"So, please explain to us using your devastating powers of logic why this is an acceptable conclusion to draw based on one person's experience on one set of hardware, but it is not acceptable for someone to cite a counter-example of the software running perfectly stably to highlight that, arguably, any instability is not the fault of the OS per se but rather the reviewer's improperly configured system?"
It is not reasonable to base a conclusion on either of those anecdotes. Put them together -- one stable, one instable experience -- you still can't reach a reasonable conclusion.
However, add to that the fact that the guy who was arguing *for* Vista's stability also acknowledges that there is a "relatively common" sound driver bug that causes crashes -- I think with this evidence, you could reasonably conclude that Vista is unstable.
I got tha Deva-STATE-in' Ill-logic!!
Outta Sight In-Sight-Full! Mod me up, DJ Doomsday! <toke> <cough> <cough!>
"Your trite response misses the point - I'm providing anecdotal evidence to refute the anecdotal story presented by the author of the article that is the subject of this slashdot discussion. Don't you think you should be directing these comments towards the article, and not me?"
No. I should be directing these comments to you, because you are making logic errors in your argument.
The fact that you haven't had a crash doesn't 'refute' the author's experience. He had crashes, you didn't. These anecdotal pieces of evidence don't wipe each other out. Was the author lying to us, or making up his crash stories, simply because you never had a crash? No, that's silly. He had a bad experience with Vista, you didn't. Your story doesn't make him wrong, any more than his would make yours wrong. Only if he were lying or misrepresenting would that make his story wrong.
"Why don't you name me a single OS that won't become unstable with faulty drivers. "
Irrelevant. What we are talking about is how stable Vista is for the general public, on common hardware in typical scenarios. You claim never to have had a crash with any OS aside from DOS 6 -- so what? Does that mean no OS has ever crashed, except DOS 6? No, that's an over-generalization. Because you never had a problem, that doesn't mean that Windows ME wasn't a shitty, buggy, lock-up-and-crash-prone OS that should never have seen a retail shelf.
You have said yourself that there is a *common* problem with sound card drivers. We both agree that faulty drivers cause problems. But should it be a *common* problem, especially for MS' flagship product, released to the public? Shouldn't MS make better drivers, or only allow well-tested, signed drivers? If faulty drivers are a *common* problem, doesn't that show some problem in MS' development or distribution methods?
"I've been running the 64-bit version of Vista since it was released and it hasn't crashed on me once."
"I'm not having problems; therefore, nobody else could be having any, either."
" This guy couldn't figure out which driver/piece of hardware was causing this instability in a MONTH?"
He was using it as a common user with OEM hardware. You're telling me that Joe Six-pack can troubleshoot a driver problem in any timeframe? Remember, MS is marketing this as a retail, for-the-masses OS. The review chose to review the machine as a typical end-user.
"Btw, chances are it was a sound card driver - this is a moderately common problem, but it sure isn't the end of the world."
So now you admit sound card drivers are a common problem? You're right, it's not the end of the world, but the reviewer did claim it was the end for a lot of his data -- which goes against the whole reason to use a computer in the first place -- to store your data.
"This isn't 1994 anymore. The arguments against MS for making unstable operating systems ended when NT was released. Since Windows 2000, MS has made stable operating systems that really are usable by the average joe without difficulty."
Except for the fact of this relatively common sound card driver bug causing crashes. You have openly admitted as much yourself. Sounds like 1994 all over again.
I am in favor of such forms of government as you listed above, but I think three things have to happen in order for them to be implemented on a large scale.
These have to be shown to work on a large scale. This is where I give hippies credit -- they tried creating communes and 'intentional communities' in the sixties stretching to today. To a large part, they didn't have staying power, much less spreading power. There are still intentional communities up and running today, but more or less, they failed. But they tried. They tried and failed. Compared to libertarians, that's amazing. I hear a lot of talk from libertarians, but I don't know of any libertarian cities or municipalities. I'm aware of the Free State Project, but AFAIK, it's just a list of people *intending* to move *someday*. There will be a lot of bugs and details to work through in an actual, functioning direct democracy.
Things have to get so bad that people are willing to give up on a system that has mostly worked for 200+ years all around the world. Sorry, I don't think average people are motivated enough to change their form of government. Things have to get really bad before people start looking for serious alternatives. Right now, the only people these kinds of projects will attract will be zealots and dogmatists. While such attempts are important and necessary, the vast majority of people will not live under a totally new system unless their currently lifestyle is un-maintainable.
