...that fierce competition, if applied to a bunch of morons, can produce monopolies that jack up the price immediately after gaining control, and still provide a shitty product. Flat rate was the standard since the time of dialup, but when DSL and cable companies started the price war they ended up:
Offering a service sold at loss, expecting to cover it by more expensive services, then wondering why everybody subscribes to it and no one wants anything else.
Overselling the bandwidth to a ridiculious level (>100 times). Residential "1.5Mbps DSL" would be actually 3 times slower than a dialup if all users were downloading or tried to receive something streamed at the same time -- and when people started doing just that, of course, results started to suck.
As the result, anyone who attempted to provide decent quality was losing money on supporting low-priced service to run at some tolerable level, and the only people who survived were ones that provided only or mostly high-priced services (Covad -- and it barely survived), or ones that simply had a shitload of money to burn (SBC, USWest/Qwest, TW). Now the survivors are trying to bring the prices to the level where they can actually make money, but since the public got accustomed to low prices in the advertisements, former low-priced services are becoming high-priced through more sneaky tactics, and customers overall lose compared to the hypothetical situation when prices and service were reasonable to begin with. As some fictional character said, "dodge this", free market worshipers/propaganda workers with degrees.
Necessary bit of disclosure: this is written over a Covad line that costs me $114/mo and works.
...I have came for a cup of coffee and ricochet-covered location (long story) to the Tattered Cover bookstore, and first thing I see on my notebook on slashdot is... a story about tattered cover;-).
By whom? Microsoft spekeperson for Windows CE, that is trying to pretend to be an embedded system for many years already?
a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple- faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."
There aren't "a lot of embedded engineers" in the whole world -- even though, embedded systems are widespread, designing them is a relatively rare occupation, just like while plastics are everywhere, chemists and companies that develop them aren't that numerous.
...against this kind of law is that in all practical applications it legally mandates everybody who wishes to produce software, computers or other electronic devices capable of playing audio and video, to either join some kind of "industry alliance" group, formed by corporations to protect the secrecy of copy-protection technology, or license some way to access it, thus differentiating himself from a regular consumer, to whom the access to those technologies must be denied (or he will just use them to pretend that he is allowed to play all content he can receive, "protected" or not). This creates an artificial barrier to entry for everybody who isn't allowed to license the technology or access to it, and the decision, who is allowed, will be made by the very people with whom they are going to compete. Even if the government will take over the control of this licensing process, it will be unable to license anything to parties that it can't trust, and most of electronics and software is now being produced by the people who definitely will never be trusted with this kind of secret -- this reduction of the set of possible producers will drive the costs to heights that only worst monopolies can achieve.
Also it is known that currently large amount of copy-protection technology is covered by patents. It is entirely possible that some patents cover ALL possible copy-protection schemes due to their breadth. If some copy-protection scheme will be considered to be acceptable, it is very likely to fall under those patents, or be challenged to be under some, therefore the companies that own patents will keep the control, being "gatekeepers" for everyone that wishes to produce software, computers and electronics capable of playing audio or video.
Both those problems will completely destroy all kinds of projects that are mandated, by licensing or by the set of participants, or by ethical reasons (such as open source projects, academic research, international projects, etc.) to be non-patent-encumbered, and to avoid association with industry groups who oppose the development of technology that obsoletes their current products.
It's like asking what policy should KKK adopt to accommodate blacks' complaints about it, or how should gangs operate to be acceptable -- the whole design of Microsoft business model is incompatible with anyone's else goals, it is designed to have everything controlled by it, or fail. I would rather help it fail.
1. Implied contract that you are talking about, does not exist -- when you buy a book, there is absolutely nothing that gives you certain rights and doesn't give you other ones, except the copyright law itself.
2. Contract must be legal to be valid. You can't write any kind of stuff on paper, sign it with someone else and call it a contract. Ex: "Person A sells his daughter into slavery for a person B, in exchange to a certain amount of crack" is a contract that has absolutely nothing valid in it.
There are a lot of countries where infrastructure was at some point destroyed, yet they exist. And it's hard to kill _everybody_ in the government -- "government" is usually a large number of organizations, not just top-level institutions that are associated with the word "government" for most of people.
Yes, and suicide is incompatible with that goal! Your argument would make sense if the country without the defense were starting from a position of superiority, where it could wipe out the opposing country and still survive.
