First of all, "Linux" is not a collection of programs. It is *only* a kernel. A "linux distribution" is a collection of open source software including the linux kernel. These are referred to as "linux distributions" as a matter of tradition, but really linux is only one part (albeit a pretty big one). There are other open source kernels (e.g. hurd) but Linux is just the most popular and mature.
I don't see how being "a loose collection of programs" is a bad thing. What is a typical computer running windows but a loose collection of programs. Windows is a boot loader ntldr, a kernel ntoskrnl.exe, and a million exe and dll files.
I am not saying linux is great at everything. If you want to play games, you need windows. I am saying that I don't thing the approach taken by linux is flawed. It's a really good design. Linux just needs some better drivers from Nvidia and AMD, and for game makers to make cross platform version of their games and, bingo it's basically just as good as windows. Windows has problems. Linux has more problems, but they are not insurmountable.
There are some things that can't be done in Linux as easily as in other OSes (like games), but there are also many things that really ARE things you just don't want to do. For example, lots of people ask how to defrag their hard disks in linux. Well because of the way ext filesystems work, you just don't need to defrag them.
Aantivirus software is fairly useless in linux. Linux does not have the same sorts of problems with viruses that windows does. Windows is getting a lot better though starting with vista in terms of security. Ideally when you find a security hole, the fix should be patching the problem so it can't be exploited rather than updating some kludgey antivirus software that hopefully will catch the virus before you get it.
The only reason anti virus programs even exist is because Windows used to be so incredibly full of security holes. You'd only have to leave your computer plugged into the internet for a few minutes before you'd be infected. Thats not the case for linux, and is not the case anymore for windows either.
Windows is good at some things. Linux is good at some things. Windows has much more support from hardware vendors. They have also managed to create some closed framework/APIs that became ubiquitous, which pretty much guarantees that a lot of things only work on windows. Games/DirectX being the big one.
Linux (or rather open source software) has some really good things too though. They were ahead of the game in many areas like servers, live booting, filesystems, software raid, scalability of the OS (same OS runs on mobile phones, netbooks, desktops, and servers).
In fact the success of open source has made windows a great deal more useful. Most of the software I use in Windows is open source. 7-zip, gimp, firefox, eclipse, virtualdub, avisynth, librecad, xbmc, cygwin, vlc
In fact the success of open source has made windows a great deal more useful. Most of the software I use in Windows is open source. 7-zip, gimp, firefox, eclipse, virtualdub, librecad, xbmc, cygwin, vlc
No I can't play my games or edit videos without windows, that's why I have it. I would however be much more disabled if I lost my open source software than if I lost my closed source software.
Time Warner can’t pass on the cost only to Netflix subscribers; every Time Warner customer would have to pay more.
Time warner *could* absolutely pass the cost only to netflix users, but that would not even be the best solution. The best solution would be to simply charge based on data transmitted rather than bandwidth caps. The cost you incur as a subscriber to an ISP is not your bandwidth cap during off peak hours. The cost you incur is how much data you actually send and receive during peak hours.
The pricing scheme employed by the ISP should incentivize efficient use of network resources at all times. Imagine if the electric company, rather than charging for kilowatt*hours (i.e. units of energy) charged for the analog of bandwidth limits (i.e. power usage, energy/time). This would mean you would pay monthly for a 15 Watt limit, or more for a 30 Watt limit. You could use as much enerfy as you wanted but you are not allowed to exceed a certain rate of energy per time. This means that if you run your electric dryer you'd need to turn off everything else or you'd need to pay for a higher wattage. How would people behave? They would waste electricty because there would be no incentive not to. All they need to do is stay under 30 Watts (or whatver they paid for). People would consume far more electricity than they do now *and* have a much smaller power limit than they do now. It's much better if people use as little energy as possible but are free to use very high power when they need to (like when using a dryer). This keeps prices low and allows the most freedom.
Imagine a world where you had to watch how much data you were using. It sounds terrible until you consider the benefit. Imagine you could download at like 1 terabyte per second. Current technology only allows for about 125 Megabytes per second, but that is rapidly changing. You would never need to wait to download things. You could get them nearly instantly. If we keep the amount of data people download per month the same, wouldn't it be better to just the same data but faster?, with the option of paying more and getting even more data?
