Science is often naive in its investigation of things that could only possibly be used for benign purposes. My personal preference is that we focus on finding the morality gene before intelligence, and make that a prerequisite requirement for any intelligence improvement. I think even Dr. Evil would agree, he doesn't like competition.
I certainly learned more about history from games like Colonization than I did in school. It's too bad that most Sim games, like Spore, distort reality horribly when they could have been made into valuable learning experiences with little effort.
I love how half the comments in this thread would normally be rated as trolls... but since we all realize the fact that windows is crap, they're rated funny instead.
"Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold."
Call me amoral, but if she makes enough money that it only takes 3-4 years to get out of $400,000 in debt, I don't feel bad for her.
I'm sure there are people blowing a couple year-s salaries in Vegas every day... they only have slightly better odds then her at getting money and are just as gullible.
What he really wants as a retirement gift:
Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers....
At least that's what he told Steve he wanted.
A lot of people are complaining that it's misuse of a service that they're paying for. Aside from the ethical question of editing someone else's incoming data, how many people would be ok with ISP inserted adds it if it meant FREE high speed internet? What if it went even further and ISPs competed to PAY you to use their service and view their adds? This goes back to the 'free pc' days when companies would give you a free PC with adds always displayed around the edge of the monitor. Providing hardware is a little too easy to hack, inserting into html is much more reliable.
I don't personally agree with any of it, but it might be the way things are heading.
Rather funny that Spiralfrog.com seems to be having some response issues at the moment... don't think they intended it to be marketed to an audience as large as slashdot, anyhow glad to see the.aspx extension on its pages.
I finished school a couple years ago now, at that time the kid who brought a laptop to every class was called "laptop", and it wasn't the most endearing nickname.
My girlfriend is still in school now though, and the majority of her pre-med program class bring their laptops to class. The most interesting thing is that professors seem to be required to provide their lecture notes as a type of powerpoint presentation. Students open the powerpoint and follow along with the teacher typing notes into the file itself, which can they later review on the computer for tests and exams.
The point can be made that this doesn't properly prepare you for tests that are written but even those are changing. The MCAT was changed to an all electronic format in which you are required to answer all multiple choice and even essay questions on a computer.
I wonder how long before English exams are being done entirely online?
The only subject I have trouble seeing easily transferable to an electronic form without some form of tablet would be math and engineering subjects which require extensive equations. There is no good standard equation editor that can create and manipulate formulas nearly as fast as can be done by hand afaik. (Although LaTeX equations do look a whole lot better than by hand once you get all the symbols in the right place.)
My belief after working on KDE based applications in QT for some time that the "flimsy" aspect you describe is the fault of the underlying language of QT from Trolltech, especially QT4 and its continuous state of development even after being in "release" status for nearly two years now.
Some graphical things are very difficult to implement and get broken too easily imo between even minor releases of QT.
But again, I'm a huge fan, and I'm not going to stop programming in QT;) There are just a lot of challenges that I can understand from the development standpoint the difficulties KDE developers are facing and believe that the ongoing QT4 development is the biggest factor that keeps pushing KDE4 deadlines back.
Ironically Mr. "Microsoft platform strategy director" got his linux-is-dead propaganda posted on a linux* hosted server.
Oops.
(* assumption based on "ssh www.bangkokpost.com" being friendly)
I could care less what people say about how their "system" idles, vista does not run at an acceptable speed with 512MB of ram.
I recently purchased a laptop with my girlfriend, since they don't sell laptops with XP anymore we got a brand new cheaper vista laptop. I assumed if they were selling a laptop with 512 RAM and vista home basic, the operating system would actually function. I suppose it does if you never need to multitask, but it is impossible to run two things at once. Lets say you want to edit a word document and listen to an mp3, the applications hang so bad switching back and forth that windows tells you they're not responding. If you open more than 4, such as powerpoint, firefox, word, and an mp3 player, the OS stops responding. I mean even with ALL visual effects turned of and NO extra processes running it takes 7 seconds for the right click menu on the desktop to show up.
