1) linux doesn't (well, not a legal one anyway). It's not free. 2) neither does windows xp 3) even in the cases where such is provided, they're like all other "standard" implementations : incompatible
The whole point of laws is that, yes there is. Before laws, like, say in any muslim country before 1970 or so, you could be "sued" for any reason whatsoever. You could get any punishment whatsoever for any reason, and usually this meant people got the death penalty for some idiotic technicality while "coincidentally" also having irritated the current dictator. (and of course, millenia before that, it worked similarly in the west)
Compared to that, we're golden. In our country you can pay a lawyer to write an extensive document describing the (likely) legality of a number of actions and all concerns and thoughts that govern the decision process of the judge, and in pretty damn close to all cases, this is what will happen (if for no other reason, because it's generally lawyers that get promoted to judge). Once upon a time, laws were simple enough that anyone who went to university (college didn't exist then) would be able to predict the outcome of any court case.
Given that lawyers exist you can place a pretty safe bet these companies did quite a bit of research into the validity of microsoft's patents, and that they were found to 1) be valid patents 2) apply to linux So you can make a pretty safe bet that, if ever tested in open court, microsoft could get an injuction against linux distribution.
(frankly, given, say, the patents of companies like motorola or ericsson, a lot of companies could prevent linux distribution if they wanted to using patents. And it's still not impossible that a company like oracle could have a valid copyright claim against some important part of linux, or X11, or some other critical part of linux infrastructure today, so microsoft is hardly alone in having this power).
The sad fact is, that microsoft was the great innovator in this space. IBM, who came before them, didn't allow any os but their own to use any hardware they produced, nor did they allow any competition on the hardware side of things. They were like apple's iphone business.
Microsoft is the reason that you can install alternative operating systems in the first place. Everyone else managed to blow themselves up, despite having a really strong opportunity. DR-DOS, Concurrent PC-DOS, CP/M, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, Novell DOS, OpenDOS and I'm not even providing a full list here. Geos, PC/Geos, GeoWorks, MAC/OS, OS/2, Amiga/OS, BeOS, Iris, NextStep, RISC OS, Visi On... Microsoft openly competed with all of them and won, mostly on technical merit. Apple was one of the companies that used the courts to prevent alternative operating systems from becoming possible, and has always been openly hostile to competition. Along with that, Microsoft created the market for hardware innovations (my apologies to any lisp/c64/... machine addicts, but... even you know what I man). You should give them credit for that, even if that credit mostly belongs to Bill Gates, and little claim can be laid to it by the current microsoft crew.
Microsoft is the canonical example of a company that faced lots and lots of competition and won mostly on technical merits.
Besides, I'm kinda starting to hate this anti-microsoft bashing. It's been years since I've used any form of windows on my own machines, or at work. There is no anti-competition behavior microsoft might be doing of that apple isn't doing 10x worse. Compatibility with iWork ? Just try it. Yet apple is not just forgiven for being anti-freedom, but actually revered for it. "A curated experience is better" and so on. And on apple machines, you really can't install the software you want, because there are actual, technical control measures in place that actually try to prevent it.
In this case, people are afraid of what microsoft *might* at some point, try to do. Great. Microsoft, today, isn't the problem. Apple is the big enemy of software freedom today. Microsoft is mostly becoming less free by imitating apple.
So please, let's shelve this discussion until apple has been broken up into a hardware business entirely separate from the software business. Including on the iPhone front.
If you were to read the actual study (not publicly accessible), you'd see the EXACT experiment done :
1) first he measured how violent 60 college students are 2) then he let them play 4 games : * Mortal Kombat versus DC Universe * Left 4 Dead 2 * Marble Blast Ultra * Fuel (this one in case you're wondering) 3) he tested the violent behavior again.
Observation violent behavior increased, except in the case of "marble blast ultra". There's a "big surprise" in the data.
Note that this experiment *does* prove causality, if it sufficiently excludes other influences between steps 1 and 3. It is not mere correlation (you're only stuck with correlation if you can only do passive experiments. This is an active experiment : you actually influence those people)
The "big surprise" is 1) while every group showed increase violent responses there was a subgroup that showed an extreme increase (they basically went from 50% acted "violently", to 100%, which is the source of their "check the personality type" comments. This was known before, of course, but in this study it's a pretty huge increase (only mental patients showed increases like this before, so this is probably a measurement error, or they have some seriously unstable college students in Canada) 2) the game "Fuel" was more effective in creating violent responses than Left 4 Dead 2 (but what was left out is that there are 2 possible allowed tactics : either you race, or you try to destroy your opponents). But "Mortal Kombat" took the crown spot, and left 4 dead 2 still increased violent responses.
Politics refuses to accept the answer that media (whether it's movies, video games, punk rock, comic books, etc.) is just not as influencing of behavior as they like to believe. People need to be able to blame something other than themselves for the perceived "immorality" of young people today...
Cute, very nice way of throwing in the assumption that games don't have any effect. Nicely done. Of course, the position of psychology science is just the opposite, so isn't your response a very good example of letting your politics override your common sense ?
Of course, parenting is a much bigger influence, but let's hope your kids will resist the urge of simply throwing around inapplicable soundbytes when they don't like scientific results anyway ("correlation doesn't equal causation", when no such principle was used in the research).
First, yes, the major influence on kids are the parents. In just about everything. Yes, it's the actual "parent", which may or may not match the biological parent(s). If you spend time with kids when they're very little, they will imitate you throughout their entire life. If you're a violent slob, guess what will happen. Parents, or their de-facto replacements, have much, much more influence than any tv program or video game. This does not mean, of course, that there is no such influence.
So do you realize the reason this research was "presented" ? I guess not.
