Seriously, as a layman I read it and it struck me as interesting and helpful.
From the outside, my hazy impression at the time was that many people were working with a simple, unitary notion of consciousness, a homunculus sitting in Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" and doing heavy math. Or Searle's "Chinese Room" notions. Not that people were explicitly saying that's how things worked or should work, but it seemed like that's the kind of thing they were building. Society of Mind seemed a refreshing departure from that.
Of course, I've paid scant attention to the field in the last ten or fifteen years. What's the scoop these days?
did you ever come across any philosophers/schools of thought that exemplify the kinds of stances you are developing?
Wow, great question. The short answer is "not exactly".
One place to start would be the British newsweekly The Economist. I've been reading them for ages now, and I'm sure I've soaked up a lot from them.
Aside from being an excellent way to get your news, they believe in free markets not for their own sake, but as a tool to make the world a better place. Some American progressives mistake them as a conservative outfit, but that's wrong. They're economically pretty conservative, and socially very liberal. From an American perspective, that can be confusing. Mainly, they're data-focused pragmatists.
As far as using markets as tools, it's worth checking out the way a lot of greens have come to embrace them. A green pal tells me that they were anathema 15 or 20 years ago, but now they're pretty popular. She recommended Natural Capitalism as a good place to start.
If it's more a question of how capitalism can avoid being evil, take a look at Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. It's a memoir from the founder of Patagonia, and it's an enjoyable and inspiring read. It's the spiritual opposite of the grinchy Randite tone, but the guy is still a smashing success who started from zero, just like their heroes.
Sure, they meant that to happen. Ditto for all the other civilian and military accidents. Oh wait, they're accidents, meaning something unexpected and bad happened.
Companies build reactors to make money, not to be hated or weird. It's in their best interests to make good reactors, and companies did (before regulations killed all new ones).
Look, I'm not against nuclear power. I think it's cool, and I don't have a problem with it. However, blaming its lack of adoption purely on FUD borders on the simpleminded.
Companies do things to make money. So do their employees. People cut corners all the time, and sometimes they screw up big, which is why we have messes like Enron and the current credit crisis. If people do this with a coal plant, you get a bankruptcy. If they do it with a nuke plant, maybe you have to sacrifice a thousand square miles. Oopsie.
Based on nuclear power's current track record, none of those sensible corporations that you're so fond of will give them insurance at low enough rates to make nuclear power viable. That means government subsidies. And I haven't noticed the US nuclear companies solving the disposal problem, either, so we're looking at more government subsidies.
If we're going to subsidize something, I'd rather it be an alt-energy source where we're not gambling quite so heavily. About the worst thing that can happen with a solar panel is that it comes loose from the roof and falls on you.
Thanks for that insightful comment. If all free-market capitalists shared your views on the conditions for markets to work well, the world wouldn't be such a fucked-up place. And I might consider free-market capitalism more favorably...
Thanks for the kind words. Honestly, pretty much everything has this problem. Take a great idea that works, and it instantly develops a bunch of fanboys who like the results but only have a surface understanding of what's going on, inevitably leading to snowdrifts of idiocy.
You oughta see my super-green girlfriend cringe when some enviro-kook demonstrates their lack of basic math skills (or basic hygiene). The ones who get my goat are the libertarians and the objectivists: it's not that both sides don't have good points, but fundamentalist Randites are not appreciably saner than any other kind of fundie. Most of them are crazy enough that they'd have a hard time talking me out of a burning building, let alone into making major changes to our country.
I put the a lot of the B-school blowhards in the same basket. Adam Smith is not somebody you pledge allegiance to. Markets are amazingly powerful tools for solving certain sorts of problems, not magic fairy wands. And they certainly shouldn't be the curtains you put up to hide your thievery from the people whose money you're gambling with. But that's what happened both with Enron and the current mortgage crisis.
So don't let the idiots throw you off. There are a lot of great ideas out there; just scrape off the barnacles and put 'em to work.
Clean energy was killed by the very environmentalists who tout it. [...]There's also a nuclear jet engine [...]
Connect the dots here, pal.
If there are engineers dumb enough to put a reactor on an airplane, it's no wonder the environmentalists don't believe that nuclear power can be safe. As if cleaning up Manhattan and the Pentagon wasn't enough of a problem without tons of piping-hot uranium dioxide (plus tasty fission byproducts) to deal with.
If we could build more reactors at the real cost of building them [...]
Real cost? Take a read through The Economist's last study of nuclear power. The only way people are talking about new nuclear plants in the US is because the government will heavily subsidize their insurance. Personally, I think nuke plants are pretty neat, but when they fail, they can fail big.
