let's give Microsoft a chance for a real-world test before we cast our lots.
Let's do what we usually do: cast our lots for the best thing that is currently available. That would be bittorrent. Let's also reserve the right to change our minds if and when something better comes along. NB when it comes to downloading, "faster" is not the only measure of "better". See DRM etc.
Every encroachment it makes results in the diminishment of freedom for its citizens
Damn right. Give them the freedom to starve, be ignorant and sick and poisoned. Nobody needs goverment schools, heath care, social security or environmental health regulations. Hey, so long as enron can make more money.
To the extent that government funds help jumpstart lagging scientific research, the same amount of freedom is lost.
So, you say that industry-funded research is more free than goverment funded research? Do you work for the Tobacco industry or something?
Re:Private and public are not mutually exclusive
on
Open Source Molecules
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it seems that they are threatened financially by this.
And it's the goverment's role (on behalf of the people, remember) to reply by saying "so?".
It's always possible that the people would be better of if the company has "unfair" competition from subsidised government services, or even is put out of business by this. In theory, governments serve people before companies.
But "Engage warp drive, Scotty" to explain how characters get from A to B might as well be "Cast a spell of teleportation, O mighty wizard" - It's fantasy with no basis in reality. You can enjoy it for that, but science it isn't.
Why matter or information cannot exceed the speed of light.
A lot of FTL proponents discuss the mechanisms that prevent matter from exceeding the speed of light, which lead some to hope that the matter can be finessed with wormholes or the like, and thus avoid these speed-limits.
I propose to discuss the consequences of matter or information travelling from A to B by any means in less time than light can, and thus show the whole enterprise to have severe logical inconsistencies. I'm aiming at an overview without the math. You can find more details in other writeups and in the links provided.
Spacetime diagram My undergraduate physics was a while back, but a few things stuck from relativity. A useful diagram is a spacetime diagram, particularly a light-cone. Now, as you know, two observers travelling rapidly with respect to one another have different frames of reference, and don't see things the same way; time dilation and length contraction see to that. So what's a 45-degree line on observer A's light cone won't be so on observer B's diagram.
Causality in light cones The light cone divides the universe into three parts for the observer in the center: the past, the future and and what's neither, elsewhere. This ties into cause and effect. For instance, if you want to cause something to happen on Mars from here on Earth, like sending an instruction to your remote Mars-rover, you need to send a signal to it, and it takes the radio waves 4 minutes to get there when the conjunction is favourable. So whilst an event on Mars in four minutes time is within the bounds of your possible future, an event on Mars in two minutes time is not, it is just elsewhere. Likewise an event on Mars two minutes ago is not in your past right now, since you cannot know about it and cannot react to it until another two minutes pass.
The relativity of simultaneity.
Relative simultaneity is a consequence of this: On the spacetime diagram, simultaneous events, i.e. events taking place at the same time have the same vertical (time) position. But different observers use different axes, because they measure space and time along axes which are skewed with respect to other observer's axes. What is simultaneous for one observer is not necessarily so for other observers with very different velocities.
So when observer A sees event P happening just before event Q, observer B can see Q happening just before P. That's OK if P and Q are well-separated, but what if P causes Q? But we'd hope that all observers, no matter how fast they travel, always see causes happening before the effects. the effect aloways belongs inside the future light cone of its cause. Yes, in order for this reversal of order to occur, the one event must be outside the light-cone of the other.
The equivalence of time travel and faster-than-light travel But if you travel faster than light, you step outside of your light-cone. There can be an observer speeding past who sees you arriving before they see you depart. Furthermore, if they too travel faster than light they could take a message from you when you arrive, and deliver it to you before you depart. What if your future self convinces your past self not to go? What if they take a passenger not a message? The only way you can make sense of the paradox is that you end up in a parallel universe every time you switch on the FTL drive.
