But you have to admit: a drummer in a punk band, carrying soap, might qualify as 'suspicious activity' to a jury of their peers. The guy was lucky he was cleared so quickly. If he had been a Linux developer, he'd have an even harded time explaining himself.:-)
What killed Deus Ex 2 was mediocre storytelling compared with the original, and lots of hype and unfulfillable expectations.
I'm a big fan of Deus Ex, and was as disappointed as anyone on Deus Ex 2, but the simplified interface did not make it a poor game... just like the messy interface did not hurt Deus Ex that much either.
Dumbed-down? Perhaps. But Deus Ex would have been awesome on a console with that same interface, and Deus Ex 2 would have been equally lame with the original's interface and joys of inventory management, played by a few PC gamers.
Even if Sony decided to keep the same price and pocket the difference as profit (or reduced losses), ditching the Blu-Ray and its cost would give them a lot of flexibility which they do not have right now.
Sure, they could still have charged 500-600 bucks per system. But they would ALSO have the option to lower the prices and/or upgrade their bundles to be more competitive, at any point, without dipping so much into the red ink.
Even as a time-limited offer, a 100 bucks rebate could change the equation drastically in a few scenarios... like say, when there is cheaper competition at launch, no killer-app games, and 600-bucks consoles are accumulating on the shelves.
Business-wise, the question would be whether the subsidy is worth it for their content business. But for the console, 'profitMargin += 100' is difficult to argue against, even (specially) if it is still negative.
I think some programmers have suggested that perhaps, as a possibility, changing the programming model to something far more difficult to exploit was not the smartest choice in a competitive console market.
But I don't think anyone really 'cried' about it. They just chose not to invest on it, yet.
Even the skeptics seemed to think Cell was pretty cool by itself (me included).
What people 'cried about' was the price tag, the misleading trailers / screenshots, the lack of game titles, lackluster online experience, and the sheer arrogance of the company throughout the process (i.e.: anyone should be eager to work overtime to buy our revolutionary new luxury console).
Personally, I was skeptical of the Cell on the PS3, but hopeful for a myriad of other Cell applications.
But none of the things I saw people crying about (and none of the reasons I won't buy a PS3) have anything to do with the Cell. They all seem to be things Sony could have avoided / handled very differently.
It seems you missed the point of the comment, so I'll just cut short to the argument we seem to agree on. Which incidentally, was the whole point of the comment.
But honestly, if you can ALWAYS say that avoiding copy-and-paste at all costs is the right decision for your product, for your team, and for yourself... I don't know whether to envy you, or to fear you.
Code duplication has risks. You learn about the risks in almost each book about software engineering. Is it always the right decision to avoid it? I don't know, I don't know all possible scenarios.
That was the point: no developer can really claim X is ALWAYS the right/wrong decision. The absolutism of the word I capitalized above (as in the previous reply) is what bothered me from the original claim.
Do you write code? It sounds like some copy-and-paste code had a bug in it, and they didn't catch both places.
I do write code. And copy-and-paste code is always a sure sign of an incompetent coder.
There is no such certainty in real world software engineering. Not outside of academia, or some other ivory-tower universe where code is the goal per se rather than the means, and there are no risk / costs that customers have to pay for.
Every choice, both 'shortcuts' and 'optimal' solutions, have risks associated with them that can bite you sooner or later, and ignoring the risks of the latter can be as dangerous as ignoring the risks of the former. Evaluating such trade-offs is the substance of engineering after all, software or otherwise.
Really? I write code for a living too, and a categorical statement of the form "doing X is ALWAYS a sign of an incompetent coder"... always seems to me, at best, a sign of an unexperienced coder. Either that, or an extremely lucky one.
I'll just assume your case is the latter:-)
Sure, copy-and-paste duplication should be avoided where possible, along with gotos, reinventing the wheel, long complicated functions, lack of type safety, etc. Also, all code should really be a perfect and pristine example of elegance and modularity. Bug-free is even better!
Reality bites, though.
Unless we're talking of brand-new projects of a small size, I find it really hard to believe that comminiting to 0% copy-and-paste-code is a practical proposition.
For a non-trivial product with some legacy, copy-and-paste is often the best among various non-optimal choices.
