Hell to the yeah brother. First one to get that right (and durable) gets riiiich.
Or sued into oblivion since there's about a billion patents for useless tech that's tangentially related to it and not even really trying to build toward the goal.
Who took them away from you? There's plenty of phones with buttons, plenty of feature phones, and if you really want to get medieval, you can even find phones that can barely text. How about you stop trying to stifle things you don't understand?
Fair enough, I was projecting a bit, wasn't I? To be fair to me though, the concession that some things are better explained through other means is a fairly important one to leave out for brevity's sake, and given the rest of your comment's apparent position that text communication is the ultimate form of communication (which I believe is true only for specific cases, and I disagree with strongly otherwise), I don't think my leap was entirely unreasonable.
I also take issue with the assertion that speed of consuming information is a limiter on education. The vast majority of the time is spent on digesting the information, not getting it into your head in the first place. And the thing that has the largest effect on the time it takes to digest (e.g. truly understand) information is the amount of context you can place that new information into, the end result being that the major factor in how fast you become educated is how educated you already are. And given that we spend such a small amount of time actually educating ourselves compared to how much time we have, motivation to devote more time to education is, for those of us with access to nearly unlimited sources, easily the other most important factor. Speed of consumption is just so far down on the list that it's nearly irrelevant. Now, enjoyment of the process of consumption is very important, but only because it affects the level of motivation. If reading is more enjoyable for you, or anything non-readable has a negative effect on your motivation, it will be important for the material to be in a readable form, but the thing you seem to have lost sight of is the fact that it's important for you, not everybody. I personally owe a great deal of my level of education to the fact that I had a attractive young teacher who wore tight sweaters and was nice to me, that I desperately wanted to impress. Other people in the same class didn't get nearly as much out of it as me, because they didn't share the same motivation.
Now, you may say that all you were saying is that you were arguing for taking the time to do a job well when presenting material in readable form, but that is not how your original post read.
Finally, your point that written text is the single greatest accelerator of human thought is missing the forest for the trees. I'm not certain it's correct even in this form, but the "written" part is irrelevant--the boost comes from the fact that we could make a record not subject to the limits of human memory, that could be passed from person to person. In fact, its effect was hindered by the fact that for a very long time, only a very few people could take advantage of it. Imagine what the dark ages would have looked like with a 100% literacy rate, which is what you would have if people back then could pass around and duplicate videos as easily as books.
I can read five times faster than I can listen to someone talk.
Can? Maybe, although I doubt your comprehension is anywhere near what it would be at 2x or slower, and even if it is, that isn't true for the vast majority of people, so expecting everyone to write, and give up important things like tone, semi-subconscious markers like vocal fry, intentional markers like body language, and other supplementary information, just because it's your preferred form of communication, is the picture of the arrogance you accuse others of. So is assuming that nobody's time never really is more valuable than yours, or even assuming that that's actually what somebody is saying when they make a video or have a poor command of grammar.
And why do you think that anything worth reading is going to be read by multiple people is some kind of advantage over recorded video, or audio? Do you really think that the rate at which we consume information is any sort of limiter on how intelligent our society is? Do you really think this indicates that the author is somehow contemptuous of the value of our time, or that it could be better explained through text?
I'm not saying that proper grammar and written works don't have their places, but when you write diatribes like this it sounds as if you'd like to eliminate every other form of communication. To those of us who actually connect with other people, it makes you sound positively inhuman.
I use (mostly) proper grammar out of habit--even a message I couldn't possibly care less about and would rather not even take the time to write will have correct spelling and proper grammar to the best of my knowledge.
I think the same is true for the other side of the fence as well. It's more of a personality trait than anything else, otherwise you'd see a large variation in quality from a single person. For the most part, that's not the case--people don't suddenly know the idiom is "by all means" when they're writing an e-mail at work, and in fact you couldn't have picked a worse example since idioms are frequently composed of "improper" grammar and often have definitions only tangentially linked to the words themselves. Spelling and grammar tend to be constant from a given person, indicating at best a general interest in clarity of communication, but even that is a leap: maybe they're just stupid, or are otherwise intelligent but have a learning disability, and are humiliated by their inability to get things right, or they are intentionally tweaking the noses of tightasses who choose to misinterpret what they're perfectly capable of understanding, or they are going for a particular literary "style".
There's nothing wrong with being a pedant, and as someone who's easily annoyed I sympathize and know that you don't get to choose what you'll be annoyed by any more than somebody chooses what they're allergic to, but there's a difference between both of those things and a simple lack of empathy. Which, I guess, is only really your fault if it's intentional.
