I guess, looking back, id has never really been all that innovative, so you're probably right. Carmack never seems to actually implement new stuff wrt graphics.. generally he takes existing theory and techniques in computer graphics, and then he's the first to come up with a way to do that super quickly on PC's. Wrt games, I don't think they've ever actually had a game that wasn't based on the old "run around in a maze and shoot everything that moves" plot. When you look at it that way, nothing of there's seems particularly innovative (commander keen aside.) People often mis-attribute to id many of the innovative things *within* the fps genre too (as I apparently did re rocket jumps).. things that id didn't come up with. But people tend to associate id with most of that innovation. I often hear people claiming stuff like "quake was the first to..." when I know that Duke3d (for example) had the same stuff in before Quake was released.
So I guess they don't have particularly innovative games (although the Q3 character physics model is damn well fine-tuned, those flick-jumps are very difficult to get right) but what they do do, they do very well. Very good 3d engines. Very good sound. Very good graphics. And atmosphere.
I wonder how much of id's income is from licensing the engine, and how much is from the sales of games? They probably make lots of money from both. It's OK though, I guess, Carmack always seems to come up with leading-edge 3d engines.
Let me say.. I know several 50+ year old programmers who are worth *TEN* younger programmers. Sure, their attitudes are different. Sure.. they don't put up with 80 hour workweeks.
And they produce nice, clean code at an amazingly steady rate. Oh sure, it might be 4 or 5 or maybe 10 lines of perfect code a day....
Yup. Experienced programmers can easily perform a task in much less than a quarter of the time it takes an inexperienced programmer to do the same thing - and they do a better, simpler, cleaner job of it.
Yet managers still can't seem to do math, since they still seem to think that the inexperienced guy must be cheaper, because they're paying him, say, a third of what they would have to pay an experienced person. Only problem is the inexperienced people take at lesat three times longer to get the job done..
Hear hear. A buddy of mine with a comp sci degree + honours and about a year of work experience, who is clued up with C++ programming, went to a recruitment agency.. he was told flat out by one guy "don't waste my time". I had not unsimilar experiences when I graduated (I had been doing C++ programming for a few years already part-time, and was obviously fairly qualified); yet not one recruitment agency even bothered to look at my CV. They first waited 6 months or so, so I was settled into a job I like, then they dug out my CV and started harassing me with phone calls about all these wonderful jobs they have lined up for me. Screw them. I don't know what it is with these people, basically they seem to want people experience, but aren't willing to pay for them. Experienced people will typically quite easily perform a task in under a third of the time an inexperienced person will do it, and do a better job of it - yet so many places still seem to think it's cheaper to hire inexperienced people and pay them peanuts. Really, how can you complain about an IT skills shortage, when it takes a C++ programmer with several years experience *8 months* to find a job?
"Myself, with 25 years of experience in the industry (15 with unix and linux since '92)"
This reminded me (for some reason) of an ad I saw in the classifieds for IT jobs a few years back, when I was looking for a job. These people wanted "Java programmers with 5 years experience". Only the Java language was about 3 years old at the time.
"This sounds a bit like they mixed some Tomb Raider into it? Rocket jumps are not new in Quake 3, btw"
OK.. it's the first game I played with rocket jumps. What about strafe jumps and flick jumps though? Is that new?
Ironically enough, despite the amazine graphics in Q3A, many of the best players play with their graphics settings horribly low ("r_picmip 5", anyone?), making the game look absolutely horrible, but it gives you a slight edge. I also play q3a with horrible visuals (mainly disabling shadowmaps and lowering texture quality), as I find it helps my brain be just that few milliseconds quicker in evaluating and reacting to the scene in front of me.
The game seems to remain just as much fun, no matter how low the graphics are set.
I still don't think you're being fair to id wrt q3a. Please, give q3 a fair chance, it is nowhere near wolfenstein in gameplay.
"I never said they were the 20 best songs, where did you get that idea?"
