Blame the government for 40% tax and the colleges that require $100,000 a year tuition from every student to function. Cars, health and insane insurance drain the middle and lower class dry.
Vicious cycle when you think about it. Gov. has to charge high taxes to give out the nearly free loans to send people to school. Colleges know this so they up their tuitions since people can get huge loans with low interest. Additionally when you apply for financial aide you have to put your entire life story on the application. This information makes it easy for colleges to adjust their rates upwards just to the point of people barely being able to afford it.
Health insurance costs could easily be fixed by not taking it out of peoples check before hand. Give everyone their money and then charge for insurance. I think you would see some pretty quick changes (not that anyone really wants that though). Same goes for income taxes and SS.
Never thought I would hear someone equate any Toyota with 'an old-persons car.' Buick and Pontiac maybe, but any Toyota? To me a Camry is just reliable no frills transportation. It's not young or old, it just is:)
Microsoft has released a quality product that relatively stacks up quite well against the Ipod, in QUALITY AND SALES.
Not an ipod fanboy or anything, but sales just isn't true. Second place with 7% is behind the first place ipod with 70%+. Not sure how that stacks up well against the ipod.
Quality is of course debatable. I own an ipod and it works well for me. I've only played with the zune in the stores and the wheel on the front felt cheap and flimsy to me. Now that could have been b/c it was a display model or whatever, but only time will tell on the quality issue. Also, the screen while bigger looks like crap. Only later I found out that even though the screen is bigger than the ipods, it runs at the same resolution.
At the end of the day I'm happy the zune was released. In fact, I wish they had released one with real wifi features built in and not some half-ass attempt like squirting. Competition is a great thing, and anything that can push apple to continue to innovate on the ipod is a plus for ipod and non-ipod owners alike.
For example - is there any particular reason that an AI would every miss in an FPS combat... They know exactly where they are, exactly where you are, what your direction and rate of movement is, how fast the projectile flys - heck they can even pick up tendencies in your movement patterns. Now they should be able to place a round pretty much exactly where you will be (given your current tendencies) each and every time. Ok, that is FPS games.
The developers could also give the computer more health and armor, the problem is that neither are AI. In fact, most would call that cheating (or developers too lazy to create true AI). Using internal game knowledge that the player has little to no knowledge of isn't an example of how to make good AI. Same thing goes for the MMO comment. For a true AI to work it needs to have the same knowledge that the other players have (which is often incomplete). What you're saying is like building a poker bot where the bot gets to see all of the mucked cards. Sure the bot will beat a lot of people, but it is in effect cheating.
Chess is also not a very good example since most of the chess programs I've seen just use a brute force search algorithm. The board contains all of the information (which is actually pretty limited) at which point the computer just has to do the calculations.
If you want to see where true AI is at work look at the game Go. Many players can beat the computer regularly since the solution space is so large (can no longer use a brute force like chess). Also look at poker (in particular the pokibot where players are always working with incomplete sets of information. A decent poker player still can beat computer players simply by changing their game once and awhile. It ends up taking the bots too long to adapt before they are put out.
Real AI, not the shortcut methods you mentioned, require time and a lot of processing power to implement.
I have yet to hear a valid reason of why people like PvP: "Challenge of a human opponent," "Unpredictable," "Fair chance," or "Dispense justice" are the most frequent comments I hear from PvPers (not to be confused with PKers). To me it always boils down to "ruin someone else's day."
Huh? NPCs are predictable. Once you learn the pattern there is no challenge. If games had an AI that learned as it went then things might be different, but the state (and processing power required to implement) of current AI is lacking.
Take a look at sports games. Sure, it can be entertaining to play against the computer, but it doesn't take long till you figure out what they will do in what situation. Now play against a real person and they won't only do different things, but if you're winning they'll change their strategy accordingly and often much more efficiently than a computer.
Good point about the other formats. I was just stating the default in itunes. I wanted to do lossless with my collection, but it used too much space. I ended up going with high quality aac and it sounds pretty good in the car.
Apple does nothing of the sort. The only files that get DRMed are ones you download from ITMS. If you rip your library using the itunes software, your rips will be mp4 w/o any type of DRM on them.
