The exceptions and formality of Java are supposed to aid development by making sure you've crossed all your t's and dotted your i's when it comes to error handling and type checking. (emphasis mine)
You carefully qualified your statement so I won't lay into you;-) That is indeed the "strong, static type checking" party line.
An increasing number of smart people are starting to ask questions about that party line though. They'll try out a dynamic language like Python, and the disaster promised by the static typing advocates conspicuously fails to materialize. For two examples of this, see Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages? and Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing. A lot of other people are leaning this way too in newsgroups and on personal weblogs, and of course a lot of people still believe the party line.
Personally, I'm suspicious of "received wisdom" that's much older then 10 or 20 years, as the static typing claims are; the world has changed a lot since then in a lot of ways, not least of which is our improved understanding of how to build things (i.e., even in non-technological ways).
I know other people have said it, but let me give more concrete examples.
Keys can be associated with every field on the screen. The convention is to mark those keys with an underscore (prefacing the desired key with '&' in the label definition on most GUI systems), and CTRL-thatkey will jump to that box.
Reasonable default values are another key to console-app speed, and there's absolutely no reason why they can't show up in GUI apps either. In fact it's almost exactly the same amount of work.
The GUI has other advantages over console use as well, because of the wider array of widgets you can use. A notebook tab interface is easy to write in a GUI, but I doubt many console libraries make it quite as easy. (There may be isolated counterexamples.) Tab navigation is usually as easy as a keypress, CTRL-PgUp (mozilla) or CTRL-Tab (wxWindows tab control, some exceptions in wxGTK if certain widgets are included in a tab that might eat the CTRL-Tab) for instance. The ability to embed things into the GUI display might be useful.
I'd suggest going GUI and just being very methodical about making shortcuts for everything (and showing them on the screen).
Failing that, if you have time to learn it I'd suggest building the app in Emacs, or at least looking at it, along with the Lynx+web suggestions I've seen.
I agree with you, too. A better balance needs to be struck, between the extremes of 'everything is locked up for 150 years' and 'screw the companies, I can do whatever I want if I think I deserve it'.
I don't have room on my TiVo for every episode and since they announced the DVD I'll probably get that when it comes out, cursing Fox loudly while I do.
But I still have one episode on my TiVo which I have not seen yet. I just watched "Serenity" three days ago (the two hour "pilot episode" which Fox saw fit to air in the middle of the season, for those who didn't watch the show; just one more way they screwed it over). I just can't stand the thought of watching "the last episode"... if it wasn't for the DVD announcement and the unaired episodes it's supposed to have those episodes would probably still be on my TiVo and goodness knows when I'd watch them...
(I wonder if the writers ever cruise the net or anything, seeing stuff like this and getting a kick out of it.)
So why is it that I, a non-trekie, loves Enterprise yet the faithful despise it? The characters are well-developed, the acting is impressive and the story lines are not nearly as predicatable as TNG.
My answer is that none of the bold stuff is true, in fact it's actively false. In particular I watched a couple of episodes and literally said what will happen in five minutes. Example: In the episode where Hoshi has the transporter accident and dreams she's going out of phase, I had it figured out at the halfway point. (Rule of thumb: If the transporter can conceivably be involved, it is. Even more true on Enterprise where the transporter generally can't be involved.)
The acting is OK, I admit, but they don't have much to work with.
One of the reasons I liked Firefly is that it really was unpredictable. I'm pretty sure that Mal was going to off Jain in one episode or another, although Jain might have finally reformed if he ever figured that out... see what I mean? I don't know whether that character was going to survive into the next episode unless Fox showed him in next week's previews. In the scene where Mal has him hanging out the bay door I really thought that was it for him. You couldn't assume that anybody was going to survive.
Whereas in Star Trek, that's one thing you can always count on, and after 200+ episodes of the heros always surviving (unless their death is announced in advance in the episode preview; the only possible exception was Tasha Yar. I was young but I seem to recall you could figure it out from the preview then... anyone who wasn't 8 at the time care to comment on that?), you can actually use it as an axiom to help you resolve the plot. Pre-diddly-ictable to the max. And you know the reset button will be pushed, i.e., nothing will have effectively changed, even when it should have. Characters on Enterprise routinely forget important things from last week.
I loved Star Trek. Still love the old stuff. But post Berman/Braga has become painful and insulting. I've tried to deny it but it finally forced itself through.
The good news is that it prompted me to look around and see what else was on, and there's some good stuff out there. Stargate: SG-1 is a load of fun (The "Wormhole eXtreme!" episode kicked ass, my favorite was when it started poking holes in both Star Trek and even itself), and the aforementioned (and sadly demised) Firefly had a lot of promise. Take a look around. Of course nobody says you have to hate Enterprise, but it's average at best, and garbage at worst. (Depends on your personal rating system.)
(Note on the last one, I purchased that once for $2 just for Beamrider, which remains a truly awesome game.)
Of course it need not be a "threat to civilization", it need only harm a bottom line, and the argument can be made that it indeed may. (Note a lot of old stuff is coming out for the Gameboy Advance, for instance; I purchased the Phantasy Star Collection recently, and I am pleased. What I'd really like is the Bard's Tale on the GBA, though. If it weren't for the infernal need to make money that would be a cool development project to undertake.
