here in britain the majority of people want capital punishment brought back
Citation?
having the beliefs of the minority imposed on the majority CANNOT be justified
The point you're missing is that it isn't about majority or minority. As soon as you're talking about imposing one group's beliefs on another, the first group have no absolute right to that, even if they outnumber them. That's nothing more than "But my gang's bigger than yours". When you kill someone, or criminalise them because of a minaret, you are severely infringing upon them. Trying to suggest that by not doing so, it's somehow infringing on your rights by anywhere near the same level, is nonsense (are you the one being killed, or being criminalised? No).
That's why we put the burden of argument upon those who want to criminalise something - simply saying "But there's more of us" is an appeal to popularity fallacy.
Nobody? Lots of people did and do scream outrage over those things, certainly here on Slashdot, just search for recent stories.
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic towards banning acts considered serious crimes in real life from being the subject of a game (by which I mean games requiring players to act out these types of crimes).
Why should it be different for games, to other media? Jack Baeur commits serious crimes on 24 - does this mean it should be illegal to play him in the computer game?
Note that this wouldn't include games that have caused an uproar (e.g., there was some recent game where you could shoot civilians, which caused people to whine, but AFAIK you weren't actually required to).
And how would that work for war and strategy games, where something would count as illegal under international law - e.g., Civilization 3, where I'm required to invade random other countries for oil?
Why aren't we seeing any games manufacturer try for a push in games that aren't quite as destructive?
You do realise there are plenty of other genres than FPS? Obviously FPSs themselves involve shooting, that's kind of obligitary by definition...
Indeed! I fail to see why this article is talking about the Ipad. It's not an e-reader[*], and it's not even released. Yet already, the media are trying to spin it as being a generic term for e-readers? It was bad enough doing this with Iphone/phone, but at least there they waited until the thing was released.
When in years to come, Apple fans are predictably and tediously claiming that Apple "popularised" e-reading, remember it now: it's the media who are doing the popularising, over a device that doesn't exist, and even if it did, it wouldn't fit into that market.
[*] If someone is happy with LCD and short battery life, then any bog standard laptop, netbook or tablet out there is an "e-reader".
My iPhone replaced a much-higher-specced, 5-year-old phone that did jack diddly shit when you got right down to it.
Wow, the Iphone is better than phones from 5 years ago.
And yes, you may have had a poor phone. There are other phones. And any phone today is going to be miles ahead, including ones much cheaper than the Apple phone (e.g., Nokia's 5800).
The fact that it also handles e-mail pretty well, Twitter, Facebook, music/podcast playback, financial tracking, simple street maps and directions, my calendar, a couple of games (not a big mobile gaming fan... too busy), checking via bar codes on prices, xkcd downloads (GRIN), youtube (most things), pandora, IM clients, text messages, and whatever else I have on there... is just icing on the cake.
This sort of thing is bog standard even on cheap feature phones these days. In fact, many of these things (email, web, music, Google maps with directions, calendar, games, and obviously text messages) have been bog standard on cheap feature phones for about 5 years or more.
Unlike a software bug, you can't put out a patch to fix a collapsed bridge, or release a service pack for a unbalanced rotor shaft that destroys a generator.
So wait, it is acceptable to patch it afterwards?
When you hear people moaning about buggy software, or claiming the developers be personally liable, the implication is usually that patching afterwards isn't acceptable. If I can patch it afterwards, and maybe charge them for it too, sure I'll gladly accept the comparison to engineering.
We're talking about functions that you could expect the completed product to perform, not fucking miracles.
When we're talking about security holes, it's a fair comparison.
For other things, all that would happen in a world of personal libaility is that the number of functions you could expect the completely product to perform would be vastly diminished. You'd get software that was only certified to be used for a small number of finite inputs (which is no different to the way most engineered products work), and anymore would be a higher cost.
My bridge doesn't fall down because a bus drives over it instead of a car.?
Nonsense, things like bridges and tunnels do have limits, and yes there is a risk if you exceed things like weight or height limits.
Your software still breaks. That's why everyone's pissed at you.
The ultimate problem is that you want it on the cheap. How much did your browser or operating system cost? Now how much does a bridge cost? And which of these two systems is more complex?
If you really want to compare to bridges, then perhaps you should start paying those kinds of prices. The fact is that bug free software does exist, you just have to pay for it - and most people are too cheap.
Your'e paid to produce software that performs a given function, not software that might work under some circumstances.