- Do you really want to tightly couple these two unrelated components because you want to use those 5 lines of code? - Can you afford to carry over all of the dependencies on that library or class? - Or can you afford the refactoring to avoid those dependencies? How many new components (which were not changing before) do you need to retest now that you pulled the code out? - Can you afford to lose that development and testing time on other features that you need for RTM?
That's not to mention the almost-guaranteed design time discussing where that re-usable code should move to in the first place... and do we need to change it to make it more generic? Do we need to ship all the refactored components with no functionality change? etc. etc.
I agree with the sentiment: Copy-and-paste duplication sucks, and should be avoided wherever possible.
But honestly, if you can ALWAYS say that avoiding copy-and-paste at all costs is the right decision for your product, for your team, and for yourself... I don't know whether to envy you, or to fear you.
If you had not seen/followed Firefly before, I'd have to agree with you, even though I really liked Serenity (to be expected, being a fan of the series).
I think the movie is pretty good, technically speaking, but it made some gigantic assumptions on the exposition of the characters, plot details, etc. It felt like a really good TV season finale, not a theatrical movie that stood by itself. I can see how watching the movie without following Firefly would feel like catching the last episode of a series you don't watch, with closures for plot points that were never opened, and characters that you have no reason to care about... fine for late night cable, but not the same entertainment bar for paying a ticket to watch a movie in the theater.
Admittedly, I doubt adapting it to a stand-alone movie would work. A lot of what was great about Firefly as a series depended on having that span to explore the universe and the characters over an episodic show. The tempo would have to be very different.
As part of the show, I think the "movie" was great and well worth it. As a movie per se, it was overrated, because the very vocal fans are Firefly fans, and saw it (and hyped it) as part of the show.
It reminds me of the X-files movie in that sense, except Serenity was better made and had more of the grass-roots-hype, and less of the bovine and equine abuse.
No, he should be introduced as "Prof. Lawrence Lessig", and a short explanation of who he is should be in the summary, with some background links for context.
Much like Bruce Schneier is presumed to be a recognized authority in cryptography and security, Lessig is universally recognized as an influential authority on the field: copyright, software and IP in general. Whether he is right or wrong, his opinion most likely will carry more weight in and out of academia than other random law professors.
Mentioning Lessig as "a well-known law professor" loses a lot of context: both the weight of his credentials and influence, and the history of his work and corresponding bias. While I agree with the original posters that his name on the title will be enough for most Slashdotters, just a couple of background links would let everyone see where he is coming from, and why an op-ed on IP from him has more effect than one by Harriet Miers, for example.
As "Insightful" as this may be, it seems even more "Offtopic", since it has nothing to do with multitasking.
You're just complaining about their inability to understand and complete a particular single task in the first place.
And while part of me agrees that knowledge is becoming dangerously superficial, what you're describing isn't anything new. Objectively, it isn't that much different from our grandparents' shock on the common ignorance about proper clothing maintenance, radio repair, etc... which is normal because if everything is cheaper/disposable now, time and other forms of knowledge are more valuable.
Most valuable skills for particular tasks change over time; the skill to manage multiple arbitrary tasks, however, is always valuable, and I do believe is far more difficult to acquire from training late in life.
I believe you need to listen to the speech to understand the full effect.
There is one main thing that made this a particularly awful speech:
Mr. Stevens was trying to 'educate' his fellow Senators, assuming the condescending tone of a self-appointed 'expert' in the subject.
He was not trying to explain it in the sense of 'this is sort of how I understand it, as a simile', but more like 'you kids don't understand this interweb thing, and I do, so I'm going to extemporate here until you get it'. This makes silly gaffes like 'my staff sent an internet through the tubes', and his wild guess as to his delay 'receiving his Internets', positively painful to hear.
Also, whether by tone of voice, timing, or phraseology, his metaphorical description didn't just seem that metaphorical. It sounded like he took it almost literally, at least to my ears... and I suspect a lot of people have had enough experience with some computer-illiterate person (cd trays as cup-holders, wireless devices never plugged in, etc) that the picture just completes itself.
I doubt Mr. Stevens believes the interwebs are made of tubes, but I got the impression he was shortly briefed on the subject by his staff, and he took a metaphor he didn't completely understand and ran away with it. Considering his role in the Senate and in this particular issue, that is very worrying...
