I agree with your general take on this, but I can absolutely see that an individual would run into trouble at a different stage in life, while still exhibiting signs of problems. I have no horse in this race -- I really don't have any kind of preconceived notion regarding this issue. But you can't dismiss the possibility that there is no problem that's difficult to see in statistical samples until people exposed to the violence grow to a certain age simply on the basis that it's preposterous is not especially scientific. If we had better long term studies, it'd be a different matter, but such studies are nearly non-existent.
2. The possibility that propensity to violence may not manifest until later in life. Suppose exposure to violent content does increase one's propensity to violence. If we believe kids are affected by this, it's entirely plausible to expect those people to be more violent 10 or 20 years down the road, not within a year.
And this one is so implausible on its face that it surely qualifies as special pleading. Essentially, what you are proposing is that videogames do not increase violence over the age range at which people are most susceptible to committing violent crimes, but somehow do increase violence at a later age (conveniently, with a delay long enough not to be reflected in the statistics) at an age when (as you put it) people are "retiring out" of violent crime.
Why is it improbable? PTSD can have delayed manifestations. Why not this?
I think when we're talking about crime statistics, we need to be very careful with what we control for. I'm no statistician, but I understand the basics. There's a good example of how to set up controls in "Freakonomics", where they attempt to establish causality between various hypothetical factors and violent crime. It's very tough, but they make a good case for the sole important factor being police presence per capita. To arrive at that conclusion, they had to control for geography, economics, demographic changes, and legislature, among other things. Here, I think it's obvious that we have 2 huge factors that may be skewing results that we'd have to find a way to control for before any conclusive statements can be made:
1. Baby boomers are getting older, population on the whole is getting older, and so there is a vast number of people that are "retiring" out of violent crime age.
2. The possibility that propensity to violence may not manifest until later in life. Suppose exposure to violent content does increase one's propensity to violence. If we believe kids are affected by this, it's entirely plausible to expect those people to be more violent 10 or 20 years down the road, not within a year.
Additionally, I did not read this to suggest that it must automatically apply to kids as a long-term effect. My first thought is that this might be acting like a drug, where any person feels its effects for a period of time. Long term effects may still be there, but we're a long way from establishing that.
What I'm gonna say will probably set some people off, but that's okay. Obviously, everyone, who is generally happy with themselves, probably thinks their childhood was the optimum way to raise a kid. I think this country (the US) is setting up kids for failure in a big way. Lacking expertise in education, I can only speak from my own experiences, such as they are, but here it goes anyway.
I was born in Russia and attended 2 schools in Leningrad/St. Petersburg. The first one was a normal local public school. That was from 1st grade to something like 6th. My mom got me into an English class after school, where I lasted about a year before getting kicked out for being rowdy. My dad also encouraged me to enroll in a city math club and try my hand at math and physics olympiads. I always sucked at them, but I hung out with some really smart kids and my mind was always occupied. Then I applied to 2 public magnet schools and got into one, along with one of my friends. There, it became largely a continuation of my math club experiences, as there was a lot of overlap between the 2 places in terms of kids as well as teachers. I sucked at that school too, refusing to learn most things, but the pressure was such that a fair bit got through my thick head anyway. The only thing I was interested in was the programming class and later English, when I found out we were going to be moving to New York. One thing I cherish about that programming class to this day is the limited computer time we had. As I recall, around 1991-1992, in my class of about 28 kids, only one had a computer at home. The rest of us got by with about 1 hr of computer lab per week. The class itself was taught on the blackboard, and before we got access to the computers (Pascal), we cut our teeth programming with registers on some bad ass Russian programmable calculators.
