> Leaving it up to the OSS community and expecting > them to produce something useful to your client
There are many more reasons to open source something than to sit back and let people hack at your code while you just absorb the patches, you know.
Sometimes the code is dead to you. But you make it available just in case someone else wants to use it. Sometimes a hack you made would serve as a great example to help teach someone else. Sometimes it tackles a problem in a totally new way that someone would just love to incorporate into their program.
I make a habit of tarballing everything I write and tossing it up on my website. I don't clean up the code, I don't turn it into a distribution.. I just let the people have the code because it serves no purpose to let it rot on my HD. Has anyone ever sent me a thank you email? No. But watching my http logs, once in a while someone does download something, and it feels cool to know that someone somewhere might be learning something from it.
THAT's what open source is about.;) Letting people do whatever the heck they want with the code.
Whole concept of "good" and "bad" domains is so laughably absurd, the arrival of new tld's and people's attempts to hype them up turns it from "roll ones eyes" to "I just lost faith in humanity".
When are people gonna realize that DNS does NOT scale well to the business world?
When is a system going to arrive where joe schmoe just types in the name of the company he wants into his browser, it resolves to an ip, and away he goes. Or if there's multiple matches, the browser fetches the full company name, perhaps their market (eg "computers" or "vacuum cleaners"), a street address, and maybe a phone number. Joe user goes through the list, selects the company he wants, and again, away he goes.
No clever domains, this asinine "domain name" market dissapears, and every company gets represented the way they want to be.. by their very own, human readable name.
DNS for more than basic name->ip translation is a joke, and the fact an entire industry has sprung up about it only proves that.
DNS names should NOT be a method of brand recognition.
> We have a ban on kids watching sex, why not kids > watching killing?
Countries in europe can have this situation flipped around. It's okay for children to see nudity (which, if the last time i was in europe was any indication, *isn't* simply showing a boob or two, there's definite sexual overtures), but violence and gore in gaming is a strict taboo. Some countries don't allow red blood, for example.
Which could lead one to argue that it's impossible to say that the availability of either sex or violence has a harmful impact on children, because both europe and america has it's fair share of well-balanced, and totally screwed up, inhabitants.
I'd suggest that it's more reliant on how good a job of parenting is going on.
> We know that sometimes kids [...] can go way > overboard the first time... is there a possibility > of the same thing happening with violent video > games?
Not really. All you have to do is look at the past 20 years to see this.
When the NES (just as an easy example) released, did anyone who was age 18 suddenly self destruct, rotting themselves in front of the tv for days on end? When Doom came out, did 18 year olds suddenly stop dropping out of school because they spent their every waking moment shooting demons?
These groups of people likely never had access to games before, much less violent games. Suddenly having them available had little to no impact on their ability to function in society.
Self-destructing on games, alcohol, or drugs has little to do with the point at which they become available. Seems to me a lack of proper upbringing or being just plain stupid has a greater effect than anything else.
> it wont happen, not in our lifetimes, and possibly > not in our grandchildrens lifetimes.
Why not? There's still people alive (though I imagine the count is getting smaller each day) who were born before cars even existed. If we can go from no cars to everyone has a car within one person's lifetime, who's to say we can't go from oil dependant to something else in the same time frame?
In other words the world changes a lot faster than you're giving it credit for.
Why does "easy to use" seem to translate, almost precisely "looks exactly like windows"?
OS X, while not flawless, is living proof that the evolution of computer interaction is not over, can people PLEASE stop acting like the M$ desktop is the only way to make an interface?
> grass really is greener on the corporate side > of the fence
I happen to hold a government job, and after the four years prior to that holding a private sector job, I find it refreshing.
The atmosphere is laid back, there's no constant fears of being bought up or laid off, there's some truly brilliant people to learn things from, the benefits and pay is quite competitive, and when they say 9-5 on a government job, they MEAN 9-5. 7 months here and I haven't worked overtime once. I carry a pager, and it's never been used.. once.
The workload varies between very light to decently busy to keep me interested, but I'm still left with enough time that I can do pretty much anything I want with any piece of hardware/software we own and teach myself something.
