How many people browse the web with only a keyboard? How many people edit pictures/music/movies with only a keyboard?
How many people that *think* they've been educated on computer usage never learned to type to begin with? How many keyboards these days are so shoddily made they are effectively useless for those of us that do know how to use them, clearly designed for use by hunt-and-peckers only? How many computer programs just assume the current answers to those facts and dont bother to even consider exceptions to the rule in their design and implementation?
How many people use a dozen programs in a different day, each with different keyboard shortcuts that would need to be muscle-memoried?
How many programmers cant be bothered to use the standard shortcut keys of the system(s) they target with their programs? Particularly in X, unfortunately, many even deliberately remove the ability of the user to *set* those keys to the standard they are used to? (Yes, I'm looking at you Gnome.)
Much like "touch typing is just faster" falls apart once special characters and numbers are introduced in large quantities
Actually, it doesnt. Numbers are no problem at all, as long as you do them often enough to keep your fingers in practice. Special characters can be problematic, yes, but they dont have to be. Windows makes it bloody impossible, but with only a little practice I found I can type most special characters without ever breaking stride on a mac with a standard English keymap. (Assuming, of course, someone's already done the sensible thing and replaced the pretty but unusable little toy Apple pretends is a keyboard in the trash and gone to the trouble of fitting a decent one on the machine.) X keymappings are absolute horror to setup in my experience, but at least they're editable.
or when one is not transcribing but rather writing original text (where regardless of typing technique, most people can press keys considerably faster than they can think of keys to press)
I dont see how you think pausing to think has any bearing on the subject. Sure, you pause to think, then you type, then you pause to think... pausing to grab the mouse and run it around the screen still adds time and more importantly it breaks the concentration on the subject matter, so this doesnt help the case for the 'do everything with the mouse' argument at all.
"keyboard shortcuts are faster" falls apart when you start using apps that are unfamiliar, unpredictable or simply make more sense with a mouse
Absolutely true. However this, again, does very little for the argument. Just how often do you need to learn a new program? For most people it's relatively rare, you spend far more time *using* programs you know than learning new ones.
Furthermore it would be far more rare to need to learn new programs if we didnt keep fixing things that arent broken - i.e. replacing perfectly good, functional programs we already know how to use with new, buggy, bloated junk that gets pushed on us for marketing reasons. For most people that use a computer today, the thing is primarily a bloody typewriter. They spend most of their time in 'Word.' Yet every couple of years they have to get a new version of word, with a new learning curve and new and higher hardware requirements just to keep doing what they were doing all along - using the computer as a typewriter.
Finally, on a decently designed system, the commands that are 'common' to many programs should have system-wide standard keystrokes anyway. Even windows gets this concept - ctrl-s is always supposed to be save, ctrl-c copy, etc.
Of course, the best option is just to give people both and let them use whatever they want. We're probably only talking milliseconds here anyway, so perception is all that really counts.
That's the one. I love how the site you found poo-poos the specs though. $expletive-string-here, this thing has hundreds of times the ram of machines that only a few decades ago were being used by dozens of scientific users doing real work concurrently, and a processor to easily match that, and it's not considered sufficient to read a news article and check your email on?
I expect sloppy programming and bloat on windows, it's quite disappointing how thoroughly it's taken over the linux world as well though.
Keyboard shortcuts are not amenable to muscle memory, as the muscle movement differs depending on the previous shortcut. Returning to the home position between each keypresses allows muscle memory, but I'd be very surprised if it were enough to compensate for the movement inefficiency.
You're obviously not a touch typist. That's absurd. A practiced touch typist on a decent keyboard can select a paragraph for manipulation in about the time it takes you to get your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, let alone actually using the mouse to select the paragraph and THEN move the hand back into home position.
This is only true for people who havent *learned* the keyboard shortcuts, or dont even touch-type to begin with. It was a rigged test and TOG, while usually good, shouldnt stoop so low as to imply otherwise.
Give me a system with keyboard shortcuts that I know well (i.e. have in muscle memory) and I'll blow away the fastest mouser in the world. I'm not even a particularly fast typist either.
Put me on a system with unfamiliar shortcut keys however and you will get results similar to what he's describing.
I saw a MIPS based netbook for about US $150 a week or two ago. Trying to remember where.
It strikes me that the best way to improve usability of X apps might be to send these little babies off to as many developers as you can find - and then preferably putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to try and use their apps on them.
The gun to the head part, of course, is tongue in cheek - but wow! seldom is such a bad idea so tempting.
It's actually more complicated than that, the state interferes in the economy in so many different ways simultaneously it can be difficult or impossible to determine in a specific case whether, on the whole, it's actually encouraging or discouraging a certain activity.
