Does playing some mostly realistic racing game help you drive in everyday life
There are certain maneuvers it can help you with that apply to regular road driving.
When cars go into either understeer or oversteer, the natural reaction of most people is to slam on the brakes. This is fine for understeer but only makes oversteer worse. The correct reaction there is to countersteer a bit and apply more throttle. It's not enough to know technically how to do it--you have to be able to do it reflexively when you weren't expecting it to happen. A good sim racing game can train you to do that.
(Not surprisingly, manufacturers tend to setup cars from the factory in ways that tend to make it understeer, such as putting on oversized tires in back.)
This is rubbish. Number of people screened has no bearing on what the accuracy rate needs to be at all. What you want is a test where the cost of administering the test + the cost of dealing with false positives is less than the costs of not administering the test and dealing with the uncaught positives.
Let's throw this in: out of the 1 million people who might be infected, only 1,000 actually are. If your test says 10,000 people are infected, it's useless. OTOH, if 500,000 people are actually infected, then maybe an extra 10k aren't so bad.
Every situation will be different, but the gist is that if you're going to use a detection technique for broad screening, then it needs to be very, very accurate.
In the NSA's case, the number of people who have deliberately leaked information is very small compared to the number of job interviews they go through. I'd bet that more people have simply mishandled information (or will end up mishandling information) in the sort of accident that could happen to anyone. Even worse is the false positive rate--the test could easily pass someone who intends to pass secrets to a foreign country, even if they didn't get any training in fooling a polygraph.
In this case they have tons of applicants, if they falsely fail 10% then oh well they still had a 90% success rate and if 50% of those all passed then yup they have filled their slots.
90% is a very optimistic number for accuracy. Consenus estimates put it around 60%. Since the tests only work on yes/no questions, that's not much better than a coin flip.
Washing out people out at that rate, who have presumably already passed through some level of the interview process, get's expensive. Even worse are the false negatives.
As for privacy, if you fail the test it's not put in the newspaper and you walk out the door still looking for a job.
The results are held within the US government, and can be used against you when applying to other government jobs.
If you admit to criminal activity well then that might be a problem for you - they aren't going to cover that up!
The Fifth Amendment still applies. The most the NSA can do is pass it to the police with jurisdiction for a follow up investigation. Certain written guarantees may even prevent that much. In any case, a polygraph alone isn't admissible evidence, just a "point the investigation in the right direction" sort of tool.
Except it's actually so bad for their intended use that it's a hindrance to their job, not a help.
Let's say you have a test for a virus that is 99% accurate, but 1% of the time, it gives a false positive (says someone has the virus, but doesn't). Let's also say that there are 1000 people that might be infected, but nobody is sure. All of them are tested, and on average, 10 of them will show up as false positives. That number can probably be delt with, perhaps with a more expensive (but more accurate) test, or maybe the treatment is no big deal (so they can just get an injection and go on).
OTOH, let's say that 1 million people might be infected. Test all of them and there ends up being 10,000 false positives. Now the costs of the more accurate test start rising. Perhaps the treatment is more dangerous or expensive (rabies shots used to be pretty nasty, for example), so you really don't want to use it on people who aren't really sick.
So your accuracy rates need to be in line with how many people are going to be screened. If its use is highly targeted, then a test that's 90% accurate might be OK. If it's more of a general screening, then it needs to go into the five-9's kind of accuracy, perhaps more.
Polygraphs are nowhere near 90% accurate. It's maybe 70% accurate, and has both false positives and false negatives. For general job screening, like the NSA is using it for here, that's nowhere near good enough. It might be good enough for police investigations as a way of seeing if they're on the right track, but there's a reason it's not considered admissible court evidence in the US.
Of course, all this is only focusing on the basic statistical issues. There's a whole other set of arguments surrounding privacy, which matter even if a future technology is 99.999% accurate.
Billionaires don't hold on to their wealth, though. It's always invested into something--that's how they became billionaires in the first place. If you kidnapped a billionaire and demanded half his fortune for ransom, he'd have difficulty getting it to you because most of it isn't in assets he could immediately liquidate.
