The problem with your example is that the two versions don't mean the same thing. The first example guarantees that someComparator can be used with objects supporting the SomeClass interface, and stipulates that it won't work with objects that don't. The second example provides no such guarantees. Which is better depends on what happens later in the code.
You might say that kind of static checking isn't really necessary much of the time, and you'd be right. You can always roll your own type guarantees (e.g. by checking prototypes in Javascript), but then your code gets much more complex. You have to look at *net* simplicity over a project, not simplicity in one line of code. Whether a weakly typed language is simpler or not depends on how often you end up rolling your own type checking, and how often you need to do things that are convenient in weakly typed languages like adding mix-in interfaces to objects dynamically.
Given that Java requires the programmer to provide type guarantees, the addition of generics to Java makes the language both sounder and (net) simpler. Prior to that you had to cast every object you had to swear on your honor as a Boy Scout that an object taken out of a List or Set supported some API by casting it on every single retrieval. That was true even when the code that put the object there didn't belong to you. Java generics eliminate that repated, knee-jerk, boilerplate typecasting on every retrieval at a slight cost in verbosity when you declare the container object. That's a net win for Java programmers, and the practice of restricting generic containers to certain object types is a net win on some (but not all) projects.
I like big brackets and I can not lie you Python programmers can't deny when a module's checked in with a bitty interface and a dozen different kinds of brace you whip out static code analysis and do a little logical bris...
Well -- I haven't seen a coherent argument that he should not be prosecuted, given what he's supposed to have done. I'm open to persuasion, but it seems to me that as long as he's given a fair chance to defend himself (including being detained under reasonable conditions), he *should* face trial.
Right off the bat I'll grant you the "Collateral Murder" video. I don't think Wikileak's spin on those tapes is fair or accurate, but I'll grant that atrocities *do* happen and that a reasonable person looking at the video might conclude that's what it showed. It's at least defensible to go public with that tape, given the assumption that the Army has no safe and effective mechanism for dealing with these matters.
The diplomatic cables and the Afghan war documents are a different matter. I don't think these turned out to be as damaging as Manning's more hysterical detractors claim, but I still think Manning did something wrong. He took a huge body of data, more than he could possibly have understood in detail himself, then he sent him to somebody he didn't actually know so that person could go on a fishing expedition. That was grossly irresponsible.
If he had a piece of information in his hands that he was familiar with and he thought it was something that the public ought to know, then I'd call him a whistle-blower and I'd support him. But teams of expert reporters took months to comb through the mountains of random stuff he leaked, just to figure what was there. Manning could not possibly have known what he setting in motion, and he must have known that. Until I learn otherwise, I'd call him a chaos-monger, not a whistle-blower.
The question isn't whether good things happened as the result of what Manning did, although I do think some good things have happened. And to my knowledge there's no documented evidence of any serious, irreparable harm resulting. But Manning's actions were unconscionably reckless, and a violation of a professional trust. I believe the Manning case shows we probably can afford to be a lot more open with information than we are, and that's a positive outcome. But a serious potential for harm to innocent third parties was there and Manning took no steps to prevent that. Even where some parties deserve exposure for being, as Assange calls them, "collaborators", the same principle of justice applies to them as to Manning. They deserve a fair chance to defend themselves before they are punished.
Well, to be fair it's a bit more than a mailing list. It's a business that actually makes money, what's more it makes it in a straightforward way that doesn't require you to give much credence to any novel, non-negatable theories about the nature of "business value".
That said, the simplicity of the business is also its drawback. They're basically brokering information between buyers and sellers then taking a cut. Anybody with a little money could reproduce that business model in a couple of months... maybe less. Furthermore the "no risk" nature of the transaction means that there's no reason for the parties on either end of the transaction not to negotiate that transaction through a different provider. Of course you could say that about search, and even Google has its Bing, but search is really difficult to do adequately, much less well, and last time I checked Bing was having an uphill slog, despite having Microsoft's financial might and desktop monopoly behind it.
So I don't think I see what the investors are supposed to be getting for their money, unless this outfit is going end up with so much cash its marketing will drown out any potential competitors before they gain any mind-share. Or perhaps they'll be able to scale their business up so that they can cut their margins on each transaction so low that competitors won't even bother. But I have my doubts.
I don't buy that. The money came from somebody who stood to earn a lot more than $25 million on this deal. If we knew who that was, we'd know who was calling the tune. If we knew whose hands the money passed through, any Americans on that list would be subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That might even include administration officials who were acting in a private capacity for their friends.
Well, how about the Reagan administration decision to leave the choice of cell transmission system up to the free market? I'm not saying there were *no* advantages to doing things that way, but net I don't think it produced such great results.
I think you misunderstood...What the system does is that it detects if someone fires 13,000 gunshots at you.
But only if that person shooting has something against you in particular. If he's thinking something like "I'm sick of carrying this damn ammo, I may as well shoot it at that guy over there," the system won't register.
It'll help us figure out whether we're winning hearts and minds by deducting all the shots taken at us for *personal* reasons from the ones taken at us because the shooter hates *all* Americans.
Sure, but you can still discriminate based on the quality of the research they publish there. A lousy paper saying humanity originated with a single breeding pair in the Middle East 10,000 ago should not be given preferential treatment over a lousy paper connecting H. sapiens and P. troglodytes eight million years ago. A lousy creationism paper should be treated like any other lousy paper.
Of course, that's point that will no doubt be lost as scientific merit is argued in front of Texas juries, where it will no doubt come down to which viewpoint the jury thinks is right.
calling an entire party "hypocrites" based on one man's opinions is quite absurd.
I agree. Many Republicans are dupes. And of course there's the ones who are in denial. A substantial minority appears to be well-meaning but confused folks who believe that the party's extremism in defense of X means X, whatever it happens to be, must be liberty. Oh, and I almost forgot: there's the ones who are sincerely and openly evil.
(Do I really have to include a disclaimer with this post? I do? For shame.)