For instance, with solar hot water, the state here is offering a direct subsidy. It's also offering a very slightly less direct subsidy through a carbon credit scheme. Both of these effectively lower the price of the units, making the economic break-even point come sooner.
At the same time, however, it is holding the price of off-peak mains electricity artificially low, which amounts to subsidising electric water heaters as well, which has exactly the opposite effect.
It's also doing many other things that affect the equation, and it would be a sisyphian task to try and untangle all the different distortions which are going on at the same time.
You're making the conclusion that "these people are full of %*!&" which is a huge generalization.
Well, by 'these people' I intended to refer only to 'global warming enthusiasts' who also make certain public policy prescriptions on the basis of evidence that clearly does not properly support those prescriptions. Not anyone else. With that reading, I maintain that, yes, they are indeed full of it. I realise I wasnt very clear in the first post with that phrase, however.
As I said, I dont see any problem with the notion that our emissions affect climate - I dont consider that controversial at all. But there is a HUGE set of intervening steps between that and justifying any prescriptions.
No doubt there's a lot of whacko environmental alarmists out there quoting BS pseudoscience and inventing statistics, but that doesn't mean that legit scientists can't come to the same conclusions through proper scientific methods.
This is very true. It is also something I believe I stated in other words in my own post. Perhaps again I was less clear than I would wish.
Oh really? Are you competent to evaluate controversial issues in high-energy physics?
Only to the extent of being able to spot certain grosser errors. I'm sure there would be many errors that could be made in the more obscure corners of the field that would fly right by me. So this means that if I see a clear logical error that is NOT over my head, I'm supposed to just trust the supposed expert that made it? I dont think so. Quite the opposite. If he makes a mistake I can catch that's just more reason to think he's making plenty of others I can't.
Synthetic organic chemistry? Structural bioinformatics? Or is it only in regards to climatology where you think you have some magical insight which people who have worked and studied in the field for years lack?
I didnt claim any such 'magical insight' and you know it.
Are you really claiming that only someone with specialised experience in physics is qualified to point out errors in the arithmetic in a physics paper? So if A is a physicist and B is a mathematician, and B says A's paper makes an error in a given calculation, you're going to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore him until a qualified physicist makes the same observation? That's the modus operandi of a priesthood or a beaureacracy, not of a scientist.
A fundamental characteristic of science is that it relies on logic. Logical errors in ANY field can be fatal to claims which rely on them.
With regard to the methods of science, you're partly right -- obviously it's true that science isn't done by consensus, else no new science would ever be done at all. (I say "partly" because all scientists in the modern world build on the knowledge gained by their predecessors, and that knowledge is passed on by, yes, consensus in the field.) But with regard to the body of knowledge we call "science," you're dead wrong.
If the body of 'knowledge' you call science is characterised by testing propositions for truth by polling workers in a certain field on their opinion, rather than by rigorously testing the logical consequences of those propositions against empirical data, it is neither scientific nor is it knowledge.
Which means that when it comes to setting policy based on science, it is the responsibility of those who do not work in the field to shut up and listen to those who do
Not just a very unscientific statement, but in fact an actively anti-scientific statement. Just because you get paid to work in a field clearly does not ensure that you do that work in a scientifically valid and meaningful way. In fact, if anything, the opposite argument can be made, and clearly applies in some cases. Funding sources may not, quite often do not, understand, or care, about scientific rigor.
You think they're going to be perfectly scientific and objective when their paycheques are riding on it?
No more than I think that the ones paid by governments and environmental cultists will be.
So to evaluate the arguments one must go further than looking at the fact that research takes money and the provenance of a researchers budget tends to correlate with their opinion on the issue. You have to take a look at the actual scientific merits of the work done.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
The endless repetition of fallacious arguments such as those referencing 'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not, is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method) by those on one side in particular stands out like a sore thumb. So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists. A real scientist in such a situation has no option but to go to the private corporations for funding or retire from the field entirely.
This doesnt mean either side is wrong. If you have multiple funding sources with multiple agendas, each is naturally going to tend to fund researchers that tend to support their agenda. The researchers themselves, if they are good scientists, will simply do the research properly and if it displeases their funding source they'll go to a different source who DID like their results for their next grant - this is much easier said than done, it's inconvenient at best, and runs the risk of failing and leaving the scientist and her family in deep difficulty, but still, if you want to be a scientist that's what you have to do.
If they're NOT good scientists, they'll just play ball and make sure that their reports favour the right side to avoid the issue. To see which one is happening in any individual case, there's no substitute for a critical review of the work itself. Simply correlating results with funding sources doesnt mean anything.
