I won't disagree he needs to control his mouth better. His flu remarks were just plain dumb.
On the other hand, this is no big deal. If somebody wants to target ICBMs to take out the US government's top echelon, they aren't going to skip the old naval observatory because "oh, the veep is in his secret bunker". In any case, the Bush administration pretty much spilled the beans when they had the veep's residence obscured in public imagery data sets.
At least that is the name that rhetoricians use for it: referring to a thing by something associated with it.
When we call soldiers "boots on the ground" that is metonymy. A special case is synecdoche, using the part for the whole ("blade" for "sword").
In any case, its wired into human language and thought. If you look in a dictionary, you'll find words with three or more definitions. Usually there is a process of metonymy going on. "Justice" entered the English language meaning something to mete punishment or reward according to the right of the recipient. It has come to mean a lot of other things: fairness, righteousness, the law, a judge or other legal official, etc.
To be fair, there isn't really much practical value for a "human like" AI. The only reason to create such a thing is curiosity.
On the other hand, lots of things modern software does would formerly have been considered "intelligent". Even simple calculations. We forget that originally computers were called "electronic computers"; the noun "computer" referred to a profession, one that took a great deal of intelligence to master.
On the other hand, they were immensely strong. Anatomical studies of things like muscle attachments points indicate that they were as much a 3x the strength of a modern human. They are also quite brainy: they made tools and weapons and must have hunted cooperatively because they sometimes went after big game, like mammoth.
So, slow and tasty they might be, but since they were armed with clubs and spears and were probably strong enough to rip your arms off with their bare hands, they weren't exactly easy pickings. If modern humans ate them, it was probably in the context of warfare -- as in the case of historically documented modern human cannibalism.
I wonder whether Neanderthal strength was too much of a good thing. Modern humans don't need it. Neanderthal skeletons indicate a rough life -- lots of broken bones. Some have suggested they jumped on moderate sized prey and wrestled it to the ground for the kill. It's pretty bad-ass, to be sure, but unnecessary for a creature with a brain that size. Modern humans, being weaker, have greater incentive to improve their tactics and weapons, and in the long term that beats out any conceivable degree of physical strength.
It's clearly not the case that the first derivative of the status quo is not a constant. Likewise I can think of things that are a constant that are not change (e.g. the number grams in a kilogram). Altogether I think that whoever it is who comes up with these expressions is not mathematically or scientifically literate.
I mean, take a saying like "the more things change, the more things stay the same." What are we supposed to make of that?
Well, you should go one step further and ask, why build something like this at all when you can buy a finished product for less, if you count your time worth anything?
The reason to use the piezo buzzer is simple: you've got one in your parts box and you're curious what you could do with it besides make a buzzing sound. It's like what somebody said about dogs who've been trained to walk: it's not that they do it well, it's that they do it at all.
With respect to the use of a single transistor, that's educational. Yeah, you can get a better IC amp, but then you can buy a better finished device. You learn something different by using discrete components. Of course, you could do a more elaborate discrete amplifier, but then you put off the satisfaction of seeing the blinken' lights that much longer.
Years and years ago when I was at MIT, there was a kid who commuted to campus in a homemade electric car. It wasn't a very good car. For the money and effort he put into it, he could have bought a cheap gasoline car and tinkered with that. For that matter, I don't think his car was much better than a bike. The same kind of arguments you are making could apply to that.
When, other than when you are learning, can you do something differently than by the book, just for the fun of seeing it work?
How many buggy whip manufacturers are there today? Quite a few actually, if you bothered to look. In any case, buggy whip manufacture never was something done on an industrial scale. Buggies were not anything like as common as cars are today. It was never an important industry.
In any case, the thing you're missing is that the primary product of newspapers wasn't the sheaf of paper you could hold in your hand; it was knowledge. Knowledge isn't a commodity like a buggy whip, or an hour or so's entertainment at the drive in. We are enriched as much if not more by others around us having knowledge than our own knowledge itself.
