Consider: A 32-bit number is not nearly large enough to count the number of GPs in a game, so let's say each ID has to be a 64-bit number. That's 8 bytes per GP, right?
So let's say there is a total of 125 billion GPs in the world. This is probably a low estimate - I don't know the actual figures for MMORGs but I'd bet it's an order of magnitude more for popular ones like WoW - but for the sake of our calculation let's say it's that, and it makes the numbers easier.:-) Then we need 1 trillion bytes of storage for them - that's nearly 1TB just for gold piece IDs.
And now suppose a character gives 1 million GPs to another character. 8MB of data needs to be transferred. That's a fairly significant data hit. How long does your PC sit and think when you copy an 8MB file? A few seconds? Well suppose this is happening every second - and it will be, maybe not single characters transferring 1 million, but many characters earning/spending/giving/dropping smaller numbers of GPs. Kiss your server bye-bye...
In short, unique IDs for GPs would be *very* heavy where it counts, and where it counts is on the servers of the guys running the game.
I'm well aware of the history, as are all female "equality" campaigners. Trouble is that that too few of the female "equality" campaigners are looking at the current state of the world.
Too few women in engineering? Well, do women *want* to do engineering? I've yet to meet a sexist or racist person in 4 years of uni and 10 years of industrial software engineering.
Women's average pay is lower than men's? Well if you've taken 5 years out of work to look after your kids, you'd better expect to be on a lower wage than someone who's worked those 5 years. If men could take those 5 years out to look after the kids, without suffering immense social stigma, we'd do it. If men could take a year off for paternity leave and still have our jobs at the end of it, we'd do it. But only women get those kind of benefits right now.
And I'd *really* like to see the plans for the massive male unemployment/skills shortage in 5-10 years time, when a generation of underachieving boys reach the job market with no qualifications. That's going to be a barrel of laughs, right?
However, check the following sequence (imagine you're playing this, using some mouse interface):-
You swing your sword at Ogre's head. Ogre parries the sword with his shield. Ogre swings axe at you. You parry with your shield. There is a loud crunchy noise, your avatar goes "argh", and the avatar's arm hangs loosely at its side. You swing your sword at Ogre's head again. Your avatar's sword-arm is much harder to control now. Ogre catches your blade on its shield, then hammers its axe on the centre of the blade. The blade shatters. You back away. Ogre raises its axe and lets out a battleroar. You run like a baby.
Who needs number-based stats, if the game shows perfectly well what's going on? As you say, the problem is that with current games there's no such feedback. Characters look look physically fine even if they've just taken a dozen stab-wounds in the chest, and they play the same whether they're fresh and rested or whether they've had an arm chopped off by a troll and a wild boar has just bitten their balls off.
Wow - they're only about 3 or 4 years behind the times. Were these guys asleep during Napster and all the rest?
Newsflash: Band releases songs on something called "Compact Disc". Band says, "This new format will revolutionise a music industry made stale by LP records. What, you mean other people already use CDs?! Damn that's harsh! Yeah, we've been sat in a basement for 20 years so it's not our fault."
Who says the "growth" has to be the character you're playing? "Growth" can as easily be applied to *your* abilities.
The key to role-playing is using your own imagination, not the imagination stat of your character! If every encounter amounts to "I charge the group of 2/5/50 Orcs" or "I fire a lightning bolt at the group of 2/5/50 Orcs", welcome to Snore City. OTOH if you have the option of "I sneak behind that pillar and push it on top of them", or "I use my lightning bolt to take out the roof member above them", now that's an improvement! And it doesn't need any growth, just the ability to use your imagination in an unconstrained way. XPs are just a non-monetary form of reward, but other forms of reward for your character are equally valid - prestige, money, some good kit, etc.
A good guide to roleplaying is how valuable illusionist spells are. Someone with a good imagination can think up some doozies. Equally a good GM can bounce off that and come back with a response from the Orcs which, whilst logical, is utterly not what you expected. That's *real* roleplaying. And it's almost impossible to code that. When I see an MMORG that offers anything that good, I'll be impressed. So far it's all just rabbit-killing with pretty graphics, as far as I can see.
