Yet the message behind [Saving Private Ryan] is the pointlessness and futility of the whole thing. Most violence in GTA is trivial in comparison but instills that VIOLENCE HAS REWARDS. That is a very significant difference.
Now you have engaged in picking a winner between two works of art. Fine for a private person to do, but not fine for the government or for any entity that serves the whole public (like de facto offical ratings agency like ESRB).
Georgia was bear-baiting Russia. It was only a matter of time before they responded.
Don't believe that for a second. Russia had been pushing Georgia for a long time into this. That doesn't make what Georgia did trying to take back South Ossetia a smart move. Nor was it easily justifiable - legally or otherwise. Georgians either lost their cool or seriously misjudged their strength and/or Russian's intentions. Nothing in that changes the fact that Russia is the aggressor here.
Russia would quasi partner with China if we do not
In the long term this is almost impossible. Both nations are happy to use the other to limit power of USA/West (including the UN Security Council), but they are not natural allies. In fact, Russia is already dearly concerned about China's rise. Russia holds large areas of historically Chinese territory. They compete fiercely over influence in Central Asia. There is very little respect between the two peoples. Historically corporatist/fascist regimes are not good at solving their differences to pursue a common policy.
I wonder why the example mentioned is Sakai? Anyone working with Open Source Software in the education knows very well that the real success story is Moodle. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into details in this regard, so I'm left just thinking that it's another case of Big Organization Blindness.
He wasn't planning to sell it, or he wouldn't have let you borrow it.
I think this is the main part of it. Our Farmer Jones, whether he had apples or stock to borrow, is sitting tight on something valuable. He benefits in two ways.
1) You pay him. He's not going to borrow his stuff for free. The exact amount and conditions of the payment can vary greatly, but it'll be there.
2) What you are doing will result in more accurate the price for the stuff the Farmer has. Markets are in large part about setting the correct price for each item. This is often called generating a price signal and it is the main tool for making economic decisions in free-market economies.
No, the database does not care what you think of it. It will do what you tell it to do. However, the next person working on the same code needs to know that you think he is pretty and you love him no matter what... and that you accept and value him exactly as he is. You need to do this or he will become too distraught to even think about what you were telling the database to do previously.
1. Would you mind to explain me how glittering Headlines, dancing smilies, an eggshell-textured backdrop (of course alsmost indistinguishable from plain white), and the occasional Chain-Mail-ppt actually make communications MORE effective? Would you mind to explain how a straw man argument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man) makes communication more effective?
Effectivity is measured in information per size unit. Per size unit? Really?... Did you think this at all? To me at least it is fairly obvious that size in bits is irrelevant in practice and even "size on screen" is the wrong way to look at the issue. As "successful transfer of intended meaning" is too vague the more simple readability would be my first hunch for the most relevant metric. "Time spend in understanding the communication" might a good way to go, too.
And for anything that cant be put into plain text, use a fitting attachment. (pdf, png, perhaps even doc and ppt if it suits you) Good grief, you are on a roll, that's zero out of three now. Of course you want to put your images inline into the relevant context of the text. Paragraphs and headings shouldn't require separate application. Only reason not to do it is technical limitations of plain text. It's beyond me why you would want to have for strictly plain email its own separate application that clearly needs to be supported by more expressive applications/formats in the real world.
2. Yes, landline Speeds may have evolved from the days of the 2400baud modems, but i bet if you're stuck somewhere out in the wild with only a slow GSM connection (no WLAN, no UMTS/EDGE/whatever) you'll be glad for everyone who sends you only plaintext emails. So it's welcome back to the 20 year old speed restrictions, that actually ARE progress. Phew, finally something somewhat sane. 2G and 2.5G mobile networks are indeed going to be around for some time still. Their data trasmission capablities should be a baseline for basic services, like email. However, even low end GPRS gives you 20kbps down and 14.4kbps up, which is significantly more than 2400 baud modemn (2kbps). GPRS speeds are in fact much more suited for a relatively parse rich text format and inline images than mixture of plain text and attachments.