They have tuition reimbursement, *frequently* have guest speakers talking about various unix topics, and so on.
Now obviously there's some bureaucratic headaches, but if you want my opinion, the grass is greener on the *governmen* side.;)
No, not at all. "Free software" isn't about not making money for something, or about not paying for it. It's about putting software into the hands of people that can't, or are not yet willing, to pay for their software.
In any community that has a sizable portion of "fans", there is always going to be a component that will quite willingly donate money to their chosen cause. This does not however imply that everyone has to pay.
A semi-decent analogy would be the whole mp3 argument. People broadcast daily that they buy more CD's now because they got to hear the songs for free at first. Stuff starts out free (not neccesarily legal to distribute you but you know what I mean) and those who feel like it has value put in a few dollars to support the creator.
That's what free beer software should be, giving people the freedom to put their own value on it and act accordingly.
Why is it sad? It merely lends credence to the idea that necessity breeds invention. People wanted to explore space, so they made stuff that eventually became today's VCR's. People wanted to explore the interior of one of the most famous shipwrecks ever, so they made a couple robots that could do it.
Just because the goals have different purposes (financial gain versus scientific) doesn't make the inventions "sad".
In other words, productivity can come from even the most trivial pursuits.
Just to illustrate the problems with this stuff (beyond the well known superbowl incident), browse through this moderatley-related link: flo control
Seems like a pretty cool set up, right? Not quite.. start flipping through the timeline archives this guy has saved up (the "flo watch" button). As you click through, note how many times it seems like the cat would be permitted to enter, yet it comes up not letting him through the door. this day was a particularily bad day for the system. We, as humans, would have positively identified the cat properly. Computers, obviously, can't do that yet with any high accuracy.
Now granted "law enforcement" versions are going to be a wee bit more sophisticated, but if the cell phone version has even half the errors this cat detector does, are we ever gonna be able to put any faith into this technology?
Heh, finally someone that agrees with me. Economy is something I've never seen replicated properly in any game, anywhere. They either fail to emulate resource gathering sufficiently, or they make it too tedious, or they don't make the system zero sum (which I've always felt is vitally important, someone has to lose so someone can win).
However, there's one big problem with your ideas.;)
> Other humans are going to be far more > interesting and challenging opponents or allies > than any AI creature.
This is something I've watched a bit with the recent release of Dark Age of Camelot. The lesson learned? Players HATE to lose. If someone beats them, their first inclination is to assume there's a problem with game balance and they appeal to the developers to fix the balance. In short, players expect that they will always win. Very, very few people can soak up a loss without complaining, get back on their feet, and go at it again. They ALWAYS blame game imbalances.
Computer controlled conflict doesn't have this flaw, or at least not nearly as badly. Players are better at accepting that a comptuer is more impartial, even in th face of suspecting the computer is artificially buffed up to make the fight a challenge (ie, compensate for poor AI). Or else, they blame the developer (which happens no matter what they do, so it's mostly down to deciding what kind of blame the developer wants to cope with).
But I digress. As interesting as human opponents look on paper, in practice, they end up being an amazing pain in the ass to a developer, which is something I highly reccomend not overlooking.;)
Blizzard has always been a company that's lagged a bit behind in making use of new computer power, ie they lock you into a specific screen resolution, limit the options for tweaking eye candy, and for a long time would only make games that used sprite animation.
I always feel cramped playing blizzard games in their enforced low resolutions, to the point where I really don't enjoy playing them. The control panel takes up too much screen space, the buildings are too large, and I end up fighting with the interface when it comes to getting done the things I want done.
In other words, does anyone know? I notice the faq says they're upping the available resolutions.. but that doesn't say much as you could have 1600x1200 and still have a graphic rendered to take up one third of the screen.
If the game doesn't provide zooming out and camera rotation, ala Myth, count me out.:p
First job of mine was with a national hosting firm, so they made a naming scheme that reflected geography, client, and series. For example:
customer-01.jfk.foo.net
Worked fairly well. We used the code for the closest airport for the geography portion. Also served to make dns adminning a mite prettier. Course that provides you're not against overly specific domain names. The '01' could also be replaced with significant letters for certain machines. customer-fw, for example, would be customer's firewall.