Frankly I dont doubt that human pollution is having and will continue to have consequences on the climate of the planet - I cant think of anyone that does. But that fact tells us nothing about whether the affect is large or small, beneficial or damaging, let alone what, if any, actions would actually moderate or reverse the affects (assuming that doing so is desirable.) Despite that global warming enthusiasts are constantly making policy prescriptions which, just coincidentally, always wind up being that we should do what environmental cultists have always wanted to do for their own religious reasons.
The logical conclusion is that these people are full of %*!&, particularly when they claim to be scientists (to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title,) and if they happen to be getting anything right in their predictions at all, it's an accident.
You really have to distinguish between two values of 'works.'
The free-market, in rare cases where it's allowed to function, works great in long-term, aggregate measures. It doesnt (nothing can) magically solve all problems immediately and turn the world into a utopia.
In a free-market if demand for electricity outpaces supply, the price of electricity increases, which spurs effort in a number of directions at once - more incentive to build new power plants, more incentive to increase the efficiency of current ones, more incentive to eliminate unecessary usage, and more incentive to develop alternatives.
In this manner the short term 'failures' are effectively harnessed to drive long-term success.
The alternative is a system where *visible* short term failures are sometimes avoided, which seems on the surface to be a good thing. However when you consider that this breaks the feedback loop that allows a market to adapt to constantly changing situations, it starts to look much more sinister.
The narrowly selfish 'consumer' is just happy he experiences no blackout and a low power bill. The politician is happy because the first guy is happy which means re-election. But our future, and that of our children and grandchildren and so on, is inevitably degraded as the price of that 'success.'
Now if you want to know *why* this is so, look to the EPA and 'Environmental Protection' legislation in general. It's not designed to protect the environment, but to protect 'important' polluters and their customers.
The problem with electricity is that how much a device actually uses is pretty well hidden from the user, so most people just don't know it and don't factor it into their buying decisions
Nah, the problem is that people are taught to be stupid. The usage is hardly hidden - and if people in general werent so thoroughly trained to act like idiot 'consumers' it would be much less hidden, for the simple reason that manufacturers that attempted to hide it would just find no one wants to buy their crap.
Of course it's a complicated issue and I'm simplifying, but the key here really is the so-called 'public education' system. This is the root cause of issue after issue, and each supposed solution that avoids confronting that fact just winds up accellerating the dumbing down process.
What you suggest is why democracy is the worst form of government ever devised. The tyranny of the majority can be just as bad as any other tyranny. This is why the US founding fathers, for instance, REJECTED democracy and constructed a federation of democratic republics instead, where the will of the majority is (supposed to be) severely limited by the law to protect individual liberty.
Which is exactly why I stated clearly this was just a small piece of the difference, although if you think it through right most of the rest follows from it. "The difference between a GUI and a window manager" - well, sort of, except youre poisoning the well right off by describing a desktop shell as a 'GUI' as if there were no other GUIs which is utter nonsense. The underlying thought with a desktop shell is that one size fits all. This is also utter nonsense. The underlying thought to a Workstation is power and specialisation - not that the underlying software cant be adapted for many different tasks, of course. But it is intended to be *adapted* and customised for a tasks or a set of tasks that take place at a given workstation. It doesnt need to carry the cruft for a million other applications which wont be used, and it doesnt need a genericised GUI based on a desktop metaphor which gets in the way as often as it helps. It's actually BETTER to have a noticeably different form of GUI on unlike workstations - each adapted to its own tasks.
I am not Mr Beckerman either, but in this sort of situation there clearly cannot be a 'reasonable settlment' (sic) with such scoundrels less than dismissal with prejudice, payment of all defendents expenses, and a public apology. Certainly any settlement that imposed a gag order on such a defendent coud never be described as 'reasonable.'
In regards to your own corporate clients, if the situations really are as similar as you describe, the same would apply to them. What they're doing is paying hush money to cover up their wrongdoing, and relying on your technical skill to keep them from justice when they run into a defendent who cant be bribed.
There's a lot, more things than I have time, even if I had it all thought out for explanation which I dont, but I'll try to give you a brief clarification.
A 'desktop' has that thing called a 'desktop' obviously, and it tends to get cluttered with icons, a place where work gets dumped on top of work until no one can find anything.
A workstation, on the other hand, has no 'desktop.' It has no 'desktop icons.' There is no clutter. Where those used to a desktop machine think they see a desktop, but wonder why it's so clean and uncluttered - that's no desktop. That's the root window.
There is nothing unusual here. You tease someone and they suck it up you get off. You tease someone and they become severely distressed and you have problems. You tease someone and they die because of it, its homicide.
But, in point of fact, no one has ever died because of teasing.
This girl died because she strung up a noose and hung herself in her closet.
