You make an assumption here that music and videos have a value universal to everyone. Any given movie at $10 will be priced just right for some, too much for others, and by yet another group be considered a bargain. Two of these three groups will buy the movie, one of them won't. The same goes for music. Britney Spears tracks aren't worth $0.05 to me (except for maybe Toxic, because the video was well...if you've seen it, you know), but clearly they're worth it to many people. In a perfect market these prices would adjust perfectly to their consensus value. Jobs' argument with music that he is trying to extend to movies is that consumers just want a simple pricing system that is fairly inexpensive. There is definitely some value in this simplicity as well. If I'm thinking about buying a song/movie I don't even have to go on-line to decide whether I will, I know the price, if I"m willing to pay it I go to my computer and pay it, if not, I just stay on the couch. That being said, I think that a very simple tiered system might be reasonable for films, because I think there is a wider variability in things like quality and length (I'm definitely willing to pay more for a long period of entertainment like LOTR than I am for a short one).
I get DSL and a landline for $54/month in San Francisco with SBC. Comcast would charge me $58/month for just Internet access (after 3 months at $19.99/month). I don't have much use for the landline, but it does provide some utility if I lose my cell phone or the network is experiencing problems
Certainly solving the world's problems is a better idea, its also much harder. Pragmatically, if your goal is preservation of the species, the easiest way to increase the chances is to get some of us off this rock. As to over population, its not going to be a problem. The world population is forecast to peak in the next fifty years. Population is already falling in many European countries and Japan (or will be shortly), and if it weren't for immigration, the population of the US would be declining as well. The challenge in a century may not be over, but under, population. One thing that could be an issue is resource competition. Will there be enough food for us to survive? Yes. As India and China grow richer the competition for resources that make consumer goods will increase, causing prices of many items to rise. Ironically the low-cost production the West has been tapping for the last couple of decades will eventually lead to increasing prices.
So now kids will leave their phone somewhere and just go without it. Then if they really get into trouble they'll be without a phone. Also, does this work if the phone is off? If not, I'd just always claim I was going to the movies, go the direction of the theater, turn off the phone and then do whatever I wanted for five hours, cause I saw two shows.:-)
Justin
I view this much like road access. I pay for the road via my taxes and I can then get in my car and drive where I please. In certain exceptional cases I'll pay a bit more to go somewhere (toll road), but for the most part I'm free to drive as I wish. If the access companies want to charge ME for something that actually costs them money, then fine. Instead they're saying something like, "We'll charge Wal-Mart for the privilege of allowing tax payers the ability to get to Wal-Mart's store." The supplier doesn't cost the access company money directly, the person going to the supplier does. Charge the source of the cost. Regardless, this essentially makes some internet sites more expensive (because they'll have to charge customers/members more, or lower the service quaility) than others that has loose or no correlation to costs incurred by the provider-of-access to the given site.
Its true that there are a limited number of writes, but its also not necessarily a fatal probelm. As bits in the flash memory fail, you can mark them as unavailable. This will shrink your solid state cache over time, but it will allow you to keep working until the physical disk fails. Very graceful degredation.
I've never really used Ask, the whole concept of ask an english question never appealed, because I couldn't believe that they could really get anything useful from the question syntax that would provide better results than keywords. I did just try their maps though and was quite impressed, many because you can do multi-location routes, which is great. My biggest problem with Google maps is in the Bay area when they always want to take me down US 101, which is often a parking lot, and I know the better route is on I-280, but I couldn't find a way to do this with Google, maybe I just missed it.
Of course this computer isn't for everyone, but if you do the LAN party thing, then this is much more convenient than dragging around a desktop. Maybe you just want your computer to take up less space, could it be, could it?! If Apple didn't make the Mini it would be an easy decision for me that I would buy a 'Book because perhaps the most appealing thing to me is not portability of a computer, but that it doesn't take up much space and can be easily moved if I want to use the space for something else. Stop automatically crying, "Why would anyone do this, its hot, its expensive, if not as powerful...blah...blah...blah," engage your brain, think, and you might just discover that while this machine is not for everyone it has utility for some. Everything is about tradeoffs and for some this machine makes the right ones.
