This is just my opinion, but I'm starting to think Cowboy Bebop is one of the most over rated Anime I have ever watched. (Dont get me wrong. I love the show but...)
I understand where you're coming from, but I would put it a different way: I think Cowboy Beebop isn't so much overrated as inconsistent. Some episodes just blow me away with their seamless fusion of music, epic storylines, and deep characters. On the other hand I find some episodes, especially those with Ed, just downright annoying.
Wow, my heart is racing reading all this rebellion against the abuses of intellectual property holders. Great article, thanks. Mod the parent up, please.
Why would they ever add operator overloading? It's a feature which has little use, and causes confusion galore because its easily abused. That is the reason it's not in there now. I don't see that changing.
Amen, brother
The worst are casting operators, such as "operator const char*()", that can really lead to bizarre code and hard-to-catch errors because if your finger slips on the keyboard while entering an operator, you will all of a sudden vastly change the semantics of your code while the syntax, at a glance, appears the same. And who outside of the secret, special cadre of C++ gurus can fully predict the results when you have a combination of casting operator overloading and method overloading on a call? I end up explicitly casting objects such as _bstr_t that misuse this behavior and do not provide an alternative named method to avoid confusion in my code.
The totally weirdest is, of course, in STL, where they have the function operator such as "result_type operator()(const argument_type& y) const;" where for object foo you would call "foo(argument_type_obj)", and the object reference behaves like a function pointer. This can create some really cool algorithmic constructs like a "for each" in C++, at the mere expense of zapping your noodle with pyschodelic hippie mind rays.
The whole idea of interfaces, to me, seems to be due to the fact that you don't have callbacks in Java. This, of course, is stupid: Why can't I say "OK, you performed an action, so call this function" instead of "OK, if you insist on it, I will call my method 'actionPerformed'"?
Several other people have addressed the issue of callbacks, but I am interested in talking about your assertion that interfaces are only for callbacks. Interfaces are contracts that are at the heart of polymophism, a client doesn't care "what" your object is as long as it provides the services you need.
Others may disagree, but in my opinion, multiple inheritance in C++ is the result of confusion between polymorphism and reuse on the part of the language developers. If you want to reuse multiple objects and also provide similar services to two or more of those objects it is much clearer to the observer of your code if those parent classes implement interfaces describing their services and you include instances of the classes you need as private member variables and you delegate to those private member instances in your implementation of the interface methods that you need to provide.
I think this is much better than having tons of confusion over similar method names with grossly different semantics, figuring out which parent class a virtual method is tied to, dealing with virtual vs non-virtual inheritance, and the tons of other things that make deciding through inspection who exactly implements the bar() method on your class foo next to impossible without having 4 monitors.
The MPEG-2 encoder on normal TiVo's is an expensive piece of equipment, requiring both a per-unit license and an expensive chip. DirectTiVo's record directly off the satellite mpeg-2 stream, and can even record two channels at once (or watch one channel while the other is recording.) And since the industrial-quality mpeg-2 encoders the satellite companies use are more space-efficient at encoding television, the same size hard drive buys you more hours of recording on a DirectTiVo, making hard drive costs cheaper.
Finally, you often are required to subscribe to the satellite service for a year for the better deals on DirectTiVo's.
FrontLine's "Dot.Con" edition had some numbers that shed some light on the e-retailing situation. IIRC (unfortunately the transcript is not yet on the website), it was a mother nature.com CEO discussing a review of the numbers for his business, and he found that it cost $80 in advertising, etc costs to get a customer, but that customer's marginal value, the odds of the customer having return visits to the site, and the profit margin from that customers future purchases, was only $10.
I suppose it could be that there is enough room for a few big e-retailers since the really big ones get free customer awareness since they have more mind share, but those numbers speak to a real difficulty to get a sustainable business online due to low customer loyalty inherent when there is no geographic locality and hence no physical reality to such retailers. It could be that Amazon is merely reaping the high advertising costs in previous quarters and will tank once that mind share that cost so dearly to develop wears off.
