Didn't everyone learn the lesson? Above the individual level, to be most effective, you aren't going for kills. You are trying to maim as many of the enemy as possible. Military apparatus can get bogged down in attempting to save itself.
If I shoot you dead, you're dead. If shoot you and lodge the bullet in your stomach, you're bleeding and screaming and demoralizing everyone standing around you. I can then try to lodge a bullet in the stomach of the guy trying to drag you away to safety. If you both are still alive after all this, now there's doctors working on you, surgical equipment and resources being used, transportation to get you off the battlefield. If you make it past there, you go home and can't work, can't support your family, and rely on assistance from the government. Do that enough, and you win by default.
Yes, I know the man standing in the thick of things is not thinking this way -- mostly they're thinking about staying alive and doing their job. At the institutional level, where doctrine and procedure is set, this is the thinking behind much of the decisions. This is why armed forces commanders go gooey for remote pilots, battle armor, and everything else, while cutting down the typical bullet caliber. Turns out, smaller rounds used properly will render you non-combative and make you bleed out just as good as large caliber.
This is also why I think only as the absolute last option should troops be deployed. Too many of my friends in the military have more to offer than maimed limbs and broken lives in the name of political machinations.
heh. we've wandered way off topic, but i feel compelled now.
But what are you actually using? Be honest, now - don't let your ego get in the way.
It's not ego, just dealing with the aggrivations of internationalization over the last 18 months. And living in L.A., having moved here 15 years ago when my family showed up to work on the metro. The rail runners still shake their head in disbelief -- they did in six years here what took 18 months in other cities. Had nothing to do with the work, just the politics of the city. And the same deal is happening with high-speed trains in this country. It's just sad.
For the record, the keyboard is qwerty-ish, japanese version. Major alpha keys are in the same place, but enough others are swapped to make it a whole new set of memory muscles to me. Typing Hiragana/Katakana tosses qwerty out the window.
I'm a youngin', so asked many of the old-hats why it's only now this is a big gnarly issue. Consensus seems to be, "it didn't matter, since we wrote the specs." Visionaries years ago were the ones pointing out that increased computer literacy around the world will create a nigtmare unless something is done. Everyone else responded, yeah so what? A fix requires changing all our infrastructure. So now I spend my time at work banging my head against the screen because someone just a few years ago wrote some code that totally explodes in the presence of anything but 7-bit ascii. Yeah, I could bail on the job, but I'm compensated for my grief.
I didn't mean to imply that anything new is better, but sometimes the old way isn't the proper thing to do. So sometimes you have to chop down the tree to save the forest. Dismissing people who are dissatisfied with the status quo can often lead to baroque stratifications. I think about this when reading about China developing programming languages. After a few generations -- quite possibly before I've retired -- I can't help but think the most popular, by number, computer/programming environment will not be so attached to ascii and qwerty. It would suck if no one stopped to think of the way I might be able to interact with that space just because qwerty has done so well up till now.
The talk of evolution at the beginning made me think of my last trip to New Zealand. In the Auckland Museum, there's a gallery of animals that were killed off by the few mamals brought there by early settlers. Extinct now because some rats showed up. It's hard not to feel like the current state of computer use is a giant Moa.
Small, green aliens probably don't use QWERTY keyboards, either. The embedded wisdom of the QWERTY keyboard doesn't apply to them, either.
But... what did YOU use?
A Dvorak keyboard. No, a touch pad with character regonition. A Twidler chording keyboard. Speech recognition. I hand wrote it in Mandarin and my friend typed it in for me. It wasn't a friend, it was my scanner using OCR. Does it matter? Can you tell the difference?
And what the hell? So you're saying, anyone who gets their first, wins the debate? Oh, to hell with everyone who doesn't speak Latin based languages, anyone in L.A. who can't afford a car can walk to work, and the IRS with the WORST accuracy audit rating of any government agency can keep their mainframe... because its hard to fix?
Your idea o critical infrastructure seems more like dogma. If it is so critical, it won't or can't be thrown away. This silly PC of mine is using 2,000 year old math to jigger symbols around. Doesn't mean its the end of the line and shouldn't be fixed. Lots of man-hours doesn't negate scientific rigor.
