Well, if you're surrounded by people who think it's crazy to leave a stable well-paying job simply because you hate it, I think a book could help validate that you're not really crazy, you're just running with a crowd with weird values. Being intellectually independent of the values of your friends, family, and favorite TV anchors isn't always easy for us herd animals. It kind of makes sense that if a book presents a bunch of people who are stampeding in the direction you want to go, you can kind of adopt them as a surrogate herd until such time as you can surround yourself with sane people.
It hardly seems fair that Dactyl can be a moon but Ceres and friends can't be planets. Maybe Mars' moons should be demoted. I vote that things heavy enough to pull themselves into a ball be called moons and planets; everything else is an asteroid regardless of what it's currently orbiting. Uppity rubble they are, those asteroids.
Hmmm -- isn't that true of anything you do that breaks your regular routine? It shakes your assumptions and you talk a lot about what it's made you think about. I suppose it comes off as bragging, but the alternative is to withdraw from your friends every time you are exposed to something new, for fear of annoying people who aren't in the mood for discussion of anything outside of weather, football and nasdaq.
You don't need to hoard art to experience it
on
Drama in the Desert
·
· Score: 1
IMO art is an expression from one person to another. Music was art before it could be written down or recorded; dance was art before we had videotape. Just because you can't buy it and hang it on your wall to impress your friends doesn't mean it can't move you.
Saving pieces of art is great -- I don't think all art should be temporary. But it's also OK to improvise on an instrument, to doodle on the corner of your math notes; to fingerpaint; to hum a tune while you're walking somewhere.
Burning the art at the end of the event gives people permission to "doodle" and let their creativity out a little more. Experiencing that temporary week of freedom does leave a permanent mark on the world, but it happens by changing people's heads, rather than producing hunks of sculpted plaster and painted canvas.
My dad bought one. He needed it for a project, and thought it would fit the bill. Seems to be working fine for him. I agree with you -- I get all worked up about annoying ads, invasions of privacy, stupid politicians, proprietary software, etc, but my dad is much more sanguine and practical about these things. He wants the product; it works; popups are annoying but surviveable; there are more important things in life to worry about. So now he has this cool website up and running and has moved on to the next project while I'm sitting hunched over my emphatically non-microsoft computer in my apartment ranting to slashdot.
I first saw porn in elementary school when we found a book about sex in a field behind my friend's house. It was fascinating and icky at the same time. But I didn't turn into a serial murderer. I don't think we should go apeshit over the possiblity that a kid will find "hot bi babes" when searching for breast cancer information.
Secondly, i'm concerned about kids who are looking for information that's aimed at adults, but not "adult-oriented". Like say you're interested in stamp collecting. Do you think a philately site will bother to also put their catalog on.kids.us? if they do, they'll fill it with dumbed down "the magical journey of stamp collecting" fluff. So if a school decides to block all but.kids.us, they'll be blocking an important escape for those kids that are curious about anything outside the pablum they tend to get fed.
It is kind of similar to HTTP/HTML, but the judge points out that this patent was already defended against a prior art claim, by emphasizing the fact that the links contained not virtual references but actual track/sector numbers; and that the links appeared in a separate section of the file from the main text. Those quirky details were therefore an intregal part of what their patent claims, and they definitely don't apply to HTML.
Look at the requirements for the degrees
and go for the one where the classes look
the most interesting. That way you'll be
qualified for a career you'll enjoy.
I've never held a job for more than a couple
years, and I don't feel powerless. I get laid
off on a whim sometimes (especially as a
contractor/consultant) but I also never feel
"trapped" in a job.
People who work in one place for many many years
have to guard against the tendency to fear the
job market and feel stuck and dependent on their
current employer. The ridiculous tradition of
having employers furnish health insurance only
makes that worse by tying people's health
security to their current job.
Rather than go back to the traditional serf-like
loyalty, I'd rather constantly upgrade my skills
and move from job to job as I'm needed. I know
that's harder to do in lines of work other than
mine, but let's talk about how to fix that.
Having the skills
to quit your job any time you want is *real*
job security, and it gives you a lot more
leverage to push for doing things right in the
workplace and not being treated like an
expendable cog.
IMO they don't quit because the conditions
don't seem so bad in the context of really
messed-up third world economic conditions.
