For some it may be. Why do you think you know what is best for everyone?
Although not explicitly stated, (at least) the first option comes with a 2-year contract.
Thus, it only takes some very simple math to figure out that in two years, the first
option comes out to $1539, and the second option to $1080.
If you'd really like to spend more, feel free to send me the extra $500 and we'll
call it good.
I do like your solution though of actually watching them write the code though,
because that does prevent them just copying and pasting other code and sending it to you.
Copying and pasting code amounts to 90% of even the best programmers' jobs. Other than some
aspects of GUI design and input validation (which even then just means "tweak the conditionals of what
you have", not "write an input handler from scratch"), if you sit down at a blank editor on
anything but a toy project, you either work in academia or need a much tighter deadline.
And there, I have my biggest objection to "testing" applicant, particularly in a vacuum. In the
real world, I program with access to huge libraries of functions and at least half the time, a web browser
open to look random things up as I need them. Yeah, I could rewrite Windows from scratch if you give
me 500 man-years to do it, but do you want to see if I can really do the job, or do you want to see
if I happen to know the prototype for some particularly obscure network calls off the top of my head?
People pay me to solve problems efficiently, not because I've memorized the latest edition of K&R.
(and for the record - Yeah, I pretty much do have the prototypes for the entire standard ANSI C library
memorized, but would prove just as valuable if you wanted me to program in any language, including
one I've never used before)
I say Child A doesn't need to learn his multiplication tables. I submit that it's better for him to learn
how to multiply instead, and eventually, once he uses his method many times, he starts to memorize without
actually trying to memorize.
"Multiplication tables" in this context means learning the function x*y over the set [x,y<=9],
which amounts to the atomic operation for performing base-10 multi-digit multiplications. You can't realistically
break that down in any useful way - Although I suppose you can "solve" those by adding x to itself y times,
you can't meaningfully move on to more complex problems before mastering that basic one.
Granted, I am in the top 1 percentile intelligence-wise.
Then you should know that your stance on this doesn't generalize to the bottom
99 percent. Hey, I feel the same as you - School bored the hell out of me, and
I consider my entire pre-college "education" nothing but a waste of time between
actual learning in my free time.
But at the same time, in all the classes we may have slept through and aced, most
people really do need to pay attention and work through the same problems day
after day after day before they can retain (I won't go so far as to say "understand")
enough to someday serve as good cashiers and greeters and ditch diggers. And I
have nothing against any of those professions - The world very much needs ditch
diggers - But you can't extrapolate your own far-outside-the-norm experience to the
masses.
Obviously, Child A needs to learn his multiplication tables too.
I would argue a different point here - I would say that Child A needs to learn
social behavior far more than his multiplication tables... Though I don't
really consider the current socialized babysitting service we call "school" the
best place for that, it does a world more than never meeting anyone outside your
local neighborhood kids (if by nothing more blunt than teaching us that we have
always and will always treat each other as poorly as we can get away with).
But a school system that sacrifices the very best students in an effort to cater to the very
worst - that isn't a good strategy for any society.
Welcome to "No Child Gets Ahead" (and no, I don't blame Dubbya for merely codifying the trend
in education for the past 50 years).
Anecdote is not, nor ever will be, the singular of "data".
Some things count as so obvious as to not require scientific inquiry. Hot women give get males wood. You don't need
to publish this to claim it, end of story.
perhaps we can look into the actual physiological mechanisms which control it.
Evolution, my friend. If a reproductively desirable female doesn't arouse you, your
genes have come to the end of their otherwise long and successful run.
Now, if you want to study what "reproductively desirable" means, I'll gladly participate in your study. But
c'mon, some things just don't need peer review and independent corroboration to claim as trivially true.
The plot can usually be summarized as: ... It seems to me that a lot of science fiction has an anti-science bent.
You could just as well say that all non SciFi has the same problem... Govenrment wants to do something stupid and only the maverick politician can save the day; Spouse does something stupid and only two hours of dramatic avoiding-the-real-problem can reunite the couple; Boy wants girl but it takes 90 minutes of wacky adventures and two near-death experiences before he gets the courage to ask her out.
The "best" SciFi doesn't make science out as the villain or the hero - Instead, it shows us the (possible) realities of everyday situations in a setting that extracts those problems from the limitations of "modern" science... ie, The boy will still take 90 minutes and nearly die before he gets up the courage to ask the girl out, whether he lives today, or in a dirt hovel 300 years ago, or on a colony station orbiting Jupiter in the year 3517.
I think your real complaint applies to most forced-plot movies in general... You need some artificially-induced source of tension, followed by stalling and CGI to make the story last more than five minutes, followed by a completely predictable but somehow "unexpected" resolution to the original problem. Faux-science just happens to make for some good villians without needing to really justify their motivations. Why does the god-like AI want to enslave humanity? Because, um, er, humans look weak and inefficient (and what about dogs, trees, ants, and every other lower life form on the planet that A, humans don't see a need to enslave/exterminate, and B, we must look barely better than them to this god-like AI?).
700 comments already, so I doubt I'll say anything original here, but...
But I can't think of anyone in a right frame of mind that would actually welcome the experience after a week.
