I had a similar experience in Boston one year. I was on the 40th floor of One Boston Place, near city hall, and there was a pretty bad wind storm moving through. We get those from time to time... just a freak burst of 60 mph winds with little or no storm associated. It's rare, but it happens.
Anyway, the building was swaying and during the course of the day two things happened which I found amusing. First, we had one of those big green LED signs with news tickers scrolling over it. It was suspended from the ceiling by two cables and it was swinging back and forth dramatically. A co-worker had been looking at it somewhat queasily, and asked, "why is it moving so much?" In retrospect, she was looking for a comforting answer. I just thought about it for a second and gave her the most logical answer I could think of: "It's not." That took her a second to process and then she looked very unhappy.
The other thing that happened was kind of unnerving to me. I was sitting in my chair, working on some code, and I stood up to get something. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I tried to get up again, and bang, I was on the floor again. My inner ear had just given up, but I had no idea until I tried to stand. It was odd because I'd spent years around the ocean, and never got sea sick or even a touch nauseous, but in this building I was incapacitated for a short time... no other symptoms, just the complete lack of balance.
And keep in mind that (and I'm speaking as someone who grew up in a house that was literally 5 feet from the ocean in southeastern Mass) the impact of any hurricane or tropical whatnot on the Northeast is almost entirely determined by the state of the tide when it hits. If they're predicting it will make landfall during high tide, then that could be serious even if it were a tropical depression by the time it arrived.
If there was no fall, there was no need for redemption. If there was no need for redemption, there was no need for a savior. And without a savior, there is no Christianity.
Have you met any humans? There's plenty of need for redemption.
Why even bother with history, when you must admit it contains errors? Which part of History Books contain facts, and which doesn't?
If we manage to gain new information about history, we will change the history books to reflect this. I don't believe the same is true for the bible.
That's because it doesn't need to be updated. No one with half a brain thinks that a 2,000 year old book that's been translated into the ground has a whole lot of literal truth in it. On the other hand, it represents a philosophy and a mythology which are quite real, and which should not be cast aside because we sequenced the human genome.
According to Karen Armstrong's book "The Case For God", taking religious stories literally is a pretty new development. She reckons that right back into prehistory, people understood that creation myths were just that -- myths. Stories with a point; something to teach us about how to live our lives, but still just stories. This is why the stories were so malleable, or why the same culture could have more than one, contradictory, creation story on the go at once.
She reckons that was true of mainstream Christianity for most of its lifetime; literal readings being a 19th-20th century thing.
I think it really started when scientific thought in the late 17th century and into the 18th started to challenge the Church. That lead to a series of entrenchments from the Church where they felt that they had to defend the religion from these new questions. No longer were people asking, "why does the Sun rise," but, "why didn't religion tell us that the Sun rose because the Earth is rotating?"
Frankly, I think it was a mistake. Religion should never be in the business of trying to tell us what is. Rather it should seek to answer, why. That's a job that science is poorly suited to, and which religion is quite adept at.
I'm intrigued, how did they suggest you choose which should be taken as metaphors and as fact/instructions? Or did they indicate that all of the bible should be taken as a metaphor?
Why is that something that you would have to be told? Does it matter?
You're looking at the Bible as a history text. It's not. It's a guide book for a religious mythology, and as such it does not need to clarify metaphor and historical fact.
What you come away from the Bible with is the same thing you should come away from poetry with: a sense of what the text was meant to convey.
... they suddenly stand up and go "Eh, well, looks like we can't read Genesis the way we'd like."
Actually, that process has been underway for a long time now. The Catholics declared that evolution wasn't in conflict with Church doctrine years ago, and that debate was one that the Church had been having, internally, for decades.
Keep in mind that Christianity is an institution that is 2,000 years old, and has been roughly in at least one of its current forms for around 1,500 years. When you talk about "20 or 30 years" being a long time, you're working on a scale that Christianity simply doesn't work on.
While it's good they realise that the genetic evidence gives a good case against their religion,
It does no such thing. It gives a good case against Biblical literalisim, but that's a fairly new beast, and one could argue that it's really only a reaction to the scientific challenges of a mostly church-framed world view circa 1650 to now.
Even a thin layer of metaphor on top of Christian doctrine, such as the idea that the "clay" that Adam and Eve were molded out of was an ancestor species, would resolve the conflict. I'm not religious, but I'm enough of a fan of logic that I have to defend religion against such an absurd premise as the idea that it could be "disproved" by sequencing the human genome.