The reason Nike et al go to these
places to set up factories is that even
a pittance is enough to attract workers
the workers. Of course Nike's doing it out of
pure greed, but ironically they're bringing
jobs to the places on earth where they're most
desparately needed.
Personally I think that locally owned
industry would be a much better development
path, but if that's not happening for whatever
reason (maybe local corruption, lack of
education, etc) at least maquilladoras are
better than starvation. At least the workers
there seem to think so, and their opinions
ought to matter.
But there are some informational things for which simulations are no different from reality. Suppose I write a simple BASIC program with an infinite loop, and run that in an Apple II emulator on a Pentium. Is it a real infinite loop, or just a simulation of an infinite loop? It's a silly question.
Similarly, an ALife form in a simulated world has no less effect on external reality than a gerbil in a cage with manufactured toys and synthetic cedar shavings. Both could affect the real world -- the gerbil by being set loose, the ALife by being downloaded into a robot and placed in a real environment that's analogous to the simulated environment it was trained in.
The fact that Artificial Life programs are many orders of magnitude simpler than natural living things is only relevant if complexity is defined as a prerequisite for life, and I don't see why it should be.
You've already mostly written what they want, and you have full physical control of it. It's in their interest to negotiate something to your and their satisfaction. Maybe your employer would have a legal right to force the issue through contract gimmickry, but they would have nothing to gain since you could simply delete the source code and all backups before you let them take it from you. That's a risk to you legally, but no benefit to them financially. Be tactful and honest and I don't see why everybody can't come out ahead.
Some of the dogma 2001 rules are just lists of pet peeves: for example the list of banned characters, which allows queens but not elves. The list is too inelegant to be compelling.
But most people do win in the end with finding a partner -- we may not all bag Keanu Reeves, but we find someone that makes us happer than we would be alone. Coke may edge out Pepsi in one market segment or another, but they're both raking in cash and paying salaries and delivering drinks to people. The Americans and Soviets wasted zillions of dollars and rubles on military preparations and cynical global geopolitics, but everyone came out behind in the end -- it was a negative-sum game.
Zero-sum games are just battles for short-term advantage within larger, longer-term positive- or negative-sum games. All three kinds of games are instructive, I suppose, but playing Monopoly and Risk our whole lives may give us distorted instincts about where our opportunities for success lie.
It's very wrong IMO that Windows software typically is inextricably linked to the GUI, so that for example if you try to print a Word document directly via a right-click menu selection from the desktop, the Word GUI flashes up and disappears. It seems like lately some apps with ActiveX interfaces don't do that -- Microsoft programmers have learned to separate the gui from the functionality. But it's a disciplined effort they have to make.
It would be nice if programs wanting to do GUI could represent drawing and writing and receiving menu choices and clicks, as ascii streams to and from a general purpose GUI client window. That way the GUI streams could be redirected to a second program, if you wanted to use the functionality without the GUI.
That wouldn't work well for everything, since it would limit what you could do with custom window painting and event handling, but for simple, mostly text- and icon-based GUIs, it might be sufficient.
I had a twiddler, and it was a pretty cool concept, but my hand hurt after using it, and it turned out to be ergnomically a lot worse (for me) than a regular keyboard. I had to apply a lot of force to press the buttons, with my hand in odd positions.
In my experience a light touch is the way to avoid wrist problems etc.; that wasn't possible with the twiddler, and I'm skeptical about this one too. If you're holding a mechanism up by putting your fingers between the buttons, the buttons have to be significantly stiffer to avoid spurious keypresses.
There's a H. P. Lovecraft story about a meteorite that is a fourth primary color, "The Color Out of Space", printed in Sept '27 Amazing Stories.
"The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it a colour at all."
Saying that a technology shouldn't be explored until the ethical questions are resolved is the same as saying that the technology should be suppressed forever. There are still people who question the morality of vaccination for example: it is applied unequally to rich and poor; it subvert's God's plan for who lives and who dies; it could be an Evil Conspiracy to infect people with diseases. Shall we call a moratorium on vaccination until every last one of these people is convinced?
If you read arguments against genetic engineering by someone like Jeremy Rifkin, they exactly parallel arguments against vaccination. He thinks we should wait until all issues are resolved. But that implies that moral issues are like scientific facts; something that sufficient study and observation can clarify.
