It's simpler than that: the author purports to see a black swan that will blindside the industry and cause a major turn-over; but you can't see black swans, and so this is not a blind risk. The auto industry is probably sitting on contingency plans to partner with various manufacturers at the tipping point, waiting back to avoid the major investment, knowing that it's a lot of start-up risk to start manufacturing cars. This is a controlled and managed risk, not the kind of industry-disrupting black swan that rises out of nowhere and leaves everyone confused about wtf just happened.
Two megabytes. Four, really, when using a single 4MB huge page to allocate the entire kernel in one go. A few bytes to maintain each task's information, each cached disk page, each handle held by an application.
Linux uses so little memory you can run it on a microcontroller with a megabyte of RAM. When you build up all the services needed to supply network management, graphical systems, user log-on, audio mixing, and so forth, you get maybe 100MB. When you then run a Web browser and go to a few open tabs, you need a gigabyte or three.
My applications eat all of that; if I were to use a different OS, I'd still have Thunderbird on top of it eating gigabytes of RAM, and Chrome or Firefox eating gigabytes of RAM. Linux eats 2MB of my RAM, and the rest of the hundreds of MB it eats are for managing all of the shit applications need--the kernel is keeping small bits of data around, a few hundred bytes to describe each task or thread, a few dozen bytes to describe cached disk pages, and so forth. Any OS will need to do all that, and the application will be the same.
I have like 24GB on my computer and it runs a VM consuming some 2GB of RAM. I had 16GB, but was always 900-1400MB into swap. At times, my computer would hang for 20 minutes, until Linux kicked in the OOM killer; it would swap like fuck in the interim. Modern web browsers are kind of asinine; run Chrome and let Flash play a video on a news site or YouTube or whatnot, and you'll find that the Flash Player Plug-In thread runs in 200MB of RAM, and then 600, and then over a gigabyte eventually; meanwhile something like Facebook can eat 300-500MB on its own. Firefox somehow consumes several gigabytes. Often my e-mail client is bigger than the fucking VM.
I wonder what use they're thinking at all. Minix 3 is a step forward: were we to port Linux interfaces for udev, kevents, and such onto Minix, we could drop a Linux userland onto it wholesale, with systemd and all, and benefit from a core operating system which lends itself to drastic rearchitecting.
Consider that running Minix as an OS-level virtualizer--OpenVZ, LXC--is a trivial task, one which requires only providing a different network server and different security features (e.g. users and groups, and their flow through the file system driver and such), largely doable on the existing code base. You could even run Xen on top of Minix with a minor tweak.
Consider that Minix is a collection of services which may be extended by adding other services. It is interfaces and features, not tightly-bonded kernel code. The shape and form of the OS can be changed without commitment: to add services to handle Linux services is not to change Minix, for you may simply not use those services; you could instead add services to make Minix pretend to be OpenBSD. You could replace its threading model or scheduler by swapping out a service, providing a system that uses the advanced features of DragonflyBSD.
There, again, we see a step forward: DragonflyBSD, with its non-locking semaphores, its highly-efficient threading model, its ability to freeze an application and thaw it after a reboot, to checkpoint running applications--a feature Minix does not possess, but could simply by adding a new kernel service--and even to move applications between machines. Extending some of these things would be to bring the features of OpenMOSIX: check pointing and running an application on a different boot cycle or different machine brings the magic of scheduling applications across a cluster of machines acting as one.
Why, then, do we persist in creating these tinker toys, instead of extending, cannibalizing, or imitating those things which show real progress? Why has Minix not embraced the great strides forward made by Linux and integrated its interfaces so as to integrate its user space in distribution? Why has Linux not subsumed the threading model of Dragonfly BSD? Why has someone chosen to create an OS to no purpose, rather than to create a unified system carrying and integrating the lessons from all prior systems?
The problem with this thinking is memory is not cheap. Memory has grown, and program memory usage has grown linearly with memory, or greater. The problem is when you run two programs at once: the combined working set is bigger than RAM, and has grown linearly as well. Where you may have had 32MB of RAM and 48MB swapping on and off disk, now you have 16GB of RAM and you're swapping around 10GB of data; but swapping is not now 500 times faster, and so the bloat has slowed the machine.
The growth of the working set means the growth of memory controller latency, the need for RAS and CAS selects on different rows requiring precharges taking up 200 FSB cycles on CPUs which now have multipliers of 10 or 15 instead of 1.5 or 2. Random memory access may now have delays of 3000 cycles, causing an instruction requiring 4 cycles to execute to now take 750 times as long; your typical CAS selection may in fact require 7, 10, even 21 cycles now, multiplied by 10 or 15, so as to take 300 cycles of stall. Modern CPUs are made and broken by their CPU cache efficiency and their predictive execution, and multi-tasking flushes those caches and destroys performance.
Computers have grown to manage immense spans of cheap resources, yet they have not increased their capability to manage resources nearly as fast as they have increased those resources.