FTL travel, regardless of how it might be accomplished, be it big-ass rockets, warp drives, wormholes, spacetime-fabric zips, blue boxes, genetic mutation, frantic handwaving or mental telepathy, is equivalent to time travel into the past, and you'd have to make sense of that. It is "incompatible with causality". Without causality (i.e. the notion that things happen for explainable reason that occurred beforehand for all observers), making sense of the universe is a lost hope. Causality has not been shown to hold globally throught all space and time, a thought that makes some physicists very nervous. But if we know anything, we know
This may be true, but what you're saying is that although all the javaScript work that you will ever do will be as painful as hammering nails into your forehead, JavaScript itself is nevertheless really good fun. it's a rather academic distiction.
. For what should be the most portable language there is, it certainly gives me lots of pain...
There's a big difference between porting java code and porting the java platform that java code runs upon: The former is (mostly) platform-neutral, the latter is the infrastructure needed to acomplish that, and it must know about platforms, so that java code doesn't have to.
Instead what they say in the study basically and with a lot of hand waving is we couldn't think of anything which might be causing this culturally and wouldn't know how to measure it anyway so it must be biological.
This is a hypothesis, nobody claims that it's proven.
Can you prove that it's purely a cultural effect? Until then, you must also entertain the biological hypothesis.
The other is stating that an advanced civilization would shun planets for artificial habitats.
An advanced civilization in the Star Wars universe should, seeing as putting megatons of metal in orbit seems easy there. But then, logic doesn't really apply to the Star Wars universe.
The "amount" of homework means little when its content is trivial, and does not do anything but repeat something that should be obvious based on what is learned in class.
On the other hand, in some areas like maths, or learning to drive a car, most students need to go through a certain number of examples in order to master a technique. Call it repetition, drilling, but it's often necessary.
will decide that they don't need a broadcast flag in order to license their movies for high-def broadcast. At that point they will have the entire market to themselves and it will be easy money to fullfill that previously unmet market demand.
The counterargument is that without the protection of the broadcast flag, this company will be pirated right out of business, so that instead of a thriving market, there will be a barren wasteland.
There are holes in this argument - one is the assumption that the broadcast flag is an effective deterent to piracy (e.g. DVD encryption doesn't stop the large operators from simply burning thousands of identical copies). But nevertheless, it is the way that they are thinking.
"I have a beautiful 29-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife, and I don't want some screeners to be looking at them through their clothes, plain and simple," he said
Do they ever go to a doctor? Doctors see so much meat they stop noticing after a while. So what? It's necessary for the job. Now, are these scanners necessary?
Nice theory, but if that's true, why does the iPod support MP3
Apple did not create the digital audio player market, they entered it. A new digital audio player that doesn't play the massive existing base of MP3s would be deader than a three-week old kipper. I would have thought that was blindingly self-evident.
adding another format that no one uses is hardly going to hurt them
MP3s are the bait, iTunes is the hook. A migration from MP3 to ogg just doesn't fit into that business plan. In fact, it may work against it. Before iTunes, AAC was a format that hardly anyone used. Apple would love people to migrate from old, smelly, boring MP3s to new, shining DRM's AACs.
I'd buy an iPod instantly if it could play oggs, but I'm under no illusions that this will happen anytime soon.
While Operations researchers do use this algorithym, Operations Researchers would be very upset if you claimed that thier field was just this method.
O.R. in general is the use of mathemicatical, statistical and simulation methods to model and improve the way that companies work, and make their operations more cost-effective. The transport sector is a major employer e.g. it costs more than a few million and takes years to build a railroad - you'd like to know beforehand just how many people are likely to use it if you do. It costs loads of money to have to fly an empty 747 in from New York because you need it in London today. You'd like to plan your air schedule so that doesn't happen.
How many TV torrents still contain the original advertisements they aired with? I'm thinking in the region of.. hmm... zero? Now, how is all this "free to air" television subsidised? Oh? Advertisements?