In essence, like Dan Quayle's issues with the word 'potato', this is a particularly bad delivery that became a problem because it symbolizes the character so well.
Another good comparison may be Al Gore's "I invented the Internet"... everyone knows he didn't really claim that. But the phrase was indelibly attached to him because it was so easy to picture him saying that, even if it was not true. It was a concise symbol of some parodiable elements of his character.
AFAIK, Imperial units were not "designed" at all. Rather they were codified/formalized after common use.
The superiority of the metric system rests in the fact that it was, indeed, designed for use.
This applies to science, education, AND common use: it is just easier to move between different magnitudes, from grams to kilograms, for example, or cms to metres... and once children learn of one type of measurement (space), all of the principles (prefixes, conversion methods, etc) apply to the others (e.g.: weight).
Of course, I'm from a metric country, so I can't readily see how the imperial units feel any easier to north americans. I'm as used to metric on daily use as you are to imperial.
But I have to disagree that the "foot" provides any convenience for common human work; it has always seemed to me one of the most irrational measuring units.
The final 'imperial foot' is as arbitrary as the meter, without any of the conveniences. Whose 'foot' is it? The british king's back in the 12th century? Your foot? An ostrich's? Feet, hands, fingers vary in size between people, and for each person, they vary within their lifetimes.
While your foot may approximate an 'imperial foot', not only does this not apply to a lot of people, but is utterly useless to a child, for example. The approximation is also deceiving, because unless my foot is almost exactly that length, I cannot really measure a room by walking through it without losing a lot of precision (unless it is very small).
For that kind of rough approximation, any arbitrary equivalence works. In any metric country, children and adults have rough mental images of how long are meter/centimeters/etc, and make rough measurements in the same way, while preserving the advantages that the system was designed for, and the universality of the measurements for every line of work.
I do not believe there is any intrinsic convenience in the imperial unit system. The reasons it has not been replaced are well known: cultural solipsism, and population.
The US has a lot of both, and being the economic superpower it can afford not to optimize on this and other things. Admittedly, it has much bigger things to deal with.
I'm having some difficulty following the logic here:
The article complains that Gates spends only 2% of his net worth - US$ 6 Billions - directly on the Gates foundation.
And then claims that "the game" is given away by an investment by the foundation of US$ 200 Million. What's that, 0.66% of his net worth? 3% of the foundation? Aggregated over different drug companies?
Heck, I hope those 200 million pay off to catch up to the 6 billions. They must have a better ROI than the similar investments almost every 401K, or any form of diversified investment for that matter, has on the same area.
Ah, well... some people spend 2% of their net worth giving to charity. Some people spend it on aluminion foil hats.
You seem to be proving the point. How exactly was that idea new who actually WANTED to go?
The one character in this picture for whom the Indy-template was "new" is NOT the one who paid for the tickets. And from the story, if the decision had been yours, you'd never had seen it in the first place, because it was an unsafe choice for entertainment.
Indy was not new to the movie studios: if anything, it was a nostalgic (retro?) re-make of the old pulp adventure B-movie serials from which they made money throughout decades, but filmed this time with very high production values. Although it had an original plot, the idea was not any more "new" than the King Kong remake.
It was most likely not new to your parents: they were probably familiar with adventure serials, from old B-movies, TV and comics. And for parents the movies were a very safe bet. Not only was this "another epic adventure by the maker of Star Wars", but the model (plot, timeline, scenarios) was even more traditional and straightforward. In all a safer bet.
Surrounding yourself with experts is easy. More important: a good leader should be smart enough to ask for advice and listen to the experts he keeps around.
It shouldn't take much effort to find someone who can say "Well, no, Senator. The Internets are not really a series of tubes."
If I am selling an item and you want it, you can NOT know what my costs are, how I make it, or how much it costs me to sit on it until it sells. I can NOT know how much you have in your wallet.
That seems a different issue than the labelings in question. In a capitalistic society, I may not know what your real costs are, but I definitely want to know what the product IS.
