"20 years ago, only two of those five companies even existed."
20 years ago, the computers-and-internet thingie was still inventing itself.
Now, it comes more and more towards maturity. Look at History, this is no news nor it's the first time it happens. Look at what happened then and you'll have quite a certainty about what's going to happen now.
"On the surface your statement sounds really good, I certainly believe that I would get sick of violence very quickly after seeing it first hand. However, why is it that war has continued for so long?"
Because the youngsters that go to war, generation after generation, is the first time that are youngsters.
"Does being omnipotent mean:having the capacity to do anything our minds can conceive?"
Quite to the point: see St Anselm's Ontological Argument and rebuttals.
In this case (a similar) one, no: God's omnipotency doesn't allow for non-logically standing requests (another example: No, God's omnipotency doesn't allow for 2+2 to be 3 -even for large values of 3).
"In logic, the truth value of that statement is 'indeterminate'. It's neither true nor false, as both lead to paradox."
No, they don't. It's the pretty thing about infinite quantities: they lead to "look-like paradoxes", but only if you look at them for just a second, or you have a bland brain.
Let's see: Can God make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot eat it? No, because "hotness" is (within this context) an infinite property of chili. All that He could do is making hotter and hotter chili that He would always be able to consume.
Now that you have some practice, here comes another one, also related to infinite properties: Can God create a natural number so big that He can't add one to it? Oh! now it doesn't look neither indeterminate nor a paradox, does it?
The other one is more about semantics, but still neither indeterminate nor a paradox: Can God make an imaginary beast to exist? No: the very moment He takes it into existence, it is an imaginary beast no more. All He can do is change the beast's status from imaginary to real, which may look like the same at first glance, but it certainly isn't.
"The video would also be very useful to a falsely accused defendant, who would be able to subpoena relevant video without paying a fee."
One thing is asking for footage about an incident one is directly related to. A very different other a company on a for-profit fishing expedition. I don't see why them both should be managed the same.
"Years ago, it could cost you as much as $10 per page for a copy of a police report or any other document from a government office. This was, allegedly, to cover the time spent by the employees making copies. Lawsuits were filed and the courts agreed -- public employees are already getting paid by the taxpayers and there is no justification for charging anything above and beyond the actual copying cost"
Devil is in the details.
When you say "it could cost you...", d'you mean me? Then, yes: I already payed my fair share of police's expenditures. But if when you say "you" you mean "an incorporated news agency", then no: police is there to serve and protect *me* no the interests of a private company. The time the cops are serving the commercial interests of a company is time they are not serving and protecting me, so I find fair to recoup all the costs -plus a profit margin, now that I think of it.
I would want to know the petty details of those previous sentences to see if they really apply here, because I doubt it.
"Can God make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot eat it ?"
That's not even difficult to answer: No.
You might think well, but then He wouldn't be omnipotent, would He? Still, God can't make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot it just as He can't make an imaginary beast to exist. The problem is not God but your lack of knowledge of basic Logic.
"That's not entirely the way I remember it. Microsoft didn't touch ODF, didn't extend or extinguish it. They tried to bypass the need for it."
You don't think Microsoft people are stupid, nor their marketing guys haven't thought on what made Microsoft a successful company and what "embrace, extend, extinguish" really means and how it works, right?
Embrace: Oh! you people really want "open standards"? Like ODF? I'll give you one.
Extend: Here you have an open standard just like you want them: docx. And I'll make sure I get docx to be approved and to be in a position of being chosen by EU governments and whoever says that needs and open standard. Certainly I'll add little things to these kind of standards, like binary blobs or "this is to be implemented just like in Word 6" paragraphs, so it becomes impossible to re-implement.
Extinguish: Oh, by the way, in the process of making docx an open standard, I'll corrupt the standard-approval process so much that no one ever will ask for anything-open again.
"I read the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish article on Wikipedia looking for examples of this actually happening, and it had to go back 15 years to find an example."
An example is an example. On the other hand, you can get the concept while not up to the letter. For a recent "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" strategy from Microsoft (only at a different level), look for what they tried to do to the Open Document format (and that's not 15 years ago).
"let's not forget that they [China] intentionally created a whole bunch of dangerous and unwanted space debris back in 2007 with an anti-satellite missile test. Nothing peaceful about blowing up satellites."
