That type of coding is a result of management encouraging speed and something that "just works" over maintainability. It could be argued that he "could" be faster and have less bugs if coded more conventionally but not without extra education on his part (violating the speed objective).
The only argument you can likely make (unless his code just doesn't work) is the maintainability one. If management doesn't go for it then they actively don't care about maintainability as much and as offensive as that might be to you as an engineer it is their choice to go down that route.
Overtime your style will win out if it truly is the superior choice for their needs. The parts that you coded versus his should be easier to refactor, debug and have less general issues overall. If this is not the case then your assumption that your style of code is better than his may be wrong (at least in terms of the company's needs).
Paper of course. By the end I just wanted to know which candidate would allow me vote in a reasonable amount of time for the next election. Worst voting experience I have ever had.
Oddly enough I have a different view. The Bible's purpose could be less specific and more general. Meaning that it was never intended to "empower" a specific individual with ultimate truth. It wasn't it's intention to get "you" into heaven as much as get "us" as in "all of us" into heaven.
As a thought experiment lets imagine an alternate parallel universe where the Bible never existed. It's my belief that our world where the Bible exists would be superior to one where it did not. Based on the concept that it provided a strong moral foundation and it provided a strong basis for a well ordered universe (factors critical for long term social and scientific success).
The atheistic argument that these things are inherently true, is missing the point. We get there quicker with the Bible than without. Taking into account how quickly Christianity spread, its' overall impact and it's core message. I think as religions go it did the "best" at penetrating our social conscience and steering us towards these goals (but that is my opinion based on my own observations and experiences).
Given that, the concept of God being omnipotent is not really relevant to how literal the bible is or isn't. It's as literal as God needed it to be to get us exactly here. We now toe the line between atheistic and theistic and both are rational choices despite what either side may tell you. Giving each of us an actual choice.
Why not? Is it not delusional to believe in a fairytale? Just because that fairytale has a huge church makes it not delusional any more?
The difference between a cult and a religion is simply the number of followers.
Is it "delusional" to "believe" that their is life on other planets? Is it "delusional" to believe that the "Higgs Boson" exists at some energy level? Believing in something that hasn't been proven isn't delusional. The difference in opinion you are having here is that you believe there is enough evidence to declare "no God exists" others believe that their is enough evidence to declare "God exists" and still others believe something in between.
[b]A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information[b/]
Note the second and third sentence, so, yes it is wrong to consider them delusional. Note also that you and them would likely disagree on what is considered strong evidence for or against.
"certainly a literal interpretation of the Bible is incompatible", never declare something impossible simply because you can't imagine a valid explanation (my own totalitarian statement of the fallacy of totalitarian statements *grin* ). At least one of the lessons from evolution that we can take away is that even the improbable is possible given enough time.
I often find myself arguing on the other side of this where a "biblical literalist" flat out declares that the universe absolutely can not be 13.7 billion years old. This thinking makes practically the same mistake that thinking that there is no way the universe could have been created in 7 days does. Both of these statements make an inherent assumption that "time" is the same for the author of the genesis account as it is the reader. Normally this is a perfectly valid assumption but in an account that covers the creation of the universe to the nearly present, a valid time frame of reference really needs to be established. It doesn't make any sense to set that time frame of reference to reader, or the created as its a frame of reference that wouldn't have been around at the creation of the universe.
Does there exist two time frames of reference such that 13.7 billions years can pass for one while only 7 days can pass for the other. I imagine that this is possible (though note I can't necessarily prove it) so I think it would be remiss to declare that is "literally" isn't possible for the universe to be both 13.7 billion years old and 7 days at the same time.
I remember reading a book by a physics professor that postulated that if you set the time frame of reference for the biblical account to that of the CBR that it paralleled our empirical understanding of when things happened fairly well. Wish I could remember the name of it.
I am pretty sure his hipster comment was a dig at the article submitter "InfernoApple" and their completely unnecessary and overly dramatic mowing comment. I mean sure, while my backyard grass is a little annoying using a semi-automatic rifle to cut it seems a bit excessively wasteful in bullets. Those kooky hipsters always using the wrong tool for the job. Unless of course you have a walled garden and an semi-auto rifle is all you have to "mow" with. Wait a minute I am now starting to understand InfernoApple's comment a little better now....
