You are missing the point. Seeing other people's opinions does not change my mind, and neither should they change yours. A logical mind bases its opinions on facts, not on what other people think. Once you have the facts you need, you can form an opinion. From that point on, other people's opinions are either right (if they agree with yours) or wrong (if they don't). This is not going to change unless you get new information that invalidates your prior arguments. If the subject is important to you and you have searched for enough information before making your decision, this event is highly unlikely, and rereading other people's opinions is a waste of time. Your disagreements are based not on what they know, but on their moral code, and that is not reconcilable.
You must be young. When you've been around for a while, you've already heard all those "other points of view". I certainly have, and I can tell you that seeing them is now little more than annoying. People would call it being "close-minded", which really just means "someone whose brain we can't easily stuff with our opinions". In reality it's just a difference in the core values; there is nothing you can say to change my opinion because my opinion is based on what I deeply believe is right. The polarization comes from the fact that different people have different values, and thus a different, sometimes completely opposite, idea of what is right and what is wrong. You can't change that abour yourself short of suicide. These are the things that form the core of your character, that define who you are. You could present your "point of view" all you want; that will change nothing. I already know what it is, and I already know that you think it's right and I think it's wrong, and I know there is absolutely no way to resolve this difference. As a result, I prefer to avoid articles with a slant opposite to mine; reading them simply goads my mind into repeating the same old tired arguments on why the author is an idiot. Why would I want to constantly subject myself to that? As far as I am concerned, the issue is closed; if you want, we can vote on it and let the democracy decide what the country should do.
Does anyone find it disturbing that taxpayers' money is used to do the bad guys' work for them? I can understand researching anti-malware strategies, but why are these people given money to come up with bad things to do to my computer?
The problem is not the existence of powerful stacks, it's the AI's inability to use them properly. It is much better for the human player to have a few powerful units than a hundred weaker ones because they are easier to control. The sheer tedium of arranging your units so they'll attack properly is the result of the latter, and is the reason I am not even going to bother getting this new civ.
Supreme Ruler 2020 is a good example of this problem. You get really wimpy units that you are supposed to make a lot of and then to manually layer them to put the artillery and supply units behind the infantry. To take on a decent sized country you'll need a several hundred units, arranged into a three line front, which can take hours to set up. And God help you if you want to change formation in case the AI tries its favorite tactic of circling around your front to cut off your supply. Sure it's sort of realistic, but the real world solution of widening the front line is simply not practical for my poor human patience.
Micromanaging units is NOT a good thing. It's what the computer ought to know how to do already. Please, give me some AI generals that will already know that the artillery goes behind the infantry and should STAY THERE, DAMMIT! Let the computer do tactics because it should be good at it and the player do strategy because humans are better at that.
Web developers REALLY love their javascript, even when serving only static data. So is it surprizing that they would like to "spice up" the "boring" google search results page? Even the page with the article on it has nothing interesting except article text, and yet it insists on popping up a dialog box reminding me that my browser (elinks) is "too old", as if whatever they are doing with their useless scripts and graphics can possibly be of interest to me.
A 4000km sphere has the volume of 3.35e19 m^3. In diamond, that masses at 1.18e20 tons, or 5.9e26 carats. At $5500/carat it's worth $3e30. Current railroad rates are 3c/ton*mile (there being no current space freight rates), so you'd pay $1e33 to bring it here. To summarize:
A 6e26 carat diamond: $3e30 Transportation: $1e33 Giving your gold digger girlfriend an engagement ring she is not fat enough to wear: priceless
The reason people don't eat algae is that it tastes bad. The author himself says he can only eat 15 grams a day, which comes to about 60 calories. Gee, that's only 3% of his daily energy needs. Now, if he could splice in some genes to make his spirulina taste like beef or chicken, he'd have a lot more success.
Personally, I'd like it if somebody worked on engineering trees instead. A tree growing potatoes with sugarcane's photosynthesis efficiency could feed the world.
If you've learned ballroom dancing you may have heard this one: "You are the frame. She is the picture in the frame. Everything you do is to make her look good."
> I have a suspicion you haven't actually read The Baroque Cycle. To me it seemed all about the idea > that only rational thinking and actual science (not 'alchemy') can move civilization forward.
That's quite correct, I haven't read it and do not intend to. You don't need to tell me that only rational thinking can move civlization; that's just preaching to the choir. Like I said, it's for an entirely different audience.
> And what's with the 'we'? Are techies now some sort of homogeneous hive mind that are all interested or not in the exact same thing?
