Doesn't that lead you to question whether a corporate system that forces people to make those decisions is healthy? Whether a structure that requires people with no empathy at its highest levels will be one under which decisions are made that benefit humanity?
You know what some people care about? I'm going to go all Ballmer here: Laptop hard drive, laptop hard drive, laptop hard drive! I just flat don't trust a laptop hard drive for primary storage on a computer that's going to get heavy use.
I could get cheap, slow, low-power components and put them in a big ugly case for less money because they're not miniaturized. Or I could have some other OEM perform the service for me. The case sits under my desk where nobody sees it and it doesn't get in the way. Miniaturization offers me no value, since portability is mostly useless without built-in IO devices; the loss in reliability (it's commonly accepted that laptop components are less reliable than their full-sized equivalents; if this is no longer true I'd be interested to know) and inability to make small upgrades and repairs myself are big issues for someone that expects a long life out of his computer. The ability to throw in a cheap or reclaimed PCI card is useful for someone like me that can't necessarily predict future computer uses (I currently have three cards in there I didn't have when I built the computer 6 years ago).
I'm sure there are some people in the Mac Mini market. It doesn't, however, offer some things that I value. Lots of people 'round these parts would like to run OS X but have the same concerns that I do. I think this truly constitutes a hole in Apple's line-up. I'd consider an Apple for my next computer (the ability to run OS X legally and without hassle gives their machines an automatic advantage, in fact) if they addressed it.
Let me get this straight. The experience of driving a car is more authentic if it includes loud revving and shifting gears. I question your notion of an "authentic driving experience". These aspects of driving are artifacts of the limitations of existing engine technology. There's nothing more authentic about driving without those limitations. Just something more traditional. Today skilled drivers can get better performance with manuals than with automatics; it's the challenge of manually optimizing the acceleration and fuel economy that creates the experience. If a car doesn't need a transmission to achieve optimum performance, the authenticity of the challenge disappears, and a shiftless experience gets a driver closer to controlling the car at a low level.
Fortunately, there's nothing intrinsically more "authentic" about driving a stickshift, so this attitude will fade even from purists in about a generation.
"Green Revolution" in agriculture has a specific meaning that has nothing to do with the various "Green" political parties, nor "Green" environmental initiatives and marketing campaigns. It basically refers to high-yield industrialized agriculture. Wiki it (although the article isn't very clear about defining the term up-front, you get a pretty good idea by reading the whole thing).
My understanding, which might be wrong, is that you can't do this with just screen and an ssh-forwarded X server.
In X, for those that don't know, applications are clients and the display is the server. So when you run apps from your server box and display them on your laptop, the app on the server box is the client and your laptop display is the server.
An X client needs to be connected to an X server. I think it would be possible to write ones that could handle dropping and resuming their server connections, but I don't think any programs actually act this way in practice. So to have clients running persistently while you're not connected you need a locally-running X server that those clients remain connected to. The traditional thing to do, then, is to use VNC to let other computers access that local X session. Compared to what you were doing, forwarding the actual X connection over SSH, this has the advantage that a smart VNC client/server can adjust for slow network connections by combining messages to be sent, remembering the display state on the client side so window redraws (as a result of overlapping windows) don't require any network activity, and image compression (for some kinds of windows sending an X11 command stream is more efficient than sending compressed image data, but for others it's the other way).
The VNC protocol, however, doesn't have many security features built in, and there are lots of different client-server combinations that use non-standard or semi-standard compression techniques. The standard answer to VNC's lack of built-in security features is to forward VNC connections through SSH. That, plus any modern VNC client-server combo, generally gets the job done. But there's a relatively new program that essentially is a better VNC. It's called NoMachine. Google it. For some uses it's free-as-in-beer, and I think they release some source code, but they are a for-profit company and generally use a proprietary model IIRC. If that doesn't bother you, their product is good as far as I've seen. If you want to stay with Free Software, you'll probably want VNC+SSH.
