If we can put a man on the moon, why do I still have to recharge my laptop every day?
I get what you're trying to say, but given the OP's statements of:
computers can drive cars
and
why do I still have to manually move windows around, resize them, alt-tab between overlapping windows, accidentally screw things up due to keyboard focus, etc. etc?
it's not quite the same scenario. The usual "If we can put a man on the moon" complaint generally involves a lack of appreciation for the resources involved in that sort of undertaking, and failing to realize that we can't dedicate those sorts of resources to every single engineering problem out there (it's fascinating to hear the same person in the same conversation complain about costs and why can't something be done more cheaply). But software isn't like that. Once you've solved the problem, it's far less effort to duplicate it or mimic it elsewhere. It *is* fair to ask why the hell we haven't solved this sort of thing yet.
I shouldn't be forced to publish everything -- I paid for the information. If someone else wants it, they can pay for it.
I'll admit this is completely off-topic and I do not have a better alternative, but this statement caught my attention. While completely aligned with current market goals, this demonstrates very succinctly what is ultimately wrong with capitalism and pretty much every market system that has come before it. It takes true vision and innovation which should be symbiotic with human progress and perverts it into a parasitic act whereby we eliminate the best parts (human progress through information sharing) and turn it into a net negative (information consolidation and stonewalling through IP law).
Paraphrasing Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others. The ultimate reality is that a system which requires people to act against their own personal interests is at best going to yield similar results with some layers of added corruption.
However, IP law is not exactly capitalistic. It is a government granted monopoly on a patent, copyright, or trademark. The assumption is that a greater amount of creative effort is applied when they exist vs when they do not exist.
There's no requirement that privately funded research become publicly available, and every effort to change that has been scuttled, so far.
And it should stay that way. Not all research is about cherry picking what you want to publish. Sometimes it's a matter of determining what I can do to improve my market position. Or what new features consumers what in my market. I shouldn't be forced to publish everything -- I paid for the information. If someone else wants it, they can pay for it.
It's not a matter of what technology the cops are allowed to use, it's a matter of how they use it.
Cops, with a warrant, are allowed to do all sorts of stuff. They can listen to your phone calls or search your house. As long as there's some level of checks and balances on it, I can accept that. I have this crazy idea here -- hear me out -- that before the police put together a database of everywhere my car has been pretty much forever, they should need a warrant for that too. And it'd be kind of nice if they had to get rid of that data after a certain point if it didn't enable them to build a case.
That sounds like a cure that's worse than the disease. Unless there's a very careful plan to phase that in gradually, that'll produce a fat pile of foreclosures.
It depends on what you value. You're from "Southern Europe". That's semi-specific. What sort of place are you looking for? Good schools? What kind of community do you want? What kind of language skills do you have and/or are willing to acquire? What sort of culture are you looking for?
Plus, your economic analysis is overly simplistic:
The U.S. is in debt and there is no way of telling how long this can go on.
If the US experiences a major economic collapse, there is no place in the world where you won't feel the effects of that. Or at least, no place in the world where you can hold a job as an "IT researcher".
The world is of course never as black and white as anyone makes it seem.
I'm largely pro-capitalist. I buy into what I thought was Rand's core statement, namely that a governing system that requires large numbers of people to act against their own self-interest is either doomed to fail (best case) or aggregate power into the hands of those who are good at pretending to act on behalf of everyone else.
That said, I'm not completely opposed to charity, even the forced charity via welfare and similar that are the usual complaints of libertarians.
However, two scenarios:
I saw a woman not too long ago while I was waiting for a train. She had a long white skirt on, the back of which was stained brown in what was obviously fecal matter. There were other aspects of her appearance and scent to reinforce this conclusion. She behaved in a way that implied she thought this was perfectly normal and acceptable. I don't think there's much that could be done for her now, but I think that somewhere in the past, say 5-10 years ago she might have been in a place to reach her. I'm all for the idea of publicly funding programs that could prevent the people today that may end up like her (implementation details are certainly an issue, but let's assume for the sake of argument that an effective and viable approach exists).
vs.
I know someone (don't want to get too specific on who) who is incapable of supporting himself and his daughter on his salary, despite that I was able to support myself, my wife, and (at the time) two kids on less salary in the past. He simply makes piss poor financial decisions -- his mother does the same thing. I have a much bigger problem publicly funding his bailout.
The trouble is telling apart at a large scale those who got dealt a shit hand versus those who either dig their own grave or are disinclined to further themselves.
I suppose it's possible that the spectrum line is actually more of a circle, and batshit liberal and batshit conservative are either the same, or next-door neighbors.
That would make his analogy more apt rather than less IMHO, since it can be difficult to tell apart batshit extremists from each side in real world politics too.
