Are you referring to nicotine and alcohol? I don't believe these are either the most addictive or the most dangerous on an individual usage basis. You may be right if you count aggregate effect (total number of people addicted to smoking or drinking) but this makes a good argument against legalization.
It's hard to use absolute arguments on this kind of subject. Take your argument to one extreme and you get something like "The problem isn't having easily-available nuclear bombs, the problem is those people who would use them." This statement goes too far at least in one way, that while drugs use causes some collateral damage so to speak, not nearly as much as nukes.
Another problem with legalized (free market) drugs is that many are physically addictive, so users are quickly unable to make free choices regarding their use. Marijuana is less addictive than most, which allows room for debate on legalization. (I voted "yes" on legalization in CO, though I'm willing to admit that may have been a mistake. I'm not sure yet but it makes an interesting experiment in any case.)
I felt like some of DPR's arguments supporting his website were delusional. Particularly this: "Let us assume you have a son who is in his teenage years and you knew they were going to do drugs, what as a parent, would you do? Would you let them go to their friends’ friends’ dealer or would you help them buy from Silk Road..." As a parent I would not even consider either option for an instant. As soon as I become aware of my teenage (or younger or older) child's drug use, I have a very difficult responsibility and it's not as an enabler or bystander.
You also are bringing up a good point that an accurate review of any complex software requires an unreasonably large time commitment. What's the learning curve like? (This beats "intuitiveness".) How often are updates buggy or force re-learning on users? (Beats bugs-I-just-found reports.) How helpful is the community when it comes to resolving problems? What has the history of security flaws been like? How would you estimate the software's long-term viability and adoption by others? Does an experienced user find common tasks to be easy and fast, while unusual tasks are not too difficult? (Beats feature-list comparisons).
To review a movie you need (1) a decent understanding of... I don't know maybe "filmography". Then you need to (2) watch the movie. After a couple hours you can write about it. None of the important questions about software can be answered after a couple hours' exposure. Combine this with the sheer quantity of software out there and you can see how software reviews aren't as prolific or celebrated as one might hope.
This claim (regulatory capture) would be possible to argue against if only internet access in the US were cheaper or as cheap as it is in other countries without subsidies. We know that's not true, therefore we have a market (and government) failure. Case closed.
FTA: "Vehicle tests confirmed that one particular dead task would result in loss of throttle control, and that the driver might have to fully remove their foot from the brake during an unintended acceleration event before being able to end the unwanted acceleration."
I was reading through comments hoping to find some general opinion of whether or not Barr's findings could have applied to practically any software stack. You usually don't have to work very hard when reading through code before you spot a bug or two. But in my experience most of these bugs are never (or rarely) exposed because they lie in corner cases. But in the case of Toyota's electronic throttle control system, you'd have higher expectations.
It sure sounds like Barr's group indeed found code of "unreasonable quality." I'm just not sure how to put that into proper context. One can always spend more time and money on code analysis and robustness improvements. Did Toyota really fall short of reasonable expectations? It sounds to me like they did, but I'm only hearing one side of the argument.
What I can't yet understand is how this experiment helps validate the theory of time as an emergent quantum phenomenon. It seems more like a demonstration than an experiment to me. What alternative theory is their experiment excluding?
I'm a physicist but that doesn't mean I understand any of this QM stuff. I have a feeling this is a little like experimentally demonstrating Bell's inequality -- one can do experiments whose results are consistent with predictions of QM, and in ways that one might expect other general classes of theories to differ even though you don't have a specific alternative theory to exclude. Most experiments are like this really. But in the case of this time-entanglement experiment I really don't see room for alternative predictions. I think the paper's title acknowledges this: "Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration" (my emphasis).
I'm not saying that the experiment is in any way unhelpful or bad. It's a great idea, but I would not go so far as to say that this is "experimental evidence."
I've long enjoyed KDE and pyqt programming. It's nice to see the underlying library move forward so successfully. I've found that, at least with pyqt, the QT libraries are rather large to ship around. I hope this doesn't increase the size of wireshark too much. It's nice to be able to easily install and run it on platforms like raspbian.
For numeric code, I find that stepwise debugging is rarely helpful and never necessary. Print statements are my primary tool for spot-checking numbers, data structures, and even for evaluating the general flow of the program. The next tool is to create histograms and other plots of the data you're getting at various stages or calculations. By varying the inputs and seeing the effects on plots (in vague terms), you have a very powerful and underrated diagnostic. The more work you put into analyzing your program's data, the better off you'll be.
I second the Python/C++ combination, and should add that you can do a lot with numpy and scipy so you may very well not need the C++ side of things.
