It's pretty ridiculous to me that Linux developers ever accepted the Bitkeeper terms.
Oh, the righteous fog of clueless indignation.
Linux was in crisis at the time Linus adopted BitKeeper. The only work process that had so far panned out had been stretched beyond the breaking point. They had next to no idea precisely what kind of a source control system they required. BitKeeper was one of the few reliable, distributed systems around and the terms were hardly egregious on the whole compared to the risk of managing the Linux crisis some other way.
Linus has said over and over again that without the BitKeeper experience he wouldn't have felt qualified to develop the Git alternative. It was only through using a competent tool for that period of time that he came to understand his precise needs.
And you think a picture is worth a thousand words?
Now I think Larry was a complete ass about much of this, escalating this into a far bigger stink than it needed to be. I'm ecstatic he got thoroughly kicked to the open source curb.
As ungracious as he was over some of the details, he did throw the Linux community a rescue plank at a critical juncture. With a better attitude, he could have come out of this smelling like a rose. Instead he came out of this smelling a bit like an ass.
In any case, that's his shirt to wear. For my part, I'm in no rush to return to his product (for which I once had a commercial license) even if it remains far better than Git (after an awfully big head start). Our shop had no complaints about the BitKeeper technology at all back in 2005, and some of our diaspora later got in on the ground floor in other shops because after our BitKeeper boot camp, Git was so easy to understand and adopt in its more advanced use cases.
Morals of the story: Once BitKeepered, fly high. Once BitKeepered, twice shy.
Taking a bigger stance on this, the entire history of SCM is actually a weird, professionally embarrassing, upside-down thing that should never have been so late to the party in the first place.
We talk about people that come along like Einstein and advance an entire field, perhaps before its natural time. SCM is the anti-Einstein story, where some smart guy could have come along fifteen years earlier and changed everything, but somehow didn't.
It would have had to have been some guy who deeply understood collaborative work flow at scale (more from intuition than experience), who was razor sharp on attention to nasty detail, and in total command of certain key algorithms.
What we got instead was Larry, fifteen years late. By this point Larry really did understand collaborative work flow at scale, but from direct experience rather than intuition. Somehow getting there the hard way put a fly up his nose over certain control issues, and we ended up with this twisted Dr Strangelove-esque love story.
But please, don't go around claiming that no-one involved had sane reasons. Sir Galahad with the fly up his nose was a strangely compelling figure in that particular time and place.
So thanks, Larry, for all the fish, but also, don't call us, we'll call you.
More over schadenfreude. The inimitable Larry McVoy has taught us all how to crave a cheek-twisting German word for "nasty divorce gratitude".
Mozilla says Universal Search "combines the Awesome Bar history with the Firefox Search drop down menu to give you the best recommendations so you can spend less time sifting through search results and more time enjoying the web."
Ah, more time swallowing and less time smelling and chewing. That never goes badly, does it?
Last summer I refurbished a small manufacturer in the agricultural space (mainly for my own sanity). We tried to buy new and failed.
It was a Windows shop with many legacy XP systems scattered about on the production floor (some used maybe once per month depending on product mix out the door). Not a single long-term employee expressed any love for Windows, so we had buy-in to replace everything on the white collar side with Mac Minis, after one of the employees brought in his own quad-core mini with 16 GB RAM to show off.
Then we went to the Apple store and discovered that in the soldered RAM era, the price point we had approved covered a dual core system with 8 GB of RAM soldered in. By the time we scaled it up to be comparable to the Mini from two years earlier, it became 50% more expensive. Because of the Windows legacy, we expected fairly heavy use of virtualization, making 8 GB a very low ceiling into the near future.
And then the answer came back at the new value point: well, fuck it, we're already getting an armload of HP refurbs for the manufacturing floor, let's just get more refurbished Windows 7 boxes for the office staff, too.
More teeth, smaller apple. Funny how you can now see Apple shrinking all the way from the stock exchange.
It's just a responsibility, like showering, brushing your teeth, and flossing.
I have never taken a narcotic drug (unless you count the weakest possible prescription, three or four days post-wisdom tooth removal). My daily expenditure in continuing to not take narcotic drugs is consequently next to zilch.
It's far from a life well lived to accumulate this kind of responsibility for no good initial reason (hair-shirted Calvinists perhaps excepted—bring on temptation so I can resist more good).
