I know the difference between patents and copyright.
The point is that they are both in play in software, and the combination of the two are very unbalanced. I am not aware of any other arena where you must worry both about violating patents and copyright, or, put another way, where a given object can enjoy both copyright and patent protection. It's not that copyright and patent offers the same protections, it's that they are functioning on the same object.
(I say "I am not aware of" because there may be a few, but even if there are I don't expect them to be as important as software.)
The one interface not allowed for a First Person shooter is, you know, a gun-like interface?
Keyboard and mouse interface: Yup, it's a shooter!
Gamepad interface: Yup, it's a shooter!
Gun interface: OMGWTFBBQ, it's Duck hunt!
What kind of stupid fanboy do you have to be to make that kind of argument?
Actually, there is a difference: Copyright
on
Paul Graham on Patents
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, there is a good distinction you can draw between software patents and conventional patents that is strong enough that you can't automatically infer that being against software patents means you are against all patents: Software patents are the only things I know of where the patented objects are also covered under copyright law.
I go more into depth about this elsewhere, but the short answer is that we shouldn't be surprised that patents, balanced for one type of use, and copyrights, balanced for another, make no sense when both are covering the same thing, since they were never designed to do that.
Obviousness is a real problem too, of course, but that's more a practical problem, one that could be corrected by more aggressive denials by the PTO. This is a fundamental conflict.
Heh, you've attracted a lot of replies and nobody's yet hit the right answer.
Propose your choice of terraforming technique. Convert one chemical into another, physically remove the atmosphere, don't care which you choose, really.
Now, compute the energy requirements of your terraforming action.
Then you shall achieve enlightenment.
In short, terraforming Mars for a geologically brief period of time is on the tantalizing edge of feasibility, because a lot of it would involve slightly nudging comets and such to hit Mars. That's a net gravitational energy reduction, and we might be able to manage that. Even so, it might not work; I think it far more likely you'd have to build enclosed settlements, or perhaps even more likely, modify life forms to live on Mars basically as it is, possibly with some resources augmented by the aforementioned comets. But to get from Venus as it is, to a Venus we could walk on, would take an astronomical amount of energy no matter how you slice it. (A rather small "astronomical" amount of energy as such things go, but "astronomical" nonetheless.) It's one of those things that by the time we can do it, we'll probably have better uses for that sort of energy.
By the way, I'm actually-factually talking about energy states, in the technical thermodynamic sense. It's not a matter of waiting for "science" to wave a magic wand; any 'science' that can re-write the laws of thermodynamics is well beyond anything we can speculate about. Conservation laws are about the strongest physics results we have.
(Note this is a reply to someone that is probably below the reader's threshhold.)
If I tell you that for every canybar sold I earn $0.25 and you go and fill a bag with 10 candybars and I charge you $50 you're going to ask me what's going on. Well of course my rates change.
Your argument is incoherent. If you assume that from a claimed profit margin of $.25, that I can derive anything on the final cost, that's your error, not mine. In fact, due to the wonders of advertising the cost to me may be lower than your profit.
(For reference, I recall seeing that the average profit margin in the Fortune 500 is on the order of something like 5%, and if I'm screwing up either way, that's probably high. For a $.25 profit, that's a cost to the consumer of $5. So ironically, all else being equal and assuming you were a reasonably efficient company in a competitive market, your "surprising" price is close to the correct guess!)
I actually thought I understood what you were getting at, but the more I read your post the less I understood. I think the statistics may be wrong, but I think what you think is "misleading" is actually your own fuzzy thinking on the topic.
Your arguments are more obviously ludicrous than the ones in the article. Yours are absurd on their face, whereas the ones in the article can be true, but I would want to have more substantiation than just this one person's word.
For example, if 8 million Americans are out of work, we should outsource 1 million American jobs.
You are assuming linearity where there is not even a faint trace of it. If I have the capability to produce 1000 cars, and I sell 900 of them, that does not mean that if I double my capacity, I will sell 1800 of them. That is to say, the fact that I today have a 90% sale rate means nothing, in terms of trying to predict what would happen if I change my sale rate. Similarly, the claim that 8 jobs are created for every outsourced job only holds true under current conditions (if any). If you force the outsourcing of jobs, odds are that since almost by definition that will be less economically efficient, that ration will drop. It's not written in stone.