I'll gladly be like a bridge builder, who gets paid to write software that works with only one limited set of inputs, and does a specific thing. E.g., a web browser that will decode one specific web page (which is surely no more simple than a single bridge that allows a car to travel from one specific place to another specific place). Most people want things that are vastly more complex, however.
I once wrote a general newsreader, that included binary reading. It was funny when people would send me bug reports of the image decoding, and you can guess what kinds of images these were... so there I am, genuinely having to download and decode pr0n for research and development purposes.
Then of course I had to keep the images around, for my test set.
But that's only straightforward in the most trivial of cases, where the number of possible inputs that a user might want to enter are fairly limited.
Yes, I can right bug free code that I am responsible for if I limit the only allowed inputs to a few countable cases, each one that I can test individually. And yes, the price will go up for every extra case that I add. But the market is not interested in such software (well, outside of a few mission critical cases where they are prepared to pay for it).
Trusting user-generated input is one of the first taboos you learn about in computer science.
Yes, but only because we hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Perhaps engineers shouldn't trust that people will always follow the safety and design limitations, but they don't get hold responsible for them (e.g., if someone drives a truck over a bridge, when it exceeds the safety load).
Another issue, why is it the developer, and not say the testers, management, or the people who sold it for something beyond its original expected capabilities?
And if I'm going to be responsible for the losses when things go wrong, I'll also expect a share in the profits when things go right - they can't have it both ways.
Thanks - though as Snarky McButtface points out above in his reply to me, we should be careful of trying to judge scientific consensus from magazine articles. How many papers predicting global cooling were there? And how does that compare to predictions of global climate change today?
Oh sure, I know it's possible to take advantage. But these things no longer fall under the "embarrassingly parallel" algorithms that the OP (you?) claimed AFAIK (I admit I may be wrong - are there embarrasingly parallel algorithms for such things? And would these form a significant proportion of the processing time?)
Indeed. And if we do manage to reduce pollution, I can't help thinking if long term, global warming will be the new "Y2K bug myth":
"Oh, remember all that fuss about global warming at the turn of the century? We spent all that effort reducing pollution, and now look! The temperatures didn't rise after all. What a waste of time that was!"
Other examples include the problem of vaccinations, where if an epidemic is stopped as a result of a vaccination programme, idiots claim how it was all scaremongering and the risk of an epidemic never existed. Hmm, is there a generic name for this fallacy, I wonder?
So why are we trying to implement policies to combat that change?
Well maybe because we've grown to be dependent on the way the climate is today, and a lot of people may end up dying?
Should we try to change the climate so that we can return N. America back to its natural, under ice state? Should we try to return the Earth to it's glorious molten past? Should we try our best to strip the atmosphere of all oxygen so to usher in the return of Methanite bacteria?
No, because none of those are beneficial to humanity today.
We should predict where the climate is heading and spend our resources to adapt to the change instead of trying to stop it!
Who says we shouldn't? Both these methods are worth pursuing. What isn't good is sticking our heads in the sand, and saying "Climate change isn't happening, no one needs do anything!"
Er, real-time rendering is embarrassingly parallel
Yes, and it's embarrassingly parallelised on a GPU. How do multiple cores on a CPU help there?
That's one reason why it's particularly tough - game programmers are already having to juggle a multicore GPU, together with a CPU, even before we worry about running multiple threads on the CPU too.
Using SMP is far from trivial, including doing so for game engines. Some game engines do, some don't. But I'm not sure it's something to be shocked by, nor is it fair to write it off as "laziness".
The other factor you're missing is that the thing which can most importantly be made parallel - graphics rendering - is already done in parallel on the GPU. The issue here is making things run in parallel, that are still better done by the CPU, not the GPU.
Ah yes, I love it: If it turns out that Google is mostly made up of white males, then any attempt to complain about or change that is "Political correctness!"
Yet if it turns out that there's too many people who aren't the kind of people you think should be working there, then I can just hear those same people moaning about it...
Who cares who Google employs, including immigrants? You're not suggesting some kind of political correctness, are you?
Then that's a problem with the Equal Opportunity Employer status and law. If that's what the OP meant, fair enough, but given he just said "equal opportunity", it was reasonable to interpret it in the more common sense (e.g., the idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to apply for a job, and be judged on individual merit). If, as you say, this isn't even relevant to Google, that's more evidence that he wasn't talking about this law.
The more accurate and specific terms for this are positive discrimination or affirmative action. In fact, even your own Wikipedia link refers to this as "affirmative action plans".
Really, so who holds the majority of the mobile phone application market? If you put all the other app stores together, they wouldn't sell anywhere near the amount Apple does on its own.
