I agree that it's amazing to think about how fast we can go in cars. I make a trip in less than a day that would have taken weeks or months to make before trains. That's absolutely amazing.
However, if you look at the way that humans control cars, they're basically controlling a machine that moving over 60 mph like it's moving at less than 30 mph. The interactions with cars around you can be seen as you going (your speed - his speed) mph around a stationary object. The entire system can be modeled (and is, at least by my brain) as the slowest moving car in the vicinity being stationary and everyone else moving in relation to him. Curves cause problems, but the faster you are the more gradual they are, so they can also be treated as a more-sharp turn taken at slower speeds. For the most part, controlling a car going 75 mph is the same as one going 20 mph; the trouble comes when people don't keep a large enough margin of safety and something breaks the general rules that allow you to treat the situation that way.
We could have a run-in between consumer protection laws and the DMCA. I think if it ever went to court, Palm would win since compatibility with itunes can only be a good thing for consumers.
I agree that the wiimote is a pretty mediocre solution. However, I have a hard time faulting it because it gets the job done most of the time. Call of Duty and Metroid seemed to be able to get the "gun pointed at screen" mechanic working fairly well, Wii Sports is immensely fun in spite of the sometimes frustrating controls, and there are a lot of games that make good use of the motion sensitivity. Compare that to the sixaxis, where they absolutely did it wrong, or other motion control systems where the motion sensor is too sensitive or has weird glitches that cause the system to mess up unless you're trained to use it.
In other words, the mediocrity of the controller keeps it from being a massive failure, which allowed them to gain market position and push a technology that nobody else had successfully pushed for gaming. I believe they absolutely made the right choice, and they're incrementally improving it now that some of the basics are in place. I don't know if they could have been successful making a more sensitive control scheme, but I do know that there were a lot of pitfalls down that path that they neatly avoided.
she said a female latina Judge would come to a better decision (on the basis of her being female and latina) than a white male judge.
And she probably would if that were the only difference between her and a white male judge. Nobody worth their salt is going to claim that you can overcome your background when making a judgment. Further, it's easier to have empathy towards those who are in situations similar to those you've been in. Finally, even George Will will tell you that empathy is an important part of the judicial process.
That said, I don't think that gender or race should be the highest criteria for nominating a supreme court justice. Any form of racial or gender-based discrimination should be eliminated when possible, otherwise we create a group mentality of us vs them. That's why I hate this nomination and will probably hate Obama's nominations from here on out. I don't believe that Obama would nominate a white male for this position regardless of the circumstances, and that's ridiculous.
And don't tell me about WMD's when North Korea is testing nukes.
North Korea isn't as belligerent as Iraq was, so the threat from their WMDs is less. Also, Iraq was violating the terms of their much-younger peace treaty.
In other words, the two situations you equate were not, in fact, equal.
This isn't communism in the sense that a government would implement communism (ie all property's held in common), it's more like communism in the way that it's communism to help your neighbor move out. It's holding things in common that have no intrinsic worth (eg the polarity on the hard disk's platter doesn't have any value in and of itself, but when you put it together with the other bits they become an mp3) and then giving labor for free that would normally be charged for (just like helping your neighbor move).
It's more like communitism (yeah, I made that up), where people help each other just to help each other out. It's a great thing, but communism it's not.
The kind of fear-mongering from TFA = not invented here syndrome + troll.
Most cars in the US aren't properly designed to take ethanol. Most of the ethanol we'd use in the US would be as bad as gasoline. How are those products of NIH + trolling?
Considering that Oracle acquired InnoDB a few years ago with a company for whom that was the only real asset, I think it'd be a mistake to think that Oracle doesn't have plans for MySQL. InnoDB is the engine for those who are moving in the direction of more robust database solutions, and if you're supporting people on InnoDB and MySQL who could use a feature in Oracle, it's mighty easy to train tech support to say, "Well, there's a horrendous workaround, or you could upgrade to Oracle which will fix all your problems. We'll even send a tech out there to help you migrate, which we've gotten pretty good at since we've got experts for both codebases in our company."
