Business users use MS software because it's a known cost. MS software is generally good enough for a business's needs, and it's known to be good enough. It's sufficiently dominant to control people's expectations, so that its failures and infelicities are accepted as inherent in software. If MS software isn't good enough, that's not normally considered the fault of the person who ordered it.
If some manager or executive moved to Linux, the expected savings would be license fees, and there would be a perceived risk that it might not work well enough, and then it would be somebody's fault.
Microsoft is industry best practice (aka what everyone else is doing, aka mediocrity), and that's at least as strong a force as unique Windows apps.
Have you ever noticed that there are people with other needs and abilities than you have? People who want to do things with their computers that, for one reason or other, require MS Windows? People that care more about getting something done than which OS they use? People who aren't interested in spending lots of time relearning how to use different and sometimes inferior software?
Except that lots of businesses have set themselves up in areas of the Microsoft hotel that require a guest key to reach, and the government has stacks of envelopes pre-addressed to the Microsoft hotel. This isn't the usual take-it-or-leave-it hotel, because not staying there has some considerable costs and inconveniences.
There's been a lot of books considered hard SF that did as improbable a job on the science. So, instead of faster-than-light travel, we get computers made out of a single proton? Both are highly improbable, and both fit nicely into plots.
What mostly bothered me was how the Trisolarians managed to survive. The first time we see them, they also have infrastructure for dehydrating and rehydrating, including large buildings, and the occasional massive screw-up didn't seem to doom civilizations. Finally, we see them expecting something any time now that hasn't happened for hundreds of millions of years, and they can't even make a Beowulf cluster of unfolded protons to model the orbital mechanics in the system? So massive variations and catastrophes in the civilized period, but presumably hundreds of millions of years of evolution? It felt like more of a twisted artificial setting than I'm used to.
Whose funds should be used? This is a great example of infrastructure development, which is generally considered best handled by government, albeit more abstract than roads and airports.
As someone whose tax money went to the Iraq war, I have no sympathy with people who just don't want their money spent on moral things the rest of us agree should be tax-funded.
Nobody else saw it clearly. Poincare had the math for Special Relativity worked out, but didn't believe what the math told him (that there was no preferred inertial reference frame). Einstein was the one who was willing to throw out the ideas of absolute space and time.
I don't get what you mean by explaining quantum mechanics. You can't explain it in terms of classical physics, because things don't work that way. It might help if you were to give an example of what an explanation of some quantum phenomenon could be like (it doesn't have to be correct). It sounds to me like you're looking for meaning that may well not exist (an explanation of the Kantian noumenon in terms of phenomena). There's not necessarily a "why" to laws of physics (although your questions about the speed of light have at least some explanation).
As far as the transitions from classical mechanics went, they happened because of cases where classical mechanics was incapable of explaining observations. AIUI, one problem with modern physics is that it's too blasted successful: we don't have cases where QFT or GR are definitely wrong. Making more observations refines the theories rather than refutes them. We can come up with situations where we really don't know what would happen, but we generally can't observe things in those situations, so we don't know how to modify the theories.
I'm not understanding why we shouldn't try for a theory of everything. There pretty much has to be one, or physics is fundamentally broken.
It doesn't have to derive from the current theories of GR and QFT; after all, neither GR nor QFT is derivable from classical physics. It does have to reduce to GR in the case of objects large enough so we can disregard their quantum nature, and to QFT in weak enough gravitational fields. (Similarly, GR and QFT reduce to classical physics for the most part, so except for its black-body radiation we can explain baseballs in Earth's gravitational field classically.) Is that what you're getting at?
It's not that something is a particle and a wave simultaneously, it's that we can get particle-like and wave-like behavior out of it depending on what we do. It's a particle or a wave at any given time, and can change freely. That's how I understand it, anyway, not being a physicist.
Feynman diagrams rely on the fact that one spatial dimension is like any other, and there are things that can adequately be represented along a line. For example, a photon travels along a line, so you can pick that line as the X axis and plot its motion in X and T. If two things can happen along the same line, they can be plotted that way (even if they would almost never be on the same line in the real world). If something needs more than one spatial dimension to describe, it won't fit into a Feynman diagram.
