"If we had the desire to see goldfish riding bicycles I'm quite certain we could design an appropriate bowl to fit the second seat."
No, no, no. What if I have a desire to reach into the bowl right now, pull out the fish, toss it at the Schwinn on the other side of the room, have it land on the seat by itself and pedal off down the road to pick up a loaf of bread? Is that going to happen? Does it matter how much I want it to?
"nothing is impossible, if you put your mind to it"
That's some wonderful positive-attitude can-do spirit stuff there, but in any literally sense, false.
Well, to my ears, and obviously those of many others, "begs the question" is awfully close to "begs for the question", which would, in modern English, literally mean what we use "begs the question" for. It means something like "raises the question" or "brings up the question", but with different connotations as to urgency or obviousness.
"But you're wrong that it 'doesn't really make any sense' -- it actually makes perfect sense in terms of the grammar of the phrase if you think about it"
If by "think about it" you include parsing the grammar via 17th century English, and considering the Greek from which it would have been translated. The language has evolved because there is a useful, reasonable meaning understood by everybody contrasted with an original meaning understood by very few.
"The petitio principii fallacy is actually a common one in public discourse; we would be fools to give up our power to understand and describe that fallacy when it is used to hoodwink us."
"Begging the question" is not descriptive to anyone who doesn't already know what you're talking about. If you need to describe it to those who don't know it, you'll need more and better words. If you want to precisely and succinctly identify the fallacy to those who do know it, I would suggest "petitio principii", as it won't get confused with the modern meaning of "begs the question".
Simply put, I am not actually arguing that you give up the original meaning of the phrase. I am suggesting you notice that it has been taken from you. When a word or phrase cannot be used in it's original sense without actually mentioning that you're doing so, it's time to let go.
Oh, can't we start overlooking it yet? I mean, I took Logic as a freshman in college, well, let's leave it at considerably more than a decade ago. In that class, I learned the "official" meaning of the phrase. Since then, I've never even once heard the phrase used in it's original sense, nor had occasion to do so myself. Not ever. On the other hand, I've heard it used to mean "obviously raises the question"... I'll estimate here.... 45 Gadzillion times. Per day.
Yes, Aristotle used some greek phrase that probably made sense that translates as "begs the question", which doesn't really make any sense in terms of getting across what is meant. And what is meant never really comes up in normal conversation.
Tens of Millions of people since have used "begs the question" to mean something different, and that does make sense relative to the literal meaning of the words, and that is actually useful.
If ever there was a case for saying "Language evolves, deal with it", this is it. This bit of language already has evolved; quite a while ago and for excellent reasons. Complaining about "begs the question" is the mark of not just the pedant, but the pointless and actually wrong pedant.
So give it a rest and join me in threatening violence to those who misuse "literally".
"Of all of the things that I have learned, one of the most important is nothing is impossible. I fully believe we WILL travel faster than light someday"
Do you firmly believe goldfish will ride bicycles? Do you firmly beleive a block of cheddar cheese the size of Jupiter will spontaneously spring into being in outer space, crashing into earth and destroying all life?
You learned wrong: Some things are impossible.
"keep in mind that our science re-invents itself every century or so"
Bull. We improve our models steadily. Apples still fall to the ground exactly as fast as Newton figured out they should.
There are many things I do not know about goldfish. How closely related are they to trout? What do they eat in the wild? Heck, where do they live in the wild at all? But somehow, with all these gaps in my knowledge, I'm entirely sure the goldfish here in the bowl on my desk cannot ride a bicycle.
It is perfectly possible to know some things even though you don't know other things.
The astrophysicists I know say they know FTL is impossible the same way I know the fish won't win the Tour de France. You're welcome to argue that with them if you like, but "we don't know everything therefore we can't be sure of anything" is clearly false.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
Was it by any chance a generic term starting with Z refering to a type of undead creature? I have a friend who had a sufficiently negative experience of the sort you relate that I'm shy of making the word show up on a search engine. Well, that and it's fun to be paranoid.
Note that I've no idea who your friend is, and the other facts presented don't match my friend who had a similar issue. I'd just be amused if those guys suck as much as I think.
