Windows applications support drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste simultaneously. Does that confuse you, too? Does it bother you that you can't drag-and-drop something while also deleting the destination?
Well, X11's selection mechanisms doesn't, as you put it, perform an "automatic copy", it is actually separate from the copy-and-paste system, just like drag-and-drop is separate from copy-and-paste on Windows. X11's selection mechanism is a drag-and-drop operation, only that you can let go of the mouse button between selecting what you are going to drag and dropping it in the destination. It's actually significantly more convenient than drag-and-drop and significantly easier to handle. To make drag-and-drop work as well as X11's selection mechanism, you need to add weird hacks like "spring loaded containers".
Well-behaved X11 applications should implement both X11's selection mechanism and copy-and-paste. To convert between selections and clipboards, you can use any working X11 applications that can hold the datatype you are interested in converting, like an X11 text editor or the xclipboard application.
Sure you do. The expression just means "some well-defined but unknown probability value" and suggests it is different from zero. It's common usage in statistics and stochastics. Search on Google for examples (about 19300 of them).
My point was, clearly stated, that people generally agreed that the probability of an event was low, even people who opposed the Cassini launch. Therefore, absence of an event does not prove, as the post implied, that the launch was low risk because the event itself was low probability.
Beyond that, you are just reiterating the usual arguments that the risk was low. I happen to agree with that. But arguing, as the original poster implied, that absence of deaths resulting from the Cassini launch suggests that Cassini was safe is a bogus argument, and presenting bogus arguments in support of some policy is a bad idea because, while people may not understand the safety of RTGs, they generally have a pretty good everyday understanding of probability, risk, and cost.
[NASA] are not infalliable, but they have numbers to back up their claims. And I would take a 100 scientist recommendation over an elitest snob.
NASA is publicly financed. If they acquire a reputation for going over people's heads with missions that are perceived to be dangerous, they'll lose political support and funding. It doesn't matter whether they are objectively right, what matters is whether they can convince the taxpayer that what they are doing is valuable and safe.
The only way to achieve that is to increase the general level of interest and understanding of science and technology in the US and around the world. Sending up space probes against significant objections and then presenting bogus arguments in hindsight to "show" that it was safe only does harm.
And, frankly, given how much trouble you seem to have participating in a coherent dissection of an argument, it seems to me your science education could stand some improvement as well. You see, just because one agrees with a conclusion does not mean that every argument leading to that conclusion has to be right.
Oh, nonsense. All evidence says that RTGs are very safe. Therefore someone saying that they are not has the burden of proof.=
Yes, RTGs probably are very safe, but that is not the point. The point is how ordinary people, whose lives might be affected by them, get to the point of being convinced of that.
In economics, information itself has a cost. Now, lets say, you are a scientist and you want to perform some experiment which involves dangerous materials and has little perceived benefit to most people. For them to determine that your safety arguments are valid imposes a significant cost on them: they'll have to listen to your arguments and understand them, or they at least have to determine whether there are some authorities they can trust on the matter and evaluate their credibility. You are saying they should bear that cost for something you, but not they, benefit from. Why should they?
This silly thing where "my side need only be plausible, your side needs to be 100% concrete" is stupid.
No, it's not stupid, it's rational economic behavior. And you will behave the same way when faced with the same kind of situation--you just have trouble putting yourself into their shoes in this case.
Asking people to behave differently is irrational, arrogant, and, in the long run, doomed to failure anyway.
Obviously, you are a forcer, since you are saying that people should either just acquiesce or spend time "investigating opposing viewpoints". But people have no obligation to "investigate opposing viewpoints" just so that your pet project can take place. If you want some project to happen, it is your obligation to explain why it is interesting and safe patiently until there is no widespread concern about it anymore.
What happened with Cassini was harmful to the relationship between science and the public. Let's hope that the results are spectacular enough so that people can come to believe that it was worth whatever risk they thought there was in hindsight.
The parent poster specifically said "look/feel or other infringement issues."
Yes, and that, in particular, could imply that he considered "look/feel infringement" something that was prosecutable under US law, in addition to "other infringement". If he knew that LAF was infringeable nowhere, there would have been no point in mentioning it.
then I'm forced to conclude you've never used an iPod.
I tried it out, and I don't think it's a very good player: the battery life is too short, it can't be recharged through USB, and, yes, I didn't like the wheel. I bought a different player, which looks less stylish but works a whole lot better.
Apple's wheel is the only design so far that lets you do that without continually removing your finger and reapplying it.
I found the wheel to be a pain for scrolling through long lists. And, anyway, whoever said that removing your finger and reapplying it was bad? We do it for lots of pointing devices.
A better design is a pressure-sensitive rocker: press hard, scroll quickly, press softly, scroll slowly, and click to step.
Returning to the planet, a nuclear plant is far less likely to cause ANY harm than most power technologies or chemical processes (See Bophal, India). We KNOW that radiation can be dangerous, hence the extreme precations we take.
