If you try hard enough you can still create deadlocks and race conditions at a higher level. Arguably this is worse for the programmer, if you create/detect/fix 100 simple small deadlocks, then a major architectural design flaw of the same type is just... a bigger one, no problemo. If you can't make the little mistakes because of language design, you'll be hopeless at fixing bugs in your individual architectural design.
Maybe its a good language once you learned the hard way why its a good language by working with others.
Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only...
on
OCaml For the Masses
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· Score: 1
Ah you've taught them the syntax but not the reason why. Noob is going to look at that, and say WTF why not just write the main control loop in "bash" with vertical pipe bars between calls to the real programs? Or even worse, noob is going to see that, and say, why not use perl semicolons between your statements, whats the big deal.
Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only...
on
OCaml For the Masses
·
· Score: 1
The problem is the mas of sunday day programmers out there that think that javascript or php are the end all to computer languages.
The "good" news is all the 80s home computer microsoft basic programmers are age-discriminated out. Its gonna take awhile to get rid of the dotcommers.
People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.
Want and use are two different things.
Its been proven by human interface design studies people have been trained to desire, even demand squigglie icons, but in actual use they simply read the text.
Some of it is cultural. If you live in a culture where literacy = two dozen or so glyphs, you probably don't use icons and just read the text underneath them, or, frankly, guess based on location and tool tip popups. If you live in a culture where literacy = ten thousand different glyphs, then you probably actually use icons.
Do you visually scan for an orange slime trail underneath and over a white blue circle, or the words "Firefox"? Most people look for the words.
Well, considering those are the same users who typically have their desktop so full of icons that the wallpaper's indistinguishable and a gazillion icons in the system tray to make launching those program faster, why not kill wallpapers too? (Personally, I'm more of a minimalist and have no icons on my desktop and try and keep my system tray pruned to the bare minimum, so the start menu is very important to me).
Why force everyone to one paradigm? Some people thrive in clutter, both in the real world and on their computers. Some people are ultraminimalists. I get rid of stuff in my visual field until I can't get rid of any more. Backgrounds are distracting, see thru windows annoy me. I don't need 250 icons on the background for stuff I never use. Its mentally kind of a sh1t or get off the pot thing for me. If I wanted to look at that... whatever, I'd look at it. Not what my computer wants me to see instead. First thing I do is get rid of the background and put up a shade of gray about as bright as my surroundings. Then I get rid of 90% of the icons on the screen. Basically every millisecond I spend searching is wasted time. On a CLI search time drops to zero quickly. On a GUI search time never drops.
I like ratpoison, because 99% of my productive time is spent in a terminal. XFCE is OK. I used KDE until it took about a gig of memory... all to start a terminal window... so I scrapped KDE.
How many other TV series from that time period can you name?
Despite the belief by the youth that Star Trek was a "pre-hippies 60s show", the last episode of TOS was just months before the first All in the Family, a rather iconic 70s show.
You would have to have a compatible, expansive iMouth to eat their even more expansive iFood.
My guess is the "iMouth" would be a new model iPhone/iPod/iPad/mac laptop with NFC micropayment hardware, and the store would literally only accept the NFC micropayments for the iFood. No cash, no CC, no checks, just the new NFC thing. Probably if you buy a new iPhone in person at a iFood store you'd get a $5 credit with the expectation you'd immediately use it to buy iFood to get that first initial experience with the new NFC thing.
Also, anyone who's ever bought iProducts has noticed the packaging is beyond crazy, so expect your coffee to come in some weird three dimensional plastic sculpture and your donut to come in some elaborate clear plastic puzzle that takes 15 minutes to open.
It is ALWAYS full of people. Why would they give up valuable floor space currently used to display products, to try to sell coffee? To bring in customers? They do not seem to have a problem with that.
I've noticed that. Some random quiet midday there will be 200 people in the mall, great my chance to browse the apple store in non-claustrophobic peace, no, 100 of those 200 mall rats will all be crammed into the Apple store. Totally weird.