Newspapers as an artifact aren't important. As organizations for generating knowledge about current events, they are indispensable. A mediocre newspaper does vastly more story development than the best newscast.
The salient characteristic of the Internet in the funding of knowledge generation is that Internet is funded by huge volumes of tiny transactions. This means that you want knowledge with wide appeal and low cost. Expensive local news gathering is out, and the national political opinion echo chamber is in. It probably cost the Boston Globe a half million dollars to break the clergy sex abuse scandal. Countless other organizations made money off of writing opinion pieces on that. That's the future of news: less fact gathering, more opinion spreading. In the end, "news" will simply be the upper echelon of the blogosphere.
The positive side might be "crowd sourced" news. That's certainly a bright spot. But while that's find for getting pictures of an airliner that ditches in the Hudson river, it's no substitute for going after a story.
was for developers to stop creating their own interfaces for things like printing or saving files. Our applications would be more usable if we just used the underlying platform's routines and conventions.
I wonder whether Office turning its back on Windows UI conventions isn't a long term hedge against the desktop OS monopoly collapsing. Without a monopoly, is Windows worth the effort and cost for Microsoft?
Imagine that Windows fails. Office remains an economically important platform. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a return to the days of dedicated word processing hardware, with devices that "run office".
I hate that kind of thinking. It can be used to justify anything. It doesn't matter if I happen to agree with you on some aspects of the IP debate. It's the same reasoning as "9/11 changed everything." It didn't change anything, it just brought certain things that were always true into the public debate. It was always true that we were subject to terrorist attack. It was always true that copyright was not a true property right, but a clever and technology specific arrangement in the public interest: to enable creative people to support themselves without resort to patronage. In a way it's ironic that huge intellectual property companies and cartels are dominating the debate, since the whole point of copyright was to enable the development of a kind of independent, creative yeomanry.
In any case, the quote in question ("Iâ(TM)m a guy who doesnâ(TM)t see anything good having come from the Internet") pretty much says this guy is not qualified for his job. As CEO of a large entertainment company, his job is to find "something good" (i.e., profitable), in particular something good his competitors have overlooked. Instead, he's effectively confessing his leadership incompetence. The world is changing and he doesn't know how to make money in the new world. I doubt he's even on top of half his business. Last time I checked his company made a game console with Internet connectivity that his customers use to play multiplayer games.
War is so intimately part of human language and thought that it's hard to avoid the metaphor. I suppose there are only a small number of game paradigms possible: war, hunting, exploration, perhaps a few like that.
Thee question "when is it OK" is easy. The answer is "Whenever there is no reasonable ground to object." The question "What are all the reasonable grounds to object?" is what is unanswerable. We have to be specific.
I can think of two grounds for objecting to the game in question; whether these apply in fact I cannot say, not having played the game myself.
The first charge might be that it is propaganda. While war as a metaphor is very common, shooting games are not metaphorical. They present models of war; they immerse the player in an artificially constructed experience of war, sanitized from the real, raw emotion, human pain, and political nuance. This is not a problem for chess because chess is evidently metaphorical, and not an immersive experience. One is not going to take any conclusions about real conflicts, the real actions of individuals, or real historical issues from a game of chess.
This charge is particularly worth considering in games that model real historical situations, particularly ones that are driving current events. However the charge could be extended to immersive combat games in general, to anything that presents a sanitized pseudo-experience of violence against people.
The second grounds might be one of privacy or perhaps in this case decency. There is a kind of intrusion involved in representing what was a horrific experience of real marines, many whom are still serving or who perhaps have returned from the battle with psychological or physical wounds. To treat those experiences as light entertainment bespeaks a lack of appreciation. Another consideration are those who still serve in Iraq; to turn of the civilian suffering and physical damage to the city into entertainment is certainly callous towards the Iraqi survivors, and might well endanger US troops still serving there.