Actually I didn't have that idea, neither did I imply that I had that idea. Likewise, I'm by no means claiming the songs I mentioned were the best either, I named them off the top of my head as a bunch of arbitrary examples, just songs that I happen to like. Just as you did.
I'm not trying to say you're "wrong", sheez, where did I say that? What the hell does it mean for a song to better than another song? Ask 100 different people and you'll probably get as many different answers. I have my own answer to that question, and obviously it's different to yours.
Some songs are more "technically advanced" though than other simpler songs (e.g. "moonlight sonata" vs "bellisima"). Some songs definitely have lyrics that show more insight into life than other songs (e.g. "matthew and son" vs "macarena"). Can't really argue against that. Doesn't mean they're "better" in general, just "better" against certain criteria. Would you honestly say that metallica (for example) isn't better than Boyzone (for example, urgh.. ?)
Apart from great songs like "smells like teen spirit", which I've recently been made aware is a 90's song, I thought of some additional 90's music while driving home that I do really like. I like a lot of Tori Amos's stuff, for example. And some of Black's songs were also done in the early 90's. Most of the stuff I thought of though was from the first half of the 90's, dance music aside.
Hmm.. I'm afraid I don't think much of most of the song's you've mentioned. Enter Sandman is an excellent song (I thought it was late 80's actually.) Same goes for Smells like Teen Spirit - thought that was eighties.
Man in the moon is not too bad, but doesn't come close to the best songs of the 60's.
Most of the songs you mentioned are from the first half of the 90's, if I'm not mistaken (although I might be mistaken.)
None of the other songs you've mentioned even come close to at least a dozen great songs from the 60's era. Some of them are OK (e.g. black hole sun), but others are quite boring and merely pretend to be deep.
Naturally these are just one person's opinions:) Music is obviously fairly subjective, each to his own etc. So maybe those songs do something for you, that they just don't do for me. I guess I'm just more of a folk music fan, in general, with some noteable exceptions, like Guns n Roses, and I like dance music too. But seriously, how can you compare songs like "What's my age again" to songs like Don Mclean's "Vincent", or "Windmills of my mind", or Donovan's "Catch the Wind", or "Diamonds and Rust", or "Sounds of Silence", "bridge over troubled water", or at least half a dozen of Cat Steven's earlier songs (e.g. "sad lisa", "matthew and son"), or John Lennon's "working class hero".. and really, we're just scraping the tip of the iceberg here.
"Instead of being creative, id Software has made a thousand different iterations of Wolfenstein"
To be fair, Quake3arena is a bit more than a Wolfenstein clone with fancy graphics. There are a number of interesting new and original elements that no earlier FPS had, e.g. rocket jumps, strafe jumping, flick jumps etc, that do make the game more interesting, particularly when you become better at it. Sure, it plays pretty much like any previous FPS if you're a beginner, but I like Quake because as you get better, you're actually learning new techniques and strategies, even after playing for many months.
Hehe.. at one stage I was practically addicted to "Windows Tetris", an early Win16 implementation of tetris. One day I got my highest score ever, all excited - then was surprised when I was not prompted to enter my name on the high-score list. Turns out the score was stored in a 16-bit *signed* integer, and my score went over 32768, and I wound up with a negative score. I never played that one again.
In general, I fully agree with you. People look back and only the see the good stuff, forgetting all the rubbish.
But hell, the 90's produced almost only sheer rubbish on the music scene. Seriously. Ask anyone you know to compile a list of the "the 20 greatest songs of.." lists for the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. I'm sorry, but my mind draws a blank when I reach the 90's. The biggest hit of the 90's was probably the macarena, for pete's sake, and most people I know get extremely irritated now whenever anyone tries to play that song, hardly a classic.
