In C++, IIRC, templates bring with them limitations and restrictions that can really cause problems down the line. Worse, their memory footprint is an abomination. You can generally assume that for each different template type you pass to a template class, you've duplicated a significant portion (and possibly all) of the executable code for that class.
Modern C++ compilers have known how to remove duplicate template code for quite a few years.
They also clutter up the syntax every time you declare the class
That's true if you're used to pre-TR1 C++, what I call "Older C++". I call "Modern C++" the stuff that uses and looks like Boost (e.g. functors, templates, metaprogramming). To me they are really two different languages, even though "Modern C++" compilers will often compile "Old C++" source. I try to avoid mixing these two languages in source.
I agree with you about multithreading, though. One should not eschew it because it is hard. Bolting it on when you realize you're only taking advantage of 12.5% of that eight core CPU is much harder than designing your app right to begin with.
Depending on my app designs, if they are "embarrassingly" parallelizable I'll generally split them into discrete processes using the filesystem as glue (e.g. intermediate files between stages, named pipes between parallelized parts, fork()/exec()/kill()/wait4()). This makes it really easy to test individual "threads" (processes) and lets me use whatever language for each part that makes the most sense for that job. For things that need to be highly-threaded, I lean toward languages with well-tested thread support like Clojure/Java.
I'm plagiarizing a point I saw on Reddit and I'm too lazy to find the original article, but I agree with the author of it: there doesn't have to be a choice between "crappy duct tape" programming and "crappy over-architected" programming. A decent programmer can get both: a small program that does its job well, AND can be extended in unplanned-for ways for new functionality.
Interesting. So, if I want to circumvent the GPL on a library, I only have to create a binary interface layer on top of the library and use that layer? The layer itself of course would be GPL.
There are all sorts of ways to "circumvent" GPL on a library. One of the easiest is to expose the library functions as a separate command-line program and manipulate that through a pty interface. What you're talking about wouldn't work if your in-between layer was GPL, but if it was BSD it *might* work - that's still under debate and probably won't be known unless case law makes a precedent - but it is the way the nVidia and ATI drivers are packaged.
But we're talking about the kernel, not userspace programs. Does the kernel itself qualify as a library with respect to a userspace program? To me it seems like it does not.
"Compiling in" is not vague at all though, at least in the context of a C/C++ compiler. "Header files" have no meaning to the compiler - it's all just source, regardless of which top level module caused it to be included verbatim.
Right, but does a header file containing only constant declaration and forward declarations constitute "compiling in"? E.g. "extern int strlen(char * str);" vs "int strlen(char * str) {... function code... }". The latter case is clearly "compiled in", as in two modules including a header file that contained the implementation would each put the implementation in their respective.o/.obj file, which would (usually) cause the link to fail due to duplicate functions. However, the former case to me is NOT "compiling in" because without the implementation the link is guaranteed to fail due to the missing function.
It's a good thing that Linux system calls are excepted from the normal GPL rules, otherwise we wouldn't have seen its massive success in embedded devices.
Could you elaborate on the "normal GPL rules" regarding syscalls? Because I'm not seeing why any exception would be needed. Has this been hashed out somewhere before?
(My thinking is: yes, user code can call kernel functions through a binary interface, which is similar to linking, but it's not *really* linked to the kernel; the same binary program could run on a BSD kernel too. I fail to see how syscalls would be any different than a GPL and non-GPL program communicating through SysV IPC shared memory. It seems like the "viral-ness" of the GPL would only come into play if the kernel + user-mode program together became a single program, which would require ripping out the kernel scheduler.)
I know you hate to hear this, but what you describe is not a failure of "the system", it's a failure of personal responsibility. If a person is not willing to implement a plan for unexpected loss of income, why would you expect anyone else (or the government) to do it for them?
No, it IS a failure of "the system" when jobs that pay enough to save up six months just aren't plentiful enough to go around. Either pay needs to be higher in general, or prices on needs (not luxuries) need to be lower. That means housing, college loan, health insurance, car loan, and car insurance. There is some wiggle room (what you'd call personal responsibility) to have a smaller house / apartment, go to a cheaper state school, get a used car, etc., but in the end most people would still need to be in the top 40% of the income distribution to have any chance at meeting those bills and then saving up six months on top of it all.
Funny enough, those "luxury" items you mention (premium cable, touch phone) are much less cheaper than the "need" items. One months' rent in cheap-ass Texas is 6-10 times more expensive than premium cable or the nicest cell phone plan.
