The evil twin theme is very common in comic books, whether the twin is in a parallel universe, or is a pretender, or just somebody who is awfully like the hero. The quest for more complexity and realism in recent stories means there is no better candidate for evil twin than the hero himself. It's an even match, no kryptonite needed.
It's a very plausible and useful theme. What is a supervillain, but a superhero with a plan to drag the world, against its will if need be, into a better future? He starts by acting as if his undeniable superiority gives him the right to make decisions for others. In the end he finds himself using lesser people as expendable means to his ends. What I've argued is that the classic comic book hero is really not all that heroic. The villains are arguably more heroic, but only from the perspective of their severe moral short sightedness.
If you want to take a superhero on a journey from being a muscle-bound enforcer of the status quo to being real hero, the straightest path cuts right across supervillain territory.
Is Tony Stark really any different from Dr. Doom? They're both vain, armor wearing geniuses with a serious authoritarian streak. As bona-fide geniuses they have more reason than most to believe themselves qualified to decide what is in the best interest of others. However, Dr. Doom will never be a hero, because there is no end to his self-delusion of omniscience; there are no limits to what he will destroy today to build a better tomorrow.
Sacrifice is essential to heroism. A hero has to give something up for the greater good. In the DC universe, Batman is a kind of neurotic fixation of Bruce Wayne; Wayne fights crime, but in a way that precludes him having normally satisfying relationships with other people.
Clearly, the easiest way to make Tony Stark into a hero is to give him something he has to give up; you can't take away his genius, which makes taking away his money futile. So you have to give him something, namely the power and authority he not-so-secretly craves. The best way to show that Tony Stark is different from Dr. Doom in an essential way is for him to become Dr. Doom. Then turn back. And, since this is Marvel, he'll return from the trip with enough personal demons to flummox Dr. Strange.
It's well worth examining here what "begs the question" means in a technical sense -- and not as a usage Nazi. I understand that most people mean "leads to the question" when they say "beg the question."
"Begging the question" is to ask a question which only makes sense to ask after certain other questions have been answered. The classic example is, "have you stopped beating your wife?" You cannot expect a meaningful answer to that question unless you have established that the person being asked has, at some time in the past, beat his wife. It's not valid to ask the first question until the second has been dealt with.
In this case, the argument is that plants such as this could produce a given amount of energy does not beg the question of the resources needed to create or maintain them. It leads to that question, but does not beg that question. If we were, on the other hand, to ask the questions in reverse order, we would be begging the question. It makes no sense to consider asking how many of our current resources will will apply to these plants until we have answered how many of our current resources these plants will replace.
Furthermore, "How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?" is a kind of catch-all question. You aren't saying, "Well this stuff requires a million kilos of unobtainium per watt produced, wouldn't that be more expensive than oil over the next twenty years?" That would be a valid question.
Asked generically, your question amount to this:Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to go on as we have indefinitely? This indeeds begs a question, namely, which is can we?
Here's an elementary principle of story telling: you can't get your hero to win against impossible odds, if the villain is stupider and weaker than he is. It follows that a hero must be at a disadvantage when facing his enemies.
Part of the Marvel formula, of course, is the neurotic, conflicted hero. Following the principle of heroic disadvantage, it follows that it helps to give the villain clarity. And there is nothing that promotes clarity like a mad, Utopian vision. What makes the vision mad is not its lack of feasibility; what makes it mad is that getting there requires subverting the things the vision is supposed to accomplish. Dr. Doom is certain that if he makes decisions for people, they'll be better of in the end. In practice that means enslaving them. Real life examples include right wing terror groups who rob banks in the cause of non-interference with individual liberty, or left wing extremists who run kidnapping and extortion rackets in the name of human dignity.
Heroes in comic book universes tend to be conservative. Not necessarily politically so, but they always act to preserve the status quo. In part, this is determined by the need to reset the universe story after story after story. The superhero might not know what he wants, but whatever it is, it does not involve change. Superman does not fight to make America a better place, he fights to preserve the "American way". Batman crusades against crime, but in his wealthy playboy alter ego he does not crusade for education, which would ultimately be more effective.
Tony Stark, arguably, has the worst plan for using his super abilities of any comic book hero.
Stark's super-ability is engineering. A physically super-powered character like Spider-man can only accomplish things that require him to be on the spot; Stark's potential super-deeds can be mass produced. Even a moderately talented engineer could do hundreds of times more for humanity than Spider-man, and Stark is not an ordinary engineer; he is prodigiously talented. He could use his unique engineering prowess to cure heart disease, or to provide mobility to paralysis victims. Instead he chooses to pursue a quixotic crusade against villainy which could be left to dozens, if not hundreds of other costumed superheroes. He's brought himself down from the level of engineering genius to the level of a mere superhero. Instead of designing mass producible solutions to humanity's problems, he designs combat technologies that threaten humanity when they are reproduced. Indeed he spends a great deal of superhero energy trying to put the technology transfer genie back in the bottle.
In short, in the comic book universe it is never the superheroes who have a vision of a better world. It is the supervillains who are agents of change. Their vision, of course, is insane, otherwise they'd be super-philanthropists, not super-villains. But if it weren't for supervillains, superheroes wouldn't have the imagination to put their powers to any productive uses. Superman, by spending an hour a day or so on a super-treadmill, could provide enough power for Metropolis to shut down all it's coal fired power plants, improving the economic life and health of everybody in the city. Instead he wastes his out of costume time playing absurd games with secret identities.
Actually, this is why OOXML is such a bad "standard". The whole point of a standard is to allow vendors to provide alternatives to customers, and for the customers to take from those alternatives whatever meets their needs.
Making a huge, omnibus standard built around a single vendor's current technology profile is just a branding campaign with standards body collusion. You aren't going to get anybody else implementing everything in OOXML, so why fret over whether it is a "standard" or not? Why not simply continue contenting yourself with the "de facto" standard of whatever MS choose to release as "MS Office"?
