Yeah, I don't know what it is with the Tesla hating. But that said, *this* particular bit of hype does deserve to be condemned.
(1) The driver in the video is a moron. You never drive your car into a situation you aren't sure you can drive it out of -- particularly one involving water. People get stranded that way (and often killed, if water is involved).
(2) Because you saw some guy do it doesn't mean your car will do it. If it's not part of the design specifications of the car, the car can't be relied upon to do it. If people routinely drive through deep water with near-perfect success, then sure. But because it happened once doesn't mean you should be the second person to try it.
(3) Tesla owners should not be encouraged by the company to think their cars can act as boats unless the company plans to stand behind that.
I am not in support of this program, as it has shown to be cost negative in that we are spending more than we are saving, but there is one key difference here. Money that you itemize as deductions is NOT a gift from the government.
Well, let's examine that thought for a moment in concrete detail, rather than in abstract. Let's take the mortgage interest deduction. In principle it helps middle-class people and above, but in practice if you make around the median household income and own a house it's worth about $500 to you on average -- not chicken feed, but less than 1/10 the amount people who make $250K and above get to deduct on average.
Is there any reason for the government owes it to people to reduce their taxes because they own and use something? Let's imagine the mortgage interest deduction didn't exist. Let's say instead the government decided to cut you a check for $5500 for owning a million-dollar home. Wouldn't that be a gift? Think like an accountant for a moment. An accountant keeps substance (which is what really counts) and form (which is what triggers various tax rules) strictly separate, in order to maximize for you what really matters -- the substance. Substantially there is no difference between having $5500 of tax forgiven, and having the government hand you a $5500 check; or rather the tax deduction is actually better because you'd have to pay tax on the $5500 next year.
But, you say, home ownership has public utility. People are being encouraged to live in a way that makes them better citizens, which benefits everyone.
Exactly. Which brings me to your second point:
Money received in these programs is purely a gift from the government.
This is true, but no more true than the mortgage interest deduction is a gift from the government. People who can't or don't choose to burden themselves with a home subsidize that deduction. But the programs exist for their social utility. They exist for the same reason: to encourage socially benign behavior -- or at least discourage malign behavior.
People who don't have substantial savings and can't make a living by legal means -- even in the short term -- have no choice but to turn to illegal means. For example in Victorian London there was approximately one prostitute for every twelve men, despite the fact that prostitution was (a) illegal and (b) extremely hazardous. If that doesn't sound to bad to you, consider that men in similar extremes turned to robbery and housebreaking. And children... Oliver Twist wasn't a fantasy, there actually were thieves dens in which children were trained to pick pockets and shoplift. Mugging was rife, and even if you weren't mugged you'd be besieged by peddlars, panhandlers and con artists.
So social welfare may be a "gift" to the poor, but it's not pure charity. There is enlightened self-interest as well. That was the whole motivation for Roosevelt's New Deal -- that and staving off the advance of Communism.
The "scientists" are looking at ~120 years of data and make predictions reaching thousands of years into the future. Something tells me those "scientists" are really snake oil salesman looking for grants who have as much credibility as those "scientists" doumenting water canals on mars in the 19th century.
And how do you know there aren't canals on Mars? Have you actually been there? Or do you base your implication that there are no Martian canals purely based on some kind of hearsay?
Hearsay from whom?
If only there were people whose job it was to gather evidence for or against ideas like Martian canals, and then argue each side until one becomes the clear winner.
Which gets to what I hate about so much software these days: you end up fighting it because it has its own agenda. Software is seen by marketers not as tools for users to accomplish their own ends, but as a tool for the company to shape consumer behavior.
When I started in this industry it was at a time when most people had never seen a computer, other than possibly Pong at the pinball parlor. We had a vision of software liberating people from drudgery -- and by in large that vision has succeeded beyond anything we expected was possible. But what we never expected was that software would create new and unprecedented forms of drudgery.
Each machine has its own challenges. The watch has to work consistently for years running off of a tiny amount of energy. That's why watchmakers developed the jewel bearing -- to make a bearing that is tight-fitting, long-wearing, and yet low-friction..