Gamers. Seriously - I don't even consider myself "hardcore", and I've accidentally wasted a week doing nothing but
sleeping and playing emulated console RPGs.
I'm not sure what landing a person on the ground for a few days is going to tell us that a rover can't.
Simple example, the rovers had a sifter-tool to look through the Martian dust... A robot with a fixed repertoire of
tools and motions can't do a whole lot when it encounters something totally unexpected like that; A human would have
worked around the problem (perhaps shake differently, or dip it in a bucket of water, or try a more coarse sieve, or
whatever it takes). Of course, a human wouldn't need to fully sift a random sample of dust, they could deliberately
poke through yards and yards of dust to pick out a few pebbles (or whatever they wanted to find).
The biggest threat to the rovers came from dust building up on their solar panels. A human would just brush them off, problem solved.
One of the rovers broke a wheel... A human could most likely repair that wheel, or at least remove it so the poor
thing didn't waste energy dragging it along like an anchor.
Put simple, a human has far more flexibility in their actions than even the most decked-out robot you can imagine. Even
when it comes to tasks we can't directly perform (due to size or strength requirements or environmental dangers), humans
have the ability to make new tools to fit the task.
Some of the scientists involved in the Biodome thought they had the self-sustaining environment thing figured out to
the T. That didn't work so well.
Realistically, the first group will die before their natural lifespan expires, no one has argued
against that. Probably (if they manage to survive a week) within a year, at best. But what they can
tell us in that time, both about Mars and about the problems inherent in surviving in a totally incompatible
environment, will give the second group a much better chance - And they, the third group. Perhaps the third
group will make it, perhaps it will take a few more, but eventually, if we want it as a species, we can
establish a permanent and self-sustaining presence on Mars.
And if nothing else, history will remember the first group for as long as something vaguely similar to modern
civilization lasts. Few (if any) of us can hope for the same.
I will, of course, download it, regardless of what the vendor wants to call it. But if it costs less for
them to use the magic word "streaming", then by all means, they can do so.
Nice and simple answer to that FTA: "Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant worth £228,000 to develop
the amorphous non-silicon biological robot".
At the risk of getting modded "redundant", this really doesn't sound like much of a "discovery",
much less a "robot". At best, IF they came up with a novel way to arrange food around it
to solve NP-complete problems, you could call it a type of massively parallel processor. Possibly,
with a real stretch of the imagination and some polymer science voodoo, a self-arranging scaffold
for 3d modelling. But a robot? Just because it moves doesn't make it a Porche.
With AMD's reputation for producing hot-running processors
What reputation? Since the days of the original Thunderbird core (which still ran cooler
than comparable P4s, though admittedly didn't have meltdown prevention circuitry), AMD has
consistently given Intel a run for their money in that regard.
Now, the Atom has finally brought Intel back to the realm of "reasonable", but it doesn't
seriously compete with AMD, it competes with VIA (and poorly at that - The Nano blows the
Atom away, clock for clock and Watt for Watt).
Don't get me wrong, Intel has certainly regained my respect when it comes to performance,
but to call AMD the toaster requires ignoring the past 10 years.
IRL, perhaps unlike online, we default to anonymous. Someone can walk up
to you in public, insult you, and walk away, and unless you get lucky and someone
present knows your tormentor, you can't do a damned thing about it. Someone can
key your car. Flip you off at an intersection (plates make that a bit less anonymous,
but only in the most extreme of circumstances would that eventually lead to you knowing
the real identity of the person). Moon you. All purely anonymous.
We even have whole classes of crimes dependent on precisely that anonymity - Mugging,
pick-pockets, shell-games (and other rigged street-gambling), even many forms of "confidence"
scam depend on you not really knowing the ID of the perpetrator.
So, I would have to say exactly the opposite of your claim appears true... We do
have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the real world, and if anything, going online
weakens that due to the after-the-fact traceability of virtually all of our activities.
Now, whether or not to consider all that a good reason for anonymity... Well, I've listed all negatives.
How about the "right" to criticize the government, which in many political systems (or even on a local scale),
a lack of anonymity makes a fatal mistake? The "right" to call a shoddily-made product exactly that, which
often means getting sued into oblivion? The "right" to out a fraud, which even in the best of situations walks
a thin line with "defamation". Notice I put all those rights in quotes - Because without anonymity, they don't exist.
Because we like to sing "happy birthday" at parties.
Then pay
up cheapskate! Or write your own and make it as popular as this one.
(...snip...)
Buck up and tell the world, and me along with it what exactly it is that has you so
aggravated. I can't see it here.
So how much have you paid in license fees to sing happy birthday to friends and relatives?
I'll presume, of course, that you can provide receipts or some form of proof of your non-infringement...
Sorry, if not for that one, I might have taken you seriously, but you meant your response either as
missed sarcasm, or as an outright troll.
There is damn little that isn't available legally.
In some form, for an ungodly price, you mostly speak the truth. In a convenient form,
at a price in the same ballpark as any "popular" example of the same artform, absolutely false.