Want to solve the problem of under-motivated talented kids? Create some publicly funded charter schools for gifted and talented kids. Make the admission criteria rigorous. Make it tuition free so that socioeconomic status is not a barrier to application.
In Texas, two "Academies" exist just like this: the Texas Academy of Math & Science (TAMS) and the Texas Academy of Leadership in the Humanities (TAOLITH). Both are actually dorms on the campuses of state universities and have admissions processes more rigorous than their respective host universities. TAMS admits about 200 per year, TAOLITH (I think) closer to 25 per year. Students actually take college classes alongside regular freshmen and sophomores; being "bright" they often screw the curve too:) .
AND create a funding structure that would encourage schools to send their students there. Without the proper incentive structure for the local schools, it can't work.
I was the first from my high school to go to TAMS. When I applied my high school principal dragged his feet on the paperwork I needed. I brought back admissions materials for future students, AFAIK they were never distributed. In theory, every Texas high school student should have heard about TAMS from four different people: their math teacher, their science teacher, their counselor, and their principal. In practice, the counselors and principals never mention it; the teachers that do are "bucking the system" when they do so.
1) A university researcher funded by a public grant invents a drug, at the tax-payers' expense of $10 million dollars of research. 2) A private corporation files for a patent that currently takes a minimum of 2 years to be examined 3) The corporation gets rich
Actually it was NOT decided that corporations were legal persons. A Supreme Court case from the 1800's involving corporate behavior was summarized that way in the abstract, but the actual text of the legal decision makes no such arguments. That was enough of a wedge for more decisions to come down relying on the "corporate personhood" theory over the years, and now it's accepted fact. But it was never really true law in the first place.
Your original post says that these are samples of people agreeing to slow progress.
I think a lot of people at multiple levels of the existing economic pyramid have a personal interest in slowing progress. They didn't have to get together and establish a conspiracy for this outcome to occur, it just takes a general resistance to change. People at the top don't want their wealth to become worthless, people closer to the bottom don't want their jobs to go away. The result is that society gets some better automation in labor, but not significant independence for consumers.
Particularly in the case of women employment and wage gap, which was around for as long as human history has documentation, I do not see how this was implemented to slow technology.
Those were examples of "things that are demonstratably true" that sound like a conspiracy but don't have to be. As in, you won't find many particular people insisting that women should be paid less / blacks should be incarcerated more / etc., yet the outcome happens just the same.
Seems so. Unless you think there really WAS a conspiracy.
Why has the gap between men and women employment and wages consistently narrowed over the past several generations?
Because a relatively few people fought tirelessly against the prevailing view. How does that invalidate the existence of a prevailing view to fight against?
But automation has trimmed this workforce considerable. Look at modern farm equipment and large commercial farming. Look at modern construction, with nail guns and prefab walls and parts. The food industry represents roughly 10% of the GDP, but only employs approximately 5% of the population. For every skill-less manual labor job you lose, you gain jobs producing items higher up the pyramid. This is kind of like how glass blowing, cotton picking, and blacksmithing used to be huge industries, and now are largely automated. This increases the supply of educated workers, since fewer jobs are available for uneducated workers, which reduces the cost, which spurs innovation. Rinse and repeat.
(I will assume you're generalizing from the U.S.) You missed the part where the United States became a service sector economy entirely dependent on goods made from a manufacturing-based economy (China).
And who is going to pay the state? If they are the only people working, what benefit would the pay give them?
Hybrid systems provide the basics of survival but still have a competitive economy for non-basic items. People in those systems seem to be happy enough.
You aren't advocating forcing the people to work, are you? You aren't in favor of slavery, are you?
1) I'm not advocating anything. 2) Fallacy of the excluded middle.
The state produces nothing of value, it only consumes.
Ah I see, you're a libertarian. Carry on then, no more to see here.
Hydrogen car----Pretty sure it,s being held back by oil companies because they would lose it all
Actually you have it backward: hydrogen was being promoted because it would leave the existing oil companies on top in a green energy future. Hydrogen cars require a fluid distribution system similar to the network of gasoline stations in use today. Contrast with electrical cars which can be powered from the much more energy efficient electrical grid. Also, hydrogen is made easiest from fossil fuels, again putting the existing oil and gas companies on top.
Technically, hydrogen has very very poor volumetric energy density, making hydrogen-powered cars very expensive (needing cryogenic storage) and unable to go very far on one "tank".
(BTW--My M.S. thesis was hydrogen storage for transportation.)
Just for you, I'll address the grandparents idiocy point by point.
