Not sure why everyone seems to think that microsoft pays no taxes. Look at its income statement on Yahoo.
Particularly, the line
Income Tax Expense: $1,374,000,000
Granted, this is just the amount they report on the balance sheet for investors (the tax books are different), but if they were paying NO taxes I think they would point this out and not take the expense.
everyone uses IQ as a test of intelligence, but it's a bunch of bull. do you think intelligence is a scalar quantity that fits on a nice scale?
IQ tests were created to test the developing progress of mental patients.
an IQ is a ratio of your "mental age" / "physical age" * 100.
the average IQ is 100 because most people's mental age is the same as their physical age. it's not because the test is scaled and rebalanced to have this effect. Similarly, an IQ > 100 means you've developed more quickly, 100 means you developed more slowly.
but it doesn't really have to do with intelligence at large, i don't think there is any way to test it except to look at the decisions and actions one has made in life. THAT is a nice test of intelligence =)
I think that's a great point, and I agree with you. Children should have to deal with loss, and in fact, they are often confronted with it: pets and elder relatives dying, even movies (it seems that the hero in almost every disney movie must lose a parent; Bambi, Dumbo, Lion King...).
However, I see violent video games differently. There is no pause or discussion of coping after you mow down pedestrians in GTA3. The point I'm trying to make (perhaps not clearly enough in my first post) is that games glorify violence, and often show it without the accompanying suffering.
I belive that presenting such a situation/scene to a child without explaining it is irresponsible. And this is what most modern games do. Violence is sometimes necessary and noble (self-defence), but most games just present death and killing without explanation. This is situation that is artificially created, so it is easy to insert a message.
If no such message is present, then perhaps the game should be available to adults, i.e. those who are mature enough to understand it properly.
I just tried inverting the colors in Opera, and it's pretty nice.
However, black-on-white is still a lot of contrast... maybe grey on black, or yellow (as another poster wrote) would be even smoother.
It's true that bad parenting (or no parenting at all) is a large problem, but the video games and TV shows need to take responsibility as well.
Parents who police and control their child's every movement probably cause as much psychological damage as the violent games/shows. Realistically, parents cannot monitor every audiovisual input their child receives -- it is the duty of those *creating* that input to make it reasonably wholesome for the sake of children.
Violent games/TV shows are about trends -- not every person will attack someone, but does the average person become more violent? If so, there is a negative influence. Think about brainwashing and propaganda -- still think TV/movies/games don't have any effect? None at all?
A particularly poignant example is this: in high school, I saw a video that showed a live execution. It was during the Vietnam War; an officer held a gun to the head of an enemy solider (Viet Cong I think), pulled the trigger, and the victim fell. He slumped over, blood spurted out of his head like a fountain, and slowly subsided.
That really effected me. I think we can agree that is a moving video. But why is that so different from a video game depicting the same thing. "Because it's real!" you say. The fact that *you* know it is real and not a hollywood set makes that difference. The same exact audiovisual input, coupled with the fact that "it's real" makes it scary.
Now think about kids. They have a hard time understanding what is real and what isn't, hell, we give them stories about the Easter Bunny and Santa. And so we expect them to understand that the deaths on the news are entirely different than the deaths on a video game, even though with increasing graphics, etc. they may look strikingly similar.
I'm not against banning the games; humans have come a long way from the Roman Colleseum and spectators making a sport of death. Death is a sad, inevitable fact of life, which cannot be fully appreciated by young children. Training them to kill at that age, or to view repeated killings, will surely have some effect. Minimizing this before they are old enough to understand (like restricting porn from them when they are young) is a Good Thing.
So yeah, I want to play some counterstrike/quake like the next guy, but maybe the little chilluns should kill monsters (aka Doom 3) instead of living, breathing humans.
