I read Code Complete cover to cover after having been a hobbiest programmer for 5-7 years. Some of the many mistakes I'd made over time were mentioned and left me nodding my head in acknowledgement and gave me the ground to realize that probably a lot of the other wisdom distilled in the pages was worth heeding as well. Code Complete made me realize how bad my coding practices were. Its a book I recommend to everyone now.
I wish the general public would learn that global warming isn't just about the temperature getting warmer as time goes on, such that "Winter will become a perpetual Fall season." Its about the increase of energy in the entire system which we call "global weather." This leads to more extreme and bizarre weather conditions.
This will get little coverage in news outlets around the world, but its worth spreading and this article is as good as any to mention it.
The Japanese Lower House, in the Diet, passed a bill which set up a National Secrets law. Essentially it is an anti-whistleblower law. It has many of the usual sections present in other countries save for one. The bill sets forth that all information dealing with "nuclear energy" will be considered a national secret and releasing any information without the oversight of the government will basically be illegal.
This means that if something bad is happening at the Fukushima plant, then we have to rely on someone doing the moral thing and telling the world and then going to jail.
The bill still has to go through the Upper House but it's likely to pass without much opposition even though the media and the public have been strongly opposed to it. It seems very likely that the bill is there to cover up any bad information that might tarnish Japan or TEPCO's image.
I think you missed the point, and probably because the OP didn't carry the results of the 'experiment' out to its conclusions.
The OP was suggesting that we use games to make concepts in quantum mechanics more intuitive to KIDS. I've always wondered if we can bring the concepts and teaching of harder concepts, to kids at younger ages, if this won't spur more quicker advances because less time is spent in the more valuable years simply trying to grasp current ideas.
For example, there was probably a period where basic algebra was considered a "college subject" and not fit for teaching to anyone under the age of 18, yet in most places, the concepts are now taught in high school and sometimes even earlier. Calculus is now becoming a normal high school subject. If we can get these ideas into kids' minds at earlier ages, then later on expanding on the concepts won't be as time consuming and we can move past this period quicker and into more theoretical realms. My brother who is also a physicist often wonders if we could make Lie Algebra regular 12th grade curriculum, what that might do to the advances in math and physics.
I'm going to put my self out and just state that in our current system. Voting for a third party IS a wasted vote, in that it potentially weakens the party that might have been closely matching your ideologies and might have won had you not voted for that matching third party. Its a lot like how the Tea Party has caused a a weakening of the main Republican party, which provides more strength for the Democrats. Telling people to run out and "vote third party" won't solve any of these problems. If you want to truly fix this then you need to overhaul the voting system currently in place.
Japan's fiber already works something like this. NTT laid a lot of fiber years ago and I believe a lot of it was subsidized.
Today they still do the same and when you want to sign up for it you call them and they can run it to your house or room. Then you sign up for an ISP who deals with delivering your data to the net. You pay a bit each month for maintaining the line and the rest for the isp access. It's really convenient and a 100/100 is about 60USD a month.
There's often talk about whether there is a lot of Helium-3 under the surface of the moon since the astronauts brought back rocks containing lots of it. Shouldn't this helium show up in a spectrum analysis of the dirt plume from the crash?
There's a tendency in Japan to place the blame for serious problems on the people up top. For instance, political campaign scandals in Japan, which may often only involve people in the middle of the organization, can and have landed many politicians in jail. It works similarly with the yakuza and likewise with corporations.
So even though the fault clearly lies with the moderators, they're trying to blame the person at the top, the founder.
If you demand censure of someone's speech, you allow him a loophole to demand the censure of yours.
Then I wish someone would explain to me how WBC can picket almost anywhere with relative ease, but something like "Occupy Wall Street" gets relegated to "free speech zones" out of the way of all eyes and ears.
I can concur with this. Anytime I hit the heavy crowded areas, Shinjuku, Akihabara, I basically lose my connection a lot. As soon as I'm headed back up north toward Saitama and Ibaraki, signal/connection comes right back no problem. I use a Galaxy S2.