Lastly, such institutions must be taught in schools. This is kind of 'after the revolution', but I think once you are living in a direct democracy, you have to teach the form of government to kids. Contrary to American belief, if you give kids -- children -- freedom and responsibility, they will learn to behave like adults. Allow them to fail. Our system of education, IMHO, leans towards fascist, infantilizing behavior in children, where they depend on the teacher for everything. In other countries, such as in Europe, kids are given much more free reign to complete their assignments, and they do alright. For several years of my elementary and middle school education, I attended a Montessori school, where we have a lot of freedom to get our work done. I was much better prepared for public high school, and got more out of it, than my public school peers. Kids will live up to their expectations; if you treat them like children, they will remain children. If you teach them to become adults, you will get adults at the end of their education.
I think you're right. In America, our system still works well enough that people's daily lives aren't yet too much impacted by fraud and cronyism.
There's a quote I encountered somewhere in my anthropology studies that says "People don't protest when their bellies are full." Everyone loves to say that nobody in America cares, but when the shit starts hitting the fan, you will witness a sea change in the US, on the scale of the 1930s. The kindling is building up, sooner or later some event will spark the whole thing aflame.
I was reading over your post, and I think I kind of misread it. I think we probably do agree more than we disagree. It's easy to point out situations like Katrina where supposed representative government has failed, but the everyday stories, where government has worked for the most part for hundreds of years, such as, say, New York or Pennsylvania. There are spectacular failures that capture attention, but the quiet examples of the system mostly working don't get capture the imagination.
That's not to say that there is no corruption -- no system is perfect. But I think for the most part, you can consider it a success. There is a pendulum of corruption and cleansing of the system, and it oscillates back and forth. Corruption creeps in, and eventually when it affects enough people's daily lives, they start protesting and demanding a cleaning. Then some politician makes a career out of cleaning up the system, does some cleaning, and things improve. Then the system slowly corrupts again, and the cycle repeats.
I guess I would say that if the government is corrupt, it's not truly representative government. Instead it's a patron system, where it's who you know, or who you have paid off, instead of government representing the expressed interest of the people. In name, it is representative government, but in reality it's not, if it can be bought, or if favors are traded.
You are right, that the Incans and Romans are conquering, Imperial governments. But, the thing is, the lifestyle and culture we are used to here in the US can only be created by Imperial government. If we were without that kind of government, we would also be without public infrastructure.
We can go to a system where the is little to no government, but then we would have the infrastructure we are used to, like highways, electricity, sewers, gas pipelines, cities with skyscrapers, etc. I've spent some time in small, out-of-the way villages that are "off the grid" and "outside the system". Nothing gets accomplished that's bigger than one extended family can do. So you only have small houses or huts, maybe a church (and usually those are organized and driven with the structure of the sponsoring church organization, not just the families). No bridges or sewers. No infrastructure. You can only have what you can backpack in, or float in on a boat, or collect in the woods.
I enjoy those types of social structures (life is simpler), but I also enjoy living in a city with lots of infrastructure ( you have much more creature comforts and entertainment). A lot of technophile, libertarians geeks really are unaware of the benefits of government that they just take for granted. They think it happens in spite of government, but I haven't seen a case where that happens. Small villages just can't maintain paved roads or build a concrete bridge, much less run an internet. I'm not saying it can't happen; I just haven't seen it, and at this point I am suspicious of the libertarian paradise of no government. There are such places, like war-torn Somalia, or the middle of the amazon, where you could get speared for looking at someone the wrong way. There is no way to improve your lot in those societies. People basically live the way their parent have lived for dozens of generations back, until the village starts becoming more involved in whatever Imperial government it belongs to. Instead of having new technology and improved medicine, they learn the old traditions, such as bow hunting, herbal medicine, and small-scale garden plot farming, for thousands of years.
I've met very few libertarians who would truly be comfortable living in a small village, but if we give up Imperial government, even if is a responsible, representative government, with built-on checks on government, we give up a lot that we are used to here in the US. I think at this point, we have to do the best we can with a system we know has worked in the past. As far as the future, I am in favor of direct democracy.
I agree with you that corruption, which includes mis-management of money, is the problem that created the tragedy of New Orleans.
However, I disagree that the libertarian perspective that government is the problem, and not the solution, is wrong, also. I've spent a decent amount of time in South America where there is only corrupt government. There are places like small, out-of-the-way villages, where the everyday person has immense personal freedom, but the problem is something like getting a bridge built properly can't happen without some form of government, whether it's the local or national government, or an international aid project. So the people are able to make a living without paying taxes, but in the village, all the homes are one or two stories, the streets are unpaved, there is no sewer system, no electricity, etc. etc. When a bridge collapses, or the road or runway washes out, it just stays down, and the people work around it. However, the community is never able to organize themselves enough to build a new bridge or clear the runway. Their lifestyle just downsizes. They start backpacking materials across a foot-bridge, instead of trucking it across the river. They take a three-day bus instead of an hour-long flight. They light their homes with candles and cook with wood, instead of electricity and gas.