You'd be surprised what Excel is used for. I know for a fact that a certain very large insurance company relies on Excel sheets and macros for some of its policy price calculation tools. I'm not saying its right, I was shocked as well, but the fact is that almost everyone knows how to use Excel and the knowledge required to move a macro-based Excel application to even use Access is large (and Access is nearly useless on 1M rows). One point that is missed here is that the previous limit (65K rows) was ludicriously small for a dataset by today's standards.
If I deserve to be fired, fire me. I bare you no ill will, you did what you should. All these things you talk about can be done without unions. Unions create inflexibility and that, particularly, in high tech, will do nothing but harm. Your arguments make me want to respond like the Borg Queen when asked if she "controls" the Borg, "You imply disparity where none exists." In a properly run company there is no disparity between its goals and those of its workers. The company wishes to produce a good product, for this it requires good workers, for this it must pay them accordingly. The worker wishes to get paid well and live comfortably, for this he must do good work to produce a good product. Everything else is details. All the things you list will tend to produce a better product, why must either party be chained into something that can not flex and adapt to every circumstance as respect and reason between minds can?
If I heard about a tech workers union forming at my company, I"d leave. Plain and simple, I don't need anyone free loading on my abilities to negotiate a better salary for their stellar ability to sit on their ass and play WoW instead of writing decent code. Likewise, if I feel my company doesn't appreciate me, I'm outta there. I'm in this for me, not to help me "fellow man" (MY fellow men don't want my help anyway) or to give my company something they don't appreciate and compensate me for.
No, their cells' DNA will still be damaged by various things (UV light, toxins, etc). The difference is that these mice have an additional protection mechanism against dangerously damaged cells. Within a cell there are already processes that operate during cell division to make sure the DNA is transcribed properly. In these mice the white blood cells act as a post-cellular division defense. If you think about it, the point of white blood cells is to eliminate foreign cells from your body. When a cell becomes cancerous, in some sense it becomes a foreign cell, no longer like the others. The interesting thing is how these white blood cells are able to perform this pattern match with such high resolution.
Here in the Bay Area you aren't even allowed to use other search engines. Within a 100 mile radius of Mountain View Google sifts all Internet traffic looks for requests to other search engines. If it finds that you've requested MSN, Ask, A9 or the like it does one of two things
1) If you're using a Windows machine, it'll probably just blue screen you, you'll curse Microsoft, and probably just use Google the next time, I mean, what kind of worthless operating system/browser pair can't even load their own company's search page. Sometime though, it'll do the second option, just to keep people entertained.
2) If you are Linux/UNIX/Macix it renders a custom search page for you that LOOKS like the search engine you requested, but actually returns Google results and displays Google ads. Google considers this a risky play, as they could just redirect you to the Google home page, but they feel its necessary to maintain the cloak on this operation.
Hey, this is just what you do, if you have virtually limitless processing power, bandwidth, and storage.
This post is redundant, because even though I haven't read the discussion thread I'm sure over 50% say this as well. Raise your own f*cking kids, and don't blame others because you were too lazy to get off the couch and see what they were up to. It still really shocks me that in order to drive a car, I need the government to give me a slip of paper, an insurance company to give me another one, and both of these have to be renewed on a regular basis, but I"m completely unrestricted in my ability to screw and make children. Poorly raised children are a far bigger danger to society than an unlicensed, drunk, speed freak driving down the expressway.
I think this is really great news for me and for Apple. I can see getting a lot of use out of this, but not the way Napster intends. Now I can preview the full song a couple of times, then I can go to iTunes and buy it for my iPod, Sweet! Also, let the hacking begin to record the audio stream from your five free plays.
The similarity they were referring to is the plug-and-play nature of USB. The external link capability combined with 3.0's hot swapping would allow you this same kind of flexibility. You completely missed the point of the analogy.
The effect is the same but you gain more flexibility. If you only add more EUs to a chip then they can get starved because it's hard to to the despatch to keep them full. If you have multicore, but only one main thread then at least half of your EUs are getting unused. The cute answer, from an engineering point of view is to allow both, and then switch between them. Then if you have long single-threaded sections of code with lots of implicit parallelism (ie games) you can load up the EUs,
You definitely lost me here. Why would it be easier for a dispatcher to keep twice the number of execution units fed when they're on two different cores as opposed to twice the number of execution units on a single core. If you put all of the EUs on one core, just increase the size of the dispatcher, since you're effectively doubling it here anyway. I think you're hinting at interleaving which core instructions are dispatched to, but I would imagine the switching time would be huge, so I don't think this will really work.
or if you have lots of threads without lots of implicit parallelism then you can still load them up - but segrated into cores.
