I realize that I was pretty skinny back then. But not so skinny that only supermodels qualified as "weighs less than I do."
What good would expanding my circle of friends do? One of the more annoying occasions I had was when a friend and I were at a social gathering. He was "Mr. Sociable" and the women would talk to him and completely ignore me to the point where he was grinding his teeth trying to get them to pay attention to me. They simply refused to do so.
I never got into playing video games and other nerd anti-social activity. In fact, one of the things that won me my wife was that her ex-boyfriend was trying to get me to play arcade games when we were all out together and I preferred to spend time with her. He probably wouldn't have been an ex- boyfriend if he'd spent less time playing video games himself.
I meant "joined-up" as in "words written in a single continuous stroke", as opposed to having to lift your writing implement between the individual letters. Which also happens to be a natural feature of shorthand, quite understandably.
I think we call that "cursive". As I recall, however, shorthand isn't so much cursive as it is a substitute character set where some glyphs are abbreviations for common words and word combinations.
I haven't written anything meaningful in cursive in years. I'm not sure it ever was that much of an actual speed boost. Especially after factoring the reduced legibility.
There are also a lot of women who expect "Mr. Perfect" and won't have anything to do with lesser life forms. Me, I would have been fairly happy just finding someone showing an interest who wasn't heavier than I was.
I don't know that I was bad at dating. No one would seriously consider me for a date until they'd grown old enough to be fed up with the abusive guys.
Yeah, but Graffiti - unlike Teeline and co. - doesn't really have joined-up symbols, right? Plus the shapes seem still quite complex, the same amount of characters leads to many more movements.
If you mean joined-up as in font ligatures, no. Then again, neither does my keyboard. Ligatures are something I'd expect to get applied downstream and only where appropriate.
I can't recall any Grafitti characters that were more complex than the standard letters, and a few were less so. It was annoying that "u" and "v" were the same shape written in opposite directions, but I got over it.
If you did not like the Newtons hand writing recognition, then you mad the same mistake many did: you tried to figure how to write so it understands. That was wrong, you should have teached it to recognize 'your' writing. For some people that was obviously to cumbersome. But all I know who had a Newton did that and had a near perfect and fast recognition... with the drawback they could not write on each others Newtons;)
To the contrary. I was rather arrogant about the idea that the Newton should learn to serve me and not the other way around.
That could be, because, like I said, I cannot read my own writing, either.
I can get the same effect on my reader by pressing anywhere along the side of the page.
"Pressing" or "touching"? Can you be touching the same spot while holding the device and not initiate a page turn?
Parent's point was that you can't hold the Kindle and initiate a page turn without changing how you're holding the Kindle. I like the idea of not having to move my hand or fingers, just having to increase pressure. If I hold my Paperwhite in one hand at an awkward angle, moving my thumb into place to tap the screen is awkward, since it's also what's gripping the device.
Probably not, but I can operate page-turning one-handed and without shifting my grip.
No, this is where you keep your finger in exactly the same place but just apply a little extra force.
The Kindle 1 had this. It was called a "button".
I can get the same effect on my reader by pressing anywhere along the side of the page. A much bigger "button", and it doesn't have contacts that get dirty or wear down.
Compared to a book there are less ads on my Nexus 7. The last few pages of current paperbacks are always ads. Often, you think you have about 10 minutes of reading left and it is a "sample" from some other upcoming book - perhaps a chapter or so. Following this are ads for other books from the publisher. On my Nexus 7? If I compare to a book, I don't see ads. Now, if you say "but if you visit a web page you see ads!". Sure, but books can't go to a web page. When I am just reading a book on the N7 I don't see any ads.
Back circa 1970s, one of the first things I did when purchasing a new paperback was rip the cigarette ad out from the middle. They printed them on heavy color stock and it interfered with page turning.
I'd like handwriting recognition, but perhaps not in the usual sense. What I'd consider really neat would be shorthand recognition. Perhaps recognition something similar to Teeline. Writing legible longhand with a stylus has always felt a bit too brittle (shape-wise) and slow (lag-wise) to me. With a reasonable language model, it wouldn't be much slower than speech recognition while being more accurate (it actually feels like a similar task, but there might be less noise in the "graphic formants").
I had a Newton and its handwriting recognition was every bit the joke that it was made out to be.
Next device after that was a Palm, with Grafitti. Grafittis isn't free-form print/cursive write-on-paper, but it is close enough to get used to quickly.
I can enter text in Grafitti faster than I can type. And it's more readable than my actual handwriting. Unfortunately, none of my current devices supports it.