I never see libertarians migrating to places without government, like Somalia. They love to stay in America, where we have an excellent public infrastructure, created by functioning, representative government, and then complain that government creates problems. I think it's naive. Areas without government are controlled by warlords, and such societies are even more corrupt, and people have fewer opportunities to improve their life. In every civilization, from the Romans to the Incans, monumental public architecture, such as well-maintained roads, bridges, and public buildings have always been the domain of government. It's no different today.
We need properly-functioning representative government, not corrupt government. Getting rid of government because it is corrupt to various degrees is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What the right solution is, in my mind, is to pressure the government is to get rid of corruption, and make government more responsible to the needs of the people.
Several times I got an email that had links to the google maps sections of New Orleans underwater. Even from bird's eye view, it was clearly an unliveable disaster area. I think this was an email meme going around.
You have a valid point, but I think there will always be a need for a port on the mouth of the Mississippi river. It was the fifth largest port in the US, IIRC. That's the difference between New Orleans and beach-front resort property in Florida. We don't need the resort homes; we do need a port for the Mississippi river. That port will need workers, and those workers will need housing and grocery stores, etc. I think it's a question how far inland we re-build New Orleans. Unless we want a 3rd-world shanty-city in the US, servicing a major port. .
Oh good, for a minute there I thought the heavens were going to crash into the Earth because people didn't understand exactly how they worked...
Natural phenomena still continues in spite of the fact that people don't understand it or believe in the most accurate theory. So what? What is the value of pointing that out?
"Reality is still reality despite what you believe" is an argument that works on *both* sides of the debate. It doesn't get us anywhere.
"Why should my tax dollars go to people who have chosen to live in disaster-prone areas?"
You're failing to look at the big picture. The reason is because New Orleans is one of the busiest ports in the world. All of the goods we send down the Mississippi river enter the ocean through the port of New Orleans.
Of course, the port is more than just long docks and loading cranes. Part of the infrastructure of the port are the human workers who actually make the thing go. All of the people who live in New Orleans provide the human infrastructure to keep the port running. That's the reason they live there -- the port needs human laborers to keep the cargo coming in. Those human laborers need places to sleep at night, places to eat, places to buy groceries from, etc. You get the idea.
The problem with ports is that they have to be on the water. We can't build ports in the middle of Montana so that they will be safe from hurricanes. Ports, which hopefully I don't need to explain are a vital part of our infrastructure, will periodically be threatened by flooding and hurricanes. As a society, we have to band together to create massive projects such as ports so we can import our morning coffee from South America and send our DVDs to Europe. You won't personally be conscripted to work on the port itself, like in the pyramid-building days of ancient Egypt, but you will have to pitch in some money in the form of taxes.
Or, we could just let our ports be destroyed, one by one, after each flood or hurricane. We don't really *need* bananas from Brazil, or rice from China. But I don't think you'll find much to eat in the middle of your desert.
As a society, we did fuck up the New Orleans situation. We had a horrifically inadequate levy system. Politicians at all levels failed to bring them up to par for decades. As a society, we didn't plan ahead to protect our infrastructure, and now we are paying for it.
I do agree that if people are taking risks, such as building million-dollar beachfront homes in California or Florida, we don't need to subsidize them through taxes. However, we do need a port on the mouth of the Mississippi, and we need to make sure that that port will be manned no matter what natural disasters threaten it.
I don't have a theory. You don't have to immediately have a theory for every suspicious event. I'm satisfied at this point to say "I don't know what happened, I think we need more facts before we jump to conclusions."
But, I do have some problems with your theory. First, I don't see any reason to assume 'accident' or 'random chance' by default. Second, I saw this story posted on digg two days ago. If google was interested in maintaining an accurate map, shouldn't they have fixed it by now? Have google's offices been closed Friday and Saturday?
The fact that they haven't repaired the error argues *against* some lackey making an error. If there weren't enough safeguards in place to prevent them from making this error (i.e. double-checking your work, peer review, timestamp checks), what's keeping them fixing the mistake? Don't they have managers or overseers whose job it is to check out changes made to the map? Aren't there some cartographers or GIS guys running around there, saying, "Hey, who put up these old images?" An organization of google's size doesn't make a product as large as google maps without layers of bureaucracy and oversight. You simply wouldn't get a decent map of the US without more than 'an underling' working on the project.
If it's so easy to make a mistake this glaring, shouldn't google maps be wildly inaccurate in many places? If google maps are fairly accurate, that means there are many eyeballs ( i.e. corporate structure and bureaucracy ) checking the work, reviewing changes, implementing procedures and code to make sure that the maps are accurate.