The newspaper-comics industry is an example of an art that most definitely degenerated between 1920 and 2000. Try to find yourself a copy of "the smithsonian collection of newspaper comics", and read it. Compare what the artists produced in the first half of the century, with the tiny, overcommercialized, washed-out, watered-down, politically correct, family-friendly comic strips you read in the papers these days. Bill Watterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, is one of the few modern cartoonists who did a decent job (dilbert is good too, but that probably had more to do with the internet, since no publisher wanted to touch dilbert when Scott Adams started out). Check out Bill Watterson's speech "the cheapening of the comics" (http://www.teleport.com/~e nnead/ampersand/watterson.html). Compare garfield's first years to garfield now - became more and more commercial, selling more and more on "cute", creating a multi-million dollar industry on paraphernalia.
This isn't just the "good old days" nostalgic memory problem either. As I said, I agree with you fully, and one has to be very careful to differentiate between when such criticisms are "valid", and when it's just the "good old days" phenomenon.
I do think that overcommercialization of any art form does lead to more generic, trite crap. It happened to comics (although the underground comics movement did breathe a little fresh air into the industry, until underground went commercial - similar to alternative music - alternative music was originally a type of backlash against commercialization of music - until the record companies figured it out and commercialized "alternative".)
The problems many musicians and the public have with record companies are surprisingly similar to many of the problems had with comic strip syndicates.
"A genetic predisposition to a disease does not indicate you're going to get it"
Generally, yes, but with Hungtington's, you either have it or you don't. If you don't have it, then the "genetic disposition" is gone, i.e. all of your kids or grandkids are no longer at risk. If one of your parents has it, you have a 50% chance, at time of conception, of getting it. If you've got it, you definitely will suffer from the symptoms (unless by chance you die before the age of onset, which averages around 40 - 50, but can be much later or earlier, so it doesn't happen often that people die before this), and if you don't have it, you can stop worrying. You've got the gene, or you don't.
I think this is different to a conventional "genetic predisposition", in which you may have the disease-carrying gene, but might still not develop the disease. That's slightly more blurry.
So if an insurance company knows you have the HD gene, they can be essentially 100% sure that at some stage you will start developing symptoms (unless you get run over by a bus before then.) That is all assuming that a cure isn't found any time soon.
"If I test positive, the insurance company would be an idiot to insure me. Therefore, back to square one: no spreading of the risk, no benefit to me"
Many people don't want to take the test though. If you have one parent with it, you know you're at 50% risk, but many people don't want to find out while they're young. Huntingtons generally starts affecting people at +/- age 40 to 50. Knowing you have it can change the way you plan your life, e.g. you may decide not to get married.
So as long as the test isn't mandatory then, what is the insurance company to do, all they know is that you have a 50% chance of getting it? It would be very unethical to try to force people to take the test.
Of course, all of this is assuming that the disease will remain uncurable (looking at current research I'm guessing we may see a cure in the next 20 to 30 years.) Imagine you found out you had something like Huntington's, changed your entire life plans, didn't get married etc - then the cure is found as the disease is about to start affecting you. What a waste.
"Have a gene which guarantees a certain disease? We aren't going to have the people with good genes subsidize your care -- you have to pay more because you, as a single individual, are unprofitable otherwise"
Sounds a lot like natural selection:) In our caveman days, before the advent of modern medicine, those without all the genetic problems were the advantaged ones who survived. So now, after a few brief centuries of modern medicine "evening the odds", technology has advanced sufficiently to bring us back to the caveman days, where we have those genetically fated to struggly more to survive.
I suppose we can hope that given a few more decades of genetic research, modern medicine will be able to all or almost all genetic diseases. That should even the odds again, and make this whole insurance issue a non-issue. In fact, this is probably the way things will go - making this insurance problem a temporary one that people only have to suffer for a few decades. I hope. There is a reasonable chance that we may see a cure for Huntington's (as an example) in the next 20 to 30 years, current research looks somewhat promising.
