This must be a school by school thing. In the university I went to, the CS department was a part of the college of engineering. They didn't (and still don't) offer anything like "software engineering" as a major. You can tailor the classes you take to be more software or systems oriented and get the same degree - they leave that up to the student. That does, of course, mean that not all students with a CS major leave equal, but I'm not sure that's even a realistic goal. I don't think there is any college or university that can boast graduates all having equal quality and breadth of knowledge.
And, to be quite honest, unless you're going to college for something requiring a post-graduate degree then the primary benefit of any sort of computer related major degree should be to give you a wide array of foundational knowledge, exercise in critical thinking, and a foot in the door for your first job. If you're thinking of a 4 year computer science or software engineering degree as job training, you're doing it wrong. If you already have the foundational knowledge, you'd get far more bang for your buck getting a lesser degree in whatever applied field you want to work in and cutting your chops with internships and securing an entry level job.
My most important advice for students thinking about any sort of computer-related major is this: don't do it unless there is something about computers that makes you fidget with them, try to figure out their inner workings, and makes you want to try to get them to do different things just to see if you can. I don't care how good the money is. If you go into the field you're going to be competing with and working with others who do it because they love it with a passion and will put more time and thought into it than you're ever going to be able to match if you don't love it too. And I can speak from experience that those of us who do it because we love it don't find it very enjoyable or rewarding to work with people who do it because they thought the pay would be good.
The data is incomplete. AI, like humans, makes mistakes like "correlation = causation". The problem is, like some humans, AI doesn't understand this and can't ask for additional information or self-correct.
Very much this. Reading the ProPublica article (the Axios one in the summary doesn't have anything useful except a couple of links - this being one), it's easy to see that the real complaint is that the sentencing algorithm appears to have problems with accuracy when its predictions are compared to what really happens.
Interestingly, if this article is correct, race is not one of the inputs into the system in question (Northpointe's Compas system).
Reading the field guide for the system here I was impressed by the depth of coverage of various facets of criminality the system attempts to analyze in section 4.2, but I can see how whoever came up with those facets could have put a statistical bias into the system if they simply looked at data points of past studies as future predictors. My suspicion is that the underlying problem is that there are dimensions that we either don't understand correctly/are applying inappropriately or that the system was built to use past statistics as future predictors and that races can tend to have those input data points in common.
The most interesting thing I found about the cabbage/wasp/butterfly link was this:
Certain kinds of butterflies landing on part of a cabbage (or yellow mustard - a cabbage relative) for some time can trigger the plant to release a chemical that makes the butterfly less likely to lay its eggs. Parasitic wasps are very sensitive to butterfly pheromones (for obvious reasons, since they lay their eggs alongside the caterpillar eggs). The chemical released by cabbage family plants against butterflies also attracts parasitic wasps.
I wonder if the pheromones and the plant's chemical defense are closely related. The wasps certainly seem to be sensitive to both. And to the wasp it's probably as simple as "this smell means a good place to lay my eggs for my young to feed and thrive."
While it is cool that plants have defense mechanisms against herbivores, the claim that the plants are "turning caterpillars into cannibals" is a bit of a stretch. Caterpillars are already cannibalistic in a pinch. All the plant does is make itself taste bad. If I only have meat and vegetables in my refrigerator and all the meat spoils first, then my choice to eat vegetables does not imply that meat's tendency to spoil faster turns me into a vegetarian.
Agreed about the benefits of men and women working together. But don't make the mistake of thinking that universities are the only ones guilty of building walls between the sexes. Religions, legislators, media figures, universities... All have members guilty of creating or perpetuating divisions between the sexes for various reasons and with varying political leanings.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to point out the divisiveness caused by some university courses or teachers. Just don't lose sight of the existence of a larger problem.
The two problems that I have with the whole debate is: 1) proponents always frame it as a "we are here to help" sort of thing, while never willing to acknowledge that their "help" requires that everyone involved give up some of their rights (again, that is a matter for local jurisdictions to decide if that is an equitable exchange, the right of choice of employment for the guarantee of a better wage); and, 2) for some reason lots people seem to think that this is a matter for the federal government when it clearly is not.
You have a very strange definition of "rights." Your definition appears to be something along the lines of each person being able to say "what I've decided is best for my situation" as evidenced by:
if there are people out there willing to work for less than $15/hour, or $13/hour, or $11/hour, or whatever, who are you to tell them that they can't. If there are employers out there who don't think that they can or want to pay a certain amount, who are you to tell them that they must?
and
fundamentally, the discussion is about taking away choices from employees, employers, and even customers and other actors in the market. Ultimately, every government regulation is a removal of rights and choices.
But that definition suffers from so many obvious flaws. I mean, take antitrust regulations. Do they take away choices? Of course! They take away the decision of corporate entities and their owners to eliminate all competition in a market and become the sole source of an essential good or service. By doing so, the regulation stops entities who would do that from denying choice to consumers after they've cornered their market. So, whether regulation is applied or not, choice is inevitably denied to someone. But, according to your definition, for some reason that's a bad thing because it was the federal government making that restriction and not a state or local government. I never fully understood that logic. But I digress.
On to the matter at hand - the existence of minimum wage. And let's cut to the chase here, all your arguments here have been most applicable to the existence of minimum wage, not about whether the minimum wage should be increased or not. I mean, by saying that I as an employer have to pay someone at least $7.25 per hour (the current federal minimum wage in the US), the federal government has taken away my choice to pay someone $3 per hour and the choice of people to find a job that pays $3 per hour, so your arguments still apply.
Employers have a rational desire to seek the most gain for the least cost to them. This means that without outside interference they will pay the least amount that someone is willing to do the job for. Employees will seek the greatest pay for the skills they possess (actually, it's more complicated than that, but I think we can all agree that that is at least one of the factors). With no minimum wage, for skilled labor there is a shortage of the necessary workers so you end up with pay pretty much the same as what it is now - well above the minimum wage. For unskilled labor, if there are ever more people than jobs in any locality then you end up with people competing against each other to see who is willing to accept the least pay and the longest hours. Those who refuse to accept low pay don't get jobs. It doesn't matter if the long hours at low pay just barely get you enough to pay for enough food to survive. You will accept it if the alternative is starvation.
