I know very little about Memes, but it seems to me that explaining such things using the Meme perspective makes more sense than looking at it from a human biology perspective. It's probably true that religious memes are better suited for survival than alternative memes, so they stick around, multiply, and become the dominant perspective. The question is, what about human psychology makes such memes so prevalent?
I read a book called the Millionaire Next Door about people who really are "prodigious accumulators of wealth" or PAW as they put it. It pointed out that a typical PAW would be first generation American because anyone who has the motivation to leave most of what they know, move to another country, drag their family along and start over is probably someone who has the entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not afraid to take risks. It's not surprising that so many immigrants are innovators.
Google isn't some public service that needs to be "fair." If consumers start to feel like google's self-promotion degrades the quality of the (free, bear in mind) service they provide, then they will stop using it.
To clarify that a bit... IF Google actually had a defacto monopoly (which it doesn't) AND there was a significant barrier to entry into the search engine market (which I doubt there is), ONLY THEN would anti-trust laws start to apply which would force Google to be fair about not promoting their other products artificially.
For instance, if Google has a service that cleans your gutters for you and it competes with my gutter cleaning service, and Google artificially promotes their gutter cleaning service over mine, it would still be very easy for me to create a specific "gutter cleaning service search engine" that accurately rated our services, and there are other advertising channels to promote it in other than Google Adsense, so anti-trust laws probably wouldn't apply.
Wah. Why shouldn't Google put their own products first? Name me one other company that wouldn't do the same thing.
Any company would, and that's why we have anti-trust laws. If Google gets a defacto monopoly on searches (which it hasn't got yet), then manipulating the search results to promote it's own non-search related products would be a clear anti-trust violation. Plus, Google has told us their motto is "don't be evil", and manipulating search results is at the very least naughty.
Maybe back in '91 Allen-Bradley gave away its programming software, but now the software (RSLogix) is sold by Rockwell Software for thousands of dollars depending on what options you want. Support is extra, of course. Still, it's the easiest to use PLC programming software out there, and I've tried about 7 or 8 different programming softwares for different PLCs.
If you want to buy an ABB robot with the controller, that'll probably run you about $50,000. Getting someone to install it for you, build some end of arm tooling, install the guarding, put in all the safety interlocks, and program everything could easily cost you another $100,000 or way more depending on the application. But that one robot could replace one or two operators over 3 shifts, so payback could be 6 to 12 months.
I would imagine the reason for the $40,000 is the very low volume that they sell. If you only sell 100 a year then there's no economy of scale for you to get volume discounts on parts, efficiencies in manufacturing, etc.
I actually do a little robot programming in industrial settings. The language on some popular models, such as Fanuc robots, is remarkably simple. Basically:
Go to Point 1 Wait for Input 3 to turn on Go to Point 2 Wait for Input 3 to turn off etc.
There are other more complicated aspects to it, but the program tends to be very simple. In fact, most industrial robots are programmed by people who never took a university programming course. Fanuc follows a North American view that it should be simple enough for a high school graduate to figure out.
Some industrial robots, such as ones made by ABB, are PC based and have a more complicated language, similar to BASIC or Pascal and are more powerful, but also harder for the typical maintenance person to deal with in a factory environment. In Germany, the view is that robots should be programmed by dedicated robot programmers.
Either way, Visual Basic would be overkill when it comes to the robot programming that typically goes on in industry.
Remember that this is the dollar bill we're talking about. Thousands upon thousands of machines only take dollar bills, not dollar coins; they would need to be refitted / reprogrammer.
In Canada this took all of about 1 year for almost all vending machines to be switched over. Until then they were quick to deploy change machines that gave you quarters. However, if you notice, the Canadian one dollar coin is exactly the same size and shape as the US Sakajawaya (or whatever the hell you call it). Therefore, the hardware has already been designed - deployment could be nearly instantaneous with advance warning. In fact I saw some vending machines in the US that took the US $1 coins.
Then there's the fact that "singles" slip into strippers' garments - coins not so easily;)
All I can say to you is if you haven't been to some of the seedier Canadian strip clubs, you have no idea... Two things: (A) Canadians also have a larger $2 coin, and (B) strip clubs in Canada are fully nude. I won't go any farther than that. Human imagination has no limits when it comes to erotic entertainment.