But Risk went back ages - role-playing the leader of a country, anyone? Or come to that, Cluedo, roleplaying a detective? Monopoly, roleplaying a property developer?
Great, a campaign to get women into software. Equal opportunities is a great thing.
Now can we look forward to a campaign for men to become nurses, or physiotherapists (our nearest hospital shows no male physiotherapists qualified for the last 5 years - less than 1% representation), or - shock! - stay at home and take care of the kids whilst getting equal rights for paternity leave? Or get equal rights for access and maintenance after divorce? Or even allow boys to be educated in ways that suit them better, so that boys will not be so horrendously disadvantaged at school as they currently are? (If you're a boy at school today, regardless of your intelligence or ability, the stats show that girls will outperform you in every subject except maths.)
Thought not... "Equal opportunities" sadly means "encourage women to do traditionally male jobs" but has never, in the history of the phrase, meant "encourage men to do traditionally female jobs".
When I see as much news about boys failing exams as I do about women not being allowed to have children and a fancy house *and* hold down a full-time job (news-flash: kids *are* a full-time job, and you do one or the other if you want your kids brought up properly), and companies are so terrible bcos they won't allow women to work less hours whilst being paid the same - when that day comes, I'll know we've got equality. Until then, fuck "women in games".
It is said the United States has always collected as much detailed information as possible about every battle they've ever engaged in.
Shame they don't do more about the battles they're *about* to engage in - might have saved them some grief over the last 10 years, especially in Somalia. Maybe it would even help them tell the difference between enemy positions and embassies.
And for bonus points, why is he such a shit parent? "My kid's playing this game I bought him, and I think it's turning him into a psycho, but there's nothing I can do about it." Well duh! stop him playing it then! Regardless of whether the "violent games make kids psycho" argument holds water (MHO: about as much as a really leaky sieve), a parent's responsibility is to use their judgement in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing. By 14-16 you can be letting them free, but 12 is still kiddie territory.
I would say "oh, but this is America", except I know there are plenty of Americans who are damn good parents. Trouble is that there are also plenty who couldn't look after a pet rock, never mind a child, and it does seem like America has more of them than other countries (or they're more prominent, at least). To quote Terry Pratchett, "parents should have to take an exam to have children, and not just the physical"...
A good movie critic can go and see a blockbuster and still say whether it's good for its genre. The main thing a critic is looking for is a plot. And that's what most movie-goers are looking for too.
Consider recent superhero films - the two X-Men and Spiderman films, for instance. Both feature well-constructed plots and good acting - plus the explosions and fights that you expect in a blockbuster. And they did very well by the critics. Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 though were panned by the critics, bcos they were plot-free and acting-free zones. Critics expect more than flashy SFX, and that's bcos most cinema-goers also want more than flashy SFX.
And games are the same way. The sets in Star Trek:TOS were state-of-the-art eye-candy, but now we have a higher standard of eye-candy we can look at them and see that the plots and acting were shit. Similarly Doom was state-of-the-art eye-candy in its day, but a simple run-and-shoot FPS doesn't hold up these days. So a good game reviewer should be able to tell what's just glossy eye-candy, and what's good gameplay. And the same game may feature both.
Good gameplay doesn't always mean innovative, it just has to be entertaining. Open-ended games like Far Cry are no more than a glossier Doom on the surface, but when you realise that you have freedom of movement to achieve your objective via just about any means you can think of, you see a bit more depth there. And Far Cry is very much just the beginning in real "immersive" games. Me, I look forward to MMOGs that allow building of your own structures, objects and realms, not just the preprogrammed ones that the game lets you have. Other people may want sports sims that allow alternative strategies for football, or whatever. So long as you find yourself immersed in the game, it's succeeded in its aim.
English spelling is consistent, for a given value of "consistent"!;-)
Most words with Greek roots will be pronounced the same way. Most words with Latin roots will be pronounced the same way. Ditto French, German, Anglo-Saxon roots. The problem is that each uses a different system of representing phonemes with letters of the Roman alphabet.
