Just out of interest, are you making a reference to the winning entry of one of those recent, pompous so-called "art" competitions in the UK, where the winning entry was a room with nothing in it but a light bulb that just switched on and off repeatedly?
Just to throw a little more fuel into this semantic fire, even Stephen Hawking, who it is probably safe to assume knows what he is talking about, talks about "multiple universes" in "The Universe in a Nutshell". If there are multiple Universes, then under the "Universe is everything" definition, those universes are not really universes, since all of them form "The Universe". It does seem like we really need two terms.
As a business I can offer NO refunds whenever I want -- you may choose to shop elsewhere and I accept that. It's called business.
As it stands here, this is completely incorrect. As a business, you are legally required to provide refunds for the products you sell, if they are not fit for the purpose for which they are sold. This is the so-called "implied warranty", and the duration and other terms depend on the type of product, but all products have it. These are essentially the "default" terms of a sale, and UNLESS OTHERWISE AGREED, BEFORE A SALE IS MADE, you are bound to this by law. In other words, your warranty conditions may only not be the same as the implied warranty if both parties (you and the customer) KNOWINGLY enter into such an alternate arrangement. Some writing on the back of your receipt does NOT qualify as "knowingly entering into" a different warranty agreement. This should preferably be in writing and signed if clarity is needed in court should a dispute arise.
store owners used to use this kind of tactic to rip customers off
"Used to"? They still do, just not as overtly. A (poorly educated) friend of mine was taken in like this recently: He wanted to buy something on credit. On the product the retailer advertised the price of the deposit and the monthly payment. This is obviously the "advertised price" on the product. AFTER he had gone through the process of filling in the forms, and AFTER he had signed the agreement, they suddenly pulled out an 'oh, you will need to a pay an "administration fee"' (which was expensive, it was nearly twice the monthly repayment, the equivalent of about 80 US$). He didn't know any better, and paid it, but I gave him hell for that. He will know better next time.
Exactly. I don't see how Joe Public could even realistically be expected to KNOW that there IS even a EULA (i.e. a supposed contract) inside the box. This isn't clear in a software sale. You walk into a store, pick up the box, maybe read some of the product info on the back of the box, and go to the checkout to purchase it.
Whoever thought up the title of this article is a cockmaster. Deal with it.
I guess it does partially come down to whether or not he knew of the possible connotations when he wrote it, and how general the term is. I have heard the term "trail of tears" before but had never heard of the ethnic cleansing it was associated with; it is a slightly more general phrase than Auschwitz, outside the US especially.
If the author knew about the "trail of tears" ethnic cleansing, then certainly, it was just plain shit-headed. To imply (even indirectly) that his ODBC woes anywhere near approach the suffering of the indigenous Americans is moronic.
Powerful words should be used carefully, otherwise their glib use leaves our language impoverished and trivialized
I've noticed the same interesting phenomenon with the word "apartheid", and the result has been a weakening of the word over time since 1994. Apartheid was an extremely brutal form of racist oppression, which resulted in thousands of deaths, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of families torn apart, and the suffering of millions. But people initially began to associate the word more strongly with "plain old" segregation, as if it were on a level similar to segregation in the USA under Jim Crow law up until the 1960s, as well as the pre-apartheid segregation in South Africa.
Part of the reason for the weakening of the word is that because of government control of the media, most white SAns actually never knew (and still don't know) just how bad apartheid really was. Most white SAns still think of it as little more than segregation.
Lately, I've started to see the word apartheid very often used metaphorically to describe almost any separation of two entities. The word is also used now to describe almost any oppressive system.
Apartheid was a unique thing. There was nothing else in history quite like apartheid, it has no direct comparisons to anything else, and by watering down the word, this uniqueness is de-emphasized, and no longer conveys the specific South African experience. One of the overtly ill effects of the weakening of this word is that many people now still think apartheid was little more than a form of segregation.
