Yes, computers are starting to return to the normal world from Moore's bizarro-universe where unbounded exponential growth is possible.
[citation needed]. While CPUs a few years old are generally fast enough to run most interactive tasks nearly as fast as new CPUs, the exponential growth of instruction throughput or transistor count doesn't seem to be slowing at all. Consider the "IPS/Hz" column in this table. Not only are modern CPUs much faster than older ones, but they're much faster in proportion to their clock speed. Compare the Intel Core i7 Extreme 965EE at 3.2GHz (76KMIPS) versus a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.2GHz (10KMIPS). A single i7 core is approximately twice as fast as a single P4 core, so the new one is much faster even if you ignore that you get 4 of them. For bonus points, calculate MIPS per dollar at release date.
Processing power is still accelerating at the same rate. The difference is that current models are "good enough" for most things for most people today. Technology shows no signs of standing still just for that, though.
I'd like to ask why companies are allowed to buy other companies
First, why would you want to prevent that? If your company is doing poorly, you have the option of selling it to someone else who can hopefully make changes that would keep the doors open. Or maybe you want to retire and would like to use the sale to finance your later years, or at least to get out from the thing so you can rest a little. In either case, the alternative to selling is going out of business. That doesn't benefit anyone, from the owners to the employees to the customers.
Second, how could you prevent that? If you think of a company in terms of being a collection of assets, how could you possibly craft a law that would prevent my company from buying the assets of another? Suppose I want to buy Foo, Inc. and they want to sell to me. How would you phrase the code that would keep me from buying their building, their equipment, their inventory, and their customer list, then hiring away every single employee?
What you describe is impossible, and you wouldn't want to do it anyway.
Do you know what I meant to do? Did I intend to move the second if within the first, or did I intend for that second expression in the first if statement to execute in the second if statement? Answer: you have no idea, because the lack of bracing makes it impossible to determine where the blocks are supposed to start and end.
That's a perfect example of a solid theoretical concern that never, ever comes up in practice. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard a detailed explanation of a problem that would be very inconvenient - if it ever existed.
In reality, everyone I've ever turned on to Python complained for the first day, silently considered on the second day, and declared it the One True Way on the third day. Again, these things seem like they would be problems, but they never turn out to be.
The idea that we own our thoughts and work, and they do not belong to 'the people'.
...right up to the point that we sell them to the freakin' government, which is, by definition, "the people". This greedy geezer wants to sell his work and keep profiting from it. I'm glad my plumber doesn't want a royalty every time I flush my toilet.
Scary, or perhaps stupid, or even ridiculous. This was commissioned by Congress and occupies space in a public park. It belongs to the United States, so we should be able to use images of it just as we do with the other public buildings and monuments we own.
And the Corps of Engineers should be able to take the damn thing to a safe place and blow it up. I'd rather see it destroyed than stand in mockery of the men it commemorates.
Popcorn kernels are a better candidate than ball bearings. I'm not saying ball bearings aren't a good choice but you'll find a lot of people have an aversion to finding them in something they're going to eat.
Option 1: a chunk of vegetable matter that is probably prone to getting some strain of mold or bacteria that I'd rather not ingest.
Option 2: a smooth hunk of the same metal that my dining implements are made of.
There are really people who'd prefer that their spices be in long-term contact with bits of food instead of sterilizable metal?
Oh, I agreed completely with your message that decent people lend skills and abilities to their neighbors. My point was just that there doesn't really seem to be a cap on the value of those exchanges. That ingrown toenail would've cost quite a bit, and I'd hate to think what I'd have to pay to get someone to haul off all that waste and dispose of it.
Applying this to the OP, who seemed to think he was so much smarter than his "drunk frat boy" neighbors: the neighborly (and smart) response would've been to offer his skills to help them. I'll bet he could've gotten more than $50 worth of assistance from them the next time he had some heavy furniture to move.
Your neighbors are your neighbors. You're supposed to talk to them, loan and borrow tools and knowledge (within reason. obviously you wouldn't do a free surgical consult).
My wife's a doctor and has done all sorts of free medical stuff for neighbors. When we had 104 bags of leaves to haul out of our yard one fall (yeah, we have a lot of trees), our next door neighbor showed up with a dumptruck and took them to his burn pit. Think the wife charged him when he needed to have an ingrown toenail removed?