The trick is to work out the roots. So the same way as you'd look for prefixes "in/aus/vor" in German to figure out what words mean, you'd look for the roots of words in English. In English this doesn't just help you work out the meaning, but also how to pronounce it. (For example, consider the words "pronounce", "announce", "renounce": the root "-nounce" is clearly to do with saying something, which it is since it comes from the Old English for "message".)
You missed Greek, French and German, plus a fair smattering of random Arabic, Indian and Chinese words picked up during the days of the British Empire.
You're wrong that "Britain didn't care". Ever heard of a guy called Samuel Johnson? Even though Johnson's dictionary was pretty arbitrary and missed tons of stuff, it was *the* essential book that every English-speaking home had (after the Bible). It wasn't until the Oxford English Dictionary that it was completely superseded in Britain. American dictionaries were significantly later than Johnson, although slightly earlier (by a few decades) than the OED.
You're also wrong that spelling and grammar are completely arbitrary. All these rules are based on their source languages. So if you learn some of the basic component parts of words (eg. "aqua-", "anti-", "ante-", "ex-") then you see these underlying rules in action. It helps if you know another language that does this - German is a really good example, bcos German hardly ever invents new words, it just smashes more of them together to get the overall meaning. Which is what was done in English, except English used Greek/Latin/Anglo-Saxon/French stems.
"Fernseher" as the German for "television" is a great example. "Fern"=far, "seher"=viewer/seer. What a funny way of expressing it, you think. But "television" comes from Greek roots: "tele"=far, "vision"=that which is seen. Ah-hah! Suddenly things fall into place, don't they?
The one good thing about English is that however tortured the grammar and spelling used, the meaning is almost always obvious. English is spoken in so many different ways, with so many different local versions, that English-speakers are used to inferring meaning on-the-fly, even if the phrases used are not familiar, and to following the most amazing variation in accents. Now compare and contrast to French, for example. French has its Academie which enforced French grammar rules and new words very strictly. Result? If you don't speak perfect French, you have one hell of a job making yourself understood. Some may say this is the French being snobbish, but I sincerely believe they're just not used to trying to follow the speech of people who don't talk the way they do.
You can't have rights that infringe on other people's life, liberty and happiness without responsibilities. Children have different legal status bcos they're not old enough to make those kind of calls.
Check any playground at break/recess. Primary school ("elementary school" in the US? up to age 11 anyway) will almost certainly have multiple fights break out per day. High school (11-18) will have less, but still a significant number (a week won't go by without a fight). Now if this was the adult world, all those kids would be on assault charges, but we recognise that kids can't deal with keeping their physical instincts under control. So kids don't get judged by the same rules as adults. But equally, they can't expect to have the same rights as adults, for exactly the same reason.
I support 100% the aim of equal opportunities. But the key word is *opportunities*. If you seriously don't want to do something, then a selling campaign isn't going to persuade you. And we do have to face it that a majority of men are good at spatial-mathematical work and prefer that, and a majority of women are good at caring work and prefer that. Only on average though - there are large minorities who don't fit the stereotype, and for them the equality of opportunities has to allow them to do what they want. But to try and cajole/force/bribe people to do something they don't really enjoy and aren't good at, simply to get an even 50-50 split of male-female - that's plain stupid.
So if you want to do a selling job on engineering for women, that's fine by me, *if and only if* you also do a similar selling job on being a house-husband, or your example of psychology, or physiotherapy (my wife just had physio at our local hospital, and looking at the class photos on the wall, there wasn't a single man in the year photos for the last 10 years). No-one does this.
And then people wonder why boys' school grades and careers are going down the toilet. Well, duh! the girls have had positive role models and career paths pushed down their necks until they practically feel obliged to go and do it, whereas all the boys get is, "Girls can do this, that and the other, and succeed wonderfully. Boys? Oh, just do whatever."
The weird thing is that engineering, sciences, maths, etc are seen as "sexist" bcos there are more men than women doing them. But actually meet them and you find they're the least sexist, most ready to judge on merit people that you'll find. Equality of opportunity is here and now in industry everywhere, but no-one seems to have realised yet.
The day people really *understand* the words "equal opportunities" and don't try to go on the positive-discrimination jag, I will be one happy individual.
