The problem is that it would only be available to relatively few people.
Unless, of course, it isn't.
First of all, there is no "it" here. If you read up on what Aubrey de Grey wants to do, it's a series of smaller interventions that all add up to greatly extended lifespan. Each of them has some benefit, so to completely deny life extension to the poor, you'd have to somehow prevent market forces from affecting all of them. While nobody would argue that poor people have good medical care compared to rich people, medical treatments do tend to trickle down over time. If "the rich get it first" were a reason to avoid working on something, we'd be short a lot of common medical advances today.
At first many of these new treatments will be expensive and only available to wealthy patients, like a lot of other medical advances. However, if company A can provide a treatment to billionaires, company B will do the same thing for millionaires with a smaller, but still worthwhile, profit margin. Then company C will come along and sell it to hundred-thousand-aires, making up for the smaller margin with bigger volume. And so on.
The point about assets and power becoming more concentrated, though, is a valid one. Society will need to restructure itself in fundamental, and painful, ways to adequately handle large numbers of immortal citizens.
Only for some 70-year-olds. Even today, there are plenty of them who are happy and engaged in the world. My parents are getting close to 70 and my mom is learning to use a computer, Dad loves his TiVo, and thanks to the big retirement nest egg they saved up over the years and the part-time business they run, they're both enjoying traveling all over the world.
Even leaving that aside, though, people are changing too. In my opinion, people growing up in first-world countries today (in the last 20 years, really) will be less susceptible to that particular symptom of aging than their ancestors because they're used to things changing all the time. The rate of change will continue to increase if you believe Vernor Vinge, but "things are changing faster than they did when I was young" is a different kettle of fish than "things were about the same when I was 15 and when I was 5, so why can't they stay that way forever?"
You can choose to greet change by cowering in fear and retreating into a hole or meeting it head-on and treating it as an opportunity. I believe today's kids are more likely to do the latter than previous generations were.
And even leaving that aside, you can bet that the perspective of a 70-year-old who hasn't even reached the average age of the population yet will be a bit different than one who's reaching the tail end of the actuarial tables.
Sure, you can get opposing viewpoints easily. But how many people actually do it? I've been asking people about that for the last couple years and the results are pretty depressing. While I haven't been keeping a precise count, I'd say fewer than one in ten people I've talked to even claim to regularly read sites with opposing points of view.
I think the problem is, getting something out of a news source with a different point of view requires the ability and inclination to think critically about your own point of view, or your thinking will never rise above "what a bunch of liberal/conservative/religious/atheistic nutcases" and you'll gain nothing from the experience. Critical self-examination is not something that comes naturally to... well, anyone, really, though some people take to it more readily than others and it does get easier with practice.
Basically you have to apply something like the scientific method, or at least a healthy skepticism, to each and every one of your beliefs about the world. Including the ones your parents and community told you when you were a little kid and you've kept in your head without questioning ever since. (Those are the hardest, but parents and communities can be wrong too.) Assume for the sake of argument that you're wrong about X. What things that you've observed about the world make more sense if X isn't true?
Do that thought exercise at least once a day with some value of X that actually matters to you, and even if you don't change your mind, you'll suddenly find yourself much better able to defend your point of view.
Unfortunately, Internet or no, it's much safer and more comfortable and easier to gravitate toward people who think the same way we do than it is to think honestly about the fallibility of your own beliefs. As much as I agree that the net makes it much more practical to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, it also makes it equally practical to shield yourself from them. Reading Salon and The National Review Online is a lot more work than just choosing one or the other.
On the other hand, I agree that it is much more desirable to let the users decide, rather than forcing something down their throats from above. It's just too bad that the decisions they seem to be making (assuming my informal survey is representative) aren't the ones that would lead to a well-informed, thoughtful electorate.
Is breaking into a person's server or blogsite and messing with the contents any different from breaking in to a person's house/business and messing around? In both cases peoples "space" and privacy have been violated.
I can't restore my house or business from last night's backup.
Apparently the fair use train doesn't make stops in Greenwich also.
I'm curious to know what exactly you think "fair use" means. It's a short, somewhat loaded (and frequently misused) phrase that actually means something specific in US law.
Duplicating the town seal without permission might or might not be covered by the fair use doctrine. It would depend on the context: if you reproduced it as an example in an essay discussing the history of town seals, that'd certainly be covered. If you produced a map of the town and put the town seal in the corner, it almost certainly wouldn't and you'd need permission.