This appears to be a different or related bug. The original 125 fps bug is most definitely fixed: you cannot use 125 fps anymore to jump up to the megahealth in dm13.
One reason is that Quake3 suffers far worse at 24 fps than a movie is that your camera pan rate is typically MUCH quicker than you'll ever see in a movie. When playing Q3, you often need to pan your camera up to 180 degrees horizontally in less than a quarter of a second (I'm being generous, thats if you're slow). So thats a camera pan rate of 720 degrees/sec. At 24 fps, that means a delta of 30 degrees per frame; those are pretty big jumps, each image will be quite different, and your brain has to work pretty hard to perceive the motion. I doubt you'll ever really see a camera pan that fast in a movie, except in very rare and particular cases.
In Quake, your brain is also trying to do a lot more work to analyse the image its getting, while in a movie you are normally fairly relaxed and don't concentrate that hard on the image.
Its easier to pick up image "choppiness" in your peripheral vision. If you sit fairly close to the screen in the cinema, and you're looking at the center, you can fairly easily pick up jerkiness in motion at the sides of the screen (out of the "corners of your eyes").
Having a physics engine be dependent on the current framerate shows a flaw in the game's design, and it is just one more reason to stop using the sorely outdated Q3 engine to benchmark new hardware.
Just to clarify, again.. this WAS a bug in Quake3Arena. However, it WAS NOT a bug in the "Quake 3 engine". It was a bug in the Quake3 game code. The "Quake3 game" is separate from (and built on top of) the "Quake 3 engine". The engine is the basic graphics and network system, source code NOT available, while the Quake 3 game itself was built essentially as the "default mod" for this game, and the source code is available for it.
The slightly-frame-rate-dependent jumping in Quake3 was a bug in the game code, and ONLY affected the jumping. The bug was fixed in one of the Quake3 patches. The game was intended to be designed so the physics were NOT frame-rate dependent. As you said, this would be a major flaw in a game design.
If the physics in a game were frame-rate dependent, you would see a HUGE difference in physics performance between 30, 60 and 90 fps. These sorts of rates affect (badly designed) game physics in a big way - you would notice it quickly. No major commercial game intentionally has such flaws.
Just to clarify, Quake3Arena wasn't specifically coded to do this, it was actually a bug, and it only affected the jumping physics, nothing else in the game was affected (it was not intentional behaviour, in fact the game was specifically designed to try to NOT have the physics dependent on the frame rate). (You could jump a little bit higher and in some maps this gave a big advantage, e.g. DM13, since you could take a shortcut to the megahealth). The bug was fixed in one of the last patches (I think they made it optional though).
The jumping performance also wasn't proportional to the frame rate, the bug occurred around specific frame rates, such as 120 fps.
Re:What about ad-hoc cash transfers?
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
(3) What about counting your cash?
I suspect that in the future, these things will have small screens built into them.
(5) If a card gets snapped in half, then what?
Then its gone, and just be more careful next time. Just like when you leave notes in your clothes and put them in the wash. 'People being careless' is not a problem with the technology. Sure, statistically these things are going to happen, but so is paper money in the washing machine.
(6) Can someone run a bulk demagnetizer over my card and financially wipe me out?
Hello, its CASH. If you are keeping ALL YOUR MONEY on a card in your wallet, then you are FRIGGIN STUPID. Just like if you keep all your money as cash in your wallet, and I don't know anybody who is stupid enough to do that. Wallets get lost or stolen.
Use a bank for your savings, use the card for "carry around cash". Just like you do now.
Your other concerns are legitimate (but I presume that in time they will be technologically solved). But I think you're being a teensy bit ridiculous on some of them.
I had the same experience with GNU chess, and so I just stopped playing against it. They should probably make a broader gradient of levels, i.e. make it so that beginner players have a chance on the lowest levels, and can work their way up. Otherwise, people just quit. It should be useful for people learning to play, not just people who can already play, would probably be more popular than.