You are also assuming that you can artificially just jack up the supply of jobs with no consequences, also patently false. Jobs are an economy, and there is demand (work to be done and the money to pay for it) and supply (workers willing to do the work). Neither side of that equation can be magically changed without affecting the other.
someone should be firing management! If every outsourced job creates 9 new ones, management fails in its cost savings argument. (That is unless of course, the nine new jobs combined actually pay less than the outsourced job -- which may actually be a possibility.)
This is a continuation of failing to view the job market as a market. Jobs are not cost centers alone, as you seem to imply, because if they were, the ideal number of jobs would be "zero". The correct criteria is to compare the in-sourced job's generated value, accounting for the cost of paying the worker, and the outsourced job + the other created job's values, accounting for the cost of paying them. While the pay in the second scenario will almost certainly be higher, the value may be much greater too.
Now note I'm not saying these numbers are correct, I'm just saying you are quite wrong.
By using the same sort of understanding that you are lacking, we can actually show a much greater case that there is something fishy about these numbers. Often in this sort of situation, there is what we call "low-hanging fruit", initial actions you can take which will have great results, and then you eventually get into "diminishing returns". If outsourcing a single job is capable of creating enough value to support the pay of nine new workers, than that strikes me as still being well into the "low-hanging fruit" stage, and people ought to still be aggressively outsourcing as the gains are so obvious and big. However, it is also obvious that outsourcing has either slowed or is starting to slow, and the backlash is well into the "development" stage... and note that's not a legal backlash I'm referring to, but people pointing out it doesn't seem to actually save much money. That's also a stage these sorts of things go through, and that occurs when the low-hanging fruit is basically gone and the new-comers are noticing they aren't getting the promised results.
Thus, I would expect the correct statistic is that you can expect a 1.3x-1.8x improvement for an outsourced job, which is the range where you start questioning the whole thing, although with large variation. ("Large variation" also implies that there will be many people who lose, which would also start to contribute to the backlash.)
To "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp" and other such oxymorons, you can add "mob justice".
News media works on mob justice principles and are unbelievably klutzy with their accusations and witch hunts. I'm not inclined to blame "the American people" because most people have better things to do with their time than dig into exactly which employees are guilty, but the media could have been a bit more careful. But hey, it's not their lives wrecked.
There are a number of projects you can do that are easy, have good payoff, and will teach you a lot.
Consider:
Web content management system. Good returns for modest effort, a gradual introduction to problems with a good ability to fix them, and it's a project you might keep working on for a few years so you get that lived-in experience.
But promise me you won't inflict it on the rest of the world.
There are any number of small games you can write in a reasonable amount of time. Don't try to be too original the first time. You can also learn how subtle UI can be, as with games the difference between "nice technical demo" and "fun game" can literally be in the milliseconds.
Do not attempt a Roguelike from scratch. Pick up Angband and mod it, maybe, but don't start one from scratch. A lot of people make this mistake, but to make any decent Roguelike from scratch requires some algorithms and design experience you don't have yet.
A text editor can be educational too. Again, promise me not to share it.
Look at all the open-source software you use. Pick one to work on that you know, isn't Apache. A lot of open source projects have one or a very small handful of people, and you can both get into them in a reasonable amount of time, and actually contribute.
Once you've got a couple of things under your belt, you'll find all kinds of things to do. But when you're young, it's hard to know what you're even capable of. Any of these projects will be a good start.
Well, I have a hard time with the idea that the only productive thing he can do is remove spyware.:)
But, I suppose if I really break down the economics, at least one of the following is true: 1. He could obtain higher pay elsewhere doing something else, and in an economic sense probably should, or 2. He can not obtain higher pay somewhere else, therefore this is the most valuable thing he can be doing, therefore if the spyware problem went away while he wouldn't necessarily be jobless, he would take a pay cut.
Still, all else being equal and with my understanding of society, the first is more likely than the second. The free market may be the most efficient thing we know for allocating resources (including job skills), but it's far from 100% perfect, for any reasonable definition of perfect efficiency.
You're not directly claiming this, but you might want to read up on the broken window fallacy. If you were not always fixing damage done by others, society could use your skills in a more productive manner.
Setting up to run Vmware simply to surf because you're afraid of spyware is absolutely ridiculous.