It's because it's a tested, re-tested, re-verified and oh yes double-blind checked observation that video games increase violent behavior, in the short term, in the long term, in little kids, in big kids, in young adults, in middle aged people, older people and pensioners. In men and in women. Leftists, rightists, there's even studies testing mental patients. Other than that the effect is stronger and lasts longer the younger you are, there's no difference. Some people react stronger to this than others (in fact it's really, really, really bad in some people), but not a single group has ever shown itself to be immune. There's been an insane amount of resources wasted on this specific question, tons of outright falsifications have gotten caught, people have gotten fired over this left and right...
Show people violence, you're making them violent. Make people participate, even in imagined violence, and you're doing the same, but much faster. Show people relaxing images, they relax. Make them participate even in imagined relaxation, and it works better. No big surprises there.
So that's the reason this research had to be presented. Note that the actual study indicated that people are very much affected, specifically made violent, by these video games. What the study mostly claimed is that some types of imagined violence had more of an effect than others (big surprise : convincing violence, preferably with some sort of consequence on a real, human, victim, even if it's just a number on his/her screen, evokes more violence than what amounts to showing a picture of some blood).
So can we now please please grow up and assume that, yes, 40 years of testing the same thing (20 years for video games), with every honest psychologist coming again and again to the same conclusion did not result from a desire to steal your tv/video games ? Argue for or against video games (or tv) knowing full well that they cause violent behavior. The whole point of science is that you can be VERY certain that it won't conform to your political persuasion, whatever that may be.
A lot of methods are known for artificially influencing earths temperature. But let's face it, this is "artificial" and anything artificial just can't be a "green" policy, right ? So it'll be rejected as a policy option. The target of global warming policies is not to actually slow or stop global warming, since they are simply totally incapable of doing that. So why do we have those policies at all ?
Imagine we're killing 500 elephants yearly, and for a stable population you can only kill 10 yearly. Current policies are the equivalent of putting a "strict" quota of 499 elephants, then grant exceptions on it. (of course, in the case of climate policies, enforcing them strictly would mean people die, and millions of people have already died because of obsolete-but-still-law biofuel policies. Needless to say, those policies are still in place. You'd think a black president would have more qualms about killing Africans, by letting them starve no less, but that's apparently not the case)
On the plus side : Of course, if we want long-term climate stability, we will need to take control of the temperature.
On the con side : It's irreversible. Start the pumps, and in 24-48 hours an effect that will last decades will have started. Nothing to do but see it happen, and count the damages. Which brings us to the second point : This is a weapon. Worse: it's like an atomic bomb, it's a potential world-ender : you cannot realistically hope to stop any larger entity from doing this, especially if that entity has territorial waters, it would be impossible. If it works, it's much more scary than hydrogen bombs. If, say Saudi Arabia would do this, they could easily make most of northern europe and canada completely unlivable. You can't stop them from doing this without invading, or at least executing areal bombing. It's artificial. And gaia is apparently supposed to fix itself. Ask yourself, do you think greens would accept this artifial temperature lowering coupled with returning to increasing co2 output until oil runs out ? It will create a legal "responsible entity" for changes in world temperature. Lowering the earth's temperature by even minute amounts will create victims, and there's a clear responsible entity. So, say 2-3 cities have to move southward as a result of doing this. Do they get to sue whichever country does this for damages ? (I would think yes). So you're screwed. We don't actually have a good way of predicting what the exact results of this will be. We don't know the exact effects of temperature variations "on the ground", we don't know them when temp goes up, we don't know what will happen when temp goes down
Did you know that medical scientists, at least the ones with docter degrees, don't just have the academic punishments to threaten them into correctness. They swear the hippocratic oath.
And, frankly, anyone who doubts the influence of society on science should simply look into "debates" that have been settled. Psychology is a really, really great science to illustrate this problem, because there's plenty of stuff we really don't like about ourselves. A number of questions are entirely settled science, and yet it is constantly challenged, attacked and worse.
A few settled psychological facts : 1) violent tv causes people to act violently, whether we're talking adults or kids, low or high iq,... the smaller the kids, the more pronounced the effect, but there is a definite effect even on 50-year-olds 2) violent computer games are much, much worse than tv, and also cause violent behavior. Including adults 3) the basic principle of communism "to each according to need, from each according to ability" doesn't work. At all. In every conceivable test, everybody finds ways to improve their needs and decrease their abilities... A majority of people will lie to claim more entitlements, in some studies up to 90%.
Given the nature of these debates, including the fact that several "honorable" institutions have been caught falsifying data to negate these conclusions (especially point 3 is bad in this manner. Even today, you find no shortage of papers claiming how people do not lie to claim entitlements, openly falsified).
So how can one possibly defend the claim that something like climate science isn't massively influenced by societal pressure ?
You're all acting like climate science is an exact science. The ONLY "evidence" for global warming is statistical. It is mathematically impossible to model systems like the weather.
So you're mostly all wrong : global warming's core claim is a mathematically better-built version of "in the last 150 years temperature and co2 concentration in the athmosphere appeared to move upwards in lockstep". That's all.
CO2 is not a very important gas in the "inner workings" of global warming, but politically it's the central - or sometimes only - actor. In "the science" the main player is water, and CO2 only matters in how it created an initial push of H2O into the athmosphere, and kept providing a tiny little push. The real warming comes from a much more unpredictable process : the speed of water evaporation above the world's oceans. Please do NOT assume that this process listens to such simplistic arguments as "if it's warmer there's more" (wind speeds are a *much* bigger influence). These things are NOT well-modeled in the models, they've just "mostly" evolved in a similar way over a bit over a century.
