"Digital first" does not have to mean "create a gigantic, centralized, privacy invading registry", like governments frequently seem to think. "Digital first" could well mean "print a digital signature as a QR code that we can then verify using a reader if need be". You know, it could work like movie tickets and boarding passes. Such a scheme is also much easier to administer and much more resistant to failure.
The identity card debate is often messed up in just the same way: an identity card need not be coupled to a central register; quite to the contrary, giving people a physical token that establishes their identity and can carry data on a smartchip in principle reduces the need for centralized, insecure databases and could be privacy enhancing.
Digital technology can either enhance or destroy privacy, depending on how we use it.
Executive orders are issued by the president; our current "constitutional expert" in the White House could change this any time he wants to with the stroke of a pen, like he promised during his campaign. The fact that these policies remain in place is solely the responsibility of the president.
Science uses the metric system universally, even in the UK and the US, and outside science, it hardly matters. In particular, while the thought of dealing with non-metric units may seem daunting to people raised on metric, to people raised on imperial units, it's just another unit; if you have inches, miles, feet, and acres, having one more length unit hardly makes a difference.
Advocacy of the metric system seems to be more a kind of political shibboleth. Keeping non-metric units is a matter of national pride, an expression that a country is rich and powerful enough not to have to give in to international uniformity. Advocating metricization is something people use to appear more rational and more scientific, and people from countries who are already metricized like to use it to express their silent resentment at the fact that other countries have been able to maintain a larger level of independence.
Whoa I did not advise anything other than caution.
No, you advised "managing the transition", presuming that there is a transition, that there is a problem, and that it requires massive interference by government to manage.
They spend lots on energy, certainly lots more than the poor do, as a percentage of their income no its not as much but its more in absolute terms
That is what " the rich simply don't spend much money on energy" means; such statements are relative to their income. The point is: they are not going to be wasting a lot of their time dicking around with solar panels. In fact, the rich tend to outsource a lot of stuff because it's more convenient.
This is my point; that is the sort of individual who is going to look at the costs and go, oh if I put in a battery room and a large solar array I can save all kinds of money, but that is also the person who can invest 30K all at once in doing that. That isn't an option for the paycheck to paycheck masses. They will get stuck being slowly squeezed for more each month because they won't be able to get the capital together to buy their way out; until one day they won't be able to afford gird prices anymore and it will bye bye to 24-7 electricity for them.
Yeah, and lions andhseep will lie down together, and it will rain frogs, and there will be a great darkness over the land. Yadda yadda yadda. Your scenario is utterly ridiculous, the usual kind of fear mongering people use to justify enriching themselves.
Well that is the trouble with the planned economy model, but the poster does have a point. One of the "nice" things we can say about life in the USA is that pretty much everyone has access to affordable electricity.
And the evidence that that is due to government regulation is... nonexistent. Take of your tinfoil hat: cheap, renewable energy means energy gets cheaper, and that's good for rich and poor alike. Such innovations benefit the poor most, because the rich simply don't spend much money on energy.
Many people will chose to go off grid.... So we do need think about how to manage this transition,
No, we don't. There is not a shred of evidence that such a "transition" will happen at all. "Managing" such a transition would primarily screw the poor. And if going off the grid were actually cheaper than getting your electricity from the grid, we could have efficient local generation at all scales; that is towns and cities could still have shared generation and storage facilities that would be less expensive for each customer than being on the grid.
People are proposing to screw the poor right now based on scifi fantasies that wouldn't be a threat even if they came true.
I don't think we as a society really want to move backward to where there are haves and have nots when it comes to affordable electricity
Well, we surely will be going backwards if we follow your kind of advice.
No, it didn't "escalate". I was merely using sarcasm to expose how ridiculous the "argument" was. Apparently, you are so dumb that you mistake sarcasm for an actual analogy.
The problem the utilities have here is that solar is dropping so fast in cost that it's now cost effective on a 10 year ROI to install.
If that actually were the case, why would it matter to you what utilities charge or pay you for connecting your solar panels to the grid? You could just put those panels on your roof, disconnect from the grid, and, voila, profit. But, in fact, you get a "10 year ROI" only because you don't have to deal with issues such as reliability and backup, and because those companies are forced to buy your useless solar electricity at an inflated price.
