"I mean when you can start being able to have virtual families including virtual inheritance, we might be crossing the veritable rubicon of unhealthy gaming."
On the plus side, though, virtual inheritance would neatly solve the "diamond problem" (not being able to afford that virtual wedding ring).
"I've marvelled at some of the Dell laptops that have very high resolution LCDs, but I don't think I'd want to work on one for an extended period of time."
Yeah, I bought one of these (15.4" widescreen @ 1920x1200) and really regret it. Eyestrain per se isn't an issue because I jacked up the screen's DPI setting to the correct value, but a lot of stuff breaks - specifically, just about anything that was built with a point-and-click absolute-position-based GUI builder instead of a layout manager. Moz was fine. Firefox is fine. Eclipse is fine. Anything written in VB is hosed, but hey, that's not much of a loss.
How would people react if Microsoft were the company in question? They'd be far more hostile. Is this inconsistent or hypocritical? Not in the least.
Microsoft are fundamentally hostile to the Web. They are fundamentally hostile to standards. They are fundamentally hostile to cross-platform applications. They are fundamentally hostile to Free Software.
None of these observations applies to Google. So what was your point again?
Now, you listen here. You will not offer ANY grilled bread products to ANY member of the crew. If you do, you will be on the receiving end of a very large -1, Obsessed With Toast moderation.
Once again, I don't think this line of investigation will lead anyone to believe in the authenticitiy and reliability of the Bible.
And I wasn't suggesting that you were suggesting that. I was concerned that you might be relying on a presupposition of Biblical truth to justify an apparent double standard regarding the possibility of "apprehending" God.
my job is only to introduce possible scenarios and constraints which can reconcile tsunamis and ALAP God, whereas your job is to show these scenarios impossible. Right?
Right. I'd prefer "plausible" to "possible", since the latter would permit hypotheses both absurd and obscene. But yes, that's the challenge. So what's your scenario?
On the other hand, perhaps your own bias is what keeps you from accepting a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
That's certainly possible. One reason I get into these debates from time to time is as a regular check-up on my assumptions. But, ultimately, you can't accept something nonsensical to compensate for the possibility that you might be biased against it. I'm all for an open mind but, in the words of my old philosophy prof, not so open that my brain falls out.
[...] I don't understand why Jesus had to die for us to be forgiven. However, that's not a prerequisite for me to have faith in the promises that result.
I don't see what that has to do with the argument.
Your claim as I read it was that we can't comprehend God accurately enough to understand his motivations, and hence to be able to judge him fairly as a moral agent. My objection was that you do make claims about his motivation, and you do describe him (in favourable terms) as a moral agent. How come you get to do this and we don't? If you want to lean on the Bible as a source of privileged information, that's your prerogative, but you can't expect such a line to carry any weight with people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, and these are the people you're trying to convince.
John 3:16--is simple enough for a child to understand
The proposition that 1+1=3 is simple enough for a child to understand, as a proposition, but if they can't see how it could be true they'd be doing themselves a disservice by adopting it as a belief.
But there are also two thousand years of Christians who have grappled with this problem--many of whom I bet are people whose intellect you admire-
In some fields, perhaps. I don't consider intellect to be a generic attribute. Christians may be great writers, or artists, or programmers, or even scientists, but I've yet to find one I'd consider a great philosopher. I don't feel compelled to defer to somebody's views on religion just because they produced a kick-ass proof/painting/program/whatever.
-and come to a satisfactory conclusion
Satisfactory to whom? To themselves, perhaps; our standards of intellectual rigour always slip when it comes to our most cherished beliefs. If any of them came to a genuinely satisfactory conclusion, I find it odd that none of them chose to share it with the rest of the world.
That's even assuming that the earthquake wasn't actually a good outcome out of all the possible outcomes; for example, what if the earthquake released tectonic pressure that otherwise would've built up and killed millions instead of hundreds of thousands?
I've heard this line of argument (the so-called "hidden harmony" defence) described as pornography for priests, and tend to agree. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity can't do anything about geological events on one small planet? Even a half-arsed demiurge with no more foreknowledge than a blurry impression of next week's National Enquirer ought to be able to manage at least a booming voice from the heavens suggesting that people might want to head up to higher ground for the next couple of days.
