If they don't re-design the software every couple of years, what are they getting paid for?
Sadly, this same attitude is even *stronger * with *worse* results among the people who AREN'T getting paid - the open source community. Every time I read that "project X has fewer commits, it must be dying", I know I'm reading an inexperienced child who doesn't appreciate things reaching maturity and WORKING. Nobody says "Can openers haven't changed much lately, I guess nobody uses them any more" or "USB memory sticks are pretty much the same, I guess nobody uses them any more."
I agree - one need not use "belief", akin to faith "the evidence of things unseen", to accept something that is visibly trending factual data. Or to notice that high tide on the Jersey Shore has been eating away the beaches and moving closer to the houses. These are objectively observable phenomena.that CAN be seen with the naked eye. Maybe the cities won't be under *deep* flood waters, but I would advise against buying an apartment in Manhattan's Battery Park City.
In my comment, I used the term "alien" in the article's sense of "genetics different from anything found on Earth". Like calling any ethnic food by the ethnic-country name even though the restaurant serving them is in NYC and all of the ingredients came from the US.
The Netflix price will go up so that the end customer can be paying Comcast twice for the same bandwidth. Now THAT is a non-technical argument with a direct effect on one's wallet.
... as a user, YOU are "requesting" date from Netflix... and you have already paid Comcast for that bandwidth.
I'm betting most normal users don't understand this, and I also think this is the best hope of positive counter-publicity. It should be obvious that "Comcast is trying to charge twice for the same thing!"
I'll add a fourth demographic: people who don't want to be bothered. My wife has an iPhone, I have a 4-year-old flip-phone that makes calls and that's about it. And I like it that way.
Depends on whether fertility (with healthy children) continues through the longer lifespan. Perhaps people will be in MORE of a hurry to have a few children while they are young and healthy, and then start taking anti-aging drugs in their late 30s or early 40s. Ideas of marriage and relationships might change; even the happiest couple might want a change after 50 or 100 years . . . And why do people need a job? Buckminster Fuller pointed out in the 1950s that there IS enough to go around (at least, there was then).
Yes, right now everything that lives ages and wears out and dies, making room for new generations. But why? If people can live longer PRODUCTIVELY and CREATIVELY, why not do so? I wouldn't want to be old and feeble and sick forever, but if I could be in my 30s or 40s forever . . . . or take hundreds of years to age from my 30s to 50s instead of just twenty . . . Think of the experience to be gained! OTOH think of the ossification of society if we all become Struldbrugs. Think of adventurous people being able to make long trips to other planets because we can afford the time! (Cities in Flight, James Blish) OTOH think of the bubble-wrapping as other people are terrified that an accidental death means losing centuries rather than decades, and safety regulations overcome everything else in life (Larry Niven touches on this in discussion of "boosterspice").
"several years"? I was getting my Social Security survivor's benefits in college (after my father died) direct deposited in the early 1970s. I think they were pioneers of direct deposit, even more than the then-fledgeling payroll companies.
Ditto. There's a big difference between congresspeople or businesspeople having staff open their office/business related mail; after all, that's what an office bureaucracy handles. But at a personal level, forget it.
And the article was sort of stupidly self-consciously hipster. There should be no surprise that the true customer of the Postal Service, and for that matter any delivery service, is the people who PAY them - not people who receive deliveries. "Disruption" is a word in the English language, and it's negative; the supposedly positive use in business only positive for the newcomer, and certainly negative for the disruptee being pushed aside to the dustbin of history.
Digital *is* a fad, for some things. Who's going to look at a "catalog" rather than search for what they want when they want - that is, a database-driven website? Of course, the vendors want to remind you that there are other interesting things to buy, but they don't send you "catalogs" - they send you emails with a handful of themed selections to whet your appetite. The folks at ThinkGeek are good at this, the folks at Amazon just send a pile of crap randomly thrown together hoping there's something in there for everyone.
Premise: when there are many eyes looking at open source, it leads to more bugs getting fixed.
Faulty reasoning (of too many people): this project didn't have many eyes, therefore the premise is false.
