SETI is listening, and your arguments are rejected.
This may sound odd to people participating in distributed.net, but SETI is not about processing data as quickly as possible. It's science. In science, you want to hold as many of the variables as similar as possible, so that you can be sure they didn't create a false result (false positive OR false negative). All else being equal, speed is nice, but it is not the goal.
Open source is not the answer for everything. Sure, if it was open source, some good patches might come out, but how many people would download the code, apply the patches that speed it up, and never have a clue that they just fatally broke the FFT result testing algorithm? Or for that matter, if they broke the FFT algorithm? Or would simply use it to easily learn how to send result blocks without processing them?
The fact of the matter is, even if you can improve the code, you cannot improve the code. (That's not a typo.) If you can improve the code, instead of helping SETI by processing keys faster, you bring yourself out of alignment with everybody else, create potential bugs in the experiment, and render all of your results suspect. SETI is science... distributed.net is engineering. There is a big difference, and science does things the way it does it for a reason. SETI needs the results to be as solid as possible. (If one of the hacked clients detects a signal, rest assured that even if SETI doesn't subject it to extra scrutiny as a result, some other scientist will.)
SETI can't stop people from modifying the executable on their own systems, but I think the people calling for SETI to make it even easier for people to modify the system (not just your code, SETI is part of a system and subject to the interactions thereof) have a fundamental misunderstanding of what SETI is about.
Wow, you've impressed me with your fine reading skills. Next time, try reading the source material before engaging in combative behavior.
You are doing a hell of a lot of whining about something that is completely free and explicitly tells people to add markup if they so choose. If you can't understand them, it's probably because they are thinking in the long term, and you arent'. Quote from the above referenced page:
Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others will be with us as long as civilization. ..an operating system, a program, a markup system. ..will not.
Something's not right here, as several have pointed out. A crappy essay receives a 100% "outstanding" grade. (This might be adequately explained by lowered standards in school, but still, 100+%?) Being asked to read it aloud in class, then being sent to jail for a week? Why would a teacher send the student to jail if the essay was so good? Laughing at the portrayal of the death of a teacher?
Hypothesis One: The teacher was genuinely amused, and a student who was in the class and heard it read aloud reported it to higher authorities.
To corroborate this theory, wait to see if that teacher faces disciplinary action for "encouraging" violent threats.
Hypothesis Two: If you're paranoid, you'll love this. The teacher was disturbed by the contents of the note. To play along with and placate the student, she gives him the best possible grade and overacts her enjoyment of the story. She then later turns him in, after he's left.
If this is the case, the teacher will not face disciplanary action, and will probably be held up as an example of how to act under these circumstances in the educational circles.
Does anyone have anything to add to resolve these apparent inconsistencies?
Neat idea, but you can't filter noise with noise. It doesn't work. Filtering requires differentiation of one sort or another, and that's exactly what the hypothetical monkeys don't have.
You're missing some key points of the reality of this thing.
You're right. And the more you look at it, the worse it looks to stick a "tool" like this in the hands of incompentents. (And I doubt it will be a very controversial thing around here to claim that there exists a large number of incompentents in the school administrations in the US!)
17.) John comes up behind you while you are eating lunch, and throws your tray to the floor. Do you: A. Politely ask John to not destroy your Lunch, and allow you to obtain your nourishment. B. Inform a supervisor that John is causing a disruption, and should be punished. C. Pull out a Glock and plant a bullet in John's Head.
Answering C would signal that you were trying to throw the test. Do you think the people putting this test together are total idiots? B might signal a normal reaction. A might signal a violent person trying to hide the tendancies and cover them up.
Or it might not. This is not the kind of question that would show up anyhow, but if it did, what the answers meant would be determined experimentally, and not by a psychologist sitting and thinking about them. They know better then that.
An example of a real question might be,
"On a scale of one to five, where one is totally disagree and five is total agreement, how much do you agree with the following statements:
1. People like me. 2. I like people. 3. I feel safe when I am at my primary residence. 4. My school is a safe environment. 5. When people pick on me, I can just shrug it off. 6. If my an aquaitence of mine betrayed me, I would bring a gun to school and shoot them."
If you answered "strongly agree" with 6, then you are probably trying to skew the curve, but it depends on the profile of the other questions.
These tests do work; they wouldn't be dangerous if they were always wrong, because nobody would trust them!
I simply cannot believe most of the posts that have been posted up to this point. As dangerous as this is, you almost all have the wrong reason.
These tests are not targetting "geeks", they are targeting "violent people". Obviously, they know there's a difference, because most violent people are not geeks.