Trivial example - The majority of massed produced wax cylinder recordings, you cannot
currently obtain in any form other than to buy an actual original wax cylinder, which would
most likely disintegrate if you actually tried to play it. A number of projects have started
preserving these digitally, but of course can't make anything produced after 1923 available
(without extensive legal searches that usually result in a dead-end with a long-defunct publisher).
It's just that not everything is available for free.
Technically true, but hundreds/thousands of dollars for a single song does not fall into
the realm of "reasonable"....
Entry into the public domain does not guarantee you access to the original - to the master prints or recordings.
...Which few people actually want. Some historical-rarities collectors might really want them, and they
expect to pay through the nose - Most of us just want a CD or MP3 of, say, the complete recorded works of Willie
Dixon. And whether or not enough material exists to provide that, you couldn't release the bulk of it without
violating copyright law, despite no commercially available source of the same material.
It does not guarantee funding for storage, restoration or distribution.
No, but it goes a looooong way to guaranteeing exactly that. How many Dr. Who fans would give their left nut for
the opportunity to have helped preserve some of the work "purged" by the BBC in the 1970s? And if not one, but hundreds, of
devoted fans all have copies, well, even if we lose a semi-mythical "master", at least we'd have the episode itself at some
decent level of quality. Instead, we have fan-initiated projects to reproduce those episodes from crappy steel-wire
soundtracks and production stills.
And people really have to wonder why some of us have a problem with current copyright law?
Because your "right" to sing along with the radio, alone in your car, without paying for a
license to perform that work, depends entirely on the inability of the RIAA and "interested"
congresscritters to catch you.
Because documentary filmmakers regularly "censor" any music or visible brands in something that
supposedly presents a realistic snapshot of its subject matter.
Because we like to sing "happy birthday" at parties.
Because none of the "new" media today comes even remotely close to "original" - Indeed, when artists
actually do come up with something more than a few percent truly original, it tends to fail miserably.
Because copyright exists for promoting advancement in the arts for MY and your benefit, and
to a lesser degree the artists themselves. Not for the benefit of Sony or four generations of
the artist's descendants with no value to society beyond "owns the rights to grandpa's book".
Feel free to sell your soul to Mammon. I want - We demand - access to the culture of
which we form (however small) a part on our terms. Meet them, or we'll just take, while you piss and moan
about "fairness" in a world we rule because of our ruthless ability to consume those who believe in fairness.
So while it may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on
that individual's computer, a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or
tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.
Nice doublespeak there, Marilyn, but a right that you have no way to exercise does not exist.
Now, saying that Real violated the terms of the CSS license, I have no problem with. But extending your
ruling to the more general case, I find both absurd and insulting.
Consider yourself in contempt of
rational humanity - I sentence you to arguing with an Intelligent Design proponent for 30 days or until
you realize the problem with calling something definitionally (rather than factually) true (or il/legal).
The criteria is 'derivative work', not 'link to'. Linking is sometimes a rule of thumb in this area, but it isn't
decisive.
Excellent point, and one that I expected to go unstated here due to the rampant "don't piss in Stallman's Cheerios"
attitude.
Simple thought-experiment... I create a program Foo, which links against GPL'd library Bar. Seems
clear-cut, right? But, I also release library Baz, which contains a cleanroom implementation of
all the functionality of Bar on which Foo depends. Although I don't release these as GPL, I do release
the source code.
This leads to an absurdity, in that the end user gets to determine the copyright status of something
written by me - If you build Foo against Bar, you'd need the GPL to make it kosher; If you
build it against Baz, anything goes.
Thus we can see the problem of considering linked works as "derivative", in that linking, in the case of
something released as source code, does not describe a fixed reality, but merely an option available
to the end user.
Not kidding... Around 5 years ago I started considering my desktop PCs disposeable and my
fileserver as the first thing I'd grab if I woke up in the middle of the night with the
house on fire. I beat my head against the problem of how to back up almost a terabyte (five
years ago, backing up a terabyte even to horrid tape would have taken several $100+ tapes and
a $10k drive) for about two years before I finally came up with a simple, elegant, even obvious
solution...
I realized that for under $500, I could just completely duplicate the machine. Rsync them
on occasion, and I never again had to worry about losing (a significant amount of) data. Incidentally,
don't auto-rsync them, because if you lose a drive and have it spanning FSs, you'll very
neatly "mirror" the loss to the other machine.
Now, that solution doesn't allow you to roll back to an earlier state (though you can, and I currently
do, use hardlinks before rsync'ing to get exactly that functionality), but it does protect against
outright loss of the current versions of your files.
Honestly, it's just a 15 year old kid with some views of his life. I highly doubt he's
actually got anything revolutionary to say.
Revolutionary, no. Marketable, yes.
A lot of companies consider Twitter the "next big thing", when in reality, not only has Twitter always had
major problems, it jumped the shark at least a year ago. Then some kid comes out and effectively points-and-laughs
at all the foolish VCs trying to recapture the glory of the Dot Com bubble... Something they'd love to ignore, but
unfortunately he perfectly represents their target audience. Not something easily ignored when you have
billions on the table calling his bluff, basically betting that this particular 15YO differs enough from the
norm that you won't lose your shirt.
Now, the point about in-game chats, well, he has a point, but one limited in validity to his particular market segment
(young males with a lot of free time and decent access to money). In that segment, he very much describes reality...
