Right. Because your first comment was so positive and cheery.
Look, you took a gigantic crap in someone else's cereal, and now you're shocked that they don't like it.
I'd like you to post every dollar you've ever spent on entertainment and justify to us all why we shouldn't judge your spending to be wasteful.
It's not that you've got a bad argument - it's that you're pretending that it has a logical basis which does not apply to you, too. Merely because you don't like our show. Superbowl ok, Enterprise bad.
It's just sad that people have to pick on us out of a pretend sense of superiority. That's all. You can go ahead and mock our show. I'm not judging you. I'm just saying it's sad that you don't have something better to do.
Geez. Just thought it was sad that a good T.V. show is going to be replaced with even more reruns of Elimidate. I don't need a lecture from some ass I don't even know.
Why do you think money paid up front for a product (the show) being produced gets taxed, but possible revenue after you create the product and put it on the (advertising) market is not?
It's revenue. It doesn't "raise the cost" just because it comes from a different place.
Presumably, there isn't enough revenue there. If the fans are willing to split the difference, then Paramount shouldn't mind.
So, these guys should start a non-profit corporation. That non-profit should go into contract. What's complicated about this?
And yes, legal action would result if Paramount didn't hold up their end.
The contracted revenue should clearly go back to the non-profit to sustain future episodes, not the original donators.
Why is the fans' money different from advertisers' money, in your mind? Paramount shouldn't care at all. Heck, think of direct-to-video sales - that's basically the same thing (just with lower risk to the production company). It just has a stigma of being low-quality. It doesn't have to be that way.
The possibility of Paramount getting to air it and receive advertising revenue just sweetens the deal for them.
I find it very sad that people are willing to pay (or even contemplate paying) for bottled water, instead of municipal water. Don't you know that Sally Struthers could use that money to save a child?
Why do people pay close to five bucks for a Starbucks coffee? Don't they know that President Carter could use that money to build a Habitat for Humanity?
Why would someone drive a $30k car? Don't they know that just $10k could make the difference in a kid being able to go to college?
People make consumer choices all of the time. Why does this one bother you guys?
Don't you know that the ring-tone (!) market on cell phones is in the billions per year? This is a drop in the bucket.
This is entertainment. People pay to be entertained. All forms of entertainment are frivolous, and they can all be compared against the costs of saving lives.
Hell, why aren't you running Folding at Home on your computer right now? Honest to God, if you're not running Folding at Home right now, then who the hell are you to criticize?
"When a player cheats in a game, they are choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the game itself."
This is totally false.
Uh, no - it's totally true.
When someone creates a hack for Quake 3 that allows them to perfectly see where every other player is - they've just entered the predator / prey relationship of security in gaming.
The problem is that you're forgetting that a "system" can be defined at multiple levels. Most chose to play the system of a game within the rules as the designers intended them. Some chose to play the system as it actually behaves, and chose to exploit the differences between design and implementation. Some chose to exploit security flaws in the system to enhance their experience beyond what is even possible within the implementation. Some chose to pay someone else to play the game for them, making the system the larger world of the economy of people willing to trade in-game items for real-world cash. Some chose to walk away from a specific game after ten minutes of play, and tell themselves they could have beaten it, if they had the time (playing the system of "all games are the same"). Some design and release a competing product (playing the system of profit from gamers).
All of these people potentially had fun - and they all have a different view of what the system is. Some have a huge sense of accomplishment, and all but the first group have left the context of the game as designed.
The customer needs to be informed, yes. You can't blame the vendor for this one. And you can only blame the government if they interfere with the choices the vendor would make - which is only true for like VA hospitals, and the like.
IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) tests exactly the things you talk about (during their Connectathon, and other times), and the results are public, aren't they?
The vendors do what the vendors do. If their products aren't right for the customer, they're both to blame.
Nothing is stopping customers from doing exactly what you propose, with their contracts.
Installing computers doesn't mean you have to know what HIPAA stands for. It's very possible the poster heard someone say "hippa" was the reason they were upgrading, while he was dropping ethernet, or upgrading to VOIP, or even installing a MS Office upgrade on PCs. Does he need to know what "HIPAA" stands for to observe the decreptitude of their PCs, ethernet, phones, or software? No.
Hell, I filled TPS reports at IBM for nine months, and I *never* found out what TPS stood for.