However, Salon.com should not be publishing articles which contain untrue information. "From the start, the evidence against it was overwhelming"? Oh yes?
Scientific journals tend to (or are supposed to) carry out some factual checking on article content before publishing. Salon.com apparently just published without checking. Kennedy is claiming an ability to spot connections which is not backed up by evidence, or by a superior scientific ability.
If this were an editorial expressing one person's opinion, then fine - but responsible journalism requires that it is made clear this is all it is. This is presented as a factual evidence-based investigation, which it clearly is not. If Salon is just a blog, then fine. But if Salon claims to be a reputable news source, which it does, then it's screwed beyond belief.
You're correct - anyone should be able to submit stories on anything. However it is grossly incompetent and unethical for a magazine to publish articles of this nature. My beef is not with Kennedy (hell, he can submit stories claiming he's the second coming of Elvis, and I'll not worry about it) but with Salon for printing such easily-disproved rubbish and passing it off as factual content.
Frankly though, this doesn't surprise me. It's been a very long time since I've seen anything worth reading on Salon. It's just another blog these days. "Online magazine"? Don't make me laugh.
Dude, he's just given you exactly what you asked for. Name of effect, who discovered it, when, etc. The whole damn works. Now either you are competent enough in that area to look this up on your own or not. If you are not competent to look in the literature and check on it, you are not competent to criticise it.
For myself, the whole of quantum physics sounds pretty fucking bizarre, but there's no way I'm going to tell a physicist "you're talking unproveable gobbledygook" when they mention Heisenberg or whatever.;-/
Nice try dude, but my job is automotive software, and has been for 6 years.
Nothing in cars is a secret, and any information you need to repair or modify a car is easily available.
Bullshit. As an automotive software engineer working for Ford, I can promise you that anyone wanting to use a standard off-the-shelf engine controller and tweak the maps themselves for higher performance is SOL. Yes, you can replace the ECU - but the ECU has usually taken at least as long to develop as the rest of the car, because this is the bit that ensures the car meets CARB/ISO/SAE/whatever standards. Now all these standards are freely available - but only a fool would release the design documents that say exactly how they implemented them, because their rivals would then have a headstart of hundreds of thousands of hours of engineer time.
Yep. Compare number of servers to number of PCs total, and number of servers becomes insignificant. And servers do not come with wireless, fancy video cards, sound cards, etc, etc.
In that case your DVD player is supporting PAL60 mode, which allows compatibility, and your TV is getting it OK. Some DVD players don't do this - if your DVD player doesn't do PAL60 and your TV doesn't do NTSC then your Region 1 DVDs might as well be shiny coasters.
You're right that cost is not an issue though. I bought Amazon's cheapest DVD player last year, and that does PAL60. You just need to be careful choosing your player/TV combination. Or you need to be lucky, as you apparently were!;-)
RF is definitely *NOT* critical for anything hobbyist. A hobbyist will generally be making up circuits on breadboard or stripboard. An advanced one will be making his own double-sided PCBs. A *really* advanced one may use some of the larger surface-mount components.
What they *won't* be doing is making up 6-layer PCBs with umpty-tum surface mount components, so small you can hardly see them, auto-routed using Protel or some similar package, etc, etc. This simply is not possible at an amateur level. The equipment costs tens of thousands of pounds even if you're doing manual assembly (add another few hundred K for a pick-and-place machine), the software costs some more thousands, and so on.
And it isn't until you get to that level that you'll be working at fast enough digital frequencies to worry about RF effects. Until then, forget about it.
By all means, choose to use ham radio as your entry point into electronics. But don't think the RF stuff will be relevant to what you're doing in other electronics, bcos 99% of the time it won't.
Slashdot Mirror
They are on the servers.
:-) Then we need 1 trillion bytes of storage for them - that's nearly 1TB just for gold piece IDs.
Consider: A 32-bit number is not nearly large enough to count the number of GPs in a game, so let's say each ID has to be a 64-bit number. That's 8 bytes per GP, right?
