So I guess for now (until we can build real biospheres in space) silkworms aren't really renewable because you'd still have to transport their food, which isn't renewable. Perhaps the most efficient thing to do is to breed them ahead of time rather than letting them breed in space, grind them up to make them more compact, then freeze them. It's not like astronauts will complain that freezing them will ruin their freshness. Since it's a generic food base kind of like soy products, you can make anything out of it. Instead of the Silk soymilk, it's more like Soylent Silk.
What does it mean to "manage people"?
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
With a division of labor, the idea of the manager is to strictly keep to "managing people", right? What does that actually mean in real practice? If the techies are the ones with all the actual skill to implement technology, what happens when techs have a technological debate? If a team is designing a complex system and there is a difference of opinion between two or more choices with subtle but far-reaching consequences, in the real world, is the manager going to be hands-off and stick with the "people side" only?
I don't know about anyone else, but that's not how I've ever seen it happen. The manager must make a decision about the design of the technology. How is he/she to decide? Based on which developer is a snappier dresser, or which one kisses ass more?:-) The business world needs to get rid of this obsolete idea of a "manager" who mechanistically manages human "resources". We need to be more honest about human interaction. What most businesses need are LEADERS. You can't lead if you're not in front. You want quality code from your employees? Then can YOU recognize the difference between bad and good code? In practice, good managers in IT are technically proficient AND have people skills. It's out of necessity, businesses really don't have a choice unless they want to keep burying their heads in the sand and sticking with merely "managing" their employees who they have no idea what those employees actually do.
This list was created by a publisher called Stardock, best known for Galactic Civilizations and Sins Of A Solar Empire. The list makes tons of sense, and it's doubtful if the PC gaming market will survive if publishers don't heed the wisdom of its suggestions. I never even heard of this publisher before Gal. Civ., but now I'm becoming a fan due to their benevolent attitude toward gamers. Boycotting clueless publishers isn't enough because there will always be people who will buy the game anyway. Instead of showing publishers what they can lose (which might not be a lot to them), show them what they can gain. Show them the profitability of treating customers well by giving the good publishers a chance. Also, don't underestimate the innovation of indie games.
Your question contains a logical paradox - if an answer is given in any number, the truth is there were no principles to begin with.
It's not a logical paradox. The question implies the consideration of what it means to have principles, which is part of the difficulty of this whole situation. You are simply indicating which decision you had made instead of leaving the consideration open as the point of the question. The consideration is, is it possible to have principles and yet fail at them? You answer appears to be "no", and of course that's the answer we all want.
But the answer will depend upon whether you believe there is a distinction between "having integrity" and "having principles". "Integrity" means that you have principles and that you succeed at upholding them. If you have principles, of course you want to have the integrity to uphold them. But if you fail, is failing to uphold principles (i.e. integrity) the same as lacking the values and beliefs (i.e. the principles themselves)?
This is an old argument. We of course feel obligated to blame people for their failure, but what about times when you are torn between two principles and must uphold them both, but can't? For example, take the story of Agamemnon and Iphegenia, or the story of Abraham and Isaac. For the first you must either uphold your principles as a father and not slay your child or uphold your principles as a king and patriot and save your kingdom. For the second, it's much the same: you must be pious to God and you must also be a protective parent. You can succeed at one, but that necessitates a failure of the other. The fact is that you *did* fail, so does that mean you lack integrity or principles? The point of this is to honestly consider the subject of having principles without oversimplifying how it must be made manifest in practice.
In the case of the patent issue, there seems to be less of a contradiction of principles, but the considerations remain the same. And at the end of the day, it's easy to judge others for what you don't have to live with. It's up to him to decide for himself what he's willing to live with and which is truly doing less harm and greater good. Honestly, I want to agree that you either have full integrity or you don't have principles at all (we all want to), but then another side of me remembers that there were many men in history who genuinely upheld to their beliefs and values, and yet for them to uphold their principles meant that they burned witches and heretics at the stake. Such things were only possible when people detach principles from the practice of implementing them (e.g. spread the message of love at all costs, even if it means burning heretics, etc.). If the patent is actually almost worthless anyway (as many are), and the guy loses his job and now he can't take care of his family, was more harm done than good? Isn't the greater good the point of many principles? For any controversial subject, there are almost always other considerations we forget.
In all cases like this, there is one question that needs to be answered first with absolute clarity before you can decide what to do next. The question is, "How much is your integrity worth to you?"
There are tons of secondary questions that make it harder to come to a decision...
1. How *much* are you willing to risk to lose for the sake of your principles, and perhaps justifiably so?
2. How *much* are you not willing to risk?
3. Is it self-centered to only consider your own sacrifices, or does morality truly mandate your actions toward a greater good?
4. Could this become a non-issue if you could persuade them to do otherwise?
...but if you haven't first decided how much your integrity is worth to you, then you have no hope of answering the secondary questions without ambivalence or without lack of motivation for action. If you are unswerving in your integrity, you'll fight this even if it's technically out of your hands. But if you're like many people, you'll compromise to some degree, and fight up until the point to where it is not worth it for you. No one else can answer for you what you are willing to live with. Not even lawyers can help you with that part.
This seems like another example of political misdirection. Many people that want to become professional musicians have such a difficult time getting a record deal that they will sign anything. Record companies know this, and so you either accept their terms or you don't get a record deal. They know that there are thousands of others just like you that would sign the contract. So, they basically make you sign away your rights to the music. They own the music you wrote, not you.
I believe many of us have heard of the example where John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself, because "The Old Man Down The Road" sounds so much like his songs "Run Through The Jungle" and "Green River" during his Creedence Clearwater Revival years. Obviously, if you can be sued for making songs that sound like songs you previously wrote yourself, then obviously the cry for compensating musicians in this case is a red herring. Granted, this is Europe rather than the USA, but the political motivations are the same on both sides of the pond and the industry is pushing for international standardization for copyright laws. The real reason they want to extend copyright is so that the record labels can squeeze more money out of classic songs.
There are two general ways to make money off of software: you either require other people to pay for the privilege of using and benefiting from the use of the software, or you make money by using the software yourself. No one would ever pay to use software unless the actual use of that software benefited them (i.e. financially). I have to explain this to management and sales people all the time because they are suspicious of why anyone would want to create OSS unless there was a payoff, which in many cases is to simply allow a tool to solve a problem. Problem-solving can translate into money. Writing your own stock analysis software is one example where someone may benefit financially without selling the software.