Functionality is if I write a Java runtime to run Java programs on. I've got a really good case for doing that, which is really what the industry needs in copyright permissions. If I create a different language that's going to run on the JVM, that's functionality. If I create a different language that's not going to run on the JVM, the functionality question is much less clear.
The usual idea of functionality is whether I could write something different and still get the same functionality. In the case of a system that runs Java programs or runs on the JVM, I have to use the API as written. If I'm doing something different, I can get essentially the same functionality with a different API. Oracle is claiming that Google is not intending to run standard Java programs on Android, and is using Dalvik
It has been known for at least twenty years that people are people and will continue to be people, and that all the whining about how they should know what those of us in the field know is pointless. Calling someone stupid because he or she doesn't keep up with computer news is stupid and shows a thorough lack of empathy.
This is an attempt on Microsoft's part to dupe those people who aren't into computers like you and I are into updating their OS regardless of consequences. That's malware.
The real problem here is that people want to own computers, but don't want to take any responsibility for maintaining them or knowing how they work.
The real problem here is people who take any excuse they can to blame the victim. After all, that guy bought a computer, didn't change the defaults, didn't go out and do independent research on how to maintain a computer (ever looked at the instructions that come with the computer?), and didn't keep track of any nefarious thing Microsoft might think up, so it's his fault.
If my car breaks down, it's for a not-completely-predictable mechanical reason. It's never been because of someone's deliberate act (I wasn't trying to run into that thing, so it doesn't count as deliberate). I have an instruction book (the owner's manual) that tells me how to maintain the car, and I follow it, and it's been very reliable. Apparently, though, this level of care is not sufficient for a computer.
However, why did Google choose to use that API? Was it to allow Java software to run under Android, or was it to present a familiar interface to Android programmers? Oracle is arguing that Android is sufficiently different that Google could have designed its own API without losing functionality.
There's another complication here. How much are regular Java programs interoperable with Android programs? If I were implementing a version of Java, I could claim that I need to copy the API to create my own compiler. I'd be on much shakier ground if I were writing a compiler for a new language and decided to use the Java API just for convenience. AIUI, Oracle is arguing that Google produced something that won't run Java programs, and therefore used it to make things more familiar rather than for interoperability.
Somebody has caused the car to go from one place to another, whether by sitting in it, issuing a command, or setting up a regular schedule. That person is responsible for the car being on the road.
Are you familiar with the concept of "common carrier"? It applies pretty well to cell providers, and the conversation should have nothing to do with dropped service. Facebook isn't anything like a common carrier.
Come back when you've learned a little more about how things work.
In the US, "hate speech" is not a legal concept. If I hear it, I may criticize it, which is my right. A "hate crime", in the US, is one of various possible aggravating conditions that can increase the sentence for an already defined crime.
I'd say that minorities are in a much better position today due to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, to give one example of government intervention. The leftist governments of Western Europe do a much better job of providing equal opportunity, and have higher social mobility.
It seems to really bother right-wingers when I point out that personal weapons wielded by people not trained in military action and not accustomed to their unit are going to do absolutely nothing to overthrow a government.
The great thing about freedom of speech is that conservatives are allowed to say things (mostly that I disagree with, but it's a free country). They're allowed to make their own social networking sites and news media and all that. They do have a venue, talk radio, in which they dominate. The leftist reaction has been to try to get leftist talk radio going, which is entirely as it should be. The fact that it has been largely unsuccessful doesn't mean that talk radio needs to change. Now, Facebook is favoring liberal causes, and conservatives whine that they should favor conservative causes rather than to set up their own site and try to compete.
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It's not all that bad if you customize it. It's a reasonably good way of launching the software you use most when your hand's already on the mouse.