Techies, like all other groups, define group membership by adherence to a particular set of values, which in our case are technology and everything that makes it possible, like intelligence, rational thought, personal freedom, etc. So yes, it is quite appropriate to say "we" when you are talking about the group you belong to; you either share these values, or you don't belong to the group. In the case of history, I would expect that while you may be interested in the history of technology (as opposed to political history, which consists mainly of who killed whom when, and thus is one of the most useless subjects in existence), you would be studying it with an eye on the future, not as an end in itself.
Science fiction sales must be really plummeting, since all the authors want to leave the genre as soon as possible. They write a few scifi novels and then switch to fantasy, or, in Stephenson's case, historical fiction. People read those too, of course, but it's an entirely different audience. We techies are not interested in the past; we are interested in the future. We might want to examine history for forgotten ideas that might be helpful in the future, but we certainly don't want to live there! No horse-driven carriages please, enough with the stupid wishing-makes-it-so bullshit, and primitive communities that have never seen a bath. There are no noble savages out there and primitivism in real life results in poverty, disease, starvation, and general misery. Only technology can let people move out of their cold and drafty caves, stop spending their nights shivering around a fire (assuming they have the technology of building one), and finally acquire enough time to do something other than foraging for food. Something, like, perhaps, rational thinking - an activity that leads to more technology and a more comfortable life. And it is an activity you can't get to if you persist in believing in magic spells or that studying history (or the Bible) will yield answers to every possible problem.
Forbid lawyers in the courtroom. The rationale being that if an average Joe is unable to understand the law, it is a problem with the law, not with Joe. Any law Joe can't understand should be immediately repealed. After all, you do want citizens to know if they are criminals or not, don't you?
I don't understand why this works. Why is the browser allowing a site to read another site's cookies? I can see giving cookies to another site in the same domain, but giving a cookie from, say, Facebook, to Amazon should definitely not be allowed. So if Firefox does this idiotic thing, do they give an option for disabling it?
I'm always baffled when people use a lot of tabs. What are the advantages of keeping all those pages open at the same time? If you have so many that you feel the need to organize them in a tree, why not just use the bookmarks from the menu, which are already organized that way?
Compare this to the reasoning behind gun laws. One person can kill many very quickly by using a gun. Therefore we should prohibit people from purchasing a gun. Thinking about terrorist acts can lead someone to committing a terrorist act. Therefore we should prohibit people from thinking. If you accept the premise that anything prohibited by law does not happen, these arguments make a lot of sense.
> t's not (yet...) illegal to possess US currency. Period.
You clearly don't keep up with current US law. As of Aug 18th the courts have ruled in "USA v. $124,700" that possession of large sums of money is automatically evidence of drug trafficking. Any money found on your person is immediately forfeited to the state and you may be charged with some drug offense.
Even before the judgement people had their money seized. For example, a few years ago there was a notable case of a trucker being stopped at a weigh station near El Paso, where a police officer searched the truck and confiscated $23700. Although carrying the cash was still technically legal, the trucker was taken into custody and spent six hours in jail. ACLU later filed a suit to get the money back, but as far as I know that still hasn't happened.
Also, it has long been illegal to carry more than $10000 across a border. That limit is not a hard one. Last year, TSA detained a man for carrying only $4700. So even if you think you are within the legal limit, you'd be advised to seriously consider carrying your money in some other form, like a traveller's check.
> He's looking at the genome, and then saying that you can build a working brain from that info > alone. It may be theoretically possible, but is so difficult that we shouldn't even bother trying.
Your brain, like the rest of you, was grown from that info alone, so that is definite proof that it is possible not just theoretically.
I think it is more a question of justice. People who pirate a game and don't buy it are getting something for nothing. The assumption that all the pirates would buy the game if the game was impossible to pirate is, of course, ridiculous; there are very few games that are so good that everyone wants them no matter what. $28 for a straightforward RPG game with indie content is a bit high. But then, DND RPG is just not my kind of game, so I'm not even tempted to pirate it.
So what a pirate really is is not a lost sale, but a freerider. Someone who benefits from your work without rewarding you. Someone who gets something he does not deserve. And there lies the moral issue: not preventing theft, but ensuring that nobody but the paying customers enjoy your games. Sounds a little different when you put it that way, does it not? How much time and effort are you willing to devote to the pursuit of economic justice?
> I find it ironic that you're laughing your ass off at the poor, ignorant Java kids when your grasp of the situation is so deficient. > First off, permgen is not just class definitions. One of the largest consumers of permgen space is intern'd Strings.
Oh God, now I'm laughing even harder. I can't even imagine where you would get 256M of strings, much less see why you would want to keep them loaded in memory all at once. You see, there's this nifty thing called a "database" that you should be using for that purpose.