I should clarify, because it's on-topic, that I still don't think a device *enforcing* manners is a good idea. Maybe a cell phone that, when you pick it up while driving, advises you to pull off before having a conversation would be nice. Sort of like the sound a car makes when you open the door with the key in the ignition or turn it off with the lights on. Or like a "fasten seat belts" light. Those things remind me not to do stupid things, but give me the choice to do what I want. I do strongly support my city's no-phones-while-driving law, and wish it would be extended to hands-free devices and be more strictly enforced. Driving here is too complicated to do while distracted. If you're on a rural freeway in light traffic I have little problem with responsible phone use.
The guy sitting next to you in the car can see out the windows and will know if you're in a potentially tricky situation. If he's not watching the road he can probably observe your body language, which includes cues that you're not listening because there's a complicated situation ahead. That type of communication takes no effort, and is lost over audio-only channels like phones. At the very least, the person in the car with you knows that you're driving, which a caller might not.
I heard a while ago (no citation, someone told me this on a tour of a lab at UIUC) of a study saying that hands-free phones are still a pretty large impairment to driving ability, and that people sitting in the car generally aren't as bad. It's not that they are necessarily less distracting by virtue of them being there, it's that because they're there it's much easier for them to be conscientious.
I'm not going to claim that conversations with people in the car aren't a distraction, or that nav screens and radios aren't distractions. I will claim that voice conversations are a pretty bad distraction, that this is backed up by empirical research, and that there are plenty of good, common-sense reasons for those results to be true.
I'm not going to claim that Linux's, or any other kernel's, architecture is perfect; I'm not qualified to judge that. I do suspect you're missing one of the key differences between kernels and most types of software when you make that statement: much of the kernel's behavior is specified by external forces. Hardware, processor, and system specs. Often the weird details of these specs are based on details of their hardware design, which is often based on making the final product cheaply mass-producible rather than on having a nice clean interface. The kernel doesn't have a choice: it has to deal with many of these idiosyncratic devices at once.
Additionally there are performance concerns: even beyond the application-specific cases where kernels have to perform, and the levels of performance they have to meet to comply with hardware specs, generally a kernel has to perform well against competing kernels to be successful in the market.
There might be more complex systems in number of lines of code, or in number of tasks that need to be performed, but there are lots of choices that kernel writers don't get to make, because of the types of tasks that the kernel has to perform and how efficiently it has to perform them.
"Why can't I just have my simple pleasures?", you ask. Because they aren't simple. Most stuff we do, the things we grew up with and took for granted, consume tons of energy. Our lifestyles affect lots of people. The fact that you enjoy steaks and burgers doesn't change the fact that meat takes a lot of energy to produce. So why shouldn't that be reported if it's true? Similarly, my computer uses lots of energy and I'm severely missing the point if I call someone that points that out to me an eco-Nazi. It's simply a fact, and something to take into consideration when I make choices about computer usage, I guess. Hard to be perfect.
It certainly is poor form, and stupid, to blame obese people for global warming for consuming marginally more resources. If all the obese people lost weight by decreasing consumption that could (this is maybe some but not all), we'd be very slightly less fucked (but still very much fucked) on food and energy costs. Trying to point the finger at someone instead of understanding that the mainstream western lifestyle simply requires tons of energy misses the point even more than calling people eco-Nazis for stating facts. It's the same type of reasoning that makes people in America worry about what will happen to the environment when people in India get cheap cars.
If a politician drove drunk all over San Diego every Friday after getting home from the bars we wouldn't call him an expert on driving. Why should we think someone is knowledgeable about copyright law just because he's violated it a lot?
There certainly are disadvantages to the independence of projects there are advantages too. How many times has WinFS been promised and then retracted since it was first conceived? As an independent project it wouldn't have its resources and schedule determined by an overseeing body trying to put a whole operating system together.
This advantage is seen in Mozilla vs. IE. Mozilla is concerned with making a browser, whereas the IE team is serving the goals of Windows at large. Which for a long time meant doing almost nothing and getting way behind with support for rendering technologies.
This isn't specific to Microsoft or to closed- vs. open-source development. The major F/OSS desktop environments try to get applications for their environment moving in the same direction and sometimes along the same release schedules. Meanwhile people like me collect what they feel are the best programs for what they do, regardless of desktop alignment. While I might have software that's better in some areas, I also have to navigate several different UI styles and get very little integration between those programs.
