I guess you're the person who uses them. Weird. I don't even know how they work really; are they related to that Enlightenment feature that was similarly confusing?
I use virtual desktops, never minimizing or maximizing anything. I'm happy with either the normal style or the old view-into-huge-desktop style. I've seen people (most people actually) who maximize everything, using alt-tab or the taskbar to change stacking order. I've seen people who minimize any window they are not using. I've never seen workspaces get used.
Sawfish was ridiculously slow, being pointlessly built around a scheme interpreter, so it had to go.
I did notice a few features that temporarily went missing in the transition, but mainly I just noticed that the GUI was no longer horribly slow. The missing features came back. I can't complain about a speed improvement that doesn't change much else.
Badness would be later releases. Focus-follows-mouse is now very difficult to enable, requiring something like a registry editor. Nautilus is now a requirement for having GNOME installed, and it always wants to start unless you resort to some pretty obscure hacking. Sound seems to require PulseAudio, which just adds latency and CPU overhead for the pointless gain of audio-enabled remote desktops. There isn't even a decent icon for an xterm anymore; icons that MY DESKTOP IS USING keep getting removed with each release.
Look back to the GNOME that shipped with Red Hat 7 through Red Hat 9. It was free of distracting crap. It didn't have anything on the desktop unless you count the panel (taskbar thing) or the solid-color background. Now we get TWO panels, because Mac-oriented and Windows-oriented developers formed a committee, and loads of random shit on a desktop that would be buried under windows if you were actually using the computer.
It happened with Windows too. Never minding the rotten core, Windows 95 was actually attractive and generally had a usable GUI. Then they added that evil IE-in-the-wallpaper thing with the crazy TV-like presentation, and gradients so that only half of a titlebar has good contrast. By the time XP shipped, the formerly nice-looking start menu featured a giant garish green glob for the button. They fixed the looks for Vista, but took until Windows to fix the behavior and get the core back into a less-rotten state.
I don't know if OS X has ever gotten truly nasty, but it certainly has had to endure pointless cosmetic changes. These nearly always detract from the original design. Designs start off clean and coherent, but the marketing need for VISIBLE change means that even the theoretical ideal GUI would get changed for the next release.
We're stuck paying made-in-the-USA prices. The second spender obviously gets made-in-China prices. The one nice thing here is that we're employing our own people; it must suck to be a country that has to buy from elsewhere.
We also tend to include non-military expenses in our "military" budget. This includes medical research, biofuel research, solar power research, self-driving car research, military healthcare and retirement benefits, and congressionally mandated bases that the military doesn't want.
I think it is kind of nice to have the military researching prosthetic limbs, brain injury, rehydratable blood substitutes, and bandages treated with chemicals that stop bleeding. It doesn't do anything nice for the budget of course.
If we cut back to Chinese funding levels, we won't get anywhere near the same results as they get. This is especially true if you count all the extras that we include in our "military" budget.
you want hospitals to turn away people who can't pay?
Of course. It's unreasonable that they provide services for free.
Hey, I want a free pony too. With wings. And it farts rainbows.
I'm far from a free market fundamentalist. I recognize that there are times when a free market is impossible, I'm paranoid about the instability that leads to monopoly and too-big-to-let-fail situations, and I strongly support taxing externalities like pollution. Ordinary non-emergency health care can and should be much more of a free market than it is today.
When you are simply unable to shop around for treatment, there is no free market. In this case, the government should pay. They should pay for heart attacks, cracked skulls, diabetic shock, and similar. They should not pay for slow-growing skin cancer, long-term drug supplies, heart valve replacement, and similar.
There is that problem, yes. It is reasonable for the government to cover the cost of treating everybody who is unable to shop around for low prices and think about payment. The free market is broken if you have a bullet in your heart; there is no time to compare prices or decide if medical care is not worthwhile.
For a broken arm, there is no reason you should get treatment without payment. It's not immediately life threatening, it doesn't impair your ability to phone doctors, and you can wait.
Really, your complaint should be against the unfunded mandate that hospitals (ones accepting medicare/medicade and having an emergency room) accept all people without regard to past debt and without the ability to deduct unpaid bills from judgements against the hospital.
If I choose to buy insurance, I'm choosing to gamble. I may "win" by getting expensive care provided to me, or "lose" by staying healthy and getting nothing.
