Those networks that are mac-only are likely small and running on a shoestring budget.
I don't know where you've been looking for mac-only networks but obviously you have never stepped foot inside a company in the creative industries. Photography, design, print, and graphics happen almost exclusively in mac-only environments (such as the one I work in). Our IT department (and likely many, many others in similar companies around the world) uses ARD to remotely install software so that a technician doesn't have to come over from the other building just to sit and wait for installs to happen.
In addition, ARD is used extensively in mac-only computer labs on University campuses everywhere. It can be used to allow a single person to sit at a desk in front of the lab and read questions from users in the form of administrator messages. It saves the trouble of having to search in a lab for someone who needs help and it allows an administrator to better multitask while helping students.
Don't assume that just because you personally don't have a use for something that it's useless. If there weren't a multitude of sites that used ARD version 2 and were all willing to purchase licenses for it, Apple wouldn't bother to come out with a third version.
A common theme in politics today seems to be that a loud minority of people want the US Government to act as a safety net for poor parenting. Honestly, if you bought your 12-year-old a copy of GTA San Andreas, it's not Rockstar's fault, it's not the US Government's fault, it's not the store's fault, it's yours, because you made a conscious decision to buy your kid that game when the title and the carton art tell the whole story. It's not as if the violent and sexually themed games are hiding among more "wholesome" games and trying to fool parents. They're clearly labelled and it's no one's responsibility but the parents' to take a proactive role in choosing the material to which their children are exposed.
Working as a designer, I actually spend a significant amount of my time creating what I guess you would call static eye candy. Part of my job is to make applications (in my case web apps) not just usable but pleasant. At every step of the game, I'm conscious of where I'm diverting the attention of the user and how I'm spending their time. Simple visual effects like an item fading into view or sliding into position can help maintain a kind of continuity in an interface and improve—even if it's on a subconscious level—the user's ability to follow and comprehend the actions of the workings lying beneath that interface. I personally doubt the usefulness of something like a full-3D desktop where you can rotate windows and move them around in more than 2 dimensions, but at the same time Apple's Expose feature in OS X is eye candy, but extremely useful eye candy. I use it nearly constantly.
As users become more sophisticated and, more importantly, the applications they use become more complicated, some little graphical niceties are becoming more and more necessary. Think of something as simple as live window dragging. If you want a purely functional interface, go with the command line; it's faster for a lot of day-to-day OS tasks anyway.
I admire your optimism, but an asteroid impact can't really be described as a "blessing in disguise" for a number of reasons.
First off, "stone" is mostly a terrestrial thing. Anything flying around in space is either "various metals" or "ice" or "cosmic dust". It's not as if you could have an asteroid made out of fine italian marble flying around space.
Secondly, mining asteroids isn't even a very practical way of acquiring useful metals, much less an effective means of saving the planet from an impact. Determining the exact composition of an asteroid isn't really an exact science unless we can get up close enough to do it accurately. Of course, if the asteroid does hit the Earth, then it'll save us the trouble by littering our atmosphere and the Earth's crust with whatever it's made of.
The fact of the matter is that we don't really have any easy ways to dispose of celestial objects that are about to hit us, and cancelling out global warming with another great extinction doesn't really sweeten the deal that much.
When I first started programming, I did find myself reinventing the wheel a whole lot. Using pre-written libraries wasn't my style, either, since I wanted to actually learn something. So, what I end up doing often when I learn a new language is writing a little library that contains functions or classes or code snippets that I find myself re-writing again and again. When I learned Python, I wrote an extensive framework for doing the kinds of things that I do in Python. When I learned Ocaml, I did the same. SVN and CVS are great for keeping track of individual projects and they can be great for keeping track of your API as you write it, too, but for most programmers I know they are ill-suited for stashing code snippets away.
What you really need is to be organized in a way that works for you, and either have little mini-APIs, or have collections of code snippets that you use often, and rock it. The advantage of APIs is that you can have a set of headers (in C) or interface files or the equivalent in whatever language, and you can import them from programs you're writing. With a directory full of code snippets the pressure to stay organized amid the dozens--and then hundreds--of little tiny files becomes greater and greater. For example, you might want to keep one file with only list-related functions in it, and another that has some helpful array-related functions in it. For little things like this, sometimes it's not worth it to actually go through the whole procedure of writing a high-quality API. Sometimes all you need is a little something that you can copy and paste in where you need it. Of course, you could work some combination of the two.
The bottom line is that code isn't like produce; you don't have to store it in a cool, dry place. You just have to make sure you can find what you're looking for later on.
*If* you argue that this is an FCC thing, you can't use the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to argue it. Though this law could potentially affect businesses which do engage in interstate commercial activities, its primary thrust is to regulate the activities of these companies on a local level. That's why it's a county law and not a state or federal one.
I can see this kind of thing passing anyway because politicians typically don't have a very clear grasp of technology, but I'm not sure how readily anyone could challenge it in court. Would you use the "This is bullsh*t, yo" defense?
DST is only really effective because it changes the hours of the day that we use electricity. If we went to DST year-round, for those few months we would be wasting energy at different times of day and nothing would really be improved over not using DST at all. Of course that'd make it simpler, but no matter.