I agree, and think this is a problem you often see with OSS in general.
Re:Scientific consensus not quite there yet...
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 1
I'm also not sure when consensus became proof (as alluded to in the summary). And as you have pointed out above there are many scientist already debunking Gores film.
I think the whole issue would get much more traction if they focused not on global warming, but on cleaning up pollution as a whole. It's easy to point to scientific fact that dumping contaminants into the environment does lead to bad things. Instead of pointing to hard to prove concepts like global warming (now) or global cooling (20-30 years ago), lets just focus on dumping poison == bad.
In an interview with GameSpot, Reggie Fils-Aime had some advice for those who are left Wii-less after today, saying that those people "should not give up hope, but they should prepared to be fast on their feet." He reaffirms that Nintendo is committed to delivering 4 million units by December 31, adding that North America will command the largest share of shipments.
I agree. My only complaint is that instead of pushing for H1-Bs they should push to fast track green cards to highly skilled people. As a country we want these people working and studying here, and we want them to stay.
People talk all day long about American IT workers "adapting to the market" and "creating more value" than their counterparts create overseas, but there's nothing in the universe that an American IT worker can do that someone else overseas can't do, for cheaper.
If the only reason you think jobs are moving overseas is because it's cheaper your missing out on some of the other huge reasons. One big one is that people overseas work hard. They have been poor and now see an opportunity, whereas many americans are lazy and happy to punch a clock 9-5 and go home and watch Britney Spears. The american attitude will not survive as the world goes global. There are too many people in the world who are just getting a taste of freedom and capitalism that no job from an MBA to IT monkey is safe. It's scary, but in the end will create more for everyone.
There is no adaptation that a US IT worker can aspire to, that can't be matched or exceeded or even pre-emptively achieved by workers elsewhere. Not even one.
There is, to stay educated. The US must be the place where the next big thing comes out of. Our public educational system is so screwed up right now I fear that this won't be the case.
That's exactly why Toyota, Nissan and Honda are eating the US auto industry alive: we offshored our technology to them and now they're using it against us after having turned the proverbial transistor into the transistor radio except this time in a much bigger way.
Um no. All those companies beat the US companies because they innovated better than the US companies did. For many years US car companies manufactured crap at extremely high costs for which you have unions to blame. Paying some guy $30/hour to turn a screw is a complete waste when we have robotics and tech that can do that. Lets not even go into all the complete marketing blunders from when gas prices sky rocketed and the US car companies were still trying to sell these huge beasts of cars. Toyota, Honda, etc... took this opportunity to build better for cars for less money. And guess what, many of the Hondas, etc... are built in the US. Actually lots of foreign cars are built here. While not really low cost, every BMW z3/z4 roadster is built in the SC and then shipped all over the world.
I know that and you know that. Now try telling all the people whose mantra was 'but real estate always goes up...they aren't making anymore land' that:)
This is a fun site to read. Just remember that they like to paint a very bleak picture. I think it's somewhere between those people and the RE agents to where things will play out in the end.
A MS may not get you into game design, but more education is never a waste of time. Someone who works during the day while getting their MS at night shows a lot of commitment and desire. The exact kind of person I would want to hire. Like with anything, there are many paths that will take you where you want to go. Getting an MS is one of those.
What do you think supported the housing boom the last few years? You think millions of people were suddenly able to afford $500k+ RE? LOL. If you really want to see what a mess we're going to be in if things start going badly check out neg-am (hint, you don't even have to pay all the interest each month if you chose not to. All the while, banks get to book revenue like you paid the full amount and get to book the interest on the amount you didn't pay as revenue, f'd up I tell you) mortgages...
Yeah, the GP is basically talking about leverage. It's great when it works and really bad when it doesn't. Taking all the money (by financing as much of the car as possible) and investing it is great until something unexpected happens like losing your job or your investment tanks, leaving you with a high car payment and no way to pay for it.
It also requires extreme discipline, which is pretty clear very few people have.
I'm in the camp that cars are one of those things you should always try to own. When everything goes to shit, you don't want to also be losing your source of transportation.