By allowing choice up front (the choice to form monopolies or pay as low a wage as you can get employees to work for), you take away the choice of unskilled employees to do anything but struggle to survive. Whether you regulate or not, someone's choices are going to be affected by the economic framework they live in. If you're going to complain about everyone else misrepresenting the debate, you need to make sure you're not making the same mistake.
tl;dr - Maximizing the number of choices that each economic player has is not a "right" and it is not a wise long term strategy.
Despite the noise that the vocal minority is making over this, I think you will find that most folks, if asked (assuming no one could find out the answer) would support a completed ban on Muslims in the country. Naturally, most folks are simply afraid of being a racist or other "ist" word.
Honestly, I do not know understand why it is an issue to dislike someone because they are Muslim. It's not like disliking a person because they are brown, or black or whatever color. Islam is a religion and an ideology. It is reasonable to not like a person based on what they choose to believe?
Disliking people is fine. Nobody is upset with you because you dislike certain people. For that matter, you can dislike people because of the color of their skin, for all I care. Yes, it would be racist, but you don't go to jail for having racist thoughts. What people take issue with is trying to turn dislike of a group into law. If your issue is with people who commit violence in the name of religion and those who subjugate women in the name of religion, why aren't you arguing for tougher legislation against that? Muslims most definitely don't have a monopoly on those actions.
People aren't refusing to support a Muslim ban because they're afraid of being called a racist. They're refusing to support a Muslim ban because it wouldn't be any more morally defensible than a Christian ban or a Jew ban or an Atheist ban. Institutional discrimination seems pretty fun until you realize it can be done to a group that you might get unfairly lumped into too.
I work with several guys from Morocco. Naturally, they are all Muslim. They are seem like "normal" guys to me. I once asked one of my colleagues, hey... man, I heard that the Quran says that it is OK to hit your wife if she is disobedient or disrespectful. His answer... Of course! How else shall she learn? He went on to explain that of course, you could not cause damage or marks, but only enough that she gets the point and never more.
For all those people who say how great and peaceful Muslim people are... go to the middle east. Take your wife, or go alone if you are a woman. See how "peaceful" they are. I have lived in the middle east and I will not support or "tolerate" and religion that puts so little value on a human because of their sex.
I thought you said this was about religion. Do Muslims from Indonesia hold this same view? Those from India? Uzbekistan? It's not at all possible that you saw a regional custom with religion draped around it rather than a religious custom, is it? Or a subset of religious views not held by all those who follow that religion? I once worked with a Christian who told me that masturbation (onanism, as she put it) is an affront to God. She even had scripture quotes to support her point. I can therefore infer that all Christians are vehemently against masturbation because of their religious principles, right?
If I'm watching TV it's because I *don't* want to interact.
Me either, but I'm guessing we're both adults. From my in-depth examination of the summary, I don't think this is aimed at adults. Children have different motivations watching TV. I would have loved to make a couple of choices for the Thundercats or show Big Bird that I was paying attention.
As long as Netflix continues to keep children as the target audience (which does, indeed, appear to be their target market), this will probably work out well for them. But I pity them if they attempt to aim for adult demographics.
Telltale tried that with a lot of "choose your own adventure" sort of computer game offerings, but after the first couple of them I realized that all they were offering was the illusion of choice. I understand the reasoning and limitations - creating all the content for very different story branch paths that not all users will bother to see is not cost effective and leaves you with less time to focus on lengthening the story and adding choices. But playing them as an adult, it just left me feeling that the choices were pointless because you can't actually affect how the story ultimately plays out and ends.
To put it in software terms, they create the story as if it were a source control repository. You branch off the main path to make changes, but ultimately everything has to reconcile and go back to the central path.
The only reason to continue playing was to see how the developers had decided to have the story play out. In which case, why interrupt me with choices that barely matter? Sometimes I'd almost rather they dropped the price for a product where you just watch the story as though it were a movie with a "standard" choice already made for each branch and drop the whole choice facade.
Oh look its the "since one thing is possible all things must be possible" guy. How original.
That argument would be no worse than, "we haven't done that and can't do it now, therefore we never can." Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure what other argument could be inferred from "You can't live anywhere else but Earth anyway" except that since you gave no reason why you believe this to be the case.
Plus, just to clarify, my argument was "since similar problems (getting to and staying alive in previously uninhabitable places) have already been overcome, this problem likely can be overcome too." Not all things are possible. But the distinction between impossible and infeasible is important and worth discussing regarding this topic.
OR you could work to improve things here on Earth, rather than dreaming about leaving it. You can't live anywhere else but Earth anyway.
That's an odd argument. 200 year ago people couldn't fly either, so why dream about leaving the ground? It's important to distinguish between the impossible and the currently unfeasible.
And it's not as if throwing money at problems here on Earth has done any good at solving them, so why not continue to spend a very modest amount on experimental research? We've already reaped some technological benefits from space exploration that filter into every day society, so what's so terrible about continuing?
That said, I do agree that putting all our eggs in the "we have to get off the planet within 100 years and put most of our resources towards that" basket is ludicrous as well.
Try orbiting outside the Van Allen belt though and see how long humans live.
The astronauts who have been near and on the moon didn't seem to die from it. Granted, it was a short duration outside of the belt, but hard and inefficient with today's technology != impossible.
Yeah, but we're in the only livable part of space that we know of. Every other part that we can get to, and all of the parts that we can't get to but observe, hold nothing but beautiful views and death. If we can't survive on the only livable spot in the universe that we know of (and only making it worse over time) what chance do we out there? Forget about terraforming Mars, we'll need to be terraforming Earth before too long.
There is a distinct advantage in attempting to terraform Mars before Earth: if it fails, then we didn't wipe out the human race.
Also, there are livable parts of space that we created that are now orbiting the Earth in ways that were previously utterly devoid of all life. It's not unreasonable to think that we might be able to extend our ability to adapt to even more previously completely inhospitable and deadly environments. That's pretty much been the pattern for humanity for thousands of years.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because.....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
You say that as if a planet populated by pond scum is a bad thing. What's so bad about that? What's so inherently great about higher biological complexity? And while we're pulling fantasy scenarios from thin air, who's to say that the next thing to show up after us wouldn't be some sort of Lovecraftian horrors that exist only to subjugate or wipe out all other life in the universe? Is that automatically "better" because it came later, evolutionarily?
