why do people treat autism like its a disease, when its just genetics
There are plenty of serious diseases that are "just genetics". PKU, sickle-cell anemia, even things like an elevated predisposition to breast cancer are "just genetics".
While I agree with your conclusion that labels and drugs are not the answer, I don't see how it's relevant whether a disease's origins are genetic or not. In some ways you could even argue that genetic oddities should get *more* attention than ones that are more behavioral, given that you have control over your behavior but not over your genes...
I find this especially baffling given that most prolific programmers are also pretty decent typists, so I don't understand why it's so hard to use variable and function names that are a bit longer and more descriptive.
My guess is that many programmers haven't had enough painful experience maintaining crappily-written code. Maybe the first thing that should be taught in CS 101 is not how to write "hello, world", but how to take a poorly documented and convoluted program written by somebody else and fix the bugs. (No flames about how CS is about computer science not programming; you know what I mean here.)
For me personally, the incentive to write more self-documenting code was having to maintain stuff I'd written and deployed in commercial environments for a period of years. I don't care how well you knew the code when you wrote it, when your customer unearths some obscure bug in five years' time you're not going to remember a damn thing. And that is a miserable experience. It taught me to take the time up front to save myself the agony down the line.
...that Perl is much more useful than it's often credited for, I'd dispute the claim that programmers "like to write short and clever programs...it's every programmers dream." OK, maybe that's what I'd like to do, but my real dream is to produce code that (a) works as intended and (b) is maintainable. Short and clever may be fun but they are essentially self-indulgences, and performance (for most applications) is not all that critical except in a handful of hotspots.
All in all, I don't really care about lines of code and efficiency (of execution). CPU time is absurdly cheap. Human time is extremely expensive. So I care about time to develop and maintain -- if that means a slightly longer, less clever, and easier-to-read approach to solving a problem, that's likely the one I'll choose.
I think one of the recurring questions that underlies many legal issues on the Internet has to do with jurisdiction: How do you even determine a location in which an activity is taking place in order to decide which laws might apply? This question arises in topics as diverse as suppressing so-called hate speech or levying sales taxes. It's inconceivable that every government on the planet could possibly agree on a universal set of legal standards for the global Internet, and yet it's equally implausible that governments will maintain a hands-off approach in perpetuity (as much as many of us might hope for it). Given the seeming catch-22 inherent in this situation, I'd be very curious to hear how Mr. Lessig thinks this will play out over the next decade or so. (I'm less interested in the philosophical arguments about why things should be one way or another than I am about a pragmatic assessment of what scenarios seem most likely.)
...calls out to an external time server to grab the correct time. If it's not 11-6 wherever the person is they cannot view the X-rated sites.
And how do you know what the local time is? An external time server will tell you what UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, basically Greenwich Mean Time) is, but it can't tell where you physically *are*, so it can't know the offset to compute your local time. Oh, it's not past 11pm? I'll just temporarily reset the time zone on my computer so it says I'm in Japan.
Um, let's think for a moment about why the Internet is different from TV:
TV is a broadcast medium, meaning that if you have a receiver, it comes into your home whether you want it to or not. The Internet (Web, more precisely) is a client-server mechanism where you have to request content.
TV is basically local (though there's some spillage across a country's borders, of course), so it's reasonable to expect local laws to apply. The Internet is fundamentally international.
Think about it: Should a guy browsing a German Web site from Japan be blocked because it's not after 11pm? Is that client time or server time? What about the reverse, a German guy browsing a Japanese Web site? This whole idea is not internally consistent.
A friend and I stopped in at the GameWorks in Seattle a year or two ago just to see what's going on in the games world (we're both in our 30s now, so arcade visits are no longer a regular part of our lives). Anyway, the one thing that really captivated us was a combat game that detected the motion of your limbs and used it to control the on-screen characters. Naturally we hopped aboard -- I wish we'd had a tape, because I'm sure we looked like total idiots! (I know I *felt* like a total idiot!)
Unfortunately I don't remember the name of this device...