I see the labeling regulations, at best, as a way for government to protect itself against widespread fraud and the costs of dealing with it through other legal processes. There are basic tenets for when a contract is valid, and this makes it easier to read the contract. People are not buying organic or mass-produced because they want to know the best bargain: they consider "organic" or kosher a completely different product, and if it is mislabeled it is like any other product misrepresentation. If I sell you pork claiming it is a vegetarian dish, for many people "caveat emptor" is not a sensible counter-argument.
As to calling the manufacturers, I generally only have to do it once. 1/2 an hour for a lifetime of consumption is a good investment.
That implies a level of trust in the manufacturer that may take more than 1/2 hour to establish. If you do not trust the labels they use in their product at government's request, trusting the first person on the phone willing to answer is knowledgeable, correct and honest seems a bit naive to me.
In essence, I agree with you that the current labels are useless and counterproductive, and I agree that governments are unlikely to implement them right. That does not mean preventing product misrepresentation was not their responsability in the first place.
The market self-correction I expect to work best is at the consumer-group and retailer level. Assuming this kind of information (product contents and source) is readily and publicly available, the accountability of identifying these products falls on the immediate providers (grocery stores, markets, etc) serving a particular community. Consumer groups can hold them accountable by reaching and verifying the same type of information, and detecting inconsistencies. Over time, it is in the self-interest of a store to clearly label their products to meet their customer's expectations.
Current labels gives them an excuse not to make that effort, since it is now the government's and manufacturers role. But ensuring this kind of information is readily provided by manufacturers is the kind of free information flow that is still the role of the government. The implicit risk of business should be on the bargaining process, not in the contents of the product you buy.
As an AC has mentioned, there were practical reasons for the death of the character you mention. Even so, I do think that it fit the drama nicely, and the reactions of some characters to the 'meaninglessness' of that death itself is nicely played. Meaningless death is, after all, one of the most frustrating things about situations like the one they portrayed. I would have been disappointed if they just used a red-shirt to deal with that aspect.
If you have the DVD set as you mentioned, I strongly recommend watching that (and other) episodes with the podcast commentaries.
They clarify a lot of things, a lot of the reasons why they did X or Y and what they were trying to achieve, and has actually some of the best self-critical commentaries I've seen in DVDs: they candidly discuss what episodes work or not, which parts were difficult, etc.
The consistent darkness of the series is a frequent point they discuss, and why it was justified in each case. It is, after all, a holocaust story: the human species is almost exterminated and still actively hunted to extinction by a superior enemy. It is a story about survival, not victory.
There is some hope, but an uplifting story is not something BSG can be within that context. A character with a 'happy story so far' would just not be realistic at all, you would need some base of normality first to even get there, and the point of the show is that normality is gone.
Things may change in the new season, since the rules have changed so dramatically.
Unfortunately, sometimes the problem IS too much workload, and the penalized students are the ones who didn't cheat. I still think cheating just encourages the problem, and deludes the professor into thinking that is the right way to teach the class. Honestly, excessive workload is most often an indication of a poor class.
If the professor cares about the class, the workload can rarely be excessive because they also have to spend the time preparing, grading and managing the assignments. Not only will they notice it is too much for students, but it will be too much for them (at least if they spent any time at all on the work).
Back at school I had some classes like that: the professor would ask for a lot of busy-work assignments, which for all indications he was either not willing or not qualified to grade in depth (a compiled solution would get an A, anything else is an F). Everybody cheated and handed out the same assignments with some formatting differences, and the only use I could see was inflating the grades for all the people who were failing the tests.
First time it happened it lowered my grade because I didn't cheat in the assignments.
By next time I had learned my lesson quickly: drop the class and switch to professors who think their class is worth their time. It's the only way it will be worth your time (and, in the US and some other countries, your money).
I'd take a guess that if the price was right for pirated copies, he wouldn't be making US$ 20 million dollars selling them. Or maybe it's like the 'change bank', it's all about volume?
Maybe he said that because Norman kings would be more likely to speak French/Anglo-Norman in court rather than the language (old english) they were actively replacing in government and law. It being 1066 and all that.
In terms of eras and periods, it is very rare that someone sends a memo to let everyone know that, say, they should stop reading Latin and start looting and rioting because the Dark Ages just began.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the drug test was faulty evidence...
