Very Interesting - Since you're here on Slashdot, I'm going to go ahead and assume you're as geeky as the rest of us...;)
This article a while ago in Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html) has some interesting details on how in the Silicon Valley area, the number of Autistic kids is higher than the national average, and how that may co relate to a particular mutation in the techie crowd...
I dismissed it as an interesting piece of circumstantial evidence until just the other day. I live in Canada, in RIM country - in recent years a great number of tech and science companies have brought their operations up here, including Google and McAfee to name very few. At any rate, my daughter told me she had an altercation with a specialist teacher who commented on her wardrobe;) - when asked what she meant by specialist teacher, she told me she was from the Autism Program at her school. They had to separate the Special Programs into two to deal with the surge of Autistic kids in the region...
A recent study by the CDC showed "that about 5.6 per 1,000 children aged 4-17 years had a parent-reported autism diagnosis." (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/531797)
There are 12 kids in the program, for a school population of 1500. (about a 42% increase over the average) There are similar programs in most of the schools in the region....
One could take this circumstancial evidence and form a hypothesis that, if they could isolate the differences in your two sons DNA, and then figure out the base pairs in you and your partner that this coding came from, they could be able to identify the conditions under which autism is more likely to occur...
"Which provides you with no guitar skills whatsoever. This summary hits it right on the head that it improves your rhythm..."
So either it does do something to improve playing skills (rhythm) or you don't believe rhythm is important to learning to play guitar. So which is it?
The number of guitar 'players' out there that have no rhythm at all is astounding. They play a collection of notes at random velocity - impressive when you're drunk or stoned at a party, but not terribly entertaining otherwise, and certainly very annoying to any one who has to play with them.
My daughter is new to playing guitar (I have been playing twenty years) and was having a very hard time relating the timing and rhythms required to play exercises and peices of music. As a learning tool for the raw bigger, it provides an alternate method of relating what you hear and what you are expected to play in a way that requires no knowledge of how to read music. Similar to tab, the interface for guitar hero provides an allegory of sight for the velocities of the notes you hear, and gives you a paradigm for fitting the two together. With additional input from myself, within the span of about 2 weeks, my daughter was able to better discern the relationships of the various note velocities. It was a break through for her that otherwise could have been very frustrating, but within the context of the game was nothing but fun.
FTFA - WRT ""It's been a theme all over the country that it is very difficult to discipline police department employees, but it is particularly disturbing when it involves a scientist who should have known better," said Bill Thompson"
Bench workers are technicians, not scientists. They have a process to follow, defined by their superiors. I'm certain most of these people graduated from some 9 month, city college program on proper beaker maintenance, and chain of evidence protocol - an accomplishment to be sure, but by no means worthy of raising them to the rank of "scientists that know better"
If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.
My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.
Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.
There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.
One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!!;)
In canada Roger's does provide an SLA, at least they did when last I changed my service. For thier 1 mB service the SLA was 500kBps. Unfortunately the SLA for the 3 mB service was also only 500 kBps... I often got faster then the posted SLA but they only guaranteed what was listed in the contract......that would be the paper version of a EULA - comes on those thin sheets of pulped wood material... you usually have to sign the bottom and often are encouraged to read through with a magnifying glass...;)
If your trying to look cool buying RPG, your going to have to try a lot harder, no matter how nicely illustrated the book's cover is...
I grew up role playing with TMNT - the rules were pretty complicated to the point that we had no idea what we were doing. In one instance we had characters where the stat bonuses were added directly to the stat to acheive some ugly numbers (80 STR on a first lvl character!!) But we figured out enough to make characters, resolve conflicts, use skills and have fun. The campaigns were vast and highly detailed, because coming across source material was fairly sketchy and we were left to our own devices. This isn't a negative - the rulebooks gave you a framework from which to evolve, leaving limitless possibilities. I came away a much better player and GM learning to rely on myself as interpretter and creative designer than by being a slave to the 800 book library that is DnD. I also was way more likely to embrace other types and genres of games than my strictly DnD compatriots. All in all it is a phase of my life I look back on fondly, and I credit those beginnings for the number of RP awards myself and my gaming crew won over the years at DnD tourneys in our area...
Personally I have found that the Paladium games had more intrinsically in common with modern d20 games than even the originally DnD. All joking aside, main stream gamers obviously require a little glitz to get them out of their comfort zone. I would like to see them embrace d20 completely and reissue the games with a beefed up marketing plan - add some hardcovers and pretty pictures for the easily distracted. That's what will save the company if indeed it needs saving. I own almost all the games and and most source material. I've gone through 3 copies of TMNT and Heroes Unlimited myself. I'd pay for some hardcover books to put up beside my 800 DnD books...