A reusable system could be cheaper, if you could launch it once a week instead of 1-2 times a year. The shuttle ended up having too many maintenance problems to make that kind of schedule possible, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
The language may not guarantee secure code, but it can make writing secure code easy.
For instance, using placeholders in SQL makes code virtually immune to SQL injection attacks. If your database does not support placeholders, then the library can simulate it by quoting bad characters when data is passed in.
In Perl, any tutorial on database usage that anybody will point you to will most definitely show you how to use placeholders. The main one is over 10 years old, and it's very first Perl code example uses placeholders, as do all its other examples that run a query against a variable. It was the correct way to do things back then, and still is. DBI makes it very easy to do it right because there are no additional methods to call to make use of placeholders, and the Perl community is good about showing new programmers how to use them.
If you use PHP with PosgreSQL, then you have the pg_query_params() for the job. Why can't pg_query() do it? For that matter, why can't the equivalent function translate placeholders for braindamaged databases that don't use them? Making the programmers handle this with an escape function is inconvenient. Smarter programmers will have their time wasted on writing frivolous string escaping code, and more noobtacular programmers won't even know what it is or why they should be doing it.
It's entirely possible to write it correctly in PHP, but languages don't differer in what they make possible; they differ in what they make easy. Writing secure code should be much easier than it is.
Projecting items into a speech to make it say whatever you want it to say is not reasonable debate. Summary even mentioned an attack on radio, which, as far as I can tell, Obama never even brought up.
Firstly that there is a "right" number that people are willing to pay for techie gadgets. 499 of whatever currency units is about right for a toy like this. People don't think about exchange rates when looking at an item on a retail shelf.
Second, it's hardly just Apple. All companies that export from the US into the UK are making a fortune. That's the upside of having your country's currency devalued. Consider: the Chrysler 300C has a US base price of $28k, but a UK base price of £25k (or $37.5k at an exchange rate of 150%).
No, ideas really are the easy part. That's not because ideas are easy, but because creative people, by definition, generate them constantly. However, the number of ideas these people have are much more than they can ever develop.
So while ideas are hard, condensing a set of ideas into something manageable for the size of your team, and then focusing on just that until its done, is much harder. Being able to do that is what separates the millionaire nerds from the basement dwelling variety.
Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?
No. Since the '80s, an entire generation of programmers grew up with the initial idea of making their own games. Most of them never actually made a commercial game, but most of them now create other types of software. Those that did go into the industry either have way more ideas for games than their studio could ever implement, or they became slaves in the code mines of Activision.
Good attempt, but there seems to be some things in the levels that aren't quite right. In 1-2, there is only one Goomba coming when you first enter (should be two directly side-by-side). Also, the first mushroom in that world, coming off the row of blocks, goes far enough to jump over the wall, instead of bouncing off it and coming back at you.
And no way of getting into the -1 world (as Mario or otherwise). Just doesn't seem possible to get your head stuck that way.
Except there are very, very few oil-powered plants. It's coal. While it is technically more efficient by being centralized, coal is extremely dirty. It ain't just CO2 you have to worried about.
If you have to choose between the two, ditch the coal plants and keep the gas cars. But we shouldn't have to choose, either.
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Does playing some mostly realistic racing game help you drive in everyday life
There are certain maneuvers it can help you with that apply to regular road driving.
When cars go into either understeer or oversteer, the natural reaction of most people is to slam on the brakes. This is fine for understeer but only makes oversteer worse. The correct reaction there is to countersteer a bit and apply more throttle. It's not enough to know technically how to do it--you have to be able to do it reflexively when you weren't expecting it to happen. A good sim racing game can train you to do that.
(Not surprisingly, manufacturers tend to setup cars from the factory in ways that tend to make it understeer, such as putting on oversized tires in back.)
Let's not forget "Forbidden Planet". I was very surprised to learn that the 1950s managed to create one good science fiction film.