I'm with you. I think the next system I buy will be the xbox360 when it has it's first price drop. I saw an article this morning talking about how the ps3 will be a machine that's around for 10 years. I'm guessing right around the time I get bored with the xbox360, I can pick up a ps3 for $200 or less. I'm really not sure what's so big with the ps3 hype right now. It doesn't have much in the way of games right now and is insanely expensive. If I had $1k burning a whole in my entertainment fund pocket I'd probably buy a xbox360 (good base of games and HD) and a wii (new unique play experience) today.
I don't think BluRay or HDDVD will really go anywhere. First of all, who is going to rebuy movies once again? Second, where is the consumer push for it? Are people out there complaining that the current DVD is inadequate? Finally, and this is the big one, there are much more efficient ways to deliver content to the home now. Most cable companies offer HD ondemand. You have MS and Apple hinting around delivering movies to the home over the internet. Why buy any movie at all now when I can pick any one I might want to watch for a couple dollars or just pay a monthly subscription service?
I was wondering the same thing. We all saw how the xbox360s were sold on ebay so everyone is trying to do the ps3s the same way this time around. After the craziness goes away, I wonder what the price will settle at? Speaking of supply and demand, there are nearly 10k ps3s for sale on ebay now. One has to wonder how many people are out there that are willing to pay 2x-3x retail for something that will be plentiful (and with more games) in just a few months. It's not like Sony is going to quit making them lol, in fact I can promise that Sony will make millions of them when all is said and done:p
Buying all of your assets "cash" is nothing to be proud of; frankly, it is only one step less irresponsible than using credit recklessly.
I agree with you to a point. The problem is that many(most?) people buy too much car on credit that they can't really afford. For this type of person it would've made more sense to save up some cash and buy a 5k car to get them around rather than make payments that they can barely afford for 5-7(for a fn' car!) years. Also, the type of financing you're talking about is generally for a *new* car, which is a complete rip off for so many other reasons. So now the person who is buying this car is buying a car on credit that is most likely way overpriced that they can barely afford.
I've often wondered this myself. What is the reward for developing open source software?
One non-direct way that OSS helps everyone is that it allows companies to start with much less investment than before. Basic IT infrastructure (internet, email, web server, office) now takes very little capital. The more companies that get started (and not just tech companies) the more jobs there will be for everyone.
It can also be argued that the only reason the internet is the way it is today is b/c of OSS. Apache and linux allowed small companies to act big with minimal investment and then expand as needed. Imagine if Google had to negotiate license deals with MS for windows and IIS...
Don't let OSS developers fool you either. I'm sure there are some who do it for altruistic purposes, but many do it for their own selfish reasons (which is fine!). Not everyone wants more money; peer recognition, fame, and skill development are other big motivators.
Standardized tests, when created properly, and when combined with others methods of verification, can be a useful tool. On their own, and poorly written, they mean next to nothing.
I agree with pretty much your whole post. We do need some objective way to measure students and teach performance and the current method might not be the right way.
I also agree with your comments about science, but I think that needs to be both hands on and book work. The problem is limited time. Maybe the school day needs to be lengthened or the schools need to be in session year round. The US is now competing on a global scale when it comes to how we educate our children and we are falling behind especially in the math and sciences.
Have you taken the SATs? How much of that was useful in college, and later in life? Virtually none of the verbal portion. Why do you think there are SAT (and other standardized test) prep courses.
I took the SATs a long time ago when I was in tenth grade ('93), without any sort of prep course. I only took them once since my first score got me into the college I wanted to go to. I can't comment on if they were a good measure of my ability or not since I don't really remember them at this point.
I did take the GRE 2 weeks ago and what I found is that what the verbal section really tested was have I been reading since I got out of college. There is really no way to study for the verbal portion (memorizing thousands of words lol), other than having read a lot and becoming familiar with words.
As far as prep course go, I think learning the strategies to take the test is part of the test itself. Knowing on the GRE to make sure to fill in every answer b/c a wrong answer hurts less than a question you didn't reach is part of showing that you know how to do a little research and come prepared to a situation.
Slashdot Mirror
If this pattern matching software actually worked, people would use it for some purpose that makes wads of cash.... like the stock market.
It does and people do...
Blame the government for 40% tax and the colleges that require $100,000 a year tuition from every student to function. Cars, health and insane insurance drain the middle and lower class dry.