I've also written a lot in Fortran years ago, but only because I was working with a ton of legacy code. Compared to C and C++, Fortran is actually more elegant for pure numerical computing. I'm not actually recommending it, mind you, but I also found the main weaknesses of Fortran could be mitigated by writing wrappers in Perl to get data in and out. Java is not actually bad for numerical code either, and it's arguably easier to learn than C++. I guess I'm saying this to point out that it doesn't actually matter much what language you use. Visual basic is a rare exception -- never use that for any reason.:-) And you have to be aware that high-level languages like Python are going to be slow if you have no consideration for what operations are time-consuming. Be particularly mindful of memory allocation / object creation.
It took me a few days to watch the videos and read through this article, but I think the main problem with the OP's arguments lie in this "for the good of the whole society" bit.
On the one hand I agree with this in principle, in a world in which lawyers and detectives are working foremost to uncover the truth in any given case. But our justice system is inherently an adversarial one, for better or worse. In the adversarial system, the police and prosecution is working almost exclusively for the plaintiff in a case and therefore against all suspects as well as all those who may potentially be a future suspect in any case that exists or is yet to be created. The goal of uncovering truth is purely secondary, thought to be a natural consequence of prosecution and defense each arguing their side to their best ability. Most of the OP's objections are, I think, rooted in the counter-intuitive nature of this adversarial system.
It's easy to find problems with our legal system. There is a lot of evidence that not all lawyers are equally matched ("buy the best lawyer you can afford" is common advice). A "jury of peers" is very easily misled and influenced by propaganda techniques. This may partly explain why some lawyers are better than others -- some are more skilled with propaganda and rhetoric. This system also is economically inefficient in the sense that it tends to necessitate its own professionals. That's the driving force behind these videos: the audience, legal students, are being told how absolutely essential they are in the legal process, so much so that virtually all communication to law enforcement must go through lawyers. There are also a LOT of cases (anyone have percentages?) where innocents have been convicted, jailed, even executed.
But on the other hand it's very difficult, for me anyway, to envision a system that is not antagonistic and also has as many checks and balances as ours does. It may be a little like democracy, "the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." I can't help but suggest that propaganda is also the Achilles's heel of democracy as much or more as it is for the legal system.
There's an interesting parallel between the adversarial justice system and a free, unregulated market economy. In both cases the ultimate goal, truth and justice for one and economic efficiency for the other, is thought to be achieved as a result of individuals working toward myopic or selfish ends. The invisible hand of justice, anyone? Also in both cases real world results show that there are major flaws in the theories. Perhaps these flaws result from simplifications or assumptions that are just not true.
It sounded to me like article is responding to a change in management (Peter Lee taking the reigns). It's not very direct about what it's advocating however, probably there's some inside context for this. The following points stood out to me:
- Research is not advanced development on potential new products
- Research areas should be carefully chosen with an eye toward giving the company an edge
That first point is probably what Bob Buderi is most concerned about. Management may be pushing Microsoft Research to be more product-focused. His response might be to instead focus on more careful selection of research areas, and more willingness to try productizing the research output.
For me, Unity would take a long time to get used to. I found the MacOS-like unified menu bar to be flaky, hard to use, and worked badly with a lot of software. Unity was fine with most apps if I wanted one window on the screen at a time, but that's not even close to how I work.
I'm using Kubuntu at the moment on my laptop, and Gentoo on a desktop at home. I'm happy enough with kubuntu but it does require a lot of tweaking, care and maintenance. It certainly does not "just work" the way Ubuntu used to several years ago. My coworkers (who mostly use xubuntu) and I have a hard time with lockups and experience lots of installation issues. About half of these relate to Nvidia drivers and multi-monitor support, but that still leaves a lot of other problems to contend with. It just seems less stable than it used to for me. GTK and QT seem to work less and less well with each other, and Network Manager and the networking service sometimes fight each other (lockups on boot even). In my office there have been several instances of whole-system corruption where people had to re-install everything from scratch. Distribution upgrades have not been smooth. I used to be very happy with Ubuntu but these days I'm falling out of love with it.
A lot of this may be hardware-related. I notice that coworkers with newer laptops have many more problems than I do. Some of this is expected, but again not to the degree that I'm seeing it.
The itunes, google play, and other paid app stores seem to me to discourage open source development. AFAICT there is no standard way to go from the market page to a project or source code page. Very few Android apps are open source, and the few that are open are hard to identify as such and find the code. But most desktop Linux-based distributions have package managers that allow easy access to the source code.
There is something about the mobile development community that almost discourages open source. Part of this may be the ease of creating paid or add-supported apps. Is this drawing developers that otherwise would not be coding or just writing Windows software onto a (mostly) open-source platform? Or is it outright discouraging open-source development? I'm thinking it's mostly the former but a little of the latter too.