Yeah, but it's chained much more lightly. Upgrading from IE7 to IE8+ or Firefox or Chrome or Safari is much easier than upgrading from IE6 to IE7. Once you've gotten over breaking backward compatibility, the options are a lot better.
Have you read the GPL? No you can't sue them for stuff under the GPL.
What? I can think of a lot of ways you could sue over GPLed software. For example, if I hire you to add a given feature to a GPLed program, pay you, then you fail to deliver, then you bet I can take you to court (and win). The dispute is not with the software, but with your failure to perform your contractual duties. The legal protection that the GPL offers is this: if I release software under the GPL, and some random stranger has problems with it, then they can't sue me because it didn't meet their needs. If that random stranger becomes a paid customer, then they most certainly can.
Same with the Debian support contractors mentioned here. If you pay them to ensure a given system meets specific performance and feature requirements, then they're legally obligated to meet those goals. They don't get to say "well, it was the fault of this GPLed library - so sorry!" and walk away. That's the risk that you're paying the contractors to assume.
A good example of homeopathic remedy to treat nausea and depressed appetite in chemotherapy patients and for relaxing optic muscles of glaucoma sufferers is good old fashioned marijuana.
It has nothing to do with politicians and everything to do with the fact that homeopathy is "watered down horseshit" by definition - the more watered down, the better. If it were merely diluted from full strength, then you could formulate a theory of action that was consistent with modern knowledge of chemistry. However, when it's diluted so that the odds of finding a single molecule of the "active ingredient" are 10^80-to-1 against, there's no point even investigating further. If homeopathy worked, it would invalidated all modern physics and chemistry. Since you and I are still alive and able to have this conversation over a network of computers, it can't work.
I have to wonder about this approach, if it falls into the category of seemingly random today, because we simply don't yet know how to predict the outcome, but maybe someone in a few years' time figures out the necessary principles to predict what the outcome will be?
Who cares if it does, as long as it's not the only entropy source used. At worst, if it emitted "1" every single time, it simply wouldn't add to the entropy of the system. There's nothing it could do to lessen the randomness collected from other sources.
The license grants you rights. If the license doesn't apply that means you don't have these rights anymore.
I think you're wrong, and apparently Bruce does, too. Re-read that:
The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole, must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be distributed under any other license. The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software.
In other words, the requirement to use that particular license is contingent on the font not being embedded in another document. In that case, the license explicitly revokes the prohibition against distributing the font under a different license of your choosing.
In other words, I can't re-license the font using, say, the GPL, unless I embed it first in a document. At that point, I am allowed to distribute it under the terms of the GPL from then on.
I think that's the interpretation that Bruce was exploring, and I think that's a perfectly legitimate way of reading the license - even if that's not what the license's authors originally intended.
Contracts can be a lot like code: it does what you say, not necessarily what you mean. Ambiguity is a bug in either case.
Flash's most popular feature for end users is that it allows them to watch videos embedded on a lot of websites. If HTML5 standardized on a single widely-supported codec, Flash's #1 reason for being would disappear overnight. Yeah, a few people would miss an online game or two, but those have nothing on the popularity of Youtube and other Flash-based video sites.
and the only real method the court has do to that is to impose punitive fines.
But if naked pictures are found - which seems pretty likely at this point - I suspect a few irate fathers would get a free pass from a jury (and probably the DA before that) for imposing their own justice.
Ability to specify proxy servers and prevent users from modifying them?
That's just stupid. Lesson one: you do not trust the clients. Lesson two: you do not trust the clients. Lesson three: review.
If you want everyone to use a proxy, set it up as the default configuration in the browser, then redirect all outbound port 80/443 connections from anything other than the proxy server itself back the proxy. The users can change their local settings (and you're on crack if you think they can't) but still get handled the way you want. This has the added benefit of supporting transient devices like laptops that you don't necessarily want to totally reconfigure every time they come into the building.
What you don't do, under any circumstances, is fall into the mindset that hey, you configured the policy so your job is forever done because policy reigns supreme!!1!one!
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Yes, computers are starting to return to the normal world from Moore's bizarro-universe where unbounded exponential growth is possible.
[citation needed]. While CPUs a few years old are generally fast enough to run most interactive tasks nearly as fast as new CPUs, the exponential growth of instruction throughput or transistor count doesn't seem to be slowing at all. Consider the "IPS/Hz" column in this table. Not only are modern CPUs much faster than older ones, but they're much faster in proportion to their clock speed. Compare the Intel Core i7 Extreme 965EE at 3.2GHz (76KMIPS) versus a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.2GHz (10KMIPS). A single i7 core is approximately twice as fast as a single P4 core, so the new one is much faster even if you ignore that you get 4 of them. For bonus points, calculate MIPS per dollar at release date.
