From my reading, the "innovation" is supposed to come in tuning the game's difficulty automatically to the user's performance, not merely the idea that a game should be between "frustrating" and "boring".
This can be a good idea, but it's worth pointing out it's not new at all. I recently started in on a task that I've had planned for a while working on the same basic idea, only applied to a learning program (can't even call it a "game"): Dynamically deciding which new concepts to introduce when, depending on how well and how quickly the user has mastered the previous concepts. The only odd thing is how few "learning" programs use this idea. It's not a new one.
In gaming, the idea is older than many Slashdot posters. While I wouldn't be surprised somebody can pull out an Atari 2600 game that uses the same principles, I can name the Intellivision game, Astrosmash as using the same basic idea. As you do better, the game gets more difficult. As you do work, the game gets easier. It very naturally slots into a difficulty level that can suck you in for hours. (It is probably a good thing nobody has really studied how to make an addictive game deliberately, excepting maybe the MMORPG people although I still that that's accidental; it would probably be surprisingly easy to make a truly addictive game if you tried.) I played this just a couple of years ago and it was even in the PS2 era capable of being quite addicting, because the game never ended.
Follow the link; there is a funny story on the bottom about the accidental combination of some Intellivision features and limitations, a scoring contest for money, and the fact that it's essentially impossible to lose a game of Astrosmash even for a complete novice.
It would seem to me that you're unlikely to find an essay online that you can plagerize for an industry-sponsered project that is also under non-disclosure. Besides, if your industry-sponsered projects are anything like my industry-sponsered-like projects I did in school, there aren't a whole lot of "essays" involved that require grading.
No, not really. They are assigning value to the work being original, but they still are not about to create a Compendium of the Best Student Essays Every and sell it in every Barnes and Noble for $19.95 plus tax.
(To the extent that there really are such compendiums, they are by far the exception and not the rule; considered over the set of all essays submitted for grading we're talking odd-of-winning-lottery huge.)
As far as the law is concerned, the value of the student essay is what the students can get for them for being (re)published. Copyright law doesn't care about sentimental value, at least not directly (it has the side effect of allowing authors to control works for sentimental reasons, but that is not the purpose), and it doesn't care about the value of the work in terms of evaluating the student's skills. Proof: If the student tried to make using the work to grade him conditional on the grade being a good one, otherwise he'll sue you for a copyright violation by using the work in an unapproved manner, they'd be laughed out of court. Copyright law has no provisions for that sort of "value".
Use of the anti-cheating service does nothing to affect the value of the student essays, which was $0 before being submitted, and $0 after being submitted.
Wal-Mart is the ultimate symbol of what is wrong with the world today: TOO MANY MIDDLE MEN WHO DO NOTHING IN TERMS OF ORIGINAL PRODUCTION.
Wrong. They centralize a lot of products into one place so you don't need to travel to the Nabisco store and the Keebler store and the M&M Mars store and the Pepsi store and the Coke store and the Nike store and the Sony store and the Nintendo store and the Pioneer store and the... clearly this could go on for quite a while.
They are also able to lower costs by shipping en masse to this facility rather than shipping to a bajillion homes directly or a lot of separate stores, and there's other benefits in centralization that reflect in the costs, both to them and to you.
These benefits are not unique to Wal-Mart, which is, after all, why they are neither the first nor last retail chain. They've merely been the most successful.
Retail stores add plenty of value for the consumer. Do-nothing middlement would be the ones between Wal-Mart and the relevant factories, and I'd lay money the number of those has been undergoing a dramatic decrease in the past decade.
Given how screwed your understanding of business is in the first twenty or so words, I'm not even going to begin to try to take apart the rest of your message. I merely invite you to put your clearly awesome business skills to the test someday.
I can say it, but it's more of a gesture, really. You look your conversation partner (or whomever you're responding to) right in the eye, you inhale loudly, you lazily point your finger at them, and you exhale loudly and cut it off sharply, like you were going to say something. (You do those things in order, not all at once.)
Used sparingly it's good for a laugh every time it's even remotely appropriate.
Whatever the reason as I get older I am now totally depended on Opera's excellent zoom function.
The Mozilla browsers have the ability to set a "Minimum Font Size", which I use. I wouldn't be surprised that Opera has something similar.
I have young-ish eyes (not perfect but near vision is not where I have my problems), but just because I can read rather small fonts doesn't mean I want to.