It's your kind of thinking that I hear taunting me in my mind every time a flight I'm on drops a few hundred feet to dodge another airplane. But oh, this critical infrastructure developed in the 60's by thousands of man-hours does an okay job of keeping planes from smashing into each other... most of the time at least.
Ok, given, most people are idiots and 99% of everything is crap. But perhaps general computing requires more effort than it should.
Using a PC for anything is still bewildering to most people because it insists you pass several barriers to entry, none of which are communicative. I know people that can make Excel sit up and beg for a cookie but can't run another app or write a single line of code. I've watched command-line gurus paralyzed by the prevalent GUI interface. This tells me general computer use is still mysterious and obscure, and I don't think this is the way it should be. Nor do I think this state is significantly different from twenty years ago.
Many people never bother with computers because it appears to never help them get closer to their goals. Which is a shame, since harnessing computing power for examination would often help if someone could get that far with it. Why bother to learn Excel... and its macro language, and its function set, and an OS with all its quirks, and how to administor the machine, and general computer maintenance, just to balance a check book? Perhaps so you can extend the simulation and find out if you'll be destitute when you retire, but good luck getting to that point unless your full-time job involves working with computers.
So no, I don't mark most people as lazy for shrugging off my own passion for this computer mess to read a book.
The notion that people with advanced degrees who are "highly educated people, who ought to have a desire to learn" have trouble with computers pretty much speaks to my complaint.
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
if you happen to write in an roman alphabet. Perhaps the other two-thirds of the world that use pictographic or script based character sets might disagree about "good enough".
Example? Los Angeles has spent 75 years developing around the automobile, and their recent construction of subways have been extremely expensive (300 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE) and the residual effects of the subway on local business has driven many to bankruptcy.
Um, it wasn't until the 1950's L.A. disasemmbled a large portion it's light rail system. It costs millions now because its a badly run project across all levels, not because building light-rail and subway systems are hard. Three generations of my family in the business will back me up on this. And a subway has the same chance of putting someone out of business as a city redirecting car traffic.
It's odd to say computers are evolving while saying you don't change critical infrastructure. Perhaps I should give up my net-connected cheap-and-powerful PC and wait for a turn on the mainframe. Oh, right, never mind.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population
Balls! Everyone is creative, and most like learning when they aren't being beaten by horrid teacher.
Your attitude seems to stem from some weird notion of sanctifying the 'simulation' as a complex nerdy low-level thing. Personal computers are universal computers, so anything you do that involves 'examination of a problem often not subject to direct experimentation' is a simulation. Printing 'Hello, world.' all over the screen is a simulation. Balancing your check book using Excel is a simulation. Modelling weather patterns over Greenland with custom hand-crafted code is a simulation. It the examination that is key, not the medium.
His points speak to the fact we've all stayed convinced computers are only really good ledgers. The means we have to interrogate data on personal level -- hence 'personal computer' not 'Personal Computer' -- hasn't significantly changed or improved in 20 years. That people, as an individual and the society as whole, might fare a bit better if we spent a little more time using computers to examine our problems, both for personal and global gain.
But to do that on a computer is hard. Maybe less so for you, but definitely for everyone not in your 'thin sliver'. Why? Because it's still as f'ing arcane to use a computer now as it was 20 years ago! He seems to think that perhaps the hardness could have been decreased some over the last two decades. I happen to agree.
Tunnel-vision, more like frustration. I've been using computers only during these last 20 years, and I'm about ready to scream from spending all my time working on the computer instead of actually using it. Least I found a career where I get paid for my pain, The average person just gets humped by the salesguy at CompUSA.
California based anecdote. While being ticketed by a cop for stomping my cig butt out on the sidewalk (erk!) I was asking him what would have happened if I had thrown my butt into the street like most smokers do? He grinned, said it was a traffic violation then. Okay, what happens if I had no drivers license? My ticket/personal info goes into the system, my identity is assigned a license number with a special prefix (?), and when I do apply for and receive a license, the ticket is then considered active. Fines to be paid at that point.
