the Apollo astronaughts had difficulty performing certain tasks. Well, I can forgive them that - it's hard to expect the absence of anything to do anything for you, regardless of whether it's in space or not.
Prosecutors didn't indite O.J. Simpson because they didn't like him and wanted to send him to prison for the rest of his life, they indited him because they had two dead bodies in the morgue and a ton of evidence. s/indite/indict/g;
It also helps me to ease my conscience with regard to racism I don't think I'm guilty of, but must assume I might be guilty of. Your first paragraph implies you are completely guilty of racism, as well as sexism and age-ism. Well, it's not like I'm a bad person or anything. I mean, when I'm walking down the street and I see a black person, it's not like I avoid them or anything... I mean, I don't stare either, but I make eye contact. But not too much eye contact, just enough to be friendly, acknowledge them. And make sure they know that I'm alert, aware of my surroundings. You're a target for mugging if you look like you're not paying attention. Not necessarily by a black person.
So everyone has taken to addressing issues that don't matter, that don't have any actual effect on people (like gay marriage) and offering quick fixes on those, so it looks like they're effective. I agree with most of what you're saying, but how do you figure issues like gay marriage or abortion don't matter? Just 'cause they don't matter to you?
Rather than classifying these issues as important/not important, maybe it'd be more accurate to classify them as hard or easy to impress people with? Like some issues take too long to resolve, as you said - some issues aren't readily understood by the general population, so they don't care - while others are easy to understand, familiar, and facing some decisive battles in the near future (like the proposals for a constitutional amendment to prevent official recognition of polygamy or same-sex marriage, etc.)
First, how is he black, when he has the same % being white? How would it make him a first black president? First mulatto president. Saying he is first black is as disgenious as calling you a woman because you have half of the genome to be one. Is USA so racist that we label people by the color of their skin?
Yes.
What part of "black" did you not understand? It's kind of like how Tiger Woods is black. It's pretty easy, you can just look at their skin and just know.
I have minimal interest in this subject, but even I know his damn name is spelled "Barack", not "Barrack". Wasn't Barack the one with the crazy teeth and the swords in his arms? He fought like crap but he was such a fun character!
I can picture her in a press conference concurrent to Obama's inauguration saying "I'm not making any decisions tonight; I still have a few cards to play". If nothing else, a sufficiently-long assassination list would do the trick...
I can't agree. The LAST thing Obama wants is Hillary as his VP. It sends the message of "same old same old", it brings Bill (and the problem of trying to control him) along as part of the baggage You know I saw this great product in a catalog the other day...
See, it's this collar, right, and it has a radio receiver connected to an electrical circuit, so that the person holding the transmitter can push a button and give an electrical shock through the collar. It's supposed to be very good at controlling behavior problems, because it's so immediate.
I think it was for dogs or something, but it ought to work. If not, maybe they can get him fixed.
Oh yeah, Youtube...great measure of the will of those old enough to vote...... Well, I for one am prepared to stand firmly behind an Astley/Kauranen ticket...
Wait, what do you mean neither of them are eligible for election to US office? Don't bother me with details, man!
If both candidates were white, I would probably have to agree with you. But, as I indicated in another post in this discussion, there seems to be a huge undercurrent of support for trying to keep Obama out just because he's black. Wait, hold up - Obama is black?
He's...equally not white... Actually he's more not white than Obama, for those who care about that. I find that voting for someone who is not simultaneously white, male, old, and wealthy gives me a sense that I am helping to create a change in the world by supporting something different. Electing wealthy old white men is kind of the more mainstream choice, electing someone who's black, or a woman is like supporting local businesses instead of going to the big chains, or cheering on my favorite local bands instead of just listening to the top 40...
It also helps me to ease my conscience with regard to racism I don't think I'm guilty of, but must assume I might be guilty of. I mean, I do think Michael Richards is a pretty funny guy... This balances the scale.
You've obviously forgotten the whole point of a BBS: It's local to a specific area, usually designated by an area code. I once made roughly that same argument - to argue why BBSes were good and newsgroups were bad. But, honestly, I was probably just making that assertion because I ran a BBS that didn't have newsgroups, and someone else ran one that did...
Anyway, I think that assertion is dead wrong. I sure as hell wasn't "local to a specific area" by choice - it was just because of the economic realities of amateur computer networking in that era. BBSes were local because that was the only affordable option. There's nothing inherent about a BBS that requires it to be local, it's just that when run over POTS it worked out that way - because otherwise, for anything you might actually want to do on a BBS, you'd quickly wind up racking up hundreds of dollars in long-distance fees.
If their local nature was an inherent part of BBSes, then why did software authors try to overcome that? (For instance, networking the message boards of different BBSes together, propagating the messages with a nightly dial-out script...)