I have trouble understanding your point of view. It seems anti-human and that can't possibly be true, so I can only assume that I am misunderstanding you in some way. There must be some communication mishap. I am trying to empathize but I simply don't understand. There is something you haven't communicated or something that must be inferred that will make this make sense I am sure. Is this simply a concern for dividing a set of limited resources among too many people?
We the only species in the known universe that has any ability to get off world. Not to brandy about the old cliche but if a planet killing asteroid comes barreling towards us from places unknown, the "Planet" won't do a damm thing about it. Only humans have a shot of stopping it and only if we pull together.
Hatred of our fellow man didn't put us at the top of the evolutionary chain. Banding together and sharing the burden of survival as a group did.
I really meant no offense by that. I was pre-answering a question about the moral ambiguity of the activity I was describing. I didn't want to get into a larger argument as to why the activity would be considered wrong. Past experience suggested to me that moral debates always break down into philosophical and religious debates which I thought I would simply head off by simply saying the developer in question was atheist. You are correct that I was more accurately describing nihilistic behavior than atheistic. Oddly enough you at least understood what I "meant" though now I see why you would take insult, and I honestly intended none. I did accidentally express an internal belief that an atheist has more freedom to be more morally ambiguous and remain at least partially philosophically consistent than a Christian, Jew, Muslim or Buhadist.
So I write code for Diablo 3. I find, while looking at the source code, an exploit. I give this information to my wife/child/best friend who then uses it to gain an advantage in gaining real cash. I don't fix it. I still do my job, I still fix every bug Q&A finds, I still give great input into the hard technical decisions. I just don't fix this one exploit I found. Even if I am caught the best they could claim is incompetence.
Evil, possibly, but I am a developer and an atheist. I offset my personal moral compass by knowing that they are underpaying me for my brilliance and contribution. The CTO has a yacht and a Ferrari for goodness sake.
The risk/reward relationship between getting fired and doing something unethical but monetarily beneficial will be more skewed toward unethical behavior because of this decision. They are now dealing with money and all the security concerns that come with it, whether they like it or admit it or not.
I agree.
Plus the fundamental issue here is not a choice between WebGL and no 3D browser support because drivers are insecure and unstable. Its really a choice between WebGL and 3D browser plugins. People want 3D in their browser Microsoft saying no will not change this. They will simply get it through any number of 3rd party plugins as opposed to an open standard like WebGL. This is actually great news for Flash and Unity. It's bad news if you didn't want another proprietary 3rd party company setting the standard.
...she refuses to believe any science that proves that the earth is more than ~6000 years old. When I explained to her that simply refusing that fact throws out almost our entire understanding of the universe around us...
Be careful absolute language, we still don't know everything. Perhaps you both are right? There exists, at least theoretically, an observer state where relativistically speaking the earth/universe would have taken only 6 days to create, correct? What took 13 Billion years for us could have only taken 6 days for the observer.
We would then have to account for how that account got written in a book that clearly exists in a relativistic state where the universe takes ~13 billion years to create. Bible says the account was supposedly given to man (moses) directly by God. It's probably more interesting to try and account for how God who must be moving at damn near the speed of light was able to even communicate with a man in any discernible way.
I have always been most curious on what impact direct machine brain interfaces would have on Human communication. If we can communicate thought, feeling, and memory at the speed of light where is the barrier between you and I? Where do I stop and you begin? Would the direct connection of billions of humans to one another form a self aware super intelligence?
There are times where I feel this may be our only chance at survival as a race. If we don't unify to the point where each one of us sees that harming another human is the same as harming ourselves then as technology advances a single misguided human may be able to do enough harm to destroy the entire species.
This then seems to have weird parallels to religious teachings, the golden rule comes to mind. Selflessness versus Selfishness; a common theme across a lot of religions.
But if we could form the equivalent of a God-like intelligence. Does that make the idea of God at least more plausible? If God is plausible and religions have been "training" us morally for a day when clustering was technologically possible, that would be rather... interesting.
Admittedly this is a bit more optimistic and pro-religious than is customary for slashdot but these are MY random bits of waxing imaginative dammit....
It's imho an illogical assumption that the universe needed an intelligent creator, but that the intelligent creator didn't need one himself. If you say the creator created himself, then I can also the universe created itself.
Maybe but I think your limiting your imagination here in your thought experiment. String theory postulates that there could be as many 10^500 other distinctive universes (branes?) out there beyond ours. The physical rules in those universes maybe even more friendly to the emergence of intelligent life than ours. Perhaps an intelligent creator originated in one of those universes. Though our constants seem to be rather uniquely and curiously tuned to support life here in this universe anyway.
