But what's being proposed here is precisely that a single mutation radically changed primate head morphology and changed the selective constraints on all those other intelligence-enhancing mutations. Is it true? Who knows? But that does seem to be what's being argued.
One can imagine a "critical path" of mutations to get from that first single-cell to where we are today. I definite whether a gene/mutations is on that critical path as "could we have gotten a modern human that we'd consider a modern human without it?"
There's obviously some fuzziness inherited from the definition of "modern human that we'd consider a modern human", but for one that's clearly not on this critical path, one can see that we didn't "need" green eyes vs. blue eyes vs. brown eyes. On the other hand, it is plausible we needed this jaw loosening.
My point is that maybe this is on the critical path, maybe not. But there are thousands (millions?) of other things on that path. Promoting this one mutation above others isn't science, it's grandstanding, either by the journalist, the scientist, or both. (Establishing whether this is on the path or not is science; it's the emphasis and the spin, not the work, I object to.)
(And to forstall another object, note I'm defining "critical path" explicitly as the path to humanity; there are other paths to other hypothetical intelligent beings, but as humans, we pretty much only care about how we got to where we are. At least for now.)
Silly protozoa, if only you had known that this one gene would be responsible for super intelligence, you could have mutated billions of years ago and beats humans to the punch!
What? You say you're missing thousands of other necessary genes and you can't assign responsibility for such large changes on one single change? However will I then write misleading science stories, and even more misleading Slashdot article intros?
That's not bad commentary, for a protozoa. Pity the article author isn't that smart.
It's interesting how many of these kinds of programs are animated. Is it easier to speak dangerous words when your face isn't on the screen?
It's more flexible, which the satire can take advantage of to the hilt. On one of the Family Guy DVD commentaries, they observed how impossible the show would have been in live action, prompted by the show where Peter goes from fat slob, to thin slob, to thin, buff man, back to fat man in the course of half an hour. (Obviously you can fatten up an actor artificially, but the other direction is too violent to use for a TV show, and you certainly couldn't get them back to fat in one show's taping time.)
Cartoon Nixon on Futurama is funnier then the real thing or an actor playing Nixon could ever have been. (On one of the Futurama commentaries, Matt Groening says when he was a kid he always dreamed of doing something to make fun of Nixon; he never dreamt how successful Nixon-mocking would be 25 years later...;-) )
Yes, I listen to the commentaries. Best part sometimes.
There are thousands of Java projects on Sourceforge. There are thousands of C++ projects on Sourceforge. The magnitudes are quite similar, in theory. I can point at tens of C++ gui programs on any desktop Linux install. I can't reliably point at any Java program on any desktop Linux install; oh, the user may have one or two, but their neighbor will use a C++ program.
The existance of programs doesn't prove the success of those programs. The rubber hits the road on what people actually use, and so far we're not using Swing apps.
(For what it's worth, I think there ought to be more Python and Perl apps on the desktop, too, so I have my own pet languages that suffer from this curse, but it doesn't change the fact that right now, C++ is still kicking arse on the desktop, Java isn't even showing, and I can name the Python program that people might conceivably use: fetchmailconf, and that's about it.)
If we have a ton of differing GUI frameworks, what the odds that anyone will still be able to "write once and run everywhere" after the APIs fragment?
You don't worry about "fragmentation" in a market where you have such miniscule penetration, and have for years. (Maybe if you were making the initial thrust, but Java is well past that point; remember, they started out thinking it would be a desktop environment; I don't think they would have guessed in advance they'd take over servers and nearly completely fail on the desktop.)
Besides, the fragmentation concern is overrated in an environment designed to be able to download libraries on an as-needed basis on the desktop. The choice facing Sun is their personal GUI and no penetration to speak of, or perhaps officially opening the GUI toolkit door and at least standing a chance. They're going to worry themselves into extinction on the desktop if they're worried about fragmentation. ('Cause it's not like.Net, GTK, QT, or anything else is standing still, and I'd wager any one of them has more man-hours spent on it per day then anything Sun can afford.)
OK, I admit I committed a sin and only looked for bindings after my post;-) But I poked around and nothing I looked at seemed mature. wx4j is version 0.1.0 and doesn't seem to have been updated since March 2003.
Is that because they just got it right the first time? I'll admit I assumed from the 0.1.0 status that it wouldn't be ready for prime time.
Honest question; obviously I can't take the week or two it would take to analyse the software to see if it's mature for a Slashdot message.