If I recall correctly, some languages actually do this. For example, in Hebrew the name Yahweh is written
Yhwh
Similarly, in Arabic the vowel sounds, which are indicated by marks above/below the letters (which are consonants), are used for the benefit of non-native speakers. Native speakers know how to fill in the vowels.
It seems this compression would work quite well for native English speakers... if you are taking notes, for example, you can probably increase your writing speed 20-50% by eliminating vowels. It's a lossy compression scheme, but our brain does a decent job of nearest-neighbor reconstruction, based on context. The small words get tricky though...
I think you pointed out something interesting, others were being unnecessarily harsh.
Basically, your statement is:
Any prime number must be of the form 6n + 1 or 6n - 1.
The inverse is not necessarily true: 6n + 1 doesn't necessarily go to primes. Likewise, all primes are odd, but not all odds are prime.
I like your points, but don't think this argument invalidates the Chinese Room example.
Yes, an initial level of understanding is necessary to create the Chinese room. Searle argues that the *Chinese room* does not necessarily have this understanding (while the creator does).
That is, the Chinese room can act intelligently, but does not necessarily have intelligence. Likewise, an adder in hardware does not understand addition, although it adds. An odometer does not understand counting, although it counts.
I like that you explicitly state the unwritten assumption of the Chinese room: a being with understanding created it. But I don't see how this invalidates the example.
This is interesting. Is google a trademark? Is it in sufficient common usage to be acceptable (I.e. coke for any soda down in the south, xerox for generic photocopy, kleenex for a tissue).
Although in this case, googling something means going to google, and not a generic search.
I think we should assume more of the author. Think of it this way:
Using General Relativity, you can predict what the gravitational field will be. His experiment measured what the field actually was. If the predictions match the measurement, the theory is confirmed (or at least not disproven).
Yeah, I'm sure when the other guy writes "his own" program he sets the bits in RAM using two paper clips and a battery. Premade compilers, linkers and assemblers are for chumps.
I think e-ink and flexible displays could take off if the readibility improves to that of paper. The sharpness and contrast of ink-on-paper is extremely difficult to beat. Look at a LCD or monitor close enough, and you can distinguish the individual pixels (the limit on font resolution). The pixelization of a curve comprising a parenthesis can easily be seen.
Now try looking at a printed page: you can't see the dots comprising the individual letters. S's curve smoothly, etc.
Now, hold up a white piece of paper and compare it to the white slashdot background. Quite a difference, eh? Even the black from computer displays seems more "shiny" than the black ink on paper (maybe just the glare =) ).
Has e been found to more decimal places? Pi and e are so related [Euler's equation, e^(i * pi) + 1 = 0], I wonder if precision in one will lead to precision in the other.
I'm still using the Dell laptop I got freshman year (I'm a senior now):
400Mhz Celeron, 192 MB Ram, 4 Gig harddrive
I'm a CS major, and when I need to code I ssh/xterm into the more powerful machines here. When I want to play Warcraft/counterstrike I use a cluster computer.
I don't do any video editing, but what fraction of the population does? I use email/IM/Opera 90% of the time, the other 10% in ssh. This article seems right on.
Slashdot Mirror
heh, i love finding contradictory adages. it seems that every adage boils down to "don't do too much of one thing", which is good advice.
...
He who hesitates is lost vs. Look before you leap
Beware Greeks bearing gifts vs. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
Eye for an eye vs. Turn the other cheek
Practice makes perfect vs. Everyone makes mistakes (or: No one is perfect)
there are so many =)
Particularly, the line
Income Tax Expense: $1,374,000,000
Granted, this is just the amount they report on the balance sheet for investors (the tax books are different), but if they were paying NO taxes I think they would point this out and not take the expense.