And building standards this way kills innovation. Suppose something better than INK comes along. Well, it'll never go anywhere. If you had two standards, X (OOXML or ODF), Y (how to embed INK in X), then somebody could propose a standard Z (how to embed the better think in X).
Then you, as a customer, simply look for a vendor or vendors who give you X & Y today; if you decide to jump on the Z bandwagon, you look for X & Y (for backward compatiblity) & Z.
Claiming a product is compliant with a standard isn't some magic pixie dust that makes it a good product, it's just a means of determining if the product might meet your needs. Approving OOXML as a standard allows Microsoft to market its product as compliant with "standards", but without customers receiving any of the benefits of standardization.
Oh, I don't think there is any rule that you can't have more standards than you need, although maybe that'd be a good rule to have, if you could make it stick.
But a standard is meaningless unless it is possible to determine whether you've complied with it or not. And for something like this, it should be possible to define a compliance test suite that everybody who wants to claim compliance has to pass. Sorry, "our product is the only compliant one because we're the only ones who knows what compliance means" doesn't cut the mustard.
If a neutral third party could not examine a product and determine that it is compliant, what you have isn't a standard, it's a brand dressing up like a standard.
You say, "But if it doesn't work out, then we'll have to pick up the pieces."
They say, "That won't happen; if it doesn't work out we'll be on our own."
Then you say to yourself, "My life would be a lot easier if I came down hard on this." Then you remind yourself, "But it's not my job to make my life easy. It's my job to try to get the needs of the company met."
Then you decide to look the other way, the project fails, serious business repercussions threaten, you're called in to clean up the mess, and by the way you don't get any more resources to do it.
File it under: no good deed goes unpunished.
I've been on the other end of the stick, an application developer with decades of experience in multiple industries, having to wait on some kid whose development knowledge amounts to having read "Access for Dummies" to figure things out.
I don't think there should be a hard and fast rule on this, but I think if you let user projects go forward, it's a bad idea to turn a blind eye towards them. If the project looks like it's going to have some impact, either by succeeding or failing, I'd probably require the user to make a proposal, as if he were a vendor, and I'd track it the way I'd track a vendor project. He should make a business case, show he's the best person to do it we can get for the money available, then he should commit to deliverables, milestones, acceptance tests and so forth.
If the product doesn't pass tests, you pull the plug on it before the company starts relying upon it.
If a user just wants to hack his iPhone for his own amusement, then he should buy his own iPhone. If he wants to hack his iPhone in a way that arguably solves a problem for the company, I might entertain him doing this, but only if I were prepared for him to brick the thing. If it's not worth a bricked iPhone, it's not worth letting him do it with company property.
I was in a small company that merged with another small company; we used ThinkPads, because we'd had good experience with their quality, they used Toshibas, because they were affordable.
All I can say is that going with the Toshibas was a false economy. We were accustomed to beating on our ThinkPads until the letters on the keycaps were literally worn off. Actually the Thinkpad keys are probably its weakest point; individual keys tend to break off after eighteen months to two years of this punishment, although we became adept at fixing these problems. Toshibas often had multiple problems before they were a year old, with the power supply, screen or keyboard.
And forget about Linux running on them, not if you wanted everything to work. Toshiba's BIOS appears deliberately designed to kick Linux in the nuts. Things don't work, but you can get them to work if you lie to the BIOS when you are booting and say you are running Windows XP. Oh, and forget about changing any BIOS settings, Toshiba won't let you adjust much more than the system clock; you can change the boot order of devices, but that doesn't work very well either.
In a computer science framing, we are arguing about whether the human brain implements a feature called "free will".
Naturally, we can only do this if we have a definition of free will that captures every aspect that fuzzy concept. The first question, which is a purely philosophical one, is whether there is a self-consistent definition of "free will".
Let's presume for a moment there is such a definition, and it requires consciousness to influence decisions. What we have here is proof that an individual decision is made before consciousness can process it. It would seem to be an open and shut case of disproof.
But it's not. Not necessarily.
You see, our specification says nothing about how consciousness participates in decision making. It is quite possible for consciousness to influence decisions before it comes into play, as I will show in a moment.
Let's imagine there are two classes of animals: non-conscious animals and conscious animals, which evolved from them. Both make process information to make decisions, but the conscious animal has this extra cognitive step after the decision has been made, that evaluates the decision in terms of a sense of an individual self, in time and place. Is this just some kind of side effect of having more powerful brain, or does it serve (speaking loosely) some kind of purpose?
Why not both?
Animals, it is well known, make decisions based on prior conditioning. It is not necessary to be conscious to learn. Suppose you are an animal that, as a side effect of having developed consciousness, has developed shame. Let's say that you make a decision, and when you become conscious of that decision you experience shame. Since shame is an unpleasant experience it serves as a form of aversive conditioning.
Now suppose you have two animals, one of which is "conscious" in the way this study suggests we are at least under the conditions studied. We have another animal that is conscious of a decision as or even before it is made, which we will call a super-conscious animal.
We place both animals in a series of situations in which they must make decisions. Each decision is novel, and involves a choice between a pair of actions, one of which has features which are sure to evoke negative self-evaluations like shame, guilt, or cognitive dissonance.
Could an observer, not knowing which animal was which, tell the difference from a single decision? From a sequence of decisions?
I would expect that all things being equal, a super-conscious animal's free will might be more effective at balancing the demands of maintaining it's self-image than a normally conscious one. However, there is no intrinsic reason why a sufficiently intelligent, normally conscious animal might not make a sequence of choices that is indistinguishable from what we'd expect of a super-conscious animal. It is quite possible that there is no behavioral test that could, short of looking into the animal's brains and determining how the decision is being made. However that begs the question we are examining, which is whether the means by which the decision is made matter.
Therefore, while it might be possible that a kind of pre-cognitive involvement of consciousness in decision making might make better use of a given amount of brain power, such a kind of consciousness doesn't necessarily influence decisions in a measurably different manner than post-cognitive awareness would.