Another thing that's worth mentioning kinda echoes the parent poster's experience. I spent most of my summers in the country, where my parents rented upstairs of a house. The family that owned the place occupied downstairs. They had 2 kids, the younger of whom was 2 years my senior. His older brother and his dad each had a car, which was pretty swanky for Russia. Over-there, if you wanted to have a car, you pretty much had to know how to work on it yourself. I always thought it was the coolest thing watching them take out and install engines, tune them, and they even gave me a couple of "driving lessons". I sat on my friend's brother's lap, while he shifted and worked the pedals, but steering was all me, baby! It was around the same time that my parents took me to see some local motocross races. They were loud, smelly, and scary, especially after the events, when some of the racers terrorized our town by riding wheelies on local gravel roads. Aside from that, my time was occupied by fixing and riding my bicycle all over, swimming in the lake, and setting stuff on fire. I enjoyed the hell out of my summers.
It wasn't until we moved to New York, that I got my first taste of feeling truly constrained. I got myself into Bronx Science -- a very good magnet school. But even there, popping up with remarks like "I have a better way" was often looked at as a deviation from the schedule. Friendships were a little harder to come by also. Not because of the language or culture barrier, but simply because here every student has a personal class schedule. Back in the old country, you went to every class with the same group of students. Aside from greatly assisting in ripping off homework from one another, it was a worthwhile educational experience as well. You could talk to your peers about the more difficult subjects at random times throughout the day. In my junior year of high school, I ran out of AP math and physics classes that I could take and I didn't feel like taking classes at a local community college because, quite frankly, I was lazy.
I couldn't go anywhere during the summer. My mom convinced me to sign up as a guidance councilor in a kid's d
1. AWT uses what's called native peers to draw each individual component. That means that every interaction between Java code and an AWT widget required JVM to go outside of the managed code stack and vice versa.
2. AWT exposed its API in a very primitive way with inadequate data-presentation separation and a poor event model.
Swing came on the scene from outside of Sun. It became incorporated into J2SE, but it retains the javax top-level package name because it was originally a 3rd party solution. Swing attempted to address the 2 issues above. It made use of as few native peers as possible (usually just one per frame to draw the enclosing window) with the help from "lightweight components". It also hailed itself as an MVC framework. Interestingly, this separation of presentation from data and business logic allowed a greater degree of freedom with regard to what the GUI looked like, but the default behavior was to create a native GUI look-alike, and it remains so to this day. However, it's possible, should the developer need it, to take full control of what GUI looks like and not care about making it fit with the native look of the system.
When Swing first came out, it was excruciatingly slow, in part because it wasn't well optimized and in part because JVM itself was slow. And of course the hardware was slower back then too. This is when Java caught a lot of flack for having piss poor GUI response and feel. Nowadays things are significantly better, but popular opinion is still partly affected by this "Java is slow" mentality. The hoopla about Java 6 not being available on Leopard is important, even if not too many non-developer end users are aware of it.
The reason it's important is because until this Open JDK port, Mac Java was the only implementation of the JVM that was not authored by Sun. So it was up to Apple to provide a version of Java that would work well with OS X. This goes beyond just making it work, which is what this BSD-derived port does. Apple's implementation optimized Swing's Apple look and feel to work well with Cocoa, while the Open JDK port uses X11. Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful that this has happened, which is the whole point of having Open JDK around, but we're still waiting on a full-on Mac Java in terms of GUI. The worry that many have is that Jobs has downgraded Java on the priority list and that this may become a significant roadblock in letting Java succeed on the desktop as a cross-platform solution. Since Apple chooses to be very closed in the way Mac OS X is developed, it is really their responsibility to provide a good Java experience to their users. But I can see how it's a conflict of interest to them, so they may choose not to, which I think is a shame.
the dock is better than the stupid taskbar (hey, what isn't?)
I'm not clear on this. Maybe it's the longtime Windows user in me talking, but what does the dock give you that the taskbar doesn't? I can make the taskbar disappear when not in use. It can group windows of the same app under one item. You can put buttons on it for single-click launch functionality. What am I missing?
What I also found curious is that we already have a precedent for this situation: GWT. It's almost the same thing as what happens here:
1. Write stuff in Java against a subset of J2SE API with Google's proprietary API added. 2. Compile to standard Java bytecode. 3. Cross compile to something else (JavaScript in the case of GWT). 4. Run in something other than a JVM (DOM with JavaScript in the case of GWT).