A more bureaucratic approach that we did at another job combined the theme idea with the department name. This works in a place where there are lot of computing divisions that have their own little kingdom of machines. Like where I work, we're known as "D0". Thus, we call our machines d0nut, d0mino, d0om, you get the idea.
We also have an unofficial series system that borrows on the idea, d0lx001 is d0's first linux node. Again, it works well for the scope it's been defined for.
I wager a nicely scalable system could be built using a combination of my two examples. If your machines have limits on hostname length, check on the limits of dns heirarchy. They may allow finer granularity.
For small organizations (under 20 machines, not counting workstations), theme oriented works just fine.
> Weaknesses are inherent in all forms of life. And > in this case, the weakness is basically being > forced out of the child. I don't think this is a > good thing, and here is why...
How fair is that to the child? Is it not the parent's responsibility to give their offspring every positive chance in life they can get? The short of it is, there are innumerable diseases and afflictions that plague humanity that are passed through the genes. Most of them have no cures to date, and considering the money put into research these days, it's hard to remain optimistic that cures will ever be found.
What's so evil about weeding out these undesireable genes? It SUCKS to have to live with a hereditery disease, just try on my shoes sometimes because I gotta do it every damn day.
If my parents had had this opportunity, I would have encouraged them to take it. Because if I had never been born, I wouldn't be around to care if I didn't exist. I have no illusions about my importance to this world to try and claim that if I didn't exist, the world would be a worse place. And even if I weren't here typing this, some other child of my parents would be out there doing something, sans disease. Sounds win-win to me, because the kid I could have been was raised by the same two people and would probably end up with the same core values.
> If you want a child so badly, lady, go ADOPT ONE.
Course, I'll agree with you on this one. I don't see myself ever having a kid, cuz I don't wanna pass on my shit-for-genes to any descendents. If I ever get that parental urge, I'll probably adopt. Adoption, for as long as there are orphaned children, is the better solution. But that doesn't make "gene screening" evil by any means.
For those trying to get an informed opinion, here's the actual paragraph from the article:
"Lawyers for makers of the file-sharing applications Morpheus and Grokster say that, if their clients can be held responsible for illegal copies of music and motion pictures, then so too should companies such as Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, whose software and Internet connectivity are essential to building networks of file traders."
Notice any differences?:p
At any rate, this isn't an attempt to shut down the internet. It's a rhetorical question.. forcing people to ask questions about what is TRULY responsible for piracy. It's the age old gun cliche.. the gun isn't evil, it's the person holding it.
Bonus points to anyone who read the article, which by the pile of comments already posted, are few and far between.;)
what if the "record" gets a "scratch" ;)
on
Perpetual Skislope
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· Score: 5, Insightful
When this thing is running at full tilt, how the hell do you get off it? Or worse yet, where do you go if you fall, as is sure to happen.
Seems to me there's a lot of issues with physics involved as well, ignoring the problems of getting the thing to actually operate.
People learn to ski on solid, non moving surfaces. What happens when you try to stop.. do you overbalance and fall down? Or how about the race track problem.. you're always turning left, cuz if you turn right you run into the wall.
Basically I see this thing creating more questions than solutions.:p Be nice if the article was more than a brief overview.
Re:But what about hot dogs and apple pie?
on
The Future of MREs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As a person who's actually eaten these MRE's, in varying conditions (ie, voluntarily and involuntarily), I have to take exception to your statements.:p Now granted MRE's aren't a steak dinner at an expensive restaurant somewhere, but the food isn't anything worse than the junk we stuff our faces with daily at places like mcdonalds or taco bell.
Hard work generally makes food taste better too. I used mine, mostly, when hiking around with a frame pack where I grew up. At the end of the day, that stuff tastes DAMN good.. it's several times easier on the stomach than dehydrated food, and usually offers a lot more variety.
Considering the requirements of being an MRE.. most notably the 3 year shelf life, it's amazing how good the stuff really is. Only downside compared to more orthodox trail food is there's more garbage to carry back with you, and MRE's are a bit heavier because the food is fully hydrated.