I believe what you've described is intelligent design via evolution... You're assuming that there's some "better" form that everything is evolving towards and that overly successful species need to die off and get out of the way for the next successful species to arrive. Neither the theory of natural selection nor the theory of evolution have ever made this claim. It's a claim put forth by those who prefer to think that the universe is deterministic in its path. It has nothing to do with scientific theory. It's purely philosophy.
Personally, I don't think the universe cares one way or another whether our species remains the dominant species on the planet (or even the universe), or it dies out and another species rises, or if it dies out and all life on earth dies with it. But as an animal with a standard self preservation instinct, I'd prefer that myself and my species continues to thrive. Especially if all we have to do is accept short term economic slowdown to guarantee avoiding potential catastrophe.
When I read and post on these forums, I am disparaged for being liberal. I am called ignorant,naive, and violent...because I disagree with the Red State take on tax policy and the way to achieve human dignity. But yet again, here we are with yet another news story where someone from the right is using violence to silence others.
At some point, don't you guys have to look in the mirror and notice there is something wrong with you? ALL these shootings, all violent political protest are coming from your ideology. How quickly you forget shootings like Senator Gabby Giffords came from a rightist. You claim tolerance, but in actuality practice none. Do you not think that those "cute" photos showing the beheading of Hillary Clinton have an effect on society? Do you not see how all this talk of people who disagree with you as evil, inhuman, and beneath contempt doesn't translate to this?
In these forums, the stench of this ignorance runs rampant. If you post any hate few spew about the president, a democrat, or a liberal, it will be modded up. The more dehumanizing, the higher the mod. None of these posts are ever backed with links, or logical arguments. It is enough to hate.
And when the hate is expressed in the inevitable outcome of murder, you will pretend you had nothing to do with it. Instead of preaching calm or making reasoned arguments, you will conveniently forget how you fed the hate machine. The blood of these killings in partly on your hands, and my guess is that most of you are too chicken shit to look in the mirror and ask why is my so called ideology of peace and tolerance producing so much violence?
I modified your original post by putting all the easy copy/paste changes in bold. I just wanted to point out that everything you said could just as easily be said and is equally as valid about the side you claim to take. By talking in terms of sides and perpetuating ad hominem attacks, you continue to perpetuate the problem. If you insist that people take a look in the mirror, you really ought to have started with yourself.
Stop making everything "us vs them". You've stopped seeing people with nuanced opinions and actions and started seeing a group unified against you that you must unify against. You ARE part of the problem as much as James Hodgkinson. I'm not talking about conservatives or Republicans, liberals or Democrats. I'm specifically referring to you and posts like yours from both sides that make assumptions that there is a unified bloc of people working against you when reality is more complicated than that. This is exactly why ad hominem arguments are not a good thing.
I wonder what percent of people actually click on these things?
Sadly, probably more than you'd think.
I mean, I get it. Application/computer security isn't always straightforward to the layperson, and it's sometimes hard to tell what's a vulnerability and what isn't. You get an email from someone you know (or that looks like it might have been from someone you know) and you're curious what they're sharing with you. If you're not familiar with phishing patterns and how they usually have to generalize their messages and hide reflected XSS links, it can be tricky to spot a clever phishing attempt.
I really wish there were an easy answer. So far, my best advice to less computer savvy friends and family has been to treat any unexpected or unprecedented links or attachments in their email with suspicion. But I know that sooner or later they'll find a legitimate email that they initially thought was suspicious and start to relax their guard. If anyone has better rules of thumb for less tech savvy family and friends, I'd love to hear it.
the whole end goal is to trap all big name AAA games on the other side of the net
Then don't play big name AAA games. They're the ones with incentive to DRM- and server-lock as much as possible to recoup costs. In my experience, they're usually not worth the markup anyway. There's a very healthy market of non-AAA games with no DRM. Vote with your wallet. Don't act as if you have no choice in the matter when you very clearly do.
Quake was once a game you owned with dedicated servers and level editors providing free content to players and goes to a server locked f2p model where the game you are dumping money into
Did I not just say that there are companies still trying to pull shenanigans?
You act as though Quake and Quake Champions have anything to do with each other except for the licensed brand name. It's not the same development studio. It's not the same target market. It's not the same business model. It's not even the same gameplay experience. Different things are different.
I loved the original Quake and Quake 2. I found Quake 3 to be underwhelming. I find Quake Champions to be a completely uninteresting attempt to cash in on the same market as games like Overwatch, which I also don't find interesting.
I find the f2p model to be disgusting, but it has nothing to do with ownership. I don't like that it's a predatory business model that takes advantage of a specific subset of people who are easily manipulated into lots of tiny purchases that add up to more than anyone would have normally spent on a more traditional one-time transaction game.
But I don't feel threatened by a lackluster game using a business model that I don't agree with in a world where there are plenty of better games available using business models I do agree with. I don't see why you're so threatened or surprised by large studios imposing heavy-handed DRM when plenty of small studios do not.
I'm using the new quake champions as an example because all prior quakes used a buy once, you own it and control it model. All the great mods that came out of the quake community because of that freedom and having level editors, etc... gets taken away.
If the original Quake had been a f2p game that was not modifiable, it wouldn't have been anywhere close to the classic game we know and love. The model itself limits the game's appeal and audience. I dispute your hypothesis that some companies treating games as a service will lead to all games being offered as services. Case in point:
can be 'shut down' at the behest of besthesda, aka gaming history is being literally destroyed
Wow, where were you in '97 when Ultima Online came out? You realize the players don't OWN those characters, right? If the servers go away, the characters and the world go away. Have you been railing against the system for 20 years now? We've seen other MMOs come that died off, and people's characters were gone for good. And yet, there hasn't been widespread backlash against the business model. People are actually OK with games as a service existing alongside games as a product. And the games as a product model has not died off either. Funnily enough, it seems that you can't always outcompete the games as a product model if you chain yourself to the games as a service model instead.
You're (sic) rights and fun are being progressively reduced.
Well I'm glad you're here to tell me what I find fun and what rights I have that I should be most concerned about.
Your brain does NOT see reality as it is, see the science, you can be told the facts and NOT reason to the right conclusion.
