...they're right. The "western culture" (spanning most of the anglophone world and the EU) does censor, and is very much a "pot calling the kettle black".
I'll also go on record as saying they're equally wrong. The only experience that "harms children" is lack of family stability and trust, and/or lack of love. All of the stuff about sex and porn and most of the stuff about watching violence is basically a cultural bee in our bonnet, comparable to Victorians covering up "scandalous" naked table legs. People in 100 years will look back and laugh.
...very much like deciding that tears explain sadness.
I know subjectively, that even my simple emotions are complex, multilayered things. There's the sensation-level feedback which lets me know I'm experiencing an emotion. There's learned-behaviour changes like reinforcement (of love, happiness, etc) or disincentive (from pain, shame, etc). There's thought-ability changes, belief-prioritization changes, even memory recall changes. All in parallel. And that's leaving aside the experience, belief and attention context that triggered the emotion. So, it looks to me like what these guys are doing is picking at one strand (new love's pleasure/reinforcement/habituation mechanism) and thinking they have the totality. Which is just ignorant, and I'd guess it's not accidentially ignorant. More people pushing the "mind is nothing but meat" idea. Not an opinion I share!
So many other folks don't seem to get how the Jedi Order in the prequels was intentionally a bit crap. The "return" in ROTJ means Luke is restarting the Jedi, but it also means that the purity has returned, the Jedi are back to their ideal.
Note how neither Yoda nor Obi-Wan try to teach Jedi culture to Luke. No "council", no rules, no "padawan" or other ranks. If they hadn't the time while alive, they could still do it while blue and glowy - but no. I'd call that deliberate.
I hate and despise the TV tax, but it had at least some theoretical justification. Here was a service, supposedly according to its friends a worthy service that couldn't be duplicated by the market, broadcast free for the taking. The BBC was to inform the nation and produce worthy and fair programming, without commercial bias. Vital for the nation and yet lacking an income - I can see how a levy on televisions could make sense. I disagree with the assumptions, but that was the argument.
!!! BUT !!!
WHAT do the BBC bring to the internet that isn't already there? Dead air there certainly isn't! Nor is there any lack of worthy content.
WHAT marks them out as special, that they ought to receive handouts, when other voluntarily free services (eg: Wikipedia) do not?
WHO do they think they are, treating a mutual medium as if it was broadcast? If any Joe can publish, why privilege the BBC?
Even their original argument falters in the online context. Even by their own standards, they have no reason to be here. Why are they, then? I doubt they could answer in any terms except "we can, so we shall". Fair enough, but without your justifications, who are you? You're nobody special. You get to continue, but you get to pay your own way! Not as if you can't, either. BBC may call itself non-commercial, but it makes money hand-over-fist on DVDs and syndication.
Like anything else, the answer's "be sensible" - play to your strengths. If your company uses the "infinite monkeys" model, then standardize on Java.
In general: an adequate coder can handle Java and bodge C++. A good coder can pick up and use any ordinary language in a week or less, and be fluent and experienced within six months. A guru can handle the oddballs, like lisp and haskell, and make them dance.
Do not expose code monkeys to haskell. You'll pop their fuses, leading to expensive lawsuits, etc.
It would be "evil" by what appears to be Google's consistently applied definition of evil, namely, decreasing users' access to information, or polluting it with noise. (The China thing, I believe, was reasoned as "We're adding access. Not as much as we'd like, but still.")
They're far more likely to simply set up their own wide pipe and set up in open competition to the telcos. Destroy the enemy by providing a better service.
The problem is, modern warplanes are too slow. This baloon sits more or less dead still, and the plane whips past it at 500mph. Given that, it's simply hard to shoot at.
Were this tried in war, the obvious countermeasure would be to revive the open cockpit biplane. The pilot can lean out and poke it with a sharp stick.
According to a report on the projected annual costs of the Kyoto treaty to the United States, issued by the federal Energy Information Agency in October 1998, "The total cost to the economy can be estimated as the loss in actual GDP (the loss in potential GDP plus the macroeconomic adjustment cost) plus the purchase of international permits... Total costs range from an annual average level for the period 2008 to 2012 of $77 billion to $338 billion 1992 dollars depending on the carbon reduction case and how funds are recycled back to the economy."
