It sounds like you are arguing that Apple did something that only Apple was ever going to be capable of doing.
I'm saying it looks that way because Apple did it first and we don't get to see the alternate reality that would have ensued had Apple not existed.
I am not arguing that Apple didn't accelerate good changes in the smartphone industry. They certainly did. What I am saying is that we shouldn't conflate the acceleration of changes with being the only force for change that could ever have existed.
The fact that a manager at her level possesses so little technical skills is a serious fault in her managerial skills.
Does she posses fewer technical skills than we expect her to?! Is she supposed to be reviewing the source code to the website every night to make sure it's on track? No, she's supposed to hire experts that she can trust to perform these audits (i.e. managing).
And who knows, maybe she does lack technical skills. I have no idea. But whatever technical skills she lacks wouldn't matter if she was a good manager.
It just keeps on getting better after that excuse and your correction doesn't it?
I honestly just didn't (and still don't) know which word your were trying to use. Is is sophism? Because sophism is not about "wondering if the universe is real or imagined" either. The closest philosophical topic I can think of to this would be anti-realism.
Also the point is you didn't appear to understand the meaning or origin of the bit you put in quotes, hence it being a rather amusing failure considering your apparent intention to deliver a lecture from on high.
I am well aware that there are several philosophers and different areas of philosophy that deal with the subject of whether things are "real", and I was objecting to the characterization that this was the area of philosophy pertinent to this conversation and/or that these were characteristic of philosophy as a whole.
If you are going to try to put people down it's best to have some understanding of the topic being discussed!
I have a degree in computer science. In school my area of research was artificial intelligence. I have been working on drone technology for the past 9+ years. I co-run a philosophy discussion group that has met every week for the past 6 years. I have read about 5+ books on the subject of the nature of consciousness. I actually attend lectures on the subject of consciousness. I am pretty current on the main players in this field, current and historical, the differences of opinion, etc.
I literally do not know anyone who is knows more about this subject that isn't a professional philosopher/author.
I'm not trying to put anyone down. It is frustrating when you present arguments that seem not to be understood. So let me try this. Here is the paper I actually read in 2003 as part of my first artificial intelligence class (which started and ended with a heated philosophical discussion) that really solidified my view that machines will one day be intelligent (i.e. conscious). It was Alan Turing's paper which described the "Turing Test", or as he calls it in the paper "The Imitation Game".
There are plenty of people in Texas that would not be happy with intelligent design being taught in schools. I know for a fact that lots of people in California hate the restrictive California gun laws.
We don't have red states and blue states. We have a more or less even distribution of red and blue and purple people living in just about every state. I don't think having a one size fits all government is a good thing, but I don't think simply splitting up power geographically by state really makes things all that much better.
Maybe there was a time when your political views could be assumed to follow the state you lived in. Maybe that was never true. But it's obviously false now. We are a country run by idiots. Having the idiots be local idiots only solves a small part of the problem.
Well, they do get credit for being at least one of the first to actually shove the components together like this.
absolutely
The first iphone was a revolutionary device. It changed the direction of smartphones the day it came out. That doesn't mean we'd all be using the same shitty Windows CE interface right now, if iphone never existed. It just would have taken a bit longer for the advancement to happen without apple.
Einstein was the first to discover relativity. He will forever get the credit for this. But had he not existed someone else would have still figured it out. It just would have taken a bit longer.
I think patents, when they are structured correctly, can drive innovation. When they are structured incorrectly they can stifle innovation greatly. When we run the numbers to figure out how long a patent should exist in order to get people to create things they otherwise wouldn't in various fields, we should not be thinking "How valuable is a smartphone like the iphone to society". We should be thinking "How valuable is it to society to get a smartphone like the iphone 1 or 2 years earlier".
Obviously getting a smartphone like the iphone 1 or 2 years earlier is a wonderful thing that is certainly very valuable. But I don't think it is so valuable as to allow a company like apple to prevent good features from making to competitor phones almost a decade after the iphone was invented. Especially when we consider that Apple would probably have made the iphone almost exactly as it is now even if they were not granted these trvially obvious patents.
I am not disputing that the federal government is overreaching in a lot of areas. I am just not convinced that moving vast amounts of power back to the states will be some kind of magic bullet. There is plenty of corruption in state governments even with the minimal power they have now. In theory they are more accountable, I am doubtful about how well it would actually work in practice.
I actually support things like abolishing the department of education. But I wouldn't bet my life that education will magically get better after doing so. Some states would probably get much worse without federal oversight. I think we can all take a guess at which states those would be...
