Why was this modded as flamebait? He just honestly answered the question.
I feel the same way as you, ObjetDart. I am also a leftist, and I am startled by many things (I tend to be very conservative when it comes to my live).
No, corporations should make money. They shouldn't be (by themselves) responsible to other "communities" than to their shareholders. The reason is that making money is why they do exist; to behave differently is expecting them to behave irrationally. Government intervention changes the cost-benefit ratios so it becomes rational for them to do things which they normally wouldn't, such as acting responsibly to communities.
If you want production to be in the hands of some body that cares about communities by itself, there are alternatives, such as collectives or cooperatives. These are entities controlled by the target community, and as such they behave rationally to please the community, without the need of government intervention.
Re:Market. People. they decide. and they did.
on
Django 1.0 Released
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excuse me, i hate to break it to you people but we programmers dont decide what goes on to being popular.
I don't think so. Things are not popular for no reason. Usually, things that become popular have some obvious advantage to existing technology, and that's why people chose it. Only later it is discovered there are also disadvantages to the new technology (usually because it's not so mature in other areas), and even later, the new technology is integrated with the technologies that existed before. It's a natural cycle of progress.
PHP is nice example. It had advantage in allowing having business logic directly in HTML pages (i.e. easy creation of dynamic pages compared to CGI), and was free. But there was a disadvantage to this approach, so the MVC model and frameworks using templates were invented. So the modern frameworks combine advantages of both technologies.
The same could be said about Rails. They use obscure language (sorry), but the basic ideas are sound. That's why they are copied by other frameworks, which combine advantage of more well-known language with the advantages of Rails.
Actually, I used "we", but I am not American (I cheated a little:-)). In my country (Czech Republic), there are about 4 available channel frequencies for terrestrial wireless analog TV broadcast in Czech (this has probably to do with the fact that in Europe, different states require different sets of channels). However, with the cable, you can get some more, as well as other European channels (I would say 30-100 channels). This will probably change with the switch to digital broadcast - then it will be possible to fit several channels into one analog frequency.
However, my original point still stands - in wireless, there is limit to number of channels / amount of data you can move through the air. With cable, while there is a physical limit, it is a lot higher.
No, I think we are having these issues, because we are going backwards. It's like going from cable TV back to the wireless broadcast. If we were doing that, we would have less TV channels to select from.
It's ultimately consumers who are to blame. Almost all of us would rather buy low-quality mass-produced items instead of a higher quality product that costs 10% more.
I would like to buy higher quality product, but there is no insurance that I am really buying high quality for the price. There is no feedback mechanism to force the producers to produce the highest quality goods possible.
If I go to shop to buy something, I have a choice let's say between gizmo A which has 2 years warranty (in EU) and gizmo B which also has a 2 years warranty, but costs twice as much and presumably has, by the brand, better quality. But do I know that gizmo B will really last 4 years? How can I know that? In the presence of such uncertainty, of course I will prefer gizmo A.
I know what you will say - that making gizmos B lasting 4 years is better for the company making them. But it's actually not true. It's a lot better for that company to make them last 3 years, because that way, they will sell a lot more of them. And the cycle is too long for consumers to measure statistically which company cheats this way and which doesn't (hint: everybody cheats, maybe except companies just founded by idealistic engineers).
I really don't see how free market can solve this problem. The only way is government regulation. (Actually, there is a free market way to solve this - let the companies release all the internal documentation pertaining to design and testing of their products, so we could see who is planning obsolescence in what way - but this is impossible method politically IMHO).
Few decades back, companies didn't do that - it was a common wisdom that making high quality pays off, and also that repairing things pays off. Unfortunately, because of imperfect information, it doesn't. It makes me sad because I believe markets can solve most ecological problems on their own - except this one: increasing consumption of low quality goods and making them harder to repair.
Do you have a link? This would be interesting - I doubt that people on one of the two biggest Linux portals in Czechia wouldn't know that it's possible to buy Lenovo laptop with Linux.
My guess is even if they did, they won't do it here in Czechia. Asus also doesn't offer its EEE PC 901 with Linux here, for some strange reason.
