However, when the majority of people also like doing that something - well, that's what should determine law in a democracy.
It's not, actually.
A majority that enjoyed owning slaves, segregating schools, etc. had those things taken away from them by a legally empowered minority. A minority chooses to get tattoos, but that doesn't mean we make tattoos illegal. The laws are determined based on larger realities and principles, not just what the population votes on. The fact that the majority of the people see being gay as morally wrong doesn't justify legislating against it. The fact that the majority of the people don't see copyright violation as wrong doesn't mean we should ignore copyright.
You have to come up with better arguments for major public policy influencing billions of dollars than "everyone I know seems to agree that it's okay."
Lastly, your sample is definitely biased. Your quote was "Everyone who used Napster". That's like saying "All murders I know think murder is morally okay." Of course the Napster users are biased in favor of Napster. I don't think a majority of the USA used Napster. Consider the percentage of people who even have broadband at all, and it begins to look pretty unlikely.
Put ports 1 through 8 in VLAN 1
Ports 9 through 16 plus port 1 in VLAN 2
You can't put port 1 in both VLANs, unless the Internet connected router does trunking and subinterfaces, in which case you would need to configure access lists to prevent the router from routing VLAN 2 traffic to VLAN 1 (ie, viruses from the unsafe network infecting the "secure" VLAN 1)
VLANs simply allow you to create two separated network segments with one switch. You could do just as well with two cheap switches. The problem is that if you want to connect them both to the Internet, with only one ISP connection, you need to connect the two networks to the same router. At that point, any logical separation has to be done in the router, presumably via some sort of access lists. I doubt the "el cheapo" router will do this, much less do trunking and subinterfaces (to talk to VLAN 1 and 2 simultaneously).
The best comparable cost solution I can think of (short of building a Linux box and configuring it to be the router/firewall) is to buy another router. Now both routers connect to a separate segment (another switch, or VLAN 3), which is considered the "outside" or "public" segment. Now the inside port of router 1 goes to segment 1 (either a VLAN or a physical switch) and the inside of router 2 goes to segment 2. This does, however, require your ISP to allow you two DHCP addresses, but it achieves the goal of both networks getting to the Internet but not each other.
I'm currently studying to take Cisco's CCNA test - I find it interesting that they *don't even mention* IPV6 in the study guides etc. It seems to me that until Cisco gets behind IPV6, it isn't really gonna happen.
They mention it plenty in CCNP/CCIE level areas. CCNA is introductory stuff, and it's a waste of time to introduce you to technology you won't even see deployed before you have to recertify.
Geoff Huston, the guy you're quoting, the one who was defending current IPv4 status quo, was not the Cisco guy.
The Cisco guy was Tony Hain, who said: "The end to sustainable growth of the IPv4-based Internet has arrived and it is time to move on. IPv6 is ready as the successor, so the gating issue is attitude. When CIOs make firm decisions to deploy IPv6, the process is fairly straightforward. Staff will need to be trained, management tools will need to be enhanced, routers and operating systems will need to be updated, and IPv6-enabled versions of applications will need to be deployed. All these steps will take time-in many cases multiple years."
Which, if you feel like being cynical about selfish motives, still makes sense. You're wrong, Cisco does sell tons of IPv6 capable gear, and most companies that decided to do a big migration would have to buy lots of that gear. Cisco wants you to move to IPv6, not stay with NAT boxes.
Instead of a new format every 10 years we're faced with every year. Or Month.
I sure don't want my music collection to become obsolete instantly if I forget to pay a bill.
I don't know about you, but I'm entering my third year with iTunes Music Store, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And whether I pay some theoretical future bill is irrelevant. Just like when I bought my CDs, I paid to get them, now I have them.
There are several things to complain about with iTMS, but "new format every year" and "goes away if you don't pay a bill" aren't among them.
I thought the entire point of the Internet is that they picked reliability.
Then your first problem was assuming that "the Internet" could be represented as "they". The Internet is an abstract concept, it's the interconnection of a bunch of different networks. Each of those networks is run by different people/companies/goverment-agencies, each of which has their own policies. Obviously they have to agree on a bunch of things in order to interconnect (ie, "let's speak BGP for routing, rather than this nifty routing protocol I wrote last night") but that doesn't mean they all share the same values and priorities (fast, cheap, reliable).