"I believe Microsoft is perfectly entitled to drop support for newer processors in old versions of Windows."
Even more: that's not dropping support. "Dropping" implies something was supported and it is supported no more. If doing something, like being able to boot up on processor X, was never in the feature list, you are not "dropping" anything by still being unable to boot up on processor X.
A different issue, and one that, given Microsoft history, wouldn't surprise me, would be if Microsoft were to go out of their way to add an "update" to test for the new processor and refuse to boot on that.
"they're implying... just a guess here... that something along the lines of a person with a legal copy of say win 7, buys new processor and is forced to upgrade to windows 10 to use it."
And what's the problem?
I hate Microsoft as anyone else around here, and my stanza on how long software should be supported is much stronger than the average here, since I think software should be supported forever (as long as you are in business) and still don't see the problem here: do you want new features (like being able to boot up on a new kind of processors)? then you need a new version.
"The EU Constitution doesn't have any references to christianity"
No, certainly not. It only starts saying "DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe..."
What do you think is such a "religious inheritance" that can draw inspiration to the concept of Europe? Do you remember "The Christianity"? The Holy Roman Empire?
"What if you don't really know the expected behavior?"
Don't refactor.
Unless you mathematically can offer proof that your tweaking of the code is not going to change the output, in and out the expected input data boundaries, don't touch it. Of course, once you reach that point you *do* know the expected behaviour, don't you?
And, if you are really, really *that* desperate for the change to come, make sure you can run in parallel your new version along the old with production data for a long enough time (sometimes that takes a whole year) to check for their outputs to be the same.
"What you suggest is the right way to do it, but it depends on having time allocated to doing it the right way and a manager who gives a crap"
On one hand, you already have been told that's not usually "the right way to do it" since allowing for features to go along and see, once they are tested in real world, which ones will stay and which ones will not is usually the best way to go.
On the other hand, unless your manager is both a micromanager *and* technically competent, don't think about what your manager can do for you but what can you do for your manager.
If you think a bit about it, he's completely at your mercy and the code can not be "done" till you make it "done". No, not when you *say* it's done, but when you *make* it done: don't think about refactoring the code and refactor the way you write it instead, and even if your manager is the kind of "you say it's a mock up, but it looks good enough for production to me", if there's no box, no screen, no output, it won't be done even for him. Instead of coding "the happy path" first and then go after the corner cases (and never have time for the corner cases), go with the inner parts first and make your code so it doesn't do anything useful till you deem it good enough (and don't fool yourself: it's probably "good enough" quite before you usually think).
Uhhh... nope. Darwinian evolution is all about fitting, not evolving. Yes, it looks weird, but that's the case. In fact, because it is about fitting, not evolving, it can explain the same why a species evolves and why another doesn't: because fit.
Darwinian evolution lacks any ethics so, if some culture -be it by overgrowing others, or by killing everybody around, persists and expands, it's the best fitted.
Humankind, on the other hand, does know about ethics and values, so it's perfectly possible to say that a culture with certain ethics and values is better than other, even in the event of being annihilated by the latter.
" If Rome had been destroyed around 1400 there would have been no industrial revolution. All books would have been burned and the Latin alphabet would have gone the way of Sanskrit."
Maybe you are right with regards of the alphabet, and it's difficult to assert if that would have been a good or a bad thing, but about the knowledge? Please remember it was Muslims the ones that took care of the old knowledge and opened the door to Renaissance, not the Europeans.
"The irony is that Europe was already THE most multicultural continent on the planet. Polish, German, French, Italian, Greek..."
Are you kidding? Those are not cultures, those are countries. Europe (the political idea) has been always monocultural: white christians, that's all -it's even in the EU Constitution, you can look for it.
And even Europe, the geographical region, has been two cultures at most along all their recorded history: Greeks and Barbarians, Romans and Barbarians, Gothics and Muslims, Christianity, Catholics and Protestants. All of them white people and, from Lepanto onwards, all of them white christians.
It's the same lack of vision than calling Esperanto a universal language. Well, it is, if Europe is your whole universe.
"the more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more they turn out to have been resourceful and clever."
I get the point that putting back far away colonization from 30K to 45K years ago have an interesting impact on population demography or even sociology but "resourcefulness or cleverness"? The article also goes that line: "The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere."
