Anyone can design a bad system, regardless of the underlying technology. There's no reason electronic systems can't be as or (one would hope) vastly more reliable than their mechanical predecessors. Because Toyota fucked up with this one says no more about electronic controls than the bugginess of Windows says about C/C++/C# or a shoddily constructed house says about the reliability of hammers and nails. It's what you do with the tools that counts.
Odds are the underlying problem here is the same as with a lot of commercial software: some bean counter wants it out the door before its ready in a corporate culture where product quality is secondary to the current quarter's profits. Under those conditions, the system could have been built with [insert your favorite technology here] and still come out poorly.
And that, my friends, is hyperbole. This is tyranny. Choosing an iPod and iTunes over one of the many unencumbered music players on the market and then bitching about the well-known restrictions it imposes is just ordinary, garden-variety cluelessness.
Also, it's not a "huge step backward" even if we agree with everything else you say, because [...]
It's not a huge step backwards for computing because the iPad, like the iPhone, is an expensive and fashionable toy based around general-purpose computing hardware. Its impact on computing in general is likely to be about the same as RPN calculators: a small but devoted market segment will love them, and years later, there will be a couple dozen emulator projects on Freshmeat for it, and life will go on. The sale of appliances just doesn't have much impact on the field of computing as a whole.
That's not intended as a criticism, by the way. Toys are cool. Mine are mostly cameras, and it doesn't bother me any that I can't run arbitrary software on my newest digital camera any more than it bothers me that I can't run any software on my mid-70's manual Pentax Spotmatic. That's not why I have them. For that, I have several general purpose computers.
Would it be nice if the iPad was a general-purpose computer? Sure, I guess. But last time I checked, there was a superabundance of general purpose computers, so who cares?
And there's no chance whatsoever that this will ever happen to Mac OS X, so don't lose sleep over it.
I wouldn't say no chance. If Jobs thought it would increase revenues, it would happen. And if it did, you'd probably be back here telling us how people really like being safely locked in the App Store. And it still wouldn't be cause for alarm, because there are plenty of alternatives.
Every time one of these crazy schemes comes to light, I really wonder what I should do with the rest of my career...I have at least 30 years until I retire!!
So that would make you about 35, right? Well, take a look around you. How many technical coworkers do you see that are ten years older than you? How about twenty? And thirty years?
There's age discrimination in every field, but being a 60-year-old programmer is only marginally more likely than being a 60-year-old stripper. You might get lucky and still have a job in this field in ten years if you're really, really good, but as hardly anyone has only one career these days, it might be a good idea to think seriously about what comes next.
I don't have a degree (in this field, anyway), either, and my income is currently $100k/yr, though I've spent most of the last five years working as an independent contractor, so it can vary quite a bit -- it's usually closer to $60k, so I feel pretty lucky considering the state of the economy right now. All that said, it took me fifteen years to get to this level. My observation of my coworkers is that the degree buys you almost nothing at the outset, but it will let you advance faster. Of course, how much faster will depend on what you actually learned in school, how fast you learn on the job, and particularly on your social skills. I've supervised people far more skilled than I am -- and I'm no slouch -- but who couldn't play the office political game, and I've been supervised by total morons whose lack of constructive skills was more than balanced by their skill at kissing their superiors' asses and taking credit for the work done by the people below them.
The degree helps, but it's not the be-all and end-all that dewy-eyed college kids would like to think it is. The big shock that everyone entering the real world has to adjust to is this: it's not remotely meritocratic. A degree, both as a simple credential and as the knowledge that (sometimes) goes with it, is one tool among many, and it's not necessarily the most important one.
I'll say this, though: I wish I'd gotten the degree. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the work you don't do in school will have to be done on the job, where the stress and stakes are higher, and it will almost certainly take longer to fill in all of the gaps in your knowledge.
