We just had elections, and the Conservative Right won power, democratically, under the promise of doing exactly this thing. So Democracy is working just fine.
Wrong. The Republicans in WI won power partially under the promise of making the unions pay for their benefits. They're doing that, and the unions agreed to it. That's democracy in action. However, the GOP is also trying to make a permanent end to collective bargaining, effectively crippling public sector unions forever. There was not a hint that they would do that before the election, but now that they're in power, they're trying to cram it through. Oh, except for those unions which supported them. Those get a free pass. That's not democracy, that's corruption and cronyism. I applaud the Democrats for effectively filibustering this bill - slowing it down so that people can see it and react to it.
There have been two major polls of Wisconsin voters in the past few days, both showing growing support for the unions and diminishing support for Walker. I won't give the exact numbers here, since they were commissioned by partisan groups and therefore probably skew the results by a few points in their favor. But in both cases the unions have a 20-point favorability lead over Walker. If you take out the bias, it's probably around 12 points, which is still very significant.
"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.
"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby (it beats GFWL and GameSpy) or because they use it as copy protection (it beats SafeDisc/Starforce/whatever else is around these days)
"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.
"Centrally owned" - If you refuse to use any software that's owned by a private organization, you're gonna have some trouble playing games.
"Why not just use the internet?" - Because, as I mentioned above, Steam supplies multiplayer functions and copy protection. Plus they probably don't want to make it support IE6.
Steam also syncs saved games and settings across platforms, provides in game text & voice chat, a very helpful friends list through which you can jump directly into a friends server, and tons of other nice features. Yes, you could get the same functionality by combining Direct2Drive, SafeDisc, Ventrilo, AIM, Games for Windows Live, and probably a few other programs. But that doesn't make Steam redundant. It makes all those other programs redundant.
Why would anyone make an effort to launch a non-Steam game under Steam? Not being sarcastic, just never used it.
Digital distribution, with easy and non-intrusive copy protection -- you need an internet connection to install, but that's it unless the publisher (e.g. Ubisoft) insists on more.
A digital storefront that millions of gamers see every time they play any Steam game, making impulse buys more likely.
A friends list that lets people see what their friends are playing, essentially giving free word-of-mouth advertising without even needing your customers to talk about the game.
No they did not ask permission. We specifically denied them to use of some of the images and of our videos (some are CC licensed and thus we have no control over, but many are not). However he has ignored most of the requests from the Blender Foundation.
Well, if that's true, fuck 'em. And the more I look at "reviews", the more I'm inclined to believe you're being honest. That site screams scam.
Seriously though, they did add notes to all of the images naming the source. Maybe they asked permission, and that was all the creators asked of them? I'd advise we hold off on the lynching until one of the artists comes out and complains.
I'm not saying it can't happen here because of American Exceptionalism, or any bullshit like that. I'm saying our leaders are smart enough to know it's counter-productive. And for the record, it wouldn't happen in England or Germany or Japan or any other first world democracy. And that's because in a democracy, the leaders are by definition the ones who are savvy enough to get elected. The sort of people stupid enough to think that shutting down the internet will quell protests are too hamfisted to attain office in the first place.
And unrelated, but this oft repeated lie that anti-war protesters are naive or just trying to be hip is a load of crap. This may come as a shock to you, but a great many people genuinely think that killing is bad, and will oppose it unless it is absolutely necessary. The lies about them all being stoners and hippies are just propaganda by the very people who were pushing for war in the first place.
That's never been the case. Words can harm, and they can kill. You can't shout fire in a crowded theater. You can't hire a hitman, and then claim you were just exercising your first amendment rights when you told him you'd give him a thousand bucks to kill your wife. You can't commit fraud and claim it was just free speech. Mind you, I don't think the Phelps clan has actually crossed the line, despicable as they may be.
Scratch a progressive, find a fascist. Every. Time.
