Except of course rent and real estate prices have been going up pretty steadily as a proportion of income. A hundred years ago most of a single man or woman's income went on food. Rent was provided by the employer, subsidised, or cheap. Today we spend much less on food. If we're thrifty we can live for practically free and still eat a balanced diet. Progress, eh? Instead, most of our money goes on rent. In fact, most of our money still goes down the drain. If you take into account things like more people paying student loans and doctor's fees, we end up being able to buy even less with our disposable income today than a hundred years ago. (I'm not originally from this country, so my look back a hundred years isn't to the same situation as yours would be, but the basics remain true).
They have those in most hospitals I've worked at in the US, just next to all the other machines -- change, drinks, candy, coffee, etc -- and I'm pretty sure I've seen them at other places too. Trouble is it's still expensive to have to replace the food each morning, throw out the waste, not know how many you need to deliver to it in the first place, and then refrigerate it all day. And as far as I'm concerned it's cold.
No, the CLI appeals primarily to people who like to focus on memorising semantic minutiae and believe that doing so is, in and of itself, a productive endeavour.
BS. Have you ever compared people who use vim or emacs with people who use TextMate or notepad++ or Eclipse? People don't learn the former two for the hell of it, they learn them because it makes them faster and less stressed.
You find people who learn to manually configure their Gentoo driver settings and build flags and whatnot. But personally I've seen more people who trick out their Windows desktop to look like a Mac, replete with window decorations and docks, or for that matter, a hell of a lot of people who decorate their monitors with little dolls and paper their offices with printouts of cartoons or trite sayings. People waste their time and it has nothing to do with CLI vs GUI.
Fundamentally, given a GUI and CLI that are equally good at a specific task, the CLI is likely to be more automatable and is less likely to get in the way of an expert user: partly due to the inherently different design and partly due to the different philosophy of the people who write each kind of tool.
I couldn't parse that correctly for a minute, as I kept thinking: why is he trying to say we need to set the "poly" option and to what metaphorical command? Yes, Unix gets into your head...
The fact is, whenever any group of people at each other's throats kiss and make up, they get the pace prize. Whenever someone makes a credible threat to the world and then recants it, he gets a prize. I mean just take a look at the list and see what slimeballs get it. It's a political prize, it's meaningless, get over it. (And before you cite the Dalai Lama, look at the actual system he stands for.) There have been a few deserving recipients over the years, especially further back, but they would probably feel ashamed to be in such company.
I think of current computers as things that employers pay for.
Agreed. I have been working in tech for nearly ten years and have never bought a laptop. I have got several depreciated-to-zero freebies and my employers have paid for laptops. I just switched to broadband a year ago as my employer pays for it, but before that I used to get by on 56k. (A screen session isn't slow over a 56k link, especially with ssh compression.) My phone's a free phone that just does calls and pictures. I've played around with the iphones and ipads that are de rigeur here in the Valley and I don't miss a thing.
I understand that's what you meant to say, and I didn't counsel a decision either way -- I just wanted to point out that when playing that kind of future game, you're calculating probabilities with people's lives, so that needs to weigh on your calculations. For instance, I think it's better to go with the devil you know (in this case, intervention). But it's really hard to predict, so that's just my opinion. Remember how wrong many of us were about the "surge" in Iraq, for instance?
I haven't looked at each battle, but I consider the siege of Yorktown with the naval action in the Chesapeake to be the key engagement. It's been a while since I looked at an actual source about this, but according to Wikipedia if you add up the American militia and regulars you get about 2,500 less than the French troops on the ground, and I'm pretty sure that 26 French ships of the line had more sailors than that. Of course, we're arguing trivialities here -- the actual forces were roughly the same size, within an error margin anyway. Undeniably the majority of the ships, guns and cash were French, and in a modern parallel, that's what the West would mostly be providing in Libya if we intervened....
The people of Libya haven't asked for outside aid.
Oh, right, good point! Wait, except they have. Their UN delegation (and if their representatives at the United Nations don't represent them to the international community, then remind me again whom we should listen to) has asked the West to intervene, repeatedly.
A truly insightful analogy, except for the actual facts... the US received help in 1776, quite a lot of it. More French troops and more French ships were fighting that war by the end of it than American troops and American ships. The conclusion from your analogy would be: let's go right in.
No. I'd give a reasoned argument but examples and quotes are more memorable, so here's a quote from Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons":
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Stick by the law, protest within the law, try to change the law.
I've RTFA, though not the research paper. I don't understand what prevents someone from compiling some C with a malicious nacl compiler (one that makes no bones about, say, jumping to evil memory locations) and serving it up?
