Please note that most real leaps in technology are only available to the fabulously wealthy at first.
Just look at airplanes. The first commercial flights were really expensive and only an exotic diversion for the rich. Now, I can fly across this country and back again for a couple of hundred bucks.
Cars were quite expensive until the Model T revolutionized the manufacture and made them cheap enough for everyone.
Entry level computers were multi-thousand dollar machines as recent as 5-10 years ago and now you can have a new machine every year for under $1 a day.
The only way that "affordable for the average person" arrives is to go through a phase of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" first.
This being Slashdot, I explicitely avoided any superlative comparison when describing the failure of those to whom I've posed the challenge. Rather, I stated that "many" have "difficulty".
You, of course, being a Slashdotter, apparently read it as "all" of them finding it "impossible" to find a single scenario which might meet my criteria. As such, you posed a single scenario, intended to invalidate the superlative statement you believe I made.
In addition, as only about 2% of people becoming parents are adoptions and I've not had this conversation with more than 50 people, it shouldn't be surprising that your hand-picked scenario hasn't applied to a single one of those situations.
Incidentally, when pushed hard by someone who appears unrelenting, I, indeed, point to adoption. If, for some reason, I regret my decision, I will pursue adoption.
First, I only pose this challenge to those who feel it necessary to not just question my decision but to INSIST that I'm wrong, going to change my mind or wickedly selfish for not having children. Given that context, especially the accusation that remaining childless is ultimately selfish, the challenge stands as far as I'm concerned. While I stated that the desire to have children is selfish, I didn't say (or at least didn't mean to) that selfishness was a bad thing.
Personally, I think both situtations are driven by the selfish nature of pretty much everyone and that these forms of selfishness are morally neutral. The challenge is posed, not to paint having children as the MORE selfish decision or to malign that decision, but rather to point out that both are driven by selfishness (and as such, insisting that I have some higher mandate to breed should cease).
1. In the absence of a reason why I SHOULD have kids, I don't think it's a good idea. For some reason, in this area, the decision which results in another human being in your family is seen as the default and, rather than THAT decision being the one requiring justification, inaction is the decision that requires justification.
2. In almost all cases with people who say they want or wanted kids, they've imagined themselves as parents and enjoyed the fantasy. Not me and not my wife. By my age, my parents were actually DONE having 3 kids. Yet, I still have no desire. I don't have dreams of myself as a parent, etc.
3. Probably the most important for me is that I'm currently happy with my life and, anything I add to it should be something I'm reasonably sure will make my life happier. Given the huge numbers of miserable parents I know, the numbers aren't in my favor for something I don't really want anyway.
Tell you what. When world populations fall back to where they were 200 years ago, I'll take one for the team and have a couple of kids. Let me know when that happens.
By having checks and balances with each branch able to step in and correct the other, we can keep things relatively in line. Not that things like PATRIOT don't get through, but *without* the checks and balances, there's a pretty good chance we'd see a lot more and a lot worse than that.
I also didn't specify, but my challenge to the interrogation came from numerous comments that people not only thought I was doing the wrong thing, but that my (and my wife's) decision to enjoy our life together was wickedly selfish. This led me to ask, if NOT having kids is selfish (as asserted by my challengers), and that's a bad thing, while having kids is a good thing, do these people think that having kids is selfless? That questioning led to my little experiment.
I'm definitely not criticizing anyone for thoughtfully becoming a parent. I agree with your general approach. If, by some failure of modern medicine, we do end up with a child, I will not hesitate to love that child, provide for and parent that child.
I am childless by choice and have always puzzled at statements that having a child is a selfless act (not to pick on you directly, but you did mention selfishness in your post). The reason is this. A few years ago, I started challenging those who insisted that I should have children (and they do. at great length.) to give me the reasons THEY had children. However, in those reasons, they need to avoid using the first person. No "I", "me", "us", etc. MANY parents have a really hard time coming up with any.
