It's a falsehood, not a fallacy. They're very different things, and cannot be used exchangably. The falsehood is that the several OSes are equivalent and may be lumped together. Given that there is no argument being made, no fallacy is possible at all.
Wow, and only two years after the first DS coding tutorials came out. Pre-emptive strike to those who point out that the system's only a year and a half old: I know. We had tutorials, largely correct, as well as a toolchain and nearly-functional binaries, almost six months before the hardware actually came to market.
(Le sigh. In order to defeat the repetition filter from ruining my joke,
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--- Seeking Employment: I am currently seeking employment in the south of England, but will happily work remotely. Anything related to HTML/PHP/MySQL or linux server setup/maintenance would be appreciated. Please email webmaster@lipsum.com for more information. --- Donat
Bzzt. The person to whom you're replying is in fact quite correct. Using the word decimate in any sense other than to destroy a tenth of is a signator of a low quality of education.
In fact, I'd venture to say that perhaps one native English speaker in a hundred is even aware of the other definition, and that your post just sounds really weird to the other 99.
Are you really attempting to argue that the word decimate's meaning is anything other than painfully obvious? If so, your grasp of the language isn't really strong enough to be criticizing other people, much less to the degree of challenging whether or not someone else speaks it as a first language.
You strike me as the sort of person who attempts to defend bad definitions of irony just because it's what they grew up with. Here's a hint: ignorance is not linguistic drift, and just because you hang out with ignorami who don't know how to speak using words in a proper fashion doesn't mean that the language has changed to suit you.
Before you get off onto some predictable rant about how language changes and how anything you and your buddies do wrongly is a reflection of progress in English, please take some classes on linguistics. It turns out that generations tend to have mistakes which neither their parents nor their children reflect. Your dad almost certainly doesn't make the mistake with the word decimate that you do; it's a foul error that the media started making in the early 1980s, around the same time they bollocksed up the words indicted, alleged and translucent.
Please stop feigning a deep familiarity with English; it ain't there. That you (claim to) make a living writing suggests to me that either your editor is desperately overworked or appallingly underskilled.
Speciation is the result of macroevolution. People have a tendency to think of evolution as a one-directional thing; I often retreat to old Jack Kirby comic books, where there was a character with a ray-gun who would evolve you on the spot to the highest peak of your particular genetic code. Problem is, evolution doesn't work that way. It's a cluster of small changes which eventually find complimentary locusses and adaptive maxima which can successfully exploit their environment.
Consider the relatively silly example of the Chinese Land Octopus. Ask your Chinese friend; if they're cool, they'll keep a straight face and tell you it's a real animal, and I'll mail them a crispy dollar. The Chinese Land Octopus went into the deep Chinese forests, and adapted to a very different environment. Some decreased their size to get through the underbrush more effectively, creating the Chinese Midget Octopod. Some decreased their body size but greatly increased their tentacle size, allowing them to swing through the trees, resulting in the Nanking Arboreal Monkeysquid. Still others got into the streams, and thanks to the nearby nuclear plant developed a limb doubling, allowing them to more effectively trap individual fish in rock corrals in turbulence eddies, from where we get the famous hexadecipus.
Now, this is all obvious to anyone fond of the broad family of chinese land cephalopods. However, what people tend to forget is that evolution isn't all benefits. There were a bunch of birth defects in there, some unimportant, some crippling, many even fatal. Some changes were steps back, instead of steps forward; consider the dodecapus. Still others were contrarian - the midget octopod and the monkeysquid can still breed, but since the longer tentacles of the monkeysquid make it hard to get through the underbrush, and the general decreased size of the midget octopod mean the tentacles won't reach branches either, that means a midget octosquid (the hybrid offspring of the other two, kind of like a Liger, a Zorse, a Wolphin or Dick Cheney) cannot exist in either arena and will therefore starve to death.
Speciation is difficult to nail down. The general dividing line is when two animals have changed do the degree that they no longer associate directly and are difficult or impossible to breed (in most cases, hybrids are sterile, though sometimes they aren't - typically males are reproductively far more fragile than females, and in most hybrid species where only one gender can mate it's nearly always the female.)
By the way, the example I gave is sympatrism - speciation in a single location due to divergent population pressures (some went for the underbrush, some the trees, and some back to the water.) There are other speciation mechanics; the other two big ones are allopatrism (drift because of isolation, such as eye color among humans, where in different regions different colors are the commonality, even though it serves no apparent evolutionary advantage) and parapatrism (where two populations are partially seperated, such as through behavioral characteristics, and progressively diverge despite overlap because of decreasing cross-fertility.)
As far as all believers of creationism being the same, they aren't. Whereas I'm not religious, one of the people I look up to simple casts the physical universe as seen by scientists as God's plan. That belief has the neat side effect of being absolutely unassailable by science; it's absolutely different than Intelligent Design, which is largely a political platform, and has conceptual holes an eight year old would be embarrassed by.
Surprisingly to some, you can be religious, believe in one of the holy books near-verbatim, and still be a scientist. Before you laugh, consider whether you revere Knuth; he's one of those. The God of my God is... no, wait. Well, you get the idea.
Whereas you're entirely right to suggest a car is more dangerous than a computer in the hands of the non-functional, it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that skillless use of a computer isn't a real threat. Identity theft is a very real problem, a very real result of being conned online, and since it happened to my aunt, I can tell you firmly that it takes years and thousands of dollars to clear up. Hell, even if you get all your money back, you're still out a mint on lawyers, filing fees, time spent, grief, higher interest while you're waiting, et cetera.
Honestly, sometimes that identity insurance they started advertising lately has begun to seem very tempting. I'm not at risk on my computer, but I got dumpster dove once; I was damned lucky to catch it by coincidence, because I was in the middle of moving and one of the things they tried to get me on were utility bills.
Re:Loving complexity for complexity's sake
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Ruby Off the Rails
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· Score: 1
Neither J2ME nor embedded average more than 23 meg per device,
Typo. That's supposed to say 2 meg.
Re:Loving complexity for complexity's sake
on
Ruby Off the Rails
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As even a 'smallish box' these days is more than 128MB, memory really is not going to be a problem at all.
Amusingly, Java's three strongest positions are the portable market (J2ME,) followed by the server market (EJB,) followed by the embedded market (microcontrollers, especially with the upcoming blu-ray deployment.) Neither J2ME nor embedded average more than 23 meg per device, and for servers where parallelism is a serious issue, the smallest possible memory footprint is desirable.