But if you're representing the dual core processor as single core one, you'll never know there are additional threads, because the OS will never schedule them to run. In fact a processor has no idea how many threads there are, it just gets told which one to run when.
Count me in the confused camp. It would seem to achieve roughly the same effect as adding more functional units, but with lower returns because the code running on each chip can't share state information as easily. My best guess is that they want the processor to appear as two cores sometimes and one core at other times. I haven't a clue who makes this decision, perhaps a hypervisor in a virtualized environment? My only other speculation is that perhaps branch prediction is somehow easier, although I can't imagine why or how.
How can I get a job where all I have to do is write an article with no backup or substantiation beyond my own knowledge and speculation about an idea that I shat out this morning on the toliet? Not only that, how can I get a job where I get to keep it after doing this every week for years?
But you see, here Microsoft succeeds in being completely middle of the road. If I want a dazzling interface and ability to easily do media functions, I'll buy an Apple. Then I can go on the web and get all kinds of web applications for everyday stuff and use iTunes, iPhoto, and iDVD for multimedia viewing and authoring. Microsoft makes nothing for me in this equation, except that I might decide to be Office for compatibility reasons, although really OpenOffice.org will probably be good enough. Microsoft I think is being left behind, ideas that don't work generally disappear in a couple of generations of anything. In the software world I'd say a generation is 2-3 years tops, and by generation, I mean period of time in which pretty much every vendor releases a new version. Microsoft hasn't released anything compelling in OSes since WindowsXP (for sure) or Windows 2000 (arguably). As far as the last time they did something with Office, I'd say its been about as long.
Not only is there more than one way to get ALOT of money, such as inheritance and theft.
True, and theft represents a failure of soceity, both to prevent the act and to produce an individual that would commit it. Assuming that you have a soceity with proper values, such instances are few and far between enough as to not have a significant impact. As to inheritance, a man's fortune will grow or shrink to match his ability.
The second problem is that just because you got there with good intentions does not mean you will always have good intentions. If we let money truelly be the deciding factor in society then all it would take is a very crafty person to come up with (or steal) a good idea to make their wealth and then use that wealth to rule as they see fit with an iron fist.
This is a risk you have to keep in mind when you give anyone power. Its a calculated risk, and you may calculate wrong. Assuming this person does "turn evil" you are then free to cut off his inflow of further resources. Again, this person represents a failure of soceity in that they are capable of such things.
Personally I would rather my society and citizens not be judge by what and how they produce things. There are alot of very good things in this world that have no baring on productivity.
None of which are going to put food in your stomach or heat your house.
I would like my voice in society to be of the same value as everyone elses, not based on my families income.
But in a physical universe where we require certain things to survive it is your income (a proxy for productive ability) those who are more capable of providing for themselves will be listened to more. I have far less interest in listening to the village idiot than Albert Einstein.
Ask Gates himself, he will tel you he was lucky.
Nature is not fair, even on the quantum level random fluctuations aren't fair.
In short, your argument is that everyone is Superman with X-Ray vision, unless he/she sucks far too much not to be. You blame the Jews for their time in the camps because they were simply too lacking in talent to dominate the Nazis? Firstly, this is pretty inflamatory. Next, do I BLAME anyone for being in a concentration camp? No. Is the reason they were there that they didn't have the resources to stop themselves from being there, yes. Is this their fault? No, there was little, if any, way they could have avoided Nazi oppression.
You are as subject to the whims of others as they are subject to your whims.
This is not true. I am far more subject to the whims of President idiot donkey boy, err, Bush, than he is to my whims. Why? He possesses far more resources than I do.
99.5% of your life is dependent on what other people do. The problem with Americans is that you all think that 100.0% percent of everyone's lives are completely independent and solo acts
Firstly, talk about sweeping and useless generalizations! Secondly, I never claimed my life was independent of others. To think this is folly, greater than Fulton's by far. I interact and depend on others continously. The problem with many ultra-liberal whinners is that if they have a problem someone has fucked them and nothing is their fault. Take responsibility for your own actions, or don't complain when you let yourself be carried out to sea by the tide and find you don't like water.
People like you who are willing to exploit anything and blame any crime on the victim are manufacturing the abortion of human rights and common decency that is capitalist modernity.