This change would have had to pass through those checks. I can see something like the badlands of Montana being out-of-date, but the damage from hurricane Katrina? None of the managing cartographers said "Hey, these images are pre-Katrina! If we post them, our map would be wrong."
"AI : We wanted to integrate in our game the original AI behavior of the ghosts (those that were in the original Pacman game). Without AI, the game was not interesting to play, since a random behavior is too simple to play. Each ghost has its own personality: Shadow is the red ghost and it chases Pacman all the time, using a straight forward tracking algorithm. Speedy is the pink ghost. It is very fast but moves in a random manner. Bashful is the blue ghost: it is shy at the beginning and escapes from pacman all the time, but if Pacman approaches him to much, then it is not shy anymore and begins to chase him (Pacman is then chased by two ghosts at the same time...). Pokey is the orange ghost and is slow and moves in a random manner. "
Not as complex as the story that I read, but apparently they don't follow a pre-planned course.
"but I'd be willing to bet it was simply decided based on quality/resolution of images, and some underling working on it didn't really think about the fact that it the imagery in question is significantly different from how it looks now."
I'd like to take you up on your bet.
If google regularly revises its images on google maps, sometimes rolling them back in time for reasons of quality or resolution, I'd believe it. I doubt that any American would mistakenly upload old images of New Orleans, no matter their seniority or expertise, given what a giant story Katrina was. If it was a simple underling's error, why hasn't it been rolled back yet?
One factor you are ignoring is that by using old images, they have made their maps less accurate. The idea of a map is that you know where you are and what the things around you look like. Imagine they had access to super hi-rez satellite images from the 1980s. Should they use them? They *do* have higher resolution...
Of course not! Lots has changed and been built in the US since the 1980s. You would just be creating a very hi-rez, inaccurate map. Who needs that? Who cares if you have higher-rez images of the past? You don't want them on a current map.
The fact is that the fallout from Katrina, and the fact that very little has improved two years later, is a serious blight on America's image as a first-world-nation. You expect this kind of thing in Africa or South America.
I don't have any evidence for my particular interpretation, but you certainly don't have any for yours.
When I was contemplating learning video game programming, I was reading a guide that told you first to program a pong clone, and then a pac-man clone. Why pac-man? It teaches you AI. The ghost behavior is actually fairly complex. One ghost wanders randomly, another tries to get on the opposite side of the board from wherever pac-man is. The other two form a hunting pair: one tries to cut off your escape while the other goes for the kill.
I never thought that the ghosts would be so complex!
At times in the past, I've proposed a reputation system for credentials. There's a lot of possible ways to do it, but it's basically a quantification of public opinion.
As I imagine it, people would mod your articles and that would affect your reputation. Additionally, people could mod you directly. One user, one vote per article or other user.
Then, as you are browsing articles, you can set up your own filters, setting thresholds of ratings for articles, perhaps giving bonuses for personal mods. There would be a default filter for anonymous browsing to keep casual users from seeing too much crap.
You can't buy cool. Cool is something you define personally. It's entirely subjective and based on whim. Corporations do business by trying to understand and meet other people's needs. If a corporation is trying to buy 'cool', they are trying to guess what someone else will think is cool. You will never guess correctly. The 'coolness' you are trying to buy becomes an imitation of what some corporate decision makers think Gen-Xers will think is cool, which is not coolness. Cool has an 'is-ness', a zen-like quality that can't be defined. If you are trying to be, then by definition, you are not cool. You are a wanna-be.
You can argue that the kind of cynical, postmodern, commercial/corporate kitch can be cool , but I say again, as long as something is being what it is, rather than trying to be something else to impress someone, then it is cool. If they are consciously going with corporate/commercial kitch with awareness, and embracing it, then they are being cool, being themselves. If they are inadvertently creating corporate wanna-be-cool kitch without awareness, then that is trying, which is not cool.
I read the articles. I didn't see anything about heat and noise output. Can anyone fill me in? I would guess it would be minimal and none, respectively.
IIRC, a few years ago, documentation about the X window system had scary warnings about blowing up your monitor if you attempted to use an incorrect video mode. I can't find an authoritative link, but here are some hints:
"I've always wondered why someone hasn't put up a huge server farm in places like Alaska or Russia. From my underestanding a big "cost" is in the cooling."
Another big "cost" might be connectivity.
Sorry to sound so smarmy, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity;)
I'm open-minded about UFO sightings. However, I grew up right next to a small airport and saw several "UFOs" that I shortly realized was an airplane.
