When Napster first came about, people could easily find the music of "unknown" artists, and successfully download/listen to it. When labels cracked down, file sharing moved to P2P, and this reduced the reliability of the system somewhat, meaning that popular songs shared by many hosts would be the only guaranteed downloads for music sharers. When the recording industry then added "junk" files left and right, this further reduced the reliability, and reinforced the distribution of only popular content.
Their point is true, but only because the recording industry brought it about.
I think the biggest reason why it is difficult is that people tend to process information in a linear fashion. I break large projects into a series of chronologically ordered steps and complete one at a time. Sometimes if I am working on multiple projects, I will multitask and do them in parallel, but that is really an example of trivial parallelization.
That's because you have a global interpreter lock.
You completely ignore the main issue of privacy and of google penchant for data mining. You specifically use your ISP in your own country to ensure there is some legal basis for data privacy and your private email is your private email.
Yes, the only issues here are privacy issues, which are the same issues for anyone that uses Gmail. The privacy line that people are prepared to walk is where no person will ever read your emails, but automatic scanning can target ads to you. This is fine with me, but might not be fine for you. So change ISP if yours goes this route. I'm sure there'll still be plenty of choice in the market.
It really is about time that ISP were brought under more strict legislative requirements to ensure continuation of services, reliability of services, security of services and privacy of services, there is absolutely no reason the ISPs and email should not be bound by similar rules to phone and postal services.
A few quick points on this:
ISPs are already bound by privacy legislation, so no need for new laws.
Greater reliability for any individual means greater cost. You can get that now, it's called a SLA. It usually means you pay for bandwidth which you might not be using, and that you get priority when things need fixing. Most home plans have less redundant bandwidth and are thus more efficient, hence they are cheaper. Legislating would reduce choices for people.
Ensuring compliance with legislation increases costs, which users will pay.
Email is already more reliable than standard postal mail is.
Continuity of email service can be had across ISPs with a forwarding email address with a large company or professional society (e.g. ACM). Pay for it and it's yours.
The "dark side" does seem to be not very well thought through. Basically, it argues that by giving them a much better email service (for webmail at least), customers might become more attached to their isp-specific email address. So it's actually arguing for worse ISP service, so that nobody will accept it and everyone will choose some more "liberating" mail provider. Give me a break. Better service is better service. It's your own problem if your ISP ties you in this way (they all do), and at least here there's the chance for an easy migration to a generic Gmail account if Google pursues this strategy. Customers didn't even have that chance before.
Think about it. If you can be an Alpha Male without even being able to stand then genetic features become less relevant in determining who reproduces. Dramatically slowing the process of human evolution.
That's not true at all. Steven Hawking has genetic traits, in particular intelligence, which have helped him rise to his current status in society.
I doubt the speed of evolution has changed at all. In comparison, the evolution of ideas, sustained across generations through education and faster global communication, is occurring much more quickly than ever before. It's this speed which makes evolution seems slow and much less important in comparison.
Jar Jar Binks sums up a big part of what flopped with the new movies. Why include a character for 6 year olds? They'll think all the adult adventure is cool enough anyway, and by leaving him out they can properly develop a movie without alienating their adult fanbase. Also, am I the only one disgusted with the new CG they inserted into the old Star Wars movies? It doesn't serve any purpose other than to erode their charm.
The other half of the floppage was the oh-so-compelling romance scenes...
I agree, whether or not people believe in evolution is not a litmus test for their intelligence. However, taking these beliefs over a large groupings of people can provide a litmus test for both scientific awareness in the communities in which they were raised, and for science education in the institutions they were educated in.
If we call evolution a process, then we know that this process exists and we have large amounts of evidence for it. There is no real debate about this in the scientific community, thus an education which claims there that there is this debate is poor, at best misleading. People who deny that this process exists, and is applicable for all living things including humans, are actually the victims here, victims of a poor education system.