If I'm forced to buy insurance (private or government) then I'm being forced to gamble. My choice has been taken from me. Maybe I want to gamble, and maybe I don't, but taking away the choice is not OK.
I don't feel right taking your choice from you. Please don't take mine from me.
fox news, that incenses the poor and middle class to actually fight against their own interests
You don't understand these people.
OK, an analogy of sorts: I don't shoplift. It's against my interest to not shoplift. Why then, do I not shoplift? I have this feeling that taking stuff from other people is wrong. Yes, I know, I'm being stupid and I should just do what is in my best interest. I also get really pissed off when other people shoplift, even if I'm not the shopkeeper and even if I don't see it happen. Perhaps you feel differently?
When the government takes money from other people to supply my healthcare, I get the same feeling. It's like shoplifting. It's in my interest, but it is wrong.
Not understanding the intricacies doesn't make it "faith".
It's faith to you if you accept it without understanding it. To all people, the vast majority of science is "known" by faith.
This is why so many people persist in accepting the magic man in the sky. To them, it's not any less believable than some science that they couldn't possibly understand.
The problem given: maximize the return, given that big profits can be kept (salary, stock options, and bonuses) while big losses can be eliminated via bankruptcy or bailout.
Engineers are mighty good at optimizing that problem.:-(
Do you want to make healthcare more expensive? Are you trying to keep us paying for the boomers for an extra decade or two?
We'd save quite a bit if we went the other way. Health care was perfectly fine in 1985. We could go back to that, except for those few advances that are both better AND cheaper.
We could even go back more. Health care got to be pretty decent as soon as they figured out that surgeons should wash their hands and stop taking some kind of twisted pride in wearing a shirt smeared with pus.
Because we are all already descended from people who are programmed by genetics and conditioned by experience to have as many children as possible. Yet, the birthrate drops.
...to have as many children as possible in an environment that no longer exists in the First World. We're programmed for an environment in which sex==reproduction. The birthrate drops because we are not yet well adapted to the new environment.
We do things that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective (use of birth control) because we're like fish out of water. As a group, we haven't adapted yet. Some individuals are clearly better adapted than others though, and they are very strongly favored by natural selection.
You're looking for evidence on a timescale that is too short. I suppose that very careful statistics might just barely be able to show something, but it wouldn't be easy with so few generations. The only thing obvious is the short-term drop in birthrate caused by change in our environment. You're seeing the selection occur, and then deciding that this is some permanent result on an unchanging gene pool.
What you're doing is like noticing a billion years ago that creatures are getting killed by increasing oxygen levels, assuming this will always be the case, and ignoring those few individuals that tolerate and even benefit from oxygen. The gene pool is never static.
Given the CURRENT gene pool, sure, those conditions make the birth rate (the AVERAGE fertility) drop.
If some people are less affected by those conditions, eventually their offspring will dominate. Such people exist.
The currently typical genetic programming has the implicit assumption that sexual desire is the same thing as a desire to have kids. This isn't true, but the distinction didn't matter in ancient times. Our environment has changed drastically, by our own doing, and we will adapt to it. Typical genetic programming of future humans will be more directly oriented toward having children.
Oddly, the First World will experience the resulting population boom before the Third World will. This is because the First World already has a head start on natural selection in favor of behaviors that defeat birth control.
I don't think you were 18 or even 13 when you learned about the concept. I was 6 to 9 years old when I was discussing them with my classmates and looking at porn.
The law that makes Facebook restrict age and ultimately makes kids lie is idiotic. It is one of the many crappy laws passed back when normal non-nerd people were terrified of the internet.
Changes are *already* noticeable - in areas where the conditions I mention hold, birth rates are dropping. Evolution is irrelevant here, because our genes do not blindly override other pressures.
Wrong change. You're not considering the gene pool.
The dropping birthrate shows a *lack* of noticable change in the gene pool. Most people act no different than people of half a century ago when educated and offered birth control: they do not make many offspring.
Once the gene pool changes to a noticable extent, those conditions will no longer matter. Essentially everybody will descend from those few women of today who decided either to avoid education or to pop out a dozen kids despite education. It simply won't matter if a woman has education, rights, birth control, or whatever -- she will produce many kids.