In the meantime, I'll pay 50$ to keep them around a little longer...
FTFA - "took his invention to one audio company after another - Grundig, *Phillips*, Yamaha and ITT among them..."
You'd have to analyze the text a little more to get the timeline, but doesn't it seem odd to you, that a guy presenting a portable music player swings by the Philips office - they laugh at him and tell him it's crazy - and then said company comes out with similar in the same time frame? Ever wonder why hollywood seems to be constantly putting out similarly themed movies at the same time all the time?
Same reason - a guy is wandering around pitching a script idea - the studio laughs at him and tells him he's crazy - they hire their own writers to capitilize on the idea without having to pay out royalties...
Of course, this is all mere speculation - but then how come Philips didn't sue Sony? Maybe cause they'd stolen the idea themselves?
Do the chimps worry about disappointing thier parents if they miss a step? Are they worried about being disobedient?
I'll admit that I didn't RTFA, but as a parent one thing I have come to understand - expecially when they are young, kids are more afraid of disappointing you than death, taxes and making things more efficient.
IANAPsychologist, and I'm not sure whether video games will turn you into a killer but I find that everytime I binge on playing SW:BattlefrontII for a few days, i find that everyone I look at has a red reticle over their face, and I have an intense desire to jump and roll to the left whenever I am startled...
...for some reason my Teflon pants attract Dog hair like a SOB. Hmmm... I wonder if I shouldn't have gone the cheap way and sprayed Teflon paint on them myself...
I'm not sure where you are from, but saying the service is US-only is a tad untrue, though it may look like it from the opening page. Though arguably Canada might as well be a state, we aren't yet......and they mapped the frikin' cemetery near my house! Right down to where they put pylons to limit the traffic to one lane! Dead or alive you ain't gettin lost with this map service......I also found out the park by my house where I grew up actually has a name! God love the internet...
Who uses an encyclopedia as an authoritative source anyway?
So I should tell my twelve year old daughter to throw out her encyclopedias and invest in a nanotech research facility to finish her 7th grade science project??
Furthermore, your argument falls apart when you consider that small towns in Canada, such as Fort McMurray in Alberta (and many towns even smaller than that) have had broadband for years now (since 1997, in Fort McMurray's case) while many major cities in the U.S. still don't have half-decent broadband penetration.
Some of that though is because of oil companies and other large natural resource dependant corporations that have offices or 'outposts' in the more rural areas where they do business. They slug fiber across the country and then resell to the little towns that pop up around the mines and what not - look at Elliot Lake in Northern Ontario for example.
"... Frankly that car was not street legal, it shouldn't have been allowed on the highway..."
Except by not allowing them on the highway you remove the possibility of long distance endurance type competition. These races are important because they present challenges you won't necessarily have on a closed course - like construction, road conditions, inclement weather, and oncoming traffic...
.. there is a section at the end where a similar technology used. I thought this was the least believable part of the story actually... that is until now...
Or a sixth possibility - (and incidentally I am 27, with 12 years experience in IT) Work fulltime/school fulltime - same as school full time/gaming fulltime except you get paid =) By age fifteen I had already taken all the computer courses my school offered - I was teaching one of them so I could get credit (which I am not counting since for me it was a course as far as I was concerned). I had 4 spares so I could work from 2 in the afternoon and finish at nine thirty (or later on deadlines) and buy that Camaro Berlinetta I wanted in time for my 16th birthday... (which subsequently wrapped itself around a telephone pole...the nerve!) IMHO the person that started this crazy thread seems like the same kind of person that would look at trying to get me fired... old, jealous, and not Asperger's material. No offense really but you are proving the article writer's point precisely...
2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time
Pardon? If all endeavours considered futile at the time had been abandoned throughout the span of human history, there would likely be no computers for us to debate about. There would be no excursions to Mars, no walks on the moon, no flying in airplanes, no trips around the globe... Even in the errands of futility there is knowledge to be gleened in failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Very Interesting - Since you're here on Slashdot, I'm going to go ahead and assume you're as geeky as the rest of us... ;)
;) - when asked what she meant by specialist teacher, she told me she was from the Autism Program at her school. They had to separate the Special Programs into two to deal with the surge of Autistic kids in the region ...