In the book, they locked open the teleporter network to thousands of Psychlo worlds, then set a nuke off on the homeworld. The fireball washed over the teleportation fields of other teleporter platforms and ignited thousands of planets in giant nuclear fireballs.
Yes, that is a thing; it's not a thing that makes Java or Rust bad (other factors make Java shit), but it is a thing that happens. When Java came out, everyone wrapped everything in try{}catch{continue anyway!}
A programming language is better if it does one thing: Solves a particular type of general problem more efficiently and clearly than the language of comparison. The larger this set and scope of general problems, the better the language; the fewer corner cases hinder the language, the better the language.
You will find the integration of mathematical languages, physics languages, or graphics languages into a general programming language a pile of clutter and complication. They won't integrate with much of the language, or they'll complicate it, or they'll constrict it. This is why you have libraries in a language to do some general tasks (Box2d, PhysX APIs, etc.), low-level specialized assemblies (OpenGL CUDA, shader assembly), and specialized high-level languages (R, Matlab): these tasks are best integrated by interfacing with a black box that takes in a data set, runs it through a set of coded procedures, and spits out a result.
What makes a programming language "better" than state-of-the-art is its ability to supply general programming practices and functionality in an efficient way for humans. Classes that can be easily swiveled or overloaded or extended or polymorphed, but only in a way that a human being can reliably understand--that is, that a human being who has studied the language won't still struggle with understanding the workings of the language due to its conflict with the method of human thought. Code bodies which are simultaneously readable, maintainable, and efficiently executable. The ability to represent a wide variety of specialized tasks as API classes and functions, even if less effective than a specialized language, should someone seek to integrate physics or mathematics or cryptography or other such things with their program. All of these things, reflected in a way a human can grasp and use with fewer human-introduced defects, and also in a way that does not constrict the human from approaching the subset of programming tasks carried out in nearly 100% of code (imagine if 1 in 100 functions needed a specialized language, not a simple library API or raw programming code; even the Linux kernel is far less than 1% low-level assembly).
It is not valid to say that people are bad at programming in C++ because they are bad programmers; but it is valid to say that bad programmers will not become good programmers if given a good language. If we assume, for example, that Perl is terrible and Python is some form of holy perfection, then we can claim that Perl will cause a good, studied, skilled Perl programmer to make many more defects than a good, studied, skilled Python programmer will make in Python; indeed, our metric for whether Perl or Python is superior to one another would be both the speed at which a new inductee to the language can learn to code with similar defects--how much programming exposure over a variety of challenging tasks does a person need in order to use the language for tasks of similar complexity without creating defects? Swift, Rust, C#, and so forth will face the same challenges: what is the defect rate produced by the programmer, relative to the amount of effort and resulting skill of the programmer in the given language, and how does it compare to all other languages?
Bad languages will make good programmers produce more bad code. Good languages will not make bad programmers produce good code; they will enable good programmers to produce less bad code.
Modern politicians tend to just steamroll shit nobody wants down their throats, or smear their opponents so people default ("Senator McKinley is a faggot and likes fucking 16-year-old paiges in the ass; of course he wants to destroy our moral fiber by legalizing gay marriage!").
I must admit, there is some sense in instilling myself, with my advanced understanding of what would be truly good for America, as a dictator; but I believe there is more profit in keeping with our current system, using the sway of politics to educate and inspire Americans to demand those things which they would benefit from by providing understanding and enthusiasm instead of the rule of an iron fist. Perhaps a critic will arise who will point out some wrongness in my ideas, and so I can correct these problems before it is too late; the real power of democracy is to challenge such plans and, on occasion, highlight their flaws so they may be improved.
It's immense bullshit. Unity charges nothing, and Unreal charges 5%. Unity, with a $1500 pro license, makes sense if you're making more than $30,000 per seat per game on average: if you have 3 programmers and you're going to make more than $90,000 on your game, Unity is a better buy than Unreal. When Unreal charged 20%, this number was $7,500: any game more profitable than $7,500 would pay more in Unreal licensing than it would pay in Unity licensing.
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
And having received these for free, others now have money with which to buy other, similar, newer works, fueling the great machine of creativity, yes?
It makes a good which one may duplicate by his own effort into a good which one is not allowed to, creating an artificial scarcity, a constriction, and a high barrier to committing certain profitable acts. Consider that the great realm of fan fiction, fan games, and fan art add much to our culture--sometimes good artwork, sometimes practice to encourage and develop a new artist who would otherwise be lost to unmotivation--but are also horribly illegal.
At the same time, the artificial scarcity, as a temporary being, provides an incentive to produce such works. Researchers are paid to continuously research, to create new knowledge, which has many applications, most of which are expensive to commercialize, or which may improve an existing commercial product in a highly non-fungible way; creative works, of course, have no such strength, as they are inherently useless and replaceable, transient at best, and all despite their value to society. Society wants these things for free because it cannot profit greatly from them, and so a chain must temporarily be wrought unto these things so as to command stimulating tithe.