That's the point - on any other platform, you don't have to download from an "app store". According to you, there must be more Iphone software sold than Windows, because they have more downloads than on the "Windows app store"! And then according to you, this means there are more Iphone users than Windows users!
The point is irrelevant anyway. The OP's statement is a fact, supported by market share figures (I'll dig some out, if you like). Those facts don't change, no matter how much to try to speculate, hand-wave, or dodge the issue by talking about their wonderful app store.
Aha, here is the key. Chances are, the "per-user" sales of the Amiga platform is better than Windows. I'm not sure how useful that is, though.
And I'd say it's unfair to compare Windows PCs now, to the mobile market now. The desktop market is saturated and mature - most things that people need, they've already bought, or free (speech or beer) versions are available.
Yet the phenomenon where you could make money money for simple things on mobiles existed long before Apple entered the market late. For years, places were selling simple games, or even ringtones as the obvious example, for stupid amounts of money, considering what you got.
And you give another difference yourself - piracy. It's easy to pirate on PCs these days, but this isn't the case for mobiles yet. So that's another difference, which has nothing to do with Apple, or app stores.
So wait, since Macs can download from anywhere, are you saying that they need "anti-virus/anti-malware software" and are full of "junkware/crapware/malware idiocy"?
All of my phones can download from anywhere, and I've never had this problem. Do you seriously think the best way to solve the worry of malware is to hand over control of what can be distributed, to a single private company? Especially one that has already shown that it will block apps for far more than simply being malware?
It's a sad day on Slashdot. I remember when this was a place to praise things like open source, and criticise companies like Microsoft. Now here we are, saying it's better if a company tells us what we're able to run on "our" own machines.
Go ahead.
On any other platform, I can distribute apps without paying 30%.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm European, and I think it's mad. The only political correctness is from people who want to ban something, because they're offended by it.
Banning minarets? It's political correctness gone mad.
like an educated christian and take everything with a grain of salt
Hah, if only they did.
here in britain the majority of people want capital punishment brought back
Citation?
having the beliefs of the minority imposed on the majority CANNOT be justified
The point you're missing is that it isn't about majority or minority. As soon as you're talking about imposing one group's beliefs on another, the first group have no absolute right to that, even if they outnumber them. That's nothing more than "But my gang's bigger than yours". When you kill someone, or criminalise them because of a minaret, you are severely infringing upon them. Trying to suggest that by not doing so, it's somehow infringing on your rights by anywhere near the same level, is nonsense (are you the one being killed, or being criminalised? No).
That's why we put the burden of argument upon those who want to criminalise something - simply saying "But there's more of us" is an appeal to popularity fallacy.
Nobody? Lots of people did and do scream outrage over those things, certainly here on Slashdot, just search for recent stories.
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic towards banning acts considered serious crimes in real life from being the subject of a game (by which I mean games requiring players to act out these types of crimes).
Why should it be different for games, to other media? Jack Baeur commits serious crimes on 24 - does this mean it should be illegal to play him in the computer game?
Note that this wouldn't include games that have caused an uproar (e.g., there was some recent game where you could shoot civilians, which caused people to whine, but AFAIK you weren't actually required to).
And how would that work for war and strategy games, where something would count as illegal under international law - e.g., Civilization 3, where I'm required to invade random other countries for oil?
Why aren't we seeing any games manufacturer try for a push in games that aren't quite as destructive?
You do realise there are plenty of other genres than FPS? Obviously FPSs themselves involve shooting, that's kind of obligitary by definition...
Indeed! I fail to see why this article is talking about the Ipad. It's not an e-reader[*], and it's not even released. Yet already, the media are trying to spin it as being a generic term for e-readers? It was bad enough doing this with Iphone/phone, but at least there they waited until the thing was released.
When in years to come, Apple fans are predictably and tediously claiming that Apple "popularised" e-reading, remember it now: it's the media who are doing the popularising, over a device that doesn't exist, and even if it did, it wouldn't fit into that market.
[*] If someone is happy with LCD and short battery life, then any bog standard laptop, netbook or tablet out there is an "e-reader".
My iPhone replaced a much-higher-specced, 5-year-old phone that did jack diddly shit when you got right down to it.
Wow, the Iphone is better than phones from 5 years ago.
And yes, you may have had a poor phone. There are other phones. And any phone today is going to be miles ahead, including ones much cheaper than the Apple phone (e.g., Nokia's 5800).