This was brought up on here once before and there was a good solution to this. Go get yourself a gun carrying license first. Get a gun or simply by a part of a gun, like the barrel. Get a gun carrying case with a lock. Also get a heavy duty lock for your bag. When you travel and don't want something stolen from your bag, bring the piece. Tell the counter you are checking a gun (part). Even gun pieces are treated like a whole gun. If TSA wants to check the bag they will need to do it while in front of you, after that you can lock the suit case and they won't be able to open the suitcase after that. This is the gist of it.
I don't know how posted this, but I read it on here and found it to be a very good idea.
It's funny you should mention something like this. In Japan, there is a lack of an online purchasing system. Stuff like Newegg/TigerDirect don't really exist and there are loads of brick and mortar stores to shop at, meaning shopping around in Japan can be quite a challenge. One of Japan's version of BestBuy, YodobashiCamera, actually has a system where you sign up for a point card and then everything you buy and use the point card with accumulated points. It just happens to work out such that the points equal the sales tax usually, and sometimes you even get sales that let you acquire say 5% more points from the purchase price. These points then work as real money where 1 point = 1 yen and you can return and buy items in nothing but points. So if I bought a 10,000yen item I would get 1000 points back if I paid in cash (credit cards only got you 8%). I always thought this system was somewhat ingenious as it sort of created a system where once people started buying big price items from there and started getting points, its likely they would want to continue to return. Even with the point savings though, many other stores still tended to have much better prices on some items than Yodobashi did; you just couldn't use those points there:).
Pretty sure its 20 yrs old to drink in Japan. I was there for a year recently.
The drinking culture there is completely different from the culture in the states. There alcohol is treated as just another beverage that can make you sick if you drink too much. No one thought it really odd to have someone passed out on the street or throwing up on the side of the road, it was normal. That would get you jailed in the states for public drunkenness. Craziest thing I still remember and I had already been there for 7 months so it shouldn't have caught me off guard, I walked into a liquor store to buy some import beer and the guy at the register after I bought it asked "” took me a second to realize he was asking if I wanted to the cap removed so I could drink it on the go. Even after having been there almost a year, the idea of walking down the street chugging a beer still seemed foreign to me.
I read a BCI panel report put together by Theodore Berger some 3 years ago and the one thing I took away from the report was that the problem with BCI right now (for invasive implants) isn't the matter of "Where to put the implant" and "How to communicate," but a problem with keeping it permanently there. I hadn't realized prior to reading that report that the body was actually the number one "enemy" in any kind of long term study involving invasive implants. At the time that panel report was published (2007), the longest running implant had been just about a year. There were still a lot of open questions as well as to what was causing the implants to eventually fail.
Unless the implant tech has improved in the last 3 three years; it seems to me the biggest hurdle will be getting implants that can last longer than a year.
I've thought the same thing about WoW as well. In the current expansion you can see it already happening. Items from Ulduar already have >+100 stats. In BC this didn't happen until Sunwell or so.
My theory is that blizz will rework the game mechanics again, possibly for the next expansion. So far the track record has held that Blizz likes to introduce something new in each expansion that will cause people to have to regear. In Vanilla -> BC they introduced the rating system and emphasized things like +hit, which caused people to have to regear completely. In BC -> Wrath we've seen, or at least initially we saw, an emphasis placed on the need for +spirit in casters (I'm sure melee had some stat they emphasized as well). Resillence also became an important part of PvP, compared to BC (You need resil or you die in PvP 9 times out of 10, no ifs ands or buts about it.) So I wouldn't be surprised to see Blizz rework the mechanics once more so that there isn't stat inflation.
For the rest of your post I concur. Blizz is falling into the rehash mentality. Each new expansion will provide a burst of new content but the rest of the lifetime of the expansion will pretty much be populated with reuses of other content (look at armour, weapons, and mounts, its all the SAME but with a few minor changes). I don't think Blizz really cares though. In fact, I think Blizz is banking on WoW dieing out here in the future and then having all the player base move to their new MMO they are making so they can restart the cycle all over again. They're even hoping that all those that have quited will return to the new MMO. I'm sure they only need a few million people to sign up and play for a few months in order to recoup production costs.
