You have made many good points in this discussion, but this isn't one of the best:
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents; and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
Let me illustrate why I don't agree with the reasoning using some search-and-replace:
I should also point out that the USA has a sizable portfolio of nuclear weapons, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech presidents appreciate the value of nuclear weapons; and secondly, in keeping with their government philosophy, the USA does not believe intercontinental nuclear weapons are evil.
Giving the sales pitch under an NDA does not protect you if the customer has the ability to develop the technology itself.
I just got a crazy idea here: perhaps there would be a market for "IP escrow" companies? You want to sell an idea to possibly sinister company A. You present your idea to a trusted company B which hires the best of experts. B tells A what they think your idea is worth, and how it may be applicable to A's business. If A isn't interested, they never get to see the idea. If they are, they have to pay before they can see it. Could it work?
It's the logical next step, really. Where else are you going to go?
How about this: Another chips is implanted in the regions of the brain handling speach, and detects everything you say to check if it matches anything you've ever heard, and automatically bills you for reproducing someone else's copyrighted sentences.
Even further, technology is developed that analyses our thoughts and checks if they are registered IP. And every new idea you have is checked and derived to whatever you have seen and heard that inspired you to come up with it, and automatically transferes a portion of any profit it generates to the inspirators.
While I too find personal freedom an honorable ideal, I maintain that it isn't the only ideal that measures the quality of a society.
Taking the ideal of personal freedom to its extreme would be a giant sociological experiment, which I am fairly confident would run a significant risk of catastrophic failure. Huge sociological experiments based on admirable ideals have been tried before unsuccessfully. While it may seem good in theory, you make lots of assumptions that aren't obvious at all. For example, how can you be so sure that laws lack a normative function?
And by the way, how do you define "wanting help"? I isn't as straightforward as you make it. Suppose you ask a surviving car crash victim that didn't wear seat belt: "would you have wanted us to require you to wear a seat belt?", I suspect many would answer "yes". Did he or she want the help or not? Another example: if I feel like buying a coca cola, but wouldn't have done so if it wasn't for all the extensive advertisement, then did I want to buy a coca cola?
It's nice to see decent media starting to report what most people are thinking and saying.
...except that it should be the other way around. The reason we have journalists is that they are supposed to dig things like this up before everyone is thinking it and saying it.
The endpoint of *your* method is that nobody has cars. I *might* hit someone if I drive, so obviously I shouldn't be allowed. Also, we should ban everything *bad* because "think of the children". I shouldn't be allowed to smoke, I might die, and then my children wouldn't have a father. I shouldn't be allowed to skydive, bungee jump, go skiing, etc, etc, they're all too dangerous.
Are you aware of the word "compromise"?
Looking at your line of reasoning in a similar fashion, I assume you think that all sorts of narcotics should of be legal to use. And if they are legal to use, why should they be illegal to sell? After all, the government must not act as a parent telling me what I can buy and not. Beeing legal to sell, they must naturally be legal to market (to children as well, of course, since it is the parents' and not the government's job to protect them). Now wait a couple of decades and behold how "free" the people will have become.
Really, if all I have to do for thousands of lives to be saved each year, is to accept a law telling me I must pay a fine if I don't wear seat belt, I'm happy to give away that freedom!
As an interesting side note, I read somewhere that the Cell were supposed to have 6 SPE:s, but they chose 8 for aesthetical reasons, although it made the manufacturing process a bit trickier.
Anyway, the PS3 will only use 7 of them for some reason, so no, it doesn't have to be 2^n. And why should it, really? (Interesting by the way: the PS3 will have 7 SPE:s, the 360 has 3 cores, my computer has 2 cores -- all prime are numbers. =P)
I can think of two bad situations I've been in just this past month where I got out by adding power, not removing it. Both of them were loss of traction on icy/wet roads.
I actually thought of that before I posted (coming from northern Sweden I am more used to icy roads than dry asphalt), but I assumed that the speed is measured by the positioning sytem in which case there shouldn't be any problem adding power as long as the speed doesn't increase too much.
Have you ever used a GPS? I frequently see my in-car GPS reporting that I'm on the sidestreet (25mph or less) instead of the highway (45 or 55mph) 100' away.
Yes I have, and I have also used differential GPS, which is accurate down to metre. I would be surprised if the developers haven't thought of the accuracy issues.
Anyway, perhaps I should point out that I'm not wholeheartedly defending technology of this kind. But I am allergic to bad arguments and rationalisations, regardless of the cause. Especially when all of them seem to be modded insightful.
In an emergency, it may be necessary to accelerate quickly, e.g. to get out of the way of another vehicle that's swerving into your lane, etc. If the behavior of the gas pedal suddenly changes in the middle of a crisis, it could CAUSE an accident.
