His problem is that he's confusing form and function.
I've met many a hack I couldn't figure out; a massive tangle of irreplicatable crap. But I can still make something new that is functionally identical, and that is what would need to be accomplished to replicate the brain.
I see wishful thinking on two fronts. One, he wants to be immortal and touch the "weak godhood" of the Singularity. But two, he still wants to be "unique" in having this wonderful un-hackable brain. I think those two ideas contradict each other.
Wishful thinking has made fools of better thinkers.
Biomedical advances will never increase at the same rate as computer technology, simply because experimenting with silicon (or whatever) doesn't have any health and safety issues tied to it, more less any potential moral backlash (barring real AI, which I think is farther away as well).
It takes 15 years, sometimes, for a useful drug with no proven side effects to make it to market. Even if we made theoretical breakthroughs today, it'd be a decade or more before they could be put into practice on a meaningful scale, assuming that they were magically perfect and without flaws/side-effects/whatever.
It's very dangerous to look at our advances in computer technology and try to apply those curves to other disciplines. It's equally ridiculous to assume that the rate of increase will remain the same with no compelling evidence to support the assertion. In terms of computers and biotech, we're still taking baby steps, and while they seem like a big deal, we still have a long way to go.
Nomination: The major parties have a big round of voting to figure out who they're going to put forward as their candidate. This is different by state, but in the end the candidate that wins the state gets a chunk of the delegate votes. Delegates are allocated to states based on population and their electoral college representation.
Super-Delegates: Jury rigged compromise in which the major elected members of the party can act as voting delegates independent of their voting constituents in the event of a close race.
Basically the supers together have about 1/6th of the total delegate votes, and they can vote for whoever they want to.
The current problem is that no candidate has a majority without a number of super delegates. Obama has the more regular delegate votes, and that would be the end of it, except for the supers.
He can "want" it all he likes, but it's unlikely he's going to get it at this point. A nice brutal minority shareholder lawsuit should finish the company off nicely.
It is strongly typed, however it doesn't use type declarations, so some people make the mistake of assuming because it doesn't ask, it doesn't care.
Python assumes you know what the hell you're doing, so it won't throw errors if you create two variables, put an Int in each one, and do an Int operation on them, all without declaring a type...It'll figure out the type by context.
However, if you try to multiply an Int by a String, it'll throw the same type errors any other strongly type language will. They call it "duck typing."
I think you've got Python confused with Perl. Python was first released in 1991, and one of its core tenets is a formatting structure that makes it a lot more difficult to write illegible code. So I'm just going to assume you were talking about Perl, and I'm going to assume that you're not as ill-informed as it appears.
Perl is what it is: A quick and dirty language for generating practical programs. It's ugly, it's hard to maintain, and it makes a lot of peoples lives a lot easier by making operations that are extremely complicated in other languages quite trivial to code. Comparing it to C is not an apples to apples comparison. Comparing it to BASIC is like comparing a Pineapple to a Raisin.
Power: What can it do? Performance: How fast can it do it? Ease of Development: How fast can quality code be turned out by regular programmers?
Most modern languages fail on a couple of these. C is first class in Power and Performance, but it's not Easy. Ruby is okay in Power, and its very Easy, but it's slow. Java is Powerful, but doesn't match C for Performance, and it's not the quickest for development.
I'm sure many fanboys will disagree with my analysis. They'll say "Regular programmers don't matter (C)" or "It's NOT SLOW (Ruby)" or "Development is too quick! (Java)".
Really though, that's what it comes down to. The problem is, that there are unfortunate tradeoffs that have to be made. Most languages have a strength, but they all make sacrifices to be strong.
So copy protection is immoral? No one is forcing you to buy it.
Both sides of the DRM debate are really irrational about the whole issue; it's not a "moral" issue on either side. The seller wants to be fairly compensated for their product, the buyer wants to have full access to the thing that they buy, and they don't want to lose access at some later date because of issues with the DRM.
If these issues can be worked out, then there is no problem. So saying that people are losing their morals as the hassle goes away is pretty ridiculous.
1) No, it's all bad. I went out of my way to get dell certified so they'd stop sending incompetent morons to bother me when I had problems. I guess a lot of people here live in big cities, because in the rest of the world, their service is slow, poorly trained, and half the time they have the wrong part.
2) Imagine what they'd be like otherwise. It's amusing actually...The AMA around the turn of the century used to decry anyone making a medicine who advertised...Advertising was considered proof-positive that you were selling nothing but snake oil. How things have changed.
