I completely understood the point of the movie. It was preachy and romantically foolish, in the 19th century sense of the term.
You must assume that their diagnosis of a heart defect is accurate. Even if the estimation is flawed, or even if he falls in that 01% margin where there is no defect, Vincent has no way of knowing that. It doesn't matter who wants it most, or even who is most capable. It is all about risk management, and Vincent is an unnacceptable risk.
Besides, that kind of society is impossile, because no matter how good you are at predicting someone based on their genes, it will always be more cost effective to clone proven success. Even the poorest mother should have access to zygotes of Jerome's caliber, because like all digital information, genes are infinitely reproducable. I'm less concerned about the ramifications of genetic technology than I am about the restriction of genetic technology, which is more likely to create "class" divisions like that in the movie.
Good god, yes. And the actors... geesh, I never knew how annoying they were until the sciffy channel starting showing its promo every freakin' 15 minutes. If I ever hear "They'll recognize me!" in that whiney voice again I'm gonna puke.
Gattaca: the movie where fraud and the endangerment of a dozen lives and the life's work of countless others is considered a moral victory.
Come on, who's the real snob: the person who insists on Word, or the person who insists on plain text, the format that every word processor and printer on the planet can understand? Being bitchy about a document format is stupid no matter which format it is. But accepting only standard formats is a much more reasonable expectation than accepting only Word files.
And besides, what do people call it when a person stands by their principles even when faced by petty opposition... um, character?:-)
There is nothing particulalry insightful about a "this is the real world, deal with it" argument. His top level post probably doesn't deseve to be marked "troll", but his others certainly demonstrate that is the basis of his opinion.
Besides, what is so bad about politely informing people that you won't accept non-standard document formats? The truly obnoxious people are the ones too stupid or too stubborn to learn the "save as text" feature.
It still forces you to have to use that lame "Reveal Codes" nonsense (yes, I know a lot you think that's a feature not a bug, but you're wrong. Presentation should be separate from content).
You don't understand what that means. Both the codes and the WYSIWYG display are part of the presentation. One is simply the processed from of the other. The text is the content. (And for one who calls the Word format a standard, it seems a bit strange to hear you harp about the distinction between presentation and content).
And as it is, the reveal codes option is increadibly useful, and I wish that Word's support for it was as good as I remember Word Perfect. Because Word, in all it's WYSIWYG sophistication, is pretty freaking stupid when it comes to manipulating the formatting. When dealing with a large document, with multiple authors, and three dozen text styles, all that hidden sophistication becomes a nightmare of sloppy organization that is hard to fix because it's hard to see. Doing something like changing a heading can break the rest of the document. God how I pray that I could dump Word files to text and clean them up like I clean up the crap generated by WYSIWYG HTML editors.
I was thinking about this the other day when people were ranting about XML in that Microsoft.NET thread. It will be a beautiful world when all documents are XML, especially Word documents, because it will become relatively trivial to convert the content into a meaningful form using XSLT. Then one only has to pick their favorite stylesheet and presentation vocabulary to render it, or convert the file to the storage vocabulary of their favorite word processor. With conversion so easy, I bet it won't be long before a simplified version of DocBook becomes the real industry document standard.
The impression I got from that Cringly PBS special was that personal computers didn't really take off until VisiCalc was sold. That was the killer app, not wee Billy's BASIC interpreter.
And how many serious consumer apps were written in BASIC, anyways? Or are you claiming that Bill Gates personally invented the idea of copyright as applied to computer programs? I'm no expert in this regard (being about five years old at the time), but I know I've seen references to commercial software from before 1980. Heck, what about unix? You don't believe AT&T claimed copyright on that!?
Who moderated this up? The only "guinea pigs" are the individuals who donated small tissue samples that are the source of the genes. If I recall correctly, these "guinea pigs" are some of the actual scientists involved, at least in the public effort.
And could you provide links to support this "insightful" flaimbait?
Interesting. What branch of government do the three companies I mentioned belong to? Or are you saying that I really do own a stake in the Internet, and have every right to walk into the offices of my service provider and tell them how to run their business?
And you do realize that public property, (you know, the stuff that belongs to "the people"), is legally owned and maintained by government?
