Is the end goal of life a high salary?

I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.

Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?

A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.

I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.

If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.

There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.

For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.

Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.

The didn't want to given a place of their own, they wanted to be left in peace as they built a place of their own.

Personally, I agree that they should have defended their sovereignty with force, if necessary.

Their mistake, in the case of Minerva, was that the land that they created would be acknowledged to be theirs, since it was in unclaimed territory in (at the time) international waters. It's no different, in principle, from a volcanic island being formed in international waters; the only difference is that it was immediately habitable.

They thought other nations would act civilly, and in accordance with international law; they were wrong; if there's a next time, they'll know better.

Unless you map a route for "how do you get there from here", you're stuck with the same problem that a lot of Open Source projects face: blind faith that there is some incremental, rather than revolutionary, method of moving from a mediocre saddle point to a revolutionary result. I personally maintain that you can not incrementally achieve a revolution.

This may be because historically I'm tainted by working for companies like IBM, Apple, and Google, and I have seen where incremental gets you, compared to placing a stake in the ground, and just building around the stake, while letting the past wander off into the weeds.

Google X will accomplish revolutionary things. Most of the rest of Google will not. Facebook will not, and Yahoo will not, nor will Blackberry, all of whom are patterning themselves after an existing model.

This is a viewpoint from a post-singularity world; to get there, however, you have to be able to survive the singularity in the first place. There is no clear path from an economy of scarcity (what we have now) to an economy of abundance (a post-singularity world). The closest things we have to guideposts are science fiction stories in which someone implements a technological generational leap, and then gives it away to everyone, whether or not everyone wants it or not.

Barring that, we will have a short term centralization of wealth as automation centralized control of the means of production. The closest thing to a non-singularity bootstrap patch to get us over that divide would be declaring a flat or linear single slope tax, start it at some minimum income, and for people below that minimum income, the government makes up the difference so that everyone below the line hits the line, regardless of their contribution (or outright detriment) to society. That particular patch would have the highest probability, in terms of avoiding outright revolution, for the majority to at least live past the point of singularity.

So you can't discount economics, unless you are willing to accept a large-scale die-off (many malthusian minded environmental groups have already advocated this without advocating it directly (that would be politically suicidal), but the key to recognizing them is any statement that "Earth is nearing/over its carrying capacity", or words to that effect. What you can do is design strategies within the existing economic system.

I think you did not read me correctly. My statement was more to the effect that interventionist policies to enforce our idea of correct social, economic, or moral behaviour on external polities have triggered reprisals. This is not to say that we should, as a people, be insular, but we can't dictate policy. The more effective we are in our intervention, the more disenfranchised the people who disagree with these policies become. Eventually, from despair, they believe that they might be better off dead, and, if so, exercise their ability to take as many of the people they perceive as oppressors with them as they possibly can.

I have absolutely no doubt that, had there been no safety valve of "Conscientious Objector" during the Vietnam war, and no safety valve of "escape to Canada/elsewhere", those people who were being forced into a position of violating their moral code would have taken the military training forced on them and excelled: they would have been the best soldiers they possibly could be, the best marksmen, the bess killing machines the training could make them. And then they would have turned that training not on the enemy they, once weaponized, were intended to be pointed at, but upon those that forced them into the position of violating their moral code in the first place. I have anecdotal evidence to this effect in the form of statements from people who used both types of safety valve.

The point being is that it's not possible, nor is it desirable, to legislate morality. Ultimately, the only laws which are effective are those which agree with the fundamental laws of the universe, since the physical universe does not believe in arbitrary enforcement; you step off a cliff, you fall. No exceptions for a senators son.

You're being eminently reasonable about this discussion so far. Thank you.

I think the problem with the "participate in the community that we have, or ..." philosophy is that protestors, starting in the Vietnam war era, have been shuffled off to "Free Speech Zones", effectively excluding them from all other areas, including those areas in which public discourse is taking place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

Indeed, these do end up giving you your preference of excluding them from "anywhere near the society i participate in", i.e. they are enforced non-participants. This has been most recently visible with the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements, as well as G7, G8, and G20 summits: those who are being protested against don't have to see the protests, effectively neutering them. You can define them out of the group you belong to and into a separate "group they belong to", but effectively, since everyone in a given geopolity lives under the same laws, this merely disenfranchises them.

