Steve Jobs is wrong.
Now that the Apple fanboys have gone apoplectic... The reason Steve is wrong is not that he hasn't made what appears to be a sound business decision for Apple. Its that the purported reasons for doing so on behalf of customers is assuming that there are only two choices: Apple-provided toolkits and high quality, and third-party toolkits and low-quality. This is wrong. To me it's a classic tying argument, pulling together what you want (lock-in) with what you need (high-quality) and claiming they are inseparable. If you want the apps to be high quality, have a certification program which software vendors may submit to. Ensure this certification program only lets through the high quality apps you desire. Reject the rest. Then it doesn't matter which toolkit is used for which platform. Quality problem solved, and no draconian restrictions on development methods are introduced. Concerns are once again separate and honest.
But, as has already been pointed out, Apple is not interested in being honest with their customers. Steve is out for his business (as he should be). But no one should be under any illusions that this decision represents the only one which achieves high quality applications for his customers.
All those employees who file their taxes with IBM's EID, compare to historical growth rates and IBMs hiring trends versus the current state of the economy, and I bet you could estimate it well enough for public policy purposes. Anyone want to start a data-mining operation contracting to the government to find this information for them?:)
Actually the XBox is also very easy to develop (XNA anyone?) The only real restrictions there are that if you want your game to go out to everyone as a full game on Live, you have to pass a certification process to ensure you abide by the rules for how apps are supposed to behave. But the tools are all there and MS does a good job of encouraging their use.
Whoever was shooting that video, please... put down the camera and walk away. You clearly don't know what you are doing, and it sickens us to watch you. Either that or take your anti-spasmodics. I don't know how you managed to do it, but the most interesting bits - the stopping and starting - you managed to effectively miss. Did you even know what your subject was or why it would be interesting? Apparently not. Go home, please.
Until you solve the problem of ubiquitous, seamless radio coverage in the car, your ideas will be relegated to your small, poorly lit IT office where they belong. Solve the real problems, not your pet ones.
Legal distinctions are important. Politicians use our reluctance to hold the line on the Constitution to proceed down the slippery slope of increased power at our expense. Keep in mind that today we use those enhanced "powers" against accused terrorists, tomorrow it might be against those who speak out against the government.
We don't have a declared war. We have an administration that plays fast and loose with executive power, and a Congress which is largely complicit. We see daily blatant violations of the Constitution - such as wiretapping, holding people without due process, etc. - yet remain largely ambivalent as if it isn't our problem. But it *is* our problem, one which *will* come back and bite us in the ass hard.
I'm sorry your great uncle spent three years in a Chinese prison camp, and I'm sorry John McCain was tortured. But they were out there to defend the Constitution which forms the fabric of our society. Wouldn't it be a spit in their faces to say that we can now just ignore that same document because it is politically convenient? Remember, our soldiers aren't out there dying simply to preserve our land or our property. They are out there defending our way of life. Don't throw that away over a few accused terrorists.
Having done this mod myself, I can say with confidence that it works perfectly and is easy to do for someone wh has basic soldering skills (which you could learn as part of doing this project.) And it doesn't cost a fortune, just need the original drum controller and about $100 worth of parts (detailed in that posting.)
Executive Orders by a President are law unless Congress overturns them...
No. From the Constitution:
Section. 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Unlike some parts of the constitution, this one is quite clear. All - not some, but all - legislative powers in the Constitution are granted to the Congress. To wit, some relevant ones:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof
The President cannot interpret the law - that's not the function of the Executive branch, it belongs to the judiciary - his job is specifically to enforce it, plus the other powers granted him relating to treaties and bring Commander-in-chief. His job as enforcer of the law extends only to selecting how to enforce it, within the rules laid down by Congress. To wit:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;
Again, all judicial power, not some. Only Congress can establish courts inferior to the Supreme Court, and all courts are inferior to it. The President has no power under the Constitution in these matters.
Of course all of this is moot when no one puts a check on that authority. However, if Congress has written laws which are full of loopholes or are permissive, it is not the fault of Executive overstepping that those loopholes exist since, if written into law, it is perfectly legal (if nor moral) for the Executive to use them. However, when the Executive steps outside of the legal framework which Congress has constructed, it is the function of the Legislative and Judicial branches to restrain him. This is, in some cases, slowly happening. The question is whether it will occur fast enough to halt the downward spiral.
Well, there's the rub. We might all be able to agree that some information should reasonably be kept secret. But what we can't agree on is which information, and often why. The principle of state secrets is one which is usually only truly upheld by those who believe government can and should be trusted. In America, it should be damn near treasonous to believe that, given the principles on which we are founded.
