"...should we be shoehorning these apps into the Web's infrastructure..."
You might as well ask if we should be shoehorning data communications into lines laid for analog phones and TV.
Is the web a quirky, limiting platform for app development? Sure. If you want a platform where as many people have and are comfortable with the client software is there an alternative? Nope.
"You know, a friend and I were just talking about how work had pretty much destroyed the creative joy we used to get out of coding."
I like to think work *uses* the creative joy I get out of coding; and when my job is going well it's true. But I don't wind up coding for myself anymore. I think it's mainly getting older; I've lost my youthful passion, or become more balanced, depending how you look at it. I still love coding, but I no longer want to do any one type of thing for more than 8 hours a day. After a day of coding, my hobbies all involve building very non-virtual things. Maybe it's just that now I can afford good power tools.
Bull. We don't know exactly what will happen, but that's not the same as having no idea at all. We know very well that certain things will not happen; like destroying the earth. The experiment to be performed is performed regularly by random cosmic rays in the atmosphere. We don't know what will happen in terms of the data collected by the sophisticated instruments in place at the LHC, because these instruments are not in place for those naturally occurring experiments. But for those naturally occurring experiments, certain very crude instruments are in place. Including a crude, but actually perfect detector for earth-destroying effects, which we call the earth. It's still here.
"We often see the scientific community putting manned spaceflight down, saying that it is not useful for scientific research."
If manned spaceflight is better, why doesn't an astronaut pitch in and dig up a sample? Manned spaceflight has a vastly larger budget at NASA than robotic probes. Yet they are busily trying to keep their toilet working at the edge of the atmosphere while this probe analyzes samples on Mars.
"Had we sent people, with even a minimal laboratory, we'd have known within about 15 minutes whether what they were digging up was ice or not."
Had we sent humans, the mission won't get there for (optimistically) another 20 years, so diagnosing it as ice in 15 minutes might not be a time saver. With robots we can design and build another probe that can do whatever experiment you want astronauts to do, send that, do the experiment, take the knowledge gained, and repeat dozens and dozens of times before the human ever gets there, and at a fraction of the cost.
You seem to assume sending humans would be better because humans are quite clever. This is true. One of the really clever things they do is build remote probes, because it's a much better way to explore space.
"We should be working on getting our launch costs down..."
There's a pretty strong market for launch capabilities to support the only "real benefit out of space" we've found: terrestrial communications. If you, or anyone, really knows how to reduce launch costs, the economic incentive is there and massive; it doesn't want for public subsidy via NASA.
Factories don't actually take up that much space. People do.
Assuming we move all food production, factories, and everything off the earth, and leave only space for people to sit next to lakes and have solitude, you can be surrounded by five and a half acres of land at the worlds current population. Of course, your 5.5 acres might be in Antarctica, world population is growing fast, and we're really not going to move all the farms into orbit ever.
If you want to get back to "The Garden", space exploration is irrelevant.
Not that I entirely agree with the other poster, but: Understanding tides, understanding sunspots effects on communications, searching for asteroids/comets... none of these require space exploration. They all can be, and almost entirely have been, done by earth-bound observation.
Except for atmospheric drag (minor on Mars), "straight up" isn't any better than any other direction that misses the ground. As the speculation is about a catapult, you need to build a very long straight thing, so the closer to flat along the ground, the easier it will be.
Sublimation is transition from solid to gas. Sublimation is how snow un-forms in sufficiently cold dry climates, such as eastern Colorado, or certainly Mars.
"NDAs, like any contract, are only worth more than the paper they're on if you are willing to sue for breech of contract."
Typically, the main value of an NDA is in establishing that you are making an effort at keeping information contained for trade secret purposes. I have you sign an NDA not because I don't trust you and might want to sue you, but because I might want to sue someone else who steals the info and claims it wasn't really secret because I was telling it to people without a NDA.