This is rubbish. Number of people screened has no bearing on what the accuracy rate needs to be at all. What you want is a test where the cost of administering the test + the cost of dealing with false positives is less than the costs of not administering the test and dealing with the uncaught positives.
Let's throw this in: out of the 1 million people who might be infected, only 1,000 actually are. If your test says 10,000 people are infected, it's useless. OTOH, if 500,000 people are actually infected, then maybe an extra 10k aren't so bad.
Every situation will be different, but the gist is that if you're going to use a detection technique for broad screening, then it needs to be very, very accurate.
In the NSA's case, the number of people who have deliberately leaked information is very small compared to the number of job interviews they go through. I'd bet that more people have simply mishandled information (or will end up mishandling information) in the sort of accident that could happen to anyone. Even worse is the false positive rate--the test could easily pass someone who intends to pass secrets to a foreign country, even if they didn't get any training in fooling a polygraph.
In this case they have tons of applicants, if they falsely fail 10% then oh well they still had a 90% success rate and if 50% of those all passed then yup they have filled their slots.
90% is a very optimistic number for accuracy. Consenus estimates put it around 60%. Since the tests only work on yes/no questions, that's not much better than a coin flip.
Washing out people out at that rate, who have presumably already passed through some level of the interview process, get's expensive. Even worse are the false negatives.
As for privacy, if you fail the test it's not put in the newspaper and you walk out the door still looking for a job.
The results are held within the US government, and can be used against you when applying to other government jobs.
If you admit to criminal activity well then that might be a problem for you - they aren't going to cover that up!
The Fifth Amendment still applies. The most the NSA can do is pass it to the police with jurisdiction for a follow up investigation. Certain written guarantees may even prevent that much. In any case, a polygraph alone isn't admissible evidence, just a "point the investigation in the right direction" sort of tool.
The rest of my comment lays out the logical basis for that statement. Citations are for underling facts, not reasonable conclusions from those facts.
If you want a citation for a specific fact, I can turn some up.
Except it's actually so bad for their intended use that it's a hindrance to their job, not a help.
Let's say you have a test for a virus that is 99% accurate, but 1% of the time, it gives a false positive (says someone has the virus, but doesn't). Let's also say that there are 1000 people that might be infected, but nobody is sure. All of them are tested, and on average, 10 of them will show up as false positives. That number can probably be delt with, perhaps with a more expensive (but more accurate) test, or maybe the treatment is no big deal (so they can just get an injection and go on).
OTOH, let's say that 1 million people might be infected. Test all of them and there ends up being 10,000 false positives. Now the costs of the more accurate test start rising. Perhaps the treatment is more dangerous or expensive (rabies shots used to be pretty nasty, for example), so you really don't want to use it on people who aren't really sick.
So your accuracy rates need to be in line with how many people are going to be screened. If its use is highly targeted, then a test that's 90% accurate might be OK. If it's more of a general screening, then it needs to go into the five-9's kind of accuracy, perhaps more.
Polygraphs are nowhere near 90% accurate. It's maybe 70% accurate, and has both false positives and false negatives. For general job screening, like the NSA is using it for here, that's nowhere near good enough. It might be good enough for police investigations as a way of seeing if they're on the right track, but there's a reason it's not considered admissible court evidence in the US.
Of course, all this is only focusing on the basic statistical issues. There's a whole other set of arguments surrounding privacy, which matter even if a future technology is 99.999% accurate.
OpenBSD will secure your wireless network for you, in a way that lets guests easily access it while keeping ner-do-wells out?
Or how about this one: "There's got to be a better way to encrypt web traffic than OpenSSL".
CSV? I have a team of slaves move stones around a field like a giant abacus.
Billionaires don't hold on to their wealth, though. It's always invested into something--that's how they became billionaires in the first place. If you kidnapped a billionaire and demanded half his fortune for ransom, he'd have difficulty getting it to you because most of it isn't in assets he could immediately liquidate.
A reusable system could be cheaper, if you could launch it once a week instead of 1-2 times a year. The shuttle ended up having too many maintenance problems to make that kind of schedule possible, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
You say that because you don't understand how much brain power it takes to think this illogically.