Personally, I would have grave doubts in participating in creation of a game that represented a battle in a still ongoing war. It is irresponsible and in bad taste. However, I don't think this game would add very much to the net bad taste and irresponsibility in the world, nor would banning it subtract much from the stupidity and banality everywhere.
For that reason, I'm not for banning anything. The right answer to propaganda is the truth; or at least to shine light on the truth from a different direction. The movie "Three Kings" is a comedy about the first Gulf War -- you might say that it is open to the same charge of treating real pain as a subject for laughs. However, I think it isn't just played for laughs. The bitter irony of the film is an attempt to speak what the filmmakers saw as an unspoken truth.
Ultimately, that's the only answer to propaganda: to show the missing pieces of the truth. The only answer to ignorance is education. The only answer to bad taste is better taste.
Speaking of which , I am reading Fagles' translation of the Iliad. Highly recommended..
Well, not to endorse the "Java is slow" meme or anything, but starting from a red light I can beat most cars across the intersection on my bike.
Likewise if I had to drive across country in the shortest time possible, I'd choose a Ford F250 if the challenge stipulated I had to bring 3000 pounds of bricks with me.
It's the subtle way I slipped in the absurd notion that a slashdotter knows any females. The way that we refer to the opposite sex as "females" is in large part responsible for this.
it might also influence the thinking of UFO chasers but that won't help determine whether they're piloted by little green men.
Well, the little green men are probably here because they use the cold, nutrient rich waters of the Western Current to irrigate the symbiotic culture of blue-green algae that colors their skin and from which their bloodstream harvests ATP molecules.
sheesh. Don't they teach kids how to do fluid dynamics calculations with billions upon billions of variables all of which change over with time and depend on a multitude of other models which themselves have varying levels of accuracy to their data these days.
My wife went to grad school in physical oceanography (at WHOI, it turns out).
One of my MIT buddies was this guy who pretty much finished up course 18 (Mathematics) undergrad requirements at the end of his sophomore year, and spent the next two years studying these really thin, expensive, and badly printed books of what looked like the output of a line printer on the wrong parity setting. I knew my then girlfriend was in trouble when I told this guy what she was studying and he was impressed.
But you know what? That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
Perhaps you are getting cause and effect mixed up. Maybe your girlfriends are that way because that's your idea of feminine you received from your family.
In any case, I'm a man, and I like to cook. And at my age, I do have to count calories. Even so, I wouldn't buy a notebook "geared" toward people who like to cook and are watching their weight. I can do that for myself, thank you very much. That is the condescending part, the assumption that they've got to do this for the ladies, who can't figure it out themselves. Just think about how much you hate that bloatware that comes on new computers, then imagine how much more annoying it would be if it came with the message, "we're putting this bloatware in special for you because you're a girl."
As for pink, well, as a man, I've got nothing against it. I dyed my martial arts uniform burgundy, and it came out a very pretty rose pink. I decided to use it anyway. I figured there'd be nothing like getting your ass kicked by a two hundred and twenty pound man in a uniform the color of.. hmm... persian rose I'd say. If I could buy a laptop for $20 cheaper because it was pink, I'd do it. I don't much care for scented candles, but I'd use one in a blackout. My wife, on the other hand, would rather sit in the dark, because she can't stand anything scented. She doesn't like pink or purple; her favorite color is gray.
The idea that women luuve pink is ridiculous. Adult women in my experience (other than my wife) choose their favorite color by what is flattering on them due to their complexion, hair and eye color.
The best generalization you can make about women is that they have about half the upper body strength of men on average. Therefore a solid, well constructed laptop that was nonetheless light weight is how I'd target the female market. I don't mind lugging around a seven or eight pound laptop, but a woman once she has her garment bag and suitcase would probably appreciate a few pounds less to carry.
Symbolic appeal is very much different from aesthetic appeal.
