I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf).
I have a fairly significant hearing loss which caused me a great deal of difficulty when I was at school. My hearing was good enough for me to definitely not be considered deaf, but it often wasn't good enough for me to be able to reliably have conversations with my peers (how well I can hear people varies hugely from very well to not at all).
At the time, I was seriously considering whether I would have preferred to be profoundly deaf for precisely the reasons you outline. Now, my hearing loss is much less of an issue for two reasons: one is that I have better hearing aids, and have had more time to adjust to them, and the other is that I have tuned my life so that I no longer feel any particular desire to socialise, avoiding the problem completely, but at the cost of living a rather more lonely life.
I may, however, just be taking my current level of hearing for granted; I don't know.
We go over there to give them aid, and they get mad because we weren't there sooner. When we actually are there, they shoot at us and steal our things.
Obviously you're grossly over-generalising, etc, etc. But more to the point, this is predictable, and it's not their faults. If you dine in front of a starving person, expect them to get angry. If you go on a spending spree in front of a homeless person, expect them to get pissed.
I don't know enough about the incident in question to respond directly to it, but I'm responding to your comment in general. They ("they" referring to the people in Haiti who have been affected by the disaster) do not have perfect information (they don't know whether the rest of the world is helping, or whether we're too busy with our trivial lives (which, incidentally, for the most part, we are)). If they see some folk who look like tourists, surrounded by life's luxuries, cruise by in a van, they're going to get angry. Sure, it'd be nice if they approached the situation more logically---maybe querying the tourists as to their purpose there---but in their situation, I'm betting emotions are going to come first.
Despite the fact that I strongly disagreed with her previous post, girlintraining made a good point about helping a drowning person. They're likely to cling to you, probably endangering you both. But that _doesn't_ mean you shouldn't help them, and that _doesn't_ make them a bad person. It's an understandable and predictable response. It means you should factor it in when trying to help them. If you want to help a lion with a thorn in its paw, don't be surprised if it tries to eat you first.
If there's no law enforcement left, just how are the emergency supplies that are moving all to slowly going to wind up in the right hands?
The "right hands"? That's rather arrogant of you.
No, it's not. The emergency supplies should be distributed as evenly as possible, with bias in favour of those who need it most. If you're in the sort of situation that people in Haiti are in, and you see a van full of everything you need to survive, you're quite possibly going to do whatever you need to do to get at it (as you yourself mention). Allowing this to happen is _not_ in the best interest of the population as a whole. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the slightest blaming, judging or harbouring negative thoughts against these people---quite the opposite. But what I am saying is that to help them requires proper organisation, and not recklessly sparking a riot, during which supplies will be wasted, and distributed to only a fraction of the number of people which could be allowed to benefit from them.
Notice that just because I am writing this in the comfort of my armchair does not make it any less true. If I were in their position, I would probably do the same. If you read this as anything even resembling an attack on the people in question, then you read this wrong (or I explained it wrong, or whatever).
it will be stolen someday. (~750.000 stolen bikes per year, on 15 million people).
My understanding is that most of these bikes have built-in locks which go around the back wheel. These are extremely convenient, but provide almost no real security. Thus, your statistics probably don't apply to people who use a decent lock. So, if you want to ride an expensive bike in the Netherlands, use a decent lock.
In reading my sibling comments, I'm deafened by the sound of *whooosh*
Whether the number of children I have is a natural number depends on your preference. I personally prefer the definition which does not include the cardinality of my offspring set.
I'm not necessarily saying you're not right, but I do have several comments. You seem to think that multiple medical conditions are being falsely diagnosed. If you are right, then I have nothing else to say. On the other hand, what evidence do you have to support your argument? That more children are being diagnosed than were when you were growing up? That's certainly not evidence. You may claim that none of this happened in your day, and everybody got on just fine. But do you actually know if they got on just fine? It's perfectly possible that undiagnosed children from your generation looked like they were doing fine, but were seriously struggling with life.
Having said all this, I do tend to agree that a lot of children are being overly pampered, but I also think we should be careful not to ignore real issues just because we did in the past.
I'm tired of the government mandated bullshit where everyone ELSE has to accommodate, bend over for, and kiss the ass of the one.
