First people driving 5 - 10 under the speed limit is unsafe - especially when everyone else is going 5 -10 over
Safe speed depends on road conditions. I've driven through heavy rains where between flooded road surface and short visibility the maximum safe speed was 20-30mph under the limit, and I've been on straight clear highways on beautiful days where 20mph over the posted limit was still pretty safe.
If I'm driving slower than the posted limit because of bad conditions while members of the species Driverus Ignoramus overdrive their visibility and stopping distance to exceed the limit, I'm not the one being unsafe.
In such circumstances I do try to get to the right lane to let them go to hell in their own way; however, members of this common species often fail to understand that tailgating makes lane changes more difficult - if they're close enough that they subtend my entire rear window field of view, they obstruct my view of traffic. Especially if there're blinding me with their headlights.
Anyway: software would not have to be very smart to improve upon the average American driver.
I think a lot of programs need to be cut, and the budget needs to be balanced and the debt needs to be payed off. But we do that by reducing government, not spending more.
Reducing government is a great idea. Let's start by reducing government's power to concentrate wealth into the hand of a few, by revoking or greatly limiting the issuance of corporate charters, land deeds, inheritance rights, resource rights, copyrights, and patents. (Actually before that should be ending government's power to criminalize consensual behavior like drug use and prostitution, but let's stick with economic issues for the moment.)
The "social spending" that the right would like to slash is just an (inadequate) governor on the engine of state capitalism. Breaking the government power that enables the L-curve is a necessary prerequiste for eliminating these governors.
When the rich get richer, the poor do NOT get poorer. There is no finite pie in economics.
Which is the problem with economics - it does not correspond to reality.
All natural resources, and all human resources, are finite. Land or gold or the services of a skilled physician that I own, reduces the amount available to the rest of you.
Until economic theories that accept that we live in a finite world come to greater prominence, we're screwed.
At this point if I were just starting out in Web development, wouldn't I want to invest in learning Ruby on Rails instead of PHP?
No, you wouldn't. PHP has a massive installation base, it's not going anywhere. RoR shows signs of being just the latest the flavor of the month, but even if it does persist it's a framework, not a language - works great if what you want to do fits into that frame, otherwise you spend your time trying to bend the bars of the cage.
but Mr. Hunter Gatherer would be amazed that at my age I'm still alive. I'd be the tribe's ancient elder guy at anything older than 35.
Not so much. While premature death is common, in surviving hunter-gatherer cultures with no access to modern medicine someone who survives to reproductive age has a good shot at living into their 60s, and 70-80 years is not unheard of. Pre-industial agricultural societies may actually have represented a decline in lifespan, between the harder work necessary and the concentration of population leading to more deaths from communicable diseases.
Again, not that I don't like modern antibiotics and trauma medicine. But your plumber and your garbageman can take more credit than your doctor for longer life expectancies in industialized societies. Removing the concentrations of shit and trash that have plagued cities since the dawn of civilization does more for us than high-tech medicine - and is less likely to kill you by accident.
But self rule in those areas (as well as in Iraq) prior to the formation of larger colonies/future-countries was pretty much limited to small territories and relatively small clan/tribal groups with homogenous cultures.
It would be foolish to pretend that those groups didn't routinely fight over resources, or even essentially eliminate one another on occasion.
What, like larger nations didn't? C'mon. At least battles over resource between smaller groups were self-limiting; when you're fighting over pasture land, you're careful to not destroy the land.
So, who are you referring to? Come on, out with it.
Colonialism has been mostly a game played by the European powers (including Russia/the USSR) and the Unites States, with some forays into the field by China and Japan. In its new form as "globalization" it might be better seen as a game for multi-national corporations, though it's getting harder and harder to separate state from corporate power and interest.
Surely you're not saying that, say, Niger (currently starving itself to death) would be a picture of high tech prosperity if only the French, Brits, and Germans had stayed out of Africa?
"High tech" and "prosperity" are not identical; as much as I like technology, some argue that a simple hunter-gather culture can be more prosperous. Certainly I know poor people here in the US who live a high-tech lifestyle due to cheap electronics - or even free cast-off stuff; while some more prosperous people choose to live with less tech.
But yes, I am asserting that the socioeconomic development of areas like Niger if the European powers hadn't drawn and quartered the continent in the 1800s, destroying the foundations for self-rule. (Pretty much the same problem we see in Iraq today.)
