"I love my Linux desktop because *I*, not Steve J or Bill G, am in charge"
I can see that, and respect it. But personally, 99% of the details about my desktop I don't want to be in charge of; I don't care and I don't want to be bothered so long as they're handled even reasonably intelligently. Both Bill and Steve handle them reasonably intelligently (your opinion may vary, and given that this is slashdot, almost certainly does. Keep in mind, I may have a different level considered "reasonable", and I definetly seem to exceed most peoples ability to not care about things I consider, well, not worth caring about)
Sometimes I'd rather Steve were in charge, because I think he more frequently exceeds "reasonably inteligent" and reaches for brilliant . But Steve is awfully insistent that he's right, even when I think he's wrong. Bill still does ok most of the time and when he is wrong, he's easier to outwit and work around than Steve (possibly I'm just more used to it). He doesn't really try for "brilliant" so he has a better hit rate on reasonable.
"You say Windows is open? Not to me it isn't." The sense in which he says it is open is , I suspect, the very thing that tips me firmly from Steve to Bill: hardware. Steve want's to be in charge of my hardware. Bill dosen't. (Or if you prefer, Steve is picky about what hardware he's in charge of, Bill wants to be in charge of all the hardware...)
So there you go, Bill G is in charge of my desktop, and like it that way. Show of hands please: Would you like to proceed straight to the lynching, or tar-and-feather first?
Lots. Well, personally, the machines I've liked have come from Dell, but my employer bought them. From this geeks perspective, hardware is, or rather should be, boring. Software is where it's at. Dell hardware is blandly competent, exactly as it should be. My home computer I shopped around to find the hot processor (~4 years ago) I wanted, figuring I could tweak the rest; wound up with Compaq, leading to 2Short's rule of computer shopping number 2: Never Buy a Compaq. ~4 Years later the hot Athlon 500 is sh*t over the next one down, and ~4 years of Compaq proprietary cr*p isn't worth it. Still, it's fine for remote-desktoping over to the hot (this year) Dell at work.
Sometime soon I'll replace my lame Compaq. Still undecided between the mid range at the used PC store, or a low end Dell.
My understanding was that hitchiking or picking up hitchikers on the highway was illegal, just as walking along the highway is. I imagine it varies by jurisdiction, but I find it hard to imagine that it would be illegal for people waiting at a bus stop to get in a car instead. That's all we're talking about: You pull up to a bus stop and say "I want to use the HOV lane. Anyone interested in a bus leaving right now?"
That you know of. Even assuming it doesn't, that doesn't mean HOV lanes don't cause car pools. It means Californians don't form car pools, even when it is to their advantage. I could speculate why, but it would get awfully derogatory.
"Okay - fine, you disagree, and think that HOV lanes are a great idea."
Actually, I think bicycles are a great idea.
"But I'll bet you are a SMALL MINORITY!"
No need to bet. California has a stong referendum process. Start one to eliminate HOV lanes. Then you'll find out for sure. I'm betting you'll find out you are wrong.
"If you are going to pay for infrastructure - spend it on infrastructure that everyone can use! You are probably for progressive taxation too!"
I'm for less taxation generally. I'd love to spend tax money only on infrasturcture everyone (particularly me) uses. I don't use highways at all.
Where I come from, we also call it "hitch hiking" Generally smiled upon, given the chance to help out a guy who needs a ride, without being paralyzed by paranoia. The frequency of "psychos" is grossly overestimated...
Anyway, we're talking about where I used to come from: Washington DC. There, I wouldn't pick up a random stranger by the side of the road. He's still almost certainly not a "psycho", but he might well be a hardened criminal planning a car-jacking. But given a bunch of commuters in suits at an established pick-up point, would I take the next 3 in line? Sure. It would be an incredibly stupid way to do a car-jacking. Car-jacking is the crime of a desperate criminal. Given 3 guys bent on crime, working together, and willing to put on suits and head out to a suburban park-and-ride, they're going to come up with something lower risk or higher pay-off than car-jacking.
"Car Pooling lanes do NOT cause car pools to form"
Sure it does. At least in DC, where you can get a ride into the city by showing up at certain suburban park-and-rides, or out by showing up at certain street corners and getting in line. Very shortly, someone will come by and pick up the next three people in line, just so they can use the HOV lane. Those car pools have certainly formed because the lane is there. When I used this commuting method, that was a car pool forming every few minutes for several hours each rush. At peak, it was car pools forming as fast as people could climb in the cars.
My taxes "already PAID for the" road, and yet I went to some extra effort to make using it more efficient, and I was rewarded with a faster commute. That is SMART public policy.
My tax dollars helped pay for all the highway lanes, and I don't use any of them. So get over it.
If you want to argue that tax dollars shouldn't be used to build any highways; that the should be funded by bonds against toll receipts; i.e. make every highway a toll road, paid for by its users, well in that case I'm with you! Tell me where to sign the petition!
