"One can observe one apple or one galaxy, but one cannot observe the number one.
Apples and galaxies are countable because we percieve them as distinct objects but if you look very closely the 'obvious' distinction between an apple and the rest of the universe is no so obvious after all.
Putting god(s) to one side, the mind is a mathematical construct that emerges from the activity of the brain and the nervous system. The language of maths does not describe the Universe, it describes our perception of it. In other words the mind is a mathematical entity that is to some degree self describing to other mathematical entities.
When one thinks of the mind in this way it comes as no surprise that maths is such a powerfull yet simple language for describing the 'real world'?
"The problem with the UN helping is it's a democratic process and by the time the members vote to form a study group to report on the degree of the required help, then reports back to the committee who holds a vote to request the..."
I will continue the theame of emphasising the good works of the UN in the case of the tsunami. A snippet below from this link dated ~4 weeks after the Tsunami hit. Note this is the area where the US were, the UN assisted across the rim of the Indian ocean to Ethiopia and brough political attention to the plight of NE Sri Lanka.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) had scaled up its plans to hire locals in Aceh to remove debris while creating employment opportunities for up to 3,000 people, from an initial 300, over the next six months. The agency has also provided 17 units of heavy equipment and 60 crew members to clear debris and bodies from the worst-hit areas.
Since the tsunami struck in Indonesia on 26 December, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has delivered over 4,000 tons of food to 330,000 people in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. It has also provided eight tons of medical supplies while the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has distributed information on the disease in emergency settings and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has delivered over 600 reproductive health kits.
BTW: I don't think admirals have been so gung-ho since the Mogadishu thing. IIRC, in the case of Indonesia they were welcomed with open arms after responding to a request for help by the Indonesians via the UN.
Meh, I could rattle of a list of 'evil' shit for just about any nation or international group, or I could quote what ambulance drivers and moticians talk about during lunch break, to do so would miss the point of my original post.
If there is a systemic problem with the UN it is that the permenent members of the UNSC use it as a method of fight proxy wars where real people (ie: smaller oil rich nations) get caught in the middle, still it's preferable to nothing.
"My point being, the educational games sector is filled with poorly made products that feature very little fun and are a pain to administer."
This is true for the entire software industry not just educational games. Also I think branding something 'educational' is kinda silly, education happens when you learn something new and modify your worldview to account for it. As a child in the 60's I loved Disney comics, adults told me they were a waste of time yet when I got older I realised I had I learnt stuff like Bolivia has emerald mines and many other tit-bits of knowledge from them. I also credit my appreciation of classical music to Bugs Bunny and Co.
A formal education and a good computer game are in fact similar, they both take a while to learn the basics, are somewhat repetitive, keep the next goal just out of reach and are fun for those willing to explore on their own. The difference (and the thing people are really complaining about) is the subject matter.
About 15yrs ago I wrote a game for MBA students at a university here in Australia. The object of the game was to grow a bussiness using a particular management theroy (the details and name of which escape me). It was textual and turn based, it ran for one semester and the students entered a budget once a week as part of an ongoing assignment. The lecturer I wrote it for did the testing, this worked well because I thought the game was boring and the programming was fun and he thought the opposite. For some reason the (adult) students perception of 'fun and educational' seemed to be heavily correlated with their ranking in the game even though the game was provided as a tool not a test.;)
I'm an Aussie, I generally agree with your post and think Americans (both in government and in private) are generous when disaster strikes.
The ships you speak of helped out in Indonesia, it took less than a week since, they were in the area and arrived before the Aussies could get there (and we live next door!!). The US had a shipload of choppers and spent weeks carting bottled water, desal plants, portable hostpitals, etc, etc. On one isolated island the choppers were attacked by some stone age natives with bows and arrows (who had survived by following their ancestors advice and going to high ground when the earth rumbled), but generally the assistance was greatly appreciated.
One point in your post bugs me, you don't need to denigrate the efforts of others (UN) to make the US look good. The US is great for initial releif and moving a lot of bulk in a hurry. The UN is great for long term assistance and opening the political doors that enable the US Navy to do it's stuff. In other words the US & UN work best together not in competition.
This happened in one electorate at the last election. After two counts that came out with a different winner the two contestants agreed to send a couple of dozen disputed ballots to a group of handwriting specialists who made the final judgement. Of course there is always the option of calling it a draw and holding a new bi-election.