It looks and feels like a TV remote control. Ugh.
everyone uses IQ as a test of intelligence, but it's a bunch of bull. do you think intelligence is a scalar quantity that fits on a nice scale? IQ tests were created to test the developing progress of mental patients. an IQ is a ratio of your "mental age" / "physical age" * 100. the average IQ is 100 because most people's mental age is the same as their physical age. it's not because the test is scaled and rebalanced to have this effect. Similarly, an IQ > 100 means you've developed more quickly, 100 means you developed more slowly. but it doesn't really have to do with intelligence at large, i don't think there is any way to test it except to look at the decisions and actions one has made in life. THAT is a nice test of intelligence =)
I think that's a great point, and I agree with you. Children should have to deal with loss, and in fact, they are often confronted with it: pets and elder relatives dying, even movies (it seems that the hero in almost every disney movie must lose a parent; Bambi, Dumbo, Lion King...).
However, I see violent video games differently. There is no pause or discussion of coping after you mow down pedestrians in GTA3. The point I'm trying to make (perhaps not clearly enough in my first post) is that games glorify violence, and often show it without the accompanying suffering.
I belive that presenting such a situation/scene to a child without explaining it is irresponsible. And this is what most modern games do. Violence is sometimes necessary and noble (self-defence), but most games just present death and killing without explanation. This is situation that is artificially created, so it is easy to insert a message.
If no such message is present, then perhaps the game should be available to adults, i.e. those who are mature enough to understand it properly.
I just tried inverting the colors in Opera, and it's pretty nice. However, black-on-white is still a lot of contrast... maybe grey on black, or yellow (as another poster wrote) would be even smoother.
It's true that bad parenting (or no parenting at all) is a large problem, but the video games and TV shows need to take responsibility as well.
Parents who police and control their child's every movement probably cause as much psychological damage as the violent games/shows. Realistically, parents cannot monitor every audiovisual input their child receives -- it is the duty of those *creating* that input to make it reasonably wholesome for the sake of children.
Violent games/TV shows are about trends -- not every person will attack someone, but does the average person become more violent? If so, there is a negative influence. Think about brainwashing and propaganda -- still think TV/movies/games don't have any effect? None at all?
A particularly poignant example is this: in high school, I saw a video that showed a live execution. It was during the Vietnam War; an officer held a gun to the head of an enemy solider (Viet Cong I think), pulled the trigger, and the victim fell. He slumped over, blood spurted out of his head like a fountain, and slowly subsided.
That really effected me. I think we can agree that is a moving video. But why is that so different from a video game depicting the same thing. "Because it's real!" you say. The fact that *you* know it is real and not a hollywood set makes that difference. The same exact audiovisual input, coupled with the fact that "it's real" makes it scary.
Now think about kids. They have a hard time understanding what is real and what isn't, hell, we give them stories about the Easter Bunny and Santa. And so we expect them to understand that the deaths on the news are entirely different than the deaths on a video game, even though with increasing graphics, etc. they may look strikingly similar.
I'm not against banning the games; humans have come a long way from the Roman Colleseum and spectators making a sport of death. Death is a sad, inevitable fact of life, which cannot be fully appreciated by young children. Training them to kill at that age, or to view repeated killings, will surely have some effect. Minimizing this before they are old enough to understand (like restricting porn from them when they are young) is a Good Thing.
So yeah, I want to play some counterstrike/quake like the next guy, but maybe the little chilluns should kill monsters (aka Doom 3) instead of living, breathing humans.
That's my two cents. =)
I think the compiler might do the for -> while translation...
For those too lazy to click:
/d1///d2////d3/test.html becomes /d1/d2/d3/test.html
... imagine an input like
Problem: remove excess slashes from a URL, so
Original Algorithm:
If an additional slash is found, copy the remainder of the string over. So
a///b => a//b => a/b
This copying, an inner loop, makes the algorithm O(n^2).
New algorithm:
Have 2 pointers, and copy from one to the other. One pointer skips additional slashes. At the end, throw on a "\0" to terminate the string.
a///b => a/b
The second pointer has a loop to skip over additional slashes, and each slash is only visited once. Thus, the algorithm is O(n).
