Says a member of the group best known for sitting at their monitors until their muscles atrophy. (note to self: get away from monitor before tigers . . . )
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that there should be *more* irresponsible morons than any other type of people.
Hmm. Didn't Cyril Kornbluth write "The Marching Morons back in the early 1950s? Since there is prior art on this subject, you're not allowed to think that.
Maybe for individual wiretaps and criminal investigations. But the blanket surveillance? That's just co-location expenses. Remember, compliance with federal law is one of the requirements of licensing, and if federal law says "we get to look over your shoulder at your switching records" then that's just part of the cost of doing business.
Look at all the tax and right-of-way concessions already being made. It's one of the annoying little things about so-called "deregulation" - some of the regulations and requirements and price controls had been the trade-offs for free or cheap access to properties and rights-of-way to install wiring. At some point in the 1970s or 1980s the accountants took over the world and insisted on "monetizing" every layer of everything independently, which caused part of the economic bubble: the amount of money supposedly being spent to buy and sell things went way up, but the numbers were far beyond the actual productive activity - it was all about prices being put on separate things that had previously been bundled parts of the same company ("delivery + usage" of utilities, for example), or for things that had been bartered and/or cooperatively paid (electric and phone lines on the same pole co-maintained by in-house staff vs. two companies each paying a third company to maintain, plus adding cable company etc.)
Plus investment periods ran out. 50 year startup periods sounded like a long time . . . 50 years ago. All of the new suburbs built in the 50s and 60s aren't new any more.
It *is* relevant - an American trainee might well ask his elder/senior "Hey, shouldn't we be going faster?" where these folks might have hesitated until they were 1000% certain (yes, I meant a thousand, it's called "hyperbole"). During landing, which is essentially controlled flight into terrain, seconds matter.
I remember my assembly. IBM macros could do things that C++ templates still dream of. Plus I've worked in embedded systems the rest of my career, so it's always included some assembly on one processor or another.
Sorry, you're looking from only one angle. It's not that they don't want to invest. It's that they don't want to make a complete change from the ground up all at once. It would be like renovating your house by bulldozing it. And some houses are historic:-) and aren't gonna get bulldozed anytime soon.
Look at the air traffic control system (NOT in Cobol!). It's old, it's outdated, it's straining under the load. Multiple projects have tried to replace it . . . and failed. I don't understand why - a game industry that could do MMP online Freespace and Wing Commander *decades* ago should have been able to handle tracking real planes by now - but the new projects just don't keep up. And nobody is going to pull the plug on the old system until they're *sure* that the new one can be trusted.
If an old accounting system is still running, still doing its job, just like the pipes and wires in the walls, nobody wants to go change them just because they're not new.
True, EBCDIC is a nightmare, but with packed decimal you can have exact numbers up to 10**508 or something (it's not a full 256 bytes, I just forget what the leading key looks like). I started on IBM 360s, and thought EBCDIC was normal; then I moved to DECsystems and realized how much easier ASCII was. But the MVC and CLC packed decimal instructions, especially when modified with an EXecute , were amazingly powerful for the era.
... people do not want to be reminded that their phone is technical, rather that it was formed by some kind of magic.
But it was. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And since the greater part of our population has a very limited comprehension of science and technology, the level of "sufficiently advanced" is distressingly low.
The very fact that people are arguing with this post proves its point. Yes, philosophy *could* be about whether "Just because science can do X, should it?", but it's usually about arguing some detailed interpretation of the nth line of someone else's book, and if you explain that you think it means something different from what your professor thinks it means, you're wrong.
Yes, you need to define the constructor, and it may not work; or it works ever so slightly differently from every other constructor; or it may be incomplete; or it may not keep up with future modifications when somebody adds something to the structure(s). MOVE CORRESPONDING will either work or give a compile error. Simple.
I wouldn't write Cobol again unless there were nothing else to work at; but if you're telling me that a language you make up on the fly by hiding the most important things is automatically better, I'll disagree bigtime. I've seen things hidden in constructors that should have been in open code, with big flashing neon signs for comments, because they were so "clever" that nobody could ever fix them when they went wrong.
You obviously were not in the mainframe world when editing and display terminals showed up. I was. Yes, there's more CPU power and prettier display now, but the work is being done somewhere else and the control is not local.