"prevent unscrupulous businesses sending the phone books to somewhere cheap to get them copy typed into a database"
Why is that unscrupulous? I know of a couple companies that call every business in the phone book, verifying the information there and gathering some more for entry into a database they then resell. It's perfectly legal, and I can't even see why you'd think it unethical.
They include fake entries in an attempt to copyright their book (the true entries are not copyrightable) It's dubious they'd get any damages even if you copied the false ones (what's the real value of a bad phone number?), but what possible complaint could they have about someone calling the bad number to check it?
Despite isolated cases of insanity, the phone book people mostly realize that their database is not the product. The product is advertising delivered to everyones home in a format they might not throw away.
If my friend emails me a rough draft of his next novel because I offered to give him feedback, can I publish it and take the money?
I agree that the notices put on the bottom of peoples mail are irrelevant to copyright law (they may be relevant to trade-secret law). And I agree that 99.9% of the time anyone is going to forward or publish an email, copyright won't prevent it.
Copyright might, maybe, protect the words contained in an email you send. But most people who put those notices in want it to protect the information, which it doesn't.
Ha ha ha!!! OMFG! LOL! that's like SOOOOO funny, you changed "think" to "know"! That's the cleverest bit of commentary, like EVER!
Because it was in a sentence next to Microsoft right? I mean, the actual meaning of your change would be that the Boy Scouts are unambiguously assholes, but I'm speculating there isn't that much deep thinking going on here.
Well, partly you're wrong, some terms od the conventions do apply to people who don't abide by it. But if the conventions don't apply to these people, it's because these people are criminals. So they should be charged with crimes.
No one should get locked up indefinitely without charges. I could point to where this principle is codified in various parts of international and US law, but I won't because I'm not making a legal argument, but a moral one. No one should get locked up indefinitely without due process. If you disagree, there is something wrong with your soul.
No, by that standard we don't know if some guy that the government says is Osama is a terrorist. He might be Osama, he might not. We might have any good reason to be holding him, we might not. Maybe it's a case of mistaken identity. If only we had some procedure for sorting such things out...
Yes, he was ransfered to the civilian courts the day before the Supreme Court was set to take up his case, and tried for charges unrelated to what they initially accused him of.
He was still held for years without charges.
The Constitution grants you the right to a speedy trial, not a trial "eventually", when the administration runs out of stalling tactics.
"This will force the government to either release the enemy combatants or release the details of their intelligence gathering"
No, it won't. Courts handle cases touching on sensitive information routinely, via a variety of mechanisms in a variety of contexts. There's no reason procedures can't be devised that protect secrets but still maintain constitutional protections and evidence standards.
Besides, the negative PR generated by the abandonment of our own principles at Gitmo has real negative consequences too, and I find it hard to imagine these are not greater than whatever "benefit" we get from it.
Well, there's plenty of sources, but I suppose you will just say they are biased. Could you perhaps point us to anyone in a position to know who actually claims most of them were taken on the field of battle? I have not heard this suggested by anyone.
"...non-predictive classifications can be quite useful for communicating with other people (if somebody says "planet," it may not allow you to predict a lot about the object, but it helps you guess what the other person may be talking about)."
Exactly.
"But usually, those classifications don't really need to be very precise."
Sure they do, just not for science. Just because the terms of such a definition are scientific, don't assume the motivation is.
When an astronomer finds an object around a distant star, whether it is a planet or not may make an enormous difference to their fame and career for reasons that have nothing to do with science or the real nature of the object. A precise definition of "planet" is scientifically worthless, but socio-politically essential. It is better that the astronomers of the world spent an IAU meeting wrangling over the scientifically irrelevant question of what a planet is, than the alternative; which is that they do so continually.
"Now, what I think people are objecting to is the apparent lack of logic for the 'planet' classification itself. You get objects as different as gas giants and telluric planets under the same umbrella, 'planet'. So, why not Kuiper belt objects ?"
