> by the 6th week my default reaction to being awakened was to choke whatever woke me up...i am sure these kids have received the same benefits
The scary thing is how twisted your mind has become so that you're able to perceive your psychological problems as benefits. And we're training thousands of other people to behave like this too?
There's no point reading a study unless you know how likely it is to be accurate. I've never seen any kind of study to find out how accurate they are. So why should I consider this report as anything other than noise?
> Perhaps you're confusing normal usage with scientific terminology
Hello. We're talking science here. Hadn't you noticed? (And ancestral apes fit the definition in every dictionary I've looked in.) I bet you're one of those people who complains about the chemist's use of the word organic because it doesn't fit in with common usage down the supermarket. Idiot.
> My brother and I share the same parents, but he's not my ancestor, and nor am I his ancestor.
Bad analogy. The word ape is defined to include humans and all other modern apes as well as ancestral organisms that are common ancestors to humans and modern apes. The word 'brother' isn't defined like that. That's it. There is no more discussion to have. If you don't like this fact then you're simply using the word 'ape' unconventionally meaning you're not speaking the same language as the rest of us.
> they beat you over the head with whatever moral/political point they are trying to make at the time.
What is it with science fiction and moral lecturing? I was ecstatic at the beginning of BSG because it was so full of moral ambiguity, so far from the clarity of Star Trek. I think of an episode like Hero that seemed to completely undermine the notion of the moral hero in TV. I don't think it's completely lost this (I think Baltar is one of the more ambiguous characters in TV, and the whole foundation of BSG society still seems founded on the corruptness of the protagonists) but I do feel like the authors seem to have somehow forgotten their earlier sophistication. How can you write stories that seem to undermine a genre one week, and then fall into the usual cliché traps of that genre a few weeks later? I'd have thought that a writer would have to suffer major brain damage to have that much of a change in personality.
There's a 1% chance that I might have found that funny if you'd found a way to spell Uranus that actually contained the 4-letter word that's supposed to be the source of the humor.
> The purpose of dark matter is to explain why spiral galaxies can rotate as a fixed plate.
No it isn't. Spiral galaxies don't rotate like fixed plates. The spiral arms are density waves moving around galaxies and the rotation period of a star around the center of a galaxy varies with distance from the center of the galaxy. I don't know what astrophysicists need to do, but I do know that/. readers could do without people just making stuff up and trying to pass it off as science.
Eh? Warcraft and Starcraft were great games. Why would I want to take a break by watching some cheesy cut scene? If I wanted to stop playing I'd just get up and do something else. Thankfully I just pressed the Esc key every time yet another cheesy render appeared on my screen.
> Automatic resource freeing is not a static problem. It must be done in runtime.
Of course. But figuring out what branches to insert in the example above is static and *easy*, there's no excuse for a language not to do it for you.
> you don't have too many languages to choose from.
Yes, it's a pity. There is so much embedded code it's surprising things haven't moved much past how they were in the 60s. But the ideas are out there. There are papers on technqiues like region analysis for figuring out in advance what memory needs allocating, and there are interesting tools like Lava which can serve just as well as programming languages for embedded systems as well as HDLs. There are lots of smart people thinking hard about targeting small devices with functional languages and at some point I'll test this out.
...thinking to myself "What could possibly lie at Mercury's core". I went through a mental checklist. Cheese? No. Highly compacted fluffy bunnies? No. A sphere of pure neutronium? No. And then I got to hot molten magma and I thought "yup, it's gonna be pretty hot down there and Mercury is probably made of rock, so that sounds right." And guess what, now some scientists are saying the same thing. Amazing how far you can get just thinking in your armchair.
You really need to get a clue yourself. The compilers for embedded systems don't run on the embedded systems themselves, they run on PCs. The problem of figuring out how to free memory after the failures given above is a completely static problem that can easily be solved by a compiler. If your compiler is unable to automatically generate the kind of rollback code required by the example above then your language is seriously broken. This has nothing to do with the power of the device you're programming. Automatically generating jumps to deal with resource failures applies whether we're dealing with a 512 byte Atmel AVR or a 32MB ARM microcontroller. (Both devices I have experience of programming BTW.) No human should have to do this.
