Unprofessional ? UNPROFESSIONAL? Listen here kid, being a professional means that you tell the boss to go suck eggs when he orders you to do something stupid. Being a professional at a critical job means you finish your shift and await your replacement, even when they fired you earlier in the day. Because someone has to do the job. Being a professional means you refuse to sign off on the untested software because the plane might crash and people will die. Being a professional means you don't let the bosses idiot son steer the boat, because he's incompetent and would steer it into shore.
Being a professional means you're not just there for the paycheck to be a yes-man to your superior. You're there, in part, to do a good job. Because doing a bad job will get people killed and/or cost millions.
People like to throw the "unprofessional" term about when people don't have the right cut of dress, or speak with the proper tone, but if you want to play hardball with professionalism, you need to realize that it's more important than shmoozing with the boss and climbing that corporate ladder.
I preferred statecraft II. It gave the Chinese that overseer->Changling power. It balances out mid-game scouting against French observers and American scanner sweeps.
Kid, computers are LUDICROUSLY fast. They can handle more data, than you can EVER possibly hope process for a computer game. And I mean game. Physics simulator, sure, that can always take more. But for games, we've largely hit peak-pixel. There's no need to add more polygons, it doesn't look any better. In that same vein, there's no need to shrink the resolution of, say, the shatter remains of the wall that your cool-aid guy just broke through below a level that has diminishing gameplay impact.
Now hey, cool ideas will make real good use of advanced hardware. But if you have an good idea for a game, computers can do it. If computers can't do it, ask yourself if it really add to the game?
Then it will be worth doing some crap with blocks
There is no hardware limitation. You can do it now. It was worth doing so more than a decade ago. This is a pathetic excuse.
Wow dude... just wow. I guess this demonstrates a dark side to humanity. Wait a second... There it is. Right there:
Jealous as fuck,
There we go. That pretty much describes the entire problem encountered here. We've got a word for it.
But lemme just point how this guy is wrong:
Do you not know how much money the game made?
A lot. It's sold 33 million, so he's probably made around a hundred million. But that doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to what motivates Notch.
Do you not know how much the game used to sell for and got an arbitrary increase in price "just because not alpha / beta now"?
Yeah. $15 -> $30. "Just because" it's a more fleshed out game. Come on dude, they were selling an empty sandbox without any gameplay. When they added some content (which honestly isn't a big draw for me), they bumped the price.
Do you not see him throwing away his money on projects all the time like Kickstarter and such?
Yeah, it's like he's got a shit-ton of money and doesn't particularly want to horde it.
Notch used to be in it for the games, but once he realized Minecraft could make him money,
"The game" has always been sale. It's a product you sell for money. "In it for the game" does not exclude making money. "The indie scene" doesn't shun money, they just usually don't have any. The "spirit of Minecraft" is not the same spirit as the GPL or open source.
So anyway, this is an important reminder that if you take an average joe, and give him a bunch of money, then a host of people out there will instantly hate his guts no matter what he does. This is simply jealousy. Move along.
A big question college students should be asking is, "What IT and electronics knowledge will be most in demand five or six years from now?" In these fast moving niches, an answer is almost impossible to come by
Actually, I believe there are good solid answers to this one that have been true for a decade and will likely be true for the coming decade.
First off kid, you have to understand that there are a lot of fields you seem to be lumping together. There's a difference between code-monkeys, sysadmins, network engineers, electrical engineers, embedded engineers, and web-devs.
For any programmer there's a big question of which programming language to learn. This is something that induces flame-wars and strong passions because everyone has an opinion and their own choice is best. This is because it's an inverse tragedy of the commons, everyone wants you to learn their language because it benefits them and their language to have more users. But a binary search tree is a binary search tree in any language. Some are more verbose. Some are cludgy. But if you understand binary search trees, or whatever, the language used to deal with them by and far doesn't matter. Knowing the syntax of a language doesn't make you a good programmer. Knowing how to use the language to accomplish meaningful tasks, that's what's important. It's a little easier if you learned C rather than IBM RPG back in the day, but if you could learn RPG, you can pick up C without serious problems.
For Web-devs, they'll fret over... let's say... which CMS project is better: Joomla, Sharepoint, Drupal, Django, Wordpress, yaddayaddayadda. Conformity is nice and picking one is important. But you're a COLLEGE KID, when you graduate you'll know what goes into a CMS, theoretically how to make one, and how they work. If you just wanted to learn how to turn it on, you should have gone to a tech school. They'll hold your hand and read the manual with you.
(By the way I also have a thing against "certification". It might make sense for the sysadmin types, but a cert on a programmers resume is a net negative.)
Sysadmins, network engineers, and the hardware guys all probably have similar stories. There are common tools out there you should know, but god knows everyone and their brother make a version of it. Try not to tie yourself to one particular set of tools least you suffer from over-specialization.
tl;dr: It doesn't matter what specific component, language, framework, or gadget is popular in 6 years. You're in college, not a tech school. Learn the basic fundamentals of your field and whatever the hip new thing is will fall nicely into place and you'll understand what it's doing and what's going on. You need to learn how to use a hammer and nails to build things, not fret over which hammer is the best bet.
Note that I don't think Desert Shield or even Desert Storm were particularly mismanaged clusterfucks.
But if you think the Bush the 2nd's invasion of Iraq was some sort of continuation of the hostilities initiated by Saddam invading Kuwait, you're the one living in a reality distortion field.
Yeah, when their parent put up collateral. Usually whatever portion of the house they own. Plus, you know, federally backed Stafford loans. But the entire reason that the term "student loans" exist is because there are federal laws about loans for college education.
Ok, so you're totally egalitarian when it comes to education. So who gets to foot the bill when the masses of poor shlubs go to "highschool plus", rack up massive debt, get shit degrees (because if there's guarenteed money somewhere SOMEONE will offer a "degree" to take it. Unless you want some sort of regulating body that decides what does and doesn't count as a real education), and then graduate facing the same competition that they have from all the other poor shlubs with a worthless degree fighting over the same shit walmart job. They have no hope of paying off the debt. That money will simply never come. Who foots that bill?
