Steve Jobs was a terrible person. He setup a deal with a local car dealership to switch cars on a regular basis for the sole purpose of never having to get a license plate so he could park in handicap spaces without getting a ticket. He could have had his own parking spot damned near anywhere he went, but no, he was such a huge asshole he couldn't just have the spot, he had to take it from someone else that needed it. Jobs fanboys always like to sweep that fact under the rug...
Jobs was exactly what the average person wishes he was: a jerk who got away with it. His mixture of socipathy and success is precisely what Jobs "fanboys" admire about him. Even his need to take parking space from the disabled is not really any different from the rants about "welfare queens" who aren't as miserable as they could be because they - oh the humanity - have cable television.
But the Jobs fanboys are not really to blame. It's the culture they are immersed in, where success is to be admired and failure is to be despised. After all, the Invisible Hand does not make errors of judgement, thus Jobs was clearly in the right and his victims in the wrong. The very idioms of language reinforce this notion: "I'm worth $BALANCE_OF_MY_BANK_ACCOUNT". By this criteria, Jobs was worth more than his victims, thus his convenience and pleasure trumped their needs.
That the Jobs fanboys feel the need to "sweep that fact under the rug" is actually a good thing, for it implies they still sense something perverse and shameful in it, despite all their cultural conditioning. Time will tell if that discomfort grows enough to wake them - and those like them - from the American Dream in time to save their country from its slide into an oligarchy. Doesn't look good right now, but, who knows?
If the system won't enforce the laws, they for all intents and purposes don't exist.
Sure they do. Not when it's the powerful abusing the weak, of course, but try to step on Apple's toes and you'll see just how fast and effective the law can be.
If someone can figure out how to jump a charge across the insulating layer without damaging it, flash memory will never wear out.
Limited lifespan is good for the Powers That Be, so even if such a technology exists, it's not for consumers like you. Your role is to run the economic Red Queen's Race in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to keep your position in the hierarchy, all for the glory of the 1% and their masters.
Next time you're browsing the search results returned from Google, look at the source for the links. It LOOKS like you're clicking on a legitimate url, but in actual fact you're clicking on a Google spy link, that FIRST talks to google servers so they can track what you're doing, and THEN sends your browser to the place you thought you were going.
However, this is neither spying nor bad. A search engine has a good legitimate reason to know what result the user found most useful for a given search. It's basically similar to a shop tracking which items are most in demand. Nor does user have any good reason to complain, having already decided to inform the engine they're searching for X.
It's never useful for discussion to insist on a technical term that excludes everything. It's like philosophical skepticism: sure, it's true that we can't prove we're not in the matrix, and it's briefly amusing to ponder that, but it's not a useful insight.
Well, it turns out that the nonexistence of intrinsic economic value is a very useful insight which historically allowed us to transition from mercantilism ("hoard as much crap as possible, since it has intrinsic value") to capitalism ("crap is useless to us; sell it to a farmer for use as fertilizer") and ultimately allowed us to go off the gold standard.
Given your real or pretended inability to comprehend this I think I'll end this economic discussion here.
But if you're not into scifi vampires creating furry orgies between giants and tiger people using their pheromones you'll likely just feel uncomfortable while reading them and wonder what asshole gave this guy a pen.
Isn't that how modern humanity came to be? By folding the rest of the sub-species back to the herd, so to speak? And the same - the willingness to meld heritages, both cultural and genetic - has arguably been behind pretty much every great human society. Our very cells contain assimilated micro-organisms (mitochondria); in this world, even bacteria engage in crude approximation of sex by swapping plasmids. Face it: assimilation through xenophilia is the human way.
And this is the real reason aliens haven't contacted us: they know the second they do, they get to admire Rule 34 of themselves. We're the perverts of the stellar neighborhood, the creepy guy in the dirty trenchcoat no one wants to know. The Goa'uld took one good look at what kind of mythology ancient Egyptians were building around them and ran for saner stars; dread Cthulhu lies awake beneath waves and tries in vain to unsee what has been seen; the things that go bump in the night skulk around in silence least they're the next one to be made a sparkly sex symbol.
Pegging it to stock at fixed exchange rate means that bitcoin's volatily will match the volatility of a stock bundle which can be quite small.
But it retains 100% of it's virtues: Bit coin provides a a digital exchange mechanism, a digital wallet you (not Merrill Lynch) controls and is portable. Finally it has some degree of anonymity.
