Every generation thinks that the current generation of children is going to hell. Since you're old enough to be a parent, you might remember the comic book censorship debate. A lot of good that did, huh? Our cultural values are a lot more resilient to corruption than you might imagine. Playing cops and robbers didn't turn kids into thugs and thieves.
Look, if values were that easy to corrupt, murder, rape and theft wouldn't be universal human taboos. Our values are rooted in something more fundamental than what we read when we're eight.
I don't have kids, but when I do, I sure as hell won't censor anything. Explain, educate, encourage, yes, but never outright ban something. Ignorance is never healthy.
Instinctively, the more similar* a person is to me, the higher I rank that person in importance. We all feel this way. Every mother thinks her child is more important than a stranger halfway around the world. Who wouldn't blow off work to visit his best friend in the hospital after a car accident?
Why do we feel this way? We're hard-wired for it.
Why? Because our ancestors were the ones who received the help of those with similar genes. As a result, our ancestors prospered and had more children than those who thought of the drosophila. It's just a more effective strategy.
On what basis can you even meaningfully say that the environment is more important than we are? Who's to judge? The invisible sky wizard? Let's be intelligent people here.
We protect the environment so we have a place to live. That's important, but no giraffe is going to write poetry, fall in love, or land on the moon. We should protect the environment only far enough that this protection doesn't impair human progress or happiness.
*: These days, we measure similarity as much by shared ideology as by shared genetic goop.
Instead of wrecking the swamps with oil, why not drain them and put the land to good use? Drained swamps provide some of the most fertile farmland around.
Anything technically possible will be tried eventually. Even if a technological advance turns out to be a loser at first, sometimes we need to try it and either refine it, or learn about alternatives. If we never try anything, we make no progress, and might as well sit on our hands.
Remember those folks who didn't want Galileo, the probe to Jupiter, launched because it had a few kilograms of plutonium? What about the ones who didn't want CERN's new particle accelerator built because they were afraid miniature black holes would be created?
We live in a risky world, and we have to take risks to make progress. Besides, these risks are minimal compared to the ones you probably take every day, driving to work.
What balance? How about the rise of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria, which single-handedly raised the concentration of oxygen to where it is today over a few million years? Keep in mind oxygen was a poison back then, and no doubt killed a lot of early life.
How about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which killed 96% of all marine species and a little over 70% of land species? How about the Cryogenian glaciation, also known as Snowball Earth, when glaciers reached the equator? How about the Carboniferous, when the oxygen concentration was so high that wet grass could burn? Hell, compared to the last ice age, the last ten thousand years have been wickedly hot and weird.
There is no balance in nature. There was no Garden of Eaden before we ate from the tree of science and sinned with industrialization. There was no paradise, only variable, capricious nature. The environment is valuable, but remember that we should protect it for our sake, so that we have a place to live, not because a trout or a tree is morally superior to man.
Actually, modern versions of find (including GNU and OS X find) support this syntax. (Yes, it's standard.)
find "$PATH" -type f/bin/some-program {} +
Which works like the old print0/xargs -0 combination.
Also, ${FOO} is the same as $FOO. If you want to not cause whitespace-separated chunks to expand to multiple words, you must put the variable reference in double quotes.
The heavy users would abuse the unlimited service, forcing the price to go even higher.
Until the law stops them, ISPs will advertise unlimited service to everyone and either cap or kick off the heavy users. That's the situation we're in today.
The computer you typed that comment on has a similar complexity, yet we don't need to posit a new fundamental force for it to work. If you were an otherwise reasonable 19th century scientist stumbling upon a working computer, you'd take the same approach to understanding it that scientists now do to understand the brain.
Besides, even if there were another fundamental force, we could manipulate and measure it with machines.
The fact is that consciousness does not occupy a privileged place in the universe, no matter what your sentimentality might have you believe. We are just machines, all of us, for making more people.
"Disprove" in science doesn't mean what it does in mathematics or in informal conversation. Scientists say a theory has been disproved when enough data are no longer explained by that theory, or a more powerful or simpler theory is developed. Science never "disproved" the luminous aether; scientists merely showed that other theories are much more likely, and have a greater ability to explain the world.