If you leave it to "the market" then they simply won't loan money to these poor shlubs. Because, sadly, it's not financially viable for a statistical percentage of them. If you're saying the poor shlubs have a right to education, WHO PAYS FOR IT?
"get one" as in obtain a job. As in they find one, create one or are provided one.
ok. So they can't find one and don't have the capital/idea/opportunity to create one. WHO PROVIDES?
Imagine a system of constraints. You learn about it in mathematics.
You actually learn a lot more about that in Systems and Control. Those classes are pretty high up there in the engineering department. I don't think enough people get to them. You've essentially stated that there are variables. Congratulations for identifying 3 moving parts in the system. If we could model human behavior and politics with Nyquist plots or set up some PID loops to account for corruption and greed then we'd have a lot better government, and the stock market would be fucked.
The community is the social structure in which occupies your region. You'll find out about it if you ever buy a house or pay your own rent.
We're 4/5th of the way paying off the mortgage on a 200,000 house in a midwest city. The "community" is layered: City State Nation They each take their cut in taxes, provide services, and have their own ruleset which has to comply with the layer above. We democratically elect people to run the joint. Your concept of "social structure" as having any say in the legal wranglings of government regulation is laughable and outdated. We no longer live in clans and tribes.
Do you have any better alternatives
Yeah, DON'T LISTEN TO THE LIBERTARIANS. They've got really bad ideas and want to tear down institutions that more or less work and they REALLY haven't thought out their plans.
couldn't even land under its own power (it just glides in)
...even gliders can LAND perfectly fine. What exactly were you expecting? It to take a couple of passes at the runway before deciding to touch down? Did you want it to carry fuel up into space and then back down, just so it can fly in the atmosphere for a little bit? They're in orbit, they can come down wherever the hell they want.
You don't need to regulate labour, nor do you need labour laws. You must give citizens the rights necessary to defend themselves from being forced to work, being forced into contracts against their will, and to defend themselves from employers that would punish past legitimate contractual terms for an employee that refuses to complete a task (one could construe the last item as a labour law, but it's still an issue of a poor contract).
Uh huh... And how do you do that?
You want some concrete examples? Let's go with:
Hiring kids to work in factories, cause anyone can do this job and kids are cheap.
Company towns, company stores, company script: The work is in town X, but the company owns everything in town X, they have a monopoly on what everything costs there, from housing to food. Since they control what you're paid they can charge just about exactly what you can afford for basic necessities. One of the things they did was to pay workers not in cash, but in company script which you could only spend at the company store. It was impossible to save up any money to afford the move away to a better job.
And before you say something like: "It's in the contract", that only works if the laborers have any sort of power to dictate what goes into that contract. That "negotiating" thing. One lone worker can't negotiate shit and takes what he can get. If he butts heads with megacorp, the megacorp can simply get someone else or float for a little while until the laborer starts to starve.
#1) You seem to have an awfully narrow definition of "ugly". What about gun violence? Rampant obesity? People getting dumped at hospitals for emergency care? What about those damn whipper-snappers who don't cut their lawn? Lemme guess, while you're "libertarian" you're totally backing the social security entitlement program?
#2) Dude, the only thing this says is that people are allowed to spend their own money. What the hell? This is your solution to education? "Spend your own money"!? Take a guess about how much money poor uneducated kids can borrow. No, no. No government education loans. Take a guess.
#3) "anyone who wants a job should get one". "get one" as in it's provided for them? or "get one" as in they really ought to just go out and get one themselves? If it's the first, WHOA BOY is that some serious government intervention into the economy on the scale even ultra-nanny would balk at. Or maybe you're just talking about public works programs. If it's the second, it's as empty a statement as #2.
#4) Is a wishy-washy half free-market half-welfare statement. I think you're arguing for free healthcare... but only if they're dying and only if it's cheap? Dude, look up "emergency care".
#5) Yeah, dude, you just pointed out three factors that are at odds with each other. If you stress any one of those three sentences you can have labor laws and regulation that looks like anything from China, to France, to the USA.
WTF is this "community" you seem to be worshiping?
Your ideas are half-baked. Please come back when you actually have some opinions about how to do things.
The main reason that we think that libertarian rants are vulgar is mostly due to the volume of ANTS-IN-THE-PANTS-CRAZY that gets exhibited by a frightening percentage of people calling themselves "libertarians". That and I've known libertarians in person and they've been assholes. All of them. That's... you know... judging a group by a vocal minority, but it's the vocal minority that steer the boat. If you stood up and disagreed with them, managed, regulated, and control the party/philosophical movement, then you'd either split in two due to your disagreements or you'd contain the crazy.
Listen, I lean liberal. We've got our own batch of crazies. People that think we should abolish money, give everyone a handout, cut the workweek to 10 hours, and the stereotypical ultra-nanny that wants to put a collar on culture and shame people into smoking less. (Oh wait, that worked... hmmm) By and large I do what I can to try and talk sense into them. It doesn't matter how smart and level-headed individuals in the group are if the point of contact outside the group is a bunch of crazy nutters. And it's worse if they get in control of the group. You have to self-police. Or detach yourself from the group if they get too crazy.
Regulate that which needs to be, and nothing more, that's the creed of the libertarian. What's the problem with that?
What needs to be regulated? You can swing that dial all the way from anarchy to totalitarian state. The problem is that it's a meaningless statement unless you put some meat behind it like "abolishing legal marriage".
But here you go. An easy one right over the plate: As a libertarian would you say the US needed more or less labor laws and regulation in the 1890's?
Jesus jumping christ on a cracker, have you READ any of this? Ok, ok, you're right. "no reason" was a bit of a hyperbole. But from what I can tell Bush invaded Iraq because he felt his daddy failed to conquer it. No, that doesn't sound like a very good reason, and of course he wouldn't come out and say that, but I just don't see any other reason. Wagging the dog? Scapegoat for 9/11? Funneling money to Halliburton? We were already in Afghanistan. Protecting the Jews? It was arguably a buffer between them and Iran. "Because he's an idiot" doesn't seem like a valid reason, but it was the popular one. Maybe it was just to keep the whole region destabilized, which makes it a super-dick-move.