> or its wheels might slip on the floor, thus allowing hte prey to escape.
Not trying to be argumentative, but can't programming duplicate random bad luck just as easily?
I mean if random chance is the only difference between virtual and real (I know it's not but in the scope of this debate it is), that's still not striking me as a sound argument marking real world robots as a better option.
Just playing devil's advocate, just seems to me that having complete control over the physics of the world would permit more variants/options in testing than real world mechanics.
> This would be much cooler as well if both
> predators and prey could mate with their own
> species, i.e exchange randomization factors for
> their strategies.
At this point, robots (hardware) to do this would make the experiment prohibive-- er, really expensive to do.
Why not just hack up a x proggie that does the above, run it as a screen saver or something. Far far cheaper for two pixels to reproduce and create another data structure than to actually build machinery to do it. Personally, seems to me they're doing with this robots just for the eye candy factor (cuz it'll attract better money). If they really wanted to explore evolution, driving pixels would be more efficient all around.
But then again that might not be so fun, as it's already been done.;)
> The EULA specifically DISALLOWS sales of items
> and currency
That's a secondary reason why this case, if it ever flew, would be interesting.
How much power is an EULA actually allowed to provide? If I pay to participate in something, and during my participation I acquire some item of worth, what restraints are there on the overseeing entity telling me what I can and can't do with my acquisition?
Same with on the job inventions, or student research at a university. At what point does something belong the entity's, and at what point does it belong to the "acquirer"?
Read the "legal documents". They use such choice words as "squash" in the letter, and instead of being able to quote exact monthly pricing, the most accurate they can get is "about ten dollars a month". Or "the genie has been let out of the bottle".
I find it hard to take seriously something that uses such turns of phrase, but then again I've never been one to scour complaints. At any rate, the lawyers hired to represent these people appear legitemete, even if the document reads like a high school essay.
Am quite interested in how it turns out.. this always was a sticking point between Verant and EQ players as well. Would be a nice precedent to have established in the books, because it would also cast shadows on the legitemcy of EULA's.
I think their example ideas pretty much suck, dunno, maybe they did it on purpose so no one would try that stuff or maybe they just don't wanna see much creativity.
I personally think it'd be coolest to turn it into an art project.. imagine you had a repository of the consciousness of an entire race and could run a script on it. Things like the map of the internet. Or the web collage. Or use it to power some kind of AI
chatterbot.
I dunno. Their webpage on it didn't seem to do much to promote being creative; they just want to pay someone 10k to develop a new way to make more relevent search results.
I'm up to my ears with books detailing how to write in a specific language. Structure and syntax is easy.. you learn how to use an if statement in one language, you know how they work in all languages. API's are about the same, references documenting joe random library are a dime a dozen.
My problem whenever I involve myself with coding something is getting knowledge about all the other vital pieces to programming, various algorithms, methods of structuring a program, stuff like that.
See, for those kids who managed to push themselves through college all think this is easy stuff.. linked lists, random numbers, event based programming, hashing, and so on (have a firm grasp of these concepts, just using them as examples). That's what they paid to go to school for. But for the rest of us who're trying to cut a living and can't easily do the school thing anymore, a "teach yourself" book or books educating the more abstract parts of programming would be a major help.
Some of this is documented, slightly, on the web or in existing open sourced projects. But most of it reads like class notes at best, and I have yet to find good books that go over these sorts of things. The information is there, but it's not presented in a manner that's easy to absorb.
As an example, oreilly did a book a while back called 'Practical Programming in C'. That was a step in the right direction. It was an easy read, but taught a lot of really useful C concepts that most people take for granted. As far as it went, it was immensely valuable to me both as a reference and a tutor.
Basically, there's a niche between API references and language syntax books that seems horribly unfilled. I'd buy books immediatley if they seemed to fall in that category.
There's is absolutely NOTHING wrong with charging for software. If you do nothing but write software for work, you have a reasonable expectation to make a living off it. The world doesn't run off charity man, nothing is free.
