I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.
What's the penalty for bleeding on the sidewalk? Two beatings?
The baby boomer generation is the greatest generation's GREATEST FAILURE.
I guess it turns out that if you take a generation of kids out of high school, teach them to hate and kill a few million foreigners for five years, they come back really good with military hardware, but a bit screwed up about raising well-rounded children. Who could have ever predicted that?
For a normal extension language for use with trusted apps, I recommend C. We can wrap it with anything, and no matter how bad your API is, we can provide our own zero-day buffer overflow exploits. Trivially.
More to the point, LISP is dynamically scoped and Scheme is statically scoped. And if you do not understand the difference, then you are much too young.
Or too old, but have been frozen in a cryogenic sleep capsule since 1959...
How many slashdotters are boycotting products made by those evil corporations who pollute and slave drive? Not many I'd wager.
I tried to do that for a few years, and it was a soul-destroying experience. The huge amount of research trivia needed to get the slightest sense of "how much evil(tm) does this consumer product contain", and the ultimate frustration when most research just led to blank walls of corporate deniability, and then the fact that most consumer "choices" are utterly false McChoices between different brands which are merely swappable logos of the same company, who won't reveal their outsourcing chain because it's a trade secret, and changes randomly even within the same model - meant I ended up nearly going crazy with the stress. I tried to become an informed consumer, yet I knew I was still making bad, or even worse, just plain random decisions.
Expecting the consumer to track the entire supply chain partner history of every product they buy is like expecting them to run a Linux where they compile every package from source, without the benefit of a package management system. It's just not feasible.
But this is why the Linux world invented "distributions", so that we could delegate all those choices to a trustworthy group on our behalf. Fortunately, we have the same thing with the economy- we call it "government regulations".
This problem should not be forced down to the consumer. It needs to be solved at the government level. It's cheaper and simpler for everyone. The problem is we've let a generation of right-wing activists tell us that government regulation is somehow bad - which is exactly the same thing as saying that "quality control is bad for business".
It's not. Quality makes for satisfied customers. And an earlier generation understood this. But we now have a generation of CEOs who really don't believe that quality is their business. We need to get them out of power, fast, and replace them with managers who truly care.
Do we have any of those coming through the business schools today? If so, we need to spot them - the Bruce Waynes rather than Lex Luthors - and back them.
It's not like Apple don't audit these people. But they can't be there 24/7 and 365 days of the year.
Then they shouldn't be using them in their supply chain, should they? It's not like Apple have a problem with being obsessive control freaks about everything else, like the App Store.
Actually, reforestation has a much more direct impact on temperatures than sequestering CO2 could ever have.
+this.
I'm rather annoyed by the whole CO2 issue as I think it's a red herring compared to deforestation. The big problem is that we're cutting down too many trees, fishing the oceans dry, and letting too many species go extinct; if we just stop doing that, CO2 will fix itself. No need for fancy industrial band-aid solutions; even if we have those, they won't solve the bigger problem of lack of biodiversity.
It's really not that difficult. We've been watching a slow-motion environmental disaster unfold since the 1950s. But this very recent myopic focus on CO2 and global warming to the exclusion of the real, living, parts of the biosphere is disappointing and seems to miss the entire point of the environmental movement: it's the life forms, stupid.
How many times have you seen liberals shouting about some disaster and demanding the adoption of free-market policies to solve it?
None, because liberals believe free-market policies cause problems not solutions - they redistribute weath upwards to the already rich and powerful, for instance. The right wing thinks that that is a feature, not a bug.
But I was born in New Zealand and lived through both the Roger Douglas "sell off everything" privatisation panic of the 1980s, and the current John Key reprise of the same under "Canterbury Earthquake" urgency. The right wing in NZ has done exactly what you claim the left does: shouting about impending disaster and then railroading through "free-market" policies in great haste. Which usually involved selling off assets owned by the people to foreign private corporations in dodgy under-the-counter deals. A few years later, shock horror! We discover that our now private owner in Qatar really doesn't care about our New Zealand railroad or power line and has just been charging extortionate rates and failing to invest in infrastructure. But hey, they've been making exquisite profits for some investment fund on Wall Street so hoo-ah for capitalism!