As I see this it's nothing short of a human tragedy that so many people—in an otherwise wealthy society—got themselves into this adverse metabolic state in the first place, though it's hard to see how the consumerist free market could have worked differently until the obesity epidemic reached push-back proportion. (Wouldn't it be lovely if we could some day discover an economic system which allows us to become wealthy without also making us collectively stupid—insert Coke commercial here—until the sins of societal wealth delivers its giant bill?)
Where you say "just" I spit.
Doctor: I've got good news and bad news.
Patient: What's the good news?
Doctor: You don't have to be fat forever.
Patient: What's the bad news?
Doctor: To become and remain thin, you will have to think about not eating food every day, all day, for the rest of your life.
Patient: Hooray! I don't have to be fat!
Patient dances a quick jello shuffle complete with an inflated underwear crotch grab, in a passable impression of Weird Al miming a fat Michael Jackson.
Doctor: You aren't by any chance mocking me, are you?
Patient: Of course not. Why on earth would I do that?
To assert that Google "earned additional revenue" from this change, you also need to demonstrate that the addition revenue measured did not come from revenue they would have received regardless, had they waited longer.
By the similar kind of "logic", it wouldn't surprise me that one could justify using cocaine to treat ADHD in children. (They really did pay more attention for the duration of the comparative study.)
In any case, what seems clear enough is that this comparative study shook loose a significant chunk of pocket change that will now feed into their employee compensation formulas by year's end (whether one, or two, or three, or tens steps removed).
And that, of course, is what's most important at the end of the day.
I agree. 4 Mbps that fully delivers qualifies as broadband for everything short of multiparty cable cutting. (Sure, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe wouldn't willingly settle for less than 40 Mbps, but at this point if she can't afford an urban shoe maybe she needs to go back and rethink her family planning).
If you don't like their business practices, then don't do business with them. If they have something you want, they don't have to give it to you under your terms. But if enough people refuse to accept their terms, they'll have to change their model.
That's how free enterprise works.
Toy model much?
Last time I tried to purchase a cell phone cash, they wouldn't sell one to me. Cross off the corporate offenders one by one, pretty soon you become an embargoed island. Man, we have a lot of ground to cover. How about we start here?
Perhaps my first cut was slightly too oblique. How about we visit the other extreme?
medical blunder when the medication prescribed after your quadruple bypass interacts with your erection pill (clearly stated in the fine print of a 2000-page pharmaceutical bible), leading to catastrophic failure of your on-again/off-again donor kidney
Doctors also make basic mistakes, but whooey is the complexity floor rising.
Sleeping in the comfort of controlled temperature and humidity makes every man a medieval king's envy, yet, comfort seemingly always weakens men.
What you're calling "comfort" allows the vast majority of the population to live past the age of thirty. Lack of "comfort" doesn't make you strong. It makes you dead or alive, where the "strong" tend to accrue to the second group.
You also didn't get the memo on refrigeration, on which point any Swedish TED talk would inform you that electrification (primarily due to electrification bringing refrigeration) commonly leads to the greatest of all large bumps in human health and life expectancy.
Dried food hasn't been a viable staple since humanity invented the bottom billion.
As for significant gadgets, I'll throw in a vote for the sounding weight, which permitted the skillful Phoenicians to actually spread their fancy alphabet.
This tool was bell shaped, made from stone or lead, with tallow inside attached to a very long rope. When out to sea, sailors could lower the sounding weight in order to determine how deep the waters were, and therefore estimate how far they were from land.
Also, the tallow picked up sediments from the bottom which expert sailors could examine to determine exactly where they were.
Excuse me if I prefer to get this sort of information from people who are more reputable.
What's with the small box? Based on one damn thing after another, our entire species has been shown to be disreputable. Excuse me if I prefer to get this sort of information from a species with a better track record.
Reputation is a fractal all the way down. Who can be trusted based on reputation? Well, how long is a beach?
At the turn of the century, 1900, 80% of Americans worked on farms. Today, it's about 4%. The mechanization of agriculture didn't result in 76% unemployment, it freed people to do other work. The availability of labor that was previously tied up in farming allowed incredible increases in productivity and our standard of living in the 20th century.
