Thanks for the reply. I agree the self-referential bits about movie-making were actually the best parts....:) I only caught the Matthew 7:24 reference because I was seeing it in translation and the last line by the kid was subtitled. What bizarre dialogue, I remember thinking and then had one of those moments of realization where it is like something hits you.
A fantastic movie anyway. And a blast to watch even without thinking about the intellectual side at all!
Cobb didn't put the spinning top down and walk away. He looked at his family, he let them go on ahead of him, then he spun the object on the table and stared intently at it.
Cobb walks in and spins the top, then sees his family and walks away. We get the line about the kids building a house on the cliff (nonsensical in any other interpretation) and then everyone disappears. The camera closes on the spinning top in an empty room.
Once he had enough room to accept the possibility that it was real, he didn't want to ruin it by finding out it's not.
The seduction offered by Mal (malevolent?) in limbo is exactly what you describe above. I'm paraphrasing here, but what she essentially says to him is, "you don't *know* there is anything else out there, so why not enjoy being here with me and the children." Cobb rejects it, and we see the wisdom of this as Limbo is subsequently destroyed as per the parable.
If the film started and ended with a reference to Plato's Republic, I agree it would make sense to discuss Greek philosophy on Slashdot. Otherwise... let us just agree that there is a lot of water in the film.
There is so much water in fact that someone who took film seriously might even ask if it is being used symbolically. Perhaps it isn't coincidental that the opening shot to Inception is basically the same as that to A.I.. or that water has been a standard literary symbol for the subconscious since the nineteenth century. Maybe it isn't accidental that Nolan even has his characters talk about the "shores of our subconscious" while the camera is showing a shot of the ocean.
So no... I don't worry about over-interpreting when I see a film about death and faith reference a well-known parable about death and faith. Where I wonder if I'm over-interpreting is when I notice things like it being a glass of water that sends Fischer to sleep on the plane.
I'm not sure what the plot holes are. The film is a Christian parable and the plot makes sense if you take it at its word.
I thought the linked video was funny, but if people are complaining seriously about whether "kicks" transcend levels in shared dreamspace is silly. The film deals with all of this stuff on the level of metaphor anyway.
Respectfully, I don't think you understood Inception... let me try to explain:
Inception opens with a shot of children building a castle on the beach. This is a biblical reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The film closes when Cobb's real children tell us they are building a castle “on the cliff”. So we start and end with a biblical story about how getting to heaven requires faith in God. This encourages us to read Inception as an allegorical journey towards redemption through faith, not an action film. Having failed to “buy his way” to heaven, Cobb gets there by taking a “leap of faith”.
If you are confused by the spinning top or self-referential nature of the movie (films are also dreams, and who is to say what message the audience will find in the safe?), that's because you aren't thinking critically about what you saw. People who argue about the spinning top for instance miss the point. The ending of the film is a heaven sequence depicting Cobb’s reunion with God. We have the forgiveness of sins (immigration), the family reunion and the return to the heavenly garden. In order to get there Cobb simply needs to forgive himself (for his complicity in his wife's death) and sacrifice his own life to rescue Saito from limbo. The point of the spinning top is that Cobb ignores it -- he has faith.
One more paragraph because in case you still think that this is a stretch, consider that Michael Caine plays a master architect (creator). Or consider the scene where Cobb stops by Paris to ask his father for guidance. After being chided for his worldliness and corruption (“I never taught you to steal”), Cobb argues he is doing the best he can in a fallen world. But when he asks for help, help is given in the form of a woman whose mythological name suggests her role is guide Cobb out of the maze that is the mortal world (“all dreams are mazes”).
Given that the film has lines like "you have to die to wake-up" I don't think Nolan can be accused of subtly. But if he's made a film that goes over the heads of most filmgoers, it can only be because people have been trained out of having any expectations from movies by the very sorts of films you criticize. So whatever you want to say about Inception go ahead, but calling it a logically inconsistent film with mundane action sequences is about as far off-mark as you can get. This is a film about ideas (it doesn't always give answers -- where does Cobb get the "genesis" of the idea of salvation). If you watch it with the right mindset, I think you'll have a lot more fun and realize how much better it is than anything else released this year!