The stated reason of "They've got WMDs! (back when that meant nukes) They're a threat!" was made up intelligence. It's the intelligence they wanted to hear and they formed a specific organization just to tell them that. They had it in their heads immediately after 9/11 that they were going to invade Iraq. They were given complete control by a shellshocked nation and they decided they needed to start a pointless war.
Personally, I thought it was a PERFECT moment for us to topple him, as well as a much-needed reminder of American martial power... But the invasion itself? Diplomatically useful and well-timed.
It was diplomatically poison. Remember that whole "destroying trust" thing? It was a pre-emptive INVASION of a nation. You are literally arguing pro-war. You are a warmonger. From all the dead civilians, maimed troops, and the family of those who never came home, fuck you.
- George W Bush: certainly one of our least-competent presidents, in terms of foreign policy he worked with near-crystal clarity; I doubt he broke anyone's trust or betrayed them.
The man invaded a nation for no reason at all. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. If you're in a room with a dog, a friendly pet, you trust it not to bite you. After it mauls someone in the room to death, you re-evaluate that trust.
- The Tea Party: contrary to the media-industry's tendentious portrayal of the Tea Party, as far as I can tell the Tea Party was formed to protest the ridiculous and ongoing government spending beyond its means.
Well this is a bit of a secret. But they formed together to protest taxes. Their name stands for the "taxed enough already" party. Bit of a pun there really. You'd have to have a grasp of history to really appreciate that, but hey, that was a long time ago and acronyms are giving you trouble so let's just leave that one aside for now.
pretty much need to come from taxing what most of us consider to be the middle class, or the upper end thereof any way. That family of four earning just a little more than 250K
Wut? Listen, me and the wife bring in ~130 in the midwest. We're wealthy. Money really isn't an issue. Maybe a family making a quarter million a year is merely "middle class" in New York or something, but around here you would be rich. If you're taxing incomes at, above, or even around 250K, you're taxing the rich.
As far as wealthy individuals dodging taxes you really are talking tiny sums of money compared to federal spending.
WutWut? The IRS misses in the range of hundred of billions per year. That's really broken down into poor waitresses not reporting tips and rich brokers squirreling away money in offshore tax havens. Tax havens have ~20 trillion dollars out there. Pretend it's in a bank with interest and you treat it like capital gains, and that's hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes. Seriously dude, these numbers are big.
What they wanted was a corporate giveaway from the start.
Yeah, I'm kinda getting that vibe from this health insurance reform too.
[cut] 1. Discretionary
Yeah, the fiscal cliff really wasn't that bad. And it didn't seem that bad as we approached it either, yet I remember a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from a lot of people. You know if you just cut out the pointless bashing of your strawmen, you'd get more traction. Still though, cutting education is really slitting our throats if we're talking about being internationally competitive. I'd be happy if we could get academia to stop fucking around with all those useless liberal arts majors and made more, you know, engineers and scientists.
[cut] 2. Defense
Dear god YES. You seem to be in bed with the GOP side. They claim to want to cut spending. Let's get on with it!
[cut] 3. Entitlements
Which entitlements are you talking about? Because it comes down to social security: $768 billion and medicaid/care: $802 billion. And you're right, cutting and/or trimming either would be hard on a lot of folks. Do you think it's reasonable that we could just BUY a nation's worth of hospitals, doctors and drugs for $802 billion/year? Plus, you know, whatever you spend on health insurance.
Ah, the -1 over-rated mod with no explanation given. The mod of choice by all those quiche-eating libertarian's with their panties in a twist.
Gee, I'm sorry I rained on the spontaneously generated libertarian rant and gave a level-minded explanation of exotic pet laws. It's a good rant. It really gives that strawman a beatdown.
Well, sort of, I guess. But it's called ENCRYPTION. And the only one with the rights to that material is me. DRM traditionally let's other people sorta kinda maybe see the material. And is bound to fail.
Actually, the guy didn't say anything about anarchy, he just commented about exotic pet laws. You're the one that took the slightest mention that people can be assholes and assumed he's a wing-nut statist who wants to clamp down on your every freedom. That's.... actually the exact same sort of behavior that you are rally against.
Really, read the thread again. Someone mentions libertarians, someone makes a comment about exotic pet laws, someone questions if we really need those laws and then there's you. Who's flipping out, and calling that anonymous coward a statist who thinks libertarians are anarchists. Come on dude.
That's called living. And Learning.
Well, you know, unless you're eaten by a panther. Then it's called dying. Fortunately other people have learned from such deaths and as a whole they decided that anyone wanting a pet panther should know how to handle and care for panthers. And that someone should vouch that he knows what he's doing, possibly training him if he doesn't. And that he panther owner should then carry around a little piece of cardboard known as an exotic pet license. Which you and your libertarian minded panther-loving friends can go get. Your freedom to own a panther is not gone. It just has a hoop you have to jump through. Because some poor bloke in the past died to some rich dick's weird-ass pet.
But anyway, like all things, it's a balance. We obviously need more state control than we had during the 1980's. Nobody likes a rober baron. And in a desperate attempt to get this whole mess back on track, I believe that we certainly need less state control when it comes to journalism and whistle-blowing. That's the first amendment. A specific limit of power that the government shall not break. A collar to keep it in line. If they slip out of that then they could do something horrible like maul a child or something. And then we'd have our exotic government license revoked.
On top of the corrections that the others have heaped on here, you've got some misconceptions about QM and chemistry.
the new electrical interaction with the other atom would cause the electrons' WF to collapse and molecules wouldn't form.
Uh, it's not like molecules can't form if there's not some QM going on. "Having a waveform" isn't, like, a requirement for forming molecules. I'm not sure that sort of idea even makes sense. But say you're measuring how many molecules there are. The waveform definitely has to collapse once you know how many molcules there are. Or a version of you knows a discreet number in one of the worlds that was spawned.
as the electrons' wave functions immediately collapse and the electrons spiral into the nucleus.