While taking care of the child once it arrives may be selfless, the reasons for choosing to have them in the first place are almost always centered around the parent rather than the child.
My wife's grandfather conistently says that he NEVER would have retired at 65 if he thought he'd still be alive at 86.
That problem hasn't been adjusted for in Social Security or society in general. When he and my grandfather were young and SS was just starting up and the retirement age was set, the average person didn't even make it to 65. As such, it wasn't really designed to pay out that much. The arbitrary retirement age of 65 hasn't caught up with the reality that people live longer than that now.
I didn't follow up on my original intent on that post. The project in the article is specific to Java, etc. Richer client widgets with simple declaritive syntax like HTC provides would make generating those interfaces easy in ANY language. The client and server can be agnostic to how the other is implemented.
After all, for as much as people try to dress it up, building stuff on the web is basically text requests (http get and post) and data response (html and other files). If you funnel everything through HTTP and HTML, it shouldn't matter what's on each end.
If you're looking for basic workstations, at under $300, upgrading isn't even on my radar. I'll just shift the machine, as is, to a less demanding task when it isn't cutting it any more. The things that workstations DO need upgraded on occasion: RAM and hard disk space, are just as replaceable on a Dell as anything else. CPU's are hardly worth upgrading on machines as, for most purposes, any bump is either not worth it (no perceivable change) or cost enough that you might as well drop another $300-500 and move the slower machine into another role.
I haven't needed a better video card than what came with the workstation EVER. I don't play games on my machines, I work with them and the default hardware in the categories of components that most folks upgrade do the job fine out of the box.
There are already several comments about how many round trips this uses even for changes in widgets, something I don't think should take a form post to do.
I've been working with HTML Components/Behaviors to build elaborate interface widgets for my current project. By rolling up a bunch of code, complete widgets like drop down menu's can be put into place with a single tag.
I'd avoided them in the past because they were IE only, but http://dean.edwards.name/my/behaviors/ (the same guy who did the IE7 compatibility stuff) has made it so the same component can work on Mozilla as well. As such, I've been looking for widget sets that can be used to build richer components.
For example, I've got an HTML behavior for text boxes that adds an attribute of "validationrule". That behavior invokes the appropriate rule when the text box's onchange event is fired and warns the user (by invoking my "message" component's display_message() method) if the contents don't validate according to the rule.
Does anyone know of a resource for things like this? Richer client side widgets, possibly implemented as HTC/RBL components?
A little perspective on the Bush plan (I'm not defending the Kerry plan. I currently think that this entire country's "plans" for things like this are a joke.)
To compare that 1.2 billion (over 5 years) for hydrogen to the investment in a moon launch is laughable. The moon launch in 1969 cost over 100 billion in current dollars. The *totality* of financial commitment represented in this year's portion of that 1.2 billion dollars will be spent on our military efforts in Afghanistan during the next 7 DAYS.
In that same 5 years (using 2005's budget as a multiplier), the US will spend 9630 *billion* dollars.
If you make $50,000, that investment is equivilent to investing ~$625 this year, which incidentally is half of what most folks spend on lunch at work in a year.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'd hardly call lunch every other working day a large investment in something.
I think I probably downloaded the exact same stuff you did during that time. Unfortunately, a lightning strike took out both the hard drive I had it on and the backup hard drive and now I don't have any of it.
When Emusic.com had unlimited MP3's for something like $14.99 a month and I was a subscriber for a couple of years. Then they "relaunched" with monthly limits and I jumped ship. I was willing to try new music when there wasn't a limit, but as soon as there was a ceiling, I stopped experimenting with the music in their catalog and dropped the service.
Now, they're "relaunching" again with what looks like a smaller catalog, the same monthly restrictions, etc. I'm trying to see how this is better. Most likely an attempt to appear as a "new" alternative to iTunes, et al when in fact they've been there all along and are actually on a downward spiral.