Who would bother texting or even booting a PC to chat, when the standalone networked device you sit in front of for 8+
hours a day already has that functionality built in? That doesn't mean texting or IM will go away, but if you want to
appeal to a 15YO male PS3 junkie, you'd damned well better know where to reach him.
If true, I would indeed change my tone somewhat, but several parts of the story make no sense if we
consider this "just" a private company doing military research.
First, why did his university's ExCO have any knowledge of or involvement in his lecture tour in
China? If university material, then he committed his crime "for" the university; If purely private
material from his company, he arguably violated his contract just by letting them review it.
Second, why did he have grad students working on projects for his company? Research assistant positions
commonly come with the territory, but student visas do not equal work visas. Placing them with
a private organization not affiliated with the university would likely violated immigration laws, not
just the terms of an overblown NDA.
This all makes sense only in one context - The "company" existed as a shell entirely under control of
the university for the sole purpose of marketing their IP (IP likely derived from public funds in this
case, making the distinction between "university" and "company" even more dubious). Not an uncommon
arrangement.
"Openness", both ideologically and in the FOSS sense, forms one of the core requirements of
successful academia.
I don't blame or absolve the professor - He had a contract, and I suppose the legal details
of this boil down to a matter of contract law (though I most certainly do have a problem
with prison time rather than monetary damages for breach of contract). But I do blame
both his university and the government itself.
I blame the university for undermining any sense of credibility by selling out to the highest
bidder at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid
the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as
their peers all because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases
they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed
in our Cheerios.
And I blame the government for foisting their homework onto a domain that largely considers
secrecy either beneath consideration or outright contemptible. Don't want foreign students to
have access to military projects? Simple - Give those projects to standard military-industrial
contractors familiar with paranoid levels of obfuscation and mistrust such as Lockheed, Grumman,
Boeing or the like. And if they do decide to tap academia for parts of their research,
I blame them for not taking care to prevent any one group from having "enough" information to
do anything useful with.
You don't spank a baby for giggling at butterflies, and you don't hold it accountable if you
give it a gun and someone gets hurt. Simple as that.
successful advertising tends to enhance the experience of the media they support.
Based on that premise, I have to conclude that no such thing as "successful advertising" exists, with
the possible exception of Superbowl ads - And I wouldn't say they enhance the media itself, so
much as they exist as content on their own (an idea supported by more people watching the halftime ads than
the game itself).
How many of us would listen to the radio of watch TV if the ads were just 30 seconds of monotonous droning
Well now, I expect in that situation, you would see massive numbers of people avoiding "live" TV, instead
preferring to watch everything later via TiVo where they can skip the commercials. But with the commercials as such fun and
exciting content, dare I say rivaling the actual programs they break, I suppose we don't have to worry about such a
grim world full of ad-skipping thieves.
Oh, wait...
or if the ads interrupted the expected flow of content.
You do realize modern TV has ad-breaks designed in to the script, right? The ads don't come
mid-sentence, they come at an arguable "worse" time - Right before an artificially-introduced cliffhanger
inserted solely to keep you from changing the channel for the next 3 minutes of garbage.
In sophisticated media, there is some experience in what works and what does not.
What "sophisticated" media? If you mean we haven't figured out a way to skip ads in print media,
I can't argue that... But the fact that we can't skip it doesn't make it any more effective,
just more intrusive.
I grudgingly have to accept that advertising pays for most of the so-called "free" content we have
available to us (and subsidizes even most for-pay content; compare the cost of a subscription to SciAm
vs Science). But don't pretend that advertising has any merit, or nobility, or class whatsoever
beyond the base fact that it helps pay the bills. In every other aspect it can do nothing but offend,
both through its interruption of actual content, and through the insulting tricks it uses to get us to
bend to someone else's will.
If you're being professional, you shouldn't have to worry about who can have you fired
Let me know when the flying ponies arrive, I missed my last shipment of pixie dust.
The simple answer to the FP's question boils down to one basic fact - "You don't". Your coworkers will
consider you incompetent when something goes wrong, and useless when everything goes right; arrogant
when you say you can do something right away, and lazy if you tell them it will take a week; rude if you
don't help them use Google for the 150th time, and a showoff if you just give them the answer they want; antisocial
if you eat lunch at your desk, and weird if you socialize but don't know all the pop cultural trivia.
IT people really can't win this, because people don't like feeling helpless and will resent your
attempts to teach them how to help themselves.
Also, giving up domain names means completely abdicating your surfing to search
engines and people who know SEO. Not a good idea.
You make a lot of good points, but I have to wonder (respectfully, not mockingly) - Have you ever
watched a non-geek "go" to a specific web site?
Fact #1 - They run Windows.
Fact #2 - They use the default browser (MSIE).
Fact #3 - They use the default homepage (MSN), or at best, have changed this to Google.
Now, when you stand there and tell such a person to, for example, "go to www.slashdot.org", they will,
without fail, proceed to type "www.slashdot.org" into the MSN search box.
So while I agree with everything you said in principle (and expect it holds true for most advanced computer
users), in practice, the GP had it right... The URL doesn't matter, because the vast majority of people don't even realize
they can type things directly into the address bar - This really does boil down to the old Microsoft joke of
"Where do we want you to go today?".