If you wanted to save money you could even schedule large downloads to occur during off peak hours, like how people schedule their dryers to run during off peak hours.
Right now our internet works like a world where everyone pays for 5 Watts of electricity and in order to run your dryer you need to charge a battery off of a 5 Watt main for 5 hours to have enough juice to run the 30 watt dryer. (i.e. buffering a 50GB high def movie). But whenever you try to tell people that if they give up "unlimited" energy usage (power caps) they can have like 100 Watts for the same price (but just not on all the time), they freak out and think it's a bad thing.
The DNC likely owns this software.
1. The DNC keeps the software closed source because the #1 priority is defeating republicans.
2. The programmers loyal to the DNC will continue to maintain the software.
3. The programmers loyal to freedom will write a new bit of open source software that does the exact same thing.
4. Republicans will make a closed source copy of the software and use and update that themselves.
5. Eventually the open source one will just be better, but both sides will maintain a closed source duplicate of the open source software in order to bluff to the other side that they have a secret advantage.
I am sure at this very moment people in China are trying to figure out which socialist party candidate they can try to support that will be less totalitarian. Working towards toppling the socialist party in favor of true freedom might be bad because that effort could have been spent supporting the most progressive puppet of the socialist party. Sometimes you just need to realize that the game is rigged and stop playing. Playing the game legitimizes it.
I think our election system is still reasonably fair, so I continue to vote in it. What I feel is not worth legitimizing is the idea that it is important to waste my vote on ensuring that a democrat defeats a republican or vice versa. If the actual election system stops being reasonably fair (like if write in candidates are not honored), I will no longer legitimize it by voting.
The reason 3rd party candidates can't win is because of the perception that they can't win. The 2 major parties have all the money, and they use that money to keep this perception alive. Do you really think that the people put forth by these 2 parties are actually the most qualified people to run the country in every election? Obviously not. The people could (if they really wanted to) more qualified people to be nominated, but they are happy with the perception that this is the way things are and they must pick between the 2 choices given to them. The alternative would be far to much work.
As Alexis de Toqueville said... In a democracy you get the government you deserve.
If you are prone to accepting false dichotomies, then yes, that was the alternative. Otherwise the alternativeS were/are not voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and vote for someone you actually agree with. Is this not feasible because of our 2 party degenerate FPP voting system? Then maybe an alternative is working towards improving our voting system. These aren't easy alternatives, but usually the good alternatives are not easy. Democracy was not an easy alternative. Abolishing slavery was not an easy alternative. At one point in history people said these things were never going to happen. These goals may not even be attainable in my lifetime, but working towards them seems a much more worthy goal than picking sides in the internal squabbling of the republicrat party.
Our company uses MS office. I am a good programmer and a fairly competent computer user. I absolutely hate MS office. The other day I could not delete an embedded picture without deleting the one right below it, even though they were independently selectable. How irritating.
I am not saying libre office is better. I am saying it can't be much worse.
I have read consciousness explained. I have even talked with Professor Dennett on multiple occasions. There are different levels to knowing how something works. Knowing *that* the brain is a bunch of biomechanical robots that communicate without knowing how *that* causes consciousness does not mean you don't know *anything*. In fact knowing such a thing implies that it is theoretically possible to build an AI. This is opposed to an alternate hypothesis that the brain works through a supernatural soul bestowed by God that is not reproducible by the natural universe.
I would also like to point out that human beings make natural intelligences without knowing how they work all the time (through procreation). We know the process for making a thing (a zygote) that knows how to make itself as long as food and protection are supplied. I suspect creating an AI will follow a similar model. We make a thing that has the tools to have it's own experiences, just like an embryonic brain, provide it with a rich environment (of information), and let it create itself.
One day we may figure out how to micromanage the top down creation of an AI, but I think we will make one before that day comes. Evolution may be slower compared to intelligent design, except when you don't have the intelligence to start with.