If, however, you yourself can't benefit financially from merely using the software, then you'll have to charge people somehow. How you do that will depend on what your software does. Does the program download specialized data for some advanced features? Just because the source is free doesn't mean every possible data-source has to be. Does the software allow plug-ins? Give all the essentials as open-source so that most people find it useful, but make proprietary plug-ins that only the big companies that need really advanced features would care about.
Also, why is it that people have remote controls for their car stereo when both the stereo and the remote is one arm's length away? Because, apparently, people are willing to pay for even the most miniscule of added convenience. If they want a set of fancy wizards for something they could have easily done themselves if they RTFM, charge for it.
Buyers want selection, convenience, control over what they buy, and a low price. UMG will find a way to fail to give them at least two of these. This experiment will last several months, just long enough for some people to finally hear about it, before the plug is pulled. For those who actually did hear about it, they had to register away their life's biography and every account number they have just so that they can get a crappy selection of music where the song they were *actually* looking for they could just have easily found on any P2P client. UMG will smugly declare themselves victorious, and they will continue to lose money no matter what they believe. Why? Because they just don't get it.
Allow me to offer the clue-bat: narrow it down to cheap and convenient. DRM isn't even really about freedom for the average joe, they just don't like being inconvenienced by it. Has anyone thought of maybe kiosks offering custom-burned CD's in Walmart for pennies a song? What about pre-paid cards for music you could pick up at your local store so you don't have to worry about privacy and identity theft concerns? Seriously people, business could easily get creative if they pulled their heads out of the sand. It's like any other market, adapt or die. The music industry isn't any different.
Typical short-sighted management only thinks in terms of what other short-sighted managers would do. They know that if they had a software company, they would use all their experience from their weekly readings of Joe Blow Manager Magazine or whatever to sell software the same way Microsoft does. They perceive all that as "business reality". Ironically, they trust adversarial behavior towards them such as attempts at vendor lock-in and one-sided licenses, because it is what they know. It sounds like normal "serious" business. So speak in "business reality" terms that they'll relate to. Turn perception upside down.
For example, there are two ways to make money from software, by selling it or by using it. Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Linux is used by a greater number of important companies because of the utility of better "quality control and customization" and greater "ROI". Now point your boss to the Top 500 List and then go to the statistics menu and sort by Operating System. Now show him how 69% of all the world's top supercomputers run Linux and how Windows only has 2 computers (0.4%) on the list. Apparently, Windows is completely inappropriate for high-end computing, and is only useful as a low-end platform for office productivity tools. From here you can point them to countless stastics of Apache's dominance of the web server market, how Google is a Linux shop, IBM is a Linux shop, the movie industry is basically standardized on Linux, etc.
Here we go again, sweeping statements due to ignorant political bias.
Here's an idea: Solar-powered electrolysis for hydrogen.
There. Do the math for ER/EI. We're already doing it. It already works. Now remove the "always is and always will be" from your statement. The energy problem you mentioned doesn't apply to the fuel side. There is only economic concern for the infrastructure of semi-backwards-compatible solutions, where instead people need to get over the pipe dream that the reliance of oil for internal combustion engines is somehow sustainable.
I would think sunlight would be pretty cheap to "produce", and considering the potential energy from oil comes from ancient plants that stored energy from the sun... We also have hordes of technology for filtering and purifying water cheaply, that again could be almost cost-free if solar energy is utilized. I don't think people really grasp how much spacial real estate is wasted that could be used for solar technology (e.g. roofs of large commercial buildings, etc.). Sooner or later we'll have little choice but to switch to new engine technology, it's just that people gripe about it being sooner rather than later. Once the initial costs are out of the way, the savings are permanently several orders of magnitude better. The problem is that (as usual) people only care about the short term costs, not the long term costs. (Save $1 today so that you can pay $3 tomorrow and $5 the next. But at least you saved a buck today, right?!)
FACT: Oil is inevitably *guaranteed* to be cost prohibitive in the future. It's only a matter of when. I think I'll try to stop posting on this subject anymore, because if I wait long enough, all this bickering will be a moot point.
I think it's pretty safe to say that Linux users understand the Windows demographic because of its ubiquity (we all use it sometime), but the reverse is not true (most never tried Linux, others didn't stick with it long enough). You have demonstrated this lack of understanding right now.
I am posting this comment FROM LINUX (or rather, from Firefox on Linux). It is my MAIN OS, and it's been that way since 1999. I dual boot into Windows 98 for some old games I have, which should tell you how often I use Windows for my own use. Back in '99, a couple of my friends had already started to switch to Linux which influenced me as well (plus I was trying to run the old 3D program Moonlight Creator/Atelier which ran on Linux). Notice how Linux users often are born out of exposure to other Linux users? Linux users aren't rare nor are they isolated exceptions to the rule, only Linux commercial sales figures make it seem that way.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who hardly know anything other than Windows just can't understand why other OS's are compelling. Computers aside, there is a demographic of people that are do-it-yourselfers. They like learning. They like control over the products they use. They like their freedom. They like feeling they can trust those who make the product and that the product itself isn't purposedly designed to monitor them or get in their way of work and play. They aren't timid towards technology. These type of people are not rare, and it's not like you haven't met someone like this. These are the types of people that run Linux, open source BSD Unices, etc.
If you take offense that people are cynical towards Windows sales figures, I agree that people need to care more about truth than knee-jerk reaction. Unfortunately, most retorts motivated by the need for retribution miss their mark frankly because most Windows people really don't understand anything about the libre/open-source software community and the software they use.
I guess it depends on what the story is about, how well it's cast, and if character development actually exists at all, unlike the prequels. The original trilogy was great because of how much it really felt like you were part of a world never seen before, but more so that the characters were memorable. Han and Leia had chemistry. Anakin and Padme, not so much. Etc.
But at the same time, this is a good opportunity to show some of the back story that didn't get shown in the movies. I'd be interested in Mara Jade's story, or prior to Darth Bane when there was more than two Sith at a time, or the bounty hunters, etc. (But none of that Jedi twin crap...). Honestly, before Episode 1 came out, I was hoping they would have slews of Sith and Jedi fighting, so it was kind of a bummer when all we got was like 5 minutes of Darth Maul before he got his ass kicked.
Biofuels are useful because of the economic benefits of fuels mostly compatible with current engines. It's the first step: renewable energy rather than non-renewable. But we're not meant to stay with biofuels. Compared with other pieces of the alternative fuel puzzle, it's one of the most expensive. It's only meant to subsidize oil consumption for now. The next step is cheaper, enviro-freindly, economical, renewable energy *sources*.
