Summary: you put a computer somewhere in rural India. Kids, who don't know much of english, flock to it and learn on their own how to use it; when you come back later, they say "We need a faster CPU and a better mouse."
In my experience, kids want to learn. At age three, you have to try hard to make them stop asking "why?" about almost everything. If they have a sliver of interest, they will pick up reading with a wee bit of parent assistance (as I did, FWIW) before school. As they grow up and become adolescents and eventually adults, they will acquire a passion and develop their skills in it, as I'm convinced most people here have done. When they do, you encourage them and lend them a helping hand if (and only if!) they ask for it.
Or, you send them to school (or rather, you don't resist the people who pressure them to go there), and the school system will drain the curiousity out of them and make certain they won't later acquire a passion for much of what's taught in there.
Ask yourself: did you become fascinated by mathematics, programming, astronomy, biotechnology, music or law (just to name some of the stated passions of slashdotters) because you were forced to study it in school? Did you become good at it because you were forced to study it?
In the study of logic (a part of both computer science and philosophy) it is trivial to show that one cannot prove a negative.
If we take "a negative" to mean a statement on the form "not exists x: P(x)" for some predicate P, what you're saying is that you can prove "not exists V: is_proof_of(V, 'not exists x: P(x)')".
In order words, "You can't prove a negative" _is_ a negative: it's the statement that for each negative, there isn't a proof of it. So proving that you can't prove a negative is a contradiction.
(Maybe that takes second-order rather than first-order predicates, and I don't know _all_ of logic, so take it with a grain of random password padding data)
A few browsers you may want to investigate further, if you feel Internet Firechrome Safoperari is a decent but slightly 'meh' browser:
w3m, links, links2, elinks, w3-mode, w3m-mode, surfraw: command line goodness. Especially the Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Against WWW (SURFRAW), how's that for an acronym.
Uzbl: a graphical browser (webkit innards) with highly customizable keybindings, designed from the Unix philosophy---a lot of its internal state can be poked at from shell scripts (or whatever works on stdin, stdout and files) and this is highly encouraged by the design of the thing.
Been using it ever since I heard about it and I'm only begrudgingly going back to firechrome whenever I need to.
Just like `Telephone operator' is a worthless job except for the people doing it. The market for horse carriages, whips and horse shoes has drastically diminished since cars became mass-produced. Electricity diminished the market for candles. I suspect email decreased the demand for mail (both domestic and international).
Are you against electricity, cars, telephones and the internet? Your argument sounds like you are; or at least, it doesn't distinguish technological progress from technological progress.
The thing is, most people manage to do well; in fact, most people are better off from technological progress. The few it touches upon, well, they will have to learn to do something else. They don't deserve the power to hold the rest of us back, in my opinion.
Where to, that's the question. I want good food and fast broadband. Cool smartphones would be a plus.
Denmark: 20/1 for 45$/month, 50/5 for 90$. An N900 for 700$, Android phones at similar prices. You can get cheap phones with 6-month shackles or expensive phones with cheap subscriptions and no shackles. Mobile internet for 10$/month (1/.5, capped at 1 GB).
Oh, we can buy milk that's milked within 24 hours at our groceries.
the Democrats need not pay any attention to the left, since the left will either vote Democratic or not vote at all.
Note that if the left starts voting for a non-Democrats party and in doing so ceases voting for the Democrats, that might very well cause the Republicans to win (e.g. if the votes go from 51-49 to 3-48-49).
For that reason, the Democrats can't much afford to let the left wing go do its own thing. But also, the left can't afford to go do its own thing (I assume they don't want the Republicans to win).
I'm not sure how the power game plays out, but I suspect that the Democrats, by virtue of being larger and by virtue of being able to recruit centrist votes to compensate for leftward loss, will come out on top.
So forming a one-party union between the Democrats and the Greens will, I think, by and large give you the Democrats (with a few minor concessions to the Green to keep them in line).
They box could identify itself with an infinite number of working keys generated each time it is powered up.
If by infinite you mean `40 choose 20', or at most 2^40, then yes. It's explained fairly well in the article a few days back.
The short version: 40, because it's a 40x40 matrix; `choose 20' because your public key has 20 one-bits and 20 zero-bits; 2^40 because maybe the restriction doesn't matter (but your key is still a linear combination of rows of the key matrix).
I can't think of a much sleazier business practice.