I'm also very glad you're here to point us all to the One True Answer and that there couldn't possibly be any valid concerns on the part of game publishers or development studios that DRM is an attempt to address. It's good to know that empirically, in all cases, DRM == bad.
Oof. That's some knee-jerk reactionism if ever I've seen it.
Why did you list a bunch of games whose entire gameplay model revolves around online interactions between players? Frankly, I'd be shocked if those games *weren't* online only. Are games of that genre becoming more popular? Yes, there does seem to be a growing market segment interested in them that they can compete for. But you make it sound like there are no single player games or games with multiplayer that don't require a central server. What about The Witcher 3? DRM-free is available from gog.com and it's a AAA title. You want multiplayer? Why not play Grim Dawn? It's Diablo-like and you can directly connect to a friend. Again, no DRM. There's also Star Ruler 2, Shadow Warrior 2, Ashes of the Singularity, etc.
Yeah, there are lots of games pulling DRM shenanigans. When haven't there been? Some Commodore games in the 80s used to come with DRM that required you to have access to the manual or a "code wheel" to try to verify that you really own the game and didn't just copy the files. It's not like we suddenly arrived in an age where, out of the blue, game publishers realized they have a vested interest in trying to ensure that as many copies of their software as possible were purchased legitimately.
I myself tend to take a more nuanced approach than "DRM = bad!" If it's a model that benefits the parties involved enough (such as Steam, in many cases), I'm ok with accepting DRM as part of the package. I'm ok with knowingly accepting that I don't truly have the final say in who really "owns" the game. I have enough of a say in the things I care about regarding the game. If that changes, I will re-evaluate my purchasing strategy. If a publisher adds DRM that detracts from the experience or adds nothing at all (in my opinion, pretty much anything from Ubisoft over the last 5 years at least would be a good example), I will stay away from their products.
tl;dr - Don't equate a willingness to accept compromise on DRM as laziness or ignorance. Some of us (perhaps even many) are fully aware of what we're doing and are OK with it.
On the flip side, the lowered barriers to entry caused by not needing to go through a traditionally restrictive publisher have resulted in a modern renaissance for indie games. Low budget titles available through gog.com or Steam have some real gems among them. Granted, there are a lot of terrible low budget games and "in development" games that never get finished too, but I'll accept that as a price I'm willing to pay for really imaginative and refreshingly fun titles being regularly released by people or studios I've never heard of.
The central server fad seems to be a big developer/publisher only obsession, fortunately. But yes, it is unfortunate that some otherwise good games decided they should assume that there's a central server that will always exist.
Each time we contradict ourselves publicly by making untested or untestable statements we only serve to make our research, our methods, our philosophy, and our entire field look like a joke.
FTFY. Do you honestly think that scientists (by whom I am assuming you mean people applying the scientific method to their field of research) are the ones making bold claims with no data to back them up? Or is it people who find tests that have been done for other reasons, retroactively apply a hypothesis they'd like to promote, and publicize that hypothesis as fact?
Let's be very clear here. Scientists did not claim a damn thing in this article. "Experts" looked at other people's work and decided that they needed to tell everyone that what they think it means is a scientific fact. This is analogous (in more ways than you'd think) to pundits going on television to promote their opinions under the guise of "journalism". That's not journalism, and this isn't science. That some people don't seem to understand that there is a difference is, to me, the bigger problem.
DotA is definitely more than a mash-up of Warcraft 3 and Tower Defense, I mean it spawned an entire genre that has dominated gaming for the better part of 10-years.
Why do you think its popularity and longevity preclude it from being a combination of derivative ideas?
Games like Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch are also very popular, and TF2 has had a very long life indeed. But their core concepts were still spawned from a Quake mod called Team Fortress that was really just another Capture the Flag clone (of which there were many in those days) with classes. It's just that it was done very well and arrived at the right time to become very popular.
The original version of DotA WAS a Warcraft 3 mod which was based on a Starcraft custom map called Aeon of Strife. And Aeon of Strife was an evolution of the (at the time) very popular Tower Defense sub-genre.
DotA is popular and has continued to evolve, but it's still a derivative work. That doesn't detract from the fact that it's fun to play and continues to innovate. It just means it didn't form in a vacuum.
I think it's a great film. I just didn't consider it science fiction. Taken with the rest of Terry Gilliam's "Trilogy of Imagination" (which includes Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), I tend to lump it into the fantasy genre. But I can see how it might also fit within science fiction.
For Terry Gilliam directed science fiction, I like Twelve Monkeys a lot as well.
And while we're on the subject of time travel movies, why no significant mention of Looper so far? I was far more impressed by that movie than I expected to be when I saw it.
I wholeheartedly agree that using a cell phone while driving is distracting and dangerous. I've had too high a percentage of experiences being nearly hit by another driver only to later see at a stoplight that they've been using their cell phone to feel any other way about this. However, I do feel that the Zen Drive survey is making some strange extrapolations from their data. From the article:
Zendrive researchers also found that during an hour-long trip, drivers spent an average of 3.5-minutes using their phones. This finding is frightening, especially when you consider that a 2-second distraction is long enough to increase your likelihood of crashing by over 20-times. In other words, that’s equivalent to 105 opportunities an hour that you could nearly kill yourself and/or others.
Ok, that's just ridiculous extrapolation there. The assumption that you had 105 2-second distractions is in no way supported by the survey. There could have been 42 5-second distractions mostly involving stoplights. There could have been 420 0.5-second distractions from glancing at the phone and reading it without interacting with it. Or any distribution in between. They could have just included a section on whether the drivers were ever interacting with their phones for more than 2 seconds and used that to determine a link between that number and the "more than 3 minutes" number. At least then they would have data to back up the claim.
Also, what is "phone use" in this context? If I'm using a hands-free device connected to my smartphone to have a conversation without interacting with the phone does the duration of that entire conversation count as "phone use?"
tl;dr - Disingenuous and ill-thought-through extrapolations designed to reinforce your point hurt your argument, even if I would otherwise agree with you.