Evolution (or science in general) vs. religion is a false dichotomy. Evolution is a natural process like the Earth going around the Sun. The debate between Galileo and the Church didn't end Christianity and neither will the genome because, and this is a crucial point, the Christian creation myth pre-dates the Church (a Church, by the way, which has agreed a few years ago that there is no contradiction between Evolution and Christianity).
Actually, I'd say the police should review the output of the model and patrol the areas least likely to produce crime. On the assumption that smart criminals will use the same modeling to predict where police coverage will be decreased, this allows you to determine where to find the smart criminals. An excellent tool!
I think the take-away from this is that a new and heretofore unseen form of matter is one way to explain the phenomenon we call dark matter. There are probably many others, most of which are going to be based on the problem of scaling up the physics we can test to the size of the observable universe.
Dark matter is by no means dead, but phenomenon that take this long to explain typically turn out to have solutions which are complex enough to render most of the early assumptions moot.
to be so rich? it's investor money they were bidding with,
It's a mix of investor-provided cash from bond and stock offerings and liquid assets, I would imagine.
as such you'd like to read reasoning for that in quarterly reports, not bullshit about how they saved few tens of millions by their "fx hedging program" (no shit, they really think that's worthwhile info to spend couple of slides on and then just skip over the billion dollar stuff).
That's fairly substantial. Just because you don't want to hear about it, doesn't mean it's not important.
but did they even want to win the bids? did they have solid reasoning for the bids worth? did they even check what they were bidding on?
That's all been covered previously on Slashdot. This was a key strategic buy that was aimed at growing their patent warchest in order to survive patent challenges against technologies like Android (e.g. the Oracle/Java suit).
have you noticed how android is not actually letting fresh new players enter the phone market? niche production numbers aside, only the same old moto, samsung, lg, huawei, sony-e etc are in the game and they got their patents and licensing for the patents covered.
Uh... smartphones were the sole domain of 2 primary players and one "yeah, right," contender until Android came along. HTC and LG specifically had very little hope of producing a viable smartphone without Android. The problem is that the licensing for all of the non-OS technologies is crazy, so only the largest companies have any hope of surviving in the market, right now. This is not something Google has any control over.
I mean, they kind of did that with their bid of $3.14159 * 10^9 + 0i, right?
Just imagine what the accountants would have done if The Goog had tried to bid a non-trivial complex number.... probably just complained that they didn't have a column for "i" in their spreadsheet...:-)
These are Google accountants. After they finished determining that the quarter's numbers all lined up with Benford's law they would have complained that the complex number violated type safety constraints and thrown an exception.
Not really. Any time they display or send your content to another person, that's copyright infringement. So they need a license from you, it needs to be worldwide (since anyone can access the website), you WANT it to be non-exclusive, they don't intend to pay you to use their service so royalty-free, sublicenseable to the extent that if they use akami or some such to host the content, then akami doesn't comment infringement..
Ding! Correct answer. Akami is a great example of where this is necessary. I could easily imagine a user suing Dropbox when they find out that their stuff was handed over to a third party (possibly even modified into another format in the process). In reality, of course, this might be done for the simple reason of getting it back to the same user that put it in Dropbox faster, but without these protections, there's no way for Dropbox to defend such an action.
Also, keep in mind that the TOS is broad so that when you want to use some additional feature to publish stuff you have in Dropbox later on, you don't have to sign up for a whole new service in order to do that.
Um, yeah. Next up, they'll be taking users to court for doing just that, claiming it denies their rights to use your works.
Ok, probably not... but these days, it seems the craziest lawsuits get filed, so it wouldn't really surprise me.
But I gotta wonder: Could they legally bring such a suit, based on their TOS?
It doesn't matter. Such an action would immediately result in at least half of their users abandoning the service. I know I would.
I think the Slashdot crowd is trying awfully hard to imagine scenarios where this TOS (which is the same as many other Web-based storage TOSes) will lead to total anarchy. Problem is, it's really fairly standard.
I haven't used Dropbox, but I didn't think it had a similar purpose. I thought it was more like a cloud-based hard drive.
I see a significant difference between the two.
