All that matters is the odds. The odds that Valve will be a problem are far less than the odds that my physical media will be a problem (I move often), so for me it's easy. It's not like games are priceless treasures, after all, and if Steam somehow manages to lose my entire collection I'll shrug and move on.
Of course, I buy everything I can find of interest on GoG, but that's a very limited selection.
The budgets for the early Doctor Whos was incredibly tiny. I suspect most kickstarted indie SF effort would laugh and walk away at the modern equivalent of those budgets. Heck, for the most part they didn't even have editing - the scenes were shot "as live" and scenes with only minor errors went out the way they were shot. And yet many of them were more interesting than the modern CGI effects fest. There was certainly some magic happening at the BBC back then, but it had noting at all to do with how it was funded.
Say what? Are we so far gone now that we confuse "SF" and "effects movie". There's not a single SF movie in thse top 10. Even "Gravity" belongs in the same bucket as "Titanic": a fictionalized historical adventure with good effects, only with a more recent kind of ship.
No one knows what John Carter was: it certainly wasn't "hard core allegiance" to any book. OTOH, the "Hunger games" movies stick as close to the books as time permits and seem to do quite well, since the books were pretty good YA action/drama stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy other fiction genres, but SF is a specific genre that rarely makes it to the screen in America. I re-watching Bab5 right now for the Nth time, as there's so little else to watch when I'm in the mood for SF.
I should add that Euler did actually invent a bunch of notation as he went along (a lot of modern notation, like f(x) for a function, is due to his textbooks). But much of his notation was his alone, and typically his notation came after a lot of work in a given area. Had he started with modern notation, the field would be a different place.
Euler discovered most of 20th century mathematics, but he didn't have modern notation, nor modern proof structure. While there were people working hard to translate his work into modern notation and make his proofs formal, people working from scratch usually made better progress.
So while he discovered a big chunk of all the math that would be discovered in the next several decades, for the most part he wasn't the basis for that new work, because he lacked good notation. Good notation is that powerful - had Euler written as modern mathematicians do, the field would likely be 30-50 years beyond where it is today. But he mostly wrote in natural language augmented with jargon, and so his amazing genius could not be properly communicated.
The hard part is clearly, unambiguously describing the solution to the problem at hand. English is a crappy language for that (legalese and standardese are harder to read than code). The easy part is expressing your clear thoughts in a formal language. Seriously, if you can't get past the fact that you need a formal language, you'll never be writing non-trivial programs - you've high-centered on the easy part and haven't even gotten to the hard part.
There's one tried and true way to create a computer program to solve your problem without learning to code: hire a programmer. Even then, you'll likely discover that you lack the ability to even explain the problem clearly and unambiguously.
Gray markets are a real problem though. People in the US already buy drugs from India, and someone has to pay for drug research. (Of course, a true communist would reply: it will be free, because taxes will pay for it.)
That's like buying an automobile dealership to get a new car. Sure, it will have some limited success, but just like Game of Thrones: when your customers are shouting shut up and take my money, best to do so.
Sure, sure, but the assumption here is that people would actually give NBC more money if NBC had, get this, a way for customers to give NBC money for NBC's product. Complicated idea, I know, but I think it works.
Wow. I hate to be the guy asking "why is this on Slashdot", but WTF? This is a purely political click-trolling story. This is not what Slashdot is for.
You know, I'm actually OK with the blatant Slashvertisements, as long as they're geek-interest products. Man's got to pay the bills; I understand. But this pure-political story BS needs to stop!
Does NBC give you a way to pay to stream all their coverage from their web site? Watching broadcast television is what we did in the 20th century - in this century we stream stuff on the internet.
I don't think it's the government's job to require NBC to sell products. If NBC doesn't want to get money by selling streaming options, that's not the government's business.
I do think it's the Olympic committee's business. They're the ones who should be requiring NBC to provide live internet coverage (for a fee) as part of their exclusive deal. And it's probably just an oversight that they didn't - practical live streaming internet coverage is still new-ish, and I can believe the market for it hasn't quite sunk in with the older generation who generally makes these sorts of decisions.
And correct me if I'm wrong, didn't the UI go through a major revision 6-7 years ago - what we're now calling/. classic?
Most of that change, other than some CSS, is optional. Other than the rounded corners on the green bars, and the nav column on the left,/. looks just the same for me as it always did. I browse comments with no JavaScripty features at all, just like the original.
I'd have no problem at all with Beta being offered as an option! I'd opt out of the changes, just as I did with the first round, and be content. But that's not the path they've chosen.