It's a disgrace that under the standards of modern discourse this kind of shallow parable still counts as a positive contribution to any meaningful debate.
After we killed all the X, people panicked a lot, but we started eating Y.
After we killed all the Y, people panicked a little bit less, but we started eating Z.
After we killed all the Z, everyone immediately recalled the shallow parables so nobody panicked much, but by lunch time the next there was a very intense conversation about precisely what letter comes after Z.
After cognitive automation, what comes after Z?
Please set aside your trusty parable and try again.
Doh! For a moment there I forgot where I was and trotted out an uncoded mdash. Shudder. In a different era I could have been eaten by a wildebeest over a lesser mishap.
We have zero statistics about it and any number people give is just blowing in the wind.
We have zero statistics about it and any number of people giving any number is just a wind chime of dull knives ruffled once again by a passing breeze.
Superforecasting 101
Step 1: Determine the base rate.
Let's examine a few.
Base rate of species maximally exploiting (without self-imposed introspective limits) any natural resource that resembles sugar (hello geocarbon!): 100% over a few billion years; nervous, fragile, primitive first appearance of the mere possibility of a species so doing, last 0.000000050 billion years.
Base rate of global earth extinction events: unknown, first billion years; zero so far, subsequent billions of years.
Orchestrated global climate interventions that worked out exactly according to plan: none yet, many billions of years (and potentially several billion moreâ"supposing our collective evolutionary journey has any possibility of stopping at this station, which is far from a sure thing).
Hitchhiker's Guide to Superforecasting
Step 1: Panic.
Step 2: Assign an alarming, yet comfortingly precise numerical probability.
If our descendants in much less than a thousand years can't go in and transmute that waste into whatever they want then somewhere along the way humans got lazy and stopped bothering to advance themselves
So this is how we know we're not descended from ape stock, who under no circumstances would permit any such thing.
But, wait!
We don't even need to sell the future up the river with a British accent. It's dumb already in the here and now. From Wikipedia:
One analyst at Liberium Capital described the strike price as 'economically insane': "as far as we can see this makes Hinkley Point the most expensive power station in the world... on a leveraged basis we expect EDF to earn a Return on Equity (ROE) well in excess of 20% and possibly as high as 35%.
He was the first person to post a shadow CV that lead to this discussion thread today. Isn't that good enough?
Perhaps there's an interesting spin-off of Groundhog Day, a world in which it is impossible for anything that's ever happened before to be repeated ever again. In that world, "First post!" would be regarded as a truly special and unique accomplishment, as one would expect in a world where the average human never manages to do a single exemplary thing in their entire lives. There would still be Guinness, but there wouldn't be records.
11,539.41153 BCE: Thag attempts to jump over bar loosely suspended at both ends, knocking the bar down.
11,539.41154 BCE: Thag attempts to jump over bar loosely suspended at both ends, and doesn't knock the bar down.
Great work, Thag! You got it back up again for another go in just 10 milliyears. There would be no need to list the height cleared. It wouldn't mater. No-one would care.
I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of us realize we're not actually living in anti-Groundhog world. I don't think you'd like it there. Any person who attempts to say "it's been done before" vanishes in a puff of logical contraction (unfortunately, due to conservation of snot—similar to spin, yet different—people who vanish in a puff of logical contraction tend to immediately show up in a nearby brane with fewer logical constraints, such as this one here).
Because you've gone out of your way to not actually ask the question, I'll answer it for you. Here's the problem. You can repeat this meme forever and it will never stick.
It's like one of the four blind men describing an elephant (this party game is even more fun after substituting a cross-legged Brahmin). Blind man #2's partial description of the elephant (or the left toes and right knee of the Brahmin) simply doesn't make fully integrated, conceptual sense.
Money flows in circles. You can't be the product sold to the advertiser, unless the advertiser receives a flow of money in return (whereupon you assume the consumer role, and the actual product becomes the product—how amazing is that?).
Can you imagine trying to explain the transistor by constantly mentioning holes as the only charge carrier, and then wondering why people never completely get over this old electron thing? If a person is going to assimilate just half of the story, it will be the electron story, not the hole story, no matter if it's repeated infinitely often.
It's real problem is that it completely redesigns itself all the time, so I refuse to update it for months or years at a time because I have to learn how to use it all over again every time I do update it.