As you say a printed ballot may improve things in these circumstances but the problem is vote counting machines not ballot printing machines. I am happy to report our electrol commision told Diebold to take a hike when they came knocking a few years back.
The comparison between security in voting machines and ATM's is a strawman designed to get government officials to throw more money at 'secure as an ATM' voting machines. ATM's are secure because a somebody owns them, runs them, and controls access to them, with voting machines the opposite is true. The slimebags at Diebold cannot be so stupid as to not understand this, they are simply hoping to milk 'upgrade' money out of the taxpayer.
BTW: By voting machine I mean one that counts your ballot, not one that prints your ballot.
Alfred Nobel was a nerd, he loved explosions and was utterly oblivious to human nature. He thought dynamite was so powerfull that people would never use it as a weapon even in all out war. The offer of a peace prize can be seen as anknowledgement by Nobel that he failed to shock people out of fighting each other, OTHOH his delusional view of human nature was the precursor of the current MAD strategy of international politics.
To emphasis my point you orinally wrote "A programmer not checking for a null pointer return or a buffer overflow is the equivalent of... geez, I don't know... a surgeon forgetting to wash his hands before operating?" To which I basically relpied that checking usually only needs to occur when talking input from outside your app and that a common and trivial mistake made by proffesionals is no justification for failing a student.
Not that someone like you would have made a mistike in your original statement but now you are telling me it means something different to what it actually says (ie: it now means "Do not copy a block of memory to another block of memory unless you know the destination block is large enough to contain the data you are copying.")
"Having code testers is no excuse for the original programmer being sloppy."
Never said it was, but in the real world as compared to your ivory tower only an idiot trusts a team of programmers to get everything right the first time. Take a look at the bug list for any major application, crappy apps don't have such lists (Hint: Absense of a bug list does not imply the programmer 'got it right').
Now here's a looping exercise for you:
Say: "In the real world people are expected to make mistakes despite their best efforts, teachers are not employed to act as a lint program." - until it bores through your ridgid ideology and the contorted logic you use to keep it alive.
"Our team takes it the other direction altogether. Our engine is in C++. Our GUI is in Swing. As long as they're going to be different, may as well really make them different."
Conceptually that's exactly how it should be, decouple the engine from the display as much as possible. Many enterprise projects learnt this lesson the hard way when they spread the engine across a multitude of MFC dialogs and widgets under Win31, many of the same enterprises are still learning the same lesson with web apps.
"This is debatable but I find that fortran seems to have a more logical memory order in 2-d arrays. Namely if you take a sub-array you get elements that are consecutive in memory and thus for most microprocessors will all get pulled into the cache on the same page. Slices of C-arrays have consecutive elements spaced by the row width apart in memory. One can of course find cases where one is preferred over another"
Not much of a debate but here goes. Arguing Fortran has "a more logical memory order in 2-d arrays" than C is nonsense since it's quite likely that your Fortran compiler was written in C.
"In what sense is driving comparable to web browsing?"
Far to many 'drivers' think they can do whatever they like as long as they don't get caught. As other have pointed out - spammers are the root cause. OTOH: The arms race has created some interesting technology.
"Is MP3tunes allowed to offer a "mp3 vault" for my music?"
Don't see why not since I can rent storage for my DVD collection and have the company ship them to whatever location. I think EMI are objecting mainly to the fact that the user has the 'key' to the safe and can therefore allow others to use it to bypass EMI's toll.
FTL relative to what? - We are already travelling FTL relative to whatever is beyond the visable universe simply because the universe is expanding. We are also travelling FTL relative to any tachons that may be wizzing by. (don't fall into the trap and say we are not moving, it's just as valid to think of the tachons as standing still while the universe wizzes by).
However the fact we have insufficient knowledge of how the Universe works does not imply everything will eventually be possible. At the risk of sounding "foolish" I would say that no matter how much science and money we throw at the problem, surviving a skinny dip in lava is impossible.
"My question is, how do these unreleased products make their way out into the world? Wouldn't any cartridges used by a major company have been wiped before being sold or trashed?"
The company has to pay people to either wipe the data or securely destroy the device. Sure large corporations take these things a bit more seriously nowadays but minor companies don't become major companies by writing cheques.
