But what about for math/science? You don't exactly write tons of papers, but you do solve lots of problems.
When I couldn't come up with an algorithm to solve problems in O(whatever) time, as required by an assignment, I would often go to the web. I considered this to be research, as I could adopt a similar approach when confronted with analogous problems in the future.
Plagarism is clearly cheating. But is anything short of completely-original work also considered cheating? Is not one of the cornerstones of modern computer science the idea of re-use?
For un-faired bikes, I prefer them to be air-cooled. The giant radiator at the front is butt-ugly. Some people prefer aesthetics to the almighty price/performance ratio.
Interesting read - but I don't think it totally rules out anti-humans that are outside of our observable universe.
If I understand correctly, the unobservable portion of our universe was a product of the inflationary epoch, which started and ended less than a second after the Big Bang
I've been espousing this point of view for a while. There is nothing inherent in science or religious fundamentalism that make them mutually exclusive. For that, we can blame overly zealous representatives of either camp.
>>There is such a thing as a unilateral contract that involves a promise made by a single party, rather than reciprocal agreements made by all involved parties.
A unilateral contract is just a bilateral contract with one of the names left blank for whoever comes by and wants to fill it out.
... which makes it a contract with one party.
This is different from a EULA or whatever-the-hell you'd call a website that tries to bind you to a contract by just visiting it. Honestly, they should be illegal, especially since you can't actually take open software back to most places these days if you do decide to not accept the terms of the "offer".
I'm with you - visiting a site that attempts to bind you to an agreement on the first visit is unlikely to be held up in court.
A key difference here is that they only expect payment after continued use of the site, presumably after the terms of continued use are made clear.
I'm not saying it's right, or even a good solution - but it's a interesting legal distinction
There is such a thing as a unilateral contract that involves a promise made by a single party, rather than reciprocal agreements made by all involved parties.
Sometimes, positive action can be considered implicit acceptance of a contract or offer.
For example, If I advertise all around town that I will give my prized house-cat to the next person to climb mount Everest - and you climb mount Everest with the intention of winning my prized kitty, then I cannot argue in court that there was no 'signed' agreement or exchange of money. I made an offer, and you accepted by taking positive action.
In this case, the argument would be that the website's content is the prize and the positive action of accessing multiple pages is acceptance of that offer. It's not a particularly great argument, but it's there.
I don't think stopping at something that just "is" is nonsensical at all. In mathematics, it happens all the time. Axioms.
Think of Godel's incompleteness theorem: any sufficiently complex system cannot be both complete and consistent. In other words, there are many truths that are unprovable within that system.
If it works for mathematics, I don't think it's too unreasonable to suspect it may work for the universe. There could very likely be truths about the universe that are unprovable within the system.
"... Right but the very fact that they are wealthy and advanced enough to create multi-generational colony ships makes me wonder why they would want to. "
Easy: survival.
Any sufficiently intelligent species capable of space travel knows that the universe is a harsh and violent place. Tying your species chances of survival with that of your home planet is unwise in the long run.
A big issue holding back PC gaming, in comparison to consoles, are standards-related.
For a console game, developers know exactly the hardware environment they'll be running on. They don't have to deal with a myriad of drivers, set-ups, and configuration issues. Neither do their customers... being tech-savvy isn't a requirement to play.
This can be solved with standards. Using the xbox as an example...
You buy a computer, certified to run the xbox and xbox360 virtual machines, from Dell. Developers code for those standards, knowing the game will run and how well it will run. You simply start your xbox 360 VM, insert your disk, and off you go. Power users are welcome to configure their graphic/sound/etc options via menu choices.
This discussion comes up on slashdot a lot: self-taught vs. unversity degrees...
It's a false dichotomy; they're not mutually exclusive. The value of being self-taught is that you have an obvious drive to learn, and a lot of real-world experience. The value of a university degree is that you're going to be exposed to a much broader array of critical thought than the narrow focus that most jobs provide.
The really valuable employee is one who has both characteristics...
Yes, we can build generation-ships. We're probably capable of doing this right now, with enough economic effort.
But I propose that the problem is not solely one of technology and capability, but of cultural psychology. The organization that builds that ship would have to invest enormous amounts of resources, with no tangible return for themselves during their lifespan. The generation that spends their lives in space would have to be extraordinarily benevolent - willing to donate their lives for the sake of the species. I don't think a group like this has existed in the history of the species... nor will it.
Either the technology shifts to require less 'benevolence' on behalf of the people involved (FTL tech), or the psychology of the culture shifts (longer lifespans) to make such a tremendous investment payoff during the lifespans of the people involved. I posit that the cultural shift due to extended lifespans is more likely than FTL.