I feel like the Guardian article's mention of "regression toward the mean" is incorrect because it attributes this effect as a causal one. The wikipedia link cited warns against using this effect as a predictive one under "misunderstandings." Past deviations do not predict future returns to the norm, just like rolling a high number with dice doesn't predict that the next roll will be below average. Dana makes it sound like climatologists predicted this year's rise as a consequence of last year's fluctuation.
I do agree with the conclusion that the 2013 sea ice level remains consistent with a decreasing trend.
It all depends on your frame of reference. CPython is a blurry rocket of speed when compared with Jython. And in theory you can write all the compute-expensive routines in C++.
I find that copy and paste in Python is very easy to do in any editor that lets you block indent (most do). I've also seen lots of C++ and Java recently that have been cut & pasted with little regard to indentation which makes reading it misleading to say the least. I'm not saying that one syntax (with curly braces or without) is better than another, but curly braces are no panacea. I've uncovered a LOT of bugs in C++ caused by cut & paste with sloppy and wrong attempts to re-balance the braces. I've also found Python bugs caused by wrong indentations, often caused by letting an editor run wild with auto-indent -- you can do that in bracey languages so Python runs a little counter to that habit. Also for Python if sections of code at some indentation level get way too long, then there's probably a more readable way to break that code down.
I've been working on an Android project for the past couple years, using Python for test automation, C for the kernel and drivers of course, C and C++ for low-level Android OS stuff and native libraries, and Java for upper layers (internals and apps). Whitespace in the C-like languages is inconsistent across the board, sometimes even within a file. Tab widths and tab/space usage are different for each developer (and their "style periods"). We cannot enforce a corporate policy in whitespace because we get so much (99.9%) of the code from open source and other suppliers. But thanks to PEP 8, Python code from multiple sources all looks pretty much the same and you don't have to invest time customizing your editor to use one style for files from one subtree, change formatting on the fly, etc.
I should mention that where Python has Guido, The Linux kernel has Linus and his style guide. I find even local kernel module code is consistent style-wise. But outside of that, on my project anyway, it's a style free-for-all.
Google's role in Android is an interesting one. The majority of Android is open-source. Most devices have a few closed-source components from the manufacturer such as EGL libraries (glue between Android's surface composer and Linux framebuffer devices), maybe wifi firmware, some few other small libraries too and of course the various bloatware that's usually nice to get rid of. Google's closed-source contributions are their apps (play store, browser, maps, email clients, etc) which are not internal Android components and all of which have non-Google alternatives.
In addition to the Linux kernel Android includes bionic C libraries and a variety of userspace daemons and utilities that are open-source and maintained by other companies. One can put things like busybox (GPL) and glibc libraries on an Android device. From a technical perspective the bionic C libraries are just inferior to the GNU equivalents. But the licensing makes it a lot less tricky for other companies to work with and so their inclusion in Android could be thought of as a clever industrial/political/marketing maneuver.
Since most of Android is covered by an Apache license, what keeps it from forking? Maybe just the fact that Google still develops it heavily. Everyone want's the latest "official" version on their own device, and I think that's the market force that drives a large amount of the code merging efforts today. Maybe it really is Google's product, not because it actually is but because people continue to perceive it that way.
The motherboard and chipset don't have to be sold with a profit margin since they support CPU sales. It may not even have to do with the profitability of the desktop market. Investors play a large role in steering public corporations. Investors are interested in growth potential, almost to the exclusion of all else.
They don't see growth potential in the desktop market therefore they declare it to be "dead" (meaning saturated). They see instead, and mostly with hindsight, growth potential in the tablet and smartphone markets. So it's the potential for growth in emergent markets which dictates stock prices rather than the health and viability of existing markets. I'm worried about the disconnect here. It doesn't matter whether or not people want tablets instead of laptops and desktops, it only matters that the tablet market is not yet fully saturated.
I'm enjoying reading the Washington Post article, linked from Stallman's reference. I'm no expert in this field, but the arguments seem reasonable. Do you have any specific objections beyond name-calling?
I kinda like the Fahrenheit scale for temperature. I'm an SI nut on all the other basic measures. Celsius is good for chemistry, Kelvins for physics, but Fahrenheit for humans. 0 was supposed to be as cold as he could get in his lab (salt water freezes, drivers beware), and 100 was body temperature. Okay it's not quite 100 but that was the original intent which makes the scale pretty good when talking about the weather.
I should also mention that most people want to convert pounds into kilograms, which is nonsense (well except on the Earth at sea level). Pounds convert to Newtons, and slugs to kilograms.
