I know that I will be in the minority here, but I don't agree.
I would much rather see programming taught as a language or linguistics course instead of as an offshoot of math. I'm an English major with a great dislike for math. I've taken no math courses beyond the required Algebra II to get through college...no calculus, no trig, and I would have failed them if I'd had to take them anyway. I've gone on to become the lead developer at 2 companies and worked my way to up to CTO of third. I've never felt as though math was intrinsically important to writing code. Creativity and problem solving skills yes...Math not so much.
I've always felt that it was more like learning a foreign language. First you learn the rules of the language, then you learn to speak it, and eventually you become fluent enough to tell stories as though you were a native speaker. That's how I view programming, much like writing a well layered story with background and subplots and ideally no loose ends.
I was out hiking and I couldn't get couldn't get a coding problem that I was having out of my head. When the solution finally came to me I was in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a patch of sand and a stick. I wrote out my code as clearly as possible and took a picture with my camera...this was pre-cell phone days, so I had to wait for the film to get developed before I could see my code.
Yes you are reading that wrong. What they are saying is that since you can end up with similar looking creatures that took different DNA routes to get there, it's only the results that matter and not the DNA framework.
If you can end up with the same body style with different DNA then if you rewind the clock and started over there would be no reason to believe that you would end up with the same creatures we have today.
"Always on" issue - gone Gold Membership to use streaming apps - gone Bundled Kinect - gone
Almost everything that people have complained about has been removed / improved / fixed. I know there is a long tradition of slamming Microsoft on Slashdot... almost a sport really, but come on. They are doing exactly what we've been asking them to do and everyone is still bitching about it. I for one commend them for listening to feedback and addressing the issues that we've known were there from the start.
I don't own an XBOX One, I'm a PC gamer, but I have to say I'm impressed to see a company that's willing admit their mistakes...I'm looking at you Nintendo...get your act together.
Having people categorize themselves on an objective technical skill such as math is at least slightly more reliable than having people self judge on such a subjective skill as writing.
Many people I went to college with were certain their one act plays could win awards and that their sonnets would outlive them. I certainly wouldn't trust many of them when it comes to something as nuanced as the American legal system.
A better breakdown of the populace would have been to separate out people based on the level of education achieved, or perhaps by specific college degree, or even split out people with legal backgrounds from the average layperson. This would remove all the "touchy, feely" issues his current survey has.
With that said, this Tennessee man may be a danger to society, and his actions really creep me out, but I don't believe that he broke the law as it is currently written.
For what it is worth, on his poll I would have fit this profile Writing skills > Math Skills
Since we are dealing with cartoons here this is already a ridiculous issue for the courts to deal with, but for the sake of argument lets look at this from the perspective of the Simpsons being real people.
These people were all technically born on April 19, 1987, on the Tracey Ullman Show, with the debut of their first sketch.
Since the age of real humans are figured from the date of their birth that would put even the youngest character at a minimum age of 21 years old. Well past the age of consent.
This alone should be grounds for appeal I would think. IANAL however, and the basis for this whole case seems a bit out there, so I have no idea what kind of legal position this gentleman is in at this point.
The company I work for owned a copy of 3D Studio Max that was a few years old. After a particularly bad virus hit our network we had to reinstall on a couple of machines and of course we ran into an issue with the ridiculous copy protection scheme they use.
Soooo we called into the company that handles our licenses and it turns out they stopped dealing with 3Dstudio Max licensing. After numerous calls to different entities within AutoCad and over a weeks worth of effort we did eventually get new codes.
Of course after the first day, and without telling the boss, we had found a crack and patched our copies of Max to work without the license. DRM would have put our company a week behind on a project.
The cracked versions are more reliable and portable so we've never bothered activating the codes we had to battle to get.
Many of the terrorists which have been part of the popular news media the last few years have had the eventual goal of creating a very structured and ordered society. While this may seem to fit the barest idea of what an engineer might approve of, it is a far stretch from matching the what I know of engineering types.
1. Engineers are just as interested in knowing how things work as they are in making sure they work orderly. This would lend itself to a desire for more openness in working systems. To easier be able to lift the hood and see what's going on. Most terrorists seem interested in extremely closed societies with no openness.
2. Terrorists main method of operation is to create fear and chaos in order to eventually gain control. Chaos is not an engineer's friend. While an engineer would be glad to have created order from chaos, he would not create disorder in an attempt to create a working system.
3. Engineering is generally a respected, fairly good paying career choice. What is the incentive to give up a promising future for a life of uncertainty and danger.