FVWM a clone of Win95? This shit is getting modded up?
There was an inexplicably popular mod of FVWM called FVWM95 that tried to emulate the Windows 95 GUI. FVWM unless similarly modified isn't going to look like MacOS at all. Maybe someone has done that? If so, I've never heard of it. I doubt it represents the majority of FVWM users today, at any rate. FVWM is highly modular and ridiculously flexible (without recompiling it can be made to emulate the major functionality of just about any other window manager), but without very heavy customization it shows mostly influences from various early Unix window managers.
Yeah, the whole GNUStep project was out to clone NextStep. And a lot of the ideas for KDE and Gnome are inspired by the very successful GUIs of Windows and Mac computers. If you're going to accuse FVWM of copying something, though, your list shouldn't be Windows and Mac, it should be TWM and Emacs.
I just ran a quick calculation assuming that every team in the NL has an equal chance of winning the NL pennant, and then a 50% chance of winning the World Series after that. This was so I'd only have to keep track of the number of teams in the NL instead of in both leagues. It doesn't account for a lot of stuff, and I don't care.
For the first 53 years of the WS drought, 1909 through 1961 in an 8-team National League
octave:1> (1 - 1/8 * 1/2)^53 ans = 0.032695
There's only a 3.3% chance of the Cubs not winning the WS. The league started expanding in 1962, and for the remaining 46 years, the odds of the Cubs not winning are
15.2%. The total probability that any given team wouldn't win a World Series over 1909-2007 comes out to just under a half-percent.
The Cubs, though, for many of those years, didn't have the same chance to win the NL pennant as any other team. Losing 7 straight World Series between 1910 and 1945 is awful luck (1/128 probability of losing those Series), but not appearing in another one since then is systematic ineptitude. Not making the postseason from 1946 through 1983, and having no fewer than 3 postseason-less years between each appearance in the various expanded playoff formats that have arisen since then, is not bad luck, it's bad management.
tl;dr: through 1945, blame the goat. Since 1945, blame the suits.
I'm self-centered because I'd like people to follow basic rules of public courtesy that have been customary since the beginning of time? No. I don't ask that people not talk on cell phones, just that they talk in the six-inch voices necessary for their phones to pick up the sound of their voices. Doing so doesn't affect in any way the ability of the speaker to have a conversation.
This isn't about unexpected sounds on airplanes (that was probably not well worded, sorry). This is about public spaces in general, and about any sounds that could be useful to hear. It could be on a plane or on a train trying to have a conversation of my own at reasonable volume. Face-to-face, cell, walkie-talkie, whatever. I actually don't fly much, but I ride the L (Chicago subway/elevated trains) pretty often; if I had earplugs in on the L I might miss a change-of-service announcement (sometimes when trains get bunched they'll have the lead train skip stops). And I'd certainly be less aware of people around me trying to board and depart crowded trains. Fortunately not very many people talk loudly on the L, and not many people wear earplugs, because a train full of people that couldn't hear anything would really suck.
I think it's great that someone is finally putting to rest the idea that cell phones will harm plane navigation systems, and is even working out a solution to make in-flight calls work. Go progress! Now why can't people progress (or even just not regress) in their ability to behave conscientiously? You know, take regard for the people around them? You calling me self-centered is fucking laughable.
Wearing earplugs doesn't just filter out cellphone talker noise. It's important to be able to hear unexpected sounds.
People have always had conversations in public. It's only become a particular nuisance on cellphones because they talk so loud. There's no reason to talk above a 6-inch voice in a face-to-face conversation on a train or airplane, and no reason to do so on a cellphone either. But because people have a hard time hearing on cellphones and don't have feedback of their own voice through the earpiece they talk louder and louder until they're practically yelling. Look, sometimes people talk loudly in face-to-face conversations and they're obnoxious too. It's not a matter of cell-phone hate, it's a matter of courtesy. Often in public hearing things is useful, and I'm not going to put in earplugs because people can't keep their voices down. I'll ask them to quiet down.