As far as objects disappearing from the naked eye, I can think of an easy explanation offhand. This is something I've witnessed personally: When an airplane is reflecting sunlight in the evening, it shows up as a bright metallic object. Because both the sun and the airplane are in motion, there will be a point in time, a single instant, when the light goes to a different angle. At this point, the bright, shiny airplane becomes totally dark. If the plane is far enough away, it just disappears. It's like someone using a mirror to reflect sunlight right into your eyes, and slowly turning it away. There will be a single moment when it just stops shining.
At this time, I'm not aware of any well-understood phenomena that explains multiple 90* turns at high speeds -- so good point there.
Slashdot Mirror
"So, please explain to us using your devastating powers of logic why this is an acceptable conclusion to draw based on one person's experience on one set of hardware, but it is not acceptable for someone to cite a counter-example of the software running perfectly stably to highlight that, arguably, any instability is not the fault of the OS per se but rather the reviewer's improperly configured system?"
It is not reasonable to base a conclusion on either of those anecdotes. Put them together -- one stable, one instable experience -- you still can't reach a reasonable conclusion.
However, add to that the fact that the guy who was arguing *for* Vista's stability also acknowledges that there is a "relatively common" sound driver bug that causes crashes -- I think with this evidence, you could reasonably conclude that Vista is unstable.
I got tha Deva-STATE-in' Ill-logic!!
Outta Sight In-Sight-Full! Mod me up, DJ Doomsday! <toke> <cough> <cough!>
"Your trite response misses the point - I'm providing anecdotal evidence to refute the anecdotal story presented by the author of the article that is the subject of this slashdot discussion. Don't you think you should be directing these comments towards the article, and not me?"
No. I should be directing these comments to you, because you are making logic errors in your argument.
The fact that you haven't had a crash doesn't 'refute' the author's experience. He had crashes, you didn't. These anecdotal pieces of evidence don't wipe each other out. Was the author lying to us, or making up his crash stories, simply because you never had a crash? No, that's silly. He had a bad experience with Vista, you didn't. Your story doesn't make him wrong, any more than his would make yours wrong. Only if he were lying or misrepresenting would that make his story wrong.
"Why don't you name me a single OS that won't become unstable with faulty drivers. "
Irrelevant. What we are talking about is how stable Vista is for the general public, on common hardware in typical scenarios. You claim never to have had a crash with any OS aside from DOS 6 -- so what? Does that mean no OS has ever crashed, except DOS 6? No, that's an over-generalization. Because you never had a problem, that doesn't mean that Windows ME wasn't a shitty, buggy, lock-up-and-crash-prone OS that should never have seen a retail shelf.
You have said yourself that there is a *common* problem with sound card drivers. We both agree that faulty drivers cause problems. But should it be a *common* problem, especially for MS' flagship product, released to the public? Shouldn't MS make better drivers, or only allow well-tested, signed drivers? If faulty drivers are a *common* problem, doesn't that show some problem in MS' development or distribution methods?
"I've been running the 64-bit version of Vista since it was released and it hasn't crashed on me once."
"I'm not having problems; therefore, nobody else could be having any, either."
" This guy couldn't figure out which driver/piece of hardware was causing this instability in a MONTH?"
He was using it as a common user with OEM hardware. You're telling me that Joe Six-pack can troubleshoot a driver problem in any timeframe? Remember, MS is marketing this as a retail, for-the-masses OS. The review chose to review the machine as a typical end-user.
"Btw, chances are it was a sound card driver - this is a moderately common problem, but it sure isn't the end of the world."
So now you admit sound card drivers are a common problem? You're right, it's not the end of the world, but the reviewer did claim it was the end for a lot of his data -- which goes against the whole reason to use a computer in the first place -- to store your data.
"This isn't 1994 anymore. The arguments against MS for making unstable operating systems ended when NT was released. Since Windows 2000, MS has made stable operating systems that really are usable by the average joe without difficulty."
Except for the fact of this relatively common sound card driver bug causing crashes. You have openly admitted as much yourself. Sounds like 1994 all over again.
I think you're right. In America, our system still works well enough that people's daily lives aren't yet too much impacted by fraud and cronyism.
There's a quote I encountered somewhere in my anthropology studies that says "People don't protest when their bellies are full." Everyone loves to say that nobody in America cares, but when the shit starts hitting the fan, you will witness a sea change in the US, on the scale of the 1930s. The kindling is building up, sooner or later some event will spark the whole thing aflame.
" So by that rationale, if I can kick in your front door to get into your house, is it your fault for not having a better door lock/frame?"
"I still don't get it . . . Maybe you could use a car analogy."
If I can kick in your driver's side door to get into your car, is it your fault for not having a better door lock/frame?
I was reading over your post, and I think I kind of misread it. I think we probably do agree more than we disagree. It's easy to point out situations like Katrina where supposed representative government has failed, but the everyday stories, where government has worked for the most part for hundreds of years, such as, say, New York or Pennsylvania. There are spectacular failures that capture attention, but the quiet examples of the system mostly working don't get capture the imagination.