I have never heard of HTML-TIME and just looked at the specification. I have now read the entire thing. There is nothing in that entire specification that can't be accomplished (and in all likelihood, better and more flexibly accomplished) by giving Javascript access to a more accurate timer (the same one that HTML+TIME will need to work correctly), a couple of additional properties on reflected movie object, and a Javascript library (where each library could offer different things to different users, instead of enforcing a standard that may or may not meet the user's needs and they'll need a library anyhow).
All of that uselessness and security holes too! If they'd stuck with my solution, they'd only have one method and a couple of attributes to secure instead of an entire massive specification.
People are naturally asking "What does open sourcing Java get us?"
My answer is "Java on the desktop", where it has been an abysmal failure. Yep, there's three or four applications you can point at that are the exception... now show me 20 or 30 common Java desktop applications.
Imagine Java + QT or Java + GTK. I'm a Python partisan and frankly pretty much hate Java, but you know, stick a decent, time-test GUI toolkit on it and I might consider developing with it in the future, especially in light of the other improvements being made to it.
(Being able to program in Java without making me gag would probably improve my employability long term, though I'm still running successfully with "if I never learn Java I'll never have to program in it" without limiting myself as much as you might think...)
That's a bad plan. In two or three years, the "money" job will be something else. You need to either get ahead of the curve by a couple of years, or you need to wait for a cycle to catch back up to you. I'm in computer science and I fully expect the market will pick up again, at least for the kind of thing I'd want to do, outsourcing notwithstanding, because things are cyclic. If I chased after something else, I'd just keep losing, but if I keep the faith, while I never expect to see "the bubble" again, I expect I'll be OK.
One interesting thing though is once I understood the math, it was like some light went on in my head, and it wasn't that hard anymore.
People make this same mistake in computer science all the time. When you hear someone say "They have all this useless theory stuff that I'll never use in real life." When you hear that, there is someone who most likely never understood the theory in the first place, so who are they to judge the usefulness of it in real life?
(And if your first instinct was to say "Hey, I understood the theory and I've never used it in real life!" thinking that this disproves my point, you just proved my point that you didn't Really Get the math. Examine the previous paragraph to see if you can figure out why this is true. It may help to logically diagram the sentences. I'm dead serious here.)
Even when the theory isn't directly useful, it provides mental exercise and develops thought processes that are directly useful in the real world. And it is quite often useful, even in the most practical sense; if you're not using it, then is it because it's useless, or because you don't understand how to use it? If you're not using graph theory, maybe that's because you don't understand how it might be helpful? If you're not using OO correctly, maybe it's because you don't understand it? (And maybe not, of course, but if you can give me a cogent reason why beyond "It's stupid" for those things, then I'm not addressing this to you.)
Indeed, if you're successful you may well be using it implicitly.
Computer science was a hard program where I took it, too. Sometimes I wonder if the education system is really "going to hell", or if we're just absorbing the useless influx of folks who think they "need to go to college" into non-rigorous programs like business or marketing. (Note I don't call them "useless"... but they are not as hard as Comp. Sci. or EE and don't kid yourself that they are.) The solution to college woes, or at least the start of one, is probably to stop accepting everybody.
Maybe I'm missing your point here. If the output is tracked,
The point is, what does "tracked" mean? Nothing. There is no way to be customer of one and not the other. Electricity is electricity. It's not like you can only ask for electrons that come from the hydro plant, because (contrary to simplifications in elementary school) electricity isn't electrons.
If the electric company set this up for you to your specifications, the only, sole single thing that would change is that you would give them more money.
If you want more hydro plants and fewer coal plants, you're going to have to work on the policy level; you can't really vote with your dollars.
I want to be able to choose for my electricy comes from a hydro plant and not a coal plant for example.
What meaningful difference would you expect to occur? What meaningful difference would such a scheme have vs. you just saying to yourself right now, "All my electricity comes from hydro plants"?
Electricity is electricity. It's not even water, where you can hypothetically track water molecules back to their source. It's just a potential, an energy field; there is no way to seperate which "part" of the energy field came from where. If you try to re-route by having dedicated wires, you'll create inefficiencies in the system (running power farther then it needs to be, seperate and unnecessary infrastructure) that might make you feel better, but at the cost of harming the environment much more due to unnecessary materials, construction, development, energy loss in the wires requiring more energy to be generated and corresponding pollution for each of those things.