Exactly. I find it strange that a general public who wasn't willing to pony up $2000 for 50" rear projection TV's which we've had a while, is expected to fall all over themselves to pay $5000 for 40" LCD Tv's. Or people who've gotten used to $300 27" CRT TV's are suddently supposed to be excited about paying $800 for a 19" LCD widescreen?
I've used O.M. Jenkins as a pen name, company name (O.M. Jenkins, LLC) and server name at omjenkins.com for quite a while. Almost no one gets the joke.
Right. I needed the SSH access. However, even as slow as GPRS is, the fact that it works pretty much *everywhere* I might want access. Plus, since it's a pretax business expense for me, it's pretty cheap for the benefit it provides. And, it's the only access I can get that goes beyond a handful of restaurants, Starbucks and the airport, none of which are places I spend much time.
A couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd give hooking my laptop up to GPRS access would be a worthwhile project (as my house is for sale and I keep getting kicked out for hours at a time for showing) so I could access email, etc. from anywhere. Tmobile offers unlimited GPRS for $20/month if you already have phone service with them. They try to steer you to an expensive ($200-300) PCMCIA card like the one in the story. However, if you have a bluetooth phone (like the Sony Ericsson T610 that they are giving away in the US) and a bluetooth enabled laptop, you already have the hardware you need. On WindowsXP, I didn't even need any software other than the stuff that came with my bluetooth dongle.
After pairing the devices and getting my TMobile account set up for the access, I connected to the phone through the bluetooth devices, selected the dialup networking "service" the phone provides, using "*99#" as the number with no username or password and a few seconds later, I was connected. That's it.
It's not fast, but neither are half of the WiFi hotspots I've used (both pay and free), and many of those don't work at all. With GPRS, it doesn't matter if the restauranteur doesn't have their WiFi connected properly, I can still work while strangers stomp through my house.
And done so many times that people aren't even just beating a dead horse. Rather, the horse rotted away ages ago and they're now just beating the idea and ghost of a dead horse.
Yeah. I've been telling my wife all about the elementary school I went to. The one with the 16 foot ceilings in the classrooms and the 20 foot basketball rims. For some reason she thinks my memory may be exaggerating the details.
As a general rule, anyone who needs to steal money to gamble isn't on a winning streak. If won $200 in our $100 stakes game last week and I'm sure not going to need to dip anywhere other than my winnnings to get the $100 buyin the next time we play. However, the guy who gets cleaned out has to find $100 from scratch. If you get cleaned out too often, you either quit playing (if you don't have a compulsive personality) or you seek out other sources of money.
If you can actually consistently turn $1 into $1.50 in a night's playing, you don't need to steal to play. Heck, if it's consistent enough, you could (and this would require some REAL confidence in your game) get cash advances from your credit card and bootstrap your way to much more money. Unfortunately, many gambling addictions lie down this path as well as many bankruptcies as people *think* they win more consistently than they really do.
Poker is different from pretty much every other game in a casino. The casino makes a straight commission in poker. Most of the money transferred is between players. Therefore there is no "house advantage".
With all of the people on this site who railed for years against Windows as a complete OS, instead calling it a GUI shell over DOS, I find it amusing that A9.com gets called, over and over again, a search engine when it's just a wrapper for Google, ads and all.
I haven't had a battery go dead in one yet. Granted, I haven't had the same one for longer than a year, but physically, the display is pretty much what a digital watch would be. There's no backlight, etc., just a string of numbers and a little countdown meter. Internally, it's doing more calculations than a watch does, but we're still talking about a really small electrical draw.
Incidentally, there's an expiration date on the back of these things (I just thought to check). My current fob has an expiration date in Dec of 2007. I think that's a pretty good duration and it's more likely the thing will get destroyed by being dropped on the pavement, lost, scratched beyond usability, etc. in over 3 years of use on a keychain.
Slashdot Mirror
Please note that most real leaps in technology are only available to the fabulously wealthy at first.