While many people may be afraid of the potential harm from nuclear power plant accidents, the real problem with them is that nobody has figured out what to do with the waste.
Bhopal may have been a terrible chemical accident, but the chemicals that were released can be destroyed fairly easily if anybody cared to. But with nuclear waste, once you have generated it, you are pretty much stuck with it for millennia.
Incidently, NOTHING is 100% safe... along with fearing (and guarding against) the risk, you should consider the rewards.
Well, and your reward metrics may be very different from other people's. Most people on this planet probably couldn't care less about the scientific data Cassini yields. It isn't even worth their time listening to you (or me) why Cassini is safe. Likewise, given a realistic choice, many people might well prefer using less energy to using nuclear power.
The Soviet leadership could deploy whatever technologies they liked because the people had no say in the matter. But we live in a democracy and a nation of laws, not a totalitarian state. Before you can do something, either as part of a government project or as a private company, you better convince people that you are not going to cause any harm. How strongly you believe that RTGs are safe is irrelevant, what matters is whether you can convince almost everybody else of that belief.
Because, while RTGs may be reasonably safe (and I think they are), some lunatic may decide to engineer a "curative HIV virus" and just get it wrong, or release some wonderful new chemical into the environment.
For scientists and engineers to force technologies on people that they aren't comfortable with is arrogant and ultimately harms the standing of science and technology in our culture. Yes, that means people like you.
Remember cassini is nasa's deadly space probe. It is nice to see that these groups have other stuff to protest these days. Hope that stuff is not as deadly as cassini...
The protests were about a risk, that is, an accident that could have occurred with a certain probability. Everybody pretty much agreed that the risk of an accident was at least fairly low. What people disagreed on was the cost should such an accident acctually occur. The fact that a fairly low-risk event didn't occur does not tell you anything about whether it was prudent to engage in the activity in question.
I'm sorry that such elementary scientific and economic concepts as "risk" and "cost" elude you. Without an understanding of those concepts, you are simply in no position to even participate in such debates.
The ancient history lawsuit whose entry you linked to was an attempt by Apple to seek redress
"Redress"? For what? Apple didn't invent the GUI, they licensed it from Xerox, and they didn't even pay a lot of money for it.
These days Apple looks to the admittedly fucked up (but nevertheless easier to litigate) patent process to protect their IP.
The parent poster specifically talked about Apple trying to enforce look and feel rights and I just pointed out that such rights don't exist according to US courts.
It's good that Apple is now using the patent system, because that forces them to state ahead of time what they are actually claiming to own, and it allows their claims to be challenged specifically.
but they're the real reason you're not likely to see another mp3 player with a scroll wheel/pad.
I think the real reason you aren't going to see another MP3 player with a scroll wheel is that there are better, more standard input devices: touch pads, track points, game-controller like pads, etc. The wheel gives the iPod brand identity, that's all.
No doubt some of the nameless companies in Taiwan and China which are nearly impossible for Apple to sue on look/feel or other infringement issues.
Fortunately, Apple's grandiose notions of protecting their "look and feel" have also been soundly defeated in the US. It it had come out otherwise, it would have been very bad for the industry.
Much as Apple would like it to be otherwise, they do not own the market of slim, nicely-styled MP3 players. Other companies have the right to come out with a white, simple, sleek, slim MP3 player with rounded corners and polycarbonate housing as well.
PCs stole the market for desktop computers away from Apple, eventhough the Apple product was technically superior and more user friendly.
"Stealing" the market somehow implies that it was rightfully Apple's. In what way do you think it was?
Will Apple lower its prices to compete with the iPod clones or will they foolishly lose command of a market again on the belief that superior quality will save them?
The whole point of Apple's existence is to sell to the high-end segment of the market: image conscious, "hip" customers with lots of money. It's the premium people pay for Apple products that makes them a status symbol.
Maybe if the idea of "Linux UI" were actually defined, people would start writing stuff for it.
Yes, there are multiple GUIs for Linux. So what? You pick one or several and support them. The obvious choice for Sun would have been good Gnome integration.
As it is, Mono is taking over from Java for Gnome developers. Sun has basically lost their shot at the Linux desktop.
As it stands now, though, it's a moving target, and for 5% of the market, a moving target isn't worth their time.
That reasoning just doesn't work: Sun Java and OpenOffice are largely irrelevant to the Windows desktop market. By focusing on the Windows market, Sun has produced a system that is generally uninteresting to Windows developers and generally too low quality for Linux developers. That's why it has failed to catch on.
Or how about the complete insult to freedom of religion when they started banning Muslim head scarves in our schools?
Every nation, including the US, imposes limits on what is acceptable under freedom of religion. France imposed a minimal dress code in schools and they banned all religious symbols. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Furthermore, keep in mind that this is a pretty recent phenomenon, brough on by significant immigration into France. But people who come to France know what kind of culture they are getting into, namely a mostly secular culture with Catholic roots. France is not, and never pretended to be, an American-style multicultural society and it draws its lines differently. France's choice may well speed up integration and help Muslims assimilate culturally, while they develop new traditions for their religion in a French cultural context.