TiVo put some channel on my TV the other night -- TNT, maybe -- that actually had little ads circulating in the lower-right corner of the screen in the spot where the semi-transparent network watermark usually appears. They were mostly ads for other shows on the network, and not tremendously big, but it was still distracting and annoying.
And of course product placement is rampant. Ever notice how many black-and-white cow-splotch-pattern Gateway boxes you see being carried around on shows like ER? It's not accidental, I'm sure.
Look, designing cars is like any kind of engineering: It inevitably involves tradeoffs, and somebody has to make decisions about which combination of tradeoffs will be the most acceptable to the people who actually buy the car.
What proportion of people do you think are concerned about car theft. Fifty percent, maybe? What proportion of people care about remote starters? Five percent? So clearly the electronic key is a net benefit to the customer base. I'm pulling these particular numbers out of my ass, obviously, but you get the idea...
There's an old rule of thumb with regard to user interfaces: Color should be used only as a secondary, never as a primary, conveyor of information. This is partly because a significant portion of the population -- something like 6-8% of men -- is color-blind (many more males than females because common forms of colorblindness are X-chromosome-linked). It's also because, for example, color isn't preserved in many printouts/photocopies.
Upshot: OpenView or whatever should have clearly different icons for status, and the color should only be provided as a backup indicator.
For one thing, the plot was absolutely full of internal inconsistencies. To take just one example: Owen Wilson is supposed to go to a rally point and report in. He proceeds as directed and calls in; at the end of the call, Gene Hackman tells his team to triangulate Wilson's location. This just moments after Wilson said "Hey, I'm at the rally point" -- the one marked on his map. They know his exact coordinates; what's the need for triangulation? Besides, doesn't triangulation (by definition) require receiving a radio signal from two different locations?
Others have already commented on the director's annoying habit to go overboard with shaky cameras, slo-mo/speed-up effects, and rapid zooms. I think it was supposed to feel like war-zone journalism, but it ended up just feeling self-indulgent and forced.
The general premise was indeed quite implausible, and the specifics defy belief as well. I've never served in the military, but I feel fairly confident asserting that if a pilot were shot down behind enemy lines, he would try to find cover rather than sit out in an open field next to his parachute. This goes doubly true in the mountains in winter, if only to maintain your body heat until you can be rescued!
I could go on and on, but I don't want to waste any more of my life thinking about this stinking pile of crap. By the way, I'm not averse to seeing cheesy action movies in general -- this was just a particularly poorly conceived and executed one.
At various points in my life I've heard this claim -- "the U.S. is a Christian nation" -- put forth as if it were a fact. Unfortunately nobody has ever given me any actual evidence to back up this opinion, which is of course utterly absurd if you actually read the core documents defining the shape of the U.S. government such as the Constitution. (Of course, in practice lots of folks are trying to make it true, but desire and reality are not the same thing.) I'd be really curious to know who "plainly explained" otherwise to you -- I sure hope it wasn't someone in a position of institutional authority such as a teacher or government official.
Here is a pretty good discussion of why this claim is false. Read it and gain ammunition to use next time you hear this garbage.
On a personal note, it amazes me that anyone who has simply read the Constitution could come to a conclusion like this. I can only assume that it's something like an urban legend...
At about one thousandth the size of a regular power station, the engine-on-a-chip will create about 1 millionth the power level
The author doesn't specify whether "regular power station" means hydroelectric or not, but if this is three orders of magnitude less efficient by volume than a regular large power station, it's exceedingly unlikely that putting a lot of them side by side would be a smart solution.
Of course, who knows how it would behave if the turbine were powered by flowing water rather than hydrogen combustion.
In Washington state, you can conduct a surprising amount of government business online. When I needed to apply for a business license, I went to the Web expecting to look up the address of an office where I'd go stand in line all day. Instead I found an online application -- answer a few pages' worth of questions, provide a credit card number, and bingo, they give you your business license number on the spot (and the actual paper license was in my mailbox three days later).
Similar experience when I had to renew my car registration: I went to a state Web site, typed in my VIN, and it said hey, you need a smog check before we can renew your registration. I got one, drove back home, went back to the Web site, and it already knew I had passed not 15 minutes ago. Typed in my credit card number and the new tags were in my mailbox within a week.