... I once read a Science story about humans that hopped on a giant ship and accelerated to llghtspeed to visit a star with an earthlike planet. The humans inboard only aged two years, but 150 years passed-away back home..... whole countries rose and fell during that timespan. Totally impractical way to explore.
I don't know that the problem is light-speed being the upper barrier to velocity. I think the problem is the length of human lives. Scale up the length of the human lifetime to a thousand, ten thousand years and those sorts of time frames are very practical.
Many of the problems we face today are due to humanity not taking the 'long-view' approach.
We could colonize the galaxy, under the speed of light, in a very reasonable time frame (cosmologically/geologically speaking) - if only the human lifespan were longer or indefinite.
I know that quaint ethnic traditions are pure and good and "homogenization" is evil, but when you hold an international sporting event, there's the expectation that the players should be able to play the goddamn sport without interference from the fans. It's up there with "providing a stadium", you're just kind of expected to do that.
One thing that I really like about american college football is precisely the opposite. The stadiums are massive, and the fans purposely make the most noise during the opposing team's offensive possession to interfere with their coordination.
Of course, it's [mostly] human-originating noise, without aid of noise-making devices...
And we wonder why people "over there" hate us. I wish they could differentiate us from our government. This will never end while we are over there making mistakes like this.
Should people differentiate the American people from its government?
It's a democracy. We're responsible for the actions of the people we vote for; collectively that's the American government. If and when they act in ways that the public disapproves of, it's the public's job to remove them via the political process. If the public is too apathetic or unmotivated to do so, I believe that is implicit approval.
Mistakes will be made. Undoubtedly, some will be tragic. I feel heartbroken by this story.
Check out heavy rain - I'd like to myself, if I had a ps3:-)
An excerpt from wired's review:
"...We’re well into the era of games-for-everyone, where if dinner isn’t on the table it’s because mom is too busy playing FarmVille. But what if she’s in the mood to trade in cartoon cows for adult drama? There’s practically nothing to serve this expanding audience. That’s why games like Heavy Rain are going to be a big part of gaming’s future.
Heavy Rain, which will be released Tuesday in North America, is not perfect. But it’s a successful experiment. And when it’s good, it’s good in ways that traditional games rarely touch."
What's funny, is WoW originally DID have penalties intended for killing passive NPCs or low-level characters. The rule book talks about dishonor, and how getting enough dishonor would cause you own faction to stop talking to you, eventually even attacking you if you entered town before your dishonor wore off.
Just being a bit of a minor pedant - but dishonor wasn't in the game originally. It was part of a patch that added the 'honor' system (rank / rewards from pvp). The day that patch was released may have been one of the single greatest large-scale world pvp events that I can think of. Epic zerging:-)
I knew some people who took dishonor as a challenge - it was leet to have 1337 dishonorable kills;-)
Battlegrounds basically solved the ganking issue more than the dishonor system - move the pvp rewards to an instance, and that's where the people will go. People you met out in the open after that were generally after the same thing as you - gathering, questing, whatever - and more likely to be on the same footing level-wise (rather than a bored level 60 looking to cause a ruckus). Dishonor was later removed because of this.
The reality is that the number of people who find being griefed fun is smaller then the number of people who don't.
There's a distinction between pvp and griefing.
For me, the beauty of world pvp was that you were never safe while levelling, farming, gathering, whatever. Humans are sneaky and intelligent - unlike npc's - I was always keeping an eye out for surprises. Some of my fondest wow-memories involve breaking up the monotony of npc-related activity with some adrenaline-pumping player combat.
The reason I play MMO's is to interact with a large number of other players. As I prefer human team-mates, I also prefer human opponents - they generally behave in much more interesting ways than npc's.
Slashdot Mirror
Copy/paste a paper - plagarism.
But what about for math/science? You don't exactly write tons of papers, but you do solve lots of problems.
When I couldn't come up with an algorithm to solve problems in O(whatever) time, as required by an assignment, I would often go to the web. I considered this to be research, as I could adopt a similar approach when confronted with analogous problems in the future.
Plagarism is clearly cheating. But is anything short of completely-original work also considered cheating? Is not one of the cornerstones of modern computer science the idea of re-use?
I wrote a long response, but found that was pretty well summarized by one sentence:
Because 4-cylinder bikes sound like a cat in heat when you rev them.
Some people like vintage stuff. It's OK.
HD is a modern 'vintage' bike.