I for one think the "If an omnipotent, loving God exists, why does he let bad things happen?" line of argument is a red herring. It's impossible for us to understand the actions of a being with an infinite perspective
And I for one think that's a cop-out of Homeric proportions. You (assuming you're a Christian) claim to understand the actions of just such a being every time you espouse the tenets of your faith. God sent Jesus to redeem us, did he? How is that statement not claiming to understand his actions?
The "Problem Of Evil" is a notable argument, as cogent as it is concise, and the fact that two thousand years of Christian thought (Catholic and Protestant, at least) have failed to produce a single plausible theodicy, to my mind, strongly suggests that those thinkers ought to revisit their assumptions.
Not sure whether you were going for Funny or Informative there, or whether I'm missing a reference (AcmeVaporWare?) but ejection seats for helicopters do exist. The rotor blades are separated first by explosive bolts, after which centrifugal force gets them out of the way pretty quickly, after which you eject as normal. (Presumably with rocket assist, since you're likely to be at very low altitude.)
Unfortunately, I think that "perfect timing" would have been about a year ago. The law seems to move veeeery sloooowly; it'll be a few months before it's clear whether this guy's bizarre suit is going to be taken seriously, and a few months after that before companies' lawyers wake up and start pumping out the spin.
The Euro pro-patent lobby is aiming to sneak its unamended directive through in a week's time. (And yes, I've written to my MEP, but I'm not overly optimistic.)
What does it take to make our world come alive? What does it take to make us sing?
<nitpick> Been meaning to bring that up for a while... my memory's hazy, but isn't it "What do we need to make our world come alive?"? </nitpick>
"they're unpolished, unoptimized, address problems that really aren't and suffer from hardware limitations"
All but the third of those observations were equally true of 2D GUIs for at least their first five years, and arguably the first ten. That didn't stop them gaining massmarket acceptance. It's that third problem that's the killer - apart from those that deal with genuinely 3D data, 3D UIs don't solve any existing problems, and introduce a whole raft of new ones.
Three-dimensional UIs are worth pursuing because one-dimensional UIs are too limited? Did you not get a nagging sensation while writing that paragraph that maybe, just maybe, there was some intermediary stage that might merit some investigation?
"Imagine programming in 3D, where each class and function is a labeled box which you can enter to see its code"
Okay, I'm imagining it. It's awful. Graphical representations of code are equally feasible in 2D; I've used one, and it was appalling. Took forever to do the simplest things. I don't see it getting drastically better when I can't find the method I need because a base class is blocking my view.
Don't get me wrong, I can certainly see how mucking about with this sort of thing could be fun. But people have been building 3D UIs since before Jurassic Park. There's a reason they haven't caught on. They're bleedin' useless.
The RSS feature struck me as somewhat unfinished, actually. Updates are infrequent, so if you're a news-as-it-happens junkie you'll still need to keep visiting/refreshing the site. And it would be nice to have some visible indication that an RSS bookmark has new items - IIRC Opera bookmarks changed colour if the page had been updated since your last visit. That was handy.
there's a number of vector units attached that are basically "VMX on steroids"
Did they offer any details on how folks are going to program these beasts? Will you have to write assembler to take advantage of the vector units?
Also, will they release their own compiler, or port gcc? There's been a fair amount of traffic on auto-vectorization on the gcc list over the last year or so, but while I've seen a few Apple people there, I don't recall seeing anyone from IBM. (Or Sony, for that matter.)
Re:Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If it's effective, it will be affordable, one way or another. If the maker sets the price too high and governments or aid agencies don't step up, the demand will be met by the generics makers, and governments will turn a blind eye as necessary. No amount of flak about "respecting IP" outweighs a quarter of your population dropping dead.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation get involved here, too. Say what you like about Bill, the Foundation has done some good work in this field, and he's not short of the shekels.
By DPI I mean dots per inch; by high DPI I mean an accurate value of pixels-per-inch on a high-resolution display. In my case, ~144dpi on a 1920x1200 15.4" Dell laptop display which I foolishly bought in the optimistic assumption that Windows would actually work with the damn thing.
I'm delighted that you don't have this problem. I have it whenever I turn on the machine and don't feel like squinting at half-millimetre-high text. Anything using layout managers - Eclipse, Moz, Firefox - works flawlessly. Anything perpetrated by Pointy-Clicky GUI Builders breaks horribly and/or looks like arse. Changing my DPI settings to run a broken program is a painful process involving a restart and lots of manual fiddling to put things right again afterwards; it's not something to be done lightly.