Oh, the one other thing that the US customary measurements are good for is the speed of light, approximately 1 foot per nanosecond.
I don't think that the Vulgate Bible was really accessible to the masses. See Tyndale's wikipedia article on his rationale for an English translation in the early 1500s:
"They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture."
At about the same time in history, Thomas Linacre was studying a Greek Bible and comparing it with the Vulgate. He reportedly said: "Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel or we are not Christians." So I think the Vulgate was a lot less accurate than even the earliest English translations including the King James Version.
But I think what's really interesting about this is how the Latin Bible verses were used at the time, and how they were infused with a sense of deep reverence and/or fear. Along comes Tyndale, who translates the Bible from original language sources into English. Among other things he uses informal pronouns Thee and Thou to refer to God. That had to be absolutely shocking to the people at the time, but at the same time restoring a lost aspect of Christianity -- our personal and direct relationship with God.
Now a few hundred years later when people mimic the language of the King James bible in a Christian context, it is with a sense of deep reverence and/or fear, and often used in today's culture to imply a blind religious faith. It's as if humanity somehow wants to create some kind of formality within religion and rely on authority instead of accepting the uncertainty of a personal religious searching.
I should also point out how the early Christian Bible was translated into hundreds of different languages until the Holy Roman church collected and burned all non-Latin translations. So it wasn't just the 1500s that saw language as a tool for control over the masses.
This sounds to me like a reactionary statement that may be fueled by media hyperbole and exaggeration. Have we really thrown out the constitution? Remember that the US Constitution is a living document and was far from perfect at its inception. I have lots of respect for it but do not worship it. I'd like to tell you to actually read it but I'm ashamed to say that I myself have not done so. I've read some parts of it and found that it's actually very readable and not affected much by "legalese" so I plan to read more of it in the future. I'm just trying to say that going to the source sometimes helps de-fuse our emotional triggers that are abused by the propaganda of our day.
Our tax burden is not crippling. Our standard of living continues to improve. Lifespans are improving. Our income tax rates are lower than most developed countries and our corporate tax rates are on a par with others. Government revenue has been between 15 and 20% of GDP since the 1940's, and in the past 4 years it's gone down and is closer to 15%.
There are a lot of political issues today that I'd love to be able to correct, but I don't think everything is "broken." What I most want is more education in propaganda analysis (deconstruction -- see for example http://propagandacritic.com/), and less two-party partisan nonsense. These are both problems as old as our country. Yes, corporate lobbyists are another way of spelling "corruption" but this too is nothing new. The national debt and CO2 emissions are serious problems that are new to the past few decades, and they both frighten me a little, but they are complex problems that will need to be solved in an intelligent manner without reactionary thought.
And finally, as many people pointed out above, these succession petitions are far from representative of the majority opinion. There's a massive gap between a signed petition (to let off steam mostly) and finding that these states want to actually secede.
I cannot understand why Maine and Nebraska do this! I applaud them of course but I don't see this as a locally-correct strategy.
If you're a swing state, you love it because you get lots of attention, perhaps to your own state's needs, during presidential election season. That's good. If you go to proportional representation that no longer happens. (A friend pointed out to me that this kind of attention is really a bad thing. We live in Colorado and I've had no less then 12 phone calls reminding me to vote during the past week, and sticky notes on my doors.)
If you're not a swing state, winner-take-all is still good for you because if you transition to proportional representation most of your citizens will feel like they have less of a voice in the election -- less impact for their collective votes. If all "blue" states, for example, went to proportional representation while the "red" states did not then it would be nearly impossible for a democrat to win the presidency. The blue state citizens would generally not like this and wish to change back.
So while I'd love to see proportional representation happen, I don't think it can happen unless the constitution is amended to force all states to do it at once. Of course along come Maine and Nebraska -- an ugly disfigurement on my lovely little theory. What stupid states, doing what's best for the good of the country and all that. Makes me sick.
What I think is even more important is going from plurality voting to almost any other system. The grandparent post mentions instant runoff, but I'm starting to favor approval voting. We're so close to doing that anyway. I heard a news report reminding voters that if they mark YES for more than one candidate, their ballot would be invalidated. Approval voting is just like our current system except that voting YES for more than one candidate is allowed. Maybe that's not quite as good as instant runoff, but it's close and dead simple. It eliminates the third-party spoiler effect, and I think that's huge and worth fighting for. I think it would make a noticeable improvement in partisan politics! Yes we'd again need an amendment, but honestly who in their right minds would oppose that? I guess the catch is "who in their right minds."
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Are you referring to nicotine and alcohol? I don't believe these are either the most addictive or the most dangerous on an individual usage basis. You may be right if you count aggregate effect (total number of people addicted to smoking or drinking) but this makes a good argument against legalization.
