Actually, a GAME that teaches about game engines would be better.
(in a console window) "We're going to make a window now! To do this, we'll use this code... This piece of the code does this, that piece does that. Press Enter to make the window. Press Enter to close the window. We closed the window with this code... This piece of code does this, that piece does that. Now go to your IDE and try it! Press any key to exit."
(next session) "Hi! Last time we learned how to make a window. This time, let's take listen for keystrokes..."
(much, much later) "And with this line of code, we can position Leisure Suit Larry by the bed..."
I'm posting here because I worry that if my other reply is seen as contentious (it's not meant that way) then it would also be seen as discouraging and that's the last thing I want to do to any developer.
As an independent game engine developer, you have the skills to provide a service nobody is yet doing well: training. API manuals for engines smell like code, and that can be daunting to a newcomer. Wading through an ocean of video tutorials is frustrating because the speaker may mumble or drag progress along at an excruciating pace. Have you ever seen those Youtube videos that last ten minutes despite demonstrating a two second task? It's a bit shit, right? Every second spent watching a video is a second not spent developing.
There's this huge cultural momentum toward teaching people to code, and aside from that entire debate's tenets, making learning easy makes sense for those who are self-motivated. So, imagine a game engine engineered to teach about game engines.
You're probably thinking, "Nobody has time for that!" But I'm just showing you where the market can go. The goal is to do what nobody else is doing, right?
You're trying to analyze an entire microeconomy using only one product. If a gas station offers a free cup of coffee in the morning, does that guarantee that it goes out of business, that the coffee bean farmers don't get paid, and that the entire coffee industry implodes?
These companies can still pull revenue with support services, asset sales, and code sales. That broadens the economy by empowering hobbyists and freelancers to take on the role they're good at in game development and license the fruits of their labor for fun and profit. Developers who make game engines have an idea of which features should be used at what points in a project. So, they continue a paid license for very advanced features that few projects need right away. The industry as a whole gets more games, which means more revenue for indie devs and even more paid licenses and royalties for the engine developers.
Getting apoplexy at mention of the word "free" is Scrooge McDuck syndrome, and it's a wonder the ol' duck's vault wasn't empty of coin. Why cut yourself out of market? Game development isn't a fancy restaurant requiring reservations for only the most distinguished guests willing to shell out obscene licensing fees. Keeping it that way reserves a place in the industry for hacks who only make games because they have the coin; people who will be out of a job when they see competition that replaces their job with countless others. Well, that or they'll up their game (pun intended).
As for the primary topic, so long as new engines do new things or at least old things in new ways, they'll still be used. A huge, feature-rich engine can't compete with a small, basic little thing when what you need is something small and basic. Also, rapid prototyping will be the productivity race of tomorrow...
If a pirate is caught downloading, charging them a fine that's a little higher than the price to legally see the content makes perfect sense. That's not even $50 most of the time, but after court costs are added in, $50 seems about right. Ten years is ridiculous. Hollywood really over-values itself to the point that we'd all be better off it the whole thing were put out of business. Do they really think that ninety minutes of one of their screenplays or three minutes of a song is worth ten years of anybody's life? That movie or song better damn well confer a PhD just by viewing/listening to it because that's what ten years is worth.
That's the most interesting question I've seen come up in a Slashdot thread so far. It's a bit of a tangent from the article, but it would be interesting to see it explored more aside from the predictably, "It would make prices go up," line.
It could be because real estate and automobiles have immediate real value but intellectual property only has speculative value. If you invent something, you can be optimistic but you don't know for sure it will fly in the market. The same goes for creative works. Real estate has risk too, but renters less often destroy their residence than people decide not to see a movie or buy a gadget.
It would be awesome if somebody well-versed in IP laws in Britain and the states could chime in.
My first thought was that there are different kinds of complexity, and some are very carefully defined to mean something specific. That is the kind that the paper's author refers to. It would be neat if somebody could suggest an introductory book on the computational complexity of discrete microscopic physical phenomena in analytic organic chemistry, but it's kind of an esoteric subject. You don't just find organic chemists lying around anywhere, and organic chemists specializing in topics in quantum mechanics are probably more rare. I checked under my couch cushions and couldn't even find one. And an introductory book on that topic wouldn't exactly be introductory where the prerequisite skills are concerned. It would probably be harder than SQL.