The tests (from actually READING the article) will work on the well-established psychological principle of analysing known violent people's answers to a series of questions, discovering where they differ most from normal people's answers, and using those to distinguish between violent and non-violent people. You can use this technique for nearly any trait, and it works reasonably well. (It's a blind shooting technique; you don't necessarily understand why some questions are answered differently, but they are and it works.) Many tests use this in psychology, and you can even more-or-less detect people trying to answer the way they "know" they should answer to pass the test.
The results of this test will, honestly, correlate to those who have violent tendencies. It does appear not do it on the basis of who is wearing trenchcoats, who is "different", or who is left out. It is not about geeks, nerds, or social rejects at all.
This test is not dangerous because it will somehow enforce "conformance". The danger is that the test is reliable, but not reliable enough. There are four permutations of "person is violent" (assume for a moment that this is a simple boolean, for the sake of argument), and "test says person is violent." The true danger here is that a large number of people will become "diagnosed" as violent who are not, known as a "false positive". The society will then act on this false information, possibly in drastic and damaging ways. (false negatives aren't half as disturbing; few violent people shoot up schools)
The truly dangerous thing is that, contrary to most people's uninformed opinions here, this will work to some extent. (It is certainly not impossible.) That actually makes it worse; if it never worked correctly, then nobody will worry about the results, positive or negative. But because it will work, those who get false positives will seriously be treated as being violent people. This is horrible (and could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy).
This actually isn't much different then what can already occur (as the article says, it is only meant to be used on kids that are suspected to have problems). But as many people in schools worship both psychologists and computers (as the understand neither), having a computer program diagnose a kid as "violent", after the kid has somehow attracted attention to himself in some other fashion, could well become a Kiss of Death from which the kid will not recover until out of the school system.
THAT is the problem; geekness and enforced conformance have little to do with it. Read the article before posting. (And a lessening in the geek paranoia level would be nice; society is not out to get you, they barely know you exist.)
It is particularly disturbing that the Times did not point this out in the article. Must journalists swallow everything uncritically like this?
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school (unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to help write the test to know the "answers").
I don't think that Roblimo was trying to dismiss entire populations with a wave of his hand, but I do understand why a few women have posted comments being upset at him about the perception that he is doing so.
This was basically guy talk here, so don't read too much into it:-) The problem he is trying to address is that so many guys/men only look for geek women, only look for Beautific Babes, or, worse yet, only look for Beautific Geek Babes (wow... talk about long odds; I go to a fricken' huge university and there aren't more then one or two Beautific Geek Babes around here!), that they overlook the other 90% of the population. Constraining yourself to 10% of the population from the get go, and shrinking it from there to "decent girls" (and Roblimo's right to the extent that Beautific Babes have a negative correlation with a good personality, which makes things even worse), is not a good way to suceed in this scenario, and as a resul guys retreat into fantasy land of what things will be like Real Soon Now instead of taking the opportunities presenting themselves Right Now.
If Roblimo was going to write something that would offend nobody, it would be at least twice as long and therefore twice as likely not to be read. (OK, OK, that's glib, but it's at least generally true.) He made some generalizations in the process of trying to quickly debunk other people's generalizations; to make them think about their own preconcieved notions by presenting them with other ideas. It's a Good Thing; I'm suspect Roblimo would be the last to claim that this was The Final Word on this topic.
The reader is expected to take the opportunity to, ummmm, I don't know what verb to put here, take? a Babe or Geek if the opportunity presents, but to look beyond that anyhow.
(Me? I'm extremely happily engaged to a zoologist, who has a basic understanding of computing but still has no idea why I get paid what I do for being a good webmaster. If I'd stuck to local geek girls, I'd have never gotten anywhere. More people need to realize that this may be true for them too. It's not necessarily true for everybody, but it is for some.)
As a Nerdy Man (in clear preference to "geek"), which is alternatively described in the article as "wierdo", "loser" (shall we compare salaries, Dr. Rachel Carmotta?), "desperate wimps", "nerdy dude with the cowlick and bow tie", "nerdy nobodies with pocket protectors and pants cuffs that stop just below the knees", and "geeky oddballs", I must confess the following:
I am extremely attracted to:
Girls who WALK WITH THEIR SHOULDERS FORWARD AND THEIR HEADS DOWN
Girls who FREQUENTLY ENGAGE IN NERVOUS GIGGLING
Girls who FREQUENTLY USE WISHY-WASHY PHRASES IN THEIR CONVERSATION
and girls who ADJUST THEIR CLOTHING TOO MUCH
Yes siree Bob, as a bona-fide geeky loser I find these extremely attractive, which causes a lot of friction with my fiance (which I inexplicably have) when she fails to exhibit these charecteristics. I feel this article is a serious challenge to my way of life, as I may run out of girls to fantasize about now!