The case for secrecy is often made, but it's made not with examples of where failure to keep secret has harmed us. It's made using fear of what MIGHT happen if those secrets were revealed. We all have vivid imaginations and can think of worst-case scenarios to scare ourselves with what MIGHT happen. But it's far more useful for us to live in reality. I don't think we've ever become a weaker nation for our transparency.
Security through obscurity, as we all know, is no security at all. When did we forget this?
so you can mentally and verbally masturbate about it to all of your other geeky computer friends. That's what this thread is all about, after all. If you are gonna be a zealot about it, at least be honest about your reasons.
Attempting to use imprecise verbage to explain precise logic isn't going to help. Just because a word is defined to have a particular meaning does not imply that the word IS the thing. For instance, just because the word 'Universe' is used to mean 'everything that exists' doesn't mean that what we think of as the Universe is actually all that exists. This is not because we are stupid, but rather because our language fails us here. Most of us have a lot more meaning wrapped up in our words than is copied down into a dictionary, and half of us couldn't even put those meanings into words if asked to.
I may be off the mark here, but I believe the energy comes from the black hole because the virtual particles are derived from the energy locked up in the space-time substrate itself - they don't just come from "nowhere", and their existence is not free in the entropic sense. The black hole is just a manifestation of this substrate, so any particles which temporarily appear must take their energy from it.
Until that happens, I would rather have some of the federal budget used on social programs and education than to have all of it be channeled into corporate welfare, unnecessary wars and enforcing personal viewpoints of the politicians.
Social Programs = channelling money to corporations. Education = channelling money to corporations. No matter where the government spends money, it goes to corporations one way or another. And those will become big, fat corporations, just like every other government contractor.
You can't win when the government has your money. Your best bet is to ensure they have as little of it as possible. If you compromise on these issues, the only thing that happens is that you lose your principles (and your cash.)
Unlikely. These video tapes serve very useful purposes internally to the organization, for instance to diagnose and correct problems. While it's fun to believe that government agencies like this operate as if they had no responsibility whatsoever, they have to avoid having repeat accidents or they will get shut down, people will lose their jobs, etc. So if for no other reason that to help them cover their own asses in the future they will continue to produce this kind of evidence for us to receive as leaks.
Any recording is necessarily less perfect than hearing the original live performance. The recording is different in ways that may be better depending on your point of view (more equalized sound, less crowd noise, etc.) but it is never more perfect. One of the joys of a live performance is that what you hear can never be heard again by anyone else in the same way, so it is a very personal experience.
That and there is always the chance that some crazy dude will bite the head off a fake animal. You won't see THAT on CD...
Classic supply and demand. If employees want more, they should ask for more, and if enough of them do so, they will get it because there won't be anyone else to do the job. If, on the other hand, there are people willing to work for less, then that's just tough titties. But you can't blame people for trying to get the best deal they can.
What's interesting to my mind though was that the quality of movies for Blu-Ray was so inferior. When we went to get our next-gen equipment, we surveyed the movie landscape. To this day, BluRay still has fewer good movies for it than Blu Ray. We tried to buy every movie of interest, and HD DVD had at least 4:1 ratio of quality flicks.
Since I already own both players, I guess I am technically format-agnostic. I would rather have had the region-less, less DRM-crippled format win, but as we all know this is not to be for our generation.
Because it's the destination, not the journey, which people are interested in. If you are interested in the journey, you take the train, a car or a ship. Commercial jet transportation doesn't cater to this market. Airships would compete most directly against ship travel I suspect, since they are both relatively slow.
This is an interesting point. Bouyancy is related to the amount of mass displaced. Water has a mass of 1kg/L. Air has a mass of 1.3g/L. So all things being equal, you need an airship with a volumetric displacement roughly 1000x larger than a ship for the same cargo capacity.
Capital costs could come down with mass production, like all things. But I agree its unlikely we'll see fleets of airships replacing intercontinental shipping any time soon.
The Air Traffic system is controlled by central authorities - its not as if jumbo jets just pick their own course and off they go. Their routes are very well known and pretty predictable. THe same would apply to airships I expect. Routes could be marked on aviation maps for airship airways (since they might be flying below the 18,000ft IFR-only area where central air traffic control is not optional.) GA pilots would know to stay away from these, and air traffic control would obviously be aware of them. I don't think this is going to be the problem.