Just look at airplanes. The first commercial flights were really expensive and only an exotic diversion for the rich. Now, I can fly across this country and back again for a couple of hundred bucks.
Cars were quite expensive until the Model T revolutionized the manufacture and made them cheap enough for everyone.
Entry level computers were multi-thousand dollar machines as recent as 5-10 years ago and now you can have a new machine every year for under $1 a day.
The only way that "affordable for the average person" arrives is to go through a phase of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" first.
This being Slashdot, I explicitely avoided any superlative comparison when describing the failure of those to whom I've posed the challenge. Rather, I stated that "many" have "difficulty".
You, of course, being a Slashdotter, apparently read it as "all" of them finding it "impossible" to find a single scenario which might meet my criteria. As such, you posed a single scenario, intended to invalidate the superlative statement you believe I made.
In addition, as only about 2% of people becoming parents are adoptions and I've not had this conversation with more than 50 people, it shouldn't be surprising that your hand-picked scenario hasn't applied to a single one of those situations.
Incidentally, when pushed hard by someone who appears unrelenting, I, indeed, point to adoption. If, for some reason, I regret my decision, I will pursue adoption.
First, I only pose this challenge to those who feel it necessary to not just question my decision but to INSIST that I'm wrong, going to change my mind or wickedly selfish for not having children. Given that context, especially the accusation that remaining childless is ultimately selfish, the challenge stands as far as I'm concerned. While I stated that the desire to have children is selfish, I didn't say (or at least didn't mean to) that selfishness was a bad thing.
Personally, I think both situtations are driven by the selfish nature of pretty much everyone and that these forms of selfishness are morally neutral. The challenge is posed, not to paint having children as the MORE selfish decision or to malign that decision, but rather to point out that both are driven by selfishness (and as such, insisting that I have some higher mandate to breed should cease).
For me, it's several things.
1. In the absence of a reason why I SHOULD have kids, I don't think it's a good idea. For some reason, in this area, the decision which results in another human being in your family is seen as the default and, rather than THAT decision being the one requiring justification, inaction is the decision that requires justification.
2. In almost all cases with people who say they want or wanted kids, they've imagined themselves as parents and enjoyed the fantasy. Not me and not my wife. By my age, my parents were actually DONE having 3 kids. Yet, I still have no desire. I don't have dreams of myself as a parent, etc.
3. Probably the most important for me is that I'm currently happy with my life and, anything I add to it should be something I'm reasonably sure will make my life happier. Given the huge numbers of miserable parents I know, the numbers aren't in my favor for something I don't really want anyway.
Tell you what. When world populations fall back to where they were 200 years ago, I'll take one for the team and have a couple of kids. Let me know when that happens.
It's not a bug. It's a feature.
By having checks and balances with each branch able to step in and correct the other, we can keep things relatively in line. Not that things like PATRIOT don't get through, but *without* the checks and balances, there's a pretty good chance we'd see a lot more and a lot worse than that.
I also didn't specify, but my challenge to the interrogation came from numerous comments that people not only thought I was doing the wrong thing, but that my (and my wife's) decision to enjoy our life together was wickedly selfish. This led me to ask, if NOT having kids is selfish (as asserted by my challengers), and that's a bad thing, while having kids is a good thing, do these people think that having kids is selfless? That questioning led to my little experiment.
I'm definitely not criticizing anyone for thoughtfully becoming a parent. I agree with your general approach. If, by some failure of modern medicine, we do end up with a child, I will not hesitate to love that child, provide for and parent that child.
I am childless by choice and have always puzzled at statements that having a child is a selfless act (not to pick on you directly, but you did mention selfishness in your post). The reason is this. A few years ago, I started challenging those who insisted that I should have children (and they do. at great length.) to give me the reasons THEY had children. However, in those reasons, they need to avoid using the first person. No "I", "me", "us", etc. MANY parents have a really hard time coming up with any.