It's the same here, and in some respects, yes, that's cheap.
But I used to buy top of the line dell's for my home use (this is almost a decade ago now), and shelling 3,500 dollars for a machine that is basically un-upgradable is the opposite of cheap, especially when you know that their motherboards are utter crap, and their power supplies are barely adequate (and expensive to replace, due to proprietary connectors).
I haven't bought a dell for personal use since 1999, and the crap I deal with on the ones at work has cured me of any desire to ever buy one again.
Pack it in schill. I had 5 servers with bad RAID cards a few years back (PERC 3 cards) and they managed to utterly corrupt the raid in almost every case, to the point where it could not be rebuilt but only restored from backup. It's only almost because I refused to let the guy touch it the last time, and, magically, that time it recovered normally.
I've had printer techs who couldn't take a printer apart. I've had server technicians who couldn't handle basic terminology. I had hours and hours of sitting on the phone with optiplex capacitor problems trying to convince them to just fricking replace the motherboard like they claimed they were doing on their website. This is fricking GOLD corporate support here! I'm glad they got nailed, they richly deserved it.
Just as a footnote, we switched to HP about 18 months ago, and I have no idea what their customer service is like because we haven't had to call it yet.
So holding a company accountable is a bad thing because they didn't hold every company accountable at the same time?
Whenever one company is held accountable it makes it easier for others to be held accountable.
Anyway, the class action suits do a decent job of holding big pharma in check. Juries just don't give out the same awards because your computer repair was a couple of days late.
What industry? Mind you, commodity desktop hardware support has always sucked, but their server support is a joke compared to companies that really specialize in servers.
Really? So if you loan me 100,000 dollars based on my future income, and I default on that loan and declare chapter 11, where does the money go? It goes bye bye. It no longer exists.
Banks loan money to people; in economic terms this is known as the multiplier effect, because they're taking your money and loaning it to someone, but you still have access to your money so in practical terms, there is "more" money in the economy.
What you're saying is that investment moves around, and that is completely correct. But I am talking about a very real "loss" of liquid money through banks no longer being able to loan, and effectively multiply the amount of money in circulation, which directly effects the economic "velocity" of money.
Sure, and this is why you don't see automation in places like China, where labor costs are dirt cheap.
But in the states you can't really pull that sort of crap. Some of it is that people don't want to work on the line, but most of it is that the line workers union require those people make enough money that it's really cheaper to buy robots.
But there are a lot of line work economies left in the world so why bother to do the robot thing when you can just ship your line work to China?
Commodities are irritating to a lot of economists, especially in times like these. It's the big finance equivalent of hiding your money under your mattress.
Lowering rates is weird; there is the risk of inflation, but frankly, the real lowering of the value of the dollar is our national debt, and the fed is really for trying to manage our economy by controlling lending rates.
Gas is relatively cheap; we're paying now effectively what europe has been paying for decades. In the long run, it's still enough to drive the adoption of alternatives, and that's beneficial for our economy.
We're the best placed in the world to come up with a good, marketable fuel solution, simply because most other countries have artificially screwed with their fuel demand. China and India are subsidising cheap gas to fire their economies; this prohibits the adoption of a solution, because economics don't favor one. On the other side, Europe's historically high fuel taxes have already pushed them to adopt fuel efficient cars and public transit...They're not going to feel the pinch like we will.
There is a real issue; people losing money on the stock market, people dealing with fuel and food costs, people losing money on real estate...All those things mean that there is less money running around in the economy, and less money means economic issues.
Now generally recessions are a problem of herd mentality. Plenty of people who haven't lost any money are deferring purchases because they're worried that they may lose money, and that restricts the flow of money further and effects industries that were not effected by the original troubles. It seems stupid when the government says, "Go out and spend!" but that actually has a measurable effect.
Partly it's because you can put, "Programmer for (insert OSS project here)" as your current occupation, rather than "sitting on the couch, watching the phone" and partly because the best way to put food on the table is to do some work, and the easiest sort of work to get is freelance work.
When you're freelance, you can't afford the licensing for the nice proprietary stuff. You can't afford to scratch build huge webapps. You absolutely have to jump on the OSS bandwagon, just because it's what you can afford.
And when the OSS app you're deploying turns out to lack some feature that's critical to your sale...You code it. Or you jump on the lists, and beg someone else to code it. Or you incorporate some other OSS project to provide that functionality, etc.