You can make a very good case that the exact opposite is true, especially if you're dealing with someone who insists on using Internet Explorer. IE has had a large number of flaws that allow hostile remote websites to do silent installs of arbitrary software. It quite likely still has some. I'm also not prepared to say Firefox doesn't have any, even though I'd expect it to be somewhat better.
So what, you say? You only browse the safe websites? I respond, oh, you mean you absolutely, positively never make a typo in the location bar? The websites you browser are absolutely guaranteed to not be hacked?
Heck, I've accidentally clicked on links in my spam when my touchpad acts up. I use Linux so I'm not too worried, but in Windows, that could have been enough!
It certainly ought to be ridiculous, but if you really examine the facts of the case as they are rather than as they should be, setting up a VM for browsing makes quite a lot of sense in any situation where the user can't be trusted to re-install their OS if necessary. If that includes home use for some family where all the members have better things to do with their time than learn the arcana of Windows, so be it. The only downside is memory consumption and the fact that it makes downloading things for the host system that much harder... something in that scenario I'd be inclined to call a feature anyhow.
Not bad. Not bad at all. Involve Kodos and/or Kang in the love triangles and I daresay you've got the beginning of a good script there.
I think that's probably the way to go. Realize that you jumped the shark ten years ago, and just go for wacky hijinks. Maybe everybody should die in the end, muHAI, why not, with the drama and the pathos and the dying, glaven.
Really, the reason to have a movie, is because the studio makes a lot more money that way.
I kind of figured that goes without saying. I'm talking about the reasons why we would want to go see a movie. You can't just throw a television episode up on the silver screen and hope that people go to see it. Even if they do, that's another huge hunk of reputation you just blew, and Hollywood is rapidly running out.
"Hey, man, we gotta go see that Simpsons movie, or the studios might not recoup their investment!" Let me count the number of times I've heard that... well, maybe once for Serenity.
Done that, several times. As flash-forwards, yes, but story-wise it doesn't matter.
Marge gets pregnant?
Even if you age the kids, family-baby interactions have basically been mined with Maggie.
They move from Springfield?
Also been done, several times, plus every "vacation" episode is basically "The Simpsons Not In Springfield". May not be "permanent" but that's a flexible idea with cartoons.
I actually did try to come up with something before my post; if I came up with a good one I would have posted that instead.
Traditionally, a television series made into a movie is an opportunity to do two things: To tell a Really Big story that just wouldn't fit in one episode, and to spend more money on special effects than you could on one episode.
The second really isn't a problem. But what story is too big for a Simpsons episode? Given the unreality of the series, what premise could carry a movie that shouldn't simply be an episode?
About the only storyline not used several times is the death of one of the major characters (and I mean a Simpson, not Mrs. Flanders). Which would make for a pretty disappointing movie, I think, not to mention some very out-of-character writing in all likelihood. I mean, what are they going to do, have Homer heroically sacrifice himself to save Springfield? (Not to mention they've basically done that a number of times, minus actual death...)
Oh well. It's quite likely that it will be at least average, given the state of movies lately, and what more can you ask for?
Seriously, think about it. The trite answer of "you should sober up" really isn't well supported by that episode. And subsequent episodes have him eventually backsliding and returning to his old ways, though to the best of my knowledge this has never been highlighted, just something that happens in the background. Barney has certainly not been a very hopeful social message.
(I find social messages can often be tricky things. I've lost count of the pacifist races portrayed in science fiction as morally superior; Stargate SG-1 alone has had at least 4. But somehow, the forces of the story always seem to wipe them out, seriously undermining the surface-level "pacifism is superior" message. Stargate's at 2 for 4, with a third currently facing a major threat (and the forth seems to have simply disappeared off-stage since the first season oh-so-many years ago). I've always wondered how much of this is deliberate, or if authors really so rarely notice that their putative social message is directly contradicted by the story itself if they look more closely at it...)
There are plenty of good programmers who dislike the hard sciences and mathematics.
I agree.
But I think you'll be hard-pressed to find great programmers who hold Computer Science (and yes, I'm being more specific) in contempt.
(I also think there's no shortage of people who think they're great and hold Computer Science in contempt.)
(And yes, logically speaking in the absense of hard data on programmer quality and opinions of computer science, it's hard to push this point any further because courtesy of the previous parenthetical we're firmly in the realm of opinion. But it should be put out for consideration, even if it can't be rigorously proven in the context of a Slashdot comment box.)