Poor grammar always makes people look like an idiot to you. To another "idiot", it might make them look like a kindred soul. Dig?
By the way, spelling and grammar are two distinct concepts. In order to avoid looking like you don't know the difference, you should have said something like, "How would you like to hire someone who 'ain't never missed no work in 2008-2012'?"
Of course somebody who isn't a C programmer shouldn't care about this. Both the previous poster and I were talking about C programmers, which is pretty clear from our posts.
I can't decide if that detail escaped you, or if you're saying somebody hiring a C programmer should hire somebody that would need to google this kind of thing.
Although acquiring the information is going to be a crime in itself, it's generally not treason even to hack into a government computer. But releasing information can be much worse. So if they put this stuff up there, what about the person that exercises judgment? Even if I came by it through legitimate means, I'd never release information that didn't expose corruption of some sort, but I'd have to think long and hard about information that did. If it's bad enough, somebody who would have never released actual information may be enticed to release this fake information.
Somehow though, I doubt anyone but the defendant will give a shit.
There are plenty of good reasons for not doing this. I just don't feel that the reasons the original poster gave are among them. Doing something even more effective is a great reason though.
Your argument seems to be based around the idea that it's impossible for you to ever be aided by this service. Instead of castigating you for your unrecognized selfishness, I'll try to appeal to it. First though, we need to at least attempt to break through your self-deception, because a rational conversation isn't possible with it. If I fail, well, at least I tried.
Have you ever encountered black ice? If you haven't, talk to someone who has, whose opinion you trust. If such a person exists, you'll find out that sometimes, it hits, and there is absolutely no way you could have avoided it short of never driving, ever. If it forms just right, you can't see it, period, not with three extra eyes and binoculars. If it forms on a turn, and you hit it, your car will slide, and there is no amount of driving skill that will prevent it, not even if you were the best driver that ever lived. Physics and all that jazz.
And there's all those other idiots on the road, too. What if that hot shit drops his joint in his lap and jerks the wheel just as you're passing, running his car into your lane at the last possible instant causing a head-on collision and knocking you both out? I know you're a magnificent driver, but daddy's money bought little Mr. Hot-Shit a car that turns faster than yours, and the random jerking of the wheel happened to replicate a perfect turn that pushed that car to the limit of its lateral grip, so no matter how astounding your reflexes and command of the machine you pilot, the immutable laws of the universe are dictating a crash. Even though you're perfect, you can't react to something before it happens, provided you're a believer in free will.
So now that we've established that even though you're perfect (and you are), it could still happen to you, what's the price you're willing to pay to drastically reduce the chance that you die, or perhaps just lose a leg? I know you've got a price, since you've made that your argument. I guess $500 isn't worth it to you. I'm curious. What is?
This was all over the news, and is a matter of public record. Do some googling, you'd have to be a conspiracy theorist to claim that it isn't true given the volume of consistent coverage by reputable publications, up to and including the New York Times.
If it were up to me, no there wouldn't be fines if you voluntarily disconnect the beacon, provided you notify your passengers that you're taking on more than the minimum possible amount of responsibility for their lives because you'd rather live off the grid than address the issue of corruption that motivates your desire to live off the grid, and you feel that your desire to take the easy way out is more important than the possibility of their avoidable death.
The problem you seem to be having trouble with is that you live in a society. If more people, or a few more powerful people than you, want something different than what you want... well, I think you can see where this is going. I'd say that if you don't like the society you're in you should form your own, but there just ain't a lot of empty spaces on this planet anymore. As the song says, you can't always get what you want.
Well, if we're making up hypothetical situations...
If I needed somebody to protect me while I slept, I wouldn't give the gun to the person who wanted to kill me, I'd give it to someone who wanted to protect me. Even if my gun is the only gun in the world, and I destroy the gun, the person who wants to kill me will just do it with a knife. If I keep it for myself because I trust no one, they'll just kill me while I sleep. Truth be told, I'd rather be shot than stabbed, or strangled.
The problem is not the gun. The problem is that somebody wants to kill me. And I'm saying that if the people we would give this technology to will use it against us, we should replace those people with people who want to use it to help us, because my gun isn't the only gun in the world. The technology exists, that's a hard fact. The only question is how it's used.
Well, we could stifle technological progress in order to prevent things like this. Just think of all the privacy we'd have if electricity had been outlawed at the start!
Or, we could apply a system of checks and balances to address the root issue, which is that privacy is being violated, regardless of the means.
Try to remember this post when you're upside-down in a ditch with two broken arms at 3 AM on a country road.
Me? I'll gladly pay $500 extra dollars per car even if only one in a hundred people ever go through that experience. I know a hundred people, and I don't think any of them should spend a minute more in that ditch than they have to.
