Yes, but if they don't understand 'if (!ptr)', what will they understand? And if they don't understand it, they have no business touching the code.
Personally, I'll take properly objectified and commented code over 'clear' unoptimized code any day. If you're writing business apps, you may not need the extra cycles, so you can write a formula the way it would look in a math textbook. In game programming. almost nothing will come out looking that way. Formulas get broken down so that the inner loop does only what it absolutely needs to--and that's a simple example. More often than not, the algorithm is itself based on some bizarre mathematical hack from one of the Gems books. This is why dev editors now recognize web links...
My present pet peeve is badly designed objects. I shouldn't have to know the implementation details of a class and half a dozen associated classes in order to call one method. Hide that crap--that's what objects are for! If I have to duplicate all the effort someone put into writing the class every time I go to use it, I might as well write my own, so why are we paying them?
And dammit, if someone is going to specify a long list of complex arguments, the least they can do is put something in the header to describe what those arguments are and how they're used. Mind you, if the coupling is that strong, it usually means your object is broken, and it's time to refactor.
...that French is dying. A living language doesn't get prickly or defensive, and it does not try to impose linguistic purity the way the Acadamie Francais does. Culture grows synthetically, by combining influences from various sources. Purity is death. Look at the wonderful things that the Nazis did for Germany in the name of cultural purity--they killed the culture of Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe, and Kant. If you want to preserve something, you pickle it in formaldehyde--but first, you have to kill it.
If French has a word that English doesn't have, English speakers will happily pick it up, and it will soon appear in the Oxford English dictionary. The same is not true for French. And if the French are bad in this regard, the Quebecois are 10 times worse. The dream of the separatists in Quebec is a country inhabited only by "pur laine", descendants of the original French settlers. In fact, Quebec's cultural influence peaked in the late 60's, when Montreal was New Orleans North, a mixture of races, religions, languages, and traditions. After that the separtists started driving out, in Jacques Parizeau's words, "money and the ethnic vote."
If the French and the Quebecois get their wish, they may preserve their culture, but it will be dead, and no one will care.
Since when the hell can you patent something that someone else has done and has been in the public domain for years, and copyright a name that's been in common use for years?
Does this mean I can patent the wheel and sue all auto-manufacturers for it? Maybe I can copyright the word 'the' and collect royalties on it. Hey, maybe I can trademark the word "Christian" and sue all the churches!
Whatever drooling asswipe at the trademark office gave him this trademark needs to be shit canned ASAP. This is gross incompetence.
Government organizations are usually (but not always) plagued by politics and power, which produce inefficient and dishonest bureaucracies. Political partisanship makes it political suicide to take responsibility for a mistake. As a result, politicians take no responsibility, and the job of the lower ranks of the bureaucracy is to cover their ass when the blame comes down. The best way to avoid making mistakes is to do nothing, and to shuffle all real useful work to the bottom of the ladder. This is the zero-error principle, but it might just as well be called the zero-effectiveness principle. When a mistake is made, the worker bees take the fall, and the politically savvy middle or upper managers escape blame and continue to clog the system. The cost of political partisanship is that the government is nit-picked into paralysis. Thus, the expansion of government is the fault of all sides of the political spectrum.
Indeed, these professional bureaucrats protect themselves by building empires, and can actually turn their own incompetence to their benefit, by demanding more money to address their own failings. Governmental power attract the corruptible, who seek to turn that power and public wealth to their own ends. To counter this decay, and to attempt to prevent normal administrative errors, new departments accumulate to check existing ones (the Department of Homeland Security is an example of this.) This is how the government grows, again, usually through partisan criticism and demands for change. Ironically, much of this expansion may be the result of calls for more fiscal responsibility--bean counters on bean counters on bean counters.
The most efficient form of government is probably a benevolent dictatorship, but dictatorships never stay benevolent. The tradeoff in government is between effectiveness and damage control. Too little power and nothing gets done, too much power and the wrong thing gets done. The American system is built for gridlock, to provide checks and balance on power. You may not get the most efficient government, but you will get a less harmful one. The problem comes when a politician wants heavy handed effectiveness. This soon causes the system to grow rapidly, as the new powers attract political beaurocrats, greedy for a piece of the pie, while at the same time abuses of that power encourage the growth of institutions of restraint. It is not surprising, then, that the current administration has ushered in an period of unprecendented governmental expansion that will likely continue long after it has left office.
Far from solving the problem, calls for large government cuts make it worse, because these are merely simplistic, populist postures to gain votes. They act like binge and purge dieting, burning muscle and leaving fat. Political beaurocrats, who actually do no work, are politically savvy enough to escape the cuts. The ones who get cut will be those too busy doing actual work to notice the axe coming down. Indeed, the perfect political beaurocrat will be right there beside you, calling for the cutbacks, because that will score political points and make his job more secure. And the ones most likely to jump this demoralized beaurocracy will probably be the most competent, who are also the ones most likely to find other employment. The end product is survival of the fattest--who are also the ones that cost the most.
The cuts, once made, are rapidly felt--capitalism is, after all, a partnership between business and government. The economic system we all live under was created and is sustained by continual government intervention (if you don't know this, and are one of those people who think all government should be abolished, you get a failing grade.) So the cuts must be rolled back--in fact, the government must be expanded well beyond its previous size to get any useful work done.
The solutions would be less partisanship and a higher fault tolerance in the beaurocracy (rather than the zero-error principle), with emphasis on accomplishment rather than mere error-avoidance. But above all, we have to abolish the narcissistic management style, epitomized by the current administration and encouraged by pundits everywhere, where leaders take all of the credit but none of the blame.
I'll wait for the inevitable analysis, and most likely, debunking of this to pass final judgement, but this has the smell of a deliberate hoax, possibly perpetrated as part of a psychological study or by some sort of sketpical group to study the persistence of popular myths.