I only blame the "victims" who knowingly give their murders the knife. If you don't like Wal-Mart and what they do, don't give them resources to continue doing it. How simple is that?
Do I use AJAX, do I think its cool? Yeah, that's why I use it. But you seem to suggest that somehow an AJAX request is different from any other HTTP request a server receives. To the best of my knowledge this is untrue, if I am incorrect, enlighten me.
Maybe you're just afraid that something comes along that changes the value of your skill set.
The value of a skill set depreciates over time, just like almost all assets, don't upgrade it and you're f'ed. That's why I learned about AJAX in the first place. I don't say "learned AJAX" because it doesn't actually introduce new concepts, but rather resassembles old ones in a new way. The only thing new about AJAX is the ability to perform actions aynchronously that don't directly change page state.
PS. I looked at your site. It is interesting, in that its easy to visualize, but why is this new? You've always been able to make one session context aware of others. What's the benefit of reinventing the wheel? I really mean these as questons and not flamebait.
You sir, are spreading FUD if ever anyone has First, you have data communication on the background, for everyone curious to see. If you're sending critical data over a non-SSL connection, whether its AJAX or anything else, you deserve what you get.
Second, there's a leap in usage and development and thus potential for crackers. What does this mean? More code is written so there's a greater chance that there will be a bug? True, but this is true with ALL software. Plus, AJAX is usually using an interface or set of parameters that already exist. So, you've already written the validation code for these parameters.
Last, the average AJAX developer is inexperienced. Ummm, I was coding web apps well before AJAX became "the thing". Am I less experienced at writing things for AJAX, yes, it hasn't really been en vogue as long as JSP/Java. Am I a pretty experienced developer and web developer who picked up AJAX because it could enhance his apps, yes. You (and many others) seem to have this concept that AJAX is something truly different from the web application point of view. Its not, on the server side its just another request with parameters that has to be serviced. As I said before, often there the same parameters you're dealing with elsewhere. There is nothing inherently different here, besides AJAX apps are going to be more chatty and you might have some additional executions paths.
Slashdot Mirror
You make an assumption here that music and videos have a value universal to everyone. Any given movie at $10 will be priced just right for some, too much for others, and by yet another group be considered a bargain. Two of these three groups will buy the movie, one of them won't. The same goes for music. Britney Spears tracks aren't worth $0.05 to me (except for maybe Toxic, because the video was well...if you've seen it, you know), but clearly they're worth it to many people. In a perfect market these prices would adjust perfectly to their consensus value. Jobs' argument with music that he is trying to extend to movies is that consumers just want a simple pricing system that is fairly inexpensive. There is definitely some value in this simplicity as well. If I'm thinking about buying a song/movie I don't even have to go on-line to decide whether I will, I know the price, if I"m willing to pay it I go to my computer and pay it, if not, I just stay on the couch. That being said, I think that a very simple tiered system might be reasonable for films, because I think there is a wider variability in things like quality and length (I'm definitely willing to pay more for a long period of entertainment like LOTR than I am for a short one).
I get DSL and a landline for $54/month in San Francisco with SBC. Comcast would charge me $58/month for just Internet access (after 3 months at $19.99/month). I don't have much use for the landline, but it does provide some utility if I lose my cell phone or the network is experiencing problems
Certainly solving the world's problems is a better idea, its also much harder. Pragmatically, if your goal is preservation of the species, the easiest way to increase the chances is to get some of us off this rock. As to over population, its not going to be a problem. The world population is forecast to peak in the next fifty years. Population is already falling in many European countries and Japan (or will be shortly), and if it weren't for immigration, the population of the US would be declining as well. The challenge in a century may not be over, but under, population. One thing that could be an issue is resource competition. Will there be enough food for us to survive? Yes. As India and China grow richer the competition for resources that make consumer goods will increase, causing prices of many items to rise. Ironically the low-cost production the West has been tapping for the last couple of decades will eventually lead to increasing prices.
Somehow, recently, we decided an individual is too stupid to think for themselves until they turn 18.
Most, unfortunately, are still too stupid to think for themselves at this age and much older.