So don't try to pretend that this is a "liberal" thing. It's not. It's a political thing, every group with an agenda for restructuring society believes that they should be the ones to restructure society because their beliefs are right.
I mean, that's only common sense, right? And if you disagree with me, you're just wrong.
Everyone thinks "Mars", but I vote for airship cities on Venus. Once we solve the little breathing-sulphuric-acid-rain and falling-to-a-screaming-burning-implosion-death problems (gas masks and handrails might be one solution, as long as they can be tastefully designed), we'll be able to set up profitable carbon dioxide refineries!
We do have a solar system wide market for carbon dioxide, right?
Thought experiment = oxymoron. You can't use that to PROVE anything about how the Real World functions.
Not only that, Einstein was also famous for inventing so many thought experiments so rapidly that they contradicted each other. Try reading up on the history of GR. He confused himself lots of times, and then he spent 40 years working on Unified Field Theory which never came together. Possibly he wasn't completely misguided, but he never got it to work, and while everyone loves to celebrate the young 1905 Einstein, they forget that the old electric-shock-hair Einstein disagreed with not only his younger self but the rest of the physics community quite dramatically.
The problem is that nobody in science loves a loser, and Old Einstein was a loser - at least according to his contemporaries.
So if he didn't ultimately get things right - or if he did, he was so far outside the quantum mechanics mainstream by the 1950s as to be considered a crackpot if he didn't have his Nobel Prize - why do we treat him like an infallible demigod? Why don't we study his later UFT works, for instance - the ones which did try to take General Relativity to its logical conclusion?
Because if he wasn't, ultimately, right about the conclusions of relativity, should we be so sure that its foundations are correct either?
Einstein is an intriguing paradox. He invented the photon, but still held to the belief that reality was a continuum, and therefore that the photon had to be not an elementary particle but a wave. He didn't believe in wave-particle duality. He didn't believe in a lot of things which we now consider absolute sacrosanct physical truth. Why don't we teach this?
For example, you won't be able to make a square with a diagonal connecting two corners.
Interestingly enough, we can't actually do that in the real world either - we don't have infinite pixels on a screen, or infinitely small whiteboard markers. Eventually you get down to atoms, and then quanta, and they seem very much like someone maxed out their numeric precision and started using integers.
And yet reality seems to get along just fine.
By the way, whyever do we call finite-precision floating point numbers in computers "reals"? They're no more real than I'm the square root of negative Pi.
Our universe is doomed. Unless we come to an understanding of how to escape to the multiverse outside, humanity will end.
You know, kind of by definition, there is no such thing as an "outside" to a universe. If it's connected to something else, it's not the whole verse, it's just a part-y-verse.
Governments are in the business of spying on people.
Goodness! Are they really? It's a good thing that private corporations aren't in the business of harvesting and selling personal data to the highest bidders, then. Let me create a Facebook profile right away!
As a commenter last week put it, he set out to make a dent in the universe, and actually did it.
And now we have to pay the LHC folks to get the universe repaired. Seriously, Steve, you couldn't even back it out of the local manifold coordinate chart without scraping the Magellenic Cloud on a superstring?
this is definitely the most moral way of saving money - working for it, as opposed to how gov't creates it
Right, those nasty governments which do nothing except borrow money, invest in building shared infrastructure, and then levy taxes on the users of that infrastructure, and return any excess to the public purse. They're totally different from private companies which borrow money, invest in building shared infrastructure, and then levy intellectual property rent fees on the users of that infrastructure, and return a sizeable profit to a bunch of speculators in another country who don't use or care about the products at all.
Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem?
Not really. There is always a finite quantity of bandwidth. It only becomes a "problem" when you have applications which assume infinite bandwidth or are forced to assume this for legal or political rather than technical reasons.
Like, oh let's just say for example, streaming video.
Streaming is the anti-caching. It's a terrible technical non-solution to a legal problem. It clogs the tubes and wastes bandwith by design just to retain control over the obsolete idea of "broadcasting" so that copyright control and advertisements can be retrofitted into the stream.
But doing video right would require re-engineering our entire economy -- which will have to happen sooner or later when the IP crash comes -- so we'd rather just break the Internet by design and then attempt to retrofit some kind of weird fixup after the fact to make some preferred partners work sort-kinda okay.