Correct reasoning: when the condition of "many eyes" was met, the premise is shown to be true.
Faulty common inference from the true premise: When source is open, many eyes will be looking at it.
It seems the reverse occurs: People start to trust the *small* group actually doing work on any particular project, and since it is nobody's assigned responsibility to review it, nobody does. Yes, when a fire occurs there are many volunteer firemen; but that's a little late.
Well, yes, I'm not suggesting we'll *never* have the technology, just that we're not ready to send a ship off into the darkness at the moment. Especially one that has enough people for enough genetic diversity that they're not having children by their half-siblings within a few generations. (Can't remember the 1950s or 60s story that was considered shocking at the time, about people needing to have children by a carefully-selected roster of not-their-spouses, and whether couples changed partners or stayed together... and of course there was some of both and a full spectrum in between.)
If the ability to update and maintain *anything* is lost, the ship is in trouble. So there had better be people trained for many things all the time - they're stuck in the ship, there's not much else to do - which is what I meant about a "cultish" society, like a learned monastic order (though obviously not celibate or there are no more generations and it stops being a generation ship). I would think you have to expect loss of contact simply because of signal strength at some point; the long delays are no problem for TCP/IP (as demonstrated by previous discussions of TCP over carrier pigeon).
"Starlost", a badly-done early-1970s TV show that wasted a promising premise (by Harlan Ellison): The multiple bio-domes of a generation ship have been sealed off from each other for hundreds of years after an accident damaged the ship's bridge. The people in each have long forgotten that they are on a ship at all; they only know their little world, like medieval peasants. A handful of people try to escape their own little community and discover that there are other humans - and, after contacting the ship's half-disintegrating AI, that the ship is in danger and *someone* must figure out how to get to the reserve bridge.
Oh, of course, their full-time job - in fact, their *lives* - will be dedicated to maintaining, repairing, and improving the ship, not to mention growing their food (easiest way to recycle). We already have some of that technology - I just read an article in this week's New Yorker about people working on a US Navy air craft carrier, with many people in tight space, no privacy, hazards everywhere, etc. But even a carrier expects supplies and spare parts delivered in port, or in emergency by air. Submarines stay out for six months at a time, and are a lot closer to the spaceship situation, but still get oxygen out of the water around them. Right now, we have no way to travel in space, with no support whatever, without stockpiling a lot of spare parts and spare materials at the beginning. As nice as it would be to scavenge materials from space as the ship travels, we don't have the technology, so the ship won't have it available. The list of science fiction things we DON'T have is endless. Add to that the random danger of a rock zipping through the hull . . .
Their nav and control systems had better be open source, because as you point out, they may need to work on *everything* as they're traveling.
If they last long enough, they may forget why they're traveling, or that there is anything real outside the ship. That's an SF staple. In fact it might be *useful* to develop a cultish atmosphere about the work of supporting The Trip; after all, it's not as if there is any economy supporting any other line of work. They'll need cooks, and maybe entertainers, and maybe writers . . . though what they will imagine after five or six generations in the ship is an interesting thought.
Robert Heinlein, "Orphans of the sky". Alexi Panshin, "Rite of Passage". Just look up "Generation Ship" and there are lots of articles about lots and lots of classic SF.
No, it would be OK to send a generation ship, where people live their lifespans on board raising their children. Assuming we could build something that lasts long enough without a BSOD.
It's called "reductio ad absurdum" - in math, proof by contradiction. Take the apparently reasonable premises to their extremes and show that they contradict themselves.
Double down: Stewart seems *more* irritated by stupid lefty shit, in the tone of "Hey, why are you being as stupid as the other side, you're supposed to be the smart ones!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
If they don't re-design the software every couple of years, what are they getting paid for?
Sadly, this same attitude is even *stronger * with *worse* results among the people who AREN'T getting paid - the open source community. Every time I read that "project X has fewer commits, it must be dying", I know I'm reading an inexperienced child who doesn't appreciate things reaching maturity and WORKING. Nobody says "Can openers haven't changed much lately, I guess nobody uses them any more" or "USB memory sticks are pretty much the same, I guess nobody uses them any more."
