Sorry for all this, thanks for the reply, this seems a bit much indeed.
I think you need professional help, to start to see some people again. You may want to consider getting a job when you can handle it, even if you don't really need it financially, so you can recover a sense of purpose and action. You need to change something.
I live around severely depressed people in my daily life and I've experienced depression myself. It is possible to recover from most depressions, just don't try to fight alone. It's a long and difficult fight too.
Actually this is not quite true. You forgot to mention that the way the contest was run to choose a design for the SOH simply did not require engineering studies, so you can't blame architects for not providing them. Further Utzon, the Danish architect who won the contest actually moved to Sydney and supervised the construction initially. He actually is credited, together with the head construction engineer, with the reusable design of the arches that made the construction of the shells possible at low cost.
He later resigned following a change of government and political infighting. *THEN* after he left, did the costs start ballooning. Utzon was still widely blamed for cost overrun.
Eventually the building was finished in 1973 and had cost over A$ 100 million. This was an enormous sum for the time, 15x what was originally planned for the building, but to my knowledge, the building is used daily with separate opera, a concert hall, several theaters and restaurants. It does not leak, in fact it is a magnificent and functional building, recognized the world over as a cultural icon and has done wonders for the image of Australia abroad as a modern society. It has repaid its initial cost many many times over in tourism goodwill alone.
In fact Utzon was offered the keys to the city of Sydney in 2003 along with the Pritzker Prize (architecture's top award) and several other Australians and international awards. I believe we can say the SOH is nothing like a failure.
Utzon never build anything like the SOH in his life again. Far from being a failure, this is one of the finest building in the world today. Far from being treated as a genius, the political turmoil over the building broke him.
The quality of individual hardware components in macs varies a great deal, in fact. Sometimes it's top notch like the current Intel processor they use at the moment, but sometimes it falls behind, like right now the external 23" screen they sell for MacPros, which are both behind in terms of quality *and* much more expensive than their PC counterparts. The problem is that you can't pick and choose individual components if they are not to your liking.
Regularly Apple has a well-publicized problem with their hardware.
Actually, FACTOR is in QP (there exist a polynomial algorithm for factoring, but on a quantum computer). QP is believed to be simpler than NP, but there is no proof.
No, our understanding of NP-complete problem is that they are indeed all fundamentally the same. Knapsack and TSP are the same problem, as one can convert any knapsack into a TSP in polynomial time, and vice-versa. As a result, being able to solve any knapsack in polynomial time would ensure one would also be able to solve TSP in polynomial time.
Sales did not fall. Microsoft is still selling Vista hands over fists. It is only selling them at a lower rate than previous months, which is is (a) expected and (b) not significant.
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:
1. Person A has position X.
2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
3. Person B attacks position Y.
4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
In this instance, I asserted that in general modded iPhones worked fine, in the sense that people who applied the modding were by and large happy with the results, i.e. a working phone and associated iPhone goodness.
You asserted in response that the phones were in fact not working fine, because Apple could, and did, release a piece of software that detected the modding and made the phones non-functionnal.
This clearly does not address the fact that modding was by and large safe and that Apple decided to play nasty with the modders, to the apparent expense of some non-modders too. Apple is either incompetent or plain evil in this case, choosing to cause monetary harm to their own customers for greed.
So you changed an informal definition of "working fine" to suit your argument, which I cannot follow.
Here people have modded their iPhones, they were still working 100% fine until Apple released an "update" that bricked them. This is futile, people who do not want to party with AT&T will find a way to use their own phone the way they want.
Apple is too greedy, this lawsuit is for their own good. Plus they are stupid, the business model they currently have will not work in Europe.
Except for little things like emulators & so. It's still possible to run old pre-os/x software, it's just not as convenient as before. Apple decides to obsolete things fast, this is true, but it's not all bad, and it drives changes. Witness Adobe and Microsoft eventually moving off Carbon.
Win2k, which you left out, was easily the best MS product ever. Could (still can) play games as well as XP, more secure, no activation, near zero DRM, fewer bugs, less memory usage, etc.
I don't personnally want anything. I'm more than capable of building my own PC and have done so since 1986 or so.