For thirty years people have attempted to hand-wave away bloat with "modern" computing power. With age you will discover that it's not the ceiling so much as the margin that's important. Yes, you can use a language which requires 300% overhead, and for lots of things that's okay. But, in industry, where RAND suggests almost m80% of software is actually developed, the cruel reality is that your 300% overhead means that your competition can do four times as much on the same machine. Whereas that may not be important for a word processor, that's hella important to simulators, aggregators, data mining, and the sort of large-scale tasks that dominate real-world developer time.
There are dozens of higher level languages than Java and dozens of faster languages than Java, all of which predate Java. Java's strength comes not in its speed, but in its low cost of binary portable redevelopment (hence its near-complete redomination of the cell phone world as previously taken wholesale by Symbian and BREW.) Java's "high performance" is a myth; you guys seem to think that C++ is the only speed candidate, when code written in Forth, K, Structure and portable assembly (for some tasks) tend to blow the doors off of both.
There's a reason Java never took C++ out of the industrial performance market. It has nothing to do with actual performance; that's why C++ took over from FORTRAN even though FORTRAN is essentially faster, and why other languages never took over from C++ despite having relatively complete support libraries. Java is a spectacular example of what a language needs to do to not fail to defeat C++, because Java did everything but one thing.
The fundamental problem is reliability. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to hammer this into a Java programmer's head, because the first thing you want to say is "Java doesn't have exceptions," at which point the Java programmer absolutely shits themselves, because a third of their language revolves around handling these things called exceptions. The problem is, Java exceptions are an error propogation and handling mechanism, and they're so visually similar to C++ exceptions that it's just dental work and a half to get a Java programmer to believe they're not the same thing (especially since the number of people who came into the occupation was so huge during the dot com boom, when Java was big money central, and so since they've migrated into C++ they're using C++ exceptions the way Java programmers use the word, and since there are as a result so many glaringly badbear uses on the intarweb, where it seems all Java programmers learn their trade.)
Exceptions in C++ are a very different thing than they are in Java. Properly used, exceptions in C++ are used to handle situations like "hey, where did my disk drive disappear to," or CPU panic conditions. Exceptions in C++ are a last ditch holy shit maneuver to save the information when the moon crashes into the data center. Exceptions in C++ are for ghastly aberrant situations, such as failing hardware, not to handle sloppy programmer problems.
Of course, I shall receive ten counters from people dredging up code on sites full of badbearery such as geoshitties, codeproject and msdn (to all the peanut-gallery screamers, there's void main() all over MSDN, and if you don't know why that should make you shut up, you're not qualified to comment on quality c++ source and you need to stop reading Herb Schildt books) pointing out egregiously bad uses of exceptions in defense of
1) The etymology of "quote" goes from Old Latin "quot" how many conjugated "quotus" which from a sequence to medieval Latin "quotare" to distinguish by numbers; enumerate (esp. as chapters), then old French "coter" (same meaning,) then into middle English as "quote" to mark a book with chapters or references in margins. Those marginal references are the quotes, not the things in the book; it means citation, not transcription. Quotes are by default paraphrases. This is why one hears the phrases precise quote and exact quote. Granted it's a bit silly to use the word verbatin, which is middle Latin, with the word quote, whose meaning has change since middle Latin - its old meaning wouldn't make sense - but a quote, though often expected due to journalist's zealous misuse of the word (qv 'alleged') to be expected to be precise, is not denotatively required to be word for word.
2) A tautology is an argument; this is an internally self-supporting phrasing. The word you're looking for is "redundant." Tautologies are arguments which are true by the nature of their construction; they're generally either accidental, crafty ways to support circular reasoning, or silly. Using reasoning to prove that black people have darker skin than white people would be tautological if one used characteristics of the skin itself to make the proof, given that the distinction between the skins is originally drawn on the characteristic being used as a target providence. Lots of reasoning used to "prove" things based on character arguments or prejudicial arguments is tautological, relying in some inobvious fashion on one of the conclusions as a critical supporting argument. Oddly, I also saw a mathematician use this term on a strikingly inobvious transformation of an equation - the transformation was so dramatically different and useful in such a different way that the mathematician had to in fact display that they were the same thing, and to refer to that as a tautology seems strange, if accurate and defensible.
By the way, the DCSA has nothing whatsoever to do with fair use. The DCSA is an attempt to prevent archival and media retrofit. It's a completely different set of rights than fair use, which has to do with the use of a fragment of someone else's work within your own - media, journalism, sampling in music (especially rap and techno,) quotes in rebuttal, references in derivative journal work, et cetera. Fair use is about the law saying "yes, you may put those two paragraphs from Dr. Joe Blow's thesis on how Shakespeare was a Martian, in order that you can call him a buffoon and display that he was in fact from Neptune." Dr. Joe Blow has no right to say "you cannot use my two paragraphs in your contrary work." DCSA is not related in any way.
Er. Actually, micro- and macro-evolution are scientific concepts that predate this iteration of creationism significantly. They're not from ID any more than the term ubermensch came from the Nazis; it's just that it was an isolated concept which was brought to prevalence in a twisted form for political reasons. Micro-evolution is in fact a very real concept in the sciences. It's simply that because micro-evolution can be observed directly, the ID people knew they couldn't deny it directly, and have chosen to spin it as an unimportant side process, rather than small-scale evidence of the larger framework.
The biologist's definition of micro-evolution is "evolution at or below the species level," or more accessably, evolutionary changes which are not large enough to differentiate between species. Skin color in humans is an example of microevolution: it's a minor adaptation to the cold, and doesn't mean white people and black people can't interbreed. Straight hair is another (heat retention,) asian eyes still another (eye surface minimization.) Non-human exaples include the popular spotted rook example (rooks, a kind of crow which occupy in Britain the role that Pigeons do to Americans, were generally white because they were harder to see at a distance or against the sky for predators; when London went early-coal industrial, the species went nearly-black within five years, presumably because the soot made the black birds so much more difficult to find.)
Just because ID distorts the term doesn't mean it doesn't have a legitimate meaning.
Actually, it isn't. The bulk of the fans which care enough to do something like that already bought the entire series on DVD years ago for a sum total of $70. The perfect show to broach the topic of packet content provision shouldn't already be available in its entirety on a far cheaper, far more convenient medium.
And, um. Four dollars an episode? I wouldn't pay that for almost anything, and Futurama might very well be my favorite TV show ever.
