And in the long run, the trans-continental railroad was a good thing for the country. So are you agreeing that in the long term the high speed rail will also be worth it?
It was good back then because there were no better technological alternatives. Today, we have planes, buses, and cars as alternatives, and it's not clear what purpose trains serve.
What self-driving cars operate at 350 km/h (220 mph)? Heck, how many manually driven cars do? Very, very few. Sure, you might need an extra half hour at each end of the journey getting to/from the station, but given a long-distance journey your total travel time will still be less.
Do you ever actually travel by train? I do, regularly. High speed trains don't go every five minutes, they run a few times a day; if you have appointments, that means you usually waste hours waiting, both going and coming back. You may also not get the train you want, because they actually fill up. Furthermore, most people will have to switch trains in order to get there, meaning waiting times from between half an hour to hours, and that's not even taking into account delays which completely mess up the schedule. Luggage is limited to what you can carry (or you have to deal with even more hassles), so taking the train to go surfing becomes difficult.
Even in Europe, you almost never save time by train travel, and often it's also slower even if you don't count the waiting time. The big advantage is that you can do other things while going on the train. But with self-driving cars, believe me, trains will be dead.
Yes, bad ones too. So what? There will still be a supply of Chinese born degree holders of many different fields, some good, some bad, some rich, some poor. The point is: China really doesn't take a big risk by eliminating some programs from its public universities; it can always get the graduates it needs and it can always restart those programs if it needs to, even with native Chinese professionals.
And if it really needs to, it can just turn a whole bunch of degrees from public universities into private vocational schools. There is no particular reason why fields like non-research psychology and even non-research medicine should be taught at academic institutions. They are vocations and could be taught in vocational schools (including private ones) and don't require either bachelors or masters.
Well, why would you invest hundreds of billions of dollars in a long distance passenger rail system? It isn't cost effective, it often isn't faster than driving, and it has little benefit for the environment. The only real benefit long distance passenger train service has is convenience: you get in, you can work/read/chat while you travel, you get out near your destination. Self-driving cars give you that convenience as well. As a side-benefit, self-driving cars also have the potential for reducing congestion and pollution.
So, you tell me: what actual benefit do you think long distance passenger rail has over self-driving cars?
Except for extremely busy corridors, trains make little environmental or economic sense. I frankly doubt that this is a sensible way of spending the money for California. And while one might say that it will stimulate the economy, building something more useful will stimuate the economy even more. And this system will probably be in need of tax payer support indefinitely.
On the other hand, trains are actually a really nice way to travel, so in that sense I hope they will be building it.
Adam Smith, all the American Founding Fathers (yes, most of them were rich),
Smith was a professor--he was teaching. The American Founding Fathers were either rich or they were businessmen. None of them were paid by the government simply to sit around and be intellectuals.
And most writers, mathematicians, and musicians who have day jobs don't tend to produce great works.
Really? And this astounding factoid comes from... what source? Most mathematicians I know are professors--they teach. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and most of the other great composers worked as performers and teachers. Writers usually have a variety of odd jobs, some related, some unrelated to what they are writing about.
It's simply a matter of time: you need to put in years just to get to the point where you know what has been done in the past, never mind producing something new.
And jobs like teaching, contract research, etc. are excellent ways of exercising just those mental muscles.
The psychology graduates came from psychology majors in universities. If you eliminate these majors you have ZERO graduates not 1/10 the number of graduates.
Not true. In China, many Chinese study abroad anyway, so there would still be many graduates in these other fields even if China eliminated them entirely. Probably, what they should do, however, is to just trim them down and stiffen the admission requirements.
In the US, the US government can't phase out entire fields of study. What it can do is phase out government-supported student loans and scholarships in specific fields. And that might well be a good idea in a number of fields.
They come from the same place they came from 40 years ago, when we had perhaps 1/10th the number of psychology graduates. Too many people go to university.
And the reason NASA has problems is because their funding is uncertain and their planning erratic. I'd love to have worked at NASA, but planning a career around that would have been a bad move.
So you are saying that free societies should produce a large glut of unemployed intellectuals? Get real.
Any society should aim to educate its people so that it can function properly. The number of social scientists and historians any society needs happens to be pretty low, no matter what its form of government.
What happens when 60% of engineers are unemployable? This policy ignores the 40% of these majors that have jobs.
If the world needs more psychologists, then there will be private schools springing up supplying that need, and/or the government will start supporting psychology degrees again. What's the problem?
the "liberal arts" (literally, the freeing arts, specifically geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic, grammar, logic, and rhetoric)
They weren't the "freeing arts", they were the arts that "free" people studied. Those people tended to be the rich and powerful, who didn't actually need something like a job. Anybody who is rich and powerful today can still study those and pay for them.