The first things anybody needs to learn about programming are generic in terms of language. They're concepts. Branches, loops, function calls, and maybe even classes and delegates are all within range of exercises off of the machine. This approach can go well beyond basic. I'll describe it generally but apply as needed.
Here's a template: Split students into groups of three. One person must come up with non-ambiguous instructions to complete a task, such as taking balled up sheets of paper out of a box one by one and putting them in another box. One person executes the instructions exactly as they are written. One person catches mistakes in the execution where something is ambiguous that shouldn't be. They can rotate roles twice, so between each time there's a chance to stop the activity and have a quick class discussion about things that went wrong in different groups. Next iteration, they should each improve upon their instructions according to mistakes made by the whole class last iteration. By the third iteration, if there's not a perfect algorithm out there then the best will still be a short instructor's change away from the goal.
Design exercises like this carefully. For example, the above exercise focuses on loops and branches, but those concepts can be further divided. Function calls can be taught by having different groups perform different tasks, but they have to "call out" to each other to complete a more complicated task together. Classes can be demonstrated literally, whereas one class has one role it develops for in its exercises and another class of students develops another. Then, they have to find a way to work together with simple messages like notes.
Before they ever touch a development environment, they can already have the conceptual foundation to understand what they will be taught. Instead of introducing functions to the sound of, "I don't get it!" you can have students asking about the concept ahead of time. For example, "This assignment would be so much easier with loops! But we have to finish it with branches."
When I saw that outburst Kanye West had during the Katrina relief program, I predicted that in 2008 Democrats would run a black guy and win. I can also tell you now that the only way the GOP can guarantee the White House for themselves is to assume what you've said is true of the party first.
Second, bring out the "conquering hero" kind of personality to disagree with the GOP and get its support anyway. But that person should be somebody we don't know brought to the limelight early so the country can get to know them.
In one move, that would give the GOP a little rebuilt trust for not appearing to be Bolshevists (backing the guy who was always disagreeing with them), eliminate concerns over gaffes already made among the potential candidates we know, allow the future candidate time to learn campaigning before the big push, and give them a free ticket to revise their platform to whatever extent the choose to.
And they have the largest cold think thank in the history of the world to provide the script. People could only better spell out their disagreements with the party and how they might be persuaded if we were all telepathic.
This is why I say that the GOP's current behavior is not conducive to their success. It makes people cringe to watch anybody make bad decisions, so this has nothing to do with party ideology even. Watching the GOP blunder right now is surreal in its cartoonish quality. I know they're smarter than this.
I think you got downmodded because you include all of us in that summary. Really, we have different subcultures, and as distasteful as some are at some times, there are other times when they're the people who actually do make the best decisions. Human civilization works specifically because different types of people each benefit society in their own way.
In this case, there are two things that we can call "the American public". If you watch a lot of television then you see hints of what I call the Beavis and Butthead public. It has the traits you describe, but the important thing about it is that it doesn't actually exist in reality. Once people have all the information necessary to properly weigh a decision, if they intentionally pick an option that harms us and they're not insane, then they're pulling your leg. There's a small movement of old men who troll young people exactly like that, just for fun.
A real point of solution here is that our conservative voters need better options and more information. We can't circumnavigate gerrymandering, but if gerrymandered districts had better candidate options and enough information to distinguish them, it would still prevent the Congress from becoming a loony bin.
Calm down there, spunky. I'm not saying that technology is bad. I'm saying that we've already outpaced our capacity to bond with other humans via our most prevalent form of communication, and it might be a good idea to let that dust settle a bit before we start denying people jobs or friendships because they argued with a troll that one time.
Were we discussing this in person, you'd be able to tell that the Amish thing is a joke. I shouldn't have to tell you that online either, but I do. Because to you, I'm only text on a screen; nothing human about me. You're the same to me. We don't have a choice. These pixels are the only part of ourselves that we share here. Get it?
They could write legislation about anything and expect us to like it because it has a word in it like "freedom" or "patriot". Imagine: The Hero's Freedom Act. Sounds good, right? It could also potentially describe a bill that calls some group heroes while empowering them to take the freedom of others. That would be a hero's freedom act, technically.
Actually, that has more to do with freedom than this does. What they meant to call it is the "Internet Just Give Us Your Wallets And Shut Up Act".
