This is about teaching kids. I learned to program as a nine year old , hacking away on a "Dick Smith Wizard" 4k computer and a Basic cartridge trying to figure out how to make games. It crash coursed me on some basic maths that put me on a flying start when we started algebra in highschool , and set me up with a life-long interest in math and computing that 25 years later earns me a pretty decent wage. That whole concept of "Can't fix your computer? Ask your kids" started with our generation, and it was ALL ABOUT making games. Believe me, I'd rather have hit a cricket ball about than learn to make excel macros, but I sure as hell was interested in making my own dream variant of space invaders.
And I saw the dynamic again later in life as a music teacher. Sticking an unwanted instrument in a kids hand and ordering them to play scales and classical songs leads to kids who resent the instrument and never learn. Get the kid to bring in tapes of his favorite songs, teach them how to play it and the theory behind how the songs chords and melody work, and you'll have a kid whos facinated with scales and theory.
The kids can move onto serious stuff later when the fire has been ignited in their belly. The first task is to teach them to code.
The beauty of games too is that for all the fun involved, the kid has to learn some maths too, 2D geometry (including stuff like pythagoras' triangle equasions etc) and then right onto the meaty stuff with 3D like matrixes and stuff. Its stuff that tortures 16 year olds when presented as rote math, but you teach it in the form of game programming (Ok, this math will let you transform a spaceship in 3D, but first we gotta learn what it means and why it works) and I guarantee kids will learn it in a jiffy.
And thats the beauty of it all. Kids learn best by playing, its actually how our species is wired, so make the boring stuff like math into a game and transform it into interesting stuff.
Macs have always been "Leave on and let it sleep" machines , even back in the ugly days of the pre Os/X era. It was one thing that I found interesting and at first a little disturbing coming across from windows was shaking the idea that windows seem to instill that rebooting often lead to greater stability, whereas OS/X and Linux you where often better off leaving it on as much as possible and just letting it take naps when necessary (granted linux has had a shaky relationship with laptop power supplies, historically)
The only thing I can really see this useful for is if you've completely hosed your computer, and need to get online to figure out wtf is going on.
I wonder how wide the curve is to say its all Gen-X's
I mean, my *grandmother* likes to sit on her computer and whack away at puzzle games and if she's feeling naughty, she'll play the space invaders clone that she insisted I put on there (She's been playing space invaders since the 80s).
She's nearly 90. Granted she spends most of her time now on skype pestering the grandkids.
God help us if she ever discovers online gaming. We'll never hear the end of her.
er forget I used the word tort there. Its been 10+ years since i did my undergrad law unit, and shit comes out jumbled now. serves me right for using big words, even 4 letter ones.
Yeah but an iPad is a thing, not a softare package. You can't copyright it.
This was pretty much worked out in the lexmark vs SCC cases that copyright law can't be used to smuggle in restraints against property rights for things. Ie in the lexmark vs scc case the majority appeal decision held that the DMCA couldn't be used to prevent third party print cartriges from being sold.
All they can really do is grumble about the use of trademarks, but even then its limited by the fair use stuff. Ie you cant whack an apple logo on your stuff and expect a court to aprove, but you can definately write "We are giving away a free ipad", because its a truthful statement.
The fact is, unless you agree to these rules, they don't apply, because companies can't just invent rules for unwilling parties or seek rent outside of established torts. Apple trying to squash resale of retail products brought domestically (that omega case is a legal abomination by the way, but it seems to be about cross-border stuff which is.... wierd law) wouldn't last 15 seconds in a courtroom until the judge told apple to GTFO.
Just so you know, the US isn't going to default its debt. Thats silly speculation from the conservative press thats led to a bit of nervousness from some isolated quarters because the statuatory debt limit is being reached.
But its just a debt limit, its got nothing to do with defaulting what so over, because pushing the default button would nuke the economy and the whitehouse knows it. It simply won't happen.
The US economy is still held to be a low risk of defaulting, simply because it doesn't need to, as it can just go austere instead. Or raise the limit.
Of course austerity is going to suck, because spending cuts wreck economies that are slumping, but life goes on.
If you ask me, its about time the US pulled out of a few wars and cashed in that peace dividend.