I made more when I was out of work than I do now, but I didn't get to post on Slashdot as much. It's all about how you decide to spend that time.
So what you're saying is, either it will effect tech or it won't? You must be an economist.
The first thing you want to do when you're belt tightening is cut jobs; employees are huge overhead. But how do you cut jobs when the work still has to be done?
Answer? Automation. If you can't automate, you'll outsource, and outsourcing itself often requires new technology.
When the bubble popped, a lot of tech people took it in the shorts, and since that's the last big economic wobble, it's the one everyone is thinking about. But in reality there is no guarantee that a downturn will be bad for tech, or tech industries...It depends on what sectors experience the lowest growth. (Sadly, I do economics too.)
I'm sorry, but that's completely wrong. Insulation is a thermal barrier that slows temperature equalization...In English, it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.
So NO, actually, it doesn't heat up your house in the summer. It slows the transition of the outside heat to the (presumably) cooler area inside. If you use air conditioning, it means that you can keep the same space the same temperature for a lower cost given the same outside temperatures.
I hear that crap from people all the time. Put your hand on some insulation. Does it put off heat? Then how the HELL is it going to heat up your house?
I understand the sentiment, but if a parent is such a jackass to not be able to ignore their phone for a single day to go have fun with their kid, there is no way the park is going to be able to "force" them to b a good parent by stealing their phone.
I've tried telling the office to only call me for emergencies when I'm on vacation. That didn't work. Now they know that I'll check my messages at night, and if they haven't fixed the problem, I'll remote in and fix it when I get a minute.
Vacation means vacation. The fact that they're not willing to hire someone else who can take some of the load off of me, doesn't mean that I'm going to give up my vacation time (says the puppy, posting from work on Sunday on a holiday weekend).
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His problem is that he's confusing form and function.
I've met many a hack I couldn't figure out; a massive tangle of irreplicatable crap. But I can still make something new that is functionally identical, and that is what would need to be accomplished to replicate the brain.
I see wishful thinking on two fronts. One, he wants to be immortal and touch the "weak godhood" of the Singularity. But two, he still wants to be "unique" in having this wonderful un-hackable brain. I think those two ideas contradict each other.
Wishful thinking has made fools of better thinkers.
Biomedical advances will never increase at the same rate as computer technology, simply because experimenting with silicon (or whatever) doesn't have any health and safety issues tied to it, more less any potential moral backlash (barring real AI, which I think is farther away as well).
It takes 15 years, sometimes, for a useful drug with no proven side effects to make it to market. Even if we made theoretical breakthroughs today, it'd be a decade or more before they could be put into practice on a meaningful scale, assuming that they were magically perfect and without flaws/side-effects/whatever.
It's very dangerous to look at our advances in computer technology and try to apply those curves to other disciplines. It's equally ridiculous to assume that the rate of increase will remain the same with no compelling evidence to support the assertion. In terms of computers and biotech, we're still taking baby steps, and while they seem like a big deal, we still have a long way to go.
Nomination: The major parties have a big round of voting to figure out who they're going to put forward as their candidate. This is different by state, but in the end the candidate that wins the state gets a chunk of the delegate votes. Delegates are allocated to states based on population and their electoral college representation.
Super-Delegates: Jury rigged compromise in which the major elected members of the party can act as voting delegates independent of their voting constituents in the event of a close race.
Basically the supers together have about 1/6th of the total delegate votes, and they can vote for whoever they want to.
The current problem is that no candidate has a majority without a number of super delegates. Obama has the more regular delegate votes, and that would be the end of it, except for the supers.
Speaking of ugly people...
He can "want" it all he likes, but it's unlikely he's going to get it at this point. A nice brutal minority shareholder lawsuit should finish the company off nicely.
Silly, the Traveling Salesman is only the first part of the game.
The second part is the Coupon Collectors Problem. How many mobs with drop rate i must I kill to get set of items A?
Rinse and repeat for the dangling carrots of A1, A2, A3...Ax.
I pay for two terabytes a month on my webhosting and it's less than 40 bucks, and they're charging that for a handful of gigs?
Metering is one thing, but that is a fricking joke.
It is strongly typed, however it doesn't use type declarations, so some people make the mistake of assuming because it doesn't ask, it doesn't care.
Python assumes you know what the hell you're doing, so it won't throw errors if you create two variables, put an Int in each one, and do an Int operation on them, all without declaring a type...It'll figure out the type by context.