It does seek to inhibit other phone companies from making phones which are too much like the Apple phone
Or seeking to inhibit other phone companies from making *any* good smart phones, thereby giving the consumer less choice and increasing the odds that they will buy an apple device.
A smartphone is a computer. The reason that phones are getting better, is because the technology underpinning computers is getting better. More powerful computers allow for better user interfaces. It's not like no one thought of making a nice UI for a phone before Apple. It's that it wasn't possible until technology reached a certain point. Apple was just the first company to really exploit these advances in technology to do the obvious.
Allowing these sorts of obvious patents is harmful to society.
Apple doesn't get to take credit for computers getting smaller and more powerful.
"It can be fitted to a commercial airliner for less than $100,000. But the industry has decided that it's not worth the expense. Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Commercial airplane crashes are extremely rare. Even in these rare instances, it is even more rare not to find the aircraft that crashed.
It's NOT worth the extra expense. Should we really believe that *anything* is worth doing at *any* cost if it saves *any* lives? I would say no. But you don't have to take my word for it. People risk their own lives everyday to save money. It doesn't take a big greedy corporation to do it. If you offered people the option to pay $100 extra for their plane ticket so that in the event of a crash, their dead body could be located a bit more quickly, I think most people would say "fuck that".
It's easy to scream "Tell that to the families" after a catastrophe involving loss of life.
Why not ground all air traffic forever so that this kind of thing never happens again?. Is that too extreme? Well if you think it's too extreme, why don't you TELL THAT TO THE FAMILIES that you would rather their loved ones DIE than be inconvenienced.
If that is the case then shouldn't we also abolish state state governments. With only city governments the politicians will have even less power, meaning even less corruption and even more competitors. Plus it is even easier to move to a different city than to a different state.
You make some really good points. But, interestingly, I think this is becoming less relevant today, where computers are left on for months at a time, and perhaps put into a low-powered "sleep" mode which preserves RAM contents.
I leave my computer on for months at a time. But unless a computer can be guaranteed not to lose power for it's entire lifetime, the distinction between volatile and non-volatile memory will still be important. Even if all your important information is stored in the cloud, the distinction between volatile and nonvolatile is important for the cloud server your data resides on.
For me, RAM now is more like human memory
Humans have long term memory too (e.g. what street did I live on 50 years ago?). Maybe it isn't very reliable, but that's beside the point. Filing cabinets are certainly a way that humans augment their own memory, but I don;t think they necessarily thought of it this way. When computers were first created, people immediately realized the analogy between human memory and data storage. Sometimes people prefer to use the "storage" metaphor, and sometimes they prefer to use the "memory" metaphor, but it's all basically the same thing. It is incidental that we happen to have media with different advantages. If anyone ever invented some kind of flash memory that was faster than RAM and cheaper per megabyte than hard drives, computers would only have this kind of flash ram to do both he job of hard drives and RAM.
For ages nerds have been calling nonvolatlile nearline storage "storage" and random-access memory "memory".
I call RAM "memory" too. That doesn't make it incorrect to call a hard drive memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory
This is in fact more logical than what you suggest. If they turn you off and switch you on again, you might lose contents as well.
I don't know what turning a person on and off would entail, but people don't lose their memory in the same way that RAM does. Maybe that's because people don't ever turn off and on again, but if that is the case then there is no distinction between volatile and non-volatile memory.
Consciousness is an observed phenomenon. We don't have to have a deep understanding of how it works to define it. We didn't need to know how nuclear fusion works to define the sun as the big bright thing in the sky. And whatever science was going to discover about stars, it was never going to discover that the big bright thing in the sky was something other than the sun. (because we defined it to be the sun)
An approach using philosophy alone can't immediately be distinguised from a stopped clock that is correct twice a day since it's dealing with correctness of output.
What are you talking about?
Science itself was created from philosophy (i.e. epistemology).
So the guy attempting to lecture me on philosophy doesn't seem to have heard of sophilism (which is typically something most people pick up as general knowledge)
"sophilism" doesn't seem to be a real thing. Maybe you spelled it wrong? Typically google knows about things that are general knowledge
From google:
Did you mean: "sophism"
and doesn't understand that the bit he's put in quotes is a definition!
when most people hear "I just upgraded my computer memory", they assume you're talking about RAM
I probably would have agreed with you a few years ago.
I am starting to change my mind on this. With the increasing prevalence of flash memory and SSDs serving as non-volatile storage for smart phones, cameras, tablets, notebooks and desktops, I think the term memory is starting to no longer imply "RAM", even in common colloquial usage.