The 3000 figure is misleading, since Chinese words are bigrams and knowing them in isolation doesn't help. I think http://newsinchinese.com/ is the best way to train for reading Chinese newspapers. Otherwise it is painful.
I agree. I run an educational business that teaches how to learn Chinese. Advancing to fluency myself and now engaging with students day after day who are struggling to learn has convinced me that the major obstacle to student progress in most places outside China is institutional torpidity, and the fact that the structures that have emerged to organize and cheapen learning (classrooms, textbooks, etc.) don't allow students to learn at their own pace, or - in some cases - to learn at all.
People are frustrated and they are looking for alternatives. There are an increasing number of them available and I share the sense with you that a lot of these are happening outside existing academic channels. Given that systems to issue educational grants are already online, so it is unclear what this organization adds that the existing system doesn't.
I can't disagree more. Traditional classrooms and textbooks are designed to make educational institutions economical to operate. The textbook standardizes the class to the point where an intelligent undergraduate could run it. The reason students need to commit to several months of learning in advance is to amortize the costs of running a physical school.
Everyone moves at the same pace because you only have X lectures per week and the material is canned. Huge classes have evolved to make the system inexpensive to operate. So where is the focus on learning? What about student convenience, or the ability to move at your own pace? Why not let students explore their interests and take more responsibility for their courses? The competing economic model is the gym. But you can't run an educational business that way if everyone has to proceed at the same pace.
Online learning isn't going to displace traditional universities but it will change the point of going to class, because paying top dollar for huge lectures will seem like a waste of time and money. It's also silly to say it will never dominate the top X schools because you don't know what those schools will look like. Full disclosure: I run an educational company that teaches how to learn Chinese. We have more students than are studying mandarin at any university in the United States. But you can't compare the approaches because the business model is different and what students get out of it is totally different too.
Maybe that's why this StraighterLine company focuses mostly on freshman courses...
Easier explanation: education is a pyramid and the majority of the students are at the bottom. Freshman courses are the biggest market opportunity and the space in the market most open to adopting non-traditional study methods.
Stick with it. The fact that you've already started puts you seriously ahead of the game.
At risk of sounding spammish, I'm running a company from Beijing that specializes in online Chinese learning at http://popupchinese.com. We are pretty exposed to conditions in the local market and are still seeing a lot of growth in small and mid-sized businesses in northern China. These are the smart innovative companies. In contrast, it's the export-oriented manufacturing sector down south that are having a really hard time.
The job market is definitely a lot softer in Beijing than it used to be, but the problems are mostly hitting people who are monolingual and unskilled. Chinese university graduates are having an especially really rough time these days (you can get a fulltime hire for about $500 a month). People who are genuinely fluent are doing pretty well. We're certainly hiring (on the off chance anyone reading is fluent in mandarin or cantonese and a native english speaker and is looking for work in Beijing please get in touch).
His first step should be getting rid of those so he can keep the staff under constant surveillance, and ideally packed four or six to a table to maximize team communication and learning. Follow agile development methods and experiment with seating arrangements before locking things down and setting up the camera so you can monitor from home if needed.
Make sure none of them have keys to the office and set up a punchcard machine. Link punctuality to pay and make sure they work weekends once in a while too (a measure of team devotion). I'd also recommend keeping the washroom locked and having a signout sheet for the key so you can monitor whether they are wasting time or drinking too much coffee. Hover when possible.
Wasn't aware you could get AOL in China. I use a company called Witopia to get around those problems.
I find CPod good for beginner materials, but their effectiveness drops off once you scale up past the elementary level. Repeated media exposure is key though, so anything helps.