I think intelligence is an emerging trait. A system that I set up to evolve could come up with something that is more intelligent than me in the end. The rules are usually simple, they imply no limits that tell the system not to evolve beyond the intelligence of the creator.
So coming back to what I said first, the universe itself could be rather dumb and generated all the intelligence that we see, but assuming there was an intelligent creator leads to even more contradictions than assuming there was none.
An intelligent creator may seem less likely in your opinion but I don't think it has more contradictions inherently. Remember in the end we all extrapolating from ONE POINT of data when we talk about intelligence. Life as far as we can prove only evolved on this planet. High order self aware intelligence as far as we know has only evolved in us. It is exceedingly difficult to say what exactly the odds are for such things.
Ordinary Jews have allowed themselves to become loathsome. They think religion is science, they crave circuses instead of information, they are lazy, and they let their pandering media pundits of choice think for them.
It's natural to despise such people. They cannot be changed, improved, or made noble, but they can be milked.
I figured I would go ahead and invoke Godwin's Law. Your "insightful" fascists diatribe, which I fixed for clarity, seemed an appropriate place to start.
The entire planet is absolutely covered with at least one, often both, of those, just in less economic forms. Solar, wind, tidal, plants, worms, poor people, etc.
Wait a second. You can harvest poor people to fuel my Hummer? My opinion of the viability of Green Technologies has just changed. Starting my soylent green corporation tommorrow!!!
When Driod gift cards hit the Walmart checkout isle the iPhone rein will come to an end. There is of course no such "plan" yet of course. If Google can somehow manage to link the chrome web app store, Google TV and the Andriod app store to one gift card, then given Driod's expected market share it's hard to see how Apple will compete when they keep punishing their developers like this.
I honestly never understood the opposition to religion as concept. The organizations and leaders that commonly claim association with religion certainly but why the broad hatred towards all things religious. The most logical answer always seemed "we can't say for sure". Those that show extreme hatred for the religious view always struck me expressing emotional backlash against being forced to sit through a Sunday sermon full of contradiction and no scientific foundation.
Every reasonable conversation I have ever tried to have on the subject seemed to spoiled by some previous unreasonable argument that someone had to endure in the past. It always struck me as odd that reasonable people who both likely agreed with the concept of "Do unto others..." often ended up with complete disdain for each other because of the specifics of dogma and prejudicial generalizations about the people associated with either side.
It's funny we consistently have debates about how Apple through non support is killing flash off. And you make a good point about how Silverlight has the potential to take over the web from W3C. I would argue that Flash/Flex is already way ahead of Silverlight and has the install base.
Developers here may hate flash/flex but it pushes the envelope in terms of features. And as the article pointed out having a third party push us to a Rich Internet over the monolithically slow W3C process isn't so bad.
As a developer I have no sacred cows and am pretty agnostic in terms of what I develop in. I will pick up whatever platform the web is now running on. What I do care about is install base and features. I want web apps to be as powerful as desktop apps. Give me the best platform for building a Rich Internet. I'd love to see an open spec HTML 5 and JS win this race if JS was easier to debug in and HTML 5 had the feature set. But for that to happen, you're right, W3C needs to step it up.
Lets say he's right that all alien societies do succumb to VR instinct fulfillment and abandon all further progression of society. Perhaps our universe is filled with the empty husks of species that progressed to the point where they could tap their own pleasure center neurons and then died out.
If you believe that by pointing this out we can somehow prevent our species from succumbing to the same result, then the problem of the paradox comes right back. As these aliens species must have had the same reservations before they fell to the darkness of VR.
Or he believes to be so clever that no alien species could have pointed out this trap in time. So they all fell to ruin. But we are more clever so we can prevail, now that we know, whilst all of the others have clearly epic failed.
Or he is just a philosophical pessimist languishing in the doomy juices of determinism. As no amount of pointing out the impending doom will change the course. Thus the paradox is avoided and we all get to die a pleasure filled VR death.
Or he is just doing some geeky mental imagination masturbation and wants to share the "fruits" of his labor.
The last choice I actually have the most respect for as it might eventually lead to something useful. Possibly sowing the "seeds" of other great ideas.