Regardless, what worries me about the transition from a VM to native code is that every implementor has to get it really right. Securing interpreted code is really easy: you can just restrict the API. Securing a VM is harder (witness Flash) but still doable (witness Java). But securing native code means you have to have a really good team and be really careful, and almost certainly at some point some bug will slip through (witness the remote root in OpenBSD of all things). I like the stupid solution because it's reliable and secure and they can do wonders with optimising it these days anyway...
I'll admit I don't know the first thing about OS X, as I installed Linux on my company's macbook shortly after they issued it to me. But my coworker regularly projects slides from his macbook, and I've seen him give full-screen presentations both with powerpoint and adobe reader. So what was the missing functionality that's now there?
Ironically, Orwell, whom you quote, also warned against writers who didn't pay attention to their metaphors, and gave the example of the bad usage "tow the line" instead of "toe the line", which actually makes sense...
But I don't suppose, for that matter, that he would have liked your wild hyperbole in the first place.
Also it had actual valuable content. I backed up quite a few geocities pages (typically transcripts of old Britcoms, fansites with essays, fanfic sites, and lyric sites) just because I was a packrat. Now I'm glad I did.
But Facebook? Seriously, there is no actual useful non-personal content there.
Right, so if your first child is a girl or mentally deficient, or you're very, very rich, or you're not a member of the dominant race, then you can have a second child... Right, so none of the conditions are exactly calculated to increase the productive workforce then, are they now?
Can I just say, as a poor sod, that the Democrats (before Obama got in) actually reined in the more egregious practices of credit card companies and banks, like overlimit and overdraft fees. As someone struggling to get by, living paycheck to paycheck, I'm damned grateful to them for that.
On a grand scale, I actually think some surveillance is necessary and an ideal world where all of the laws written in America actually apply and are enforced in America would be totally unworkable. America is a bit weird like that: the rule of law is still stronger, especially in small things, than in many countries, but there is a tendency to write sweeping idealistic laws (like most of its constitution) that just won't work and are quietly ignored or bent. It's a shame, but I've just learnt to live with it (I'm a foreigner, just living here for some years) and just tune out most of the grandiose ideas from the top. They matter, but ultimately I think nobody at the top echelons has their head screwed on right, nor has for a long time, so I am just thankful for little mercies and hope for the best.
They're still short-changing themselves. Every last topic you are forced to think about, every last topic you are forced to write coherently about, imparts something of value to you that you will probably never force yourself to attain later, when you're out of college and stuck on your career path. Why, they even squirmed out from under the discipline, and you can bet that precious few of them will attain anything like self-discipline later, so they're stuck without any internal or external discipline.
Yeah, except footballers get private money, scientists have to rely on taxpayer's money. Of course you're cheap if it's you paying up, rather than people paying on your behalf (the money still comes from your pocket, but you gave it of your own accord).
Speaking as someone who came here to study, and am going back -- sorry, but we pay for our education. Paying three and a half times the in-state rate, I even subsidised a few in-state students. The rules are that no federal or state money can go to foreign students, so if you want to get into a federally funded programme, tough titty. You can get private money, but all but a handful of scholarships and loans are limited to citizens and green card holders. At most you can work for the university you attend, but you pay taxes just the same as anyone else, so it's hard to call that support in any way either.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think US immigration policy is sane. But don't think it's naive and is giving money away. It's hard-nosed.
Yeah, well, didn't turn out to be true, did it? For the few hundred years after he said that, the only country that might fit Jefferson's hopeful criteria was Liberia -- and that was founded by people who had to leave America to be free. Meanwhile Americans wiped out the Indians and got started on the rest of the non-white planet, like the Philippines, except fortunately there wasn't too much left by the time they caught up with the Europeans on empire-building. For the century and a half after Jefferson's statement, the world aped the culture of the British (and the Germans and the French -- but of the 3, only the British were really a free people). Then in the twentieth century, as America grew rich and Europe lost its wealth -- surprise -- the world started aping American culture instead. And in all the intervening centuries, the only real freedom that's been spread in the world has been by 1. Empire and decolonisation (the British and French colonial empires), 2. bloody, murderous, foreign war (Western Europe), and 3. economic liberalisation (Eastern Europe and some of Latin America). Latin America is kind of a special case: a combination of revolution, foreign intervention, and unstable democracies dependent on prosperity. (You might say the same about most of Africa.)
No, you'd be shocked at just how much foreign entertainment people can pick up and have their society's worldview untouched. I've seen it first-hand. The only way to get freedom and democracy to stick somewhere seems to me to have it established in a prosperous society for several generations, and keep some level of prosperity. Establishing it can be very hard: apart from war and empire, only gradual economic boosting and intervention seems to work, but it's so easy to get wrong. The EU might prove a good model of doing it right.
