It's been a number of years since you couldn't get a PC from a major manufacturer without Windows loaded on it.
Yeah, so? The issue was about definition of "microsoft tax" and comparing it to buing cars with more seatbelts than you need. Even if "microsoft tax" no longer happens, that doesn't make the comparison any more valid, or my reply to it invalid.
Each time the number of people infected gets just a little bit smaller.
You wish. That'd mean that people actually learn. They don't. Or let's say "we don't", though the things I "don't learn" are mostly not computer related.
Why would the government, or anyone else, have any interest in forcing me to DRM my own web page?
If you can't play non-DRM material on your computer, you can't spend your valuable time stuff like Troops or RvB, but have to watch something that's not free (as in $$$).
And government wants it because they (the individual persons in government) get paid by media companies to want it.
However, for loops and while loops are identical in power. for(a;b;c){d;} is identical to a;while(b){c;d;}. Just rearranging stuff.
Common mistake! There is a subtle yet important difference, continue command. With for-loop continue will jump to 'c' in your code, but in while-loop it will skip 'c' and go directly to 'b'. That's why you can't iterate over something with while loop if you use continue, the index (or pointer whatever) will not be incremented.
Not to mention, your while has 'c' and 'd' in the wrong order, it should be a; while(b) { d; c; }
i wish people would learn LISP before claiming LISP is impossible.
Point taken, I was inaccurate. By compiled language I meant basically non-interactive languages, ie languages that you can't make a meaningful interactive interpreter for (without changing their syntax at least a bit).
Though if you really wanted, you could do runtime compilation even in C. Just output C code, compile it into dynamic object, load it and call it. Just wrap doing all that into a nice function, and it's even simple to use, and could only compile any given piece of code once and then just re-execute it if exactly same code is asked for again etc. Of course not practical, but possible.
What a thing to leave out. Memory leaks are one of the hardest-to-track-down and most annoying kinds of bugs that we perpetually see in application after application.
Well, there are plenty of applications that never need to (or should for optimal performance) release any memory, only shuffle it around, and have well defined points for releasing other resources (such as closing files and sockets) that can't be left to be done in the background. Such applications have no fear of memory leaks (well, mostly anyway, you can always screw up with data structures and pointers).
I'm trying to imagine a programming language that doesn't let you create functions on the fly but is powerful enough for writing real applications.
This I don't quite understand. Any compiled language by definition can't create functions on the fly, every functions needs to be compiled before the program is run. So what do you mean by "creating functions on the fly", actually?
*RIA* aren't bad in principle, quite the contrary. If they get too much power and abuse it (and let's face it, too much power always leads to abuse), then that can be bad. But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists, just as good or bad as for example EFF can be. It's just that money tends to corrupt everything.
The article states that "Superpower's next generation tape has a pre-mass production cost of $50 kA/m". That's $50 for a meter of wiring able to carry 1000 amps.
Hardly a neglible current, though cost is probably hundreds of times more than equal current carrying capacity with copper wire.
"Pirates" have a very real purpose to serve in the cycle of software development and that's to weed out all the useless crap. Software pirates have internal ethical codes. The best software gets shared only with friends. Only the crappiest software gets shared freely.
Eh? Oh really? Why do I notice just the opposite, the most wanted (ok, not necessary "the best", but when its "free" they're usually the same) software being (*gasp*) shared the most... Nobody gets kicks from "sharing" some crap.
Well, I've not given it serious thought, but still some thought. IMHO a human is not a human without body, and even human "heritage" is inevitably bound to our flesh (hormones and all that). A purely mechanical culture would very soon transform into something completely different, with really nothing in common with humanity.
Also, I seriously doubt we'll even have time to become technologically sophisticated enough soon enough... The bleeding edge of current scientific and technological advancement depends on current post-industrial society to support it. If that support collapses, there's no more fast processors or abundant (electrical) energy, and the very tools needed to advance technology disappear, and we'll be stuck with refining what we have (or more likely struggling to just stay where we were before collapse).
Population growth is inevitable, there's no stopping it without serious global disaster of some kind. The question is, what happens when we really run out of resources (fresh water being perhaps the first), and how long it'll take... Technology can help, and give us more time, but only so much...