Yes you can install malware on linux if you try hard enough. The kernel will undoubtedly require you to provide the root password a few times, but once you do that, you can permanently bypass all security measures, including modifying the kernel. There is fundamentally no difference between windows and linux in this regard. It used to be common for the default windows login to be root (administrator), bypassing even the requirement to provide a root password before making dangerous changes, but that changed with vista to a more "linuxy" model.
The state in one position of the brain cannot instantaneously affect the state at a different position in the brain, due to relativity. The speed limit for communications between computers, transistors, neurons, chemical levels, etc is the speed of light. While this may be a common limit, neural impulses in fact travel about 3 million times slower than the speed of electrical signals through a wire. Artificial computers may not be computationally faster for computing the things a human brain computes, but they do have an advantage in regards to latency of communications, making it possible to separate individual components at distances much greater than the distances between neurons for the same functionality. Simultaneity does not exist.
You can install linux applications from executables just like in windows. There is nothing that prevents you from copying all sorts of files wherever you want to. In fact most applications provide packages for popular distributions *and* source code for you to do whatever you want with. You have more choices than windows. You have the option of allowing the package manager to organize things for you, or have ultimate control (more control than even windows allows).
Almost everything you need comes in the default repositories for the more popular linux distributions. Also adding a repository is not any harder than going to a website to download an exe. Both involve remembering or googling a URL. You can install parts of packages in linux. apt-get install libreoffice-calc. It will even figure out all the dependencies for you. You don't have to figure out that you also need java to get it to work. The fact that people are used to installing applications on windows, does not mean it is universally easier. In fact windows is moving towards package management systems. Like android, apple, and amazon, they are going to have a store that installs things for you.
"free as in libre" is not meant to directly benefit the average joe. Just like how democracy doesn't directly benefit the average joe who is too lazy to vote. The average joe, however indirectly benefits from open source, just like he benefits from democracy. He benefits from people who care contributing their time and energy to continue the march of progress. The average joe benefits from cheap routers, android phones, and cable boxes running linux. He doesn;t care that one major reason these devices are so cheap is that the bulk of the software to run them pre-dated the device and is free for the manufacturers to use and modify.
Whether average joe wants to use an open source OS for his desktop are not relevant. Open source software makes it possible for many people to make new and great things which average joe does care about. Imagine a world where using calculus required paying royalties to the family of Isaac Newton. People who hate doing math wouldn't care because they wouldn't be doing calculus anyway, but how many applications that indirectly benefit average joe require calculus to function? A world where calculus is open source is a better world than one where it is proprietary. I am not saying everything should be open source. I am just saying that we should appreciate that some people have given us their creations for free and in a way that allows them to keep on giving through improvement and refinement.
You can;t do *everything* in parallel, but you can do *lots* of things in parallel. The human brain does lot's of things in parallel. Even if individual experiences are required to be sequential so they can influence subsequent experiences, you can still parallelize the gaining of a single experience. If gaining 1 experience requires a trillion operations, then you can shorten the time required to gain this experience by parallelizing it. If you reduce the time required to gain a single experience by a factor of a thousand, then you can gain experiences a thousand times faster. There does come a point where you can't parallelize things anymore, but I don't think we are anywhere near that point. The brain is far more parallel than any computers we currently have. Making them even more parallel is a step in the right direction (because it's easier to get more computational power this way than by making individual computers faster).
If you treat the human brain as 1 computer (or even a trillion parallel computers), then having a thousand times as many of hem, should in theory, make computing the same things (i.e. life experiences) go a thousand times faster.
Linux's 2 big issues are driver problems (i.e. lack of stable drivers with full feature support) and lack of games designed for it.
Not every desktop environment that runs on linux works well. Some (maybe even most) are buggy. They are not all buggy and you are not forced to use the buggy ones. I see more options (even if some are bad) as a good thing. Windows is fairly stable now, but it wasn't a few years ago and you didn't have the option of using alternate desktop environments in windows (although I suppose you do now with windows 8 and metro:))
Clunky package management system? The package management systems in linux are far superior to windows. In windows you just download your own executable and install it yourself. This is like complaining that going to the store in a car is "clunky" than just walking there. Yeah there is more involved in having a functional car (gas, maintenance, traffic laws, etc), but it is a more powerful mode of transport.