Are people really going to develop web applications for Chinese users and not host them in China? Do they think Chinese users surf a lot of English language content on budget shared hosts?
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
Once you know the language you can get out into the actual Chinese Internet. Find out the difference between Baidu and Google. Have Tencent screw up your computer. Watch videos on youku and surf chat forums. It takes time to get to the point where this is comfortable for second language speakers, but Chinese is looking a lot more valuable than banking at this point.....
My take? They approached you, and if it is a small project they are unlikely to find someone else with equivalent experience to work on the code base. Their alternative is building the project from scratch.
You would be an idiot to sign any open-ended non-compete clause. It is reasonable for the company to expect you to keep their modifications private, but their way of addressing this is not reasonable. A more reasonable compromise is for you to remain bound to non-competitive terms as long as you are employed by the company. This provides some teeth to your "employment at will" and gives them an incentive not to screw you over once you are working for them. Also remember that anything you sign that restricts your freedom to work on the project will also restrict your freedom to work on a consulting basis with other companies when you leave.
On a final note that comes from personal experience, "providing resources" isn't a tangible promise at all and you'll be lucky to get much of anything. If these guys had resources to throw around it seems unlikely they'd be trying to fork an open source project instead of building from scratch and trying to keep the whole thing proprietary.
This sounds like a very simple case of theft, not espionage. If people want to ask questions, a good place to start is finding out why this guy was sent to China in the first place, and what he was supposed to be doing.
This is the sort of thing that happens to people who can't speak Chinese when you put them in a room with people who like to trade sex for mobile phones. Worrying about "espionage" is ludicrous in this situation. If this guy was taken for a ride on anything important, it wouldn't have been by the girl.
Huh? I clicked through to the link, but didn't read anything that would suggest the decision was political. What I read was that the Supreme Court wasn't convinced:
"BCE failed to adequately considered the effect on its bondholders of its sale"
As a Canadian if I'm irritated by anything it's that court time is being wasted on this sort of case. Bonds are risk-bearing instruments and if BCE bondholders are worried about losing money they should simply sell their bonds on the open market and invest elsewhere like everyone else. If the company is really in the tank it will have to pay higher interest rates.
Perhaps you could elucidate what exactly is it about this case that flies in the face of Canadian law and jurisprudence. It looks to me as if the court simply decided there wasn't enough evidence of malfeasance to justify intervening in the market.
There are a lot of us out here. I figure you just support the companies and individuals who make the stuff you like, and try to spread the word about games you think are undervalued.
Also - Tim Schafer is a rock star. I really enjoyed Psychonauts and highly, highly recommend it. Best story-driven game I've played in ages, which is strange since it's technically a platformer.
I'd mod you up if I could. What really struck me about the novel (which I read after the film) was the way it took a morsel of something definite (what is life) and turned it into a haze. Idiots admiring robots for their intelligence. Robots admiring idiots for their empathy. Sick real cats and healthy robotic ones. People unsure of their own humanity.
And the two police departments subplot was also brilliant!. What an unexpected headrush for the reader!
I never really understood what was happening with the religious subplot so am glad the film left it out. I suspect that Dick didn't quite know either, since the ending of The Man in the High Castle is loose as well, like a coat-hanger made of coats. But Blade Runner was a smart movie with purpose. My favourite small touch is the "it is finished" line at the end which echoes the Centurion's comment upon Christ's death.
I don't mean to flame here, but Total Recall is a great film and totally blows away "A Scanner Darkly". You should give it another shot!
The great thing about the movie is that it isn't just a visual retelling of the short story. It is a tirade against the dominance of sex and violence in the entertainment industry (our collective fantasies). The director might be somewhat tongue-in-cheek for communicating this using such a violent film, but even if the hypocrisy rubs you the wrong way the focus on fantasies of violence is a brilliant treatment of the original story since it works so well in conjunction with it: the resolution of Dick's paradox (is it a dream?) ends up irrelevant to the central message of the film. Under-emphasized elements of the book (Mars = God of War) also gain new salience.