I really have no idea what they want to find out about me, they know I don't like them and that I like their recent predecesors even less (mainly because I'd rather be re-Neducated than incarcerated).
We had an "ideas summit" here on the weekend that "drew together the county's best and brightest". There was a sound bite from one of these people who looked remarkably like a 30 something bonghead, "We are here to imagine a better life for everyone.". A shudder went down my spine as the words fell out of his mouth like mollases, but then I thought...hmmm...maybe he is talking about free pot?
In reality amoungst the bongheads and myopic activists there were some pretty smart people attending, but predictably the ideas that got the most press were not new: "clean coal", "ditching the Queen", and "a bill of rights". Pity nobody came up with the idea of replacing Mick Keelty.
Maybe that's what they meant, but buying stuff cheap at a fire sale is a bit different to being "given it for free". One is good bussiness sense the other is charity.
"Of course, industry would have more excuses to use Microsoft software, so with a University job, if they use Microsoft stuff that is a red-light, "something's not quite right here"."
What a load of closed minded twaddle. You will get nowhere being an O/S zealot in the workplace, actively trying to avoid MS in either a corporate or an academic environment is like trying to avoid death and taxes.
The rule is 'use the best tool available for the job', as a low-level newcomer to the lab the submitter can hardly be expected to know how the lead proffesor has defined 'best'.
Yep, that's how I remeber it. I recall paying $2/min to phone the UK from Australia in 1978 when direct dial long distance was still a novelty. $2/min back then was about 0.5-1hrs worth of wages. Interestingly it was corporate communications that also paid for the initial copper infrastructure, in many places this was simply a wire joining the points along the supply chain.
Slashdot Mirror
"One can observe one apple or one galaxy, but one cannot observe the number one.
Apples and galaxies are countable because we percieve them as distinct objects but if you look very closely the 'obvious' distinction between an apple and the rest of the universe is no so obvious after all.
Putting god(s) to one side, the mind is a mathematical construct that emerges from the activity of the brain and the nervous system. The language of maths does not describe the Universe, it describes our perception of it. In other words the mind is a mathematical entity that is to some degree self describing to other mathematical entities.
When one thinks of the mind in this way it comes as no surprise that maths is such a powerfull yet simple language for describing the 'real world'?
I will continue the theame of emphasising the good works of the UN in the case of the tsunami. A snippet below from this link dated ~4 weeks after the Tsunami hit. Note this is the area where the US were, the UN assisted across the rim of the Indian ocean to Ethiopia and brough political attention to the plight of NE Sri Lanka.
BTW: I don't think admirals have been so gung-ho since the Mogadishu thing. IIRC, in the case of Indonesia they were welcomed with open arms after responding to a request for help by the Indonesians via the UN.
Meh, I could rattle of a list of 'evil' shit for just about any nation or international group, or I could quote what ambulance drivers and moticians talk about during lunch break, to do so would miss the point of my original post.
If there is a systemic problem with the UN it is that the permenent members of the UNSC use it as a method of fight proxy wars where real people (ie: smaller oil rich nations) get caught in the middle, still it's preferable to nothing.
"the average donation per capita of you Aussies was about USD 66. Holy shit, you guys ROCK!"
Thanks, most of it was private, I belive the govt gave $1B to Indonesia in cash and kind.
"My point being, the educational games sector is filled with poorly made products that feature very little fun and are a pain to administer."
;)
This is true for the entire software industry not just educational games. Also I think branding something 'educational' is kinda silly, education happens when you learn something new and modify your worldview to account for it. As a child in the 60's I loved Disney comics, adults told me they were a waste of time yet when I got older I realised I had I learnt stuff like Bolivia has emerald mines and many other tit-bits of knowledge from them. I also credit my appreciation of classical music to Bugs Bunny and Co.
A formal education and a good computer game are in fact similar, they both take a while to learn the basics, are somewhat repetitive, keep the next goal just out of reach and are fun for those willing to explore on their own. The difference (and the thing people are really complaining about) is the subject matter.
About 15yrs ago I wrote a game for MBA students at a university here in Australia. The object of the game was to grow a bussiness using a particular management theroy (the details and name of which escape me). It was textual and turn based, it ran for one semester and the students entered a budget once a week as part of an ongoing assignment. The lecturer I wrote it for did the testing, this worked well because I thought the game was boring and the programming was fun and he thought the opposite. For some reason the (adult) students perception of 'fun and educational' seemed to be heavily correlated with their ranking in the game even though the game was provided as a tool not a test.