I believe that the characterization of "a majority of the Guantanamo" being captured by people other than US military (not necessarily bounty hunters) originates in the Mark Denbeaux's "Report on Guantanamo detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees" from 2006. See the Wikipedia article, which though fairly badly written does in my opinion give a fair assessment of the report and its findings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Denbeaux_study (link to the actual 30 or so page study can be found there too).
I don't know what you would consider a "NON BIASED Source" nor do I much care - your typographical choices annoyed me. The Denbeaux study is well-referenced and everyone willing can read it themselves.
Question: How does a format really get out of date
There are several ways in which a format can become outdated. Below I will list some. You will notice that from a strictly technical point-of-view they aren't even close to being show stoppers (ie. you could work around them probably in several way). However, should that outdated format be mandated for use by a law then the technical challenges and financial burdens may become serious hindrances in the least and actual show stoppers in the worst case. Changing a law will always be more difficult than changing just a standard.
An ad hoc list of how a format can become outdated (pardon the poor examples):
1) An underlaying technology or medium becomes outdated. Example: 8-, 16-, and 32-bit integers. Another example: pre-web/xml EDI-formats.
2) A superior (= more fit) competing technology is developed. Example: SGML vs XML.
3) The intended use case of the format becomes outdated and/or irrelevant, which may happen due multitude of technical and non-technical reasons (the world does not stand still). Example: an early text-processing format that does not support hyperlinks or embedded pictures. Data formats for various deprecated ports.
Your particular question was about "an XML format designed to represent a wordprocessed document. How exactly is that going to go out of date?" Let's first note that in practical terms this is a format specifically designed for longevity. However, it fairly easy to imagine that a word processing format designed today does not allow for all important future use cases. Information about intention might be very important in mere twenty years, as AI and cognitive modeling applications might require it. The format might lack important security features that become necessary way you interface with data via a brain implant.
In all instances I am aware of, it was *not* Spanish technology that carried the day.
Dude, you need to get your thinking process checked.
There are always several factors to any significant historic event. You can't let that cloud your mind so much that you become unable to recognize the real trends. If Cortes or Pizarro hadn't been successful then the next guy would have, or the next guy. Eventually Aztecs and Incas would have been conquered. The only theoretical alternative is that they too gain technology and fast enough to avoid being conquered, which is almost impossible.
There's of course no need to romanticize or dramatize conquests; over time history just is much less random than it may appear.
It is a common mistake, but a mistake still, to think that the program's logic is more important than program's data. For everyday computer use this is even more of a mistake. People have data and they need to use it. First and foremost they need to understand that this data is a set of sets of datum. All important computer operations that the everyman needs to do transformations between two sets. The amount of logic required for the transformation is often trivial, provided that they understand their data and can mentally organize it into sets correctly. Some declarative language is probably best suited for injecting the "business logic" into the system that hosts the sets.
Thus, set theory - at least the naive version of it.
Think-of-the-children does deserve the bad rep it has, I'm with you on that one. However, I don't think many Slashdotters have actually tried to think of the children. To be fair to "the other side" I think we should give that a try sometimes. By themselves many (most?) parents are woefully ill-equipped to deal with the dangers that a child faces. Nor is there much help available for the parents from their social network. Luckily, for the child the risks aren't that high because, unlike the think-of-the-children crowd thinks, the world isn't all that dangerous place. Still, there really does seem to be a need for a sensible risk management structure(*). The society at large does have a right and the responsibility to protect it's members. I think saying that it is just the parents responsibility is a cop out. This conversation needs people who understand of the technology works and what benefits to individuals and society will be lost if the resort is broad censorship.
(*) Like any risk management structure or system you would first want to make it less likely for a danger to actualize and, when that fails, how to detect that a child is presently in actual danger and how to intervene. I'm certain that something can be done that doesn't have prohibitive societal cost associated with it.
You're not better than people who don't care to learn about computers; you just have different interests.
This statement needs a bit of clarification before I can argue with it. As it would be too slow to ask for clarification I'm going to assume the following:
- stuff the people don't care to learn is stuff like intermediate and advanced levels of configuration, programming, CLI and the like, but also set theory, theory of data, theory of communication etc.
- the better you are referring to is not ethical, but mainly economical, societal and utilitarian.