My guess is that things will be noticable 200 to 500 years from now. (very fast for evolution) Even countries like Japan and Russia will grow like mad, ultimately stopped only by mortality.
My ideal is that health care goes to desirable people, and I get to choose who is desirable.
Money is a very crude approximation of that. It beats the near-random results of a waiting list.
People with money tend to be smarter, harder working, more rational, better at planning ahead, less violent, etc. -- all traits that I think are worthy.
An alternate crude approximation could be an IQ test. Since health care requires money though, we might as well use money to determine desirability.
If a service can't keep up with demand, "wait your turn" is equivalent to "go away". The waiting list grows without bound, except that people die on the waiting list.
Somebody making triage decisions is equivalent to a Death Panel whenever the demand truly (not just this moment) exceeds supply.
I take it you don't believe in evolution, or you have the crazy idea that somehow we humans can escape it. The proportion of people with DNA to make them breed like mad is increasing exponentially.
In the space of a couple generations, sure, the birthrate will drop. You haven't given evolution much of a chance. The selection pressure of birth control is enormous, so fast changes are to be expected, but not THAT fast. We've only had reliable birth control for half a century, which is just 2 to 4 generations. Changes might be noticable after 10 or so.
In this supposedly non-growing population of richer people, not everybody will have 2 kids. Some will have none, and some will have a dozen.
If family size is even slightly inheritable, natural selection takes care of the rest. Let's consider why people might have huge families.
The mothering instinct is a big reason. It's clearly way stronger in some people than in others. It's entirely reasonable that this is an inheritable brain trait.
Religion is another reason. The inheritable thing here is spirituality, magic thinking, and so on. The choice of religion itself is subject to some sort of "meme inheritance", with choices that demand followers to "go forth and multiply" being more successful.
Stupidity is certainly inheritable. If you can't manage to properly use birth control...
See where this goes? Natural selection can trivially defeat birth control. All creatures naturally are in a state of squalor, barely able to survive. Consider yourself fortunate to live during an anomaly for your species.
I think that people who say this are interested in changing from universal suffrage to "some significant portion of them". The same sort of people who spout this sort of stuff will often be heard to say that things were better when only those who owned land could vote. That is the presupposition hidden in this meme--disenfranchisement. Since we're quickly moving to a society where the minorities are a majority and where only the bankers and a few rich (white) people own land, this is simply advocating a new form of apartheid through the back door.
How is it good that our government is chosen by people who are unable to comprehend things like economics? We'd be way better off if votes were multiplied by IQ squared. Right now, the pretty face with nice ads (funded by special interest group bribes called campaign contributions) wins.
For those of you who find liberal or Democrat a dirty word, be aware that college students can guess party affiliation from a head shot 80% of the time.
There is no party affiliation after a head shot, but I suppose splattered brains is evidence that the person probably thought republicans were the lesser evil. If the head shot doesn't expose any brain matter, then you can assume the person did actually like one of the parties.
That means that liberal and conservative reflect basic personality traits, and it takes all kinds.
No, it doesn't take all kinds. Both sides are horrified to be stuck sharing the same planet.
Gee, it's the same as when you join any decent-sized corporation. I'm not seeing a difference.
Joining a start-up, or even founding one, rarely works out better. Normally it's worse. At the end, your paycheck goes missing.
Your IPO dreams are like the dreams of a high school kid who wants to be a movie star, pop star, or sports star. In theory it could happen. You could also win the lottery. Are you going to grow old chasing start-up hopes, or are you going to do the rational thing?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you're the person who uses them. Weird. I don't even know how they work really; are they related to that Enlightenment feature that was similarly confusing?
I use virtual desktops, never minimizing or maximizing anything. I'm happy with either the normal style or the old view-into-huge-desktop style. I've seen people (most people actually) who maximize everything, using alt-tab or the taskbar to change stacking order. I've seen people who minimize any window they are not using. I've never seen workspaces get used.
Sawfish was ridiculously slow, being pointlessly built around a scheme interpreter, so it had to go.
I did notice a few features that temporarily went missing in the transition, but mainly I just noticed that the GUI was no longer horribly slow. The missing features came back. I can't complain about a speed improvement that doesn't change much else.