Two things that give it a bad smell: the mention of Diana (psychics love bringing up predictions about Diana; if James Randi were to stage this, he'd throw that in as a joke,) and the post hoc ergo prompter hoc nature of the 'predictions.' Note that the prediction concerning Diana was about her funeral, not her death, though the immediate reaction to her death would have been much stronger than the reaction to the funeral. All researchers into the paranormal claim to be able to control for this sort of second guessing. If this projects interpretations stand up to scrutiny, it will be the first time for a project of this nature.
The other oddity is that probability does not say that the ones and zeroes will even out over a period of time, but that they will tend to even out over time. There will, however, be periods where this averaging will not occur, with no other explanation necessary beyond pure random chance. Given enough time, even the most improbable thing will happen. Low probability is not zero probability. I suspect that if this is not a deliberate hoax, it is a mathematical error motivated by wishful thinking.
Pull your head out of your ass. There was no 'global cooling'; changes in weather patterns due to global climactic changes produce local minima and maxima. The overall change has been a steady climb. The global cooling theory is handy soundbite trotted out by conservatives based upon a misreading of inconclusive and rather marginal articles printed 40 years ago, when meteorologists couldn't tell you what the weather was going to do 3 hours from now.
You can do a reality check here. Of course, I don't suppose that having informed opinions is much of a priority for you...
Next time you're at the supermarket, look at the tabloids. What you see in there is a combination of titillation and outraged posturing. How better to disguise your own sexual desires, even from yourself, then to assume a posture of moral outrage? Of course, the tabloids have photos of semi-naked celebrities only because paparazzi are paid outrageous sums to intrude into private spaces to take pictures of people who think they are in a place where no one can see them. It's like having someone barge into your bathroom while you take a shower and being outraged that you aren't wearing any clothes. And yet, these tabloids sell like hotcakes by doing this and appealing to purient outrage. So who are the perverts here?
There's another interesting thing going on here. Yesterday my wife and I were trying to figure out why some people get turned on by S&M. We just couldn't see the attraction. Then it occurred to me that it has to do with guilt: crime and punishment. If you're naughty you must be punished, but the punishment itself gives you permission to be naughty. The other side of the equation is the dom, who punishes the submissive; the attraction here is power and control. The dom is in fact attempting to control their own desires; they are also motivated by guilt, which they escape by shifting it on to the submissive. The submissive is the naughty one. (In fact I've heard it said that the submissive is actually the one in control in S&M--at least when it's done right, and a lot of doms just play the role for the benefit of the submissive.)
And then it struck me: this whole 'family values' thing is kink! The outraged moralists are frustrated doms, obsessed with sex, desparate to partake in it. The reason they are so offended by the sexual practices of others is that they just can't stop thinking about it. So they displace the guilt. It's your fault that they're thinking about it--if you would just stop doing it, they could stop thinking of it. In the Muslim world, this is the motivation behind the hijab, the bhurka, and female cirumcision.
What we are witnessing is a sexual disfunction elevated to the level of a social and political movement. But it's still just kink.
1. Ability to Save: Most Wal-Mart employees with families are living below the poverty line. Let me explain what that's like. Each month, the person budgetting has to decide what bills go unpaid. Medical and dental problems go ignored until they reach the level of crisis. You cannot save, because to save means deferring debts which will accrue faster than your savings. Wal-Mart is America's largest employer. Are you getting the picture here?
2. Inflation. All of the deficit spending that the government is doing will eventually manfifest as inflation. The money you save today will be worth less tomorrow--much less. Inflation also favours debt, by making deferred payment advantageous because it is payment with cheaper money.
3. Investment. I know people who were millionaires who are now broke and barely able to pay rent. They saved. They invested. They lost. And it wasn't like they were stupid. They were robbed by corporate CEO and financial managers who cooked the books and made killings on insider trade deals. Banks pay almost no interest, so to get anything that's likely to stay ahead of inflation and gather value over time, you have to swim with sharks. Most people who do will get eaten. These sharks are the same people who want your retirement savings in the public sphere, where they can get at them.
4. Old Age. Maybe you'll be happy, healthy, and productive till you're 85 years old. The odds are overwhelming that you won't be, that no one will want to employ you after you're 65, and that you'll have to retire then, whether you can work or not, whether you have money or not. Keep in mind that medicine and medical insurance at this age is very expensive. And you have to pay other people to do the things you can no longer do. You're going to need a lot more money to live in your old age than you do now. So your savings probably won't last as long as you think.
The point of social security is not just for those who didn't save. So you save for your retirement? Bully for you, so do I, a lot--but I'm a lot poorer than I used to be, and I haven't drawn a penny from my savings. As millions discovered in 1929, and again in 2000, savings can vanish in an instant. If this happens to you when you're 35 and in good health, you can recover. If it happens when you're 65, you may well end eating dog food until winter comes and you freeze to death. If social security is not there to pick up the slack, for many of the people reading this, this will mean YOU.
Telling school children that scientific theory is just theory is a game of dishonest semantics. The sense of the word theory in a scientific context is quite different from its common usage. In everyday usage, theory means an opinion based upon sketchy evidence. In science, a theory remains a theory no matter how well founded--even when everyone agrees that it is a fact. Gravity is a theory. Changing your mind about it will not give you the power to fly. To confuse the two meanings deliberately in a children's textbook, as this does, is a deliberate lie.
All over the world, religious adherents are using the old arguments of postmodernism to try to discredit science wherever it contradicts their beliefs. They are not engaging in scientific debate, but in meta-debates, using methods from literary criticism to paint science as mere opinion and orthodoxy. They are not talking about evidence. They are arguing that evidence itself is irrelevant. And they are not talking to scientists, who have already heard all their arguments and refuted them soundly. They are talking to people without any scientific knowledge, preferrably as young as they can get them. From the sound of some of the responses on this post, they've been talking to a lot of the people here. The goal is political. They can't refute science, but if they get enough votes, they can outlaw it.
I'm not kidding about this. The strategy is called The Wedge, and the long term goal (we're talking in terms of generations here) is to encourage a widespread attitude of distrust towards science and skeptical thinking. The have identified science, quite correctly, as the greatest threat to the type of magical thinking required for fundamentalist religions. Muslim and Hindu extremists have come to the same conclusion, as have a horde of New Age con men and fortune tellers, and are fighting for the same goal; the disparagement of science and the scientific method.
