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How do you come to that idea?

Introductory statistics

Hint: I know what a median is, and how to use it

You have proven conclusively that you don't.

Except God didn't; man did.

Pope Leo XIII, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis would disagree with you. But you would probably know more about God than those losers, right?

http://w2.vatican.va/content/l...

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

http://www.usccb.org/upload/Pr...

And labor unions would not necessarily make things much better. Many nurses work for under a union, and it tends to create the "well, it's not my job to do X" mentality, because if you're in a union and you do your job but could have done X that is Jane's or Joe's job then you get penalized despite it being faster for you to do it than calling Joe or Jane to do so.

You've never been in a labor union have you?

It's also why it costs $19 to get an aspirin in the hospital.

I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit. You think the hospital's markup on drugs is because of the unions?

https://web.williams.edu/Econo...

You mean lizards, right?

> And all of you clueless Obama-loving lberal weenies will still vote for her next election

With alternatives like Palin and Romney one is left with little choice.

Because otherwise the wrong lizard might get in?

No, the problem with democracy is that we are all obsessing over ensuring that the wrong lizards don't get in.

Precisely. This is why third parties seldom fare well; the general attitude of American voters is, "But if I don't vote for Party A's candidate, Party B's candidate will get in, and we can't have that!"

No, the problem with democracy is that we are all obsessing over ensuring that the wrong lizards don't get in.

GW Bush signed the patriot act.....not obama.....the patriot act created these programs.....

Who cares? After 4 1/2 years, you can firmly say that Obama has taken ownership of that problem, especially after the "compromise" reauthorization in 2011. Obama ran on a campaign that in part was supposed to be about putting an end to war on terror abuses. Instead, the only "wrongdoers" Obama has pursued with any vigor in connection with war on terror crimes and state surveillance are government whistleblowers.

I voted twice for Obama. And now, I just feel like I've been voting against "the wrong lizard" the whole time (because I don't believe for a second that Romney or McCain would have been better on 4th Amendment rights).

You are failing to realize that the mass media would have outed everything they could, if only a Republican was in office. Don't you remember the original 'leaked stories' of government surveillance? The ones that actually involved spying on foreigners, even if they were talking to Americans. They were front page stories in the New York Times, back when Bush was in office. Now that Obama is there, Snowden had to go to a foreign paper to get his story out.

I'm getting incredibly disillusioned with American democracy, and it's the fault of the people for spending far more time getting worked up on partisan circus issues than real, substantial matters of policy.

That's why many of us who agree with that sentiment voted third party this last time. It's the only option left, unless...

I'd say we need a revolution,

Whether we need one or not, I believe one is coming. Within the next decade, at that.

but I'm even more terrified of the most eager revolutionaries than I am of the lizards in charge.

So find less eager revolutionaries, and form your own group of concerned citizens, who plan to survive the coming revolution. Oops, you just became one of the groups you are terrified of.

Honestly, that's all it would take. But once you are at the point, you'll see most of the other groups are more like you than you currently appreciate. (There are the groups of racist thugs, but they are not the majority of the groups.) They don't want to overthrow the government, they want to return the government to what it is supposed to be. But they realize the government won't allow this without a fight.

I just don't know what to do anymore.

Get a handgun, go to a gun range to learn to fire it, talk to people who you think are too scary. Let things evolve from there.

GW Bush signed the patriot act.....not obama.....the patriot act created these programs.....

Who cares? After 4 1/2 years, you can firmly say that Obama has taken ownership of that problem, especially after the "compromise" reauthorization in 2011. Obama ran on a campaign that in part was supposed to be about putting an end to war on terror abuses. Instead, the only "wrongdoers" Obama has pursued with any vigor in connection with war on terror crimes and state surveillance are government whistleblowers.

I voted twice for Obama. And now, I just feel like I've been voting against "the wrong lizard" the whole time (because I don't believe for a second that Romney or McCain would have been better on 4th Amendment rights). I'm getting incredibly disillusioned with American democracy, and it's the fault of the people for spending far more time getting worked up on partisan circus issues than real, substantial matters of policy. I'd say we need a revolution, but I'm even more terrified of the most eager revolutionaries than I am of the lizards in charge.

I just don't know what to do anymore.

Dear Richard Allen Black,

Hey, look, someone knows how to look at a profile!

FYI, Captain Assumption, I am in fact not Mr. Black, though I do work for the man. Strike 1.

There's no such thing as a road tax

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_tax -

Road tax, known by various names around the world, is a tax which has to be paid on a motor vehicle before using it on a public road.

Strike 2.