As far as destroying wealth, no one became poor spending a few hundred dollars a year.
Wealth is not money; wealth is productivity. Wealth is not that many dollars exist, but that those dollars can make many things. In a time when 1 million people have collectively 10,000 million dollars and can buy a house with poor insulation requiring 200,000 BTU of heat per month, there is half as much wealth as in a later time when 1 million people have collectively 10,000 million dollars and can buy a house with good insulation requiring 50,000 BTU of heat per month. In this later time, people have invented power tools and advanced building methods: less human labor is required to build a house, and the house is more sturdy, and less drafty, and better insulated, and so it is a better house with more materials invested, and costs the same, and requires less to upkeep.
In reality, population changes, money changes, and wealth changes. This makes such things difficult to understand: in the later time, you would have 2 million people collectively owning 40,000 million dollars, and proposing that there is twice as much wealth would be confusing and difficult. What stands out is that 2/5 of the total money originally was spent on housing, and that 2/5 of the new money is spent on housing, and yet that 2/5 purchases more: if there is twice as much money, more than twice as much housing--not just twice as many houses, or twice as much square footage, but also housing of better construction quality, of better sturdiness and insulation--is purchased without spending more than twice the original raw amount of money.
Society would gain wealth as well if ten times as much creative work were put out each year: our wealth of art, of culture, the thing that made the ancient Greeks so wealthy, would be enormous. To do so, of course, we would need monetary demand for that art: the sculptures and architecture of Greece were things of trade, drawing much income to the nation in times of old. This doesn't mean we wouldn't become more wealthy if art was produced to no profit; we would become greatly more wealthy if everyone did the same work in half as much time, receiving twic
there are plenty of efficient farmers and businessmen who are more capable of maintaining these real properties than the (often inexperienced) descendents of the previous owner. So, why pass these properties down to the descendents?
A farmer may work a farm or sell the land, depending on if he is skilled enough to turn profitable output from the land. In the same way, a musician may play his instruments or sell them on eBay.
Copyrighted works too maintain and decay in wealth generation after their prime years. So, not very different. Yet it is redistributed.
Ah, but a copyrighted work can be altered, performed, incorporated, built upon. It can be used as a limitless foundation for new works. In this it is not consumed as land or metal, but multiplied and expanded as knowledge; for the exercise of earth and steel leaves you with less of each, but the exercise of knowledge and creativity creates more of these things.
To constrict the sale of earth and steel is to deny yourself the profit from it, while to sell said earth and steel is to deny yourself the possession of it; but to constrict the sale of knowledge and creativity is to deny others the profit from it, while to release said knowledge and creativity is to provide yourself the profit of future knowledge and creativity based upon that foundation.
What differentiates these is that constricting the sale of knowledge and creativity is what provides you monetary profit, while foregoing that monetary profit provides society a profit which you may share in, and so you are left at a decision, and the monetary decision is more concrete and understandable. As an individual, you may very well want extensive copyright terms; but as a society, you will want shorter copyright terms so that you, too, may profit off the works of others, enhancing them and reselling them. Such profit is greater, but less guaranteed, and so is risky and frightening in comparison to the less-profitable hoarding strategy; yet the hoarding strategy fails when pop culture shifts--an uncontrollable and terrifying beast--and, yet again, provides delayed returns when pop culture shifts later to a retrospective taste.
One may surmise, then, that the true dilemma is between an attempt at profit on retrospective pop culture--a sudden resurgence of interest in things long-since past their profitability suddenly gained new profitability--or an attempt at profit on compounding creativity--that the old, which may become again interesting, be released anyway, and incorporated into the new if interest in the old resurfaces, demanding more work yet providing a profit opportunity to the markets seeking both old and new. The second form is, from a societal standpoint, more profitable: while one entity may profit from a hoarded work, that work will provide a basis for many other entities if that work is freed; likewise, that one entity may or may not find a niche in the new market, and thus build upon many freed works to profit from opportunities he may otherwise miss. In any case, the new market will expand all of these freed works which are now interesting again across many creative entities, thus producing more than in a hoarding market, and thus giving more to society as a whole.
You can see the difficulty, the conflicting drivers, and the reasoning which makes people believe firmly in a hoarding strategy as the best means of personal profit: what one has made once, one believes should belong to him for all time, and thus should deny to others that they may build upon if he is not the chief recipient of its profits. This is more concrete than that one may make great profit by continuing effort, as one will ignore the efforts of others to build upon his works, questioning why they should be allowed to profit from his effort, yet complaining that he must now put out similar effort to them to mold the prior efforts of another into a profitable form for himself--questioning why they are allowed to do w
Social security will be simultaneously eliminated and expanded. I have written these plans and I will see them done so that we may all be the more wealthy.