This is even worse when your wife owns the iMac and you only sit down at the keyboard once every four months to resolve some issue or curate a heavy update/upgrade cycle.
If that program had ever worked the same way twice for me it might not boil my blood from fifty paces. Every session soon turns into another hour of "where the fuck did they hide some simple function this time?" And for what, I ask you? The program is never the least damn bit improved by all this churn, so far as I've ever noticed.
Apple has now done at least as much to harm usability as they once did to improve it. Too bad that reputational stickiness takes so darn long to overturn.
For a long time they sold us the message: control = consistency = ease_of_use.
Somehow the "control" half of the equation remains as strong as it ever was, while the "consistency" half turned into "consistency of control", with control != user_experience_betterment.
You're talking about property as if it's a black and white thing. It's not, and never has been. What we now understand as "property" is the end result of a complex social negotiation that's been ongoing now for many millennia, which has always featured strange winners and losers, and devils in the details.
One can't live in the world and not notice this.
Woe to you if you discover that "your" back yard is contaminated with someone else's "ancestral" DNA.
If "your" antenna radiates energy through "my" radio circuitry, am I allowed to do what I wish with my radio's behaviour?
I once saw Prince making some ridiculous argument about the protection of music, with no idea at all that the people who come up with the fancy clothing he wears are afforded nothing at all like what he presumes:
The main protection fashion designers have is over their trademark: their logo, their name.
Source is protected; that's why you hear about raids on pirates, who have made copies of Louis Vuitton bags, Canal St. in New York, Santee Alley in Los Angeles.
Have control of their name; have copyright protection of all the two-dimensional designs that go into the production of a garment.
Textile design with a certain pattern—automatically qualify for copyright protection of that design.
What they don't own are any of the three-dimensional designs they end up creating. The stuff you see prancing out on a runway are actually up for grabs. Anybody can copy any aspects of any of those designs and get into no trouble with the law.
Those designs are not particularly utilitarian—a word that comes up a lot in this industry—utilitarian stuff tends not to be protected legally.
Something has to be considered a work of art in order to be considered for copyright protection. The courts decided long ago that they did not want any fashion designers owning such utilitarian designs as shirts, blouses, pants, belts, lapels. Don't want somebody owning a monopoly—basically what a copyright gives you.
If I'm at the runway in Milan and I see a design I like and I'm a medium-to-high end retailer, versions of those non-utilitarian clothes get translated into garments that are worn by everyday people, correct?
Yes, and the courts would say that any fashion design, no matter how non-utilitarian it may seem, does not qualify for copyright protection.
The only way it would qualify is if there were some detachable piece from that outfit. The rare example would be like a belt-buckle—a sculptural item that you could remove and hang on the wall and regard as a piece of art.
[I put what sounded like Russ into italics, which on that transcript is anyone's guess.]
Next we get into the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. Under no moral theory of copyright, as originally conceived, do retroactive term extensions make any moral sense whatsoever. Basically one group of assholes paid off another group of assholes (who were actually supposed to represent the interests of their constituents, but that's another matter).
The motivated citizen tries to take property seriously, and then it degenerates all over again into Boss Hogg and Rosco vs the Downloaders of Hazzard Country.
So now you know why your two cents worth of Morality 101 sometimes falls on deaf ears.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, the righteous fog of clueless indignation.
Linux was in crisis at the time Linus adopted BitKeeper. The only work process that had so far panned out had been stretched beyond the breaking point. They had next to no idea precisely what kind of a source control system they required. BitKeeper was one of the few reliable, distributed systems around and the terms were hardly egregious on the whole compared to the risk of managing the Linux crisis some other way.
Linus has said over and over again that without the BitKeeper experience he wouldn't have felt qualified to develop the Git alternative. It was only through using a competent tool for that period of time that he came to understand his precise needs.
And you think a picture is worth a thousand words?
Now I think Larry was a complete ass about much of this, escalating this into a far bigger stink than it needed to be. I'm ecstatic he got thoroughly kicked to the open source curb.
As ungracious as he was over some of the details, he did throw the Linux community a rescue plank at a critical juncture. With a better attitude, he could have come out of this smelling like a rose. Instead he came out of this smelling a bit like an ass.