You are advocating luddism as a solution to a social problem. The social problem being that "they" think they have a right to track other people. Until you address that, you're just playing whack-a-mole, and with every smack of the hammer denying society access to the technology that's being used against it.
If you think correctly defining your function arguments' types is a pointless gotcha, you shouldn't call yourself either one, at least not in C. Maybe you think details like this are beneath you, and maybe you're right and this kind of thing should be abstracted away, but when you get right down to it, computers are just billions of on/off switches, and software has to be written at this level at some point to enable your high-level magic. If they don't get it right, your magic isn't possible. Did you think Python just sprang from the ether?
An anecdote of an incredibly poor driver does nothing to support your argument that even a better-than-average driver can drive safer without ABS than with. I won't argue that ABS is more fun, but then again I was never arguing that. I'm saying it's more safe unless you're a 1 in 100,000 driver, and probably not even then.
Why is it illegal to sleep in the back seat with the radio on while drunk?
Like I said, it's not a question of safety. It's a question of whether you are making yourself politically vulnerable or popular by voting for a given law.
I live in upstate New York. I once spent three winters in a row taking every single corner through city traffic sideways in my RWD manual, and I used to go bombing around the unplowed country roads for fun after a big snowstorm. Yes, I know it was dangerous and I regret doing it and am incredibly lucky that I didn't hurt anyone. The point is though, I never wrecked my car, never ditched it, and saved it from too many close calls to count. I know how to drive in snow and ice, I know how good people can get at handling it, and I know what the effect of ABS and traction control are. That would roughly be why I'm so contemptuous of anyone who isn't a professional stunt driver who thinks they can do better.
Autonomous cars would mean the end of revenue streams from red light cameras, speed traps, DUIs, and driver's license checkpoints. It also means fewer cops would be needed, so the blue wall (cop unions) will fight it too.
It would not mean the end of DUIs. You can get a DUI on a bicycle, and you can get a DUI for sleeping it off in the back seat with the radio on.
I won't take the position that driving drunk (or even with just a couple beers) should be legal, but the law has progressed far past the point where it's about saving lives. It's about politics now.
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Hell to the yeah brother. First one to get that right (and durable) gets riiiich.
Or sued into oblivion since there's about a billion patents for useless tech that's tangentially related to it and not even really trying to build toward the goal.
Who took them away from you? There's plenty of phones with buttons, plenty of feature phones, and if you really want to get medieval, you can even find phones that can barely text. How about you stop trying to stifle things you don't understand?
Fair enough, I was projecting a bit, wasn't I? To be fair to me though, the concession that some things are better explained through other means is a fairly important one to leave out for brevity's sake, and given the rest of your comment's apparent position that text communication is the ultimate form of communication (which I believe is true only for specific cases, and I disagree with strongly otherwise), I don't think my leap was entirely unreasonable.
I also take issue with the assertion that speed of consuming information is a limiter on education. The vast majority of the time is spent on digesting the information, not getting it into your head in the first place. And the thing that has the largest effect on the time it takes to digest (e.g. truly understand) information is the amount of context you can place that new information into, the end result being that the major factor in how fast you become educated is how educated you already are. And given that we spend such a small amount of time actually educating ourselves compared to how much time we have, motivation to devote more time to education is, for those of us with access to nearly unlimited sources, easily the other most important factor. Speed of consumption is just so far down on the list that it's nearly irrelevant. Now, enjoyment of the process of consumption is very important, but only because it affects the level of motivation. If reading is more enjoyable for you, or anything non-readable has a negative effect on your motivation, it will be important for the material to be in a readable form, but the thing you seem to have lost sight of is the fact that it's important for you, not everybody. I personally owe a great deal of my level of education to the fact that I had a attractive young teacher who wore tight sweaters and was nice to me, that I desperately wanted to impress. Other people in the same class didn't get nearly as much out of it as me, because they didn't share the same motivation.
Now, you may say that all you were saying is that you were arguing for taking the time to do a job well when presenting material in readable form, but that is not how your original post read.
Finally, your point that written text is the single greatest accelerator of human thought is missing the forest for the trees. I'm not certain it's correct even in this form, but the "written" part is irrelevant--the boost comes from the fact that we could make a record not subject to the limits of human memory, that could be passed from person to person. In fact, its effect was hindered by the fact that for a very long time, only a very few people could take advantage of it. Imagine what the dark ages would have looked like with a 100% literacy rate, which is what you would have if people back then could pass around and duplicate videos as easily as books.
Well aren't you just amazing. I'm sure your parents are very proud.