So let's say there is a total of 125 billion GPs in the world. This is probably a low estimate - I don't know the actual figures for MMORGs but I'd bet it's an order of magnitude more for popular ones like WoW - but for the sake of our calculation let's say it's that, and it makes the numbers easier.
And now suppose a character gives 1 million GPs to another character. 8MB of data needs to be transferred. That's a fairly significant data hit. How long does your PC sit and think when you copy an 8MB file? A few seconds? Well suppose this is happening every second - and it will be, maybe not single characters transferring 1 million, but many characters earning/spending/giving/dropping smaller numbers of GPs. Kiss your server bye-bye...
In short, unique IDs for GPs would be *very* heavy where it counts, and where it counts is on the servers of the guys running the game.
Grab.
*Sigh*
I'm well aware of the history, as are all female "equality" campaigners. Trouble is that that too few of the female "equality" campaigners are looking at the current state of the world.
Too few women in engineering? Well, do women *want* to do engineering? I've yet to meet a sexist or racist person in 4 years of uni and 10 years of industrial software engineering.
Women's average pay is lower than men's? Well if you've taken 5 years out of work to look after your kids, you'd better expect to be on a lower wage than someone who's worked those 5 years. If men could take those 5 years out to look after the kids, without suffering immense social stigma, we'd do it. If men could take a year off for paternity leave and still have our jobs at the end of it, we'd do it. But only women get those kind of benefits right now.
And I'd *really* like to see the plans for the massive male unemployment/skills shortage in 5-10 years time, when a generation of underachieving boys reach the job market with no qualifications. That's going to be a barrel of laughs, right?
Grab.
However, check the following sequence (imagine you're playing this, using some mouse interface):-
You swing your sword at Ogre's head.
Ogre parries the sword with his shield.
Ogre swings axe at you.
You parry with your shield.
There is a loud crunchy noise, your avatar goes "argh", and the avatar's arm hangs loosely at its side.
You swing your sword at Ogre's head again. Your avatar's sword-arm is much harder to control now.
Ogre catches your blade on its shield, then hammers its axe on the centre of the blade. The blade shatters.
You back away.
Ogre raises its axe and lets out a battleroar.
You run like a baby.
Who needs number-based stats, if the game shows perfectly well what's going on? As you say, the problem is that with current games there's no such feedback. Characters look look physically fine even if they've just taken a dozen stab-wounds in the chest, and they play the same whether they're fresh and rested or whether they've had an arm chopped off by a troll and a wild boar has just bitten their balls off.
Grab.
Wow - they're only about 3 or 4 years behind the times. Were these guys asleep during Napster and all the rest?
Newsflash: Band releases songs on something called "Compact Disc". Band says, "This new format will revolutionise a music industry made stale by LP records. What, you mean other people already use CDs?! Damn that's harsh! Yeah, we've been sat in a basement for 20 years so it's not our fault."
Grab.
Who says the "growth" has to be the character you're playing? "Growth" can as easily be applied to *your* abilities.
The key to role-playing is using your own imagination, not the imagination stat of your character! If every encounter amounts to "I charge the group of 2/5/50 Orcs" or "I fire a lightning bolt at the group of 2/5/50 Orcs", welcome to Snore City. OTOH if you have the option of "I sneak behind that pillar and push it on top of them", or "I use my lightning bolt to take out the roof member above them", now that's an improvement! And it doesn't need any growth, just the ability to use your imagination in an unconstrained way. XPs are just a non-monetary form of reward, but other forms of reward for your character are equally valid - prestige, money, some good kit, etc.
A good guide to roleplaying is how valuable illusionist spells are. Someone with a good imagination can think up some doozies. Equally a good GM can bounce off that and come back with a response from the Orcs which, whilst logical, is utterly not what you expected. That's *real* roleplaying. And it's almost impossible to code that. When I see an MMORG that offers anything that good, I'll be impressed. So far it's all just rabbit-killing with pretty graphics, as far as I can see.
Grab.
But Risk went back ages - role-playing the leader of a country, anyone? Or come to that, Cluedo, roleplaying a detective? Monopoly, roleplaying a property developer?
No, I don't think so.
Grab.
Great, a campaign to get women into software. Equal opportunities is a great thing.