Anyway the idea is if customer satisfaction is dropping due to long wait times, one time honored way to improve it is to stuff food and drink down the customer's maw. Hence the mid level car dealers and repair shops I visit have donut and soda and coffee while you wait for them to prepare your purchase paperwork or replace your transmission filter. Free coffee at my local (slow) bank. In the event I hold my nose and visit walmart/sams club, I go to the cafeteria while wife goes thru checkout line. Actually kind of a tradition to eat that sams club pizza every time we go, while she checks out.
76 comments and no one, not even the original article, has commented on this is the perfect way to roll out a near field communications micropayment function in the next iphone?
NFC / micropayments / all that rot all have the chicken and the egg problem. But if you knew you could at least buy a cuppa coffee at any Apple store with it... maybe if Apple didn't sell the coffee itself but got some established coffee shop to move in as part of a deal ALL of that chain's coffee shops would accept the new NFC micropayments thingy... I think we're on to something here, for the intro of NFC payment.
At least around here, Apple stores are in big malls, with lots of foot traffic, which certainly pushes the NFC concept into other stores.... I can buy a cuppa coffee at the apple store, why not every food court vendor... why not buy a shirt at old navy... I think we're on to something here, for the NFC midgame/growth phase...
No amount of regulation is going to stop that short of tariffs and that will start a trade war that at this point we might lose.
If we've already lost our economy, what have we got to lose in a trade war?
Seriously... Think about it. Compare and contrast a deep permanent depression vs losing a nice short little trade war. Do not look at the effect on the rich, they'll always be OK anyway. Look at the effect on the median citizen.
So in a trade war, our military would have to go to the middle east to seize oil producing assets... oh wait we're already doing that, not gonna run out of oil. In a trade war, our factories exports would decline so they would all close... oh wait been there done that they're already closed. Well in a trade war the over 50% who are not employed by private industry would... oh wait yeah just go on like every other day guess it wouldn't really matter.
The thing to do is not compare losing a trade war vs the economy of the 60s, but compare losing a trade war to the economy of the 2010s. I think we're better off with the trade war.
I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment
One of the most important features of regulation is to keep the big corps big and grind the small ones out of profitability... I can't see a big slow lumbering dilbertian horror of a company loving the idea of not having regulation expenses to crush their smaller competitors.
Not that I assume the 100 developers were on this full-time
Unless you had your own guys looking over their shoulder, how do you know that? Look up "overbilling fraud".
So.. we'll work for 1/20 their wages... We could bill honestly and make 1/20th their profits, a nice honest sum. But... what if we billed them ten times over? Faked the whole thing? We'll make 10 times 1/20th equals half their profit, much better. Whoo hoo! We can't get caught because we're private contractors and you shouldn't be directly supervising us and we're on the other side of the planet in a wildly different timezone in a field where its pretty hard to monitor piecework... IF anyone catches us, point out they're getting the product for 1/2 price and everyone over here cheats this way anyway, and they fired all their developers so they can't move back, so they can just STFU with their complaints. Said in an Indian accent of course. Not that I'm publicly admitting I've heard this conversation from a friend...
Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.
Naah, study your history. That was an effect along the way, but hardly the cause.
The cause was the rich people had all the money land and power. Read your Gibbon, near the end all the land in the empire was owned by only a thousand landlords and everyone else was dirt poor. Kind of like where the USA is headed. When Rome was more egalitarian, Rome the city produced 25K fighting men, which means a total army size in those days of about 75K. Back then individuals paid for their own gear when they volunteered for service...
Once only the rich had money, the poor couldn't even volunteer to be the equivalent of cannon fodder, and the rich had to hire foreign mercenaries, at ripoff prices. Toward the end, the average Roman was so poor that the empire could barely raise 100K fighting men. You'd think an empire could raise more than 4x just one city, but they had economically destroyed themselves, so...
If there's a great depression going on throughout the world, where the hell are people finding the scratch to piss away on electronic devices that will be stuck in a walled garden and bricked in less than a decade?
I ran the numbers, and if those are US only, that means perhaps the top 0.013% of the population is doing OK... Or if world wide numbers, the top 0.00007% of the population is doing OK.
would i understand/benefit from the course material from an undeveloped background?