Farms and other businesses have great upkeep costs which must be exceeded by their useful output in order to turn a profit. All investments collapse; hard assets do not draw upon the economy to divert wealth, but rather maintain or decay in wealth. All of these things either bring no cost to society or provide a continuing useful output; by contrast, music, movies, and books exist, and can be copied--the service of copying creates a good, while the fact of existing creates nothing.
A farmer who holds but does not work the land will make no profit; a copyright holder who holds ownership of a piece of music may make profit, for when another entity invests its own resources to produce a copy of that work, the copyright holder claims he must be paid for... nothing, just for the fact of being who he is. It is as if the farmer, content with who he is and lazy in his way, farmed no tomatoes, but instead charged every other farmer on the planet for growing and selling tomatoes.
Works entering the public domain provide an economic benefit to future generations. Copyright is an economic negative: it costs us in wealth, making us poorer; it provides, however, a window of opportunity to make a profit from new works, and is thus justified in its cost. When you expand that window of opportunity such as to build an empire rather than to make profit, you are abusing the mechanism and bringing economic damage, weakening culture and destroying wealth.
Jefferson said inheritance was unnatural; but Jefferson was a hyper-liberal ass leaning toward Social Democrat. He believed a man's death should mark the right of the state to take all his stuff. All. Some much more moderate folks (FDR, who was also supremely liberal, but nowhere near Jefferson's game) proposed we take a percentage as inheritance (the Death Tax or Estate Tax), and an increasingly large percentage as the size of the estate grew.
In any case, I think the inheritance thing is a sham argument. What is inheritance, but a windfall when you are old and secure? What is inheritance but a thing cut up across three generations spreading wide, a paltry sum distributed among many? Inheritance won't provide secure income, except in that you inherit a rather large business such as Ford.
What's different about it this time? People normally balk at this argument. It's one I've begun to think I need to avoid politically--I have political initiatives for a far better welfare system (supplies stronger social safety nets without the constantly rising proportional costs our current system suffers from) and for K-12 education improvement (no fixed plan yet; lots of concepts to glue together, but I need to find someone with real understanding of K-12 education to translate those to classroom management), and may need to completely step away from the college education problem because nobody will accept that the public initiative to get everyone an independently-gained college education is actively harmful to the individual and most greatly damaging to the least-advantaged (poor, minorities).
The only plans I'm firm on are economics plans; public support of college education is an economic problem, concerning the market interactions with the supply and demand of skilled labor from multiple angles. What of my comment do you find excellent, that I may improve on it so as to convey my concern with those market behaviors and, hopefully, bring understanding of the college education problem?
It's industry fast-talk meant to muddle your minds. Look at this:
Compare that to the average tech-pro salary of $89,450 in 2014, which is only expected to rise this year.
In all stable markets, salaries rise. In the dot-com boom, IT people were getting $150k-$250k; they dropped to $60k, and have been on the rise since. Why did they drop? Because the bubble bust and because everyone went to school for IT; we have a STEM glut, especially in IT, so salaries are low. As long as we continue the narrative of climbing salaries for high-value IT professionals, people will go to college for IT, and will continue to contribute to the high candidate availability and relatively low salary. With such a stable market--constantly and continuously oversupplied with labor--salaries will climb at a slow pace, but they will always climb.
Showing high average salaries, especially un-adjusted for high-cost areas where many technicians live, puts out golden dollar signs for people to chase. People imagine themselves one day as a Director of IA, a VP of InfoSec, a CISO, a big-name boss doing as little work as possible for a maximized salary. They don't consider that such positions are on the order of one per company, matched to the company's size (small business's Director of Information Security is going to get small-business salary), and actually a whole hell of a lot of work--and not just tech work, but work of a different nature you may find greatly rewarding or horrifyingly torturous. It doesn't matter; they go to get those degrees in IT and IT Security, imagining themselves rolling in money.
Welcome to higher-education initiatives, where the Government facilitates college education. We've shifted social responsibility from businesses--who would normally experience pain from a lack of professionals and thus aggressively supply education and training to career entrants in order to maximize their profitable strategic market advantage--to individuals--who face higher risks and a greater chance of unemployment for the potential to garner lower salaries, but believe themselves advantaged by being able to independently acquire a certification of their skill in an area which they would have otherwise acquired by advancing their career and drawing income. The point of supplying free college education or government-backed loans is to transfer power and, ultimately, money away from the individual laborer and to the hands of large businesses in the most non-intuitive and unrecognizable way, so that people will cry out for more of this rather than recognizing how much harm it's doing to them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simpler than that: the author purports to see a black swan that will blindside the industry and cause a major turn-over; but you can't see black swans, and so this is not a blind risk. The auto industry is probably sitting on contingency plans to partner with various manufacturers at the tipping point, waiting back to avoid the major investment, knowing that it's a lot of start-up risk to start manufacturing cars. This is a controlled and managed risk, not the kind of industry-disrupting black swan that rises out of nowhere and leaves everyone confused about wtf just happened.