In fact moral issues in the real world are usually only resolved through the death of one faction or the other. We know slavery is bad now because all slave owners are dead and buried and no one holds that viewpoint anymore. But no "proof" of the evilness of slavery has been discovered that was unknown in the 1700's. The abolition of slavery was accomplished simply by pushing ahead with it despite objections and letting ex-slaveowners whine about it until they died off.
Moral issues can only be resolved after very thorough and widespread implementation, not before!
I have seen substantive discussion of issues that
matter in media coverage of this election. It's
not in mainstream media, but in special-interest
media. Slashdot has been discussing the positions
of the candidates on internet filtering, for example, and the gay weekly newspapers that I read tend to analyze to death nuances of what the candidates say with respect to gay marriage, dont-ask-dont-tell, etc.
IMO elections may appear more mindless lately simply because media is fragmenting, and people are supplementing mainstream news with specialized media sources. You read Focus on the Family or The Advocate to find out about candidates positions on homosexuality (if you care) and read USA Today to find out about common-denominator factors that transcend "issues": character, confidence, and hairstyle/wardrobe analysis.
I think that Gore and Bush probably do differ more significantly than they'll let on to USA Today, but you have to look at not-widely-publicized interviews with specialist publications to see those differences.
(That being said, the two candidates are still too close together for my tastes and I'm not voting for either one. I'd rather help build a third party so I can vote for someone I genuinely like in 2040!)
One way of characterizing languages is by the order they place verb, subject and object. English is typcially "SVO"; "The cat ate the sushi" has subject, verb, then object. Japanese is usually SOV: neko wa (the cat) sushi wo (the sushi) tabemashita (ate).
If a function is like a verb and its arguments are like subjects and objects, than C might be considered a VSO language. I imagine there must be natural languages that have VSO order, but I don't know what they are, and I have a sneaking suspicion that speakers of such a language weren't the primary designers of languages such as C and Pascal. It must be that VSO just seems more logical to designers and logicians.
The earliest electronic calculators that I remember seeing used RPN (i.e. "3 enter 4 +" instead of "3 + 4 =") -- which is more SOV-like than the more familiar math notation that modern calculators use. Of course that's because they were doing stack-based math, which doesn't have issues of precedence or need parentheses. Natural SOV languages do not share that feature; Japanese syntax can be ambiguous just like English.
When i get stuck, I rewrite the damn thing from scratch. In practice I usually give up on the rewriting effort because I see an easier way to fix it as I get into the flow of things again, but it helps me a lot to be able to start with a blank screen again.
Another thing you might look into is Refactoring -- get mechanical about fixing design problems until your software becomes easy to think about again.
>Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants >to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, >smart and attractive inhabitants.
I don't want to live in a world where people get to vote on who they live amongst. If you think genetic engineering is creepy, don't engineer your children.
It's brutally condescending to suggest that among starving people there are no geeks and amateur philosophers who care about things like SETI. Or even worse, that they do care, but what they care about doesn't matter. We're sending aid because they're people, and people are cool, and they're cool because of their intelligence and imagination. If human beings were merely stomachs-on-legs that needed nothing but food to be fulfilled, we wouldn't be worth saving.
If we threw away all human endeavor outside of feeding the hungry, then why would the hungry bother eating the food? People want to live for reasons more interesting than another day in a bread line.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you're surrounded by people who think it's crazy to leave a stable well-paying job simply because you hate it, I think a book could help validate that you're not really crazy, you're just running with a crowd with weird values. Being intellectually independent of the values of your friends, family, and favorite TV anchors isn't always easy for us herd animals. It kind of makes sense that if a book presents a bunch of people who are stampeding in the direction you want to go, you can kind of adopt them as a surrogate herd until such time as you can surround yourself with sane people.
Is this what they found? Is it just me or does this disturbing logo have a tiny pair of "hind wings"?
It hardly seems fair that Dactyl can be a moon but Ceres and friends can't be planets. Maybe Mars' moons should be demoted. I vote that things heavy enough to pull themselves into a ball be called moons and planets; everything else is an asteroid regardless of what it's currently orbiting. Uppity rubble they are, those asteroids.