Besides, head scarves are more cultural symbols rather than religious symbols anyway. They are supposed to express modesty, but in a different cultural context, they achieve the opposite effect. Just because people claim that they are religious symbols doesn't make it so.
Not to mention the extrordinary stupidity of when they required the characters in Contra to be changed from people into robots because it seemed to violent for the children.
Well, and what about the extraordinary stupidity of banning nudity and sex in US media? Every culture has its sensitive spots. Banning violence seems no less reasonable than banning sex and nudity.
I mean, the way that the government has surveillance cameras in public places is just creepy.
In the US, the only difference is that it is private companies that do it. The US government can get the same information out of that, but they aren't even subject to the same kind of public oversight as the UK government.
Yes, $400-$500 is an expensive software title for a consumer application.
Whether StarOffice/OpenOffice is better or not than Microsoft Office (I think it actually is), the fact is that StarOffice/OpenOffice has all the features 99% of businesses need. So, yes, compared to a free piece of software that would get the job done as well, a $400-$500 piece of software also is hugely expensive.
For the amount you get, it's actually comparatively very cheap.
You are kidding yourself if you think that people buy MS Office because they think it's the best choice or value around--they probably don't give it much thought at all. They buy Office only because they know that if they don't, they may have to retrain their employees and they may not be able to exchange files reliably with other businesses.
First, software should be written to be more secure and error free.
Vote with your dollars--you don't have to run software that requires weekly security patches.
Secondly, and especially with the window between announcing of a vulnerability and the release of an exploit in the wild constantly shrinking, other forms of deterrance must be enlisted - namely the law.
It's the system administrator's choice that he runs software that he knows to be the frequent target of virus writers and that he knows to be full of exploits.
And lastly, it is expensive.
Sure, but it is also expensive to maintain a police force, put tough penalties in place, and to implement an infrastructure that permits tracking down cybercriminals.
Viruses exist and someone has to pay for the cost of dealing with them. The questions are (1) is it cheaper/more effective to prevent or to hunt down perpetrators, and (2) who should pay the cost--your business or the tax payer?
I think it's cheaper to prevent. And if the emphasis is put on tax-payer funded law enforcement, rather than business-funded prevention, we take away the incentive of businesses to actually select and implement virus-proof software.
In fact, I think the way to get software to be secure is to hold businesses themselves liable for any damages that arise to their customers from viruses and break-ins. That way, the market would end up making the right tradeoffs: should we use computers for this business function at all, and if we do, which software should we use?
The best way to continue the status quo of flaky, virus-prone software is to place the responsibility on the tax payer and the government. Is that what you want? I don't.
Almost nobody gives a damn about document version control outside of particular corporate backoffices.
Everybody who works on Word files together cares about version control, and a large part of Word usage is with people collaborating on writing something. That isn't a few percent of Word users, it is probably the majority of Word users. It's just that most of them don't realize how bad Word actually is for collaboration.
As for requiring hugely expensive software to work on, last time I checked, I could do everything I wanted as a home user with.doc files with the INCLUDED "wordpad" software on Windows (pick your version).
Then you haven't checked very well. And, of course, even Windows itself is rather expensive.
The grandparent post is correct..DOC as a format, regardless of its failings, works in about 80-90% of all cases that most people need it to, it's ubiquitous, and so it's not going away.
Actually, it is going away: Microsoft is replacing it with an XML-based format for pretty much the reasons that I gave.
Regardless of whether StarOffice or any other clone has a superior format, until they're ubiquitous, they have even WORSE interoperability stories than.DOC, so they can't solve the problems that matter to normal users anyway.
See, that shows your faulty thinking: the only categories you think in are whether one format is superior to another and whether some vendor manages to muscle itself into the market.
In fact, the only way we are going to get a usable standard for document formats is through standards bodies and industry collaboration. So far, attempts at doing that have been unsuccessful because Microsoft wasn't interested, but it will happen sooner or later.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have.
If you think that, you aren't going to compete on any platform. When I run something on Linux, I expect that it integrates tightly with the Linux operating system. None of the cross-platform dreck that has come out of Sun (OpenOffice, Java), does that--they all treat Linux as a second class citizen and ignore Linux key bindings, user interface conventions, etc. WORA is useful for a small niche market, but most developers couldn't care less.
I am grateful that they are telling me that this is a cross-platform Java office suite because I then know what I can expect from the UI.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in?
You're right: consumers don't. But consumers might care about getting lower cost software, better features, more reliability, easier extensibility, etc. Languages can help there: much of the reason why Mozilla and OpenOffice are such behemoths and such a bitch to extend is their choice of language and object system.
Java is a much better language to write large end-user applications in than C/C++, but Sun, unfortunately, nixes that advantage with their insistence on "cross-platform support".