"while these vaccines causing autism is a much more foggy link."
Worse, it's not a foggy link. It's a clear non-link. Those not getting vaccines develop autism at the same rate. Lack of correlation positively implies lack of causation.
"Here's a hint: don't ignore ancient Greece when you try to talk about science."
When talking about Science, Ancient Greece is highly overrated. They advanced the practice of thinking about stuff and writing it down, which led them to do great stuff for Mathematics, which basically demands that you be right in order to write it down coherently. But when it came to science, they were overfond of guessing, and quoting each others guesses, and they never developed the core scientific habit of checking to see if one is right.
A few people here and there over the ages did discover things by experiment and observation, but the scientific revolution didn't really get going until someone formally insisted on never having to taking anyone's word for things, about 350 years ago. And even at that late date they had a heck of a lot of ancient Greek BS to clear away.
Again, I'll give the Greeks mad props for Math, but for inventing Science I've got to go with the 17th century Europeans who made "Nullius in Verba" their motto. It wasn't really Science before that.
I too am sorry about your daughter, but I still think you're wrong and doing a disservice to the cause of figuring out what causes Autism.
Rates of Autism are the same between people who get the MMR vaccine and those who don't.
We can argue mechanisms or timing until we're blue in the face, but the simple fact is people who don't get the MMR vaccine still develop Autism just as frequently as those who do, and therefore it is just not possible that MMR causes Autism.
"Do you have any proof that these vaccines indeed were the major reason for all of these diseases?"
Yes, absolutely. We compare the rates of the disease amongst people who get the vaccine and those who didn't. We also collect data about their diets, exercise habits, etc, to control for those factors. The case is not subtle. Those who do not get the vaccine are radically more likely to get the disease than those who don't. QED
It doesn't matter how long you can yell "correlation != causation", because the interesting logical rule to know here is that lack of correlation implies lack of causation.
A "boatload of children go from being normal to starting to show symptoms" at the same age and at the same rate amongst groups that get the vaccines or not.
It's not just that there is no evidence vaccines cause autism; there is extremely strong evidence that they definitely do not cause autism. If they did, kids who got the vaccines would show increased rates of autism vs. those who did not, and that is not the case.
Kids who do not get vaccines get autism at the same rate, and other nasty things for which we have perfectly good vaccines at much higher rates.
I should note that my Chess-Checkers analogy was just the first way I could think to jam a rule from one ruleset into another; I'm not claiming 4E is chess to 3E being checkers as any sort of analogy about the quality or sophistication of the games.
If you wanted to say 4E was really a whole new game and calling it D&D was just a marketing ploy, I'd say it was both an excellent marketing ploy and an obvious one and WotC obviously wouldn't pass it up. I certainly wouldn't assume that WotC would always put what made sense ahead of marketing, to put it mildly.
Or one could say that 4E maintains the essential character of D&D, and therefore deserves the name, even though practically all of the details are different. You're still charachters in a fantasy setting doing a fair amount of fighting, and conducting that fighting via rounds during which you roll polyhedral dice and track hitpoints, etc, etc.
In any case, I have seen the rules and will tell you: it is not an incremental change, it's a rewrite. Whether it's worthy of the name or a cheap marketing trick you'll have to decide for yourself; I'm just encouraging you to judge it in totality, not as individual rules fragments that can be expected to make any sense jammed into the context of a different ruleset.
I'm in the third camp. As a player in a playtest campaign I've signed an NDA and can't say anything about the specifics of the rules. But I can certainly say whether I like it or not and can't think of any reason I ought to be biased.
Therefore: In my humble opinion, which may or may not be impartial (though I think it is), and which I can at least claim to be informed as it stems from actual experience: Fourth Edition is wicked frickin awesome, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or a completely entrenched grognard I don't want to play with anyway.:)
"... represents a serious change for DM's to bear in mind. Hopefully the ENTIRE rule-set has been reworked to take this into account and every DM is drilled on the change..."