Computers are quite popular in Vietnamn. You seem to have a few sterotypes about the rest of the world that are better laid to rest.
That aside, I like my humor dry, as you seemed to have intuited.
Ten Thousand Villages new Project?
on
EverQuest and the UN
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ten Thousand Villages is a not-for-profit store that sells 3rd-world arts and crafts in North America for as little markup as possible. I wonder if it would be more profitable to have some of the 3rd world participants play Everquest and sell their accounts at the stores. $3.42 an hour isn't bad!
Wouldn't it be ironic, the one time slashdot takes a high headed journalistic stand, it's for a some crazy story that some time from now turns out to be true.
Given that ironic roughly means perversely unexpected, this would not be ironic since it would be well in the trend of Slashdot getting basic stuff wrong.
I'm glad michael was there to explain to us why he's smarter than Reuters though.
If they somehow figure out how to repair brain damage due to old age with these cells, wouldn't that mean people could theoretically live forever?
Calm down there, brother. In order to live forever, your vascular system, your organs, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, and your nervous system must function properly. Even if they invent a way to replace all of these with fresh cells grown outside the body from time to time, it would be quite expensive to replace all of these items via surgery. Every third person in the US would have to be a doctor in order to meet the demand. (exaggeration?)
Growing the cells isn't the hard part, migrating them to the proper place in the body is the hard part. Think about your teeth: they grow at a specific point in your life and then start their gradual decay, there are a bunch of them, and surgery to insert 20-30 new ones into your jaw would take days. The problem is the body is designed for a distinct growth phase, and after that phase, certain tissues and structures are naturally incapable of spontaneous regeneration.
I think it would be some time before we move beyond figuring out how to duplicate the growth phase in a jar and duplicate it in the body, where we would presumably only want certain tissues to grow, etc. In the short to medium term, medicine's ability to keep you alive will be significantly increased, but you will be an old person with new parts, not a perpetually young person.
I bet skin and associated connective tissue should be relatively easy to replace, though, so you'll see a lot of actors in their 80's emulating young folks, just don't expect them to be able to do their own stunts.
In economics, wealth "evaporation" means a change in the multipliers of a measure of money. In a liquid economy, money gets multiplied because it is leant out to other people who use it and whoever receives it lends another portion of it out. I am using "lend" in the loosest possible sense of the word, for example, when you put money in a bank, you are "lending" it to whoever gets a loan from that bank.
When confidence dries up in enterprises that borrow money, risk is perceived to increase and people that hold assets are less likely to lend it out, decreasing liquidity. Less liquidity means less money available for investment, which is the primary negative effect on the economy as a whole when things like Enron and this IPO thingy happen.
A government can try to increase liquidity through a number of means, reducing risk by buying off bad loans so troubled banks will be more likely to lend money, issuing more currency, and buying back government bonds are a few of the tools available to governments. Many people think Japan's only way out of its current recession is to bail out its banks, many of which have a bunch of bad loans on the books and are very adverse to new loans, thus preventing GDP growth since new businesses and business expansion is driven through bank loans (as well as stock.)
The more boring the crime, the less the publicly elected police, DA's, and other enforcement agents are interested in it. If you want to commit crime for profit, pick the most pervasive, boring abuse you can think of.
It reminds me of those guys who spent like $20,000 to set up a bunch of fake ATM's to grab ATM cards and PIN's. They actually lost money on their investment because the crime was so original and got so much media attention that the FBI devoted a legion of Agents to track every lead.
Nah. Those are far too similar to describe this comparison. We're talking apples and orangutans.
I disagree. Anyone seriously involved with physics loves nothing more than to remove infinities from his/her equations. By definition, Singularity is infinity, and if it is possible to remove it from space as it exists today, it seems to me that this new theory lends hope to the prospect of removing infinities from the entire lifetime of the universe.
I have read Walt Disney described as a control freak: he wanted to create a perfect, sanitary environment. I think digital piracy would have seemed far too out of control for him.