Anyone here who does not think that the scientific method works, throw out your computer now. And your car, all your appliances, hell, you should probably burn your house, because all of these things, the way they're made, the materials they are made of, are possible because of science. You probably would not be alive without the medicine and food that scientific advances have made possible. Think of the number of people who just died in the Asian Tsunami who would have lived if there had been an early warning system. Ignorance kills.
And if you think that evolution is just a theory or 'pseudo-scientific propaganda', that there are lots of arguments against it and its on shaky ground, then you haven't bothered to read the literature. I'm sorry, but all the arguments against it advanced by ID theorists and Creationists have been answered, and there is no alternative theory that has anywhere near the same volume of evidence to support it. If you don't know this, I suspect you either don't care to know it, or would refuse to acknowledge any evidence no matter how sound.
EQ uses trial-by-boredom: difficulty = time. And I think the way EQ2 is tanking tells the story on that. I'm sorry to say I bought this turkey, and killed it after the first month.
Difficulty should be about strategy, but this is hard--not for the players, but for the game maker. Real strategy requires more options in play, not just higher numbers applied to the same thing. You know the game works if, given the same situation and stats, a good player gains a lot more XP, loot, etc, than a bad player, and the difference should be apparent in minutes. If it takes you five hours to get anything happening, your game is broken, and I won't bother with it.
Apparently, no one else will either. It's gratifying to see EQ2 tank, WoW soar, and CoH recover nicely after the dip it took when these come out. Bot WoW and CoH actually treat their players as if their time mattered.
In my blog I I have an entry entitled The RIAA... in a Perfect World. The point is that when a company or organisation loses the moral high ground, and comes to occupy the moral low ground, everything they have is fair game. No one cares about stealing from a thief. And anyone who deals with a thief can expect no better. The articles that have appeared here and elsewhere about EA give it a very bad reputation.
PC games are easy to crack. Console games are easy enough too, with a mod chip. If you have a reputation for being a slime ball, no one will think twice about doing it. EA has had a lot of bad press lately, and believe me, as someone in the industry, you don't know the half of it. Anyone who makes a deal with EA right now is at risk. NBA just made a good business decision.
If EA wants to improve its chances with regard to licensings, they need to work on their reputation. Very hard.
The collective animosity of a group as large as the readership of slashdot is not a trivial matter.
The point of GPL is sharing. The other team leader is an egotistical idiot. Take what you want. If he were anything but an idiot, he would be flattered, and he would take anything from yours that came in handy. But he's one of those arrogant fools who thinks that everything he does is better than everyone else. His opinion is not worthy of consideration. So don't consider it.
The more extraneous crap they monitor, the higher the noise to signal ratio. Kerry mentioned in the debates that there were hundreds of thousands of hours of unexamined surveillance tape. Of course there is! The best thing you can hope for with the growing mountain of surveillance output is that after the next attack, the cops will be able to look at the tapes and say, "Oh, yeah, there go the terrorists..."
The intelligence community needs men on the ground, deep cover agents in the places where the terrorists are recruiting. By the time they are sending encoded messages to each other in secret areas of the net, it's already too late. Getting rid of Ashcroft helps too. They just don't come any more incompetent than that.
Whew! Thanks for the warning. Cthulu is really bad for you. Last year I had some sea food with some Cthulu in it, and I almost died of mood poisoning. Of course, now they're putting Cthulu in everything. We have chips in our office vending machine that are Ketchup and Cthulu flavoured. Still, it's gotta be better than that Yog Soggoth gum...
Too bad they fumbled the metaphor...and it was such a great one too: the Matrix as the Veil of Maya, created by humanity acting as a hive-mind. Reality becomes obscured by the a cloud of illusions generated by society as a whole. It was all there in the first movie, but I suspect they didn't realize what they had. Instead, they made the humans into batteries (WTF? Nuclear generators would have been far more efficient) instead of actual nodes in the Matrix (apparently they forgot what the words itself meant.) Otherwise they would have realized that the Architect character wasn't at all needed. The Matrix was not built, but emergent.
If you want real objectivity, go read a lab report.
Journalism conveys not only the raw facts, but the experience of being there, and the opinions of those on the scene. Some journalists try to stick to the facts, but the reality is that "fact based" reporting can be turned into the most subjective and biased thing you can possibly read, simply by the way that certain facts can be emphasisized or de-emphasized. As the old saying goes, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!" If you think journalism is objective, you may be in for some rather harsh disappointments.
Hemingway was a brilliant journalist, but I doubt the man could be objective to save his life. He could, however, tell you what it was like to walk down that street in Paris, or attend that bullfight in Madrid, in a way that would make you feel as if you'd been there.
You can give me a rundown of the features of the game, and you know what? There are probably twenty games out there with the same features. That doesn't tell you what it's like to play the game. You can make almost the same game with the same feature set, controls, etc, and it can still be either a turkey or a fantastic game, but the difference between the two is in how it all comes together. The most important remarks in a game article are usually in the last line or two, where the writer says "great game" or "worth a look" or "avoid unless you need sleep." That's where the sale is usually made or lost. These are subjective judgements. All reviews are.
Good production values won't save a turkey, and there have been some amazing games made of spit and paper mache. The details tell you nothing--they're usually there to be spun by some shill in a marketing department. I liked the article. It was well written, and it described what it was like to play the game. If even 10% of the crap out there really did that, I'd be a happy man.
The article addresses volcanic eruptions and compares them to human emissions. They are not even close to being on the same scale. It also cites fossil records from geological activity in ages long past, which indicate that they do not produce this kind of disruptive CO2 spike.
Please read the articles before you post. It is painfully apparent that many of the people posting on this topic have not.
And spare us the "scientists can be wrong" crap. We know they can be wrong, but since they have a high level of expertise in the subject, there is a high probability that they are right. This probability is much greater in the absence of a coherent counter-argument (I've certainly found none here.) Those who harp upon the fallibility of scientists are in fact usually making a claim about their own infallibility.
