So you want AT&T to charge you $10 per month because you don't use it much, when you've proven to them that you're willing to pay $30? They might be evil, but they're not retarded.
The trouble is, once this crew lands on Mars, there's nothing you can do to control them. They may honor their end of the deal and do science for you, or they may just walk around all day like tourists, while supplies last. Worse, some (most?) such volunteers would obviously also be people with minimal attachments on Earth, so why would they care if science is advanced or not? I'm generally a responsible person, but given the last few weeks of my life on a foreign planet, I'm really not sure I'd spend it working.
I completely disagree with you. In many, many cases, wide adoption of an "inferior" standard is much better than fragmentation. HTML is horrid in many ways, yet it enables browsers to be written for many different platforms, and enables us to communicate right now. As for CDMA's supposed technical advantage in rural areas, how good is the overall bandwidth efficiency if GSM carriers have to provide redundant and mutually-incompatible coverage anyway? Instead of naturally fragmenting into compatible regional carriers with mutual roaming agreements, now you need national coverage, which is almost inevitably spotty.
The FCC should have enforced GSM, and it should have enforced number portability much earlier, and it probably should have required unlocked phones. In aggregate, this is better for the consumer/citizen. Giving carriers the flexibility to choose technology did not result in a freer market for us.
There has always been a way to get a "free phone" if the customer doesn't have enough cash up front. It's called a credit card.
Since all the Windows drivers are provided by Apple, I believe it is deliberate on their part to degrade the user experience on anything but OSX.
You have a curiously low threshold for reaching the conclusion that somebody is deliberately mean-spirited. Would a Windows bug also lead you to conclude that Microsoft hates users?
How important do you suppose getting the best Windows experience is at Apple? How many of their best and brightest do you suppose this task attracts?
I think you mistakenly interpreted my comments as some sort of value judgment on the embryos. They are not. What I'm trying to point out is the logical inconsistency between insisting that embryos are "life" yet not quite treating them as the "first-class life" that you and I are. If "abortion is murder", then each miscarriage seem to at least deserve an accidental death investigation (a handful of which may even be negligent homicide), but I hear no cries for such.
To use your example, you cannot be an advocate of equal rights for African-Americans, without also being willing to expend the resources required to investigate their deaths.
You quote poorly. The "not quite fully life" portion refers to the fact that I know of no human society that treats most miscarriages the way it would the death of an infant. I say that to point out that "life begins at conception" is a problematic definition.
The distinction between person and human may be clear to you, but I assure you that it is lost among most voters.
Whether life begins at conception depends entirely on what you mean by "life", and that's a matter for philosophy or religion, not science. Science can never change one's mind about what constitutes life, because life is life by definition.
Whenever necessary, the people who want to believe a certain thing will refine their definitions to suit what they want to believe. Take, for example, the loophole in some laws that forgot to mention that "marriage" must be between a man and a woman that anti-gay folks are trying to close.
While most might "agree that there is a living human at fertilization", the same most would probably not be willing to investigate every single miscarriage as an accidental death, or even potential murder case. Clearly, they're not quite fully "life", both morally and logistically.
Actually, it's quite simple. Purists are people who are bound by certain principles. Principles are good, but sometimes they are not right. Whenever principles lead us to the right solution, purists are successful. Whenever they do not, purists fail.
Pragmatists are not similarly bound, and see principles as useful approximations of the right solution. When the principles fail, they adapt and adjust their approach until they find the right answer.
Most importantly, neither is a substitute for sound judgment. Pragmatists can just as easily be simply wrong as purists. The only hope is that the pragmatist should be less stubborn about the error, while the purist has no choice.
I think you may be taking Dijkstra out of context. While it's important not to be tied to the physics of contemporary computers, his own algorithms do make assumptions about the machine that might implement them. For example, many problems are trivially solved by a infinite number of infinitely fast CPUs, but that doesn't get us anywhere. Take the simple binary search, for example, and you'll see the core assumption that comparisons are expensive. It is in that sense that computer science is about computers, although it must not be limited to what contemporary computers can do.