Cool stuff
a///...{500 slashes later}...///b
It could really do some damage to the first algorithm.
If I recall correctly, some languages actually do this. For example, in Hebrew the name Yahweh is written
... if you are taking notes, for example, you can probably increase your writing speed 20-50% by eliminating vowels. It's a lossy compression scheme, but our brain does a decent job of nearest-neighbor reconstruction, based on context. The small words get tricky though...
Yhwh
Similarly, in Arabic the vowel sounds, which are indicated by marks above/below the letters (which are consonants), are used for the benefit of non-native speakers. Native speakers know how to fill in the vowels.
It seems this compression would work quite well for native English speakers
t (it, at, eat, out, to)
I think you pointed out something interesting, others were being unnecessarily harsh. Basically, your statement is: Any prime number must be of the form 6n + 1 or 6n - 1. The inverse is not necessarily true: 6n + 1 doesn't necessarily go to primes. Likewise, all primes are odd, but not all odds are prime.
I like your points, but don't think this argument invalidates the Chinese Room example.
Yes, an initial level of understanding is necessary to create the Chinese room. Searle argues that the *Chinese room* does not necessarily have this understanding (while the creator does).
That is, the Chinese room can act intelligently, but does not necessarily have intelligence. Likewise, an adder in hardware does not understand addition, although it adds. An odometer does not understand counting, although it counts.
I like that you explicitly state the unwritten assumption of the Chinese room: a being with understanding created it. But I don't see how this invalidates the example.
This is interesting. Is google a trademark? Is it in sufficient common usage to be acceptable (I.e. coke for any soda down in the south, xerox for generic photocopy, kleenex for a tissue).
Although in this case, googling something means going to google, and not a generic search.
... everything you didn't write to get your program to run?
It will give some pasty programmers a good reason to get outside =). Unless they SSH in from a wireless link...
I think we should assume more of the author. Think of it this way: Using General Relativity, you can predict what the gravitational field will be. His experiment measured what the field actually was. If the predictions match the measurement, the theory is confirmed (or at least not disproven).
a slashdotted server. That bastard!
Right on man...
Yeah, I'm sure when the other guy writes "his own" program he sets the bits in RAM using two paper clips and a battery. Premade compilers, linkers and assemblers are for chumps.
Dreamweaver has a "clean up word html" option. But then again, another proprietary solution.
I think e-ink and flexible displays could take off if the readibility improves to that of paper. The sharpness and contrast of ink-on-paper is extremely difficult to beat. Look at a LCD or monitor close enough, and you can distinguish the individual pixels (the limit on font resolution). The pixelization of a curve comprising a parenthesis can easily be seen.
Now try looking at a printed page: you can't see the dots comprising the individual letters. S's curve smoothly, etc.
Now, hold up a white piece of paper and compare it to the white slashdot background. Quite a difference, eh? Even the black from computer displays seems more "shiny" than the black ink on paper (maybe just the glare =) ).
True, vegetarians don't have to be pacificsts. Have you seen that bumper sticker?
'I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, it's because I hate plants.'
Has e been found to more decimal places? Pi and e are so related [Euler's equation, e^(i * pi) + 1 = 0], I wonder if precision in one will lead to precision in the other.
Number ten in base ten is "10"
Number two in base two is "10"
Number sixteen in base sixteen is "10"
Obvious in hindsight, but interesting nonetheless. The "ones" digit of any number system is, by definition, never big enough to hold that number.
MY blue screen of death
I'm still using the Dell laptop I got freshman year (I'm a senior now): 400Mhz Celeron, 192 MB Ram, 4 Gig harddrive I'm a CS major, and when I need to code I ssh/xterm into the more powerful machines here. When I want to play Warcraft/counterstrike I use a cluster computer. I don't do any video editing, but what fraction of the population does? I use email/IM/Opera 90% of the time, the other 10% in ssh. This article seems right on.