C# offers similar advantages at the language level, but, unlike Java, it emphasizes the use of platform-specific libraries. That's why you are going to see lots of Windows and Linux software in C#, and unlike Java, users neither will know nor care that it's written in C#--they'll just get better, more robust software more quickly. (There is nothing magical about C#--any language could have taken the place of a Java-like language with platform specific libraries--but C# actually seems to be taking off.)
because an MP3 works nearly everywhere, just as a.doc
Microsoft Word files do not work "nearly everywhere". They don't even work very well on the platform they were designed for: they have version incompatibilities, contain hidden information, do not format reproducibly, are difficult to manipulate programmatically, are difficult to version control, require hugely expensive software to work on, and they carry viruses. Microsoft Word is about the worst of the document formats in common use, and it wasn't even designed for interchange. Just about the only merit it has is that it is what you get by default when you choose "Save" in Word. And that's probably the only reason it is popular. But even Word gives you some better alternatives.
...while passive RFID tags don't require power. This application just wouldn't be practical in the same way with IR.
That's no big deal: you either use a disposable unit with an integrated battery, or you recharge with a small solar cell. Keep in mind that it is more important for many applications that the end user has a reader already available, rather than that the tag has the lowest possible price. Compared to the rent people pay for movie posters and other advertising space, a few bucks spent on a disposable IR emitter with battery is going to be negligible.
In any case, if you want something passive and cheap, an even better way of dealing with it is to use something like Semacodes--2D barcodes recognized with a phonecam or PDA camera. 2D barcodes are even cheaper than RFID tags to produce, and readers (cameras) are becoming ubiquitous. Certainly, you are much more likely to have (and want) a digital camera on your phone or PDA than an RFID reader.
RFID and short-range wireless makes sense in some specific applications, but for most uses, you are already far better off with existing technologies. But, of course, RFID vendors are trying to get their new, proprietary stuff into everything. Sorry, I don't want or need the added weight, cost, or complexity of RFID or short-range wireless. Give me IR, Bluetooth, and a digital camera in my devices.
I don't need Nielsen to tell me that computers will be faster and displays will be bigger (although it is likely that Moore's law will have fallen by then).
Nielssen seems to be saying that computers will be used largely the same way they are being used today, with some obvious tweaks. While computers have gotten faster, fundamentally, we have made little progress in how we interact with them over the last 30 years (Smalltalk and the Alto were being developed in the 1970s and contained most of the paradigms that the most advanced commercial desktops are using today), and Nielssen is basically saying that not much will change over the next 30 years either. That may excite him, since it allows him to continue to peddle his user interface incrementalism, but, frankly, I find it depressing.
One thing is certain: in 30 years, we will still have self-appointed "gurus" that make a name and a business for themselves by repeating populist techno-babble and buzzwords, but without having any real insight or vision. That has nothing to do with computers, it is just human nature, and that won't change.
No matter how you author or present a story, people will still experience it in some linear order. Authors spend a lot of time worrying that the order a reader actually gets is interesting and makes sense; that's what a big part of good writing is all about. Linearity is something that is an added value for a story, not a restriction.
Many games may well be "non-linear" (i.e., have many different paths), but that's not to make them more engaging, it's to make them more replayable. And there will also continue to be many highly linear games that present a single, well-designed storyline as part of the game, although hopefully authors will find ways of making the interaction with the storyline more natural than "you must find switch A and trigger it to continue".
This is why I still regularly hear people complain about the lack of even a simple, C-like preprocessor in Java.
People complain about a lot of things, in particular things that are different from what they are used to. But the fact is: they are using Java. And the lack of macros makes a lot of developers on large projects really happy (you rarely hear from the happy people).
Besides, C macros can hardly be called "macros" at all, let alone general purpose macros.
By those criteria imprisoning somebody is wrong, as well
I didn't say "capital punishment is wrong". I didn't even say "you shouldn't execute people", I said that there are problems and costs with capital punishment and that people apparently underestimate them.
Try to read what people actually wrote, instead of responding to some preconceived notion of what you imagine people wrote.
If one were to rigorously apply those criteria, then the only punishment that is allowed would be fines - repayable with interest upon an overturned conviction.
There you are on the right track. What you don't see is that a year of life spent in prison has an economic cost to the individual that can usually be repaid. I think the restitution that the state should pay for that should be no different than if any private citizen did the same thing to someone. I consider it a serious fault of our legal system that the state, judges, and district attorneys can make errors with impunity and little consequence.
Unlike wrongful imprisonment, in the case of a wrongful execution, compensation is never possible to the victim. That just makes it very different. Nevertheless, at the very least, the state should still be financially liable to dependents, just as if a private citizen causes the death of another person through negligence.
a year of memories of dehumanizing experiences,
Imprisonment should not be dehumanizing. The fact that it is in the US is itself a serious problem.
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Windows applications support drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste simultaneously. Does that confuse you, too? Does it bother you that you can't drag-and-drop something while also deleting the destination?