I can read five times faster than I can listen to someone talk.
Can? Maybe, although I doubt your comprehension is anywhere near what it would be at 2x or slower, and even if it is, that isn't true for the vast majority of people, so expecting everyone to write, and give up important things like tone, semi-subconscious markers like vocal fry, intentional markers like body language, and other supplementary information, just because it's your preferred form of communication, is the picture of the arrogance you accuse others of. So is assuming that nobody's time never really is more valuable than yours, or even assuming that that's actually what somebody is saying when they make a video or have a poor command of grammar.
And why do you think that anything worth reading is going to be read by multiple people is some kind of advantage over recorded video, or audio? Do you really think that the rate at which we consume information is any sort of limiter on how intelligent our society is? Do you really think this indicates that the author is somehow contemptuous of the value of our time, or that it could be better explained through text?
I'm not saying that proper grammar and written works don't have their places, but when you write diatribes like this it sounds as if you'd like to eliminate every other form of communication. To those of us who actually connect with other people, it makes you sound positively inhuman.
I use (mostly) proper grammar out of habit--even a message I couldn't possibly care less about and would rather not even take the time to write will have correct spelling and proper grammar to the best of my knowledge.
I think the same is true for the other side of the fence as well. It's more of a personality trait than anything else, otherwise you'd see a large variation in quality from a single person. For the most part, that's not the case--people don't suddenly know the idiom is "by all means" when they're writing an e-mail at work, and in fact you couldn't have picked a worse example since idioms are frequently composed of "improper" grammar and often have definitions only tangentially linked to the words themselves. Spelling and grammar tend to be constant from a given person, indicating at best a general interest in clarity of communication, but even that is a leap: maybe they're just stupid, or are otherwise intelligent but have a learning disability, and are humiliated by their inability to get things right, or they are intentionally tweaking the noses of tightasses who choose to misinterpret what they're perfectly capable of understanding, or they are going for a particular literary "style".
There's nothing wrong with being a pedant, and as someone who's easily annoyed I sympathize and know that you don't get to choose what you'll be annoyed by any more than somebody chooses what they're allergic to, but there's a difference between both of those things and a simple lack of empathy. Which, I guess, is only really your fault if it's intentional.
Poor grammar always makes people look like an idiot to you. To another "idiot", it might make them look like a kindred soul. Dig?
By the way, spelling and grammar are two distinct concepts. In order to avoid looking like you don't know the difference, you should have said something like, "How would you like to hire someone who 'ain't never missed no work in 2008-2012'?"
Of course somebody who isn't a C programmer shouldn't care about this. Both the previous poster and I were talking about C programmers, which is pretty clear from our posts.
I can't decide if that detail escaped you, or if you're saying somebody hiring a C programmer should hire somebody that would need to google this kind of thing.
That is a very, very good point.
Although acquiring the information is going to be a crime in itself, it's generally not treason even to hack into a government computer. But releasing information can be much worse. So if they put this stuff up there, what about the person that exercises judgment? Even if I came by it through legitimate means, I'd never release information that didn't expose corruption of some sort, but I'd have to think long and hard about information that did. If it's bad enough, somebody who would have never released actual information may be enticed to release this fake information.
Somehow though, I doubt anyone but the defendant will give a shit.
Finally, someone with valid points!
There are plenty of good reasons for not doing this. I just don't feel that the reasons the original poster gave are among them. Doing something even more effective is a great reason though.
Your argument seems to be based around the idea that it's impossible for you to ever be aided by this service. Instead of castigating you for your unrecognized selfishness, I'll try to appeal to it. First though, we need to at least attempt to break through your self-deception, because a rational conversation isn't possible with it. If I fail, well, at least I tried.
Have you ever encountered black ice? If you haven't, talk to someone who has, whose opinion you trust. If such a person exists, you'll find out that sometimes, it hits, and there is absolutely no way you could have avoided it short of never driving, ever. If it forms just right, you can't see it, period, not with three extra eyes and binoculars. If it forms on a turn, and you hit it, your car will slide, and there is no amount of driving skill that will prevent it, not even if you were the best driver that ever lived. Physics and all that jazz.
And there's all those other idiots on the road, too. What if that hot shit drops his joint in his lap and jerks the wheel just as you're passing, running his car into your lane at the last possible instant causing a head-on collision and knocking you both out? I know you're a magnificent driver, but daddy's money bought little Mr. Hot-Shit a car that turns faster than yours, and the random jerking of the wheel happened to replicate a perfect turn that pushed that car to the limit of its lateral grip, so no matter how astounding your reflexes and command of the machine you pilot, the immutable laws of the universe are dictating a crash. Even though you're perfect, you can't react to something before it happens, provided you're a believer in free will.