Paper money has to be carefully studied and then duplicated with painstaking attention to detail
Of course, this has never stopped people from trying to counterfeit paper money (and coins). People still do it all the time, in every country in the world, and often with much success.
There will probably still be people who can cheat the system and create money themselves, but if this can be kept lower than the rate of counterfeiting of paper money, you're still better off than you were.
Someone could just probably figure out how money is "stored" and just keep on replenishing
Your choice of wording is a bit misleading here. You make it sound like its "just" an easy job to figure out how the money is stored. I'm sure that it will ALSO require careful studying and painstaking work to cheat this system. The problem is that once you do, creating more counterfeit money will be easier than manufacturing counterfeit paper money.
Unless this whole thing works on a centralised DB system.. then you are going to have a very difficult time creating money out of nowhere. You'd have a better chance by hacking into the central system, without getting caught. Which wouldn't be easy.
"Cigarette smoking kills at least 400,000 people in the United States each year and makes countless others ill, including those who are exposed to secondhand smoke". Try tell me with a straight face that that is productivity enhancing in any company/economy..
So you're saying people who have money aren't "allowed" to struggle with the same emotional and social issues that make us all human? Or are you just saying that people who have money aren't "allowed" to have problems, period? Or are you saying that people who have money are allowed to have problems but should not complain about their problems, just because they have money? So people who have lots of money MUST be happy and satisfied, because they have money, regardless of whatever other problems they may have?
We all know money cannot make a person happy (although LACK of money CAN make a person unhappy).. but then you imply that people with money have no right to not be absolutely content? Sorry, but thats just inane. The only thing that makes people with money different from other people is that they have money. In all other ways, they are completely human, and have all the other crap that comes along with being human.
There is a huge difference between living a life that you enjoy and living a life that is satisfying. You can enjoy every minute of every day, 'living life to its fullest', and yet still, somehow, have this vague feeling that its unfulfilling. Over the longer term, you need more than just "doing what you love". I love programming, but even with a great programming job that I thoroughly enjoyed, I still had a sense of "emptiness" and lack of deeper satisfaction. If doing what you love is enough to satisfy you over the longer term, then thats fine, but its not as simple for everyone. I felt I needed more than my perfect, comfortable, cushy, enjoyable life was providing. I'm happier now I've started using my free time and programming skills on a project which could potentially help uplift millions of people in the (third world) country I live in.
The way I see it, there are at least two different "levels" of "happiness": one being a "day-to-day" happy (i.e. doing what you love on a day-to-day basis), and the other being a longer-term (months/years/decades) overall happiness/satisfaction: doing what makes your life feel more worthwhile. I guess finding the former is usually easier than finding the latter. The fact that I love programming provides me with a goal for any particular day ("do lots of programming"), but it doesn't give any ideas for a worthy goal for any particular year.
When a company buys insurance they are 100% guarenteed to recover losses from a crack.
When a company spends that money on an admin, the chance for being broken into goes down, but will never be 0%
Taking out h/crack insurance, then, lowers the incentive for additionally investing in proper network security (e.g. a decent sysadmin). The companies, if the insurance leaves them feeling "financially safe" from an attack, will be even less inclined than they are now to implement proper security. In "normal" insurance, this sort of thing amounts to negligent/deliberate behaviour that in some cases will make the insurer decide not to pay. If enough people leave their networks vulnerable, and the insurers are struggling to stay afloat as a result, then they are going to start getting more strict about the conditions of the insurance vs premiums (as happens in auto insurance, more security features on a car imply general lower risk and thus lower premiums). I don't see why it should be any different here. If companies are making almost no effort whatsoever to secure their networks (as many companies do now), then the insurer either should refuse to cover them, or they should have to pay much larger premiums. (Although then it starts to look like the old "then whats the point of insurance" argument; disability insurance providers in my country routinely refuse to even consider covering people with a medical past that includes things like even very minor back problems. In other words, they will only cover people who do not represent much of a risk at all). However, in the case of 'network insurance', its deliberately irresponsible behaviour that places one in a high risk group (e.g. like smoking).