Oh, that's just being blunt. It may also be being a bit socially awkward.
You're not an asshole if you tell your female coworker she looks fat in that dress. You're just a jerk. You're an asshole if you tell her if she helps you on this project you'll share the benefits, then renege.
In any case, people don't have a right to what is in your head. So when she asks you before a meeting whether she looks OK in that dress, you don't have to say, "It makes you look really fat." You can say "You look as lovely as ever." or "Green is not your color." And you don't have to add, "If you do have a color it must be one that can't be perceived by the human eye."
Failing to keep those little truths to yourself makes you a jerk. Failing to tell her she tucked the back edge of her skirt into her underwear so that she'll make a fool of herself and you'll get the promotion -- that's being an asshole.
Well, if you are a small business, your choices are different. You are running the business to benefit yourselves, and you have more choice of the coin in which you will be paid than if you were a publicly traded company.
Growth, cash flow and profits are all things that you trade off, at least in the short term. Growth is easy to achieve; you just shovel cash into getting new business. I've known businesses that lost money (profit) for years because they did this; they paid last year's debt out of this year's growth -- until they hit the wall. It might have been a brilliant strategy if they had had a plan to get off the merry go round.
I know that rapid growth has almost been a religion in business, but the truth is most small businesses thrive best on slow growth, staying profitable and in healthy cash flow by being careful with cash and consistent with customers.
But the things that small businesses can potentially do better is attention to detail in the customer relationship, and when your labor and know-how is a big part of what makes you profitable, it isn't easy to scale quickly. If you are in a business for the long run, and you only require a good living out of it, you can probably get all kinds of other things out of it. Like anything else in economics, it's about marginal costs; the marginal cost of producing a dollar more of profit may be greater than a dollar, whereas producing a marginal dollar's worth of fun or of community prestige, might be a lot less.
The world has to have different types, asshole types included.
That's what the assholes want you to think.
You think Enron was the only company that fudged numbers so their top brass made their bonuses? This behavior doesn't create wealth, it only redirects it from productive uses. These people are parasites on wealth building processes. The system functions despite these people.
The essence of being an asshole is being a person who habitually lies to get ahead. Many highly successful people are assholes, but for ever such there are a thousand whose lies caught up with them. It isn't that assholes aren't forward thinkers, it's that they don't look any farther into the future than is necessary to keep their deceptions from collapsing. It's not about rational self interest, it's about the inability to control the impulse to grasp and manipulate.
This doesn't mean nice guys finish first. The world isn't divided into assholes and nice guys. Ben Franklin was a bit of a conceited jerk, but he was never an asshole, and he pretty much accomplished anything he ever set his hand to. He was incredibly disciplined; it was always a penny saved with old Ben. He know the line between jerk and asshole, and didn't step over. He wasn't the type to cheat a customer because a repeat customer, after all, is the most profitable in the long term. He might deceive his way into a lady's boudoir, but his aims in those matters were exclusively short term.
And sometimes assholes smarten up. Young George Washington was a nasty piece of work, but the transparent ugliness of his social climbing ruined any prospects he had of advancement, and this changed his thinking.
Thomas Jefferson never stopped being an asshole, and suffered his entire life as a result. No question he was very bright, of course, but what he accomplished was because of his intelligence and despite his unwillingness to face his personal problems squarely.
The world needs many kinds of people: kindly people and stern people, benevolent people and ambitious ones. But saying it needs assholes is just another way of saying that it needs more fools. Saying that many assholes are successful is like saying that many people successfully pursue the lottery to riches. It's only "many" if you don't compare it to the failures.
In matters of logic, it is critical to be clear about what questions are being addressed by which evidence.
The first question is the worthiness of OOXML to be an international standard. The second question is the integrity of the process under which ISO approved OOXML.
Nobody is arguing that OOXML is a bad standard because the process that approved it was corrupted. They are arguing that OOXML is a bad standard AND the process that approved it was corrupted. These questions are not unrelated; one could argue that assuming the badness of the OOXML process is evidence of the corruption of the process. However it isn't strictly necessary for one question to beg the other. There is sufficient independent evidence to consider each question separately.
It is really proponents that are confusing the two issues, and have an interest in doing so.
If the standard is bad, then the process that approved it must be questionable. Therefore, if the process that approved the proposal is above reproach, then the standard cannot be bad. We can't say, however, that because the process was bad, the proposal was bad, although it is not inconsistent to believe this.
Well sovereignty is different from national security.
I'm not saying one reason is better than the others. But it's more specific to say, "this sale won't go forward because it undermines national security," and another to say "this sale won't go forward because it is not in the national interest."
LM is a bad example. They aren't going to sell overseas because a lot of their value is in a cozy relationship they have with the pentagon.
In any case a lot of US defense content is sourced overseas; if LM wanted to sell itself to Airbus, and divested itself of a few sensitive bits, I don't think it would be all that different from what we have now.
The parts of LM that would be sensitive are, for practical purposes, quasi-governmental. They take money from the government to do projects that are directed by the government. Is that the case for this Canadian outfit? I don't think so. What they're doing amounts to a kind of technological mercantilism.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. I'm just saying if a significant US tech company, like Intel, sold itself to foreign investors, I don't even think the matter would come up because it's hard to argue Intel is a US company in the sense of what this used to mean forty years ago.
P.S: US please dont take this seriously, we still love you, eh.
Umm, don't take this the wrong way, but you're a Canadian and you thought that Americans might take your geopolitical views seriously? It's not something to be proud of, but I doubt that people even in a place like Buffalo NY ever think about Canada except in conjunction with hockey or obnoxious Francophone tourists.
Why does Canada need to maintain sovereignty over a private company, in an era of free trade? Why not let the owners cash their chips in?
The US doesn't block this kind of thing on sovereignty grounds -- although to be fair it may be because the current administration doesn't understand that US sovereignty has any geographic limits...
Paraguay is a country ruled by a conservative coalition.