The Mechanism has an enormous number of gears and thus friction to overcome -- especially as the bearings are crude and many gear faces rub against adjacent faces or supporting spacers. These facts may be related: if the bearings were made tight enough to support the gears in place without additional support, the friction might be even worse. So the multiplying effect of additional gears in the train is much, much higher than it would be using modern watchmaking technology. Clearly this mechanism wasn't designed and built by spacefaring aliens; it is a machine of its place time: a very sophisticated but technologically primitive device.
As for a bike, the challenge is to transmit lots of power; the tolerances are quite loose with a chain drive. There have been shaft drive bikes, but frictional losses are actually greater, as is the challenge of building the frame stiff enough to hold the bevel gears in place; a degree of flex that is meaningless in a chain drive is a problem for an all-gear setup. Still in a shaft driven bike there are only three gears (not counting any internal gearing the hub has). So getting the rear wheel to turn would be possible even if frictional losses were massive.
You know, after Newtown, our collective response amounted to this: it was horrible, but we can live with it.
And as horrible as that sounds, you can make a case it for it. Because was while these mass shootings are happening on an increasingly grand scale, overall your chance of perishing in a violent crime -- even a "gun-related" crime -- has been going down.
I actually think that's an argument worth serious consideration. It's not entirely convincing, in that you can't necessarily yoke every individual death to the overall death rate. You can't argue that murder is OK because the overall murder rate is going down. You can't argue that a death wasn't preventable because the death rate is going down. But you can make a reasonable argument that there isn't an overall gun crisis just because very bad incidents do happen involving guns.
The thing is many people keen on the "let's not get hasty about guns" position use the very logic they despise the anti-gun people for against Muslims. Because restrictions on guns affect them.
Well, as to background checks, after you've researched all the ways you can separate potentially dangerous people from the general population, you're left with this question: is it more important to me to avoid false positives (where someone is mistakenly identified a dangerous), or false negatives (where a potentially dangerous person isn't flagged as dangerous). That's because background checks are a specific instances of a general class of tasks we're very imperfect at: predicting future human behavior.
A background check system that has almost no false positives OR false negatives is beyond the current abilities of science to provide. So you have to accept a lot of one, or the other, or both. However a high false negative rate doesn't mean background checks aren't worth doing, because without background checks the false negative rate is 100%. It's really a question of cost/benefit. If you could save a significant number of lives without costing very much, it'd be worth doing even if you can't save all or even most of them. But if the cost his high you have to compare it to other alternatives for saving lives.
This statement is about a perp who called 911 and proclaimed himself an agent of ISIS
I am the plenipotentiary agent of the Galactic Autarky; and in the name of his Mightiness, Supreme Mugwump Artaxerxes MMCXII, I command you to stick your head in a bucket of water. In fact, I command you ALL to stick your heads in buckets of water, on pain of immediate planetary incineration.
Know that I must be a plenipotentiary agent of the GA, because people don't just make shit up.
This actually makes my point. This is the obvious kind of approach that would occur to any intelligent layman. And it would work for making short two or three wheel gear trains from very large gears where relative precision is easy to attain.
But the Mechanism is both compact and incredibly elaborate -- far, far more elaborate than a clockwork. I dabble in watch repair so I would know; a basic clock train has five gears in the going train (which transfers power from the spring) and two in the motion work (which drive the hands) for a total of 7, and everything has to be perfect or the watch doesn't run. While the Mechanism is much larger than a watch -- about the size of a mantle clock -- its gear train had at least 30 individual gears. Backlash and other imperfections from crude manufacture, when multiplied over so many gears, would certainly translate into a frozen gear train. Even individual imperfections that were invisible to the naked eye would ruin the operation.
So they must have had a much more sophisticated gear-machining method than chiseling out bronze blanks by hand. They might have filed teeth for gears of the required precision using some kind of index wheel arrangement; that would have occurred to the Greeks of all people. But the path to success with such methods is paved with many, many failures.
Anyone capable of constructing something like this would have to have achieved a very high practical level of mastery at gear making before they even attempted something so difficult. Even if they took up gear making with this device in mind, they'd have made many, many proof-of-concept models with much less elaborate gear trains, because the failures they encountered at smaller scales would have guided them to ultimate success that much faster. So it's pretty clear this could not possibly have been the first such device.