It does tend to mess some sites up, but usually it's no loss. (For example, the much-linked-by-Slashdat "Escapist" gaming magazine is completely unreadable, but "obviously unreadable due to typographic reasons" is still an improvement over "subtly unreadable due to excessive pretension".)
Properly-created statistics never lie. They just tell useless truths, and then even if you're competent to judge the value of a statistic, it's extremely rare to be told the full statistic.
(That is, "70% of murderers hate their mothers" is not useful unless you know the definition of "murderer", the definition of "hate", even the definition of "mother" (would a step-mother who raised the murderer since he was two be a "mother"?), and how they were sampled. Even in this simple example, you can see why statistics are rarely useful when reported in the news, and this is a useless, contrived example; the real world is far more complicated.)
soulless internet replacing good ol' natural hobbies.
In your zeal to dismiss the story, you missed the point. It's not about the Internet "replacing" natural hobbies, it's about the ubiquitous and automated surveillance enabled by pervasive networking (not really what you're thinking of as "the Internet") destroying natural hobbies.
My personal phrase for it is inhuman justice. I wrote that at least four years ago and it hasn't gotten any less true. Bruce here applies it particularly to teenagers, but you could take Bruce's implicit universe and write an equally angsty story about any number of adults.
I'd even be fine with starting Firefox when Windows loads, keeping the executable in memory.
There is a folder in your Start Menu labelled "Startup" (or something similar). Drag a copy of the Firefox shortcut into that folder. It will now load when windows loads. Don't close it.
If you're worried about taskbar pollution... well, you're using the wrong OS. (Or the wrong window manager, anyhow, but my experience is that certain basic assumptions about how Windows works are so deeply embedded into the Windows environment that alternate shells are usually pretty unsatisfactory.)
You know, you can get your internet license revoked for refusing to take an post(er) and oppose it at all costs, regardless of what positions that forces you to take.
Kudos. (No sarcasm. People could stand to be positive more often on the internet.)
We won't need a lot of systems to know if the controller is no fun; heck, ten shipped right now to the right people would do the trick.
The word "abject" wasn't tossed in to my phrase "abject failure" to show my vocabulary; it's an essential part of my point. Dreamcast-failure takes months or years to show. Virtual-boy failure, another abject failure, takes days for the hype to go from stellar to hellish, once people actually get their hands on the system for real and the hype fades like morning mist in the light of day.
I think we'll know whether it's an abject failure pretty quickly, and it's probably not even worth worrying about this close to release.
Just wait for the reviews about two weeks after the Wii has been released to the reviewers, after the novelty has had time to wear off and there's a better sense of whether the games are actually fun, or if the controller is just a useless gimmick.
Right now, probably nobody really knows. The game devs and their testers are too close to the game to know whether it is any actual fun, and almost all of our reviewers have at most a few hours experience, all in the same day.
I think we'll only know it's an abject failure if the controller simply becomes tiresome, or hard to use, or to sum it up "no fun" with real use.
Otherwise, I'd expect the first Wii generation to look like the first DS generation, for the same basic reasons, and again for the same reasons, if you tried to determine the success of the DS based on that first generation you'd have been way off.
Anyhow, of all the times to be worrying about whether the Wii is going to fail, this is really the silliest, when we're this close to release. Just wait and see.
Well, if the definition of "cunning linguist" includes the likes of folks like [K]arl Rove, then yes. It should come as no surprise that anyone who can define the terms of a discussion, controls the discussion.
Karl's really the repudiation of this semi-myth; he learned it from the Democrats, who learned it from the English professors, who got it from philosophers. (I'm not intending this as a political slam on the Democrats. Everybody tries to control the debate in every way they can think of, and that's not even limited to politicians. In a way, kudos to the Dems for realizing they could use it first.)
Karl proves you really can't control the debate that way, because as easily as you define the terms, somebody else can define some other terms right back at you.
The most recent interesting example I've seen comes from the right (and I give you this one even though I basically agree with the premise): "Gun control" sounds like a positive thing, how can you not want guns "controlled"? Now the new term gaining currency in response is "victim disarmament", building on the idea that only law-abiding people turn in their guns and only law-abiding people get disarmed by gun laws. I'm pretty sure that if that term manages to enter the public debate it's going to have a significant effect.
Orwell was semi-wrong, you can't control thoughts by controlling language, because language shifts, and if you make thoughts "unexpressable", the language will be strongly impelled to shift in exactly such a way that those thoughts are expressable; that's the whole point of language. (Which is why trying to outlaw racial slurs is basically pointless; outlaw the current crop and you'll just get a new generation, if the desire to express racial slurs remains.)