Slashdot Mirror
"Facebook protest".
Your ancestors - Not impressed.
For some it may be. Why do you think you know what is best for everyone?
Although not explicitly stated, (at least) the first option comes with a 2-year contract. Thus, it only takes some very simple math to figure out that in two years, the first option comes out to $1539, and the second option to $1080.
If you'd really like to spend more, feel free to send me the extra $500 and we'll call it good.
I do like your solution though of actually watching them write the code though, because that does prevent them just copying and pasting other code and sending it to you.
Copying and pasting code amounts to 90% of even the best programmers' jobs. Other than some aspects of GUI design and input validation (which even then just means "tweak the conditionals of what you have", not "write an input handler from scratch"), if you sit down at a blank editor on anything but a toy project, you either work in academia or need a much tighter deadline.
And there, I have my biggest objection to "testing" applicant, particularly in a vacuum. In the real world, I program with access to huge libraries of functions and at least half the time, a web browser open to look random things up as I need them. Yeah, I could rewrite Windows from scratch if you give me 500 man-years to do it, but do you want to see if I can really do the job, or do you want to see if I happen to know the prototype for some particularly obscure network calls off the top of my head?
People pay me to solve problems efficiently, not because I've memorized the latest edition of K&R.
(and for the record - Yeah, I pretty much do have the prototypes for the entire standard ANSI C library memorized, but would prove just as valuable if you wanted me to program in any language, including one I've never used before)
I say Child A doesn't need to learn his multiplication tables. I submit that it's better for him to learn how to multiply instead, and eventually, once he uses his method many times, he starts to memorize without actually trying to memorize.
"Multiplication tables" in this context means learning the function x*y over the set [x,y<=9], which amounts to the atomic operation for performing base-10 multi-digit multiplications. You can't realistically break that down in any useful way - Although I suppose you can "solve" those by adding x to itself y times, you can't meaningfully move on to more complex problems before mastering that basic one.
Granted, I am in the top 1 percentile intelligence-wise.
Then you should know that your stance on this doesn't generalize to the bottom 99 percent. Hey, I feel the same as you - School bored the hell out of me, and I consider my entire pre-college "education" nothing but a waste of time between actual learning in my free time.
But at the same time, in all the classes we may have slept through and aced, most people really do need to pay attention and work through the same problems day after day after day before they can retain (I won't go so far as to say "understand") enough to someday serve as good cashiers and greeters and ditch diggers. And I have nothing against any of those professions - The world very much needs ditch diggers - But you can't extrapolate your own far-outside-the-norm experience to the masses.
Obviously, Child A needs to learn his multiplication tables too.
I would argue a different point here - I would say that Child A needs to learn social behavior far more than his multiplication tables... Though I don't really consider the current socialized babysitting service we call "school" the best place for that, it does a world more than never meeting anyone outside your local neighborhood kids (if by nothing more blunt than teaching us that we have always and will always treat each other as poorly as we can get away with).
But a school system that sacrifices the very best students in an effort to cater to the very worst - that isn't a good strategy for any society.
Welcome to "No Child Gets Ahead" (and no, I don't blame Dubbya for merely codifying the trend in education for the past 50 years).
Anecdote is not, nor ever will be, the singular of "data".
Some things count as so obvious as to not require scientific inquiry. Hot women give get males wood. You don't need to publish this to claim it, end of story.
perhaps we can look into the actual physiological mechanisms which control it.
Evolution, my friend. If a reproductively desirable female doesn't arouse you, your genes have come to the end of their otherwise long and successful run.
Now, if you want to study what "reproductively desirable" means, I'll gladly participate in your study. But c'mon, some things just don't need peer review and independent corroboration to claim as trivially true.
The plot can usually be summarized as:
:)
...
It seems to me that a lot of science fiction has an anti-science bent.
You could just as well say that all non SciFi has the same problem... Govenrment wants to do something stupid and only the maverick politician can save the day; Spouse does something stupid and only two hours of dramatic avoiding-the-real-problem can reunite the couple; Boy wants girl but it takes 90 minutes of wacky adventures and two near-death experiences before he gets the courage to ask her out.
The "best" SciFi doesn't make science out as the villain or the hero - Instead, it shows us the (possible) realities of everyday situations in a setting that extracts those problems from the limitations of "modern" science... ie, The boy will still take 90 minutes and nearly die before he gets up the courage to ask the girl out, whether he lives today, or in a dirt hovel 300 years ago, or on a colony station orbiting Jupiter in the year 3517.
I think your real complaint applies to most forced-plot movies in general... You need some artificially-induced source of tension, followed by stalling and CGI to make the story last more than five minutes, followed by a completely predictable but somehow "unexpected" resolution to the original problem. Faux-science just happens to make for some good villians without needing to really justify their motivations. Why does the god-like AI want to enslave humanity? Because, um, er, humans look weak and inefficient (and what about dogs, trees, ants, and every other lower life form on the planet that A, humans don't see a need to enslave/exterminate, and B, we must look barely better than them to this god-like AI?).