Because Oracle licenses can cost millions in an economy where every dollar counts whereas MySQL is free and fairly reliable. When he says "unneeded", he's probably referring not only to features but to stability and all those things that make people consider MySQL a toy database. If you need multiple 9s reliability, use something else. If you just need things to be up 90%+ of the time without any of the fancy features that Oracle gives you, then MySQL is an easy choice. At that point it comes down to whether you want to use MySQL or a more robust free database, and when it hits that point MySQL has a strong advantage in ease of use.
I've heard the arguments that postgres is as easy as MySQL, and they're bullshit. MySQL has good GUI applications, a good command line application, market share that ensures a tutorial for everything under the sun, and an easy installer for windows and linux. Postgres has no good GUI applications that can compare with MySQL's, their command line application is just as good in its own way, and the market share that ensures you need to google multiple times to find the info you're looking for. Installing postgres is also a nightmare compared to MySQL.
To sum up: free > $millions, easy > full-featured (in many circumstances).
Talking about bad SF: very few SF movies have approached the question of time travel in any meaningful way - a fantastic exception to this is "Primer". Excellent hard-SF that takes into consideration time travel paradoxes.
I would think that's an oxymoron. To be hard sci-fi, you're supposed to emphasize actual science, which says that it's impossible to travel back in time. Any of the theories in which you can go back in time comes with things that tend to eliminate paradoxes; for instance, a wormhole could only go back a finite amount of time that is less than the time since it was created (ie you can only jump back to some specific time between the present and when the wormhole was created), and that's ignoring the fact that you'd have to both be able to create a stable wormhole and be able to move one of the ends.
Another theory posits that you would travel back in time into an alternate universe. This would mean that if you tampered at all with the timeline, it wouldn't affect you in the slightest, leaving causality intact.
If you take relativity at face value, then it says that time is just another dimension, like length, width, or height, and everything deterministic, which means that the conditions in the universe right now perfectly predict the conditions of the universe in 1000 years. Since this is the case, if in 10 years a man were to travel back 20 years in time and take a potshot at your dad, then right now your dad would already have this memory of a crazy dude who shot at him for no apparent reason. For all intents and purposes, this would mean that the entire timeline of the universe is already set and we're just acting it out, as it were. No paradox, since the timeline's already incorporated any changes into itself.
Paradoxes of causality are just mental masturbation. It's like speculation that the LHC will destroy the world: sure, it's possible, but the possibility of it is so slim that arguing over the details of how it would destroy the world and making fun of someone else for thinking it will destroy it differently is ridiculous. No scientific theory says that this is possible and anyone who resorts to science to make an argument over the mechanics of it is woefully lacking in knowledge.
Once the killer robot gets a head shot on the boy (he's dead, no chance of resuscitation) the show is over. The "very complex plot with many main characters" collapses because there is nothing else to carry it.
A well written series would not have that flaw.
That could be said of any series. If the main character around whom the plot revolves were to die, the show would collapse!
And with the numerous accounts of tests showing weapons passing through security checkpoints unnoticed, the extra security is fairly useless as well.
This deserves further analysis. We need to remember that, whatever else happens, it's humans who are the ones who finally decide whether something's a weapon or not. Whether something can be used to hijack/destroy and airplane is fairly objective; fingernail clippers cannot, a handgun can. Whether or not a human decides whether it can be is entirely subjective and dependent on many factors.
First of all, there's the training. They spend at most a few months learning how to foil every single method to get something through security. There's no way they'll catch everything. The x-ray scans of bags moving through the conveyor belts are hard to read and easy to foil. Anyone remember the guy who hid lockpicks in his luggage without any extra scrutiny?
Second, these people aren't paid a lot of money. There's nothing magical in the amount of money that somebody earns, but it is a fairly good indicator of how much they're valued and trained and the ability to retain talented people. In this case, a talented person is one who can provide thorough security while still making the process run smoothly for all the people involved. With how little they're paid, I'm guessing that TSA agents are by and large not a talented and eager group.
Third, humans are subject to a lot of biases. Something as simple as how long they've been staring at x-rays can affect how attentive they are. By the 3000th bag, they're not checking as thoroughly as they were with the first one. If they're having a bad day, they're more likely to single out bags or people for additional training and be more strict. If they have an ax to grind against a group for whatever reason, they're going to treat members of that group worse while treating members of groups they like better.