Of course, if I had it to do over, I wouldn't be in this field at all. The same things that interested me about computing in the 80's are still around, but I haven't spent the last fifteen years working on AI, VR, or even games: I've spent it building web apps, billing software, and other mind-numbingly boring crap. Once I've got the kid through college, I think I'm going to go do something else. As the main thread notes, there's not even any prestige left to the field. When I was a kid, computers and programmers were exotic, mysterious things. Now, computers are ubiquitous, and programmers are thought of by non-programmers as digital janitors.
That's not the real problem. Nickel pages 1.27 microns thick simply don't have enough stiffness for you to be able to pick up a page without crinkling it, never mind any risk to the skin on your fingers, which is quite resilient by comparison. What Mr. Edison wasn't thinking about -- I assume he was speaking off the cuff to the interviewer, as he certainly had the technical knowledge -- was the tensile strength of nickel. If you think it's hard to handle a sheet of aluminum foil without getting it crinkled, good luck with nickel leaf.
The other problem is that layers of printing ink have thickness. It doesn't matter a whole lot with paper (for most inks, anyway) because paper is so thick relative to the ink, but relative to 1.27 micron metal leaf, it's another matter altogether. Bear in mind that most of the ink sits on or near the surface of the paper -- if it soaked in too much it would cause the outlines of the letters to blur. And with paper, there is actually lots of empty space in the fibers for the pigment particles (mostly carbon) and the binder to settle in. Nickel leaf, on the other hand, is not fibrous, and while I suppose it might eventually be possible to cheaply mass produce sheets of nanoscale nickel fibers, it's not possible now and sure as heck wasn't in Edison's day.
The idea of using nickel isn't an entirely bad one, though printing isn't the way to go. The Long Now Foundation -- the current project of Stewart Brand, the guy who gave us the classic hippie Whole Earth Catalog -- is working on using an excimer laser to etch 350,000 pages onto 2.8-inch nickel discs. This will be actual, unencoded, human-readable text -- if the human in question has a student-grade microscope capable of 650x magnification. The required technology already exists; the main problem, aside from the sheer expense of the equipment, is that it takes a day and a half to etch a single disc this way. I can't help but think that Brand would be better off using a chip fab to crank out more or less the same thing using the same technology we use for making tiny circuits.
If we do find them they're likely to be more intelligent than us, they may turn out to be hostile, and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc. They may be intelligent enough that we don't even appear sentient to them. I'm not sure I want us to find intelligent extraterrestrials.
I think it's rather unlikely that they would be hostile or have any need for anything here that they couldn't get more easily closer to home. It's much more likely that they would be less aggressive than us, as any intelligent species is going to pass through a period when their technology is advanced enough to exterminate themselves (intentionally or unintentionally) before it is advanced enough to colonize other worlds. That should act as at least a partial natural filter on starfaring assholes.
The thing the SETI people seem not to be considering is that no one with our intelligence or better is going to want to contact us. If they bothered to observe us first, they'd see that we are, as a species, extremely aggressive to other species -- we did, after all, quite likely exterminate all the other contemporary members of our genus -- and incredibly self-destructive. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each other, and a rapidly collapsing ecosystem? No thanks. Odds are, if there are any starfaring species in the neighborhood, they have found us already, and they've stationed monitors in the Oort Cloud to make sure we don't try to get out. We don't even like each other as neighbors; why would aliens?
I never thought I'd be one of the people who'd say this, but the vast resources we'd need to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would probably better be devoted to making sure that the Earth remains habitable. Later, when we're not at risk of drowning in our own pollutants, then let's go back to looking for aliens.
Besides, it'll be a lot less embarrassing if, when we find alien intelligence, we don't have to explain to them why we're committing collective suicide.
So the idea is to discourage piracy trying to sell people additional content that, by the very act of pirating music, they have indicated they can happily live without?
Marketing people aren't just idiots, they're idiot-savants. If a planet-killer asteroid was entering the atmosphere at this very moment, they'd be scheduling a meeting for later in the week to discuss how to put a banner ad on it.
