They'll just use corrupt business laws and politics to rape the "retirement accounts" for their own benefit. Then they'll leave the dangerous corpses of their businesses as a warning to future generations on the stupidity of trusting your future to lowest-common-denominator businessmen.
Yep.
It's situations like this, and the revelation of how costs were cut on Fukushima's seawall by omitting the datapoint of the big tsunami in the 1800s, that made me realize something that shocked me:
Nuclear power is perfectly safe, ideal, and awesome... but nuclear power built by humans is NOT. As a species we are short-sighted venal lying scammers, so there are many glorious technologies (nanotech anyone?) that become liabilities in our hands.
Look at the available evidence - if there was any psychic ability then the chances are that it would already be well documented.
No, that's backwards, because:
Even a slight statistical ability would have big impacts in warfare, commerce and many other areas of life.
Whatever real psychics are out there, they either a) are getting rich in the stock market (etc.) and not talking about it, or b) have all been sucked into various intelligence agencies.
The only way an ordinary member of the ballast like yourself would hear of proven psychic powers, is if they were so common that they could not be kept under wraps.
I started reading the title of this thread and though "please don't be the US".
After all, we have
- global climate change deniers
- anti-vaccination groups
- paleo diet followers
- raw foodism
- a museum that claims dinosaurs and cavemen lived together on the newly created 5 thousand year old Earth.
What a relief to know that the US is not the only developed country with a problem of people making up their own reality.
Your attempt at passing off a package deal has been detected by automatic scanners.
"One of these things is not like the other . . . one of these things does not belong . . . "
When I read the summary, I thought it was some letter (maybe in the style of Jack Thompson) threatening anyone who published any research related to the lawsuit, thus attempting to create a chilling effect over any impartial researcher who might be studying the field. [...]Most importantly, it doesn't prevent anything from being published, merely requests a 90 day waiting period before publishing anything from the parties in the lawsuit. There could be some funny business going on here, but this letter doesn't show it.
What, did you just arrive on this planet after thumbing a ride on a passing spaceship piloted by a green bug-eyed monster who was headed for the Basingstoke roundabout? What do you think will happen during those 90 days if the studies reach any conclusion that is not "OMG underground diesel exhaust is teh AWESOMES!!!11!"?
It seems to me that this is utterly backwards. The scientific journals should be sending cease-and-desist to the lawyers, saying that a peer reviewed study is pending and all litigation should cease until 90 days after it has been published.
Sound stupid? But the idea that lawyers are the best judge of science is currently having more and more of a throttling effect on the USA. In fact, if you weigh in sociology and experimental psychology, it can be argued that scientists should have more part in law making than at present. Though the concept that people who make laws should have exact knowledge of something might adversely affect some politicians.
You would only think that if you did not work in those fields. Those who do work in those fields (including my best friend) are keenly aware of the comically low quality, the embarrassing irreproducibility, and the appalling "p hunting", that all enter in to studies in psychology, experimental psychology, and sociology. Not to mention the very grave "selection bias" problems that stem from the fact that most psychology and sociology studies are poorly funded and are therefore conducted on fellow psychology and sociology students.
No one who has experienced the state of research in those fields would ever, ever consider basing legislation on such results.
Words and punctuation have meaning. If you use them improperly, you change the meaning of what is being said. This matters a lot in contracts as well as everyday communication.
Secondly, this is a website for technically minded people. Presumably, many of us have been programmers at some point, or at least we have some familiarity with coding. If you are not such, let me assure you that a compiler cares about spelling and punctuation. It cares a lot.
The whole idea of "proper spelling" is a recent cultural invention. Prior to the 1800s, writers often spelled things phonetically. And while a misspelling can occasionally "change the meaning of what is being said", I doubt it happens more than rarely that a) a misspelling changes the meaning significantly yet b) the readers don't catch the mistake from context.
In my mind, the best argument to make in favor of proper spelling is: search engines. Today the zeitgeist thinks using search engines, and most search engines (including e.g. the simpler 'find' commands) are not spelling-agnostic. Not yet anyway.
But even then, how often do your search results depend on the difference between "it's" and "its"?
Reminds me of something we say in UI design meetings:
"If 3% of your users screw up, it's a user problem... but if 30% of your users screw up, it's a UI problem."