Don't know if I'd call Zelazny underappreciated, but maybe that's because I've grabbed everything I could of his. You can usually btw find people who've read Lord of Light too. But yeah, Zelazny's heroes tend to be exceedingly pratical and snarky at the same time, which is kind of fun.
Except the company uses exclusively isopropyl throughout their entire chemical processing chain and switching to 2-propanol is a multi million or billion dollar effort that would take years to complete and many more years to show a return on the investment. Not to mention the environmental impact studies that would need to be performed to determine if any byproducts would harm the local environment and also testing to make sure the output did not have any adverse effects.
Using the latest and greatest process, tool, widget, language, whatever, is not always a good idea. Sometimes you should live by the motto "if it's not broke, don't fix it."
The problem isn't with a company wanting to do things a specific way, it's with the assumption that people who've done something that's very similar but not exactly the same can't adapt.
Usually, it's not so much that one guys does it "right" the first time vs. others who don't, but more like one guy does it acceptably, and (ideally) flexibly, while another guy does it horribly wrong.
Sometimes the most valuable skill a developer can have is a good instinct for which business requirements are most likely to change over time.
Apparently, "number of users" is now more important a metric than how many of those users are giving you money, or how much.
I got the idea in my head that rather than facebook, you were referring to 'your mom' (not yours personally, but rather that you were explaining what metrics are and are not useful when discussing one's mother).
Any sale, on any stock market, that includes the figure of how many users - without context of how many were paying and/or how much profit they make per user
Once I got the thought stuck in my head, various parts made me giggle, but that one the most. I need to grow up.
Random tidbit: at -40, you can just say -40. Kelvin doesn't go negative, and -40F == -40C. Unless you're using some other scale, but that should cover most of the cases.
Slashdot Mirror
have. It's "must HAVE". "of" makes no sense.
The best response of that nature that I've seen read something like "Do you of any idea how annoying that is?"
I wonder if you could prepare yourself for Alzheimers by writing and learning songs about all your important memories
I wonder if you could prepare yourself for Alzheimers by writing and learning songs about all your important memories
OT, but this is twice in two days that I've seen someone on slashdot double quote their parent post. Wonder if it's some new bug.
If we can put a man on the moon, why do I still have to recharge my laptop every day?
I get what you're trying to say, but given the OP's statements of:
computers can drive cars
and
why do I still have to manually move windows around, resize them, alt-tab between overlapping windows, accidentally screw things up due to keyboard focus, etc. etc?
it's not quite the same scenario. The usual "If we can put a man on the moon" complaint generally involves a lack of appreciation for the resources involved in that sort of undertaking, and failing to realize that we can't dedicate those sorts of resources to every single engineering problem out there (it's fascinating to hear the same person in the same conversation complain about costs and why can't something be done more cheaply). But software isn't like that. Once you've solved the problem, it's far less effort to duplicate it or mimic it elsewhere. It *is* fair to ask why the hell we haven't solved this sort of thing yet.
I shouldn't be forced to publish everything -- I paid for the information. If someone else wants it, they can pay for it.
I'll admit this is completely off-topic and I do not have a better alternative, but this statement caught my attention. While completely aligned with current market goals, this demonstrates very succinctly what is ultimately wrong with capitalism and pretty much every market system that has come before it. It takes true vision and innovation which should be symbiotic with human progress and perverts it into a parasitic act whereby we eliminate the best parts (human progress through information sharing) and turn it into a net negative (information consolidation and stonewalling through IP law).
Paraphrasing Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others. The ultimate reality is that a system which requires people to act against their own personal interests is at best going to yield similar results with some layers of added corruption.
However, IP law is not exactly capitalistic. It is a government granted monopoly on a patent, copyright, or trademark. The assumption is that a greater amount of creative effort is applied when they exist vs when they do not exist.
There's no requirement that privately funded research become publicly available, and every effort to change that has been scuttled, so far.
And it should stay that way. Not all research is about cherry picking what you want to publish. Sometimes it's a matter of determining what I can do to improve my market position. Or what new features consumers what in my market. I shouldn't be forced to publish everything -- I paid for the information. If someone else wants it, they can pay for it.
It's not a matter of what technology the cops are allowed to use, it's a matter of how they use it.
Cops, with a warrant, are allowed to do all sorts of stuff. They can listen to your phone calls or search your house. As long as there's some level of checks and balances on it, I can accept that. I have this crazy idea here -- hear me out -- that before the police put together a database of everywhere my car has been pretty much forever, they should need a warrant for that too. And it'd be kind of nice if they had to get rid of that data after a certain point if it didn't enable them to build a case.
Let me know how to boycott Saudi and ONLY Saudi gas and I'm on board.
Because he's not happy with the way shit's going.