Total Recall is a great film because it takes good material, does it's own thing with it, and puts the viewer in a paradox much like the one it shows us. As long as we enjoyed the movie, the film has us pinned. How much of our enjoyment was because of the sex and violence the film revels in even as it critiques it?
In contrast, "A Scanner Darkly" paid homage to the high noes of the book (and it was sweet that they included the epilogue too), but there wasn't anything really original and exceptional about the execution save the style of the animation. Worth watching, but not worth watching more than once.
I helped with the election process in Canada several times. There we use paper ballots and the process is fast and accurate. Our district completed its count about 3-4 hours after closing, and could easily have conducted a recount in the same amount of time.
Representatives from all of the political parties were at the table watching the count, making tampering effectively impossible (everyone from the Communist Party to the Conservative Party would have had to be in on the fix for anything to happen).
The problem is not paper ballots, it's the volume of questions Americans are asked, which (ironically) makes hand-counting less effective and requires a more sophisticated technological solution.
Re:Chapter 10 - Large Projects
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 1
Defining large in terms of the size of the code base is not appropriate - that's more a question about the compactness and expressivity of the underlying language.
I'd imagine "large" is being used here to mean an ability to tolerate enterprise load level. I'd be curious to hear stories about this myself. Our rails application is slower than something coded in PHP, largely (I think) because the framework encourages development without much concern for database speed. Writing your own SQL commands is one solution, but somewhat defeats the point of using a framework.
I thought ASCII was a standard. Try feeding a data-file into MySQL that contains both GB2312 and UTF8-formatted data sometime and let me know what DOCTYPE you'd use passing the file over a network.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the reply. I agree the self-referential bits about movie-making were actually the best parts.... :) I only caught the Matthew 7:24 reference because I was seeing it in translation and the last line by the kid was subtitled. What bizarre dialogue, I remember thinking and then had one of those moments of realization where it is like something hits you.
A fantastic movie anyway. And a blast to watch even without thinking about the intellectual side at all!
Of course it was intentional.... He deliberately asks "is this real or a dream" because he wants you to think about it.
You only get to the answer "neither" by understanding the film. :)
Cobb didn't put the spinning top down and walk away. He looked at his family, he let them go on ahead of him, then he spun the object on the table and stared intently at it.
Watch the ending again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQPy88-E2zo
Cobb walks in and spins the top, then sees his family and walks away. We get the line about the kids building a house on the cliff (nonsensical in any other interpretation) and then everyone disappears. The camera closes on the spinning top in an empty room.
Once he had enough room to accept the possibility that it was real, he didn't want to ruin it by finding out it's not.
The seduction offered by Mal (malevolent?) in limbo is exactly what you describe above. I'm paraphrasing here, but what she essentially says to him is, "you don't *know* there is anything else out there, so why not enjoy being here with me and the children." Cobb rejects it, and we see the wisdom of this as Limbo is subsequently destroyed as per the parable.
If the film started and ended with a reference to Plato's Republic, I agree it would make sense to discuss Greek philosophy on Slashdot. Otherwise... let us just agree that there is a lot of water in the film.
There is so much water in fact that someone who took film seriously might even ask if it is being used symbolically. Perhaps it isn't coincidental that the opening shot to Inception is basically the same as that to A.I.. or that water has been a standard literary symbol for the subconscious since the nineteenth century. Maybe it isn't accidental that Nolan even has his characters talk about the "shores of our subconscious" while the camera is showing a shot of the ocean.
So no... I don't worry about over-interpreting when I see a film about death and faith reference a well-known parable about death and faith. Where I wonder if I'm over-interpreting is when I notice things like it being a glass of water that sends Fischer to sleep on the plane.
I'm not sure what the plot holes are. The film is a Christian parable and the plot makes sense if you take it at its word.