I've not RTFA (this is/., right?), so I don't know what is being suggested. There are several solutions to the problem of disabled people not being able to do things that able people can. One is to reduce everyone to the greatest common divisor. This solution sucks. Another is to minorly inconvenience a number of able people to cater for a disabled person. This solution doesn't suck, but a suitable trade-off should be selected. For example, showing subtitles at a cinema for certain viewings, so that deaf/hearing-impaired people can watch films is a good solution. Requiring that all cinemas show subtitles on all viewings sucks if the subtitles are invasive to the able-listeners. if the subtitles are only visible to the deaf, for example by projecting them in suck a way that they're only visible when special glasses are worn, then this solution wouldn't suck. If, on the other hand, everyone else has to wear special glasses to filter out the subtitles, then they should only be shown selectively.
The point is, sometimes it's perfectly possible to cater for the disabled at only a minor inconvenience to everyone else. In such cases, I feel a good attempt should be made to cater for the disabled (it really sucks being disabled, and so able-bodied people should at least be accommodating to them), when practical.
In the case in question, it seems perfectly reasonable to have a small fraction of seats marked as a disable-friendly zone. Such a zone would then be minorly customised for the passenger, and the other passengers in that small fraction would work on a greatest-common-divisor-basis. So, for example, the seats would be more spacious (to accommodate people in wheel chairs, or who are tall enough that sitting in normal seats would cause non-trivial discomfort), they would be located close to the stewards' quarters, and they would have braille notices for the blind, and written copies of instructions for the deaf. In the special case discussed in the article, people in this section would be asked not to eat nuts, and perhaps a curtain would be put up.
The main point is, the solution outlined above is easy. Normally the section would not require any extra attention than standard first-class seating. Do you think all people with disabilities should be excluded from everything just because they're a slight inconvenience?
Why use the original key at all? They have no idea what the key looks like, so a random key is just as plausible as the original key (which obviously should have been random when it was created).
Call me naive, but refusing to give up the keys does make you look guilty any which way you look at it.
Yes I do have locks on my doors too and they indeed come in useful to keep peeping toms out; however when the police knocks saying they suspect my basement to be a meth-lab, well I'll gladly let them in and go look for themselves
How about when the police knocks on your door asking to see your meth-lab, which is in fact your super-secret fantasy basement, complete with props for you sexual fetishes and evidence of your deviant fantasy of wanting to be your own mother?
The above is not against the law, but you might rather die than have your friends/relatives know about it. Also consider if the basement was the HQ of a (perfectly legal and moral, etc) secret anti-government organisation. While not illegal, I'm sure you would rather the police did not know of its existence.
Then I'd say David Chaum's "digital cash" is not what will wind up being used.
Very possibly
And no, the tokens won't be useless unless payed into a bank.... you simply stockpile them just like you would cash
With Chaum's protocol, the tokens are worthless unless they are repaid by the bank. Stockpiling them is worthless. That may or may not be good, but it's how the protocol works. Like you say, another protocol may be used.
With digital cash*, one obtains a token from the bank, which they can then spend anonymously at stores. Obtaining the token is not anonymous, so criminals cannot make huge payoffs without the bank noticing that they're withdrawing £1,000,000 as a single token (or lots of little tokens at the same time). The tokens themselves are useless unless payed into the bank, and so if a gangsta receives £1,000,000 worth of tokens, it shall still be noticed by the bank. What will not be noticed by the bank is how they received the £1,000,000.
(The above is an argument against anonymous digital cash being worse than high-value bills; I'm not arguing against your other points)
* There are presumably many protocols for digital cash; I think I'm referring to the one introduced by David Chaum, but it was a while ago when I read about it.
TFA repeats itself a lot, and doesn't really contain any interesting information, other than a few brief outlines of UFO encounters, none of which contain any more details than the summarised eye-witness reports.
I used to play AssaultCube (aka ActionCube) a fair bit, where cheating was a fairly common occurrence. The AC solution was rather depressingly inefficient. The admin could kick cheaters (with some servers allowing bans too), but that was about all.
In the Cube-derived games, anyone can be an admin. When there is no admin currently active, a player can request it. Therefore, rogue admins were quite common, and the powers of the admin were typically limited for obvious reasons. The server admin could, of course, claim full power when they were online, but many server admins were either ignorant of this, decided not to, or were rarely online.
I've always felt that a web of trust-style system could work quite nicely. Clans act as good hubs of authority, where the top 5 or so clans are commonly known among frequent players. Open matches could be played when the server's admin is online, such that cheaters could be properly dealt with. When the admin is offline, an automatic system could allow only reasonably trusted players to play. Players who have not obtained any trust could do so in the open matches.