When we only had hard disk drives or optical disk drives for non-volatile storage, the word memory was not literally part of these terms, in the way that the M in RAM stood for memory. Now we have flash memory, and the question of "how much memory does your tablet have?" is now more ambiguous, especially if it is one that is assumed not to have a magnetic disk drive. Many small devices including some notebooks no longer even provide you with a way to upgrade/change RAM.
I don't think it's fair to say Kathleen Sebelius was technically challenged because the healthcare.gov website didn't work on time. Even if it were her fault, that the healthcare.gov launch went badly, it wouldn't be because of her technical skills, it would be because of her managerial skills.
What's the point? He'll be dead soon. I certainly wouldn't want to spend the last 2 years of my life learning some technology that I will never get to use.
The hard drive *is* memory. It's non-volatile memory (as opposed to volatile memory, like RAM). It's also a hard disk (as opposed to floppy disks). It's also magnetic storage (as opposed to optical, etc). It's also electro-mechanical storage (as opposed to solid-state).
It actually bugs me more that RAM is referred to as "memory" which is and should be a very generic term.
If anything the harddisk is probably a better candidate for the term "memory" than RAM is. A harddisk is what ultimately must store the data permanently and recall it. RAM exists to make certain frequently used data quicker to access, and it "forgets" when the computer is powered off. Granted this is basically equivalent to short-term memory, but I think long-term memory is more what people think of when they think of the generic term "memory".
There are some philosophers who wonder this. There are also some scientists (e.g. physicist Leonard Suskind), that believe the universe is a hologram. Obviously I could make some joke about how preposterous the suggestion that the universe is a hologram is, but that would be childish and I happen to think that Suskind is a very good physicist who has some very good ideas.
The fact that you think philosophy is about "wondering if the universe is real or imagined" just shows me that you don;t really know what philosophy is.
The scientific method itself is a philosophical construct. How do you know that the scientific method is the correct way to obtain truth? Can we test the "Scientific method theory of truth" using the scientific method? This is outside the realm of science. It is an epistemology question.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you are arguing that Apple did something that only Apple was ever going to be capable of doing.
I'm saying it looks that way because Apple did it first and we don't get to see the alternate reality that would have ensued had Apple not existed.
I am not arguing that Apple didn't accelerate good changes in the smartphone industry. They certainly did. What I am saying is that we shouldn't conflate the acceleration of changes with being the only force for change that could ever have existed.
The fact that a manager at her level possesses so little technical skills is a serious fault in her managerial skills.
Does she posses fewer technical skills than we expect her to?! Is she supposed to be reviewing the source code to the website every night to make sure it's on track? No, she's supposed to hire experts that she can trust to perform these audits (i.e. managing).
And who knows, maybe she does lack technical skills. I have no idea. But whatever technical skills she lacks wouldn't matter if she was a good manager.
It just keeps on getting better after that excuse and your correction doesn't it?
I honestly just didn't (and still don't) know which word your were trying to use. Is is sophism? Because sophism is not about "wondering if the universe is real or imagined" either. The closest philosophical topic I can think of to this would be anti-realism.
Also the point is you didn't appear to understand the meaning or origin of the bit you put in quotes, hence it being a rather amusing failure considering your apparent intention to deliver a lecture from on high.
I am well aware that there are several philosophers and different areas of philosophy that deal with the subject of whether things are "real", and I was objecting to the characterization that this was the area of philosophy pertinent to this conversation and/or that these were characteristic of philosophy as a whole.
If you are going to try to put people down it's best to have some understanding of the topic being discussed!
I have a degree in computer science. In school my area of research was artificial intelligence. I have been working on drone technology for the past 9+ years. I co-run a philosophy discussion group that has met every week for the past 6 years. I have read about 5+ books on the subject of the nature of consciousness. I actually attend lectures on the subject of consciousness. I am pretty current on the main players in this field, current and historical, the differences of opinion, etc.
I literally do not know anyone who is knows more about this subject that isn't a professional philosopher/author.
I'm not trying to put anyone down. It is frustrating when you present arguments that seem not to be understood. So let me try this. Here is the paper I actually read in 2003 as part of my first artificial intelligence class (which started and ended with a heated philosophical discussion) that really solidified my view that machines will one day be intelligent (i.e. conscious). It was Alan Turing's paper which described the "Turing Test", or as he calls it in the paper "The Imitation Game".
http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php
There are plenty of people in Texas that would not be happy with intelligent design being taught in schools. I know for a fact that lots of people in California hate the restrictive California gun laws.