The latter can only morph into the prior by virtue of huge doses of mush-headed, addle-brained politically correct brain rot.
Long wires with a low population density does not make it cost effective to upgrade everyone to the latest technology. It probably took the phone company 20 years to break even on the last set of wires they install in a rural community.
They would like you to believe this, however it's nonsense. Federal subsidies for this were easily enough to cover initial outlays, and customer fees are more than sufficient to cover maintainence. Where I used to live in the rural US (as recently as three years ago, and I'm still in contact with family members there - the situation has not changed) our phone service was provided by a small non-profit cooperative, run on a shoestring and serving an irregularly shaped area whose borders were determined by the baby bell - they just chopped out the bits that supposedly werent profitable enough for them to serve and sold them off. That cooperative runs year after year, with better line maintainence and better customer service than is received in the more profitable areas served by major companies, lower line costs, and after all that they even send out refunds (they call them dividends) many years as well. Just as examples, we got DSL 18 miles from the nearest town before it was available many places inside that town (served by the baby bell,) at ~ the same price with noticeably better ISP services attached, and despite the relatively large amount of wire and low number of subscribers, our service was restored after a major storm as fast or faster than the town was.
This clearly shows the area *could* be served profitably. Why wont the for-profit telcos do this? Why do they whine that they would lose money? Because, similiarly to politicians who project a 20% budget increase, then pass an 18% increase instead, and claim to have cut the budget by 10% as a result, these guys use numbers in a different way than we do. While to a reasonable person the break-even point is defined as the point where income exceeds expenses, and the excess is considered profit, these guys start with a fat profit margin that decades of government subsidies and corporate welfare programs have lead them to be accustomed to, and consider anything below that a "loss." In their mind, if they're used to making a 25% profit and due to changing conditions they only manage 20%, this counts as a loss of 20%!
I've been using Linux since '93 or '94, my primary machine for several years now has been a Mac, and I recommend and support Macs heavily.
That said, your line about a 'better unix' is just trash. Linux is a much better *nix, in just about every way. The Macs are great for providing a fairly sane and stable system in a package with well-supported hardware and a UI that 'joe and gramma' can use without too much handholding, but at the command line level it's missing a lot of stuff that on any other *nix system would be taken for granted - it's clunky and frankly just not intended to be used that way.
At the GUI level it's also missing a lot of basic functions that Linux had in '94.
That said, the 'desktop' is just the wrong target from square one IMOP. It's shooting far too low. The 'desktop' is a very poor metaphor for a computer system, particularly one intended to do anything serious. It's an import from the world of Mac and Windows, and it's a very tempting target for those that for some reason are fixated on 'bringing linux to the masses' since it's what those masses already been conditioned to seek, but it's just an abominable substitute for a workstation. That metaphor is native to *nix systems, no harder (indeed by every indication easier) for the uninitiated to learn, and far more powerful and useful to those familiar with it.
IMOP 'linux to the masses' along with the 'desktop' mentality it encourages are bass ackwards to begin with. It all too often leads to the import of bad design, the copying of bad implementation, the cloning of an utterly inferior system in the pursuit of popularity.
Linux became popular because it did a good job, not because it provided a free clone of the worst software on the market. Abandoning the first path for the second may bring a little short-term popularity, but it may not - and even if it does it's hardly worth the price of losing our own, far superior, metaphors and mannerisms.
If you are serving coffee that hot, you are a poor host.
Thanks for demonstrating your ability to respond without even reading the post you're responding to. Now if only slashdot would expand the allowance for 'foe' listing I'd have one less insincere poster cluttering up the articles I read with pre-written propaganda.
So what you're saying is it's perfectly reasonable to serve coffee so hot it can give you third degree burns?
Yes, of course. Doh. How do you make coffee? You boil water! Knock knock, anyone home? Fresh coffee is too hot to drink. Learning to uncover it and let it cool slightly before you drink it, and to take care with the first few drinks in particular to notice the temperature and if necessary back off and let it cool another couple degrees isn't rocket science, it's basic common sense.
At the time this occured I was working an early job and it was my habit to get a hot coffee at the drivethrough each day on my way to work. It came in a cup with cover and carrier and I would put it in its place, make sure it was stable, and then continue on my morning commute. By the time I got on down the road to the point where I stopped the car and then opened my coffee, it had cooled to just the perfect temperature to drink. And all was well.
Then this idiotic woman orders hot coffee, pours it down her pants, and sits there for a minute and a half to make sure her skin is seriously damaged, and makes bank on it. As a consequence, I and everyone else in the country suddenly found that, not just the chain that got sued, but every drive-through, would no longer serve fresh hot coffee, but instead could offer only pre-cooled coffee that was drinkable immediately.