If the fracking process is not tolerant of hasty, underfunded, undertrained, fly-by-night drilling operations, then the process is not suitable for deployment here in the West.
No it can't just be ignored. If these laws pass, every EU country will be forced to implement them. The European Commission has very sharp teeth indeed on stuff like this, and does not take kindly to companies trying to ignore its rules.
Yep yep.
As a US citizen now thoroughly ashamed of my society's behavior (esp. regulatory capture, as well as the all-classes corruption of the housing bubble), this news is the first time in my entire life that European society has seemed superior.
It is quite a moment for me, coming as it is at the tail end of twenty years of staunch libertarian patriotism.
Yeah, THAT will sure attract new talent to their space program! Alex, I'll take Perverse Incentives for 500 rubles, please!
And never mind the equally important point that the current team at least learned something and won't repeat this particular mistake again. Can't say that for the new team.
That submarine? Pipelines? The military planes which crash and burn at every air show in the world?
Russia still can't get over the fact that, in terms of being some sort of global player they're about as important as Spain. They didn't have any problems when they were sealing dogs in rockets and bunging them into orbit - that's about their level.
I am amused to report that they couldn't even handle that. Laika was accidentally killed very very early in the flight. The rest of her time aboard the capsule, and the gentle story of her demise, was all fiction.
While I appreciate the need to expose students to computer classes in the same way they're exposed to other subjects, I don't think that something as specific as programming should be a *mandatory* requirement. Programming is a vocation, like many vocations, that some people are cut out for and other people are not. Those with a true passion for it will actively seek it out and those with no interest in it will hate it no matter how many programming classes you force them take. You can't MAKE a great programmer any more than you can MAKE a great engineer, mechanic, etc. Someone has to WANT it first.
I taught my two sons to program. Only one of them liked it, but they both got an astonishing side benefit from it: it taught them to see their own brains as software... with algorithms and bugs. In the context of a broader parent-child discussion of recognizing and dealing with personality bugs, programming seems to make it real, in a way that no amount of lecture can.
Haven't you noticed how few people are introspective, how few are even capable of thinking that their thoughts and feelings may be incorrect?
Like it or not, there is, and must be, a price on human life.
Yep. Where most people get confused, is by conflating "value of MY life to ME" with "value of one citizen to society". They switch back and forth between these contexts in order to make whatever stupid "if it saves just one life" point they are working.
I think the best way to measure the value of a life to society is to look at per capita GDP.
For that matter, It is actually possible to determine the rational value people place on their lives. Of course you can't ask them directly, because you'll get gibberish... but you can ask it indirectly, by asking how much extra we'd have to pay them to take a job that has x% chance of fatality per annum.
The research has been done. They crunched the numbers and came out with $2-$10 million compensation for a job with 100% risk of fatality. The dollar amount somewhat depended on their current salary level. Interestingly, the dollar amount was pretty close to the average citizen's lifetime per capita GDP.
Those concepts are not axiomatic. I can easily conceive of the existence of slavery, in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means.
The essence of slavery is ownership of one person by another. (not in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means). Part of the concept of a right is that everybody has it and can only lose it by violating someone else's right. The basic (and axiomatic) right is the right to one's own life, and from that all other rights are either equivalent or derived. To live, one must be able to act to support one's own life (I am not considering infants and invalids here). To live, one must be able to own (and in some situations trade for) the results of his actions. The first thing he must own is himself, which is equivalent to his right to his own life (I suppose that's debatable, but I think it can be established fairly easily.)
Slavery, the claim of another person to own me, contradicts my self-ownership. Since my self-ownership is a right, there can be no right of another person to own me; slavery is inherently a violation of a human right.
Look, I with agree you, but your arguments still need work. The right to control your body does not obviously follow from right to feed yourself. Nor does self-ownership obviously follow from ownership. Nor does total ownership obviously follow from partial ownership (think your use of a laptop provided by your company).
Your rights derive from MY self-interest, because your rights morally bind me in some way. I can make the argument, perhaps persuasively, that it is obviously right for me to allow you to feed yourself, and even to get ahead, but to disallow you from ruining your life with heroine. From my point of view, I must deny you full self-ownership because my self-interest requires me to defend society from addictive destructive substances.