Something that could be interesting would be to allow all players to enter a game, but only allow players to directly interact with players who share a mutual trust. Players with whom you do not share a mutual trust might have low opacity, and can not harm, nor be harmed by, you.
Of course, this would introduce problems. If three players are in a fight (assuming every-man-for-himself, to simplify things): Joe, Jim, and Bob. Joe and Jim trust each other, but only Jim trusts Bob. In such a situation, Jim is at a disadvantage, for he can sustain damage from both Joe and Bob; whereas the other two can only sustain damage from Jim.
Interesting algorithms could be used to assign handicaps to players in such circumstances.
Certainly! I was not intending to claim that Haskell is entirely a Microsoft Research project. However, I don't think we can deny that Simon et al have made major contributions since being at MSR.
I'm currently doing a research project on Haskell at Glasgow, so am aware* of GHC's heritage:-)
* [Unfortunately, Glasgow don't actually make much mention of Haskell in their undergraduate course, however.]
There's little evidence that anything useful has come out of Microsoft Research. Ever.
I use Haskell a lot, and I can say that that's certainly not true. Simon PJ has made a tremendous number of contributions to Haskell.
Whatever your views on Haskell, it _is_ being used by a lot of people for practical purposes, so it's clearly not true that "[nothing] useful has [ever] come out of Microsoft Research".
I do not know if there are any other interesting projects being developed by Microsoft Research, but I would guess there are surprisingly many.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf).
I have a fairly significant hearing loss which caused me a great deal of difficulty when I was at school. My hearing was good enough for me to definitely not be considered deaf, but it often wasn't good enough for me to be able to reliably have conversations with my peers (how well I can hear people varies hugely from very well to not at all).
At the time, I was seriously considering whether I would have preferred to be profoundly deaf for precisely the reasons you outline. Now, my hearing loss is much less of an issue for two reasons: one is that I have better hearing aids, and have had more time to adjust to them, and the other is that I have tuned my life so that I no longer feel any particular desire to socialise, avoiding the problem completely, but at the cost of living a rather more lonely life.
I may, however, just be taking my current level of hearing for granted; I don't know.
Please may I have the chemical formula for your beaker?
We go over there to give them aid, and they get mad because we weren't there sooner. When we actually are there, they shoot at us and steal our things.
Obviously you're grossly over-generalising, etc, etc. But more to the point, this is predictable, and it's not their faults. If you dine in front of a starving person, expect them to get angry. If you go on a spending spree in front of a homeless person, expect them to get pissed.
I don't know enough about the incident in question to respond directly to it, but I'm responding to your comment in general. They ("they" referring to the people in Haiti who have been affected by the disaster) do not have perfect information (they don't know whether the rest of the world is helping, or whether we're too busy with our trivial lives (which, incidentally, for the most part, we are)). If they see some folk who look like tourists, surrounded by life's luxuries, cruise by in a van, they're going to get angry. Sure, it'd be nice if they approached the situation more logically---maybe querying the tourists as to their purpose there---but in their situation, I'm betting emotions are going to come first.
Despite the fact that I strongly disagreed with her previous post, girlintraining made a good point about helping a drowning person. They're likely to cling to you, probably endangering you both. But that _doesn't_ mean you shouldn't help them, and that _doesn't_ make them a bad person. It's an understandable and predictable response. It means you should factor it in when trying to help them. If you want to help a lion with a thorn in its paw, don't be surprised if it tries to eat you first.
If there's no law enforcement left, just how are the emergency supplies that are moving all to slowly going to wind up in the right hands?
The "right hands"? That's rather arrogant of you.
No, it's not. The emergency supplies should be distributed as evenly as possible, with bias in favour of those who need it most. If you're in the sort of situation that people in Haiti are in, and you see a van full of everything you need to survive, you're quite possibly going to do whatever you need to do to get at it (as you yourself mention). Allowing this to happen is _not_ in the best interest of the population as a whole. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the slightest blaming, judging or harbouring negative thoughts against these people---quite the opposite. But what I am saying is that to help them requires proper organisation, and not recklessly sparking a riot, during which supplies will be wasted, and distributed to only a fraction of the number of people which could be allowed to benefit from them.