The effort is in keeping all the stories straight. Telling a single rehearsed lie is one thing. Maintaining a skein of lies is a whole different matter. Even when a set of lies are well rehearsed, reality just doesn't go along with you, and that's where good interrogation techniques come in. No, not torture or coaching, which are notoriously unreliable because the answers you get are the ones you started out with.
A good interrogator will find the holes in the story--and there all always holes, because it's a lie! The idea is to poke at those holes, force the liar to start ad-libbing, then cross reference all the material for contradictions. A good liar may not slip up, but the way he responds to the questions will be different from someone who hasn't come rehearsed.
Of course, a bad interrogator won't know the difference, will take gaps in memory as gaps in the story, and will coach the subject until he tells the story the interrogator wants to hear--at which point the entire interview becomes worthless. The problem, of course, is that bad interrogators always think they're good interrogators.
SUV's do not win in accidents. They don't stop and push the other car out of the way, they push the other car down and ramp over it. The center of gravity is much too high--usually 6 inches to a foot above the bumper, which is already high enough to pass over the bumpers of most passenger cars, initiating the ramp effect.
There is even a good chance of this happening with a Smart Car. As the bumper of the SUV compresses the front end, the front end and cage of the little car will become a ramp, the tires will blow or the axles collapse, and the car will be locked in place by the sheer friction of the weight of both vehicles plus the force of lifting the SUV. The Smart Car will stop abruptly, which is bad, but the SUV will become a tumbling death trap, with 2 to 4 tons of vehicle crushing the heads of its occupants like overripe grapes.
Trust me, stopping is better than tumbling. Accidents aren't about winning. It's about how you stop. SUV's don't, and that's the problem. Even the people that make them admit that SUV's are more dangerous than standard passenger cars.
Actually, it doesn't quite work like that. Exhaustion will affect all 80 hours, so you aren't going to get 40 hours at full production, etc. You get all 80 at the reduced rate. Prolonged death march projects produce a chronic state of mental fog.
What makes it worse is that software development does not scale in productivity like this. At a certain point, you actually begin to work in reverse, breaking working code and introducing bugs that nullify all of your work. In the early 90's I heard a statistic that said that something like 80% of all large software projects are "abandoned in disgust." That number sounds high, but we don't hear about the vast majority of the projects that go down like this. Shareholders get freaked out about them--and some of them happen in big shops like IBM.
These projects just can't make progress beyond a certain point. You can probably figure out why. The deadline slips. Hours are increased to make up. Brain rot occurs, and errors increase. More slippage, more hours, more errors. Accompany this cycle with the sound of a toilet flushing and you get the picture.
Variated work which includes a different kinds of efforts--social, physical, mental, etc--can be sustained longer. A few people can maintain hours like this on a single task indefinitely by sacrificing everything else--friends, family, hobbies, entertainment, personal hygiene, etc, etc. This is not a desirable habit, but a mental condition probably in need of clinical treatment, which will probably result in early death of nervous breakdown (and try not to be nearby when they snap--there may be collateral damage.) If you can't do it, it just means you're a normal human being.
You picked that sig as a troll. You did so to deliberately antagonize people--if you didn't know it was going to have that effect, you are an idiot. It's also moronically flippant, the sound-bite version of a complex issue, the bleating of a Ditto-Head.
Fetuses are not children, they are potential children--like eggs and sperm, which get flushed down the toilet by the millions every day. Between that potential and the actuality lay several months in the womb of a woman. Whether that happens is up to her, not you. It's not your womb.
However, thanks for Conservative policies, which cut funding for any agencies in the third world with any connections to abortion, and encouraging birth control through 'abstinence', they're killing a lot more babies. Yes, actual babies. With no birth control, no abortions, and enormous stigmas attached to illegitimate birth (including honor killings,) women have the baby in secret, suffocate it, and throw it in a hole. Or just let them starve to death, which is how they handled it in Ireland when the Catholic Church ran the place.
Capital punishment has no deterrent effect on any form of crime. It's not even a particularly good punishment--most serial killers prefer death to life imprisonment. Ted Bundy made sure he got caught in a state that had the death penalty. Which means it isn't even that good for getting revenge; you're doing them a favor. It may save money, by killing people you don't intend to let go again anyway, so you don't have to pay their room and board for 50 years. But actually, it's not even that good as a cost cutting measure--the court costs for a capital case are brutal.
So why is it done? Any eye for an eye? That's Old Testament--even the Jews stopped believing that a long time ago, and it was never part of Christianity. Closure? Damn right--even if they got the wrong guy and find the guy who actually did it, the cops wouldn't dare reopen the case. If the wrong man takes the rap in a capital case, the guilty need never fear justice.
And if someone's name is cleared after sentencing, it's damn hard to pardon them if they're dead.
Carter's problems were caused by the rise in oil prices, which drove the price of everything else up (and will do so again), and by the sudden appearance of the Asian tigers, primarily Japan.
Reagan's people convinced the Saudis to cut oil prices, which ended that period of inflation worldwide. This is also the action by the Reagan administration most credited with bringing down communism in Russia (by cutting desperately needed oil revenue), but to be honest, the effect on Russia was probably an afterthought. The primary goal was to break the oil cartel, and that's what they did.
As for Japan, it was riding partly on the backs of cheap labour in nearby countries, mainly Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Over the next few years, American companies began to deal with these countries directly, and Japan lost it's privileged position with these countries, and the huge markups that position entailed.
These are the reasons for the recovery in the 80's. Supply-side economics, although a tidy theory, has yet to show any empirical evidence of success. When the two are plotted on the same graph, the tax rates of the very rich have absolutely no correlation with overall economic health. Tax breaks for the rich are motivated by politics, not economics.
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Yes, but if they don't understand 'if (!ptr)', what will they understand? And if they don't understand it, they have no business touching the code.