The problem is this : First there was AR1 (IPCC assessment report 1)... it gave a 95% interval for the temperature in the 21st century. Temperature is outside of the 95% range, below it Then came AR2... idem Then came AR3... idem Then came AR4... we're just barely (barely) within the interval, and it's not going the correct direction Then came AR5... which doesn't actually predict the temperature anymore (let's not ask skeptics as to why this is), but contains a prediction for solar output, that as it turns out, was *very* wrong.
Now the way I learned science is that if predictions made by a theory and a series of scientists are wrong... what do we do ?
Yeah of course you're right. I'm just a bit afraid of this:
I agree that not stopping them was not an option, as they were violent and dangerous, but I really don't think the numbers were there to make it a real possibility that they couldn't be stopped.
The argument was not that they would topple the state. As plenty of revolutions have shown, no matter how unrealistic and moronic the revolutionaries, there's always a state coming out of it. See Iran, for example, for a bunch of morons demonstrating only to get terrorized into an islamic state by perhaps 5% of the revolutionaries because they didn't have any stomach for a real fight, and the progressives showed they couldn't organize their way out of a bomb belt. If you don't build the state, someone else will. You won't like the new meaning of getting stoned.
But this London demonstrations is making a free western democracy consider suppressing the right to demonstrations, social media, free exchange of ideas and so on. And that's for one little event. I wonder what will happen when this has occurred five times. And when it happens 50 times.
However there's also the downside. I recently implemented a text parser for certain configuration file checking. Now granted we have huge configs, but :
Python parsing a 3.2 megabyte config file : 50 sec C++ parsing that same file, same operations, same grammaer : 0.05 sec
(most of the code was parsing code anyway so there wasn't much to rewrite, also 90+% of dev time was spent getting that grammar to work)
This made the difference between the tool being used, and not used. Runtime matters. I participated in google code jam last year only with python, and the runtime is... distracting. I don't deny the advantages of python : simply don't check for number overflows, simply don't care. But the disadvantages include a 20x slowdown for basic calculations. When problem runtimes for C++ code start exceeding 5-10 seconds, python is no longer an option. The time difference is actually so big that C++ O(n^2) algorithms would beat O(n log n) python algorithms on the large dataset in some cases.
Next year, I'll be using C++ in google code jam. Python is good for shell scripting and basic website operations.
That's not actually true for learning. I find I learn by far the fastest if thrown in to a problem, and then have someone critique what I come up with. Climbing small mountains first has the effect of solidifying *wrong* information in my brain, which takes ages to get back out. In your metaphor, the reality simply is that mount Everest exist. Training on a molehill where oxygen masks don't matter will lead to forgetting them in basecamp, then dying, utterly convinced of how competent you are.
Throw students on mount everest, make sure to have evacuation options. That's how sherpa's do it (starting with 3-year-olds), and nobody beats them at rock climbing. There, metaphor taken too far... check.
Besides, small-scale training just doesn't prepare you for the reality. You want to learn how to write every last imperative language there is ? Learn C++... then figure out which parts to drop so it becomes C/Java/Pascal/C#/F#/Python... Learn functional programming (only const functions and objects)... Monads (think about adding return this to every void member function)... Learn dynamic typing (always lookup your functions in a map, don't directly call them).... Learn java (autopointer everything, then look into more advanced garbage collection)...
And if you want garbage collection to "just work"... C++ can do that fine. A lot of programs are actually simpler in C++ than in java. They're certainly shorter, although that's hardly a contest when we're talking about java.
I do not think that the rioters were trying to achieve change.
How about "they certainly wanted change in their personal situation, they just didn't care about politics and the real world at all, so they took what they wanted".
But what can you do against protests like this except meet them with greater violence ? And how would you yourself even have a peaceful demonstration ? In a crowd of a thousand people a few hundred rioters are not really noticed, yet they will cause justified counterattacks against the whole.
I mean these rioters are 100x more dangerous to freedom than even Syria's governments or all those other islamic hellholes. If they aren't stopped, it won't be just that they're not free, you will lose big parts of your freedom.
Really ? How is this different from, say, a gaia demonstration ? Except for the fact that these people want TV's and those gaia demonstrations want to get attention to themselves. There's nothing fundamentally different between these 2 protests. Rebels without a cause, nothing more.
What you're saying, in effect, is that political demonstrations are only possible in a group of people with a minimum level of morality.
Perhaps it's slightly different : political advocates exist anywhere, but peaceful change is only possible with a peaceful people. Which brings up the question of Syria again...
1) Classical banking does not require anything innovative. You simply give out loans using funds from deposits. It's simple, it works.
Of course not, that's because the innovation and risk is not in the loan itself, but WHO you lend to. Give this power to the politicians and the banking system crashes because we "lent" 10*GDP to the solar panel installation company run by the president's nephew. You see the problem ?
Oh let me guess : you will make legislation immune to this problem, right ? Again : how would that work ?
2) Banks certainly don't NEED to invest in anything risky. Usually banks require collateral to back the loan applications.
Euhm... are you sure about this ? Because it sure seems to me that just about every venture I know of depends on banks to run (either direct loans with wildly insufficient collateral, or "leasing" equipment).
3) There are more than enough entities ready to invest in risky ventures.
Right. Go read hacker news and double check this claim.
4) Small and medium-sized banks with properly regulated leverage are perfectly OK.
I kinda to agree with this, but the way to get this done is to let big banks fail. Of course, that means a lot of people will lose their savings.
