Because, as we all know, performance comes in only one flavour.
This is an even sneakier version of what Daniel Dennett calls "rathering". This is where you write "The proponents of A would say that A resolves this issue. As we can see, A does not solve the problem, so rather B." The trick here is that no-one ever said the issue was a dichotomy between A and B. It's been implied by a rhetorical device that few readers even notice. Apparently Stephen J. Gould used this technique a fair amount. This surprised me. He was a pretty solid author for the most part.
Do you really think that SSD is the best storage option for Google Earth's highest resolution imagery of the Nunavut territory? I guess your philosophy is that if the data isn't in high enough demand to justify SSD performance levels, there's no point keeping the data online in the first place.
Then there's a few hundred people who charter expensive hunting trips in the Canadian north and afterwards they go to Google Earth to review where they've been and Google Earth says "Imagery 404: not enough demand to make it cost effective to host the data on SSD".
If it's just a few hundred people, so who gives a shit?
As it happens, I was just wondering to myself this morning how much of our present right-wing enthusiasm for our current economic system is rooted in capitalist democracy being far, far, far superior to pre-COBOL Stalinism. The true test arrives when some Asian economic model arises, one very different from our own historical model, and kicks us in the pants.
It's sad, really, that "market-based" turned into such a horrible cliche. Most of the damage was caused by so many people putting it in front of "solution" (market-based solution) when what they really meant was market-based approach.
Many don't even realize that these two phrases are different, because they've defined "market-based approach" as being the solution, as it was and ever shall be, dating all the way back to pre-COBOL Stalinism.
It is, in fact, possible to design markets—markets are a human construction—that create more problems than they solve.
Ideology is when you play epsilon-delta with an infinite sleeve of mulligans. If this market fails, that just means we need to change something and try again. Even market failures are characterized as stepping stones to progress.
Personally, I'm not willing to drink mulligan Kool-Aid. I love markets that work. I hate markets that don't. It sure would be nice at the outset if it was more obvious which was which, without greater society picking up the tab for all the hooks and shanks.
Until we know *why* Apple's doing this, it's hard to judge the situation. They may have a reason that seems insignificant to the end user, but you don't get to be the biggest company on the planet by making decisions like this for no reason.
I recently watched the documentary The Prince of Sugar in which a rabble-rousing priest fights for the rights of illegal Haitian aliens the Dominican Republic can't do without (sound familiar?) while the least fortunate among the Dominicans burn giant tires in protest against the Haitians "taking away" jobs extremely few Dominicans would willingly do at the wages offered.
The movie makes it out like the Catholic Church stands completely behind the hard ass priest, but well before the movie's formal release the Catholic Church reversed its stance and the priest, Christopher Hartley, is promptly expelled from the country (as many of the power brokers in the Dominican sugar trade had demanded with ominous overtones the whole time he was there).
Bishop Ozoria never describes the specifics of the "incident," but he does state in a letter to Father Hartley dated September 21, 2006 that Father Hartley's "deplorable" actions affect "'the good of the souls' entrusted to [Bishop Ozoria's] pastoral care," create a "harmful" ministry to the parish and diocese, produce "serious detriment or disturbance to the ecclesiastical community," and harm the level of trust necessary between a bishop and a priest.
Certainly, the Catholic Church didn't get to where it is now by having no reasons at all. But just look at what they consider to be an adequate external justification of their decisions within.
Until we know *why* Bishop Ozoria did this, it's hard to judge the entire controversy.
When I went into information technology long ago, the great joy for me was getting away from these cryptic smoke signals of thin public account. And what does Apple mainly offer in compensation of this lost joy? World class interior decoration—another profession very near the bottom of my high school career assessment (along with manning the security desk in an appartment-building entrance lobby).
When one can go s/until/if ever/g with complete impunity to the meaning of the message, I'm done with the program. The moral of the story is that one man's patience is another man's purgatory.
Do you ever say anything with any truth in it? The 4.x series was the worst in FreeBSD history as they switched on all the horrible SMP bits. No one used 4.x on anything that required stability.
The 4 series had legendary stability. The 5 series, not so much. I think by 5.3 it was stable enough for some purposes, and by 5.4 things were cleared headed in the right direction again. (How about you create a keyboard binding to output that phrase "Do you ever say anything with any truth in it?" and use the time you save for an itty bitty Google refresher course?) The unusually flaky 5.x releases covered a time period of about 18 months beginning January 2003.
The last 4-STABLE branch release was 4.11 in January 2005 supported until 31 January 2007.
The problem was that the FreeBSD transition to kernel SMP came late in the day, and by 2005 one tended to strongly desire kernel SMP performance levels. Unfortunately, there was a highly inconvenient period where you couldn't enjoy legendary stability and critical-path kernel SMP at the same time. It was a good time to run Linux for some purposes.
I recall that some FreeBSD deployments running 5.3 had spotless stability, but you had to get your build right and then muck with things hardly at all, which I guess went against the grain of some server admins. The 5 series was not a release for these people.
GIANT hung around for a long time on some less critical kernel paths. It was a long, slow excision.
The Linux social contract at the time was that you put your finger in the air to find out what the cool kids were doing, and if you did mostly the same things—for whatever was trending that month—you couldn't go too far wrong. The problem was the different things were trending every six months, so the moment you took your finger out of the air and stopped pumping your feet like a teenaged Fred Flintstone, you'd find yourself running a not-entirely-supported combination of Old Things.
The rate at which The New Hotness decayed into An Old Thing in the Linux community was truly terrifying if you were trying to build a security appliance to be deployed in the worst possible places—places where you might prefer to buy a new ride rather than cross the tracks to fetch your old ride, even a ride barely six months old and custom armored.
Under FreeBSD it remains a good idea to read the release notes and then exercise personal restraint over unsuitable flavours of ice cream. The cool kids algorithm does not work well.
*****
At a very late hour on Prometheus Night, Fred's car glides to a silent stop at the side of a dark road. "What's the matter?" Wilma asks. "My dogs are beat," says Fred. "Rub my feet for a just a minute?" Wilma harrumphs silently to herself for a short moment, but doesn't wish to create a scene. "Well, put your filthy feet up if you must," says Wilma. Fred's hesitates. He had vaguely hoped that Wilma would halfway invert herself under the steering plinth.
The whole "fault" meme is Garden of Eden bullshit, the implication being that we need to busy ourselves—pronto—with barfing up the forbidden apple.