So blame Hollywood, not SciFi in general.
700 comments already, so I doubt I'll say anything original here, but...
But I can't think of anyone in a right frame of mind that would actually welcome the experience after a week.
Gamers. Seriously - I don't even consider myself "hardcore", and I've accidentally wasted a week doing nothing but sleeping and playing emulated console RPGs.
I'm not sure what landing a person on the ground for a few days is going to tell us that a rover can't.
Simple example, the rovers had a sifter-tool to look through the Martian dust... A robot with a fixed repertoire of tools and motions can't do a whole lot when it encounters something totally unexpected like that; A human would have worked around the problem (perhaps shake differently, or dip it in a bucket of water, or try a more coarse sieve, or whatever it takes). Of course, a human wouldn't need to fully sift a random sample of dust, they could deliberately poke through yards and yards of dust to pick out a few pebbles (or whatever they wanted to find).
The biggest threat to the rovers came from dust building up on their solar panels. A human would just brush them off, problem solved.
One of the rovers broke a wheel... A human could most likely repair that wheel, or at least remove it so the poor thing didn't waste energy dragging it along like an anchor.
Put simple, a human has far more flexibility in their actions than even the most decked-out robot you can imagine. Even when it comes to tasks we can't directly perform (due to size or strength requirements or environmental dangers), humans have the ability to make new tools to fit the task.
Some of the scientists involved in the Biodome thought they had the self-sustaining environment thing figured out to the T. That didn't work so well.
Realistically, the first group will die before their natural lifespan expires, no one has argued against that. Probably (if they manage to survive a week) within a year, at best. But what they can tell us in that time, both about Mars and about the problems inherent in surviving in a totally incompatible environment, will give the second group a much better chance - And they, the third group. Perhaps the third group will make it, perhaps it will take a few more, but eventually, if we want it as a species, we can establish a permanent and self-sustaining presence on Mars.
And if nothing else, history will remember the first group for as long as something vaguely similar to modern civilization lasts. Few (if any) of us can hope for the same.
Will You Stream Or Download Your Mobile Music
I will, of course, download it, regardless of what the vendor wants to call it. But if it costs less for them to use the magic word "streaming", then by all means, they can do so.
And what exactly do they intend to use it for?
Nice and simple answer to that FTA: "Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant worth £228,000 to develop the amorphous non-silicon biological robot".
At the risk of getting modded "redundant", this really doesn't sound like much of a "discovery", much less a "robot". At best, IF they came up with a novel way to arrange food around it to solve NP-complete problems, you could call it a type of massively parallel processor. Possibly, with a real stretch of the imagination and some polymer science voodoo, a self-arranging scaffold for 3d modelling. But a robot? Just because it moves doesn't make it a Porche.
With AMD's reputation for producing hot-running processors
What reputation? Since the days of the original Thunderbird core (which still ran cooler than comparable P4s, though admittedly didn't have meltdown prevention circuitry), AMD has consistently given Intel a run for their money in that regard.
Now, the Atom has finally brought Intel back to the realm of "reasonable", but it doesn't seriously compete with AMD, it competes with VIA (and poorly at that - The Nano blows the Atom away, clock for clock and Watt for Watt).
Don't get me wrong, Intel has certainly regained my respect when it comes to performance, but to call AMD the toaster requires ignoring the past 10 years.
In RL, there is no anonymity.
Absolutely untrue.
IRL, perhaps unlike online, we default to anonymous. Someone can walk up to you in public, insult you, and walk away, and unless you get lucky and someone present knows your tormentor, you can't do a damned thing about it. Someone can key your car. Flip you off at an intersection (plates make that a bit less anonymous, but only in the most extreme of circumstances would that eventually lead to you knowing the real identity of the person). Moon you. All purely anonymous.
We even have whole classes of crimes dependent on precisely that anonymity - Mugging, pick-pockets, shell-games (and other rigged street-gambling), even many forms of "confidence" scam depend on you not really knowing the ID of the perpetrator.
So, I would have to say exactly the opposite of your claim appears true... We do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the real world, and if anything, going online weakens that due to the after-the-fact traceability of virtually all of our activities.
Now, whether or not to consider all that a good reason for anonymity... Well, I've listed all negatives. How about the "right" to criticize the government, which in many political systems (or even on a local scale), a lack of anonymity makes a fatal mistake? The "right" to call a shoddily-made product exactly that, which often means getting sued into oblivion? The "right" to out a fraud, which even in the best of situations walks a thin line with "defamation". Notice I put all those rights in quotes - Because without anonymity, they don't exist.
So how much have you paid in license fees to sing happy birthday to friends and relatives? I'll presume, of course, that you can provide receipts or some form of proof of your non-infringement...
Sorry, if not for that one, I might have taken you seriously, but you meant your response either as missed sarcasm, or as an outright troll.
There is damn little that isn't available legally.
...Which few people actually want. Some historical-rarities collectors might really want them, and they
expect to pay through the nose - Most of us just want a CD or MP3 of, say, the complete recorded works of Willie
Dixon. And whether or not enough material exists to provide that, you couldn't release the bulk of it without
violating copyright law, despite no commercially available source of the same material.