But as it is, YOUR taxes didn't pay for the HOV lane. OUR takes paid for it. So WE, collectively, should decide whether it should be an HOV lane or not. We decide this, and other things, via a mechanism known as government. Which has the unfortunate side effect of letting you curse the damn "bureaucrats", ignoring the possibility that others, such as myself, who also pay taxes, might disagree with you.
Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. We'll never know. And thus we'll gut the markets ability to set prices. If the only people who buy albums are those willing to pay $20, what price do you expect album sellers will charge? Duh. If you want legal albums to cost less than $20, listen to music you can legally buy for less. (Hint: used CD store) If you get your music illegaly for free, why should anyone assume you'll pay anything? You take yourself out of the pricing equation. If most people didn't buy $20 CDs, but did buy $10 CDs, what do you think would happen?
"Cuba? How come I don't hear any outrage that the US has a concentration camp in Cuba, or ANY business there, inside the borders of our sworn enemy?"
OT, for what it's worth: We have a perfectly legal lease for the land that base is on. OK, the terms of the lease are stupidly generous, and we negotiated it with a puppet we installed. Despite that, I'm no fan of Castro, don't think our government should be, and see no problem retaining this particular thorn in his side.
I think calling it a concentration camp is to strong, and a disservice to those who have been intered in actual concentration camps. As far as why we have a military prison there: It's convieninetly nearby, yet avoids various pesky legal implications of having the prisoners in the US proper, as well as being nicely isolated from protester/media types. I, for one, am outraged.
Enforcing Federal laws governing interstate commerce? Uh, yeah, that's pretty much right up the FBIs alley. Good use of resources? I guess you could argue they should have other fish to fry, but if widespread, multi state violation of Federal law isn't handled by the FBI, then who do you sugest? There are several other agencies that deal with National security, and whose charters are more directly to protect it. The FBI gets involved, certainly, but mainly because most National security threats involve some sort of federal law breaking, and becasue they've got some rather stupifying investigative manpower. If you're trying to break in to a government computer system for example, the FBI cares that you're breaking the law, but the NSAs job is to make sure you fail.
If you don't think the laws in question should be enforced, that's a different discussion, but if someone is going to enforce them, seems like the FBI is it.
OK, but define a "reasonable price" for anything without reference to a market in which one party can set prices and others can decide whether to buy or not. You can't. The only "reasonable price" is the price at which one party is willing to buy and the other is willing to sell. If the record companies could say "This is the price, and you HAVE to buy" that would not be reasonable. But you want to say, "This is the price, and you have to sell, because otherwise I'm going to take it anyway". Why should the price you set under those conditions be considered reasonable?
I think the ease of perfect replication in the digital age means the entertainment/information market is certainly going to change. But if you say, "I could buy, or I could just take it for free, which do you think I'll chose?", I don't think you should be all that surprised if the response is "We could just let you take it for free, but since doing so is against the law, we could push to prosecute you, which do you think we'll choose?"
What would they blow the whistle on? He phrased the equation a bit bluntly, but this is obviously how companies do it. It's even probaly how they should do it. Just consider "cost of lawsuits" to be a pretty good rough mesure of "significance of problem". To make up some random numbers: If you find that a certain part will fail during the lifetime of the car in one out of every 10,000 cars, and have a 0.01% chance of causing an accident if it does, do you do a recall? You've got to draw the line somewhere; it's impossible to make the car entirely foolproof (and you'll drive the price of the car out of anyones range before you even get close.)
"Another guy creates what is arguably the best compiler in the world."
I can only assume you mean gcc, in which case that would be an interesting argument. All depends on how you define "best" I guess. I'm only after a single language and platform, and I'm judging based only on execution speed of the code produced. gcc is not in the running.
Anyway, you whole post is a pile of unverifiable assumptions: "one guy creates an OS kernel by himself -- without an entire development team -- that evolves"
with an entire development team
"to be better than anything MS or proprietary UNIX vendors crank out"
arguable, define "better", probably still arguable (note I don't say "wrong" but "arguable")
"There are probably more FOSS programmers than proprietary programmers...by a long shot"
Maybe on Slashdot. In the world at large, measured in programmer-hours (or something better than head count), I would guess not. Neither of us has good numbers.
"That means that there is a huge amount of total talent." Total talent is pretty irrelevant, give me ten really talented guys over 1,000 a tenth as talented any day.
Your last paragraph I mostly agree with, so you're not all bad:) Actually, I wouldn't bother debating you at all except for the moderation. Cheerleading isn't insightful.
Well, YMMV I guess. I certainly got plenty of crashes and reboots pre-Win2K, but I spent a couple years on Win2K, and now ~6 months on XP, and didn't crash once. Some (but not most) patches require a reboot. I don't recall adding devices under Win2K, and under XP I've only added USB devices, but every one of them has just popped up a "New hardware found" message and let me start using it.