Notice that just because I am writing this in the comfort of my armchair does not make it any less true. If I were in their position, I would probably do the same. If you read this as anything even resembling an attack on the people in question, then you read this wrong (or I explained it wrong, or whatever).
it will be stolen someday. (~750.000 stolen bikes per year, on 15 million people).
My understanding is that most of these bikes have built-in locks which go around the back wheel. These are extremely convenient, but provide almost no real security. Thus, your statistics probably don't apply to people who use a decent lock. So, if you want to ride an expensive bike in the Netherlands, use a decent lock.
Also, beware of shooting bystanders. This can sometimes lose you points.
In reading my sibling comments, I'm deafened by the sound of *whooosh*
Whether the number of children I have is a natural number depends on your preference. I personally prefer the definition which does not include the cardinality of my offspring set.
I'm not necessarily saying you're not right, but I do have several comments. You seem to think that multiple medical conditions are being falsely diagnosed. If you are right, then I have nothing else to say. On the other hand, what evidence do you have to support your argument? That more children are being diagnosed than were when you were growing up? That's certainly not evidence. You may claim that none of this happened in your day, and everybody got on just fine. But do you actually know if they got on just fine? It's perfectly possible that undiagnosed children from your generation looked like they were doing fine, but were seriously struggling with life.
Having said all this, I do tend to agree that a lot of children are being overly pampered, but I also think we should be careful not to ignore real issues just because we did in the past.
I'm tired of the government mandated bullshit where everyone ELSE has to accommodate, bend over for, and kiss the ass of the one.
I've not RTFA (this is /., right?), so I don't know what is being suggested. There are several solutions to the problem of disabled people not being able to do things that able people can. One is to reduce everyone to the greatest common divisor. This solution sucks. Another is to minorly inconvenience a number of able people to cater for a disabled person. This solution doesn't suck, but a suitable trade-off should be selected. For example, showing subtitles at a cinema for certain viewings, so that deaf/hearing-impaired people can watch films is a good solution. Requiring that all cinemas show subtitles on all viewings sucks if the subtitles are invasive to the able-listeners. if the subtitles are only visible to the deaf, for example by projecting them in suck a way that they're only visible when special glasses are worn, then this solution wouldn't suck. If, on the other hand, everyone else has to wear special glasses to filter out the subtitles, then they should only be shown selectively.
The point is, sometimes it's perfectly possible to cater for the disabled at only a minor inconvenience to everyone else. In such cases, I feel a good attempt should be made to cater for the disabled (it really sucks being disabled, and so able-bodied people should at least be accommodating to them), when practical.
In the case in question, it seems perfectly reasonable to have a small fraction of seats marked as a disable-friendly zone. Such a zone would then be minorly customised for the passenger, and the other passengers in that small fraction would work on a greatest-common-divisor-basis. So, for example, the seats would be more spacious (to accommodate people in wheel chairs, or who are tall enough that sitting in normal seats would cause non-trivial discomfort), they would be located close to the stewards' quarters, and they would have braille notices for the blind, and written copies of instructions for the deaf. In the special case discussed in the article, people in this section would be asked not to eat nuts, and perhaps a curtain would be put up.
The main point is, the solution outlined above is easy. Normally the section would not require any extra attention than standard first-class seating. Do you think all people with disabilities should be excluded from everything just because they're a slight inconvenience?
which means that if you can't do it now, you'll probably be able to do it on your cell phone in 10 years.
I can't solve the TSP for 1000 cities on my desktop computer today, but I suspect in 10 years time I'll be able to solve it on my mobile phone.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Moderators, please note: he's not being funny --- he's being insightful.
but everyone would like to know whether it's going to rain tomorrow
I live in my parents' basement. Why would I want to know whether it's going to rain tomorrow?
Meat is the same tissue, but terminally locked into 'deadness'
It would appear that we are all undead.
It sounds like it doesn't add anything that cryptographic secret sharing (or splitting) can't provide.
Why use the original key at all? They have no idea what the key looks like, so a random key is just as plausible as the original key (which obviously should have been random when it was created).
Call me naive, but refusing to give up the keys does make you look guilty any which way you look at it.
Yes I do have locks on my doors too and they indeed come in useful to keep peeping toms out; however when the police knocks saying they suspect my basement to be a meth-lab, well I'll gladly let them in and go look for themselves
How about when the police knocks on your door asking to see your meth-lab, which is in fact your super-secret fantasy basement, complete with props for you sexual fetishes and evidence of your deviant fantasy of wanting to be your own mother?