Or it illustrates the fact that people who gravitate to the Mac are interested in a tool they can use and, say, Linux users are interested in a toy (and I mean that in a good way- I love me my toys) they can fiddle with. Windows users (those who choose it when they don't have to for some reason), well, who can understand them?;-)
Tastes, needs, and levels of knowledge differ widely, that's all. The cost of switching platforms is also high, both in terms of time and money, compared to the benefits of switching.
Sturdier - since a) apple introduced their unibody aluminium cases and b) lenovo started making IBM's designs into utter crud
That's at least partially true -- Apple's notebooks are quite solidly constructed. However, I never had an IBM-era ThinkPad fail on me, including the one I toted around for ten years for notetaking and word processing long after I'd replaced it with a more recent model for work. As far as I can tell so far, most of the new Lenovo ThinkPads are also pretty good, though there are occasionally exceptions, which is true of all manufacturers.
An excellent track pad, not a track nipple
Every ThinkPad I've had has both, and I prefer the nipple and disable the trackpad. I don't care to waste my time making repeated motions on a trackpad to achieve what I can in a single gesture with the trackpoint.
Really good quality IPS screens
Granted. Screen quality varies pretty widely across ThinkPad models, though I've never had any complaints with mine.
MagSafe power connectors
Whatever. Never had any problems with the connectors on any brand of laptop I've owned.
A really good quality keyboard - with backlighting
Backlighting? That's not a feature, it's a bug. I learned to type thirty years ago. I don't hunt and peck in broad daylight, much less in a darkened corner of the local Starbucks.
If you like Apple's products, good for you. They are not, however, the only manufacturers of decent hardware, and tastes differ. The Apple style that Apple fans like repels me, personally, and no doubt they dislike the appearance of my preferred machines. Big deal. We probably own different cars and different brands of shoes. There are people who affect a stance of superiority over that bullshit, too.
Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Sure, where useful == high profile cult following. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to spend the next eight hours working on my current project, which is developing yet another product for my Fortune 500 employer on top of an entirely open source stack. Call me when the iPhone starts letting me pay my daughter's college tuition, would you?
For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors.
There are editors that don't let you define arbitrary tab widths? No, seriously -- I'm not sure I've ever seen an editor that didn't provide the option, generally along with the option to have the tab key insert spaces instead of tabs, thereby avoiding that issue and the inevitable problems that arise as tabs and spaces are mixed.
And if that doesn't work, there's this really newfangled tool called indent that you can use...
But copyright holders have no control over the dissemination of books in public libraries!
Actually, they do. To get permission to distribute a book in libraries, the library must purchase the book, or at least receive it via a chain of physical ownership that begins with someone purchasing the book. And even then, the library cannot simply sell or otherwise distribute additional copies they make of the book.
What Le Guin is complaining about here is that, unlike the deal she made with her publisher to make and sell copies of her books, the Google deal is being forced upon her by organizations she did not empower to act on her behalf. Google is engaged in a virtual land grab by taking advantage of the long lag time between technological advances and the legislatures being populated by people who actually understand the technology.
Even if you belong to the "data wants to be free camp" -- with which I have some sympathy -- it's not like Google is going to be freely distributing copyrighted works. They're going to charge us for them, provide the authors with terms that they unilaterally dictate, and do so in a market in which they will have a virtual monopoly, enabling them to charge any price the market will bear without significant competition. Both readers and writers get shafted in this arrangement. Only Google comes out ahead. And once Google has turned a substantial chunk of the body of human knowledge into their product inventory, as a publicly-owned company, they're practically obligated by law to devote their enormous resources to lobbying for further copyright extensions in order to protect the interests of their shareholders.
Ursula Le Guin is not one of the bad guys here. She's spoken out against copyright extension before, and done so quite eloquently. All she -- and I would assume the vast majority of authors -- is asking for is for something like the original intent of the Constitution on the subject to be honored: to secure for a limited time the right of creators to their creations. And not to be subject to coercion just because a giant corporation has the resources to walk all over a bunch of private individuals.
