I could see myself spending a few hours at a place like this, but that's because I'm nostalgically remembering a childhood when these things weren't called "museums".
In philosophy, researchers at the top of their field (disproportionately young, but not only) are invited to submit articles to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And yes, philosophers do put this on their CV and are proud to have an article there. When one of the top philosophers of mind, David Chalmers discovered that his Wiki page blatantly misrepresented one of his central views, he got an account as "David Chalmers" and fixed it, only to be overruled by some undergrad in a state school who thought he owned that page and flamed Chalmers for impersonating someone famous. That would discourage me as well.
The real leader that I would want says: "Dude, that's a machine gun nest! You better lay low! I called in an airstrike. Here, eat some nachos while we wait."
Geez, if I were an OpenGL developer and Carmack started talking about things that OpenGL should implement to make his game engines work better, I'd be like "Yes sir, Mr. Carmack!" Seriously, those game engines are what's keeping people using OpenGL in the first place. It's too bad that ID software doesn't have the resources to fork that shit and develop it to suit their needs. I'm sure that it would be better.
It's pretty obvious that the smartest Microsoft engineers are working on game-related projects, and it's smart. Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing. DirectX is a big part of that, and the Kinect has also really stirred the pot. Lots of comments here are to the effect that Carmack is stating what has been obvious to everyone else for years. Yes, Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just... quixotic. It's not quite like RMS saying that he really should just start using Windows because it works better, but it's about 10% of the way there.
I like to think of technology as giving us the opportunity to fulfill more desires more cheaply. So in a real sense, it's making all of us rich. Even the poor in the industrialized world have a higher quality of life, longer life expectancy, etc. than the very rich did 200 years ago. But the question of employment depends on whether we rich people are going to keep demanding more so that another person will find it worth their while to have a job satisfying our demand. I honestly don't know; this depends on human psychology. Once we become rich enough, maybe one of our demands will be to have leisure time instead of working, and working will not be judged to be worth doing. I guess that's called retirement. Technology might enable us to retire young without us being comparatively rich. I happen to think that's a good thing, because I think it's sad that so many people have to work who don't want to. But sometimes I think that there is something about human nature that will always keep us craving more stuff that money can buy - no matter how rich we get - and getting this extra stuff will require that we have jobs. But of course, this demand for extra stuff means that mean that there is also a demand for the people who produce that stuff, which means that on this scenario, there will be jobs for us.
You might not be right about your point; it's all a quantitative question. By your pattern of reasoning, technology could never put people out of work because people are necessary to create the technology. That's obviously absurd. How many workers are employed developing the cotton mill that so offended the Luddites? I think the answer today is somewhere close to zero. Yet their invention long ago means that the Luddites' positions are never coming back. Invention is a bit like that. You don't need to invest brain power to maintain the existence of something that had been created in the past, for example, software. If there are people currently maintaining it, this may be because they are trying to permanently kill yet more jobs with it.
Of course, lots of technology is there to do jobs that nobody ever did before. So for example, our government snoops (with software) on every single one of our phone calls and emails. I don't think that an army of human snoops lost their jobs, because before the age of smart software, our government never did this job. So yes, technology is constantly helping us discover new jobs that we now think are worth doing, that wouldn't have been worth doing without the technology that makes them easy. But this doesn't mean that technology creates only these kinds of jobs. Many human jobs, like "computer", are simply not coming back.
Your pathetic attempt at humor makes me sad. Stories like this should never appear on Slashdot, because while readers here manage to say interesting things about tech issues, they are basically stuck in retarded, rude and simple stereotypes about gender relations. For other readers who are similarly retarded about this issue: Please wise up before you make comments like this, here and everywhere else.
If Microsoft suddenly get good ad blocking - as in, really good ad blocking, they could completely cut off all oxygen from Google. Of course, MS also makes some money from web advertising, but they don't need it to live like Google does. Also, it really would improve the quality of the user experience in IE if this were done well and thoroughly.
I think you have a point. The best Sci-Fi show, Firefly, will be re-run on cable, and it will be on the Science Channel. That probably means something.
Sadly, you're right. As it happens, I belong to some environmental groups (nothing radical) and trust me, I scream when they start on their "no nuke" bullshit. Luckily, I'm not the only one. Environmentalists are coming around, but too many (like my enemy Al Gore) are just too stupid to overcome the "ick" factor of nuclear power. I think it will take another 10 years before the hippies die and environmental groups will be led by people who have a more fact-based view of what's actually good for the environment - and energy poverty most definitely isn't. In the meanwhile, at least we can all agree on wind and on insulating houses - though that's really not going to take us far.