My Grandmother (89 years old) is quite net savy: email, instant messaging, and ebaying almost daily. The vast majority of the items that she sells on ebay however are for other people who live in her massive assisted living complex. Last year over $12,000 worth of goods went through my Grandma's ebay account. She only charges the people a dollar per posting (on top of the normal ebay posting charges). For her it's just a fun hobby, so her net income off of that amount was almost nothing. With this kind action by the IRS my Grandma would be held liable for the taxes on that $12,000, regardless of the fact that she didn't really make any kind of profit from it.
I'm sure that there are many people who sell an item here or there for a friend on their ebay account. There is no way for ebay to distinguish a personal sale from a 3rd party transaction, so for ebay to report this information to the IRS as profit could be wildly inaccurate.
There is one good reason to work on this type of medicine delivery device and that is the eyes. The interior of the eye has NO blood flow. Delivering medicine inside the eye has some very tricky problems.
1. It needs to be perfectly clear...and/or 2. After it is injected it then needs to be able to be completely absorbed through the interior of the eye so as to not leave any residue floating around. 3. You can't go injecting a large amount of fluid into an already full fluid sac. High pressure against the retina can tear the retina wall, and can rupture the incredibly fine veins that supply the retina with blood (causing large amounts of what are known as floaters). 4. How do you get the medicine to disperse evenly throughout the fluid in the eye. If it's heavy it sinks, equal to the eye fluid it generally stays where it is, or eventually sinks, or if it's lighter then the fluid in they eye it rises to the top. Perhaps severely shaking the patient after the injection would help...
Now if you had a colony of microbes which could be directed to different areas in the eye or simply ordered to disperse and deliver the drug when it comes into contact with "x" then you would have something.
Why Slashdot...why? Blizzards servers can barely handle a normal days worth of traffic. But to post an article covering expansion information here of all places...that's just cruel.
His opening and closing statement about "turning OS X into an open-source project" and the sudden ability it would have to "make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene" are not actually discussed anywhere in the article. Perhaps if he would have stayed on topic there would have been something to discuss...doubtful...but perhaps. The meat of the article is simply a rehash of former speculation he's had and deviates so far from the subject as to be worthless. Nothing to see here...please move along.
Here is a link to a CNN article showing how this inventor never intended that dead cats be used as fuel. Pure sensationalism from a tabloid journal...what a suprise.
While any new antimicrobial drug would be very welcome in this time of increase resistance and decreased antibiotic innovation, this research has just started the animal testing phase and as such there are no live trials yet. If furanones disable the ability of microbes to send signals to each other this could have a very detrimental effect on our health. Our bodies are partialy controled by the symbiotic relationship we have with certain benevolent bacteria that we carry around with us. The human intestinal microbiota plays an important role in maintaining human health by preventing colonization by pathogens and increased nutrient uptake by the body. While antibiotics are somewhat targeted toward a specific type of bacteria, furanones disrupt basic microbial communication. I'm not saying this wont work, just that without live testing this is way too early to be news.
Any hope of lessening global warming through plankton activity are about zero. As the oceans are warming the plankton are dying. It may have gone to far to rely on mother nature to help us turn this juggernaught around. And it's not just global warming that is killing the plankton but oceanic pollution as well (info at bottom of article). Creatures as well as humans have survived through many devistating climate/environmental changes, but these changes took place over hundreds and more often thousands of years. We are at a point where we are seeing major climate change within a single generation. I don't know what the answer to the problem is, and it will undoubtedly take more that one solution to fix this mess, but something had better be done soon or we (as a civilization) are in for a bad hangover.
One thing that does not seem to be taken into account is that, by the shear number of scientists out there doing research and making discoveries today compared to 100 or 1000 years ago creates its own kind of obscurity. No 1 person is likely to get the kind of attention that someone like Edison could. There are amazing discoveries being made all the time, beautiful works of art being created, but they are buried under an avalanch of mediocre work, or just outright crap. Sometimes you can't see the trees for the forest.
There is one more thing to take into account when looking at the adult and the size of the eggs laid, and that is the number of eggs laid at once. While an ostrich will lay up to 10 eggs each with an average size of 3.3 pounds whereas an alligator will lay about 45 eggs in one sitting each about the size of a golf ball. There is a dinosaur egg in the American Museum of Natural History in New York that's about the size of basketball. There is no idea what dinosaur it comes from or how many eggs it laid at one time though. Egg to adult size ratio has to take into account whether the adult will be taking care of the eggs during incubation which can be viewed as a way of increasing the survival average and thus fewer eggs need to be laid. Reptiles tend not to monitor the progress of their young and often lay a large # of eggs to increase the chances of the overall survival of the species. Although there are always exceptions to the rule some have seen potential evidence that the diplodocus, who were believed to be herd animals, did stay with the eggs until they hatched.