Okay, I was busted for a minor but legit law violation. Happens. Could even happen to someone thats spent lots of time not getting ID'd. How many violations now have driving-privileged based punishments or obscure jurisdictional overlap? You do the math while waiting in line in the DMV. Of course, this horror story is only true if believe a cop.
(Ironically, this ticket resulted in me plea bargaining my conviction down to a misdemeanor with fine and/or maximum six months jail time! Paid my finally assigned penalty of $187 and walked out of Burbank Superior with a new sense of fear. Top of the world, ma.)
Having to reset my master computer a few cars back, I found most cars built after '85 have a way to get a dash light to pulse the codes. With that particular car, you keyed the ignition on-off 3 times to put it in "diagnostic mode". It pulsed any error codes stored with the check engine light. The big problem of course is cars that have this feature also have more advanced emission control and auto-calibration systems that will spew lots of errors at you because their sensors aren't in the right state at that point. The same problems exist with the cheap generic daignostic tools you can get at better auto stores.
seeing how a large portion of the population of the world hasn't even used a telephone, i'm guessing the "masses" won't be immediately subjected to gene screening, therapy, or conditioning.
yeah yeah, the population that jumps both feet into this is creating new potential for catastrophe, but we're doing a good job of that without didling our genes. most likely they'd end up purging themselves out of existence than threatening every human on the planet.
speaking from the viewpoint that i'd already be dead without lots of constant medical intervention, technology is evolution -- we wouldn't exist in the form we are now without it. that doesn't suddenly change for the things we are just now discovering.
Don't know if this counts for anything, but it seems relatively easy to retrain yourself to handle the games better. I was trying to get a co-worker to play CounterStrike, but he refused saying that FPS games made him sick. Joking around, I told him Doom used to make me sick till I played it for 14 hours straight (that's true) and he should just spend the weekend playing it till he's cured. Saw him the next Monday, green and staggering, but smiling. Now he's the second best player in the office, without any of the previous problems. Another friend did the same, but popped a bunch of motion sickness pills before doing the long haul, and that seemed to work for him.
What makes me curious now is exactly how long the "training" takes, and if it translates to other games, and other causes of motion sickness?
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't everyone learn the lesson? Above the individual level, to be most effective, you aren't going for kills. You are trying to maim as many of the enemy as possible. Military apparatus can get bogged down in attempting to save itself.
If I shoot you dead, you're dead. If shoot you and lodge the bullet in your stomach, you're bleeding and screaming and demoralizing everyone standing around you. I can then try to lodge a bullet in the stomach of the guy trying to drag you away to safety. If you both are still alive after all this, now there's doctors working on you, surgical equipment and resources being used, transportation to get you off the battlefield. If you make it past there, you go home and can't work, can't support your family, and rely on assistance from the government. Do that enough, and you win by default.
Yes, I know the man standing in the thick of things is not thinking this way -- mostly they're thinking about staying alive and doing their job. At the institutional level, where doctrine and procedure is set, this is the thinking behind much of the decisions. This is why armed forces commanders go gooey for remote pilots, battle armor, and everything else, while cutting down the typical bullet caliber. Turns out, smaller rounds used properly will render you non-combative and make you bleed out just as good as large caliber.
This is also why I think only as the absolute last option should troops be deployed. Too many of my friends in the military have more to offer than maimed limbs and broken lives in the name of political machinations.
heh. we've wandered way off topic, but i feel compelled now.
But what are you actually using? Be honest, now - don't let your ego get in the way.
It's not ego, just dealing with the aggrivations of internationalization over the last 18 months. And living in L.A., having moved here 15 years ago when my family showed up to work on the metro. The rail runners still shake their head in disbelief -- they did in six years here what took 18 months in other cities. Had nothing to do with the work, just the politics of the city. And the same deal is happening with high-speed trains in this country. It's just sad.
For the record, the keyboard is qwerty-ish, japanese version. Major alpha keys are in the same place, but enough others are swapped to make it a whole new set of memory muscles to me. Typing Hiragana/Katakana tosses qwerty out the window.