DO NOT USE THIS FOR BACKUPS. Technical details on the format are missing but the only place I can think of for them to stick this extra data is in the space normally reserved for the extensive error-correction codes used on normal CD-ROMS.
All CD-ROMS have far more 'data' on them then you can get off with a CD ripper. CDs have a lot of error correcting codes on them because they are exposed to the real world (unlike a hard drive platter) and need to recover reasonably gracefully from large scratches and such.
The last thing you want for your backups is to push the medium past its rated capacity, in this case dropping the error correcting codes! If you cared enough to back it up in the first place, you don't want to lose this extra protection. Without it, the smallest scratch might wipe out huge chunks of data in nearly-impossible to reconstruct ways.
It is possible that they are getting some benefit by burning the bits closer together on the medium, but again, the last thing you want with a backup is to push a medium beyond its rated capacity. In months or ever weeks the bits might start bleeding together because the medium was never rated for that density.
God help your backups if they're doing this with a little bit of both.
Good to try to burn a little longer movie onto, where capacity is a higher priority then reliability. Horrible, horrible idea for backups.
I've always wondered if they can get a password from you involuntarily by just hooking you up to a lie detector and asking questions like, "is the first letter a vowel? Is it 'A'? Is it 'E'? Is the second letter a number?... etc.
Only if you believe in the polygraph's ability to tell truth. Polygraphs are garbage; see for yourself. Their primary use is to scare people who don't know better into confessing something they otherwise wouldn't.
This is the best you can get from Slashdot. As usual, for a real answer, you're going to need to consult a lawyer. I especially note that slander/libel is done on the state level according to findlaw, so since you don't give your state of residence, and because few if any posters are likely to understand the details of interstate legal interactions for things like this (including me!), it's probably impossible for even a lawyer who happens to be cruising Slashdot giving out free advice (also known as "casting pearls before swine") to give you a solid answer.
Protecting the national museums wouldn't have required any where near as much effort.
Incorrect. At the time the heist(s) took place, the museum was in an area still controlled by the Saddam regime. "Protecting" the museum would have meant accelerating an already-fast push into Baghdad, which would have cost lives on both sides.
And it probably wouldn't have mattered at all, since an accelerated push would have caused the people who did the heist to do it that much sooner.
Protecting the national museums was almost impossible without cooperation from the reigning government, and that's who did the heist in the first place.
Why the statement that disagreement over national policy is the product of a diseased mind?
No. Opposition to the war is fine. Demanding that people protect artifacts instead of people is what is sick. The rest of your post is completely unfounded, because you overextended. I'm not squelching dissent, I'm expressing disgust at priorities that put people below artifacts.
When you take enough cracks at something, and you fail miserably every time, it becomes time to question the value of what you are advocating.
I don't care what the Chinese or the Soviet Union "really" were, not to mention all the other communist states over time. Everybody claiming to be communist and creating a state has created a horror, many of which did decay into fascist states in short order. The logical conclusion is that communism leads directly to fascism, because the whole philosophy is so very wrong in almost every conceivable way that it's impossible to even implement partially correctly! Communism is built from step one on a fallacious model of a human being; to understand how fallacious compare it to Adam Smith's model, and compare how successful the predictions were. The reason nobody's ever build a "true communist state" is that such a thing isn't possible with our species, and this isn't an idle philosophical debate, either, because when it fails, it kills. Millions.
To think that communism will work, ever, if we just "try harder" is to be blinded as I was talking about. Communism sounds great but history shows, over and over and over again, how well it works. It requires extreme denial to believe that it will ever work, denial of the kind that requires shutting off your intelligence to believe.
To advocate communism at this point in history is madness. Communism-as-theory leads directly to what you call "communism-as-rhetoric", without fail, over and over again. It boggles the mind that people still want it.
(Extreme capitalism has its own problems too; as I mentioned in my post I wouldn't mind participating in an anti-corporate-power demonstration. But it pales to the evil of any given communist regime in the history of man.)
I'd say that millenia-old artifacts which are our only link to the beginnings of civilization are a little more important than you make them out to be.
You are aware that by saying that, you are claiming that they are more important then the lives saved by both the troops not guarding the museum but doing something more important, and by the oil revenues that will be the salvation of the millions who live in that country?
It's just plain selfish to demand that people give their welfare, food, or even lives for artifacts that you think are important, and I have no respect for people like you, who demand sacrifice (for baubles no less!) from others while you live in comfort, far, far away from the conflict.
Oh, and let's not let the facts about who actually did it, when they did it, and the unlikelihood that anything could have stopped it get in the way. Ironic that the theft of artifacts is the only thing the left is willing to criticize Saddam's administration about, and they still lay the blame on the US, instead of the people who actually did the looting.
In conclusion, you and your misplaced priorities disgust me. People rate over museum collections anyday and it takes a diseased mind to miss that.
Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.
That's more true now than it has been for most of our history. On some level that's always true, but I doubt keeping Saddam in power was truly the will of the Iraqi people.