Often I ask people what sort of PC they have, hoping for a reply like, "oh, a Pentium II 450". Very often I get an answer along the lines of "Huh, I don't know, it's Windows" (along with a puzzled expression on their faces.)
I think your points are precisely the reason that Microsoft's hardware products are primarily keyboards and mice. As long as the majority of users see a windows logo on their keyboard, and "microsoft" on the mouse, they keep people from making a mental distinction between the computer itself, and the operating system - to these people, it's a "Windows computer".
"If Microsoft wants to charge for their operating systems, let them. If I don't want to buy it, I won't"
I think the people that all software should be free are a fairly tiny minority here. I get the impression that most people here don't mind the idea of charging money for software (many here make their living from doing software development.) Most people aren't complaining about Microsoft *because* they charge money for their software, but because of the poor quality of most of their software (e.g. Windows95, their biggest product) and the way they do business (namely, their many many monopoly abuses, that have been dragging down the amount of competition and the level of quality in the entire software industry for many years.
Re:Thank you for gracing us with your presence
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
"In other words, Slashdot is just as bad as any other forum, but the knee-jerk garbage here is more in agreement with your own preconceived and ill-considered notions"
Hmm.. not a bad one. But almost all "riddles" like these seem to divide by zero somewhere to obtain their confusing-looking results, which is exactly what you've done there (x - y is 0)..
Thank you for gracing us with your presence
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
Well, aren't we just incredibly honoured that all of us lowly unknowledgable plebs have been graced with your presence, the one and only knowledgeable person "in the crowd"?
What are you saying, that you are knowledgable but everyone else here isn't, or that nobody here is knowledgeable, including you? Either way, you've just insulted a lot of people - many of them notably more intelligent and more knowledgeable than either you or me. So get off your high horse. Yes there are a lot of idiots on/., but there are a lot of very intelligent people here too, people who are actually capable of thinking for themselves and analyzing situtations. I like/. discussions precisely because these people have interesting things to say; I've tried before to peruse more "mass-market" average-joe discussion groups, and I couldn't handle it - almost everybody there either accepts the status quo, or they just follow whatever the crowd thinks, or they just spew rehashed versions of whatever shit ideas their parents raised them with. As difficult as it might be to believe, of all online discussion groups,/. has one of the highest percentages of contributors who actually *think*.
Re:I must be a dumb CS graduate then
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 2
I studied CS (graduated 2 years ago) and my first thought upon reading this post was along the lines of "NP-complete.. that sounds familiar"..:)
So basically these companies dump their tax burden onto their own employees. A useful thought to keep in mind for those hyped up on relatively low salaries, with stock options.
Thats a damn huge company. I seem to remember somebody posted a partial list of their assets in a/. thread before, and you'd have to do a lot of research and probably change a number of things you currently do in order to not to business with them.
Some snippets from their website:
Cable networks: TBS Entertainment, CNN, HBO. Warner music group, record labels: Warner Music International, Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, London Sire Records, Warner Bros. Records and their affiliate labels; "Warner Music Group's publishing division, Warner/Chappell, is one of the world's leading music publishers, controlling more than one million copyrights". Also includes WEA inc: "produced 38% of the world's DVD's in 1999, making it the world's largest manufacturer of DVDs". Filmed entertainment: Warner brothers (5,700 feature films, 32,000 television titles, 13,500 animated titles); also owns New Line Cinema. Publishing, 36 magazines (total 130million readers) including Time magazine, sports illustrated etc. "Time Warner Trade Publishing placed 36 books on The New York Times best-seller lists in 1999 from its Warner Books and Little, Brown imprints". Time Warner cable: digital cable, video on demand, HDTV, Road Runner.
"Private citizens should not have to retain attorneys to compel corporations to comply with the law!"
I fully agree. These days it seems the outcome of a court case often seems to boil down to who could afford the most expensive lawyer. That isn't a real justice system.
