I wouldn't call this forcing it, as this sounds like it's trying to appeal to women's interests. However, while this sounds interesting (I'd really be interested in seeing this implemented and tracked over a long period of time), I think it overlooks whether or not there are a lot of engineering, IT, or computer jobs for this kind of societally meaningful work. I think that having an engineering degree means that a person has the kind of mind to apply themselves well to almost anything, but if we have these droves of women leaving the profession after working for a few years because most of the jobs are for the hum-drum kind of things that they don't appear to be interested in, is anyone really better off?
If it gets some people to tackle these problems that no one else is looking at great, but the real world is a lot of code monkey going to boring meetings and writing goddamn login page.
and most importantly editors/distributors don't have a leg to stand on when requesting 75% of the money on the premise that they sold the engine
The claim that without the game itself there would be nothing to mod seems like a rather large leg. Never mind that Valve is allowing the use of their store and payment system which makes it a lot easier to collect money.
That said, there are far too many problems with the current implementation for Valve to allow for paid mods. They already have enough issues with quality control on Greenlight. Mods are an even bigger problem as there's no guarantee of quality, indication that there won't be conflicts with other paid mods, and the invariable jerks that submit existing free mods that aren't theirs in order to make a quick buck.
If Valve wants to do this they should develop a system that makes it easier to address some of those issues before they try to offer paid mods.
If a person isn't ever supposed to drink diet, how would they become acquainted to the taste?
If they drank the non-diet version regularly enough they could probably tell if they were given a mystery bottle, but with fountain pop, the taste isn't always as consistent. There's also the chance that the person normally is a Coke person but found themselves in a Pepsi restaurant (or vice versa) and doesn't have much of a clue about how the diet version of the product should taste.
For example, you could give me a glass and tell me it's Pepsi, and I probably couldn't tell you if it was actually Pepsi, diet Pepsi, or some cheap imitation cola. Similarly, I wouldn't know the difference between Mountain Dew and Mellow Yellow as I never drink those at all.
Before you go off claiming that someone is an idiot, it might be best to examine the problem from their point of view or to look for holes in your own explanation. I myself am a little skeptical that someone could have an episode over what was probably a small amount of the substance, but people have all manner of different tolerance levels and we could be dealing with an individual who is a few standard deviations towards the fringe.
I think it's just an easy way to add some science to the lives of those who might not otherwise care.
There's a lot of advanced physics for which we currently lack practical applications or even a good way of relating what's being done to the public. If this sparks an interest in a few dozen kids I'd say it's a good thing.
Which is why the stock is valuable. No one is paying the current price because Amazon is making a lot of profit but because in the future they might be the only one left standing to make any profit. They've essentially said that their game is drag a razor across everyone's throat and bet on their skin being the thickest.
It will be interesting to see at what point the government goes after them for predatory market practices if they're only sustainable because of massive revenue/profit from other divisions.
I don't speak for everyone, but if I were a hostage I'd rather be blown up in a drone strike than having my head cut off or being burned alive for some terrorist recruitment video.
Wouldn't starting in the year 2000 still be basing the calendar on Christ as you're picking precise point in time that's in reference to the old calendar? The year 2000 is only the year 2000 because it was 2000 years after the estimated birth of Christ and you'd still be using it as the basis for the new calendar.
You'd have to pick some other human event to set the start date. You could go with the moon landing or the first atomic bomb test or any other number of historic dates that are well established. Or perhaps you could choose based on some celestial event or even something more mundane like the founding of Slashdot.
I was mildly interested in whether or not this had any effect at all or if there was a strong correlation.
I grabbed some data from Wikipedia for homicide rate and required minimum leave and did a quick and dirty correlation after removing any countries that didn't have both data points.
Without controlling for any other factors there's only a very weak correlation (r = -.205) which would suggest that vacation days don't have much to do with the homicide rate of a country. Note that this doesn't reflect that actual vacation days, simply the number mandated by law, which may or may not be closely followed. However a bigger problem is that regardless of country, the type of people who tend to commit the most murders likely aren't working the kind of regular job that has vacations so there's probably too many confounding factors for the Wikipedia data to be useful.
It would be nice to have a better data set as the idea is interesting.
Plea bargaining is merely a symptom of having entirely too many laws such that almost everyone is guilty of something and far, far, too many laws that make illegal that which has no business being illegal. If you made plea deals illegal, the court system would be so backed up that it might take years to go to court over something as minor as a traffic violation.