You're right, but you're too optimistic. The Internet can not be built without the bullshit. It's impossible, and I can prove it.
What do we get excited/happy about as people? Let's be very basic. Also, let's constrain this with the ways that we can generally come across as happy people while communicating in text online. By "excited," I mean that we're happy enough about something that we want to talk to others about it.
We get excited about an optimistic future where things may happen that we want to happen, and it doesn't really matter if that future is likely. It need only be possible. We get excited about steps that take us closer to that future. We get excited about new toys and new solutions to problems. Everything else we get excited about is personal-level stuff that nobody cares about online.
Hone in on that last category. That is the vast and overwhelming majority of everything we have to be happy about. A new job, a good relationship, seeing our children master a new skill, and all the other things both big and little that make life worth living are all things that no stranger will ever care about. So, here we are sharing thoughts and ideas in an environment where we form friendships and enmity without even including the core of the most fundamental positive things in human life. This goes for little things too. My day can be improved by something as simple as seeing my neighbor hug a puppy. Somebody standing next to me at that moment will at least smile when I do, but nobody online will care about it at all.
Since we've eliminated most of the positive, what are we left with? We have those other sources of being excited. New toys get old eventually. New solutions only impact those affected by the problems they address. New research fosters optimism, but everything about the future is nothing more than a guess. We don't actually know if some super awesome thing we can talk about to bring each other's mood up is a thing that will ever happen.
Mirror neurons are so essential to human interaction that when they or the neural circuitry that makes them work malfunctions, we get sociopaths, psychopaths, and people on the autism spectrum. Here online, NONE of us have functioning mirror neurons. We can empathize best with those we see in person, a little less with people we see in picture (such as a video), and even less through text. Where we empathize in text, we actually bond with an imaginary person going through whatever the text covers. Meanwhile we don't know the actual human being who typed that text.
Any Internet is going to spawn enmity and grief because the most fundamental things that make humans bond are missing online. We don't have the full benefit of empathy and most of the things we can get excited about don't apply. So, we lose the vast and overwhelming majority of possible positive experiences that humans can share.
In an environment where the probability of sociopathy, social dysfunction, and enmity are greatly increased (drumroll please... brrr brrr brrrbrrrbrrr) there's more sociopathy, social dysfunction, and enmity. And there upon a foundation that strips away all the best things about humanity, leaving only guesswork as our most redeeming trait, is built the technology that some people want to have shape our society.
You are absolutely correct. Sooner or later, people are going to realize what bullshit this is and look for the first exit.
We have enough ways for small groups to try and keep a stranglehold on the lives of others already. The very last thing we need is some manipulable artificial construct to dehumanize us in our real world relationships like we already are online. Will we have to live under rocks to get some kind of peace of mind in the future?
Screw it, let's go make a new Amish colony. We'll have conversations in person where we can actually see that we're not talking to robots, and mirror neurons will actually mean something. We'll be human again. Who's with me?
Be careful. Republican voters are offended by verifiable truth with citations. They prefer pretty lies.
They're all such kind, intelligent people and are so good for this country. Heroes, really, for having the bravery to confront reality and call it the sham it is. If only God would do what they say!
"Good" is a subjective term. I think that we may have different expectations of informed voters come next year. If there's a strong turnout at the voting booth, the GOP is doomed in their race for the White House. And they keep digging that hole deeper.
Thing is, the population overall is becoming progressively smarter. Thanks to social networks, it's easy now to see that people who consistently support the GOP are also the ones to make bigoted statements, assertions easily proven false with less than five minutes of reading, and who throw temper tantrums when they're disagreed with. Stupid is loud, and the Internet has given it a megaphone so it can show just how loud it is.
So, that base of informed voters is growing while the uninformed mass the GOP relies upon is shrinking. Their most loyal constituents are post-retirement, *possibly* pre-senility. Only *possibly*. On top of that, recent voter turn out means almost nothing. Democrats and moderates seldom show up for midterm voting, but the race for the White House isn't exactly something that happens quietly like midterms often do.
I'm optimistic. I think that if the GOP just keeps digging that hole deeper at such a vulnerable time, then America will show them just how stupid that is. And I think that after they lose 2016, their party will be forced to reevaluate its strategy. The only question is whether they'll manage to rig enough electronic voting booths that none of this will matter and whether they'll destroy the evidence quickly enough again.