Also, you have been able to pay U.S. income taxes electronically for years now. I'm not sure quite what's new about this French thing, except that perhaps it's broader and being done on a bigger scale than in the U.S., whose federal structure is supposed to mean more things get done at a state level.
Yet at only a penny a page I can't imagine it would be worth their effort to properly index their content.
It actually might be a disincentive to index their content properly, because they get paid for false hits just like they do for real ones. So unscrupulous webmasters would go looking for popular search terms and then try to get their pages to show up on those terms even if they have nothing to do with them. And you thought search engines were bad now!
I suspect that McD's in India does NOT sell beef products, or at least has a lot more variety than just burgers.
I know that McD's in Indonesia are at least in some cases locally owned. There was a story recently in either the Economist or NYT (no reference, sorry) about how some Indonesian folks started an almost-riot outside a local McDonald's to protest the U.S. bombing of Aghanistan -- causing the Indonesian owner to come running out and beg them to stop ruining his business.
...that's not what this is about. France can tell its citizens that they can't go look for Nazi memorabilia on other sites, and bring charges against them if they do. (They can also tell corporations based in their country that they can't sell that memorabilia, and fine or charge them if they do.) They cannot, however, expect to tell a company BASED IN ANOTHER COUNTRY what it can or can't do, simply because its citizens may have access to it.
Consider a lower-tech analogy. Say there are phone-sex lines in France that would be considered obscene and illegal under U.S. law. Now say that a U.S. citizen calls from California and listens to one of those phone-sex lines. He may be breaking the law in the U.S., but the U.S. can't really expect to go to France and say "hey, you've got this service that my citizens are using, and even though it's legal there, where it's based, it's illegal here, and my citizens can get to it, so you must shut it down!" (Not that the U.S. might not try such a thing in one of its more imperialistic moments, but I really can't see any legal foundation for it...)
Remember that Yahoo France had already removed the illegal items from its site. This case was about whether a French court could impose its standards on entities entirely outside its borders. That makes no sense at all. (If France can do it, why not Afghanistan? What's to stop courts there from claiming that Afghani citizens can use their Internet connections to look at images of women who work outside the home and don't wear veils?)
If France is really insistent that its citizens shouldn't be able to get this stuff, it should take the China approach and just firewall the whole damn country. They could do it, much as I might find it despicable.
Ordinary stony asteroids, which have a rather crumbly composition,
must be larger than 50 meters across (half the size of a football
field) to do any damage at the ground. Such a projectile packs about.
10 megatons of energy, comparable to the largest nuclear bomb.
You stipulate a football-field-sized asteroid, which would make it 8x the mass and therefore 8x the energy of the above, or 80 megatons. That's pretty big, all right.
But from this page about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa:
The total energy released by the four main events of the 1883 eruption was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT. Most of this energy was released by the third paroxysmal explosion which has been estimated to be equivalent to an explosion of 150 megatons of TNT.
Krakatoa, though gigantic, is hardly the biggest eruption the world has ever seen. Mt. Mazama (now Crater Lake) in Oregon is said to have erupted with the force of approximately 10 thousand megatons of TNT. But that's nothing in comparison with the biggest Yellowstone eruptions, which are estimated to have exceeded 2 million megatons. If such an eruption happened today I'd expect it would blow away most evidence of civilization in the western U.S., but the rest of the world might be quite nicely preserved under the ash.
Could be the same reason that we still find evidence of dinosaurs despite the devastation of the meteor impact that is now generally believed to have wiped them out. If an eruption caused anything like a "volcanic winter", it could easily disrupt the food chain and have a profound impact on a civilization -- yet settlements outside the area of devastation caused directly by the blast could be quite well preserved. Just look at how well-preserved Pompeii is. Certainly the eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius haven't been big enough to cause the decline of civilization in the areas, but then again Pompeii is practically at ground zero.