"God did it" has about as much explanatory power as a toothpick.
Also, as far as atheism goes, followers of political candidates are often zealots, but nobody's saying there's a religion of Ron Paul.
Except, that is, fanatic 'true believers' who consider unbelievers to be inferior, and attempt to shout down any opposing views. I don't believe in god(s), but I despise smug, more-intellectual-than-thou atheists as much as I do in-your-face baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, or whatever - and for the same reason. You can say that atheism isn't a formal religion all you want, but its devout adherents show most of the bad traits of followers of any religion.
Follows of $YOUR_FAVORITE_CANDIDATE also exhibit the same behavior, but no sensible person is going to say there's an actual (as opposed to metaphorical) cult on Ron Paul.
We call these people fanboys, extremists, zealots, and so on, but they're not necessarily religious. They're merely annoying.
That's a great idea, but unfortunately, I can't see it happen.
Look at it from a game-theoretic perspective. Imagine a community of ISPs all using this pricing scheme. If one cheats, it'll attract low-info users disproportionately, even if use actually is limited. All the other ISPs will have to follow in order to not be left out of the market. It's a race to the bottom, and your idea is an unstable state. Unfortunately.
But too keep Mac platform safe, we won't discuss it here.
Security professionals who believe in security through obscurity aren't. Also, I suspect that people who can't differentiate "to" and "too" aren't smart enough to really consider all the nuances of full system security.
In other words, my crackpot meter is going "beep! beep! beep! beep!"
Point conceded. I hadn't thought about implicit 'this' making porting easier. (I'm generally a fan of explicit 'this', like in CLOS and Python.) Also, I personally haven't had any problems with GObject startup.
As for COM -- yes, using the C bindings directly is complex. But that complexity results from the impedance mismatch between C and a distributed component model. The COM people could have done better, but not much better.:-)
The reasons I translated the C code to C++ were: 1) eliminate all global variables, so multiple simulators could exist simultaneously without interfering with each other, 2) define all interfaces in one place so it's easier to work with and evolve the code, 3) enable SWIG to automatically generate an object oriented wrapper for any of a large number of scripting languages, like Python, 4) Impose some sane programming conventions on the code, for reliability and readability's sake.
You can do all these things with C or hell, any language that has structures and function pointers. Object orientation is a state of mind, not a programming language feature.
Just look at GTK+. It's good, clean, modular code with better bindings than SWIG will ever crap out.
Furthermore, COM does a whole lot more than C++ does, and saying it's the result of trying to "simulate C++ in C" is disingenuous. Furthermore, given how much it does, COM isn't even all that bad!
If C++ has any killer feature, it's the templating system. And Common Lisp did that better back in the mid-eighties.
Actually, I agree with you as long as we're talking about companies that are privately held by a few people. In that case, freedom of association wins.
Corporations, on the other hand, should be regulated tightly. Because they have a legal obligation to put profit ahead of everything else, and because they have so many layers of middle management, they'll do anything that'll increase the perception of profitability unless it's illegal. There's power without anything but financial responsibility, and unfortunately, lots of evil things don't have financial consequences.
If a person on the street can't help but bite everyone who he sees, he's insane, and we put him in a mental health facility. It's not his fault, but we need to remove some of his rights in order to protect society. The same principle applies to corporations: they can't help but be vicious profit-hungry monsters, so we must restrain them.
If you want to live in that kind of society, move to Singapore, where there's a prohibition on gum. Me? I'll accept the slight risk of a drunk ruining my day in order to not live under MADD's thumb.
They shouldn't be able to say "no drinking". That's just a choice. But if you have something more serious going on (like a drinking problem) that's indicative of something more serious and could easily effect them.
Well, the company can deal with the situation if and when it becomes a problem that can "effect [sic] them." Your worldview veers dangerously close to totalitarianism. Government is not a club to force people to give up habits you find disagreeable. We could reduce drunk driving to zero tomorrow with a sufficiently oppressive society. Although reducing drunk driving is a socially defensible goal, sacrificing persona liberty to achieve that reduction is not acceptable.