MOVE CORRESPONDING. Try doing that right in any other language. Try figuring out where each different C compiler put your bits and bytes, and what size it made your integers, and what other random changes it made with alignment and ordering. I cannot believe that anyone on/. honestly loves a language that defines which of its behavior is undefined and unpredictable.
You can write both garbage and poetry in any language. Cobol at least *tried* to make some things clear.
As an Apple convert, I suggest you just accept their 'way of doing things' for 2 weeks. Embrace it completely and accept it. Then decide if you hate it so much.
1. Your use of the word "convert" is disturbingly apt. It is a mindset driven by revealed miraculous scripture.
2. Tried this. We *won* a Macbook a few years ago - got it for free - so I figured I couldn't go wrong . . . and so many things are wrong, all the time. My wife uses it for iPhoto, and that's about it.
3. I encountered exactly the same "Why would you want to do that?" responses to *any* question I asked of Apple support or the company making the one accessory I was foolish enough to buy (won't even dignify them by adding their name). If it's not in the application, then nobody could possibly want it, and if it is, then nobody could possibly want it differently.
Baskin Robbins' whole advertising focus is 31+ flavors in each store. There's a frozen-yogurt chain called 16 Handles. Variety is usually considered a positive in consumer products. Apple doesn't want customers, they want cultists. They say "Think Different"; they mean "Think All The Same Like We Do".
Phillips was not designed for low quality. It was designed to cam-out the driver rather than strip the screw threads. Stripping the head is an accidental byproduct.
No. It's not necessarily just one person. Like allergies and other chemical sensitivities, each person who has a problem thinks they're weird, because nobody else seems to have the problem; but just like ANY OTHER aspect of humanity there is a wide range of reactions.
I can see car brake LEDs flicker; my wife can't. Doesn't mean my eyes are better, or worse, just different. And that the car light systems could probably work better.
Maybe it's not a tiny minority, and maybe it's not enough to make people ill. Maybe a tenth or a quarter of the world feels a little less well than they might all the time, but it's "just" a few percent so not enough to notice and each person thinks they just need more sleep. Or maybe a tenth or a quarter of the world is "just" a few IQ points lower than they might have been.
Whenever someone uses the "nothing to hide" line (and unfortunately I work with some) I ask: "When you go to the bathroom at home, do you close the door? Even if you're the only one home? What are you hiding?"
I'm less worried about Obama reading my email - he seems reasonably sane - than the ongoing collection and storage. It would take just one election for a fundamentalist government of whatever religion to come in and start hunting that data for thought crimes retroactively (and don't tell me about ex post facto laws, if they think it's evil now then it was evil then).
I live near New York City. When I walk around Times Square or Central Park, I often pass policepeople keeping an eye on things. They look at everyone, and either they pass along or the crowd does. Doesn't bother me - no storage, no history, just ready response. Put a ring of cameras on the traffic light poles, though, and suddenly it's surveillance, history, tracking, facial recognition, and whatever else gets invented over time - not to mention the possibility of misuse and falsification. Law enforcement will say it's just the same as police scanning the crowd, and point to the usefulness of such records in the Boston Marathon bombings; I wonder why it should be assumed that everyone is guilty and needs watching.
Of the five airports in London, four (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and City) have railway stations directly underneath, within or adjacent... also the case for most large / modern airports I've used in Europe.
New York City has three of the oldest and busiest airports - except one of them is in New Jersey, paying taxes to different government. Mass transit connections of any kind were fought tooth and nail for years by the taxi and limousine industry. Despite NYC having a metro subway system, there was no connection from that system to the two airports within city limits other than private bus lines until comparatively recently. The train station at Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey is also recent, and not as easily (or frequently) reached from NYC as one would like.
When I was working on phone systems, one of the issues was the required-by-law amortization period. We were making brand new interfaces that had to connect to 40-year-old systems buried under the street somewhere.
As I see it, the assumption that everything is disposable is part of the problem. People seem to forget that cars, buildings, roads, etc. do NOT get replaced every 2 years like cellphones./.ers tend to live on the leading edge of technology, and that technology often has some interface in the real world that is NOT leading edge.
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That being said, fuck yeah, bring on the tigers.
Says a member of the group best known for sitting at their monitors until their muscles atrophy. (note to self: get away from monitor before tigers . . . )
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that there should be *more* irresponsible morons than any other type of people.
Hmm. Didn't Cyril Kornbluth write "The Marching Morons back in the early 1950s? Since there is prior art on this subject, you're not allowed to think that.