GWT has been out in the wild for some time now and Sun doesn't seem to care.
It seems like they're in an ideal position to say "Fine, we won't call it Java." And they will be careful to refer to it only as the "Android language", "Android libraries", and "Android runtime" in their official documentation -- even though many people will simply call it "Java" anyway.
I don't think that's gonna fly, if it came down to that. If you look at the Dalvik libraries, there's a good deal of common J2SE API, which are there for a reason -- to make your pre-existing Java code run on this platform. For instance, Apache Commons libraries should just recompile for Dalvik straight out of the box. Not only are those libraries using "java.*" packages, they need those libraries to work. So even if Google renamed "java.*" packages to "android.*" packages, it might not pass the muster in court unless they actually stopped using cloned Sun's libraries, which would be a hard pill to swallow.
But I'm with the other posters. I don't think Sun's really gonna move on this. Wouldn't be much to gain for them.
Your house building analogy is right, but for the wrong reasons. Our cars -- something that requires a lot more engineering background than a typical 2 story house -- are already built by robots. The difficulty with using robots to build something like a house is that most houses are still one-off custom affairs, which is what makes them so expensive. You have to look at the terrain, architectural requirements, and so on. That said, there are ways to mass produce small houses or their components and some of those projects are pretty neat. For example, my brother in law -- a fine carpenter by trade -- used to work for a company that specialized in high end window manufacturing and installation. Before he quit to start his own operation, that company had purchased a CNC machine with wood-specific tooling.
And on the other side, robots are already starting to get into automating even custom tasks through learning. Take some of the more expensive modern agricultural machinery, which is able to learn the field with the help of GPS and subsequently analyze the yield of specific spots in the field as the tractor rolls through the field (with the operator only overseeing and not touching any controls). Later, the farmer can look at the graphs of how the field is doing and the computer in the tractor can further fine tune what what it does on each square foot of the field, such as add nitrates in a spot that needs them, but not anywhere else. This is already happening and most people are blissfully unaware of it.
In terms of wider acceptance by the public, first people need to understand what robots actually are. Telepresence devices like the ConnectR are not robots. They're just machines. A robot is something that exhibits a great degree of autonomy. The Roomba is a robot. A mechanical pet, even if it doesn't learn, is a robot. A machine designed to pick you up off your bed and carry you to the toilet is only a robot if it doesn't require you to steer it. Given that most people are still confused by this important dichotomy, it seems we're gonna wait a bit longer before robots enter our homes. Or perhaps they'll do so sooner by attaching mechanical functions to our current mobile devices (or allowing said devices to control non-robot machines). Might be interesting...
The society that legitimately or not feels it needs to have a measure of protection from people going off the deep end needs to make a very difficult choice: is it concerned with mental health of its members in general or is it only concerned with those that get violent? No one seems to be talking about it, yet there are laws that stride both sides of this fence, usually in contradictory and ineffective fashion. I'm not suggesting I know what the answer should be, but I believe a choice has to be made, at least on the legislative level.
I'll second your point. I've been a long time Sprint customer and I really can't say I've had any problems with them. I probably overbuy when I'm picking out a plan, but, just as you said, all my phones have worked fine, never had a billing issue, and the features that I do use just work.
That said, I am excited about Android, provided it is indeed open for 3rd party developers. It would be the first time I was ever excited about anything in the mobile market.
my wife would kill me if I bought anything resembling a motorcycle Sorry to hear that. My wife "made" me stop cheaping out and get a new race bike 2 years ago. And then a year later, she "made" me book a rental bike in San Francisco so we could fly in and go two-up to see MotoGP at Laguna Seca on our vacation.
You are absolutely correct. I tried it and got pretty much the same results. If one exports to MS Word 97, you seem to get an image the size of the original, but the actual picture is a fraction of the size sitting in the top left corner. Seems to be some sort of sizing problem. I looked around on an OO.o users mailing list and found a relevant question posted in 2003 with no responses. Not very encouraging. Posted mine there as well. We'll see...