We don't have red states and blue states. We have a more or less even distribution of red and blue and purple people living in just about every state. I don't think having a one size fits all government is a good thing, but I don't think simply splitting up power geographically by state really makes things all that much better.
Maybe there was a time when your political views could be assumed to follow the state you lived in. Maybe that was never true. But it's obviously false now. We are a country run by idiots. Having the idiots be local idiots only solves a small part of the problem.
Well, they do get credit for being at least one of the first to actually shove the components together like this.
absolutely
The first iphone was a revolutionary device. It changed the direction of smartphones the day it came out. That doesn't mean we'd all be using the same shitty Windows CE interface right now, if iphone never existed. It just would have taken a bit longer for the advancement to happen without apple.
Einstein was the first to discover relativity. He will forever get the credit for this. But had he not existed someone else would have still figured it out. It just would have taken a bit longer.
I think patents, when they are structured correctly, can drive innovation. When they are structured incorrectly they can stifle innovation greatly. When we run the numbers to figure out how long a patent should exist in order to get people to create things they otherwise wouldn't in various fields, we should not be thinking "How valuable is a smartphone like the iphone to society". We should be thinking "How valuable is it to society to get a smartphone like the iphone 1 or 2 years earlier".
Obviously getting a smartphone like the iphone 1 or 2 years earlier is a wonderful thing that is certainly very valuable. But I don't think it is so valuable as to allow a company like apple to prevent good features from making to competitor phones almost a decade after the iphone was invented. Especially when we consider that Apple would probably have made the iphone almost exactly as it is now even if they were not granted these trvially obvious patents.
I am not disputing that the federal government is overreaching in a lot of areas. I am just not convinced that moving vast amounts of power back to the states will be some kind of magic bullet. There is plenty of corruption in state governments even with the minimal power they have now. In theory they are more accountable, I am doubtful about how well it would actually work in practice.
I actually support things like abolishing the department of education. But I wouldn't bet my life that education will magically get better after doing so. Some states would probably get much worse without federal oversight. I think we can all take a guess at which states those would be...
It does seek to inhibit other phone companies from making phones which are too much like the Apple phone
Or seeking to inhibit other phone companies from making *any* good smart phones, thereby giving the consumer less choice and increasing the odds that they will buy an apple device.
A smartphone is a computer. The reason that phones are getting better, is because the technology underpinning computers is getting better. More powerful computers allow for better user interfaces. It's not like no one thought of making a nice UI for a phone before Apple. It's that it wasn't possible until technology reached a certain point. Apple was just the first company to really exploit these advances in technology to do the obvious.
Allowing these sorts of obvious patents is harmful to society.
Apple doesn't get to take credit for computers getting smaller and more powerful.
Limit their powers to what exactly? What things would be better in the hands of state governments than city governments?
"It can be fitted to a commercial airliner for less than $100,000. But the industry has decided that it's not worth the expense. Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Commercial airplane crashes are extremely rare. Even in these rare instances, it is even more rare not to find the aircraft that crashed.
It's NOT worth the extra expense. Should we really believe that *anything* is worth doing at *any* cost if it saves *any* lives? I would say no. But you don't have to take my word for it. People risk their own lives everyday to save money. It doesn't take a big greedy corporation to do it. If you offered people the option to pay $100 extra for their plane ticket so that in the event of a crash, their dead body could be located a bit more quickly, I think most people would say "fuck that".
It's easy to scream "Tell that to the families" after a catastrophe involving loss of life.
Why not ground all air traffic forever so that this kind of thing never happens again?. Is that too extreme? Well if you think it's too extreme, why don't you TELL THAT TO THE FAMILIES that you would rather their loved ones DIE than be inconvenienced.
If that is the case then shouldn't we also abolish state state governments. With only city governments the politicians will have even less power, meaning even less corruption and even more competitors. Plus it is even easier to move to a different city than to a different state.
You make it seem as if the constitution can't be changed.
I can't think of a worse fate than being labelled something.
What figures would show that it isn't a redistributionist government? If the government workers just kept the money to themselves?
Bring the power back to the states as it is supposed to do, and we'll cut most of this spending nonsense out.
Because states are not run by the same democrat and republican politicians running Washington?
You make some really good points. But, interestingly, I think this is becoming less relevant today, where computers are left on for months at a time, and perhaps put into a low-powered "sleep" mode which preserves RAM contents.
I leave my computer on for months at a time. But unless a computer can be guaranteed not to lose power for it's entire lifetime, the distinction between volatile and non-volatile memory will still be important. Even if all your important information is stored in the cloud, the distinction between volatile and nonvolatile is important for the cloud server your data resides on.