I can't quite tell where you are from your question; you could be a high-school-aged person getting into programming, or an early college student. I'm assuming that's true, as you probably wouldn't be asking if you were on the verge of graduation from college.
It is true that you need some good mathematical foundations to truly excel. It is also true that those who never realize this rarely make it much past "mediocre", by my admittedly-high standards. However, the math you need to be good at may not be the math you are thinking.
When most people say "math", they're thinking Arithmetic (the manipulation of numbers with few or no "variables"), some Algebra, and maybe Calculus. These maths are nearly useless for day-to-day programming, unless you are dealing with a clear and obvious exception, like game engine programming, writing a CAD program, etc. This is not to say they are completely useless; at the very least they are brain exercise of a calibre hardly attainable anywhere else, and that's nothing to spit at. But in general, this sort of math is not useful to programming, and you can be borderline atrocious at all three of those disciplines and be fine.
What you really need to be good at is "discrete math", which at best gets mentioned in high school cirricula as "sets" and then ignored pretty thoroughly after that. It's still true that what you do in the classroom doesn't bear much resemblence to programming (I've only had to do something even remotely like a proof two or three times in 10 years of programming), but the things they are trying to test you on do matter a lot. Think of it like the exercises you'll do on a basketball team or something; you're not going to do a lot of running straight to half-court and right back again 20 times in a row in a real game, but it's good exercise. And you can still be good at playing basketball even if you don't do the exercises, but you'll be better if you do.
Some examples of things that the discrete math theory will talk about that I find many people are very weak on:
Understanding the "domain" and the "range" of a function, and thus how to manipulate the domain and range of the function, and to verify (at some level) that the complete domain and range are covered. Concrete example: For every function you write in C that takes a pointer, you need to know what happens when a NULL pointer is passed in, 'cause it will be, sooner or later. Maybe you choose not to write code to handle it, but you need to have thought about it and made that choice, not let ignorance or poor thinking make it for you. Failure to do so is a failure to consider the entire domain of the function.
Working boolean expressions in 'if' statements; can you write the logical negation of (A&B)|(C&D)? Considering that's literally a homework problem, I've witnessed several of my co-developers screw that up in practice and then not notice, because the particular cases they tested happened to work right.
On that note, a gut feeling for how treacherous discrete math constructs can be. If you've got an if statement working on 6 true/false values, you really need to be careful that all 64 combinations do what you expect, not just test 5 of them and call it a day.
Understanding data structures, in particular when a tree is called for and when a graph is called for. (It's important to understand list vs. hash and a couple of others, but this is the one I see a lot of people missing a lot more often, and often it's not a matter of slowing the program down but of it being a buggy, fragile piece of junk, in a way a much worse problem.) In my experience, people start with trees, then badly kludge semi-graph-like features on top, breaking the whole system and ending up with something that still has all the complexities of a graph, but all the features of a tree, plus a couple, and usually buggy. They might as well have gone straight for graphs, but they are tricky buggers, which is why people avoid them in the
Yeah, but I'm betting that's more platitude than literal truth. The evidence is that Jedi basically deal with normal "object" size, and even Yoda seemed to need to concentrate to move the X-Wing, frankly belying his own point. (That is, if "size didn't matter" than it should have required no more and no less concentration that a rock; clearly, there was a difference.)
Leaving open the question, why does a telekinetic Jedi who can lift a spaceship need a lightsaber? Why not just use the power of the Force to make unwanted objects fall apart?
At the risk of coming off like a nerd, albeit one who likes tactics and strategy questions like this, I think the answer is: Against a non-Jedi, they don't. A Jedi can probably face down a lot of non-Jedis even without their lightsaber. As long as they carry one around they tend to use it against non-Jedis (no point denying yourself a resource, especially one that confers a psycological advantage even before you start doing mind tricks), but they don't need it.
However, facing a Jedi at least partially negates that. Let us assume that it is easier for a Jedi to disrupt another Jedi's telekinesis than to actually do the telekinesis (since otherwise even the slightest difference in skill would be reflected by telekinesis coming up in every battle, which doesn't happen; this also means that when Darth is pummelling Luke in (IIRC) TESB that that demonstrates a huge power/skill disparity, and every other example I can think of of telekinesis during battle has a similar disparity, though I stopped reading after the Thrawn books). One exception may be telekinetic control of your own body, allowing for the leaps we see.