While I agree with you that the Fukushima team deserves admiration and praise, I don't think the Japanese are automatically better at honor and duty than everyone else. That notion almost diminishes the Fukushima team's personal bravery by attributing it to something like cultural determinism.
Consider the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, was caught falsifying nuclear safety tests at Fukushima in 2004. They falsified information again in 2007 after an earthquake at a different plant. Where was management's sense of duty then? It was clearly misplaced, and short-sighted. That history doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this incident; it is quite possible that management has been exemplary since then. If management hasn't been responsible, that wouldn't diminish the heroism of the team on site at Fukushima one bit. It would simply illustrate one of the common features of heroism: a hero often the guy who has to step up when somebody else screws up.
Holding some people responsible for making a mistake doesn't mean respecting the people who deal with that mistake any less. That's important to remember, because people who screw up like to cover themselves with the glory that rightfully belongs to others. And somebody screwed up here. It may have been an unavoidable mistake (when we designed this 40 years ago we did the best we could but now we could do better). It could been something that somebody chose to ignore because it would be very unwelcome news (we knew we really shouldn't be running these ancient reactor designs in places like this). Or might be an omission due to not having enough review of how things were done (safety drills should have revealed the problem restoring axillary power to the cooling system).
One thing it's worth reminding ourselves is why Japan has so many nuclear power plants, even though as the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack you'd expect anti-nuclear sentiment to be high there. It's the same reason they attacked Pearl Harbor. They don't have the natural resources needed to supply a modern industrial economy, so in the 30's they set out to secure oil and rubber the old-fashioned way: they sent gunboats and troops to take it from someone else. We moved the Pacific Fleet to send Japan a message that we'd oppose that. They received the message loud and clear, but their response wasn't what we were expecting.
After WW2 they still had the same problem: they didn't have the petroleum they needed to grow their economy, so they turned to nukes.
And that's probably where we're all headed sooner or later. As the price of oil climbs higher and higher above the $100/bbl mark, more Americans will want to take the nuclear plunge. At the same time, the Fukushima incident will harden the attitudes of Americans with predisposition against nuclear power. The result will be an ugly, unenlightening political fracas in which politicians of various stripes pander to one side or the other.
Well, it looks to me like one of those situations where you apply the DRY principle to your design, and suddenly realize that the uncoupling of assumptions has created some surprising, oddball ways of using your code. Whether or not actually doing those things is sensible, you've got to code up some demonstrations just to show how successful your refactoring is.
Another way of saying this is that some people ask, "Why should the system be designed to make this possible?" Others ask, "Why should the system be designed to *preclude* this possibility?" Now who are the better designers?
By this definition, you also disqualify movies from being art. I doubt you intended that.
No, because I haven't disqualified games from being art.
Movies make my point. They range from student projects that aside from acting are practically solo efforts to mega-block busters costing a hundred million dollars or more. Which tend to be more interesting (not necessarily entertaining, mind you)?
Blockbuster movies illustrate what I am saying about collective efforts and creativity. Huge budget pictures are seldom very significant from an artistic standpoint, and where they are there's somebody with major clout at the creative helm. In fact, if you look at the list of the top 40 most expensive films of all time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films), it's astonishing how many of them are sequels to big hits, and remarkable how uniformly inferior they are to the original, even when they're pretty good. That's because money pours into these huge sequels to recapitulate the original's success, not to pursue an original, personal vision.
One of the critical legacies of the pre-blockbuster film era was the auteur theory, in which a film director is viewed as its artistic "author". All such theories are of course untrue if you wish to be pig-headed about applying them. I think Casablanca is the product of the Epstein brothers' script and a charismatic cast, not the creative vision of Michael Curtiz. Still, it's an influential notion, and young directors can cut their creative teeth without legions of technicians at their beck and call.
Compare that to the gaming industry. With the possible exception of Shigeru Miyamoto the aren't any *designers* who are household names, people whose work you look forward to because of their distinctive creative vision. Who are the artistic role models?
Here's my point, boiled down to the minimum: The limitation of games as art isn't primarily the *medium*, it's the *industry* and the cultural expectations about what a new game should be. They seem to mostly fall into several camps: blockbusters, sequels (or blockbuster/sequels), retreads of existing games and movie tie-ins. Strange, quirky, original games like Portal are rare birds. I looked at the Wikipedia entry for "Portal" and the standard Wikipedia summary box doesn't even have a slot for creative leadership. That's because we don't *expect* games to have notable creative leadership. If we expected more creativity, we'd get more.
You're missing an important part of the argument, namely:
It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity.
Video game art, like, say, the design of the latest MacBook, is designed to marketed to vast numbers consumers the artist will never meet. That's a lot different than having to find *one* rich patron, convince him to give you money, and then keep him happy while you are completing the monumental work he can show his buddies as proof of his wealth and refinement. But despite this the product artist doesn't have *less* interference in his work because of another important related point: mass marketed products are collective efforts. So when you're a video game artist you don't just have your boss to deal with, you have committees and departments, and unless I miss my guess that will include people who have their own ideas about how your work should turn out, not necessarily as informed as they think it is. Not only do you have what amounts to a committee directing your art, and they aren't supposed to be doing it based on their own tastes, but on what they think the taste of a typical consumer in some market segment will be (or perhaps advancing their own tastes under that flag) and other factors like what the consumer's parents will think of your work (which might cut either way).
None of which is to say that you aren't producing art or aren't being creative. Nor is it saying that *fine art* (which is not necessarily better art) isn't influenced by venal considerations. But the essential element of fine art is that it represents primarily the creative vision of a single artist or perhaps the work of several artists working together because of a shared vision. That's part of the cachet of fine art to the patron. He wants to point up at the ceiling of his chapel and say to his buddies, "That Michelangelo is undoubtedly the greatest creative genius of our age, and don't forget he works for me. Look, I had him put Rodrigo Borgia in Hell, get the hint?"