A lot of reason for the debate is that the discovery of evolution was a significant blow to a literal interpretation of the bible. For this reason, there exists a lot of religious tension around the issue. If people debating it with you were smug, it's because there is no room in science for a blending of science and religion. Where questions are answerable, science will never turn to religious beliefs to support a theory. Even if their beliefs were wrong in their current form, they would still be eventually vindicated in their choice to leave theology out of it, as some new scientific theory displaced the old one.
Re:Anybody switching to Textmate from Vim?
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TextMate
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I'm a Vim user, but I shuffle between developing in OS X and on my linux dev boxes. I already have plenty of customized language macros for the languages I use a lot (Python, C++), so there's no extra productivity that I'm missing out on here. I almost always work under screen, with somewhere between 2-10 screens open and easily switched between with a few keystrokes. Moving to Texmate would provide me with a nice GUI, maybe an easier way to make more sophisticated macros (I only scrape the surface of vim), but the rest is probably downhill for now. I'll still be using vim on linux and over ssh. Oh, and Textmate costs $$. Still I'm glad to see a new entrant into this domain.
I currently don't have health insurance because I quite my corporate job to be a contractor for a few months. If I got injured, and die due to lack of medical care, I deserve to die. I never finished college. If no one will hire me as a result, I deserve to literally starve to death. I would accept private charity, but would chose death over welfare. I drink and occasionally smoke cigars. I will not blame anyone for liver cancer.
Even if you are this principled, I think this approach is misguided. Consider the cost/benefit to society of letting you die of a minor treatable illness instead of allowing you to continue contributing as an active member. Consider the cost/benefit to society of helping you over a few rough months with welfare than to have you spiral into poverty and likely crime. If public education is good enough, even people who live off welfare could have children who surpass them and contribute beneficially. The world doesn't need to be so cold, and in many developed countries, it isn't.
The government needs to not deal with these problems. Private charities should. If charities can not raise enough money to help you, you do not deserve help. I am being callous here, but it is necessary to keep the government small.
From this comment, I'm assuming you're American, since I've only ever heard arguments and fear of government size from friends from the states. I don't quite understand this point, but there must have been some severe cultural trauma in the past to inspire this fear of government. This fear is not present in people from other countries, as far as I know. It seems there are many problems which can only be addressed efficiently on a country-wide scale. The government should be as big as it needs to be to address those problems, no more, no less. Clearly the government shouldn't interfere with fundamental human-rights. The rest is economics.
Surely there's a question of what we eat too. Now more than ever we have food which is targeted to our taste buds to be more full of fat, salt and sugar than before. Is it really true that people given unlimited diets of, for example junk food, will be in the same boat as others given unlimited diets of less processed food types?
I really like this idea! You'd have to be VERY careful though, to correctly prime customer's expectations. Otherwise, there'd be a lot of misconceptions about what customers paid for, and why they're not getting the personalized help they wanted. Perhaps you'd call the machine bundled with "Community Support", and emphasize that support requests are handled by volunteers. If you were even better, you could prime people to join the support forums and help out others with similar problems. Of course, all this assumes they've got the internet connection working...
I have no doubt that Apple is a hassle. Dell isn't all peaches either though, although their response time is faster. I had a new Dell laptop which was semi-broken on arrival. It had transient keyboard problems. After 3 on-site services, which didn't fix the problem, I asked for a complete replacement. They insisted on another service. I said that if it broke again, I wanted a refund. Sure enough, it broke again. They were polite about the refund though. I went and bought a MacBook Pro instead. Now let's hope it doesn't break too.
There are two ways to maintain a revenue stream: 1. Expand your product into new market sectors. How? One possibility would be to upport Linux and sell your software at a much lower price so that you can penetrate markets that can't afford your product now. Another way is to simply lower the price so that all the people who currently pirate the software can easily afford it, then make up the difference by charging more for a commercial use license.
Sometimes economists can pull the latter off. They can lower taxes AND take in more money, since less people avoid the lower tax. Maybe if MS chose a lower price point, they could get much more sales in countries where piracy is rampant. This is even without considering a separate commercial version, as you suggested. Then again, they'd probably have done this already if they could.