Yeah, the collapse doesn't really have that sort of effect on the atom. The waveform is a collection of everywhere the electron could be. When it collapses, it chooses one. I mean, I guess one of those possibilities could be the start of... what is that? Lowering it's energy state? Yeah, that's possible, but there has to be a reason it does that. Like, if it's an atom in the middle of a lightning strike. The vast majority of the waveform is going to have the electron jumping to a higher energy state, on account of all that energy around it, but there's a chance it'll go lower.
Anyway, there's a question out there about how big the system can get before a collapse. You seem to think that individual electrons have to collapse because they're interacting with the nucleus. But no, the waveform can encompass the entire atom. It doesn't matter how the electron interacts with the nucleolus, the whole thing is in superposition until it interacts with something. How big does that go? if a whole atom what about molecules? What about people? Planets? Answer: I dunno. But it appears that QM effects are constrained to small things. But, since all larger things are made up of smaller things, those effects propagate, we see the butterfly effect, and the whole world cannot be considered to be deterministic. It's more like probabilistic. Life is a pachinko game.
but we have observed quantum behaviour in things as big as a virus
Huh, really? That's neat. Got a link? I mean, news about the physicists gearing up to do that experiment made the rounds around 2009. But I can't seem to find out their results. Indeed, this article from 2012 seems to imply that the German and Spanish guys failed. Still, in 2012 they showed QM effects on a molecule of 100 atoms (a far cry from the billion of atoms that a virus has) which is something.
God, I need to read more about this. Apparently this is one of those points of contentions that has been around forever: QM observer Mind-body Wigner's Friend Which, as a thought experiment, includes a separate person in the system existing in quantum superposition (IE, it has a waveform to collapse).
But I think it's put to rest by the many-world interpretation. It offloads the question of "which one happens when?" to "well if they all happen, which one do I/we experience?". You know, I really don't have the math or physics chops to really understand all this, but the many-world interpretation feels to jive more with the rest of what I know. That's kind of the definition of a bias, but meh.
Yeah.... That's, you know, the joke. The fact that it hides it for you means that they simply don't teach that aspect of programming anymore.
Or
That's the sad state of affairs in college level computer science education. Yes, damn near everything in Java is a pointer and you can make it jump in circles if you really want. But while that's true, it doesn't keep professors from deciding that they can just skip over teaching the students anything about pointers. Because it's Java. I went through ISU's computer engineering program. This was before they had a software engineering degree, and they were co-opting the ComSci departments classes for teaching kids how to code.
Well I got the lovely experience of them switching from C++ to Java mid-way through. That was lovely. And this is a quoate from the ComSci professor who taught the intro to Java class: "Java has no pointers".
The engineering department stopped sending students to comSci courses shortly after I graduated and made their own software engineering degree.
Actually, Delphi is as much a language as Objective C is a language. In fact, it is often referred to as Object Pascal
Huh, that almost sound like Delphi (the program owned and sold by Embarcadero Technologies) has it's own version of Pascal. Which I believe is EXACTLY WHAT I SAID.
Pascal didn't die due to 'fragmentation' for two reasons,
the first being that it's hardly dead,
Bwahahahahahahahahaaaaaa, oh boy, that's cute.
and the second being that Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero were the only the current owners at the time and they all had exactly the same product: Delphi.
Let me know how that compares to free pascal, turbo pascal, Niklaus Wirth's 1974 Standard, UCSD Pascal, or Pascal-P. And, historically there where competing standards. IEC/ISO 7185 didn't match ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1983, and ISO 7185:1983. Even the old established guys whose job it is to keep everyone on the same page couldn't agree which version to go with. It took a decade for them to agree on one standard, but by then there was of course and extended version of the Pascal standard ISO/IEC 10206....
But hey, if you think that Delphi and it's Object Pascal is the One True Pascal, that's great. For you.
they all had exactly the same product: Delphi.
Oh! Wait wait wait, are you telling me they never had any backwards compatibility issues? That code for the original Delphi way back in 1995 will run just perfectly fine with whatever Ebarcadero is selling now? Do you really believe that?
It's a hyperbole to drum up some clicks. Quantum waveform collapse is the new mystical edge of science where a lot of crazies have their hopes and dreams pinned. It also makes for some good sci-fi if you can suspend disbelief.
But this phrase right here:
collapse from a blend of several possible quantum states to just one the moment it is measured by an experimentalist
This is problematic and it keeps drawing in the crazies like flies. People read that and they think that the universe has a specific reaction to people watching it. That things happen differently if it's observed or not observed. By people. With souls.
But no, that's wrong. And that quote is wrong. That's simply not how it works. It's close, but it's not entirely true. The waveform collapses when it has ANY measurable impact. IE, when it interacts with anything, then it collapses. It's not a special trait that only "experimentalists" possess. It's not a trait that humans posses. It's a trait that everything in the universe possesses.
Yes, yes, I know how much you want to be special. But in this case, you're not. Now get over it and start doing good scientific journalism rather than this misleading tripe.
Ok, I know this might be confusing, but just because the Greek city of Delphi had that famous oracle doesn't mean that Oracle owns Delphi. Oracle owns Java. The programming language, not the country of Java. And when I say own, I mean they blood well own it and anyone who says otherwise trying to whine about open source while their panties get in a bunch don't understand how the political landscape of patents, standard stewardship, lawyers, money, and power work.
Delphi is owned by Embarcadero Technologies. It compiles IT'S OWN VERSION of Pascal. Because any time you talk about Pascal you have to specify what version of it you're talking about because Pascal died due to fragmentation. Everyone took it their own direction and it was effectively drawn and quartered.
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Unprofessional ? UNPROFESSIONAL?
Listen here kid, being a professional means that you tell the boss to go suck eggs when he orders you to do something stupid. Being a professional at a critical job means you finish your shift and await your replacement, even when they fired you earlier in the day. Because someone has to do the job. Being a professional means you refuse to sign off on the untested software because the plane might crash and people will die. Being a professional means you don't let the bosses idiot son steer the boat, because he's incompetent and would steer it into shore.