As someone who wrote exactly this kind of thing for Java, I can attest to the idea that it can be useful and not a security issue. The trick is to think of its uses in a completely different way than what we tend to associate with Excel. The way I use Bean Sheet (my programmer's spreadsheet) is in the following ways:
- To hold and manipulate small amounts (usually sub-100,000 rows) of formatted and structured data.
One thing I've never seen anybody do in Excel is script your own sorting algorithms for example.
- To have a format compatible with a version control system so as to see diff's in simple, but formatted, lists of data.
- A more visual way of modeling/testing/debugging API and components.
- To allow programmatic access to the spreadsheets.
This is what this guy was talking about as a good opportunity to seed quickly changing business rules into an otherwise static system. Suppose you have a piece of code that needs to perform some business-rules driven operations on a data set. You can encapsulate those business rules in such a spreadsheet containing no data, test it, and deploy it with your application. The app then loads the data into the spreadsheet (the spreadsheet might even contain information on where to put the data set into it, so the interaction can be quite generic) and the app then queries the spreadsheet's "result" cells. And since these kinds of spreadsheets can contain all manners of data types, integration can be really simple. Then, if need be, pop open the spreadsheet, tweak the business rules, and deploy it back into your app -- perfect component-oriented programming model implementation
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I dig the idea, but how does it open doors? I'm actually thinking more about having a robot at home to check up on my cat and maybe interact with my wife when she's there. This would be mostly just for fun, no real need at the moment, but you never know. The door issue is stumping me though. Didn't seem to be mentioned in the article.
I recall reading a study recently (can't remember which) that posited that on occasion women get into a work environment, where they are treated as equals by their male colleagues, and find it to be "hostile". The issue is that they're getting exactly what they've asked for. Now, I'm all for having a close knit team that feels comfortable enough with each other to make off-color jokes and go to bars, but one has to be careful not to alienate people (male or female) that might otherwise bring a lot to the table and make the team stronger, should said team curb the jokes just a wee bit.
I don't think it's a black and white issue. I think in most workplace settings, it's entirely possible to find a casual enough code of conduct that allows people to maintain their sense of humor and foster a friendly attitude, but perhaps without the fart jokes. Don't get me wrong, I love fart jokes and pinups and all the rest. But I've also known how rewarding it is to work with someone you respect for reasons other than your shared taste in TV shows or music, but... professional merit. This is ultimately what I consider having an open mind: letting yourself get to know a person you don't immediately bond with along the lines already familiar to you. This is what will make you a better professional, as well as a better human being in the long run.
I think you're off on some concepts here, as are most of the people replying to your post. You do not want to put the electric motors into the wheels for handling reasons of course. But that doesn't mean that a series hybrid is a bad idea. Electric motors can still be the sole sources of mechanical propulsion and stay inboard. They can essentially sit where differentials are located currently on a 4 wheel drive vehicle. If I'm not mistaken, a new military vehicle is being designed as a Hummer replacement that's going to be using this sort of arrangement. BTW, other benefits of this are that it would allow better electronic traction and braking controls, as well as ability to design an internal combustion motor for running at a single RPM for most efficiency. This is what the diesel-electric locomotives do already.
I totally agree. This concept seems really neat, but all we're gonna get is a bunch of clip shows from people who think they're being creative. And then we're gonna get clip shows of clip shows. And clip shows of clip shows of clip shows. And then... the Hasselhofian recursion!
And that is why I've been developing my own spreadsheet app. It's far from being a finished product and it's not targeted at Joe-the-accountant, but it does address maintainability by using XML for persistence. As such it lends itself very nicely to things like source control. It also blends features of traditional spreadsheets with object orientation and scripting to allow more sophisticated data modeling. I do admit that spreadsheets can expose too much to the user. But I look at it the same way I look at Perl allowing people to write unmanagable code -- you just have to put more thought into it and things will be okay. And of course, as others have pointed out, no one tool is right for every job. Use spreadsheets for modeling, reporting and such. Don't use it for huge data mining jobs. Not sure how I feel about complex apps though. I believe, if properly designed and tested, a spreadsheet can be a great way of representing complex relationships.