I'm much more optimistic than you. Most local governments seem to be fixing their budgets at the last possible moment when they can't possibly continue, rather than going bankrupt as Detroit did. It's really only the federal government that seems to have sailed off the cliff and just not cared. Since I don't think the federal government actually does much that's important, I think we'll survive federal collapse-and-reboot on the strength of local governments.
Anthrax is always less damaging than the same amount of traditional explosive, just so you know. Most chemical attacks are the same way. If your goal is to damage instead of merely frighten, those sorts of weapons are poor (which is why we've dropped them from our arsenals - heck, almost every weapon banned by treaty is there because it's not very effective).
The "scud" is certainly a missile, but its targeting is poor enough in practice that it might as well be a rocket. There are a lot of early cold war missiles like that - designed to target a city, not a building.
Sure, we could imagine such a threat one day, an it would be awesome to have a defense against it. But given our current foreign policy, it seems much more likely we'll be attacked by some minor dictator who simply isn't deterred by threat of retaliation, for lack of any concern for the citizens of his nation. That's certainly the fights we've been picking in the last decade or so, anyhow. So yes, defense against symmetric threats is great, but defense against weaker opponents is still good.
The right way to determine "as little government as we can get away with and still maintain order"? Is to reduce the size of government bit by bit until it actually starts to be a problem. Of course, you can't do that, because the moment you reduce a local budget by $5/year the government responds "well, we'll just have to fire all the teachers and policemen to make the budget work", basically holding the taxpayers hostage to pad the roles of administrative personnel and (in most places) really nice office buildings to work in.
Thus, cash re-asserts itself as a convenience for mediating barter. There will always be a need for that (just as there will always be a need for/. classic).
To me that's right on the border *if* the language didn't include a math library. If the devs working on the code would know at a glance that it was a correct implementation, and it didn't need optimization, then I'd say dragging in the library was unnecessary. If it would confuse, or we'd care about the performance, then I'd drag in the library, but now I'd have a justification for doing so.
The only libraries that are free are the ones that come with the language. Re-implementing the language standard library is bad, but any third party library is a non-trivial cost.
GNAA trolling was fixed a long time ago. I've always browsed at -1, (having liked the site fine before there were mods) and haven't seen an ASCII-art goatse for years.
Fixing the mycleanpc one would be good though, just like they smacked down the page wideners all those years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
All that matters is the odds. The odds that Valve will be a problem are far less than the odds that my physical media will be a problem (I move often), so for me it's easy. It's not like games are priceless treasures, after all, and if Steam somehow manages to lose my entire collection I'll shrug and move on.
Of course, I buy everything I can find of interest on GoG, but that's a very limited selection.
The budgets for the early Doctor Whos was incredibly tiny. I suspect most kickstarted indie SF effort would laugh and walk away at the modern equivalent of those budgets. Heck, for the most part they didn't even have editing - the scenes were shot "as live" and scenes with only minor errors went out the way they were shot. And yet many of them were more interesting than the modern CGI effects fest. There was certainly some magic happening at the BBC back then, but it had noting at all to do with how it was funded.
Say what? Are we so far gone now that we confuse "SF" and "effects movie". There's not a single SF movie in thse top 10. Even "Gravity" belongs in the same bucket as "Titanic": a fictionalized historical adventure with good effects, only with a more recent kind of ship.
No one knows what John Carter was: it certainly wasn't "hard core allegiance" to any book. OTOH, the "Hunger games" movies stick as close to the books as time permits and seem to do quite well, since the books were pretty good YA action/drama stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy other fiction genres, but SF is a specific genre that rarely makes it to the screen in America. I re-watching Bab5 right now for the Nth time, as there's so little else to watch when I'm in the mood for SF.
I should add that Euler did actually invent a bunch of notation as he went along (a lot of modern notation, like f(x) for a function, is due to his textbooks). But much of his notation was his alone, and typically his notation came after a lot of work in a given area. Had he started with modern notation, the field would be a different place.
Euler discovered most of 20th century mathematics, but he didn't have modern notation, nor modern proof structure. While there were people working hard to translate his work into modern notation and make his proofs formal, people working from scratch usually made better progress.
So while he discovered a big chunk of all the math that would be discovered in the next several decades, for the most part he wasn't the basis for that new work, because he lacked good notation. Good notation is that powerful - had Euler written as modern mathematicians do, the field would likely be 30-50 years beyond where it is today. But he mostly wrote in natural language augmented with jargon, and so his amazing genius could not be properly communicated.
</b>
The hard part is clearly, unambiguously describing the solution to the problem at hand. English is a crappy language for that (legalese and standardese are harder to read than code). The easy part is expressing your clear thoughts in a formal language. Seriously, if you can't get past the fact that you need a formal language, you'll never be writing non-trivial programs - you've high-centered on the easy part and haven't even gotten to the hard part.