If I had time to drink it immediately I wouldnt be in the drive-through.
I've heard all the apologetics that get trotted out everytime this is mentioned, and it's frankly disgusting. The fact is the woman did something really dumb and hurt herself, then sued. She should have been laughed out of court. Instead, she and her lawyer got a huge payday, and each and every one of the rest of us, millions I have no doubt, who day in and day out bought the same coffee and had no problems because we used common sense, got screwed.
Wont evolution speed up as the organism becomes more complex ? It took over a billion years for a single cell to evolve into a complex organism. But it took only 30000 years for us to jump from cave paintings to space travel. Do such leaps happen in such evolutionary algorithms ?
You are confusing biological evolution with cultural development. While there are enough parallels that the latter is sometimes even referred to as "social evolution" or similar phrases, they are entirely different things. And yes, we can change our behaviour far more quickly through cultural development than through evolution - that's sort of the point to developing culture.
Also, there is no hard and fast rule that more complex organisms evolve faster - the trend would be the other way around. Mutations in simpler organisms are more likely to be viable, hence evolution tends to work much faster in simpler organisms.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people that *think* they've been educated on computer usage never learned to type to begin with? How many keyboards these days are so shoddily made they are effectively useless for those of us that do know how to use them, clearly designed for use by hunt-and-peckers only? How many computer programs just assume the current answers to those facts and dont bother to even consider exceptions to the rule in their design and implementation?
How many programmers cant be bothered to use the standard shortcut keys of the system(s) they target with their programs? Particularly in X, unfortunately, many even deliberately remove the ability of the user to *set* those keys to the standard they are used to? (Yes, I'm looking at you Gnome.)
Actually, it doesnt. Numbers are no problem at all, as long as you do them often enough to keep your fingers in practice. Special characters can be problematic, yes, but they dont have to be. Windows makes it bloody impossible, but with only a little practice I found I can type most special characters without ever breaking stride on a mac with a standard English keymap. (Assuming, of course, someone's already done the sensible thing and replaced the pretty but unusable little toy Apple pretends is a keyboard in the trash and gone to the trouble of fitting a decent one on the machine.) X keymappings are absolute horror to setup in my experience, but at least they're editable.
I dont see how you think pausing to think has any bearing on the subject. Sure, you pause to think, then you type, then you pause to think... pausing to grab the mouse and run it around the screen still adds time and more importantly it breaks the concentration on the subject matter, so this doesnt help the case for the 'do everything with the mouse' argument at all.
Absolutely true. However this, again, does very little for the argument. Just how often do you need to learn a new program? For most people it's relatively rare, you spend far more time *using* programs you know than learning new ones.
Furthermore it would be far more rare to need to learn new programs if we didnt keep fixing things that arent broken - i.e. replacing perfectly good, functional programs we already know how to use with new, buggy, bloated junk that gets pushed on us for marketing reasons. For most people that use a computer today, the thing is primarily a bloody typewriter. They spend most of their time in 'Word.' Yet every couple of years they have to get a new version of word, with a new learning curve and new and higher hardware requirements just to keep doing what they were doing all along - using the computer as a typewriter.
Finally, on a decently designed system, the commands that are 'common' to many programs should have system-wide standard keystrokes anyway. Even windows gets this concept - ctrl-s is always supposed to be save, ctrl-c copy, etc.
I
That's the one. I love how the site you found poo-poos the specs though. $expletive-string-here, this thing has hundreds of times the ram of machines that only a few decades ago were being used by dozens of scientific users doing real work concurrently, and a processor to easily match that, and it's not considered sufficient to read a news article and check your email on?
I expect sloppy programming and bloat on windows, it's quite disappointing how thoroughly it's taken over the linux world as well though.
You're obviously not a touch typist. That's absurd. A practiced touch typist on a decent keyboard can select a paragraph for manipulation in about the time it takes you to get your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, let alone actually using the mouse to select the paragraph and THEN move the hand back into home position.
This is only true for people who havent *learned* the keyboard shortcuts, or dont even touch-type to begin with. It was a rigged test and TOG, while usually good, shouldnt stoop so low as to imply otherwise.
Give me a system with keyboard shortcuts that I know well (i.e. have in muscle memory) and I'll blow away the fastest mouser in the world. I'm not even a particularly fast typist either.
Put me on a system with unfamiliar shortcut keys however and you will get results similar to what he's describing.
I saw a MIPS based netbook for about US $150 a week or two ago. Trying to remember where.
It strikes me that the best way to improve usability of X apps might be to send these little babies off to as many developers as you can find - and then preferably putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to try and use their apps on them.