I freely admit that I'm suffering for stupidly being an early adopter. However, these displays are becoming more and more common, and many of the problems also afflict people using "Large fonts" for accessibility. Ultimately, assuming 96dpi is now indefensibly sloppy in the general case, just as assuming a US English keyboard, perfect red/green colour vision or a three-button mouse is indefensibly sloppy.
You've clearly never tried to run Windows on a high-DPI display. I mean dialogs where crucial widgets get hidden under other widgets or pushed outside the bounds of the (non-resizable) dialog window because the "programmer" and tools vendor thought that 96dpi with 8pt fonts are some sort of universal constant.
part of the reason for their popularity is the quality of their development tools
And part of the reason for the quality of their development tools is that the languages are easy to parse, which in turn makes it easy for a tool to understand the code well enough to provide useful assistance. C++ is a nightmare to parse compared with C# or Java.
Another part of the reason is the Pointy-Clicky GUI Builder, of course, but that part I most definitely would not want to see emulated elsewhere. Addiction to the PCGB is the main reason why Windows still can't do even halfway decent device-independent GUI in 2004; they're trapped in a world of crappy fixed-layout dialogs and oxymoronic "WYSIWG" HTML.
Remember that a geosynchronous orbit is restricted to the equator, for reasons which are obvious if you think about them. (It's not just a matter of travelling at the same speed as the ground beneath you; you also need to be travelling in the same direction and around the Earth's centre of mass.)
So, if these sats really are primarily for internal surveillance, anything "over areas of significant interest" probably isn't going to be geosync. Unless you're really into rainforests, most of the equator isn't that interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
"I mean when you can start being able to have virtual families including virtual inheritance, we might be crossing the veritable rubicon of unhealthy gaming."
On the plus side, though, virtual inheritance would neatly solve the "diamond problem" (not being able to afford that virtual wedding ring).
Selling bullet-proof pyjamas to elephants?
"I've marvelled at some of the Dell laptops that have very high resolution LCDs, but I don't think I'd want to work on one for an extended period of time."
Yeah, I bought one of these (15.4" widescreen @ 1920x1200) and really regret it. Eyestrain per se isn't an issue because I jacked up the screen's DPI setting to the correct value, but a lot of stuff breaks - specifically, just about anything that was built with a point-and-click absolute-position-based GUI builder instead of a layout manager. Moz was fine. Firefox is fine. Eclipse is fine. Anything written in VB is hosed, but hey, that's not much of a loss.
This, frankly, is a silly question.
How would people react if Microsoft were the company in question? They'd be far more hostile. Is this inconsistent or hypocritical? Not in the least.
Microsoft are fundamentally hostile to the Web. They are fundamentally hostile to standards. They are fundamentally hostile to cross-platform applications. They are fundamentally hostile to Free Software.
None of these observations applies to Google. So what was your point again?
There we go!
Now, you listen here. You will not offer ANY grilled bread products to ANY member of the crew. If you do, you will be on the receiving end of a very large -1, Obsessed With Toast moderation.
...and nobody is quoting Red Dwarf? What's wrong with you people?
Which is somewhat embarrassing, but not surprising. As in so many areas, I assume the UK followed the party line laid down by the US.
/.ers have any more luck?
I wrote to my MEP about the fisheries-meeting shenanigans, but heard nothing back - did any other Brit
Once again, I don't think this line of investigation will lead anyone to believe in the authenticitiy and reliability of the Bible.
And I wasn't suggesting that you were suggesting that. I was concerned that you might be relying on a presupposition of Biblical truth to justify an apparent double standard regarding the possibility of "apprehending" God.
my job is only to introduce possible scenarios and constraints which can reconcile tsunamis and ALAP God, whereas your job is to show these scenarios impossible. Right?
Right. I'd prefer "plausible" to "possible", since the latter would permit hypotheses both absurd and obscene. But yes, that's the challenge. So what's your scenario?
On the other hand, perhaps your own bias is what keeps you from accepting a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
That's certainly possible. One reason I get into these debates from time to time is as a regular check-up on my assumptions. But, ultimately, you can't accept something nonsensical to compensate for the possibility that you might be biased against it. I'm all for an open mind but, in the words of my old philosophy prof, not so open that my brain falls out.