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This must be a school by school thing. In the university I went to, the CS department was a part of the college of engineering. They didn't (and still don't) offer anything like "software engineering" as a major. You can tailor the classes you take to be more software or systems oriented and get the same degree - they leave that up to the student. That does, of course, mean that not all students with a CS major leave equal, but I'm not sure that's even a realistic goal. I don't think there is any college or university that can boast graduates all having equal quality and breadth of knowledge.
And, to be quite honest, unless you're going to college for something requiring a post-graduate degree then the primary benefit of any sort of computer related major degree should be to give you a wide array of foundational knowledge, exercise in critical thinking, and a foot in the door for your first job. If you're thinking of a 4 year computer science or software engineering degree as job training, you're doing it wrong. If you already have the foundational knowledge, you'd get far more bang for your buck getting a lesser degree in whatever applied field you want to work in and cutting your chops with internships and securing an entry level job.
My most important advice for students thinking about any sort of computer-related major is this: don't do it unless there is something about computers that makes you fidget with them, try to figure out their inner workings, and makes you want to try to get them to do different things just to see if you can. I don't care how good the money is. If you go into the field you're going to be competing with and working with others who do it because they love it with a passion and will put more time and thought into it than you're ever going to be able to match if you don't love it too. And I can speak from experience that those of us who do it because we love it don't find it very enjoyable or rewarding to work with people who do it because they thought the pay would be good.
That's ok. I got "Troll" for diving through the article within the summary and finding related links to share. /shrug
The data is incomplete. AI, like humans, makes mistakes like "correlation = causation". The problem is, like some humans, AI doesn't understand this and can't ask for additional information or self-correct.
Very much this. Reading the ProPublica article (the Axios one in the summary doesn't have anything useful except a couple of links - this being one), it's easy to see that the real complaint is that the sentencing algorithm appears to have problems with accuracy when its predictions are compared to what really happens.
Interestingly, if this article is correct, race is not one of the inputs into the system in question (Northpointe's Compas system).
Reading the field guide for the system here I was impressed by the depth of coverage of various facets of criminality the system attempts to analyze in section 4.2, but I can see how whoever came up with those facets could have put a statistical bias into the system if they simply looked at data points of past studies as future predictors. My suspicion is that the underlying problem is that there are dimensions that we either don't understand correctly/are applying inappropriately or that the system was built to use past statistics as future predictors and that races can tend to have those input data points in common.
The most interesting thing I found about the cabbage/wasp/butterfly link was this:
Certain kinds of butterflies landing on part of a cabbage (or yellow mustard - a cabbage relative) for some time can trigger the plant to release a chemical that makes the butterfly less likely to lay its eggs. Parasitic wasps are very sensitive to butterfly pheromones (for obvious reasons, since they lay their eggs alongside the caterpillar eggs). The chemical released by cabbage family plants against butterflies also attracts parasitic wasps.
I wonder if the pheromones and the plant's chemical defense are closely related. The wasps certainly seem to be sensitive to both. And to the wasp it's probably as simple as "this smell means a good place to lay my eggs for my young to feed and thrive."
While it is cool that plants have defense mechanisms against herbivores, the claim that the plants are "turning caterpillars into cannibals" is a bit of a stretch. Caterpillars are already cannibalistic in a pinch. All the plant does is make itself taste bad. If I only have meat and vegetables in my refrigerator and all the meat spoils first, then my choice to eat vegetables does not imply that meat's tendency to spoil faster turns me into a vegetarian.
Pokemon Go was augmented reality in the same way that games on the Virtual Boy were virtual reality.
Agreed about the benefits of men and women working together. But don't make the mistake of thinking that universities are the only ones guilty of building walls between the sexes. Religions, legislators, media figures, universities... All have members guilty of creating or perpetuating divisions between the sexes for various reasons and with varying political leanings.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to point out the divisiveness caused by some university courses or teachers. Just don't lose sight of the existence of a larger problem.
The two problems that I have with the whole debate is: 1) proponents always frame it as a "we are here to help" sort of thing, while never willing to acknowledge that their "help" requires that everyone involved give up some of their rights (again, that is a matter for local jurisdictions to decide if that is an equitable exchange, the right of choice of employment for the guarantee of a better wage); and, 2) for some reason lots people seem to think that this is a matter for the federal government when it clearly is not.
You have a very strange definition of "rights." Your definition appears to be something along the lines of each person being able to say "what I've decided is best for my situation" as evidenced by:
if there are people out there willing to work for less than $15/hour, or $13/hour, or $11/hour, or whatever, who are you to tell them that they can't. If there are employers out there who don't think that they can or want to pay a certain amount, who are you to tell them that they must?
and
fundamentally, the discussion is about taking away choices from employees, employers, and even customers and other actors in the market. Ultimately, every government regulation is a removal of rights and choices.
But that definition suffers from so many obvious flaws. I mean, take antitrust regulations. Do they take away choices? Of course! They take away the decision of corporate entities and their owners to eliminate all competition in a market and become the sole source of an essential good or service. By doing so, the regulation stops entities who would do that from denying choice to consumers after they've cornered their market. So, whether regulation is applied or not, choice is inevitably denied to someone. But, according to your definition, for some reason that's a bad thing because it was the federal government making that restriction and not a state or local government. I never fully understood that logic. But I digress.
On to the matter at hand - the existence of minimum wage. And let's cut to the chase here, all your arguments here have been most applicable to the existence of minimum wage, not about whether the minimum wage should be increased or not. I mean, by saying that I as an employer have to pay someone at least $7.25 per hour (the current federal minimum wage in the US), the federal government has taken away my choice to pay someone $3 per hour and the choice of people to find a job that pays $3 per hour, so your arguments still apply.
Employers have a rational desire to seek the most gain for the least cost to them. This means that without outside interference they will pay the least amount that someone is willing to do the job for. Employees will seek the greatest pay for the skills they possess (actually, it's more complicated than that, but I think we can all agree that that is at least one of the factors). With no minimum wage, for skilled labor there is a shortage of the necessary workers so you end up with pay pretty much the same as what it is now - well above the minimum wage. For unskilled labor, if there are ever more people than jobs in any locality then you end up with people competing against each other to see who is willing to accept the least pay and the longest hours. Those who refuse to accept low pay don't get jobs. It doesn't matter if the long hours at low pay just barely get you enough to pay for enough food to survive. You will accept it if the alternative is starvation.