Orbits come in many sizes. Orbits close to geostationary orbits have the following properties : if you are slightly closer to earth, you will fall down (slowly) if you are at the exact right spot, you will stay there if you are slightly further away from earth, you are in effect on an escape trajectory, you will gain height (slowly)
So here's an idea. Since this cable has to withstand umpteen giganewtons of tension anyway, place the top of the elevator too high. Therefore the cable will have to pull on the satellite to keep it in a stable orbit. Since a giganewton more or less doesn't really matter, let's add a giganewton. Then we can attach payloads of up to 100 tons to the wire without causing the satellite to fall down to earth.
Where does the energy come from ? It uses the rotation of the earth to pull satellites into orbit, so conservation of energy is effected by slowing down the earth for every satellite going up.
Also the whole point of a space elevator is that we don't need to carry fuel to put fuel into orbit. When the US launches the space shuttle, 50% of the fuel in the rocket is used up to give the rocket 1 meter elevation. Electricity is available everywhere if you've got millions to spend on hugely expensive solar panels (and millions would be *very* cheap for satellites). Rockets have 0.4% efficiency because most fuel is used to have a little fuel available higher up. With a space elevator at 50% efficiency, launch energy costs would go down a factor of 120...
And let's not forget that a space elevator would make space-based solar power a braindead endeavour, so it would probably pay thousandfold for it's energy expenditures anyway. An operational space elevator would be even better than working fusion power.
But imho a better and easier option would be to get a working fabrication facility operational on the moon. Your mother can knit a working space elevator for the moon together easily, and her grandson is probably operating a catapult capable of launching satellites into earth orbit from the moon surface near some people he doesn't like. So another easy option would be to simply fabricate satellites on the moon. It would have the additional advantages of massive free amounts of solar power, easily mineral stores you wouldn't believe, and you can easily get to the rest of the solar system in addition to earth orbit (which would still require a relatively big rocket starting from earth geostationary orbit).
I have one question : how will that work ? Can you explain how & why that would influence the majority of society and why that would be a good/bad thing ?
Here's what will happen, according to me : nationalizing the biggest banks, if effective, meaning it will really control lending will switch the economy to the communist model : capital only available under control of the government system.
Banks need to invest in risky ventures and they need to do this out of profit motive. This is close to the basis of capitalism. Obviously this can only be done by banks not controlled by the state which may go bankrupt (and must be allowed to go bankrupt). The only alternative to profit motive is political motive and this will, again, bring us back to the failed communist history.
Doing this will obviously massively widen the gap between rich and poor, to levels that are currently only seen in socialist or dictatorial states like North Korea or Middle eastern states.
Everything is an object is not a property of dynamically typed languages, nor is it a property of static languages. It can be part of language design, or it can not be. It won't force a language to be either static or dynamically typed. Imho, usually laziness of language designers is what makes languages dynamically typed. Some at least have the decency to limit that dynamic typing to the implementation,and not build it into the design.
Personally I find the one language that actually does the "everything is an object" thing correctly is C++. Python and Ruby and the like cheat : in java parlance they only have Integers and Floats and lack int and float types (and they lack &int and &float, but so does java. Actually python only really has a BigInteger). They only have pointer types and they implement hugely confusing calling conventions (at least from the viewpoint of someone who actually knows how a computer works) (and with C++0x you could say that there is a new gaping hole in most languages : move semantics versus copy semantics)
C++ by contrast has all the options : int, int*, int&, float, float*, float&, and you can stick all of them in a collection without issues. Well, except if you're shooting yourself in the foot and there is no way for the compiler to fix it.
You're argument only makes sense if you accept that the python language design requires dynamic typing. And this may (may) be true for the really advanced and esoteric uses of python, but anyone who's ever built a tiny compiler knows that 95% of python can easily be implemented statically typed. It would be a great exercise to try to fully inline the entire python runtime library to cover the remaining 5%.
Personally I'm convinced that a statically typed python supporting 90% of common use cases, and the IDE and tools that are possible to build using such a language would blow the regular python out of the water. Python's "dynamic" typing is in reality no more powerful than inference + splitting (ie. if you do 'x = 5; print x + 1; x = "boe"; print x + "1";' translate to 'x = 5; print x + 1; y = "boe"; print y + "1"', and split the variable name when re-typing occurs). And is there anyone here claiming that java's ctrl+space wouldn't be a great help in writing library intensive python code, never mind all other refactorings ?
I may understand in practice why people use dynamically typed languages, but theoretically there is no good reason for using dynamic typing at all. Furthermore python's "garbage collector" is so extremely basic it could simply be moved to compile time (I mean that there is no theoretical problem predicting all allocations of a python program at compile time, so (if you had a year to get this right) you could make python object allocation compile to a nop.
You do realize that, whether we agree that huge companies have 1-3% or 15-20% doesn't really matter for the point made, right ? 20% profit added to govt's coffers is not nearly enough to solve our social problems, and the destruction that measure will cause will far exceed 20% of the economy.
So whether you're right... or I'm right, the point remains : taking the money of the bankers will bring nothing but destruction for barely any reward. Stop claiming it somehow will (because you're being rather disingenuous about this, you're in essence claiming that because a tiny number is off by an order of magnitude, yet still quite tiny, and this somehow makes a large difference to the larger point. It doesn't)
(the number I think you should take is total corporate profit/GDP which is definitely not 15%)
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3 things :
1) linux doesn't (well, not a legal one anyway). It's not free.
2) neither does windows xp
3) even in the cases where such is provided, they're like all other "standard" implementations : incompatible
The whole point of laws is that, yes there is. Before laws, like, say in any muslim country before 1970 or so, you could be "sued" for any reason whatsoever. You could get any punishment whatsoever for any reason, and usually this meant people got the death penalty for some idiotic technicality while "coincidentally" also having irritated the current dictator. (and of course, millenia before that, it worked similarly in the west)
Compared to that, we're golden. In our country you can pay a lawyer to write an extensive document describing the (likely) legality of a number of actions and all concerns and thoughts that govern the decision process of the judge, and in pretty damn close to all cases, this is what will happen (if for no other reason, because it's generally lawyers that get promoted to judge). Once upon a time, laws were simple enough that anyone who went to university (college didn't exist then) would be able to predict the outcome of any court case.