Vicious cycle when you think about it. Gov. has to charge high taxes to give out the nearly free loans to send people to school. Colleges know this so they up their tuitions since people can get huge loans with low interest. Additionally when you apply for financial aide you have to put your entire life story on the application. This information makes it easy for colleges to adjust their rates upwards just to the point of people barely being able to afford it.
Health insurance costs could easily be fixed by not taking it out of peoples check before hand. Give everyone their money and then charge for insurance. I think you would see some pretty quick changes (not that anyone really wants that though). Same goes for income taxes and SS.
Never thought I would hear someone equate any Toyota with 'an old-persons car.' Buick and Pontiac maybe, but any Toyota? To me a Camry is just reliable no frills transportation. It's not young or old, it just is :)
Microsoft has released a quality product that relatively stacks up quite well against the Ipod, in QUALITY AND SALES.
Not an ipod fanboy or anything, but sales just isn't true. Second place with 7% is behind the first place ipod with 70%+. Not sure how that stacks up well against the ipod.
Quality is of course debatable. I own an ipod and it works well for me. I've only played with the zune in the stores and the wheel on the front felt cheap and flimsy to me. Now that could have been b/c it was a display model or whatever, but only time will tell on the quality issue. Also, the screen while bigger looks like crap. Only later I found out that even though the screen is bigger than the ipods, it runs at the same resolution.
At the end of the day I'm happy the zune was released. In fact, I wish they had released one with real wifi features built in and not some half-ass attempt like squirting. Competition is a great thing, and anything that can push apple to continue to innovate on the ipod is a plus for ipod and non-ipod owners alike.
For example - is there any particular reason that an AI would every miss in an FPS combat... They know exactly where they are, exactly where you are, what your direction and rate of movement is, how fast the projectile flys - heck they can even pick up tendencies in your movement patterns. Now they should be able to place a round pretty much exactly where you will be (given your current tendencies) each and every time. Ok, that is FPS games.
The developers could also give the computer more health and armor, the problem is that neither are AI. In fact, most would call that cheating (or developers too lazy to create true AI). Using internal game knowledge that the player has little to no knowledge of isn't an example of how to make good AI. Same thing goes for the MMO comment. For a true AI to work it needs to have the same knowledge that the other players have (which is often incomplete). What you're saying is like building a poker bot where the bot gets to see all of the mucked cards. Sure the bot will beat a lot of people, but it is in effect cheating.
Chess is also not a very good example since most of the chess programs I've seen just use a brute force search algorithm. The board contains all of the information (which is actually pretty limited) at which point the computer just has to do the calculations.
If you want to see where true AI is at work look at the game Go. Many players can beat the computer regularly since the solution space is so large (can no longer use a brute force like chess). Also look at poker (in particular the pokibot where players are always working with incomplete sets of information. A decent poker player still can beat computer players simply by changing their game once and awhile. It ends up taking the bots too long to adapt before they are put out.
Real AI, not the shortcut methods you mentioned, require time and a lot of processing power to implement.
I have yet to hear a valid reason of why people like PvP: "Challenge of a human opponent," "Unpredictable," "Fair chance," or "Dispense justice" are the most frequent comments I hear from PvPers (not to be confused with PKers). To me it always boils down to "ruin someone else's day."
Huh? NPCs are predictable. Once you learn the pattern there is no challenge. If games had an AI that learned as it went then things might be different, but the state (and processing power required to implement) of current AI is lacking.
Take a look at sports games. Sure, it can be entertaining to play against the computer, but it doesn't take long till you figure out what they will do in what situation. Now play against a real person and they won't only do different things, but if you're winning they'll change their strategy accordingly and often much more efficiently than a computer.
Good point about the other formats. I was just stating the default in itunes. I wanted to do lossless with my collection, but it used too much space. I ended up going with high quality aac and it sounds pretty good in the car.
and apple doesn't add drm to files you create.
Apple does nothing of the sort. The only files that get DRMed are ones you download from ITMS. If you rip your library using the itunes software, your rips will be mp4 w/o any type of DRM on them.
Maybe once you have an AI engine that can crawl the internet and other news sources faster then humans, then you might be onto something.