How often does that happen to you? I can't think of many situations at all where you are actually be able to accelerate out of danger, without a first class sports car, super fast gear box and racing driver reactions. And if there truly is a crisis, a little resistance from the gas pedal would surely be negligible -- I am certain I wouldn't even notice it.
In any event, you can't honstly think that there are more accidents avoided by accelerating out of them than accidents caused by excessive speeds, can you? I can accept arguments that this kind of technology interferes with personal integrity, but that it would cause more accidents than it prevents I seriously doubt.
You're driving along at 50mph, and suddenly the GPS system mistakenly thinks you're close enough to the residential street that you should now be going 25mph.
And how is that different from failure in any other complex system in a modern car? You approach a sharp turn, and suddenly the ABS mistakenly thinks your breaks have locked. Or the ESC suddenly thinks the car is in a skid.
I'm not sure what you are talking about, and neither am I fluent in slashdot memes, but I have studied some statistics. In this case, they have obviously found a correlation. The question is whether there is causality as well (as the quoted sentence states), and if there is: what is the cause and what is the effect? Journalists are often experts at mixing these concepts up, and a healthy dose of skepticism is prudent.
showed that investment in telecommunications, which leads to better services for end users, is lower in countries where there is little competition
I haven't time to RTFA, som maybe I'm way off here, but:
Couldn't this simply be because competition is often triggered by a strong investor deciding it's time to get into the game and compete with the old ineffective giants?
I could, but then I haven't really switched altogether. Google would still have access to most of the email I receive for half a year. And what about archived email, can you download those? Anyway, assuming Google had turned evil, what is to stop them from removing the free email forwarding service?
If you read my post again you will see that I said something like that, albeit with fewer words.
But who is to say that the situation as you describe it will remain forever? Already with gmail a switching cost is there. I don't know about you, but when I switch email address there are several hundred people and organisations that still have my old address on a business card or in some register, that I have no record of at all.
Google are getting more and more types of information every day it seems. For now, they don't really have any incentive to do bad things with it, since it would destroy their not-evil-image, but if Google one day turns to the dark side it will make one horribly powerful evil company. Especially considering all advances being made in data mining.
don't worry about the negatives of downtime or a possible catastrophic host failure that deletes all their archives
I'd say the probability of a catastrophic failure that results in data loss usually is much more likely at the client side. How many home users make daily or even regular back-ups, use redundant storage media and buy high quality hardware?
Doesn't the ocean rise due to an increase in the temperature of the water (expansion) ?
It increases both because of melting ice and thremal expansion. The expansion is projected to be the dominating cause over the next 100 years or so. But theoretically, if all ice in antarctica melted the sea level would rise 60 meters(!).
I would argue that it's a great way to deter people who *are* great programmers from recommending you for that new team lead position....
Hehe, didn't you see my Fox Newsian prefix: "some would argue..."?
But seriously, I don't share that point of view myself (even though I also think that code can be self-documenting to an extent). There are generally to few and too bad comments in code that I see. In fact, I am examining candidates for employment at the moment where I work, and I have put strong emphasis on their ability to document the code that they write (work samples are required!). But this also means writing code that doesn't require huge amounts of comments to be comprehensible. Spaghetti code bloated with comments can often be worse than good written code with no comments at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me illustrate why I don't agree with the reasoning using some search-and-replace:
I just got a crazy idea here: perhaps there would be a market for "IP escrow" companies? You want to sell an idea to possibly sinister company A. You present your idea to a trusted company B which hires the best of experts. B tells A what they think your idea is worth, and how it may be applicable to A's business. If A isn't interested, they never get to see the idea. If they are, they have to pay before they can see it. Could it work?
How about this: Another chips is implanted in the regions of the brain handling speach, and detects everything you say to check if it matches anything you've ever heard, and automatically bills you for reproducing someone else's copyrighted sentences.
Even further, technology is developed that analyses our thoughts and checks if they are registered IP. And every new idea you have is checked and derived to whatever you have seen and heard that inspired you to come up with it, and automatically transferes a portion of any profit it generates to the inspirators.
They must have outsourced everything to India. A budget of 20 eurocents per year?
Taking the ideal of personal freedom to its extreme would be a giant sociological experiment, which I am fairly confident would run a significant risk of catastrophic failure. Huge sociological experiments based on admirable ideals have been tried before unsuccessfully. While it may seem good in theory, you make lots of assumptions that aren't obvious at all. For example, how can you be so sure that laws lack a normative function?
And by the way, how do you define "wanting help"? I isn't as straightforward as you make it. Suppose you ask a surviving car crash victim that didn't wear seat belt: "would you have wanted us to require you to wear a seat belt?", I suspect many would answer "yes". Did he or she want the help or not? Another example: if I feel like buying a coca cola, but wouldn't have done so if it wasn't for all the extensive advertisement, then did I want to buy a coca cola?