And of course, this is 100% true; the Weekly World News hath spoken.
Foriegn equivalency clauses used to only matter if your trademark extended in other countries, which isn't as common as it seems. For every McDonalds, there are thousands of Joe's Local Trademarked Band.
But on the Internet, it's all international. Taking it to the extreme that whatshappin.com seems to want to take it implies that when you get a trademark, and take it to the internet, not only do you instantly gain an international trademark (because trademark's can be tied to a specific locality, such as a state), but, apparently, you gain every translation of the trademark???
This really shrinks the trademark domain! Furthermore, a quick spin around altavista shows "What's happenin?" -> French -> English as "Which is happenin?", which, silly as it sounds, would registering that as a domain name be an infringement because it translates to the same thing in another common language? (Note: AFAIK, that's not a babelfish blunder; the phrase pretty much translates equivalently. If not in French, then elsewhere.)
I think "whatshappenin" actually has a reasonable argument, founded in trademark law, although quepasa does as well. The problem is trademark law; in principle, it's a good thing, but a device that made things work well, keeping trademarks local until they are used on a large scale (how many college bands have the same, trademarked name, just live in different states?) no longer functions correctly on the Internet. Unfortunately, only a new international agreement could really fix the problem. In the meantime, if this goes to court, keep an eye on the result; it certainly will set precedents. Watch out, Le Monde (A major french newspaper that translates in english to "The World")... here comes the Boston Globe... both newspapers (same trademark domain), both translate to roughly (very) the same thing... lawsuit time!
Some of those domain names disappeared quite recently in some ways.
I was kicking the idea around of registering jerf.com, but a couple of days before I got up the guts to do so, some squatter got it. (Check alphabetically around "jerf.com"... a lot belong to the same group, whoever the heck they are)
So it pushed me to grab what I have now... http://www.jerf.org
After the incredibly annoying You-Must-Have-A-Pentium-III-To-Enjoy-The-Internet (despite your inability to actually find any sites that look even remotely as processor intensive as the ones in the commercial, that looked more like CAD/CAM), can you imagine the advertisements for the Intanium, which is NAMED after the darned network?
"Intanium: This One Will Actually Enhance Your Internet Experience, Honestly!"
"Intanium: If You Thought The 32-Bit Internet Was Great, Wait Until You See The 64-Bit Internet!"
"Intanium: Databases Will Commit Transactions Like Never Before."
You do have to look at it from Intel Marketing's point of view... how do you hype "Do Things Faster" when that's been your line for the last 20 years and is, apparently, wearing thin with the management.
Still, I can think of a campaign targetting the slashdot crowd that would work well:
"Intanium: Have A Computer More Powerful Then Most Servers You Visit!"
No: You will still be adapting to that "perfect technology" by learning to speak in a recognized language. That doing so also allows you to function in society may someday be an incidental byproduct.
The only intuitive user interface is a nipple. I agree with dillon rinker: That is such a specious argument.
he tricky part would be the location, it could be determined by the number of spaces it has to take from a 'home base', but this has it's flaws, what if a dog came and started chewing on it, and left it 100 feet from where it 'thinks' it is supose to be.
Then it "dies". In the real world, nothing has a 100% survival chance. It's one of the fundamental problems of AI.
Mother Nature solved that with the firehose approach. That will be too expensive until we can manufacture robots that manufacture robots that manufacture robots.
That solution is worse then the problem. If you do that, they you are implicitly agreeing to the idea that Universal has some right to determine who links to them... and you lost the game already.
Don't do that. Universal needs to show WHY they have the right to control who links to what. As others say, there are technical options, and other issues I seriously doubt they've thought of. Like "lost advertisement"... if you clicked on a link to see a trailer for "This Summer's Hot Movie", and it sent you to Universal's home page, would YOU browse through the who-knows-how-many-pages to get to the trailer? I think not!
Besides, why is Universal griping about "lost advertising" when people are linking directly to (drum roll please...) advertising? They're upset because we're bypassing their advertising to voluntarily watch their advertising? Good grief, they ought to LOVE the linking like that! You can't buy eyeballs that are that interested in your movies at any price, only fan websites can provide them!
Universal may be short-sighted idiots, but let's not retaliate with even more short-sighted "linking agreements." We DON'T want to grant them those rights. If they're that excited about it, put up a password page or secure it somehow. Those "rights" (if you can call them that) they already have; don't create new ones that will cause thousands of small fry to be sued even more often then before (see today's Phantom Menace story!).