If you RTFA, this is exactly what they are doing/trying to do now.
I agree, and think this is a problem you often see with OSS in general.
I'm also not sure when consensus became proof (as alluded to in the summary). And as you have pointed out above there are many scientist already debunking Gores film.
I think the whole issue would get much more traction if they focused not on global warming, but on cleaning up pollution as a whole. It's easy to point to scientific fact that dumping contaminants into the environment does lead to bad things. Instead of pointing to hard to prove concepts like global warming (now) or global cooling (20-30 years ago), lets just focus on dumping poison == bad.
Here's the quote from NoA CEO
In an interview with GameSpot, Reggie Fils-Aime had some advice for those who are left Wii-less after today, saying that those people "should not give up hope, but they should prepared to be fast on their feet." He reaffirms that Nintendo is committed to delivering 4 million units by December 31, adding that North America will command the largest share of shipments.
You can read the whole thing here.
I agree. My only complaint is that instead of pushing for H1-Bs they should push to fast track green cards to highly skilled people. As a country we want these people working and studying here, and we want them to stay.
People talk all day long about American IT workers "adapting to the market" and "creating more value" than their counterparts create overseas, but there's nothing in the universe that an American IT worker can do that someone else overseas can't do, for cheaper.
If the only reason you think jobs are moving overseas is because it's cheaper your missing out on some of the other huge reasons. One big one is that people overseas work hard. They have been poor and now see an opportunity, whereas many americans are lazy and happy to punch a clock 9-5 and go home and watch Britney Spears. The american attitude will not survive as the world goes global. There are too many people in the world who are just getting a taste of freedom and capitalism that no job from an MBA to IT monkey is safe. It's scary, but in the end will create more for everyone.
There is no adaptation that a US IT worker can aspire to, that can't be matched or exceeded or even pre-emptively achieved by workers elsewhere. Not even one.
There is, to stay educated. The US must be the place where the next big thing comes out of. Our public educational system is so screwed up right now I fear that this won't be the case.
That's exactly why Toyota, Nissan and Honda are eating the US auto industry alive: we offshored our technology to them and now they're using it against us after having turned the proverbial transistor into the transistor radio except this time in a much bigger way.
Um no. All those companies beat the US companies because they innovated better than the US companies did. For many years US car companies manufactured crap at extremely high costs for which you have unions to blame. Paying some guy $30/hour to turn a screw is a complete waste when we have robotics and tech that can do that. Lets not even go into all the complete marketing blunders from when gas prices sky rocketed and the US car companies were still trying to sell these huge beasts of cars. Toyota, Honda, etc... took this opportunity to build better for cars for less money. And guess what, many of the Hondas, etc... are built in the US. Actually lots of foreign cars are built here. While not really low cost, every BMW z3/z4 roadster is built in the SC and then shipped all over the world.
It just sounds like financial suicide.
:)
I know that and you know that. Now try telling all the people whose mantra was 'but real estate always goes up...they aren't making anymore land' that
This is a fun site to read. Just remember that they like to paint a very bleak picture. I think it's somewhere between those people and the RE agents to where things will play out in the end.
Anytime you use leverage it's risky :)
:D
If you want to get scared about leverage, check out futures trading sometime
A MS may not get you into game design, but more education is never a waste of time. Someone who works during the day while getting their MS at night shows a lot of commitment and desire. The exact kind of person I would want to hire. Like with anything, there are many paths that will take you where you want to go. Getting an MS is one of those.
What do you think supported the housing boom the last few years? You think millions of people were suddenly able to afford $500k+ RE? LOL. If you really want to see what a mess we're going to be in if things start going badly check out neg-am (hint, you don't even have to pay all the interest each month if you chose not to. All the while, banks get to book revenue like you paid the full amount and get to book the interest on the amount you didn't pay as revenue, f'd up I tell you) mortgages...
Yeah, the GP is basically talking about leverage. It's great when it works and really bad when it doesn't. Taking all the money (by financing as much of the car as possible) and investing it is great until something unexpected happens like losing your job or your investment tanks, leaving you with a high car payment and no way to pay for it.
It also requires extreme discipline, which is pretty clear very few people have.