Certainly, to a business, this would be at least as damaging as having their computer systems hacked into. And since the US seems to think hacking is so bad that it warrants sentences longer than those given for rape or even murder, then for their views/arguments to be logically consistent, they would surely have to admit that these supposedly "harmless" weapons would indeed be very harmful to civilians. While certainly not as bad as being bombed to pieces by traditional bombs, there is still very definitely demonstrable harm caused to civilians, by way of having all their electronic equipment destroyed in one go. If they are claiming "no harm done", then they certainly can't claim that a hacking incident is terribly harmful.
Thats irrelevant, thats 10-bit per channel processing ON THE GPU, and provides absolutely no benefit to software like Adobe Photoshop, which must do > 8 bit (16-bit/channel in PS) colour manipulation *in the software*. It isn't really feasible to use the hardware for this. All that 10-bit/channel means is that your colours in a 3D rendered scene are going to look a little prettier (e.g. fewer banding effects etc) because there is greater accuracy in various *real-time rendering* calculations - the loss in these calculations then fall into the lower few bits, which then ANYWAY get trucated to 8-bits per channel for the final output buffer (and thus you're only getting 8-bit/channel resolution on your monitor anyway).
PCs may be faster ($ for $), but on the downside, PCs really suck. I hate them. I work on the bloody things for typically 8 to 12 hours a day, and all day long you're fighting with them.
Its the software. I use primarily Windows XP, and behind that Windows 2000 and Linux. And I am so sick of fighting with my computer to get simple things done (like try delete a big HTML file or an AVI file and have Windows Explorer tell me that "the file is in use by another application" when I know for a damn fact that the only application "using" the file is Windows Explorer itself. Or Visual Studio giving me a similar error dialog when I try to save.cpp files. Or excel telling me it can't open two files with the same name but in different directories. Or Norton Antivirus freezing up my whole PC for five or ten seconds every time I send an email. Or pressing WindowsKey+E after boot up and having to wait at least thirty seconds just for Windows Explorer to show itself. Etc etc etc, I'm sick of it).
There are hundreds of shitty little problems like these on PC software (Windows and Linux). I'm starting to realise more and more lately just how much I really don't like PCs.. I'm thinking, if I have to use a computer 8+ hours a day, I should at least be able to enjoy what I used to enjoy doing, i.e. C++ programming, some web page development etc. And I'm sick of dual-booting all the time, somehow two bad OSs don't add up to one good OS. So I'm thinking of getting a Mac. I'm hoping the software doesn't stink so bad as PC software does. Maybe I'm being optimistic.
It's the power and its arbitrary exercise that count. If someone with no power over others chooses to be bigoted, let them be, perhaps with pity
Indeed. In most cases, the worst that women today trying to study in a field like CS typically have to put up with, are the odd bigoted comments from male students. I don't buy the argument that a few nasty comments consitutes a 'major barrier' in any way.
Many of the women I studied CS with did get nasty comments now and again from some of the students. But a couple of things I noticed: (a) it was a minority of male students, (b) usually, the males who did make comments were the ones who were the most clueless about computers, i.e. usually the ones who were more clueless than the females, and (c) those women knew it. Although unpleasant, those women pretty much had enough confidence in themselves to be able to just "shrug it off" whenever it happened.
Personally, I think the stereotype of the helpless, victimized female that the media constantly batters us with is sexist in itself. Articles like this are actually *reinforcing* the stereotype that women are weak, helpless, easily victimized people, requiring special treatment and protection. If that notion sounds familiar, its because its the age-old stereotype historically used to justify sexism in society in the first place.
Women are capable. Period. If we say they need some sort of special protection or encouragement in society, we are also indirectly saying that they are not as capable.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of interest, are you making a reference to the winning entry of one of those recent, pompous so-called "art" competitions in the UK, where the winning entry was a room with nothing in it but a light bulb that just switched on and off repeatedly?