I'm surprised you didn't quote the second definition of "genuine" from Dictionary.com:... Inasmuch as pirated copies of Windows are fraudulent copies, they are NOT genuine.
So, your argument is, if a word has two dictionary definitions, and the way the word is used matches one, but not the other, the word is unacceptable.
This is an incredibly bad argument made in bad faith.. Your entire post, this post, and nearly every written and oral communication ever, fail that standard. You pre-ordained your conclusion and bent your argument to fit.
What's really scary is nobody seems to have called you on this point yet, and insisted on trying to debate your non-point.
My wife wanted to get a DS (w00t!) just for Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, which she played at a friends briefly.
She initially liked Brain Age better, as did I, but Big Brain Academy has aged better.
It feels less stupid. Brain Age is true to its goal of trying to keep your brain alert, but many of the challenges only make sense in that context. If you're not in to things where the computer just sits there and watches you do it, like making you draw a picture but being completely unable to grade it, you won't like it as well. In Big Brain Academy everything is actually evaluated.
Also, in Big Brain Academy, while we like some challenges more than others, we pretty much like them all. Leave it to a psychologist to decide to write a test that uses the same parts of the brain as the Stroop test, and actually implements... the Stroop color test directly. Look, when we say games "test reaction time", we don't do it by having every "game" consist of pressing the button as quickly as possible when the light goes on. We have a game where reaction time is smoothly integrated into the rest of the game. Surely we could have done something Stroop-like, without being basically a video-game transcription of a rather dull psychological test.
I don't regret getting Brain Age because some of its tests are valuable. I intend to work with the word list memorization one more, for instance. But I plan on using the cheat code to allow myself to pick it deliberately and skip the Stroop testing.
"In conclusion", while Brain Age had the slicker initial package, Big Brain Academy has much better long-term appeal.
His science is far from "stellar". Often, it's quite poor.
"Science" here has two basic meanings.
What is science? The distinguishing characteristic is that it comes as close as possible to the ideal of "gather data - hypothesize - test hypothesis" feedback loop as possible. There are some additional useful criteria, like using controls, etc., but the feedback loop is the basic element of science.
By this criteria, this is nearly the most scientific show on television, and they've gotten better in the past couple of seasons too. For actually showing the scientific process, I can forgive much.
(The process may not always be perfect, but news flash: If you think every peer-reviewed study has perfect, impeccable controls and rock-solid statistics and complete coverage of the relevant topics, you're on crack. Real experiments often look uncomfortably like a Mythbusters production. No fair holding Mythbusters to semi-mythical ideals when "real" scientists generally don't make it either.)
The other aspect of science is the large body of knowledge and experience that has been built up by the human race by the repeated application of that feedback loop. Sometimes they do OK, sometimes they do poorly; the farther they stray from application of mechanical principles, the worse they tend to do. (On the other hand, they sometimes surprise me; IIRC, they pointed out that sharp pointy things attract lightning better than flat things in one of the lightning episodes, which is something I only covered in calc-based electromagnetism in college and I daresay most people have never been exposed to.)
Yes, they aren't perfect in this department. However, I'm not sure it's possible for them to be perfect. First, I've seen a lot of so-called criticisms that are more wrong than the show is, so for those people even if the show actually improved, they'll believe it's getting worse. Second, by its very nature, it covers an extremely large array of topics, and you're just not going to be able to put together a team of experts in chemistry (all kinds), physics (any kind you'd encounter in normal life), psychology (all kinds), history (all kinds, including the actual building of historical devices), and random misc. (all kinds), and still be able to afford to put it on TV.
Personally, I think they're better than nothing, and doing a decent job, all things considered.
Could they be better in theory? Certainly! Could you get much better in practice? That's much less clear. It's not fair to compare Mythbusters to the show that exists in your head that has an infinite budget and unlimited access to the best experts of all kinds. That's not an alternative.
Not only that, but as AI grows it will be necessary to treat any information processing system at least as if it has the capacity for human experience.
In my essay I explicitly disclaim, albeit in a footnote, the issue of AI. That's not something we're ready to argue about yet, any more than an 19th century civil libertarian would really have been able to reasonably debate airline security procedures.