So "post-humanity" is not inevitable, far from it. Current society might not be around long enough for it to emerge...
I said basic human right, not stupid human rights. Your equating having children to mass murder. sheesh.
Well, it is, kind of.
There's no way universe can support exponential population growth. Unless we manage find a way for infinite energy or find a way to reduce energy needed by one "human" (which at that point would be some kind of energy/computer thing) to infinitely small amount, we simply can't sustain exponential growth. With current growth rate, it doesn't take very long before we'd have more mass in human flesh than the mass of Earth... And we'll hit a food limit (read: famine, war) long before that.
The more children each of us has (well, obligatory "/. crowd is certainly doing their part in fighting overpopulation by not getting laid" joke goes here, the sooner and harder we hit the limit.
And at the point we hit the limit... Man, is it going to be messy. Only hope is to avoid exponential population growth, either buy dieing more often (so we can keep current economic model of lots of young people, few old people) or by breeding less (so we'll have to get the retired people back to being productive in the economy), so that there's balance.
Yeah, the "retirement bomb" or whatever you want to call it.
But the problem can't be solved by exponential population growth. I takes what, 20 years for human population to double currently? So now 10 billion, in 80 years (and I hope to be alive in 80 years, modern medicine and all that) it'd need to be 160 billion to maintain current age structure. I seriously doubt earth can sustain that, and I also seriously doubt we can ship people off to Mars or whatever fast enough for it to make any difference.
And even if we could colonize space at the speed of light, we still couldn't keep up with exponential population growth. Total volume of space taken up by human bodies would eventually catch up with the volume of the expanding sphere containing humans. Assuming we learn a way to produce infinite energy (pump it out of parallel universe or whatever) we could actually fill a huge sphere with fat, bloated human bodies, until it would collapse into a black hole. Now there's a disburbin though;-)
So the other alternative is to have less people. Either less born, and then also old people will need to be productive in the global economy, not just living off the work of young, or more young people...
So I'd suggest we make world a lot more dangerous place so that many people still die young. Live fast, die young, that'd allow us to keep our current way of life. Dangerous traffic, deadly sports, gladiator games (not necessarily just physical fighting) as a rite of passage for teenagers...
Too bad we're too much of pussies to even talk about an alternive like that seriously. So we'll die of ecological catasthophe (either caused by collapsing economy and war, or causing a collapsing economy and war, not much difference really) instead. Oh well, with luck we won't wipe out the Earth (but I'm not feeling lucky here...).
1. There's been a measured increase in Solar activity and radiation, which is *where* we get our heat from, obviously. Once the Sun gets over it's current temper tantrum, temperatures will get more moderate.
Except, you know, it might not get over it, at least not completely... AFAIK, current solar models suggest that sun slowly grows hotter and hotter through it's normal life. So I wouldn't gamble on current situation being a tantrum that will pass. It could even be just the opposite, there was a "cold tantrum" that's ending now, and we could in fact get a "hot tantrum" next.
2. If Dinosaurs ruled a tropical paradise 65 million years ago, wouldn't the current trend of Global Warming just be the Earth returning to a Tropical state?
I guess. But don't expect it to become a stable "paradise" very quickly, be prepared for a few thousand years of total climate chaos...
3. Isn't is just a little bit arrogant on the part of humanity to assume that we really affect the environment that much? What about bovine methane? What about a single volcanic eruption spewing more CFC's then we've ever thought about using?
No, it's not at all arrogant. I mean, just think how big part of earth land area is controlled by human activity. And the thing about human activity is that it's increasing, and I don't really see it decrease. I mean, just do the math, and consider size of human population on Earth, and how it'll keep growing, and growing... There's no way 3rd world cultures and economies can develop to 1st world phase (close to zero population growth) very fast, and even if they could, 1st world has enough trouble trying to figure out what to do with society where half of people are retired and expect to live off the work of those who are still at working age.
Also, stuff like volcanic eruptions are spikes, human activity is constant (plus it's *adding* to volcanic activity etc not replacing it). Also, bovine methane is still mostly produced by *our* cows, and we control their populations.