I prefer Sneakemail.com. It lets me keep the "temporary" address for as long as I want. I have a different address for every single web service. If one of them starts spamming me, then I can permanently delete that address.
If you're getting into the kind of issues you mention, I highly recommend the book, "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. He uses simple examples like door knobs, stove tops, etc., but all of his work is directly applicable to GUI design. The principles of good design are timeless.
I live in Canada in a wood framed (brick clad) new home. The frame, of course, is packed with insulation, which is a rather important feature in Canada during the winter. If you build a home out of concrete, you are then going to add another 6 inches of insulation on the inside, correct? One would hope anyway. Unless you live in some old 14th century stone castle without any insulation I suppose.
Of course, if I lived in a hurricane or earthquake prone zone, I would be interested in making sure that the building would stand up to such an event, or I'd be interested in moving because I know the insurance won't cover it. But where I live, the typical natural disaster is an ice storm where we lose power for a few days/weeks at worst and I'm really not worried about the house being blown over. The construction is just fine. But a person who builds their house in BC, California, Florida or Louisiana, well, if you're crazy enough to think it's safe there, you probably don't care what your house is made of.
Now, everyone seems to think if you build a deck you should use screws to fasten it because the heads on the nails will back out. If this new nail can prevent that, I'm all for using it. The same with floors. Screwing in a fastener takes way longer than using a nail gun.
Also, wood is not a bad construction material when it's used right. There are century old homes around here that are all wood framed and the frames are still in good shape. Of course, if you don't maintain the exterior of your house right and you let water get in, or your foundation shifts or cracks, then you're going to have a problem with the frame. Maintenance is very important.
In my last job I was required to carry a cell phone at all times - one of the Nextel phones with the push-to-talk feature. I deliberately went on vacation in places where the cell phone wouldn't work or I wasn't "allowed" to take it: other continents, up in the mountains, etc.
But I knew a lot of guys who just took a week off, stayed around home, and left their cell phone on and even took calls. I'd never to that. I would also never call a person on vacation. Nobody is that important. Once you realize that if you died tomorrow, the company would get along just fine without you, it's a lot easier to disconnect without feeling any guilt.
I left that job over 6 months ago, and they're doing just fine without me.
The one place that economists generally accept government interference as "ok" is when the government is protecting cultural distinctiveness. The idea is that different cultural viewpoints fosters creativity, which in turn increases overall productivity.
I'm not sure that actually relates to video games, of course...
I only vaguely remember my grade 10 science, but I thought the definition of different species was that they couldn't mate to produce fertile offspring.
We use Rogers for cable service here, and they have a competing phone product (Rogers home phone). When my mother was talking to Rogers about switching to Vonage, the Rogers rep. said you "can't dial 911" with Vonage. Certainly 911 service works a bit differently, but to say you can't dial 911 is a lie. Here's the vonage page about it: 911 Dialing.
I agree. But it's all about the attitude you take towards killing those innocents. Americans portray an attitude of not caring, and of the handful of Americans I've known, they really don't care, for the most part. A good person would care, would hold their government to account to make sure the war is waged as morally as possible for the simple reason that it's the right thing. It's quite possible to fight the insurgents without bombing wedding parties.
We need to commit to seeing this through, but we need to commit to doing it right to set an example for the world and for the future generations.
This new law would make the above scenario perfectly legal.
If the law goes against the constitution then it's not "perfectly legal". HOWEVER, the most disgusting thing about this law is that: a) nobody knows where you are b) you don't have access to a lawyer or the judicial system c) the evidence is secret so you can't argue against it.
People have already been "disappeared" and there's nothing they can do about it and nothing we can do about it, even if it violates their rights under the constitution.
I'm not one for doomsday prophesies, but I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of the end of political freedom in the USA.
I look at it this way... international law is a good idea for humanity. It's morally right to follow international law especially if you signed on to following it. Now just because most of the other big countries decide not to follow it doesn't change the fact that following the law is right.