The entire rule set has been reworked, period. It's a new ruleset. Any discussion of 4E as a list of changes, or of how any 4E rule doesn't work in a 3E context is beyond pointless. Perhaps an illustration will help:
You know the castling rule in chess, how it says you can't do it if your king has moved? That's totally stupid, because in checkers, you only get a king by getting to the back row, and how are you supposed to do that without moving?
That's what most people discussing what's wrong with 4E online sound like. 4E is a new ruleset, not a collection of tweaks.
Potentially. Certainly having a bad DM can make any system bad, which is what I had in mind when I threw that line in. I've played several systems over a couple decades, with basically one DM, who is fabulously good. By the fact he's running 4E playtest campaigns, you may deduce he's an "insider" of sorts.
If he's running it, it's going to be fun. But 4E is even more fun for me, and notably is clearly more fun for him. A good DM can go beyond the system to make things work, but it's smoother and better the less they need to.
Combat is easier, in that I can actually get my brain around what my options are in a particular round. But I'm still selecting between various possibilities based on the tactical situation, and using powers that change that tactical situation in interesting ways and that interact in interesting ways with the powers of my teammates.
In short, try it, you may like it; I certainly do.
"Here's my example: say you want to play a swashbuckler or a duelist, does a fighter fit?"
You want a Ranger; it is (or can be) exactly what you're describing.
"4e is just making the matters worse with the Roles, which basically tweak characters to min/max one way."
If Roles do anything besides group classes for ease of table-of-contents ordering, I haven't seen it.
I find it interesting how many people declare how horrible 4E is in such specific terms, when they clearly haven't played it. If you think 3E is the greatest RPG system ever, you may not like 4E. It's different than 3E.
But I and everyone I know who has actually played 4E with a good GM will tell you one simple feature that puts 4E over the top: It's more fun.
"Space Pens" are not actually expensive; they are literally a few bucks at Office Depot. So I'm guessing the Russians just bought them, if they weren't given them free, like NASA, who never spent any money at all on them.
Occam's Razor is about the relative likely hood of any theories about anything. Of two theories that explain something, the one that requires fewer assumptions is more likely to be correct.
"The cables were cut by the anchor of this ship, which was in fact anchored over the cables when they were cut." is a perfectly good theory. There are any number of more complicated theories one might have, and Occam's Razor tells us they are less likely to be true.
Occam's Razor can be applied to any theories you like. The catch to note is that it never proves anything; it just tells you which way to bet in the absence of other evidence. Which is, frankly, what science is all about.
Sure, humans do illogical, inefficient, non-straightforward things, just like any other animal. That's no reason we can't form theories about what they did and asses them scientifically.
Don't be ridiculous: a "ship of the line" is a large age of sail era warship. The only one left is the HMS Victory, and it's in drydock. Then again, it's a commissioned warship of a US ally, and nobody would ever expect it...
What I find funny is people who assume there is some reason not to do it his way. If you hadn't stopped him he'd:
- have gotten to foobar.com just as fast
- been somewhat protected from typos.
- not needed to remember an exact URL
Typing where you want to go in a search box instead of the address bar is just better. You and I know it makes more work for more computers, but why is that a problem?
As a developer who works in a small enough shop that I do get a voice in calling the shots, I strongly advise anyone involved in any sort of decision making around development:
Be as lazy as you possibly can. Laziness is the greatest virtue developers can aspire to. If there are two ways to get the job done, the one that requires less effort by developers is almost always better. Developing software is fraught with uncertainty and peril. You're obviously going to have to do it some, since you're, you know, a software developer; but you should still avoid it whenever possible.
I don't pretend to declare exactly how this applies to the situation at hand. Apple seems to have said everyone must convert to a new API; but not until now has anything forced the issue. They should not be surprised that Adobe has put off the extra development work as long as they possibly could. If Adobe has had years to make this transition, then they have arguably made the right decision by not doing so yet. All manner of things could have happened in those years; Apple could have died, or blinked first and done the work to support their old API. The latter would seem to be less development work for the world as a whole, so maybe better in some sense, if not for Apple.
"You are correct, it is his best ending, but that soesn't change the fact that it's crap."