So it's us all right, we're *not* too insignificant, quite the opposite.
Well, the revealing thing about is, that it does include *some* STL features in the comparison chart, such as strings and vectors, but fails to recognize for example map. This reveals fundamental lack of knowledge about C++ and STL by the writer of the comparison, and justifies quite a bit of BZZZTing...
After all there's not much difference between putting stuff at the core and putting it into a standard library, really. Mostly putting stuff to core may allow cleaner syntax, while putting it to the library may allow more flexibility.
Governments? Ha! They're just puppets for evil corporations!
Well, with ubiquitous RFID tagging, you'll need a full-body tinfoil suit worn over other clothes anyway. And remember to microware it daily, just in case.
HDs at least used to have quite limited shelf life, bearings getting stuck & stuff, and certainly not suited for archival purposes. Short-term backups they're fine, sure, but you can never be sure a HD that's been on shelf for a year still spins up. I don't know if current drives are better though.
California already has problems with foreign grasses that took over, and only stay green for half the year since they are from an area that snows in the winter.
Curious. One would think that a grass that stays green (and therefore can grow) year around would have clear advantage over one that is adapted for winter... Do you have any references?
one of the gyros free-floats inside its housing, and if it starts to drift off-center, the satellite fires its thrusters to reposition _the satellite_ so that the free-floating gyro is again in the center of its cavity.
Flying the satellite so that it follows a free-floating gyro it encases... Wow! Is it just me, or does that somehow sound like an extremely cool contraption?:-)
As long as they use only standard e-mail, there's no problem. And considering that every company, university, isp has their own e-mail service, they just can't go proprietary and start pushing stuff that only works between gmail accounts.
Of course if gmail at some point has like 90% of all email accounts of the world, then they might have a chance to do something nasty, but I just don't see that happening... So it's not comparable to MS.
...which is not true. elementary particle = fundamental particle != subatomic particle. electrons are composed of quarks.
Uh... Did you mean to say "electrons are NOT composed of quarks"? Protons and neutrons are, but electrons are not, they're fundamental particles (as far as our current knowledge goes, anyway).
If you think corporatism has anything to do with free market economics, you've been reading too many corporate PR statements. Behind the rhetoric, corporatism is even more hostile to free market economics than the Soviet Union was to real communism.
I think you're referring to stuff like for example corporations having their fingers in politics and lawmaking? That's completely separate issue (and a bad one at that). Companies not being allowed to do offshore outsourcing would be quite different thing, a lot like cartel really, trying to force business to "right" companies so that "right" people get the profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, so? The issue was about definition of "microsoft tax" and comparing it to buing cars with more seatbelts than you need. Even if "microsoft tax" no longer happens, that doesn't make the comparison any more valid, or my reply to it invalid.
Differences being
a) there's not only one company that makes seatbelts, and won't sell you any if you don't install them on every seat
b) you don't have to pay for 5 seatbelts if you get a 2-seater sports car
c) that seatbelts are mandated by government, not by some corporation that makes them but does not make cars
So actually it's nothing like it at all.
But this doesn't really matter, since a 100 in them feels like 200 anyway. And the speedometer usually knows it too!
If you need to ask that, you've probably never done it, and therefore can not understand
You wish. That'd mean that people actually learn. They don't. Or let's say "we don't", though the things I "don't learn" are mostly not computer related.
If you can't play non-DRM material on your computer, you can't spend your valuable time stuff like Troops or RvB, but have to watch something that's not free (as in $$$).
And government wants it because they (the individual persons in government) get paid by media companies to want it.
So, $$$ is why they want it.
Common mistake! There is a subtle yet important difference, continue command. With for-loop continue will jump to 'c' in your code, but in while-loop it will skip 'c' and go directly to 'b'. That's why you can't iterate over something with while loop if you use continue, the index (or pointer whatever) will not be incremented.
Not to mention, your while has 'c' and 'd' in the wrong order, it should be
a; while(b) { d; c; }
Point taken, I was inaccurate. By compiled language I meant basically non-interactive languages, ie languages that you can't make a meaningful interactive interpreter for (without changing their syntax at least a bit).
