This is mature old technology that would actually achieve the stated goal at a reasonable cost with little to no opportunity for abuse, so of course no one in government is going to seriously consider the option.
Making all the cars talk to each other would cost far more (lots of opportunities for the well-connected to make their next billion here) and open up nearly endless opportunities for abuse, while most likely not actually solving the problem (so that next year we can make the well-connected even more money by attempting to solve it again.) From a government perspective, that plan is so superior the former no one will even think twice.
For the same reason every attempt at investigating this at the time turned into career (if not literal) suicide and went nowhere. Because if you are going to arrest anyone, you have to investigate, and if you investigate, you have to follow leads, and if you follow leads, you will wind up in the 'Oval Office.'
Which has enough juice to quash your investigation and make your life very uncomfortable for trying.
Well if you have some who are treated fairly, and others who are 'horror stories' in your own words then clearly their average pay is below the market value of their labor even if some of them do ok. Which is exactly what we should expect.
The difference between an H1B worker and his first cousin from the same town who has a green card is that the latter can probably go get a job with your competitor if the notion strikes him, while the H1B guy is more firmly under your control. It's reminiscent of indentured servitude and offensive IMOP. They should be abolished entirely and the people that are here on them already should be given residency and work permits for the duration of their previously scheduled stay. If there is need for more foreign workers expand the availability of work permits to accomodate that. But let them compete on a level playing field with their full human rights instead of making them second-class non-citizens.
"I don't know if it is justified. But enough people have taken that position, that we need to at least acknowledge, that there is a group of people with that opinion."
The top managers at a lot of these companies think this way, because they would rather not have to compete to retain employees, but there is no coherent reason anyone else would take this view other than simple brown-nosing the boss.
"That Hideki Moronuki fellow doesn't know what he's talking about: at least in the American case, deer are overpopulated to the point of becoming a pest (mostly because their natural predators, e.g. wolves, are endangered)"
It may be that you as well are missing some information. American deer are plentiful not only because their natural predators got beat back, but in large part because of conservation efforts by hunters all around the country that has preserved plenty of natural habitat for them to flourish in. This is the meaning of 'conservation' - we are not trying to turn the world into a petting zoo, we like to eat venison.
The whaling treaty was sold to the Japanese (and Norwegians) as being about the same sort of conservation - for whales. Over-whaling under tragedy-of-the-commons conditions had reduced whale stocks to dangerously low levels for many species, and it was desperately needed.
Today, several commercially useful species have recovered populations levels to the point where whaling should be permitted to resume. And on the demand side, well demand is deeply in the toilet. Even if whaling were permitted with no restrictions starting tomorrow demand is so low it might not even be a problem. The moratorium on harvest of the specific species the Japanese have been taking should beyond any doubt have ended many years ago.
Animal-rights activists in countries where whale-meat is not considered something civilized people eat have seized on it as a wedge issue, and successfully blocked all efforts to acknowledge the fact officially, leaving the Japanese to exploit the scientific exemption to allow their people to do what the international body should have authorized long ago. This is the context you appear to be missing.
The courts decision may well result in Japan withdrawing from the whaling treaty entirely. A lot of coherent hatred would be directed at them around the world for this, but in truth it would probably be their most reasonable option.
Might I suggest setting your browser to ignore it?
Personally I have my browser set to ignore nearly everything a web server hands it these days. Refreshes, ecmascript, plugins - all the crap that makes the web suck.
Which is just a cheap way of smuggling the old concept of the soul in with a dash of new sciency sounding paint. But in fact Heisenburgs principle applies the same to living and non-living matter.
Kind of making my point. Without knowing what 'bitch' actually means, without the slightest hint of understanding of the denotation, you still get the connotation loud and clear.
This works, and it's exactly the way the UT is supposed to work. But all the qualities that supposedly set the language apart, and beyond the reach of the UT, are in fact universal qualities shared with every language.
It's much much worse than you say though. *IF* the basic idea behind the transporter were workable, then follow the dominoes. We scan you, then destroy you, then re-assemble you at a remote location. It's not really transport, we just murdered you and dropped a close - a close that is completely up to date on your growth and memories so maybe he doesnt mind but still.
