I didn't think so, but I continue to be proven wrong time and time again as this whole site slides further and further to the left every day.
Slashdot generally leans left, but this article is not evidence of that. It's just the logical extension of traffic cops writing tickets to meet quotas, and I have no doubt the same thing would be going on under a Democratic administration. Conservatives are supposed to be distrustful of inflexible bureaucracies and centralized government power, but sadly many have abandoned those principles because "our guys" are in charge.
Price: $1,766.00 (before 30% off coupon, which is practically always available.) Price after coupon: $1,236.20
If we're bringing discounts into this, Amazon has perpetual $150 rebates on MBPs, so you can get the 2.0GHz base model for $1850. Also, there's no reason to pay Apple $100 for a 512MB upgrade when you can get a 1GB stick from third parties for the same amount. Finally, like any extended warranty AppleCare isn't a good buy unless you know that your usage patterns are unusually likely to lead to failures.
Look, the reality is that CS theory (including AI) has been fairly stagnant for 20-30 years. Applied programming technology is higher-level than it was a few decades ago, but what about the theory?
Recently there have been a number of interesting developments in AI theory. Google "AIXI" for starters.
I cannot say the U.S. is by any means close to perfect - I can only say it is better than the alternative.
Already posted so I can't mod, but very well said. Yes, it really is possible to oppose many current American policies while still recognizing the oppressive and dangerous ideology of radical Islamic fundamentalism.
I know this is not exactly a popular sentiment here, but I don't really have a problem with DRM.
I don't have a problem with DRM per se; we can always just not buy the crippled content. I have a problem when proponents of DRM make technologies illegal because they *could* be used for copyright infringement.
For now, they're getting by with bridges to a lot of the more popular scripting-style languages, but the fact that the Java bridge failed is proof that this approach can't work for "real" languages.
No. It's proof that it doesn't work for statically typed languages with limited dynamic capabilities. (Maybe that's what you mean by "real", in which case we have an irreconcilable definition dispute). The Python bridge works quite well; in fact some things in Cocoa are easier to do in Python than ObjC.
I'm a bit of a heretic, but I think Apple might do well to wholeheartedly embrace.NET/C#.
Thereby becoming dependent on their primary competitor? Not going to happen; GTK or Qt would make more sense, and that's not going to happen either.
I certainly believe alcohol should be banned to the same extent as other addictive, destructive drugs that render the user a danger to those around them. I certainly wouldn't mind accomplishing it in a more effective way than immediate prohibition.
While I will fight your totalitarian views at every opportunity, I have to at least give you points for consistency. There is no rational reason for alcohol to be legal and pot illegal.
When you go to a Nevada casino, you know that the Nevada Gaming Commission has examined the slots and certified the dealers and operators. If a casino is consistantly fraudulant, the Gaming Commission will shut it down and put the criminals in jail.
Or they'll take bribes.
There might be some honnest on-line casinos, but you can never be sure.
You can never be sure *any* casino is honest. But PartyPoker and PokerStars and others live and die by their reputation. They can rake in millions running fair tables, and any credible evidence of cheating would drive their customers away.
One of the features of online poker is that you can easily record every hand. Serious players can collect databases of hundreds of thousands of hands. Statistical anomolies that deviate from random chance would be apparent at that point, and to my knowledge nobody has found evidence that any of the major sites are rigging the cards.
I'm not saying that online casinos are paragons of virtue. But I disagree with the implication that regulated==honest and unregulated==dishonest.
Sometimes people with excellent math ability can win consistently at games like BlackJack. In my opinion, this is wrong also.
That's just silly. A successful blackjack card counter is following the rules of the game, and coming out ahead by making correct decisions. You might as well say that it's "wrong" to pay off your credit card every month because Mastercard wants to collect interest on the balance.
I just wish I could remember how the quote goes, and/or who said it...
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
As an artist, however, I would rather the parents say "we're not going to watch this movie" and not buy it than for them to re-edit it themselves.
That's nice, but it's not your call. Contrary to the **AA's memes, copyright is not equal to absolute control over usage. Would you prohibit the parents from fast-forwarding over the objectionable parts if you could?
Look at it this way. Would you buy any mac without also buying the applecare? Of course not.
Of course yes. Extended warranties are almost always a bad deal; the seller profits from them, therefore buyers on average lose.
Everybody who has had a mac laptop will tell you that it's been broken down at least once
No significant problems with my Wallstreet, two TiBooks, or MBP over the last 8 years. The worst was when a hard drive died in the first year, and was replaced under the standard warranty. (Another reason you don't need AppleCare; typically electronic stuff either dies quickly due to manufacturing defects, or after many years due to age. AppleCare only covers the second and third years when failures are less likely).
But we can agree regarding the crapulence of the Finder. Fortunately between Quicksilver and iTerm, I don't deal with it much.
The GP used gas which is a good example of an unfair commodity.
Actually the gas market is highly efficient, at the retail level at least. (When you get into crude oil you have OPEC interfering with the free market, but even they aren't omnipotent or oil would never have been below $50/barrel).