If cutting 10% costs you every major mission that NASA is going to fly... don't do it.
Either kill NASA, or disband it. But you won't save any money simply crippling it. You'll throw away a lot of money that will never be useful, because we can't fly those major missions upon which all depends. It's a false economy.
It's time for an asteroid to directly impact Washington DC... a nice, small one... it only has to kill a few thousand people... THEN NASA would get any money they wanted... for a year or two, until the beaurocracy forgot... again... (pardon my spelling of that blasted "B" word)
Does that mean my console is going to do e-mail? (Add a keyboard) Does that mean I'm going to be able to browse the web without destroying my eyes? (Add a monitor.) Does that mean I'm going to need an input device more appropriate for these operations? (Tack a trackball onto the already-complicated console controls.)
Gonna do my word processing to write notes to granny? (Add a hard drive to save things larger then a few K.) Gonna print that web page? (Add a printer.)
Now, at this point, what do we have? We have something on the order of a modern computer. The console's big advantage, as everybody else says, is that it is truly plug and play. So, we have two possibilities:
1. The console company locks down all options, and, quite probably, is the sole manufacturor of the perhipherals. Now, you get plug and play, but you have no options, and you still can't use anything that wasn't designed in from day one. (And you will PAY THROUGH THE NOSE for this priviledge).
2. The console company allows others to create things for the console. Don't fool yourself into thinking that consoles are somehow immune to conflict issues. If everybody is creating things, there _will_be_incompatibilities_, so consoles will lose their biggest advantage. They'll still be cheap, and look good, but adding all this hardware will be expensive, and no real upgrade choices will exist.
Now, ask yourself, how can consoles replace PCs by 2005? In 2005, PC's won't look like PC's and consoles won't look like consoles, so how can you say that consoles will replace PC's? They will continue to merge until you get your choice between cheap and more expensive; and, rest assured, they won't be called consoles; they'll be called computers.
Consoles won't die, they'll just be absorbed into the computing-devices market. Just like Palm Pilots/WinCE will merge with portable gaming, because nothing else makes sense.
I agree with the other replies. Put this thing back up; it's a valid point! We ride other companies (cough cough MICROSOFT cough) for vaporware, why do we hear about a [nearly] dead OS so often, when there's nothing there yet?
They may be limiting the number of simultaneous connections allowed (wise! very wise!), so be patient if you want to get through.
It is pretty good.
I'd swear I could watch the slashdot effect kick in... the farther the movie got, the worse the video got... though that could be an effect of me selected "Really, Really Fast"... sorry, everybody else!
What does academics have a history of producing? Acadamia produce theories... in this case, theories about why games are good, why they're bad, and, worst of all, what they should be.
I'm sure the program will start out cool... and maybe this specific program won't suffer from this problem, but I'd hate to get a degree in gaming. Gaming isn't EVER going to be a field that acadamia will be strong in. Gaming has enough problems with the "me-too" games... can you image what it would be like if 3-D shooters were the Only Fun Game according to some panel of PhD's?
This isn't a panic post, because this won't happen. Either the program will avoid it (likely in the short term, unlikely in the long term), or it will die. If the program turns out people with only a certain set of skills, or attitudes, or gaming styles, well, certain houses might employ them, but the cutting edge places NEVER will. This is not a field where the academics will innovate, so all this place can possibly do is produce people who really, really know how to do what's already been done.
I've contemplated writing an editorial before, and I'm currently running a site that is, in essense, one big editorial, with a few technical solutions thrown in.
While it is tempting to ask writers to keep things short, the simple fact of the matter is that most concepts cannot be communicated in one or two, or even 10, paragraphs. And when the concepts aren't communicated, two big things happen: One, you failed to accomplish your primary goal, which was to communicate your concept, and two, you will be the recipient of ENDLESS STREAMS of e-mail (or slashdot posts) taking you to task (or flaming!) you for statements you never made, interpretations you never meant (and could have corrected in another paragraph), or berating you for missing a point that you did not miss, but cut in the interests of space.
Keeping things short is not the best solution. Writing in a newspaper style is ("inverted pyramid").
Slashdot Mirror
SETI is listening, and your arguments are rejected.
This may sound odd to people participating in distributed.net, but SETI is not about processing data as quickly as possible. It's science. In science, you want to hold as many of the variables as similar as possible, so that you can be sure they didn't create a false result (false positive OR false negative). All else being equal, speed is nice, but it is not the goal.