We don't outlaw cars, but we do regulate them heavily because they can easily kill people. We limit their travel to specific paths, limit their speed, require that they stop and yield at various times, etc. People know not to cross busy streets in the middle of traffic, and drivers know not to run red lights. Even though cars are by nature deadly machines it's reasonably safe to walk, run, and cycle in cities because these rules are understood. Even with all this they're still responsible for lots of injuries and deaths, and we put up with that because lots of people find them useful.
Because the drones are controlled by the police they almost certainly won't have to follow any kind of protocol or restrictions in their movement; they have no drivers to hold individually accountable if they mess up and the people most closely responsible will be protected vigorously. To me, this means the devices should have to meet very tough standards of safety and privacy protection. And also reviews for utility. Unless they prove themselves useful there's no reason to take the risk.
I think the attitude that someone shouldn't be concerned about theft of company property just because it's not his own stuff is short-sighted. Even if the guy is concerned only with his own well-being, having stuff stolen hurts productivity (which reflects poorly on him even if not his fault) and could be a security risk for the company. Deterring theft might help the company, and in the event things were stolen and his was protected, might even get him noticed.
Yeah, but what will most people care more about: some amount of mercury in LA or a somewhat smaller amount of mercury in their kids' room if they break bulbs there? Kids and stressed parents can be pretty accident-prone.
Why don't we? Because the lack of organization among individual consumers renders them unable to manipulate market forces strategically like that (usually the best we can do is make rational decisions for personal benefit). Why wouldn't it work even if we did? Because after one swing of the pendulum (the one that's happening right now, for example) one format will already have enough installs for Hollywood to ignore the other one. Why wouldn't we want to? Format wars suck.
Between this article and the Tim Sweeney interview there's been a disturbing amount of gaming evangelism today. Sweeney makes these comical statements that all computers need to have fast graphics cards and be gaming-ready, when really that just takes away the choice of ordering more affordable hardware away from consumers and businesses that have no interest in gaming. And then there's this article which implores the Linux community to care about gaming. If a gamer goes to a LUG and finds that the people there just aren't interested in gaming... who cares? They'd probably rather be hacking.
It may not be cheating, necessarily; maybe it looks more like time-shifted collaboration.
I'm out of college and sometimes I challenge myself with math or programming problems in my spare time. Usually stuff that's been done and documented. Sometimes I get stuck and need to look up some information on the problem. Searching the Internet is very useful in doing this. I usually try to find help on one specific part of the problem that I don't know how to do.
Or maybe a student comes in after working through some problems independently, wanting to check if he'd approached it in a logical way. He'd get quicker and likely more complete info doing this than waiting for a grade to come back. In many classes grading is slow and doesn't teach very much. In many classes there will be students that learn better from some of the other students than from that particular professor and set of TAs.
Grading is not the most important part of education, learning is. If a student works through homework problems and then looks to external resources for more help, and gains a better understanding of the subject in the process, what's wrong with that? In the end there are few college courses where homework results will override test scores. If the student through whatever means manages to learn something, and does well on the exam, who cares if he saw how other people did their homework?
This is like saying that we need more intelligent programmers. The total amount of intelligence going into any profession is pretty hard to change without making the field more interesting or appealing (perhaps more lucrative?). Maybe improving education could bring up the overall level of intelligence.
It's often quicker and better to come up with tools and systems that augment the intelligence of their users and help prevent mistakes. It's easier for one group of programmers to write tools that make all programmers more efficient than for all programmers to get smarter. Similarly, as technology evolves guidelines and standard procedures need to be set down by the judges, policymakers, and technologists that understand it best to help other judges and policymakers make wise and effective decisions. It probably is worth it for all judges to understand the now-famous notion, "the Internet treats censorship as damage...", but they shouldn't have to understand the layering of network protocols or how DNS works.
Of course it sounds like we're not really asking for more intelligent judges but ones that agree with our priorities. Plenty of intelligent people want corporate rights over civil rights, often to protect their profits (that is, they're highly motivated). If that wasn't the case then getting things turned around our way would be easy.