I'm not sure I'd read a lot into the fact that there may be only one legend (Gilgamesh) referring to this incident. Remember that the vast majority of history and culture of the time was conveyed orally; there simply wasn't a lot of writing, and much of what was written was undoubtedly focused on mundane things like keeping tracking of financial transactions or religious observances. I happen to be in the midst of reading Gilgamesh right now, so I'll quote from the introduction (this is from the Pengiun Classics edition translated by Andrew George): "Literature was already being written down in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, though because the script did not yet express language fully, these early tablets remain extremely difficult to read....Texts in Akkadian appear in quantity from about 2300 BC....The early texts in Akkadian dating from this period include a very small body of literature." Incidentally, 2300 BC is just about the time this impact is supposed to have occurred.
I agree with you that the evidence for this seems pretty thin so far, based on what the article describes. But I don't think it's implausible on its face, either...
I'm not saying that greed is a *virtue*, but how is it morally wrong, unless you are literally depriving someone else of their fundamental human rights in the process?
The only thing I'd agree with in your list of moral "absolutes" is that you shouldn't constrict fundamental human rights and freedoms. But as much as I may hate the RIAA/MPAA cabal, I certainly wouldn't put them on a list of human-rights violators because they are trying to prevent folks from stealing media products that don't belong to them...
One of the biggest reasons I find Perl so useful is precisely because there often are five, or more, ways to do something. TMTOWTDI (There's More Than One Way To Do It) is, to my mind, one of the biggest programming productivity enhancers ever. Simple and elegant is fine if you want to spend your time thinking like a computer. Five ways to do something is great when you want the computer to Do What You Mean.
Maybe Perl is bloated in that it's big, but what does that matter in practical terms? If performance is what you're concerned about, it's usually cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem than to throw more programmer-hours at it; I say, let programmers write in a language they can be productive in. (Obviously there are exceptions if you're building an application where performance is truly paramount, but in my experience performance is merely one consideration, along with issues like solution complexity in a given language, maintainability, portability, and so on.)
Perl definitely does give you enough rope to hang yourself with. But if you think that something like operator overloading is dangerous, then don't use it! Just because my car can go 140+ mph doesn't mean I mash the pedal to the floor every day, but it's nice to have the capability when I'm out in the middle of Montana and want to push the envelope.
In my experience, code maintainability has a lot more to do with the practices and discipline of the programmer than with the language they use. It's possible to create convoluted, hairy, unmaintainable code in any language. (I won't say the converse is true, because there is always Intercal...)
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There are plenty of serious diseases that are "just genetics". PKU, sickle-cell anemia, even things like an elevated predisposition to breast cancer are "just genetics".
While I agree with your conclusion that labels and drugs are not the answer, I don't see how it's relevant whether a disease's origins are genetic or not. In some ways you could even argue that genetic oddities should get *more* attention than ones that are more behavioral, given that you have control over your behavior but not over your genes...
My guess is that many programmers haven't had enough painful experience maintaining crappily-written code. Maybe the first thing that should be taught in CS 101 is not how to write "hello, world", but how to take a poorly documented and convoluted program written by somebody else and fix the bugs. (No flames about how CS is about computer science not programming; you know what I mean here.)
For me personally, the incentive to write more self-documenting code was having to maintain stuff I'd written and deployed in commercial environments for a period of years. I don't care how well you knew the code when you wrote it, when your customer unearths some obscure bug in five years' time you're not going to remember a damn thing. And that is a miserable experience. It taught me to take the time up front to save myself the agony down the line.
All in all, I don't really care about lines of code and efficiency (of execution). CPU time is absurdly cheap. Human time is extremely expensive. So I care about time to develop and maintain -- if that means a slightly longer, less clever, and easier-to-read approach to solving a problem, that's likely the one I'll choose.