It really is just for reading though and I agree giving it the ability to be able to play audio while reading would be fantastic. I'd pay an extra $20 for that which should more than cover the additional hardware and MP3 license.
The original (paperwhite) Nook could do that. It even had a pair of miniscule stereo speakers in the bottom if you didn't have earbuds handy. It came free with the Nook.
One of the nastiest things about spreadheets in relation to software is that software is essentially linear, making it easier to follow what's affecting what.
Spreadsheets are 2-dimensional, can incorporate data from invisible cells and even other sheets. Then on top of that, what's normally displayed is the results, not the code. There's no side-by-side view of code/value on any spreadsheet I'm aware of.
Also, since code is linear, one screwup and it tends to make itself obvious by propagating downstream. Spreadsheets can have pockets of decay intermingled with perfectly good stuff.
Completely missing my point. Assume that datamining a la NSA, FBI, etc, actually worked to protect the citizenry from thoughtcrime before it becomes realcrime. Thus, the best way to avoid that worm, if you wanted to commit a crime, would be to delete all your social media accounts so they can't even get a network diagram for you, let alone posting bullshit rants about whatever you intend to use as your justification for going crazy and killing people.
Of course, the actual fact is that predictive analysis like this is worthless, because humans are non-deterministic creatures.
Deleting the evidence isn't going to help if the authorities were going to go all Minority Report. In fact, a sudden disappearance of tell-tale rants would be a prime indicator that the suspect was transitioning from the rant phase to the rampage phase.
The best way to stay off the radar is never to post anything to begin with. Which in itself probably gets you flagged in this Brave New World.
Humans are not non-deterministic, although they can be perverse. And, of course, they aren't rigidly deterministic. You cannot predict with full certainty what they will do, just with varying degrees of probability.
So what I glean from this is "Step 1 in committing any crime: Delete all social media accounts before posting anything about it".
Only if you care about what happens afterwards.
That's like saying a better death penalty would have discouraged this guy. He never intended to survive and the only thing that would have held him back would have been the certainty that he couldn't have done anything to begin with. Consequences after the fact were immaterial.
How is it possible to be a psychopath in a game? This and other research are based on the premise that video games contain real violence. No game has ever contained true violence in this sense, which is why violent video gaming behavior doesn't lead to the harm that real psychopaths cause in society.
The only way to act psychopathic--doing actual harm to another human being with true apathy--in a video game would seem to be through communications between players inside the game, where feelings could be hurt. It would be hard of course to separate psychopathic communicative behavior from other common factors like immaturity, inebriation, gaming cultures, etc. That should probably be the real focus of these kinds of studies. Another interesting study might be to study actual psychopaths, pulled from corporate environments or the like, and seeing if/how they play games differently from non-psychos.
Game Theory allows for different attitudes on the part of the players. A psychopathic attitude is basically a me-first/screw-everyone else attitude. When a game (entertainment or mathematical theory) has no real-world consequences, you have freedom to let your inner psychopath go. And everyone has one - it's basically the 2-year old that most of us have left behind.
The fault is that Capitalism shouldn't be treated like a religion, which is what a lot of people do. Capitalism is a process that enables capital to be amassed and harness to accomplish a goal. It shouldn't be a goal in itself. Take water as an example. Water is wonderful stuff. Makes plants grow, makes a nicer environment. We need water. If we don't get it, everything dies.
But water has a darker side. Too much water in the wrong place and people drown and structures - even massive parts of the landscape - wash away. So it is with ideology.
We spend a LOT of time and effort on harnessing water for public benefit. But there are people who think that the forces of Capitalism are strictly benign and should be left uncontrolled.
Do you remember her campaign? Vote for me - I know how to run a government like a business. It turns out - no she doesn't.
I'm sorry - but if you dish it out you have to take it too.
I don't want my government run like a business. Governments shouldn't be profit-oriented, they should be customer (citizen) oriented. In theory, that means that each and every citizen gets the same level of service from the government, no matter what the individual cost.
Not as long as you might think. The technology needed for this level of data collection is only a few decades old at best. 20-30 years ago even tracing a call in an industrialized nation could be a laborious task and collection like this was just undoable.
And in another 40-50 years, if the Taliban can be kept at bay, Afghanistan might even be able to move up to the status of "industrialized nation".
Everywhere is a "Theatre of war" these days, between the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc., etc., etc.
However, while the "war" in Afghanistan is long over, enough people are still running around killing other people, it's hardly surprising that all 5 Afghan telephone circuits would be tapped. With, I have no doubt, complicit approval of the Afghan government.
Officially, the Afghan government would have to protest this gross invasion of their national sovreignity as a matter of face, irrespective of the practical benefits. However, considering what the NSA has done on their own home soil, I guess it actually should be a status symbol. They get treated just like a First World nation!