And beyond that philosophical conundrum, how about a practical one. If this really worked, then we could duplicate people at will. Just eliminate the murder phase and otherwise it's exactly like a standard transport! How many ST plot lines would disintegrate with this ability? Need physicists? Just put the best man you have into the transporter and we will make 100 more just like him! They even come out with all the education and experience he has collected.
If transporters worked as advertised, that would be a massive, paradigm shifting discovery, and a lot of things would be different. Things that are pointedly NOT different in ST.
"Language is glossed over in the whole series. For a single episode they decided to address that one elephant in the room, and they did it well and in a memorable way."
OK, so in your view this was the only good episode of the entire run?
Because as I see it, either we accept your premise, call this a good episode, and call every single other episode trash, or... we reject your premise, accept the UT as a given, and call this one episode trash.
All the supposed reasons why the UT would fail here - would have made it fail many times before.
Some of them, mind you, are good reasons. Good reasons to doubt that a 'universal translator' might ever be invented, that is.
But once you swallow the UT itself, the idea that this one language resists it makes absolutely no sense.
"You're such a Samantha?" We say all the time "You're such a bitch" and it's the same case. To know what it connotes you have to know not just the denotations of the words and the place of dogs in our culture, you have to know something of their behaviour, you really need lots of background to fully understand the nature of the insult. But without that background you can still figure out it's a bad thing to call someone just from context. The UT supposedly works by teasing out those contextual clues to connotation even when the denotation is unknowable - which makes sense, that is how it would have to be done.
But if so, that leaves us without even the slightest suggestion as to why it would not work in this case. All the rationales presented are false on their face.
"However, if people did choose to ignore it, that would be completely OK."
Uh, no. It would be far from ok.
"Developers fix what interests them, perhaps because they need it themselves or because a friend needs it."
Pretty sure some of those developers are paid, and this crap doesnt work for them. Nor for the project as a whole. Sure, you do what interests you. But if you are adding features and neglecting critical bugs you suck, and need to go back to McDonalds.
"Bug fixes often take 1-2 years even for high priority bugs."
If true, that is absolutely pathetic, and makes the more forlorn parts of TFA sound much more understandable.
"To expect a bug fix after three months is totally unreasonable."
Oh bullshit. This is a bug that was introduced with a known commit and can easily be fixed by simply backing out that change. A change that should have been rejected immediately in the first place. What's totally unreasonable is to introduce a bug in critical system architecture and then wait months to fix it. If that's how you work your commit privileges need revoked. And that would arguably still be true if it were some provincial project no one cared about.
We are talking about x.org here. There is no excuse.
If this were a bug that only affected some unnecessary eye-candy or 'feature' then I would agree with you.
A certain amount of gratitude is certainly due for a free product, but on the other hand this is a bug affecting critical system functionality which is not visible to the majority of users, and for some reason this is exactly the sort of bug that free software projects have a distressing tendency to ignore. So I think it's appropriate to ask the question if only to raise awareness. It may be that none of the Xorg core use these features and they simply are not aware of how critical they are.
In this case I gather it's been three months so it's appropriate to be asking questions. Not appropriate to be abusive towards the developers, but TFA was not doing that.
Distros downstream choose when to rev and as long as xorg gets it fixed before downstream revs then it should cause no one any problem. If you are using a bleeding edge distro that merges critical software with critical bugs and does not see the problem, I would recommend changing distros.
"a world where gays are not prosecuted and are not discriminated any more"
Running this guy out of town on a rail for his political beliefs is not going to bring that world closer. Quite the opposite.
Everyone in this story looks bad. It sounds like the organization is packed from top to bottom with people that are far too worried about lifestyle and office politics to have the time for software engineering.
No, there are at least 6 others, and that is not counting the ones who are drawing a paycheck from canonical.
"Ubuntu is the distro that got me to switch from Win 7 to Linux (still have to keep Win 7 around for one or two things though). I really don't understand all the hate other than the stupid Amazon search lens thing (which I disabled). My best guess is that it might be because I'm a new convert to Linux rather than a long time user."
Yes, that's likely to have a lot to do with it. Coming over from the commercial world late you are used to being treated in exactly the ways that the early adopters found so bitterly objectionable.
