That's not what "fruit of the poisonous tree" means.
Yours is the ethical argument against using Mengele's research, and it's even weaker here than it was there. In fact, it makes no sense at all here. The companies doing the research get no money from their cruelty-free competitors. The consumers of cruelty-free cosmetics are not incentivizing the animal-testing cosmetic companies to do additional research in any way. If anything, the price competition from cruelty-free cosmetics companies will make the companies that do experiments on animals have less R&D money to do additional experiments.
The argument works to the extent it does with Mengele because a Mengele researcher might be doing work for the good of humanity, in his own twisted way, rather than financial reward, and will do unethical experiments just for the sake of advancing the state of science. Unless you think there are altruistic scientists working on lipstick, your argument makes no sense at all.
So testing a hydrogen bomb is engineering, but testing cosmetics is science? First, you're wrong; second, you're splitting hairs trying to evade acknowledging the fact that what you said was absurd.
But whatever. Here's another example. Why don't we send probes to Venus? That would be science. We're not doing that science. We totally could. The USSR did. We don't, because it's not worth the cost, because Venus is a shit environment for our probes, so it would cost more to send them there. And don't say we're doing "better science instead", because we have enough money to send probes to Venus in addition to all the other science we're doing. We choose to make Hollywood movies, or build cars, or do other non-science stuff instead. Because doing the science isn't always the right answer.
This is the last time I will engage you on this point. Grow up, acknowledge what you said was stupid, or don't.
And finally, that doesn't we don't do the science in the way that causes the least damage.
I suggest we handcuff all airline passengers before they get on the plane. To, you know, fight terrorism and stuff. They'll be unhandcuffed when they get off the plane and it's totally their choice to put the handcuffs on or to not fly. No restriction on liberty.
They should also be stripped nude and hosed down before they're allowed on the plane. Cause they might have lice or something. They can totally refuse to go through this and just not fly if they don't like it. No restriction on liberty.
Oh, and I think everyone should have to have a microchip implanted in their hands that tracks where they go at all times and can be used by the government to deliver disabling electric shocks to anyone resisting arrest. It would totally improve public safety. But it won't restrict liberty cause you only have to have it implanted if you drive a car, ride a bike, take the bus or a taxi, have a bank account, receive Social Security or Medicare, or apply for a government ID of any kind.
Strongly disagree here. You're correct that rights only make sense in the context of society (there's no need for free speech if there's no one to talk to), but group interactions don't completely dominate the world. Or do you never listen to music by yourself, never read a book, never whittle (carve wood), program, sew, keep a diary, or engage in another solitary hobby, and never just sit by yourself and think about life and the universe? If that is all true for you, then you are an unusual individual. Most people's lives are not completely dominated by their interactions with others: they have internal worlds. It has nothing to do with "special snowflake syndrome" (did you just make that up?).
Cosmetics aren't going anywhere so they have to be tested.
Nonsense. The FDA could outlaw any new, untested cosmetics, not have a procedure for testing/approving them, and no one would even blink except some wacko libertarian whiners. We've got plenty of cosmetics and we really don't as a society need anymore. Will companies keep making new ones if we let them? Yeah, of course, why not? It's a market based on monopolistic competition, meaning, essentially, that companies compete on variety and are eternally try to find and develop niches.
Will there be an underground cosmetics market like the illegal drug market if we outlaw potentially unsafe new chemicals in cosmetics and don't allow them to be tested? No, silly, of course not. Unlike, say, the underground heroin market, black market cosmetics would have to compete with a fully-developed legal market which can operate without the substantial costs of smuggling product into the country from inside desperate and impoverished people's asses. The legal market also has the substantial advertising advantage of, "Guaranteed by the FDA not to melt your face off!". Only a supreme idiot would buy black-market cosmetics, assuming the legal market retained at least its current diversity of products. There are probably a few such supreme idiots, but not enough.*
Don't believe me? Look at how regulated alcohol is, or tobacco is, and consider that the legal markets still rule. A significant argument for legal marijuana is, after all, to be able to regulate the product while shutting down the black market. If all regulation automatically resulting in the formation of a black market, this would be a silly argument. Given the recent experiences in Colorado and other states, it is not a silly argument at all.
*I expect a few supreme idiots, in such a world, would talk to each other on the Internet, concoct dangerous schemes involving amateur chemistry to produce cosmetics for their personal use, and proceed to melt their faces off. I expect this happens now, occasionally, anyway.
Doing the science is the right answer every time, it's who you are going to test on, us or them. Would you prefer cosmetics and their potential side-effects be tested on humans?
Sorry for replying twice, there was more stupid in your post that I didn't see until after replying to the first instance. "Doing the science is the right answer every time" is an absurd statement. The risks of experimentation must be balanced with the expected rewards. Or do you think we should resume testing hydrogen bombs by exploding them in random areas where we hope there aren't any people?
The Soviets exploded a giant bomb that created an earthquake in neighboring countries significant enough to cause effects such as shattering windows. I'm sure some people cut themselves on the glass. Was that really worth it to have another confirmation that splitting atoms makes things boom? No, and it was done more for political intimidation tactic than for science.
But I'm sure they had some scientists observe the boom from a safe distance. And I'm sure they, you know, got something out of it. Probably not much, but at least, "this bomb design is not so flawed that it won't at least sometimes go boom when activated". It was science. And it was science that should not have been done, because the earthquake alone was more disruptive than the marginal scientific gain.
And yet they'll still enjoy the benefits. Their cruelty-free products are build on generations of animal testing.