However, the PC which I have next to me is a HP that was bought by my institution, and sports a Windows Vista Business Edition license sticker, complete with a presumably valid licence key. This PC is currently running Ubuntu 7.04, but came to my office door with the Windows XP disk image that is standard across the whole institution.
Clearly someone paid for both the Vista license, and the XP licence. Clearly a PC doesn't really need two windows licences. HP should be more than capable of negociating any deals with Microsoft such that PCs that will be reformated upon arrival comes with nothing preinstalled on it. These PCs should not be subjected to any Microsoft Tax. Yet this is not what is happening, and the only entity that benefits from the situation is Microsoft.
Personally I think enough Windows licences since 1990 or so have been purchased from Microsoft so I can supposedly do my work, when I only ever require the hardware. This is a situation that makes no sense whatsoever and allows the Microsoft money machine to keep spinning.
Note that I'm not complaining about paying for *a* license, but for two, one of which I will never ever use for sure. This is an issue that affect all the hundreds of PC users in my institution.
Clearly MS is still strongarming HP to buy their software. HP is currently the #1 PC vendor. This is pretty sick, and makes no business sense.
I agree. If someone would make a "vi" mode in Emacs it would not become popular either, for all the right reasons. VI mode for Emacs is alive, kicking and even popular
It's possible, but it's not trivial, to buy a brand-name, vendor-supported PC without a Windows license. This is because Microsoft is allowed to make deals with vendors whereby a version of windows gets shipped with the hardware, and is of course paid for, regardless of whether the PC actually will run windows or not.
It's so not trivial that all the workplaces I've been in the last 10 years or so buy computers with a version of windows on them, which they pay for, even though they all had a site license and re-formatted the disk first thing. Often the license to the version of windows on the sticker on the PC did not match the version of Windows actually running.
What is almost impossible, is to know what proportion of the sale price of any new brand-name PC goes to Microsoft.
The unbundling idea is to make the sort of blind Microsoft deal linked to the raw number of PCs sold impossible. This will force everybody to be more open. It will be good for the consumer because it will allow other OS makers to compete on price and features, and it will prevent Microsoft abusing its monopoly by forcing PC vendors to buy their software.
The problem is that cancer is not *a* disease. All cancers are different, have different causes, and are even sometime heterogeneous within one single patient, meaning some cancer cells will respond well to a kind of treatment, but not others. It only takes one surviving cancer cell to restart the whole thing. The odds of beating this soon are slim.
10,000 cameras by themselves don't do squat. Who is watching the feed, and what do they do if they find something weird happening ? This simply means automated video analysis, video data mining, face and gait analysis etc are not up to scratch yet. They need people to use the data, and this is such a boring job that it can't be done well.
If you are an Australian taxpayer, you may argue that you have already paid for access to the technology. Somehow I don't think Apple, CISCO, IBM, HP et al. have contributed in any way.
CSIRO is constantly being told by government to earn some of it income. As it was when I was working there, CSIRO only got about 70% of its income from government subsidies, the rest was through industrial contracts.
It is perfectly reasonable for CSIRO, in this context, to demand royalties. What's the point of patents otherwise ?
So, one perfectly valid argument against the death penalty is that it is hard, and becoming increasingly harder, to apply. So hard that it's not worth it.
Basically many people think the death penalty is OK, but also don't like to see innocent people die at the hand of the state because of a mistake, or sometime even when the law used to convict is seen as unjust.
Hence the extremely long, costly, difficult appeal process. If a person is executed 20 years after the crime, is it worth it ?
The UN is run by people therefore it's imperfect. In all of your statements you assume that because the UN makes mistakes, it's a worthless body. In fact the UN is as worthwhile or worthless as all the nations that compose it.
It's probably possible to run the UN better, but it's not an easy job. The US and many of its citizens such as yourself in particular likes to show contempt and disrespect to the whole body, indeed because many of its members don't agree with the USA various policies. In fact the USA is to enamored to its own military strength and economic might that it often believes talks, treaties and in general diplomacy is a useless past-times meant for weaker nations.
It will unfortunately take quite a few Vietnam and Iraq fiascos to perhaps change this view.
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Sorry for all this, thanks for the reply, this seems a bit much indeed.
I think you need professional help, to start to see some people again. You may want to consider getting a job when you can handle it, even if you don't really need it financially, so you can recover a sense of purpose and action. You need to change something.