"1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again."
So there is no demand for anything but food and shelter? All human beings presently produce nothing but food and shelter? I want a lot more stuff besides food and shelter, and I'm willing to work to pay for it. I don't want to live in a welfare state, I've seen the average welfare recipient.
Maslow's heirarchy of needs is one description of what drives individual motivation, usually depicted a pyramid with "psysiological needs" at the bottom and "self-actualization" at the top. Maslow generalized that most people seek to satisfy each level before focusing on the next level. Though it has its criticisms, generalizing this idea to society at large can be useful.
Imagine Maslow's heirarchy of needs for society, with layers for "food and shelter" (bottom), "national defense" (next up), "civil order", and so on up to whatever top you wish. As you move up Maslow's heirarchy of needs, the number of people employed or otherwise exchanging their time to produce goods that satisfy those needs diminishes. It takes hundreds of millions of people (worldwide) to build houses, roads, cars, chemicals, etc., but only hundreds of thousands to produce enough books and music for the entire world. On the bottom-most level of Maslow's heirarchy, automation can remove over half the people needed, yet the economy does not have jobs for them at higher layers.
"The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued."
Who is going to make the basic stuff for no cost to consumers for free. Even if you build robots that can do all the work, someone still has to design, build, and maintain them.
Correct. In non-capitalistic systems those people might be paid by the state, in the same manner private military contractors are paid by the US government. Or perhaps through religious channels. Who knows? Until the technology is widely deployed we can only speculate how such a society might operate.
Why should those people have to work when nobody else does?
I only generalized, I didn't make moral judgments. You can make whatever moral judgments you wish. You might also ask: "Why should I care if others don't work, so long as I am happy with my own achievements?" "When has anyone been motivated by something other than compensation to do work?" Or even: "Wouldn't it be really nice if the people who obviously don't want to do work weren't in everyone else's way?"
"Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective."
And who exactly made the decision to slow down the pace? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else? How do they prevent people not directly under their control from innovating themselves? Why did they open of vast information sources like the Internet, and make them searchable, if they are trying to impede progress?
"No one" decided, yet everyone abided. It is the same way with everything else. "Who exactly decided that women would get paid less for the same work as men? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else?" "Who exactly decided that disproportionate numbers of blacks would be sent to prison for the same non-violent crimes committed by whites?" "Who exactly decided that blue jeans are acceptable attire for most white-collar work?" "Who exactly decided that athletics will be supported more than arts and sciences in American public schools?
...and because of corporatist capitalism. We have two major things going on:
1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again. The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued. Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective. Call this is the Conspiracy Theory version of why we don't develop technology advanced enough such that we no longer need to work for The Man.
2. Globalization's "race to the bottom" has produced a business culture that values short-term profits over long-term progress, such that it makes more economic sense to squeeze a little more money out of what we have than take the risk of shooting for something much better. Thus it is more profitable to make things last just until the manufacturer's warranty runs out than as long as possible, partly due to existing infrastructure but also largely due to consumer preferences for newer-is-better (who still wants power tools from the 1950's even if they continue to work well?). This has led to the death of craftsmanship and the skills necessary for significant innovation. Call this the Idiocracy Theory of why it doesn't make business sense to fund R&D.
Most likely, the easiest thing for them to do would be to gather and... plant the seeds from the foods they gather.
Actually, the easiest thing for them would be to begin roaming the fertile areas looking for nuts, fruits, and vegetables growing in the wild. They could survey the area with their technology and quickly develop a list of edible plants. Roaming nomadic tribes would be able to survive with an average 4-5 hour work day. Really it would be feast or famine: lots of work followed by periods of almost no work, but on average it would be less work than they did on the ships.
I would teach them about the sun, the stars, the moon.
You might be interested in Aristarchus, who posited that the Sun was the center of the solar system and stars were suns but very far away. There was also a historian of antiquity who had the Earth's creation a full hundred thousand years earlier than Genesis. In the BSG universe, these two might very well have been passing down knowledge from the Colonial settlers. (Both references are mentioned in Carl Sagan's Cosmos when he is discussing the Library of Alexandria.)
But not me - you can disagree with everything I have said up to now, but at least know this: all I'm saying is what I personally would do.
I'm no Luddite, I've got an MS in engineering and routinely use the scientific method, but if it was me and I had seen my society's analogue to the Age of Reason produce the genocidal Cylons, I very well might consider abandoning the pursuit of science for science's sake for my children. "Dumb, happy and alive" beats "enlightened and dead" any day.