They all pretty much cost the same since the supply is controlled by a limited number of companies.
They cost the same because it's a commodity market. Anybody charging more than the prevailing market price goes out of business because customers will go elsewhere. Anybody charging less either goes out of business due to insufficient revenues, or forces his competitors to lower prices or fail. In the equilibrium state, all prices are nearly identical.
I do agree that the ISP market is not competitive, typically due to goverment backed monopolies and duopolies.
And all of that comes at the expense of the environement. There is no such thing as free lunch and there isn't an infinate amount of anything in the universe. Every dollar created comes at the expense of some natural resource without exception.
With varying degrees of efficiency. Economic output per energy unit is consistently rising. The USSR and its satellites had both worse environmental records and lower economic growth than the West.
If the rate of wealth increase in china and india keep up and come within 30 to 40 percent of the US we will see global catastrophies. Can you imagine every chinese with a suburban house and an SUV? Every Indian? Can't happen.
Probably not based on petroleum. But with nuclear, solar, and other forms of energy, quite possibly.
If the Chinese people start an uprising and ask for help, that's a different story althogether. Barring that, stay out of their fucking business.
And likewise, the rest of the world should just shut up about Guantanamo and US-supported torture, right? Sorry, when a government is abusive, I'm going to condemn them whether I'm within their jurisdiction or not. And as much as I disagree with some of the actions of the Bush administration, they look like the ACLU compared to the tyrants in Beijing.
Modems were fundamentally different from newspapers, and to a lesser extent DVDs were fundamentally different from VHS. HD-DVD and BluRay aren't; the only advantage is more pixels, and you pay for it both in dollars and DRM straightjackets. To abuse the analogy further, it would be like AOL coming out with a 96k modem that could only dial to them, and expecting everyone to "upgrade" from 56k.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't think so, but I continue to be proven wrong time and time again as this whole site slides further and further to the left every day.
Slashdot generally leans left, but this article is not evidence of that. It's just the logical extension of traffic cops writing tickets to meet quotas, and I have no doubt the same thing would be going on under a Democratic administration. Conservatives are supposed to be distrustful of inflexible bureaucracies and centralized government power, but sadly many have abandoned those principles because "our guys" are in charge.
Price: $1,766.00 (before 30% off coupon, which is practically always available.)
Price after coupon: $1,236.20
If we're bringing discounts into this, Amazon has perpetual $150 rebates on MBPs, so you can get the 2.0GHz base model for $1850. Also, there's no reason to pay Apple $100 for a 512MB upgrade when you can get a 1GB stick from third parties for the same amount. Finally, like any extended warranty AppleCare isn't a good buy unless you know that your usage patterns are unusually likely to lead to failures.
Right. I've described Java as "very exactly ok". It was intended to be more usable than C++, and it has met those low expectations.
Java works. Python is fun.
Look, the reality is that CS theory (including AI) has been fairly stagnant for 20-30 years. Applied programming technology is higher-level than it was a few decades ago, but what about the theory?
Recently there have been a number of interesting developments in AI theory. Google "AIXI" for starters.
I cannot say the U.S. is by any means close to perfect - I can only say it is better than the alternative.
Already posted so I can't mod, but very well said. Yes, it really is possible to oppose many current American policies while still recognizing the oppressive and dangerous ideology of radical Islamic fundamentalism.
She got axed for timecard fraud, not blogging.
I suspect guys at the CIA occasionally talk about the latest Redskins game when they're officially on the clock.
I know this is not exactly a popular sentiment here, but I don't really have a problem with DRM.
I don't have a problem with DRM per se; we can always just not buy the crippled content. I have a problem when proponents of DRM make technologies illegal because they *could* be used for copyright infringement.
Yes, and also Twinkies, which were created for the primary purpose of surviving nuclear war.
For now, they're getting by with bridges to a lot of the more popular scripting-style languages, but the fact that the Java bridge failed is proof that this approach can't work for "real" languages.
.NET/C#.
No. It's proof that it doesn't work for statically typed languages with limited dynamic capabilities. (Maybe that's what you mean by "real", in which case we have an irreconcilable definition dispute). The Python bridge works quite well; in fact some things in Cocoa are easier to do in Python than ObjC.
I'm a bit of a heretic, but I think Apple might do well to wholeheartedly embrace
Thereby becoming dependent on their primary competitor? Not going to happen; GTK or Qt would make more sense, and that's not going to happen either.
The "new" operator in Java always creates a new object. It's an unnecessary misfeature adopted so C++ guys would be more comfortable.
I certainly believe alcohol should be banned to the same extent as other addictive, destructive drugs that render the user a danger to those around them. I certainly wouldn't mind accomplishing it in a more effective way than immediate prohibition.
While I will fight your totalitarian views at every opportunity, I have to at least give you points for consistency. There is no rational reason for alcohol to be legal and pot illegal.
What is up with the recent explosion in poker-related TV advertising, "celebrity poker" shows and poker spam?