The gun to the head part, of course, is tongue in cheek - but wow! seldom is such a bad idea so tempting.
It's actually more complicated than that, the state interferes in the economy in so many different ways simultaneously it can be difficult or impossible to determine in a specific case whether, on the whole, it's actually encouraging or discouraging a certain activity.
For instance, with solar hot water, the state here is offering a direct subsidy. It's also offering a very slightly less direct subsidy through a carbon credit scheme. Both of these effectively lower the price of the units, making the economic break-even point come sooner.
At the same time, however, it is holding the price of off-peak mains electricity artificially low, which amounts to subsidising electric water heaters as well, which has exactly the opposite effect.
It's also doing many other things that affect the equation, and it would be a sisyphian task to try and untangle all the different distortions which are going on at the same time.
Well, by 'these people' I intended to refer only to 'global warming enthusiasts' who also make certain public policy prescriptions on the basis of evidence that clearly does not properly support those prescriptions. Not anyone else. With that reading, I maintain that, yes, they are indeed full of it. I realise I wasnt very clear in the first post with that phrase, however.
As I said, I dont see any problem with the notion that our emissions affect climate - I dont consider that controversial at all. But there is a HUGE set of intervening steps between that and justifying any prescriptions.
This is very true. It is also something I believe I stated in other words in my own post. Perhaps again I was less clear than I would wish.
Only to the extent of being able to spot certain grosser errors. I'm sure there would be many errors that could be made in the more obscure corners of the field that would fly right by me. So this means that if I see a clear logical error that is NOT over my head, I'm supposed to just trust the supposed expert that made it? I dont think so. Quite the opposite. If he makes a mistake I can catch that's just more reason to think he's making plenty of others I can't.
I didnt claim any such 'magical insight' and you know it.
Are you really claiming that only someone with specialised experience in physics is qualified to point out errors in the arithmetic in a physics paper? So if A is a physicist and B is a mathematician, and B says A's paper makes an error in a given calculation, you're going to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore him until a qualified physicist makes the same observation? That's the modus operandi of a priesthood or a beaureacracy, not of a scientist.
A fundamental characteristic of science is that it relies on logic. Logical errors in ANY field can be fatal to claims which rely on them.
If the body of 'knowledge' you call science is characterised by testing propositions for truth by polling workers in a certain field on their opinion, rather than by rigorously testing the logical consequences of those propositions against empirical data, it is neither scientific nor is it knowledge.
Not just a very unscientific statement, but in fact an actively anti-scientific statement. Just because you get paid to work in a field clearly does not ensure that you do that work in a scientifically valid and meaningful way. In fact, if anything, the opposite argument can be made, and clearly applies in some cases. Funding sources may not, quite often do not, understand, or care, about scientific rigor.
No it isnt.
Which is why that phrase is one which only tends to come out of the mouths of people who can't distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey.'
No more than I think that the ones paid by governments and environmental cultists will be.
So to evaluate the arguments one must go further than looking at the fact that research takes money and the provenance of a researchers budget tends to correlate with their opinion on the issue. You have to take a look at the actual scientific merits of the work done.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
The endless repetition of fallacious arguments such as those referencing 'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not, is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method) by those on one side in particular stands out like a sore thumb. So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists. A real scientist in such a situation has no option but to go to the private corporations for funding or retire from the field entirely.
This doesnt mean either side is wrong. If you have multiple funding sources with multiple agendas, each is naturally going to tend to fund researchers that tend to support their agenda. The researchers themselves, if they are good scientists, will simply do the research properly and if it displeases their funding source they'll go to a different source who DID like their results for their next grant - this is much easier said than done, it's inconvenient at best, and runs the risk of failing and leaving the scientist and her family in deep difficulty, but still, if you want to be a scientist that's what you have to do.
If they're NOT good scientists, they'll just play ball and make sure that their reports favour the right side to avoid the issue. To see which one is happening in any individual case, there's no substitute for a critical review of the work itself. Simply correlating results with funding sources doesnt mean anything.
Frankly I dont doubt that human pollution is having and will continue to have consequences on the climate of the planet - I cant think of anyone that does. But that fact tells us nothing about whether the affect is large or small, beneficial or damaging, let alone what, if any, actions would actually moderate or reverse the affects (assuming that doing so is desirable.) Despite that global warming enthusiasts are constantly making policy prescriptions which, just coincidentally, always wind up being that we should do what environmental cultists have always wanted to do for their own religious reasons.
The logical conclusion is that these people are full of %*!&, particularly when they claim to be scientists (to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title,) and if they happen to be getting anything right in their predictions at all, it's an accident.
But it is not rational or effective to pursue the good of the many by doing evil to the few.