:-)
But you have to admit: a drummer in a punk band, carrying soap, might qualify as 'suspicious activity' to a jury of their peers.
The guy was lucky he was cleared so quickly. If he had been a Linux developer, he'd have an even harded time explaining himself.
Not really.
What killed Deus Ex 2 was mediocre storytelling compared with the original, and lots of hype and unfulfillable expectations.
I'm a big fan of Deus Ex, and was as disappointed as anyone on Deus Ex 2, but the simplified interface did not make it a poor game... just like the messy interface did not hurt Deus Ex that much either.
Dumbed-down? Perhaps.
But Deus Ex would have been awesome on a console with that same interface, and Deus Ex 2 would have been equally lame with the original's interface and joys of inventory management, played by a few PC gamers.
Leaving the accuracy of the numbers aside...
Even if Sony decided to keep the same price and pocket the difference as profit (or reduced losses), ditching the Blu-Ray and its cost would give them a lot of flexibility which they do not have right now.
Sure, they could still have charged 500-600 bucks per system.
But they would ALSO have the option to lower the prices and/or upgrade their bundles to be more competitive, at any point, without dipping so much into the red ink.
Even as a time-limited offer, a 100 bucks rebate could change the equation drastically in a few scenarios... like say, when there is cheaper competition at launch, no killer-app games, and 600-bucks consoles are accumulating on the shelves.
Business-wise, the question would be whether the subsidy is worth it for their content business.
But for the console, 'profitMargin += 100' is difficult to argue against, even (specially) if it is still negative.
Did 'people' really cry about the Cell that much?
I think some programmers have suggested that perhaps, as a possibility, changing the programming model to something far more difficult to exploit was not the smartest choice in a competitive console market.
But I don't think anyone really 'cried' about it. They just chose not to invest on it, yet.
Even the skeptics seemed to think Cell was pretty cool by itself (me included).
What people 'cried about' was the price tag, the misleading trailers / screenshots, the lack of game titles, lackluster online experience, and the sheer arrogance of the company throughout the process (i.e.: anyone should be eager to work overtime to buy our revolutionary new luxury console).
Personally, I was skeptical of the Cell on the PS3, but hopeful for a myriad of other Cell applications.
But none of the things I saw people crying about (and none of the reasons I won't buy a PS3) have anything to do with the Cell. They all seem to be things Sony could have avoided / handled very differently.
Which incidentally, was the whole point of the comment.
That was the point: no developer can really claim X is ALWAYS the right/wrong decision.
The absolutism of the word I capitalized above (as in the previous reply) is what bothered me from the original claim.
There is no such certainty in real world software engineering.
Not outside of academia, or some other ivory-tower universe where code is the goal per se rather than the means, and there are no risk / costs that customers have to pay for.
Every choice, both 'shortcuts' and 'optimal' solutions, have risks associated with them that can bite you sooner or later, and ignoring the risks of the latter can be as dangerous as ignoring the risks of the former. Evaluating such trade-offs is the substance of engineering after all, software or otherwise.
Really? I write code for a living too, and a categorical statement of the form "doing X is ALWAYS a sign of an incompetent coder"... always seems to me, at best, a sign of an unexperienced coder. Either that, or an extremely lucky one.
:-)
I'll just assume your case is the latter
Sure, copy-and-paste duplication should be avoided where possible, along with gotos, reinventing the wheel, long complicated functions, lack of type safety, etc.
Also, all code should really be a perfect and pristine example of elegance and modularity. Bug-free is even better!
Reality bites, though.
Unless we're talking of brand-new projects of a small size, I find it really hard to believe that comminiting to 0% copy-and-paste-code is a practical proposition.
For a non-trivial product with some legacy, copy-and-paste is often the best among various non-optimal choices.
- Do you really want to tightly couple these two unrelated components because you want to use those 5 lines of code?
- Can you afford to carry over all of the dependencies on that library or class?
- Or can you afford the refactoring to avoid those dependencies? How many new components (which were not changing before) do you need to retest now that you pulled the code out?
- Can you afford to lose that development and testing time on other features that you need for RTM?
That's not to mention the almost-guaranteed design time discussing where that re-usable code should move to in the first place... and do we need to change it to make it more generic? Do we need to ship all the refactored components with no functionality change? etc. etc.