This article a while ago in Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html) has some interesting details on how in the Silicon Valley area, the number of Autistic kids is higher than the national average, and how that may co relate to a particular mutation in the techie crowd...
I dismissed it as an interesting piece of circumstantial evidence until just the other day. I live in Canada, in RIM country - in recent years a great number of tech and science companies have brought their operations up here, including Google and McAfee to name very few. At any rate, my daughter told me she had an altercation with a specialist teacher who commented on her wardrobe
A recent study by the CDC showed "that about 5.6 per 1,000 children aged 4-17 years had a parent-reported autism diagnosis." (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/531797)
There are 12 kids in the program, for a school population of 1500. (about a 42% increase over the average) There are similar programs in most of the schools in the region....
One could take this circumstancial evidence and form a hypothesis that, if they could isolate the differences in your two sons DNA, and then figure out the base pairs in you and your partner that this coding came from, they could be able to identify the conditions under which autism is more likely to occur...
A red headed detective put it thusly
[takes off glasses]
Trust, then verify
[puts glasses back on again]
"Which provides you with no guitar skills whatsoever. This summary hits it right on the head that it improves your rhythm..."
So either it does do something to improve playing skills (rhythm) or you don't believe rhythm is important to learning to play guitar. So which is it?
The number of guitar 'players' out there that have no rhythm at all is astounding. They play a collection of notes at random velocity - impressive when you're drunk or stoned at a party, but not terribly entertaining otherwise, and certainly very annoying to any one who has to play with them.
My daughter is new to playing guitar (I have been playing twenty years) and was having a very hard time relating the timing and rhythms required to play exercises and peices of music. As a learning tool for the raw bigger, it provides an alternate method of relating what you hear and what you are expected to play in a way that requires no knowledge of how to read music. Similar to tab, the interface for guitar hero provides an allegory of sight for the velocities of the notes you hear, and gives you a paradigm for fitting the two together. With additional input from myself, within the span of about 2 weeks, my daughter was able to better discern the relationships of the various note velocities. It was a break through for her that otherwise could have been very frustrating, but within the context of the game was nothing but fun.
[Plutonian Grand Overlord to Imperial General Zif'f]
"That's it! That's the last straw! Zif'f - launch the invasion!!"
FTFA - WRT ""It's been a theme all over the country that it is very difficult to discipline police department employees, but it is particularly disturbing when it involves a scientist who should have known better," said Bill Thompson"
Bench workers are technicians, not scientists. They have a process to follow, defined by their superiors. I'm certain most of these people graduated from some 9 month, city college program on proper beaker maintenance, and chain of evidence protocol - an accomplishment to be sure, but by no means worthy of raising them to the rank of "scientists that know better"
If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.
;)
My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.
Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.
There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.
One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!!
In canada Roger's does provide an SLA, at least they did when last I changed my service. For thier 1 mB service the SLA was 500kBps. Unfortunately the SLA for the 3 mB service was also only 500 kBps ... I often got faster then the posted SLA but they only guaranteed what was listed in the contract... ...that would be the paper version of a EULA - comes on those thin sheets of pulped wood material... you usually have to sign the bottom and often are encouraged to read through with a magnifying glass... ;)
If your trying to look cool buying RPG, your going to have to try a lot harder, no matter how nicely illustrated the book's cover is...
I grew up role playing with TMNT - the rules were pretty complicated to the point that we had no idea what we were doing. In one instance we had characters where the stat bonuses were added directly to the stat to acheive some ugly numbers (80 STR on a first lvl character!!) But we figured out enough to make characters, resolve conflicts, use skills and have fun. The campaigns were vast and highly detailed, because coming across source material was fairly sketchy and we were left to our own devices. This isn't a negative - the rulebooks gave you a framework from which to evolve, leaving limitless possibilities. I came away a much better player and GM learning to rely on myself as interpretter and creative designer than by being a slave to the 800 book library that is DnD. I also was way more likely to embrace other types and genres of games than my strictly DnD compatriots. All in all it is a phase of my life I look back on fondly, and I credit those beginnings for the number of RP awards myself and my gaming crew won over the years at DnD tourneys in our area...
Personally I have found that the Paladium games had more intrinsically in common with modern d20 games than even the originally DnD. All joking aside, main stream gamers obviously require a little glitz to get them out of their comfort zone. I would like to see them embrace d20 completely and reissue the games with a beefed up marketing plan - add some hardcovers and pretty pictures for the easily distracted. That's what will save the company if indeed it needs saving. I own almost all the games and and most source material. I've gone through 3 copies of TMNT and Heroes Unlimited myself. I'd pay for some hardcover books to put up beside my 800 DnD books...