That's not to say that there is no corruption -- no system is perfect. But I think for the most part, you can consider it a success. There is a pendulum of corruption and cleansing of the system, and it oscillates back and forth. Corruption creeps in, and eventually when it affects enough people's daily lives, they start protesting and demanding a cleaning. Then some politician makes a career out of cleaning up the system, does some cleaning, and things improve. Then the system slowly corrupts again, and the cycle repeats.
I guess I would say that if the government is corrupt, it's not truly representative government. Instead it's a patron system, where it's who you know, or who you have paid off, instead of government representing the expressed interest of the people. In name, it is representative government, but in reality it's not, if it can be bought, or if favors are traded.
You are right, that the Incans and Romans are conquering, Imperial governments. But, the thing is, the lifestyle and culture we are used to here in the US can only be created by Imperial government. If we were without that kind of government, we would also be without public infrastructure.
We can go to a system where the is little to no government, but then we would have the infrastructure we are used to, like highways, electricity, sewers, gas pipelines, cities with skyscrapers, etc. I've spent some time in small, out-of-the way villages that are "off the grid" and "outside the system". Nothing gets accomplished that's bigger than one extended family can do. So you only have small houses or huts, maybe a church (and usually those are organized and driven with the structure of the sponsoring church organization, not just the families). No bridges or sewers. No infrastructure. You can only have what you can backpack in, or float in on a boat, or collect in the woods.
I enjoy those types of social structures (life is simpler), but I also enjoy living in a city with lots of infrastructure ( you have much more creature comforts and entertainment). A lot of technophile, libertarians geeks really are unaware of the benefits of government that they just take for granted. They think it happens in spite of government, but I haven't seen a case where that happens. Small villages just can't maintain paved roads or build a concrete bridge, much less run an internet. I'm not saying it can't happen; I just haven't seen it, and at this point I am suspicious of the libertarian paradise of no government. There are such places, like war-torn Somalia, or the middle of the amazon, where you could get speared for looking at someone the wrong way. There is no way to improve your lot in those societies. People basically live the way their parent have lived for dozens of generations back, until the village starts becoming more involved in whatever Imperial government it belongs to. Instead of having new technology and improved medicine, they learn the old traditions, such as bow hunting, herbal medicine, and small-scale garden plot farming, for thousands of years.
I've met very few libertarians who would truly be comfortable living in a small village, but if we give up Imperial government, even if is a responsible, representative government, with built-on checks on government, we give up a lot that we are used to here in the US. I think at this point, we have to do the best we can with a system we know has worked in the past. As far as the future, I am in favor of direct democracy.
I agree with you that corruption, which includes mis-management of money, is the problem that created the tragedy of New Orleans.
However, I disagree that the libertarian perspective that government is the problem, and not the solution, is wrong, also. I've spent a decent amount of time in South America where there is only corrupt government. There are places like small, out-of-the-way villages, where the everyday person has immense personal freedom, but the problem is something like getting a bridge built properly can't happen without some form of government, whether it's the local or national government, or an international aid project. So the people are able to make a living without paying taxes, but in the village, all the homes are one or two stories, the streets are unpaved, there is no sewer system, no electricity, etc. etc. When a bridge collapses, or the road or runway washes out, it just stays down, and the people work around it. However, the community is never able to organize themselves enough to build a new bridge or clear the runway. Their lifestyle just downsizes. They start backpacking materials across a foot-bridge, instead of trucking it across the river. They take a three-day bus instead of an hour-long flight. They light their homes with candles and cook with wood, instead of electricity and gas.
I never see libertarians migrating to places without government, like Somalia. They love to stay in America, where we have an excellent public infrastructure, created by functioning, representative government, and then complain that government creates problems. I think it's naive. Areas without government are controlled by warlords, and such societies are even more corrupt, and people have fewer opportunities to improve their life. In every civilization, from the Romans to the Incans, monumental public architecture, such as well-maintained roads, bridges, and public buildings have always been the domain of government. It's no different today.
We need properly-functioning representative government, not corrupt government. Getting rid of government because it is corrupt to various degrees is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What the right solution is, in my mind, is to pressure the government is to get rid of corruption, and make government more responsible to the needs of the people.
Several times I got an email that had links to the google maps sections of New Orleans underwater. Even from bird's eye view, it was clearly an unliveable disaster area. I think this was an email meme going around.
