Or it could of course be a case of thieving scumbags, as others have pointed out. I do think that in general you have to look deeper before you blame everyone in a company for what appears to be plagiarism, even if (as in this case) the evidence seems pretty strong that they are thieves (or fools).
Not that I approve. Some people can write code, design game concepts etc but be incapable of drawing pictures. When I look at the photo of the 3 main developers I don't see a picture that looks like three guys that would play typical cutting edge games. They come up with game logic that kinda works but is butt ugly. They hire someone who claims they are a shit hot CG artist, complete with examples of "their" work. This person then proceeds to rip other peoples' work.
The developers are of course stoked by the amazing art "developed" for their game, and give lots of bonuses. Then they discover that they've been sounded robbed, as their game (and their reputations) are soundly denounced.
I'm not saying this has happened in this case, but I've seen scenarios like this before (when I did work in the games industry).
I'm also not saying that this justifies it. If anything it reveals "technology blindness" where the developers are so in love with their own product that they don't bother looking at what else is on the market.
Wouldn't it be nice if all Americans had the access to officials that only lobbyists get?
Sorry, that only happens in a democracy.
Yes I know this will be modded into oblivion. But please realise that The Rest Of The World does not acknowledge the USA as a shining example of Democracy and Freedom. I think it's because you've lost that "of the people, by the people, for the people" bit, and now have "of the moneyed, by the moneyed, for the moneyed".
Unfortunately the majority of simulation environments require knowledge way beyond what the kids have (kids learn by building on what they already know). There are a few examples of great ideas in CAL, such as the Kedama system for Squeak, or DrGeo, but these are (1) exceptions, (2) way outside most teachers' experience, and (3) don't fit into the neat "Microsoft Educational License" model that most schools are forced into.
Ideally CAL systems should allow kids to explore ideas, and to assist them to find their own solutions to real problems. Most products on the market (including most OSS offerings) simply regurgitate facts, or walk kids through closed paths on a particular specific problem.
The Intel microscope has potential, but is really just an instrument, and not a learning tool. Mindstorms is great, but once again is just a single tool (although it is incredibly good for solving open problems in the domains of control and engineering mechanics).
The OLPC tried to be a flexible learning tool that covered all bases, providing the environment for knowledge discovery and construction, and I fully expect that in 5 years we will see real educational results in the kids who have them now. But there are flaws in it - simply for the reason that it is the first *real* attempt at implementing Alan Kay's Dynabook. *IF* it doesn't get completely sidetracked by corporate and political interests it has great potential as the foundation for a true CAL device, and not just glorified electronic paper.
Pull them apart, and use the magnets to make a magnetic rail gun. Or some other fun game. There has to be a lot of fun (and destruction) in 200 ceramic magnets.
Most "Educational Software" is nothing of he kind. I've been involved in research on the topic on the past and basically there are 3 main things called "Educational Software":
1) Testing Applications. These are no more than Electronic versions of the lists of exercises found in texts, with a little logic thrown in to mix up the questions, and maybe to direct the difficulty to how the kids answer the problems. These are just substitutes for paper - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required of the student and so very little learning.
2) Slide Shows. Done in HTML, Flash or Powerpoint. A substitute for books, blackboards and handouts - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required of the student and so very little learning.
3) Office Apps with scripting. Substitutes for paper - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required of the student and so very little learning.
One of the big impediments has been the Blackboard patents. They were so broad, and Blackboard was so aggressive asserting them, that they stifled real innovation in the field once machines became powerful enough to actually do interesting things.
Another is that the educators at primary and secondary level in general are not programmers, do not really understand software design, and have no idea what machines and networking could actually do. There are a few exceptions to this, but these poor souls are busy trying to teach and to keep the schools IT infrastructure working, as they become the first support point in the school. It's a foolish teacher who lets it be known that they can make computers work. They might do some interesting things in the classroom, but they are careful to keep it there, and not to advertise it. How many of you want to become the unpaid support person in an environment where 200 antique machines running Windows have to be maintained and protected from curious and tech-savvy 8-16 year olds? Yet these are the real experts in education. Someone who has taught for 30+ years usually has a few good ideas on how to get kids to think.