Actually, I'm downloading the episode of Dr Who that I missed last night. The original contained no advertisiments, and is subsidised by the tax that I pay in the UK. Now the reason why I shouldn't download it again is... what exactly?
ALso I'm really not sure what the difference is between downloading an American show that I missed a few weeks ago on the Sci-fi channel (yup, again I pay for that), and recording it with a VCR, DVR, TiVo or whatnot.
(including the programming teacher *pulls out hair*) that insist that soon everything will be done in java, that C, C++, and perl are dead languages
Which is clearly tosh. The Java,.NET, perl, mono and python VMs; not to mention OS cores and device drivers will need to be written in C or a language like it.
This year I rewrote all the old Pascal programs that we use for them in VB
For the love of god man, why? Java may not be perfect, but there are worse things. VB is one of them. Stop before it damages your mind. If your on a pascal mission and don't mind proprietary windows tools, try Delphi.
MS should just start from scratch and write a new OS from the ground up. Compatibility be damned, nobody is going to move away from Windows anyway,
They did that already. It was called Windows NT. Now it's called Windows 2000 and XP. Compared to the code that came before (windows 3.1, windows 95 etc) it is more functional, more secure and more stable.
He was a genius programmer - but wrote code that almost no one else could ever maintain.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. -Martin Fowler, "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code "
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian Kernighan
Why do you say "genius programmer", and not "genius, and inscrutible programmer"? Did nobody tell Mr "Genius" that his code was unreadable, that this was stupid, and that he could do better if he was actually as smart as he thought, and was any good at programming?
Slashdot Mirror
let's give Microsoft a chance for a real-world test before we cast our lots.
Let's do what we usually do: cast our lots for the best thing that is currently available. That would be bittorrent. Let's also reserve the right to change our minds if and when something better comes along. NB when it comes to downloading, "faster" is not the only measure of "better". See DRM etc.
Every encroachment it makes results in the diminishment of freedom for its citizens
Damn right. Give them the freedom to starve, be ignorant and sick and poisoned. Nobody needs goverment schools, heath care, social security or environmental health regulations. Hey, so long as enron can make more money.
To the extent that government funds help jumpstart lagging scientific research, the same amount of freedom is lost.
So, you say that industry-funded research is more free than goverment funded research? Do you work for the Tobacco industry or something?
it seems that they are threatened financially by this.
And it's the goverment's role (on behalf of the people, remember) to reply by saying "so?".
It's always possible that the people would be better of if the company has "unfair" competition from subsidised government services, or even is put out of business by this. In theory, governments serve people before companies.
Creative speculation, yes.
But "Engage warp drive, Scotty" to explain how characters get from A to B might as well be "Cast a spell of teleportation, O mighty wizard" - It's fantasy with no basis in reality. You can enjoy it for that, but science it isn't.
Why matter or information cannot exceed the speed of light.
A lot of FTL proponents discuss the mechanisms that prevent matter from exceeding the speed of light, which lead some to hope that the matter can be finessed with wormholes or the like, and thus avoid these speed-limits.
I propose to discuss the consequences of matter or information travelling from A to B by any means in less time than light can, and thus show the whole enterprise to have severe logical inconsistencies. I'm aiming at an overview without the math. You can find more details in other writeups and in the links provided.
Spacetime diagram
My undergraduate physics was a while back, but a few things stuck from relativity. A useful diagram is a spacetime diagram, particularly a light-cone. Now, as you know, two observers travelling rapidly with respect to one another have different frames of reference, and don't see things the same way; time dilation and length contraction see to that. So what's a 45-degree line on observer A's light cone won't be so on observer B's diagram.
Causality in light cones
The light cone divides the universe into three parts for the observer in the center: the past, the future and and what's neither, elsewhere. This ties into cause and effect. For instance, if you want to cause something to happen on Mars from here on Earth, like sending an instruction to your remote Mars-rover, you need to send a signal to it, and it takes the radio waves 4 minutes to get there when the conjunction is favourable. So whilst an event on Mars in four minutes time is within the bounds of your possible future, an event on Mars in two minutes time is not, it is just elsewhere. Likewise an event on Mars two minutes ago is not in your past right now, since you cannot know about it and cannot react to it until another two minutes pass.
