Most people want to write software, or play the guitar, or build a house.
That is, until they see it requires years of learning and practice to do it well.
That's only half of the story.
Creative or energetic or curious people try lots of things and stick with what turns them on.
Most of the people who take up guitar or any other hobby whatsoever don't stick with it. So what?
Try it and stick with the one(s) that keep your interest over time.
For the OP, the posts on game design with cardboard and rules are accurate but if the kid ain't into them, then they are useless. I'd suggest it along with one of the game dev packages (Unity3d is my pref) and see what sticks. When my son was 11, he and a friend filled several notebooks with rules for an open world game they were going to write. It was far too big for them (but I didn't say that to them). The exercise was excellent, they loved doing it, and they're the ones who eventually figured out just how complicated it all is. Now my son is in college and just released his first game on the iApp store. It's got a single mechanic, touch the screen or release it.
It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.
Yup. that applies to most of the comments.
Viruses mutate and flus occur regularly. Occasionally, one is deadly.
To get in front of evolution and have 50 million vaccines ready for distribution, you need to make educated guesses.
This year we guessed wrong. That's the gist of the article.
There appears to be an infinity of possible things that could happen evolutionarily.
But if you look merely at the number of stars in the entire universe, approximately 300 billion billion, that's essentially 10 to the 20th power. That means in order for life to be unique in the universe, all we need are 20 one out of ten possibilities in a row.
If the hack results in a jailbreak, I'm sure there will be a patch or a workaround on Cydia. I remember this happening with a SSL issue a few years ago.
Absolutely true. If the hack causes users to trash their old phone and buy a new one, well there's an incentive for the company to NOT fix the hack.
OTOH, if the hack causes jailbreaking and the carrier loses money, now we're talking about terrorists trying to destroy the entire capitalist system.
Incentives are very powerful.
Every carrier (this wasn't about the phone but the network) in India provides a back door to the Indian government.
Lucky for all of us in America that we have the Department of Homeland Security "protecting" our private data.
(That's called sarcasm for those of you who are poorly socialized.)
I'd really like to see a falsifiable rendering of "evolution". It would make discussion so much easier.
That must be the basic problem with physics too. The universe we live in is NOT falsifiable; therefore physics can never come up with a valid scientific theory that us internally consistent and also completely covers everything.
Is that the philosophy of science in a nutshell? Enquiring minds want to know;-)
The average height of post-war (WWII) Japanese was 2 inches taller than the previous generation. and that was due merely to the better availability of food--an environmental factor--but probably not anything to do with evolution per se.
As stated in another post, if you kill off the shortest 1/3 of the population, the average height immediately goes up.
Similarly, if the small-footed lizards drop off the trees and can't find enough food, the average foot-size immediately increases in the population independent of evolution occurring. Evolution is 2-step process. The environmental advantage or disadvantage occurs during the individual lives of each member of the species. The passing of genes to the next generation is a separate process that still reshuffles the genes via sex relentlessly regardless of environment. That's what makes it hard to determine when evolution via genes is occurring vs purely environmental factors winnowing a current population. The new population of lizards still produces some amount of small-footed ones due to sexual mixing of genes--and if the environment changes to reward smaller feet, the population will again change quickly.
It may be good for the economy. It may not be so good for the people who can no longer support themselves because they just lost their minimum wage job to a robot. It may not be good for the people who then get mugged by said hungry person either.
Actually, if it's bad for the workers on the bottom, then it will be bad for the economy over the long run.
Economics is civilization's circulatory system and when money stops circulating because it gets trapped at the top, the economy stops working./*Money never gets trapped at the bottom */
Quote from the FED: You can't push a string.
No matter how low you push interest rates, it ain't worth borrowing to build a factory if DEMAND--the key to all economics--does not exist or cannot exist because the bottom-most folks have no money. Using taxes to rebuild our roads, bridges and aging water treatment systems would kickstart demand again (by hiring mid-level and low-level construction workers throughout America) but the rich folks think it's "my" money when it's really "our" economy.
Ayn Rand wrote fiction. Reset her "heroes" in Somalia or The Congo or some place without a strong central government and you can quickly see the benefits of a government that provides roads, infrastructure, and enforces contracts.
I think the Texas hospital caused the infection _because_ we used First World thinking.
1. They did NOT spray the hazmat clothing down with bleach before taking it off--something they do in Africa
2. They suspect the nurses became infected performing intubation or dialysis, neither of which are done for patients in Africa.
Everything, even advanced medical technology, comes with pros and cons, benefits AND costs.