I don't want to hear anymore about Obama and his socialist plan to move space launching into the hands of private enterprise.
The language may not guarantee secure code, but it can make writing secure code easy.
For instance, using placeholders in SQL makes code virtually immune to SQL injection attacks. If your database does not support placeholders, then the library can simulate it by quoting bad characters when data is passed in.
In Perl, any tutorial on database usage that anybody will point you to will most definitely show you how to use placeholders. The main one is over 10 years old, and it's very first Perl code example uses placeholders, as do all its other examples that run a query against a variable. It was the correct way to do things back then, and still is. DBI makes it very easy to do it right because there are no additional methods to call to make use of placeholders, and the Perl community is good about showing new programmers how to use them.
If you use PHP with PosgreSQL, then you have the pg_query_params() for the job. Why can't pg_query() do it? For that matter, why can't the equivalent function translate placeholders for braindamaged databases that don't use them? Making the programmers handle this with an escape function is inconvenient. Smarter programmers will have their time wasted on writing frivolous string escaping code, and more noobtacular programmers won't even know what it is or why they should be doing it.
It's entirely possible to write it correctly in PHP, but languages don't differer in what they make possible; they differ in what they make easy. Writing secure code should be much easier than it is.
I bet this is more reliable than any printer HP ever put out. I'm certain the cost of ink is cheaper.
Love all the little minifigs scattered around the machine.
How does monopoly law apply? BP isn't the only oil company, and isn't even the biggest, or even second biggest.
I can buy an argument of collusion between oil companies, but that's not quite the same thing as a monopoly.
The Tea Party organized itself via XBox Live?
Projecting items into a speech to make it say whatever you want it to say is not reasonable debate. Summary even mentioned an attack on radio, which, as far as I can tell, Obama never even brought up.
Firstly that there is a "right" number that people are willing to pay for techie gadgets. 499 of whatever currency units is about right for a toy like this. People don't think about exchange rates when looking at an item on a retail shelf.
Second, it's hardly just Apple. All companies that export from the US into the UK are making a fortune. That's the upside of having your country's currency devalued. Consider: the Chrysler 300C has a US base price of $28k, but a UK base price of £25k (or $37.5k at an exchange rate of 150%).
No, ideas really are the easy part. That's not because ideas are easy, but because creative people, by definition, generate them constantly. However, the number of ideas these people have are much more than they can ever develop.
So while ideas are hard, condensing a set of ideas into something manageable for the size of your team, and then focusing on just that until its done, is much harder. Being able to do that is what separates the millionaire nerds from the basement dwelling variety.
Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?
No. Since the '80s, an entire generation of programmers grew up with the initial idea of making their own games. Most of them never actually made a commercial game, but most of them now create other types of software. Those that did go into the industry either have way more ideas for games than their studio could ever implement, or they became slaves in the code mines of Activision.
You'll have to create and market it on your own.
Good attempt, but there seems to be some things in the levels that aren't quite right. In 1-2, there is only one Goomba coming when you first enter (should be two directly side-by-side). Also, the first mushroom in that world, coming off the row of blocks, goes far enough to jump over the wall, instead of bouncing off it and coming back at you.
And no way of getting into the -1 world (as Mario or otherwise). Just doesn't seem possible to get your head stuck that way.
If the Agriculture Ministry isn't in charge of Gundam, then I'd like to know who in the government is.
They do it because they're Japanese. They want an actual Gundam in space.
Cheaper electricity? If you say the smart grid won't do that alone, then you've obviously missed my point.
Except there are very, very few oil-powered plants. It's coal. While it is technically more efficient by being centralized, coal is extremely dirty. It ain't just CO2 you have to worried about.
If you have to choose between the two, ditch the coal plants and keep the gas cars. But we shouldn't have to choose, either.
There's no relationship between electric cars and windmills. The production of one does not spur the production of the other.
They can, but you have to add a third part--the smart grid. Then you can specifically charge electric cars during peak wind or solar production.