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Except of course rent and real estate prices have been going up pretty steadily as a proportion of income. A hundred years ago most of a single man or woman's income went on food. Rent was provided by the employer, subsidised, or cheap. Today we spend much less on food. If we're thrifty we can live for practically free and still eat a balanced diet. Progress, eh? Instead, most of our money goes on rent. In fact, most of our money still goes down the drain. If you take into account things like more people paying student loans and doctor's fees, we end up being able to buy even less with our disposable income today than a hundred years ago. (I'm not originally from this country, so my look back a hundred years isn't to the same situation as yours would be, but the basics remain true).
They have those in most hospitals I've worked at in the US, just next to all the other machines -- change, drinks, candy, coffee, etc -- and I'm pretty sure I've seen them at other places too. Trouble is it's still expensive to have to replace the food each morning, throw out the waste, not know how many you need to deliver to it in the first place, and then refrigerate it all day. And as far as I'm concerned it's cold.
No, the CLI appeals primarily to people who like to focus on memorising semantic minutiae and believe that doing so is, in and of itself, a productive endeavour.
BS. Have you ever compared people who use vim or emacs with people who use TextMate or notepad++ or Eclipse? People don't learn the former two for the hell of it, they learn them because it makes them faster and less stressed.
You find people who learn to manually configure their Gentoo driver settings and build flags and whatnot. But personally I've seen more people who trick out their Windows desktop to look like a Mac, replete with window decorations and docks, or for that matter, a hell of a lot of people who decorate their monitors with little dolls and paper their offices with printouts of cartoons or trite sayings. People waste their time and it has nothing to do with CLI vs GUI.
Fundamentally, given a GUI and CLI that are equally good at a specific task, the CLI is likely to be more automatable and is less likely to get in the way of an expert user: partly due to the inherently different design and partly due to the different philosophy of the people who write each kind of tool.
I couldn't parse that correctly for a minute, as I kept thinking: why is he trying to say we need to set the "poly" option and to what metaphorical command? Yes, Unix gets into your head...
The fact is, whenever any group of people at each other's throats kiss and make up, they get the pace prize. Whenever someone makes a credible threat to the world and then recants it, he gets a prize. I mean just take a look at the list and see what slimeballs get it. It's a political prize, it's meaningless, get over it. (And before you cite the Dalai Lama, look at the actual system he stands for.) There have been a few deserving recipients over the years, especially further back, but they would probably feel ashamed to be in such company.
I think of current computers as things that employers pay for.
Agreed. I have been working in tech for nearly ten years and have never bought a laptop. I have got several depreciated-to-zero freebies and my employers have paid for laptops. I just switched to broadband a year ago as my employer pays for it, but before that I used to get by on 56k. (A screen session isn't slow over a 56k link, especially with ssh compression.) My phone's a free phone that just does calls and pictures. I've played around with the iphones and ipads that are de rigeur here in the Valley and I don't miss a thing.
I understand that's what you meant to say, and I didn't counsel a decision either way -- I just wanted to point out that when playing that kind of future game, you're calculating probabilities with people's lives, so that needs to weigh on your calculations. For instance, I think it's better to go with the devil you know (in this case, intervention). But it's really hard to predict, so that's just my opinion. Remember how wrong many of us were about the "surge" in Iraq, for instance?
I haven't looked at each battle, but I consider the siege of Yorktown with the naval action in the Chesapeake to be the key engagement. It's been a while since I looked at an actual source about this, but according to Wikipedia if you add up the American militia and regulars you get about 2,500 less than the French troops on the ground, and I'm pretty sure that 26 French ships of the line had more sailors than that. Of course, we're arguing trivialities here -- the actual forces were roughly the same size, within an error margin anyway. Undeniably the majority of the ships, guns and cash were French, and in a modern parallel, that's what the West would mostly be providing in Libya if we intervened....
The people of Libya haven't asked for outside aid.
Oh, right, good point! Wait, except they have. Their UN delegation (and if their representatives at the United Nations don't represent them to the international community, then remind me again whom we should listen to) has asked the West to intervene, repeatedly.
A truly insightful analogy, except for the actual facts... the US received help in 1776, quite a lot of it. More French troops and more French ships were fighting that war by the end of it than American troops and American ships. The conclusion from your analogy would be: let's go right in.
It may end the killing a little sooner, but then what?
Please don't forget these aren't numbers, they're people. It's really easy to forget, but please, please, don't.
(Actual human lives sometimes conflict with ideals and ideas down there in the thick of it.)
No. I'd give a reasoned argument but examples and quotes are more memorable, so here's a quote from Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons":
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Stick by the law, protest within the law, try to change the law.
I've RTFA, though not the research paper. I don't understand what prevents someone from compiling some C with a malicious nacl compiler (one that makes no bones about, say, jumping to evil memory locations) and serving it up?