Personally, I'll take properly objectified and commented code over 'clear' unoptimized code any day. If you're writing business apps, you may not need the extra cycles, so you can write a formula the way it would look in a math textbook. In game programming. almost nothing will come out looking that way. Formulas get broken down so that the inner loop does only what it absolutely needs to--and that's a simple example. More often than not, the algorithm is itself based on some bizarre mathematical hack from one of the Gems books. This is why dev editors now recognize web links...
My present pet peeve is badly designed objects. I shouldn't have to know the implementation details of a class and half a dozen associated classes in order to call one method. Hide that crap--that's what objects are for! If I have to duplicate all the effort someone put into writing the class every time I go to use it, I might as well write my own, so why are we paying them?
And dammit, if someone is going to specify a long list of complex arguments, the least they can do is put something in the header to describe what those arguments are and how they're used. Mind you, if the coupling is that strong, it usually means your object is broken, and it's time to refactor.
...that French is dying. A living language doesn't get prickly or defensive, and it does not try to impose linguistic purity the way the Acadamie Francais does. Culture grows synthetically, by combining influences from various sources. Purity is death. Look at the wonderful things that the Nazis did for Germany in the name of cultural purity--they killed the culture of Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe, and Kant. If you want to preserve something, you pickle it in formaldehyde--but first, you have to kill it.
If French has a word that English doesn't have, English speakers will happily pick it up, and it will soon appear in the Oxford English dictionary. The same is not true for French. And if the French are bad in this regard, the Quebecois are 10 times worse. The dream of the separatists in Quebec is a country inhabited only by "pur laine", descendants of the original French settlers. In fact, Quebec's cultural influence peaked in the late 60's, when Montreal was New Orleans North, a mixture of races, religions, languages, and traditions. After that the separtists started driving out, in Jacques Parizeau's words, "money and the ethnic vote."
If the French and the Quebecois get their wish, they may preserve their culture, but it will be dead, and no one will care.
Since when the hell can you patent something that someone else has done and has been in the public domain for years, and copyright a name that's been in common use for years?
Does this mean I can patent the wheel and sue all auto-manufacturers for it? Maybe I can copyright the word 'the' and collect royalties on it. Hey, maybe I can trademark the word "Christian" and sue all the churches!
Whatever drooling asswipe at the trademark office gave him this trademark needs to be shit canned ASAP. This is gross incompetence.
Government organizations are usually (but not always) plagued by politics and power, which produce inefficient and dishonest bureaucracies. Political partisanship makes it political suicide to take responsibility for a mistake. As a result, politicians take no responsibility, and the job of the lower ranks of the bureaucracy is to cover their ass when the blame comes down. The best way to avoid making mistakes is to do nothing, and to shuffle all real useful work to the bottom of the ladder. This is the zero-error principle, but it might just as well be called the zero-effectiveness principle. When a mistake is made, the worker bees take the fall, and the politically savvy middle or upper managers escape blame and continue to clog the system. The cost of political partisanship is that the government is nit-picked into paralysis. Thus, the expansion of government is the fault of all sides of the political spectrum.
Indeed, these professional bureaucrats protect themselves by building empires, and can actually turn their own incompetence to their benefit, by demanding more money to address their own failings. Governmental power attract the corruptible, who seek to turn that power and public wealth to their own ends. To counter this decay, and to attempt to prevent normal administrative errors, new departments accumulate to check existing ones (the Department of Homeland Security is an example of this.) This is how the government grows, again, usually through partisan criticism and demands for change. Ironically, much of this expansion may be the result of calls for more fiscal responsibility--bean counters on bean counters on bean counters.
The most efficient form of government is probably a benevolent dictatorship, but dictatorships never stay benevolent. The tradeoff in government is between effectiveness and damage control. Too little power and nothing gets done, too much power and the wrong thing gets done. The American system is built for gridlock, to provide checks and balance on power. You may not get the most efficient government, but you will get a less harmful one. The problem comes when a politician wants heavy handed effectiveness. This soon causes the system to grow rapidly, as the new powers attract political beaurocrats, greedy for a piece of the pie, while at the same time abuses of that power encourage the growth of institutions of restraint. It is not surprising, then, that the current administration has ushered in an period of unprecendented governmental expansion that will likely continue long after it has left office.
Far from solving the problem, calls for large government cuts make it worse, because these are merely simplistic, populist postures to gain votes. They act like binge and purge dieting, burning muscle and leaving fat. Political beaurocrats, who actually do no work, are politically savvy enough to escape the cuts. The ones who get cut will be those too busy doing actual work to notice the axe coming down. Indeed, the perfect political beaurocrat will be right there beside you, calling for the cutbacks, because that will score political points and make his job more secure. And the ones most likely to jump this demoralized beaurocracy will probably be the most competent, who are also the ones most likely to find other employment. The end product is survival of the fattest--who are also the ones that cost the most.
The cuts, once made, are rapidly felt--capitalism is, after all, a partnership between business and government. The economic system we all live under was created and is sustained by continual government intervention (if you don't know this, and are one of those people who think all government should be abolished, you get a failing grade.) So the cuts must be rolled back--in fact, the government must be expanded well beyond its previous size to get any useful work done.
The solutions would be less partisanship and a higher fault tolerance in the beaurocracy (rather than the zero-error principle), with emphasis on accomplishment rather than mere error-avoidance. But above all, we have to abolish the narcissistic management style, epitomized by the current administration and encouraged by pundits everywhere, where leaders take all of the credit but none of the blame.
Given that the point of the Department of Homeland Security is interoperability between intelligence and law enforcement, that's really not an option.
I'll wait for the inevitable analysis, and most likely, debunking of this to pass final judgement, but this has the smell of a deliberate hoax, possibly perpetrated as part of a psychological study or by some sort of sketpical group to study the persistence of popular myths.
Two things that give it a bad smell: the mention of Diana (psychics love bringing up predictions about Diana; if James Randi were to stage this, he'd throw that in as a joke,) and the post hoc ergo prompter hoc nature of the 'predictions.' Note that the prediction concerning Diana was about her funeral, not her death, though the immediate reaction to her death would have been much stronger than the reaction to the funeral. All researchers into the paranormal claim to be able to control for this sort of second guessing. If this projects interpretations stand up to scrutiny, it will be the first time for a project of this nature.