First off, I would want to agree with you that people do need to make decisions about what to learn. Even though you will spread that learning throughout your whole life there's just too much stuff to know. However, it a dangerous self-deception to think that you can ignore computers and not have negative consequences to yourself in terms of your economic prospects, your fitness to society and your personal happiness.
It is really hard say what level of knowledge with computer should be considered a citizen skill(*), but it is more than basic OS usage and knowledge of specific applications. I think people should be able to command their computers. To this logic and set theory are most important, although any specific formalism unimportant and those used by experts of the particular fields are probably counterproductive. A working knowledge of a general command language is probably a must, although you may be able to get by with GUIs. A general command language is of course also a programming language, but don't let that fool you. Programming (i.e. building computational systems) isn't part of the operational ability to command a computer.
For better or worse, computer skills aren't just another technical skill that might be fun to have. Computers are the foundations of our current and future prosperity. They are the means of production and communication of our societies. Computer knowledge is power. Computers can't be just a purview of engineers.
(*) A skill nearly every citizen has or is expected to acquire. I know this is a very Finnish concept, but I'm not ashamed of that.:-)
Ok, so I appreciate schadenfreude as much as the next guy (and he's an asshole), but I still fail to see how this is funny. In fact, this is a big part of the reason why most people are so bad at technical things, which is an increasingly difficult problem in Western societies. Most people have learned the hard way that technical skills are a bad investment just because they become obsolete or commoditized so quickly. We (and I speak both as a techie and an educator) need to better guiding people to durable skill paths.
To me that says that XML handles a problem that wasn't there. Parsing problem for pretty much everything is almost universally solved by regex...
XML doesn't handle parsing. XML makes parsing easier; in fact so easy that parsing XML isn't a problem anymore.
For an expert, I think XML and regex are complementary techniques. For anyone other than an expert regex are way too brittle. Ordinary people need to be able to operate on their data, it can't require voodoo. (Not that XML in all its arcane application is anything close to plain English, but it's much better than custom data formats and regex.)
I just bought new monitor (22' widescreen) and graphics card (GeForce 8800GT). I would really like to use DirectX 10. The newer games are starting to support it. For this I would need Vista. What I want to know is if Vista w/SP1 is good enough to use. Can I replace XP with it and get a better experience in games and light non-game use? (For any real work I'll use a remote linux server anyways.)
Well, to be more accurate, what the patent system is supposed to do in a case like this is lower the net costs of security, and then reward the inventor by diverting some of the savings to him.
Sort of, yes, but mostly, no. (Or you are just be using "net cost" loosely.) Patent system isn't supposed drive down prices, it is supposed to drive up the benefits. Patent system also only works over time, sometimes quite a long time. One can't really make any claims or observations about the patent system at any single point of time. (Don't judge a function by its value, but by the value of its derivate.:-))
The mechanism by which patent systems drives up benefits is broadly that sharing innovations speeds innovation. There is a steep cost in giving monopolies to any one actor. In theory, innovation is a cumulative process and the cost is constant, so valid patents usually end up positive. Keys to validness of a patent are of course novelty and non-obviousness. The '600 patent seems to fail here.
First: This is a good thing. It is a good thing especially for the individual.
Second: This is how things have been always been in most of Europe. The commissioner didn't change a ruling, he just said that he agrees with the consensus view. (Of course I don't know what the situation is in every European country, only for the ten or so.)
Personal data doesn't mean private. If fact, in many cases it is the opposite of private. In European practice, an individual has control over their own personal data. To use your personal data, I need your permission. Sometimes this permission needs to be implicit, as in using an IP address number to enable real time communication between two computers. In cases where the permission doesn't need to be implicit it isn't. An example would be if I wanted to store your IP after the real time communication between has ended. To be able to do so, I would have to tell you at the first opportunity that I am going to store your IP, what I'm going to do with it and how I'm going to protect it from other people. (Logging just for operational purposes is considered a special case, not requiring an explicit declarations, but that sort of assumes that your logging practices fall within the industry norms. Best thing would be to inform your user about your logging practices in any case.)
2) Make it 'just work'. Automate as much as you can. Try to have configuration options that either will work in the vast majority of cases with the defaults, or have the application automatically try to determine the best settings for the user's environment. The best configuration dialog is one the user never has to see.