In addition to that, sometimes even when you prioritize reliability, it still fails you. You can dual-home your routers, but if they're both running the same code, they're both vulnerable to the same bugs. Now you decide to quad-home them, so you can run a set with different code, but they're all running the same hardware platform. Maybe the WAN modules included the same bad batch of ASICs. The "cost" vs. "reliability" graph grows exponentially, so it doesn't take long to stray into absurdity. It sounds like this particular outage was a case of "we designed it to be highly-redundant, but something happened which we hadn't anticipated."
There's really no way around that, you just try to minimize it.
Therefore, I submit that with 100 Us and 100 Bs on the island, the information is already universal and the countdown can begin immediately. On day 100, each person who sees 99 Bs knows he is a B, and each person who sees 99 Us knows he is a U.
As Council states in the original puzzle, they don't know that the distribution is equal. You may see 99 Us, but for all you know there are 99 Us and you're one of the 101 Bs.
One small correction:
"The Guru speaks only once (let's say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island."
should read:
"The Guru speaks only once (let's say at noon), on each day of all their endless years on the island."
"only once... on one day" says that after the first day the Guru never speaks again.
Could this be a step towards a single IM protocol? Not XMPP, but good enough for me:-)
It's not about protocol, it's about networks. Even if MSN, Yahoo, and AIM all switched to XMPP, that wouldn't really help the users, only the developers of software like GAIM and Trillian.
Users would still have to sign up for accounts at all the different providers, and would have to keep track of which of their friends had which user IDs on which networks. As long as a user has to download a third-party application and enter all their different user IDs and buddies from all the different networks so it can connect to several different services at the same time, the user doesn't care what protocols those services are running.
Network peering is far more important here than protocol.
No, it doesn't.
It comes from the companies that pay them for ads.
They get those ad contracts because they are effective.
They are effective because they are targeted well, and because Google has a ton of users.
Google has a ton of users for many reasons, of which "name-recognition" and "technically-superior features" are at the top, and "not evil" is in the niche frequented by a minority even amongst hardcore geeks.
It's good that they are good, and it helps them court users, but as it starts to slide away, they'll still do fine. They don't need to be good, they just need to be better than their competition.
Yep. And so the "best" interface for Linux would be... whatever the majority of Windows users are familiar with.
Very close.
Let's take the scare-quotes off "best", and remove the ellipsis and the word "Windows"...
"Yep. And so the best interface for Linux would be... whatever the majority of users are familiar with."
There you go. That's much better.
Usability pretty much breaks down into two big issues:
1. How much time/effort/difficulty is involved in adapting to the new interface?
2. How easily/efficiently/comfortably can the interface be used by someone who knows it?
The second one is not insignificant, but what prevents most people from moving to a free operating system is not fear that it's inefficient, but rather the huge hurdle of time and effort and difficulty (all different things) involved in adapting to a new system. Therefore, testing the ease with which users of a different operating system move to yours is extremely valuable, and yes, it turns out that "Windows users" are the vast majority of "users of another operating system".
If your point was that the test users should have more closely represented the population breakdown of Win9x/Win2k/WinXP/MacOS9/MacOSX users, you have a valid point, even if that only means one of the eleven people would represent Mac OS. But I suspect your point was "Linux UIs shouldn't try to emulate Windows", and I think if your goal is to convert more people to Linux, (which is clearly important to Novell) then you pretty much have to emulate Windows UI.
And what's more, when you talk about the bandwidth of that fiber, you're talking about the bandwidth inside it. You can lay other fibers right next to it in a conduit. When you talk about the bandwidth in wireless (say, 54 Mbps for 802.11g) you're talking about available bandwidth in that channel.
The impact of that is, if your cell has a radius of 100 feet, then everyone using channel 6 (802.11 has three "non-overlapping" channels, 1, 6, and 11) in that 100 foot radius shares that 54 Mbps. So if we're talking about running an Internet connection from NYC to Boston, in the best of cases, in which nobody runs wireless except participants in our mesh, the total bandwidth available for everyone going between NYC and Boston becomes 54 Mbps. With fiber, AT&T can run a conduit with 10 pairs of fiber. Verzion can run 10 pairs. Qwest can run 10 pais. Now they put an OC-192 on each pair, and you've got something like 300 Gpbs between NYC and Boston.