By allowing choice up front (the choice to form monopolies or pay as low a wage as you can get employees to work for), you take away the choice of unskilled employees to do anything but struggle to survive. Whether you regulate or not, someone's choices are going to be affected by the economic framework they live in. If you're going to complain about everyone else misrepresenting the debate, you need to make sure you're not making the same mistake.
tl;dr - Maximizing the number of choices that each economic player has is not a "right" and it is not a wise long term strategy.
Despite the noise that the vocal minority is making over this, I think you will find that most folks, if asked (assuming no one could find out the answer) would support a completed ban on Muslims in the country.
Naturally, most folks are simply afraid of being a racist or other "ist" word.
Honestly, I do not know understand why it is an issue to dislike someone because they are Muslim. It's not like disliking a person because they are brown, or black or whatever color.
Islam is a religion and an ideology. It is reasonable to not like a person based on what they choose to believe?
Disliking people is fine. Nobody is upset with you because you dislike certain people. For that matter, you can dislike people because of the color of their skin, for all I care. Yes, it would be racist, but you don't go to jail for having racist thoughts. What people take issue with is trying to turn dislike of a group into law. If your issue is with people who commit violence in the name of religion and those who subjugate women in the name of religion, why aren't you arguing for tougher legislation against that? Muslims most definitely don't have a monopoly on those actions.
People aren't refusing to support a Muslim ban because they're afraid of being called a racist. They're refusing to support a Muslim ban because it wouldn't be any more morally defensible than a Christian ban or a Jew ban or an Atheist ban. Institutional discrimination seems pretty fun until you realize it can be done to a group that you might get unfairly lumped into too.
I work with several guys from Morocco. Naturally, they are all Muslim. They are seem like "normal" guys to me. I once asked one of my colleagues, hey... man, I heard that the Quran says that it is OK to hit your wife if she is disobedient or disrespectful.
His answer... Of course! How else shall she learn? He went on to explain that of course, you could not cause damage or marks, but only enough that she gets the point and never more.
For all those people who say how great and peaceful Muslim people are... go to the middle east. Take your wife, or go alone if you are a woman. See how "peaceful" they are. I have lived in the middle east and I will not support or "tolerate" and religion that puts so little value on a human because of their sex.
I thought you said this was about religion. Do Muslims from Indonesia hold this same view? Those from India? Uzbekistan? It's not at all possible that you saw a regional custom with religion draped around it rather than a religious custom, is it? Or a subset of religious views not held by all those who follow that religion? I once worked with a Christian who told me that masturbation (onanism, as she put it) is an affront to God. She even had scripture quotes to support her point. I can therefore infer that all Christians are vehemently against masturbation because of their religious principles, right?
If I'm watching TV it's because I *don't* want to interact.
Me either, but I'm guessing we're both adults. From my in-depth examination of the summary, I don't think this is aimed at adults. Children have different motivations watching TV. I would have loved to make a couple of choices for the Thundercats or show Big Bird that I was paying attention.
As long as Netflix continues to keep children as the target audience (which does, indeed, appear to be their target market), this will probably work out well for them. But I pity them if they attempt to aim for adult demographics.
Telltale tried that with a lot of "choose your own adventure" sort of computer game offerings, but after the first couple of them I realized that all they were offering was the illusion of choice. I understand the reasoning and limitations - creating all the content for very different story branch paths that not all users will bother to see is not cost effective and leaves you with less time to focus on lengthening the story and adding choices. But playing them as an adult, it just left me feeling that the choices were pointless because you can't actually affect how the story ultimately plays out and ends.
To put it in software terms, they create the story as if it were a source control repository. You branch off the main path to make changes, but ultimately everything has to reconcile and go back to the central path.
The only reason to continue playing was to see how the developers had decided to have the story play out. In which case, why interrupt me with choices that barely matter? Sometimes I'd almost rather they dropped the price for a product where you just watch the story as though it were a movie with a "standard" choice already made for each branch and drop the whole choice facade.
Oh look its the "since one thing is possible all things must be possible" guy. How original.
That argument would be no worse than, "we haven't done that and can't do it now, therefore we never can." Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure what other argument could be inferred from "You can't live anywhere else but Earth anyway" except that since you gave no reason why you believe this to be the case.
Plus, just to clarify, my argument was "since similar problems (getting to and staying alive in previously uninhabitable places) have already been overcome, this problem likely can be overcome too." Not all things are possible. But the distinction between impossible and infeasible is important and worth discussing regarding this topic.
OR you could work to improve things here on Earth, rather than dreaming about leaving it. You can't live anywhere else but Earth anyway.
That's an odd argument. 200 year ago people couldn't fly either, so why dream about leaving the ground? It's important to distinguish between the impossible and the currently unfeasible.
And it's not as if throwing money at problems here on Earth has done any good at solving them, so why not continue to spend a very modest amount on experimental research? We've already reaped some technological benefits from space exploration that filter into every day society, so what's so terrible about continuing?
That said, I do agree that putting all our eggs in the "we have to get off the planet within 100 years and put most of our resources towards that" basket is ludicrous as well.
Try orbiting outside the Van Allen belt though and see how long humans live.
The astronauts who have been near and on the moon didn't seem to die from it. Granted, it was a short duration outside of the belt, but hard and inefficient with today's technology != impossible.
Yeah, but we're in the only livable part of space that we know of. Every other part that we can get to, and all of the parts that we can't get to but observe, hold nothing but beautiful views and death. If we can't survive on the only livable spot in the universe that we know of (and only making it worse over time) what chance do we out there? Forget about terraforming Mars, we'll need to be terraforming Earth before too long.
There is a distinct advantage in attempting to terraform Mars before Earth: if it fails, then we didn't wipe out the human race.
Also, there are livable parts of space that we created that are now orbiting the Earth in ways that were previously utterly devoid of all life. It's not unreasonable to think that we might be able to extend our ability to adapt to even more previously completely inhospitable and deadly environments. That's pretty much been the pattern for humanity for thousands of years.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
You say that as if a planet populated by pond scum is a bad thing. What's so bad about that? What's so inherently great about higher biological complexity? And while we're pulling fantasy scenarios from thin air, who's to say that the next thing to show up after us wouldn't be some sort of Lovecraftian horrors that exist only to subjugate or wipe out all other life in the universe? Is that automatically "better" because it came later, evolutionarily?
