Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part.
Yes, everyone has beliefs, biases, and a worldview. But the term religion is a little bit more precise, and atheism in the general sense does not seem to have the dogma, strictures, rites, and communal/identity implications that we normally associate with religion. Perhaps more militant atheists groups would qualify for the label, but your general, everyday I-don't-believe-in-god type would not.
Incidentally, I would argue that your burning-ball-of-nuclear-fire hypothesis regarding the sun is not "faith" in the religious sense. Yes, you extend faith/credit to certain authorities and institutions in choosing to believe that claim, but if the question were ever to come into doubt, you could opt to mentally reexamine the issue without feeling that your identity was being ripped out. In my mind, religious faith implies having a certain feeling that you ought to believe something and resist challenging it, even when your natural mind wants to doubt it.
Um, that's exactly what an atheist is. They don't accept the god hypothesis without proof.
Every atheist thread seems to degenerates into semantic hair-splitting over the terms atheist and agnostic and what varying degree of confidence/belief/doubt they are suppose to represent. In my experience, this does not yield productive/interesting discussions.
The question is, how easy is it to use? With X forwarding, it's nothing more than 'ssh -X remotehost', then just run your program.
Geeze Hatta, have some faith. If not in the Wayland developers themselves (who are also X developers and have some cred here, IIRC), then in the developers, distributions, and users of the Linux community writ large that will evaluate, integrate, and extend Wayland if it's advantageous over X or ignore if it's not.
Everyone, including the Wayland developers, understands that network transparency is a necessary, compelling feature. It may undergo a shakeup and it may not be fully baked on day 1, but it will happen.
Most of the complexity that the X server used to handle is now available in the kernel or self contained libraries (KMS, evdev, mesa, fontconfig, freetype, cairo, Qt, etc). In general, the X server is now just a middle man that introduces an extra step between applications and the compositor and an extra step between the compositor and the hardware.
Just think if 10% of the population have electric vehicles, coming home at the end of a hot day in the middle of summer, and then all dutifully plugging in their cars to the grid at roughly the same time.
Believe it or not, the utility and automotive industries are well aware of these issues. A lot of work is being done to anticipate the possible rise of electrical vehicles, integrate them with the smart grid, etc. etc.
Incidentally, winter peaks are going to be more challenging than summer, because they happen later in the evening (compare slides 30 [summer] and 31 [winter], here).
More like late-bound, text-based RPC that doesn't require asking permissions from the firewall gods. Add in some HTML/JS/CSS and you have a universal interface with no client-side deployment headaches and low barrier-to-entry for other developers.
RPC was good for systems programming in a homogenous environment; web services (particularly the newer JSON/REST variants) are substantially better for application programming in our very heterogeneous world.
Sure, they're alike in sharing the essential feature of moving a method invocation across the network, but it's not always feature count or performance that makes a technology desirable. The creative potential of a tool is inversely proportional to the amount of setup/integration/deployment/configuration/documentation/coordination/change management needed to use it. Minimize the cost of initial setup and each subsequent version and you've got something that developers and IT departments find exciting.
Once Wayland components developers started trying to implement something practical, they discover, one by one, that they need those "unnecessary" X features after all.
Wayland has shot itself in the foot by being marketed as a replacement for X. But it's not really meant to be the entire car: this is just a new engine (that exploits low-level features of the Linux kernel). You could retrofit this engine into the old car (X Windows) or you can build entirely new cars with it. You won't see it on the highway tomorrow, but ~10-20 years from now it might be powering everything and putting a lot of exciting new cars on the road.
Bullshit. Without patents, there is no motivation, at all, for him to tool up and make them.
Um... I doubt the tooling costs for a little rubber coating would be all that significant for an existing cable manufacturer. If you have that idea first, you'd definitely wouldn't sit on it because your competition is going to figure it out sooner or later and snag (heh heh) the opportunity for product differentiation. You see, there is a motivation for R&D other than patents, and it's called market forces. Keeping your R&D at zero is an non-optimal strategy (classic prisoner's dilemma) when you have healthy competition. Heck, even if you had a monopoly on all cable manufacturing, it would still be smart to do the R&D so you can offer products at different price tiers (like how Monster makes a cadillac HDTV cable, cause some folks will always pay more).