I think the problem with Iwo Jima is that it is in black and white and the system is designed to rank color images, according to TFA. However, I think we can see a certain... similarity between the two pictures. One of the criteria for a composition is how the eye is drawn to a focal point in an image. In the Iwo Jima photo, the mound of the hill is sharpened by the triangular form of the squad and the flagpole, drawing the eye to the flag. I think we can conclude that it is an unusually strong composition.
As for Mr. Goatse... Well, I suppose if we judge it by the same criterion it'd have to be pretty good.
Speaking of cold war, my late father-in-law was an inertial guidance system engineer. He designed gyros. Remember the whole business about gimbel lock in Apollo 13? That was one of the gyros he worked on. One time he visited the naval air station at Alameda with a portable inertial guidance device, and discovered that the base didn't know where it was. The coordinates the base had were hundreds of meters off.
I was in on some early uses of GPS and maps, and let me tell you that maps based on the old surveying techniques can be wrong, particularly in coastal areas, because of failure to account for local gravitational anomalies caused by the variations in the thickness of the Earth's crust.
In any case, it sounds like positional accuracy wouldn't have been the issue. No GPS device can give you a heading. I don't know too much about LORAN but I think it works on similar principles; it doesn't tell you which way you're pointed. The GPS system doesn't give headings, but the device can interpolate a a "speed and heading made good" by looking at the trend in fixes. I believe LORAN works the same way.
In any case, such calculations can't be relied upon in coastal areas, precisely because of currents, which change from place to place. The pilot of a vessel who runs aground because he relied on GPS is still at fault because you shouldn't rely on GPS in such places.
No, we're talking past each other, making different, although not incompatible points.
My characterizing of task types was not meant to be exclusive; we might well add a fourth category of tasks whose component subtasks have no demonstrably optimal method.
It seems to me that this issue has different dimensions, some of which are fluid, others of which are not.
You would not expect the so called czar to direct a response to an attack by himself. That's not feasible. However the czar could oversee the aspects of the problem that are repeatable, for example ensuring training programs exist for system administrators; making sure groups working with critical systems have contingency plans; ensuring that vulnerability testing is done; investigating open installations which haven't installed recommended security patches. That sort of thing.
When an attack on a large scale occurs, then there needs to be a team in place to coordinate the response. That team will move to fast for some administrator to make all the decisions. But who ensures the team exists, and is ready, trained and equipped?
No, I think this would be a very useful position, so long as we don't think of security per se as someting that can be produced by he fiat of a centrally managed bureaucracy. There are multiple styles of organizational preparation needed to promote security, and some of those responses are dependent on repeated, efficient execution of reasonably routine tasks like training.
Well, what are the requirements of an encyclopedia?
You will find that when it comes to consistent scholarly accountability, Brittanica is the way to go. If responsiveness to changing needs is at a premium, Wikipedia is far more useful, albeit not entirely reliable. No responsive medium could be.
Top down works -- for managing the efficient, repeated performance of a task with well defined and stable success criteria, and where performance can be improved incrementally by local adjustments. Top down has a place in the world. When consistent is at a premium, top down is the way to go.
Bottom up works too -- for tasks that involve things that are too complex and fluid for a single person or chain of command to comprehend and react to. Where creativity is at a premium, bottom up is the way to go.
No structure works too -- for tasks where there is a body of people who understand every part of that task. Think a Shaker barn raising. When you have a body of people who've mastered every aspect of a task and everyone can see what task needs more hands, then no structure is the way to go.
It seems to me that something like cybersecurity needs a bit of each approach. It's organizationally difficult, if not impossible to approach such a problem perfectly. However, I think the rough appearance of a structure to handle this would be top down with expertise pushed out to the various groups in the organization and discretion allowed.
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I won't disagree he needs to control his mouth better. His flu remarks were just plain dumb.