A lot of factors, not least of which is governmental power being vested in a few or even one person, bend the decisions the "society" would make if it was in some hypothetical "pure" state. (I personally interpret Arrow's Theorum to imply that there is no such thing as one clear "voice of the society" no matter how you slice it. YMMV, but it's not an unreasonable corrolary.)
But even now it's not completely true. The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.
The aggregations of decisions we make as individuals has an impact, but in the final analysis if Jack T. Ass, owner of a large logging interest, decides to clear cut a county in Montana and does it before the law (i.e., "the rest of us") even notices, then the environmental damage has occurred, regardless of how the rest of the individuals feel about it.
Herein lies the primary problem with "educational games"... if you set out in advance to make an educational game, you are almost certainly doomed to produce crap. The counterexamples can be named on one hand, and those aren't all the great either... what did you really learn from Oregon trail?
IMHO the problem is that games are useless for real facts, as your review demonstrates. You just can't create a viable structure where you can just plug in your multiple choice questions and have a fun game. The closest we've ever seen is probably the Carmen Sandiego series, and again, you're learning geographical or historical (or several other spinoffs) trivia, not useful information.
Games are strong in the fuzzy areas, like logic, resource allocation, game-theory type situations (which include many real-world situations including business negotiation, so it's not empty knowlege), and simulations (how many people here already knew how to drive long before setting your butt in front of the driver's wheel, courtesy of video games? I basically did...). All those things conventional education totally sucks at.
So what do those oh-so-bright educators do? Try to take the only feasible way to actually teach those skills, and jam a multiple-choice problem delivery system into it.
God, educational theorists are stupid. What do we pay them for again?
The idea is to make them so cheap that you don't care that you loose a couple; taking them all out over any significant area would require a nuke (literally). (Or a nuke-powered EMP device. EMP is cool and it works but it eats energy like nobody's business.)
Small things are inherently limited in capability, yes, which is one of the reasons the gray-goo fears are unfounded; nanomachines are only invincible ravenous beasts in science-fiction. In reality it would probably be little more then an annoyance, and gray-goo-type nanomachines would be easily destroyed with the simple application of heat, radiation, or nearly anything else. These helicopters will be able to take a far wider range of environmental conditions then microscopic-scale machines, and we still think of the helicopters as fragile...
If you're willing to have an open mind, I'd check out stuff likethis.
Most estimates I've seen have the space program paying for itself in the long-run, you just don't see it because the money doesn't show up as income on NASA's budget sheets.
The apathy of the American population is growing, not shrinking. Attempting to motivate them to protest anything at all is an exercise in futility.
I disagree, the problem is not apathy but how out of touch the wanna-be protest organizers are with America.
Of course anti-war protesters, many of whom cut their teeth in the 60's, couldn't mobilize America as well as they would have liked. Most of America saw right through their outrageous lies and bombastic rhetoric. (Hint: No matter how many times you saw it, you will not be convincing the public that Bush is a Nazi. Just ain't gonna happen.) The wanna-be protesters were so out of touch with reality that even many genuinely anti-war people wouldn't be caught dead at one of their abortive rallies; just because you're anti-war doesn't mean you want to be seen protesting next to the communist* party, white supremecists, or anti-Semites. (I wish I was exaggerating, but those groups made up a large portion, if not the majority, of the protesters you saw, and they were responsible for organizing nearly %100 of them. This is documented, so if you disagree with me, go look it up, read the facts, and change your mind.)
On the other hand, convincing people of something legitimate, such as over-powerful corporations, might not be so difficult if you can concentrate correctly on just that issue and resist letting the toxic leftists participate, and promptly hijacking the platform and turning it into just more leftist noise to the people of America. ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is very untrue; start thinking that way and your enemy's enemy will do more damage to you then whom you are technically against.)
It's also worth pointing out that protests should be seen solely as a vehicle for getting onto the news and communicating with the people, to make your issue an issue in the next election. By and large, protests are a weak forum to actually get anything done, they're much more useful as agenda-setters. (For instance, while protests may have given dark-skinned people official civil rights equality, look how many protests it took. Each protest did not accomplish much, for protests to effect direct action it takes a lot of them... and it did take a lot of them, big ones at that.)
And you must always be willing to face the possibility that no, the people aren't on your side and they just plain disagree with you, not because of apathy or any other frankly insulting ideas like that. This is another thing that wanna-be protesters seem to have a problem with.
Frankly, until the 60's-era wanna-be protesters are bumped out of the position of organizing these things, and some more realistic folks start organizing on some more tightly focused issues, the protest movement will remain dead. I wouldn't mind participating in an anti-corporate power movement, but if you want my help it's going to have to be focussed. I won't demonstrate next to Communists, anti-Semites, or white supremecists, and I won't demonstrate on a flat anti-corporation platform either; corporations aren't inherently evil, it's their protection on equals as people and their excessive power that's bad, not the idea of people grouping together and trying to make money.