The technical limitations of most BBSes back in the day were consequences of economic factors, not conscious design choices. Nowadays, online forums are generally "local" to shared interests rather than shared geography. I find I have a lot more in common with computer programmers in the California or modelers in the Philippines than I do with a lot of people who happen to live in the same calling area as I do...
Congress isn't using war/oil money to fund video games. And in any case it's taxpayer money. It's all "taxpayer money". So what? That's what a tax is - they take your money. It's not yours anymore.
Video games are a medium, like anything else. The point of this project was to try to use that medium to teach - now, there may be numerous reasons this is not a great idea (the fact that kids play games because they're fun, for instance, combined with a game whose primary goal is not to entertain but to teach - the fact that technology changes so fast that the game may have a short practical lifespan, etc.) but if nothing else, something like this is probably worth research.
Google SketchUp is intuitive -- you can produce something useful with within a few hours without prior 3d skills. Amazing. And I wouldn't for a moment belittle that achievement. Nevertheless, the tool has inherent limitations in how it approaches modeling. It's built around the idea of making surface extrusion/sliding and related operations (scaling, rotation, etc.) very simple - which is great for certain kinds of shapes but totally inadequate for others. In particular, it's not well-suited to defining compound curves and detailed organic shapes. As far as I can tell it can't do animation, apart from simple show/hide or camera moves. It seems like even for a job as simple as creating a new character model for a 3-D game, Sketchup would be totally inadequate.
But, as I said, I don't want to dismiss the real value of Sketchup - as you said, it is intuitive and allows you to create certain kinds of models very efficiently. That's no small feat IMO - and if it gives people the ability to do 3-D modeling, even in a limited capacity, that's fantastic. But you can't cite it as a reason why full-featured 3-D modeling packages needn't be difficult to learn - when it isn't, itself, a full-featured 3-D modeling package.
maybe, just maybe, Blender isn't for kids that just want to make a quick model of the Solar system for a school project. But there are very few F/OSS programs that would fill that gap (if there are any at all) and by implementing a "simple" mode which wouldn't take too long and wouldn't bloat the binary, it could fill that need, and it wouldn't just be limited to kids, adults who want to make simple 3-D models without spending hours reading tutorials and dealing with an unfamiliar interface would also help make it be popular. Good, let me know when you've finished this project of yours. It sounds interesting, and it shouldn't take too long. Then you can start releasing patches to allow people to model things apart from the Solar System.
Here's the trick: modeling isn't easy. This is true whether you're doing 3-D modeling on the computer or physical sculpture. It's not just about learning the software interface, you have to learn how to actually do the task. Modeling is a set of skills that has to be cultivated. But certainly mesh modeling on the computer (and dealing with mostly 2-D input devices and 2-D display devices for dealing with a 3-D model) carries its own challenges as well. It doesn't help that you can't work with CG models in any sort of tactile fashion - and in most cases, for low-poly models, the computer treats your model not as a "solid" (which could be easily "carved", "sanded", etc. to change its shape) but very much as a "mesh" - points in space bridged by edges and faces.
You talk about "adults who want to make simple 3-D models without spending hours reading tutorials" - what sort of 3-D models? How does this hypothetical person define "simple"? I might think a human head is a "simple" model - after all, I could sculpt a decent one from clay in maybe 20 minutes. But on a computer that's not really a "simple model" - it could be edited with dense-mesh tools which might give you almost the same process as with clay, minus the tactile experience and true 3-D interaction... or it could be edited with sparse-mesh tools, in which case your workflow is mostly about laying out the vertices in 3-D space for the head's defining features. The dense-mesh process is probably the easier of the two, but neither is especially intuitive by nature.
So what is a "simple" model, really? Really it's defined by what set of tools is made "simple". Most all 3-D editors make the creation of geometric primitives "simple"... Sketchup, for instance, puts a lot of emphasis on extrusion and scaling - and so in that program a "simple model" is something fairly boxy. In a program built around the idea of sculpting the model as if it were made of "clay", creating a boxy shape like that would pretty much suck - but a tool like that would be good for sculpting organic shapes.
And then there's the question of how much finishing work you want to do - do you want to be able to control things like reflectivity? Surface color? Transparency? Do you want to be able to create bitmap textures, or animate the thing?
Talking about "simple models" - all it really means is you've chosen some subset of modeling techniques within whose limitations you're willing to work. Some kinds of models will be easy to model within this limited scope and others won't. If you want to move beyond those limitations you need to start learning a fuller set of tools.
So, really, feel free to make a "simpler" (that is, more limited) modeling package - Blender's aim is to be a more complete toolset, and I don't think it's worth getting side-tracked from that goal (which is quite difficult enough as it is!) to try to make something more limited but easier to use.