And people so like to believe that science is objective, free of self-interest and politics, and trustworthy as a source of real world insight...
Sorry you bought the Hollywood version. In my mind, the magic of science is NOT that it transform us (naturally selfish and biased) people into paragons of impartial objectivity, but that it provides tools and rules for testing our ideas to effect (out of imperfect man) an institution that achieves (or nearly achieves) those ideals over the long term. It has a self-correcting aspect to it that, um, most other human institutions lack.
at what point does someone wake up and develop a system that can be trusted out of the box to be secure
Never. Security is subtle, complex, and in contention with most other design goals. Oh... you see attempts to build sandboxed hardware, OS'es, runtimes, and languages from the ground up, and these are worthwhile efforts, but as long as people are doing new stuff with computers, other people will finds ways to exploit it.
When you have a 20 foot long drone that can withstand 20G's of stopping force and 20G's of takeoff force from a relatively short magnetic rail gun, you don't necessarily need a 1000 foot 100,000 ton aircraft carrier to service it.
It opens up some fascinating possibilities... will we have destroyer-sized "micro-carriers" that can rack-and-launch an internal warehouse of drones with minimal crew? Or how about sub-carriers that surface, launch, and dive down again? Could a cargo plane (like the massive C-5 Galaxy) launch an entire squadron?
Does that bother you? I mean, that people (on both sides of the aisle) automatically assume voter ID laws disproportionately affects Democrats?
No. It's not a wild hypothesis... people of lower means are more easily deterred from accomplishing an objective when administrative hurdles are introduced. You seem to assume that these politicians are ignorant of demographics and voting patterns and so forth... that's nonsense.
It basically shouts to the world, "We have such a strong association as the party of complete losers, of illegals, of 3rd gen welfare dynasties, that we just assume all the human trash in our society will vote blue".
No, it shouts to the world that lower- and working-class people are part of the Democratic base. I'm sure that includes many of the losers/illegals/trash you mention, but I'm not going to paint 50% of Americans [depending on what definitions of social class you use] with that brush.
Why the hell are mission-critical systems connected to business networks that are themselves connected to the Internet?
Because the functioning of the business relies integrally on both.
Look... I sympathize with the "air gap" argument, but it's not the mid-90's anymore. Business has been transformed by the ability to connect industrial systems with centralized command centers with payment systems with other companies. It's not for execs to have bullshit ipad dashboards... it's for the business to make operational decisions that will take effect in the upcoming hours/minutes/seconds, to meet contractual and legal obligations, to feed customer- and billing-related systems (no point in running a business if you can't cut a bill, eh?).
The world's not going back... VPN's, firewalls, segregated networks, etc., etc., but "air gap" won't do it anymore. Data is the lifeblood of business.
Not related to the story, but watch out for this "split the difference" bias. Often, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But also often, the truth is 90% toward one side or the other. Sometimes (rarely), everybody's right and they just don't realize it. More often, the truth lies far outside the two sides you are listening to. A good solution for that is to listen to more sides. An even better solution is to study chemistry, economics, probability, computer science, sociology, and so forth... not because these fields offer direct insight on contemporary issues (though they often do), but because they help us appreciate the difficulties of understanding (and tinkering with) complex systems. That cautions us against the political certainties we so frequently espouse.
To be honest, progress bars shouldn't be used for indeterminate timescales.
Um... the point, as I took it, of indeterminate progress bars is to show that the program is "busy" and hasn't crashed. In the past ~5 years this has been more or less universally replaced with the "spinning circle of arrows" animation, but the indeterminate progress bar is still useful for dialog boxes that need to express both determinate and indeterminate waits (e.g., because it would be awkward for layout and aesthetics to switch b/t a determinate progress bar and the spinning circle of arrows).
Now granted: the longer the wait the more your design "owes" the user in terms of communicating progress, time remaining, etc.