Or imagine you are arguing with a Roman, who believes he has all rights to the dozen slaves he captured in Lydia. Can you explain to him why his arranement is automatically wrong for all of the players? Remember, the only reason the Roman economy could support such a large empire (i.e. so much border to guard) was via slaves captured on conquests.
Huh? Only a philosophical weakling would bring that up at this point.
Hint: if you enter a philosophical discussion with an insult, and then pepper the rest of your post with additional ad hominem, then your own philosophy still needs work.
Life and liberty fall under the axiomatic concept of self-ownership.
Those concepts are not axiomatic. I can easily conceive of the existence of slavery, in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means.
Sensible, maybe, but not axiomatic. It may also be impossible to hold together a social pattern without at least some degree of state control over what people do with their bodies. Just look at what the (de facto) freedom to use opium did to China for a century.
Everybody says they are the "good guys". Who comes right out and says they are evil? The world isn't black and white, anyways, though the fight against Hitler and his dictator allies was about as black and white as it gets.
Agreed; by then, Germany had really run off the rails. I also feel we did right by Japan, when we rebooted their society after the war and turned them into a Western-style state that is vastly more free and efficient than it was.
You have a natural right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property and Happiness (I'll argue real-estate, material possessions, and non-material happiness in this comment). You don't have an intrinsic right to property and happiness, just a right to be allowed to earn them. So the government doesn't have to provide you with a job, housing, food, healthcare or internet access for free. They just have to make sure a system is in place to allow you to make those things happen.
Very good. Now tell us *why* all humans possess those rights.
The definition doesn't help, either... a political right is defined as "A behavior which you may practice, and anyone who tries to stop you is automatically wrong." No information there about where the right springs from.
The answer, that most people will not agree with, is: rights are the those behaviors that humans must practice if they seek to establish a pro-human society, where 'pro-human' means a society whose primary goal is the long-term production of safety, comfort, and pleasure. Any other society is automatically wrong, in the sense of "illogical for humans to seek".
I'm an American citizen and I feel ashamed about the degree to which my country has fallen to regulatory capture.
Stop calling it regulatory capture and start calling it corruption.
Just because it is legal does not mean it isn't a corruption of the government's duty to the people.
I used "regulatory capture" because it points to a solution, at least in principle. Whereas for the more general problem of "corruption", no one has any idea how to fix it. Religion used to be the answer ("The invisible old man in the sky who loves you will torture you forever!!!11!"), but that has lost all credibility these days. And with the college curriculum passionately certain that certainty is impossible (i.e. Skepticism), there is no alternative in sight.
Being a big bully is one thing. It's one thing if we're a big bully on things like human rights. What's more distressing to me is that we're basically allowing the media companies to push the US into being a big bully for things that even our own citizens think is ridiculous.
Before the media companies there were other commercial interests that pushed the US government to do their bidding. Go back to 1893 and you'll find that sugar interests were responsible for Hawaii being taken over by the US. And that is just one example.
Yep. Not to mention all of the banana republics in South America, who had their approximately-democratic governments violently toppled by the CIA acting on behalf of American produce companies.
America has never been The Good Guy, it has just been a typical state out to get ahead at any cost... any cost, that is, short of allowing its citizens to discover that it is not The Good Guy.
That's why the diplomatic cable leaks are such a Big Deal, and the reason why Bradley Manning will get no popular sympathy. His revelations cause American citizens to feel cognitive dissonance ("We aren't the Good Guy? Really?")... and people deeply hate those who cause them cognitive dissonance.
I'm an American citizen and I feel ashamed about the degree to which my country has fallen to regulatory capture.
...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?
Yep, it launched my entire career. C64 handed down from my brother, wrote my first horrible games... then a Tandy 1000TL (XT286 clone from Radio Shack) handed down from my father, ran my first BBS... then Pascal in High School CS, and you know the rest. Wow. I wish I could shake the hands of the C64's designers.
I still have mine, it's in the attic now, but it still works.
such a charger couldn't be used to sell expensive phones under the pretext of Nokia being environmentally-friendly and all the associated fraudulent propaganda....and so the project is scrapped.