It is supposed to represent that every keyboard has a different place where a dollar sign is. In a similar way, you cannot expect all the charger connectors to be the same.
I think it's a good idea, and many people here misunderstand it. I would like to have such program myself.
Sometimes, one's own emotional response will cloud the rational thinking. Then a "manual" or "guide" about how to think rationally about the psychological problem could be very helpful. But of course, it requires willing cooperation of the person who reads the book to solve the problem.
For example, sometimes I feel lonely, and I know that. The emotion is here, and it affects my ability to see what could I do to prevent that emotion (call and see some friends, for example, or read something funny). So having handy a simple list of things like that would be helpful. Software is better than a simple list because it can be made more interactive, in a way.
Actually, Sudoku is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_coloring for a special graph. From mathematics perspective, it is thus pretty boring, although that doesn't mean it cannot be fun.
The LPARs on a modern z9 mainframe are certified EAL 5. The z/OS is certified to be EAL 4, but (I am not an expert in this area) it's probably on par with SELinux or so (however, mainframes had such features for ages).
I want my The Sims Movie. It would make a nice horror. A loving husband who died in the pool would return at night, and don't let me start on garden gnomes..
Here is a simple idea, which would make all of the insurance companies work properly, as everyone expects.
The problem with insurance companies is that they can cheat, ie. they can overestimate the risk in order to increase their own profits.
So let's separate the operational costs and profits of the insurance company from the insurance fund itself. If you would purchase insurance, you would see these parts as different entities on your bill. Under _no_ circumstances could be the money from the insurance fund be used to fund the operation of the insurance company, i.e. every investment of the fund money would have to come back to the fund. So the insurance company could well go under, even if it had large quantities of money in it's fund (these would then be redistributed back to customers). Or in the other way, if some big disaster occurs, the fund could become empty, but the operational profits of the company wouldn't be touched.
This would be an incentive for the insurance company to be honest with respect to correct calculation of risk and operational profits, and thus would encourage fair competition.
I find it interesting that you cite OpenOffice as being very usable, when as far as I could tell the interface is ripped almost directly from Microsoft...
Not quite true. There are things that are better than Microsoft and there are also things that are worse than Microsoft (my favorite examples being resizing of a picture being inserted in Writer and cell background color selection in Calc).
I believe that there exists a good technical solution to this problem: GUI should be decoupled from the application, to the point it could be created in some WYSIWYG editor and dynamically linked with it.
Just imagine, if you would like GIMP to behave more like Photoshop, you would just take the UI source file in the editor and edit it. You could move the panels, change keybindings, restructure dialogs and so on. Then you would just save it, and voila - you could run GIMP as a Photoshop. No programming skill required, really. Or even better - there would be a whole repository of such UI skins, because it would be so damn easy to create them.
This is what happened with the web applications (the visual design/application logic separation).
There would be a couple of problems to solve, like how to describe custom widgets in generic enough fashion, but it should work for the most part. But it would also save people a lot of work trying to rewrite the same application in their favorite GUI toolkit.
We don't know if information contained in DNA is actually sufficient. It may well also be that DNA catalyzes some processes, and then the invention (of nature) is embodied in a physical "product".
That being said, I disagree with patenting of DNA.
Actually, rampant child pornography in Czech Republic was a myth invented by some German non-profits that fight child pornography, to get more funding. In reality, there is no more child pornography produced here than in e.g. Germany or Belgium, or any other European Country (exact numbers are of course hard to measure).
Part of this myth may also be due to the fact that lot of porn actors/actresses come from Czech Republic, because we are very atheist and liberal country. But this has nothing to do with child pornography.
I doubt that Cuba has enough resources to control the internet this way effectively. China may have, but in Cuba, it will be probably controlled by hardware and connection access, than by firewalls and propaganda.
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Why was this modded as flamebait? He just honestly answered the question.
I feel the same way as you, ObjetDart. I am also a leftist, and I am startled by many things (I tend to be very conservative when it comes to my live).
