Germany was a disaster after WWI, and something was bound to happen. Without Hitler, WWII might have been even messier. Or maybe WWII would never happen, and many great things (like computers) that we take for granted would never have been invented (necessity being the mother of invention).
If I were given the option to go back in time and kill Hitler I wouldn't, since I cannot predict the consequences.
You're not really altering how your brain works, you're simply controlling something that is normally automatic. A bit like trying to keep your eyes open while waving something in front of them (supressing blink reflex). Or holding your breath.
I'd be more concerned of getting twitches in your facial muscles even when you're not playing a game.
It's not all that bad. From memory (I'm sure the x86 asm below is fairly, but probably not 100%, accurate)
push ebp mov ebp, esp sub esp, #amount
> code in the block
leave #amount
While there is overhead, which is unacceptable when it can easily be involved, the overhead of these instructions is not that impressive when compared to a branch-misprediction.
And your statement makes no sense. It assumes that do_something() and do_one_more_thing() both return values, and that these values can be interpreted as booleans, and that the language does not simply skip do_one_more_thing() when it encounters that do_something() is false...
> And if it was someone in your family lying painfully in the hospital, the photo of the defendant carrying on in a jailbird costume two weeks after the accident would likely fill you with rage. You'd want justice.
You misspelled 'revenge'. And that's not what the law is for.
As long as the guy had decided never to do drunk driving again, I don't see the problem. Him sitting at home crying is not going to help the woman in the hospital, nor does it prove he will commit the crime again. So he might as well go out and have a good time.
I'm going off-topic here, but I still don't understand why you americans accept this crazy 'no alcohol before you turn 21' thing. I was under the impression that you are an adult when you turn 18? Why make an exception for alcohol?
Reloaded has existed for quite a while and as far as I know they've never put malware in their cracks. While it's obvious there is always a risk involved when you run an executable (no matter where it came from), I'd say you are reasonably save using their cracks. Probably more safe than running DRM'ed software, since that software tries to hook itself into all kinds of important parts of you operating system.
> Young girls - by my definition, anything under 16 - do not have tits(1), do not have curves(2), and most importantly, can't deal with a proper relationship yet(3).*
*Numbers added by me.
I'm willing to give you (3), although I'm sure there are some exceptions to that one. However, (1) and (2) make no sense at all. I'm not sure where you're from but in my universe many girls under 16 have tits and curves, especially those who are slightly overweight.
> Want more women in the hard sciences, look to the night clubs for your answer. "ladies get math tuition free" Try that a few semesters, and you will see it will still be a sausage fest, but you might get a few women interested enough to stick with it.
Should this 'math tuition free' ever become policy, then if I, being male, were at some point to be in a position where I had to choose between hiring a woman or a man, would definitely choose the guy, if only because it would feel just. The women want unequal treatment? They can have it.
This kind of 'positive' discrimination breeds contempt.
Just out of interest, can you mention a culture where the boys mostly do things that we consider girl-ish and the girls mostly do things that we consider boy-ish? You can pick any culture. I'm not trying to troll, I'm geniunely interested if such a culture exists (If it exists, which I doubt, it would probably be some tribe far from western civilisation).
> The value of someone who can think outside the box should not be underestimated, and up until now the box is largely drawn out by testosterone junkies.
So you suggest replacing people who are not afraid of taking risks by people who are adverse to risk, in the hope that the latter will think (more) out of the box while the former won't?
> By engineering a system which dissuades women
Yes obviously the system is the way it is because a woman-hater engineered it that way.
> we not only lose out on a significant number of competent individuals undertaking research (a catastrophe in and of itself)
A shame, but if working in science means these people won't be working in another field, that's a catastrophe for that other field, right? It's no use talking about what could have been, and 'potential' losses.
> but we lose out on those outliers whose drastically different modes of thought might spur important breakthroughs.
Ah, our new drastical different risk-adverse overlords. Science has been fine for the past 100 years with a very low number of females, and it will be fine for another 100 years without changing this.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for more women in science (I'm doing comp sci and my year has about 50 guys and 1 girl), but I disagree with your arguments.
> and my memory regularly makes calculation errors
How regular? A single changed bit in a program's code can make it crash or at least behave in very strange ways. If this problem really occurs so often that you can't even load the complete WoW client in memory without it containing at least 1 error, it's a miracle your computer makes it to the point where you can start a browser and post on slashdot without crashing.
People in third world countries make very little money, so they can't save any. When they get old, they need their children to look after them because they don't have any savings and are unable to work [enough to make a living]. Unless you want to die alone of starvation, you NEED to have many babies. Also, children are much more likely to die in third world countries so it is good policy to have a few spares. Finally, contraceptives are expensive and/or, depending on your religion of choice, their use may be considered a sin.
Assuming no free will, you 'want' to do whatever it is that you do in exactly the same way that a rock 'wants' to fall when you drop it. The existance or non-existance of free will is pretty important in the matter of computers being able or unable to 'want'. Lucky us, the free-will thing might at some point be solved by biology, making society's opinion irrelevant.