"Superiority" and "complete destruction" are myths -- certainly something will survive even a global nuclear war, it just would really, really suck compared to what mankind is/was for the most of its history. And certainly that, pretty bad by any measure, situation would be still better than what countries may expect to be turned into by a sufficiently aggressive opponent, acting with guaranteed impunity -- if nuclear war's results have limits, human cruelty and stupidity don't.
That's ridiculous. The goal of aggression is to force people to do what you want, not to kill them. Killing is only done to set an example or eliminate a threat. Aggressive nations *need* enemies to exploit.
Decisions to start a war are made by governments, not by collections of all individuals. Certainly governments will defend their own survival/independence/...
If the potential attacker is aggressive enough to build working missle defense, there is no possible outcome that it will tolerate the existence of its "enemies" at all -- in this case the time is on the side of the country that built the defense first. Therefore playing for time is pointless, it's better to destroy the future aggressor at any cost.
What would be the point of nuking the US before SDI was operational? We're still operating under MAD. If they were to launch a first strike now, they would only ensure their own destruction.
Working ABM makes eventual destruction of the ABM-owning aggressive country's "enemies" inevitable, so MAD is not a sufficient deterrent -- whatever kind of destruction may happen at the moment when threat is apparent, is insignificant compared to offensive capabilities that will be used later, so it's safer to attack now and risk having large percentage of population destroyed, as opposed to be turned into a hole in the ground later.
Your dubious convenience pays for extermination of choice for people that actually come up with ideas. Whose design do you think, will Microsoft rip off few years from now? Where do you think, Microsoft takes money to to this to us? Right, from what you have paid them for "convenience" of not knowing how to configure a desktop on a unixlike system.
Now don't blame me for hating you, and better think, what will happen when you, and people like you, will give Microsoft enough money to take over everything that has been left in computer science and industry. It's not that much time, considering how willing you and your likes were to sponsor this before.
When you lose the argument miserably, just try to claim that "both sides are right, there shouldn't even be an argument like this". After all, this is what people are indoctrinated with in school here -- makes a great society of happy, unthinking sheep who would never question dominant religion, be interested in philosophy or -- completely impossible -- devise an original thought and be able to act on it, defend it in an argument, and achieve anything.
The fact is, it's even in theory impossible for Windows to get a decent remote, or automated system administration -- the lack of design pretty much condemned this system to have all "features" bolted on, implemented by monkeys (because anyone with a human brain would choke on his own puke after trying to develop this), with interoperability problems being solved by constant replacement of everything with Microsoft software, and protocols being replaced by thin wrappers to underdesigned "object model" of COM and its descendants. How recognizably sheepish -- don't try to apply any original thought, use Microsoft tools, and other Microsoft tools will do predefined actions using carefully collected set of interfaces that look like an explosion on a spaghetti factory.
I don't know, what your office of 17 does -- maybe it calculates optimal duration of the amber light, to maximize fines, commercially-collected with automated cameras. Maybe it makes late-night advertisements for "money making schemes". Maybe it even does something more useful. But very likely, it doesn't need computers in the first place, and it's possible that whatever good it made in its history, is negated by the amount of money it paid to Microsoft. Those money without any doubt will be used to make sure that people like you will never know what software exists now, that is far superior to what they are doing, and will force people to abandon the development of everything but VB interfaces to Microsoft's own software. Because Microsoft can do with bullshit more than anyone can do with bombs and guns. What brings us back to the topic of this discussion -- Microsoft is either the world leader in commercial bullshit, or the company that created most amount of harm using this bullshit.
...as something used for other purpose than fixing remote user's configuration strikes me as ridiculous.
IDE? What IDE? If you want to develop things, you can just keep all your work in CVS, and edit/compile/... it locally or remotely depending on the needs, using whatever software you choose. I usually choose XEmacs and gcc locally (on a Linux box), or ssh to a Solaris box with XEmacs and SunPro compiler, to do the same (for Solaris-specific development). The point is, you don't run compiler remotely because you don't have your sources locally, you bring sources to wherever you want them to be compiled using CVS.
Email? Simple solution -- don't store any email locally in the first place. IMAP will keep and access your mailboxes faster than if they were local, or at least it will be faster if the server is Cyrus.