There's no doubt that this aspect of fine art is a corrupting influence on taste, just as surely as mass marketing considerations can be. That's why people turn to folk and decorative arts. For example the Mingei movement in Japan focuses on inexpensive, functional objects hand-made by anonymous craftsmen for daily use. That is not art made without commercial concern, but it is as close to capturing the aesthetic vision of an individual artist in tangible form as we'll ever get. I think this is a very geek friendly aesthetic, because it's all about cool, well designed things.
I think the real limitation on games as aesthetically significant works is not their *commercial* nature, but the *collective* manner in which they are made, which limits individual creative freedom and risk taking. Novels are written to be sold, but for the most part they reflect the creative vision of the author, who until he is a known quantity underwrites the labor of creation. The exception are category novels like romances. There's no reason a romance novel can't be great art but we don't expect that. The reason is that they're written to specification. I have a friend who has two fantasy novels coming out next year with Tor. She's sold a third novel to a different publisher as a paranormal romance, and the editors are making her rework it to the remarkably precise specifications of their line. For example, it had to come in at around 80,000 words, have four to five explicit sex scenes, the first of which occurs before the 25,000 word mark.
Which is not to say that we won't ever see a game that is an important aesthetic landmark in our culture. We may already have, since historically we're bad at recognizing great art. *Casablanca* was a throw-away movie, generally well received, but I doubt anyone realized it was a cultural landmark. The only reason we remember it today is that it was cheap fodder for low-rent media outlets, and it somehow connected with later generations.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be much better & cheaper to create a global space agency. Use the best technology from all the member countries.
Well, as a friend of mine likes to say, "In theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they're different."
In theory you've envisioned a Utopia in which every country puts its national security and economic interests after the common good of humanity when they decide on the "best technology". In practice you'll get a life and death struggle to preserve the jobs and prestige of having major system components designed and built in your country, not to mention the bonus of being able to veto any space project you want by withholding those components. Russia thinks that satellite has defense applications, so no booster for you. China doesn't like the fact your communication system doesn't play nice with their political filters so you'll have to power it with a wind-up spring instead of solar panels. And the Canada(tm) is mad at you because you failed to mention the robot arm was built there, so they're taking it back.
It's not that I think people are inevitable corrupt and venal, it's that if you get enough of them together inevitably some of them will be corrupt and venal. If there is enough money, power and prestige involved they'll be easy to spot because they'll be the ones in charge.
Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that this is a defamation case, but really the verdict was that Mr. Hoff had invaded Mr. Moore's *privacy* by committing "tortious interference". In other words he maliciously stuck his nose into Mr. Jordan's business. Let's take a critical look at this notion that freedom of speech justifies any communication that is true, and then let's look at *this* case.
Freedom of speech isn't the only freedom we cherish. We also cherish privacy. In a sense these rights emerge from a deeper, more fundamental right: the right to conduct your affairs without interference. In practice these rights often come into conflict unless we define them fairly carefully. Tortious interference is a perfect vehicle to study this conflict, because it is free of extraneous detail. It's easy to categorically put libel or fraud outside the pale of free speech because they are malicious and false. From a utilitarian perspective false, malicious speech serves no positive function in society. From an ethical perspective that stresses duties and rights, nobody has a right to spread malicious lies. But tortious interference is interesting because it can involve something that plays an important positive role in society: bringing unwelcome truths to someone's attention.
Is it even possible to tell the truth in a way that violates somebody's rights? I think so. Extortion can involve true allegations. If it were your right to spread any truthful fact in your possession, then why shouldn't extortion be legal? I could enter into a contract with you right now in which I gave you $10 in exchange for your never saying anything bad about my Slashdot posts. You're bartering away your right to free speech in that case, so why not allow extortionists to do the same thing? Because extortionists make their victim pay for something he by rights should enjoy for free: non-interference in his personal affairs.
Suppose your ex-girlfriend's boss works for a boss who is a conservative Christian. You want to get her fired, so you call her boss up and tell him that she had an abortion. If you like you can flip around the political affiliations and make the victim a conservative Christian and her boss a pro-choice activist. In either case her job is none of your business and if you use your knowledge of the truth to get her fired, you're violating her rights.
Whether Mr. Moore was wronged by Mr. Hoff boils down to two questions. (1) Did Mr. Hoff actually take steps with the intention of getting Mr. Moore fired and (2) was Mr. Moore's employment any of Mr. Hoff's business? I actually think Mr. Hoff didn't engineer Mr. Moore's firing. Mr. Moore was a well known public figure whose career Mr. Hoff had followed and discussed publicly. He remained a public figure, and Mr. Hoff continued to discuss his career, albeit disparagingly. That got to the ears of Mr. Moore's employers and they fired him. Mr. Hoff cheered this development and took credit for it, but that's not quite the same as taking credit for *engineering* the dismissal.
If that's so, we don't even get to the really interesting question: did Mr. Hoff have any right to get Mr. Moore fired. Even though U of Mn is a public institution, I don't think that makes everybody who works there "fair game". Nor is every former public figure fair game. I think Mr. Hoff would have to have some rational purpose in getting Mr. Moore fired, such as Mr. Moore being in a position to gain improper personal benefits (given his involvement with questionable characters), or even Mr. Moore having substantial power to influence policy in ways that Mr. Hoff didn't like. I don't think either of those are the case here, so *if* Mr. Hoff engineered Mr. Moore's dismissal, he'd be sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. If Mr. Moore lost his job because of this employer's reaction to Mr. Hoff's unflattering discussion, but it wasn't Hoff's *intent* to get Moore fired, then Hoff is off the hook, even if he danced for joy at the news.
I dunno. I have a rooted Nook Color and all the phone oriented apps I've used on it have worked remarkably well, even though the tablet lacks the standard complement of Android phone hardware buttons.
I've done mobile app UI design, so I know you can't just take an app designed for, say, a laptop and expect the UI to work on a phone. It's possible that some apps designed for a 3" mobile phone screen might appear cartoonishly absurd blown up to 7", but I haven't run into anything like that yet. I suppose there might be some kind of magical boiling point between 7" and 10" which would make the apps I've tried thus far into unusable garbage, but I can't see why off the top of my head. Maybe a full screen calculator designed for smart phone would be bigger than optimal on a Xoom, but I haven't found scaling up most smartphone apps to tablet size to be a problem. Not at 7", at least. On the other hand I *have* found apps that work very nicely on the Nook but I think would have been UI garbage on a smartphone sized screen.