I'm no great fan of MS, but it always bugs me when people say Windows crashes constantly. It just doesn't jibe with my experience, or that of others one wants to convince MS sucks, so we ignore the person. MS does suck. But they suck because of their business practices, not their tech, which pretty well covers the range from the freaking awesome (VisualStudio), through the pretty good (XP, Excel), and on down to poor and freaking braindead (I don't need to provide examples here, do I?)
Thanks for telling me that for a fact. Otherwise I would have gone with my own experience: I plug in a new periferal, and start using it. Heck, lets try an experiment, what can I plug in... Looks like all I've got handy is the (USB) keyboard from my Mac. That's a little weird, but what the hell... OK, I stuck the USB keyboard plug in my XP box (despite already having a satndard PS2 type keyboard plugged in. A little box popped up briefly telling me I now had an "Apple Human Interface Device" attached (got to love that Apple market speak), and went away on its own. (Why does it even pop up? I guess people don't really believe in "just works" otherwise.) Anyway, it worked just fine, which I can "tell you for a fact" because I'm typing this sentence with my left hand on the Mac keyboard and my right on the regular keyboard. Added to a cd burner, a printer, and (briefly) a stylus/tablet, my experience with Windows 2000/XP is now 4 for 4 on plug-it-in-and-start-using-it. What are you doing wrong?
Yes. "What the market will bear" does imply finding the point at which the burden is just shy of driving customers away. You think of this burden as a level of abuse, but another term for it is "price". Part of the price may be monetary, part of it may be agreement to terms set out by the company.
Don't take Microsoft for instance. They are extremely atypical. Take Random Company X for instance. They don't "take" more and more concessions. They don't "abuse the customer" more and more. They offer a more restricted product, and customers then decide if they still want it. Everyone had better expect to "bear as much as they can bear"; this is how prices are set in a market.
The problem with Microsoft isn't the supposedly extreme restrictions they put on their software; the problem is whether you realistically have the choice to not use it. With MS I would argue you don't neccessarily have that choice. But with RedHat? Does anyone feel locked in to RedHat??? Seems to me like "the market is entitled to tell them to fuck off", so they are free and expected, yes even "entitled" to ask for "whatever concessions they think the market will bear". This doesn't damage capitalism, this is capitalism. The threat to capitalism worth worrying about is successful capitalists.
"We are paying them a very small wage, for work that's worth quite a bit more."
If that wage gets the job done, how can the work be worth more?
"if an approach is more efficient, but costs more"
In Economic terms, if an aproach costs more, it isn't more efficient. A process is more efficient if it gets the same job done for less money.
This may cause some people to lose their jobs, and it sucks to be them. But the left over money doesn't just evaporate, it is used elsewhere. In the aggregate, a more efficient economy should be able to employ more people. Free trade should make the world economy more efficient, and lead to greater empolyment. But not necessarily of Americans. (Actually, it's pretty clear protectionism hurts more than it helps, but that's a different argument.)
You would be wrong. You're thinking maybe the walls of the lunar landers (never exposed to anything but vaccum)? Even there the aluminum foil comparison is a bit of an exageration. The "heat shield" on the shuttle is thick ceramic tiles.
I'm sitting here trying to guess how many beats per minute you're talking about for a really fast beat, then convert that into megahertz... Well I can't imagine the speed of the beat would be any issue for the robot. Further, you need to to have an understanding of the "feel", but the robot can exactly reproduce preprogrammed combinations of speed and pressure. I'd guess it is using your input as a random seed to choose preselected combinations. So I would guess it could be a good player, if the human who programmed it made it a good player. Not that I'd be able to tell, it all sounds like crap to me.
The limit of 1/x as x aproaches infinity is not really, really close to zero. It is zero.
If you want to determine the value of 1/x if x is infinity, you need to be working in an algebraic space ("ring" in abstract algebra parlance) that includes infinity. The typical rings encounterd by non Math majors (the integers, the rationals, the reals) do not include infinity. There are various ways to construct reasonable extensions of these rings that do include infinity, and in any of these 1/infinity will equal 0. A good test of an extensions "reasonableness", and the usual point of extending them in the first place, is to have a system where lim(F(x)) as x->y = F(y) for any function F.
So "1 divided by infinity" is either zero or meaningless.
To say a particular quantity "approaches zero infinitely" is just meaningless. The quantity isn't moving anywhere, and there is no such thing as "infinitely close, but not equal".