2. Add new features that are so compelling that people will buy it. Unfortunately, most of the Office suite is already so feature-bloated that it's a pain in the backside to use, so that's probably a bad idea unless the new feature involves adding another app to the suite.
I'm actually perfectly in favor of a subscription model, but only one where I keep paying and you keep improving, say on a 6-monthly or yearly basis. I don't want to keep paying for software which is stagnant though. In this respect you're certainly right, people wouldn't pay more for that. A good subscription wouldn't be so different from being up to date with good software which is regularly released on such a cycle. I think they can still do things with MS office, so I'm not opposed to them charging for improvements.
x86 instructions are much lower level than the CLI runtime is, which is the crux of the matter. VB.NET and C# can use the same libraries, and can probably have similar code generated for them. Their similarities probably push some of the syntax, and some of the practicalities of using them on a day-to-day basis, closer together. You can't say the same for C and Fortran.
Most of the GM foods being pushed have nothing to do with starving people - it's all about increasing corporate profits, as usual. The "terminator gene" was being pushed to prevent poor third-world farmers from saving their own seed after buying grain crops once.
There's two sides to the terminator gene, as I understand it, one of which you're overlooking. Suppose you engineer a crop which grows extremely well, much better than in its original form. This crop might spread wildly, and become a form of a weed, overcoming native plants and even other useful crops. The terminator gene is useful here because it prevents the crop from spreading into the wild. In this way it's a safeguard.
Suppose there is some series of studies confirming that a particular crop is statistically more correlated with the occurrence of some medical problem in humans who eat it. If that crop has already spread in the wild, and perhaps merged with non GM crops, then we'll still be eating it whether we like it or not. We need safeguards like the terminator gene.
Also, using it doesn't mean choosing the new business models it allows. They could sell seed to the same farmers at close to cost price for repeat customers, making it closer to the existing business models.
The answer is hundreds of thousands of people around the world who use the correct tool for a given job, rather then trying to hammer in screws with the "latest and greatest".
I tend to use Python for most things, and consider it a general purpose language, suitable for all but performance critical tasks. I'd put Perl and Ruby in the same basket, as general languages with many libraries which just help you get things done. To me, these languages seem pretty interchangeable in this respect. In that case, the choice of which to use comes down to personal experience alone.
I'm curious as to whether you have a different opinion. Lets leave aside issues of syntax. What libraries or other features would you consider makes Perl the correct tool for a particular task? Are there particular tasks for which you use other scripting languages, in particular Python or Ruby?
Well, Gentoo will continually evolve as you update packages, and it's really not that much maintenance if you update it every day. Still, you pay with some of your time rather than a subscription fee.
For that reason I use Gentoo and Ubuntu, and occasionally alternate between them. These days though, Ubuntu seems to get the default desktop just right for me, meaning that the amount I have to customize is far less. Both of them I love for having extensive, recent packages. Some friends use Debian unstable, but I think they'd be better off with Gentoo if they want something continuously evolving.
This is one thing that I hate about OS X in comparison to Linux. Take even their Mail app for example. It didn't have threading. I cried out loud for threading. They added it, but to the next OS release, which you wait for then pay for. Using Ubuntu, I get something stable and recent, and every 6 months I get a nice feature refresh in the everyday programs that I actually use. Windows hasn't had its "feature refresh" in so long, it doesn't even score a point from this consideration.
I'd happily pay a small subscription amount for an operating system, for which I'd expect it to continually evolve in a stable manner. There doesn't seem to be this option though, at least at the OS level.
...it's unsustainable: either the first-world country's costs and standards of living are going to sink, or the third-world's are going to rise, and the former is a whole lot easier and a lot more likely than the latter. (Think of it in terms of economic "mass," and of two bodies orbiting around each other; it's a lot easier to move 300 million people down towards the level of a billion poor ones than it is to move the billion up to meet the 300M.)
In case you haven't noticed, standards of living have generally been increasing worldwide, maybe minus some African nations. Ask your parents, or grandparents if either are still alive. This isn't some zero-sum game where you only enjoy a nice life because others are suffering in poverty. Isn't the famous conservative economics creed: "a rising tide lifts all boats"?