Nothing particularly sinister or unusual or inappropriate about any of that, in my opinion.
Well, yes, but unlike Newton's Laws, in medicine the reaction is often neither equal nor opposite. Sometimes the price is small compared to the benefit. For example, aspirin can cause an upset stomach in some people -- but it's also been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease. If I were in a high-risk group, I know I'd rather have a grumbling stomach than a malfunctioning heart.
There is no physical law that requires the aftereffects or side effects of a performance-enhancing drug to be severe in proportion to the benefit. Nor, of course, is there a law that requires them to be mild -- if you're interested in this sort of thing you need to evaluate the risks and benefits on a case-by-case basis and wait for as long as your comfort level dictates to watch for any long-term effects.
To use one of the article's drugs as an example: for a while I was taking modafinil for a sleep disorder (which I no longer have, happily.) The only negative side effect I found was that if I took it in the morning, my eyes were a bit on the dry side by the end of the day. That's a small price to pay for being awake and alert. Are there other long-term effects that will only appear years after the fact? Maybe, but I'll take my chances.
There are other big legal downloads available via BT as well. For example, I set my web server up as a seed for the Project Gutenberg DVD-ROM and CD-ROM images, about as legal a set of files as you can get. So far I have served up over half a terabyte of those two images to people. I also seed a couple freeware games and some Creative Commons-licensed video to the tune of a couple hundred gigabytes of traffic, not a single byte of illegal or unauthorized content there.
Hosting the 3.85GB Gutenberg DVD image would be a bit costly for the Gutenberg folks. Without BT or something like it, it would be much less convenient for volunteers like me to help them out by spreading the load around.
He should also ban all news channels for showing the violence in Iraq
The network news already censors out all the really violent stuff. Heaven forbid war should make any of the home viewers squeamish.
Re:the Japanese sorted this out ages ago
on
Cell Phones In The Air?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it works because everyone respects not being an ass to others... whether or not this would work on airplanes is another matter
Whether it would work anywhere but Japan is another matter. It works in Japan because people there actually care about what random strangers think of them. Shame is not nearly as strong a motivating factor in most other cultures. (Which in this case is too bad.)
I would almost go the opposite direction: instead of telling the noisy people to go to a particular part of the plane, instead wall off a quiet section reserved for people who sign an agreement to stay non-noisy for the entire trip. Cell phones must remain off in the quiet section, if you listen to music or play video games you must do so with headphones that are inaudible to anyone but you (like these), babies are not allowed there, striking up conversations with your neighbors is strongly discouraged, and only the safety-critical annoucements from the cabin crew are piped over the PA system. Violate the rules and you get charged double for the flight. A solid wall with a door to separate the quiet section from the rest of the cabin, and I know I'd pay extra to be there for flights of more than an hour or two.
And for intercontinental flights, I'd pay even more if the seats were arranged as bunk beds so I could lie down the whole time. Trains have had sleeper cars for ages, but so far I've never seen beds on a plane.
Actually, I'd argue that it's both at the same time. People have more independent channels available to them now, but I think most people (me included, a lot of the time) are showing a depressing tendency to seek out information sources that reinforce their existing worldviews. If you're an environmentalist, you're probably getting a lot of your news from environmentalist blogs. If you're a libertarian, you'll feel good reading libertarian news sites. If you're very religious, there are plenty of comfortably pious news sites to choose from. Spend enough time doing that, and it feels like you're in the majority.
I think this is partly responsible for what seems like the rapidly evaporating ability for people to respect each other's political views. Nobody has differences of opinion any more -- one person is 100% right and the other one is a moron, a dupe, a tool, a shill. That trend has been deliberately helped along by many in the media, but I think the unintentional echo-chamber effect of highly specialized news and discussion sites bears some of the blame too.
Neat -- now I'm a "troll" for wanting my new and very expensive device to perform its basic functions adequately. Thank you for enlightening me. Life truly is a nonstop journey of self-discovery.
You are not too far wrong in your subject line, even if everything after that is bogus. By posting about this to Slashdot I did have the thought in mind that more publicity would light a fire under PalmOne to offer up a good solution to the problem. It has worked once with this product already on the memory issue. I also wanted to make potential buyers aware that they may run into this problem, and that if they do, they aren't alone.
As I said in the article, other than this problem, the 650 is an amazing little device, and if they fix this issue, I'll be very happy with it and won't hesitate to show it off to all the early-adopter geeks I know. Actually I already have done that a bit, and even with the iffy sound quality most of them are still drooling over it. There are tons of awesome things about it.