For me, RAM now is more like human memory
Humans have long term memory too (e.g. what street did I live on 50 years ago?). Maybe it isn't very reliable, but that's beside the point. Filing cabinets are certainly a way that humans augment their own memory, but I don;t think they necessarily thought of it this way. When computers were first created, people immediately realized the analogy between human memory and data storage. Sometimes people prefer to use the "storage" metaphor, and sometimes they prefer to use the "memory" metaphor, but it's all basically the same thing. It is incidental that we happen to have media with different advantages. If anyone ever invented some kind of flash memory that was faster than RAM and cheaper per megabyte than hard drives, computers would only have this kind of flash ram to do both he job of hard drives and RAM.
For ages nerds have been calling nonvolatlile nearline storage "storage" and random-access memory "memory".
I call RAM "memory" too. That doesn't make it incorrect to call a hard drive memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory
This is in fact more logical than what you suggest. If they turn you off and switch you on again, you might lose contents as well.
I don't know what turning a person on and off would entail, but people don't lose their memory in the same way that RAM does. Maybe that's because people don't ever turn off and on again, but if that is the case then there is no distinction between volatile and non-volatile memory.
Consciousness is an observed phenomenon. We don't have to have a deep understanding of how it works to define it. We didn't need to know how nuclear fusion works to define the sun as the big bright thing in the sky. And whatever science was going to discover about stars, it was never going to discover that the big bright thing in the sky was something other than the sun. (because we defined it to be the sun)
An approach using philosophy alone can't immediately be distinguised from a stopped clock that is correct twice a day since it's dealing with correctness of output.
What are you talking about?
Science itself was created from philosophy (i.e. epistemology).
So the guy attempting to lecture me on philosophy doesn't seem to have heard of sophilism (which is typically something most people pick up as general knowledge)
"sophilism" doesn't seem to be a real thing. Maybe you spelled it wrong? Typically google knows about things that are general knowledge
From google:
Did you mean: "sophism"
and doesn't understand that the bit he's put in quotes is a definition!
I put it in quotes because I was quoting you.
when most people hear "I just upgraded my computer memory", they assume you're talking about RAM
I probably would have agreed with you a few years ago.
I am starting to change my mind on this. With the increasing prevalence of flash memory and SSDs serving as non-volatile storage for smart phones, cameras, tablets, notebooks and desktops, I think the term memory is starting to no longer imply "RAM", even in common colloquial usage.
When we only had hard disk drives or optical disk drives for non-volatile storage, the word memory was not literally part of these terms, in the way that the M in RAM stood for memory. Now we have flash memory, and the question of "how much memory does your tablet have?" is now more ambiguous, especially if it is one that is assumed not to have a magnetic disk drive. Many small devices including some notebooks no longer even provide you with a way to upgrade/change RAM.
The whole point of my post was that your dad did was not actually incorrect to call a hard drive memory.
I don't think it's fair to say Kathleen Sebelius was technically challenged because the healthcare.gov website didn't work on time. Even if it were her fault, that the healthcare.gov launch went badly, it wouldn't be because of her technical skills, it would be because of her managerial skills.
What's the point? He'll be dead soon. I certainly wouldn't want to spend the last 2 years of my life learning some technology that I will never get to use.
The hard drive *is* memory. It's non-volatile memory (as opposed to volatile memory, like RAM). It's also a hard disk (as opposed to floppy disks). It's also magnetic storage (as opposed to optical, etc). It's also electro-mechanical storage (as opposed to solid-state).
It actually bugs me more that RAM is referred to as "memory" which is and should be a very generic term.
If anything the harddisk is probably a better candidate for the term "memory" than RAM is. A harddisk is what ultimately must store the data permanently and recall it. RAM exists to make certain frequently used data quicker to access, and it "forgets" when the computer is powered off. Granted this is basically equivalent to short-term memory, but I think long-term memory is more what people think of when they think of the generic term "memory".
There are some philosophers who wonder this. There are also some scientists (e.g. physicist Leonard Suskind), that believe the universe is a hologram. Obviously I could make some joke about how preposterous the suggestion that the universe is a hologram is, but that would be childish and I happen to think that Suskind is a very good physicist who has some very good ideas.
The fact that you think philosophy is about "wondering if the universe is real or imagined" just shows me that you don;t really know what philosophy is.
The scientific method itself is a philosophical construct. How do you know that the scientific method is the correct way to obtain truth? Can we test the "Scientific method theory of truth" using the scientific method? This is outside the realm of science. It is an epistemology question.