Which only goes to show what my old bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he'd say, "nobody believes in capitalism. Nobody believes in socialism. It's socialism for me, and capitalism for you!" Ivan may have been a red, but he was a cynic first and foremost, and that keeps you honest.
In the end, there is only one thing that really matters in any system: transparency. At least if the system is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people who live under it. You can be all for the proletariat, or all for the free market, but if you're pulling the wool of the peoples' eyes, you aren't any different from anybody else running a con behind high sounding priciples.
Well, as a practical matter you probably wouldn't make linear memory with a single read head that was billions of bits long. Nor would you be likely to treat it as such in your programs, although you might have clever adjustments to your algorithms that take its overall performance characteristics into account, the way that people take the performance characteristics of hard disks as a kind of unspoken assumption.
For that matter, modern random access memory is really more of an abstraction than a reality. Programmers usually don't worry about things like memory pages except in a kind of statistical way. The address you want may be in cache, or it may be in DRAM or it may be in the paging file.
Most programmers have been living with an abstraction for a very long time, which is that there are two kinds of memory: fast, volatile random access memory and slow, persistent "external" memory. This seems like it is a fundamental difference, but it is really quite arbitrary. You could treat a robotic tape library as a massive, but slow random access persistent memory, if that suited your purposes. Different aspects of flash memory straddle different parts of the divide between working memory and persistent storage.
I'd say the single thing most likely to really change over the next twenty years is this neat two way division of memory, especially as mobile and embedded devices become more common.
Ah, you beat me to it. The mercury delay lines were readily available because they had been developed for radar systems in WW2.
CRT based memory was also, in a sense, a product of radar. If you've seen early radar depictions from old movies, you had this kind of linear cursor started at the center of a round CRT tube and went to the edge. The end swept around the perimeter of the display, and when a line crossed a "blip", it would be refreshed. Over the next couple of seconds the blip would fade and the sweeping line would refresh the blip in a slightly different place. The persistence of phosphors on the screen were a kind of short term memory, so it's not surprising that engineers familiar with radar hit on the idea of making CRT storage units.
Random access is not the only memory model ever used in computers, nor is it the only one that will ever be used in the future. This is one of the reasons CS students are taught to regard polynomial time differences between classes of algorithms as relatively unimportant in a theoretical sense, although they are obviously important in a practical sense.
If you are hosting your own web site, there is no magic whereby NS can reach out and grab a URL and redirect it whereever it pleases. DNS doesn't work that way.
This is only possible if the host in the URL resolves to a NS box, at point your browser hands the URL to the server on that box and the box figures out what to send back. What this amounts to is allowing them to use the 404 not found page to promote their interests rather than yours, even if you are a current, paid up customer for hosting.
Now if we were in the Utopian future of the semantic web, we would need to watch the guardians of that very closely indeed, but DNS falls far short of that.
With respect to subdomains -- that's similar, but a bit different. If you move your domain registration to another service, there's nothing they can do about subdomains. But if you let NS run your DNS service, then they're claiming the right to benefit from things like mistyped URLs that should resolve to YOUR content.
It's not NICE, but it is not nefarious either. What it says is that NS reserves the right to treat its customers in a cheesy way. Well, then the customers should expect something in return. If all things being equal, one vendor stipulates he can grab the benefit of people trying to reach you but failing, and the other doesn't, you should go to the vendor who treats your name service and URL space as belonging to you.
Believe it or not, I think many, if not MOST of the new ideas in Vista are fundamentally reasonable. They're awkward in Vista for historical reasons, or because of certain implementation choices.
The UAE "nag" screens are not, in principle, any different from Ubuntu's sudo pop-ups. They're more ubiquitous because of the Windows software ecosystem's DOS pedigree. DOS was not an OS, it was more like a library of system access routines. Any process could access any resource on the system and do as it pleased. Windows software tends to be designed around that assumption. Too many things ought to take administrative privileges, perhaps. Under the circumstances, where the policy was being overlaid on a large body of existing software, perhaps a more coarsely grained privilege escalation procedure would have been better, but it would be impossible to avoid excessive prompting altogether.
Windows Defender is another thing that is -- not fundamentally unreasonable in conception. Vista's policy on configuration and program files is not exactly foreign to Unix users: it thinks they should go in different places. The problem is that Vista treats every piece of non-MS software as presumptively spyware, and thwarts the user by silently sandboxing his attempts to use non-MS tools. If you use a MS tool, Vista does the right thing -- it pops a UAE "nag" dialog.
I can't speak to things like DRM problems -- I haven't had any nor am I like to have. But in many ways Vista is more Unix-like than XP. Early on in my evaluation of Vista, I had the audio system crash, with the usual cryptic error message. But the rest of the system was unaffected. I didn't say to myself, "The audio system crashed, Vista is a piece of shit." I was impressed. This is how it's supposed to work. Programmers are fallible, and one part of a system shouldn't trust another more than it has to.
The basic mark against Vista is that it was never finished to production release quality. It has prodigious memory requirements, even with the eye candy turned off. It's performance on average is acceptable, but people don't live in "on average", they live in the moment. The performance is a little inconsistent, which is much worse than the average performance being a little slow. Attempts to "fix" long standing problems sort of work, but they often have unintended consequences. Some things it tried to do were reasonable in conception but need to be taken back to the drawing boards and redesigned.
All in all, this is something you'd tolerate from a middling beta release, something between initial beta and a serious release candidate. I'm using a beta of Ubuntu hardy now, and it's tolerable, but actually a bit less polished than Vista. But we should expect it to be a LOT less polished at this point in time, because Vista is already in SP1.
I think the inability of MS to get Vista to production quality probably shows it is probably just too complex. It feels like a product shoved out the door when the clock ran out.
Unfortunately, my meat printer is jammed. I think I should have stuck to flank steak; in retrospect, it appears that hamburger wasn't such a great idea.
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I actually think this proves what I was saying.
The evil twin theme is very common in comic books, whether the twin is in a parallel universe, or is a pretender, or just somebody who is awfully like the hero. The quest for more complexity and realism in recent stories means there is no better candidate for evil twin than the hero himself. It's an even match, no kryptonite needed.