Thus, for most matchups of two skilled Force users, telekinesis is not an issue, and they need some physical weapon that they physically possess to stand a chance. Light sabers are as good as any, within reason.
It is, however, vitally important that the Force user not neglect to divert a small amount of attention to nullifying their opponent's telekinetic abilities w.r.t. their own lightsaber's power switch, lest the battle go shortly and very, very badly.
(Oh, and this neglects talking about making things "fall apart", because I assume you mean simply by pulling them apart. There's no evidence for any sort of "disintegration" power.)
Slashdot Mirror
I know the difference between patents and copyright.
The point is that they are both in play in software, and the combination of the two are very unbalanced. I am not aware of any other arena where you must worry both about violating patents and copyright, or, put another way, where a given object can enjoy both copyright and patent protection. It's not that copyright and patent offers the same protections, it's that they are functioning on the same object.
(I say "I am not aware of" because there may be a few, but even if there are I don't expect them to be as important as software.)
a form of skeet shooting where penguins launch down ice ramps into the air and you try to get them before they land on the other side.
I think it's more likely Microsoft would put out this game than Nintendo.
I can't take credit for that term.
The one interface not allowed for a First Person shooter is, you know, a gun-like interface?
Keyboard and mouse interface: Yup, it's a shooter!
Gamepad interface: Yup, it's a shooter!
Gun interface: OMGWTFBBQ, it's Duck hunt!
What kind of stupid fanboy do you have to be to make that kind of argument?
Actually, there is a good distinction you can draw between software patents and conventional patents that is strong enough that you can't automatically infer that being against software patents means you are against all patents: Software patents are the only things I know of where the patented objects are also covered under copyright law.
I go more into depth about this elsewhere, but the short answer is that we shouldn't be surprised that patents, balanced for one type of use, and copyrights, balanced for another, make no sense when both are covering the same thing, since they were never designed to do that.
Obviousness is a real problem too, of course, but that's more a practical problem, one that could be corrected by more aggressive denials by the PTO. This is a fundamental conflict.
Heh, you've attracted a lot of replies and nobody's yet hit the right answer.
Propose your choice of terraforming technique. Convert one chemical into another, physically remove the atmosphere, don't care which you choose, really.
Now, compute the energy requirements of your terraforming action.
Then you shall achieve enlightenment.
In short, terraforming Mars for a geologically brief period of time is on the tantalizing edge of feasibility, because a lot of it would involve slightly nudging comets and such to hit Mars. That's a net gravitational energy reduction, and we might be able to manage that. Even so, it might not work; I think it far more likely you'd have to build enclosed settlements, or perhaps even more likely, modify life forms to live on Mars basically as it is, possibly with some resources augmented by the aforementioned comets. But to get from Venus as it is, to a Venus we could walk on, would take an astronomical amount of energy no matter how you slice it. (A rather small "astronomical" amount of energy as such things go, but "astronomical" nonetheless.) It's one of those things that by the time we can do it, we'll probably have better uses for that sort of energy.
By the way, I'm actually-factually talking about energy states, in the technical thermodynamic sense. It's not a matter of waiting for "science" to wave a magic wand; any 'science' that can re-write the laws of thermodynamics is well beyond anything we can speculate about. Conservation laws are about the strongest physics results we have.
(Note this is a reply to someone that is probably below the reader's threshhold.)
If I tell you that for every canybar sold I earn $0.25 and you go and fill a bag with 10 candybars and I charge you $50 you're going to ask me what's going on. Well of course my rates change.
Your argument is incoherent. If you assume that from a claimed profit margin of $.25, that I can derive anything on the final cost, that's your error, not mine. In fact, due to the wonders of advertising the cost to me may be lower than your profit.
(For reference, I recall seeing that the average profit margin in the Fortune 500 is on the order of something like 5%, and if I'm screwing up either way, that's probably high. For a $.25 profit, that's a cost to the consumer of $5. So ironically, all else being equal and assuming you were a reasonably efficient company in a competitive market, your "surprising" price is close to the correct guess!)
I actually thought I understood what you were getting at, but the more I read your post the less I understood. I think the statistics may be wrong, but I think what you think is "misleading" is actually your own fuzzy thinking on the topic.
Your arguments are more obviously ludicrous than the ones in the article. Yours are absurd on their face, whereas the ones in the article can be true, but I would want to have more substantiation than just this one person's word.