If you want to get rid of plea bargaining you're better off getting rid of the vast majority of vice crimes. The court load would drop to the point where it's no longer necessary to offer these kind of deals in the interest of keeping things moving.
Let's put you in such a position where you are one of these powerful elite who owns or controls a large amount of robotic power, enough that you can provide comfortably for some arbitrarily large (even all of humanity if you'd like) number of people.
Let's further suppose that only about 3% of these people will ever be capable of providing some service that's materially beneficial to you or that your robots are currently incapable of doing. Further suppose another 3% can produce something that has no material value but is aesthetically pleasing to you.
What would you do if you found yourself in such a position? You have the current wealth to provide comfortably for everyone, cast off those who are not useful to you (peacefully or violently) and provide more resources for the small number of individuals who are useful, or you could even isolate yourself from everyone else if you wanted. You might even start giving individuals who didn't own robots their own robot so that they could become like you.
If you know how you would answer that question, under what circumstances would you expect some other arbitrary individual in the same circumstance to choose differently? If you don't expect yourself to be overly evil or oppressive towards others what makes you expect that almost everyone else in the position would be? What would they gain from it? Certainly nothing of material value so unless they want to be some kind of petty ruler or act like a god, or are outright evil for whatever reason there isn't much rational reason for their behavior.
At best you could say that those in power fear what those who are not would do if they could wield similar power and therefore they seek to deprive others of it, but in a world where keeping serfs doesn't benefit you because they are cheap labor, anyone who reasons such is more likely to just kill off everyone else rather than keeping them around as some kind of underclass. That outcomes reminds me of Asimov's Solaria where a small number of people with massive amounts of robot labor isolate themselves from everyone else.
It just seems as though the only reason to keep a perpetual underclass around is for the sake of some individual's own sick mind. Something similar to North Korea perhaps. Most of the selfish people would go for either the Solaria or the Atlas Shrugged strategies.
Which is why the model only works reasonably well when there is a market with competition. I can't sit around selling $50 glasses of lemonade if someone else has a stand right next to me that will do it for a single dollar.
Let's suppose for sake of argument that after some number of years things have been automated to the extent that all of human necessities can be taken care of by robots and that people no longer hold these jobs. Essentially, robots can grow and distribute food (or we have some other system that's advanced beyond raising crops) build infrastructure, and provide rudimentary healthcare.
Does it really matter if we're serfs if the standard of living is better than what you can expect for a middle class family today?
Throughout human history the desire to control a population was to have cheap labor. If robots can provide all of that, there's no real reason to have a feudal system where you need a population of cheap labor outside of some human desire to rule over other humans. What could keeping these people enthralled do to benefit another person? Any low-level task that they could perform could be better done by a robot. What value does the average serf give their feudal lord in this scenario? Unless everyone is getting a whole lot of education and doing the design and development for better robots, what good is having lordship over some group of people?
If we reach a point in the future where the have not crowd is only lacking in luxury space liners for weekend holidays on Mars it leaves humanity in a far better position than it has ever been. If there are a few yahoos that "own" everything and waste some of it on inane opulence I'll have a hard time caring if it means that there aren't any people who are starving, having to work 80 hours a week in sweetshop conditions just to keep feeding their family, or being subject to some of the other forms of savagery that exist in the world today.
Probably "ook?", but that's just because the chimp cannot not even understand the question that you're asking. It's possible that there aren't any chimps in existence that could understand that question.
The point is that most animals are intelligent on some level. Look at all of the experiments involving rats and measuring their ability to learn and solve problems. Do rats get to receive legal personhood as well? If the answer is no, then what makes chimps worthy of being set apart?
If there are concerns about the way that these animals are being treated, those can be addressed through various laws.
It's a difficult subject, but even though chimps (and other primates) can be taught sign language, they're not on the same level. Most animals already use body language as a form of communication, so sign language isn't some higher sign of intelligence. Are dogs also legal persons because they can be taught to understand human spoken words?
Interestingly enough, despite many primates being taught sign language, none of them have ever used it to ask an existential question. Interestingly enough, the only animal ever recorded as having done this was a parrot that after being taught words for several colors asked what color it was.
This ruling is likely to be overturned on appeal. I'm all for ethical animal treatment, but let's not use faulty reasoning to justify it, especially when that same reasoning could be broadly applied in unintended ways.