Not even going to think about running antivirus software of any kind, the OS is "unusable" enough already. I'd love to hear someone say positive things about any version of vista with 512MB of ram, and a new (but slow) laptop harddrive.
I've never played, but I've heard that Second Life is built on scripting. If you have the ability, get people together and script all the necessary things like chat logging to create a good classroom environment: white board, pseudo-textbook, tests etc.
Forget trying to teach people, you could probably even make a profit off it by charging people admission. I'm sure even if the concept of learning was useless, you'd make money just based on novelty.
And I wouldn't worry about lag too much, its not like people go to class in real life much, how much less will they do it in a virtual world? But as long as you keep hammering them with reminders and some sort of "diploma" for their completion of stuff they will probably show up for exams.
Best of all, since it'd be the definition of contributing to the world of second life you'd be able to trade the money you make off lucrative virtual colleges into real world cash. Its not like you have to worry about paying off any accreditation board (yet) for all the PhD's you hand out to the highest bidders.
I am just guessing here, but I think your problem has more to do with p2p file sharing then the number of wireless networks in your area.
I am typing this about 5 minutes walk from a university, and I can pick up at least a dozen wireless networks from the basement. This router also goes down *a lot* but it always coincides with someone opening BT or some other file sharing program on their computer. I've had to educate the people in the house how to set your max connections low etc. but even still if more than one person decides they want to download something at the same time the router just dies.
There are two cheap solutions to this: buy a router and get Linux on it, or go wired.
I went with wired, since in my opinion it takes less time to staple gun the hell out of a rented house than to purchase, flash, configure a router:)
I have yet to find a consumer wireless router that would stand up to multiple wireless clients running un-throttled p2p applications.
F*$#. I just filed my taxes last Friday with this system. I just checked their web page, thank goodness they have an information bulletin that the system is down for maintenance with absolutely no information about whether my return was affected or not.
I'm sure I'll get a nasty call a couple years from now, with a few thousand dollars in fines attached. They will attempt to convince me it was my fault taht they screwed up my information. How do I know this because I've spent the last 4 years trying to clean up the confusion when they swapped my social insurance number with someone else who happens to have the exact same name.
CRA: "You lied, and put someone else's social insurance number down on your employment record."
me: "Mmmmhmmm, I went and found someone out there with the exact same name, stole their SIN number, and filed a tax returns with that number FOR THREE YEARS just to see if you'd catch me."
CRA: "You're lucky we are only applying financial charges for the trouble."
me: "I claimed every penny I made and I paid full tax on it, and you still want more money?"
CRA: "That is because you provided false identification."
me: "Even though you (apparently) had no record of me being employed anywhere, you audited me every year and approved my tax returns. Now FIVE years after the initial mistake you realize I owe you MORE money?"
CRA: "Our records show that you provided false identification."
Although its nearly impossible to deal with these people, the story does have a happy ending. The government eventually paid me back all of the extra money they had taken from me, no interest mind you, but it's better than nothing. I still find it mind boggling that they audited me every year for three years, and it took them five years to admit that they mixed up their data.
So yes, I expect a call in a few years.
At least I know everyone in the first world probably has to deal with a similar taxation system, that's some comfort. I think I'm really starting to support the fair tax idea...
Random: There is such a thing as a "farm vehicle" to the insurance companies. I only know because a relative has several nice SUV's because he owns a farm. Farm vehicle = cheap insurance + tax write-off.
That makes me wonder if corporations can't claim Vista as an R&D Tax Credit.
I like the "give everyone a randomly generated number so they can check their vote" idea - granted you'd probably want a long random string using numbers and letters to reduce the chance of duplicates, and have each set of random numbers usable on a database representing a certain geographical area like a city.