*: By the way, if you've made it this far into the twenty-first century and unless you've been totally blinded by their rhetoric, you should realize that communists belong right next to the anti-Semites and white supremecists on the evil scale. At the beginning of the 20th century one could be an honest communist without being evil, but advocating a political system with a cumulative death toll in the hundreds of millions is just evil now. Whatever accusations those people might be legitimately able to lay at the feet of capitalism absolutely pale in comparision to what their political philosophy is directly and undeniably responsible for. If they were halfway honest people they'd be protesting against Communism themselves. If the US government directly killed as many of its own citizens as Communism has, the US would be dangerously close to completely unpopulated...
While there are some cute tricks you can do with a regexp-based engine on the user's side, cute tricks do not a viable technology make. Along with the obvious computational issues, and the difficulty (though perhaps not impossibility) of a creating a caching scheme, I think there's the problem that most use cases where someone might really want to use your search engine, there are more promising ways to approach the problem other then regexps.
The two ones that come to mind are word stemming approaches and things trying to take advantage of processing that's closer to (though of course not necessarily reaching) natural language processing. Both of those improvements are really useful, and are at least possible to implement, though not easy.
Word stemming approaches eliminate the whole class of "I want every form of kill: kill(|ed|er|ing)" queries; plus you don't want a human to have to enumerate that.
Phrase alternations is already handle by existing syntax: "All your (base OR chili) is belong to (us OR them)." You don't need regexp for that.
Most of the rest of the examples of where a regexp might be useful are almost certainly toys, that sound like a cool hack but won't actually be useful.
Note that a counterexample requires not yet another probably-silly hack, but a plausible usecase where you have an example of something you were really searching for, that a regexp engine might have been able to solve, and that there was no good way of finding currently. In my experience the only searches that I can't do are the ones for things where there isn't a search term I can use that will unique identify what I'm looking for out of a sea of pages related to that term, but not what I'm looking for. One example I recall was looking for how poisonous a philodendren is to a cat; if the info is out there, it's swamped by pages saying simply that it is poisonous, with no indication of how much.
That's an example where a hypothetical search engine with better NLP might have helped me, where I could have asked it for only a page that included "how much" information about the poison level, and not its mere existance.
On the one hand, I'd take this with a grain of salt as I'm just a random Internet yahoo, and you'll always find someone who says "X won't work." You can't let that be a stopper. On the other hand, you might want to mull this over and be sure you are not being overoptimistic about the usefullness of this before committing much resources to it. In particular, I recommend scrutinizing your own usage of real search engines over the next few weeks, and ideally the usage of others, and make sure that you're sure your approach can beat Google in at least some useful domain. Overoptimistic assessments of one's own program is a very real danger of being a programmer and it has scuttled more then one project.
Re:Negligence Or Delusion
on
The Virus Did It
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· Score: 2, Insightful
First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected.
Someday, we may be able to claim this. But I'm really uncomfortable claiming it today.
A couple of computers got hacked. One of them was with a vulnerability that I hadn't even heard of yet in samba; I got my Debian announcement later that day.
Right now, even the most updated computer is just too full of vulnerabilities to make a valid case that it should be possible to maintain a computer that has no vulnerabilities at all. That line of reasoning is too dangerous, and will make felons of us all.
Not that it's a bad idea in theory, but the times aren't ready for it.
My problem is I want empirical evidence that what I'm going to switch to is an actual improvement. If I'm going to invest tens of hours becoming proficient in something wierd, I want scientific evidence that it prevents carpal tunnel syndrome. At least modern keyboards are a known hazard with known ways of dealing with them.
The problem with all of these devices, not to mention even the simple solutions like "re-arrange to Dvorak", is that all of the claimed gains on carpal tunnel syndrome vs. a normal keyboard is perfectly explainable via simple placebo psychology. That doesn't mean that some of them aren't valid improvements; it also doesn't mean that some of the solutions aren't actually even worse! What it does mean is that some real science really needs to be done to figure out which is the easiest on our bodies compared to the maximum input speed possible.
Until I see at least preliminary real research it's going to be hard to justify switching, especially given the priciness of these things (since they can't be mass-produced).
Pointers to real research (not anecdotal!) welcome; I readily admit I haven't spent much time looking, since right now it's simply not an issue due to the obvious monetary issues.
I don't care if he's Hitler, his criticisms seem valid to me. I didn't browse around much more of the site, proto-sci-fi Universes don't interest me, they're a dime a dozen. I've got one myself. Until they make it to a final product I've got better things to do.
I'd have a hard time calling Alias sci-fi. The only sci-fi aspects (rather then fairly realistic and current science) are the Rambaldi storylines, and given what we've seen so far, I'm more inclined to call that fantasy then sci-fi.
It's a hard call because that storyline is so small and not-well exposited (to keep it mysterious) that you can't get a "feel" for it. I call it fantasy because right now the artifacts are basically working like magic, returning life to long-dead things and so on.
I admit that my current #1 theory to explain Rambaldi is that he is indeed a space alien who couldn't or wouldn't go home, but that's my theory, not official show theory.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The exceptions and formality of Java are supposed to aid development by making sure you've crossed all your t's and dotted your i's when it comes to error handling and type checking. (emphasis mine)
;-) That is indeed the "strong, static type checking" party line.