Well, then a reasonable question is whether or not you could create the sort of emergent behavior we see on the scale we see using a simulation of a smaller scale. Perhaps with the set of apparent constants in our Universe it does generally take a sphere 30 billion light years across to produce a single planet with intelligent life, and that you can't get rid of the rest of it without negating the chance of us existing. In which case you'd need a universe-sized simulator to do it. Now of course we can go off the deep end here and also assume that our simulator lives in a vastly larger universe, where such a machine doesn't consume vast portions of its own Universe. We could also assume that the laws of physics are fundamentally and radically different in that universe, allowing such a simulation to take place using less material resources. But at that point we are simply making stuff up. Not like suggesting the Universe is VR isn't just making stuff up too.
And I still haven't seen a convincing argument for how we can determine a simulated Universe from a real one. Given the complexity of interactions we know exist today, and the fact that the Universe hasn't "fallen over" due to high energies or complex patterns, it seems unlikely we are going to suddenly create those conditions, even if this supposed simulation wasn't specifically designed to deny us knowledge of its existence.
When we think of software testing and exploitation - which is what this is all about - we know the places to look are boundary conditions and pattern matching (or errors thereof). The trouble is that all of the boundaries we might examine have already been exploited by the system itself (black holes, supernovas, the big bang perhaps) and the set of patterns which we might try have no bounding function smaller than the set of all interactions in the Universe.
Personally, if I just HAD to expend energy on this problem, I'd focus on two areas: black holes and searching for ever smaller particles (essentially probing the Universe to the Planck length.) These two avenues of exploration are already being pursued for reasons much less fantastic than to prove we are in a VR simulation. I'm happy to leave it to that until we exploit phenomenon from those experiments which fit none of our other well-tested theories and which essentially demand a 'VR simulation' answer. Because 'VR Simulation' still smacks of God, or turtles all the way down.
I read Zubrin's book about how to get to Mars, and as I recall, billions were not required (it was on the order of 10s or millions to low hundreds.) Perhaps I am comparing apples to oranges, but I am pretty sure two to three orders of magnitude spread lets apples and oranges be compared in this case:)
No, the point I am trying to get across is that on the list of things which we could be studying which is likely to lead to further understanding of the Universe, examining if it is a simulation does not seem to rank very high. Not the least reason of which is that it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to determine the difference between simulation and reality which simply looks like simulation.
Because there is no reason at all to suspect we are in a VR simulation to begin with. As far as I know, there are no unanswered questions which would be answered by knowing we are in a VR simulation.
Slashdot Mirror
At least as a method of increasing knowledge...
Steve Jobs is wrong. Now that the Apple fanboys have gone apoplectic... The reason Steve is wrong is not that he hasn't made what appears to be a sound business decision for Apple. Its that the purported reasons for doing so on behalf of customers is assuming that there are only two choices: Apple-provided toolkits and high quality, and third-party toolkits and low-quality. This is wrong. To me it's a classic tying argument, pulling together what you want (lock-in) with what you need (high-quality) and claiming they are inseparable. If you want the apps to be high quality, have a certification program which software vendors may submit to. Ensure this certification program only lets through the high quality apps you desire. Reject the rest. Then it doesn't matter which toolkit is used for which platform. Quality problem solved, and no draconian restrictions on development methods are introduced. Concerns are once again separate and honest. But, as has already been pointed out, Apple is not interested in being honest with their customers. Steve is out for his business (as he should be). But no one should be under any illusions that this decision represents the only one which achieves high quality applications for his customers.
All those employees who file their taxes with IBM's EID, compare to historical growth rates and IBMs hiring trends versus the current state of the economy, and I bet you could estimate it well enough for public policy purposes. Anyone want to start a data-mining operation contracting to the government to find this information for them? :)
Actually the XBox is also very easy to develop (XNA anyone?) The only real restrictions there are that if you want your game to go out to everyone as a full game on Live, you have to pass a certification process to ensure you abide by the rules for how apps are supposed to behave. But the tools are all there and MS does a good job of encouraging their use.
Whoever was shooting that video, please... put down the camera and walk away. You clearly don't know what you are doing, and it sickens us to watch you. Either that or take your anti-spasmodics. I don't know how you managed to do it, but the most interesting bits - the stopping and starting - you managed to effectively miss. Did you even know what your subject was or why it would be interesting? Apparently not. Go home, please.
Until you solve the problem of ubiquitous, seamless radio coverage in the car, your ideas will be relegated to your small, poorly lit IT office where they belong. Solve the real problems, not your pet ones.
Legal distinctions are important. Politicians use our reluctance to hold the line on the Constitution to proceed down the slippery slope of increased power at our expense. Keep in mind that today we use those enhanced "powers" against accused terrorists, tomorrow it might be against those who speak out against the government.