Given that lawyers exist you can place a pretty safe bet these companies did quite a bit of research into the validity of microsoft's patents, and that they were found to
1) be valid patents
2) apply to linux
So you can make a pretty safe bet that, if ever tested in open court, microsoft could get an injuction against linux distribution.
(frankly, given, say, the patents of companies like motorola or ericsson, a lot of companies could prevent linux distribution if they wanted to using patents. And it's still not impossible that a company like oracle could have a valid copyright claim against some important part of linux, or X11, or some other critical part of linux infrastructure today, so microsoft is hardly alone in having this power).
The sad fact is, that microsoft was the great innovator in this space. IBM, who came before them, didn't allow any os but their own to use any hardware they produced, nor did they allow any competition on the hardware side of things. They were like apple's iphone business.
Microsoft is the reason that you can install alternative operating systems in the first place. Everyone else managed to blow themselves up, despite having a really strong opportunity. DR-DOS, Concurrent PC-DOS, CP/M, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, Novell DOS, OpenDOS and I'm not even providing a full list here. Geos, PC/Geos, GeoWorks, MAC/OS, OS/2, Amiga/OS, BeOS, Iris, NextStep, RISC OS, Visi On... Microsoft openly competed with all of them and won, mostly on technical merit. Apple was one of the companies that used the courts to prevent alternative operating systems from becoming possible, and has always been openly hostile to competition. Along with that, Microsoft created the market for hardware innovations (my apologies to any lisp/c64/... machine addicts, but ... even you know what I man). You should give them credit for that, even if that credit mostly belongs to Bill Gates, and little claim can be laid to it by the current microsoft crew.
Microsoft is the canonical example of a company that faced lots and lots of competition and won mostly on technical merits.
Besides, I'm kinda starting to hate this anti-microsoft bashing. It's been years since I've used any form of windows on my own machines, or at work. There is no anti-competition behavior microsoft might be doing of that apple isn't doing 10x worse. Compatibility with iWork ? Just try it. Yet apple is not just forgiven for being anti-freedom, but actually revered for it. "A curated experience is better" and so on. And on apple machines, you really can't install the software you want, because there are actual, technical control measures in place that actually try to prevent it.
In this case, people are afraid of what microsoft *might* at some point, try to do. Great. Microsoft, today, isn't the problem. Apple is the big enemy of software freedom today. Microsoft is mostly becoming less free by imitating apple.
So please, let's shelve this discussion until apple has been broken up into a hardware business entirely separate from the software business. Including on the iPhone front.
I did not state they "don't have any effect." I did however state they have no greater effect than that of movies, books, comics, etc.
Do not go around stating the falsehood that it is settled and agreed by psychologists that violent video games cause violent behavior.
Wait ... what ? Is there an effect, or isn't there ? If you expose people to violent video games, is increased violent behavior the result or not ?
You're not making your opinion very clear.
If you were to read the actual study (not publicly accessible), you'd see the EXACT experiment done :
1) first he measured how violent 60 college students are
2) then he let them play 4 games :
* Mortal Kombat versus DC Universe
* Left 4 Dead 2
* Marble Blast Ultra
* Fuel (this one in case you're wondering)
3) he tested the violent behavior again.
Observation violent behavior increased, except in the case of "marble blast ultra". There's a "big surprise" in the data.
Note that this experiment *does* prove causality, if it sufficiently excludes other influences between steps 1 and 3. It is not mere correlation (you're only stuck with correlation if you can only do passive experiments. This is an active experiment : you actually influence those people)
The "big surprise" is
1) while every group showed increase violent responses there was a subgroup that showed an extreme increase (they basically went from 50% acted "violently", to 100%, which is the source of their "check the personality type" comments. This was known before, of course, but in this study it's a pretty huge increase (only mental patients showed increases like this before, so this is probably a measurement error, or they have some seriously unstable college students in Canada)
2) the game "Fuel" was more effective in creating violent responses than Left 4 Dead 2 (but what was left out is that there are 2 possible allowed tactics : either you race, or you try to destroy your opponents). But "Mortal Kombat" took the crown spot, and left 4 dead 2 still increased violent responses.
Politics refuses to accept the answer that media (whether it's movies, video games, punk rock, comic books, etc.) is just not as influencing of behavior as they like to believe. People need to be able to blame something other than themselves for the perceived "immorality" of young people today ...
Cute, very nice way of throwing in the assumption that games don't have any effect. Nicely done. Of course, the position of psychology science is just the opposite, so isn't your response a very good example of letting your politics override your common sense ?
Of course, parenting is a much bigger influence, but let's hope your kids will resist the urge of simply throwing around inapplicable soundbytes when they don't like scientific results anyway ("correlation doesn't equal causation", when no such principle was used in the research).
First, yes, the major influence on kids are the parents. In just about everything. Yes, it's the actual "parent", which may or may not match the biological parent(s). If you spend time with kids when they're very little, they will imitate you throughout their entire life. If you're a violent slob, guess what will happen. Parents, or their de-facto replacements, have much, much more influence than any tv program or video game. This does not mean, of course, that there is no such influence.
So do you realize the reason this research was "presented" ? I guess not.