The point of linux is not mean to be "free as in beer". I would agree that a free as in beer OS is not worth the aggravation. A pirated copy of windows is a similar "free as in beer" OS that is not worth the aggravation. A "free as in speech" OS is a far more worthy goal. It means that it can't be owned or controlled by anyone else. It means that you always have the choice to decide what the software on your computer does. A "free as in speech" OS is extremely powerful in the sense that you are not prevented from modifying it (or using the modifications of others) in any way you choose.
The difference between a free as in beer OS and a free as in speech OS is the difference between a benevolent (for now) dictator and autonomy
If you control the test scores based on test score then all the scores worldwide are the same. It isn't fair to compare students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, because *of course* the students from wealthy families will have all the advantages and score higher. In fact your test scores is a pretty good indicator of how wealthy you are. So what I propose is grouping people by their test scores and only comparing those groups. We group people who scored 100% in the same group, 99% in another group, etc, all the way down to 0%. If you do this, it turns out that every country has equally smart "smart kids" and equally smart "dumb kids". We are all equal. The only difference is how many kids in each group each country has. But I don't see how that's important./s
Excessive anything is bad.
It's good to use templates whenever you find yourself copying and pasting a bunch of code over and over again, and doing find replace for the types.
When you find yourself putting in a bunch of special cases for different types in your "generic" code, then maybe it's time to take the templates out.
We shouldn't even be trying to stop Sandy Hook type mass shootings specifically anyway. Despite the media coverage, mass shootings are extremely rare. 100 times as many people are killed in non-mass shootings. If we could lower by 2% the number of normal shootings, we will have saved twice as many people as if we eliminated all mass shootings entirely.
Whatever legislation we come up with should be attempting to do the most amount of good, rather than being an overreaction to a tragic but rare occurrence. While making laws that specifically address the tragedy most fresh in our mind may make us feel better, it is a poor substitute for laws that actually make society better in general.
I think there is a presumption that people who commit at least one crime are more likely to commit more in the future. If someone is going to murder 10 people unchecked, but you arrest them after they've committed the first, you've prevented 9 murders.
Also like fche noted, the deterrent effect will stop some crimes as well. How many depends on the quality of enforcement.
While the magic cards are written in something like natural language, they seem almost like source code that has been translated into natural language by hand. It would probably be less work to translate the magic cards back into source code rather than writing a program to do it. Also there are many ambiguous cards that have had their text meanings clarified by some magic rules authority, this would be hard for an automated text->meaning analyzer to deal with properly.
Also, I believe the actual rules for magic (e.g. rules related to timing) have gradually changed over the years, so the way the cards worked when hey were printed and the way they would work now might be slightly different.
This is a perfect example of why code beauty is subjective. On the one hand the author loves saving vertical space by not putting parentheses on their own lines, then he hates it when you remove them entirely, even though it saves even more space. He finds conditionals without parentheses to be less readable. I find non-horizontally aligned parentheses less readable, and have no problem following conditionals without them.
I think where it becomes less arbitrary (but still subjective) is in the actual design. I don't see the point of not using STL. Being able to write 1 hash (or use someone else's) without needing multiple copies in the code simply to deal with different types seems great to me. Yeah it's a little harder to read, but you only need to read one of them, and you know all the hashes are the same unless there are methods overloaded for different types. Checking that each part of 2 classes that look identical except for types, are actually identical is tedious.
Sometimes there is a tradeoff between code readability and design. I tend to favor design over readability. Inheritance makes code less readable, but if done correctly, it makes the design much better by reducing redundant code. Redundant code may be perfectly readable, but it makes it much harder to "read" the design of the application.
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Why is it even possible to fuck up a word doc in a word doc editor?
First of all, "Linux" is not a collection of programs. It is *only* a kernel. A "linux distribution" is a collection of open source software including the linux kernel. These are referred to as "linux distributions" as a matter of tradition, but really linux is only one part (albeit a pretty big one). There are other open source kernels (e.g. hurd) but Linux is just the most popular and mature.