I'm no lawyer nor a theologian, but there is logic to this. The key factor is not that someone is simply encouraging someone else to kill themselves, but that they are doing it knowing the person is sensitive to that sort of talk and their words may have a serious impact at the moment of truth or hesitation. Legally, it's probably not unlike laws that make an exception to free speech when the speech in question advocates violence -- you're not doing it yourself, but you're having a real impact and you know it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your general take on this, but I can absolutely see that an individual would run into trouble at a different stage in life, while still exhibiting signs of problems. I have no horse in this race -- I really don't have any kind of preconceived notion regarding this issue. But you can't dismiss the possibility that there is no problem that's difficult to see in statistical samples until people exposed to the violence grow to a certain age simply on the basis that it's preposterous is not especially scientific. If we had better long term studies, it'd be a different matter, but such studies are nearly non-existent.
Why is it improbable? PTSD can have delayed manifestations. Why not this?
I think when we're talking about crime statistics, we need to be very careful with what we control for. I'm no statistician, but I understand the basics. There's a good example of how to set up controls in "Freakonomics", where they attempt to establish causality between various hypothetical factors and violent crime. It's very tough, but they make a good case for the sole important factor being police presence per capita. To arrive at that conclusion, they had to control for geography, economics, demographic changes, and legislature, among other things. Here, I think it's obvious that we have 2 huge factors that may be skewing results that we'd have to find a way to control for before any conclusive statements can be made:
1. Baby boomers are getting older, population on the whole is getting older, and so there is a vast number of people that are "retiring" out of violent crime age.
2. The possibility that propensity to violence may not manifest until later in life. Suppose exposure to violent content does increase one's propensity to violence. If we believe kids are affected by this, it's entirely plausible to expect those people to be more violent 10 or 20 years down the road, not within a year.
Additionally, I did not read this to suggest that it must automatically apply to kids as a long-term effect. My first thought is that this might be acting like a drug, where any person feels its effects for a period of time. Long term effects may still be there, but we're a long way from establishing that.
What I'm gonna say will probably set some people off, but that's okay. Obviously, everyone, who is generally happy with themselves, probably thinks their childhood was the optimum way to raise a kid. I think this country (the US) is setting up kids for failure in a big way. Lacking expertise in education, I can only speak from my own experiences, such as they are, but here it goes anyway.
I was born in Russia and attended 2 schools in Leningrad/St. Petersburg. The first one was a normal local public school. That was from 1st grade to something like 6th. My mom got me into an English class after school, where I lasted about a year before getting kicked out for being rowdy. My dad also encouraged me to enroll in a city math club and try my hand at math and physics olympiads. I always sucked at them, but I hung out with some really smart kids and my mind was always occupied. Then I applied to 2 public magnet schools and got into one, along with one of my friends. There, it became largely a continuation of my math club experiences, as there was a lot of overlap between the 2 places in terms of kids as well as teachers. I sucked at that school too, refusing to learn most things, but the pressure was such that a fair bit got through my thick head anyway. The only thing I was interested in was the programming class and later English, when I found out we were going to be moving to New York. One thing I cherish about that programming class to this day is the limited computer time we had. As I recall, around 1991-1992, in my class of about 28 kids, only one had a computer at home. The rest of us got by with about 1 hr of computer lab per week. The class itself was taught on the blackboard, and before we got access to the computers (Pascal), we cut our teeth programming with registers on some bad ass Russian programmable calculators.
Another thing that's worth mentioning kinda echoes the parent poster's experience. I spent most of my summers in the country, where my parents rented upstairs of a house. The family that owned the place occupied downstairs. They had 2 kids, the younger of whom was 2 years my senior. His older brother and his dad each had a car, which was pretty swanky for Russia. Over-there, if you wanted to have a car, you pretty much had to know how to work on it yourself. I always thought it was the coolest thing watching them take out and install engines, tune them, and they even gave me a couple of "driving lessons". I sat on my friend's brother's lap, while he shifted and worked the pedals, but steering was all me, baby! It was around the same time that my parents took me to see some local motocross races. They were loud, smelly, and scary, especially after the events, when some of the racers terrorized our town by riding wheelies on local gravel roads. Aside from that, my time was occupied by fixing and riding my bicycle all over, swimming in the lake, and setting stuff on fire. I enjoyed the hell out of my summers.