This attitude - that new versions of the language should always support everything the old versions supported - only makes sense if you assume that the initial design was perfectly sound to begin with.
Had PHP4 been perfectly designed, and perfectly well-suited to what people are now using PHP for, there wouldn't be any need to change it at all. But PHP isn't perfect. They've found ways to make it better. They could fork off a new project containing those changes - but PHP6 is more like PHP5 than not - and if they had to fork off every time they changed things around they'd have a lot of extraneous extra names for basically the same thing.
Also consider - how much time and effort might they have to put in to augmenting PHP6 to be fully backward-compatible, and to maintain that awkwardness - even in the face of new features that may flat-out contradict older policies in the language? How much work would have to be wasted just to make PHP6 a better PHP4 than PHP4 is?
If you wrote your code for PHP4, just keep running it on PHP4 until you're ready to port it.
There was a very good reason for having '.' as the concatenation operator. The "very good reason" is that PHP doesn't distinguish between a string containing digits and a numeric value...? I am seriously not convinced that's a good thing.
I mean, OK, it's a convenient thing to have in a language that primarily deals with textual I/O (such as HTML, XML, HTTP form submissions, etc.) - I am familiar with the idea from languages like Perl. But lately I've felt like that convenience isn't worth the muddled type identity it results in... It's better, IMO, to clearly establish that $a contains numerical data or $b contains textual data - and if somebody tries to add $a to $b, reject it for the nonsensical operation it is.
"Unicode is an industry-standard set of characters, character encoding, and encoding methodologies primarily aimed at enabling i18n and localization (i10n)."
Ha ha... Everybody knows that i10n is shorthand for "intoxication", not "localization"...
I am impressed by Freenet's devotion to freedom of speech, but if my computer is hosting content, I should have the freedom to choose what that content is. Freedom of speech does not mean I should have to provide any resources to help you. You have the freedom to not run Freenet. You don't have to provide any resources at all. So what are you complaining about?
Have you also failed to realize that if all the peer nodes had the luxury of picking and choosing what content to support, that it could become significantly harder to find peers willing to serve the content you want?
Slashdot Mirror
And won't they be surprised when they see the rings around Uranus...
And then they'll have to go back to Uranus to wipe out the Klingons!
Yes, there will be no more dot-com distasters for us!
In Soviet Russia, they had many weapons and a large army!
Rather than classifying these issues as important/not important, maybe it'd be more accurate to classify them as hard or easy to impress people with? Like some issues take too long to resolve, as you said - some issues aren't readily understood by the general population, so they don't care - while others are easy to understand, familiar, and facing some decisive battles in the near future (like the proposals for a constitutional amendment to prevent official recognition of polygamy or same-sex marriage, etc.)
Yes.
What part of "black" did you not understand? It's kind of like how Tiger Woods is black. It's pretty easy, you can just look at their skin and just know.
See, it's this collar, right, and it has a radio receiver connected to an electrical circuit, so that the person holding the transmitter can push a button and give an electrical shock through the collar. It's supposed to be very good at controlling behavior problems, because it's so immediate.
I think it was for dogs or something, but it ought to work. If not, maybe they can get him fixed.
DOWN, BILL! SIT!
Wait, what do you mean neither of them are eligible for election to US office? Don't bother me with details, man!
as I indicated in another
post
in this discussion, there seems to be a huge undercurrent of support for trying
to keep Obama out just because he's black. Wait, hold up - Obama is black?
Why don't people tell me these things??!?
I believe the USA should be a beacon of hope and civilization ...all alone, in the night...
It also helps me to ease my conscience with regard to racism I don't think I'm guilty of, but must assume I might be guilty of. I mean, I do think Michael Richards is a pretty funny guy... This balances the scale.
Now they have to go to Uranus and wipe out the Klingons!
That guitar clearly has some kind of rectangle on it! Holy shit!
Anyway, I think that assertion is dead wrong. I sure as hell wasn't "local to a specific area" by choice - it was just because of the economic realities of amateur computer networking in that era. BBSes were local because that was the only affordable option. There's nothing inherent about a BBS that requires it to be local, it's just that when run over POTS it worked out that way - because otherwise, for anything you might actually want to do on a BBS, you'd quickly wind up racking up hundreds of dollars in long-distance fees.
If their local nature was an inherent part of BBSes, then why did software authors try to overcome that? (For instance, networking the message boards of different BBSes together, propagating the messages with a nightly dial-out script...)
The technical limitations of most BBSes back in the day were consequences of economic factors, not conscious design choices. Nowadays, online forums are generally "local" to shared interests rather than shared geography. I find I have a lot more in common with computer programmers in the California or modelers in the Philippines than I do with a lot of people who happen to live in the same calling area as I do...