Just to throw a little more fuel into this semantic fire, even Stephen Hawking, who it is probably safe to assume knows what he is talking about, talks about "multiple universes" in "The Universe in a Nutshell". If there are multiple Universes, then under the "Universe is everything" definition, those universes are not really universes, since all of them form "The Universe". It does seem like we really need two terms.
As a business I can offer NO refunds whenever I want -- you may choose to shop elsewhere and I accept that. It's called business.
As it stands here, this is completely incorrect. As a business, you are legally required to provide refunds for the products you sell, if they are not fit for the purpose for which they are sold. This is the so-called "implied warranty", and the duration and other terms depend on the type of product, but all products have it. These are essentially the "default" terms of a sale, and UNLESS OTHERWISE AGREED, BEFORE A SALE IS MADE, you are bound to this by law. In other words, your warranty conditions may only not be the same as the implied warranty if both parties (you and the customer) KNOWINGLY enter into such an alternate arrangement. Some writing on the back of your receipt does NOT qualify as "knowingly entering into" a different warranty agreement. This should preferably be in writing and signed if clarity is needed in court should a dispute arise.
store owners used to use this kind of tactic to rip customers off
"Used to"? They still do, just not as overtly. A (poorly educated) friend of mine was taken in like this recently: He wanted to buy something on credit. On the product the retailer advertised the price of the deposit and the monthly payment. This is obviously the "advertised price" on the product. AFTER he had gone through the process of filling in the forms, and AFTER he had signed the agreement, they suddenly pulled out an 'oh, you will need to a pay an "administration fee"' (which was expensive, it was nearly twice the monthly repayment, the equivalent of about 80 US$). He didn't know any better, and paid it, but I gave him hell for that. He will know better next time.
You're probably on shaky ground if you're returning it for being ugly, but surely not if, say, the pockets have holes in them. Like Windows.
Security flaws are clearly a defect in the product. Doesn't a defective product imply a legal right to be able to return it?
Exactly. I don't see how Joe Public could even realistically be expected to KNOW that there IS even a EULA (i.e. a supposed contract) inside the box. This isn't clear in a software sale. You walk into a store, pick up the box, maybe read some of the product info on the back of the box, and go to the checkout to purchase it.
Why don't they teach this sort of thing in schools?
Whoever thought up the title of this article is a cockmaster. Deal with it.
I guess it does partially come down to whether or not he knew of the possible connotations when he wrote it, and how general the term is. I have heard the term "trail of tears" before but had never heard of the ethnic cleansing it was associated with; it is a slightly more general phrase than Auschwitz, outside the US especially.
If the author knew about the "trail of tears" ethnic cleansing, then certainly, it was just plain shit-headed. To imply (even indirectly) that his ODBC woes anywhere near approach the suffering of the indigenous Americans is moronic.
Powerful words should be used carefully, otherwise their glib use leaves our language impoverished and trivialized
I've noticed the same interesting phenomenon with the word "apartheid", and the result has been a weakening of the word over time since 1994. Apartheid was an extremely brutal form of racist oppression, which resulted in thousands of deaths, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of families torn apart, and the suffering of millions. But people initially began to associate the word more strongly with "plain old" segregation, as if it were on a level similar to segregation in the USA under Jim Crow law up until the 1960s, as well as the pre-apartheid segregation in South Africa.
Part of the reason for the weakening of the word is that because of government control of the media, most white SAns actually never knew (and still don't know) just how bad apartheid really was. Most white SAns still think of it as little more than segregation.
Lately, I've started to see the word apartheid very often used metaphorically to describe almost any separation of two entities. The word is also used now to describe almost any oppressive system.
Apartheid was a unique thing. There was nothing else in history quite like apartheid, it has no direct comparisons to anything else, and by watering down the word, this uniqueness is de-emphasized, and no longer conveys the specific South African experience. One of the overtly ill effects of the weakening of this word is that many people now still think apartheid was little more than a form of segregation.