And we haven't even started talking about noise/jamming problems. Wireless backbone is a contradiction in terms.
Level-3 wants money for Cogent customers to connect to Level-3's network but does not understand that this is a two-way connection and that Cogent's customers and Level-3's customer both benefit from this equally.
That's where you went wrong. Level 3 doesn't perceive them as benefitting equally. My connection to my ISP is a two-way connection, and yet they charge me money, rather than recognizing that we benefit equally. Because we don't. They're big, with connections to many. I am small, with only a server or two. In this case, presumably Level-3 decided that they were benefitting less from this arrangement than Cogent.
You're absolutely right about the service issues though, and Level-3 customers should complain. Cogent customers should complain too. Even if it's "not their fault", they are no longer able to provide the Internet service they're charging for, and they have to do what it takes to get it back. If it turns out there's way more Level-3 customers complaining, then Level-3 will cave. If it's the other way around, then Cogent will either pay Level-3 or find some other peering that will get them to those networks. That's how it should work. Being a tier 1 carrier costs money, so you have to charge money. When the situations change, the money being charged changes. Regulation isn't the answer.
Having a strong leadership with no space for dissent guarantees that if the leader knows the way no time will be lost discussing.
Yes, this is true, but you inserted an "if".
Democracy and free speech aren't about finding the most efficient way to implement the solution, they're about finding the best solution. A dictator can rapidly and efficiently put their decisions in place, but you have no way of guaranteeing they make good decisions.
On the subject of economics in particular, economy represents tons and tons of decisions being made based on a vast number of factors, so it is most efficient when that decision making capability is distributed. Now you have 100 million sensors gathering the information and 100 million brains processing it. Some of the information may be bad data, and some of the decisions may be poor ones, but on the whole you'll reach a much more efficient structure than having some guy in an office somewhere threaten people into giving him the information and then making the decisions on his own.
I was trying to make a point that our weapons are TOO good right now, and don't allow for Americans to know what sacrifice is.
You seem to take it for granted that war is really-really-bad, and see it as a problem when war is made less-bad, because war is really-really-bad. There's a sort of internally-inconsistent logic there. Better weapons, for this particular meaning of better, mean decreasing the human cost of war for both civilians and combatants. This is obvious when you compare the total lives lost in WW I or WW II to the lives lost in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yes, these new wars were smaller in scope, but they were orders of magnitude smaller in human cost.
This is a good thing.
Yes, it may make the people less reluctant to engage in wars, but you shouldn't pre-suppose that that is a bad thing. If those wars are "less-bad" than the previous wars, then we should be less-reluctant to engage in them. Your hesitance to do something should be determined by how bad that thing is.
We are doomed. We have children who vote who know more about planes than policy.
You now represent the 1,000th consecutive generation of human beings to declare that "we are doomed" because "[scoff], kids today!" I think you overestimate the intelligence and education and knowledge of past generations. The average person never knew national policy in depth. Some people always do, and many people always don't. 49% of people will be below average. Always.
For objective metrics like "percentage of population starving", "percentage of population dying in wars", "percentage of population homeless", the world just keeps getting better every year. Yes, I know, we're all doomed because the President can't pronounce "nuclear", but really we've been "doomed" ever since we were first living.
Re:How does the quality..
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 1
How does the source code and implementation design quality of such open source engines compare to the actual products?
Well, the fact that you use the word "actual", rather than "commercial", certainly speaks to the perception of open source engines.
Conclusion: the technology exists to fix these problems and enable people to listen at lower volumes, manufacturers just can't be bothered.
It's not entirely the manufacturers' faults. Adding technology to a product adds cost - even if you don't add any physical components, design complexity adds cost in design, testing, and support.
People already complain that the iPod is too expensive, and even technically savvy users will scoff at the discman/mp3 player/headphones that cost 20% more but claim to have Fancytronic Noise Goodification Technology(TM)(R)(C).
The users that know and care about these specific technologies and features will seek them out and purchase solutions like the ones you name. Most customers will buy the cheaper product unless they know better. You won't see this stuff included by default until a large percentage of customers know about it and are willing to spend extra for it.