Yep. A e-buddy of mine developed "geared" while either in high school or college and I remember him telling me on IRC the sales figures. I pretty much said "Kid, get an accountant f****ing NOW, and get a lawyer. You are now a rich man, but if you dont get GOOD advice you'll get nothing out of it". The game was a tiny thing, move gears into the right place to sync and win. But it hit that magic spot of simple likeability and he ended up a millionaire (or damn close to it).
Meanwhile there are a tonne of amazing little 3D games that dont hit the top 100 and make a few thousand dollars.
I'm not begrudging my mate. I'm proud of him. But its a damn strange and unbalanced market and success dont have shit all to do with money put into it, but other more esoteric criteria.
The thing is though is that australia doesn't censor the internet, nor is it monitored (without a court warrant, something common to everywhere)
The government proposed it, then dropped it when it realised it would be deeply unpopular.
Australia *does* have censorship issues, but its about Games, not the internet. Just because its computers, don't mean its the same. (In fact what makes the games censorship ironic is the fact that with an uncensored internet we can download it from uncensored and unmonitored.
I don't get it. I can understand having separate cultural student groups when the goal is to celebrate your culture, but is there any reason why Hispanics need their own separate Engineer society? Is there something different about Hispanic engineering or does this mean the Society of Professional Engineers excludes Hispanics? Can't we all just get along?
Uh. To encourage hispanic people to enter the field and provide professional development for them? Hispanic folk have found themselves facing a lot more employment discrimination and education discrimination than regular white folk and so felt it necessary to put a club together to try and fix that.
Or are you just angry about hispanics for some reason?
Give it time. Gnome 2 was buggy as heck when it came out too, but things got fixed and compatibility increased as time went on.
Its linux. Linux folks see software like wine. Give it some time, and you'll get something special, or just jump right in if you don't mind a few rough edges.
I think Gnome 3 is welcome. Gnome 2 and XFCE are great environs, but they are showing their ages a little bit, and I think a lot of good UI useability thinkings gone into Gnome 3. But theres no rush. Give them time to get the wrinkles out, and for apps to start migrating to some of the new idioms, as well as improved support for remote logins (I wonder how this works with redhats spice) and you'll see a great environment.
I dunno man. I think one of the problems with teaching kids math is that often the underlying mechanics are unexplained and so it becomes a case of teaching techniques by rote that don't make sense but can be understood the just repeating the technique. I remember learning parallel equasions and learning these long complicated procedures that didn't mean shit , till an uncle sat down and we just kind of meditated a bit on equality and variable substitution and why x = y+1 means x-1= y (etc), and then *blam* it all made sense. I utterly shot past the class on the topic because I *got* it, and it wasn't a technique anymore but a way of thinking about algebra. I wish I had someone do this with me for calculus.
I doubt this kid would have gotten this far without having worked out the underlying rationality behind it, because rote is just so damn boring. At 12, life feels too interesting to just accept things "because they are". A 12 year olds principle question is "WHY?". And this kid appears to have asked "WHY" to all the right topics.
It depends on what they are trying to achieve. I've often thought university CS really ought have two streams, science and engineering , so the student can chose whether he's doing it for employment or if he wants to be involved in CS research. (For contrast think of the difference between a physicist and an engineer. An engineer APPLIES physics, a physicist DISCOVERS physics)
OO is brilliantly productive technology, it encourages people to think in terms of modelling and interactions, and it naturally suits the UML style of project design and management. If I'm hiring coders for a real work task, they better damn well know OO, not just as pseudo namespaces for structured programming but how to think in objects, models and stuff, because we'd be doing a heck of a lot of that.
However from a computer *science* research point of view, OO really isn't the most interesting game in town, and I think CS has been starting to look back at the functional and non imperative modes of coding as a better foundation for really understanding algorithms. Once thats well understood, students can then learn OO/structured/etc with a much deeper understanding of WHY a good algorithm works, not just how to do it.
This is especially important as the age of parallelism is starting to show up OOs short falls. I'm still regularly surprised at the amount of coders , for instance, that don't know why "side effect" programming is bad, or if they do, don't know why.
Don't get me wrong, OO is still vital technology and is still the centerpiece of my personal toolkit of coding skills, but science vs engineering are different practices and whilst OO is great engineering, its not that interesting anymore as science.