This appears to be a different or related bug. The original 125 fps bug is most definitely fixed: you cannot use 125 fps anymore to jump up to the megahealth in dm13.
One reason is that Quake3 suffers far worse at 24 fps than a movie is that your camera pan rate is typically MUCH quicker than you'll ever see in a movie. When playing Q3, you often need to pan your camera up to 180 degrees horizontally in less than a quarter of a second (I'm being generous, thats if you're slow). So thats a camera pan rate of 720 degrees/sec. At 24 fps, that means a delta of 30 degrees per frame; those are pretty big jumps, each image will be quite different, and your brain has to work pretty hard to perceive the motion. I doubt you'll ever really see a camera pan that fast in a movie, except in very rare and particular cases.
In Quake, your brain is also trying to do a lot more work to analyse the image its getting, while in a movie you are normally fairly relaxed and don't concentrate that hard on the image.
Its easier to pick up image "choppiness" in your peripheral vision. If you sit fairly close to the screen in the cinema, and you're looking at the center, you can fairly easily pick up jerkiness in motion at the sides of the screen (out of the "corners of your eyes").
Having a physics engine be dependent on the current framerate shows a flaw in the game's design, and it is just one more reason to stop using the sorely outdated Q3 engine to benchmark new hardware.
Just to clarify, again .. this WAS a bug in Quake3Arena. However, it WAS NOT a bug in the "Quake 3 engine". It was a bug in the Quake3 game code. The "Quake3 game" is separate from (and built on top of) the "Quake 3 engine". The engine is the basic graphics and network system, source code NOT available, while the Quake 3 game itself was built essentially as the "default mod" for this game, and the source code is available for it.
The slightly-frame-rate-dependent jumping in Quake3 was a bug in the game code, and ONLY affected the jumping. The bug was fixed in one of the Quake3 patches. The game was intended to be designed so the physics were NOT frame-rate dependent. As you said, this would be a major flaw in a game design.
If the physics in a game were frame-rate dependent, you would see a HUGE difference in physics performance between 30, 60 and 90 fps. These sorts of rates affect (badly designed) game physics in a big way - you would notice it quickly. No major commercial game intentionally has such flaws.
Just to clarify, Quake3Arena wasn't specifically coded to do this, it was actually a bug, and it only affected the jumping physics, nothing else in the game was affected (it was not intentional behaviour, in fact the game was specifically designed to try to NOT have the physics dependent on the frame rate). (You could jump a little bit higher and in some maps this gave a big advantage, e.g. DM13, since you could take a shortcut to the megahealth). The bug was fixed in one of the last patches (I think they made it optional though).
The jumping performance also wasn't proportional to the frame rate, the bug occurred around specific frame rates, such as 120 fps.
(3) What about counting your cash?
I suspect that in the future, these things will have small screens built into them.
(5) If a card gets snapped in half, then what?
Then its gone, and just be more careful next time. Just like when you leave notes in your clothes and put them in the wash. 'People being careless' is not a problem with the technology. Sure, statistically these things are going to happen, but so is paper money in the washing machine.
(6) Can someone run a bulk demagnetizer over my card and financially wipe me out?
Hello, its CASH. If you are keeping ALL YOUR MONEY on a card in your wallet, then you are FRIGGIN STUPID. Just like if you keep all your money as cash in your wallet, and I don't know anybody who is stupid enough to do that. Wallets get lost or stolen.
Use a bank for your savings, use the card for "carry around cash". Just like you do now.
Your other concerns are legitimate (but I presume that in time they will be technologically solved). But I think you're being a teensy bit ridiculous on some of them.
GNU chess beats me quite easily
I had the same experience with GNU chess, and so I just stopped playing against it. They should probably make a broader gradient of levels, i.e. make it so that beginner players have a chance on the lowest levels, and can work their way up. Otherwise, people just quit. It should be useful for people learning to play, not just people who can already play, would probably be more popular than.
