It seems more obvious that "Wheels = disqualification" than it does that "Prosthetic legs = disqualification." I suspect a lot of it is due to the fact that people are imagining him running on the sort of "around town" prosthetics that most amputees use for day to day walking, rather than the carbon fibre arcs that he actually runs on.
Just looking at them, it's debatable as to whether or not its an advantage, but assuming the science was done correctly, a large mechanical advantage over an unmodified human should be grounds for disqualification from events that only feature unmodified humans. That's just math.
I think we all wish you weren't an intellectually bankrupt hysteric, but wishes don't seem to help very much.
If you truly believe that a few cells bound together are capable of experiencing cruelty, then how do you go through your day? If you sneeze you're killing more cells than that. I certainly hope you're a vegan, but even there, how do you bear the sufferings of all the vegetables?
In your world menstruation is murder, and masturbation is genocide, so why don't you go crusade against porn or something?
"Anyway, I don't think the case for banning/editing/etc games is as strong as you say -- it's more that many parents and legislators are waking up to the fact that games aren't ms pac man and galaga anymore."
Waking up? I'm too young to have been in the absolute first wave of gamers...I was damn close (I'm 33), but just a touch too young for Pong. At that, I'm old enough to have gone through college, and had a kid who would be 12 by now. In the next 10 years, whenever you "Think of the Children" you're going to be thinking of the children of people who can hum the theme music to Super Mario Brothers. People who were in high school or college when Doom came out.
Jesus, I remember playing galaga on those table top machines, when I was too young for my feet to touch the floor...A good quarter century ago. No one who can vote and has kids younger than 30 is "waking up" to first person shooters for the first time, unless they're Amish.
Don't mistake it. The people who are against games right now, know exactly what they're crusading against. Ten years from now, all of them but the diehards will have moved on to things that they care about more, like dentures.
The article I read on it yesterday said that aside from possible applications in stealth technology (they haven't tested its reflective index against IR and radar yet), there were a lot of possible applications in solar energy.
And objects which reflect light on all wavelengths are actually white not black. All black things absorb light to varying degrees.
Shrug. The difference between a well written game and a poorly written game is so obvious as to not even need pointing out. A poorly written game with beautiful graphics, is still likely to be a flop, while a graphically mediocre game with excellent writing can be a huge success.
You can't just write it off based on how much time it took. Time is a poor measure of value. If you sic two programmers independently on the same task, the final product matters more than the time it took to produce (within reason). If the results were identical except for time, no one would argue that the one that took longer to produce was worth more (unless you're Marx).
So it comes down to measuring the contribution to the final product. If the writing doubled the value of the project, the writer should get a larger share than if the writing was merely adequate.
If you're dealing with a writer who has a ton of successes under his belt, and he comes in, does a month of work and leaves with a fat check, that's just the market rewarding his skill, same as it would be with a code consultant, or a designer.
Of course, this is pretty much the opposite of the way unions work. C'est la vie.
Like most of us are in a situation to make things like that compatible with existing systems?
Whenever someone comes to me with that sort of demand, I tell 'em I'll be glad to support it, whenever they buy the software/hardware appliance/developers license/whatever that I'll need to run to support it. And I am happy to do that, because that does fall under the realm of things that I can do, unlike waving the magic compatibility wand and recoding interfaces to support a platform that only just released a real api.
Well, I'm entrusted with financial data, so my credit score is absolutely relevant to my job. Having someone who is perpetually in debt handling a lot of cash is a bad idea.
As far as the drugs thing goes, I personally could care less about drug use. The government thinks it should be illegal for whatever stupid reason they have today, and so they give businesses the nod so they can buy into the whole "War on Drugs" nonsense. The fact that it is illegal gives them a ton of leverage in this case (you'd never lose a lawsuit against someone alleging that you discriminate against convicted criminals), and the hyperbole that surrounds drug use makes it likely that a jury would agree with a companies desire not to have "that kind of person" working for them.
I think you're right, that they judge based on productivity, but they can't use that as a reason, they have to come up with a reason that has to do with health, safety, or character.
Urine and credit score can be argued to be relevant to employment. It's hard to see how a level of monitoring this invasive could slip by in a non-secure industry, or one that doesn't depend on operator health for safety.