Gavin Newsom made this point rather well in his book "Citizenville", with the example of the Obama administration starting its campaign with honest public input into it's platform, and then the transformation of that platform into a petition platform, and then as soon as the number one thing the citizens wanted was legalization of Marijuana, it became a suggestion platform. Then as soon as other unpopular-with-the-powers-that-be issues, like holding the finance and insurance industries accountable for the financial meltdown became top issues, suddenly the number of signatures required went up by a factor of 10, and then when that number was reached anyway, the executive response was to state that it hadn't been phrased in the proper legalese so that the executive branch could take action on it. A similar thing happened with the Aaron Swartz Prosecution, after which we were informed that it was "advisory only".

I think the reason you allow it is so that they do not bomb you, in the same way that a pragmatic Libertarian will support certain aspects of what they consider a welfare state at best, and public socialism at worst, in order to prevent people who are starving or simply desirous of material wealth they cannot afford from "taking their stuff".

I think the only way you could add a codicil enforcing human rights, specifically the right of emigration to get away from such a society, would be to open the borders of societies more desirable to those emigrating to permit their immigration to the society they desire most.

This would effectively mean opening the borders of all countries. To do otherwise would generally neutralize a peoples ability to emigrate; consider the oppressive regime with freedom of emigration, but completely land-locked by neighbor states which do not permit immigration.

I expect that this is not workable, since it would require drawing not only polity boundaries as borders, but philosophical boundaries as well. If this were the status quo, then it would be possible to "capture territory" from a neighboring polity through intentional politically motivated emigration across philosophically porous borders which were not intended to be politically porous.

I don't know what the answer is, but whether the result is "they steal my stuff" or "they bomb my office buildings and public events", unless you allow there to be some latitude in the enforcement of your philosophy on external polities - unless there is leeway for them to exist and hold their views within their subset of the larger community - that type of emergent behavior will not be preventable.

Notably people with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (Leprosy), Tuberculosis, Smallpox, Typhoid, and other infectious diseases with airborne vectors, prior to effective treatments being available.

We used to call this "quarantine", and felt the discrimination engendered by public knowledge that the person was a carrier had sufficient benefit to society that it was worth denying the carriers their rights, until they could be effectively treated, or they died - whichever came first. As a side effect of the danger to society being effectively blocked, we also didn't tend to fund research into a cure/treatment very heavily.

I believe the last time some people tried to "get the fuck out" as you say, the United States paid Tonga to send the Tongan Navy to claim the land away from the Libertarians who had built the island in the first place and claim it for Tonga:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva

There was a "conference of neighboring states" which then rubber stamped the Tongan claim to the newly created island, afte which the ships sailed and the claim was officially made. There have been subsequent disputes with Fiji since then, when neither nation had bothered to claim the atoll until it was landfilled by the Libertarians to create the island which is now there.

With the existing Antarctic Treaty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

there is nowhere for these people to "get the fuck out" [SIC] to any more, since every scrap of land is spoken for, and every scrap of land that gets created is immediately "foreclosed" upon by an existing nation which didn't bother to lay claim to the region until after the land came into existence.

The boot is firmly on the neck of the people who you are telling to "get the fuck out": if you won't actually let them out of the existing geopolitical system as it currently exists, then you are going to have to damn well come to some accommodation with them.

I'm really surprised that it isn't already obvious to everyone that most of the militant Islamists just want a territory that they can run the way they see fit (however incredibly objectionably run that would be to the sensibilities of the rest of us). The only difference between them and the people trying to build their own nation states by land-filling atolls is that they don't have enough money to do the same thing, and so instead they are trying to take of the geographic regions in which they are currently located.