What's more, short of a major war breaking out, the US will probably never "decline", but instead become gradually superceded by larger global bodies, until it no longer has the clout to flout international conventions, and instead becomes just another (large) global citizen. Some will mourn this loss of "empire", but lets face it, people have long looked to the Scandinavian countries anyway for examples of best-practice progressive policy and leadership.
If data is reliably recoverable in "layers", why not use this for higher density storage? Sure some extra curcuitry would be required, and failure rates might be higher in earlier models, but the extra storage could be impressive. The added benefit would be that erased data would be more difficult still to recover, requiring much more expensive hardware.
An SUV is NOT inherently dangerous. Should we ban semi trailers because they're so huge they pose a threat to everyone else? Should we ban school buses because they're also too big? Should we ban minivans too, because they're nearly as heavy as SUV's? (do some research on GVWR of a minivan compared to a midsize SUV, you'll be surprised)... should we ban cargo vans because they're big, and tow trucks, and limousines, and anything over 3,000 lbs curb weight? This is exactly what's wrong with your (and the other guy that responded to my post) mentality - you focus too much on saying "well big cars are bad when we crash" instead of thinking about avoiding crashes in the first place.
My argument is indeed that with more large heavy cars/trucks/minivans, the road becomes more dangerous, at least for people in smaller cars. If everyone drives a large car, maybe this is ok, aside from issues of space/fuel efficiency. I'm not arguing that this is a more important variable than the driver, but I am arguing that is important nonetheless. The reason I target SUVs in particular is that they've become pretty much a luxury car, not a necessity. There's clearly a tradeoff in the amount of good for society. I believe that its far better for a shop owner to drive their minivan to keep their business viable, but say if I work in IT, do I really need a SUV? Do I need a car at all? Also, how many of these SUVs are really going to make it offroad?
A young, inexperienced driver, in ANY car, is far more dangerous to everyone else than an older, experienced, skilled driver in ANY car, because they are MORE LIKELY TO CAUSE AN ACCIDENT in the first place. I don't care if an SUV is "blocking a view"... it's ALL about drivers... a small car in the wrong hands may not block views, but it might be speeding, tailgating, and doing erratic lane changes, which is WAY more dangerous to the general population than an SUV driving SAFELY.
I completely agree that on average a younger, less experienced driver will be more dangerous than an older, experienced driver. Perhaps what you're missing is that these are two independent variables you can change, with are both significant. Ideally we would have skilled drivers and safe, small cars, which promote road visibility and cause limited collateral damage when they crash.
Your argument is akin to saying "Ban sports cars, because they're fast and when you get in an accident, since you're going so fast, it's worse than regular cars that aren't going as fast." Fast car does not equal bad, dangerous driver. Large car does not equal bad, dangerous driver.
Sports cars are also expensive gas-guzzling status symbols, BUT... you have a choice as to whether you go fast, and indeed it's illegal to go too fast. There are already laws in general about car speed. If you have an SUV, you can't choose to "drive lightly today, since I'm not going offroad". Also, sports cars are in general low to the ground, thus they don't detract from the visibility of others. I'd much prefer it if the trend was towards these cars rather than "bigger is better".
A sixteen year old girl who just got her license but drives a Civic is far more dangerous than a grown man with years of driving experience in many types of situations, who is driving an SUV.
The same man though is much more dangerous in an SUV than the Civic, which I believe is the point. He is basically improving his personal safety at the expense of everyone else. When he drives in front of someone, he limits their view of the road ahead much more than a smaller car would, and yet he enjoys greater view himself by being able to see over smaller cars. When he crashes into someone, his greater weight and thus greater momentum mean that the other car better damn be big as well, otherwise they will undergo a much greater acceleration/deceleration and be likely to sustain greater injuries. Large cars are bad for everyone else on the road, so they should be limited as much as possible to just the necessities for industry. Perhaps they could be taxed heavily in order to subsidize smaller cars.
(With the field of view thing, remind anyone of old style nobility? Riding on horseback whilst the peasants walked?)