The short answer is, if you're trying to draw a sharp line through a big grey area, you've got to draw it somewhere. There's a few places in that grey area that make a little more sense than others though, and one of them is just this side of Pluto.
"It's as if some day, the 'International Biologists Union' decided it was a good time to formally define the word 'bug'. And ruled that only insects should be called bugs, and not arachnids."
"as if"? In informal usage by laymen, "bug" might mean most anything. But any insect biologist, (and certainly any professional organization thereof) will tell you that "bug" properly refers only to those insects in the order Hemiptera (cicadas, aphids, planthoppers, etc.)
OK, so it wasn't you that failed those kids (both the assaulters and asaultee), but it was the scout leader. The problem in your troop wasn't the presence of a gay kid - they would have beaten up on someone else if he wasn't there. The problem was adults who couldn't deal with such a situation yet thought they had some business teaching kids about leadership and adult responsibility.
Kids picked on you, so you know removing homosexuals doesn't mean kids don't get picked on. I'm not gay, but in my troop, I was the guy who got picked on, to the tune of a trip to the emergency room for a concussion from having rocks thrown at me. No one called the police or did anything with any real consequences then either. I left scouting, the perpetrators became Eagle scouts a couple years later, and were in jail a couple years after that. So hooray for "man-building."
You tell that story about the gay kid as if it supported excluding gay kids from scouting. That kid wasn't the problem; the other kids were. Though, at a deeper level, where do you think they got the idea that the gay kid was the one to make fun of? Maybe from organizations that declare Homosexuals to be not "morally straight"?
"one of the other kids kneed him in the crotch - so hard it split the end of his penis. And there was not a damn thing I could do about it."
Optimally, call the police; you witnessed the commission of assault and battery. At the least, kick them out of the scout troop. But a stern talking to? Are you kidding?
The part I quoted above was the entire post I originally replied to except for "From the linked article"... all the context I had. I have since misquoted Einstein and you for what I assumed was obvious, if juvenile, rhetorical effect.
To whatever extent I misunderstood you, I apologize.
As for Gore, I've heard him elaborate on that very topic, but I'd wager the vast majority of people have only heard that he claimed to have invented the internet. The misquote has seen vastly wider dissemination than the original, much less any subsequent clarification. Millions think Gore is a smug snob, because they judge him based on lies.
For what little it's worth, I don't think Gore is a smug snob, but I don't think he'd be a good President either.
So imagine rather than the Scouts, it's some organization you think are a-holes. Microsoft, perhaps. Now, imagine this organization comes to a group you are part of, and says, "Hey, we'd like some free help, because we're this organization you know is so nice". Would you really be unable to believe vitriol being spent on them?
It's not that BSA gets federal money, it's not that anyone isn't free to join them or not. It's that they are asking for free help. At which point it is perfectly reasonable for people to say, "hey, before you help them out, note: they are assholes."
"One of the largest, most respected, proven institutions of leadership and man-building in our country and you are happy to see it's demise."
It's large, but you might deduce I don't respect it terribly much. If your concept of "man-building" includes required homophobia, then yes, I would be happy to see its demise.
"Demise" is a bit melodramatic though. They don't get to use my churches basement anymore so long as they promote the homophobia you celebrate, as they directly oppose the inclusive policy that congregation feels compelled to adopt based on their beliefs. I am indeed pleased that while I disagree with that church on many things (like the whole "God" part), they have the courage of their convictions. They think it is wrong to discriminate people based on how God made them, so they won't lend their assistance to organizations that do it. It's not like they are gleeful about it; it's they themselves that bear the burden of their decision, because it's their kids who were in the troop.
You know, people have discussions about sex with peers and other adults in all sorts of contexts, not just walking through the woods. I can only assume you'd like to ban gays from life in general. Sorry, but you're a bigot.
"For all it's faults, you should be ashamed." For all it's faults, it should be ashamed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I've noticed that I find the web much less useful than I did in the mid nineties.... Oh, wait...
"...should we be shoehorning these apps into the Web's infrastructure..."