If you live in a city where half the people are murderers, that doesn't make it OK for you to kill. Nobody is saying you shouldn't defend yourself but that doesn't mean you walk across the street and "pre-emptively" shoot your neighbour because he beats his wife. Neither does it mean it's ok for you to beat your wife.
The US has a chance to be a moral leader in the world, but I'm afraid it's not taking advantage of it. There are much much worse countries, but if the Americans continue to compare themselves only to the worst of the other countries, they will naturally follow a downward spiral.
I would like to see the US work towards meeting an ideal. Think about what the world should be like, and how countries should act, and act that way. It's a lot easier to win allies and isolate your enemies when you hold the moral high ground.
As I understand it, the ability of cells in a human body to regenerate themselves (heal) diminishes over time due to "programming" in our genes. This causes aging, but is also a cancer fighting mechanism.
If you could use a given adult's body to grow a blastema or whatever it is and then use it to grow a limb or organ, the cells would remember their "age" and would still not be as resilient as a child's organ or limb. Therefore, you could replace your heart at the age of 75 but it would still be a 75 year old's heart in some ways.
If you could use a child's cells to create a blastema and then use that to create organs for an adult, then you're talking about real rejuvenation. Of course, you'd not be able to do this with a brain, so you're still going to eventually run out of neurons. At least you could live a better quality of live though.
The best idea would be to combine this blastema thing with the ability to turn off the genes that cause aging, while finding a cure for cancer at the same time. Then I think we would be almost immortal. Just keep your brain from being damaged beyond repair.
I don't think you need a dead man switch. (I work with dead man's switches all the time in industrial robotics). What you could probably get away with is a vigilance control switch. From Wikipedia:
Vigilance control, also called an alerter, is similar to a dead man's switch, the difference being that a vigilance control system requires that the operator press a button at specified regular intervals. If the operator fails to operate the vigilance control, a warning sounds, and should the driver still not operate the vigilance control the machinery will stop.
I have one of these motorola pagers that my company gave me to carry around. It may only be available in Canada, but I'm sure you can find something similar in your area.
At any rate, you can send a page to it with an email, and then you have the option to reply to the email with a canned response like "OK" or "Will call back soon", etc. I was thinking that you could write a script on a server that would kick off an email to your pager every 30 minutes and if it didn't see a response within 15 minutes, activate some kind of emergency routine like contacting a relative. The timing could be varied to your needs.
It would be easier if you had something that hung around your neck, or a wristwatch that beeped every 15 minutes and required you to push a button to silence the alarm. Not silencing the alarm would somehow trigger your emergency routine. Using a windows mobile device or a blackberry (the API is available for free) you could write a program for one of these devices to do this task and send an email if you failed to respond.
Of course, this only works during waking hours. I don't know if you hire someone to watch your child during the night while you're asleep or not.
I ran across this article. I wonder if it has gone any further than that.
As for protecting students' IP, why not store a unique hash of the paper (and possibly select excerpts) rather than the paper itself? I'm surprised that no one's yet done this.
Well, actually I think the software checks more than the *whole* paper; it checks for matches within the document. Many students who plagiarize will copy and paste whole paragraphs from other papers. Plus, the teacher has to be presented with the excerpt that matches so they can make a decision, such as the phrase "to be or not to be" or other parts of the same text is probably in a million essays about Hamlet. The teacher should be able to tell that this doesn't count at plagiarism if the quote was noted correctly.
This only works if the essay was submitted electronically. Wayyy back when I was in high school we could only submit the essays in paper form, preferrably typed (but they did allow us to write it out in neat hand writing). Does this high school require that people submit their essays in electronic form? I would think that if you submitted all your work on paper then you'd at least force the teachers to scan the document before submitting it (making it that much more work). Or if you submitted it handwritten, there's no way they would sit there and type it in to submit it to a website.
Of course, if you're actually going to go through the trouble of writing it out by hand, you're probably not plagiarizing either. But at least it would help to protect your IP.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but only hard core geeks like us played Wolfenstein. Doom really popularized the FPS.