It's a very plausible and useful theme. What is a supervillain, but a superhero with a plan to drag the world, against its will if need be, into a better future? He starts by acting as if his undeniable superiority gives him the right to make decisions for others. In the end he finds himself using lesser people as expendable means to his ends. What I've argued is that the classic comic book hero is really not all that heroic. The villains are arguably more heroic, but only from the perspective of their severe moral short sightedness.
If you want to take a superhero on a journey from being a muscle-bound enforcer of the status quo to being real hero, the straightest path cuts right across supervillain territory.
Is Tony Stark really any different from Dr. Doom? They're both vain, armor wearing geniuses with a serious authoritarian streak. As bona-fide geniuses they have more reason than most to believe themselves qualified to decide what is in the best interest of others. However, Dr. Doom will never be a hero, because there is no end to his self-delusion of omniscience; there are no limits to what he will destroy today to build a better tomorrow.
Sacrifice is essential to heroism. A hero has to give something up for the greater good. In the DC universe, Batman is a kind of neurotic fixation of Bruce Wayne; Wayne fights crime, but in a way that precludes him having normally satisfying relationships with other people.
Clearly, the easiest way to make Tony Stark into a hero is to give him something he has to give up; you can't take away his genius, which makes taking away his money futile. So you have to give him something, namely the power and authority he not-so-secretly craves. The best way to show that Tony Stark is different from Dr. Doom in an essential way is for him to become Dr. Doom. Then turn back. And, since this is Marvel, he'll return from the trip with enough personal demons to flummox Dr. Strange.
Oh, I've gotten over evolved language. I just haven't gotten over sloppy thinking.
Maybe I should though.
It's well worth examining here what "begs the question" means in a technical sense -- and not as a usage Nazi. I understand that most people mean "leads to the question" when they say "beg the question."
"Begging the question" is to ask a question which only makes sense to ask after certain other questions have been answered. The classic example is, "have you stopped beating your wife?" You cannot expect a meaningful answer to that question unless you have established that the person being asked has, at some time in the past, beat his wife. It's not valid to ask the first question until the second has been dealt with.
In this case, the argument is that plants such as this could produce a given amount of energy does not beg the question of the resources needed to create or maintain them. It leads to that question, but does not beg that question. If we were, on the other hand, to ask the questions in reverse order, we would be begging the question. It makes no sense to consider asking how many of our current resources will will apply to these plants until we have answered how many of our current resources these plants will replace.
Furthermore, "How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?" is a kind of catch-all question. You aren't saying, "Well this stuff requires a million kilos of unobtainium per watt produced, wouldn't that be more expensive than oil over the next twenty years?" That would be a valid question.
Asked generically, your question amount to this:Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to go on as we have indefinitely? This indeeds begs a question, namely, which is can we?
Here's an elementary principle of story telling: you can't get your hero to win against impossible odds, if the villain is stupider and weaker than he is. It follows that a hero must be at a disadvantage when facing his enemies.
Part of the Marvel formula, of course, is the neurotic, conflicted hero. Following the principle of heroic disadvantage, it follows that it helps to give the villain clarity. And there is nothing that promotes clarity like a mad, Utopian vision. What makes the vision mad is not its lack of feasibility; what makes it mad is that getting there requires subverting the things the vision is supposed to accomplish. Dr. Doom is certain that if he makes decisions for people, they'll be better of in the end. In practice that means enslaving them. Real life examples include right wing terror groups who rob banks in the cause of non-interference with individual liberty, or left wing extremists who run kidnapping and extortion rackets in the name of human dignity.
Heroes in comic book universes tend to be conservative. Not necessarily politically so, but they always act to preserve the status quo. In part, this is determined by the need to reset the universe story after story after story. The superhero might not know what he wants, but whatever it is, it does not involve change. Superman does not fight to make America a better place, he fights to preserve the "American way". Batman crusades against crime, but in his wealthy playboy alter ego he does not crusade for education, which would ultimately be more effective.
Tony Stark, arguably, has the worst plan for using his super abilities of any comic book hero.
Stark's super-ability is engineering. A physically super-powered character like Spider-man can only accomplish things that require him to be on the spot; Stark's potential super-deeds can be mass produced. Even a moderately talented engineer could do hundreds of times more for humanity than Spider-man, and Stark is not an ordinary engineer; he is prodigiously talented. He could use his unique engineering prowess to cure heart disease, or to provide mobility to paralysis victims. Instead he chooses to pursue a quixotic crusade against villainy which could be left to dozens, if not hundreds of other costumed superheroes. He's brought himself down from the level of engineering genius to the level of a mere superhero. Instead of designing mass producible solutions to humanity's problems, he designs combat technologies that threaten humanity when they are reproduced. Indeed he spends a great deal of superhero energy trying to put the technology transfer genie back in the bottle.
In short, in the comic book universe it is never the superheroes who have a vision of a better world. It is the supervillains who are agents of change. Their vision, of course, is insane, otherwise they'd be super-philanthropists, not super-villains. But if it weren't for supervillains, superheroes wouldn't have the imagination to put their powers to any productive uses. Superman, by spending an hour a day or so on a super-treadmill, could provide enough power for Metropolis to shut down all it's coal fired power plants, improving the economic life and health of everybody in the city. Instead he wastes his out of costume time playing absurd games with secret identities.
Well, analogies are a left brain function, and left brains probably prefer to generate cdr analogies.
Actually, this is why OOXML is such a bad "standard". The whole point of a standard is to allow vendors to provide alternatives to customers, and for the customers to take from those alternatives whatever meets their needs.
Making a huge, omnibus standard built around a single vendor's current technology profile is just a branding campaign with standards body collusion. You aren't going to get anybody else implementing everything in OOXML, so why fret over whether it is a "standard" or not? Why not simply continue contenting yourself with the "de facto" standard of whatever MS choose to release as "MS Office"?