Last I read, they are suspecting the nurse(s) got infected performing dialysis and intubation, neither of which are ever done for Ebola patients in Africa. There's a lot more possible exposure while doing stuff like that. And it may have been a simple unprotected neck or perhaps an error when taking the infection protection stuff off.
The lawyers have the same disincentive for getting the best price that a Realtor does.
As soon as a Realtor has _any_ reasonable offer for your $300,000 house, even if it is 30K less than what you want, the Realtor is looking at a decent 6% commission. S/he isn't too concerned with trying to get 6% of an additional $10-$30,000 AT THE RISK of losing 6% of the $270,000 already in hand. S/he'll honestly tell you it's a good deal because for her, it is a good deal.
For you, maybe not so much.
Mine too. I had to report two e-mails as spam this past month
But I haven't had to do that in years and my spam folder is chockfull and my inbox is easy to read.
The article writer obviously doesn't know how to handle email or how to click correctly on options apparently.
That's how social change starts.
The ones who want it to occur faster ignore the inertia of society.
imo, we (most folks) have accepted Global Warming/Human-Caused Climate Change fairly quickly. The ones who think we haven't done it quickly enough probably don't recognize their own input which delayed acceptance. We've kinda, sorta known about it since 1990 so that's a fairly quick change in attitude. And the ones who want it quicker want it to go on their time schedule. It's like a religion almost. If they were convinced (converted) in 1996, then _everybody_ who still doesn't believe is part of the problem. Yet they don't consider themselves being part of the problem in 1993.
I think acceptance of women as actual equals will occur fairly quickly in American technology. It takes awhile. The Bab was the first religious prophet to declare men and women are equal and need equal access to education. That didn't occur until 1844. We're moving ahead.
Another advantage for garbage trucks and other vehicles that stay in the same city or area, you don't have to set up a nationwide recharging or hydrogen network to get started. There are a lot of fleet vehicles in certain areas using all sorts of different energy sources.
I think the metric system is a big part of the problem for Americans.
Scientists use it. And the only other people who use the metric system are foreigners and terrorists, neither of whom can be trusted.
And some projects should not be done Agiley/
Management consultant Bob Lewis pointed out that Obamacare would not have been fixed by an agile development path (one of the myriad suggestions). In fact, it was a prime candidate for straight up waterfall methodology. The requirements were right there in The Affordable Care Act passed by Congress.
You mean like American Marines being unable to fire a weapon because the software upgrade didn't work?
Or the license expired?
Or the IT dept forgot to register the serial numbers?
Equal opportunity for the sexes rarely leads to equal outcome.
imo, the "problem" is that people who complain about the issue only look at a small subset of the problem.
If it is a social issue, then look at all of society, or at least see if you can find any counter-examples.
If you look at prisons, men are severely over-represented. If you look at _all_ the school classrooms, you quickly realize that both the top-end AP classes AND the bottom-end remedial classes are mostly male.
I think men as a group have a wider range of behaviors than women as a group (which makes sense if you just look at the sizes of the X and Y chromosomes).
What that means, if true, is that a completely gender-neutral society will probably still end up with 67% male and 33% females in any of the "outlier" skills which seems to include advanced mathematics and crime. i.e., men will tend to dominate in both the "smartest" and "dumbest" ends of the Bell curve.
If women don't participate in Wikipedia, Wikipedia cannot be said to be "encyclopedic"
So Encyclopedia Britannica is a "real" encyclopedia because it is edited by equal parts women and men (something I doubt is true).
I don't follow the "logic."
I suspect wikipedia isn't that attractive to normal men either. Perhaps someone needs to do an analysis on the differences between the average editor on wikipedia and the average male who uses the internet. The way the editing process works reminds me more of folks fighting each other in a first-person shooter game than it reminds me of folks trying to arrange information into a useful site.
When looking into video game consoles, I was stunned to realize that Xbox and PS3/4 are _not_ even close to being the most popular video game consoles in the world. The top three are all Chinese consoles you've never heard of. Population-wise, the US is to China as VietNam is to the US and I suspect the Chinese worry about Americans about as much as we Americans worry about the Vietnamese.
Our economic might blinds us to the realities of the actual world and that perhaps is the most dangerous flaw in American culture. Remember the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks (both civilizations), the Romans, the Ottomans? (There is a similar litany for homegrown emperors in China, also, but no one talks about it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Most people want to write software, or play the guitar, or build a house.
That is, until they see it requires years of learning and practice to do it well.
That's only half of the story.
Creative or energetic or curious people try lots of things and stick with what turns them on.