Paper money has to be carefully studied and then duplicated with painstaking attention to detail
Of course, this has never stopped people from trying to counterfeit paper money (and coins). People still do it all the time, in every country in the world, and often with much success.
There will probably still be people who can cheat the system and create money themselves, but if this can be kept lower than the rate of counterfeiting of paper money, you're still better off than you were.
Someone could just probably figure out how money is "stored" and just keep on replenishing
Your choice of wording is a bit misleading here. You make it sound like its "just" an easy job to figure out how the money is stored. I'm sure that it will ALSO require careful studying and painstaking work to cheat this system. The problem is that once you do, creating more counterfeit money will be easier than manufacturing counterfeit paper money.
Unless this whole thing works on a centralised DB system.. then you are going to have a very difficult time creating money out of nowhere. You'd have a better chance by hacking into the central system, without getting caught. Which wouldn't be easy.
Indeed. Try google for some more information, e.g http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-nicotine.html . The release of dopamine may also be perceived as 'increased focus'.
"Cigarette smoking kills at least 400,000 people in the United States each year and makes countless others ill, including those who are exposed to secondhand smoke". Try tell me with a straight face that that is productivity enhancing in any company/economy..
So you're saying people who have money aren't "allowed" to struggle with the same emotional and social issues that make us all human? Or are you just saying that people who have money aren't "allowed" to have problems, period? Or are you saying that people who have money are allowed to have problems but should not complain about their problems, just because they have money? So people who have lots of money MUST be happy and satisfied, because they have money, regardless of whatever other problems they may have? We all know money cannot make a person happy (although LACK of money CAN make a person unhappy) .. but then you imply that people with money have no right to not be absolutely content? Sorry, but thats just inane. The only thing that makes people with money different from other people is that they have money. In all other ways, they are completely human, and have all the other crap that comes along with being human.
There is a huge difference between living a life that you enjoy and living a life that is satisfying. You can enjoy every minute of every day, 'living life to its fullest', and yet still, somehow, have this vague feeling that its unfulfilling. Over the longer term, you need more than just "doing what you love". I love programming, but even with a great programming job that I thoroughly enjoyed, I still had a sense of "emptiness" and lack of deeper satisfaction. If doing what you love is enough to satisfy you over the longer term, then thats fine, but its not as simple for everyone. I felt I needed more than my perfect, comfortable, cushy, enjoyable life was providing. I'm happier now I've started using my free time and programming skills on a project which could potentially help uplift millions of people in the (third world) country I live in.
The way I see it, there are at least two different "levels" of "happiness": one being a "day-to-day" happy (i.e. doing what you love on a day-to-day basis), and the other being a longer-term (months/years/decades) overall happiness/satisfaction: doing what makes your life feel more worthwhile. I guess finding the former is usually easier than finding the latter. The fact that I love programming provides me with a goal for any particular day ("do lots of programming"), but it doesn't give any ideas for a worthy goal for any particular year.
Each to his own though, I suppose.
When a company buys insurance they are 100% guarenteed to recover losses from a crack.
When a company spends that money on an admin, the chance for being broken into goes down, but will never be 0%
Taking out h/crack insurance, then, lowers the incentive for additionally investing in proper network security (e.g. a decent sysadmin). The companies, if the insurance leaves them feeling "financially safe" from an attack, will be even less inclined than they are now to implement proper security. In "normal" insurance, this sort of thing amounts to negligent/deliberate behaviour that in some cases will make the insurer decide not to pay. If enough people leave their networks vulnerable, and the insurers are struggling to stay afloat as a result, then they are going to start getting more strict about the conditions of the insurance vs premiums (as happens in auto insurance, more security features on a car imply general lower risk and thus lower premiums). I don't see why it should be any different here. If companies are making almost no effort whatsoever to secure their networks (as many companies do now), then the insurer either should refuse to cover them, or they should have to pay much larger premiums. (Although then it starts to look like the old "then whats the point of insurance" argument; disability insurance providers in my country routinely refuse to even consider covering people with a medical past that includes things like even very minor back problems. In other words, they will only cover people who do not represent much of a risk at all). However, in the case of 'network insurance', its deliberately irresponsible behaviour that places one in a high risk group (e.g. like smoking).