Second, your car (especially if you drive an SUV or pickup) causes wear and tear on the road. My bicycle does not.

http://www.williams.edu/feature-stories/elementary-physics/

Your bicycle has mass, and where the tires meet the road there is friction; while your bike does not cause as much damage to the roads as larger vehicles, to say that it causes no damage is intellectually dishonest at best, and yet another example of your ignorance.

Three strikes already? Damn, and there's so much bigoted, ignorant shit left to point out!

Third, you live in Montana

Yea, no I don't. Geolocation fail.

Your state...

Is not Montana, so whatever you were going to say means precisely dick to me.\

bicycle doesn't cause property damage, injury and death...your car sure as hell does,

Yea, no it doesn't. My truck has never once caused "property damage, injury [or] death," but if you disagree you're welcome to file charges with the local sheriff. Just be prepared for me to sue your ass into oblivion for defamation, oh and spend a little time in prison for filing a false report.

What you probably meant was that my truck has the potential to cause damage where your bicycle cannot, which is obvious bullshit. Bikes hurt/kill people too, when their operators are fucktards (and, judging by your nonsensical and very, very angry posts, you belong in that category).

hick.

Yea, real reasonable, adult response there. You sure you don't want to make a crack about my mother while you're at it, you bigoted fuck?

Making a car safer to drive because accidents becmoe more survivable is not the same thing as making accidents less likely, which is what we've been discussing. Those two cars will of course behave differently. Do you think that the presence of an airbag or a seat belt materially affects the car's handling? Of course not. The differences are due to a litany of other changes to cars over time.

As for that limb you're on. Don't look down:
https://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2006/060927ManneringOffset.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8198694?dopt=Abstract
http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/failure%20of%20seatbelt%20legislation.pdf
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Buckle-Up-And-Behave.html

And it's not limited to cars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IB2xRfRHOA
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/07/peltzman-effect.html
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-balance-of-risk/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603134/abstract
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702825.html
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61755-3/fulltext?_eventId=login
http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Wilson_Circumcision.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

First, you want to compare the US government, an organization that has bee around for hundreds of years to a start up? If you want to compare us to something, then compare us to an old blue chip. And guess how much debt those old corps run up? Oh that's right, they tend to run massive cash reserves because they're not stupid.

Apple does, sure. But old dogs like IBM have had periods of high (or volatile) debt to equity ratios specifically for the purposes of financing... wait for it... growth. Since the dollar is a fiat currency, there's no reason for the United States to care too much about how much "money" there is. Keep in mind that when the US dollar doesn't buy a loaf of bread, gold won't either. The only thing that will matter at that point is who has the guns to protect their food supply. No amount of pretend hard currencies are going to change that. So, if you're a doomsday libertarian, which it looks like you are, I'd recommend guns, ammo, and arable land instead of krugerrands.

Third, I love that you think the problem in the US is a lack of infrustructure. You honestly think that if we had a few more bridges or roads or a couple extra solar power planets all our problems would be solved. You think that somehow the economy would be good. Because in your mind, the reason US businesses are failing is because they don't have enough roads. Really? Wake up...

Ten years ago I traveled on a TGV while in France. If you're unaware, that's a nuclear powered electric bullet train that travels 500 miles in 3 hours and twenty minutes, and is rarely late. That kind of infrastructure simply doesn't exist in the United States, because all of our money is poured down the drain of car commuting instead of mass transportation. Even our airports are overloaded because there are no shorthaul trains as an alternative, and this ends up filling airports with unnecessary traffic.

Also: "We investigate the long run consequences of infrastructure provision on per capita income in a panel of countries over the period 1950-1992. Simple panel based tests are developed which enable us to isolate the sign and direction of the long run effect of infrastructure on income in a manner that is robust to the presence of unknown heterogeneous short run causal relationships. Our results provide clear evidence that in the vast majority of cases infrastructure does induce long run growth effects. But we also find a great deal of variation in the results across individual countries. Taken as a whole, the results demonstrate that telephones, electricity generating capacity and paved roads are provided at close to the growth maximizing level on average, but are under-supplied in some countries and over-supplied in others. These results also help to explain why cross section and time series studies have in the past found contradictory results regarding a causal link between infrastructure provision and long run growth."

http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/pedroniinfrastructure.pdf

Fourth, I love how you think we're in debt because there were some tax breaks. Yes there were tax breaks and it caused US tax revenue to decrease by what percentage? Okay... and by what percentage did US spending go up? Exactly. I'll admit that if we didn't lower taxes our debt would be better but not by much. It is the spending that went up by the most and continues to go up by the most. That isn't an opinion. It's a mathematical fact. You agree or be wrong.