Regardless, what worries me about the transition from a VM to native code is that every implementor has to get it really right. Securing interpreted code is really easy: you can just restrict the API. Securing a VM is harder (witness Flash) but still doable (witness Java). But securing native code means you have to have a really good team and be really careful, and almost certainly at some point some bug will slip through (witness the remote root in OpenBSD of all things). I like the stupid solution because it's reliable and secure and they can do wonders with optimising it these days anyway...
I'll admit I don't know the first thing about OS X, as I installed Linux on my company's macbook shortly after they issued it to me. But my coworker regularly projects slides from his macbook, and I've seen him give full-screen presentations both with powerpoint and adobe reader. So what was the missing functionality that's now there?
Ironically, Orwell, whom you quote, also warned against writers who didn't pay attention to their metaphors, and gave the example of the bad usage "tow the line" instead of "toe the line", which actually makes sense...
But I don't suppose, for that matter, that he would have liked your wild hyperbole in the first place.
Also it had actual valuable content. I backed up quite a few geocities pages (typically transcripts of old Britcoms, fansites with essays, fanfic sites, and lyric sites) just because I was a packrat. Now I'm glad I did.
But Facebook? Seriously, there is no actual useful non-personal content there.
Right, so if your first child is a girl or mentally deficient, or you're very, very rich, or you're not a member of the dominant race, then you can have a second child... Right, so none of the conditions are exactly calculated to increase the productive workforce then, are they now?
Can I just say, as a poor sod, that the Democrats (before Obama got in) actually reined in the more egregious practices of credit card companies and banks, like overlimit and overdraft fees. As someone struggling to get by, living paycheck to paycheck, I'm damned grateful to them for that.
On a grand scale, I actually think some surveillance is necessary and an ideal world where all of the laws written in America actually apply and are enforced in America would be totally unworkable. America is a bit weird like that: the rule of law is still stronger, especially in small things, than in many countries, but there is a tendency to write sweeping idealistic laws (like most of its constitution) that just won't work and are quietly ignored or bent. It's a shame, but I've just learnt to live with it (I'm a foreigner, just living here for some years) and just tune out most of the grandiose ideas from the top. They matter, but ultimately I think nobody at the top echelons has their head screwed on right, nor has for a long time, so I am just thankful for little mercies and hope for the best.
Emergency services be damned, ham radio would be the first spectrum they'd jam.
They're still short-changing themselves. Every last topic you are forced to think about, every last topic you are forced to write coherently about, imparts something of value to you that you will probably never force yourself to attain later, when you're out of college and stuck on your career path. Why, they even squirmed out from under the discipline, and you can bet that precious few of them will attain anything like self-discipline later, so they're stuck without any internal or external discipline.
Or hell, just look at your your local Asda / Walmart.
Yeah, except footballers get private money, scientists have to rely on taxpayer's money. Of course you're cheap if it's you paying up, rather than people paying on your behalf (the money still comes from your pocket, but you gave it of your own accord).
Speaking as someone who came here to study, and am going back -- sorry, but we pay for our education. Paying three and a half times the in-state rate, I even subsidised a few in-state students. The rules are that no federal or state money can go to foreign students, so if you want to get into a federally funded programme, tough titty. You can get private money, but all but a handful of scholarships and loans are limited to citizens and green card holders. At most you can work for the university you attend, but you pay taxes just the same as anyone else, so it's hard to call that support in any way either.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think US immigration policy is sane. But don't think it's naive and is giving money away. It's hard-nosed.
Yeah, well, didn't turn out to be true, did it? For the few hundred years after he said that, the only country that might fit Jefferson's hopeful criteria was Liberia -- and that was founded by people who had to leave America to be free. Meanwhile Americans wiped out the Indians and got started on the rest of the non-white planet, like the Philippines, except fortunately there wasn't too much left by the time they caught up with the Europeans on empire-building. For the century and a half after Jefferson's statement, the world aped the culture of the British (and the Germans and the French -- but of the 3, only the British were really a free people). Then in the twentieth century, as America grew rich and Europe lost its wealth -- surprise -- the world started aping American culture instead. And in all the intervening centuries, the only real freedom that's been spread in the world has been by 1. Empire and decolonisation (the British and French colonial empires), 2. bloody, murderous, foreign war (Western Europe), and 3. economic liberalisation (Eastern Europe and some of Latin America). Latin America is kind of a special case: a combination of revolution, foreign intervention, and unstable democracies dependent on prosperity. (You might say the same about most of Africa.)
No, you'd be shocked at just how much foreign entertainment people can pick up and have their society's worldview untouched. I've seen it first-hand. The only way to get freedom and democracy to stick somewhere seems to me to have it established in a prosperous society for several generations, and keep some level of prosperity. Establishing it can be very hard: apart from war and empire, only gradual economic boosting and intervention seems to work, but it's so easy to get wrong. The EU might prove a good model of doing it right.
Somehow that post is terribly, tragically ironic in light of your sig.