> Thirdly, the issue with Eclipse is that it doesn't set a correct pergmen size at startup due to an acknowledged bug, > this isn't a case where it's eating up too much space because of a funky classloader.
From my old-fashioned C++ perspective, any program that needs 256M of metadata is a defective program. firefox, for example, is a particularly badly designed program, IMO, and it only has a 118M resident set according to top as I'm using it to type this comment. That's all its internal data, not just the program description. 10-20M is more common, and I consider those bloated. Java programmers, on the other hand, are totally oblivious to bloat in their programs, and solve all their problems by throwing memory at them. It isn't that they care about my disdain for them, of course, but I can still have a good sad laugh at the whole situation and lament about how it is only likely to worsen in the future.
Ok, here's some research. First, there are actually two memory areas in the VM, the heap and the Permanent Generation. It is a PermGen overflow that's causing Eclipse's problems, not heap overflow. As I understand from the linked article, PermGen is a place where VM data is stored; stuff like the class structure, method bytecodes (is that just a copy of the executable?), heap content information, etc. PermGen info used to be stored in the heap, but was moved out as a performance optimization, which incidentally is no longer relevant. I'm still not quite clear why PermGen has a fixed size. Evidently there are quite a few applications out there that routinely overrun PermGen and have to increase it. The cause seems to be people writing custom classloaders that bypass the "class already loaded" optimization, which I suppose makes sense for Eclipse where you keep modifying the class all the time and want to keep reloading it into the VM for testing. Apparently it is possible to write them in such a way that the resultant class metadata "leaks", resulting in overflow. Now, I think I'll just take a small break laughing my ass off at how those poor Java kids need 256M just to store their class definitions. I say, collect your garbage off my lawn and learn C++ already! It seems your fancy Java doesn't absolve you from the need to learn memory management after all:)
I don't get it. Why would you design the VM to have a fixed size address space in the first place? Anybody here remember the reason? And how come there is no standard option to change that size so Eclipse has to resort to platform-specific hacks to do it? 128M ought to be enough for everybody, I guess...
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> But the right get all up in your face about it, completely ignoring any contrasting opinion.
Well, duh! That's because we're right!
You are missing the point. Seeing other people's opinions does not change my mind, and neither should they change yours. A logical mind bases its opinions on facts, not on what other people think. Once you have the facts you need, you can form an opinion. From that point on, other people's opinions are either right (if they agree with yours) or wrong (if they don't). This is not going to change unless you get new information that invalidates your prior arguments. If the subject is important to you and you have searched for enough information before making your decision, this event is highly unlikely, and rereading other people's opinions is a waste of time. Your disagreements are based not on what they know, but on their moral code, and that is not reconcilable.
You must be young. When you've been around for a while, you've already heard all those "other points of view". I certainly have, and I can tell you that seeing them is now little more than annoying. People would call it being "close-minded", which really just means "someone whose brain we can't easily stuff with our opinions". In reality it's just a difference in the core values; there is nothing you can say to change my opinion because my opinion is based on what I deeply believe is right. The polarization comes from the fact that different people have different values, and thus a different, sometimes completely opposite, idea of what is right and what is wrong. You can't change that abour yourself short of suicide. These are the things that form the core of your character, that define who you are. You could present your "point of view" all you want; that will change nothing. I already know what it is, and I already know that you think it's right and I think it's wrong, and I know there is absolutely no way to resolve this difference. As a result, I prefer to avoid articles with a slant opposite to mine; reading them simply goads my mind into repeating the same old tired arguments on why the author is an idiot. Why would I want to constantly subject myself to that? As far as I am concerned, the issue is closed; if you want, we can vote on it and let the democracy decide what the country should do.
You must mean "of when your Mom accidentally packed you for lunch"
How about "Sexy Office"? It's very French and has a nice mass appeal to it.
Does anyone find it disturbing that taxpayers' money is used to do the bad guys' work for them? I can understand researching anti-malware strategies, but why are these people given money to come up with bad things to do to my computer?
The problem is not the existence of powerful stacks, it's the AI's inability to use them properly. It is much better for the human player to have a few powerful units than a hundred weaker ones because they are easier to control. The sheer tedium of arranging your units so they'll attack properly is the result of the latter, and is the reason I am not even going to bother getting this new civ.