I live around severely depressed people in my daily life and I've experienced depression myself. It is possible to recover from most depressions, just don't try to fight alone. It's a long and difficult fight too.
Actually this is not quite true. You forgot to mention that the way the contest was run to choose a design for the SOH simply did not require engineering studies, so you can't blame architects for not providing them. Further Utzon, the Danish architect who won the contest actually moved to Sydney and supervised the construction initially. He actually is credited, together with the head construction engineer, with the reusable design of the arches that made the construction of the shells possible at low cost.
He later resigned following a change of government and political infighting. *THEN* after he left, did the costs start ballooning. Utzon was still widely blamed for cost overrun.
Eventually the building was finished in 1973 and had cost over A$ 100 million. This was an enormous sum for the time, 15x what was originally planned for the building, but to my knowledge, the building is used daily with separate opera, a concert hall, several theaters and restaurants. It does not leak, in fact it is a magnificent and functional building, recognized the world over as a cultural icon and has done wonders for the image of Australia abroad as a modern society. It has repaid its initial cost many many times over in tourism goodwill alone.
In fact Utzon was offered the keys to the city of Sydney in 2003 along with the Pritzker Prize (architecture's top award) and several other Australians and international awards. I believe we can say the SOH is nothing like a failure.
Utzon never build anything like the SOH in his life again. Far from being a failure, this is one of the finest building in the world today. Far from being treated as a genius, the political turmoil over the building broke him.
Read this and more at Wikipedia.
The quality of individual hardware components in macs varies a great deal, in fact. Sometimes it's top notch like the current Intel processor they use at the moment, but sometimes it falls behind, like right now the external 23" screen they sell for MacPros, which are both behind in terms of quality *and* much more expensive than their PC counterparts. The problem is that you can't pick and choose individual components if they are not to your liking.
Regularly Apple has a well-publicized problem with their hardware.
What is the reason for this level of suffering ? Is there something else you are not telling besides depression ?
Watch http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/view/id/33
That is the very same. Chomsky is primarily known as a linguist, though. Activism is just a hobby :-)
Actually, FACTOR is in QP (there exist a polynomial algorithm for factoring, but on a quantum computer). QP is believed to be simpler than NP, but there is no proof.
No, our understanding of NP-complete problem is that they are indeed all fundamentally the same. Knapsack and TSP are the same problem, as one can convert any knapsack into a TSP in polynomial time, and vice-versa. As a result, being able to solve any knapsack in polynomial time would ensure one would also be able to solve TSP in polynomial time.
Sales did not fall. Microsoft is still selling Vista hands over fists. It is only selling them at a lower rate than previous months, which is is (a) expected and (b) not significant.
WWI started in 1914, mate. It hadn't even begun in 1910...
Description of Straw Man
In this instance, I asserted that in general modded iPhones worked fine, in the sense that people who applied the modding were by and large happy with the results, i.e. a working phone and associated iPhone goodness.
You asserted in response that the phones were in fact not working fine, because Apple could, and did, release a piece of software that detected the modding and made the phones non-functionnal.
This clearly does not address the fact that modding was by and large safe and that Apple decided to play nasty with the modders, to the apparent expense of some non-modders too. Apple is either incompetent or plain evil in this case, choosing to cause monetary harm to their own customers for greed.
So you changed an informal definition of "working fine" to suit your argument, which I cannot follow.
No, I mean carbon, which is unofficially deprecated with 10.5, and which has had plenty of deprecated bits for 10.4, see this .
Come on, this is not the same issue.
Here people have modded their iPhones, they were still working 100% fine until Apple released an "update" that bricked them. This is futile, people who do not want to party with AT&T will find a way to use their own phone the way they want.
Apple is too greedy, this lawsuit is for their own good. Plus they are stupid, the business model they currently have will not work in Europe.
OK, let's level the US then ;-), who is up for it?
Except for little things like emulators & so. It's still possible to run old pre-os/x software, it's just not as convenient as before. Apple decides to obsolete things fast, this is true, but it's not all bad, and it drives changes. Witness Adobe and Microsoft eventually moving off Carbon.
They might switch to OpenSolaris, which is not half bad.