Mr. Zubrin states that, "As far as the mice are concerned, they would live in comfortable quarters and be brought safely back to Earth for study". This makes it sound all nice and animal friendly but in all likelyhood these mice will be poked, prodded, dissected and pureed soon after landing. I have no huge problem with using animals in testing like this instead of humans, but lets not pretend like these little "heroes for the human species" are going to live a life of luxury on their return home.
I find it disturbing that they claim the asbestos will not be a problem because it is sealed into the subway cars. They give no definition of method used for sealing and leave no estimates on the long term safety due to corrosion of the subway cars. this site points out that "Colonizing animals will live and feed in and on the cars; once the asbestos is exposed as metal degrades, the animals will be using asbestos as a substratum for habitat and food." This is something that should be looked into carefully. On a related topic the US Government planned to dump 165 twenty-foot containers of asbestos at a former munitions dump,which is 18 miles off the coast and 12,000 feet down. I don't know what the outcome of this finally was but this article has a number of specialist in the fields of oceanography and asbestos wieghing in on it with no clear consensus on the environmental risk that it poses.
Governor John Rowland should have told the legislature to add an adendum which stated that no one under the age of 18 would be allowed access to: point and shoot games, toy guns (including any action figures which come with toy guns...ie green army men), nerf guns, super soakers, paintball guns or most importantly real guns.
He could tell them that if they could pass the bill with those additions he would gladly sign it. A bill like that would last about 2 seconds before being thrown in the trash.
Well According to an article previously posted on slashdot Stimulating Bone Growth In Astronauts "A State University of New York at Stonybrook researcher has invented a machine
that stimulates bone growth in subjects by just having them stand on a vibrating platform." Since this device is shown to increase bone growth from the use of an external device emmiting a frequency within the 20-50Hz range, then wouldn't it be possible that a cat's purring, which is within the same frequency range, could have a similar effect on a person as that found by using this device?
This article leads me to wonder if they have considered studying people who are long time owners of cats to see if they have any significant increase in bone mass as compared to the average person. It would seem to me that if you were to regularly hold a cat while it was purring then you would be likely to recieve some of the benefits of the purring as well (at least in the region of your body that was in contact with the cat).
Slashdot Mirror
I know that I will be in the minority here, but I don't agree.
I would much rather see programming taught as a language or linguistics course instead of as an offshoot of math. I'm an English major with a great dislike for math. I've taken no math courses beyond the required Algebra II to get through college...no calculus, no trig, and I would have failed them if I'd had to take them anyway. I've gone on to become the lead developer at 2 companies and worked my way to up to CTO of third. I've never felt as though math was intrinsically important to writing code. Creativity and problem solving skills yes...Math not so much.
I've always felt that it was more like learning a foreign language. First you learn the rules of the language, then you learn to speak it, and eventually you become fluent enough to tell stories as though you were a native speaker. That's how I view programming, much like writing a well layered story with background and subplots and ideally no loose ends.
I was out hiking and I couldn't get couldn't get a coding problem that I was having out of my head. When the solution finally came to me I was in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a patch of sand and a stick. I wrote out my code as clearly as possible and took a picture with my camera...this was pre-cell phone days, so I had to wait for the film to get developed before I could see my code.
Yes you are reading that wrong. What they are saying is that since you can end up with similar looking creatures that took different DNA routes to get there, it's only the results that matter and not the DNA framework.
If you can end up with the same body style with different DNA then if you rewind the clock and started over there would be no reason to believe that you would end up with the same creatures we have today.
"Always on" issue - gone
Gold Membership to use streaming apps - gone
Bundled Kinect - gone
Almost everything that people have complained about has been removed / improved / fixed. I know there is a long tradition of slamming Microsoft on Slashdot ... almost a sport really, but come on. They are doing exactly what we've been asking them to do and everyone is still bitching about it. I for one commend them for listening to feedback and addressing the issues that we've known were there from the start.
I don't own an XBOX One, I'm a PC gamer, but I have to say I'm impressed to see a company that's willing admit their mistakes...I'm looking at you Nintendo...get your act together.
This site has done an amazing job of turning learning a language into a game...Duolingo
Having people categorize themselves on an objective technical skill such as math is at least slightly more reliable than having people self judge on such a subjective skill as writing.
Many people I went to college with were certain their one act plays could win awards and that their sonnets would outlive them. I certainly wouldn't trust many of them when it comes to something as nuanced as the American legal system.
A better breakdown of the populace would have been to separate out people based on the level of education achieved, or perhaps by specific college degree, or even split out people with legal backgrounds from the average layperson. This would remove all the "touchy, feely" issues his current survey has.