It's hard to use absolute arguments on this kind of subject. Take your argument to one extreme and you get something like "The problem isn't having easily-available nuclear bombs, the problem is those people who would use them." This statement goes too far at least in one way, that while drugs use causes some collateral damage so to speak, not nearly as much as nukes.
Another problem with legalized (free market) drugs is that many are physically addictive, so users are quickly unable to make free choices regarding their use. Marijuana is less addictive than most, which allows room for debate on legalization. (I voted "yes" on legalization in CO, though I'm willing to admit that may have been a mistake. I'm not sure yet but it makes an interesting experiment in any case.)
I felt like some of DPR's arguments supporting his website were delusional. Particularly this: "Let us assume you have a son who is in his teenage years and you knew they were going to do drugs, what as a parent, would you do? Would you let them go to their friends’ friends’ dealer or would you help them buy from Silk Road ..." As a parent I would not even consider either option for an instant. As soon as I become aware of my teenage (or younger or older) child's drug use, I have a very difficult responsibility and it's not as an enabler or bystander.
You also are bringing up a good point that an accurate review of any complex software requires an unreasonably large time commitment. What's the learning curve like? (This beats "intuitiveness".) How often are updates buggy or force re-learning on users? (Beats bugs-I-just-found reports.) How helpful is the community when it comes to resolving problems? What has the history of security flaws been like? How would you estimate the software's long-term viability and adoption by others? Does an experienced user find common tasks to be easy and fast, while unusual tasks are not too difficult? (Beats feature-list comparisons).
To review a movie you need (1) a decent understanding of ... I don't know maybe "filmography". Then you need to (2) watch the movie. After a couple hours you can write about it. None of the important questions about software can be answered after a couple hours' exposure. Combine this with the sheer quantity of software out there and you can see how software reviews aren't as prolific or celebrated as one might hope.
This claim (regulatory capture) would be possible to argue against if only internet access in the US were cheaper or as cheap as it is in other countries without subsidies. We know that's not true, therefore we have a market (and government) failure. Case closed.
FTA: "Vehicle tests confirmed that one particular dead task would result in loss of throttle control, and that the driver might have to fully remove their foot from the brake during an unintended acceleration event before being able to end the unwanted acceleration."
I was reading through comments hoping to find some general opinion of whether or not Barr's findings could have applied to practically any software stack. You usually don't have to work very hard when reading through code before you spot a bug or two. But in my experience most of these bugs are never (or rarely) exposed because they lie in corner cases. But in the case of Toyota's electronic throttle control system, you'd have higher expectations.
It sure sounds like Barr's group indeed found code of "unreasonable quality." I'm just not sure how to put that into proper context. One can always spend more time and money on code analysis and robustness improvements. Did Toyota really fall short of reasonable expectations? It sounds to me like they did, but I'm only hearing one side of the argument.
What I can't yet understand is how this experiment helps validate the theory of time as an emergent quantum phenomenon. It seems more like a demonstration than an experiment to me. What alternative theory is their experiment excluding?
I'm a physicist but that doesn't mean I understand any of this QM stuff. I have a feeling this is a little like experimentally demonstrating Bell's inequality -- one can do experiments whose results are consistent with predictions of QM, and in ways that one might expect other general classes of theories to differ even though you don't have a specific alternative theory to exclude. Most experiments are like this really. But in the case of this time-entanglement experiment I really don't see room for alternative predictions. I think the paper's title acknowledges this: "Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration" (my emphasis).
I'm not saying that the experiment is in any way unhelpful or bad. It's a great idea, but I would not go so far as to say that this is "experimental evidence."
You're running Kubuntu 13.10? How is it so far?
I've long enjoyed KDE and pyqt programming. It's nice to see the underlying library move forward so successfully. I've found that, at least with pyqt, the QT libraries are rather large to ship around. I hope this doesn't increase the size of wireshark too much. It's nice to be able to easily install and run it on platforms like raspbian.
For numeric code, I find that stepwise debugging is rarely helpful and never necessary. Print statements are my primary tool for spot-checking numbers, data structures, and even for evaluating the general flow of the program. The next tool is to create histograms and other plots of the data you're getting at various stages or calculations. By varying the inputs and seeing the effects on plots (in vague terms), you have a very powerful and underrated diagnostic. The more work you put into analyzing your program's data, the better off you'll be.
I second the Python/C++ combination, and should add that you can do a lot with numpy and scipy so you may very well not need the C++ side of things.