It wasn't until we moved to New York, that I got my first taste of feeling truly constrained. I got myself into Bronx Science -- a very good magnet school. But even there, popping up with remarks like "I have a better way" was often looked at as a deviation from the schedule. Friendships were a little harder to come by also. Not because of the language or culture barrier, but simply because here every student has a personal class schedule. Back in the old country, you went to every class with the same group of students. Aside from greatly assisting in ripping off homework from one another, it was a worthwhile educational experience as well. You could talk to your peers about the more difficult subjects at random times throughout the day. In my junior year of high school, I ran out of AP math and physics classes that I could take and I didn't feel like taking classes at a local community college because, quite frankly, I was lazy.
I couldn't go anywhere during the summer. My mom convinced me to sign up as a guidance councilor in a kid's d
Maybe it's too late for your project, but I've always loved using BeanShell.
The reason why AWT was a problem is two-fold:
1. AWT uses what's called native peers to draw each individual component. That means that every interaction between Java code and an AWT widget required JVM to go outside of the managed code stack and vice versa.
2. AWT exposed its API in a very primitive way with inadequate data-presentation separation and a poor event model.
Swing came on the scene from outside of Sun. It became incorporated into J2SE, but it retains the javax top-level package name because it was originally a 3rd party solution. Swing attempted to address the 2 issues above. It made use of as few native peers as possible (usually just one per frame to draw the enclosing window) with the help from "lightweight components". It also hailed itself as an MVC framework. Interestingly, this separation of presentation from data and business logic allowed a greater degree of freedom with regard to what the GUI looked like, but the default behavior was to create a native GUI look-alike, and it remains so to this day. However, it's possible, should the developer need it, to take full control of what GUI looks like and not care about making it fit with the native look of the system.
When Swing first came out, it was excruciatingly slow, in part because it wasn't well optimized and in part because JVM itself was slow. And of course the hardware was slower back then too. This is when Java caught a lot of flack for having piss poor GUI response and feel. Nowadays things are significantly better, but popular opinion is still partly affected by this "Java is slow" mentality. The hoopla about Java 6 not being available on Leopard is important, even if not too many non-developer end users are aware of it.
The reason it's important is because until this Open JDK port, Mac Java was the only implementation of the JVM that was not authored by Sun. So it was up to Apple to provide a version of Java that would work well with OS X. This goes beyond just making it work, which is what this BSD-derived port does. Apple's implementation optimized Swing's Apple look and feel to work well with Cocoa, while the Open JDK port uses X11. Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful that this has happened, which is the whole point of having Open JDK around, but we're still waiting on a full-on Mac Java in terms of GUI. The worry that many have is that Jobs has downgraded Java on the priority list and that this may become a significant roadblock in letting Java succeed on the desktop as a cross-platform solution. Since Apple chooses to be very closed in the way Mac OS X is developed, it is really their responsibility to provide a good Java experience to their users. But I can see how it's a conflict of interest to them, so they may choose not to, which I think is a shame.
I'm not clear on this. Maybe it's the longtime Windows user in me talking, but what does the dock give you that the taskbar doesn't? I can make the taskbar disappear when not in use. It can group windows of the same app under one item. You can put buttons on it for single-click launch functionality. What am I missing?
What I also found curious is that we already have a precedent for this situation: GWT. It's almost the same thing as what happens here:
1. Write stuff in Java against a subset of J2SE API with Google's proprietary API added.
2. Compile to standard Java bytecode.
3. Cross compile to something else (JavaScript in the case of GWT).
4. Run in something other than a JVM (DOM with JavaScript in the case of GWT).
GWT has been out in the wild for some time now and Sun doesn't seem to care.