> While I program for a living much of my day is spent writing stuff with pen and paper. A computer simply cannot support the same flow of thoughts as a couple of pieces of paper can.
Hear hear! Pen+paper is great for drawing complex systems, writing an algorithm in extremely high-level pseudocode, and debugging. Especially debugging. It's amazing how easy it is to find errors in your code when you execute it by hand on a piece of paper.
> a (justified or not) lack of faith in the general public's ability to have access to their own data without turning into raging hypochondriacs.
Maybe it would be good for people to know more about their risks of having certain diseases. It puts other things in perspective. Why worry about terrorists when you are 10.000 times more likely to die in some other way? Why be a hypochondriac when it is X times more likely that you'll die in a car-crash?
> (I've been told that every dutch person speaks English but people seem to like you more if you try to speak their language even if you suck at it - well at least that's how they seem to be in Quebec).
Being a Dutchy myself, I can assure you that most people from the Netherlands switch to English the moment they notice your Dutch isn't perfect. I hear this can be quite frustrating for those who intent to learn our language, but we are unlikely to cooperate; it is hard for us to understand why someone would go through the trouble of learning Dutch. We have no love for our language and won't bother to hide that.
Here is my advice to you: if you intend to learn Dutch, do not, under any circumstance, admit that you speak English, especially to strangers. In you post you mentioned Quebec, so I assume you speak decent French. Tell everyone that is the only language you speak. Lie. Our French is much worse than our English* (I know mine is, I'm pretty much limited to saying "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" and I'm not even sure I spelled it that correctly) so we'll be forced to speak Dutch with you (and hate it).
AC makes no sense. Assuming it takes users some constant time C to update, and all users update theri browsers (big assumption...), then with two updates per week, users will run the latest version of the browser 1-C/7 of the time. With updates twice per month, users will run with the latest version 1-C/30 of the time. Obviously C/7 > C/30 therefore if you update less often users will be up-to-date more often. That firefox users are up-to-date 83-ish% of the time is MORE, not less, impressive because Mozilla pushes out a fix for something about twice a week.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany was a disaster after WWI, and something was bound to happen. Without Hitler, WWII might have been even messier. Or maybe WWII would never happen, and many great things (like computers) that we take for granted would never have been invented (necessity being the mother of invention).
If I were given the option to go back in time and kill Hitler I wouldn't, since I cannot predict the consequences.
Yay for offtopic :)
I gave that thing a try, only to find out that I hate Lua. That's a shame, since I really liked the way those creature-thingies moved on a screen.
You're not really altering how your brain works, you're simply controlling something that is normally automatic. A bit like trying to keep your eyes open while waving something in front of them (supressing blink reflex). Or holding your breath.
I'd be more concerned of getting twitches in your facial muscles even when you're not playing a game.
It's not all that bad. From memory (I'm sure the x86 asm below is fairly, but probably not 100%, accurate)
push ebp
mov ebp, esp
sub esp, #amount
> code in the block
leave #amount
While there is overhead, which is unacceptable when it can easily be involved, the overhead of these instructions is not that impressive when compared to a branch-misprediction.
And your statement makes no sense. It assumes that do_something() and do_one_more_thing() both return values, and that these values can be interpreted as booleans, and that the language does not simply skip do_one_more_thing() when it encounters that do_something() is false...
> I feel the death penalty is an appropriate deterrent.
Because people who are high and/or drunk have been known to carefully weigh the consequences of their actions? :)
It can't be that hard to convince someone who is very drunk to drive somewhere, even if they had no intention of driving when they started drinking.
Okay my sarcasm detector must be malfunctioning.
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
> And if it was someone in your family lying painfully in the hospital, the photo of the defendant carrying on in a jailbird costume two weeks after the accident would likely fill you with rage. You'd want justice.
You misspelled 'revenge'. And that's not what the law is for.
As long as the guy had decided never to do drunk driving again, I don't see the problem. Him sitting at home crying is not going to help the woman in the hospital, nor does it prove he will commit the crime again. So he might as well go out and have a good time.
I'm going off-topic here, but I still don't understand why you americans accept this crazy 'no alcohol before you turn 21' thing. I was under the impression that you are an adult when you turn 18? Why make an exception for alcohol?
Reloaded has existed for quite a while and as far as I know they've never put malware in their cracks. While it's obvious there is always a risk involved when you run an executable (no matter where it came from), I'd say you are reasonably save using their cracks. Probably more safe than running DRM'ed software, since that software tries to hook itself into all kinds of important parts of you operating system.
What are you trying to tell us? 'I can name one (or even a few) country that is worse than mine, therefore my country doesn't suck' ?
You'd think a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would have invented the geiger counter.
> Young girls - by my definition, anything under 16 - do not have tits(1), do not have curves(2), and most importantly, can't deal with a proper relationship yet(3).*
*Numbers added by me.