I make no claim about whether Microsoft wrote this version of BASIC or not; I have no idea. But if it was public domain Microsoft would have absolutely had the right to copy it, sell it, keep their source code secret, and enforce copyright on the resulting binaries. That's the whole point of public domain.
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Doesn't that lead you to question whether a corporate system that forces people to make those decisions is healthy? Whether a structure that requires people with no empathy at its highest levels will be one under which decisions are made that benefit humanity?
You know what some people care about? I'm going to go all Ballmer here: Laptop hard drive, laptop hard drive, laptop hard drive! I just flat don't trust a laptop hard drive for primary storage on a computer that's going to get heavy use.
I could get cheap, slow, low-power components and put them in a big ugly case for less money because they're not miniaturized. Or I could have some other OEM perform the service for me. The case sits under my desk where nobody sees it and it doesn't get in the way. Miniaturization offers me no value, since portability is mostly useless without built-in IO devices; the loss in reliability (it's commonly accepted that laptop components are less reliable than their full-sized equivalents; if this is no longer true I'd be interested to know) and inability to make small upgrades and repairs myself are big issues for someone that expects a long life out of his computer. The ability to throw in a cheap or reclaimed PCI card is useful for someone like me that can't necessarily predict future computer uses (I currently have three cards in there I didn't have when I built the computer 6 years ago).
I'm sure there are some people in the Mac Mini market. It doesn't, however, offer some things that I value. Lots of people 'round these parts would like to run OS X but have the same concerns that I do. I think this truly constitutes a hole in Apple's line-up. I'd consider an Apple for my next computer (the ability to run OS X legally and without hassle gives their machines an automatic advantage, in fact) if they addressed it.
Let me get this straight. The experience of driving a car is more authentic if it includes loud revving and shifting gears. I question your notion of an "authentic driving experience". These aspects of driving are artifacts of the limitations of existing engine technology. There's nothing more authentic about driving without those limitations. Just something more traditional. Today skilled drivers can get better performance with manuals than with automatics; it's the challenge of manually optimizing the acceleration and fuel economy that creates the experience. If a car doesn't need a transmission to achieve optimum performance, the authenticity of the challenge disappears, and a shiftless experience gets a driver closer to controlling the car at a low level.
Fortunately, there's nothing intrinsically more "authentic" about driving a stickshift, so this attitude will fade even from purists in about a generation.
"Green Revolution" in agriculture has a specific meaning that has nothing to do with the various "Green" political parties, nor "Green" environmental initiatives and marketing campaigns. It basically refers to high-yield industrialized agriculture. Wiki it (although the article isn't very clear about defining the term up-front, you get a pretty good idea by reading the whole thing).
My understanding, which might be wrong, is that you can't do this with just screen and an ssh-forwarded X server.
In X, for those that don't know, applications are clients and the display is the server. So when you run apps from your server box and display them on your laptop, the app on the server box is the client and your laptop display is the server.
An X client needs to be connected to an X server. I think it would be possible to write ones that could handle dropping and resuming their server connections, but I don't think any programs actually act this way in practice. So to have clients running persistently while you're not connected you need a locally-running X server that those clients remain connected to. The traditional thing to do, then, is to use VNC to let other computers access that local X session. Compared to what you were doing, forwarding the actual X connection over SSH, this has the advantage that a smart VNC client/server can adjust for slow network connections by combining messages to be sent, remembering the display state on the client side so window redraws (as a result of overlapping windows) don't require any network activity, and image compression (for some kinds of windows sending an X11 command stream is more efficient than sending compressed image data, but for others it's the other way).
The VNC protocol, however, doesn't have many security features built in, and there are lots of different client-server combinations that use non-standard or semi-standard compression techniques. The standard answer to VNC's lack of built-in security features is to forward VNC connections through SSH. That, plus any modern VNC client-server combo, generally gets the job done. But there's a relatively new program that essentially is a better VNC. It's called NoMachine. Google it. For some uses it's free-as-in-beer, and I think they release some source code, but they are a for-profit company and generally use a proprietary model IIRC. If that doesn't bother you, their product is good as far as I've seen. If you want to stay with Free Software, you'll probably want VNC+SSH.