"The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has estimated the 10-year revenue loss from extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts beyond 2010 at $2.9 trillion, with an additional $606 billion in debt service costs (interest), for a combined total of $3.5 trillio

Ended Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Yeah. About that:

The Obama administration objected Thursday to immediately ending the military's ban on openly gay service members, saying that an injunction to stop the "don't ask, don't tell" policy might harm military readiness in a time of war.

In a filing with a federal court in California, the Justice Department said that a judge who struck down the policy as unconstitutional should not enforce that ruling with a military-wide injunction banning the discharge of gay service members.

Kudos to him for coming around to the side of decency and eventually signing the DADT Repeal Act of 2010, albeit after ordering his Justice Department to fight it tooth and nail.

Maybe I'm just young, but most of my adult life has been under Bush, and now Obama. Bush seemed to mostly screw things up. Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.

Like Gitmo still being open. Like ordering the assassination of American citizens. Like fighting against the end of indefinite detention of unconvicted, untried suspects. Like the drones circling over the Middle East. This is the "better direction" you see America moving toward?

Note: I'm explicitly not supporting Romney, either. As Douglas Adams might say, they're both the wrong lizards. And given that Romney pretty much invented Obamacare, frankly, I can't really tell them apart.

the lizards

The problem is that we vote on choices that are given to us.

Actually we don't. This is a case of perception creating reality. Douglas Adams described this rather humorously.

It seems like >50% of the people only vote for someone from one of two parties. They act as though there are no other parties around. They also refuse to run for office or vote for a write-in candidate. Then they complain that there are no choices. That is self-defeating behavior.

The real world is that we vote on the choices we give to ourselves. We should not allow this attitude that "we" vote for "them." There is not one pool of voters and a separate pool of candidates. The whole point of a democracy is that if we don't like the choices, we run for office ourselves. But that system falls apart when >50% of the people only vote for one of two parties. And yes, this is human nature, so I am almost ready to give up trying.

If everyone who didn't vote because they don't like the choices just voted randomly for some 3rd-party candidate, those parties would qualify for federal funding and suddenly the playing field would open up.

http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

[Bessen and Meurer] analyzed data from 1976 to 1999, the most recent year with complete data. They found that starting in the late 1990s, publicly traded companies saw patent litigation costs outstrip patent profits. Specifically, they estimate that about $8.4 billion in global profits came directly from patents held by publicly traded United States companies in 1997, rising to about $9.3 billion in 1999, with two-thirds of the profits going to chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Domestic litigation costs alone, meanwhile, soared to $16 billion in 1999 from $8 billion in 1997.

Things have probably become worse since then. For instance, patent litigation is up: there were 2,318 patent-related suits in 1999, and 2,830 in fiscal 2006 (though that’s down from the peak year, 2004, when 3,075 were filed). Mr. Bessen said awards in patent cases also seemed to be up, though he was less confident in that data. Worse, he says, companies doing the most research and development are sued the most.

As for "sheltered", I do IT for a living, and all of the companies I work with-- from missions organizations, to auto shops, to dentist / podiatrist / general MD offices, to law firms, to economists, all can do nothing when their network backbone (switch) goes down.

Nothing? Wow, that is bad. A decade or two ago all these places probably didn't even have a computer network. Must make your wallet proud that they've all come to rely on this unnecessary point of failure in such a short time. Hell, even when I was working as a software developer in an office I estimate that most of my work involved thought, design and discussion rather than bashing a keyboard - we were able to carry on productively with the network/power out.

Why do you think OLPC is putting a focus on mesh networking in Africa?

Last I checked, OLPC is a feel-good waste of time by a bunch of rich kids with no sense of perspective, explaining why they were getting nowhere.

Do you realize that if the people actually had access to information about just how bad Mugabe was, information NOT controlled by him, they might actually break free?

You're an idiot. Everyone there knows how he behaves, just as the side of my family which grew up in a particular dictatorship could gnash their teeth at the bullshit which came out from the Generalissimo but were powerless to do anything about it. And every regime from the US to NK has elements in power which are trying to censor the Internet: the difference is that the US doesn't feel a pressing need to because it has the resources to drown out dissent. This hasn't stopped US, EU and AU from implementing censorship to varying degrees.

Then there's copyright, a suppression of speech barely practised in China but strongly upheld in the US. Even the Constitution's framers acknowledged that copyright was a limited exception to the natural freedom of ideas and their expressions in order to promote science and the useful arts. But copyright is no longer anything of the sort.

Yea, and screw the printing press, its 500 years old. What is your point?