It's clear they have additional plans as well. My guess is that they're going to layer lots of content management and presentation services on top of Dropbox. For example, if you store lots of text on Dropbox, then you might want a way to catalog and organize it, and transform some of it into books for self-publishing while pushing other chunks out to the Web as a blog. They could easily offer this service with their "cloud hard drive" as the backing store. Amazon already gives you several ways to use their storage for various types of publication including streaming music, cloud server storage, etc.
I'd be shocked if Dropbox's business plan is "become the hard drive utility for the cloud," as that's a fairly limiting proposition.
Has nothing to do with that. Simple disclaimers fix that. They are doing it to profit off what they don't own.
Oh well, my account is now deleted, not my problem anymore.
That seems a foolish overreaction. Yes, this TOS is fairly broad, but it releases them to implement many new services down the line that require automatic transcoding, format conversions, creation of Web sites, etc.
The reality is that Dropbox has no interest in alienating their customers by selling off their stuff. However, consider one simple case: you have your music collection on Dropbox. They decide to offer a "share my photos" feature. You select that feature and they connect your photos to some N friends of yours who also use Dropbox via a browser-based client. They don't have to walk you through a pile of agreements just to sign up for that additional service, allowing them to do format conversion, store the resulting images on a separate server for their image service, or assign "performance rights." You've already done this, so they can just provide you with a service.
I wouldn't bother dropping Dropbox as a service just because you think their TOS is broad. You're not likely to come across a cloud storage service without a broad TOS. Instead, I would base my choice of cloud storage provider on how their treat their customers.
Not quite, I'll grant, but that's because popularity in music, like most aspects of human culture, is the result of many inputs and functions applied to them. However, it's true that mating-related lyrics and music that evokes sexual behavior both play extremely well, and together are responsible for a majority of our successful pop music.
Every blues song follows one of a handful of formulas. Every rock song does, as well.
Sure, of course. Except... well, Bohemian Rhapsody which is probably the best, but certainly not only counter-example. In fact, Bohemian Rhapsody is probably about as far as you can go from mainstream rock and still have a legitimate claim at being rock. So, no, rock isn't formulaic. The rock industry is heavily reliant on formulaic hits, but it's important to remember that artists occasionally do produce art;-)
Just to remind people, those two examples (along with the old coffee maker example) are taken insanely out of context, and neither the hammer nor the toilet seat were as expensive as you're quoting.
If I recall correctly, the hammer was a copper alloy that was required in a condition where the small sparks that could be thrown by a standard iron hammer could have been catastrophic, but where a rubber mallet would not have been sufficiently hard. The toilet seat was for a destroyer, where combat conditions and weather could have resulted in the toilet water (and or results of active use) being sloshed all over the ship, so the seat cover had to lock down, water-tight. The coffee maker was for long-range bombers, and one of the requirements was that it needed to not spill any coffee at various negative G-forces.
This is all off the top of my head, but I recall looking over the specs long ago and thinking, "wow, that's actually a pretty economical solution."
The military buys a lot of generic stuff, but from time to time, they have requirements which make prices kind of crazy. I think it's generally worth it to outfit the military well, though obviously, it's a good thing to look for waste... just apply the right contexts.
This never should have started. There is no principle of justice, morality, or reason that will stop the American government from harming its people and the rest of the world in order to benefit its politicians and business associates.
I think you're confused.
This is a fairly typical fear reaction. Politicians and government bodies feel that they need to be seen to be acting in order to avoid a future event, resulting in questions about their inaction. It's not some kind of conspiracy. It's the same kind of fear response that results in laws that say that if you've been arrested for having sex in public, you have to register yourself as a threat to your neighbors' children.
Like nuclear submarines, have the TSA agents where dosimeter badges every day for a year. Lets see if there is a problem.
There are a lot of problems with this, but they're surmountable with care. It's true that we definitely need to gather lots of raw data about the impact of these devices.
If optional air travel (that is: travel that is not dictated by work or family emergencies) drops radically as a result of enhanced interro... er... body scanning, it will still be enough of a hit to the economy that politicians will see a need to act. Remember, morality and ethics don't motivate politicians; votes do. If you can threaten their ability to get votes to re-elect them, they will move heaven and earth to get the problem solved.
Hell, I miss the days when the pilots would sometimes just leave the door open, and I'm a pretty young guy. It weirds me out whenever I get on a bus service that has the driver behind a plexiglass cage.
There are different kinds of threats.