No, corporations should make money. They shouldn't be (by themselves) responsible to other "communities" than to their shareholders. The reason is that making money is why they do exist; to behave differently is expecting them to behave irrationally. Government intervention changes the cost-benefit ratios so it becomes rational for them to do things which they normally wouldn't, such as acting responsibly to communities.
If you want production to be in the hands of some body that cares about communities by itself, there are alternatives, such as collectives or cooperatives. These are entities controlled by the target community, and as such they behave rationally to please the community, without the need of government intervention.
excuse me, i hate to break it to you people but we programmers dont decide what goes on to being popular.
I don't think so. Things are not popular for no reason. Usually, things that become popular have some obvious advantage to existing technology, and that's why people chose it. Only later it is discovered there are also disadvantages to the new technology (usually because it's not so mature in other areas), and even later, the new technology is integrated with the technologies that existed before. It's a natural cycle of progress.
PHP is nice example. It had advantage in allowing having business logic directly in HTML pages (i.e. easy creation of dynamic pages compared to CGI), and was free. But there was a disadvantage to this approach, so the MVC model and frameworks using templates were invented. So the modern frameworks combine advantages of both technologies.
The same could be said about Rails. They use obscure language (sorry), but the basic ideas are sound. That's why they are copied by other frameworks, which combine advantage of more well-known language with the advantages of Rails.
Actually, I used "we", but I am not American (I cheated a little :-)). In my country (Czech Republic), there are about 4 available channel frequencies for terrestrial wireless analog TV broadcast in Czech (this has probably to do with the fact that in Europe, different states require different sets of channels). However, with the cable, you can get some more, as well as other European channels (I would say 30-100 channels). This will probably change with the switch to digital broadcast - then it will be possible to fit several channels into one analog frequency.
However, my original point still stands - in wireless, there is limit to number of channels / amount of data you can move through the air. With cable, while there is a physical limit, it is a lot higher.
No, I think we are having these issues, because we are going backwards. It's like going from cable TV back to the wireless broadcast. If we were doing that, we would have less TV channels to select from.
It's ultimately consumers who are to blame. Almost all of us would rather buy low-quality mass-produced items instead of a higher quality product that costs 10% more.
I would like to buy higher quality product, but there is no insurance that I am really buying high quality for the price. There is no feedback mechanism to force the producers to produce the highest quality goods possible.
If I go to shop to buy something, I have a choice let's say between gizmo A which has 2 years warranty (in EU) and gizmo B which also has a 2 years warranty, but costs twice as much and presumably has, by the brand, better quality. But do I know that gizmo B will really last 4 years? How can I know that? In the presence of such uncertainty, of course I will prefer gizmo A.
I know what you will say - that making gizmos B lasting 4 years is better for the company making them. But it's actually not true. It's a lot better for that company to make them last 3 years, because that way, they will sell a lot more of them. And the cycle is too long for consumers to measure statistically which company cheats this way and which doesn't (hint: everybody cheats, maybe except companies just founded by idealistic engineers).
I really don't see how free market can solve this problem. The only way is government regulation. (Actually, there is a free market way to solve this - let the companies release all the internal documentation pertaining to design and testing of their products, so we could see who is planning obsolescence in what way - but this is impossible method politically IMHO).
Few decades back, companies didn't do that - it was a common wisdom that making high quality pays off, and also that repairing things pays off. Unfortunately, because of imperfect information, it doesn't. It makes me sad because I believe markets can solve most ecological problems on their own - except this one: increasing consumption of low quality goods and making them harder to repair.
Exactly. By the way, we are just Czechs now, but for Slovaks this procedure could easily apply too.
Do you have a link? This would be interesting - I doubt that people on one of the two biggest Linux portals in Czechia wouldn't know that it's possible to buy Lenovo laptop with Linux.
My guess is even if they did, they won't do it here in Czechia. Asus also doesn't offer its EEE PC 901 with Linux here, for some strange reason.
It is supposed to represent that every keyboard has a different place where a dollar sign is. In a similar way, you cannot expect all the charger connectors to be the same.