If the nuclear plant operators would pay the real cost of their risks, I'd be much more partial to them. Instead, they talked Cheney into dumping the costs on taxpayers.
if the legislatures hadn't messed it all up,
Come now. You have heard of the S&L crisis, California's power crisis, Enron, and our unfolding mortgage/credit crisis? Tens of billions lost each time, while the gambler executives generally kept their winnings and retired. The legislatures are quite right to think "trust us" is not a reasonable regulatory plan when it comes to large businesses taking giant risks with other people's money.
I'm an ardent free-market capitalist, with entrepreneurship going back generations in my family. But markets only work well when there are tight feedback loops, plenty of competition, and the opportunity to fail. Nuclear energy plants don't meet any of those: the feedback loops are decades long, there is very limited competition, and, assuming you like your water table where it is, the plants can't be allowed to fail.
Blaming everything on the legislators and the environmentalists is sometimes completely right, but in the case of nuclear power, it's a lot of happy horseshit.
So if you were to eat only meat, you would not avoid the need to grow vegetables. In fact, to grow a pound of beef in north america, it takes at least 2.6 pounds of grain.
Not so fast, Mr. Smarty Pants. You've left out a crucial factor in your calculations.
A person consuming mainly factory-farmed beef, thanks to the massive cholesterol, hormone, and antibiotic intake, will die years, maybe decades earlier than the vegetarian. As their arteries clog up, they'll become sedentary, further reducing their energy consumption. Plus, once everybody gets fatter and wheezier, birth rates will go way down.
So we can conclude that super-beefy diets are better for the planet. Even better, if we listen to people like the 'tard who proposed it, I'm pretty sure humanity will die out in short order, allowing the planet to recover nicely
The Fed inflates because it really can't do anything else. It can't remove money from circulation.
That's not true at all.
I'm no expert, but two of the ways that the Fed creates money are to loan it out and to tell banks how much they can loan based on their assets. To reduce the money supply, they just lend less or tell the banks to tighten up. Because loans are continuously coming due, lending less reduces the money supply.
Until you've managed some memory yourself, it's very hard to get what Java's up to,
Not if you understand hashing, sorting, and counting algorithms -- the things all memory management systems depend on essentially.
I'm not saying you should code to your particular memory manager. I agree that you should avoid that unless you're desperate. Root of all evil, etc.
However, I've come across all too many developers who have only ever worked in high-level languages that can't think about the lower-level stuff. E.g., they have no idea how many bytes an object might occupy, and they aren't clear on the cost of copying and allocation. Or even when copying or allocation happen. Or when their garbage collector can get rid of something.
It's those kinds of people that build an awful lot of "enterprise" bloatware, and they desperately need a little more grounding in the basics.
I did say that it isn't so bad that people need to discourage others from using it.
And that's where you're wrong. Like any tool, it's good for some jobs, bad for others. For the latter, people should be actively discouraged from using it, as the ease of getting something quick and basic out gives them a false sense of security about the greater effort. As a few of my clients have discovered to their cost.
You're responses are so riddled with assumptions and misinformation, you're already wasted too much of my time.
Classic. Taking extra time to tell me I'm a waste of time? Sounds like it's not so much about your busy schedule.
That 1%, or whatever fraction, of artists who practice their art full time includes pretty much all of the artists who are widely considered to be great, and even those considered merely good. It works in the converse too: the vast majority of great or good artists do not have a day job. This suggests that, in order to produce great art, one must do so full time.
You've got correlation mixed up with causation here. Great artists (or at least popular ones) can live off their art because people support them. That was true before the modern music industry, and it will be true after. Take a look at Radiohead's "In Flowers" for a suggestion of what's to come. Nobody had to pay a dime, but Radiohead made $6m in the first month. And when they got around to selling the physical album, it hit #1. File sharing does not seem to have hurt them.
And you're also ignoring all of the potentially great artists who never got official blessing from the gatekeepers in their respective industries. A modern example is the Pulitzer-winner John Kennedy Toole, who we just barely heard about, and only after he killed himself in despair. Reducing the cost of distribution to zero makes a much greater volume of creative work available, and could well increase the amount of great work available. Perhaps with his work on the Internet, somebody would have noticed Toole's talent while he was alive.
But the most obvious flaw in that argument is the number of artists with great first novels, albums, or films. Those people couldn't be living off of their art, but yet they still create.
So I think we agree that great artists who can live off their work could produce more great work, and I'm sure some do. But I don't think you can use that to draw any particular conclusions about the effect file sharing would have on the amount of great art.
Go visit some contemporary galleries and modern art museums. If the modern art world lacks for anything, it is certainly not variety.
And given that is the least industrial of the major arts, and the one where copyright matters least, doesn't that suggest something to you? Commercial radio, on the other hand, is the one where copyright matters most, and I hear no end of complaint about the lack of variety there.
Even in contemporary art, any working artist will tell you that it's hugely driven by trends and fads. If you are trying to make a living off of it, you definitely face choices about making marketable work versus the work you want to make. The only ones who escape that are the very successful and the very lucky.