I once had the same problem with the NYC subway, which is extremely loud.
The solution you need is in-ear (as opposed to ear-bud) headphones. They'll block out most of the surrounding sound, and you can clearly hear hi-quality sound at low-volumes.
Apple sells its own in-ear phones, which are not bad but not great.
They also sell the Etymotic ER-6i's, which are fantastic but expensive.
They're even white, so you stick to the iPod style.
Mi niece told me the other day that she would rather be beautifull than intelligent.
Society tells women to be stupid and popular and then asks itself why women, on average, seem less inteligent than men.
I wonder sometimes why we take it for granted that this is a bad thing, and that Society is some evil entity that we can blame for this bad thing. Can you prove, rationally or scientifically, that it's better to be smart than beautiful?
I'm not convinced that it leads to being happier, nor that it leads to making other people happier. Those may not be your metrics, and if your evaluation works out differently than mine, that's fine. But keep in mind that there are no universal metrics for good, and even if there were it's far from proven that "intelligent" achieves them better than "beautiful".
Feel free to do your best to get your niece interested in learning, but try not to make her feel shallow for wanting to be beautiful.
To be fair, that's entirely the fault of researchers announcing results without having the articles published to back them up.
Yes, but to be fair to the researchers, if they didn't announce their studies formally, some journalist would find out and annouce it anyway, but without any reasonable clarification from the scientists. As it is, the article at least states that it's based on statistical differences in IQ scores. If the authors of the study hadn't put out the information to the press, the articles might have just been "New Study Shows Women Are Dumb".
This same behavior occurs in most areas of media coverage, particularly politics. It's vital to release a story before the press finds out about it on their own, even if the story isn't really "ready" to be released yet.
Slashdot Mirror
However, when the majority of people also like doing that something - well, that's what should determine law in a democracy.
It's not, actually.
A majority that enjoyed owning slaves, segregating schools, etc. had those things taken away from them by a legally empowered minority. A minority chooses to get tattoos, but that doesn't mean we make tattoos illegal. The laws are determined based on larger realities and principles, not just what the population votes on. The fact that the majority of the people see being gay as morally wrong doesn't justify legislating against it. The fact that the majority of the people don't see copyright violation as wrong doesn't mean we should ignore copyright.
You have to come up with better arguments for major public policy influencing billions of dollars than "everyone I know seems to agree that it's okay."
Lastly, your sample is definitely biased. Your quote was "Everyone who used Napster". That's like saying "All murders I know think murder is morally okay." Of course the Napster users are biased in favor of Napster. I don't think a majority of the USA used Napster. Consider the percentage of people who even have broadband at all, and it begins to look pretty unlikely.
I think the point you're missing is that "popularity amongst its users" is not a very good benchmark for validity.
The fact that I like doing something illegal doesn't mean that it should be legal.
Put ports 1 through 8 in VLAN 1
Ports 9 through 16 plus port 1 in VLAN 2
You can't put port 1 in both VLANs, unless the Internet connected router does trunking and subinterfaces, in which case you would need to configure access lists to prevent the router from routing VLAN 2 traffic to VLAN 1 (ie, viruses from the unsafe network infecting the "secure" VLAN 1)
VLANs simply allow you to create two separated network segments with one switch. You could do just as well with two cheap switches. The problem is that if you want to connect them both to the Internet, with only one ISP connection, you need to connect the two networks to the same router. At that point, any logical separation has to be done in the router, presumably via some sort of access lists. I doubt the "el cheapo" router will do this, much less do trunking and subinterfaces (to talk to VLAN 1 and 2 simultaneously).
The best comparable cost solution I can think of (short of building a Linux box and configuring it to be the router/firewall) is to buy another router. Now both routers connect to a separate segment (another switch, or VLAN 3), which is considered the "outside" or "public" segment. Now the inside port of router 1 goes to segment 1 (either a VLAN or a physical switch) and the inside of router 2 goes to segment 2. This does, however, require your ISP to allow you two DHCP addresses, but it achieves the goal of both networks getting to the Internet but not each other.
I'm currently studying to take Cisco's CCNA test - I find it interesting that they *don't even mention* IPV6 in the study guides etc. It seems to me that until Cisco gets behind IPV6, it isn't really gonna happen.