Of course they can. That's how 17th century European clockmakers did it. But the very first mechanical clocks didn't have fine brass gears. It took hundreds of years of clock making to get to that point.
Nothing so advanced could have been the "first" thing of its kind. Think about it. If I told you to make a bronze wheel 140mm in diameter with 233 perfectly spaced teeth, would you know how to do it? With tools that were available in 200 BC Greece?
No there is must have been an at least decades-old tradition of instrument-making leading up to the design and execution of the Antikythera Mechanism, stuff like armillary spheres and quadrants and such. At some point they must have made simpler instruments that maybe could use wheels coupled by friction, and from there the very notion of toothed gears (which we take for granted) could be invented.
Well, the streets may not belong to the homeowners, but the whole system is a tradeoff between competing and somewhat different mutually exclusive uses of streets: moving non-local traffic through an area vs. living on.
So what planners and engineers do is to try to segregate uses to achieve a reasonable tradoff. This application doesn't necessarily make a better trade-off; it simply exploits an assumption made by traffic planners: that circuitous routes through local street networks are impractical for through-traffic drivers to plot. This makes things better for the app users with no costs to them, but this is not necessarily a better overall tradeoff because that discounts the other system users. Fighting the app by posting false data is essentially the same thing: taking unilateral steps to force de facto changes in the tradeoff.
It would be better for the community which regulates the street network to make a policy decision about how it wants to tradeoff those applications, and then use traffic engineering to enforce that policy. This could be as simple as making some streets one way; setting lower speed limits; and using traffic-limiting measures like alternating side head-in parking; or even outright banning non-local traffic on some streets.
Yes, it's within the rights of any driver to use any street in any manner which isn't forbidden by law; but it's within the rights of municipalities to discourage that or even ban it.
You're not going to get a point and click interface that performs better than voice recognition at its best. However it's trivial to make one that performs more consistently than voice recognition does, and consistency is a big thing. And then of course there's the worst case, where you tell your phone to "Navigate to the nearest gas station," and instead it dials a random person from your contacts.
Alternatively, you could have the trial judge refer what he believes are abusive suits referred to a panel of judges. If the plaintiff is found b the panel to have brought a clearly frivolous suit, he pays the defendant's legal costs, and the attorneys who brought the suit waive their fees and are suspended from practicing law for a couple of months.
You don't want to simply penalize people who bring suits that have a reasonable chance of success, because that creates a system where people with deep pockets can still threaten to sue with impunity, simply because they can afford the downsides of the case coming to trial; poor people on the other hand wouldn't be able to afford to sue unless they were virtually certain of winning. Instead focus where the bulk of the responsibility lies: with lawyers who have the understanding of the system to know what they're doing is wrong.
It's the low hanging fruit strategy. Don't try to get a perfect solution to the problem, because the attempt will necessarily sweep in a lot of borderline situations. Just make committing the most egregious offenses unattractive enough that lawyers who want to make a living stay far away from it.
Oh, it wasn't self-evidently stupid, but that would be wishing for too much. In fact it's the worst kind of stupid: the kind that looks really clever, and may even have considerable utility within a few narrow scopes of application. It was more like Satan's diabolically inspired kind of stupidity.
Microsoft got where it is by selling, not to user, but to people who buy stuff that other people have to use.
The only successful (to some measure) consumer product the've ever made is the XBox, and that's largely a matter of developing relationships with game studios. No user buys a Microsoft console because of the cool things Microsoft put on it; those are tolerated rather than embraced. People buy XBoxes to run games; they've largely been lukewarm at best to Microsoft's attempt to take charge of their entertainment consumption.
... said the lead programmer after glancing through the megabytes of 20 year-old legacy code, and then realizing every single variable had been named with Hungarian Notation.
Of course. But it also means being able to employ more memory.
The math works like this, roughly: going to 64 bits can increase the memory needed by a factor of up to 2^1. At the same time it expands your memory space by 2^32. So that project that the IDE was thrashing on because the projected needed 5 GB of RAM may need 10 GB o RAM after the IDE is migrated to 64 bit. But that's fine because a basic developer's machine has 16GB of RAM these days. The problem was that you couldn't make use of it.