Right! I sure hate all those progressives outlawing abortions, giving lengthy prison sentences to non-violent drug users, demanding we invade foreign countries to spread our views, insisting that creationism be taught in the classroom, setting up "free speech zones" on campuses, outlawing flag-burning, protesting construction of mosques, and so on.
Give it a rest already. There will NEVER be an internet shutdown in the US in response to a protest. You know why? Because our leaders are a fuckton smarter than the tinpot dictators in the Middle East, and are smart enough to know that the best way to prevent revolt is to provide the people with bread and circuses. Shutting down the internet would snap the masses out of their stupor.
Instead, they'll do what they did for the Iraq War protests. Paint the protesters as lazy slackers with nothing better to do, and ignore them.
Absolutely agree. Only a very small percent of people speak out on Facebook/Twitter/etc., but many times that number read what that small percent are saying. The internet is the ultimate soapbox. Anyone who thinks that the proverbial soapbox is unimportant because only a few people stand up on it is missing the point entirely.
Right, which is why I included the scare quotes. I don't know how the other answers are fed to it, but according to an article I read, that was one of the later alterations they made to the program in order to improve its performance.
I don't think anyone's claiming that the success in answering the questions isn't impressive, but the buzzer speed difference made the game objectively unfair. No one cares that a machine can push a button faster than a person - that's been the case for over a hundred years. What we wanted to see is if the machine could answer questions better than a human, and we didn't get to see that, because the humans were rarely given the opportunity to answer.
Well sure, buzzing speed matters for human v human matches too, but that's different. No one cares that IBM has built a machine that can push a button faster than a human. They could do than in the 19th century.
Watson was able to "hear" their responses. It made one blunder in the game, repeating Jennings' answer, because it failed to recognize that the 20s and the 1920s are the same decade.
Actually, based on the article you linked, Watson does have an advantage on the buzzer. The human players have to guess when the light will come on and try to press right afterward - one instant early and your buzzer is disabled. The computer can "see" the light come on and press immediately. It's reaction time is likely measured in microseconds. You try timing a button press to come in during a 100 microsecond window.
If they were interested in a good game, they should have designed it to simulate a typical human reaction time, but that's not the point. The point was the proof of concept - that the machine can answer Jeopardy questions accurately. Really, they didn't even need the human players there, it would have been just as interesting to see it blaze through the board solo.
You call that good advice? If you want effective PR in today's world, NEVER admit you were wrong. No matter how much evidence, no matter how obvious your blunder. Just lie with every breath, and people will believe it. Just look at the birthers, the young-earth creationists, the trickle-down economists, the anti-vaccination crowd, etc... It doesn't matter how obviously wrong you are -- as long as you never blink, you'll maintain your core crowd of supporters, because they don't want to admit to themselves that they were wrong to trust you. But the moment you express self-doubt, the moment you acknowledge facts, you shatter your supporters' self-imposed delusion.
If the government says, "Our bad, we acted hastily and screwed up", then people will want to know what they'll do to prevent it next time. But if the government pretends everything is A-OK, then people will go along with it, because they know they're against child porn, and they don't want it to be any more complicated than that.
no amount of OMG WAR ON TERROR fearmongering will make the US Supreme Court sustain an overtly unconstitutional law.
Oh how I wish that were true, but the Roberts court is thoroughly corrupt. Bear in mind - four of the justices decide cases entirely on the desires of their party. If the Republicans want to see Assange in jail (and boy do they ever) then the best possible outcome is a 5-4 decision with Kennedy joining Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Recently there was just such a decision in Boumediene v Bush to uphold habeus corpus rights. Who knows if a bit more fearmongering might push Kennedy over the edge?
The laws are not "intentionally wrong". In fact, as Asimov himself pointed out, the three laws are basically common sense for any tool. It should have safeguards to protect the user, it should accomplish what the user wants, and it should be durable. Most machinery has interlocks (first law), can be tinkered with (second law), and shouldn't smash itself to bits unless the user screws up (third law).