The hell are you talking about? No Child Left Behind is a demographic accounting system to create standards of quality for teachers, so that problem teachers can be refined or removed. Saying "X% of the students must pass" doesn't give the schools incentive to lower the quality of their curriculum, because there's already a 50-year-old mandatory minimum. What that does is say "hey principal, get rid of that screwup chem teacher, or we're getting rid of you.
Make sure to do a lot of typing IN ALL CAPS. That way when you're caught with the SAME OLD TIRED RANT and a position of sanctimony as if YOU HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH OPPOSING THE US and as if you think AMERICANS DON'T KNOW WHAT BUSH DID UNTIL YOU TOLD US, nobody will think you're a PATHETIC WHINER DESPERATE TO SEEM CORRECT who's engineering his self esteem by spending FIVE YEARS BITCHING ABOUT A POLITICIAN'S ERROR.
An error, mind you, which not only isn't in fact all that bad - civilians are largely unaffected, and the kventching you're doing about utilities is just silly; besides, they just held free elections for the first time in 40 years, and that's worth a hell of a lot - but which would be being cheered globally if it hadn't been done under false pretenses.
Please keep this tired, tantrum-oriented condescention in the political threads where it belongs. Everybody's sick of Bush on both sides of the ocean. But, here's a hint: we're sick of you whiny anti-bush zealots, too. When you get bitched out for whining politics on Slashdot by a guy who runs an anti-bush store, it's time to fucking shut up.
Oh, and put a rock under your caps lock key. You look like a twelve year old.
HP wants to support HD-DVD because Windows Vista will have support for HD-DVD, but add-ons like Java will be required for Blu-ray. Microsoft won't ship Java with Windows Vista.
Luckily, since the stuff in question will be in the decoding hardware rather than in the software, Microsoft won't actually have to ship anything beyond drivers.
It's not often I get to chastize someone on Slashdot for having an excessively Microsoft-centric view of hardware. Today, folks, is such a day. Badbear! BAD.
Right, because consumers everywhere are copying DVDs to other mediums.
Actually, I've been doing exactly that ever since I got my Archos DV4100. With the recent advent of the Video iPod, that is only going to get more common as time goes on.
The primary limitation hasn't been inability, but rather the compelling reason to leave the relatively portable DVD. Now that hard drives are becoming cheap enough for portable players to not cost a corporate mint, that is a burgeoning reality.
Nonetheless, whether or not people are actually doing it is absolutely not the issue here, and that's the sort of semi-subtle shift of topic which the MPAA wants us to be making. The real issue here is whether we have the right to carry the DVD we bought on other formats. Hollywood wants us to say no, not because of piracy, but because of the cost of format turnover. Thanks to VHS and DVD, I've already bought half of my collection twice; some people have done more, through laserdisc or UMD or what have you. Now there's another disc format coming out, and we'll buy them again.
Hollywood can sneak in "protection" against your ability to maintain the value of your investment by restricting what you've purchased to a ridiculously narrow set of circumstances. Now, they've kept the restrictions somewhat at bay because if they go too overboard, people will realize what's going on.
That said, I remember vividly how several months ago my mother put a DVD into her computer, only to have the computer announce that it wasn't allowed to play the DVD because it wasn't able to acquire appropriate licensure. Granted I was able to repair the manufacturer-induced damage, most people cannot, and furthermore there's just no reason for that kind of crap. She paid for - well, okay, I paid for it, it was a gift, but - the DVD was legitimate and fully paid for, to be used in only one location. Why the hell should she be unable to play it on her computer in her downstairs office?
So, yes, it hasn't hit a huge boiling point yet, because the general populace is only just now discovering media-unbound video-caliber portable storage and viewing devices. The Video iPod will make this a very serious issue, very soon.
Re:GCC is important, but what about progress in C+
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 1
1) type inference and the 'auto' keyword, as it was suggested a while back.
This has been expected of c++0x for some years.
2) real garbage collection. It is not possible to have effective collection without support from the compiler.
Baloney. Several perfectly good portable snap-in garbage collectors are for sale on the open market. Don't confuse "not possible" with "nobody's done it for free yet." Besides, garbage collection behavior by needs must vary between devices with different architectural considerations; what would be right for a cellular phone would be a nightmare on a vector supercomputer, and vice versa. Pervasive garbage collection is anathema to a language whose focus is extreme portability. C and C++ have instead provided language-level modularization so that you can replace new, malloc and so on with your own mechanisms. If that's not good enough, then you need to hit the books.
3) a standard library that goes beyond collections, algorithms and files (and is based around garbage collection, mentioned above). We need gui, threads, sockets, XML, etc.
We must not have GUI, because user interface varies so wildly between machines that C and C++ are intended to target, including machines without user interface. Threads, sockets and XML are all already in Boost, the set of libraries developed specifically for consideration for inclusion into the C++SL and with a large membership reflecting the ISO/IEC standards committee.
The argument that it is too difficult to do it no longer holds
That was never the argument. The argument was and remains that there is no portable way to do such a thing without imposing a rigid ideal for user interface. C and C++ programmers who do embedded programming are frequently appalled by Java. If you've ever used J2ME in a situation where performance is important, you know exactly why this should never be done, and why things like BREW and Symbian fail so hard.
And I don't want to hear anyone say 'why don't you join GCC to do it yourself', because I have a full-time job working as a C++ programmer
So do the rest of us. Hell, I have two, and I make time for several OSS projects, a gaming community and my significant other. Besides, it's not as if implementing something in GCC makes it part of C/C++.
Predicting [Google's] next move seems nearly impossible. Microsoft on the other hand is a known quantity.
This sort of thinking has struck me as patently absurd for several years now. Google gets called ground-breaking for releasing things like webmail, an instant messenger, calculators that do base conversions, site price indexers and image spiders several years after someone else releases them, frequently with no major compelling benefits over the competition.
Google invented two things: a better page indexing mechanism, and a better advertising mechanism. If Microsoft released what Google released, you'd never know, because you're not watching them like hawks, slavering over whatever new DHTML toy they're going to throw out there. OMG, a web browser bar that lets you tap into data. What will they do next? A Wiki?