Slashdot Mirror
"nothing of there's seems particularly innovative"
Aaaargh! Has my english gotten *that bad* since I left school? That should be "nothing of theirs"!!!
I guess, looking back, id has never really been all that innovative, so you're probably right. Carmack never seems to actually implement new stuff wrt graphics .. generally he takes existing theory and techniques in computer graphics, and then he's the first to come up with a way to do that super quickly on PC's. Wrt games, I don't think they've ever actually had a game that wasn't based on the old "run around in a maze and shoot everything that moves" plot. When you look at it that way, nothing of there's seems particularly innovative (commander keen aside.) People often mis-attribute to id many of the innovative things *within* the fps genre too (as I apparently did re rocket jumps) .. things that id didn't come up with. But people tend to associate id with most of that innovation. I often hear people claiming stuff like "quake was the first to ..." when I know that Duke3d (for example) had the same stuff in before Quake was released.
So I guess they don't have particularly innovative games (although the Q3 character physics model is damn well fine-tuned, those flick-jumps are very difficult to get right) but what they do do, they do very well. Very good 3d engines. Very good sound. Very good graphics. And atmosphere.
I wonder how much of id's income is from licensing the engine, and how much is from the sales of games? They probably make lots of money from both. It's OK though, I guess, Carmack always seems to come up with leading-edge 3d engines.
Yup. Experienced programmers can easily perform a task in much less than a quarter of the time it takes an inexperienced programmer to do the same thing - and they do a better, simpler, cleaner job of it.
Yet managers still can't seem to do math, since they still seem to think that the inexperienced guy must be cheaper, because they're paying him, say, a third of what they would have to pay an experienced person. Only problem is the inexperienced people take at lesat three times longer to get the job done ..
Hear hear. A buddy of mine with a comp sci degree + honours and about a year of work experience, who is clued up with C++ programming, went to a recruitment agency .. he was told flat out by one guy "don't waste my time". I had not unsimilar experiences when I graduated (I had been doing C++ programming for a few years already part-time, and was obviously fairly qualified); yet not one recruitment agency even bothered to look at my CV. They first waited 6 months or so, so I was settled into a job I like, then they dug out my CV and started harassing me with phone calls about all these wonderful jobs they have lined up for me. Screw them. I don't know what it is with these people, basically they seem to want people experience, but aren't willing to pay for them. Experienced people will typically quite easily perform a task in under a third of the time an inexperienced person will do it, and do a better job of it - yet so many places still seem to think it's cheaper to hire inexperienced people and pay them peanuts. Really, how can you complain about an IT skills shortage, when it takes a C++ programmer with several years experience *8 months* to find a job?
"Myself, with 25 years of experience in the industry (15 with unix and linux since '92)"
This reminded me (for some reason) of an ad I saw in the classifieds for IT jobs a few years back, when I was looking for a job. These people wanted "Java programmers with 5 years experience". Only the Java language was about 3 years old at the time.
"This sounds a bit like they mixed some Tomb Raider into it? Rocket jumps are not new in Quake 3, btw"
OK .. it's the first game I played with rocket jumps. What about strafe jumps and flick jumps though? Is that new?
Ironically enough, despite the amazine graphics in Q3A, many of the best players play with their graphics settings horribly low ("r_picmip 5", anyone?), making the game look absolutely horrible, but it gives you a slight edge. I also play q3a with horrible visuals (mainly disabling shadowmaps and lowering texture quality), as I find it helps my brain be just that few milliseconds quicker in evaluating and reacting to the scene in front of me.
The game seems to remain just as much fun, no matter how low the graphics are set.
I still don't think you're being fair to id wrt q3a. Please, give q3 a fair chance, it is nowhere near wolfenstein in gameplay.
"I never said they were the 20 best songs, where did you get that idea?"
Actually I didn't have that idea, neither did I imply that I had that idea. Likewise, I'm by no means claiming the songs I mentioned were the best either, I named them off the top of my head as a bunch of arbitrary examples, just songs that I happen to like. Just as you did.