However, if you try to multiply an Int by a String, it'll throw the same type errors any other strongly type language will. They call it "duck typing."
Well, it's got a better object model than Java, and it's a lot faster to code with. Java just isn't appropriate in every situation.
Python also plays well with C, so it's often used in concert with C for interfaces, etc.
I think you've got Python confused with Perl. Python was first released in 1991, and one of its core tenets is a formatting structure that makes it a lot more difficult to write illegible code. So I'm just going to assume you were talking about Perl, and I'm going to assume that you're not as ill-informed as it appears.
Perl is what it is: A quick and dirty language for generating practical programs. It's ugly, it's hard to maintain, and it makes a lot of peoples lives a lot easier by making operations that are extremely complicated in other languages quite trivial to code. Comparing it to C is not an apples to apples comparison. Comparing it to BASIC is like comparing a Pineapple to a Raisin.
Power: What can it do?
Performance: How fast can it do it?
Ease of Development: How fast can quality code be turned out by regular programmers?
Most modern languages fail on a couple of these. C is first class in Power and Performance, but it's not Easy. Ruby is okay in Power, and its very Easy, but it's slow. Java is Powerful, but doesn't match C for Performance, and it's not the quickest for development.
I'm sure many fanboys will disagree with my analysis. They'll say "Regular programmers don't matter (C)" or "It's NOT SLOW (Ruby)" or "Development is too quick! (Java)".
Really though, that's what it comes down to. The problem is, that there are unfortunate tradeoffs that have to be made. Most languages have a strength, but they all make sacrifices to be strong.
So copy protection is immoral? No one is forcing you to buy it.
Both sides of the DRM debate are really irrational about the whole issue; it's not a "moral" issue on either side. The seller wants to be fairly compensated for their product, the buyer wants to have full access to the thing that they buy, and they don't want to lose access at some later date because of issues with the DRM.
If these issues can be worked out, then there is no problem. So saying that people are losing their morals as the hassle goes away is pretty ridiculous.
1) No, it's all bad. I went out of my way to get dell certified so they'd stop sending incompetent morons to bother me when I had problems. I guess a lot of people here live in big cities, because in the rest of the world, their service is slow, poorly trained, and half the time they have the wrong part.
2) Imagine what they'd be like otherwise. It's amusing actually...The AMA around the turn of the century used to decry anyone making a medicine who advertised...Advertising was considered proof-positive that you were selling nothing but snake oil. How things have changed.
It's the same here, and in some respects, yes, that's cheap.
But I used to buy top of the line dell's for my home use (this is almost a decade ago now), and shelling 3,500 dollars for a machine that is basically un-upgradable is the opposite of cheap, especially when you know that their motherboards are utter crap, and their power supplies are barely adequate (and expensive to replace, due to proprietary connectors).
I haven't bought a dell for personal use since 1999, and the crap I deal with on the ones at work has cured me of any desire to ever buy one again.
Pack it in schill. I had 5 servers with bad RAID cards a few years back (PERC 3 cards) and they managed to utterly corrupt the raid in almost every case, to the point where it could not be rebuilt but only restored from backup. It's only almost because I refused to let the guy touch it the last time, and, magically, that time it recovered normally.
I've had printer techs who couldn't take a printer apart. I've had server technicians who couldn't handle basic terminology. I had hours and hours of sitting on the phone with optiplex capacitor problems trying to convince them to just fricking replace the motherboard like they claimed they were doing on their website. This is fricking GOLD corporate support here! I'm glad they got nailed, they richly deserved it.
Just as a footnote, we switched to HP about 18 months ago, and I have no idea what their customer service is like because we haven't had to call it yet.
So holding a company accountable is a bad thing because they didn't hold every company accountable at the same time?
Whenever one company is held accountable it makes it easier for others to be held accountable.
Anyway, the class action suits do a decent job of holding big pharma in check. Juries just don't give out the same awards because your computer repair was a couple of days late.
What industry? Mind you, commodity desktop hardware support has always sucked, but their server support is a joke compared to companies that really specialize in servers.
Really? So if you loan me 100,000 dollars based on my future income, and I default on that loan and declare chapter 11, where does the money go? It goes bye bye. It no longer exists.
Banks loan money to people; in economic terms this is known as the multiplier effect, because they're taking your money and loaning it to someone, but you still have access to your money so in practical terms, there is "more" money in the economy.