Even if that can technically 'work' in the short term, in the long term the effect is to the detriment of the many as well as the few.
You really have to distinguish between two values of 'works.'
The free-market, in rare cases where it's allowed to function, works great in long-term, aggregate measures. It doesnt (nothing can) magically solve all problems immediately and turn the world into a utopia.
In a free-market if demand for electricity outpaces supply, the price of electricity increases, which spurs effort in a number of directions at once - more incentive to build new power plants, more incentive to increase the efficiency of current ones, more incentive to eliminate unecessary usage, and more incentive to develop alternatives.
In this manner the short term 'failures' are effectively harnessed to drive long-term success.
The alternative is a system where *visible* short term failures are sometimes avoided, which seems on the surface to be a good thing. However when you consider that this breaks the feedback loop that allows a market to adapt to constantly changing situations, it starts to look much more sinister.
The narrowly selfish 'consumer' is just happy he experiences no blackout and a low power bill. The politician is happy because the first guy is happy which means re-election. But our future, and that of our children and grandchildren and so on, is inevitably degraded as the price of that 'success.'
You have a very good point.
Now if you want to know *why* this is so, look to the EPA and 'Environmental Protection' legislation in general. It's not designed to protect the environment, but to protect 'important' polluters and their customers.
Nah, the problem is that people are taught to be stupid. The usage is hardly hidden - and if people in general werent so thoroughly trained to act like idiot 'consumers' it would be much less hidden, for the simple reason that manufacturers that attempted to hide it would just find no one wants to buy their crap.
Of course it's a complicated issue and I'm simplifying, but the key here really is the so-called 'public education' system. This is the root cause of issue after issue, and each supposed solution that avoids confronting that fact just winds up accellerating the dumbing down process.
What you suggest is why democracy is the worst form of government ever devised. The tyranny of the majority can be just as bad as any other tyranny. This is why the US founding fathers, for instance, REJECTED democracy and constructed a federation of democratic republics instead, where the will of the majority is (supposed to be) severely limited by the law to protect individual liberty.
Which is exactly why I stated clearly this was just a small piece of the difference, although if you think it through right most of the rest follows from it. "The difference between a GUI and a window manager" - well, sort of, except youre poisoning the well right off by describing a desktop shell as a 'GUI' as if there were no other GUIs which is utter nonsense. The underlying thought with a desktop shell is that one size fits all. This is also utter nonsense. The underlying thought to a Workstation is power and specialisation - not that the underlying software cant be adapted for many different tasks, of course. But it is intended to be *adapted* and customised for a tasks or a set of tasks that take place at a given workstation. It doesnt need to carry the cruft for a million other applications which wont be used, and it doesnt need a genericised GUI based on a desktop metaphor which gets in the way as often as it helps. It's actually BETTER to have a noticeably different form of GUI on unlike workstations - each adapted to its own tasks.
I am not Mr Beckerman either, but in this sort of situation there clearly cannot be a 'reasonable settlment' (sic) with such scoundrels less than dismissal with prejudice, payment of all defendents expenses, and a public apology. Certainly any settlement that imposed a gag order on such a defendent coud never be described as 'reasonable.'
In regards to your own corporate clients, if the situations really are as similar as you describe, the same would apply to them. What they're doing is paying hush money to cover up their wrongdoing, and relying on your technical skill to keep them from justice when they run into a defendent who cant be bribed.
There's a lot, more things than I have time, even if I had it all thought out for explanation which I dont, but I'll try to give you a brief clarification.
A 'desktop' has that thing called a 'desktop' obviously, and it tends to get cluttered with icons, a place where work gets dumped on top of work until no one can find anything.
A workstation, on the other hand, has no 'desktop.' It has no 'desktop icons.' There is no clutter. Where those used to a desktop machine think they see a desktop, but wonder why it's so clean and uncluttered - that's no desktop. That's the root window.
It's just an entirely different metaphor.
But, in point of fact, no one has ever died because of teasing.
This girl died because she strung up a noose and hung herself in her closet.
The latter can only morph into the prior by virtue of huge doses of mush-headed, addle-brained politically correct brain rot.
They would like you to believe this, however it's nonsense. Federal subsidies for this were easily enough to cover initial outlays, and customer fees are more than sufficient to cover maintainence. Where I used to live in the rural US (as recently as three years ago, and I'm still in contact with family members there - the situation has not changed) our phone service was provided by a small non-profit cooperative, run on a shoestring and serving an irregularly shaped area whose borders were determined by the baby bell - they just chopped out the bits that supposedly werent profitable enough for them to serve and sold them off. That cooperative runs year after year, with better line maintainence and better customer service than is received in the more profitable areas served by major companies, lower line costs, and after all that they even send out refunds (they call them dividends) many years as well. Just as examples, we got DSL 18 miles from the nearest town before it was available many places inside that town (served by the baby bell,) at ~ the same price with noticeably better ISP services attached, and despite the relatively large amount of wire and low number of subscribers, our service was restored after a major storm as fast or faster than the town was.