To me, the "pearl of Free Software" being version controlled by a commercial product is a grand statement.. that free software and commercial software can coexist peacefully.
Software "should" only be free as in speech anyways. If it's simultaneously free beer that's just icing on the cake.
Slashdot Mirror
> Leaving it up to the OSS community and expecting
;) Letting people do whatever the heck they want with the code.
> them to produce something useful to your client
There are many more reasons to open source something than to sit back and let people hack at your code while you just absorb the patches, you know.
Sometimes the code is dead to you. But you make it available just in case someone else wants to use it. Sometimes a hack you made would serve as a great example to help teach someone else. Sometimes it tackles a problem in a totally new way that someone would just love to incorporate into their program.
I make a habit of tarballing everything I write and tossing it up on my website. I don't clean up the code, I don't turn it into a distribution.. I just let the people have the code because it serves no purpose to let it rot on my HD. Has anyone ever sent me a thank you email? No. But watching my http logs, once in a while someone does download something, and it feels cool to know that someone somewhere might be learning something from it.
THAT's what open source is about.
Whole concept of "good" and "bad" domains is so laughably absurd, the arrival of new tld's and people's attempts to hype them up turns it from "roll ones eyes" to "I just lost faith in humanity".
When are people gonna realize that DNS does NOT scale well to the business world?
When is a system going to arrive where joe schmoe just types in the name of the company he wants into his browser, it resolves to an ip, and away he goes. Or if there's multiple matches, the browser fetches the full company name, perhaps their market (eg "computers" or "vacuum cleaners"), a street address, and maybe a phone number. Joe user goes through the list, selects the company he wants, and again, away he goes.
No clever domains, this asinine "domain name" market dissapears, and every company gets represented the way they want to be.. by their very own, human readable name.
DNS for more than basic name->ip translation is a joke, and the fact an entire industry has sprung up about it only proves that.
DNS names should NOT be a method of brand recognition.
> We have a ban on kids watching sex, why not kids
> watching killing?
Countries in europe can have this situation flipped around. It's okay for children to see nudity (which, if the last time i was in europe was any indication, *isn't* simply showing a boob or two, there's definite sexual overtures), but violence and gore in gaming is a strict taboo. Some countries don't allow red blood, for example.
Which could lead one to argue that it's impossible to say that the availability of either sex or violence has a harmful impact on children, because both europe and america has it's fair share of well-balanced, and totally screwed up, inhabitants.
I'd suggest that it's more reliant on how good a job of parenting is going on.
> We know that sometimes kids [...] can go way
> overboard the first time... is there a possibility
> of the same thing happening with violent video
> games?
Not really. All you have to do is look at the past 20 years to see this.
When the NES (just as an easy example) released, did anyone who was age 18 suddenly self destruct, rotting themselves in front of the tv for days on end? When Doom came out, did 18 year olds suddenly stop dropping out of school because they spent their every waking moment shooting demons?
These groups of people likely never had access to games before, much less violent games. Suddenly having them available had little to no impact on their ability to function in society.
Self-destructing on games, alcohol, or drugs has little to do with the point at which they become available. Seems to me a lack of proper upbringing or being just plain stupid has a greater effect than anything else.
Apparently, it can be done with a 100k zip file, for free.
> it wont happen, not in our lifetimes, and possibly
> not in our grandchildrens lifetimes.
Why not? There's still people alive (though I imagine the count is getting smaller each day) who were born before cars even existed. If we can go from no cars to everyone has a car within one person's lifetime, who's to say we can't go from oil dependant to something else in the same time frame?
In other words the world changes a lot faster than you're giving it credit for.
..but it had to be said.
Why does "easy to use" seem to translate, almost precisely "looks exactly like windows"?
OS X, while not flawless, is living proof that the evolution of computer interaction is not over, can people PLEASE stop acting like the M$ desktop is the only way to make an interface?
> grass really is greener on the corporate side
;)
> of the fence
I happen to hold a government job, and after the four years prior to that holding a private sector job, I find it refreshing.