Other than the two things above, Google hasn't really outdone anyone on anything that matters. Google Talk is rudimentary compared to things like GAim, Trillian and Odigo. GMail is cute, but other than that it's AJAX (big whoop) and it does the kind of thread indexing we had in email/newsreaders 20 years ago, its only real claim to fame was Google dropping a bundle of cash on the storage. Google Earth is neat, except that again it's AJAX (boy howdy) and it's cute. TerraServer and other competitors were up years earlier. Google Maps is a cute overlay of MapQuest onto TerraServer. Google News is just a web-based newsreader stuck onto a big archive. I had something better at calculating than Google Calculator in DOS in the late 1980s; all it inspires is awe at the coolness of that it understands Douglas Adams quotes as universal constants. Their book scanning effort is just Project Gutenberg with a fat wallet. The first Froogle I saw was called PriceWatch, though there may have been earlier. If you can't see precedent for Google Accelerator, you don't remember pre-popup-blocking WWW. Various collaborations, such as SETI@Home and Find-a-Drug, as well as companies, notably including Sun and IBM, have already done Google Compute. Google Ride Finder used to be called Yellow Cab. Google Desktop was Java Desktop was GEOS. Google Groups was Yahoo Groups was EGroups was NetForums was majordomo. Google Local came up in lots of disparate pieces by industry; being a fat bastard my favorite was always food.com. Google Language was Babelfish. Personalized Home was every content-based portal, including AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, GEnie, old BBSes, even Netscape in its pre-ISP death. Hell, they even stole SlashDot's annual april fools' lie fest.
Don't get me wrong, they're a neat company. They do good things, they release cool stuff. But if you look at the list of things Google actually did, and ignore advertising and web searching, can you actually point out something Google did that neither Microsoft nor AOL did first? (Remember, AOL offered Usenet almost seven years before Google existed, among various other web services, so don't just see Microsoft and give up.)
You show me Google doing something like MSDN or Terrarium, and I'll be impressed (don't even pretend about Google Code.) Where are google's several free compilers? How about some free fonts? Subpixel anti-aliasing tools? How about comprehensive documentation on any subject, or a free online encyclopedia? (Well, with their by their standards small support of wikipedia, I guess you could argue they've done that.) Does Google give away any video games? Where's that free SQL engine again? What about that free text-to-speech stuff? Or hey, I know, how about a web browser? A major multimedia architecture? A huge network-oriented library architecture? An interface generation toolkit? An animation editor? How about the business center, the educational alliance, or the reference library? The home-schooling applications? The CRM? Maybe you could point out their online gaming network, their ergonomic hardware division, their UI research team, their tablet computing initiative or their pre
So what you're saying is, it's Nintendo's fault that your parents are too lazy to come up with a reasonably adequate password? These things aren't rocket science. Your parents, I assume, have a mac machine card. They have a dialup account. They have a password at the bank. They didn't let people into the secret fort without the password as kids. It's not like this is the first generation to have passwords. Ask your parents or grandparents what the phrase "shave and a haircut, six pence" actually means.
Look, Caesar understood crypto. This isn't rocket science. The only reason you could crack the TV password is that your parents didn't give enough of a shit to do a good job. "Intensive program of password cracking" is your phrase for trying numbers on a remote control? "Intelligent brute forcing" is how you describe "Okay, try 1111. No? Try 2222."
Honestly.
As long as adults don't care enough to protect their children with any effort, children with any effort will defeat adults. It has nothing to do with tech savvy. It's the same thing as crawling out your bedroom window when you're grounded, hiding pornography inbetween your bed mattresses, or putting the weed in the back corner of the closet behind your galoshes. You need to be vigilant to raise a child, or else the child will be vigilant for you. Kids are people; they're just as smart as adults. They're just not wise enough to know better than to play asphyxiation games, take drugs, play with guns or speed on the highway.
THAT'S WHY YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WATCH THEM. Once upon a time, parents went to jail for neglect. Now they just blame the TV manufacturers. "OMG my appliance isn't doing the parenting for me."
Ignorance, blame shifting and kneejerk criticism make me sad. The very second sentence on the front page of their website, accompanied by a fairly painfully obvious explanatory graphic:
ESRB ratings have two parts: rating symbols that suggest what age group the game is best for, and content descriptors that indicate elements in a game that may have triggered a particular rating and/or may be of interest or concern.
The image in question (since I obviously can't embed it): Embedded rating example. The example in question has the flags "cartoon violence" and "mild lyrics," which maker it obvious that they go into significantly more detail than you're whining that they somehow don't do. In fact they rate five distinct kinds of violence, use of and reference to drugs as seperate concerns, then also use of and reference to tobacco, and use of and reference to alcohol, so that you can pretend the drugs you use in front of them aren't actually drugs. In fact, they even note that some games can add end-user content, which should stop nonsense like the hot coffee mod, if asshat parents like you would bother to read the manual. The system rates 32 distinct topics outside of their general rating, including five distinct of one and six distinct of the other things you chose to moan and wail about.
The one on the front has to be relatively small, so that the marketers can make the box pretty, so it will sell well. All you have to do is look at the back. Oooh, that's difficult.
Then again, it's not like I'd expect much in the way of research on the topic from the sort of parent who expects the machine to validate the content that their child will be playing, given that what you're doing is rejecting researching what your child does with their life. While you might want to blame Nintendo for not watching your kids, maybe you should consider doing some, what's it called again, parenting. I seriously hope you rethink this.
You're already complaining that a ratings system doesn't do enough, when in fact it does what you want; did it occur to you to check the protection mechanisms you're relying on to ward your offspring for you? All you had to do was load esrb.com, and you might have gained a clue. Or, y'know, looked at one of the ratings. Or asked a store clerk. Or hell, even used common sense. I mean, since theater movies don't allow you this kind of control, nor bookstores, nor magazine subscriptions, then shame on Nintendo for doing more than any other media channel except TV that you're not bothering to watch for your kid, right?
Seriously, shame on people who want entertainment companies to raise their kids for them. (Then again, you think violence is better for a child than the natural process that made them, so it's not like your priorities are straight in the first place.)
It's hard to have sympathy for the parents complaining how they get blindsided by media content when it's obvious that they haven't made the first attempt to even check what content is in the media. It's on the fucking box. The machine checks it for you. What more do you need, a robot to come with the game and nag you until you ratify the content explicitly?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the fallacy of the comparison is
It's a falsehood, not a fallacy. They're very different things, and cannot be used exchangably. The falsehood is that the several OSes are equivalent and may be lumped together. Given that there is no argument being made, no fallacy is possible at all.