I actually don't see why they killed it. I would have paid an extra hundred bucks to have a phone with a longer battery life. My Galaxy S II barely gives me a day, if with a solar panel it would give me a day and a half, at least it would last without problems until I get home from work. Worth it in my books.
Have you looked at the inductive charging pads? There are several brands out there, and you can place pads on each of your desks plus one on your car dashboard. You could even contrive one inside the driver's seat of your car where it will press against your phone while it is in your pocket.
I'm thinking the limitation will be the amount of power used when communicating with the local network. When transmitting, cell phones blast out a fair bit of RF power, on the order of 1 W, if memory serves. Audio, on the other hand, is easy to do with 10 mW or so when the speaker is near one's ear. Moreover, even in standby mode, phones still periodically connect to the local network which requires bursts of high power.
The handset's transmit power is regulated by the tower, based on how well the tower can hear the handset. Most handsets can do up to 0.6W of transmit power if so requested... but naturally they will use less power whenever possible.
Remember back when cellphones used a frequency that caused dit-dit-dit-daaaaaa-dit-dit interference on your car stereo? Ever noticed that sometimes the dits were really loud, other times very faint? That variance was the handset using different power levels, under orders from the tower.
So, the bottom line is, if you want to reduce handset power consumption, you need more towers (i.e. smaller cells) and/or more sensitive tower receivers. Yes, I realize that greater sensitivity will at some point require going below the noise floor... but that can be accompli$hed.
Since the beginning of this debate, twenty years ago when we were all still using 1.44MB floppy disks, I have been firmly in the "thou shalt not copy" camp. I never, ever pirated software or music. Occasionally I copied MP3s from a friend, then re-bought them if I ended up listening to them more than once or twice. And I still felt guilty.
Last month was my change of heart.
I was trying to Do The Right Thing, and download Terry Pratchett's Discworld audiobooks using iTunes. Each audiobook costs $20, but I was willing to pay it. I splurged and bought the first three. The download of the third one failed, and there is no way to resume it (in order to get the rest of the audiobook, I only received the first 42 minutes), because of Audible.com's license restrictions. I'm facing an hour on the phone with iTunes tech support.
But even THAT was acceptable. Until I found out, the hard way, that my audiobooks can't be listened to on my other iOS devices. I can listen to them on the iPhone I purchased them on, but not on my iPad (same iTunes) account or my sons' iPads (same iTunes). WTF?
So I decided that Audible.com and iTunes have colluded to defraud the consumer. And I got gypped $60 before I figured it out. I therefore conclude that I am free of my moral obligation to pay them for the content they control. And suddenly, the world, and this whole piracy conversation, looks very different to me.
It's too bad they're too busy downloading and sharing music to call their congressmen, threaten not to vote for them if they vote for SOPA/PIPA, and actually follow through on that threat on election day.
You ask us to become single-issue voters. I consider other problems to be far more grave -- specifically: restoring the adversarial relationship between the SEC and the companies it regulates, and putting teeth into laws against white-collar crime. I'm a long-time libertarian who, thanks to this recession and its causes, has only recently become so cynical about human nature that I consider these reforms to be important.
In fact I think they are so important that if we don't follow through, the gloriously productive pattern of our society will be wrecked.
Yes I agree that copyright reform is important too... but if I write more than one letter to my congresspeople per quarter, or threaten to vote against them over more than one or two issues, they will just tune me out.
While I generally understand what you two are trying to say, you don't provide a downside to leaving comments on your ever-so-clearly written code. Probably because there isn't one.
Omitting code comments is plain lazy, period, and there's no excuse not to.
Depends on your definition of 'omit'. At this point in my career, I find that I have finite energy for any given task / bug / refactoring crusade, and it is far better to spend that energy renaming things (for clarity), and preening the whitespace, than on writing comments that nobody reads because everyone knows that code comments are misleadingly outdated.
That said, I think we both agree with the GP post that comments are needed when the reader will need information about why the code does what it does. I presently do a lot of work bugfixing code that was cranked out by our company's low-priced Indian counterparts, and sometimes I would kill for even one sentence of explanation, with which I can proceed to fix up all the variable and function names.