Well, aside from the fact that their economy would collapse if they tried to attack us...It is they who are primarily responsible for the fact that that dollar has stayed so high for so long...They've been inflating it by buying billions of dollars worth of our bonds.
Setting all that aside, I think you should check some of your facts. For a lot of products, it's hard not to find "Made in China" stamped all over them, but if you want to blow shit up, look for "Made in the USA" because we are still the kings of making things that go boom. China can throw squeaky plastic crap at us all day long.
So we should have spent billions propping up factories running on turn of the century technology on the off chance that someday they'd be profitable again? That makes even less sense. It's almost never a good idea economically to do crap like that.
Anyway, I doubt we're going to leap back to our manufacturing roots in a big way. Lot of the existing industries will see boosts, we may see some foreign investment, and new domestic investment. We won't see a return to the 1940's, and we shouldn't. Cheaper dollar doesn't roll back the times; our economy has largely passed beyond that sort of labor.
Weakening dollar also means products and services produced in the US become more globally competitive; that means more work done here. Rising oil prices give good incentives for conservation and efficiency...Relatively modest increases there will drive energy prices back down.
I don't think anything is inevitable at this point...It'll all depend on how people handle it, as always.
Don't discount people who just deploy OSS for a living. I know a guy who probably hasn't contributed 10 lines of code over his career, but who is so effective at taking poorly documented OSS projects and making them function beautifully in commercial deployments...He makes a good living, evangelizes the hell out of OSS (he's a true believer), and drives money back into the projects.
Most critically of all, he has the ability to see the flaws, and to visualize the next step that would make the project into something awesome. People like that, who know the features that really need to exist in the project, are almost more important than the people who end up actually coding the feature in. I can do the code, but the spark of genius behind a really good feature...That's special.
Do they think OSS has a problem with recessions? Quite the reverse.
I got nailed in the Bomb, like a lot of us. Went through 4 companies in 3 years, and only one of them still existed after I left it (for another 3 whole months). Leaves you with nothing but crap on your resume; can't even prove the companies existed, more less get a reference.
I got left with skills that no one wanted, and no money to buy professional tools to start my own business. So I turned to Open Source. I'd hardly used it to that point; hadn't had any real need. But the ability to churn out products using nothing but freely available tools put money in my pocket, let me undercut my competition, and basically saw me through a rough patch. I've never been as active in OSS development as I was in those days...It wasn't because I had so much free time, it was because I needed that stuff, and if it didn't exist, I damn well had to create it!
So they think OSS is something that comes out of people being well off? All of us volunteer because we're all so bored, and have so much money and free time that we just sit around coding things? Are they nuts? Did Linus start programming Linux because he was bored with working with all the fancy Unix code people were throwing at him? No! He started it because he couldn't afford the expensive stuff, so he damn well made his own. Did anyone pay him to do it? No! Did he end up making money off it none-the-less? Yes!
Far from being bad for OSS, recessions are GOOD for OSS. You lose your job, and freelance while looking for another one...What are you going to use? Companies have a need, and no budget to fill it with commercial software...What are they going to use? Sure, if you specialize in zillion dollar OSS deployments, you've got problems (problem #1: You're mythical), but the true strength of OSS isn't in giant deployments, but in filling in the gaps...When the gaps get bigger, there we are.
If you've got a track record of doing more with less, recessions are always a good time for you.
So after you've picked up those languages, what then? Half the people reading this will never be more than code monkeys; it's certainly no use to them. Hell I've programmed in half of those (LISP, PROLOG, C) and nothing there is remotely useful to me in my daily life. In most cases there aren't really any practical applications for that stuff (C obviously being the exception).
It seems more to me like pretensiousness than real need. Almost all of those languages have a very specific, very narrow, strength...I learned Prolog because I was working with automata, and that's the best language for that sort of thing. When I'm not doing that, it's useless, and most people will never move in that direction.
I'd definitely recommend C, because it really does give you insight into what your code is really doing, and that does have benefits. Everything else though? Not so much.
Oh please. I've worked in the business for a decade. My advice for an emerging undergrad? Remember that you don't know crap.
School is about a foundation. You're worried about what you know about C? You may never in your life program in C. Or you may program in it every day. Either way, you're not going to get your first job based on your college programming experience, not unless you did something so wildly off the charts that you could have programmed it in RPG and people'd still be lining up to hire you.