So now kids will leave their phone somewhere and just go without it. Then if they really get into trouble they'll be without a phone. Also, does this work if the phone is off? If not, I'd just always claim I was going to the movies, go the direction of the theater, turn off the phone and then do whatever I wanted for five hours, cause I saw two shows. :-)
Justin
I view this much like road access. I pay for the road via my taxes and I can then get in my car and drive where I please. In certain exceptional cases I'll pay a bit more to go somewhere (toll road), but for the most part I'm free to drive as I wish. If the access companies want to charge ME for something that actually costs them money, then fine. Instead they're saying something like, "We'll charge Wal-Mart for the privilege of allowing tax payers the ability to get to Wal-Mart's store." The supplier doesn't cost the access company money directly, the person going to the supplier does. Charge the source of the cost. Regardless, this essentially makes some internet sites more expensive (because they'll have to charge customers/members more, or lower the service quaility) than others that has loose or no correlation to costs incurred by the provider-of-access to the given site.
Its true that there are a limited number of writes, but its also not necessarily a fatal probelm. As bits in the flash memory fail, you can mark them as unavailable. This will shrink your solid state cache over time, but it will allow you to keep working until the physical disk fails. Very graceful degredation.
I've never really used Ask, the whole concept of ask an english question never appealed, because I couldn't believe that they could really get anything useful from the question syntax that would provide better results than keywords. I did just try their maps though and was quite impressed, many because you can do multi-location routes, which is great. My biggest problem with Google maps is in the Bay area when they always want to take me down US 101, which is often a parking lot, and I know the better route is on I-280, but I couldn't find a way to do this with Google, maybe I just missed it.
Of course this computer isn't for everyone, but if you do the LAN party thing, then this is much more convenient than dragging around a desktop. Maybe you just want your computer to take up less space, could it be, could it?! If Apple didn't make the Mini it would be an easy decision for me that I would buy a 'Book because perhaps the most appealing thing to me is not portability of a computer, but that it doesn't take up much space and can be easily moved if I want to use the space for something else. Stop automatically crying, "Why would anyone do this, its hot, its expensive, if not as powerful...blah...blah...blah," engage your brain, think, and you might just discover that while this machine is not for everyone it has utility for some. Everything is about tradeoffs and for some this machine makes the right ones.
You'd be surprised what Excel is used for. I know for a fact that a certain very large insurance company relies on Excel sheets and macros for some of its policy price calculation tools. I'm not saying its right, I was shocked as well, but the fact is that almost everyone knows how to use Excel and the knowledge required to move a macro-based Excel application to even use Access is large (and Access is nearly useless on 1M rows).
One point that is missed here is that the previous limit (65K rows) was ludicriously small for a dataset by today's standards.
If I deserve to be fired, fire me. I bare you no ill will, you did what you should. All these things you talk about can be done without unions. Unions create inflexibility and that, particularly, in high tech, will do nothing but harm. Your arguments make me want to respond like the Borg Queen when asked if she "controls" the Borg, "You imply disparity where none exists." In a properly run company there is no disparity between its goals and those of its workers. The company wishes to produce a good product, for this it requires good workers, for this it must pay them accordingly. The worker wishes to get paid well and live comfortably, for this he must do good work to produce a good product. Everything else is details. All the things you list will tend to produce a better product, why must either party be chained into something that can not flex and adapt to every circumstance as respect and reason between minds can?
If I heard about a tech workers union forming at my company, I"d leave. Plain and simple, I don't need anyone free loading on my abilities to negotiate a better salary for their stellar ability to sit on their ass and play WoW instead of writing decent code. Likewise, if I feel my company doesn't appreciate me, I'm outta there. I'm in this for me, not to help me "fellow man" (MY fellow men don't want my help anyway) or to give my company something they don't appreciate and compensate me for.
No, their cells' DNA will still be damaged by various things (UV light, toxins, etc). The difference is that these mice have an additional protection mechanism against dangerously damaged cells. Within a cell there are already processes that operate during cell division to make sure the DNA is transcribed properly. In these mice the white blood cells act as a post-cellular division defense. If you think about it, the point of white blood cells is to eliminate foreign cells from your body. When a cell becomes cancerous, in some sense it becomes a foreign cell, no longer like the others. The interesting thing is how these white blood cells are able to perform this pattern match with such high resolution.