Being a professional means you're not just there for the paycheck to be a yes-man to your superior. You're there, in part, to do a good job. Because doing a bad job will get people killed and/or cost millions.
People like to throw the "unprofessional" term about when people don't have the right cut of dress, or speak with the proper tone, but if you want to play hardball with professionalism, you need to realize that it's more important than shmoozing with the boss and climbing that corporate ladder.
I preferred statecraft II. It gave the Chinese that overseer->Changling power. It balances out mid-game scouting against French observers and American scanner sweeps.
Oh god no. We don't want to touch Chicago with a 10' pole. (And that super-train from the Quad Cities to Chicago is a really bad idea)
We'd probably try to make some sort of food-equivalent to OPEC.
More likely, Monsanto would establish it self as an evil vizier and end up owning half the land before too long.
And then it's nothing but weevils.
and I'll do so, but not before...
Kid, computers are LUDICROUSLY fast. They can handle more data, than you can EVER possibly hope process for a computer game. And I mean game. Physics simulator, sure, that can always take more. But for games, we've largely hit peak-pixel. There's no need to add more polygons, it doesn't look any better. In that same vein, there's no need to shrink the resolution of, say, the shatter remains of the wall that your cool-aid guy just broke through below a level that has diminishing gameplay impact.
Now hey, cool ideas will make real good use of advanced hardware. But if you have an good idea for a game, computers can do it. If computers can't do it, ask yourself if it really add to the game?
Then it will be worth doing some crap with blocks
There is no hardware limitation. You can do it now. It was worth doing so more than a decade ago. This is a pathetic excuse.
Wow dude... just wow. I guess this demonstrates a dark side to humanity. Wait a second... There it is. Right there:
Jealous as fuck,
There we go. That pretty much describes the entire problem encountered here. We've got a word for it.
But lemme just point how this guy is wrong:
Do you not know how much money the game made?
A lot. It's sold 33 million, so he's probably made around a hundred million. But that doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to what motivates Notch.
Do you not know how much the game used to sell for and got an arbitrary increase in price "just because not alpha / beta now"?
Yeah. $15 -> $30. "Just because" it's a more fleshed out game. Come on dude, they were selling an empty sandbox without any gameplay. When they added some content (which honestly isn't a big draw for me), they bumped the price.
Do you not see him throwing away his money on projects all the time like Kickstarter and such?
Yeah, it's like he's got a shit-ton of money and doesn't particularly want to horde it.
Notch used to be in it for the games, but once he realized Minecraft could make him money,
"The game" has always been sale. It's a product you sell for money. "In it for the game" does not exclude making money. "The indie scene" doesn't shun money, they just usually don't have any. The "spirit of Minecraft" is not the same spirit as the GPL or open source.
So anyway, this is an important reminder that if you take an average joe, and give him a bunch of money, then a host of people out there will instantly hate his guts no matter what he does. This is simply jealousy. Move along.
A big question college students should be asking is, "What IT and electronics knowledge will be most in demand five or six years from now?" In these fast moving niches, an answer is almost impossible to come by
Actually, I believe there are good solid answers to this one that have been true for a decade and will likely be true for the coming decade.
First off kid, you have to understand that there are a lot of fields you seem to be lumping together. There's a difference between code-monkeys, sysadmins, network engineers, electrical engineers, embedded engineers, and web-devs.
For any programmer there's a big question of which programming language to learn. This is something that induces flame-wars and strong passions because everyone has an opinion and their own choice is best. This is because it's an inverse tragedy of the commons, everyone wants you to learn their language because it benefits them and their language to have more users. But a binary search tree is a binary search tree in any language. Some are more verbose. Some are cludgy. But if you understand binary search trees, or whatever, the language used to deal with them by and far doesn't matter. Knowing the syntax of a language doesn't make you a good programmer. Knowing how to use the language to accomplish meaningful tasks, that's what's important. It's a little easier if you learned C rather than IBM RPG back in the day, but if you could learn RPG, you can pick up C without serious problems.
For Web-devs, they'll fret over... let's say... which CMS project is better: Joomla, Sharepoint, Drupal, Django, Wordpress, yaddayaddayadda. Conformity is nice and picking one is important. But you're a COLLEGE KID, when you graduate you'll know what goes into a CMS, theoretically how to make one, and how they work. If you just wanted to learn how to turn it on, you should have gone to a tech school. They'll hold your hand and read the manual with you.
(By the way I also have a thing against "certification". It might make sense for the sysadmin types, but a cert on a programmers resume is a net negative.)
Sysadmins, network engineers, and the hardware guys all probably have similar stories. There are common tools out there you should know, but god knows everyone and their brother make a version of it. Try not to tie yourself to one particular set of tools least you suffer from over-specialization.
tl;dr: It doesn't matter what specific component, language, framework, or gadget is popular in 6 years. You're in college, not a tech school. Learn the basic fundamentals of your field and whatever the hip new thing is will fall nicely into place and you'll understand what it's doing and what's going on. You need to learn how to use a hammer and nails to build things, not fret over which hammer is the best bet.
Yeah, to defend yourself.
Note that I don't think Desert Shield or even Desert Storm were particularly mismanaged clusterfucks.
But if you think the Bush the 2nd's invasion of Iraq was some sort of continuation of the hostilities initiated by Saddam invading Kuwait, you're the one living in a reality distortion field.
poor kids get student loans all the time
Yeah, when their parent put up collateral. Usually whatever portion of the house they own. Plus, you know, federally backed Stafford loans.
But the entire reason that the term "student loans" exist is because there are federal laws about loans for college education.
Ok, so you're totally egalitarian when it comes to education. So who gets to foot the bill when the masses of poor shlubs go to "highschool plus", rack up massive debt, get shit degrees (because if there's guarenteed money somewhere SOMEONE will offer a "degree" to take it. Unless you want some sort of regulating body that decides what does and doesn't count as a real education), and then graduate facing the same competition that they have from all the other poor shlubs with a worthless degree fighting over the same shit walmart job. They have no hope of paying off the debt. That money will simply never come. Who foots that bill?