I'm not going to provide a full review, but I will say this: It's worth reading. Parts of it, like the chilling conversation with the Nazgul, are absolutely brilliant. I came away with the impression that the trilogy makes more sense now. I guess I just never really believed Tolkien when he painted a country/kingdom as being unambiguously evil in every way. This story doesn't claim that Mordor was good while the others were evil. It just that like the other powers, Mordor had noble motives that wholly good people could understandably follow. Those motives were actually really interesting and deep. If we view the Middle Earth myth as fake history, I have to say this take is a whole lot more plausible than Tolkien's own.
I don't think you read the story very carefully. The ring was a ruse by Mordor, the goal of which was to divide the Western kingdoms. This failed when Boromir failed to bring the ring to Gondor. It never had the power to command the other rings. Regarding Sauron's evilness, this is not really treated clearly in the story. It's not directly contested, but consider your Almaren evidence: Has a land never been conquered for a noble cause? The point is that we might not be hearing the full story in the tidbits of "history" we pick up. However, if Sauron really was evil, this doesn't mean that his subjects were. Sometimes good people get evil leaders. It sucks.
But your most puzzling misconception is in thinking that this work "criticizes the shit out of" Tolkien's LotR. It totally doesn't. In fact, it's quite reverential to the original work. It's a tribute to its detail and depth that the events of that story allow for such an interesting re-imagination. This work, unlike most re-imaginings, actually adds a lot of depth (so sorry for the spoilers).
I was thinking the same thing: Don't governments want pliant, opiated masses? And aren't video games just about the best antidote to civil unrest? Hell, forget about protesting. Those kids won't even go outside.
I can't use Chrome, because I hate tabs and I want my window management to be handled consistently. Mozilla loves tabs too, but unlike Chrome, they give me the option to easily turn off the features I don't want to use. I can already use Firefox without a URL bar. But the point is, it's left up to me. As long as Chrome doesn't respect my well-justified and not unusual choices, I'll not even consider trying it.
All those habitable worlds, and yet no sign of life. That's very bad news for us. There must be some kind of a great filter in the universe which prevents 99.99999999995% of all habitable planets from developing a visibly space-faring civilization like the one that we hope to soon become. ("Soon" in the cosmological sense.) This means that we should expect to fail before we ever get there, and never recover. That's bad news. If Earth-like planets had been rare, we could at least have had the hope that we have one big step of the great filter behind us, but apparently not - with means that it's probably in our future.
This month, our government has proposed a budget in which we confess that we're so fucking poor that we cannot afford to subsidize nutritional supplements for babies born with low birth weight. And yet there seems to be a whole parallel word of government, where insane shit like this must still look insane, but fuck it, we'll fund it anyway, because we're rich and we don't give a fuck. I mean seriously, who could possibly make the decision "Yeah, that's worth paying for" when they hear a sales pitch like this? Only an organization that's so flush with money that they're experimenting with using it for toilet paper. It's a little shocking, given the nature of all the sacrifices the government is forcing on normal people.
The show that will air tonight has been filmed weeks ago, for no good reason that I can think of. They would definitely stir up more attention and attract more viewers if the show was broadcast live. This is like being told months after the fact that Deep Blue did in fact beat Kasparov, and the moves were 1. Kp3,... That would have been completely lame.
What IBM hopes for is for Watson to win, but not win by much, so that people aren't put off by its brutality. And this taping of the show weeks ahead of the airing just invites speculation that the game was rigged to produce exactly this result. After investing so many resources in Watson, it's pretty dumb of IBM to not do this last thing right - which would have greatly raised the interest without any additional cost. One imagines that they did this because of their lack of confidence in Watson's performance. And that makes them look far less badass than they otherwise would.
So you're telling me that a standards body is coding up a video compression codec? That sounds pretty far fetched. No, of course the coding is done by whatever corporate bodies normally write MPEG codecs, and even if they're not exactly the same as the MPEG-LA group, I'd be shocked if the overlap weren't large.
Honestly, unless there is something huge that I don't know about, I just don't get how the information gained this way could be worth the cost of our freedom. This is just so sad!
Since the members of the MPEG group are making such good money from the royalties, why would they want to undermine that project with something that's free? It's in their interest to make it only slightly less crappy than VP8 (which won't be hard). This will kill the motivation to develop the independent free codecs, and this is what MPEG wants, I guess. But they don't want to really risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
To be fair, Beck might not have raped and killed a girl in 1990. But the fact remains that many Americans are asking the question: "Did he rape and kill a girl in 1990?"
As much as I like taking the train, I have to admit that you're right. It makes me sad, but we as a country made a decision that our primary means of terrestrial travel will be on roads. We can regret this - and I do - but we also have to accept it. What you say about rail freight and electrification are also right on.
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I could see myself spending a few hours at a place like this, but that's because I'm nostalgically remembering a childhood when these things weren't called "museums".
