Is the "economy collapsing" a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing because everyone has all they want for free? Or a bad thing because now that there's no incentive to pay for products (information, entertainment, ideas) that there's no incentive to create new products (information, entertainment, ideas)?
Did you get paid for that analysis? No? Then what incentivized you to make it?
The simple fact is that humans enjoy accomplishing things. If I had unlimited resources, the first thing I'd do was get a few thousand computers, network them together, and start researching AI. Some other people would likely concentrate on particle physics, astronomy, or whatever. Some would paint for the joy of it, some would write, some would compose.
Endless vacation is a common dream because a common jobs suck. Allow people to do whatever they want without threat of starvation hanging over them and they'll do things out of curiosity, desire for fame, or simply because.
/. is a business, not a charity, and not a public service (although it provides public service as part of its business model).
Every time I hear "is is a business, therefore it doesn't have to care about anything besides profit" I turn a little more to the left. Seriously, did CEOs mistake Soviet propaganda as instruction manuals or something?
It's one thing to suggest/. _should_ do this (and I think they should, all things being equal), but it's another to say (or imply) it is wrong for them not to.
If it's not wrong for them to not do something, then why should they do it?
Sometimes I despair when I read or hear somebody referring to eg. Djengis Khan as "Mr Khan" ("Khan" is a title, not a name)
"Mr. President, the Great Khan is attacking us! Professor, did you forgot to turn off your time machine? Oh never minds! Captain! Arm the proton cannon!"
It makes me wonder, if Senators bring in pork to their state to get re-elected, do you think there would be more pork in general if we repealed the direct election of senators, which some claim would give states more say in the Federal government?
Why should States have more say than their citizens? What, exactly speaking, does having n layers between your vote and some high-up position of power do besides give said high-ups n opportunities to keep you from holding them responsible for their actions?
What advance in physics is needed? Gravity works by the attraction of objects to each other, so all you need is a really, really, really massive object at the base of mirror. Such objects could easily range from a planet to a small black hole.
So just put it on the back of an airplane and fly the plane to a location where whatever direction you want to look at is straight up. Or would some kind of helicarrier be better?
You could use a ship or a barge, but then most of the atmosphere is goign to be between you and your target.
Having 8 threads is fine and dandy but I'll bet you're more likely to see them controlling a robot with 8 limbs rather than 8 settlers.
6 limbs. You need a thread for overall control and body coordination, and could really use another to keep a look at environment.
Actually, you could easily use hundreds of threads, doing basic processing with senses, integrating data, predicting how the world around you evolves, planning, etc. But certainly need more than "one thread per limb", or the damn thing can't even walk.
Repeat after me: programming languages and frameworks do not make developers dumber.
But they do make promises that they cannot keep. The abstractions they offer leak, so when a developer works with these abstractions, the code develops weird bugs and slowdowns.
It's this kind of thinking that forces every developer-user of a complicated system to be continually faced with issues outside of their domain of expertise, or even just the current problem focus. *That's* what causes these problems.
No, what forces developers face issues outside their domain of experience is that modern computers still don't have artificial intelligence. Consequently, when the frameworks start leaking, they start leaking hard. You end up acquiring a lot of knowlede and habits just to work around the oddities caused by the mess.
Frameworks and high-level languages are a good thing, but using them requires more, not less, expertize, since you need to know not only them but the underlaying system too - because that system will find a way to peek in.
Allowing our programming languages, libraries, and frameworks to do the heavy lifting so we humans can focus on the real problems we want to solve pretty much describes the history of real progress in software development.
Perhaps, but it also describes the history of weird little bugs that keep on creeping in from the leaky abstractions in every framework. Sooner or later you end up fighting the framework because it's limited in some way; fixing every such instance results in unbelievably convoluted frameworks that are really their own programming languages. At that point it would probably be better to just scrap the whole thing and start over with a newer, higher-level language.
Next up I suppose you're going to complain about how Legos don't force you to learn proper civil engineering before building things?
Actually, they do. You either learn to build strong, light structures, or they are going to keep breaking a lot. Nothing like having a hollow plastic block be the strongest part to really drive home the principles of structural stress and why you should care about it.
Government is wasteful. (When the choice is private companies competing or government. Government will always cost more.
More to the point, larg organizations are wasteful. It's a matter of bad communication and insufficiently well defined division of labour. It's not really even real stupidity, as the people involved can be quite intelligent; they are all just pulling in different directions.
Most countries have way too much government.