I'm old enough to have gone through this three times: once going from eight to sixteen bit; next from sixteen to thirty two and then finally thirty-two to sixty-four. I think it's pretty safe to say that I won't ever have to go through another power-of-two word size shift though:) .
Sure. If the information wasn't in the public domain it'd be much, much harder. Having that information is how a country with a GDP of only fifteen billion dollars managed to put a satellite in orbit. But that still doesn't make it easy. Actual experience tells you how to build a design that is sound in principle so that the actual rocket doesn't blow up -- which is very common in rocket experimentation.
Running a rocket design program in an economy as poor as North Korea's is even more challenging. It's also unconscionable.
Just so -- quality matters. "Infrastructure" that makes it more dangerous and inconvenient to cycle is worse than useless. I wonder to what degree the Dunning-Kruger effect plays a role in people proposing bad cycling infrastructure. Everyone who learned to ride a bike as a kid probably thinks he's a qualified traffic engineer where bike are concerned.
Sometimes when planners talk about "bike paths" they're really talking about mixed use, pedestrian-dominated recreational infrastructure that can secondarily be used for light traffic by occasional cyclists who freewheel along at 5-7 mph. They've got no place to go, so they can take their time weaving in between the selfie-takers, double-wide strollers and kids chalking pictures on the pavement. And the thing is, I'm not against those kinds of mixed-use linear parks. I'm just against counting them as transportation infrastructure.
I've seen mixed pedestrian-cyclist trails work for bike travel, but it seems to depend on (a) having a relatively small number of pedestrians or (b) having a critical mass of cyclists so that pedestrians naturally organize themselves around the fact that there's heavy bike traffic. You can see the critical mass effect on the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge is of course nearly always has heavy pedestrian traffic, but the continual stream of cyclists makes it manageable as a bike route (despite the obvious tourists taking pictures).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't know what it is with the Tesla hating. But that said, *this* particular bit of hype does deserve to be condemned.
(1) The driver in the video is a moron. You never drive your car into a situation you aren't sure you can drive it out of -- particularly one involving water. People get stranded that way (and often killed, if water is involved).
(2) Because you saw some guy do it doesn't mean your car will do it. If it's not part of the design specifications of the car, the car can't be relied upon to do it. If people routinely drive through deep water with near-perfect success, then sure. But because it happened once doesn't mean you should be the second person to try it.
(3) Tesla owners should not be encouraged by the company to think their cars can act as boats unless the company plans to stand behind that.
I am not in support of this program, as it has shown to be cost negative in that we are spending more than we are saving, but there is one key difference here. Money that you itemize as deductions is NOT a gift from the government.
Well, let's examine that thought for a moment in concrete detail, rather than in abstract. Let's take the mortgage interest deduction. In principle it helps middle-class people and above, but in practice if you make around the median household income and own a house it's worth about $500 to you on average -- not chicken feed, but less than 1/10 the amount people who make $250K and above get to deduct on average.
Is there any reason for the government owes it to people to reduce their taxes because they own and use something? Let's imagine the mortgage interest deduction didn't exist. Let's say instead the government decided to cut you a check for $5500 for owning a million-dollar home. Wouldn't that be a gift? Think like an accountant for a moment. An accountant keeps substance (which is what really counts) and form (which is what triggers various tax rules) strictly separate, in order to maximize for you what really matters -- the substance. Substantially there is no difference between having $5500 of tax forgiven, and having the government hand you a $5500 check; or rather the tax deduction is actually better because you'd have to pay tax on the $5500 next year.
But, you say, home ownership has public utility. People are being encouraged to live in a way that makes them better citizens, which benefits everyone.
Exactly. Which brings me to your second point:
Money received in these programs is purely a gift from the government.
This is true, but no more true than the mortgage interest deduction is a gift from the government. People who can't or don't choose to burden themselves with a home subsidize that deduction. But the programs exist for their social utility. They exist for the same reason: to encourage socially benign behavior -- or at least discourage malign behavior.