I have an addendum to this one: have a mechanism for power users to access all the functionality of your application. This should not to be part of the main GUI, nor does it need to a GUI at all. This way you don't have two important design goals, usability and expressiveness, competing with each other (well, not as much anyways). A nice architecture for this is have a intermediate, highly expressive and scriptable, command line interface and use that interface as the back-end for the GUI that most people will see.
Re:Mark Pilgrim said it best a year ago
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Re: "Mark Pilgrim said it best a year ago"
No he didn't. While the sound bite you quoted is snappy, the rest of the his post is just blindingly stupid. The only even remotely sensible part is "I guess the part I don't understand is the target audience. Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don't have a favorite editor already?".
Uh? Trying to make tools better is bad now? All the possible good text editors exist already?
There is actually a serious fallacy here: the believe that because the problem is old, the current solutions must be good. The current solutions probably are best of their kind that were possible when the problem was new. That does not mean that we can't come up with better solutions today and for today. This may include rather specialized and/or personalized text editors, after all tool-making is cheaper now than it was 10-20 years ago.
The so called two party "rigging" is party responsible for the tremendous stability of the governments of the US and the UK.
"Partly responsible"? Partly is such a weasel word; almost anything is partly responsible for everything.
I'm not going to deny that the UK has been a tremendous success in a relatively tough place, but that can be attributed to many factors: constitutional monarchy, liberal economics, expansionism. It is far from clear which factors have been the most important. As to the US, well, the US has had it really easy. Separated from enemies by oceans, lots of room to expand. Before the Second World War the US government did not face pressures that governments in continental Europe faced.
turning faramir into a flawed human almost like his brother instead of a noble character was done for time?
Mostly no, not directly at least.
According to the Two Towers (Extended Edition) commentary the main reasons firstly that Faramir should not be immune to the rings effect and secondly that without changes Frodo's storyline was lacking tension and would not have a climactic end. These are perfectly valid reasons. In the movies the Ring is a major antagonist, a much bigger character than Faramir. The filmmakers have spend a lot of time establishing the Ring's power, they didn't want to undermine it for sake of a relatively minor character (does Faramir make the top 20 in the books?). The second reason is even more apparent. It is pretty much given that Frodo's storyline will begin after the Breaking of the Fellowship and end before Minas Morgul. If you look at what happens in the book between those two point you see that it's not a movie. It's not not even a B-plot, it's something you cut out - or something you add tension to, hence Faramir is made flawed.
but he fails utterly to understand the nobility in the books.
I'm not certain do you mean nobility as a concept that is portrayed in the books, or that in the books there are more nobles and they aren't quite so glorious in the movies?
The filmmakers considered Aragorn as written to be boring. They preferred to have Aragorn doubt the worth of humans and his own ability too in the beginning. This allows us to see the growth and drama happen on the screen. This reflects the filmmakers sensibilities: they clearly preferred more conflicted characters than what Tolkien wrote.
I don't think there is less nobility in the movies than in the books. There are less portrayals of nobles and all-conquering heroes, especially of the birthright type. I think the movie is better for it, although I do agree that it is a substantive change. Pretty much the only thing I disagree is that Gondor (the people and the state) is so feeble in the movie.
Like it was previously pointed out: no original research. Also, people should not contribute to articles about themselves or entities or events closely related to themselves. Both are sound policies for maintaining objectivity.
On one hand I'm going: "Good grief!", but on the other hand I'm like: "Fair enough, if you really don't get it yourself than I guess that is a valid question to ask."
I agree with you that it is really questionable if any form of government is in absolute terms responsible enough to entrusted with nuclear weapons.
Theocracies deny inherent value of human and other forms of life. Nor will a theocracy value truth or equality as a basis for a system of law. By now it seem almost inconsequential that freedom of speech and transparency of government are antithetical to theocracy.
A theocracy will value what its dogma says is important. If that dogma is relatively benign, like Jainism, you might get lucky, while Satanism would seem particularly sinister choice. If the dogma just silly and contradictory, like with the big Abrahamic religion, you're still pretty much out of luck. Governing is a difficult job in the first place and no bonus is awarded for extra difficulty.