Check out the memory footprint of Linux sometime.
Two megabytes. Four, really, when using a single 4MB huge page to allocate the entire kernel in one go. A few bytes to maintain each task's information, each cached disk page, each handle held by an application.
Linux uses so little memory you can run it on a microcontroller with a megabyte of RAM. When you build up all the services needed to supply network management, graphical systems, user log-on, audio mixing, and so forth, you get maybe 100MB. When you then run a Web browser and go to a few open tabs, you need a gigabyte or three.
My applications eat all of that; if I were to use a different OS, I'd still have Thunderbird on top of it eating gigabytes of RAM, and Chrome or Firefox eating gigabytes of RAM. Linux eats 2MB of my RAM, and the rest of the hundreds of MB it eats are for managing all of the shit applications need--the kernel is keeping small bits of data around, a few hundred bytes to describe each task or thread, a few dozen bytes to describe cached disk pages, and so forth. Any OS will need to do all that, and the application will be the same.
I have like 24GB on my computer and it runs a VM consuming some 2GB of RAM. I had 16GB, but was always 900-1400MB into swap. At times, my computer would hang for 20 minutes, until Linux kicked in the OOM killer; it would swap like fuck in the interim. Modern web browsers are kind of asinine; run Chrome and let Flash play a video on a news site or YouTube or whatnot, and you'll find that the Flash Player Plug-In thread runs in 200MB of RAM, and then 600, and then over a gigabyte eventually; meanwhile something like Facebook can eat 300-500MB on its own. Firefox somehow consumes several gigabytes. Often my e-mail client is bigger than the fucking VM.
I wonder what use they're thinking at all. Minix 3 is a step forward: were we to port Linux interfaces for udev, kevents, and such onto Minix, we could drop a Linux userland onto it wholesale, with systemd and all, and benefit from a core operating system which lends itself to drastic rearchitecting.
Consider that running Minix as an OS-level virtualizer--OpenVZ, LXC--is a trivial task, one which requires only providing a different network server and different security features (e.g. users and groups, and their flow through the file system driver and such), largely doable on the existing code base. You could even run Xen on top of Minix with a minor tweak.
Consider that Minix is a collection of services which may be extended by adding other services. It is interfaces and features, not tightly-bonded kernel code. The shape and form of the OS can be changed without commitment: to add services to handle Linux services is not to change Minix, for you may simply not use those services; you could instead add services to make Minix pretend to be OpenBSD. You could replace its threading model or scheduler by swapping out a service, providing a system that uses the advanced features of DragonflyBSD.
There, again, we see a step forward: DragonflyBSD, with its non-locking semaphores, its highly-efficient threading model, its ability to freeze an application and thaw it after a reboot, to checkpoint running applications--a feature Minix does not possess, but could simply by adding a new kernel service--and even to move applications between machines. Extending some of these things would be to bring the features of OpenMOSIX: check pointing and running an application on a different boot cycle or different machine brings the magic of scheduling applications across a cluster of machines acting as one.
Why, then, do we persist in creating these tinker toys, instead of extending, cannibalizing, or imitating those things which show real progress? Why has Minix not embraced the great strides forward made by Linux and integrated its interfaces so as to integrate its user space in distribution? Why has Linux not subsumed the threading model of Dragonfly BSD? Why has someone chosen to create an OS to no purpose, rather than to create a unified system carrying and integrating the lessons from all prior systems?
The problem with this thinking is memory is not cheap. Memory has grown, and program memory usage has grown linearly with memory, or greater. The problem is when you run two programs at once: the combined working set is bigger than RAM, and has grown linearly as well. Where you may have had 32MB of RAM and 48MB swapping on and off disk, now you have 16GB of RAM and you're swapping around 10GB of data; but swapping is not now 500 times faster, and so the bloat has slowed the machine.
The growth of the working set means the growth of memory controller latency, the need for RAS and CAS selects on different rows requiring precharges taking up 200 FSB cycles on CPUs which now have multipliers of 10 or 15 instead of 1.5 or 2. Random memory access may now have delays of 3000 cycles, causing an instruction requiring 4 cycles to execute to now take 750 times as long; your typical CAS selection may in fact require 7, 10, even 21 cycles now, multiplied by 10 or 15, so as to take 300 cycles of stall. Modern CPUs are made and broken by their CPU cache efficiency and their predictive execution, and multi-tasking flushes those caches and destroys performance.
Computers have grown to manage immense spans of cheap resources, yet they have not increased their capability to manage resources nearly as fast as they have increased those resources.
One of the greatest space fiction writers to ever live: L. Ron Hubbard. He was a master of telling people shit he just made up.