As far as The Big U, I agree entirely. It reads like the amateurish undergrad work of someone still figuring out how to write; which of course, it is. Zodiac is a big improvement; Snow Crash even more so. (Having grown up in the Boston area as the child of a marine biologist, I'm prepared to forgive much in Zodiac)
"Not to mention the many plot holes he left hanging in snowcrash."
For example? I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt. It's just that it seems to me this "Stephenson does bad endings" meme has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hear it all the time and when you question people you'll hear that his books don't tie up loose ends; that they keep going too long after the loose ends get tied up; the the climax is too predictable; that there is no climax, etc. People project what they didn't like about one particular ending and assume everyone else shares that opinion about all his books.
I'll not argue that Snow Crash was particularly realistic about anything, or that it is great literature. Neither is necessary for my enjoyment nor appear to have been it's goal. Things that don't make sense in the details of the fictionalized, parody-reality? Sure. But "left hanging" would imply something that really needed explanation didn't get it, and I can't think what.
"I've read Snow Crash, and didn't have a problem with its ending, it just stopped."
In the last few pages before it "just stopped":
The kid in over her head survives and goes home with mom. The elder mentor goes out in a blaze of glory, taking down the big bad guy thug. The lead bad guy, his plans foiled, gets incinerated in a massive explosion. The hero saves the world and gets the girl.
If there is a big-climactic-ending cliche he didn't get in there, I'm not coming up with it. Where exactly would you have liked to see things go from there? Hiro and Juanita picking out a china pattern? YT trying to catch up on the homework she missed? I don't get it.
The Big U : Bad guys defeated, entire setting destroyed in a climactic fireball Zodiac : Bad guys defeated in climactic act of piracy/shootout Snow Crash : Bad Guy defeated in a climatic fireball The Diamond Age : Climactic battle / Recognition of Sovereignty Cryptonomicon : Cracked the code and got the gold The Baroque Cycle : A bit complex to go into; Individual books have climactic endings; the final one seemed fitting to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"If we had the desire to see goldfish riding bicycles I'm quite certain we could design an appropriate bowl to fit the second seat."
No, no, no. What if I have a desire to reach into the bowl right now, pull out the fish, toss it at the Schwinn on the other side of the room, have it land on the seat by itself and pedal off down the road to pick up a loaf of bread? Is that going to happen? Does it matter how much I want it to?
"nothing is impossible, if you put your mind to it"
That's some wonderful positive-attitude can-do spirit stuff there, but in any literally sense, false.
Well, to my ears, and obviously those of many others, "begs the question" is awfully close to "begs for the question", which would, in modern English, literally mean what we use "begs the question" for. It means something like "raises the question" or "brings up the question", but with different connotations as to urgency or obviousness.
"But you're wrong that it 'doesn't really make any sense' -- it actually makes perfect sense in terms of the grammar of the phrase if you think about it"
If by "think about it" you include parsing the grammar via 17th century English, and considering the Greek from which it would have been translated. The language has evolved because there is a useful, reasonable meaning understood by everybody contrasted with an original meaning understood by very few.
"The petitio principii fallacy is actually a common one in public discourse; we would be fools to give up our power to understand and describe that fallacy when it is used to hoodwink us."
"Begging the question" is not descriptive to anyone who doesn't already know what you're talking about. If you need to describe it to those who don't know it, you'll need more and better words. If you want to precisely and succinctly identify the fallacy to those who do know it, I would suggest "petitio principii", as it won't get confused with the modern meaning of "begs the question".
Simply put, I am not actually arguing that you give up the original meaning of the phrase. I am suggesting you notice that it has been taken from you. When a word or phrase cannot be used in it's original sense without actually mentioning that you're doing so, it's time to let go.
Oh, can't we start overlooking it yet? I mean, I took Logic as a freshman in college, well, let's leave it at considerably more than a decade ago. In that class, I learned the "official" meaning of the phrase. Since then, I've never even once heard the phrase used in it's original sense, nor had occasion to do so myself. Not ever. On the other hand, I've heard it used to mean "obviously raises the question"... I'll estimate here.... 45 Gadzillion times. Per day.