People who don't have substantial savings and can't make a living by legal means -- even in the short term -- have no choice but to turn to illegal means. For example in Victorian London there was approximately one prostitute for every twelve men, despite the fact that prostitution was (a) illegal and (b) extremely hazardous. If that doesn't sound to bad to you, consider that men in similar extremes turned to robbery and housebreaking. And children... Oliver Twist wasn't a fantasy, there actually were thieves dens in which children were trained to pick pockets and shoplift. Mugging was rife, and even if you weren't mugged you'd be besieged by peddlars, panhandlers and con artists.
So social welfare may be a "gift" to the poor, but it's not pure charity. There is enlightened self-interest as well. That was the whole motivation for Roosevelt's New Deal -- that and staving off the advance of Communism.
"... for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."
The "scientists" are looking at ~120 years of data and make predictions reaching thousands of years into the future. Something tells me those "scientists" are really snake oil salesman looking for grants who have as much credibility as those "scientists" doumenting water canals on mars in the 19th century.
And how do you know there aren't canals on Mars? Have you actually been there? Or do you base your implication that there are no Martian canals purely based on some kind of hearsay?
Hearsay from whom?
If only there were people whose job it was to gather evidence for or against ideas like Martian canals, and then argue each side until one becomes the clear winner.
Laugh at them.
Which gets to what I hate about so much software these days: you end up fighting it because it has its own agenda. Software is seen by marketers not as tools for users to accomplish their own ends, but as a tool for the company to shape consumer behavior.
When I started in this industry it was at a time when most people had never seen a computer, other than possibly Pong at the pinball parlor. We had a vision of software liberating people from drudgery -- and by in large that vision has succeeded beyond anything we expected was possible. But what we never expected was that software would create new and unprecedented forms of drudgery.
Each machine has its own challenges. The watch has to work consistently for years running off of a tiny amount of energy. That's why watchmakers developed the jewel bearing -- to make a bearing that is tight-fitting, long-wearing, and yet low-friction..
The Mechanism has an enormous number of gears and thus friction to overcome -- especially as the bearings are crude and many gear faces rub against adjacent faces or supporting spacers. These facts may be related: if the bearings were made tight enough to support the gears in place without additional support, the friction might be even worse. So the multiplying effect of additional gears in the train is much, much higher than it would be using modern watchmaking technology. Clearly this mechanism wasn't designed and built by spacefaring aliens; it is a machine of its place time: a very sophisticated but technologically primitive device.
As for a bike, the challenge is to transmit lots of power; the tolerances are quite loose with a chain drive. There have been shaft drive bikes, but frictional losses are actually greater, as is the challenge of building the frame stiff enough to hold the bevel gears in place; a degree of flex that is meaningless in a chain drive is a problem for an all-gear setup. Still in a shaft driven bike there are only three gears (not counting any internal gearing the hub has). So getting the rear wheel to turn would be possible even if frictional losses were massive.
You know, after Newtown, our collective response amounted to this: it was horrible, but we can live with it.
And as horrible as that sounds, you can make a case it for it. Because was while these mass shootings are happening on an increasingly grand scale, overall your chance of perishing in a violent crime -- even a "gun-related" crime -- has been going down.
I actually think that's an argument worth serious consideration. It's not entirely convincing, in that you can't necessarily yoke every individual death to the overall death rate. You can't argue that murder is OK because the overall murder rate is going down. You can't argue that a death wasn't preventable because the death rate is going down. But you can make a reasonable argument that there isn't an overall gun crisis just because very bad incidents do happen involving guns.
The thing is many people keen on the "let's not get hasty about guns" position use the very logic they despise the anti-gun people for against Muslims. Because restrictions on guns affect them.
Well, as to background checks, after you've researched all the ways you can separate potentially dangerous people from the general population, you're left with this question: is it more important to me to avoid false positives (where someone is mistakenly identified a dangerous), or false negatives (where a potentially dangerous person isn't flagged as dangerous). That's because background checks are a specific instances of a general class of tasks we're very imperfect at: predicting future human behavior.