Is a theocracy more likely to use a nuclear weapon than any other form of government?
Yes. Before using nuclear weapons offensively (including clandestine use) the top echelon of power will do cost-benefit analysis based on information provided by a bureaucracy. This is true of many forms of government. In a theocracy this cost-benefit analysis is more likely to show a positive ratio than in a democracy, socialist or totalitarian governments. It may well make sense to gamble if the present statue quo is an affront to gods or the possible end result is paradise. To make the matters worse, anyone making these decisions will be deeply indoctrinated in the dogma and as a group will highly likely demonstrate the ill-effects of groupthinking.
Whether you disagree with this policy or not, the internees are not eligible for constitutional protections under any legal theory with which I am familiar.
I do understand that this does not qualify as a legal theory, but as an ethical theory I consider this a fine one: you should tread people in a certain way, not because who they are, but because who you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet the message behind [Saving Private Ryan] is the pointlessness and futility of the whole thing. Most violence in GTA is trivial in comparison but instills that VIOLENCE HAS REWARDS. That is a very significant difference.
Now you have engaged in picking a winner between two works of art. Fine for a private person to do, but not fine for the government or for any entity that serves the whole public (like de facto offical ratings agency like ESRB).
Georgia was bear-baiting Russia. It was only a matter of time before they responded.
Don't believe that for a second. Russia had been pushing Georgia for a long time into this. That doesn't make what Georgia did trying to take back South Ossetia a smart move. Nor was it easily justifiable - legally or otherwise. Georgians either lost their cool or seriously misjudged their strength and/or Russian's intentions. Nothing in that changes the fact that Russia is the aggressor here.
Russia would quasi partner with China if we do not
In the long term this is almost impossible. Both nations are happy to use the other to limit power of USA/West (including the UN Security Council), but they are not natural allies. In fact, Russia is already dearly concerned about China's rise. Russia holds large areas of historically Chinese territory. They compete fiercely over influence in Central Asia. There is very little respect between the two peoples. Historically corporatist/fascist regimes are not good at solving their differences to pursue a common policy.
I wonder why the example mentioned is Sakai? Anyone working with Open Source Software in the education knows very well that the real success story is Moodle. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into details in this regard, so I'm left just thinking that it's another case of Big Organization Blindness.
He wasn't planning to sell it, or he wouldn't have let you borrow it.
I think this is the main part of it. Our Farmer Jones, whether he had apples or stock to borrow, is sitting tight on something valuable. He benefits in two ways.
1) You pay him. He's not going to borrow his stuff for free. The exact amount and conditions of the payment can vary greatly, but it'll be there.
2) What you are doing will result in more accurate the price for the stuff the Farmer has. Markets are in large part about setting the correct price for each item. This is often called generating a price signal and it is the main tool for making economic decisions in free-market economies.
No, the database does not care what you think of it. It will do what you tell it to do. However, the next person working on the same code needs to know that you think he is pretty and you love him no matter what ... and that you accept and value him exactly as he is. You need to do this or he will become too distraught to even think about what you were telling the database to do previously.
I believe that the characterization of "a majority of the Guantanamo" being captured by people other than US military (not necessarily bounty hunters) originates in the Mark Denbeaux's "Report on Guantanamo detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees" from 2006. See the Wikipedia article, which though fairly badly written does in my opinion give a fair assessment of the report and its findings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Denbeaux_study (link to the actual 30 or so page study can be found there too).
I don't know what you would consider a "NON BIASED Source" nor do I much care - your typographical choices annoyed me. The Denbeaux study is well-referenced and everyone willing can read it themselves.
Question: How does a format really get out of date
There are several ways in which a format can become outdated. Below I will list some. You will notice that from a strictly technical point-of-view they aren't even close to being show stoppers (ie. you could work around them probably in several way). However, should that outdated format be mandated for use by a law then the technical challenges and financial burdens may become serious hindrances in the least and actual show stoppers in the worst case. Changing a law will always be more difficult than changing just a standard.
An ad hoc list of how a format can become outdated (pardon the poor examples):
1) An underlaying technology or medium becomes outdated. Example: 8-, 16-, and 32-bit integers. Another example: pre-web/xml EDI-formats.