Maybe for individual wiretaps and criminal investigations. But the blanket surveillance? That's just co-location expenses. Remember, compliance with federal law is one of the requirements of licensing, and if federal law says "we get to look over your shoulder at your switching records" then that's just part of the cost of doing business.
Look at all the tax and right-of-way concessions already being made. It's one of the annoying little things about so-called "deregulation" - some of the regulations and requirements and price controls had been the trade-offs for free or cheap access to properties and rights-of-way to install wiring. At some point in the 1970s or 1980s the accountants took over the world and insisted on "monetizing" every layer of everything independently, which caused part of the economic bubble: the amount of money supposedly being spent to buy and sell things went way up, but the numbers were far beyond the actual productive activity - it was all about prices being put on separate things that had previously been bundled parts of the same company ("delivery + usage" of utilities, for example), or for things that had been bartered and/or cooperatively paid (electric and phone lines on the same pole co-maintained by in-house staff vs. two companies each paying a third company to maintain, plus adding cable company etc.)
Plus investment periods ran out. 50 year startup periods sounded like a long time . . . 50 years ago. All of the new suburbs built in the 50s and 60s aren't new any more.
It *is* relevant - an American trainee might well ask his elder/senior "Hey, shouldn't we be going faster?" where these folks might have hesitated until they were 1000% certain (yes, I meant a thousand, it's called "hyperbole"). During landing, which is essentially controlled flight into terrain, seconds matter.
Elder languages are like elder gods: irate when disturbed.
I remember my assembly. IBM macros could do things that C++ templates still dream of. Plus I've worked in embedded systems the rest of my career, so it's always included some assembly on one processor or another.
Sorry, you're looking from only one angle. It's not that they don't want to invest. It's that they don't want to make a complete change from the ground up all at once. It would be like renovating your house by bulldozing it. And some houses are historic :-) and aren't gonna get bulldozed anytime soon.
Look at the air traffic control system (NOT in Cobol!). It's old, it's outdated, it's straining under the load. Multiple projects have tried to replace it . . . and failed. I don't understand why - a game industry that could do MMP online Freespace and Wing Commander *decades* ago should have been able to handle tracking real planes by now - but the new projects just don't keep up. And nobody is going to pull the plug on the old system until they're *sure* that the new one can be trusted.
If an old accounting system is still running, still doing its job, just like the pipes and wires in the walls, nobody wants to go change them just because they're not new.
True, EBCDIC is a nightmare, but with packed decimal you can have exact numbers up to 10**508 or something (it's not a full 256 bytes, I just forget what the leading key looks like). I started on IBM 360s, and thought EBCDIC was normal; then I moved to DECsystems and realized how much easier ASCII was. But the MVC and CLC packed decimal instructions, especially when modified with an EXecute , were amazingly powerful for the era.
... people do not want to be reminded that their phone is technical, rather that it was formed by some kind of magic.
But it was. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And since the greater part of our population has a very limited comprehension of science and technology, the level of "sufficiently advanced" is distressingly low.
That's like saying, "We don't live in a world increasingly dominated by unreality."
Interestingly unprovable.
The very fact that people are arguing with this post proves its point. Yes, philosophy *could* be about whether "Just because science can do X, should it?", but it's usually about arguing some detailed interpretation of the nth line of someone else's book, and if you explain that you think it means something different from what your professor thinks it means, you're wrong.
a 3D printout... would not really be suitable for use as a permanent key. Perhaps a key intended to be used for a short term period ....
Just one robbery. After all, the place will be empty afterwards.
Yes, you need to define the constructor, and it may not work; or it works ever so slightly differently from every other constructor; or it may be incomplete; or it may not keep up with future modifications when somebody adds something to the structure(s). MOVE CORRESPONDING will either work or give a compile error. Simple.
I wouldn't write Cobol again unless there were nothing else to work at; but if you're telling me that a language you make up on the fly by hiding the most important things is automatically better, I'll disagree bigtime. I've seen things hidden in constructors that should have been in open code, with big flashing neon signs for comments, because they were so "clever" that nobody could ever fix them when they went wrong.
You obviously were not in the mainframe world when editing and display terminals showed up. I was. Yes, there's more CPU power and prettier display now, but the work is being done somewhere else and the control is not local.
People have been reinventing mainframes - badly - for years. They just call them "servers" and "clouds" and other euphemisms.