Open source is not the answer for everything. Sure, if it was open source, some good patches might come out, but how many people would download the code, apply the patches that speed it up, and never have a clue that they just fatally broke the FFT result testing algorithm? Or for that matter, if they broke the FFT algorithm? Or would simply use it to easily learn how to send result blocks without processing them?
The fact of the matter is, even if you can improve the code, you cannot improve the code. (That's not a typo.) If you can improve the code, instead of helping SETI by processing keys faster, you bring yourself out of alignment with everybody else, create potential bugs in the experiment, and render all of your results suspect. SETI is science... distributed.net is engineering. There is a big difference, and science does things the way it does it for a reason. SETI needs the results to be as solid as possible. (If one of the hacked clients detects a signal, rest assured that even if SETI doesn't subject it to extra scrutiny as a result, some other scientist will.)
SETI can't stop people from modifying the executable on their own systems, but I think the people calling for SETI to make it even easier for people to modify the system (not just your code, SETI is part of a system and subject to the interactions thereof) have a fundamental misunderstanding of what SETI is about.
Who says it has to be this way [mostly meant for stuff like Shakespeare or other important literary works]?
.an operating system, a program, a markup system. . .will not.
Project Gutenburg.
Who says books have to be this way to be online?
Project Gutenburg.
http://www.promo.net/pg/history. html#beginningphil
Where does it say that this is PG's purpose,
Here: http://www.promo.net/pg/history.h tml#theselection
and who wrote that?
Project Gutenburg.
Wow, you've impressed me with your fine reading skills. Next time, try reading the source material before engaging in combative behavior.
You are doing a hell of a lot of whining about something that is completely free and explicitly tells people to add markup if they so choose. If you can't understand them, it's probably because they are thinking in the long term, and you arent'. Quote from the above referenced page:
Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others will be with us as long as civilization. .
Quit whining, AC.
Something's not right here, as several have pointed out. A crappy essay receives a 100% "outstanding" grade. (This might be adequately explained by lowered standards in school, but still, 100+%?) Being asked to read it aloud in class, then being sent to jail for a week? Why would a teacher send the student to jail if the essay was so good? Laughing at the portrayal of the death of a teacher?
Hypothesis One: The teacher was genuinely amused, and a student who was in the class and heard it read aloud reported it to higher authorities.
To corroborate this theory, wait to see if that teacher faces disciplinary action for "encouraging" violent threats.
Hypothesis Two: If you're paranoid, you'll love this. The teacher was disturbed by the contents of the note. To play along with and placate the student, she gives him the best possible grade and overacts her enjoyment of the story. She then later turns him in, after he's left.
If this is the case, the teacher will not face disciplanary action, and will probably be held up as an example of how to act under these circumstances in the educational circles.
Does anyone have anything to add to resolve these apparent inconsistencies?
Neat idea, but you can't filter noise with noise. It doesn't work. Filtering requires differentiation of one sort or another, and that's exactly what the hypothetical monkeys don't have.
Read the article hook on slashdot:
Stuff like this just gives me the willies - must everyone conform to one set standard? Just because I'm different doesn't mean I'm violent.
"Get a fucking clue, asshole." Such advice is notorious for turning around and biting the giver...
You're missing some key points of the reality of this thing.
You're right. And the more you look at it, the worse it looks to stick a "tool" like this in the hands of incompentents. (And I doubt it will be a very controversial thing around here to claim that there exists a large number of incompentents in the school administrations in the US!)
Thanks for the amplifications.
See, here's the thing.
If the test indeed included that question,
17.) John comes up behind you while you are eating lunch, and throws your tray to the floor. Do you:
A. Politely ask John to not destroy your Lunch, and allow you to obtain your nourishment.
B. Inform a supervisor that John is causing a disruption, and should be punished.
C. Pull out a Glock and plant a bullet in John's Head.
Answering C would signal that you were trying to throw the test. Do you think the people putting this test together are total idiots? B might signal a normal reaction. A might signal a violent person trying to hide the tendancies and cover them up.
Or it might not. This is not the kind of question that would show up anyhow, but if it did, what the answers meant would be determined experimentally, and not by a psychologist sitting and thinking about them. They know better then that.
An example of a real question might be,
"On a scale of one to five, where one is totally disagree and five is total agreement, how much do you agree with the following statements:
1. People like me.
2. I like people.
3. I feel safe when I am at my primary residence.
4. My school is a safe environment.
5. When people pick on me, I can just shrug it off.
6. If my an aquaitence of mine betrayed me, I would bring a gun to school and shoot them."
If you answered "strongly agree" with 6, then you are probably trying to skew the curve, but it depends on the profile of the other questions.