In the book, they locked open the teleporter network to thousands of Psychlo worlds, then set a nuke off on the homeworld. The fireball washed over the teleportation fields of other teleporter platforms and ignited thousands of planets in giant nuclear fireballs.
The book was good, but the movie was like... one of the worst movies ever made.
I haven't had an employer do a code review yet.
Yes, that is a thing; it's not a thing that makes Java or Rust bad (other factors make Java shit), but it is a thing that happens. When Java came out, everyone wrapped everything in try{}catch{continue anyway!}
A programming language is better if it does one thing: Solves a particular type of general problem more efficiently and clearly than the language of comparison. The larger this set and scope of general problems, the better the language; the fewer corner cases hinder the language, the better the language.
You will find the integration of mathematical languages, physics languages, or graphics languages into a general programming language a pile of clutter and complication. They won't integrate with much of the language, or they'll complicate it, or they'll constrict it. This is why you have libraries in a language to do some general tasks (Box2d, PhysX APIs, etc.), low-level specialized assemblies (OpenGL CUDA, shader assembly), and specialized high-level languages (R, Matlab): these tasks are best integrated by interfacing with a black box that takes in a data set, runs it through a set of coded procedures, and spits out a result.
What makes a programming language "better" than state-of-the-art is its ability to supply general programming practices and functionality in an efficient way for humans. Classes that can be easily swiveled or overloaded or extended or polymorphed, but only in a way that a human being can reliably understand--that is, that a human being who has studied the language won't still struggle with understanding the workings of the language due to its conflict with the method of human thought. Code bodies which are simultaneously readable, maintainable, and efficiently executable. The ability to represent a wide variety of specialized tasks as API classes and functions, even if less effective than a specialized language, should someone seek to integrate physics or mathematics or cryptography or other such things with their program. All of these things, reflected in a way a human can grasp and use with fewer human-introduced defects, and also in a way that does not constrict the human from approaching the subset of programming tasks carried out in nearly 100% of code (imagine if 1 in 100 functions needed a specialized language, not a simple library API or raw programming code; even the Linux kernel is far less than 1% low-level assembly).
It is not valid to say that people are bad at programming in C++ because they are bad programmers; but it is valid to say that bad programmers will not become good programmers if given a good language. If we assume, for example, that Perl is terrible and Python is some form of holy perfection, then we can claim that Perl will cause a good, studied, skilled Perl programmer to make many more defects than a good, studied, skilled Python programmer will make in Python; indeed, our metric for whether Perl or Python is superior to one another would be both the speed at which a new inductee to the language can learn to code with similar defects--how much programming exposure over a variety of challenging tasks does a person need in order to use the language for tasks of similar complexity without creating defects? Swift, Rust, C#, and so forth will face the same challenges: what is the defect rate produced by the programmer, relative to the amount of effort and resulting skill of the programmer in the given language, and how does it compare to all other languages?
Bad languages will make good programmers produce more bad code. Good languages will not make bad programmers produce good code; they will enable good programmers to produce less bad code.
Modern politicians tend to just steamroll shit nobody wants down their throats, or smear their opponents so people default ("Senator McKinley is a faggot and likes fucking 16-year-old paiges in the ass; of course he wants to destroy our moral fiber by legalizing gay marriage!").
I must admit, there is some sense in instilling myself, with my advanced understanding of what would be truly good for America, as a dictator; but I believe there is more profit in keeping with our current system, using the sway of politics to educate and inspire Americans to demand those things which they would benefit from by providing understanding and enthusiasm instead of the rule of an iron fist. Perhaps a critic will arise who will point out some wrongness in my ideas, and so I can correct these problems before it is too late; the real power of democracy is to challenge such plans and, on occasion, highlight their flaws so they may be improved.
They're "elected public servants", not "leaders".
It's immense bullshit. Unity charges nothing, and Unreal charges 5%. Unity, with a $1500 pro license, makes sense if you're making more than $30,000 per seat per game on average: if you have 3 programmers and you're going to make more than $90,000 on your game, Unity is a better buy than Unreal. When Unreal charged 20%, this number was $7,500: any game more profitable than $7,500 would pay more in Unreal licensing than it would pay in Unity licensing.
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dickens works have been public domain for quite some time. What economic benefits have been gained so far? Nothing, other than getting those works for free.
And having received these for free, others now have money with which to buy other, similar, newer works, fueling the great machine of creativity, yes?
Or we could use the creative argument that Wagner is in public domain, and now others have created works upon works.
I fail to see how paying for art weakens culture.
It makes a good which one may duplicate by his own effort into a good which one is not allowed to, creating an artificial scarcity, a constriction, and a high barrier to committing certain profitable acts. Consider that the great realm of fan fiction, fan games, and fan art add much to our culture--sometimes good artwork, sometimes practice to encourage and develop a new artist who would otherwise be lost to unmotivation--but are also horribly illegal.