What they do produce are things like the concept of human rights, new (and sometimes better) political and economic systems,
You mean like those great European intellectuals, like Marx and Engels?
great works of literature, and new areas of mathematics.
Many writers, mathematicians, and musicians have "day jobs", teaching, performing, solving practical problems.
Oh yeah, and those people also tend to produce revolutions in human society (such as Marxism, somewhat ironically). It is pretty obvious that governments which are interested primarily in preserving the status quo and not in the good of it's citizens wouldn't encourage such leisurely pursuits.
Half the world was built on the ideas you espouse throughout the 20th century, and that has conclusively shown that what you envision doesn't work because real human beings don't behave like the idealized members of society those "revolutions" assume. Socialism and communism invariably ended up in poverty, misery, and totalitarianism. Liberty, personal responsibility, and free markets may seem intellectually less appealing and less fair, but we keep them because they still end up producing better results for everybody, even those at the bottom.
It's bad because Liberty is an unalienable right, and the government has no business deciding what you should study.
You can study whatever you like, the government just happens not to pay for some fields.
Unemployment is a good thing, a sign of economic progress, the result of higher productivity. What we should do is provide a basic income to everyone who wants one, and hold challenges to stimulate innovation and the advance of knowledge.
Most people don't seem to "innovate or advance knowledge" if you just give them money with no strings attached. And those that actually do innovate and advance seem to have no problem paying the bills. People also don't seem to be very happy without some meaningful job.
Thanks for the explanation, but doesn't work out. If you choose equivalent focal lengths (same perspective) and the same exposure, you get a lower depth of field. If you take advantage of the larger sensor area and increase sensitivity to the same noise level you would have gotten on a smaller sensor, you still get somewhat less depth of field.
I don't see why you would choose "different framing" depending on sensor size. Maybe you mean that use use the same focal lengths with different sensor sizes. You can do that, but that's comparing apples and oranges; you're just not taking the same picture. For these comparisons to be meaningful, you need to compare DOF at equivalent focal lengths, not at numerically equal focal lengths. And when you do, the larger sensor still loses in terms of DOF (but wins in terms of noise and gradation).
I don't get why this is news. Is Qt5 so unportable that it requires 400 developers to port it to a new machine? Is Qt5/X11 so slow and inefficient that you can't use it on a 128MB RAM machine that's faster and bigger than high end desktop PCs of a few years ago that used to run Qt just fine, and therefore needs a separate "embedded" version? What's the news here?
Absolutely. If you look at the historical temperature record, even slight drops in temperature have been disastrous, while warming tends to cause more gradual changes and not hurt agriculture as much. Furthermore, cooling doesn't quickly give you new arable land, while warming does. And within at most a few thousand years, we are probably going to start a new glacial cycle, with an 8C temperature drop, which will be a disaster for humanity if we can't prevent it.
All of the earlier images (and text referencing them) that show something that looks like a menu is in fact a modal button (either clickable or a reference to a function key)
Even Smalltalk-80 had a "Keep this Menu Up" feature. If you selected it, you got a persistent menu that you could select from. The Star had buttons in the menu bar that would pop up dialogs that were menu-like (but could be more complicated). UCSD Pascal had a menu with submenus at the top. There were also tons of text-based menu systems that did similar things.
but they did indeed invent the pull-down menu and they should get credit for it.
I didn't say that they didn't "invent the pull-down menu", I'm saying that the pull-down menu is merely a variation on interfaces that already existed. It was a small step in a long evolution.
Apart from Smalltalk, on which you might have a point, none of those other things would have been usable on a 68000 processor. It's questionable whether any sort of OOP runtime could have run on it.
That's my point: Apple chose low-end components and messy software architecture in order to beat everybody to market. All the compromises Apple made in the software were just to get a 6-12 month lead and grab market share. It was a good business strategy but bad engineering.
You could argue that the CPU was too small for the job,... The point is, it was a very productive way to program for a while. I'm not saying it was anywhere near perfect, but calling it a piece of shit is to judge it by the standards of today, not 1984.
No, it was bad even by the standards of 1984. A 68k was powerful enough to run UNIX, OS-9, AmigaOS, Smalltalk, Lisp, C, and Objective-C (all of which existed at the time). From an engineering point of view, Apple should have put a bit more memory on the machine and done a better job at the OS. But their objective wasn't to engineer a good system, their objective was to make something that looked good and could be released quickly, and that turned out to be the right business decision in the short term, but almost killed them in the long term.