Selling drugs to kids? Taking taxpayer money and not giving them a new set of intertelephony tubes? Killing brown people and taking their oil? Frivolously suing people just to scare them and extract money from them? Oh, wait...
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. [...] Good luck finding such a group [of interested problem-solvers], however.
So what you're saying is that the subjects form a quite representative subset of the population, and thus the result is invalid?;-)
Kidding aside, I think you are saying the first bit (about representativity), and thus the interpretation of the observations should bear this in mind: i.e. for people who don't care much about learning information but want to use it in service of some goal, they won't remember the information (or won't remember it very well) but they will achieve their goals.
why not modify the virus to host P2P trackers along with it?
Who should do that?
Are you suggesting that I, a disinterested party, finds all the infested machines, break into them, and make sure they run P2P software such that someone else will come in and take out the machines? In that case, if I'm willing to break the law (by breaking into machines) and I don't mind spending my time on doing this work, why don't I just clean the machine myself?
Or are you suggesting that the virus _writer_ goes out of his way to attract more attention to himself from people who have lawyers and can poke law enforcement? Why is that in his interest?
Or are you suggesting that the people owning the machines running the virus finds the virus and modifies it? Why don't they just remove it?
Your plan sounds great, but who executes it?
That's almost a fork bomb ("fork dud"?)
on
Cooking For Geeks
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· Score: 1
Receiving a good education does not ensure that you are right or wrong, but it means you are very highly trained in the existing hubris of your culture.
Compare the amount of evidence going into medical learning at the heyday of the humor theory and today. You'll find considerable more evidence going into medicine today.
Yes, there is a layer of interpretation on top of any collection of evidence. But if you collect evidence densely enough, and around the same problem from many angles, I believe you will converge towards an objective truth.
This approximate truth (and the methods for finding and improving it) is among what you learn when you take a university education today. I think. At least in the natural sciences and social sciences (I don't know what you do in the humanities, but I guess you argue and discuss a lot).
Personally, I think I reached a little too far. I would have rather stayed below $75,000 and enjoyed the slack.
"Demote" yourself then. You know what you want---less money, more slack and a more relaxed lifestyle with more of your time being your own. Aim for what you want. Work towards your goal.
Never mind people who don't understand. To me it makes perfect sense: you only have one life, and money can't buy you the time you need to add meaning to your life via tai chi, kung fu or HDTVs;-)
The most common such belief seems to be the belief that a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
Allow me to expand a bit on that.
There's a complexity class known as BQP which is defined to be what quantum computers can do in polynomial time (hence the Q and P; the B is for Bounded error probability, i.e. algorithms succeed with probability at least 2/3; if you want better: repeat and take majority voting).
It is known that BQP contains P and BPP (randomized poly-time turing machines), and is contained within PSPACE (which contains NP).
It is conjectured that P != NP and that BQP contains some but not all of (NP minus P), and is also not contained in NP.
Now, let's talk about factoring. It is known to be in NP (if I show you a candidate factoring, you can multiply it together rapidly and check whether I told the truth; you can even check primality in polynomial time). It's also in coNP---well, depending on how you turn factoring into a yes/no question. I lean towards "given n and k (in binary) does n have a non-trivial factor less than k". Then you can extract such a factor by binary search. It that case, it's easy to check proofs that a number _doesn't_ have a non-trivial factor less than k: give the full factorization as the proof, then verify the factorization as checking, and also check that no prime factor is less than k.
We don't know whether factoring is in P. Factoring is known to be in BQP, though!
This is due to Shor's algorithm. A very brief 10 kilofoot overview: it uses Fourier transformation to detect periodicity in functions. In cyclic groups, raising a generator element to exponents 1, 2, 3,... has a periodicity to it. In particular, the RSA group has a periodicity to it; and you can factor n if you know phi(n), the order of the RSA group. (I'm told you can do "basically the same" to solve discrete logarithms).
You may not experience this problem, but that doesn't preclude its existence. Unless you have infinite RAM, it could potentially all be used up.
I may be ignorant and OS X might handle memory overuse in a different way; it might start closing your applications "randomly" when they use too much memory instead of degenerating performance, or it might schedule each program for a veeery long time (so as to make the I/O overhead relatively smaller).
But at the end of the day, if your computer doesn't take up the whole universe (and if you think it does and you use a Mac, you're wrong, that's your ego; unearned by the way, it's bought for money), it can run out of resources, and will have to handle that, and there are no good ways of doing that, only ways that suck differently.