Yes, Aristotle used some greek phrase that probably made sense that translates as "begs the question", which doesn't really make any sense in terms of getting across what is meant. And what is meant never really comes up in normal conversation.
Tens of Millions of people since have used "begs the question" to mean something different, and that does make sense relative to the literal meaning of the words, and that is actually useful.
If ever there was a case for saying "Language evolves, deal with it", this is it. This bit of language already has evolved; quite a while ago and for excellent reasons. Complaining about "begs the question" is the mark of not just the pedant, but the pointless and actually wrong pedant.
So give it a rest and join me in threatening violence to those who misuse "literally".
"Of all of the things that I have learned, one of the most important is nothing is impossible. I fully believe we WILL travel faster than light someday"
Do you firmly believe goldfish will ride bicycles? Do you firmly beleive a block of cheddar cheese the size of Jupiter will spontaneously spring into being in outer space, crashing into earth and destroying all life?
You learned wrong: Some things are impossible.
"keep in mind that our science re-invents itself every century or so"
Bull. We improve our models steadily. Apples still fall to the ground exactly as fast as Newton figured out they should.
There are many things I do not know about goldfish. How closely related are they to trout? What do they eat in the wild? Heck, where do they live in the wild at all? But somehow, with all these gaps in my knowledge, I'm entirely sure the goldfish here in the bowl on my desk cannot ride a bicycle.
It is perfectly possible to know some things even though you don't know other things.
The astrophysicists I know say they know FTL is impossible the same way I know the fish won't win the Tour de France. You're welcome to argue that with them if you like, but "we don't know everything therefore we can't be sure of anything" is clearly false.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
Was it by any chance a generic term starting with Z refering to a type of undead creature? I have a friend who had a sufficiently negative experience of the sort you relate that I'm shy of making the word show up on a search engine. Well, that and it's fun to be paranoid.
Note that I've no idea who your friend is, and the other facts presented don't match my friend who had a similar issue. I'd just be amused if those guys suck as much as I think.
"while these vaccines causing autism is a much more foggy link."
Worse, it's not a foggy link. It's a clear non-link. Those not getting vaccines develop autism at the same rate. Lack of correlation positively implies lack of causation.
"Here's a hint: don't ignore ancient Greece when you try to talk about science."
When talking about Science, Ancient Greece is highly overrated. They advanced the practice of thinking about stuff and writing it down, which led them to do great stuff for Mathematics, which basically demands that you be right in order to write it down coherently. But when it came to science, they were overfond of guessing, and quoting each others guesses, and they never developed the core scientific habit of checking to see if one is right.
A few people here and there over the ages did discover things by experiment and observation, but the scientific revolution didn't really get going until someone formally insisted on never having to taking anyone's word for things, about 350 years ago. And even at that late date they had a heck of a lot of ancient Greek BS to clear away.
Again, I'll give the Greeks mad props for Math, but for inventing Science I've got to go with the 17th century Europeans who made "Nullius in Verba" their motto. It wasn't really Science before that.
I too am sorry about your daughter, but I still think you're wrong and doing a disservice to the cause of figuring out what causes Autism.
Rates of Autism are the same between people who get the MMR vaccine and those who don't.
We can argue mechanisms or timing until we're blue in the face, but the simple fact is people who don't get the MMR vaccine still develop Autism just as frequently as those who do, and therefore it is just not possible that MMR causes Autism.
"Do you have any proof that these vaccines indeed were the major reason for all of these diseases?"
Yes, absolutely. We compare the rates of the disease amongst people who get the vaccine and those who didn't. We also collect data about their diets, exercise habits, etc, to control for those factors. The case is not subtle. Those who do not get the vaccine are radically more likely to get the disease than those who don't. QED
It doesn't matter how long you can yell "correlation != causation", because the interesting logical rule to know here is that lack of correlation implies lack of causation.
A "boatload of children go from being normal to starting to show symptoms" at the same age and at the same rate amongst groups that get the vaccines or not.
It's not just that there is no evidence vaccines cause autism; there is extremely strong evidence that they definitely do not cause autism. If they did, kids who got the vaccines would show increased rates of autism vs. those who did not, and that is not the case.