That you're a fool to consider basing your country's continued functioning on something 15 years old.

Sounds like a "no true scotsman argument", to me. I showed you how our enrollment is better in the US, and you reply "but Cuba has better enrollment in REAL Universities"?

That's not a "no true Scotsman" argument. I never said that University enrollment was a measure of quality of life. All I was doing for you is illustrating a simple reason why you can't use that as a measure of QoL. Consider the UK: in the '80s, Thatcher decided to rename hundreds of polytechnics (essentially technical schools) to universities with the consequent effect that what were technical/vocational qualifications were now called "degrees". Would people like you declare that Thatcher had miraculously increased the number of university undergraduates overnight?

If you have something to show in that regard, Id LOVE to see it,

Oh, all right, start here.

Because You really cant travel 100 miles ON an island thats only 265 sq miles;

Wow, has Wikipedia really got so bad that it reports Cuba as "265 sq miles" or did you accidentally copy-paste that from elsewhere? Oh, hahaha, I see what you've done, you read the "265 people per square mile" population density in the little info box. With each paragraph you demonstrate more and more that you don't really know what you're talking about and that you're just desperately looking stuff up to support a conclusion you've already made. OK, I'll do you the courtesy of responding to the rest of your post, but I'm not engaging in any further responses... this is just embarrassing.

where is your source th

While I'm certainly not a Palin supporter, it needs to be pointed out that her team just tries to earn future votes by playing a target audience, mathematically, to gain a majority. I'm saying this because it seems most of the people who enjoy the train wreck and see the obvious, don't see the obvious when it comes to the target audience they are part of. You vote too. You are played by guys talking about Change and Yes we can! The more you like what they are saying, the more suspicious you should be. Remember they are trying to gain a majority by mathematical strategy. If you now think "What?! Never, that guy is so wrong!" and start to get angry by these "accusations", know that this is exactly what the other side's target audience is thinking when you criticize their guys. These guys, each side, people shouldn't fight for them anyway. Forget what they are saying for a moment, and you'll see they play the same game. Just different lizards, picking different roads to success. Where they will fight the same war against "terrorists" and their civilians. As long as people keep pointing at the other lizard while electing the other, nothing will change.

They must of been drinking the same, with all due respect to an otherwise extremely bright programmer, software rendering kool-aid as Tim Sweeney.

"The End of the GPU Roadmap" http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/archive/SweeneyHPG2009/TimHPG2009.pdf

And while Real-Time Ray Tracing is the "Holy Grail" and is achievable, there is no way VRAM is going away to be replaced with traditional CPU memory. There are so many memory optimizations in the rendering pipeline that it would be stupid to suggest that it all should be tossed out and use slow DRAM instead.

He was actually talking about something like CUDA or OpenCL programs that look similar to a typical software rendering engine.

GPUs would still be there... but you would "talk to them" in a similar way you would a CPU. Only with slightly more simple commands that are parallelized across thousands of cores.

Basically Tim Sweeney is annoyed at all the DirectX and OpenGL quirks they need to dodge and would want to program each engine basically from first principles -- but still use the GPU for calculations that could be split into hundreds or thousands of independent parts.

They must of been drinking the same, with all due respect to an otherwise extremely bright programmer, software rendering kool-aid as Tim Sweeney.

"The End of the GPU Roadmap"
http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/archive/SweeneyHPG2009/TimHPG2009.pdf

And while Real-Time Ray Tracing is the "Holy Grail" and is achievable, there is no way VRAM is going away to be replaced with traditional CPU memory. There are so many memory optimizations in the rendering pipeline that it would be stupid to suggest that it all should be tossed out and use slow DRAM instead.

Yeah, because Harper's doing so much better. Oh wait, he's not.

You are right, of course, but so is the parent, and the grandparent.

You're so busy trying to prove that the other party is worse than "yours" that you're missing the simple truth: both major parties are bad for you. They are both evil, they are both corrupt, they will both fuck you over (and in fact have been doing it since time immemorial). Sure, one may be worse than the other, but they usually take turns.

(The above is true for both the US and Canada)

Remember that voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil.

Vote NDP, bote Block, vote Green, vote Pirate, vote Marijuana Party... Hell, vote for the fucking Rhinoceros Party, but DO NOT VOTE FOR EITHER THE LIBERALS OR THE CONSERVATIVES out of fear that the wrong lizard might get in!

And yeah, I voted Conservative.

FAIL!

From "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" by Douglas Adams:

[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship...]

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

.

So yes, raising income taxes would take more from the rich then raising capital gains, Warren Buffet aside. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of evidence that the dead-weight loss from capital gains taxes are higher then from income taxes.