As for "globalization," I suppose I'm feeling the same way. Those cultures that are oriented around a more entrepenurial way of life are delighted to have more resources and new customers.
Certainly those nations with a more exploitive bent are delighted to have new stuff to steal and a captive consumer base. That's colonialism in its essence.
[Maryland is] A terrifying prospect as a residence?
Best damn state to live in on the East Coast. States between the Coasts are of course uncivilized backwaters not worthy of serious consideration. Washington state? Home of the pestilence known as Microsoft, enough said. Oregon? Yeah, right. Some parts of California are nice, if you can afford it (and only until it falls into the ocean anyway). That leaves only Maryland, my Maryland, hon.
Packed with taxes and guaranteed to stultify?
Our state and local tax burden is just about average (10.3% versus 10.1%).
An unfortunate bump on the road from DC to New York?
You just keep thinking that, tell your friends - maybe it'll slow down the rush of DCer's invading B'more.
Convinced (like so many other states) that gambling is going to save their children from shitty education?
The "slots will save our schools!" thing is pretty much recognized as bullshit from our current gov (who I *so* look forward to seeing tossed out). We'll probably end up with some slot machines at the racetracks, but few people beleive they'll do much more for our schools than horse racing does now.
Is that any reason to back away from developing technologies that help us live well, long, and healthily while using fewer resources?...You make it sound like we should all lively poorly so long as anyone else is.
I have no idea how you read into my observation such a suggestion. I've all for better living with less impact - though I see precious little concern for that later clause in our broader society. That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of us in the West (and I include myself here) live a lifestyle that is prodigiously wasteful.
The cure for those problems is cultural, not strictly financial. And when we dare talk about helping to change the culture in a place that can't seem to shake off poverty and disease, then we're evil for that, too.
The reason most developing nations can't seem to shake off poverty is economic and political damage from centuries of colonialism (including it's latest incarnation, "globalization").
What is your example of a functioning centrally controlled economy?
The US during WWII had a highly planned economy with price controls and resource rationing, and functioned well enough to keep the populace fed and the war machine humming.
(Meant as a data point, not a argument in favor of controlled economies. It is however an important example of how "free markets" and "capitalism" are distinct - during this time the markets were controlled yet the "means of production" were still privately held.)
Yes, you can do something with 100+ line classes. (Notice that 500 lines is larger than 100 lines, and would therefore be 100+ lines.)
Uh, yeah. My point of contention was that 100 lines makes a "huge" class.
Three lines of Active Record code can duplicate 300+ lines of PHP. Which would you rather write?
Depends. Dunno "Active Record" from a hole in the ground, but I've had plenty of experience with packages that only take 3 lines to give you almost what 300 lines would otherwise do, and somewhere down the line you end up writing most of those other 297 lines to handle the edge cases.
I have yet to see a PHP app -- especially one that also used MySQL -- that used a design pattern other than "Big Ball of Mud" most often.
You can remove the PHP qualifier from that statement and it's just as true. I've seen just as much good PHP code as good code in any other language - i.e., precious little.
Did you leave a 0 out of that? Or is most of your programming done in trivial problem domains where a 100 line class can do something? (Or have you been infected with one of the object obfuscated memes where one useful class must be shattered into several smaller ones to fit some arbitary idea of proper module size?)
unit testing was nonexistent
Err, if you don't write unit tests, whose fault is that? I don't see how language choice helps with that.
and adding functionality to an existing page usually meant breaking the rest of the application.
Either provide logic as to why the well being of an individual is more important than the well being of society or keep your emotional rants to yourself.
"Society" is an abstract concept. It does not have or lack "well-being".
The closest thing to the "well-being of society" would be nothing more or less than the sum total of it's individual members. The sum of the minor damage to well-being experienced by thousands at the hand of a spammer is orders of magnitude less than the major damage to well-being experienced by one victim of rape or other greivous crime.
Many lawyers have embraced such technology but my experience is that very few doctors practicing today do.
True story:
About two years ago, I went to see my doctor about an annoying rash. We were considering whether it might be something contagious, she went off to check the incubation time for some virus. (Turned out to be nothing but some minor irritation, BTW.) I pictured her going to her office and consulting a big bookshelf of medical reference works.
She camr back and said she had ruled out the virus. "I looked up the incubation time on Google", she said.
In all seriousness, RMS really is an atheist. Sad but true. It is easier to stand convincingly for freedom if you believe it is a God given right.