MOVE CORRESPONDING. Try doing that right in any other language. Try figuring out where each different C compiler put your bits and bytes, and what size it made your integers, and what other random changes it made with alignment and ordering. I cannot believe that anyone on /. honestly loves a language that defines which of its behavior is undefined and unpredictable.
You can write both garbage and poetry in any language. Cobol at least *tried* to make some things clear.
As an Apple convert, I suggest you just accept their 'way of doing things' for 2 weeks. Embrace it completely and accept it. Then decide if you hate it so much.
1. Your use of the word "convert" is disturbingly apt. It is a mindset driven by revealed miraculous scripture.
2. Tried this. We *won* a Macbook a few years ago - got it for free - so I figured I couldn't go wrong . . . and so many things are wrong, all the time. My wife uses it for iPhoto, and that's about it.
3. I encountered exactly the same "Why would you want to do that?" responses to *any* question I asked of Apple support or the company making the one accessory I was foolish enough to buy (won't even dignify them by adding their name). If it's not in the application, then nobody could possibly want it, and if it is, then nobody could possibly want it differently.
Baskin Robbins' whole advertising focus is 31+ flavors in each store. There's a frozen-yogurt chain called 16 Handles. Variety is usually considered a positive in consumer products. Apple doesn't want customers, they want cultists. They say "Think Different"; they mean "Think All The Same Like We Do".
Phillips was not designed for low quality. It was designed to cam-out the driver rather than strip the screw threads. Stripping the head is an accidental byproduct.
No. It's not necessarily just one person. Like allergies and other chemical sensitivities, each person who has a problem thinks they're weird, because nobody else seems to have the problem; but just like ANY OTHER aspect of humanity there is a wide range of reactions.
I can see car brake LEDs flicker; my wife can't. Doesn't mean my eyes are better, or worse, just different. And that the car light systems could probably work better.
Maybe it's not a tiny minority, and maybe it's not enough to make people ill. Maybe a tenth or a quarter of the world feels a little less well than they might all the time, but it's "just" a few percent so not enough to notice and each person thinks they just need more sleep. Or maybe a tenth or a quarter of the world is "just" a few IQ points lower than they might have been.
Whenever someone uses the "nothing to hide" line (and unfortunately I work with some) I ask: "When you go to the bathroom at home, do you close the door? Even if you're the only one home? What are you hiding?"
I'm less worried about Obama reading my email - he seems reasonably sane - than the ongoing collection and storage. It would take just one election for a fundamentalist government of whatever religion to come in and start hunting that data for thought crimes retroactively (and don't tell me about ex post facto laws, if they think it's evil now then it was evil then).
I live near New York City. When I walk around Times Square or Central Park, I often pass policepeople keeping an eye on things. They look at everyone, and either they pass along or the crowd does. Doesn't bother me - no storage, no history, just ready response. Put a ring of cameras on the traffic light poles, though, and suddenly it's surveillance, history, tracking, facial recognition, and whatever else gets invented over time - not to mention the possibility of misuse and falsification. Law enforcement will say it's just the same as police scanning the crowd, and point to the usefulness of such records in the Boston Marathon bombings; I wonder why it should be assumed that everyone is guilty and needs watching.
Because terrorism is so much more dramatic, and tends to happen in groups. Otherwise it's just "normal" crime.
I remember this idea being floated in Popular Science Magazine . . . in the 1960s.
Of the five airports in London, four (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and City) have railway stations directly underneath, within or adjacent ... also the case for most large / modern airports I've used in Europe.
New York City has three of the oldest and busiest airports - except one of them is in New Jersey, paying taxes to different government. Mass transit connections of any kind were fought tooth and nail for years by the taxi and limousine industry. Despite NYC having a metro subway system, there was no connection from that system to the two airports within city limits other than private bus lines until comparatively recently. The train station at Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey is also recent, and not as easily (or frequently) reached from NYC as one would like.
When I was working on phone systems, one of the issues was the required-by-law amortization period. We were making brand new interfaces that had to connect to 40-year-old systems buried under the street somewhere.
/.ers tend to live on the leading edge of technology, and that technology often has some interface in the real world that is NOT leading edge.
As I see it, the assumption that everything is disposable is part of the problem. People seem to forget that cars, buildings, roads, etc. do NOT get replaced every 2 years like cellphones.