Even then I don't fancy dangling around with key fobs.
Hunh? Really? I wish all of my online institutions supported key fobs, but none of them do. Or rather, none of them have volunteered the option to me... I guess I really should start asking, because this "just a password" thing seems very, very silly. Heck, I'd probably setup a dedicated PC for banking in my house, but that one would be hard to get past my spouse.:O
You miss the point... the carefree/flippant attitude of WTFPL can be seen as implicit criticism of the "permission culture" thing the summary is talking about, whereas your alternative is a direct kowtow to the need to "license" everything by default. At any rate, it's not "nasty" language... it's not mean in spirit or viscerally disgusting. "Crude" maybe, if you want to be prudish about it.
Use a license that pokes fun at the concept of licensing: the WTFPL (the DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE).
Seriously though, to change this "permission culture" thing, you need to get ahead of the intellectual property movement by starting a "right to think" movement. It won't be long (historically speaking) before computers and networks access is weaved into every tool we use--if not the human brain itself.
Talk about narcissism.... We have gone beyond the me generation to now the I generation.
Whoa there buddy... people like to check themselves out in the mirror, even if it's a sort of abstract statistical mirror. Think you're any better? Just watch whose face you immediately look at the next time you see a family photograph... 10-to-1 you look for yourself first.
Also, if you're going to go off moralizing about changing societal attitudes, you can find better examples than a statistical demo developed by a first-rate narcissist of the baby boomer generation.
Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns.
Okay, now read the studies on defensive gun use. Numbers vary widely and there is much argument over methodology, but a reasonable estimate is that there are 300,000 such defensive uses per year (among Americans). If even 3% of those DGU's avoided a murder, that's on par with your number.
The bigger issue though is that, a well-armed populace disincentives genocide and tyranny. And no, I'm not talking about the "I was forced to buy health insurance"-type tyranny, I'm talking about the Red Terror, the Night of the Long Knives, Operation Condor, etc., etc. Let's not forget about how bad things can be or presume that it "can't happen here".
Most of the people who disrupt movies are not jerks, just forgetful.
Yes, the ringers are forgetful (and thus forgivable), but the texters who insist on blinding the whole theater are just outright jerks. Seriously folks... either go to the lobby or wait and read it later.
Any "locker" that is not a safe is a complete waste of time and money.
If you're talking about thieves, yes. But if your talking about accidental child deaths, than safes, lockers, and gun locks are probably pretty effective.
Unfortunately, they also come with the drawback of making guns useless for self-defense. Situations that require defensive gun use come on quick, and the assailants typically aren't willing to wait for you to unlock and load up.
The decision of how to secure firearms must be made on a case-by-case basis. Instead of trying to limit/restrict peoples' right to effective self-protection, the government (and the gun industry) should focus on how to remind/educate gun owners of their responsibilities.
Despite the many gun owners and lobbying (bribing) NRA group, self-defense hasn't prevented a single massacre
But it has prevented ~300,000 individual massacres, rapes, robberies, etc. Per year. That's based on various poll-based research efforts into defensive gun use. (The noteworthy studies seem to range from 80k to 2.6 million, but ~300k or so seemed most credible to me when I was doing some light research into the issue.)
On top of the known cases (which, admittedly, we don't know exactly how they would have turned out in the absence of a firearm), the implicit threat of firearm availability has probably saved many more lives, such as women who fear their violent exes or homeowners in crime-prone areas. And of course, the implicit threat of protracted civil revolt is a deterrent to cases of outright tyranny (i.e., Nazi Germany, communist China, Soviet Russia) that have a habit of killing millions, not just twenty.
I don't see a problem with it. PC games are already designed to handle various levels of hardware.
...at the cost of development time for developers, play time for players, and headaches for both. Know this: the awesomest technical product you can ever build is something that just works.
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Every human has a belief system. My belief system is grounded in science, but it still takes an incredible amount of faith on my part.