Accepting that all software sucks, as long as what you had before sucked a little less than what you have now, you will be happy. So Win8 -> Ubuntu =:)
"Considering that a.deb is nothing more than a zip file with scripts that you can open with most archive softwares I would say that it's vastly different."
Apparently you dont know what a windows.cab file is.
However it is different, because Windows has never really been a platform that claimed to respect user freedom.
I will disagree with those that say there is no place for it.
I was actually hopeful when Shuttleworth first got into the OS business he would provide a much needed benevolent-dictator function in exactly this way. And he's tried to. But I am afraid they have bungled it so badly and often his credibility is shot.
What's he actually produced? A distro with advertising, and a UI even more broken than is typical.
"I didn't use stacker, but Norton Utilities was in my toolkit since I got my first personal computer loaded with DOS 3.6"
Funny to think how long ago it was now. Peter Norton taught me x86 programming, via a book. By the end of that one he had walked you through implementing DiskEdit piece by piece.
Stacker was an odd one, I hated it but I loved it. Made recovering data with diskedit impossible, of course, and it was fiddly and tended to fail (though DriveSpace was much worse.) But at the same time there were applications where it could allow you to do the impossible performance-wise. Apps that were disk/IO-bound running on machines with under-utilized CPUs could see massive speedups. So in general I avoided it like the plague but on certain machines it was key.
The lineage of your DR-Novell-Caldera DOS was very interesting too. IIRC it's CP/M with DOS compatibility. There was a lawsuit MS lost or settled about MS-DOS being an unauthorized rip of CP/M, and DR got access to MS DOS code to permit compatibility in perpetuity. IIRC this was one of the earliest driving motivations at MS to get rid of DOS and promote Windows into a standalone OS.
The actual 5.0 sucked. The bugfix was 5.0a though, and that's probably what you remember.
5.0a was, IMHO, the best MS-DOS ever released. All the core functionality present, reasonably mature and field tested, well documented. I had a book on my desk that gave the syntax for every documented function, and another one that gave all the undocumented ones that were known outside of MS as well. 6.x mostly added an inferior copy of the Norton Utilities, QEMM, and Stacker products that ran wonderfully on 5.0a, along with a few bugs. As a marketing strategy it achieved its goal, killing off the competing products, but from a user and administrators point of view I preferred to avoid it.
MS did not release another reasonably mature OS until Windows 98SE, which true to form they replaced with the bug-ridden and defective by design Windows ME, for marketing reasons.
"I despise junk "alternative" medicine, but I'm not sure why you were modded troll."
Because fundamentalist materialists are just as intolerant and intolerable as fundamentalists of other stripes.
"The placebo effect is overblown, and exaggerated by many a cool story, but it does exist to some limited extent."
You should read some actual science instead of making assumptions. Wampold and Minami have written several interesting articles on the subject, for instance.
"The problem is most alternative medicine claims to cure all sorts of actual physical ailments that they can't cure."
Really? Citation needed, as they say.
I don't have any solid data but certainly my experience is that the ones I have spoken with are pretty careful to avoid claiming they can actually cure anything. Again, you have to really get more specific instead of slamming dozens of different groups under one big broad brush.
While what we call medicine includes 'curing disease' to act like that is the only thing it encompasses is just out of touch. Most of the time doctors do not cure anything either. They prescribe treatments to control symptoms. If your symptom is back pain and other assorted ailments which make sense as side effects of being in constant pain, it's hardly mind boggling to think that chiropractic manipulations might be helpful, for example. Putting that together with morons that claim to heal cancer with quartz crystals and pretending there is no difference between the two is a fundamentally dishonest debating tactic.
Slashdot Mirror
This is mature old technology that would actually achieve the stated goal at a reasonable cost with little to no opportunity for abuse, so of course no one in government is going to seriously consider the option.
Making all the cars talk to each other would cost far more (lots of opportunities for the well-connected to make their next billion here) and open up nearly endless opportunities for abuse, while most likely not actually solving the problem (so that next year we can make the well-connected even more money by attempting to solve it again.) From a government perspective, that plan is so superior the former no one will even think twice.