2) A superior (= more fit) competing technology is developed. Example: SGML vs XML.
3) The intended use case of the format becomes outdated and/or irrelevant, which may happen due multitude of technical and non-technical reasons (the world does not stand still). Example: an early text-processing format that does not support hyperlinks or embedded pictures. Data formats for various deprecated ports.
Your particular question was about "an XML format designed to represent a wordprocessed document. How exactly is that going to go out of date?" Let's first note that in practical terms this is a format specifically designed for longevity. However, it fairly easy to imagine that a word processing format designed today does not allow for all important future use cases. Information about intention might be very important in mere twenty years, as AI and cognitive modeling applications might require it. The format might lack important security features that become necessary way you interface with data via a brain implant.
In all instances I am aware of, it was *not* Spanish technology that carried the day.
Dude, you need to get your thinking process checked.
There are always several factors to any significant historic event. You can't let that cloud your mind so much that you become unable to recognize the real trends. If Cortes or Pizarro hadn't been successful then the next guy would have, or the next guy. Eventually Aztecs and Incas would have been conquered. The only theoretical alternative is that they too gain technology and fast enough to avoid being conquered, which is almost impossible.
There's of course no need to romanticize or dramatize conquests; over time history just is much less random than it may appear.
(Sorry about not getting back to this earlier.)
It is a common mistake, but a mistake still, to think that the program's logic is more important than program's data. For everyday computer use this is even more of a mistake. People have data and they need to use it. First and foremost they need to understand that this data is a set of sets of datum. All important computer operations that the everyman needs to do transformations between two sets. The amount of logic required for the transformation is often trivial, provided that they understand their data and can mentally organize it into sets correctly. Some declarative language is probably best suited for injecting the "business logic" into the system that hosts the sets.
Thus, set theory - at least the naive version of it.
Think-of-the-children does deserve the bad rep it has, I'm with you on that one. However, I don't think many Slashdotters have actually tried to think of the children. To be fair to "the other side" I think we should give that a try sometimes. By themselves many (most?) parents are woefully ill-equipped to deal with the dangers that a child faces. Nor is there much help available for the parents from their social network. Luckily, for the child the risks aren't that high because, unlike the think-of-the-children crowd thinks, the world isn't all that dangerous place. Still, there really does seem to be a need for a sensible risk management structure(*). The society at large does have a right and the responsibility to protect it's members. I think saying that it is just the parents responsibility is a cop out. This conversation needs people who understand of the technology works and what benefits to individuals and society will be lost if the resort is broad censorship.
(*) Like any risk management structure or system you would first want to make it less likely for a danger to actualize and, when that fails, how to detect that a child is presently in actual danger and how to intervene. I'm certain that something can be done that doesn't have prohibitive societal cost associated with it.
You're not better than people who don't care to learn about computers; you just have different interests.
:-)
This statement needs a bit of clarification before I can argue with it. As it would be too slow to ask for clarification I'm going to assume the following:
- stuff the people don't care to learn is stuff like intermediate and advanced levels of configuration, programming, CLI and the like, but also set theory, theory of data, theory of communication etc.
- the better you are referring to is not ethical, but mainly economical, societal and utilitarian.
First off, I would want to agree with you that people do need to make decisions about what to learn. Even though you will spread that learning throughout your whole life there's just too much stuff to know. However, it a dangerous self-deception to think that you can ignore computers and not have negative consequences to yourself in terms of your economic prospects, your fitness to society and your personal happiness.
It is really hard say what level of knowledge with computer should be considered a citizen skill(*), but it is more than basic OS usage and knowledge of specific applications. I think people should be able to command their computers. To this logic and set theory are most important, although any specific formalism unimportant and those used by experts of the particular fields are probably counterproductive. A working knowledge of a general command language is probably a must, although you may be able to get by with GUIs. A general command language is of course also a programming language, but don't let that fool you. Programming (i.e. building computational systems) isn't part of the operational ability to command a computer.
For better or worse, computer skills aren't just another technical skill that might be fun to have. Computers are the foundations of our current and future prosperity. They are the means of production and communication of our societies. Computer knowledge is power. Computers can't be just a purview of engineers.