The rights of people ought to trump the rights of corporations. Society exists to benefit people. Corporations are merely a means to make society more efficient and don't have any natural rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Every generation thinks that the current generation of children is going to hell. Since you're old enough to be a parent, you might remember the comic book censorship debate. A lot of good that did, huh? Our cultural values are a lot more resilient to corruption than you might imagine. Playing cops and robbers didn't turn kids into thugs and thieves.
Look, if values were that easy to corrupt, murder, rape and theft wouldn't be universal human taboos. Our values are rooted in something more fundamental than what we read when we're eight.
I don't have kids, but when I do, I sure as hell won't censor anything. Explain, educate, encourage, yes, but never outright ban something. Ignorance is never healthy.
So friggin' what? I question the assumption that pornography of any sort is bad in the first place.
"Aeon Flux" might as well have been the sequel to "I am Legend".
Humans are, in fact, more important.
Instinctively, the more similar* a person is to me, the higher I rank that person in importance. We all feel this way. Every mother thinks her child is more important than a stranger halfway around the world. Who wouldn't blow off work to visit his best friend in the hospital after a car accident?
Why do we feel this way? We're hard-wired for it.
Why? Because our ancestors were the ones who received the help of those with similar genes. As a result, our ancestors prospered and had more children than those who thought of the drosophila. It's just a more effective strategy.
On what basis can you even meaningfully say that the environment is more important than we are? Who's to judge? The invisible sky wizard? Let's be intelligent people here.
We protect the environment so we have a place to live. That's important, but no giraffe is going to write poetry, fall in love, or land on the moon. We should protect the environment only far enough that this protection doesn't impair human progress or happiness.
*: These days, we measure similarity as much by shared ideology as by shared genetic goop.
Instead of wrecking the swamps with oil, why not drain them and put the land to good use? Drained swamps provide some of the most fertile farmland around.
Similarly, early human settlers wiped out the North American megafauna when they arrived.
Anything technically possible will be tried eventually. Even if a technological advance turns out to be a loser at first, sometimes we need to try it and either refine it, or learn about alternatives. If we never try anything, we make no progress, and might as well sit on our hands.
Remember those folks who didn't want Galileo, the probe to Jupiter, launched because it had a few kilograms of plutonium? What about the ones who didn't want CERN's new particle accelerator built because they were afraid miniature black holes would be created?
We live in a risky world, and we have to take risks to make progress. Besides, these risks are minimal compared to the ones you probably take every day, driving to work.
What balance? How about the rise of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria, which single-handedly raised the concentration of oxygen to where it is today over a few million years? Keep in mind oxygen was a poison back then, and no doubt killed a lot of early life.
How about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which killed 96% of all marine species and a little over 70% of land species? How about the Cryogenian glaciation, also known as Snowball Earth, when glaciers reached the equator? How about the Carboniferous, when the oxygen concentration was so high that wet grass could burn? Hell, compared to the last ice age, the last ten thousand years have been wickedly hot and weird.
There is no balance in nature. There was no Garden of Eaden before we ate from the tree of science and sinned with industrialization. There was no paradise, only variable, capricious nature. The environment is valuable, but remember that we should protect it for our sake, so that we have a place to live, not because a trout or a tree is morally superior to man.
Actually, modern versions of find (including GNU and OS X find) support this syntax. (Yes, it's standard.)
/bin/some-program {} +
find "$PATH" -type f
Which works like the old print0/xargs -0 combination.
Also, ${FOO} is the same as $FOO. If you want to not cause whitespace-separated chunks to expand to multiple words, you must put the variable reference in double quotes.
Thanks. That was a great explanation.
Until the law stops them, ISPs will advertise unlimited service to everyone and either cap or kick off the heavy users. That's the situation we're in today.
The computer you typed that comment on has a similar complexity, yet we don't need to posit a new fundamental force for it to work. If you were an otherwise reasonable 19th century scientist stumbling upon a working computer, you'd take the same approach to understanding it that scientists now do to understand the brain.