Why do you think this is at all hypocritical? If there was useful stuff to be had from Dr. Mengele's research*, would you argue that we should not use it and let people suffer and die while we rediscovered it?**
In either case, the harm is done. If I were killed in a cruel scientific experiment by an amoral monster, I'd at least want the decent people in the human race to get everything they could out of my suffering. How is it less cruel to let a victim's death or suffering be entirely in vain, be that victim human or rabbit?
*According to the best sources I could find, there really wasn't. **The most popular counterargument to using Dr. Mengele's research, besides that it just was too low-quality to be useful, is that it would encourage others to follow in his footsteps. I don't think this really applies to cruelty-free cosmetics.
Well, 100% backward incompatibility isn't always possible, but I think the gratuitous incompatibility in Python 3 is bad. Example: making print a function instead of a special statement. Yes, okay, maybe that would have made more sense 20 years ago when you designed the language. No disagreement, necessarily. But probably a million people or more are now used to typing "print whatever" into the Python interpreter during debugging and when making console Python applications, and inconveniencing all of those people because you think "print(whatever)" is more aesthetically pleasing is just plain inconsiderate.
My (mostly uninformed) opinion is they should have done whatever they needed to do to get Unicode working with minimal drama... and then stopped there, at least as far as backward-incompatible changes go.
But, hey, they did it, and many people actually like what they did. Including, it looks like, the Django people. You might want to read this if you're curious what some big-name porters think of Python 3 (the attitude seems mostly positive).
That's not really fair. There are really only two versions: Python 2.7, which is mostly backward compatible earlier Python 2.x, and Python 3.x, which is a new, incompatible language similar in spirit to Python 2. The stated reason for radically breaking compatibility with Python 3 is "because Unicode". I don't much buy that, but whatever. Python 3 uptake has been slow because of the backward incompatibility, but it's clearly the future of the language. At the same time, Python 2.7 is still by no means a bad language, as long as you don't care about Unicode.
There's also Jython and IronPython, but those aren't official versions of the language.
Suddenly becoming one of the fastest growing programming languages in use and making several top ten lists isn't terribly impressive? Ok...
It grew quickly for a while because people actually cared about programming for Mac platforms after the iPhone became popular. It's stagnated now.
So, one of the most popular platforms on the planet (Apple is going to sell 71 million iPhones this quarter alone) isn't significant? Also when you say that it's a "tweaked Obj-C" that shows you have no idea what you're talking about.
Strawman. I didn't say Swift was insignificant, just that it wasn't "THE BIGGEST NEW LANGUAGE IN A LONG TIME". It's not.
It's moderately significant if you want to program for fruity platforms, although you should probably use Obj-C. It is insignificant otherwise.
And it is a tweaked Obj-C. It takes Obj-C, cuts out pointers, and adds type inference. Yawn. The biggest thing it has going for it is library compatibility with Obj-C so fruity programmers can use Cocoa/Carbon.
Wow, where to begin. First you try and poison the well by saying that yes, Apple is the world's biggest company but only because they charge money. For their "shit products" no less. However, iOS is sitting at 44% market share which is #2 only to Android at 47%. But Android is only at 47% because it's on everything from high end Samsung devices to the crappy devices you can get at the checkout line at your local grocery store.
Your disdain is for a company whose OS is only #2 to an OS that literally built its empire on "shit products".
I don't know why you think a phone has to be "shitty" just because it costs less than a used car. Inexpensive!=shitty.
But that's not the best part. The best part is that your example of a well done programming language is C#. I love C#. I've made my living in C# for close to a decade. It's a fantastic language. It is also, like Swift, a proprietary language designed by one company for their own proprietary OS. That's your yardstick. Yes, there is an always-behind implementation by the open source community but it's also a language that's over ten years old, as opposed to Swift which is literally six months old come Monday.
I never said C# was a well-done language, just that it was more significant than Swift. To me it looks like a slightly better done clone of Java. I generally prefer C++ for non-script programming.
And dismissing Mono because it lags behind the MS implementation isn't correct. That's not the point; Mono doesn't have to have 1-for-1 feature parity to be useful. Without Mono, C# would be isolated to Windows desktop/server development. Which is still a more significant area than writing 2D cartoon games for iOS, but still.
Again, this is a new, modern programming language introduced by the biggest company on earth for one of the biggest platforms on the planet and the uptake on it is unprecedented. C# didn't experience uptake this quickly because Microsoft had to explain what.NET was. Java didn't grow this fast because people thought it was used to make flashing thingies on websites. Swift has the advantage of a mature Internet age (the official guide is an eBook, not even a printed book, which Apple can patch as need be) and it's being unleashed onto a developer community starving for a better language.
lol "THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH". I already told you that was a silly thing to say. Once again, market cap doesn't equal relevance for programmers. Or relevance for anyone or anything else except potential investors, really. Do you think the Apache web server is irrelevant because it's developed by a nonprofit foundation?
The uptake is unprecedented? Really? I imagine it will be approximately the same, or less, as the uptake for Obj-C when iPhones became a thing, which is "not terribly impressive". You're essentially forced to program in Obj-C for the iPhone, and it's still a niche language. People who write Mac-specific applications and iPhone apps use it, and essentially no one else.
And the thing is: Objective C could theoretically be used other places. The bindings are there for people to write an OSS GNUStep-based application that could run on any platform. But no one does.
And now you're telling me that Swift -- which is essentially a tweaked Obj-C -- is "the biggest new language in a long time"? You can't even USE the language to program on anything other than OS X and iOS! That limits its potential to exactly the same places Obj-C is used now. In its current form, it can never be more popular than Obj-C is now. And Obj-C just isn't that popular.