At one point in time I had read an article describing ADD as if the effected individual was constantly in a warzone with huge amount of important and distracting things going on all around them. I related to that in such that I am practically unable to focus unless it feels exactly like this. Something has to be dire and extrememly important for me to get to this state, but once I am there I am super efficent.
So for me procrastination is almost a requirement. Its the only way I could shut everything else out for a time and hyperfocus. The catch however became that I could only ever be really successful when I found this hyperfocus and could not get there without the pressure of a super tight deadline.
Some people work better by doing a little bit at a time, I don't. I have a huge startup time cost associated with tasks (very bad at context switchs). For me procrastinating is almost essential to doing the task well, it unfortnatly might mean a missed deadline if the task is very complex though. I also avoid any anxiety by not even thinking about the task ahead of time so by the time I get to the point of thinking about what happens when I fail, I am already in a state of hyperfocus (on the task I procrastinated on) so I couldn't be concerned even if I wanted to be.
There is nothing wrong with marketing but I think a lot of people have problems with paid corporate influence of things like user reviews. Perfectly legal for them to do but it is kind of slimy from the customers prospective (since they expect non biased reviews from 3rd parties). Paying someone to "pose" as an unbiased 3rd party to peddle your product will definatly seem dishonest to the customer.
That said, what is disturbing about this particular marketing site is how BAD it is. The horrible rap video and fake user comments with 'l337' speak does not help them with thier target audience. Some might say that there is no such thing as bad press. Well that is definatly not true. It is especially not true when you are pushing 'hip' and "trendiness' of your product. That's a dangerous road, one mistep or one improper association and you undue all of your positive marketing work. In this case I can easily see someone pulling out a PSP to play and thier friends imediatly start ragging them by mockingly rapping to "all I want for christmas is a PSP" video. Does Sony really want to associate themselves with beyond horrible rap songs and piss poor attempts at l337 speak???
GenCon already embodies the spirit of what E3 had become basically: a huge con were geeks get togeather to play. GenCon has been growing every year. As a gamer the top to conventions that I wanted to attend every year were GenCon and E3 (in that order). I suspect I am not alone.
Companies can claim that its too expensive all they want. However they will not avoid the oppourtunity to reach 25K+ of thier most passionate customers all in one place. There booths may not be as big or flashy, but they will be there. It makes too much marketing sense not to be. Here is quite possibly the most fertile ground they can find for growing thier most faithful fanboys.
GenCon is already built, the fans have already come to play. It's the biggest 5 day gaming party of the year, why would they NOT want to be smack dab in the middle of it?
The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them.
This wisdom applies doubley so for MMOs as those hardcore players "play" (I use that term loosely) the game so much different from the average player. Vangaurd was doomed from the very begining, corpse runs and experience penalties were tolerated because there was not another game like EQ at the time. The landscape is different for MMOs now, if your game even gives a hint of some boring, grindlike mechanic gamers have way to many other options that are actually fun. Making a game challenging does create a fun experience for most people however if that challenge is simply enduring hour upon hour of repeated monotony then you missed the point. Anyone can make an undeafeatable challenge (he mister raid encouter have a billion health points) and it is easy enough to flip some numbers in a database to make leveling up take 50 hours as opposed to 5. Making 50 hours of rock solid challenging yet not frustrating fun however is difficult. I would be all to happy to pay you 20$ a month if you can entertain me that much.
This all boils back down to blu-ray, and the response from E3 maybe sony's first really good test of how receptive thier customers will be to the product. Basically for Sony Blu-ray added one year and 200$ to thier console. They probably should have done a little bit better market research if they were expecting better product reception. Sony intermixed too seperate markets of thier company hoping to leverage the success in one to bolster the other. It's too early to call but it certianly very clear now how risky this is for them.
In a wierd ironic twist Microsoft will now start leveraging its dominance in the OS market with Vista's support for live anywhere to help it's console and this strategy seems to be very well concieved (as oppossed to Sonys). Then agian its not so wierd to expect Microsoft to be the Master at leveraging its OS effectivly (like they haven't done that before).
It's too early to call this whole console war (but it sure is fun to speculate isn't it:) ) however Microsoft and Nintendo seem to both be positioned well. Sony however seems to have only it's current last gen user base (no small factor though) to help bolster demand for the PS3. I think Blu-ray may have been too risky a bet for them.