I've also written a lot in Fortran years ago, but only because I was working with a ton of legacy code. Compared to C and C++, Fortran is actually more elegant for pure numerical computing. I'm not actually recommending it, mind you, but I also found the main weaknesses of Fortran could be mitigated by writing wrappers in Perl to get data in and out. Java is not actually bad for numerical code either, and it's arguably easier to learn than C++. I guess I'm saying this to point out that it doesn't actually matter much what language you use. Visual basic is a rare exception -- never use that for any reason. :-) And you have to be aware that high-level languages like Python are going to be slow if you have no consideration for what operations are time-consuming. Be particularly mindful of memory allocation / object creation.
Agreed. I'm surprised there weren't more posts mentioning Gradle here!
It took me a few days to watch the videos and read through this article, but I think the main problem with the OP's arguments lie in this "for the good of the whole society" bit.
On the one hand I agree with this in principle, in a world in which lawyers and detectives are working foremost to uncover the truth in any given case. But our justice system is inherently an adversarial one, for better or worse. In the adversarial system, the police and prosecution is working almost exclusively for the plaintiff in a case and therefore against all suspects as well as all those who may potentially be a future suspect in any case that exists or is yet to be created. The goal of uncovering truth is purely secondary, thought to be a natural consequence of prosecution and defense each arguing their side to their best ability. Most of the OP's objections are, I think, rooted in the counter-intuitive nature of this adversarial system.
It's easy to find problems with our legal system. There is a lot of evidence that not all lawyers are equally matched ("buy the best lawyer you can afford" is common advice). A "jury of peers" is very easily misled and influenced by propaganda techniques. This may partly explain why some lawyers are better than others -- some are more skilled with propaganda and rhetoric. This system also is economically inefficient in the sense that it tends to necessitate its own professionals. That's the driving force behind these videos: the audience, legal students, are being told how absolutely essential they are in the legal process, so much so that virtually all communication to law enforcement must go through lawyers. There are also a LOT of cases (anyone have percentages?) where innocents have been convicted, jailed, even executed.
But on the other hand it's very difficult, for me anyway, to envision a system that is not antagonistic and also has as many checks and balances as ours does. It may be a little like democracy, "the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." I can't help but suggest that propaganda is also the Achilles's heel of democracy as much or more as it is for the legal system.
There's an interesting parallel between the adversarial justice system and a free, unregulated market economy. In both cases the ultimate goal, truth and justice for one and economic efficiency for the other, is thought to be achieved as a result of individuals working toward myopic or selfish ends. The invisible hand of justice, anyone? Also in both cases real world results show that there are major flaws in the theories. Perhaps these flaws result from simplifications or assumptions that are just not true.
It sounded to me like article is responding to a change in management (Peter Lee taking the reigns). It's not very direct about what it's advocating however, probably there's some inside context for this. The following points stood out to me:
- Research is not advanced development on potential new products
- Research areas should be carefully chosen with an eye toward giving the company an edge
That first point is probably what Bob Buderi is most concerned about. Management may be pushing Microsoft Research to be more product-focused. His response might be to instead focus on more careful selection of research areas, and more willingness to try productizing the research output.
For me, Unity would take a long time to get used to. I found the MacOS-like unified menu bar to be flaky, hard to use, and worked badly with a lot of software. Unity was fine with most apps if I wanted one window on the screen at a time, but that's not even close to how I work.
I'm using Kubuntu at the moment on my laptop, and Gentoo on a desktop at home. I'm happy enough with kubuntu but it does require a lot of tweaking, care and maintenance. It certainly does not "just work" the way Ubuntu used to several years ago. My coworkers (who mostly use xubuntu) and I have a hard time with lockups and experience lots of installation issues. About half of these relate to Nvidia drivers and multi-monitor support, but that still leaves a lot of other problems to contend with. It just seems less stable than it used to for me. GTK and QT seem to work less and less well with each other, and Network Manager and the networking service sometimes fight each other (lockups on boot even). In my office there have been several instances of whole-system corruption where people had to re-install everything from scratch. Distribution upgrades have not been smooth. I used to be very happy with Ubuntu but these days I'm falling out of love with it.
A lot of this may be hardware-related. I notice that coworkers with newer laptops have many more problems than I do. Some of this is expected, but again not to the degree that I'm seeing it.
The itunes, google play, and other paid app stores seem to me to discourage open source development. AFAICT there is no standard way to go from the market page to a project or source code page. Very few Android apps are open source, and the few that are open are hard to identify as such and find the code. But most desktop Linux-based distributions have package managers that allow easy access to the source code.
There is something about the mobile development community that almost discourages open source. Part of this may be the ease of creating paid or add-supported apps. Is this drawing developers that otherwise would not be coding or just writing Windows software onto a (mostly) open-source platform? Or is it outright discouraging open-source development? I'm thinking it's mostly the former but a little of the latter too.