For the same reason every attempt at investigating this at the time turned into career (if not literal) suicide and went nowhere. Because if you are going to arrest anyone, you have to investigate, and if you investigate, you have to follow leads, and if you follow leads, you will wind up in the 'Oval Office.'
Which has enough juice to quash your investigation and make your life very uncomfortable for trying.
Well if you have some who are treated fairly, and others who are 'horror stories' in your own words then clearly their average pay is below the market value of their labor even if some of them do ok. Which is exactly what we should expect.
The difference between an H1B worker and his first cousin from the same town who has a green card is that the latter can probably go get a job with your competitor if the notion strikes him, while the H1B guy is more firmly under your control. It's reminiscent of indentured servitude and offensive IMOP. They should be abolished entirely and the people that are here on them already should be given residency and work permits for the duration of their previously scheduled stay. If there is need for more foreign workers expand the availability of work permits to accomodate that. But let them compete on a level playing field with their full human rights instead of making them second-class non-citizens.
"I don't know if it is justified. But enough people have taken that position, that we need to at least acknowledge, that there is a group of people with that opinion."
The top managers at a lot of these companies think this way, because they would rather not have to compete to retain employees, but there is no coherent reason anyone else would take this view other than simple brown-nosing the boss.
"That Hideki Moronuki fellow doesn't know what he's talking about: at least in the American case, deer are overpopulated to the point of becoming a pest (mostly because their natural predators, e.g. wolves, are endangered)"
It may be that you as well are missing some information. American deer are plentiful not only because their natural predators got beat back, but in large part because of conservation efforts by hunters all around the country that has preserved plenty of natural habitat for them to flourish in. This is the meaning of 'conservation' - we are not trying to turn the world into a petting zoo, we like to eat venison.
The whaling treaty was sold to the Japanese (and Norwegians) as being about the same sort of conservation - for whales. Over-whaling under tragedy-of-the-commons conditions had reduced whale stocks to dangerously low levels for many species, and it was desperately needed.
Today, several commercially useful species have recovered populations levels to the point where whaling should be permitted to resume. And on the demand side, well demand is deeply in the toilet. Even if whaling were permitted with no restrictions starting tomorrow demand is so low it might not even be a problem. The moratorium on harvest of the specific species the Japanese have been taking should beyond any doubt have ended many years ago.
Animal-rights activists in countries where whale-meat is not considered something civilized people eat have seized on it as a wedge issue, and successfully blocked all efforts to acknowledge the fact officially, leaving the Japanese to exploit the scientific exemption to allow their people to do what the international body should have authorized long ago. This is the context you appear to be missing.
The courts decision may well result in Japan withdrawing from the whaling treaty entirely. A lot of coherent hatred would be directed at them around the world for this, but in truth it would probably be their most reasonable option.
Might I suggest setting your browser to ignore it?
Personally I have my browser set to ignore nearly everything a web server hands it these days. Refreshes, ecmascript, plugins - all the crap that makes the web suck.
Which is just a cheap way of smuggling the old concept of the soul in with a dash of new sciency sounding paint. But in fact Heisenburgs principle applies the same to living and non-living matter.
Sure, that might be a problem.
It's a problem you get to after the initial tech is set and accepted. Yet not a problem that ST ever addressed. See what I am getting at yet?
Kind of making my point. Without knowing what 'bitch' actually means, without the slightest hint of understanding of the denotation, you still get the connotation loud and clear.
This works, and it's exactly the way the UT is supposed to work. But all the qualities that supposedly set the language apart, and beyond the reach of the UT, are in fact universal qualities shared with every language.
It's much much worse than you say though. *IF* the basic idea behind the transporter were workable, then follow the dominoes. We scan you, then destroy you, then re-assemble you at a remote location. It's not really transport, we just murdered you and dropped a close - a close that is completely up to date on your growth and memories so maybe he doesnt mind but still.
And beyond that philosophical conundrum, how about a practical one. If this really worked, then we could duplicate people at will. Just eliminate the murder phase and otherwise it's exactly like a standard transport! How many ST plot lines would disintegrate with this ability? Need physicists? Just put the best man you have into the transporter and we will make 100 more just like him! They even come out with all the education and experience he has collected.
If transporters worked as advertised, that would be a massive, paradigm shifting discovery, and a lot of things would be different. Things that are pointedly NOT different in ST.