It's like taxes and money; your $X thousand basically just goes into a money pool; there's no way, even in theory, to talk about where "your" exact tax dollars went. Thus, to some degree, talking about being upset that "your" tax dollars went to funding, say, the military is flawed; you can simply decide that it all went to the space program, and nothing changes meaningfully. (The proper complaint is to complain about society's tax dollars and the resulting tax burdens on individuals that result, but you can not directly map a specific dollar spent by the government to a specific dollar given in taxes by an individual.)
I recommend you give both Puzzle Pirates and Planetside a try.
The only reason I haven't is that I am really only interested, even fascinated in the theoretical aspects of MMORPGS, but not terribly interested in playing most of them. The only MMORPG I find interesting is online discussion boards (not being silly, I consider them roughly the same thing in many significant ways), and my interest in the theoretical aspects of MMORPGs parallels my interest in how structure determines the nature of a community.
However, I've seen Puzzle Pirates in person and it definately seemed a strong game.
Re:Problem that doesn't exist big time...
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Passport to Nowhere
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The idea of Single Sign-On is to put all of your eggs in one basket, then make sure it's a really good basket. Nobody trusts Microsoft to make that really good basket, but it doesn't mean that they're not trying to solve a real problem. It's a tricky one, because the trust factor is scary, and the stakes are very high.
[Suppose t]here are 10 $100 piles, each secured by individual $200 security systems. They're all secure. There are another 10 $100 piles, each secured by individual $50 systems. They're all insecure.
Clearly something must be done.
One suggestion is to replace all the individual security systems by a single centralized system. The new system is much better than the ones being replaced; it's a $500 system.
Unfortunately, the new system won't provide more security. Under the old systems, 10 piles of money could be stolen at a cost of $50 per pile; an attacker would realize a total profit of $500. Under the new system, we have 20 $100 piles all secured by a single $500 system. An attacker now has an incentive to break that more-secure system, since he can steal $2000 by spending $500 -- a profit of $1500.
The problem is centralization. When individual security systems are combined in one centralized system, the incentive to break that new system is generally higher. Even though the centralized system may be harder to break than any of the individual systems, if it is easier to break than ALL of the individual systems, it may result in less security overall.
There is a security benefit to decentralized security.
From what i've heard from beta testers so far, its pretty much the same lvling treadmill we've gotten used to over the past few years. It's going to need something revolutionary to make me go out and buy this game, not the Warcraft name alone.
The levelling treadmill is a fundamental result of trying to apply the levelling system to MMORPGs. Anything that tries to apply the idea of levelling runs into two fundamentally conflicting forces:
10% of your customer base accounts for 90% of the logged in time, and
90% of your customer base (and by extension, income) doesn't do that.
You need to make the game fun for both groups, because the first one is loud (and will impact whether anyone buys the game at all disproportionately), and because the second one accounts for the majority of your cash flow.
Any system that rewards the player for spending time in the game, or, equivalently, requires significant time in the game to advance in skills, will always have the same flaws modern "levelling treadmills" do. Until you do away with the level idea as the central organization of the game, MMORPGs will not advance significantly over what they are now. (I'm not saying they have to go away completely, but they can't be the central number used in every RNG computation.)
It's not something that can be designed around, it's fundamental to the genre and the technique. Fortunatley, all hope is not lost. I know of at least two systems that eschew the levelling treadmill: Puzzle Pirates, which uses head-to-head puzzle competition as its combat technique, and Planetside, which I've heard is more FPS then level-based. (Could be wrong. I haven't played either.) Until these alternate techniques go mainstream, MMORPGs are going to be stuck in the same rut they've been stuck in since Ultima Online.
The awful thing is that this is going to be just another reason for Congress to loot the NASA money bag.
Ya just gotta love the human capacity for rationalization, especially in committee. If NASA does well, then they obviously don't need that much money. If NASA does poorly, then they obviously don't deserve that much money.
Logic trivially reverses, of course.
This is not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is that people rarely notice, either in themselves or others, how many arguments are offerred that work perfectly well to support the opposing side.
But then again, no IT guys have to work in feces in a sweaty, humid, tiny room. STFU you little baby.
The key to understanding the comment as given is that it is the exact same people, over and over again, downloading the BonziBuddy this week, spreading MyDoom next week, and installing three other pieces of spy ware the week after.
Then, they yell at you because they somehow, in a manner I don't fully understand, rationalize it to be your fault.