Most of the people who take up guitar or any other hobby whatsoever don't stick with it. So what?
Try it and stick with the one(s) that keep your interest over time.
For the OP, the posts on game design with cardboard and rules are accurate but if the kid ain't into them, then they are useless. I'd suggest it along with one of the game dev packages (Unity3d is my pref) and see what sticks. When my son was 11, he and a friend filled several notebooks with rules for an open world game they were going to write. It was far too big for them (but I didn't say that to them). The exercise was excellent, they loved doing it, and they're the ones who eventually figured out just how complicated it all is.
Now my son is in college and just released his first game on the iApp store. It's got a single mechanic, touch the screen or release it.
It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.
Yup. that applies to most of the comments.
Viruses mutate and flus occur regularly. Occasionally, one is deadly.
To get in front of evolution and have 50 million vaccines ready for distribution, you need to make educated guesses.
This year we guessed wrong. That's the gist of the article.
There appears to be an infinity of possible things that could happen evolutionarily.
But if you look merely at the number of stars in the entire universe, approximately 300 billion billion, that's essentially 10 to the 20th power. That means in order for life to be unique in the universe, all we need are 20 one out of ten possibilities in a row.
If the hack results in a jailbreak, I'm sure there will be a patch or a workaround on Cydia. I remember this happening with a SSL issue a few years ago.
Absolutely true. If the hack causes users to trash their old phone and buy a new one, well there's an incentive for the company to NOT fix the hack.
OTOH, if the hack causes jailbreaking and the carrier loses money, now we're talking about terrorists trying to destroy the entire capitalist system.
Incentives are very powerful.
Every carrier (this wasn't about the phone but the network) in India provides a back door to the Indian government.
Lucky for all of us in America that we have the Department of Homeland Security "protecting" our private data.
(That's called sarcasm for those of you who are poorly socialized.)
Never mix science with politics.
Don't worry. We never do. Scientists can't be trusted because they use the metric system just like foreigners do.
....Now about those Moon landings, would you need some falsifiable evidence there too?
Does a link to a Faux News web site count? ;-)
I'd really like to see a falsifiable rendering of "evolution". It would make discussion so much easier.
That must be the basic problem with physics too. The universe we live in is NOT falsifiable; therefore physics can never come up with a valid scientific theory that us internally consistent and also completely covers everything.
;-)
Is that the philosophy of science in a nutshell? Enquiring minds want to know
The average height of post-war (WWII) Japanese was 2 inches taller than the previous generation. and that was due merely to the better availability of food--an environmental factor--but probably not anything to do with evolution per se.
As stated in another post, if you kill off the shortest 1/3 of the population, the average height immediately goes up.
Similarly, if the small-footed lizards drop off the trees and can't find enough food, the average foot-size immediately increases in the population independent of evolution occurring. Evolution is 2-step process. The environmental advantage or disadvantage occurs during the individual lives of each member of the species. The passing of genes to the next generation is a separate process that still reshuffles the genes via sex relentlessly regardless of environment. That's what makes it hard to determine when evolution via genes is occurring vs purely environmental factors winnowing a current population. The new population of lizards still produces some amount of small-footed ones due to sexual mixing of genes--and if the environment changes to reward smaller feet, the population will again change quickly.
It may be good for the economy. It may not be so good for the people who can no longer support themselves because they just lost their minimum wage job to a robot. It may not be good for the people who then get mugged by said hungry person either.
Actually, if it's bad for the workers on the bottom, then it will be bad for the economy over the long run. /*Money never gets trapped at the bottom */
Economics is civilization's circulatory system and when money stops circulating because it gets trapped at the top, the economy stops working.
Quote from the FED: You can't push a string.
No matter how low you push interest rates, it ain't worth borrowing to build a factory if DEMAND--the key to all economics--does not exist or cannot exist because the bottom-most folks have no money. Using taxes to rebuild our roads, bridges and aging water treatment systems would kickstart demand again (by hiring mid-level and low-level construction workers throughout America) but the rich folks think it's "my" money when it's really "our" economy.
Ayn Rand wrote fiction. Reset her "heroes" in Somalia or The Congo or some place without a strong central government and you can quickly see the benefits of a government that provides roads, infrastructure, and enforces contracts.
I think the Texas hospital caused the infection _because_ we used First World thinking.
1. They did NOT spray the hazmat clothing down with bleach before taking it off--something they do in Africa
2. They suspect the nurses became infected performing intubation or dialysis, neither of which are done for patients in Africa.
Everything, even advanced medical technology, comes with pros and cons, benefits AND costs.