You sound like some of the embedded systems people I know - they never look out of their cubicles to see what's happening in the rest of the computer science world and still program the way their ancestors did in the 60s.
You're using a programming language where you have to write the code yourself to keep track of what memory has been allocated and then free whatever half-baked state you find yourself in when an error happens? I didn't know they still had such things. Tell me. Does your computer use valves or relays?
That's all I'm saying really. Maintain a healthy dose of scepticism and bear in mind that a journalist is likely to have distorted a story to include connections with current hot topics like video games and mass killings. I've no idea what actually happened here. But don't think that because you've ready a story about it you know either.
(Slightly different but this story was pretty popular recently. It's apparently a complete fabrication. How much work would a journalist have to have carried out to determine that before publishing it? Note the story was edited after the fact - it was originally published as fact.)
The first rule of scepticism is this: if X comes form an untrustworthy source, it doesn't tell you that X is true or false. It simply doesn't tell you anything at all. Government agencies do stupid things all the time. I know well, my wife works for two of them. So I won't simply declare this story false. But neither do I think that it's all that likely to be true either.
...taking this story so seriously. Have so few people ever experienced how an event in the real world is reported in the media? Nobody does this just because someone made a video game map. When I was a kid I created D&D scenarios based around my school that were full of violence and so did plenty of other kids. This is entirely normal behavior. (Normal modulo being a D&D player, that is.) Almost certainly this guy had a history and the video game aspect has been brought to the foreground by journalists for some other reason.
Over the years I've been involved in many stories that have been reported in the news and not a single time has the report been accurate. The job of a journalist is to get paid for telling stories. The less imaginative ones borrow some of the story elements from real world events. Don't they teach people how to read the media?
It's not straightforward. We have all these taboos about sex for a bunch of reasons. One of these is that sexual jealousy can do untold damage to a community. Just saying to people "have sex whenever you want" might sound like a good idea at first. But it's inevitable that over time relationships may form and reform and nothing is going to make crew members more resentful than hearing other crew members engaging in sexual activity with an ex-partner they still feel some attachment to.
> we need to think beyond the shackles of our ancient cultural silliness.
These so called shackles are probably there, not as a result of silliness, but as a result of thousands of years of experience of jealous males (and maybe females) duking it out.
Slashdot Mirror
The scary thing is how twisted your mind has become so that you're able to perceive your psychological problems as benefits. And we're training thousands of other people to behave like this too?
There's no point reading a study unless you know how likely it is to be accurate. I've never seen any kind of study to find out how accurate they are. So why should I consider this report as anything other than noise?
Hello. We're talking science here. Hadn't you noticed? (And ancestral apes fit the definition in every dictionary I've looked in.) I bet you're one of those people who complains about the chemist's use of the word organic because it doesn't fit in with common usage down the supermarket. Idiot.
> My brother and I share the same parents, but he's not my ancestor, and nor am I his ancestor. Bad analogy. The word ape is defined to include humans and all other modern apes as well as ancestral organisms that are common ancestors to humans and modern apes. The word 'brother' isn't defined like that. That's it. There is no more discussion to have. If you don't like this fact then you're simply using the word 'ape' unconventionally meaning you're not speaking the same language as the rest of us.
What is it with science fiction and moral lecturing? I was ecstatic at the beginning of BSG because it was so full of moral ambiguity, so far from the clarity of Star Trek. I think of an episode like Hero that seemed to completely undermine the notion of the moral hero in TV. I don't think it's completely lost this (I think Baltar is one of the more ambiguous characters in TV, and the whole foundation of BSG society still seems founded on the corruptness of the protagonists) but I do feel like the authors seem to have somehow forgotten their earlier sophistication. How can you write stories that seem to undermine a genre one week, and then fall into the usual cliché traps of that genre a few weeks later? I'd have thought that a writer would have to suffer major brain damage to have that much of a change in personality.