The atmosphere is laid back, there's no constant fears of being bought up or laid off, there's some truly brilliant people to learn things from, the benefits and pay is quite competitive, and when they say 9-5 on a government job, they MEAN 9-5. 7 months here and I haven't worked overtime once. I carry a pager, and it's never been used.. once.
The workload varies between very light to decently busy to keep me interested, but I'm still left with enough time that I can do pretty much anything I want with any piece of hardware/software we own and teach myself something.
They have tuition reimbursement, *frequently* have guest speakers talking about various unix topics, and so on.
Now obviously there's some bureaucratic headaches, but if you want my opinion, the grass is greener on the *governmen* side.
> does this not curb the "free" aspect?
No, not at all. "Free software" isn't about not making money for something, or about not paying for it. It's about putting software into the hands of people that can't, or are not yet willing, to pay for their software.
In any community that has a sizable portion of "fans", there is always going to be a component that will quite willingly donate money to their chosen cause. This does not however imply that everyone has to pay.
A semi-decent analogy would be the whole mp3 argument. People broadcast daily that they buy more CD's now because they got to hear the songs for free at first. Stuff starts out free (not neccesarily legal to distribute you but you know what I mean) and those who feel like it has value put in a few dollars to support the creator.
That's what free beer software should be, giving people the freedom to put their own value on it and act accordingly.
> This is sad. Today the tables have turned.
Why is it sad? It merely lends credence to the idea that necessity breeds invention. People wanted to explore space, so they made stuff that eventually became today's VCR's. People wanted to explore the interior of one of the most famous shipwrecks ever, so they made a couple robots that could do it.
Just because the goals have different purposes (financial gain versus scientific) doesn't make the inventions "sad".
In other words, productivity can come from even the most trivial pursuits.
Seems like a pretty cool set up, right? Not quite.. start flipping through the timeline archives this guy has saved up (the "flo watch" button). As you click through, note how many times it seems like the cat would be permitted to enter, yet it comes up not letting him through the door. this day was a particularily bad day for the system. We, as humans, would have positively identified the cat properly. Computers, obviously, can't do that yet with any high accuracy.
Now granted "law enforcement" versions are going to be a wee bit more sophisticated, but if the cell phone version has even half the errors this cat detector does, are we ever gonna be able to put any faith into this technology?
Heh, finally someone that agrees with me. Economy is something I've never seen replicated properly in any game, anywhere. They either fail to emulate resource gathering sufficiently, or they make it too tedious, or they don't make the system zero sum (which I've always felt is vitally important, someone has to lose so someone can win).
;)
;)
However, there's one big problem with your ideas.
> Other humans are going to be far more
> interesting and challenging opponents or allies
> than any AI creature.
This is something I've watched a bit with the recent release of Dark Age of Camelot. The lesson learned? Players HATE to lose. If someone beats them, their first inclination is to assume there's a problem with game balance and they appeal to the developers to fix the balance. In short, players expect that they will always win. Very, very few people can soak up a loss without complaining, get back on their feet, and go at it again. They ALWAYS blame game imbalances.
Computer controlled conflict doesn't have this flaw, or at least not nearly as badly. Players are better at accepting that a comptuer is more impartial, even in th face of suspecting the computer is artificially buffed up to make the fight a challenge (ie, compensate for poor AI). Or else, they blame the developer (which happens no matter what they do, so it's mostly down to deciding what kind of blame the developer wants to cope with).
But I digress. As interesting as human opponents look on paper, in practice, they end up being an amazing pain in the ass to a developer, which is something I highly reccomend not overlooking.
Blizzard has always been a company that's lagged a bit behind in making use of new computer power, ie they lock you into a specific screen resolution, limit the options for tweaking eye candy, and for a long time would only make games that used sprite animation.
:p
I always feel cramped playing blizzard games in their enforced low resolutions, to the point where I really don't enjoy playing them. The control panel takes up too much screen space, the buildings are too large, and I end up fighting with the interface when it comes to getting done the things I want done.
In other words, does anyone know? I notice the faq says they're upping the available resolutions.. but that doesn't say much as you could have 1600x1200 and still have a graphic rendered to take up one third of the screen.
If the game doesn't provide zooming out and camera rotation, ala Myth, count me out.