The above is not against the law, but you might rather die than have your friends/relatives know about it. Also consider if the basement was the HQ of a (perfectly legal and moral, etc) secret anti-government organisation. While not illegal, I'm sure you would rather the police did not know of its existence.
Don Stewart wrote about optimising Haskell programs using genetic algroithms.
Then I'd say David Chaum's "digital cash" is not what will wind up being used.
Very possibly
And no, the tokens won't be useless unless payed into a bank. ... you simply stockpile them just like you would cash
With Chaum's protocol, the tokens are worthless unless they are repaid by the bank. Stockpiling them is worthless. That may or may not be good, but it's how the protocol works. Like you say, another protocol may be used.
With digital cash*, one obtains a token from the bank, which they can then spend anonymously at stores. Obtaining the token is not anonymous, so criminals cannot make huge payoffs without the bank noticing that they're withdrawing £1,000,000 as a single token (or lots of little tokens at the same time). The tokens themselves are useless unless payed into the bank, and so if a gangsta receives £1,000,000 worth of tokens, it shall still be noticed by the bank. What will not be noticed by the bank is how they received the £1,000,000.
(The above is an argument against anonymous digital cash being worse than high-value bills; I'm not arguing against your other points)
* There are presumably many protocols for digital cash; I think I'm referring to the one introduced by David Chaum, but it was a while ago when I read about it.
See also an interesting paper on the history of Erlang, by Armstrong, and Erlang, The Movie.
Now instead of sitting on the couch wasting 90-120 minutes of my life at a time, I'm spending that time enjoying getting around
Or to reverse that argument:
Now, instead of sitting on my bike, wasting days of my life travelling, I'm spending my time enjoying films in 90-120 minute blocks!
:-)
Disclaimer: I've just come back from a long weekend touring with my bike
TFA repeats itself a lot, and doesn't really contain any interesting information, other than a few brief outlines of UFO encounters, none of which contain any more details than the summarised eye-witness reports.
I used to play AssaultCube (aka ActionCube) a fair bit, where cheating was a fairly common occurrence. The AC solution was rather depressingly inefficient. The admin could kick cheaters (with some servers allowing bans too), but that was about all.
In the Cube-derived games, anyone can be an admin. When there is no admin currently active, a player can request it. Therefore, rogue admins were quite common, and the powers of the admin were typically limited for obvious reasons. The server admin could, of course, claim full power when they were online, but many server admins were either ignorant of this, decided not to, or were rarely online.
I've always felt that a web of trust-style system could work quite nicely. Clans act as good hubs of authority, where the top 5 or so clans are commonly known among frequent players. Open matches could be played when the server's admin is online, such that cheaters could be properly dealt with. When the admin is offline, an automatic system could allow only reasonably trusted players to play. Players who have not obtained any trust could do so in the open matches.
Something that could be interesting would be to allow all players to enter a game, but only allow players to directly interact with players who share a mutual trust. Players with whom you do not share a mutual trust might have low opacity, and can not harm, nor be harmed by, you.
Of course, this would introduce problems. If three players are in a fight (assuming every-man-for-himself, to simplify things): Joe, Jim, and Bob. Joe and Jim trust each other, but only Jim trusts Bob. In such a situation, Jim is at a disadvantage, for he can sustain damage from both Joe and Bob; whereas the other two can only sustain damage from Jim.
Interesting algorithms could be used to assign handicaps to players in such circumstances.
Certainly! I was not intending to claim that Haskell is entirely a Microsoft Research project. However, I don't think we can deny that Simon et al have made major contributions since being at MSR.
I'm currently doing a research project on Haskell at Glasgow, so am aware* of GHC's heritage :-)
* [Unfortunately, Glasgow don't actually make much mention of Haskell in their undergraduate course, however.]
There's little evidence that anything useful has come out of Microsoft Research. Ever.
I use Haskell a lot, and I can say that that's certainly not true. Simon PJ has made a tremendous number of contributions to Haskell.
Whatever your views on Haskell, it _is_ being used by a lot of people for practical purposes, so it's clearly not true that "[nothing] useful has [ever] come out of Microsoft Research".
I do not know if there are any other interesting projects being developed by Microsoft Research, but I would guess there are surprisingly many.