The only way Swift could become a language anyone not writing OS X or iOS-specific applications cares about is if it gets taken up by the OSS community and bindings are made so it can be used for normal cross-platform application development. Do you see that happening?
It could. Essentially GNUStep would be the key to that. But GNUStep has been around for well over a decade and has gotten essentially zero uptake.
I'm not seeing it, man. If a single popular smartphone and 10% desktop OS market share were enough for a language to piggyback off of to mainstream adoption, Objective C would be mainstream for cross-platform development. And it's not. It's "the language you use to write iPhone apps", and that's all it is. Swift borrows heavily from Obj C, and borrows the libraries wholesale. It will go the same way.
One last thing? Apple's only the "world's biggest company" because it overcharges for all its shit products, and stupid people don't see what a bad deal they're getting. In importance to the programming community, they're well below Google and Microsoft. Don't believe me? Take a look at C#'s popularity versus Obj-C.
If I wanted to learn a niche statically compiled programming language, I'd look at Rust or Go over Swift. My advice to the questioner would be to go learn Objective-C. At least you theoretically could use it for non-Apple-platform development if you really wanted to as the bindings to a few big-name C-family libraries like GTK are there. It's a tier-3 language in library support, for sure, but that's better than no support at all. Which is what Swift has right now and likely will for the foreseeable future.
Multithreading is hard, man. And it's not the only way to do parallelism, either. It also can hit all with, for instance, cache coherence traffic blocking access to RAM.
IMO multithreading might be a good model for handling multiple IO streams and really performance-sensitive apps.
Chrome and Firefox's Electrolysis actually use multiprocessing, not multithreading, for their parallelism. Multiprocessing is often a much better parallel computation model, and much more Unixy.
Although I've been with Slackware since long before the SystemD crap. Debian's been on a downward spiral ever since the hot-babe controversy, and probably before.
Even their logo is a downward spiral (okay that was a joke).
I think this fork will be fairly insignificant, and, further, that it will increasingly run into problems as desktops and other packages depend more and more on systemd components (that trend was one of the major factors in the Debian decision to adopt it).
Right! Lord knows open source software is known for its hard dependencies on system-specific interfaces, and for its contempt for cross-platform standards such as POSIX.
I mean, if you're on Windows, you're totally SOL if you want to use anything from Linux-land. Likewise, Mac users are totally f*ed if they want to make use of their OS's Unix roots to run Linux-oriented software.
Oh, and BSD users who want to run anything outside the system core? Out of luck. No one's going to bother taking all that Linux-specific code, which never pays attention to POSIX and uses syscall() into the Linux kernel everywhere, for such a fringe distro!
I guess we'll just stay in the world we are now, where everything on SourceForge is hooked directly into the Linux kernel, and the de-jure standards like POSIX and de-facto ones like GLIB are used as toilet paper for the Linux devs' asses.
Everyone knows almost all OSS software only runs on Linux right now anyway. Now it'll just be more of the same, but with SystemD dependencies built in, too!...
Hmm, I think the LSD has worn off now. Ok, I have another opinion:
OSS software tends to follow portability best practices, where hard dependencies are eschewed when possible. A few corrupt, blinkered projects such as GNOME might decide to build in hard dependencies to SystemD. Most other software won't, because they'd lose portability to every platform other than Linux with SystemD. And most OSS software cares about that.
Geez man... defensive much? Also, you write like a 10 year old. Might want to work on that.
I can completely defeat both your contentions with just one word: India.
India's HDI lags behind China, yes, but its growth rate has been matching China's as of late. Not sure what you mean by "superpower"... both India and China have nukes and neither has enough to destroy the world, so... yeah.
The same cannot be said of...oh Taiwan, Japan, UK, Germany, France...you know, much of the developed world.
Well, considering each of those countries has less than a tenth of the population of China, I'm not sure why you'd expect their GDPs to match. A fairer comparison, I guess, would be China and the EU. You would call the EU a "superpower", I guess, right? Higher GDP? Probably more nuclear weapons?
And take another look at Japan. It's an almost uninhabitable collection of islands with half the GDP of China, a country with 10 times its population and probably 100 times or more habitable land.
And Taiwan, too. Yeah it's got 5% the GDP of China... but it's a tiny island with a population 3 times the size of New York City. What more do you want, man?
Umm...not sure if your medication has worn off here.
That's offensive, unfairly stereotypes a class of people who are already disadvantaged, and also is not an argument. Good job.
Woah, target rich environment here. You think Western governments are "non-authoritarian"? Western governments that willy nilly trample upon its own constitution and/or basic human rights?
You think there's "free speech" in the West? There are people on the TSA no-fly list that begs to differ.
Besides, it seems every CEO and board of director of every company worth their salt in the developed world differ from your assessment of the Chinese government...they're beating down each other to get into China...while you think they should be getting out of China if I'm reading you correctly. Let's be clear, businesses don't go to China for altruistic, ideological, benevolent motivations like you. They go there because of MONEY.
Well, Google's not. But, yes, human rights abuses are not generally relevant to foreign investment. I did say earlier that China hasn't been completely incompetent developing its economy.
I don't have a strong opinion on international investment in China either way. Certainly it's probably not a bad option to build a factory there or something in the short-to-medium term. Re financial investment, though, I've heard of pump-and-dump schemes on the China exchange, other crap, "joint ventures" with foreign corps where the foreign corp gets screwed over with industrial espionage... the legal environment is iffy to say the least.
Businesses are actually moving to Vietnam and places for factories now because Chinese wages are getting too high.
And let me guess, linuxrocks123 because?....democracy hasn't worked out real well for government imposed backdoors and draconian DRM...?