I agree with the sentiment: Copy-and-paste duplication sucks, and should be avoided wherever possible.
But honestly, if you can ALWAYS say that avoiding copy-and-paste at all costs is the right decision for your product, for your team, and for yourself... I don't know whether to envy you, or to fear you.
If you had not seen/followed Firefly before, I'd have to agree with you, even though I really liked Serenity (to be expected, being a fan of the series).
I think the movie is pretty good, technically speaking, but it made some gigantic assumptions on the exposition of the characters, plot details, etc. It felt like a really good TV season finale, not a theatrical movie that stood by itself.
I can see how watching the movie without following Firefly would feel like catching the last episode of a series you don't watch, with closures for plot points that were never opened, and characters that you have no reason to care about... fine for late night cable, but not the same entertainment bar for paying a ticket to watch a movie in the theater.
Admittedly, I doubt adapting it to a stand-alone movie would work. A lot of what was great about Firefly as a series depended on having that span to explore the universe and the characters over an episodic show. The tempo would have to be very different.
As part of the show, I think the "movie" was great and well worth it.
As a movie per se, it was overrated, because the very vocal fans are Firefly fans, and saw it (and hyped it) as part of the show.
It reminds me of the X-files movie in that sense, except Serenity was better made and had more of the grass-roots-hype, and less of the bovine and equine abuse.
No, he should be introduced as "Prof. Lawrence Lessig", and a short explanation of who he is should be in the summary, with some background links for context.
Much like Bruce Schneier is presumed to be a recognized authority in cryptography and security, Lessig is universally recognized as an influential authority on the field: copyright, software and IP in general. Whether he is right or wrong, his opinion most likely will carry more weight in and out of academia than other random law professors.
Mentioning Lessig as "a well-known law professor" loses a lot of context: both the weight of his credentials and influence, and the history of his work and corresponding bias.
While I agree with the original posters that his name on the title will be enough for most Slashdotters, just a couple of background links would let everyone see where he is coming from, and why an op-ed on IP from him has more effect than one by Harriet Miers, for example.
As "Insightful" as this may be, it seems even more "Offtopic", since it has nothing to do with multitasking.
You're just complaining about their inability to understand and complete a particular single task in the first place.
And while part of me agrees that knowledge is becoming dangerously superficial, what you're describing isn't anything new.
Objectively, it isn't that much different from our grandparents' shock on the common ignorance about proper clothing maintenance, radio repair, etc... which is normal because if everything is cheaper/disposable now, time and other forms of knowledge are more valuable.
Most valuable skills for particular tasks change over time; the skill to manage multiple arbitrary tasks, however, is always valuable, and I do believe is far more difficult to acquire from training late in life.
I believe you need to listen to the speech to understand the full effect.
There is one main thing that made this a particularly awful speech:
Mr. Stevens was trying to 'educate' his fellow Senators, assuming the condescending tone of a self-appointed 'expert' in the subject.
He was not trying to explain it in the sense of 'this is sort of how I understand it, as a simile', but more like 'you kids don't understand this interweb thing, and I do, so I'm going to extemporate here until you get it'.
This makes silly gaffes like 'my staff sent an internet through the tubes', and his wild guess as to his delay 'receiving his Internets', positively painful to hear.
Also, whether by tone of voice, timing, or phraseology, his metaphorical description didn't just seem that metaphorical. It sounded like he took it almost literally, at least to my ears... and I suspect a lot of people have had enough experience with some computer-illiterate person (cd trays as cup-holders, wireless devices never plugged in, etc) that the picture just completes itself.
I doubt Mr. Stevens believes the interwebs are made of tubes, but I got the impression he was shortly briefed on the subject by his staff, and he took a metaphor he didn't completely understand and ran away with it.
Considering his role in the Senate and in this particular issue, that is very worrying...
In essence, like Dan Quayle's issues with the word 'potato', this is a particularly bad delivery that became a problem because it symbolizes the character so well.
Another good comparison may be Al Gore's "I invented the Internet"... everyone knows he didn't really claim that. But the phrase was indelibly attached to him because it was so easy to picture him saying that, even if it was not true. It was a concise symbol of some parodiable elements of his character.