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They'll just use corrupt business laws and politics to rape the "retirement accounts" for their own benefit. Then they'll leave the dangerous corpses of their businesses as a warning to future generations on the stupidity of trusting your future to lowest-common-denominator businessmen.
Yep.
It's situations like this, and the revelation of how costs were cut on Fukushima's seawall by omitting the datapoint of the big tsunami in the 1800s, that made me realize something that shocked me:
Nuclear power is perfectly safe, ideal, and awesome... but nuclear power built by humans is NOT. As a species we are short-sighted venal lying scammers, so there are many glorious technologies (nanotech anyone?) that become liabilities in our hands.
Look at the available evidence - if there was any psychic ability then the chances are that it would already be well documented.
No, that's backwards, because:
Even a slight statistical ability would have big impacts in warfare, commerce and many other areas of life.
Whatever real psychics are out there, they either a) are getting rich in the stock market (etc.) and not talking about it, or b) have all been sucked into various intelligence agencies.
The only way an ordinary member of the ballast like yourself would hear of proven psychic powers, is if they were so common that they could not be kept under wraps.
I started reading the title of this thread and though "please don't be the US".
After all, we have - global climate change deniers - anti-vaccination groups - paleo diet followers - raw foodism - a museum that claims dinosaurs and cavemen lived together on the newly created 5 thousand year old Earth.
What a relief to know that the US is not the only developed country with a problem of people making up their own reality.
Your attempt at passing off a package deal has been detected by automatic scanners.
"One of these things is not like the other . . . one of these things does not belong . . . "
When I read the summary, I thought it was some letter (maybe in the style of Jack Thompson) threatening anyone who published any research related to the lawsuit, thus attempting to create a chilling effect over any impartial researcher who might be studying the field. [...]Most importantly, it doesn't prevent anything from being published, merely requests a 90 day waiting period before publishing anything from the parties in the lawsuit. There could be some funny business going on here, but this letter doesn't show it.
What, did you just arrive on this planet after thumbing a ride on a passing spaceship piloted by a green bug-eyed monster who was headed for the Basingstoke roundabout? What do you think will happen during those 90 days if the studies reach any conclusion that is not "OMG underground diesel exhaust is teh AWESOMES!!!11!"?
It seems to me that this is utterly backwards. The scientific journals should be sending cease-and-desist to the lawyers, saying that a peer reviewed study is pending and all litigation should cease until 90 days after it has been published.
Sound stupid? But the idea that lawyers are the best judge of science is currently having more and more of a throttling effect on the USA. In fact, if you weigh in sociology and experimental psychology, it can be argued that scientists should have more part in law making than at present. Though the concept that people who make laws should have exact knowledge of something might adversely affect some politicians.
You would only think that if you did not work in those fields. Those who do work in those fields (including my best friend) are keenly aware of the comically low quality, the embarrassing irreproducibility, and the appalling "p hunting", that all enter in to studies in psychology, experimental psychology, and sociology. Not to mention the very grave "selection bias" problems that stem from the fact that most psychology and sociology studies are poorly funded and are therefore conducted on fellow psychology and sociology students.
No one who has experienced the state of research in those fields would ever, ever consider basing legislation on such results.
So who cares?
Words and punctuation have meaning. If you use them improperly, you change the meaning of what is being said. This matters a lot in contracts as well as everyday communication.
Secondly, this is a website for technically minded people. Presumably, many of us have been programmers at some point, or at least we have some familiarity with coding. If you are not such, let me assure you that a compiler cares about spelling and punctuation. It cares a lot.
The whole idea of "proper spelling" is a recent cultural invention. Prior to the 1800s, writers often spelled things phonetically. And while a misspelling can occasionally "change the meaning of what is being said", I doubt it happens more than rarely that a) a misspelling changes the meaning significantly yet b) the readers don't catch the mistake from context.
In my mind, the best argument to make in favor of proper spelling is: search engines. Today the zeitgeist thinks using search engines, and most search engines (including e.g. the simpler 'find' commands) are not spelling-agnostic. Not yet anyway.
But even then, how often do your search results depend on the difference between "it's" and "its"?
Reminds me of something we say in UI design meetings:
"If 3% of your users screw up, it's a user problem... but if 30% of your users screw up, it's a UI problem."