The other oddity is that probability does not say that the ones and zeroes will even out over a period of time, but that they will tend to even out over time. There will, however, be periods where this averaging will not occur, with no other explanation necessary beyond pure random chance. Given enough time, even the most improbable thing will happen. Low probability is not zero probability. I suspect that if this is not a deliberate hoax, it is a mathematical error motivated by wishful thinking.
Pull your head out of your ass. There was no 'global cooling'; changes in weather patterns due to global climactic changes produce local minima and maxima. The overall change has been a steady climb. The global cooling theory is handy soundbite trotted out by conservatives based upon a misreading of inconclusive and rather marginal articles printed 40 years ago, when meteorologists couldn't tell you what the weather was going to do 3 hours from now.
You can do a reality check here. Of course, I don't suppose that having informed opinions is much of a priority for you...
Interesting, but not surprising.
Next time you're at the supermarket, look at the tabloids. What you see in there is a combination of titillation and outraged posturing. How better to disguise your own sexual desires, even from yourself, then to assume a posture of moral outrage? Of course, the tabloids have photos of semi-naked celebrities only because paparazzi are paid outrageous sums to intrude into private spaces to take pictures of people who think they are in a place where no one can see them. It's like having someone barge into your bathroom while you take a shower and being outraged that you aren't wearing any clothes. And yet, these tabloids sell like hotcakes by doing this and appealing to purient outrage. So who are the perverts here?
There's another interesting thing going on here. Yesterday my wife and I were trying to figure out why some people get turned on by S&M. We just couldn't see the attraction. Then it occurred to me that it has to do with guilt: crime and punishment. If you're naughty you must be punished, but the punishment itself gives you permission to be naughty. The other side of the equation is the dom, who punishes the submissive; the attraction here is power and control. The dom is in fact attempting to control their own desires; they are also motivated by guilt, which they escape by shifting it on to the submissive. The submissive is the naughty one. (In fact I've heard it said that the submissive is actually the one in control in S&M--at least when it's done right, and a lot of doms just play the role for the benefit of the submissive.)
And then it struck me: this whole 'family values' thing is kink! The outraged moralists are frustrated doms, obsessed with sex, desparate to partake in it. The reason they are so offended by the sexual practices of others is that they just can't stop thinking about it. So they displace the guilt. It's your fault that they're thinking about it--if you would just stop doing it, they could stop thinking of it. In the Muslim world, this is the motivation behind the hijab, the bhurka, and female cirumcision.
What we are witnessing is a sexual disfunction elevated to the level of a social and political movement. But it's still just kink.
There are several problems with this:
1. Ability to Save: Most Wal-Mart employees with families are living below the poverty line. Let me explain what that's like. Each month, the person budgetting has to decide what bills go unpaid. Medical and dental problems go ignored until they reach the level of crisis. You cannot save, because to save means deferring debts which will accrue faster than your savings. Wal-Mart is America's largest employer. Are you getting the picture here?
2. Inflation. All of the deficit spending that the government is doing will eventually manfifest as inflation. The money you save today will be worth less tomorrow--much less. Inflation also favours debt, by making deferred payment advantageous because it is payment with cheaper money.
3. Investment. I know people who were millionaires who are now broke and barely able to pay rent. They saved. They invested. They lost. And it wasn't like they were stupid. They were robbed by corporate CEO and financial managers who cooked the books and made killings on insider trade deals. Banks pay almost no interest, so to get anything that's likely to stay ahead of inflation and gather value over time, you have to swim with sharks. Most people who do will get eaten. These sharks are the same people who want your retirement savings in the public sphere, where they can get at them.
4. Old Age. Maybe you'll be happy, healthy, and productive till you're 85 years old. The odds are overwhelming that you won't be, that no one will want to employ you after you're 65, and that you'll have to retire then, whether you can work or not, whether you have money or not. Keep in mind that medicine and medical insurance at this age is very expensive. And you have to pay other people to do the things you can no longer do. You're going to need a lot more money to live in your old age than you do now. So your savings probably won't last as long as you think.
The point of social security is not just for those who didn't save. So you save for your retirement? Bully for you, so do I, a lot--but I'm a lot poorer than I used to be, and I haven't drawn a penny from my savings. As millions discovered in 1929, and again in 2000, savings can vanish in an instant. If this happens to you when you're 35 and in good health, you can recover. If it happens when you're 65, you may well end eating dog food until winter comes and you freeze to death. If social security is not there to pick up the slack, for many of the people reading this, this will mean YOU.
Telling school children that scientific theory is just theory is a game of dishonest semantics. The sense of the word theory in a scientific context is quite different from its common usage. In everyday usage, theory means an opinion based upon sketchy evidence. In science, a theory remains a theory no matter how well founded--even when everyone agrees that it is a fact. Gravity is a theory. Changing your mind about it will not give you the power to fly. To confuse the two meanings deliberately in a children's textbook, as this does, is a deliberate lie.
All over the world, religious adherents are using the old arguments of postmodernism to try to discredit science wherever it contradicts their beliefs. They are not engaging in scientific debate, but in meta-debates, using methods from literary criticism to paint science as mere opinion and orthodoxy. They are not talking about evidence. They are arguing that evidence itself is irrelevant. And they are not talking to scientists, who have already heard all their arguments and refuted them soundly. They are talking to people without any scientific knowledge, preferrably as young as they can get them. From the sound of some of the responses on this post, they've been talking to a lot of the people here. The goal is political. They can't refute science, but if they get enough votes, they can outlaw it.
I'm not kidding about this. The strategy is called The Wedge, and the long term goal (we're talking in terms of generations here) is to encourage a widespread attitude of distrust towards science and skeptical thinking. The have identified science, quite correctly, as the greatest threat to the type of magical thinking required for fundamentalist religions. Muslim and Hindu extremists have come to the same conclusion, as have a horde of New Age con men and fortune tellers, and are fighting for the same goal; the disparagement of science and the scientific method.