While taking care of the child once it arrives may be selfless, the reasons for choosing to have them in the first place are almost always centered around the parent rather than the child.
My wife's grandfather conistently says that he NEVER would have retired at 65 if he thought he'd still be alive at 86.
That problem hasn't been adjusted for in Social Security or society in general. When he and my grandfather were young and SS was just starting up and the retirement age was set, the average person didn't even make it to 65. As such, it wasn't really designed to pay out that much. The arbitrary retirement age of 65 hasn't caught up with the reality that people live longer than that now.
I didn't follow up on my original intent on that post. The project in the article is specific to Java, etc. Richer client widgets with simple declaritive syntax like HTC provides would make generating those interfaces easy in ANY language. The client and server can be agnostic to how the other is implemented.
After all, for as much as people try to dress it up, building stuff on the web is basically text requests (http get and post) and data response (html and other files). If you funnel everything through HTTP and HTML, it shouldn't matter what's on each end.
If you're looking for basic workstations, at under $300, upgrading isn't even on my radar. I'll just shift the machine, as is, to a less demanding task when it isn't cutting it any more. The things that workstations DO need upgraded on occasion: RAM and hard disk space, are just as replaceable on a Dell as anything else. CPU's are hardly worth upgrading on machines as, for most purposes, any bump is either not worth it (no perceivable change) or cost enough that you might as well drop another $300-500 and move the slower machine into another role.
I haven't needed a better video card than what came with the workstation EVER. I don't play games on my machines, I work with them and the default hardware in the categories of components that most folks upgrade do the job fine out of the box.
There are already several comments about how many round trips this uses even for changes in widgets, something I don't think should take a form post to do.
I've been working with HTML Components/Behaviors to build elaborate interface widgets for my current project. By rolling up a bunch of code, complete widgets like drop down menu's can be put into place with a single tag.
I'd avoided them in the past because they were IE only, but http://dean.edwards.name/my/behaviors/ (the same guy who did the IE7 compatibility stuff) has made it so the same component can work on Mozilla as well. As such, I've been looking for widget sets that can be used to build richer components.
For example, I've got an HTML behavior for text boxes that adds an attribute of "validationrule". That behavior invokes the appropriate rule when the text box's onchange event is fired and warns the user (by invoking my "message" component's display_message() method) if the contents don't validate according to the rule.
Does anyone know of a resource for things like this? Richer client side widgets, possibly implemented as HTC/RBL components?
A little perspective on the Bush plan (I'm not defending the Kerry plan. I currently think that this entire country's "plans" for things like this are a joke.)
To compare that 1.2 billion (over 5 years) for hydrogen to the investment in a moon launch is laughable. The moon launch in 1969 cost over 100 billion in current dollars. The *totality* of financial commitment represented in this year's portion of that 1.2 billion dollars will be spent on our military efforts in Afghanistan during the next 7 DAYS.
In that same 5 years (using 2005's budget as a multiplier), the US will spend 9630 *billion* dollars.
If you make $50,000, that investment is equivilent to investing ~$625 this year, which incidentally is half of what most folks spend on lunch at work in a year.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'd hardly call lunch every other working day a large investment in something.
I think I probably downloaded the exact same stuff you did during that time. Unfortunately, a lightning strike took out both the hard drive I had it on and the backup hard drive and now I don't have any of it.
When Emusic.com had unlimited MP3's for something like $14.99 a month and I was a subscriber for a couple of years. Then they "relaunched" with monthly limits and I jumped ship. I was willing to try new music when there wasn't a limit, but as soon as there was a ceiling, I stopped experimenting with the music in their catalog and dropped the service.
Now, they're "relaunching" again with what looks like a smaller catalog, the same monthly restrictions, etc. I'm trying to see how this is better. Most likely an attempt to appear as a "new" alternative to iTunes, et al when in fact they've been there all along and are actually on a downward spiral.