You might as well ask if we should be shoehorning data communications into lines laid for analog phones and TV.
Is the web a quirky, limiting platform for app development? Sure. If you want a platform where as many people have and are comfortable with the client software is there an alternative? Nope.
"You know, a friend and I were just talking about how work had pretty much destroyed the creative joy we used to get out of coding."
I like to think work *uses* the creative joy I get out of coding; and when my job is going well it's true. But I don't wind up coding for myself anymore. I think it's mainly getting older; I've lost my youthful passion, or become more balanced, depending how you look at it. I still love coding, but I no longer want to do any one type of thing for more than 8 hours a day. After a day of coding, my hobbies all involve building very non-virtual things. Maybe it's just that now I can afford good power tools.
"we don't really know what will happen. Period."
Bull. We don't know exactly what will happen, but that's not the same as having no idea at all. We know very well that certain things will not happen; like destroying the earth. The experiment to be performed is performed regularly by random cosmic rays in the atmosphere. We don't know what will happen in terms of the data collected by the sophisticated instruments in place at the LHC, because these instruments are not in place for those naturally occurring experiments. But for those naturally occurring experiments, certain very crude instruments are in place. Including a crude, but actually perfect detector for earth-destroying effects, which we call the earth. It's still here.
"We often see the scientific community putting manned spaceflight down, saying that it is not useful for scientific research."
If manned spaceflight is better, why doesn't an astronaut pitch in and dig up a sample? Manned spaceflight has a vastly larger budget at NASA than robotic probes. Yet they are busily trying to keep their toilet working at the edge of the atmosphere while this probe analyzes samples on Mars.
"Had we sent people, with even a minimal laboratory, we'd have known within about 15 minutes whether what they were digging up was ice or not."
Had we sent humans, the mission won't get there for (optimistically) another 20 years, so diagnosing it as ice in 15 minutes might not be a time saver. With robots we can design and build another probe that can do whatever experiment you want astronauts to do, send that, do the experiment, take the knowledge gained, and repeat dozens and dozens of times before the human ever gets there, and at a fraction of the cost.
You seem to assume sending humans would be better because humans are quite clever. This is true. One of the really clever things they do is build remote probes, because it's a much better way to explore space.
"We should be working on getting our launch costs down..."
There's a pretty strong market for launch capabilities to support the only "real benefit out of space" we've found: terrestrial communications. If you, or anyone, really knows how to reduce launch costs, the economic incentive is there and massive; it doesn't want for public subsidy via NASA.
Factories don't actually take up that much space. People do.
Assuming we move all food production, factories, and everything off the earth, and leave only space for people to sit next to lakes and have solitude, you can be surrounded by five and a half acres of land at the worlds current population. Of course, your 5.5 acres might be in Antarctica, world population is growing fast, and we're really not going to move all the farms into orbit ever.
If you want to get back to "The Garden", space exploration is irrelevant.
Not that I entirely agree with the other poster, but: Understanding tides, understanding sunspots effects on communications, searching for asteroids/comets... none of these require space exploration. They all can be, and almost entirely have been, done by earth-bound observation.
Except for atmospheric drag (minor on Mars), "straight up" isn't any better than any other direction that misses the ground. As the speculation is about a catapult, you need to build a very long straight thing, so the closer to flat along the ground, the easier it will be.
"That's how snow forms...."
Sublimation is transition from solid to gas. Sublimation is how snow un-forms in sufficiently cold dry climates, such as eastern Colorado, or certainly Mars.
"NDAs, like any contract, are only worth more than the paper they're on if you are willing to sue for breech of contract."
Typically, the main value of an NDA is in establishing that you are making an effort at keeping information contained for trade secret purposes. I have you sign an NDA not because I don't trust you and might want to sue you, but because I might want to sue someone else who steals the info and claims it wasn't really secret because I was telling it to people without a NDA.