(Note that it's not because they have no clue, but because they don't have enough of one. It would take one hell of a prescient 19th century philosopher to realize that gigantic commercial airliners which didn't exist could crash into gigantic buildings which didn't exist, and kill thousands of people at one crack, and reasonably incorporate that into their opinions. That's where we are with AI and ethics right now.)
Also, are individual experiences unique or once someone experiences some media can they experience it again in the future as if it's equivalent to the first time, or is that dependant on some contract? If it's dependant, what do you do about the copy of the information in their brain?
Barring the implications of direct mind-to-mind transfer, I actually address that.
Moreover, just in general, you seem to be reflexively taking a contrary position, even as you eventually talk yourself into total agreement with me. My position is that it doesn't matter if you buy a CD, download an MP3 (over any of a bazillion distinct ways of communicating an MP3 from one machine to another), or have a friend play a CD while you record it with your mic; they all amount to the same thing, and trying to legally slice whether or not "infringement" takes place based on the copying mechanism is doomed to failure. The fact that this has other implications is not lost on me; the page I linked to explicitly calls out "two friends watching a DVD" vs. "one friend giving a copy of the DVD to his friend which he watches once" as an example of a situation that already exists where my model says the same thing happened, but the current legal model is that one was legal and one was not.
What are the limits on the owner's right to use a machine to decode their copy of the work? For instance, it is apparently perfectly legal for CD players to read ahead several seconds or even minutes and store a copy of the CD data in memory so that CD player skips will not impact playback. In this case, the owner seems to have the right to make a copy of the work for personal use, but where does this right come from?
Personally, I think that this is basically a fundamental weakness in the law and it can not be redressed, as the entire foundation of trying to work with "copies" is fatally flawed.
In fact, that fundamental problem came up in question #7 as well.
That's why when I tried to re-work communication laws (including copyright), I developed the idea of a human-experinced message, separate from the "concrete parts" that make up a message, to resolve this.
In summation, I assert that a computer shouldn't have any legal or ethical standing anyhow, so who cares how many copies a computer makes of something? What matters is human experience. Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
(Note that this is really necessary anyhow; suppose you download something claiming to be public domain, yet you discover it's actually last year's top movie, and delete it immediately upon discovering that. You really shouldn't be charged with piracy. Under the law today, you are. The fact that it can be difficult to determine whether something was actually consumed is honestly the legal system's problem; it seems to be able to reasonably determine "intent" in other contexts.)
So, what exactly would qualify as innovation, anyhow?
If you game the definition to something like "If anybody anywhere ever thought of it before it was deployed, it's not innovative", then you're going to live a very uninnovative life. Which is fine, but such a definition of "innovation" that nothing can meet isn't very useful.
I suppose there aren't any innovating programming languages since LISP since proper LISP macros could emulate pretty much any of them. A consistent definition of "innovative", but not a useful one.
It's certainly not something they put on the degree itself, but it sounds like what the GGP got, as well as the sibling post to yours.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, other than the name. Computer science is about decidability and algorithmic efficiency (without regard to any particular machine) and complexity and some other thing like that that are all pretty much about math more than real machines. A Computer Scientist could in theory have an entire career without ever uttering the word "API". And an excellent, award-winning Computer Scientist can be one of the worst coders you'll ever lay eyes on.
We really ought to have a "software engineering" degree that truly, honestly focuses just on programming. Such a degree probably still ought to talk about regexs and the theory behind them, but it wouldn't get into it as much as my program did. I think the concern is that nobody would be interested in Computer Science after that.
My computer science degree taught me *nothing* about regular expressions. In fact, I would expect that any quality computer science degree wouldn't teach you about RE. Here's why: A good computer science degree teaches you one language, then it teaches you the concepts behind programming -- algorithim analysis, discrete math, data structures, fundamentals of programming on modern operating systems (threads, semaphores, etc), and once you learn all of the fundamentals, you are expected to be able to learn any programming language virtually at will.
Very wrong, albeit with qualifications.
Any competent Computer Science course should contain a discussion of the Chomsky Language Hierarchy. If you hold a computer science degree and that page is gibberish to you, you have been robbed. (Or at least, it should be familiar gibberish, for those who didn't like that course.)
Regular Expressions come up in that course because the languages they are capable of describing are provably isomorphic to the languages that can be recognized by a Finite State Automaton, another word you ought to know if you have a computer science degree.