They mention it plenty in CCNP/CCIE level areas. CCNA is introductory stuff, and it's a waste of time to introduce you to technology you won't even see deployed before you have to recertify.
Wow did you misread the bias in that article.
Geoff Huston, the guy you're quoting, the one who was defending current IPv4 status quo, was not the Cisco guy.
The Cisco guy was Tony Hain, who said:
"The end to sustainable growth of the IPv4-based Internet has arrived and it is time to move on. IPv6 is ready as the successor, so the gating issue is attitude. When CIOs make firm decisions to deploy IPv6, the process is fairly straightforward. Staff will need to be trained, management tools will need to be enhanced, routers and operating systems will need to be updated, and IPv6-enabled versions of applications will need to be deployed. All these steps will take time-in many cases multiple years."
Which, if you feel like being cynical about selfish motives, still makes sense. You're wrong, Cisco does sell tons of IPv6 capable gear, and most companies that decided to do a big migration would have to buy lots of that gear. Cisco wants you to move to IPv6, not stay with NAT boxes.
Instead of a new format every 10 years we're faced with every year. Or Month.
I sure don't want my music collection to become obsolete instantly if I forget to pay a bill.
I don't know about you, but I'm entering my third year with iTunes Music Store, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And whether I pay some theoretical future bill is irrelevant. Just like when I bought my CDs, I paid to get them, now I have them.
There are several things to complain about with iTMS, but "new format every year" and "goes away if you don't pay a bill" aren't among them.
I thought the entire point of the Internet is that they picked reliability.
Then your first problem was assuming that "the Internet" could be represented as "they". The Internet is an abstract concept, it's the interconnection of a bunch of different networks. Each of those networks is run by different people/companies/goverment-agencies, each of which has their own policies. Obviously they have to agree on a bunch of things in order to interconnect (ie, "let's speak BGP for routing, rather than this nifty routing protocol I wrote last night") but that doesn't mean they all share the same values and priorities (fast, cheap, reliable).
In addition to that, sometimes even when you prioritize reliability, it still fails you. You can dual-home your routers, but if they're both running the same code, they're both vulnerable to the same bugs. Now you decide to quad-home them, so you can run a set with different code, but they're all running the same hardware platform. Maybe the WAN modules included the same bad batch of ASICs. The "cost" vs. "reliability" graph grows exponentially, so it doesn't take long to stray into absurdity. It sounds like this particular outage was a case of "we designed it to be highly-redundant, but something happened which we hadn't anticipated."
There's really no way around that, you just try to minimize it.
Oh, I'm sorry, you're quite correct.
My mistake, I would retract my original comment had I the ability.
Yours was a good puzzle, and reminds me of the Pirates dividing loot puzzle.
Therefore, I submit that with 100 Us and 100 Bs on the island, the information is already universal and the countdown can begin immediately. On day 100, each person who sees 99 Bs knows he is a B, and each person who sees 99 Us knows he is a U.
As Council states in the original puzzle, they don't know that the distribution is equal. You may see 99 Us, but for all you know there are 99 Us and you're one of the 101 Bs.
One small correction:
"The Guru speaks only once (let's say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island."
should read:
"The Guru speaks only once (let's say at noon), on each day of all their endless years on the island."
"only once... on one day" says that after the first day the Guru never speaks again.
Could this be a step towards a single IM protocol? Not XMPP, but good enough for me :-)
It's not about protocol, it's about networks. Even if MSN, Yahoo, and AIM all switched to XMPP, that wouldn't really help the users, only the developers of software like GAIM and Trillian.
Users would still have to sign up for accounts at all the different providers, and would have to keep track of which of their friends had which user IDs on which networks. As long as a user has to download a third-party application and enter all their different user IDs and buddies from all the different networks so it can connect to several different services at the same time, the user doesn't care what protocols those services are running.
Network peering is far more important here than protocol.
Their income comes from not being evil
No, it doesn't.
It comes from the companies that pay them for ads.
They get those ad contracts because they are effective.
They are effective because they are targeted well, and because Google has a ton of users.
Google has a ton of users for many reasons, of which "name-recognition" and "technically-superior features" are at the top, and "not evil" is in the niche frequented by a minority even amongst hardcore geeks.