Business users use MS software because it's a known cost. MS software is generally good enough for a business's needs, and it's known to be good enough. It's sufficiently dominant to control people's expectations, so that its failures and infelicities are accepted as inherent in software. If MS software isn't good enough, that's not normally considered the fault of the person who ordered it.
If some manager or executive moved to Linux, the expected savings would be license fees, and there would be a perceived risk that it might not work well enough, and then it would be somebody's fault.
Microsoft is industry best practice (aka what everyone else is doing, aka mediocrity), and that's at least as strong a force as unique Windows apps.
Have you ever noticed that there are people with other needs and abilities than you have? People who want to do things with their computers that, for one reason or other, require MS Windows? People that care more about getting something done than which OS they use? People who aren't interested in spending lots of time relearning how to use different and sometimes inferior software?
Except that lots of businesses have set themselves up in areas of the Microsoft hotel that require a guest key to reach, and the government has stacks of envelopes pre-addressed to the Microsoft hotel. This isn't the usual take-it-or-leave-it hotel, because not staying there has some considerable costs and inconveniences.
There's been a lot of books considered hard SF that did as improbable a job on the science. So, instead of faster-than-light travel, we get computers made out of a single proton? Both are highly improbable, and both fit nicely into plots.
What mostly bothered me was how the Trisolarians managed to survive. The first time we see them, they also have infrastructure for dehydrating and rehydrating, including large buildings, and the occasional massive screw-up didn't seem to doom civilizations. Finally, we see them expecting something any time now that hasn't happened for hundreds of millions of years, and they can't even make a Beowulf cluster of unfolded protons to model the orbital mechanics in the system? So massive variations and catastrophes in the civilized period, but presumably hundreds of millions of years of evolution? It felt like more of a twisted artificial setting than I'm used to.
Whose funds should be used? This is a great example of infrastructure development, which is generally considered best handled by government, albeit more abstract than roads and airports.
As someone whose tax money went to the Iraq war, I have no sympathy with people who just don't want their money spent on moral things the rest of us agree should be tax-funded.
Nobody else saw it clearly. Poincare had the math for Special Relativity worked out, but didn't believe what the math told him (that there was no preferred inertial reference frame). Einstein was the one who was willing to throw out the ideas of absolute space and time.
I don't get what you mean by explaining quantum mechanics. You can't explain it in terms of classical physics, because things don't work that way. It might help if you were to give an example of what an explanation of some quantum phenomenon could be like (it doesn't have to be correct). It sounds to me like you're looking for meaning that may well not exist (an explanation of the Kantian noumenon in terms of phenomena). There's not necessarily a "why" to laws of physics (although your questions about the speed of light have at least some explanation).
As far as the transitions from classical mechanics went, they happened because of cases where classical mechanics was incapable of explaining observations. AIUI, one problem with modern physics is that it's too blasted successful: we don't have cases where QFT or GR are definitely wrong. Making more observations refines the theories rather than refutes them. We can come up with situations where we really don't know what would happen, but we generally can't observe things in those situations, so we don't know how to modify the theories.
I'm not understanding why we shouldn't try for a theory of everything. There pretty much has to be one, or physics is fundamentally broken.
It doesn't have to derive from the current theories of GR and QFT; after all, neither GR nor QFT is derivable from classical physics. It does have to reduce to GR in the case of objects large enough so we can disregard their quantum nature, and to QFT in weak enough gravitational fields. (Similarly, GR and QFT reduce to classical physics for the most part, so except for its black-body radiation we can explain baseballs in Earth's gravitational field classically.) Is that what you're getting at?
It's not that something is a particle and a wave simultaneously, it's that we can get particle-like and wave-like behavior out of it depending on what we do. It's a particle or a wave at any given time, and can change freely. That's how I understand it, anyway, not being a physicist.
Feynman diagrams rely on the fact that one spatial dimension is like any other, and there are things that can adequately be represented along a line. For example, a photon travels along a line, so you can pick that line as the X axis and plot its motion in X and T. If two things can happen along the same line, they can be plotted that way (even if they would almost never be on the same line in the real world). If something needs more than one spatial dimension to describe, it won't fit into a Feynman diagram.