Because truckers are working while they're listening and they already have legal precedent for charging fees for workers listening to the radio.
But the difference is, when its in a shop or mall or something, its a performance of sort, because your playing strangers music so whilst I *still* think its dubious its more to do with playing music in a publicly available place. A truck, even though its a workplace will have precisely one, at most two, people, in a private space , no different to listening to music in the car on the way to work, or driving to a meeting.
Personally however I find even the music-in-store claim dubious. As has been pointed out many times, its double dipping cos the radio station has already paid out.
Read what the post you where replying to above said. Nobody refers to the "God created the big bang" types as "Creationists", because creationism refers specificially to genesis literalism and always has.
Your inventing an excuse to be angry by redefining a common term. Thats disengenius. And yes all creationists are loonies. That much isn't really a controversial statement anymore, because we know evolution is real, the earth is billions of years old and certainly is not flat and suspended in a dome of water.
You can determine very quickly why https is so uncommon. Look at the price of a certificate. Do you really think any of these $10 a year bulk hosts want to increase their price by an order of magnitude with no extra profits to speak of?
The answer is simple. Break up that cartel, and replace the certificate system with a web of trust.
Thats a republican "culture war" myth and its not sound piolitical science at all.
The united states is a democratic republic (as opposed to australia which is a democratic constitutional monarchy for instance).
Examples of republics: United states North Korea Cuba France
Examples of non republics: Australia UK Canada Saudi Arabia
You will note there is NO correlation between "Is this an independent nation with no monarchy" and its political system, with the possible exception of a monarch that (for instance in the UK, Canada or Australia) has no real powers other than symbolic and breaking supply deadlocks.
The Correct term for Americas political system is "A democracy", or "Democratic republic" if you really want to include its independence status in there.
Theres a sliver of truth, and a big bunch of bullshit.
To hold onto a trademark, you do actually have to enforce it, or at least continue to make it clear that its yours.
That doesn't mean suing however! It can also mean granting of rights. For instance when you say "Hey fan site, I think its cool what you are doing and you can use the name "tolkien". ", and you've still enforced your IP.
Furthermore, its blantantly clear here that just mentioning a trademark doesnt infringe on it.Your actually allowed to talk about other products or make slogans about them , because thats not making a claim to be selling endorsed shit or whatever.
It the T-Shirt said "Tolkiens Lord of the Rings", then yes it probably would be an infringement". If it said "FUCK tolkiens lord of the rings", it would not be, because its bloody obvious its not an endorsed product.
Think about what would happen if just mentioning a trademark could get you sued. Protestors , for instance complaining about BPs deep water platform spill could not be directly criticized as "Down with an oil company with a platform!" would be mystifying compared to "Down with BP's deep water oil platform!" expresses a very easy to understand message. Could you imagine a competent first ammendment judge agreeing to ban mentioning companies in a negative light?
Reviewers couldn't do negative reviews.
Companies couldn't make comparitive claims about their competition.
And so on...
No you can definately use someones trademark in a reasonable speech sort of manner, as long as your not misrepresentiting yourself as using it to commercially endorse your shit or pretending your shit is their shit.
Bah. The opposition have been running a ridiculous scare campaign to try and convince people that its a terrible idea and instead the government should be rolling out 4G wireless as the new "next generation" broadband.
Never mind that 4G is slower than the current ADSL2+ network.
And the bit about a monopoly is ridiculous. The current copper network is owned as a monopoly by Telstra who are proving to be deeply anti-competitive compared to when it was government owned . If your going to do a monopoly, let the govt run it so that it wont have an anti-competitive profit motive. Then let the commercials offer alternatives. This is the current plan.
The conservatives would block their own assholes if they believed labor had invented them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is about teaching kids. I learned to program as a nine year old , hacking away on a "Dick Smith Wizard" 4k computer and a Basic cartridge trying to figure out how to make games. It crash coursed me on some basic maths that put me on a flying start when we started algebra in highschool , and set me up with a life-long interest in math and computing that 25 years later earns me a pretty decent wage. That whole concept of "Can't fix your computer? Ask your kids" started with our generation, and it was ALL ABOUT making games. Believe me, I'd rather have hit a cricket ball about than learn to make excel macros, but I sure as hell was interested in making my own dream variant of space invaders.
