Well, McCain said he wouldn't mind a permanent troop presence in Iraq, much as we have in Germany or South Korea. But they'd be there as a hammer to wield against Iran, not to promote internal stability.
The point is, everyone (excluding a few neocons who seem to think we have a holy mandate to occupy every country everywhere until the end of time) claims that, if the country ever becomes able to "govern itself", we should massively draw down our presence in Iraq. But I don't believe we should wait nearly that long, and I think our presence in Iraq promotes violence and makes the Shia-run central government unwilling to make the compromises necessary to get the Sunnis involved in the political process.
If you decide to respond, please start off with a definition of "eventual".
You're still thinking of the old presidency. Pre-9/11 mentality and all that. Under the new presidency, the President can have anyone, anywhere detained, tortured, executed, spied upon, or forbidden from using any mode of transport more advanced than Greyhound. He can funnel substantial fractions of our ginormous military budget to private contractors run by the President's political contributors. He can use the Justice Department to fight "political corruption" among the opposing party. He can exonerate those who broke the law while doing his bidding. He can use the military against any target in the world, without further Congressional approval.
Knowing what Republicans think of Hillary, I can only imagine what they think of her getting super-invincibility power-up that comes ewith being a "War President."
I'll be deeply disappointed if the next President of the United States does not immediately divest him/herself of all these newfound powers. So far, Ron Paul is the only candidate who seems like he would, which in my mind makes up for the fact that most of his other proposals are a bit nutty.
Do you also criticize game developers for starting their development cycle by targeting machines they expect to be common in three years, when they expect to release? Or should they do the honest thing and only talk about how their game would run on the machines of today?
Negroponte's targets weren't unreasonable. He couldn't have forseen the plummeting dollar. He probably should have figured that a lot of the handshake deals he'd made with foreign leaders would fall through, reducing sales volume and driving up the price per unit. But it was reasonable to assume that, given those predicted volumes, the OLPC would have actually reduced the costs of its own hardware.
Moore's law should have made the $100 laptop a reality by 1993. I base this on the fact that, in 1985, my parents bought a 286 laptop for $2000. Five price-halvings at 1.5 years each, and there you go. But the market never asked for $100 laptops. The people demanding laptops at that time wanted ever more powerful machines in the $2000-$4000 range, so improvements in miniaturization led to advances in capability, not affordability. If chip makers were committed to building the chips in that 1985 laptop using today's tech, the relevant parts might cost a buck. These days there is more computing power in a Tickle-Me Elmo.
Cost of "a computer" has fallen much more slowly than the cost of any given model should predict, because manufacturers stopped producing older parts in large quantities, and relegated those parts to older fabs. So I think it's crap to say that Negroponte was just taking advantage of underlying trends. Some form of the OLPC has been conceivable for a very long time now. Somebody just had to make the huge demand for functional, low-cost hardware apparent (that "someone" being the world of cell phone and other portable devices, not Negroponte).
It's also notable that one of the jumps in the expected cost of the XO came with the addition of a couple of new features (including the integrated camera). Without those features, the stripped down version would probably cost around $150.
It's hard for me to understand the people who claim that Negroponte should be happy at the success of the Classmate. The goal was never to get "a laptop" into the hands of each child. The OLPC was designed from the ground up not as a "cheap laptop." The Classmate was, which I consider to be its biggest failing. Apparently Intel's concept was to build the cheapest possible machine that could run Windows and Office.
XO, by comparison, was designed from the ground up to be rugged, low power, useful even without access to the wider Internet, collaborative, human-chargeable, and child friendly. Yet it's got all the power of a full-fledged Linux distro under the hood, and it comes with everything a kid would need to write applications that run on it. As a cheap laptop, I'm sure that the two are running neck in neck. As an educational tool, the XO blows the Classmate away, even at the $200 price point (which is still far cheaper than the Classmate).
When Intel tries to take sales away from OLPC, I think they're doing a disservice to kids. While I don't consider them 'evil' in any sense, Intel has a very different -- and I believe, inferior -- vision of education in developing countries.
If the "reputation economy" ever manifests, the currency is going to need some sort of expiration date.
Google is never going to let this guy live it down. I don't know if the new state of affairs will be more or less fair than the old one where people could avoid punishment by simply moving, but it will definitely be unfair in a very different way.
Interesting, indeed. Shocking? Not sure, without context.
I'd like to hear more about it, but given that Rails processes are basically independent and interchangeable, such a state of affairs might not have affected the app performance significantly. Nor do we know whether the cause of this instability was a single, well-placed bug, or broader proof of a rickety code base.
Hell, we don't even know if Zed's characterization was remotely accurate. I'm having trouble finding him believable.