Hmmm -- isn't that true of anything you do that breaks your regular routine? It shakes your assumptions and you talk a lot about what it's made you think about. I suppose it comes off as bragging, but the alternative is to withdraw from your friends every time you are exposed to something new, for fear of annoying people who aren't in the mood for discussion of anything outside of weather, football and nasdaq.
IMO art is an expression from one person to another. Music was art before it could be written down or recorded; dance was art before we had videotape. Just because you can't buy it and hang it on your wall to impress your friends doesn't mean it can't move you.
Saving pieces of art is great -- I don't think all art should be temporary. But it's also OK to improvise on an instrument, to doodle on the corner of your math notes; to fingerpaint; to hum a tune while you're walking somewhere.
Burning the art at the end of the event gives people permission to "doodle" and let their creativity out a little more. Experiencing that temporary week of freedom does leave a permanent mark on the world, but it happens by changing people's heads, rather than producing hunks of sculpted plaster and painted canvas.
My dad bought one. He needed it for a project, and thought it would fit the bill. Seems to be working fine for him. I agree with you -- I get all worked up about annoying ads, invasions of privacy, stupid politicians, proprietary software, etc, but my dad is much more sanguine and practical about these things. He wants the product; it works; popups are annoying but surviveable; there are more important things in life to worry about. So now he has this cool website up and running and has moved on to the next project while I'm sitting hunched over my emphatically non-microsoft computer in my apartment ranting to slashdot.
I first saw porn in elementary school when we found a book about sex in a field behind my friend's house. It was fascinating and icky at the same time. But I didn't turn into a serial murderer.
I don't think we should go apeshit over the possiblity that a kid will find "hot bi babes" when searching for breast cancer information.
Secondly, i'm concerned about kids who are looking for information that's aimed at adults, but not "adult-oriented". Like say you're interested in stamp collecting. Do you think a philately site will bother to also put their catalog on
Bah. Kids are citizens, not orchids.
It is kind of similar to HTTP/HTML, but the judge
points out that this patent was already defended against a prior art claim, by emphasizing the fact that the links contained not virtual references but actual track/sector numbers; and that the links appeared in a separate section of the file from the main text. Those quirky details were therefore an intregal part of what their patent claims, and they definitely don't apply to HTML.
41 light years isn't so far. We'd be seeing
original broadcasts of I Love Lucy instead of
the reruns.
Look at the requirements for the degrees
and go for the one where the classes look
the most interesting. That way you'll be
qualified for a career you'll enjoy.
I've never held a job for more than a couple
years, and I don't feel powerless. I get laid
off on a whim sometimes (especially as a
contractor/consultant) but I also never feel
"trapped" in a job.
People who work in one place for many many years
have to guard against the tendency to fear the
job market and feel stuck and dependent on their
current employer. The ridiculous tradition of
having employers furnish health insurance only
makes that worse by tying people's health
security to their current job.
Rather than go back to the traditional serf-like
loyalty, I'd rather constantly upgrade my skills
and move from job to job as I'm needed. I know
that's harder to do in lines of work other than
mine, but let's talk about how to fix that.
Having the skills
to quit your job any time you want is *real*
job security, and it gives you a lot more
leverage to push for doing things right in the
workplace and not being treated like an
expendable cog.
IMO they don't quit because the conditions
don't seem so bad in the context of really
messed-up third world economic conditions.
The reason Nike et al go to these
places to set up factories is that even
a pittance is enough to attract workers
the workers. Of course Nike's doing it out of
pure greed, but ironically they're bringing
jobs to the places on earth where they're most
desparately needed.
Personally I think that locally owned
industry would be a much better development
path, but if that's not happening for whatever
reason (maybe local corruption, lack of
education, etc) at least maquilladoras are
better than starvation. At least the workers
there seem to think so, and their opinions
ought to matter.
But there are some informational things for which simulations are no different from reality. Suppose I write a simple BASIC program with an infinite loop, and run that in an Apple II emulator on a Pentium. Is it a real infinite loop, or just a simulation of an infinite loop? It's a silly question. Similarly, an ALife form in a simulated world has no less effect on external reality than a gerbil in a cage with manufactured toys and synthetic cedar shavings. Both could affect the real world -- the gerbil by being set loose, the ALife by being downloaded into a robot and placed in a real environment that's analogous to the simulated environment it was trained in. The fact that Artificial Life programs are many orders of magnitude simpler than natural living things is only relevant if complexity is defined as a prerequisite for life, and I don't see why it should be.