I've been linuxrocks123 for over 12 years. I use it because it's technically excellent, not because of any of that. Not going to say OSS isn't relevant for security, but that's just gravy.
It's essentially a microcosm of the US except with a few more Asians. 90% of the city is White+Black+Hispanic, which is essentially like the rest of the US. There are ethnic enclaves... just like every other major city in the US.
The only really unique thing you can really say about NYC is that it's huge. There's also that it simultaneously has a reputation for extreme rudeness and extreme politeness (unlike Paris, which is just rude). I'm sure some social scientists would love to speculate on why that is.
So, no, New York isn't like the Soviet Union about to break up into a dozen little countries, any more than the US as a whole. Like almost every city, they've got their baseball teams (a really good one, in their case), city pride ("The Big Apple"), and civic identity.
You want an example of a political entity that can't be held together except by brute force? Look at the island of Cyprus.. and the country of Cyprus... and the country of the Turkish Republic of Northen Cyprus. Island populated by the descendants of Greece and the descendants of Troy? They gonna have some problems!
And they did. And it's not like they didn't give it a good shot, either. They had a special setup with the office of the vice president constitutionally reserved for the Turkish minority, etc., etc. They really tried. Buuuut nope. Turkey has to intervene to stop them from ethnic cleansing 30% of their population.
Falsely arresting someone carries risk. They'll usually not want to do that. Especially with dashcam videos, etc., they could actually get in trouble.
Which isn't to say you shouldn't be polite. It's worth being polite. But consenting to unlawful searches... no. You say you don't consent; if they order you to empty your pockets:
"I don't consent to any searches." "Take everything out of your pockets." "If you're going to search me anyway, then do it yourself, please. I don't want there to be any confusion later that I did not consent to a search."
It's easy to win "most improved" when starting from a third-world mudhole. It's also easy to become "a powerhouse" when you've got a billion people to work with.
Let's also not forget that, while China had stagnated for hundreds of years prior to the early 20th century, it has a very long history as an advanced civilization. The "cultural infrastructure" if you will was there.
I don't think the Communist Party has been entirely incompetent with China, but, compare China's success to the democratic government in Taiwan. Or the semi-democratic government in Hong Kong. China's development has been good, but Taiwan and Hong Kong have done better. It looks like the most "impressive" regions of China are not under control of the central government. That probably says something about the Communists' approach.
It also probably says something about the Communists' approach that almost the entirety of the developed world is run under non-authoritarian governments. Democracy and free speech lead to stability and growth in the long run.
Your post is pretty troll-like itself. And I have no idea what you could be talking about with my posting history. I assure you l rarely if ever troll on this site (I can't be entirely sure I "never" did -- never say never -- but it's certainly not my modus operandi). If you really looked at my posting history, you would see I frequently get upmodded.
It's not personal. My numerous law-related posts should have been enough for you to deduce that. People who are simultaneously arrogant and wrong just annoy me. And he's either a troll -- for the reasons I already stated -- or something resembling Poe's Law has been exercised. I don't really care which. Low UID doesn't mean he's not a troll; not sure why you think it would.
Instead of calling everyone around you an idiot, why don't you read the question again and consider again what is being asked.
Unless you have absolutely no ethical qualms about what Dr. Mengele did to his experimental subjects, the ethical questions raised by emulating a complete human brain are in no way trivial and in no way unimportant. Right now, we reformat computers, turn them off, turn them on, and don't and don't have to care at all about what they "want" or about treating them with any kind of respect. If we successfully simulate a human brain to the point where it can "think" and has humanlike "emotions", deleting that neural net file might be fairly considered murder. No, really. If you can talk to the thing and it can talk back, and it looks, talks, and acts like a human... it's a duck. Sorry, human.
Now, we are nowhere near having that capability. We don't have to worry about that question now. But it's a very interesting question to think about, because thinking about it can grant insights into what it means for something to be sentient or human in the first place.
Don't respond to him. He's a troll. He's coming on Slashdot of all sites and saying, "geeks are stupid because...". I was tempted to respond to him, too. But the right response isn't to respond to his discriminatory, offensive bullshit. It's to mod him (-1, Troll) if you have mod points and otherwise to ignore him like any other troll. Or, if you really must respond, don't dignify the substance of his argument with a response, and simply call for mods to mod him down.
(If it looks like I responded to him, I didn't; I responded to an AC who responded to him, but you might not be able to see the AC since ACs start at score 0.)
It's not that bad. There are SLAPP laws. And, as horrible as the incident involving Brendan Eich's personal political views was, it's the exception, not the rule.
You have the right to anonymous speech, too, if you feel you might be discriminated against for what you say.
A sociopath going under the pseudonym M.E. Thomas published a memoir about what it's like to be a sociopath. That's almost as bad as "child predator" in the public consciousness. But, she was free to speak, and to hide her name while speaking. We're doing pretty well. I just hope we stay that way.
Well, it's illegal to hire a hit man, so, no, that would be unacceptable.
Contributing to the American Nazi Party, though? That's none of anyone else's business, no more than who or what someone votes for.
Also: do you honestly not see the difference between saying, "I don't think the state should recognize gay marriages" and "I hate and want to kill all gay people"? Sheesh. Godwin's Law indeed.
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That's not what "fruit of the poisonous tree" means.
Yours is the ethical argument against using Mengele's research, and it's even weaker here than it was there. In fact, it makes no sense at all here. The companies doing the research get no money from their cruelty-free competitors. The consumers of cruelty-free cosmetics are not incentivizing the animal-testing cosmetic companies to do additional research in any way. If anything, the price competition from cruelty-free cosmetics companies will make the companies that do experiments on animals have less R&D money to do additional experiments.