Knowing the current trend of Blizz's actions concerning games. The answer to this is no.
They want to centralize everyone on B.net. They want to make sure everyone buy's the game so they get their money, which is fine, but many people will cry foul at this and will give Blizz the finger over it. A Dedicated server/clone server, would still present the same loop holes they are trying to close by taking these actions. They want to totally control the product. If people can launch a server and play offline, then that means they can't lock out/ban a client at their own whim.
In short, Blizz doesn't care about the customer as much anymore, they are only interested in milking the series for what its worth.
Something the article failed to mention was that her telomeres were still progressing like they would in a normal person.
As seen in Fig. 6, the subject's PBMC telomere length at 13 years of age was significantly shorter than that of an age-matched female control as well as male and female controls of younger ages. While variability in average telomere length exists between individuals, the low subject values are probably not due to errors in measurement since the coefficients of variation were sufficiently low to assume adequate precision. Although the subject's telomeres were nearly half the length of a healthy, age-matched female control, this comparison in and of itself does not prove that her cellular age is advanced beyond that of the normal girl. However, an important observation relevant to this difference is that there occurs a precipitous loss of telomere length during early life after which a plateau period is reached (Frenck et al., 1998). As a result, telomere length in newborns is longer on average than that in adolescents so that comparison of the subject's telomeres with newborn controls would be expected to provide more reliable estimate of her cellular age range. For example, significant shortening would be expected if her cellular age proceeded as usual despite her severe developmental delay whereas longer telomeres would suggest that her cellular aging was delayed consistent with that of her somatic development. However, this was not the case. Subject's telomeres were considerably shorter than those of both infant controls as well as the age-matched control suggesting that her cellular age was advanced beyond infancy. Since the rate of telomeric shortening is substantially greater in infants than in adults (Zeichner et al., 1999), subject's prolonged infancy may have caused her to have shorter telomeres than age-matched controls. In addition, accelerated telomeric shortening has been reported in developmentally abnormal conditions including progeroid syndromes (Kruk et al., 1995). These circumstances may have resulted in her cellular age being appropriate for or perhaps even greater than her chronological age. Consistent with other reports showing a lack of telomerase (telomere terminal transferase) expression in human dermal fibroblasts from children (Oâ(TM)Donnell et al., 2008), subject's fibroblasts were telomerase negative. This fact suggests that possible enhancement of telomeric erosion did not stimulate compensatory increases in enzyme activity.
Pulled from:
Richard F. Walker, Lawrence C. Pakula, Maxine J. Sutcliffe, Patricia A. Kruk, Jesper Graakjaer, Jerry W. Shay, A case study of 'disorganized development' and its possible relevance to genetic determinants of aging, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, Volume 130, Issue 5, May 2009, Pages 350-356, ISSN 0047-6374, DOI: 10.1016/j.mad.2009.02.003.
Upon reading the summary, I was immediately reminded of the book Calculating God. In it, the star Betelgeuse goes supernova and starts an end of the world scenario here on Earth. Where in, us and a few other alien races in the this sector of the Milky Way are saved by "god."
I saw this earlier last week over at kotaku.TFA didn't mention this but it should be noted that while the EOCS made an official announcement that they would not produce any more "rape"-related games, it only means they have changed the way the material is presented. For example:
From the Kotaku article:
What kind of changes can we expect? Ero game maker Syrup Soft is delaying its upcoming game Gang raped by the entire village ~girls covered in milky liquid~ to re-moniker it The trap set by the entire village ~bodies covered in milky liquid~. So, yeah, expect more creative ways of masking rape and rape iconography as well as possibly more "amateur" or unlicensed games.
So "rape"-related content will still be released in video games but it will simply be masked as something else. This is just like having characters in anime that look like little kids, but claim they are actually adults.Additionally, this right's group might think they have one a victory, but there are still tons of magazines and independent comics (and games) released that are focused on the topic rape.
Slashdot Mirror
AKA the device from Snow Crash.
By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality.
I don't know about anyone else but immortality through machines is my life long goal. I think we'll probably accomplish it around 2060-2070 though.