To get a good chance of staying below 2C, the report's scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050 from current levels and to 'near zero or below in 2100.
This forecast has about a 5% chance of being vindicated retrospectively by future generations of scientists as being mostly on the mark. Isn't it amazing how it comfortably falls within the parameters—as tuned by the 2C free parameter—of what might fly politically (if we really did busy barfing up the forbidden apple).
No species on planet earth has ever before barfed up a forbidden apple. The general principle in the biological world is "see food, eat food". It applies to every life form from bacteria on up.
Our species has managed to turn coal into sugar. It's a clever bit of business in the department of thermodynamic laundering, but hardly the cleverest trick mother nature has yet tossed into the soup—were it not for the human fixation on human exceptionalism.
Prudence might actually be the right path forward. I was in favour of prudence growing up in the 1970s, a point in time where it would have been almost trivial to enact. What was then coming out of most tail pipes was richer in unburnt hydrocarbons than much of what now comes out of the ground. It was one of the hardest things to understand about the world back when I was that age. I now understand that what America was paying for hydrocarbons from the Middle East was a tiny fraction of the wealth one could create through its consumption, this being the primary reason the race was on—the race to exhaust what was already then strongly suspected of being a soon-limited resource. Had the western world slowed its consumption out of prudence, less of the wealth would have crossed the divide. That was too high a price on prudence in the Nixon era, and realistically, it probably still is, because—you know—Sun Tsu and Machiavelli have grown so outdated since the advent of the microchip they are now relegated to the category of mere historical curiosities along with books, and land lines, and VHS.
One of the first professional software developers I ever met was a young fellow driving a first or second generation Honda Civic as The Right Thing To Do (circa 1979). Since then, because the debate has been hijacked by self-serving neo-Luddites vs anyone with even half a clue, the science itself gets more smug by the day. So far as I'm concerned, there is no scientific certainty or consensus on the appropriate societal response to these changes which appear to be taking place with ever greater confidence, though not yet as judged by the standards of scientific process established over hundreds of years as taking hundreds of years, in the ideal case.
Increasingly they just wave around the smoking gun—the gun, the gun, the gun, we've proven the smoking gun—and then they expect their policy recommendations to be given the same heft as the conclusions they are actually trained to reach. Are they crisis management experts? Are they economists? Are they political scientists? Have they traced the precautionary principle all the way back to the primordial soup?
There's no great track record of science getting anything much right over time periods of under twenty years. Give me a century any day. Every year I read another paper outlining yet another carbon sink now suspected. The target is still bobbing around faster than a UFO hand-filmed from a topless Corvette before the invention of wishbone suspension. It's absolutely clear that there's an anthropic contribution to the future condition of the blue marble. I wouldn't have argued against that in the mid-seventies barely out of elementary school. We simply can not un-eat the apple of our own success.
Google didn't do this to make the gamers happy. They did it to make the non gamers happy, because video game culture is ladden with a rich and repurposed vocabulary that constantly shows up when people don't want to see video games in their search results.
They have to recognize games in order to remove games. Once they've gone that far, throwing up a positive infobox is Slidebox Bob.
I didn't see an actual link to the study anywhere, but TFA at least appears to assume correlation = causation.
No, actually every version of the article I've seen bends over backwards to end off by saying "correlation does not equal causation".
With this kind of a study, which is methodologically weak (participant recall), I don't think one gets uniform results across gender, age, race, and education very darn often. You would get this in a study of cigarette smoking, because the health impacts of smoking are direct and universal.
When one gets a study with a profile that resembles a study on cigarette smoking in its power and statistical profile, it does tend to clear the mind of ancillary explanations. Occam's razor is practically beating the door down. It's not like sugar have never before been suspected as an agent of direct metabolic stress.
If this study holds up, it's a pretty darn big deal no matter how you slice it. Anyone here have a method to detect 5 years of invisible biological aging which is less onerous than giving someone a fifteen minute quiz? No, I didn't think so.
Almost all the hacks imposed on C++ to remain compatible with C are linear hacks that don't combine combinatorially. That's what makes these hacks ugly: bending over backwards to achieve hack containment. The C++ standardization literature contains many of the fiercest debates ever waged among pointy hats concerning hack containment. Purity wasn't an option. Impurity segregation was.
The hacks in C++ that do have combinatorial complexity pertain to features of the C++ language completely unrelated to C, such as templates and namespaces.
The bending over backward to avoid non-linear hacks due to compatibility with C got the standards committee into a wee bit of time pressure. Both the template and namespace features were added "on the fly" against the stated policy of the standardization group to only standardize after there was enough experience on the ground to avoid the worst mistakes.
If the standard isn't finished on a timely basis: market fail.
If the standard is finished without templates and namespaces: paradigm fail.
If the standard makes blunders in defining templates and namespaces: an eternal witch's brew.
The committee members rather sanely (and unhappily) chose the least of several competing evils.
There's never been a language like C++ to get otherwise smart people to say stupid things.
* C++ contains many ugly hacks due to its C legacy * most ugly hacks are combinatorial * C++ contains many combinatorial hacks * therefore C++ is riven with combinatorial hacks due to its C legacy
Yes, but the ugly hacks to support C are not the combinatorial hacks, and the combinatorial hacks to support templates and namespaces before their time are not the hacks to support C.
Of course, if you don't delve deeply enough to figure this out, one might just conclude that C++ was concocted by a brigand of insane ideologues. You'd be stupid and wrong, but if your surround yourself with an echo chamber of the equally lazy, there's hardly any detectable social downside (near you).
There's remains, however, this irritating tendency of the world around you not to adopt your favourite "clean" language and put C++ out to pasture once and for allâ"due exclusively to inertia, incompetence, and mendacity. Of course.
The next rank of fierce debate during standardization concerned the elimination of all proposed features where adopting the feature imposed a performance penalty across the board even when it isn't used. A few performance points here and there on a heavy-lifting, industrial programming language quickly adds up to entire data centers. Elegance was never a sufficient argument, unless the performance tax imposed was—at most—barely measurable.
Elegance looks like such a great thing until one begins writing an application at industrial scale. The hacks inherent in making any computational system work efficiently on industrial scale (with smooth degradation around the edge cases, and no crippling instabilities) instantly dwarfs the hackishness of the C++ language itself.
Surprisingly, almost without me noticing it, it's become my silent workhorse. It's fairly heavy and stiff, with just enough key feel for the speed I type. It has nice key surface sculpting, too. Every couple of years I shake an entire meal out of the mechanism and give the key caps the car wash treatment. It still works great, but does get a bit sticky for a few days after being washed.