...Ultima Online! I was plenty addicted to this at school. I only got a few hours sleep a night, and had decided that my "leisure time" was until 10 or 11pm, and school work could be done afterwards. I was often in a sleep-deprived haze, where just seeing a bird in real life would make me want to chase it, kill it and use the feathers to make arrows. Those were the days... the thrill, the excitement, being chased by bastard PKers with huge lag, later becoming an inept bastard PKer myself. I only stopped when I moved to Everquest. Somehow EQ never caught me up though, and I gave it up after only a few months. In that time though, I introduced it to my friend, and his Dad, who would become seriously addicted for several years after retiring. Whoops.
You're talking about the difference between a computer science degree and a software engineering degree. At the Uni I went to, CS was billed as "research oriented", precisely because of the features you mentioned which are lacking from a CS degree.
The main differences between the degrees? An extra year in the SE degree, two year-long projects (5 person, then 13 person teams), and subjects on testing, requirements gathering, and management. Believe me, this stuff makes a big difference to your outlook on coding. Perhaps you should consider a postgrad masters in software engineering (they exist!), if you want a formal education in this area.
"Critical real estate on the menu bar"? Exactly how big is your Spotlight icon? Mine is less than half the size of my little fingernail on my 12" iBook, as big across as the menu bar is thick. I hardly call that "critical" but if that's your opinion, then so be it.
Maybe he's talking about placement. Corners are considered critical because the user can flick the mouse to them without having to get angle or distance right. Although, you can also set your mac to use these "critical" corners for expose, like I do. Then you always end up accidentally activating things when you try to click on corner icons. Doh!
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When Napster first came about, people could easily find the music of "unknown" artists, and successfully download/listen to it. When labels cracked down, file sharing moved to P2P, and this reduced the reliability of the system somewhat, meaning that popular songs shared by many hosts would be the only guaranteed downloads for music sharers. When the recording industry then added "junk" files left and right, this further reduced the reliability, and reinforced the distribution of only popular content.
Their point is true, but only because the recording industry brought it about.
That's because you have a global interpreter lock.
Yes, the only issues here are privacy issues, which are the same issues for anyone that uses Gmail. The privacy line that people are prepared to walk is where no person will ever read your emails, but automatic scanning can target ads to you. This is fine with me, but might not be fine for you. So change ISP if yours goes this route. I'm sure there'll still be plenty of choice in the market.
A few quick points on this:
The "dark side" does seem to be not very well thought through. Basically, it argues that by giving them a much better email service (for webmail at least), customers might become more attached to their isp-specific email address. So it's actually arguing for worse ISP service, so that nobody will accept it and everyone will choose some more "liberating" mail provider. Give me a break. Better service is better service. It's your own problem if your ISP ties you in this way (they all do), and at least here there's the chance for an easy migration to a generic Gmail account if Google pursues this strategy. Customers didn't even have that chance before.
That's not true at all. Steven Hawking has genetic traits, in particular intelligence, which have helped him rise to his current status in society.
I doubt the speed of evolution has changed at all. In comparison, the evolution of ideas, sustained across generations through education and faster global communication, is occurring much more quickly than ever before. It's this speed which makes evolution seems slow and much less important in comparison.
Jar Jar Binks sums up a big part of what flopped with the new movies. Why include a character for 6 year olds? They'll think all the adult adventure is cool enough anyway, and by leaving him out they can properly develop a movie without alienating their adult fanbase. Also, am I the only one disgusted with the new CG they inserted into the old Star Wars movies? It doesn't serve any purpose other than to erode their charm.
The other half of the floppage was the oh-so-compelling romance scenes...
I agree, whether or not people believe in evolution is not a litmus test for their intelligence. However, taking these beliefs over a large groupings of people can provide a litmus test for both scientific awareness in the communities in which they were raised, and for science education in the institutions they were educated in.
If we call evolution a process, then we know that this process exists and we have large amounts of evidence for it. There is no real debate about this in the scientific community, thus an education which claims there that there is this debate is poor, at best misleading. People who deny that this process exists, and is applicable for all living things including humans, are actually the victims here, victims of a poor education system.