Wow, and only two years after the first DS coding tutorials came out. Pre-emptive strike to those who point out that the system's only a year and a half old: I know. We had tutorials, largely correct, as well as a toolchain and nearly-functional binaries, almost six months before the hardware actually came to market.
The PSP homebrew scene? Meh.
Well, in the theme of hair splittery,
Scientists Witness Moon Meteor Strike
But who's counting?
Actually, it's
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Little known fact.
(Le sigh. In order to defeat the repetition filter from ruining my joke,
What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Why do we use it?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham. Where can I get some?
There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.
paragraphs
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Donat
Bzzt. The person to whom you're replying is in fact quite correct. Using the word decimate in any sense other than to destroy a tenth of is a signator of a low quality of education.
In fact, I'd venture to say that perhaps one native English speaker in a hundred is even aware of the other definition, and that your post just sounds really weird to the other 99.
Are you really attempting to argue that the word decimate's meaning is anything other than painfully obvious? If so, your grasp of the language isn't really strong enough to be criticizing other people, much less to the degree of challenging whether or not someone else speaks it as a first language.
You strike me as the sort of person who attempts to defend bad definitions of irony just because it's what they grew up with. Here's a hint: ignorance is not linguistic drift, and just because you hang out with ignorami who don't know how to speak using words in a proper fashion doesn't mean that the language has changed to suit you.
Before you get off onto some predictable rant about how language changes and how anything you and your buddies do wrongly is a reflection of progress in English, please take some classes on linguistics. It turns out that generations tend to have mistakes which neither their parents nor their children reflect. Your dad almost certainly doesn't make the mistake with the word decimate that you do; it's a foul error that the media started making in the early 1980s, around the same time they bollocksed up the words indicted, alleged and translucent.
Please stop feigning a deep familiarity with English; it ain't there. That you (claim to) make a living writing suggests to me that either your editor is desperately overworked or appallingly underskilled.
Speciation is the result of macroevolution. People have a tendency to think of evolution as a one-directional thing; I often retreat to old Jack Kirby comic books, where there was a character with a ray-gun who would evolve you on the spot to the highest peak of your particular genetic code. Problem is, evolution doesn't work that way. It's a cluster of small changes which eventually find complimentary locusses and adaptive maxima which can successfully exploit their environment.
... no, wait. Well, you get the idea.
Consider the relatively silly example of the Chinese Land Octopus. Ask your Chinese friend; if they're cool, they'll keep a straight face and tell you it's a real animal, and I'll mail them a crispy dollar. The Chinese Land Octopus went into the deep Chinese forests, and adapted to a very different environment. Some decreased their size to get through the underbrush more effectively, creating the Chinese Midget Octopod. Some decreased their body size but greatly increased their tentacle size, allowing them to swing through the trees, resulting in the Nanking Arboreal Monkeysquid. Still others got into the streams, and thanks to the nearby nuclear plant developed a limb doubling, allowing them to more effectively trap individual fish in rock corrals in turbulence eddies, from where we get the famous hexadecipus.
Now, this is all obvious to anyone fond of the broad family of chinese land cephalopods. However, what people tend to forget is that evolution isn't all benefits. There were a bunch of birth defects in there, some unimportant, some crippling, many even fatal. Some changes were steps back, instead of steps forward; consider the dodecapus. Still others were contrarian - the midget octopod and the monkeysquid can still breed, but since the longer tentacles of the monkeysquid make it hard to get through the underbrush, and the general decreased size of the midget octopod mean the tentacles won't reach branches either, that means a midget octosquid (the hybrid offspring of the other two, kind of like a Liger, a Zorse, a Wolphin or Dick Cheney) cannot exist in either arena and will therefore starve to death.
Speciation is difficult to nail down. The general dividing line is when two animals have changed do the degree that they no longer associate directly and are difficult or impossible to breed (in most cases, hybrids are sterile, though sometimes they aren't - typically males are reproductively far more fragile than females, and in most hybrid species where only one gender can mate it's nearly always the female.)
By the way, the example I gave is sympatrism - speciation in a single location due to divergent population pressures (some went for the underbrush, some the trees, and some back to the water.) There are other speciation mechanics; the other two big ones are allopatrism (drift because of isolation, such as eye color among humans, where in different regions different colors are the commonality, even though it serves no apparent evolutionary advantage) and parapatrism (where two populations are partially seperated, such as through behavioral characteristics, and progressively diverge despite overlap because of decreasing cross-fertility.)
As far as all believers of creationism being the same, they aren't. Whereas I'm not religious, one of the people I look up to simple casts the physical universe as seen by scientists as God's plan. That belief has the neat side effect of being absolutely unassailable by science; it's absolutely different than Intelligent Design, which is largely a political platform, and has conceptual holes an eight year old would be embarrassed by.
Surprisingly to some, you can be religious, believe in one of the holy books near-verbatim, and still be a scientist. Before you laugh, consider whether you revere Knuth; he's one of those. The God of my God is
Whereas you're entirely right to suggest a car is more dangerous than a computer in the hands of the non-functional, it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that skillless use of a computer isn't a real threat. Identity theft is a very real problem, a very real result of being conned online, and since it happened to my aunt, I can tell you firmly that it takes years and thousands of dollars to clear up. Hell, even if you get all your money back, you're still out a mint on lawyers, filing fees, time spent, grief, higher interest while you're waiting, et cetera.
Honestly, sometimes that identity insurance they started advertising lately has begun to seem very tempting. I'm not at risk on my computer, but I got dumpster dove once; I was damned lucky to catch it by coincidence, because I was in the middle of moving and one of the things they tried to get me on were utility bills.
Neither J2ME nor embedded average more than 23 meg per device,
Typo. That's supposed to say 2 meg.
As even a 'smallish box' these days is more than 128MB, memory really is not going to be a problem at all.
Amusingly, Java's three strongest positions are the portable market (J2ME,) followed by the server market (EJB,) followed by the embedded market (microcontrollers, especially with the upcoming blu-ray deployment.) Neither J2ME nor embedded average more than 23 meg per device, and for servers where parallelism is a serious issue, the smallest possible memory footprint is desirable.
For thirty years people have attempted to hand-wave away bloat with "modern" computing power. With age you will discover that it's not the ceiling so much as the margin that's important. Yes, you can use a language which requires 300% overhead, and for lots of things that's okay. But, in industry, where RAND suggests almost m80% of software is actually developed, the cruel reality is that your 300% overhead means that your competition can do four times as much on the same machine. Whereas that may not be important for a word processor, that's hella important to simulators, aggregators, data mining, and the sort of large-scale tasks that dominate real-world developer time.