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That type of coding is a result of management encouraging speed and something that "just works" over maintainability. It could be argued that he "could" be faster and have less bugs if coded more conventionally but not without extra education on his part (violating the speed objective).
The only argument you can likely make (unless his code just doesn't work) is the maintainability one. If management doesn't go for it then they actively don't care about maintainability as much and as offensive as that might be to you as an engineer it is their choice to go down that route.
Overtime your style will win out if it truly is the superior choice for their needs. The parts that you coded versus his should be easier to refactor, debug and have less general issues overall. If this is not the case then your assumption that your style of code is better than his may be wrong (at least in terms of the company's needs).
Paper of course. By the end I just wanted to know which candidate would allow me vote in a reasonable amount of time for the next election. Worst voting experience I have ever had.
Oddly enough I have a different view. The Bible's purpose could be less specific and more general. Meaning that it was never intended to "empower" a specific individual with ultimate truth. It wasn't it's intention to get "you" into heaven as much as get "us" as in "all of us" into heaven.
As a thought experiment lets imagine an alternate parallel universe where the Bible never existed. It's my belief that our world where the Bible exists would be superior to one where it did not. Based on the concept that it provided a strong moral foundation and it provided a strong basis for a well ordered universe (factors critical for long term social and scientific success).
The atheistic argument that these things are inherently true, is missing the point. We get there quicker with the Bible than without. Taking into account how quickly Christianity spread, its' overall impact and it's core message. I think as religions go it did the "best" at penetrating our social conscience and steering us towards these goals (but that is my opinion based on my own observations and experiences).
Given that, the concept of God being omnipotent is not really relevant to how literal the bible is or isn't. It's as literal as God needed it to be to get us exactly here. We now toe the line between atheistic and theistic and both are rational choices despite what either side may tell you. Giving each of us an actual choice.
Why not? Is it not delusional to believe in a fairytale? Just because that fairytale has a huge church makes it not delusional any more?
The difference between a cult and a religion is simply the number of followers.
Is it "delusional" to "believe" that their is life on other planets? Is it "delusional" to believe that the "Higgs Boson" exists at some energy level? Believing in something that hasn't been proven isn't delusional. The difference in opinion you are having here is that you believe there is enough evidence to declare "no God exists" others believe that their is enough evidence to declare "God exists" and still others believe something in between.
[b]A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information[b/]
Note the second and third sentence, so, yes it is wrong to consider them delusional. Note also that you and them would likely disagree on what is considered strong evidence for or against.
"certainly a literal interpretation of the Bible is incompatible", never declare something impossible simply because you can't imagine a valid explanation (my own totalitarian statement of the fallacy of totalitarian statements *grin* ). At least one of the lessons from evolution that we can take away is that even the improbable is possible given enough time.
I often find myself arguing on the other side of this where a "biblical literalist" flat out declares that the universe absolutely can not be 13.7 billion years old. This thinking makes practically the same mistake that thinking that there is no way the universe could have been created in 7 days does. Both of these statements make an inherent assumption that "time" is the same for the author of the genesis account as it is the reader. Normally this is a perfectly valid assumption but in an account that covers the creation of the universe to the nearly present, a valid time frame of reference really needs to be established. It doesn't make any sense to set that time frame of reference to reader, or the created as its a frame of reference that wouldn't have been around at the creation of the universe.
Does there exist two time frames of reference such that 13.7 billions years can pass for one while only 7 days can pass for the other. I imagine that this is possible (though note I can't necessarily prove it) so I think it would be remiss to declare that is "literally" isn't possible for the universe to be both 13.7 billion years old and 7 days at the same time.
I remember reading a book by a physics professor that postulated that if you set the time frame of reference for the biblical account to that of the CBR that it paralleled our empirical understanding of when things happened fairly well. Wish I could remember the name of it.
I am pretty sure his hipster comment was a dig at the article submitter "InfernoApple" and their completely unnecessary and overly dramatic mowing comment. I mean sure, while my backyard grass is a little annoying using a semi-automatic rifle to cut it seems a bit excessively wasteful in bullets. Those kooky hipsters always using the wrong tool for the job. Unless of course you have a walled garden and an semi-auto rifle is all you have to "mow" with. Wait a minute I am now starting to understand InfernoApple's comment a little better now....
I have trouble understanding your point of view. It seems anti-human and that can't possibly be true, so I can only assume that I am misunderstanding you in some way. There must be some communication mishap. I am trying to empathize but I simply don't understand. There is something you haven't communicated or something that must be inferred that will make this make sense I am sure. Is this simply a concern for dividing a set of limited resources among too many people?