Nonsense. If your claim your freedom is given by some god(s), you make your freedom dependant on proving the existance of said deities. As you can't make such a proof, you've placed your freedom on the weakest of foundations.
If you believe it is given by society - than whose to say an unfree society is any worse?
Nor is my freedom given by society.
My freedom is not a "gift" given by others. It is mine by my nature.
Frederick Douglas wrote that "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." We each know that it is our own nature to be free; all it takes is the realization that other humans are of the same nature, to know that they are free too.
Remember, though, that RU-486 and its ilk are a pretty recent development.
Birth control pills have been around since the 1960s, so that's no excuse for the wingnuts refusing to fill those prescriptions.
Mifepristone was approved for use in France in 1988, anyone going to pharmacy school should have been aware of it and known it would come to the U.S. eventually.
So you're saying that someone who has spent most of their life working as a pharmacist (after going to school for years to become one) should be obligated to quit their job if they don't want to sell a product (which wasn't even around when they became a pharmacist) that goes against their conscience?
If your field changes such that you can no longer find a job that doesn't conflict with your ethics, you're SOL and have to change jobs. Why should pharmacists be an exception?
If all non-military programming jobs dried up, the fact that I went to school for six years to study computer science doesn't create a special right to demand that someone create a non-military job for me. I have a friend who's an aerospace engineer who's facing this challenge now, as the shuttle program withers away and her company goes after more military contracts she may have to leave the field she's worked in for twenty years.
There are significant differences between the two genders, and the reason feminists are full of shit is because they refuse to realise this.
A difference may exist on average. It is unknown how much of this difference is a socially created "self-fulfilling prophecy" and how much is intrinsic.
Women make less on average because they like spending more time with their family.
No. Even when differences in work patterns are controlled for, a 20% wage gap remains.
I think you need to re-read my full statement about that: "women are naturally inclined to have a greater number of them prioritize family over career"...the fact remains that, on the whole, women give a higher priority to family over career than men do. Are you disputing this fact?
"Naturally?" We don't know that; the "nature versus nurture" question of gender roles is far from settled. It's true that in our society, on average women choose family over career, but how much of that is self-fulfilling prophecy is unknown. Societies like ours haven't existed long enough for us to have any idea.
Oh, come now. Surely you are not satisfied merely to whine about a social injustice. Surely you want to impose discrimination against young white men in order to 'correct' this problem
Uh, no. I'm opposed to discrimination. Especially (like most people) to discrimination against a class to which I belong. (Well, maybe used to belong, since at 35 I seem no longer, at least by/. standards, to be "young".)
Please explain to me why a medication that artificially induces the flushing of the uterus should be less restrictive.
First, the FDA should keep its grubby little hands off the bodies of citizens, and not require any competent adult to have a permission slip before purchasing medicine. (With perhaps an exception for antibiotics, where my misuse can breed superbugs to infect my neighbors.)
That said, the health risks of a one-time dose of medication can clearly be less than those of a continual dose. The FDA's own scientific panel recommended OTC status for this drug. The problem is political, not medical.
I hereby mandate that every store owner must sell firearms. After all, we don't care if you're morally opposed to selling them - we have a right to bear them granted by the second amendment.
A better metaphor: if I take a job at a gun store, can I refuse to sell firearms or ammunition to hunters (since I'm ethically opposed to hunting) and still expect to keep my job? I doubt it.
If a pharmacist is morally opposed to being a conduit for chemical abortions, who are you to decide his morality is inferior to yours and compell him to act against his conscience?
I certainly wouldn't ask anyone to go against their conscience. On the other hand, if following their conscience means that they cannot fulfil their professional duties, they need to resign and find a new job. Or be fired.
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Safe speed depends on road conditions. I've driven through heavy rains where between flooded road surface and short visibility the maximum safe speed was 20-30mph under the limit, and I've been on straight clear highways on beautiful days where 20mph over the posted limit was still pretty safe.
If I'm driving slower than the posted limit because of bad conditions while members of the species Driverus Ignoramus overdrive their visibility and stopping distance to exceed the limit, I'm not the one being unsafe.
In such circumstances I do try to get to the right lane to let them go to hell in their own way; however, members of this common species often fail to understand that tailgating makes lane changes more difficult - if they're close enough that they subtend my entire rear window field of view, they obstruct my view of traffic. Especially if there're blinding me with their headlights.
Anyway: software would not have to be very smart to improve upon the average American driver.