Sorry... also... why don't you think a species seeded with 40,000 people would survive to the Stone Age?
Because even Stone Age technology takes a lot of work to maintain. Their "knowledge" is just what they vaguely remember in books or entertainment, it's not practical for everyday use. Could you figure out how to domesticate an animal from its wild habitat in a reasonably short time frame? Especially if it looks nothing at all like a horse, ox, sheep, goat, or cow? How many people would you be willing to sacrifice trying to domesticate wildebeests first? Even if you knew something of agribusiness-style farming with tractors and other mechanized equipment, could you translate that knowledge into procedures involving only stone age equipment?
I work in a chemical manufacturing plant. Even with state-of-the-art automation that has removed 80% of the workforce needed just 50 years ago, it takes all told over a thousand people to make... paint. Just paint. Granted, it's state-of-the-art paint, but even something as simple as that is pretty labor-intensive. Stone Agers might not need advanced paint, but they definitely would need clothes, flint for fires, clay and straw for bricks, tools to work stone, animal husbandry, etc. I don't see 40,000-ish people being able to do that from scratch.
It's worse than that. Baltar wants to become a farmer because he's finally made peace with his father, a character introduced for a storyline only present in the finale itself.
Not his father, his roots: being born near the bottom of an almost-caste system and fighting his whole life to be seen as deserving of the best society had to offer. But to me the biggest revelation for Baltar was the reason he gave Six access to the defense systems ("the things men do for love"). It puts in stark relief everything he has done over the four seasons -- almost like the "twist" of The Sixth Sense.
I think if they had had the fifth season we would have seen a lot more of Baltar's past.
Even Gaius Baltar is going to start farming... did anyone catch that? That's right, the agricultural revolution actually started 140,000 years before you think it did.
Sure we caught that. And for all we know Baltar made a wonderful little farm with Caprica Six and they had a few babies together, but obviously that didn't start the agricultural revolution. Baltar started what you wanted and failed to change the world. How do you know that everyone else would have succeeded? The entire survining population couldn't even fill up a modern sports arena (Aloha Stadium seats 50000). Plus they had already tried to make a city on a new world using their technology and they were moments away from a general strike before the Cylons showed up.
they pull classic hippie / not-thinking-the-concept-through / technology-and-science-is-inferior-to-"nature"-even-though-it's-a-part-of-it crap.
No, they had no chance in hell at making it to even the Stone Age with the population they had. Their choice wasn't "give up technology", it was "figure out how to live without your technology since you're going to lose it anyway". Their choices: 1) rely on Centurion labor and repeat the Cylon War someday, 2) shoot for the Stone Age and watch half their grandchildren be enslaved, 3) use the fleet until it breaks down, and then decide all over again, or 4) go nomadic and see what happens.
It would be, but people don't want to wait on the JVM to load, so they would rather cram all the already-existing Java applet functionality into Javascript.
(Actually, the plugin doesn't work smoothly with everything else. If it was standard for Java applets to pass keystrokes back to the browser, integrating with the tab order and handling Ctrl-K/E/L/F / Alt-D/F / etc., then there wouldn't be much point to using Javascript for anything.)
1) Never go to bed angry. You might go to bed before you solve the problem, but no matter what it is, no matter how bad it is, you can always find a way to hug your wife, kiss her, and tell her that the two of you will be able to work it out. Going to bed angry breeds resentment.
I was once in a relationship where "never go to bed angry" translated to "let's keep talking about an issue until it's resolved, even if that means staying up all night and ruining the next two days. And oh yeah since I can totally stay up later than you and still be effective that means I get my way most times."
I think it's perfectly OK to go to bed angry and deal with a conflict later when you're both well-rested. You're married, you're not going to split over something smaller than a nuclear issue (e.g. adultery), you've got time to deal with it at a less stressful moment than 11pm.
very big nono and should rightly result in a error message from the os.
DOS wouldn't have been able to return an error message as it had no real memory protection. One could do anything they wanted to memory under DOS, you'd just never know if an interrupt came in what someone else's code would do, so you tried to play nice.
and when it receives EAGAIN, it assumes that there's no further data incoming (because the child is dead!).
I haven't read the thread, but my understanding was that the only time to assume a descriptor is closed is when select() indicates the fd is readable yet read() returns 0, after which I expect read() to return -1.
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In C++, IIRC, templates bring with them limitations and restrictions that can really cause problems down the line. Worse, their memory footprint is an abomination. You can generally assume that for each different template type you pass to a template class, you've duplicated a significant portion (and possibly all) of the executable code for that class.