There are dozens of higher level languages than Java and dozens of faster languages than Java, all of which predate Java. Java's strength comes not in its speed, but in its low cost of binary portable redevelopment (hence its near-complete redomination of the cell phone world as previously taken wholesale by Symbian and BREW.) Java's "high performance" is a myth; you guys seem to think that C++ is the only speed candidate, when code written in Forth, K, Structure and portable assembly (for some tasks) tend to blow the doors off of both.
There's a reason Java never took C++ out of the industrial performance market. It has nothing to do with actual performance; that's why C++ took over from FORTRAN even though FORTRAN is essentially faster, and why other languages never took over from C++ despite having relatively complete support libraries. Java is a spectacular example of what a language needs to do to not fail to defeat C++, because Java did everything but one thing.
The fundamental problem is reliability. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to hammer this into a Java programmer's head, because the first thing you want to say is "Java doesn't have exceptions," at which point the Java programmer absolutely shits themselves, because a third of their language revolves around handling these things called exceptions. The problem is, Java exceptions are an error propogation and handling mechanism, and they're so visually similar to C++ exceptions that it's just dental work and a half to get a Java programmer to believe they're not the same thing (especially since the number of people who came into the occupation was so huge during the dot com boom, when Java was big money central, and so since they've migrated into C++ they're using C++ exceptions the way Java programmers use the word, and since there are as a result so many glaringly badbear uses on the intarweb, where it seems all Java programmers learn their trade.)
Exceptions in C++ are a very different thing than they are in Java. Properly used, exceptions in C++ are used to handle situations like "hey, where did my disk drive disappear to," or CPU panic conditions. Exceptions in C++ are a last ditch holy shit maneuver to save the information when the moon crashes into the data center. Exceptions in C++ are for ghastly aberrant situations, such as failing hardware, not to handle sloppy programmer problems.
Of course, I shall receive ten counters from people dredging up code on sites full of badbearery such as geoshitties, codeproject and msdn (to all the peanut-gallery screamers, there's void main() all over MSDN, and if you don't know why that should make you shut up, you're not qualified to comment on quality c++ source and you need to stop reading Herb Schildt books) pointing out egregiously bad uses of exceptions in defense of
I think "verbatim quoting" is a tautology
Nope, on two seperate grounds.
1) The etymology of "quote" goes from Old Latin "quot" how many conjugated "quotus" which from a sequence to medieval Latin "quotare" to distinguish by numbers; enumerate (esp. as chapters), then old French "coter" (same meaning,) then into middle English as "quote" to mark a book with chapters or references in margins. Those marginal references are the quotes, not the things in the book; it means citation, not transcription. Quotes are by default paraphrases. This is why one hears the phrases precise quote and exact quote. Granted it's a bit silly to use the word verbatin, which is middle Latin, with the word quote, whose meaning has change since middle Latin - its old meaning wouldn't make sense - but a quote, though often expected due to journalist's zealous misuse of the word (qv 'alleged') to be expected to be precise, is not denotatively required to be word for word.
2) A tautology is an argument; this is an internally self-supporting phrasing. The word you're looking for is "redundant." Tautologies are arguments which are true by the nature of their construction; they're generally either accidental, crafty ways to support circular reasoning, or silly. Using reasoning to prove that black people have darker skin than white people would be tautological if one used characteristics of the skin itself to make the proof, given that the distinction between the skins is originally drawn on the characteristic being used as a target providence. Lots of reasoning used to "prove" things based on character arguments or prejudicial arguments is tautological, relying in some inobvious fashion on one of the conclusions as a critical supporting argument. Oddly, I also saw a mathematician use this term on a strikingly inobvious transformation of an equation - the transformation was so dramatically different and useful in such a different way that the mathematician had to in fact display that they were the same thing, and to refer to that as a tautology seems strange, if accurate and defensible.
By the way, the DCSA has nothing whatsoever to do with fair use. The DCSA is an attempt to prevent archival and media retrofit. It's a completely different set of rights than fair use, which has to do with the use of a fragment of someone else's work within your own - media, journalism, sampling in music (especially rap and techno,) quotes in rebuttal, references in derivative journal work, et cetera. Fair use is about the law saying "yes, you may put those two paragraphs from Dr. Joe Blow's thesis on how Shakespeare was a Martian, in order that you can call him a buffoon and display that he was in fact from Neptune." Dr. Joe Blow has no right to say "you cannot use my two paragraphs in your contrary work." DCSA is not related in any way.
Er. Actually, micro- and macro-evolution are scientific concepts that predate this iteration of creationism significantly. They're not from ID any more than the term ubermensch came from the Nazis; it's just that it was an isolated concept which was brought to prevalence in a twisted form for political reasons. Micro-evolution is in fact a very real concept in the sciences. It's simply that because micro-evolution can be observed directly, the ID people knew they couldn't deny it directly, and have chosen to spin it as an unimportant side process, rather than small-scale evidence of the larger framework.
The biologist's definition of micro-evolution is "evolution at or below the species level," or more accessably, evolutionary changes which are not large enough to differentiate between species. Skin color in humans is an example of microevolution: it's a minor adaptation to the cold, and doesn't mean white people and black people can't interbreed. Straight hair is another (heat retention,) asian eyes still another (eye surface minimization.) Non-human exaples include the popular spotted rook example (rooks, a kind of crow which occupy in Britain the role that Pigeons do to Americans, were generally white because they were harder to see at a distance or against the sky for predators; when London went early-coal industrial, the species went nearly-black within five years, presumably because the soot made the black birds so much more difficult to find.)
Just because ID distorts the term doesn't mean it doesn't have a legitimate meaning.
Actually, it isn't. The bulk of the fans which care enough to do something like that already bought the entire series on DVD years ago for a sum total of $70. The perfect show to broach the topic of packet content provision shouldn't already be available in its entirety on a far cheaper, far more convenient medium.
And, um. Four dollars an episode? I wouldn't pay that for almost anything, and Futurama might very well be my favorite TV show ever.
Or maybe we're tired of the last decade of Simpson style jokes set in different places
Or maybe we aren't. You've got other channels. Use them. Don't take futurama away.
"Mandatory minimum curriculum," I meant to say. Whoops.