Badness would be later releases. Focus-follows-mouse is now very difficult to enable, requiring something like a registry editor. Nautilus is now a requirement for having GNOME installed, and it always wants to start unless you resort to some pretty obscure hacking. Sound seems to require PulseAudio, which just adds latency and CPU overhead for the pointless gain of audio-enabled remote desktops. There isn't even a decent icon for an xterm anymore; icons that MY DESKTOP IS USING keep getting removed with each release.
Look back to the GNOME that shipped with Red Hat 7 through Red Hat 9. It was free of distracting crap. It didn't have anything on the desktop unless you count the panel (taskbar thing) or the solid-color background. Now we get TWO panels, because Mac-oriented and Windows-oriented developers formed a committee, and loads of random shit on a desktop that would be buried under windows if you were actually using the computer.
It happened with Windows too. Never minding the rotten core, Windows 95 was actually attractive and generally had a usable GUI. Then they added that evil IE-in-the-wallpaper thing with the crazy TV-like presentation, and gradients so that only half of a titlebar has good contrast. By the time XP shipped, the formerly nice-looking start menu featured a giant garish green glob for the button. They fixed the looks for Vista, but took until Windows to fix the behavior and get the core back into a less-rotten state.
I don't know if OS X has ever gotten truly nasty, but it certainly has had to endure pointless cosmetic changes. These nearly always detract from the original design. Designs start off clean and coherent, but the marketing need for VISIBLE change means that even the theoretical ideal GUI would get changed for the next release.
We're stuck paying made-in-the-USA prices. The second spender obviously gets made-in-China prices. The one nice thing here is that we're employing our own people; it must suck to be a country that has to buy from elsewhere.
We also tend to include non-military expenses in our "military" budget. This includes medical research, biofuel research, solar power research, self-driving car research, military healthcare and retirement benefits, and congressionally mandated bases that the military doesn't want.
I think it is kind of nice to have the military researching prosthetic limbs, brain injury, rehydratable blood substitutes, and bandages treated with chemicals that stop bleeding. It doesn't do anything nice for the budget of course.
If we cut back to Chinese funding levels, we won't get anywhere near the same results as they get. This is especially true if you count all the extras that we include in our "military" budget.
you want hospitals to turn away people who can't pay?
Of course. It's unreasonable that they provide services for free.
Hey, I want a free pony too. With wings. And it farts rainbows.
I'm far from a free market fundamentalist. I recognize that there are times when a free market is impossible, I'm paranoid about the instability that leads to monopoly and too-big-to-let-fail situations, and I strongly support taxing externalities like pollution. Ordinary non-emergency health care can and should be much more of a free market than it is today.
When you are simply unable to shop around for treatment, there is no free market. In this case, the government should pay. They should pay for heart attacks, cracked skulls, diabetic shock, and similar. They should not pay for slow-growing skin cancer, long-term drug supplies, heart valve replacement, and similar.
There is that problem, yes. It is reasonable for the government to cover the cost of treating everybody who is unable to shop around for low prices and think about payment. The free market is broken if you have a bullet in your heart; there is no time to compare prices or decide if medical care is not worthwhile.
For a broken arm, there is no reason you should get treatment without payment. It's not immediately life threatening, it doesn't impair your ability to phone doctors, and you can wait.
Really, your complaint should be against the unfunded mandate that hospitals (ones accepting medicare/medicade and having an emergency room) accept all people without regard to past debt and without the ability to deduct unpaid bills from judgements against the hospital.
If I choose to buy insurance, I'm choosing to gamble. I may "win" by getting expensive care provided to me, or "lose" by staying healthy and getting nothing.
If I'm forced to buy insurance (private or government) then I'm being forced to gamble. My choice has been taken from me. Maybe I want to gamble, and maybe I don't, but taking away the choice is not OK.
I don't feel right taking your choice from you. Please don't take mine from me.
fox news, that incenses the poor and middle class to actually fight against their own interests
You don't understand these people.
OK, an analogy of sorts: I don't shoplift. It's against my interest to not shoplift. Why then, do I not shoplift? I have this feeling that taking stuff from other people is wrong. Yes, I know, I'm being stupid and I should just do what is in my best interest. I also get really pissed off when other people shoplift, even if I'm not the shopkeeper and even if I don't see it happen. Perhaps you feel differently?