There's no way around these fundamental problems. Humans are always going to be humans, and as anyone knows who deals with digital security, humans are the weakest link 95% of the time. Most security measures don't take this into account. Nor do they take into account that the system is only as strong as the weakest point, which in this case is probably the x-raying of the bag. Very few people are going to carry a weapon on their person when they can pass it through in their carry ons more easily. The sooner this topic becomes less political and falls into the domain of people with aims towards security instead of publicity, the better.
Finally, a politician from my state is featured on slashdot for NOT being an idiot. Of course, anyone who saw this guy on the Colbert Report realizes that he's still an idiot, but the specific reason he's here isn't idiocy!
I really support anything that helps everyone on capitol hill and watching Fox News realize that prevention of terrorism isn't worth giving up everything.
Who would have thought that routers might not allow for large numbers of listening sockets on its client machines?
I wouldn't have. I've dealt with pretty good equipment my whole life because I love computers and am willing to buy nice equipment. The people who don't love computers and don't buy that equipment don't tend to use it like I do anyway, so I've never encountered this in my informal tech support either.
these devs apparently didn't consider these obvious questions. Do they even have a QA department?
That's quite a leap there. What you consider an obvious question after reading the summary doesn't seem so obvious in a vacuum when you have the entire rest of the game to consider as well. It's nearly impossible to consider everything you need to consider while programming because there are so many variables involved. QA can't catch everything because QA's not going to try the game in as many ways as home users will. QA catches the most obvious and glaring bugs, but they can't catch everything that 1m+ users will.
The bottom line is that, while programming their game, they had a bug. In this case, the bug was right smack dab in the middle of the most important part of their game. They should have never let the bug get into production (just like no bug should ever get into production), but to say that it was obvious is going a little far.
But then you search for "SAT score" and get back distribution information about SAT scores. Search for "GRE score" or "ACT score" and it returns nothing. While neither of those tests are as big as the SAT, they're certainly big enough that you'd expect to get something back. Half finished is about right to describe my experience. Extremely useful for some topics (my hometown, for instance) but not so much for others (my wife's maiden name, for example).
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
They can both be considered customers. I'm Google's customer because I give them money; not directly, but through their advertising. Of course, that depends on the definition that you use for customer, but I'm giving Google something they want (pageviews and advertisement clicks) in exchange for them giving me something that I want (good search results). If we're not their customer, then we're very close. If I go to another site for my searches, then Google loses money.
Maybe, but at the same time if it works 80% of the time, then the infection rate will go down much further than that and stop the problem almost in its tracks. If another strain comes out that can get around it, then we've still got existing medications and the ability to adapt the shot to the new strain.
What would be best is if the treatment is cheap enough to administer in Africa (and if it's really effective, than that can be relative since I can see a lot of people and countries giving more money for something this big). Stopping AIDS in Africa could easily be the biggest medical achievement this century.
I tried to keep from smiling... however, in all seriousness, coding is 30% of programming. too many coders consider themselves programmers.
A lot depends on deadlines. If you have 3 things that needs to be done and committed by tomorrow, then there's going to be a tendency towards hackery. If you've got one thing that the company wants you to work on until it's finished, then you need to be more of a thinker. Programming's all about tradeoffs, and deciding which tradeoff happens isn't always the responsibility of the coder.
Of course, most of the time management doesn't even realize that a tradeoff is being made. There's a breakdown in communication somewhere and most managers don't even realize that by pushing the deadline to be shorter they're asking for more work in the future and more bugs.
I could see firefox users typically having higher resolutions anyway, though. The relation would be tech savvy users are more likely to user firefox, and the people most likely to have higher resolutions are also tech savvy. With higher resolutions, most web pages will either widen themselves to the higher resolution or have wasted space on the side. Either way, using the extra side space is a better alternative IMHO than using vertical screen space.
The words "double standards" come to mind. When Republicans lie and cheat and steal, it's for our protection, when Democrats do it, it's because they're traitorous liberals who hate america. Hypocrisy.
Both sides will lie, cheat, and steal anything they can to make their side look good and the other side look bad. Neither party has a monopoly on douchebaggery.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that it's amazing to think about how fast we can go in cars. I make a trip in less than a day that would have taken weeks or months to make before trains. That's absolutely amazing.