With that said, this Tennessee man may be a danger to society, and his actions really creep me out, but I don't believe that he broke the law as it is currently written.
For what it is worth, on his poll I would have fit this profile
Writing skills > Math Skills
Since we are dealing with cartoons here this is already a ridiculous issue for the courts to deal with, but for the sake of argument lets look at this from the perspective of the Simpsons being real people.
These people were all technically born on April 19, 1987, on the Tracey Ullman Show, with the debut of their first sketch.
Since the age of real humans are figured from the date of their birth that would put even the youngest character at a minimum age of 21 years old. Well past the age of consent.
This alone should be grounds for appeal I would think. IANAL however, and the basis for this whole case seems a bit out there, so I have no idea what kind of legal position this gentleman is in at this point.
The company I work for owned a copy of 3D Studio Max that was a few years old. After a particularly bad virus hit our network we had to reinstall on a couple of machines and of course we ran into an issue with the ridiculous copy protection scheme they use.
Soooo we called into the company that handles our licenses and it turns out they stopped dealing with 3Dstudio Max licensing. After numerous calls to different entities within AutoCad and over a weeks worth of effort we did eventually get new codes.
Of course after the first day, and without telling the boss, we had found a crack and patched our copies of Max to work without the license. DRM would have put our company a week behind on a project.
The cracked versions are more reliable and portable so we've never bothered activating the codes we had to battle to get.
Many of the terrorists which have been part of the popular news media the last few years have had the eventual goal of creating a very structured and ordered society. While this may seem to fit the barest idea of what an engineer might approve of, it is a far stretch from matching the what I know of engineering types.
1. Engineers are just as interested in knowing how things work as they are in making sure they work orderly. This would lend itself to a desire for more openness in working systems. To easier be able to lift the hood and see what's going on. Most terrorists seem interested in extremely closed societies with no openness.
2. Terrorists main method of operation is to create fear and chaos in order to eventually gain control. Chaos is not an engineer's friend. While an engineer would be glad to have created order from chaos, he would not create disorder in an attempt to create a working system.
3. Engineering is generally a respected, fairly good paying career choice. What is the incentive to give up a promising future for a life of uncertainty and danger.
I just don't see it.
My Grandmother (89 years old) is quite net savy: email, instant messaging, and ebaying almost daily. The vast majority of the items that she sells on ebay however are for other people who live in her massive assisted living complex. Last year over $12,000 worth of goods went through my Grandma's ebay account. She only charges the people a dollar per posting (on top of the normal ebay posting charges). For her it's just a fun hobby, so her net income off of that amount was almost nothing. With this kind action by the IRS my Grandma would be held liable for the taxes on that $12,000, regardless of the fact that she didn't really make any kind of profit from it.
I'm sure that there are many people who sell an item here or there for a friend on their ebay account. There is no way for ebay to distinguish a personal sale from a 3rd party transaction, so for ebay to report this information to the IRS as profit could be wildly inaccurate.
There is one good reason to work on this type of medicine delivery device and that is the eyes. The interior of the eye has NO blood flow. Delivering medicine inside the eye has some very tricky problems.
1. It needs to be perfectly clear...and/or
2. After it is injected it then needs to be able to be completely absorbed through the interior of the eye so as to not leave any residue floating around.
3. You can't go injecting a large amount of fluid into an already full fluid sac. High pressure against the retina can tear the retina wall, and can rupture the incredibly fine veins that supply the retina with blood (causing large amounts of what are known as floaters).
4. How do you get the medicine to disperse evenly throughout the fluid in the eye. If it's heavy it sinks, equal to the eye fluid it generally stays where it is, or eventually sinks, or if it's lighter then the fluid in they eye it rises to the top. Perhaps severely shaking the patient after the injection would help...
Now if you had a colony of microbes which could be directed to different areas in the eye or simply ordered to disperse and deliver the drug when it comes into contact with "x" then you would have something.
Why Slashdot...why? Blizzards servers can barely handle a normal days worth of traffic. But to post an article covering expansion information here of all places...that's just cruel.
His opening and closing statement about "turning OS X into an open-source project" and the sudden ability it would have to "make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene" are not actually discussed anywhere in the article. Perhaps if he would have stayed on topic there would have been something to discuss...doubtful...but perhaps. The meat of the article is simply a rehash of former speculation he's had and deviates so far from the subject as to be worthless. Nothing to see here...please move along.
Here is a link to a CNN article showing how this inventor never intended that dead cats be used as fuel. Pure sensationalism from a tabloid journal...what a suprise.