(*) A skill nearly every citizen has or is expected to acquire. I know this is a very Finnish concept, but I'm not ashamed of that.
Ok, so I appreciate schadenfreude as much as the next guy (and he's an asshole), but I still fail to see how this is funny. In fact, this is a big part of the reason why most people are so bad at technical things, which is an increasingly difficult problem in Western societies. Most people have learned the hard way that technical skills are a bad investment just because they become obsolete or commoditized so quickly. We (and I speak both as a techie and an educator) need to better guiding people to durable skill paths.
I'm sorry but any Cuban history summarization of three or more words must include the word Batista. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
To me that says that XML handles a problem that wasn't there. Parsing problem for pretty much everything is almost universally solved by regex...
XML doesn't handle parsing. XML makes parsing easier; in fact so easy that parsing XML isn't a problem anymore.
For an expert, I think XML and regex are complementary techniques. For anyone other than an expert regex are way too brittle. Ordinary people need to be able to operate on their data, it can't require voodoo. (Not that XML in all its arcane application is anything close to plain English, but it's much better than custom data formats and regex.)
I just bought new monitor (22' widescreen) and graphics card (GeForce 8800GT). I would really like to use DirectX 10. The newer games are starting to support it. For this I would need Vista. What I want to know is if Vista w/SP1 is good enough to use. Can I replace XP with it and get a better experience in games and light non-game use? (For any real work I'll use a remote linux server anyways.)
Well, to be more accurate, what the patent system is supposed to do in a case like this is lower the net costs of security, and then reward the inventor by diverting some of the savings to him.
:-))
Sort of, yes, but mostly, no. (Or you are just be using "net cost" loosely.) Patent system isn't supposed drive down prices, it is supposed to drive up the benefits. Patent system also only works over time, sometimes quite a long time. One can't really make any claims or observations about the patent system at any single point of time. (Don't judge a function by its value, but by the value of its derivate.
The mechanism by which patent systems drives up benefits is broadly that sharing innovations speeds innovation. There is a steep cost in giving monopolies to any one actor. In theory, innovation is a cumulative process and the cost is constant, so valid patents usually end up positive. Keys to validness of a patent are of course novelty and non-obviousness. The '600 patent seems to fail here.
First: This is a good thing. It is a good thing especially for the individual.
Second: This is how things have been always been in most of Europe. The commissioner didn't change a ruling, he just said that he agrees with the consensus view. (Of course I don't know what the situation is in every European country, only for the ten or so.)
Personal data doesn't mean private. If fact, in many cases it is the opposite of private. In European practice, an individual has control over their own personal data. To use your personal data, I need your permission. Sometimes this permission needs to be implicit, as in using an IP address number to enable real time communication between two computers. In cases where the permission doesn't need to be implicit it isn't. An example would be if I wanted to store your IP after the real time communication between has ended. To be able to do so, I would have to tell you at the first opportunity that I am going to store your IP, what I'm going to do with it and how I'm going to protect it from other people. (Logging just for operational purposes is considered a special case, not requiring an explicit declarations, but that sort of assumes that your logging practices fall within the industry norms. Best thing would be to inform your user about your logging practices in any case.)
2) Make it 'just work'. Automate as much as you can. Try to have configuration options that either will work in the vast majority of cases with the defaults, or have the application automatically try to determine the best settings for the user's environment. The best configuration dialog is one the user never has to see.
I have an addendum to this one: have a mechanism for power users to access all the functionality of your application. This should not to be part of the main GUI, nor does it need to a GUI at all. This way you don't have two important design goals, usability and expressiveness, competing with each other (well, not as much anyways). A nice architecture for this is have a intermediate, highly expressive and scriptable, command line interface and use that interface as the back-end for the GUI that most people will see.
Re: "Mark Pilgrim said it best a year ago"
No he didn't. While the sound bite you quoted is snappy, the rest of the his post is just blindingly stupid. The only even remotely sensible part is "I guess the part I don't understand is the target audience. Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don't have a favorite editor already?".
Uh? Trying to make tools better is bad now? All the possible good text editors exist already?