I don't see how being "a loose collection of programs" is a bad thing. What is a typical computer running windows but a loose collection of programs. Windows is a boot loader ntldr, a kernel ntoskrnl.exe, and a million exe and dll files.
I am not saying linux is great at everything. If you want to play games, you need windows. I am saying that I don't thing the approach taken by linux is flawed. It's a really good design. Linux just needs some better drivers from Nvidia and AMD, and for game makers to make cross platform version of their games and, bingo it's basically just as good as windows. Windows has problems. Linux has more problems, but they are not insurmountable.
There are some things that can't be done in Linux as easily as in other OSes (like games), but there are also many things that really ARE things you just don't want to do. For example, lots of people ask how to defrag their hard disks in linux. Well because of the way ext filesystems work, you just don't need to defrag them.
Aantivirus software is fairly useless in linux. Linux does not have the same sorts of problems with viruses that windows does. Windows is getting a lot better though starting with vista in terms of security. Ideally when you find a security hole, the fix should be patching the problem so it can't be exploited rather than updating some kludgey antivirus software that hopefully will catch the virus before you get it.
The only reason anti virus programs even exist is because Windows used to be so incredibly full of security holes. You'd only have to leave your computer plugged into the internet for a few minutes before you'd be infected. Thats not the case for linux, and is not the case anymore for windows either.
Windows is good at some things. Linux is good at some things. Windows has much more support from hardware vendors. They have also managed to create some closed framework/APIs that became ubiquitous, which pretty much guarantees that a lot of things only work on windows. Games/DirectX being the big one.
Linux (or rather open source software) has some really good things too though. They were ahead of the game in many areas like servers, live booting, filesystems, software raid, scalability of the OS (same OS runs on mobile phones, netbooks, desktops, and servers).
In fact the success of open source has made windows a great deal more useful. Most of the software I use in Windows is open source. 7-zip, gimp, firefox, eclipse, virtualdub, avisynth, librecad, xbmc, cygwin, vlc
In fact the success of open source has made windows a great deal more useful. Most of the software I use in Windows is open source. 7-zip, gimp, firefox, eclipse, virtualdub, librecad, xbmc, cygwin, vlc
No I can't play my games or edit videos without windows, that's why I have it. I would however be much more disabled if I lost my open source software than if I lost my closed source software.
Time Warner can’t pass on the cost only to Netflix subscribers; every Time Warner customer would have to pay more.
Time warner *could* absolutely pass the cost only to netflix users, but that would not even be the best solution. The best solution would be to simply charge based on data transmitted rather than bandwidth caps. The cost you incur as a subscriber to an ISP is not your bandwidth cap during off peak hours. The cost you incur is how much data you actually send and receive during peak hours.
The pricing scheme employed by the ISP should incentivize efficient use of network resources at all times. Imagine if the electric company, rather than charging for kilowatt*hours (i.e. units of energy) charged for the analog of bandwidth limits (i.e. power usage, energy/time). This would mean you would pay monthly for a 15 Watt limit, or more for a 30 Watt limit. You could use as much enerfy as you wanted but you are not allowed to exceed a certain rate of energy per time. This means that if you run your electric dryer you'd need to turn off everything else or you'd need to pay for a higher wattage. How would people behave? They would waste electricty because there would be no incentive not to. All they need to do is stay under 30 Watts (or whatver they paid for). People would consume far more electricity than they do now *and* have a much smaller power limit than they do now. It's much better if people use as little energy as possible but are free to use very high power when they need to (like when using a dryer). This keeps prices low and allows the most freedom.
Imagine a world where you had to watch how much data you were using. It sounds terrible until you consider the benefit. Imagine you could download at like 1 terabyte per second. Current technology only allows for about 125 Megabytes per second, but that is rapidly changing. You would never need to wait to download things. You could get them nearly instantly. If we keep the amount of data people download per month the same, wouldn't it be better to just the same data but faster?, with the option of paying more and getting even more data?