Many apps could be redesigned to take advantage of the greater real estate on a tablet. They Honeycomb home screen is an example of that. But if you're telling people they'll be sitting around with their $800 Xoom with only a couple of dozen apps that are even usable on it, that's pure FUD.
Yeah, I reread what I wrote and see what you mean. It's called "grading on a curve."
The worst case is Chernobyl style radiological disaster, next to which a hydrogen explosion is no big deal and which a hydrogen explosion does not necessarily portend. In fact a hydrogen explosion is a possible side effect of steps to prevent a more serious steam explosion that would breach the reactor vessel and primary containment.
What's worrisome is that the second explosion injured so many workers. How did that happen, especially after the explosion in No. 1? It makes me think they seriously misread the condition of the No. 3 reactor.
Because of the various reactor designs, news on what is happening in Fukushima is difficult to interpret. Some reports say that "secondary containment" has been destroyed, but then illustrate that with a totally different reactor design in which the "secondary containment" structure is supposed to contain a core meltdown after a reactor vessel ruptures. That's not what happened here. Had that happened, it would probably be game over, because they'd probably have lost any control of the reactor along with the final line of defense against major environmental contamination. What appears to have happened is that the outermost shell of the reactor building was destroyed. It was designed with blow away panels for just this kind of scenario, so the destruction of the outer building doesn't imply the complete loss of control that the complete destruction of the containment structure containing the drywall would have spelled.
That doesn't make all this a happy scenario. Not by a long shot. But none of the specific information I've seen so far suggests that we aren't heading for a Three Mile Island style resolution in which environmental and health damage outside the plant is extremely limited. I hope officials are prudent and prepare for a much worse scenario than that, although under the circumstances that's going to be a challenge.
One of the many important lessons of TMI is how fallible people are at inferring the state of a complex system in unusual circumstances. Furthermore the *initial* state of a complex system at the outset of an even like this might not be what it is supposed to be. TMI-2's auxiliary coolant system was down for maintenance, which should not have been allowed unless TMI-2 was shut down. Right from the outset of the incident was that the operators consistently fit the data they had into incorrect models of the system's state.
The unreliability of human decision making in these conditions is why fourth generation reactor designs are much less complex and in some cases passively safe.
So the lesson here is to treat situational assessments in this kind of incident as highly suspect. The hydrogen explosions per se are not anything to be particularly concerned about, but I think we can take them as evidence that the operators don't have the plant under control. For example, the *second* explosion injured eleven workers, so even though the operators clearly knew that additional explosions were possible, they still had workers in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite the complexity of TMI's design, the defense in depth in that design succesfullly prevented serious public health or environmental damage from the TMI incident despite inevitable human error. I expect the same will happen in Fukushima. But there are no guarantees until the situation has been stabilized.
Well, what you're saying is that the HDMI connection doesn't have value for most people. That's a legitimate point. I bought the video out connector for my iPod touch, but most people didn't. I'd like to have a cheaper solution mostly integrated into the device, but clearly most people would prefer a lower price.
Most people *won't* want an HDMI connection, but most people won't buy a tablet in the first place. You don't design a product for *everyone*; you design a product to look like an attractive deal to some subset of everyone. Likewise if you design something like a tablet, your design specs reflect what you think will maximize your profit, not necessarily your units sold. Motorola clearly positioned their product to be attractive to high end customers. Why did they do that, and not match Apple feature for feature at each price level? I think because they don't *want* to.
I suspect the calculus may have went like this. At the $500 entry point, they're going to have to compete with both Apple, and cheap Android tablets costing hundreds of dollars less. At the $800 level its a different ball game. They can turn a profit selling a small number of units, leaving the volume android market to players like Archos, thus establishing themselves as a premium brand. At $500, if Apple sold 10x the number of iPad2s as Motorola sold Xooms, everyone would call Xoom a failure even if it turned a profit. Not so at $800, which is not a segment where volume counts so much. Nobody looks at the gross units sold for Porsche and compares that to Ferrari. Once they establish themselves as a critical success and the low rent Android vendors start chipping away at platform numbers, they can consider whether they want to address a higher volume market segment or not.
If that is their strategy, I'm not saying it's the best possible strategy. What I'm saying is that it's not necessarily totally incomprehensible and irrational. Personally, I think bracketing Apple's entry level offering would be a better strategy, but that depends on how much capital you have to play with. You can't judge a business strategy without looking at opportunity costs and how they limit the resources a company can bring to bear on a market. Here's a question: if you had a choice of putting your chips on a single price point, would that be below Apple or above? My personal inclination would be below, but it's a crowded space.
I'd say the strongest argument in favor of notability is to curb promotion, either self-promotion or narrow advocates. Furthermore, the "no original research" criterion is closely related to the "notability" criterion, and is especially important if you want an anonymously/pseudonymously editable reference to be credible (acknowledging of course that this is probably in fact a lost cause). Theoretically, if the criteria were applied consistently and fairly (acknowledging also that this is a known sore point), then you wouldn't have to trust the unknown authors of an article.
That is in accord with the way a sensible person would use Wikipedia when dealing with something he cared about. He'd read the article, but then follow up the references to see if the article was on the level. The reason that the application of the rules is so arbitrary is that it really isn't that important in many cases. Sure if you are looking up a disease you have, it's critical that the article contain reliable citations and not "original research" (which typically means opinions the writer has pulled out of his ass). If you're looking up "Old Man Murray", who the hell cares if it's the writer's personal opinion?
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The problem with your example is that the two versions don't mean the same thing. The first example guarantees that someComparator can be used with objects supporting the SomeClass interface, and stipulates that it won't work with objects that don't. The second example provides no such guarantees. Which is better depends on what happens later in the code.