I had two of the old IBM keyboards around, but I simply type too fast to use one as my main keyboard. My typing oscillates between high speed ticking and a low frequency buzz. IBM keyboards are noisy and stiff and I began to wonder about the strain on my fingers, as well.
On this keyboard I've never actually forced myself to use the backspacebar key. I popped the the key cap off the right Windows key a long time ago. Miraculously, Firefox is now the bane of my typing existence, since any accidental strike of the right ALT key takes me into a modal menu-bar mode.
About six months ago I bound the Linux compose key to capslock and set it up to generate mdashes and ndashes and a whole bunch of HTML markup.
I have <blockquote> bound to caps-q-a and </blockquote> bound to caps-q-s. I have <nowiki> bound to caps-w-a and </nowiki> bound to caps-w-s. I guess it's obvious what software I use for taking notes. What a godsend to have a useful capslock key. Now if I could just shoot someone at the Mozilla Foundation for perpetrating the modal Alt key to activate the drop-down menubar, my keyboard life would be nirvana.
Yeah, maybe there's a Firefox setting to disable this. Can't be bothered just yet. Too many moving carpets. This I learned from Ubuntu. If you hate something, do nothing about it. If twelve months down the road some twenty-something GUI designer asshole hasn't already yanked the carpet out from underneath you consider investing three minutes of quality Google time in stone-from-shoe removal prowess. (My what sharp fangs you have, Grandma! All the better to service the tablet marketplace, my darling little Ms Underhood.)
For example, I use middle-click paste all the time, while also carrying a to-be-pasted item around in my regular paste buffer (and even more in my clippy tool). I'm sure I read something about some distro/desktop deciding to eliminate this from their next GUI iteration, right before I hit the emergency stasis field activation button and curled into a foetal ball.
What I desperately want is a middle-click erase-paste, in which the contents of the target area are vaporised prior to the paste operation (clearing out search boxes is especially annoying). I just noticed that the paste happens on button release. A long middle-button press could be a field erase operation. Then long-press/release would be paste-replace. That would be golden. All the methods I know to quickly delete a field involve first selecting the field, which really sucks when you're already carrying something in your X buffer.
Hard on the heals of my compose key triumph, I might give it a go at some point in the next six to nine months.
Actually you only need to pear the population down by about 20 million. The top 2% of the world's population consume something like 90-95% of the resources, they are extremely expensive to have around. Remove them and everyone's standard of living jumps significantly.
And what about the other 98% who dream of becoming the 2%? Nature abhors voluntary prudence. Stable equilibria in straightened circumstance is what you get after everyone goes "oh shit, what now?"
Perhaps in about twenty more years, we'll have a SimEarth realistic enough to set your proposal up to watch the earth burn. The stampede to replace the profligate 2% being but the first unmitigated ecological disaster of many to follow.
Skill testing question: Does the extremely high American incarceration rate aid or abet the trade in deprecated substances? I'm not even going to bother offering up antonyms. Prison is many things, and one of those things is serving as a first-rate finishing school in general lawlessness. Every trip to prison makes your "straight" options that much less attractive. After three trips to prison, minimum wage under the table is your glass ceiling in the straight economy.
The law of unexpected consequence is nowhere else in force so strongly as it applies to human incentive.
The core problem is not Google+ (pustulent imposition that it was) but that Google does not provide clean answers about anything it does. Google's motto has long ceased being "don't be evil" and morphed into "that's for us to know, and users to divine".
My view is that happiness in life is directly proportional to eliminating all forms of "X behind a curtain" where X is man, woman, beast, tyrant, saint, priest, missionary, Smallpox vector, committee, club, association, organization, governmental body, natural, supernatural, mythical, legendary, or outright fabrication.
Google as presently configured is not a conduit of happiness in this world.
Yeah, if he's stuck in a state of decline, he can still contribute.
I guess you don't have any grandparents who live alone, but can no longer reliably identify their own children. My wife's grandmother recently "celebrated" her ninetieth birthday (I don't use scare quotes lightly). All her "loved ones" showed up. She spent the entire day looking like a four-year-old lost in a giant shopping mall. She didn't know who she was, who anyone else was, where she was (with all the people around, she couldn't identify the house she had lived in since 1950). Out of compassion, the family soon arranged a quiet room, so that she could "contribute" to the celebration by sitting alone in a nearby room.
You are so deep into denial about the reality of aging, I had to pull out triple scare quotes. If you still don't get it, I'm done. I'll just have to say "I've got nothing" and leave to you to your own date with destiny. Enjoy it, if you can.
When exactly did "honestly" become a synonym for living under a rock? This question comes up on almost every thread where FreeBSD is mentioned, though granted this is barely more often than its major releases.
The first answer in every such thread for years now is always ZFS, but actually this just disguises how many people have been using it for years or decades and just plain like the way FreeBSD does things even if nine out of ten, or ninety nine out of a hundred, or nine hundred and ninety nine out of a thousand have different tastes.
I get intensely piqued over the implication that there's a nuisance hurdle that needs to be cleared just for existing. When "honestly" becomes a cover story for living under a rock (or an equivalent not-be-bothered-hood) this ultimately seems to resonate as the main implication.
It's especially irritating when FreeBSD predates all the Johnny-come-latelies. It would have needed to be clairvoyant to have correctly decided to not exist, so as not to strain the reputational resources of open source groupthink.
I used to use an axe, but I stopped using it when I had to cut down a tree ten-feet wide at the base. I am presently using a Husqvarna and I am perfectly happy with it but for some reason the axe retains a magical "hard core" allure. So I am honestly asking, what is an axe good for?
CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking
This does not deserve to live on Oprah, much less Slashdot. Not on Fox News, not on Rush Limbaugh, not on Howard Stern, not on Jerry Springer. On its own, exactly as it stands, it would set a new standard for outright stupidity in any legal jurisdiction that has yet to legislate pi = 3.
Oh, but wait, there's a footnote: preventable deaths among working-aged adult Americans. THAT'S NOT FUCKING FINE PRINT. My credibility circuit assigned six zeros (0.00000% chance of being true) before I managed to read the next line.
In all the many long years I've been here, I can not recall a single story headline that revolts me to this degree. I was reading recently Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by Michael Ignatieff. At some point during his election campaign he said something stupid about the Middle East. His campaign manager pulled him aside and explained to him: "Politicians have nine lives. You just burned eight."