Because the true owner of the Internet's open architecture has never been either the government or the telecom companies. The true owner was us -- the hackers.
Shoot, I'm calling up Network Solutions, MCI, and BBN Planet right now and demand the equity that's mine. All this time, thinking property law defined who controls the infrastructure.. what a chump I was! I guess all is well after all.
Oops, forgot something. You'll need to add the following in your filetype.vim file for it to work automatically: " JSP au BufNewFile,BufRead *.jsp set ft=jsp
No no no, not faster than the popups, faster than their help browser. Most of the time I need to lookup parameters, I want to look up the exact behavior of the function/method I'm calling. Intellisense is only useful when I know the parameters, but aren't quite sure of the order.
Of course you'll get that problem, you're mixing two languages to where you've essentially got a third language. Here's a syntax file for JSP that I found linked off the vim pages: http://altern.org/rgs/vim/syntax/jsp.vim
Put it in your vim syntax directory. I used to have a syntax file for ASP scripts too, but can't seem to find it anymore. It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the one I linked for ASP or embedded perl.
MSVC is full of speed bumps. In my experience most of them have been resolved with the lines "Damn, it can't do that. I guess I'll have to write a makefile".
That is the flaw in having everything "built in"; you are constrained by the expectations of the person building the tool. Deviate from those expectations, and using it is like pulling teeth.
Because the benefit is not worth the effort required to implement it? Think about it. It is essentially half of a compiler tacked on to the editor. Who wants to go through all that work to implement crutch? Where's the glory?
It is a nice toy, but I find it less useful than syntax highlighting, and vim does that wonderfuly using only regular expressions. About the only time I find it useful is when I'm trying to remember all the parameters to a Windows system call. In unix, it's as easy as "man <whatever>", and I've usually got my answer in less time than it takes MSVC's help to start up.
Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
·
· Score: 1
C++ polymorphism is badly restricted by its association with class inheritance
Excuse me? Some of us happen to like strong typing. Purly signature-based polymorphism is sloppy.
One of the things that bugs me about Quicken is the feature bloat. That, and the fact that the QIF format is so freakin' brain dead.
Of course, I was turned off by GnuCash because of the dependance on Motif and half a dozen obscure libraries.
I see the problem this way: commercial software caters to the lowest common denominator in order to sell the most units. Free software caters to the programmers' favorite toys (whether it be language / libraries / environment / etc.) in order to make it the most fun to write and use. The best software of either type finds a happy medium between these extremes.
This is probably not what you're thinking of, but I remember a comical story by Charles Sheffield (?) about a race of aliens who devote themselves to spreading their religion across the galaxy. They aren't that bright, and after a thousand year trip to planet Earth in hollowed asteriods, they take to door-to-door proselytization like Jehova's Witnesses. There is a great punch line that isn't very politically correct.
I don't give shit what your evaluation function for PNG is. I've never used it, nor do I plan to in the immediate future, but I'm glad it exists.
No, what I'm saying is that you are an anti-establishment fanboy. You don't have any valid criticism of PNG, but it is so cool to be the persecuted minority on slashdot you had to say something bad about it. I was pissed because your post was modded up. It has now been spanked back down, and I am satisfied.
Zico, you're a fucking moron. You're the anti-Signal 11, equal in value but opposite in ideology, posting gibberish that caters to moderators who think blind cynicism is somehow profound.
No it won't. It will fund the shananegans of whatever oligrarchs control the Mir now. In modern Russia being wealthy pretty much guarantees you are in some way associated with the mafia. All this money will do is fuel more corruption.
Besides, I hope you understand that the trickle-down is propoganda, because money is only lost through innefficiency.
Consider that a "fat cat's" bank account enables loans to be made, so that people can buy houses, start businesses, etc. And afterwards it can still be exchanged for an equivalent amount of work or property.
An expendable rocket and it's propellant are used once and then become garbage. Add to this the fact that the tourist will be a useless crew-member, who does nothing but consume resources on Mir and get in the way of whatever real science and engineering is going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely understood the point of the movie. It was preachy and romantically foolish, in the 19th century sense of the term.
You must assume that their diagnosis of a heart defect is accurate. Even if the estimation is flawed, or even if he falls in that 01% margin where there is no defect, Vincent has no way of knowing that. It doesn't matter who wants it most, or even who is most capable. It is all about risk management, and Vincent is an unnacceptable risk.