It's because it's a tested, re-tested, re-verified and oh yes double-blind checked observation that video games increase violent behavior, in the short term, in the long term, in little kids, in big kids, in young adults, in middle aged people, older people and pensioners. In men and in women. Leftists, rightists, there's even studies testing mental patients. Other than that the effect is stronger and lasts longer the younger you are, there's no difference. Some people react stronger to this than others (in fact it's really, really, really bad in some people), but not a single group has ever shown itself to be immune. There's been an insane amount of resources wasted on this specific question, tons of outright falsifications have gotten caught, people have gotten fired over this left and right ...
Show people violence, you're making them violent. Make people participate, even in imagined violence, and you're doing the same, but much faster. Show people relaxing images, they relax. Make them participate even in imagined relaxation, and it works better. No big surprises there.
So that's the reason this research had to be presented. Note that the actual study indicated that people are very much affected, specifically made violent, by these video games. What the study mostly claimed is that some types of imagined violence had more of an effect than others (big surprise : convincing violence, preferably with some sort of consequence on a real, human, victim, even if it's just a number on his/her screen, evokes more violence than what amounts to showing a picture of some blood).
So can we now please please grow up and assume that, yes, 40 years of testing the same thing (20 years for video games), with every honest psychologist coming again and again to the same conclusion did not result from a desire to steal your tv/video games ? Argue for or against video games (or tv) knowing full well that they cause violent behavior. The whole point of science is that you can be VERY certain that it won't conform to your political persuasion, whatever that may be.
This is THE way to politicize science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly_1880-2010_(Fig.A).gif
From just below -0.2 to +0.5 (you have to follow the red line and round towards zero).
Indeed : Why bother doing this test ?
A lot of methods are known for artificially influencing earths temperature. But let's face it, this is "artificial" and anything artificial just can't be a "green" policy, right ? So it'll be rejected as a policy option. The target of global warming policies is not to actually slow or stop global warming, since they are simply totally incapable of doing that. So why do we have those policies at all ?
Imagine we're killing 500 elephants yearly, and for a stable population you can only kill 10 yearly. Current policies are the equivalent of putting a "strict" quota of 499 elephants, then grant exceptions on it. (of course, in the case of climate policies, enforcing them strictly would mean people die, and millions of people have already died because of obsolete-but-still-law biofuel policies. Needless to say, those policies are still in place. You'd think a black president would have more qualms about killing Africans, by letting them starve no less, but that's apparently not the case)
On the plus side : Of course, if we want long-term climate stability, we will need to take control of the temperature.
On the con side :
It's irreversible. Start the pumps, and in 24-48 hours an effect that will last decades will have started. Nothing to do but see it happen, and count the damages. Which brings us to the second point :
This is a weapon. Worse: it's like an atomic bomb, it's a potential world-ender : you cannot realistically hope to stop any larger entity from doing this, especially if that entity has territorial waters, it would be impossible. If it works, it's much more scary than hydrogen bombs. If, say Saudi Arabia would do this, they could easily make most of northern europe and canada completely unlivable. You can't stop them from doing this without invading, or at least executing areal bombing.
It's artificial. And gaia is apparently supposed to fix itself. Ask yourself, do you think greens would accept this artifial temperature lowering coupled with returning to increasing co2 output until oil runs out ?
It will create a legal "responsible entity" for changes in world temperature. Lowering the earth's temperature by even minute amounts will create victims, and there's a clear responsible entity. So, say 2-3 cities have to move southward as a result of doing this. Do they get to sue whichever country does this for damages ? (I would think yes). So you're screwed.
We don't actually have a good way of predicting what the exact results of this will be. We don't know the exact effects of temperature variations "on the ground", we don't know them when temp goes up, we don't know what will happen when temp goes down
Right, after all, scientists can be trusted.
Did you know that medical scientists, at least the ones with docter degrees, don't just have the academic punishments to threaten them into correctness. They swear the hippocratic oath.
Here's how that worked out.
And, frankly, anyone who doubts the influence of society on science should simply look into "debates" that have been settled. Psychology is a really, really great science to illustrate this problem, because there's plenty of stuff we really don't like about ourselves. A number of questions are entirely settled science, and yet it is constantly challenged, attacked and worse.
A few settled psychological facts : ... the smaller the kids, the more pronounced the effect, but there is a definite effect even on 50-year-olds ... A majority of people will lie to claim more entitlements, in some studies up to 90%.
1) violent tv causes people to act violently, whether we're talking adults or kids, low or high iq,
2) violent computer games are much, much worse than tv, and also cause violent behavior. Including adults
3) the basic principle of communism "to each according to need, from each according to ability" doesn't work. At all. In every conceivable test, everybody finds ways to improve their needs and decrease their abilities
Given the nature of these debates, including the fact that several "honorable" institutions have been caught falsifying data to negate these conclusions (especially point 3 is bad in this manner. Even today, you find no shortage of papers claiming how people do not lie to claim entitlements, openly falsified).
So how can one possibly defend the claim that something like climate science isn't massively influenced by societal pressure ?
"Turning DRM into iDRM" (invasive direct rectal machiavellism)
New and inventive features to make people pay hundreds of bucks monthly ... after paying near a thousand bucks for the device itself.
You're all acting like climate science is an exact science. The ONLY "evidence" for global warming is statistical. It is mathematically impossible to model systems like the weather.
So you're mostly all wrong : global warming's core claim is a mathematically better-built version of "in the last 150 years temperature and co2 concentration in the athmosphere appeared to move upwards in lockstep". That's all.
CO2 is not a very important gas in the "inner workings" of global warming, but politically it's the central - or sometimes only - actor. In "the science" the main player is water, and CO2 only matters in how it created an initial push of H2O into the athmosphere, and kept providing a tiny little push. The real warming comes from a much more unpredictable process : the speed of water evaporation above the world's oceans. Please do NOT assume that this process listens to such simplistic arguments as "if it's warmer there's more" (wind speeds are a *much* bigger influence). These things are NOT well-modeled in the models, they've just "mostly" evolved in a similar way over a bit over a century.