In the meantime, I'll pay 50$ to keep them around a little longer...
FTFA - "took his invention to one audio company after another - Grundig, *Phillips*, Yamaha and ITT among them..."
You'd have to analyze the text a little more to get the timeline, but doesn't it seem odd to you, that a guy presenting a portable music player swings by the Philips office - they laugh at him and tell him it's crazy - and then said company comes out with similar in the same time frame? Ever wonder why hollywood seems to be constantly putting out similarly themed movies at the same time all the time?
Same reason - a guy is wandering around pitching a script idea - the studio laughs at him and tells him he's crazy - they hire their own writers to capitilize on the idea without having to pay out royalties...
Of course, this is all mere speculation - but then how come Philips didn't sue Sony? Maybe cause they'd stolen the idea themselves?
Do the chimps worry about disappointing thier parents if they miss a step? Are they worried about being disobedient?
I'll admit that I didn't RTFA, but as a parent one thing I have come to understand - expecially when they are young, kids are more afraid of disappointing you than death, taxes and making things more efficient.
IANAPsychologist, and I'm not sure whether video games will turn you into a killer but I find that everytime I binge on playing SW:BattlefrontII for a few days, i find that everyone I look at has a red reticle over their face, and I have an intense desire to jump and roll to the left whenever I am startled...
...for some reason my Teflon pants attract Dog hair like a SOB. Hmmm... I wonder if I shouldn't have gone the cheap way and sprayed Teflon paint on them myself...
"We've got no idea at all what a Star Wars TV series will be like"
How quickly we forget the ewok adventures - I for one shiver in my leather-like, authentic reproduction Obi Wan boot covers....
I'm not sure where you are from, but saying the service is US-only is a tad untrue, though it may look like it from the opening page. Though arguably Canada might as well be a state, we aren't yet... ...and they mapped the frikin' cemetery near my house! Right down to where they put pylons to limit the traffic to one lane! Dead or alive you ain't gettin lost with this map service... ...I also found out the park by my house where I grew up actually has a name! God love the internet...
Who uses an encyclopedia as an authoritative source anyway? So I should tell my twelve year old daughter to throw out her encyclopedias and invest in a nanotech research facility to finish her 7th grade science project??
but it does find the really important things...
Furthermore, your argument falls apart when you consider that small towns in Canada, such as Fort McMurray in Alberta (and many towns even smaller than that) have had broadband for years now (since 1997, in Fort McMurray's case) while many major cities in the U.S. still don't have half-decent broadband penetration.
Some of that though is because of oil companies and other large natural resource dependant corporations that have offices or 'outposts' in the more rural areas where they do business. They slug fiber across the country and then resell to the little towns that pop up around the mines and what not - look at Elliot Lake in Northern Ontario for example.
"... Frankly that car was not street legal, it shouldn't have been allowed on the highway ..."
Except by not allowing them on the highway you remove the possibility of long distance endurance type competition. These races are important because they present challenges you won't necessarily have on a closed course - like construction, road conditions, inclement weather, and oncoming traffic...
.. there is a section at the end where a similar technology used. I thought this was the least believable part of the story actually... that is until now...
re: tin foil hat
The Alluminatti would be proud to have you among their numbers....
Or a sixth possibility - (and incidentally I am 27, with 12 years experience in IT) Work fulltime /school fulltime - same as school full time/gaming fulltime except you get paid =) By age fifteen I had already taken all the computer courses my school offered - I was teaching one of them so I could get credit (which I am not counting since for me it was a course as far as I was concerned). I had 4 spares so I could work from 2 in the afternoon and finish at nine thirty (or later on deadlines) and buy that Camaro Berlinetta I wanted in time for my 16th birthday... (which subsequently wrapped itself around a telephone pole...the nerve!) IMHO the person that started this crazy thread seems like the same kind of person that would look at trying to get me fired... old, jealous, and not Asperger's material. No offense really but you are proving the article writer's point precisely...
2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time Pardon? If all endeavours considered futile at the time had been abandoned throughout the span of human history, there would likely be no computers for us to debate about. There would be no excursions to Mars, no walks on the moon, no flying in airplanes, no trips around the globe... Even in the errands of futility there is knowledge to be gleened in failure.