Besides, that kind of society is impossile, because no matter how good you are at predicting someone based on their genes, it will always be more cost effective to clone proven success. Even the poorest mother should have access to zygotes of Jerome's caliber, because like all digital information, genes are infinitely reproducable. I'm less concerned about the ramifications of genetic technology than I am about the restriction of genetic technology, which is more likely to create "class" divisions like that in the movie.
Good god, yes. And the actors... geesh, I never knew how annoying they were until the sciffy channel starting showing its promo every freakin' 15 minutes. If I ever hear "They'll recognize me!" in that whiney voice again I'm gonna puke.
Gattaca: the movie where fraud and the endangerment of a dozen lives and the life's work of countless others is considered a moral victory.
The original poster said nothing about the observer being "sentient". You're just looking for an opportunity to act like a snot.
If a troll flames on slashdot, and no one reads it, is his post information or noise?
Come on, who's the real snob: the person who insists on Word, or the person who insists on plain text, the format that every word processor and printer on the planet can understand? Being bitchy about a document format is stupid no matter which format it is. But accepting only standard formats is a much more reasonable expectation than accepting only Word files.
:-)
And besides, what do people call it when a person stands by their principles even when faced by petty opposition... um, character?
There is nothing particulalry insightful about a "this is the real world, deal with it" argument. His top level post probably doesn't deseve to be marked "troll", but his others certainly demonstrate that is the basis of his opinion.
Besides, what is so bad about politely informing people that you won't accept non-standard document formats? The truly obnoxious people are the ones too stupid or too stubborn to learn the "save as text" feature.
It still forces you to have to use that lame "Reveal Codes" nonsense (yes, I know a lot you think that's a feature not a bug, but you're wrong. Presentation should be separate from content).
.NET thread. It will be a beautiful world when all documents are XML, especially Word documents, because it will become relatively trivial to convert the content into a meaningful form using XSLT. Then one only has to pick their favorite stylesheet and presentation vocabulary to render it, or convert the file to the storage vocabulary of their favorite word processor. With conversion so easy, I bet it won't be long before a simplified version of DocBook becomes the real industry document standard.
You don't understand what that means. Both the codes and the WYSIWYG display are part of the presentation. One is simply the processed from of the other. The text is the content. (And for one who calls the Word format a standard, it seems a bit strange to hear you harp about the distinction between presentation and content).
And as it is, the reveal codes option is increadibly useful, and I wish that Word's support for it was as good as I remember Word Perfect. Because Word, in all it's WYSIWYG sophistication, is pretty freaking stupid when it comes to manipulating the formatting. When dealing with a large document, with multiple authors, and three dozen text styles, all that hidden sophistication becomes a nightmare of sloppy organization that is hard to fix because it's hard to see. Doing something like changing a heading can break the rest of the document. God how I pray that I could dump Word files to text and clean them up like I clean up the crap generated by WYSIWYG HTML editors.
I was thinking about this the other day when people were ranting about XML in that Microsoft
The impression I got from that Cringly PBS special was that personal computers didn't really take off until VisiCalc was sold. That was the killer app, not wee Billy's BASIC interpreter.
And how many serious consumer apps were written in BASIC, anyways? Or are you claiming that Bill Gates personally invented the idea of copyright as applied to computer programs? I'm no expert in this regard (being about five years old at the time), but I know I've seen references to commercial software from before 1980. Heck, what about unix? You don't believe AT&T claimed copyright on that!?
It would probably be 10 times the size and twice as cryptic.
But it would be a cinch to write a graphical configuration tool for it. Oh wow, and you could use XSLT like it uses M4 now.
Who moderated this up? The only "guinea pigs" are the individuals who donated small tissue samples that are the source of the genes. If I recall correctly, these "guinea pigs" are some of the actual scientists involved, at least in the public effort.
And could you provide links to support this "insightful" flaimbait?
But without the source you might never know if it had "hidden" functionality.
Interesting. What branch of government do the three companies I mentioned belong to? Or are you saying that I really do own a stake in the Internet, and have every right to walk into the offices of my service provider and tell them how to run their business?