The fact that it also handles e-mail pretty well, Twitter, Facebook, music/podcast playback, financial tracking, simple street maps and directions, my calendar, a couple of games (not a big mobile gaming fan... too busy), checking via bar codes on prices, xkcd downloads (GRIN), youtube (most things), pandora, IM clients, text messages, and whatever else I have on there... is just icing on the cake.
This sort of thing is bog standard even on cheap feature phones these days. In fact, many of these things (email, web, music, Google maps with directions, calendar, games, and obviously text messages) have been bog standard on cheap feature phones for about 5 years or more.
Puppy Linux needs a whole 30MB of RAM? Talk about bloatware! I run AmigaOS on less than a single MB of RAM!
Unlike a software bug, you can't put out a patch to fix a collapsed bridge, or release a service pack for a unbalanced rotor shaft that destroys a generator.
So wait, it is acceptable to patch it afterwards?
When you hear people moaning about buggy software, or claiming the developers be personally liable, the implication is usually that patching afterwards isn't acceptable. If I can patch it afterwards, and maybe charge them for it too, sure I'll gladly accept the comparison to engineering.
We're talking about functions that you could expect the completed product to perform, not fucking miracles.
When we're talking about security holes, it's a fair comparison.
For other things, all that would happen in a world of personal libaility is that the number of functions you could expect the completely product to perform would be vastly diminished. You'd get software that was only certified to be used for a small number of finite inputs (which is no different to the way most engineered products work), and anymore would be a higher cost.
My bridge doesn't fall down because a bus drives over it instead of a car.?
Nonsense, things like bridges and tunnels do have limits, and yes there is a risk if you exceed things like weight or height limits.
Your software still breaks. That's why everyone's pissed at you.
The ultimate problem is that you want it on the cheap. How much did your browser or operating system cost? Now how much does a bridge cost? And which of these two systems is more complex?
If you really want to compare to bridges, then perhaps you should start paying those kinds of prices. The fact is that bug free software does exist, you just have to pay for it - and most people are too cheap.
Your'e paid to produce software that performs a given function, not software that might work under some circumstances.
I'll gladly be like a bridge builder, who gets paid to write software that works with only one limited set of inputs, and does a specific thing. E.g., a web browser that will decode one specific web page (which is surely no more simple than a single bridge that allows a car to travel from one specific place to another specific place). Most people want things that are vastly more complex, however.
I once wrote a general newsreader, that included binary reading. It was funny when people would send me bug reports of the image decoding, and you can guess what kinds of images these were ... so there I am, genuinely having to download and decode pr0n for research and development purposes.
Then of course I had to keep the images around, for my test set.
But that's only straightforward in the most trivial of cases, where the number of possible inputs that a user might want to enter are fairly limited.
Yes, I can right bug free code that I am responsible for if I limit the only allowed inputs to a few countable cases, each one that I can test individually. And yes, the price will go up for every extra case that I add. But the market is not interested in such software (well, outside of a few mission critical cases where they are prepared to pay for it).
Trusting user-generated input is one of the first taboos you learn about in computer science.
Yes, but only because we hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Perhaps engineers shouldn't trust that people will always follow the safety and design limitations, but they don't get hold responsible for them (e.g., if someone drives a truck over a bridge, when it exceeds the safety load).
Another issue, why is it the developer, and not say the testers, management, or the people who sold it for something beyond its original expected capabilities?
And if I'm going to be responsible for the losses when things go wrong, I'll also expect a share in the profits when things go right - they can't have it both ways.
So if it's not news, why do we have yet another Iphone story for it?
I guess it's tough that the auto-Iphone-publicity sometimes cuts both ways, and means it gets the bad publicity too.
(And there's plenty of competition btw. Especially as it still lacks basic things that even years old feature phones do.)
Thanks - though as Snarky McButtface points out above in his reply to me, we should be careful of trying to judge scientific consensus from magazine articles. How many papers predicting global cooling were there? And how does that compare to predictions of global climate change today?
Oh sure, I know it's possible to take advantage. But these things no longer fall under the "embarrassingly parallel" algorithms that the OP (you?) claimed AFAIK (I admit I may be wrong - are there embarrasingly parallel algorithms for such things? And would these form a significant proportion of the processing time?)
Indeed. And if we do manage to reduce pollution, I can't help thinking if long term, global warming will be the new "Y2K bug myth":
"Oh, remember all that fuss about global warming at the turn of the century? We spent all that effort reducing pollution, and now look! The temperatures didn't rise after all. What a waste of time that was!"