The hell are you talking about? No Child Left Behind is a demographic accounting system to create standards of quality for teachers, so that problem teachers can be refined or removed. Saying "X% of the students must pass" doesn't give the schools incentive to lower the quality of their curriculum, because there's already a 50-year-old mandatory minimum. What that does is say "hey principal, get rid of that screwup chem teacher, or we're getting rid of you.
Standards were raised, not lowered.
Seriously, if they to do cryogenics
Hold on, I'm packing the fridge now.
Make sure to do a lot of typing IN ALL CAPS. That way when you're caught with the SAME OLD TIRED RANT and a position of sanctimony as if YOU HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH OPPOSING THE US and as if you think AMERICANS DON'T KNOW WHAT BUSH DID UNTIL YOU TOLD US, nobody will think you're a PATHETIC WHINER DESPERATE TO SEEM CORRECT who's engineering his self esteem by spending FIVE YEARS BITCHING ABOUT A POLITICIAN'S ERROR.
An error, mind you, which not only isn't in fact all that bad - civilians are largely unaffected, and the kventching you're doing about utilities is just silly; besides, they just held free elections for the first time in 40 years, and that's worth a hell of a lot - but which would be being cheered globally if it hadn't been done under false pretenses.
Please keep this tired, tantrum-oriented condescention in the political threads where it belongs. Everybody's sick of Bush on both sides of the ocean. But, here's a hint: we're sick of you whiny anti-bush zealots, too. When you get bitched out for whining politics on Slashdot by a guy who runs an anti-bush store, it's time to fucking shut up.
Oh, and put a rock under your caps lock key. You look like a twelve year old.
HP wants to support HD-DVD because Windows Vista will have support for HD-DVD, but add-ons like Java will be required for Blu-ray. Microsoft won't ship Java with Windows Vista.
Luckily, since the stuff in question will be in the decoding hardware rather than in the software, Microsoft won't actually have to ship anything beyond drivers.
It's not often I get to chastize someone on Slashdot for having an excessively Microsoft-centric view of hardware. Today, folks, is such a day. Badbear! BAD.
Right, because consumers everywhere are copying DVDs to other mediums.
Actually, I've been doing exactly that ever since I got my Archos DV4100. With the recent advent of the Video iPod, that is only going to get more common as time goes on.
The primary limitation hasn't been inability, but rather the compelling reason to leave the relatively portable DVD. Now that hard drives are becoming cheap enough for portable players to not cost a corporate mint, that is a burgeoning reality.
Nonetheless, whether or not people are actually doing it is absolutely not the issue here, and that's the sort of semi-subtle shift of topic which the MPAA wants us to be making. The real issue here is whether we have the right to carry the DVD we bought on other formats. Hollywood wants us to say no, not because of piracy, but because of the cost of format turnover. Thanks to VHS and DVD, I've already bought half of my collection twice; some people have done more, through laserdisc or UMD or what have you. Now there's another disc format coming out, and we'll buy them again.
Hollywood can sneak in "protection" against your ability to maintain the value of your investment by restricting what you've purchased to a ridiculously narrow set of circumstances. Now, they've kept the restrictions somewhat at bay because if they go too overboard, people will realize what's going on.
That said, I remember vividly how several months ago my mother put a DVD into her computer, only to have the computer announce that it wasn't allowed to play the DVD because it wasn't able to acquire appropriate licensure. Granted I was able to repair the manufacturer-induced damage, most people cannot, and furthermore there's just no reason for that kind of crap. She paid for - well, okay, I paid for it, it was a gift, but - the DVD was legitimate and fully paid for, to be used in only one location. Why the hell should she be unable to play it on her computer in her downstairs office?
So, yes, it hasn't hit a huge boiling point yet, because the general populace is only just now discovering media-unbound video-caliber portable storage and viewing devices. The Video iPod will make this a very serious issue, very soon.
1) type inference and the 'auto' keyword, as it was suggested a while back.
This has been expected of c++0x for some years.
2) real garbage collection. It is not possible to have effective collection without support from the compiler.
Baloney. Several perfectly good portable snap-in garbage collectors are for sale on the open market. Don't confuse "not possible" with "nobody's done it for free yet." Besides, garbage collection behavior by needs must vary between devices with different architectural considerations; what would be right for a cellular phone would be a nightmare on a vector supercomputer, and vice versa. Pervasive garbage collection is anathema to a language whose focus is extreme portability. C and C++ have instead provided language-level modularization so that you can replace new, malloc and so on with your own mechanisms. If that's not good enough, then you need to hit the books.
3) a standard library that goes beyond collections, algorithms and files (and is based around garbage collection, mentioned above). We need gui, threads, sockets, XML, etc.
We must not have GUI, because user interface varies so wildly between machines that C and C++ are intended to target, including machines without user interface. Threads, sockets and XML are all already in Boost, the set of libraries developed specifically for consideration for inclusion into the C++SL and with a large membership reflecting the ISO/IEC standards committee.
The argument that it is too difficult to do it no longer holds
That was never the argument. The argument was and remains that there is no portable way to do such a thing without imposing a rigid ideal for user interface. C and C++ programmers who do embedded programming are frequently appalled by Java. If you've ever used J2ME in a situation where performance is important, you know exactly why this should never be done, and why things like BREW and Symbian fail so hard.
And I don't want to hear anyone say 'why don't you join GCC to do it yourself', because I have a full-time job working as a C++ programmer
So do the rest of us. Hell, I have two, and I make time for several OSS projects, a gaming community and my significant other. Besides, it's not as if implementing something in GCC makes it part of C/C++.
Predicting [Google's] next move seems nearly impossible. Microsoft on the other hand is a known quantity.
This sort of thinking has struck me as patently absurd for several years now. Google gets called ground-breaking for releasing things like webmail, an instant messenger, calculators that do base conversions, site price indexers and image spiders several years after someone else releases them, frequently with no major compelling benefits over the competition.
Google invented two things: a better page indexing mechanism, and a better advertising mechanism. If Microsoft released what Google released, you'd never know, because you're not watching them like hawks, slavering over whatever new DHTML toy they're going to throw out there. OMG, a web browser bar that lets you tap into data. What will they do next? A Wiki?