If they did that then you'll get the usual crowd of yammerheads complaining about gentrification as the prices increase and start driving the less well off out of the state. Since no one wants to tell them to pound sand you just end up continuing the same unsustainable policies again and again.
The same drug companies that brought us things like Oxycontin, etc. that have turned out to be as bad (if not worse) than what they were supposed to replace?
They don't give a damn if someone dies, it's all about the publicity and the public relations. And the money. Let's not forget about that.
Vista was also a resource hogging monstrosity that had issues running on a lot of older hardware. With more and more computers being ultra-portables or notebooks that don't have exceptionally powerful CPUs in a desire for better battery life, a flat UI that isn't trying to display a ridiculous number of intensive effects is going to provide a better experience.
Now whether this is a well-made flat UI is certainly open to debate, but I won't miss the style-over-substance approach that seemed to plague UI design for so long.
Not necessarily. If a company is willing to pay a higher salary they'll have a better selection of candidates and will over time have better workers than their competition. If that allows them to provide a better service than their competitors it's going to result in more revenue generated.
Look at a store like Wal-Mart and then something like Costco and tell me that one doesn't have employees that are more enjoyable to interact with. Guess which store is more likely to get my business.
The extra publicity will probably generate some business on its own, but it's definitely possible that some long-term gains will come from this as well.
If they have poor discipline, now they are eligible for more credit and can rack up bigger debts faster.
This is definitely true. I had a relative who spent several years working in the oil fields after dropping out of college. He easily was making enough money in one year to completely pay off all his student loans and other debts that he had racked up.
During the recent downturn he was laid off and was more in debt after several years of hauling in six figures than he was when he first started working out there. You tend to see the same thing with lottery winners as well where they can suddenly have millions of dollars, but in a few years will be penniless.
Fortunately he's managed to find work again and I hope that the last few years have been enough of an educational experience that he doesn't piss everything down his leg again.
The underlying problem is that it's possible for a single person to essentially "own" an article and reject any changes they don't like and perpetually block anyone else from contributing. This has led to a large collection of petty fiefdoms across the site and many of the local lords getting cozy with one and other so that if anything does get run a little further up the flagpole it still has a chance of being outright ignored or buried under bureaucracy and rule lawyering.
Wikipedia needs to change how their system works to allow for more collaboration and participation. I'd suggest a system where anyone can propose changes that are collected over a period of time until a group of individuals can work together to create new revisions of an article. Have other teams that are devoted solely to improving the grammar or readability of articles and others that are just looking to fact check the existing information to recommend removal of fallacious information. Perhaps even go so far as to assign people randomly to different teams and articles to mix it up and prevent the same kind of agenda-driven article ownership that we see so often now.
The problem is that there isn't a single American company responsible for all innovation so everyone is trapped in this giant prisoner's dilemma where any company that does outsource gets a temporary competitive advantage and any company that drags its heels for too long on the issue isn't likely to remain in business because the other companies can drop their prices in response to reduced labor costs.
The only solution is to get even better at innovation to the point where it elevates the rest of the world to a similar standard of living as quickly as possible. There are a lot of barriers to that, but I suspect that in the long term most of the cheap labor in China, Africa, etc. is going to be replaced by machines anyhow.
It's probably still going to be a rude awakening for a lot of Americans (and other Westerners in general) when the open taps of cheap credit get cut off and not everyone can have all of the new shiny toys as often, but I think that we'll come out okay in the end.
Honestly any IDE worth a damn should convert a tab into a configured number of spaces. A space is a space regardless of what's being used to display or edit the code. If everyone is using the same IDE, it probably doesn't matter, but if you've had to deal with a mixed environment, it winds up creating all manner of unnecessary headaches. A tab is open to interpretation and if mixed with spaces could end up looking heinous on some other IDE. We have so much storage space now that no one is going to squabble over a few bytes of extra space taken up by a source code file. If you're dealing with some kind of system where it needs the source code and space is limited, it's likely that you'll pre-processes the code to strip out white space anyways.
If you work alone, it's not a problem, but get enough people together and inane differences in coding style can rapidly devolve into petty wars of passive aggression. No need to let differences in choice of IDE/editor add fuel to the fire.
Slashdot Mirror
First they need to develop a bullet that will sprinkle some crack on em.