When the government takes money from other people to supply my healthcare, I get the same feeling. It's like shoplifting. It's in my interest, but it is wrong.
Yeah, we see you as morally corrupt.
Not understanding the intricacies doesn't make it "faith".
It's faith to you if you accept it without understanding it. To all people, the vast majority of science is "known" by faith.
This is why so many people persist in accepting the magic man in the sky. To them, it's not any less believable than some science that they couldn't possibly understand.
I can be attentive to things that stress me out or even terrify me. Don't conclude that I'm having a pleasurable experience.
Worse yet, a pleasurable experience isn't necessarily good. Crack cocaine is pleasurable, but is it good?
Reading between the lines, I'm seeing TV with extra-horrible enhanced addictiveness. No thanks.
Engineers solve problems and take orders.
The problem given: maximize the return, given that big profits can be kept (salary, stock options, and bonuses) while big losses can be eliminated via bankruptcy or bailout.
Engineers are mighty good at optimizing that problem. :-(
Noooooo!!!
Do you want to make healthcare more expensive? Are you trying to keep us paying for the boomers for an extra decade or two?
We'd save quite a bit if we went the other way. Health care was perfectly fine in 1985. We could go back to that, except for those few advances that are both better AND cheaper.
We could even go back more. Health care got to be pretty decent as soon as they figured out that surgeons should wash their hands and stop taking some kind of twisted pride in wearing a shirt smeared with pus.
Because we are all already descended from people who are programmed by genetics and conditioned by experience to have as many children as possible. Yet, the birthrate drops.
...to have as many children as possible in an environment that no longer exists in the First World. We're programmed for an environment in which sex==reproduction. The birthrate drops because we are not yet well adapted to the new environment.
We do things that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective (use of birth control) because we're like fish out of water. As a group, we haven't adapted yet. Some individuals are clearly better adapted than others though, and they are very strongly favored by natural selection.
You're looking for evidence on a timescale that is too short. I suppose that very careful statistics might just barely be able to show something, but it wouldn't be easy with so few generations. The only thing obvious is the short-term drop in birthrate caused by change in our environment. You're seeing the selection occur, and then deciding that this is some permanent result on an unchanging gene pool.
What you're doing is like noticing a billion years ago that creatures are getting killed by increasing oxygen levels, assuming this will always be the case, and ignoring those few individuals that tolerate and even benefit from oxygen. The gene pool is never static.
You think that birth rate drop is forever? Why?
Given the CURRENT gene pool, sure, those conditions make the birth rate (the AVERAGE fertility) drop.
If some people are less affected by those conditions, eventually their offspring will dominate. Such people exist.
The currently typical genetic programming has the implicit assumption that sexual desire is the same thing as a desire to have kids. This isn't true, but the distinction didn't matter in ancient times. Our environment has changed drastically, by our own doing, and we will adapt to it. Typical genetic programming of future humans will be more directly oriented toward having children.
Oddly, the First World will experience the resulting population boom before the Third World will. This is because the First World already has a head start on natural selection in favor of behaviors that defeat birth control.
I don't think you were 18 or even 13 when you learned about the concept. I was 6 to 9 years old when I was discussing them with my classmates and looking at porn.
The law that makes Facebook restrict age and ultimately makes kids lie is idiotic. It is one of the many crappy laws passed back when normal non-nerd people were terrified of the internet.
Changes are *already* noticeable - in areas where the conditions I mention hold, birth rates are dropping. Evolution is irrelevant here, because our genes do not blindly override other pressures.
Wrong change. You're not considering the gene pool.
The dropping birthrate shows a *lack* of noticable change in the gene pool. Most people act no different than people of half a century ago when educated and offered birth control: they do not make many offspring.
Once the gene pool changes to a noticable extent, those conditions will no longer matter. Essentially everybody will descend from those few women of today who decided either to avoid education or to pop out a dozen kids despite education. It simply won't matter if a woman has education, rights, birth control, or whatever -- she will produce many kids.
My guess is that things will be noticable 200 to 500 years from now. (very fast for evolution) Even countries like Japan and Russia will grow like mad, ultimately stopped only by mortality.
My ideal is that health care goes to desirable people, and I get to choose who is desirable.