No, most countries have too little regulation at places and insane level of regulation at others. Various forms of social security, for example, are usually regulated to the point where any attempt to get back on your feet is actively punished, while big business can do pretty much what it damn well pleases.
SO. Government should be small but should be used where needed and feared everywhere else.
Unfortunately, you cannot run a modern economy with a small government, and as this latest financial debacle once again shows, you simply cannot trust economy to run itself.
This seems a good idea for the US Member States to copy, hiring actual doctors to handle 911 calls, rather than some minimum wage person. If I was a politician I would shove it through the Legislature, but of course I'm a nobody say I have no say whatsoever. Oh well.
The problem is, it would cost tax money and be providing a public service, and collecting taxes to provide a public service is against the oh-so-fashionable right-wing ideals.
"Too fast" and "normal driving" are clear oposites. "Normal driving" means "at the proper speed for the way and its conditions", not "too fast".
Humans make mistakes. While it's better to avoid them, being a safe driver requires you to know how to recover from them.
I'm so sure I can even say that it can be taken as an operative definiton: the moment the wheels slip is the moment you know you are beyond normal driving conditions.
It follows that it would take near-miraculous luck to stay inside normal driving conditions your whole life. After all, at any moment in a city a pedestrian could decide to jump in front of your car, necessiating the slamming of brakes or evasive action.
It's impossible to plan for every eventuality, and if something unexpected happens, your tires will likely end up slipping.
Most of EU still has not realized that high taxes kill entrepreneurship, and thus kill the economy. lowering taxes grows the economy and thus increases the tax base -- but having a sizeable tax base is not nearly as important as having a sizeable economy, so better to err on the side of caution and cut taxes and entitlements where possible.
Oh yes, the Reagan theory of economy. I wonder how many more countries will go bankrupt before they realize that it doesn't work, and that they are not an exception?
But hey, the financial elite of those countries can get themselves a bit more money at the expense of everyone else, so it's okay, right?
A bug for an OS which is two versions behind current and almost a decade old, should not be higher priority than fixing current versions of the software.
If the OS is irrelevant, then publishing its bugs is also irrelevant. If the OS is not irrelevant, then your comment is irrelevant.
5 days is also far too short a time for a company the size of Microsoft to even get a team together to look at the problem, let alone come up with an adequate solution, properly test that solution, distribute that solution and get that solution tested and deployed by customers.
It takes a whole week of work for Microsoft to forward an email to the bugfixing department? I know that Windows lowers productivity, but still: WTF?
This guy was a dickhead and if he'd done it to anyone other than Microsoft he'd have been burned at the stake, ffs 5 days?
The guy was not a dickhead and he didn't do it to someone else, he did it to Microsoft.
Yes, my idea is a workaround to defective API, and there really should be some way to bind a list of items - or append an itme to the list of already bound ones - to a single parameter placeholder. But even so, being completely immune to SQL injection once and for all is very nice.
Wrong. A house is worth what the market is willing to pay for it.
This seems to contradict the term "overpriced house" you used. Please explain?
What if, at the time, you didn't believe that housing prices would fall 50%, or didn't believe they would fall at all (maybe just not continue to rise so quickly)?
The same as if you believed the superstition you're selling: no, it's not unethical, since you're acting in good faith, rather than trying to fool some sucker.
Historically, real estate has been a very very safe investment, until now. It's easy to have 20/20 hindsight, but how many people who weren't real estate professionals or in the mortgage industry really knew what was going to happen?
Pretty much everyone who gave it any thought, to put it bluntly. When prices start rising faster and faster, fueled mainly by the belief that they'll rise even more later so if you buy high now you can sell even higher later, you are looking at a classical bubble, or a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme if you will.
There were many people pointing this out beforehand, right here on Slashdot.
Sociopaths climb to the top in all societies, except perhaps very small primitive ones (i.e. tribes). You don't seriously think the people at the top of the USSR's society were good, honest people do you?
True enough, I suppose. However, free-market systems are often marketed as "meritocracies", so it's worth noting that the merit worth most seems to be sociopathy, or just plain evilness.
Cheating at undergrad levels and graduate levels shouldn't be permitted - or "needed".
Cheating at any level shouldn't be permitted or needed, unless it's a spy school or something. The point is to teach people, not have them fake understanding; the latter is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.
It's one thing to take money from the stupid when they give it away willfully (such as by selling them an overpriced house, even though it's not overpriced compared to all the other comparable houses around it), it's another thing to con them into giving it to you with a pack of lies (such as telling them that giving you money will grant them God's favor).