The so-called debate about constructivism is a furphy. The debate isn't that constructivism works (and it was Piaget not Papert who worked that out), but rather how do we teach modern content in an investigative, activity based framework? Traditionally content is taught constructivistally - the Farmer's child learns his stuff by working in the fields with Mum & Dad, solving real problems, like where is next winter's food coming from. But the Greeks developed a teaching model that divorced learning and doing (although that pedagogy works for the gifted) and we are only just beginning to go back to pedagogies that presuppose that education is for everyone.
I'm thinking seriously about doing a PhD on these things - what are the real requirements for ITC that provides a framework for learning, and that doesn't reinforce the concept that education is a social filter that keeps the lower socio-economic classes in their places.
The OLPC has been an interesting (non-rigorous) experiment in these things. It has tried to break the mold of ITC being a mere substitute for paper. Unfortunately it hasn't quite got there. Whether this is due to the "Hackers" or mismanagement, or the "need" to fit in with the corporate picture (and as such become a paper substitute again) I don't know.
I'm in the interesting position of being partway through training to become a High School maths teacher. I finished high school in 1979, where I came 23rd in the state. I did 4Unit NSW HSC maths, which had 8 or 9 hours of teacher contact in maths alone each week.
In the early 90s I ended up back at uni, where I did a maths degree with a minor in computing. I ended up with a 1st class honours, and was part of the teaching team in maths for 1st and 2nd year science and engineering students. We found that close to a third of 1st yr students, in week 1 of semester 1, could not calculate the volume of a rectangular prism!!!
Now that I have kids at high school, I've decided to become a high school maths teacher. My 15 yr old (year 10) has yet to see a quadratic equation (yr 8 when I was at school). My 12 year old (yr 7) does not understand that -5 -2 = -7, though he does know that negative integers exist.
In my course last semester, on middle years maths education, I was the only one out of the group of 24 who could express the relationship between yards and feet correctly. The rest of the class said 3F=Y was right when F is number of feet and Y is number of yards.
I expect to get about $45k-$50k as a maths teacher when I finish. With my quals and experience I can get $100k+ in industry, or $500+/hour as an actuary. Where is the incentive for people like myself who are good at maths, can teach it and enjoy it to teach in schools knowing that the vast majority of the kids hate maths and will hate me for teaching it, unless I can show them how to discover their inner maths nerd?
I was at a school for gifted kids the other week, a school that uses the IBL instead of the std Queensland senior syllabus. Kids doing IBL SL get 3 hours of teaching per week. Those in HL get 1 additional hour. I don't think the problem is restricted to only one school system, state, country or syllabus. There are some serious resource shortfalls in maths and science education worldwide, which are being masked by lowering the standards, so showing the same proportion passing. This will bite us on the arse in a few years when there is massive shortage of physicists, engineers and statisticians.
Expenditure in education is investment in the future.
I have yet to see a problem simple enough that I would choose to use an OODBMS over an RDBMS while simultaneously being interesting enough that I would bother working on it in the first place.
Perhaps you have yet to really understand how an object model that isn't driven by the constraints of the underlying RDMS can make the problem simpler. In particular, the use of a well designed Containers class with well designed efficient enumerators can often make what is a very complex SQL query into a fairly simple combination of select: and inject:into: messages, where you get back a Collection of the objects you want. I see RDMS as being best at fairly simple problems, or for problems where the structure of the data is better understood than the relationships between the objects. And I hate all that overhead you have to manage to get the data into a RDMS.
JP Morgan uses Gemstone/S behind it's financial systems. I'd say that's a fairly major user. As I understand it MagLev is basically the Gemstone/S Smalltalk VM extended to understand Ruby bytecodes. They (Gemstone) state that the same VM can run Smalltalk, indeed Ruby will be able to talk to Smalltalk objects transparently. The only real questions are how much more complex does Ruby make the VM (Smalltalk VMs are absurdly simple), and what does this complexity do to stability (Smalltalk VMs typically stand up to enormous abuse)? Given the scalability of Gemstone, I don't see MagLev being absurdly scalable as being much of a surprise.
Following that logic every language has stolen features from the Jacquard Loom. And look at the number of ideas that have come from Smalltalk - Design Patterns, Unit Tests, Continuous Compilations. Extreme Programming etc.