The problem is this : ... it gave a 95% interval for the temperature in the 21st century. Temperature is outside of the 95% range, below it ... idem ... idem ... we're just barely (barely) within the interval, and it's not going the correct direction ... which doesn't actually predict the temperature anymore (let's not ask skeptics as to why this is), but contains a prediction for solar output, that as it turns out, was *very* wrong.
First there was AR1 (IPCC assessment report 1)
Then came AR2
Then came AR3
Then came AR4
Then came AR5
Now the way I learned science is that if predictions made by a theory and a series of scientists are wrong ... what do we do ?
Yeah of course you're right. I'm just a bit afraid of this :
I agree that not stopping them was not an option, as they were violent and dangerous, but I really don't think the numbers were there to make it a real possibility that they couldn't be stopped.
The argument was not that they would topple the state. As plenty of revolutions have shown, no matter how unrealistic and moronic the revolutionaries, there's always a state coming out of it. See Iran, for example, for a bunch of morons demonstrating only to get terrorized into an islamic state by perhaps 5% of the revolutionaries because they didn't have any stomach for a real fight, and the progressives showed they couldn't organize their way out of a bomb belt. If you don't build the state, someone else will. You won't like the new meaning of getting stoned.
But this London demonstrations is making a free western democracy consider suppressing the right to demonstrations, social media, free exchange of ideas and so on. And that's for one little event. I wonder what will happen when this has occurred five times. And when it happens 50 times.
However there's also the downside. I recently implemented a text parser for certain configuration file checking. Now granted we have huge configs, but :
Python parsing a 3.2 megabyte config file : 50 sec
C++ parsing that same file, same operations, same grammaer : 0.05 sec
(most of the code was parsing code anyway so there wasn't much to rewrite, also 90+% of dev time was spent getting that grammar to work)
This made the difference between the tool being used, and not used. Runtime matters. I participated in google code jam last year only with python, and the runtime is ... distracting. I don't deny the advantages of python : simply don't check for number overflows, simply don't care. But the disadvantages include a 20x slowdown for basic calculations. When problem runtimes for C++ code start exceeding 5-10 seconds, python is no longer an option. The time difference is actually so big that C++ O(n^2) algorithms would beat O(n log n) python algorithms on the large dataset in some cases.
Next year, I'll be using C++ in google code jam. Python is good for shell scripting and basic website operations.
That's not actually true for learning. I find I learn by far the fastest if thrown in to a problem, and then have someone critique what I come up with. Climbing small mountains first has the effect of solidifying *wrong* information in my brain, which takes ages to get back out. In your metaphor, the reality simply is that mount Everest exist. Training on a molehill where oxygen masks don't matter will lead to forgetting them in basecamp, then dying, utterly convinced of how competent you are.
Throw students on mount everest, make sure to have evacuation options. That's how sherpa's do it (starting with 3-year-olds), and nobody beats them at rock climbing. There, metaphor taken too far ... check.
Besides, small-scale training just doesn't prepare you for the reality. You want to learn how to write every last imperative language there is ? Learn C++ ... then figure out which parts to drop so it becomes C/Java/Pascal/C#/F#/Python ... Learn functional programming (only const functions and objects) ... Monads (think about adding return this to every void member function) ... Learn dynamic typing (always lookup your functions in a map, don't directly call them) .... Learn java (autopointer everything, then look into more advanced garbage collection) ...
And if you want garbage collection to "just work" ... C++ can do that fine. A lot of programs are actually simpler in C++ than in java. They're certainly shorter, although that's hardly a contest when we're talking about java.
I do not think that the rioters were trying to achieve change.
How about "they certainly wanted change in their personal situation, they just didn't care about politics and the real world at all, so they took what they wanted".
But what can you do against protests like this except meet them with greater violence ? And how would you yourself even have a peaceful demonstration ? In a crowd of a thousand people a few hundred rioters are not really noticed, yet they will cause justified counterattacks against the whole.
I mean these rioters are 100x more dangerous to freedom than even Syria's governments or all those other islamic hellholes. If they aren't stopped, it won't be just that they're not free, you will lose big parts of your freedom.
Really ? How is this different from, say, a gaia demonstration ? Except for the fact that these people want TV's and those gaia demonstrations want to get attention to themselves. There's nothing fundamentally different between these 2 protests. Rebels without a cause, nothing more.
Ah the old "it's the TV". Perhaps it's video games ?
And what exactly where they rioting for ? More free money ? Will you give it to them ?
(and if you actually do, chances are they'll stab you for your trouble)
What you're saying, in effect, is that political demonstrations are only possible in a group of people with a minimum level of morality.
Perhaps it's slightly different : political advocates exist anywhere, but peaceful change is only possible with a peaceful people. Which brings up the question of Syria again ...
1) Classical banking does not require anything innovative. You simply give out loans using funds from deposits. It's simple, it works.
Of course not, that's because the innovation and risk is not in the loan itself, but WHO you lend to. Give this power to the politicians and the banking system crashes because we "lent" 10*GDP to the solar panel installation company run by the president's nephew. You see the problem ?
Oh let me guess : you will make legislation immune to this problem, right ? Again : how would that work ?
2) Banks certainly don't NEED to invest in anything risky. Usually banks require collateral to back the loan applications.
Euhm ... are you sure about this ? Because it sure seems to me that just about every venture I know of depends on banks to run (either direct loans with wildly insufficient collateral, or "leasing" equipment).
3) There are more than enough entities ready to invest in risky ventures.
Right. Go read hacker news and double check this claim.