I believe what you've described is intelligent design via evolution... You're assuming that there's some "better" form that everything is evolving towards and that overly successful species need to die off and get out of the way for the next successful species to arrive. Neither the theory of natural selection nor the theory of evolution have ever made this claim. It's a claim put forth by those who prefer to think that the universe is deterministic in its path. It has nothing to do with scientific theory. It's purely philosophy.
Personally, I don't think the universe cares one way or another whether our species remains the dominant species on the planet (or even the universe), or it dies out and another species rises, or if it dies out and all life on earth dies with it. But as an animal with a standard self preservation instinct, I'd prefer that myself and my species continues to thrive. Especially if all we have to do is accept short term economic slowdown to guarantee avoiding potential catastrophe.
When I read and post on these forums, I am disparaged for being liberal. I am called ignorant,naive, and violent...because I disagree with the Red State take on tax policy and the way to achieve human dignity. But yet again, here we are with yet another news story where someone from the right is using violence to silence others.
At some point, don't you guys have to look in the mirror and notice there is something wrong with you? ALL these shootings, all violent political protest are coming from your ideology. How quickly you forget shootings like Senator Gabby Giffords came from a rightist. You claim tolerance, but in actuality practice none. Do you not think that those "cute" photos showing the beheading of Hillary Clinton have an effect on society? Do you not see how all this talk of people who disagree with you as evil, inhuman, and beneath contempt doesn't translate to this?
In these forums, the stench of this ignorance runs rampant. If you post any hate few spew about the president, a democrat, or a liberal, it will be modded up. The more dehumanizing, the higher the mod. None of these posts are ever backed with links, or logical arguments. It is enough to hate.
And when the hate is expressed in the inevitable outcome of murder, you will pretend you had nothing to do with it. Instead of preaching calm or making reasoned arguments, you will conveniently forget how you fed the hate machine. The blood of these killings in partly on your hands, and my guess is that most of you are too chicken shit to look in the mirror and ask why is my so called ideology of peace and tolerance producing so much violence?
I modified your original post by putting all the easy copy/paste changes in bold. I just wanted to point out that everything you said could just as easily be said and is equally as valid about the side you claim to take. By talking in terms of sides and perpetuating ad hominem attacks, you continue to perpetuate the problem. If you insist that people take a look in the mirror, you really ought to have started with yourself.
Stop making everything "us vs them". You've stopped seeing people with nuanced opinions and actions and started seeing a group unified against you that you must unify against. You ARE part of the problem as much as James Hodgkinson. I'm not talking about conservatives or Republicans, liberals or Democrats. I'm specifically referring to you and posts like yours from both sides that make assumptions that there is a unified bloc of people working against you when reality is more complicated than that. This is exactly why ad hominem arguments are not a good thing.
I wonder what percent of people actually click on these things?
Sadly, probably more than you'd think.
I mean, I get it. Application/computer security isn't always straightforward to the layperson, and it's sometimes hard to tell what's a vulnerability and what isn't. You get an email from someone you know (or that looks like it might have been from someone you know) and you're curious what they're sharing with you. If you're not familiar with phishing patterns and how they usually have to generalize their messages and hide reflected XSS links, it can be tricky to spot a clever phishing attempt.
I really wish there were an easy answer. So far, my best advice to less computer savvy friends and family has been to treat any unexpected or unprecedented links or attachments in their email with suspicion. But I know that sooner or later they'll find a legitimate email that they initially thought was suspicious and start to relax their guard. If anyone has better rules of thumb for less tech savvy family and friends, I'd love to hear it.
Diablo 2 >> Diablo 3
Blizzard >> Activision
Quake 3 >> Quake champions
id >> Bethesda
Hmm, I'm seeing a pattern.
the whole end goal is to trap all big name AAA games on the other side of the net
Then don't play big name AAA games. They're the ones with incentive to DRM- and server-lock as much as possible to recoup costs. In my experience, they're usually not worth the markup anyway. There's a very healthy market of non-AAA games with no DRM. Vote with your wallet. Don't act as if you have no choice in the matter when you very clearly do.
Quake was once a game you owned with dedicated servers and level editors providing free content to players and goes to a server locked f2p model where the game you are dumping money into
Did I not just say that there are companies still trying to pull shenanigans?
You act as though Quake and Quake Champions have anything to do with each other except for the licensed brand name. It's not the same development studio. It's not the same target market. It's not the same business model. It's not even the same gameplay experience. Different things are different.
I loved the original Quake and Quake 2. I found Quake 3 to be underwhelming. I find Quake Champions to be a completely uninteresting attempt to cash in on the same market as games like Overwatch, which I also don't find interesting.
I find the f2p model to be disgusting, but it has nothing to do with ownership. I don't like that it's a predatory business model that takes advantage of a specific subset of people who are easily manipulated into lots of tiny purchases that add up to more than anyone would have normally spent on a more traditional one-time transaction game.
But I don't feel threatened by a lackluster game using a business model that I don't agree with in a world where there are plenty of better games available using business models I do agree with. I don't see why you're so threatened or surprised by large studios imposing heavy-handed DRM when plenty of small studios do not.
I'm using the new quake champions as an example because all prior quakes used a buy once, you own it and control it model. All the great mods that came out of the quake community because of that freedom and having level editors, etc... gets taken away.
If the original Quake had been a f2p game that was not modifiable, it wouldn't have been anywhere close to the classic game we know and love. The model itself limits the game's appeal and audience. I dispute your hypothesis that some companies treating games as a service will lead to all games being offered as services. Case in point:
can be 'shut down' at the behest of besthesda, aka gaming history is being literally destroyed
Wow, where were you in '97 when Ultima Online came out? You realize the players don't OWN those characters, right? If the servers go away, the characters and the world go away. Have you been railing against the system for 20 years now? We've seen other MMOs come that died off, and people's characters were gone for good. And yet, there hasn't been widespread backlash against the business model. People are actually OK with games as a service existing alongside games as a product. And the games as a product model has not died off either. Funnily enough, it seems that you can't always outcompete the games as a product model if you chain yourself to the games as a service model instead.
You're (sic) rights and fun are being progressively reduced.