I'm a youngin', so asked many of the old-hats why it's only now this is a big gnarly issue. Consensus seems to be, "it didn't matter, since we wrote the specs." Visionaries years ago were the ones pointing out that increased computer literacy around the world will create a nigtmare unless something is done. Everyone else responded, yeah so what? A fix requires changing all our infrastructure. So now I spend my time at work banging my head against the screen because someone just a few years ago wrote some code that totally explodes in the presence of anything but 7-bit ascii. Yeah, I could bail on the job, but I'm compensated for my grief.
I didn't mean to imply that anything new is better, but sometimes the old way isn't the proper thing to do. So sometimes you have to chop down the tree to save the forest. Dismissing people who are dissatisfied with the status quo can often lead to baroque stratifications. I think about this when reading about China developing programming languages. After a few generations -- quite possibly before I've retired -- I can't help but think the most popular, by number, computer/programming environment will not be so attached to ascii and qwerty. It would suck if no one stopped to think of the way I might be able to interact with that space just because qwerty has done so well up till now.
The talk of evolution at the beginning made me think of my last trip to New Zealand. In the Auckland Museum, there's a gallery of animals that were killed off by the few mamals brought there by early settlers. Extinct now because some rats showed up. It's hard not to feel like the current state of computer use is a giant Moa.
Small, green aliens probably don't use QWERTY keyboards, either. The embedded wisdom of the QWERTY keyboard doesn't apply to them, either.
But... what did YOU use?
A Dvorak keyboard. No, a touch pad with character regonition. A Twidler chording keyboard. Speech recognition. I hand wrote it in Mandarin and my friend typed it in for me. It wasn't a friend, it was my scanner using OCR. Does it matter? Can you tell the difference?
And what the hell? So you're saying, anyone who gets their first, wins the debate? Oh, to hell with everyone who doesn't speak Latin based languages, anyone in L.A. who can't afford a car can walk to work, and the IRS with the WORST accuracy audit rating of any government agency can keep their mainframe... because its hard to fix?
Your idea o critical infrastructure seems more like dogma. If it is so critical, it won't or can't be thrown away. This silly PC of mine is using 2,000 year old math to jigger symbols around. Doesn't mean its the end of the line and shouldn't be fixed. Lots of man-hours doesn't negate scientific rigor.
It's your kind of thinking that I hear taunting me in my mind every time a flight I'm on drops a few hundred feet to dodge another airplane. But oh, this critical infrastructure developed in the 60's by thousands of man-hours does an okay job of keeping planes from smashing into each other... most of the time at least.
Ok, given, most people are idiots and 99% of everything is crap. But perhaps general computing requires more effort than it should.
Using a PC for anything is still bewildering to most people because it insists you pass several barriers to entry, none of which are communicative. I know people that can make Excel sit up and beg for a cookie but can't run another app or write a single line of code. I've watched command-line gurus paralyzed by the prevalent GUI interface. This tells me general computer use is still mysterious and obscure, and I don't think this is the way it should be. Nor do I think this state is significantly different from twenty years ago.
Many people never bother with computers because it appears to never help them get closer to their goals. Which is a shame, since harnessing computing power for examination would often help if someone could get that far with it. Why bother to learn Excel... and its macro language, and its function set, and an OS with all its quirks, and how to administor the machine, and general computer maintenance, just to balance a check book? Perhaps so you can extend the simulation and find out if you'll be destitute when you retire, but good luck getting to that point unless your full-time job involves working with computers.
So no, I don't mark most people as lazy for shrugging off my own passion for this computer mess to read a book.
The notion that people with advanced degrees who are "highly educated people, who ought to have a desire to learn" have trouble with computers pretty much speaks to my complaint.
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
if you happen to write in an roman alphabet. Perhaps the other two-thirds of the world that use pictographic or script based character sets might disagree about "good enough".
Example? Los Angeles has spent 75 years developing around the automobile, and their recent construction of subways have been extremely expensive (300 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE) and the residual effects of the subway on local business has driven many to bankruptcy.
Um, it wasn't until the 1950's L.A. disasemmbled a large portion it's light rail system. It costs millions now because its a badly run project across all levels, not because building light-rail and subway systems are hard. Three generations of my family in the business will back me up on this. And a subway has the same chance of putting someone out of business as a city redirecting car traffic.