If we don't make the changes to the grid right now we won't be ready for that colossal shift in generation and everyone will be installing their own backup systems and disconnecting from the grid (which is going to hurt the poor and those living in apartments very hard)
So, let me get this straight. You're saying we should invest in unnecessary upgrades to the grid in order to create sunk costs that will then motivate hypothetical future users of efficient solar generation to connect to the grid instead of installing cheaper individual backup systems. And you want to do this to subsidize the poor and apartment dwellers. Well, that sure makes sense! With long term thinking like that, what could possibly go wrong with the economy?
There's a long tradition of regulating electrical utilities
Well, I guess that makes it alright then. No doubt you are in favor of other policies with "long tradition", like slavery, corruption, and the death penalty, right?
A perfect example of why connectivity should be controlled by the PUC (and considered a public utility).
Oh, sure, because that worked so well when we had a regulated phone service! It's not like AT&T ever told you what phones you could connect to the phone line, or what you could do with your phone service. Oh, no! Never!
Venturing even further, you can take your POTS system separation from my bandwidth and the double income you have been earning for the past 15 years and put it where the sun doesn't shine.
You can shove your proposal for regulating carriers where the sun don't shine, because your cure is far worse than the disease.
There's a number of papers which have evaluated the performance of GC against optimal memory management (the one that frees memory as soon as it is not needed). For about 2x the usage, the GC doesn't have much penalty,
Those are benchmarks of GC algorithms, not entire GC systems. In a real-world, multi-generational GC, that 2x only applies to recently allocated data, not the entire heap (it also only applies to pointer data, not all data). As your heap fills up, this becomes smaller and smaller, so while the GC runs more frequently, it takes less time each time.
If you have memory to spare, GC can win[*], but if memory gets tight, RC will win.
GC-based systems can work down to essentially no free memory (and even do so reasonably efficiently). RC-based systems suffer from fragmentation and can fail even if there is a lot of free space available.
To combat fragmentation to at least some degree, RC-based systems need to maintain internal data structures that add significant runtime and space overhead, overhead that GC-based systems also don't have.
RC is likely the best solution possible for Objective-C, but that's a limitation of Objective-C, not of GC, and it's not a good solution.
The other point is that languages that do mamagement with RC typically include C, C++ and ObjectiveC all of which are also capable of doing stack allocation, which is faster than GC, so that complicates matters a bit.
Many languages with GC are capable of stack allocation in some way; other languages simply have GC that is so fast that they dispense with a stack altogether.
Nope. Kill them, replace it with a citizen-favoring system and you end up having to work with the US population.
Do you think having Silicon Valley is a birthright of Americans? What do you think those skilled foreigners would do if they couldn't come to the US? Drive taxicabs? Weave baskets?
Canada and Europe would like nothing more than that, because they make it easy to shaft their own citizens
Their citizens are leaving in large numbers to come to the US: "brain drain". If we couldn't come to the US, we'd be working somewhere else and compete with the US.
The arrogant sense of entitlement of rich, clueless people like you is just amazing. Let's hope that sanity will prevail, skilled immigration will remain relatively easy, and corporate taxes will get lowered, because otherwise, the future of the US economy looks pretty bleak.
It's certainly not inferior in terms of memory utilization because it's precise in that it deallocates as soon as the last object pointing to it disappears, whereas in normal GC, you have to wait for the allocator to run.
Actually, with a GC, from a programmer's point of view, memory is available as soon as it has become garbage; the collector is just run transparently when necessary; there is no more "waiting" than for malloc/free. In addition, because of fragmentation, having the same amount of active memory may take a lot more space in Objective-C and the memory you freed may not be usable. And reference counting often retains pointers longer than necessary, with objects retained only for the release call, where in a garbage collected system, the reference would be optimized out. In practice, there is also a good chance you have circular references and memory leaks with reference counting.
3D printing languished in obscurity in large part due to patents. As patents are expiring, low cost 3D printers are becoming available: fused deposition, stereolithography, laser sintering. It will take a few more years for the market to catch up now that the core patents largely have expired, although that's probably only the beginning of patent trolling and other legal issues.
What Obj-C has now is something called ARC (Automatic Reference Counting). At compile time (not run time) the compiler does a static analysis of the code and determines where it needs to add memory management code, and then quietly does so for you. This means there is no run time hit, and behind the scenes everything is still manual memory management. Sometimes you still need to hint to the compiler what to do (usually when trading pointers with C), but 99.99% of the time it just works.
Automatic reference counting means adding retain and release messages automatically; there most certainly is a runtime hit, and that's on top of the usual memory allocator costs, which can be quite high. A good compiler can eliminate some of those retain/release calls. Furthermore, because of deallocation cascades, a release message in such schemes can have a very high latency (don't know whether Apple tried to add workarounds). And, of course, ARC has the same problems with circular references that regular reference counting has.