The only thing I'd add is redundancy in servers - make sure there's at least one democrat, one republican, and one independantly run server that receive the same data;)
Slashdot Mirror
touché
Science is often naive in its investigation of things that could only possibly be used for benign purposes. My personal preference is that we focus on finding the morality gene before intelligence, and make that a prerequisite requirement for any intelligence improvement. I think even Dr. Evil would agree, he doesn't like competition.
He was just quoting Winston Churchill, you should take it up with that guy.
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
You should be playing FF, SE has not let anything stand in the way of endless grinding reaping exclusive rewards.
I certainly learned more about history from games like Colonization than I did in school. It's too bad that most Sim games, like Spore, distort reality horribly when they could have been made into valuable learning experiences with little effort.
Well it's not *that* old, it's not like anyone has or ever will need more than 512K of ram...
Like this guy who showed up on slashdot a couple months ago.
2009, already almost a decade of blatant monopoly abuse by Microsoft in the new century, and she comes out with a statement like this?
Wow, words can't describe what wonders she can perform as antitrust chief. Yes She Can.
I love how half the comments in this thread would normally be rated as trolls... but since we all realize the fact that windows is crap, they're rated funny instead.
"Spears said it would take her at least three to four years to dig out of the debt she ran up in pursuit of the non-existent pot of Nigerian gold."
Call me amoral, but if she makes enough money that it only takes 3-4 years to get out of $400,000 in debt, I don't feel bad for her.
I'm sure there are people blowing a couple year-s salaries in Vegas every day... they only have slightly better odds then her at getting money and are just as gullible.
What he really wants as a retirement gift: Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers.... At least that's what he told Steve he wanted.
A lot of people are complaining that it's misuse of a service that they're paying for. Aside from the ethical question of editing someone else's incoming data, how many people would be ok with ISP inserted adds it if it meant FREE high speed internet? What if it went even further and ISPs competed to PAY you to use their service and view their adds? This goes back to the 'free pc' days when companies would give you a free PC with adds always displayed around the edge of the monitor. Providing hardware is a little too easy to hack, inserting into html is much more reliable. I don't personally agree with any of it, but it might be the way things are heading.
Rather funny that Spiralfrog.com seems to be having some response issues at the moment... don't think they intended it to be marketed to an audience as large as slashdot, anyhow glad to see the .aspx extension on its pages.
My girlfriend is still in school now though, and the majority of her pre-med program class bring their laptops to class. The most interesting thing is that professors seem to be required to provide their lecture notes as a type of powerpoint presentation. Students open the powerpoint and follow along with the teacher typing notes into the file itself, which can they later review on the computer for tests and exams.
The point can be made that this doesn't properly prepare you for tests that are written but even those are changing. The MCAT was changed to an all electronic format in which you are required to answer all multiple choice and even essay questions on a computer.
I wonder how long before English exams are being done entirely online?
The only subject I have trouble seeing easily transferable to an electronic form without some form of tablet would be math and engineering subjects which require extensive equations. There is no good standard equation editor that can create and manipulate formulas nearly as fast as can be done by hand afaik. (Although LaTeX equations do look a whole lot better than by hand once you get all the symbols in the right place.)
Some graphical things are very difficult to implement and get broken too easily imo between even minor releases of QT.
But again, I'm a huge fan, and I'm not going to stop programming in QT ;) There are just a lot of challenges that I can understand from the development standpoint the difficulties KDE developers are facing and believe that the ongoing QT4 development is the biggest factor that keeps pushing KDE4 deadlines back.
I wonder if Lisa Nowak was ever ordered to... experiment... with a certain other astronaut...
Ironically Mr. "Microsoft platform strategy director" got his linux-is-dead propaganda posted on a linux* hosted server. Oops. (* assumption based on "ssh www.bangkokpost.com" being friendly)
I recently purchased a laptop with my girlfriend, since they don't sell laptops with XP anymore we got a brand new cheaper vista laptop. I assumed if they were selling a laptop with 512 RAM and vista home basic, the operating system would actually function. I suppose it does if you never need to multitask, but it is impossible to run two things at once. Lets say you want to edit a word document and listen to an mp3, the applications hang so bad switching back and forth that windows tells you they're not responding. If you open more than 4, such as powerpoint, firefox, word, and an mp3 player, the OS stops responding. I mean even with ALL visual effects turned of and NO extra processes running it takes 7 seconds for the right click menu on the desktop to show up.