On the other hand, this is no big deal. If somebody wants to target ICBMs to take out the US government's top echelon, they aren't going to skip the old naval observatory because "oh, the veep is in his secret bunker". In any case, the Bush administration pretty much spilled the beans when they had the veep's residence obscured in public imagery data sets.
At least that is the name that rhetoricians use for it: referring to a thing by something associated with it.
When we call soldiers "boots on the ground" that is metonymy. A special case is synecdoche, using the part for the whole ("blade" for "sword").
In any case, its wired into human language and thought. If you look in a dictionary, you'll find words with three or more definitions. Usually there is a process of metonymy going on. "Justice" entered the English language meaning something to mete punishment or reward according to the right of the recipient. It has come to mean a lot of other things: fairness, righteousness, the law, a judge or other legal official, etc.
To be fair, there isn't really much practical value for a "human like" AI. The only reason to create such a thing is curiosity.
On the other hand, lots of things modern software does would formerly have been considered "intelligent". Even simple calculations. We forget that originally computers were called "electronic computers"; the noun "computer" referred to a profession, one that took a great deal of intelligence to master.
On the other hand, they were immensely strong. Anatomical studies of things like muscle attachments points indicate that they were as much a 3x the strength of a modern human. They are also quite brainy: they made tools and weapons and must have hunted cooperatively because they sometimes went after big game, like mammoth.
So, slow and tasty they might be, but since they were armed with clubs and spears and were probably strong enough to rip your arms off with their bare hands, they weren't exactly easy pickings. If modern humans ate them, it was probably in the context of warfare -- as in the case of historically documented modern human cannibalism.
I wonder whether Neanderthal strength was too much of a good thing. Modern humans don't need it. Neanderthal skeletons indicate a rough life -- lots of broken bones. Some have suggested they jumped on moderate sized prey and wrestled it to the ground for the kill. It's pretty bad-ass, to be sure, but unnecessary for a creature with a brain that size. Modern humans, being weaker, have greater incentive to improve their tactics and weapons, and in the long term that beats out any conceivable degree of physical strength.
Well, what is a species? Does putting a name on an animal decide whether it is human or not?
Species are names for contiguous regions in gene space. That is all.
It's clearly not the case that the first derivative of the status quo is not a constant. Likewise I can think of things that are a constant that are not change (e.g. the number grams in a kilogram). Altogether I think that whoever it is who comes up with these expressions is not mathematically or scientifically literate.
I mean, take a saying like "the more things change, the more things stay the same." What are we supposed to make of that?
Well, you should go one step further and ask, why build something like this at all when you can buy a finished product for less, if you count your time worth anything?
The reason to use the piezo buzzer is simple: you've got one in your parts box and you're curious what you could do with it besides make a buzzing sound. It's like what somebody said about dogs who've been trained to walk: it's not that they do it well, it's that they do it at all.
With respect to the use of a single transistor, that's educational. Yeah, you can get a better IC amp, but then you can buy a better finished device. You learn something different by using discrete components. Of course, you could do a more elaborate discrete amplifier, but then you put off the satisfaction of seeing the blinken' lights that much longer.
Years and years ago when I was at MIT, there was a kid who commuted to campus in a homemade electric car. It wasn't a very good car. For the money and effort he put into it, he could have bought a cheap gasoline car and tinkered with that. For that matter, I don't think his car was much better than a bike. The same kind of arguments you are making could apply to that.
When, other than when you are learning, can you do something differently than by the book, just for the fun of seeing it work?
How many buggy whip manufacturers are there today? Quite a few actually, if you bothered to look. In any case, buggy whip manufacture never was something done on an industrial scale. Buggies were not anything like as common as cars are today. It was never an important industry.
In any case, the thing you're missing is that the primary product of newspapers wasn't the sheaf of paper you could hold in your hand; it was knowledge. Knowledge isn't a commodity like a buggy whip, or an hour or so's entertainment at the drive in. We are enriched as much if not more by others around us having knowledge than our own knowledge itself.