I'm not trying to say you're "wrong", sheez, where did I say that? What the hell does it mean for a song to better than another song? Ask 100 different people and you'll probably get as many different answers. I have my own answer to that question, and obviously it's different to yours.
Some songs are more "technically advanced" though than other simpler songs (e.g. "moonlight sonata" vs "bellisima"). Some songs definitely have lyrics that show more insight into life than other songs (e.g. "matthew and son" vs "macarena"). Can't really argue against that. Doesn't mean they're "better" in general, just "better" against certain criteria. Would you honestly say that metallica (for example) isn't better than Boyzone (for example, urgh .. ?)
Apart from great songs like "smells like teen spirit", which I've recently been made aware is a 90's song, I thought of some additional 90's music while driving home that I do really like. I like a lot of Tori Amos's stuff, for example. And some of Black's songs were also done in the early 90's. Most of the stuff I thought of though was from the first half of the 90's, dance music aside.
Hmm .. I'm afraid I don't think much of most of the song's you've mentioned. Enter Sandman is an excellent song (I thought it was late 80's actually.) Same goes for Smells like Teen Spirit - thought that was eighties.
Man in the moon is not too bad, but doesn't come close to the best songs of the 60's.
Most of the songs you mentioned are from the first half of the 90's, if I'm not mistaken (although I might be mistaken.)
None of the other songs you've mentioned even come close to at least a dozen great songs from the 60's era. Some of them are OK (e.g. black hole sun), but others are quite boring and merely pretend to be deep.
Naturally these are just one person's opinions :) Music is obviously fairly subjective, each to his own etc. So maybe those songs do something for you, that they just don't do for me. I guess I'm just more of a folk music fan, in general, with some noteable exceptions, like Guns n Roses, and I like dance music too. But seriously, how can you compare songs like "What's my age again" to songs like Don Mclean's "Vincent", or "Windmills of my mind", or Donovan's "Catch the Wind", or "Diamonds and Rust", or "Sounds of Silence", "bridge over troubled water", or at least half a dozen of Cat Steven's earlier songs (e.g. "sad lisa", "matthew and son"), or John Lennon's "working class hero" .. and really, we're just scraping the tip of the iceberg here.
"Instead of being creative, id Software has made a thousand different iterations of Wolfenstein"
To be fair, Quake3arena is a bit more than a Wolfenstein clone with fancy graphics. There are a number of interesting new and original elements that no earlier FPS had, e.g. rocket jumps, strafe jumping, flick jumps etc, that do make the game more interesting, particularly when you become better at it. Sure, it plays pretty much like any previous FPS if you're a beginner, but I like Quake because as you get better, you're actually learning new techniques and strategies, even after playing for many months.
Hehe .. at one stage I was practically addicted to "Windows Tetris", an early Win16 implementation of tetris. One day I got my highest score ever, all excited - then was surprised when I was not prompted to enter my name on the high-score list. Turns out the score was stored in a 16-bit *signed* integer, and my score went over 32768, and I wound up with a negative score. I never played that one again.
In general, I fully agree with you. People look back and only the see the good stuff, forgetting all the rubbish.
But hell, the 90's produced almost only sheer rubbish on the music scene. Seriously. Ask anyone you know to compile a list of the "the 20 greatest songs of .." lists for the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. I'm sorry, but my mind draws a blank when I reach the 90's. The biggest hit of the 90's was probably the macarena, for pete's sake, and most people I know get extremely irritated now whenever anyone tries to play that song, hardly a classic.