Hey, maybe that's a good tagline. "Mac: suck different".
(No trolling intended; Linux sucks differently too, as does BSD, Windows, Haiku, OpenVMS, ReactOS,...)
"But that's a phone and not a tablet", you might say. Nokia disagrees: "Such devices should be seen more as portable computers with phone functionality rather than traditional mobile phones mainly capable making a phone call. N900 belongs to this category of mobile computers." (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=57214)
You might argue that tablets can do all sorts of whiz-bang things my phone can't. I don't know what they are, exactly. Play music? No, my N900 does that. Play videos? My N900 does that too. Okay, so you're not going to watch a movie on a 3.5 inch screen (a 3.5 _foot_ screen would be more like it), but you're not going to watch movies on a 7 inch screen either, are you? But watching a 20 minute TED talk (ted.com) is something the N900 handles well.
Play games, then---well, the N900 does that too. It runs all the emulators debian runs (i.e. nes, snes, game boy, amiga, c64). There are native ports of commercial games (you supply the data files): HoMM2, Quake; abandonware (Beneath a Steel Sky, descent), Linux games (Battle for Wesnoth, Frozen Bubble), you name it. Okay, so you can't play starcraft except using the stratagus engine which is weird, but hey---can other non-x86 linux tablets run x86 windows games?:-)
Or if you don't want a media circus but just want to communicate, take notes, put appointments in your calendar and be productive (instead of reading slashdot:D), you can do that too. Sure, it has a smaller screen and a smaller keyboard, and it ain't lightning fast, but it fits in your pocket so you can have computing wherever you go.
And... well, I guess I'm coming near a point besides just sharing my experience; or if not a point, then a question: if you're going to go somewhere and you're going to carry a bag with you (I suspect you don't have 7-to-10 inch pockets), why not carry a computer with a decent-sized keyboard? You know, on'-o'-dem laptops? I'm genuinely curious: which jobs are tablets the best for, and why?
As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down?
Because if you agree to let yourself be inconvenienced slightly around the edges, we (the systems designers) can make the big part in the middle much more convenient.
Ever encountered thrashing (excessive swap file reads/writes)? If you want to be able to turn the system off on moment's notice, you're asking for all data to be written to disk at all times. That is, instead of having RAM between CPU and disk, the CPU should just write straight to disk. That is, it should write to disk all the time.
You're asking for thrashing to be the way computers operate by default. You don't want that. We are in fact so certain you don't want it that we are arrogant enough to make the edge-inconvenient way the default without asking you.
Or rather, given what most people do with their computers, that's the best way for them to work. If you're really insistent, you're welcome to run on a diskless workstation or off a Linux LiveCD, or mount all your file systems read only.
Let's see, your TV doesn't store much data and can afford to sync every time anything changes; neither does your car. Your VCR, I would assume, can sync rather rapidly. Also, you don't install new applications on any of those, and you don't complain when your VCR player can't play the new "DVD" format. I don't know about your cell phone, but my 5 year old dumbphone has a cute shutdown animation to cover up the fact that it's a computer with all its inherent complexity. And my N900 which runs Linux; well, go figure...
In short: computer behave differently because they have to meet different demands. If you want something other than what computers give you, well, all the more power to you I guess. It might be expensive to build if it's only you who wants it, though.
"Yeah, ask me a specific structured question and I'll give you a two-dimensional array to work with as an answer."
I thought it was more like an array of structs, where each array entry is a row and each struct member is a column. In non-C you might say each row is an object, each field-of-a-class is a column (where class : table) and each field-of-an-object is a single cell.
Then the cartesian product operation on tables of types T1 and T2 (respectively) has a type which is the product of T1 and T2, and everything matches up neatly.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at this guy: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Summary: you put a computer somewhere in rural India. Kids, who don't know much of english, flock to it and learn on their own how to use it; when you come back later, they say "We need a faster CPU and a better mouse."
In my experience, kids want to learn. At age three, you have to try hard to make them stop asking "why?" about almost everything. If they have a sliver of interest, they will pick up reading with a wee bit of parent assistance (as I did, FWIW) before school. As they grow up and become adolescents and eventually adults, they will acquire a passion and develop their skills in it, as I'm convinced most people here have done. When they do, you encourage them and lend them a helping hand if (and only if!) they ask for it.
