I don't think anyone is saying that the time was ill-spent. The objection is to the hyperbole, especially in the headline. If I said, "My children learned how to drive, you would assume that they now know how to drive. While learning how to read a speedometer and turn the key in the ignition are components of that, I would hardly say that they "learned driving".
The words are not quite the same... according to the page I reference:
c. Catholic/Lutheran Version (Deuteronomy 5) - Catholics and Lutherans follow this particular version, the text of which was likely written around 300 years later than the Exodus text. Interestingly, the Catholic version omits the prohibition against graven images, which is fitting, as the Roman Catholic church displays many shrines and statues.
A. Catholics & Lutherans (Deuteronomy 5) B. Jewish (Exodus 20, referring only to the delivery from Egypt) C. Muslim (Qur'an-Citations refer to verses in the Qur'an) D. Protestant (Exodus 20, referring only to graven images)
This was back in the 1970s, when I was just a kid. It was a purely text-based moon landing game on a mainframe -- REALLY text-based, played via a "terminal" consisting of a keyboard and a dot-matrix printer. The computer printed out how much fuel you had and how fast you were descending; you had to enter a number indicating how much fuel you want to burn, and then the computer would recalculate and print out the new velocity and fuel level. Repeat. The idea, obviously, was not to crash.
A few years later, when I learned BASIC programming on a Commodore PET, I started writing my own games along the same lines. In high school I had my own business writing educational software for the Apple ][, working for the guy who had taught me programming.
Coding has always been fun for me. I think because at some level I associate it with the games I was able to create, and the LEGO blocks I loved to play with. Imagining something, and then building it -- just because you want to.
This is probably years away, but if X-rays/CT scans/realtime data/etc. could be turned into a 3-D image, and the coordinates of that image "georegistered" with the patient on the table, we'd have an AR system capable of overlaying invisible information onto what the surgeon is sheeing as he/she operates.
E.g., superimposing the outlines of a tumor onto the surgeon's visual field "beyond" the visible surface of the body, so that the surgeon sees exactly where to cut and how deep.
Actually, ISO 8601 dates (YYYY-MM-DD) are unambiguous: far better than the ambiguous AA/BB/YYYY notation, since Americans interpret it as MM/DD/YYYY but in some other countries it's regarded as DD/MM/YYYY.
As an added plus, a lexical sorting of YYYY-MM-DD dates is also a temporal sorting. Not so with either of the other two formats.
I understand your misunderstanding of my phrasing, then.:-) Many American high schools do not (or, at least at one point, did not) teach fractional reserve banking or have a "Civics" class that would have covered it. The school I went to absorbed all that information in their "history" curriculum, which covered government and court cases but barely touched on economics. Quite a few Americans I have spoken to are surprised by this aspect of their own economic system.
I didn't say we should. But a lot of other folks find gold more comforting, as irrational as it may seem. A number of American talk radio shows are interspersed with ads for buying gold coins in preparation for the impending collapse of the government and the US dollar. Those companies are largely predatory (that's another topic entirely) but clearly they're marketing to someone...
Excellent point. "Money" in all forms is merely a proxy for the power to obtain the goods or services we desire. It's just that (at a given time in a given society) some proxies are more universally acknowledged to have worth than others. If civilization were to collapse, an ounce of gold might be considered worthless compared to an ounce of food.
But there is common comfort in either, which is why some people probably long for a return to the days of the gold standard: both gold and food are tangible and can be possessed by anyone. Digital currency may be convenient, but it's abstract, requiring a reliable and secure computing infrastructure to make it function. Which brings us back to the article.
Sorry; I must have missed the part where I blamed the Fed for anything, or even said that they created fractional reserve banking, or said that we should be on the gold standard. Let me re-read my comment. Hmmm... nope, still not seeing it. I just said:
We seem to be fast approaching the point where computer-based theft will be the way you "really rob a bank".
And then explained why. You may object to the word "bizarre", but fractional reserve banking is pretty surprising to most people who think that banks keep sacks of cash on hand.
If Obama is going to be embarrassed politically, I think it should be more for his domestic and international spying programs.
It so much easier for the public to ignore things that don't have a visible, direct impact on their daily lives. Domestic and international spying are probably perceived as things that affect "other people". The ACA, on the other hand, is causing a massive flurry of activity as the populace struggles to determine whether they can stay on their current plan, what do if they can't, and how to sign up if they have no plan in the first place. So healthcare.gov and the state-level exchanges are very much in everyone's face.
Given how polarized America is right now, an "embarrassment" to Obama is really just something which erodes his support among the Left and the Center, since getting any kind of approval from the Right is pretty much a lost cause* (ACA begin as a Republican program under Romney, remember). You would think that the issue of domestic spying would gain more traction among the Left, particularly those who remember how it was used against political activists in the Civil Rights era. I'm sure it does among some on the Left, but it seems like nothing compared to the discussions about the ACA's laws and implementation.