For un-faired bikes, I prefer them to be air-cooled. The giant radiator at the front is butt-ugly. Some people prefer aesthetics to the almighty price/performance ratio.
You picked a couple topics that are difficult to discuss rationally.
These purchases are driven out of [irrational] passion rather than getting the best price/performance ratio.
Given: sometimes that passion is for the 'fastest machine I can afford' - where the sportscar or bike you end up with is the 'rational choice'.
PS. Don't knock the Corvette - it's a very competent racer.
I'm in the US. Florida, actually. I ride my motorcycle more than I drive my car.
You certainly do need safety checks (required by sanity), insurance (required by law) and a license (required by law) to operate a motorcycle.
Interesting read - but I don't think it totally rules out anti-humans that are outside of our observable universe.
If I understand correctly, the unobservable portion of our universe was a product of the inflationary epoch, which started and ended less than a second after the Big Bang
Perhaps Christian religion, like science, is an evolving philosophy that gets ever closer to approximating the truth.
Pointing out a flawed part of a religion is akin to giggling about Newton's theories not being the 'final truth' on gravity.
Hear, Hear.
I've been espousing this point of view for a while. There is nothing inherent in science or religious fundamentalism that make them mutually exclusive. For that, we can blame overly zealous representatives of either camp.
Live, and let live.
>>There is such a thing as a unilateral contract that involves a promise made by a single party, rather than reciprocal agreements made by all involved parties.
A unilateral contract is just a bilateral contract with one of the names left blank for whoever comes by and wants to fill it out.
... which makes it a contract with one party.
This is different from a EULA or whatever-the-hell you'd call a website that tries to bind you to a contract by just visiting it. Honestly, they should be illegal, especially since you can't actually take open software back to most places these days if you do decide to not accept the terms of the "offer".
I'm with you - visiting a site that attempts to bind you to an agreement on the first visit is unlikely to be held up in court.
A key difference here is that they only expect payment after continued use of the site, presumably after the terms of continued use are made clear.
I'm not saying it's right, or even a good solution - but it's a interesting legal distinction
There is such a thing as a unilateral contract that involves a promise made by a single party, rather than reciprocal agreements made by all involved parties.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilateral_contract#Bilateral_and_unilateral_contracts
Sometimes, positive action can be considered implicit acceptance of a contract or offer.
For example, If I advertise all around town that I will give my prized house-cat to the next person to climb mount Everest - and you climb mount Everest with the intention of winning my prized kitty, then I cannot argue in court that there was no 'signed' agreement or exchange of money. I made an offer, and you accepted by taking positive action.
In this case, the argument would be that the website's content is the prize and the positive action of accessing multiple pages is acceptance of that offer. It's not a particularly great argument, but it's there.
Transitions from one age to the next, especially in mythological terms, tend to be violent and filled with hardship.
I don't think stopping at something that just "is" is nonsensical at all. In mathematics, it happens all the time. Axioms.
Think of Godel's incompleteness theorem: any sufficiently complex system cannot be both complete and consistent. In other words, there are many truths that are unprovable within that system.
If it works for mathematics, I don't think it's too unreasonable to suspect it may work for the universe. There could very likely be truths about the universe that are unprovable within the system.
"... Right but the very fact that they are wealthy and advanced enough to create multi-generational colony ships makes me wonder why they would want to. "
Easy: survival.
Any sufficiently intelligent species capable of space travel knows that the universe is a harsh and violent place. Tying your species chances of survival with that of your home planet is unwise in the long run.
A big issue holding back PC gaming, in comparison to consoles, are standards-related.
For a console game, developers know exactly the hardware environment they'll be running on. They don't have to deal with a myriad of drivers, set-ups, and configuration issues. Neither do their customers... being tech-savvy isn't a requirement to play.
This can be solved with standards. Using the xbox as an example...
You buy a computer, certified to run the xbox and xbox360 virtual machines, from Dell. Developers code for those standards, knowing the game will run and how well it will run. You simply start your xbox 360 VM, insert your disk, and off you go. Power users are welcome to configure their graphic/sound/etc options via menu choices.
Mr. Buzzkill here.
In some situations, where the numbers involved are so large or small that the scale isn't easily grasped, the use of analogies is appropriate.
I will admit that the media does tend to use them excessively. :-)
This discussion comes up on slashdot a lot: self-taught vs. unversity degrees...
It's a false dichotomy; they're not mutually exclusive. The value of being self-taught is that you have an obvious drive to learn, and a lot of real-world experience. The value of a university degree is that you're going to be exposed to a much broader array of critical thought than the narrow focus that most jobs provide.