This way politicians would have to upset everyone in order to raise taxes and couldn't single out certain groups based on which one is most likely to put up with it (or is unable to vote them out). If they want/need to increase taxes, it must affect ALL of their constituents.
You make it sound like there's a mad rush to tax the heck out of everyone, which doesn't seem to jibe with the incredibly low tax rates in the United States compared to the rest of the developed world. The fact of the matter is that politicians have very little incentive to tax people. Nobody likes taxes, and everyone can vote. That we have taxes at all is only because people dislike taxes less than they dislike regressing to the Middle Ages. Taxes are how we buy modern civilization and all of its conveniences -- paved roads, sewers, public education, and other niceties we can't effectively turn over to private enterprise because it's difficult or impossible to turn a profit with them while delivering even a fraction of the existing level of service.
In any case, the main objection to the flat tax, aside from the fact that all of the serious proposals to date have defined "income" in such a way as to exclude the rich from paying taxes at all -- it's not coincidental that the most vocal advocates of the flat tax are the rich (and front organizations funded by them) -- is that taxing everyone at the same rate and generating enough revenue to actually maintain a civilized state would amount to forcing the poor into serfdom and quite likely sending the middle class after them, as shifting the bulk of the tax burden downstream would likely result in a substantially higher flat tax rate than your existing progressive tax rate.
Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. "Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.
Sure, if you're looking for another job in the game industry. It's not going to count for much in the bulk of the business software world, where the stiffs in HR who are screening the resumes probably haven't even heard of GTA and are mainly looking for an entirely different set of buzzwords and acronyms than a game programmer is likely to have.
They'll address it when people stop standing for it. If their developers quit, and they can't find replacements, then things will change. Unfortunately, my experience in the industry has taught me that most developers are willing to put up with enormous amounts of crap so as "not to rock the boat".
It's not just developers. This is why we have unions and labor regulations. They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time, a figure that the Federal Reserve works very hard to maintain lest it create upward pressure on wages. And most people prefer shitty working conditions to the uncertainty of finding another job, never mind actual unemployment.
If you're going to effectively refute the charge of being brainwashed, perhaps you should cite some of your actual experience with unions.
My experience with unions doesn't jibe with your description of them. I was a union member in a west coast school system that I developed software for, and the dues were trivial and I never once had a union official telling me what to do. About the only thing you got right was that the union did attempt to influence local politics, but guess what? Most companies do that as well, and they sure as hell don't ask their employees what they think about it.
What I got out of the deal was decent pay, decent hours, and full health care coverage and a really nice pension plan.
This is not to say that unions don't have drawbacks as well, but everything involves a tradeoff. For a good picture of what life was like without unions, see the 19th century. Or, apparently, Rockstar.
Isn't "terminal velocity" lower than the speed of sound?
Terminal velocity depends on aerodynamic drag. At altitudes that high, there atmosphere is quite thin, so there's not much drag and a man-sized object can fall well in excess of the speed of sound. In fact, the air is so thin at 100,000 feet that even deploying his parachute wouldn't do much to slow him down. When he reaches the lower, denser parts of the atmosphere, he'll slow down considerably.
If not, terminal velocity in the lithosphere is approximately 0 mph.
This may sound like a good idea, but I suspect the cops will be using this a lot more liberally than intended.
Not only that, given that they are already legally protected from liability in high speed chases -- including cases when bystanders are killed -- I don't expect anyone will have any luck getting their car repairs (or injuries) paid for when the cops overuse it or, just as likely, miss and hit the wrong car. The OnStar kill signal is noxious and prone to abuse, too, but this is just reckless endangerment.
Good luck talking them out of it, though. Cops being cops, resistance will only encourage them.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone can design a bad system, regardless of the underlying technology. There's no reason electronic systems can't be as or (one would hope) vastly more reliable than their mechanical predecessors. Because Toyota fucked up with this one says no more about electronic controls than the bugginess of Windows says about C/C++/C# or a shoddily constructed house says about the reliability of hammers and nails. It's what you do with the tools that counts.