But more to the point, Knuth is an expert in programming. He wrote TeX, one of the most famously bug-free* programs in existence. I agree completely with his point of not getting bogged down by the language du jour, but I'm not talking about the language du jour. I'm talking about a language.
Do you actually know of a good computer scientist who can't program?
Just as frequently, unfortunately, they turn out people who can't actually program in any of those languages. I think it's very good that a school can teach multiple very different (meaning, not just C/C++/Java) languages, but I also think it's important for a graduate of a 4-year CS degree to be an expert in at least one. To me it's akin to a literature major being able to write very well in one human language.
Yet somehow they manage to design, deploy, and maintain thousands of nuclear warheads over decades. You trust your government with nukes, but not health care? You generally have electric power. You probably have potable water coming out of the tap. Planes don't crash all the time. It does many things wrong, but you're also selectively ignoring many unglamorous things that go right day after day after day.
The government doesn't have to fix health care. Making it better would already be a good thing.
If instead the effort had been applied to fixing OSS, sound on Linux would now be further ahead than it is now.
You hear this a lot in the open source circle. Many projects have close competition (Gecko/KHTML, KDE/Gnome, etc.) where this comment might apply. The problem is that "fixing the few issues that existed" is frequently not only very hard, but also very boring. Put another way, if it was fun and/or easy, the original developers would've already done it. IOW, this is probably crappy work that you have to pay people to do, and unfortunately free software doesn't usually pay, so volunteers gravitate towards the fun and easy (at least, perceived to be easy), which is often to start a new exciting project.
With windows, they started by playing nice with IBM as long as possible, even promoting OS/2 for a while, until the precise moment when they needed to backstab them. With Netscape, Wordperfect, they kept on pushing their average products until the other companies made a mistep, and they were ready to pounce.
I'm no fan (anymore) of Microsoft's, but having actually lived through that era I feel I should contribute my observations. IBM was ready to kill Microsoft, and OS/2 was precisely the weapon to do so, so it's wrong to say Microsoft backstabbed IBM. Netscape and Wordperfect were not nearly the same stories. Wordperfect at one point in time required a key combination to show you a preview of what your page looked like, while Word was much closer to the modern WYSIWYG word processor, and IMO won fair and square on technical merits. Similarly, Excel beat out Lotus 1-2-3, which was very late to the GUI.
My problem with Microsoft was how it acted after their success, such as with Stac and Netscape, as well as with the lack of improvements to their products.
If my house is destroyed, there's a good chance that I'm dead and won't need it. If I'm lucky to have survived, I'll still need some supplies to last until help can get to me, and may even be able to help unprepared people like you.
Counting on some organization to already be prepared is your choice, but do remember Katrina. Anyway, the point is there are things that individuals and local government can already do at minimal cost to much better prepare for a disaster if given a week's notice.
You cannot evacuate cities for long periods just to find out that it was a false alarm.
Correct, but you could update your emergency kit, stock up slightly on water and food, make sure your car has a full tank of gas, and run some refresher fire/earthquake drills. On a larger scale, the government could pre-position medical supplies, communications equipment, vehicles, and staff.
In other words, depending on the perceived accuracy of the alarm, you have a range of options that cost various amounts of money. An earthquake warning with a week's error can already save lives for just minimal cost.
How many launch pads do you have to use for those thousand rovers to be launched within a reasonable time span? Note that Mars is not always the same distance from the Earth, so you don't want to space out the launches.
There's no real rush to learning about Mars, but let's not take forever either. That doesn't mean a manned mission, mind you, just that let's not do a thousand rovers either. Money is valuable, but so is time.
Depression is a disease. [...] one also has the ability to choose what words one listens to.
Are you a doctor? Because as far as I know depression is exactly the disease where one is unable to choose to be happy and ignore the bad things that happen to everybody.
Many Slashdot readers do not understand that while convenience is a sliding scale, there are important thresholds along the way that enable (or disable) certain applications. For example, what you state is entirely correct: you can swap SIM cards around different devices.