What you need most to remember is that it's your work once you're out in the world that will define your career. It's a hell of a lot more important to buckle down and learn in the real world, than it is to leave college thinking that you "know" how it's supposed to be.
Regardless of the Autisim link (which was thin at best) ethylmercury hasn't had the sort of widescale toxicity tests that bioaccumulating mercury compounds (e.g methylmercury) have had.
Until that point, I'm not big on the idea of injecting a solution containing a large amount of ethylmercury into my body. Most mercury compounds aren't really anything that anyone would want to inject.
It's no better to be irrationally pro-ethylmercury just because it's a good preservative...The reason the uninformed freak out so easily is because we leave ourselves open to this crap by not doing to full research.
They taught mostly Java where I went to school, though "taught" isn't really right. They didn't "teach" by languages at all, it's just that the programming projects mostly tended to be in Java, unless the class concepts were better suited to something else.
Mostly the classes were theory, concepts; stuff that applied equally to all languages. It was weird in some ways; I had a networking class that assigned the eternal "create a server/client chat program" project, where part of the project was a Java GUI. At this point, I'd never programmed a GUI, and neither had anyone else I talked to. The response of the TA (who was the only one who'd ever give programming advice, because the professor only dealt in theory), was that GUI design was beyond the scope of the class and we'd just have to figure it out.
My method for figuring it out involved downloading a Java editor, and using the GUI design tools. It was the first time I'd used a graphical editor for Java; it was encouraged to do the work in VI or Emacs, and generally, that's all we did.
Now I hated that crap at the time, but nothing has prepared me better for my day to day life than having projects dumped on me where I had to goddamn well use my initiative and figure it out. Over and over again, I was forced to go out and read and work out for myself how to translate the theory into code. These days, I program in Java about 20% of the time. I'd hardly say it stunted my abilities, and it certainly didn't make me into a cookie cutter corporate programmer.
I'd have to say that specifically teaching any language is a problem. They all come in and out of fashion. I work with a guy whose mind is stuck in Visual Basic...And I don't mean.Net. The idea that you should focus on intellectually sexy teaching languages (like goddamn SCHEME) because it builds character or some crap...I just don't buy it. Language is a tool, and should be treated as such.
I think it only works where the world is itself interesting enough to make the game worth playing. I love sandbox games, though admittedly I seldom finish them, because finishing to me seems like it's missing the point.
I think a dynamic world coupled with a multi-user environment offers a lot of sandbox possibilities. Imagine GTA if you could be a cop, shooting down other dumbasses who were running over prostitutes? That'd be a hell of a game.
I think in the long run the genre will transition to MMOs...That's the natural progression, because the biggest weakness of the MMO is that there isn't enough content, and the biggest weakness of the sandbox game is that the content is diluted by the fact that you can effectively skip it if you don't want to do it. I think Eve has done a good job of moving in this direction. I think you'll see others following that lead.
There is an economic principle known as "Opportunity Cost." In a nutshell, it boils down to time management...You have limited time, and so you must decide what to spend that time doing.
Now a big-brained academic could spend their time learning about computers (assuming that's not already their specialty), and become competent...They probably still wouldn't be as proficient as a full time IT guy because they don't do it all the time, but they could fix stuff if they had to.
The question is, why the hell would they do that? That's in no way their job, and the time they spend learning to do it half as well as someone who does it for a living is just time wasted that they could be using to do something that they do better. It's an opportunity cost. It's the same reason most of us don't make our own clothes. We're all smart people, we could probably figure it out...But WHY? What possible benefit is there?
I have this argument with my boss, who insists that all people in his department should be able to take over for all other people. While it can be done, the amount of time that is wasted in eternal cross-training so that I can do a job half as well as some other guy represents a massive opportunity cost which is manager brain is unable to reconcile with the decrease in productivity that follows.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems more obvious that "Wheels = disqualification" than it does that "Prosthetic legs = disqualification." I suspect a lot of it is due to the fact that people are imagining him running on the sort of "around town" prosthetics that most amputees use for day to day walking, rather than the carbon fibre arcs that he actually runs on.
Just looking at them, it's debatable as to whether or not its an advantage, but assuming the science was done correctly, a large mechanical advantage over an unmodified human should be grounds for disqualification from events that only feature unmodified humans. That's just math.