The argument works to the extent it does with Mengele because a Mengele researcher might be doing work for the good of humanity, in his own twisted way, rather than financial reward, and will do unethical experiments just for the sake of advancing the state of science. Unless you think there are altruistic scientists working on lipstick, your argument makes no sense at all.
So testing a hydrogen bomb is engineering, but testing cosmetics is science? First, you're wrong; second, you're splitting hairs trying to evade acknowledging the fact that what you said was absurd.
But whatever. Here's another example. Why don't we send probes to Venus? That would be science. We're not doing that science. We totally could. The USSR did. We don't, because it's not worth the cost, because Venus is a shit environment for our probes, so it would cost more to send them there. And don't say we're doing "better science instead", because we have enough money to send probes to Venus in addition to all the other science we're doing. We choose to make Hollywood movies, or build cars, or do other non-science stuff instead. Because doing the science isn't always the right answer.
This is the last time I will engage you on this point. Grow up, acknowledge what you said was stupid, or don't.
And finally, that doesn't we don't do the science in the way that causes the least damage.
http://t.qkme.me/3lcd.jpg
I suggest we handcuff all airline passengers before they get on the plane. To, you know, fight terrorism and stuff. They'll be unhandcuffed when they get off the plane and it's totally their choice to put the handcuffs on or to not fly. No restriction on liberty.
They should also be stripped nude and hosed down before they're allowed on the plane. Cause they might have lice or something. They can totally refuse to go through this and just not fly if they don't like it. No restriction on liberty.
Oh, and I think everyone should have to have a microchip implanted in their hands that tracks where they go at all times and can be used by the government to deliver disabling electric shocks to anyone resisting arrest. It would totally improve public safety. But it won't restrict liberty cause you only have to have it implanted if you drive a car, ride a bike, take the bus or a taxi, have a bank account, receive Social Security or Medicare, or apply for a government ID of any kind.
So it's optional. So it won't restrict liberty.
Strongly disagree here. You're correct that rights only make sense in the context of society (there's no need for free speech if there's no one to talk to), but group interactions don't completely dominate the world. Or do you never listen to music by yourself, never read a book, never whittle (carve wood), program, sew, keep a diary, or engage in another solitary hobby, and never just sit by yourself and think about life and the universe? If that is all true for you, then you are an unusual individual. Most people's lives are not completely dominated by their interactions with others: they have internal worlds. It has nothing to do with "special snowflake syndrome" (did you just make that up?).
Cosmetics aren't going anywhere so they have to be tested.
Nonsense. The FDA could outlaw any new, untested cosmetics, not have a procedure for testing/approving them, and no one would even blink except some wacko libertarian whiners. We've got plenty of cosmetics and we really don't as a society need anymore. Will companies keep making new ones if we let them? Yeah, of course, why not? It's a market based on monopolistic competition, meaning, essentially, that companies compete on variety and are eternally try to find and develop niches.
Will there be an underground cosmetics market like the illegal drug market if we outlaw potentially unsafe new chemicals in cosmetics and don't allow them to be tested? No, silly, of course not. Unlike, say, the underground heroin market, black market cosmetics would have to compete with a fully-developed legal market which can operate without the substantial costs of smuggling product into the country from inside desperate and impoverished people's asses. The legal market also has the substantial advertising advantage of, "Guaranteed by the FDA not to melt your face off!". Only a supreme idiot would buy black-market cosmetics, assuming the legal market retained at least its current diversity of products. There are probably a few such supreme idiots, but not enough.*
Don't believe me? Look at how regulated alcohol is, or tobacco is, and consider that the legal markets still rule. A significant argument for legal marijuana is, after all, to be able to regulate the product while shutting down the black market. If all regulation automatically resulting in the formation of a black market, this would be a silly argument. Given the recent experiences in Colorado and other states, it is not a silly argument at all.
*I expect a few supreme idiots, in such a world, would talk to each other on the Internet, concoct dangerous schemes involving amateur chemistry to produce cosmetics for their personal use, and proceed to melt their faces off. I expect this happens now, occasionally, anyway.
Doing the science is the right answer every time, it's who you are going to test on, us or them. Would you prefer cosmetics and their potential side-effects be tested on humans?
Sorry for replying twice, there was more stupid in your post that I didn't see until after replying to the first instance. "Doing the science is the right answer every time" is an absurd statement. The risks of experimentation must be balanced with the expected rewards. Or do you think we should resume testing hydrogen bombs by exploding them in random areas where we hope there aren't any people?
The Soviets exploded a giant bomb that created an earthquake in neighboring countries significant enough to cause effects such as shattering windows. I'm sure some people cut themselves on the glass. Was that really worth it to have another confirmation that splitting atoms makes things boom? No, and it was done more for political intimidation tactic than for science.
But I'm sure they had some scientists observe the boom from a safe distance. And I'm sure they, you know, got something out of it. Probably not much, but at least, "this bomb design is not so flawed that it won't at least sometimes go boom when activated". It was science. And it was science that should not have been done, because the earthquake alone was more disruptive than the marginal scientific gain.
And yet they'll still enjoy the benefits. Their cruelty-free products are build on generations of animal testing.
Why do you think this is at all hypocritical? If there was useful stuff to be had from Dr. Mengele's research*, would you argue that we should not use it and let people suffer and die while we rediscovered it?**
In either case, the harm is done. If I were killed in a cruel scientific experiment by an amoral monster, I'd at least want the decent people in the human race to get everything they could out of my suffering. How is it less cruel to let a victim's death or suffering be entirely in vain, be that victim human or rabbit?
*According to the best sources I could find, there really wasn't.