What makes them say that I'm a troll? Is it that there's not a presidential election in 2016, that the GOP doesn't do things that tick off nearly every informed voter, or that the GOP isn't the only party that is consistently anti-science.
Because last I checked, there is an election in 2016, the GOP consistently does whatever the majority of voters object to (see: their response to the FCC ruling for a recent example), and literally every single anti-science thing that ever originates in D.C. comes from the GOP. Every. One.
But I guess that because I said something negative about the GOP, reality is suspended and I'm a troll.
What a genius political strategy when there's not a presidential election next year!
While they're busy sucking up to low-information voters who have a non-specific axe to grind, they're also alienating the support they'll need to not lose the White House for the third time in a row for the first time since the 1940's. I get the feeling they think that because it hasn't happened in so long, they're protected by some kind of voodoo fairy magic and pixie dust that will keep it from happening. But that would be par for the course for the party of "science am fake".
They need to provide what nobody else does. We have the very restrictive, closed iPhone platform that requires a personal blessing from the High Priests of Apple to public on, and the very open but ridiculously vulnerable Android platform that gives away all our personal information to any and every app developer to poop out anything at all.
Clearly, an open platform that takes security seriously at all would be in demand. The difficulty here is that Microsoft hasn't communicated that they're making just that. Instead, it *appears* to the uninformed consumer that they're trying to make what we already have but with a different skin.
This is either a design issue or a marketing issue. Maybe if they put less effort into controlling online conversations and more effort into telling us useful stuff, that could be helped a bit. Remember the Ubuntu phone? Remember what people were excited about regarding it? Notice how it hasn't been achieved due to various business cockblocks, thus leaving the gate wide open for someone bigger to step in? Hint hint.
But what do I know? I'm going off the assumption that when consumers repeat themselves without variation for years on end, they're spelling out in the simplest possible terms what they'd just love to hand over their money to acquire. I could be wrong about that. Do consumers know what they want? We might as well ask if free will exists; that debate will never be settled.
It's trivially proven. Without intellectual property rights, competition in innovation is *only* a matter of who can produce the fastest, with the most efficiency. So, in other words, for every significant invention or innovation, the inventor gets screwed by people with enough money that they can already buy Congress. Without patents, there is zero motivation to innovate.
Patents have some bad effects, sure, but a qualitative comparison of those effects with some imagined scenario where all the bad ceases to be and all the good somehow survives on magical fairy dust isn't a mature evaluation. It's short-sighted and extremely subjective. It's also defeatist because it's an implicit statement that these problems are just too hard for us. Sorry, but I don't bow that way.
In the real world, research has to be funded and people who spend all their time toiling away with tools want a better future for themselves and their children. Innovation is a way that a hard-working person who puts in enough effort to learn and achieve something can offer their children better than a rental slum or mobile home. Doing away with patents would destroy all hope for those people. I will not and can not condone such an egregious goal.
If this man thinks it's even possible for him to get a fair and impartial trial, then the Russian cold must be getting to his head. Everybody in the United States has already chosen sides with or against him. I would challenge anybody here to seek out even a single conversation that isn't wrapped in such strong bias that it results in hailing him as a hero or calling him a traitor.
This is all aside from the fact that he embarrassed the government and that revealing their actions has harmed diplomacy and economy. Citizens don't even get fair trials here when accused of something inconsequential. I'm not even sure it would be possible to buy that man a fair trial at any price.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad deal. I'd rather the reaction pipeline have two tiers and go like this:
Tier One: Non-Vital Systems Targeted
1. NSA notices megahertz getting stoled
2. NSA informs at least two competing consumer security companies.
3. The two companies send their assessment to a judge.
4. The judge orders ISPs to shut down the attack.
5. The holder of the affected account gets 30 days to respond in their defense.
6. The case is reviewed again by a judge, who forwards it to a prosecutor if necessary.
7. The NSA never knows jack nor shit about anything after their part (step 1).
Tier Two: Vital Systems Targeted (infrastructure, utilities, government, or financial institutions)
1. NSA notices megahertz getting stoled.
2. NSA notifies an electronic security unit in each branch of the armed forces.
3. The security units rapidly evaluate the threat, and if any one concurs...
4. A service denial request targeting the source is dispatched to an ISP and a judge.
5. The ISP immediately suspends the target service. The judge can restore service.
6. Steps 5, 6, and 7 from Tier One.
7. Because it bears emphasis, the NSA doesn't know shit about the outcome ever, at all, period, otherwise this can be abused.