First job of mine was with a national hosting firm, so they made a naming scheme that reflected geography, client, and series. For example:
customer-01.jfk.foo.net
Worked fairly well. We used the code for the closest airport for the geography portion. Also served to make dns adminning a mite prettier. Course that provides you're not against overly specific domain names. The '01' could also be replaced with significant letters for certain machines. customer-fw, for example, would be customer's firewall.
A more bureaucratic approach that we did at another job combined the theme idea with the department name. This works in a place where there are lot of computing divisions that have their own little kingdom of machines. Like where I work, we're known as "D0". Thus, we call our machines d0nut, d0mino, d0om, you get the idea.
We also have an unofficial series system that borrows on the idea, d0lx001 is d0's first linux node. Again, it works well for the scope it's been defined for.
I wager a nicely scalable system could be built using a combination of my two examples. If your machines have limits on hostname length, check on the limits of dns heirarchy. They may allow finer granularity.
For small organizations (under 20 machines, not counting workstations), theme oriented works just fine.
> Weaknesses are inherent in all forms of life. And
> in this case, the weakness is basically being
> forced out of the child. I don't think this is a
> good thing, and here is why...
How fair is that to the child? Is it not the parent's responsibility to give their offspring every positive chance in life they can get? The short of it is, there are innumerable diseases and afflictions that plague humanity that are passed through the genes. Most of them have no cures to date, and considering the money put into research these days, it's hard to remain optimistic that cures will ever be found.
What's so evil about weeding out these undesireable genes? It SUCKS to have to live with a hereditery disease, just try on my shoes sometimes because I gotta do it every damn day.
If my parents had had this opportunity, I would have encouraged them to take it. Because if I had never been born, I wouldn't be around to care if I didn't exist. I have no illusions about my importance to this world to try and claim that if I didn't exist, the world would be a worse place. And even if I weren't here typing this, some other child of my parents would be out there doing something, sans disease. Sounds win-win to me, because the kid I could have been was raised by the same two people and would probably end up with the same core values.
> If you want a child so badly, lady, go ADOPT ONE.
Course, I'll agree with you on this one. I don't see myself ever having a kid, cuz I don't wanna pass on my shit-for-genes to any descendents. If I ever get that parental urge, I'll probably adopt. Adoption, for as long as there are orphaned children, is the better solution. But that doesn't make "gene screening" evil by any means.
For those trying to get an informed opinion, here's the actual paragraph from the article:
:p
;)
"Lawyers for makers of the file-sharing applications Morpheus and Grokster say that, if their clients can be held responsible for illegal copies of music and motion pictures, then so too should companies such as Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, whose software and Internet connectivity are essential to building networks of file traders."
Notice any differences?
At any rate, this isn't an attempt to shut down the internet. It's a rhetorical question.. forcing people to ask questions about what is TRULY responsible for piracy. It's the age old gun cliche.. the gun isn't evil, it's the person holding it.
Bonus points to anyone who read the article, which by the pile of comments already posted, are few and far between.
When this thing is running at full tilt, how the hell do you get off it? Or worse yet, where do you go if you fall, as is sure to happen.
:p Be nice if the article was more than a brief overview.
Seems to me there's a lot of issues with physics involved as well, ignoring the problems of getting the thing to actually operate.
People learn to ski on solid, non moving surfaces. What happens when you try to stop.. do you overbalance and fall down? Or how about the race track problem.. you're always turning left, cuz if you turn right you run into the wall.
Basically I see this thing creating more questions than solutions.
As a person who's actually eaten these MRE's, in varying conditions (ie, voluntarily and involuntarily), I have to take exception to your statements. :p Now granted MRE's aren't a steak dinner at an expensive restaurant somewhere, but the food isn't anything worse than the junk we stuff our faces with daily at places like mcdonalds or taco bell.
Hard work generally makes food taste better too. I used mine, mostly, when hiking around with a frame pack where I grew up. At the end of the day, that stuff tastes DAMN good.. it's several times easier on the stomach than dehydrated food, and usually offers a lot more variety.