The software industry, as a whole, has essentially nothing to do with the art world.
Nothing at all. Well, except that it is the creative industry most affected by changes in digital distribution and most prone to the piracy that you're worried about ruining art. Other than that, nothing.
Before you wanted to do them a favor by restricting the money supply and making them all work at Starbucks. [...] In general, it seems to me that you have no idea what you're talking about.
If you want to have an actual discussion, go for it. If you'd like to be a dick, find somebody else.
So my career path, which lead to developing in a specific language, has somehow excluded me from being eligible to offer up any "useful information"? Where is the logic in that?
Your career path has prevented you from offering useful information on all sorts of things. Industrial cooking, counseling drug addicts, and waste recycling are probably among them. Unfortunately, one of those things is the relative merits of different languages. Sorry if the truth hurts.
You saying PHP is totally awesome is like somebody who has never traveled saying their country is the best one in the world. Hell, they even could be right, but they don't have enough perspective to make me expect that they'll have anything interesting to say.
And on a technical note, if you're suggesting PHP cannot scale, I advise you to reach just how scalable it is. You can start by informing yourself with how Wikipedia operates.
Thanks, I already know how it operates. I know that they struggle to introduce new features, and have for years. I know that a lot of key code is not in PHP, but rather in C++, as the PHP was way too slow for them. And I know that they are stuck in the same design ghetto that traps a lot of two-tier applications that need to scale, not just in traffic volume, but in complexity.
About the best high-volume use I've seen for PHP is the same approach as Facebook: relatively basic front-end code in PHP, with all serious development work done in other languages as services that the PHP calls via APIs. At which point, its technical handicaps don't matter much, and it's just another page templating language. Except that you have a big pool of cheap front-end developers to hire from.
And of course, it's fine for all of those 5-10 page dynamic web sites in the world, too. A cheap solution is just the thing for people with limited needs and small budgets. In that space, I'm all for PHP.
you need to argue what else you use instead which is so much better than PHP.
No, I don't need to argue that.
My point is that you should use the right tool for the job. The guy I replied to is one of many people who only has one tool in his toolbox: PHP. In my view, that makes him either a novice or a dolt. I'm ok with novices: they know they need to learn more, and eventually do. The dolts, on the other hand, are beyond my power to help.
Taking your comment at face value, it would seem that artists who need to support themselves through means other than art would end up producing less. So let's say that's true: file sharing will lead to an overall decrease in the amount of available music.
Not obviously. An artist in business for themselves will spend a lot of time on business, unless they're so successful that they can afford a manager and staff. That's a lot of time soaked up, possibly more than a part-time job would require. Heck, it could be more than what a full-time job would require. If 1% of active bands make it that far, I'd be amazed. And I'm sure not even 1% of actors or painters or writers make it that far.
Just as bad, once you try to live off your art, you are obliged to produce marketable art rather than what you think is best. That presumably leads to less variety.
Do you think this is an acceptable tradeoff? If so, why? Because I think that's kind of paradoxical: it would mean that culture is suffering so that you can have easier access to culture.
Even assuming your notion that being a full-time artist leads to more and better culture than being a part-time one, I'm not sure the paradox follows. File-sharing may kill large music companies, but it's not clear that means less total money to artists, or fewer full-time artists. Maybe if there's less over-marketed, over-produced pop, there will be more room for artists, not less.
As a counter-example, look at software. If the Internet was going to kill anything, it should have been the commercial software industry, with programmer wages taking a steep dive too. But both are doing amazingly well, and it has given us an open-source movement that has hugely enriched us.
And if that's not an acceptable tradeoff, isn't the purpose of the law to rectify these kinds of imbalances?
Even supposing you're right down the line, I'd say no, that's not the main purpose of law.
Copyrights and patents aren't a mechanism for ultimate fairness; they're to encourage investment in creative works. If copyright on personal entertainment materials has become effectively unenforceable without putting ourselves under permanent Orwellian surveillance, then I'd say screw copyright, or at least enforcement of it on end users.
The big difference between Bach's time and ours is that we're much, much richer. If you live frugally, getting by with a part-time job is perfectly plausible. In effect, the artist can become their own patron.
To suggest that remuneration has little or nothing to do with an artist's ability to find the time to create is plain silly.
I think "nothing" is too strong, and I agree full-time artists can create more and better work than part-time ones. But I don't think that's always the case.
A lot of "full-time" artists spend an awful lot of time managing the business of being an artist. Getting grants, hitting up galleries, promoting their brand, et cetera. It's a frequent complaint that well-known artists may be better self-promoters than they are artists.
I know a number of very good artists who have day jobs, and it's not clear to me that they spend any less time on their art or produce work of lower quality than the artists who are making a full-time living. Indeed, that they don't care about being marketable gives them a freedom that full-time artists often don't have.