What else would you expect? We have been basically the same for the last 100K years, so reaching far north or east or west 30K or 45K years ago says nothing about human evolution.
"The more ice melts, the more water rises and the more readily coastal civilisations are inundated."
Well, not exactly, specifically here, since we are talking about Northern Eurasia.
When ice melts water rises, true, but there's also the fact that the melted ice adds weight no more to the land it sat on, so land also rises. It's then a matter of what rises more/faster: sea level or land and in Northern Europe (i.e. Scandinavia) it's land the one winning the race.
"Yea but we're talking about Ransomware aren't we?"
Yes: we are talking here about ransomware AAAAND... the standard corporate director that can get a computer from a microwave: "We need to share knowledge 'how malware works', but sharing 'sample code' is not needed for that.".
Yes sure: I'm a corporate exec, I don't have to know the petty details, do I? Just show me a pretty powerpoint.
"It doesn't matter if a system is useful if it is not successful. Barring coercion from above..."
There: that's exactly the point. There's a lot of things that get done because they need to be done. Taxes is the first thing that comes to my head, whatever is needed to acomplish your job comes second.
Not that I (fully) disagree with your obvious point but that quite a lot of times I've seen users moaning when related to computers' interfaces to a level that would just sound ridiculous on basically any other level of your professional live: I don't see, i.e. bulldozer operators moaning about how difficult is to drive their machines despite of the fact that a) is much more difficult than the vast majority of computer UIs and b) bulldozer operators don't usually are extracted from the top 10 IQ percentile. How in damn hell is it possible that somebody capable of sucessfull brain surgery finds some forms on a computer unbearable? Except because of arrogance, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
"20 years ago, only two of those five companies even existed."
20 years ago, the computers-and-internet thingie was still inventing itself.
Now, it comes more and more towards maturity. Look at History, this is no news nor it's the first time it happens. Look at what happened then and you'll have quite a certainty about what's going to happen now.
"The only possible conclusion is that he is NOT omnipotent."
There's another one: He *is* omnipotent and, as such, quite capable of producing brains of such little power as yours.
"Twist your thinking all you want"
Read a bit. St Anselm's ontological argument already appeared in this thread, but you can take a shortcut by going straight to Russell.
A hint: your problem is not in the answer, it is in the question.
"Has humankind, then surpassed God?"
Better than that: One of them, Nietzsche by name, killed Him.
"On the surface your statement sounds really good, I certainly believe that I would get sick of violence very quickly after seeing it first hand. However, why is it that war has continued for so long?"
Because the youngsters that go to war, generation after generation, is the first time that are youngsters.
"Slick and efficient if you don't happen to be someone who lives in the affected countries"
Yes, it's in the abstract: "It's a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war".
But wasn't war that little thing the president should announce and get approved by the Congress? When did USA declare war to Somalia and Yemen?
And killing people not at war with without due process, wasn't assassination, a crime both under USA and international laws?
"Does being omnipotent mean:having the capacity to do anything our minds can conceive?"
Quite to the point: see St Anselm's Ontological Argument and rebuttals.
In this case (a similar) one, no: God's omnipotency doesn't allow for non-logically standing requests (another example: No, God's omnipotency doesn't allow for 2+2 to be 3 -even for large values of 3).
"In logic, the truth value of that statement is 'indeterminate'. It's neither true nor false, as both lead to paradox."
No, they don't. It's the pretty thing about infinite quantities: they lead to "look-like paradoxes", but only if you look at them for just a second, or you have a bland brain.
Let's see:
Can God make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot eat it? No, because "hotness" is (within this context) an infinite property of chili. All that He could do is making hotter and hotter chili that He would always be able to consume.
Now that you have some practice, here comes another one, also related to infinite properties: Can God create a natural number so big that He can't add one to it? Oh! now it doesn't look neither indeterminate nor a paradox, does it?
The other one is more about semantics, but still neither indeterminate nor a paradox: Can God make an imaginary beast to exist? No: the very moment He takes it into existence, it is an imaginary beast no more. All He can do is change the beast's status from imaginary to real, which may look like the same at first glance, but it certainly isn't.
"The video would also be very useful to a falsely accused defendant, who would be able to subpoena relevant video without paying a fee."