BTW, Kyoto is acknowledged even by its defenders as a mere regulatory icebreaker with little direct impact, intended to open a path for far harsher protocols to follow. A modern civilised economy is very energy-hungry, and strangling the main source of energy would brake the economy hard. That has real costs, both in money and in human suffering.
In other words, faced with those sorts of costs, $50bn starts to look like pocket change.
Just from an engineering perspective, surely you can see how a direct attack on the problem makes more sense? It's like the difference between dealing with a slow-dripping spigot that has flooded your floor by stopping the leak and letting the floor dry in its own time (Kyoto) versus mopping the mess up first (climate engineering).
People have been complaining about the GIMP UI for ages. The coders have made efforts to reduce the pain. However, as far as I've ever seen, very few open source programs ever get their UI iteratively improved towards perfection. As with Eclipse versus Emacs, they're surpassed by newer programs with fresh UIs, more modern design ideas, better dev methods.
A lot has been told about the development of the Firefox browser since Firefox 1.0. The reality is that the story is bigger than just Firefox 1.0. It goes back years, spans continents, and includes a cast of thousands. It's a fantastic story, with all of your standard themes -- greed, rage, turmoil, love lost. But mostly it's a story of dedicated people laboring to create something they truly believe in.
Is it just me, or does this page need a musical theme accompaniment? Something orchestral, stirring, and self-impressed, like the music in Titanic.
Prop aircraft type go so slow you can barely see them move from the ground. Jet aircraft are fast but hard to see. Rocket aircraft would be both startlingly fast, and very easy to see (because of the 20ft flame and the persistent smoke trail). They would if anything be easier to watch than NASCAR, owing to being in view all the time, rather than disappearing behind hills and bits of track furniture. Plus they could layout the track so the racers whizz past on a straight, 100 ft overhead above the viewing stands.
The main problem would be the number of viewers getting cricks in their necks.
It may be necessary to use C++ for parts of the system, but can they be isolated as a seperate adjunct process? That way, your damage is limited and your main, secure process can keep a watchful eye on the C++ process.
Design the C++ side to be stateless, so a halt-and-restart can occur losslessly between RPC transactions.
Digicams are generally considered useless for any sort of evidential use, because of photoshop. But they could become far better than film by the simple expedient of embedding a cryptographic signature generator. You could connect to the camera, download pictures like normal, download detached signatures for each photo, download the x509 certificate embedded into that one camera which was used to sign them. The private key itself being inside a tamper-resistant chip, and therefore the signatures are definitive. Combine this with time, date and GPS location shown on the photo, and you have a sure winner for any situtation where proof is important. Eg: time-dependent business contracts, evidence gathering by law enforcement, private detectives, etc.
I don't necessarily agree about graphics versus gameplay.
People tolerated lego-brick-pixel 16 color graphics because there was no alternative. Gameplay is good, but bad graphics are just jarring in a modern game. People have learned to expect better.
I think game graphics are near the end of the rising phase in a typical new tech rise-and-plateau. While they continue to improve, they'll continue to sell. Their rise will finally end when new improvements become visually irrelevant, comparable to any improvement in screen colors beyond 32 bit truecolor. The sign that we've hit the plateau will be the emergence of mature game engines and the death of roll-your-own. At that point, when any idiot with a copy of "visual game studio" can crank out a generic shooter in ten minutes, the purity of gameplay will return to center focus.
BTW, the hollywood voice actor thing... sooo 20th century. Machinima is the 21st century flipside: the game engines will eat hollywood.
1. Stupid people spend to their most optimistic projection and then complain that money's tight.
2. Stupid people assume that because they've always made money up to now, they can rest on their laurels.
3. Stupid people think that when their income dries up, whining will make it return.
BTW, have any of these numbskulls considered and compared the effect of the used car market? If a thing retains value for resale, people will be happy paying extra for it first-hand.
I find myself suspicious of static typing
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
Static typing pretends to eliminate type bugs, but I find myself suspicous that its real effect in most cases is to lull a false sense of security. Consider the zillion bugs in Java from casting to Object and back!