Actually, a GAME that teaches about game engines would be better.
... This piece of the code does this, that piece does that. Press Enter to make the window. Press Enter to close the window. We closed the window with this code ... This piece of code does this, that piece does that. Now go to your IDE and try it! Press any key to exit."
(in a console window) "We're going to make a window now! To do this, we'll use this code
(next session) "Hi! Last time we learned how to make a window. This time, let's take listen for keystrokes..."
(much, much later) "And with this line of code, we can position Leisure Suit Larry by the bed..."
I'm posting here because I worry that if my other reply is seen as contentious (it's not meant that way) then it would also be seen as discouraging and that's the last thing I want to do to any developer.
As an independent game engine developer, you have the skills to provide a service nobody is yet doing well: training. API manuals for engines smell like code, and that can be daunting to a newcomer. Wading through an ocean of video tutorials is frustrating because the speaker may mumble or drag progress along at an excruciating pace. Have you ever seen those Youtube videos that last ten minutes despite demonstrating a two second task? It's a bit shit, right? Every second spent watching a video is a second not spent developing.
There's this huge cultural momentum toward teaching people to code, and aside from that entire debate's tenets, making learning easy makes sense for those who are self-motivated. So, imagine a game engine engineered to teach about game engines.
You're probably thinking, "Nobody has time for that!" But I'm just showing you where the market can go. The goal is to do what nobody else is doing, right?
You're trying to analyze an entire microeconomy using only one product. If a gas station offers a free cup of coffee in the morning, does that guarantee that it goes out of business, that the coffee bean farmers don't get paid, and that the entire coffee industry implodes?
These companies can still pull revenue with support services, asset sales, and code sales. That broadens the economy by empowering hobbyists and freelancers to take on the role they're good at in game development and license the fruits of their labor for fun and profit. Developers who make game engines have an idea of which features should be used at what points in a project. So, they continue a paid license for very advanced features that few projects need right away. The industry as a whole gets more games, which means more revenue for indie devs and even more paid licenses and royalties for the engine developers.
Getting apoplexy at mention of the word "free" is Scrooge McDuck syndrome, and it's a wonder the ol' duck's vault wasn't empty of coin. Why cut yourself out of market? Game development isn't a fancy restaurant requiring reservations for only the most distinguished guests willing to shell out obscene licensing fees. Keeping it that way reserves a place in the industry for hacks who only make games because they have the coin; people who will be out of a job when they see competition that replaces their job with countless others. Well, that or they'll up their game (pun intended).
As for the primary topic, so long as new engines do new things or at least old things in new ways, they'll still be used. A huge, feature-rich engine can't compete with a small, basic little thing when what you need is something small and basic. Also, rapid prototyping will be the productivity race of tomorrow...
If a pirate is caught downloading, charging them a fine that's a little higher than the price to legally see the content makes perfect sense. That's not even $50 most of the time, but after court costs are added in, $50 seems about right. Ten years is ridiculous. Hollywood really over-values itself to the point that we'd all be better off it the whole thing were put out of business. Do they really think that ninety minutes of one of their screenplays or three minutes of a song is worth ten years of anybody's life? That movie or song better damn well confer a PhD just by viewing/listening to it because that's what ten years is worth.
That's the most interesting question I've seen come up in a Slashdot thread so far. It's a bit of a tangent from the article, but it would be interesting to see it explored more aside from the predictably, "It would make prices go up," line.
It could be because real estate and automobiles have immediate real value but intellectual property only has speculative value. If you invent something, you can be optimistic but you don't know for sure it will fly in the market. The same goes for creative works. Real estate has risk too, but renters less often destroy their residence than people decide not to see a movie or buy a gadget.
It would be awesome if somebody well-versed in IP laws in Britain and the states could chime in.