Yes, I've read the Russell and Norvig textbook the AI class is using and you'll do OK without a programming background.
It is not a training class like a "third semester C++ with implementation of AI concepts and special focus on C++ polymorphism syntax" where you must have taken first and second semester to survive. Its more like reading Knuth where you think about algorithms a lot in psuedocode.
Programming classes legendarily do a poor job of teaching logical thinking and reasoning skills anyway. Good at weeding out those who can't, but not so good at teaching them. Sink or swim, etc. So you're not missing much by skipping the stereotypical first year classes, unless you want to implement what you've learned.
In other words, the book is definitely an educational text as opposed to a training text, the class will probably reflect that.
Also, its free... if you try it and don't like it, thats OK. Its not going on your transcript, or permanent record, there is no nonrefundable $5000 tuition fee...
Correction: Free education would be something new, since finding a way to provide education without a cost of resources that could be applied elsewhere would be entirely unheard of.
Digital education is not exactly new. Its new to some people, but that doesn't imply its new.
I signed up for the AI class and am now set up as the "basic" course, where they issue a syllabus and I watch some video lectures and read some book chapters. It'll all be freely available, legally or not. So other than adding my email addrs to yet another marketing list, I'm not thinking I've gained anything.
In the advanced course they "require" you to do the (ungraded) homework and take the exams, but if I don't, nothing happens, and if I do, nothing happens. Its very much like a new years resolution to lose weight or quit smoking. So I'm not thinking signing up will gain me anything.
Some people carry a dumbphone and either an iPod touch or an Archos 43 to use as a PMP/PDA because smartphone service is so expensive in the United States
1) Corporate phones don't allow end user to fool around with music and video. If the company is paying for it, the workers are not allowed to play. Email and text and stuff, sure, but listen to pirated mp3s on corporate property? Not if they can stop it... Maybe the execs will be allowed to do so, fitting in with the culture of keeping the little guy down, etc.
2) I can not afford from a business standpoint to be out of touch because I listened to music draining the battery while I work out. I'm amazed no one has come out with a smartphone using a separate battery or some firmware that lets you do "whatever the manufacturer allows" down to 50% and then voice telephone only for the bottom 50% of battery capacity. I'm sure there is a expensive patent preventing it.
3) I don't much care if I drop my $20 mp3 player while doing physical activities (yard work, exercise, heavy housework, whatever). I'd be really sad if I dropped a $500 phone while jogging because I wanted to listen to music.
4) I don't care if I drain and charge the battery on my $20 mp3 player so many times it turns into junk in six months. I'd be pissed if I destroyed my $500 phone battery that quickly. Its simply too expensive to fool around with a smartphone, if there's a pocket-change alternative to fool around with.
5) Out in public, I'd be pissed if my $500 phone were lost or stolen or mugged from me. My $20 mp3 player, heck no one is gonna take that.
MS is still the only one of these big three to have a committed interest in long-term research
MS does research? For real? I thought all they did was buy startups and competitors, some of which had done research in the past, or are winding down R+D after the purchase.
Please don't confuse research grants from the bill gates charitable foundation with "MS does long term research".
Sadly, I'm starting to see this problem in Google too. Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan.
Applies if you've only been watching "lately" or "recently". Otherwise, not so.
Could cut and paste the same tired argument from the announcement of gmail, or the announcement of news.google.com or.. pretty much anything GOOG has ever done other than the basic search page.
>The Greeks were arguably far more educated than we are.
Sure, so long as one only counts citizens and discounts slaves.
Their slaves were mostly other Greeks, of equal educational level.
Its an american perspective that all slaves in all eras were all uneducated, due to the whole American South plantation thing, because the pre-1900s African continent education system was not exactly universal. As for the non-citizens, again, its an American thing because of our crop picking neighbor to the south. World wide, non-citizens were usually either traveling geniuses, or successful merchants/traders who at least had an education in a craft or markets and banking in general, or political envoys, aside from famine migrations, ethnic cleansing refugees, etc.