Well, X11's selection mechanisms doesn't, as you put it, perform an "automatic copy", it is actually separate from the copy-and-paste system, just like drag-and-drop is separate from copy-and-paste on Windows. X11's selection mechanism is a drag-and-drop operation, only that you can let go of the mouse button between selecting what you are going to drag and dropping it in the destination. It's actually significantly more convenient than drag-and-drop and significantly easier to handle. To make drag-and-drop work as well as X11's selection mechanism, you need to add weird hacks like "spring loaded containers".
Well-behaved X11 applications should implement both X11's selection mechanism and copy-and-paste. To convert between selections and clipboards, you can use any working X11 applications that can hold the datatype you are interested in converting, like an X11 text editor or the xclipboard application.
You never have a "certain probability".
Sure you do. The expression just means "some well-defined but unknown probability value" and suggests it is different from zero. It's common usage in statistics and stochastics. Search on Google for examples (about 19300 of them).
My point was, clearly stated, that people generally agreed that the probability of an event was low, even people who opposed the Cassini launch. Therefore, absence of an event does not prove, as the post implied, that the launch was low risk because the event itself was low probability.
Beyond that, you are just reiterating the usual arguments that the risk was low. I happen to agree with that. But arguing, as the original poster implied, that absence of deaths resulting from the Cassini launch suggests that Cassini was safe is a bogus argument, and presenting bogus arguments in support of some policy is a bad idea because, while people may not understand the safety of RTGs, they generally have a pretty good everyday understanding of probability, risk, and cost.
[NASA] are not infalliable, but they have numbers to back up their claims. And I would take a 100 scientist recommendation over an elitest snob.
NASA is publicly financed. If they acquire a reputation for going over people's heads with missions that are perceived to be dangerous, they'll lose political support and funding. It doesn't matter whether they are objectively right, what matters is whether they can convince the taxpayer that what they are doing is valuable and safe.
The only way to achieve that is to increase the general level of interest and understanding of science and technology in the US and around the world. Sending up space probes against significant objections and then presenting bogus arguments in hindsight to "show" that it was safe only does harm.
And, frankly, given how much trouble you seem to have participating in a coherent dissection of an argument, it seems to me your science education could stand some improvement as well. You see, just because one agrees with a conclusion does not mean that every argument leading to that conclusion has to be right.
Oh, nonsense. All evidence says that RTGs are very safe. Therefore someone saying that they are not has the burden of proof.=
Yes, RTGs probably are very safe, but that is not the point. The point is how ordinary people, whose lives might be affected by them, get to the point of being convinced of that.
In economics, information itself has a cost. Now, lets say, you are a scientist and you want to perform some experiment which involves dangerous materials and has little perceived benefit to most people. For them to determine that your safety arguments are valid imposes a significant cost on them: they'll have to listen to your arguments and understand them, or they at least have to determine whether there are some authorities they can trust on the matter and evaluate their credibility. You are saying they should bear that cost for something you, but not they, benefit from. Why should they?
This silly thing where "my side need only be plausible, your side needs to be 100% concrete" is stupid.
No, it's not stupid, it's rational economic behavior. And you will behave the same way when faced with the same kind of situation--you just have trouble putting yourself into their shoes in this case.
Asking people to behave differently is irrational, arrogant, and, in the long run, doomed to failure anyway.
Obviously, you are a forcer, since you are saying that people should either just acquiesce or spend time "investigating opposing viewpoints". But people have no obligation to "investigate opposing viewpoints" just so that your pet project can take place. If you want some project to happen, it is your obligation to explain why it is interesting and safe patiently until there is no widespread concern about it anymore.
What happened with Cassini was harmful to the relationship between science and the public. Let's hope that the results are spectacular enough so that people can come to believe that it was worth whatever risk they thought there was in hindsight.
The parent poster specifically said "look/feel or other infringement issues."
Yes, and that, in particular, could imply that he considered "look/feel infringement" something that was prosecutable under US law, in addition to "other infringement". If he knew that LAF was infringeable nowhere, there would have been no point in mentioning it.
then I'm forced to conclude you've never used an iPod.
I tried it out, and I don't think it's a very good player: the battery life is too short, it can't be recharged through USB, and, yes, I didn't like the wheel. I bought a different player, which looks less stylish but works a whole lot better.
Apple's wheel is the only design so far that lets you do that without continually removing your finger and reapplying it.
I found the wheel to be a pain for scrolling through long lists. And, anyway, whoever said that removing your finger and reapplying it was bad? We do it for lots of pointing devices.
A better design is a pressure-sensitive rocker: press hard, scroll quickly, press softly, scroll slowly, and click to step.
Returning to the planet, a nuclear plant is far less likely to cause ANY harm than most power technologies or chemical processes (See Bophal, India). We KNOW that radiation can be dangerous, hence the extreme precations we take.
While many people may be afraid of the potential harm from nuclear power plant accidents, the real problem with them is that nobody has figured out what to do with the waste.