"Rubbish. You would be highcentered on snow long before most of them"
Now if only most roads were plowed... Even when I lived at 10,000 feet in Colorado, on an unplowed road, my neighbor with the big SUV got about an extra two weeks of not having to resort to leaving a snowmobile at the bottom. (and got stuck trying it more times than I can count) Compared to staying on a road in light snow, high centering in deep snow just doesn't compare. (High centering won't kill you, or more importantly, me in the next lane)
"Not to mention extra weight means extra traction" And extra momentum to cancel it out. Add in a higher center of gravity and a stiffer suspension, and the car wins for staying on the road. For getting moving in the first place, the heavier vehicle has an advantage, but some cheap tire chains eliminate that.
In any case, we're talking about some fraction of a percent of driving. Most SUVs spend most of their time doing jobs (e.g. commuting) that any car could do. People don't drive them because they need them, they drive them because they want to feel powerful, and they don't care if they're endangering others.
I don't know what "bling bling" means and I don't know what makes something a "real" SUV. I'm talking about mass. It is stupid to drive a vehicle several times bigger than necessary in order to make the driver feel bigger. It's really stupid to give stupidly big cars exemptions from the regulations imposed on regular cars just because they're stupidly big. Particulary bumper and headlight height rules. I'm all for fuel efficiency, but eventually gas prices will take care of that. Endangering my life because of your insecurity issues I've got a bigger problem with.
>>"a nice 4WD car with a reasonable center of gravity"
>Sounds like you drive a Subaru?
I said a nice 4WD car. But the Subaru will in fact serve you better in the snow than a similar price SUV.
>Being a hippie treehugger doesn't make sense to me....maybe that's why you are opposed to SUV's?
I believe I spelled out that I'm opposed to SUVs because they don't reduce your chances of getting killed, and they dramatically increase mine. If not wanting to die makes one a "hippie treehugger", I'm pretty surprised that doesn't make sense to you.
I'll tell you what makes perfect sense to me: Your need to call someone a "hippie tree hugger" because they point out that your vehicle is stupidly large. It fits in perfectly with the sort of inferiority complex that leads someone to drive something stupidly large in the first place.
>How does that affect you unless I permit you on my property? And if you do get hurt, you can still sue.
Good building permit rules derive from the fact that it's often difficult to tell if buildings are built safely after the fact. Assume you build a house with a crappy foundation, then sell it to me assuring me it's rock-solid. Eventually, it falls down and kills me. I don't expect I would gain much satisfaction from suing you.
>>filling wetlands
>If I owned it, so what? If, for some reason, they're supposed to be "protected", then perhaps selling them to people is a bad idea!
You fill some wetlands, your neighbor fills some, etc. etc. Eventually, massive flooding downstream wipes out hundreds of homes. Which of the thousands of people who filled small wetlands should we sue? Will this make it better? There are various reasons various aspects of the land should be "protected". Would you prefer we say "you can't do that on this piece of your land" or "We don't want to interfere with your doing whatever you want on your land, so we're taking this piece away from you."
"Bingo. Generally, most people don't die all that suddenly"
Of course they do. On the time scale filling wetlands, dumping toxics, etc. are going to continue to have an effect, we ARE fruitflies.
> If I used it as a nuclear waste dump, but didn't harm any surrounding property in doing so, the only say should be the fact I can't even give the land away.
If you use it as a nuclear waste dump, the land will be unusable for many thousands of years. How exactly are you not going to give it away?
>Great. So you want to be able to tell me what I can do with my property? You want it to be your property? Did you create it? Was it given to you personally by some diety? Your ability to own land and not have it taken by some guy with more guns is not naturally occuring. It is provided by the society in which you live. You are complaining that it is provided with some strings attached.
> Who is going to watch that there's no shitheads forcing buildings on my property to be over 1 m tall? You are. The 1m tall rule sounds pretty idiotic to me. I'd assume there is some justification (possibly stupid), but I can't think what. If there really isn't any good reason, you ought to be able to convince enough other people to get it changed. Sensible government is not automatic. It requires effort by sensible people. Take some responsibility.
> Now, if I could organize a way to vote that shithead out of office, I might be more comfortable with that. But how can I do that?
Yeah, if only we lived in a democracy, and could organize political parties, and try to get stupid laws changed. That sure would be nice.
>Because there's 1900 shitheads working for the city. I suspect it's the ratio of shitheads voting and running for office that's more significant.
Most crashes are single car. And SUVs have more of them, and nastier ones, than non-SUVs.
Overall, your chances of dying are slightly higher driving an SUV than a similarly priced car. Your chances of killing someone are much, much higher.
Of course "Econoboxes" don't compare favorably with an SUV costing several times as much. Compare to a regular car in the same price range, and SUVs suck.
Everytime I go skiing and the weather turns rough, I drive happily past a bunch of people who have gone off the road. Almost all SUVs. On snow, a nice 4WD car with a reasonable center of gravity will serve you better than an SUV.