I think we all wish you weren't an intellectually bankrupt hysteric, but wishes don't seem to help very much.
If you truly believe that a few cells bound together are capable of experiencing cruelty, then how do you go through your day? If you sneeze you're killing more cells than that. I certainly hope you're a vegan, but even there, how do you bear the sufferings of all the vegetables?
In your world menstruation is murder, and masturbation is genocide, so why don't you go crusade against porn or something?
To you and me. Jack Thompson and his ilk would class them all as murderer-trainers.
"Anyway, I don't think the case for banning/editing/etc games is as strong as you say -- it's more that many parents and legislators are waking up to the fact that games aren't ms pac man and galaga anymore."
Waking up? I'm too young to have been in the absolute first wave of gamers...I was damn close (I'm 33), but just a touch too young for Pong. At that, I'm old enough to have gone through college, and had a kid who would be 12 by now. In the next 10 years, whenever you "Think of the Children" you're going to be thinking of the children of people who can hum the theme music to Super Mario Brothers. People who were in high school or college when Doom came out.
Jesus, I remember playing galaga on those table top machines, when I was too young for my feet to touch the floor...A good quarter century ago. No one who can vote and has kids younger than 30 is "waking up" to first person shooters for the first time, unless they're Amish.
Don't mistake it. The people who are against games right now, know exactly what they're crusading against. Ten years from now, all of them but the diehards will have moved on to things that they care about more, like dentures.
The article I read on it yesterday said that aside from possible applications in stealth technology (they haven't tested its reflective index against IR and radar yet), there were a lot of possible applications in solar energy.
And objects which reflect light on all wavelengths are actually white not black. All black things absorb light to varying degrees.
Shrug. It was more of an example, though I admit I was thinking of that goddamn Blackberry mail server when I did the post.
Shrug. The difference between a well written game and a poorly written game is so obvious as to not even need pointing out. A poorly written game with beautiful graphics, is still likely to be a flop, while a graphically mediocre game with excellent writing can be a huge success.
You can't just write it off based on how much time it took. Time is a poor measure of value. If you sic two programmers independently on the same task, the final product matters more than the time it took to produce (within reason). If the results were identical except for time, no one would argue that the one that took longer to produce was worth more (unless you're Marx).
So it comes down to measuring the contribution to the final product. If the writing doubled the value of the project, the writer should get a larger share than if the writing was merely adequate.
If you're dealing with a writer who has a ton of successes under his belt, and he comes in, does a month of work and leaves with a fat check, that's just the market rewarding his skill, same as it would be with a code consultant, or a designer.
Of course, this is pretty much the opposite of the way unions work. C'est la vie.
Like most of us are in a situation to make things like that compatible with existing systems?
Whenever someone comes to me with that sort of demand, I tell 'em I'll be glad to support it, whenever they buy the software/hardware appliance/developers license/whatever that I'll need to run to support it. And I am happy to do that, because that does fall under the realm of things that I can do, unlike waving the magic compatibility wand and recoding interfaces to support a platform that only just released a real api.
Well, I'm entrusted with financial data, so my credit score is absolutely relevant to my job. Having someone who is perpetually in debt handling a lot of cash is a bad idea.
As far as the drugs thing goes, I personally could care less about drug use. The government thinks it should be illegal for whatever stupid reason they have today, and so they give businesses the nod so they can buy into the whole "War on Drugs" nonsense. The fact that it is illegal gives them a ton of leverage in this case (you'd never lose a lawsuit against someone alleging that you discriminate against convicted criminals), and the hyperbole that surrounds drug use makes it likely that a jury would agree with a companies desire not to have "that kind of person" working for them.
I think you're right, that they judge based on productivity, but they can't use that as a reason, they have to come up with a reason that has to do with health, safety, or character.
No way dude, that would be awesome.
"Johnson, just take a look at that guy. He works all day, and his vitals are like he's lying on the couch. He's a machine! Give him a raise!"
Urine and credit score can be argued to be relevant to employment. It's hard to see how a level of monitoring this invasive could slip by in a non-secure industry, or one that doesn't depend on operator health for safety.
Don't worry, we'll just outsource the wearing of our biometrics to people in southeast asia.
Time to make outsourcing work for us!