Modern C++ compilers have known how to remove duplicate template code for quite a few years.
They also clutter up the syntax every time you declare the class
That's true if you're used to pre-TR1 C++, what I call "Older C++". I call "Modern C++" the stuff that uses and looks like Boost (e.g. functors, templates, metaprogramming). To me they are really two different languages, even though "Modern C++" compilers will often compile "Old C++" source. I try to avoid mixing these two languages in source.
I agree with you about multithreading, though. One should not eschew it because it is hard. Bolting it on when you realize you're only taking advantage of 12.5% of that eight core CPU is much harder than designing your app right to begin with.
Depending on my app designs, if they are "embarrassingly" parallelizable I'll generally split them into discrete processes using the filesystem as glue (e.g. intermediate files between stages, named pipes between parallelized parts, fork()/exec()/kill()/wait4()). This makes it really easy to test individual "threads" (processes) and lets me use whatever language for each part that makes the most sense for that job. For things that need to be highly-threaded, I lean toward languages with well-tested thread support like Clojure/Java.
My $0.02. YMMV.
I'm plagiarizing a point I saw on Reddit and I'm too lazy to find the original article, but I agree with the author of it: there doesn't have to be a choice between "crappy duct tape" programming and "crappy over-architected" programming. A decent programmer can get both: a small program that does its job well, AND can be extended in unplanned-for ways for new functionality.
Interesting. So, if I want to circumvent the GPL on a library, I only have to create a binary interface layer on top of the library and use that layer? The layer itself of course would be GPL.
There are all sorts of ways to "circumvent" GPL on a library. One of the easiest is to expose the library functions as a separate command-line program and manipulate that through a pty interface. What you're talking about wouldn't work if your in-between layer was GPL, but if it was BSD it *might* work - that's still under debate and probably won't be known unless case law makes a precedent - but it is the way the nVidia and ATI drivers are packaged.
But we're talking about the kernel, not userspace programs. Does the kernel itself qualify as a library with respect to a userspace program? To me it seems like it does not.
"Compiling in" is not vague at all though, at least in the context of a C/C++ compiler. "Header files" have no meaning to the compiler - it's all just source, regardless of which top level module caused it to be included verbatim.
Right, but does a header file containing only constant declaration and forward declarations constitute "compiling in"? E.g. "extern int strlen(char * str);" vs "int strlen(char * str) { ... function code ... }". The latter case is clearly "compiled in", as in two modules including a header file that contained the implementation would each put the implementation in their respective .o/.obj file, which would (usually) cause the link to fail due to duplicate functions. However, the former case to me is NOT "compiling in" because without the implementation the link is guaranteed to fail due to the missing function.
It's a good thing that Linux system calls are excepted from the normal GPL rules, otherwise we wouldn't have seen its massive success in embedded devices.
Could you elaborate on the "normal GPL rules" regarding syscalls? Because I'm not seeing why any exception would be needed. Has this been hashed out somewhere before?
(My thinking is: yes, user code can call kernel functions through a binary interface, which is similar to linking, but it's not *really* linked to the kernel; the same binary program could run on a BSD kernel too. I fail to see how syscalls would be any different than a GPL and non-GPL program communicating through SysV IPC shared memory. It seems like the "viral-ness" of the GPL would only come into play if the kernel + user-mode program together became a single program, which would require ripping out the kernel scheduler.)
I know you hate to hear this, but what you describe is not a failure of "the system", it's a failure of personal responsibility. If a person is not willing to implement a plan for unexpected loss of income, why would you expect anyone else (or the government) to do it for them?
No, it IS a failure of "the system" when jobs that pay enough to save up six months just aren't plentiful enough to go around. Either pay needs to be higher in general, or prices on needs (not luxuries) need to be lower. That means housing, college loan, health insurance, car loan, and car insurance. There is some wiggle room (what you'd call personal responsibility) to have a smaller house / apartment, go to a cheaper state school, get a used car, etc., but in the end most people would still need to be in the top 40% of the income distribution to have any chance at meeting those bills and then saving up six months on top of it all.
Funny enough, those "luxury" items you mention (premium cable, touch phone) are much less cheaper than the "need" items. One months' rent in cheap-ass Texas is 6-10 times more expensive than premium cable or the nicest cell phone plan.
Want to solve the problem of under-motivated talented kids? Create some publicly funded charter schools for gifted and talented kids. Make the admission criteria rigorous. Make it tuition free so that socioeconomic status is not a barrier to application.