Other things that have a Smalltalk heritage are those grown from OWL (which include MS Windows and the Borland languages) and MacOS (ObjectiveC).
By the way, I like Smalltalk.
Finally, and not directly related to your post, I am still boggled by how people consider Java Object Oriented. It's Object Like for sure, but as long as you have to jump through so many hoops just to have true abstraction and polymorphism, and as long as classes have to advertise everything about their interfaces I personally think it's a steaming pile of crap. And that's to say nothing about the Integer/int thing.
Both of them seem to have some kind of weird metabolism where food goes straight to storage - the other kids and myself can eat massive amounts of crap and gain a little weight, whereas those two can gain weight eating salads.
Where are these "huge chunks of the world that are lifeless desert" you speak of? Deserts tend to be rich and complex ecosystems. Or do you mean "I can't see how modern humans can live there or otherwise profit from there, so lets find a way to exploit it".
That being said (and overlooking all the comments on "thermaldynamics") deserts could be places for large solar farms, as long as you can deal with transmission losses. There are remote communities in Oz that make use of solar and wind to provide most of their power needs. There are even solar powered public telephones. I personally find it a shame that here in Australia there is not more work being done on industrial scale solar farms in the more marginal areas, as we have large areas that could be used, and a lot of sunshine.
Near the end of the video the comment is made that if you aren't an athlete the Wii Fit will probably work for you. That is pretty much in line with what I've seen. We got one 2 weeks ago, and it does give you a workout if you aren't fit.
My wife and eldest son are both very obese, and the machine can get them both sweating with jelly-legs. I'm not overweight, but don't get to exercise much any more. I find I can get my cardio right up on it. Is it a complete substitute for a gym with personal trainer? No. But it's much cheaper than gym membership for my entire family (7 people) and gets my kids (especially the video game addicted teens) moving more than they were before.
What I'm hoping to see is that it will be a tool that will improve their fitness enough that they get back on their bikes. So far I believe it will.
As an old fart, the DEC-10 and DEC-20, when compared bit-for-bit, word-for-word and cycle-for-cycle, ran rings around today's hardware. One reason why so much code developed for those machines worked so well was because they were nice to work with, and in many respects a lot of what you today think is great software is directly descended from that "simple" software written on that platform.
One example is that an entire file copy program (less the strings for source/destination pathnames) could be written in about 30 bytes of MACRO assembler. Do that on today's hardware.
I think you're missing the point of MMIX. It was never intended to be an example of great processor design. It was intended to be a construct for teaching how to program, without being an Intel, or ARM, or Motorola, with the way these "lock you in" to the patterns that make most sense for that platform.
Socialism is only theft if you have nowhere else to live. As I was told when I lived in the USA, "If you don't like it here go live somewhere else". So I did. People here in Oz have the same choice. People in the former Soviet Union didn't.
Some people believe that issues of social justice prevail over issues of personal prosperity, and that the prosperity of the nation outweighs that of the individual. These people are quite happy to see their taxes being paid and spent. Other people see things a bit differently. They are called Americans.
If you look at our constitution and society structure, it is pretty much a democratic socialist state. We have Federally mandated Free Health cover and hospitalisation (which is close to collapse - thanks Mr Howard), Free Education (although not quite so free in Queensland), real Social Security (although that was weakened by the previous Government - why oh why do I, a disabled person, have to stand in lines at Centerlink until I collapse to the floor, when I've been in the system for 10 years, with over 20 documents from doctors and specialists?), reasonable protection from the worst abuses of Capitalism (although Prof Fels departure from the ACCC seemed to pull its teeth somewhat - thanks again Johnny).
So we aren't Communist, but even our right (the Liberals) neo-cons are generally way left of yours, and some of our right is left of your Democrats.
The previous government (under John 'Bonsai' Howard) was possibly the most right wing we've ever had. The Rudd Labor Government is way left of Johnny, but is dominated by the Labor Right and Centre factions. This is possibly a good thing, as I don't think that an immediate massive swing to the left would be good for the country's stability. That being said, there are quite a few far-reaching social justice reforms being put up, and Rudd seems to be looking at some far reaching long-term economic reforms, although not to the extent of a completely centrally planned economic model.