AFAIK, Imperial units were not "designed" at all.
Rather they were codified/formalized after common use.
The superiority of the metric system rests in the fact that it was, indeed, designed for use.
This applies to science, education, AND common use: it is just easier to move between different magnitudes, from grams to kilograms, for example, or cms to metres... and once children learn of one type of measurement (space), all of the principles (prefixes, conversion methods, etc) apply to the others (e.g.: weight).
Of course, I'm from a metric country, so I can't readily see how the imperial units feel any easier to north americans. I'm as used to metric on daily use as you are to imperial.
But I have to disagree that the "foot" provides any convenience for common human work; it has always seemed to me one of the most irrational measuring units.
The final 'imperial foot' is as arbitrary as the meter, without any of the conveniences.
Whose 'foot' is it? The british king's back in the 12th century? Your foot? An ostrich's? Feet, hands, fingers vary in size between people, and for each person, they vary within their lifetimes.
While your foot may approximate an 'imperial foot', not only does this not apply to a lot of people, but is utterly useless to a child, for example. The approximation is also deceiving, because unless my foot is almost exactly that length, I cannot really measure a room by walking through it without losing a lot of precision (unless it is very small).
For that kind of rough approximation, any arbitrary equivalence works. In any metric country, children and adults have rough mental images of how long are meter/centimeters/etc, and make rough measurements in the same way, while preserving the advantages that the system was designed for, and the universality of the measurements for every line of work.
I do not believe there is any intrinsic convenience in the imperial unit system.
The reasons it has not been replaced are well known: cultural solipsism, and population.
The US has a lot of both, and being the economic superpower it can afford not to optimize on this and other things.
Admittedly, it has much bigger things to deal with.
I'm having some difficulty following the logic here:
The article complains that Gates spends only 2% of his net worth - US$ 6 Billions - directly on the Gates foundation.
And then claims that "the game" is given away by an investment by the foundation of US$ 200 Million.
What's that, 0.66% of his net worth? 3% of the foundation? Aggregated over different drug companies?
Heck, I hope those 200 million pay off to catch up to the 6 billions.
They must have a better ROI than the similar investments almost every 401K, or any form of diversified investment for that matter, has on the same area.
Ah, well... some people spend 2% of their net worth giving to charity. Some people spend it on aluminion foil hats.
This isn't new to Slashdotters...
For years, Slashdot posts have used wikipedia as a form of artificial intelligence.
As opposed to asking the government to censor the Interwebs, which just makes the whole teacher's union look like an idiot.
You seem to be proving the point.
How exactly was that idea new who actually WANTED to go?
The one character in this picture for whom the Indy-template was "new" is NOT the one who paid for the tickets.
And from the story, if the decision had been yours, you'd never had seen it in the first place, because it was an unsafe choice for entertainment.
Indy was not new to the movie studios: if anything, it was a nostalgic (retro?) re-make of the old pulp adventure B-movie serials from which they made money throughout decades, but filmed this time with very high production values. Although it had an original plot, the idea was not any more "new" than the King Kong remake.
It was most likely not new to your parents: they were probably familiar with adventure serials, from old B-movies, TV and comics. And for parents the movies were a very safe bet. Not only was this "another epic adventure by the maker of Star Wars", but the model (plot, timeline, scenarios) was even more traditional and straightforward. In all a safer bet.
I'm amazed it took them five years to figure out this one.
Anyone knows how long did it take them to deal with more complex questions, like the safety (or exact composition) of a Twinkie?
Tong? With that name, I really couldn't have guessed what your game is about.
I clicked the link with a mix of dread and anticipation, and am now both relieved and disappointed. Tetris + Pong...
I'll give it a try, though.
This post is right under the highly moderated masturbation joke...
Am I the only one for whom the default indent almost makes it look like a reply?
Surrounding yourself with experts is easy.
More important: a good leader should be smart enough to ask for advice and listen to the experts he keeps around.
It shouldn't take much effort to find someone who can say "Well, no, Senator. The Internets are not really a series of tubes."
That seems a different issue than the labelings in question.
In a capitalistic society, I may not know what your real costs are, but I definitely want to know what the product IS.