If you wanted to save money you could even schedule large downloads to occur during off peak hours, like how people schedule their dryers to run during off peak hours.
Right now our internet works like a world where everyone pays for 5 Watts of electricity and in order to run your dryer you need to charge a battery off of a 5 Watt main for 5 hours to have enough juice to run the 30 watt dryer. (i.e. buffering a 50GB high def movie). But whenever you try to tell people that if they give up "unlimited" energy usage (power caps) they can have like 100 Watts for the same price (but just not on all the time), they freak out and think it's a bad thing.
Paying per byte is better than bandwidth caps.
The DNC likely owns this software. 1. The DNC keeps the software closed source because the #1 priority is defeating republicans. 2. The programmers loyal to the DNC will continue to maintain the software. 3. The programmers loyal to freedom will write a new bit of open source software that does the exact same thing. 4. Republicans will make a closed source copy of the software and use and update that themselves. 5. Eventually the open source one will just be better, but both sides will maintain a closed source duplicate of the open source software in order to bluff to the other side that they have a secret advantage.
I am sure at this very moment people in China are trying to figure out which socialist party candidate they can try to support that will be less totalitarian. Working towards toppling the socialist party in favor of true freedom might be bad because that effort could have been spent supporting the most progressive puppet of the socialist party. Sometimes you just need to realize that the game is rigged and stop playing. Playing the game legitimizes it.
I think our election system is still reasonably fair, so I continue to vote in it. What I feel is not worth legitimizing is the idea that it is important to waste my vote on ensuring that a democrat defeats a republican or vice versa. If the actual election system stops being reasonably fair (like if write in candidates are not honored), I will no longer legitimize it by voting.
The reason 3rd party candidates can't win is because of the perception that they can't win. The 2 major parties have all the money, and they use that money to keep this perception alive. Do you really think that the people put forth by these 2 parties are actually the most qualified people to run the country in every election? Obviously not. The people could (if they really wanted to) more qualified people to be nominated, but they are happy with the perception that this is the way things are and they must pick between the 2 choices given to them. The alternative would be far to much work.
As Alexis de Toqueville said... In a democracy you get the government you deserve.
If you are prone to accepting false dichotomies, then yes, that was the alternative. Otherwise the alternativeS were/are not voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and vote for someone you actually agree with. Is this not feasible because of our 2 party degenerate FPP voting system? Then maybe an alternative is working towards improving our voting system. These aren't easy alternatives, but usually the good alternatives are not easy. Democracy was not an easy alternative. Abolishing slavery was not an easy alternative. At one point in history people said these things were never going to happen. These goals may not even be attainable in my lifetime, but working towards them seems a much more worthy goal than picking sides in the internal squabbling of the republicrat party.
Our company uses MS office. I am a good programmer and a fairly competent computer user. I absolutely hate MS office. The other day I could not delete an embedded picture without deleting the one right below it, even though they were independently selectable. How irritating.
I am not saying libre office is better. I am saying it can't be much worse.
I have read consciousness explained. I have even talked with Professor Dennett on multiple occasions. There are different levels to knowing how something works. Knowing *that* the brain is a bunch of biomechanical robots that communicate without knowing how *that* causes consciousness does not mean you don't know *anything*. In fact knowing such a thing implies that it is theoretically possible to build an AI. This is opposed to an alternate hypothesis that the brain works through a supernatural soul bestowed by God that is not reproducible by the natural universe.
I would also like to point out that human beings make natural intelligences without knowing how they work all the time (through procreation). We know the process for making a thing (a zygote) that knows how to make itself as long as food and protection are supplied. I suspect creating an AI will follow a similar model. We make a thing that has the tools to have it's own experiences, just like an embryonic brain, provide it with a rich environment (of information), and let it create itself.
One day we may figure out how to micromanage the top down creation of an AI, but I think we will make one before that day comes. Evolution may be slower compared to intelligent design, except when you don't have the intelligence to start with.