For a full coverage, mathematically provable type system, take a look at SPARK Ada. It has detailed coverage annotations, no dynamic allocation, no recursion, no exceptions, no overloading or polymorphism. Until recently it had no threading. That's what you have to sacrifice to get a type system that works! Ergo, any more flexible language has holes in its armor. If you expected it to be impregnable, you have a nasty surprise coming.
Dynamic typing, at least, is honest about its limitations.
Seems to me that I'm seeing a lot of emotional investment in the idea of diets, and obesity being caused by weak will and gluttony. Evidence for the defense: all the ridicule and insults.
It's obviously true that if you reduce calorie intake below calorie burn, a person will get thin. Obvious, but it's really beside the point!
The core problem of obesity is this: there seems to be some body-fat level which humans automatically aim for. Eat more, and you'll lose your hunger and get fidgety to burn the energy off. Eat less, and you're staring down millennia of evolution which is screaming EAT NOW OR DIE. (I've heard this mechanism called a "lipostat".) Evidentially, it's a rare human who can override that. It's frustrating not to be under rational control, but it's a fact. Willpower diets fail for the same reason as suicide by breath-holding.
In obesity, this "lipostat" fails and either wedges into "gotta eat" mode, or at least drifts upwards by increments.
This could validly be described as a body mechanism failure, and it could quite plausibly be caused by a virus.
This is actually what i posted about before. Any project that licenses GPL2 is going to feel an increasing pressure to go GPL3. Some of them will just be assimilated by the "...or any later version" suggested language. Some, like Linux, which are GPL2 only, will start to look like isolated islands of ancient code, shut out from all the modern goodies.
Par for the course - all government is that form of slavery. What do you think they're doing to you for the 50+% of the year you're working to pay the taxman or keep the regulators happy? You might as well be in shackles.
Ah, you're assuming I'm thinking like a statist, which I never do. I meant "people, including media owners, should voluntarily shun them and refuse to help with spreading FUD". Let them get their own blog, and preach from there.
Slashdot Mirror
...they're right. The "western culture" (spanning most of the anglophone world and the EU) does censor, and is very much a "pot calling the kettle black".
I'll also go on record as saying they're equally wrong. The only experience that "harms children" is lack of family stability and trust, and/or lack of love. All of the stuff about sex and porn and most of the stuff about watching violence is basically a cultural bee in our bonnet, comparable to Victorians covering up "scandalous" naked table legs. People in 100 years will look back and laugh.
...very much like deciding that tears explain sadness.
I know subjectively, that even my simple emotions are complex, multilayered things. There's the sensation-level feedback which lets me know I'm experiencing an emotion. There's learned-behaviour changes like reinforcement (of love, happiness, etc) or disincentive (from pain, shame, etc). There's thought-ability changes, belief-prioritization changes, even memory recall changes. All in parallel. And that's leaving aside the experience, belief and attention context that triggered the emotion. So, it looks to me like what these guys are doing is picking at one strand (new love's pleasure/reinforcement/habituation mechanism) and thinking they have the totality. Which is just ignorant, and I'd guess it's not accidentially ignorant. More people pushing the "mind is nothing but meat" idea. Not an opinion I share!
So many other folks don't seem to get how the Jedi Order in the prequels was intentionally a bit crap. The "return" in ROTJ means Luke is restarting the Jedi, but it also means that the purity has returned, the Jedi are back to their ideal.
Note how neither Yoda nor Obi-Wan try to teach Jedi culture to Luke. No "council", no rules, no "padawan" or other ranks. If they hadn't the time while alive, they could still do it while blue and glowy - but no. I'd call that deliberate.
Encryption and NAT tunneling are important. Yes, even to ordinary people. Everyone has secrets!
Leading in what way? They have a news site, whoop-de-do. No shortage of those!
Wikipedia is leading. Blogs are leading. Google video is leading. BBC is just copying.
I hate and despise the TV tax, but it had at least some theoretical justification. Here was a service, supposedly according to its friends a worthy service that couldn't be duplicated by the market, broadcast free for the taking. The BBC was to inform the nation and produce worthy and fair programming, without commercial bias. Vital for the nation and yet lacking an income - I can see how a levy on televisions could make sense. I disagree with the assumptions, but that was the argument.
