I think it's about as much evidence as having someone's IP address. It can be spoofed, it's not necessarily linkable to that exact person - but it is sort of a pointer in the direction of that person, as occam's razor would suggest that it is more likely to be real than a frame.
So I would not say it should be admissible in court, or if it is it should come with a giant caveat, but I could see it pointing investigators in the direction of someone to try to find more hard evidence.
Reliability is the only reason I've considered it. There is nothing worse than sitting on hold for 45 minutes while working out a bill with a company only to have the line cut out. When you call back, you're not sure the call center you'll end up in is even in the same country. I've had my service significantly messed up by this before.
Sort of like that... the wikipedia article explains it better than I can. Essentially you have a bunch of stream processors, and a central unit that is mostly in charge of keeping those stream processors busy, but doesn't do much by itself. And because they want you to be able to optimize completely for what you're doing, a lot of basic memory access and caching that processors normally do for you you now have to do yourself. It made writing decent compilers for the thing really really hard, and even then, you still need to be able to restructure your code and data to be able to be handle by all of these stream processors instead of a normal CPU that can handle out of order execution well. Some things are a natural for this sort of model (like drawing triangles - that's why they did it) but some things don't work mesh quite as naturally (like AI).
They do to a large extent. That's what game engines like the Unreal engine, or lower-level middleware solutions like different sound or physics libraries are for. Using someone else's engine has its own problems, though. They can be expensive, it can be hard to fix their bugs.
And there are issues where you just want to use an entirely different algorithm on different consoles that the engine may not be able to abstract away. Libraries definitely do help, though, and they do have tools to automate quite a bit, as mentioned in the article.
It actually has very little to do with API's and quite a lot to do with memory and architecture limitations. When your architectures are so vastly different as to require entirely different algorithms to extract speed from them, you run into some difficulties.
Take something like level streaming. On a PC you can probably just load the whole thing into system memory and go. On an Xbox you can stream it from the hard drive, but on the PS3 you've got to hide it well enough to handle loading from optical.
Or something really standard for all games - vertex skinning. You've got to process thousands of vertices by the bones of their models, what's the fastest way to do it? The available memory you have on your stream processors, the speed of transfer from main memory to stream processor memory, and how good your stream processor is at handling this sort of thing will completely change how you store the data, and where, and what parts of your algorithm you handle at each step.
Just to give you an idea, on relatively modern PC hardware, moving your skinning into an entirely GPU based model can give you a 10x boost or more over doing it on the main processor. This usually requires rewriting a fair bit of that code. However, on slightly more dated hardware, it will actually be slower to put it on the GPU. And if you're doing it on a multi-cored system with a slow gpu, you really want to be handling this in a separate thread from your rendering. And where is the data stored? on a console, you have a small amount of memory, but fast transfer from GPU to main memory and back, if they aren't the same thing. On a PC you have ton of memory, but if you move it all down at once you'll have a giant pause.
So... no one's saying that writing C++ that compiles for both systems is hard, or even that learning the different assembler is wasting their time. It's the fact that large portions of your engine can require a complete rewrite because the basic algorithm that made sense on one system is *completely* wrong for another.
It's based on PowerPC, but the architecture is so radically different from any other Power PC you'd develop for that you can't just write code for a G4 and expect it to run well at all. It also apparently took a very long time for IBM/Sony to release decent libraries to do basic, standard things for you on the processor.
I think you'd also find it does better in the "simulated' environment of most jobs, relationships, and structured civilized society. Most people and institutions I interact with on a given day are *not* trying to cheat me, and I would do pretty poorly in those situations if I assumed that they were. Now, that assumption probably does pretty poorly in the hood or in a war zone, but that's not what I'm planning on preparing my children for foremost.
Also, I'm pretty sure there's a high correlation between success in school and success in the real world, even though it definitely isn't 100%.
And this is exactly why I oppose the repeated attempts to add more and more standardized testing to elementary education. Poor managers think that they can replace personal judgment with tests and statistics and systems. It's been shown to be a complete failure in industry according to every software engineering class I've ever taken, but education boards insist upon doing it for teachers and students.