The really valuable employee is one who has both characteristics...
Yes, we can build generation-ships. We're probably capable of doing this right now, with enough economic effort.
But I propose that the problem is not solely one of technology and capability, but of cultural psychology. The organization that builds that ship would have to invest enormous amounts of resources, with no tangible return for themselves during their lifespan. The generation that spends their lives in space would have to be extraordinarily benevolent - willing to donate their lives for the sake of the species. I don't think a group like this has existed in the history of the species... nor will it.
Either the technology shifts to require less 'benevolence' on behalf of the people involved (FTL tech), or the psychology of the culture shifts (longer lifespans) to make such a tremendous investment payoff during the lifespans of the people involved. I posit that the cultural shift due to extended lifespans is more likely than FTL.
... I once read a Science story about humans that hopped on a giant ship and accelerated to llghtspeed to visit a star with an earthlike planet. The humans inboard only aged two years, but 150 years passed-away back home..... whole countries rose and fell during that timespan. Totally impractical way to explore.
I don't know that the problem is light-speed being the upper barrier to velocity. I think the problem is the length of human lives. Scale up the length of the human lifetime to a thousand, ten thousand years and those sorts of time frames are very practical.
Many of the problems we face today are due to humanity not taking the 'long-view' approach.
We could colonize the galaxy, under the speed of light, in a very reasonable time frame (cosmologically/geologically speaking) - if only the human lifespan were longer or indefinite.
I know that quaint ethnic traditions are pure and good and "homogenization" is evil, but when you hold an international sporting event, there's the expectation that the players should be able to play the goddamn sport without interference from the fans. It's up there with "providing a stadium", you're just kind of expected to do that.
One thing that I really like about american college football is precisely the opposite. The stadiums are massive, and the fans purposely make the most noise during the opposing team's offensive possession to interfere with their coordination.
Of course, it's [mostly] human-originating noise, without aid of noise-making devices...
And we wonder why people "over there" hate us. I wish they could differentiate us from our government. This will never end while we are over there making mistakes like this.
Should people differentiate the American people from its government?
It's a democracy. We're responsible for the actions of the people we vote for; collectively that's the American government. If and when they act in ways that the public disapproves of, it's the public's job to remove them via the political process. If the public is too apathetic or unmotivated to do so, I believe that is implicit approval.
Mistakes will be made. Undoubtedly, some will be tragic. I feel heartbroken by this story.
Check out heavy rain - I'd like to myself, if I had a ps3 :-)
An excerpt from wired's review:
"...We’re well into the era of games-for-everyone, where if dinner isn’t on the table it’s because mom is too busy playing FarmVille. But what if she’s in the mood to trade in cartoon cows for adult drama? There’s practically nothing to serve this expanding audience. That’s why games like Heavy Rain are going to be a big part of gaming’s future.
Heavy Rain, which will be released Tuesday in North America, is not perfect. But it’s a successful experiment. And when it’s good, it’s good in ways that traditional games rarely touch."
And the link: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/02/review-heavy-rain/
What's funny, is WoW originally DID have penalties intended for killing passive NPCs or low-level characters. The rule book talks about dishonor, and how getting enough dishonor would cause you own faction to stop talking to you, eventually even attacking you if you entered town before your dishonor wore off.
Just being a bit of a minor pedant - but dishonor wasn't in the game originally. It was part of a patch that added the 'honor' system (rank / rewards from pvp). The day that patch was released may have been one of the single greatest large-scale world pvp events that I can think of. Epic zerging :-)
I knew some people who took dishonor as a challenge - it was leet to have 1337 dishonorable kills ;-)
Battlegrounds basically solved the ganking issue more than the dishonor system - move the pvp rewards to an instance, and that's where the people will go. People you met out in the open after that were generally after the same thing as you - gathering, questing, whatever - and more likely to be on the same footing level-wise (rather than a bored level 60 looking to cause a ruckus). Dishonor was later removed because of this.
The reality is that the number of people who find being griefed fun is smaller then the number of people who don't.
There's a distinction between pvp and griefing.
For me, the beauty of world pvp was that you were never safe while levelling, farming, gathering, whatever. Humans are sneaky and intelligent - unlike npc's - I was always keeping an eye out for surprises. Some of my fondest wow-memories involve breaking up the monotony of npc-related activity with some adrenaline-pumping player combat.
The reason I play MMO's is to interact with a large number of other players. As I prefer human team-mates, I also prefer human opponents - they generally behave in much more interesting ways than npc's.
...declaring Utah to be dumb!