In regards to fuel, there is a practical difference between an energy *source* and an energy *carrier*. (In general physics, it's all just energy transfer. But this is in practical terms, not theoretical.) There are only a handful of what we might consider energy *sources*: solar, nuclear, geothermal, wind, etc. Energy *carriers* would be: hydrogen, electricity, compressed air, etc. Biofuels are somewhere in between depending on how it's made. The difference is that with sources, we don't really expend very much energy to get a net gain of energy. Especially with solar (which is now cheaper and 40% efficient compared to past solar tech) we simply soak up the sun and use the energy. Biofuels are basically carriers of solar energy, just like oil. If we can make it with little effort, it's more of a source. If we consume a lot of oil, coal, etc. to make it, then it's more of a carrier. Hydrogen is made with electrolysis, which spends electrical energy (e.g. from the sun or another source), and you get the energy back using the fuel cell in your car that reverses the process to output eletricity, so hydrogen is also carrier (electricity could be seen as a carrier as well, since we are ultimately concerned with kinetic energy for motion).
To make a long story short, biofuel technology is meant for backwards compatibility until cars are designed to run on something else. The future will be energy sources that are practically free or will be very cheap in the long run once the tech becomes more widely used (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.).
Linden Labs chose the familiar C/C++ style syntax to make things comfortable for the greatest majority of programmers. But scripting is a high-level task, so in some cases it is more practical to use some features of more dynamic languages. There is nothing exotic about a "list" (i.e. dynamic heterogenous arrays). Quite a few languages have it, and Python in particular actually calls their version a list and is also enclosed in brackets too. At the *high-level*, there is nothing an array offers over a list, although arrays have been around longer in lower level languages and will of course run faster.
But I definitely agree about the "bastard child" part. LSL seems to have made a laundry list of requirements and then plucked the features from other languages without making it all coherent. It tries to look like a traditional static language like C, but then adds dynamic-language features without having a clean way to manage them. Their "list" isn't very flexible compared to real languages that have them, string manipulation is a PITA, and retrieving data with XMLRPC seems to be the best way to actually store any data. Worst of all, the scripts don't always react to stimulus in a timely manner or at all. It's sometimes hard to tell whether the script is buggy, the function has been disabled by LL, or it just decided not to work, try again in 30 seconds.
...the frog has been preserved for millions of years, another 50 isn't going to make a difference. The scientific community could just wait for the owner to die, then they can get the amber and drill anyway.
I hate it when people make foolish claims like this. NO, ads are not inaccurate "by definition". People, quit using phrases like "by definition" and "literally" etc. with such carelessness. If ads are inaccurate, it is a *tendency* and nothing more. Inaccuracy is an accidental property, not essential property. For example, if I show a commercial saying, "Battle-of-The-Bands event at City Expo Center, 9:00pm on Saturday. Tickets for $20"...there is nothing inaccurate or deceitful about that. Simply because (especially in America) businesses believe that profit is justification for any action, especially immoral ones that will convince customers to buy, doesn't mean that advertising *must* be inherently designed to misinform. That is a cultural practice due to a (non)value system that doesn't even understand why ethics and morality are worthwhile.
They already know that everyone is locked-in to their proprietary Office formats. This XML "standard" is not created as a real product that Microsoft hopes to promote. That would be a conflict of interest. Instead, they want to make sure that it is a gigantic convoluted spec that no one can implement. It's designed as a distraction. They want the spec to leave you with a feeling of disgust for open XML formats because: 1. You'll go back to your works-good-enough-for-me Office formats you've already been using (e.g. Word Doc). 2. If you're the typical uneducated business person, you'll get confused between OOXML and ODF and falsely believe that ODF is that bloated mess of a spec you believe you heard about from your fresh-out-of-high-school IT guy. Well he knows about computers, so that ODF (OOXML? Open Office XML? XML? Open Document?) thing must be a bad idea.
Not many people know much about Open Office, even many supposed "techs" in many businesses (at least in the U.S.). Microsoft wants to take advantage of their greater mind-share to control public opinion through their usual tactics of FUD and confusion. They want to make sure that the reputation among developers of XML as being a bloated exchange medium will work in their favor by amplifying that perception thereby killing off ODF and any chance of the industry adopting a common format.
If they were going to add extras, honestly I would like to have the music videos come with the CD. Mostly because it's been years since I've seen the music video to a song I liked. So-called "Music" Television (MTV) doesn't actually have music videos anymore and neither does "Video" Hits 1 (VH1). They're basically teen pop culture TV nowadays and "reality" shows. If you'll notice, people almost treat the music video as if it is part of the song itself, and a good video sometimes tends to make a song famous and not the other way around. I would like to keep a copy of the videos on CD for nostalgic reasons. I know they've already done this to some degree, I would just like them to be more consistent.
Oh yeah, and also versions of the song greater than 320 Kb/s. Compressed formats like MP3 actually don't sound that great. CD quality is clear but harsh and cold compared to an analog recording or digital recording at a higher bitrate. It doesn't make sense to record using high-quality reverb and condenser mics if it just gets reduced in quality in the final mix. We've got compressibility and portability, now let's try making quality the next advancement in audio.
Despite starting out with the usual languages of my generation, such as Basic, Pascal, C, and C++, I eventually chose Python as the jack-of-all-trades for my programming for the reason you mentioned. It is human-friendly rather than focusing on saving clock cycles, and I wanted to be able to work from one language for almost everything (it has bindings for almost everything). It's kind of a strange coincidence that Scheme was Slashdotted today, as I was browsing websites for learning LISP or Scheme as well. Maybe it's just intuition, but my gut feeling is that the simplicity of LISP/Scheme will help me re-think programming, as they say. My end goal is to improve my Python programming, and perhaps use Bigloo Scheme to write compiled programs for the JVM,.NET, and C that I will use in coordination with Python.
But I would be careful about being too quick to judge Scheme as a human-unfriendly language. There are lots of parentheses to type, but to me that doesn't hurt the readability because its uniformity maintains the same "flow" throughout the program. It's all just lists using parentheses. Normally, I would hate parentheses being a Python programmer, but at least Scheme doesn't require semicolons and tons of other types of brackets and dots and slashes, and so the elegance of parentheses-only makes up for the extra typing. From what I've seen so far, readability is more a matter of knowing the names of the procedure calls and keywords, so it has more to do with being unfamiliar with the language.