If anyone's interested in this sort of thing, The Mismeasure of Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) is a really interesting look at the ridiculous motivations and mistakes that resulted in IQ becoming synonymous with intelligence.
The problem is that the IQ test was never meant to reliably grade normal to exceptional people. It was devised as a way to diagnose the mentally handicapped that got blown completely out of proportion because it provide this nice, comparable number.
I had the opposite problem - I didn't realize the orientation of the vagina was up and into the body, so I could never figure out how my penis wasn't going to be poking out of her back.
Bullshit. By your definition, anything you can do to someone should be legal if the victim is too terrified to resist.
Rape and robbery are violent crimes because they would not continue without the implicit threat of force. Whether the victim had a reasonable chance of resistance or not, their resistance is not required for them to be a victim.
Note that I agree with you on consensual "under age" sex, at least to a point (I'm sure you can convince a five year old that all sorts of terrible things are fun and normal), but your definition of rape is rather weak.
That said, there can be implicit consent as well. A boyfriend or girlfriend, for example, should not require explicit permission to initiate sexual contact if consent has been given regularly beforehand (they should still, however, be required to stop when told). But that isn't what you said.
Even completely ignoring the time value of money and depreciation of the car, that's an absolutely horrible deal when you compare it to buy a new gas car of equal size and luxury (or more lack thereof). The only reason to buy this car is make a $20k donation to GM's green tech budget, or because you enjoy the smell of your own smug.
You do realize the car costs $40,000? ($32,500 after mooching off of the rest of us for a government subsidy, thanks). Compare that to a new civic which is a better car in every way and *still* gets over 35 mpg while costing $15,500? So you might barely break even, again, assuming you ignore the fact that even in a basic government-issued bond that money would have increased over 50% in that time? You're basically paying $10k to have a neat, but underpowered car. I mean, more power to you if you just want it (I pay more money than I need to to have a car I consider fun) but don't even begin to think that this makes economic sense.
You'll forgive me for not being completely up in arms that the 400 or so billionaires in the US aren't paying more taxes. They're already, with that wealth, generally creating companies large enough to fund jobs for thousands upon thousands of working slobs like me, and donating hundreds of millions more to charity (partially out of their own hearts, partially to avoid a lot of the death taxes). Many of those funds exist as loopholes largely because they encourage people to do good things with their money.
I honestly expect them to be doing a better job of growing employment and the economy than the government could do with the cash.
It's nowhere close to as politically correct, but you can do a lot more good in this world by being a greedy bastard for most of your life so you have the power and ability to do greater works (see Bill Gate's charity efforts) later on than you can by working at a soup kitchen every weekend for fifty years and living like a saint.
What I want to know is at what age a child can figure out how to unwrap a leash that they've wound around a tree. I've never seen a dog figure that one out. I'm honestly sort of tempted to subject my children to this test once a year until they defeat it, just to determine at what age they can be considered superior to dogs.
Just out of curiosity - what's your take on breeds that seem to be "smart" but don't have the happy-to-please-you attitude associated with working dogs?
We adopted an Akita/Chow Chow mutt a month ago, and I've been amazed at how quickly she picks up on commands - learning what you mean by the command word or gesture in as short of a time as my old border collie did. She's just in no way motivated yet to perform unless there's something in it for her - if I have the food bowl out she runs through everything she knows in an instant. I've just found it very different, because I've trained dogs before who got everything the first time, and I've trained dogs where they just took forever to figure out what you want, but she's the first who seems to know what you want and just doesn't care most of the time whether she gives it to you. I'd think it's a dominance issue, but she doesn't act dominant toward us any other times, she just seems to think that doing tricks is beneath her.
Not really wondering about my specific dog, I was just very surprised to encounter this sort of middle ground in dog intelligence that I had not met before.
I'd say the reason Apple is so lax is because they make very little money on software.
They only really care how much music you buy on iTunes, how many copies of OS X you buy, or whether you use things on the app store in regards to how many more ipods, macbooks, and iphones it allows them to sell.