I'm willing to give you (3), although I'm sure there are some exceptions to that one. However, (1) and (2) make no sense at all. I'm not sure where you're from but in my universe many girls under 16 have tits and curves, especially those who are slightly overweight.
> Want more women in the hard sciences, look to the night clubs for your answer. "ladies get math tuition free" Try that a few semesters, and you will see it will still be a sausage fest, but you might get a few women interested enough to stick with it.
Should this 'math tuition free' ever become policy, then if I, being male, were at some point to be in a position where I had to choose between hiring a woman or a man, would definitely choose the guy, if only because it would feel just. The women want unequal treatment? They can have it.
This kind of 'positive' discrimination breeds contempt.
Just out of interest, can you mention a culture where the boys mostly do things that we consider girl-ish and the girls mostly do things that we consider boy-ish? You can pick any culture. I'm not trying to troll, I'm geniunely interested if such a culture exists (If it exists, which I doubt, it would probably be some tribe far from western civilisation).
> The value of someone who can think outside the box should not be underestimated, and up until now the box is largely drawn out by testosterone junkies.
So you suggest replacing people who are not afraid of taking risks by people who are adverse to risk, in the hope that the latter will think (more) out of the box while the former won't?
> By engineering a system which dissuades women
Yes obviously the system is the way it is because a woman-hater engineered it that way.
> we not only lose out on a significant number of competent individuals undertaking research (a
catastrophe in and of itself)
A shame, but if working in science means these people won't be working in another field, that's a catastrophe for that other field, right? It's no use talking about what could have been, and 'potential' losses.
> but we lose out on those outliers whose drastically different modes of thought might spur important breakthroughs.
Ah, our new drastical different risk-adverse overlords. Science has been fine for the past 100 years with a very low number of females, and it will be fine for another 100 years without changing this.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for more women in science (I'm doing comp sci and my year has about 50 guys and 1 girl), but I disagree with your arguments.
> and my memory regularly makes calculation errors
How regular? A single changed bit in a program's code can make it crash or at least behave in very strange ways. If this problem really occurs so often that you can't even load the complete WoW client in memory without it containing at least 1 error, it's a miracle your computer makes it to the point where you can start a browser and post on slashdot without crashing.
People in third world countries make very little money, so they can't save any. When they get old, they need their children to look after them because they don't have any savings and are unable to work [enough to make a living]. Unless you want to die alone of starvation, you NEED to have many babies.
Also, children are much more likely to die in third world countries so it is good policy to have a few spares.
Finally, contraceptives are expensive and/or, depending on your religion of choice, their use may be considered a sin.
Assuming no free will, you 'want' to do whatever it is that you do in exactly the same way that a rock 'wants' to fall when you drop it. The existance or non-existance of free will is pretty important in the matter of computers being able or unable to 'want'. Lucky us, the free-will thing might at some point be solved by biology, making society's opinion irrelevant.
> While I program for a living much of my day is spent writing stuff with pen and paper. A computer simply cannot support the same flow of thoughts as a couple of pieces of paper can.
Hear hear! Pen+paper is great for drawing complex systems, writing an algorithm in extremely high-level pseudocode, and debugging. Especially debugging. It's amazing how easy it is to find errors in your code when you execute it by hand on a piece of paper.
> a (justified or not) lack of faith in the general public's ability to have access to their own data without turning into raging hypochondriacs.
Maybe it would be good for people to know more about their risks of having certain diseases. It puts other things in perspective. Why worry about terrorists when you are 10.000 times more likely to die in some other way? Why be a hypochondriac when it is X times more likely that you'll die in a car-crash?
> (I've been told that every dutch person speaks English but people seem to like you more if you try to speak their language even if you suck at it - well at least that's how they seem to be in Quebec).
Being a Dutchy myself, I can assure you that most people from the Netherlands switch to English the moment they notice your Dutch isn't perfect. I hear this can be quite frustrating for those who intent to learn our language, but we are unlikely to cooperate; it is hard for us to understand why someone would go through the trouble of learning Dutch. We have no love for our language and won't bother to hide that.
Here is my advice to you: if you intend to learn Dutch, do not, under any circumstance, admit that you speak English, especially to strangers. In you post you mentioned Quebec, so I assume you speak decent French. Tell everyone that is the only language you speak. Lie. Our French is much worse than our English* (I know mine is, I'm pretty much limited to saying "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" and I'm not even sure I spelled it that correctly) so we'll be forced to speak Dutch with you (and hate it).
*On average
True. For those who do intend to come to the Netherlands: English will suffice.
AC makes no sense. Assuming it takes users some constant time C to update, and all users update theri browsers (big assumption...), then with two updates per week, users will run the latest version of the browser 1-C/7 of the time. With updates twice per month, users will run with the latest version 1-C/30 of the time. Obviously C/7 > C/30 therefore if you update less often users will be up-to-date more often.
That firefox users are up-to-date 83-ish% of the time is MORE, not less, impressive because Mozilla pushes out a fix for something about twice a week.
If you can MAKE them choose to be exploited, then you made the choice for them, effectively taking away their choice.