Odds are the underlying problem here is the same as with a lot of commercial software: some bean counter wants it out the door before its ready in a corporate culture where product quality is secondary to the current quarter's profits. Under those conditions, the system could have been built with [insert your favorite technology here] and still come out poorly.
Do not check network signal with remaining eye.
That, my friends, is tyranny.
And that, my friends, is hyperbole. This is tyranny. Choosing an iPod and iTunes over one of the many unencumbered music players on the market and then bitching about the well-known restrictions it imposes is just ordinary, garden-variety cluelessness.
...in the Kurzweil might not be completely full of shit even if he is crazy column.
Also, it's not a "huge step backward" even if we agree with everything else you say, because [...]
It's not a huge step backwards for computing because the iPad, like the iPhone, is an expensive and fashionable toy based around general-purpose computing hardware. Its impact on computing in general is likely to be about the same as RPN calculators: a small but devoted market segment will love them, and years later, there will be a couple dozen emulator projects on Freshmeat for it, and life will go on. The sale of appliances just doesn't have much impact on the field of computing as a whole.
That's not intended as a criticism, by the way. Toys are cool. Mine are mostly cameras, and it doesn't bother me any that I can't run arbitrary software on my newest digital camera any more than it bothers me that I can't run any software on my mid-70's manual Pentax Spotmatic. That's not why I have them. For that, I have several general purpose computers.
Would it be nice if the iPad was a general-purpose computer? Sure, I guess. But last time I checked, there was a superabundance of general purpose computers, so who cares?
And there's no chance whatsoever that this will ever happen to Mac OS X, so don't lose sleep over it.
I wouldn't say no chance. If Jobs thought it would increase revenues, it would happen. And if it did, you'd probably be back here telling us how people really like being safely locked in the App Store. And it still wouldn't be cause for alarm, because there are plenty of alternatives.
Every time one of these crazy schemes comes to light, I really wonder what I should do with the rest of my career...I have at least 30 years until I retire!!
So that would make you about 35, right? Well, take a look around you. How many technical coworkers do you see that are ten years older than you? How about twenty? And thirty years?
There's age discrimination in every field, but being a 60-year-old programmer is only marginally more likely than being a 60-year-old stripper. You might get lucky and still have a job in this field in ten years if you're really, really good, but as hardly anyone has only one career these days, it might be a good idea to think seriously about what comes next.
I don't have a degree (in this field, anyway), either, and my income is currently $100k/yr, though I've spent most of the last five years working as an independent contractor, so it can vary quite a bit -- it's usually closer to $60k, so I feel pretty lucky considering the state of the economy right now. All that said, it took me fifteen years to get to this level. My observation of my coworkers is that the degree buys you almost nothing at the outset, but it will let you advance faster. Of course, how much faster will depend on what you actually learned in school, how fast you learn on the job, and particularly on your social skills. I've supervised people far more skilled than I am -- and I'm no slouch -- but who couldn't play the office political game, and I've been supervised by total morons whose lack of constructive skills was more than balanced by their skill at kissing their superiors' asses and taking credit for the work done by the people below them.
The degree helps, but it's not the be-all and end-all that dewy-eyed college kids would like to think it is. The big shock that everyone entering the real world has to adjust to is this: it's not remotely meritocratic. A degree, both as a simple credential and as the knowledge that (sometimes) goes with it, is one tool among many, and it's not necessarily the most important one.
I'll say this, though: I wish I'd gotten the degree. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the work you don't do in school will have to be done on the job, where the stress and stakes are higher, and it will almost certainly take longer to fill in all of the gaps in your knowledge.
Of course, if I had it to do over, I wouldn't be in this field at all. The same things that interested me about computing in the 80's are still around, but I haven't spent the last fifteen years working on AI, VR, or even games: I've spent it building web apps, billing software, and other mind-numbingly boring crap. Once I've got the kid through college, I think I'm going to go do something else. As the main thread notes, there's not even any prestige left to the field. When I was a kid, computers and programmers were exotic, mysterious things. Now, computers are ubiquitous, and programmers are thought of by non-programmers as digital janitors.