You've already mostly written what they want, and you have full physical control of it. It's in their interest to negotiate something to your and their satisfaction. Maybe your employer would have a legal right to force the issue through contract gimmickry, but they would have nothing to gain since you could simply delete the source code and all backups before you let them take it from you. That's a risk to you legally, but no benefit to them financially. Be tactful and honest and I don't see why everybody can't come out ahead.
Some of the dogma 2001 rules are just lists of pet peeves: for example the list of banned characters, which allows queens but not elves. The list is too inelegant to be compelling.
Zero-sum games are just battles for short-term advantage within larger, longer-term positive- or negative-sum games. All three kinds of games are instructive, I suppose, but playing Monopoly and Risk our whole lives may give us distorted instincts about where our opportunities for success lie.
It would be nice if programs wanting to do GUI could represent drawing and writing and receiving menu choices and clicks, as ascii streams to and from a general purpose GUI client window. That way the GUI streams could be redirected to a second program, if you wanted to use the functionality without the GUI.
That wouldn't work well for everything, since it would limit what you could do with custom window painting and event handling, but for simple, mostly text- and icon-based GUIs, it might be sufficient.
In my experience a light touch is the way to avoid wrist problems etc.; that wasn't possible with the twiddler, and I'm skeptical about this one too. If you're holding a mechanism up by putting your fingers between the buttons, the buttons have to be significantly stiffer to avoid spurious keypresses.
"The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it a colour at all."
If you read arguments against genetic engineering by someone like Jeremy Rifkin, they exactly parallel arguments against vaccination. He thinks we should wait until all issues are resolved. But that implies that moral issues are like scientific facts; something that sufficient study and observation can clarify.
In fact moral issues in the real world are usually only resolved through the death of one faction or the other. We know slavery is bad now because all slave owners are dead and buried and no one holds that viewpoint anymore. But no "proof" of the evilness of slavery has been discovered that was unknown in the 1700's. The abolition of slavery was accomplished simply by pushing ahead with it despite objections and letting ex-slaveowners whine about it until they died off.
Moral issues can only be resolved after very thorough and widespread implementation, not before!
IMO elections may appear more mindless lately simply because media is fragmenting, and people are supplementing mainstream news with specialized media sources. You read Focus on the Family or The Advocate to find out about candidates positions on homosexuality (if you care) and read USA Today to find out about common-denominator factors that transcend "issues": character, confidence, and hairstyle/wardrobe analysis.
I think that Gore and Bush probably do differ more significantly than they'll let on to USA Today, but you have to look at not-widely-publicized interviews with specialist publications to see those differences.
(That being said, the two candidates are still too close together for my tastes and I'm not voting for either one. I'd rather help build a third party so I can vote for someone I genuinely like in 2040!)
If a function is like a verb and its arguments are like subjects and objects, than C might be considered a VSO language. I imagine there must be natural languages that have VSO order, but I don't know what they are, and I have a sneaking suspicion that speakers of such a language weren't the primary designers of languages such as C and Pascal. It must be that VSO just seems more logical to designers and logicians.
The earliest electronic calculators that I remember seeing used RPN (i.e. "3 enter 4 +" instead of "3 + 4 =") -- which is more SOV-like than the more familiar math notation that modern calculators use. Of course that's because they were doing stack-based math, which doesn't have issues of precedence or need parentheses. Natural SOV languages do not share that feature; Japanese syntax can be ambiguous just like English.
chris
When i get stuck, I rewrite the damn thing from scratch. In practice I usually give up on the rewriting effort because I see an easier way to fix it as I get into the flow of things again, but it helps me a lot to be able to start with a blank screen again.
Another thing you might look into is Refactoring -- get mechanical about fixing design problems until your software becomes easy to think about again.
>Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants
>to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful,
>smart and attractive inhabitants.
I don't want to live in a world where people get to vote on who they live amongst. If you think
genetic engineering is creepy, don't engineer your
children.
If we threw away all human endeavor outside of feeding the hungry, then why would the hungry bother eating the food? People want to live for reasons more interesting than another day in a bread line.