4) Small and medium-sized banks with properly regulated leverage are perfectly OK.
I kinda to agree with this, but the way to get this done is to let big banks fail. Of course, that means a lot of people will lose their savings.
Or how about this simple way of doing things :
Orbits come in many sizes. Orbits close to geostationary orbits have the following properties :
if you are slightly closer to earth, you will fall down (slowly)
if you are at the exact right spot, you will stay there
if you are slightly further away from earth, you are in effect on an escape trajectory, you will gain height (slowly)
So here's an idea. Since this cable has to withstand umpteen giganewtons of tension anyway, place the top of the elevator too high. Therefore the cable will have to pull on the satellite to keep it in a stable orbit. Since a giganewton more or less doesn't really matter, let's add a giganewton. Then we can attach payloads of up to 100 tons to the wire without causing the satellite to fall down to earth.
Where does the energy come from ? It uses the rotation of the earth to pull satellites into orbit, so conservation of energy is effected by slowing down the earth for every satellite going up.
Also the whole point of a space elevator is that we don't need to carry fuel to put fuel into orbit. When the US launches the space shuttle, 50% of the fuel in the rocket is used up to give the rocket 1 meter elevation. Electricity is available everywhere if you've got millions to spend on hugely expensive solar panels (and millions would be *very* cheap for satellites). Rockets have 0.4% efficiency because most fuel is used to have a little fuel available higher up. With a space elevator at 50% efficiency, launch energy costs would go down a factor of 120 ...
And let's not forget that a space elevator would make space-based solar power a braindead endeavour, so it would probably pay thousandfold for it's energy expenditures anyway. An operational space elevator would be even better than working fusion power.
But imho a better and easier option would be to get a working fabrication facility operational on the moon. Your mother can knit a working space elevator for the moon together easily, and her grandson is probably operating a catapult capable of launching satellites into earth orbit from the moon surface near some people he doesn't like. So another easy option would be to simply fabricate satellites on the moon. It would have the additional advantages of massive free amounts of solar power, easily mineral stores you wouldn't believe, and you can easily get to the rest of the solar system in addition to earth orbit (which would still require a relatively big rocket starting from earth geostationary orbit).
I have one question : how will that work ? Can you explain how & why that would influence the majority of society and why that would be a good/bad thing ?
Here's what will happen, according to me : nationalizing the biggest banks, if effective, meaning it will really control lending will switch the economy to the communist model : capital only available under control of the government system.
Banks need to invest in risky ventures and they need to do this out of profit motive. This is close to the basis of capitalism. Obviously this can only be done by banks not controlled by the state which may go bankrupt (and must be allowed to go bankrupt). The only alternative to profit motive is political motive and this will, again, bring us back to the failed communist history.
Doing this will obviously massively widen the gap between rich and poor, to levels that are currently only seen in socialist or dictatorial states like North Korea or Middle eastern states.
Yes, but even then you can still group them into large chunks, instead of small allocations.
Everything is an object is not a property of dynamically typed languages, nor is it a property of static languages. It can be part of language design, or it can not be. It won't force a language to be either static or dynamically typed. Imho, usually laziness of language designers is what makes languages dynamically typed. Some at least have the decency to limit that dynamic typing to the implementation,and not build it into the design.
Personally I find the one language that actually does the "everything is an object" thing correctly is C++. Python and Ruby and the like cheat : in java parlance they only have Integers and Floats and lack int and float types (and they lack &int and &float, but so does java. Actually python only really has a BigInteger). They only have pointer types and they implement hugely confusing calling conventions (at least from the viewpoint of someone who actually knows how a computer works) (and with C++0x you could say that there is a new gaping hole in most languages : move semantics versus copy semantics)
C++ by contrast has all the options : int, int*, int&, float, float*, float&, and you can stick all of them in a collection without issues. Well, except if you're shooting yourself in the foot and there is no way for the compiler to fix it.
You're argument only makes sense if you accept that the python language design requires dynamic typing. And this may (may) be true for the really advanced and esoteric uses of python, but anyone who's ever built a tiny compiler knows that 95% of python can easily be implemented statically typed. It would be a great exercise to try to fully inline the entire python runtime library to cover the remaining 5%.
Personally I'm convinced that a statically typed python supporting 90% of common use cases, and the IDE and tools that are possible to build using such a language would blow the regular python out of the water. Python's "dynamic" typing is in reality no more powerful than inference + splitting (ie. if you do 'x = 5; print x + 1; x = "boe"; print x + "1";' translate to 'x = 5; print x + 1; y = "boe"; print y + "1"', and split the variable name when re-typing occurs). And is there anyone here claiming that java's ctrl+space wouldn't be a great help in writing library intensive python code, never mind all other refactorings ?
I may understand in practice why people use dynamically typed languages, but theoretically there is no good reason for using dynamic typing at all. Furthermore python's "garbage collector" is so extremely basic it could simply be moved to compile time (I mean that there is no theoretical problem predicting all allocations of a python program at compile time, so (if you had a year to get this right) you could make python object allocation compile to a nop.
You do realize that, whether we agree that huge companies have 1-3% or 15-20% doesn't really matter for the point made, right ? 20% profit added to govt's coffers is not nearly enough to solve our social problems, and the destruction that measure will cause will far exceed 20% of the economy.
So whether you're right ... or I'm right, the point remains : taking the money of the bankers will bring nothing but destruction for barely any reward. Stop claiming it somehow will (because you're being rather disingenuous about this, you're in essence claiming that because a tiny number is off by an order of magnitude, yet still quite tiny, and this somehow makes a large difference to the larger point. It doesn't)
(the number I think you should take is total corporate profit/GDP which is definitely not 15%)