It's good that they are good, and it helps them court users, but as it starts to slide away, they'll still do fine. They don't need to be good, they just need to be better than their competition.
And yet millions of people, literally, use Macs every single day.
By that line of reasoning, Windows is more than ten times as usable as Mac OS X.
Yep. And so the "best" interface for Linux would be ... whatever the majority of Windows users are familiar with.
Very close.
Let's take the scare-quotes off "best", and remove the ellipsis and the word "Windows"...
"Yep. And so the best interface for Linux would be... whatever the majority of users are familiar with."
There you go. That's much better.
Usability pretty much breaks down into two big issues:
1. How much time/effort/difficulty is involved in adapting to the new interface?
2. How easily/efficiently/comfortably can the interface be used by someone who knows it?
The second one is not insignificant, but what prevents most people from moving to a free operating system is not fear that it's inefficient, but rather the huge hurdle of time and effort and difficulty (all different things) involved in adapting to a new system. Therefore, testing the ease with which users of a different operating system move to yours is extremely valuable, and yes, it turns out that "Windows users" are the vast majority of "users of another operating system".
If your point was that the test users should have more closely represented the population breakdown of Win9x/Win2k/WinXP/MacOS9/MacOSX users, you have a valid point, even if that only means one of the eleven people would represent Mac OS. But I suspect your point was "Linux UIs shouldn't try to emulate Windows", and I think if your goal is to convert more people to Linux, (which is clearly important to Novell) then you pretty much have to emulate Windows UI.
And what's more, when you talk about the bandwidth of that fiber, you're talking about the bandwidth inside it. You can lay other fibers right next to it in a conduit. When you talk about the bandwidth in wireless (say, 54 Mbps for 802.11g) you're talking about available bandwidth in that channel.
The impact of that is, if your cell has a radius of 100 feet, then everyone using channel 6 (802.11 has three "non-overlapping" channels, 1, 6, and 11) in that 100 foot radius shares that 54 Mbps. So if we're talking about running an Internet connection from NYC to Boston, in the best of cases, in which nobody runs wireless except participants in our mesh, the total bandwidth available for everyone going between NYC and Boston becomes 54 Mbps. With fiber, AT&T can run a conduit with 10 pairs of fiber. Verzion can run 10 pairs. Qwest can run 10 pais. Now they put an OC-192 on each pair, and you've got something like 300 Gpbs between NYC and Boston.
And we haven't even started talking about noise/jamming problems. Wireless backbone is a contradiction in terms.
Level-3 wants money for Cogent customers to connect to Level-3's network but does not understand that this is a two-way connection and that Cogent's customers and Level-3's customer both benefit from this equally.
That's where you went wrong. Level 3 doesn't perceive them as benefitting equally. My connection to my ISP is a two-way connection, and yet they charge me money, rather than recognizing that we benefit equally. Because we don't. They're big, with connections to many. I am small, with only a server or two. In this case, presumably Level-3 decided that they were benefitting less from this arrangement than Cogent.
You're absolutely right about the service issues though, and Level-3 customers should complain. Cogent customers should complain too. Even if it's "not their fault", they are no longer able to provide the Internet service they're charging for, and they have to do what it takes to get it back. If it turns out there's way more Level-3 customers complaining, then Level-3 will cave. If it's the other way around, then Cogent will either pay Level-3 or find some other peering that will get them to those networks. That's how it should work. Being a tier 1 carrier costs money, so you have to charge money. When the situations change, the money being charged changes. Regulation isn't the answer.
Having a strong leadership with no space for dissent guarantees that if the leader knows the way no time will be lost discussing.
Yes, this is true, but you inserted an "if".
Democracy and free speech aren't about finding the most efficient way to implement the solution, they're about finding the best solution. A dictator can rapidly and efficiently put their decisions in place, but you have no way of guaranteeing they make good decisions.
On the subject of economics in particular, economy represents tons and tons of decisions being made based on a vast number of factors, so it is most efficient when that decision making capability is distributed. Now you have 100 million sensors gathering the information and 100 million brains processing it. Some of the information may be bad data, and some of the decisions may be poor ones, but on the whole you'll reach a much more efficient structure than having some guy in an office somewhere threaten people into giving him the information and then making the decisions on his own.