Yes, everyone has beliefs, biases, and a worldview. But the term religion is a little bit more precise, and atheism in the general sense does not seem to have the dogma, strictures, rites, and communal/identity implications that we normally associate with religion. Perhaps more militant atheists groups would qualify for the label, but your general, everyday I-don't-believe-in-god type would not.
Incidentally, I would argue that your burning-ball-of-nuclear-fire hypothesis regarding the sun is not "faith" in the religious sense. Yes, you extend faith/credit to certain authorities and institutions in choosing to believe that claim, but if the question were ever to come into doubt, you could opt to mentally reexamine the issue without feeling that your identity was being ripped out. In my mind, religious faith implies having a certain feeling that you ought to believe something and resist challenging it, even when your natural mind wants to doubt it.
Um, that's exactly what an atheist is. They don't accept the god hypothesis without proof.
Every atheist thread seems to degenerates into semantic hair-splitting over the terms atheist and agnostic and what varying degree of confidence/belief/doubt they are suppose to represent. In my experience, this does not yield productive/interesting discussions.
The question is, how easy is it to use? With X forwarding, it's nothing more than 'ssh -X remotehost', then just run your program.
Geeze Hatta, have some faith. If not in the Wayland developers themselves (who are also X developers and have some cred here, IIRC), then in the developers, distributions, and users of the Linux community writ large that will evaluate, integrate, and extend Wayland if it's advantageous over X or ignore if it's not.
Everyone, including the Wayland developers, understands that network transparency is a necessary, compelling feature. It may undergo a shakeup and it may not be fully baked on day 1, but it will happen.
It's not reinventing the wheel so much as reorganizing it to remove legacy cruft from the performance-critical hotpath b/t clients and hardware.
From the Wayland architecture overview:
Most of the complexity that the X server used to handle is now available in the kernel or self contained libraries (KMS, evdev, mesa, fontconfig, freetype, cairo, Qt, etc). In general, the X server is now just a middle man that introduces an extra step between applications and the compositor and an extra step between the compositor and the hardware.
Just think if 10% of the population have electric vehicles, coming home at the end of a hot day in the middle of summer, and then all dutifully plugging in their cars to the grid at roughly the same time.
Believe it or not, the utility and automotive industries are well aware of these issues. A lot of work is being done to anticipate the possible rise of electrical vehicles, integrate them with the smart grid, etc. etc.
Incidentally, winter peaks are going to be more challenging than summer, because they happen later in the evening (compare slides 30 [summer] and 31 [winter], here).
More like late-bound, text-based RPC that doesn't require asking permissions from the firewall gods. Add in some HTML/JS/CSS and you have a universal interface with no client-side deployment headaches and low barrier-to-entry for other developers. RPC was good for systems programming in a homogenous environment; web services (particularly the newer JSON/REST variants) are substantially better for application programming in our very heterogeneous world.
Sure, they're alike in sharing the essential feature of moving a method invocation across the network, but it's not always feature count or performance that makes a technology desirable. The creative potential of a tool is inversely proportional to the amount of setup/integration/deployment/configuration/documentation/coordination/change management needed to use it. Minimize the cost of initial setup and each subsequent version and you've got something that developers and IT departments find exciting.
Once Wayland components developers started trying to implement something practical, they discover, one by one, that they need those "unnecessary" X features after all.
Wayland has shot itself in the foot by being marketed as a replacement for X. But it's not really meant to be the entire car: this is just a new engine (that exploits low-level features of the Linux kernel). You could retrofit this engine into the old car (X Windows) or you can build entirely new cars with it. You won't see it on the highway tomorrow, but ~10-20 years from now it might be powering everything and putting a lot of exciting new cars on the road.
Bullshit. Without patents, there is no motivation, at all, for him to tool up and make them.
Um... I doubt the tooling costs for a little rubber coating would be all that significant for an existing cable manufacturer. If you have that idea first, you'd definitely wouldn't sit on it because your competition is going to figure it out sooner or later and snag (heh heh) the opportunity for product differentiation. You see, there is a motivation for R&D other than patents, and it's called market forces. Keeping your R&D at zero is an non-optimal strategy (classic prisoner's dilemma) when you have healthy competition. Heck, even if you had a monopoly on all cable manufacturing, it would still be smart to do the R&D so you can offer products at different price tiers (like how Monster makes a cadillac HDTV cable, cause some folks will always pay more).