In any case, that's his shirt to wear. For my part, I'm in no rush to return to his product (for which I once had a commercial license) even if it remains far better than Git (after an awfully big head start). Our shop had no complaints about the BitKeeper technology at all back in 2005, and some of our diaspora later got in on the ground floor in other shops because after our BitKeeper boot camp, Git was so easy to understand and adopt in its more advanced use cases.
Morals of the story: Once BitKeepered, fly high. Once BitKeepered, twice shy.
Taking a bigger stance on this, the entire history of SCM is actually a weird, professionally embarrassing, upside-down thing that should never have been so late to the party in the first place.
We talk about people that come along like Einstein and advance an entire field, perhaps before its natural time. SCM is the anti-Einstein story, where some smart guy could have come along fifteen years earlier and changed everything, but somehow didn't.
It would have had to have been some guy who deeply understood collaborative work flow at scale (more from intuition than experience), who was razor sharp on attention to nasty detail, and in total command of certain key algorithms.
What we got instead was Larry, fifteen years late. By this point Larry really did understand collaborative work flow at scale, but from direct experience rather than intuition. Somehow getting there the hard way put a fly up his nose over certain control issues, and we ended up with this twisted Dr Strangelove-esque love story.
But please, don't go around claiming that no-one involved had sane reasons. Sir Galahad with the fly up his nose was a strangely compelling figure in that particular time and place.
So thanks, Larry, for all the fish, but also, don't call us, we'll call you.
More over schadenfreude. The inimitable Larry McVoy has taught us all how to crave a cheek-twisting German word for "nasty divorce gratitude".
Ah, more time swallowing and less time smelling and chewing. That never goes badly, does it?
Last summer I refurbished a small manufacturer in the agricultural space (mainly for my own sanity). We tried to buy new and failed.
It was a Windows shop with many legacy XP systems scattered about on the production floor (some used maybe once per month depending on product mix out the door). Not a single long-term employee expressed any love for Windows, so we had buy-in to replace everything on the white collar side with Mac Minis, after one of the employees brought in his own quad-core mini with 16 GB RAM to show off.
Then we went to the Apple store and discovered that in the soldered RAM era, the price point we had approved covered a dual core system with 8 GB of RAM soldered in. By the time we scaled it up to be comparable to the Mini from two years earlier, it became 50% more expensive. Because of the Windows legacy, we expected fairly heavy use of virtualization, making 8 GB a very low ceiling into the near future.
And then the answer came back at the new value point: well, fuck it, we're already getting an armload of HP refurbs for the manufacturing floor, let's just get more refurbished Windows 7 boxes for the office staff, too.
More teeth, smaller apple. Funny how you can now see Apple shrinking all the way from the stock exchange.
The passive voice foretells exactly how much personal control I expect to have over its choice of bedroom and duration of stay.
You want the master bedroom with the en suite? I was kind of hoping you wouldn't, but sure, far be it from me to exert influence in my own home.
I have never taken a narcotic drug (unless you count the weakest possible prescription, three or four days post-wisdom tooth removal). My daily expenditure in continuing to not take narcotic drugs is consequently next to zilch.
It's far from a life well lived to accumulate this kind of responsibility for no good initial reason (hair-shirted Calvinists perhaps excepted—bring on temptation so I can resist more good).
As I see this it's nothing short of a human tragedy that so many people—in an otherwise wealthy society—got themselves into this adverse metabolic state in the first place, though it's hard to see how the consumerist free market could have worked differently until the obesity epidemic reached push-back proportion. (Wouldn't it be lovely if we could some day discover an economic system which allows us to become wealthy without also making us collectively stupid—insert Coke commercial here—until the sins of societal wealth delivers its giant bill?)
Where you say "just" I spit.
Doctor: I've got good news and bad news.
Patient: What's the good news?
Doctor: You don't have to be fat forever.
Patient: What's the bad news?
Doctor: To become and remain thin, you will have to think about not eating food every day, all day, for the rest of your life.
Patient: Hooray! I don't have to be fat!
Patient dances a quick jello shuffle complete with an inflated underwear crotch grab, in a passable impression of Weird Al miming a fat Michael Jackson.
Doctor: You aren't by any chance mocking me, are you?
Patient: Of course not. Why on earth would I do that?
To assert that Google "earned additional revenue" from this change, you also need to demonstrate that the addition revenue measured did not come from revenue they would have received regardless, had they waited longer.