There are things we wish we could uninvent - like VX Gas.
Holding on to the last remaining smallpox seems dangerous, but they've made an excellent case in my opinion, that destroying it forever would be even more dangerous.
But we are absolutely talking about doing experiments that we as a culture (let alone we as a species) do not all agree we should do - and that we can't undo.
We should be cautious.
Science is a tool - it doesn't have some holy purpose. Science for the sake of science is like a hammer for the sake of a hammer - even if you're hitting people with it.
For the most part, scientists do have a purpose which for the most part benefits us all. But I think it's a reasonable position that this crosses the line. (At least as sensationalized here - maybe the true facts are more innocuous.)
I also happen to believe that it's a reasonable position that this does not cross some arbitrary line. I hold that view - I think this is reasonable work. But I am forced to acknowledge that the alternate viewpoint is just as reasonable.
I'm an atheist, so you can't go claiming I'm a religious zealout here - and I consider myself to be a very scientific thinker.
Human + NotHuman is a recipe for argument.
If you agree that there's no logical way to resolve an argument based on differing but reasonable personal opinions, then maybe we've just agreed that this should be halted.
it just seems wrong to me that we are "re-defining" what our humanity means
Seriously? You think that the work Jane Goodall did was "wrong"?
She certainly helped redefine what our humanity means.
Heck - making calculators and robots and chess-playing computers that can beat every single human that ever lived except maybe one or two, have all been acts of redefining what humanity means.
But it does not seem to wholly prevent ideology from trumping morality.
A single person can have any random viewpoint in the entire world. So, yes you're right. And unfortunately in this age of privatization of warfare, yes, it is possible for a few madmen to kill thousands of people.
But the more educated that a people are, the better equipped they are to make good choices, and to have the ability to follow through on them.
They can still make bad choices, and they can still delude themselves about reality (for instance, the so-called "innocent Nazi's"), but I believe that they are better equipped to make good choices.
Not to mention personal health, employment, personal satisfaction, raising healthy kids, contributing to the arts and sciences, having compassion for your fellow man, and being better equipped to effect real change in the world. I'm not comparing someone with a Masters degree with someone with just a Bachelor's degree - I'm talking about literacy, and self-empowerment. I'm speaking in generalities, not specifics.
So, yeah - I still think education is the silver bullet, but there's an exception to every rule as you have pointed out.
Now, as to how to go about making education better, we can all start to disagree. Welcome to Democracy.:)
Well first your analogy is poor, but clearly for some people it is more convenient to walk out to the farm and milk a cow.
If C#, PHP, Java, or VB can not read a filedump of arrays of structs then they're not capable of handling any binary data. This isn't rocket science.
Backwards compatability doesn't come for free, in any encoding. If I decide that I want to normalize some data in my XML, then when you and I move back and forth between our programs, we are going to get out of synchronization. I'll make some edit you're unaware of, or you'll make some edit that I'm unaware of.
The idea of edit-in-place is like a virus that moves into my code, making it extremely inefficient, just for the sake of you being able to inject data for me to drag along. And most people don't even do it that way (they recreate the output, instead of injecting changes into the original XML structure), thus completely obliterating the "X" from XML.
Can this be overcome by a smart developer - sure, but it would take effort.
In *any* forward-looking project, you will have *major* revisions, and minor revisions. XML doesn't help you move between major revisions (with enough hard work, XSLT might be able to help you - just like any portable programming language which is capable of transforming data). The fact that XSLT is a de facto standard is what makes it useful - not any intrinsic property of XSLT itself. C++ is clearly inferior to other programming languages in several details, but it is the de facto standard. Claiming that it's "portable" has always obfuscated the real point - yes, with work. You have to be careful what you do, and how you do it.
I was focusing on the one and only one comment that gets repeated a billion times as the ultimate defense of XML for the use in some project - portability.
I guarantee that for a specific problem, a binary representation is as good or better than XML. (I'm cheating with this argument, since XML itself is actually binary - you don't go creating XML without using at least UTF-8, do you?)
Domain knowledge always wins. Injecting "portability" and "extensibility" as top-level requirements absolutely makes sense in some areas, and is absolutely brain-dead in others. TCP/IP doesn't need to be extensibile - it works. If it were extensibile, it would be a dog, and it would be significantly more expensive to process.