I wouldn't call this forcing it, as this sounds like it's trying to appeal to women's interests. However, while this sounds interesting (I'd really be interested in seeing this implemented and tracked over a long period of time), I think it overlooks whether or not there are a lot of engineering, IT, or computer jobs for this kind of societally meaningful work. I think that having an engineering degree means that a person has the kind of mind to apply themselves well to almost anything, but if we have these droves of women leaving the profession after working for a few years because most of the jobs are for the hum-drum kind of things that they don't appear to be interested in, is anyone really better off?
If it gets some people to tackle these problems that no one else is looking at great, but the real world is a lot of code monkey going to boring meetings and writing goddamn login page.
and most importantly editors/distributors don't have a leg to stand on when requesting 75% of the money on the premise that they sold the engine
The claim that without the game itself there would be nothing to mod seems like a rather large leg. Never mind that Valve is allowing the use of their store and payment system which makes it a lot easier to collect money.
That said, there are far too many problems with the current implementation for Valve to allow for paid mods. They already have enough issues with quality control on Greenlight. Mods are an even bigger problem as there's no guarantee of quality, indication that there won't be conflicts with other paid mods, and the invariable jerks that submit existing free mods that aren't theirs in order to make a quick buck.
If Valve wants to do this they should develop a system that makes it easier to address some of those issues before they try to offer paid mods.
If a person isn't ever supposed to drink diet, how would they become acquainted to the taste?
If they drank the non-diet version regularly enough they could probably tell if they were given a mystery bottle, but with fountain pop, the taste isn't always as consistent. There's also the chance that the person normally is a Coke person but found themselves in a Pepsi restaurant (or vice versa) and doesn't have much of a clue about how the diet version of the product should taste.
For example, you could give me a glass and tell me it's Pepsi, and I probably couldn't tell you if it was actually Pepsi, diet Pepsi, or some cheap imitation cola. Similarly, I wouldn't know the difference between Mountain Dew and Mellow Yellow as I never drink those at all.
Before you go off claiming that someone is an idiot, it might be best to examine the problem from their point of view or to look for holes in your own explanation. I myself am a little skeptical that someone could have an episode over what was probably a small amount of the substance, but people have all manner of different tolerance levels and we could be dealing with an individual who is a few standard deviations towards the fringe.
I think it's just an easy way to add some science to the lives of those who might not otherwise care.
There's a lot of advanced physics for which we currently lack practical applications or even a good way of relating what's being done to the public. If this sparks an interest in a few dozen kids I'd say it's a good thing.
Which is why the stock is valuable. No one is paying the current price because Amazon is making a lot of profit but because in the future they might be the only one left standing to make any profit. They've essentially said that their game is drag a razor across everyone's throat and bet on their skin being the thickest.
It will be interesting to see at what point the government goes after them for predatory market practices if they're only sustainable because of massive revenue/profit from other divisions.
I don't speak for everyone, but if I were a hostage I'd rather be blown up in a drone strike than having my head cut off or being burned alive for some terrorist recruitment video.
Wouldn't starting in the year 2000 still be basing the calendar on Christ as you're picking precise point in time that's in reference to the old calendar? The year 2000 is only the year 2000 because it was 2000 years after the estimated birth of Christ and you'd still be using it as the basis for the new calendar.
You'd have to pick some other human event to set the start date. You could go with the moon landing or the first atomic bomb test or any other number of historic dates that are well established. Or perhaps you could choose based on some celestial event or even something more mundane like the founding of Slashdot.
It practically pays for itself if it can eliminate many of the hereditary diseases that plague many people today.
I was mildly interested in whether or not this had any effect at all or if there was a strong correlation.
I grabbed some data from Wikipedia for homicide rate and required minimum leave and did a quick and dirty correlation after removing any countries that didn't have both data points.
Without controlling for any other factors there's only a very weak correlation (r = -.205) which would suggest that vacation days don't have much to do with the homicide rate of a country. Note that this doesn't reflect that actual vacation days, simply the number mandated by law, which may or may not be closely followed. However a bigger problem is that regardless of country, the type of people who tend to commit the most murders likely aren't working the kind of regular job that has vacations so there's probably too many confounding factors for the Wikipedia data to be useful.
It would be nice to have a better data set as the idea is interesting.
Plea bargaining is merely a symptom of having entirely too many laws such that almost everyone is guilty of something and far, far, too many laws that make illegal that which has no business being illegal. If you made plea deals illegal, the court system would be so backed up that it might take years to go to court over something as minor as a traffic violation.