Yes you can install malware on linux if you try hard enough. The kernel will undoubtedly require you to provide the root password a few times, but once you do that, you can permanently bypass all security measures, including modifying the kernel. There is fundamentally no difference between windows and linux in this regard. It used to be common for the default windows login to be root (administrator), bypassing even the requirement to provide a root password before making dangerous changes, but that changed with vista to a more "linuxy" model.
The state in one position of the brain cannot instantaneously affect the state at a different position in the brain, due to relativity. The speed limit for communications between computers, transistors, neurons, chemical levels, etc is the speed of light. While this may be a common limit, neural impulses in fact travel about 3 million times slower than the speed of electrical signals through a wire. Artificial computers may not be computationally faster for computing the things a human brain computes, but they do have an advantage in regards to latency of communications, making it possible to separate individual components at distances much greater than the distances between neurons for the same functionality. Simultaneity does not exist.
You can install linux applications from executables just like in windows. There is nothing that prevents you from copying all sorts of files wherever you want to. In fact most applications provide packages for popular distributions *and* source code for you to do whatever you want with. You have more choices than windows. You have the option of allowing the package manager to organize things for you, or have ultimate control (more control than even windows allows).
Almost everything you need comes in the default repositories for the more popular linux distributions. Also adding a repository is not any harder than going to a website to download an exe. Both involve remembering or googling a URL. You can install parts of packages in linux. apt-get install libreoffice-calc. It will even figure out all the dependencies for you. You don't have to figure out that you also need java to get it to work. The fact that people are used to installing applications on windows, does not mean it is universally easier. In fact windows is moving towards package management systems. Like android, apple, and amazon, they are going to have a store that installs things for you.
"free as in libre" is not meant to directly benefit the average joe. Just like how democracy doesn't directly benefit the average joe who is too lazy to vote. The average joe, however indirectly benefits from open source, just like he benefits from democracy. He benefits from people who care contributing their time and energy to continue the march of progress. The average joe benefits from cheap routers, android phones, and cable boxes running linux. He doesn;t care that one major reason these devices are so cheap is that the bulk of the software to run them pre-dated the device and is free for the manufacturers to use and modify.
Whether average joe wants to use an open source OS for his desktop are not relevant. Open source software makes it possible for many people to make new and great things which average joe does care about. Imagine a world where using calculus required paying royalties to the family of Isaac Newton. People who hate doing math wouldn't care because they wouldn't be doing calculus anyway, but how many applications that indirectly benefit average joe require calculus to function? A world where calculus is open source is a better world than one where it is proprietary. I am not saying everything should be open source. I am just saying that we should appreciate that some people have given us their creations for free and in a way that allows them to keep on giving through improvement and refinement.
You can;t do *everything* in parallel, but you can do *lots* of things in parallel. The human brain does lot's of things in parallel. Even if individual experiences are required to be sequential so they can influence subsequent experiences, you can still parallelize the gaining of a single experience. If gaining 1 experience requires a trillion operations, then you can shorten the time required to gain this experience by parallelizing it. If you reduce the time required to gain a single experience by a factor of a thousand, then you can gain experiences a thousand times faster. There does come a point where you can't parallelize things anymore, but I don't think we are anywhere near that point. The brain is far more parallel than any computers we currently have. Making them even more parallel is a step in the right direction (because it's easier to get more computational power this way than by making individual computers faster).
How do you get a human brain to experience things? It's just a bunch of biomechanical robots (i.e. neurons).
If you treat the human brain as 1 computer (or even a trillion parallel computers), then having a thousand times as many of hem, should in theory, make computing the same things (i.e. life experiences) go a thousand times faster.
Linux's 2 big issues are driver problems (i.e. lack of stable drivers with full feature support) and lack of games designed for it.
Not every desktop environment that runs on linux works well. Some (maybe even most) are buggy. They are not all buggy and you are not forced to use the buggy ones. I see more options (even if some are bad) as a good thing. Windows is fairly stable now, but it wasn't a few years ago and you didn't have the option of using alternate desktop environments in windows (although I suppose you do now with windows 8 and metro :))
Clunky package management system? The package management systems in linux are far superior to windows. In windows you just download your own executable and install it yourself. This is like complaining that going to the store in a car is "clunky" than just walking there. Yeah there is more involved in having a functional car (gas, maintenance, traffic laws, etc), but it is a more powerful mode of transport.