Everything else is just too trivial -- if it can be run locally, just do that and take care of what files it should bring and update. Simple scripts that update things through scp, or CVS, will make things easier. If it for any reason can not run on whatever box is local, use X, or X over ssh.
Of course, if all you have is Windows on the "server", you have to use Terminal Services, Metaframe or VNC, and they will sheepishly copy screens or draing commands no matter what the purpose. But this is fair -- Windows users must suffer.
The same mode change fixes "jerky" movement when playing DVDs (for obvious reason). Observed on ogle and BDV-212B, (non-region-locked, firmware) drive.
What, slashdot would link to any arrogant asshole's interview only because his opinion is unpopular? And why is he answering to comments here in the form of "interview"? Can't he just umm... write comments here like we do, and be flamed in a regular course of things?
...why won't they look at the source of the problem and ban Outlook. Or, even better, Windows?
And if they are so indoctrinated with "we-need-Windows-for-our-business" stuff, why not just block all email attachments (and learn to communicate in text)?
This fan seems to have both advantages and disadvantages. The most obvious for me advantage is that its axis vibrates less -- force is applied to the edges of the fan, straightening it. That may help with the problem that often kills "classic" fans -- the bearing (that usually is a brass pipe attached by one end to the plastic base and a steel pin attached by the opposite end to the hub of the blades) wears out unevenly, what causes the fan's pin to roll in the pipe, and with precession causing further damage that, among other things, converts a cylindrical surface into a cone, making a bad problem even worse, causing more noise, vibration, squeezing out the lubricant and clogging of the bearing.
Another positive thing is that this design (but not the device itself) allows for relatively easy improvement -- even though the picture looks like the bearing is the same as I have described above, this can be converted into a "reversed" bearing design without the motor getting in the way -- a pin can be attached to the plastic base/grille at both ends, and a pipe (or ball bearings, or whatever) -- to the middle of the hub. Then the fan will be also symmetric and even less vulnerable to the vibrations. "Classic" fan design can be converted into this, however then the rotating pipe would push back already tiny coils and cores of the motor. With coils outside, and reduced vibrations in the first place this would be more efficient (and oh, btw, if some asshole will try to patent this, I would be happy to see him in court, with this comment as an evidence of the prior art;-).
The disadvantages are also obvious. First, blades, even with heavy magnet ring on their ends, are still flexible and prone to deformation. This may affect the balance of the rotor in the long run -- "classic" fan has a smaller ring magnet in a sturdy plastic cup of the hub, and therefore is almost invulnerable to this (until the bearing wears out enough to shift the center -- but by then the fan would be dead already). Second, this, and plain need to accommodate heat expansion, precision of manufacturing, etc. increases the necessary gap between magnets and cores. That would require larger, stronger coils, but there isn't that much space available for them in the corners.
A lot of people expressed or defended the capitalist ideology (and a bunch of other ideologies and their varieties as well) or various legal systems by claiming that their favorite idea is based on "human nature". I have big news for people who bring "no incentive for innovation" argument:
IT'S BASIC HUMAN NATURE TO INVENT AND IMPROVE THINGS. In fact, this is one of two things humans are good at, another being exploration/research.
Someone will invent things anyway. If society will be better if such inventions will be rewarded, the discussion should be about how to reward them, not how to turn ideas into a currency, something what they never were supposed to be, and can't be because of -- you guessed -- human nature. So far the ability to sell a patent to a large company does not work at all -- most of people that innovate are employees of those companies already, and a fee that employees get for a patent that they surrender to the employer is beyond insulting -- therefore nothing really works as a reward to those people. Giving the companies incentive to go on a patent-squatting run may create few stable and rich companies, but society at large does not benefit from companies being stable and rich -- it benefits from companies being effective at producing things that people need. If companies are inefficient, and have to disappear, they have to -- no company has a right to survive in the first place, only people's lives are supposed to be protected. So again, it comes back to one of the most disturbing problems in the recent history -- "lives" and welfare of companies are now better protected than lives and welfare of people. Congratulations, non-human entities are running human societies.
You have no idea what you're talking about. All modern languages are Turing-complete, most are self-hosting or at least have compilers written in other "modern" languages such as SML or Haskell, and often compile straight to assembly. I have no idea where you get the impressed that NONE of these languages are self-hosted.