I should clarify, because it's on-topic, that I still don't think a device *enforcing* manners is a good idea. Maybe a cell phone that, when you pick it up while driving, advises you to pull off before having a conversation would be nice. Sort of like the sound a car makes when you open the door with the key in the ignition or turn it off with the lights on. Or like a "fasten seat belts" light. Those things remind me not to do stupid things, but give me the choice to do what I want. I do strongly support my city's no-phones-while-driving law, and wish it would be extended to hands-free devices and be more strictly enforced. Driving here is too complicated to do while distracted. If you're on a rural freeway in light traffic I have little problem with responsible phone use.
The guy sitting next to you in the car can see out the windows and will know if you're in a potentially tricky situation. If he's not watching the road he can probably observe your body language, which includes cues that you're not listening because there's a complicated situation ahead. That type of communication takes no effort, and is lost over audio-only channels like phones. At the very least, the person in the car with you knows that you're driving, which a caller might not.
I heard a while ago (no citation, someone told me this on a tour of a lab at UIUC) of a study saying that hands-free phones are still a pretty large impairment to driving ability, and that people sitting in the car generally aren't as bad. It's not that they are necessarily less distracting by virtue of them being there, it's that because they're there it's much easier for them to be conscientious.
I'm not going to claim that conversations with people in the car aren't a distraction, or that nav screens and radios aren't distractions. I will claim that voice conversations are a pretty bad distraction, that this is backed up by empirical research, and that there are plenty of good, common-sense reasons for those results to be true.
Nice try, Jake and Elwood.
I'm not going to claim that Linux's, or any other kernel's, architecture is perfect; I'm not qualified to judge that. I do suspect you're missing one of the key differences between kernels and most types of software when you make that statement: much of the kernel's behavior is specified by external forces. Hardware, processor, and system specs. Often the weird details of these specs are based on details of their hardware design, which is often based on making the final product cheaply mass-producible rather than on having a nice clean interface. The kernel doesn't have a choice: it has to deal with many of these idiosyncratic devices at once.
Additionally there are performance concerns: even beyond the application-specific cases where kernels have to perform, and the levels of performance they have to meet to comply with hardware specs, generally a kernel has to perform well against competing kernels to be successful in the market.
There might be more complex systems in number of lines of code, or in number of tasks that need to be performed, but there are lots of choices that kernel writers don't get to make, because of the types of tasks that the kernel has to perform and how efficiently it has to perform them.
"Why can't I just have my simple pleasures?", you ask. Because they aren't simple. Most stuff we do, the things we grew up with and took for granted, consume tons of energy. Our lifestyles affect lots of people. The fact that you enjoy steaks and burgers doesn't change the fact that meat takes a lot of energy to produce. So why shouldn't that be reported if it's true? Similarly, my computer uses lots of energy and I'm severely missing the point if I call someone that points that out to me an eco-Nazi. It's simply a fact, and something to take into consideration when I make choices about computer usage, I guess. Hard to be perfect.
It certainly is poor form, and stupid, to blame obese people for global warming for consuming marginally more resources. If all the obese people lost weight by decreasing consumption that could (this is maybe some but not all), we'd be very slightly less fucked (but still very much fucked) on food and energy costs. Trying to point the finger at someone instead of understanding that the mainstream western lifestyle simply requires tons of energy misses the point even more than calling people eco-Nazis for stating facts. It's the same type of reasoning that makes people in America worry about what will happen to the environment when people in India get cheap cars.
If a politician drove drunk all over San Diego every Friday after getting home from the bars we wouldn't call him an expert on driving. Why should we think someone is knowledgeable about copyright law just because he's violated it a lot?
There certainly are disadvantages to the independence of projects there are advantages too. How many times has WinFS been promised and then retracted since it was first conceived? As an independent project it wouldn't have its resources and schedule determined by an overseeing body trying to put a whole operating system together.
This advantage is seen in Mozilla vs. IE. Mozilla is concerned with making a browser, whereas the IE team is serving the goals of Windows at large. Which for a long time meant doing almost nothing and getting way behind with support for rendering technologies.
