the point of mentioning these two things is very very simple: prior to modern "computers", parallel "Computing" algorithms were commonplace, well known, and heavily relied on.
Except - your descriptions don't prove this at all. The second one in particular gives us nothing but the name of the hero.
I just find it fascinating how posters on this story are blasting the patent system and the entirety of the United States itself based on a single, solitary email from some unknown guy.
That's because you hold the mistaken belief that if you're not the winner, you didn't accomplish anything.
Not at all.
Well, you sure go to great lengths to give the impression otherwise.
But if I don't win, then it had better have been worth it to me doing it anyway. And if it was worth me doing it anyway, then I'd have done it anyway. And if I'd have done it anyway, there doesn't need to be a prize to motivate me to do what I'd have done anyway.
In other words, if you don't win - you didn't accomplish anything, it's all about the tangible bottom line.
"Prizes and challenges have an excellent track record of accelerating problem-solving by tapping America's top talent and best expertise."... and are cheap too because instead of paying people to solve it, you let a multitude of people do it in their free time, and then you pay the winner a set amount regardless of how long it took or what it actually cost. Everyone else gets nothing, regardless of how much time they spend, or what their expenses were.
Well, that depends... There were prizes for various aeronautical feats back in the (19)20's and 30's for fairly pitiful amounts, but that didn't stop people and companies from chasing after them because the knowledge and experience thus gained fed back into more productive/profitable work.
I'm surprised scientists get sucked into this stuff, its about as sensible as playing the lottery, and self-destructive to the viability of one's own profession.
That's because you hold the mistaken belief that if you're not the winner, you didn't accomplish anything.
You can't seem to keep straight the difference between "can follow along"/"understanding what's going on" and "deeply understanding"/"getting every reference/in joke". The point of TFA and my original post was the former set, you keep trying to move the goalposts to the latter set.
I think the show would be extremely hard to understand if you literally knew *none* of the Star Trek references. For instance, all the talk of "honor" and "warriors" only makes sense because most people probably know that about Klingons, whether or not they've seen Star Trek. Obviously, you can *follow* the plot by reading the subtitles but actually understanding why anything is happening requires more context.
So, essentially what you're saying is that nobody knows anything about the Christmas Carol, and even if they did they're too stupid too make the conceptual leap to map the obvious concepts onto the well known concepts. Or the play is so badly written so that it obscures why things are happening.
Kodak used to be the single leader in innovative technology with their film, cameras, and the invention of the (nearly) instant-print Polaroid. Now, they're essentially a gigantic patent troll.
Well, no. Not only did they not invent or market Polaroid, they're still a big player in cameras, sensors, printers and printing (both home and commercial scale, photo and text/page), etc... etc...
They haven't been really innovative for a very long time, and their last resort is to sue.
Star Trek has worked its way into the fabric of American pop culture so much, that even those people who aren't Trekkies (or, Trekkers) understand what's going on," Kidder says.
Well, no. People who aren't Klingon 'speaking' Trek fans (a small subset of all Trek fans) can understand what's going on because you've provided English subtitles and based your play on a story extremely well known and woven much deeper into American culture than Star Trek. Given the preconditions (subtitles, extremely well knows story), pretty much anyone could follow along and understand what's going on almost regardless of language, staging, etc... etc...
And most of what you list is high level software development (and mostly application development at that). You completely leave out lower lever stuff like OS's, drivers, languages, etc... And you barely mention hardware at all.
It shouldn't be up to the "legal system" to determine what settled science is. It should be up to the jury. Fingerprints for instance are not settled science. Ask any two fingerprint experts what the false positive rate for fingerprinting is. You'll get two different answers, if you can even get an answer out of them.
You are blissfully and utterly clueless as to how the legal system works. So clueless I can't even begin to educate you.
You seem to forget the opposite can also happen - the jury can find a tinfoil hat site that claims that recovered memories are valid and base their verdict on that.
This is why we should encourage juries to bring the material they are considering to court for discussion.
That sound you heard is my point whooshing over your head. Juries shouldn't be examining outside material at all because they are bound to consider only the facts placed before them by the prosecution and defense - not the facts and or opinions of some random website. The system requires that all facts be presented in open court so that *both sides* have a chance to examine and support or refute them.
Keep in mind that nothing is stopping juries from doing their own research today, the rules only stop the jurors from talking about it.