!!! BUT !!!
WHAT do the BBC bring to the internet that isn't already there? Dead air there certainly isn't! Nor is there any lack of worthy content.
WHAT marks them out as special, that they ought to receive handouts, when other voluntarily free services (eg: Wikipedia) do not?
WHO do they think they are, treating a mutual medium as if it was broadcast? If any Joe can publish, why privilege the BBC?
Even their original argument falters in the online context. Even by their own standards, they have no reason to be here. Why are they, then? I doubt they could answer in any terms except "we can, so we shall". Fair enough, but without your justifications, who are you? You're nobody special. You get to continue, but you get to pay your own way! Not as if you can't, either. BBC may call itself non-commercial, but it makes money hand-over-fist on DVDs and syndication.
Like anything else, the answer's "be sensible" - play to your strengths. If your company uses the "infinite monkeys" model, then standardize on Java.
In general: an adequate coder can handle Java and bodge C++. A good coder can pick up and use any ordinary language in a week or less, and be fluent and experienced within six months. A guru can handle the oddballs, like lisp and haskell, and make them dance.
Do not expose code monkeys to haskell. You'll pop their fuses, leading to expensive lawsuits, etc.
It would be "evil" by what appears to be Google's consistently applied definition of evil, namely, decreasing users' access to information, or polluting it with noise. (The China thing, I believe, was reasoned as "We're adding access. Not as much as we'd like, but still.")
They're far more likely to simply set up their own wide pipe and set up in open competition to the telcos. Destroy the enemy by providing a better service.
The problem is, modern warplanes are too slow. This baloon sits more or less dead still, and the plane whips past it at 500mph. Given that, it's simply hard to shoot at.
Were this tried in war, the obvious countermeasure would be to revive the open cockpit biplane. The pilot can lean out and poke it with a sharp stick.
According to a report on the projected annual costs of the Kyoto treaty to the United States, issued by the federal Energy Information Agency in October 1998, "The total cost to the economy can be estimated as the loss in actual GDP (the loss in potential GDP plus the macroeconomic adjustment cost) plus the purchase of international permits ... Total costs range from an annual average level for the period 2008 to 2012 of $77 billion to $338 billion 1992 dollars depending on the carbon reduction case and how funds are recycled back to the economy."
BTW, Kyoto is acknowledged even by its defenders as a mere regulatory icebreaker with little direct impact, intended to open a path for far harsher protocols to follow. A modern civilised economy is very energy-hungry, and strangling the main source of energy would brake the economy hard. That has real costs, both in money and in human suffering.
In other words, faced with those sorts of costs, $50bn starts to look like pocket change.
Just from an engineering perspective, surely you can see how a direct attack on the problem makes more sense? It's like the difference between dealing with a slow-dripping spigot that has flooded your floor by stopping the leak and letting the floor dry in its own time (Kyoto) versus mopping the mess up first (climate engineering).
People have been complaining about the GIMP UI for ages. The coders have made efforts to reduce the pain. However, as far as I've ever seen, very few open source programs ever get their UI iteratively improved towards perfection. As with Eclipse versus Emacs, they're surpassed by newer programs with fresh UIs, more modern design ideas, better dev methods.
Prop aircraft type go so slow you can barely see them move from the ground. Jet aircraft are fast but hard to see. Rocket aircraft would be both startlingly fast, and very easy to see (because of the 20ft flame and the persistent smoke trail). They would if anything be easier to watch than NASCAR, owing to being in view all the time, rather than disappearing behind hills and bits of track furniture. Plus they could layout the track so the racers whizz past on a straight, 100 ft overhead above the viewing stands.
The main problem would be the number of viewers getting cricks in their necks.
It may be necessary to use C++ for parts of the system, but can they be isolated as a seperate adjunct process? That way, your damage is limited and your main, secure process can keep a watchful eye on the C++ process.
Design the C++ side to be stateless, so a halt-and-restart can occur losslessly between RPC transactions.