Now can we look forward to a campaign for men to become nurses, or physiotherapists (our nearest hospital shows no male physiotherapists qualified for the last 5 years - less than 1% representation), or - shock! - stay at home and take care of the kids whilst getting equal rights for paternity leave? Or get equal rights for access and maintenance after divorce? Or even allow boys to be educated in ways that suit them better, so that boys will not be so horrendously disadvantaged at school as they currently are? (If you're a boy at school today, regardless of your intelligence or ability, the stats show that girls will outperform you in every subject except maths.)
Thought not... "Equal opportunities" sadly means "encourage women to do traditionally male jobs" but has never, in the history of the phrase, meant "encourage men to do traditionally female jobs".
When I see as much news about boys failing exams as I do about women not being allowed to have children and a fancy house *and* hold down a full-time job (news-flash: kids *are* a full-time job, and you do one or the other if you want your kids brought up properly), and companies are so terrible bcos they won't allow women to work less hours whilst being paid the same - when that day comes, I'll know we've got equality. Until then, fuck "women in games".
Grab.
It is said the United States has always collected as much detailed information as possible about every battle they've ever engaged in.
Shame they don't do more about the battles they're *about* to engage in - might have saved them some grief over the last 10 years, especially in Somalia. Maybe it would even help them tell the difference between enemy positions and embassies.
Grab.
Good call, man.
And for bonus points, why is he such a shit parent? "My kid's playing this game I bought him, and I think it's turning him into a psycho, but there's nothing I can do about it." Well duh! stop him playing it then! Regardless of whether the "violent games make kids psycho" argument holds water (MHO: about as much as a really leaky sieve), a parent's responsibility is to use their judgement in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing. By 14-16 you can be letting them free, but 12 is still kiddie territory.
I would say "oh, but this is America", except I know there are plenty of Americans who are damn good parents. Trouble is that there are also plenty who couldn't look after a pet rock, never mind a child, and it does seem like America has more of them than other countries (or they're more prominent, at least). To quote Terry Pratchett, "parents should have to take an exam to have children, and not just the physical"...
Grab.
A good movie critic can go and see a blockbuster and still say whether it's good for its genre. The main thing a critic is looking for is a plot. And that's what most movie-goers are looking for too.
Consider recent superhero films - the two X-Men and Spiderman films, for instance. Both feature well-constructed plots and good acting - plus the explosions and fights that you expect in a blockbuster. And they did very well by the critics. Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 though were panned by the critics, bcos they were plot-free and acting-free zones. Critics expect more than flashy SFX, and that's bcos most cinema-goers also want more than flashy SFX.
And games are the same way. The sets in Star Trek:TOS were state-of-the-art eye-candy, but now we have a higher standard of eye-candy we can look at them and see that the plots and acting were shit. Similarly Doom was state-of-the-art eye-candy in its day, but a simple run-and-shoot FPS doesn't hold up these days. So a good game reviewer should be able to tell what's just glossy eye-candy, and what's good gameplay. And the same game may feature both.
Good gameplay doesn't always mean innovative, it just has to be entertaining. Open-ended games like Far Cry are no more than a glossier Doom on the surface, but when you realise that you have freedom of movement to achieve your objective via just about any means you can think of, you see a bit more depth there. And Far Cry is very much just the beginning in real "immersive" games. Me, I look forward to MMOGs that allow building of your own structures, objects and realms, not just the preprogrammed ones that the game lets you have. Other people may want sports sims that allow alternative strategies for football, or whatever. So long as you find yourself immersed in the game, it's succeeded in its aim.
Grab.
Or your books won't be read by co-workers you put in one of these either...
English spelling is consistent, for a given value of "consistent"! ;-)
Most words with Greek roots will be pronounced the same way. Most words with Latin roots will be pronounced the same way. Ditto French, German, Anglo-Saxon roots. The problem is that each uses a different system of representing phonemes with letters of the Roman alphabet.
The trick is to work out the roots. So the same way as you'd look for prefixes "in/aus/vor" in German to figure out what words mean, you'd look for the roots of words in English. In English this doesn't just help you work out the meaning, but also how to pronounce it. (For example, consider the words "pronounce", "announce", "renounce": the root "-nounce" is clearly to do with saying something, which it is since it comes from the Old English for "message".)