One thing is asking for footage about an incident one is directly related to. A very different other a company on a for-profit fishing expedition. I don't see why them both should be managed the same.
"Years ago, it could cost you as much as $10 per page for a copy of a police report or any other document from a government office. This was, allegedly, to cover the time spent by the employees making copies. Lawsuits were filed and the courts agreed -- public employees are already getting paid by the taxpayers and there is no justification for charging anything above and beyond the actual copying cost"
Devil is in the details.
When you say "it could cost you...", d'you mean me? Then, yes: I already payed my fair share of police's expenditures. But if when you say "you" you mean "an incorporated news agency", then no: police is there to serve and protect *me* no the interests of a private company. The time the cops are serving the commercial interests of a company is time they are not serving and protecting me, so I find fair to recoup all the costs -plus a profit margin, now that I think of it.
I would want to know the petty details of those previous sentences to see if they really apply here, because I doubt it.
"Can God make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot eat it ?"
That's not even difficult to answer: No.
You might think well, but then He wouldn't be omnipotent, would He? Still, God can't make a chili pepper so hot that He cannot it just as He can't make an imaginary beast to exist. The problem is not God but your lack of knowledge of basic Logic.
"That's not entirely the way I remember it. Microsoft didn't touch ODF, didn't extend or extinguish it. They tried to bypass the need for it."
You don't think Microsoft people are stupid, nor their marketing guys haven't thought on what made Microsoft a successful company and what "embrace, extend, extinguish" really means and how it works, right?
Embrace: Oh! you people really want "open standards"? Like ODF? I'll give you one.
Extend: Here you have an open standard just like you want them: docx. And I'll make sure I get docx to be approved and to be in a position of being chosen by EU governments and whoever says that needs and open standard. Certainly I'll add little things to these kind of standards, like binary blobs or "this is to be implemented just like in Word 6" paragraphs, so it becomes impossible to re-implement.
Extinguish: Oh, by the way, in the process of making docx an open standard, I'll corrupt the standard-approval process so much that no one ever will ask for anything-open again.
"I read the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish article on Wikipedia looking for examples of this actually happening, and it had to go back 15 years to find an example."
An example is an example. On the other hand, you can get the concept while not up to the letter. For a recent "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" strategy from Microsoft (only at a different level), look for what they tried to do to the Open Document format (and that's not 15 years ago).
"let's not forget that they [China] intentionally created a whole bunch of dangerous and unwanted space debris back in 2007 with an anti-satellite missile test. Nothing peaceful about blowing up satellites."
As in "no other country*1 would do that"?
*1 Except, of course, USA.
"I believe Microsoft is perfectly entitled to drop support for newer processors in old versions of Windows."
Even more: that's not dropping support. "Dropping" implies something was supported and it is supported no more. If doing something, like being able to boot up on processor X, was never in the feature list, you are not "dropping" anything by still being unable to boot up on processor X.
A different issue, and one that, given Microsoft history, wouldn't surprise me, would be if Microsoft were to go out of their way to add an "update" to test for the new processor and refuse to boot on that.
"they're implying... just a guess here... that something along the lines of a person with a legal copy of say win 7, buys new processor and is forced to upgrade to windows 10 to use it."
And what's the problem?
I hate Microsoft as anyone else around here, and my stanza on how long software should be supported is much stronger than the average here, since I think software should be supported forever (as long as you are in business) and still don't see the problem here: do you want new features (like being able to boot up on a new kind of processors)? then you need a new version.
"The EU Constitution doesn't have any references to christianity"
No, certainly not. It only starts saying "DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe..."
What do you think is such a "religious inheritance" that can draw inspiration to the concept of Europe? Do you remember "The Christianity"? The Holy Roman Empire?
"What if you don't really know the expected behavior?"
Don't refactor.
Unless you mathematically can offer proof that your tweaking of the code is not going to change the output, in and out the expected input data boundaries, don't touch it. Of course, once you reach that point you *do* know the expected behaviour, don't you?
And, if you are really, really *that* desperate for the change to come, make sure you can run in parallel your new version along the old with production data for a long enough time (sometimes that takes a whole year) to check for their outputs to be the same.