If you leave it to "the market" then they simply won't loan money to these poor shlubs. Because, sadly, it's not financially viable for a statistical percentage of them. If you're saying the poor shlubs have a right to education, WHO PAYS FOR IT?
"get one" as in obtain a job. As in they find one, create one or are provided one.
ok. So they can't find one and don't have the capital/idea/opportunity to create one. WHO PROVIDES?
Imagine a system of constraints. You learn about it in mathematics.
You actually learn a lot more about that in Systems and Control. Those classes are pretty high up there in the engineering department. I don't think enough people get to them. You've essentially stated that there are variables. Congratulations for identifying 3 moving parts in the system. If we could model human behavior and politics with Nyquist plots or set up some PID loops to account for corruption and greed then we'd have a lot better government, and the stock market would be fucked.
The community is the social structure in which occupies your region. You'll find out about it if you ever buy a house or pay your own rent.
We're 4/5th of the way paying off the mortgage on a 200,000 house in a midwest city. The "community" is layered:
City
State
Nation
They each take their cut in taxes, provide services, and have their own ruleset which has to comply with the layer above. We democratically elect people to run the joint.
Your concept of "social structure" as having any say in the legal wranglings of government regulation is laughable and outdated. We no longer live in clans and tribes.
Do you have any better alternatives
Yeah, DON'T LISTEN TO THE LIBERTARIANS. They've got really bad ideas and want to tear down institutions that more or less work and they REALLY haven't thought out their plans.
Right on the money except for:
couldn't even land under its own power (it just glides in)
...even gliders can LAND perfectly fine. What exactly were you expecting? It to take a couple of passes at the runway before deciding to touch down? Did you want it to carry fuel up into space and then back down, just so it can fly in the atmosphere for a little bit? They're in orbit, they can come down wherever the hell they want.
You don't need to regulate labour, nor do you need labour laws. You must give citizens the rights necessary to defend themselves from being forced to work, being forced into contracts against their will, and to defend themselves from employers that would punish past legitimate contractual terms for an employee that refuses to complete a task (one could construe the last item as a labour law, but it's still an issue of a poor contract).
Uh huh... And how do you do that?
You want some concrete examples? Let's go with:
Hiring kids to work in factories, cause anyone can do this job and kids are cheap.
Company towns, company stores, company script: The work is in town X, but the company owns everything in town X, they have a monopoly on what everything costs there, from housing to food. Since they control what you're paid they can charge just about exactly what you can afford for basic necessities. One of the things they did was to pay workers not in cash, but in company script which you could only spend at the company store. It was impossible to save up any money to afford the move away to a better job.
Pinkertons
And before you say something like: "It's in the contract", that only works if the laborers have any sort of power to dictate what goes into that contract. That "negotiating" thing. One lone worker can't negotiate shit and takes what he can get. If he butts heads with megacorp, the megacorp can simply get someone else or float for a little while until the laborer starts to starve.
#1) You seem to have an awfully narrow definition of "ugly". What about gun violence? Rampant obesity? People getting dumped at hospitals for emergency care? What about those damn whipper-snappers who don't cut their lawn? Lemme guess, while you're "libertarian" you're totally backing the social security entitlement program?
#2) Dude, the only thing this says is that people are allowed to spend their own money. What the hell? This is your solution to education? "Spend your own money"!? Take a guess about how much money poor uneducated kids can borrow. No, no. No government education loans. Take a guess.
#3) "anyone who wants a job should get one". "get one" as in it's provided for them? or "get one" as in they really ought to just go out and get one themselves? If it's the first, WHOA BOY is that some serious government intervention into the economy on the scale even ultra-nanny would balk at. Or maybe you're just talking about public works programs. If it's the second, it's as empty a statement as #2.
#4) Is a wishy-washy half free-market half-welfare statement. I think you're arguing for free healthcare... but only if they're dying and only if it's cheap? Dude, look up "emergency care".
#5) Yeah, dude, you just pointed out three factors that are at odds with each other. If you stress any one of those three sentences you can have labor laws and regulation that looks like anything from China, to France, to the USA.
WTF is this "community" you seem to be worshiping?
Your ideas are half-baked. Please come back when you actually have some opinions about how to do things.
The main reason that we think that libertarian rants are vulgar is mostly due to the volume of ANTS-IN-THE-PANTS-CRAZY that gets exhibited by a frightening percentage of people calling themselves "libertarians". That and I've known libertarians in person and they've been assholes. All of them. That's... you know... judging a group by a vocal minority, but it's the vocal minority that steer the boat. If you stood up and disagreed with them, managed, regulated, and control the party/philosophical movement, then you'd either split in two due to your disagreements or you'd contain the crazy.
Listen, I lean liberal. We've got our own batch of crazies. People that think we should abolish money, give everyone a handout, cut the workweek to 10 hours, and the stereotypical ultra-nanny that wants to put a collar on culture and shame people into smoking less. (Oh wait, that worked... hmmm) By and large I do what I can to try and talk sense into them. It doesn't matter how smart and level-headed individuals in the group are if the point of contact outside the group is a bunch of crazy nutters. And it's worse if they get in control of the group. You have to self-police. Or detach yourself from the group if they get too crazy.
Regulate that which needs to be, and nothing more, that's the creed of the libertarian. What's the problem with that?
What needs to be regulated? You can swing that dial all the way from anarchy to totalitarian state. The problem is that it's a meaningless statement unless you put some meat behind it like "abolishing legal marriage".
But here you go. An easy one right over the plate: As a libertarian would you say the US needed more or less labor laws and regulation in the 1890's?
Jesus jumping christ on a cracker, have you READ any of this?
Ok, ok, you're right. "no reason" was a bit of a hyperbole. But from what I can tell Bush invaded Iraq because he felt his daddy failed to conquer it. No, that doesn't sound like a very good reason, and of course he wouldn't come out and say that, but I just don't see any other reason.