I don't think that's gonna fly, if it came down to that. If you look at the Dalvik libraries, there's a good deal of common J2SE API, which are there for a reason -- to make your pre-existing Java code run on this platform. For instance, Apache Commons libraries should just recompile for Dalvik straight out of the box. Not only are those libraries using "java.*" packages, they need those libraries to work. So even if Google renamed "java.*" packages to "android.*" packages, it might not pass the muster in court unless they actually stopped using cloned Sun's libraries, which would be a hard pill to swallow.
But I'm with the other posters. I don't think Sun's really gonna move on this. Wouldn't be much to gain for them.
Your house building analogy is right, but for the wrong reasons. Our cars -- something that requires a lot more engineering background than a typical 2 story house -- are already built by robots. The difficulty with using robots to build something like a house is that most houses are still one-off custom affairs, which is what makes them so expensive. You have to look at the terrain, architectural requirements, and so on. That said, there are ways to mass produce small houses or their components and some of those projects are pretty neat. For example, my brother in law -- a fine carpenter by trade -- used to work for a company that specialized in high end window manufacturing and installation. Before he quit to start his own operation, that company had purchased a CNC machine with wood-specific tooling.
And on the other side, robots are already starting to get into automating even custom tasks through learning. Take some of the more expensive modern agricultural machinery, which is able to learn the field with the help of GPS and subsequently analyze the yield of specific spots in the field as the tractor rolls through the field (with the operator only overseeing and not touching any controls). Later, the farmer can look at the graphs of how the field is doing and the computer in the tractor can further fine tune what what it does on each square foot of the field, such as add nitrates in a spot that needs them, but not anywhere else. This is already happening and most people are blissfully unaware of it.
In terms of wider acceptance by the public, first people need to understand what robots actually are. Telepresence devices like the ConnectR are not robots. They're just machines. A robot is something that exhibits a great degree of autonomy. The Roomba is a robot. A mechanical pet, even if it doesn't learn, is a robot. A machine designed to pick you up off your bed and carry you to the toilet is only a robot if it doesn't require you to steer it. Given that most people are still confused by this important dichotomy, it seems we're gonna wait a bit longer before robots enter our homes. Or perhaps they'll do so sooner by attaching mechanical functions to our current mobile devices (or allowing said devices to control non-robot machines). Might be interesting...
The society that legitimately or not feels it needs to have a measure of protection from people going off the deep end needs to make a very difficult choice: is it concerned with mental health of its members in general or is it only concerned with those that get violent? No one seems to be talking about it, yet there are laws that stride both sides of this fence, usually in contradictory and ineffective fashion. I'm not suggesting I know what the answer should be, but I believe a choice has to be made, at least on the legislative level.
I'll second your point. I've been a long time Sprint customer and I really can't say I've had any problems with them. I probably overbuy when I'm picking out a plan, but, just as you said, all my phones have worked fine, never had a billing issue, and the features that I do use just work.
That said, I am excited about Android, provided it is indeed open for 3rd party developers. It would be the first time I was ever excited about anything in the mobile market.
Very cool exercise. This could make for a really interesting addon to some social networking sites.
You are absolutely correct. I tried it and got pretty much the same results. If one exports to MS Word 97, you seem to get an image the size of the original, but the actual picture is a fraction of the size sitting in the top left corner. Seems to be some sort of sizing problem. I looked around on an OO.o users mailing list and found a relevant question posted in 2003 with no responses. Not very encouraging. Posted mine there as well. We'll see...