What you're saying is that investment moves around, and that is completely correct. But I am talking about a very real "loss" of liquid money through banks no longer being able to loan, and effectively multiply the amount of money in circulation, which directly effects the economic "velocity" of money.
Sure, and this is why you don't see automation in places like China, where labor costs are dirt cheap.
But in the states you can't really pull that sort of crap. Some of it is that people don't want to work on the line, but most of it is that the line workers union require those people make enough money that it's really cheaper to buy robots.
But there are a lot of line work economies left in the world so why bother to do the robot thing when you can just ship your line work to China?
Commodities are irritating to a lot of economists, especially in times like these. It's the big finance equivalent of hiding your money under your mattress.
Lowering rates is weird; there is the risk of inflation, but frankly, the real lowering of the value of the dollar is our national debt, and the fed is really for trying to manage our economy by controlling lending rates.
Gas is relatively cheap; we're paying now effectively what europe has been paying for decades. In the long run, it's still enough to drive the adoption of alternatives, and that's beneficial for our economy.
We're the best placed in the world to come up with a good, marketable fuel solution, simply because most other countries have artificially screwed with their fuel demand. China and India are subsidising cheap gas to fire their economies; this prohibits the adoption of a solution, because economics don't favor one. On the other side, Europe's historically high fuel taxes have already pushed them to adopt fuel efficient cars and public transit...They're not going to feel the pinch like we will.
Interesting times.
Well, as to your first point, yes and no.
There is a real issue; people losing money on the stock market, people dealing with fuel and food costs, people losing money on real estate...All those things mean that there is less money running around in the economy, and less money means economic issues.
Now generally recessions are a problem of herd mentality. Plenty of people who haven't lost any money are deferring purchases because they're worried that they may lose money, and that restricts the flow of money further and effects industries that were not effected by the original troubles. It seems stupid when the government says, "Go out and spend!" but that actually has a measurable effect.
Otherwise I agree.
I did a lot more, last time I was unemployed.
Partly it's because you can put, "Programmer for (insert OSS project here)" as your current occupation, rather than "sitting on the couch, watching the phone" and partly because the best way to put food on the table is to do some work, and the easiest sort of work to get is freelance work.
When you're freelance, you can't afford the licensing for the nice proprietary stuff. You can't afford to scratch build huge webapps. You absolutely have to jump on the OSS bandwagon, just because it's what you can afford.
And when the OSS app you're deploying turns out to lack some feature that's critical to your sale...You code it. Or you jump on the lists, and beg someone else to code it. Or you incorporate some other OSS project to provide that functionality, etc.
I made more when I was out of work than I do now, but I didn't get to post on Slashdot as much. It's all about how you decide to spend that time.
So what you're saying is, either it will effect tech or it won't? You must be an economist.
The first thing you want to do when you're belt tightening is cut jobs; employees are huge overhead. But how do you cut jobs when the work still has to be done?
Answer? Automation. If you can't automate, you'll outsource, and outsourcing itself often requires new technology.
When the bubble popped, a lot of tech people took it in the shorts, and since that's the last big economic wobble, it's the one everyone is thinking about. But in reality there is no guarantee that a downturn will be bad for tech, or tech industries...It depends on what sectors experience the lowest growth. (Sadly, I do economics too.)
Ha! Sorry. I've actually heard that argument so often that the mere hint of it sends me over the edge.
I'm sorry, but that's completely wrong. Insulation is a thermal barrier that slows temperature equalization...In English, it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.
So NO, actually, it doesn't heat up your house in the summer. It slows the transition of the outside heat to the (presumably) cooler area inside. If you use air conditioning, it means that you can keep the same space the same temperature for a lower cost given the same outside temperatures.
I hear that crap from people all the time. Put your hand on some insulation. Does it put off heat? Then how the HELL is it going to heat up your house?
I understand the sentiment, but if a parent is such a jackass to not be able to ignore their phone for a single day to go have fun with their kid, there is no way the park is going to be able to "force" them to b a good parent by stealing their phone.
I've tried telling the office to only call me for emergencies when I'm on vacation. That didn't work. Now they know that I'll check my messages at night, and if they haven't fixed the problem, I'll remote in and fix it when I get a minute.
Vacation means vacation. The fact that they're not willing to hire someone else who can take some of the load off of me, doesn't mean that I'm going to give up my vacation time (says the puppy, posting from work on Sunday on a holiday weekend).