Whether or not they are aware of the reality that the other nation states wouldn't permit them to actually create land and keep it - which the more radical Libertarians have been patiently banging their head against for a while - or they just realize that no women would come live there voluntarily and so their state would die out after one generation of an all-boys-club is unknown. But both are additional motivation for trying to take over the existing local geopolity, rather than building a new one somewhere else, and striking out at those polities who won't let them do so via acts of terrorism.

I expect that, should we ever be permitted to have cheap access to space without direct governmental control, we will quickly see the more radical Libertarians demonstrating that The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as quickly as they can manage to do so.

Until then: they are your citizens, by your choice, so deal with it.

Except the part where the money is flying out of your pocket, unless you are suggesting that instead of Google selling aggregate information about us, we should be selling our non-aggregate personal information to Microsoft and Acxion ourselves, and trusting them to aggregate it like we know Google does?

Some would argue it is worse killing the adult, but that it depends on the adult. As a purely social equation, society at large has a lot more already invested in the adult, while a kid merely represents potential. However, the value to society of an adult with a PhD in Education who works with the homeless, and the value of an adult drug dealer, tend to weigh in on both sides of adult value as a whole, but on average, the investment is not mis-sunk cost.

One of Orson Scott Card's motivations in writing Ender's Game was to argue against this philosophy, via the "what if the kid is the next Einstein?" argument, but practically, the current system is designed to normalize performance as much as possible, so even if the kid IS the next Einstein, they'll be likely to stay with their job at the patent office.

Gun rampages are typically entered into with cool calculation and a bit of psychopathy/sociopathy; they are done by mentally ill persons or political zealots. The one exception I can think of is the Texas Tower Sniper, and it turned out he had a brain tumor.

The figure cited in the blog was 26% CPU utilization, with a bazillion threads (no specific number give, but given that 4 cores on an 8 core machine were used, it couldn't have been that many.

The problem the service has is that it has a single work loop in order to manage events from a lot of disparate locations, and when it gets an event, it checks all possible people who want to do work. In this case, it's a timer event to go poll to see if an iDevice has been installed, and that causes a bunch of other stuff to run at an earlier time than it would have.

This is an artifact of the implementation using a GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) based design on top of BlueBox, which is an API layer that makes a Windows box look like a Carbon API (it hasn't been totally updated yet) Mac OS X box. The upper level software is designed for device arrival notification, rather than having a timer to kludge around the issue by forcing the polling.

Yeah, this does mean that you could effectively port any Mac OS X program to Windows by recompiling it, if Apple were to make the technology available, which they likely never will.

Insufficient. I don't WANT to have to install a damn device driver to handle a general class of devices. This is the Microsoft model, and it is flawed. I want to write a program in userspace which gets notified when devices arrive, and then it goes out and sniffs their butt to see if it's a device I can claim, and if it is, then I claim it by opening it as a raw USB device and handle the device specific communications protocols in userspace. This is the Mac OS X / Linux / BSD model.

The benefits of this model over the model Microsoft wants us to use is that it allows us to deal with classes of devices without writing a new driver for the device -- or in this case, since we want to start a user space program, a new service for the device.

Conceptually, I suppose it's possible to build a Rube-Goldberg contraption that would consist of a device driver that used the mechanism you suggest, a service in userspace to talk to the Rube-Goldberg contraption, and then launch the application based on it being a device it recognized. That just trades unknown GUIDs for unknown vendor IDs, if not both them and device IDs as well.

Then we are left with replicating the Microsoft USB class driver functionality in its entirety, since the device will have been claimed by our USB driver, and that is the driver our service and application will end up having to talk to.

But now we are back in the same boat of having to install new software - it's just a device driver, instead of a service. Or we can access a vendor/device ID table from the registry - but again, this new table has to be installed for the device to be used.

This is the part that's insufficient about GUIDs: if I have a per-device GUID during device development, then I have to put it in the table somewhere, and that's an installation step before I can use the new device.

iTunes is a pig when it polls, no question; PhoneTools and other software is less of a pig, but the main complaint of the OP was that it's using any cycles at all (probably a battery/thermal issue for them), and not blocking when there's no work to do.