Or, you send them to school (or rather, you don't resist the people who pressure them to go there), and the school system will drain the curiousity out of them and make certain they won't later acquire a passion for much of what's taught in there.
Ask yourself: did you become fascinated by mathematics, programming, astronomy, biotechnology, music or law (just to name some of the stated passions of slashdotters) because you were forced to study it in school? Did you become good at it because you were forced to study it?
In the study of logic (a part of both computer science and philosophy) it is trivial to show that one cannot prove a negative.
If we take "a negative" to mean a statement on the form "not exists x: P(x)" for some predicate P, what you're saying is that you can prove "not exists V: is_proof_of(V, 'not exists x: P(x)')".
In order words, "You can't prove a negative" _is_ a negative: it's the statement that for each negative, there isn't a proof of it. So proving that you can't prove a negative is a contradiction.
(Maybe that takes second-order rather than first-order predicates, and I don't know _all_ of logic, so take it with a grain of random password padding data)
A few browsers you may want to investigate further, if you feel Internet Firechrome Safoperari is a decent but slightly 'meh' browser:
w3m, links, links2, elinks, w3-mode, w3m-mode, surfraw: command line goodness. Especially the Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Against WWW (SURFRAW), how's that for an acronym.
Uzbl: a graphical browser (webkit innards) with highly customizable keybindings, designed from the Unix philosophy---a lot of its internal state can be poked at from shell scripts (or whatever works on stdin, stdout and files) and this is highly encouraged by the design of the thing.
Been using it ever since I heard about it and I'm only begrudgingly going back to firechrome whenever I need to.
*** ABBEGIN (stack underflow) ***
China values imitation much more than the USA does.
It gets even pricless-er:
I googled his name on altavista.com (there was no google)
Did he go like "use google // I see no google here // use google on altavista"?
Worthless jobs? Not to the people who do them.
Just like `Telephone operator' is a worthless job except for the people doing it. The market for horse carriages, whips and horse shoes has drastically diminished since cars became mass-produced. Electricity diminished the market for candles. I suspect email decreased the demand for mail (both domestic and international).
Are you against electricity, cars, telephones and the internet? Your argument sounds like you are; or at least, it doesn't distinguish technological progress from technological progress.
The thing is, most people manage to do well; in fact, most people are better off from technological progress. The few it touches upon, well, they will have to learn to do something else. They don't deserve the power to hold the rest of us back, in my opinion.
Basically, this is a tablet that has a printer queue running ? Impressive. *cough*
I like your signature in this context:
What a depressingly stupid machine.
;-)
Where to, that's the question. I want good food and fast broadband. Cool smartphones would be a plus.
Denmark: 20/1 for 45$/month, 50/5 for 90$. An N900 for 700$, Android phones at similar prices. You can get cheap phones with 6-month shackles or expensive phones with cheap subscriptions and no shackles. Mobile internet for 10$/month (1/.5, capped at 1 GB).
Oh, we can buy milk that's milked within 24 hours at our groceries.
the Democrats need not pay any attention to the left, since the left will either vote Democratic or not vote at all.
Note that if the left starts voting for a non-Democrats party and in doing so ceases voting for the Democrats, that might very well cause the Republicans to win (e.g. if the votes go from 51-49 to 3-48-49).
For that reason, the Democrats can't much afford to let the left wing go do its own thing. But also, the left can't afford to go do its own thing (I assume they don't want the Republicans to win).
I'm not sure how the power game plays out, but I suspect that the Democrats, by virtue of being larger and by virtue of being able to recruit centrist votes to compensate for leftward loss, will come out on top.
So forming a one-party union between the Democrats and the Greens will, I think, by and large give you the Democrats (with a few minor concessions to the Green to keep them in line).
They box could identify itself with an infinite number of working keys generated each time it is powered up.
If by infinite you mean `40 choose 20', or at most 2^40, then yes. It's explained fairly well in the article a few days back.
The short version: 40, because it's a 40x40 matrix; `choose 20' because your public key has 20 one-bits and 20 zero-bits; 2^40 because maybe the restriction doesn't matter (but your key is still a linear combination of rows of the key matrix).
I can't think of a much sleazier business practice.
Selling drugs to kids? Taking taxpayer money and not giving them a new set of intertelephony tubes? Killing brown people and taking their oil? Frivolously suing people just to scare them and extract money from them? Oh, wait...