Here in the Bay Area you aren't even allowed to use other search engines. Within a 100 mile radius of Mountain View Google sifts all Internet traffic looks for requests to other search engines. If it finds that you've requested MSN, Ask, A9 or the like it does one of two things
1) If you're using a Windows machine, it'll probably just blue screen you, you'll curse Microsoft, and probably just use Google the next time, I mean, what kind of worthless operating system/browser pair can't even load their own company's search page. Sometime though, it'll do the second option, just to keep people entertained.
2) If you are Linux/UNIX/Macix it renders a custom search page for you that LOOKS like the search engine you requested, but actually returns Google results and displays Google ads. Google considers this a risky play, as they could just redirect you to the Google home page, but they feel its necessary to maintain the cloak on this operation.
Hey, this is just what you do, if you have virtually limitless processing power, bandwidth, and storage.
This post is redundant, because even though I haven't read the discussion thread I'm sure over 50% say this as well. Raise your own f*cking kids, and don't blame others because you were too lazy to get off the couch and see what they were up to. It still really shocks me that in order to drive a car, I need the government to give me a slip of paper, an insurance company to give me another one, and both of these have to be renewed on a regular basis, but I"m completely unrestricted in my ability to screw and make children. Poorly raised children are a far bigger danger to society than an unlicensed, drunk, speed freak driving down the expressway.
I think this is really great news for me and for Apple. I can see getting a lot of use out of this, but not the way Napster intends. Now I can preview the full song a couple of times, then I can go to iTunes and buy it for my iPod, Sweet! Also, let the hacking begin to record the audio stream from your five free plays.
The similarity they were referring to is the plug-and-play nature of USB. The external link capability combined with 3.0's hot swapping would allow you this same kind of flexibility. You completely missed the point of the analogy.
The effect is the same but you gain more flexibility. If you only add more EUs to a chip then they can get starved because it's hard to to the despatch to keep them full. If you have multicore, but only one main thread then at least half of your EUs are getting unused. The cute answer, from an engineering point of view is to allow both, and then switch between them. Then if you have long single-threaded sections of code with lots of implicit parallelism (ie games) you can load up the EUs,
You definitely lost me here. Why would it be easier for a dispatcher to keep twice the number of execution units fed when they're on two different cores as opposed to twice the number of execution units on a single core. If you put all of the EUs on one core, just increase the size of the dispatcher, since you're effectively doubling it here anyway. I think you're hinting at interleaving which core instructions are dispatched to, but I would imagine the switching time would be huge, so I don't think this will really work.
or if you have lots of threads without lots of implicit parallelism then you can still load them up - but segrated into cores.
But if you're representing the dual core processor as single core one, you'll never know there are additional threads, because the OS will never schedule them to run. In fact a processor has no idea how many threads there are, it just gets told which one to run when.
Count me in the confused camp. It would seem to achieve roughly the same effect as adding more functional units, but with lower returns because the code running on each chip can't share state information as easily. My best guess is that they want the processor to appear as two cores sometimes and one core at other times. I haven't a clue who makes this decision, perhaps a hypervisor in a virtualized environment? My only other speculation is that perhaps branch prediction is somehow easier, although I can't imagine why or how.
How can I get a job where all I have to do is write an article with no backup or substantiation beyond my own knowledge and speculation about an idea that I shat out this morning on the toliet? Not only that, how can I get a job where I get to keep it after doing this every week for years?
But you see, here Microsoft succeeds in being completely middle of the road. If I want a dazzling interface and ability to easily do media functions, I'll buy an Apple. Then I can go on the web and get all kinds of web applications for everyday stuff and use iTunes, iPhoto, and iDVD for multimedia viewing and authoring. Microsoft makes nothing for me in this equation, except that I might decide to be Office for compatibility reasons, although really OpenOffice.org will probably be good enough. Microsoft I think is being left behind, ideas that don't work generally disappear in a couple of generations of anything. In the software world I'd say a generation is 2-3 years tops, and by generation, I mean period of time in which pretty much every vendor releases a new version. Microsoft hasn't released anything compelling in OSes since WindowsXP (for sure) or Windows 2000 (arguably). As far as the last time they did something with Office, I'd say its been about as long.
Not only is there more than one way to get ALOT of money, such as inheritance and theft.
True, and theft represents a failure of soceity, both to prevent the act and to produce an individual that would commit it. Assuming that you have a soceity with proper values, such instances are few and far between enough as to not have a significant impact. As to inheritance, a man's fortune will grow or shrink to match his ability.