Considering the requirements of being an MRE.. most notably the 3 year shelf life, it's amazing how good the stuff really is. Only downside compared to more orthodox trail food is there's more garbage to carry back with you, and MRE's are a bit heavier because the food is fully hydrated.
> or its wheels might slip on the floor, thus allowing hte prey to escape.
Not trying to be argumentative, but can't programming duplicate random bad luck just as easily?
I mean if random chance is the only difference between virtual and real (I know it's not but in the scope of this debate it is), that's still not striking me as a sound argument marking real world robots as a better option.
Just playing devil's advocate, just seems to me that having complete control over the physics of the world would permit more variants/options in testing than real world mechanics.
> predators and prey could mate with their own
> species, i.e exchange randomization factors for
> their strategies.
At this point, robots (hardware) to do this would make the experiment prohibive-- er, really expensive to do.
Why not just hack up a x proggie that does the above, run it as a screen saver or something. Far far cheaper for two pixels to reproduce and create another data structure than to actually build machinery to do it. Personally, seems to me they're doing with this robots just for the eye candy factor (cuz it'll attract better money). If they really wanted to explore evolution, driving pixels would be more efficient all around.
But then again that might not be so fun, as it's already been done. ;)
> The EULA specifically DISALLOWS sales of items
> and currency
That's a secondary reason why this case, if it ever flew, would be interesting.
How much power is an EULA actually allowed to provide? If I pay to participate in something, and during my participation I acquire some item of worth, what restraints are there on the overseeing entity telling me what I can and can't do with my acquisition?
Same with on the job inventions, or student research at a university. At what point does something belong the entity's, and at what point does it belong to the "acquirer"?
I find it hard to take seriously something that uses such turns of phrase, but then again I've never been one to scour complaints. At any rate, the lawyers hired to represent these people appear legitemete, even if the document reads like a high school essay.
Am quite interested in how it turns out.. this always was a sticking point between Verant and EQ players as well. Would be a nice precedent to have established in the books, because it would also cast shadows on the legitemcy of EULA's.
I personally think it'd be coolest to turn it into an art project.. imagine you had a repository of the consciousness of an entire race and could run a script on it. Things like the map of the internet. Or the web collage. Or use it to power some kind of AI chatterbot.
I dunno. Their webpage on it didn't seem to do much to promote being creative; they just want to pay someone 10k to develop a new way to make more relevent search results.
I'm up to my ears with books detailing how to write in a specific language. Structure and syntax is easy.. you learn how to use an if statement in one language, you know how they work in all languages. API's are about the same, references documenting joe random library are a dime a dozen.
My problem whenever I involve myself with coding something is getting knowledge about all the other vital pieces to programming, various algorithms, methods of structuring a program, stuff like that.
See, for those kids who managed to push themselves through college all think this is easy stuff.. linked lists, random numbers, event based programming, hashing, and so on (have a firm grasp of these concepts, just using them as examples). That's what they paid to go to school for. But for the rest of us who're trying to cut a living and can't easily do the school thing anymore, a "teach yourself" book or books educating the more abstract parts of programming would be a major help.
Some of this is documented, slightly, on the web or in existing open sourced projects. But most of it reads like class notes at best, and I have yet to find good books that go over these sorts of things. The information is there, but it's not presented in a manner that's easy to absorb.
As an example, oreilly did a book a while back called 'Practical Programming in C'. That was a step in the right direction. It was an easy read, but taught a lot of really useful C concepts that most people take for granted. As far as it went, it was immensely valuable to me both as a reference and a tutor.
Basically, there's a niche between API references and language syntax books that seems horribly unfilled. I'd buy books immediatley if they seemed to fall in that category.
> It's somewhat sad that Linux,
Why? I find it interesting.
There's is absolutely NOTHING wrong with charging for software. If you do nothing but write software for work, you have a reasonable expectation to make a living off it. The world doesn't run off charity man, nothing is free.
To me, the "pearl of Free Software" being version controlled by a commercial product is a grand statement.. that free software and commercial software can coexist peacefully.
Software "should" only be free as in speech anyways. If it's simultaneously free beer that's just icing on the cake.