"Or efficiency could be increased. Given that we're wasting up to half our money on the biggest expenditure the federal government has (Medicare+Medicaid),"

Medicare is the most efficient health provider in the country after the VA. Unless you want to implement an NHS style health-care system, I don't see where your 50% figure comes from.

Even if we did, we still have lower taxes then most of the OECD. We have pension shortfalls, crumbling infrastructure, a massively unequal educational system, etc. Taxes need to go up.

I'm not an American and certainly not a republican. So you're way off, I did not lose or think the republicans are better (they seem to be much worse). I think a republican would call a European like me a liberal, which is something really bad in their eyes?

Look, I appreciate your problem of having to vote for one evil or the other, and voting for the lesser evil.

But don't FUD me in your anger or deny you voted for evil. You voted for evil. You voted for lizards. And when someone points it out to you, you FUD the hell out of him in denial.

So why do we keep electing these bozos?

Douglas Adams explains it much better than I ever could.

Obligatory H2G2 reference: http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

On the other hand, the top state of the art real-time fully dynamic global illumination is implemented _only_ in an open source engine. Paper & free code for the GI solution: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PhotonHPG09/ The engine it's implemented in: http://g3d.sourceforge.net/ One cannot say that closed-source leads the pack across the scape of graphical features. Another example besides this level of RT GI is spherical-blend skinning, which was in open source first as well. I'm sure others can point out other advances that come from the open source world.

http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

That is all.

If you don't want to wait for the power of their GPU servers, check out a recent project I did with NVIDIA for ray tracing realistic illumination on today's desktops:

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PhotonHPG09/

From the abstract, "Image Space Photon Mapping (ISPM) rasterizes a light-space bounce map of emitted photons surviving initial-bounce Russian roulette sampling on a GPU. It then traces photons conventionally on the CPU. Traditional photon mapping estimates final radiance by gathering photons from a k-d tree. ISPM instead scatters indirect illumination by rasterizing an array of photon volumes. Each volume bounds a filter kernel based on the a priori probability density of each photon path. These two steps exploit the fact that initial path segments from point lights and final ones into a pinhole camera each have a common center of projection. An optional step uses joint bilateral upsampling of irradiance to reduce the fill requirements of rasterizing photon volumes. ISPM preserves the accurate and physically-based nature of photon mapping, supports arbitrary BSDFs, and captures both high- and low-frequency illumination effects such as caustics and diffuse color interreflection. "

I heard a commentary around the time of the Rod Blagojevich scandal that said it is the fault of the Chicagoans that Chicago is so corrupt. The idea was that when someone is in power, they just kind of expect that people around will get a little kickback, it makes sense to them. So a government like Chicago is what you get when you're not willing to fight back against that kind of stuff, just like the US gets a government that starts wars in various countries because we accept it and we're not willing to fight back against it. I'm not sure if that characterization of Chicago, but it sounds plausible enough.

I do think that, to some extent, there's truth in the idea that people get the government they expect. And Chicago - not to mention Illinois - is certainly a place that keeps electing more lizards.

To be completely honest, I think what's been so offensive about the parking meters to so many people is that the corruption in Chicago is, ultimately, expected to result in good services and a smooth-running city. I've never thought about it this way before, but for all of the overt signs of Daley's power I can think of - Meigs Field's demolition, the planters on Michigan Avenue, Millennium Park - as much as people bitch and moan, the end product is really quite wonderful.

As I said, I've never made that connection as it applies to the parking meters, and I don't think the reason for the outrage at the parking meters and the complacency at Meigs Field, Millennium Park, and so on is conscious. But when I am proud of Chicago it's for the many things that make it a beautiful and wonderful city. Had Daley sold the parking meter rights in the same ridiculous, undemocratic, veiled process but provided good service, I would have whined about another example of Daley's iron grip and then gone and enjoyed the magic auto-parking robots that sang "My Kind of Town."

I suppose the lesson is that, if you're going to be corrupt, at least make sure your corruption results in a better [whatever] than before...

-Trillian

No, it's a (somewhat oblique) reference the the Hitchikers' Guide:

http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

I wrote a very long to response to this question: check out the new book, Creating Games: Mechanics, Content and Technology http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/creatinggames.

The short answer is that a game programmer typically has years of experience in C++ and a working knowledge of computer graphics, AI, and physical simulation. There are many kinds of game programmers. Tools programmers create level editors, internal compilers, and other art and music tools that are used to make the game itself. Engine programmers work on the libraries that are shared between games. Gameplay programmers write the actual game, using the tools and engine. There are of course many jobs within a game company besides programmer. The least understood outside the industry are the designers, who are typically not programmers, are the ones who create the mechanics and storyline for a game. That is, if you are a programmer you will have some input into what the game is about and how it works, but your influence over that will be very small compared to a full-time designer. So perhaps you want to be a designer and not a programmer!