In the grand scheme of things, jailbreaking actually sells them more iphones. They can't support it openly because of the support *nightmare* that unsigned code on a limited access box is, and because of their contract with AT&T. But as long as they don't have to support it, it helps them.
And very few people (in terms of the grand market) will ever use a Hackintosh.
So it's a win-win for them - no headache of officially supporting these things, but it all helps them sell more hardware, which is where they make their money.
Twitter only makes sense when you combine it with the mobile phone community. You're right, it's exactly like RSS, except for built entirely around texting.
Social networking sites provide a useful tool for people to organize events and keep in touch.
That does not mean it can't be done without them, but it also doesn't mean that they haven't improved the process for doing it.
Similarly with twitter - it provides a useful and easy to disseminate information, whether it is gossip, jokes, funny links, football updates (there have been some very good football feeds where people give more information than you would ever normally have about different pro team practices) or something more substantive like world news or local police reports. There is a place in this world for information that can be summarized in a short paragraph instead of requiring to read an entire article - it's like looking at today's headlines in the paper and then deciding which ones you want to follow up on.
They're useful tools for a specific purpose. Those who hate on them and those who gush on them on the front page of CNN both seem to be missing this fact.
Honestly, sex in a shower completely sucks compared to sex almost anywhere else in the house. You're cramped, the water makes really weird sounds when you thrust, it's hard to get a good position (although for a while in college I started weightlifting just so we could try more lift-type positions in the cramped shower stall). And the water usually gets cold before you're done.
In a long term relationship, there are myriad advantages to intimacy that doesn't involve sex at all. Just hanging out, cuddling, and maybe a few quick massages help keep your relationship balanced and centered.
It's a stupid little thing, but if your schedules allow it, I highly recommend showering together every morning or evening. It's some time with just the two of you, no other real distractions, and some nice physical closeness. Even if you end up being busy and running your own direction the whole rest of the day, at least you have some time together when you aren't too tired and grumpy to appreciate each other.
My biggest advice on relationships is the "You can be right or happy" line. Don't give up all the time, and don't stop communicating your point, but choose your battles. The vast majority of the time, whoever actually cares most about what the current issue should get their way. The moment you realize you've said or even *thought* anything that is generalized or hurtful toward your partner is the moment you need to stop the argument and come back to it later.
As a minor example - if "can you get the dishes done tonight?" turns into "you never do the dishes because you're a slacker, and you make me do all the work in the house," EVEN JUST IN YOUR HEAD, stop the encounter immediately, say you'll work this out later, and come back when you're more emotionally rational. This argument cannot end well if either of you start getting defensive. You can bring up balance of workload in a separate conversation if it *is* actually an issue, at another time when neither of you are actually upset.
This advice comes from someone who has been living very happily with a programmer girl for five years now. Five years that included graduating college, a long distance relationship over a summer, living with grandparents while looking for a house to buy, refinishing an old house, and my losing my job. All classic relationship stressing events. It all comes down to wanting the other person to be happy more than anything, communication, and respecting each other. Honestly if you're learning anything in those marriage guidance books you're probably in pretty rough shape to begin with.
I sat in the stands of the Georgia Dome during the FIRST Robotics competition (started by Dean Kaimen, which is probably the real reason the segways were there) and watched the event staff use them. They would have "saddlebags" of some sort slung on the front of it, and they left them parked all over the place when they were running errands. Is there maybe a parking brake?
It also has the added advantage of not being easily knocked over when you leave it some place. You just step off and it stays where it is.
And believe it or not, there *are* places where the added exercise (and therefore stink and sweat) of a bike is not an advantage.
I've seen them used by crews for different large events as an alternative to those little carts you see people drive around, and they seem to work really well for that. When you have to travel back forth across the super dome many times a day through a large crowd it can be an improvement on a bike or walking. Or if you have to do something like that while wearing a suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Has someone made this movie of a nuclear sub being thrown into a skyscraper and exploding? If not, someone get Michael Bay on the line immediately.