If you make money from stupid people in a way that depends on them being stupid, then you have conned them. Selling a lie is selling a lie, whether that lie takes the form of a house that's worth a lot less than what you're asking or spiritual knowledge you don't actually have.
If you want to insult the general public because they're stupid, that's one thing. But if you're actively involved in making them stupid (by making up superstitions to con them with), then to turn around and insult them for their stupidity is inane.
How is selling superstition you don't believe in any different than selling the idea that housing prices will rise infinitely so buying an overpriced house is an investment?
Only a sociopath would do such things.
Only a sociopath would do any of these things. Which is why sociopaths tend to climb to the top in free-market societies.
You might be able to make a case with this in terms of basic unskilled labor. (I'd have to consult my personal labor economist before making an informed response.) But I don't really see how this works when we're talking about science. There's no steam-engine or robotic equivalent of the guy with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, at least that I'm aware of. And I don't think supercomputer-clusters really come close, either.
The point the grandparent was making that it only pays to pump R&D funds to a steam engine in a society where you don't have an endless supply of slave labour. The more labour costs, the better the return of investment from developing a steam engine is.
In other words, you can only make a profit from developing a steam engine if it replaces expensive labour, not free slave labour. A steam engine that does the work of a hundred men is fine, but if it costs the same as a thousand slaves, you could spend one 10th of the money on a hundred slaves instead and get the same amount of work done. It's only when you actually have to pay for labour when it makes sense to start automating it.
Speaking of that, I'm more worried about the russians being the only ones who have anything even resembling a real doomsday machine. Why hasn't the US or the EU allocated funds to the construction of a doomsday device?
Isn't the whole point of a doomsday machine that you only need one?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you get paid for that analysis? No? Then what incentivized you to make it?
The simple fact is that humans enjoy accomplishing things. If I had unlimited resources, the first thing I'd do was get a few thousand computers, network them together, and start researching AI. Some other people would likely concentrate on particle physics, astronomy, or whatever. Some would paint for the joy of it, some would write, some would compose.
Endless vacation is a common dream because a common jobs suck. Allow people to do whatever they want without threat of starvation hanging over them and they'll do things out of curiosity, desire for fame, or simply because.
Every time I hear "is is a business, therefore it doesn't have to care about anything besides profit" I turn a little more to the left. Seriously, did CEOs mistake Soviet propaganda as instruction manuals or something?
If it's not wrong for them to not do something, then why should they do it?
Switch to a cloud-based storage, such as Facebook. Those are guaranteed to hold your memories forever, or at least the most embarrassing ones.
"Mr. President, the Great Khan is attacking us! Professor, did you forgot to turn off your time machine? Oh never minds! Captain! Arm the proton cannon!"
Why should States have more say than their citizens? What, exactly speaking, does having n layers between your vote and some high-up position of power do besides give said high-ups n opportunities to keep you from holding them responsible for their actions?
So just put it on the back of an airplane and fly the plane to a location where whatever direction you want to look at is straight up. Or would some kind of helicarrier be better?
You could use a ship or a barge, but then most of the atmosphere is goign to be between you and your target.
6 limbs. You need a thread for overall control and body coordination, and could really use another to keep a look at environment.
Actually, you could easily use hundreds of threads, doing basic processing with senses, integrating data, predicting how the world around you evolves, planning, etc. But certainly need more than "one thread per limb", or the damn thing can't even walk.
But they do make promises that they cannot keep. The abstractions they offer leak, so when a developer works with these abstractions, the code develops weird bugs and slowdowns.
No, what forces developers face issues outside their domain of experience is that modern computers still don't have artificial intelligence. Consequently, when the frameworks start leaking, they start leaking hard. You end up acquiring a lot of knowlede and habits just to work around the oddities caused by the mess.
Frameworks and high-level languages are a good thing, but using them requires more, not less, expertize, since you need to know not only them but the underlaying system too - because that system will find a way to peek in.
Perhaps, but it also describes the history of weird little bugs that keep on creeping in from the leaky abstractions in every framework. Sooner or later you end up fighting the framework because it's limited in some way; fixing every such instance results in unbelievably convoluted frameworks that are really their own programming languages. At that point it would probably be better to just scrap the whole thing and start over with a newer, higher-level language.