We the only species in the known universe that has any ability to get off world. Not to brandy about the old cliche but if a planet killing asteroid comes barreling towards us from places unknown, the "Planet" won't do a damm thing about it. Only humans have a shot of stopping it and only if we pull together.
Hatred of our fellow man didn't put us at the top of the evolutionary chain. Banding together and sharing the burden of survival as a group did.
Sigh...
As odd as it sounds I was really trying to avoid the philosophical debate with as few words as possible by stating it that way.
I really meant no offense by that. I was pre-answering a question about the moral ambiguity of the activity I was describing. I didn't want to get into a larger argument as to why the activity would be considered wrong. Past experience suggested to me that moral debates always break down into philosophical and religious debates which I thought I would simply head off by simply saying the developer in question was atheist. You are correct that I was more accurately describing nihilistic behavior than atheistic. Oddly enough you at least understood what I "meant" though now I see why you would take insult, and I honestly intended none. I did accidentally express an internal belief that an atheist has more freedom to be more morally ambiguous and remain at least partially philosophically consistent than a Christian, Jew, Muslim or Buhadist.
So I write code for Diablo 3. I find, while looking at the source code, an exploit. I give this information to my wife/child/best friend who then uses it to gain an advantage in gaining real cash. I don't fix it. I still do my job, I still fix every bug Q&A finds, I still give great input into the hard technical decisions. I just don't fix this one exploit I found. Even if I am caught the best they could claim is incompetence.
Evil, possibly, but I am a developer and an atheist. I offset my personal moral compass by knowing that they are underpaying me for my brilliance and contribution. The CTO has a yacht and a Ferrari for goodness sake.
The risk/reward relationship between getting fired and doing something unethical but monetarily beneficial will be more skewed toward unethical behavior because of this decision. They are now dealing with money and all the security concerns that come with it, whether they like it or admit it or not.
I agree. Plus the fundamental issue here is not a choice between WebGL and no 3D browser support because drivers are insecure and unstable. Its really a choice between WebGL and 3D browser plugins. People want 3D in their browser Microsoft saying no will not change this. They will simply get it through any number of 3rd party plugins as opposed to an open standard like WebGL. This is actually great news for Flash and Unity. It's bad news if you didn't want another proprietary 3rd party company setting the standard.
...she refuses to believe any science that proves that the earth is more than ~6000 years old. When I explained to her that simply refusing that fact throws out almost our entire understanding of the universe around us...
Be careful absolute language, we still don't know everything. Perhaps you both are right? There exists, at least theoretically, an observer state where relativistically speaking the earth/universe would have taken only 6 days to create, correct? What took 13 Billion years for us could have only taken 6 days for the observer.
We would then have to account for how that account got written in a book that clearly exists in a relativistic state where the universe takes ~13 billion years to create. Bible says the account was supposedly given to man (moses) directly by God. It's probably more interesting to try and account for how God who must be moving at damn near the speed of light was able to even communicate with a man in any discernible way.
I have always been most curious on what impact direct machine brain interfaces would have on Human communication. If we can communicate thought, feeling, and memory at the speed of light where is the barrier between you and I? Where do I stop and you begin? Would the direct connection of billions of humans to one another form a self aware super intelligence?
There are times where I feel this may be our only chance at survival as a race. If we don't unify to the point where each one of us sees that harming another human is the same as harming ourselves then as technology advances a single misguided human may be able to do enough harm to destroy the entire species.
This then seems to have weird parallels to religious teachings, the golden rule comes to mind. Selflessness versus Selfishness; a common theme across a lot of religions.
But if we could form the equivalent of a God-like intelligence. Does that make the idea of God at least more plausible? If God is plausible and religions have been "training" us morally for a day when clustering was technologically possible, that would be rather... interesting.
Admittedly this is a bit more optimistic and pro-religious than is customary for slashdot but these are MY random bits of waxing imaginative dammit....
It's imho an illogical assumption that the universe needed an intelligent creator, but that the intelligent creator didn't need one himself. If you say the creator created himself, then I can also the universe created itself.