Newspapers as an artifact aren't important. As organizations for generating knowledge about current events, they are indispensable. A mediocre newspaper does vastly more story development than the best newscast.
The salient characteristic of the Internet in the funding of knowledge generation is that Internet is funded by huge volumes of tiny transactions. This means that you want knowledge with wide appeal and low cost. Expensive local news gathering is out, and the national political opinion echo chamber is in. It probably cost the Boston Globe a half million dollars to break the clergy sex abuse scandal. Countless other organizations made money off of writing opinion pieces on that. That's the future of news: less fact gathering, more opinion spreading. In the end, "news" will simply be the upper echelon of the blogosphere.
The positive side might be "crowd sourced" news. That's certainly a bright spot. But while that's find for getting pictures of an airliner that ditches in the Hudson river, it's no substitute for going after a story.
... It's the Eye of Sauron.
Ha! I know it can't be a fruit fly on a honeydew, because according to Groucho Marx, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
was for developers to stop creating their own interfaces for things like printing or saving files. Our applications would be more usable if we just used the underlying platform's routines and conventions.
I wonder whether Office turning its back on Windows UI conventions isn't a long term hedge against the desktop OS monopoly collapsing. Without a monopoly, is Windows worth the effort and cost for Microsoft?
Imagine that Windows fails. Office remains an economically important platform. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a return to the days of dedicated word processing hardware, with devices that "run office".
I hate that kind of thinking. It can be used to justify anything. It doesn't matter if I happen to agree with you on some aspects of the IP debate. It's the same reasoning as "9/11 changed everything." It didn't change anything, it just brought certain things that were always true into the public debate. It was always true that we were subject to terrorist attack. It was always true that copyright was not a true property right, but a clever and technology specific arrangement in the public interest: to enable creative people to support themselves without resort to patronage. In a way it's ironic that huge intellectual property companies and cartels are dominating the debate, since the whole point of copyright was to enable the development of a kind of independent, creative yeomanry.
In any case, the quote in question ("Iâ(TM)m a guy who doesnâ(TM)t see anything good having come from the Internet") pretty much says this guy is not qualified for his job. As CEO of a large entertainment company, his job is to find "something good" (i.e., profitable), in particular something good his competitors have overlooked. Instead, he's effectively confessing his leadership incompetence. The world is changing and he doesn't know how to make money in the new world. I doubt he's even on top of half his business. Last time I checked his company made a game console with Internet connectivity that his customers use to play multiplayer games.
War is so intimately part of human language and thought that it's hard to avoid the metaphor. I suppose there are only a small number of game paradigms possible: war, hunting, exploration, perhaps a few like that.
Thee question "when is it OK" is easy. The answer is "Whenever there is no reasonable ground to object." The question "What are all the reasonable grounds to object?" is what is unanswerable. We have to be specific.
I can think of two grounds for objecting to the game in question; whether these apply in fact I cannot say, not having played the game myself.
The first charge might be that it is propaganda. While war as a metaphor is very common, shooting games are not metaphorical. They present models of war; they immerse the player in an artificially constructed experience of war, sanitized from the real, raw emotion, human pain, and political nuance. This is not a problem for chess because chess is evidently metaphorical, and not an immersive experience. One is not going to take any conclusions about real conflicts, the real actions of individuals, or real historical issues from a game of chess.
This charge is particularly worth considering in games that model real historical situations, particularly ones that are driving current events. However the charge could be extended to immersive combat games in general, to anything that presents a sanitized pseudo-experience of violence against people.
The second grounds might be one of privacy or perhaps in this case decency. There is a kind of intrusion involved in representing what was a horrific experience of real marines, many whom are still serving or who perhaps have returned from the battle with psychological or physical wounds. To treat those experiences as light entertainment bespeaks a lack of appreciation. Another consideration are those who still serve in Iraq; to turn of the civilian suffering and physical damage to the city into entertainment is certainly callous towards the Iraqi survivors, and might well endanger US troops still serving there.