However, if you look at the way that humans control cars, they're basically controlling a machine that moving over 60 mph like it's moving at less than 30 mph. The interactions with cars around you can be seen as you going (your speed - his speed) mph around a stationary object. The entire system can be modeled (and is, at least by my brain) as the slowest moving car in the vicinity being stationary and everyone else moving in relation to him. Curves cause problems, but the faster you are the more gradual they are, so they can also be treated as a more-sharp turn taken at slower speeds. For the most part, controlling a car going 75 mph is the same as one going 20 mph; the trouble comes when people don't keep a large enough margin of safety and something breaks the general rules that allow you to treat the situation that way.
We could have a run-in between consumer protection laws and the DMCA. I think if it ever went to court, Palm would win since compatibility with itunes can only be a good thing for consumers.
If that's the case, then the government should do something about it!
I agree that the wiimote is a pretty mediocre solution. However, I have a hard time faulting it because it gets the job done most of the time. Call of Duty and Metroid seemed to be able to get the "gun pointed at screen" mechanic working fairly well, Wii Sports is immensely fun in spite of the sometimes frustrating controls, and there are a lot of games that make good use of the motion sensitivity. Compare that to the sixaxis, where they absolutely did it wrong, or other motion control systems where the motion sensor is too sensitive or has weird glitches that cause the system to mess up unless you're trained to use it.
In other words, the mediocrity of the controller keeps it from being a massive failure, which allowed them to gain market position and push a technology that nobody else had successfully pushed for gaming. I believe they absolutely made the right choice, and they're incrementally improving it now that some of the basics are in place. I don't know if they could have been successful making a more sensitive control scheme, but I do know that there were a lot of pitfalls down that path that they neatly avoided.
she said a female latina Judge would come to a better decision (on the basis of her being female and latina) than a white male judge.
And she probably would if that were the only difference between her and a white male judge. Nobody worth their salt is going to claim that you can overcome your background when making a judgment. Further, it's easier to have empathy towards those who are in situations similar to those you've been in. Finally, even George Will will tell you that empathy is an important part of the judicial process.
That said, I don't think that gender or race should be the highest criteria for nominating a supreme court justice. Any form of racial or gender-based discrimination should be eliminated when possible, otherwise we create a group mentality of us vs them. That's why I hate this nomination and will probably hate Obama's nominations from here on out. I don't believe that Obama would nominate a white male for this position regardless of the circumstances, and that's ridiculous.
And don't tell me about WMD's when North Korea is testing nukes.
North Korea isn't as belligerent as Iraq was, so the threat from their WMDs is less. Also, Iraq was violating the terms of their much-younger peace treaty.
In other words, the two situations you equate were not, in fact, equal.
And, for some unknown reason, the total number of hits went down by around 15%, right?
This isn't communism in the sense that a government would implement communism (ie all property's held in common), it's more like communism in the way that it's communism to help your neighbor move out. It's holding things in common that have no intrinsic worth (eg the polarity on the hard disk's platter doesn't have any value in and of itself, but when you put it together with the other bits they become an mp3) and then giving labor for free that would normally be charged for (just like helping your neighbor move).
It's more like communitism (yeah, I made that up), where people help each other just to help each other out. It's a great thing, but communism it's not.
The kind of fear-mongering from TFA = not invented here syndrome + troll.
Most cars in the US aren't properly designed to take ethanol. Most of the ethanol we'd use in the US would be as bad as gasoline. How are those products of NIH + trolling?
What their spokeperson says doesn't necessarily have any correlation to what their head of IT thinks.
From my experience, what the PR people say is correlated with what the IT people think. However, the correlation is negative.
Considering that Oracle acquired InnoDB a few years ago with a company for whom that was the only real asset, I think it'd be a mistake to think that Oracle doesn't have plans for MySQL. InnoDB is the engine for those who are moving in the direction of more robust database solutions, and if you're supporting people on InnoDB and MySQL who could use a feature in Oracle, it's mighty easy to train tech support to say, "Well, there's a horrendous workaround, or you could upgrade to Oracle which will fix all your problems. We'll even send a tech out there to help you migrate, which we've gotten pretty good at since we've got experts for both codebases in our company."