A lot of reason for the debate is that the discovery of evolution was a significant blow to a literal interpretation of the bible. For this reason, there exists a lot of religious tension around the issue. If people debating it with you were smug, it's because there is no room in science for a blending of science and religion. Where questions are answerable, science will never turn to religious beliefs to support a theory. Even if their beliefs were wrong in their current form, they would still be eventually vindicated in their choice to leave theology out of it, as some new scientific theory displaced the old one.
I'm a Vim user, but I shuffle between developing in OS X and on my linux dev boxes. I already have plenty of customized language macros for the languages I use a lot (Python, C++), so there's no extra productivity that I'm missing out on here. I almost always work under screen, with somewhere between 2-10 screens open and easily switched between with a few keystrokes. Moving to Texmate would provide me with a nice GUI, maybe an easier way to make more sophisticated macros (I only scrape the surface of vim), but the rest is probably downhill for now. I'll still be using vim on linux and over ssh. Oh, and Textmate costs $$. Still I'm glad to see a new entrant into this domain.
Even if you are this principled, I think this approach is misguided. Consider the cost/benefit to society of letting you die of a minor treatable illness instead of allowing you to continue contributing as an active member. Consider the cost/benefit to society of helping you over a few rough months with welfare than to have you spiral into poverty and likely crime. If public education is good enough, even people who live off welfare could have children who surpass them and contribute beneficially. The world doesn't need to be so cold, and in many developed countries, it isn't.
From this comment, I'm assuming you're American, since I've only ever heard arguments and fear of government size from friends from the states. I don't quite understand this point, but there must have been some severe cultural trauma in the past to inspire this fear of government. This fear is not present in people from other countries, as far as I know. It seems there are many problems which can only be addressed efficiently on a country-wide scale. The government should be as big as it needs to be to address those problems, no more, no less. Clearly the government shouldn't interfere with fundamental human-rights. The rest is economics.
Surely there's a question of what we eat too. Now more than ever we have food which is targeted to our taste buds to be more full of fat, salt and sugar than before. Is it really true that people given unlimited diets of, for example junk food, will be in the same boat as others given unlimited diets of less processed food types?
I really like this idea! You'd have to be VERY careful though, to correctly prime customer's expectations. Otherwise, there'd be a lot of misconceptions about what customers paid for, and why they're not getting the personalized help they wanted. Perhaps you'd call the machine bundled with "Community Support", and emphasize that support requests are handled by volunteers. If you were even better, you could prime people to join the support forums and help out others with similar problems. Of course, all this assumes they've got the internet connection working...
I have no doubt that Apple is a hassle. Dell isn't all peaches either though, although their response time is faster. I had a new Dell laptop which was semi-broken on arrival. It had transient keyboard problems. After 3 on-site services, which didn't fix the problem, I asked for a complete replacement. They insisted on another service. I said that if it broke again, I wanted a refund. Sure enough, it broke again. They were polite about the refund though. I went and bought a MacBook Pro instead. Now let's hope it doesn't break too.
Sometimes economists can pull the latter off. They can lower taxes AND take in more money, since less people avoid the lower tax. Maybe if MS chose a lower price point, they could get much more sales in countries where piracy is rampant. This is even without considering a separate commercial version, as you suggested. Then again, they'd probably have done this already if they could.
I'm actually perfectly in favor of a subscription model, but only one where I keep paying and you keep improving, say on a 6-monthly or yearly basis. I don't want to keep paying for software which is stagnant though. In this respect you're certainly right, people wouldn't pay more for that. A good subscription wouldn't be so different from being up to date with good software which is regularly released on such a cycle. I think they can still do things with MS office, so I'm not opposed to them charging for improvements.
x86 instructions are much lower level than the CLI runtime is, which is the crux of the matter. VB.NET and C# can use the same libraries, and can probably have similar code generated for them. Their similarities probably push some of the syntax, and some of the practicalities of using them on a day-to-day basis, closer together. You can't say the same for C and Fortran.