Ever fatter pipes in North America have always reduced the need for this sort of solutions and my guess is that it will continue to be the case.
Fixed that for you. The rest of the world, not so much, and we grind our teeth at having to use American web apps because they're sloppy bandwidth hogs just like American cars are petrol hogs. Caching is a good thing. Pity AJAX seems practically engineered to break caching as its primary purpose.
No, it doesn't mean they are wrong, but it does tingle the intuitive "beauty vs ugliness" detector, which historically seems to have had some linkage to physical reality. Theories like Newton's and Maxwell's have a simplicity and coherence to them beyond their mere physical predictions which might be just a coincidence. Or it might be a clue that somehow, 20th century physics has diverged onto a track where its foundations are not quite correct, but we're now so deeply entrenched in a model-centric world of theory that we can't yet see our way to the beautiful solution which will tie it all together.
Renormalising away infinities, brrr. That makes my "this shit ain't right" detector beep at full strength, and Feynman thought so too.
But just the gut sense that something is deeply wrong in the Standard Model because of its ugly clunkiness isn't quite enough. It does after all do the brute work of coming up with the right numbers. So did Ptolemaic epicycles, even though it wasn't elegant or ultimately as insightful as the Copernican heliocentric model.
I'm sure that somehow, we're missing something as big, simple and retrospectively obvious as "put the big bright thing in the middle", but I have no clue what the big bright thing might be. Einstein tried messing with time and that got him only so far and then he stalled out with Unified Field Theory. The best minds of a century have tried and failed. Once we get it, we'll probably laugh and teach it to five year olds. But until then...
Slashdot Mirror
If chewing gum is outlawed, then only outlaws will chew gum.
Well, at least they won't be able to walk at the same time.
I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.
What's the penalty for bleeding on the sidewalk? Two beatings?
Most competent sysadmins try to do their best to secure their system, and those worth their salt, succeed to do so.
So, um. What does that make the kernel.org guys? ;)
Yeah, I thought so.
No, more of a fishy flavor.
With a sprinkling of Cesium-137.
The baby boomer generation is the greatest generation's GREATEST FAILURE.
I guess it turns out that if you take a generation of kids out of high school, teach them to hate and kill a few million foreigners for five years, they come back really good with military hardware, but a bit screwed up about raising well-rounded children. Who could have ever predicted that?
For a normal extension language for use with trusted apps, I recommend C. We can wrap it with anything, and no matter how bad your API is, we can provide our own zero-day buffer overflow exploits. Trivially.
Fixed by Lulzsec!
More to the point, LISP is dynamically scoped and Scheme is statically scoped. And if you do not understand the difference, then you are much too young.
Or too old, but have been frozen in a cryogenic sleep capsule since 1959...
How many slashdotters are boycotting products made by those evil corporations who pollute and slave drive? Not many I'd wager.
I tried to do that for a few years, and it was a soul-destroying experience. The huge amount of research trivia needed to get the slightest sense of "how much evil(tm) does this consumer product contain", and the ultimate frustration when most research just led to blank walls of corporate deniability, and then the fact that most consumer "choices" are utterly false McChoices between different brands which are merely swappable logos of the same company, who won't reveal their outsourcing chain because it's a trade secret, and changes randomly even within the same model - meant I ended up nearly going crazy with the stress. I tried to become an informed consumer, yet I knew I was still making bad, or even worse, just plain random decisions.
Expecting the consumer to track the entire supply chain partner history of every product they buy is like expecting them to run a Linux where they compile every package from source, without the benefit of a package management system. It's just not feasible.
But this is why the Linux world invented "distributions", so that we could delegate all those choices to a trustworthy group on our behalf. Fortunately, we have the same thing with the economy- we call it "government regulations".
This problem should not be forced down to the consumer. It needs to be solved at the government level. It's cheaper and simpler for everyone. The problem is we've let a generation of right-wing activists tell us that government regulation is somehow bad - which is exactly the same thing as saying that "quality control is bad for business".
It's not. Quality makes for satisfied customers. And an earlier generation understood this. But we now have a generation of CEOs who really don't believe that quality is their business. We need to get them out of power, fast, and replace them with managers who truly care.