I don't know if you read this article today on Reuters...But I'm afraid they have closed that loophole now.
If you hate Boll, read the article, it's like hot cocoa for the mind. He's pretty much done, as far as wide distribution goes.
Well, aside from the fact that their economy would collapse if they tried to attack us...It is they who are primarily responsible for the fact that that dollar has stayed so high for so long...They've been inflating it by buying billions of dollars worth of our bonds.
Setting all that aside, I think you should check some of your facts. For a lot of products, it's hard not to find "Made in China" stamped all over them, but if you want to blow shit up, look for "Made in the USA" because we are still the kings of making things that go boom. China can throw squeaky plastic crap at us all day long.
So we should have spent billions propping up factories running on turn of the century technology on the off chance that someday they'd be profitable again? That makes even less sense. It's almost never a good idea economically to do crap like that.
Anyway, I doubt we're going to leap back to our manufacturing roots in a big way. Lot of the existing industries will see boosts, we may see some foreign investment, and new domestic investment. We won't see a return to the 1940's, and we shouldn't. Cheaper dollar doesn't roll back the times; our economy has largely passed beyond that sort of labor.
Weakening dollar also means products and services produced in the US become more globally competitive; that means more work done here. Rising oil prices give good incentives for conservation and efficiency...Relatively modest increases there will drive energy prices back down.
I don't think anything is inevitable at this point...It'll all depend on how people handle it, as always.
Don't discount people who just deploy OSS for a living. I know a guy who probably hasn't contributed 10 lines of code over his career, but who is so effective at taking poorly documented OSS projects and making them function beautifully in commercial deployments...He makes a good living, evangelizes the hell out of OSS (he's a true believer), and drives money back into the projects.
Most critically of all, he has the ability to see the flaws, and to visualize the next step that would make the project into something awesome. People like that, who know the features that really need to exist in the project, are almost more important than the people who end up actually coding the feature in. I can do the code, but the spark of genius behind a really good feature...That's special.
Do they think OSS has a problem with recessions? Quite the reverse.
I got nailed in the Bomb, like a lot of us. Went through 4 companies in 3 years, and only one of them still existed after I left it (for another 3 whole months). Leaves you with nothing but crap on your resume; can't even prove the companies existed, more less get a reference.
I got left with skills that no one wanted, and no money to buy professional tools to start my own business. So I turned to Open Source. I'd hardly used it to that point; hadn't had any real need. But the ability to churn out products using nothing but freely available tools put money in my pocket, let me undercut my competition, and basically saw me through a rough patch. I've never been as active in OSS development as I was in those days...It wasn't because I had so much free time, it was because I needed that stuff, and if it didn't exist, I damn well had to create it!
So they think OSS is something that comes out of people being well off? All of us volunteer because we're all so bored, and have so much money and free time that we just sit around coding things? Are they nuts? Did Linus start programming Linux because he was bored with working with all the fancy Unix code people were throwing at him? No! He started it because he couldn't afford the expensive stuff, so he damn well made his own. Did anyone pay him to do it? No! Did he end up making money off it none-the-less? Yes!
Far from being bad for OSS, recessions are GOOD for OSS. You lose your job, and freelance while looking for another one...What are you going to use? Companies have a need, and no budget to fill it with commercial software...What are they going to use? Sure, if you specialize in zillion dollar OSS deployments, you've got problems (problem #1: You're mythical), but the true strength of OSS isn't in giant deployments, but in filling in the gaps...When the gaps get bigger, there we are.
If you've got a track record of doing more with less, recessions are always a good time for you.
So after you've picked up those languages, what then? Half the people reading this will never be more than code monkeys; it's certainly no use to them. Hell I've programmed in half of those (LISP, PROLOG, C) and nothing there is remotely useful to me in my daily life. In most cases there aren't really any practical applications for that stuff (C obviously being the exception).
It seems more to me like pretensiousness than real need. Almost all of those languages have a very specific, very narrow, strength...I learned Prolog because I was working with automata, and that's the best language for that sort of thing. When I'm not doing that, it's useless, and most people will never move in that direction.
I'd definitely recommend C, because it really does give you insight into what your code is really doing, and that does have benefits. Everything else though? Not so much.
Oh please. I've worked in the business for a decade. My advice for an emerging undergrad? Remember that you don't know crap.