By the way, you must be thinking of a different language than Python. Python doesn't require a $ as a prefix for anything at all. Global variables are either already global or you use the "global" keyword. Perl uses a $ in front of variables, but if you want to avoid "straining your brain with the grammar side" and use a simple and readable language, I sincerely hope you aren't thinking of Perl. Not that it's a bad language, but readability is a deliberate effort in Perl that isn't really encouraged by the syntax itself.
It's easy to have faith in things we revere but don't understand.
It saddens me to see how restricted and small-minded we've become in our day in age. But it's not Creationists that I'm referring to. Nor is it the "scientific thinkers". It's all of us in the West, because we believe that these are the only two choices. We assert that you either believe that the Scientific Method is the only way to knowledge, or that you believe in religion with its dogmas and so-called "faith". Not so.
In the end, neither religion nor science has ultimately proved itself. In both cases, we take faith in the side we believe. For example, many so-called scientific thinkers I've met assert that if it's not empirical, it's unproven, and there are no exceptions. Really? Then empirically prove that this must be true: "if it's not empirical, it's unproven". You can't prove Empiricism with Empiricism. Think about it. The material world doesn't interpret for you, you do.
Don't misunderstand me, I believe in Evolution, and I believe the Chrisitian position is a deluded state of denial. But I'm not ignorant of how Western thought came about. "Science" is a special case of thinking. Don't get started on objective vs. subjective, logic, etc. I've heard it all before and understand it quite well. All that is missing the point if you don't understand the roots of Western thought throughout history. Go study the roots of mathematics, philosophy, and science from India, China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Study Pythagoras, Archimedes, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, through to Kant, Leibniz, Galileo and Newton, Popper, Kuhn, Einstein, Heidegger, Derrida, etc. etc. Once you've done that, by understanding more than just a superficial faith in a Western triumph in thinking, then you'd understand what I'm talking about.
Contrary to what was said before, you can take these positions (or more):
1. Don't know.
2. Don't know yet.
3. Can't know. (but not because of "meant to" or "meant not to" sort of thinking, because it's not possible)
4. Know.
Nothing about number 3 implies that you *must* then use faith. If you do, fine. It's a choice. Or you could choose to fall into number 1 permanently. It's up to you. But we need to stop deluding ourselves that number 3 doesn't exist. Go study hermeneutics and its relation to epistemology. Theoretical physicists can come up with a "theory of everything" 'til they're blue in the face, but the question remains, well then what is the grounding of *that* that makes it true? Is it turtles all the way down? If the laws are real, then they're *here* are they not? Can you pour me a glass of E=MC2 particles into a glass, or isn't the laws just a mental construct? Or are they in the "heavens" (a la Platonic, Christian-like thought), where they are somehow more "real" than the material world they dictate?
We can never see the world as if our head were cut off. We will always be locked in a world of interpretation and meaning. You can never understand without doing the understanding. Looking "behind" the material world has nothing to do with the world, it's about *you*. I love Slashdot, but perhaps I'm talking to the wrong crowd about this. The true spirit of science is to be open to *truth*, not to merely accept what is acceptable to scientific method and deny that there are any possible limitations of such method. Because then, you wouldn't be any different than a religious zealot of the opposing side. Think about it. Acting this way is like programming only in Javascript and saying you know all there is to know about computer science. Both sides need to remember what it is like to be open minded.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle
The FSF's stance is controversial (as exemplified by the GPL 3) because it's about freedom, which for all of human history has been hardly understood.
Licenses like BSD/MIT have a view of freedom that is more like anarchy: the "do anything you want" style of so-called freedom (but at least give credit to who wrote the code). This stance doesn't actually create freedom because "anything you want to do" can also include taking freedom away from others. BSD people used to argue that you would still have freedom, only it's with the old code before the proprietary fork, etc. But DRM and other methods of preventing you from modifying and running software is not protected by BSD licensing. So, it is even more true today that BSD-like licensing in actuality has little to do with freedom and more to do with technological research without regard to the sustained openness that made studying that code possible.
Freedom must be preserved and encouraged in order to exist! It is not a spontaneous choice that can be made after neglecting its preservation. Once freedom is gone, once official mechanisms are in place to restrict you, you can't simply make a choice to be free again. When I think of the FSF, I believe they understand freedom as many others have realized throughout history...
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." - Clarence Darrow
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." -Goethe
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy
...while the FSF would probably characterize false freedom as this:
"After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement." - Norman Thomas
The more we are tempted by money to deprive others of freedom, the less freedom we all have in the end, and the less it's worth living in such a society even if you're rich. Don't worry about people crying about loss of profitability, etc. History has always shown that there will always be clever people that will find some way to make money, whether people are free or in chains.
Yes, software could definitely use some trimming away of the cruft. But I don't agree with the idea that we should probably just go back to assembler, etc. Honestly, I think the new generation of programming languages have got The Right Idea, because the emphasis is shifting towards telling the computer what to do, and less and less about how to do it.
I believe the real "The Future of Computing" will happen when we move to clock-less architectures. The current problem is that high clock speeds suck up more power and generate more heat. "Efficiency" is currently understood in terms of cpu cycles. It will be a whole different ballgame between programming languages when that is no longer
the case.
No one using Python is "waiting for a faster CPU". Languages like Python and Ruby do have productivity gains that are worth whatever overhead they have.
If the only good thing going for such languages is that they are "high-level", and higher level languages must be slow and clunky (like BASIC, which doesn't belong in the same category), then I could see your point. However:
1. Languages like Python gained popularity as a glue language. 90% of it is running C/C++ for the heavy lifting anyway.
2. Such languages are also prototyping languages. A programmer who uses these languages as the prototype can still translate to C/C++ later, and they'll be much more productive because these languages allow you to more freely experiment with your working design. There's less reason to fear starting over if necessary. Simply taking an elitist view that you begin and end with C isn't going to make you more productive, nor does it guarantee your program to be faster if it ends up with a bad design because you already had 5000 lines of code (instead of 500 lines) written that you'd hate to just throw away.
3. Face it, there are varying skill-levels for programmers of all languages. Optimized standard libraries and built-in higher-level datatypes are tried and tested code within the language that works. Leveraging this code reduces the chance that a newbie will try to re-invent a higher-level data structure, and do it wrong, which would be slower than simply using an optimized one already available.