I have a finite amount of all-caps to expend on Slashdot outrage. I just burned 80% of my lifetime supply. Next time I resort to all-caps, I'll never post here again.
So totally true. But once you allow that 99% of modern life is jumping off, I'm not sure what you're griping about.
Just as one comparison, take every organization prominent enough to have it's own article in en.Wikipedia, go to their own websites (the vast majority will have one) and scrape all of the "about us" web pages these organizations authored about themselves, and imagine these as a collective "About Us"-apedia.
This "About Us"-apedia would make MySpace's worst year look like an exercise in design consistency. I for one can live without the metric fuckton of Flash-based incoherence as my standard point of departure on the agencies of the world.
It seems to me that all the people who hated Wikipedia on first sight share an underlying belief in knowledge as an authority network. The reason Wikipedia succeeded is that knowledge isn't what we thought it was. For the vast majority of purposes, authority is a boundary condition, not the thing itself.
The first step in assimilating a new body of knowledge is to survey the field's lexicon: What words are used and roughly how are they linked together? This cognitive process takes place long before factual assertions amount to a hill of beans. When the facts do begin to matter, most smart people are well aware that in this world we're all fed baloney 24 hours a day. Wikipedia is one of the places where it becomes especially clear how the baloney is made. That doesn't make it worse baloney than Superbowl Sunday—America's national slick-baloney celebration day. Is iOS somehow less Orwellian than the IBM PC? So we were told through a non-linguistic medium.
On Wikipedia, when I spot baloney, I click the magic button called "History" where I scan for edit wars and substantial discards. For the vast majority of articles, it's all there in plain view. The mythical, Orwellian-smashing parentage of iOS is harder to trace.
In the upcoming era of Deep Watson, those Wikipedia crumb trails of sturm und churn will suddenly become interesting resources to expose to automated data mining. Perhaps then the present surface form of the articles will begin to fade in importance. There's nothing stopping this, except for the will to go there, which is depressingly thin in the general public for the 99% of the time they're merely jumping off.
Apparently over a 168000 light year stretch this adds up to a 0.0005 light year detour
After scanning TFA, the first thing I looked up was the distance to SN 1987a, which the author somehow regarded as beneath notice. Perhaps he was preoccupied with the correct keyboarding of "orthopositronium".
Call me old fashioned, but I think that a person bleating away about an esoteric footnote of astrophysical revelation ought to first muster basic magnitude mastery.
There is reason to believe that Intel has done CPUs for quite a time at a loss in order to ruin AMD. The effects of AMD being reduced are also blatantly obvious with massively retarded innovations.
That's the danger in posting so soon after being woken up from a long sleep by a handsome prince. You need to shake your head and check out the competitive landscape in 2014.
4 Cores @ 2.5GHz Qualcomm Krait 400
Intel might wish to rethink sitting on their innovative thumbs.
At least it is steadily loosing ground to Python and for reason.
None of those dynamics have ever occurred in a Python shop?
The second half of the nineties was a bad scene for code readability all around, or did you somehow not notice the Herman Miller office furniture bubble?
There was a lot of Perl written during this era. Perl was the only language that could keep up with the Vogon rapture of all things brick and mortar. The ferryman threw in the towel, auction off his ferry on eBay, bought two cords of dynamite (mail order), and simply diverted the river. Pretty much everything was still where it had been, but traditional commerce was all on the other side now.
My development platform circa 1996 was NT 4, on a P6 200 with 32 MB of EDO system memory, a 640 MB disk drive, and a good quality 17" Dell CRT. It was tolerable, but hardly coding nirvana. The world was shifting under my feet almost daily: Linux, BSD, 2000, LBA, AMD64, SATA, DDR, broadband, Mozilla, Google, DVI, PHP, Python, Ruby, C++, STL, and not an open source version control system worth a crock of shit for love nor money.
I wonder why my coding standards at the time did not optimally favour my future self in the mid 2000s with my CoreDuo workstation, 4 GB of ram, 200 GB of disk space, and twin 19" monitors.
Do recall the little puzzle with the sliding digits 1-15 in a 4x4 grid? Trying to get any significant piece of glue code to run on NT and Linux and able to survive unscathed a major upgrade of each was a lot like that. Or have you blacked it out? Many ugly lines of code were written because the tiles were sticky. In the stupidest possible ways. And it was all going to be Ruby next year anyway. Whatever language you were working in was next up against the wall after the demise of B&M (if any wall could still be found). Soon the Wall was up against the wall, but I digress.
Programmers were in such short supply that vast numbers of people were coding in languages they only pretended to know. Have you forgotten that, too? If Visual Basic had been a better scripting language, Perl would have come out the other side better loved.
The great thing for the smart young programmers about becoming trendoids is that it helps to insulate them from the ugly job of cleaning up yesterday's bubble's giant mess.
The paper's contribution is to propose a new cache coherence scheme which they claim has scalability advantages over existing schemes.
Somehow this was obvious to me even from the press release. I've never yet seen details of an ordering model laid bare where it wasn't the core novelty. Ordering models are inherently substantive. Ordering models beget theorems. Cute little Internets drool and coo.
Over the commercial lifespan of 2000/XP, the cost of gene sequencing went down by five orders of magnitude (100,000 x) and there's still one more order of magnitude crumbling in full swing ($1b per human genome to $1000 per per human genome).
We're not merely drinking their milkshake, we're reading their source code, and it's gone from the Manhattan project garage to hamburgers served in the length of time it takes for a helpless human baby to mature into a helpless head case with little recourse to perspective or logic.
After we invented the steam engine, the Amazon wasn't the first forest we cut down. The Amazon is full of piranha and poisonous snakes and many other protective life forms.
Yet somehow you wish to depict the interval in human history between the invention of the steam engine as the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest as a race the forest can win?
Sure can, if the entire human race dies off in the next World Wide Crusade at some point in the next fifty-odd years.
Penicillin was an inspired one-off. Gene sequencing is the devil's root kit.
But maybe I'm wrong, and I severely underestimate microbial evolution. Twenty years from now we'll wake up one day to discover hostile bacteria with no chemical genome at all: it's all hidden behind some bitcoin quantum process we are unable to sequence, that mutates in nature faster than we can puzzle it out, and we'll all be left scratching our chins and wondering how that happened.
"There will always be a need for car dealerships,..."