"Language is glossed over in the whole series. For a single episode they decided to address that one elephant in the room, and they did it well and in a memorable way."
OK, so in your view this was the only good episode of the entire run?
Because as I see it, either we accept your premise, call this a good episode, and call every single other episode trash, or... we reject your premise, accept the UT as a given, and call this one episode trash.
I think YOU missed the point.
All the supposed reasons why the UT would fail here - would have made it fail many times before.
Some of them, mind you, are good reasons. Good reasons to doubt that a 'universal translator' might ever be invented, that is.
But once you swallow the UT itself, the idea that this one language resists it makes absolutely no sense.
"You're such a Samantha?" We say all the time "You're such a bitch" and it's the same case. To know what it connotes you have to know not just the denotations of the words and the place of dogs in our culture, you have to know something of their behaviour, you really need lots of background to fully understand the nature of the insult. But without that background you can still figure out it's a bad thing to call someone just from context. The UT supposedly works by teasing out those contextual clues to connotation even when the denotation is unknowable - which makes sense, that is how it would have to be done.
But if so, that leaves us without even the slightest suggestion as to why it would not work in this case. All the rationales presented are false on their face.
"However, if people did choose to ignore it, that would be completely OK."
Uh, no. It would be far from ok.
"Developers fix what interests them, perhaps because they need it themselves or because a friend needs it."
Pretty sure some of those developers are paid, and this crap doesnt work for them. Nor for the project as a whole. Sure, you do what interests you. But if you are adding features and neglecting critical bugs you suck, and need to go back to McDonalds.
"Bug fixes often take 1-2 years even for high priority bugs."
If true, that is absolutely pathetic, and makes the more forlorn parts of TFA sound much more understandable.
"To expect a bug fix after three months is totally unreasonable."
Oh bullshit. This is a bug that was introduced with a known commit and can easily be fixed by simply backing out that change. A change that should have been rejected immediately in the first place. What's totally unreasonable is to introduce a bug in critical system architecture and then wait months to fix it. If that's how you work your commit privileges need revoked. And that would arguably still be true if it were some provincial project no one cared about.
We are talking about x.org here. There is no excuse.
"Spy on everyone, so you won't be surprised when friends become enemies."
Yes, spy on your friends, that way you can *guarantee* they will eventually become enemies No more surprises!
Yeah, but there is a downside here, can you see it?
Spying on a nation we are at war with? Spying on their military capabilities? Ok, that would be part of their job description.
Spying on allied nations? Commercial and political espionage? Not the same thing. Not at all.
Shocked? Not I, not anymore. But folks that still believe the state can do what it's told, not so much.
If this were a bug that only affected some unnecessary eye-candy or 'feature' then I would agree with you.
A certain amount of gratitude is certainly due for a free product, but on the other hand this is a bug affecting critical system functionality which is not visible to the majority of users, and for some reason this is exactly the sort of bug that free software projects have a distressing tendency to ignore. So I think it's appropriate to ask the question if only to raise awareness. It may be that none of the Xorg core use these features and they simply are not aware of how critical they are.
In this case I gather it's been three months so it's appropriate to be asking questions. Not appropriate to be abusive towards the developers, but TFA was not doing that.
Distros downstream choose when to rev and as long as xorg gets it fixed before downstream revs then it should cause no one any problem. If you are using a bleeding edge distro that merges critical software with critical bugs and does not see the problem, I would recommend changing distros.
"a world where gays are not prosecuted and are not discriminated any more"
Running this guy out of town on a rail for his political beliefs is not going to bring that world closer. Quite the opposite.
Everyone in this story looks bad. It sounds like the organization is packed from top to bottom with people that are far too worried about lifestyle and office politics to have the time for software engineering.
"Am I the only one who LIKES Unity?"
:)
:((
No, there are at least 6 others, and that is not counting the ones who are drawing a paycheck from canonical.
"Ubuntu is the distro that got me to switch from Win 7 to Linux (still have to keep Win 7 around for one or two things though). I really don't understand all the hate other than the stupid Amazon search lens thing (which I disabled). My best guess is that it might be because I'm a new convert to Linux rather than a long time user."