I think it's about as much evidence as having someone's IP address. It can be spoofed, it's not necessarily linkable to that exact person - but it is sort of a pointer in the direction of that person, as occam's razor would suggest that it is more likely to be real than a frame.
So I would not say it should be admissible in court, or if it is it should come with a giant caveat, but I could see it pointing investigators in the direction of someone to try to find more hard evidence.
Reliability is the only reason I've considered it. There is nothing worse than sitting on hold for 45 minutes while working out a bill with a company only to have the line cut out. When you call back, you're not sure the call center you'll end up in is even in the same country. I've had my service significantly messed up by this before.
Sort of like that... the wikipedia article explains it better than I can. Essentially you have a bunch of stream processors, and a central unit that is mostly in charge of keeping those stream processors busy, but doesn't do much by itself. And because they want you to be able to optimize completely for what you're doing, a lot of basic memory access and caching that processors normally do for you you now have to do yourself. It made writing decent compilers for the thing really really hard, and even then, you still need to be able to restructure your code and data to be able to be handle by all of these stream processors instead of a normal CPU that can handle out of order execution well. Some things are a natural for this sort of model (like drawing triangles - that's why they did it) but some things don't work mesh quite as naturally (like AI).
They do to a large extent. That's what game engines like the Unreal engine, or lower-level middleware solutions like different sound or physics libraries are for. Using someone else's engine has its own problems, though. They can be expensive, it can be hard to fix their bugs.
And there are issues where you just want to use an entirely different algorithm on different consoles that the engine may not be able to abstract away. Libraries definitely do help, though, and they do have tools to automate quite a bit, as mentioned in the article.
It actually has very little to do with API's and quite a lot to do with memory and architecture limitations. When your architectures are so vastly different as to require entirely different algorithms to extract speed from them, you run into some difficulties.
Take something like level streaming. On a PC you can probably just load the whole thing into system memory and go. On an Xbox you can stream it from the hard drive, but on the PS3 you've got to hide it well enough to handle loading from optical.
Or something really standard for all games - vertex skinning. You've got to process thousands of vertices by the bones of their models, what's the fastest way to do it? The available memory you have on your stream processors, the speed of transfer from main memory to stream processor memory, and how good your stream processor is at handling this sort of thing will completely change how you store the data, and where, and what parts of your algorithm you handle at each step.
Just to give you an idea, on relatively modern PC hardware, moving your skinning into an entirely GPU based model can give you a 10x boost or more over doing it on the main processor. This usually requires rewriting a fair bit of that code. However, on slightly more dated hardware, it will actually be slower to put it on the GPU. And if you're doing it on a multi-cored system with a slow gpu, you really want to be handling this in a separate thread from your rendering. And where is the data stored? on a console, you have a small amount of memory, but fast transfer from GPU to main memory and back, if they aren't the same thing. On a PC you have ton of memory, but if you move it all down at once you'll have a giant pause.
So... no one's saying that writing C++ that compiles for both systems is hard, or even that learning the different assembler is wasting their time. It's the fact that large portions of your engine can require a complete rewrite because the basic algorithm that made sense on one system is *completely* wrong for another.
It's based on PowerPC, but the architecture is so radically different from any other Power PC you'd develop for that you can't just write code for a G4 and expect it to run well at all. It also apparently took a very long time for IBM/Sony to release decent libraries to do basic, standard things for you on the processor.
The actual DirectX code is only a very small part of a video game engine, let alone an entire game.
I think you'd also find it does better in the "simulated' environment of most jobs, relationships, and structured civilized society. Most people and institutions I interact with on a given day are *not* trying to cheat me, and I would do pretty poorly in those situations if I assumed that they were. Now, that assumption probably does pretty poorly in the hood or in a war zone, but that's not what I'm planning on preparing my children for foremost.
Also, I'm pretty sure there's a high correlation between success in school and success in the real world, even though it definitely isn't 100%.
And this is exactly why I oppose the repeated attempts to add more and more standardized testing to elementary education. Poor managers think that they can replace personal judgment with tests and statistics and systems. It's been shown to be a complete failure in industry according to every software engineering class I've ever taken, but education boards insist upon doing it for teachers and students.