My first thought was that there are different kinds of complexity, and some are very carefully defined to mean something specific. That is the kind that the paper's author refers to. It would be neat if somebody could suggest an introductory book on the computational complexity of discrete microscopic physical phenomena in analytic organic chemistry, but it's kind of an esoteric subject. You don't just find organic chemists lying around anywhere, and organic chemists specializing in topics in quantum mechanics are probably more rare. I checked under my couch cushions and couldn't even find one. And an introductory book on that topic wouldn't exactly be introductory where the prerequisite skills are concerned. It would probably be harder than SQL.
*ineffective (facepalm)
While you guys figure out the cyberwar, I'm going to think about whether typo reduction is a lost cause. (shaking my head)
Then they won't render offensive tools *that* effective.
The first things anybody needs to learn about programming are generic in terms of language. They're concepts. Branches, loops, function calls, and maybe even classes and delegates are all within range of exercises off of the machine. This approach can go well beyond basic. I'll describe it generally but apply as needed.
Here's a template: Split students into groups of three. One person must come up with non-ambiguous instructions to complete a task, such as taking balled up sheets of paper out of a box one by one and putting them in another box. One person executes the instructions exactly as they are written. One person catches mistakes in the execution where something is ambiguous that shouldn't be. They can rotate roles twice, so between each time there's a chance to stop the activity and have a quick class discussion about things that went wrong in different groups. Next iteration, they should each improve upon their instructions according to mistakes made by the whole class last iteration. By the third iteration, if there's not a perfect algorithm out there then the best will still be a short instructor's change away from the goal.
Design exercises like this carefully. For example, the above exercise focuses on loops and branches, but those concepts can be further divided. Function calls can be taught by having different groups perform different tasks, but they have to "call out" to each other to complete a more complicated task together. Classes can be demonstrated literally, whereas one class has one role it develops for in its exercises and another class of students develops another. Then, they have to find a way to work together with simple messages like notes.
Before they ever touch a development environment, they can already have the conceptual foundation to understand what they will be taught. Instead of introducing functions to the sound of, "I don't get it!" you can have students asking about the concept ahead of time. For example, "This assignment would be so much easier with loops! But we have to finish it with branches."
Its effectiveness against a moving target depends entirely upon how quickly it aims itself. And... you know, whether it aims itself.
When I saw that outburst Kanye West had during the Katrina relief program, I predicted that in 2008 Democrats would run a black guy and win. I can also tell you now that the only way the GOP can guarantee the White House for themselves is to assume what you've said is true of the party first.
Second, bring out the "conquering hero" kind of personality to disagree with the GOP and get its support anyway. But that person should be somebody we don't know brought to the limelight early so the country can get to know them.
In one move, that would give the GOP a little rebuilt trust for not appearing to be Bolshevists (backing the guy who was always disagreeing with them), eliminate concerns over gaffes already made among the potential candidates we know, allow the future candidate time to learn campaigning before the big push, and give them a free ticket to revise their platform to whatever extent the choose to.
And they have the largest cold think thank in the history of the world to provide the script. People could only better spell out their disagreements with the party and how they might be persuaded if we were all telepathic.
This is why I say that the GOP's current behavior is not conducive to their success. It makes people cringe to watch anybody make bad decisions, so this has nothing to do with party ideology even. Watching the GOP blunder right now is surreal in its cartoonish quality. I know they're smarter than this.
I think you got downmodded because you include all of us in that summary. Really, we have different subcultures, and as distasteful as some are at some times, there are other times when they're the people who actually do make the best decisions. Human civilization works specifically because different types of people each benefit society in their own way.
In this case, there are two things that we can call "the American public". If you watch a lot of television then you see hints of what I call the Beavis and Butthead public. It has the traits you describe, but the important thing about it is that it doesn't actually exist in reality. Once people have all the information necessary to properly weigh a decision, if they intentionally pick an option that harms us and they're not insane, then they're pulling your leg. There's a small movement of old men who troll young people exactly like that, just for fun.
A real point of solution here is that our conservative voters need better options and more information. We can't circumnavigate gerrymandering, but if gerrymandered districts had better candidate options and enough information to distinguish them, it would still prevent the Congress from becoming a loony bin.
lmao This one gets it.
Calm down there, spunky. I'm not saying that technology is bad. I'm saying that we've already outpaced our capacity to bond with other humans via our most prevalent form of communication, and it might be a good idea to let that dust settle a bit before we start denying people jobs or friendships because they argued with a troll that one time.