In Texas, two "Academies" exist just like this: the Texas Academy of Math & Science (TAMS) and the Texas Academy of Leadership in the Humanities (TAOLITH). Both are actually dorms on the campuses of state universities and have admissions processes more rigorous than their respective host universities. TAMS admits about 200 per year, TAOLITH (I think) closer to 25 per year. Students actually take college classes alongside regular freshmen and sophomores; being "bright" they often screw the curve too :) .
AND create a funding structure that would encourage schools to send their students there. Without the proper incentive structure for the local schools, it can't work.
I was the first from my high school to go to TAMS. When I applied my high school principal dragged his feet on the paperwork I needed. I brought back admissions materials for future students, AFAIK they were never distributed. In theory, every Texas high school student should have heard about TAMS from four different people: their math teacher, their science teacher, their counselor, and their principal. In practice, the counselors and principals never mention it; the teachers that do are "bucking the system" when they do so.
1) A university researcher funded by a public grant invents a drug, at the tax-payers' expense of $10 million dollars of research.
2) A private corporation files for a patent that currently takes a minimum of 2 years to be examined
3) The corporation gets rich
FTFY
Actually it was NOT decided that corporations were legal persons. A Supreme Court case from the 1800's involving corporate behavior was summarized that way in the abstract, but the actual text of the legal decision makes no such arguments. That was enough of a wedge for more decisions to come down relying on the "corporate personhood" theory over the years, and now it's accepted fact. But it was never really true law in the first place.
Or did we forget that the 10th man owns 80%ish of everything? While 1-8 own basically nothing?
Yeah, libertarians always forget that.
Your original post says that these are samples of people agreeing to slow progress.
I think a lot of people at multiple levels of the existing economic pyramid have a personal interest in slowing progress. They didn't have to get together and establish a conspiracy for this outcome to occur, it just takes a general resistance to change. People at the top don't want their wealth to become worthless, people closer to the bottom don't want their jobs to go away. The result is that society gets some better automation in labor, but not significant independence for consumers.
Particularly in the case of women employment and wage gap, which was around for as long as human history has documentation, I do not see how this was implemented to slow technology.
Those were examples of "things that are demonstratably true" that sound like a conspiracy but don't have to be. As in, you won't find many particular people insisting that women should be paid less / blacks should be incarcerated more / etc., yet the outcome happens just the same.
Everyone abided?
Seems so. Unless you think there really WAS a conspiracy.
Why has the gap between men and women employment and wages consistently narrowed over the past several generations?
Because a relatively few people fought tirelessly against the prevailing view. How does that invalidate the existence of a prevailing view to fight against?
But automation has trimmed this workforce considerable. Look at modern farm equipment and large commercial farming. Look at modern construction, with nail guns and prefab walls and parts. The food industry represents roughly 10% of the GDP, but only employs approximately 5% of the population. For every skill-less manual labor job you lose, you gain jobs producing items higher up the pyramid. This is kind of like how glass blowing, cotton picking, and blacksmithing used to be huge industries, and now are largely automated. This increases the supply of educated workers, since fewer jobs are available for uneducated workers, which reduces the cost, which spurs innovation. Rinse and repeat.
(I will assume you're generalizing from the U.S.) You missed the part where the United States became a service sector economy entirely dependent on goods made from a manufacturing-based economy (China).
And who is going to pay the state? If they are the only people working, what benefit would the pay give them?
Hybrid systems provide the basics of survival but still have a competitive economy for non-basic items. People in those systems seem to be happy enough.
You aren't advocating forcing the people to work, are you? You aren't in favor of slavery, are you?
1) I'm not advocating anything. 2) Fallacy of the excluded middle.
The state produces nothing of value, it only consumes.
Ah I see, you're a libertarian. Carry on then, no more to see here.
Hydrogen car----Pretty sure it,s being held back by oil companies because they would lose it all
Actually you have it backward: hydrogen was being promoted because it would leave the existing oil companies on top in a green energy future. Hydrogen cars require a fluid distribution system similar to the network of gasoline stations in use today. Contrast with electrical cars which can be powered from the much more energy efficient electrical grid. Also, hydrogen is made easiest from fossil fuels, again putting the existing oil and gas companies on top.
Technically, hydrogen has very very poor volumetric energy density, making hydrogen-powered cars very expensive (needing cryogenic storage) and unable to go very far on one "tank".
(BTW--My M.S. thesis was hydrogen storage for transportation.)