And I saw the dynamic again later in life as a music teacher. Sticking an unwanted instrument in a kids hand and ordering them to play scales and classical songs leads to kids who resent the instrument and never learn. Get the kid to bring in tapes of his favorite songs, teach them how to play it and the theory behind how the songs chords and melody work, and you'll have a kid whos facinated with scales and theory.
The kids can move onto serious stuff later when the fire has been ignited in their belly. The first task is to teach them to code.
The beauty of games too is that for all the fun involved, the kid has to learn some maths too, 2D geometry (including stuff like pythagoras' triangle equasions etc) and then right onto the meaty stuff with 3D like matrixes and stuff. Its stuff that tortures 16 year olds when presented as rote math, but you teach it in the form of game programming (Ok, this math will let you transform a spaceship in 3D, but first we gotta learn what it means and why it works) and I guarantee kids will learn it in a jiffy.
And thats the beauty of it all. Kids learn best by playing, its actually how our species is wired, so make the boring stuff like math into a game and transform it into interesting stuff.
Macs have always been "Leave on and let it sleep" machines , even back in the ugly days of the pre Os/X era. It was one thing that I found interesting and at first a little disturbing coming across from windows was shaking the idea that windows seem to instill that rebooting often lead to greater stability, whereas OS/X and Linux you where often better off leaving it on as much as possible and just letting it take naps when necessary (granted linux has had a shaky relationship with laptop power supplies, historically)
The only thing I can really see this useful for is if you've completely hosed your computer, and need to get online to figure out wtf is going on.
I wonder how wide the curve is to say its all Gen-X's
I mean, my *grandmother* likes to sit on her computer and whack away at puzzle games and if she's feeling naughty, she'll play the space invaders clone that she insisted I put on there (She's been playing space invaders since the 80s).
She's nearly 90. Granted she spends most of her time now on skype pestering the grandkids.
God help us if she ever discovers online gaming. We'll never hear the end of her.
er forget I used the word tort there. Its been 10+ years since i did my undergrad law unit, and shit comes out jumbled now. serves me right for using big words, even 4 letter ones.
Yeah but an iPad is a thing, not a softare package. You can't copyright it.
This was pretty much worked out in the lexmark vs SCC cases that copyright law can't be used to smuggle in restraints against property rights for things. Ie in the lexmark vs scc case the majority appeal decision held that the DMCA couldn't be used to prevent third party print cartriges from being sold.
All they can really do is grumble about the use of trademarks, but even then its limited by the fair use stuff. Ie you cant whack an apple logo on your stuff and expect a court to aprove, but you can definately write "We are giving away a free ipad", because its a truthful statement.
The fact is, unless you agree to these rules, they don't apply, because companies can't just invent rules for unwilling parties or seek rent outside of established torts. Apple trying to squash resale of retail products brought domestically (that omega case is a legal abomination by the way, but it seems to be about cross-border stuff which is.... wierd law) wouldn't last 15 seconds in a courtroom until the judge told apple to GTFO.
Just so you know, the US isn't going to default its debt. Thats silly speculation from the conservative press thats led to a bit of nervousness from some isolated quarters because the statuatory debt limit is being reached.
But its just a debt limit, its got nothing to do with defaulting what so over, because pushing the default button would nuke the economy and the whitehouse knows it. It simply won't happen.
The US economy is still held to be a low risk of defaulting, simply because it doesn't need to, as it can just go austere instead. Or raise the limit.
Of course austerity is going to suck, because spending cuts wreck economies that are slumping, but life goes on.
If you ask me, its about time the US pulled out of a few wars and cashed in that peace dividend.
Yep. A e-buddy of mine developed "geared" while either in high school or college and I remember him telling me on IRC the sales figures. I pretty much said "Kid, get an accountant f****ing NOW, and get a lawyer. You are now a rich man, but if you dont get GOOD advice you'll get nothing out of it". The game was a tiny thing, move gears into the right place to sync and win. But it hit that magic spot of simple likeability and he ended up a millionaire (or damn close to it).
Meanwhile there are a tonne of amazing little 3D games that dont hit the top 100 and make a few thousand dollars.