The newspaper-comics industry is an example of an art that most definitely degenerated between 1920 and 2000. Try to find yourself a copy of "the smithsonian collection of newspaper comics", and read it. Compare what the artists produced in the first half of the century, with the tiny, overcommercialized, washed-out, watered-down, politically correct, family-friendly comic strips you read in the papers these days. Bill Watterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, is one of the few modern cartoonists who did a decent job (dilbert is good too, but that probably had more to do with the internet, since no publisher wanted to touch dilbert when Scott Adams started out). Check out Bill Watterson's speech "the cheapening of the comics" (http://www.teleport.com /~e nnead/ampersand/watterson.html). Compare garfield's first years to garfield now - became more and more commercial, selling more and more on "cute", creating a multi-million dollar industry on paraphernalia.
This isn't just the "good old days" nostalgic memory problem either. As I said, I agree with you fully, and one has to be very careful to differentiate between when such criticisms are "valid", and when it's just the "good old days" phenomenon.
I do think that overcommercialization of any art form does lead to more generic, trite crap. It happened to comics (although the underground comics movement did breathe a little fresh air into the industry, until underground went commercial - similar to alternative music - alternative music was originally a type of backlash against commercialization of music - until the record companies figured it out and commercialized "alternative".)
The problems many musicians and the public have with record companies are surprisingly similar to many of the problems had with comic strip syndicates.
"A genetic predisposition to a disease does not indicate you're going to get it"
Generally, yes, but with Hungtington's, you either have it or you don't. If you don't have it, then the "genetic disposition" is gone, i.e. all of your kids or grandkids are no longer at risk. If one of your parents has it, you have a 50% chance, at time of conception, of getting it. If you've got it, you definitely will suffer from the symptoms (unless by chance you die before the age of onset, which averages around 40 - 50, but can be much later or earlier, so it doesn't happen often that people die before this), and if you don't have it, you can stop worrying. You've got the gene, or you don't.
I think this is different to a conventional "genetic predisposition", in which you may have the disease-carrying gene, but might still not develop the disease. That's slightly more blurry.
So if an insurance company knows you have the HD gene, they can be essentially 100% sure that at some stage you will start developing symptoms (unless you get run over by a bus before then.) That is all assuming that a cure isn't found any time soon.
"If I test positive, the insurance company would be an idiot to insure me. Therefore, back to square one: no spreading of the risk, no benefit to me"
Many people don't want to take the test though. If you have one parent with it, you know you're at 50% risk, but many people don't want to find out while they're young. Huntingtons generally starts affecting people at +/- age 40 to 50. Knowing you have it can change the way you plan your life, e.g. you may decide not to get married.
So as long as the test isn't mandatory then, what is the insurance company to do, all they know is that you have a 50% chance of getting it? It would be very unethical to try to force people to take the test.
Of course, all of this is assuming that the disease will remain uncurable (looking at current research I'm guessing we may see a cure in the next 20 to 30 years.) Imagine you found out you had something like Huntington's, changed your entire life plans, didn't get married etc - then the cure is found as the disease is about to start affecting you. What a waste.
"Have a gene which guarantees a certain disease? We aren't going to have the people with good genes subsidize your care -- you have to pay more because you, as a single individual, are unprofitable otherwise"
Sounds a lot like natural selection :) In our caveman days, before the advent of modern medicine, those without all the genetic problems were the advantaged ones who survived. So now, after a few brief centuries of modern medicine "evening the odds", technology has advanced sufficiently to bring us back to the caveman days, where we have those genetically fated to struggly more to survive.
I suppose we can hope that given a few more decades of genetic research, modern medicine will be able to all or almost all genetic diseases. That should even the odds again, and make this whole insurance issue a non-issue. In fact, this is probably the way things will go - making this insurance problem a temporary one that people only have to suffer for a few decades. I hope. There is a reasonable chance that we may see a cure for Huntington's (as an example) in the next 20 to 30 years, current research looks somewhat promising.
Often I ask people what sort of PC they have, hoping for a reply like, "oh, a Pentium II 450". Very often I get an answer along the lines of "Huh, I don't know, it's Windows" (along with a puzzled expression on their faces.)