"What you suggest is the right way to do it, but it depends on having time allocated to doing it the right way and a manager who gives a crap"
On one hand, you already have been told that's not usually "the right way to do it" since allowing for features to go along and see, once they are tested in real world, which ones will stay and which ones will not is usually the best way to go.
On the other hand, unless your manager is both a micromanager *and* technically competent, don't think about what your manager can do for you but what can you do for your manager.
If you think a bit about it, he's completely at your mercy and the code can not be "done" till you make it "done". No, not when you *say* it's done, but when you *make* it done: don't think about refactoring the code and refactor the way you write it instead, and even if your manager is the kind of "you say it's a mock up, but it looks good enough for production to me", if there's no box, no screen, no output, it won't be done even for him. Instead of coding "the happy path" first and then go after the corner cases (and never have time for the corner cases), go with the inner parts first and make your code so it doesn't do anything useful till you deem it good enough (and don't fool yourself: it's probably "good enough" quite before you usually think).
"Darwinian evolution is all about evolving."
Uhhh... nope. Darwinian evolution is all about fitting, not evolving. Yes, it looks weird, but that's the case. In fact, because it is about fitting, not evolving, it can explain the same why a species evolves and why another doesn't: because fit.
Darwinian evolution lacks any ethics so, if some culture -be it by overgrowing others, or by killing everybody around, persists and expands, it's the best fitted.
Humankind, on the other hand, does know about ethics and values, so it's perfectly possible to say that a culture with certain ethics and values is better than other, even in the event of being annihilated by the latter.
" If Rome had been destroyed around 1400 there would have been no industrial revolution. All books would have been burned and the Latin alphabet would have gone the way of Sanskrit."
Maybe you are right with regards of the alphabet, and it's difficult to assert if that would have been a good or a bad thing, but about the knowledge? Please remember it was Muslims the ones that took care of the old knowledge and opened the door to Renaissance, not the Europeans.
"The irony is that Europe was already THE most multicultural continent on the planet. Polish, German, French, Italian, Greek..."
Are you kidding? Those are not cultures, those are countries. Europe (the political idea) has been always monocultural: white christians, that's all -it's even in the EU Constitution, you can look for it.
And even Europe, the geographical region, has been two cultures at most along all their recorded history: Greeks and Barbarians, Romans and Barbarians, Gothics and Muslims, Christianity, Catholics and Protestants. All of them white people and, from Lepanto onwards, all of them white christians.
It's the same lack of vision than calling Esperanto a universal language. Well, it is, if Europe is your whole universe.
"the more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more they turn out to have been resourceful and clever."
I get the point that putting back far away colonization from 30K to 45K years ago have an interesting impact on population demography or even sociology but "resourcefulness or cleverness"? The article also goes that line: "The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere."
What else would you expect? We have been basically the same for the last 100K years, so reaching far north or east or west 30K or 45K years ago says nothing about human evolution.
"The more ice melts, the more water rises and the more readily coastal civilisations are inundated."
Well, not exactly, specifically here, since we are talking about Northern Eurasia.
When ice melts water rises, true, but there's also the fact that the melted ice adds weight no more to the land it sat on, so land also rises. It's then a matter of what rises more/faster: sea level or land and in Northern Europe (i.e. Scandinavia) it's land the one winning the race.
"Yea but we're talking about Ransomware aren't we?"
Yes: we are talking here about ransomware AAAAND... the standard corporate director that can get a computer from a microwave: "We need to share knowledge 'how malware works', but sharing 'sample code' is not needed for that.".
Yes sure: I'm a corporate exec, I don't have to know the petty details, do I? Just show me a pretty powerpoint.
"It doesn't matter if a system is useful if it is not successful. Barring coercion from above..."
There: that's exactly the point. There's a lot of things that get done because they need to be done. Taxes is the first thing that comes to my head, whatever is needed to acomplish your job comes second.
Not that I (fully) disagree with your obvious point but that quite a lot of times I've seen users moaning when related to computers' interfaces to a level that would just sound ridiculous on basically any other level of your professional live: I don't see, i.e. bulldozer operators moaning about how difficult is to drive their machines despite of the fact that a) is much more difficult than the vast majority of computer UIs and b) bulldozer operators don't usually are extracted from the top 10 IQ percentile. How in damn hell is it possible that somebody capable of sucessfull brain surgery finds some forms on a computer unbearable? Except because of arrogance, that is.