Exactly. I find it strange that a general public who wasn't willing to pony up $2000 for 50" rear projection TV's which we've had a while, is expected to fall all over themselves to pay $5000 for 40" LCD Tv's. Or people who've gotten used to $300 27" CRT TV's are suddently supposed to be excited about paying $800 for a 19" LCD widescreen?
I've used O.M. Jenkins as a pen name, company name (O.M. Jenkins, LLC) and server name at omjenkins.com for quite a while. Almost no one gets the joke.
Right. I needed the SSH access. However, even as slow as GPRS is, the fact that it works pretty much *everywhere* I might want access. Plus, since it's a pretax business expense for me, it's pretty cheap for the benefit it provides. And, it's the only access I can get that goes beyond a handful of restaurants, Starbucks and the airport, none of which are places I spend much time.
A couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd give hooking my laptop up to GPRS access would be a worthwhile project (as my house is for sale and I keep getting kicked out for hours at a time for showing) so I could access email, etc. from anywhere. Tmobile offers unlimited GPRS for $20/month if you already have phone service with them. They try to steer you to an expensive ($200-300) PCMCIA card like the one in the story. However, if you have a bluetooth phone (like the Sony Ericsson T610 that they are giving away in the US) and a bluetooth enabled laptop, you already have the hardware you need. On WindowsXP, I didn't even need any software other than the stuff that came with my bluetooth dongle.
After pairing the devices and getting my TMobile account set up for the access, I connected to the phone through the bluetooth devices, selected the dialup networking "service" the phone provides, using "*99#" as the number with no username or password and a few seconds later, I was connected. That's it.
It's not fast, but neither are half of the WiFi hotspots I've used (both pay and free), and many of those don't work at all. With GPRS, it doesn't matter if the restauranteur doesn't have their WiFi connected properly, I can still work while strangers stomp through my house.
And done so many times that people aren't even just beating a dead horse. Rather, the horse rotted away ages ago and they're now just beating the idea and ghost of a dead horse.
"At least that's how I remember it... "
Yeah. I've been telling my wife all about the elementary school I went to. The one with the 16 foot ceilings in the classrooms and the 20 foot basketball rims. For some reason she thinks my memory may be exaggerating the details.
As a general rule, anyone who needs to steal money to gamble isn't on a winning streak. If won $200 in our $100 stakes game last week and I'm sure not going to need to dip anywhere other than my winnnings to get the $100 buyin the next time we play. However, the guy who gets cleaned out has to find $100 from scratch. If you get cleaned out too often, you either quit playing (if you don't have a compulsive personality) or you seek out other sources of money.
If you can actually consistently turn $1 into $1.50 in a night's playing, you don't need to steal to play. Heck, if it's consistent enough, you could (and this would require some REAL confidence in your game) get cash advances from your credit card and bootstrap your way to much more money. Unfortunately, many gambling addictions lie down this path as well as many bankruptcies as people *think* they win more consistently than they really do.
Poker is different from pretty much every other game in a casino. The casino makes a straight commission in poker. Most of the money transferred is between players. Therefore there is no "house advantage".
With all of the people on this site who railed for years against Windows as a complete OS, instead calling it a GUI shell over DOS, I find it amusing that A9.com gets called, over and over again, a search engine when it's just a wrapper for Google, ads and all.
I haven't had a battery go dead in one yet. Granted, I haven't had the same one for longer than a year, but physically, the display is pretty much what a digital watch would be. There's no backlight, etc., just a string of numbers and a little countdown meter. Internally, it's doing more calculations than a watch does, but we're still talking about a really small electrical draw.
Incidentally, there's an expiration date on the back of these things (I just thought to check). My current fob has an expiration date in Dec of 2007. I think that's a pretty good duration and it's more likely the thing will get destroyed by being dropped on the pavement, lost, scratched beyond usability, etc. in over 3 years of use on a keychain.