In fact, the laws are so reasonable and obvious that they needed to be twisted into bizarre contortions (e.g. Runaround), flat out ignored (e.g. Little Lost Robot), or overridden with the Zeroeth Law , in order to achieve most of Asimov's best stories.
Kindles don't "consume WiFi" either, unless you're using it to browse the web, in which case you really ought to get a more appropriate tool for the job.
Basically, Kindles are interchangeable with books and newspapers. If the cafe's okay with books, there's no reason to ban Kindles (or Nooks or any other dedicated e-reader).
1. Make a boost converter. They're super easy. Or buy one as an IC. They cost around $1. 2. You really should use external memory for datalogging, specifically an SD card controlled via SPI. I don't know about #3, as I don't have much personal experience with them, but that is a nasty design flaw if you're right.
Based on what you mentioned about your project (battery-powered, USB connection, interfacing with sensors, and possibly wireless transmission), I'd actually recommend one of Cypress' PSoC3's. The microprocessor is more powerful and just as easy to code for, it has a built-in boost converter, and the chip also has built-in programmable analog and digital blocks that can be configured as, in your case: a full-speed USB port, SPI master for memory access, 20-bit ADC's for sensor reading, etc... and they are available as SSOPs for breadboarding (or you can shell out the $250 for a dev kit, but the chip itself is only $5).
Really, any dev kit from any half-way decent company will be just as painless to jump into. The difference is that the Arduino is so much cheaper than professional dev kits. While EEs who like to tinker in their spare time (like me) might not mind shelling out $250 for a versatile kit, novices (or people who don't need the extra muscle) are understandably put off.
The Arduino fills that niche, and is much nicer to work with than the old basic stamps I had to put up with in college.
I'm really surprised that those books are still dominating the list. Don't get me wrong, I read them all (on the Kindle - for the sake of relevance to TFA), and absolutely loved every word, and would recommend them to anyone. But they've been out for years. It's amazing that they're still on top of a weekly best-seller list.
Slashdot Mirror
We just had elections, and the Conservative Right won power, democratically, under the promise of doing exactly this thing. So Democracy is working just fine.
Wrong. The Republicans in WI won power partially under the promise of making the unions pay for their benefits. They're doing that, and the unions agreed to it. That's democracy in action. However, the GOP is also trying to make a permanent end to collective bargaining, effectively crippling public sector unions forever. There was not a hint that they would do that before the election, but now that they're in power, they're trying to cram it through. Oh, except for those unions which supported them. Those get a free pass. That's not democracy, that's corruption and cronyism. I applaud the Democrats for effectively filibustering this bill - slowing it down so that people can see it and react to it.
There have been two major polls of Wisconsin voters in the past few days, both showing growing support for the unions and diminishing support for Walker. I won't give the exact numbers here, since they were commissioned by partisan groups and therefore probably skew the results by a few points in their favor. But in both cases the unions have a 20-point favorability lead over Walker. If you take out the bias, it's probably around 12 points, which is still very significant.
Steam is fantastic.
"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.
"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby (it beats GFWL and GameSpy) or because they use it as copy protection (it beats SafeDisc/Starforce/whatever else is around these days)
"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.
"Centrally owned" - If you refuse to use any software that's owned by a private organization, you're gonna have some trouble playing games.
"Why not just use the internet?" - Because, as I mentioned above, Steam supplies multiplayer functions and copy protection. Plus they probably don't want to make it support IE6.
Steam also syncs saved games and settings across platforms, provides in game text & voice chat, a very helpful friends list through which you can jump directly into a friends server, and tons of other nice features. Yes, you could get the same functionality by combining Direct2Drive, SafeDisc, Ventrilo, AIM, Games for Windows Live, and probably a few other programs. But that doesn't make Steam redundant. It makes all those other programs redundant.
Why would anyone make an effort to launch a non-Steam game under Steam? Not being sarcastic, just never used it.