There's no need to be snide in a civil discussion; that's twice, if I include the original posting's comment about moderation.

The answer is that they do not implement the functionality precisely because it would take a service which eats CPU all the time (or the aforementioned Rube-Goldberg, or something like it).

Companies which offer contact sync software for a single device/device class (for example) DO implement the polling, and yes, they take CPU.

This sounds like a problem for Microsoft Developer Relations to solve by providing working sample code. Remember, however, the requirements:

(1) Everything needs to block until a device arrives
(2) When a device arrives, a service needs to wake up
(3) None of this must be contingent on a specific vend/device ID pair or GUID
(4) The service then gets to decide if it wants it's application to have the device, and if so, launch the application
(5) When the application claims the device, it needs to be able to do so as a generic USB device, per current APIs

I don't think you will be able to do this without contortions, or without extending the generic USB class device driver, but either would be an acceptable solution. For one thing, you need to be aware that most mobile phones (Motorolla, for example) implement multi-endpointing, where the secondary endpoint only shows up after a conversation with the first. This works by opening the endpoint, and putting the device in an alternate mode which causes a second endpoint to be advertised by the device (effectively, a new USB device arrives), after which the new USB device is talked to with a vendor-private protocol.

BTW, this last (one endpoint arrives, you talk to it, then you get a second endpoint) is exactly how the IronKey and similar secure USB FOBs work, except they also need to launch an intermediate application from the service in order to handle password exchange with the device.

The point here being that I want to be able to plug in my just released Tuesday device, and have my released last year software intended to work with all my devices, including future ones, come up and be able to talk to it.

I do not want to have to do an install, and I do not want to go through the "Windows has discovered a new device; Search for drivers?" dance.

I want it to Just Work(tm).

You do that.

Tell them to make a version of DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL that doesn't require you to have a window handle to get the callback to the message pump so that you don't have to poll using PeekMessage(). The notifications need to be able to go to windowless services. If they can't go to windowless services running and paused in the background, they are no good for causing the launching of a specific program when a device of a specific type arrives.

Then tell them that RegisterDeviceNotification() is useless for detecting new iPod/iPhone/iPad devices because it require matching a GUID that has not been defined at the time that the service was written, and that having to update the service by having to update iTunes each time you buy a new device before the plugged in device is recognized as launching iTunes because you don't get a broadcast notification in that case, which you can then use to open up the device temporarily to probe it further ("Hi, USB device, are you an Apple Device?") rather than using a stinking GUID.

Then call up the IronKey and other encrypted USB storage device folks and tell them about it, too, because, hey, they have to do a crypto handshake and need to be able to aske the same question AFTER the handshake.

Then you can call up Motorola, and tell them so they can update their PhoneTools Software, because they have the same problem.

Then call the DataPilot folks, who have no idea in heck what the phone GUID would be when you plug in your stupid random phone, particularly if you are using their DataPilot Universal PRO Kit, which connect up to almost all the phones from Apple, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Sanyo,
Sony Ericsson, and Audiovox.

I have more concrete examples, but I think you get the point.

This is a general problem. The current Microsoft APIs do not solve this general problem; they require either an open application window, or they require a service which polls. They are insufficient. If you can indeed call up your engineers, do so. Tell them the problem space their APIs are not solving, and request they fix the existing APIs or add new ones to address the problem.

Why is parent modded funny instead of informative?

It makes 3 good points:

(1) The periodic scanning is Apple looking for device arrivals
(2) You can disable the service with no ill effects
(3) The Windows APIs for device arrival notification suck and require polling rather than blocking a thread to wait

True Supercomputers can solve non-highy-parallel problems.

The wall got smacked in the 1980's.

Which is why the TSA is so beloved of us all, and why none of us cheered when Yukari Mihamae groped the TSA agent back...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/17/yukari-mihamae-61yearold-_n_900969.html

The only real surprise in that case is that you can't buy T-shirts with her face on it.