Reference counting is a mediocre memory management scheme at best; people use it in C-like languages because they don't have a choice. It is inferior in just about every way (runtime overhead, latency, memory utilization) to a good garbage collector.
Objective-C didn't "come out of" Apple or NeXT or Jobs. It was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love at ITT and Stepstone in 1983 and is derived from Smalltalk-80. Jobs just bought the company in 1995.
If we just get those evil (insert other party) out of office and then pass better laws, finally, regulations will work and achieve the desired outcome! Life will be swell!
The NSA and CIA do not need their powers limited, they need to be abolished entirely and the formation of any similar entity banned by constitutional amendment.
Not at all. All we need to do is limit the domestic activities of the NSA and CIA. I very much want them to go on spying on countries elsewhere, in particular in Europe and Asia.
Demise: In the late 1920s a Swedish-Danish-Norwegian union of companies (the North European Luma Co-op Society) began planning an independent manufacturing centre. Economic and legal threats by Phoebus did not achieve the desired effect, and in 1931 the Scandinavians produced and sold lamps at a considerably lower price than Phoebus.
That cartel lasted all of seven years, and that's despite patent protection, legal threats, and fairly primitive manufacturing and logistics operations. It ended not through government regulation but through market competition.Today, you'd see the Chinese clones appear within a few months at most.
Note that when it comes to lifetime of LED lamps, that's a product attribute that's really pretty difficult to ascertain beforehand, and that has nothing to do with cartels or conspiracies. However, in the 21st century, we have some pretty good options. Checking online reviews (e.g., Amazon) seems to work pretty well and alert people to major problems (many component failures occur with distributions that let you determine lifetime and reliability by operating large numbers of lamps for shorter periods).
Every lock, every door can be attacked and broken. It's no different with protocols. We don't stop locking our bikes or cars just because a government soldier with an M16 can shoot the lock open.
US society is the most Social Darwinist of the western world. It conditions people to value success over everything else.
<sarcasm>Oh, of course! That's why we have some of the highest per capita social welfare spending in the world, some of the toughest environmental regulations, highest corporate taxes, and highest income taxes! That's why corporations are fleeing the US; they can operate in a much more cut-throat fashion in socialist nirvanas like Canada and Ireland. How could I not have seen that!?</sarcasm>
The problem is, being cynical and ruthless is a great way of making yourself everyone's enemy. Reputation is a part of a nation's power base, and US has pretty much destroyed theirs. Which is already having an effect, for example people avoid buying US-made equipment for fear it contains NSA spyware.
European elites have hated the US since it was founded, and everything you have said could have been said by Bismarck, Hitler, Stalin, or de Gaulle. The idea that only if we did X, Europe would be our friend is a joke. Besides, both European friendship and European enmity are irrelevant, given Europe's increasing economic, military, cultural, and intellectual irrelevance.
The US (and the world) benefits from free markets, free trade, peace, and free movement of people. If other countries share those goals, we can collaborate for mutual benefit. If they don't share those goals (and much of Europe doesn't), they are worthless as allies and we shouldn't waste our time. The main problem of the US is that we have neglected those principles and it is high time that return to pursuing those goals.
The ACA has vendors line up similar health insurance plans with prices attached. How does this eliminate competition?
What are they going to compete on? They have to offer roughly the same coverage from roughly the same providers, using roughly the same drugs, and using roughly the same administrative procedures and business models. It's all regulated and prescribed.
Ah, that explains why nobody's ever been prosecuted for it - because nobody does it, because there's nothing to gain from it.
Oh, sorry, you seem to have trouble reading... I did not say that "nobody ever did it", nor did I say that it wasn't "profitable". What I said was that Collusion like that only works briefly; it's too profitable to defect.
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Brilliant! We can make a lot of problems go away by simply not looking for them.
"Digital first" does not have to mean "create a gigantic, centralized, privacy invading registry", like governments frequently seem to think. "Digital first" could well mean "print a digital signature as a QR code that we can then verify using a reader if need be". You know, it could work like movie tickets and boarding passes. Such a scheme is also much easier to administer and much more resistant to failure.
The identity card debate is often messed up in just the same way: an identity card need not be coupled to a central register; quite to the contrary, giving people a physical token that establishes their identity and can carry data on a smartchip in principle reduces the need for centralized, insecure databases and could be privacy enhancing.