Supreme Ruler 2020 is a good example of this problem. You get really wimpy units that you are supposed to make a lot of and then to manually layer them to put the artillery and supply units behind the infantry. To take on a decent sized country you'll need a several hundred units, arranged into a three line front, which can take hours to set up. And God help you if you want to change formation in case the AI tries its favorite tactic of circling around your front to cut off your supply. Sure it's sort of realistic, but the real world solution of widening the front line is simply not practical for my poor human patience.
Micromanaging units is NOT a good thing. It's what the computer ought to know how to do already. Please, give me some AI generals that will already know that the artillery goes behind the infantry and should STAY THERE, DAMMIT! Let the computer do tactics because it should be good at it and the player do strategy because humans are better at that.
Web developers REALLY love their javascript, even when serving only static data. So is it surprizing that they would like to "spice up" the "boring" google search results page? Even the page with the article on it has nothing interesting except article text, and yet it insists on popping up a dialog box reminding me that my browser (elinks) is "too old", as if whatever they are doing with their useless scripts and graphics can possibly be of interest to me.
A 4000km sphere has the volume of 3.35e19 m^3. In diamond, that masses at 1.18e20 tons, or 5.9e26 carats. At $5500/carat it's worth $3e30.
Current railroad rates are 3c/ton*mile (there being no current space freight rates), so you'd pay $1e33 to bring it here.
To summarize:
A 6e26 carat diamond: $3e30
Transportation: $1e33
Giving your gold digger girlfriend an engagement ring she is not fat enough to wear: priceless
The reason people don't eat algae is that it tastes bad. The author himself says he can only eat 15 grams a day, which comes to about 60 calories. Gee, that's only 3% of his daily energy needs. Now, if he could splice in some genes to make his spirulina taste like beef or chicken, he'd have a lot more success.
Personally, I'd like it if somebody worked on engineering trees instead. A tree growing potatoes with sugarcane's photosynthesis efficiency could feed the world.
If you've learned ballroom dancing you may have heard this one: "You are the frame. She is the picture in the frame. Everything you do is to make her look good."
> I have a suspicion you haven't actually read The Baroque Cycle. To me it seemed all about the idea
> that only rational thinking and actual science (not 'alchemy') can move civilization forward.
That's quite correct, I haven't read it and do not intend to. You don't need to tell me that only rational thinking can move civlization; that's just preaching to the choir. Like I said, it's for an entirely different audience.
> And what's with the 'we'? Are techies now some sort of homogeneous hive mind that are all interested or not in the exact same thing?
Techies, like all other groups, define group membership by adherence to a particular set of values, which in our case are technology and everything that makes it possible, like intelligence, rational thought, personal freedom, etc. So yes, it is quite appropriate to say "we" when you are talking about the group you belong to; you either share these values, or you don't belong to the group. In the case of history, I would expect that while you may be interested in the history of technology (as opposed to political history, which consists mainly of who killed whom when, and thus is one of the most useless subjects in existence), you would be studying it with an eye on the future, not as an end in itself.
Then you'll end up with a free country.
Science fiction sales must be really plummeting, since all the authors want to leave the genre as soon as possible. They write a few scifi novels and then switch to fantasy, or, in Stephenson's case, historical fiction. People read those too, of course, but it's an entirely different audience. We techies are not interested in the past; we are interested in the future. We might want to examine history for forgotten ideas that might be helpful in the future, but we certainly don't want to live there! No horse-driven carriages please, enough with the stupid wishing-makes-it-so bullshit, and primitive communities that have never seen a bath. There are no noble savages out there and primitivism in real life results in poverty, disease, starvation, and general misery. Only technology can let people move out of their cold and drafty caves, stop spending their nights shivering around a fire (assuming they have the technology of building one), and finally acquire enough time to do something other than foraging for food. Something, like, perhaps, rational thinking - an activity that leads to more technology and a more comfortable life. And it is an activity you can't get to if you persist in believing in magic spells or that studying history (or the Bible) will yield answers to every possible problem.
Forbid lawyers in the courtroom. The rationale being that if an average Joe is unable to understand the law, it is a problem with the law, not with Joe. Any law Joe can't understand should be immediately repealed. After all, you do want citizens to know if they are criminals or not, don't you?
I don't understand why this works. Why is the browser allowing a site to read another site's cookies? I can see giving cookies to another site in the same domain, but giving a cookie from, say, Facebook, to Amazon should definitely not be allowed. So if Firefox does this idiotic thing, do they give an option for disabling it?
I'm always baffled when people use a lot of tabs. What are the advantages of keeping all those pages open at the same time? If you have so many that you feel the need to organize them in a tree, why not just use the bookmarks from the menu, which are already organized that way?
A 10 foot wok can fry a lot of chinese food.