Actually, they do. You either learn to build strong, light structures, or they are going to keep breaking a lot. Nothing like having a hollow plastic block be the strongest part to really drive home the principles of structural stress and why you should care about it.
...no true Scotsman would do such a thing.
More to the point, larg organizations are wasteful. It's a matter of bad communication and insufficiently well defined division of labour. It's not really even real stupidity, as the people involved can be quite intelligent; they are all just pulling in different directions.
No, most countries have too little regulation at places and insane level of regulation at others. Various forms of social security, for example, are usually regulated to the point where any attempt to get back on your feet is actively punished, while big business can do pretty much what it damn well pleases.
Unfortunately, you cannot run a modern economy with a small government, and as this latest financial debacle once again shows, you simply cannot trust economy to run itself.
ARGH! I mean solar power!
So... Does that mean that Greenpeace will be turning against nuclear power next?
You might see something you don't like. Light is scary for those who prefer the darkness of ignorance.
This seems a good idea for the US Member States to copy, hiring actual doctors to handle 911 calls, rather than some minimum wage person. If I was a politician I would shove it through the Legislature, but of course I'm a nobody say I have no say whatsoever. Oh well.
The problem is, it would cost tax money and be providing a public service, and collecting taxes to provide a public service is against the oh-so-fashionable right-wing ideals.
Humans make mistakes. While it's better to avoid them, being a safe driver requires you to know how to recover from them.
It follows that it would take near-miraculous luck to stay inside normal driving conditions your whole life. After all, at any moment in a city a pedestrian could decide to jump in front of your car, necessiating the slamming of brakes or evasive action.
It's impossible to plan for every eventuality, and if something unexpected happens, your tires will likely end up slipping.
Of course they do. There's a reason why Megatron keeps Starscream around.
In my experience, it's just plain old arrogant stupidity that makes people take risks rather than aggression.
I love driving a powerful car because it accelerates faster, making it easier and safer to, say, merge into traffick.
Oh yes, the Reagan theory of economy. I wonder how many more countries will go bankrupt before they realize that it doesn't work, and that they are not an exception?
But hey, the financial elite of those countries can get themselves a bit more money at the expense of everyone else, so it's okay, right?
If the OS is irrelevant, then publishing its bugs is also irrelevant. If the OS is not irrelevant, then your comment is irrelevant.
It takes a whole week of work for Microsoft to forward an email to the bugfixing department? I know that Windows lowers productivity, but still: WTF?
The guy was not a dickhead and he didn't do it to someone else, he did it to Microsoft.
Yes, my idea is a workaround to defective API, and there really should be some way to bind a list of items - or append an itme to the list of already bound ones - to a single parameter placeholder. But even so, being completely immune to SQL injection once and for all is very nice.
This seems to contradict the term "overpriced house" you used. Please explain?
The same as if you believed the superstition you're selling: no, it's not unethical, since you're acting in good faith, rather than trying to fool some sucker.
Pretty much everyone who gave it any thought, to put it bluntly. When prices start rising faster and faster, fueled mainly by the belief that they'll rise even more later so if you buy high now you can sell even higher later, you are looking at a classical bubble, or a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme if you will.
There were many people pointing this out beforehand, right here on Slashdot.
True enough, I suppose. However, free-market systems are often marketed as "meritocracies", so it's worth noting that the merit worth most seems to be sociopathy, or just plain evilness.
Cheating at any level shouldn't be permitted or needed, unless it's a spy school or something. The point is to teach people, not have them fake understanding; the latter is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.
If you make money from stupid people in a way that depends on them being stupid, then you have conned them. Selling a lie is selling a lie, whether that lie takes the form of a house that's worth a lot less than what you're asking or spiritual knowledge you don't actually have.
How is selling superstition you don't believe in any different than selling the idea that housing prices will rise infinitely so buying an overpriced house is an investment?
Only a sociopath would do any of these things. Which is why sociopaths tend to climb to the top in free-market societies.
The point the grandparent was making that it only pays to pump R&D funds to a steam engine in a society where you don't have an endless supply of slave labour. The more labour costs, the better the return of investment from developing a steam engine is.
In other words, you can only make a profit from developing a steam engine if it replaces expensive labour, not free slave labour. A steam engine that does the work of a hundred men is fine, but if it costs the same as a thousand slaves, you could spend one 10th of the money on a hundred slaves instead and get the same amount of work done. It's only when you actually have to pay for labour when it makes sense to start automating it.
Isn't the whole point of a doomsday machine that you only need one?