And people so like to believe that science is objective, free of self-interest and politics, and trustworthy as a source of real world insight...
Sorry you bought the Hollywood version. In my mind, the magic of science is NOT that it transform us (naturally selfish and biased) people into paragons of impartial objectivity, but that it provides tools and rules for testing our ideas to effect (out of imperfect man) an institution that achieves (or nearly achieves) those ideals over the long term. It has a self-correcting aspect to it that, um, most other human institutions lack.
at what point does someone wake up and develop a system that can be trusted out of the box to be secure
Never. Security is subtle, complex, and in contention with most other design goals. Oh... you see attempts to build sandboxed hardware, OS'es, runtimes, and languages from the ground up, and these are worthwhile efforts, but as long as people are doing new stuff with computers, other people will finds ways to exploit it.
When you have a 20 foot long drone that can withstand 20G's of stopping force and 20G's of takeoff force from a relatively short magnetic rail gun, you don't necessarily need a 1000 foot 100,000 ton aircraft carrier to service it.
It opens up some fascinating possibilities... will we have destroyer-sized "micro-carriers" that can rack-and-launch an internal warehouse of drones with minimal crew? Or how about sub-carriers that surface, launch, and dive down again? Could a cargo plane (like the massive C-5 Galaxy) launch an entire squadron?
Does that bother you? I mean, that people (on both sides of the aisle) automatically assume voter ID laws disproportionately affects Democrats?
No. It's not a wild hypothesis... people of lower means are more easily deterred from accomplishing an objective when administrative hurdles are introduced. You seem to assume that these politicians are ignorant of demographics and voting patterns and so forth... that's nonsense.
It basically shouts to the world, "We have such a strong association as the party of complete losers, of illegals, of 3rd gen welfare dynasties, that we just assume all the human trash in our society will vote blue".
No, it shouts to the world that lower- and working-class people are part of the Democratic base. I'm sure that includes many of the losers/illegals/trash you mention, but I'm not going to paint 50% of Americans [depending on what definitions of social class you use] with that brush.
Why the hell are mission-critical systems connected to business networks that are themselves connected to the Internet?
Because the functioning of the business relies integrally on both.
Look... I sympathize with the "air gap" argument, but it's not the mid-90's anymore. Business has been transformed by the ability to connect industrial systems with centralized command centers with payment systems with other companies. It's not for execs to have bullshit ipad dashboards... it's for the business to make operational decisions that will take effect in the upcoming hours/minutes/seconds, to meet contractual and legal obligations, to feed customer- and billing-related systems (no point in running a business if you can't cut a bill, eh?).
The world's not going back... VPN's, firewalls, segregated networks, etc., etc., but "air gap" won't do it anymore. Data is the lifeblood of business.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Not related to the story, but watch out for this "split the difference" bias. Often, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But also often, the truth is 90% toward one side or the other. Sometimes (rarely), everybody's right and they just don't realize it. More often, the truth lies far outside the two sides you are listening to. A good solution for that is to listen to more sides. An even better solution is to study chemistry, economics, probability, computer science, sociology, and so forth... not because these fields offer direct insight on contemporary issues (though they often do), but because they help us appreciate the difficulties of understanding (and tinkering with) complex systems. That cautions us against the political certainties we so frequently espouse.
To be honest, progress bars shouldn't be used for indeterminate timescales.
Um... the point, as I took it, of indeterminate progress bars is to show that the program is "busy" and hasn't crashed. In the past ~5 years this has been more or less universally replaced with the "spinning circle of arrows" animation, but the indeterminate progress bar is still useful for dialog boxes that need to express both determinate and indeterminate waits (e.g., because it would be awkward for layout and aesthetics to switch b/t a determinate progress bar and the spinning circle of arrows).