If you want to express a floating point number, I'll chose IEEE Standard 754 for binary floating point representation every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It seems pretty portable to me. I don't know though, maybe I'm an idiot.
The fact that anyone thinks that XML is "text" instead of "binary" is cute, but it's meaningless in all but the most exaggerated terms (or the tightest constraints).
So, when someone claims that "XML is certainly more portable than binary code", then they're wrong.
It so happens that XML is a very bloated binary code which humans can read unassisted by an XML-savy viewer most of the time.
If XML had originally been written as a tighter binary code, everyone would have been perfectly happy with it. In fact, if XML had been written to be multi-byte character only from the first day, it would have taught people more quickly that 8-bit characters are almost useless, in a large enough audience.
I still say that for small amounts of data, a good binary representation is probably better, and for large amounts of data (for out-of-core processing), a good binary representation is certainly better. Yes, and more portable. Because if I give you 17 gigabytes of arbitrary XML and you need to process it in real-time, I think you'd rather have the 11 gigabytes of binary data with intelligently-written index tables.
There should be precisely the amount of syntactic sugar to consisely express a programming construct.
Any more than that, and you're just typing because the editor is too stupid to do it for you - and you're making it harder to scan. ("Read" or "Grok")
"begin" and "end" look pretty silly compared to { and }, and <bizarre-programming-construct-that-means-the-same -thing-as-an-open-paren> is retarded. Maybe as an intermediate language for easy translation, but not for my fingers to be typing or eyes to be reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Because your first comment was so positive and cheery.
Look, you took a gigantic crap in someone else's cereal, and now you're shocked that they don't like it.
I'd like you to post every dollar you've ever spent on entertainment and justify to us all why we shouldn't judge your spending to be wasteful.
It's not that you've got a bad argument - it's that you're pretending that it has a logical basis which does not apply to you, too. Merely because you don't like our show. Superbowl ok, Enterprise bad.
It's just sad that people have to pick on us out of a pretend sense of superiority. That's all. You can go ahead and mock our show. I'm not judging you. I'm just saying it's sad that you don't have something better to do.
=P~ Pbbbth.
Geez. Just thought it was sad that a good T.V. show is going to be replaced with even more reruns of Elimidate. I don't need a lecture from some ass I don't even know.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
BTW: Groovy.
Why do you think money paid up front for a product (the show) being produced gets taxed, but possible revenue after you create the product and put it on the (advertising) market is not?
It's revenue. It doesn't "raise the cost" just because it comes from a different place.
Presumably, there isn't enough revenue there. If the fans are willing to split the difference, then Paramount shouldn't mind.
So, these guys should start a non-profit corporation. That non-profit should go into contract. What's complicated about this?
And yes, legal action would result if Paramount didn't hold up their end.
The contracted revenue should clearly go back to the non-profit to sustain future episodes, not the original donators.
Why is the fans' money different from advertisers' money, in your mind? Paramount shouldn't care at all. Heck, think of direct-to-video sales - that's basically the same thing (just with lower risk to the production company). It just has a stigma of being low-quality. It doesn't have to be that way.
The possibility of Paramount getting to air it and receive advertising revenue just sweetens the deal for them.
I find it very sad that people are willing to pay (or even contemplate paying) for bottled water, instead of municipal water. Don't you know that Sally Struthers could use that money to save a child?
Why do people pay close to five bucks for a Starbucks coffee? Don't they know that President Carter could use that money to build a Habitat for Humanity?
Why would someone drive a $30k car? Don't they know that just $10k could make the difference in a kid being able to go to college?
People make consumer choices all of the time. Why does this one bother you guys?
Don't you know that the ring-tone (!) market on cell phones is in the billions per year? This is a drop in the bucket.
This is entertainment. People pay to be entertained. All forms of entertainment are frivolous, and they can all be compared against the costs of saving lives.
Hell, why aren't you running Folding at Home on your computer right now? Honest to God, if you're not running Folding at Home right now, then who the hell are you to criticize?
perhaps both of you mean: Rap Sheet - Person : Raph Koster?
"When a player cheats in a game, they are choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the game itself."
This is totally false.
Uh, no - it's totally true.
When someone creates a hack for Quake 3 that allows them to perfectly see where every other player is - they've just entered the predator / prey relationship of security in gaming.