If I, rather than Merrill Lynch, control my wallet, how do you peg Bitcoin to anything? How do you stop me from buying or selling at whatever rate I damn well please? And if you don't, how is anything different from the current situation?
Then there's the little issue of Bitcoin having nothing to do with any company, or even a bundle of companies, so why should its value depend on their fortunes?
In short it's a great idea in principle.
It's a stupid idea that's also impossible to implement, even in principle.
Stocks are the only thing with intrinsic value: ownership of the means of production.
How will that intrinsic value hold without the machinery of the society backing your claims of ownership? It doesn't? Then it's not intrinsic.
Everything else is convention, but the ability to make something that someone else wants or needs is intrinsic value.
No, it's extrinsic value - specifically, value derived from that someone's needs and wants. Nothing has intrinsic value in economics. Which is one of the reasons why the current obsession to make economy the sole arbiter of every decision - indeed, a false god - is a bad idea.
And of course this is all ignoring the fact that wants and needs change. There's not much money in today's buggy whip market, now is there?
Companies aren't people and the "dessicated corpse of a company" is not something to cry about.
The good people are absorbed into the acquiring company, and the dead wood is cast off. The "company" is an illusion and it dissipates into the aether as it should.
The whole is more than just sum of the parts. A company is not just a bunch of assets, it's also a container for the organizational culture. This culture is ultimately the difference between succesful and failing companies, and is often lost when the company is absorbed.
The same is of course true for nations and other organizations, too.
Beyond this, the tendency of large incumbents to absorb small startups leads to a marketplace dominated by just a few large companies, which become de facto monopolies and might even become Too Big To Fail.
Your moral obligation to write the essay yourself is independent of the method they use for grading it.
That is highly questionable, but let's start with a simpler one: on what basis would you have such a moral obligation in the first place? Simply because someone who has power over you said so?
Regardless of how much time the TAs did or didn't spend on the essays, however, the students had the same obligations, and rightfully so.
Go on, don't leave us hanging: "rightfully so, because..."?
1.37 * 6 is beyond easy mental math for me. 1*6=6, 33*3*2=200, so 1.37 =~8. That's as close as I'd ever come to calculating 6 of something without taking out a calculator.
1.37*10 = 13.7 13.7 / 2 = 7- 7- + 1.37 = 8+.
The key to fast multiplication is bit shift, then add or subtract.
Basic numeracy is impossible without memorizing tables for addition, and multiplication.
This is, of course, rubbish. Memorising results for common operations saves time when performing them, that's all.
Seen the recent "common core" controversy about quite crazy approaches to basic math that seem motivated by avoidance of memorization (it's the revenge of new math!).
In Real Life, if you need numerical answers often, you use a calculator. It's faster and less error-prone. And if you don't need numerical answers often, you won't remember the relevant tables, since you aren't actually using them.
The sad fact is that most of the time memorization is a complete waste of time. Either you use some data, in which case you'll learn it as a natural side effect, or you don't, in which case it won't stick, no matter what you do. This is especially true if your reason to try to memorize is that you're being forced to, as is the case with math tables.
But then, do they allow calculators on the SAT?
Do they allow English, or do you have to answer in Latin? World changes. Pretending it hasn't simply makes a test irrelevant or perverts it into outright hinderance to learning.
Carbon shows signs of potentially being rather nastier in its fancy forms than it is in more familiar flavors; but other nanomaterials might go the other way.
Unlikely. The problem with "nano" anything is that small particles are hard to filter out, for example by your nose and throat, and thus tend to get where they aren't wanted, for example into your lungs. Whenever you hear "nanoparticle" think "really fine dust"; if the bulk material is toxic, why wouldn't the dust be? Remember that poison needs to get into your body to poison you, so a solid lump is harmless unless you eat it, but dust tends to float in the air and get sucked in when you inhale.
But luckily, most of the promises of graphene - specifically, carbon nanotubes - depend on producing longer fibers, which should have the side effect of solving this problem.
How much do you make an hour? Logically if you make more than a builder, it is better to work overtime and pay the builder.
Your logic omits the "boss factor": it's more stressful to work for money, because then you're beholden to someone else, than for yourself. In fact "free time" usually means working, even if only by producing these comments, rather than just laying in your bed; it's free because you're not obligated to do anything, not because you aren't doing anything.
Getting that last pour done at 2am as the two halves of the bridge expand and contract enough that they are next to each other and not eight metres apart is also part of engineering.