Kids who do not get vaccines get autism at the same rate, and other nasty things for which we have perfectly good vaccines at much higher rates.
I should note that my Chess-Checkers analogy was just the first way I could think to jam a rule from one ruleset into another; I'm not claiming 4E is chess to 3E being checkers as any sort of analogy about the quality or sophistication of the games.
If you wanted to say 4E was really a whole new game and calling it D&D was just a marketing ploy, I'd say it was both an excellent marketing ploy and an obvious one and WotC obviously wouldn't pass it up. I certainly wouldn't assume that WotC would always put what made sense ahead of marketing, to put it mildly.
Or one could say that 4E maintains the essential character of D&D, and therefore deserves the name, even though practically all of the details are different. You're still charachters in a fantasy setting doing a fair amount of fighting, and conducting that fighting via rounds during which you roll polyhedral dice and track hitpoints, etc, etc.
In any case, I have seen the rules and will tell you: it is not an incremental change, it's a rewrite. Whether it's worthy of the name or a cheap marketing trick you'll have to decide for yourself; I'm just encouraging you to judge it in totality, not as individual rules fragments that can be expected to make any sense jammed into the context of a different ruleset.
I'm in the third camp. As a player in a playtest campaign I've signed an NDA and can't say anything about the specifics of the rules. But I can certainly say whether I like it or not and can't think of any reason I ought to be biased. :)
Therefore: In my humble opinion, which may or may not be impartial (though I think it is), and which I can at least claim to be informed as it stems from actual experience: Fourth Edition is wicked frickin awesome, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or a completely entrenched grognard I don't want to play with anyway.
"... represents a serious change for DM's to bear in mind. Hopefully the ENTIRE rule-set has been reworked to take this into account and every DM is drilled on the change..."
The entire rule set has been reworked, period. It's a new ruleset. Any discussion of 4E as a list of changes, or of how any 4E rule doesn't work in a 3E context is beyond pointless. Perhaps an illustration will help:
You know the castling rule in chess, how it says you can't do it if your king has moved? That's totally stupid, because in checkers, you only get a king by getting to the back row, and how are you supposed to do that without moving?
That's what most people discussing what's wrong with 4E online sound like. 4E is a new ruleset, not a collection of tweaks.
"Having a good DM can make any system good."
Potentially. Certainly having a bad DM can make any system bad, which is what I had in mind when I threw that line in. I've played several systems over a couple decades, with basically one DM, who is fabulously good. By the fact he's running 4E playtest campaigns, you may deduce he's an "insider" of sorts.
If he's running it, it's going to be fun. But 4E is even more fun for me, and notably is clearly more fun for him. A good DM can go beyond the system to make things work, but it's smoother and better the less they need to.
Combat is easier, in that I can actually get my brain around what my options are in a particular round. But I'm still selecting between various possibilities based on the tactical situation, and using powers that change that tactical situation in interesting ways and that interact in interesting ways with the powers of my teammates.
In short, try it, you may like it; I certainly do.
"No more, well I'm a fighter but specialize in damage..."
That's funny, because I'm playing 4E, and well, I'm a fighter but specialize in damage...
"Here's my example: say you want to play a swashbuckler or a duelist, does a fighter fit?"
You want a Ranger; it is (or can be) exactly what you're describing.
"4e is just making the matters worse with the Roles, which basically tweak characters to min/max one way."
If Roles do anything besides group classes for ease of table-of-contents ordering, I haven't seen it.
I find it interesting how many people declare how horrible 4E is in such specific terms, when they clearly haven't played it. If you think 3E is the greatest RPG system ever, you may not like 4E. It's different than 3E.
But I and everyone I know who has actually played 4E with a good GM will tell you one simple feature that puts 4E over the top: It's more fun.
"Space Pens" are not actually expensive; they are literally a few bucks at Office Depot. So I'm guessing the Russians just bought them, if they weren't given them free, like NASA, who never spent any money at all on them.
Occam's Razor is about the relative likely hood of any theories about anything. Of two theories that explain something, the one that requires fewer assumptions is more likely to be correct.