The problem is that you're forgetting that a "system" can be defined at multiple levels. Most chose to play the system of a game within the rules as the designers intended them. Some chose to play the system as it actually behaves, and chose to exploit the differences between design and implementation. Some chose to exploit security flaws in the system to enhance their experience beyond what is even possible within the implementation. Some chose to pay someone else to play the game for them, making the system the larger world of the economy of people willing to trade in-game items for real-world cash. Some chose to walk away from a specific game after ten minutes of play, and tell themselves they could have beaten it, if they had the time (playing the system of "all games are the same"). Some design and release a competing product (playing the system of profit from gamers).
All of these people potentially had fun - and they all have a different view of what the system is. Some have a huge sense of accomplishment, and all but the first group have left the context of the game as designed.
*spits soda*
Hilarious.
Um. Okay.
The customer needs to be informed, yes. You can't blame the vendor for this one. And you can only blame the government if they interfere with the choices the vendor would make - which is only true for like VA hospitals, and the like.
IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) tests exactly the things you talk about (during their Connectathon, and other times), and the results are public, aren't they?
The vendors do what the vendors do. If their products aren't right for the customer, they're both to blame.
Nothing is stopping customers from doing exactly what you propose, with their contracts.
any and all medical information
Really? Is DICOM a part of HL7? I thought they were distinct...?
I think you're wrong about the "any and all".
No you didn't.
Yeah, it's possible he did.
Installing computers doesn't mean you have to know what HIPAA stands for. It's very possible the poster heard someone say "hippa" was the reason they were upgrading, while he was dropping ethernet, or upgrading to VOIP, or even installing a MS Office upgrade on PCs. Does he need to know what "HIPAA" stands for to observe the decreptitude of their PCs, ethernet, phones, or software? No.
Hell, I filled TPS reports at IBM for nine months, and I *never* found out what TPS stood for.
Okay - I'd like to chip in my $0.02.
There are things we wish we could uninvent - like VX Gas.
Holding on to the last remaining smallpox seems dangerous, but they've made an excellent case in my opinion, that destroying it forever would be even more dangerous.
But we are absolutely talking about doing experiments that we as a culture (let alone we as a species) do not all agree we should do - and that we can't undo.
We should be cautious.
Science is a tool - it doesn't have some holy purpose. Science for the sake of science is like a hammer for the sake of a hammer - even if you're hitting people with it.
For the most part, scientists do have a purpose which for the most part benefits us all. But I think it's a reasonable position that this crosses the line. (At least as sensationalized here - maybe the true facts are more innocuous.)
I also happen to believe that it's a reasonable position that this does not cross some arbitrary line. I hold that view - I think this is reasonable work. But I am forced to acknowledge that the alternate viewpoint is just as reasonable.
I'm an atheist, so you can't go claiming I'm a religious zealout here - and I consider myself to be a very scientific thinker.
Human + NotHuman is a recipe for argument.
If you agree that there's no logical way to resolve an argument based on differing but reasonable personal opinions, then maybe we've just agreed that this should be halted.
let's make sure that they can't feel misery and don't want the same things we do.
Right - so let's start with something that we all agree can't feel misery: animals.
Oh, wait.
it just seems wrong to me that we are "re-defining" what our humanity means
Seriously? You think that the work Jane Goodall did was "wrong"?
She certainly helped redefine what our humanity means.
Heck - making calculators and robots and chess-playing computers that can beat every single human that ever lived except maybe one or two, have all been acts of redefining what humanity means.
But it does not seem to wholly prevent ideology from trumping morality.
:)
A single person can have any random viewpoint in the entire world. So, yes you're right. And unfortunately in this age of privatization of warfare, yes, it is possible for a few madmen to kill thousands of people.
But the more educated that a people are, the better equipped they are to make good choices, and to have the ability to follow through on them.
They can still make bad choices, and they can still delude themselves about reality (for instance, the so-called "innocent Nazi's"), but I believe that they are better equipped to make good choices.
Not to mention personal health, employment, personal satisfaction, raising healthy kids, contributing to the arts and sciences, having compassion for your fellow man, and being better equipped to effect real change in the world. I'm not comparing someone with a Masters degree with someone with just a Bachelor's degree - I'm talking about literacy, and self-empowerment. I'm speaking in generalities, not specifics.