Well I'm glad you're here to tell me what I find fun and what rights I have that I should be most concerned about.
Your brain does NOT see reality as it is, see the science, you can be told the facts and NOT reason to the right conclusion.
I'm also very glad you're here to point us all to the One True Answer and that there couldn't possibly be any valid concerns on the part of game publishers or development studios that DRM is an attempt to address. It's good to know that empirically, in all cases, DRM == bad.
On reason
Oh irony, how I do love thee.
Oof. That's some knee-jerk reactionism if ever I've seen it.
Why did you list a bunch of games whose entire gameplay model revolves around online interactions between players? Frankly, I'd be shocked if those games *weren't* online only. Are games of that genre becoming more popular? Yes, there does seem to be a growing market segment interested in them that they can compete for. But you make it sound like there are no single player games or games with multiplayer that don't require a central server. What about The Witcher 3? DRM-free is available from gog.com and it's a AAA title. You want multiplayer? Why not play Grim Dawn? It's Diablo-like and you can directly connect to a friend. Again, no DRM. There's also Star Ruler 2, Shadow Warrior 2, Ashes of the Singularity, etc.
Yeah, there are lots of games pulling DRM shenanigans. When haven't there been? Some Commodore games in the 80s used to come with DRM that required you to have access to the manual or a "code wheel" to try to verify that you really own the game and didn't just copy the files. It's not like we suddenly arrived in an age where, out of the blue, game publishers realized they have a vested interest in trying to ensure that as many copies of their software as possible were purchased legitimately.
I myself tend to take a more nuanced approach than "DRM = bad!" If it's a model that benefits the parties involved enough (such as Steam, in many cases), I'm ok with accepting DRM as part of the package. I'm ok with knowingly accepting that I don't truly have the final say in who really "owns" the game. I have enough of a say in the things I care about regarding the game. If that changes, I will re-evaluate my purchasing strategy. If a publisher adds DRM that detracts from the experience or adds nothing at all (in my opinion, pretty much anything from Ubisoft over the last 5 years at least would be a good example), I will stay away from their products.
tl;dr - Don't equate a willingness to accept compromise on DRM as laziness or ignorance. Some of us (perhaps even many) are fully aware of what we're doing and are OK with it.
On the flip side, the lowered barriers to entry caused by not needing to go through a traditionally restrictive publisher have resulted in a modern renaissance for indie games. Low budget titles available through gog.com or Steam have some real gems among them. Granted, there are a lot of terrible low budget games and "in development" games that never get finished too, but I'll accept that as a price I'm willing to pay for really imaginative and refreshingly fun titles being regularly released by people or studios I've never heard of.
The central server fad seems to be a big developer/publisher only obsession, fortunately. But yes, it is unfortunate that some otherwise good games decided they should assume that there's a central server that will always exist.
Each time we contradict ourselves publicly by making untested or untestable statements we only serve to make our research, our methods, our philosophy, and our entire field look like a joke.
FTFY. Do you honestly think that scientists (by whom I am assuming you mean people applying the scientific method to their field of research) are the ones making bold claims with no data to back them up? Or is it people who find tests that have been done for other reasons, retroactively apply a hypothesis they'd like to promote, and publicize that hypothesis as fact?
Let's be very clear here. Scientists did not claim a damn thing in this article. "Experts" looked at other people's work and decided that they needed to tell everyone that what they think it means is a scientific fact. This is analogous (in more ways than you'd think) to pundits going on television to promote their opinions under the guise of "journalism". That's not journalism, and this isn't science. That some people don't seem to understand that there is a difference is, to me, the bigger problem.
DotA is definitely more than a mash-up of Warcraft 3 and Tower Defense, I mean it spawned an entire genre that has dominated gaming for the better part of 10-years.
Why do you think its popularity and longevity preclude it from being a combination of derivative ideas?
Games like Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch are also very popular, and TF2 has had a very long life indeed. But their core concepts were still spawned from a Quake mod called Team Fortress that was really just another Capture the Flag clone (of which there were many in those days) with classes. It's just that it was done very well and arrived at the right time to become very popular.
The original version of DotA WAS a Warcraft 3 mod which was based on a Starcraft custom map called Aeon of Strife. And Aeon of Strife was an evolution of the (at the time) very popular Tower Defense sub-genre.
DotA is popular and has continued to evolve, but it's still a derivative work. That doesn't detract from the fact that it's fun to play and continues to innovate. It just means it didn't form in a vacuum.
I think it's a great film. I just didn't consider it science fiction. Taken with the rest of Terry Gilliam's "Trilogy of Imagination" (which includes Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), I tend to lump it into the fantasy genre. But I can see how it might also fit within science fiction.
For Terry Gilliam directed science fiction, I like Twelve Monkeys a lot as well.
And while we're on the subject of time travel movies, why no significant mention of Looper so far? I was far more impressed by that movie than I expected to be when I saw it.
I wholeheartedly agree that using a cell phone while driving is distracting and dangerous. I've had too high a percentage of experiences being nearly hit by another driver only to later see at a stoplight that they've been using their cell phone to feel any other way about this. However, I do feel that the Zen Drive survey is making some strange extrapolations from their data. From the article:
Zendrive researchers also found that during an hour-long trip, drivers spent an average of 3.5-minutes using their phones. This finding is frightening, especially when you consider that a 2-second distraction is long enough to increase your likelihood of crashing by over 20-times. In other words, that’s equivalent to 105 opportunities an hour that you could nearly kill yourself and/or others.
Ok, that's just ridiculous extrapolation there. The assumption that you had 105 2-second distractions is in no way supported by the survey. There could have been 42 5-second distractions mostly involving stoplights. There could have been 420 0.5-second distractions from glancing at the phone and reading it without interacting with it. Or any distribution in between. They could have just included a section on whether the drivers were ever interacting with their phones for more than 2 seconds and used that to determine a link between that number and the "more than 3 minutes" number. At least then they would have data to back up the claim.
Also, what is "phone use" in this context? If I'm using a hands-free device connected to my smartphone to have a conversation without interacting with the phone does the duration of that entire conversation count as "phone use?"
tl;dr - Disingenuous and ill-thought-through extrapolations designed to reinforce your point hurt your argument, even if I would otherwise agree with you.