However, most people don't do that regularly, probably because you generally have to remove a battery to reveal the SIM slot and so on. The SIM is also not designed to be plugged and unplugged many times, so you may develop contact problems after a while. Finally, the SIMs that I'm familiar with can't generally store all the data (full contact information, email logs, browser bookmarks, etc.) that you want to take along with you.
So, if the idea is to switch "sleeves" daily or more than daily, then the SIM solution is just not convenient enough. Not to say this Modu phone will solve it, but no, you don't already have this.
Improving capitalism doesn't mean socialism or communism. I think most people will agree that anti-trust laws improved capitalism. Many others will argue that environmental protection laws improved capitalism. Still others would argue that socialized medicine improved capitalism. It's not as if all you have are binary settings of laissez-faire capitalism and from-each-according-to-ability-to-each-according-to-need communism.
You misread my scenario. A wear-leveler will indeed avoid wearing down the same erase unit when the disk is nearly full, but every write will then still trigger an erase. It won't destroy an erase unit as quickly as if you didn't have a wear-leveler, but it's closer to a worst case.
No, a large write once a day is hardly the worst case usage scenario for a flash drive. In fact, it's almost the best case scenario and is unrealistic for a desktop computer's usage pattern.
The worst case is something akin to having just one sector free, which means any write will fill up the drive, and the next write to the same spot will require an erase first. So if you want to destroy your flash, fill it up with data, and then constantly rewrite a small file.
5. No automatic copyright for photos. There has to be some artistic quality to them.
This is actually a worse solution in practice than the problem. A common decision a person has to make is whether an act violates copyright. Right now, you know you must negotiate with the owner. With your new law, you need a court every single time the owner disagrees. You might as well say that a computer program should not be protected by copyright if it "sucks," leaving everybody to decide for themselves.
Besides, even if we accept the "no automatic copyright" concept, there are many more exceptions than "artistic quality." For example, if somebody has footage or photos of a dramatic event (say, big terrorist attack in major US city), should this person not be compensated by every news outlet in the world that wants to use it?
The "slightly different way" allows a web page on a small screen to finally be usable. I used to work on mobile browsers for cell phones, but quit basically in disgust because we could never get the hardware support to make it usable. When it's a luxury to have four (instead of two) arrow keys with a center select button, the iPhone's browser UI (which includes the multi-touch hardware and gestures) is itself the revolution, even if others have had pieces of it before.
Slashdot Mirror
So you want AT&T to charge you $10 per month because you don't use it much, when you've proven to them that you're willing to pay $30? They might be evil, but they're not retarded.
Actually, I wouldn't mind the following features:
Basically, at least for UI-level programming, there are lots of ways to make the source code more visually descriptive than plain text.
The trouble is, once this crew lands on Mars, there's nothing you can do to control them. They may honor their end of the deal and do science for you, or they may just walk around all day like tourists, while supplies last. Worse, some (most?) such volunteers would obviously also be people with minimal attachments on Earth, so why would they care if science is advanced or not? I'm generally a responsible person, but given the last few weeks of my life on a foreign planet, I'm really not sure I'd spend it working.
I completely disagree with you. In many, many cases, wide adoption of an "inferior" standard is much better than fragmentation. HTML is horrid in many ways, yet it enables browsers to be written for many different platforms, and enables us to communicate right now. As for CDMA's supposed technical advantage in rural areas, how good is the overall bandwidth efficiency if GSM carriers have to provide redundant and mutually-incompatible coverage anyway? Instead of naturally fragmenting into compatible regional carriers with mutual roaming agreements, now you need national coverage, which is almost inevitably spotty.
The FCC should have enforced GSM, and it should have enforced number portability much earlier, and it probably should have required unlocked phones. In aggregate, this is better for the consumer/citizen. Giving carriers the flexibility to choose technology did not result in a freer market for us.
There has always been a way to get a "free phone" if the customer doesn't have enough cash up front. It's called a credit card.
You have a curiously low threshold for reaching the conclusion that somebody is deliberately mean-spirited. Would a Windows bug also lead you to conclude that Microsoft hates users?
How important do you suppose getting the best Windows experience is at Apple? How many of their best and brightest do you suppose this task attracts?