And you do realize that public property, (you know, the stuff that belongs to "the people"), is legally owned and maintained by government?
Shoot, I'm calling up Network Solutions, MCI, and BBN Planet right now and demand the equity that's mine. All this time, thinking property law defined who controls the infrastructure.. what a chump I was! I guess all is well after all.
Oops, forgot something. You'll need to add the following in your filetype.vim file for it to work automatically:
" JSP
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.jsp set ft=jsp
No no no, not faster than the popups, faster than their help browser. Most of the time I need to lookup parameters, I want to look up the exact behavior of the function/method I'm calling. Intellisense is only useful when I know the parameters, but aren't quite sure of the order.
Of course you'll get that problem, you're mixing two languages to where you've essentially got a third language. Here's a syntax file for JSP that I found linked off the vim pages:
http://altern.org/rgs/vim/syntax/jsp.vim
Put it in your vim syntax directory. I used to have a syntax file for ASP scripts too, but can't seem to find it anymore. It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the one I linked for ASP or embedded perl.
it will only hammer plastic nails.
MSVC is full of speed bumps. In my experience most of them have been resolved with the lines "Damn, it can't do that. I guess I'll have to write a makefile".
That is the flaw in having everything "built in"; you are constrained by the expectations of the person building the tool. Deviate from those expectations, and using it is like pulling teeth.
Because the benefit is not worth the effort required to implement it? Think about it. It is essentially half of a compiler tacked on to the editor. Who wants to go through all that work to implement crutch? Where's the glory?
It is a nice toy, but I find it less useful than syntax highlighting, and vim does that wonderfuly using only regular expressions. About the only time I find it useful is when I'm trying to remember all the parameters to a Windows system call. In unix, it's as easy as "man <whatever>", and I've usually got my answer in less time than it takes MSVC's help to start up.
C++ polymorphism is badly restricted by its association with class inheritance
Excuse me? Some of us happen to like strong typing. Purly signature-based polymorphism is sloppy.
Yes, exactly. You are indeed a lonely guardian of truth and rationalily among ignorant sheep.
One of the things that bugs me about Quicken is the feature bloat. That, and the fact that the QIF format is so freakin' brain dead.
Of course, I was turned off by GnuCash because of the dependance on Motif and half a dozen obscure libraries.
I see the problem this way: commercial software caters to the lowest common denominator in order to sell the most units. Free software caters to the programmers' favorite toys (whether it be language / libraries / environment / etc.) in order to make it the most fun to write and use. The best software of either type finds a happy medium between these extremes.
This is probably not what you're thinking of, but I remember a comical story by Charles Sheffield (?) about a race of aliens who devote themselves to spreading their religion across the galaxy. They aren't that bright, and after a thousand year trip to planet Earth in hollowed asteriods, they take to door-to-door proselytization like Jehova's Witnesses. There is a great punch line that isn't very politically correct.
I don't give shit what your evaluation function for PNG is. I've never used it, nor do I plan to in the immediate future, but I'm glad it exists.
No, what I'm saying is that you are an anti-establishment fanboy. You don't have any valid criticism of PNG, but it is so cool to be the persecuted minority on slashdot you had to say something bad about it. I was pissed because your post was modded up. It has now been spanked back down, and I am satisfied.
Here ya go: http://www.hampsterdance2.com/hamp sterdance.html. :-)
Zico, you're a fucking moron. You're the anti-Signal 11, equal in value but opposite in ideology, posting gibberish that caters to moderators who think blind cynicism is somehow profound.
No it won't. It will fund the shananegans of whatever oligrarchs control the Mir now. In modern Russia being wealthy pretty much guarantees you are in some way associated with the mafia. All this money will do is fuel more corruption.
Besides, I hope you understand that the trickle-down is propoganda, because money is only lost through innefficiency.
Consider that a "fat cat's" bank account enables loans to be made, so that people can buy houses, start businesses, etc. And afterwards it can still be exchanged for an equivalent amount of work or property.
An expendable rocket and it's propellant are used once and then become garbage. Add to this the fact that the tourist will be a useless crew-member, who does nothing but consume resources on Mir and get in the way of whatever real science and engineering is going on.
So, which use of $20 million is more efficient?