...neighbor A discovers neighbor B's cache of hard-core pr0n is being backed up on his disk... or more prosiacally, their TurboTax files... ;-)
I think one of the recurring questions that underlies many legal issues on the Internet has to do with jurisdiction: How do you even determine a location in which an activity is taking place in order to decide which laws might apply? This question arises in topics as diverse as suppressing so-called hate speech or levying sales taxes. It's inconceivable that every government on the planet could possibly agree on a universal set of legal standards for the global Internet, and yet it's equally implausible that governments will maintain a hands-off approach in perpetuity (as much as many of us might hope for it). Given the seeming catch-22 inherent in this situation, I'd be very curious to hear how Mr. Lessig thinks this will play out over the next decade or so. (I'm less interested in the philosophical arguments about why things should be one way or another than I am about a pragmatic assessment of what scenarios seem most likely.)
And how do you know what the local time is? An external time server will tell you what UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, basically Greenwich Mean Time) is, but it can't tell where you physically *are*, so it can't know the offset to compute your local time. Oh, it's not past 11pm? I'll just temporarily reset the time zone on my computer so it says I'm in Japan.
TV is a broadcast medium, meaning that if you have a receiver, it comes into your home whether you want it to or not. The Internet (Web, more precisely) is a client-server mechanism where you have to request content.
TV is basically local (though there's some spillage across a country's borders, of course), so it's reasonable to expect local laws to apply. The Internet is fundamentally international.
Think about it: Should a guy browsing a German Web site from Japan be blocked because it's not after 11pm? Is that client time or server time? What about the reverse, a German guy browsing a Japanese Web site? This whole idea is not internally consistent.
Unfortunately I don't remember the name of this device...
Geez, I *bought* the (Compact, but perfectly readable with the magnifier) OED for US$300...
And of course product placement is rampant. Ever notice how many black-and-white cow-splotch-pattern Gateway boxes you see being carried around on shows like ER? It's not accidental, I'm sure.
What proportion of people do you think are concerned about car theft. Fifty percent, maybe? What proportion of people care about remote starters? Five percent? So clearly the electronic key is a net benefit to the customer base. I'm pulling these particular numbers out of my ass, obviously, but you get the idea...
Upshot: OpenView or whatever should have clearly different icons for status, and the color should only be provided as a backup indicator.
Others have already commented on the director's annoying habit to go overboard with shaky cameras, slo-mo/speed-up effects, and rapid zooms. I think it was supposed to feel like war-zone journalism, but it ended up just feeling self-indulgent and forced.
The general premise was indeed quite implausible, and the specifics defy belief as well. I've never served in the military, but I feel fairly confident asserting that if a pilot were shot down behind enemy lines, he would try to find cover rather than sit out in an open field next to his parachute. This goes doubly true in the mountains in winter, if only to maintain your body heat until you can be rescued!
I could go on and on, but I don't want to waste any more of my life thinking about this stinking pile of crap. By the way, I'm not averse to seeing cheesy action movies in general -- this was just a particularly poorly conceived and executed one.
Here is a pretty good discussion of why this claim is false. Read it and gain ammunition to use next time you hear this garbage.
On a personal note, it amazes me that anyone who has simply read the Constitution could come to a conclusion like this. I can only assume that it's something like an urban legend...
The author doesn't specify whether "regular power station" means hydroelectric or not, but if this is three orders of magnitude less efficient by volume than a regular large power station, it's exceedingly unlikely that putting a lot of them side by side would be a smart solution.
Of course, who knows how it would behave if the turbine were powered by flowing water rather than hydrogen combustion.
Similar experience when I had to renew my car registration: I went to a state Web site, typed in my VIN, and it said hey, you need a smog check before we can renew your registration. I got one, drove back home, went back to the Web site, and it already knew I had passed not 15 minutes ago. Typed in my credit card number and the new tags were in my mailbox within a week.
Also, you have been able to pay U.S. income taxes electronically for years now. I'm not sure quite what's new about this French thing, except that perhaps it's broader and being done on a bigger scale than in the U.S., whose federal structure is supposed to mean more things get done at a state level.
You know, like when there's an anonymous informant on TV they put that gray bubble over his face and disguise his voice?
;-)
at least they can't claim that it glamorizes drug addiction ;-)
It actually might be a disincentive to index their content properly, because they get paid for false hits just like they do for real ones. So unscrupulous webmasters would go looking for popular search terms and then try to get their pages to show up on those terms even if they have nothing to do with them. And you thought search engines were bad now!