I think you mistakenly interpreted my comments as some sort of value judgment on the embryos. They are not. What I'm trying to point out is the logical inconsistency between insisting that embryos are "life" yet not quite treating them as the "first-class life" that you and I are. If "abortion is murder", then each miscarriage seem to at least deserve an accidental death investigation (a handful of which may even be negligent homicide), but I hear no cries for such.
To use your example, you cannot be an advocate of equal rights for African-Americans, without also being willing to expend the resources required to investigate their deaths.
...which may be why I wrote "accidental death" first.
You quote poorly. The "not quite fully life" portion refers to the fact that I know of no human society that treats most miscarriages the way it would the death of an infant. I say that to point out that "life begins at conception" is a problematic definition.
The distinction between person and human may be clear to you, but I assure you that it is lost among most voters.
Whether life begins at conception depends entirely on what you mean by "life", and that's a matter for philosophy or religion, not science. Science can never change one's mind about what constitutes life, because life is life by definition.
Whenever necessary, the people who want to believe a certain thing will refine their definitions to suit what they want to believe. Take, for example, the loophole in some laws that forgot to mention that "marriage" must be between a man and a woman that anti-gay folks are trying to close.
While most might "agree that there is a living human at fertilization", the same most would probably not be willing to investigate every single miscarriage as an accidental death, or even potential murder case. Clearly, they're not quite fully "life", both morally and logistically.
Actually, it's quite simple. Purists are people who are bound by certain principles. Principles are good, but sometimes they are not right. Whenever principles lead us to the right solution, purists are successful. Whenever they do not, purists fail.
Pragmatists are not similarly bound, and see principles as useful approximations of the right solution. When the principles fail, they adapt and adjust their approach until they find the right answer.
Most importantly, neither is a substitute for sound judgment. Pragmatists can just as easily be simply wrong as purists. The only hope is that the pragmatist should be less stubborn about the error, while the purist has no choice.
I think you may be taking Dijkstra out of context. While it's important not to be tied to the physics of contemporary computers, his own algorithms do make assumptions about the machine that might implement them. For example, many problems are trivially solved by a infinite number of infinitely fast CPUs, but that doesn't get us anywhere. Take the simple binary search, for example, and you'll see the core assumption that comparisons are expensive. It is in that sense that computer science is about computers, although it must not be limited to what contemporary computers can do.
But more to the point, Knuth is an expert in programming. He wrote TeX, one of the most famously bug-free* programs in existence. I agree completely with his point of not getting bogged down by the language du jour, but I'm not talking about the language du jour. I'm talking about a language.
Do you actually know of a good computer scientist who can't program?
* US$327.68 awaits.
Just as frequently, unfortunately, they turn out people who can't actually program in any of those languages. I think it's very good that a school can teach multiple very different (meaning, not just C/C++/Java) languages, but I also think it's important for a graduate of a 4-year CS degree to be an expert in at least one. To me it's akin to a literature major being able to write very well in one human language.
Yet somehow they manage to design, deploy, and maintain thousands of nuclear warheads over decades. You trust your government with nukes, but not health care? You generally have electric power. You probably have potable water coming out of the tap. Planes don't crash all the time. It does many things wrong, but you're also selectively ignoring many unglamorous things that go right day after day after day.
The government doesn't have to fix health care. Making it better would already be a good thing.
You hear this a lot in the open source circle. Many projects have close competition (Gecko/KHTML, KDE/Gnome, etc.) where this comment might apply. The problem is that "fixing the few issues that existed" is frequently not only very hard, but also very boring. Put another way, if it was fun and/or easy, the original developers would've already done it. IOW, this is probably crappy work that you have to pay people to do, and unfortunately free software doesn't usually pay, so volunteers gravitate towards the fun and easy (at least, perceived to be easy), which is often to start a new exciting project.
I'm no fan (anymore) of Microsoft's, but having actually lived through that era I feel I should contribute my observations. IBM was ready to kill Microsoft, and OS/2 was precisely the weapon to do so, so it's wrong to say Microsoft backstabbed IBM. Netscape and Wordperfect were not nearly the same stories. Wordperfect at one point in time required a key combination to show you a preview of what your page looked like, while Word was much closer to the modern WYSIWYG word processor, and IMO won fair and square on technical merits. Similarly, Excel beat out Lotus 1-2-3, which was very late to the GUI.