Other than the two things above, Google hasn't really outdone anyone on anything that matters. Google Talk is rudimentary compared to things like GAim, Trillian and Odigo. GMail is cute, but other than that it's AJAX (big whoop) and it does the kind of thread indexing we had in email/newsreaders 20 years ago, its only real claim to fame was Google dropping a bundle of cash on the storage. Google Earth is neat, except that again it's AJAX (boy howdy) and it's cute. TerraServer and other competitors were up years earlier. Google Maps is a cute overlay of MapQuest onto TerraServer. Google News is just a web-based newsreader stuck onto a big archive. I had something better at calculating than Google Calculator in DOS in the late 1980s; all it inspires is awe at the coolness of that it understands Douglas Adams quotes as universal constants. Their book scanning effort is just Project Gutenberg with a fat wallet. The first Froogle I saw was called PriceWatch, though there may have been earlier. If you can't see precedent for Google Accelerator, you don't remember pre-popup-blocking WWW. Various collaborations, such as SETI@Home and Find-a-Drug, as well as companies, notably including Sun and IBM, have already done Google Compute. Google Ride Finder used to be called Yellow Cab. Google Desktop was Java Desktop was GEOS. Google Groups was Yahoo Groups was EGroups was NetForums was majordomo. Google Local came up in lots of disparate pieces by industry; being a fat bastard my favorite was always food.com. Google Language was Babelfish. Personalized Home was every content-based portal, including AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, GEnie, old BBSes, even Netscape in its pre-ISP death. Hell, they even stole SlashDot's annual april fools' lie fest.
Don't get me wrong, they're a neat company. They do good things, they release cool stuff. But if you look at the list of things Google actually did, and ignore advertising and web searching, can you actually point out something Google did that neither Microsoft nor AOL did first? (Remember, AOL offered Usenet almost seven years before Google existed, among various other web services, so don't just see Microsoft and give up.)
You show me Google doing something like MSDN or Terrarium, and I'll be impressed (don't even pretend about Google Code.) Where are google's several free compilers? How about some free fonts? Subpixel anti-aliasing tools? How about comprehensive documentation on any subject, or a free online encyclopedia? (Well, with their by their standards small support of wikipedia, I guess you could argue they've done that.) Does Google give away any video games? Where's that free SQL engine again? What about that free text-to-speech stuff? Or hey, I know, how about a web browser? A major multimedia architecture? A huge network-oriented library architecture? An interface generation toolkit? An animation editor? How about the business center, the educational alliance, or the reference library? The home-schooling applications? The CRM? Maybe you could point out their online gaming network, their ergonomic hardware division, their UI research team, their tablet computing initiative or their pre
You can't philosophically be a subset of something you don't philosophically agree with.
Never met a catholic, a post-Reagan republican, a neo-nazi or an existential realist?
Hell, creation scientists do it twice.
So what you're saying is, it's Nintendo's fault that your parents are too lazy to come up with a reasonably adequate password? These things aren't rocket science. Your parents, I assume, have a mac machine card. They have a dialup account. They have a password at the bank. They didn't let people into the secret fort without the password as kids. It's not like this is the first generation to have passwords. Ask your parents or grandparents what the phrase "shave and a haircut, six pence" actually means.
Look, Caesar understood crypto. This isn't rocket science. The only reason you could crack the TV password is that your parents didn't give enough of a shit to do a good job. "Intensive program of password cracking" is your phrase for trying numbers on a remote control? "Intelligent brute forcing" is how you describe "Okay, try 1111. No? Try 2222."
Honestly.
As long as adults don't care enough to protect their children with any effort, children with any effort will defeat adults. It has nothing to do with tech savvy. It's the same thing as crawling out your bedroom window when you're grounded, hiding pornography inbetween your bed mattresses, or putting the weed in the back corner of the closet behind your galoshes. You need to be vigilant to raise a child, or else the child will be vigilant for you. Kids are people; they're just as smart as adults. They're just not wise enough to know better than to play asphyxiation games, take drugs, play with guns or speed on the highway.
THAT'S WHY YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WATCH THEM. Once upon a time, parents went to jail for neglect. Now they just blame the TV manufacturers. "OMG my appliance isn't doing the parenting for me."
Your allowed-to-play-M-rated-games test is hereby rated M for mature.
Ignorance, blame shifting and kneejerk criticism make me sad. The very second sentence on the front page of their website, accompanied by a fairly painfully obvious explanatory graphic:
ESRB ratings have two parts: rating symbols that suggest what age group the game is best for, and content descriptors that indicate elements in a game that may have triggered a particular rating and/or may be of interest or concern.
The image in question (since I obviously can't embed it): Embedded rating example. The example in question has the flags "cartoon violence" and "mild lyrics," which maker it obvious that they go into significantly more detail than you're whining that they somehow don't do. In fact they rate five distinct kinds of violence, use of and reference to drugs as seperate concerns, then also use of and reference to tobacco, and use of and reference to alcohol, so that you can pretend the drugs you use in front of them aren't actually drugs. In fact, they even note that some games can add end-user content, which should stop nonsense like the hot coffee mod, if asshat parents like you would bother to read the manual. The system rates 32 distinct topics outside of their general rating, including five distinct of one and six distinct of the other things you chose to moan and wail about.
The one on the front has to be relatively small, so that the marketers can make the box pretty, so it will sell well. All you have to do is look at the back. Oooh, that's difficult.
Then again, it's not like I'd expect much in the way of research on the topic from the sort of parent who expects the machine to validate the content that their child will be playing, given that what you're doing is rejecting researching what your child does with their life. While you might want to blame Nintendo for not watching your kids, maybe you should consider doing some, what's it called again, parenting. I seriously hope you rethink this.
You're already complaining that a ratings system doesn't do enough, when in fact it does what you want; did it occur to you to check the protection mechanisms you're relying on to ward your offspring for you? All you had to do was load esrb.com, and you might have gained a clue. Or, y'know, looked at one of the ratings. Or asked a store clerk. Or hell, even used common sense. I mean, since theater movies don't allow you this kind of control, nor bookstores, nor magazine subscriptions, then shame on Nintendo for doing more than any other media channel except TV that you're not bothering to watch for your kid, right?
Seriously, shame on people who want entertainment companies to raise their kids for them. (Then again, you think violence is better for a child than the natural process that made them, so it's not like your priorities are straight in the first place.)
It's hard to have sympathy for the parents complaining how they get blindsided by media content when it's obvious that they haven't made the first attempt to even check what content is in the media. It's on the fucking box. The machine checks it for you. What more do you need, a robot to come with the game and nag you until you ratify the content explicitly?
What happened to parental responsibility?