No they did not ask permission. We specifically denied them to use of some of the images and of our videos (some are CC licensed and thus we have no control over, but many are not). However he has ignored most of the requests from the Blender Foundation.
Well, if that's true, fuck 'em. And the more I look at "reviews", the more I'm inclined to believe you're being honest. That site screams scam.
But information wants to be freeeeeee!~
Seriously though, they did add notes to all of the images naming the source. Maybe they asked permission, and that was all the creators asked of them? I'd advise we hold off on the lynching until one of the artists comes out and complains.
And the only reason the EPA is making policy is because the Republicans flat out refuse to do so, and filibuster any attempts.
I'm not saying it can't happen here because of American Exceptionalism, or any bullshit like that. I'm saying our leaders are smart enough to know it's counter-productive. And for the record, it wouldn't happen in England or Germany or Japan or any other first world democracy. And that's because in a democracy, the leaders are by definition the ones who are savvy enough to get elected. The sort of people stupid enough to think that shutting down the internet will quell protests are too hamfisted to attain office in the first place.
And unrelated, but this oft repeated lie that anti-war protesters are naive or just trying to be hip is a load of crap. This may come as a shock to you, but a great many people genuinely think that killing is bad, and will oppose it unless it is absolutely necessary. The lies about them all being stoners and hippies are just propaganda by the very people who were pushing for war in the first place.
That's never been the case. Words can harm, and they can kill. You can't shout fire in a crowded theater. You can't hire a hitman, and then claim you were just exercising your first amendment rights when you told him you'd give him a thousand bucks to kill your wife. You can't commit fraud and claim it was just free speech. Mind you, I don't think the Phelps clan has actually crossed the line, despicable as they may be.
Scratch a progressive, find a fascist. Every. Time.
Right! I sure hate all those progressives outlawing abortions, giving lengthy prison sentences to non-violent drug users, demanding we invade foreign countries to spread our views, insisting that creationism be taught in the classroom, setting up "free speech zones" on campuses, outlawing flag-burning, protesting construction of mosques, and so on.
Oh, wait. That's the conservatives.
Give it a rest already. There will NEVER be an internet shutdown in the US in response to a protest. You know why? Because our leaders are a fuckton smarter than the tinpot dictators in the Middle East, and are smart enough to know that the best way to prevent revolt is to provide the people with bread and circuses. Shutting down the internet would snap the masses out of their stupor.
Instead, they'll do what they did for the Iraq War protests. Paint the protesters as lazy slackers with nothing better to do, and ignore them.
Absolutely agree. Only a very small percent of people speak out on Facebook/Twitter/etc., but many times that number read what that small percent are saying. The internet is the ultimate soapbox. Anyone who thinks that the proverbial soapbox is unimportant because only a few people stand up on it is missing the point entirely.
Right, which is why I included the scare quotes. I don't know how the other answers are fed to it, but according to an article I read, that was one of the later alterations they made to the program in order to improve its performance.
That's a very old version on weak hardware. When I played it, it thought that the hat most commonly associated with Abe Lincoln was the sombrero.
I don't think anyone's claiming that the success in answering the questions isn't impressive, but the buzzer speed difference made the game objectively unfair. No one cares that a machine can push a button faster than a person - that's been the case for over a hundred years. What we wanted to see is if the machine could answer questions better than a human, and we didn't get to see that, because the humans were rarely given the opportunity to answer.
Well sure, buzzing speed matters for human v human matches too, but that's different. No one cares that IBM has built a machine that can push a button faster than a human. They could do than in the 19th century.
Watson was able to "hear" their responses. It made one blunder in the game, repeating Jennings' answer, because it failed to recognize that the 20s and the 1920s are the same decade.
Actually, based on the article you linked, Watson does have an advantage on the buzzer. The human players have to guess when the light will come on and try to press right afterward - one instant early and your buzzer is disabled. The computer can "see" the light come on and press immediately. It's reaction time is likely measured in microseconds. You try timing a button press to come in during a 100 microsecond window.