Just for you, I'll address the grandparents idiocy point by point.
"1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again."
So there is no demand for anything but food and shelter? All human beings presently produce nothing but food and shelter? I want a lot more stuff besides food and shelter, and I'm willing to work to pay for it. I don't want to live in a welfare state, I've seen the average welfare recipient.
Maslow's heirarchy of needs is one description of what drives individual motivation, usually depicted a pyramid with "psysiological needs" at the bottom and "self-actualization" at the top. Maslow generalized that most people seek to satisfy each level before focusing on the next level. Though it has its criticisms, generalizing this idea to society at large can be useful.
Imagine Maslow's heirarchy of needs for society, with layers for "food and shelter" (bottom), "national defense" (next up), "civil order", and so on up to whatever top you wish. As you move up Maslow's heirarchy of needs, the number of people employed or otherwise exchanging their time to produce goods that satisfy those needs diminishes. It takes hundreds of millions of people (worldwide) to build houses, roads, cars, chemicals, etc., but only hundreds of thousands to produce enough books and music for the entire world. On the bottom-most level of Maslow's heirarchy, automation can remove over half the people needed, yet the economy does not have jobs for them at higher layers.
"The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued."
Who is going to make the basic stuff for no cost to consumers for free. Even if you build robots that can do all the work, someone still has to design, build, and maintain them.
Correct. In non-capitalistic systems those people might be paid by the state, in the same manner private military contractors are paid by the US government. Or perhaps through religious channels. Who knows? Until the technology is widely deployed we can only speculate how such a society might operate.
Why should those people have to work when nobody else does?
I only generalized, I didn't make moral judgments. You can make whatever moral judgments you wish. You might also ask: "Why should I care if others don't work, so long as I am happy with my own achievements?" "When has anyone been motivated by something other than compensation to do work?" Or even: "Wouldn't it be really nice if the people who obviously don't want to do work weren't in everyone else's way?"
"Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective."
And who exactly made the decision to slow down the pace? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else? How do they prevent people not directly under their control from innovating themselves? Why did they open of vast information sources like the Internet, and make them searchable, if they are trying to impede progress?
"No one" decided, yet everyone abided. It is the same way with everything else. "Who exactly decided that women would get paid less for the same work as men? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else?" "Who exactly decided that disproportionate numbers of blacks would be sent to prison for the same non-violent crimes committed by whites?" "Who exactly decided that blue jeans are acceptable attire for most white-collar work?" "Who exactly decided that athletics will be supported more than arts and sciences in American public schools?
...and because of corporatist capitalism. We have two major things going on:
1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again. The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued. Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective. Call this is the Conspiracy Theory version of why we don't develop technology advanced enough such that we no longer need to work for The Man.
2. Globalization's "race to the bottom" has produced a business culture that values short-term profits over long-term progress, such that it makes more economic sense to squeeze a little more money out of what we have than take the risk of shooting for something much better. Thus it is more profitable to make things last just until the manufacturer's warranty runs out than as long as possible, partly due to existing infrastructure but also largely due to consumer preferences for newer-is-better (who still wants power tools from the 1950's even if they continue to work well?). This has led to the death of craftsmanship and the skills necessary for significant innovation. Call this the Idiocracy Theory of why it doesn't make business sense to fund R&D.
Most likely, the easiest thing for them to do would be to gather and... plant the seeds from the foods they gather.
Actually, the easiest thing for them would be to begin roaming the fertile areas looking for nuts, fruits, and vegetables growing in the wild. They could survey the area with their technology and quickly develop a list of edible plants. Roaming nomadic tribes would be able to survive with an average 4-5 hour work day. Really it would be feast or famine: lots of work followed by periods of almost no work, but on average it would be less work than they did on the ships.
I would teach them about the sun, the stars, the moon.
You might be interested in Aristarchus, who posited that the Sun was the center of the solar system and stars were suns but very far away. There was also a historian of antiquity who had the Earth's creation a full hundred thousand years earlier than Genesis. In the BSG universe, these two might very well have been passing down knowledge from the Colonial settlers. (Both references are mentioned in Carl Sagan's Cosmos when he is discussing the Library of Alexandria.)
But not me - you can disagree with everything I have said up to now, but at least know this: all I'm saying is what I personally would do.
I'm no Luddite, I've got an MS in engineering and routinely use the scientific method, but if it was me and I had seen my society's analogue to the Age of Reason produce the genocidal Cylons, I very well might consider abandoning the pursuit of science for science's sake for my children. "Dumb, happy and alive" beats "enlightened and dead" any day.