Processing power is still accelerating at the same rate. The difference is that current models are "good enough" for most things for most people today. Technology shows no signs of standing still just for that, though.
I'd like to ask why companies are allowed to buy other companies
First, why would you want to prevent that? If your company is doing poorly, you have the option of selling it to someone else who can hopefully make changes that would keep the doors open. Or maybe you want to retire and would like to use the sale to finance your later years, or at least to get out from the thing so you can rest a little. In either case, the alternative to selling is going out of business. That doesn't benefit anyone, from the owners to the employees to the customers.
Second, how could you prevent that? If you think of a company in terms of being a collection of assets, how could you possibly craft a law that would prevent my company from buying the assets of another? Suppose I want to buy Foo, Inc. and they want to sell to me. How would you phrase the code that would keep me from buying their building, their equipment, their inventory, and their customer list, then hiring away every single employee?
What you describe is impossible, and you wouldn't want to do it anyway.
Do you know what I meant to do? Did I intend to move the second if within the first, or did I intend for that second expression in the first if statement to execute in the second if statement? Answer: you have no idea, because the lack of bracing makes it impossible to determine where the blocks are supposed to start and end.
That's a perfect example of a solid theoretical concern that never, ever comes up in practice. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard a detailed explanation of a problem that would be very inconvenient - if it ever existed.
In reality, everyone I've ever turned on to Python complained for the first day, silently considered on the second day, and declared it the One True Way on the third day. Again, these things seem like they would be problems, but they never turn out to be.
no editor can actually auto-indent Python properly
O RLY?
The idea that we own our thoughts and work, and they do not belong to 'the people'.
...right up to the point that we sell them to the freakin' government, which is, by definition, "the people". This greedy geezer wants to sell his work and keep profiting from it. I'm glad my plumber doesn't want a royalty every time I flush my toilet.
Scary, or perhaps stupid, or even ridiculous. This was commissioned by Congress and occupies space in a public park. It belongs to the United States, so we should be able to use images of it just as we do with the other public buildings and monuments we own.
And the Corps of Engineers should be able to take the damn thing to a safe place and blow it up. I'd rather see it destroyed than stand in mockery of the men it commemorates.
Popcorn kernels are a better candidate than ball bearings. I'm not saying ball bearings aren't a good choice but you'll find a lot of people have an aversion to finding them in something they're going to eat.
Option 1: a chunk of vegetable matter that is probably prone to getting some strain of mold or bacteria that I'd rather not ingest.
Option 2: a smooth hunk of the same metal that my dining implements are made of.
There are really people who'd prefer that their spices be in long-term contact with bits of food instead of sterilizable metal?
automate it with a shell script
Pfft. That's M-x make-initial-chicken (Emacs 22.1 and newer).
Why do we need Linux for the desktop?
Good question. I prefer FreeBSD on the desktop, and so do the folks at PC-BSD.
Oh, I agreed completely with your message that decent people lend skills and abilities to their neighbors. My point was just that there doesn't really seem to be a cap on the value of those exchanges. That ingrown toenail would've cost quite a bit, and I'd hate to think what I'd have to pay to get someone to haul off all that waste and dispose of it.
Applying this to the OP, who seemed to think he was so much smarter than his "drunk frat boy" neighbors: the neighborly (and smart) response would've been to offer his skills to help them. I'll bet he could've gotten more than $50 worth of assistance from them the next time he had some heavy furniture to move.
Your neighbors are your neighbors. You're supposed to talk to them, loan and borrow tools and knowledge (within reason. obviously you wouldn't do a free surgical consult).
My wife's a doctor and has done all sorts of free medical stuff for neighbors. When we had 104 bags of leaves to haul out of our yard one fall (yeah, we have a lot of trees), our next door neighbor showed up with a dumptruck and took them to his burn pit. Think the wife charged him when he needed to have an ingrown toenail removed?
That's what she said!
IE7 is almost as much of an albatross as IE6 was.
Yeah, but it's chained much more lightly. Upgrading from IE7 to IE8+ or Firefox or Chrome or Safari is much easier than upgrading from IE6 to IE7. Once you've gotten over breaking backward compatibility, the options are a lot better.