Wagging the dog? Scapegoat for 9/11? Funneling money to Halliburton? We were already in Afghanistan. Protecting the Jews? It was arguably a buffer between them and Iran. "Because he's an idiot" doesn't seem like a valid reason, but it was the popular one. Maybe it was just to keep the whole region destabilized, which makes it a super-dick-move.
The stated reason of "They've got WMDs! (back when that meant nukes) They're a threat!" was made up intelligence. It's the intelligence they wanted to hear and they formed a specific organization just to tell them that. They had it in their heads immediately after 9/11 that they were going to invade Iraq. They were given complete control by a shellshocked nation and they decided they needed to start a pointless war.
Personally, I thought it was a PERFECT moment for us to topple him, as well as a much-needed reminder of American martial power ... But the invasion itself? Diplomatically useful and well-timed.
It was diplomatically poison. Remember that whole "destroying trust" thing? It was a pre-emptive INVASION of a nation. You are literally arguing pro-war. You are a warmonger. From all the dead civilians, maimed troops, and the family of those who never came home, fuck you.
- George W Bush: certainly one of our least-competent presidents, in terms of foreign policy he worked with near-crystal clarity; I doubt he broke anyone's trust or betrayed them.
The man invaded a nation for no reason at all. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. If you're in a room with a dog, a friendly pet, you trust it not to bite you. After it mauls someone in the room to death, you re-evaluate that trust.
- The Tea Party: contrary to the media-industry's tendentious portrayal of the Tea Party, as far as I can tell the Tea Party was formed to protest the ridiculous and ongoing government spending beyond its means.
Well this is a bit of a secret. But they formed together to protest taxes. Their name stands for the "taxed enough already" party. Bit of a pun there really. You'd have to have a grasp of history to really appreciate that, but hey, that was a long time ago and acronyms are giving you trouble so let's just leave that one aside for now.
pretty much need to come from taxing what most of us consider to be the middle class, or the upper end thereof any way. That family of four earning just a little more than 250K
Wut? Listen, me and the wife bring in ~130 in the midwest. We're wealthy. Money really isn't an issue. Maybe a family making a quarter million a year is merely "middle class" in New York or something, but around here you would be rich. If you're taxing incomes at, above, or even around 250K, you're taxing the rich.
As far as wealthy individuals dodging taxes you really are talking tiny sums of money compared to federal spending.
WutWut? The IRS misses in the range of hundred of billions per year. That's really broken down into poor waitresses not reporting tips and rich brokers squirreling away money in offshore tax havens. Tax havens have ~20 trillion dollars out there. Pretend it's in a bank with interest and you treat it like capital gains, and that's hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes.
Seriously dude, these numbers are big.
What they wanted was a corporate giveaway from the start.
Yeah, I'm kinda getting that vibe from this health insurance reform too.
[cut] 1. Discretionary
Yeah, the fiscal cliff really wasn't that bad. And it didn't seem that bad as we approached it either, yet I remember a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from a lot of people. You know if you just cut out the pointless bashing of your strawmen, you'd get more traction. Still though, cutting education is really slitting our throats if we're talking about being internationally competitive. I'd be happy if we could get academia to stop fucking around with all those useless liberal arts majors and made more, you know, engineers and scientists.
[cut] 2. Defense
Dear god YES. You seem to be in bed with the GOP side. They claim to want to cut spending. Let's get on with it!
[cut] 3. Entitlements
Which entitlements are you talking about? Because it comes down to social security: $768 billion and medicaid/care: $802 billion. And you're right, cutting and/or trimming either would be hard on a lot of folks. Do you think it's reasonable that we could just BUY a nation's worth of hospitals, doctors and drugs for $802 billion/year? Plus, you know, whatever you spend on health insurance.
Ah, the -1 over-rated mod with no explanation given. The mod of choice by all those quiche-eating libertarian's with their panties in a twist.
Gee, I'm sorry I rained on the spontaneously generated libertarian rant and gave a level-minded explanation of exotic pet laws. It's a good rant. It really gives that strawman a beatdown.
Would You Secure Personal Data With DRM Tools?
Well, sort of, I guess. But it's called ENCRYPTION. And the only one with the rights to that material is me.
DRM traditionally let's other people sorta kinda maybe see the material. And is bound to fail.
Actually, the guy didn't say anything about anarchy, he just commented about exotic pet laws. You're the one that took the slightest mention that people can be assholes and assumed he's a wing-nut statist who wants to clamp down on your every freedom. That's.... actually the exact same sort of behavior that you are rally against.
Really, read the thread again. Someone mentions libertarians, someone makes a comment about exotic pet laws, someone questions if we really need those laws and then there's you. Who's flipping out, and calling that anonymous coward a statist who thinks libertarians are anarchists. Come on dude.
That's called living. And Learning.
Well, you know, unless you're eaten by a panther. Then it's called dying. Fortunately other people have learned from such deaths and as a whole they decided that anyone wanting a pet panther should know how to handle and care for panthers. And that someone should vouch that he knows what he's doing, possibly training him if he doesn't. And that he panther owner should then carry around a little piece of cardboard known as an exotic pet license. Which you and your libertarian minded panther-loving friends can go get. Your freedom to own a panther is not gone. It just has a hoop you have to jump through. Because some poor bloke in the past died to some rich dick's weird-ass pet.
But anyway, like all things, it's a balance. We obviously need more state control than we had during the 1980's. Nobody likes a rober baron. And in a desperate attempt to get this whole mess back on track, I believe that we certainly need less state control when it comes to journalism and whistle-blowing. That's the first amendment. A specific limit of power that the government shall not break. A collar to keep it in line. If they slip out of that then they could do something horrible like maul a child or something. And then we'd have our exotic government license revoked.
On top of the corrections that the others have heaped on here, you've got some misconceptions about QM and chemistry.
the new electrical interaction with the other atom would cause the electrons' WF to collapse and molecules wouldn't form.
