You have no idea how nostalgic that makes me feel. I miss the days of the (relatively) innocent, slightly awkward Windows 3.1 options ("Hotdog Stand", indeed), After Dark icons and Starry Night, 8.3 filenames (IMPORTNT.DOC), and even those little silly system menu controls. There wasn't any depth effects on menus, just color inversion. Sigh, I feel old.

Sometimes I look around at the modern desktop and I wonder when did we lose it? When did it become so ... processed? We've gained a lot, but ... at some point the old computers "grew up", and I miss the little tykes.

Tractable means easily managed. It, as a subset of that, has the meaning "can be easily accomplished." If something is expensive, that means it is not easily accomplished, nor easily managed. If you can "manage" something that includes as a strict subset that you can afford it. Those are very precise meanings. In computer science (which is not what is being discussed here, but still illustrates the point) problems which take an unacceptable amount of processor time (a week on an interactive desktop, five seconds on a realtime system) are similarly intractable.

For me? Yes, absolutely, because I can't afford the parts or the assembly. Given a car already (i.e. modifying a car to have an additional video camera)? No, of course not, because that's not expensive.

You are not accounting for the energy needed to find, extract, refine, and ready the materials at the destination, nor to run, maintain, and diagnose the "nanotech assembler."

Further, the body is suffused with electrical activity, which an atomic replica would not capture the proper state of.

I fully, enthusiastically agree about the feasibility and importance of mining NE asteroids, though.

The information content of the brain has been narrowed down to about 20PB (petabytes -- that's 20,000 terabytes). Free-space optical transmission has managed to get up to 500 MBits/s -- let's get really optimistic and assume it gets up to 5 Gbits/s. 20PB is 167,772,160 Gbits. Transmitting that at 5 Gbits/s would take slightly over one year if there's no interference and no beam dispersal. Since there are both of those, you actually must transmit much more data than that, so it will easily take three years or more. The whole time you have to have a known receiver dedicated and ready.

For your trouble, you get a copy of yourself somewhere else in a robot body while you're stuck on Earth still.

You don't know what "tractable" means. A problem that we know how to solve is not "tractable." A problem is tractable only when we have the implementation to solve it easily. The fact that "it's expensive right now" means exactly that it's not tractable.

The code you linked is written against the Windows API and most of the code on display is conforming to that. The OpenGL code takes up less than a screen.

GLUT is limiting because it's cross-platform; the limitation isn't in the abstraction but in the union of deployable platform features.

Yeah, all guys are sexist slobs, just like all whites are privileged racists, right? This is, frankly, ridiculous. You've been provided with data that you reject, because you don't like it. You find a claim in one study and assume that it must be the case in all studies, even when the studies don't show that. You accuse an entire gender of being violent slobs, and a paragraph later complain of 'sexism' as though you hadn't just gotten done classifying half the human race as somehow beneath you.

We're obviously not reaching consensus here. You are free to hold whatever opinions you want based on whatever facts you want, but do remember that no matter how much you want it to be true, you can't make blanket assumptions about three billion people and expect them to be true -- or expect the three billion to think highly of you for it.

I'm tired, it's late, and I think I'm running a fever, so I'm going to do that dirty pool where one quotes things and replies to them instead of writing proper paragraphs. My apologies. :)

I cannot find in these studies one that states this directly. Can you cite the one in which this is enumerated, please?

Yes, and the data I provided (and that can be easily found) shows that women in lesbian relationships engage in verbal and physical abuse just as often, meaning it's not just gender and therefore shouldn't be seen as men 'causing' divorce.

Certainly not my intention. Here's what you said:

And here's how I summarized:

Is that not a fair summary?

The study did have a control group -- men. The exact same circumstances were tested for men, and men did not change reactions based on the "dirty old Ford Fiesta to the clean new car." Since it does not matter to men and does matter to women, would you not agree that income level is more relevant for women? I fail to see how this is a biased study -- to be fair, certainly not any more so than a survey which reveals women less frequently hold full-time positions and more frequently do housework and use it to claim men are not contributing.

You are making a large number of unsubstantiated assumptions, here, such as assuming that infrequency contributes to difficulty of orgasm, or that the sex lives of people in China are somehow fundamentally different from ours.

This is, respectfully, more misdirection, and an attempt to avoid an original point.

In addition, dismissing the survey because you don't like the information it presents is intellectually dishonest. If you'd like, I can give you an exhaustive critique of the studies you cited, with similar results. The facts are it's hard to gather good data. That's why when you get such strongly correlated results as almost no men caring about cars whilst almost all women do, or that increased wealth increases orgasm frequency across all income brackets, it cannot be simply dismissed.

You are misdirecting.

First -- number of women in the workforce is completely tangential to the point being discussed, which was that as reported by the studies showing women do more housework the men are spending more time at their jobs. I fail to see how this is not at least a first approximation of equitable. I have yet to see a study in which a) the women spent as much time at the office AND b) did substantially more housework (although another thing worth pointing out is that these numbers are self-reported, giving them questionable accuracy on both counts). If this is dilberate misdirection, it is extremely dishonest.