For example, if 8 million Americans are out of work, we should outsource 1 million American jobs.
You are assuming linearity where there is not even a faint trace of it. If I have the capability to produce 1000 cars, and I sell 900 of them, that does not mean that if I double my capacity, I will sell 1800 of them. That is to say, the fact that I today have a 90% sale rate means nothing, in terms of trying to predict what would happen if I change my sale rate. Similarly, the claim that 8 jobs are created for every outsourced job only holds true under current conditions (if any). If you force the outsourcing of jobs, odds are that since almost by definition that will be less economically efficient, that ration will drop. It's not written in stone.
You are also assuming that you can artificially just jack up the supply of jobs with no consequences, also patently false. Jobs are an economy, and there is demand (work to be done and the money to pay for it) and supply (workers willing to do the work). Neither side of that equation can be magically changed without affecting the other.
someone should be firing management! If every outsourced job creates 9 new ones, management fails in its cost savings argument. (That is unless of course, the nine new jobs combined actually pay less than the outsourced job -- which may actually be a possibility.)
This is a continuation of failing to view the job market as a market. Jobs are not cost centers alone, as you seem to imply, because if they were, the ideal number of jobs would be "zero". The correct criteria is to compare the in-sourced job's generated value, accounting for the cost of paying the worker, and the outsourced job + the other created job's values, accounting for the cost of paying them. While the pay in the second scenario will almost certainly be higher, the value may be much greater too.
Now note I'm not saying these numbers are correct, I'm just saying you are quite wrong.
By using the same sort of understanding that you are lacking, we can actually show a much greater case that there is something fishy about these numbers. Often in this sort of situation, there is what we call "low-hanging fruit", initial actions you can take which will have great results, and then you eventually get into "diminishing returns". If outsourcing a single job is capable of creating enough value to support the pay of nine new workers, than that strikes me as still being well into the "low-hanging fruit" stage, and people ought to still be aggressively outsourcing as the gains are so obvious and big. However, it is also obvious that outsourcing has either slowed or is starting to slow, and the backlash is well into the "development" stage... and note that's not a legal backlash I'm referring to, but people pointing out it doesn't seem to actually save much money. That's also a stage these sorts of things go through, and that occurs when the low-hanging fruit is basically gone and the new-comers are noticing they aren't getting the promised results.
Thus, I would expect the correct statistic is that you can expect a 1.3x-1.8x improvement for an outsourced job, which is the range where you start questioning the whole thing, although with large variation. ("Large variation" also implies that there will be many people who lose, which would also start to contribute to the backlash.)
Now that's a criticism of the numbers.
To "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp" and other such oxymorons, you can add "mob justice".
News media works on mob justice principles and are unbelievably klutzy with their accusations and witch hunts. I'm not inclined to blame "the American people" because most people have better things to do with their time than dig into exactly which employees are guilty, but the media could have been a bit more careful. But hey, it's not their lives wrecked.
Consider:
- Web content management system. Good returns for modest effort, a gradual introduction to problems with a good ability to fix them, and it's a project you might keep working on for a few years so you get that lived-in experience.
- There are any number of small games you can write in a reasonable amount of time. Don't try to be too original the first time. You can also learn how subtle UI can be, as with games the difference between "nice technical demo" and "fun game" can literally be in the milliseconds.
- A text editor can be educational too. Again, promise me not to share it.
- Look at all the open-source software you use. Pick one to work on that you know, isn't Apache. A lot of open source projects have one or a very small handful of people, and you can both get into them in a reasonable amount of time, and actually contribute.
Once you've got a couple of things under your belt, you'll find all kinds of things to do. But when you're young, it's hard to know what you're even capable of. Any of these projects will be a good start.But promise me you won't inflict it on the rest of the world.
Do not attempt a Roguelike from scratch. Pick up Angband and mod it, maybe, but don't start one from scratch. A lot of people make this mistake, but to make any decent Roguelike from scratch requires some algorithms and design experience you don't have yet.
Well, I have a hard time with the idea that the only productive thing he can do is remove spyware. :)
But, I suppose if I really break down the economics, at least one of the following is true: 1. He could obtain higher pay elsewhere doing something else, and in an economic sense probably should, or 2. He can not obtain higher pay somewhere else, therefore this is the most valuable thing he can be doing, therefore if the spyware problem went away while he wouldn't necessarily be jobless, he would take a pay cut.