So, yeah - I still think education is the silver bullet, but there's an exception to every rule as you have pointed out.
Now, as to how to go about making education better, we can all start to disagree. Welcome to Democracy.
Robot on fire: "WHY? Why was I built to feel pain!?"
I love the Simpsons.
This clip once again proves my theory that Bill Gates hates Nebraska.
Well first your analogy is poor, but clearly for some people it is more convenient to walk out to the farm and milk a cow.
If C#, PHP, Java, or VB can not read a filedump of arrays of structs then they're not capable of handling any binary data. This isn't rocket science.
Backwards compatability doesn't come for free, in any encoding. If I decide that I want to normalize some data in my XML, then when you and I move back and forth between our programs, we are going to get out of synchronization. I'll make some edit you're unaware of, or you'll make some edit that I'm unaware of.
The idea of edit-in-place is like a virus that moves into my code, making it extremely inefficient, just for the sake of you being able to inject data for me to drag along. And most people don't even do it that way (they recreate the output, instead of injecting changes into the original XML structure), thus completely obliterating the "X" from XML.
Can this be overcome by a smart developer - sure, but it would take effort.
In *any* forward-looking project, you will have *major* revisions, and minor revisions. XML doesn't help you move between major revisions (with enough hard work, XSLT might be able to help you - just like any portable programming language which is capable of transforming data). The fact that XSLT is a de facto standard is what makes it useful - not any intrinsic property of XSLT itself. C++ is clearly inferior to other programming languages in several details, but it is the de facto standard. Claiming that it's "portable" has always obfuscated the real point - yes, with work. You have to be careful what you do, and how you do it.
I was focusing on the one and only one comment that gets repeated a billion times as the ultimate defense of XML for the use in some project - portability.
I guarantee that for a specific problem, a binary representation is as good or better than XML. (I'm cheating with this argument, since XML itself is actually binary - you don't go creating XML without using at least UTF-8, do you?)
Domain knowledge always wins. Injecting "portability" and "extensibility" as top-level requirements absolutely makes sense in some areas, and is absolutely brain-dead in others. TCP/IP doesn't need to be extensibile - it works. If it were extensibile, it would be a dog, and it would be significantly more expensive to process.
If you want to express a floating point number, I'll chose IEEE Standard 754 for binary floating point representation every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It seems pretty portable to me. I don't know though, maybe I'm an idiot.
The fact that anyone thinks that XML is "text" instead of "binary" is cute, but it's meaningless in all but the most exaggerated terms (or the tightest constraints).
So, when someone claims that "XML is certainly more portable than binary code", then they're wrong.
It so happens that XML is a very bloated binary code which humans can read unassisted by an XML-savy viewer most of the time.
If XML had originally been written as a tighter binary code, everyone would have been perfectly happy with it. In fact, if XML had been written to be multi-byte character only from the first day, it would have taught people more quickly that 8-bit characters are almost useless, in a large enough audience.
I still say that for small amounts of data, a good binary representation is probably better, and for large amounts of data (for out-of-core processing), a good binary representation is certainly better. Yes, and more portable. Because if I give you 17 gigabytes of arbitrary XML and you need to process it in real-time, I think you'd rather have the 11 gigabytes of binary data with intelligently-written index tables.
As with any encoding, binary is a representation of other things - integers, floating-point values, characters, strings...
XML is certainly more portable than binary code
That's a huge fricking lie that I wish would die.
Your TCP/IP packets don't all start and end with < and >, and they seem to be fairly portable.
Endian-ness and packing are not rocket science.
There should be precisely the amount of syntactic sugar to consisely express a programming construct.
e -thing-as-an-open-paren> is retarded. Maybe as an intermediate language for easy translation, but not for my fingers to be typing or eyes to be reading.
Any more than that, and you're just typing because the editor is too stupid to do it for you - and you're making it harder to scan. ("Read" or "Grok")
"begin" and "end" look pretty silly compared to { and }, and <bizarre-programming-construct-that-means-the-sam
It's a nice idea, but only if the person is actually earning anything.
What if their fortune is all in their checking account? $5 M in checking, and they still get $25k a year?
I agree it's an improvement, but it seems like it's still busted.
AAaaaag! My precious eyes! Aaaah!
I thought it was 18 months?
Is it that the frequency doubles every 18?