Reducing government is a great idea. Let's start by reducing government's power to concentrate wealth into the hand of a few, by revoking or greatly limiting the issuance of corporate charters, land deeds, inheritance rights, resource rights, copyrights, and patents. (Actually before that should be ending government's power to criminalize consensual behavior like drug use and prostitution, but let's stick with economic issues for the moment.)
The "social spending" that the right would like to slash is just an (inadequate) governor on the engine of state capitalism. Breaking the government power that enables the L-curve is a necessary prerequiste for eliminating these governors.
Which is the problem with economics - it does not correspond to reality.
All natural resources, and all human resources, are finite. Land or gold or the services of a skilled physician that I own, reduces the amount available to the rest of you.
Until economic theories that accept that we live in a finite world come to greater prominence, we're screwed.
FreeNoteQT runs on the newer Zauruses (Zaurusi?). I've installed it but not yet played with it to any significant extent.
No, you wouldn't. PHP has a massive installation base, it's not going anywhere. RoR shows signs of being just the latest the flavor of the month, but even if it does persist it's a framework, not a language - works great if what you want to do fits into that frame, otherwise you spend your time trying to bend the bars of the cage.
Not at all. There are many ethical systems that don't rely on supernaturalism: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, existentialism, and others.
Not so much. While premature death is common, in surviving hunter-gatherer cultures with no access to modern medicine someone who survives to reproductive age has a good shot at living into their 60s, and 70-80 years is not unheard of. Pre-industial agricultural societies may actually have represented a decline in lifespan, between the harder work necessary and the concentration of population leading to more deaths from communicable diseases.
Again, not that I don't like modern antibiotics and trauma medicine. But your plumber and your garbageman can take more credit than your doctor for longer life expectancies in industialized societies. Removing the concentrations of shit and trash that have plagued cities since the dawn of civilization does more for us than high-tech medicine - and is less likely to kill you by accident.
Actually before European colonization there were several large African states and empires, some of which endured for hundreds of years.
What, like larger nations didn't? C'mon. At least battles over resource between smaller groups were self-limiting; when you're fighting over pasture land, you're careful to not destroy the land.
Colonialism has been mostly a game played by the European powers (including Russia/the USSR) and the Unites States, with some forays into the field by China and Japan. In its new form as "globalization" it might be better seen as a game for multi-national corporations, though it's getting harder and harder to separate state from corporate power and interest.
"High tech" and "prosperity" are not identical; as much as I like technology, some argue that a simple hunter-gather culture can be more prosperous. Certainly I know poor people here in the US who live a high-tech lifestyle due to cheap electronics - or even free cast-off stuff; while some more prosperous people choose to live with less tech.
But yes, I am asserting that the socioeconomic development of areas like Niger if the European powers hadn't drawn and quartered the continent in the 1800s, destroying the foundations for self-rule. (Pretty much the same problem we see in Iraq today.)
Certainly those nations with a more exploitive bent are delighted to have new stuff to steal and a captive consumer base. That's colonialism in its essence.
Best damn state to live in on the East Coast. States between the Coasts are of course uncivilized backwaters not worthy of serious consideration. Washington state? Home of the pestilence known as Microsoft, enough said. Oregon? Yeah, right. Some parts of California are nice, if you can afford it (and only until it falls into the ocean anyway). That leaves only Maryland, my Maryland, hon.
Our state and local tax burden is just about average (10.3% versus 10.1%).
You just keep thinking that, tell your friends - maybe it'll slow down the rush of DCer's invading B'more.
The "slots will save our schools!" thing is pretty much recognized as bullshit from our current gov (who I *so* look forward to seeing tossed out). We'll probably end up with some slot machines at the racetracks, but few people beleive they'll do much more for our schools than horse racing does now.
I have no idea how you read into my observation such a suggestion. I've all for better living with less impact - though I see precious little concern for that later clause in our broader society. That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of us in the West (and I include myself here) live a lifestyle that is prodigiously wasteful.
The reason most developing nations can't seem to shake off poverty is economic and political damage from centuries of colonialism (including it's latest incarnation, "globalization").
On the global scale, you and I and everyone reading this are disgustingly, wastefully, rich. About half the world lives on $2 a day or less.
The US during WWII had a highly planned economy with price controls and resource rationing, and functioned well enough to keep the populace fed and the war machine humming.
(Meant as a data point, not a argument in favor of controlled economies. It is however an important example of how "free markets" and "capitalism" are distinct - during this time the markets were controlled yet the "means of production" were still privately held.)