The "qualifications" mentioned before is that the Regular Expressions in this case are a very limited, precisely-specified language that forms only the barest shell of the Regular Expressions that the book in question discusses. (The mathematical definition is practically useless, because very simple things like "i{0,50}" translate into a horrific mathematical RE, but most RE features can so be translated and many homework problems consist of doing just that, just to prove it can be done.) Nevertheless, it is important to understand these limitations so you don't press Regular Expressions to do something they can't really do, like entirely parse Context-Free or Context-Sensitive languages, like most programming languages (at least mostly) are.
(It is true that some extensions, especially those found in perl, push the regular expression into Context-free or Context-sensitive territory when used correctly, but generally speaking, you're really asking for one disaster of a Regular Expression. You're better off using a parser. Perl 6 has some interesting innovations on this front, essentially building on their regular expression support to upgrade the language to built-in parser support, presumably at least the context-free level, perhaps more. I don't know.)
It is true that a Programmer degree may not cover regular expressions, but you absolutely should have at least seen the mathematical basis for a Regular Expression in your Computer Science course. At Michigan State University where I got my education, it is, IIRC, in the sophmore course on the theory track.
The language hierarchy is one of the absolute fundamentals of computer science.
The extremes of both parties trend totalitarian, because they are sure they are so right that it's OK for them to impose their views. It is a grave error to assume that only "your opposition" wants total control.
This being Slashdot and mostly trending left, a warning that the prime mover in 1984 was actually Socialism is worth issuing. I'd be equally happy to point out that it applies to the far right wing as well if somebody tried to stuff that book down a leftist's throat.
You want to see the closest thing to a thought-control state in the US, go to a major university.
Place it in context. Cold War, McCarthyism... get the connection.
True enough, but it's worth pointing out on this forum that 1984 was a warning against socialism, not McCarthyism. Ingsoc is "English Socialism".
(It's also worth pointing out that while McCarthy may have been overzealous, he was largely right, as declassified KGB records have shown; there were Communist operatives everywhere doing what damage they could, much of which we're still sufferring from. Research it.)
Slashdot Mirror
From my reading, the "innovation" is supposed to come in tuning the game's difficulty automatically to the user's performance, not merely the idea that a game should be between "frustrating" and "boring".
This can be a good idea, but it's worth pointing out it's not new at all. I recently started in on a task that I've had planned for a while working on the same basic idea, only applied to a learning program (can't even call it a "game"): Dynamically deciding which new concepts to introduce when, depending on how well and how quickly the user has mastered the previous concepts. The only odd thing is how few "learning" programs use this idea. It's not a new one.
In gaming, the idea is older than many Slashdot posters. While I wouldn't be surprised somebody can pull out an Atari 2600 game that uses the same principles, I can name the Intellivision game, Astrosmash as using the same basic idea. As you do better, the game gets more difficult. As you do work, the game gets easier. It very naturally slots into a difficulty level that can suck you in for hours. (It is probably a good thing nobody has really studied how to make an addictive game deliberately, excepting maybe the MMORPG people although I still that that's accidental; it would probably be surprisingly easy to make a truly addictive game if you tried.) I played this just a couple of years ago and it was even in the PS2 era capable of being quite addicting, because the game never ended.
Follow the link; there is a funny story on the bottom about the accidental combination of some Intellivision features and limitations, a scoring contest for money, and the fact that it's essentially impossible to lose a game of Astrosmash even for a complete novice.
It would seem to me that you're unlikely to find an essay online that you can plagerize for an industry-sponsered project that is also under non-disclosure. Besides, if your industry-sponsered projects are anything like my industry-sponsered-like projects I did in school, there aren't a whole lot of "essays" involved that require grading.
(To the extent that there really are such compendiums, they are by far the exception and not the rule; considered over the set of all essays submitted for grading we're talking odd-of-winning-lottery huge.)
As far as the law is concerned, the value of the student essay is what the students can get for them for being (re)published. Copyright law doesn't care about sentimental value, at least not directly (it has the side effect of allowing authors to control works for sentimental reasons, but that is not the purpose), and it doesn't care about the value of the work in terms of evaluating the student's skills. Proof: If the student tried to make using the work to grade him conditional on the grade being a good one, otherwise he'll sue you for a copyright violation by using the work in an unapproved manner, they'd be laughed out of court. Copyright law has no provisions for that sort of "value".
Use of the anti-cheating service does nothing to affect the value of the student essays, which was $0 before being submitted, and $0 after being submitted.
They are also able to lower costs by shipping en masse to this facility rather than shipping to a bajillion homes directly or a lot of separate stores, and there's other benefits in centralization that reflect in the costs, both to them and to you.