No, juries are not allowed to do their own research - that's the whole point of the article you imbecile.
Imagine you've been falsely accused of child molestation based on the fault science of "recovered memories". The judge considers this settled science, so your defense team cannot question the scientific basis of the evidence. (This happens all the time with fingerprints).
It happens all the time with things that the legal system considers settled matters. Fingerprints fit this mold, recovered memories do not. Not to mention that if a judge denies the admission of evidence, and if either the prosecution or the defense feels the judge is wrong, the system provides the appeals system precisely to ensure that an individual judges bias can be reversed.
Wouldn't you want the jury to be able to do some research on their own to discover that recovered memories are a load of shit?
You seem to forget the opposite can also happen - the jury can find a tinfoil hat site that claims that recovered memories are valid and base their verdict on that.
I'm not saying we should regulate the hell out of everything but I really miss having other options when I shop.
In the city to which I'm currently residing in Kentucky (you know, south of the Mason-Dixon, where all of those gun-toting conservatives people love to make fun of so much) there is a Walmart, at least 2 Meijers, several Kroger's, a bunch of specialty ethnic stores, a whole foods type co-op, along with both chain electronics stores and several specialty shops all over the place. "Other options" are doing just fine.
Not really. What you have is the illusion of other options - as the other chains have long since adopted Walmart's predatory pricing and shoddy merchandise.
Actually, most larger metro systems are 3d, with tunnels in varying depths, and lines happily crossing underneath or over each other.
So are roads, and canals, and pretty much every other form of transportation ever invented. (Or in other words, the swooshing sound you heard was my point going over your head.) But even though you have tunnels in 3D, the *vehicles* travel in *2D*. You cannot depart the plane defined by the track, you cannot use the third dimension to avoid other traffic or to travel in an arbitrary dimension.
On a well designed system, you should be able to get from any station to any other one changing at most once. And frequency should be high enough that changing is not too time-consuming.
Yeah, and in the same perfect world all politicians are honest and children well behaved.
The metro in Paris actually works quite well (when it is not on strike).
If you'd paid attention, you'd have noticed the paragraph I replied to wasn't talking about existing metro's, but about new build light rail.
Hmm let's see: some form of transportation to link neighborhoods, that works in 3D, to relieve gridlocks? Remove the insane flying-vehicle thing, make it cheap and practical, and you've got yourself a metro.
The problem is, once you remove the "insane flying-vehicle thing", you also remove a dimension - a metro is a 2D system, not 3D. This also negates the primary advantage of a 3D system, the ability to travel directly from any arbitrary point in the network to another arbitrary point. In a 2D (metro) system you can only traveling to arbitrary nodes (assuming there is a station there) frequently requires changing trains or extended travel times.
Instead of dreaming up shit like this, policymakers should bring back light-rail, which can work under or over streets, carries a great deal of people quickly, silently and without local air pollution, and doesn't cost a lot.
Well, you're pretty much right - except for the "doesn't cost a lot" part. The primary problem with light rail is that it does cost a lot, the secondary problem being that it isn't actually generally all that convenient.
Yahoo's Geocities could have been Facebook+MySpace.
Well, no. Geocities was webhosting, not social networks. Apples and oranges.
Yahoo Mail could have been gmail.
Why in the heck would Yahoo want to be the distant third mail host rather than a strong second?
Yahoo's Delicious could have been stumbleupon+twitter+digg. Yahoo's Overture could have been Google Adsense+Adwords Yahoo's Altavista could have been google search.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Anyone could have been anything.
But instead Yahoo's turning into little more than a reseller of Bing search results.
Yeah. And the largest and busiest sports site on the net, and the largest fantasy sports site on the net, and the largest and busiest photo repository on the net, and one of the biggest online games site on the net... etc... etc... The smoke you're blowing about what Yahoo 'might have been' has pretty much blinded you to what Yahoo actually is.
Yahoo may not be l33t and have teh sexy like Google - but you're badly mistaken if you think it's some kind of has been.
What keeps me coming back to Wikipedia is because it is actually truly excellent as an encyclopedia. Whenever I'm looking for something about physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geography, history, etc. etc. etc., I find what I'm looking for and I find it quickly.
I can think of half a dozen articles that disseminate actual information - yet are incomplete, misleading/slanted, out-of-context copy pasta from other sources (usually US or state government since it's copyright free), etc... etc... Being able to find information quickly isn't the same thing as being able to find quality information quickly. (And if you aren't familiar with the field, you can't tell which is which just from it 'looking excellent'.)