I think your points are precisely the reason that Microsoft's hardware products are primarily keyboards and mice. As long as the majority of users see a windows logo on their keyboard, and "microsoft" on the mouse, they keep people from making a mental distinction between the computer itself, and the operating system - to these people, it's a "Windows computer".
"If Microsoft wants to charge for their operating systems, let them. If I don't want to buy it, I won't"
I think the people that all software should be free are a fairly tiny minority here. I get the impression that most people here don't mind the idea of charging money for software (many here make their living from doing software development.) Most people aren't complaining about Microsoft *because* they charge money for their software, but because of the poor quality of most of their software (e.g. Windows95, their biggest product) and the way they do business (namely, their many many monopoly abuses, that have been dragging down the amount of competition and the level of quality in the entire software industry for many years.
"In other words, Slashdot is just as bad as any other forum, but the knee-jerk garbage here is more in agreement with your own preconceived and ill-considered notions"
No, you misread my post.
Hmm .. not a bad one. But almost all "riddles" like these seem to divide by zero somewhere to obtain their confusing-looking results, which is exactly what you've done there (x - y is 0) ..
Well, aren't we just incredibly honoured that all of us lowly unknowledgable plebs have been graced with your presence, the one and only knowledgeable person "in the crowd"?
What are you saying, that you are knowledgable but everyone else here isn't, or that nobody here is knowledgeable, including you? Either way, you've just insulted a lot of people - many of them notably more intelligent and more knowledgeable than either you or me. So get off your high horse. Yes there are a lot of idiots on /., but there are a lot of very intelligent people here too, people who are actually capable of thinking for themselves and analyzing situtations. I like /. discussions precisely because these people have interesting things to say; I've tried before to peruse more "mass-market" average-joe discussion groups, and I couldn't handle it - almost everybody there either accepts the status quo, or they just follow whatever the crowd thinks, or they just spew rehashed versions of whatever shit ideas their parents raised them with. As difficult as it might be to believe, of all online discussion groups, /. has one of the highest percentages of contributors who actually *think*.
I studied CS (graduated 2 years ago) and my first thought upon reading this post was along the lines of "NP-complete .. that sounds familiar" .. :)
"Considering each employee who took their options is probably a millionaire, this still isn't a bad deal for the employee"
Yes. I'm sure I'm just jealous, it was a bit of a knee-jerk post.
For big companies anyway .. I'd be a little more hesitant taking stock options + low salary from a startup ..
So basically these companies dump their tax burden onto their own employees. A useful thought to keep in mind for those hyped up on relatively low salaries, with stock options.
Thats a damn huge company. I seem to remember somebody posted a partial list of their assets in a /. thread before, and you'd have to do a lot of research and probably change a number of things you currently do in order to not to business with them.
Some snippets from their website:
Cable networks: TBS Entertainment, CNN, HBO. Warner music group, record labels: Warner Music International, Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, London Sire Records, Warner Bros. Records and their affiliate labels; "Warner Music Group's publishing division, Warner/Chappell, is one of the world's leading music publishers, controlling more than one million copyrights". Also includes WEA inc: "produced 38% of the world's DVD's in 1999, making it the world's largest manufacturer of DVDs". Filmed entertainment: Warner brothers (5,700 feature films, 32,000 television titles, 13,500 animated titles); also owns New Line Cinema. Publishing, 36 magazines (total 130million readers) including Time magazine, sports illustrated etc. "Time Warner Trade Publishing placed 36 books on The New York Times best-seller lists in 1999 from its Warner Books and Little, Brown imprints". Time Warner cable: digital cable, video on demand, HDTV, Road Runner.
"Private citizens should not have to retain attorneys to compel corporations to comply with the law!"
I fully agree. These days it seems the outcome of a court case often seems to boil down to who could afford the most expensive lawyer. That isn't a real justice system.
2.4 will be "a couple of months late" and still costs nothing. Windows 2000 was several years late and still costs hundreds. Hellloooo ..