There's two sides to the terminator gene, as I understand it, one of which you're overlooking. Suppose you engineer a crop which grows extremely well, much better than in its original form. This crop might spread wildly, and become a form of a weed, overcoming native plants and even other useful crops. The terminator gene is useful here because it prevents the crop from spreading into the wild. In this way it's a safeguard.
Suppose there is some series of studies confirming that a particular crop is statistically more correlated with the occurrence of some medical problem in humans who eat it. If that crop has already spread in the wild, and perhaps merged with non GM crops, then we'll still be eating it whether we like it or not. We need safeguards like the terminator gene.
Also, using it doesn't mean choosing the new business models it allows. They could sell seed to the same farmers at close to cost price for repeat customers, making it closer to the existing business models.
I tend to use Python for most things, and consider it a general purpose language, suitable for all but performance critical tasks. I'd put Perl and Ruby in the same basket, as general languages with many libraries which just help you get things done. To me, these languages seem pretty interchangeable in this respect. In that case, the choice of which to use comes down to personal experience alone.
I'm curious as to whether you have a different opinion. Lets leave aside issues of syntax. What libraries or other features would you consider makes Perl the correct tool for a particular task? Are there particular tasks for which you use other scripting languages, in particular Python or Ruby?
For that reason I use Gentoo and Ubuntu, and occasionally alternate between them. These days though, Ubuntu seems to get the default desktop just right for me, meaning that the amount I have to customize is far less. Both of them I love for having extensive, recent packages. Some friends use Debian unstable, but I think they'd be better off with Gentoo if they want something continuously evolving.
This is one thing that I hate about OS X in comparison to Linux. Take even their Mail app for example. It didn't have threading. I cried out loud for threading. They added it, but to the next OS release, which you wait for then pay for. Using Ubuntu, I get something stable and recent, and every 6 months I get a nice feature refresh in the everyday programs that I actually use. Windows hasn't had its "feature refresh" in so long, it doesn't even score a point from this consideration.
I'd happily pay a small subscription amount for an operating system, for which I'd expect it to continually evolve in a stable manner. There doesn't seem to be this option though, at least at the OS level.
In case you haven't noticed, standards of living have generally been increasing worldwide, maybe minus some African nations. Ask your parents, or grandparents if either are still alive. This isn't some zero-sum game where you only enjoy a nice life because others are suffering in poverty. Isn't the famous conservative economics creed: "a rising tide lifts all boats"?
What's more, short of a major war breaking out, the US will probably never "decline", but instead become gradually superceded by larger global bodies, until it no longer has the clout to flout international conventions, and instead becomes just another (large) global citizen. Some will mourn this loss of "empire", but lets face it, people have long looked to the Scandinavian countries anyway for examples of best-practice progressive policy and leadership.
If data is reliably recoverable in "layers", why not use this for higher density storage? Sure some extra curcuitry would be required, and failure rates might be higher in earlier models, but the extra storage could be impressive. The added benefit would be that erased data would be more difficult still to recover, requiring much more expensive hardware.
An SUV is NOT inherently dangerous. Should we ban semi trailers because they're so huge they pose a threat to everyone else? Should we ban school buses because they're also too big? Should we ban minivans too, because they're nearly as heavy as SUV's? (do some research on GVWR of a minivan compared to a midsize SUV, you'll be surprised) ... should we ban cargo vans because they're big, and tow trucks, and limousines, and anything over 3,000 lbs curb weight? This is exactly what's wrong with your (and the other guy that responded to my post) mentality - you focus too much on saying "well big cars are bad when we crash" instead of thinking about avoiding crashes in the first place.
My argument is indeed that with more large heavy cars/trucks/minivans, the road becomes more dangerous, at least for people in smaller cars. If everyone drives a large car, maybe this is ok, aside from issues of space/fuel efficiency. I'm not arguing that this is a more important variable than the driver, but I am arguing that is important nonetheless. The reason I target SUVs in particular is that they've become pretty much a luxury car, not a necessity. There's clearly a tradeoff in the amount of good for society. I believe that its far better for a shop owner to drive their minivan to keep their business viable, but say if I work in IT, do I really need a SUV? Do I need a car at all? Also, how many of these SUVs are really going to make it offroad?