Not to mention that if you think articles that concentrate on 'actual information' are unaffected by edit wars, political soapboxes, etc... you're seriously deluding yourself.
Advertisers are a bad idea. They will end up with editorial control, and that would be a very bad thing. That's a big part of why our modern news media is so awful.
You and others keep saying that as if it were a natural law - but I'm not seeing it.
Both Natural Geographic and Smithsonian magazines accept advertising, but there's not so much as a hint of editorial bias. PBS has been accepting ad revenue (excuse me 'donations' and 'sponsorships') for decades, with no hint of editorial bias. On a daily basis I use a number of special interest websites that rely on users for their content and advertisements to keep the lights on. Yet I regularly see reviews and posts taking issue with a particular vendor or product right alongside an advertisement for that vendor or product.
Yes, Big Media has whored itself out and altered it's contents for advertising money - but that appears to be a result of their own choices, not an invariable outcome of accepting advertising money.
Maybe they could go to a model in which people could contribute resources to handle traffic load instead of directly contributing money? The big problem here is the raft of centralized servers and databases needed to keep Wikipedia fast and responsive.
They tried that back in the early days. The result was endless maintenance and operational headaches due to the numerous different configurations and performance levels of the donated machines and colocation space. (Some of that was also shooting themselves in the foot, at least back then the Wikimedia software was widely regarded as being nothing but a collection of kludges, patches, and improvisations.) That directly resulted in their first call(s) for money, so they could have standardized configurations and predictable performance by buying and setting up the boxen themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Except - your descriptions don't prove this at all. The second one in particular gives us nothing but the name of the hero.
It's called the Two Minutes Hate.
Well, that's happens when you expand thirty or so lines of text into a ninety minute movie...
But seriously, the 3D *was* that bad. When characters opened their mouths, you could see the inside of their skulls, etc... etc...
Well, you sure go to great lengths to give the impression otherwise.
In other words, if you don't win - you didn't accomplish anything, it's all about the tangible bottom line.
Well, that depends... There were prizes for various aeronautical feats back in the (19)20's and 30's for fairly pitiful amounts, but that didn't stop people and companies from chasing after them because the knowledge and experience thus gained fed back into more productive/profitable work.
That's because you hold the mistaken belief that if you're not the winner, you didn't accomplish anything.
You can't seem to keep straight the difference between "can follow along"/"understanding what's going on" and "deeply understanding"/"getting every reference/in joke". The point of TFA and my original post was the former set, you keep trying to move the goalposts to the latter set.
So, essentially what you're saying is that nobody knows anything about the Christmas Carol, and even if they did they're too stupid too make the conceptual leap to map the obvious concepts onto the well known concepts. Or the play is so badly written so that it obscures why things are happening.
Which is it?
ROTFLMAO. You're not only utterly clueless, it seems you're willingly so as you're too stupid or lazy to visit Wikipedia or Kodak's own website.
Well, no. Not only did they not invent or market Polaroid, they're still a big player in cameras, sensors, printers and printing (both home and commercial scale, photo and text/page), etc... etc...
As above - not even remotely true.
Star Trek has worked its way into the fabric of American pop culture so much, that even those people who aren't Trekkies (or, Trekkers) understand what's going on," Kidder says.
Well, no. People who aren't Klingon 'speaking' Trek fans (a small subset of all Trek fans) can understand what's going on because you've provided English subtitles and based your play on a story extremely well known and woven much deeper into American culture than Star Trek. Given the preconditions (subtitles, extremely well knows story), pretty much anyone could follow along and understand what's going on almost regardless of language, staging, etc... etc...
You must be new here and unaware of the 'submit story' button and not reading the story summaries where '$X write' is in the first line of each.
Or you're just a fucking moron who is too fucking ignorant to notice the 'much more like' in my post.
And most of what you list is high level software development (and mostly application development at that). You completely leave out lower lever stuff like OS's, drivers, languages, etc... And you barely mention hardware at all.
"Founded as" != "currently is". Slashdot stopped being a blog and became much more of a moderated forum a very long time ago.
You are blissfully and utterly clueless as to how the legal system works. So clueless I can't even begin to educate you.