In Rome, for example, they loved to buy educated greek slaves to teach their children. I would hazard a guess that before slavery was abolished, the majority of teachers, doctors, and engineers were enslaved...
While environmental catastrophe may have been widespread in geologic history, things are different now. When the sea level rose dramatically a million years ago, it didn't destroy trillions of dollars/euros/yuan worth of real estate.
1) The preposterous assumption we can stop that forever in to the future by forcing ourselves to become "noble savages"
2) The preposterous assumption that the best way to prevent trillions of dollars of destruction is to implement economic policies that will only cost tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars.
3) The preposterous assumption that people should not be responsible for their actions in the face of strong scientific evidence. Frankly, we need people who cannot process information to suffer a bit of Darwinian selection. We should encourage dumb people to live on top of an earthquake fault, or below sea level on the coast. Not punish everyone else because of the stupidity of a small group.
The way to evaluate environmentalist proposals is by time, not money. OK, we'll destroy modern civilization, or crush current civilization under the heel of a 1984 style boot for all eternity. The way to evaluate that is not in dollars, but in years... So that would cost us trillions, so what. The real effect is the next ice age will arrive about a hundred years sooner. Is that worth all the human suffering?
The solution to coastal flooding is not to go paleoconservative and try to prevent all geological change, which is utterly inevitably doomed to failure. Its to flow with the earth and not do something moronic, like, say, building a major city below (current or future) sea level.
It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again.
... Productive is hard to quantify....
Not really. Extreme stress level, from "produce or you and your kids will be euthanized", means dramatically lower productivity, dramatically higher stress related medical expenses, dramatically higher expenses related to anti-social behavior, dramatically higher expenses related to fraud, dramatically reduced revenue because of risk aversion behavior related to new technologies... It seems fairly common sense that the "feeling of security" that a welfare program provides would result in higher productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
you avoid race conditions
If you try hard enough you can still create deadlocks and race conditions at a higher level. Arguably this is worse for the programmer, if you create/detect/fix 100 simple small deadlocks, then a major architectural design flaw of the same type is just... a bigger one, no problemo. If you can't make the little mistakes because of language design, you'll be hopeless at fixing bugs in your individual architectural design.
Maybe its a good language once you learned the hard way why its a good language by working with others.
Ah you've taught them the syntax but not the reason why. Noob is going to look at that, and say WTF why not just write the main control loop in "bash" with vertical pipe bars between calls to the real programs? Or even worse, noob is going to see that, and say, why not use perl semicolons between your statements, whats the big deal.
The problem is the mas of sunday day programmers out there that think that javascript or php are the end all to computer languages.
The "good" news is all the 80s home computer microsoft basic programmers are age-discriminated out. Its gonna take awhile to get rid of the dotcommers.
People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.
Want and use are two different things.
Its been proven by human interface design studies people have been trained to desire, even demand squigglie icons, but in actual use they simply read the text.
Some of it is cultural. If you live in a culture where literacy = two dozen or so glyphs, you probably don't use icons and just read the text underneath them, or, frankly, guess based on location and tool tip popups. If you live in a culture where literacy = ten thousand different glyphs, then you probably actually use icons.
Do you visually scan for an orange slime trail underneath and over a white blue circle, or the words "Firefox"? Most people look for the words.
Well, considering those are the same users who typically have their desktop so full of icons that the wallpaper's indistinguishable and a gazillion icons in the system tray to make launching those program faster, why not kill wallpapers too? (Personally, I'm more of a minimalist and have no icons on my desktop and try and keep my system tray pruned to the bare minimum, so the start menu is very important to me).
Why force everyone to one paradigm? Some people thrive in clutter, both in the real world and on their computers. Some people are ultraminimalists. I get rid of stuff in my visual field until I can't get rid of any more. Backgrounds are distracting, see thru windows annoy me. I don't need 250 icons on the background for stuff I never use. Its mentally kind of a sh1t or get off the pot thing for me. If I wanted to look at that ... whatever, I'd look at it. Not what my computer wants me to see instead. First thing I do is get rid of the background and put up a shade of gray about as bright as my surroundings. Then I get rid of 90% of the icons on the screen. Basically every millisecond I spend searching is wasted time. On a CLI search time drops to zero quickly. On a GUI search time never drops.