If you're not a US Citizen, you might not be aware that the new healthcare law which Healthcare.gov was built to service was advanced by the current President (a Democrat) amid much controversy, and the opposition party (Republican) is firmly against it. There have been media blitzes (propaganda efforts, if you will) on both sides of the political fence around the failure of the website. I think all parties can agree that it has been a bit of a political embarrassment for the President.
So, yes, this is a big project that was probably hurried amid changing requirements, with perhaps with too many players not talking to each other and not using the right tools. And yes, it will eventually get fixed or have parts rewritten, because that's what always happens in these sorts of situations.
But in the meantime, member of both parties are demanding that Blood Must Flow. They just disagree on whose.
We seem to be fast approaching the point where computer-based theft will be the way you "really rob a bank".
It's not like today's banks have all got huge safes full of bags with dollar signs on them -- not in the U.S., anyway. Money is becoming increasingly virtual. A dollar bill doesn't actually represent value; it represents debt, an IOU. A bank doesn't need to keep one physical dollar bill on hand for every dollar in its bank accounts; it only needs a fraction, because you don't expect 100% of your customers to come in on the same day to cash out. And thanks to the Federal Reserve system, there aren't even physical assets (like gold bars) of equal value to all the Federal Reserve notes in circulation. It's a bizarre system that only works as long as debt keeps circulating (buying and selling) and accumulating (loans with interest).
Agreed: I generally assume that if someone is trying to sell me insurance, it's because they believe they stand a greater chance of profiting by it than I do.
But I'm lucky: for things like smartphones and major appliances, I have the financial means to re-buy the thing if the dice come up snake eyes. Some of my friends are just scraping by and don't have that option. I suspect that's why they buy extended warranties: even though they pay more in the long run, they can't afford to shell out another $500 in one big chunk if they drop their shiny in a puddle.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is Slashdot! Don't you know you're not supposed to read the summary, much less the article! :-)
Nice. :-) But for scansion, might I suggest: ...with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for Code!
I don't think anyone is saying that the time was ill-spent. The objection is to the hyperbole, especially in the headline. If I said, "My children learned how to drive, you would assume that they now know how to drive. While learning how to read a speedometer and turn the key in the ignition are components of that, I would hardly say that they "learned driving".
But then, I don't work in PR.
Thank you. The BS quotient in that headline was alarmingly high. Or are we now just publishing Microsoft and Facebook press releases verbatim?
The words are not quite the same... according to the page I reference:
There are *four* versions, and they all differ:
A. Catholics & Lutherans (Deuteronomy 5)
B. Jewish (Exodus 20, referring only to the delivery from Egypt)
C. Muslim (Qur'an-Citations refer to verses in the Qur'an)
D. Protestant (Exodus 20, referring only to graven images)
http://undergod.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000824
Seems like whichever version you post, someone might be unhappy with the choice. :-)
FWIW, the Daily Mirror* does attribute the quote to her. Not sure where they got that from:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/grace-hopper-top-10-facts-2907958
* Yeah, yeah, I know.
This was back in the 1970s, when I was just a kid. It was a purely text-based moon landing game on a mainframe -- REALLY text-based, played via a "terminal" consisting of a keyboard and a dot-matrix printer. The computer printed out how much fuel you had and how fast you were descending; you had to enter a number indicating how much fuel you want to burn, and then the computer would recalculate and print out the new velocity and fuel level. Repeat. The idea, obviously, was not to crash.
A few years later, when I learned BASIC programming on a Commodore PET, I started writing my own games along the same lines. In high school I had my own business writing educational software for the Apple ][, working for the guy who had taught me programming.
Coding has always been fun for me. I think because at some level I associate it with the games I was able to create, and the LEGO blocks I loved to play with. Imagining something, and then building it -- just because you want to.
"Every-von Vould Be Better Off Publishink Else-vier"
That game exists already in the United States. It's called "Congress".
Soon no one will be able to do stuff on their own, as they will be sued into oblivion just for thinking about something.
I thought of posting that comment first. Expect to hear from my lawyer.
I *hate* ill-noise Nazis...
This is probably years away, but if X-rays/CT scans/realtime data/etc. could be turned into a 3-D image, and the coordinates of that image "georegistered" with the patient on the table, we'd have an AR system capable of overlaying invisible information onto what the surgeon is sheeing as he/she operates.
E.g., superimposing the outlines of a tumor onto the surgeon's visual field "beyond" the visible surface of the body, so that the surgeon sees exactly where to cut and how deep.
...now if it were Comic Sans, I would TOTALLY agree.