There's one tried and true way to create a computer program to solve your problem without learning to code: hire a programmer. Even then, you'll likely discover that you lack the ability to even explain the problem clearly and unambiguously.
Gray markets are a real problem though. People in the US already buy drugs from India, and someone has to pay for drug research. (Of course, a true communist would reply: it will be free, because taxes will pay for it.)
That's like buying an automobile dealership to get a new car. Sure, it will have some limited success, but just like Game of Thrones: when your customers are shouting shut up and take my money, best to do so.
Sure, sure, but the assumption here is that people would actually give NBC more money if NBC had, get this, a way for customers to give NBC money for NBC's product. Complicated idea, I know, but I think it works.
Wow. I hate to be the guy asking "why is this on Slashdot", but WTF? This is a purely political click-trolling story. This is not what Slashdot is for.
You know, I'm actually OK with the blatant Slashvertisements, as long as they're geek-interest products. Man's got to pay the bills; I understand. But this pure-political story BS needs to stop!
Does NBC give you a way to pay to stream all their coverage from their web site? Watching broadcast television is what we did in the 20th century - in this century we stream stuff on the internet.
I don't think it's the government's job to require NBC to sell products. If NBC doesn't want to get money by selling streaming options, that's not the government's business.
I do think it's the Olympic committee's business. They're the ones who should be requiring NBC to provide live internet coverage (for a fee) as part of their exclusive deal. And it's probably just an oversight that they didn't - practical live streaming internet coverage is still new-ish, and I can believe the market for it hasn't quite sunk in with the older generation who generally makes these sorts of decisions.
And correct me if I'm wrong, didn't the UI go through a major revision 6-7 years ago - what we're now calling /. classic?
Most of that change, other than some CSS, is optional. Other than the rounded corners on the green bars, and the nav column on the left, /. looks just the same for me as it always did. I browse comments with no JavaScripty features at all, just like the original.
I'd have no problem at all with Beta being offered as an option! I'd opt out of the changes, just as I did with the first round, and be content. But that's not the path they've chosen.
I'm much more optimistic than you. Most local governments seem to be fixing their budgets at the last possible moment when they can't possibly continue, rather than going bankrupt as Detroit did. It's really only the federal government that seems to have sailed off the cliff and just not cared. Since I don't think the federal government actually does much that's important, I think we'll survive federal collapse-and-reboot on the strength of local governments.
Anthrax is always less damaging than the same amount of traditional explosive, just so you know. Most chemical attacks are the same way. If your goal is to damage instead of merely frighten, those sorts of weapons are poor (which is why we've dropped them from our arsenals - heck, almost every weapon banned by treaty is there because it's not very effective).
The "scud" is certainly a missile, but its targeting is poor enough in practice that it might as well be a rocket. There are a lot of early cold war missiles like that - designed to target a city, not a building.
Sure, we could imagine such a threat one day, an it would be awesome to have a defense against it. But given our current foreign policy, it seems much more likely we'll be attacked by some minor dictator who simply isn't deterred by threat of retaliation, for lack of any concern for the citizens of his nation. That's certainly the fights we've been picking in the last decade or so, anyhow. So yes, defense against symmetric threats is great, but defense against weaker opponents is still good.
The right way to determine "as little government as we can get away with and still maintain order"? Is to reduce the size of government bit by bit until it actually starts to be a problem. Of course, you can't do that, because the moment you reduce a local budget by $5/year the government responds "well, we'll just have to fire all the teachers and policemen to make the budget work", basically holding the taxpayers hostage to pad the roles of administrative personnel and (in most places) really nice office buildings to work in.
Thus, cash re-asserts itself as a convenience for mediating barter. There will always be a need for that (just as there will always be a need for /. classic).
Awww, thanks. Even without the goatse ascii art, I still nostalgiad.
To me that's right on the border *if* the language didn't include a math library. If the devs working on the code would know at a glance that it was a correct implementation, and it didn't need optimization, then I'd say dragging in the library was unnecessary. If it would confuse, or we'd care about the performance, then I'd drag in the library, but now I'd have a justification for doing so.
The only libraries that are free are the ones that come with the language. Re-implementing the language standard library is bad, but any third party library is a non-trivial cost.
That may be the hardest I've ever laughed at a Slashdot post. All my Internets to you, good sir or madam.
How am I to know this is the real Bruce Perens without a sig that tells me his real UID? :) Ah, the good old days of /.
Your sig is old-school awesome to this day.
GNAA trolling was fixed a long time ago. I've always browsed at -1, (having liked the site fine before there were mods) and haven't seen an ASCII-art goatse for years.
Fixing the mycleanpc one would be good though, just like they smacked down the page wideners all those years ago.