**The most popular counterargument to using Dr. Mengele's research, besides that it just was too low-quality to be useful, is that it would encourage others to follow in his footsteps. I don't think this really applies to cruelty-free cosmetics.
Well, 100% backward incompatibility isn't always possible, but I think the gratuitous incompatibility in Python 3 is bad. Example: making print a function instead of a special statement. Yes, okay, maybe that would have made more sense 20 years ago when you designed the language. No disagreement, necessarily. But probably a million people or more are now used to typing "print whatever" into the Python interpreter during debugging and when making console Python applications, and inconveniencing all of those people because you think "print(whatever)" is more aesthetically pleasing is just plain inconsiderate.
My (mostly uninformed) opinion is they should have done whatever they needed to do to get Unicode working with minimal drama ... and then stopped there, at least as far as backward-incompatible changes go.
But, hey, they did it, and many people actually like what they did. Including, it looks like, the Django people. You might want to read this if you're curious what some big-name porters think of Python 3 (the attitude seems mostly positive).
That's not really fair. There are really only two versions: Python 2.7, which is mostly backward compatible earlier Python 2.x, and Python 3.x, which is a new, incompatible language similar in spirit to Python 2. The stated reason for radically breaking compatibility with Python 3 is "because Unicode". I don't much buy that, but whatever. Python 3 uptake has been slow because of the backward incompatibility, but it's clearly the future of the language. At the same time, Python 2.7 is still by no means a bad language, as long as you don't care about Unicode.
There's also Jython and IronPython, but those aren't official versions of the language.
What will happen when this collides with Apple and Google deliberately creating encryption that they themselves cannot break?
How will it "collide"? They'll do what they can to assist with the decryption, which is nothing, and there will be no collision.
Suddenly becoming one of the fastest growing programming languages in use and making several top ten lists isn't terribly impressive? Ok...
It grew quickly for a while because people actually cared about programming for Mac platforms after the iPhone became popular. It's stagnated now.
So, one of the most popular platforms on the planet (Apple is going to sell 71 million iPhones this quarter alone) isn't significant? Also when you say that it's a "tweaked Obj-C" that shows you have no idea what you're talking about.
Strawman. I didn't say Swift was insignificant, just that it wasn't "THE BIGGEST NEW LANGUAGE IN A LONG TIME". It's not.
It's moderately significant if you want to program for fruity platforms, although you should probably use Obj-C. It is insignificant otherwise.
And it is a tweaked Obj-C. It takes Obj-C, cuts out pointers, and adds type inference. Yawn. The biggest thing it has going for it is library compatibility with Obj-C so fruity programmers can use Cocoa/Carbon.
Wow, where to begin. First you try and poison the well by saying that yes, Apple is the world's biggest company but only because they charge money. For their "shit products" no less. However, iOS is sitting at 44% market share which is #2 only to Android at 47%. But Android is only at 47% because it's on everything from high end Samsung devices to the crappy devices you can get at the checkout line at your local grocery store.
Nice try. Not everyone uses their smartphone for web browsing: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/sm...
Your disdain is for a company whose OS is only #2 to an OS that literally built its empire on "shit products".
I don't know why you think a phone has to be "shitty" just because it costs less than a used car. Inexpensive!=shitty.
But that's not the best part. The best part is that your example of a well done programming language is C#. I love C#. I've made my living in C# for close to a decade. It's a fantastic language. It is also, like Swift, a proprietary language designed by one company for their own proprietary OS. That's your yardstick. Yes, there is an always-behind implementation by the open source community but it's also a language that's over ten years old, as opposed to Swift which is literally six months old come Monday.
I never said C# was a well-done language, just that it was more significant than Swift. To me it looks like a slightly better done clone of Java. I generally prefer C++ for non-script programming.
And dismissing Mono because it lags behind the MS implementation isn't correct. That's not the point; Mono doesn't have to have 1-for-1 feature parity to be useful. Without Mono, C# would be isolated to Windows desktop/server development. Which is still a more significant area than writing 2D cartoon games for iOS, but still.
Again, this is a new, modern programming language introduced by the biggest company on earth for one of the biggest platforms on the planet and the uptake on it is unprecedented. C# didn't experience uptake this quickly because Microsoft had to explain what .NET was. Java didn't grow this fast because people thought it was used to make flashing thingies on websites. Swift has the advantage of a mature Internet age (the official guide is an eBook, not even a printed book, which Apple can patch as need be) and it's being unleashed onto a developer community starving for a better language.
lol "THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH". I already told you that was a silly thing to say. Once again, market cap doesn't equal relevance for programmers. Or relevance for anyone or anything else except potential investors, really. Do you think the Apache web server is irrelevant because it's developed by a nonprofit foundation?
It doesn't
Given the replies to this post, apparently "I think the LSD has worn off now" wasn't an OBVIOUS ENOUGH SARCASM TAG.
So: SARCASM!
The uptake is unprecedented? Really? I imagine it will be approximately the same, or less, as the uptake for Obj-C when iPhones became a thing, which is "not terribly impressive". You're essentially forced to program in Obj-C for the iPhone, and it's still a niche language. People who write Mac-specific applications and iPhone apps use it, and essentially no one else.
And the thing is: Objective C could theoretically be used other places. The bindings are there for people to write an OSS GNUStep-based application that could run on any platform. But no one does.
And now you're telling me that Swift -- which is essentially a tweaked Obj-C -- is "the biggest new language in a long time"? You can't even USE the language to program on anything other than OS X and iOS! That limits its potential to exactly the same places Obj-C is used now. In its current form, it can never be more popular than Obj-C is now. And Obj-C just isn't that popular.