Again, neither Xerox nor anyone else had pull-down menus nor anything like it.
Many systems had a global hierarchical menu, some put them at the top, some used vertically stacked buttons, some used a menu button. Apple's choice was a minor variation of these systems,
Whether or not it's attached to the screen or the app window *IS* a minor variation, yet that's something you bring up in the hope of changing this from a discussion of fact, to one of preference.
Yeah, you're just the typical Apple fanboy trying to rewrite history.
Actually, it wasn't hell to program. By the standards of the day, it was really not bad.
When the Mac came out, Smalltalk-80 had been out for several years. Xerox Star had InterPress and object embedding. AmigaOS was right around the corner. LISP had CLIM. On Linux and UNIX workstations, you could get X10. On other platforms, there were high level languages, dynamic object systems, GUI designers, graphical debuggers, and IDEs.
Yes, even by the standards of the day, MacOS was a piece of shit.
Slashdot Mirror
It was good back then because there were no better technological alternatives. Today, we have planes, buses, and cars as alternatives, and it's not clear what purpose trains serve.
Do you ever actually travel by train? I do, regularly. High speed trains don't go every five minutes, they run a few times a day; if you have appointments, that means you usually waste hours waiting, both going and coming back. You may also not get the train you want, because they actually fill up. Furthermore, most people will have to switch trains in order to get there, meaning waiting times from between half an hour to hours, and that's not even taking into account delays which completely mess up the schedule. Luggage is limited to what you can carry (or you have to deal with even more hassles), so taking the train to go surfing becomes difficult.
Even in Europe, you almost never save time by train travel, and often it's also slower even if you don't count the waiting time. The big advantage is that you can do other things while going on the train. But with self-driving cars, believe me, trains will be dead.
Yes, bad ones too. So what? There will still be a supply of Chinese born degree holders of many different fields, some good, some bad, some rich, some poor. The point is: China really doesn't take a big risk by eliminating some programs from its public universities; it can always get the graduates it needs and it can always restart those programs if it needs to, even with native Chinese professionals.
And if it really needs to, it can just turn a whole bunch of degrees from public universities into private vocational schools. There is no particular reason why fields like non-research psychology and even non-research medicine should be taught at academic institutions. They are vocations and could be taught in vocational schools (including private ones) and don't require either bachelors or masters.
Well, why would you invest hundreds of billions of dollars in a long distance passenger rail system? It isn't cost effective, it often isn't faster than driving, and it has little benefit for the environment. The only real benefit long distance passenger train service has is convenience: you get in, you can work/read/chat while you travel, you get out near your destination. Self-driving cars give you that convenience as well. As a side-benefit, self-driving cars also have the potential for reducing congestion and pollution.
So, you tell me: what actual benefit do you think long distance passenger rail has over self-driving cars?
Don't travel at all. It's the cheapest and pollutes the least.
And since you mention European passenger rail systems, they are increasingly in trouble as well.
In 20 years, we'll probably have self-driving cars, and we'll be wondering why we wasted that much money on rail.
Except for extremely busy corridors, trains make little environmental or economic sense. I frankly doubt that this is a sensible way of spending the money for California. And while one might say that it will stimulate the economy, building something more useful will stimuate the economy even more. And this system will probably be in need of tax payer support indefinitely.
On the other hand, trains are actually a really nice way to travel, so in that sense I hope they will be building it.
Smith was a professor--he was teaching. The American Founding Fathers were either rich or they were businessmen. None of them were paid by the government simply to sit around and be intellectuals.
Really? And this astounding factoid comes from... what source? Most mathematicians I know are professors--they teach. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and most of the other great composers worked as performers and teachers. Writers usually have a variety of odd jobs, some related, some unrelated to what they are writing about.
And jobs like teaching, contract research, etc. are excellent ways of exercising just those mental muscles.
Good Chinese students just go abroad to the US and Europe.
Not true. In China, many Chinese study abroad anyway, so there would still be many graduates in these other fields even if China eliminated them entirely. Probably, what they should do, however, is to just trim them down and stiffen the admission requirements.
In the US, the US government can't phase out entire fields of study. What it can do is phase out government-supported student loans and scholarships in specific fields. And that might well be a good idea in a number of fields.
Is that you, King Bum?
They come from the same place they came from 40 years ago, when we had perhaps 1/10th the number of psychology graduates. Too many people go to university.
And the reason NASA has problems is because their funding is uncertain and their planning erratic. I'd love to have worked at NASA, but planning a career around that would have been a bad move.
So you are saying that free societies should produce a large glut of unemployed intellectuals? Get real.