Certainly, to a business, this would be at least as damaging as having their computer systems hacked into. And since the US seems to think hacking is so bad that it warrants sentences longer than those given for rape or even murder, then for their views/arguments to be logically consistent, they would surely have to admit that these supposedly "harmless" weapons would indeed be very harmful to civilians. While certainly not as bad as being bombed to pieces by traditional bombs, there is still very definitely demonstrable harm caused to civilians, by way of having all their electronic equipment destroyed in one go. If they are claiming "no harm done", then they certainly can't claim that a hacking incident is terribly harmful.
Thats irrelevant, thats 10-bit per channel processing ON THE GPU, and provides absolutely no benefit to software like Adobe Photoshop, which must do > 8 bit (16-bit/channel in PS) colour manipulation *in the software*. It isn't really feasible to use the hardware for this. All that 10-bit/channel means is that your colours in a 3D rendered scene are going to look a little prettier (e.g. fewer banding effects etc) because there is greater accuracy in various *real-time rendering* calculations - the loss in these calculations then fall into the lower few bits, which then ANYWAY get trucated to 8-bits per channel for the final output buffer (and thus you're only getting 8-bit/channel resolution on your monitor anyway).
PCs may be faster ($ for $), but on the downside, PCs really suck. I hate them. I work on the bloody things for typically 8 to 12 hours a day, and all day long you're fighting with them.
Its the software. I use primarily Windows XP, and behind that Windows 2000 and Linux. And I am so sick of fighting with my computer to get simple things done (like try delete a big HTML file or an AVI file and have Windows Explorer tell me that "the file is in use by another application" when I know for a damn fact that the only application "using" the file is Windows Explorer itself. Or Visual Studio giving me a similar error dialog when I try to save .cpp files. Or excel telling me it can't open two files with the same name but in different directories. Or Norton Antivirus freezing up my whole PC for five or ten seconds every time I send an email. Or pressing WindowsKey+E after boot up and having to wait at least thirty seconds just for Windows Explorer to show itself. Etc etc etc, I'm sick of it).
There are hundreds of shitty little problems like these on PC software (Windows and Linux). I'm starting to realise more and more lately just how much I really don't like PCs .. I'm thinking, if I have to use a computer 8+ hours a day, I should at least be able to enjoy what I used to enjoy doing, i.e. C++ programming, some web page development etc. And I'm sick of dual-booting all the time, somehow two bad OSs don't add up to one good OS. So I'm thinking of getting a Mac. I'm hoping the software doesn't stink so bad as PC software does. Maybe I'm being optimistic.
It's the power and its arbitrary exercise that count. If someone with no power over others chooses to be bigoted, let them be, perhaps with pity
Indeed. In most cases, the worst that women today trying to study in a field like CS typically have to put up with, are the odd bigoted comments from male students. I don't buy the argument that a few nasty comments consitutes a 'major barrier' in any way.
Many of the women I studied CS with did get nasty comments now and again from some of the students. But a couple of things I noticed: (a) it was a minority of male students, (b) usually, the males who did make comments were the ones who were the most clueless about computers, i.e. usually the ones who were more clueless than the females, and (c) those women knew it. Although unpleasant, those women pretty much had enough confidence in themselves to be able to just "shrug it off" whenever it happened.
Personally, I think the stereotype of the helpless, victimized female that the media constantly batters us with is sexist in itself. Articles like this are actually *reinforcing* the stereotype that women are weak, helpless, easily victimized people, requiring special treatment and protection. If that notion sounds familiar, its because its the age-old stereotype historically used to justify sexism in society in the first place.
Women are capable. Period. If we say they need some sort of special protection or encouragement in society, we are also indirectly saying that they are not as capable.