I've been saying this for years. Psych students are bombarded by vast numbers of stats courses, yet they typically don't know what a derivative is, nor can they tell you what basic stats results like the Law of Large Numbers mean. They learn to do all sorts of tricks with time series, yet can't tell you what "linear" means.
My suspicion is that the academics desperately want psychology to be considered a science, and they think that quantifying everything is the answer, rather than addressing the issue of the Scientific Method. As a result they tend to use the most impressive tests and designs they can, regardless of applicability.
Psychologists tend to over-sample, over test and over analyse. They often perform multiple tests on the same sample, reducing the power of their results. They routinely perform massive multiple regressions on huge samples, ignoring the fact that with a sample large enough, and enough 'independent' variables, you can make any data set show a significant fit to any model.
They also seem to love the various measures of correlation, without asking what (if anything) that particular magic number might mean in the context under investigation (i.e. "r=0.76 which is significant at alpha=0.05 so food colour preference is related to hat size" is the kind of statement that seems to be highly regarded amongst them).
Much of the seminal work in inferential statistics was done by psychologists (Fisher, Pearson). These were people who could do maths. Today psychs don't seem to have the same level of mathematical literacy. If psychology does want to be considered a hard science, then it should train its people that way. Otherwise they should be content to be a social science, and realise that there is no real competition or ranking between social science and hard science.
Meriadoc and Rohan were both names from Breton history - Conan Meriadog was the founder of Celtic Brittany (previously Armorica) and was the ancestor of the House of Rohan. This is incredibly obscure Celtic history, dating from the 4th century AD, before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.
What many fail to notice is that the language used in the Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin is very similar to that in The Tale of Arwen and Aragorn (found in the Appendices to The Return of the King).
Tolkien was not an author of fantasy stories most of the time - he was a Professor of Languages at one of the oldest Universities in the world. He was one of the authorities on Dark Age Germanic, Scandinavian and Celtic Languages and History. He was also one of the main contributors to The Oxford Dictionary, which will probably turn out to be his greatest literary accomplishment in a hundred years or two.
The fact is that people will either enjoy the archaic language forms used by Tolkien, or they will hate it. It is a great story (if somewhat depressing), but is not, nor is it intended to be, a story about Hobbits, nor is it a gentle read like Farmer Giles of Ham. Personally I enjoy fiction that forces me to slow down and 'enjoy the scenery', rather than race through to the conclusion, but then I enjoy Russion Science Fiction for the same reasons.
I ended up playing MERP/Rolemaster(2E) for almost exactly the same reasons. I started playing D&D from the Blue Box, and then 1st Ed AD&D. I ran campaigns for over 12 years, and have to admit there was a lot of fun to be had.
One day I saw a couple of gameplaying modules for Mirkwood from Tolkien's Middle Earth. Although they claimed to be adaptable to any game system, I was curious as to what this "Rolemaster' was that was mentioned in them.
Now I'd firmly (dare I say religiously) believed the TSR claims that combat systems with location specific damage were unwieldy. I believed that each class neede its own set of rules. I assiduously followed the advice of the DMG and kept its contents secret from my players.
I played a game of Runequest. I thought it was silly - checking for falling over when sneaking up on tombs.
Then one day I saw the Rolemaster 2nd Edition Boxed set. On a whim I bought it and was amazed and confused. But then I got MERP, and suddenly RM made sense: only one kind of die, only 3 tables to cover everything except combat. I realised that the combat tables were all just adaptations of the one master table and from then on I never looked back.
These days I understand GURPS is the same, a simple set of rules consistently applied, with no secret rules. This leads to fun, fast playing, and no 3 hour dice fests.
I wish WotC the best of luck with their franchise, I just hope that these 4th edition rules are about FUN and not about spending lots of money on addendums, supplements and expansions as TSR did.
Although many have pointed out that we have enough hydrocarbons here on Earth for our forseeable non-fuel needs, I see a resource like Titan would be great for nanobot driven construction of truely massive structures. Imagine a nano-tube based space elevator about Titan with swarms of little bots running up and down, constructing orbital farms or solar concentrators that are tens or even hundreds of hectares in size.