If you're a sociopath, this doesn't bother you. If you're human, the unrelenting pounding of stupid people upset at you, and in general being obstinately stupid, can easily match most plausible physical jobs. Sure, they may not be shoveling shit, but the shit shoveler can go home, take a shower, change clothes, and be more-or-less OK. The IT-frontliner goes home, and is emotionally exhausted. This should not be trivialized just because it's not physical; in many ways its worse. (For one thing, your nose tends to adjust to bad smells, your brain and emotions tend to get sensitized to stupidity.)
If a person makes a mistake and learns from it, it's understandable; we're all newbies. The good people never call because they fix their own problems. But if you think dealing with unrelenting and unapologetic (and sometime downright arrogant) stupidity is so easy, I invite you to spend a year doing front-line tech support. There is a reason the attrition rate of tech support is much higher then shit-shoveling.
It can be done, but it is a little touchy. Check the Wiki.
Once I've gotten it running, though, it has worked correctly, so the hard part seems to be just getting it running. I'm actually using it in a 'production' environment, too, perhaps a little bravely, but it's better then the alternatives.
That doesn't say the same thing. Andresson clearly invokes the concept of "carrier" as a "transmission vector" in the disease sense; the Internet spreads the use of open source in an infectious manner. (It's not a disease, of course; a lot of non-diseases have disease-like spreading characteristics.)
Your reformulation merely states that the Internet happens to transmit bits that are open source, without the "transmission vector" aspect. It also carries other things.
Ain't English grand? This is why I end up being so verbose, so often; if I want, I can condense many of my multi-page essays down to one dense paragraph, but I prefer that more then a handful of my readers understand what I'm saying. (Which still may not happen often, but what can you do?) You can see a lot more of this in the other Slashdot replies too; 103 words is nice, but by the time everyone is done misinterpreting and projecting onto them, one wonders if a 103-page essay wouldn't have been called for. (Of course, more words means more opportunities to misinterpret; argh!)
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
This is still true. However, note that it says "nations", not "programmers". Nations don't write open source software, individual programmers do (even if being paid by a nation). Thus, this quote and this concept don't really belong in a discussion of "Open Source" software, whereas the motivation of individual programmers do.
To twist back one more time, though, the quote is still misguided. Indepedence from the "US" is not relevant; I'm an American and I still strongly value the indepedence from Microsoft and proprietary software that closes my data. Those reasons alone are sufficient, "anti-Americanism" need not enter the mix, though it may for some folks.
If you could tell the difference between "Orion's Belt from Earth" and "Orion's Belt from Mars" on your computer screen, I'd like to buy your monitor. Because the difference is way, way, way, way, way, way, WAY below one pixel's size on your screen.
You want to change the starfield to any degree, you need to travel lightyears, not a few piddly million miles.
I believe in cultural relativism, Whahabi 'islam' is barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards.
You do realize that that is one of the most breath-taking oxymorons I've ever seen uttered on Slashdot? If you're willing to label a culture "barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards", then you are not a relativist. You believe that there are absolute standards applicable to all cultures and that there can therefore be cultures in violation of those standards.
(Many, if not most, people who think they are cultural relativists aren't for precisely this reason. It's all relative this and you can't judge me because relative that, until they are faced with women getting the clitorises cut off at birth, and wham, in come in the concrete standards and out goes the relativism. Thank goodness; I just wish more people were more honest and internalized that they are not relativists and thus using "it's all relative" as a defense for anything is fairly hypocritical, unless they are indeed willing to admit that brutal mutilation of children or the degradation of women are morally acceptable in certain cultures. (Bringing up the question of, why not also here?))
You are in trouble briefly, as the natural first suspect is you (and there's not much you can do about that), but in all likelihood it will rapidly become evident that you did not register the domain as the money trail doesn't lead back to you.
(You can get in deep trouble if your computer is compromised, your credit information stolen, and somebody buys and points the domain with your info from your computer. The moral of the story is that securing your computer is one of the best things you can do. It's only a matter of time before these spam networks turn to more lucrative and also small-scale crimes, committed with self-wiping viruses, that look exactly like the computer owner committed the fraud. But I digress; this remains an unplausible scenario for now.)
Unless the law is written extremely poorly, the crime is not "owning the site pointed to by the non-.xxx domain" but "pointing to an.xxx domain with a non-.xxx domain name", which you won't have committed. Despite your cynicism, the lawyers writing the laws are indeed good for something and tend to get this sort of thing right more often then not. We may question the goals and the motivations of things like the DMCA, but I believe it is reasonably safe to say that the DMCA largely reflects the will of the authors, i.e., that it is not inaccurate due to authorial error.