These benefits are not unique to Wal-Mart, which is, after all, why they are neither the first nor last retail chain. They've merely been the most successful.
Retail stores add plenty of value for the consumer. Do-nothing middlement would be the ones between Wal-Mart and the relevant factories, and I'd lay money the number of those has been undergoing a dramatic decrease in the past decade.
Given how screwed your understanding of business is in the first twenty or so words, I'm not even going to begin to try to take apart the rest of your message. I merely invite you to put your clearly awesome business skills to the test someday.
I can say it, but it's more of a gesture, really. You look your conversation partner (or whomever you're responding to) right in the eye, you inhale loudly, you lazily point your finger at them, and you exhale loudly and cut it off sharply, like you were going to say something. (You do those things in order, not all at once.)
Used sparingly it's good for a laugh every time it's even remotely appropriate.
I have young-ish eyes (not perfect but near vision is not where I have my problems), but just because I can read rather small fonts doesn't mean I want to.
It does tend to mess some sites up, but usually it's no loss. (For example, the much-linked-by-Slashdat "Escapist" gaming magazine is completely unreadable, but "obviously unreadable due to typographic reasons" is still an improvement over "subtly unreadable due to excessive pretension".)
Properly-created statistics never lie. They just tell useless truths, and then even if you're competent to judge the value of a statistic, it's extremely rare to be told the full statistic.
(That is, "70% of murderers hate their mothers" is not useful unless you know the definition of "murderer", the definition of "hate", even the definition of "mother" (would a step-mother who raised the murderer since he was two be a "mother"?), and how they were sampled. Even in this simple example, you can see why statistics are rarely useful when reported in the news, and this is a useless, contrived example; the real world is far more complicated.)
My personal phrase for it is inhuman justice. I wrote that at least four years ago and it hasn't gotten any less true. Bruce here applies it particularly to teenagers, but you could take Bruce's implicit universe and write an equally angsty story about any number of adults.
If you're worried about taskbar pollution... well, you're using the wrong OS. (Or the wrong window manager, anyhow, but my experience is that certain basic assumptions about how Windows works are so deeply embedded into the Windows environment that alternate shells are usually pretty unsatisfactory.)
You know, you can get your internet license revoked for refusing to take an post(er) and oppose it at all costs, regardless of what positions that forces you to take.
Kudos. (No sarcasm. People could stand to be positive more often on the internet.)
We won't need a lot of systems to know if the controller is no fun; heck, ten shipped right now to the right people would do the trick.
The word "abject" wasn't tossed in to my phrase "abject failure" to show my vocabulary; it's an essential part of my point. Dreamcast-failure takes months or years to show. Virtual-boy failure, another abject failure, takes days for the hype to go from stellar to hellish, once people actually get their hands on the system for real and the hype fades like morning mist in the light of day.
I think we'll know whether it's an abject failure pretty quickly, and it's probably not even worth worrying about this close to release.
Just wait for the reviews about two weeks after the Wii has been released to the reviewers, after the novelty has had time to wear off and there's a better sense of whether the games are actually fun, or if the controller is just a useless gimmick.
Right now, probably nobody really knows. The game devs and their testers are too close to the game to know whether it is any actual fun, and almost all of our reviewers have at most a few hours experience, all in the same day.
I think we'll only know it's an abject failure if the controller simply becomes tiresome, or hard to use, or to sum it up "no fun" with real use.
Otherwise, I'd expect the first Wii generation to look like the first DS generation, for the same basic reasons, and again for the same reasons, if you tried to determine the success of the DS based on that first generation you'd have been way off.
Anyhow, of all the times to be worrying about whether the Wii is going to fail, this is really the silliest, when we're this close to release. Just wait and see.
Karl proves you really can't control the debate that way, because as easily as you define the terms, somebody else can define some other terms right back at you.
The most recent interesting example I've seen comes from the right (and I give you this one even though I basically agree with the premise): "Gun control" sounds like a positive thing, how can you not want guns "controlled"? Now the new term gaining currency in response is "victim disarmament", building on the idea that only law-abiding people turn in their guns and only law-abiding people get disarmed by gun laws. I'm pretty sure that if that term manages to enter the public debate it's going to have a significant effect.
Orwell was semi-wrong, you can't control thoughts by controlling language, because language shifts, and if you make thoughts "unexpressable", the language will be strongly impelled to shift in exactly such a way that those thoughts are expressable; that's the whole point of language. (Which is why trying to outlaw racial slurs is basically pointless; outlaw the current crop and you'll just get a new generation, if the desire to express racial slurs remains.)