I see the labeling regulations, at best, as a way for government to protect itself against widespread fraud and the costs of dealing with it through other legal processes. There are basic tenets for when a contract is valid, and this makes it easier to read the contract.
People are not buying organic or mass-produced because they want to know the best bargain: they consider "organic" or kosher a completely different product, and if it is mislabeled it is like any other product misrepresentation. If I sell you pork claiming it is a vegetarian dish, for many people "caveat emptor" is not a sensible counter-argument.
That implies a level of trust in the manufacturer that may take more than 1/2 hour to establish. If you do not trust the labels they use in their product at government's request, trusting the first person on the phone willing to answer is knowledgeable, correct and honest seems a bit naive to me.
In essence, I agree with you that the current labels are useless and counterproductive, and I agree that governments are unlikely to implement them right. That does not mean preventing product misrepresentation was not their responsability in the first place.
The market self-correction I expect to work best is at the consumer-group and retailer level. Assuming this kind of information (product contents and source) is readily and publicly available, the accountability of identifying these products falls on the immediate providers (grocery stores, markets, etc) serving a particular community.
Consumer groups can hold them accountable by reaching and verifying the same type of information, and detecting inconsistencies. Over time, it is in the self-interest of a store to clearly label their products to meet their customer's expectations.
Current labels gives them an excuse not to make that effort, since it is now the government's and manufacturers role.
But ensuring this kind of information is readily provided by manufacturers is the kind of free information flow that is still the role of the government.
The implicit risk of business should be on the bargaining process, not in the contents of the product you buy.
As an AC has mentioned, there were practical reasons for the death of the character you mention.
Even so, I do think that it fit the drama nicely, and the reactions of some characters to the 'meaninglessness' of that death itself is nicely played. Meaningless death is, after all, one of the most frustrating things about situations like the one they portrayed. I would have been disappointed if they just used a red-shirt to deal with that aspect.
If you have the DVD set as you mentioned, I strongly recommend watching that (and other) episodes with the podcast commentaries.
They clarify a lot of things, a lot of the reasons why they did X or Y and what they were trying to achieve, and has actually some of the best self-critical commentaries I've seen in DVDs: they candidly discuss what episodes work or not, which parts were difficult, etc.
The consistent darkness of the series is a frequent point they discuss, and why it was justified in each case.
It is, after all, a holocaust story: the human species is almost exterminated and still actively hunted to extinction by a superior enemy. It is a story about survival, not victory.
There is some hope, but an uplifting story is not something BSG can be within that context. A character with a 'happy story so far' would just not be realistic at all, you would need some base of normality first to even get there, and the point of the show is that normality is gone.
Things may change in the new season, since the rules have changed so dramatically.
If by 'good' you mean 'less painfully bad, but still horribly, painfully, disgustingly bad', sure.
Unfortunately, sometimes the problem IS too much workload, and the penalized students are the ones who didn't cheat.
I still think cheating just encourages the problem, and deludes the professor into thinking that is the right way to teach the class. Honestly, excessive workload is most often an indication of a poor class.
If the professor cares about the class, the workload can rarely be excessive because they also have to spend the time preparing, grading and managing the assignments. Not only will they notice it is too much for students, but it will be too much for them (at least if they spent any time at all on the work).
Back at school I had some classes like that: the professor would ask for a lot of busy-work assignments, which for all indications he was either not willing or not qualified to grade in depth (a compiled solution would get an A, anything else is an F). Everybody cheated and handed out the same assignments with some formatting differences, and the only use I could see was inflating the grades for all the people who were failing the tests.
First time it happened it lowered my grade because I didn't cheat in the assignments.
By next time I had learned my lesson quickly: drop the class and switch to professors who think their class is worth their time.
It's the only way it will be worth your time (and, in the US and some other countries, your money).
I'd take a guess that if the price was right for pirated copies, he wouldn't be making US$ 20 million dollars selling them.
Or maybe it's like the 'change bank', it's all about volume?
Maybe he said that because Norman kings would be more likely to speak French/Anglo-Norman in court rather than the language (old english) they were actively replacing in government and law. It being 1066 and all that.
In terms of eras and periods, it is very rare that someone sends a memo to let everyone know that, say, they should stop reading Latin and start looting and rioting because the Dark Ages just began.