That sound you heard is my point whooshing over your head. Juries shouldn't be examining outside material at all because they are bound to consider only the facts placed before them by the prosecution and defense - not the facts and or opinions of some random website. The system requires that all facts be presented in open court so that *both sides* have a chance to examine and support or refute them.
No, juries are not allowed to do their own research - that's the whole point of the article you imbecile.
There's always someone who doesn't think the rule applies to them. Reading TFA, this seems to be a case of exactly that.
It happens all the time with things that the legal system considers settled matters. Fingerprints fit this mold, recovered memories do not. Not to mention that if a judge denies the admission of evidence, and if either the prosecution or the defense feels the judge is wrong, the system provides the appeals system precisely to ensure that an individual judges bias can be reversed.
You seem to forget the opposite can also happen - the jury can find a tinfoil hat site that claims that recovered memories are valid and base their verdict on that.
Not really. What you have is the illusion of other options - as the other chains have long since adopted Walmart's predatory pricing and shoddy merchandise.
So are roads, and canals, and pretty much every other form of transportation ever invented. (Or in other words, the swooshing sound you heard was my point going over your head.) But even though you have tunnels in 3D, the *vehicles* travel in *2D*. You cannot depart the plane defined by the track, you cannot use the third dimension to avoid other traffic or to travel in an arbitrary dimension.
Yeah, and in the same perfect world all politicians are honest and children well behaved.
If you'd paid attention, you'd have noticed the paragraph I replied to wasn't talking about existing metro's, but about new build light rail.
The problem is, once you remove the "insane flying-vehicle thing", you also remove a dimension - a metro is a 2D system, not 3D. This also negates the primary advantage of a 3D system, the ability to travel directly from any arbitrary point in the network to another arbitrary point. In a 2D (metro) system you can only traveling to arbitrary nodes (assuming there is a station there) frequently requires changing trains or extended travel times.
Well, you're pretty much right - except for the "doesn't cost a lot" part. The primary problem with light rail is that it does cost a lot, the secondary problem being that it isn't actually generally all that convenient.
There, fixed that for you.
Oh, and just as a by-the-way, the universe doesn't revolve around you.
Well, no. Geocities was webhosting, not social networks. Apples and oranges.
Why in the heck would Yahoo want to be the distant third mail host rather than a strong second?
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Anyone could have been anything.
Yeah. And the largest and busiest sports site on the net, and the largest fantasy sports site on the net, and the largest and busiest photo repository on the net, and one of the biggest online games site on the net... etc... etc... The smoke you're blowing about what Yahoo 'might have been' has pretty much blinded you to what Yahoo actually is.
Yahoo may not be l33t and have teh sexy like Google - but you're badly mistaken if you think it's some kind of has been.
Do we have any actual sources other than a random blogger, a random tweet from a random twit, and a friend of a friend?
I can think of half a dozen articles that disseminate actual information - yet are incomplete, misleading/slanted, out-of-context copy pasta from other sources (usually US or state government since it's copyright free), etc... etc... Being able to find information quickly isn't the same thing as being able to find quality information quickly. (And if you aren't familiar with the field, you can't tell which is which just from it 'looking excellent'.)
Not to mention that if you think articles that concentrate on 'actual information' are unaffected by edit wars, political soapboxes, etc... you're seriously deluding yourself.
You and others keep saying that as if it were a natural law - but I'm not seeing it.
Both Natural Geographic and Smithsonian magazines accept advertising, but there's not so much as a hint of editorial bias. PBS has been accepting ad revenue (excuse me 'donations' and 'sponsorships') for decades, with no hint of editorial bias. On a daily basis I use a number of special interest websites that rely on users for their content and advertisements to keep the lights on. Yet I regularly see reviews and posts taking issue with a particular vendor or product right alongside an advertisement for that vendor or product.
Yes, Big Media has whored itself out and altered it's contents for advertising money - but that appears to be a result of their own choices, not an invariable outcome of accepting advertising money.
They tried that back in the early days. The result was endless maintenance and operational headaches due to the numerous different configurations and performance levels of the donated machines and colocation space. (Some of that was also shooting themselves in the foot, at least back then the Wikimedia software was widely regarded as being nothing but a collection of kludges, patches, and improvisations.) That directly resulted in their first call(s) for money, so they could have standardized configurations and predictable performance by buying and setting up the boxen themselves.
I use About.com just as much as I use Wikipedia - and have no particular problems with About.com.