But everyone knows what that conveys, even the dealers themselves:
We've been printing money for a long time by bilking our customers for costly extras, and even though they often know this and resent it deeply, until now there hasn't been a credible alternative, so they just squeal to silently to themselves, then come back for more. With recent developments, that's going to change real darn fast if we don't (A) somehow force the competition out of business, or (B) do a prompt about-face in our shifty business practices, or (C) both at the same time with the intent of achieving the first option ASAP.
Of course, this divides ranks with the dealership community itself, as the old guys close to retirement are going to continuing milking their cash cow by any means available, as the younger guys start to worry about their long term futures when the backlash strikes, which the old guys are doing nothing whatsoever to abate sooner rather than later.
They say that society is "only" three square meals from anarchy. That's a lot, actually. I estimate that the fraternal order of the car dealership is only two snifters of brandy and one Cuban cigar's worth of suggested forbearance away from king-sized flop house crossfire.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, as we all know, performance comes in only one flavour.
This is an even sneakier version of what Daniel Dennett calls "rathering". This is where you write "The proponents of A would say that A resolves this issue. As we can see, A does not solve the problem, so rather B." The trick here is that no-one ever said the issue was a dichotomy between A and B. It's been implied by a rhetorical device that few readers even notice. Apparently Stephen J. Gould used this technique a fair amount. This surprised me. He was a pretty solid author for the most part.
Do you really think that SSD is the best storage option for Google Earth's highest resolution imagery of the Nunavut territory? I guess your philosophy is that if the data isn't in high enough demand to justify SSD performance levels, there's no point keeping the data online in the first place.
Then there's a few hundred people who charter expensive hunting trips in the Canadian north and afterwards they go to Google Earth to review where they've been and Google Earth says "Imagery 404: not enough demand to make it cost effective to host the data on SSD".
If it's just a few hundred people, so who gives a shit?
As it happens, I was just wondering to myself this morning how much of our present right-wing enthusiasm for our current economic system is rooted in capitalist democracy being far, far, far superior to pre-COBOL Stalinism. The true test arrives when some Asian economic model arises, one very different from our own historical model, and kicks us in the pants.
It's sad, really, that "market-based" turned into such a horrible cliche. Most of the damage was caused by so many people putting it in front of "solution" (market-based solution) when what they really meant was market-based approach.
Many don't even realize that these two phrases are different, because they've defined "market-based approach" as being the solution, as it was and ever shall be, dating all the way back to pre-COBOL Stalinism.
It is, in fact, possible to design markets—markets are a human construction—that create more problems than they solve.
Ideology is when you play epsilon-delta with an infinite sleeve of mulligans. If this market fails, that just means we need to change something and try again. Even market failures are characterized as stepping stones to progress.
Personally, I'm not willing to drink mulligan Kool-Aid. I love markets that work. I hate markets that don't. It sure would be nice at the outset if it was more obvious which was which, without greater society picking up the tab for all the hooks and shanks.
I recently watched the documentary The Prince of Sugar in which a rabble-rousing priest fights for the rights of illegal Haitian aliens the Dominican Republic can't do without (sound familiar?) while the least fortunate among the Dominicans burn giant tires in protest against the Haitians "taking away" jobs extremely few Dominicans would willingly do at the wages offered.
The movie makes it out like the Catholic Church stands completely behind the hard ass priest, but well before the movie's formal release the Catholic Church reversed its stance and the priest, Christopher Hartley, is promptly expelled from the country (as many of the power brokers in the Dominican sugar trade had demanded with ominous overtones the whole time he was there).
From Christopher Hartley:
Certainly, the Catholic Church didn't get to where it is now by having no reasons at all. But just look at what they consider to be an adequate external justification of their decisions within.
When I went into information technology long ago, the great joy for me was getting away from these cryptic smoke signals of thin public account. And what does Apple mainly offer in compensation of this lost joy? World class interior decoration—another profession very near the bottom of my high school career assessment (along with manning the security desk in an appartment-building entrance lobby).
When one can go s/until/if ever/g with complete impunity to the meaning of the message, I'm done with the program. The moral of the story is that one man's patience is another man's purgatory.
The 4 series had legendary stability. The 5 series, not so much. I think by 5.3 it was stable enough for some purposes, and by 5.4 things were cleared headed in the right direction again. (How about you create a keyboard binding to output that phrase "Do you ever say anything with any truth in it?" and use the time you save for an itty bitty Google refresher course?) The unusually flaky 5.x releases covered a time period of about 18 months beginning January 2003.
The problem was that the FreeBSD transition to kernel SMP came late in the day, and by 2005 one tended to strongly desire kernel SMP performance levels. Unfortunately, there was a highly inconvenient period where you couldn't enjoy legendary stability and critical-path kernel SMP at the same time. It was a good time to run Linux for some purposes.
I recall that some FreeBSD deployments running 5.3 had spotless stability, but you had to get your build right and then muck with things hardly at all, which I guess went against the grain of some server admins. The 5 series was not a release for these people.
GIANT hung around for a long time on some less critical kernel paths. It was a long, slow excision.
The Linux social contract at the time was that you put your finger in the air to find out what the cool kids were doing, and if you did mostly the same things—for whatever was trending that month—you couldn't go too far wrong. The problem was the different things were trending every six months, so the moment you took your finger out of the air and stopped pumping your feet like a teenaged Fred Flintstone, you'd find yourself running a not-entirely-supported combination of Old Things.
The rate at which The New Hotness decayed into An Old Thing in the Linux community was truly terrifying if you were trying to build a security appliance to be deployed in the worst possible places—places where you might prefer to buy a new ride rather than cross the tracks to fetch your old ride, even a ride barely six months old and custom armored.
Under FreeBSD it remains a good idea to read the release notes and then exercise personal restraint over unsuitable flavours of ice cream. The cool kids algorithm does not work well.
*****
At a very late hour on Prometheus Night, Fred's car glides to a silent stop at the side of a dark road. "What's the matter?" Wilma asks. "My dogs are beat," says Fred. "Rub my feet for a just a minute?" Wilma harrumphs silently to herself for a short moment, but doesn't wish to create a scene. "Well, put your filthy feet up if you must," says Wilma. Fred's hesitates. He had vaguely hoped that Wilma would halfway invert herself under the steering plinth.
Sorry, Fred. Life's not that easy.
The whole "fault" meme is Garden of Eden bullshit, the implication being that we need to busy ourselves—pronto—with barfing up the forbidden apple.