I like ratpoison, because 99% of my productive time is spent in a terminal. XFCE is OK. I used KDE until it took about a gig of memory... all to start a terminal window... so I scrapped KDE.
How many other TV series from that time period can you name?
Despite the belief by the youth that Star Trek was a "pre-hippies 60s show", the last episode of TOS was just months before the first All in the Family, a rather iconic 70s show.
The only place I can find a working text report of whats happening is Mike Elgan who seems to be liveblogging on G+.
They could also put in an altar where they could worship at the likeness of Steve Jobs. Then call it a church and claim non-profit status.
Burnt offering of your old windows laptop on the altar?
I suppose the mutterings of the genius bar provide Delphic prophesy? "If you delete that malware, you will destroy a great piece of software"
You would have to have a compatible, expansive iMouth to eat their even more expansive iFood.
My guess is the "iMouth" would be a new model iPhone/iPod/iPad/mac laptop with NFC micropayment hardware, and the store would literally only accept the NFC micropayments for the iFood. No cash, no CC, no checks, just the new NFC thing. Probably if you buy a new iPhone in person at a iFood store you'd get a $5 credit with the expectation you'd immediately use it to buy iFood to get that first initial experience with the new NFC thing.
Also, anyone who's ever bought iProducts has noticed the packaging is beyond crazy, so expect your coffee to come in some weird three dimensional plastic sculpture and your donut to come in some elaborate clear plastic puzzle that takes 15 minutes to open.
It is ALWAYS full of people. Why would they give up valuable floor space currently used to display products, to try to sell coffee? To bring in customers? They do not seem to have a problem with that.
I've noticed that. Some random quiet midday there will be 200 people in the mall, great my chance to browse the apple store in non-claustrophobic peace, no, 100 of those 200 mall rats will all be crammed into the Apple store. Totally weird.
Anyway the idea is if customer satisfaction is dropping due to long wait times, one time honored way to improve it is to stuff food and drink down the customer's maw. Hence the mid level car dealers and repair shops I visit have donut and soda and coffee while you wait for them to prepare your purchase paperwork or replace your transmission filter. Free coffee at my local (slow) bank. In the event I hold my nose and visit walmart/sams club, I go to the cafeteria while wife goes thru checkout line. Actually kind of a tradition to eat that sams club pizza every time we go, while she checks out.
76 comments and no one, not even the original article, has commented on this is the perfect way to roll out a near field communications micropayment function in the next iphone?
NFC / micropayments / all that rot all have the chicken and the egg problem. But if you knew you could at least buy a cuppa coffee at any Apple store with it... maybe if Apple didn't sell the coffee itself but got some established coffee shop to move in as part of a deal ALL of that chain's coffee shops would accept the new NFC micropayments thingy... I think we're on to something here, for the intro of NFC payment.
At least around here, Apple stores are in big malls, with lots of foot traffic, which certainly pushes the NFC concept into other stores.... I can buy a cuppa coffee at the apple store, why not every food court vendor... why not buy a shirt at old navy... I think we're on to something here, for the NFC midgame/growth phase...
No amount of regulation is going to stop that short of tariffs and that will start a trade war that at this point we might lose.
If we've already lost our economy, what have we got to lose in a trade war?
Seriously... Think about it. Compare and contrast a deep permanent depression vs losing a nice short little trade war. Do not look at the effect on the rich, they'll always be OK anyway. Look at the effect on the median citizen.
So in a trade war, our military would have to go to the middle east to seize oil producing assets... oh wait we're already doing that, not gonna run out of oil. In a trade war, our factories exports would decline so they would all close ... oh wait been there done that they're already closed. Well in a trade war the over 50% who are not employed by private industry would ... oh wait yeah just go on like every other day guess it wouldn't really matter.
The thing to do is not compare losing a trade war vs the economy of the 60s, but compare losing a trade war to the economy of the 2010s. I think we're better off with the trade war.