The only way Swift could become a language anyone not writing OS X or iOS-specific applications cares about is if it gets taken up by the OSS community and bindings are made so it can be used for normal cross-platform application development. Do you see that happening?
It could. Essentially GNUStep would be the key to that. But GNUStep has been around for well over a decade and has gotten essentially zero uptake.
I'm not seeing it, man. If a single popular smartphone and 10% desktop OS market share were enough for a language to piggyback off of to mainstream adoption, Objective C would be mainstream for cross-platform development. And it's not. It's "the language you use to write iPhone apps", and that's all it is. Swift borrows heavily from Obj C, and borrows the libraries wholesale. It will go the same way.
One last thing? Apple's only the "world's biggest company" because it overcharges for all its shit products, and stupid people don't see what a bad deal they're getting. In importance to the programming community, they're well below Google and Microsoft. Don't believe me? Take a look at C#'s popularity versus Obj-C.
If I wanted to learn a niche statically compiled programming language, I'd look at Rust or Go over Swift. My advice to the questioner would be to go learn Objective-C. At least you theoretically could use it for non-Apple-platform development if you really wanted to as the bindings to a few big-name C-family libraries like GTK are there. It's a tier-3 language in library support, for sure, but that's better than no support at all. Which is what Swift has right now and likely will for the foreseeable future.
Multithreading is hard, man. And it's not the only way to do parallelism, either. It also can hit all with, for instance, cache coherence traffic blocking access to RAM.
IMO multithreading might be a good model for handling multiple IO streams and really performance-sensitive apps.
Chrome and Firefox's Electrolysis actually use multiprocessing, not multithreading, for their parallelism. Multiprocessing is often a much better parallel computation model, and much more Unixy.
*Fellow Slackware user high-five!*
Although I've been with Slackware since long before the SystemD crap. Debian's been on a downward spiral ever since the hot-babe controversy, and probably before.
Even their logo is a downward spiral (okay that was a joke).
I think this fork will be fairly insignificant, and, further, that it will increasingly run into problems as desktops and other packages depend more and more on systemd components (that trend was one of the major factors in the Debian decision to adopt it).
Right! Lord knows open source software is known for its hard dependencies on system-specific interfaces, and for its contempt for cross-platform standards such as POSIX.
I mean, if you're on Windows, you're totally SOL if you want to use anything from Linux-land. Likewise, Mac users are totally f*ed if they want to make use of their OS's Unix roots to run Linux-oriented software.
Oh, and BSD users who want to run anything outside the system core? Out of luck. No one's going to bother taking all that Linux-specific code, which never pays attention to POSIX and uses syscall() into the Linux kernel everywhere, for such a fringe distro!
I guess we'll just stay in the world we are now, where everything on SourceForge is hooked directly into the Linux kernel, and the de-jure standards like POSIX and de-facto ones like GLIB are used as toilet paper for the Linux devs' asses.
Everyone knows almost all OSS software only runs on Linux right now anyway. Now it'll just be more of the same, but with SystemD dependencies built in, too! ...
Hmm, I think the LSD has worn off now. Ok, I have another opinion:
OSS software tends to follow portability best practices, where hard dependencies are eschewed when possible. A few corrupt, blinkered projects such as GNOME might decide to build in hard dependencies to SystemD. Most other software won't, because they'd lose portability to every platform other than Linux with SystemD. And most OSS software cares about that.
HAND.
Geez man ... defensive much? Also, you write like a 10 year old. Might want to work on that.
I can completely defeat both your contentions with just one word: India.
India's HDI lags behind China, yes, but its growth rate has been matching China's as of late. Not sure what you mean by "superpower" ... both India and China have nukes and neither has enough to destroy the world, so ... yeah.
The same cannot be said of ...oh Taiwan, Japan, UK, Germany, France...you know, much of the developed world.
Well, considering each of those countries has less than a tenth of the population of China, I'm not sure why you'd expect their GDPs to match. A fairer comparison, I guess, would be China and the EU. You would call the EU a "superpower", I guess, right? Higher GDP? Probably more nuclear weapons?
And take another look at Japan. It's an almost uninhabitable collection of islands with half the GDP of China, a country with 10 times its population and probably 100 times or more habitable land.
And Taiwan, too. Yeah it's got 5% the GDP of China ... but it's a tiny island with a population 3 times the size of New York City. What more do you want, man?
Umm...not sure if your medication has worn off here.
That's offensive, unfairly stereotypes a class of people who are already disadvantaged, and also is not an argument. Good job.
Woah, target rich environment here.
You think Western governments are "non-authoritarian"?
Western governments that willy nilly trample upon its own constitution and/or basic human rights?
You think there's "free speech" in the West?
There are people on the TSA no-fly list that begs to differ.
That Western governments are not perfect does not mean China is isn't much, much worse. The no-fly list issue is working its way through the courts as we speak.
Besides, it seems every CEO and board of director of every company worth their salt in the developed world differ from your assessment of the Chinese government...they're beating down each other to get into China...while you think they should be getting out of China if I'm reading you correctly.
Let's be clear, businesses don't go to China for altruistic, ideological, benevolent motivations like you. They go there because of MONEY.
Well, Google's not. But, yes, human rights abuses are not generally relevant to foreign investment. I did say earlier that China hasn't been completely incompetent developing its economy.
I don't have a strong opinion on international investment in China either way. Certainly it's probably not a bad option to build a factory there or something in the short-to-medium term. Re financial investment, though, I've heard of pump-and-dump schemes on the China exchange, other crap, "joint ventures" with foreign corps where the foreign corp gets screwed over with industrial espionage ... the legal environment is iffy to say the least.