But hey, I guess only Microsoft employees have a motivation to speak up when they're not satisfied with a competitor's product, right? After all, nobody would ever post a negative comment about anything if they weren't being paid to do it.
it is usual to see code where people capture (because they are forced by the language) and ignore exceptions (because they are too lazy and/or stupid to understand the consequences).
Ignoring exceptions completely is almost always a bad idea (though what do you do to handle, say, the InterruptedException that can be thrown by Thread.sleep(), or a CloneNotSupportedException from one of your own classes that you know is cloneable?) But there is some legitimate difference of opinion about whether Java's checked exceptions were a good idea or not.
In my Java code I'm pretty paranoid about catching exceptions and handling them in as intelligent a way as I can, and even so I've run into plenty of situations where there's really no good way to recover from an underlying error and I end up just repackaging the exception into a higher-semantic-level one and tossing it upstream, where the upstream code does the same thing, all the way back out to the UI code, which displays an error message. At which point all I've achieved is cluttering up the intermediate layers of code with useless exception handlers when I could have gotten exactly the same effect by just catching a superclass exception in the UI code and displaying the same error message. (In addition to catching any specific exceptions that would cause a different result, of course.)
Most likely anyone who's written a Java app of any appreciable size has run into exactly the same thing. In theory, and in small sample snippets of code, checked exceptions seem great. In practice, even some experienced Java gurus find them more hassle than they're worth. I'm quite certain that over the years I've spent far more time writing code to handle checked exceptions than they've saved me in debugging or diagnosis time. That to me is not the sign of a helpful language feature.
Really? I've been running it on several machines (desktop and server) for most of this year and it has been rock-solid for me. What has broken for you lately?
When was the last time testing was broken for weeks? I've been running it on two servers and a desktop machine since early this year and have never once seen anything break. Pretty impressive, really. What has broken lately?
I wasted two hours on exactly the same invisible wall before I finally broke down and read some spoilers that told me what I had to do. Like the parent says, it's not the only place you're penalized for trying to find your own path through the game.
For those who want to see this themselves... it's in the "Water Hazard" level. The section in question has a beached ship on the left, followed by a ramp that you're supposed to use to jump over the water into a tunnel on the right. The main part of the area is a big open space with a beached ship in the middle, a couple of broken cargo containers on the outside walls, and two armored cars on the pier/road above you.
If you ram your boat repeatedly into the space just to the right of the ramp (there's a little gap between the ramp and the fence) you can flip your boat up into the air and land on the other side of the fence at the bottom of the ramp. From there you can back off to get a running start, go speeding up the ramp, and you'll hit the invisible wall rather than going through the tunnel.
What you're supposed to do is... (spoiler)
...walk to the far side of one of the cargo containers and see that it contains some explosive barrels. Shoot one of the barrels and the end will be blown off the container, after which you can drive your boat through and around to the ramp.
Another example is in the section with the crane -- it is possible to stack stuff up such that you should be able to climb up and over the barbed-wire fence. But no, the game designers didn't think of that, so instead of sneaking up behind the guards nearby, you get to paw helplessly at the glass wall above the fence, like some poor little zoo animal in a display case. The guards are probably too busy laughing at you to bother shooting you.
more people will become interested in messing with the software in TIVO
So the percentage of severely-hacked systems in TiVo's subscriber base goes from 0.5% to 0.8%. Big deal. The vast majority of their customers wouldn't know a shell prompt from a hole in the ground and will never hack anything. The vast majority of their customers on Slashdot may be a different story, but TiVo has been targeting the mass market more than the techie early-adopter crowd for a long time now.
As for free subscriptions, well, those of us who paid up front for lifetime subscriptions, or whose subscriptions are covered by a DirecTV premium package, have no motivation to ever do that. And even if we did it just out of boredom or curiosity, it wouldn't cost TiVo a dime.
I played the game for an hour or so before I went to bed last night. Wanted to play it again this morning, but I made the idiot mistake of disconnecting from Steam in the meantime. Now (presumably because their servers are getting hammered by thousands of users) I can't connect to the Steam server at all. Which means I can't get to the list of games. Which means I can't play the goddamn single-player game I paid $60 for and that's sitting on my computer, already unencrypted.
When I try to launch the Half-Life 2 executable on its own, I get an error that it can't find filesystem_stdio.dll, which indeed does not exist anywhere on my hard disk. There is a filesystem_steam.dll, though. How helpful!