Not the constant War-State mentality where we have to fight "Terrorism", "Drugs", "Copyright", etc, etc, and again, pay for it.
Even as a zealous GPL freetard, I for one would love to support the War on Copyright ;-)
But now that the DRM is broken, the poor movie studios will have no defense against piracy.
Expect them to release numbers and graphs showing how their revenue takes a sharp turn downwards.
(Unless, of course, their claims of connections between piracy and revenue are all lies, but I would never suggest anything like that...)
oligopoloies.
FWIW, "oligopolies" (s/lo/l/). The market has imperfect competition because it has few sellers. (`oligoi' is greek for few).
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. [...] Good luck finding such a group [of interested problem-solvers], however.
So what you're saying is that the subjects form a quite representative subset of the population, and thus the result is invalid? ;-)
Kidding aside, I think you are saying the first bit (about representativity), and thus the interpretation of the observations should bear this in mind: i.e. for people who don't care much about learning information but want to use it in service of some goal, they won't remember the information (or won't remember it very well) but they will achieve their goals.
why not modify the virus to host P2P trackers along with it?
Who should do that?
Are you suggesting that I, a disinterested party, finds all the infested machines, break into them, and make sure they run P2P software such that someone else will come in and take out the machines? In that case, if I'm willing to break the law (by breaking into machines) and I don't mind spending my time on doing this work, why don't I just clean the machine myself?
Or are you suggesting that the virus _writer_ goes out of his way to attract more attention to himself from people who have lawyers and can poke law enforcement? Why is that in his interest?
Or are you suggesting that the people owning the machines running the virus finds the virus and modifies it? Why don't they just remove it?
Your plan sounds great, but who executes it?
fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork();
Jeez, that's 8192 processes (2^13). Are you specializing in parallel cooking algorithms? Do you have a (highly) multicore stove?
Receiving a good education does not ensure that you are right or wrong, but it means you are very highly trained in the existing hubris of your culture.
Compare the amount of evidence going into medical learning at the heyday of the humor theory and today. You'll find considerable more evidence going into medicine today.
Yes, there is a layer of interpretation on top of any collection of evidence. But if you collect evidence densely enough, and around the same problem from many angles, I believe you will converge towards an objective truth.
This approximate truth (and the methods for finding and improving it) is among what you learn when you take a university education today. I think. At least in the natural sciences and social sciences (I don't know what you do in the humanities, but I guess you argue and discuss a lot).
Personally, I think I reached a little too far. I would have rather stayed below $75,000 and enjoyed the slack.
"Demote" yourself then. You know what you want---less money, more slack and a more relaxed lifestyle with more of your time being your own. Aim for what you want. Work towards your goal.
Never mind people who don't understand. To me it makes perfect sense: you only have one life, and money can't buy you the time you need to add meaning to your life via tai chi, kung fu or HDTVs ;-)
The most common such belief seems to be the belief that a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
Allow me to expand a bit on that.
There's a complexity class known as BQP which is defined to be what quantum computers can do in polynomial time (hence the Q and P; the B is for Bounded error probability, i.e. algorithms succeed with probability at least 2/3; if you want better: repeat and take majority voting).
It is known that BQP contains P and BPP (randomized poly-time turing machines), and is contained within PSPACE (which contains NP).
It is conjectured that P != NP and that BQP contains some but not all of (NP minus P), and is also not contained in NP.
Now, let's talk about factoring. It is known to be in NP (if I show you a candidate factoring, you can multiply it together rapidly and check whether I told the truth; you can even check primality in polynomial time). It's also in coNP---well, depending on how you turn factoring into a yes/no question. I lean towards "given n and k (in binary) does n have a non-trivial factor less than k". Then you can extract such a factor by binary search. It that case, it's easy to check proofs that a number _doesn't_ have a non-trivial factor less than k: give the full factorization as the proof, then verify the factorization as checking, and also check that no prime factor is less than k.
We don't know whether factoring is in P. Factoring is known to be in BQP, though!
This is due to Shor's algorithm. A very brief 10 kilofoot overview: it uses Fourier transformation to detect periodicity in functions. In cyclic groups, raising a generator element to exponents 1, 2, 3, ... has a periodicity to it. In particular, the RSA group has a periodicity to it; and you can factor n if you know phi(n), the order of the RSA group. (I'm told you can do "basically the same" to solve discrete logarithms).
I hope this helps someone.