In some form, for an ungodly price, you mostly speak the truth. In a convenient form, at a price in the same ballpark as any "popular" example of the same artform, absolutely false. Trivial example - The majority of massed produced wax cylinder recordings, you cannot currently obtain in any form other than to buy an actual original wax cylinder, which would most likely disintegrate if you actually tried to play it. A number of projects have started preserving these digitally, but of course can't make anything produced after 1923 available (without extensive legal searches that usually result in a dead-end with a long-defunct publisher).
It's just that not everything is available for free.
Technically true, but hundreds/thousands of dollars for a single song does not fall into the realm of "reasonable"....
Entry into the public domain does not guarantee you access to the original - to the master prints or recordings.
It does not guarantee funding for storage, restoration or distribution.
No, but it goes a looooong way to guaranteeing exactly that. How many Dr. Who fans would give their left nut for the opportunity to have helped preserve some of the work "purged" by the BBC in the 1970s? And if not one, but hundreds, of devoted fans all have copies, well, even if we lose a semi-mythical "master", at least we'd have the episode itself at some decent level of quality. Instead, we have fan-initiated projects to reproduce those episodes from crappy steel-wire soundtracks and production stills.
And people really have to wonder why some of us have a problem with current copyright law?
Why exactly is this a problem?
Because your "right" to sing along with the radio, alone in your car, without paying for a license to perform that work, depends entirely on the inability of the RIAA and "interested" congresscritters to catch you.
Because documentary filmmakers regularly "censor" any music or visible brands in something that supposedly presents a realistic snapshot of its subject matter.
Because we like to sing "happy birthday" at parties.
Because none of the "new" media today comes even remotely close to "original" - Indeed, when artists actually do come up with something more than a few percent truly original, it tends to fail miserably.
Because copyright exists for promoting advancement in the arts for MY and your benefit, and to a lesser degree the artists themselves. Not for the benefit of Sony or four generations of the artist's descendants with no value to society beyond "owns the rights to grandpa's book".
Feel free to sell your soul to Mammon. I want - We demand - access to the culture of which we form (however small) a part on our terms. Meet them, or we'll just take, while you piss and moan about "fairness" in a world we rule because of our ruthless ability to consume those who believe in fairness.
Because it means there is less paper schedules that people just dump into the normal trash?
So, to repeat the question...
So while it may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual's computer, a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.
Nice doublespeak there, Marilyn, but a right that you have no way to exercise does not exist.
Now, saying that Real violated the terms of the CSS license, I have no problem with. But extending your ruling to the more general case, I find both absurd and insulting.
Consider yourself in contempt of rational humanity - I sentence you to arguing with an Intelligent Design proponent for 30 days or until you realize the problem with calling something definitionally (rather than factually) true (or il/legal).
The criteria is 'derivative work', not 'link to'. Linking is sometimes a rule of thumb in this area, but it isn't decisive.
Excellent point, and one that I expected to go unstated here due to the rampant "don't piss in Stallman's Cheerios" attitude.
Simple thought-experiment... I create a program Foo, which links against GPL'd library Bar. Seems clear-cut, right? But, I also release library Baz, which contains a cleanroom implementation of all the functionality of Bar on which Foo depends. Although I don't release these as GPL, I do release the source code.
This leads to an absurdity, in that the end user gets to determine the copyright status of something written by me - If you build Foo against Bar, you'd need the GPL to make it kosher; If you build it against Baz, anything goes.
Thus we can see the problem of considering linked works as "derivative", in that linking, in the case of something released as source code, does not describe a fixed reality, but merely an option available to the end user.
Two words: "Build another".
Not kidding... Around 5 years ago I started considering my desktop PCs disposeable and my fileserver as the first thing I'd grab if I woke up in the middle of the night with the house on fire. I beat my head against the problem of how to back up almost a terabyte (five years ago, backing up a terabyte even to horrid tape would have taken several $100+ tapes and a $10k drive) for about two years before I finally came up with a simple, elegant, even obvious solution...
I realized that for under $500, I could just completely duplicate the machine. Rsync them on occasion, and I never again had to worry about losing (a significant amount of) data. Incidentally, don't auto-rsync them, because if you lose a drive and have it spanning FSs, you'll very neatly "mirror" the loss to the other machine.
Now, that solution doesn't allow you to roll back to an earlier state (though you can, and I currently do, use hardlinks before rsync'ing to get exactly that functionality), but it does protect against outright loss of the current versions of your files.
Honestly, it's just a 15 year old kid with some views of his life. I highly doubt he's actually got anything revolutionary to say.
Revolutionary, no. Marketable, yes.
A lot of companies consider Twitter the "next big thing", when in reality, not only has Twitter always had major problems, it jumped the shark at least a year ago. Then some kid comes out and effectively points-and-laughs at all the foolish VCs trying to recapture the glory of the Dot Com bubble... Something they'd love to ignore, but unfortunately he perfectly represents their target audience. Not something easily ignored when you have billions on the table calling his bluff, basically betting that this particular 15YO differs enough from the norm that you won't lose your shirt.