Is this what I have to look forward to? Buying a game and being able to maybe play it from time to time, whenever their servers happen to be up and not too terribly busy? Way to go, guys.
I can understand requiring Steam for multiplayer. Fine. No problem at all with that. But I should not need to connect to their servers every time I want to fire up the game on my own.
The first hour of my experience with this game was incredible. So far, the second hour of my experience is frustrating, annoying, and completely dissatisfying.
I grew up in a semi-rural area in the mountains in California. The closest store was an hour and a half walk away. No food delivery, and there were power outages every winter and spring whenever it rained heavily for a few days in a row and a mudslide knocked out the power lines. Now I live in Silicon Valley, and other than visiting my parents or attending family get-togethers, I'm not heading back any time soon.
For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac or fenugreek, a durian, or fresh kaffir lime leaves in rural America?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)
For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.
I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.
The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.
Try a different Bayesian filter. I use DSPAM and it has been catching over 98% of my spam for the last year. It is not quite as effective for me as it seems to be for its author, but still pretty close, and an infinitesimal false-positive rate.
That plus a combination of blocking senders on the Spamhaus SBL and doing greylisting, which I put in place on my mail server a few months ago, has dropped my personal spam volume to about one every week (out of about 600 a day that try to get through.) Most spams are stopped by the SBL and the greylisting, which is great because very little bandwidth is wasted. Greylisting blocks a lot of viruses too (ClamAV takes care of the rest.)
Needless to say, I won't be installing any HashCash systems on my mail server any time soon. For the moment, until spammers get a lot more sophisticated, they're pretty much stopped dead in their tracks by a combination of existing, widely-deployed technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the writing quality of a lot of Slashdot posts, I'd prefer they stayed far, far away from the end-user documentation.
"Mommy? Why does the computer always spell 'lose' with an extra O?"
First of all, there is no "it" here. If you read up on what Aubrey de Grey wants to do, it's a series of smaller interventions that all add up to greatly extended lifespan. Each of them has some benefit, so to completely deny life extension to the poor, you'd have to somehow prevent market forces from affecting all of them. While nobody would argue that poor people have good medical care compared to rich people, medical treatments do tend to trickle down over time. If "the rich get it first" were a reason to avoid working on something, we'd be short a lot of common medical advances today.
At first many of these new treatments will be expensive and only available to wealthy patients, like a lot of other medical advances. However, if company A can provide a treatment to billionaires, company B will do the same thing for millionaires with a smaller, but still worthwhile, profit margin. Then company C will come along and sell it to hundred-thousand-aires, making up for the smaller margin with bigger volume. And so on.
The point about assets and power becoming more concentrated, though, is a valid one. Society will need to restructure itself in fundamental, and painful, ways to adequately handle large numbers of immortal citizens.
Even leaving that aside, though, people are changing too. In my opinion, people growing up in first-world countries today (in the last 20 years, really) will be less susceptible to that particular symptom of aging than their ancestors because they're used to things changing all the time. The rate of change will continue to increase if you believe Vernor Vinge, but "things are changing faster than they did when I was young" is a different kettle of fish than "things were about the same when I was 15 and when I was 5, so why can't they stay that way forever?"
You can choose to greet change by cowering in fear and retreating into a hole or meeting it head-on and treating it as an opportunity. I believe today's kids are more likely to do the latter than previous generations were.
And even leaving that aside, you can bet that the perspective of a 70-year-old who hasn't even reached the average age of the population yet will be a bit different than one who's reaching the tail end of the actuarial tables.
I think the problem is, getting something out of a news source with a different point of view requires the ability and inclination to think critically about your own point of view, or your thinking will never rise above "what a bunch of liberal/conservative/religious/atheistic nutcases" and you'll gain nothing from the experience. Critical self-examination is not something that comes naturally to... well, anyone, really, though some people take to it more readily than others and it does get easier with practice.
Basically you have to apply something like the scientific method, or at least a healthy skepticism, to each and every one of your beliefs about the world. Including the ones your parents and community told you when you were a little kid and you've kept in your head without questioning ever since. (Those are the hardest, but parents and communities can be wrong too.) Assume for the sake of argument that you're wrong about X. What things that you've observed about the world make more sense if X isn't true?
Do that thought exercise at least once a day with some value of X that actually matters to you, and even if you don't change your mind, you'll suddenly find yourself much better able to defend your point of view.