Don't think of this discovery of what we can do now, think of what we can do in one or two hundred years.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it could of course be a case of thieving scumbags, as others have pointed out. I do think that in general you have to look deeper before you blame everyone in a company for what appears to be plagiarism, even if (as in this case) the evidence seems pretty strong that they are thieves (or fools).
Not that I approve. Some people can write code, design game concepts etc but be incapable of drawing pictures. When I look at the photo of the 3 main developers I don't see a picture that looks like three guys that would play typical cutting edge games. They come up with game logic that kinda works but is butt ugly. They hire someone who claims they are a shit hot CG artist, complete with examples of "their" work. This person then proceeds to rip other peoples' work.
The developers are of course stoked by the amazing art "developed" for their game, and give lots of bonuses. Then they discover that they've been sounded robbed, as their game (and their reputations) are soundly denounced.
I'm not saying this has happened in this case, but I've seen scenarios like this before (when I did work in the games industry).
I'm also not saying that this justifies it. If anything it reveals "technology blindness" where the developers are so in love with their own product that they don't bother looking at what else is on the market.
Sorry, that only happens in a democracy.
Yes I know this will be modded into oblivion. But please realise that The Rest Of The World does not acknowledge the USA as a shining example of Democracy and Freedom. I think it's because you've lost that "of the people, by the people, for the people" bit, and now have "of the moneyed, by the moneyed, for the moneyed".
Unfortunately the majority of simulation environments require knowledge way beyond what the kids have (kids learn by building on what they already know). There are a few examples of great ideas in CAL, such as the Kedama system for Squeak, or DrGeo, but these are (1) exceptions, (2) way outside most teachers' experience, and (3) don't fit into the neat "Microsoft Educational License" model that most schools are forced into.
Ideally CAL systems should allow kids to explore ideas, and to assist them to find their own solutions to real problems. Most products on the market (including most OSS offerings) simply regurgitate facts, or walk kids through closed paths on a particular specific problem.
The Intel microscope has potential, but is really just an instrument, and not a learning tool. Mindstorms is great, but once again is just a single tool (although it is incredibly good for solving open problems in the domains of control and engineering mechanics).
The OLPC tried to be a flexible learning tool that covered all bases, providing the environment for knowledge discovery and construction, and I fully expect that in 5 years we will see real educational results in the kids who have them now. But there are flaws in it - simply for the reason that it is the first *real* attempt at implementing Alan Kay's Dynabook. *IF* it doesn't get completely sidetracked by corporate and political interests it has great potential as the foundation for a true CAL device, and not just glorified electronic paper.
Pull them apart, and use the magnets to make a magnetic rail gun. Or some other fun game. There has to be a lot of fun (and destruction) in 200 ceramic magnets.
Most "Educational Software" is nothing of he kind. I've been involved in research on the topic on the past and basically there are 3 main things called "Educational Software":
1) Testing Applications. These are no more than Electronic versions of the lists of exercises found in texts, with a little logic thrown in to mix up the questions, and maybe to direct the difficulty to how the kids answer the problems. These are just substitutes for paper - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required of the student and so very little learning.
2) Slide Shows. Done in HTML, Flash or Powerpoint. A substitute for books, blackboards and handouts - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required of the student and so very little learning.
3) Office Apps with scripting. Substitutes for paper - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required of the student and so very little learning.
One of the big impediments has been the Blackboard patents. They were so broad, and Blackboard was so aggressive asserting them, that they stifled real innovation in the field once machines became powerful enough to actually do interesting things.
Another is that the educators at primary and secondary level in general are not programmers, do not really understand software design, and have no idea what machines and networking could actually do. There are a few exceptions to this, but these poor souls are busy trying to teach and to keep the schools IT infrastructure working, as they become the first support point in the school. It's a foolish teacher who lets it be known that they can make computers work. They might do some interesting things in the classroom, but they are careful to keep it there, and not to advertise it. How many of you want to become the unpaid support person in an environment where 200 antique machines running Windows have to be maintained and protected from curious and tech-savvy 8-16 year olds? Yet these are the real experts in education. Someone who has taught for 30+ years usually has a few good ideas on how to get kids to think.