I was trying to make a point that our weapons are TOO good right now, and don't allow for Americans to know what sacrifice is.
You seem to take it for granted that war is really-really-bad, and see it as a problem when war is made less-bad, because war is really-really-bad. There's a sort of internally-inconsistent logic there. Better weapons, for this particular meaning of better, mean decreasing the human cost of war for both civilians and combatants. This is obvious when you compare the total lives lost in WW I or WW II to the lives lost in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yes, these new wars were smaller in scope, but they were orders of magnitude smaller in human cost.
This is a good thing.
Yes, it may make the people less reluctant to engage in wars, but you shouldn't pre-suppose that that is a bad thing. If those wars are "less-bad" than the previous wars, then we should be less-reluctant to engage in them. Your hesitance to do something should be determined by how bad that thing is.
We are doomed. We have children who vote who know more about planes than policy.
You now represent the 1,000th consecutive generation of human beings to declare that "we are doomed" because "[scoff], kids today!" I think you overestimate the intelligence and education and knowledge of past generations. The average person never knew national policy in depth. Some people always do, and many people always don't. 49% of people will be below average. Always.
For objective metrics like "percentage of population starving", "percentage of population dying in wars", "percentage of population homeless", the world just keeps getting better every year. Yes, I know, we're all doomed because the President can't pronounce "nuclear", but really we've been "doomed" ever since we were first living.
How does the source code and implementation design quality of such open source engines compare to the actual products?
Well, the fact that you use the word "actual", rather than "commercial", certainly speaks to the perception of open source engines.
Conclusion: the technology exists to fix these problems and enable people to listen at lower volumes, manufacturers just can't be bothered.
It's not entirely the manufacturers' faults. Adding technology to a product adds cost - even if you don't add any physical components, design complexity adds cost in design, testing, and support.
People already complain that the iPod is too expensive, and even technically savvy users will scoff at the discman/mp3 player/headphones that cost 20% more but claim to have Fancytronic Noise Goodification Technology(TM)(R)(C).
The users that know and care about these specific technologies and features will seek them out and purchase solutions like the ones you name. Most customers will buy the cheaper product unless they know better. You won't see this stuff included by default until a large percentage of customers know about it and are willing to spend extra for it.
I once had the same problem with the NYC subway, which is extremely loud.
The solution you need is in-ear (as opposed to ear-bud) headphones. They'll block out most of the surrounding sound, and you can clearly hear hi-quality sound at low-volumes.
Apple sells its own in-ear phones, which are not bad but not great.
They also sell the Etymotic ER-6i's, which are fantastic but expensive.
They're even white, so you stick to the iPod style.
If you cannot deal with people without resorting to childish antics then I simply don't want to work with you.
I'm sure Steve Ballmer will be really disappointed to hear that. I know he was looking forward to being taught how to run a successful company by you.
Mi niece told me the other day that she would rather be beautifull than intelligent. Society tells women to be stupid and popular and then asks itself why women, on average, seem less inteligent than men.
I wonder sometimes why we take it for granted that this is a bad thing, and that Society is some evil entity that we can blame for this bad thing. Can you prove, rationally or scientifically, that it's better to be smart than beautiful?
I'm not convinced that it leads to being happier, nor that it leads to making other people happier. Those may not be your metrics, and if your evaluation works out differently than mine, that's fine. But keep in mind that there are no universal metrics for good, and even if there were it's far from proven that "intelligent" achieves them better than "beautiful".
Feel free to do your best to get your niece interested in learning, but try not to make her feel shallow for wanting to be beautiful.
To be fair, that's entirely the fault of researchers announcing results without having the articles published to back them up.
Yes, but to be fair to the researchers, if they didn't announce their studies formally, some journalist would find out and annouce it anyway, but without any reasonable clarification from the scientists. As it is, the article at least states that it's based on statistical differences in IQ scores. If the authors of the study hadn't put out the information to the press, the articles might have just been "New Study Shows Women Are Dumb".
This same behavior occurs in most areas of media coverage, particularly politics. It's vital to release a story before the press finds out about it on their own, even if the story isn't really "ready" to be released yet.
However, I didn't feel like taking the time to do a statistical analysis on book sales
Well, the highest selling book ever is the Bible, and that was written by a woman, so I think you have a pretty good case...