[...] I don't understand why Jesus had to die for us to be forgiven. However, that's not a prerequisite for me to have faith in the promises that result.
I don't see what that has to do with the argument.
Your claim as I read it was that we can't comprehend God accurately enough to understand his motivations, and hence to be able to judge him fairly as a moral agent. My objection was that you do make claims about his motivation, and you do describe him (in favourable terms) as a moral agent. How come you get to do this and we don't? If you want to lean on the Bible as a source of privileged information, that's your prerogative, but you can't expect such a line to carry any weight with people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, and these are the people you're trying to convince.
John 3:16--is simple enough for a child to understand
The proposition that 1+1=3 is simple enough for a child to understand, as a proposition, but if they can't see how it could be true they'd be doing themselves a disservice by adopting it as a belief.
But there are also two thousand years of Christians who have grappled with this problem--many of whom I bet are people whose intellect you admire-
In some fields, perhaps. I don't consider intellect to be a generic attribute. Christians may be great writers, or artists, or programmers, or even scientists, but I've yet to find one I'd consider a great philosopher. I don't feel compelled to defer to somebody's views on religion just because they produced a kick-ass proof/painting/program/whatever.
-and come to a satisfactory conclusion
Satisfactory to whom? To themselves, perhaps; our standards of intellectual rigour always slip when it comes to our most cherished beliefs. If any of them came to a genuinely satisfactory conclusion, I find it odd that none of them chose to share it with the rest of the world.
That's even assuming that the earthquake wasn't actually a good outcome out of all the possible outcomes; for example, what if the earthquake released tectonic pressure that otherwise would've built up and killed millions instead of hundreds of thousands?
I've heard this line of argument (the so-called "hidden harmony" defence) described as pornography for priests, and tend to agree. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity can't do anything about geological events on one small planet? Even a half-arsed demiurge with no more foreknowledge than a blurry impression of next week's National Enquirer ought to be able to manage at least a booming voice from the heavens suggesting that people might want to head up to higher ground for the next couple of days.
I for one think the "If an omnipotent, loving God exists, why does he let bad things happen?" line of argument is a red herring. It's impossible for us to understand the actions of a being with an infinite perspective
And I for one think that's a cop-out of Homeric proportions. You (assuming you're a Christian) claim to understand the actions of just such a being every time you espouse the tenets of your faith. God sent Jesus to redeem us, did he? How is that statement not claiming to understand his actions?
The "Problem Of Evil" is a notable argument, as cogent as it is concise, and the fact that two thousand years of Christian thought (Catholic and Protestant, at least) have failed to produce a single plausible theodicy, to my mind, strongly suggests that those thinkers ought to revisit their assumptions.
Not sure whether you were going for Funny or Informative there, or whether I'm missing a reference (AcmeVaporWare?) but ejection seats for helicopters do exist. The rotor blades are separated first by explosive bolts, after which centrifugal force gets them out of the way pretty quickly, after which you eject as normal. (Presumably with rocket assist, since you're likely to be at very low altitude.)
Truly is it written: Dulux hath no shade of crimson like a Sisters fan caught misquoting the Word Of Eldritch...
Unfortunately, I think that "perfect timing" would have been about a year ago. The law seems to move veeeery sloooowly; it'll be a few months before it's clear whether this guy's bizarre suit is going to be taken seriously, and a few months after that before companies' lawyers wake up and start pumping out the spin.
The Euro pro-patent lobby is aiming to sneak its unamended directive through in a week's time. (And yes, I've written to my MEP, but I'm not overly optimistic.)
What does it take to make our world come alive? What does it take to make us sing?
<nitpick> Been meaning to bring that up for a while... my memory's hazy, but isn't it "What do we need to make our world come alive?"? </nitpick>
"they're unpolished, unoptimized, address problems that really aren't and suffer from hardware limitations"
All but the third of those observations were equally true of 2D GUIs for at least their first five years, and arguably the first ten. That didn't stop them gaining massmarket acceptance. It's that third problem that's the killer - apart from those that deal with genuinely 3D data, 3D UIs don't solve any existing problems, and introduce a whole raft of new ones.
Three-dimensional UIs are worth pursuing because one-dimensional UIs are too limited? Did you not get a nagging sensation while writing that paragraph that maybe, just maybe, there was some intermediary stage that might merit some investigation?