The real problem is that democracy in America is bought and sold, we don't notice it when two coporations with opposed interests battle it out, because they usually end of achieving a synthesis somewhere in the middle and the laws do not change very much. In situations where it is coporate interests versus the interests of individual citizens, we have the free rider problem: a company is big enough that it pays to spend some money on a politician to change a law, but no one individual has enough to gain from a law change (or to prevent a law change) to make it in his economic interest to contribute to politicians. Some people do it anyway of course, for idealistic reasons, but not enough to win against the likes of Disney.
I used to feel like only people who know what they're doing should be able to build their own kernels... i was a young and cocky kid, too.
My first reaction was, no way, don't allow everyone to do this. But after reading posts like yours I realize that my bias is based the the incredibly poorly documented and ill-conceived kernel configuration programs available in the early days of Linux. I tried to use one, and despite being a computer engineer, I managed to screw up my distro.
If a kernel configuration program was more like an "options dialog" that actually made sense and worked, then the user doesn't have to know that they are actually recompiling the fundamental execution unit of their operating system. In computers, appearance is reality.
Wow, this is the most "Meta-Posts" I've ever seen on slashdot. I guess that my comment is a meta-meta post. And the previous sentence is a meta-meta-meta post, and...
I saw a one-man play on Buckminster Fuller (the designer of the geodesic dome among other things) and they had some interesting information on some of his ideas. One of the ones I found most interesting related to putting Manhattan under one large dome. He calculated that the costs of doing this would be outweighed by just the snow removal costs saved! I am a bit skeptical, but it is an interesting point anyway.
Bioshere attempted to pull it off with an initial air supply which was hoped to be rinsed by the plants.
Biosphere was a bit of a joke for another reason involving air: as they began to seal it up they only then realized that thermal expansion of the air would blow the structure apart, so they installed a huge bladder that would expand and contract with the air!
We had superior kill ratios in both of those conflicts, by a lot. The failure of Vietnamn was the failure to inflict a decisive defeat and little political support for American casualties in the war.
Knights' weakness was apparent even before then, I do not recall the name of the battle, but English Longbowmen made short work of French Knights in a pivotal battle because the English understood the tactical situation better than the French: longbows easily pierce armor at range.
Of course, the Mongols and the Huns showed the advantages of light, fast units where the only armor was silk shirts so that they could pull out arrows without further damaging the flesh (the silk would embed into the flesh along with the arrow.)
I agree with the points you make in your post. I have been thinking about this and while I think exoskeletons are a ways off, it seems inevitable that they will become reality.
The reason for this is that kinetic energy delivery units have progressed more rapidly than structures that offer protection from kinetic energy. I.E. there is no equivalent of a phalanx in the modern combat arena: a weapon that cannot be damaged at a distance. As we get more sophisticated with damage from a distance, missles, lasers, explosives, torpedoes, what have you, we find that large, expensive assets are particularly vulnerable to small, cheap weapons.
There are only 3 types of protection from these weapons: speed, stealth, and small size. Speed is embodied in aircraft, stealth in submarines, and surface ships and aircraft to some degree, and size is embodied in soldiers. Short of nuclear weapons, it is very difficult to obliterate a dispersed group of soldiers using sound tactics.
I think this means that we will try to pack as much kill capability into individual soldiers and increase their stealth and speed as we advance military technology. Also, the roles of aircraft carriers, tanks, and other large assets will be decreased as time moves forward. This is especially true if some country manages to challenge NATO's dominance of space and the seas.
The almost mythical ferocity of the modern american army is demoralizing enough--imagine if the *common soldiers* were tougher as well!
US regular infantry is tougher as well. You don't have to be an expert to realize that American soldiers will have a vastly superior kill ratio to most other nations in identical circumstances. Just look at the photos of the gear that servicemen are using over in Afghanistan, they have night vision, kevlar body armor, superior command and control, superior tactics, superior weaponry, obviously superior support, and more advantages that explain why a lot more Taliban have died than Americans. You have to be the superior force to engage an enemy on his own turf, and that is the role the US army has been designed to play.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand where you're coming from, but I would put it a different way: I think Cowboy Beebop isn't so much overrated as inconsistent. Some episodes just blow me away with their seamless fusion of music, epic storylines, and deep characters. On the other hand I find some episodes, especially those with Ed, just downright annoying.