And some people hate anybody more successful then them. And no matter what you give them, it only makes them hate you worse, for rubbing their nose in how they need your help.
"Just be friends with everybody" sounds great on paper. But with six going on seven billion people in the world, and even supposing we made you Unfettered Dictator of the United States and implemented your "be friends with everybody" policy to the letter, are you willing to bet your life that absolutely nobody will want to kill you, or the country you represent? Or will you still hire bodyguards?
If you are willing to go without personal security, you're a fool. If you would still hire security, then you begin to understand on a personal level why this country still needs to defend itself, and why "just be everybody friends" isn't even possible, let alone something we can depend on. It extends to the country level, only moreso.
Slashdot Mirror
But what's being proposed here is precisely that a single mutation radically changed primate head morphology and changed the selective constraints on all those other intelligence-enhancing mutations. Is it true? Who knows? But that does seem to be what's being argued.
One can imagine a "critical path" of mutations to get from that first single-cell to where we are today. I definite whether a gene/mutations is on that critical path as "could we have gotten a modern human that we'd consider a modern human without it?"
There's obviously some fuzziness inherited from the definition of "modern human that we'd consider a modern human", but for one that's clearly not on this critical path, one can see that we didn't "need" green eyes vs. blue eyes vs. brown eyes. On the other hand, it is plausible we needed this jaw loosening.
My point is that maybe this is on the critical path, maybe not. But there are thousands (millions?) of other things on that path. Promoting this one mutation above others isn't science, it's grandstanding, either by the journalist, the scientist, or both. (Establishing whether this is on the path or not is science; it's the emphasis and the spin, not the work, I object to.)
(And to forstall another object, note I'm defining "critical path" explicitly as the path to humanity; there are other paths to other hypothetical intelligent beings, but as humans, we pretty much only care about how we got to where we are. At least for now.)
Silly protozoa, if only you had known that this one gene would be responsible for super intelligence, you could have mutated billions of years ago and beats humans to the punch!
What? You say you're missing thousands of other necessary genes and you can't assign responsibility for such large changes on one single change? However will I then write misleading science stories, and even more misleading Slashdot article intros?
That's not bad commentary, for a protozoa. Pity the article author isn't that smart.
It's interesting how many of these kinds of programs are animated. Is it easier to speak dangerous words when your face isn't on the screen?
;-) )
It's more flexible, which the satire can take advantage of to the hilt. On one of the Family Guy DVD commentaries, they observed how impossible the show would have been in live action, prompted by the show where Peter goes from fat slob, to thin slob, to thin, buff man, back to fat man in the course of half an hour. (Obviously you can fatten up an actor artificially, but the other direction is too violent to use for a TV show, and you certainly couldn't get them back to fat in one show's taping time.)
Cartoon Nixon on Futurama is funnier then the real thing or an actor playing Nixon could ever have been. (On one of the Futurama commentaries, Matt Groening says when he was a kid he always dreamed of doing something to make fun of Nixon; he never dreamt how successful Nixon-mocking would be 25 years later...
Yes, I listen to the commentaries. Best part sometimes.
There are thousands of Java projects on Sourceforge. There are thousands of C++ projects on Sourceforge. The magnitudes are quite similar, in theory. I can point at tens of C++ gui programs on any desktop Linux install. I can't reliably point at any Java program on any desktop Linux install; oh, the user may have one or two, but their neighbor will use a C++ program.
The existance of programs doesn't prove the success of those programs. The rubber hits the road on what people actually use, and so far we're not using Swing apps.
(For what it's worth, I think there ought to be more Python and Perl apps on the desktop, too, so I have my own pet languages that suffer from this curse, but it doesn't change the fact that right now, C++ is still kicking arse on the desktop, Java isn't even showing, and I can name the Python program that people might conceivably use: fetchmailconf, and that's about it.)
If we have a ton of differing GUI frameworks, what the odds that anyone will still be able to "write once and run everywhere" after the APIs fragment?
.Net, GTK, QT, or anything else is standing still, and I'd wager any one of them has more man-hours spent on it per day then anything Sun can afford.)
You don't worry about "fragmentation" in a market where you have such miniscule penetration, and have for years. (Maybe if you were making the initial thrust, but Java is well past that point; remember, they started out thinking it would be a desktop environment; I don't think they would have guessed in advance they'd take over servers and nearly completely fail on the desktop.)