If the self-hosted implementation is not usable, and not self-hosted one is used instead because of that, language is still not self-hosted. Also self-hostedness of the compiler is of little help when runtime has huge amount of native code written in a manner that doesn't allow any hope for security (ex: Java).
Moreover, the language the original poster was talking about - SML - offers a number of abstractions that simply aren't there in C. In comparision, C is the one with missing functionality. This is why the SML version of the code was so much smaller.
By functionality I mean not the functionality of the language but functionality of the program -- most of functionality that the program has is based on what it can do with the OS, and all "modern" languages usually pretend that 80% of what OS (or at least Unix) can do, isn't there (ex: Java's interface to anything networking-related is horrendously crippled by Java's designers idiosyncarsies).
And in languages without anything at all there can't be any bugs.
The problem is, lack of any of mentioned things isn't without a price -- it's either performance or functionality. And also it's worth to remember that none of so-called "modern" languages are self-hosted, they all are written in something else that has all those features they are so proud of lacking. That code is usually unbelievably hairy, and has no chance to even be audited by a human.
Being able to communicate ideas clearly is a skill of technical communication. Being able to read between the lines of documents is a skill of bullshit filtering. None of them are social (unless you use a crazy definition of "social" as anything that involves interaction and a language, but then writing a program in C would be a "social" activity), they are part of technical competence, and engineers usually have them -- they would not be able to get educated enough to be an engineer otherwise.
Being able to run a group of programmers in a reasonable working conditions, shield them from crazy demands and explaining nontechnical issues are social skills that engineers value in managers but don't need to possess because this isn't their job.
Being able to participate in the company's politics at the expense of work, sweep conflicts under the carpet, assert "authority" in various counterproductive ways are social skills that most engineers lack and despise when faced with.
Being able to drink huge amounts of low-quality alcohol, behave like a pig toward the opposite sex, express the obedience to "authority" by offering sex, smoke crack and display other kinds of uncivilized human behavior are vital social skills in various subsets of society, however engineers are usually dsigusted with those things, and have no chance to meet expectation of a manager that demands them. Unfortunately there is no natural barrier that prevents uncivilized people from getting into middle management.
Slashdot Mirror
...that fierce competition, if applied to a bunch of morons, can produce monopolies that jack up the price immediately after gaining control, and still provide a shitty product. Flat rate was the standard since the time of dialup, but when DSL and cable companies started the price war they ended up:
As the result, anyone who attempted to provide decent quality was losing money on supporting low-priced service to run at some tolerable level, and the only people who survived were ones that provided only or mostly high-priced services (Covad -- and it barely survived), or ones that simply had a shitload of money to burn (SBC, USWest/Qwest, TW). Now the survivors are trying to bring the prices to the level where they can actually make money, but since the public got accustomed to low prices in the advertisements, former low-priced services are becoming high-priced through more sneaky tactics, and customers overall lose compared to the hypothetical situation when prices and service were reasonable to begin with. As some fictional character said, "dodge this", free market worshipers/propaganda workers with degrees.
Necessary bit of disclosure: this is written over a Covad line that costs me $114/mo and works.
...I have came for a cup of coffee and ricochet-covered location (long story) to the Tattered Cover bookstore, and first thing I see on my notebook on slashdot is... a story about tattered cover ;-).
It's said
By whom? Microsoft spekeperson for Windows CE, that is trying to pretend to be an embedded system for many years already?
a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple- faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."
There aren't "a lot of embedded engineers" in the whole world -- even though, embedded systems are widespread, designing them is a relatively rare occupation, just like while plastics are everywhere, chemists and companies that develop them aren't that numerous.
...against this kind of law is that in all practical applications it legally mandates everybody who wishes to produce software, computers or other electronic devices capable of playing audio and video, to either join some kind of "industry alliance" group, formed by corporations to protect the secrecy of copy-protection technology, or license some way to access it, thus differentiating himself from a regular consumer, to whom the access to those technologies must be denied (or he will just use them to pretend that he is allowed to play all content he can receive, "protected" or not). This creates an artificial barrier to entry for everybody who isn't allowed to license the technology or access to it, and the decision, who is allowed, will be made by the very people with whom they are going to compete. Even if the government will take over the control of this licensing process, it will be unable to license anything to parties that it can't trust, and most of electronics and software is now being produced by the people who definitely will never be trusted with this kind of secret -- this reduction of the set of possible producers will drive the costs to heights that only worst monopolies can achieve.