A young, inexperienced driver, in ANY car, is far more dangerous to everyone else than an older, experienced, skilled driver in ANY car, because they are MORE LIKELY TO CAUSE AN ACCIDENT in the first place. I don't care if an SUV is "blocking a view" ... it's ALL about drivers ... a small car in the wrong hands may not block views, but it might be speeding, tailgating, and doing erratic lane changes, which is WAY more dangerous to the general population than an SUV driving SAFELY.
I completely agree that on average a younger, less experienced driver will be more dangerous than an older, experienced driver. Perhaps what you're missing is that these are two independent variables you can change, with are both significant. Ideally we would have skilled drivers and safe, small cars, which promote road visibility and cause limited collateral damage when they crash.
Your argument is akin to saying "Ban sports cars, because they're fast and when you get in an accident, since you're going so fast, it's worse than regular cars that aren't going as fast." Fast car does not equal bad, dangerous driver. Large car does not equal bad, dangerous driver.
Sports cars are also expensive gas-guzzling status symbols, BUT... you have a choice as to whether you go fast, and indeed it's illegal to go too fast. There are already laws in general about car speed. If you have an SUV, you can't choose to "drive lightly today, since I'm not going offroad". Also, sports cars are in general low to the ground, thus they don't detract from the visibility of others. I'd much prefer it if the trend was towards these cars rather than "bigger is better".
A sixteen year old girl who just got her license but drives a Civic is far more dangerous than a grown man with years of driving experience in many types of situations, who is driving an SUV.
The same man though is much more dangerous in an SUV than the Civic, which I believe is the point. He is basically improving his personal safety at the expense of everyone else. When he drives in front of someone, he limits their view of the road ahead much more than a smaller car would, and yet he enjoys greater view himself by being able to see over smaller cars. When he crashes into someone, his greater weight and thus greater momentum mean that the other car better damn be big as well, otherwise they will undergo a much greater acceleration/deceleration and be likely to sustain greater injuries. Large cars are bad for everyone else on the road, so they should be limited as much as possible to just the necessities for industry. Perhaps they could be taxed heavily in order to subsidize smaller cars.
(With the field of view thing, remind anyone of old style nobility? Riding on horseback whilst the peasants walked?)
...Ultima Online! I was plenty addicted to this at school. I only got a few hours sleep a night, and had decided that my "leisure time" was until 10 or 11pm, and school work could be done afterwards. I was often in a sleep-deprived haze, where just seeing a bird in real life would make me want to chase it, kill it and use the feathers to make arrows. Those were the days... the thrill, the excitement, being chased by bastard PKers with huge lag, later becoming an inept bastard PKer myself. I only stopped when I moved to Everquest. Somehow EQ never caught me up though, and I gave it up after only a few months. In that time though, I introduced it to my friend, and his Dad, who would become seriously addicted for several years after retiring. Whoops.
You're talking about the difference between a computer science degree and a software engineering degree. At the Uni I went to, CS was billed as "research oriented", precisely because of the features you mentioned which are lacking from a CS degree.
The main differences between the degrees? An extra year in the SE degree, two year-long projects (5 person, then 13 person teams), and subjects on testing, requirements gathering, and management. Believe me, this stuff makes a big difference to your outlook on coding. Perhaps you should consider a postgrad masters in software engineering (they exist!), if you want a formal education in this area.
"Critical real estate on the menu bar"? Exactly how big is your Spotlight icon? Mine is less than half the size of my little fingernail on my 12" iBook, as big across as the menu bar is thick. I hardly call that "critical" but if that's your opinion, then so be it.
Maybe he's talking about placement. Corners are considered critical because the user can flick the mouse to them without having to get angle or distance right. Although, you can also set your mac to use these "critical" corners for expose, like I do. Then you always end up accidentally activating things when you try to click on corner icons. Doh!