So how much entropy does the fact that this story is a duplicate add to the universe?
That's not the real problem. Nickel pages 1.27 microns thick simply don't have enough stiffness for you to be able to pick up a page without crinkling it, never mind any risk to the skin on your fingers, which is quite resilient by comparison. What Mr. Edison wasn't thinking about -- I assume he was speaking off the cuff to the interviewer, as he certainly had the technical knowledge -- was the tensile strength of nickel. If you think it's hard to handle a sheet of aluminum foil without getting it crinkled, good luck with nickel leaf.
The other problem is that layers of printing ink have thickness. It doesn't matter a whole lot with paper (for most inks, anyway) because paper is so thick relative to the ink, but relative to 1.27 micron metal leaf, it's another matter altogether. Bear in mind that most of the ink sits on or near the surface of the paper -- if it soaked in too much it would cause the outlines of the letters to blur. And with paper, there is actually lots of empty space in the fibers for the pigment particles (mostly carbon) and the binder to settle in. Nickel leaf, on the other hand, is not fibrous, and while I suppose it might eventually be possible to cheaply mass produce sheets of nanoscale nickel fibers, it's not possible now and sure as heck wasn't in Edison's day.
The idea of using nickel isn't an entirely bad one, though printing isn't the way to go. The Long Now Foundation -- the current project of Stewart Brand, the guy who gave us the classic hippie Whole Earth Catalog -- is working on using an excimer laser to etch 350,000 pages onto 2.8-inch nickel discs. This will be actual, unencoded, human-readable text -- if the human in question has a student-grade microscope capable of 650x magnification. The required technology already exists; the main problem, aside from the sheer expense of the equipment, is that it takes a day and a half to etch a single disc this way. I can't help but think that Brand would be better off using a chip fab to crank out more or less the same thing using the same technology we use for making tiny circuits.
If we do find them they're likely to be more intelligent than us, they may turn out to be hostile, and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc. They may be intelligent enough that we don't even appear sentient to them. I'm not sure I want us to find intelligent extraterrestrials.
I think it's rather unlikely that they would be hostile or have any need for anything here that they couldn't get more easily closer to home. It's much more likely that they would be less aggressive than us, as any intelligent species is going to pass through a period when their technology is advanced enough to exterminate themselves (intentionally or unintentionally) before it is advanced enough to colonize other worlds. That should act as at least a partial natural filter on starfaring assholes.
The thing the SETI people seem not to be considering is that no one with our intelligence or better is going to want to contact us. If they bothered to observe us first, they'd see that we are, as a species, extremely aggressive to other species -- we did, after all, quite likely exterminate all the other contemporary members of our genus -- and incredibly self-destructive. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each other, and a rapidly collapsing ecosystem? No thanks. Odds are, if there are any starfaring species in the neighborhood, they have found us already, and they've stationed monitors in the Oort Cloud to make sure we don't try to get out. We don't even like each other as neighbors; why would aliens?
I never thought I'd be one of the people who'd say this, but the vast resources we'd need to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would probably better be devoted to making sure that the Earth remains habitable. Later, when we're not at risk of drowning in our own pollutants, then let's go back to looking for aliens.
Besides, it'll be a lot less embarrassing if, when we find alien intelligence, we don't have to explain to them why we're committing collective suicide.
So the idea is to discourage piracy trying to sell people additional content that, by the very act of pirating music, they have indicated they can happily live without?
Marketing people aren't just idiots, they're idiot-savants. If a planet-killer asteroid was entering the atmosphere at this very moment, they'd be scheduling a meeting for later in the week to discuss how to put a banner ad on it.
Oh, pfft. The thing that killed Duke Nukem Forever was the decision to implement it in Perl 6.