That is not what "liberal" means in American English. In America, a liberal is what Europeans would call a progressive or a social democrat.
While that is technically true, it's mostly just used as a curse word now for those conservatives who have no concept of compromise and do not understand the difference between opinion and fact. It's one of about a dozen words that mainly serve to make these stupid conservatives angry, a list that also includes words like "socialism" and "taxation." Sadly there are few words that actually make them happy, since that generally runs counter to the goal of conservative media with the obvious exception of schadenfreude. Their media go to great lengths to prolong anger and extract pleasure from the misfortune of those they call liberals. For example, they are still talking about the tragedy in Benghazi since, even though it obviously isn't working with swing voters, it keeps their base nice and angry and pliable.
Or, as Orwell called it, DuckSpeak. Why think about complex issues when you can slap around labels as fast as you can quack them?
Just get some Big Brother figure to chant the appropriate terms over the visi-screen or whatever.
In the 1960s, the Southern Conservatives were still democrats and Southern Republicans were them damned Yankee carpetbaggers gettin' out nigras all stirred up. Southern Conservatives didn't turn Rebuplican until about the time of Reagan and Falwell.
A Guild is a group of free people using their solidarity for the benefit of all in the guild. In a way, they're a lot like a distrbuted and very flat corporation. Which is one reason why they, too operate as chartered corporations. Unions are a debased form of that. Among other things, guilds are "supposed to be" meritocracies, where demonstrated skills advance you, as opposed to many unions which are relatively unskilled and/or amalgamations of disparate skills.
As with most things, what's "supposed to be" isn't always all that closely aligned with what actually is, but that applies to both sides of the debate.
For all the faults of public schools, I'd rather fix what is "supposed to be" an even-handed socialized educational system than permit it to be further damaged by cherry-picking the profitable parts and giving them to people whose primary motivation is money over even the most questionable of educational ideals. Some of us didn't have as fortunate a background going in.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that I was pretty skinny back then. But not so skinny that only supermodels qualified as "weighs less than I do."
What good would expanding my circle of friends do? One of the more annoying occasions I had was when a friend and I were at a social gathering. He was "Mr. Sociable" and the women would talk to him and completely ignore me to the point where he was grinding his teeth trying to get them to pay attention to me. They simply refused to do so.
I never got into playing video games and other nerd anti-social activity. In fact, one of the things that won me my wife was that her ex-boyfriend was trying to get me to play arcade games when we were all out together and I preferred to spend time with her. He probably wouldn't have been an ex- boyfriend if he'd spent less time playing video games himself.
I meant "joined-up" as in "words written in a single continuous stroke", as opposed to having to lift your writing implement between the individual letters. Which also happens to be a natural feature of shorthand, quite understandably.
I think we call that "cursive". As I recall, however, shorthand isn't so much cursive as it is a substitute character set where some glyphs are abbreviations for common words and word combinations.
I haven't written anything meaningful in cursive in years. I'm not sure it ever was that much of an actual speed boost. Especially after factoring the reduced legibility.
There are also a lot of women who expect "Mr. Perfect" and won't have anything to do with lesser life forms. Me, I would have been fairly happy just finding someone showing an interest who wasn't heavier than I was.
I don't know that I was bad at dating. No one would seriously consider me for a date until they'd grown old enough to be fed up with the abusive guys.
Yeah, but Graffiti - unlike Teeline and co. - doesn't really have joined-up symbols, right? Plus the shapes seem still quite complex, the same amount of characters leads to many more movements.
If you mean joined-up as in font ligatures, no. Then again, neither does my keyboard. Ligatures are something I'd expect to get applied downstream and only where appropriate.
I can't recall any Grafitti characters that were more complex than the standard letters, and a few were less so. It was annoying that "u" and "v" were the same shape written in opposite directions, but I got over it.
If you did not like the Newtons hand writing recognition, then you mad the same mistake many did: you tried to figure how to write so it understands. That was wrong, you should have teached it to recognize 'your' writing. ... with the drawback they could not write on each others Newtons ;)
For some people that was obviously to cumbersome. But all I know who had a Newton did that and had a near perfect and fast recognition
To the contrary. I was rather arrogant about the idea that the Newton should learn to serve me and not the other way around.
That could be, because, like I said, I cannot read my own writing, either.
I can get the same effect on my reader by pressing anywhere along the side of the page.
"Pressing" or "touching"? Can you be touching the same spot while holding the device and not initiate a page turn?