Besides, the fragmentation concern is overrated in an environment designed to be able to download libraries on an as-needed basis on the desktop. The choice facing Sun is their personal GUI and no penetration to speak of, or perhaps officially opening the GUI toolkit door and at least standing a chance. They're going to worry themselves into extinction on the desktop if they're worried about fragmentation. ('Cause it's not like
OK, I admit I committed a sin and only looked for bindings after my post ;-) But I poked around and nothing I looked at seemed mature. wx4j is version 0.1.0 and doesn't seem to have been updated since March 2003.
Is that because they just got it right the first time? I'll admit I assumed from the 0.1.0 status that it wouldn't be ready for prime time.
Honest question; obviously I can't take the week or two it would take to analyse the software to see if it's mature for a Slashdot message.
Holy cow.
I have never heard of HTML-TIME and just looked at the specification. I have now read the entire thing. There is nothing in that entire specification that can't be accomplished (and in all likelihood, better and more flexibly accomplished) by giving Javascript access to a more accurate timer (the same one that HTML+TIME will need to work correctly), a couple of additional properties on reflected movie object, and a Javascript library (where each library could offer different things to different users, instead of enforcing a standard that may or may not meet the user's needs and they'll need a library anyhow).
All of that uselessness and security holes too! If they'd stuck with my solution, they'd only have one method and a couple of attributes to secure instead of an entire massive specification.
People are naturally asking "What does open sourcing Java get us?"
My answer is "Java on the desktop", where it has been an abysmal failure. Yep, there's three or four applications you can point at that are the exception... now show me 20 or 30 common Java desktop applications.
Imagine Java + QT or Java + GTK. I'm a Python partisan and frankly pretty much hate Java, but you know, stick a decent, time-test GUI toolkit on it and I might consider developing with it in the future, especially in light of the other improvements being made to it.
(Being able to program in Java without making me gag would probably improve my employability long term, though I'm still running successfully with "if I never learn Java I'll never have to program in it" without limiting myself as much as you might think...)
That's a bad plan. In two or three years, the "money" job will be something else. You need to either get ahead of the curve by a couple of years, or you need to wait for a cycle to catch back up to you. I'm in computer science and I fully expect the market will pick up again, at least for the kind of thing I'd want to do, outsourcing notwithstanding, because things are cyclic. If I chased after something else, I'd just keep losing, but if I keep the faith, while I never expect to see "the bubble" again, I expect I'll be OK.
One interesting thing though is once I understood the math, it was like some light went on in my head, and it wasn't that hard anymore.
People make this same mistake in computer science all the time. When you hear someone say "They have all this useless theory stuff that I'll never use in real life." When you hear that, there is someone who most likely never understood the theory in the first place, so who are they to judge the usefulness of it in real life?
(And if your first instinct was to say "Hey, I understood the theory and I've never used it in real life!" thinking that this disproves my point, you just proved my point that you didn't Really Get the math. Examine the previous paragraph to see if you can figure out why this is true. It may help to logically diagram the sentences. I'm dead serious here.)
Even when the theory isn't directly useful, it provides mental exercise and develops thought processes that are directly useful in the real world. And it is quite often useful, even in the most practical sense; if you're not using it, then is it because it's useless, or because you don't understand how to use it? If you're not using graph theory, maybe that's because you don't understand how it might be helpful? If you're not using OO correctly, maybe it's because you don't understand it? (And maybe not, of course, but if you can give me a cogent reason why beyond "It's stupid" for those things, then I'm not addressing this to you.)
Indeed, if you're successful you may well be using it implicitly.
Computer science was a hard program where I took it, too. Sometimes I wonder if the education system is really "going to hell", or if we're just absorbing the useless influx of folks who think they "need to go to college" into non-rigorous programs like business or marketing. (Note I don't call them "useless"... but they are not as hard as Comp. Sci. or EE and don't kid yourself that they are.) The solution to college woes, or at least the start of one, is probably to stop accepting everybody.
Maybe I'm missing your point here. If the output is tracked,
The point is, what does "tracked" mean? Nothing. There is no way to be customer of one and not the other. Electricity is electricity. It's not like you can only ask for electrons that come from the hydro plant, because (contrary to simplifications in elementary school) electricity isn't electrons.
If the electric company set this up for you to your specifications, the only, sole single thing that would change is that you would give them more money.
If you want more hydro plants and fewer coal plants, you're going to have to work on the policy level; you can't really vote with your dollars.
I want to be able to choose for my electricy comes from a hydro plant and not a coal plant for example.
What meaningful difference would you expect to occur? What meaningful difference would such a scheme have vs. you just saying to yourself right now, "All my electricity comes from hydro plants"?