Unfortunately, Internet or no, it's much safer and more comfortable and easier to gravitate toward people who think the same way we do than it is to think honestly about the fallibility of your own beliefs. As much as I agree that the net makes it much more practical to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, it also makes it equally practical to shield yourself from them. Reading Salon and The National Review Online is a lot more work than just choosing one or the other.
On the other hand, I agree that it is much more desirable to let the users decide, rather than forcing something down their throats from above. It's just too bad that the decisions they seem to be making (assuming my informal survey is representative) aren't the ones that would lead to a well-informed, thoughtful electorate.
I can't restore my house or business from last night's backup.
I'm curious to know what exactly you think "fair use" means. It's a short, somewhat loaded (and frequently misused) phrase that actually means something specific in US law.
Wikipedia has a decent explanation of what fair use really refers to.
Duplicating the town seal without permission might or might not be covered by the fair use doctrine. It would depend on the context: if you reproduced it as an example in an essay discussing the history of town seals, that'd certainly be covered. If you produced a map of the town and put the town seal in the corner, it almost certainly wouldn't and you'd need permission.
Nothing particularly sinister or unusual or inappropriate about any of that, in my opinion.
Well, yes, but unlike Newton's Laws, in medicine the reaction is often neither equal nor opposite. Sometimes the price is small compared to the benefit. For example, aspirin can cause an upset stomach in some people -- but it's also been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease. If I were in a high-risk group, I know I'd rather have a grumbling stomach than a malfunctioning heart.
There is no physical law that requires the aftereffects or side effects of a performance-enhancing drug to be severe in proportion to the benefit. Nor, of course, is there a law that requires them to be mild -- if you're interested in this sort of thing you need to evaluate the risks and benefits on a case-by-case basis and wait for as long as your comfort level dictates to watch for any long-term effects.
To use one of the article's drugs as an example: for a while I was taking modafinil for a sleep disorder (which I no longer have, happily.) The only negative side effect I found was that if I took it in the morning, my eyes were a bit on the dry side by the end of the day. That's a small price to pay for being awake and alert. Are there other long-term effects that will only appear years after the fact? Maybe, but I'll take my chances.
Hosting the 3.85GB Gutenberg DVD image would be a bit costly for the Gutenberg folks. Without BT or something like it, it would be much less convenient for volunteers like me to help them out by spreading the load around.
The network news already censors out all the really violent stuff. Heaven forbid war should make any of the home viewers squeamish.
Whether it would work anywhere but Japan is another matter. It works in Japan because people there actually care about what random strangers think of them. Shame is not nearly as strong a motivating factor in most other cultures. (Which in this case is too bad.)
I would almost go the opposite direction: instead of telling the noisy people to go to a particular part of the plane, instead wall off a quiet section reserved for people who sign an agreement to stay non-noisy for the entire trip. Cell phones must remain off in the quiet section, if you listen to music or play video games you must do so with headphones that are inaudible to anyone but you (like these), babies are not allowed there, striking up conversations with your neighbors is strongly discouraged, and only the safety-critical annoucements from the cabin crew are piped over the PA system. Violate the rules and you get charged double for the flight. A solid wall with a door to separate the quiet section from the rest of the cabin, and I know I'd pay extra to be there for flights of more than an hour or two.
And for intercontinental flights, I'd pay even more if the seats were arranged as bunk beds so I could lie down the whole time. Trains have had sleeper cars for ages, but so far I've never seen beds on a plane.
Branson, are you reading Slashdot?
You do know that copyrights and patents aren't the same thing, right? Just checking.
I think this is partly responsible for what seems like the rapidly evaporating ability for people to respect each other's political views. Nobody has differences of opinion any more -- one person is 100% right and the other one is a moron, a dupe, a tool, a shill. That trend has been deliberately helped along by many in the media, but I think the unintentional echo-chamber effect of highly specialized news and discussion sites bears some of the blame too.
Lots of Slashdot articles end with questions to spur discussion.
You are not too far wrong in your subject line, even if everything after that is bogus. By posting about this to Slashdot I did have the thought in mind that more publicity would light a fire under PalmOne to offer up a good solution to the problem. It has worked once with this product already on the memory issue. I also wanted to make potential buyers aware that they may run into this problem, and that if they do, they aren't alone.
As I said in the article, other than this problem, the 650 is an amazing little device, and if they fix this issue, I'll be very happy with it and won't hesitate to show it off to all the early-adopter geeks I know. Actually I already have done that a bit, and even with the iffy sound quality most of them are still drooling over it. There are tons of awesome things about it.