You carefully qualified your statement so I won't lay into you
An increasing number of smart people are starting to ask questions about that party line though. They'll try out a dynamic language like Python, and the disaster promised by the static typing advocates conspicuously fails to materialize. For two examples of this, see Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages? and Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing. A lot of other people are leaning this way too in newsgroups and on personal weblogs, and of course a lot of people still believe the party line.
Personally, I'm suspicious of "received wisdom" that's much older then 10 or 20 years, as the static typing claims are; the world has changed a lot since then in a lot of ways, not least of which is our improved understanding of how to build things (i.e., even in non-technological ways).
Perhaps they can settle for sixteen million dollars' worth of email addresses and bulk email solutions.
He specifically said that they don't like to post the bad reviews.
So I have to ask, what's the point? Frankly, the negative ones are far more useful.
I know other people have said it, but let me give more concrete examples.
Keys can be associated with every field on the screen. The convention is to mark those keys with an underscore (prefacing the desired key with '&' in the label definition on most GUI systems), and CTRL-thatkey will jump to that box.
Reasonable default values are another key to console-app speed, and there's absolutely no reason why they can't show up in GUI apps either. In fact it's almost exactly the same amount of work.
The GUI has other advantages over console use as well, because of the wider array of widgets you can use. A notebook tab interface is easy to write in a GUI, but I doubt many console libraries make it quite as easy. (There may be isolated counterexamples.) Tab navigation is usually as easy as a keypress, CTRL-PgUp (mozilla) or CTRL-Tab (wxWindows tab control, some exceptions in wxGTK if certain widgets are included in a tab that might eat the CTRL-Tab) for instance. The ability to embed things into the GUI display might be useful.
I'd suggest going GUI and just being very methodical about making shortcuts for everything (and showing them on the screen).
Failing that, if you have time to learn it I'd suggest building the app in Emacs, or at least looking at it, along with the Lynx+web suggestions I've seen.
I agree with you, too. A better balance needs to be struck, between the extremes of 'everything is locked up for 150 years' and 'screw the companies, I can do whatever I want if I think I deserve it'.
Firefly kicked ass. I have every episode :)
I don't have room on my TiVo for every episode and since they announced the DVD I'll probably get that when it comes out, cursing Fox loudly while I do.
But I still have one episode on my TiVo which I have not seen yet. I just watched "Serenity" three days ago (the two hour "pilot episode" which Fox saw fit to air in the middle of the season, for those who didn't watch the show; just one more way they screwed it over). I just can't stand the thought of watching "the last episode"... if it wasn't for the DVD announcement and the unaired episodes it's supposed to have those episodes would probably still be on my TiVo and goodness knows when I'd watch them...
(I wonder if the writers ever cruise the net or anything, seeing stuff like this and getting a kick out of it.)
So why is it that I, a non-trekie, loves Enterprise yet the faithful despise it? The characters are well-developed, the acting is impressive and the story lines are not nearly as predicatable as TNG.
My answer is that none of the bold stuff is true, in fact it's actively false. In particular I watched a couple of episodes and literally said what will happen in five minutes. Example: In the episode where Hoshi has the transporter accident and dreams she's going out of phase, I had it figured out at the halfway point. (Rule of thumb: If the transporter can conceivably be involved, it is. Even more true on Enterprise where the transporter generally can't be involved.)
The acting is OK, I admit, but they don't have much to work with.
One of the reasons I liked Firefly is that it really was unpredictable. I'm pretty sure that Mal was going to off Jain in one episode or another, although Jain might have finally reformed if he ever figured that out... see what I mean? I don't know whether that character was going to survive into the next episode unless Fox showed him in next week's previews. In the scene where Mal has him hanging out the bay door I really thought that was it for him. You couldn't assume that anybody was going to survive.
Whereas in Star Trek, that's one thing you can always count on, and after 200+ episodes of the heros always surviving (unless their death is announced in advance in the episode preview; the only possible exception was Tasha Yar. I was young but I seem to recall you could figure it out from the preview then... anyone who wasn't 8 at the time care to comment on that?), you can actually use it as an axiom to help you resolve the plot. Pre-diddly-ictable to the max. And you know the reset button will be pushed, i.e., nothing will have effectively changed, even when it should have. Characters on Enterprise routinely forget important things from last week.
I loved Star Trek. Still love the old stuff. But post Berman/Braga has become painful and insulting. I've tried to deny it but it finally forced itself through.
The good news is that it prompted me to look around and see what else was on, and there's some good stuff out there. Stargate: SG-1 is a load of fun (The "Wormhole eXtreme!" episode kicked ass, my favorite was when it started poking holes in both Star Trek and even itself), and the aforementioned (and sadly demised) Firefly had a lot of promise. Take a look around. Of course nobody says you have to hate Enterprise, but it's average at best, and garbage at worst. (Depends on your personal rating system.)
I used to buy this argument, but I don't anymore.
(Note on the last one, I purchased that once for $2 just for Beamrider, which remains a truly awesome game.)