As someone who wrote exactly this kind of thing for Java, I can attest to the idea that it can be useful and not a security issue. The trick is to think of its uses in a completely different way than what we tend to associate with Excel. The way I use Bean Sheet (my programmer's spreadsheet) is in the following ways: - To hold and manipulate small amounts (usually sub-100,000 rows) of formatted and structured data. One thing I've never seen anybody do in Excel is script your own sorting algorithms for example. - To have a format compatible with a version control system so as to see diff's in simple, but formatted, lists of data. - A more visual way of modeling/testing/debugging API and components. - To allow programmatic access to the spreadsheets. This is what this guy was talking about as a good opportunity to seed quickly changing business rules into an otherwise static system. Suppose you have a piece of code that needs to perform some business-rules driven operations on a data set. You can encapsulate those business rules in such a spreadsheet containing no data, test it, and deploy it with your application. The app then loads the data into the spreadsheet (the spreadsheet might even contain information on where to put the data set into it, so the interaction can be quite generic) and the app then queries the spreadsheet's "result" cells. And since these kinds of spreadsheets can contain all manners of data types, integration can be really simple. Then, if need be, pop open the spreadsheet, tweak the business rules, and deploy it back into your app -- perfect component-oriented programming model implementation .
Already done.
I dig the idea, but how does it open doors? I'm actually thinking more about having a robot at home to check up on my cat and maybe interact with my wife when she's there. This would be mostly just for fun, no real need at the moment, but you never know. The door issue is stumping me though. Didn't seem to be mentioned in the article.
I recall reading a study recently (can't remember which) that posited that on occasion women get into a work environment, where they are treated as equals by their male colleagues, and find it to be "hostile". The issue is that they're getting exactly what they've asked for. Now, I'm all for having a close knit team that feels comfortable enough with each other to make off-color jokes and go to bars, but one has to be careful not to alienate people (male or female) that might otherwise bring a lot to the table and make the team stronger, should said team curb the jokes just a wee bit.
I don't think it's a black and white issue. I think in most workplace settings, it's entirely possible to find a casual enough code of conduct that allows people to maintain their sense of humor and foster a friendly attitude, but perhaps without the fart jokes. Don't get me wrong, I love fart jokes and pinups and all the rest. But I've also known how rewarding it is to work with someone you respect for reasons other than your shared taste in TV shows or music, but... professional merit. This is ultimately what I consider having an open mind: letting yourself get to know a person you don't immediately bond with along the lines already familiar to you. This is what will make you a better professional, as well as a better human being in the long run.
I think you're off on some concepts here, as are most of the people replying to your post. You do not want to put the electric motors into the wheels for handling reasons of course. But that doesn't mean that a series hybrid is a bad idea. Electric motors can still be the sole sources of mechanical propulsion and stay inboard. They can essentially sit where differentials are located currently on a 4 wheel drive vehicle. If I'm not mistaken, a new military vehicle is being designed as a Hummer replacement that's going to be using this sort of arrangement. BTW, other benefits of this are that it would allow better electronic traction and braking controls, as well as ability to design an internal combustion motor for running at a single RPM for most efficiency. This is what the diesel-electric locomotives do already.
I totally agree. This concept seems really neat, but all we're gonna get is a bunch of clip shows from people who think they're being creative. And then we're gonna get clip shows of clip shows. And clip shows of clip shows of clip shows. And then... the Hasselhofian recursion!
And that is why I've been developing my own spreadsheet app. It's far from being a finished product and it's not targeted at Joe-the-accountant, but it does address maintainability by using XML for persistence. As such it lends itself very nicely to things like source control. It also blends features of traditional spreadsheets with object orientation and scripting to allow more sophisticated data modeling. I do admit that spreadsheets can expose too much to the user. But I look at it the same way I look at Perl allowing people to write unmanagable code -- you just have to put more thought into it and things will be okay. And of course, as others have pointed out, no one tool is right for every job. Use spreadsheets for modeling, reporting and such. Don't use it for huge data mining jobs. Not sure how I feel about complex apps though. I believe, if properly designed and tested, a spreadsheet can be a great way of representing complex relationships.
I'm no lawyer nor a theologian, but there is logic to this. The key factor is not that someone is simply encouraging someone else to kill themselves, but that they are doing it knowing the person is sensitive to that sort of talk and their words may have a serious impact at the moment of truth or hesitation. Legally, it's probably not unlike laws that make an exception to free speech when the speech in question advocates violence -- you're not doing it yourself, but you're having a real impact and you know it.
Finally. This will detach podcast listeners from their computers. As long as it has enough storage space, this should be a big boon for the medium.