The point of linux is not mean to be "free as in beer". I would agree that a free as in beer OS is not worth the aggravation. A pirated copy of windows is a similar "free as in beer" OS that is not worth the aggravation. A "free as in speech" OS is a far more worthy goal. It means that it can't be owned or controlled by anyone else. It means that you always have the choice to decide what the software on your computer does. A "free as in speech" OS is extremely powerful in the sense that you are not prevented from modifying it (or using the modifications of others) in any way you choose.
The difference between a free as in beer OS and a free as in speech OS is the difference between a benevolent (for now) dictator and autonomy
If you control the test scores based on test score then all the scores worldwide are the same. It isn't fair to compare students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, because *of course* the students from wealthy families will have all the advantages and score higher. In fact your test scores is a pretty good indicator of how wealthy you are. So what I propose is grouping people by their test scores and only comparing those groups. We group people who scored 100% in the same group, 99% in another group, etc, all the way down to 0%. If you do this, it turns out that every country has equally smart "smart kids" and equally smart "dumb kids". We are all equal. The only difference is how many kids in each group each country has. But I don't see how that's important. /s
Excessive anything is bad. It's good to use templates whenever you find yourself copying and pasting a bunch of code over and over again, and doing find replace for the types. When you find yourself putting in a bunch of special cases for different types in your "generic" code, then maybe it's time to take the templates out.
Maybe the money from the tax should go towards buying guns for good guys so they can stop the bad guys?
We shouldn't even be trying to stop Sandy Hook type mass shootings specifically anyway. Despite the media coverage, mass shootings are extremely rare. 100 times as many people are killed in non-mass shootings. If we could lower by 2% the number of normal shootings, we will have saved twice as many people as if we eliminated all mass shootings entirely.
Whatever legislation we come up with should be attempting to do the most amount of good, rather than being an overreaction to a tragic but rare occurrence. While making laws that specifically address the tragedy most fresh in our mind may make us feel better, it is a poor substitute for laws that actually make society better in general.
I think there is a presumption that people who commit at least one crime are more likely to commit more in the future. If someone is going to murder 10 people unchecked, but you arrest them after they've committed the first, you've prevented 9 murders. Also like fche noted, the deterrent effect will stop some crimes as well. How many depends on the quality of enforcement.
If he doesn't donate it soon, Harrison Ford will just do it for him.
OOPS I meant to say C++ tempates, not STL. I actually use QT for pointers and data structures, etc, when I can.
While the magic cards are written in something like natural language, they seem almost like source code that has been translated into natural language by hand. It would probably be less work to translate the magic cards back into source code rather than writing a program to do it. Also there are many ambiguous cards that have had their text meanings clarified by some magic rules authority, this would be hard for an automated text->meaning analyzer to deal with properly. Also, I believe the actual rules for magic (e.g. rules related to timing) have gradually changed over the years, so the way the cards worked when hey were printed and the way they would work now might be slightly different.
This is a perfect example of why code beauty is subjective. On the one hand the author loves saving vertical space by not putting parentheses on their own lines, then he hates it when you remove them entirely, even though it saves even more space. He finds conditionals without parentheses to be less readable. I find non-horizontally aligned parentheses less readable, and have no problem following conditionals without them.
I think where it becomes less arbitrary (but still subjective) is in the actual design. I don't see the point of not using STL. Being able to write 1 hash (or use someone else's) without needing multiple copies in the code simply to deal with different types seems great to me. Yeah it's a little harder to read, but you only need to read one of them, and you know all the hashes are the same unless there are methods overloaded for different types. Checking that each part of 2 classes that look identical except for types, are actually identical is tedious.
Sometimes there is a tradeoff between code readability and design. I tend to favor design over readability. Inheritance makes code less readable, but if done correctly, it makes the design much better by reducing redundant code. Redundant code may be perfectly readable, but it makes it much harder to "read" the design of the application.