Uh, yeah. My point of contention was that 100 lines makes a "huge" class.
Depends. Dunno "Active Record" from a hole in the ground, but I've had plenty of experience with packages that only take 3 lines to give you almost what 300 lines would otherwise do, and somewhere down the line you end up writing most of those other 297 lines to handle the edge cases.
You can remove the PHP qualifier from that statement and it's just as true. I've seen just as much good PHP code as good code in any other language - i.e., precious little.
Did you leave a 0 out of that? Or is most of your programming done in trivial problem domains where a 100 line class can do something? (Or have you been infected with one of the object obfuscated memes where one useful class must be shattered into several smaller ones to fit some arbitary idea of proper module size?)
Err, if you don't write unit tests, whose fault is that? I don't see how language choice helps with that.
Encapsulation. Learn it. Love it. Live it.
"Society" is an abstract concept. It does not have or lack "well-being".
The closest thing to the "well-being of society" would be nothing more or less than the sum total of it's individual members. The sum of the minor damage to well-being experienced by thousands at the hand of a spammer is orders of magnitude less than the major damage to well-being experienced by one victim of rape or other greivous crime.
Censure (to express disaprroval) != censor (to remove or surpress objectional content).
See the Subaru Legacy and Impreza and the Toyota Matrix.
True story:
About two years ago, I went to see my doctor about an annoying rash. We were considering whether it might be something contagious, she went off to check the incubation time for some virus. (Turned out to be nothing but some minor irritation, BTW.) I pictured her going to her office and consulting a big bookshelf of medical reference works.
She camr back and said she had ruled out the virus. "I looked up the incubation time on Google", she said.
Nonsense. If your claim your freedom is given by some god(s), you make your freedom dependant on proving the existance of said deities. As you can't make such a proof, you've placed your freedom on the weakest of foundations.
Nor is my freedom given by society.
My freedom is not a "gift" given by others. It is mine by my nature.
Frederick Douglas wrote that "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." We each know that it is our own nature to be free; all it takes is the realization that other humans are of the same nature, to know that they are free too.
Birth control pills have been around since the 1960s, so that's no excuse for the wingnuts refusing to fill those prescriptions.
Mifepristone was approved for use in France in 1988, anyone going to pharmacy school should have been aware of it and known it would come to the U.S. eventually.
If your field changes such that you can no longer find a job that doesn't conflict with your ethics, you're SOL and have to change jobs. Why should pharmacists be an exception?
If all non-military programming jobs dried up, the fact that I went to school for six years to study computer science doesn't create a special right to demand that someone create a non-military job for me. I have a friend who's an aerospace engineer who's facing this challenge now, as the shuttle program withers away and her company goes after more military contracts she may have to leave the field she's worked in for twenty years.
A difference may exist on average. It is unknown how much of this difference is a socially created "self-fulfilling prophecy" and how much is intrinsic.
No. Even when differences in work patterns are controlled for, a 20% wage gap remains.
"Naturally?" We don't know that; the "nature versus nurture" question of gender roles is far from settled. It's true that in our society, on average women choose family over career, but how much of that is self-fulfilling prophecy is unknown. Societies like ours haven't existed long enough for us to have any idea.
Uh, no. I'm opposed to discrimination. Especially (like most people) to discrimination against a class to which I belong. (Well, maybe used to belong, since at 35 I seem no longer, at least by /. standards, to be "young".)
There's nothing "standardized" about the Nolan chart. It's Libertarian (i.e. libertarian capitalist, not the original libertarian) propaganda.
It does have the benefit of introducing multi-dimensional considerations into standard left-right thinking, but its specifics are useless.
First, the FDA should keep its grubby little hands off the bodies of citizens, and not require any competent adult to have a permission slip before purchasing medicine. (With perhaps an exception for antibiotics, where my misuse can breed superbugs to infect my neighbors.)
That said, the health risks of a one-time dose of medication can clearly be less than those of a continual dose. The FDA's own scientific panel recommended OTC status for this drug. The problem is political, not medical.
A better metaphor: if I take a job at a gun store, can I refuse to sell firearms or ammunition to hunters (since I'm ethically opposed to hunting) and still expect to keep my job? I doubt it.
I certainly wouldn't ask anyone to go against their conscience. On the other hand, if following their conscience means that they cannot fulfil their professional duties, they need to resign and find a new job. Or be fired.