The so-called debate about constructivism is a furphy. The debate isn't that constructivism works (and it was Piaget not Papert who worked that out), but rather how do we teach modern content in an investigative, activity based framework? Traditionally content is taught constructivistally - the Farmer's child learns his stuff by working in the fields with Mum & Dad, solving real problems, like where is next winter's food coming from. But the Greeks developed a teaching model that divorced learning and doing (although that pedagogy works for the gifted) and we are only just beginning to go back to pedagogies that presuppose that education is for everyone.
I'm thinking seriously about doing a PhD on these things - what are the real requirements for ITC that provides a framework for learning, and that doesn't reinforce the concept that education is a social filter that keeps the lower socio-economic classes in their places.
The OLPC has been an interesting (non-rigorous) experiment in these things. It has tried to break the mold of ITC being a mere substitute for paper. Unfortunately it hasn't quite got there. Whether this is due to the "Hackers" or mismanagement, or the "need" to fit in with the corporate picture (and as such become a paper substitute again) I don't know.
I believe their policy about gays is motivated by trying to ensure that doesn't happen.
I'm in the interesting position of being partway through training to become a High School maths teacher. I finished high school in 1979, where I came 23rd in the state. I did 4Unit NSW HSC maths, which had 8 or 9 hours of teacher contact in maths alone each week.
In the early 90s I ended up back at uni, where I did a maths degree with a minor in computing. I ended up with a 1st class honours, and was part of the teaching team in maths for 1st and 2nd year science and engineering students. We found that close to a third of 1st yr students, in week 1 of semester 1, could not calculate the volume of a rectangular prism!!!
Now that I have kids at high school, I've decided to become a high school maths teacher. My 15 yr old (year 10) has yet to see a quadratic equation (yr 8 when I was at school). My 12 year old (yr 7) does not understand that -5 -2 = -7, though he does know that negative integers exist.
In my course last semester, on middle years maths education, I was the only one out of the group of 24 who could express the relationship between yards and feet correctly. The rest of the class said 3F=Y was right when F is number of feet and Y is number of yards.
I expect to get about $45k-$50k as a maths teacher when I finish. With my quals and experience I can get $100k+ in industry, or $500+/hour as an actuary. Where is the incentive for people like myself who are good at maths, can teach it and enjoy it to teach in schools knowing that the vast majority of the kids hate maths and will hate me for teaching it, unless I can show them how to discover their inner maths nerd?
I was at a school for gifted kids the other week, a school that uses the IBL instead of the std Queensland senior syllabus. Kids doing IBL SL get 3 hours of teaching per week. Those in HL get 1 additional hour. I don't think the problem is restricted to only one school system, state, country or syllabus. There are some serious resource shortfalls in maths and science education worldwide, which are being masked by lowering the standards, so showing the same proportion passing. This will bite us on the arse in a few years when there is massive shortage of physicists, engineers and statisticians.
Expenditure in education is investment in the future.
Perhaps you have yet to really understand how an object model that isn't driven by the constraints of the underlying RDMS can make the problem simpler. In particular, the use of a well designed Containers class with well designed efficient enumerators can often make what is a very complex SQL query into a fairly simple combination of select: and inject:into: messages, where you get back a Collection of the objects you want. I see RDMS as being best at fairly simple problems, or for problems where the structure of the data is better understood than the relationships between the objects. And I hate all that overhead you have to manage to get the data into a RDMS.
Perhaps there is more than one way to do it...
JP Morgan uses Gemstone/S behind it's financial systems. I'd say that's a fairly major user. As I understand it MagLev is basically the Gemstone/S Smalltalk VM extended to understand Ruby bytecodes. They (Gemstone) state that the same VM can run Smalltalk, indeed Ruby will be able to talk to Smalltalk objects transparently. The only real questions are how much more complex does Ruby make the VM (Smalltalk VMs are absurdly simple), and what does this complexity do to stability (Smalltalk VMs typically stand up to enormous abuse)? Given the scalability of Gemstone, I don't see MagLev being absurdly scalable as being much of a surprise.
Following that logic every language has stolen features from the Jacquard Loom. And look at the number of ideas that have come from Smalltalk - Design Patterns, Unit Tests, Continuous Compilations. Extreme Programming etc.
Other things that have a Smalltalk heritage are those grown from OWL (which include MS Windows and the Borland languages) and MacOS (ObjectiveC).