I'm not begrudging my mate. I'm proud of him. But its a damn strange and unbalanced market and success dont have shit all to do with money put into it, but other more esoteric criteria.
The thing is though is that australia doesn't censor the internet, nor is it monitored (without a court warrant, something common to everywhere)
The government proposed it, then dropped it when it realised it would be deeply unpopular.
Australia *does* have censorship issues, but its about Games, not the internet. Just because its computers, don't mean its the same. (In fact what makes the games censorship ironic is the fact that with an uncensored internet we can download it from uncensored and unmonitored.
I don't get it. I can understand having separate cultural student groups when the goal is to celebrate your culture, but is there any reason why Hispanics need their own separate Engineer society? Is there something different about Hispanic engineering or does this mean the Society of Professional Engineers excludes Hispanics? Can't we all just get along?
Uh. To encourage hispanic people to enter the field and provide professional development for them? Hispanic folk have found themselves facing a lot more employment discrimination and education discrimination than regular white folk and so felt it necessary to put a club together to try and fix that.
Or are you just angry about hispanics for some reason?
In Australia, at least back then, you couldn't return opened software. I had to pirate a few things I had brought but had ended up corrupted.
Give it time. Gnome 2 was buggy as heck when it came out too, but things got fixed and compatibility increased as time went on.
Its linux. Linux folks see software like wine. Give it some time, and you'll get something special, or just jump right in if you don't mind a few rough edges.
I think Gnome 3 is welcome. Gnome 2 and XFCE are great environs, but they are showing their ages a little bit, and I think a lot of good UI useability thinkings gone into Gnome 3. But theres no rush. Give them time to get the wrinkles out, and for apps to start migrating to some of the new idioms, as well as improved support for remote logins (I wonder how this works with redhats spice) and you'll see a great environment.
They really need to do a minecraft role play thing.
DM: "You are in a long and not very twisty tunnel all alike , you can go north, or south".
Player: "Fuck that *punches a hole in the roof with his fist*"
DM: "ssssssssssss"
I dunno man. I think one of the problems with teaching kids math is that often the underlying mechanics are unexplained and so it becomes a case of teaching techniques by rote that don't make sense but can be understood the just repeating the technique. I remember learning parallel equasions and learning these long complicated procedures that didn't mean shit , till an uncle sat down and we just kind of meditated a bit on equality and variable substitution and why x = y+1 means x-1= y (etc), and then *blam* it all made sense. I utterly shot past the class on the topic because I *got* it, and it wasn't a technique anymore but a way of thinking about algebra. I wish I had someone do this with me for calculus.
I doubt this kid would have gotten this far without having worked out the underlying rationality behind it, because rote is just so damn boring. At 12, life feels too interesting to just accept things "because they are". A 12 year olds principle question is "WHY?". And this kid appears to have asked "WHY" to all the right topics.
He's very bright.
It depends on what they are trying to achieve. I've often thought university CS really ought have two streams, science and engineering , so the student can chose whether he's doing it for employment or if he wants to be involved in CS research. (For contrast think of the difference between a physicist and an engineer. An engineer APPLIES physics, a physicist DISCOVERS physics)
OO is brilliantly productive technology, it encourages people to think in terms of modelling and interactions, and it naturally suits the UML style of project design and management. If I'm hiring coders for a real work task, they better damn well know OO, not just as pseudo namespaces for structured programming but how to think in objects, models and stuff, because we'd be doing a heck of a lot of that.
However from a computer *science* research point of view, OO really isn't the most interesting game in town, and I think CS has been starting to look back at the functional and non imperative modes of coding as a better foundation for really understanding algorithms. Once thats well understood, students can then learn OO/structured/etc with a much deeper understanding of WHY a good algorithm works, not just how to do it.
This is especially important as the age of parallelism is starting to show up OOs short falls. I'm still regularly surprised at the amount of coders , for instance, that don't know why "side effect" programming is bad, or if they do, don't know why.
Don't get me wrong, OO is still vital technology and is still the centerpiece of my personal toolkit of coding skills, but science vs engineering are different practices and whilst OO is great engineering, its not that interesting anymore as science.