Because Oracle licenses can cost millions in an economy where every dollar counts whereas MySQL is free and fairly reliable. When he says "unneeded", he's probably referring not only to features but to stability and all those things that make people consider MySQL a toy database. If you need multiple 9s reliability, use something else. If you just need things to be up 90%+ of the time without any of the fancy features that Oracle gives you, then MySQL is an easy choice. At that point it comes down to whether you want to use MySQL or a more robust free database, and when it hits that point MySQL has a strong advantage in ease of use.
I've heard the arguments that postgres is as easy as MySQL, and they're bullshit. MySQL has good GUI applications, a good command line application, market share that ensures a tutorial for everything under the sun, and an easy installer for windows and linux. Postgres has no good GUI applications that can compare with MySQL's, their command line application is just as good in its own way, and the market share that ensures you need to google multiple times to find the info you're looking for. Installing postgres is also a nightmare compared to MySQL.
To sum up: free > $millions, easy > full-featured (in many circumstances).
Talking about bad SF: very few SF movies have approached the question of time travel in any meaningful way - a fantastic exception to this is "Primer". Excellent hard-SF that takes into consideration time travel paradoxes.
I would think that's an oxymoron. To be hard sci-fi, you're supposed to emphasize actual science, which says that it's impossible to travel back in time. Any of the theories in which you can go back in time comes with things that tend to eliminate paradoxes; for instance, a wormhole could only go back a finite amount of time that is less than the time since it was created (ie you can only jump back to some specific time between the present and when the wormhole was created), and that's ignoring the fact that you'd have to both be able to create a stable wormhole and be able to move one of the ends.
Another theory posits that you would travel back in time into an alternate universe. This would mean that if you tampered at all with the timeline, it wouldn't affect you in the slightest, leaving causality intact.
If you take relativity at face value, then it says that time is just another dimension, like length, width, or height, and everything deterministic, which means that the conditions in the universe right now perfectly predict the conditions of the universe in 1000 years. Since this is the case, if in 10 years a man were to travel back 20 years in time and take a potshot at your dad, then right now your dad would already have this memory of a crazy dude who shot at him for no apparent reason. For all intents and purposes, this would mean that the entire timeline of the universe is already set and we're just acting it out, as it were. No paradox, since the timeline's already incorporated any changes into itself.
Paradoxes of causality are just mental masturbation. It's like speculation that the LHC will destroy the world: sure, it's possible, but the possibility of it is so slim that arguing over the details of how it would destroy the world and making fun of someone else for thinking it will destroy it differently is ridiculous. No scientific theory says that this is possible and anyone who resorts to science to make an argument over the mechanics of it is woefully lacking in knowledge.
Once the killer robot gets a head shot on the boy (he's dead, no chance of resuscitation) the show is over. The "very complex plot with many main characters" collapses because there is nothing else to carry it. A well written series would not have that flaw.
That could be said of any series. If the main character around whom the plot revolves were to die, the show would collapse!
And with the numerous accounts of tests showing weapons passing through security checkpoints unnoticed, the extra security is fairly useless as well.
This deserves further analysis. We need to remember that, whatever else happens, it's humans who are the ones who finally decide whether something's a weapon or not. Whether something can be used to hijack/destroy and airplane is fairly objective; fingernail clippers cannot, a handgun can. Whether or not a human decides whether it can be is entirely subjective and dependent on many factors.
First of all, there's the training. They spend at most a few months learning how to foil every single method to get something through security. There's no way they'll catch everything. The x-ray scans of bags moving through the conveyor belts are hard to read and easy to foil. Anyone remember the guy who hid lockpicks in his luggage without any extra scrutiny?
Second, these people aren't paid a lot of money. There's nothing magical in the amount of money that somebody earns, but it is a fairly good indicator of how much they're valued and trained and the ability to retain talented people. In this case, a talented person is one who can provide thorough security while still making the process run smoothly for all the people involved. With how little they're paid, I'm guessing that TSA agents are by and large not a talented and eager group.
Third, humans are subject to a lot of biases. Something as simple as how long they've been staring at x-rays can affect how attentive they are. By the 3000th bag, they're not checking as thoroughly as they were with the first one. If they're having a bad day, they're more likely to single out bags or people for additional training and be more strict. If they have an ax to grind against a group for whatever reason, they're going to treat members of that group worse while treating members of groups they like better.