So now that we've established that even though you're perfect (and you are), it could still happen to you, what's the price you're willing to pay to drastically reduce the chance that you die, or perhaps just lose a leg? I know you've got a price, since you've made that your argument. I guess $500 isn't worth it to you. I'm curious. What is?
This was all over the news, and is a matter of public record. Do some googling, you'd have to be a conspiracy theorist to claim that it isn't true given the volume of consistent coverage by reputable publications, up to and including the New York Times.
If it were up to me, no there wouldn't be fines if you voluntarily disconnect the beacon, provided you notify your passengers that you're taking on more than the minimum possible amount of responsibility for their lives because you'd rather live off the grid than address the issue of corruption that motivates your desire to live off the grid, and you feel that your desire to take the easy way out is more important than the possibility of their avoidable death.
The problem you seem to be having trouble with is that you live in a society. If more people, or a few more powerful people than you, want something different than what you want... well, I think you can see where this is going. I'd say that if you don't like the society you're in you should form your own, but there just ain't a lot of empty spaces on this planet anymore. As the song says, you can't always get what you want.
Well, if we're making up hypothetical situations...
If I needed somebody to protect me while I slept, I wouldn't give the gun to the person who wanted to kill me, I'd give it to someone who wanted to protect me. Even if my gun is the only gun in the world, and I destroy the gun, the person who wants to kill me will just do it with a knife. If I keep it for myself because I trust no one, they'll just kill me while I sleep. Truth be told, I'd rather be shot than stabbed, or strangled.
The problem is not the gun. The problem is that somebody wants to kill me. And I'm saying that if the people we would give this technology to will use it against us, we should replace those people with people who want to use it to help us, because my gun isn't the only gun in the world. The technology exists, that's a hard fact. The only question is how it's used.
Well, we could stifle technological progress in order to prevent things like this. Just think of all the privacy we'd have if electricity had been outlawed at the start!
Or, we could apply a system of checks and balances to address the root issue, which is that privacy is being violated, regardless of the means.
Not even you.
Try to remember this post when you're upside-down in a ditch with two broken arms at 3 AM on a country road.
Me? I'll gladly pay $500 extra dollars per car even if only one in a hundred people ever go through that experience. I know a hundred people, and I don't think any of them should spend a minute more in that ditch than they have to.
Even better than that, let's just make everyone immortal! Problem solved!
You are advocating luddism as a solution to a social problem. The social problem being that "they" think they have a right to track other people. Until you address that, you're just playing whack-a-mole, and with every smack of the hammer denying society access to the technology that's being used against it.
If you think correctly defining your function arguments' types is a pointless gotcha, you shouldn't call yourself either one, at least not in C. Maybe you think details like this are beneath you, and maybe you're right and this kind of thing should be abstracted away, but when you get right down to it, computers are just billions of on/off switches, and software has to be written at this level at some point to enable your high-level magic. If they don't get it right, your magic isn't possible. Did you think Python just sprang from the ether?
An anecdote of an incredibly poor driver does nothing to support your argument that even a better-than-average driver can drive safer without ABS than with. I won't argue that ABS is more fun, but then again I was never arguing that. I'm saying it's more safe unless you're a 1 in 100,000 driver, and probably not even then.
I don't think a self-driving car that you don't have the ability to override is what's being discussed here.
Why is it illegal to sleep in the back seat with the radio on while drunk?
Like I said, it's not a question of safety. It's a question of whether you are making yourself politically vulnerable or popular by voting for a given law.
I live in upstate New York. I once spent three winters in a row taking every single corner through city traffic sideways in my RWD manual, and I used to go bombing around the unplowed country roads for fun after a big snowstorm. Yes, I know it was dangerous and I regret doing it and am incredibly lucky that I didn't hurt anyone. The point is though, I never wrecked my car, never ditched it, and saved it from too many close calls to count. I know how to drive in snow and ice, I know how good people can get at handling it, and I know what the effect of ABS and traction control are. That would roughly be why I'm so contemptuous of anyone who isn't a professional stunt driver who thinks they can do better.
Autonomous cars would mean the end of revenue streams from red light cameras, speed traps, DUIs, and driver's license checkpoints. It also means fewer cops would be needed, so the blue wall (cop unions) will fight it too.
It would not mean the end of DUIs. You can get a DUI on a bicycle, and you can get a DUI for sleeping it off in the back seat with the radio on.
I won't take the position that driving drunk (or even with just a couple beers) should be legal, but the law has progressed far past the point where it's about saving lives. It's about politics now.