And building standards this way kills innovation. Suppose something better than INK comes along. Well, it'll never go anywhere. If you had two standards, X (OOXML or ODF), Y (how to embed INK in X), then somebody could propose a standard Z (how to embed the better think in X).
Then you, as a customer, simply look for a vendor or vendors who give you X & Y today; if you decide to jump on the Z bandwagon, you look for X & Y (for backward compatiblity) & Z.
Claiming a product is compliant with a standard isn't some magic pixie dust that makes it a good product, it's just a means of determining if the product might meet your needs. Approving OOXML as a standard allows Microsoft to market its product as compliant with "standards", but without customers receiving any of the benefits of standardization.
Oh, I don't think there is any rule that you can't have more standards than you need, although maybe that'd be a good rule to have, if you could make it stick.
But a standard is meaningless unless it is possible to determine whether you've complied with it or not. And for something like this, it should be possible to define a compliance test suite that everybody who wants to claim compliance has to pass. Sorry, "our product is the only compliant one because we're the only ones who knows what compliance means" doesn't cut the mustard.
If a neutral third party could not examine a product and determine that it is compliant, what you have isn't a standard, it's a brand dressing up like a standard.
The users have a real business need.
You don't have the resources to meet that need.
They say, "Well, let us do it for ourselves."
You say, "But if it doesn't work out, then we'll have to pick up the pieces."
They say, "That won't happen; if it doesn't work out we'll be on our own."
Then you say to yourself, "My life would be a lot easier if I came down hard on this." Then you remind yourself, "But it's not my job to make my life easy. It's my job to try to get the needs of the company met."
Then you decide to look the other way, the project fails, serious business repercussions threaten, you're called in to clean up the mess, and by the way you don't get any more resources to do it.
File it under: no good deed goes unpunished.
I've been on the other end of the stick, an application developer with decades of experience in multiple industries, having to wait on some kid whose development knowledge amounts to having read "Access for Dummies" to figure things out.
I don't think there should be a hard and fast rule on this, but I think if you let user projects go forward, it's a bad idea to turn a blind eye towards them. If the project looks like it's going to have some impact, either by succeeding or failing, I'd probably require the user to make a proposal, as if he were a vendor, and I'd track it the way I'd track a vendor project. He should make a business case, show he's the best person to do it we can get for the money available, then he should commit to deliverables, milestones, acceptance tests and so forth.
If the product doesn't pass tests, you pull the plug on it before the company starts relying upon it.
If a user just wants to hack his iPhone for his own amusement, then he should buy his own iPhone. If he wants to hack his iPhone in a way that arguably solves a problem for the company, I might entertain him doing this, but only if I were prepared for him to brick the thing. If it's not worth a bricked iPhone, it's not worth letting him do it with company property.
I was in a small company that merged with another small company; we used ThinkPads, because we'd had good experience with their quality, they used Toshibas, because they were affordable.
All I can say is that going with the Toshibas was a false economy. We were accustomed to beating on our ThinkPads until the letters on the keycaps were literally worn off. Actually the Thinkpad keys are probably its weakest point; individual keys tend to break off after eighteen months to two years of this punishment, although we became adept at fixing these problems. Toshibas often had multiple problems before they were a year old, with the power supply, screen or keyboard.
And forget about Linux running on them, not if you wanted everything to work. Toshiba's BIOS appears deliberately designed to kick Linux in the nuts. Things don't work, but you can get them to work if you lie to the BIOS when you are booting and say you are running Windows XP. Oh, and forget about changing any BIOS settings, Toshiba won't let you adjust much more than the system clock; you can change the boot order of devices, but that doesn't work very well either.
In a computer science framing, we are arguing about whether the human brain implements a feature called "free will".
Naturally, we can only do this if we have a definition of free will that captures every aspect that fuzzy concept. The first question, which is a purely philosophical one, is whether there is a self-consistent definition of "free will".
Let's presume for a moment there is such a definition, and it requires consciousness to influence decisions. What we have here is proof that an individual decision is made before consciousness can process it. It would seem to be an open and shut case of disproof.
But it's not. Not necessarily.
You see, our specification says nothing about how consciousness participates in decision making. It is quite possible for consciousness to influence decisions before it comes into play, as I will show in a moment.
Let's imagine there are two classes of animals: non-conscious animals and conscious animals, which evolved from them. Both make process information to make decisions, but the conscious animal has this extra cognitive step after the decision has been made, that evaluates the decision in terms of a sense of an individual self, in time and place. Is this just some kind of side effect of having more powerful brain, or does it serve (speaking loosely) some kind of purpose?
Why not both?
Animals, it is well known, make decisions based on prior conditioning. It is not necessary to be conscious to learn. Suppose you are an animal that, as a side effect of having developed consciousness, has developed shame. Let's say that you make a decision, and when you become conscious of that decision you experience shame. Since shame is an unpleasant experience it serves as a form of aversive conditioning.
Now suppose you have two animals, one of which is "conscious" in the way this study suggests we are at least under the conditions studied. We have another animal that is conscious of a decision as or even before it is made, which we will call a super-conscious animal.
We place both animals in a series of situations in which they must make decisions. Each decision is novel, and involves a choice between a pair of actions, one of which has features which are sure to evoke negative self-evaluations like shame, guilt, or cognitive dissonance.
Could an observer, not knowing which animal was which, tell the difference from a single decision? From a sequence of decisions?
I would expect that all things being equal, a super-conscious animal's free will might be more effective at balancing the demands of maintaining it's self-image than a normally conscious one. However, there is no intrinsic reason why a sufficiently intelligent, normally conscious animal might not make a sequence of choices that is indistinguishable from what we'd expect of a super-conscious animal. It is quite possible that there is no behavioral test that could, short of looking into the animal's brains and determining how the decision is being made. However that begs the question we are examining, which is whether the means by which the decision is made matter.