Were we discussing this in person, you'd be able to tell that the Amish thing is a joke. I shouldn't have to tell you that online either, but I do. Because to you, I'm only text on a screen; nothing human about me. You're the same to me. We don't have a choice. These pixels are the only part of ourselves that we share here. Get it?
They could write legislation about anything and expect us to like it because it has a word in it like "freedom" or "patriot". Imagine: The Hero's Freedom Act. Sounds good, right? It could also potentially describe a bill that calls some group heroes while empowering them to take the freedom of others. That would be a hero's freedom act, technically.
Actually, that has more to do with freedom than this does. What they meant to call it is the "Internet Just Give Us Your Wallets And Shut Up Act".
You're right, but you're too optimistic. The Internet can not be built without the bullshit. It's impossible, and I can prove it.
What do we get excited/happy about as people? Let's be very basic. Also, let's constrain this with the ways that we can generally come across as happy people while communicating in text online. By "excited," I mean that we're happy enough about something that we want to talk to others about it.
We get excited about an optimistic future where things may happen that we want to happen, and it doesn't really matter if that future is likely. It need only be possible. We get excited about steps that take us closer to that future. We get excited about new toys and new solutions to problems. Everything else we get excited about is personal-level stuff that nobody cares about online.
Hone in on that last category. That is the vast and overwhelming majority of everything we have to be happy about. A new job, a good relationship, seeing our children master a new skill, and all the other things both big and little that make life worth living are all things that no stranger will ever care about. So, here we are sharing thoughts and ideas in an environment where we form friendships and enmity without even including the core of the most fundamental positive things in human life. This goes for little things too. My day can be improved by something as simple as seeing my neighbor hug a puppy. Somebody standing next to me at that moment will at least smile when I do, but nobody online will care about it at all.
Since we've eliminated most of the positive, what are we left with? We have those other sources of being excited. New toys get old eventually. New solutions only impact those affected by the problems they address. New research fosters optimism, but everything about the future is nothing more than a guess. We don't actually know if some super awesome thing we can talk about to bring each other's mood up is a thing that will ever happen.
Mirror neurons are so essential to human interaction that when they or the neural circuitry that makes them work malfunctions, we get sociopaths, psychopaths, and people on the autism spectrum. Here online, NONE of us have functioning mirror neurons. We can empathize best with those we see in person, a little less with people we see in picture (such as a video), and even less through text. Where we empathize in text, we actually bond with an imaginary person going through whatever the text covers. Meanwhile we don't know the actual human being who typed that text.
Any Internet is going to spawn enmity and grief because the most fundamental things that make humans bond are missing online. We don't have the full benefit of empathy and most of the things we can get excited about don't apply. So, we lose the vast and overwhelming majority of possible positive experiences that humans can share.
In an environment where the probability of sociopathy, social dysfunction, and enmity are greatly increased (drumroll please... brrr brrr brrrbrrrbrrr) there's more sociopathy, social dysfunction, and enmity. And there upon a foundation that strips away all the best things about humanity, leaving only guesswork as our most redeeming trait, is built the technology that some people want to have shape our society.
You are absolutely correct. Sooner or later, people are going to realize what bullshit this is and look for the first exit.
We have enough ways for small groups to try and keep a stranglehold on the lives of others already. The very last thing we need is some manipulable artificial construct to dehumanize us in our real world relationships like we already are online. Will we have to live under rocks to get some kind of peace of mind in the future?
Screw it, let's go make a new Amish colony. We'll have conversations in person where we can actually see that we're not talking to robots, and mirror neurons will actually mean something. We'll be human again. Who's with me?
Be careful. Republican voters are offended by verifiable truth with citations. They prefer pretty lies.
They're all such kind, intelligent people and are so good for this country. Heroes, really, for having the bravery to confront reality and call it the sham it is. If only God would do what they say!
"Good" is a subjective term. I think that we may have different expectations of informed voters come next year. If there's a strong turnout at the voting booth, the GOP is doomed in their race for the White House. And they keep digging that hole deeper.
Thing is, the population overall is becoming progressively smarter. Thanks to social networks, it's easy now to see that people who consistently support the GOP are also the ones to make bigoted statements, assertions easily proven false with less than five minutes of reading, and who throw temper tantrums when they're disagreed with. Stupid is loud, and the Internet has given it a megaphone so it can show just how loud it is.