By the similar kind of "logic", it wouldn't surprise me that one could justify using cocaine to treat ADHD in children. (They really did pay more attention for the duration of the comparative study.)
In any case, what seems clear enough is that this comparative study shook loose a significant chunk of pocket change that will now feed into their employee compensation formulas by year's end (whether one, or two, or three, or tens steps removed).
And that, of course, is what's most important at the end of the day.
I agree. 4 Mbps that fully delivers qualifies as broadband for everything short of multiparty cable cutting. (Sure, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe wouldn't willingly settle for less than 40 Mbps, but at this point if she can't afford an urban shoe maybe she needs to go back and rethink her family planning).
Toy model much?
Last time I tried to purchase a cell phone cash, they wouldn't sell one to me. Cross off the corporate offenders one by one, pretty soon you become an embargoed island. Man, we have a lot of ground to cover. How about we start here?
Why Does Cuba Have so Many Classic Cars?
Next year, we can progress to John Nash.
Step one: discover the visual blind spot
Step two: loudly proclaim the integrated visual field doesn't exist
Step three: reload, lather, rinse, repeat
Drake equation = batshit attractor
More than reasonable by the standards of conversation in the hot tub at my local swimming pool.
On dry land, however, I prefer to aim a lot higher.
Perhaps my first cut was slightly too oblique. How about we visit the other extreme?
medical blunder
when the medication prescribed after your quadruple bypass interacts with your erection pill (clearly stated in the fine print of a 2000-page pharmaceutical bible), leading to catastrophic failure of your on-again/off-again donor kidney
Doctors also make basic mistakes, but whooey is the complexity floor rising.
From the makers of the milli-Helen (the amount of beauty required to launch one ship) comes the fabulous milli-why (unit m?).
5 ?
The amount of directed inquiry necessary to fully explicate root cause.
1 m?
The least amount of brain-cell electrical exchange required to ascribe blame.
What you're calling "comfort" allows the vast majority of the population to live past the age of thirty. Lack of "comfort" doesn't make you strong. It makes you dead or alive, where the "strong" tend to accrue to the second group.
You also didn't get the memo on refrigeration, on which point any Swedish TED talk would inform you that electrification (primarily due to electrification bringing refrigeration) commonly leads to the greatest of all large bumps in human health and life expectancy.
Dried food hasn't been a viable staple since humanity invented the bottom billion.
As for significant gadgets, I'll throw in a vote for the sounding weight, which permitted the skillful Phoenicians to actually spread their fancy alphabet.
What's with the small box? Based on one damn thing after another, our entire species has been shown to be disreputable. Excuse me if I prefer to get this sort of information from a species with a better track record.
Reputation is a fractal all the way down. Who can be trusted based on reputation? Well, how long is a beach?
It's a disgrace that under the standards of modern discourse this kind of shallow parable still counts as a positive contribution to any meaningful debate.
After we killed all the X, people panicked a lot, but we started eating Y.
After we killed all the Y, people panicked a little bit less, but we started eating Z.
After we killed all the Z, everyone immediately recalled the shallow parables so nobody panicked much, but by lunch time the next there was a very intense conversation about precisely what letter comes after Z.
After cognitive automation, what comes after Z?
Please set aside your trusty parable and try again.
Doh! For a moment there I forgot where I was and trotted out an uncoded mdash. Shudder. In a different era I could have been eaten by a wildebeest over a lesser mishap.
We have zero statistics about it and any number of people giving any number is just a wind chime of dull knives ruffled once again by a passing breeze.
Superforecasting 101
Step 1: Determine the base rate.
Let's examine a few.
Base rate of species maximally exploiting (without self-imposed introspective limits) any natural resource that resembles sugar (hello geocarbon!): 100% over a few billion years; nervous, fragile, primitive first appearance of the mere possibility of a species so doing, last 0.000000050 billion years.
Base rate of global earth extinction events: unknown, first billion years; zero so far, subsequent billions of years.
Orchestrated global climate interventions that worked out exactly according to plan: none yet, many billions of years (and potentially several billion moreâ"supposing our collective evolutionary journey has any possibility of stopping at this station, which is far from a sure thing).
Hitchhiker's Guide to Superforecasting
Step 1: Panic.