You have a valid point, but I think there will always be a need for a port on the mouth of the Mississippi river. It was the fifth largest port in the US, IIRC. That's the difference between New Orleans and beach-front resort property in Florida. We don't need the resort homes; we do need a port for the Mississippi river. That port will need workers, and those workers will need housing and grocery stores, etc. I think it's a question how far inland we re-build New Orleans. Unless we want a 3rd-world shanty-city in the US, servicing a major port. .
Oh good, for a minute there I thought the heavens were going to crash into the Earth because people didn't understand exactly how they worked...
Natural phenomena still continues in spite of the fact that people don't understand it or believe in the most accurate theory. So what? What is the value of pointing that out?
"Reality is still reality despite what you believe" is an argument that works on *both* sides of the debate. It doesn't get us anywhere.
"Why should my tax dollars go to people who have chosen to live in disaster-prone areas?"
You're failing to look at the big picture. The reason is because New Orleans is one of the busiest ports in the world. All of the goods we send down the Mississippi river enter the ocean through the port of New Orleans. Of course, the port is more than just long docks and loading cranes. Part of the infrastructure of the port are the human workers who actually make the thing go. All of the people who live in New Orleans provide the human infrastructure to keep the port running. That's the reason they live there -- the port needs human laborers to keep the cargo coming in. Those human laborers need places to sleep at night, places to eat, places to buy groceries from, etc. You get the idea.
The problem with ports is that they have to be on the water. We can't build ports in the middle of Montana so that they will be safe from hurricanes. Ports, which hopefully I don't need to explain are a vital part of our infrastructure, will periodically be threatened by flooding and hurricanes. As a society, we have to band together to create massive projects such as ports so we can import our morning coffee from South America and send our DVDs to Europe. You won't personally be conscripted to work on the port itself, like in the pyramid-building days of ancient Egypt, but you will have to pitch in some money in the form of taxes. Or, we could just let our ports be destroyed, one by one, after each flood or hurricane. We don't really *need* bananas from Brazil, or rice from China. But I don't think you'll find much to eat in the middle of your desert.
As a society, we did fuck up the New Orleans situation. We had a horrifically inadequate levy system. Politicians at all levels failed to bring them up to par for decades. As a society, we didn't plan ahead to protect our infrastructure, and now we are paying for it.
I do agree that if people are taking risks, such as building million-dollar beachfront homes in California or Florida, we don't need to subsidize them through taxes. However, we do need a port on the mouth of the Mississippi, and we need to make sure that that port will be manned no matter what natural disasters threaten it.
I don't have a theory. You don't have to immediately have a theory for every suspicious event. I'm satisfied at this point to say "I don't know what happened, I think we need more facts before we jump to conclusions."
But, I do have some problems with your theory. First, I don't see any reason to assume 'accident' or 'random chance' by default. Second, I saw this story posted on digg two days ago. If google was interested in maintaining an accurate map, shouldn't they have fixed it by now? Have google's offices been closed Friday and Saturday?
The fact that they haven't repaired the error argues *against* some lackey making an error. If there weren't enough safeguards in place to prevent them from making this error (i.e. double-checking your work, peer review, timestamp checks), what's keeping them fixing the mistake? Don't they have managers or overseers whose job it is to check out changes made to the map? Aren't there some cartographers or GIS guys running around there, saying, "Hey, who put up these old images?" An organization of google's size doesn't make a product as large as google maps without layers of bureaucracy and oversight. You simply wouldn't get a decent map of the US without more than 'an underling' working on the project.
If it's so easy to make a mistake this glaring, shouldn't google maps be wildly inaccurate in many places? If google maps are fairly accurate, that means there are many eyeballs ( i.e. corporate structure and bureaucracy ) checking the work, reviewing changes, implementing procedures and code to make sure that the maps are accurate. This change would have had to pass through those checks. I can see something like the badlands of Montana being out-of-date, but the damage from hurricane Katrina? None of the managing cartographers said "Hey, these images are pre-Katrina! If we post them, our map would be wrong."
This post seems to contradict your information:
"AI : We wanted to integrate in our game the original AI behavior of the ghosts (those that were in the original Pacman game). Without AI, the game was not interesting to play, since a random behavior is too simple to play. Each ghost has its own personality: Shadow is the red ghost and it chases Pacman all the time, using a straight forward tracking algorithm. Speedy is the pink ghost. It is very fast but moves in a random manner. Bashful is the blue ghost: it is shy at the beginning and escapes from pacman all the time, but if Pacman approaches him to much, then it is not shy anymore and begins to chase him (Pacman is then chased by two ghosts at the same time...). Pokey is the orange ghost and is slow and moves in a random manner. "
Not as complex as the story that I read, but apparently they don't follow a pre-planned course.
"but I'd be willing to bet it was simply decided based on quality/resolution of images, and some underling working on it didn't really think about the fact that it the imagery in question is significantly different from how it looks now."