If they were interested in a good game, they should have designed it to simulate a typical human reaction time, but that's not the point. The point was the proof of concept - that the machine can answer Jeopardy questions accurately. Really, they didn't even need the human players there, it would have been just as interesting to see it blaze through the board solo.
You call that good advice? If you want effective PR in today's world, NEVER admit you were wrong. No matter how much evidence, no matter how obvious your blunder. Just lie with every breath, and people will believe it. Just look at the birthers, the young-earth creationists, the trickle-down economists, the anti-vaccination crowd, etc... It doesn't matter how obviously wrong you are -- as long as you never blink, you'll maintain your core crowd of supporters, because they don't want to admit to themselves that they were wrong to trust you. But the moment you express self-doubt, the moment you acknowledge facts, you shatter your supporters' self-imposed delusion.
If the government says, "Our bad, we acted hastily and screwed up", then people will want to know what they'll do to prevent it next time. But if the government pretends everything is A-OK, then people will go along with it, because they know they're against child porn, and they don't want it to be any more complicated than that.
no amount of OMG WAR ON TERROR fearmongering will make the US Supreme Court sustain an overtly unconstitutional law.
Oh how I wish that were true, but the Roberts court is thoroughly corrupt. Bear in mind - four of the justices decide cases entirely on the desires of their party. If the Republicans want to see Assange in jail (and boy do they ever) then the best possible outcome is a 5-4 decision with Kennedy joining Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Recently there was just such a decision in Boumediene v Bush to uphold habeus corpus rights. Who knows if a bit more fearmongering might push Kennedy over the edge?
The laws are not "intentionally wrong". In fact, as Asimov himself pointed out, the three laws are basically common sense for any tool. It should have safeguards to protect the user, it should accomplish what the user wants, and it should be durable. Most machinery has interlocks (first law), can be tinkered with (second law), and shouldn't smash itself to bits unless the user screws up (third law).
In fact, the laws are so reasonable and obvious that they needed to be twisted into bizarre contortions (e.g. Runaround), flat out ignored (e.g. Little Lost Robot), or overridden with the Zeroeth Law , in order to achieve most of Asimov's best stories.
Kindles don't "consume WiFi" either, unless you're using it to browse the web, in which case you really ought to get a more appropriate tool for the job.
Basically, Kindles are interchangeable with books and newspapers. If the cafe's okay with books, there's no reason to ban Kindles (or Nooks or any other dedicated e-reader).
1. Make a boost converter. They're super easy. Or buy one as an IC. They cost around $1.
2. You really should use external memory for datalogging, specifically an SD card controlled via SPI.
I don't know about #3, as I don't have much personal experience with them, but that is a nasty design flaw if you're right.
Based on what you mentioned about your project (battery-powered, USB connection, interfacing with sensors, and possibly wireless transmission), I'd actually recommend one of Cypress' PSoC3's. The microprocessor is more powerful and just as easy to code for, it has a built-in boost converter, and the chip also has built-in programmable analog and digital blocks that can be configured as, in your case: a full-speed USB port, SPI master for memory access, 20-bit ADC's for sensor reading, etc... and they are available as SSOPs for breadboarding (or you can shell out the $250 for a dev kit, but the chip itself is only $5).
Really, any dev kit from any half-way decent company will be just as painless to jump into. The difference is that the Arduino is so much cheaper than professional dev kits. While EEs who like to tinker in their spare time (like me) might not mind shelling out $250 for a versatile kit, novices (or people who don't need the extra muscle) are understandably put off.
The Arduino fills that niche, and is much nicer to work with than the old basic stamps I had to put up with in college.
I'm really surprised that those books are still dominating the list. Don't get me wrong, I read them all (on the Kindle - for the sake of relevance to TFA), and absolutely loved every word, and would recommend them to anyone. But they've been out for years. It's amazing that they're still on top of a weekly best-seller list.
For instance, why would he say "I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket", which adds nothing to the story
Ever read American Psycho?