Slashdot Mirror
"I love my Linux desktop because *I*, not Steve J or Bill G, am in charge"
I can see that, and respect it. But personally, 99% of the details about my desktop I don't want to be in charge of; I don't care and I don't want to be bothered so long as they're handled even reasonably intelligently. Both Bill and Steve handle them reasonably intelligently (your opinion may vary, and given that this is slashdot, almost certainly does. Keep in mind, I may have a different level considered "reasonable", and I definetly seem to exceed most peoples ability to not care about things I consider, well, not worth caring about)
Sometimes I'd rather Steve were in charge, because I think he more frequently exceeds "reasonably inteligent" and reaches for brilliant . But Steve is awfully insistent that he's right, even when I think he's wrong. Bill still does ok most of the time and when he is wrong, he's easier to outwit and work around than Steve (possibly I'm just more used to it). He doesn't really try for "brilliant" so he has a better hit rate on reasonable.
"You say Windows is open? Not to me it isn't."
The sense in which he says it is open is , I suspect, the very thing that tips me firmly from Steve to Bill: hardware. Steve want's to be in charge of my hardware. Bill dosen't. (Or if you prefer, Steve is picky about what hardware he's in charge of, Bill wants to be in charge of all the hardware...)
So there you go, Bill G is in charge of my desktop, and like it that way. Show of hands please: Would you like to proceed straight to the lynching, or tar-and-feather first?
"How many geeks do you know that buy from Dell?"
Lots. Well, personally, the machines I've liked have come from Dell, but my employer bought them. From this geeks perspective, hardware is, or rather should be, boring. Software is where it's at. Dell hardware is blandly competent, exactly as it should be. My home computer I shopped around to find the hot processor (~4 years ago) I wanted, figuring I could tweak the rest; wound up with Compaq, leading to 2Short's rule of computer shopping number 2: Never Buy a Compaq. ~4 Years later the hot Athlon 500 is sh*t over the next one down, and ~4 years of Compaq proprietary cr*p isn't worth it. Still, it's fine for remote-desktoping over to the hot (this year) Dell at work.
Sometime soon I'll replace my lame Compaq. Still undecided between the mid range at the used PC store, or a low end Dell.
My understanding was that hitchiking or picking up hitchikers on the highway was illegal, just as walking along the highway is. I imagine it varies by jurisdiction, but I find it hard to imagine that it would be illegal for people waiting at a bus stop to get in a car instead. That's all we're talking about: You pull up to a bus stop and say "I want to use the HOV lane. Anyone interested in a bus leaving right now?"
"This type of car pooling doesn't happen CA"
That you know of. Even assuming it doesn't, that doesn't mean HOV lanes don't cause car pools. It means Californians don't form car pools, even when it is to their advantage. I could speculate why, but it would get awfully derogatory.
"Okay - fine, you disagree, and think that HOV lanes are a great idea."
Actually, I think bicycles are a great idea.
"But I'll bet you are a SMALL MINORITY!"
No need to bet. California has a stong referendum process. Start one to eliminate HOV lanes. Then you'll find out for sure. I'm betting you'll find out you are wrong.
"If you are going to pay for infrastructure - spend it on infrastructure that everyone can use!
You are probably for progressive taxation too!"
I'm for less taxation generally. I'd love to spend tax money only on infrasturcture everyone (particularly me) uses. I don't use highways at all.
Where I come from, we also call it "hitch hiking" Generally smiled upon, given the chance to help out a guy who needs a ride, without being paralyzed by paranoia. The frequency of "psychos" is grossly overestimated...
Anyway, we're talking about where I used to come from: Washington DC. There, I wouldn't pick up a random stranger by the side of the road. He's still almost certainly not a "psycho", but he might well be a hardened criminal planning a car-jacking. But given a bunch of commuters in suits at an established pick-up point, would I take the next 3 in line? Sure. It would be an incredibly stupid way to do a car-jacking. Car-jacking is the crime of a desperate criminal. Given 3 guys bent on crime, working together, and willing to put on suits and head out to a suburban park-and-ride, they're going to come up with something lower risk or higher pay-off than car-jacking.
"Car Pooling lanes do NOT cause car pools to form"
Sure it does. At least in DC, where you can get a ride into the city by showing up at certain suburban park-and-rides, or out by showing up at certain street corners and getting in line. Very shortly, someone will come by and pick up the next three people in line, just so they can use the HOV lane. Those car pools have certainly formed because the lane is there. When I used this commuting method, that was a car pool forming every few minutes for several hours each rush. At peak, it was car pools forming as fast as people could climb in the cars.
My taxes "already PAID for the" road, and yet I went to some extra effort to make using it more efficient, and I was rewarded with a faster commute. That is SMART public policy.
My tax dollars helped pay for all the highway lanes, and I don't use any of them. So get over it.