Money is a very crude approximation of that. It beats the near-random results of a waiting list.
People with money tend to be smarter, harder working, more rational, better at planning ahead, less violent, etc. -- all traits that I think are worthy.
An alternate crude approximation could be an IQ test. Since health care requires money though, we might as well use money to determine desirability.
If a service can't keep up with demand, "wait your turn" is equivalent to "go away". The waiting list grows without bound, except that people die on the waiting list.
Somebody making triage decisions is equivalent to a Death Panel whenever the demand truly (not just this moment) exceeds supply.
See my reply to the comment below.
After many generations, those anomalies will become the norm. You can't beat evolution in the long term, even if you are human.
I take it you don't believe in evolution, or you have the crazy idea that somehow we humans can escape it. The proportion of people with DNA to make them breed like mad is increasing exponentially.
In the space of a couple generations, sure, the birthrate will drop. You haven't given evolution much of a chance. The selection pressure of birth control is enormous, so fast changes are to be expected, but not THAT fast. We've only had reliable birth control for half a century, which is just 2 to 4 generations. Changes might be noticable after 10 or so.
I suspect the entire corn plant is edible. Seeing as most of us need more fiber and less sugar/starch, the leaves may well be the better part to eat.
All of a broccoli plant is edible. All of a carrot or beet plant is edible, both leaves and root. Grape leaves, banana leaves, sweet potato leaves...
If I don't eat the whole plant, am I wasting food?
If I pick the insects out of my vegetables, am I wasting food? The insects are high in protein. How about a blood-filled mosquito that I swat?
If I don't eat the bones of my chicken or the shell of my egg, am I wasting food? How about eyeballs and anuses?
If I refuse to chow down when my mom dies, am I wasting food?
If I throw away roses when they get old and wilted, am I wasting food?
If I ignore the jellyfish and seaweed at the beach, am I wasting food?
In this supposedly non-growing population of richer people, not everybody will have 2 kids. Some will have none, and some will have a dozen.
If family size is even slightly inheritable, natural selection takes care of the rest. Let's consider why people might have huge families.
The mothering instinct is a big reason. It's clearly way stronger in some people than in others. It's entirely reasonable that this is an inheritable brain trait.
Religion is another reason. The inheritable thing here is spirituality, magic thinking, and so on. The choice of religion itself is subject to some sort of "meme inheritance", with choices that demand followers to "go forth and multiply" being more successful.
Stupidity is certainly inheritable. If you can't manage to properly use birth control...
See where this goes? Natural selection can trivially defeat birth control. All creatures naturally are in a state of squalor, barely able to survive. Consider yourself fortunate to live during an anomaly for your species.
I think that people who say this are interested in changing from universal suffrage to "some significant portion of them". The same sort of people who spout this sort of stuff will often be heard to say that things were better when only those who owned land could vote. That is the presupposition hidden in this meme--disenfranchisement. Since we're quickly moving to a society where the minorities are a majority and where only the bankers and a few rich (white) people own land, this is simply advocating a new form of apartheid through the back door.
How is it good that our government is chosen by people who are unable to comprehend things like economics? We'd be way better off if votes were multiplied by IQ squared. Right now, the pretty face with nice ads (funded by special interest group bribes called campaign contributions) wins.
For those of you who find liberal or Democrat a dirty word, be aware that college students can guess party affiliation from a head shot 80% of the time.
There is no party affiliation after a head shot, but I suppose splattered brains is evidence that the person probably thought republicans were the lesser evil. If the head shot doesn't expose any brain matter, then you can assume the person did actually like one of the parties.
That means that liberal and conservative reflect basic personality traits, and it takes all kinds.
No, it doesn't take all kinds. Both sides are horrified to be stuck sharing the same planet.
In modernized countries, these problems are completely insignificant for spreading HIV. I'll grant that it's more likely than death by meteorite.
Gee, it's the same as when you join any decent-sized corporation. I'm not seeing a difference.
Joining a start-up, or even founding one, rarely works out better. Normally it's worse. At the end, your paycheck goes missing.
Your IPO dreams are like the dreams of a high school kid who wants to be a movie star, pop star, or sports star. In theory it could happen. You could also win the lottery. Are you going to grow old chasing start-up hopes, or are you going to do the rational thing?