Last I read, they are suspecting the nurse(s) got infected performing dialysis and intubation, neither of which are ever done for Ebola patients in Africa. There's a lot more possible exposure while doing stuff like that. And it may have been a simple unprotected neck or perhaps an error when taking the infection protection stuff off.
The lawyers have the same disincentive for getting the best price that a Realtor does.
As soon as a Realtor has _any_ reasonable offer for your $300,000 house, even if it is 30K less than what you want, the Realtor is looking at a decent 6% commission. S/he isn't too concerned with trying to get 6% of an additional $10-$30,000 AT THE RISK of losing 6% of the $270,000 already in hand. S/he'll honestly tell you it's a good deal because for her, it is a good deal.
For you, maybe not so much.
Mine too. I had to report two e-mails as spam this past month
But I haven't had to do that in years and my spam folder is chockfull and my inbox is easy to read.
The article writer obviously doesn't know how to handle email or how to click correctly on options apparently.
That's how social change starts.
The ones who want it to occur faster ignore the inertia of society.
imo, we (most folks) have accepted Global Warming/Human-Caused Climate Change fairly quickly. The ones who think we haven't done it quickly enough probably don't recognize their own input which delayed acceptance. We've kinda, sorta known about it since 1990 so that's a fairly quick change in attitude. And the ones who want it quicker want it to go on their time schedule. It's like a religion almost. If they were convinced (converted) in 1996, then _everybody_ who still doesn't believe is part of the problem. Yet they don't consider themselves being part of the problem in 1993.
I think acceptance of women as actual equals will occur fairly quickly in American technology. It takes awhile. The Bab was the first religious prophet to declare men and women are equal and need equal access to education. That didn't occur until 1844. We're moving ahead.
Another advantage for garbage trucks and other vehicles that stay in the same city or area, you don't have to set up a nationwide recharging or hydrogen network to get started. There are a lot of fleet vehicles in certain areas using all sorts of different energy sources.
I think the metric system is a big part of the problem for Americans.
Scientists use it. And the only other people who use the metric system are foreigners and terrorists, neither of whom can be trusted.
And some projects should not be done Agiley/
Management consultant Bob Lewis pointed out that Obamacare would not have been fixed by an agile development path (one of the myriad suggestions). In fact, it was a prime candidate for straight up waterfall methodology. The requirements were right there in The Affordable Care Act passed by Congress.
correction: You hire the engineer who read Jules Verne as a child.
Undesirable side-effects?
You mean like American Marines being unable to fire a weapon because the software upgrade didn't work?
Or the license expired?
Or the IT dept forgot to register the serial numbers?
That could never happen.
Is being all male (assumption) a truth or completeness problem for Encyclopedia Britannica? Seems like we're conflating two different thangs.
Equal opportunity for the sexes rarely leads to equal outcome.
imo, the "problem" is that people who complain about the issue only look at a small subset of the problem.
If it is a social issue, then look at all of society, or at least see if you can find any counter-examples.
If you look at prisons, men are severely over-represented. If you look at _all_ the school classrooms, you quickly realize that both the top-end AP classes AND the bottom-end remedial classes are mostly male.
I think men as a group have a wider range of behaviors than women as a group (which makes sense if you just look at the sizes of the X and Y chromosomes).
What that means, if true, is that a completely gender-neutral society will probably still end up with 67% male and 33% females in any of the "outlier" skills which seems to include advanced mathematics and crime. i.e., men will tend to dominate in both the "smartest" and "dumbest" ends of the Bell curve.
If women don't participate in Wikipedia, Wikipedia cannot be said to be "encyclopedic"
So Encyclopedia Britannica is a "real" encyclopedia because it is edited by equal parts women and men (something I doubt is true).
I don't follow the "logic."
I suspect wikipedia isn't that attractive to normal men either. Perhaps someone needs to do an analysis on the differences between the average editor on wikipedia and the average male who uses the internet. The way the editing process works reminds me more of folks fighting each other in a first-person shooter game than it reminds me of folks trying to arrange information into a useful site.
When looking into video game consoles, I was stunned to realize that Xbox and PS3/4 are _not_ even close to being the most popular video game consoles in the world. The top three are all Chinese consoles you've never heard of. Population-wise, the US is to China as VietNam is to the US and I suspect the Chinese worry about Americans about as much as we Americans worry about the Vietnamese.
Our economic might blinds us to the realities of the actual world and that perhaps is the most dangerous flaw in American culture. Remember the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks (both civilizations), the Romans, the Ottomans? (There is a similar litany for homegrown emperors in China, also, but no one talks about it.)