I feel like the Guardian article's mention of "regression toward the mean" is incorrect because it attributes this effect as a causal one. The wikipedia link cited warns against using this effect as a predictive one under "misunderstandings." Past deviations do not predict future returns to the norm, just like rolling a high number with dice doesn't predict that the next roll will be below average. Dana makes it sound like climatologists predicted this year's rise as a consequence of last year's fluctuation.
I do agree with the conclusion that the 2013 sea ice level remains consistent with a decreasing trend.
The actual doc says "Some aspects of Python’s C code are not yet understood by Coverity." That's much more vague admittedly, but not as shameful.
It all depends on your frame of reference. CPython is a blurry rocket of speed when compared with Jython. And in theory you can write all the compute-expensive routines in C++.
I find that copy and paste in Python is very easy to do in any editor that lets you block indent (most do). I've also seen lots of C++ and Java recently that have been cut & pasted with little regard to indentation which makes reading it misleading to say the least. I'm not saying that one syntax (with curly braces or without) is better than another, but curly braces are no panacea. I've uncovered a LOT of bugs in C++ caused by cut & paste with sloppy and wrong attempts to re-balance the braces. I've also found Python bugs caused by wrong indentations, often caused by letting an editor run wild with auto-indent -- you can do that in bracey languages so Python runs a little counter to that habit. Also for Python if sections of code at some indentation level get way too long, then there's probably a more readable way to break that code down.
I've been working on an Android project for the past couple years, using Python for test automation, C for the kernel and drivers of course, C and C++ for low-level Android OS stuff and native libraries, and Java for upper layers (internals and apps). Whitespace in the C-like languages is inconsistent across the board, sometimes even within a file. Tab widths and tab/space usage are different for each developer (and their "style periods"). We cannot enforce a corporate policy in whitespace because we get so much (99.9%) of the code from open source and other suppliers. But thanks to PEP 8, Python code from multiple sources all looks pretty much the same and you don't have to invest time customizing your editor to use one style for files from one subtree, change formatting on the fly, etc.
I should mention that where Python has Guido, The Linux kernel has Linus and his style guide. I find even local kernel module code is consistent style-wise. But outside of that, on my project anyway, it's a style free-for-all.
Google's role in Android is an interesting one. The majority of Android is open-source. Most devices have a few closed-source components from the manufacturer such as EGL libraries (glue between Android's surface composer and Linux framebuffer devices), maybe wifi firmware, some few other small libraries too and of course the various bloatware that's usually nice to get rid of. Google's closed-source contributions are their apps (play store, browser, maps, email clients, etc) which are not internal Android components and all of which have non-Google alternatives.
In addition to the Linux kernel Android includes bionic C libraries and a variety of userspace daemons and utilities that are open-source and maintained by other companies. One can put things like busybox (GPL) and glibc libraries on an Android device. From a technical perspective the bionic C libraries are just inferior to the GNU equivalents. But the licensing makes it a lot less tricky for other companies to work with and so their inclusion in Android could be thought of as a clever industrial/political/marketing maneuver.
Since most of Android is covered by an Apache license, what keeps it from forking? Maybe just the fact that Google still develops it heavily. Everyone want's the latest "official" version on their own device, and I think that's the market force that drives a large amount of the code merging efforts today. Maybe it really is Google's product, not because it actually is but because people continue to perceive it that way.
The motherboard and chipset don't have to be sold with a profit margin since they support CPU sales. It may not even have to do with the profitability of the desktop market. Investors play a large role in steering public corporations. Investors are interested in growth potential, almost to the exclusion of all else.
They don't see growth potential in the desktop market therefore they declare it to be "dead" (meaning saturated). They see instead, and mostly with hindsight, growth potential in the tablet and smartphone markets. So it's the potential for growth in emergent markets which dictates stock prices rather than the health and viability of existing markets. I'm worried about the disconnect here. It doesn't matter whether or not people want tablets instead of laptops and desktops, it only matters that the tablet market is not yet fully saturated.
I'm enjoying reading the Washington Post article, linked from Stallman's reference. I'm no expert in this field, but the arguments seem reasonable. Do you have any specific objections beyond name-calling?
I kinda like the Fahrenheit scale for temperature. I'm an SI nut on all the other basic measures. Celsius is good for chemistry, Kelvins for physics, but Fahrenheit for humans. 0 was supposed to be as cold as he could get in his lab (salt water freezes, drivers beware), and 100 was body temperature. Okay it's not quite 100 but that was the original intent which makes the scale pretty good when talking about the weather.