"The cables were cut by the anchor of this ship, which was in fact anchored over the cables when they were cut." is a perfectly good theory. There are any number of more complicated theories one might have, and Occam's Razor tells us they are less likely to be true.
Occam's Razor can be applied to any theories you like. The catch to note is that it never proves anything; it just tells you which way to bet in the absence of other evidence. Which is, frankly, what science is all about.
Sure, humans do illogical, inefficient, non-straightforward things, just like any other animal. That's no reason we can't form theories about what they did and asses them scientifically.
Don't be ridiculous: a "ship of the line" is a large age of sail era warship. The only one left is the HMS Victory, and it's in drydock. Then again, it's a commissioned warship of a US ally, and nobody would ever expect it...
What I find funny is people who assume there is some reason not to do it his way. If you hadn't stopped him he'd:
- have gotten to foobar.com just as fast
- been somewhat protected from typos.
- not needed to remember an exact URL
Typing where you want to go in a search box instead of the address bar is just better. You and I know it makes more work for more computers, but why is that a problem?
As a developer who works in a small enough shop that I do get a voice in calling the shots, I strongly advise anyone involved in any sort of decision making around development:
Be as lazy as you possibly can. Laziness is the greatest virtue developers can aspire to. If there are two ways to get the job done, the one that requires less effort by developers is almost always better. Developing software is fraught with uncertainty and peril. You're obviously going to have to do it some, since you're, you know, a software developer; but you should still avoid it whenever possible.
I don't pretend to declare exactly how this applies to the situation at hand. Apple seems to have said everyone must convert to a new API; but not until now has anything forced the issue. They should not be surprised that Adobe has put off the extra development work as long as they possibly could. If Adobe has had years to make this transition, then they have arguably made the right decision by not doing so yet. All manner of things could have happened in those years; Apple could have died, or blinked first and done the work to support their old API. The latter would seem to be less development work for the world as a whole, so maybe better in some sense, if not for Apple.
"You are correct, it is his best ending, but that soesn't change the fact that it's crap."
As far as The Big U, I agree entirely. It reads like the amateurish undergrad work of someone still figuring out how to write; which of course, it is. Zodiac is a big improvement; Snow Crash even more so. (Having grown up in the Boston area as the child of a marine biologist, I'm prepared to forgive much in Zodiac)
"Not to mention the many plot holes he left hanging in snowcrash."
For example? I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt. It's just that it seems to me this "Stephenson does bad endings" meme has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hear it all the time and when you question people you'll hear that his books don't tie up loose ends; that they keep going too long after the loose ends get tied up; the the climax is too predictable; that there is no climax, etc. People project what they didn't like about one particular ending and assume everyone else shares that opinion about all his books.
I'll not argue that Snow Crash was particularly realistic about anything, or that it is great literature. Neither is necessary for my enjoyment nor appear to have been it's goal. Things that don't make sense in the details of the fictionalized, parody-reality? Sure. But "left hanging" would imply something that really needed explanation didn't get it, and I can't think what.
"I've read Snow Crash, and didn't have a problem with its ending, it just stopped."
In the last few pages before it "just stopped":
The kid in over her head survives and goes home with mom. The elder mentor goes out in a blaze of glory, taking down the big bad guy thug. The lead bad guy, his plans foiled, gets incinerated in a massive explosion. The hero saves the world and gets the girl.
If there is a big-climactic-ending cliche he didn't get in there, I'm not coming up with it. Where exactly would you have liked to see things go from there? Hiro and Juanita picking out a china pattern? YT trying to catch up on the homework she missed? I don't get it.
Again, which book?
---SPOILER ALERT----
The Big U : Bad guys defeated, entire setting destroyed in a climactic fireball
Zodiac : Bad guys defeated in climactic act of piracy/shootout
Snow Crash : Bad Guy defeated in a climatic fireball
The Diamond Age : Climactic battle / Recognition of Sovereignty
Cryptonomicon : Cracked the code and got the gold
The Baroque Cycle : A bit complex to go into; Individual books have climactic endings; the final one seemed fitting to me.