Also it is known that currently large amount of copy-protection technology is covered by patents. It is entirely possible that some patents cover ALL possible copy-protection schemes due to their breadth. If some copy-protection scheme will be considered to be acceptable, it is very likely to fall under those patents, or be challenged to be under some, therefore the companies that own patents will keep the control, being "gatekeepers" for everyone that wishes to produce software, computers and electronics capable of playing audio or video.
Both those problems will completely destroy all kinds of projects that are mandated, by licensing or by the set of participants, or by ethical reasons (such as open source projects, academic research, international projects, etc.) to be non-patent-encumbered, and to avoid association with industry groups who oppose the development of technology that obsoletes their current products.
It's like asking what policy should KKK adopt to accommodate blacks' complaints about it, or how should gangs operate to be acceptable -- the whole design of Microsoft business model is incompatible with anyone's else goals, it is designed to have everything controlled by it, or fail. I would rather help it fail.
1. Implied contract that you are talking about, does not exist -- when you buy a book, there is absolutely nothing that gives you certain rights and doesn't give you other ones, except the copyright law itself.
2. Contract must be legal to be valid. You can't write any kind of stuff on paper, sign it with someone else and call it a contract. Ex: "Person A sells his daughter into slavery for a person B, in exchange to a certain amount of crack" is a contract that has absolutely nothing valid in it.
Actually recognition of a nose as a separate part of the body is also defined by society ;-)
There are a lot of countries where infrastructure was at some point destroyed, yet they exist. And it's hard to kill _everybody_ in the government -- "government" is usually a large number of organizations, not just top-level institutions that are associated with the word "government" for most of people.
Yes, and suicide is incompatible with that goal! Your argument would make sense if the country without the defense were starting from a position of superiority, where it could wipe out the opposing country and still survive.
"Superiority" and "complete destruction" are myths -- certainly something will survive even a global nuclear war, it just would really, really suck compared to what mankind is/was for the most of its history. And certainly that, pretty bad by any measure, situation would be still better than what countries may expect to be turned into by a sufficiently aggressive opponent, acting with guaranteed impunity -- if nuclear war's results have limits, human cruelty and stupidity don't.
That's ridiculous. The goal of aggression is to force people to do what you want, not to kill them. Killing is only done to set an example or eliminate a threat. Aggressive nations *need* enemies to exploit.
Decisions to start a war are made by governments, not by collections of all individuals. Certainly governments will defend their own survival/independence/...
If the potential attacker is aggressive enough to build working missle defense, there is no possible outcome that it will tolerate the existence of its "enemies" at all -- in this case the time is on the side of the country that built the defense first. Therefore playing for time is pointless, it's better to destroy the future aggressor at any cost.
and even XP is considerably faster than X. Linux developers have little clue as to how to design an efficient and friendly UI
This proves that you have no freaking idea what you are talking about. Or use Linux on a hardware that you threw away because it won't run Windows XP.
What would be the point of nuking the US before SDI was operational? We're still operating under MAD. If they were to launch a first strike now, they would only ensure their own destruction.
Working ABM makes eventual destruction of the ABM-owning aggressive country's "enemies" inevitable, so MAD is not a sufficient deterrent -- whatever kind of destruction may happen at the moment when threat is apparent, is insignificant compared to offensive capabilities that will be used later, so it's safer to attack now and risk having large percentage of population destroyed, as opposed to be turned into a hole in the ground later.
Your dubious convenience pays for extermination of choice for people that actually come up with ideas. Whose design do you think, will Microsoft rip off few years from now? Where do you think, Microsoft takes money to to this to us? Right, from what you have paid them for "convenience" of not knowing how to configure a desktop on a unixlike system.
Now don't blame me for hating you, and better think, what will happen when you, and people like you, will give Microsoft enough money to take over everything that has been left in computer science and industry. It's not that much time, considering how willing you and your likes were to sponsor this before.
When you lose the argument miserably, just try to claim that "both sides are right, there shouldn't even be an argument like this". After all, this is what people are indoctrinated with in school here -- makes a great society of happy, unthinking sheep who would never question dominant religion, be interested in philosophy or -- completely impossible -- devise an original thought and be able to act on it, defend it in an argument, and achieve anything.