I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment
One of the most important features of regulation is to keep the big corps big and grind the small ones out of profitability... I can't see a big slow lumbering dilbertian horror of a company loving the idea of not having regulation expenses to crush their smaller competitors.
Not that I assume the 100 developers were on this full-time
Unless you had your own guys looking over their shoulder, how do you know that? Look up "overbilling fraud".
So.. we'll work for 1/20 their wages... We could bill honestly and make 1/20th their profits, a nice honest sum. But... what if we billed them ten times over? Faked the whole thing? We'll make 10 times 1/20th equals half their profit, much better. Whoo hoo! We can't get caught because we're private contractors and you shouldn't be directly supervising us and we're on the other side of the planet in a wildly different timezone in a field where its pretty hard to monitor piecework... IF anyone catches us, point out they're getting the product for 1/2 price and everyone over here cheats this way anyway, and they fired all their developers so they can't move back, so they can just STFU with their complaints. Said in an Indian accent of course. Not that I'm publicly admitting I've heard this conversation from a friend...
Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.
Naah, study your history. That was an effect along the way, but hardly the cause.
The cause was the rich people had all the money land and power. Read your Gibbon, near the end all the land in the empire was owned by only a thousand landlords and everyone else was dirt poor. Kind of like where the USA is headed. When Rome was more egalitarian, Rome the city produced 25K fighting men, which means a total army size in those days of about 75K. Back then individuals paid for their own gear when they volunteered for service...
Once only the rich had money, the poor couldn't even volunteer to be the equivalent of cannon fodder, and the rich had to hire foreign mercenaries, at ripoff prices. Toward the end, the average Roman was so poor that the empire could barely raise 100K fighting men. You'd think an empire could raise more than 4x just one city, but they had economically destroyed themselves, so...
If there's a great depression going on throughout the world, where the hell are people finding the scratch to piss away on electronic devices that will be stuck in a walled garden and bricked in less than a decade?
I ran the numbers, and if those are US only, that means perhaps the top 0.013% of the population is doing OK... Or if world wide numbers, the top 0.00007% of the population is doing OK.
Im a beginner learning how to program.
would i understand/benefit from the course material from an undeveloped background?
Yes, I've read the Russell and Norvig textbook the AI class is using and you'll do OK without a programming background.
It is not a training class like a "third semester C++ with implementation of AI concepts and special focus on C++ polymorphism syntax" where you must have taken first and second semester to survive. Its more like reading Knuth where you think about algorithms a lot in psuedocode.
Programming classes legendarily do a poor job of teaching logical thinking and reasoning skills anyway. Good at weeding out those who can't, but not so good at teaching them. Sink or swim, etc. So you're not missing much by skipping the stereotypical first year classes, unless you want to implement what you've learned.
In other words, the book is definitely an educational text as opposed to a training text, the class will probably reflect that.
Also, its free... if you try it and don't like it, thats OK. Its not going on your transcript, or permanent record, there is no nonrefundable $5000 tuition fee...
Correction: Free education would be something new, since finding a way to provide education without a cost of resources that could be applied elsewhere would be entirely unheard of.
Digital education is not exactly new. Its new to some people, but that doesn't imply its new.
Does registration matter?
I signed up for the AI class and am now set up as the "basic" course, where they issue a syllabus and I watch some video lectures and read some book chapters. It'll all be freely available, legally or not. So other than adding my email addrs to yet another marketing list, I'm not thinking I've gained anything.
In the advanced course they "require" you to do the (ungraded) homework and take the exams, but if I don't, nothing happens, and if I do, nothing happens. Its very much like a new years resolution to lose weight or quit smoking. So I'm not thinking signing up will gain me anything.
Some people carry a dumbphone and either an iPod touch or an Archos 43 to use as a PMP/PDA because smartphone service is so expensive in the United States
1) Corporate phones don't allow end user to fool around with music and video. If the company is paying for it, the workers are not allowed to play. Email and text and stuff, sure, but listen to pirated mp3s on corporate property? Not if they can stop it... Maybe the execs will be allowed to do so, fitting in with the culture of keeping the little guy down, etc.