Uh, it's not like molecules can't form if there's not some QM going on. "Having a waveform" isn't, like, a requirement for forming molecules. I'm not sure that sort of idea even makes sense. But say you're measuring how many molecules there are. The waveform definitely has to collapse once you know how many molcules there are. Or a version of you knows a discreet number in one of the worlds that was spawned.
as the electrons' wave functions immediately collapse and the electrons spiral into the nucleus.
Yeah, the collapse doesn't really have that sort of effect on the atom. The waveform is a collection of everywhere the electron could be. When it collapses, it chooses one. I mean, I guess one of those possibilities could be the start of... what is that? Lowering it's energy state? Yeah, that's possible, but there has to be a reason it does that. Like, if it's an atom in the middle of a lightning strike. The vast majority of the waveform is going to have the electron jumping to a higher energy state, on account of all that energy around it, but there's a chance it'll go lower.
Anyway, there's a question out there about how big the system can get before a collapse. You seem to think that individual electrons have to collapse because they're interacting with the nucleus. But no, the waveform can encompass the entire atom. It doesn't matter how the electron interacts with the nucleolus, the whole thing is in superposition until it interacts with something. How big does that go? if a whole atom what about molecules? What about people? Planets? Answer: I dunno. But it appears that QM effects are constrained to small things. But, since all larger things are made up of smaller things, those effects propagate, we see the butterfly effect, and the whole world cannot be considered to be deterministic. It's more like probabilistic. Life is a pachinko game.
but we have observed quantum behaviour in things as big as a virus
Huh, really? That's neat. Got a link? I mean, news about the physicists gearing up to do that experiment made the rounds around 2009. But I can't seem to find out their results. Indeed, this article from 2012 seems to imply that the German and Spanish guys failed. Still, in 2012 they showed QM effects on a molecule of 100 atoms (a far cry from the billion of atoms that a virus has) which is something.
God, I need to read more about this. Apparently this is one of those points of contentions that has been around forever:
QM observer
Mind-body
Wigner's Friend Which, as a thought experiment, includes a separate person in the system existing in quantum superposition (IE, it has a waveform to collapse).
But I think it's put to rest by the many-world interpretation. It offloads the question of "which one happens when?" to "well if they all happen, which one do I/we experience?". You know, I really don't have the math or physics chops to really understand all this, but the many-world interpretation feels to jive more with the rest of what I know. That's kind of the definition of a bias, but meh.
DAT'S DA JOKE
Or
Whoosh!
Or
Yeah.... That's, you know, the joke. The fact that it hides it for you means that they simply don't teach that aspect of programming anymore.
Or
That's the sad state of affairs in college level computer science education. Yes, damn near everything in Java is a pointer and you can make it jump in circles if you really want. But while that's true, it doesn't keep professors from deciding that they can just skip over teaching the students anything about pointers. Because it's Java. I went through ISU's computer engineering program. This was before they had a software engineering degree, and they were co-opting the ComSci departments classes for teaching kids how to code.
Well I got the lovely experience of them switching from C++ to Java mid-way through. That was lovely. And this is a quoate from the ComSci professor who taught the intro to Java class: "Java has no pointers".
The engineering department stopped sending students to comSci courses shortly after I graduated and made their own software engineering degree.
Actually, Delphi is as much a language as Objective C is a language. In fact, it is often referred to as Object Pascal
Huh, that almost sound like Delphi (the program owned and sold by Embarcadero Technologies) has it's own version of Pascal. Which I believe is EXACTLY WHAT I SAID.
Pascal didn't die due to 'fragmentation' for two reasons,
the first being that it's hardly dead,
Bwahahahahahahahahaaaaaa, oh boy, that's cute.
and the second being that Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero were the only the current owners at the time and they all had exactly the same product: Delphi.
Let me know how that compares to free pascal, turbo pascal, Niklaus Wirth's 1974 Standard, UCSD Pascal, or Pascal-P.
And, historically there where competing standards. IEC/ISO 7185 didn't match ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1983, and ISO 7185:1983. Even the old established guys whose job it is to keep everyone on the same page couldn't agree which version to go with. It took a decade for them to agree on one standard, but by then there was of course and extended version of the Pascal standard ISO/IEC 10206....
But hey, if you think that Delphi and it's Object Pascal is the One True Pascal, that's great. For you.
they all had exactly the same product: Delphi.
Oh! Wait wait wait, are you telling me they never had any backwards compatibility issues? That code for the original Delphi way back in 1995 will run just perfectly fine with whatever Ebarcadero is selling now? Do you really believe that?
butbutbut this way we don't have to teach them anything about pointers, because Java doesn't have pointers!
It's a hyperbole to drum up some clicks. Quantum waveform collapse is the new mystical edge of science where a lot of crazies have their hopes and dreams pinned. It also makes for some good sci-fi if you can suspend disbelief.
But this phrase right here:
collapse from a blend of several possible quantum states to just one the moment it is measured by an experimentalist
This is problematic and it keeps drawing in the crazies like flies. People read that and they think that the universe has a specific reaction to people watching it. That things happen differently if it's observed or not observed. By people. With souls.
But no, that's wrong. And that quote is wrong. That's simply not how it works. It's close, but it's not entirely true. The waveform collapses when it has ANY measurable impact. IE, when it interacts with anything, then it collapses. It's not a special trait that only "experimentalists" possess. It's not a trait that humans posses. It's a trait that everything in the universe possesses.
Yes, yes, I know how much you want to be special. But in this case, you're not. Now get over it and start doing good scientific journalism rather than this misleading tripe.
Ok, I know this might be confusing, but just because the Greek city of Delphi had that famous oracle doesn't mean that Oracle owns Delphi. Oracle owns Java. The programming language, not the country of Java. And when I say own, I mean they blood well own it and anyone who says otherwise trying to whine about open source while their panties get in a bunch don't understand how the political landscape of patents, standard stewardship, lawyers, money, and power work.
Delphi is owned by Embarcadero Technologies. It compiles IT'S OWN VERSION of Pascal. Because any time you talk about Pascal you have to specify what version of it you're talking about because Pascal died due to fragmentation. Everyone took it their own direction and it was effectively drawn and quartered.
Well hot damn!
Let's hope it works.