Electricity is electricity. It's not even water, where you can hypothetically track water molecules back to their source. It's just a potential, an energy field; there is no way to seperate which "part" of the energy field came from where. If you try to re-route by having dedicated wires, you'll create inefficiencies in the system (running power farther then it needs to be, seperate and unnecessary infrastructure) that might make you feel better, but at the cost of harming the environment much more due to unnecessary materials, construction, development, energy loss in the wires requiring more energy to be generated and corresponding pollution for each of those things.
It's like taxes and money; your $X thousand basically just goes into a money pool; there's no way, even in theory, to talk about where "your" exact tax dollars went. Thus, to some degree, talking about being upset that "your" tax dollars went to funding, say, the military is flawed; you can simply decide that it all went to the space program, and nothing changes meaningfully. (The proper complaint is to complain about society's tax dollars and the resulting tax burdens on individuals that result, but you can not directly map a specific dollar spent by the government to a specific dollar given in taxes by an individual.)
I recommend you give both Puzzle Pirates and Planetside a try.
The only reason I haven't is that I am really only interested, even fascinated in the theoretical aspects of MMORPGS, but not terribly interested in playing most of them. The only MMORPG I find interesting is online discussion boards (not being silly, I consider them roughly the same thing in many significant ways), and my interest in the theoretical aspects of MMORPGs parallels my interest in how structure determines the nature of a community.
However, I've seen Puzzle Pirates in person and it definately seemed a strong game.
The most recent Cryptogram has a highly relevant comment on this issue:
The levelling treadmill is a fundamental result of trying to apply the levelling system to MMORPGs. Anything that tries to apply the idea of levelling runs into two fundamentally conflicting forces:
- 10% of your customer base accounts for 90% of the logged in time, and
- 90% of your customer base (and by extension, income) doesn't do that.
You need to make the game fun for both groups, because the first one is loud (and will impact whether anyone buys the game at all disproportionately), and because the second one accounts for the majority of your cash flow.Any system that rewards the player for spending time in the game, or, equivalently, requires significant time in the game to advance in skills, will always have the same flaws modern "levelling treadmills" do. Until you do away with the level idea as the central organization of the game, MMORPGs will not advance significantly over what they are now. (I'm not saying they have to go away completely, but they can't be the central number used in every RNG computation.)
It's not something that can be designed around, it's fundamental to the genre and the technique. Fortunatley, all hope is not lost. I know of at least two systems that eschew the levelling treadmill: Puzzle Pirates, which uses head-to-head puzzle competition as its combat technique, and Planetside, which I've heard is more FPS then level-based. (Could be wrong. I haven't played either.) Until these alternate techniques go mainstream, MMORPGs are going to be stuck in the same rut they've been stuck in since Ultima Online.
The awful thing is that this is going to be just another reason for Congress to loot the NASA money bag.
Ya just gotta love the human capacity for rationalization, especially in committee. If NASA does well, then they obviously don't need that much money. If NASA does poorly, then they obviously don't deserve that much money.
Logic trivially reverses, of course.
This is not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is that people rarely notice, either in themselves or others, how many arguments are offerred that work perfectly well to support the opposing side.
But then again, no IT guys have to work in feces in a sweaty, humid, tiny room. STFU you little baby.
The key to understanding the comment as given is that it is the exact same people, over and over again, downloading the BonziBuddy this week, spreading MyDoom next week, and installing three other pieces of spy ware the week after.
Then, they yell at you because they somehow, in a manner I don't fully understand, rationalize it to be your fault.
If you're a sociopath, this doesn't bother you. If you're human, the unrelenting pounding of stupid people upset at you, and in general being obstinately stupid, can easily match most plausible physical jobs. Sure, they may not be shoveling shit, but the shit shoveler can go home, take a shower, change clothes, and be more-or-less OK. The IT-frontliner goes home, and is emotionally exhausted. This should not be trivialized just because it's not physical; in many ways its worse. (For one thing, your nose tends to adjust to bad smells, your brain and emotions tend to get sensitized to stupidity.)
If a person makes a mistake and learns from it, it's understandable; we're all newbies. The good people never call because they fix their own problems. But if you think dealing with unrelenting and unapologetic (and sometime downright arrogant) stupidity is so easy, I invite you to spend a year doing front-line tech support. There is a reason the attrition rate of tech support is much higher then shit-shoveling.
It can be done, but it is a little touchy. Check the Wiki.