Bus drivers are probably more concerned about being attacked by passengers who are not terrorists.
In planes, I think we need a graduated policy. I think we need to have a very firm policy about shooting down planes that don't communicate and veer off of established flight plans toward heavily populated areas. Yes, that will kill many people (probably on the ground as well as in the plane), but that's something we need to have in place and make very clear to make hijacking a plane NOT worth it.
Also in planes, I think it makes sense to radically ramp up the security when the plane is full of fuel. A plane that takes off with just enough fuel to get from Boston to NY is a moderate threat, but one that takes off with enough fuel to fly non-stop from Boston to LA is another order of threat entirely.
If we could perform risk analysis and take appropriate measures to prevent the kinds of incidents that can harm thousands of people, while not making 95 year old ladies take off their diapers, perhaps we could go back to being a nation that enjoys travel.
I'm not flying either, and it's not because I'm afraid a plane will be blown up. Security lines were already onerous before 9/11 and oddly, they only got really awful in the past 3-5 years.
Until the U.S. can learn to do real risk assessment, I don't think there's any value in our attempts to curb risk.
A better comparison is you left your damned storage keys in your published machine image. This is a security blunder. That security key is, in simplistic terms, a password. Don't give out your passwords on the Web.
This has nothing to do with the security of Amazon's infrastructure or services.
Screw up some memory management in C or C++ and your OS will crash.
Unless you're a kernel hacker or running Windows ME, that's just nonsense.
I think what the GP was thinking of was the consequences of buffer overflow errors, which, while obviously not impacting to OS stability, directly, can have serious consequences outside of your application.
It's true that there's a time and a place for a low-level language like C and for a high-level language. This is why I suggest programming at both levels. I'd even suggest trying out Java, C++ and something crazily abstract like Haskell if you have a chance. The more languages you know well, the better job you can do determining what the right tool for the job is.
However, the reason to program in C once you have your bearings on the basics is to allow you to understand the consequences of your actions in those high level languages. You'll think twice about quite a few things in high level languages once you understand what the costs involved are. Sometimes the costs are worth it, but being able to make that assessment is one of the most important skills of an advanced programmer.
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I had a similar experience in Boston one year. I was on the 40th floor of One Boston Place, near city hall, and there was a pretty bad wind storm moving through. We get those from time to time... just a freak burst of 60 mph winds with little or no storm associated. It's rare, but it happens.
Anyway, the building was swaying and during the course of the day two things happened which I found amusing. First, we had one of those big green LED signs with news tickers scrolling over it. It was suspended from the ceiling by two cables and it was swinging back and forth dramatically. A co-worker had been looking at it somewhat queasily, and asked, "why is it moving so much?" In retrospect, she was looking for a comforting answer. I just thought about it for a second and gave her the most logical answer I could think of: "It's not." That took her a second to process and then she looked very unhappy.
The other thing that happened was kind of unnerving to me. I was sitting in my chair, working on some code, and I stood up to get something. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I tried to get up again, and bang, I was on the floor again. My inner ear had just given up, but I had no idea until I tried to stand. It was odd because I'd spent years around the ocean, and never got sea sick or even a touch nauseous, but in this building I was incapacitated for a short time... no other symptoms, just the complete lack of balance.
And keep in mind that (and I'm speaking as someone who grew up in a house that was literally 5 feet from the ocean in southeastern Mass) the impact of any hurricane or tropical whatnot on the Northeast is almost entirely determined by the state of the tide when it hits. If they're predicting it will make landfall during high tide, then that could be serious even if it were a tropical depression by the time it arrived.
If there was no fall, there was no need for redemption. If there was no need for redemption, there was no need for a savior. And without a savior, there is no Christianity.
Have you met any humans? There's plenty of need for redemption.
Why even bother with history, when you must admit it contains errors? Which part of History Books contain facts, and which doesn't?
If we manage to gain new information about history, we will change the history books to reflect this. I don't believe the same is true for the bible.
That's because it doesn't need to be updated. No one with half a brain thinks that a 2,000 year old book that's been translated into the ground has a whole lot of literal truth in it. On the other hand, it represents a philosophy and a mythology which are quite real, and which should not be cast aside because we sequenced the human genome.