Get over it. PHP is not perfect, but it does a damn good job. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so widely used.
Yes, all things that are popular are good and work well! Windows 3.1 and Visual Basic were very popular. So was the belief that the earth is flat. And there's chlamydia. That's hella popular.
I've been using PHP for eight years and there hasn't been a day where I wished I had chosen another language.
No offense, but if you've been using the same language for eight years without any regrets, I don't see you as having enough perspective to offer up much useful information.
As far as I can tell, PHP is popular because it's perfectly adequate language for cranking out some basic dynamic pages, and it's very easy to learn and set up. However, just like Visual Basic, the things that make it useful in the shallow end of the pool keep it from being useful at scale. And from the eternal trickle of security issues and the host of weird issues with it, it was apparently designed by amateurs.
If you're happy with it, that's awesome. Carry on. Just don't get your knickers in a twist because a lot of people correctly see it as the wrong tool for their jobs.
Toll road collections are the kings of inefficiency. There's plenty of reason not to pay for roads by the trip.
Did I say toll roads were good? No, I said they were bad; that's the opposite of good. In particular I said they could be replaced with modern technology that would make them not suck.
I'm glad you're trying to participate, and I'm sure teacher will give you a gold star. But do you think you could read the entire five-line post you're replying to? Heck, in this case, you could have just read the same paragraph you quoted from.
Thanks! I knew a big boy like you could read a whole paragraph!
I do actually think that roads are a perfectly legitimate thing for governments to spend money on
Really? I think they should organize the building of roads, but not pay for them. Not one dime. Just like water, sewer, or electricity.
Sure, roads are valuable and necessary. And without eminent domain, making them would be ridiculous. But beyond that, I think they should get paid for from user fees. Subsidizing them has led to all sorts of inefficiencies, and created a lot of unnecessary dependence on them.
Fifty years ago, the only way we could do that is with toll roads, which are expensive to run and annoying to use. But with modern tech, we can easily do usage metering and congestion pricing. If I can pay by the trip for my car, there's no reason I shouldn't pay for the road the same way.
Carpools? I won't join a carpool. If I wanted to be around other people while commuting, I'd take the bus. I don't get nearly enough time alone, and my 20 minute drive to work is one of the times I have alone with my thoughts (such as they are). Why should I give that up?
Nobody's asking you to give it up. They are asking you to pay your share, though. Is that so bad?
Right now, when you drive during a peak time, you impose costs on all the other drivers. They pay in wasteful delays. With congestion pricing, you pay for your own use, and you pay in cash. Don't want to carpool? Insist on going at peak times? Fab! Just pay for the privilege.
Granted, there is a time and place for things like C. College isn't it, unless it's for a course in operating systems, compilers (though I'd prefer Scheme for this purpose), or some kind of electronics engineering, where stuff like memory management is actually relevant to the subject.
I disagree strongly.
I agree that languages that do memory management for you are great, and for most business programming, I think that's what people should use. I love Perl, I love Java, I love Ruby. However, I think it's important that any programmer know what is actually going on under the hood.
Until you've managed some memory yourself, it's very hard to get what Java's up to, meaning it's very hard to write sane, efficient code. Some of the worst "enterprise" bullshit I've seen was written by people who didn't have a firm grasp of fundamentals, and therefore engaged in cargo cult programming.
After 45-60 minutes of non stop camera going in every direction possible, you just can't watch it without losing your head,
I definitely found it a little disorienting, but scary movies often play on disorientation, so for me it was just part of the effect. I went to see it with a dozen people, and we all enjoyed it. We all had a couple of drinks in us, though, so perhaps a little anesthesia helps.
My question has always been: how come giant monsters are never mammals?
Mammals are less scary.
I think it's the same reason that pets are mostly mammals: the greater shared evolutionary heritage makes them more understandable, more appealing, more sympathetic.
You can most easily see it with baby animals. Baby snakes, baby lizards, baby birds: maybe a little cute. Baby pigs, baby deer, baby dogs: very cute. Baby insects, baby spiders: just easier to step on.
A lot of what you described isn't refactoring, which is defined as making design improvements that don't change behavior. Instead, those guys were just doing developer goldplating.
I think if you read the book, you'll see how a lot of the techniques in Refactoring are intended to be used in the service of simplification.
Agreed! And that's the best way to explain it to execs.
On a new project, you refactor to keep debt low. On a legacy project, you refactor to keep "interest" costs low. The interest on technical debt comes out as less reliable systems, buggier code, increased maintenance cost, and higher costs for new features. All of those cost cash money, which in my experience is a lot more money than you'd pay to do things right.
Slashdot Mirror
please don't mention "Society of Mind"
What about Society of Mind?
Seriously, as a layman I read it and it struck me as interesting and helpful.