Personally, I would have grave doubts in participating in creation of a game that represented a battle in a still ongoing war. It is irresponsible and in bad taste. However, I don't think this game would add very much to the net bad taste and irresponsibility in the world, nor would banning it subtract much from the stupidity and banality everywhere.
For that reason, I'm not for banning anything. The right answer to propaganda is the truth; or at least to shine light on the truth from a different direction. The movie "Three Kings" is a comedy about the first Gulf War -- you might say that it is open to the same charge of treating real pain as a subject for laughs. However, I think it isn't just played for laughs. The bitter irony of the film is an attempt to speak what the filmmakers saw as an unspoken truth.
Ultimately, that's the only answer to propaganda: to show the missing pieces of the truth. The only answer to ignorance is education. The only answer to bad taste is better taste.
Speaking of which , I am reading Fagles' translation of the Iliad. Highly recommended..
Well, not to endorse the "Java is slow" meme or anything, but starting from a red light I can beat most cars across the intersection on my bike.
Likewise if I had to drive across country in the shortest time possible, I'd choose a Ford F250 if the challenge stipulated I had to bring 3000 pounds of bricks with me.
Speed is a very task specific notion.
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't get it.
It's the subtle way I slipped in the absurd notion that a slashdotter knows any females. The way that we refer to the opposite sex as "females" is in large part responsible for this.
it might also influence the thinking of UFO chasers but that won't help determine whether they're piloted by little green men.
Well, the little green men are probably here because they use the cold, nutrient rich waters of the Western Current to irrigate the symbiotic culture of blue-green algae that colors their skin and from which their bloodstream harvests ATP molecules.
sheesh. Don't they teach kids how to do fluid dynamics calculations with billions upon billions of variables all of which change over with time and depend on a multitude of other models which themselves have varying levels of accuracy to their data these days.
My wife went to grad school in physical oceanography (at WHOI, it turns out).
One of my MIT buddies was this guy who pretty much finished up course 18 (Mathematics) undergrad requirements at the end of his sophomore year, and spent the next two years studying these really thin, expensive, and badly printed books of what looked like the output of a line printer on the wrong parity setting. I knew my then girlfriend was in trouble when I told this guy what she was studying and he was impressed.
But you know what? That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
Perhaps you are getting cause and effect mixed up. Maybe your girlfriends are that way because that's your idea of feminine you received from your family.
In any case, I'm a man, and I like to cook. And at my age, I do have to count calories. Even so, I wouldn't buy a notebook "geared" toward people who like to cook and are watching their weight. I can do that for myself, thank you very much. That is the condescending part, the assumption that they've got to do this for the ladies, who can't figure it out themselves. Just think about how much you hate that bloatware that comes on new computers, then imagine how much more annoying it would be if it came with the message, "we're putting this bloatware in special for you because you're a girl."
As for pink, well, as a man, I've got nothing against it. I dyed my martial arts uniform burgundy, and it came out a very pretty rose pink. I decided to use it anyway. I figured there'd be nothing like getting your ass kicked by a two hundred and twenty pound man in a uniform the color of .. hmm ... persian rose I'd say. If I could buy a laptop for $20 cheaper because it was pink, I'd do it. I don't much care for scented candles, but I'd use one in a blackout. My wife, on the other hand, would rather sit in the dark, because she can't stand anything scented. She doesn't like pink or purple; her favorite color is gray.
The idea that women luuve pink is ridiculous. Adult women in my experience (other than my wife) choose their favorite color by what is flattering on them due to their complexion, hair and eye color.
The best generalization you can make about women is that they have about half the upper body strength of men on average. Therefore a solid, well constructed laptop that was nonetheless light weight is how I'd target the female market. I don't mind lugging around a seven or eight pound laptop, but a woman once she has her garment bag and suitcase would probably appreciate a few pounds less to carry.