Still, all else being equal and with my understanding of society, the first is more likely than the second. The free market may be the most efficient thing we know for allocating resources (including job skills), but it's far from 100% perfect, for any reasonable definition of perfect efficiency.
You're not directly claiming this, but you might want to read up on the broken window fallacy. If you were not always fixing damage done by others, society could use your skills in a more productive manner.
Setting up to run Vmware simply to surf because you're afraid of spyware is absolutely ridiculous.
You can make a very good case that the exact opposite is true, especially if you're dealing with someone who insists on using Internet Explorer. IE has had a large number of flaws that allow hostile remote websites to do silent installs of arbitrary software. It quite likely still has some. I'm also not prepared to say Firefox doesn't have any, even though I'd expect it to be somewhat better.
So what, you say? You only browse the safe websites? I respond, oh, you mean you absolutely, positively never make a typo in the location bar? The websites you browser are absolutely guaranteed to not be hacked?
Heck, I've accidentally clicked on links in my spam when my touchpad acts up. I use Linux so I'm not too worried, but in Windows, that could have been enough!
It certainly ought to be ridiculous, but if you really examine the facts of the case as they are rather than as they should be, setting up a VM for browsing makes quite a lot of sense in any situation where the user can't be trusted to re-install their OS if necessary. If that includes home use for some family where all the members have better things to do with their time than learn the arcana of Windows, so be it. The only downside is memory consumption and the fact that it makes downloading things for the host system that much harder... something in that scenario I'd be inclined to call a feature anyhow.
Not bad. Not bad at all. Involve Kodos and/or Kang in the love triangles and I daresay you've got the beginning of a good script there.
I think that's probably the way to go. Realize that you jumped the shark ten years ago, and just go for wacky hijinks. Maybe everybody should die in the end, muHAI, why not, with the drama and the pathos and the dying, glaven.
I was having fun. Half the mods got it.
Digital, digital, didgeridoo... all ones and zeros, but what about two?
Your digital rights to swing your digital arm ends where my digital nose begins!
(Digital, digital, didgeridoo...)
Really, the reason to have a movie, is because the studio makes a lot more money that way.
I kind of figured that goes without saying. I'm talking about the reasons why we would want to go see a movie. You can't just throw a television episode up on the silver screen and hope that people go to see it. Even if they do, that's another huge hunk of reputation you just blew, and Hollywood is rapidly running out.
"Hey, man, we gotta go see that Simpsons movie, or the studios might not recoup their investment!" Let me count the number of times I've heard that... well, maybe once for Serenity.
The kids finally age?
Done that, several times. As flash-forwards, yes, but story-wise it doesn't matter.
Marge gets pregnant?
Even if you age the kids, family-baby interactions have basically been mined with Maggie.
They move from Springfield?
Also been done, several times, plus every "vacation" episode is basically "The Simpsons Not In Springfield". May not be "permanent" but that's a flexible idea with cartoons.
I actually did try to come up with something before my post; if I came up with a good one I would have posted that instead.
Traditionally, a television series made into a movie is an opportunity to do two things: To tell a Really Big story that just wouldn't fit in one episode, and to spend more money on special effects than you could on one episode.
The second really isn't a problem. But what story is too big for a Simpsons episode? Given the unreality of the series, what premise could carry a movie that shouldn't simply be an episode?
About the only storyline not used several times is the death of one of the major characters (and I mean a Simpson, not Mrs. Flanders). Which would make for a pretty disappointing movie, I think, not to mention some very out-of-character writing in all likelihood. I mean, what are they going to do, have Homer heroically sacrifice himself to save Springfield? (Not to mention they've basically done that a number of times, minus actual death...)
Oh well. It's quite likely that it will be at least average, given the state of movies lately, and what more can you ask for?
What social message would that be?
Seriously, think about it. The trite answer of "you should sober up" really isn't well supported by that episode. And subsequent episodes have him eventually backsliding and returning to his old ways, though to the best of my knowledge this has never been highlighted, just something that happens in the background. Barney has certainly not been a very hopeful social message.