If the savings are really going to be that great, why hadn't anyone thought of this before?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you've been looking for mac-only networks but obviously you have never stepped foot inside a company in the creative industries. Photography, design, print, and graphics happen almost exclusively in mac-only environments (such as the one I work in). Our IT department (and likely many, many others in similar companies around the world) uses ARD to remotely install software so that a technician doesn't have to come over from the other building just to sit and wait for installs to happen.
In addition, ARD is used extensively in mac-only computer labs on University campuses everywhere. It can be used to allow a single person to sit at a desk in front of the lab and read questions from users in the form of administrator messages. It saves the trouble of having to search in a lab for someone who needs help and it allows an administrator to better multitask while helping students.
Don't assume that just because you personally don't have a use for something that it's useless. If there weren't a multitude of sites that used ARD version 2 and were all willing to purchase licenses for it, Apple wouldn't bother to come out with a third version.
A common theme in politics today seems to be that a loud minority of people want the US Government to act as a safety net for poor parenting. Honestly, if you bought your 12-year-old a copy of GTA San Andreas, it's not Rockstar's fault, it's not the US Government's fault, it's not the store's fault, it's yours, because you made a conscious decision to buy your kid that game when the title and the carton art tell the whole story. It's not as if the violent and sexually themed games are hiding among more "wholesome" games and trying to fool parents. They're clearly labelled and it's no one's responsibility but the parents' to take a proactive role in choosing the material to which their children are exposed.
Working as a designer, I actually spend a significant amount of my time creating what I guess you would call static eye candy. Part of my job is to make applications (in my case web apps) not just usable but pleasant. At every step of the game, I'm conscious of where I'm diverting the attention of the user and how I'm spending their time. Simple visual effects like an item fading into view or sliding into position can help maintain a kind of continuity in an interface and improve—even if it's on a subconscious level—the user's ability to follow and comprehend the actions of the workings lying beneath that interface. I personally doubt the usefulness of something like a full-3D desktop where you can rotate windows and move them around in more than 2 dimensions, but at the same time Apple's Expose feature in OS X is eye candy, but extremely useful eye candy. I use it nearly constantly.
As users become more sophisticated and, more importantly, the applications they use become more complicated, some little graphical niceties are becoming more and more necessary. Think of something as simple as live window dragging. If you want a purely functional interface, go with the command line; it's faster for a lot of day-to-day OS tasks anyway.
I admire your optimism, but an asteroid impact can't really be described as a "blessing in disguise" for a number of reasons.
First off, "stone" is mostly a terrestrial thing. Anything flying around in space is either "various metals" or "ice" or "cosmic dust". It's not as if you could have an asteroid made out of fine italian marble flying around space.
Secondly, mining asteroids isn't even a very practical way of acquiring useful metals, much less an effective means of saving the planet from an impact. Determining the exact composition of an asteroid isn't really an exact science unless we can get up close enough to do it accurately. Of course, if the asteroid does hit the Earth, then it'll save us the trouble by littering our atmosphere and the Earth's crust with whatever it's made of.
The fact of the matter is that we don't really have any easy ways to dispose of celestial objects that are about to hit us, and cancelling out global warming with another great extinction doesn't really sweeten the deal that much.
When I first started programming, I did find myself reinventing the wheel a whole lot. Using pre-written libraries wasn't my style, either, since I wanted to actually learn something. So, what I end up doing often when I learn a new language is writing a little library that contains functions or classes or code snippets that I find myself re-writing again and again. When I learned Python, I wrote an extensive framework for doing the kinds of things that I do in Python. When I learned Ocaml, I did the same. SVN and CVS are great for keeping track of individual projects and they can be great for keeping track of your API as you write it, too, but for most programmers I know they are ill-suited for stashing code snippets away.
What you really need is to be organized in a way that works for you, and either have little mini-APIs, or have collections of code snippets that you use often, and rock it. The advantage of APIs is that you can have a set of headers (in C) or interface files or the equivalent in whatever language, and you can import them from programs you're writing. With a directory full of code snippets the pressure to stay organized amid the dozens--and then hundreds--of little tiny files becomes greater and greater. For example, you might want to keep one file with only list-related functions in it, and another that has some helpful array-related functions in it. For little things like this, sometimes it's not worth it to actually go through the whole procedure of writing a high-quality API. Sometimes all you need is a little something that you can copy and paste in where you need it. Of course, you could work some combination of the two.
The bottom line is that code isn't like produce; you don't have to store it in a cool, dry place. You just have to make sure you can find what you're looking for later on.
$260. . . . I tip my cap to you, sir. And here I'm thinking about fighting my $40 ticket.
*If* you argue that this is an FCC thing, you can't use the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to argue it. Though this law could potentially affect businesses which do engage in interstate commercial activities, its primary thrust is to regulate the activities of these companies on a local level. That's why it's a county law and not a state or federal one.
I can see this kind of thing passing anyway because politicians typically don't have a very clear grasp of technology, but I'm not sure how readily anyone could challenge it in court. Would you use the "This is bullsh*t, yo" defense?
You've gotten a speeding ticket that cost you $500? Damn. . . .
DST is only really effective because it changes the hours of the day that we use electricity. If we went to DST year-round, for those few months we would be wasting energy at different times of day and nothing would really be improved over not using DST at all. Of course that'd make it simpler, but no matter. If the savings are really going to be that great, why hadn't anyone thought of this before?