Hole-card cameras, which turned poker into a spectator sport.
When you go to a Nevada casino, you know that the Nevada Gaming Commission has examined the slots and certified the dealers and operators. If a casino is consistantly fraudulant, the Gaming Commission will shut it down and put the criminals in jail.
Or they'll take bribes.
There might be some honnest on-line casinos, but you can never be sure.
You can never be sure *any* casino is honest. But PartyPoker and PokerStars and others live and die by their reputation. They can rake in millions running fair tables, and any credible evidence of cheating would drive their customers away.
One of the features of online poker is that you can easily record every hand. Serious players can collect databases of hundreds of thousands of hands. Statistical anomolies that deviate from random chance would be apparent at that point, and to my knowledge nobody has found evidence that any of the major sites are rigging the cards.
I'm not saying that online casinos are paragons of virtue. But I disagree with the implication that regulated==honest and unregulated==dishonest.
Sometimes people with excellent math ability can win consistently at games like BlackJack. In my opinion, this is wrong also.
That's just silly. A successful blackjack card counter is following the rules of the game, and coming out ahead by making correct decisions. You might as well say that it's "wrong" to pay off your credit card every month because Mastercard wants to collect interest on the balance.
I call your bluff, and raise you a fact.
String bet!
From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
I do wish I could install Ubuntu on it though, but it seems that Parallels doesn't yet support it
I don't know if it's officially "supported", but Ubuntu Dapper works fine under Parallels on my MBP.
As an artist, however, I would rather the parents say "we're not going to watch this movie" and not buy it than for them to re-edit it themselves.
That's nice, but it's not your call. Contrary to the **AA's memes, copyright is not equal to absolute control over usage. Would you prohibit the parents from fast-forwarding over the objectionable parts if you could?
Look at it this way. Would you buy any mac without also buying the applecare? Of course not.
Of course yes. Extended warranties are almost always a bad deal; the seller profits from them, therefore buyers on average lose.
Everybody who has had a mac laptop will tell you that it's been broken down at least once
No significant problems with my Wallstreet, two TiBooks, or MBP over the last 8 years. The worst was when a hard drive died in the first year, and was replaced under the standard warranty. (Another reason you don't need AppleCare; typically electronic stuff either dies quickly due to manufacturing defects, or after many years due to age. AppleCare only covers the second and third years when failures are less likely).
But we can agree regarding the crapulence of the Finder. Fortunately between Quicksilver and iTerm, I don't deal with it much.
The GP used gas which is a good example of an unfair commodity.
Actually the gas market is highly efficient, at the retail level at least. (When you get into crude oil you have OPEC interfering with the free market, but even they aren't omnipotent or oil would never have been below $50/barrel).
They all pretty much cost the same since the supply is controlled by a limited number of companies.
They cost the same because it's a commodity market. Anybody charging more than the prevailing market price goes out of business because customers will go elsewhere. Anybody charging less either goes out of business due to insufficient revenues, or forces his competitors to lower prices or fail. In the equilibrium state, all prices are nearly identical.
I do agree that the ISP market is not competitive, typically due to goverment backed monopolies and duopolies.
Individual doners and "PACs" can only run "issue ads" that use the same rules as we currently use to prohibit "soft money."
Any plan like this either leaves enough loopholes to move a swift boat through, or completely shreds the 1st Amendment. Or both.
And all of that comes at the expense of the environement. There is no such thing as free lunch and there isn't an infinate amount of anything in the universe. Every dollar created comes at the expense of some natural resource without exception.
With varying degrees of efficiency. Economic output per energy unit is consistently rising. The USSR and its satellites had both worse environmental records and lower economic growth than the West.
If the rate of wealth increase in china and india keep up and come within 30 to 40 percent of the US we will see global catastrophies. Can you imagine every chinese with a suburban house and an SUV? Every Indian? Can't happen.
Probably not based on petroleum. But with nuclear, solar, and other forms of energy, quite possibly.
The Chinese appear to be just fine and happy with the way things are over there.
Right, as demonstrated by their recent free and open elections.
And BTW, it appears we shut our student protests down just as harshly as they do.
Whatever you're smoking, you could probably be executed in China for it.
Mau Tse-Tung or Ann Coulter? Same animal...
Give or take a few dozen million dead, sure.
If the Chinese people start an uprising and ask for help, that's a different story althogether. Barring that, stay out of their fucking business.
And likewise, the rest of the world should just shut up about Guantanamo and US-supported torture, right? Sorry, when a government is abusive, I'm going to condemn them whether I'm within their jurisdiction or not. And as much as I disagree with some of the actions of the Bush administration, they look like the ACLU compared to the tyrants in Beijing.
Modems were fundamentally different from newspapers, and to a lesser extent DVDs were fundamentally different from VHS. HD-DVD and BluRay aren't; the only advantage is more pixels, and you pay for it both in dollars and DRM straightjackets. To abuse the analogy further, it would be like AOL coming out with a 96k modem that could only dial to them, and expecting everyone to "upgrade" from 56k.