But the difference is, when its in a shop or mall or something, its a performance of sort, because your playing strangers music so whilst I *still* think its dubious its more to do with playing music in a publicly available place. A truck, even though its a workplace will have precisely one, at most two, people, in a private space , no different to listening to music in the car on the way to work, or driving to a meeting.
Personally however I find even the music-in-store claim dubious. As has been pointed out many times, its double dipping cos the radio station has already paid out.
Read what the post you where replying to above said. Nobody refers to the "God created the big bang" types as "Creationists", because creationism refers specificially to genesis literalism and always has.
Your inventing an excuse to be angry by redefining a common term. Thats disengenius. And yes all creationists are loonies. That much isn't really a controversial statement anymore, because we know evolution is real, the earth is billions of years old and certainly is not flat and suspended in a dome of water.
What and mess up the cartel?
You can determine very quickly why https is so uncommon. Look at the price of a certificate. Do you really think any of these $10 a year bulk hosts want to increase their price by an order of magnitude with no extra profits to speak of?
The answer is simple. Break up that cartel, and replace the certificate system with a web of trust.
"The libertarian opposition to patents"?
Have you even READ Ayn fucking Rand? She basically built her entire philosophy on the concept of intellectual property.
Unless libertarianism has finally evicted the looney randoids , then no, libertarianism is not our friend here.
No you don't. Its a pure HTML5 thing. This will run, eventually, on an ipad for instance.
Thats a republican "culture war" myth and its not sound piolitical science at all.
The united states is a democratic republic (as opposed to australia which is a democratic constitutional monarchy for instance).
Examples of republics:
United states
North Korea
Cuba
France
Examples of non republics:
Australia
UK
Canada
Saudi Arabia
You will note there is NO correlation between "Is this an independent nation with no monarchy" and its political system, with the possible exception of a monarch that (for instance in the UK, Canada or Australia) has no real powers other than symbolic and breaking supply deadlocks.
The Correct term for Americas political system is "A democracy", or "Democratic republic" if you really want to include its independence status in there.
Theres a sliver of truth, and a big bunch of bullshit.
To hold onto a trademark, you do actually have to enforce it, or at least continue to make it clear that its yours.
That doesn't mean suing however! It can also mean granting of rights. For instance when you say "Hey fan site, I think its cool what you are doing and you can use the name "tolkien". ", and you've still enforced your IP.
Furthermore, its blantantly clear here that just mentioning a trademark doesnt infringe on it.Your actually allowed to talk about other products or make slogans about them , because thats not making a claim to be selling endorsed shit or whatever.
It the T-Shirt said "Tolkiens Lord of the Rings", then yes it probably would be an infringement". If it said "FUCK tolkiens lord of the rings", it would not be, because its bloody obvious its not an endorsed product.
Think about what would happen if just mentioning a trademark could get you sued. Protestors , for instance complaining about BPs deep water platform spill could not be directly criticized as "Down with an oil company with a platform!" would be mystifying compared to "Down with BP's deep water oil platform!" expresses a very easy to understand message. Could you imagine a competent first ammendment judge agreeing to ban mentioning companies in a negative light?
Reviewers couldn't do negative reviews.
Companies couldn't make comparitive claims about their competition.
And so on...
No you can definately use someones trademark in a reasonable speech sort of manner, as long as your not misrepresentiting yourself as using it to commercially endorse your shit or pretending your shit is their shit.
Bah. The opposition have been running a ridiculous scare campaign to try and convince people that its a terrible idea and instead the government should be rolling out 4G wireless as the new "next generation" broadband.
Never mind that 4G is slower than the current ADSL2+ network.
And the bit about a monopoly is ridiculous. The current copper network is owned as a monopoly by Telstra who are proving to be deeply anti-competitive compared to when it was government owned . If your going to do a monopoly, let the govt run it so that it wont have an anti-competitive profit motive. Then let the commercials offer alternatives. This is the current plan.
The conservatives would block their own assholes if they believed labor had invented them.
If they do business in the US, they are subject to US law, just as if a US bank does business in luxemburg they are subject to luxemburg law.
welp, I messed that joke up.
(also, am I the only one who hates that infernal "Slow down cowboy. Its been 1 minute since you last posted" nonsense :( ")