This forecast has about a 5% chance of being vindicated retrospectively by future generations of scientists as being mostly on the mark. Isn't it amazing how it comfortably falls within the parameters—as tuned by the 2C free parameter—of what might fly politically (if we really did busy barfing up the forbidden apple).
No species on planet earth has ever before barfed up a forbidden apple. The general principle in the biological world is "see food, eat food". It applies to every life form from bacteria on up.
Our species has managed to turn coal into sugar. It's a clever bit of business in the department of thermodynamic laundering, but hardly the cleverest trick mother nature has yet tossed into the soup—were it not for the human fixation on human exceptionalism.
Prudence might actually be the right path forward. I was in favour of prudence growing up in the 1970s, a point in time where it would have been almost trivial to enact. What was then coming out of most tail pipes was richer in unburnt hydrocarbons than much of what now comes out of the ground. It was one of the hardest things to understand about the world back when I was that age. I now understand that what America was paying for hydrocarbons from the Middle East was a tiny fraction of the wealth one could create through its consumption, this being the primary reason the race was on—the race to exhaust what was already then strongly suspected of being a soon-limited resource. Had the western world slowed its consumption out of prudence, less of the wealth would have crossed the divide. That was too high a price on prudence in the Nixon era, and realistically, it probably still is, because—you know—Sun Tsu and Machiavelli have grown so outdated since the advent of the microchip they are now relegated to the category of mere historical curiosities along with books, and land lines, and VHS.
One of the first professional software developers I ever met was a young fellow driving a first or second generation Honda Civic as The Right Thing To Do (circa 1979). Since then, because the debate has been hijacked by self-serving neo-Luddites vs anyone with even half a clue, the science itself gets more smug by the day. So far as I'm concerned, there is no scientific certainty or consensus on the appropriate societal response to these changes which appear to be taking place with ever greater confidence, though not yet as judged by the standards of scientific process established over hundreds of years as taking hundreds of years, in the ideal case.
Increasingly they just wave around the smoking gun—the gun, the gun, the gun, we've proven the smoking gun—and then they expect their policy recommendations to be given the same heft as the conclusions they are actually trained to reach. Are they crisis management experts? Are they economists? Are they political scientists? Have they traced the precautionary principle all the way back to the primordial soup?
There's no great track record of science getting anything much right over time periods of under twenty years. Give me a century any day. Every year I read another paper outlining yet another carbon sink now suspected. The target is still bobbing around faster than a UFO hand-filmed from a topless Corvette before the invention of wishbone suspension. It's absolutely clear that there's an anthropic contribution to the future condition of the blue marble. I wouldn't have argued against that in the mid-seventies barely out of elementary school. We simply can not un-eat the apple of our own success.
Display:block doesn't actually work. It's a vestige from my first pass (long ago) that I forgot to remove when it proved impotent.
The script just adds an angry red banner at the top of every page served.
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("sugarstring.com") {
body:before {
content: "Forbidden from covering American spying or net neutrality by Verizon's corporate sponsorship";
color: #FF0000;
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 3vmax;
padding-top: 10vh !important;
padding-bottom: 10vh !important;
}
}
Google didn't do this to make the gamers happy. They did it to make the non gamers happy, because video game culture is ladden with a rich and repurposed vocabulary that constantly shows up when people don't want to see video games in their search results.
They have to recognize games in order to remove games. Once they've gone that far, throwing up a positive infobox is Slidebox Bob.
No, actually every version of the article I've seen bends over backwards to end off by saying "correlation does not equal causation".
With this kind of a study, which is methodologically weak (participant recall), I don't think one gets uniform results across gender, age, race, and education very darn often. You would get this in a study of cigarette smoking, because the health impacts of smoking are direct and universal.
When one gets a study with a profile that resembles a study on cigarette smoking in its power and statistical profile, it does tend to clear the mind of ancillary explanations. Occam's razor is practically beating the door down. It's not like sugar have never before been suspected as an agent of direct metabolic stress.
If this study holds up, it's a pretty darn big deal no matter how you slice it. Anyone here have a method to detect 5 years of invisible biological aging which is less onerous than giving someone a fifteen minute quiz? No, I didn't think so.
Almost all the hacks imposed on C++ to remain compatible with C are linear hacks that don't combine combinatorially. That's what makes these hacks ugly: bending over backwards to achieve hack containment. The C++ standardization literature contains many of the fiercest debates ever waged among pointy hats concerning hack containment. Purity wasn't an option. Impurity segregation was.
The hacks in C++ that do have combinatorial complexity pertain to features of the C++ language completely unrelated to C, such as templates and namespaces.
The bending over backward to avoid non-linear hacks due to compatibility with C got the standards committee into a wee bit of time pressure. Both the template and namespace features were added "on the fly" against the stated policy of the standardization group to only standardize after there was enough experience on the ground to avoid the worst mistakes.
If the standard isn't finished on a timely basis: market fail.
If the standard is finished without templates and namespaces: paradigm fail.
If the standard makes blunders in defining templates and namespaces: an eternal witch's brew.
The committee members rather sanely (and unhappily) chose the least of several competing evils.
There's never been a language like C++ to get otherwise smart people to say stupid things.
* C++ contains many ugly hacks due to its C legacy
* most ugly hacks are combinatorial
* C++ contains many combinatorial hacks
* therefore C++ is riven with combinatorial hacks due to its C legacy
Yes, but the ugly hacks to support C are not the combinatorial hacks, and the combinatorial hacks to support templates and namespaces before their time are not the hacks to support C.
Of course, if you don't delve deeply enough to figure this out, one might just conclude that C++ was concocted by a brigand of insane ideologues. You'd be stupid and wrong, but if your surround yourself with an echo chamber of the equally lazy, there's hardly any detectable social downside (near you).
There's remains, however, this irritating tendency of the world around you not to adopt your favourite "clean" language and put C++ out to pasture once and for allâ"due exclusively to inertia, incompetence, and mendacity. Of course.
The next rank of fierce debate during standardization concerned the elimination of all proposed features where adopting the feature imposed a performance penalty across the board even when it isn't used. A few performance points here and there on a heavy-lifting, industrial programming language quickly adds up to entire data centers. Elegance was never a sufficient argument, unless the performance tax imposed was—at most—barely measurable.
Elegance looks like such a great thing until one begins writing an application at industrial scale. The hacks inherent in making any computational system work efficiently on industrial scale (with smooth degradation around the edge cases, and no crippling instabilities) instantly dwarfs the hackishness of the C++ language itself.