In philosophy, researchers at the top of their field (disproportionately young, but not only) are invited to submit articles to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And yes, philosophers do put this on their CV and are proud to have an article there. When one of the top philosophers of mind, David Chalmers discovered that his Wiki page blatantly misrepresented one of his central views, he got an account as "David Chalmers" and fixed it, only to be overruled by some undergrad in a state school who thought he owned that page and flamed Chalmers for impersonating someone famous. That would discourage me as well.
The real leader that I would want says: "Dude, that's a machine gun nest! You better lay low! I called in an airstrike. Here, eat some nachos while we wait."
Geez, if I were an OpenGL developer and Carmack started talking about things that OpenGL should implement to make his game engines work better, I'd be like "Yes sir, Mr. Carmack!" Seriously, those game engines are what's keeping people using OpenGL in the first place. It's too bad that ID software doesn't have the resources to fork that shit and develop it to suit their needs. I'm sure that it would be better.
It's pretty obvious that the smartest Microsoft engineers are working on game-related projects, and it's smart. Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing. DirectX is a big part of that, and the Kinect has also really stirred the pot. Lots of comments here are to the effect that Carmack is stating what has been obvious to everyone else for years. Yes, Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just ... quixotic. It's not quite like RMS saying that he really should just start using Windows because it works better, but it's about 10% of the way there.
I like to think of technology as giving us the opportunity to fulfill more desires more cheaply. So in a real sense, it's making all of us rich. Even the poor in the industrialized world have a higher quality of life, longer life expectancy, etc. than the very rich did 200 years ago. But the question of employment depends on whether we rich people are going to keep demanding more so that another person will find it worth their while to have a job satisfying our demand. I honestly don't know; this depends on human psychology. Once we become rich enough, maybe one of our demands will be to have leisure time instead of working, and working will not be judged to be worth doing. I guess that's called retirement. Technology might enable us to retire young without us being comparatively rich. I happen to think that's a good thing, because I think it's sad that so many people have to work who don't want to. But sometimes I think that there is something about human nature that will always keep us craving more stuff that money can buy - no matter how rich we get - and getting this extra stuff will require that we have jobs. But of course, this demand for extra stuff means that mean that there is also a demand for the people who produce that stuff, which means that on this scenario, there will be jobs for us.
You might not be right about your point; it's all a quantitative question. By your pattern of reasoning, technology could never put people out of work because people are necessary to create the technology. That's obviously absurd. How many workers are employed developing the cotton mill that so offended the Luddites? I think the answer today is somewhere close to zero. Yet their invention long ago means that the Luddites' positions are never coming back. Invention is a bit like that. You don't need to invest brain power to maintain the existence of something that had been created in the past, for example, software. If there are people currently maintaining it, this may be because they are trying to permanently kill yet more jobs with it.
Of course, lots of technology is there to do jobs that nobody ever did before. So for example, our government snoops (with software) on every single one of our phone calls and emails. I don't think that an army of human snoops lost their jobs, because before the age of smart software, our government never did this job. So yes, technology is constantly helping us discover new jobs that we now think are worth doing, that wouldn't have been worth doing without the technology that makes them easy. But this doesn't mean that technology creates only these kinds of jobs. Many human jobs, like "computer", are simply not coming back.
Finally, a thoughtful comment in this discussion. Thank you!
Your pathetic attempt at humor makes me sad. Stories like this should never appear on Slashdot, because while readers here manage to say interesting things about tech issues, they are basically stuck in retarded, rude and simple stereotypes about gender relations. For other readers who are similarly retarded about this issue: Please wise up before you make comments like this, here and everywhere else.
If Microsoft suddenly get good ad blocking - as in, really good ad blocking, they could completely cut off all oxygen from Google. Of course, MS also makes some money from web advertising, but they don't need it to live like Google does. Also, it really would improve the quality of the user experience in IE if this were done well and thoroughly.
I think you have a point. The best Sci-Fi show, Firefly, will be re-run on cable, and it will be on the Science Channel. That probably means something.
Sadly, you're right. As it happens, I belong to some environmental groups (nothing radical) and trust me, I scream when they start on their "no nuke" bullshit. Luckily, I'm not the only one. Environmentalists are coming around, but too many (like my enemy Al Gore) are just too stupid to overcome the "ick" factor of nuclear power. I think it will take another 10 years before the hippies die and environmental groups will be led by people who have a more fact-based view of what's actually good for the environment - and energy poverty most definitely isn't. In the meanwhile, at least we can all agree on wind and on insulating houses - though that's really not going to take us far.