Bhopal may have been a terrible chemical accident, but the chemicals that were released can be destroyed fairly easily if anybody cared to. But with nuclear waste, once you have generated it, you are pretty much stuck with it for millennia.
Incidently, NOTHING is 100% safe... along with fearing (and guarding against) the risk, you should consider the rewards.
Well, and your reward metrics may be very different from other people's. Most people on this planet probably couldn't care less about the scientific data Cassini yields. It isn't even worth their time listening to you (or me) why Cassini is safe. Likewise, given a realistic choice, many people might well prefer using less energy to using nuclear power.
The Soviet leadership could deploy whatever technologies they liked because the people had no say in the matter. But we live in a democracy and a nation of laws, not a totalitarian state. Before you can do something, either as part of a government project or as a private company, you better convince people that you are not going to cause any harm. How strongly you believe that RTGs are safe is irrelevant, what matters is whether you can convince almost everybody else of that belief.
Because, while RTGs may be reasonably safe (and I think they are), some lunatic may decide to engineer a "curative HIV virus" and just get it wrong, or release some wonderful new chemical into the environment.
For scientists and engineers to force technologies on people that they aren't comfortable with is arrogant and ultimately harms the standing of science and technology in our culture. Yes, that means people like you.
Remember cassini is nasa's deadly space probe. It is nice to see that these groups have other stuff to protest these days. Hope that stuff is not as deadly as cassini...
The protests were about a risk, that is, an accident that could have occurred with a certain probability. Everybody pretty much agreed that the risk of an accident was at least fairly low. What people disagreed on was the cost should such an accident acctually occur. The fact that a fairly low-risk event didn't occur does not tell you anything about whether it was prudent to engage in the activity in question.
I'm sorry that such elementary scientific and economic concepts as "risk" and "cost" elude you. Without an understanding of those concepts, you are simply in no position to even participate in such debates.
The ancient history lawsuit whose entry you linked to was an attempt by Apple to seek redress
"Redress"? For what? Apple didn't invent the GUI, they licensed it from Xerox, and they didn't even pay a lot of money for it.
These days Apple looks to the admittedly fucked up (but nevertheless easier to litigate) patent process to protect their IP.
The parent poster specifically talked about Apple trying to enforce look and feel rights and I just pointed out that such rights don't exist according to US courts.
It's good that Apple is now using the patent system, because that forces them to state ahead of time what they are actually claiming to own, and it allows their claims to be challenged specifically.
but they're the real reason you're not likely to see another mp3 player with a scroll wheel/pad.
I think the real reason you aren't going to see another MP3 player with a scroll wheel is that there are better, more standard input devices: touch pads, track points, game-controller like pads, etc. The wheel gives the iPod brand identity, that's all.
No doubt some of the nameless companies in Taiwan and China which are nearly impossible for Apple to sue on look/feel or other infringement issues.
Fortunately, Apple's grandiose notions of protecting their "look and feel" have also been soundly defeated in the US. It it had come out otherwise, it would have been very bad for the industry.
Much as Apple would like it to be otherwise, they do not own the market of slim, nicely-styled MP3 players. Other companies have the right to come out with a white, simple, sleek, slim MP3 player with rounded corners and polycarbonate housing as well.
PCs stole the market for desktop computers away from Apple, eventhough the Apple product was technically superior and more user friendly.
"Stealing" the market somehow implies that it was rightfully Apple's. In what way do you think it was?
Will Apple lower its prices to compete with the iPod clones or will they foolishly lose command of a market again on the belief that superior quality will save them?
The whole point of Apple's existence is to sell to the high-end segment of the market: image conscious, "hip" customers with lots of money. It's the premium people pay for Apple products that makes them a status symbol.
Maybe if the idea of "Linux UI" were actually defined, people would start writing stuff for it.
Yes, there are multiple GUIs for Linux. So what? You pick one or several and support them. The obvious choice for Sun would have been good Gnome integration.
As it is, Mono is taking over from Java for Gnome developers. Sun has basically lost their shot at the Linux desktop.
As it stands now, though, it's a moving target, and for 5% of the market, a moving target isn't worth their time.
That reasoning just doesn't work: Sun Java and OpenOffice are largely irrelevant to the Windows desktop market. By focusing on the Windows market, Sun has produced a system that is generally uninteresting to Windows developers and generally too low quality for Linux developers. That's why it has failed to catch on.
There are lots of hard-disk based MP3 players. What exactly is an "iPod clone"? Something with that funny wheel in front? Or any slim MP3 player?
Or how about the complete insult to freedom of religion when they started banning Muslim head scarves in our schools?
Every nation, including the US, imposes limits on what is acceptable under freedom of religion. France imposed a minimal dress code in schools and they banned all religious symbols. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Furthermore, keep in mind that this is a pretty recent phenomenon, brough on by significant immigration into France. But people who come to France know what kind of culture they are getting into, namely a mostly secular culture with Catholic roots. France is not, and never pretended to be, an American-style multicultural society and it draws its lines differently. France's choice may well speed up integration and help Muslims assimilate culturally, while they develop new traditions for their religion in a French cultural context.