How about knowing that concrete has very little tensile strength so it can't keep them from moving apart again? But maybe magic instantly-setting concrete is different.
Once I realized that "willpower" is a metabolic state, not moral success or a moral failing, and I learned how to manipulate that metabolic state, I lost 150 lbs.
But if being fat is not evidence of a moral failing, how will I justify looking down on fatsos? And if I can't, then who will I hate?
How do you expect us to feel good about a pecking order if we can't condemn those beneath us as inherently inferior?
Java doesn't have synchronized objects. Java has synchronized code blocks, typically whole methods, which synchronize on a particular object, typically the one the function call is associated with.
Objects ought to be either immutable, synchronized, or part of something that's synchronized. Then you're safe from low level race conditions.
No, you aren't. Individual objects may be safe from corruption, but the overall system can and will enter invalid states since the state is split across multiple objects. Even if it doesn't, the system will end up taking different code paths and produce different results from run to run due to random timing differences
What's needed is a language where every operation can only access the results of operations in its causal past, and these results are immutable (because the operations that produced them have finished). Causal past and causal future need to be defined in terms of program logic, independently of runtime timing. Some kind of combination of functional and dataflow language could be a good fit.
The solution is to use functional style for high-level control flow, and imperative style for low-level (optimized) functions.
Even if you write something in hand-optimized assembly, that still doesn't mean that it'll end up being faster than machine-optimized assembly unless you're good enough. How many programmers are "good enough" in this sense of the word?
In other words, how many people are not only good enough programmers but also knowledgeable enough about the target platform to beat a C compiler? Haskell compiler? Or even the Python interpreter? How has that number evolved as the compilers and platforms both do? And could JIT beat any programmer simply because it can profile and optimize at runtime against the actual usage, rather than hypothethised usage?
I write lots of state machines that control external world gadgets, which input new results to my program to use to compute the next state. Consequently I can only wonder about this idea of removing side effects as: "WTF?"
If you're making this about (R) vs (D), you're part of the problem.
It's not about state vs. other structures either. The problem is that our institutions are set up according to instincts meant to guide primate pack hierarchies, so they tend to be inherently oppressive as well as inefficient. And any attempt to change them results in monkey howls and poop-flinging from people who consider their position in them as a part of their identity.
The Sun is getting brighter as it ages, and will fry the entire biosphere in a couple hundred million years. And that's discounting all the asteroids, supervolcanoes, diseases, gamma-ray bursts, etc. that come around every now and then.
"Space is a tough place where wimps eat flaming plasma death" - crude, but true.
There's also the positive side: growth and change open new doors of possibility, such as this discussion taking place between multiple people in different continents. So the choice comes down to "prosper or die", and most people seem to take "prosper" being the more desirable outcome as granted.
To sustain our current economic models perhaps, but they are themselves a very recent anomaly dating back to somewhere around the beginning of the industrial revolution and the liberation of productivity from the number of laborers available.
Nope, the trend goes back to the beginning. Complexity has been increasing since Big Bang. It's the occasional dib in the trend that's the anomalous setback, and they don't last.
No matter what the economists want to believe, sustainable growth is an oxymoron and we're going to be forced to return to an economic model which presumes the entirety of production remains relatively stable.
We've never in our history, prehistory or pre-human existence had that, so we can't "return" to it. Every single society is in a race to reach the next treshold before the resources in the previous one give out. Every species is, for that matter. I don't think a steady state is possible in our universe; even the ant colonies must evolve or die in the long term, since Sun isn't eternal.
But there's no particular reason they need to grow at all. Even today there are plenty of small businesses that don't subscribe to the "grow or die" philosophy, and have instead simply grown until they reach a comfortable, sustainable size and then remain there indefinitely.
And then they get eaten by the next Wal-Mart. Or maybe they can take a book from MAFIAAs page to fight technological change. Either way, they either invest in developing their business - which doesn't necessarily mean growing in size, of course - or become obsolete.
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Jobs was exactly what the average person wishes he was: a jerk who got away with it. His mixture of socipathy and success is precisely what Jobs "fanboys" admire about him. Even his need to take parking space from the disabled is not really any different from the rants about "welfare queens" who aren't as miserable as they could be because they - oh the humanity - have cable television.
But the Jobs fanboys are not really to blame. It's the culture they are immersed in, where success is to be admired and failure is to be despised. After all, the Invisible Hand does not make errors of judgement, thus Jobs was clearly in the right and his victims in the wrong. The very idioms of language reinforce this notion: "I'm worth $BALANCE_OF_MY_BANK_ACCOUNT". By this criteria, Jobs was worth more than his victims, thus his convenience and pleasure trumped their needs.