Maybe but I think your limiting your imagination here in your thought experiment. String theory postulates that there could be as many 10^500 other distinctive universes (branes?) out there beyond ours. The physical rules in those universes maybe even more friendly to the emergence of intelligent life than ours. Perhaps an intelligent creator originated in one of those universes. Though our constants seem to be rather uniquely and curiously tuned to support life here in this universe anyway.
I think intelligence is an emerging trait. A system that I set up to evolve could come up with something that is more intelligent than me in the end. The rules are usually simple, they imply no limits that tell the system not to evolve beyond the intelligence of the creator.
So coming back to what I said first, the universe itself could be rather dumb and generated all the intelligence that we see, but assuming there was an intelligent creator leads to even more contradictions than assuming there was none.
An intelligent creator may seem less likely in your opinion but I don't think it has more contradictions inherently. Remember in the end we all extrapolating from ONE POINT of data when we talk about intelligence. Life as far as we can prove only evolved on this planet. High order self aware intelligence as far as we know has only evolved in us. It is exceedingly difficult to say what exactly the odds are for such things.
Ordinary Jews have allowed themselves to become loathsome. They think religion is science, they crave circuses instead of information, they are lazy, and they let their pandering media pundits of choice think for them.
It's natural to despise such people. They cannot be changed, improved, or made noble, but they can be milked.
I figured I would go ahead and invoke Godwin's Law. Your "insightful" fascists diatribe, which I fixed for clarity, seemed an appropriate place to start.
The entire planet is absolutely covered with at least one, often both, of those, just in less economic forms. Solar, wind, tidal, plants, worms, poor people, etc.
Wait a second. You can harvest poor people to fuel my Hummer? My opinion of the viability of Green Technologies has just changed. Starting my soylent green corporation tommorrow!!!
When Driod gift cards hit the Walmart checkout isle the iPhone rein will come to an end. There is of course no such "plan" yet of course. If Google can somehow manage to link the chrome web app store, Google TV and the Andriod app store to one gift card, then given Driod's expected market share it's hard to see how Apple will compete when they keep punishing their developers like this.
I honestly never understood the opposition to religion as concept. The organizations and leaders that commonly claim association with religion certainly but why the broad hatred towards all things religious. The most logical answer always seemed "we can't say for sure". Those that show extreme hatred for the religious view always struck me expressing emotional backlash against being forced to sit through a Sunday sermon full of contradiction and no scientific foundation.
Every reasonable conversation I have ever tried to have on the subject seemed to spoiled by some previous unreasonable argument that someone had to endure in the past. It always struck me as odd that reasonable people who both likely agreed with the concept of "Do unto others..." often ended up with complete disdain for each other because of the specifics of dogma and prejudicial generalizations about the people associated with either side.
It's funny we consistently have debates about how Apple through non support is killing flash off. And you make a good point about how Silverlight has the potential to take over the web from W3C. I would argue that Flash/Flex is already way ahead of Silverlight and has the install base.
Developers here may hate flash/flex but it pushes the envelope in terms of features. And as the article pointed out having a third party push us to a Rich Internet over the monolithically slow W3C process isn't so bad.
As a developer I have no sacred cows and am pretty agnostic in terms of what I develop in. I will pick up whatever platform the web is now running on. What I do care about is install base and features. I want web apps to be as powerful as desktop apps. Give me the best platform for building a Rich Internet. I'd love to see an open spec HTML 5 and JS win this race if JS was easier to debug in and HTML 5 had the feature set. But for that to happen, you're right, W3C needs to step it up.
Lets say he's right that all alien societies do succumb to VR instinct fulfillment and abandon all further progression of society. Perhaps our universe is filled with the empty husks of species that progressed to the point where they could tap their own pleasure center neurons and then died out.
If you believe that by pointing this out we can somehow prevent our species from succumbing to the same result, then the problem of the paradox comes right back. As these aliens species must have had the same reservations before they fell to the darkness of VR.
Or he believes to be so clever that no alien species could have pointed out this trap in time. So they all fell to ruin. But we are more clever so we can prevail, now that we know, whilst all of the others have clearly epic failed.
Or he is just a philosophical pessimist languishing in the doomy juices of determinism. As no amount of pointing out the impending doom will change the course. Thus the paradox is avoided and we all get to die a pleasure filled VR death.
Or he is just doing some geeky mental imagination masturbation and wants to share the "fruits" of his labor.
The last choice I actually have the most respect for as it might eventually lead to something useful. Possibly sowing the "seeds" of other great ideas.