Any society should aim to educate its people so that it can function properly. The number of social scientists and historians any society needs happens to be pretty low, no matter what its form of government.
If the world needs more psychologists, then there will be private schools springing up supplying that need, and/or the government will start supporting psychology degrees again. What's the problem?
They weren't the "freeing arts", they were the arts that "free" people studied. Those people tended to be the rich and powerful, who didn't actually need something like a job. Anybody who is rich and powerful today can still study those and pay for them.
You mean like those great European intellectuals, like Marx and Engels?
Many writers, mathematicians, and musicians have "day jobs", teaching, performing, solving practical problems.
Half the world was built on the ideas you espouse throughout the 20th century, and that has conclusively shown that what you envision doesn't work because real human beings don't behave like the idealized members of society those "revolutions" assume. Socialism and communism invariably ended up in poverty, misery, and totalitarianism. Liberty, personal responsibility, and free markets may seem intellectually less appealing and less fair, but we keep them because they still end up producing better results for everybody, even those at the bottom.
You can study whatever you like, the government just happens not to pay for some fields.
Most people don't seem to "innovate or advance knowledge" if you just give them money with no strings attached. And those that actually do innovate and advance seem to have no problem paying the bills. People also don't seem to be very happy without some meaningful job.
Sprint and T-Mobile should merge. That would create decent comptition for Verizon and AT&T.
Thanks for the explanation, but doesn't work out. If you choose equivalent focal lengths (same perspective) and the same exposure, you get a lower depth of field. If you take advantage of the larger sensor area and increase sensitivity to the same noise level you would have gotten on a smaller sensor, you still get somewhat less depth of field.
I don't see why you would choose "different framing" depending on sensor size. Maybe you mean that use use the same focal lengths with different sensor sizes. You can do that, but that's comparing apples and oranges; you're just not taking the same picture. For these comparisons to be meaningful, you need to compare DOF at equivalent focal lengths, not at numerically equal focal lengths. And when you do, the larger sensor still loses in terms of DOF (but wins in terms of noise and gradation).
Oh, they should just install the probulator. At least you'll be treated with dignity.
I don't get why this is news. Is Qt5 so unportable that it requires 400 developers to port it to a new machine? Is Qt5/X11 so slow and inefficient that you can't use it on a 128MB RAM machine that's faster and bigger than high end desktop PCs of a few years ago that used to run Qt just fine, and therefore needs a separate "embedded" version? What's the news here?
Ummm... how do you use a bigger sensor to get a greater depth of field?
Absolutely. If you look at the historical temperature record, even slight drops in temperature have been disastrous, while warming tends to cause more gradual changes and not hurt agriculture as much. Furthermore, cooling doesn't quickly give you new arable land, while warming does. And within at most a few thousand years, we are probably going to start a new glacial cycle, with an 8C temperature drop, which will be a disaster for humanity if we can't prevent it.
Even Smalltalk-80 had a "Keep this Menu Up" feature. If you selected it, you got a persistent menu that you could select from. The Star had buttons in the menu bar that would pop up dialogs that were menu-like (but could be more complicated). UCSD Pascal had a menu with submenus at the top. There were also tons of text-based menu systems that did similar things.
I didn't say that they didn't "invent the pull-down menu", I'm saying that the pull-down menu is merely a variation on interfaces that already existed. It was a small step in a long evolution.
That's my point: Apple chose low-end components and messy software architecture in order to beat everybody to market. All the compromises Apple made in the software were just to get a 6-12 month lead and grab market share. It was a good business strategy but bad engineering.
No, it was bad even by the standards of 1984. A 68k was powerful enough to run UNIX, OS-9, AmigaOS, Smalltalk, Lisp, C, and Objective-C (all of which existed at the time). From an engineering point of view, Apple should have put a bit more memory on the machine and done a better job at the OS. But their objective wasn't to engineer a good system, their objective was to make something that looked good and could be released quickly, and that turned out to be the right business decision in the short term, but almost killed them in the long term.
Many systems had a global hierarchical menu, some put them at the top, some used vertically stacked buttons, some used a menu button. Apple's choice was a minor variation of these systems,
Yeah, you're just the typical Apple fanboy trying to rewrite history.
When the Mac came out, Smalltalk-80 had been out for several years. Xerox Star had InterPress and object embedding. AmigaOS was right around the corner. LISP had CLIM. On Linux and UNIX workstations, you could get X10. On other platforms, there were high level languages, dynamic object systems, GUI designers, graphical debuggers, and IDEs.
Yes, even by the standards of the day, MacOS was a piece of shit.