Anyone here who does not think that the scientific method works, throw out your computer now. And your car, all your appliances, hell, you should probably burn your house, because all of these things, the way they're made, the materials they are made of, are possible because of science. You probably would not be alive without the medicine and food that scientific advances have made possible. Think of the number of people who just died in the Asian Tsunami who would have lived if there had been an early warning system. Ignorance kills.
And if you think that evolution is just a theory or 'pseudo-scientific propaganda', that there are lots of arguments against it and its on shaky ground, then you haven't bothered to read the literature. I'm sorry, but all the arguments against it advanced by ID theorists and Creationists have been answered, and there is no alternative theory that has anywhere near the same volume of evidence to support it. If you don't know this, I suspect you either don't care to know it, or would refuse to acknowledge any evidence no matter how sound.
Overheard at the theatrical release of "The Two Towers": "Oh, come on, Rangers can't tank!"
EQ uses trial-by-boredom: difficulty = time. And I think the way EQ2 is tanking tells the story on that. I'm sorry to say I bought this turkey, and killed it after the first month.
Difficulty should be about strategy, but this is hard--not for the players, but for the game maker. Real strategy requires more options in play, not just higher numbers applied to the same thing. You know the game works if, given the same situation and stats, a good player gains a lot more XP, loot, etc, than a bad player, and the difference should be apparent in minutes. If it takes you five hours to get anything happening, your game is broken, and I won't bother with it.
Apparently, no one else will either. It's gratifying to see EQ2 tank, WoW soar, and CoH recover nicely after the dip it took when these come out. Bot WoW and CoH actually treat their players as if their time mattered.
$50,000 to clone my cat? Christ, I paid $250 to have the sucker put down, and I thought that was a lot...
In my blog I I have an entry entitled The RIAA... in a Perfect World. The point is that when a company or organisation loses the moral high ground, and comes to occupy the moral low ground, everything they have is fair game. No one cares about stealing from a thief. And anyone who deals with a thief can expect no better. The articles that have appeared here and elsewhere about EA give it a very bad reputation.
PC games are easy to crack. Console games are easy enough too, with a mod chip. If you have a reputation for being a slime ball, no one will think twice about doing it. EA has had a lot of bad press lately, and believe me, as someone in the industry, you don't know the half of it. Anyone who makes a deal with EA right now is at risk. NBA just made a good business decision.
If EA wants to improve its chances with regard to licensings, they need to work on their reputation. Very hard.
The collective animosity of a group as large as the readership of slashdot is not a trivial matter.
The point of GPL is sharing. The other team leader is an egotistical idiot. Take what you want. If he were anything but an idiot, he would be flattered, and he would take anything from yours that came in handy. But he's one of those arrogant fools who thinks that everything he does is better than everyone else. His opinion is not worthy of consideration. So don't consider it.
The more extraneous crap they monitor, the higher the noise to signal ratio. Kerry mentioned in the debates that there were hundreds of thousands of hours of unexamined surveillance tape. Of course there is! The best thing you can hope for with the growing mountain of surveillance output is that after the next attack, the cops will be able to look at the tapes and say, "Oh, yeah, there go the terrorists..."
The intelligence community needs men on the ground, deep cover agents in the places where the terrorists are recruiting. By the time they are sending encoded messages to each other in secret areas of the net, it's already too late. Getting rid of Ashcroft helps too. They just don't come any more incompetent than that.
Whew! Thanks for the warning. Cthulu is really bad for you. Last year I had some sea food with some Cthulu in it, and I almost died of mood poisoning. Of course, now they're putting Cthulu in everything. We have chips in our office vending machine that are Ketchup and Cthulu flavoured. Still, it's gotta be better than that Yog Soggoth gum...
Too bad they fumbled the metaphor...and it was such a great one too: the Matrix as the Veil of Maya, created by humanity acting as a hive-mind. Reality becomes obscured by the a cloud of illusions generated by society as a whole. It was all there in the first movie, but I suspect they didn't realize what they had. Instead, they made the humans into batteries (WTF? Nuclear generators would have been far more efficient) instead of actual nodes in the Matrix (apparently they forgot what the words itself meant.) Otherwise they would have realized that the Architect character wasn't at all needed. The Matrix was not built, but emergent.
Oh, well...
If you want real objectivity, go read a lab report.
Journalism conveys not only the raw facts, but the experience of being there, and the opinions of those on the scene. Some journalists try to stick to the facts, but the reality is that "fact based" reporting can be turned into the most subjective and biased thing you can possibly read, simply by the way that certain facts can be emphasisized or de-emphasized. As the old saying goes, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!" If you think journalism is objective, you may be in for some rather harsh disappointments.
Hemingway was a brilliant journalist, but I doubt the man could be objective to save his life. He could, however, tell you what it was like to walk down that street in Paris, or attend that bullfight in Madrid, in a way that would make you feel as if you'd been there.
You can give me a rundown of the features of the game, and you know what? There are probably twenty games out there with the same features. That doesn't tell you what it's like to play the game. You can make almost the same game with the same feature set, controls, etc, and it can still be either a turkey or a fantastic game, but the difference between the two is in how it all comes together. The most important remarks in a game article are usually in the last line or two, where the writer says "great game" or "worth a look" or "avoid unless you need sleep." That's where the sale is usually made or lost. These are subjective judgements. All reviews are.
Good production values won't save a turkey, and there have been some amazing games made of spit and paper mache. The details tell you nothing--they're usually there to be spun by some shill in a marketing department. I liked the article. It was well written, and it described what it was like to play the game. If even 10% of the crap out there really did that, I'd be a happy man.
The article addresses volcanic eruptions and compares them to human emissions. They are not even close to being on the same scale. It also cites fossil records from geological activity in ages long past, which indicate that they do not produce this kind of disruptive CO2 spike.
Please read the articles before you post. It is painfully apparent that many of the people posting on this topic have not.