I'm not going to provide a full review, but I will say this: It's worth reading. Parts of it, like the chilling conversation with the Nazgul, are absolutely brilliant. I came away with the impression that the trilogy makes more sense now. I guess I just never really believed Tolkien when he painted a country/kingdom as being unambiguously evil in every way. This story doesn't claim that Mordor was good while the others were evil. It just that like the other powers, Mordor had noble motives that wholly good people could understandably follow. Those motives were actually really interesting and deep. If we view the Middle Earth myth as fake history, I have to say this take is a whole lot more plausible than Tolkien's own.
I don't think you read the story very carefully. The ring was a ruse by Mordor, the goal of which was to divide the Western kingdoms. This failed when Boromir failed to bring the ring to Gondor. It never had the power to command the other rings. Regarding Sauron's evilness, this is not really treated clearly in the story. It's not directly contested, but consider your Almaren evidence: Has a land never been conquered for a noble cause? The point is that we might not be hearing the full story in the tidbits of "history" we pick up. However, if Sauron really was evil, this doesn't mean that his subjects were. Sometimes good people get evil leaders. It sucks.
But your most puzzling misconception is in thinking that this work "criticizes the shit out of" Tolkien's LotR. It totally doesn't. In fact, it's quite reverential to the original work. It's a tribute to its detail and depth that the events of that story allow for such an interesting re-imagination. This work, unlike most re-imaginings, actually adds a lot of depth (so sorry for the spoilers).
I was thinking the same thing: Don't governments want pliant, opiated masses? And aren't video games just about the best antidote to civil unrest? Hell, forget about protesting. Those kids won't even go outside.
In Soviet Mordor, the ring disappears you.
I can't use Chrome, because I hate tabs and I want my window management to be handled consistently. Mozilla loves tabs too, but unlike Chrome, they give me the option to easily turn off the features I don't want to use. I can already use Firefox without a URL bar. But the point is, it's left up to me. As long as Chrome doesn't respect my well-justified and not unusual choices, I'll not even consider trying it.
All those habitable worlds, and yet no sign of life. That's very bad news for us. There must be some kind of a great filter in the universe which prevents 99.99999999995% of all habitable planets from developing a visibly space-faring civilization like the one that we hope to soon become. ("Soon" in the cosmological sense.) This means that we should expect to fail before we ever get there, and never recover. That's bad news. If Earth-like planets had been rare, we could at least have had the hope that we have one big step of the great filter behind us, but apparently not - with means that it's probably in our future.
This month, our government has proposed a budget in which we confess that we're so fucking poor that we cannot afford to subsidize nutritional supplements for babies born with low birth weight. And yet there seems to be a whole parallel word of government, where insane shit like this must still look insane, but fuck it, we'll fund it anyway, because we're rich and we don't give a fuck. I mean seriously, who could possibly make the decision "Yeah, that's worth paying for" when they hear a sales pitch like this? Only an organization that's so flush with money that they're experimenting with using it for toilet paper. It's a little shocking, given the nature of all the sacrifices the government is forcing on normal people.
The show that will air tonight has been filmed weeks ago, for no good reason that I can think of. They would definitely stir up more attention and attract more viewers if the show was broadcast live. This is like being told months after the fact that Deep Blue did in fact beat Kasparov, and the moves were 1. Kp3, ... That would have been completely lame.
What IBM hopes for is for Watson to win, but not win by much, so that people aren't put off by its brutality. And this taping of the show weeks ahead of the airing just invites speculation that the game was rigged to produce exactly this result. After investing so many resources in Watson, it's pretty dumb of IBM to not do this last thing right - which would have greatly raised the interest without any additional cost. One imagines that they did this because of their lack of confidence in Watson's performance. And that makes them look far less badass than they otherwise would.
Yeah, because the internet needs a search engine that can respond to erudite puns with the appropriate question.
So you're telling me that a standards body is coding up a video compression codec? That sounds pretty far fetched. No, of course the coding is done by whatever corporate bodies normally write MPEG codecs, and even if they're not exactly the same as the MPEG-LA group, I'd be shocked if the overlap weren't large.
Honestly, unless there is something huge that I don't know about, I just don't get how the information gained this way could be worth the cost of our freedom. This is just so sad!
Since the members of the MPEG group are making such good money from the royalties, why would they want to undermine that project with something that's free? It's in their interest to make it only slightly less crappy than VP8 (which won't be hard). This will kill the motivation to develop the independent free codecs, and this is what MPEG wants, I guess. But they don't want to really risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
To be fair, Beck might not have raped and killed a girl in 1990. But the fact remains that many Americans are asking the question: "Did he rape and kill a girl in 1990?"
As much as I like taking the train, I have to admit that you're right. It makes me sad, but we as a country made a decision that our primary means of terrestrial travel will be on roads. We can regret this - and I do - but we also have to accept it. What you say about rail freight and electrification are also right on.