Besides, even if there were another fundamental force, we could manipulate and measure it with machines.
The fact is that consciousness does not occupy a privileged place in the universe, no matter what your sentimentality might have you believe. We are just machines, all of us, for making more people.
Kudos for using "begs" properly.
Theology was never, is not, and will never be a science: it makes no falsifiable predictions.
"Disprove" in science doesn't mean what it does in mathematics or in informal conversation. Scientists say a theory has been disproved when enough data are no longer explained by that theory, or a more powerful or simpler theory is developed. Science never "disproved" the luminous aether; scientists merely showed that other theories are much more likely, and have a greater ability to explain the world.
:-) )
"God did it" has about as much explanatory power as a toothpick.
Also, as far as atheism goes, followers of political candidates are often zealots, but nobody's saying there's a religion of Ron Paul.
(Although there is a Church of Emacs.
Follows of $YOUR_FAVORITE_CANDIDATE also exhibit the same behavior, but no sensible person is going to say there's an actual (as opposed to metaphorical) cult on Ron Paul.
We call these people fanboys, extremists, zealots, and so on, but they're not necessarily religious. They're merely annoying.
That's a great idea, but unfortunately, I can't see it happen.
Look at it from a game-theoretic perspective. Imagine a community of ISPs all using this pricing scheme. If one cheats, it'll attract low-info users disproportionately, even if use actually is limited. All the other ISPs will have to follow in order to not be left out of the market. It's a race to the bottom, and your idea is an unstable state. Unfortunately.
Security professionals who believe in security through obscurity aren't. Also, I suspect that people who can't differentiate "to" and "too" aren't smart enough to really consider all the nuances of full system security.
In other words, my crackpot meter is going "beep! beep! beep! beep!"
I wish I had mod points today, sir.
Point conceded. I hadn't thought about implicit 'this' making porting easier. (I'm generally a fan of explicit 'this', like in CLOS and Python.) Also, I personally haven't had any problems with GObject startup.
:-)
As for COM -- yes, using the C bindings directly is complex. But that complexity results from the impedance mismatch between C and a distributed component model. The COM people could have done better, but not much better.
You can do all these things with C or hell, any language that has structures and function pointers. Object orientation is a state of mind, not a programming language feature.
Just look at GTK+. It's good, clean, modular code with better bindings than SWIG will ever crap out.
Furthermore, COM does a whole lot more than C++ does, and saying it's the result of trying to "simulate C++ in C" is disingenuous. Furthermore, given how much it does, COM isn't even all that bad!
If C++ has any killer feature, it's the templating system. And Common Lisp did that better back in the mid-eighties.
Actually, I agree with you as long as we're talking about companies that are privately held by a few people. In that case, freedom of association wins.
Corporations, on the other hand, should be regulated tightly. Because they have a legal obligation to put profit ahead of everything else, and because they have so many layers of middle management, they'll do anything that'll increase the perception of profitability unless it's illegal. There's power without anything but financial responsibility, and unfortunately, lots of evil things don't have financial consequences.
If a person on the street can't help but bite everyone who he sees, he's insane, and we put him in a mental health facility. It's not his fault, but we need to remove some of his rights in order to protect society. The same principle applies to corporations: they can't help but be vicious profit-hungry monsters, so we must restrain them.
If you want to live in that kind of society, move to Singapore, where there's a prohibition on gum. Me? I'll accept the slight risk of a drunk ruining my day in order to not live under MADD's thumb.
Well, the company can deal with the situation if and when it becomes a problem that can "effect [sic] them." Your worldview veers dangerously close to totalitarianism. Government is not a club to force people to give up habits you find disagreeable. We could reduce drunk driving to zero tomorrow with a sufficiently oppressive society. Although reducing drunk driving is a socially defensible goal, sacrificing persona liberty to achieve that reduction is not acceptable.
The rights of people ought to trump the rights of corporations. Society exists to benefit people. Corporations are merely a means to make society more efficient and don't have any natural rights.