If you want to argue that tax dollars shouldn't be used to build any highways; that the should be funded by bonds against toll receipts; i.e. make every highway a toll road, paid for by its users, well in that case I'm with you! Tell me where to sign the petition!
But as it is, YOUR taxes didn't pay for the HOV lane. OUR takes paid for it. So WE, collectively, should decide whether it should be an HOV lane or not. We decide this, and other things, via a mechanism known as government. Which has the unfortunate side effect of letting you curse the damn "bureaucrats", ignoring the possibility that others, such as myself, who also pay taxes, might disagree with you.
Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. We'll never know. And thus we'll gut the markets ability to set prices. If the only people who buy albums are those willing to pay $20, what price do you expect album sellers will charge? Duh. If you want legal albums to cost less than $20, listen to music you can legally buy for less. (Hint: used CD store) If you get your music illegaly for free, why should anyone assume you'll pay anything? You take yourself out of the pricing equation. If most people didn't buy $20 CDs, but did buy $10 CDs, what do you think would happen?
"Cuba? How come I don't hear any outrage that the US has a concentration camp in Cuba, or ANY business there, inside the borders of our sworn enemy?"
OT, for what it's worth: We have a perfectly legal lease for the land that base is on. OK, the terms of the lease are stupidly generous, and we negotiated it with a puppet we installed. Despite that, I'm no fan of Castro, don't think our government should be, and see no problem retaining this particular thorn in his side.
I think calling it a concentration camp is to strong, and a disservice to those who have been intered in actual concentration camps. As far as why we have a military prison there: It's convieninetly nearby, yet avoids various pesky legal implications of having the prisoners in the US proper, as well as being nicely isolated from protester/media types. I, for one, am outraged.
"is it the FBIs function in the first place"
Enforcing Federal laws governing interstate commerce? Uh, yeah, that's pretty much right up the FBIs alley. Good use of resources? I guess you could argue they should have other fish to fry, but if widespread, multi state violation of Federal law isn't handled by the FBI, then who do you sugest? There are several other agencies that deal with National security, and whose charters are more directly to protect it. The FBI gets involved, certainly, but mainly because most National security threats involve some sort of federal law breaking, and becasue they've got some rather stupifying investigative manpower. If you're trying to break in to a government computer system for example, the FBI cares that you're breaking the law, but the NSAs job is to make sure you fail.
If you don't think the laws in question should be enforced, that's a different discussion, but if someone is going to enforce them, seems like the FBI is it.
OK, but define a "reasonable price" for anything without reference to a market in which one party can set prices and others can decide whether to buy or not. You can't. The only "reasonable price" is the price at which one party is willing to buy and the other is willing to sell. If the record companies could say "This is the price, and you HAVE to buy" that would not be reasonable. But you want to say, "This is the price, and you have to sell, because otherwise I'm going to take it anyway". Why should the price you set under those conditions be considered reasonable?
I think the ease of perfect replication in the digital age means the entertainment/information market is certainly going to change. But if you say, "I could buy, or I could just take it for free, which do you think I'll chose?", I don't think you should be all that surprised if the response is "We could just let you take it for free, but since doing so is against the law, we could push to prosecute you, which do you think we'll choose?"
What would they blow the whistle on? He phrased the equation a bit bluntly, but this is obviously how companies do it. It's even probaly how they should do it. Just consider "cost of lawsuits" to be a pretty good rough mesure of "significance of problem". To make up some random numbers: If you find that a certain part will fail during the lifetime of the car in one out of every 10,000 cars, and have a 0.01% chance of causing an accident if it does, do you do a recall? You've got to draw the line somewhere; it's impossible to make the car entirely foolproof (and you'll drive the price of the car out of anyones range before you even get close.)
"Another guy creates what is arguably the best compiler in the world."
:) Actually, I wouldn't bother debating you at all except for the moderation. Cheerleading isn't insightful.
I can only assume you mean gcc, in which case that would be an interesting argument. All depends on how you define "best" I guess. I'm only after a single language and platform, and I'm judging based only on execution speed of the code produced. gcc is not in the running.
Anyway, you whole post is a pile of unverifiable assumptions:
"one guy creates an OS kernel by himself -- without an entire development team -- that evolves"
with an entire development team
"to be better than anything MS or proprietary UNIX vendors crank out"
arguable, define "better", probably still arguable (note I don't say "wrong" but "arguable")
"There are probably more FOSS programmers than proprietary programmers...by a long shot"
Maybe on Slashdot. In the world at large, measured in programmer-hours (or something better than head count), I would guess not. Neither of us has good numbers.
"That means that there is a huge amount of total talent."
Total talent is pretty irrelevant, give me ten really talented guys over 1,000 a tenth as talented any day.