These tests do work; they wouldn't be dangerous if they were always wrong, because nobody would trust them!
I simply cannot believe most of the posts that have been posted up to this point. As dangerous as this is, you almost all have the wrong reason.
These tests are not targetting "geeks", they are targeting "violent people". Obviously, they know there's a difference, because most violent people are not geeks.
The tests (from actually READING the article) will work on the well-established psychological principle of analysing known violent people's answers to a series of questions, discovering where they differ most from normal people's answers, and using those to distinguish between violent and non-violent people. You can use this technique for nearly any trait, and it works reasonably well. (It's a blind shooting technique; you don't necessarily understand why some questions are answered differently, but they are and it works.) Many tests use this in psychology, and you can even more-or-less detect people trying to answer the way they "know" they should answer to pass the test.
The results of this test will, honestly, correlate to those who have violent tendencies. It does appear not do it on the basis of who is wearing trenchcoats, who is "different", or who is left out. It is not about geeks, nerds, or social rejects at all.
This test is not dangerous because it will somehow enforce "conformance". The danger is that the test is reliable, but not reliable enough. There are four permutations of "person is violent" (assume for a moment that this is a simple boolean, for the sake of argument), and "test says person is violent." The true danger here is that a large number of people will become "diagnosed" as violent who are not, known as a "false positive". The society will then act on this false information, possibly in drastic and damaging ways. (false negatives aren't half as disturbing; few violent people shoot up schools)
The truly dangerous thing is that, contrary to most people's uninformed opinions here, this will work to some extent. (It is certainly not impossible.) That actually makes it worse; if it never worked correctly, then nobody will worry about the results, positive or negative. But because it will work, those who get false positives will seriously be treated as being violent people. This is horrible (and could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy).
This actually isn't much different then what can already occur (as the article says, it is only meant to be used on kids that are suspected to have problems). But as many people in schools worship both psychologists and computers (as the understand neither), having a computer program diagnose a kid as "violent", after the kid has somehow attracted attention to himself in some other fashion, could well become a Kiss of Death from which the kid will not recover until out of the school system.
THAT is the problem; geekness and enforced conformance have little to do with it. Read the article before posting. (And a lessening in the geek paranoia level would be nice; society is not out to get you, they barely know you exist.)
It is particularly disturbing that the Times did not point this out in the article. Must journalists swallow everything uncritically like this?
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school (unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to help write the test to know the "answers").
I don't think that Roblimo was trying to dismiss entire populations with a wave of his hand, but I do understand why a few women have posted comments being upset at him about the perception that he is doing so.
:-) The problem he is trying to address is that so many guys/men only look for geek women, only look for Beautific Babes, or, worse yet, only look for Beautific Geek Babes (wow... talk about long odds; I go to a fricken' huge university and there aren't more then one or two Beautific Geek Babes around here!), that they overlook the other 90% of the population. Constraining yourself to 10% of the population from the get go, and shrinking it from there to "decent girls" (and Roblimo's right to the extent that Beautific Babes have a negative correlation with a good personality, which makes things even worse), is not a good way to suceed in this scenario, and as a resul guys retreat into fantasy land of what things will be like Real Soon Now instead of taking the opportunities presenting themselves Right Now.
This was basically guy talk here, so don't read too much into it
If Roblimo was going to write something that would offend nobody, it would be at least twice as long and therefore twice as likely not to be read. (OK, OK, that's glib, but it's at least generally true.) He made some generalizations in the process of trying to quickly debunk other people's generalizations; to make them think about their own preconcieved notions by presenting them with other ideas. It's a Good Thing; I'm suspect Roblimo would be the last to claim that this was The Final Word on this topic.
The reader is expected to take the opportunity to, ummmm, I don't know what verb to put here, take? a Babe or Geek if the opportunity presents, but to look beyond that anyhow.
(Me? I'm extremely happily engaged to a zoologist, who has a basic understanding of computing but still has no idea why I get paid what I do for being a good webmaster. If I'd stuck to local geek girls, I'd have never gotten anywhere. More people need to realize that this may be true for them too. It's not necessarily true for everybody, but it is for some.)