The second problem is that just because you got there with good intentions does not mean you will always have good intentions. If we let money truelly be the deciding factor in society then all it would take is a very crafty person to come up with (or steal) a good idea to make their wealth and then use that wealth to rule as they see fit with an iron fist.
This is a risk you have to keep in mind when you give anyone power. Its a calculated risk, and you may calculate wrong. Assuming this person does "turn evil" you are then free to cut off his inflow of further resources. Again, this person represents a failure of soceity in that they are capable of such things.
Personally I would rather my society and citizens not be judge by what and how they produce things. There are alot of very good things in this world that have no baring on productivity.
None of which are going to put food in your stomach or heat your house.
I would like my voice in society to be of the same value as everyone elses, not based on my families income.
But in a physical universe where we require certain things to survive it is your income (a proxy for productive ability) those who are more capable of providing for themselves will be listened to more. I have far less interest in listening to the village idiot than Albert Einstein.
Ask Gates himself, he will tel you he was lucky.
Nature is not fair, even on the quantum level random fluctuations aren't fair.
In short, your argument is that everyone is Superman with X-Ray vision, unless he/she sucks far too much not to be. You blame the Jews for their time in the camps because they were simply too lacking in talent to dominate the Nazis?
Firstly, this is pretty inflamatory. Next, do I BLAME anyone for being in a concentration camp? No. Is the reason they were there that they didn't have the resources to stop themselves from being there, yes. Is this their fault? No, there was little, if any, way they could have avoided Nazi oppression.
You are as subject to the whims of others as they are subject to your whims.
This is not true. I am far more subject to the whims of President idiot donkey boy, err, Bush, than he is to my whims. Why? He possesses far more resources than I do.
99.5% of your life is dependent on what other people do. The problem with Americans is that you all think that 100.0% percent of everyone's lives are completely independent and solo acts
Firstly, talk about sweeping and useless generalizations! Secondly, I never claimed my life was independent of others. To think this is folly, greater than Fulton's by far. I interact and depend on others continously. The problem with many ultra-liberal whinners is that if they have a problem someone has fucked them and nothing is their fault. Take responsibility for your own actions, or don't complain when you let yourself be carried out to sea by the tide and find you don't like water.
People like you who are willing to exploit anything and blame any crime on the victim are manufacturing the abortion of human rights and common decency that is capitalist modernity.
I only blame the "victims" who knowingly give their murders the knife. If you don't like Wal-Mart and what they do, don't give them resources to continue doing it. How simple is that?
Do I use AJAX, do I think its cool? Yeah, that's why I use it. But you seem to suggest that somehow an AJAX request is different from any other HTTP request a server receives. To the best of my knowledge this is untrue, if I am incorrect, enlighten me.
Maybe you're just afraid that something comes along that changes the value of your skill set.
The value of a skill set depreciates over time, just like almost all assets, don't upgrade it and you're f'ed. That's why I learned about AJAX in the first place. I don't say "learned AJAX" because it doesn't actually introduce new concepts, but rather resassembles old ones in a new way. The only thing new about AJAX is the ability to perform actions aynchronously that don't directly change page state.
PS. I looked at your site. It is interesting, in that its easy to visualize, but why is this new? You've always been able to make one session context aware of others. What's the benefit of reinventing the wheel? I really mean these as questons and not flamebait.
You sir, are spreading FUD if ever anyone has
First, you have data communication on the background, for everyone curious to see.
If you're sending critical data over a non-SSL connection, whether its AJAX or anything else, you deserve what you get.
Second, there's a leap in usage and development and thus potential for crackers.
What does this mean? More code is written so there's a greater chance that there will be a bug? True, but this is true with ALL software. Plus, AJAX is usually using an interface or set of parameters that already exist. So, you've already written the validation code for these parameters.
Last, the average AJAX developer is inexperienced.
Ummm, I was coding web apps well before AJAX became "the thing". Am I less experienced at writing things for AJAX, yes, it hasn't really been en vogue as long as JSP/Java. Am I a pretty experienced developer and web developer who picked up AJAX because it could enhance his apps, yes. You (and many others) seem to have this concept that AJAX is something truly different from the web application point of view. Its not, on the server side its just another request with parameters that has to be serviced. As I said before, often there the same parameters you're dealing with elsewhere. There is nothing inherently different here, besides AJAX apps are going to be more chatty and you might have some additional executions paths.