Functionality is if I write a Java runtime to run Java programs on. I've got a really good case for doing that, which is really what the industry needs in copyright permissions. If I create a different language that's going to run on the JVM, that's functionality. If I create a different language that's not going to run on the JVM, the functionality question is much less clear.
The usual idea of functionality is whether I could write something different and still get the same functionality. In the case of a system that runs Java programs or runs on the JVM, I have to use the API as written. If I'm doing something different, I can get essentially the same functionality with a different API. Oracle is claiming that Google is not intending to run standard Java programs on Android, and is using Dalvik
It has been known for at least twenty years that people are people and will continue to be people, and that all the whining about how they should know what those of us in the field know is pointless. Calling someone stupid because he or she doesn't keep up with computer news is stupid and shows a thorough lack of empathy.
This is an attempt on Microsoft's part to dupe those people who aren't into computers like you and I are into updating their OS regardless of consequences. That's malware.
The real problem here is people who take any excuse they can to blame the victim. After all, that guy bought a computer, didn't change the defaults, didn't go out and do independent research on how to maintain a computer (ever looked at the instructions that come with the computer?), and didn't keep track of any nefarious thing Microsoft might think up, so it's his fault.
If my car breaks down, it's for a not-completely-predictable mechanical reason. It's never been because of someone's deliberate act (I wasn't trying to run into that thing, so it doesn't count as deliberate). I have an instruction book (the owner's manual) that tells me how to maintain the car, and I follow it, and it's been very reliable. Apparently, though, this level of care is not sufficient for a computer.
I'm seeing Bugs Bunny asking the question of Daffy Duck (or perhaps Elmer).
Sex trafficking would not exist if it weren't profitable, so purchasing the use of sex slaves does contribute to the problem.
Buying licenses is not going to work for Free/Open Source software. For that to thrive, there has to be some legal mechanism to allow use of the APIs.
However, why did Google choose to use that API? Was it to allow Java software to run under Android, or was it to present a familiar interface to Android programmers? Oracle is arguing that Android is sufficiently different that Google could have designed its own API without losing functionality.
There's another complication here. How much are regular Java programs interoperable with Android programs? If I were implementing a version of Java, I could claim that I need to copy the API to create my own compiler. I'd be on much shakier ground if I were writing a compiler for a new language and decided to use the Java API just for convenience. AIUI, Oracle is arguing that Google produced something that won't run Java programs, and therefore used it to make things more familiar rather than for interoperability.
And then it may be up to Congress to change the law. I'd rather not have judges changing the law just to get a result I see as reasonable.
Somebody has caused the car to go from one place to another, whether by sitting in it, issuing a command, or setting up a regular schedule. That person is responsible for the car being on the road.
Are you familiar with the concept of "common carrier"? It applies pretty well to cell providers, and the conversation should have nothing to do with dropped service. Facebook isn't anything like a common carrier.
Come back when you've learned a little more about how things work.
You don't know much about the 1960s, do you?
In the US, "hate speech" is not a legal concept. If I hear it, I may criticize it, which is my right. A "hate crime", in the US, is one of various possible aggravating conditions that can increase the sentence for an already defined crime.
I'd say that minorities are in a much better position today due to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, to give one example of government intervention. The leftist governments of Western Europe do a much better job of providing equal opportunity, and have higher social mobility.
It seems to really bother right-wingers when I point out that personal weapons wielded by people not trained in military action and not accustomed to their unit are going to do absolutely nothing to overthrow a government.
The great thing about freedom of speech is that conservatives are allowed to say things (mostly that I disagree with, but it's a free country). They're allowed to make their own social networking sites and news media and all that. They do have a venue, talk radio, in which they dominate. The leftist reaction has been to try to get leftist talk radio going, which is entirely as it should be. The fact that it has been largely unsuccessful doesn't mean that talk radio needs to change. Now, Facebook is favoring liberal causes, and conservatives whine that they should favor conservative causes rather than to set up their own site and try to compete.