This isn't specific to Microsoft or to closed- vs. open-source development. The major F/OSS desktop environments try to get applications for their environment moving in the same direction and sometimes along the same release schedules. Meanwhile people like me collect what they feel are the best programs for what they do, regardless of desktop alignment. While I might have software that's better in some areas, I also have to navigate several different UI styles and get very little integration between those programs.
FVWM a clone of Win95? This shit is getting modded up?
There was an inexplicably popular mod of FVWM called FVWM95 that tried to emulate the Windows 95 GUI. FVWM unless similarly modified isn't going to look like MacOS at all. Maybe someone has done that? If so, I've never heard of it. I doubt it represents the majority of FVWM users today, at any rate. FVWM is highly modular and ridiculously flexible (without recompiling it can be made to emulate the major functionality of just about any other window manager), but without very heavy customization it shows mostly influences from various early Unix window managers.
Yeah, the whole GNUStep project was out to clone NextStep. And a lot of the ideas for KDE and Gnome are inspired by the very successful GUIs of Windows and Mac computers. If you're going to accuse FVWM of copying something, though, your list shouldn't be Windows and Mac, it should be TWM and Emacs.
For the first 53 years of the WS drought, 1909 through 1961 in an 8-team National League
There's only a 3.3% chance of the Cubs not winning the WS. The league started expanding in 1962, and for the remaining 46 years, the odds of the Cubs not winning are
15.2%. The total probability that any given team wouldn't win a World Series over 1909-2007 comes out to just under a half-percent.
The Cubs, though, for many of those years, didn't have the same chance to win the NL pennant as any other team. Losing 7 straight World Series between 1910 and 1945 is awful luck (1/128 probability of losing those Series), but not appearing in another one since then is systematic ineptitude. Not making the postseason from 1946 through 1983, and having no fewer than 3 postseason-less years between each appearance in the various expanded playoff formats that have arisen since then, is not bad luck, it's bad management.
tl;dr: through 1945, blame the goat. Since 1945, blame the suits.
- A lifelong Cubs fan.
I'm self-centered because I'd like people to follow basic rules of public courtesy that have been customary since the beginning of time? No. I don't ask that people not talk on cell phones, just that they talk in the six-inch voices necessary for their phones to pick up the sound of their voices. Doing so doesn't affect in any way the ability of the speaker to have a conversation.
This isn't about unexpected sounds on airplanes (that was probably not well worded, sorry). This is about public spaces in general, and about any sounds that could be useful to hear. It could be on a plane or on a train trying to have a conversation of my own at reasonable volume. Face-to-face, cell, walkie-talkie, whatever. I actually don't fly much, but I ride the L (Chicago subway/elevated trains) pretty often; if I had earplugs in on the L I might miss a change-of-service announcement (sometimes when trains get bunched they'll have the lead train skip stops). And I'd certainly be less aware of people around me trying to board and depart crowded trains. Fortunately not very many people talk loudly on the L, and not many people wear earplugs, because a train full of people that couldn't hear anything would really suck.
I think it's great that someone is finally putting to rest the idea that cell phones will harm plane navigation systems, and is even working out a solution to make in-flight calls work. Go progress! Now why can't people progress (or even just not regress) in their ability to behave conscientiously? You know, take regard for the people around them? You calling me self-centered is fucking laughable.
Wearing earplugs doesn't just filter out cellphone talker noise. It's important to be able to hear unexpected sounds.
People have always had conversations in public. It's only become a particular nuisance on cellphones because they talk so loud. There's no reason to talk above a 6-inch voice in a face-to-face conversation on a train or airplane, and no reason to do so on a cellphone either. But because people have a hard time hearing on cellphones and don't have feedback of their own voice through the earpiece they talk louder and louder until they're practically yelling. Look, sometimes people talk loudly in face-to-face conversations and they're obnoxious too. It's not a matter of cell-phone hate, it's a matter of courtesy. Often in public hearing things is useful, and I'm not going to put in earplugs because people can't keep their voices down. I'll ask them to quiet down.