Wow, my heart is racing reading all this rebellion against the abuses of intellectual property holders. Great article, thanks. Mod the parent up, please.
Amen, brother
The worst are casting operators, such as "operator const char*()", that can really lead to bizarre code and hard-to-catch errors because if your finger slips on the keyboard while entering an operator, you will all of a sudden vastly change the semantics of your code while the syntax, at a glance, appears the same. And who outside of the secret, special cadre of C++ gurus can fully predict the results when you have a combination of casting operator overloading and method overloading on a call? I end up explicitly casting objects such as _bstr_t that misuse this behavior and do not provide an alternative named method to avoid confusion in my code.
The totally weirdest is, of course, in STL, where they have the function operator such as "result_type operator()(const argument_type& y) const;" where for object foo you would call "foo(argument_type_obj)", and the object reference behaves like a function pointer. This can create some really cool algorithmic constructs like a "for each" in C++, at the mere expense of zapping your noodle with pyschodelic hippie mind rays.
Several other people have addressed the issue of callbacks, but I am interested in talking about your assertion that interfaces are only for callbacks. Interfaces are contracts that are at the heart of polymophism, a client doesn't care "what" your object is as long as it provides the services you need.
Others may disagree, but in my opinion, multiple inheritance in C++ is the result of confusion between polymorphism and reuse on the part of the language developers. If you want to reuse multiple objects and also provide similar services to two or more of those objects it is much clearer to the observer of your code if those parent classes implement interfaces describing their services and you include instances of the classes you need as private member variables and you delegate to those private member instances in your implementation of the interface methods that you need to provide.
I think this is much better than having tons of confusion over similar method names with grossly different semantics, figuring out which parent class a virtual method is tied to, dealing with virtual vs non-virtual inheritance, and the tons of other things that make deciding through inspection who exactly implements the bar() method on your class foo next to impossible without having 4 monitors.
Finally, you often are required to subscribe to the satellite service for a year for the better deals on DirectTiVo's.
I suppose it could be that there is enough room for a few big e-retailers since the really big ones get free customer awareness since they have more mind share, but those numbers speak to a real difficulty to get a sustainable business online due to low customer loyalty inherent when there is no geographic locality and hence no physical reality to such retailers. It could be that Amazon is merely reaping the high advertising costs in previous quarters and will tank once that mind share that cost so dearly to develop wears off.
That aside, I like my humor dry, as you seemed to have intuited.
Given that ironic roughly means perversely unexpected, this would not be ironic since it would be well in the trend of Slashdot getting basic stuff wrong.
I'm glad michael was there to explain to us why he's smarter than Reuters though.
Calm down there, brother. In order to live forever, your vascular system, your organs, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, and your nervous system must function properly. Even if they invent a way to replace all of these with fresh cells grown outside the body from time to time, it would be quite expensive to replace all of these items via surgery. Every third person in the US would have to be a doctor in order to meet the demand. (exaggeration?)
Growing the cells isn't the hard part, migrating them to the proper place in the body is the hard part. Think about your teeth: they grow at a specific point in your life and then start their gradual decay, there are a bunch of them, and surgery to insert 20-30 new ones into your jaw would take days. The problem is the body is designed for a distinct growth phase, and after that phase, certain tissues and structures are naturally incapable of spontaneous regeneration.
I think it would be some time before we move beyond figuring out how to duplicate the growth phase in a jar and duplicate it in the body, where we would presumably only want certain tissues to grow, etc. In the short to medium term, medicine's ability to keep you alive will be significantly increased, but you will be an old person with new parts, not a perpetually young person.
I bet skin and associated connective tissue should be relatively easy to replace, though, so you'll see a lot of actors in their 80's emulating young folks, just don't expect them to be able to do their own stunts.