I should also mention that most people want to convert pounds into kilograms, which is nonsense (well except on the Earth at sea level). Pounds convert to Newtons, and slugs to kilograms.
Oh, the one other thing that the US customary measurements are good for is the speed of light, approximately 1 foot per nanosecond.
I don't think that the Vulgate Bible was really accessible to the masses. See Tyndale's wikipedia article on his rationale for an English translation in the early 1500s:
"They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture."
At about the same time in history, Thomas Linacre was studying a Greek Bible and comparing it with the Vulgate. He reportedly said: "Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel or we are not Christians." So I think the Vulgate was a lot less accurate than even the earliest English translations including the King James Version.
But I think what's really interesting about this is how the Latin Bible verses were used at the time, and how they were infused with a sense of deep reverence and/or fear. Along comes Tyndale, who translates the Bible from original language sources into English. Among other things he uses informal pronouns Thee and Thou to refer to God. That had to be absolutely shocking to the people at the time, but at the same time restoring a lost aspect of Christianity -- our personal and direct relationship with God.
Now a few hundred years later when people mimic the language of the King James bible in a Christian context, it is with a sense of deep reverence and/or fear, and often used in today's culture to imply a blind religious faith. It's as if humanity somehow wants to create some kind of formality within religion and rely on authority instead of accepting the uncertainty of a personal religious searching.
I should also point out how the early Christian Bible was translated into hundreds of different languages until the Holy Roman church collected and burned all non-Latin translations. So it wasn't just the 1500s that saw language as a tool for control over the masses.
This sounds to me like a reactionary statement that may be fueled by media hyperbole and exaggeration. Have we really thrown out the constitution? Remember that the US Constitution is a living document and was far from perfect at its inception. I have lots of respect for it but do not worship it. I'd like to tell you to actually read it but I'm ashamed to say that I myself have not done so. I've read some parts of it and found that it's actually very readable and not affected much by "legalese" so I plan to read more of it in the future. I'm just trying to say that going to the source sometimes helps de-fuse our emotional triggers that are abused by the propaganda of our day.
Our tax burden is not crippling. Our standard of living continues to improve. Lifespans are improving. Our income tax rates are lower than most developed countries and our corporate tax rates are on a par with others. Government revenue has been between 15 and 20% of GDP since the 1940's, and in the past 4 years it's gone down and is closer to 15%.
There are a lot of political issues today that I'd love to be able to correct, but I don't think everything is "broken." What I most want is more education in propaganda analysis (deconstruction -- see for example http://propagandacritic.com/), and less two-party partisan nonsense. These are both problems as old as our country. Yes, corporate lobbyists are another way of spelling "corruption" but this too is nothing new. The national debt and CO2 emissions are serious problems that are new to the past few decades, and they both frighten me a little, but they are complex problems that will need to be solved in an intelligent manner without reactionary thought.
And finally, as many people pointed out above, these succession petitions are far from representative of the majority opinion. There's a massive gap between a signed petition (to let off steam mostly) and finding that these states want to actually secede.
I cannot understand why Maine and Nebraska do this! I applaud them of course but I don't see this as a locally-correct strategy.
If you're a swing state, you love it because you get lots of attention, perhaps to your own state's needs, during presidential election season. That's good. If you go to proportional representation that no longer happens. (A friend pointed out to me that this kind of attention is really a bad thing. We live in Colorado and I've had no less then 12 phone calls reminding me to vote during the past week, and sticky notes on my doors.)
If you're not a swing state, winner-take-all is still good for you because if you transition to proportional representation most of your citizens will feel like they have less of a voice in the election -- less impact for their collective votes. If all "blue" states, for example, went to proportional representation while the "red" states did not then it would be nearly impossible for a democrat to win the presidency. The blue state citizens would generally not like this and wish to change back.
So while I'd love to see proportional representation happen, I don't think it can happen unless the constitution is amended to force all states to do it at once. Of course along come Maine and Nebraska -- an ugly disfigurement on my lovely little theory. What stupid states, doing what's best for the good of the country and all that. Makes me sick.
What I think is even more important is going from plurality voting to almost any other system. The grandparent post mentions instant runoff, but I'm starting to favor approval voting. We're so close to doing that anyway. I heard a news report reminding voters that if they mark YES for more than one candidate, their ballot would be invalidated. Approval voting is just like our current system except that voting YES for more than one candidate is allowed. Maybe that's not quite as good as instant runoff, but it's close and dead simple. It eliminates the third-party spoiler effect, and I think that's huge and worth fighting for. I think it would make a noticeable improvement in partisan politics! Yes we'd again need an amendment, but honestly who in their right minds would oppose that? I guess the catch is "who in their right minds."