Though if you really wanted, you could do runtime compilation even in C. Just output C code, compile it into dynamic object, load it and call it. Just wrap doing all that into a nice function, and it's even simple to use, and could only compile any given piece of code once and then just re-execute it if exactly same code is asked for again etc. Of course not practical, but possible.
Interesting. Is copper really that expensive?
Or was that retail price for a small quantity, and you'd get it for some fraction of that if you ordered a few km of it?
(Not expecting a reply from an AC poster, but perhaps someone who happens to read this knows about the stuff too.)
and most annoying kinds of bugs that we perpetually see in application after
application.
Well, there are plenty of applications that never need to (or should for optimal performance) release any memory, only shuffle it around, and have well defined points for releasing other resources (such as closing files and sockets) that can't be left to be done in the background. Such applications have no fear of memory leaks (well, mostly anyway, you can always screw up with data structures and pointers).
functions on the fly but is powerful enough for writing real applications.
This I don't quite understand. Any compiled language by definition can't create functions on the fly, every functions needs to be compiled before the program is run. So what do you mean by "creating functions on the fly", actually?
*RIA* aren't bad in principle, quite the contrary. If they get too much power and abuse it (and let's face it, too much power always leads to abuse), then that can be bad. But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists, just as good or bad as for example EFF can be. It's just that money tends to corrupt everything.
That's just a matter of cost.
The article states that "Superpower's next generation tape has a pre-mass production cost of $50 kA/m". That's $50 for a meter of wiring able to carry 1000 amps.
Hardly a neglible current, though cost is probably hundreds of times more than equal current carrying capacity with copper wire.
Eh? Oh really? Why do I notice just the opposite, the most wanted (ok, not necessary "the best", but when its "free" they're usually the same) software being (*gasp*) shared the most... Nobody gets kicks from "sharing" some crap.
Well, I've not given it serious thought, but still some thought. IMHO a human is not a human without body, and even human "heritage" is inevitably bound to our flesh (hormones and all that). A purely mechanical culture would very soon transform into something completely different, with really nothing in common with humanity.
Also, I seriously doubt we'll even have time to become technologically sophisticated enough soon enough... The bleeding edge of current scientific and technological advancement depends on current post-industrial society to support it. If that support collapses, there's no more fast processors or abundant (electrical) energy, and the very tools needed to advance technology disappear, and we'll be stuck with refining what we have (or more likely struggling to just stay where we were before collapse).
Population growth is inevitable, there's no stopping it without serious global disaster of some kind. The question is, what happens when we really run out of resources (fresh water being perhaps the first), and how long it'll take... Technology can help, and give us more time, but only so much...
So "post-humanity" is not inevitable, far from it. Current society might not be around long enough for it to emerge...
(All this very much IMHO of course.)
Well, it is, kind of.
There's no way universe can support exponential population growth. Unless we manage find a way for infinite energy or find a way to reduce energy needed by one "human" (which at that point would be some kind of energy/computer thing) to infinitely small amount, we simply can't sustain exponential growth. With current growth rate, it doesn't take very long before we'd have more mass in human flesh than the mass of Earth... And we'll hit a food limit (read: famine, war) long before that.
The more children each of us has (well, obligatory "/. crowd is certainly doing their part in fighting overpopulation by not getting laid" joke goes here, the sooner and harder we hit the limit.
And at the point we hit the limit... Man, is it going to be messy. Only hope is to avoid exponential population growth, either buy dieing more often (so we can keep current economic model of lots of young people, few old people) or by breeding less (so we'll have to get the retired people back to being productive in the economy), so that there's balance.
Yeah, the "retirement bomb" or whatever you want to call it.
;-)
But the problem can't be solved by exponential population growth. I takes what, 20 years for human population to double currently? So now 10 billion, in 80 years (and I hope to be alive in 80 years, modern medicine and all that) it'd need to be 160 billion to maintain current age structure. I seriously doubt earth can sustain that, and I also seriously doubt we can ship people off to Mars or whatever fast enough for it to make any difference.