You should seek political asylum in Europe the land of the Real Free. Not bound by legal enslavement or crooked intelligence agencies, yet.
It's definitely a possibility, as day by day, "stand and fight" becomes less and less realistic.
Or it illustrates the fact that people who gravitate to the Mac are interested in a tool they can use and, say, Linux users are interested in a toy (and I mean that in a good way- I love me my toys) they can fiddle with. Windows users (those who choose it when they don't have to for some reason), well, who can understand them? ;-)
Tastes, needs, and levels of knowledge differ widely, that's all. The cost of switching platforms is also high, both in terms of time and money, compared to the benefits of switching.
Sturdier - since a) apple introduced their unibody aluminium cases and b) lenovo started making IBM's designs into utter crud
That's at least partially true -- Apple's notebooks are quite solidly constructed. However, I never had an IBM-era ThinkPad fail on me, including the one I toted around for ten years for notetaking and word processing long after I'd replaced it with a more recent model for work. As far as I can tell so far, most of the new Lenovo ThinkPads are also pretty good, though there are occasionally exceptions, which is true of all manufacturers.
An excellent track pad, not a track nipple
Every ThinkPad I've had has both, and I prefer the nipple and disable the trackpad. I don't care to waste my time making repeated motions on a trackpad to achieve what I can in a single gesture with the trackpoint.
Really good quality IPS screens
Granted. Screen quality varies pretty widely across ThinkPad models, though I've never had any complaints with mine.
MagSafe power connectors
Whatever. Never had any problems with the connectors on any brand of laptop I've owned.
A really good quality keyboard - with backlighting
Backlighting? That's not a feature, it's a bug. I learned to type thirty years ago. I don't hunt and peck in broad daylight, much less in a darkened corner of the local Starbucks.
If you like Apple's products, good for you. They are not, however, the only manufacturers of decent hardware, and tastes differ. The Apple style that Apple fans like repels me, personally, and no doubt they dislike the appearance of my preferred machines. Big deal. We probably own different cars and different brands of shoes. There are people who affect a stance of superiority over that bullshit, too.
Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Sure, where useful == high profile cult following. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to spend the next eight hours working on my current project, which is developing yet another product for my Fortune 500 employer on top of an entirely open source stack. Call me when the iPhone starts letting me pay my daughter's college tuition, would you?
For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors.
There are editors that don't let you define arbitrary tab widths? No, seriously -- I'm not sure I've ever seen an editor that didn't provide the option, generally along with the option to have the tab key insert spaces instead of tabs, thereby avoiding that issue and the inevitable problems that arise as tabs and spaces are mixed.
And if that doesn't work, there's this really newfangled tool called indent that you can use...
But copyright holders have no control over the dissemination of books in public libraries!
Actually, they do. To get permission to distribute a book in libraries, the library must purchase the book, or at least receive it via a chain of physical ownership that begins with someone purchasing the book. And even then, the library cannot simply sell or otherwise distribute additional copies they make of the book.
What Le Guin is complaining about here is that, unlike the deal she made with her publisher to make and sell copies of her books, the Google deal is being forced upon her by organizations she did not empower to act on her behalf. Google is engaged in a virtual land grab by taking advantage of the long lag time between technological advances and the legislatures being populated by people who actually understand the technology.
Even if you belong to the "data wants to be free camp" -- with which I have some sympathy -- it's not like Google is going to be freely distributing copyrighted works. They're going to charge us for them, provide the authors with terms that they unilaterally dictate, and do so in a market in which they will have a virtual monopoly, enabling them to charge any price the market will bear without significant competition. Both readers and writers get shafted in this arrangement. Only Google comes out ahead. And once Google has turned a substantial chunk of the body of human knowledge into their product inventory, as a publicly-owned company, they're practically obligated by law to devote their enormous resources to lobbying for further copyright extensions in order to protect the interests of their shareholders.