If the fracking process is not tolerant of hasty, underfunded, undertrained, fly-by-night drilling operations, then the process is not suitable for deployment here in the West.
No it can't just be ignored. If these laws pass, every EU country will be forced to implement them. The European Commission has very sharp teeth indeed on stuff like this, and does not take kindly to companies trying to ignore its rules.
Yep yep.
As a US citizen now thoroughly ashamed of my society's behavior (esp. regulatory capture, as well as the all-classes corruption of the housing bubble), this news is the first time in my entire life that European society has seemed superior.
It is quite a moment for me, coming as it is at the tail end of twenty years of staunch libertarian patriotism.
Russian President Medvedev threatened to prosecute those responsible for the space failures. No surprise that the individuals in question are now looking to blame someone else.
Yeah, THAT will sure attract new talent to their space program! Alex, I'll take Perverse Incentives for 500 rubles, please!
And never mind the equally important point that the current team at least learned something and won't repeat this particular mistake again. Can't say that for the new team.
That submarine? Pipelines? The military planes which crash and burn at every air show in the world?
Russia still can't get over the fact that, in terms of being some sort of global player they're about as important as Spain. They didn't have any problems when they were sealing dogs in rockets and bunging them into orbit - that's about their level.
I am amused to report that they couldn't even handle that. Laika was accidentally killed very very early in the flight. The rest of her time aboard the capsule, and the gentle story of her demise, was all fiction.
While I appreciate the need to expose students to computer classes in the same way they're exposed to other subjects, I don't think that something as specific as programming should be a *mandatory* requirement. Programming is a vocation, like many vocations, that some people are cut out for and other people are not. Those with a true passion for it will actively seek it out and those with no interest in it will hate it no matter how many programming classes you force them take. You can't MAKE a great programmer any more than you can MAKE a great engineer, mechanic, etc. Someone has to WANT it first.
I taught my two sons to program. Only one of them liked it, but they both got an astonishing side benefit from it: it taught them to see their own brains as software... with algorithms and bugs. In the context of a broader parent-child discussion of recognizing and dealing with personality bugs, programming seems to make it real, in a way that no amount of lecture can.
Haven't you noticed how few people are introspective, how few are even capable of thinking that their thoughts and feelings may be incorrect?
Like it or not, there is, and must be, a price on human life.
Yep. Where most people get confused, is by conflating "value of MY life to ME" with "value of one citizen to society". They switch back and forth between these contexts in order to make whatever stupid "if it saves just one life" point they are working.
I think the best way to measure the value of a life to society is to look at per capita GDP.
For that matter, It is actually possible to determine the rational value people place on their lives. Of course you can't ask them directly, because you'll get gibberish... but you can ask it indirectly, by asking how much extra we'd have to pay them to take a job that has x% chance of fatality per annum.
The research has been done. They crunched the numbers and came out with $2-$10 million compensation for a job with 100% risk of fatality. The dollar amount somewhat depended on their current salary level. Interestingly, the dollar amount was pretty close to the average citizen's lifetime per capita GDP.
The essence of slavery is ownership of one person by another. (not in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means). Part of the concept of a right is that everybody has it and can only lose it by violating someone else's right. The basic (and axiomatic) right is the right to one's own life, and from that all other rights are either equivalent or derived. To live, one must be able to act to support one's own life (I am not considering infants and invalids here). To live, one must be able to own (and in some situations trade for) the results of his actions. The first thing he must own is himself, which is equivalent to his right to his own life (I suppose that's debatable, but I think it can be established fairly easily.)
Slavery, the claim of another person to own me, contradicts my self-ownership. Since my self-ownership is a right, there can be no right of another person to own me; slavery is inherently a violation of a human right.
Look, I with agree you, but your arguments still need work. The right to control your body does not obviously follow from right to feed yourself. Nor does self-ownership obviously follow from ownership. Nor does total ownership obviously follow from partial ownership (think your use of a laptop provided by your company).
Your rights derive from MY self-interest, because your rights morally bind me in some way. I can make the argument, perhaps persuasively, that it is obviously right for me to allow you to feed yourself, and even to get ahead, but to disallow you from ruining your life with heroine. From my point of view, I must deny you full self-ownership because my self-interest requires me to defend society from addictive destructive substances.