Your last paragraph I mostly agree with, so you're not all bad
Well, YMMV I guess. I certainly got plenty of crashes and reboots pre-Win2K, but I spent a couple years on Win2K, and now ~6 months on XP, and didn't crash once. Some (but not most) patches require a reboot. I don't recall adding devices under Win2K, and under XP I've only added USB devices, but every one of them has just popped up a "New hardware found" message and let me start using it.
I'm no great fan of MS, but it always bugs me when people say Windows crashes constantly. It just doesn't jibe with my experience, or that of others one wants to convince MS sucks, so we ignore the person. MS does suck. But they suck because of their business practices, not their tech, which pretty well covers the range from the freaking awesome (VisualStudio), through the pretty good (XP, Excel), and on down to poor and freaking braindead (I don't need to provide examples here, do I?)
Thanks for telling me that for a fact. Otherwise I would have gone with my own experience: I plug in a new periferal, and start using it. Heck, lets try an experiment, what can I plug in...
Looks like all I've got handy is the (USB) keyboard from my Mac. That's a little weird, but what the hell...
OK, I stuck the USB keyboard plug in my XP box (despite already having a satndard PS2 type keyboard plugged in. A little box popped up briefly telling me I now had an "Apple Human Interface Device" attached (got to love that Apple market speak), and went away on its own. (Why does it even pop up? I guess people don't really believe in "just works" otherwise.)
Anyway, it worked just fine, which I can "tell you for a fact" because I'm typing this sentence with my left hand on the Mac keyboard and my right on the regular keyboard. Added to a cd burner, a printer, and (briefly) a stylus/tablet, my experience with Windows 2000/XP is now 4 for 4 on plug-it-in-and-start-using-it. What are you doing wrong?
Yes. "What the market will bear" does imply finding the point at which the burden is just shy of driving customers away. You think of this burden as a level of abuse, but another term for it is "price". Part of the price may be monetary, part of it may be agreement to terms set out by the company.
Don't take Microsoft for instance. They are extremely atypical. Take Random Company X for instance. They don't "take" more and more concessions. They don't "abuse the customer" more and more. They offer a more restricted product, and customers then decide if they still want it. Everyone had better expect to "bear as much as they can bear"; this is how prices are set in a market.
The problem with Microsoft isn't the supposedly extreme restrictions they put on their software; the problem is whether you realistically have the choice to not use it. With MS I would argue you don't neccessarily have that choice. But with RedHat? Does anyone feel locked in to RedHat??? Seems to me like "the market is entitled to tell them to fuck off", so they are free and expected, yes even "entitled" to ask for "whatever concessions they think the market will bear". This doesn't damage capitalism, this is capitalism. The threat to capitalism worth worrying about is successful capitalists.
"We are paying them a very small wage, for work that's worth quite a bit more."
If that wage gets the job done, how can the work be worth more?
"if an approach is more efficient, but costs more"
In Economic terms, if an aproach costs more, it isn't more efficient. A process is more efficient if it gets the same job done for less money.
This may cause some people to lose their jobs, and it sucks to be them. But the left over money doesn't just evaporate, it is used elsewhere. In the aggregate, a more efficient economy should be able to employ more people. Free trade should make the world economy more efficient, and lead to greater empolyment. But not necessarily of Americans. (Actually, it's pretty clear protectionism hurts more than it helps, but that's a different argument.)
You would be wrong. You're thinking maybe the walls of the lunar landers (never exposed to anything but vaccum)? Even there the aluminum foil comparison is a bit of an exageration. The "heat shield" on the shuttle is thick ceramic tiles.
I'm sitting here trying to guess how many beats per minute you're talking about for a really fast beat, then convert that into megahertz... Well I can't imagine the speed of the beat would be any issue for the robot. Further, you need to to have an understanding of the "feel", but the robot can exactly reproduce preprogrammed combinations of speed and pressure.
I'd guess it is using your input as a random seed to choose preselected combinations. So I would guess it could be a good player, if the human who programmed it made it a good player. Not that I'd be able to tell, it all sounds like crap to me.
The limit of 1/x as x aproaches infinity is not really, really close to zero. It is zero. If you want to determine the value of 1/x if x is infinity, you need to be working in an algebraic space ("ring" in abstract algebra parlance) that includes infinity. The typical rings encounterd by non Math majors (the integers, the rationals, the reals) do not include infinity. There are various ways to construct reasonable extensions of these rings that do include infinity, and in any of these 1/infinity will equal 0. A good test of an extensions "reasonableness", and the usual point of extending them in the first place, is to have a system where lim(F(x)) as x->y = F(y) for any function F. So "1 divided by infinity" is either zero or meaningless. To say a particular quantity "approaches zero infinitely" is just meaningless. The quantity isn't moving anywhere, and there is no such thing as "infinitely close, but not equal".