And spare us the "scientists can be wrong" crap. We know they can be wrong, but since they have a high level of expertise in the subject, there is a high probability that they are right. This probability is much greater in the absence of a coherent counter-argument (I've certainly found none here.) Those who harp upon the fallibility of scientists are in fact usually making a claim about their own infallibility.
The effort is in keeping all the stories straight. Telling a single rehearsed lie is one thing. Maintaining a skein of lies is a whole different matter. Even when a set of lies are well rehearsed, reality just doesn't go along with you, and that's where good interrogation techniques come in. No, not torture or coaching, which are notoriously unreliable because the answers you get are the ones you started out with.
A good interrogator will find the holes in the story--and there all always holes, because it's a lie! The idea is to poke at those holes, force the liar to start ad-libbing, then cross reference all the material for contradictions. A good liar may not slip up, but the way he responds to the questions will be different from someone who hasn't come rehearsed.
Of course, a bad interrogator won't know the difference, will take gaps in memory as gaps in the story, and will coach the subject until he tells the story the interrogator wants to hear--at which point the entire interview becomes worthless. The problem, of course, is that bad interrogators always think they're good interrogators.
SUV's do not win in accidents. They don't stop and push the other car out of the way, they push the other car down and ramp over it. The center of gravity is much too high--usually 6 inches to a foot above the bumper, which is already high enough to pass over the bumpers of most passenger cars, initiating the ramp effect.
There is even a good chance of this happening with a Smart Car. As the bumper of the SUV compresses the front end, the front end and cage of the little car will become a ramp, the tires will blow or the axles collapse, and the car will be locked in place by the sheer friction of the weight of both vehicles plus the force of lifting the SUV. The Smart Car will stop abruptly, which is bad, but the SUV will become a tumbling death trap, with 2 to 4 tons of vehicle crushing the heads of its occupants like overripe grapes.
Trust me, stopping is better than tumbling. Accidents aren't about winning. It's about how you stop. SUV's don't, and that's the problem. Even the people that make them admit that SUV's are more dangerous than standard passenger cars.
Actually, it doesn't quite work like that. Exhaustion will affect all 80 hours, so you aren't going to get 40 hours at full production, etc. You get all 80 at the reduced rate. Prolonged death march projects produce a chronic state of mental fog.
What makes it worse is that software development does not scale in productivity like this. At a certain point, you actually begin to work in reverse, breaking working code and introducing bugs that nullify all of your work. In the early 90's I heard a statistic that said that something like 80% of all large software projects are "abandoned in disgust." That number sounds high, but we don't hear about the vast majority of the projects that go down like this. Shareholders get freaked out about them--and some of them happen in big shops like IBM.
These projects just can't make progress beyond a certain point. You can probably figure out why. The deadline slips. Hours are increased to make up. Brain rot occurs, and errors increase. More slippage, more hours, more errors. Accompany this cycle with the sound of a toilet flushing and you get the picture.
Variated work which includes a different kinds of efforts--social, physical, mental, etc--can be sustained longer. A few people can maintain hours like this on a single task indefinitely by sacrificing everything else--friends, family, hobbies, entertainment, personal hygiene, etc, etc. This is not a desirable habit, but a mental condition probably in need of clinical treatment, which will probably result in early death of nervous breakdown (and try not to be nearby when they snap--there may be collateral damage.) If you can't do it, it just means you're a normal human being.
You picked that sig as a troll. You did so to deliberately antagonize people--if you didn't know it was going to have that effect, you are an idiot. It's also moronically flippant, the sound-bite version of a complex issue, the bleating of a Ditto-Head.
Fetuses are not children, they are potential children--like eggs and sperm, which get flushed down the toilet by the millions every day. Between that potential and the actuality lay several months in the womb of a woman. Whether that happens is up to her, not you. It's not your womb.
However, thanks for Conservative policies, which cut funding for any agencies in the third world with any connections to abortion, and encouraging birth control through 'abstinence', they're killing a lot more babies. Yes, actual babies. With no birth control, no abortions, and enormous stigmas attached to illegitimate birth (including honor killings,) women have the baby in secret, suffocate it, and throw it in a hole. Or just let them starve to death, which is how they handled it in Ireland when the Catholic Church ran the place.
Capital punishment has no deterrent effect on any form of crime. It's not even a particularly good punishment--most serial killers prefer death to life imprisonment. Ted Bundy made sure he got caught in a state that had the death penalty. Which means it isn't even that good for getting revenge; you're doing them a favor. It may save money, by killing people you don't intend to let go again anyway, so you don't have to pay their room and board for 50 years. But actually, it's not even that good as a cost cutting measure--the court costs for a capital case are brutal.
So why is it done? Any eye for an eye? That's Old Testament--even the Jews stopped believing that a long time ago, and it was never part of Christianity. Closure? Damn right--even if they got the wrong guy and find the guy who actually did it, the cops wouldn't dare reopen the case. If the wrong man takes the rap in a capital case, the guilty need never fear justice.
And if someone's name is cleared after sentencing, it's damn hard to pardon them if they're dead.
Carter's problems were caused by the rise in oil prices, which drove the price of everything else up (and will do so again), and by the sudden appearance of the Asian tigers, primarily Japan.
Reagan's people convinced the Saudis to cut oil prices, which ended that period of inflation worldwide. This is also the action by the Reagan administration most credited with bringing down communism in Russia (by cutting desperately needed oil revenue), but to be honest, the effect on Russia was probably an afterthought. The primary goal was to break the oil cartel, and that's what they did.
As for Japan, it was riding partly on the backs of cheap labour in nearby countries, mainly Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Over the next few years, American companies began to deal with these countries directly, and Japan lost it's privileged position with these countries, and the huge markups that position entailed.
These are the reasons for the recovery in the 80's. Supply-side economics, although a tidy theory, has yet to show any empirical evidence of success. When the two are plotted on the same graph, the tax rates of the very rich have absolutely no correlation with overall economic health. Tax breaks for the rich are motivated by politics, not economics.