Of course it need not be a "threat to civilization", it need only harm a bottom line, and the argument can be made that it indeed may. (Note a lot of old stuff is coming out for the Gameboy Advance, for instance; I purchased the Phantasy Star Collection recently, and I am pleased. What I'd really like is the Bard's Tale on the GBA, though. If it weren't for the infernal need to make money that would be a cool development project to undertake.
This is will be great for backups...
DO NOT USE THIS FOR BACKUPS. Technical details on the format are missing but the only place I can think of for them to stick this extra data is in the space normally reserved for the extensive error-correction codes used on normal CD-ROMS.
All CD-ROMS have far more 'data' on them then you can get off with a CD ripper. CDs have a lot of error correcting codes on them because they are exposed to the real world (unlike a hard drive platter) and need to recover reasonably gracefully from large scratches and such.
The last thing you want for your backups is to push the medium past its rated capacity, in this case dropping the error correcting codes! If you cared enough to back it up in the first place, you don't want to lose this extra protection. Without it, the smallest scratch might wipe out huge chunks of data in nearly-impossible to reconstruct ways.
It is possible that they are getting some benefit by burning the bits closer together on the medium, but again, the last thing you want with a backup is to push a medium beyond its rated capacity. In months or ever weeks the bits might start bleeding together because the medium was never rated for that density.
God help your backups if they're doing this with a little bit of both.
Good to try to burn a little longer movie onto, where capacity is a higher priority then reliability. Horrible, horrible idea for backups.
I've always wondered if they can get a password from you involuntarily by just hooking you up to a lie detector and asking questions like, "is the first letter a vowel? Is it 'A'? Is it 'E'? Is the second letter a number?... etc.
Only if you believe in the polygraph's ability to tell truth. Polygraphs are garbage; see for yourself. Their primary use is to scare people who don't know better into confessing something they otherwise wouldn't.
Is it libel? You decide. Read the whole bit.
Also see defamation.
This is the best you can get from Slashdot. As usual, for a real answer, you're going to need to consult a lawyer. I especially note that slander/libel is done on the state level according to findlaw, so since you don't give your state of residence, and because few if any posters are likely to understand the details of interstate legal interactions for things like this (including me!), it's probably impossible for even a lawyer who happens to be cruising Slashdot giving out free advice (also known as "casting pearls before swine") to give you a solid answer.
Protecting the national museums wouldn't have required any where near as much effort.
Incorrect. At the time the heist(s) took place, the museum was in an area still controlled by the Saddam regime. "Protecting" the museum would have meant accelerating an already-fast push into Baghdad, which would have cost lives on both sides.
And it probably wouldn't have mattered at all, since an accelerated push would have caused the people who did the heist to do it that much sooner.
Protecting the national museums was almost impossible without cooperation from the reigning government, and that's who did the heist in the first place.
Why the statement that disagreement over national policy is the product of a diseased mind?
No. Opposition to the war is fine. Demanding that people protect artifacts instead of people is what is sick. The rest of your post is completely unfounded, because you overextended. I'm not squelching dissent, I'm expressing disgust at priorities that put people below artifacts.
When you take enough cracks at something, and you fail miserably every time, it becomes time to question the value of what you are advocating.
I don't care what the Chinese or the Soviet Union "really" were, not to mention all the other communist states over time. Everybody claiming to be communist and creating a state has created a horror, many of which did decay into fascist states in short order. The logical conclusion is that communism leads directly to fascism, because the whole philosophy is so very wrong in almost every conceivable way that it's impossible to even implement partially correctly! Communism is built from step one on a fallacious model of a human being; to understand how fallacious compare it to Adam Smith's model, and compare how successful the predictions were. The reason nobody's ever build a "true communist state" is that such a thing isn't possible with our species, and this isn't an idle philosophical debate, either, because when it fails, it kills. Millions.
To think that communism will work, ever, if we just "try harder" is to be blinded as I was talking about. Communism sounds great but history shows, over and over and over again, how well it works. It requires extreme denial to believe that it will ever work, denial of the kind that requires shutting off your intelligence to believe.
To advocate communism at this point in history is madness. Communism-as-theory leads directly to what you call "communism-as-rhetoric", without fail, over and over again. It boggles the mind that people still want it.
(Extreme capitalism has its own problems too; as I mentioned in my post I wouldn't mind participating in an anti-corporate-power demonstration. But it pales to the evil of any given communist regime in the history of man.)
I'd say that millenia-old artifacts which are our only link to the beginnings of civilization are a little more important than you make them out to be.
You are aware that by saying that, you are claiming that they are more important then the lives saved by both the troops not guarding the museum but doing something more important, and by the oil revenues that will be the salvation of the millions who live in that country?
It's just plain selfish to demand that people give their welfare, food, or even lives for artifacts that you think are important, and I have no respect for people like you, who demand sacrifice (for baubles no less!) from others while you live in comfort, far, far away from the conflict.
Oh, and let's not let the facts about who actually did it, when they did it, and the unlikelihood that anything could have stopped it get in the way. Ironic that the theft of artifacts is the only thing the left is willing to criticize Saddam's administration about, and they still lay the blame on the US, instead of the people who actually did the looting.