4. "Higher-level" doesn't mean "slow". JIT compilers are getting to the point where it's more efficient to let the compiler or interpreter handle garbage collection than doing it yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess for now (until we can build real biospheres in space) silkworms aren't really renewable because you'd still have to transport their food, which isn't renewable. Perhaps the most efficient thing to do is to breed them ahead of time rather than letting them breed in space, grind them up to make them more compact, then freeze them. It's not like astronauts will complain that freezing them will ruin their freshness. Since it's a generic food base kind of like soy products, you can make anything out of it. Instead of the Silk soymilk, it's more like Soylent Silk.
With a division of labor, the idea of the manager is to strictly keep to "managing people", right? What does that actually mean in real practice? If the techies are the ones with all the actual skill to implement technology, what happens when techs have a technological debate? If a team is designing a complex system and there is a difference of opinion between two or more choices with subtle but far-reaching consequences, in the real world, is the manager going to be hands-off and stick with the "people side" only?
I don't know about anyone else, but that's not how I've ever seen it happen. The manager must make a decision about the design of the technology. How is he/she to decide? Based on which developer is a snappier dresser, or which one kisses ass more? :-) The business world needs to get rid of this obsolete idea of a "manager" who mechanistically manages human "resources". We need to be more honest about human interaction. What most businesses need are LEADERS. You can't lead if you're not in front. You want quality code from your employees? Then can YOU recognize the difference between bad and good code? In practice, good managers in IT are technically proficient AND have people skills. It's out of necessity, businesses really don't have a choice unless they want to keep burying their heads in the sand and sticking with merely "managing" their employees who they have no idea what those employees actually do.
Recently Slashdot linked to an article listing the Gamer's Bill of Rights.
This list was created by a publisher called Stardock, best known for Galactic Civilizations and Sins Of A Solar Empire. The list makes tons of sense, and it's doubtful if the PC gaming market will survive if publishers don't heed the wisdom of its suggestions. I never even heard of this publisher before Gal. Civ., but now I'm becoming a fan due to their benevolent attitude toward gamers. Boycotting clueless publishers isn't enough because there will always be people who will buy the game anyway. Instead of showing publishers what they can lose (which might not be a lot to them), show them what they can gain. Show them the profitability of treating customers well by giving the good publishers a chance. Also, don't underestimate the innovation of indie games.
Your question contains a logical paradox - if an answer is given in any number, the truth is there were no principles to begin with.
It's not a logical paradox. The question implies the consideration of what it means to have principles, which is part of the difficulty of this whole situation. You are simply indicating which decision you had made instead of leaving the consideration open as the point of the question. The consideration is, is it possible to have principles and yet fail at them? You answer appears to be "no", and of course that's the answer we all want.
But the answer will depend upon whether you believe there is a distinction between "having integrity" and "having principles". "Integrity" means that you have principles and that you succeed at upholding them. If you have principles, of course you want to have the integrity to uphold them. But if you fail, is failing to uphold principles (i.e. integrity) the same as lacking the values and beliefs (i.e. the principles themselves)?
This is an old argument. We of course feel obligated to blame people for their failure, but what about times when you are torn between two principles and must uphold them both, but can't? For example, take the story of Agamemnon and Iphegenia, or the story of Abraham and Isaac. For the first you must either uphold your principles as a father and not slay your child or uphold your principles as a king and patriot and save your kingdom. For the second, it's much the same: you must be pious to God and you must also be a protective parent. You can succeed at one, but that necessitates a failure of the other. The fact is that you *did* fail, so does that mean you lack integrity or principles? The point of this is to honestly consider the subject of having principles without oversimplifying how it must be made manifest in practice.
In the case of the patent issue, there seems to be less of a contradiction of principles, but the considerations remain the same. And at the end of the day, it's easy to judge others for what you don't have to live with. It's up to him to decide for himself what he's willing to live with and which is truly doing less harm and greater good. Honestly, I want to agree that you either have full integrity or you don't have principles at all (we all want to), but then another side of me remembers that there were many men in history who genuinely upheld to their beliefs and values, and yet for them to uphold their principles meant that they burned witches and heretics at the stake. Such things were only possible when people detach principles from the practice of implementing them (e.g. spread the message of love at all costs, even if it means burning heretics, etc.). If the patent is actually almost worthless anyway (as many are), and the guy loses his job and now he can't take care of his family, was more harm done than good? Isn't the greater good the point of many principles? For any controversial subject, there are almost always other considerations we forget.
In all cases like this, there is one question that needs to be answered first with absolute clarity before you can decide what to do next. The question is, "How much is your integrity worth to you?"
...but if you haven't first decided how much your integrity is worth to you, then you have no hope of answering the secondary questions without ambivalence or without lack of motivation for action. If you are unswerving in your integrity, you'll fight this even if it's technically out of your hands. But if you're like many people, you'll compromise to some degree, and fight up until the point to where it is not worth it for you. No one else can answer for you what you are willing to live with. Not even lawyers can help you with that part.
There are tons of secondary questions that make it harder to come to a decision...
1. How *much* are you willing to risk to lose for the sake of your principles, and perhaps justifiably so?
2. How *much* are you not willing to risk?
3. Is it self-centered to only consider your own sacrifices, or does morality truly mandate your actions toward a greater good?
4. Could this become a non-issue if you could persuade them to do otherwise?
Pair programming? ;-)
This seems like another example of political misdirection. Many people that want to become professional musicians have such a difficult time getting a record deal that they will sign anything. Record companies know this, and so you either accept their terms or you don't get a record deal. They know that there are thousands of others just like you that would sign the contract. So, they basically make you sign away your rights to the music. They own the music you wrote, not you.
I believe many of us have heard of the example where John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself, because "The Old Man Down The Road" sounds so much like his songs "Run Through The Jungle" and "Green River" during his Creedence Clearwater Revival years. Obviously, if you can be sued for making songs that sound like songs you previously wrote yourself, then obviously the cry for compensating musicians in this case is a red herring. Granted, this is Europe rather than the USA, but the political motivations are the same on both sides of the pond and the industry is pushing for international standardization for copyright laws. The real reason they want to extend copyright is so that the record labels can squeeze more money out of classic songs.
There are two general ways to make money off of software: you either require other people to pay for the privilege of using and benefiting from the use of the software, or you make money by using the software yourself. No one would ever pay to use software unless the actual use of that software benefited them (i.e. financially). I have to explain this to management and sales people all the time because they are suspicious of why anyone would want to create OSS unless there was a payoff, which in many cases is to simply allow a tool to solve a problem. Problem-solving can translate into money. Writing your own stock analysis software is one example where someone may benefit financially without selling the software.