This one is still my favorite though:
1. Eliminate the mortgage interest deduction
That sounds like a cure that's worse than the disease. Unless there's a very careful plan to phase that in gradually, that'll produce a fat pile of foreclosures.
It depends on what you value. You're from "Southern Europe". That's semi-specific. What sort of place are you looking for? Good schools? What kind of community do you want? What kind of language skills do you have and/or are willing to acquire? What sort of culture are you looking for?
Plus, your economic analysis is overly simplistic:
The U.S. is in debt and there is no way of telling how long this can go on.
If the US experiences a major economic collapse, there is no place in the world where you won't feel the effects of that. Or at least, no place in the world where you can hold a job as an "IT researcher".
The world is of course never as black and white as anyone makes it seem.
I'm largely pro-capitalist. I buy into what I thought was Rand's core statement, namely that a governing system that requires large numbers of people to act against their own self-interest is either doomed to fail (best case) or aggregate power into the hands of those who are good at pretending to act on behalf of everyone else.
That said, I'm not completely opposed to charity, even the forced charity via welfare and similar that are the usual complaints of libertarians.
However, two scenarios:
I saw a woman not too long ago while I was waiting for a train. She had a long white skirt on, the back of which was stained brown in what was obviously fecal matter. There were other aspects of her appearance and scent to reinforce this conclusion. She behaved in a way that implied she thought this was perfectly normal and acceptable. I don't think there's much that could be done for her now, but I think that somewhere in the past, say 5-10 years ago she might have been in a place to reach her. I'm all for the idea of publicly funding programs that could prevent the people today that may end up like her (implementation details are certainly an issue, but let's assume for the sake of argument that an effective and viable approach exists).
vs.
I know someone (don't want to get too specific on who) who is incapable of supporting himself and his daughter on his salary, despite that I was able to support myself, my wife, and (at the time) two kids on less salary in the past. He simply makes piss poor financial decisions -- his mother does the same thing. I have a much bigger problem publicly funding his bailout.
The trouble is telling apart at a large scale those who got dealt a shit hand versus those who either dig their own grave or are disinclined to further themselves.
Almost every accident happens because of one of two things - 1) something unpredictable happens.
My driving rule #1, above all others (and I think it's good enough that everyone should follow it) is:
"Don't surprise the other drivers."
I suppose it's possible that the spectrum line is actually more of a circle, and batshit liberal and batshit conservative are either the same, or next-door neighbors.
That would make his analogy more apt rather than less IMHO, since it can be difficult to tell apart batshit extremists from each side in real world politics too.
You made it farther into the article than I could.
For instance, if you like strong and/or static typing (he conflates the two), you are conservative. If you like dynamic/weak typing, you are liberal.
His definitions seem arbitrary. I'm not sure I understand what static typing has to do with being risk averse.
What does his wife being pregnant have to do with anything?
Now we know he (or one of his friends) is virile.
Sorry but his work is more in the fantasy genre.
Sir, I applaud you. That was awesome.
I thought only book reviewers were allowed to use the word 'rollicking'
Don't know if I'd call Zelazny underappreciated, but maybe that's because I've grabbed everything I could of his. You can usually btw find people who've read Lord of Light too. But yeah, Zelazny's heroes tend to be exceedingly pratical and snarky at the same time, which is kind of fun.
Except the company uses exclusively isopropyl throughout their entire chemical processing chain and switching to 2-propanol is a multi million or billion dollar effort that would take years to complete and many more years to show a return on the investment. Not to mention the environmental impact studies that would need to be performed to determine if any byproducts would harm the local environment and also testing to make sure the output did not have any adverse effects.
Using the latest and greatest process, tool, widget, language, whatever, is not always a good idea. Sometimes you should live by the motto "if it's not broke, don't fix it."
The problem isn't with a company wanting to do things a specific way, it's with the assumption that people who've done something that's very similar but not exactly the same can't adapt.
Usually, it's not so much that one guys does it "right" the first time vs. others who don't, but more like one guy does it acceptably, and (ideally) flexibly, while another guy does it horribly wrong.
Sometimes the most valuable skill a developer can have is a good instinct for which business requirements are most likely to change over time.
Apparently, "number of users" is now more important a metric than how many of those users are giving you money, or how much.
I got the idea in my head that rather than facebook, you were referring to 'your mom' (not yours personally, but rather that you were explaining what metrics are and are not useful when discussing one's mother).
Any sale, on any stock market, that includes the figure of how many users - without context of how many were paying and/or how much profit they make per user
Once I got the thought stuck in my head, various parts made me giggle, but that one the most. I need to grow up.
Rankine don't play -40.
The odd thing was that it was -40C
Random tidbit: at -40, you can just say -40. Kelvin doesn't go negative, and -40F == -40C. Unless you're using some other scale, but that should cover most of the cases.