I thought the linked video was funny, but if people are complaining seriously about whether "kicks" transcend levels in shared dreamspace is silly. The film deals with all of this stuff on the level of metaphor anyway.
Respectfully, I don't think you understood Inception... let me try to explain:
Inception opens with a shot of children building a castle on the beach. This is a biblical reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The film closes when Cobb's real children tell us they are building a castle “on the cliff”. So we start and end with a biblical story about how getting to heaven requires faith in God. This encourages us to read Inception as an allegorical journey towards redemption through faith, not an action film. Having failed to “buy his way” to heaven, Cobb gets there by taking a “leap of faith”.
If you are confused by the spinning top or self-referential nature of the movie (films are also dreams, and who is to say what message the audience will find in the safe?), that's because you aren't thinking critically about what you saw. People who argue about the spinning top for instance miss the point. The ending of the film is a heaven sequence depicting Cobb’s reunion with God. We have the forgiveness of sins (immigration), the family reunion and the return to the heavenly garden. In order to get there Cobb simply needs to forgive himself (for his complicity in his wife's death) and sacrifice his own life to rescue Saito from limbo. The point of the spinning top is that Cobb ignores it -- he has faith.
One more paragraph because in case you still think that this is a stretch, consider that Michael Caine plays a master architect (creator). Or consider the scene where Cobb stops by Paris to ask his father for guidance. After being chided for his worldliness and corruption (“I never taught you to steal”), Cobb argues he is doing the best he can in a fallen world. But when he asks for help, help is given in the form of a woman whose mythological name suggests her role is guide Cobb out of the maze that is the mortal world (“all dreams are mazes”).
Given that the film has lines like "you have to die to wake-up" I don't think Nolan can be accused of subtly. But if he's made a film that goes over the heads of most filmgoers, it can only be because people have been trained out of having any expectations from movies by the very sorts of films you criticize. So whatever you want to say about Inception go ahead, but calling it a logically inconsistent film with mundane action sequences is about as far off-mark as you can get. This is a film about ideas (it doesn't always give answers -- where does Cobb get the "genesis" of the idea of salvation). If you watch it with the right mindset, I think you'll have a lot more fun and realize how much better it is than anything else released this year!
The 3000 figure is misleading, since Chinese words are bigrams and knowing them in isolation doesn't help. I think http://newsinchinese.com/ is the best way to train for reading Chinese newspapers. Otherwise it is painful.
I agree. I run an educational business that teaches how to learn Chinese. Advancing to fluency myself and now engaging with students day after day who are struggling to learn has convinced me that the major obstacle to student progress in most places outside China is institutional torpidity, and the fact that the structures that have emerged to organize and cheapen learning (classrooms, textbooks, etc.) don't allow students to learn at their own pace, or - in some cases - to learn at all.
People are frustrated and they are looking for alternatives. There are an increasing number of them available and I share the sense with you that a lot of these are happening outside existing academic channels. Given that systems to issue educational grants are already online, so it is unclear what this organization adds that the existing system doesn't.
I can't disagree more. Traditional classrooms and textbooks are designed to make educational institutions economical to operate. The textbook standardizes the class to the point where an intelligent undergraduate could run it. The reason students need to commit to several months of learning in advance is to amortize the costs of running a physical school.
Everyone moves at the same pace because you only have X lectures per week and the material is canned. Huge classes have evolved to make the system inexpensive to operate. So where is the focus on learning? What about student convenience, or the ability to move at your own pace? Why not let students explore their interests and take more responsibility for their courses? The competing economic model is the gym. But you can't run an educational business that way if everyone has to proceed at the same pace.
Online learning isn't going to displace traditional universities but it will change the point of going to class, because paying top dollar for huge lectures will seem like a waste of time and money. It's also silly to say it will never dominate the top X schools because you don't know what those schools will look like. Full disclosure: I run an educational company that teaches how to learn Chinese. We have more students than are studying mandarin at any university in the United States. But you can't compare the approaches because the business model is different and what students get out of it is totally different too.