Yes, that's likely to have a lot to do with it. Coming over from the commercial world late you are used to being treated in exactly the ways that the early adopters found so bitterly objectionable.
Accepting that all software sucks, as long as what you had before sucked a little less than what you have now, you will be happy. So Win8 -> Ubuntu =
On the other hand
Slackware -> Ubuntu =
"Considering that a .deb is nothing more than a zip file with scripts that you can open with most archive softwares I would say that it's vastly different."
.cab file is.
Apparently you dont know what a windows
However it is different, because Windows has never really been a platform that claimed to respect user freedom.
I will disagree with those that say there is no place for it.
I was actually hopeful when Shuttleworth first got into the OS business he would provide a much needed benevolent-dictator function in exactly this way. And he's tried to. But I am afraid they have bungled it so badly and often his credibility is shot.
What's he actually produced? A distro with advertising, and a UI even more broken than is typical.
Yeah, I remember dosshell. Used it a couple times in a pinch but I greatly preferred Xtree.
"I didn't use stacker, but Norton Utilities was in my toolkit since I got my first personal computer loaded with DOS 3.6"
Funny to think how long ago it was now. Peter Norton taught me x86 programming, via a book. By the end of that one he had walked you through implementing DiskEdit piece by piece.
Stacker was an odd one, I hated it but I loved it. Made recovering data with diskedit impossible, of course, and it was fiddly and tended to fail (though DriveSpace was much worse.) But at the same time there were applications where it could allow you to do the impossible performance-wise. Apps that were disk/IO-bound running on machines with under-utilized CPUs could see massive speedups. So in general I avoided it like the plague but on certain machines it was key.
The lineage of your DR-Novell-Caldera DOS was very interesting too. IIRC it's CP/M with DOS compatibility. There was a lawsuit MS lost or settled about MS-DOS being an unauthorized rip of CP/M, and DR got access to MS DOS code to permit compatibility in perpetuity. IIRC this was one of the earliest driving motivations at MS to get rid of DOS and promote Windows into a standalone OS.
Surely FreeDoS is ready by now though, right?
"5.0 (( don't remember any bugixes for that one)"
The actual 5.0 sucked. The bugfix was 5.0a though, and that's probably what you remember.
5.0a was, IMHO, the best MS-DOS ever released. All the core functionality present, reasonably mature and field tested, well documented. I had a book on my desk that gave the syntax for every documented function, and another one that gave all the undocumented ones that were known outside of MS as well. 6.x mostly added an inferior copy of the Norton Utilities, QEMM, and Stacker products that ran wonderfully on 5.0a, along with a few bugs. As a marketing strategy it achieved its goal, killing off the competing products, but from a user and administrators point of view I preferred to avoid it.
MS did not release another reasonably mature OS until Windows 98SE, which true to form they replaced with the bug-ridden and defective by design Windows ME, for marketing reasons.
"I despise junk "alternative" medicine, but I'm not sure why you were modded troll."
Because fundamentalist materialists are just as intolerant and intolerable as fundamentalists of other stripes.
"The placebo effect is overblown, and exaggerated by many a cool story, but it does exist to some limited extent."
You should read some actual science instead of making assumptions. Wampold and Minami have written several interesting articles on the subject, for instance.
"The problem is most alternative medicine claims to cure all sorts of actual physical ailments that they can't cure."
Really? Citation needed, as they say.
I don't have any solid data but certainly my experience is that the ones I have spoken with are pretty careful to avoid claiming they can actually cure anything. Again, you have to really get more specific instead of slamming dozens of different groups under one big broad brush.
While what we call medicine includes 'curing disease' to act like that is the only thing it encompasses is just out of touch. Most of the time doctors do not cure anything either. They prescribe treatments to control symptoms. If your symptom is back pain and other assorted ailments which make sense as side effects of being in constant pain, it's hardly mind boggling to think that chiropractic manipulations might be helpful, for example. Putting that together with morons that claim to heal cancer with quartz crystals and pretending there is no difference between the two is a fundamentally dishonest debating tactic.
"So would you be in favor of Tic Tac aggressively marketing their candies as a cure for cancer? "
No. Have you quit beating your wife yet?
FFS quit making stuff up.