Digicams are generally considered useless for any sort of evidential use, because of photoshop. But they could become far better than film by the simple expedient of embedding a cryptographic signature generator. You could connect to the camera, download pictures like normal, download detached signatures for each photo, download the x509 certificate embedded into that one camera which was used to sign them. The private key itself being inside a tamper-resistant chip, and therefore the signatures are definitive. Combine this with time, date and GPS location shown on the photo, and you have a sure winner for any situtation where proof is important. Eg: time-dependent business contracts, evidence gathering by law enforcement, private detectives, etc.
I don't necessarily agree about graphics versus gameplay.
People tolerated lego-brick-pixel 16 color graphics because there was no alternative. Gameplay is good, but bad graphics are just jarring in a modern game. People have learned to expect better.
I think game graphics are near the end of the rising phase in a typical new tech rise-and-plateau. While they continue to improve, they'll continue to sell. Their rise will finally end when new improvements become visually irrelevant, comparable to any improvement in screen colors beyond 32 bit truecolor. The sign that we've hit the plateau will be the emergence of mature game engines and the death of roll-your-own. At that point, when any idiot with a copy of "visual game studio" can crank out a generic shooter in ten minutes, the purity of gameplay will return to center focus.
BTW, the hollywood voice actor thing... sooo 20th century. Machinima is the 21st century flipside: the game engines will eat hollywood.
Sure, go ahead.
It's the usual sort of wisdom, of course: 20/20 hindsight. I've committed all 3 of those errors in my time.
1. Stupid people spend to their most optimistic projection and then complain that money's tight.
2. Stupid people assume that because they've always made money up to now, they can rest on their laurels.
3. Stupid people think that when their income dries up, whining will make it return.
BTW, have any of these numbskulls considered and compared the effect of the used car market? If a thing retains value for resale, people will be happy paying extra for it first-hand.
Static typing pretends to eliminate type bugs, but I find myself suspicous that its real effect in most cases is to lull a false sense of security. Consider the zillion bugs in Java from casting to Object and back!
For a full coverage, mathematically provable type system, take a look at SPARK Ada. It has detailed coverage annotations, no dynamic allocation, no recursion, no exceptions, no overloading or polymorphism. Until recently it had no threading. That's what you have to sacrifice to get a type system that works! Ergo, any more flexible language has holes in its armor. If you expected it to be impregnable, you have a nasty surprise coming.
Dynamic typing, at least, is honest about its limitations.
...that what they're building isn't a general OS, it's an in house standardized desktop distro. An OS by Google, for Google. Not for outside release!
Seriously, these are the smartest people in the world, why would they waste effort on an obvious loss?
Seems to me that I'm seeing a lot of emotional investment in the idea of diets, and obesity being caused by weak will and gluttony. Evidence for the defense: all the ridicule and insults.
It's obviously true that if you reduce calorie intake below calorie burn, a person will get thin. Obvious, but it's really beside the point!
The core problem of obesity is this: there seems to be some body-fat level which humans automatically aim for. Eat more, and you'll lose your hunger and get fidgety to burn the energy off. Eat less, and you're staring down millennia of evolution which is screaming EAT NOW OR DIE. (I've heard this mechanism called a "lipostat".) Evidentially, it's a rare human who can override that. It's frustrating not to be under rational control, but it's a fact. Willpower diets fail for the same reason as suicide by breath-holding.
In obesity, this "lipostat" fails and either wedges into "gotta eat" mode, or at least drifts upwards by increments.
This could validly be described as a body mechanism failure, and it could quite plausibly be caused by a virus.
Go take a trip to an electronics store, get yourself a programmable PIC and a test board, and a book on PIC assembly. Then get to hacking.
It may be hard to take apart modern prebuilt stuff, but it's never been easier to build your own.
This is actually what i posted about before. Any project that licenses GPL2 is going to feel an increasing pressure to go GPL3. Some of them will just be assimilated by the "...or any later version" suggested language. Some, like Linux, which are GPL2 only, will start to look like isolated islands of ancient code, shut out from all the modern goodies.
Par for the course - all government is that form of slavery. What do you think they're doing to you for the 50+% of the year you're working to pay the taxman or keep the regulators happy? You might as well be in shackles.
Ah, you're assuming I'm thinking like a statist, which I never do. I meant "people, including media owners, should voluntarily shun them and refuse to help with spreading FUD". Let them get their own blog, and preach from there.