"prevent unscrupulous businesses sending the phone books to somewhere cheap to get them copy typed into a database"
Why is that unscrupulous? I know of a couple companies that call every business in the phone book, verifying the information there and gathering some more for entry into a database they then resell. It's perfectly legal, and I can't even see why you'd think it unethical.
They include fake entries in an attempt to copyright their book (the true entries are not copyrightable) It's dubious they'd get any damages even if you copied the false ones (what's the real value of a bad phone number?), but what possible complaint could they have about someone calling the bad number to check it?
Despite isolated cases of insanity, the phone book people mostly realize that their database is not the product. The product is advertising delivered to everyones home in a format they might not throw away.
He's mostly wrong, but not completely.
If my friend emails me a rough draft of his next novel because I offered to give him feedback, can I publish it and take the money?
I agree that the notices put on the bottom of peoples mail are irrelevant to copyright law (they may be relevant to trade-secret law). And I agree that 99.9% of the time anyone is going to forward or publish an email, copyright won't prevent it.
Copyright might, maybe, protect the words contained in an email you send. But most people who put those notices in want it to protect the information, which it doesn't.
Ha ha ha!!! OMFG! LOL! that's like SOOOOO funny, you changed "think" to "know"! That's the cleverest bit of commentary, like EVER!
Because it was in a sentence next to Microsoft right? I mean, the actual meaning of your change would be that the Boy Scouts are unambiguously assholes, but I'm speculating there isn't that much deep thinking going on here.
Seriously though, Micor$oft SUXORZ DUDEZ!
Well, partly you're wrong, some terms od the conventions do apply to people who don't abide by it. But if the conventions don't apply to these people, it's because these people are criminals. So they should be charged with crimes.
No one should get locked up indefinitely without charges. I could point to where this principle is codified in various parts of international and US law, but I won't because I'm not making a legal argument, but a moral one. No one should get locked up indefinitely without due process. If you disagree, there is something wrong with your soul.
No, by that standard we don't know if some guy that the government says is Osama is a terrorist. He might be Osama, he might not. We might have any good reason to be holding him, we might not. Maybe it's a case of mistaken identity. If only we had some procedure for sorting such things out...
Yes, he was ransfered to the civilian courts the day before the Supreme Court was set to take up his case, and tried for charges unrelated to what they initially accused him of.
He was still held for years without charges.
The Constitution grants you the right to a speedy trial, not a trial "eventually", when the administration runs out of stalling tactics.
"This will force the government to either release the enemy combatants or release the details of their intelligence gathering"
No, it won't. Courts handle cases touching on sensitive information routinely, via a variety of mechanisms in a variety of contexts. There's no reason procedures can't be devised that protect secrets but still maintain constitutional protections and evidence standards.
Besides, the negative PR generated by the abandonment of our own principles at Gitmo has real negative consequences too, and I find it hard to imagine these are not greater than whatever "benefit" we get from it.
Well, there's plenty of sources, but I suppose you will just say they are biased. Could you perhaps point us to anyone in a position to know who actually claims most of them were taken on the field of battle? I have not heard this suggested by anyone.
"...non-predictive classifications can be quite useful for communicating with other people (if somebody says "planet," it may not allow you to predict a lot about the object, but it helps you guess what the other person may be talking about)."
Exactly.
"But usually, those classifications don't really need to be very precise."
Sure they do, just not for science. Just because the terms of such a definition are scientific, don't assume the motivation is.
When an astronomer finds an object around a distant star, whether it is a planet or not may make an enormous difference to their fame and career for reasons that have nothing to do with science or the real nature of the object. A precise definition of "planet" is scientifically worthless, but socio-politically essential. It is better that the astronomers of the world spent an IAU meeting wrangling over the scientifically irrelevant question of what a planet is, than the alternative; which is that they do so continually.
"Now, what I think people are objecting to is the apparent lack of logic for the 'planet' classification itself. You get objects as different as gas giants and telluric planets under the same umbrella, 'planet'. So, why not Kuiper belt objects ?"