The Mac doesn't seem to have this problem.
You may not experience this problem, but that doesn't preclude its existence. Unless you have infinite RAM, it could potentially all be used up.
I may be ignorant and OS X might handle memory overuse in a different way; it might start closing your applications "randomly" when they use too much memory instead of degenerating performance, or it might schedule each program for a veeery long time (so as to make the I/O overhead relatively smaller).
But at the end of the day, if your computer doesn't take up the whole universe (and if you think it does and you use a Mac, you're wrong, that's your ego; unearned by the way, it's bought for money), it can run out of resources, and will have to handle that, and there are no good ways of doing that, only ways that suck differently.
Hey, maybe that's a good tagline. "Mac: suck different".
(No trolling intended; Linux sucks differently too, as does BSD, Windows, Haiku, OpenVMS, ReactOS, ...)
I'll stick to my Nokia N900.
"But that's a phone and not a tablet", you might say. Nokia disagrees: "Such devices should be seen more as portable computers with phone functionality rather than traditional mobile phones mainly capable making a phone call. N900 belongs to this category of mobile computers." (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=57214)
You might argue that tablets can do all sorts of whiz-bang things my phone can't. I don't know what they are, exactly. Play music? No, my N900 does that. Play videos? My N900 does that too. Okay, so you're not going to watch a movie on a 3.5 inch screen (a 3.5 _foot_ screen would be more like it), but you're not going to watch movies on a 7 inch screen either, are you? But watching a 20 minute TED talk (ted.com) is something the N900 handles well.
Play games, then---well, the N900 does that too. It runs all the emulators debian runs (i.e. nes, snes, game boy, amiga, c64). There are native ports of commercial games (you supply the data files): HoMM2, Quake; abandonware (Beneath a Steel Sky, descent), Linux games (Battle for Wesnoth, Frozen Bubble), you name it. Okay, so you can't play starcraft except using the stratagus engine which is weird, but hey---can other non-x86 linux tablets run x86 windows games? :-)
Or if you don't want a media circus but just want to communicate, take notes, put appointments in your calendar and be productive (instead of reading slashdot :D), you can do that too. Sure, it has a smaller screen and a smaller keyboard, and it ain't lightning fast, but it fits in your pocket so you can have computing wherever you go.
And... well, I guess I'm coming near a point besides just sharing my experience; or if not a point, then a question: if you're going to go somewhere and you're going to carry a bag with you (I suspect you don't have 7-to-10 inch pockets), why not carry a computer with a decent-sized keyboard? You know, on'-o'-dem laptops? I'm genuinely curious: which jobs are tablets the best for, and why?
As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down?
Because if you agree to let yourself be inconvenienced slightly around the edges, we (the systems designers) can make the big part in the middle much more convenient.
Ever encountered thrashing (excessive swap file reads/writes)? If you want to be able to turn the system off on moment's notice, you're asking for all data to be written to disk at all times. That is, instead of having RAM between CPU and disk, the CPU should just write straight to disk. That is, it should write to disk all the time.
You're asking for thrashing to be the way computers operate by default. You don't want that. We are in fact so certain you don't want it that we are arrogant enough to make the edge-inconvenient way the default without asking you.
Or rather, given what most people do with their computers, that's the best way for them to work. If you're really insistent, you're welcome to run on a diskless workstation or off a Linux LiveCD, or mount all your file systems read only.
Let's see, your TV doesn't store much data and can afford to sync every time anything changes; neither does your car. Your VCR, I would assume, can sync rather rapidly. Also, you don't install new applications on any of those, and you don't complain when your VCR player can't play the new "DVD" format. I don't know about your cell phone, but my 5 year old dumbphone has a cute shutdown animation to cover up the fact that it's a computer with all its inherent complexity. And my N900 which runs Linux; well, go figure...
In short: computer behave differently because they have to meet different demands. If you want something other than what computers give you, well, all the more power to you I guess. It might be expensive to build if it's only you who wants it, though.
"Yeah, ask me a specific structured question and I'll give you a two-dimensional array to work with as an answer."
I thought it was more like an array of structs, where each array entry is a row and each struct member is a column. In non-C you might say each row is an object, each field-of-a-class is a column (where class : table) and each field-of-an-object is a single cell.
Then the cartesian product operation on tables of types T1 and T2 (respectively) has a type which is the product of T1 and T2, and everything matches up neatly.