At the same time, the artificial scarcity, as a temporary being, provides an incentive to produce such works. Researchers are paid to continuously research, to create new knowledge, which has many applications, most of which are expensive to commercialize, or which may improve an existing commercial product in a highly non-fungible way; creative works, of course, have no such strength, as they are inherently useless and replaceable, transient at best, and all despite their value to society. Society wants these things for free because it cannot profit greatly from them, and so a chain must temporarily be wrought unto these things so as to command stimulating tithe.
As far as destroying wealth, no one became poor spending a few hundred dollars a year.
Wealth is not money; wealth is productivity. Wealth is not that many dollars exist, but that those dollars can make many things. In a time when 1 million people have collectively 10,000 million dollars and can buy a house with poor insulation requiring 200,000 BTU of heat per month, there is half as much wealth as in a later time when 1 million people have collectively 10,000 million dollars and can buy a house with good insulation requiring 50,000 BTU of heat per month. In this later time, people have invented power tools and advanced building methods: less human labor is required to build a house, and the house is more sturdy, and less drafty, and better insulated, and so it is a better house with more materials invested, and costs the same, and requires less to upkeep.
In reality, population changes, money changes, and wealth changes. This makes such things difficult to understand: in the later time, you would have 2 million people collectively owning 40,000 million dollars, and proposing that there is twice as much wealth would be confusing and difficult. What stands out is that 2/5 of the total money originally was spent on housing, and that 2/5 of the new money is spent on housing, and yet that 2/5 purchases more: if there is twice as much money, more than twice as much housing--not just twice as many houses, or twice as much square footage, but also housing of better construction quality, of better sturdiness and insulation--is purchased without spending more than twice the original raw amount of money.
Society would gain wealth as well if ten times as much creative work were put out each year: our wealth of art, of culture, the thing that made the ancient Greeks so wealthy, would be enormous. To do so, of course, we would need monetary demand for that art: the sculptures and architecture of Greece were things of trade, drawing much income to the nation in times of old. This doesn't mean we wouldn't become more wealthy if art was produced to no profit; we would become greatly more wealthy if everyone did the same work in half as much time, receiving twic
there are plenty of efficient farmers and businessmen who are more capable of maintaining these real properties than the (often inexperienced) descendents of the previous owner. So, why pass these properties down to the descendents?
A farmer may work a farm or sell the land, depending on if he is skilled enough to turn profitable output from the land. In the same way, a musician may play his instruments or sell them on eBay.
Copyrighted works too maintain and decay in wealth generation after their prime years. So, not very different. Yet it is redistributed.
Ah, but a copyrighted work can be altered, performed, incorporated, built upon. It can be used as a limitless foundation for new works. In this it is not consumed as land or metal, but multiplied and expanded as knowledge; for the exercise of earth and steel leaves you with less of each, but the exercise of knowledge and creativity creates more of these things.
To constrict the sale of earth and steel is to deny yourself the profit from it, while to sell said earth and steel is to deny yourself the possession of it; but to constrict the sale of knowledge and creativity is to deny others the profit from it, while to release said knowledge and creativity is to provide yourself the profit of future knowledge and creativity based upon that foundation.
What differentiates these is that constricting the sale of knowledge and creativity is what provides you monetary profit, while foregoing that monetary profit provides society a profit which you may share in, and so you are left at a decision, and the monetary decision is more concrete and understandable. As an individual, you may very well want extensive copyright terms; but as a society, you will want shorter copyright terms so that you, too, may profit off the works of others, enhancing them and reselling them. Such profit is greater, but less guaranteed, and so is risky and frightening in comparison to the less-profitable hoarding strategy; yet the hoarding strategy fails when pop culture shifts--an uncontrollable and terrifying beast--and, yet again, provides delayed returns when pop culture shifts later to a retrospective taste.
One may surmise, then, that the true dilemma is between an attempt at profit on retrospective pop culture--a sudden resurgence of interest in things long-since past their profitability suddenly gained new profitability--or an attempt at profit on compounding creativity--that the old, which may become again interesting, be released anyway, and incorporated into the new if interest in the old resurfaces, demanding more work yet providing a profit opportunity to the markets seeking both old and new. The second form is, from a societal standpoint, more profitable: while one entity may profit from a hoarded work, that work will provide a basis for many other entities if that work is freed; likewise, that one entity may or may not find a niche in the new market, and thus build upon many freed works to profit from opportunities he may otherwise miss. In any case, the new market will expand all of these freed works which are now interesting again across many creative entities, thus producing more than in a hoarding market, and thus giving more to society as a whole.
You can see the difficulty, the conflicting drivers, and the reasoning which makes people believe firmly in a hoarding strategy as the best means of personal profit: what one has made once, one believes should belong to him for all time, and thus should deny to others that they may build upon if he is not the chief recipient of its profits. This is more concrete than that one may make great profit by continuing effort, as one will ignore the efforts of others to build upon his works, questioning why they should be allowed to profit from his effort, yet complaining that he must now put out similar effort to them to mold the prior efforts of another into a profitable form for himself--questioning why they are allowed to do w
Social security will be simultaneously eliminated and expanded. I have written these plans and I will see them done so that we may all be the more wealthy.