> Better to let it die... What a horrible metaphor to use for bringing the story to a conclusion.
There's a 1% chance that I might have found that funny if you'd found a way to spell Uranus that actually contained the 4-letter word that's supposed to be the source of the humor.
These are engineers working in an engineering department in a university.
No it isn't. Spiral galaxies don't rotate like fixed plates. The spiral arms are density waves moving around galaxies and the rotation period of a star around the center of a galaxy varies with distance from the center of the galaxy. I don't know what astrophysicists need to do, but I do know that /. readers could do without people just making stuff up and trying to pass it off as science.
...testing and 1% will find results that are 99% significant just by chance. Here's that 1% folks.
Story? There was a story? If I wanted stories I'd learn ro read. I just wanted to beat the s**t out of ogres, wizards, dragons, Zergs and Protoss.
Eh? Warcraft and Starcraft were great games. Why would I want to take a break by watching some cheesy cut scene? If I wanted to stop playing I'd just get up and do something else. Thankfully I just pressed the Esc key every time yet another cheesy render appeared on my screen.
I thought this was an English language web site.
Of course. But figuring out what branches to insert in the example above is static and *easy*, there's no excuse for a language not to do it for you.
> you don't have too many languages to choose from.
Yes, it's a pity. There is so much embedded code it's surprising things haven't moved much past how they were in the 60s. But the ideas are out there. There are papers on technqiues like region analysis for figuring out in advance what memory needs allocating, and there are interesting tools like Lava which can serve just as well as programming languages for embedded systems as well as HDLs. There are lots of smart people thinking hard about targeting small devices with functional languages and at some point I'll test this out.
And apparently the people who submit stories to /. sometimes betray their biases.
OMFG! Life is so hard!
...thinking to myself "What could possibly lie at Mercury's core". I went through a mental checklist. Cheese? No. Highly compacted fluffy bunnies? No. A sphere of pure neutronium? No. And then I got to hot molten magma and I thought "yup, it's gonna be pretty hot down there and Mercury is probably made of rock, so that sounds right." And guess what, now some scientists are saying the same thing. Amazing how far you can get just thinking in your armchair.
You sound like some of the embedded systems people I know - they never look out of their cubicles to see what's happening in the rest of the computer science world and still program the way their ancestors did in the 60s.
His code always worked first time?
You're using a programming language where you have to write the code yourself to keep track of what memory has been allocated and then free whatever half-baked state you find yourself in when an error happens? I didn't know they still had such things. Tell me. Does your computer use valves or relays?
That's all I'm saying really. Maintain a healthy dose of scepticism and bear in mind that a journalist is likely to have distorted a story to include connections with current hot topics like video games and mass killings. I've no idea what actually happened here. But don't think that because you've ready a story about it you know either.
(Slightly different but this story was pretty popular recently. It's apparently a complete fabrication. How much work would a journalist have to have carried out to determine that before publishing it? Note the story was edited after the fact - it was originally published as fact.)
The first rule of scepticism is this: if X comes form an untrustworthy source, it doesn't tell you that X is true or false. It simply doesn't tell you anything at all. Government agencies do stupid things all the time. I know well, my wife works for two of them. So I won't simply declare this story false. But neither do I think that it's all that likely to be true either.
...taking this story so seriously. Have so few people ever experienced how an event in the real world is reported in the media? Nobody does this just because someone made a video game map. When I was a kid I created D&D scenarios based around my school that were full of violence and so did plenty of other kids. This is entirely normal behavior. (Normal modulo being a D&D player, that is.) Almost certainly this guy had a history and the video game aspect has been brought to the foreground by journalists for some other reason. Over the years I've been involved in many stories that have been reported in the news and not a single time has the report been accurate. The job of a journalist is to get paid for telling stories. The less imaginative ones borrow some of the story elements from real world events. Don't they teach people how to read the media?
> we need to think beyond the shackles of our ancient cultural silliness.
These so called shackles are probably there, not as a result of silliness, but as a result of thousands of years of experience of jealous males (and maybe females) duking it out.
...Chladni pattern?