If, however, you yourself can't benefit financially from merely using the software, then you'll have to charge people somehow. How you do that will depend on what your software does. Does the program download specialized data for some advanced features? Just because the source is free doesn't mean every possible data-source has to be. Does the software allow plug-ins? Give all the essentials as open-source so that most people find it useful, but make proprietary plug-ins that only the big companies that need really advanced features would care about.
Also, why is it that people have remote controls for their car stereo when both the stereo and the remote is one arm's length away? Because, apparently, people are willing to pay for even the most miniscule of added convenience. If they want a set of fancy wizards for something they could have easily done themselves if they RTFM, charge for it.
Buyers want selection, convenience, control over what they buy, and a low price. UMG will find a way to fail to give them at least two of these. This experiment will last several months, just long enough for some people to finally hear about it, before the plug is pulled. For those who actually did hear about it, they had to register away their life's biography and every account number they have just so that they can get a crappy selection of music where the song they were *actually* looking for they could just have easily found on any P2P client. UMG will smugly declare themselves victorious, and they will continue to lose money no matter what they believe. Why? Because they just don't get it.
Allow me to offer the clue-bat: narrow it down to cheap and convenient. DRM isn't even really about freedom for the average joe, they just don't like being inconvenienced by it. Has anyone thought of maybe kiosks offering custom-burned CD's in Walmart for pennies a song? What about pre-paid cards for music you could pick up at your local store so you don't have to worry about privacy and identity theft concerns? Seriously people, business could easily get creative if they pulled their heads out of the sand. It's like any other market, adapt or die. The music industry isn't any different.
Typical short-sighted management only thinks in terms of what other short-sighted managers would do. They know that if they had a software company, they would use all their experience from their weekly readings of Joe Blow Manager Magazine or whatever to sell software the same way Microsoft does. They perceive all that as "business reality". Ironically, they trust adversarial behavior towards them such as attempts at vendor lock-in and one-sided licenses, because it is what they know. It sounds like normal "serious" business. So speak in "business reality" terms that they'll relate to. Turn perception upside down.
For example, there are two ways to make money from software, by selling it or by using it. Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Linux is used by a greater number of important companies because of the utility of better "quality control and customization" and greater "ROI". Now point your boss to the Top 500 List and then go to the statistics menu and sort by Operating System. Now show him how 69% of all the world's top supercomputers run Linux and how Windows only has 2 computers (0.4%) on the list. Apparently, Windows is completely inappropriate for high-end computing, and is only useful as a low-end platform for office productivity tools. From here you can point them to countless stastics of Apache's dominance of the web server market, how Google is a Linux shop, IBM is a Linux shop, the movie industry is basically standardized on Linux, etc.
Here we go again, sweeping statements due to ignorant political bias.
Here's an idea: Solar-powered electrolysis for hydrogen.
There. Do the math for ER/EI. We're already doing it. It already works. Now remove the "always is and always will be" from your statement. The energy problem you mentioned doesn't apply to the fuel side. There is only economic concern for the infrastructure of semi-backwards-compatible solutions, where instead people need to get over the pipe dream that the reliance of oil for internal combustion engines is somehow sustainable.
I would think sunlight would be pretty cheap to "produce", and considering the potential energy from oil comes from ancient plants that stored energy from the sun... We also have hordes of technology for filtering and purifying water cheaply, that again could be almost cost-free if solar energy is utilized. I don't think people really grasp how much spacial real estate is wasted that could be used for solar technology (e.g. roofs of large commercial buildings, etc.). Sooner or later we'll have little choice but to switch to new engine technology, it's just that people gripe about it being sooner rather than later. Once the initial costs are out of the way, the savings are permanently several orders of magnitude better. The problem is that (as usual) people only care about the short term costs, not the long term costs. (Save $1 today so that you can pay $3 tomorrow and $5 the next. But at least you saved a buck today, right?!)
FACT: Oil is inevitably *guaranteed* to be cost prohibitive in the future. It's only a matter of when. I think I'll try to stop posting on this subject anymore, because if I wait long enough, all this bickering will be a moot point.
I think it's pretty safe to say that Linux users understand the Windows demographic because of its ubiquity (we all use it sometime), but the reverse is not true (most never tried Linux, others didn't stick with it long enough). You have demonstrated this lack of understanding right now.
I am posting this comment FROM LINUX (or rather, from Firefox on Linux). It is my MAIN OS, and it's been that way since 1999. I dual boot into Windows 98 for some old games I have, which should tell you how often I use Windows for my own use. Back in '99, a couple of my friends had already started to switch to Linux which influenced me as well (plus I was trying to run the old 3D program Moonlight Creator/Atelier which ran on Linux). Notice how Linux users often are born out of exposure to other Linux users? Linux users aren't rare nor are they isolated exceptions to the rule, only Linux commercial sales figures make it seem that way.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who hardly know anything other than Windows just can't understand why other OS's are compelling. Computers aside, there is a demographic of people that are do-it-yourselfers. They like learning. They like control over the products they use. They like their freedom. They like feeling they can trust those who make the product and that the product itself isn't purposedly designed to monitor them or get in their way of work and play. They aren't timid towards technology. These type of people are not rare, and it's not like you haven't met someone like this. These are the types of people that run Linux, open source BSD Unices, etc.
If you take offense that people are cynical towards Windows sales figures, I agree that people need to care more about truth than knee-jerk reaction. Unfortunately, most retorts motivated by the need for retribution miss their mark frankly because most Windows people really don't understand anything about the libre/open-source software community and the software they use.
I guess it depends on what the story is about, how well it's cast, and if character development actually exists at all, unlike the prequels. The original trilogy was great because of how much it really felt like you were part of a world never seen before, but more so that the characters were memorable. Han and Leia had chemistry. Anakin and Padme, not so much. Etc.
But at the same time, this is a good opportunity to show some of the back story that didn't get shown in the movies. I'd be interested in Mara Jade's story, or prior to Darth Bane when there was more than two Sith at a time, or the bounty hunters, etc. (But none of that Jedi twin crap...). Honestly, before Episode 1 came out, I was hoping they would have slews of Sith and Jedi fighting, so it was kind of a bummer when all we got was like 5 minutes of Darth Maul before he got his ass kicked.
Biofuels are useful because of the economic benefits of fuels mostly compatible with current engines. It's the first step: renewable energy rather than non-renewable. But we're not meant to stay with biofuels. Compared with other pieces of the alternative fuel puzzle, it's one of the most expensive. It's only meant to subsidize oil consumption for now. The next step is cheaper, enviro-freindly, economical, renewable energy *sources*.