The best way to get a job in the games industry is to walk into an interview with experience on a game project. This could be a from another company, a mod, or a class project. You should also have a good understanding of the games that are currently out and arguments about why they are good or bad. A typical interview question might be, "how would you implement the ocean waves seen in World of Warcraft", or "how would you make a board game that captures the essence of what makes Red Faction entertaining?"

-m

"because the wrong lizard might get in" is not a good enough excuse to keep repeating a mistake. voting for bush once -- hey, everyone makes a mistake, right? voting for bush twice? as they say in texas: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...-foo..ma...won't get fooled again."

what i'm saying is, why not try asskisser b? just for the variety?

You're right that "because the wrong lizard might get in" is not a good excuse to keep repeating a mistake, but you completely missed the point of the story when you recommended trying asskisser b. Asskisser b is another "lizard" as in, the parent hates both a and b for being asskissers. The moral of the story is the vote for a human (somebody you actually like), even if they have no chance of winning, instead of voting for a lizard just to make sure the lizard you dislike more doesn't win.

If everyone had that mindset, a human that "has no chance of winning" would actually win, because nobody likes the lizards. When you vote for the lesser evil, you elect evil.

"because the wrong lizard might get in" is not a good enough excuse to keep repeating a mistake. voting for bush once -- hey, everyone makes a mistake, right? voting for bush twice? as they say in texas: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...-foo..ma...won't get fooled again."

what i'm saying is, why not try asskisser b? just for the variety?

Yes, but then the wrong lizard might get in!:

http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

Hah! So Douglas Adams beat Icke to the lizard theory?

For skimmers, I'll re-iterate my main point:

One of the voters for the other lizard feels less threatened by your own lizard, and votes for yet another lizard^wparty representative, or perhaps even a human being!

'I wrote a JE a while back, asking people to vote third or fourth party, even if they could "make do" with one of the "main" parties.'

Yes, but then the wrong lizard might get in!:

http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

"douglas adams lizards"

Ah, yes! *googles for it* I remember this now. The ancient democracy in which lizards rule. Now, if only we could get people to understand that 'lizards' == 'Democans and Republicrats'.

Excellent post, BTW.

People are always willing to pay more to be entertained that to be educated.

OK, how do you know this? Did you actually read it somewhere, or are you merely speculating that they are using the Red camera because they mention a "revolutionary new camera" and the Red camera is new? If the latter, I don't think the article supports your speculation. The Red camera merely captures video at a higher resolution than any other... essentially indistinguishable from film. The article implies that the camera they are using can capture multiple levels of focus, and I have not seen anything that says the Red camera can do this any better than a film camera could. Also, I saw a page that suggests the Red camera costs $18,000 -- cheaper than some film cameras -- so why would Susan Sarandon notice more security around it than regular cameras?

I think it's more likely that they are using computer graphics techniques to capture multiple planes of focus in a single shot. Something like the Stanford camera array can sample the lightfield of a scene, then selectively pick a depth of field or camera position/direction *after* shooting:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/

Or they could be using something like the device described in Morgan McGuire's PhD thesis, which can capture multiple planes of focus in a scene:

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/DVMSIGGRAPH 05/index.html

Both approaches would require large devices containing multiple cameras, which would explain the security described in the article for cost alone, if not also for trade secret reasons. And both would allow you to selectively refocus portions of the frame.

But it's recycling, we're not allowed to ask if it's worth it, because if we did we might not bother to recycle anything.

Saturn Bomberman was probably the best version in existence, but is hard to find and even harder to get a system to play it on.

http://wso.williams.edu/~aeatonsa/bomb/pixb.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Bomberman

In addition to a five player battle mode with dinosaur mounts that grow and have special abilities, you have wild powerups like the ability to throw bombs, kick bombs, sprint, drop bombs in front of you, and launch active bombs as they explode. When you died, you could shoot bombs onto the stage to harass people. When time ran out, blocks and powerups would drop from the sky as the level gradually shrunk down to nothing.

There was also an absolutely insane eight player mode that packed the screen with the most bomberman goodness that's ever been on a TV.

You (and people like you) are exactly why we are in this mess to begin with.

You look at the American government through polarized lenses.