You might say that kind of static checking isn't really necessary much of the time, and you'd be right. You can always roll your own type guarantees (e.g. by checking prototypes in Javascript), but then your code gets much more complex. You have to look at *net* simplicity over a project, not simplicity in one line of code. Whether a weakly typed language is simpler or not depends on how often you end up rolling your own type checking, and how often you need to do things that are convenient in weakly typed languages like adding mix-in interfaces to objects dynamically.
Given that Java requires the programmer to provide type guarantees, the addition of generics to Java makes the language both sounder and (net) simpler. Prior to that you had to cast every object you had to swear on your honor as a Boy Scout that an object taken out of a List or Set supported some API by casting it on every single retrieval. That was true even when the code that put the object there didn't belong to you. Java generics eliminate that repated, knee-jerk, boilerplate typecasting on every retrieval at a slight cost in verbosity when you declare the container object. That's a net win for Java programmers, and the practice of restricting generic containers to certain object types is a net win on some (but not all) projects.
I like big brackets and I can not lie
you Python programmers can't deny
when a module's checked in with a bitty interface
and a dozen different kinds of brace
you whip out static code analysis
and do a little logical bris...
Does it work on the adjectives in Slashdot postings?
It's not a delusion I share. I'm a Democrat and I despise the Democrats in Congress.
Anyhow, it might not have been clear to you but I was pulling my Republican friends' leg.
Well -- I haven't seen a coherent argument that he should not be prosecuted, given what he's supposed to have done. I'm open to persuasion, but it seems to me that as long as he's given a fair chance to defend himself (including being detained under reasonable conditions), he *should* face trial.
Right off the bat I'll grant you the "Collateral Murder" video. I don't think Wikileak's spin on those tapes is fair or accurate, but I'll grant that atrocities *do* happen and that a reasonable person looking at the video might conclude that's what it showed. It's at least defensible to go public with that tape, given the assumption that the Army has no safe and effective mechanism for dealing with these matters.
The diplomatic cables and the Afghan war documents are a different matter. I don't think these turned out to be as damaging as Manning's more hysterical detractors claim, but I still think Manning did something wrong. He took a huge body of data, more than he could possibly have understood in detail himself, then he sent him to somebody he didn't actually know so that person could go on a fishing expedition. That was grossly irresponsible.
If he had a piece of information in his hands that he was familiar with and he thought it was something that the public ought to know, then I'd call him a whistle-blower and I'd support him. But teams of expert reporters took months to comb through the mountains of random stuff he leaked, just to figure what was there. Manning could not possibly have known what he setting in motion, and he must have known that. Until I learn otherwise, I'd call him a chaos-monger, not a whistle-blower.
The question isn't whether good things happened as the result of what Manning did, although I do think some good things have happened. And to my knowledge there's no documented evidence of any serious, irreparable harm resulting. But Manning's actions were unconscionably reckless, and a violation of a professional trust. I believe the Manning case shows we probably can afford to be a lot more open with information than we are, and that's a positive outcome. But a serious potential for harm to innocent third parties was there and Manning took no steps to prevent that. Even where some parties deserve exposure for being, as Assange calls them, "collaborators", the same principle of justice applies to them as to Manning. They deserve a fair chance to defend themselves before they are punished.
Well, to be fair it's a bit more than a mailing list. It's a business that actually makes money, what's more it makes it in a straightforward way that doesn't require you to give much credence to any novel, non-negatable theories about the nature of "business value".
That said, the simplicity of the business is also its drawback. They're basically brokering information between buyers and sellers then taking a cut. Anybody with a little money could reproduce that business model in a couple of months ... maybe less. Furthermore the "no risk" nature of the transaction means that there's no reason for the parties on either end of the transaction not to negotiate that transaction through a different provider. Of course you could say that about search, and even Google has its Bing, but search is really difficult to do adequately, much less well, and last time I checked Bing was having an uphill slog, despite having Microsoft's financial might and desktop monopoly behind it.
So I don't think I see what the investors are supposed to be getting for their money, unless this outfit is going end up with so much cash its marketing will drown out any potential competitors before they gain any mind-share. Or perhaps they'll be able to scale their business up so that they can cut their margins on each transaction so low that competitors won't even bother. But I have my doubts.
I don't buy that. The money came from somebody who stood to earn a lot more than $25 million on this deal. If we knew who that was, we'd know who was calling the tune. If we knew whose hands the money passed through, any Americans on that list would be subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That might even include administration officials who were acting in a private capacity for their friends.
Well, how about the Reagan administration decision to leave the choice of cell transmission system up to the free market? I'm not saying there were *no* advantages to doing things that way, but net I don't think it produced such great results.
I think you misunderstood...What the system does is that it detects if someone fires 13,000 gunshots at you.
But only if that person shooting has something against you in particular. If he's thinking something like "I'm sick of carrying this damn ammo, I may as well shoot it at that guy over there," the system won't register.
It'll help us figure out whether we're winning hearts and minds by deducting all the shots taken at us for *personal* reasons from the ones taken at us because the shooter hates *all* Americans.
Sure, but you can still discriminate based on the quality of the research they publish there. A lousy paper saying humanity originated with a single breeding pair in the Middle East 10,000 ago should not be given preferential treatment over a lousy paper connecting H. sapiens and P. troglodytes eight million years ago. A lousy creationism paper should be treated like any other lousy paper.
Of course, that's point that will no doubt be lost as scientific merit is argued in front of Texas juries, where it will no doubt come down to which viewpoint the jury thinks is right.
calling an entire party "hypocrites" based on one man's opinions is quite absurd.
I agree. Many Republicans are dupes. And of course there's the ones who are in denial. A substantial minority appears to be well-meaning but confused folks who believe that the party's extremism in defense of X means X, whatever it happens to be, must be liberty. Oh, and I almost forgot: there's the ones who are sincerely and openly evil.
(Do I really have to include a disclaimer with this post? I do? For shame.)