I am extremely attracted to:
- Girls who WALK WITH THEIR SHOULDERS FORWARD AND THEIR HEADS DOWN
- Girls who FREQUENTLY ENGAGE IN NERVOUS GIGGLING
- Girls who FREQUENTLY USE WISHY-WASHY PHRASES IN THEIR CONVERSATION
- and girls who ADJUST THEIR CLOTHING TOO MUCH
Yes siree Bob, as a bona-fide geeky loser I find these extremely attractive, which causes a lot of friction with my fiance (which I inexplicably have) when she fails to exhibit these charecteristics. I feel this article is a serious challenge to my way of life, as I may run out of girls to fantasize about now!And of course, this is 100% true; the Weekly World News hath spoken.
Patents != trademarks != copyright. Your message makes little sense.
Foriegn equivalency clauses used to only matter if your trademark extended in other countries, which isn't as common as it seems. For every McDonalds, there are thousands of Joe's Local Trademarked Band.
But on the Internet, it's all international. Taking it to the extreme that whatshappin.com seems to want to take it implies that when you get a trademark, and take it to the internet, not only do you instantly gain an international trademark (because trademark's can be tied to a specific locality, such as a state), but, apparently, you gain every translation of the trademark???
This really shrinks the trademark domain! Furthermore, a quick spin around altavista shows "What's happenin?" -> French -> English as "Which is happenin?", which, silly as it sounds, would registering that as a domain name be an infringement because it translates to the same thing in another common language? (Note: AFAIK, that's not a babelfish blunder; the phrase pretty much translates equivalently. If not in French, then elsewhere.)
I think "whatshappenin" actually has a reasonable argument, founded in trademark law, although quepasa does as well. The problem is trademark law; in principle, it's a good thing, but a device that made things work well, keeping trademarks local until they are used on a large scale (how many college bands have the same, trademarked name, just live in different states?) no longer functions correctly on the Internet. Unfortunately, only a new international agreement could really fix the problem. In the meantime, if this goes to court, keep an eye on the result; it certainly will set precedents. Watch out, Le Monde (A major french newspaper that translates in english to "The World")... here comes the Boston Globe... both newspapers (same trademark domain), both translate to roughly (very) the same thing... lawsuit time!
Some of those domain names disappeared quite recently in some ways.
I was kicking the idea around of registering jerf.com, but a couple of days before I got up the guts to do so, some squatter got it. (Check alphabetically around "jerf.com"... a lot belong to the same group, whoever the heck they are)
So it pushed me to grab what I have now... http://www.jerf.org
After the incredibly annoying You-Must-Have-A-Pentium-III-To-Enjoy-The-Internet (despite your inability to actually find any sites that look even remotely as processor intensive as the ones in the commercial, that looked more like CAD/CAM), can you imagine the advertisements for the Intanium, which is NAMED after the darned network?
"Intanium: This One Will Actually Enhance Your Internet Experience, Honestly!"
"Intanium: If You Thought The 32-Bit Internet Was Great, Wait Until You See The 64-Bit Internet!"
"Intanium: Databases Will Commit Transactions Like Never Before."
You do have to look at it from Intel Marketing's point of view... how do you hype "Do Things Faster" when that's been your line for the last 20 years and is, apparently, wearing thin with the management.
Still, I can think of a campaign targetting the slashdot crowd that would work well:
"Intanium: Have A Computer More Powerful Then Most Servers You Visit!"
Now that, that just sings to me, baby!
No: You will still be adapting to that "perfect technology" by learning to speak in a recognized language. That doing so also allows you to function in society may someday be an incidental byproduct.
The only intuitive user interface is a nipple. I agree with dillon rinker: That is such a specious argument.
he tricky part would be the location, it could be determined by the number of spaces it has to take from a 'home base', but this has it's flaws, what if a dog came and started chewing on it, and left it 100 feet from where it 'thinks' it is supose to be.
Then it "dies". In the real world, nothing has a 100% survival chance. It's one of the fundamental problems of AI.
Mother Nature solved that with the firehose approach. That will be too expensive until we can manufacture robots that manufacture robots that manufacture robots.
and (IMO) the average 21st Century Net-Setter is more likely to be worth knowing than most Jet-Setters ever were.
Let the elite snobbery begin^H^H^H^H^H^H continue!
I'm only half joking.
That solution is worse then the problem. If you do that, they you are implicitly agreeing to the idea that Universal has some right to determine who links to them... and you lost the game already.
Don't do that. Universal needs to show WHY they have the right to control who links to what. As others say, there are technical options, and other issues I seriously doubt they've thought of. Like "lost advertisement"... if you clicked on a link to see a trailer for "This Summer's Hot Movie", and it sent you to Universal's home page, would YOU browse through the who-knows-how-many-pages to get to the trailer? I think not!