I've had an Erase-ease Keyboard For Compaq Computers for a long time now.
Surprisingly, almost without me noticing it, it's become my silent workhorse. It's fairly heavy and stiff, with just enough key feel for the speed I type. It has nice key surface sculpting, too. Every couple of years I shake an entire meal out of the mechanism and give the key caps the car wash treatment. It still works great, but does get a bit sticky for a few days after being washed.
I had two of the old IBM keyboards around, but I simply type too fast to use one as my main keyboard. My typing oscillates between high speed ticking and a low frequency buzz. IBM keyboards are noisy and stiff and I began to wonder about the strain on my fingers, as well.
On this keyboard I've never actually forced myself to use the backspacebar key. I popped the the key cap off the right Windows key a long time ago. Miraculously, Firefox is now the bane of my typing existence, since any accidental strike of the right ALT key takes me into a modal menu-bar mode.
About six months ago I bound the Linux compose key to capslock and set it up to generate mdashes and ndashes and a whole bunch of HTML markup.
I have <blockquote> bound to caps-q-a and </blockquote> bound to caps-q-s. I have <nowiki> bound to caps-w-a and </nowiki> bound to caps-w-s. I guess it's obvious what software I use for taking notes. What a godsend to have a useful capslock key. Now if I could just shoot someone at the Mozilla Foundation for perpetrating the modal Alt key to activate the drop-down menubar, my keyboard life would be nirvana.
Yeah, maybe there's a Firefox setting to disable this. Can't be bothered just yet. Too many moving carpets. This I learned from Ubuntu. If you hate something, do nothing about it. If twelve months down the road some twenty-something GUI designer asshole hasn't already yanked the carpet out from underneath you consider investing three minutes of quality Google time in stone-from-shoe removal prowess. (My what sharp fangs you have, Grandma! All the better to service the tablet marketplace, my darling little Ms Underhood.)
For example, I use middle-click paste all the time, while also carrying a to-be-pasted item around in my regular paste buffer (and even more in my clippy tool). I'm sure I read something about some distro/desktop deciding to eliminate this from their next GUI iteration, right before I hit the emergency stasis field activation button and curled into a foetal ball.
What I desperately want is a middle-click erase-paste, in which the contents of the target area are vaporised prior to the paste operation (clearing out search boxes is especially annoying). I just noticed that the paste happens on button release. A long middle-button press could be a field erase operation. Then long-press/release would be paste-replace. That would be golden. All the methods I know to quickly delete a field involve first selecting the field, which really sucks when you're already carrying something in your X buffer.
Hard on the heals of my compose key triumph, I might give it a go at some point in the next six to nine months.
And what about the other 98% who dream of becoming the 2%? Nature abhors voluntary prudence. Stable equilibria in straightened circumstance is what you get after everyone goes "oh shit, what now?"
Perhaps in about twenty more years, we'll have a SimEarth realistic enough to set your proposal up to watch the earth burn. The stampede to replace the profligate 2% being but the first unmitigated ecological disaster of many to follow.
Skill testing question: Does the extremely high American incarceration rate aid or abet the trade in deprecated substances? I'm not even going to bother offering up antonyms. Prison is many things, and one of those things is serving as a first-rate finishing school in general lawlessness. Every trip to prison makes your "straight" options that much less attractive. After three trips to prison, minimum wage under the table is your glass ceiling in the straight economy.
The law of unexpected consequence is nowhere else in force so strongly as it applies to human incentive.
The core problem is not Google+ (pustulent imposition that it was) but that Google does not provide clean answers about anything it does. Google's motto has long ceased being "don't be evil" and morphed into "that's for us to know, and users to divine".
My view is that happiness in life is directly proportional to eliminating all forms of "X behind a curtain" where X is man, woman, beast, tyrant, saint, priest, missionary, Smallpox vector, committee, club, association, organization, governmental body, natural, supernatural, mythical, legendary, or outright fabrication.
Google as presently configured is not a conduit of happiness in this world.
I guess you don't have any grandparents who live alone, but can no longer reliably identify their own children. My wife's grandmother recently "celebrated" her ninetieth birthday (I don't use scare quotes lightly). All her "loved ones" showed up. She spent the entire day looking like a four-year-old lost in a giant shopping mall. She didn't know who she was, who anyone else was, where she was (with all the people around, she couldn't identify the house she had lived in since 1950). Out of compassion, the family soon arranged a quiet room, so that she could "contribute" to the celebration by sitting alone in a nearby room.
You are so deep into denial about the reality of aging, I had to pull out triple scare quotes. If you still don't get it, I'm done. I'll just have to say "I've got nothing" and leave to you to your own date with destiny. Enjoy it, if you can.
When exactly did "honestly" become a synonym for living under a rock? This question comes up on almost every thread where FreeBSD is mentioned, though granted this is barely more often than its major releases.
The first answer in every such thread for years now is always ZFS, but actually this just disguises how many people have been using it for years or decades and just plain like the way FreeBSD does things even if nine out of ten, or ninety nine out of a hundred, or nine hundred and ninety nine out of a thousand have different tastes.
I get intensely piqued over the implication that there's a nuisance hurdle that needs to be cleared just for existing. When "honestly" becomes a cover story for living under a rock (or an equivalent not-be-bothered-hood) this ultimately seems to resonate as the main implication.
It's especially irritating when FreeBSD predates all the Johnny-come-latelies. It would have needed to be clairvoyant to have correctly decided to not exist, so as not to strain the reputational resources of open source groupthink.
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
div, p, h1, span, table, footer, header {
display: none !important;
}
body:after {
content: 'CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking';
color: #FF0000;
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 1.5vmax;
}
}
This does not deserve to live on Oprah, much less Slashdot. Not on Fox News, not on Rush Limbaugh, not on Howard Stern, not on Jerry Springer. On its own, exactly as it stands, it would set a new standard for outright stupidity in any legal jurisdiction that has yet to legislate pi = 3.
Oh, but wait, there's a footnote: preventable deaths among working-aged adult Americans. THAT'S NOT FUCKING FINE PRINT. My credibility circuit assigned six zeros (0.00000% chance of being true) before I managed to read the next line.
In all the many long years I've been here, I can not recall a single story headline that revolts me to this degree. I was reading recently Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by Michael Ignatieff. At some point during his election campaign he said something stupid about the Middle East. His campaign manager pulled him aside and explained to him: "Politicians have nine lives. You just burned eight."