Do we have any of those coming through the business schools today? If so, we need to spot them - the Bruce Waynes rather than Lex Luthors - and back them.
It's not like Apple don't audit these people. But they can't be there 24/7 and 365 days of the year.
Then they shouldn't be using them in their supply chain, should they? It's not like Apple have a problem with being obsessive control freaks about everything else, like the App Store.
Same thing goes for all Apple products. Apple is well known for having extremely high prices.
And massive profits despite low, low manufacturing costs based on near-slave labour. Coincidence? Yes of course it is! Why do you ask?
Actually, reforestation has a much more direct impact on temperatures than sequestering CO2 could ever have.
+this.
I'm rather annoyed by the whole CO2 issue as I think it's a red herring compared to deforestation. The big problem is that we're cutting down too many trees, fishing the oceans dry, and letting too many species go extinct; if we just stop doing that, CO2 will fix itself. No need for fancy industrial band-aid solutions; even if we have those, they won't solve the bigger problem of lack of biodiversity.
It's really not that difficult. We've been watching a slow-motion environmental disaster unfold since the 1950s. But this very recent myopic focus on CO2 and global warming to the exclusion of the real, living, parts of the biosphere is disappointing and seems to miss the entire point of the environmental movement: it's the life forms, stupid.
How many times have you seen liberals shouting about some disaster and demanding the adoption of free-market policies to solve it?
None, because liberals believe free-market policies cause problems not solutions - they redistribute weath upwards to the already rich and powerful, for instance. The right wing thinks that that is a feature, not a bug.
But I was born in New Zealand and lived through both the Roger Douglas "sell off everything" privatisation panic of the 1980s, and the current John Key reprise of the same under "Canterbury Earthquake" urgency. The right wing in NZ has done exactly what you claim the left does: shouting about impending disaster and then railroading through "free-market" policies in great haste. Which usually involved selling off assets owned by the people to foreign private corporations in dodgy under-the-counter deals. A few years later, shock horror! We discover that our now private owner in Qatar really doesn't care about our New Zealand railroad or power line and has just been charging extortionate rates and failing to invest in infrastructure. But hey, they've been making exquisite profits for some investment fund on Wall Street so hoo-ah for capitalism!
So don't try to pretend that this is a "liberal" thing. It's not. It's a political thing, every group with an agenda for restructuring society believes that they should be the ones to restructure society because their beliefs are right.
I mean, that's only common sense, right? And if you disagree with me, you're just wrong.
We need to GET OFF THIS ROCK.
Everyone thinks "Mars", but I vote for airship cities on Venus. Once we solve the little breathing-sulphuric-acid-rain and falling-to-a-screaming-burning-implosion-death problems (gas masks and handrails might be one solution, as long as they can be tastefully designed), we'll be able to set up profitable carbon dioxide refineries!
We do have a solar system wide market for carbon dioxide, right?
I suppose Google hasn't also just started a project codenamed Azorian?
Dunno, maybe they'll switch to Forth as their language... That'd be pretty cool...
FORTH GO MULTIPLY AND
Thought experiment = oxymoron. You can't use that to PROVE anything about how the Real World functions.
Not only that, Einstein was also famous for inventing so many thought experiments so rapidly that they contradicted each other. Try reading up on the history of GR. He confused himself lots of times, and then he spent 40 years working on Unified Field Theory which never came together. Possibly he wasn't completely misguided, but he never got it to work, and while everyone loves to celebrate the young 1905 Einstein, they forget that the old electric-shock-hair Einstein disagreed with not only his younger self but the rest of the physics community quite dramatically.
The problem is that nobody in science loves a loser, and Old Einstein was a loser - at least according to his contemporaries.
So if he didn't ultimately get things right - or if he did, he was so far outside the quantum mechanics mainstream by the 1950s as to be considered a crackpot if he didn't have his Nobel Prize - why do we treat him like an infallible demigod? Why don't we study his later UFT works, for instance - the ones which did try to take General Relativity to its logical conclusion?
Because if he wasn't, ultimately, right about the conclusions of relativity, should we be so sure that its foundations are correct either?