The round trip time to Mars varies between about 10 and 40 minutes, depending on the relative positions of the Earth and Mars.
Are you aware of the word "compromise"?
Looking at your line of reasoning in a similar fashion, I assume you think that all sorts of narcotics should of be legal to use. And if they are legal to use, why should they be illegal to sell? After all, the government must not act as a parent telling me what I can buy and not. Beeing legal to sell, they must naturally be legal to market (to children as well, of course, since it is the parents' and not the government's job to protect them). Now wait a couple of decades and behold how "free" the people will have become.
Really, if all I have to do for thousands of lives to be saved each year, is to accept a law telling me I must pay a fine if I don't wear seat belt, I'm happy to give away that freedom!
Ah, a little typo there. :-)
Anyway, the PS3 will only use 7 of them for some reason, so no, it doesn't have to be 2^n. And why should it, really? (Interesting by the way: the PS3 will have 7 SPE:s, the 360 has 3 cores, my computer has 2 cores -- all prime are numbers. =P)
I actually thought of that before I posted (coming from northern Sweden I am more used to icy roads than dry asphalt), but I assumed that the speed is measured by the positioning sytem in which case there shouldn't be any problem adding power as long as the speed doesn't increase too much.
Yes I have, and I have also used differential GPS, which is accurate down to metre. I would be surprised if the developers haven't thought of the accuracy issues.
Anyway, perhaps I should point out that I'm not wholeheartedly defending technology of this kind. But I am allergic to bad arguments and rationalisations, regardless of the cause. Especially when all of them seem to be modded insightful.
How often does that happen to you? I can't think of many situations at all where you are actually be able to accelerate out of danger, without a first class sports car, super fast gear box and racing driver reactions. And if there truly is a crisis, a little resistance from the gas pedal would surely be negligible -- I am certain I wouldn't even notice it.
In any event, you can't honstly think that there are more accidents avoided by accelerating out of them than accidents caused by excessive speeds, can you? I can accept arguments that this kind of technology interferes with personal integrity, but that it would cause more accidents than it prevents I seriously doubt.
And how is that different from failure in any other complex system in a modern car? You approach a sharp turn, and suddenly the ABS mistakenly thinks your breaks have locked. Or the ESC suddenly thinks the car is in a skid.
I'm not sure what you are talking about, and neither am I fluent in slashdot memes, but I have studied some statistics. In this case, they have obviously found a correlation. The question is whether there is causality as well (as the quoted sentence states), and if there is: what is the cause and what is the effect? Journalists are often experts at mixing these concepts up, and a healthy dose of skepticism is prudent.
Tele2
I haven't time to RTFA, som maybe I'm way off here, but:
Couldn't this simply be because competition is often triggered by a strong investor deciding it's time to get into the game and compete with the old ineffective giants?
I could, but then I haven't really switched altogether. Google would still have access to most of the email I receive for half a year. And what about archived email, can you download those? Anyway, assuming Google had turned evil, what is to stop them from removing the free email forwarding service?
But who is to say that the situation as you describe it will remain forever? Already with gmail a switching cost is there. I don't know about you, but when I switch email address there are several hundred people and organisations that still have my old address on a business card or in some register, that I have no record of at all.
Google are getting more and more types of information every day it seems. For now, they don't really have any incentive to do bad things with it, since it would destroy their not-evil-image, but if Google one day turns to the dark side it will make one horribly powerful evil company. Especially considering all advances being made in data mining.
I'd say the probability of a catastrophic failure that results in data loss usually is much more likely at the client side. How many home users make daily or even regular back-ups, use redundant storage media and buy high quality hardware?
Of course, downtime is still a problem.
It increases both because of melting ice and thremal expansion. The expansion is projected to be the dominating cause over the next 100 years or so. But theoretically, if all ice in antarctica melted the sea level would rise 60 meters(!).
More can be read here (among other places): http://www.science.org.au/nova/082/082key.htm
Code they write at their free time.
Hehe, didn't you see my Fox Newsian prefix: "some would argue..."?
But seriously, I don't share that point of view myself (even though I also think that code can be self-documenting to an extent). There are generally to few and too bad comments in code that I see. In fact, I am examining candidates for employment at the moment where I work, and I have put strong emphasis on their ability to document the code that they write (work samples are required!). But this also means writing code that doesn't require huge amounts of comments to be comprehensible. Spaghetti code bloated with comments can often be worse than good written code with no comments at all.
I think some would argue that lack of comments is a way to deter people who aren't great programmers from touching the code.
Btw, that link of yours 404s...