Win2k, which you left out, was easily the best MS product ever. Could (still can) play games as well as XP, more secure, no activation, near zero DRM, fewer bugs, less memory usage, etc.
I don't personnally want anything. I'm more than capable of building my own PC and have done so since 1986 or so.
However, the PC which I have next to me is a HP that was bought by my institution, and sports a Windows Vista Business Edition license sticker, complete with a presumably valid licence key. This PC is currently running Ubuntu 7.04, but came to my office door with the Windows XP disk image that is standard across the whole institution.
Clearly someone paid for both the Vista license, and the XP licence. Clearly a PC doesn't really need two windows licences. HP should be more than capable of negociating any deals with Microsoft such that PCs that will be reformated upon arrival comes with nothing preinstalled on it. These PCs should not be subjected to any Microsoft Tax. Yet this is not what is happening, and the only entity that benefits from the situation is Microsoft.
Personally I think enough Windows licences since 1990 or so have been purchased from Microsoft so I can supposedly do my work, when I only ever require the hardware. This is a situation that makes no sense whatsoever and allows the Microsoft money machine to keep spinning.
Note that I'm not complaining about paying for *a* license, but for two, one of which I will never ever use for sure. This is an issue that affect all the hundreds of PC users in my institution.
Clearly MS is still strongarming HP to buy their software. HP is currently the #1 PC vendor. This is pretty sick, and makes no business sense.
It's possible, but it's not trivial, to buy a brand-name, vendor-supported PC without a Windows license. This is because Microsoft is allowed to make deals with vendors whereby a version of windows gets shipped with the hardware, and is of course paid for, regardless of whether the PC actually will run windows or not.
It's so not trivial that all the workplaces I've been in the last 10 years or so buy computers with a version of windows on them, which they pay for, even though they all had a site license and re-formatted the disk first thing. Often the license to the version of windows on the sticker on the PC did not match the version of Windows actually running.
What is almost impossible, is to know what proportion of the sale price of any new brand-name PC goes to Microsoft.
The unbundling idea is to make the sort of blind Microsoft deal linked to the raw number of PCs sold impossible. This will force everybody to be more open. It will be good for the consumer because it will allow other OS makers to compete on price and features, and it will prevent Microsoft abusing its monopoly by forcing PC vendors to buy their software.
The problem is that cancer is not *a* disease. All cancers are different, have different causes, and are even sometime heterogeneous within one single patient, meaning some cancer cells will respond well to a kind of treatment, but not others. It only takes one surviving cancer cell to restart the whole thing. The odds of beating this soon are slim.
10,000 cameras by themselves don't do squat. Who is watching the feed, and what do they do if they find something weird happening ? This simply means automated video analysis, video data mining, face and gait analysis etc are not up to scratch yet. They need people to use the data, and this is such a boring job that it can't be done well.
If you are an Australian taxpayer, you may argue that you have already paid for access to the technology. Somehow I don't think Apple, CISCO, IBM, HP et al. have contributed in any way.
CSIRO is constantly being told by government to earn some of it income. As it was when I was working there, CSIRO only got about 70% of its income from government subsidies, the rest was through industrial contracts.
It is perfectly reasonable for CSIRO, in this context, to demand royalties. What's the point of patents otherwise ?
So, one perfectly valid argument against the death penalty is that it is hard, and becoming increasingly harder, to apply. So hard that it's not worth it.
Basically many people think the death penalty is OK, but also don't like to see innocent people die at the hand of the state because of a mistake, or sometime even when the law used to convict is seen as unjust.
Hence the extremely long, costly, difficult appeal process. If a person is executed 20 years after the crime, is it worth it ?
The UN is run by people therefore it's imperfect. In all of your statements you assume that because the UN makes mistakes, it's a worthless body. In fact the UN is as worthwhile or worthless as all the nations that compose it.
It's probably possible to run the UN better, but it's not an easy job. The US and many of its citizens such as yourself in particular likes to show contempt and disrespect to the whole body, indeed because many of its members don't agree with the USA various policies. In fact the USA is to enamored to its own military strength and economic might that it often believes talks, treaties and in general diplomacy is a useless past-times meant for weaker nations.
It will unfortunately take quite a few Vietnam and Iraq fiascos to perhaps change this view.