In conclusion, you and your misplaced priorities disgust me. People rate over museum collections anyday and it takes a diseased mind to miss that.
Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.
That's more true now than it has been for most of our history. On some level that's always true, but I doubt keeping Saddam in power was truly the will of the Iraqi people.
A lot of factors, not least of which is governmental power being vested in a few or even one person, bend the decisions the "society" would make if it was in some hypothetical "pure" state. (I personally interpret Arrow's Theorum to imply that there is no such thing as one clear "voice of the society" no matter how you slice it. YMMV, but it's not an unreasonable corrolary.)
But even now it's not completely true. The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.
The aggregations of decisions we make as individuals has an impact, but in the final analysis if Jack T. Ass, owner of a large logging interest, decides to clear cut a county in Montana and does it before the law (i.e., "the rest of us") even notices, then the environmental damage has occurred, regardless of how the rest of the individuals feel about it.
Herein lies the primary problem with "educational games"... if you set out in advance to make an educational game, you are almost certainly doomed to produce crap. The counterexamples can be named on one hand, and those aren't all the great either... what did you really learn from Oregon trail?
IMHO the problem is that games are useless for real facts, as your review demonstrates. You just can't create a viable structure where you can just plug in your multiple choice questions and have a fun game. The closest we've ever seen is probably the Carmen Sandiego series, and again, you're learning geographical or historical (or several other spinoffs) trivia, not useful information.
Games are strong in the fuzzy areas, like logic, resource allocation, game-theory type situations (which include many real-world situations including business negotiation, so it's not empty knowlege), and simulations (how many people here already knew how to drive long before setting your butt in front of the driver's wheel, courtesy of video games? I basically did...). All those things conventional education totally sucks at.
So what do those oh-so-bright educators do? Try to take the only feasible way to actually teach those skills, and jam a multiple-choice problem delivery system into it.
God, educational theorists are stupid . What do we pay them for again?
The idea is to make them so cheap that you don't care that you loose a couple; taking them all out over any significant area would require a nuke (literally). (Or a nuke-powered EMP device. EMP is cool and it works but it eats energy like nobody's business.)
Small things are inherently limited in capability, yes, which is one of the reasons the gray-goo fears are unfounded; nanomachines are only invincible ravenous beasts in science-fiction. In reality it would probably be little more then an annoyance, and gray-goo-type nanomachines would be easily destroyed with the simple application of heat, radiation, or nearly anything else. These helicopters will be able to take a far wider range of environmental conditions then microscopic-scale machines, and we still think of the helicopters as fragile...
If you're willing to have an open mind, I'd check out stuff like this.
Most estimates I've seen have the space program paying for itself in the long-run, you just don't see it because the money doesn't show up as income on NASA's budget sheets.
The apathy of the American population is growing, not shrinking. Attempting to motivate them to protest anything at all is an exercise in futility.
I disagree, the problem is not apathy but how out of touch the wanna-be protest organizers are with America.
Of course anti-war protesters, many of whom cut their teeth in the 60's, couldn't mobilize America as well as they would have liked. Most of America saw right through their outrageous lies and bombastic rhetoric. (Hint: No matter how many times you saw it, you will not be convincing the public that Bush is a Nazi. Just ain't gonna happen.) The wanna-be protesters were so out of touch with reality that even many genuinely anti-war people wouldn't be caught dead at one of their abortive rallies; just because you're anti-war doesn't mean you want to be seen protesting next to the communist* party, white supremecists, or anti-Semites. (I wish I was exaggerating, but those groups made up a large portion, if not the majority, of the protesters you saw, and they were responsible for organizing nearly %100 of them. This is documented, so if you disagree with me, go look it up, read the facts, and change your mind.)
On the other hand, convincing people of something legitimate, such as over-powerful corporations, might not be so difficult if you can concentrate correctly on just that issue and resist letting the toxic leftists participate, and promptly hijacking the platform and turning it into just more leftist noise to the people of America. ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is very untrue; start thinking that way and your enemy's enemy will do more damage to you then whom you are technically against.)
It's also worth pointing out that protests should be seen solely as a vehicle for getting onto the news and communicating with the people, to make your issue an issue in the next election. By and large, protests are a weak forum to actually get anything done, they're much more useful as agenda-setters. (For instance, while protests may have given dark-skinned people official civil rights equality, look how many protests it took. Each protest did not accomplish much, for protests to effect direct action it takes a lot of them... and it did take a lot of them, big ones at that.)
And you must always be willing to face the possibility that no, the people aren't on your side and they just plain disagree with you, not because of apathy or any other frankly insulting ideas like that. This is another thing that wanna-be protesters seem to have a problem with.
Frankly, until the 60's-era wanna-be protesters are bumped out of the position of organizing these things, and some more realistic folks start organizing on some more tightly focused issues, the protest movement will remain dead. I wouldn't mind participating in an anti-corporate power movement, but if you want my help it's going to have to be focussed. I won't demonstrate next to Communists, anti-Semites, or white supremecists, and I won't demonstrate on a flat anti-corporation platform either; corporations aren't inherently evil, it's their protection on equals as people and their excessive power that's bad, not the idea of people grouping together and trying to make money.