Therefore, while it might be possible that a kind of pre-cognitive involvement of consciousness in decision making might make better use of a given amount of brain power, such a kind of consciousness doesn't necessarily influence decisions in a measurably different manner than post-cognitive awareness would.
Oh, that's just being blunt. It may also be being a bit socially awkward.
You're not an asshole if you tell your female coworker she looks fat in that dress. You're just a jerk. You're an asshole if you tell her if she helps you on this project you'll share the benefits, then renege.
In any case, people don't have a right to what is in your head. So when she asks you before a meeting whether she looks OK in that dress, you don't have to say, "It makes you look really fat." You can say "You look as lovely as ever." or "Green is not your color." And you don't have to add, "If you do have a color it must be one that can't be perceived by the human eye."
Failing to keep those little truths to yourself makes you a jerk. Failing to tell her she tucked the back edge of her skirt into her underwear so that she'll make a fool of herself and you'll get the promotion -- that's being an asshole.
Well, if you are a small business, your choices are different. You are running the business to benefit yourselves, and you have more choice of the coin in which you will be paid than if you were a publicly traded company.
Growth, cash flow and profits are all things that you trade off, at least in the short term. Growth is easy to achieve; you just shovel cash into getting new business. I've known businesses that lost money (profit) for years because they did this; they paid last year's debt out of this year's growth -- until they hit the wall. It might have been a brilliant strategy if they had had a plan to get off the merry go round.
I know that rapid growth has almost been a religion in business, but the truth is most small businesses thrive best on slow growth, staying profitable and in healthy cash flow by being careful with cash and consistent with customers.
But the things that small businesses can potentially do better is attention to detail in the customer relationship, and when your labor and know-how is a big part of what makes you profitable, it isn't easy to scale quickly. If you are in a business for the long run, and you only require a good living out of it, you can probably get all kinds of other things out of it. Like anything else in economics, it's about marginal costs; the marginal cost of producing a dollar more of profit may be greater than a dollar, whereas producing a marginal dollar's worth of fun or of community prestige, might be a lot less.
That's what the assholes want you to think.
You think Enron was the only company that fudged numbers so their top brass made their bonuses? This behavior doesn't create wealth, it only redirects it from productive uses. These people are parasites on wealth building processes. The system functions despite these people.
The essence of being an asshole is being a person who habitually lies to get ahead. Many highly successful people are assholes, but for ever such there are a thousand whose lies caught up with them. It isn't that assholes aren't forward thinkers, it's that they don't look any farther into the future than is necessary to keep their deceptions from collapsing. It's not about rational self interest, it's about the inability to control the impulse to grasp and manipulate.
This doesn't mean nice guys finish first. The world isn't divided into assholes and nice guys. Ben Franklin was a bit of a conceited jerk, but he was never an asshole, and he pretty much accomplished anything he ever set his hand to. He was incredibly disciplined; it was always a penny saved with old Ben. He know the line between jerk and asshole, and didn't step over. He wasn't the type to cheat a customer because a repeat customer, after all, is the most profitable in the long term. He might deceive his way into a lady's boudoir, but his aims in those matters were exclusively short term.
And sometimes assholes smarten up. Young George Washington was a nasty piece of work, but the transparent ugliness of his social climbing ruined any prospects he had of advancement, and this changed his thinking.
Thomas Jefferson never stopped being an asshole, and suffered his entire life as a result. No question he was very bright, of course, but what he accomplished was because of his intelligence and despite his unwillingness to face his personal problems squarely.
The world needs many kinds of people: kindly people and stern people, benevolent people and ambitious ones. But saying it needs assholes is just another way of saying that it needs more fools. Saying that many assholes are successful is like saying that many people successfully pursue the lottery to riches. It's only "many" if you don't compare it to the failures.
Well said.
In matters of logic, it is critical to be clear about what questions are being addressed by which evidence.
The first question is the worthiness of OOXML to be an international standard. The second question is the integrity of the process under which ISO approved OOXML.
Nobody is arguing that OOXML is a bad standard because the process that approved it was corrupted. They are arguing that OOXML is a bad standard AND the process that approved it was corrupted. These questions are not unrelated; one could argue that assuming the badness of the OOXML process is evidence of the corruption of the process. However it isn't strictly necessary for one question to beg the other. There is sufficient independent evidence to consider each question separately.
It is really proponents that are confusing the two issues, and have an interest in doing so.
If the standard is bad, then the process that approved it must be questionable. Therefore, if the process that approved the proposal is above reproach, then the standard cannot be bad. We can't say, however, that because the process was bad, the proposal was bad, although it is not inconsistent to believe this.
Well sovereignty is different from national security.
I'm not saying one reason is better than the others. But it's more specific to say, "this sale won't go forward because it undermines national security," and another to say "this sale won't go forward because it is not in the national interest."
Even as I said. You have to know somebody to tease them; even I think of the Shuttle's doohickey as the "Canadian Built Robot Arm."
LM is a bad example. They aren't going to sell overseas because a lot of their value is in a cozy relationship they have with the pentagon.
In any case a lot of US defense content is sourced overseas; if LM wanted to sell itself to Airbus, and divested itself of a few sensitive bits, I don't think it would be all that different from what we have now.
The parts of LM that would be sensitive are, for practical purposes, quasi-governmental. They take money from the government to do projects that are directed by the government. Is that the case for this Canadian outfit? I don't think so. What they're doing amounts to a kind of technological mercantilism.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. I'm just saying if a significant US tech company, like Intel, sold itself to foreign investors, I don't even think the matter would come up because it's hard to argue Intel is a US company in the sense of what this used to mean forty years ago.
Umm, don't take this the wrong way, but you're a Canadian and you thought that Americans might take your geopolitical views seriously? It's not something to be proud of, but I doubt that people even in a place like Buffalo NY ever think about Canada except in conjunction with hockey or obnoxious Francophone tourists.
Why?
Why does Canada need to maintain sovereignty over a private company, in an era of free trade? Why not let the owners cash their chips in?