There is actually a serious fallacy here: the believe that because the problem is old, the current solutions must be good. The current solutions probably are best of their kind that were possible when the problem was new. That does not mean that we can't come up with better solutions today and for today. This may include rather specialized and/or personalized text editors, after all tool-making is cheaper now than it was 10-20 years ago.
The so called two party "rigging" is party responsible for the tremendous stability of the governments of the US and the UK.
"Partly responsible"? Partly is such a weasel word; almost anything is partly responsible for everything.
I'm not going to deny that the UK has been a tremendous success in a relatively tough place, but that can be attributed to many factors: constitutional monarchy, liberal economics, expansionism. It is far from clear which factors have been the most important. As to the US, well, the US has had it really easy. Separated from enemies by oceans, lots of room to expand. Before the Second World War the US government did not face pressures that governments in continental Europe faced.
turning faramir into a flawed human almost like his brother instead of a noble character was done for time?
Mostly no, not directly at least.
According to the Two Towers (Extended Edition) commentary the main reasons firstly that Faramir should not be immune to the rings effect and secondly that without changes Frodo's storyline was lacking tension and would not have a climactic end. These are perfectly valid reasons. In the movies the Ring is a major antagonist, a much bigger character than Faramir. The filmmakers have spend a lot of time establishing the Ring's power, they didn't want to undermine it for sake of a relatively minor character (does Faramir make the top 20 in the books?). The second reason is even more apparent. It is pretty much given that Frodo's storyline will begin after the Breaking of the Fellowship and end before Minas Morgul. If you look at what happens in the book between those two point you see that it's not a movie. It's not not even a B-plot, it's something you cut out - or something you add tension to, hence Faramir is made flawed.
but he fails utterly to understand the nobility in the books.
I'm not certain do you mean nobility as a concept that is portrayed in the books, or that in the books there are more nobles and they aren't quite so glorious in the movies?
The filmmakers considered Aragorn as written to be boring. They preferred to have Aragorn doubt the worth of humans and his own ability too in the beginning. This allows us to see the growth and drama happen on the screen. This reflects the filmmakers sensibilities: they clearly preferred more conflicted characters than what Tolkien wrote.
I don't think there is less nobility in the movies than in the books. There are less portrayals of nobles and all-conquering heroes, especially of the birthright type. I think the movie is better for it, although I do agree that it is a substantive change. Pretty much the only thing I disagree is that Gondor (the people and the state) is so feeble in the movie.
Like it was previously pointed out: no original research. Also, people should not contribute to articles about themselves or entities or events closely related to themselves. Both are sound policies for maintaining objectivity.
On one hand I'm going: "Good grief!", but on the other hand I'm like: "Fair enough, if you really don't get it yourself than I guess that is a valid question to ask."
I agree with you that it is really questionable if any form of government is in absolute terms responsible enough to entrusted with nuclear weapons.
Theocracies deny inherent value of human and other forms of life. Nor will a theocracy value truth or equality as a basis for a system of law. By now it seem almost inconsequential that freedom of speech and transparency of government are antithetical to theocracy.
A theocracy will value what its dogma says is important. If that dogma is relatively benign, like Jainism, you might get lucky, while Satanism would seem particularly sinister choice. If the dogma just silly and contradictory, like with the big Abrahamic religion, you're still pretty much out of luck. Governing is a difficult job in the first place and no bonus is awarded for extra difficulty.
Is a theocracy more likely to use a nuclear weapon than any other form of government?
Yes. Before using nuclear weapons offensively (including clandestine use) the top echelon of power will do cost-benefit analysis based on information provided by a bureaucracy. This is true of many forms of government. In a theocracy this cost-benefit analysis is more likely to show a positive ratio than in a democracy, socialist or totalitarian governments. It may well make sense to gamble if the present statue quo is an affront to gods or the possible end result is paradise. To make the matters worse, anyone making these decisions will be deeply indoctrinated in the dogma and as a group will highly likely demonstrate the ill-effects of groupthinking.
Whether you disagree with this policy or not, the internees are not eligible for constitutional protections under any legal theory with which I am familiar.
I do understand that this does not qualify as a legal theory, but as an ethical theory I consider this a fine one: you should tread people in a certain way, not because who they are, but because who you are.