School is about a foundation. You're worried about what you know about C? You may never in your life program in C. Or you may program in it every day. Either way, you're not going to get your first job based on your college programming experience, not unless you did something so wildly off the charts that you could have programmed it in RPG and people'd still be lining up to hire you.
What you need most to remember is that it's your work once you're out in the world that will define your career. It's a hell of a lot more important to buckle down and learn in the real world, than it is to leave college thinking that you "know" how it's supposed to be.
Regardless of the Autisim link (which was thin at best) ethylmercury hasn't had the sort of widescale toxicity tests that bioaccumulating mercury compounds (e.g methylmercury) have had.
Until that point, I'm not big on the idea of injecting a solution containing a large amount of ethylmercury into my body. Most mercury compounds aren't really anything that anyone would want to inject.
It's no better to be irrationally pro-ethylmercury just because it's a good preservative...The reason the uninformed freak out so easily is because we leave ourselves open to this crap by not doing to full research.
I spent a half an hour doing domain name searches after the last article on this, and all the ones available then are still available.
Mind you, the top level search wasn't available, but the lower tier ones that were available are still available.
They taught mostly Java where I went to school, though "taught" isn't really right. They didn't "teach" by languages at all, it's just that the programming projects mostly tended to be in Java, unless the class concepts were better suited to something else.
.Net. The idea that you should focus on intellectually sexy teaching languages (like goddamn SCHEME) because it builds character or some crap...I just don't buy it. Language is a tool, and should be treated as such.
Mostly the classes were theory, concepts; stuff that applied equally to all languages. It was weird in some ways; I had a networking class that assigned the eternal "create a server/client chat program" project, where part of the project was a Java GUI. At this point, I'd never programmed a GUI, and neither had anyone else I talked to. The response of the TA (who was the only one who'd ever give programming advice, because the professor only dealt in theory), was that GUI design was beyond the scope of the class and we'd just have to figure it out.
My method for figuring it out involved downloading a Java editor, and using the GUI design tools. It was the first time I'd used a graphical editor for Java; it was encouraged to do the work in VI or Emacs, and generally, that's all we did.
Now I hated that crap at the time, but nothing has prepared me better for my day to day life than having projects dumped on me where I had to goddamn well use my initiative and figure it out. Over and over again, I was forced to go out and read and work out for myself how to translate the theory into code. These days, I program in Java about 20% of the time. I'd hardly say it stunted my abilities, and it certainly didn't make me into a cookie cutter corporate programmer.
I'd have to say that specifically teaching any language is a problem. They all come in and out of fashion. I work with a guy whose mind is stuck in Visual Basic...And I don't mean
I think it only works where the world is itself interesting enough to make the game worth playing. I love sandbox games, though admittedly I seldom finish them, because finishing to me seems like it's missing the point.
I think a dynamic world coupled with a multi-user environment offers a lot of sandbox possibilities. Imagine GTA if you could be a cop, shooting down other dumbasses who were running over prostitutes? That'd be a hell of a game.
I think in the long run the genre will transition to MMOs...That's the natural progression, because the biggest weakness of the MMO is that there isn't enough content, and the biggest weakness of the sandbox game is that the content is diluted by the fact that you can effectively skip it if you don't want to do it. I think Eve has done a good job of moving in this direction. I think you'll see others following that lead.
There is an economic principle known as "Opportunity Cost." In a nutshell, it boils down to time management...You have limited time, and so you must decide what to spend that time doing.
Now a big-brained academic could spend their time learning about computers (assuming that's not already their specialty), and become competent...They probably still wouldn't be as proficient as a full time IT guy because they don't do it all the time, but they could fix stuff if they had to.
The question is, why the hell would they do that? That's in no way their job, and the time they spend learning to do it half as well as someone who does it for a living is just time wasted that they could be using to do something that they do better. It's an opportunity cost. It's the same reason most of us don't make our own clothes. We're all smart people, we could probably figure it out...But WHY? What possible benefit is there?
I have this argument with my boss, who insists that all people in his department should be able to take over for all other people. While it can be done, the amount of time that is wasted in eternal cross-training so that I can do a job half as well as some other guy represents a massive opportunity cost which is manager brain is unable to reconcile with the decrease in productivity that follows.