And even if we could colonize space at the speed of light, we still couldn't keep up with exponential population growth. Total volume of space taken up by human bodies would eventually catch up with the volume of the expanding sphere containing humans. Assuming we learn a way to produce infinite energy (pump it out of parallel universe or whatever) we could actually fill a huge sphere with fat, bloated human bodies, until it would collapse into a black hole. Now there's a disburbin though
So the other alternative is to have less people. Either less born, and then also old people will need to be productive in the global economy, not just living off the work of young, or more young people...
So I'd suggest we make world a lot more dangerous place so that many people still die young. Live fast, die young, that'd allow us to keep our current way of life. Dangerous traffic, deadly sports, gladiator games (not necessarily just physical fighting) as a rite of passage for teenagers...
Too bad we're too much of pussies to even talk about an alternive like that seriously. So we'll die of ecological catasthophe (either caused by collapsing economy and war, or causing a collapsing economy and war, not much difference really) instead. Oh well, with luck we won't wipe out the Earth (but I'm not feeling lucky here...).
Except, you know, it might not get over it, at least not completely... AFAIK, current solar models suggest that sun slowly grows hotter and hotter through it's normal life. So I wouldn't gamble on current situation being a tantrum that will pass. It could even be just the opposite, there was a "cold tantrum" that's ending now, and we could in fact get a "hot tantrum" next.
I guess. But don't expect it to become a stable "paradise" very quickly, be prepared for a few thousand years of total climate chaos...
No, it's not at all arrogant. I mean, just think how big part of earth land area is controlled by human activity. And the thing about human activity is that it's increasing, and I don't really see it decrease. I mean, just do the math, and consider size of human population on Earth, and how it'll keep growing, and growing... There's no way 3rd world cultures and economies can develop to 1st world phase (close to zero population growth) very fast, and even if they could, 1st world has enough trouble trying to figure out what to do with society where half of people are retired and expect to live off the work of those who are still at working age.
Also, stuff like volcanic eruptions are spikes, human activity is constant (plus it's *adding* to volcanic activity etc not replacing it). Also, bovine methane is still mostly produced by *our* cows, and we control their populations.
So it's us all right, we're *not* too insignificant, quite the opposite.
Well, the revealing thing about is, that it does include *some* STL features in the comparison chart, such as strings and vectors, but fails to recognize for example map. This reveals fundamental lack of knowledge about C++ and STL by the writer of the comparison, and justifies quite a bit of BZZZTing...
After all there's not much difference between putting stuff at the core and putting it into a standard library, really. Mostly putting stuff to core may allow cleaner syntax, while putting it to the library may allow more flexibility.
Governments? Ha! They're just puppets for evil corporations!
Well, with ubiquitous RFID tagging, you'll need a full-body tinfoil suit worn over other clothes anyway. And remember to microware it daily, just in case.
HDs at least used to have quite limited shelf life, bearings getting stuck & stuff, and certainly not suited for archival purposes. Short-term backups they're fine, sure, but you can never be sure a HD that's been on shelf for a year still spins up. I don't know if current drives are better though.
Curious. One would think that a grass that stays green (and therefore can grow) year around would have clear advantage over one that is adapted for winter... Do you have any references?
Flying the satellite so that it follows a free-floating gyro it encases... Wow! Is it just me, or does that somehow sound like an extremely cool contraption?
As long as they use only standard e-mail, there's no problem. And considering that every company, university, isp has their own e-mail service, they just can't go proprietary and start pushing stuff that only works between gmail accounts.
Of course if gmail at some point has like 90% of all email accounts of the world, then they might have a chance to do something nasty, but I just don't see that happening... So it's not comparable to MS.
Uh... Did you mean to say "electrons are NOT composed of quarks"? Protons and neutrons are, but electrons are not, they're fundamental particles (as far as our current knowledge goes, anyway).
Or do I remember it all wrong?
I think you're referring to stuff like for example corporations having their fingers in politics and lawmaking? That's completely separate issue (and a bad one at that). Companies not being allowed to do offshore outsourcing would be quite different thing, a lot like cartel really, trying to force business to "right" companies so that "right" people get the profits.