In regards to fuel, there is a practical difference between an energy *source* and an energy *carrier*. (In general physics, it's all just energy transfer. But this is in practical terms, not theoretical.) There are only a handful of what we might consider energy *sources*: solar, nuclear, geothermal, wind, etc. Energy *carriers* would be: hydrogen, electricity, compressed air, etc. Biofuels are somewhere in between depending on how it's made. The difference is that with sources, we don't really expend very much energy to get a net gain of energy. Especially with solar (which is now cheaper and 40% efficient compared to past solar tech) we simply soak up the sun and use the energy. Biofuels are basically carriers of solar energy, just like oil. If we can make it with little effort, it's more of a source. If we consume a lot of oil, coal, etc. to make it, then it's more of a carrier. Hydrogen is made with electrolysis, which spends electrical energy (e.g. from the sun or another source), and you get the energy back using the fuel cell in your car that reverses the process to output eletricity, so hydrogen is also carrier (electricity could be seen as a carrier as well, since we are ultimately concerned with kinetic energy for motion).
To make a long story short, biofuel technology is meant for backwards compatibility until cars are designed to run on something else. The future will be energy sources that are practically free or will be very cheap in the long run once the tech becomes more widely used (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.).
Unga Bunga Linux "Wascally Wombat" beta is out...
Linden Labs chose the familiar C/C++ style syntax to make things comfortable for the greatest majority of programmers. But scripting is a high-level task, so in some cases it is more practical to use some features of more dynamic languages. There is nothing exotic about a "list" (i.e. dynamic heterogenous arrays). Quite a few languages have it, and Python in particular actually calls their version a list and is also enclosed in brackets too. At the *high-level*, there is nothing an array offers over a list, although arrays have been around longer in lower level languages and will of course run faster.
But I definitely agree about the "bastard child" part. LSL seems to have made a laundry list of requirements and then plucked the features from other languages without making it all coherent. It tries to look like a traditional static language like C, but then adds dynamic-language features without having a clean way to manage them. Their "list" isn't very flexible compared to real languages that have them, string manipulation is a PITA, and retrieving data with XMLRPC seems to be the best way to actually store any data. Worst of all, the scripts don't always react to stimulus in a timely manner or at all. It's sometimes hard to tell whether the script is buggy, the function has been disabled by LL, or it just decided not to work, try again in 30 seconds.
(...or they could just ask nicely.)
I hate it when people make foolish claims like this. NO, ads are not inaccurate "by definition". People, quit using phrases like "by definition" and "literally" etc. with such carelessness. If ads are inaccurate, it is a *tendency* and nothing more. Inaccuracy is an accidental property, not essential property. For example, if I show a commercial saying, "Battle-of-The-Bands event at City Expo Center, 9:00pm on Saturday. Tickets for $20" ...there is nothing inaccurate or deceitful about that. Simply because (especially in America) businesses believe that profit is justification for any action, especially immoral ones that will convince customers to buy, doesn't mean that advertising *must* be inherently designed to misinform. That is a cultural practice due to a (non)value system that doesn't even understand why ethics and morality are worthwhile.
They already know that everyone is locked-in to their proprietary Office formats. This XML "standard" is not created as a real product that Microsoft hopes to promote. That would be a conflict of interest. Instead, they want to make sure that it is a gigantic convoluted spec that no one can implement. It's designed as a distraction. They want the spec to leave you with a feeling of disgust for open XML formats because:
1. You'll go back to your works-good-enough-for-me Office formats you've already been using (e.g. Word Doc).
2. If you're the typical uneducated business person, you'll get confused between OOXML and ODF and falsely believe that ODF is that bloated mess of a spec you believe you heard about from your fresh-out-of-high-school IT guy. Well he knows about computers, so that ODF (OOXML? Open Office XML? XML? Open Document?) thing must be a bad idea.
Not many people know much about Open Office, even many supposed "techs" in many businesses (at least in the U.S.). Microsoft wants to take advantage of their greater mind-share to control public opinion through their usual tactics of FUD and confusion. They want to make sure that the reputation among developers of XML as being a bloated exchange medium will work in their favor by amplifying that perception thereby killing off ODF and any chance of the industry adopting a common format.
If they were going to add extras, honestly I would like to have the music videos come with the CD. Mostly because it's been years since I've seen the music video to a song I liked. So-called "Music" Television (MTV) doesn't actually have music videos anymore and neither does "Video" Hits 1 (VH1). They're basically teen pop culture TV nowadays and "reality" shows. If you'll notice, people almost treat the music video as if it is part of the song itself, and a good video sometimes tends to make a song famous and not the other way around. I would like to keep a copy of the videos on CD for nostalgic reasons. I know they've already done this to some degree, I would just like them to be more consistent.
Oh yeah, and also versions of the song greater than 320 Kb/s. Compressed formats like MP3 actually don't sound that great. CD quality is clear but harsh and cold compared to an analog recording or digital recording at a higher bitrate. It doesn't make sense to record using high-quality reverb and condenser mics if it just gets reduced in quality in the final mix. We've got compressibility and portability, now let's try making quality the next advancement in audio.
Despite starting out with the usual languages of my generation, such as Basic, Pascal, C, and C++, I eventually chose Python as the jack-of-all-trades for my programming for the reason you mentioned. It is human-friendly rather than focusing on saving clock cycles, and I wanted to be able to work from one language for almost everything (it has bindings for almost everything). It's kind of a strange coincidence that Scheme was Slashdotted today, as I was browsing websites for learning LISP or Scheme as well. Maybe it's just intuition, but my gut feeling is that the simplicity of LISP/Scheme will help me re-think programming, as they say. My end goal is to improve my Python programming, and perhaps use Bigloo Scheme to write compiled programs for the JVM, .NET, and C that I will use in coordination with Python.
But I would be careful about being too quick to judge Scheme as a human-unfriendly language. There are lots of parentheses to type, but to me that doesn't hurt the readability because its uniformity maintains the same "flow" throughout the program. It's all just lists using parentheses. Normally, I would hate parentheses being a Python programmer, but at least Scheme doesn't require semicolons and tons of other types of brackets and dots and slashes, and so the elegance of parentheses-only makes up for the extra typing. From what I've seen so far, readability is more a matter of knowing the names of the procedure calls and keywords, so it has more to do with being unfamiliar with the language.