If anyone's interested in this sort of thing, The Mismeasure of Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) is a really interesting look at the ridiculous motivations and mistakes that resulted in IQ becoming synonymous with intelligence.
The problem is that the IQ test was never meant to reliably grade normal to exceptional people. It was devised as a way to diagnose the mentally handicapped that got blown completely out of proportion because it provide this nice, comparable number.
I had the opposite problem - I didn't realize the orientation of the vagina was up and into the body, so I could never figure out how my penis wasn't going to be poking out of her back.
Bullshit. By your definition, anything you can do to someone should be legal if the victim is too terrified to resist.
Rape and robbery are violent crimes because they would not continue without the implicit threat of force. Whether the victim had a reasonable chance of resistance or not, their resistance is not required for them to be a victim.
Note that I agree with you on consensual "under age" sex, at least to a point (I'm sure you can convince a five year old that all sorts of terrible things are fun and normal), but your definition of rape is rather weak.
That said, there can be implicit consent as well. A boyfriend or girlfriend, for example, should not require explicit permission to initiate sexual contact if consent has been given regularly beforehand (they should still, however, be required to stop when told). But that isn't what you said.
Even completely ignoring the time value of money and depreciation of the car, that's an absolutely horrible deal when you compare it to buy a new gas car of equal size and luxury (or more lack thereof). The only reason to buy this car is make a $20k donation to GM's green tech budget, or because you enjoy the smell of your own smug.
You do realize the car costs $40,000? ($32,500 after mooching off of the rest of us for a government subsidy, thanks). Compare that to a new civic which is a better car in every way and *still* gets over 35 mpg while costing $15,500? So you might barely break even, again, assuming you ignore the fact that even in a basic government-issued bond that money would have increased over 50% in that time? You're basically paying $10k to have a neat, but underpowered car. I mean, more power to you if you just want it (I pay more money than I need to to have a car I consider fun) but don't even begin to think that this makes economic sense.
You'll forgive me for not being completely up in arms that the 400 or so billionaires in the US aren't paying more taxes. They're already, with that wealth, generally creating companies large enough to fund jobs for thousands upon thousands of working slobs like me, and donating hundreds of millions more to charity (partially out of their own hearts, partially to avoid a lot of the death taxes). Many of those funds exist as loopholes largely because they encourage people to do good things with their money.
I honestly expect them to be doing a better job of growing employment and the economy than the government could do with the cash.
It's nowhere close to as politically correct, but you can do a lot more good in this world by being a greedy bastard for most of your life so you have the power and ability to do greater works (see Bill Gate's charity efforts) later on than you can by working at a soup kitchen every weekend for fifty years and living like a saint.
What I want to know is at what age a child can figure out how to unwrap a leash that they've wound around a tree. I've never seen a dog figure that one out. I'm honestly sort of tempted to subject my children to this test once a year until they defeat it, just to determine at what age they can be considered superior to dogs.
Just out of curiosity - what's your take on breeds that seem to be "smart" but don't have the happy-to-please-you attitude associated with working dogs?
We adopted an Akita/Chow Chow mutt a month ago, and I've been amazed at how quickly she picks up on commands - learning what you mean by the command word or gesture in as short of a time as my old border collie did. She's just in no way motivated yet to perform unless there's something in it for her - if I have the food bowl out she runs through everything she knows in an instant. I've just found it very different, because I've trained dogs before who got everything the first time, and I've trained dogs where they just took forever to figure out what you want, but she's the first who seems to know what you want and just doesn't care most of the time whether she gives it to you. I'd think it's a dominance issue, but she doesn't act dominant toward us any other times, she just seems to think that doing tricks is beneath her.
Not really wondering about my specific dog, I was just very surprised to encounter this sort of middle ground in dog intelligence that I had not met before.
I'd say the reason Apple is so lax is because they make very little money on software.