Now granted: the longer the wait the more your design "owes" the user in terms of communicating progress, time remaining, etc.
Even then I don't fancy dangling around with key fobs.
Hunh? Really? I wish all of my online institutions supported key fobs, but none of them do. Or rather, none of them have volunteered the option to me... I guess I really should start asking, because this "just a password" thing seems very, very silly. Heck, I'd probably setup a dedicated PC for banking in my house, but that one would be hard to get past my spouse. :O
You miss the point... the carefree/flippant attitude of WTFPL can be seen as implicit criticism of the "permission culture" thing the summary is talking about, whereas your alternative is a direct kowtow to the need to "license" everything by default. At any rate, it's not "nasty" language... it's not mean in spirit or viscerally disgusting. "Crude" maybe, if you want to be prudish about it.
Use a license that pokes fun at the concept of licensing: the WTFPL (the DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE).
Seriously though, to change this "permission culture" thing, you need to get ahead of the intellectual property movement by starting a "right to think" movement. It won't be long (historically speaking) before computers and networks access is weaved into every tool we use--if not the human brain itself.
Talk about narcissism.... We have gone beyond the me generation to now the I generation.
Whoa there buddy... people like to check themselves out in the mirror, even if it's a sort of abstract statistical mirror. Think you're any better? Just watch whose face you immediately look at the next time you see a family photograph... 10-to-1 you look for yourself first.
Also, if you're going to go off moralizing about changing societal attitudes, you can find better examples than a statistical demo developed by a first-rate narcissist of the baby boomer generation.
Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns.
Okay, now read the studies on defensive gun use. Numbers vary widely and there is much argument over methodology, but a reasonable estimate is that there are 300,000 such defensive uses per year (among Americans). If even 3% of those DGU's avoided a murder, that's on par with your number.
The bigger issue though is that, a well-armed populace disincentives genocide and tyranny. And no, I'm not talking about the "I was forced to buy health insurance"-type tyranny, I'm talking about the Red Terror, the Night of the Long Knives, Operation Condor, etc., etc. Let's not forget about how bad things can be or presume that it "can't happen here".
Most of the people who disrupt movies are not jerks, just forgetful.
Yes, the ringers are forgetful (and thus forgivable), but the texters who insist on blinding the whole theater are just outright jerks. Seriously folks... either go to the lobby or wait and read it later.
Any "locker" that is not a safe is a complete waste of time and money.
If you're talking about thieves, yes. But if your talking about accidental child deaths, than safes, lockers, and gun locks are probably pretty effective.
Unfortunately, they also come with the drawback of making guns useless for self-defense. Situations that require defensive gun use come on quick, and the assailants typically aren't willing to wait for you to unlock and load up.
The decision of how to secure firearms must be made on a case-by-case basis. Instead of trying to limit/restrict peoples' right to effective self-protection, the government (and the gun industry) should focus on how to remind/educate gun owners of their responsibilities.
"They have taken positions on drug prohibition, censorship, "precrime", "
Please cite an example...
Well the easy one is their recent fingering of violent media/video games. It was not an outright call for censorship, but the implication was there.
Despite the many gun owners and lobbying (bribing) NRA group, self-defense hasn't prevented a single massacre
But it has prevented ~300,000 individual massacres, rapes, robberies, etc. Per year. That's based on various poll-based research efforts into defensive gun use. (The noteworthy studies seem to range from 80k to 2.6 million, but ~300k or so seemed most credible to me when I was doing some light research into the issue.)
On top of the known cases (which, admittedly, we don't know exactly how they would have turned out in the absence of a firearm), the implicit threat of firearm availability has probably saved many more lives, such as women who fear their violent exes or homeowners in crime-prone areas. And of course, the implicit threat of protracted civil revolt is a deterrent to cases of outright tyranny (i.e., Nazi Germany, communist China, Soviet Russia) that have a habit of killing millions, not just twenty.
I don't see a problem with it. PC games are already designed to handle various levels of hardware.
...at the cost of development time for developers, play time for players, and headaches for both. Know this: the awesomest technical product you can ever build is something that just works.