We don't have a declared war. We have an administration that plays fast and loose with executive power, and a Congress which is largely complicit. We see daily blatant violations of the Constitution - such as wiretapping, holding people without due process, etc. - yet remain largely ambivalent as if it isn't our problem. But it *is* our problem, one which *will* come back and bite us in the ass hard.
I'm sorry your great uncle spent three years in a Chinese prison camp, and I'm sorry John McCain was tortured. But they were out there to defend the Constitution which forms the fabric of our society. Wouldn't it be a spit in their faces to say that we can now just ignore that same document because it is politically convenient? Remember, our soldiers aren't out there dying simply to preserve our land or our property. They are out there defending our way of life. Don't throw that away over a few accused terrorists.
Or you could set up a workstation and the game with a real (electronic) drum set for maybe $100 and a few hours of time.
May I recommend the following:
http://theflashspeaks.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/playing-rock-band-with-a-yamaha-dtxplorer-how-to/
Having done this mod myself, I can say with confidence that it works perfectly and is easy to do for someone wh has basic soldering skills (which you could learn as part of doing this project.) And it doesn't cost a fortune, just need the original drum controller and about $100 worth of parts (detailed in that posting.)
No. From the Constitution:
Section. 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.Unlike some parts of the constitution, this one is quite clear. All - not some, but all - legislative powers in the Constitution are granted to the Congress. To wit, some relevant ones:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereofThe President cannot interpret the law - that's not the function of the Executive branch, it belongs to the judiciary - his job is specifically to enforce it, plus the other powers granted him relating to treaties and bring Commander-in-chief. His job as enforcer of the law extends only to selecting how to enforce it, within the rules laid down by Congress. To wit:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;Again, all judicial power, not some. Only Congress can establish courts inferior to the Supreme Court, and all courts are inferior to it. The President has no power under the Constitution in these matters.
Of course all of this is moot when no one puts a check on that authority. However, if Congress has written laws which are full of loopholes or are permissive, it is not the fault of Executive overstepping that those loopholes exist since, if written into law, it is perfectly legal (if nor moral) for the Executive to use them. However, when the Executive steps outside of the legal framework which Congress has constructed, it is the function of the Legislative and Judicial branches to restrain him. This is, in some cases, slowly happening. The question is whether it will occur fast enough to halt the downward spiral.
Well, there's the rub. We might all be able to agree that some information should reasonably be kept secret. But what we can't agree on is which information, and often why. The principle of state secrets is one which is usually only truly upheld by those who believe government can and should be trusted. In America, it should be damn near treasonous to believe that, given the principles on which we are founded.
The case for secrecy is often made, but it's made not with examples of where failure to keep secret has harmed us. It's made using fear of what MIGHT happen if those secrets were revealed. We all have vivid imaginations and can think of worst-case scenarios to scare ourselves with what MIGHT happen. But it's far more useful for us to live in reality. I don't think we've ever become a weaker nation for our transparency.
Security through obscurity, as we all know, is no security at all. When did we forget this?
so you can mentally and verbally masturbate about it to all of your other geeky computer friends. That's what this thread is all about, after all. If you are gonna be a zealot about it, at least be honest about your reasons.
Attempting to use imprecise verbage to explain precise logic isn't going to help. Just because a word is defined to have a particular meaning does not imply that the word IS the thing. For instance, just because the word 'Universe' is used to mean 'everything that exists' doesn't mean that what we think of as the Universe is actually all that exists. This is not because we are stupid, but rather because our language fails us here. Most of us have a lot more meaning wrapped up in our words than is copied down into a dictionary, and half of us couldn't even put those meanings into words if asked to.
I may be off the mark here, but I believe the energy comes from the black hole because the virtual particles are derived from the energy locked up in the space-time substrate itself - they don't just come from "nowhere", and their existence is not free in the entropic sense. The black hole is just a manifestation of this substrate, so any particles which temporarily appear must take their energy from it.
Social Programs = channelling money to corporations. Education = channelling money to corporations. No matter where the government spends money, it goes to corporations one way or another. And those will become big, fat corporations, just like every other government contractor.
You can't win when the government has your money. Your best bet is to ensure they have as little of it as possible. If you compromise on these issues, the only thing that happens is that you lose your principles (and your cash.)
Unlikely. These video tapes serve very useful purposes internally to the organization, for instance to diagnose and correct problems. While it's fun to believe that government agencies like this operate as if they had no responsibility whatsoever, they have to avoid having repeat accidents or they will get shut down, people will lose their jobs, etc. So if for no other reason that to help them cover their own asses in the future they will continue to produce this kind of evidence for us to receive as leaks.