The US doesn't block this kind of thing on sovereignty grounds -- although to be fair it may be because the current administration doesn't understand that US sovereignty has any geographic limits...
Which only goes to show what my old bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he'd say, "nobody believes in capitalism. Nobody believes in socialism. It's socialism for me, and capitalism for you!" Ivan may have been a red, but he was a cynic first and foremost, and that keeps you honest.
In the end, there is only one thing that really matters in any system: transparency. At least if the system is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people who live under it. You can be all for the proletariat, or all for the free market, but if you're pulling the wool of the peoples' eyes, you aren't any different from anybody else running a con behind high sounding priciples.
Well, as a practical matter you probably wouldn't make linear memory with a single read head that was billions of bits long. Nor would you be likely to treat it as such in your programs, although you might have clever adjustments to your algorithms that take its overall performance characteristics into account, the way that people take the performance characteristics of hard disks as a kind of unspoken assumption.
For that matter, modern random access memory is really more of an abstraction than a reality. Programmers usually don't worry about things like memory pages except in a kind of statistical way. The address you want may be in cache, or it may be in DRAM or it may be in the paging file.
Most programmers have been living with an abstraction for a very long time, which is that there are two kinds of memory: fast, volatile random access memory and slow, persistent "external" memory. This seems like it is a fundamental difference, but it is really quite arbitrary. You could treat a robotic tape library as a massive, but slow random access persistent memory, if that suited your purposes. Different aspects of flash memory straddle different parts of the divide between working memory and persistent storage.
I'd say the single thing most likely to really change over the next twenty years is this neat two way division of memory, especially as mobile and embedded devices become more common.
Ah, you beat me to it. The mercury delay lines were readily available because they had been developed for radar systems in WW2.
CRT based memory was also, in a sense, a product of radar. If you've seen early radar depictions from old movies, you had this kind of linear cursor started at the center of a round CRT tube and went to the edge. The end swept around the perimeter of the display, and when a line crossed a "blip", it would be refreshed. Over the next couple of seconds the blip would fade and the sweeping line would refresh the blip in a slightly different place. The persistence of phosphors on the screen were a kind of short term memory, so it's not surprising that engineers familiar with radar hit on the idea of making CRT storage units.
Random access is not the only memory model ever used in computers, nor is it the only one that will ever be used in the future. This is one of the reasons CS students are taught to regard polynomial time differences between classes of algorithms as relatively unimportant in a theoretical sense, although they are obviously important in a practical sense.
I believe you've got this right.
If you are hosting your own web site, there is no magic whereby NS can reach out and grab a URL and redirect it whereever it pleases. DNS doesn't work that way.
This is only possible if the host in the URL resolves to a NS box, at point your browser hands the URL to the server on that box and the box figures out what to send back. What this amounts to is allowing them to use the 404 not found page to promote their interests rather than yours, even if you are a current, paid up customer for hosting.
Now if we were in the Utopian future of the semantic web, we would need to watch the guardians of that very closely indeed, but DNS falls far short of that.
With respect to subdomains -- that's similar, but a bit different. If you move your domain registration to another service, there's nothing they can do about subdomains. But if you let NS run your DNS service, then they're claiming the right to benefit from things like mistyped URLs that should resolve to YOUR content.
It's not NICE, but it is not nefarious either. What it says is that NS reserves the right to treat its customers in a cheesy way. Well, then the customers should expect something in return. If all things being equal, one vendor stipulates he can grab the benefit of people trying to reach you but failing, and the other doesn't, you should go to the vendor who treats your name service and URL space as belonging to you.
Believe it or not, I think many, if not MOST of the new ideas in Vista are fundamentally reasonable. They're awkward in Vista for historical reasons, or because of certain implementation choices.
The UAE "nag" screens are not, in principle, any different from Ubuntu's sudo pop-ups. They're more ubiquitous because of the Windows software ecosystem's DOS pedigree. DOS was not an OS, it was more like a library of system access routines. Any process could access any resource on the system and do as it pleased. Windows software tends to be designed around that assumption. Too many things ought to take administrative privileges, perhaps. Under the circumstances, where the policy was being overlaid on a large body of existing software, perhaps a more coarsely grained privilege escalation procedure would have been better, but it would be impossible to avoid excessive prompting altogether.
Windows Defender is another thing that is -- not fundamentally unreasonable in conception. Vista's policy on configuration and program files is not exactly foreign to Unix users: it thinks they should go in different places. The problem is that Vista treats every piece of non-MS software as presumptively spyware, and thwarts the user by silently sandboxing his attempts to use non-MS tools. If you use a MS tool, Vista does the right thing -- it pops a UAE "nag" dialog.
I can't speak to things like DRM problems -- I haven't had any nor am I like to have. But in many ways Vista is more Unix-like than XP. Early on in my evaluation of Vista, I had the audio system crash, with the usual cryptic error message. But the rest of the system was unaffected. I didn't say to myself, "The audio system crashed, Vista is a piece of shit." I was impressed. This is how it's supposed to work. Programmers are fallible, and one part of a system shouldn't trust another more than it has to.
The basic mark against Vista is that it was never finished to production release quality. It has prodigious memory requirements, even with the eye candy turned off. It's performance on average is acceptable, but people don't live in "on average", they live in the moment. The performance is a little inconsistent, which is much worse than the average performance being a little slow. Attempts to "fix" long standing problems sort of work, but they often have unintended consequences. Some things it tried to do were reasonable in conception but need to be taken back to the drawing boards and redesigned.
All in all, this is something you'd tolerate from a middling beta release, something between initial beta and a serious release candidate. I'm using a beta of Ubuntu hardy now, and it's tolerable, but actually a bit less polished than Vista. But we should expect it to be a LOT less polished at this point in time, because Vista is already in SP1.
I think the inability of MS to get Vista to production quality probably shows it is probably just too complex. It feels like a product shoved out the door when the clock ran out.
Unfortunately, my meat printer is jammed. I think I should have stuck to flank steak; in retrospect, it appears that hamburger wasn't such a great idea.