Not even going to think about running antivirus software of any kind, the OS is "unusable" enough already. I'd love to hear someone say positive things about any version of vista with 512MB of ram, and a new (but slow) laptop harddrive.
Forget trying to teach people, you could probably even make a profit off it by charging people admission. I'm sure even if the concept of learning was useless, you'd make money just based on novelty.
And I wouldn't worry about lag too much, its not like people go to class in real life much, how much less will they do it in a virtual world? But as long as you keep hammering them with reminders and some sort of "diploma" for their completion of stuff they will probably show up for exams.
Best of all, since it'd be the definition of contributing to the world of second life you'd be able to trade the money you make off lucrative virtual colleges into real world cash. Its not like you have to worry about paying off any accreditation board (yet) for all the PhD's you hand out to the highest bidders.
I am just guessing here, but I think your problem has more to do with p2p file sharing then the number of wireless networks in your area. I am typing this about 5 minutes walk from a university, and I can pick up at least a dozen wireless networks from the basement. This router also goes down *a lot* but it always coincides with someone opening BT or some other file sharing program on their computer. I've had to educate the people in the house how to set your max connections low etc. but even still if more than one person decides they want to download something at the same time the router just dies. There are two cheap solutions to this: buy a router and get Linux on it, or go wired. I went with wired, since in my opinion it takes less time to staple gun the hell out of a rented house than to purchase, flash, configure a router :)
I have yet to find a consumer wireless router that would stand up to multiple wireless clients running un-throttled p2p applications.
I'm sure I'll get a nasty call a couple years from now, with a few thousand dollars in fines attached. They will attempt to convince me it was my fault taht they screwed up my information. How do I know this because I've spent the last 4 years trying to clean up the confusion when they swapped my social insurance number with someone else who happens to have the exact same name.
CRA: "You lied, and put someone else's social insurance number down on your employment record."
me: "Mmmmhmmm, I went and found someone out there with the exact same name, stole their SIN number, and filed a tax returns with that number FOR THREE YEARS just to see if you'd catch me."
CRA: "You're lucky we are only applying financial charges for the trouble."
me: "I claimed every penny I made and I paid full tax on it, and you still want more money?"
CRA: "That is because you provided false identification."
me: "Even though you (apparently) had no record of me being employed anywhere, you audited me every year and approved my tax returns. Now FIVE years after the initial mistake you realize I owe you MORE money?"
CRA: "Our records show that you provided false identification."
Although its nearly impossible to deal with these people, the story does have a happy ending. The government eventually paid me back all of the extra money they had taken from me, no interest mind you, but it's better than nothing. I still find it mind boggling that they audited me every year for three years, and it took them five years to admit that they mixed up their data.
So yes, I expect a call in a few years.
At least I know everyone in the first world probably has to deal with a similar taxation system, that's some comfort. I think I'm really starting to support the fair tax idea...
Random: There is such a thing as a "farm vehicle" to the insurance companies. I only know because a relative has several nice SUV's because he owns a farm. Farm vehicle = cheap insurance + tax write-off. That makes me wonder if corporations can't claim Vista as an R&D Tax Credit.
He doesn't need it. He can already get away with whatever he wants regardless of local laws ;)
I like the "give everyone a randomly generated number so they can check their vote" idea - granted you'd probably want a long random string using numbers and letters to reduce the chance of duplicates, and have each set of random numbers usable on a database representing a certain geographical area like a city. The only thing I'd add is redundancy in servers - make sure there's at least one democrat, one republican, and one independantly run server that receive the same data ;)