Or imagine you are arguing with a Roman, who believes he has all rights to the dozen slaves he captured in Lydia. Can you explain to him why his arranement is automatically wrong for all of the players? Remember, the only reason the Roman economy could support such a large empire (i.e. so much border to guard) was via slaves captured on conquests.
Huh? Only a philosophical weakling would bring that up at this point.
Hint: if you enter a philosophical discussion with an insult, and then pepper the rest of your post with additional ad hominem, then your own philosophy still needs work.
Quite a lot of work.
Life and liberty fall under the axiomatic concept of self-ownership.
Those concepts are not axiomatic. I can easily conceive of the existence of slavery, in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means.
Sensible, maybe, but not axiomatic. It may also be impossible to hold together a social pattern without at least some degree of state control over what people do with their bodies. Just look at what the (de facto) freedom to use opium did to China for a century.
Everybody says they are the "good guys". Who comes right out and says they are evil? The world isn't black and white, anyways, though the fight against Hitler and his dictator allies was about as black and white as it gets.
Agreed; by then, Germany had really run off the rails. I also feel we did right by Japan, when we rebooted their society after the war and turned them into a Western-style state that is vastly more free and efficient than it was.
You have a natural right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property and Happiness (I'll argue real-estate, material possessions, and non-material happiness in this comment). You don't have an intrinsic right to property and happiness, just a right to be allowed to earn them. So the government doesn't have to provide you with a job, housing, food, healthcare or internet access for free. They just have to make sure a system is in place to allow you to make those things happen.
Very good. Now tell us *why* all humans possess those rights.
The definition doesn't help, either... a political right is defined as "A behavior which you may practice, and anyone who tries to stop you is automatically wrong." No information there about where the right springs from.
The answer, that most people will not agree with, is: rights are the those behaviors that humans must practice if they seek to establish a pro-human society, where 'pro-human' means a society whose primary goal is the long-term production of safety, comfort, and pleasure. Any other society is automatically wrong, in the sense of "illogical for humans to seek".
I'm an American citizen and I feel ashamed about the degree to which my country has fallen to regulatory capture.
Stop calling it regulatory capture and start calling it corruption. Just because it is legal does not mean it isn't a corruption of the government's duty to the people.
I used "regulatory capture" because it points to a solution, at least in principle. Whereas for the more general problem of "corruption", no one has any idea how to fix it. Religion used to be the answer ("The invisible old man in the sky who loves you will torture you forever!!!11!"), but that has lost all credibility these days. And with the college curriculum passionately certain that certainty is impossible (i.e. Skepticism), there is no alternative in sight.
Being a big bully is one thing. It's one thing if we're a big bully on things like human rights. What's more distressing to me is that we're basically allowing the media companies to push the US into being a big bully for things that even our own citizens think is ridiculous.
Before the media companies there were other commercial interests that pushed the US government to do their bidding. Go back to 1893 and you'll find that sugar interests were responsible for Hawaii being taken over by the US. And that is just one example.
Yep. Not to mention all of the banana republics in South America, who had their approximately-democratic governments violently toppled by the CIA acting on behalf of American produce companies.
America has never been The Good Guy, it has just been a typical state out to get ahead at any cost... any cost, that is, short of allowing its citizens to discover that it is not The Good Guy.
That's why the diplomatic cable leaks are such a Big Deal, and the reason why Bradley Manning will get no popular sympathy. His revelations cause American citizens to feel cognitive dissonance ("We aren't the Good Guy? Really?")... and people deeply hate those who cause them cognitive dissonance.
I'm an American citizen and I feel ashamed about the degree to which my country has fallen to regulatory capture.
...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?
Yep, it launched my entire career. C64 handed down from my brother, wrote my first horrible games... then a Tandy 1000TL (XT286 clone from Radio Shack) handed down from my father, ran my first BBS... then Pascal in High School CS, and you know the rest. Wow. I wish I could shake the hands of the C64's designers.
I still have mine, it's in the attic now, but it still works.
such a charger couldn't be used to sell expensive phones under the pretext of Nokia being environmentally-friendly and all the associated fraudulent propaganda. ...and so the project is scrapped.