I read Code Complete cover to cover after having been a hobbiest programmer for 5-7 years. Some of the many mistakes I'd made over time were mentioned and left me nodding my head in acknowledgement and gave me the ground to realize that probably a lot of the other wisdom distilled in the pages was worth heeding as well. Code Complete made me realize how bad my coding practices were. Its a book I recommend to everyone now.
And this is the kind of stuff that many of us fear when the US gives up ICANN/the internet. First its porn, then what next?
I wish the general public would learn that global warming isn't just about the temperature getting warmer as time goes on, such that "Winter will become a perpetual Fall season." Its about the increase of energy in the entire system which we call "global weather." This leads to more extreme and bizarre weather conditions.
This will get little coverage in news outlets around the world, but its worth spreading and this article is as good as any to mention it. The Japanese Lower House, in the Diet, passed a bill which set up a National Secrets law. Essentially it is an anti-whistleblower law. It has many of the usual sections present in other countries save for one. The bill sets forth that all information dealing with "nuclear energy" will be considered a national secret and releasing any information without the oversight of the government will basically be illegal.
This means that if something bad is happening at the Fukushima plant, then we have to rely on someone doing the moral thing and telling the world and then going to jail.
The bill still has to go through the Upper House but it's likely to pass without much opposition even though the media and the public have been strongly opposed to it. It seems very likely that the bill is there to cover up any bad information that might tarnish Japan or TEPCO's image.
Japan state secrets bill on track to become law despite protests
I think you missed the point, and probably because the OP didn't carry the results of the 'experiment' out to its conclusions. The OP was suggesting that we use games to make concepts in quantum mechanics more intuitive to KIDS. I've always wondered if we can bring the concepts and teaching of harder concepts, to kids at younger ages, if this won't spur more quicker advances because less time is spent in the more valuable years simply trying to grasp current ideas. For example, there was probably a period where basic algebra was considered a "college subject" and not fit for teaching to anyone under the age of 18, yet in most places, the concepts are now taught in high school and sometimes even earlier. Calculus is now becoming a normal high school subject. If we can get these ideas into kids' minds at earlier ages, then later on expanding on the concepts won't be as time consuming and we can move past this period quicker and into more theoretical realms. My brother who is also a physicist often wonders if we could make Lie Algebra regular 12th grade curriculum, what that might do to the advances in math and physics.
I'm going to put my self out and just state that in our current system. Voting for a third party IS a wasted vote, in that it potentially weakens the party that might have been closely matching your ideologies and might have won had you not voted for that matching third party. Its a lot like how the Tea Party has caused a a weakening of the main Republican party, which provides more strength for the Democrats. Telling people to run out and "vote third party" won't solve any of these problems. If you want to truly fix this then you need to overhaul the voting system currently in place.
I feel this video series explains the problem very well and shows potential solutions.
The Problems with First past the Post Voting
Japan's fiber already works something like this. NTT laid a lot of fiber years ago and I believe a lot of it was subsidized. Today they still do the same and when you want to sign up for it you call them and they can run it to your house or room. Then you sign up for an ISP who deals with delivering your data to the net. You pay a bit each month for maintaining the line and the rest for the isp access. It's really convenient and a 100/100 is about 60USD a month.
A thought just occurred.
There's often talk about whether there is a lot of Helium-3 under the surface of the moon since the astronauts brought back rocks containing lots of it. Shouldn't this helium show up in a spectrum analysis of the dirt plume from the crash?
There's a tendency in Japan to place the blame for serious problems on the people up top. For instance, political campaign scandals in Japan, which may often only involve people in the middle of the organization, can and have landed many politicians in jail. It works similarly with the yakuza and likewise with corporations.
So even though the fault clearly lies with the moderators, they're trying to blame the person at the top, the founder.
If you demand censure of someone's speech, you allow him a loophole to demand the censure of yours.
Then I wish someone would explain to me how WBC can picket almost anywhere with relative ease, but something like "Occupy Wall Street" gets relegated to "free speech zones" out of the way of all eyes and ears.
If that's not censure, then I don't know what is.
Ghost in the Shell just got a bit closer to being real. Now we just need to advance microbot and nanotechnology.