The fact is, it's even in theory impossible for Windows to get a decent remote, or automated system administration -- the lack of design pretty much condemned this system to have all "features" bolted on, implemented by monkeys (because anyone with a human brain would choke on his own puke after trying to develop this), with interoperability problems being solved by constant replacement of everything with Microsoft software, and protocols being replaced by thin wrappers to underdesigned "object model" of COM and its descendants. How recognizably sheepish -- don't try to apply any original thought, use Microsoft tools, and other Microsoft tools will do predefined actions using carefully collected set of interfaces that look like an explosion on a spaghetti factory.
I don't know, what your office of 17 does -- maybe it calculates optimal duration of the amber light, to maximize fines, commercially-collected with automated cameras. Maybe it makes late-night advertisements for "money making schemes". Maybe it even does something more useful. But very likely, it doesn't need computers in the first place, and it's possible that whatever good it made in its history, is negated by the amount of money it paid to Microsoft. Those money without any doubt will be used to make sure that people like you will never know what software exists now, that is far superior to what they are doing, and will force people to abandon the development of everything but VB interfaces to Microsoft's own software. Because Microsoft can do with bullshit more than anyone can do with bombs and guns. What brings us back to the topic of this discussion -- Microsoft is either the world leader in commercial bullshit, or the company that created most amount of harm using this bullshit.
...as something used for other purpose than fixing remote user's configuration strikes me as ridiculous.
IDE? What IDE? If you want to develop things, you can just keep all your work in CVS, and edit/compile/... it locally or remotely depending on the needs, using whatever software you choose. I usually choose XEmacs and gcc locally (on a Linux box), or ssh to a Solaris box with XEmacs and SunPro compiler, to do the same (for Solaris-specific development). The point is, you don't run compiler remotely because you don't have your sources locally, you bring sources to wherever you want them to be compiled using CVS.
Email? Simple solution -- don't store any email locally in the first place. IMAP will keep and access your mailboxes faster than if they were local, or at least it will be faster if the server is Cyrus.
Everything else is just too trivial -- if it can be run locally, just do that and take care of what files it should bring and update. Simple scripts that update things through scp, or CVS, will make things easier. If it for any reason can not run on whatever box is local, use X, or X over ssh.
Of course, if all you have is Windows on the "server", you have to use Terminal Services, Metaframe or VNC, and they will sheepishly copy screens or draing commands no matter what the purpose. But this is fair -- Windows users must suffer.
The large number of nozzles was a design decision to allow balancing/controlling the rocket in flight by controlling multiple nozzles.
The same mode change fixes "jerky" movement when playing DVDs (for obvious reason). Observed on ogle and BDV-212B, (non-region-locked, firmware) drive.
What, slashdot would link to any arrogant asshole's interview only because his opinion is unpopular? And why is he answering to comments here in the form of "interview"? Can't he just umm... write comments here like we do, and be flamed in a regular course of things?
...why won't they look at the source of the problem and ban Outlook. Or, even better, Windows?
And if they are so indoctrinated with "we-need-Windows-for-our-business" stuff, why not just block all email attachments (and learn to communicate in text)?
This fan seems to have both advantages and disadvantages. The most obvious for me advantage is that its axis vibrates less -- force is applied to the edges of the fan, straightening it. That may help with the problem that often kills "classic" fans -- the bearing (that usually is a brass pipe attached by one end to the plastic base and a steel pin attached by the opposite end to the hub of the blades) wears out unevenly, what causes the fan's pin to roll in the pipe, and with precession causing further damage that, among other things, converts a cylindrical surface into a cone, making a bad problem even worse, causing more noise, vibration, squeezing out the lubricant and clogging of the bearing.
;-).