According to Karen Armstrong's book "The Case For God", taking religious stories literally is a pretty new development. She reckons that right back into prehistory, people understood that creation myths were just that -- myths. Stories with a point; something to teach us about how to live our lives, but still just stories. This is why the stories were so malleable, or why the same culture could have more than one, contradictory, creation story on the go at once.
She reckons that was true of mainstream Christianity for most of its lifetime; literal readings being a 19th-20th century thing.
I think it really started when scientific thought in the late 17th century and into the 18th started to challenge the Church. That lead to a series of entrenchments from the Church where they felt that they had to defend the religion from these new questions. No longer were people asking, "why does the Sun rise," but, "why didn't religion tell us that the Sun rose because the Earth is rotating?"
Frankly, I think it was a mistake. Religion should never be in the business of trying to tell us what is. Rather it should seek to answer, why. That's a job that science is poorly suited to, and which religion is quite adept at.
I'm intrigued, how did they suggest you choose which should be taken as metaphors and as fact/instructions? Or did they indicate that all of the bible should be taken as a metaphor?
Why is that something that you would have to be told? Does it matter?
You're looking at the Bible as a history text. It's not. It's a guide book for a religious mythology, and as such it does not need to clarify metaphor and historical fact.
What you come away from the Bible with is the same thing you should come away from poetry with: a sense of what the text was meant to convey.
... they suddenly stand up and go "Eh, well, looks like we can't read Genesis the way we'd like."
Actually, that process has been underway for a long time now. The Catholics declared that evolution wasn't in conflict with Church doctrine years ago, and that debate was one that the Church had been having, internally, for decades.
Keep in mind that Christianity is an institution that is 2,000 years old, and has been roughly in at least one of its current forms for around 1,500 years. When you talk about "20 or 30 years" being a long time, you're working on a scale that Christianity simply doesn't work on.
While it's good they realise that the genetic evidence gives a good case against their religion,
It does no such thing. It gives a good case against Biblical literalisim, but that's a fairly new beast, and one could argue that it's really only a reaction to the scientific challenges of a mostly church-framed world view circa 1650 to now.
Even a thin layer of metaphor on top of Christian doctrine, such as the idea that the "clay" that Adam and Eve were molded out of was an ancestor species, would resolve the conflict. I'm not religious, but I'm enough of a fan of logic that I have to defend religion against such an absurd premise as the idea that it could be "disproved" by sequencing the human genome.
Evolution (or science in general) vs. religion is a false dichotomy. Evolution is a natural process like the Earth going around the Sun. The debate between Galileo and the Church didn't end Christianity and neither will the genome because, and this is a crucial point, the Christian creation myth pre-dates the Church (a Church, by the way, which has agreed a few years ago that there is no contradiction between Evolution and Christianity).
Actually, I'd say the police should review the output of the model and patrol the areas least likely to produce crime. On the assumption that smart criminals will use the same modeling to predict where police coverage will be decreased, this allows you to determine where to find the smart criminals. An excellent tool!
I think the take-away from this is that a new and heretofore unseen form of matter is one way to explain the phenomenon we call dark matter. There are probably many others, most of which are going to be based on the problem of scaling up the physics we can test to the size of the observable universe.
Dark matter is by no means dead, but phenomenon that take this long to explain typically turn out to have solutions which are complex enough to render most of the early assumptions moot.
to be so rich? it's investor money they were bidding with,
It's a mix of investor-provided cash from bond and stock offerings and liquid assets, I would imagine.
as such you'd like to read reasoning for that in quarterly reports, not bullshit about how they saved few tens of millions by their "fx hedging program" (no shit, they really think that's worthwhile info to spend couple of slides on and then just skip over the billion dollar stuff).
That's fairly substantial. Just because you don't want to hear about it, doesn't mean it's not important.
but did they even want to win the bids? did they have solid reasoning for the bids worth? did they even check what they were bidding on?
That's all been covered previously on Slashdot. This was a key strategic buy that was aimed at growing their patent warchest in order to survive patent challenges against technologies like Android (e.g. the Oracle/Java suit).
have you noticed how android is not actually letting fresh new players enter the phone market? niche production numbers aside, only the same old moto, samsung, lg, huawei, sony-e etc are in the game and they got their patents and licensing for the patents covered.
Uh... smartphones were the sole domain of 2 primary players and one "yeah, right," contender until Android came along. HTC and LG specifically had very little hope of producing a viable smartphone without Android. The problem is that the licensing for all of the non-OS technologies is crazy, so only the largest companies have any hope of surviving in the market, right now. This is not something Google has any control over.