It's odd to say computers are evolving while saying you don't change critical infrastructure. Perhaps I should give up my net-connected cheap-and-powerful PC and wait for a turn on the mainframe. Oh, right, never mind.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population
Balls! Everyone is creative, and most like learning when they aren't being beaten by horrid teacher.
Your attitude seems to stem from some weird notion of sanctifying the 'simulation' as a complex nerdy low-level thing. Personal computers are universal computers, so anything you do that involves 'examination of a problem often not subject to direct experimentation' is a simulation. Printing 'Hello, world.' all over the screen is a simulation. Balancing your check book using Excel is a simulation. Modelling weather patterns over Greenland with custom hand-crafted code is a simulation. It the examination that is key, not the medium.
His points speak to the fact we've all stayed convinced computers are only really good ledgers. The means we have to interrogate data on personal level -- hence 'personal computer' not 'Personal Computer' -- hasn't significantly changed or improved in 20 years. That people, as an individual and the society as whole, might fare a bit better if we spent a little more time using computers to examine our problems, both for personal and global gain.
But to do that on a computer is hard. Maybe less so for you, but definitely for everyone not in your 'thin sliver'. Why? Because it's still as f'ing arcane to use a computer now as it was 20 years ago! He seems to think that perhaps the hardness could have been decreased some over the last two decades. I happen to agree.
Tunnel-vision, more like frustration. I've been using computers only during these last 20 years, and I'm about ready to scream from spending all my time working on the computer instead of actually using it. Least I found a career where I get paid for my pain, The average person just gets humped by the salesguy at CompUSA.
California based anecdote. While being ticketed by a cop for stomping my cig butt out on the sidewalk (erk!) I was asking him what would have happened if I had thrown my butt into the street like most smokers do? He grinned, said it was a traffic violation then. Okay, what happens if I had no drivers license? My ticket/personal info goes into the system, my identity is assigned a license number with a special prefix (?), and when I do apply for and receive a license, the ticket is then considered active. Fines to be paid at that point.
Okay, I was busted for a minor but legit law violation. Happens. Could even happen to someone thats spent lots of time not getting ID'd. How many violations now have driving-privileged based punishments or obscure jurisdictional overlap? You do the math while waiting in line in the DMV. Of course, this horror story is only true if believe a cop.
(Ironically, this ticket resulted in me plea bargaining my conviction down to a misdemeanor with fine and/or maximum six months jail time! Paid my finally assigned penalty of $187 and walked out of Burbank Superior with a new sense of fear. Top of the world, ma.)
Having to reset my master computer a few cars back, I found most cars built after '85 have a way to get a dash light to pulse the codes. With that particular car, you keyed the ignition on-off 3 times to put it in "diagnostic mode". It pulsed any error codes stored with the check engine light. The big problem of course is cars that have this feature also have more advanced emission control and auto-calibration systems that will spew lots of errors at you because their sensors aren't in the right state at that point. The same problems exist with the cheap generic daignostic tools you can get at better auto stores.
seeing how a large portion of the population of the world hasn't even used a telephone, i'm guessing the "masses" won't be immediately subjected to gene screening, therapy, or conditioning.
yeah yeah, the population that jumps both feet into this is creating new potential for catastrophe, but we're doing a good job of that without didling our genes. most likely they'd end up purging themselves out of existence than threatening every human on the planet.
speaking from the viewpoint that i'd already be dead without lots of constant medical intervention, technology is evolution -- we wouldn't exist in the form we are now without it. that doesn't suddenly change for the things we are just now discovering.
Don't know if this counts for anything, but it seems relatively easy to retrain yourself to handle the games better. I was trying to get a co-worker to play CounterStrike, but he refused saying that FPS games made him sick. Joking around, I told him Doom used to make me sick till I played it for 14 hours straight (that's true) and he should just spend the weekend playing it till he's cured. Saw him the next Monday, green and staggering, but smiling. Now he's the second best player in the office, without any of the previous problems. Another friend did the same, but popped a bunch of motion sickness pills before doing the long haul, and that seemed to work for him.
What makes me curious now is exactly how long the "training" takes, and if it translates to other games, and other causes of motion sickness?