So, that base of informed voters is growing while the uninformed mass the GOP relies upon is shrinking. Their most loyal constituents are post-retirement, *possibly* pre-senility. Only *possibly*. On top of that, recent voter turn out means almost nothing. Democrats and moderates seldom show up for midterm voting, but the race for the White House isn't exactly something that happens quietly like midterms often do.
I'm optimistic. I think that if the GOP just keeps digging that hole deeper at such a vulnerable time, then America will show them just how stupid that is. And I think that after they lose 2016, their party will be forced to reevaluate its strategy. The only question is whether they'll manage to rig enough electronic voting booths that none of this will matter and whether they'll destroy the evidence quickly enough again.
I wish Slashdot forced moderators to comment.
What makes them say that I'm a troll? Is it that there's not a presidential election in 2016, that the GOP doesn't do things that tick off nearly every informed voter, or that the GOP isn't the only party that is consistently anti-science.
Because last I checked, there is an election in 2016, the GOP consistently does whatever the majority of voters object to (see: their response to the FCC ruling for a recent example), and literally every single anti-science thing that ever originates in D.C. comes from the GOP. Every. One.
But I guess that because I said something negative about the GOP, reality is suspended and I'm a troll.
What a genius political strategy when there's not a presidential election next year!
While they're busy sucking up to low-information voters who have a non-specific axe to grind, they're also alienating the support they'll need to not lose the White House for the third time in a row for the first time since the 1940's. I get the feeling they think that because it hasn't happened in so long, they're protected by some kind of voodoo fairy magic and pixie dust that will keep it from happening. But that would be par for the course for the party of "science am fake".
They need to provide what nobody else does. We have the very restrictive, closed iPhone platform that requires a personal blessing from the High Priests of Apple to public on, and the very open but ridiculously vulnerable Android platform that gives away all our personal information to any and every app developer to poop out anything at all.
Clearly, an open platform that takes security seriously at all would be in demand. The difficulty here is that Microsoft hasn't communicated that they're making just that. Instead, it *appears* to the uninformed consumer that they're trying to make what we already have but with a different skin.
This is either a design issue or a marketing issue. Maybe if they put less effort into controlling online conversations and more effort into telling us useful stuff, that could be helped a bit. Remember the Ubuntu phone? Remember what people were excited about regarding it? Notice how it hasn't been achieved due to various business cockblocks, thus leaving the gate wide open for someone bigger to step in? Hint hint.
But what do I know? I'm going off the assumption that when consumers repeat themselves without variation for years on end, they're spelling out in the simplest possible terms what they'd just love to hand over their money to acquire. I could be wrong about that. Do consumers know what they want? We might as well ask if free will exists; that debate will never be settled.
It's trivially proven. Without intellectual property rights, competition in innovation is *only* a matter of who can produce the fastest, with the most efficiency. So, in other words, for every significant invention or innovation, the inventor gets screwed by people with enough money that they can already buy Congress. Without patents, there is zero motivation to innovate.
Patents have some bad effects, sure, but a qualitative comparison of those effects with some imagined scenario where all the bad ceases to be and all the good somehow survives on magical fairy dust isn't a mature evaluation. It's short-sighted and extremely subjective. It's also defeatist because it's an implicit statement that these problems are just too hard for us. Sorry, but I don't bow that way.
In the real world, research has to be funded and people who spend all their time toiling away with tools want a better future for themselves and their children. Innovation is a way that a hard-working person who puts in enough effort to learn and achieve something can offer their children better than a rental slum or mobile home. Doing away with patents would destroy all hope for those people. I will not and can not condone such an egregious goal.
If this man thinks it's even possible for him to get a fair and impartial trial, then the Russian cold must be getting to his head. Everybody in the United States has already chosen sides with or against him. I would challenge anybody here to seek out even a single conversation that isn't wrapped in such strong bias that it results in hailing him as a hero or calling him a traitor.
This is all aside from the fact that he embarrassed the government and that revealing their actions has harmed diplomacy and economy. Citizens don't even get fair trials here when accused of something inconsequential. I'm not even sure it would be possible to buy that man a fair trial at any price.