The relativity of simultaneity.
Relative simultaneity is a consequence of this: On the spacetime diagram, simultaneous events, i.e. events taking place at the same time have the same vertical (time) position. But different observers use different axes, because they measure space and time along axes which are skewed with respect to other observer's axes. What is simultaneous for one observer is not necessarily so for other observers with very different velocities.
So when observer A sees event P happening just before event Q, observer B can see Q happening just before P. That's OK if P and Q are well-separated, but what if P causes Q? But we'd hope that all observers, no matter how fast they travel, always see causes happening before the effects. the effect aloways belongs inside the future light cone of its cause. Yes, in order for this reversal of order to occur, the one event must be outside the light-cone of the other.
The equivalence of time travel and faster-than-light travel
But if you travel faster than light, you step outside of your light-cone. There can be an observer speeding past who sees you arriving before they see you depart. Furthermore, if they too travel faster than light they could take a message from you when you arrive, and deliver it to you before you depart. What if your future self convinces your past self not to go? What if they take a passenger not a message? The only way you can make sense of the paradox is that you end up in a parallel universe every time you switch on the FTL drive.
FTL travel, regardless of how it might be accomplished, be it big-ass rockets, warp drives, wormholes, spacetime-fabric zips, blue boxes, genetic mutation, frantic handwaving or mental telepathy, is equivalent to time travel into the past, and you'd have to make sense of that. It is "incompatible with causality". Without causality (i.e. the notion that things happen for explainable reason that occurred beforehand for all observers), making sense of the universe is a lost hope. Causality has not been shown to hold globally throught all space and time, a thought that makes some physicists very nervous. But if we know anything, we know
This may be true, but what you're saying is that although all the javaScript work that you will ever do will be as painful as hammering nails into your forehead, JavaScript itself is nevertheless really good fun. it's a rather academic distiction.
. For what should be the most portable language there is, it certainly gives me lots of pain...
There's a big difference between porting java code and porting the java platform that java code runs upon: The former is (mostly) platform-neutral, the latter is the infrastructure needed to acomplish that, and it must know about platforms, so that java code doesn't have to.
Instead what they say in the study basically and with a lot of hand waving is we couldn't think of anything which might be causing this culturally and wouldn't know how to measure it anyway so it must be biological.
This is a hypothesis, nobody claims that it's proven.
Can you prove that it's purely a cultural effect? Until then, you must also entertain the biological hypothesis.
The other is stating that an advanced civilization would shun planets for artificial habitats.
An advanced civilization in the Star Wars universe should, seeing as putting megatons of metal in orbit seems easy there. But then, logic doesn't really apply to the Star Wars universe.
The "amount" of homework means little when its content is trivial, and does not do anything but repeat something that should be obvious based on what is learned in class.
On the other hand, in some areas like maths, or learning to drive a car, most students need to go through a certain number of examples in order to master a technique. Call it repetition, drilling, but it's often necessary.
The first completely robotic fast food restaurant opened in 2031
_ F.shtml l 1 026-1-454,00.html
It won't be anything like that long:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030801/1345236
http://www.businesspundit.com/archives/000463.htm
http://onenews.nzoom.com/onenews_detail/0,1227,21
will decide that they don't need a broadcast flag in order to license their movies for high-def broadcast. At that point they will have the entire market to themselves and it will be easy money to fullfill that previously unmet market demand.
The counterargument is that without the protection of the broadcast flag, this company will be pirated right out of business, so that instead of a thriving market, there will be a barren wasteland.
There are holes in this argument - one is the assumption that the broadcast flag is an effective deterent to piracy (e.g. DVD encryption doesn't stop the large operators from simply burning thousands of identical copies). But nevertheless, it is the way that they are thinking.