A background check system that has almost no false positives OR false negatives is beyond the current abilities of science to provide. So you have to accept a lot of one, or the other, or both. However a high false negative rate doesn't mean background checks aren't worth doing, because without background checks the false negative rate is 100%. It's really a question of cost/benefit. If you could save a significant number of lives without costing very much, it'd be worth doing even if you can't save all or even most of them. But if the cost his high you have to compare it to other alternatives for saving lives.
This statement is about a perp who called 911 and proclaimed himself an agent of ISIS
I am the plenipotentiary agent of the Galactic Autarky; and in the name of his Mightiness, Supreme Mugwump Artaxerxes MMCXII, I command you to stick your head in a bucket of water. In fact, I command you ALL to stick your heads in buckets of water, on pain of immediate planetary incineration.
Know that I must be a plenipotentiary agent of the GA, because people don't just make shit up.
Not according to the people who actually knew him. But I guess you know better.
This actually makes my point. This is the obvious kind of approach that would occur to any intelligent layman. And it would work for making short two or three wheel gear trains from very large gears where relative precision is easy to attain.
But the Mechanism is both compact and incredibly elaborate -- far, far more elaborate than a clockwork. I dabble in watch repair so I would know; a basic clock train has five gears in the going train (which transfers power from the spring) and two in the motion work (which drive the hands) for a total of 7, and everything has to be perfect or the watch doesn't run. While the Mechanism is much larger than a watch -- about the size of a mantle clock -- its gear train had at least 30 individual gears. Backlash and other imperfections from crude manufacture, when multiplied over so many gears, would certainly translate into a frozen gear train. Even individual imperfections that were invisible to the naked eye would ruin the operation.
So they must have had a much more sophisticated gear-machining method than chiseling out bronze blanks by hand. They might have filed teeth for gears of the required precision using some kind of index wheel arrangement; that would have occurred to the Greeks of all people. But the path to success with such methods is paved with many, many failures.
Anyone capable of constructing something like this would have to have achieved a very high practical level of mastery at gear making before they even attempted something so difficult. Even if they took up gear making with this device in mind, they'd have made many, many proof-of-concept models with much less elaborate gear trains, because the failures they encountered at smaller scales would have guided them to ultimate success that much faster. So it's pretty clear this could not possibly have been the first such device.
Of course they can. That's how 17th century European clockmakers did it. But the very first mechanical clocks didn't have fine brass gears. It took hundreds of years of clock making to get to that point.
Nothing so advanced could have been the "first" thing of its kind. Think about it. If I told you to make a bronze wheel 140mm in diameter with 233 perfectly spaced teeth, would you know how to do it? With tools that were available in 200 BC Greece?
No there is must have been an at least decades-old tradition of instrument-making leading up to the design and execution of the Antikythera Mechanism, stuff like armillary spheres and quadrants and such. At some point they must have made simpler instruments that maybe could use wheels coupled by friction, and from there the very notion of toothed gears (which we take for granted) could be invented.
This is social media we're talking about. Stuff just got inadvertently shared more widely than anticipated.
Forget good. This thing has a long, long way to go before it's even bad.
Well, the streets may not belong to the homeowners, but the whole system is a tradeoff between competing and somewhat different mutually exclusive uses of streets: moving non-local traffic through an area vs. living on.
So what planners and engineers do is to try to segregate uses to achieve a reasonable tradoff. This application doesn't necessarily make a better trade-off; it simply exploits an assumption made by traffic planners: that circuitous routes through local street networks are impractical for through-traffic drivers to plot. This makes things better for the app users with no costs to them, but this is not necessarily a better overall tradeoff because that discounts the other system users. Fighting the app by posting false data is essentially the same thing: taking unilateral steps to force de facto changes in the tradeoff.
It would be better for the community which regulates the street network to make a policy decision about how it wants to tradeoff those applications, and then use traffic engineering to enforce that policy. This could be as simple as making some streets one way; setting lower speed limits; and using traffic-limiting measures like alternating side head-in parking; or even outright banning non-local traffic on some streets.
Yes, it's within the rights of any driver to use any street in any manner which isn't forbidden by law; but it's within the rights of municipalities to discourage that or even ban it.
You're not going to get a point and click interface that performs better than voice recognition at its best. However it's trivial to make one that performs more consistently than voice recognition does, and consistency is a big thing. And then of course there's the worst case, where you tell your phone to "Navigate to the nearest gas station," and instead it dials a random person from your contacts.