That the Jobs fanboys feel the need to "sweep that fact under the rug" is actually a good thing, for it implies they still sense something perverse and shameful in it, despite all their cultural conditioning. Time will tell if that discomfort grows enough to wake them - and those like them - from the American Dream in time to save their country from its slide into an oligarchy. Doesn't look good right now, but, who knows?
Sure they do. Not when it's the powerful abusing the weak, of course, but try to step on Apple's toes and you'll see just how fast and effective the law can be.
Limited lifespan is good for the Powers That Be, so even if such a technology exists, it's not for consumers like you. Your role is to run the economic Red Queen's Race in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to keep your position in the hierarchy, all for the glory of the 1% and their masters.
Doesn't Windows use a swap file, no matter how much memory you have? That could conceivably see any amount of traffick per day.
However, this is neither spying nor bad. A search engine has a good legitimate reason to know what result the user found most useful for a given search. It's basically similar to a shop tracking which items are most in demand. Nor does user have any good reason to complain, having already decided to inform the engine they're searching for X.
Nothing. You're still innocent before the law. It's just that the law no longer rules.
Well, it turns out that the nonexistence of intrinsic economic value is a very useful insight which historically allowed us to transition from mercantilism ("hoard as much crap as possible, since it has intrinsic value") to capitalism ("crap is useless to us; sell it to a farmer for use as fertilizer") and ultimately allowed us to go off the gold standard.
Given your real or pretended inability to comprehend this I think I'll end this economic discussion here.
Actually, it's just v = c*tanh(a*T/c).
Isn't that how modern humanity came to be? By folding the rest of the sub-species back to the herd, so to speak? And the same - the willingness to meld heritages, both cultural and genetic - has arguably been behind pretty much every great human society. Our very cells contain assimilated micro-organisms (mitochondria); in this world, even bacteria engage in crude approximation of sex by swapping plasmids. Face it: assimilation through xenophilia is the human way.
And this is the real reason aliens haven't contacted us: they know the second they do, they get to admire Rule 34 of themselves. We're the perverts of the stellar neighborhood, the creepy guy in the dirty trenchcoat no one wants to know. The Goa'uld took one good look at what kind of mythology ancient Egyptians were building around them and ran for saner stars; dread Cthulhu lies awake beneath waves and tries in vain to unsee what has been seen; the things that go bump in the night skulk around in silence least they're the next one to be made a sparkly sex symbol.
So... fuck yeah us ?-)
If I, rather than Merrill Lynch, control my wallet, how do you peg Bitcoin to anything? How do you stop me from buying or selling at whatever rate I damn well please? And if you don't, how is anything different from the current situation?
Then there's the little issue of Bitcoin having nothing to do with any company, or even a bundle of companies, so why should its value depend on their fortunes?
It's a stupid idea that's also impossible to implement, even in principle.
How will that intrinsic value hold without the machinery of the society backing your claims of ownership? It doesn't? Then it's not intrinsic.
No, it's extrinsic value - specifically, value derived from that someone's needs and wants. Nothing has intrinsic value in economics. Which is one of the reasons why the current obsession to make economy the sole arbiter of every decision - indeed, a false god - is a bad idea.
And of course this is all ignoring the fact that wants and needs change. There's not much money in today's buggy whip market, now is there?
The whole is more than just sum of the parts. A company is not just a bunch of assets, it's also a container for the organizational culture. This culture is ultimately the difference between succesful and failing companies, and is often lost when the company is absorbed.
The same is of course true for nations and other organizations, too.
Beyond this, the tendency of large incumbents to absorb small startups leads to a marketplace dominated by just a few large companies, which become de facto monopolies and might even become Too Big To Fail.
That is highly questionable, but let's start with a simpler one: on what basis would you have such a moral obligation in the first place? Simply because someone who has power over you said so?
Go on, don't leave us hanging: "rightfully so, because..."?
1.37*10 = 13.7
13.7 / 2 = 7-
7- + 1.37 = 8+.
The key to fast multiplication is bit shift, then add or subtract.
This is, of course, rubbish. Memorising results for common operations saves time when performing them, that's all.
In Real Life, if you need numerical answers often, you use a calculator. It's faster and less error-prone. And if you don't need numerical answers often, you won't remember the relevant tables, since you aren't actually using them.