A: Legacy code.
AKA battle hardened libraries that work as advertised.
This. ++. "Stable" does not mean "boring"; it means "reliable".
I agree - one need not use "belief", akin to faith "the evidence of things unseen", to accept something that is visibly trending factual data. Or to notice that high tide on the Jersey Shore has been eating away the beaches and moving closer to the houses. These are objectively observable phenomena.that CAN be seen with the naked eye. Maybe the cities won't be under *deep* flood waters, but I would advise against buying an apartment in Manhattan's Battery Park City.
In my comment, I used the term "alien" in the article's sense of "genetics different from anything found on Earth". Like calling any ethnic food by the ethnic-country name even though the restaurant serving them is in NYC and all of the ingredients came from the US.
I, for one, welcome our new alien-genetic infections.
The Netflix price will go up so that the end customer can be paying Comcast twice for the same bandwidth. Now THAT is a non-technical argument with a direct effect on one's wallet.
... as a user, YOU are "requesting" date from Netflix... and you have already paid Comcast for that bandwidth.
I'm betting most normal users don't understand this, and I also think this is the best hope of positive counter-publicity. It should be obvious that "Comcast is trying to charge twice for the same thing!"
I'll add a fourth demographic: people who don't want to be bothered. My wife has an iPhone, I have a 4-year-old flip-phone that makes calls and that's about it. And I like it that way.
. . . . until the next generation knows not history and thinks they rediscovered RISC . . .
We don't have enough people donating for current medical needs, I don't see people donating for this unless it pays well.
Depends on whether fertility (with healthy children) continues through the longer lifespan. Perhaps people will be in MORE of a hurry to have a few children while they are young and healthy, and then start taking anti-aging drugs in their late 30s or early 40s. Ideas of marriage and relationships might change; even the happiest couple might want a change after 50 or 100 years . . . And why do people need a job? Buckminster Fuller pointed out in the 1950s that there IS enough to go around (at least, there was then).
Yes, right now everything that lives ages and wears out and dies, making room for new generations. But why? If people can live longer PRODUCTIVELY and CREATIVELY, why not do so? I wouldn't want to be old and feeble and sick forever, but if I could be in my 30s or 40s forever . . . . or take hundreds of years to age from my 30s to 50s instead of just twenty . . . Think of the experience to be gained! OTOH think of the ossification of society if we all become Struldbrugs. Think of adventurous people being able to make long trips to other planets because we can afford the time! (Cities in Flight, James Blish) OTOH think of the bubble-wrapping as other people are terrified that an accidental death means losing centuries rather than decades, and safety regulations overcome everything else in life (Larry Niven touches on this in discussion of "boosterspice").
"several years"? I was getting my Social Security survivor's benefits in college (after my father died) direct deposited in the early 1970s. I think they were pioneers of direct deposit, even more than the then-fledgeling payroll companies.
The phone companies, and utility companies, and finance companies, also send mail by the truckload. It's not *only* about junk mail.
Ditto. There's a big difference between congresspeople or businesspeople having staff open their office/business related mail; after all, that's what an office bureaucracy handles. But at a personal level, forget it.
And the article was sort of stupidly self-consciously hipster. There should be no surprise that the true customer of the Postal Service, and for that matter any delivery service, is the people who PAY them - not people who receive deliveries. "Disruption" is a word in the English language, and it's negative; the supposedly positive use in business only positive for the newcomer, and certainly negative for the disruptee being pushed aside to the dustbin of history.
Digital *is* a fad, for some things. Who's going to look at a "catalog" rather than search for what they want when they want - that is, a database-driven website? Of course, the vendors want to remind you that there are other interesting things to buy, but they don't send you "catalogs" - they send you emails with a handful of themed selections to whet your appetite. The folks at ThinkGeek are good at this, the folks at Amazon just send a pile of crap randomly thrown together hoping there's something in there for everyone.