While I agree with you that the Fukushima team deserves admiration and praise, I don't think the Japanese are automatically better at honor and duty than everyone else. That notion almost diminishes the Fukushima team's personal bravery by attributing it to something like cultural determinism.
Consider the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, was caught falsifying nuclear safety tests at Fukushima in 2004. They falsified information again in 2007 after an earthquake at a different plant. Where was management's sense of duty then? It was clearly misplaced, and short-sighted. That history doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this incident; it is quite possible that management has been exemplary since then. If management hasn't been responsible, that wouldn't diminish the heroism of the team on site at Fukushima one bit. It would simply illustrate one of the common features of heroism: a hero often the guy who has to step up when somebody else screws up.
Holding some people responsible for making a mistake doesn't mean respecting the people who deal with that mistake any less. That's important to remember, because people who screw up like to cover themselves with the glory that rightfully belongs to others. And somebody screwed up here. It may have been an unavoidable mistake (when we designed this 40 years ago we did the best we could but now we could do better). It could been something that somebody chose to ignore because it would be very unwelcome news (we knew we really shouldn't be running these ancient reactor designs in places like this). Or might be an omission due to not having enough review of how things were done (safety drills should have revealed the problem restoring axillary power to the cooling system).
It's also essential she not call herself "Eve". The crypto guys catch onto that one immediately.
She fooled them by spelling her nick backwards.
One thing it's worth reminding ourselves is why Japan has so many nuclear power plants, even though as the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack you'd expect anti-nuclear sentiment to be high there. It's the same reason they attacked Pearl Harbor. They don't have the natural resources needed to supply a modern industrial economy, so in the 30's they set out to secure oil and rubber the old-fashioned way: they sent gunboats and troops to take it from someone else. We moved the Pacific Fleet to send Japan a message that we'd oppose that. They received the message loud and clear, but their response wasn't what we were expecting.
After WW2 they still had the same problem: they didn't have the petroleum they needed to grow their economy, so they turned to nukes.
And that's probably where we're all headed sooner or later. As the price of oil climbs higher and higher above the $100/bbl mark, more Americans will want to take the nuclear plunge. At the same time, the Fukushima incident will harden the attitudes of Americans with predisposition against nuclear power. The result will be an ugly, unenlightening political fracas in which politicians of various stripes pander to one side or the other.
Well, it looks to me like one of those situations where you apply the DRY principle to your design, and suddenly realize that the uncoupling of assumptions has created some surprising, oddball ways of using your code. Whether or not actually doing those things is sensible, you've got to code up some demonstrations just to show how successful your refactoring is.
Another way of saying this is that some people ask, "Why should the system be designed to make this possible?" Others ask, "Why should the system be designed to *preclude* this possibility?" Now who are the better designers?
By this definition, you also disqualify movies from being art. I doubt you intended that.
No, because I haven't disqualified games from being art.
Movies make my point. They range from student projects that aside from acting are practically solo efforts to mega-block busters costing a hundred million dollars or more. Which tend to be more interesting (not necessarily entertaining, mind you)?
Blockbuster movies illustrate what I am saying about collective efforts and creativity. Huge budget pictures are seldom very significant from an artistic standpoint, and where they are there's somebody with major clout at the creative helm. In fact, if you look at the list of the top 40 most expensive films of all time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films), it's astonishing how many of them are sequels to big hits, and remarkable how uniformly inferior they are to the original, even when they're pretty good. That's because money pours into these huge sequels to recapitulate the original's success, not to pursue an original, personal vision.
One of the critical legacies of the pre-blockbuster film era was the auteur theory, in which a film director is viewed as its artistic "author". All such theories are of course untrue if you wish to be pig-headed about applying them. I think Casablanca is the product of the Epstein brothers' script and a charismatic cast, not the creative vision of Michael Curtiz. Still, it's an influential notion, and young directors can cut their creative teeth without legions of technicians at their beck and call.
Compare that to the gaming industry. With the possible exception of Shigeru Miyamoto the aren't any *designers* who are household names, people whose work you look forward to because of their distinctive creative vision. Who are the artistic role models?
Here's my point, boiled down to the minimum: The limitation of games as art isn't primarily the *medium*, it's the *industry* and the cultural expectations about what a new game should be. They seem to mostly fall into several camps: blockbusters, sequels (or blockbuster/sequels), retreads of existing games and movie tie-ins. Strange, quirky, original games like Portal are rare birds. I looked at the Wikipedia entry for "Portal" and the standard Wikipedia summary box doesn't even have a slot for creative leadership. That's because we don't *expect* games to have notable creative leadership. If we expected more creativity, we'd get more.
You're missing an important part of the argument, namely:
It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity.
Video game art, like, say, the design of the latest MacBook, is designed to marketed to vast numbers consumers the artist will never meet. That's a lot different than having to find *one* rich patron, convince him to give you money, and then keep him happy while you are completing the monumental work he can show his buddies as proof of his wealth and refinement. But despite this the product artist doesn't have *less* interference in his work because of another important related point: mass marketed products are collective efforts. So when you're a video game artist you don't just have your boss to deal with, you have committees and departments, and unless I miss my guess that will include people who have their own ideas about how your work should turn out, not necessarily as informed as they think it is. Not only do you have what amounts to a committee directing your art, and they aren't supposed to be doing it based on their own tastes, but on what they think the taste of a typical consumer in some market segment will be (or perhaps advancing their own tastes under that flag) and other factors like what the consumer's parents will think of your work (which might cut either way).
None of which is to say that you aren't producing art or aren't being creative. Nor is it saying that *fine art* (which is not necessarily better art) isn't influenced by venal considerations. But the essential element of fine art is that it represents primarily the creative vision of a single artist or perhaps the work of several artists working together because of a shared vision. That's part of the cachet of fine art to the patron. He wants to point up at the ceiling of his chapel and say to his buddies, "That Michelangelo is undoubtedly the greatest creative genius of our age, and don't forget he works for me. Look, I had him put Rodrigo Borgia in Hell, get the hint?"