Once I've gotten it running, though, it has worked correctly, so the hard part seems to be just getting it running. I'm actually using it in a 'production' environment, too, perhaps a little bravely, but it's better then the alternatives.
That doesn't say the same thing. Andresson clearly invokes the concept of "carrier" as a "transmission vector" in the disease sense; the Internet spreads the use of open source in an infectious manner. (It's not a disease, of course; a lot of non-diseases have disease-like spreading characteristics.)
Your reformulation merely states that the Internet happens to transmit bits that are open source, without the "transmission vector" aspect. It also carries other things.
Ain't English grand? This is why I end up being so verbose, so often; if I want, I can condense many of my multi-page essays down to one dense paragraph, but I prefer that more then a handful of my readers understand what I'm saying. (Which still may not happen often, but what can you do?) You can see a lot more of this in the other Slashdot replies too; 103 words is nice, but by the time everyone is done misinterpreting and projecting onto them, one wonders if a 103-page essay wouldn't have been called for. (Of course, more words means more opportunities to misinterpret; argh!)
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
This is still true. However, note that it says "nations", not "programmers". Nations don't write open source software, individual programmers do (even if being paid by a nation). Thus, this quote and this concept don't really belong in a discussion of "Open Source" software, whereas the motivation of individual programmers do.
To twist back one more time, though, the quote is still misguided. Indepedence from the "US" is not relevant; I'm an American and I still strongly value the indepedence from Microsoft and proprietary software that closes my data. Those reasons alone are sufficient, "anti-Americanism" need not enter the mix, though it may for some folks.
If you could tell the difference between "Orion's Belt from Earth" and "Orion's Belt from Mars" on your computer screen, I'd like to buy your monitor. Because the difference is way, way, way, way, way, way , WAY below one pixel's size on your screen.
You want to change the starfield to any degree, you need to travel lightyears, not a few piddly million miles.
I believe in cultural relativism, Whahabi 'islam' is barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards.
You do realize that that is one of the most breath-taking oxymorons I've ever seen uttered on Slashdot? If you're willing to label a culture "barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards", then you are not a relativist. You believe that there are absolute standards applicable to all cultures and that there can therefore be cultures in violation of those standards.
(Many, if not most, people who think they are cultural relativists aren't for precisely this reason. It's all relative this and you can't judge me because relative that, until they are faced with women getting the clitorises cut off at birth, and wham, in come in the concrete standards and out goes the relativism. Thank goodness; I just wish more people were more honest and internalized that they are not relativists and thus using "it's all relative" as a defense for anything is fairly hypocritical, unless they are indeed willing to admit that brutal mutilation of children or the degradation of women are morally acceptable in certain cultures. (Bringing up the question of, why not also here?))
Am I in trouble here?
.xxx domain with a non-.xxx domain name", which you won't have committed. Despite your cynicism, the lawyers writing the laws are indeed good for something and tend to get this sort of thing right more often then not. We may question the goals and the motivations of things like the DMCA, but I believe it is reasonably safe to say that the DMCA largely reflects the will of the authors, i.e., that it is not inaccurate due to authorial error.
You are in trouble briefly, as the natural first suspect is you (and there's not much you can do about that), but in all likelihood it will rapidly become evident that you did not register the domain as the money trail doesn't lead back to you.
(You can get in deep trouble if your computer is compromised, your credit information stolen, and somebody buys and points the domain with your info from your computer. The moral of the story is that securing your computer is one of the best things you can do. It's only a matter of time before these spam networks turn to more lucrative and also small-scale crimes, committed with self-wiping viruses, that look exactly like the computer owner committed the fraud. But I digress; this remains an unplausible scenario for now.)
Unless the law is written extremely poorly, the crime is not "owning the site pointed to by the non-.xxx domain" but "pointing to an
And yes, nathanh, your country has religious nut cases too. I don't even have to ask what country it is.
It takes two to be friends.
And some people hate anybody more successful then them. And no matter what you give them, it only makes them hate you worse, for rubbing their nose in how they need your help.
"Just be friends with everybody" sounds great on paper. But with six going on seven billion people in the world, and even supposing we made you Unfettered Dictator of the United States and implemented your "be friends with everybody" policy to the letter, are you willing to bet your life that absolutely nobody will want to kill you, or the country you represent? Or will you still hire bodyguards?
If you are willing to go without personal security, you're a fool. If you would still hire security, then you begin to understand on a personal level why this country still needs to defend itself, and why "just be everybody friends" isn't even possible, let alone something we can depend on. It extends to the country level, only moreso.