I have a finite amount of all-caps to expend on Slashdot outrage. I just burned 80% of my lifetime supply. Next time I resort to all-caps, I'll never post here again.
So totally true. But once you allow that 99% of modern life is jumping off, I'm not sure what you're griping about.
Just as one comparison, take every organization prominent enough to have it's own article in en.Wikipedia, go to their own websites (the vast majority will have one) and scrape all of the "about us" web pages these organizations authored about themselves, and imagine these as a collective "About Us"-apedia.
This "About Us"-apedia would make MySpace's worst year look like an exercise in design consistency. I for one can live without the metric fuckton of Flash-based incoherence as my standard point of departure on the agencies of the world.
It seems to me that all the people who hated Wikipedia on first sight share an underlying belief in knowledge as an authority network. The reason Wikipedia succeeded is that knowledge isn't what we thought it was. For the vast majority of purposes, authority is a boundary condition, not the thing itself.
The first step in assimilating a new body of knowledge is to survey the field's lexicon: What words are used and roughly how are they linked together? This cognitive process takes place long before factual assertions amount to a hill of beans. When the facts do begin to matter, most smart people are well aware that in this world we're all fed baloney 24 hours a day. Wikipedia is one of the places where it becomes especially clear how the baloney is made. That doesn't make it worse baloney than Superbowl Sunday—America's national slick-baloney celebration day. Is iOS somehow less Orwellian than the IBM PC? So we were told through a non-linguistic medium.
On Wikipedia, when I spot baloney, I click the magic button called "History" where I scan for edit wars and substantial discards. For the vast majority of articles, it's all there in plain view. The mythical, Orwellian-smashing parentage of iOS is harder to trace.
In the upcoming era of Deep Watson, those Wikipedia crumb trails of sturm und churn will suddenly become interesting resources to expose to automated data mining. Perhaps then the present surface form of the articles will begin to fade in importance. There's nothing stopping this, except for the will to go there, which is depressingly thin in the general public for the 99% of the time they're merely jumping off.
After scanning TFA, the first thing I looked up was the distance to SN 1987a, which the author somehow regarded as beneath notice. Perhaps he was preoccupied with the correct keyboarding of "orthopositronium".
Call me old fashioned, but I think that a person bleating away about an esoteric footnote of astrophysical revelation ought to first muster basic magnitude mastery.
That's the danger in posting so soon after being woken up from a long sleep by a handsome prince. You need to shake your head and check out the competitive landscape in 2014.
4 Cores @ 2.5GHz Qualcomm Krait 400
Intel might wish to rethink sitting on their innovative thumbs.
None of those dynamics have ever occurred in a Python shop?
The second half of the nineties was a bad scene for code readability all around, or did you somehow not notice the Herman Miller office furniture bubble?
There was a lot of Perl written during this era. Perl was the only language that could keep up with the Vogon rapture of all things brick and mortar. The ferryman threw in the towel, auction off his ferry on eBay, bought two cords of dynamite (mail order), and simply diverted the river. Pretty much everything was still where it had been, but traditional commerce was all on the other side now.
My development platform circa 1996 was NT 4, on a P6 200 with 32 MB of EDO system memory, a 640 MB disk drive, and a good quality 17" Dell CRT. It was tolerable, but hardly coding nirvana. The world was shifting under my feet almost daily: Linux, BSD, 2000, LBA, AMD64, SATA, DDR, broadband, Mozilla, Google, DVI, PHP, Python, Ruby, C++, STL, and not an open source version control system worth a crock of shit for love nor money.
I wonder why my coding standards at the time did not optimally favour my future self in the mid 2000s with my CoreDuo workstation, 4 GB of ram, 200 GB of disk space, and twin 19" monitors.
Do recall the little puzzle with the sliding digits 1-15 in a 4x4 grid? Trying to get any significant piece of glue code to run on NT and Linux and able to survive unscathed a major upgrade of each was a lot like that. Or have you blacked it out? Many ugly lines of code were written because the tiles were sticky. In the stupidest possible ways. And it was all going to be Ruby next year anyway. Whatever language you were working in was next up against the wall after the demise of B&M (if any wall could still be found). Soon the Wall was up against the wall, but I digress.
Programmers were in such short supply that vast numbers of people were coding in languages they only pretended to know. Have you forgotten that, too? If Visual Basic had been a better scripting language, Perl would have come out the other side better loved.
The great thing for the smart young programmers about becoming trendoids is that it helps to insulate them from the ugly job of cleaning up yesterday's bubble's giant mess.
Somehow this was obvious to me even from the press release. I've never yet seen details of an ordering model laid bare where it wasn't the core novelty. Ordering models are inherently substantive. Ordering models beget theorems. Cute little Internets drool and coo.
Why does a dog lick his balls?
Over the commercial lifespan of 2000/XP, the cost of gene sequencing went down by five orders of magnitude (100,000 x) and there's still one more order of magnitude crumbling in full swing ($1b per human genome to $1000 per per human genome).
We're not merely drinking their milkshake, we're reading their source code, and it's gone from the Manhattan project garage to hamburgers served in the length of time it takes for a helpless human baby to mature into a helpless head case with little recourse to perspective or logic.
After we invented the steam engine, the Amazon wasn't the first forest we cut down. The Amazon is full of piranha and poisonous snakes and many other protective life forms.
Yet somehow you wish to depict the interval in human history between the invention of the steam engine as the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest as a race the forest can win?
Sure can, if the entire human race dies off in the next World Wide Crusade at some point in the next fifty-odd years.
Penicillin was an inspired one-off. Gene sequencing is the devil's root kit.
But maybe I'm wrong, and I severely underestimate microbial evolution. Twenty years from now we'll wake up one day to discover hostile bacteria with no chemical genome at all: it's all hidden behind some bitcoin quantum process we are unable to sequence, that mutates in nature faster than we can puzzle it out, and we'll all be left scratching our chins and wondering how that happened.
But everyone knows what that conveys, even the dealers themselves:
Of course, this divides ranks with the dealership community itself, as the old guys close to retirement are going to continuing milking their cash cow by any means available, as the younger guys start to worry about their long term futures when the backlash strikes, which the old guys are doing nothing whatsoever to abate sooner rather than later.
They say that society is "only" three square meals from anarchy. That's a lot, actually. I estimate that the fraternal order of the car dealership is only two snifters of brandy and one Cuban cigar's worth of suggested forbearance away from king-sized flop house crossfire.