While any new antimicrobial drug would be very welcome in this time of increase resistance and decreased antibiotic innovation, this research has just started the animal testing phase and as such there are no live trials yet. If furanones disable the ability of microbes to send signals to each other this could have a very detrimental effect on our health. Our bodies are partialy controled by the symbiotic relationship we have with certain benevolent bacteria that we carry around with us. The human intestinal microbiota plays an important role in maintaining human health by preventing colonization by pathogens and increased nutrient uptake by the body. While antibiotics are somewhat targeted toward a specific type of bacteria, furanones disrupt basic microbial communication. I'm not saying this wont work, just that without live testing this is way too early to be news.
Any hope of lessening global warming through plankton activity are about zero. As the oceans are warming the plankton are dying. It may have gone to far to rely on mother nature to help us turn this juggernaught around. And it's not just global warming that is killing the plankton but oceanic pollution as well (info at bottom of article).
Creatures as well as humans have survived through many devistating climate/environmental changes, but these changes took place over hundreds and more often thousands of years. We are at a point where we are seeing major climate change within a single generation. I don't know what the answer to the problem is, and it will undoubtedly take more that one solution to fix this mess, but something had better be done soon or we (as a civilization) are in for a bad hangover.
One thing that does not seem to be taken into account is that, by the shear number of scientists out there doing research and making discoveries today compared to 100 or 1000 years ago creates its own kind of obscurity. No 1 person is likely to get the kind of attention that someone like Edison could. There are amazing discoveries being made all the time, beautiful works of art being created, but they are buried under an avalanch of mediocre work, or just outright crap. Sometimes you can't see the trees for the forest.
There is one more thing to take into account when looking at the adult and the size of the eggs laid, and that is the number of eggs laid at once. While an ostrich will lay up to 10 eggs each with an average size of 3.3 pounds whereas an alligator will lay about 45 eggs in one sitting each about the size of a golf ball. There is a dinosaur egg in the American Museum of Natural History in New York that's about the size of basketball. There is no idea what dinosaur it comes from or how many eggs it laid at one time though. Egg to adult size ratio has to take into account whether the adult will be taking care of the eggs during incubation which can be viewed as a way of increasing the survival average and thus fewer eggs need to be laid. Reptiles tend not to monitor the progress of their young and often lay a large # of eggs to increase the chances of the overall survival of the species. Although there are always exceptions to the rule some have seen potential evidence that the diplodocus, who were believed to be herd animals, did stay with the eggs until they hatched.
Mr. Zubrin states that, "As far as the mice are concerned, they would live in comfortable quarters and be brought safely back to Earth for study". This makes it sound all nice and animal friendly but in all likelyhood these mice will be poked, prodded, dissected and pureed soon after landing. I have no huge problem with using animals in testing like this instead of humans, but lets not pretend like these little "heroes for the human species" are going to live a life of luxury on their return home.
I find it disturbing that they claim the asbestos will not be a problem because it is sealed into the subway cars. They give no definition of method used for sealing and leave no estimates on the long term safety due to corrosion of the subway cars. this site points out that "Colonizing animals will live and feed in and on the cars; once the asbestos is exposed as metal degrades, the animals will be using asbestos as a substratum for habitat and food." This is something that should be looked into carefully. On a related topic the US Government planned to dump 165 twenty-foot containers of asbestos at a former munitions dump ,which is 18 miles off the coast and 12,000 feet down. I don't know what the outcome of this finally was but this article has a number of specialist in the fields of oceanography and asbestos wieghing in on it with no clear consensus on the environmental risk that it poses.
Governor John Rowland should have told the legislature to add an adendum which stated that no one under the age of 18 would be allowed access to: point and shoot games, toy guns (including any action figures which come with toy guns...ie green army men), nerf guns, super soakers, paintball guns or most importantly real guns. He could tell them that if they could pass the bill with those additions he would gladly sign it. A bill like that would last about 2 seconds before being thrown in the trash.
Well According to an article previously posted on slashdot Stimulating Bone Growth In Astronauts "A State University of New York at Stonybrook researcher has invented a machine that stimulates bone growth in subjects by just having them stand on a vibrating platform." Since this device is shown to increase bone growth from the use of an external device emmiting a frequency within the 20-50Hz range, then wouldn't it be possible that a cat's purring, which is within the same frequency range, could have a similar effect on a person as that found by using this device?
This article leads me to wonder if they have considered studying people who are long time owners of cats to see if they have any significant increase in bone mass as compared to the average person. It would seem to me that if you were to regularly hold a cat while it was purring then you would be likely to recieve some of the benefits of the purring as well (at least in the region of your body that was in contact with the cat).