The sad fact is that most of the time memorization is a complete waste of time. Either you use some data, in which case you'll learn it as a natural side effect, or you don't, in which case it won't stick, no matter what you do. This is especially true if your reason to try to memorize is that you're being forced to, as is the case with math tables.
Do they allow English, or do you have to answer in Latin? World changes. Pretending it hasn't simply makes a test irrelevant or perverts it into outright hinderance to learning.
Unlikely. The problem with "nano" anything is that small particles are hard to filter out, for example by your nose and throat, and thus tend to get where they aren't wanted, for example into your lungs. Whenever you hear "nanoparticle" think "really fine dust"; if the bulk material is toxic, why wouldn't the dust be? Remember that poison needs to get into your body to poison you, so a solid lump is harmless unless you eat it, but dust tends to float in the air and get sucked in when you inhale.
But luckily, most of the promises of graphene - specifically, carbon nanotubes - depend on producing longer fibers, which should have the side effect of solving this problem.
Your logic omits the "boss factor": it's more stressful to work for money, because then you're beholden to someone else, than for yourself. In fact "free time" usually means working, even if only by producing these comments, rather than just laying in your bed; it's free because you're not obligated to do anything, not because you aren't doing anything.
How about knowing that concrete has very little tensile strength so it can't keep them from moving apart again? But maybe magic instantly-setting concrete is different.
But if being fat is not evidence of a moral failing, how will I justify looking down on fatsos? And if I can't, then who will I hate?
How do you expect us to feel good about a pecking order if we can't condemn those beneath us as inherently inferior?
Java doesn't have synchronized objects. Java has synchronized code blocks, typically whole methods, which synchronize on a particular object, typically the one the function call is associated with.
No, you aren't. Individual objects may be safe from corruption, but the overall system can and will enter invalid states since the state is split across multiple objects. Even if it doesn't, the system will end up taking different code paths and produce different results from run to run due to random timing differences
What's needed is a language where every operation can only access the results of operations in its causal past, and these results are immutable (because the operations that produced them have finished). Causal past and causal future need to be defined in terms of program logic, independently of runtime timing. Some kind of combination of functional and dataflow language could be a good fit.
Even if you write something in hand-optimized assembly, that still doesn't mean that it'll end up being faster than machine-optimized assembly unless you're good enough. How many programmers are "good enough" in this sense of the word?
In other words, how many people are not only good enough programmers but also knowledgeable enough about the target platform to beat a C compiler? Haskell compiler? Or even the Python interpreter? How has that number evolved as the compilers and platforms both do? And could JIT beat any programmer simply because it can profile and optimize at runtime against the actual usage, rather than hypothethised usage?
newState = deriveNewStateFromDeviceMessage (oldState, message)
(bitsToSendToDevice, newState) = getHardwareCommandForSomeAction(oldState, action)
So, basically, if someone plugs two gadgets into the same control machine, Bad Things happen?
The idea of functional programming is to pass all information in function parameters and return values, rather than through globals.
It's not about state vs. other structures either. The problem is that our institutions are set up according to instincts meant to guide primate pack hierarchies, so they tend to be inherently oppressive as well as inefficient. And any attempt to change them results in monkey howls and poop-flinging from people who consider their position in them as a part of their identity.
The Sun is getting brighter as it ages, and will fry the entire biosphere in a couple hundred million years. And that's discounting all the asteroids, supervolcanoes, diseases, gamma-ray bursts, etc. that come around every now and then.
"Space is a tough place where wimps eat flaming plasma death" - crude, but true.
There's also the positive side: growth and change open new doors of possibility, such as this discussion taking place between multiple people in different continents. So the choice comes down to "prosper or die", and most people seem to take "prosper" being the more desirable outcome as granted.
Nope, the trend goes back to the beginning. Complexity has been increasing since Big Bang. It's the occasional dib in the trend that's the anomalous setback, and they don't last.
We've never in our history, prehistory or pre-human existence had that, so we can't "return" to it. Every single society is in a race to reach the next treshold before the resources in the previous one give out. Every species is, for that matter. I don't think a steady state is possible in our universe; even the ant colonies must evolve or die in the long term, since Sun isn't eternal.
And then they get eaten by the next Wal-Mart. Or maybe they can take a book from MAFIAAs page to fight technological change. Either way, they either invest in developing their business - which doesn't necessarily mean growing in size, of course - or become obsolete.
No, she fell to the Dark Side and tried to kill Jake Blues.