Technology, the result of engineering, is applied science.
I can concur with this. Anytime I hit the heavy crowded areas, Shinjuku, Akihabara, I basically lose my connection a lot. As soon as I'm headed back up north toward Saitama and Ibaraki, signal/connection comes right back no problem. I use a Galaxy S2.
This was brought up on here once before and there was a good solution to this. Go get yourself a gun carrying license first. Get a gun or simply by a part of a gun, like the barrel. Get a gun carrying case with a lock. Also get a heavy duty lock for your bag. When you travel and don't want something stolen from your bag, bring the piece. Tell the counter you are checking a gun (part). Even gun pieces are treated like a whole gun. If TSA wants to check the bag they will need to do it while in front of you, after that you can lock the suit case and they won't be able to open the suitcase after that. This is the gist of it.
I don't know how posted this, but I read it on here and found it to be a very good idea.
Still in use on every modern Japanese cell phone.
The more they spend, the greater their savings.
It's funny you should mention something like this. In Japan, there is a lack of an online purchasing system. Stuff like Newegg/TigerDirect don't really exist and there are loads of brick and mortar stores to shop at, meaning shopping around in Japan can be quite a challenge. One of Japan's version of BestBuy, YodobashiCamera, actually has a system where you sign up for a point card and then everything you buy and use the point card with accumulated points. It just happens to work out such that the points equal the sales tax usually, and sometimes you even get sales that let you acquire say 5% more points from the purchase price. These points then work as real money where 1 point = 1 yen and you can return and buy items in nothing but points. So if I bought a 10,000yen item I would get 1000 points back if I paid in cash (credit cards only got you 8%). I always thought this system was somewhat ingenious as it sort of created a system where once people started buying big price items from there and started getting points, its likely they would want to continue to return. Even with the point savings though, many other stores still tended to have much better prices on some items than Yodobashi did; you just couldn't use those points there :).
Pretty sure its 20 yrs old to drink in Japan. I was there for a year recently.
The drinking culture there is completely different from the culture in the states. There alcohol is treated as just another beverage that can make you sick if you drink too much. No one thought it really odd to have someone passed out on the street or throwing up on the side of the road, it was normal. That would get you jailed in the states for public drunkenness. Craziest thing I still remember and I had already been there for 7 months so it shouldn't have caught me off guard, I walked into a liquor store to buy some import beer and the guy at the register after I bought it asked "” took me a second to realize he was asking if I wanted to the cap removed so I could drink it on the go. Even after having been there almost a year, the idea of walking down the street chugging a beer still seemed foreign to me.
I suppose this might fit in with your (a) but...
I read a BCI panel report put together by Theodore Berger some 3 years ago and the one thing I took away from the report was that the problem with BCI right now (for invasive implants) isn't the matter of "Where to put the implant" and "How to communicate," but a problem with keeping it permanently there. I hadn't realized prior to reading that report that the body was actually the number one "enemy" in any kind of long term study involving invasive implants. At the time that panel report was published (2007), the longest running implant had been just about a year. There were still a lot of open questions as well as to what was causing the implants to eventually fail.
Unless the implant tech has improved in the last 3 three years; it seems to me the biggest hurdle will be getting implants that can last longer than a year.
I've thought the same thing about WoW as well. In the current expansion you can see it already happening. Items from Ulduar already have >+100 stats. In BC this didn't happen until Sunwell or so.
My theory is that blizz will rework the game mechanics again, possibly for the next expansion. So far the track record has held that Blizz likes to introduce something new in each expansion that will cause people to have to regear. In Vanilla -> BC they introduced the rating system and emphasized things like +hit, which caused people to have to regear completely. In BC -> Wrath we've seen, or at least initially we saw, an emphasis placed on the need for +spirit in casters (I'm sure melee had some stat they emphasized as well). Resillence also became an important part of PvP, compared to BC (You need resil or you die in PvP 9 times out of 10, no ifs ands or buts about it.) So I wouldn't be surprised to see Blizz rework the mechanics once more so that there isn't stat inflation.