I know very little about Memes, but it seems to me that explaining such things using the Meme perspective makes more sense than looking at it from a human biology perspective. It's probably true that religious memes are better suited for survival than alternative memes, so they stick around, multiply, and become the dominant perspective. The question is, what about human psychology makes such memes so prevalent?
Someone is going to get fired for this.
:)
Actually, someone just learned a very expensive and embarrassing lesson... why fire them and start all over with a green employee?
I read a book called the Millionaire Next Door about people who really are "prodigious accumulators of wealth" or PAW as they put it. It pointed out that a typical PAW would be first generation American because anyone who has the motivation to leave most of what they know, move to another country, drag their family along and start over is probably someone who has the entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not afraid to take risks. It's not surprising that so many immigrants are innovators.
Google isn't some public service that needs to be "fair." If consumers start to feel like google's self-promotion degrades the quality of the (free, bear in mind) service they provide, then they will stop using it.
To clarify that a bit... IF Google actually had a defacto monopoly (which it doesn't) AND there was a significant barrier to entry into the search engine market (which I doubt there is), ONLY THEN would anti-trust laws start to apply which would force Google to be fair about not promoting their other products artificially.
For instance, if Google has a service that cleans your gutters for you and it competes with my gutter cleaning service, and Google artificially promotes their gutter cleaning service over mine, it would still be very easy for me to create a specific "gutter cleaning service search engine" that accurately rated our services, and there are other advertising channels to promote it in other than Google Adsense, so anti-trust laws probably wouldn't apply.
Wah. Why shouldn't Google put their own products first? Name me one other company that wouldn't do the same thing.
Any company would, and that's why we have anti-trust laws. If Google gets a defacto monopoly on searches (which it hasn't got yet), then manipulating the search results to promote it's own non-search related products would be a clear anti-trust violation. Plus, Google has told us their motto is "don't be evil", and manipulating search results is at the very least naughty.
Exactly, start them on assembly like the rest of us, and let them graduate to C once they've felt the pain. :)
Maybe back in '91 Allen-Bradley gave away its programming software, but now the software (RSLogix) is sold by Rockwell Software for thousands of dollars depending on what options you want. Support is extra, of course. Still, it's the easiest to use PLC programming software out there, and I've tried about 7 or 8 different programming softwares for different PLCs.
If you want to buy an ABB robot with the controller, that'll probably run you about $50,000. Getting someone to install it for you, build some end of arm tooling, install the guarding, put in all the safety interlocks, and program everything could easily cost you another $100,000 or way more depending on the application. But that one robot could replace one or two operators over 3 shifts, so payback could be 6 to 12 months.
I would imagine the reason for the $40,000 is the very low volume that they sell. If you only sell 100 a year then there's no economy of scale for you to get volume discounts on parts, efficiencies in manufacturing, etc.
I actually do a little robot programming in industrial settings. The language on some popular models, such as Fanuc robots, is remarkably simple. Basically:
Go to Point 1
Wait for Input 3 to turn on
Go to Point 2
Wait for Input 3 to turn off
etc.
There are other more complicated aspects to it, but the program tends to be very simple. In fact, most industrial robots are programmed by people who never took a university programming course. Fanuc follows a North American view that it should be simple enough for a high school graduate to figure out.
Some industrial robots, such as ones made by ABB, are PC based and have a more complicated language, similar to BASIC or Pascal and are more powerful, but also harder for the typical maintenance person to deal with in a factory environment. In Germany, the view is that robots should be programmed by dedicated robot programmers.
Either way, Visual Basic would be overkill when it comes to the robot programming that typically goes on in industry.
Remember that this is the dollar bill we're talking about. Thousands upon thousands of machines only take dollar bills, not dollar coins; they would need to be refitted / reprogrammer.
;)
In Canada this took all of about 1 year for almost all vending machines to be switched over. Until then they were quick to deploy change machines that gave you quarters. However, if you notice, the Canadian one dollar coin is exactly the same size and shape as the US Sakajawaya (or whatever the hell you call it). Therefore, the hardware has already been designed - deployment could be nearly instantaneous with advance warning. In fact I saw some vending machines in the US that took the US $1 coins.