Digital technology can either enhance or destroy privacy, depending on how we use it.
Executive orders are issued by the president; our current "constitutional expert" in the White House could change this any time he wants to with the stroke of a pen, like he promised during his campaign. The fact that these policies remain in place is solely the responsibility of the president.
Science uses the metric system universally, even in the UK and the US, and outside science, it hardly matters. In particular, while the thought of dealing with non-metric units may seem daunting to people raised on metric, to people raised on imperial units, it's just another unit; if you have inches, miles, feet, and acres, having one more length unit hardly makes a difference.
Advocacy of the metric system seems to be more a kind of political shibboleth. Keeping non-metric units is a matter of national pride, an expression that a country is rich and powerful enough not to have to give in to international uniformity. Advocating metricization is something people use to appear more rational and more scientific, and people from countries who are already metricized like to use it to express their silent resentment at the fact that other countries have been able to maintain a larger level of independence.
No, you advised "managing the transition", presuming that there is a transition, that there is a problem, and that it requires massive interference by government to manage.
That is what " the rich simply don't spend much money on energy" means; such statements are relative to their income. The point is: they are not going to be wasting a lot of their time dicking around with solar panels. In fact, the rich tend to outsource a lot of stuff because it's more convenient.
Yeah, and lions andhseep will lie down together, and it will rain frogs, and there will be a great darkness over the land. Yadda yadda yadda. Your scenario is utterly ridiculous, the usual kind of fear mongering people use to justify enriching themselves.
And the evidence that that is due to government regulation is... nonexistent. Take of your tinfoil hat: cheap, renewable energy means energy gets cheaper, and that's good for rich and poor alike. Such innovations benefit the poor most, because the rich simply don't spend much money on energy.
No, we don't. There is not a shred of evidence that such a "transition" will happen at all. "Managing" such a transition would primarily screw the poor. And if going off the grid were actually cheaper than getting your electricity from the grid, we could have efficient local generation at all scales; that is towns and cities could still have shared generation and storage facilities that would be less expensive for each customer than being on the grid.
People are proposing to screw the poor right now based on scifi fantasies that wouldn't be a threat even if they came true.
Well, we surely will be going backwards if we follow your kind of advice.
No, it didn't "escalate". I was merely using sarcasm to expose how ridiculous the "argument" was. Apparently, you are so dumb that you mistake sarcasm for an actual analogy.
If that actually were the case, why would it matter to you what utilities charge or pay you for connecting your solar panels to the grid? You could just put those panels on your roof, disconnect from the grid, and, voila, profit. But, in fact, you get a "10 year ROI" only because you don't have to deal with issues such as reliability and backup, and because those companies are forced to buy your useless solar electricity at an inflated price.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying we should invest in unnecessary upgrades to the grid in order to create sunk costs that will then motivate hypothetical future users of efficient solar generation to connect to the grid instead of installing cheaper individual backup systems. And you want to do this to subsidize the poor and apartment dwellers. Well, that sure makes sense! With long term thinking like that, what could possibly go wrong with the economy?
Well, I guess that makes it alright then. No doubt you are in favor of other policies with "long tradition", like slavery, corruption, and the death penalty, right?
Wow, you really are a special brand of stupid, first ignoring and quoting without the "<sarcasm>" tag, and then missing the entire point.
Oh, sure, because that worked so well when we had a regulated phone service! It's not like AT&T ever told you what phones you could connect to the phone line, or what you could do with your phone service. Oh, no! Never!
You can shove your proposal for regulating carriers where the sun don't shine, because your cure is far worse than the disease.
Those are benchmarks of GC algorithms, not entire GC systems. In a real-world, multi-generational GC, that 2x only applies to recently allocated data, not the entire heap (it also only applies to pointer data, not all data). As your heap fills up, this becomes smaller and smaller, so while the GC runs more frequently, it takes less time each time.
GC-based systems can work down to essentially no free memory (and even do so reasonably efficiently). RC-based systems suffer from fragmentation and can fail even if there is a lot of free space available.
To combat fragmentation to at least some degree, RC-based systems need to maintain internal data structures that add significant runtime and space overhead, overhead that GC-based systems also don't have.
RC is likely the best solution possible for Objective-C, but that's a limitation of Objective-C, not of GC, and it's not a good solution.
Many languages with GC are capable of stack allocation in some way; other languages simply have GC that is so fast that they dispense with a stack altogether.
Do you think having Silicon Valley is a birthright of Americans? What do you think those skilled foreigners would do if they couldn't come to the US? Drive taxicabs? Weave baskets?