Businesses are actually moving to Vietnam and places for factories now because Chinese wages are getting too high.
And let me guess, linuxrocks123 because?....democracy hasn't worked out real well for government imposed backdoors and draconian DRM...?
I've been linuxrocks123 for over 12 years. I use it because it's technically excellent, not because of any of that. Not going to say OSS isn't relevant for security, but that's just gravy.
MikeRT
Are you MikeeUSA? If so, go away.
If not (and I don't think you are, but you made me think), you're not right about NYC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
It's essentially a microcosm of the US except with a few more Asians. 90% of the city is White+Black+Hispanic, which is essentially like the rest of the US. There are ethnic enclaves ... just like every other major city in the US.
The only really unique thing you can really say about NYC is that it's huge. There's also that it simultaneously has a reputation for extreme rudeness and extreme politeness (unlike Paris, which is just rude). I'm sure some social scientists would love to speculate on why that is.
So, no, New York isn't like the Soviet Union about to break up into a dozen little countries, any more than the US as a whole. Like almost every city, they've got their baseball teams (a really good one, in their case), city pride ("The Big Apple"), and civic identity.
You want an example of a political entity that can't be held together except by brute force? Look at the island of Cyprus .. and the country of Cyprus ... and the country of the Turkish Republic of Northen Cyprus. Island populated by the descendants of Greece and the descendants of Troy? They gonna have some problems!
And they did. And it's not like they didn't give it a good shot, either. They had a special setup with the office of the vice president constitutionally reserved for the Turkish minority, etc., etc. They really tried. Buuuut nope. Turkey has to intervene to stop them from ethnic cleansing 30% of their population.
Falsely arresting someone carries risk. They'll usually not want to do that. Especially with dashcam videos, etc., they could actually get in trouble.
Which isn't to say you shouldn't be polite. It's worth being polite. But consenting to unlawful searches ... no. You say you don't consent; if they order you to empty your pockets:
"I don't consent to any searches."
"Take everything out of your pockets."
"If you're going to search me anyway, then do it yourself, please. I don't want there to be any confusion later that I did not consent to a search."
It's easy to win "most improved" when starting from a third-world mudhole. It's also easy to become "a powerhouse" when you've got a billion people to work with.
Let's also not forget that, while China had stagnated for hundreds of years prior to the early 20th century, it has a very long history as an advanced civilization. The "cultural infrastructure" if you will was there.
I don't think the Communist Party has been entirely incompetent with China, but, compare China's success to the democratic government in Taiwan. Or the semi-democratic government in Hong Kong. China's development has been good, but Taiwan and Hong Kong have done better. It looks like the most "impressive" regions of China are not under control of the central government. That probably says something about the Communists' approach.
It also probably says something about the Communists' approach that almost the entirety of the developed world is run under non-authoritarian governments. Democracy and free speech lead to stability and growth in the long run.
Your post is pretty troll-like itself. And I have no idea what you could be talking about with my posting history. I assure you l rarely if ever troll on this site (I can't be entirely sure I "never" did -- never say never -- but it's certainly not my modus operandi). If you really looked at my posting history, you would see I frequently get upmodded.
It's not personal. My numerous law-related posts should have been enough for you to deduce that. People who are simultaneously arrogant and wrong just annoy me. And he's either a troll -- for the reasons I already stated -- or something resembling Poe's Law has been exercised. I don't really care which. Low UID doesn't mean he's not a troll; not sure why you think it would.
Instead of calling everyone around you an idiot, why don't you read the question again and consider again what is being asked.
Unless you have absolutely no ethical qualms about what Dr. Mengele did to his experimental subjects, the ethical questions raised by emulating a complete human brain are in no way trivial and in no way unimportant. Right now, we reformat computers, turn them off, turn them on, and don't and don't have to care at all about what they "want" or about treating them with any kind of respect. If we successfully simulate a human brain to the point where it can "think" and has humanlike "emotions", deleting that neural net file might be fairly considered murder. No, really. If you can talk to the thing and it can talk back, and it looks, talks, and acts like a human ... it's a duck. Sorry, human.
Now, we are nowhere near having that capability. We don't have to worry about that question now. But it's a very interesting question to think about, because thinking about it can grant insights into what it means for something to be sentient or human in the first place.
Don't respond to him. He's a troll. He's coming on Slashdot of all sites and saying, "geeks are stupid because...". I was tempted to respond to him, too. But the right response isn't to respond to his discriminatory, offensive bullshit. It's to mod him (-1, Troll) if you have mod points and otherwise to ignore him like any other troll. Or, if you really must respond, don't dignify the substance of his argument with a response, and simply call for mods to mod him down.
(If it looks like I responded to him, I didn't; I responded to an AC who responded to him, but you might not be able to see the AC since ACs start at score 0.)
It's not that bad. There are SLAPP laws. And, as horrible as the incident involving Brendan Eich's personal political views was, it's the exception, not the rule.
You have the right to anonymous speech, too, if you feel you might be discriminated against for what you say.
A sociopath going under the pseudonym M.E. Thomas published a memoir about what it's like to be a sociopath. That's almost as bad as "child predator" in the public consciousness. But, she was free to speak, and to hide her name while speaking. We're doing pretty well. I just hope we stay that way.
Well, it's illegal to hire a hit man, so, no, that would be unacceptable.
Contributing to the American Nazi Party, though? That's none of anyone else's business, no more than who or what someone votes for.
Also: do you honestly not see the difference between saying, "I don't think the state should recognize gay marriages" and "I hate and want to kill all gay people"? Sheesh. Godwin's Law indeed.