Then there's the fact that "singles" slip into strippers' garments - coins not so easily
All I can say to you is if you haven't been to some of the seedier Canadian strip clubs, you have no idea... Two things: (A) Canadians also have a larger $2 coin, and (B) strip clubs in Canada are fully nude. I won't go any farther than that. Human imagination has no limits when it comes to erotic entertainment.
I prefer Sneakemail.com. It lets me keep the "temporary" address for as long as I want. I have a different address for every single web service. If one of them starts spamming me, then I can permanently delete that address.
If you're getting into the kind of issues you mention, I highly recommend the book, "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. He uses simple examples like door knobs, stove tops, etc., but all of his work is directly applicable to GUI design. The principles of good design are timeless.
I live in Canada in a wood framed (brick clad) new home. The frame, of course, is packed with insulation, which is a rather important feature in Canada during the winter. If you build a home out of concrete, you are then going to add another 6 inches of insulation on the inside, correct? One would hope anyway. Unless you live in some old 14th century stone castle without any insulation I suppose.
Of course, if I lived in a hurricane or earthquake prone zone, I would be interested in making sure that the building would stand up to such an event, or I'd be interested in moving because I know the insurance won't cover it. But where I live, the typical natural disaster is an ice storm where we lose power for a few days/weeks at worst and I'm really not worried about the house being blown over. The construction is just fine. But a person who builds their house in BC, California, Florida or Louisiana, well, if you're crazy enough to think it's safe there, you probably don't care what your house is made of.
Now, everyone seems to think if you build a deck you should use screws to fasten it because the heads on the nails will back out. If this new nail can prevent that, I'm all for using it. The same with floors. Screwing in a fastener takes way longer than using a nail gun.
Also, wood is not a bad construction material when it's used right. There are century old homes around here that are all wood framed and the frames are still in good shape. Of course, if you don't maintain the exterior of your house right and you let water get in, or your foundation shifts or cracks, then you're going to have a problem with the frame. Maintenance is very important.
In my last job I was required to carry a cell phone at all times - one of the Nextel phones with the push-to-talk feature. I deliberately went on vacation in places where the cell phone wouldn't work or I wasn't "allowed" to take it: other continents, up in the mountains, etc.
But I knew a lot of guys who just took a week off, stayed around home, and left their cell phone on and even took calls. I'd never to that. I would also never call a person on vacation. Nobody is that important. Once you realize that if you died tomorrow, the company would get along just fine without you, it's a lot easier to disconnect without feeling any guilt.
I left that job over 6 months ago, and they're doing just fine without me.
The one place that economists generally accept government interference as "ok" is when the government is protecting cultural distinctiveness. The idea is that different cultural viewpoints fosters creativity, which in turn increases overall productivity.
I'm not sure that actually relates to video games, of course...
I only vaguely remember my grade 10 science, but I thought the definition of different species was that they couldn't mate to produce fertile offspring.
We use Rogers for cable service here, and they have a competing phone product (Rogers home phone). When my mother was talking to Rogers about switching to Vonage, the Rogers rep. said you "can't dial 911" with Vonage. Certainly 911 service works a bit differently, but to say you can't dial 911 is a lie. Here's the vonage page about it: 911 Dialing.
I agree. But it's all about the attitude you take towards killing those innocents. Americans portray an attitude of not caring, and of the handful of Americans I've known, they really don't care, for the most part. A good person would care, would hold their government to account to make sure the war is waged as morally as possible for the simple reason that it's the right thing. It's quite possible to fight the insurgents without bombing wedding parties.
We need to commit to seeing this through, but we need to commit to doing it right to set an example for the world and for the future generations.
This new law would make the above scenario perfectly legal.
If the law goes against the constitution then it's not "perfectly legal". HOWEVER, the most disgusting thing about this law is that:
a) nobody knows where you are
b) you don't have access to a lawyer or the judicial system
c) the evidence is secret so you can't argue against it.
People have already been "disappeared" and there's nothing they can do about it and nothing we can do about it, even if it violates their rights under the constitution.
I'm not one for doomsday prophesies, but I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of the end of political freedom in the USA.