Step 2: Assign an alarming, yet comfortingly precise numerical probability.
Step 3: Take a well-earned, hot bath.
So this is how we know we're not descended from ape stock, who under no circumstances would permit any such thing.
But, wait!
We don't even need to sell the future up the river with a British accent. It's dumb already in the here and now. From Wikipedia:
He was the first person to post a shadow CV that lead to this discussion thread today. Isn't that good enough?
Perhaps there's an interesting spin-off of Groundhog Day, a world in which it is impossible for anything that's ever happened before to be repeated ever again. In that world, "First post!" would be regarded as a truly special and unique accomplishment, as one would expect in a world where the average human never manages to do a single exemplary thing in their entire lives. There would still be Guinness, but there wouldn't be records.
11,539.41153 BCE: Thag attempts to jump over bar loosely suspended at both ends, knocking the bar down.
11,539.41154 BCE: Thag attempts to jump over bar loosely suspended at both ends, and doesn't knock the bar down.
Great work, Thag! You got it back up again for another go in just 10 milliyears. There would be no need to list the height cleared. It wouldn't mater. No-one would care.
I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of us realize we're not actually living in anti-Groundhog world. I don't think you'd like it there. Any person who attempts to say "it's been done before" vanishes in a puff of logical contraction (unfortunately, due to conservation of snot—similar to spin, yet different—people who vanish in a puff of logical contraction tend to immediately show up in a nearby brane with fewer logical constraints, such as this one here).
It's a sad thing if you don't see the problem with "might" and "president" sharing the same bed, with "might" on top.
Because you've gone out of your way to not actually ask the question, I'll answer it for you. Here's the problem. You can repeat this meme forever and it will never stick.
It's like one of the four blind men describing an elephant (this party game is even more fun after substituting a cross-legged Brahmin). Blind man #2's partial description of the elephant (or the left toes and right knee of the Brahmin) simply doesn't make fully integrated, conceptual sense.
Money flows in circles. You can't be the product sold to the advertiser, unless the advertiser receives a flow of money in return (whereupon you assume the consumer role, and the actual product becomes the product—how amazing is that?).
Can you imagine trying to explain the transistor by constantly mentioning holes as the only charge carrier, and then wondering why people never completely get over this old electron thing? If a person is going to assimilate just half of the story, it will be the electron story, not the hole story, no matter if it's repeated infinitely often.
This is even worse when your wife owns the iMac and you only sit down at the keyboard once every four months to resolve some issue or curate a heavy update/upgrade cycle.
If that program had ever worked the same way twice for me it might not boil my blood from fifty paces. Every session soon turns into another hour of "where the fuck did they hide some simple function this time?" And for what, I ask you? The program is never the least damn bit improved by all this churn, so far as I've ever noticed.
Apple has now done at least as much to harm usability as they once did to improve it. Too bad that reputational stickiness takes so darn long to overturn.
For a long time they sold us the message: control = consistency = ease_of_use.
Somehow the "control" half of the equation remains as strong as it ever was, while the "consistency" half turned into "consistency of control", with control != user_experience_betterment.
You're talking about property as if it's a black and white thing. It's not, and never has been. What we now understand as "property" is the end result of a complex social negotiation that's been ongoing now for many millennia, which has always featured strange winners and losers, and devils in the details.
One can't live in the world and not notice this.
Woe to you if you discover that "your" back yard is contaminated with someone else's "ancestral" DNA.
If "your" antenna radiates energy through "my" radio circuitry, am I allowed to do what I wish with my radio's behaviour?
Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property
I once saw Prince making some ridiculous argument about the protection of music, with no idea at all that the people who come up with the fancy clothing he wears are afforded nothing at all like what he presumes:
Johanna Blakley from That was from Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property:
[I put what sounded like Russ into italics, which on that transcript is anyone's guess.]
Next we get into the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. Under no moral theory of copyright, as originally conceived, do retroactive term extensions make any moral sense whatsoever. Basically one group of assholes paid off another group of assholes (who were actually supposed to represent the interests of their constituents, but that's another matter).
The motivated citizen tries to take property seriously, and then it degenerates all over again into Boss Hogg and Rosco vs the Downloaders of Hazzard Country.
So now you know why your two cents worth of Morality 101 sometimes falls on deaf ears.