I think it's a good idea, and many people here misunderstand it. I would like to have such program myself.
Sometimes, one's own emotional response will cloud the rational thinking. Then a "manual" or "guide" about how to think rationally about the psychological problem could be very helpful. But of course, it requires willing cooperation of the person who reads the book to solve the problem.
For example, sometimes I feel lonely, and I know that. The emotion is here, and it affects my ability to see what could I do to prevent that emotion (call and see some friends, for example, or read something funny). So having handy a simple list of things like that would be helpful. Software is better than a simple list because it can be made more interactive, in a way.
Actually, Sudoku is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_coloring for a special graph. From mathematics perspective, it is thus pretty boring, although that doesn't mean it cannot be fun.
The LPARs on a modern z9 mainframe are certified EAL 5. The z/OS is certified to be EAL 4, but (I am not an expert in this area) it's probably on par with SELinux or so (however, mainframes had such features for ages).
The source is http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/ccs_certification.html
I want my The Sims Movie. It would make a nice horror. A loving husband who died in the pool would return at night, and don't let me start on garden gnomes..
I guess that CERN people actually believe that one. :-)
Maybe you are paying for the reliability? ;-)
Seriously, I agree that it's outrageous.
No problem:
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf
Here is a simple idea, which would make all of the insurance companies work properly, as everyone expects.
The problem with insurance companies is that they can cheat, ie. they can overestimate the risk in order to increase their own profits.
So let's separate the operational costs and profits of the insurance company from the insurance fund itself. If you would purchase insurance, you would see these parts as different entities on your bill. Under _no_ circumstances could be the money from the insurance fund be used to fund the operation of the insurance company, i.e. every investment of the fund money would have to come back to the fund. So the insurance company could well go under, even if it had large quantities of money in it's fund (these would then be redistributed back to customers). Or in the other way, if some big disaster occurs, the fund could become empty, but the operational profits of the company wouldn't be touched.
This would be an incentive for the insurance company to be honest with respect to correct calculation of risk and operational profits, and thus would encourage fair competition.
I find it interesting that you cite OpenOffice as being very usable, when as far as I could tell the interface is ripped almost directly from Microsoft...
Not quite true. There are things that are better than Microsoft and there are also things that are worse than Microsoft (my favorite examples being resizing of a picture being inserted in Writer and cell background color selection in Calc).
I believe that there exists a good technical solution to this problem: GUI should be decoupled from the application, to the point it could be created in some WYSIWYG editor and dynamically linked with it.
Just imagine, if you would like GIMP to behave more like Photoshop, you would just take the UI source file in the editor and edit it. You could move the panels, change keybindings, restructure dialogs and so on. Then you would just save it, and voila - you could run GIMP as a Photoshop. No programming skill required, really. Or even better - there would be a whole repository of such UI skins, because it would be so damn easy to create them.
This is what happened with the web applications (the visual design/application logic separation).
There would be a couple of problems to solve, like how to describe custom widgets in generic enough fashion, but it should work for the most part. But it would also save people a lot of work trying to rewrite the same application in their favorite GUI toolkit.
It's a little thing called diplomacy.
We don't know if information contained in DNA is actually sufficient. It may well also be that DNA catalyzes some processes, and then the invention (of nature) is embodied in a physical "product".
That being said, I disagree with patenting of DNA.
Programs consists of input, output, processing and storage.
Modern programmers have improved upon this paradigm. Their programs consist of controller, view, model and XML.
I wonder what is the difference between ontological typology and typological ontology.
Actually, rampant child pornography in Czech Republic was a myth invented by some German non-profits that fight child pornography, to get more funding. In reality, there is no more child pornography produced here than in e.g. Germany or Belgium, or any other European Country (exact numbers are of course hard to measure).
Part of this myth may also be due to the fact that lot of porn actors/actresses come from Czech Republic, because we are very atheist and liberal country. But this has nothing to do with child pornography.
I doubt that Cuba has enough resources to control the internet this way effectively. China may have, but in Cuba, it will be probably controlled by hardware and connection access, than by firewalls and propaganda.