They only really care how much music you buy on iTunes, how many copies of OS X you buy, or whether you use things on the app store in regards to how many more ipods, macbooks, and iphones it allows them to sell.
In the grand scheme of things, jailbreaking actually sells them more iphones. They can't support it openly because of the support *nightmare* that unsigned code on a limited access box is, and because of their contract with AT&T. But as long as they don't have to support it, it helps them.
And very few people (in terms of the grand market) will ever use a Hackintosh.
So it's a win-win for them - no headache of officially supporting these things, but it all helps them sell more hardware, which is where they make their money.
Twitter only makes sense when you combine it with the mobile phone community. You're right, it's exactly like RSS, except for built entirely around texting.
Social networking sites provide a useful tool for people to organize events and keep in touch.
That does not mean it can't be done without them, but it also doesn't mean that they haven't improved the process for doing it.
Similarly with twitter - it provides a useful and easy to disseminate information, whether it is gossip, jokes, funny links, football updates (there have been some very good football feeds where people give more information than you would ever normally have about different pro team practices) or something more substantive like world news or local police reports. There is a place in this world for information that can be summarized in a short paragraph instead of requiring to read an entire article - it's like looking at today's headlines in the paper and then deciding which ones you want to follow up on.
They're useful tools for a specific purpose. Those who hate on them and those who gush on them on the front page of CNN both seem to be missing this fact.
Honestly, sex in a shower completely sucks compared to sex almost anywhere else in the house. You're cramped, the water makes really weird sounds when you thrust, it's hard to get a good position (although for a while in college I started weightlifting just so we could try more lift-type positions in the cramped shower stall). And the water usually gets cold before you're done.
In a long term relationship, there are myriad advantages to intimacy that doesn't involve sex at all. Just hanging out, cuddling, and maybe a few quick massages help keep your relationship balanced and centered.
It's a stupid little thing, but if your schedules allow it, I highly recommend showering together every morning or evening. It's some time with just the two of you, no other real distractions, and some nice physical closeness. Even if you end up being busy and running your own direction the whole rest of the day, at least you have some time together when you aren't too tired and grumpy to appreciate each other.
My biggest advice on relationships is the "You can be right or happy" line. Don't give up all the time, and don't stop communicating your point, but choose your battles. The vast majority of the time, whoever actually cares most about what the current issue should get their way. The moment you realize you've said or even *thought* anything that is generalized or hurtful toward your partner is the moment you need to stop the argument and come back to it later.
As a minor example - if "can you get the dishes done tonight?" turns into "you never do the dishes because you're a slacker, and you make me do all the work in the house," EVEN JUST IN YOUR HEAD, stop the encounter immediately, say you'll work this out later, and come back when you're more emotionally rational. This argument cannot end well if either of you start getting defensive. You can bring up balance of workload in a separate conversation if it *is* actually an issue, at another time when neither of you are actually upset.
This advice comes from someone who has been living very happily with a programmer girl for five years now. Five years that included graduating college, a long distance relationship over a summer, living with grandparents while looking for a house to buy, refinishing an old house, and my losing my job. All classic relationship stressing events. It all comes down to wanting the other person to be happy more than anything, communication, and respecting each other. Honestly if you're learning anything in those marriage guidance books you're probably in pretty rough shape to begin with.
I sat in the stands of the Georgia Dome during the FIRST Robotics competition (started by Dean Kaimen, which is probably the real reason the segways were there) and watched the event staff use them. They would have "saddlebags" of some sort slung on the front of it, and they left them parked all over the place when they were running errands. Is there maybe a parking brake?
It also has the added advantage of not being easily knocked over when you leave it some place. You just step off and it stays where it is.
And believe it or not, there *are* places where the added exercise (and therefore stink and sweat) of a bike is not an advantage.
I've seen them used by crews for different large events as an alternative to those little carts you see people drive around, and they seem to work really well for that. When you have to travel back forth across the super dome many times a day through a large crowd it can be an improvement on a bike or walking. Or if you have to do something like that while wearing a suit.
I don't disagree in the slightest. Just feel it adds to the depth of the bullshit.