Maybe that's why this StraighterLine company focuses mostly on freshman courses...
Easier explanation: education is a pyramid and the majority of the students are at the bottom. Freshman courses are the biggest market opportunity and the space in the market most open to adopting non-traditional study methods.
Stick with it. The fact that you've already started puts you seriously ahead of the game.
At risk of sounding spammish, I'm running a company from Beijing that specializes in online Chinese learning at http://popupchinese.com. We are pretty exposed to conditions in the local market and are still seeing a lot of growth in small and mid-sized businesses in northern China. These are the smart innovative companies. In contrast, it's the export-oriented manufacturing sector down south that are having a really hard time.
The job market is definitely a lot softer in Beijing than it used to be, but the problems are mostly hitting people who are monolingual and unskilled. Chinese university graduates are having an especially really rough time these days (you can get a fulltime hire for about $500 a month). People who are genuinely fluent are doing pretty well. We're certainly hiring (on the off chance anyone reading is fluent in mandarin or cantonese and a native english speaker and is looking for work in Beijing please get in touch).
Offices?
His first step should be getting rid of those so he can keep the staff under constant surveillance, and ideally packed four or six to a table to maximize team communication and learning. Follow agile development methods and experiment with seating arrangements before locking things down and setting up the camera so you can monitor from home if needed.
Make sure none of them have keys to the office and set up a punchcard machine. Link punctuality to pay and make sure they work weekends once in a while too (a measure of team devotion). I'd also recommend keeping the washroom locked and having a signout sheet for the key so you can monitor whether they are wasting time or drinking too much coffee. Hover when possible.
Wasn't aware you could get AOL in China. I use a company called Witopia to get around those problems.
I find CPod good for beginner materials, but their effectiveness drops off once you scale up past the elementary level. Repeated media exposure is key though, so anything helps.
Are people really going to develop web applications for Chinese users and not host them in China? Do they think Chinese users surf a lot of English language content on budget shared hosts?
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
Once you know the language you can get out into the actual Chinese Internet. Find out the difference between Baidu and Google. Have Tencent screw up your computer. Watch videos on youku and surf chat forums. It takes time to get to the point where this is comfortable for second language speakers, but Chinese is looking a lot more valuable than banking at this point.....
My take? They approached you, and if it is a small project they are unlikely to find someone else with equivalent experience to work on the code base. Their alternative is building the project from scratch.
You would be an idiot to sign any open-ended non-compete clause. It is reasonable for the company to expect you to keep their modifications private, but their way of addressing this is not reasonable. A more reasonable compromise is for you to remain bound to non-competitive terms as long as you are employed by the company. This provides some teeth to your "employment at will" and gives them an incentive not to screw you over once you are working for them. Also remember that anything you sign that restricts your freedom to work on the project will also restrict your freedom to work on a consulting basis with other companies when you leave.
On a final note that comes from personal experience, "providing resources" isn't a tangible promise at all and you'll be lucky to get much of anything. If these guys had resources to throw around it seems unlikely they'd be trying to fork an open source project instead of building from scratch and trying to keep the whole thing proprietary.
Can you imagine the confusion online if they'd ordered countries by radical? A Wubi system would have been fun - i haven't even figured that out yet.
I live in China and personally know two people this has happened to.
This sounds like a very simple case of theft, not espionage. If people want to ask questions, a good place to start is finding out why this guy was sent to China in the first place, and what he was supposed to be doing.
This is the sort of thing that happens to people who can't speak Chinese when you put them in a room with people who like to trade sex for mobile phones. Worrying about "espionage" is ludicrous in this situation. If this guy was taken for a ride on anything important, it wouldn't have been by the girl.