I suspect that McD's in India does NOT sell beef products, or at least has a lot more variety than just burgers.
I know that McD's in Indonesia are at least in some cases locally owned. There was a story recently in either the Economist or NYT (no reference, sorry) about how some Indonesian folks started an almost-riot outside a local McDonald's to protest the U.S. bombing of Aghanistan -- causing the Indonesian owner to come running out and beg them to stop ruining his business.
Consider a lower-tech analogy. Say there are phone-sex lines in France that would be considered obscene and illegal under U.S. law. Now say that a U.S. citizen calls from California and listens to one of those phone-sex lines. He may be breaking the law in the U.S., but the U.S. can't really expect to go to France and say "hey, you've got this service that my citizens are using, and even though it's legal there, where it's based, it's illegal here, and my citizens can get to it, so you must shut it down!" (Not that the U.S. might not try such a thing in one of its more imperialistic moments, but I really can't see any legal foundation for it...)
Remember that Yahoo France had already removed the illegal items from its site. This case was about whether a French court could impose its standards on entities entirely outside its borders. That makes no sense at all. (If France can do it, why not Afghanistan? What's to stop courts there from claiming that Afghani citizens can use their Internet connections to look at images of women who work outside the home and don't wear veils?)
If France is really insistent that its citizens shouldn't be able to get this stuff, it should take the China approach and just firewall the whole damn country. They could do it, much as I might find it despicable.
You stipulate a football-field-sized asteroid, which would make it 8x the mass and therefore 8x the energy of the above, or 80 megatons. That's pretty big, all right.
But from this page about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa:
Krakatoa, though gigantic, is hardly the biggest eruption the world has ever seen. Mt. Mazama (now Crater Lake) in Oregon is said to have erupted with the force of approximately 10 thousand megatons of TNT. But that's nothing in comparison with the biggest Yellowstone eruptions, which are estimated to have exceeded 2 million megatons. If such an eruption happened today I'd expect it would blow away most evidence of civilization in the western U.S., but the rest of the world might be quite nicely preserved under the ash.
I'm not sure I'd read a lot into the fact that there may be only one legend (Gilgamesh) referring to this incident. Remember that the vast majority of history and culture of the time was conveyed orally; there simply wasn't a lot of writing, and much of what was written was undoubtedly focused on mundane things like keeping tracking of financial transactions or religious observances. I happen to be in the midst of reading Gilgamesh right now, so I'll quote from the introduction (this is from the Pengiun Classics edition translated by Andrew George): "Literature was already being written down in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, though because the script did not yet express language fully, these early tablets remain extremely difficult to read....Texts in Akkadian appear in quantity from about 2300 BC....The early texts in Akkadian dating from this period include a very small body of literature." Incidentally, 2300 BC is just about the time this impact is supposed to have occurred.
I agree with you that the evidence for this seems pretty thin so far, based on what the article describes. But I don't think it's implausible on its face, either...
The only thing I'd agree with in your list of moral "absolutes" is that you shouldn't constrict fundamental human rights and freedoms. But as much as I may hate the RIAA/MPAA cabal, I certainly wouldn't put them on a list of human-rights violators because they are trying to prevent folks from stealing media products that don't belong to them...
Maybe Perl is bloated in that it's big, but what does that matter in practical terms? If performance is what you're concerned about, it's usually cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem than to throw more programmer-hours at it; I say, let programmers write in a language they can be productive in. (Obviously there are exceptions if you're building an application where performance is truly paramount, but in my experience performance is merely one consideration, along with issues like solution complexity in a given language, maintainability, portability, and so on.)
Perl definitely does give you enough rope to hang yourself with. But if you think that something like operator overloading is dangerous, then don't use it! Just because my car can go 140+ mph doesn't mean I mash the pedal to the floor every day, but it's nice to have the capability when I'm out in the middle of Montana and want to push the envelope.
In my experience, code maintainability has a lot more to do with the practices and discipline of the programmer than with the language they use. It's possible to create convoluted, hairy, unmaintainable code in any language. (I won't say the converse is true, because there is always Intercal...)