From the outside, my hazy impression at the time was that many people were working with a simple, unitary notion of consciousness, a homunculus sitting in Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" and doing heavy math. Or Searle's "Chinese Room" notions. Not that people were explicitly saying that's how things worked or should work, but it seemed like that's the kind of thing they were building. Society of Mind seemed a refreshing departure from that.
Of course, I've paid scant attention to the field in the last ten or fifteen years. What's the scoop these days?
The good news is that Kurzweil put cash money down to back his opinion. In this case, Mitch Kapor (of Lotus and OSAF fame) is betting against him.
did you ever come across any philosophers/schools of thought that exemplify the kinds of stances you are developing?
Wow, great question. The short answer is "not exactly".
One place to start would be the British newsweekly The Economist. I've been reading them for ages now, and I'm sure I've soaked up a lot from them.
Aside from being an excellent way to get your news, they believe in free markets not for their own sake, but as a tool to make the world a better place. Some American progressives mistake them as a conservative outfit, but that's wrong. They're economically pretty conservative, and socially very liberal. From an American perspective, that can be confusing. Mainly, they're data-focused pragmatists.
As far as using markets as tools, it's worth checking out the way a lot of greens have come to embrace them. A green pal tells me that they were anathema 15 or 20 years ago, but now they're pretty popular. She recommended Natural Capitalism as a good place to start.
If it's more a question of how capitalism can avoid being evil, take a look at Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. It's a memoir from the founder of Patagonia, and it's an enjoyable and inspiring read. It's the spiritual opposite of the grinchy Randite tone, but the guy is still a smashing success who started from zero, just like their heroes.
Hope that helps!
Three Mile Island was NOT a disaster.
Sure, they meant that to happen. Ditto for all the other civilian and military accidents. Oh wait, they're accidents, meaning something unexpected and bad happened.
Companies build reactors to make money, not to be hated or weird. It's in their best interests to make good reactors, and companies did (before regulations killed all new ones).
Look, I'm not against nuclear power. I think it's cool, and I don't have a problem with it. However, blaming its lack of adoption purely on FUD borders on the simpleminded.
Companies do things to make money. So do their employees. People cut corners all the time, and sometimes they screw up big, which is why we have messes like Enron and the current credit crisis. If people do this with a coal plant, you get a bankruptcy. If they do it with a nuke plant, maybe you have to sacrifice a thousand square miles. Oopsie.
Based on nuclear power's current track record, none of those sensible corporations that you're so fond of will give them insurance at low enough rates to make nuclear power viable. That means government subsidies. And I haven't noticed the US nuclear companies solving the disposal problem, either, so we're looking at more government subsidies.
If we're going to subsidize something, I'd rather it be an alt-energy source where we're not gambling quite so heavily. About the worst thing that can happen with a solar panel is that it comes loose from the roof and falls on you.
Thanks for that insightful comment. If all free-market capitalists shared your views on the conditions for markets to work well, the world wouldn't be such a fucked-up place. And I might consider free-market capitalism more favorably...
Thanks for the kind words. Honestly, pretty much everything has this problem. Take a great idea that works, and it instantly develops a bunch of fanboys who like the results but only have a surface understanding of what's going on, inevitably leading to snowdrifts of idiocy.
You oughta see my super-green girlfriend cringe when some enviro-kook demonstrates their lack of basic math skills (or basic hygiene). The ones who get my goat are the libertarians and the objectivists: it's not that both sides don't have good points, but fundamentalist Randites are not appreciably saner than any other kind of fundie. Most of them are crazy enough that they'd have a hard time talking me out of a burning building, let alone into making major changes to our country.
I put the a lot of the B-school blowhards in the same basket. Adam Smith is not somebody you pledge allegiance to. Markets are amazingly powerful tools for solving certain sorts of problems, not magic fairy wands. And they certainly shouldn't be the curtains you put up to hide your thievery from the people whose money you're gambling with. But that's what happened both with Enron and the current mortgage crisis.
So don't let the idiots throw you off. There are a lot of great ideas out there; just scrape off the barnacles and put 'em to work.
Clean energy was killed by the very environmentalists who tout it. [...]There's also a nuclear jet engine [...]
Connect the dots here, pal.
If there are engineers dumb enough to put a reactor on an airplane, it's no wonder the environmentalists don't believe that nuclear power can be safe. As if cleaning up Manhattan and the Pentagon wasn't enough of a problem without tons of piping-hot uranium dioxide (plus tasty fission byproducts) to deal with.
If we could build more reactors at the real cost of building them [...]
Real cost? Take a read through The Economist's last study of nuclear power. The only way people are talking about new nuclear plants in the US is because the government will heavily subsidize their insurance. Personally, I think nuke plants are pretty neat, but when they fail, they can fail big.