No, Google should have bid a complex number.
I mean, they kind of did that with their bid of $3.14159 * 10^9 + 0i, right?
Just imagine what the accountants would have done if The Goog had tried to bid a non-trivial complex number.... probably just complained that they didn't have a column for "i" in their spreadsheet... :-)
These are Google accountants. After they finished determining that the quarter's numbers all lined up with Benford's law they would have complained that the complex number violated type safety constraints and thrown an exception.
Not really. Any time they display or send your content to another person, that's copyright infringement. So they need a license from you, it needs to be worldwide (since anyone can access the website), you WANT it to be non-exclusive, they don't intend to pay you to use their service so royalty-free, sublicenseable to the extent that if they use akami or some such to host the content, then akami doesn't comment infringement..
Ding! Correct answer. Akami is a great example of where this is necessary. I could easily imagine a user suing Dropbox when they find out that their stuff was handed over to a third party (possibly even modified into another format in the process). In reality, of course, this might be done for the simple reason of getting it back to the same user that put it in Dropbox faster, but without these protections, there's no way for Dropbox to defend such an action.
Also, keep in mind that the TOS is broad so that when you want to use some additional feature to publish stuff you have in Dropbox later on, you don't have to sign up for a whole new service in order to do that.
Um, yeah. Next up, they'll be taking users to court for doing just that, claiming it denies their rights to use your works.
Ok, probably not... but these days, it seems the craziest lawsuits get filed, so it wouldn't really surprise me.
But I gotta wonder: Could they legally bring such a suit, based on their TOS?
It doesn't matter. Such an action would immediately result in at least half of their users abandoning the service. I know I would.
I think the Slashdot crowd is trying awfully hard to imagine scenarios where this TOS (which is the same as many other Web-based storage TOSes) will lead to total anarchy. Problem is, it's really fairly standard.
I haven't used Dropbox, but I didn't think it had a similar purpose. I thought it was more like a cloud-based hard drive.
I see a significant difference between the two.
It's clear they have additional plans as well. My guess is that they're going to layer lots of content management and presentation services on top of Dropbox. For example, if you store lots of text on Dropbox, then you might want a way to catalog and organize it, and transform some of it into books for self-publishing while pushing other chunks out to the Web as a blog. They could easily offer this service with their "cloud hard drive" as the backing store. Amazon already gives you several ways to use their storage for various types of publication including streaming music, cloud server storage, etc.
I'd be shocked if Dropbox's business plan is "become the hard drive utility for the cloud," as that's a fairly limiting proposition.
Has nothing to do with that. Simple disclaimers fix that. They are doing it to profit off what they don't own.
Oh well, my account is now deleted, not my problem anymore.
That seems a foolish overreaction. Yes, this TOS is fairly broad, but it releases them to implement many new services down the line that require automatic transcoding, format conversions, creation of Web sites, etc.
The reality is that Dropbox has no interest in alienating their customers by selling off their stuff. However, consider one simple case: you have your music collection on Dropbox. They decide to offer a "share my photos" feature. You select that feature and they connect your photos to some N friends of yours who also use Dropbox via a browser-based client. They don't have to walk you through a pile of agreements just to sign up for that additional service, allowing them to do format conversion, store the resulting images on a separate server for their image service, or assign "performance rights." You've already done this, so they can just provide you with a service.
I wouldn't bother dropping Dropbox as a service just because you think their TOS is broad. You're not likely to come across a cloud storage service without a broad TOS. Instead, I would base my choice of cloud storage provider on how their treat their customers.
That's not quite fair.
Not quite, I'll grant, but that's because popularity in music, like most aspects of human culture, is the result of many inputs and functions applied to them. However, it's true that mating-related lyrics and music that evokes sexual behavior both play extremely well, and together are responsible for a majority of our successful pop music.
Every blues song follows one of a handful of formulas. Every rock song does, as well.
Sure, of course. Except... well, Bohemian Rhapsody which is probably the best, but certainly not only counter-example. In fact, Bohemian Rhapsody is probably about as far as you can go from mainstream rock and still have a legitimate claim at being rock. So, no, rock isn't formulaic. The rock industry is heavily reliant on formulaic hits, but it's important to remember that artists occasionally do produce art ;-)
Just to remind people, those two examples (along with the old coffee maker example) are taken insanely out of context, and neither the hammer nor the toilet seat were as expensive as you're quoting.