Grab.
You missed Greek, French and German, plus a fair smattering of random Arabic, Indian and Chinese words picked up during the days of the British Empire.
You're wrong that "Britain didn't care". Ever heard of a guy called Samuel Johnson? Even though Johnson's dictionary was pretty arbitrary and missed tons of stuff, it was *the* essential book that every English-speaking home had (after the Bible). It wasn't until the Oxford English Dictionary that it was completely superseded in Britain. American dictionaries were significantly later than Johnson, although slightly earlier (by a few decades) than the OED.
You're also wrong that spelling and grammar are completely arbitrary. All these rules are based on their source languages. So if you learn some of the basic component parts of words (eg. "aqua-", "anti-", "ante-", "ex-") then you see these underlying rules in action. It helps if you know another language that does this - German is a really good example, bcos German hardly ever invents new words, it just smashes more of them together to get the overall meaning. Which is what was done in English, except English used Greek/Latin/Anglo-Saxon/French stems.
"Fernseher" as the German for "television" is a great example. "Fern"=far, "seher"=viewer/seer. What a funny way of expressing it, you think. But "television" comes from Greek roots: "tele"=far, "vision"=that which is seen. Ah-hah! Suddenly things fall into place, don't they?
The one good thing about English is that however tortured the grammar and spelling used, the meaning is almost always obvious. English is spoken in so many different ways, with so many different local versions, that English-speakers are used to inferring meaning on-the-fly, even if the phrases used are not familiar, and to following the most amazing variation in accents. Now compare and contrast to French, for example. French has its Academie which enforced French grammar rules and new words very strictly. Result? If you don't speak perfect French, you have one hell of a job making yourself understood. Some may say this is the French being snobbish, but I sincerely believe they're just not used to trying to follow the speech of people who don't talk the way they do.
Grab.
You can't have rights that infringe on other people's life, liberty and happiness without responsibilities. Children have different legal status bcos they're not old enough to make those kind of calls.
Check any playground at break/recess. Primary school ("elementary school" in the US? up to age 11 anyway) will almost certainly have multiple fights break out per day. High school (11-18) will have less, but still a significant number (a week won't go by without a fight). Now if this was the adult world, all those kids would be on assault charges, but we recognise that kids can't deal with keeping their physical instincts under control. So kids don't get judged by the same rules as adults. But equally, they can't expect to have the same rights as adults, for exactly the same reason.
Grab.
Next tie acquire a sense of humour, and learn about irony. ("It's kind of like silvery and goldy, isn't it?" Hey, another geek joke!)
Too right.
I support 100% the aim of equal opportunities. But the key word is *opportunities*. If you seriously don't want to do something, then a selling campaign isn't going to persuade you. And we do have to face it that a majority of men are good at spatial-mathematical work and prefer that, and a majority of women are good at caring work and prefer that. Only on average though - there are large minorities who don't fit the stereotype, and for them the equality of opportunities has to allow them to do what they want. But to try and cajole/force/bribe people to do something they don't really enjoy and aren't good at, simply to get an even 50-50 split of male-female - that's plain stupid.
So if you want to do a selling job on engineering for women, that's fine by me, *if and only if* you also do a similar selling job on being a house-husband, or your example of psychology, or physiotherapy (my wife just had physio at our local hospital, and looking at the class photos on the wall, there wasn't a single man in the year photos for the last 10 years). No-one does this.
And then people wonder why boys' school grades and careers are going down the toilet. Well, duh! the girls have had positive role models and career paths pushed down their necks until they practically feel obliged to go and do it, whereas all the boys get is, "Girls can do this, that and the other, and succeed wonderfully. Boys? Oh, just do whatever."
The weird thing is that engineering, sciences, maths, etc are seen as "sexist" bcos there are more men than women doing them. But actually meet them and you find they're the least sexist, most ready to judge on merit people that you'll find. Equality of opportunity is here and now in industry everywhere, but no-one seems to have realised yet.