*: By the way, if you've made it this far into the twenty-first century and unless you've been totally blinded by their rhetoric, you should realize that communists belong right next to the anti-Semites and white supremecists on the evil scale. At the beginning of the 20th century one could be an honest communist without being evil, but advocating a political system with a cumulative death toll in the hundreds of millions is just evil now. Whatever accusations those people might be legitimately able to lay at the feet of capitalism absolutely pale in comparision to what their political philosophy is directly and undeniably responsible for. If they were halfway honest people they'd be protesting against Communism themselves. If the US government directly killed as many of its own citizens as Communism has, the US would be dangerously close to completely unpopulated...
While there are some cute tricks you can do with a regexp-based engine on the user's side, cute tricks do not a viable technology make. Along with the obvious computational issues, and the difficulty (though perhaps not impossibility) of a creating a caching scheme, I think there's the problem that most use cases where someone might really want to use your search engine, there are more promising ways to approach the problem other then regexps.
The two ones that come to mind are word stemming approaches and things trying to take advantage of processing that's closer to (though of course not necessarily reaching) natural language processing. Both of those improvements are really useful, and are at least possible to implement, though not easy.
Word stemming approaches eliminate the whole class of "I want every form of kill: kill(|ed|er|ing)" queries; plus you don't want a human to have to enumerate that.
Phrase alternations is already handle by existing syntax: "All your (base OR chili) is belong to (us OR them)." You don't need regexp for that.
Most of the rest of the examples of where a regexp might be useful are almost certainly toys, that sound like a cool hack but won't actually be useful.
Note that a counterexample requires not yet another probably-silly hack, but a plausible usecase where you have an example of something you were really searching for, that a regexp engine might have been able to solve, and that there was no good way of finding currently. In my experience the only searches that I can't do are the ones for things where there isn't a search term I can use that will unique identify what I'm looking for out of a sea of pages related to that term, but not what I'm looking for. One example I recall was looking for how poisonous a philodendren is to a cat; if the info is out there, it's swamped by pages saying simply that it is poisonous, with no indication of how much.
That's an example where a hypothetical search engine with better NLP might have helped me, where I could have asked it for only a page that included "how much" information about the poison level, and not its mere existance.
On the one hand, I'd take this with a grain of salt as I'm just a random Internet yahoo, and you'll always find someone who says "X won't work." You can't let that be a stopper. On the other hand, you might want to mull this over and be sure you are not being overoptimistic about the usefullness of this before committing much resources to it. In particular, I recommend scrutinizing your own usage of real search engines over the next few weeks, and ideally the usage of others, and make sure that you're sure your approach can beat Google in at least some useful domain. Overoptimistic assessments of one's own program is a very real danger of being a programmer and it has scuttled more then one project.
First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected.
Someday, we may be able to claim this. But I'm really uncomfortable claiming it today.
A couple of computers got hacked. One of them was with a vulnerability that I hadn't even heard of yet in samba; I got my Debian announcement later that day.
Right now, even the most updated computer is just too full of vulnerabilities to make a valid case that it should be possible to maintain a computer that has no vulnerabilities at all. That line of reasoning is too dangerous, and will make felons of us all.
Not that it's a bad idea in theory, but the times aren't ready for it.
My problem is I want empirical evidence that what I'm going to switch to is an actual improvement. If I'm going to invest tens of hours becoming proficient in something wierd, I want scientific evidence that it prevents carpal tunnel syndrome. At least modern keyboards are a known hazard with known ways of dealing with them.
The problem with all of these devices, not to mention even the simple solutions like "re-arrange to Dvorak", is that all of the claimed gains on carpal tunnel syndrome vs. a normal keyboard is perfectly explainable via simple placebo psychology. That doesn't mean that some of them aren't valid improvements; it also doesn't mean that some of the solutions aren't actually even worse! What it does mean is that some real science really needs to be done to figure out which is the easiest on our bodies compared to the maximum input speed possible.
Until I see at least preliminary real research it's going to be hard to justify switching, especially given the priciness of these things (since they can't be mass-produced).
Pointers to real research (not anecdotal!) welcome; I readily admit I haven't spent much time looking, since right now it's simply not an issue due to the obvious monetary issues.
Ah, good ole' ad hominem.
I don't care if he's Hitler, his criticisms seem valid to me. I didn't browse around much more of the site, proto-sci-fi Universes don't interest me, they're a dime a dozen. I've got one myself. Until they make it to a final product I've got better things to do.
I'd have a hard time calling Alias sci-fi. The only sci-fi aspects (rather then fairly realistic and current science) are the Rambaldi storylines, and given what we've seen so far, I'm more inclined to call that fantasy then sci-fi.
;-)
It's a hard call because that storyline is so small and not-well exposited (to keep it mysterious) that you can't get a "feel" for it. I call it fantasy because right now the artifacts are basically working like magic, returning life to long-dead things and so on.
I admit that my current #1 theory to explain Rambaldi is that he is indeed a space alien who couldn't or wouldn't go home, but that's my theory, not official show theory.