Sorry... also... why don't you think a species seeded with 40,000 people would survive to the Stone Age?
Because even Stone Age technology takes a lot of work to maintain. Their "knowledge" is just what they vaguely remember in books or entertainment, it's not practical for everyday use. Could you figure out how to domesticate an animal from its wild habitat in a reasonably short time frame? Especially if it looks nothing at all like a horse, ox, sheep, goat, or cow? How many people would you be willing to sacrifice trying to domesticate wildebeests first? Even if you knew something of agribusiness-style farming with tractors and other mechanized equipment, could you translate that knowledge into procedures involving only stone age equipment?
I work in a chemical manufacturing plant. Even with state-of-the-art automation that has removed 80% of the workforce needed just 50 years ago, it takes all told over a thousand people to make ... paint. Just paint. Granted, it's state-of-the-art paint, but even something as simple as that is pretty labor-intensive. Stone Agers might not need advanced paint, but they definitely would need clothes, flint for fires, clay and straw for bricks, tools to work stone, animal husbandry, etc. I don't see 40,000-ish people being able to do that from scratch.
It's worse than that. Baltar wants to become a farmer because he's finally made peace with his father, a character introduced for a storyline only present in the finale itself.
Not his father, his roots: being born near the bottom of an almost-caste system and fighting his whole life to be seen as deserving of the best society had to offer. But to me the biggest revelation for Baltar was the reason he gave Six access to the defense systems ("the things men do for love"). It puts in stark relief everything he has done over the four seasons -- almost like the "twist" of The Sixth Sense.
I think if they had had the fifth season we would have seen a lot more of Baltar's past.
Buck Rogers
Did I miss this?
Even Gaius Baltar is going to start farming... did anyone catch that? That's right, the agricultural revolution actually started 140,000 years before you think it did.
Sure we caught that. And for all we know Baltar made a wonderful little farm with Caprica Six and they had a few babies together, but obviously that didn't start the agricultural revolution. Baltar started what you wanted and failed to change the world. How do you know that everyone else would have succeeded? The entire survining population couldn't even fill up a modern sports arena (Aloha Stadium seats 50000). Plus they had already tried to make a city on a new world using their technology and they were moments away from a general strike before the Cylons showed up.
they pull classic hippie / not-thinking-the-concept-through / technology-and-science-is-inferior-to-"nature"-even-though-it's-a-part-of-it crap.
No, they had no chance in hell at making it to even the Stone Age with the population they had. Their choice wasn't "give up technology", it was "figure out how to live without your technology since you're going to lose it anyway". Their choices: 1) rely on Centurion labor and repeat the Cylon War someday, 2) shoot for the Stone Age and watch half their grandchildren be enslaved, 3) use the fleet until it breaks down, and then decide all over again, or 4) go nomadic and see what happens.
It would be, but people don't want to wait on the JVM to load, so they would rather cram all the already-existing Java applet functionality into Javascript.
(Actually, the plugin doesn't work smoothly with everything else. If it was standard for Java applets to pass keystrokes back to the browser, integrating with the tab order and handling Ctrl-K/E/L/F / Alt-D/F / etc., then there wouldn't be much point to using Javascript for anything.)
Can't argue too much with your post, except this:
1) Never go to bed angry. You might go to bed before you solve the problem, but no matter what it is, no matter how bad it is, you can always find a way to hug your wife, kiss her, and tell her that the two of you will be able to work it out. Going to bed angry breeds resentment.
I was once in a relationship where "never go to bed angry" translated to "let's keep talking about an issue until it's resolved, even if that means staying up all night and ruining the next two days. And oh yeah since I can totally stay up later than you and still be effective that means I get my way most times."
I think it's perfectly OK to go to bed angry and deal with a conflict later when you're both well-rested. You're married, you're not going to split over something smaller than a nuclear issue (e.g. adultery), you've got time to deal with it at a less stressful moment than 11pm.
very big nono and should rightly result in a error message from the os.
DOS wouldn't have been able to return an error message as it had no real memory protection. One could do anything they wanted to memory under DOS, you'd just never know if an interrupt came in what someone else's code would do, so you tried to play nice.
and when it receives EAGAIN, it assumes that there's no further data incoming (because the child is dead!).
I haven't read the thread, but my understanding was that the only time to assume a descriptor is closed is when select() indicates the fd is readable yet read() returns 0, after which I expect read() to return -1.
Is that wrong?