"I have a beautiful 29-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife, and I don't want some screeners to be looking at them through their clothes, plain and simple," he said
Do they ever go to a doctor? Doctors see so much meat they stop noticing after a while. So what? It's necessary for the job. Now, are these scanners necessary?
Only 88 years? No imaginaion at all. A high-tech galactic civilisation could last for thousands of years.
The DVD's that hit the floor and got scratched up
So, what you're saying is that all DVDs are bad because someone didn't keep some valuable ones in protective sleeves or jewel cases?
Nice theory, but if that's true, why does the iPod support MP3
Apple did not create the digital audio player market, they entered it. A new digital audio player that doesn't play the massive existing base of MP3s would be deader than a three-week old kipper. I would have thought that was blindingly self-evident.
adding another format that no one uses is hardly going to hurt them
MP3s are the bait, iTunes is the hook. A migration from MP3 to ogg just doesn't fit into that business plan. In fact, it may work against it. Before iTunes, AAC was a format that hardly anyone used. Apple would love people to migrate from old, smelly, boring MP3s to new, shining DRM's AACs.
I'd buy an iPod instantly if it could play oggs, but I'm under no illusions that this will happen anytime soon.
Why not give people another option? Why not support an established, open, royalty-free format?
It doesn't send revenue towards iTunes' DRMd store.
Much as I'd love to see ogg on an iPod, Apple is acting it it's own shortsighted, greedy self-interest here.
Simplex is also known as Operational Research
While Operations researchers do use this algorithym, Operations Researchers would be very upset if you claimed that thier field was just this method.
O.R. in general is the use of mathemicatical, statistical and simulation methods to model and improve the way that companies work, and make their operations more cost-effective. The transport sector is a major employer e.g. it costs more than a few million and takes years to build a railroad - you'd like to know beforehand just how many people are likely to use it if you do. It costs loads of money to have to fly an empty 747 in from New York because you need it in London today. You'd like to plan your air schedule so that doesn't happen.
Who's going to play Luke, Han, Leia, etc?
Ten years time? CGI. Animations don't need to be paid movie-star salaries.
Programming on the sci-fi channel is partly funded by adverts. By downloading the content instead ... you reduce the value of those adverts
As opposed to the value that they would have if I were to legally record the show to VCR and fast-forward the ads?
How many TV torrents still contain the original advertisements they aired with? I'm thinking in the region of.. hmm... zero? Now, how is all this "free to air" television subsidised? Oh? Advertisements?
... what exactly?
Actually, I'm downloading the episode of Dr Who that I missed last night. The original contained no advertisiments, and is subsidised by the tax that I pay in the UK. Now the reason why I shouldn't download it again is
ALso I'm really not sure what the difference is between downloading an American show that I missed a few weeks ago on the Sci-fi channel (yup, again I pay for that), and recording it with a VCR, DVR, TiVo or whatnot.
(including the programming teacher *pulls out hair*) that insist that soon everything will be done in java, that C, C++, and perl are dead languages
.NET, perl, mono and python VMs; not to mention OS cores and device drivers will need to be written in C or a language like it.
Which is clearly tosh. The Java,
This year I rewrote all the old Pascal programs that we use for them in VB
For the love of god man, why? Java may not be perfect, but there are worse things. VB is one of them. Stop before it damages your mind. If your on a pascal mission and don't mind proprietary windows tools, try Delphi.
MS should just start from scratch and write a new OS from the ground up. Compatibility be damned, nobody is going to move away from Windows anyway,
They did that already. It was called Windows NT. Now it's called Windows 2000 and XP. Compared to the code that came before (windows 3.1, windows 95 etc) it is more functional, more secure and more stable.
Why do you say "genius programmer", and not "genius, and inscrutible programmer"?
Did nobody tell Mr "Genius" that his code was unreadable, that this was stupid, and that he could do better if he was actually as smart as he thought, and was any good at programming?