By the way, I like Smalltalk.
Finally, and not directly related to your post, I am still boggled by how people consider Java Object Oriented. It's Object Like for sure, but as long as you have to jump through so many hoops just to have true abstraction and polymorphism, and as long as classes have to advertise everything about their interfaces I personally think it's a steaming pile of crap. And that's to say nothing about the Integer/int thing.
Both of them seem to have some kind of weird metabolism where food goes straight to storage - the other kids and myself can eat massive amounts of crap and gain a little weight, whereas those two can gain weight eating salads.
Where are these "huge chunks of the world that are lifeless desert" you speak of? Deserts tend to be rich and complex ecosystems. Or do you mean "I can't see how modern humans can live there or otherwise profit from there, so lets find a way to exploit it".
That being said (and overlooking all the comments on "thermaldynamics") deserts could be places for large solar farms, as long as you can deal with transmission losses. There are remote communities in Oz that make use of solar and wind to provide most of their power needs. There are even solar powered public telephones. I personally find it a shame that here in Australia there is not more work being done on industrial scale solar farms in the more marginal areas, as we have large areas that could be used, and a lot of sunshine.
Near the end of the video the comment is made that if you aren't an athlete the Wii Fit will probably work for you. That is pretty much in line with what I've seen. We got one 2 weeks ago, and it does give you a workout if you aren't fit.
My wife and eldest son are both very obese, and the machine can get them both sweating with jelly-legs. I'm not overweight, but don't get to exercise much any more. I find I can get my cardio right up on it. Is it a complete substitute for a gym with personal trainer? No. But it's much cheaper than gym membership for my entire family (7 people) and gets my kids (especially the video game addicted teens) moving more than they were before.
What I'm hoping to see is that it will be a tool that will improve their fitness enough that they get back on their bikes. So far I believe it will.
In other words, Ford did for the car industry what Bit Torrent did for electronic Media...
As an old fart, the DEC-10 and DEC-20, when compared bit-for-bit, word-for-word and cycle-for-cycle, ran rings around today's hardware. One reason why so much code developed for those machines worked so well was because they were nice to work with, and in many respects a lot of what you today think is great software is directly descended from that "simple" software written on that platform.
One example is that an entire file copy program (less the strings for source/destination pathnames) could be written in about 30 bytes of MACRO assembler. Do that on today's hardware.
I think you're missing the point of MMIX. It was never intended to be an example of great processor design. It was intended to be a construct for teaching how to program, without being an Intel, or ARM, or Motorola, with the way these "lock you in" to the patterns that make most sense for that platform.
Socialism is only theft if you have nowhere else to live. As I was told when I lived in the USA, "If you don't like it here go live somewhere else". So I did. People here in Oz have the same choice. People in the former Soviet Union didn't.
Some people believe that issues of social justice prevail over issues of personal prosperity, and that the prosperity of the nation outweighs that of the individual. These people are quite happy to see their taxes being paid and spent. Other people see things a bit differently. They are called Americans.
If you look at our constitution and society structure, it is pretty much a democratic socialist state. We have Federally mandated Free Health cover and hospitalisation (which is close to collapse - thanks Mr Howard), Free Education (although not quite so free in Queensland), real Social Security (although that was weakened by the previous Government - why oh why do I, a disabled person, have to stand in lines at Centerlink until I collapse to the floor, when I've been in the system for 10 years, with over 20 documents from doctors and specialists?), reasonable protection from the worst abuses of Capitalism (although Prof Fels departure from the ACCC seemed to pull its teeth somewhat - thanks again Johnny).
So we aren't Communist, but even our right (the Liberals) neo-cons are generally way left of yours, and some of our right is left of your Democrats.
The previous government (under John 'Bonsai' Howard) was possibly the most right wing we've ever had. The Rudd Labor Government is way left of Johnny, but is dominated by the Labor Right and Centre factions. This is possibly a good thing, as I don't think that an immediate massive swing to the left would be good for the country's stability. That being said, there are quite a few far-reaching social justice reforms being put up, and Rudd seems to be looking at some far reaching long-term economic reforms, although not to the extent of a completely centrally planned economic model.