Parent's point was that you can't hold the Kindle and initiate a page turn without changing how you're holding the Kindle. I like the idea of not having to move my hand or fingers, just having to increase pressure. If I hold my Paperwhite in one hand at an awkward angle, moving my thumb into place to tap the screen is awkward, since it's also what's gripping the device.
Probably not, but I can operate page-turning one-handed and without shifting my grip.
No, this is where you keep your finger in exactly the same place but just apply a little extra force.
The Kindle 1 had this. It was called a "button".
I can get the same effect on my reader by pressing anywhere along the side of the page. A much bigger "button", and it doesn't have contacts that get dirty or wear down.
Compared to a book there are less ads on my Nexus 7. The last few pages of current paperbacks are always ads. Often, you think you have about 10 minutes of reading left and it is a "sample" from some other upcoming book - perhaps a chapter or so. Following this are ads for other books from the publisher. On my Nexus 7? If I compare to a book, I don't see ads. Now, if you say "but if you visit a web page you see ads!". Sure, but books can't go to a web page. When I am just reading a book on the N7 I don't see any ads.
Back circa 1970s, one of the first things I did when purchasing a new paperback was rip the cigarette ad out from the middle. They printed them on heavy color stock and it interfered with page turning.
I'd like handwriting recognition, but perhaps not in the usual sense. What I'd consider really neat would be shorthand recognition. Perhaps recognition something similar to Teeline. Writing legible longhand with a stylus has always felt a bit too brittle (shape-wise) and slow (lag-wise) to me. With a reasonable language model, it wouldn't be much slower than speech recognition while being more accurate (it actually feels like a similar task, but there might be less noise in the "graphic formants").
I had a Newton and its handwriting recognition was every bit the joke that it was made out to be.
Next device after that was a Palm, with Grafitti. Grafittis isn't free-form print/cursive write-on-paper, but it is close enough to get used to quickly.
I can enter text in Grafitti faster than I can type. And it's more readable than my actual handwriting. Unfortunately, none of my current devices supports it.
It really is just for reading though and I agree giving it the ability to be able to play audio while reading would be fantastic. I'd pay an extra $20 for that which should more than cover the additional hardware and MP3 license.
The original (paperwhite) Nook could do that. It even had a pair of miniscule stereo speakers in the bottom if you didn't have earbuds handy. It came free with the Nook.
One of the nastiest things about spreadheets in relation to software is that software is essentially linear, making it easier to follow what's affecting what.
Spreadsheets are 2-dimensional, can incorporate data from invisible cells and even other sheets. Then on top of that, what's normally displayed is the results, not the code. There's no side-by-side view of code/value on any spreadsheet I'm aware of.
Also, since code is linear, one screwup and it tends to make itself obvious by propagating downstream. Spreadsheets can have pockets of decay intermingled with perfectly good stuff.
Would you be able to make an Excel spreadsheet that can solve a Sudoku puzzle, using the puzzles in the newspaper as the starting grid?
The very first time I saw Excel (on a Mac), the demo was a working analog clock.
Garbage In, Gospel Out
Completely missing my point. Assume that datamining a la NSA, FBI, etc, actually worked to protect the citizenry from thoughtcrime before it becomes realcrime. Thus, the best way to avoid that worm, if you wanted to commit a crime, would be to delete all your social media accounts so they can't even get a network diagram for you, let alone posting bullshit rants about whatever you intend to use as your justification for going crazy and killing people.
Of course, the actual fact is that predictive analysis like this is worthless, because humans are non-deterministic creatures.
Deleting the evidence isn't going to help if the authorities were going to go all Minority Report. In fact, a sudden disappearance of tell-tale rants would be a prime indicator that the suspect was transitioning from the rant phase to the rampage phase.
The best way to stay off the radar is never to post anything to begin with. Which in itself probably gets you flagged in this Brave New World.
Humans are not non-deterministic, although they can be perverse. And, of course, they aren't rigidly deterministic. You cannot predict with full certainty what they will do, just with varying degrees of probability.
So what I glean from this is "Step 1 in committing any crime: Delete all social media accounts before posting anything about it".
Only if you care about what happens afterwards.
That's like saying a better death penalty would have discouraged this guy. He never intended to survive and the only thing that would have held him back would have been the certainty that he couldn't have done anything to begin with. Consequences after the fact were immaterial.
How is it possible to be a psychopath in a game? This and other research are based on the premise that video games contain real violence. No game has ever contained true violence in this sense, which is why violent video gaming behavior doesn't lead to the harm that real psychopaths cause in society.