Symbolic appeal is very much different from aesthetic appeal.
I think the problem with Iwo Jima is that it is in black and white and the system is designed to rank color images, according to TFA. However, I think we can see a certain ... similarity between the two pictures. One of the criteria for a composition is how the eye is drawn to a focal point in an image. In the Iwo Jima photo, the mound of the hill is sharpened by the triangular form of the squad and the flagpole, drawing the eye to the flag. I think we can conclude that it is an unusually strong composition.
As for Mr. Goatse ... Well, I suppose if we judge it by the same criterion it'd have to be pretty good.
Speaking of cold war, my late father-in-law was an inertial guidance system engineer. He designed gyros. Remember the whole business about gimbel lock in Apollo 13? That was one of the gyros he worked on. One time he visited the naval air station at Alameda with a portable inertial guidance device, and discovered that the base didn't know where it was. The coordinates the base had were hundreds of meters off.
I was in on some early uses of GPS and maps, and let me tell you that maps based on the old surveying techniques can be wrong, particularly in coastal areas, because of failure to account for local gravitational anomalies caused by the variations in the thickness of the Earth's crust.
In any case, it sounds like positional accuracy wouldn't have been the issue. No GPS device can give you a heading. I don't know too much about LORAN but I think it works on similar principles; it doesn't tell you which way you're pointed. The GPS system doesn't give headings, but the device can interpolate a a "speed and heading made good" by looking at the trend in fixes. I believe LORAN works the same way.
In any case, such calculations can't be relied upon in coastal areas, precisely because of currents, which change from place to place. The pilot of a vessel who runs aground because he relied on GPS is still at fault because you shouldn't rely on GPS in such places.
We just learned earlier today that RNA is found in primordial soup.
I'd send it back, then.
No, we're talking past each other, making different, although not incompatible points.
My characterizing of task types was not meant to be exclusive; we might well add a fourth category of tasks whose component subtasks have no demonstrably optimal method.
It seems to me that this issue has different dimensions, some of which are fluid, others of which are not.
You would not expect the so called czar to direct a response to an attack by himself. That's not feasible. However the czar could oversee the aspects of the problem that are repeatable, for example ensuring training programs exist for system administrators; making sure groups working with critical systems have contingency plans; ensuring that vulnerability testing is done; investigating open installations which haven't installed recommended security patches. That sort of thing.
When an attack on a large scale occurs, then there needs to be a team in place to coordinate the response. That team will move to fast for some administrator to make all the decisions. But who ensures the team exists, and is ready, trained and equipped?
No, I think this would be a very useful position, so long as we don't think of security per se as someting that can be produced by he fiat of a centrally managed bureaucracy. There are multiple styles of organizational preparation needed to promote security, and some of those responses are dependent on repeated, efficient execution of reasonably routine tasks like training.
Well, what are the requirements of an encyclopedia?
You will find that when it comes to consistent scholarly accountability, Brittanica is the way to go. If responsiveness to changing needs is at a premium, Wikipedia is far more useful, albeit not entirely reliable. No responsive medium could be.
Top down works -- for managing the efficient, repeated performance of a task with well defined and stable success criteria, and where performance can be improved incrementally by local adjustments. Top down has a place in the world. When consistent is at a premium, top down is the way to go.
Bottom up works too -- for tasks that involve things that are too complex and fluid for a single person or chain of command to comprehend and react to. Where creativity is at a premium, bottom up is the way to go.
No structure works too -- for tasks where there is a body of people who understand every part of that task. Think a Shaker barn raising. When you have a body of people who've mastered every aspect of a task and everyone can see what task needs more hands, then no structure is the way to go.
It seems to me that something like cybersecurity needs a bit of each approach. It's organizationally difficult, if not impossible to approach such a problem perfectly. However, I think the rough appearance of a structure to handle this would be top down with expertise pushed out to the various groups in the organization and discretion allowed.