Now, the point about in-game chats, well, he has a point, but one limited in validity to his particular market segment (young males with a lot of free time and decent access to money). In that segment, he very much describes reality... Who would bother texting or even booting a PC to chat, when the standalone networked device you sit in front of for 8+ hours a day already has that functionality built in? That doesn't mean texting or IM will go away, but if you want to appeal to a 15YO male PS3 junkie, you'd damned well better know where to reach him.
this has nothing to do with education, really.
If true, I would indeed change my tone somewhat, but several parts of the story make no sense if we consider this "just" a private company doing military research.
First, why did his university's ExCO have any knowledge of or involvement in his lecture tour in China? If university material, then he committed his crime "for" the university; If purely private material from his company, he arguably violated his contract just by letting them review it.
Second, why did he have grad students working on projects for his company? Research assistant positions commonly come with the territory, but student visas do not equal work visas. Placing them with a private organization not affiliated with the university would likely violated immigration laws, not just the terms of an overblown NDA.
This all makes sense only in one context - The "company" existed as a shell entirely under control of the university for the sole purpose of marketing their IP (IP likely derived from public funds in this case, making the distinction between "university" and "company" even more dubious). Not an uncommon arrangement.
"Openness", both ideologically and in the FOSS sense, forms one of the core requirements of successful academia.
I don't blame or absolve the professor - He had a contract, and I suppose the legal details of this boil down to a matter of contract law (though I most certainly do have a problem with prison time rather than monetary damages for breach of contract). But I do blame both his university and the government itself.
I blame the university for undermining any sense of credibility by selling out to the highest bidder at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as their peers all because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed in our Cheerios.
And I blame the government for foisting their homework onto a domain that largely considers secrecy either beneath consideration or outright contemptible. Don't want foreign students to have access to military projects? Simple - Give those projects to standard military-industrial contractors familiar with paranoid levels of obfuscation and mistrust such as Lockheed, Grumman, Boeing or the like. And if they do decide to tap academia for parts of their research, I blame them for not taking care to prevent any one group from having "enough" information to do anything useful with.
You don't spank a baby for giggling at butterflies, and you don't hold it accountable if you give it a gun and someone gets hurt. Simple as that.
successful advertising tends to enhance the experience of the media they support.
Based on that premise, I have to conclude that no such thing as "successful advertising" exists, with the possible exception of Superbowl ads - And I wouldn't say they enhance the media itself, so much as they exist as content on their own (an idea supported by more people watching the halftime ads than the game itself).
How many of us would listen to the radio of watch TV if the ads were just 30 seconds of monotonous droning
Well now, I expect in that situation, you would see massive numbers of people avoiding "live" TV, instead preferring to watch everything later via TiVo where they can skip the commercials. But with the commercials as such fun and exciting content, dare I say rivaling the actual programs they break, I suppose we don't have to worry about such a grim world full of ad-skipping thieves.
Oh, wait...
or if the ads interrupted the expected flow of content.
You do realize modern TV has ad-breaks designed in to the script, right? The ads don't come mid-sentence, they come at an arguable "worse" time - Right before an artificially-introduced cliffhanger inserted solely to keep you from changing the channel for the next 3 minutes of garbage.
In sophisticated media, there is some experience in what works and what does not.
What "sophisticated" media? If you mean we haven't figured out a way to skip ads in print media, I can't argue that... But the fact that we can't skip it doesn't make it any more effective, just more intrusive.
I grudgingly have to accept that advertising pays for most of the so-called "free" content we have available to us (and subsidizes even most for-pay content; compare the cost of a subscription to SciAm vs Science). But don't pretend that advertising has any merit, or nobility, or class whatsoever beyond the base fact that it helps pay the bills. In every other aspect it can do nothing but offend, both through its interruption of actual content, and through the insulting tricks it uses to get us to bend to someone else's will.
If you're being professional, you shouldn't have to worry about who can have you fired
Let me know when the flying ponies arrive, I missed my last shipment of pixie dust.
The simple answer to the FP's question boils down to one basic fact - "You don't". Your coworkers will consider you incompetent when something goes wrong, and useless when everything goes right; arrogant when you say you can do something right away, and lazy if you tell them it will take a week; rude if you don't help them use Google for the 150th time, and a showoff if you just give them the answer they want; antisocial if you eat lunch at your desk, and weird if you socialize but don't know all the pop cultural trivia.
IT people really can't win this, because people don't like feeling helpless and will resent your attempts to teach them how to help themselves.
Also, giving up domain names means completely abdicating your surfing to search engines and people who know SEO. Not a good idea.
You make a lot of good points, but I have to wonder (respectfully, not mockingly) - Have you ever watched a non-geek "go" to a specific web site?
Fact #1 - They run Windows.
Fact #2 - They use the default browser (MSIE).
Fact #3 - They use the default homepage (MSN), or at best, have changed this to Google.
Now, when you stand there and tell such a person to, for example, "go to www.slashdot.org", they will, without fail, proceed to type "www.slashdot.org" into the MSN search box.
So while I agree with everything you said in principle (and expect it holds true for most advanced computer users), in practice, the GP had it right... The URL doesn't matter, because the vast majority of people don't even realize they can type things directly into the address bar - This really does boil down to the old Microsoft joke of "Where do we want you to go today?".