Huh? I clicked through to the link, but didn't read anything that would suggest the decision was political. What I read was that the Supreme Court wasn't convinced:
"BCE failed to adequately considered the effect on its bondholders of its sale"
As a Canadian if I'm irritated by anything it's that court time is being wasted on this sort of case. Bonds are risk-bearing instruments and if BCE bondholders are worried about losing money they should simply sell their bonds on the open market and invest elsewhere like everyone else. If the company is really in the tank it will have to pay higher interest rates.
Perhaps you could elucidate what exactly is it about this case that flies in the face of Canadian law and jurisprudence. It looks to me as if the court simply decided there wasn't enough evidence of malfeasance to justify intervening in the market.
There are a lot of us out here. I figure you just support the companies and individuals who make the stuff you like, and try to spread the word about games you think are undervalued.
Also - Tim Schafer is a rock star. I really enjoyed Psychonauts and highly, highly recommend it. Best story-driven game I've played in ages, which is strange since it's technically a platformer.
I'd mod you up if I could. What really struck me about the novel (which I read after the film) was the way it took a morsel of something definite (what is life) and turned it into a haze. Idiots admiring robots for their intelligence. Robots admiring idiots for their empathy. Sick real cats and healthy robotic ones. People unsure of their own humanity.
And the two police departments subplot was also brilliant!. What an unexpected headrush for the reader!
I never really understood what was happening with the religious subplot so am glad the film left it out. I suspect that Dick didn't quite know either, since the ending of The Man in the High Castle is loose as well, like a coat-hanger made of coats. But Blade Runner was a smart movie with purpose. My favourite small touch is the "it is finished" line at the end which echoes the Centurion's comment upon Christ's death.
I don't mean to flame here, but Total Recall is a great film and totally blows away "A Scanner Darkly". You should give it another shot!
The great thing about the movie is that it isn't just a visual retelling of the short story. It is a tirade against the dominance of sex and violence in the entertainment industry (our collective fantasies). The director might be somewhat tongue-in-cheek for communicating this using such a violent film, but even if the hypocrisy rubs you the wrong way the focus on fantasies of violence is a brilliant treatment of the original story since it works so well in conjunction with it: the resolution of Dick's paradox (is it a dream?) ends up irrelevant to the central message of the film. Under-emphasized elements of the book (Mars = God of War) also gain new salience.
Total Recall is a great film because it takes good material, does it's own thing with it, and puts the viewer in a paradox much like the one it shows us. As long as we enjoyed the movie, the film has us pinned. How much of our enjoyment was because of the sex and violence the film revels in even as it critiques it?
In contrast, "A Scanner Darkly" paid homage to the high noes of the book (and it was sweet that they included the epilogue too), but there wasn't anything really original and exceptional about the execution save the style of the animation. Worth watching, but not worth watching more than once.
I helped with the election process in Canada several times. There we use paper ballots and the process is fast and accurate. Our district completed its count about 3-4 hours after closing, and could easily have conducted a recount in the same amount of time.
Representatives from all of the political parties were at the table watching the count, making tampering effectively impossible (everyone from the Communist Party to the Conservative Party would have had to be in on the fix for anything to happen).
The problem is not paper ballots, it's the volume of questions Americans are asked, which (ironically) makes hand-counting less effective and requires a more sophisticated technological solution.
Defining large in terms of the size of the code base is not appropriate - that's more a question about the compactness and expressivity of the underlying language.
I'd imagine "large" is being used here to mean an ability to tolerate enterprise load level. I'd be curious to hear stories about this myself. Our rails application is slower than something coded in PHP, largely (I think) because the framework encourages development without much concern for database speed. Writing your own SQL commands is one solution, but somewhat defeats the point of using a framework.
Anyone with experience?
Wasn't Gore proposing this back before 2008?
What was the US deficit on oil between 2000 and 2008 anyway?
I thought ASCII was a standard. Try feeding a data-file into MySQL that contains both GB2312 and UTF8-formatted data sometime and let me know what DOCTYPE you'd use passing the file over a network.