2) I can not afford from a business standpoint to be out of touch because I listened to music draining the battery while I work out. I'm amazed no one has come out with a smartphone using a separate battery or some firmware that lets you do "whatever the manufacturer allows" down to 50% and then voice telephone only for the bottom 50% of battery capacity. I'm sure there is a expensive patent preventing it.
3) I don't much care if I drop my $20 mp3 player while doing physical activities (yard work, exercise, heavy housework, whatever). I'd be really sad if I dropped a $500 phone while jogging because I wanted to listen to music.
4) I don't care if I drain and charge the battery on my $20 mp3 player so many times it turns into junk in six months. I'd be pissed if I destroyed my $500 phone battery that quickly. Its simply too expensive to fool around with a smartphone, if there's a pocket-change alternative to fool around with.
5) Out in public, I'd be pissed if my $500 phone were lost or stolen or mugged from me. My $20 mp3 player, heck no one is gonna take that.
MS is still the only one of these big three to have a committed interest in long-term research
MS does research? For real? I thought all they did was buy startups and competitors, some of which had done research in the past, or are winding down R+D after the purchase.
Please don't confuse research grants from the bill gates charitable foundation with "MS does long term research".
Sadly, I'm starting to see this problem in Google too. Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan.
Applies if you've only been watching "lately" or "recently". Otherwise, not so.
Could cut and paste the same tired argument from the announcement of gmail, or the announcement of news.google.com or .. pretty much anything GOOG has ever done other than the basic search page.
Nemyst wrote:
>The Greeks were arguably far more educated than we are.
Sure, so long as one only counts citizens and discounts slaves.
Their slaves were mostly other Greeks, of equal educational level.
Its an american perspective that all slaves in all eras were all uneducated, due to the whole American South plantation thing, because the pre-1900s African continent education system was not exactly universal. As for the non-citizens, again, its an American thing because of our crop picking neighbor to the south. World wide, non-citizens were usually either traveling geniuses, or successful merchants/traders who at least had an education in a craft or markets and banking in general, or political envoys, aside from famine migrations, ethnic cleansing refugees, etc.
In Rome, for example, they loved to buy educated greek slaves to teach their children. I would hazard a guess that before slavery was abolished, the majority of teachers, doctors, and engineers were enslaved...
While environmental catastrophe may have been widespread in geologic history, things are different now. When the sea level rose dramatically a million years ago, it didn't destroy trillions of dollars/euros/yuan worth of real estate.
1) The preposterous assumption we can stop that forever in to the future by forcing ourselves to become "noble savages"
2) The preposterous assumption that the best way to prevent trillions of dollars of destruction is to implement economic policies that will only cost tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars.
3) The preposterous assumption that people should not be responsible for their actions in the face of strong scientific evidence. Frankly, we need people who cannot process information to suffer a bit of Darwinian selection. We should encourage dumb people to live on top of an earthquake fault, or below sea level on the coast. Not punish everyone else because of the stupidity of a small group.
The way to evaluate environmentalist proposals is by time, not money. OK, we'll destroy modern civilization, or crush current civilization under the heel of a 1984 style boot for all eternity. The way to evaluate that is not in dollars, but in years... So that would cost us trillions, so what. The real effect is the next ice age will arrive about a hundred years sooner. Is that worth all the human suffering?
The solution to coastal flooding is not to go paleoconservative and try to prevent all geological change, which is utterly inevitably doomed to failure. Its to flow with the earth and not do something moronic, like, say, building a major city below (current or future) sea level.
It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again.
... Productive is hard to quantify....
Not really. Extreme stress level, from "produce or you and your kids will be euthanized", means dramatically lower productivity, dramatically higher stress related medical expenses, dramatically higher expenses related to anti-social behavior, dramatically higher expenses related to fraud, dramatically reduced revenue because of risk aversion behavior related to new technologies... It seems fairly common sense that the "feeling of security" that a welfare program provides would result in higher productivity.