Compare this to the reasoning behind gun laws. One person can kill many very quickly by using a gun. Therefore we should prohibit people from purchasing a gun. Thinking about terrorist acts can lead someone to committing a terrorist act. Therefore we should prohibit people from thinking. If you accept the premise that anything prohibited by law does not happen, these arguments make a lot of sense.
> t's not (yet...) illegal to possess US currency. Period.
You clearly don't keep up with current US law. As of Aug 18th the courts have ruled in "USA v. $124,700" that possession of large sums of money is automatically evidence of drug trafficking. Any money found on your person is immediately forfeited to the state and you may be charged with some drug offense.
Even before the judgement people had their money seized. For example, a few years ago there was a notable case of a trucker being stopped at a weigh station near El Paso, where a police officer searched the truck and confiscated $23700. Although carrying the cash was still technically legal, the trucker was taken into custody and spent six hours in jail. ACLU later filed a suit to get the money back, but as far as I know that still hasn't happened.
Also, it has long been illegal to carry more than $10000 across a border. That limit is not a hard one. Last year, TSA detained a man for carrying only $4700. So even if you think you are within the legal limit, you'd be advised to seriously consider carrying your money in some other form, like a traveller's check.
> He's looking at the genome, and then saying that you can build a working brain from that info
> alone. It may be theoretically possible, but is so difficult that we shouldn't even bother trying.
Your brain, like the rest of you, was grown from that info alone, so that is definite proof that it is possible not just theoretically.
I think it is more a question of justice. People who pirate a game and don't buy it are getting something for nothing. The assumption that all the pirates would buy the game if the game was impossible to pirate is, of course, ridiculous; there are very few games that are so good that everyone wants them no matter what. $28 for a straightforward RPG game with indie content is a bit high. But then, DND RPG is just not my kind of game, so I'm not even tempted to pirate it.
So what a pirate really is is not a lost sale, but a freerider. Someone who benefits from your work without rewarding you. Someone who gets something he does not deserve. And there lies the moral issue: not preventing theft, but ensuring that nobody but the paying customers enjoy your games. Sounds a little different when you put it that way, does it not? How much time and effort are you willing to devote to the pursuit of economic justice?
> I find it ironic that you're laughing your ass off at the poor, ignorant Java kids when your grasp of the situation is so deficient.
> First off, permgen is not just class definitions. One of the largest consumers of permgen space is intern'd Strings.
Oh God, now I'm laughing even harder. I can't even imagine where you would get 256M of strings, much less see why you would want to keep them loaded in memory all at once. You see, there's this nifty thing called a "database" that you should be using for that purpose.
> Thirdly, the issue with Eclipse is that it doesn't set a correct pergmen size at startup due to an acknowledged bug,
> this isn't a case where it's eating up too much space because of a funky classloader.
From my old-fashioned C++ perspective, any program that needs 256M of metadata is a defective program. firefox, for example, is a particularly badly designed program, IMO, and it only has a 118M resident set according to top as I'm using it to type this comment. That's all its internal data, not just the program description. 10-20M is more common, and I consider those bloated. Java programmers, on the other hand, are totally oblivious to bloat in their programs, and solve all their problems by throwing memory at them. It isn't that they care about my disdain for them, of course, but I can still have a good sad laugh at the whole situation and lament about how it is only likely to worsen in the future.
Ok, here's some research. First, there are actually two memory areas in the VM, the heap and the Permanent Generation. It is a PermGen overflow that's causing Eclipse's problems, not heap overflow. As I understand from the linked article, PermGen is a place where VM data is stored; stuff like the class structure, method bytecodes (is that just a copy of the executable?), heap content information, etc. PermGen info used to be stored in the heap, but was moved out as a performance optimization, which incidentally is no longer relevant. I'm still not quite clear why PermGen has a fixed size. Evidently there are quite a few applications out there that routinely overrun PermGen and have to increase it. The cause seems to be people writing custom classloaders that bypass the "class already loaded" optimization, which I suppose makes sense for Eclipse where you keep modifying the class all the time and want to keep reloading it into the VM for testing. Apparently it is possible to write them in such a way that the resultant class metadata "leaks", resulting in overflow. Now, I think I'll just take a small break laughing my ass off at how those poor Java kids need 256M just to store their class definitions. I say, collect your garbage off my lawn and learn C++ already! It seems your fancy Java doesn't absolve you from the need to learn memory management after all :)
I don't get it. Why would you design the VM to have a fixed size address space in the first place? Anybody here remember the reason? And how come there is no standard option to change that size so Eclipse has to resort to platform-specific hacks to do it? 128M ought to be enough for everybody, I guess...