If the nuclear plant operators would pay the real cost of their risks, I'd be much more partial to them. Instead, they talked Cheney into dumping the costs on taxpayers.
if the legislatures hadn't messed it all up,
Come now. You have heard of the S&L crisis, California's power crisis, Enron, and our unfolding mortgage/credit crisis? Tens of billions lost each time, while the gambler executives generally kept their winnings and retired. The legislatures are quite right to think "trust us" is not a reasonable regulatory plan when it comes to large businesses taking giant risks with other people's money.
I'm an ardent free-market capitalist, with entrepreneurship going back generations in my family. But markets only work well when there are tight feedback loops, plenty of competition, and the opportunity to fail. Nuclear energy plants don't meet any of those: the feedback loops are decades long, there is very limited competition, and, assuming you like your water table where it is, the plants can't be allowed to fail.
Blaming everything on the legislators and the environmentalists is sometimes completely right, but in the case of nuclear power, it's a lot of happy horseshit.
So if you were to eat only meat, you would not avoid the need to grow vegetables. In fact, to grow a pound of beef in north america, it takes at least 2.6 pounds of grain.
Not so fast, Mr. Smarty Pants. You've left out a crucial factor in your calculations.
A person consuming mainly factory-farmed beef, thanks to the massive cholesterol, hormone, and antibiotic intake, will die years, maybe decades earlier than the vegetarian. As their arteries clog up, they'll become sedentary, further reducing their energy consumption. Plus, once everybody gets fatter and wheezier, birth rates will go way down.
So we can conclude that super-beefy diets are better for the planet. Even better, if we listen to people like the 'tard who proposed it, I'm pretty sure humanity will die out in short order, allowing the planet to recover nicely
The Fed inflates because it really can't do anything else. It can't remove money from circulation.
That's not true at all.
I'm no expert, but two of the ways that the Fed creates money are to loan it out and to tell banks how much they can loan based on their assets. To reduce the money supply, they just lend less or tell the banks to tighten up. Because loans are continuously coming due, lending less reduces the money supply.
I'm not saying you should code to your particular memory manager. I agree that you should avoid that unless you're desperate. Root of all evil, etc.
However, I've come across all too many developers who have only ever worked in high-level languages that can't think about the lower-level stuff. E.g., they have no idea how many bytes an object might occupy, and they aren't clear on the cost of copying and allocation. Or even when copying or allocation happen. Or when their garbage collector can get rid of something.
It's those kinds of people that build an awful lot of "enterprise" bloatware, and they desperately need a little more grounding in the basics.
I did say that it isn't so bad that people need to discourage others from using it.
And that's where you're wrong. Like any tool, it's good for some jobs, bad for others. For the latter, people should be actively discouraged from using it, as the ease of getting something quick and basic out gives them a false sense of security about the greater effort. As a few of my clients have discovered to their cost.
You're responses are so riddled with assumptions and misinformation, you're already wasted too much of my time.
Classic. Taking extra time to tell me I'm a waste of time? Sounds like it's not so much about your busy schedule.
That 1%, or whatever fraction, of artists who practice their art full time includes pretty much all of the artists who are widely considered to be great, and even those considered merely good. It works in the converse too: the vast majority of great or good artists do not have a day job. This suggests that, in order to produce great art, one must do so full time.
You've got correlation mixed up with causation here. Great artists (or at least popular ones) can live off their art because people support them. That was true before the modern music industry, and it will be true after. Take a look at Radiohead's "In Flowers" for a suggestion of what's to come. Nobody had to pay a dime, but Radiohead made $6m in the first month. And when they got around to selling the physical album, it hit #1. File sharing does not seem to have hurt them.
And you're also ignoring all of the potentially great artists who never got official blessing from the gatekeepers in their respective industries. A modern example is the Pulitzer-winner John Kennedy Toole, who we just barely heard about, and only after he killed himself in despair. Reducing the cost of distribution to zero makes a much greater volume of creative work available, and could well increase the amount of great work available. Perhaps with his work on the Internet, somebody would have noticed Toole's talent while he was alive.
But the most obvious flaw in that argument is the number of artists with great first novels, albums, or films. Those people couldn't be living off of their art, but yet they still create.
So I think we agree that great artists who can live off their work could produce more great work, and I'm sure some do. But I don't think you can use that to draw any particular conclusions about the effect file sharing would have on the amount of great art.
Go visit some contemporary galleries and modern art museums. If the modern art world lacks for anything, it is certainly not variety.
And given that is the least industrial of the major arts, and the one where copyright matters least, doesn't that suggest something to you? Commercial radio, on the other hand, is the one where copyright matters most, and I hear no end of complaint about the lack of variety there.
Even in contemporary art, any working artist will tell you that it's hugely driven by trends and fads. If you are trying to make a living off of it, you definitely face choices about making marketable work versus the work you want to make. The only ones who escape that are the very successful and the very lucky.