For the rest of your post I concur. Blizz is falling into the rehash mentality. Each new expansion will provide a burst of new content but the rest of the lifetime of the expansion will pretty much be populated with reuses of other content (look at armour, weapons, and mounts, its all the SAME but with a few minor changes). I don't think Blizz really cares though. In fact, I think Blizz is banking on WoW dieing out here in the future and then having all the player base move to their new MMO they are making so they can restart the cycle all over again. They're even hoping that all those that have quited will return to the new MMO. I'm sure they only need a few million people to sign up and play for a few months in order to recoup production costs.
Knowing the current trend of Blizz's actions concerning games. The answer to this is no.
They want to centralize everyone on B.net. They want to make sure everyone buy's the game so they get their money, which is fine, but many people will cry foul at this and will give Blizz the finger over it. A Dedicated server/clone server, would still present the same loop holes they are trying to close by taking these actions. They want to totally control the product. If people can launch a server and play offline, then that means they can't lock out/ban a client at their own whim.
In short, Blizz doesn't care about the customer as much anymore, they are only interested in milking the series for what its worth.
As seen in Fig. 6, the subject's PBMC telomere length at 13 years of age was significantly shorter than that of an age-matched female control as well as male and female controls of younger ages. While variability in average telomere length exists between individuals, the low subject values are probably not due to errors in measurement since the coefficients of variation were sufficiently low to assume adequate precision. Although the subject's telomeres were nearly half the length of a healthy, age-matched female control, this comparison in and of itself does not prove that her cellular age is advanced beyond that of the normal girl. However, an important observation relevant to this difference is that there occurs a precipitous loss of telomere length during early life after which a plateau period is reached (Frenck et al., 1998). As a result, telomere length in newborns is longer on average than that in adolescents so that comparison of the subject's telomeres with newborn controls would be expected to provide more reliable estimate of her cellular age range. For example, significant shortening would be expected if her cellular age proceeded as usual despite her severe developmental delay whereas longer telomeres would suggest that her cellular aging was delayed consistent with that of her somatic development. However, this was not the case. Subject's telomeres were considerably shorter than those of both infant controls as well as the age-matched control suggesting that her cellular age was advanced beyond infancy. Since the rate of telomeric shortening is substantially greater in infants than in adults (Zeichner et al., 1999), subject's prolonged infancy may have caused her to have shorter telomeres than age-matched controls. In addition, accelerated telomeric shortening has been reported in developmentally abnormal conditions including progeroid syndromes (Kruk et al., 1995). These circumstances may have resulted in her cellular age being appropriate for or perhaps even greater than her chronological age. Consistent with other reports showing a lack of telomerase (telomere terminal transferase) expression in human dermal fibroblasts from children (Oâ(TM)Donnell et al., 2008), subject's fibroblasts were telomerase negative. This fact suggests that possible enhancement of telomeric erosion did not stimulate compensatory increases in enzyme activity.
Pulled from: Richard F. Walker, Lawrence C. Pakula, Maxine J. Sutcliffe, Patricia A. Kruk, Jesper Graakjaer, Jerry W. Shay, A case study of 'disorganized development' and its possible relevance to genetic determinants of aging, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, Volume 130, Issue 5, May 2009, Pages 350-356, ISSN 0047-6374, DOI: 10.1016/j.mad.2009.02.003.
*Obligatory Spoiler Warning*
Upon reading the summary, I was immediately reminded of the book Calculating God. In it, the star Betelgeuse goes supernova and starts an end of the world scenario here on Earth. Where in, us and a few other alien races in the this sector of the Milky Way are saved by "god."
From the Kotaku article:
What kind of changes can we expect? Ero game maker Syrup Soft is delaying its upcoming game Gang raped by the entire village ~girls covered in milky liquid~ to re-moniker it The trap set by the entire village ~bodies covered in milky liquid~. So, yeah, expect more creative ways of masking rape and rape iconography as well as possibly more "amateur" or unlicensed games.
So "rape"-related content will still be released in video games but it will simply be masked as something else. This is just like having characters in anime that look like little kids, but claim they are actually adults.Additionally, this right's group might think they have one a victory, but there are still tons of magazines and independent comics (and games) released that are focused on the topic rape.