I'm in the camp that cars are one of those things you should always try to own. When everything goes to shit, you don't want to also be losing your source of transportation.
I'm with you. I think the next system I buy will be the xbox360 when it has it's first price drop. I saw an article this morning talking about how the ps3 will be a machine that's around for 10 years. I'm guessing right around the time I get bored with the xbox360, I can pick up a ps3 for $200 or less. I'm really not sure what's so big with the ps3 hype right now. It doesn't have much in the way of games right now and is insanely expensive. If I had $1k burning a whole in my entertainment fund pocket I'd probably buy a xbox360 (good base of games and HD) and a wii (new unique play experience) today.
I don't think BluRay or HDDVD will really go anywhere. First of all, who is going to rebuy movies once again? Second, where is the consumer push for it? Are people out there complaining that the current DVD is inadequate? Finally, and this is the big one, there are much more efficient ways to deliver content to the home now. Most cable companies offer HD ondemand. You have MS and Apple hinting around delivering movies to the home over the internet. Why buy any movie at all now when I can pick any one I might want to watch for a couple dollars or just pay a monthly subscription service?
I was wondering the same thing. We all saw how the xbox360s were sold on ebay so everyone is trying to do the ps3s the same way this time around. After the craziness goes away, I wonder what the price will settle at? Speaking of supply and demand, there are nearly 10k ps3s for sale on ebay now. One has to wonder how many people are out there that are willing to pay 2x-3x retail for something that will be plentiful (and with more games) in just a few months. It's not like Sony is going to quit making them lol, in fact I can promise that Sony will make millions of them when all is said and done :p
Buying all of your assets "cash" is nothing to be proud of; frankly, it is only one step less irresponsible than using credit recklessly.
I agree with you to a point. The problem is that many(most?) people buy too much car on credit that they can't really afford. For this type of person it would've made more sense to save up some cash and buy a 5k car to get them around rather than make payments that they can barely afford for 5-7(for a fn' car!) years. Also, the type of financing you're talking about is generally for a *new* car, which is a complete rip off for so many other reasons. So now the person who is buying this car is buying a car on credit that is most likely way overpriced that they can barely afford.
I've often wondered this myself. What is the reward for developing open source software?
One non-direct way that OSS helps everyone is that it allows companies to start with much less investment than before. Basic IT infrastructure (internet, email, web server, office) now takes very little capital. The more companies that get started (and not just tech companies) the more jobs there will be for everyone.
It can also be argued that the only reason the internet is the way it is today is b/c of OSS. Apache and linux allowed small companies to act big with minimal investment and then expand as needed. Imagine if Google had to negotiate license deals with MS for windows and IIS...
Don't let OSS developers fool you either. I'm sure there are some who do it for altruistic purposes, but many do it for their own selfish reasons (which is fine!). Not everyone wants more money; peer recognition, fame, and skill development are other big motivators.
Standardized tests, when created properly, and when combined with others methods of verification, can be a useful tool. On their own, and poorly written, they mean next to nothing.
I agree with pretty much your whole post. We do need some objective way to measure students and teach performance and the current method might not be the right way.
I also agree with your comments about science, but I think that needs to be both hands on and book work. The problem is limited time. Maybe the school day needs to be lengthened or the schools need to be in session year round. The US is now competing on a global scale when it comes to how we educate our children and we are falling behind especially in the math and sciences.
Have you taken the SATs? How much of that was useful in college, and later in life? Virtually none of the verbal portion. Why do you think there are SAT (and other standardized test) prep courses.
I took the SATs a long time ago when I was in tenth grade ('93), without any sort of prep course. I only took them once since my first score got me into the college I wanted to go to. I can't comment on if they were a good measure of my ability or not since I don't really remember them at this point.
I did take the GRE 2 weeks ago and what I found is that what the verbal section really tested was have I been reading since I got out of college. There is really no way to study for the verbal portion (memorizing thousands of words lol), other than having read a lot and becoming familiar with words.
As far as prep course go, I think learning the strategies to take the test is part of the test itself. Knowing on the GRE to make sure to fill in every answer b/c a wrong answer hurts less than a question you didn't reach is part of showing that you know how to do a little research and come prepared to a situation.