Their citizens are leaving in large numbers to come to the US: "brain drain". If we couldn't come to the US, we'd be working somewhere else and compete with the US.
The arrogant sense of entitlement of rich, clueless people like you is just amazing. Let's hope that sanity will prevail, skilled immigration will remain relatively easy, and corporate taxes will get lowered, because otherwise, the future of the US economy looks pretty bleak.
Correct, good garbage collectors don't freeze the whole application under any circumstance.
Garbage collectors don't "look for objects to free", they usually don't "free objects" at all.
Really, read up on garbage collection.
Actually, with a GC, from a programmer's point of view, memory is available as soon as it has become garbage; the collector is just run transparently when necessary; there is no more "waiting" than for malloc/free. In addition, because of fragmentation, having the same amount of active memory may take a lot more space in Objective-C and the memory you freed may not be usable. And reference counting often retains pointers longer than necessary, with objects retained only for the release call, where in a garbage collected system, the reference would be optimized out. In practice, there is also a good chance you have circular references and memory leaks with reference counting.
3D printing languished in obscurity in large part due to patents. As patents are expiring, low cost 3D printers are becoming available: fused deposition, stereolithography, laser sintering. It will take a few more years for the market to catch up now that the core patents largely have expired, although that's probably only the beginning of patent trolling and other legal issues.
Automatic reference counting means adding retain and release messages automatically; there most certainly is a runtime hit, and that's on top of the usual memory allocator costs, which can be quite high. A good compiler can eliminate some of those retain/release calls. Furthermore, because of deallocation cascades, a release message in such schemes can have a very high latency (don't know whether Apple tried to add workarounds). And, of course, ARC has the same problems with circular references that regular reference counting has.
Reference counting is a mediocre memory management scheme at best; people use it in C-like languages because they don't have a choice. It is inferior in just about every way (runtime overhead, latency, memory utilization) to a good garbage collector.
Objective-C didn't "come out of" Apple or NeXT or Jobs. It was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love at ITT and Stepstone in 1983 and is derived from Smalltalk-80. Jobs just bought the company in 1995.
If we just get those evil (insert other party) out of office and then pass better laws, finally, regulations will work and achieve the desired outcome! Life will be swell!
Not at all. All we need to do is limit the domestic activities of the NSA and CIA. I very much want them to go on spying on countries elsewhere, in particular in Europe and Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That cartel lasted all of seven years, and that's despite patent protection, legal threats, and fairly primitive manufacturing and logistics operations. It ended not through government regulation but through market competition.Today, you'd see the Chinese clones appear within a few months at most.
Note that when it comes to lifetime of LED lamps, that's a product attribute that's really pretty difficult to ascertain beforehand, and that has nothing to do with cartels or conspiracies. However, in the 21st century, we have some pretty good options. Checking online reviews (e.g., Amazon) seems to work pretty well and alert people to major problems (many component failures occur with distributions that let you determine lifetime and reliability by operating large numbers of lamps for shorter periods).
Every lock, every door can be attacked and broken. It's no different with protocols. We don't stop locking our bikes or cars just because a government soldier with an M16 can shoot the lock open.
<sarcasm>Oh, of course! That's why we have some of the highest per capita social welfare spending in the world, some of the toughest environmental regulations, highest corporate taxes, and highest income taxes! That's why corporations are fleeing the US; they can operate in a much more cut-throat fashion in socialist nirvanas like Canada and Ireland. How could I not have seen that!?</sarcasm>
European elites have hated the US since it was founded, and everything you have said could have been said by Bismarck, Hitler, Stalin, or de Gaulle. The idea that only if we did X, Europe would be our friend is a joke. Besides, both European friendship and European enmity are irrelevant, given Europe's increasing economic, military, cultural, and intellectual irrelevance.
The US (and the world) benefits from free markets, free trade, peace, and free movement of people. If other countries share those goals, we can collaborate for mutual benefit. If they don't share those goals (and much of Europe doesn't), they are worthless as allies and we shouldn't waste our time. The main problem of the US is that we have neglected those principles and it is high time that return to pursuing those goals.
What are they going to compete on? They have to offer roughly the same coverage from roughly the same providers, using roughly the same drugs, and using roughly the same administrative procedures and business models. It's all regulated and prescribed.
Oh, sorry, you seem to have trouble reading... I did not say that "nobody ever did it", nor did I say that it wasn't "profitable". What I said was that Collusion like that only works briefly; it's too profitable to defect.