Ursula Le Guin is not one of the bad guys here. She's spoken out against copyright extension before, and done so quite eloquently. All she -- and I would assume the vast majority of authors -- is asking for is for something like the original intent of the Constitution on the subject to be honored: to secure for a limited time the right of creators to their creations. And not to be subject to coercion just because a giant corporation has the resources to walk all over a bunch of private individuals.
This way politicians would have to upset everyone in order to raise taxes and couldn't single out certain groups based on which one is most likely to put up with it (or is unable to vote them out). If they want/need to increase taxes, it must affect ALL of their constituents.
You make it sound like there's a mad rush to tax the heck out of everyone, which doesn't seem to jibe with the incredibly low tax rates in the United States compared to the rest of the developed world. The fact of the matter is that politicians have very little incentive to tax people. Nobody likes taxes, and everyone can vote. That we have taxes at all is only because people dislike taxes less than they dislike regressing to the Middle Ages. Taxes are how we buy modern civilization and all of its conveniences -- paved roads, sewers, public education, and other niceties we can't effectively turn over to private enterprise because it's difficult or impossible to turn a profit with them while delivering even a fraction of the existing level of service.
In any case, the main objection to the flat tax, aside from the fact that all of the serious proposals to date have defined "income" in such a way as to exclude the rich from paying taxes at all -- it's not coincidental that the most vocal advocates of the flat tax are the rich (and front organizations funded by them) -- is that taxing everyone at the same rate and generating enough revenue to actually maintain a civilized state would amount to forcing the poor into serfdom and quite likely sending the middle class after them, as shifting the bulk of the tax burden downstream would likely result in a substantially higher flat tax rate than your existing progressive tax rate.
Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. "Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.
Sure, if you're looking for another job in the game industry. It's not going to count for much in the bulk of the business software world, where the stiffs in HR who are screening the resumes probably haven't even heard of GTA and are mainly looking for an entirely different set of buzzwords and acronyms than a game programmer is likely to have.
They'll address it when people stop standing for it. If their developers quit, and they can't find replacements, then things will change. Unfortunately, my experience in the industry has taught me that most developers are willing to put up with enormous amounts of crap so as "not to rock the boat".
It's not just developers. This is why we have unions and labor regulations. They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time, a figure that the Federal Reserve works very hard to maintain lest it create upward pressure on wages. And most people prefer shitty working conditions to the uncertainty of finding another job, never mind actual unemployment.
If you're going to effectively refute the charge of being brainwashed, perhaps you should cite some of your actual experience with unions.
My experience with unions doesn't jibe with your description of them. I was a union member in a west coast school system that I developed software for, and the dues were trivial and I never once had a union official telling me what to do. About the only thing you got right was that the union did attempt to influence local politics, but guess what? Most companies do that as well, and they sure as hell don't ask their employees what they think about it.
What I got out of the deal was decent pay, decent hours, and full health care coverage and a really nice pension plan.
This is not to say that unions don't have drawbacks as well, but everything involves a tradeoff. For a good picture of what life was like without unions, see the 19th century. Or, apparently, Rockstar.
Isn't "terminal velocity" lower than the speed of sound?
Terminal velocity depends on aerodynamic drag. At altitudes that high, there atmosphere is quite thin, so there's not much drag and a man-sized object can fall well in excess of the speed of sound. In fact, the air is so thin at 100,000 feet that even deploying his parachute wouldn't do much to slow him down. When he reaches the lower, denser parts of the atmosphere, he'll slow down considerably.
If not, terminal velocity in the lithosphere is approximately 0 mph.
This may sound like a good idea, but I suspect the cops will be using this a lot more liberally than intended.
Not only that, given that they are already legally protected from liability in high speed chases -- including cases when bystanders are killed -- I don't expect anyone will have any luck getting their car repairs (or injuries) paid for when the cops overuse it or, just as likely, miss and hit the wrong car. The OnStar kill signal is noxious and prone to abuse, too, but this is just reckless endangerment.
Good luck talking them out of it, though. Cops being cops, resistance will only encourage them.