But hey, I guess only Microsoft employees have a motivation to speak up when they're not satisfied with a competitor's product, right? After all, nobody would ever post a negative comment about anything if they weren't being paid to do it.
In my Java code I'm pretty paranoid about catching exceptions and handling them in as intelligent a way as I can, and even so I've run into plenty of situations where there's really no good way to recover from an underlying error and I end up just repackaging the exception into a higher-semantic-level one and tossing it upstream, where the upstream code does the same thing, all the way back out to the UI code, which displays an error message. At which point all I've achieved is cluttering up the intermediate layers of code with useless exception handlers when I could have gotten exactly the same effect by just catching a superclass exception in the UI code and displaying the same error message. (In addition to catching any specific exceptions that would cause a different result, of course.)
Most likely anyone who's written a Java app of any appreciable size has run into exactly the same thing. In theory, and in small sample snippets of code, checked exceptions seem great. In practice, even some experienced Java gurus find them more hassle than they're worth. I'm quite certain that over the years I've spent far more time writing code to handle checked exceptions than they've saved me in debugging or diagnosis time. That to me is not the sign of a helpful language feature.
Really? I've been running it on several machines (desktop and server) for most of this year and it has been rock-solid for me. What has broken for you lately?
When was the last time testing was broken for weeks? I've been running it on two servers and a desktop machine since early this year and have never once seen anything break. Pretty impressive, really. What has broken lately?
For those who want to see this themselves... it's in the "Water Hazard" level. The section in question has a beached ship on the left, followed by a ramp that you're supposed to use to jump over the water into a tunnel on the right. The main part of the area is a big open space with a beached ship in the middle, a couple of broken cargo containers on the outside walls, and two armored cars on the pier/road above you.
If you ram your boat repeatedly into the space just to the right of the ramp (there's a little gap between the ramp and the fence) you can flip your boat up into the air and land on the other side of the fence at the bottom of the ramp. From there you can back off to get a running start, go speeding up the ramp, and you'll hit the invisible wall rather than going through the tunnel.
What you're supposed to do is... (spoiler)
Another example is in the section with the crane -- it is possible to stack stuff up such that you should be able to climb up and over the barbed-wire fence. But no, the game designers didn't think of that, so instead of sneaking up behind the guards nearby, you get to paw helplessly at the glass wall above the fence, like some poor little zoo animal in a display case. The guards are probably too busy laughing at you to bother shooting you.
So the percentage of severely-hacked systems in TiVo's subscriber base goes from 0.5% to 0.8%. Big deal. The vast majority of their customers wouldn't know a shell prompt from a hole in the ground and will never hack anything. The vast majority of their customers on Slashdot may be a different story, but TiVo has been targeting the mass market more than the techie early-adopter crowd for a long time now.
As for free subscriptions, well, those of us who paid up front for lifetime subscriptions, or whose subscriptions are covered by a DirecTV premium package, have no motivation to ever do that. And even if we did it just out of boredom or curiosity, it wouldn't cost TiVo a dime.
When I try to launch the Half-Life 2 executable on its own, I get an error that it can't find filesystem_stdio.dll, which indeed does not exist anywhere on my hard disk. There is a filesystem_steam.dll, though. How helpful!
Is this what I have to look forward to? Buying a game and being able to maybe play it from time to time, whenever their servers happen to be up and not too terribly busy? Way to go, guys.
I can understand requiring Steam for multiplayer. Fine. No problem at all with that. But I should not need to connect to their servers every time I want to fire up the game on my own.
The first hour of my experience with this game was incredible. So far, the second hour of my experience is frustrating, annoying, and completely dissatisfying.
For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac or fenugreek, a durian, or fresh kaffir lime leaves in rural America?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)
For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.
I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.
The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.
That plus a combination of blocking senders on the Spamhaus SBL and doing greylisting, which I put in place on my mail server a few months ago, has dropped my personal spam volume to about one every week (out of about 600 a day that try to get through.) Most spams are stopped by the SBL and the greylisting, which is great because very little bandwidth is wasted. Greylisting blocks a lot of viruses too (ClamAV takes care of the rest.)
Needless to say, I won't be installing any HashCash systems on my mail server any time soon. For the moment, until spammers get a lot more sophisticated, they're pretty much stopped dead in their tracks by a combination of existing, widely-deployed technologies.