I actually don't see why they killed it. I would have paid an extra hundred bucks to have a phone with a longer battery life. My Galaxy S II barely gives me a day, if with a solar panel it would give me a day and a half, at least it would last without problems until I get home from work. Worth it in my books.
Have you looked at the inductive charging pads? There are several brands out there, and you can place pads on each of your desks plus one on your car dashboard. You could even contrive one inside the driver's seat of your car where it will press against your phone while it is in your pocket.
I'm thinking the limitation will be the amount of power used when communicating with the local network. When transmitting, cell phones blast out a fair bit of RF power, on the order of 1 W, if memory serves. Audio, on the other hand, is easy to do with 10 mW or so when the speaker is near one's ear. Moreover, even in standby mode, phones still periodically connect to the local network which requires bursts of high power.
The handset's transmit power is regulated by the tower, based on how well the tower can hear the handset. Most handsets can do up to 0.6W of transmit power if so requested... but naturally they will use less power whenever possible.
Remember back when cellphones used a frequency that caused dit-dit-dit-daaaaaa-dit-dit interference on your car stereo? Ever noticed that sometimes the dits were really loud, other times very faint? That variance was the handset using different power levels, under orders from the tower.
So, the bottom line is, if you want to reduce handset power consumption, you need more towers (i.e. smaller cells) and/or more sensitive tower receivers. Yes, I realize that greater sensitivity will at some point require going below the noise floor... but that can be accompli$hed.
I suspect many people won't come forward
Since the beginning of this debate, twenty years ago when we were all still using 1.44MB floppy disks, I have been firmly in the "thou shalt not copy" camp. I never, ever pirated software or music. Occasionally I copied MP3s from a friend, then re-bought them if I ended up listening to them more than once or twice. And I still felt guilty.
Last month was my change of heart.
I was trying to Do The Right Thing, and download Terry Pratchett's Discworld audiobooks using iTunes. Each audiobook costs $20, but I was willing to pay it. I splurged and bought the first three. The download of the third one failed, and there is no way to resume it (in order to get the rest of the audiobook, I only received the first 42 minutes), because of Audible.com's license restrictions. I'm facing an hour on the phone with iTunes tech support.
But even THAT was acceptable. Until I found out, the hard way, that my audiobooks can't be listened to on my other iOS devices. I can listen to them on the iPhone I purchased them on, but not on my iPad (same iTunes) account or my sons' iPads (same iTunes). WTF?
So I decided that Audible.com and iTunes have colluded to defraud the consumer. And I got gypped $60 before I figured it out. I therefore conclude that I am free of my moral obligation to pay them for the content they control. And suddenly, the world, and this whole piracy conversation, looks very different to me.
It's too bad they're too busy downloading and sharing music to call their congressmen, threaten not to vote for them if they vote for SOPA/PIPA, and actually follow through on that threat on election day.
You ask us to become single-issue voters. I consider other problems to be far more grave -- specifically: restoring the adversarial relationship between the SEC and the companies it regulates, and putting teeth into laws against white-collar crime. I'm a long-time libertarian who, thanks to this recession and its causes, has only recently become so cynical about human nature that I consider these reforms to be important.
In fact I think they are so important that if we don't follow through, the gloriously productive pattern of our society will be wrecked.
Yes I agree that copyright reform is important too... but if I write more than one letter to my congresspeople per quarter, or threaten to vote against them over more than one or two issues, they will just tune me out.
While I generally understand what you two are trying to say, you don't provide a downside to leaving comments on your ever-so-clearly written code. Probably because there isn't one.
Omitting code comments is plain lazy, period, and there's no excuse not to.
Depends on your definition of 'omit'. At this point in my career, I find that I have finite energy for any given task / bug / refactoring crusade, and it is far better to spend that energy renaming things (for clarity), and preening the whitespace, than on writing comments that nobody reads because everyone knows that code comments are misleadingly outdated.
That said, I think we both agree with the GP post that comments are needed when the reader will need information about why the code does what it does. I presently do a lot of work bugfixing code that was cranked out by our company's low-priced Indian counterparts, and sometimes I would kill for even one sentence of explanation, with which I can proceed to fix up all the variable and function names.