Conspiracy theories are a great distraction from real issues. e.g. the 9/11 rubbish churned out by some people distracts from the real "conspiracy", i.e. that the US govt was completely incompetant and unable to handle the situation. I'm sure the authorities don't mind it at all.
The feminisation of teaching is a big problem in my opinion (much bigger than equal gender representation in fields such as science). The main cause is much more obvious and sinister (men feeling they can't work with children without being labelled a paedophile), and the effects are a bigger problem too: surely we want our kids to grow up with BOTH male and female role models (which they might not get from their parents). But you can get shot down by feminists for even suggesting this is a problem.
Maybe, but in this case, there are two distinct businesses, game development and game publishing. Blizzard has been bought out / merged / whatever many times over the years, and it's never affected it's game development business. Publishing is a different story tho, and I imagine this merge is mostly about that.
Having said that, publishers can and do affect what goes on in games development. Let's just hope that doesn't happen here.
If the ice that melts is not on land, it won't affect sea level, as the amount of water in the sea hasn't changed. It's only ice melting on land (e.g. Greenland or Antarctica) that can affect sea levels.
Plenty of people have thought that. But all the evidence points to the fact that this isn't part of a natural cycle.
There are two key points here: firstly, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased 35% since pre-industrial times, which is extemely fast as compared to pre-historic evidence that's been collected from ice core samples. Secondly, the rate of change in global temperature rising is much faster that we'd expect for a natural cycle, which tends to be very slow, in human terms at least, over tens of thousands of years.
A good place to get some basic information is the BBC's list of claims and counter-claims. But I encourage you to do your own research if you really want to form your own opinion on these things. There are a lot of very smart people applying a lot of brain power to these problems day and night, so it's unlikely anyone on Slashdot is going to come up with anything new on this. Just be sure to understand how evidence is accepted into mainstream science (which is about peer reviewed papers either proving something mathematically, or forming a weight of evidence behind a particular theory).
Moore's law does some funny things. OEMs in partnership with MS have been using it to their advantage for the last 20 years. Now, it suddenly seems to be turning against them.
The smart OEMs are trying to adapt. MS is backed into a corner. People have been predicting the end of MS's reign for a long time. Sure they've always been behind in the Internet arena, but that's periperheral for them.
This is the first *sustained* attack on MS's heartland - Windows and Office. With problems at the top (Ballmer still a psycho, Gates leaving), the debacle that is Vista, and their continued inability to make significant inroads against Google, the company clearly has some serious problems.
And it doesn't seem like they have a way out. The attempted aquisition of Yahoo is a "hail mary" to my mind. They won't go under, they won't even stop being an important part of the IT eco-system, but they'll have to get used to no longer dictating terms sooner or later.
Exactly. That's one reason for the rise of Agile development methodolgies in software. Instead of sitting around thinking about how you're going to do something, just do it and see what you learn.
There is sometimes value in simply daydreaming, it can lead you to much more left field ideas. But until you actually try to put it into practice, you'll never know whether it's an idea that has any merit.
if you think you could be a better driver in real life from driving in a video game using a thumbstick...well, you deserve to die in a fiery crash. The gene pool doesn't need that kind of person contributing. Right.... so what about the people you take down with you?
As far as the ethical situation, I think it's fine for you to go ahead and do this. Once someone is dead, their worldly possessions are handed over to their family. And since you have the family's blessing, you have nothing to worry about. This is one of the few situations where it's entirely ethical to access someone's private data.
As for whether Google, etc. will help you... well, you can try. I would be pretty surprised though. They often don't help much with normal user requests, so this sort of stuff will be way outside the usual problems they deal with. University may be different though.
Seriously, if I was Gates, I'd make comments like this every now and then just to stir up some Linux fanboi hysteria... Not like he has much else to do these days.
I'm just waiting for him to invoke Goodwin next. Gates: "You know, the Open Source movement in many ways resembles a kind of socialism first promoted by Hitler and the Nazis...."
Also, will the next big US war be in the UK? I think you mean EU not UK. The UK sides with the US on political issues, and the EU on economic issues. If there was some sort of war (likely a cold war) between EU and US in the near future, the UK could well side with the US, or at least remain neutral.
The Romans were a pretty amazing civilization for their time, but you'd hope we'd advanced somewhat since then. You'd hope we've even advanced as a society since the 19th century. I really don't see a place for excessive mudslinging in politics. A small amount is fair enough, so long as it's well grounded in reality. After all, even if your local system doesn't allow you to vote for a person directly, you are ultimately voting for people to make decisions on your behalf.
However, the more important thing should be the issues at hand. Unfortunately, our current Western systems do a pretty bad job of covering them, or even generating interest. My opinion is that the politicians, media and voters are all partially to blame, but it's possible the system itself that needs to be addressed.
I tend to agree. Didn't read TFA, but TFS seems to indicate it was based on students. If that's the case, then it would be interesting to see the same study done with late twenty to thirty somethings.