Any recording is necessarily less perfect than hearing the original live performance. The recording is different in ways that may be better depending on your point of view (more equalized sound, less crowd noise, etc.) but it is never more perfect. One of the joys of a live performance is that what you hear can never be heard again by anyone else in the same way, so it is a very personal experience.
That and there is always the chance that some crazy dude will bite the head off a fake animal. You won't see THAT on CD...
Mod parent up.
Classic supply and demand. If employees want more, they should ask for more, and if enough of them do so, they will get it because there won't be anyone else to do the job. If, on the other hand, there are people willing to work for less, then that's just tough titties. But you can't blame people for trying to get the best deal they can.
What's interesting to my mind though was that the quality of movies for Blu-Ray was so inferior. When we went to get our next-gen equipment, we surveyed the movie landscape. To this day, BluRay still has fewer good movies for it than Blu Ray. We tried to buy every movie of interest, and HD DVD had at least 4:1 ratio of quality flicks.
Since I already own both players, I guess I am technically format-agnostic. I would rather have had the region-less, less DRM-crippled format win, but as we all know this is not to be for our generation.
Because it's the destination, not the journey, which people are interested in. If you are interested in the journey, you take the train, a car or a ship. Commercial jet transportation doesn't cater to this market. Airships would compete most directly against ship travel I suspect, since they are both relatively slow.
This is an interesting point. Bouyancy is related to the amount of mass displaced. Water has a mass of 1kg/L. Air has a mass of 1.3g/L. So all things being equal, you need an airship with a volumetric displacement roughly 1000x larger than a ship for the same cargo capacity.
Capital costs could come down with mass production, like all things. But I agree its unlikely we'll see fleets of airships replacing intercontinental shipping any time soon.
The Air Traffic system is controlled by central authorities - its not as if jumbo jets just pick their own course and off they go. Their routes are very well known and pretty predictable. THe same would apply to airships I expect. Routes could be marked on aviation maps for airship airways (since they might be flying below the 18,000ft IFR-only area where central air traffic control is not optional.) GA pilots would know to stay away from these, and air traffic control would obviously be aware of them. I don't think this is going to be the problem.
Well, then a reasonable question is whether or not you could create the sort of emergent behavior we see on the scale we see using a simulation of a smaller scale. Perhaps with the set of apparent constants in our Universe it does generally take a sphere 30 billion light years across to produce a single planet with intelligent life, and that you can't get rid of the rest of it without negating the chance of us existing. In which case you'd need a universe-sized simulator to do it. Now of course we can go off the deep end here and also assume that our simulator lives in a vastly larger universe, where such a machine doesn't consume vast portions of its own Universe. We could also assume that the laws of physics are fundamentally and radically different in that universe, allowing such a simulation to take place using less material resources. But at that point we are simply making stuff up. Not like suggesting the Universe is VR isn't just making stuff up too.
And I still haven't seen a convincing argument for how we can determine a simulated Universe from a real one. Given the complexity of interactions we know exist today, and the fact that the Universe hasn't "fallen over" due to high energies or complex patterns, it seems unlikely we are going to suddenly create those conditions, even if this supposed simulation wasn't specifically designed to deny us knowledge of its existence.
When we think of software testing and exploitation - which is what this is all about - we know the places to look are boundary conditions and pattern matching (or errors thereof). The trouble is that all of the boundaries we might examine have already been exploited by the system itself (black holes, supernovas, the big bang perhaps) and the set of patterns which we might try have no bounding function smaller than the set of all interactions in the Universe.
Personally, if I just HAD to expend energy on this problem, I'd focus on two areas: black holes and searching for ever smaller particles (essentially probing the Universe to the Planck length.) These two avenues of exploration are already being pursued for reasons much less fantastic than to prove we are in a VR simulation. I'm happy to leave it to that until we exploit phenomenon from those experiments which fit none of our other well-tested theories and which essentially demand a 'VR simulation' answer. Because 'VR Simulation' still smacks of God, or turtles all the way down.
I read Zubrin's book about how to get to Mars, and as I recall, billions were not required (it was on the order of 10s or millions to low hundreds.) Perhaps I am comparing apples to oranges, but I am pretty sure two to three orders of magnitude spread lets apples and oranges be compared in this case :)
No, the point I am trying to get across is that on the list of things which we could be studying which is likely to lead to further understanding of the Universe, examining if it is a simulation does not seem to rank very high. Not the least reason of which is that it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to determine the difference between simulation and reality which simply looks like simulation.
Because there is no reason at all to suspect we are in a VR simulation to begin with. As far as I know, there are no unanswered questions which would be answered by knowing we are in a VR simulation.