The day people really *understand* the words "equal opportunities" and don't try to go on the positive-discrimination jag, I will be one happy individual.
Grab.
However, Salon.com should not be publishing articles which contain untrue information. "From the start, the evidence against it was overwhelming"? Oh yes?
Scientific journals tend to (or are supposed to) carry out some factual checking on article content before publishing. Salon.com apparently just published without checking. Kennedy is claiming an ability to spot connections which is not backed up by evidence, or by a superior scientific ability.
If this were an editorial expressing one person's opinion, then fine - but responsible journalism requires that it is made clear this is all it is. This is presented as a factual evidence-based investigation, which it clearly is not. If Salon is just a blog, then fine. But if Salon claims to be a reputable news source, which it does, then it's screwed beyond belief.
You're correct - anyone should be able to submit stories on anything. However it is grossly incompetent and unethical for a magazine to publish articles of this nature. My beef is not with Kennedy (hell, he can submit stories claiming he's the second coming of Elvis, and I'll not worry about it) but with Salon for printing such easily-disproved rubbish and passing it off as factual content.
Frankly though, this doesn't surprise me. It's been a very long time since I've seen anything worth reading on Salon. It's just another blog these days. "Online magazine"? Don't make me laugh.
Grab.
Dude, he's just given you exactly what you asked for. Name of effect, who discovered it, when, etc. The whole damn works. Now either you are competent enough in that area to look this up on your own or not. If you are not competent to look in the literature and check on it, you are not competent to criticise it.
;-/
For myself, the whole of quantum physics sounds pretty fucking bizarre, but there's no way I'm going to tell a physicist "you're talking unproveable gobbledygook" when they mention Heisenberg or whatever.
Grab.
Too right! :-) An an AC too, so we can't dish out mod points. Shame...
Nice try dude, but my job is automotive software, and has been for 6 years.
Nothing in cars is a secret, and any information you need to repair or modify a car is easily available.
Bullshit. As an automotive software engineer working for Ford, I can promise you that anyone wanting to use a standard off-the-shelf engine controller and tweak the maps themselves for higher performance is SOL. Yes, you can replace the ECU - but the ECU has usually taken at least as long to develop as the rest of the car, because this is the bit that ensures the car meets CARB/ISO/SAE/whatever standards. Now all these standards are freely available - but only a fool would release the design documents that say exactly how they implemented them, because their rivals would then have a headstart of hundreds of thousands of hours of engineer time.
Grab.
Yep. Compare number of servers to number of PCs total, and number of servers becomes insignificant. And servers do not come with wireless, fancy video cards, sound cards, etc, etc.
Grab.
Bull. You buy a Ford car, Ford are under no compulsion to sell you the design. Ditto PC hardware.
Grab.
In that case your DVD player is supporting PAL60 mode, which allows compatibility, and your TV is getting it OK. Some DVD players don't do this - if your DVD player doesn't do PAL60 and your TV doesn't do NTSC then your Region 1 DVDs might as well be shiny coasters.
;-)
You're right that cost is not an issue though. I bought Amazon's cheapest DVD player last year, and that does PAL60. You just need to be careful choosing your player/TV combination. Or you need to be lucky, as you apparently were!
Grab.
Come on, man...
"It's the Wrong Trousers, Gromit!!!"
RF is definitely *NOT* critical for anything hobbyist. A hobbyist will generally be making up circuits on breadboard or stripboard. An advanced one will be making his own double-sided PCBs. A *really* advanced one may use some of the larger surface-mount components.
What they *won't* be doing is making up 6-layer PCBs with umpty-tum surface mount components, so small you can hardly see them, auto-routed using Protel or some similar package, etc, etc. This simply is not possible at an amateur level. The equipment costs tens of thousands of pounds even if you're doing manual assembly (add another few hundred K for a pick-and-place machine), the software costs some more thousands, and so on.
And it isn't until you get to that level that you'll be working at fast enough digital frequencies to worry about RF effects. Until then, forget about it.
By all means, choose to use ham radio as your entry point into electronics. But don't think the RF stuff will be relevant to what you're doing in other electronics, bcos 99% of the time it won't.
Grab.