Farms and other businesses have great upkeep costs which must be exceeded by their useful output in order to turn a profit. All investments collapse; hard assets do not draw upon the economy to divert wealth, but rather maintain or decay in wealth. All of these things either bring no cost to society or provide a continuing useful output; by contrast, music, movies, and books exist, and can be copied--the service of copying creates a good, while the fact of existing creates nothing.
A farmer who holds but does not work the land will make no profit; a copyright holder who holds ownership of a piece of music may make profit, for when another entity invests its own resources to produce a copy of that work, the copyright holder claims he must be paid for... nothing, just for the fact of being who he is. It is as if the farmer, content with who he is and lazy in his way, farmed no tomatoes, but instead charged every other farmer on the planet for growing and selling tomatoes.
Works entering the public domain provide an economic benefit to future generations. Copyright is an economic negative: it costs us in wealth, making us poorer; it provides, however, a window of opportunity to make a profit from new works, and is thus justified in its cost. When you expand that window of opportunity such as to build an empire rather than to make profit, you are abusing the mechanism and bringing economic damage, weakening culture and destroying wealth.
Jefferson said inheritance was unnatural; but Jefferson was a hyper-liberal ass leaning toward Social Democrat. He believed a man's death should mark the right of the state to take all his stuff. All. Some much more moderate folks (FDR, who was also supremely liberal, but nowhere near Jefferson's game) proposed we take a percentage as inheritance (the Death Tax or Estate Tax), and an increasingly large percentage as the size of the estate grew.
In any case, I think the inheritance thing is a sham argument. What is inheritance, but a windfall when you are old and secure? What is inheritance but a thing cut up across three generations spreading wide, a paltry sum distributed among many? Inheritance won't provide secure income, except in that you inherit a rather large business such as Ford.
Imagine if they just charged $1/year for premium.
What's different about it this time? People normally balk at this argument. It's one I've begun to think I need to avoid politically--I have political initiatives for a far better welfare system (supplies stronger social safety nets without the constantly rising proportional costs our current system suffers from) and for K-12 education improvement (no fixed plan yet; lots of concepts to glue together, but I need to find someone with real understanding of K-12 education to translate those to classroom management), and may need to completely step away from the college education problem because nobody will accept that the public initiative to get everyone an independently-gained college education is actively harmful to the individual and most greatly damaging to the least-advantaged (poor, minorities).
The only plans I'm firm on are economics plans; public support of college education is an economic problem, concerning the market interactions with the supply and demand of skilled labor from multiple angles. What of my comment do you find excellent, that I may improve on it so as to convey my concern with those market behaviors and, hopefully, bring understanding of the college education problem?
It's industry fast-talk meant to muddle your minds. Look at this:
Compare that to the average tech-pro salary of $89,450 in 2014, which is only expected to rise this year.
In all stable markets, salaries rise. In the dot-com boom, IT people were getting $150k-$250k; they dropped to $60k, and have been on the rise since. Why did they drop? Because the bubble bust and because everyone went to school for IT; we have a STEM glut, especially in IT, so salaries are low. As long as we continue the narrative of climbing salaries for high-value IT professionals, people will go to college for IT, and will continue to contribute to the high candidate availability and relatively low salary. With such a stable market--constantly and continuously oversupplied with labor--salaries will climb at a slow pace, but they will always climb.
Showing high average salaries, especially un-adjusted for high-cost areas where many technicians live, puts out golden dollar signs for people to chase. People imagine themselves one day as a Director of IA, a VP of InfoSec, a CISO, a big-name boss doing as little work as possible for a maximized salary. They don't consider that such positions are on the order of one per company, matched to the company's size (small business's Director of Information Security is going to get small-business salary), and actually a whole hell of a lot of work--and not just tech work, but work of a different nature you may find greatly rewarding or horrifyingly torturous. It doesn't matter; they go to get those degrees in IT and IT Security, imagining themselves rolling in money.
Welcome to higher-education initiatives, where the Government facilitates college education. We've shifted social responsibility from businesses--who would normally experience pain from a lack of professionals and thus aggressively supply education and training to career entrants in order to maximize their profitable strategic market advantage--to individuals--who face higher risks and a greater chance of unemployment for the potential to garner lower salaries, but believe themselves advantaged by being able to independently acquire a certification of their skill in an area which they would have otherwise acquired by advancing their career and drawing income. The point of supplying free college education or government-backed loans is to transfer power and, ultimately, money away from the individual laborer and to the hands of large businesses in the most non-intuitive and unrecognizable way, so that people will cry out for more of this rather than recognizing how much harm it's doing to them.