My problem with Microsoft was how it acted after their success, such as with Stac and Netscape, as well as with the lack of improvements to their products.
If my house is destroyed, there's a good chance that I'm dead and won't need it. If I'm lucky to have survived, I'll still need some supplies to last until help can get to me, and may even be able to help unprepared people like you.
Counting on some organization to already be prepared is your choice, but do remember Katrina. Anyway, the point is there are things that individuals and local government can already do at minimal cost to much better prepare for a disaster if given a week's notice.
Correct, but you could update your emergency kit, stock up slightly on water and food, make sure your car has a full tank of gas, and run some refresher fire/earthquake drills. On a larger scale, the government could pre-position medical supplies, communications equipment, vehicles, and staff.
In other words, depending on the perceived accuracy of the alarm, you have a range of options that cost various amounts of money. An earthquake warning with a week's error can already save lives for just minimal cost.
How many launch pads do you have to use for those thousand rovers to be launched within a reasonable time span? Note that Mars is not always the same distance from the Earth, so you don't want to space out the launches.
There's no real rush to learning about Mars, but let's not take forever either. That doesn't mean a manned mission, mind you, just that let's not do a thousand rovers either. Money is valuable, but so is time.
Are you a doctor? Because as far as I know depression is exactly the disease where one is unable to choose to be happy and ignore the bad things that happen to everybody.
Many Slashdot readers do not understand that while convenience is a sliding scale, there are important thresholds along the way that enable (or disable) certain applications. For example, what you state is entirely correct: you can swap SIM cards around different devices.
However, most people don't do that regularly, probably because you generally have to remove a battery to reveal the SIM slot and so on. The SIM is also not designed to be plugged and unplugged many times, so you may develop contact problems after a while. Finally, the SIMs that I'm familiar with can't generally store all the data (full contact information, email logs, browser bookmarks, etc.) that you want to take along with you.
So, if the idea is to switch "sleeves" daily or more than daily, then the SIM solution is just not convenient enough. Not to say this Modu phone will solve it, but no, you don't already have this.
Improving capitalism doesn't mean socialism or communism. I think most people will agree that anti-trust laws improved capitalism. Many others will argue that environmental protection laws improved capitalism. Still others would argue that socialized medicine improved capitalism. It's not as if all you have are binary settings of laissez-faire capitalism and from-each-according-to-ability-to-each-according-to-need communism.
You misread my scenario. A wear-leveler will indeed avoid wearing down the same erase unit when the disk is nearly full, but every write will then still trigger an erase. It won't destroy an erase unit as quickly as if you didn't have a wear-leveler, but it's closer to a worst case.
No, a large write once a day is hardly the worst case usage scenario for a flash drive. In fact, it's almost the best case scenario and is unrealistic for a desktop computer's usage pattern.
The worst case is something akin to having just one sector free, which means any write will fill up the drive, and the next write to the same spot will require an erase first. So if you want to destroy your flash, fill it up with data, and then constantly rewrite a small file.
This is actually a worse solution in practice than the problem. A common decision a person has to make is whether an act violates copyright. Right now, you know you must negotiate with the owner. With your new law, you need a court every single time the owner disagrees. You might as well say that a computer program should not be protected by copyright if it "sucks," leaving everybody to decide for themselves.
Besides, even if we accept the "no automatic copyright" concept, there are many more exceptions than "artistic quality." For example, if somebody has footage or photos of a dramatic event (say, big terrorist attack in major US city), should this person not be compensated by every news outlet in the world that wants to use it?
The "slightly different way" allows a web page on a small screen to finally be usable. I used to work on mobile browsers for cell phones, but quit basically in disgust because we could never get the hardware support to make it usable. When it's a luxury to have four (instead of two) arrow keys with a center select button, the iPhone's browser UI (which includes the multi-touch hardware and gestures) is itself the revolution, even if others have had pieces of it before.