There's no way around these fundamental problems. Humans are always going to be humans, and as anyone knows who deals with digital security, humans are the weakest link 95% of the time. Most security measures don't take this into account. Nor do they take into account that the system is only as strong as the weakest point, which in this case is probably the x-raying of the bag. Very few people are going to carry a weapon on their person when they can pass it through in their carry ons more easily. The sooner this topic becomes less political and falls into the domain of people with aims towards security instead of publicity, the better.
Finally, a politician from my state is featured on slashdot for NOT being an idiot. Of course, anyone who saw this guy on the Colbert Report realizes that he's still an idiot, but the specific reason he's here isn't idiocy!
I really support anything that helps everyone on capitol hill and watching Fox News realize that prevention of terrorism isn't worth giving up everything.
Who would have thought that routers might not allow for large numbers of listening sockets on its client machines?
I wouldn't have. I've dealt with pretty good equipment my whole life because I love computers and am willing to buy nice equipment. The people who don't love computers and don't buy that equipment don't tend to use it like I do anyway, so I've never encountered this in my informal tech support either.
these devs apparently didn't consider these obvious questions. Do they even have a QA department?
That's quite a leap there. What you consider an obvious question after reading the summary doesn't seem so obvious in a vacuum when you have the entire rest of the game to consider as well. It's nearly impossible to consider everything you need to consider while programming because there are so many variables involved. QA can't catch everything because QA's not going to try the game in as many ways as home users will. QA catches the most obvious and glaring bugs, but they can't catch everything that 1m+ users will.
The bottom line is that, while programming their game, they had a bug. In this case, the bug was right smack dab in the middle of the most important part of their game. They should have never let the bug get into production (just like no bug should ever get into production), but to say that it was obvious is going a little far.
Not to be pedantic, but the judge just quashed the RIAA's attempt to be able to look at playlists.
Either that, or more and more users become "special".
Until they're all special. And then we hug.
But then you search for "SAT score" and get back distribution information about SAT scores. Search for "GRE score" or "ACT score" and it returns nothing. While neither of those tests are as big as the SAT, they're certainly big enough that you'd expect to get something back. Half finished is about right to describe my experience. Extremely useful for some topics (my hometown, for instance) but not so much for others (my wife's maiden name, for example).
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
They can both be considered customers. I'm Google's customer because I give them money; not directly, but through their advertising. Of course, that depends on the definition that you use for customer, but I'm giving Google something they want (pageviews and advertisement clicks) in exchange for them giving me something that I want (good search results). If we're not their customer, then we're very close. If I go to another site for my searches, then Google loses money.
Maybe, but at the same time if it works 80% of the time, then the infection rate will go down much further than that and stop the problem almost in its tracks. If another strain comes out that can get around it, then we've still got existing medications and the ability to adapt the shot to the new strain.
What would be best is if the treatment is cheap enough to administer in Africa (and if it's really effective, than that can be relative since I can see a lot of people and countries giving more money for something this big). Stopping AIDS in Africa could easily be the biggest medical achievement this century.
I tried to keep from smiling... however, in all seriousness, coding is 30% of programming. too many coders consider themselves programmers.
A lot depends on deadlines. If you have 3 things that needs to be done and committed by tomorrow, then there's going to be a tendency towards hackery. If you've got one thing that the company wants you to work on until it's finished, then you need to be more of a thinker. Programming's all about tradeoffs, and deciding which tradeoff happens isn't always the responsibility of the coder.
Of course, most of the time management doesn't even realize that a tradeoff is being made. There's a breakdown in communication somewhere and most managers don't even realize that by pushing the deadline to be shorter they're asking for more work in the future and more bugs.
I could see firefox users typically having higher resolutions anyway, though. The relation would be tech savvy users are more likely to user firefox, and the people most likely to have higher resolutions are also tech savvy. With higher resolutions, most web pages will either widen themselves to the higher resolution or have wasted space on the side. Either way, using the extra side space is a better alternative IMHO than using vertical screen space.
The words "double standards" come to mind. When Republicans lie and cheat and steal, it's for our protection, when Democrats do it, it's because they're traitorous liberals who hate america. Hypocrisy.
Both sides will lie, cheat, and steal anything they can to make their side look good and the other side look bad. Neither party has a monopoly on douchebaggery.