By the way, you must be thinking of a different language than Python. Python doesn't require a $ as a prefix for anything at all. Global variables are either already global or you use the "global" keyword. Perl uses a $ in front of variables, but if you want to avoid "straining your brain with the grammar side" and use a simple and readable language, I sincerely hope you aren't thinking of Perl. Not that it's a bad language, but readability is a deliberate effort in Perl that isn't really encouraged by the syntax itself.
It's easy to have faith in things we revere but don't understand.
It saddens me to see how restricted and small-minded we've become in our day in age. But it's not Creationists that I'm referring to. Nor is it the "scientific thinkers". It's all of us in the West, because we believe that these are the only two choices. We assert that you either believe that the Scientific Method is the only way to knowledge, or that you believe in religion with its dogmas and so-called "faith". Not so.
In the end, neither religion nor science has ultimately proved itself. In both cases, we take faith in the side we believe. For example, many so-called scientific thinkers I've met assert that if it's not empirical, it's unproven, and there are no exceptions. Really? Then empirically prove that this must be true: "if it's not empirical, it's unproven". You can't prove Empiricism with Empiricism. Think about it. The material world doesn't interpret for you, you do. Don't misunderstand me, I believe in Evolution, and I believe the Chrisitian position is a deluded state of denial. But I'm not ignorant of how Western thought came about. "Science" is a special case of thinking. Don't get started on objective vs. subjective, logic, etc. I've heard it all before and understand it quite well. All that is missing the point if you don't understand the roots of Western thought throughout history. Go study the roots of mathematics, philosophy, and science from India, China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Study Pythagoras, Archimedes, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, through to Kant, Leibniz, Galileo and Newton, Popper, Kuhn, Einstein, Heidegger, Derrida, etc. etc. Once you've done that, by understanding more than just a superficial faith in a Western triumph in thinking, then you'd understand what I'm talking about.
Contrary to what was said before, you can take these positions (or more): 1. Don't know. 2. Don't know yet. 3. Can't know. (but not because of "meant to" or "meant not to" sort of thinking, because it's not possible) 4. Know.
Nothing about number 3 implies that you *must* then use faith. If you do, fine. It's a choice. Or you could choose to fall into number 1 permanently. It's up to you. But we need to stop deluding ourselves that number 3 doesn't exist. Go study hermeneutics and its relation to epistemology. Theoretical physicists can come up with a "theory of everything" 'til they're blue in the face, but the question remains, well then what is the grounding of *that* that makes it true? Is it turtles all the way down? If the laws are real, then they're *here* are they not? Can you pour me a glass of E=MC2 particles into a glass, or isn't the laws just a mental construct? Or are they in the "heavens" (a la Platonic, Christian-like thought), where they are somehow more "real" than the material world they dictate?
We can never see the world as if our head were cut off. We will always be locked in a world of interpretation and meaning. You can never understand without doing the understanding. Looking "behind" the material world has nothing to do with the world, it's about *you*. I love Slashdot, but perhaps I'm talking to the wrong crowd about this. The true spirit of science is to be open to *truth*, not to merely accept what is acceptable to scientific method and deny that there are any possible limitations of such method. Because then, you wouldn't be any different than a religious zealot of the opposing side. Think about it. Acting this way is like programming only in Javascript and saying you know all there is to know about computer science. Both sides need to remember what it is like to be open minded.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle
The FSF's stance is controversial (as exemplified by the GPL 3) because it's about freedom, which for all of human history has been hardly understood.
...while the FSF would probably characterize false freedom as this:
Licenses like BSD/MIT have a view of freedom that is more like anarchy: the "do anything you want" style of so-called freedom (but at least give credit to who wrote the code). This stance doesn't actually create freedom because "anything you want to do" can also include taking freedom away from others. BSD people used to argue that you would still have freedom, only it's with the old code before the proprietary fork, etc. But DRM and other methods of preventing you from modifying and running software is not protected by BSD licensing. So, it is even more true today that BSD-like licensing in actuality has little to do with freedom and more to do with technological research without regard to the sustained openness that made studying that code possible.
Freedom must be preserved and encouraged in order to exist! It is not a spontaneous choice that can be made after neglecting its preservation. Once freedom is gone, once official mechanisms are in place to restrict you, you can't simply make a choice to be free again. When I think of the FSF, I believe they understand freedom as many others have realized throughout history...
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." - Clarence Darrow
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." -Goethe
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy
"After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement." - Norman Thomas
The more we are tempted by money to deprive others of freedom, the less freedom we all have in the end, and the less it's worth living in such a society even if you're rich. Don't worry about people crying about loss of profitability, etc. History has always shown that there will always be clever people that will find some way to make money, whether people are free or in chains.
Yes, software could definitely use some trimming away of the cruft. But I don't agree with the idea that we should probably just go back to assembler, etc. Honestly, I think the new generation of programming languages have got The Right Idea, because the emphasis is shifting towards telling the computer what to do, and less and less about how to do it.
I believe the real "The Future of Computing" will happen when we move to clock-less architectures. The current problem is that high clock speeds suck up more power and generate more heat. "Efficiency" is currently understood in terms of cpu cycles. It will be a whole different ballgame between programming languages when that is no longer the case.
No one using Python is "waiting for a faster CPU". Languages like Python and Ruby do have productivity gains that are worth whatever overhead they have.
If the only good thing going for such languages is that they are "high-level", and higher level languages must be slow and clunky (like BASIC, which doesn't belong in the same category), then I could see your point. However:
1. Languages like Python gained popularity as a glue language. 90% of it is running C/C++ for the heavy lifting anyway.
2. Such languages are also prototyping languages. A programmer who uses these languages as the prototype can still translate to C/C++ later, and they'll be much more productive because these languages allow you to more freely experiment with your working design. There's less reason to fear starting over if necessary. Simply taking an elitist view that you begin and end with C isn't going to make you more productive, nor does it guarantee your program to be faster if it ends up with a bad design because you already had 5000 lines of code (instead of 500 lines) written that you'd hate to just throw away.
3. Face it, there are varying skill-levels for programmers of all languages. Optimized standard libraries and built-in higher-level datatypes are tried and tested code within the language that works. Leveraging this code reduces the chance that a newbie will try to re-invent a higher-level data structure, and do it wrong, which would be slower than simply using an optimized one already available.
4. "Higher-level" doesn't mean "slow". JIT compilers are getting to the point where it's more efficient to let the compiler or interpreter handle garbage collection than doing it yourself.