If you want to get rid of plea bargaining you're better off getting rid of the vast majority of vice crimes. The court load would drop to the point where it's no longer necessary to offer these kind of deals in the interest of keeping things moving.
While I doubt that's the exact medical terminology used, it's quite correct.
The five year survival rate is only 6% although it apparently can get up to ~20% in limited circumstances.
If this works as well hoped, it would be a rather big deal because right now it's practically a death sentence.
Let's put you in such a position where you are one of these powerful elite who owns or controls a large amount of robotic power, enough that you can provide comfortably for some arbitrarily large (even all of humanity if you'd like) number of people.
Let's further suppose that only about 3% of these people will ever be capable of providing some service that's materially beneficial to you or that your robots are currently incapable of doing. Further suppose another 3% can produce something that has no material value but is aesthetically pleasing to you.
What would you do if you found yourself in such a position? You have the current wealth to provide comfortably for everyone, cast off those who are not useful to you (peacefully or violently) and provide more resources for the small number of individuals who are useful, or you could even isolate yourself from everyone else if you wanted. You might even start giving individuals who didn't own robots their own robot so that they could become like you.
If you know how you would answer that question, under what circumstances would you expect some other arbitrary individual in the same circumstance to choose differently? If you don't expect yourself to be overly evil or oppressive towards others what makes you expect that almost everyone else in the position would be? What would they gain from it? Certainly nothing of material value so unless they want to be some kind of petty ruler or act like a god, or are outright evil for whatever reason there isn't much rational reason for their behavior.
At best you could say that those in power fear what those who are not would do if they could wield similar power and therefore they seek to deprive others of it, but in a world where keeping serfs doesn't benefit you because they are cheap labor, anyone who reasons such is more likely to just kill off everyone else rather than keeping them around as some kind of underclass. That outcomes reminds me of Asimov's Solaria where a small number of people with massive amounts of robot labor isolate themselves from everyone else.
It just seems as though the only reason to keep a perpetual underclass around is for the sake of some individual's own sick mind. Something similar to North Korea perhaps. Most of the selfish people would go for either the Solaria or the Atlas Shrugged strategies.
Which is why the model only works reasonably well when there is a market with competition. I can't sit around selling $50 glasses of lemonade if someone else has a stand right next to me that will do it for a single dollar.
Let's suppose for sake of argument that after some number of years things have been automated to the extent that all of human necessities can be taken care of by robots and that people no longer hold these jobs. Essentially, robots can grow and distribute food (or we have some other system that's advanced beyond raising crops) build infrastructure, and provide rudimentary healthcare.
Does it really matter if we're serfs if the standard of living is better than what you can expect for a middle class family today?
Throughout human history the desire to control a population was to have cheap labor. If robots can provide all of that, there's no real reason to have a feudal system where you need a population of cheap labor outside of some human desire to rule over other humans. What could keeping these people enthralled do to benefit another person? Any low-level task that they could perform could be better done by a robot. What value does the average serf give their feudal lord in this scenario? Unless everyone is getting a whole lot of education and doing the design and development for better robots, what good is having lordship over some group of people?
If we reach a point in the future where the have not crowd is only lacking in luxury space liners for weekend holidays on Mars it leaves humanity in a far better position than it has ever been. If there are a few yahoos that "own" everything and waste some of it on inane opulence I'll have a hard time caring if it means that there aren't any people who are starving, having to work 80 hours a week in sweetshop conditions just to keep feeding their family, or being subject to some of the other forms of savagery that exist in the world today.
Probably "ook?", but that's just because the chimp cannot not even understand the question that you're asking. It's possible that there aren't any chimps in existence that could understand that question.
The point is that most animals are intelligent on some level. Look at all of the experiments involving rats and measuring their ability to learn and solve problems. Do rats get to receive legal personhood as well? If the answer is no, then what makes chimps worthy of being set apart?
If there are concerns about the way that these animals are being treated, those can be addressed through various laws.
It's a difficult subject, but even though chimps (and other primates) can be taught sign language, they're not on the same level. Most animals already use body language as a form of communication, so sign language isn't some higher sign of intelligence. Are dogs also legal persons because they can be taught to understand human spoken words?
Interestingly enough, despite many primates being taught sign language, none of them have ever used it to ask an existential question. Interestingly enough, the only animal ever recorded as having done this was a parrot that after being taught words for several colors asked what color it was.