I've been saying this for years. Psych students are bombarded by vast numbers of stats courses, yet they typically don't know what a derivative is, nor can they tell you what basic stats results like the Law of Large Numbers mean. They learn to do all sorts of tricks with time series, yet can't tell you what "linear" means.
My suspicion is that the academics desperately want psychology to be considered a science, and they think that quantifying everything is the answer, rather than addressing the issue of the Scientific Method. As a result they tend to use the most impressive tests and designs they can, regardless of applicability.
Psychologists tend to over-sample, over test and over analyse. They often perform multiple tests on the same sample, reducing the power of their results. They routinely perform massive multiple regressions on huge samples, ignoring the fact that with a sample large enough, and enough 'independent' variables, you can make any data set show a significant fit to any model.
They also seem to love the various measures of correlation, without asking what (if anything) that particular magic number might mean in the context under investigation (i.e. "r=0.76 which is significant at alpha=0.05 so food colour preference is related to hat size" is the kind of statement that seems to be highly regarded amongst them).
Much of the seminal work in inferential statistics was done by psychologists (Fisher, Pearson). These were people who could do maths. Today psychs don't seem to have the same level of mathematical literacy. If psychology does want to be considered a hard science, then it should train its people that way. Otherwise they should be content to be a social science, and realise that there is no real competition or ranking between social science and hard science.
Meriadoc and Rohan were both names from Breton history - Conan Meriadog was the founder of Celtic Brittany (previously Armorica) and was the ancestor of the House of Rohan. This is incredibly obscure Celtic history, dating from the 4th century AD, before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.
What many fail to notice is that the language used in the Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin is very similar to that in The Tale of Arwen and Aragorn (found in the Appendices to The Return of the King).
Tolkien was not an author of fantasy stories most of the time - he was a Professor of Languages at one of the oldest Universities in the world. He was one of the authorities on Dark Age Germanic, Scandinavian and Celtic Languages and History. He was also one of the main contributors to The Oxford Dictionary, which will probably turn out to be his greatest literary accomplishment in a hundred years or two.
The fact is that people will either enjoy the archaic language forms used by Tolkien, or they will hate it. It is a great story (if somewhat depressing), but is not, nor is it intended to be, a story about Hobbits, nor is it a gentle read like Farmer Giles of Ham. Personally I enjoy fiction that forces me to slow down and 'enjoy the scenery', rather than race through to the conclusion, but then I enjoy Russion Science Fiction for the same reasons.
The last part of your post sounds like you are describing Rolemaster.
I ended up playing MERP/Rolemaster(2E) for almost exactly the same reasons. I started playing D&D from the Blue Box, and then 1st Ed AD&D. I ran campaigns for over 12 years, and have to admit there was a lot of fun to be had.
One day I saw a couple of gameplaying modules for Mirkwood from Tolkien's Middle Earth. Although they claimed to be adaptable to any game system, I was curious as to what this "Rolemaster' was that was mentioned in them.
Now I'd firmly (dare I say religiously) believed the TSR claims that combat systems with location specific damage were unwieldy. I believed that each class neede its own set of rules. I assiduously followed the advice of the DMG and kept its contents secret from my players.
I played a game of Runequest. I thought it was silly - checking for falling over when sneaking up on tombs.
Then one day I saw the Rolemaster 2nd Edition Boxed set. On a whim I bought it and was amazed and confused. But then I got MERP, and suddenly RM made sense: only one kind of die, only 3 tables to cover everything except combat. I realised that the combat tables were all just adaptations of the one master table and from then on I never looked back.
These days I understand GURPS is the same, a simple set of rules consistently applied, with no secret rules. This leads to fun, fast playing, and no 3 hour dice fests.
I wish WotC the best of luck with their franchise, I just hope that these 4th edition rules are about FUN and not about spending lots of money on addendums, supplements and expansions as TSR did.
Although many have pointed out that we have enough hydrocarbons here on Earth for our forseeable non-fuel needs, I see a resource like Titan would be great for nanobot driven construction of truely massive structures. Imagine a nano-tube based space elevator about Titan with swarms of little bots running up and down, constructing orbital farms or solar concentrators that are tens or even hundreds of hectares in size.
Don't think of this discovery of what we can do now, think of what we can do in one or two hundred years.