"Rubbish. You would be highcentered on snow long before most of them"
Now if only most roads were plowed... Even when I lived at 10,000 feet in Colorado, on an unplowed road, my neighbor with the big SUV got about an extra two weeks of not having to resort to leaving a snowmobile at the bottom. (and got stuck trying it more times than I can count) Compared to staying on a road in light snow, high centering in deep snow just doesn't compare. (High centering won't kill you, or more importantly, me in the next lane)
"Not to mention extra weight means extra traction"
And extra momentum to cancel it out. Add in a higher center of gravity and a stiffer suspension, and the car wins for staying on the road. For getting moving in the first place, the heavier vehicle has an advantage, but some cheap tire chains eliminate that.
In any case, we're talking about some fraction of a percent of driving. Most SUVs spend most of their time doing jobs (e.g. commuting) that any car could do. People don't drive them because they need them, they drive them because they want to feel powerful, and they don't care if they're endangering others.
I don't know what "bling bling" means and I don't know what makes something a "real" SUV. I'm talking about mass. It is stupid to drive a vehicle several times bigger than necessary in order to make the driver feel bigger. It's really stupid to give stupidly big cars exemptions from the regulations imposed on regular cars just because they're stupidly big. Particulary bumper and headlight height rules. I'm all for fuel efficiency, but eventually gas prices will take care of that. Endangering my life because of your insecurity issues I've got a bigger problem with.
>>"a nice 4WD car with a reasonable center of gravity" >Sounds like you drive a Subaru? I said a nice 4WD car. But the Subaru will in fact serve you better in the snow than a similar price SUV. >Being a hippie treehugger doesn't make sense to me....maybe that's why you are opposed to SUV's? I believe I spelled out that I'm opposed to SUVs because they don't reduce your chances of getting killed, and they dramatically increase mine. If not wanting to die makes one a "hippie treehugger", I'm pretty surprised that doesn't make sense to you. I'll tell you what makes perfect sense to me: Your need to call someone a "hippie tree hugger" because they point out that your vehicle is stupidly large. It fits in perfectly with the sort of inferiority complex that leads someone to drive something stupidly large in the first place.
>>Building unsafe housing
>How does that affect you unless I permit you on my property? And if you do get hurt, you can still sue.
Good building permit rules derive from the fact that it's often difficult to tell if buildings are built safely after the fact. Assume you build a house with a crappy foundation, then sell it to me assuring me it's rock-solid. Eventually, it falls down and kills me. I don't expect I would gain much satisfaction from suing you.
>>filling wetlands
>If I owned it, so what? If, for some reason, they're supposed to be "protected", then perhaps selling them to people is a bad idea!
You fill some wetlands, your neighbor fills some, etc. etc. Eventually, massive flooding downstream wipes out hundreds of homes. Which of the thousands of people who filled small wetlands should we sue? Will this make it better? There are various reasons various aspects of the land should be "protected". Would you prefer we say "you can't do that on this piece of your land" or "We don't want to interfere with your doing whatever you want on your land, so we're taking this piece away from you."
"Bingo. Generally, most people don't die all that suddenly"
Of course they do. On the time scale filling wetlands, dumping toxics, etc. are going to continue to have an effect, we ARE fruitflies.
> If I used it as a nuclear waste dump, but didn't harm any surrounding property in doing so, the only say should be the fact I can't even give the land away.
If you use it as a nuclear waste dump, the land will be unusable for many thousands of years. How exactly are you not going to give it away?
>Great. So you want to be able to tell me what I can do with my property?
You want it to be your property? Did you create it? Was it given to you personally by some diety? Your ability to own land and not have it taken by some guy with more guns is not naturally occuring. It is provided by the society in which you live. You are complaining that it is provided with some strings attached.
> Who is going to watch that there's no shitheads forcing buildings on my property to be over 1 m tall?
You are. The 1m tall rule sounds pretty idiotic to me. I'd assume there is some justification (possibly stupid), but I can't think what. If there really isn't any good reason, you ought to be able to convince enough other people to get it changed. Sensible government is not automatic. It requires effort by sensible people. Take some responsibility.
> Now, if I could organize a way to vote that shithead out of office, I might be more comfortable with that. But how can I do that?
Yeah, if only we lived in a democracy, and could organize political parties, and try to get stupid laws changed. That sure would be nice.
>Because there's 1900 shitheads working for the city.
I suspect it's the ratio of shitheads voting and running for office that's more significant.
Most crashes are single car. And SUVs have more of them, and nastier ones, than non-SUVs.
Overall, your chances of dying are slightly higher driving an SUV than a similarly priced car. Your chances of killing someone are much, much higher.
Of course "Econoboxes" don't compare favorably with an SUV costing several times as much. Compare to a regular car in the same price range, and SUVs suck.
Everytime I go skiing and the weather turns rough, I drive happily past a bunch of people who have gone off the road. Almost all SUVs. On snow, a nice 4WD car with a reasonable center of gravity will serve you better than an SUV.