...
I'd like to take you up on your bet.
If google regularly revises its images on google maps, sometimes rolling them back in time for reasons of quality or resolution, I'd believe it. I doubt that any American would mistakenly upload old images of New Orleans, no matter their seniority or expertise, given what a giant story Katrina was. If it was a simple underling's error, why hasn't it been rolled back yet?
One factor you are ignoring is that by using old images, they have made their maps less accurate. The idea of a map is that you know where you are and what the things around you look like. Imagine they had access to super hi-rez satellite images from the 1980s. Should they use them? They *do* have higher resolution
Of course not! Lots has changed and been built in the US since the 1980s. You would just be creating a very hi-rez, inaccurate map. Who needs that? Who cares if you have higher-rez images of the past? You don't want them on a current map.
The fact is that the fallout from Katrina, and the fact that very little has improved two years later, is a serious blight on America's image as a first-world-nation. You expect this kind of thing in Africa or South America. I don't have any evidence for my particular interpretation, but you certainly don't have any for yours.
When I was contemplating learning video game programming, I was reading a guide that told you first to program a pong clone, and then a pac-man clone. Why pac-man? It teaches you AI. The ghost behavior is actually fairly complex. One ghost wanders randomly, another tries to get on the opposite side of the board from wherever pac-man is. The other two form a hunting pair: one tries to cut off your escape while the other goes for the kill.
I never thought that the ghosts would be so complex!
Yeah, and then you can get a job in India or China after the dollar collapses, also :)
At times in the past, I've proposed a reputation system for credentials. There's a lot of possible ways to do it, but it's basically a quantification of public opinion.
As I imagine it, people would mod your articles and that would affect your reputation. Additionally, people could mod you directly. One user, one vote per article or other user.
Then, as you are browsing articles, you can set up your own filters, setting thresholds of ratings for articles, perhaps giving bonuses for personal mods. There would be a default filter for anonymous browsing to keep casual users from seeing too much crap.
You can't buy cool. Cool is something you define personally. It's entirely subjective and based on whim. Corporations do business by trying to understand and meet other people's needs. If a corporation is trying to buy 'cool', they are trying to guess what someone else will think is cool. You will never guess correctly. The 'coolness' you are trying to buy becomes an imitation of what some corporate decision makers think Gen-Xers will think is cool, which is not coolness. Cool has an 'is-ness', a zen-like quality that can't be defined. If you are trying to be, then by definition, you are not cool. You are a wanna-be.
You can argue that the kind of cynical, postmodern, commercial/corporate kitch can be cool , but I say again, as long as something is being what it is, rather than trying to be something else to impress someone, then it is cool. If they are consciously going with corporate/commercial kitch with awareness, and embracing it, then they are being cool, being themselves. If they are inadvertently creating corporate wanna-be-cool kitch without awareness, then that is trying, which is not cool.
I read the articles. I didn't see anything about heat and noise output. Can anyone fill me in? I would guess it would be minimal and none, respectively.
IIRC, a few years ago, documentation about the X window system had scary warnings about blowing up your monitor if you attempted to use an incorrect video mode. I can't find an authoritative link, but here are some hints:
"Choose a decent depth for modern monitors. In the old days you used to be able to blow up your monitor. Is this still true? Maybe wear googles."
"What this means is, you could actually blow your monitor if you attempt to be too aggressive with the sync rate. Be careful. Most modern multisync monitors can be used safely with the relatively conservative "Non-Interlaced SVGA, 1024x768 @ 60 Hz, 800x600 @ 72 Hz" setting, which is the setting I select."
"I've always wondered why someone hasn't put up a huge server farm in places like Alaska or Russia. From my underestanding a big "cost" is in the cooling."
;)
Another big "cost" might be connectivity.
Sorry to sound so smarmy, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity
" If sugar can jack up the human body, why not electronics?"
Next up, caffiene for your cell phone, and cocaine for your PDA!
That's a valid point. I hadn't considered that.
I'm open-minded about UFO sightings. However, I grew up right next to a small airport and saw several "UFOs" that I shortly realized was an airplane.
As far as objects disappearing from the naked eye, I can think of an easy explanation offhand. This is something I've witnessed personally: When an airplane is reflecting sunlight in the evening, it shows up as a bright metallic object. Because both the sun and the airplane are in motion, there will be a point in time, a single instant, when the light goes to a different angle. At this point, the bright, shiny airplane becomes totally dark. If the plane is far enough away, it just disappears. It's like someone using a mirror to reflect sunlight right into your eyes, and slowly turning it away. There will be a single moment when it just stops shining.
At this time, I'm not aware of any well-understood phenomena that explains multiple 90* turns at high speeds -- so good point there.