Premise: when there are many eyes looking at open source, it leads to more bugs getting fixed.
Faulty reasoning (of too many people): this project didn't have many eyes, therefore the premise is false.
Correct reasoning: when the condition of "many eyes" was met, the premise is shown to be true.
Faulty common inference from the true premise: When source is open, many eyes will be looking at it.
It seems the reverse occurs: People start to trust the *small* group actually doing work on any particular project, and since it is nobody's assigned responsibility to review it, nobody does. Yes, when a fire occurs there are many volunteer firemen; but that's a little late.
Well, yes, I'm not suggesting we'll *never* have the technology, just that we're not ready to send a ship off into the darkness at the moment. Especially one that has enough people for enough genetic diversity that they're not having children by their half-siblings within a few generations. (Can't remember the 1950s or 60s story that was considered shocking at the time, about people needing to have children by a carefully-selected roster of not-their-spouses, and whether couples changed partners or stayed together ... and of course there was some of both and a full spectrum in between.)
If the ability to update and maintain *anything* is lost, the ship is in trouble. So there had better be people trained for many things all the time - they're stuck in the ship, there's not much else to do - which is what I meant about a "cultish" society, like a learned monastic order (though obviously not celibate or there are no more generations and it stops being a generation ship). I would think you have to expect loss of contact simply because of signal strength at some point; the long delays are no problem for TCP/IP (as demonstrated by previous discussions of TCP over carrier pigeon).
"Starlost", a badly-done early-1970s TV show that wasted a promising premise (by Harlan Ellison): The multiple bio-domes of a generation ship have been sealed off from each other for hundreds of years after an accident damaged the ship's bridge. The people in each have long forgotten that they are on a ship at all; they only know their little world, like medieval peasants. A handful of people try to escape their own little community and discover that there are other humans - and, after contacting the ship's half-disintegrating AI, that the ship is in danger and *someone* must figure out how to get to the reserve bridge.
see also "The Long Way Home", Fred Saberhagen http://www.baenebooks.com/chap...
Oh, of course, their full-time job - in fact, their *lives* - will be dedicated to maintaining, repairing, and improving the ship, not to mention growing their food (easiest way to recycle). We already have some of that technology - I just read an article in this week's New Yorker about people working on a US Navy air craft carrier, with many people in tight space, no privacy, hazards everywhere, etc. But even a carrier expects supplies and spare parts delivered in port, or in emergency by air. Submarines stay out for six months at a time, and are a lot closer to the spaceship situation, but still get oxygen out of the water around them. Right now, we have no way to travel in space, with no support whatever, without stockpiling a lot of spare parts and spare materials at the beginning. As nice as it would be to scavenge materials from space as the ship travels, we don't have the technology, so the ship won't have it available. The list of science fiction things we DON'T have is endless. Add to that the random danger of a rock zipping through the hull . . .
Their nav and control systems had better be open source, because as you point out, they may need to work on *everything* as they're traveling.
If they last long enough, they may forget why they're traveling, or that there is anything real outside the ship. That's an SF staple. In fact it might be *useful* to develop a cultish atmosphere about the work of supporting The Trip; after all, it's not as if there is any economy supporting any other line of work. They'll need cooks, and maybe entertainers, and maybe writers . . . though what they will imagine after five or six generations in the ship is an interesting thought.
Robert Heinlein, "Orphans of the sky". Alexi Panshin, "Rite of Passage". Just look up "Generation Ship" and there are lots of articles about lots and lots of classic SF.
No, it would be OK to send a generation ship, where people live their lifespans on board raising their children. Assuming we could build something that lasts long enough without a BSOD.
It's called "reductio ad absurdum" - in math, proof by contradiction. Take the apparently reasonable premises to their extremes and show that they contradict themselves.
I think he's be in line with Europe; the current events and public issues he discusses, being American, are what's to the right.
Double down: Stewart seems *more* irritated by stupid lefty shit, in the tone of "Hey, why are you being as stupid as the other side, you're supposed to be the smart ones!!!"
Will the same people who like the Top 10 lists understand "The Word"?