Video games are a medium, like anything else. The point of this project was to try to use that medium to teach - now, there may be numerous reasons this is not a great idea (the fact that kids play games because they're fun, for instance, combined with a game whose primary goal is not to entertain but to teach - the fact that technology changes so fast that the game may have a short practical lifespan, etc.) but if nothing else, something like this is probably worth research.
But, as I said, I don't want to dismiss the real value of Sketchup - as you said, it is intuitive and allows you to create certain kinds of models very efficiently. That's no small feat IMO - and if it gives people the ability to do 3-D modeling, even in a limited capacity, that's fantastic. But you can't cite it as a reason why full-featured 3-D modeling packages needn't be difficult to learn - when it isn't, itself, a full-featured 3-D modeling package.
Here's the trick: modeling isn't easy. This is true whether you're doing 3-D modeling on the computer or physical sculpture. It's not just about learning the software interface, you have to learn how to actually do the task. Modeling is a set of skills that has to be cultivated. But certainly mesh modeling on the computer (and dealing with mostly 2-D input devices and 2-D display devices for dealing with a 3-D model) carries its own challenges as well. It doesn't help that you can't work with CG models in any sort of tactile fashion - and in most cases, for low-poly models, the computer treats your model not as a "solid" (which could be easily "carved", "sanded", etc. to change its shape) but very much as a "mesh" - points in space bridged by edges and faces.
You talk about "adults who want to make simple 3-D models without spending hours reading tutorials" - what sort of 3-D models? How does this hypothetical person define "simple"? I might think a human head is a "simple" model - after all, I could sculpt a decent one from clay in maybe 20 minutes. But on a computer that's not really a "simple model" - it could be edited with dense-mesh tools which might give you almost the same process as with clay, minus the tactile experience and true 3-D interaction... or it could be edited with sparse-mesh tools, in which case your workflow is mostly about laying out the vertices in 3-D space for the head's defining features. The dense-mesh process is probably the easier of the two, but neither is especially intuitive by nature.
So what is a "simple" model, really? Really it's defined by what set of tools is made "simple". Most all 3-D editors make the creation of geometric primitives "simple"... Sketchup, for instance, puts a lot of emphasis on extrusion and scaling - and so in that program a "simple model" is something fairly boxy. In a program built around the idea of sculpting the model as if it were made of "clay", creating a boxy shape like that would pretty much suck - but a tool like that would be good for sculpting organic shapes.
And then there's the question of how much finishing work you want to do - do you want to be able to control things like reflectivity? Surface color? Transparency? Do you want to be able to create bitmap textures, or animate the thing?
Talking about "simple models" - all it really means is you've chosen some subset of modeling techniques within whose limitations you're willing to work. Some kinds of models will be easy to model within this limited scope and others won't. If you want to move beyond those limitations you need to start learning a fuller set of tools.
So, really, feel free to make a "simpler" (that is, more limited) modeling package - Blender's aim is to be a more complete toolset, and I don't think it's worth getting side-tracked from that goal (which is quite difficult enough as it is!) to try to make something more limited but easier to use.
This attitude - that new versions of the language should always support everything the old versions supported - only makes sense if you assume that the initial design was perfectly sound to begin with.
Had PHP4 been perfectly designed, and perfectly well-suited to what people are now using PHP for, there wouldn't be any need to change it at all. But PHP isn't perfect. They've found ways to make it better. They could fork off a new project containing those changes - but PHP6 is more like PHP5 than not - and if they had to fork off every time they changed things around they'd have a lot of extraneous extra names for basically the same thing.
Also consider - how much time and effort might they have to put in to augmenting PHP6 to be fully backward-compatible, and to maintain that awkwardness - even in the face of new features that may flat-out contradict older policies in the language? How much work would have to be wasted just to make PHP6 a better PHP4 than PHP4 is?
If you wrote your code for PHP4, just keep running it on PHP4 until you're ready to port it.
I mean, OK, it's a convenient thing to have in a language that primarily deals with textual I/O (such as HTML, XML, HTTP form submissions, etc.) - I am familiar with the idea from languages like Perl. But lately I've felt like that convenience isn't worth the muddled type identity it results in... It's better, IMO, to clearly establish that $a contains numerical data or $b contains textual data - and if somebody tries to add $a to $b, reject it for the nonsensical operation it is.
"Unicode is an industry-standard set of characters, character encoding, and encoding methodologies primarily aimed at enabling i18n and localization (i10n)."
Ha ha... Everybody knows that i10n is shorthand for "intoxication", not "localization"...
Have you also failed to realize that if all the peer nodes had the luxury of picking and choosing what content to support, that it could become significantly harder to find peers willing to serve the content you want?