"Imagine programming in 3D, where each class and function is a labeled box which you can enter to see its code"
Okay, I'm imagining it. It's awful. Graphical representations of code are equally feasible in 2D; I've used one, and it was appalling. Took forever to do the simplest things. I don't see it getting drastically better when I can't find the method I need because a base class is blocking my view.
Don't get me wrong, I can certainly see how mucking about with this sort of thing could be fun. But people have been building 3D UIs since before Jurassic Park. There's a reason they haven't caught on. They're bleedin' useless.
The RSS feature struck me as somewhat unfinished, actually. Updates are infrequent, so if you're a news-as-it-happens junkie you'll still need to keep visiting/refreshing the site. And it would be nice to have some visible indication that an RSS bookmark has new items - IIRC Opera bookmarks changed colour if the page had been updated since your last visit. That was handy.
Or maybe sites would have to stop requiring stupid, pointless, insecure plug-ins/applets to view web pages.
Oh dear. Oh my. What a calamity that would be.
there's a number of vector units attached that are basically "VMX on steroids"
Did they offer any details on how folks are going to program these beasts? Will you have to write assembler to take advantage of the vector units?
Also, will they release their own compiler, or port gcc? There's been a fair amount of traffic on auto-vectorization on the gcc list over the last year or so, but while I've seen a few Apple people there, I don't recall seeing anyone from IBM. (Or Sony, for that matter.)
If it's effective, it will be affordable, one way or another. If the maker sets the price too high and governments or aid agencies don't step up, the demand will be met by the generics makers, and governments will turn a blind eye as necessary. No amount of flak about "respecting IP" outweighs a quarter of your population dropping dead.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation get involved here, too. Say what you like about Bill, the Foundation has done some good work in this field, and he's not short of the shekels.
By DPI I mean dots per inch; by high DPI I mean an accurate value of pixels-per-inch on a high-resolution display. In my case, ~144dpi on a 1920x1200 15.4" Dell laptop display which I foolishly bought in the optimistic assumption that Windows would actually work with the damn thing.
I'm delighted that you don't have this problem. I have it whenever I turn on the machine and don't feel like squinting at half-millimetre-high text. Anything using layout managers - Eclipse, Moz, Firefox - works flawlessly. Anything perpetrated by Pointy-Clicky GUI Builders breaks horribly and/or looks like arse. Changing my DPI settings to run a broken program is a painful process involving a restart and lots of manual fiddling to put things right again afterwards; it's not something to be done lightly.
I freely admit that I'm suffering for stupidly being an early adopter. However, these displays are becoming more and more common, and many of the problems also afflict people using "Large fonts" for accessibility. Ultimately, assuming 96dpi is now indefensibly sloppy in the general case, just as assuming a US English keyboard, perfect red/green colour vision or a three-button mouse is indefensibly sloppy.
You've clearly never tried to run Windows on a high-DPI display. I mean dialogs where crucial widgets get hidden under other widgets or pushed outside the bounds of the (non-resizable) dialog window because the "programmer" and tools vendor thought that 96dpi with 8pt fonts are some sort of universal constant.
part of the reason for their popularity is the quality of their development tools
And part of the reason for the quality of their development tools is that the languages are easy to parse, which in turn makes it easy for a tool to understand the code well enough to provide useful assistance. C++ is a nightmare to parse compared with C# or Java.
Another part of the reason is the Pointy-Clicky GUI Builder, of course, but that part I most definitely would not want to see emulated elsewhere. Addiction to the PCGB is the main reason why Windows still can't do even halfway decent device-independent GUI in 2004; they're trapped in a world of crappy fixed-layout dialogs and oxymoronic "WYSIWG" HTML.
But who said they had to look straight down?
Nobody, obviously. But the post I was responding to said "over areas of significant interest", not "looking at areas of significant interest".
Remember that a geosynchronous orbit is restricted to the equator, for reasons which are obvious if you think about them. (It's not just a matter of travelling at the same speed as the ground beneath you; you also need to be travelling in the same direction and around the Earth's centre of mass.)
So, if these sats really are primarily for internal surveillance, anything "over areas of significant interest" probably isn't going to be geosync. Unless you're really into rainforests, most of the equator isn't that interesting.
It's a crying shame that this post is already moderated to +5 Funny; it richly deserves an Insightful or three.