This is an incredibly bad argument made in bad faith.. Your entire post, this post, and nearly every written and oral communication ever, fail that standard. You pre-ordained your conclusion and bent your argument to fit.
What's really scary is nobody seems to have called you on this point yet, and insisted on trying to debate your non-point.
My wife wanted to get a DS (w00t!) just for Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, which she played at a friends briefly.
She initially liked Brain Age better, as did I, but Big Brain Academy has aged better.
It feels less stupid. Brain Age is true to its goal of trying to keep your brain alert, but many of the challenges only make sense in that context. If you're not in to things where the computer just sits there and watches you do it, like making you draw a picture but being completely unable to grade it, you won't like it as well. In Big Brain Academy everything is actually evaluated.
Also, in Big Brain Academy, while we like some challenges more than others, we pretty much like them all. Leave it to a psychologist to decide to write a test that uses the same parts of the brain as the Stroop test, and actually implements... the Stroop color test directly. Look, when we say games "test reaction time", we don't do it by having every "game" consist of pressing the button as quickly as possible when the light goes on. We have a game where reaction time is smoothly integrated into the rest of the game. Surely we could have done something Stroop-like, without being basically a video-game transcription of a rather dull psychological test.
I don't regret getting Brain Age because some of its tests are valuable. I intend to work with the word list memorization one more, for instance. But I plan on using the cheat code to allow myself to pick it deliberately and skip the Stroop testing.
"In conclusion", while Brain Age had the slicker initial package, Big Brain Academy has much better long-term appeal.
What is science? The distinguishing characteristic is that it comes as close as possible to the ideal of "gather data - hypothesize - test hypothesis" feedback loop as possible. There are some additional useful criteria, like using controls, etc., but the feedback loop is the basic element of science.
By this criteria, this is nearly the most scientific show on television, and they've gotten better in the past couple of seasons too. For actually showing the scientific process, I can forgive much.
(The process may not always be perfect, but news flash: If you think every peer-reviewed study has perfect, impeccable controls and rock-solid statistics and complete coverage of the relevant topics, you're on crack. Real experiments often look uncomfortably like a Mythbusters production. No fair holding Mythbusters to semi-mythical ideals when "real" scientists generally don't make it either.)
The other aspect of science is the large body of knowledge and experience that has been built up by the human race by the repeated application of that feedback loop. Sometimes they do OK, sometimes they do poorly; the farther they stray from application of mechanical principles, the worse they tend to do. (On the other hand, they sometimes surprise me; IIRC, they pointed out that sharp pointy things attract lightning better than flat things in one of the lightning episodes, which is something I only covered in calc-based electromagnetism in college and I daresay most people have never been exposed to.)
Yes, they aren't perfect in this department. However, I'm not sure it's possible for them to be perfect. First, I've seen a lot of so-called criticisms that are more wrong than the show is, so for those people even if the show actually improved, they'll believe it's getting worse. Second, by its very nature, it covers an extremely large array of topics, and you're just not going to be able to put together a team of experts in chemistry (all kinds), physics (any kind you'd encounter in normal life), psychology (all kinds), history (all kinds, including the actual building of historical devices), and random misc. (all kinds), and still be able to afford to put it on TV.
Personally, I think they're better than nothing, and doing a decent job, all things considered.
Could they be better in theory? Certainly! Could you get much better in practice? That's much less clear. It's not fair to compare Mythbusters to the show that exists in your head that has an infinite budget and unlimited access to the best experts of all kinds. That's not an alternative.
(Note that it's not because they have no clue, but because they don't have enough of one. It would take one hell of a prescient 19th century philosopher to realize that gigantic commercial airliners which didn't exist could crash into gigantic buildings which didn't exist, and kill thousands of people at one crack, and reasonably incorporate that into their opinions. That's where we are with AI and ethics right now.)
Barring the implications of direct mind-to-mind transfer, I actually address that.
Moreover, just in general, you seem to be reflexively taking a contrary position, even as you eventually talk yourself into total agreement with me. My position is that it doesn't matter if you buy a CD, download an MP3 (over any of a bazillion distinct ways of communicating an MP3 from one machine to another), or have a friend play a CD while you record it with your mic; they all amount to the same thing, and trying to legally slice whether or not "infringement" takes place based on the copying mechanism is doomed to failure. The fact that this has other implications is not lost on me; the page I linked to explicitly calls out "two friends watching a DVD" vs. "one friend giving a copy of the DVD to his friend which he watches once" as an example of a situation that already exists where my model says the same thing happened, but the current legal model is that one was legal and one was not.