The problem is much deeper than that. It's not a question of partisanship but of a *greatly* reduced spectrum of choices. When the choice of meal is hamburger, ground beef, or minced cow, some of us start to get just a little skeptical. Basically, the whole argument these days comes down to who wants to "do more" and thus usurp more of your freedoms in the process. No one even asks "Why do we want politicians to do anything? How exactly have they helped us?". No one dares to ask what would happen if we just started ignoring the politicians (Oh no! We have to do something, or the wrong lizard might get in). No one seems to remember that the USA was made of people who believed it was the citizen's obligation to replace government--by force if necessary--if that government abuses its position.

What the democrats propose one decade, the republicans carry out in the next. The republicans of today would be considered leftist by the democrats of a century ago. The right's "seed of democracy in the middle east", is the left's Wilsonian War Democracy of two generations previous. The partisanship is a sham, and all part of the process of herding us down the ever narrower path into the corral.

And whence this strangely reduced spectrum of possibility? It all began in the 1850s when the USA made the horrendous decision to adopt the Prussian method of (enforced) public schooling, whose expressed purpose was that of breeding out independent thought and self-direction, in favor of--essentially--groupthink and dependence on authority. This is the schooling system that has given us such wonderful concentration-breakers as the 45-minute class period, punctuated by the loud martial sounds of a bell, the drudgery of homework rather than the wonder of reading, the division of knowledge up into upteen tiny containers called "subjects", the concept of "grades" and "classes", and Grade Point Averages, essentially industrializing the whole process of guiding fresh explorative minds into the same well-worn pathways. And that classic inarticulate teenage rebellion is just a recognized byproduct that actually works in the favor of all this. Why else would we keep on doing something that obviously is not working, when the past is rife with better ways?

It has done exactly what the elite wanted; it has created generations of citizens without the mental initiative to think beyond the simple choices they are presented with.

sigh...

(my child is being home-schooled, as I was)

But on a public policy side, there's no landfill shortage at all.

Check out this article from the New York Times magazine, "Recycling is Garbage" by John Tierney. From the article:

A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side.

This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.

It appears someone archived it here.... http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/gar bage.html

And there's the actual nytimes page... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096- tierney-magazine.html (If you get to this link from John Tierney's nytimes columnist page, they give you this article for free, but if you follow any other link, they try to charge you. weird!)

Now they need to post a public apology (from a Japanese company that's a big deal)

Oh I liked this one. My former ninjutsu sensei told us how Japanese people were one of the few peoples in history where in their creation myth, the japanese people were directly descended from the gods (ref: here and wiki's. Keep in mind, this isn't like the Judeo-Christian Creation, where God had a hand in it, but Man was distinctively a different being from God.

And you wonder how Japanese society remain so homogeneous and elitist when they're embedded in a culture that tells them they're Gods and God knows what those smelly, hairy American barbarians are. Publicly apologize? `But we're perfect!'

Instead, I liked the Chinese version of the Japanese creation myth that my sensei told us in class. In that version, the Chinese emperor sent some of his servants to go and pick mushrooms for dinner. Then never came back to China, but they ended up becoming the Japanese.

Nope, carbon dating has nothing to do with this. The timescale here is from 100,000 - 1,000,000 years ago. Carbon dating is only good on a timescale of thousands of years; that's great for mysterious Assyrian artefacts, frozen icemen, Egyptian mummies and so forth, and it's not bad for mammoths and sabretooths and things, but not for this. Once something's been dead for a very long time, nearly all the radioactive carbon has decayed and it's no longer a useful clock.

What's being used here is apparently electron spin resonance dating, of which more here. Not sure what the uranium measurement is, though; AFAIK, the uranium-lead clock is used on a timescale of billions of years, to date the most ancient rocks, though I'm no geologist and there may well be other decay products that give a shorter-term measure.

That would be like giving the rebel alliance award to han solo!

Remember they wouldn't crack or cowtale to gates on OS/2 (thank God!). Even though everyone suffered because of m$ since, I respect Big Blue for 'doing-the-right-thing' in not being part of the crimes of m$.

IBM along with Apple and the Lotus Corporation (remember 123?! :) actaully preddy much single handley got the word out about how wonderful computers would be in everyones hands.

It is therefore safe to say that we could have done without m$ crap, and infact the world would have excelled (scuse the pun) without it, instead of still waiting for LOOOOOOOOONNNNG Horned.

Ahhh, the good'ol days of Charlie Chaplin (remember the commercials from IBM?!) http://wso.williams.edu/~dgerstei/chaplin/myscans/ ibmcharlie.gif (sorry, it was all I could find quickly :( ..the wonderful MacinTosh Desktop, and what is considered the main reason people started buying pc's in droves initially..*Lotus 123* SpreadSheet/Calc program!!