Have you read the GPL? No you can't sue them for stuff under the GPL.
What? I can think of a lot of ways you could sue over GPLed software. For example, if I hire you to add a given feature to a GPLed program, pay you, then you fail to deliver, then you bet I can take you to court (and win). The dispute is not with the software, but with your failure to perform your contractual duties. The legal protection that the GPL offers is this: if I release software under the GPL, and some random stranger has problems with it, then they can't sue me because it didn't meet their needs. If that random stranger becomes a paid customer, then they most certainly can.
Same with the Debian support contractors mentioned here. If you pay them to ensure a given system meets specific performance and feature requirements, then they're legally obligated to meet those goals. They don't get to say "well, it was the fault of this GPLed library - so sorry!" and walk away. That's the risk that you're paying the contractors to assume.
A good example of homeopathic remedy to treat nausea and depressed appetite in chemotherapy patients and for relaxing optic muscles of glaucoma sufferers is good old fashioned marijuana.
That's not homeopathy.
It has nothing to do with politicians and everything to do with the fact that homeopathy is "watered down horseshit" by definition - the more watered down, the better. If it were merely diluted from full strength, then you could formulate a theory of action that was consistent with modern knowledge of chemistry. However, when it's diluted so that the odds of finding a single molecule of the "active ingredient" are 10^80-to-1 against, there's no point even investigating further. If homeopathy worked, it would invalidated all modern physics and chemistry. Since you and I are still alive and able to have this conversation over a network of computers, it can't work.
When learning languages i completely missed out on Python, i learn't perl and php
...having skipped right past English.
I have to wonder about this approach, if it falls into the category of seemingly random today, because we simply don't yet know how to predict the outcome, but maybe someone in a few years' time figures out the necessary principles to predict what the outcome will be?
Who cares if it does, as long as it's not the only entropy source used. At worst, if it emitted "1" every single time, it simply wouldn't add to the entropy of the system. There's nothing it could do to lessen the randomness collected from other sources.
The license grants you rights. If the license doesn't apply that means you don't have these rights anymore.
I think you're wrong, and apparently Bruce does, too. Re-read that:
In other words, the requirement to use that particular license is contingent on the font not being embedded in another document. In that case, the license explicitly revokes the prohibition against distributing the font under a different license of your choosing.
In other words, I can't re-license the font using, say, the GPL, unless I embed it first in a document. At that point, I am allowed to distribute it under the terms of the GPL from then on.
I think that's the interpretation that Bruce was exploring, and I think that's a perfectly legitimate way of reading the license - even if that's not what the license's authors originally intended.
Contracts can be a lot like code: it does what you say, not necessarily what you mean. Ambiguity is a bug in either case.
including a font license that I swear allows you to convert the font to the public domain.
Which one is that? IANAL, but I wanna play "spot the contract bug", too.
and all I want is a phone to make and receive calls
"...and those damn kids off my lawn!"
Point of order: Flash is not a video codec
Being more pedantic: they didn't say it was.
Flash's most popular feature for end users is that it allows them to watch videos embedded on a lot of websites. If HTML5 standardized on a single widely-supported codec, Flash's #1 reason for being would disappear overnight. Yeah, a few people would miss an online game or two, but those have nothing on the popularity of Youtube and other Flash-based video sites.
Each $1,000 laptop is insured by parents, with $55/yr premium and $100 deductible.
So, a dad could beat a PA school admin to death with the laptop that was used to watch his daughter undress and only be out $155? Sweet deal.
and the only real method the court has do to that is to impose punitive fines.
But if naked pictures are found - which seems pretty likely at this point - I suspect a few irate fathers would get a free pass from a jury (and probably the DA before that) for imposing their own justice.
Ability to specify proxy servers and prevent users from modifying them?
That's just stupid. Lesson one: you do not trust the clients. Lesson two: you do not trust the clients. Lesson three: review.
If you want everyone to use a proxy, set it up as the default configuration in the browser, then redirect all outbound port 80/443 connections from anything other than the proxy server itself back the proxy. The users can change their local settings (and you're on crack if you think they can't) but still get handled the way you want. This has the added benefit of supporting transient devices like laptops that you don't necessarily want to totally reconfigure every time they come into the building.
What you don't do, under any circumstances, is fall into the mindset that hey, you configured the policy so your job is forever done because policy reigns supreme!!1!one!