Besides, head scarves are more cultural symbols rather than religious symbols anyway. They are supposed to express modesty, but in a different cultural context, they achieve the opposite effect. Just because people claim that they are religious symbols doesn't make it so.
Not to mention the extrordinary stupidity of when they required the characters in Contra to be changed from people into robots because it seemed to violent for the children.
Well, and what about the extraordinary stupidity of banning nudity and sex in US media? Every culture has its sensitive spots. Banning violence seems no less reasonable than banning sex and nudity.
I mean, the way that the government has surveillance cameras in public places is just creepy.
In the US, the only difference is that it is private companies that do it. The US government can get the same information out of that, but they aren't even subject to the same kind of public oversight as the UK government.
Hugely expensive software? MS Office?
Yes, $400-$500 is an expensive software title for a consumer application.
Whether StarOffice/OpenOffice is better or not than Microsoft Office (I think it actually is), the fact is that StarOffice/OpenOffice has all the features 99% of businesses need. So, yes, compared to a free piece of software that would get the job done as well, a $400-$500 piece of software also is hugely expensive.
For the amount you get, it's actually comparatively very cheap.
You are kidding yourself if you think that people buy MS Office because they think it's the best choice or value around--they probably don't give it much thought at all. They buy Office only because they know that if they don't, they may have to retrain their employees and they may not be able to exchange files reliably with other businesses.
First, software should be written to be more secure and error free.
Vote with your dollars--you don't have to run software that requires weekly security patches.
Secondly, and especially with the window between announcing of a vulnerability and the release of an exploit in the wild constantly shrinking, other forms of deterrance must be enlisted - namely the law.
It's the system administrator's choice that he runs software that he knows to be the frequent target of virus writers and that he knows to be full of exploits.
And lastly, it is expensive.
Sure, but it is also expensive to maintain a police force, put tough penalties in place, and to implement an infrastructure that permits tracking down cybercriminals.
Viruses exist and someone has to pay for the cost of dealing with them. The questions are (1) is it cheaper/more effective to prevent or to hunt down perpetrators, and (2) who should pay the cost--your business or the tax payer?
I think it's cheaper to prevent. And if the emphasis is put on tax-payer funded law enforcement, rather than business-funded prevention, we take away the incentive of businesses to actually select and implement virus-proof software.
In fact, I think the way to get software to be secure is to hold businesses themselves liable for any damages that arise to their customers from viruses and break-ins. That way, the market would end up making the right tradeoffs: should we use computers for this business function at all, and if we do, which software should we use?
The best way to continue the status quo of flaky, virus-prone software is to place the responsibility on the tax payer and the government. Is that what you want? I don't.
Almost nobody gives a damn about document version control outside of particular corporate backoffices.
.doc files with the INCLUDED "wordpad" software on Windows (pick your version).
.DOC as a format, regardless of its failings, works in about 80-90% of all cases that most people need it to, it's ubiquitous, and so it's not going away.
.DOC, so they can't solve the problems that matter to normal users anyway.
Everybody who works on Word files together cares about version control, and a large part of Word usage is with people collaborating on writing something. That isn't a few percent of Word users, it is probably the majority of Word users. It's just that most of them don't realize how bad Word actually is for collaboration.
As for requiring hugely expensive software to work on, last time I checked, I could do everything I wanted as a home user with
Then you haven't checked very well. And, of course, even Windows itself is rather expensive.
The grandparent post is correct.
Actually, it is going away: Microsoft is replacing it with an XML-based format for pretty much the reasons that I gave.
Regardless of whether StarOffice or any other clone has a superior format, until they're ubiquitous, they have even WORSE interoperability stories than
See, that shows your faulty thinking: the only categories you think in are whether one format is superior to another and whether some vendor manages to muscle itself into the market.
In fact, the only way we are going to get a usable standard for document formats is through standards bodies and industry collaboration. So far, attempts at doing that have been unsuccessful because Microsoft wasn't interested, but it will happen sooner or later.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have.
If you think that, you aren't going to compete on any platform. When I run something on Linux, I expect that it integrates tightly with the Linux operating system. None of the cross-platform dreck that has come out of Sun (OpenOffice, Java), does that--they all treat Linux as a second class citizen and ignore Linux key bindings, user interface conventions, etc. WORA is useful for a small niche market, but most developers couldn't care less.
I am grateful that they are telling me that this is a cross-platform Java office suite because I then know what I can expect from the UI.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in?
You're right: consumers don't. But consumers might care about getting lower cost software, better features, more reliability, easier extensibility, etc. Languages can help there: much of the reason why Mozilla and OpenOffice are such behemoths and such a bitch to extend is their choice of language and object system.