I look at it this way... international law is a good idea for humanity. It's morally right to follow international law especially if you signed on to following it. Now just because most of the other big countries decide not to follow it doesn't change the fact that following the law is right.
If you live in a city where half the people are murderers, that doesn't make it OK for you to kill. Nobody is saying you shouldn't defend yourself but that doesn't mean you walk across the street and "pre-emptively" shoot your neighbour because he beats his wife. Neither does it mean it's ok for you to beat your wife.
The US has a chance to be a moral leader in the world, but I'm afraid it's not taking advantage of it. There are much much worse countries, but if the Americans continue to compare themselves only to the worst of the other countries, they will naturally follow a downward spiral.
I would like to see the US work towards meeting an ideal. Think about what the world should be like, and how countries should act, and act that way. It's a lot easier to win allies and isolate your enemies when you hold the moral high ground.
As I understand it, the ability of cells in a human body to regenerate themselves (heal) diminishes over time due to "programming" in our genes. This causes aging, but is also a cancer fighting mechanism.
If you could use a given adult's body to grow a blastema or whatever it is and then use it to grow a limb or organ, the cells would remember their "age" and would still not be as resilient as a child's organ or limb. Therefore, you could replace your heart at the age of 75 but it would still be a 75 year old's heart in some ways.
If you could use a child's cells to create a blastema and then use that to create organs for an adult, then you're talking about real rejuvenation. Of course, you'd not be able to do this with a brain, so you're still going to eventually run out of neurons. At least you could live a better quality of live though.
The best idea would be to combine this blastema thing with the ability to turn off the genes that cause aging, while finding a cure for cancer at the same time. Then I think we would be almost immortal. Just keep your brain from being damaged beyond repair.
I don't think you need a dead man switch. (I work with dead man's switches all the time in industrial robotics). What you could probably get away with is a vigilance control switch. From Wikipedia:
Vigilance control, also called an alerter, is similar to a dead man's switch, the difference being that a vigilance control system requires that the operator press a button at specified regular intervals. If the operator fails to operate the vigilance control, a warning sounds, and should the driver still not operate the vigilance control the machinery will stop.
I have one of these motorola pagers that my company gave me to carry around. It may only be available in Canada, but I'm sure you can find something similar in your area.
At any rate, you can send a page to it with an email, and then you have the option to reply to the email with a canned response like "OK" or "Will call back soon", etc. I was thinking that you could write a script on a server that would kick off an email to your pager every 30 minutes and if it didn't see a response within 15 minutes, activate some kind of emergency routine like contacting a relative. The timing could be varied to your needs.
It would be easier if you had something that hung around your neck, or a wristwatch that beeped every 15 minutes and required you to push a button to silence the alarm. Not silencing the alarm would somehow trigger your emergency routine. Using a windows mobile device or a blackberry (the API is available for free) you could write a program for one of these devices to do this task and send an email if you failed to respond.
Of course, this only works during waking hours. I don't know if you hire someone to watch your child during the night while you're asleep or not.
I ran across this article. I wonder if it has gone any further than that.
Good luck with the search.
As for protecting students' IP, why not store a unique hash of the paper (and possibly select excerpts) rather than the paper itself? I'm surprised that no one's yet done this.
Well, actually I think the software checks more than the *whole* paper; it checks for matches within the document. Many students who plagiarize will copy and paste whole paragraphs from other papers. Plus, the teacher has to be presented with the excerpt that matches so they can make a decision, such as the phrase "to be or not to be" or other parts of the same text is probably in a million essays about Hamlet. The teacher should be able to tell that this doesn't count at plagiarism if the quote was noted correctly.
This only works if the essay was submitted electronically. Wayyy back when I was in high school we could only submit the essays in paper form, preferrably typed (but they did allow us to write it out in neat hand writing). Does this high school require that people submit their essays in electronic form? I would think that if you submitted all your work on paper then you'd at least force the teachers to scan the document before submitting it (making it that much more work). Or if you submitted it handwritten, there's no way they would sit there and type it in to submit it to a website.
Of course, if you're actually going to go through the trouble of writing it out by hand, you're probably not plagiarizing either. But at least it would help to protect your IP.
You forgot: Menage a trois. :)