There's no doubt that this aspect of fine art is a corrupting influence on taste, just as surely as mass marketing considerations can be. That's why people turn to folk and decorative arts. For example the Mingei movement in Japan focuses on inexpensive, functional objects hand-made by anonymous craftsmen for daily use. That is not art made without commercial concern, but it is as close to capturing the aesthetic vision of an individual artist in tangible form as we'll ever get. I think this is a very geek friendly aesthetic, because it's all about cool, well designed things.
I think the real limitation on games as aesthetically significant works is not their *commercial* nature, but the *collective* manner in which they are made, which limits individual creative freedom and risk taking. Novels are written to be sold, but for the most part they reflect the creative vision of the author, who until he is a known quantity underwrites the labor of creation. The exception are category novels like romances. There's no reason a romance novel can't be great art but we don't expect that. The reason is that they're written to specification. I have a friend who has two fantasy novels coming out next year with Tor. She's sold a third novel to a different publisher as a paranormal romance, and the editors are making her rework it to the remarkably precise specifications of their line. For example, it had to come in at around 80,000 words, have four to five explicit sex scenes, the first of which occurs before the 25,000 word mark.
Which is not to say that we won't ever see a game that is an important aesthetic landmark in our culture. We may already have, since historically we're bad at recognizing great art. *Casablanca* was a throw-away movie, generally well received, but I doubt anyone realized it was a cultural landmark. The only reason we remember it today is that it was cheap fodder for low-rent media outlets, and it somehow connected with later generations.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be much better & cheaper to create a global space agency. Use the best technology from all the member countries.
Well, as a friend of mine likes to say, "In theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they're different."
In theory you've envisioned a Utopia in which every country puts its national security and economic interests after the common good of humanity when they decide on the "best technology". In practice you'll get a life and death struggle to preserve the jobs and prestige of having major system components designed and built in your country, not to mention the bonus of being able to veto any space project you want by withholding those components. Russia thinks that satellite has defense applications, so no booster for you. China doesn't like the fact your communication system doesn't play nice with their political filters so you'll have to power it with a wind-up spring instead of solar panels. And the Canada(tm) is mad at you because you failed to mention the robot arm was built there, so they're taking it back.
It's not that I think people are inevitable corrupt and venal, it's that if you get enough of them together inevitably some of them will be corrupt and venal. If there is enough money, power and prestige involved they'll be easy to spot because they'll be the ones in charge.
Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that this is a defamation case, but really the verdict was that Mr. Hoff had invaded Mr. Moore's *privacy* by committing "tortious interference". In other words he maliciously stuck his nose into Mr. Jordan's business. Let's take a critical look at this notion that freedom of speech justifies any communication that is true, and then let's look at *this* case.
Freedom of speech isn't the only freedom we cherish. We also cherish privacy. In a sense these rights emerge from a deeper, more fundamental right: the right to conduct your affairs without interference. In practice these rights often come into conflict unless we define them fairly carefully. Tortious interference is a perfect vehicle to study this conflict, because it is free of extraneous detail. It's easy to categorically put libel or fraud outside the pale of free speech because they are malicious and false. From a utilitarian perspective false, malicious speech serves no positive function in society. From an ethical perspective that stresses duties and rights, nobody has a right to spread malicious lies. But tortious interference is interesting because it can involve something that plays an important positive role in society: bringing unwelcome truths to someone's attention.
Is it even possible to tell the truth in a way that violates somebody's rights? I think so. Extortion can involve true allegations. If it were your right to spread any truthful fact in your possession, then why shouldn't extortion be legal? I could enter into a contract with you right now in which I gave you $10 in exchange for your never saying anything bad about my Slashdot posts. You're bartering away your right to free speech in that case, so why not allow extortionists to do the same thing? Because extortionists make their victim pay for something he by rights should enjoy for free: non-interference in his personal affairs.
Suppose your ex-girlfriend's boss works for a boss who is a conservative Christian. You want to get her fired, so you call her boss up and tell him that she had an abortion. If you like you can flip around the political affiliations and make the victim a conservative Christian and her boss a pro-choice activist. In either case her job is none of your business and if you use your knowledge of the truth to get her fired, you're violating her rights.
Whether Mr. Moore was wronged by Mr. Hoff boils down to two questions. (1) Did Mr. Hoff actually take steps with the intention of getting Mr. Moore fired and (2) was Mr. Moore's employment any of Mr. Hoff's business? I actually think Mr. Hoff didn't engineer Mr. Moore's firing. Mr. Moore was a well known public figure whose career Mr. Hoff had followed and discussed publicly. He remained a public figure, and Mr. Hoff continued to discuss his career, albeit disparagingly. That got to the ears of Mr. Moore's employers and they fired him. Mr. Hoff cheered this development and took credit for it, but that's not quite the same as taking credit for *engineering* the dismissal.
If that's so, we don't even get to the really interesting question: did Mr. Hoff have any right to get Mr. Moore fired. Even though U of Mn is a public institution, I don't think that makes everybody who works there "fair game". Nor is every former public figure fair game. I think Mr. Hoff would have to have some rational purpose in getting Mr. Moore fired, such as Mr. Moore being in a position to gain improper personal benefits (given his involvement with questionable characters), or even Mr. Moore having substantial power to influence policy in ways that Mr. Hoff didn't like. I don't think either of those are the case here, so *if* Mr. Hoff engineered Mr. Moore's dismissal, he'd be sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. If Mr. Moore lost his job because of this employer's reaction to Mr. Hoff's unflattering discussion, but it wasn't Hoff's *intent* to get Moore fired, then Hoff is off the hook, even if he danced for joy at the news.
If there is any clear wro
I dunno. I have a rooted Nook Color and all the phone oriented apps I've used on it have worked remarkably well, even though the tablet lacks the standard complement of Android phone hardware buttons.