This clearly shows the area *could* be served profitably. Why wont the for-profit telcos do this? Why do they whine that they would lose money? Because, similiarly to politicians who project a 20% budget increase, then pass an 18% increase instead, and claim to have cut the budget by 10% as a result, these guys use numbers in a different way than we do. While to a reasonable person the break-even point is defined as the point where income exceeds expenses, and the excess is considered profit, these guys start with a fat profit margin that decades of government subsidies and corporate welfare programs have lead them to be accustomed to, and consider anything below that a "loss." In their mind, if they're used to making a 25% profit and due to changing conditions they only manage 20%, this counts as a loss of 20%!
I've been using Linux since '93 or '94, my primary machine for several years now has been a Mac, and I recommend and support Macs heavily.
That said, your line about a 'better unix' is just trash. Linux is a much better *nix, in just about every way. The Macs are great for providing a fairly sane and stable system in a package with well-supported hardware and a UI that 'joe and gramma' can use without too much handholding, but at the command line level it's missing a lot of stuff that on any other *nix system would be taken for granted - it's clunky and frankly just not intended to be used that way.
At the GUI level it's also missing a lot of basic functions that Linux had in '94.
That said, the 'desktop' is just the wrong target from square one IMOP. It's shooting far too low. The 'desktop' is a very poor metaphor for a computer system, particularly one intended to do anything serious. It's an import from the world of Mac and Windows, and it's a very tempting target for those that for some reason are fixated on 'bringing linux to the masses' since it's what those masses already been conditioned to seek, but it's just an abominable substitute for a workstation. That metaphor is native to *nix systems, no harder (indeed by every indication easier) for the uninitiated to learn, and far more powerful and useful to those familiar with it.
IMOP 'linux to the masses' along with the 'desktop' mentality it encourages are bass ackwards to begin with. It all too often leads to the import of bad design, the copying of bad implementation, the cloning of an utterly inferior system in the pursuit of popularity.
Linux became popular because it did a good job, not because it provided a free clone of the worst software on the market. Abandoning the first path for the second may bring a little short-term popularity, but it may not - and even if it does it's hardly worth the price of losing our own, far superior, metaphors and mannerisms.
Thanks for demonstrating your ability to respond without even reading the post you're responding to. Now if only slashdot would expand the allowance for 'foe' listing I'd have one less insincere poster cluttering up the articles I read with pre-written propaganda.
Yes, of course. Doh. How do you make coffee? You boil water! Knock knock, anyone home? Fresh coffee is too hot to drink. Learning to uncover it and let it cool slightly before you drink it, and to take care with the first few drinks in particular to notice the temperature and if necessary back off and let it cool another couple degrees isn't rocket science, it's basic common sense.
At the time this occured I was working an early job and it was my habit to get a hot coffee at the drivethrough each day on my way to work. It came in a cup with cover and carrier and I would put it in its place, make sure it was stable, and then continue on my morning commute. By the time I got on down the road to the point where I stopped the car and then opened my coffee, it had cooled to just the perfect temperature to drink. And all was well.
Then this idiotic woman orders hot coffee, pours it down her pants, and sits there for a minute and a half to make sure her skin is seriously damaged, and makes bank on it. As a consequence, I and everyone else in the country suddenly found that, not just the chain that got sued, but every drive-through, would no longer serve fresh hot coffee, but instead could offer only pre-cooled coffee that was drinkable immediately.
If I had time to drink it immediately I wouldnt be in the drive-through.
I've heard all the apologetics that get trotted out everytime this is mentioned, and it's frankly disgusting. The fact is the woman did something really dumb and hurt herself, then sued. She should have been laughed out of court. Instead, she and her lawyer got a huge payday, and each and every one of the rest of us, millions I have no doubt, who day in and day out bought the same coffee and had no problems because we used common sense, got screwed.
Hear hear! I'm so sick of the incessant and ludicrous attempts to defend that nonsense.
You are confusing biological evolution with cultural development. While there are enough parallels that the latter is sometimes even referred to as "social evolution" or similar phrases, they are entirely different things. And yes, we can change our behaviour far more quickly through cultural development than through evolution - that's sort of the point to developing culture.
Also, there is no hard and fast rule that more complex organisms evolve faster - the trend would be the other way around. Mutations in simpler organisms are more likely to be viable, hence evolution tends to work much faster in simpler organisms.