We don't outlaw cars, but we do regulate them heavily because they can easily kill people. We limit their travel to specific paths, limit their speed, require that they stop and yield at various times, etc. People know not to cross busy streets in the middle of traffic, and drivers know not to run red lights. Even though cars are by nature deadly machines it's reasonably safe to walk, run, and cycle in cities because these rules are understood. Even with all this they're still responsible for lots of injuries and deaths, and we put up with that because lots of people find them useful.
Because the drones are controlled by the police they almost certainly won't have to follow any kind of protocol or restrictions in their movement; they have no drivers to hold individually accountable if they mess up and the people most closely responsible will be protected vigorously. To me, this means the devices should have to meet very tough standards of safety and privacy protection. And also reviews for utility. Unless they prove themselves useful there's no reason to take the risk.
I think the attitude that someone shouldn't be concerned about theft of company property just because it's not his own stuff is short-sighted. Even if the guy is concerned only with his own well-being, having stuff stolen hurts productivity (which reflects poorly on him even if not his fault) and could be a security risk for the company. Deterring theft might help the company, and in the event things were stolen and his was protected, might even get him noticed.
Yeah, but what will most people care more about: some amount of mercury in LA or a somewhat smaller amount of mercury in their kids' room if they break bulbs there? Kids and stressed parents can be pretty accident-prone.
Why don't we? Because the lack of organization among individual consumers renders them unable to manipulate market forces strategically like that (usually the best we can do is make rational decisions for personal benefit). Why wouldn't it work even if we did? Because after one swing of the pendulum (the one that's happening right now, for example) one format will already have enough installs for Hollywood to ignore the other one. Why wouldn't we want to? Format wars suck.
Between this article and the Tim Sweeney interview there's been a disturbing amount of gaming evangelism today. Sweeney makes these comical statements that all computers need to have fast graphics cards and be gaming-ready, when really that just takes away the choice of ordering more affordable hardware away from consumers and businesses that have no interest in gaming. And then there's this article which implores the Linux community to care about gaming. If a gamer goes to a LUG and finds that the people there just aren't interested in gaming... who cares? They'd probably rather be hacking.
It may not be cheating, necessarily; maybe it looks more like time-shifted collaboration.
I'm out of college and sometimes I challenge myself with math or programming problems in my spare time. Usually stuff that's been done and documented. Sometimes I get stuck and need to look up some information on the problem. Searching the Internet is very useful in doing this. I usually try to find help on one specific part of the problem that I don't know how to do.
Or maybe a student comes in after working through some problems independently, wanting to check if he'd approached it in a logical way. He'd get quicker and likely more complete info doing this than waiting for a grade to come back. In many classes grading is slow and doesn't teach very much. In many classes there will be students that learn better from some of the other students than from that particular professor and set of TAs.
Grading is not the most important part of education, learning is. If a student works through homework problems and then looks to external resources for more help, and gains a better understanding of the subject in the process, what's wrong with that? In the end there are few college courses where homework results will override test scores. If the student through whatever means manages to learn something, and does well on the exam, who cares if he saw how other people did their homework?
This is like saying that we need more intelligent programmers. The total amount of intelligence going into any profession is pretty hard to change without making the field more interesting or appealing (perhaps more lucrative?). Maybe improving education could bring up the overall level of intelligence.
It's often quicker and better to come up with tools and systems that augment the intelligence of their users and help prevent mistakes. It's easier for one group of programmers to write tools that make all programmers more efficient than for all programmers to get smarter. Similarly, as technology evolves guidelines and standard procedures need to be set down by the judges, policymakers, and technologists that understand it best to help other judges and policymakers make wise and effective decisions. It probably is worth it for all judges to understand the now-famous notion, "the Internet treats censorship as damage...", but they shouldn't have to understand the layering of network protocols or how DNS works.
Of course it sounds like we're not really asking for more intelligent judges but ones that agree with our priorities. Plenty of intelligent people want corporate rights over civil rights, often to protect their profits (that is, they're highly motivated). If that wasn't the case then getting things turned around our way would be easy.
I make no claim about whether Microsoft wrote this version of BASIC or not; I have no idea. But if it was public domain Microsoft would have absolutely had the right to copy it, sell it, keep their source code secret, and enforce copyright on the resulting binaries. That's the whole point of public domain.
Dude, your sig.