The software industry, as a whole, has essentially nothing to do with the art world.
Nothing at all. Well, except that it is the creative industry most affected by changes in digital distribution and most prone to the piracy that you're worried about ruining art. Other than that, nothing.
Before you wanted to do them a favor by restricting the money supply and making them all work at Starbucks. [...] In general, it seems to me that you have no idea what you're talking about.
If you want to have an actual discussion, go for it. If you'd like to be a dick, find somebody else.
So my career path, which lead to developing in a specific language, has somehow excluded me from being eligible to offer up any "useful information"? Where is the logic in that?
Your career path has prevented you from offering useful information on all sorts of things. Industrial cooking, counseling drug addicts, and waste recycling are probably among them. Unfortunately, one of those things is the relative merits of different languages. Sorry if the truth hurts.
You saying PHP is totally awesome is like somebody who has never traveled saying their country is the best one in the world. Hell, they even could be right, but they don't have enough perspective to make me expect that they'll have anything interesting to say.
And on a technical note, if you're suggesting PHP cannot scale, I advise you to reach just how scalable it is. You can start by informing yourself with how Wikipedia operates.
Thanks, I already know how it operates. I know that they struggle to introduce new features, and have for years. I know that a lot of key code is not in PHP, but rather in C++, as the PHP was way too slow for them. And I know that they are stuck in the same design ghetto that traps a lot of two-tier applications that need to scale, not just in traffic volume, but in complexity.
About the best high-volume use I've seen for PHP is the same approach as Facebook: relatively basic front-end code in PHP, with all serious development work done in other languages as services that the PHP calls via APIs. At which point, its technical handicaps don't matter much, and it's just another page templating language. Except that you have a big pool of cheap front-end developers to hire from.
And of course, it's fine for all of those 5-10 page dynamic web sites in the world, too. A cheap solution is just the thing for people with limited needs and small budgets. In that space, I'm all for PHP.
you need to argue what else you use instead which is so much better than PHP.
No, I don't need to argue that.
My point is that you should use the right tool for the job. The guy I replied to is one of many people who only has one tool in his toolbox: PHP. In my view, that makes him either a novice or a dolt. I'm ok with novices: they know they need to learn more, and eventually do. The dolts, on the other hand, are beyond my power to help.
Taking your comment at face value, it would seem that artists who need to support themselves through means other than art would end up producing less. So let's say that's true: file sharing will lead to an overall decrease in the amount of available music.
Not obviously. An artist in business for themselves will spend a lot of time on business, unless they're so successful that they can afford a manager and staff. That's a lot of time soaked up, possibly more than a part-time job would require. Heck, it could be more than what a full-time job would require. If 1% of active bands make it that far, I'd be amazed. And I'm sure not even 1% of actors or painters or writers make it that far.
Just as bad, once you try to live off your art, you are obliged to produce marketable art rather than what you think is best. That presumably leads to less variety.
Do you think this is an acceptable tradeoff? If so, why? Because I think that's kind of paradoxical: it would mean that culture is suffering so that you can have easier access to culture.
Even assuming your notion that being a full-time artist leads to more and better culture than being a part-time one, I'm not sure the paradox follows. File-sharing may kill large music companies, but it's not clear that means less total money to artists, or fewer full-time artists. Maybe if there's less over-marketed, over-produced pop, there will be more room for artists, not less.
As a counter-example, look at software. If the Internet was going to kill anything, it should have been the commercial software industry, with programmer wages taking a steep dive too. But both are doing amazingly well, and it has given us an open-source movement that has hugely enriched us.
And if that's not an acceptable tradeoff, isn't the purpose of the law to rectify these kinds of imbalances?
Even supposing you're right down the line, I'd say no, that's not the main purpose of law.
Copyrights and patents aren't a mechanism for ultimate fairness; they're to encourage investment in creative works. If copyright on personal entertainment materials has become effectively unenforceable without putting ourselves under permanent Orwellian surveillance, then I'd say screw copyright, or at least enforcement of it on end users.
The big difference between Bach's time and ours is that we're much, much richer. If you live frugally, getting by with a part-time job is perfectly plausible. In effect, the artist can become their own patron.
To suggest that remuneration has little or nothing to do with an artist's ability to find the time to create is plain silly.
I think "nothing" is too strong, and I agree full-time artists can create more and better work than part-time ones. But I don't think that's always the case.
A lot of "full-time" artists spend an awful lot of time managing the business of being an artist. Getting grants, hitting up galleries, promoting their brand, et cetera. It's a frequent complaint that well-known artists may be better self-promoters than they are artists.
I know a number of very good artists who have day jobs, and it's not clear to me that they spend any less time on their art or produce work of lower quality than the artists who are making a full-time living. Indeed, that they don't care about being marketable gives them a freedom that full-time artists often don't have.