I've done mobile app UI design, so I know you can't just take an app designed for, say, a laptop and expect the UI to work on a phone. It's possible that some apps designed for a 3" mobile phone screen might appear cartoonishly absurd blown up to 7", but I haven't run into anything like that yet. I suppose there might be some kind of magical boiling point between 7" and 10" which would make the apps I've tried thus far into unusable garbage, but I can't see why off the top of my head. Maybe a full screen calculator designed for smart phone would be bigger than optimal on a Xoom, but I haven't found scaling up most smartphone apps to tablet size to be a problem. Not at 7", at least. On the other hand I *have* found apps that work very nicely on the Nook but I think would have been UI garbage on a smartphone sized screen.
Many apps could be redesigned to take advantage of the greater real estate on a tablet. They Honeycomb home screen is an example of that. But if you're telling people they'll be sitting around with their $800 Xoom with only a couple of dozen apps that are even usable on it, that's pure FUD.
Ah. Paid by the word, was he?
Yeah, I reread what I wrote and see what you mean. It's called "grading on a curve."
The worst case is Chernobyl style radiological disaster, next to which a hydrogen explosion is no big deal and which a hydrogen explosion does not necessarily portend. In fact a hydrogen explosion is a possible side effect of steps to prevent a more serious steam explosion that would breach the reactor vessel and primary containment.
What's worrisome is that the second explosion injured so many workers. How did that happen, especially after the explosion in No. 1? It makes me think they seriously misread the condition of the No. 3 reactor.
Because of the various reactor designs, news on what is happening in Fukushima is difficult to interpret. Some reports say that "secondary containment" has been destroyed, but then illustrate that with a totally different reactor design in which the "secondary containment" structure is supposed to contain a core meltdown after a reactor vessel ruptures. That's not what happened here. Had that happened, it would probably be game over, because they'd probably have lost any control of the reactor along with the final line of defense against major environmental contamination. What appears to have happened is that the outermost shell of the reactor building was destroyed. It was designed with blow away panels for just this kind of scenario, so the destruction of the outer building doesn't imply the complete loss of control that the complete destruction of the containment structure containing the drywall would have spelled.
That doesn't make all this a happy scenario. Not by a long shot. But none of the specific information I've seen so far suggests that we aren't heading for a Three Mile Island style resolution in which environmental and health damage outside the plant is extremely limited. I hope officials are prudent and prepare for a much worse scenario than that, although under the circumstances that's going to be a challenge.
One of the many important lessons of TMI is how fallible people are at inferring the state of a complex system in unusual circumstances. Furthermore the *initial* state of a complex system at the outset of an even like this might not be what it is supposed to be. TMI-2's auxiliary coolant system was down for maintenance, which should not have been allowed unless TMI-2 was shut down. Right from the outset of the incident was that the operators consistently fit the data they had into incorrect models of the system's state.
The unreliability of human decision making in these conditions is why fourth generation reactor designs are much less complex and in some cases passively safe.
So the lesson here is to treat situational assessments in this kind of incident as highly suspect. The hydrogen explosions per se are not anything to be particularly concerned about, but I think we can take them as evidence that the operators don't have the plant under control. For example, the *second* explosion injured eleven workers, so even though the operators clearly knew that additional explosions were possible, they still had workers in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite the complexity of TMI's design, the defense in depth in that design succesfullly prevented serious public health or environmental damage from the TMI incident despite inevitable human error. I expect the same will happen in Fukushima. But there are no guarantees until the situation has been stabilized.
Well, what you're saying is that the HDMI connection doesn't have value for most people. That's a legitimate point. I bought the video out connector for my iPod touch, but most people didn't. I'd like to have a cheaper solution mostly integrated into the device, but clearly most people would prefer a lower price.
Most people *won't* want an HDMI connection, but most people won't buy a tablet in the first place. You don't design a product for *everyone*; you design a product to look like an attractive deal to some subset of everyone. Likewise if you design something like a tablet, your design specs reflect what you think will maximize your profit, not necessarily your units sold. Motorola clearly positioned their product to be attractive to high end customers. Why did they do that, and not match Apple feature for feature at each price level? I think because they don't *want* to.
I suspect the calculus may have went like this. At the $500 entry point, they're going to have to compete with both Apple, and cheap Android tablets costing hundreds of dollars less. At the $800 level its a different ball game. They can turn a profit selling a small number of units, leaving the volume android market to players like Archos, thus establishing themselves as a premium brand. At $500, if Apple sold 10x the number of iPad2s as Motorola sold Xooms, everyone would call Xoom a failure even if it turned a profit. Not so at $800, which is not a segment where volume counts so much. Nobody looks at the gross units sold for Porsche and compares that to Ferrari. Once they establish themselves as a critical success and the low rent Android vendors start chipping away at platform numbers, they can consider whether they want to address a higher volume market segment or not.
If that is their strategy, I'm not saying it's the best possible strategy. What I'm saying is that it's not necessarily totally incomprehensible and irrational. Personally, I think bracketing Apple's entry level offering would be a better strategy, but that depends on how much capital you have to play with. You can't judge a business strategy without looking at opportunity costs and how they limit the resources a company can bring to bear on a market. Here's a question: if you had a choice of putting your chips on a single price point, would that be below Apple or above? My personal inclination would be below, but it's a crowded space.
Well, I can see both positions.
I'd say the strongest argument in favor of notability is to curb promotion, either self-promotion or narrow advocates. Furthermore, the "no original research" criterion is closely related to the "notability" criterion, and is especially important if you want an anonymously/pseudonymously editable reference to be credible (acknowledging of course that this is probably in fact a lost cause). Theoretically, if the criteria were applied consistently and fairly (acknowledging also that this is a known sore point), then you wouldn't have to trust the unknown authors of an article.
That is in accord with the way a sensible person would use Wikipedia when dealing with something he cared about. He'd read the article, but then follow up the references to see if the article was on the level. The reason that the application of the rules is so arbitrary is that it really isn't that important in many cases. Sure if you are looking up a disease you have, it's critical that the article contain reliable citations and not "original research" (which typically means opinions the writer has pulled out of his ass). If you're looking up "Old Man Murray", who the hell cares if it's the writer's personal opinion?