Also, I wonder how important signals really are. A lot of women are pretty indecisive, and they won't actually decide they like a guy until the guy actually makes a move. They want to be "swept of their feet", not give so many signals until the clueless guy finally does something. It's kind of the relationship equivelent of the uncertainty principal.
Yeah, definitely agree with you on the name thing. I've tried to explain the concept to a few people, and they just stare at me blankly when I tell them what it's called. Still, I think a project like Citizendium (if not Citizendium itself) will one day surpass Wikipedia.
The study doesn't make any assertions about a mechanism that might cause cats to have a direct influence on human health. It merely points out that there is a statistically significant correlation. This could be a bizarre coincidence, or it might be something that we had no idea about before. Either way, it's warrants further investigation.
Welcome to the real world, Ruby developers. There's been so much hype around Ruby, and especially Rails, for a few years now that no one has even been allowed to voice an opinion that makes negative remarks about either. That honeymoon period is now well and truly over.
But pretty much every langauge community, and especially in the realm of dynamic languages Ruby is in, where there's a lot of solid competition, has to deal with criticism. You'll quickly find that, even though a lot of it might have a grain of truth in it, the vast majority is blown utterly out of proportion. Coming from the Perl community, I've seen as much of this as anyone.
In the end, you have to learn to live with it. Some of it may be interesting and useful, and as a community you need to learn how to pick out the good criticism and incorporate it where possible. As for the completely baseless FUD, it's largely irrelevant. For every person who reads that FUD and is put off, there's another who looks at the language, how popular it is, and decides they'll make up their *own* mind. Those are really the people you want in your community anyway.
Anyway, I like Ruby as a language, and - while it doesn't really fit in with my way of thinking - I can definitely see the appeal of Rails. And, long term, it'll be a good thing for the langauge that the hype period is over. Now the serious work can begin.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure companies aren't valued based on whether you've heard of them or not. FAST is a search *engine*, not an application like Google. Their value isn't so much in their brand (which is only interesting to companies that want to integrate search into their apps rather than the general public), but in the quality of their engine.
FAST isn't terrible as an engine. It's not the best either, but for proprietry software it's not bad (at least compared to other similar apps). Of course, there's lock-in problems as always, and I'm sure they'll get worse with Microsoft's help. Ah well...
The funny thing about the "invented the internet" meme is that if you look at the real story, it's actually a huge boost to Gore's credibility. He was a champion of technology at a time when it wasn't the hip thing for a politician to do. Strange how he's not admired on Slashdot instead of ridiculed.
Slashdot Mirror
Conspiracy theories are a great distraction from real issues. e.g. the 9/11 rubbish churned out by some people distracts from the real "conspiracy", i.e. that the US govt was completely incompetant and unable to handle the situation. I'm sure the authorities don't mind it at all.
The feminisation of teaching is a big problem in my opinion (much bigger than equal gender representation in fields such as science). The main cause is much more obvious and sinister (men feeling they can't work with children without being labelled a paedophile), and the effects are a bigger problem too: surely we want our kids to grow up with BOTH male and female role models (which they might not get from their parents). But you can get shot down by feminists for even suggesting this is a problem.
Especially when you only have two parties to represent hundreds of millions.
Maybe, but in this case, there are two distinct businesses, game development and game publishing. Blizzard has been bought out / merged / whatever many times over the years, and it's never affected it's game development business. Publishing is a different story tho, and I imagine this merge is mostly about that.
Having said that, publishers can and do affect what goes on in games development. Let's just hope that doesn't happen here.
If the ice that melts is not on land, it won't affect sea level, as the amount of water in the sea hasn't changed. It's only ice melting on land (e.g. Greenland or Antarctica) that can affect sea levels.
Plenty of people have thought that. But all the evidence points to the fact that this isn't part of a natural cycle.
There are two key points here: firstly, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased 35% since pre-industrial times, which is extemely fast as compared to pre-historic evidence that's been collected from ice core samples. Secondly, the rate of change in global temperature rising is much faster that we'd expect for a natural cycle, which tends to be very slow, in human terms at least, over tens of thousands of years.
A good place to get some basic information is the BBC's list of claims and counter-claims. But I encourage you to do your own research if you really want to form your own opinion on these things. There are a lot of very smart people applying a lot of brain power to these problems day and night, so it's unlikely anyone on Slashdot is going to come up with anything new on this. Just be sure to understand how evidence is accepted into mainstream science (which is about peer reviewed papers either proving something mathematically, or forming a weight of evidence behind a particular theory).
Moore's law does some funny things. OEMs in partnership with MS have been using it to their advantage for the last 20 years. Now, it suddenly seems to be turning against them.
The smart OEMs are trying to adapt. MS is backed into a corner. People have been predicting the end of MS's reign for a long time. Sure they've always been behind in the Internet arena, but that's periperheral for them.
This is the first *sustained* attack on MS's heartland - Windows and Office. With problems at the top (Ballmer still a psycho, Gates leaving), the debacle that is Vista, and their continued inability to make significant inroads against Google, the company clearly has some serious problems.