Besides, why is Universal griping about "lost advertising" when people are linking directly to (drum roll please...) advertising? They're upset because we're bypassing their advertising to voluntarily watch their advertising? Good grief, they ought to LOVE the linking like that! You can't buy eyeballs that are that interested in your movies at any price, only fan websites can provide them!
Universal may be short-sighted idiots, but let's not retaliate with even more short-sighted "linking agreements." We DON'T want to grant them those rights. If they're that excited about it, put up a password page or secure it somehow. Those "rights" (if you can call them that) they already have; don't create new ones that will cause thousands of small fry to be sued even more often then before (see today's Phantom Menace story!).
If cutting 10% costs you every major mission that NASA is going to fly... don't do it.
Either kill NASA, or disband it. But you won't save any money simply crippling it. You'll throw away a lot of money that will never be useful, because we can't fly those major missions upon which all depends. It's a false economy.
It's time for an asteroid to directly impact Washington DC... a nice, small one... it only has to kill a few thousand people... THEN NASA would get any money they wanted... for a year or two, until the beaurocracy forgot... again... (pardon my spelling of that blasted "B" word)
Replace a computer?
Does that mean my console is going to do e-mail? (Add a keyboard) Does that mean I'm going to be able to browse the web without destroying my eyes? (Add a monitor.) Does that mean I'm going to need an input device more appropriate for these operations? (Tack a trackball onto the already-complicated console controls.)
Gonna do my word processing to write notes to granny? (Add a hard drive to save things larger then a few K.) Gonna print that web page? (Add a printer.)
Now, at this point, what do we have? We have something on the order of a modern computer. The console's big advantage, as everybody else says, is that it is truly plug and play. So, we have two possibilities:
1. The console company locks down all options, and, quite probably, is the sole manufacturor of the perhipherals. Now, you get plug and play, but you have no options, and you still can't use anything that wasn't designed in from day one. (And you will PAY THROUGH THE NOSE for this priviledge).
2. The console company allows others to create things for the console. Don't fool yourself into thinking that consoles are somehow immune to conflict issues. If everybody is creating things, there _will_be_incompatibilities_, so consoles will lose their biggest advantage. They'll still be cheap, and look good, but adding all this hardware will be expensive, and no real upgrade choices will exist.
Now, ask yourself, how can consoles replace PCs by 2005? In 2005, PC's won't look like PC's and consoles won't look like consoles, so how can you say that consoles will replace PC's? They will continue to merge until you get your choice between cheap and more expensive; and, rest assured, they won't be called consoles; they'll be called computers.
Consoles won't die, they'll just be absorbed into the computing-devices market. Just like Palm Pilots/WinCE will merge with portable gaming, because nothing else makes sense.
I agree with the other replies. Put this thing back up; it's a valid point! We ride other companies (cough cough MICROSOFT cough) for vaporware, why do we hear about a [nearly] dead OS so often, when there's nothing there yet?
Sorry, the whole planet is taken. You'll need to move on. Perhaps the moon?
They may be limiting the number of simultaneous connections allowed (wise! very wise!), so be patient if you want to get through.
It is pretty good.
I'd swear I could watch the slashdot effect kick in... the farther the movie got, the worse the video got... though that could be an effect of me selected "Really, Really Fast"... sorry, everybody else!
I'm sure the program will start out cool... and maybe this specific program won't suffer from this problem, but I'd hate to get a degree in gaming. Gaming isn't EVER going to be a field that acadamia will be strong in. Gaming has enough problems with the "me-too" games... can you image what it would be like if 3-D shooters were the Only Fun Game according to some panel of PhD's?
This isn't a panic post, because this won't happen. Either the program will avoid it (likely in the short term, unlikely in the long term), or it will die. If the program turns out people with only a certain set of skills, or attitudes, or gaming styles, well, certain houses might employ them, but the cutting edge places NEVER will. This is not a field where the academics will innovate, so all this place can possibly do is produce people who really, really know how to do what's already been done.
I've contemplated writing an editorial before, and I'm currently running a site that is, in essense, one big editorial, with a few technical solutions thrown in.
While it is tempting to ask writers to keep things short, the simple fact of the matter is that most concepts cannot be communicated in one or two, or even 10, paragraphs. And when the concepts aren't communicated, two big things happen: One, you failed to accomplish your primary goal, which was to communicate your concept, and two, you will be the recipient of ENDLESS STREAMS of e-mail (or slashdot posts) taking you to task (or flaming!) you for statements you never made, interpretations you never meant (and could have corrected in another paragraph), or berating you for missing a point that you did not miss, but cut in the interests of space.
Keeping things short is not the best solution. Writing in a newspaper style is ("inverted pyramid").