In fact, that fundamental problem came up in question #7 as well.
That's why when I tried to re-work communication laws (including copyright), I developed the idea of a human-experinced message, separate from the "concrete parts" that make up a message, to resolve this.
In summation, I assert that a computer shouldn't have any legal or ethical standing anyhow, so who cares how many copies a computer makes of something? What matters is human experience. Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
(Note that this is really necessary anyhow; suppose you download something claiming to be public domain, yet you discover it's actually last year's top movie, and delete it immediately upon discovering that. You really shouldn't be charged with piracy. Under the law today, you are. The fact that it can be difficult to determine whether something was actually consumed is honestly the legal system's problem; it seems to be able to reasonably determine "intent" in other contexts.)
Jerf throws a Golden Apple MacBook Pro into the discussion inscribed, "For the nerdiest".
Hail Discordia!
So, what exactly would qualify as innovation, anyhow?
If you game the definition to something like "If anybody anywhere ever thought of it before it was deployed, it's not innovative", then you're going to live a very uninnovative life. Which is fine, but such a definition of "innovation" that nothing can meet isn't very useful.
I suppose there aren't any innovating programming languages since LISP since proper LISP macros could emulate pretty much any of them. A consistent definition of "innovative", but not a useful one.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, other than the name. Computer science is about decidability and algorithmic efficiency (without regard to any particular machine) and complexity and some other thing like that that are all pretty much about math more than real machines. A Computer Scientist could in theory have an entire career without ever uttering the word "API". And an excellent, award-winning Computer Scientist can be one of the worst coders you'll ever lay eyes on.
We really ought to have a "software engineering" degree that truly, honestly focuses just on programming. Such a degree probably still ought to talk about regexs and the theory behind them, but it wouldn't get into it as much as my program did. I think the concern is that nobody would be interested in Computer Science after that.
Any competent Computer Science course should contain a discussion of the Chomsky Language Hierarchy. If you hold a computer science degree and that page is gibberish to you, you have been robbed. (Or at least, it should be familiar gibberish, for those who didn't like that course.)
Regular Expressions come up in that course because the languages they are capable of describing are provably isomorphic to the languages that can be recognized by a Finite State Automaton, another word you ought to know if you have a computer science degree.
The "qualifications" mentioned before is that the Regular Expressions in this case are a very limited, precisely-specified language that forms only the barest shell of the Regular Expressions that the book in question discusses. (The mathematical definition is practically useless, because very simple things like "i{0,50}" translate into a horrific mathematical RE, but most RE features can so be translated and many homework problems consist of doing just that, just to prove it can be done.) Nevertheless, it is important to understand these limitations so you don't press Regular Expressions to do something they can't really do, like entirely parse Context-Free or Context-Sensitive languages, like most programming languages (at least mostly) are.
(It is true that some extensions, especially those found in perl, push the regular expression into Context-free or Context-sensitive territory when used correctly, but generally speaking, you're really asking for one disaster of a Regular Expression. You're better off using a parser. Perl 6 has some interesting innovations on this front, essentially building on their regular expression support to upgrade the language to built-in parser support, presumably at least the context-free level, perhaps more. I don't know.)
It is true that a Programmer degree may not cover regular expressions, but you absolutely should have at least seen the mathematical basis for a Regular Expression in your Computer Science course. At Michigan State University where I got my education, it is, IIRC, in the sophmore course on the theory track.
The language hierarchy is one of the absolute fundamentals of computer science.
I disagree completely that it's mostly wrong.
The extremes of both parties trend totalitarian, because they are sure they are so right that it's OK for them to impose their views. It is a grave error to assume that only "your opposition" wants total control.
This being Slashdot and mostly trending left, a warning that the prime mover in 1984 was actually Socialism is worth issuing. I'd be equally happy to point out that it applies to the far right wing as well if somebody tried to stuff that book down a leftist's throat.
You want to see the closest thing to a thought-control state in the US, go to a major university.
(It's also worth pointing out that while McCarthy may have been overzealous, he was largely right, as declassified KGB records have shown; there were Communist operatives everywhere doing what damage they could, much of which we're still sufferring from. Research it.)