Get over it. PHP is not perfect, but it does a damn good job. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so widely used.
Yes, all things that are popular are good and work well! Windows 3.1 and Visual Basic were very popular. So was the belief that the earth is flat. And there's chlamydia. That's hella popular.
I've been using PHP for eight years and there hasn't been a day where I wished I had chosen another language.
No offense, but if you've been using the same language for eight years without any regrets, I don't see you as having enough perspective to offer up much useful information.
As far as I can tell, PHP is popular because it's perfectly adequate language for cranking out some basic dynamic pages, and it's very easy to learn and set up. However, just like Visual Basic, the things that make it useful in the shallow end of the pool keep it from being useful at scale. And from the eternal trickle of security issues and the host of weird issues with it, it was apparently designed by amateurs.
If you're happy with it, that's awesome. Carry on. Just don't get your knickers in a twist because a lot of people correctly see it as the wrong tool for their jobs.
Toll road collections are the kings of inefficiency. There's plenty of reason not to pay for roads by the trip.
Did I say toll roads were good? No, I said they were bad; that's the opposite of good. In particular I said they could be replaced with modern technology that would make them not suck.
I'm glad you're trying to participate, and I'm sure teacher will give you a gold star. But do you think you could read the entire five-line post you're replying to? Heck, in this case, you could have just read the same paragraph you quoted from.
Thanks! I knew a big boy like you could read a whole paragraph!
I do actually think that roads are a perfectly legitimate thing for governments to spend money on
Really? I think they should organize the building of roads, but not pay for them. Not one dime. Just like water, sewer, or electricity.
Sure, roads are valuable and necessary. And without eminent domain, making them would be ridiculous. But beyond that, I think they should get paid for from user fees. Subsidizing them has led to all sorts of inefficiencies, and created a lot of unnecessary dependence on them.
Fifty years ago, the only way we could do that is with toll roads, which are expensive to run and annoying to use. But with modern tech, we can easily do usage metering and congestion pricing. If I can pay by the trip for my car, there's no reason I shouldn't pay for the road the same way.
Carpools? I won't join a carpool. If I wanted to be around other people while commuting, I'd take the bus. I don't get nearly enough time alone, and my 20 minute drive to work is one of the times I have alone with my thoughts (such as they are). Why should I give that up?
Nobody's asking you to give it up. They are asking you to pay your share, though. Is that so bad?
Right now, when you drive during a peak time, you impose costs on all the other drivers. They pay in wasteful delays. With congestion pricing, you pay for your own use, and you pay in cash. Don't want to carpool? Insist on going at peak times? Fab! Just pay for the privilege.
Granted, there is a time and place for things like C. College isn't it, unless it's for a course in operating systems, compilers (though I'd prefer Scheme for this purpose), or some kind of electronics engineering, where stuff like memory management is actually relevant to the subject.
I disagree strongly.
I agree that languages that do memory management for you are great, and for most business programming, I think that's what people should use. I love Perl, I love Java, I love Ruby. However, I think it's important that any programmer know what is actually going on under the hood.
Until you've managed some memory yourself, it's very hard to get what Java's up to, meaning it's very hard to write sane, efficient code. Some of the worst "enterprise" bullshit I've seen was written by people who didn't have a firm grasp of fundamentals, and therefore engaged in cargo cult programming.
After 45-60 minutes of non stop camera going in every direction possible, you just can't watch it without losing your head,
I definitely found it a little disorienting, but scary movies often play on disorientation, so for me it was just part of the effect. I went to see it with a dozen people, and we all enjoyed it. We all had a couple of drinks in us, though, so perhaps a little anesthesia helps.
My question has always been: how come giant monsters are never mammals?
Mammals are less scary.
I think it's the same reason that pets are mostly mammals: the greater shared evolutionary heritage makes them more understandable, more appealing, more sympathetic.
You can most easily see it with baby animals. Baby snakes, baby lizards, baby birds: maybe a little cute. Baby pigs, baby deer, baby dogs: very cute. Baby insects, baby spiders: just easier to step on.
It's easy to add complexity. It's hard to simplify.
Something where Refactoring's author, Martin Fowler, agrees strongly with you.
A lot of what you described isn't refactoring, which is defined as making design improvements that don't change behavior. Instead, those guys were just doing developer goldplating.
I think if you read the book, you'll see how a lot of the techniques in Refactoring are intended to be used in the service of simplification.
Refactoring code is like paying off debt.
Agreed! And that's the best way to explain it to execs.
On a new project, you refactor to keep debt low. On a legacy project, you refactor to keep "interest" costs low. The interest on technical debt comes out as less reliable systems, buggier code, increased maintenance cost, and higher costs for new features. All of those cost cash money, which in my experience is a lot more money than you'd pay to do things right.