And it doesn't seem like they have a way out. The attempted aquisition of Yahoo is a "hail mary" to my mind. They won't go under, they won't even stop being an important part of the IT eco-system, but they'll have to get used to no longer dictating terms sooner or later.
I don't know what's worse... that Americans create so much FUD about their candidates, or that some of them actually believe it.
Not to mention that there's no clear link between those who indulge in child porn, and those who commit pedophilia.
It's just more scaremongering to drum up votes by a government that knows it's on the ropes. The unfortunate thing is, it might be working.
Well, not exactly, but it's pretty hard to predict what moronic cult we'll pick up next.
That said, I agree that a few people seem to blow the importance of Star Wars a tad out of proportion sometimes.
Exactly. That's one reason for the rise of Agile development methodolgies in software. Instead of sitting around thinking about how you're going to do something, just do it and see what you learn.
There is sometimes value in simply daydreaming, it can lead you to much more left field ideas. But until you actually try to put it into practice, you'll never know whether it's an idea that has any merit.
As far as the ethical situation, I think it's fine for you to go ahead and do this. Once someone is dead, their worldly possessions are handed over to their family. And since you have the family's blessing, you have nothing to worry about. This is one of the few situations where it's entirely ethical to access someone's private data.
As for whether Google, etc. will help you... well, you can try. I would be pretty surprised though. They often don't help much with normal user requests, so this sort of stuff will be way outside the usual problems they deal with. University may be different though.
Even billionaires know how to play that game.
Seriously, if I was Gates, I'd make comments like this every now and then just to stir up some Linux fanboi hysteria... Not like he has much else to do these days.
I'm just waiting for him to invoke Goodwin next. Gates: "You know, the Open Source movement in many ways resembles a kind of socialism first promoted by Hitler and the Nazis...."
Heh. Someone registered a domain to attempt to educate people on a grammatical error. Which begs the question, doesn't s/he have better things to do?
The Romans were a pretty amazing civilization for their time, but you'd hope we'd advanced somewhat since then. You'd hope we've even advanced as a society since the 19th century. I really don't see a place for excessive mudslinging in politics. A small amount is fair enough, so long as it's well grounded in reality. After all, even if your local system doesn't allow you to vote for a person directly, you are ultimately voting for people to make decisions on your behalf.
However, the more important thing should be the issues at hand. Unfortunately, our current Western systems do a pretty bad job of covering them, or even generating interest. My opinion is that the politicians, media and voters are all partially to blame, but it's possible the system itself that needs to be addressed.
I tend to agree. Didn't read TFA, but TFS seems to indicate it was based on students. If that's the case, then it would be interesting to see the same study done with late twenty to thirty somethings.
Also, I wonder how important signals really are. A lot of women are pretty indecisive, and they won't actually decide they like a guy until the guy actually makes a move. They want to be "swept of their feet", not give so many signals until the clueless guy finally does something. It's kind of the relationship equivelent of the uncertainty principal.
Yeah, definitely agree with you on the name thing. I've tried to explain the concept to a few people, and they just stare at me blankly when I tell them what it's called. Still, I think a project like Citizendium (if not Citizendium itself) will one day surpass Wikipedia.
The study doesn't make any assertions about a mechanism that might cause cats to have a direct influence on human health. It merely points out that there is a statistically significant correlation. This could be a bizarre coincidence, or it might be something that we had no idea about before. Either way, it's warrants further investigation.
Welcome to the real world, Ruby developers. There's been so much hype around Ruby, and especially Rails, for a few years now that no one has even been allowed to voice an opinion that makes negative remarks about either. That honeymoon period is now well and truly over.
But pretty much every langauge community, and especially in the realm of dynamic languages Ruby is in, where there's a lot of solid competition, has to deal with criticism. You'll quickly find that, even though a lot of it might have a grain of truth in it, the vast majority is blown utterly out of proportion. Coming from the Perl community, I've seen as much of this as anyone.
In the end, you have to learn to live with it. Some of it may be interesting and useful, and as a community you need to learn how to pick out the good criticism and incorporate it where possible. As for the completely baseless FUD, it's largely irrelevant. For every person who reads that FUD and is put off, there's another who looks at the language, how popular it is, and decides they'll make up their *own* mind. Those are really the people you want in your community anyway.
Anyway, I like Ruby as a language, and - while it doesn't really fit in with my way of thinking - I can definitely see the appeal of Rails. And, long term, it'll be a good thing for the langauge that the hype period is over. Now the serious work can begin.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure companies aren't valued based on whether you've heard of them or not. FAST is a search *engine*, not an application like Google. Their value isn't so much in their brand (which is only interesting to companies that want to integrate search into their apps rather than the general public), but in the quality of their engine.
FAST isn't terrible as an engine. It's not the best either, but for proprietry software it's not bad (at least compared to other similar apps). Of course, there's lock-in problems as always, and I'm sure they'll get worse with Microsoft's help. Ah well...
The funny thing about the "invented the internet" meme is that if you look at the real story, it's actually a huge boost to Gore's credibility. He was a champion of technology at a time when it wasn't the hip thing for a politician to do. Strange how he's not admired on Slashdot instead of ridiculed.