Re: gender and violence, your claim was that marriages end because of domestic abuse, and that men were overwhelmingly perps, whilst women were overwhelmingly victims. The evidence does not agree with that. Your point about rape is completely irrelevant to that unless you are claiming that most marriages end because the husband rapes the wife. Again, this reads almost like an attempt at subterfuge.

Re: car, so you agree that you feel a man's car is equivalent to his hygiene? Isn't that exactly the point being discussed, that the amount of money he has the ability to spend is as important to women as his non-financial characteristics? The linked study even specifically pointed out that similar setups did not affect men in any way, shape, or form.

Re: female orgasm study. You are making assertions without data to back them up -- your chain of logic is simply that poor people can't have good sex, and I can't think of a single study that backs that up. Impotence through temporary spikes in stress levels are a known phenomenon, but you are implying that there's no such thing as someone who simply makes less than someone else. In reality income levels are different, and it must be assumed that some level of people are comfortable at their income level -- ergo, the results correlating female response to wealth transcend localized phenomena.

I agree that we need better jobs, at least.

There are some major issues, here.

One, I'm familiar with the study you linked concerning housework distribution. Are you aware that in that study, half again as many men were employed full-time as the women? Do you agree that if one person is employed full time and the other isn't, that the one that is not should take on a greater share of housework? Also, you claim the link points out a correction for this, but I don't see one. Can you cite, please?

Two, recent studies show that lesbian couples experience domestic violence at a similar rate to heterosexual couples, and it is known that men underreport, so I wouldn't say the situation is so cut and dries as "man=criminal, woman=victim."

Three, you attack the "women want wealth" position as not being supported, but cursory searching turns up evidence. Here's a couple:
Women more attracted to men in expensive cars
Women's orgasm frequency increases with the wealth of their partner

Carrying it so far as to imply the majority of divorces are because of crimes perpetrated by men is, frankly, sensationalist. I have seen deep discourse from you on this site, so I know you are not trolling, but your claims, implications, and position here are not defensible.

Yeah? Is that why iOS apps crash more frequently than Android apps?K/a>

You mean old phones don't have new software? Yeah, that's crazy. It's almost like they're creating more feature-rich software.

Most of the Android phones that people like you love to point out as "WHAR upgrade WHAR" were built as budget phones and simply don't have the horsepower for serious upgrades. With an average two-year turnaround in the American consumer cellphone market, I can't say this is a serious problem.

Everyone I know (20+ people) who have bought their first Android -- some of them coming from iPhones -- have stuck with it in successive purchases (or plan to when applicable). Not really the one purchase platform you claim. (Anecdotes, etc., but you're the one making blanket claims.)

The 500-person classes (incidentally the same ones that could be learned through google) probably don't need a professor, and sure, you could just distribute taped lectures. But that's not the important part of even a useful undergrad degree; any reasonable institution will have advanced topics classes of much smaller size and much more difficult material, which cannot be effectively learned on one's own. (Over decades? Sure. But that's woefully inefficient.)

Plenty of classes have grades only from tests and no required attendance. That is, roughly, your "only pay to get tests administered and graded" plan (albeit without the discount). Yet students who fail to show up for the optional lecture do very poorly when compared to those that do.

You appear to be seriously suggesting that there is no benefit from trying to learn a topic from someone who has mastered it. I can't think of a single instance or example of that being borne out (difficulties of quantification aside).

Current system: professor gives lectures to a group of students, and the students can ask for clarification as he continues. Students requiring more in-depth explanation can utilize the professor's office hours. Students are given small activities to do on their own initiative to help them discover holes in their learning and to test their progress.

Your system: if a student doesn't understand a lecture, he's screwed. Classtime problems don't help him at all because -- according to you -- if he doesn't already know the material he should be failed for not watching the lectures. Office hours are completely redundant. Classes separate into two groups -- people who understood the lectures and therefore don't need class time (why have the professor?) and people who can't learn the material by watching youtube and are therefore failed (why have the professor?).

We've about mined this out -- our experiences have been wildly different -- but I wanted to say that I was in a ferocious temper earlier and probably came on a bit too strong ("borderline dishonest" and aggressive crap like that). I apologize if I sounded harsh and appreciate your patience in discussing this civilly.

So what I see is Linux big where there's big iron. Our clusters, like I said, wouldn't exist without Linux, and as you say the server market is huge (one step shy of homogeneous). I see desktop problems frequently, though -- regarding software upgrades (and the more I think about it, the more I think this is a deep problem) even having to add a repo for a PPA is an order of magnitude more complex than simply installing new software without thinking about it.

Such things aren't unheard of in MS land -- the DirectX issues, as you point out, and so forth. But all of those decisions have been met with huge resistance, and I would posit that 99% of the software on the average Windows desktop user's machine can be upgraded simply by getting the new version for a good ten years afterwards, whereas in Linux if you want feature upgrades your options are all going to require a little reading. Again, project cars.

None of this is really meant as a criticism of Linux, just my own opinion that it's not really competitive in the desktop space. NTTAWWT, because it can fly in the right hands -- it's not really needed in the desktop space. Hell, the megacorps want everyone to have thin clients again, anyway. *grin*