Java is a much better language to write large end-user applications in than C/C++, but Sun, unfortunately, nixes that advantage with their insistence on "cross-platform support".
C# offers similar advantages at the language level, but, unlike Java, it emphasizes the use of platform-specific libraries. That's why you are going to see lots of Windows and Linux software in C#, and unlike Java, users neither will know nor care that it's written in C#--they'll just get better, more robust software more quickly. (There is nothing magical about C#--any language could have taken the place of a Java-like language with platform specific libraries--but C# actually seems to be taking off.)
because an MP3 works nearly everywhere, just as a .doc
Microsoft Word files do not work "nearly everywhere". They don't even work very well on the platform they were designed for: they have version incompatibilities, contain hidden information, do not format reproducibly, are difficult to manipulate programmatically, are difficult to version control, require hugely expensive software to work on, and they carry viruses. Microsoft Word is about the worst of the document formats in common use, and it wasn't even designed for interchange. Just about the only merit it has is that it is what you get by default when you choose "Save" in Word. And that's probably the only reason it is popular. But even Word gives you some better alternatives.
...while passive RFID tags don't require power. This application just wouldn't be practical in the same way with IR.
That's no big deal: you either use a disposable unit with an integrated battery, or you recharge with a small solar cell. Keep in mind that it is more important for many applications that the end user has a reader already available, rather than that the tag has the lowest possible price. Compared to the rent people pay for movie posters and other advertising space, a few bucks spent on a disposable IR emitter with battery is going to be negligible.
In any case, if you want something passive and cheap, an even better way of dealing with it is to use something like Semacodes--2D barcodes recognized with a phonecam or PDA camera. 2D barcodes are even cheaper than RFID tags to produce, and readers (cameras) are becoming ubiquitous. Certainly, you are much more likely to have (and want) a digital camera on your phone or PDA than an RFID reader.
RFID and short-range wireless makes sense in some specific applications, but for most uses, you are already far better off with existing technologies. But, of course, RFID vendors are trying to get their new, proprietary stuff into everything. Sorry, I don't want or need the added weight, cost, or complexity of RFID or short-range wireless. Give me IR, Bluetooth, and a digital camera in my devices.
I don't need Nielsen to tell me that computers will be faster and displays will be bigger (although it is likely that Moore's law will have fallen by then).
Nielssen seems to be saying that computers will be used largely the same way they are being used today, with some obvious tweaks. While computers have gotten faster, fundamentally, we have made little progress in how we interact with them over the last 30 years (Smalltalk and the Alto were being developed in the 1970s and contained most of the paradigms that the most advanced commercial desktops are using today), and Nielssen is basically saying that not much will change over the next 30 years either. That may excite him, since it allows him to continue to peddle his user interface incrementalism, but, frankly, I find it depressing.
One thing is certain: in 30 years, we will still have self-appointed "gurus" that make a name and a business for themselves by repeating populist techno-babble and buzzwords, but without having any real insight or vision. That has nothing to do with computers, it is just human nature, and that won't change.
No matter how you author or present a story, people will still experience it in some linear order. Authors spend a lot of time worrying that the order a reader actually gets is interesting and makes sense; that's what a big part of good writing is all about. Linearity is something that is an added value for a story, not a restriction.
Many games may well be "non-linear" (i.e., have many different paths), but that's not to make them more engaging, it's to make them more replayable. And there will also continue to be many highly linear games that present a single, well-designed storyline as part of the game, although hopefully authors will find ways of making the interaction with the storyline more natural than "you must find switch A and trigger it to continue".
This is why I still regularly hear people complain about the lack of even a simple, C-like preprocessor in Java.
People complain about a lot of things, in particular things that are different from what they are used to. But the fact is: they are using Java. And the lack of macros makes a lot of developers on large projects really happy (you rarely hear from the happy people).
Besides, C macros can hardly be called "macros" at all, let alone general purpose macros.
By those criteria imprisoning somebody is wrong, as well
I didn't say "capital punishment is wrong". I didn't even say "you shouldn't execute people", I said that there are problems and costs with capital punishment and that people apparently underestimate them.
Try to read what people actually wrote, instead of responding to some preconceived notion of what you imagine people wrote.
If one were to rigorously apply those criteria, then the only punishment that is allowed would be fines - repayable with interest upon an overturned conviction.
There you are on the right track. What you don't see is that a year of life spent in prison has an economic cost to the individual that can usually be repaid. I think the restitution that the state should pay for that should be no different than if any private citizen did the same thing to someone. I consider it a serious fault of our legal system that the state, judges, and district attorneys can make errors with impunity and little consequence.
Unlike wrongful imprisonment, in the case of a wrongful execution, compensation is never possible to the victim. That just makes it very different. Nevertheless, at the very least, the state should still be financially liable to dependents, just as if a private citizen causes the death of another person through negligence.
a year of memories of dehumanizing experiences,
Imprisonment should not be dehumanizing. The fact that it is in the US is itself a serious problem.