Einstein is an intriguing paradox. He invented the photon, but still held to the belief that reality was a continuum, and therefore that the photon had to be not an elementary particle but a wave. He didn't believe in wave-particle duality. He didn't believe in a lot of things which we now consider absolute sacrosanct physical truth. Why don't we teach this?
For example, you won't be able to make a square with a diagonal connecting two corners.
Interestingly enough, we can't actually do that in the real world either - we don't have infinite pixels on a screen, or infinitely small whiteboard markers. Eventually you get down to atoms, and then quanta, and they seem very much like someone maxed out their numeric precision and started using integers.
And yet reality seems to get along just fine.
By the way, whyever do we call finite-precision floating point numbers in computers "reals"? They're no more real than I'm the square root of negative Pi.
Our universe is doomed. Unless we come to an understanding of how to escape to the multiverse outside, humanity will end.
You know, kind of by definition, there is no such thing as an "outside" to a universe. If it's connected to something else, it's not the whole verse, it's just a part-y-verse.
Mmm, partyverse.
Governments are in the business of spying on people.
Goodness! Are they really? It's a good thing that private corporations aren't in the business of harvesting and selling personal data to the highest bidders, then. Let me create a Facebook profile right away!
As a commenter last week put it, he set out to make a dent in the universe, and actually did it.
And now we have to pay the LHC folks to get the universe repaired. Seriously, Steve, you couldn't even back it out of the local manifold coordinate chart without scraping the Magellenic Cloud on a superstring?
this is definitely the most moral way of saving money - working for it, as opposed to how gov't creates it
Right, those nasty governments which do nothing except borrow money, invest in building shared infrastructure, and then levy taxes on the users of that infrastructure, and return any excess to the public purse. They're totally different from private companies which borrow money, invest in building shared infrastructure, and then levy intellectual property rent fees on the users of that infrastructure, and return a sizeable profit to a bunch of speculators in another country who don't use or care about the products at all.
This way you get a mortal disease that is endemic within the population.
We already have that, it's called "life".
Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem?
Not really. There is always a finite quantity of bandwidth. It only becomes a "problem" when you have applications which assume infinite bandwidth or are forced to assume this for legal or political rather than technical reasons.
Like, oh let's just say for example, streaming video.
Streaming is the anti-caching. It's a terrible technical non-solution to a legal problem. It clogs the tubes and wastes bandwith by design just to retain control over the obsolete idea of "broadcasting" so that copyright control and advertisements can be retrofitted into the stream.
But doing video right would require re-engineering our entire economy -- which will have to happen sooner or later when the IP crash comes -- so we'd rather just break the Internet by design and then attempt to retrofit some kind of weird fixup after the fact to make some preferred partners work sort-kinda okay.
Ever fatter pipes in North America have always reduced the need for this sort of solutions and my guess is that it will continue to be the case.
Fixed that for you. The rest of the world, not so much, and we grind our teeth at having to use American web apps because they're sloppy bandwidth hogs just like American cars are petrol hogs. Caching is a good thing. Pity AJAX seems practically engineered to break caching as its primary purpose.
>That doesn't mean they are wrong however.
No, it doesn't mean they are wrong, but it does tingle the intuitive "beauty vs ugliness" detector, which historically seems to have had some linkage to physical reality. Theories like Newton's and Maxwell's have a simplicity and coherence to them beyond their mere physical predictions which might be just a coincidence. Or it might be a clue that somehow, 20th century physics has diverged onto a track where its foundations are not quite correct, but we're now so deeply entrenched in a model-centric world of theory that we can't yet see our way to the beautiful solution which will tie it all together.
Renormalising away infinities, brrr. That makes my "this shit ain't right" detector beep at full strength, and Feynman thought so too.
But just the gut sense that something is deeply wrong in the Standard Model because of its ugly clunkiness isn't quite enough. It does after all do the brute work of coming up with the right numbers. So did Ptolemaic epicycles, even though it wasn't elegant or ultimately as insightful as the Copernican heliocentric model.
I'm sure that somehow, we're missing something as big, simple and retrospectively obvious as "put the big bright thing in the middle", but I have no clue what the big bright thing might be. Einstein tried messing with time and that got him only so far and then he stalled out with Unified Field Theory. The best minds of a century have tried and failed. Once we get it, we'll probably laugh and teach it to five year olds. But until then...