The only way to act psychopathic--doing actual harm to another human being with true apathy--in a video game would seem to be through communications between players inside the game, where feelings could be hurt. It would be hard of course to separate psychopathic communicative behavior from other common factors like immaturity, inebriation, gaming cultures, etc. That should probably be the real focus of these kinds of studies. Another interesting study might be to study actual psychopaths, pulled from corporate environments or the like, and seeing if/how they play games differently from non-psychos.
Game Theory allows for different attitudes on the part of the players. A psychopathic attitude is basically a me-first/screw-everyone else attitude. When a game (entertainment or mathematical theory) has no real-world consequences, you have freedom to let your inner psychopath go. And everyone has one - it's basically the 2-year old that most of us have left behind.
The Game of Thrones.
And here is the one line answer on how to eat pretty much anything: boil the crap out of it until you render it to component molecules.
Poke sallet (not salad!). Nettles. Tapioca.
All things that can ruin your day eaten raw, but are fairly popular when processed.
The fault is that Capitalism shouldn't be treated like a religion, which is what a lot of people do. Capitalism is a process that enables capital to be amassed and harness to accomplish a goal. It shouldn't be a goal in itself. Take water as an example. Water is wonderful stuff. Makes plants grow, makes a nicer environment. We need water. If we don't get it, everything dies.
But water has a darker side. Too much water in the wrong place and people drown and structures - even massive parts of the landscape - wash away. So it is with ideology.
We spend a LOT of time and effort on harnessing water for public benefit. But there are people who think that the forces of Capitalism are strictly benign and should be left uncontrolled.
Do you remember her campaign? Vote for me - I know how to run a government like a business. It turns out - no she doesn't.
I'm sorry - but if you dish it out you have to take it too.
I don't want my government run like a business. Governments shouldn't be profit-oriented, they should be customer (citizen) oriented. In theory, that means that each and every citizen gets the same level of service from the government, no matter what the individual cost.
Remember when the HP field service guys would come out to fix your 9000...
But I thought the 9000 series had a perfect operational record?
Stop. Dave.
Not as long as you might think. The technology needed for this level of data collection is only a few decades old at best. 20-30 years ago even tracing a call in an industrialized nation could be a laborious task and collection like this was just undoable.
And in another 40-50 years, if the Taliban can be kept at bay, Afghanistan might even be able to move up to the status of "industrialized nation".
Everywhere is a "Theatre of war" these days, between the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc., etc., etc.
However, while the "war" in Afghanistan is long over, enough people are still running around killing other people, it's hardly surprising that all 5 Afghan telephone circuits would be tapped. With, I have no doubt, complicit approval of the Afghan government.
Officially, the Afghan government would have to protest this gross invasion of their national sovreignity as a matter of face, irrespective of the practical benefits. However, considering what the NSA has done on their own home soil, I guess it actually should be a status symbol. They get treated just like a First World nation!
That is not what "liberal" means in American English. In America, a liberal is what Europeans would call a progressive or a social democrat.
While that is technically true, it's mostly just used as a curse word now for those conservatives who have no concept of compromise and do not understand the difference between opinion and fact. It's one of about a dozen words that mainly serve to make these stupid conservatives angry, a list that also includes words like "socialism" and "taxation." Sadly there are few words that actually make them happy, since that generally runs counter to the goal of conservative media with the obvious exception of schadenfreude. Their media go to great lengths to prolong anger and extract pleasure from the misfortune of those they call liberals. For example, they are still talking about the tragedy in Benghazi since, even though it obviously isn't working with swing voters, it keeps their base nice and angry and pliable.
Or, as Orwell called it, DuckSpeak. Why think about complex issues when you can slap around labels as fast as you can quack them?
Just get some Big Brother figure to chant the appropriate terms over the visi-screen or whatever.
In the 1960s, the Southern Conservatives were still democrats and Southern Republicans were them damned Yankee carpetbaggers gettin' out nigras all stirred up. Southern Conservatives didn't turn Rebuplican until about the time of Reagan and Falwell.
A Guild is a group of free people using their solidarity for the benefit of all in the guild. In a way, they're a lot like a distrbuted and very flat corporation. Which is one reason why they, too operate as chartered corporations. Unions are a debased form of that. Among other things, guilds are "supposed to be" meritocracies, where demonstrated skills advance you, as opposed to many unions which are relatively unskilled and/or amalgamations of disparate skills.
As with most things, what's "supposed to be" isn't always all that closely aligned with what actually is, but that applies to both sides of the debate.
For all the faults of public schools, I'd rather fix what is "supposed to be" an even-handed socialized educational system than permit it to be further damaged by cherry-picking the profitable parts and giving them to people whose primary motivation is money over even the most questionable of educational ideals. Some of us didn't have as fortunate a background going in.