Another positive thing is that this design (but not the device itself) allows for relatively easy improvement -- even though the picture looks like the bearing is the same as I have described above, this can be converted into a "reversed" bearing design without the motor getting in the way -- a pin can be attached to the plastic base/grille at both ends, and a pipe (or ball bearings, or whatever) -- to the middle of the hub. Then the fan will be also symmetric and even less vulnerable to the vibrations. "Classic" fan design can be converted into this, however then the rotating pipe would push back already tiny coils and cores of the motor. With coils outside, and reduced vibrations in the first place this would be more efficient (and oh, btw, if some asshole will try to patent this, I would be happy to see him in court, with this comment as an evidence of the prior art
The disadvantages are also obvious. First, blades, even with heavy magnet ring on their ends, are still flexible and prone to deformation. This may affect the balance of the rotor in the long run -- "classic" fan has a smaller ring magnet in a sturdy plastic cup of the hub, and therefore is almost invulnerable to this (until the bearing wears out enough to shift the center -- but by then the fan would be dead already). Second, this, and plain need to accommodate heat expansion, precision of manufacturing, etc. increases the necessary gap between magnets and cores. That would require larger, stronger coils, but there isn't that much space available for them in the corners.
A lot of people expressed or defended the capitalist ideology (and a bunch of other ideologies and their varieties as well) or various legal systems by claiming that their favorite idea is based on "human nature". I have big news for people who bring "no incentive for innovation" argument:
IT'S BASIC HUMAN NATURE TO INVENT AND IMPROVE THINGS. In fact, this is one of two things humans are good at, another being exploration/research.
Someone will invent things anyway. If society will be better if such inventions will be rewarded, the discussion should be about how to reward them, not how to turn ideas into a currency, something what they never were supposed to be, and can't be because of -- you guessed -- human nature. So far the ability to sell a patent to a large company does not work at all -- most of people that innovate are employees of those companies already, and a fee that employees get for a patent that they surrender to the employer is beyond insulting -- therefore nothing really works as a reward to those people. Giving the companies incentive to go on a patent-squatting run may create few stable and rich companies, but society at large does not benefit from companies being stable and rich -- it benefits from companies being effective at producing things that people need. If companies are inefficient, and have to disappear, they have to -- no company has a right to survive in the first place, only people's lives are supposed to be protected. So again, it comes back to one of the most disturbing problems in the recent history -- "lives" and welfare of companies are now better protected than lives and welfare of people. Congratulations, non-human entities are running human societies.
You have no idea what you're talking about. All modern languages are Turing-complete, most are self-hosting or at least have compilers written in other "modern" languages such as SML or Haskell, and often compile straight to assembly. I have no idea where you get the impressed that NONE of these languages are self-hosted.
If the self-hosted implementation is not usable, and not self-hosted one is used instead because of that, language is still not self-hosted. Also self-hostedness of the compiler is of little help when runtime has huge amount of native code written in a manner that doesn't allow any hope for security (ex: Java).
Moreover, the language the original poster was talking about - SML - offers a number of abstractions that simply aren't there in C. In comparision, C is the one with missing functionality. This is why the SML version of the code was so much smaller.
By functionality I mean not the functionality of the language but functionality of the program -- most of functionality that the program has is based on what it can do with the OS, and all "modern" languages usually pretend that 80% of what OS (or at least Unix) can do, isn't there (ex: Java's interface to anything networking-related is horrendously crippled by Java's designers idiosyncarsies).
And in languages without anything at all there can't be any bugs.
The problem is, lack of any of mentioned things isn't without a price -- it's either performance or functionality. And also it's worth to remember that none of so-called "modern" languages are self-hosted, they all are written in something else that has all those features they are so proud of lacking. That code is usually unbelievably hairy, and has no chance to even be audited by a human.
Being able to communicate ideas clearly is a skill of technical communication. Being able to read between the lines of documents is a skill of bullshit filtering. None of them are social (unless you use a crazy definition of "social" as anything that involves interaction and a language, but then writing a program in C would be a "social" activity), they are part of technical competence, and engineers usually have them -- they would not be able to get educated enough to be an engineer otherwise.
Being able to run a group of programmers in a reasonable working conditions, shield them from crazy demands and explaining nontechnical issues are social skills that engineers value in managers but don't need to possess because this isn't their job.
Being able to participate in the company's politics at the expense of work, sweep conflicts under the carpet, assert "authority" in various counterproductive ways are social skills that most engineers lack and despise when faced with.
Being able to drink huge amounts of low-quality alcohol, behave like a pig toward the opposite sex, express the obedience to "authority" by offering sex, smoke crack and display other kinds of uncivilized human behavior are vital social skills in various subsets of society, however engineers are usually dsigusted with those things, and have no chance to meet expectation of a manager that demands them. Unfortunately there is no natural barrier that prevents uncivilized people from getting into middle management.