This ruling is likely to be overturned on appeal. I'm all for ethical animal treatment, but let's not use faulty reasoning to justify it, especially when that same reasoning could be broadly applied in unintended ways.
If they did that then you'll get the usual crowd of yammerheads complaining about gentrification as the prices increase and start driving the less well off out of the state. Since no one wants to tell them to pound sand you just end up continuing the same unsustainable policies again and again.
The same drug companies that brought us things like Oxycontin, etc. that have turned out to be as bad (if not worse) than what they were supposed to replace?
They don't give a damn if someone dies, it's all about the publicity and the public relations. And the money. Let's not forget about that.
Vista was also a resource hogging monstrosity that had issues running on a lot of older hardware. With more and more computers being ultra-portables or notebooks that don't have exceptionally powerful CPUs in a desire for better battery life, a flat UI that isn't trying to display a ridiculous number of intensive effects is going to provide a better experience.
Now whether this is a well-made flat UI is certainly open to debate, but I won't miss the style-over-substance approach that seemed to plague UI design for so long.
Not necessarily. If a company is willing to pay a higher salary they'll have a better selection of candidates and will over time have better workers than their competition. If that allows them to provide a better service than their competitors it's going to result in more revenue generated.
Look at a store like Wal-Mart and then something like Costco and tell me that one doesn't have employees that are more enjoyable to interact with. Guess which store is more likely to get my business.
The extra publicity will probably generate some business on its own, but it's definitely possible that some long-term gains will come from this as well.
If they have poor discipline, now they are eligible for more credit and can rack up bigger debts faster.
This is definitely true. I had a relative who spent several years working in the oil fields after dropping out of college. He easily was making enough money in one year to completely pay off all his student loans and other debts that he had racked up.
During the recent downturn he was laid off and was more in debt after several years of hauling in six figures than he was when he first started working out there. You tend to see the same thing with lottery winners as well where they can suddenly have millions of dollars, but in a few years will be penniless.
Fortunately he's managed to find work again and I hope that the last few years have been enough of an educational experience that he doesn't piss everything down his leg again.
The underlying problem is that it's possible for a single person to essentially "own" an article and reject any changes they don't like and perpetually block anyone else from contributing. This has led to a large collection of petty fiefdoms across the site and many of the local lords getting cozy with one and other so that if anything does get run a little further up the flagpole it still has a chance of being outright ignored or buried under bureaucracy and rule lawyering.
Wikipedia needs to change how their system works to allow for more collaboration and participation. I'd suggest a system where anyone can propose changes that are collected over a period of time until a group of individuals can work together to create new revisions of an article. Have other teams that are devoted solely to improving the grammar or readability of articles and others that are just looking to fact check the existing information to recommend removal of fallacious information. Perhaps even go so far as to assign people randomly to different teams and articles to mix it up and prevent the same kind of agenda-driven article ownership that we see so often now.
The problem is that there isn't a single American company responsible for all innovation so everyone is trapped in this giant prisoner's dilemma where any company that does outsource gets a temporary competitive advantage and any company that drags its heels for too long on the issue isn't likely to remain in business because the other companies can drop their prices in response to reduced labor costs.
The only solution is to get even better at innovation to the point where it elevates the rest of the world to a similar standard of living as quickly as possible. There are a lot of barriers to that, but I suspect that in the long term most of the cheap labor in China, Africa, etc. is going to be replaced by machines anyhow.
It's probably still going to be a rude awakening for a lot of Americans (and other Westerners in general) when the open taps of cheap credit get cut off and not everyone can have all of the new shiny toys as often, but I think that we'll come out okay in the end.
Honestly any IDE worth a damn should convert a tab into a configured number of spaces. A space is a space regardless of what's being used to display or edit the code. If everyone is using the same IDE, it probably doesn't matter, but if you've had to deal with a mixed environment, it winds up creating all manner of unnecessary headaches. A tab is open to interpretation and if mixed with spaces could end up looking heinous on some other IDE. We have so much storage space now that no one is going to squabble over a few bytes of extra space taken up by a source code file. If you're dealing with some kind of system where it needs the source code and space is limited, it's likely that you'll pre-processes the code to strip out white space anyways.
If you work alone, it's not a problem, but get enough people together and inane differences in coding style can rapidly devolve into petty wars of passive aggression. No need to let differences in choice of IDE/editor add fuel to the fire.