Alternatively, you could have the trial judge refer what he believes are abusive suits referred to a panel of judges. If the plaintiff is found b the panel to have brought a clearly frivolous suit, he pays the defendant's legal costs, and the attorneys who brought the suit waive their fees and are suspended from practicing law for a couple of months.
You don't want to simply penalize people who bring suits that have a reasonable chance of success, because that creates a system where people with deep pockets can still threaten to sue with impunity, simply because they can afford the downsides of the case coming to trial; poor people on the other hand wouldn't be able to afford to sue unless they were virtually certain of winning. Instead focus where the bulk of the responsibility lies: with lawyers who have the understanding of the system to know what they're doing is wrong.
It's the low hanging fruit strategy. Don't try to get a perfect solution to the problem, because the attempt will necessarily sweep in a lot of borderline situations. Just make committing the most egregious offenses unattractive enough that lawyers who want to make a living stay far away from it.
Oh, it wasn't self-evidently stupid, but that would be wishing for too much. In fact it's the worst kind of stupid: the kind that looks really clever, and may even have considerable utility within a few narrow scopes of application. It was more like Satan's diabolically inspired kind of stupidity.
Microsoft got where it is by selling, not to user, but to people who buy stuff that other people have to use.
The only successful (to some measure) consumer product the've ever made is the XBox, and that's largely a matter of developing relationships with game studios. No user buys a Microsoft console because of the cool things Microsoft put on it; those are tolerated rather than embraced. People buy XBoxes to run games; they've largely been lukewarm at best to Microsoft's attempt to take charge of their entertainment consumption.
32 bits ought to be enough for anyone.
... said the lead programmer after glancing through the megabytes of 20 year-old legacy code, and then realizing every single variable had been named with Hungarian Notation.
Sure that would mean using more memory?
Of course. But it also means being able to employ more memory.
The math works like this, roughly: going to 64 bits can increase the memory needed by a factor of up to 2^1. At the same time it expands your memory space by 2^32. So that project that the IDE was thrashing on because the projected needed 5 GB of RAM may need 10 GB o RAM after the IDE is migrated to 64 bit. But that's fine because a basic developer's machine has 16GB of RAM these days. The problem was that you couldn't make use of it.
I'm old enough to have gone through this three times: once going from eight to sixteen bit; next from sixteen to thirty two and then finally thirty-two to sixty-four. I think it's pretty safe to say that I won't ever have to go through another power-of-two word size shift though:) .
Sure. If the information wasn't in the public domain it'd be much, much harder. Having that information is how a country with a GDP of only fifteen billion dollars managed to put a satellite in orbit. But that still doesn't make it easy. Actual experience tells you how to build a design that is sound in principle so that the actual rocket doesn't blow up -- which is very common in rocket experimentation.
Running a rocket design program in an economy as poor as North Korea's is even more challenging. It's also unconscionable.
Just so -- quality matters. "Infrastructure" that makes it more dangerous and inconvenient to cycle is worse than useless. I wonder to what degree the Dunning-Kruger effect plays a role in people proposing bad cycling infrastructure. Everyone who learned to ride a bike as a kid probably thinks he's a qualified traffic engineer where bike are concerned.
Sometimes when planners talk about "bike paths" they're really talking about mixed use, pedestrian-dominated recreational infrastructure that can secondarily be used for light traffic by occasional cyclists who freewheel along at 5-7 mph. They've got no place to go, so they can take their time weaving in between the selfie-takers, double-wide strollers and kids chalking pictures on the pavement. And the thing is, I'm not against those kinds of mixed-use linear parks. I'm just against counting them as transportation infrastructure.
I've seen mixed pedestrian-cyclist trails work for bike travel, but it seems to depend on (a) having a relatively small number of pedestrians or (b) having a critical mass of cyclists so that pedestrians naturally organize themselves around the fact that there's heavy bike traffic. You can see the critical mass effect on the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge is of course nearly always has heavy pedestrian traffic, but the continual stream of cyclists makes it manageable as a bike route (despite the obvious tourists taking pictures).