If I recall correctly, the hammer was a copper alloy that was required in a condition where the small sparks that could be thrown by a standard iron hammer could have been catastrophic, but where a rubber mallet would not have been sufficiently hard. The toilet seat was for a destroyer, where combat conditions and weather could have resulted in the toilet water (and or results of active use) being sloshed all over the ship, so the seat cover had to lock down, water-tight. The coffee maker was for long-range bombers, and one of the requirements was that it needed to not spill any coffee at various negative G-forces.
This is all off the top of my head, but I recall looking over the specs long ago and thinking, "wow, that's actually a pretty economical solution."
The military buys a lot of generic stuff, but from time to time, they have requirements which make prices kind of crazy. I think it's generally worth it to outfit the military well, though obviously, it's a good thing to look for waste... just apply the right contexts.
This never should have started.
There is no principle of justice, morality, or reason that will stop the American government from harming its people and the rest of the world in order to benefit its politicians and business associates.
I think you're confused.
This is a fairly typical fear reaction. Politicians and government bodies feel that they need to be seen to be acting in order to avoid a future event, resulting in questions about their inaction. It's not some kind of conspiracy. It's the same kind of fear response that results in laws that say that if you've been arrested for having sex in public, you have to register yourself as a threat to your neighbors' children.
Like nuclear submarines, have the TSA agents where dosimeter badges every day for a year. Lets see if there is a problem.
There are a lot of problems with this, but they're surmountable with care. It's true that we definitely need to gather lots of raw data about the impact of these devices.
If optional air travel (that is: travel that is not dictated by work or family emergencies) drops radically as a result of enhanced interro... er... body scanning, it will still be enough of a hit to the economy that politicians will see a need to act. Remember, morality and ethics don't motivate politicians; votes do. If you can threaten their ability to get votes to re-elect them, they will move heaven and earth to get the problem solved.
Hell, I miss the days when the pilots would sometimes just leave the door open, and I'm a pretty young guy. It weirds me out whenever I get on a bus service that has the driver behind a plexiglass cage.
There are different kinds of threats.
Bus drivers are probably more concerned about being attacked by passengers who are not terrorists.
In planes, I think we need a graduated policy. I think we need to have a very firm policy about shooting down planes that don't communicate and veer off of established flight plans toward heavily populated areas. Yes, that will kill many people (probably on the ground as well as in the plane), but that's something we need to have in place and make very clear to make hijacking a plane NOT worth it.
Also in planes, I think it makes sense to radically ramp up the security when the plane is full of fuel. A plane that takes off with just enough fuel to get from Boston to NY is a moderate threat, but one that takes off with enough fuel to fly non-stop from Boston to LA is another order of threat entirely.
If we could perform risk analysis and take appropriate measures to prevent the kinds of incidents that can harm thousands of people, while not making 95 year old ladies take off their diapers, perhaps we could go back to being a nation that enjoys travel.
I'm not flying either, and it's not because I'm afraid a plane will be blown up. Security lines were already onerous before 9/11 and oddly, they only got really awful in the past 3-5 years.
Until the U.S. can learn to do real risk assessment, I don't think there's any value in our attempts to curb risk.
A better comparison is if...
A better comparison is you left your damned storage keys in your published machine image. This is a security blunder. That security key is, in simplistic terms, a password. Don't give out your passwords on the Web.
This has nothing to do with the security of Amazon's infrastructure or services.
Screw up some memory management in C or C++ and your OS will crash.
Unless you're a kernel hacker or running Windows ME, that's just nonsense.
I think what the GP was thinking of was the consequences of buffer overflow errors, which, while obviously not impacting to OS stability, directly, can have serious consequences outside of your application.
It's true that there's a time and a place for a low-level language like C and for a high-level language. This is why I suggest programming at both levels. I'd even suggest trying out Java, C++ and something crazily abstract like Haskell if you have a chance. The more languages you know well, the better job you can do determining what the right tool for the job is.
However, the reason to program in C once you have your bearings on the basics is to allow you to understand the consequences of your actions in those high level languages. You'll think twice about quite a few things in high level languages once you understand what the costs involved are. Sometimes the costs are worth it, but being able to make that assessment is one of the most important skills of an advanced programmer.