I remember the true stories of peopel not even knowing that they actully needed a pc to run the program, they just went into the old ComputerLand stores and demanded a spanking-brand-new: *Lotus 123*!

I remember living in Boca Raton FL during that glorious error.. and walking through one of IBM's factories there.. they were (and i'm not exagurating) nearly a mile long.. filled to the hilt with ROBOTS that were building the PC's!! It waz amazing..

Soooo, Ibm has had to re-invent itself many times before...and that is ok, cuz that is what people (corps) do in order to stay in business.

And now.. the OSS Communities get to not only benefit from this **Classy Company**... but get to contribute and be a part of it.. in defeating the evil dragoon.. :)

I mean, we really are in stone age. That could be anything. That could be a blob, it could be a light bulb exploding in a dark room. I need concrete evidence that that was what NASA claims it was.

If I saw something like this
http://wso.williams.edu/~rfoxwell/starwars/pics/De vastator2.jpg

there would be no doubts in my mind.

But NASA? Pffffft.

Blasphemer!!! May a thousand Sky Women smite you to a million years of suffering!! Everyone knows there is only one TRUE creation explanation and IT is what should be taught in all of our schools not your Brahma and Vishnu heresy!

"Long before the world was created there was an island, floating in the sky, upon which the Sky People lived. They lived quietly and happily. No one ever died or was born or experienced sadness. However one day one of the Sky Women realized she was going to give birth to twins. She told her husband, who flew into a rage. In the center of the island there was a tree which gave light to the entire island since the sun hadn't been created yet. He tore up this tree, creating a huge hole in the middle of the island. Curiously, the woman peered into the hole. Far below she could see the waters that covered the earth. At that moment her husband pushed her. She fell through the hole, tumbling towards the waters below. Water animals already existed on the earth, so far below the floating island two birds saw the Sky Woman fall. Just before she reached the waters they caught her on their backs and brought her to the other animals. Determined to help the woman they dove into the water to get mud from the bottom of the seas. One after another the animals tried and failed. Finally, Little Toad tried and when he reappeared his mouth was full of mud. The animals took it and spread it on the back of Big Turtle. The mud began to grow and grow and grow until it became the size of North America. Then the woman stepped onto the land. She sprinkled dust into the air and created stars. Then she created the moon and sun.

The Sky Woman gave birth to twin sons. She named one Sapling. He grew to be kind and gentle. She named the other Flint and his heart was as cold as his name. They grew quickly and began filling the earth with their creations.

Sapling created what is good. He made animals that are useful to humans. He made rivers that went two ways and into these he put fish without bones. He made plants that people could eat easily. If he was able to do all the work himself there would be no suffering.

Flint destroyed much of Sapling's work and created all that is bad. He made the rivers flow only in one direction. He put bones in fish and thorns on berry bushes. He created winter, but Sapling gave it life so that it could move to give way to Spring. He created monsters which his brother drove beneath the Earth. Eventually Sapling and Flint decided to fight till one conquered the other. Neither was able to win at first, but finally Flint was beaten. Because he was a god Flint could not die, so he was forced to live on Big Turtle's back. Occasionally his anger is felt in the form of a volcano."

No wonder why Star Wars is still remembered today, the inhabitants of the "galaxy far far away" speak thier own languages. Wookies speak Shyriiwook, almost all of the Tatooniense understand Huttese, and almost everybody else speaks in "basic".

As you guys complained how the whole Star Wars franchise went downhill, just be grateful that if it wasn't for George Lucas helming Star Wars (Episode IV for us geeks), all alien lifeforms would speak in English.

I don't think it's possible to "prove" code is correct at all - it's all so arbitrary you'd pretty much have to boil down to the assembly language and specific processor model to prove anything works - otherwise you're just relying on your compiler working correctly and who's to say that it's without bugs itself?

It is possible to prove that code is correct for specific data, because a computer program is simply a mathematical algorithm, and any algorithm can be proven to be correct for any particular input. Now, the difficulty of the proof is hard to determine, and only valid input can be considered. (Note that once your program tests for "invalid" input and does something predictable, that input is now technically valid, though unreasonable, input.)

For an example of proving certain code correct, this is an example proving the correctness of a loop using loop invariant theorem (which follows mathematical induction).

You are right, however, that a particular implementation of an algorithm on an actual machine is subject to problems with the machine itself, including design flaws and environmental effects. You may be able to prove your code is correct for a given input set, including all possible user input, but what happens when a bit gets flipped in a state register due to cosmic radiation?