The short answer is, if you're trying to draw a sharp line through a big grey area, you've got to draw it somewhere. There's a few places in that grey area that make a little more sense than others though, and one of them is just this side of Pluto.
"It's as if some day, the 'International Biologists Union' decided it was a good time to formally define the word 'bug'. And ruled that only insects should be called bugs, and not arachnids."
"as if"? In informal usage by laymen, "bug" might mean most anything. But any insect biologist, (and certainly any professional organization thereof) will tell you that "bug" properly refers only to those insects in the order Hemiptera (cicadas, aphids, planthoppers, etc.)
OK, so it wasn't you that failed those kids (both the assaulters and asaultee), but it was the scout leader. The problem in your troop wasn't the presence of a gay kid - they would have beaten up on someone else if he wasn't there. The problem was adults who couldn't deal with such a situation yet thought they had some business teaching kids about leadership and adult responsibility.
Kids picked on you, so you know removing homosexuals doesn't mean kids don't get picked on. I'm not gay, but in my troop, I was the guy who got picked on, to the tune of a trip to the emergency room for a concussion from having rocks thrown at me. No one called the police or did anything with any real consequences then either. I left scouting, the perpetrators became Eagle scouts a couple years later, and were in jail a couple years after that. So hooray for "man-building."
You tell that story about the gay kid as if it supported excluding gay kids from scouting. That kid wasn't the problem; the other kids were. Though, at a deeper level, where do you think they got the idea that the gay kid was the one to make fun of? Maybe from organizations that declare Homosexuals to be not "morally straight"?
"one of the other kids kneed him in the crotch - so hard it split the end of his penis. And there was not a damn thing I could do about it."
Optimally, call the police; you witnessed the commission of assault and battery. At the least, kick them out of the scout troop. But a stern talking to? Are you kidding?
The part I quoted above was the entire post I originally replied to except for "From the linked article"... all the context I had. I have since misquoted Einstein and you for what I assumed was obvious, if juvenile, rhetorical effect.
To whatever extent I misunderstood you, I apologize.
As for Gore, I've heard him elaborate on that very topic, but I'd wager the vast majority of people have only heard that he claimed to have invented the internet. The misquote has seen vastly wider dissemination than the original, much less any subsequent clarification. Millions think Gore is a smug snob, because they judge him based on lies.
For what little it's worth, I don't think Gore is a smug snob, but I don't think he'd be a good President either.
So imagine rather than the Scouts, it's some organization you think are a-holes. Microsoft, perhaps. Now, imagine this organization comes to a group you are part of, and says, "Hey, we'd like some free help, because we're this organization you know is so nice". Would you really be unable to believe vitriol being spent on them?
It's not that BSA gets federal money, it's not that anyone isn't free to join them or not. It's that they are asking for free help. At which point it is perfectly reasonable for people to say, "hey, before you help them out, note: they are assholes."
"One of the largest, most respected, proven institutions of leadership and man-building in our country and you are happy to see it's demise."
It's large, but you might deduce I don't respect it terribly much. If your concept of "man-building" includes required homophobia, then yes, I would be happy to see its demise.
"Demise" is a bit melodramatic though. They don't get to use my churches basement anymore so long as they promote the homophobia you celebrate, as they directly oppose the inclusive policy that congregation feels compelled to adopt based on their beliefs. I am indeed pleased that while I disagree with that church on many things (like the whole "God" part), they have the courage of their convictions. They think it is wrong to discriminate people based on how God made them, so they won't lend their assistance to organizations that do it. It's not like they are gleeful about it; it's they themselves that bear the burden of their decision, because it's their kids who were in the troop.
You know, people have discussions about sex with peers and other adults in all sorts of contexts, not just walking through the woods. I can only assume you'd like to ban gays from life in general. Sorry, but you're a bigot.
"For all it's faults, you should be ashamed."
For all it's faults, it should be ashamed.