Actually, ISO 8601 dates (YYYY-MM-DD) are unambiguous: far better than the ambiguous AA/BB/YYYY notation, since Americans interpret it as MM/DD/YYYY but in some other countries it's regarded as DD/MM/YYYY.
As an added plus, a lexical sorting of YYYY-MM-DD dates is also a temporal sorting. Not so with either of the other two formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=cache:lmgtfy.com&l=1
Warning: if you follow that recursive link you'll crash the googles and all our internets will stop.
Oh, wait... I guess the absence of pictures is proof that they succeeded. Bravo!
I understand your misunderstanding of my phrasing, then. :-) Many American high schools do not (or, at least at one point, did not) teach fractional reserve banking or have a "Civics" class that would have covered it. The school I went to absorbed all that information in their "history" curriculum, which covered government and court cases but barely touched on economics. Quite a few Americans I have spoken to are surprised by this aspect of their own economic system.
I didn't say we should. But a lot of other folks find gold more comforting, as irrational as it may seem. A number of American talk radio shows are interspersed with ads for buying gold coins in preparation for the impending collapse of the government and the US dollar. Those companies are largely predatory (that's another topic entirely) but clearly they're marketing to someone...
Excellent point. "Money" in all forms is merely a proxy for the power to obtain the goods or services we desire. It's just that (at a given time in a given society) some proxies are more universally acknowledged to have worth than others. If civilization were to collapse, an ounce of gold might be considered worthless compared to an ounce of food.
But there is common comfort in either, which is why some people probably long for a return to the days of the gold standard: both gold and food are tangible and can be possessed by anyone. Digital currency may be convenient, but it's abstract, requiring a reliable and secure computing infrastructure to make it function. Which brings us back to the article.
Sorry; I must have missed the part where I blamed the Fed for anything, or even said that they created fractional reserve banking, or said that we should be on the gold standard. Let me re-read my comment. Hmmm... nope, still not seeing it. I just said:
And then explained why. You may object to the word "bizarre", but fractional reserve banking is pretty surprising to most people who think that banks keep sacks of cash on hand.
If Obama is going to be embarrassed politically, I think it should be more for his domestic and international spying programs.
It so much easier for the public to ignore things that don't have a visible, direct impact on their daily lives. Domestic and international spying are probably perceived as things that affect "other people". The ACA, on the other hand, is causing a massive flurry of activity as the populace struggles to determine whether they can stay on their current plan, what do if they can't, and how to sign up if they have no plan in the first place. So healthcare.gov and the state-level exchanges are very much in everyone's face.
Given how polarized America is right now, an "embarrassment" to Obama is really just something which erodes his support among the Left and the Center, since getting any kind of approval from the Right is pretty much a lost cause* (ACA begin as a Republican program under Romney, remember). You would think that the issue of domestic spying would gain more traction among the Left, particularly those who remember how it was used against political activists in the Civil Rights era. I'm sure it does among some on the Left, but it seems like nothing compared to the discussions about the ACA's laws and implementation.
* This works the other way around too, obviously.
If you're not a US Citizen, you might not be aware that the new healthcare law which Healthcare.gov was built to service was advanced by the current President (a Democrat) amid much controversy, and the opposition party (Republican) is firmly against it. There have been media blitzes (propaganda efforts, if you will) on both sides of the political fence around the failure of the website. I think all parties can agree that it has been a bit of a political embarrassment for the President.
So, yes, this is a big project that was probably hurried amid changing requirements, with perhaps with too many players not talking to each other and not using the right tools. And yes, it will eventually get fixed or have parts rewritten, because that's what always happens in these sorts of situations.
But in the meantime, member of both parties are demanding that Blood Must Flow. They just disagree on whose.
We seem to be fast approaching the point where computer-based theft will be the way you "really rob a bank".
It's not like today's banks have all got huge safes full of bags with dollar signs on them -- not in the U.S., anyway. Money is becoming increasingly virtual. A dollar bill doesn't actually represent value; it represents debt, an IOU. A bank doesn't need to keep one physical dollar bill on hand for every dollar in its bank accounts; it only needs a fraction, because you don't expect 100% of your customers to come in on the same day to cash out. And thanks to the Federal Reserve system, there aren't even physical assets (like gold bars) of equal value to all the Federal Reserve notes in circulation. It's a bizarre system that only works as long as debt keeps circulating (buying and selling) and accumulating (loans with interest).
Agreed: I generally assume that if someone is trying to sell me insurance, it's because they believe they stand a greater chance of profiting by it than I do.
But I'm lucky: for things like smartphones and major appliances, I have the financial means to re-buy the thing if the dice come up snake eyes. Some of my friends are just scraping by and don't have that option. I suspect that's why they buy extended warranties: even though they pay more in the long run, they can't afford to shell out another $500 in one big chunk if they drop their shiny in a puddle.