(I find social messages can often be tricky things. I've lost count of the pacifist races portrayed in science fiction as morally superior; Stargate SG-1 alone has had at least 4. But somehow, the forces of the story always seem to wipe them out, seriously undermining the surface-level "pacifism is superior" message. Stargate's at 2 for 4, with a third currently facing a major threat (and the forth seems to have simply disappeared off-stage since the first season oh-so-many years ago). I've always wondered how much of this is deliberate, or if authors really so rarely notice that their putative social message is directly contradicted by the story itself if they look more closely at it...)
There are plenty of good programmers who dislike the hard sciences and mathematics.
I agree.
But I think you'll be hard-pressed to find great programmers who hold Computer Science (and yes, I'm being more specific) in contempt.
(I also think there's no shortage of people who think they're great and hold Computer Science in contempt.)
(And yes, logically speaking in the absense of hard data on programmer quality and opinions of computer science, it's hard to push this point any further because courtesy of the previous parenthetical we're firmly in the realm of opinion. But it should be put out for consideration, even if it can't be rigorously proven in the context of a Slashdot comment box.)
It is true that you need some good mathematical foundations to truly excel. It is also true that those who never realize this rarely make it much past "mediocre", by my admittedly-high standards. However, the math you need to be good at may not be the math you are thinking.
When most people say "math", they're thinking Arithmetic (the manipulation of numbers with few or no "variables"), some Algebra, and maybe Calculus. These maths are nearly useless for day-to-day programming, unless you are dealing with a clear and obvious exception, like game engine programming, writing a CAD program, etc. This is not to say they are completely useless; at the very least they are brain exercise of a calibre hardly attainable anywhere else, and that's nothing to spit at. But in general, this sort of math is not useful to programming, and you can be borderline atrocious at all three of those disciplines and be fine.
What you really need to be good at is "discrete math", which at best gets mentioned in high school cirricula as "sets" and then ignored pretty thoroughly after that. It's still true that what you do in the classroom doesn't bear much resemblence to programming (I've only had to do something even remotely like a proof two or three times in 10 years of programming), but the things they are trying to test you on do matter a lot. Think of it like the exercises you'll do on a basketball team or something; you're not going to do a lot of running straight to half-court and right back again 20 times in a row in a real game, but it's good exercise. And you can still be good at playing basketball even if you don't do the exercises, but you'll be better if you do.
Some examples of things that the discrete math theory will talk about that I find many people are very weak on:
Character Background: they all hate me but ill show them LOLZERZ!
.5 hands
Race: OMG PONY!
Height:
Weight: don't ask LOL
Age: 7
Gender: female
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
(I don't know... there's some potential here...)
Did Yoda not say, 'Size matters not'?
Yeah, but I'm betting that's more platitude than literal truth. The evidence is that Jedi basically deal with normal "object" size, and even Yoda seemed to need to concentrate to move the X-Wing, frankly belying his own point. (That is, if "size didn't matter" than it should have required no more and no less concentration that a rock; clearly, there was a difference.)
Leaving open the question, why does a telekinetic Jedi who can lift a spaceship need a lightsaber? Why not just use the power of the Force to make unwanted objects fall apart?
At the risk of coming off like a nerd, albeit one who likes tactics and strategy questions like this, I think the answer is: Against a non-Jedi, they don't. A Jedi can probably face down a lot of non-Jedis even without their lightsaber. As long as they carry one around they tend to use it against non-Jedis (no point denying yourself a resource, especially one that confers a psycological advantage even before you start doing mind tricks), but they don't need it.
However, facing a Jedi at least partially negates that. Let us assume that it is easier for a Jedi to disrupt another Jedi's telekinesis than to actually do the telekinesis (since otherwise even the slightest difference in skill would be reflected by telekinesis coming up in every battle, which doesn't happen; this also means that when Darth is pummelling Luke in (IIRC) TESB that that demonstrates a huge power/skill disparity, and every other example I can think of of telekinesis during battle has a similar disparity, though I stopped reading after the Thrawn books). One exception may be telekinetic control of your own body, allowing for the leaps we see.
Thus, for most matchups of two skilled Force users, telekinesis is not an issue, and they need some physical weapon that they physically possess to stand a chance. Light sabers are as good as any, within reason.
It is, however, vitally important that the Force user not neglect to divert a small amount of attention to nullifying their opponent's telekinetic abilities w.r.t. their own lightsaber's power switch, lest the battle go shortly and very, very badly.
(Oh, and this neglects talking about making things "fall apart", because I assume you mean simply by pulling them apart. There's no evidence for any sort of "disintegration" power.)