When confidence dries up in enterprises that borrow money, risk is perceived to increase and people that hold assets are less likely to lend it out, decreasing liquidity. Less liquidity means less money available for investment, which is the primary negative effect on the economy as a whole when things like Enron and this IPO thingy happen.
A government can try to increase liquidity through a number of means, reducing risk by buying off bad loans so troubled banks will be more likely to lend money, issuing more currency, and buying back government bonds are a few of the tools available to governments. Many people think Japan's only way out of its current recession is to bail out its banks, many of which have a bunch of bad loans on the books and are very adverse to new loans, thus preventing GDP growth since new businesses and business expansion is driven through bank loans (as well as stock.)
It reminds me of those guys who spent like $20,000 to set up a bunch of fake ATM's to grab ATM cards and PIN's. They actually lost money on their investment because the crime was so original and got so much media attention that the FBI devoted a legion of Agents to track every lead.
I disagree. Anyone seriously involved with physics loves nothing more than to remove infinities from his/her equations. By definition, Singularity is infinity, and if it is possible to remove it from space as it exists today, it seems to me that this new theory lends hope to the prospect of removing infinities from the entire lifetime of the universe.
Localization includes things like currency and number formatting, things not always easily changed by swapping out string tables.
The real problem is that democracy in America is bought and sold, we don't notice it when two coporations with opposed interests battle it out, because they usually end of achieving a synthesis somewhere in the middle and the laws do not change very much. In situations where it is coporate interests versus the interests of individual citizens, we have the free rider problem: a company is big enough that it pays to spend some money on a politician to change a law, but no one individual has enough to gain from a law change (or to prevent a law change) to make it in his economic interest to contribute to politicians. Some people do it anyway of course, for idealistic reasons, but not enough to win against the likes of Disney.
Oops, that's not very PC.
My first reaction was, no way, don't allow everyone to do this. But after reading posts like yours I realize that my bias is based the the incredibly poorly documented and ill-conceived kernel configuration programs available in the early days of Linux. I tried to use one, and despite being a computer engineer, I managed to screw up my distro.
If a kernel configuration program was more like an "options dialog" that actually made sense and worked, then the user doesn't have to know that they are actually recompiling the fundamental execution unit of their operating system. In computers, appearance is reality.
screw it, time for beer
Biosphere was a bit of a joke for another reason involving air: as they began to seal it up they only then realized that thermal expansion of the air would blow the structure apart, so they installed a huge bladder that would expand and contract with the air!
Of course, the Mongols and the Huns showed the advantages of light, fast units where the only armor was silk shirts so that they could pull out arrows without further damaging the flesh (the silk would embed into the flesh along with the arrow.)
The reason for this is that kinetic energy delivery units have progressed more rapidly than structures that offer protection from kinetic energy. I.E. there is no equivalent of a phalanx in the modern combat arena: a weapon that cannot be damaged at a distance. As we get more sophisticated with damage from a distance, missles, lasers, explosives, torpedoes, what have you, we find that large, expensive assets are particularly vulnerable to small, cheap weapons.
There are only 3 types of protection from these weapons: speed, stealth, and small size. Speed is embodied in aircraft, stealth in submarines, and surface ships and aircraft to some degree, and size is embodied in soldiers. Short of nuclear weapons, it is very difficult to obliterate a dispersed group of soldiers using sound tactics.
I think this means that we will try to pack as much kill capability into individual soldiers and increase their stealth and speed as we advance military technology. Also, the roles of aircraft carriers, tanks, and other large assets will be decreased as time moves forward. This is especially true if some country manages to challenge NATO's dominance of space and the seas.
US regular infantry is tougher as well. You don't have to be an expert to realize that American soldiers will have a vastly superior kill ratio to most other nations in identical circumstances. Just look at the photos of the gear that servicemen are using over in Afghanistan, they have night vision, kevlar body armor, superior command and control, superior tactics, superior weaponry, obviously superior support, and more advantages that explain why a lot more Taliban have died than Americans. You have to be the superior force to engage an enemy on his own turf, and that is the role the US army has been designed to play.