Other examples include the problem of vaccinations, where if an epidemic is stopped as a result of a vaccination programme, idiots claim how it was all scaremongering and the risk of an epidemic never existed. Hmm, is there a generic name for this fallacy, I wonder?
So why are we trying to implement policies to combat that change?
Well maybe because we've grown to be dependent on the way the climate is today, and a lot of people may end up dying?
Should we try to change the climate so that we can return N. America back to its natural, under ice state? Should we try to return the Earth to it's glorious molten past? Should we try our best to strip the atmosphere of all oxygen so to usher in the return of Methanite bacteria?
No, because none of those are beneficial to humanity today.
We should predict where the climate is heading and spend our resources to adapt to the change instead of trying to stop it!
Who says we shouldn't? Both these methods are worth pursuing. What isn't good is sticking our heads in the sand, and saying "Climate change isn't happening, no one needs do anything!"
No, some of us just remember the same crap in the 70s about how the world would be in a new ice age by now.
I'm genuinely curious - can you give me an example of scientists who predicted, in the '70s, that we'd be in an ice age by 2010?
Er, real-time rendering is embarrassingly parallel
Yes, and it's embarrassingly parallelised on a GPU. How do multiple cores on a CPU help there?
That's one reason why it's particularly tough - game programmers are already having to juggle a multicore GPU, together with a CPU, even before we worry about running multiple threads on the CPU too.
Using SMP is far from trivial, including doing so for game engines. Some game engines do, some don't. But I'm not sure it's something to be shocked by, nor is it fair to write it off as "laziness".
The other factor you're missing is that the thing which can most importantly be made parallel - graphics rendering - is already done in parallel on the GPU. The issue here is making things run in parallel, that are still better done by the CPU, not the GPU.
Ah yes, I love it: If it turns out that Google is mostly made up of white males, then any attempt to complain about or change that is "Political correctness!"
Yet if it turns out that there's too many people who aren't the kind of people you think should be working there, then I can just hear those same people moaning about it...
Who cares who Google employs, including immigrants? You're not suggesting some kind of political correctness, are you?
Then that's a problem with the Equal Opportunity Employer status and law. If that's what the OP meant, fair enough, but given he just said "equal opportunity", it was reasonable to interpret it in the more common sense (e.g., the idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to apply for a job, and be judged on individual merit). If, as you say, this isn't even relevant to Google, that's more evidence that he wasn't talking about this law.
The more accurate and specific terms for this are positive discrimination or affirmative action. In fact, even your own Wikipedia link refers to this as "affirmative action plans".
Really, so who holds the majority of the mobile phone application market? If you put all the other app stores together, they wouldn't sell anywhere near the amount Apple does on its own.
That's the point - on any other platform, you don't have to download from an "app store". According to you, there must be more Iphone software sold than Windows, because they have more downloads than on the "Windows app store"! And then according to you, this means there are more Iphone users than Windows users!
The point is irrelevant anyway. The OP's statement is a fact, supported by market share figures (I'll dig some out, if you like). Those facts don't change, no matter how much to try to speculate, hand-wave, or dodge the issue by talking about their wonderful app store.
Can you clarify - what new power do I as a consumer have, that I didn't have before?
Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
per-user sales
Aha, here is the key. Chances are, the "per-user" sales of the Amiga platform is better than Windows. I'm not sure how useful that is, though.
And I'd say it's unfair to compare Windows PCs now, to the mobile market now. The desktop market is saturated and mature - most things that people need, they've already bought, or free (speech or beer) versions are available.
Yet the phenomenon where you could make money money for simple things on mobiles existed long before Apple entered the market late. For years, places were selling simple games, or even ringtones as the obvious example, for stupid amounts of money, considering what you got.
And you give another difference yourself - piracy. It's easy to pirate on PCs these days, but this isn't the case for mobiles yet. So that's another difference, which has nothing to do with Apple, or app stores.
So wait, since Macs can download from anywhere, are you saying that they need "anti-virus/anti-malware software" and are full of "junkware/crapware/malware idiocy"?
All of my phones can download from anywhere, and I've never had this problem. Do you seriously think the best way to solve the worry of malware is to hand over control of what can be distributed, to a single private company? Especially one that has already shown that it will block apps for far more than simply being malware?
It's a sad day on Slashdot. I remember when this was a place to praise things like open source, and criticise companies like Microsoft. Now here we are, saying it's better if a company tells us what we're able to run on "our" own machines.
Go ahead.
On any other platform, I can distribute apps without paying 30%.