At one point in time I had read an article describing ADD as if the effected individual was constantly in a warzone with huge amount of important and distracting things going on all around them. I related to that in such that I am practically unable to focus unless it feels exactly like this. Something has to be dire and extrememly important for me to get to this state, but once I am there I am super efficent.
So for me procrastination is almost a requirement. Its the only way I could shut everything else out for a time and hyperfocus. The catch however became that I could only ever be really successful when I found this hyperfocus and could not get there without the pressure of a super tight deadline.
Some people work better by doing a little bit at a time, I don't. I have a huge startup time cost associated with tasks (very bad at context switchs). For me procrastinating is almost essential to doing the task well, it unfortnatly might mean a missed deadline if the task is very complex though. I also avoid any anxiety by not even thinking about the task ahead of time so by the time I get to the point of thinking about what happens when I fail, I am already in a state of hyperfocus (on the task I procrastinated on) so I couldn't be concerned even if I wanted to be.
Ves
There is nothing wrong with marketing but I think a lot of people have problems with paid corporate influence of things like user reviews. Perfectly legal for them to do but it is kind of slimy from the customers prospective (since they expect non biased reviews from 3rd parties). Paying someone to "pose" as an unbiased 3rd party to peddle your product will definatly seem dishonest to the customer.
That said, what is disturbing about this particular marketing site is how BAD it is. The horrible rap video and fake user comments with 'l337' speak does not help them with thier target audience. Some might say that there is no such thing as bad press. Well that is definatly not true. It is especially not true when you are pushing 'hip' and "trendiness' of your product. That's a dangerous road, one mistep or one improper association and you undue all of your positive marketing work. In this case I can easily see someone pulling out a PSP to play and thier friends imediatly start ragging them by mockingly rapping to "all I want for christmas is a PSP" video. Does Sony really want to associate themselves with beyond horrible rap songs and piss poor attempts at l337 speak???
Ves
GenCon already embodies the spirit of what E3 had become basically: a huge con were geeks get togeather to play. GenCon has been growing every year. As a gamer the top to conventions that I wanted to attend every year were GenCon and E3 (in that order). I suspect I am not alone.
Companies can claim that its too expensive all they want. However they will not avoid the oppourtunity to reach 25K+ of thier most passionate customers all in one place. There booths may not be as big or flashy, but they will be there. It makes too much marketing sense not to be. Here is quite possibly the most fertile ground they can find for growing thier most faithful fanboys.
GenCon is already built, the fans have already come to play. It's the biggest 5 day gaming party of the year, why would they NOT want to be smack dab in the middle of it?
Vesuvias
This wisdom applies doubley so for MMOs as those hardcore players "play" (I use that term loosely) the game so much different from the average player. Vangaurd was doomed from the very begining, corpse runs and experience penalties were tolerated because there was not another game like EQ at the time. The landscape is different for MMOs now, if your game even gives a hint of some boring, grindlike mechanic gamers have way to many other options that are actually fun. Making a game challenging does create a fun experience for most people however if that challenge is simply enduring hour upon hour of repeated monotony then you missed the point. Anyone can make an undeafeatable challenge (he mister raid encouter have a billion health points) and it is easy enough to flip some numbers in a database to make leveling up take 50 hours as opposed to 5. Making 50 hours of rock solid challenging yet not frustrating fun however is difficult. I would be all to happy to pay you 20$ a month if you can entertain me that much.
Ves
This all boils back down to blu-ray, and the response from E3 maybe sony's first really good test of how receptive thier customers will be to the product. Basically for Sony Blu-ray added one year and 200$ to thier console. They probably should have done a little bit better market research if they were expecting better product reception. Sony intermixed too seperate markets of thier company hoping to leverage the success in one to bolster the other. It's too early to call but it certianly very clear now how risky this is for them.
:) ) however Microsoft and Nintendo seem to both be positioned well. Sony however seems to have only it's current last gen user base (no small factor though) to help bolster demand for the PS3. I think Blu-ray may have been too risky a bet for them.
In a wierd ironic twist Microsoft will now start leveraging its dominance in the OS market with Vista's support for live anywhere to help it's console and this strategy seems to be very well concieved (as oppossed to Sonys). Then agian its not so wierd to expect Microsoft to be the Master at leveraging its OS effectivly (like they haven't done that before).
It's too early to call this whole console war (but it sure is fun to speculate isn't it
Ves