I'm an Aussie, I generally agree with your post and think Americans (both in government and in private) are generous when disaster strikes.
The ships you speak of helped out in Indonesia, it took less than a week since, they were in the area and arrived before the Aussies could get there (and we live next door!!). The US had a shipload of choppers and spent weeks carting bottled water, desal plants, portable hostpitals, etc, etc. On one isolated island the choppers were attacked by some stone age natives with bows and arrows (who had survived by following their ancestors advice and going to high ground when the earth rumbled), but generally the assistance was greatly appreciated.
One point in your post bugs me, you don't need to denigrate the efforts of others (UN) to make the US look good. The US is great for initial releif and moving a lot of bulk in a hurry. The UN is great for long term assistance and opening the political doors that enable the US Navy to do it's stuff. In other words the US & UN work best together not in competition.
Opps, I thought we were talking about Australia, not Alabama.
This happened in one electorate at the last election. After two counts that came out with a different winner the two contestants agreed to send a couple of dozen disputed ballots to a group of handwriting specialists who made the final judgement. Of course there is always the option of calling it a draw and holding a new bi-election.
As you say a printed ballot may improve things in these circumstances but the problem is vote counting machines not ballot printing machines. I am happy to report our electrol commision told Diebold to take a hike when they came knocking a few years back.
You bring up a good point Robin, perhaps he acted out of guilt and made that argument to sooth his concience.
The comparison between security in voting machines and ATM's is a strawman designed to get government officials to throw more money at 'secure as an ATM' voting machines. ATM's are secure because a somebody owns them, runs them, and controls access to them, with voting machines the opposite is true. The slimebags at Diebold cannot be so stupid as to not understand this, they are simply hoping to milk 'upgrade' money out of the taxpayer.
BTW: By voting machine I mean one that counts your ballot, not one that prints your ballot.
"These scientists should get a Nobel prize for this, this is way cooler than dynamite or nitroglycerine
The invention of dynamite provided the endowment to establish the prize.
Alfred Nobel was a nerd, he loved explosions and was utterly oblivious to human nature. He thought dynamite was so powerfull that people would never use it as a weapon even in all out war. The offer of a peace prize can be seen as anknowledgement by Nobel that he failed to shock people out of fighting each other, OTHOH his delusional view of human nature was the precursor of the current MAD strategy of international politics.
To emphasis my point you orinally wrote "A programmer not checking for a null pointer return or a buffer overflow is the equivalent of... geez, I don't know... a surgeon forgetting to wash his hands before operating?" To which I basically relpied that checking usually only needs to occur when talking input from outside your app and that a common and trivial mistake made by proffesionals is no justification for failing a student.
Not that someone like you would have made a mistike in your original statement but now you are telling me it means something different to what it actually says (ie: it now means "Do not copy a block of memory to another block of memory unless you know the destination block is large enough to contain the data you are copying.")
"Having code testers is no excuse for the original programmer being sloppy."
Never said it was, but in the real world as compared to your ivory tower only an idiot trusts a team of programmers to get everything right the first time. Take a look at the bug list for any major application, crappy apps don't have such lists (Hint: Absense of a bug list does not imply the programmer 'got it right').
Now here's a looping exercise for you:
Say: "In the real world people are expected to make mistakes despite their best efforts, teachers are not employed to act as a lint program." - until it bores through your ridgid ideology and the contorted logic you use to keep it alive.
"Our team takes it the other direction altogether. Our engine is in C++. Our GUI is in Swing. As long as they're going to be different, may as well really make them different."
Conceptually that's exactly how it should be, decouple the engine from the display as much as possible. Many enterprise projects learnt this lesson the hard way when they spread the engine across a multitude of MFC dialogs and widgets under Win31, many of the same enterprises are still learning the same lesson with web apps.
"This is debatable but I find that fortran seems to have a more logical memory order in 2-d arrays. Namely if you take a sub-array you get elements that are consecutive in memory and thus for most microprocessors will all get pulled into the cache on the same page. Slices of C-arrays have consecutive elements spaced by the row width apart in memory. One can of course find cases where one is preferred over another"
Not much of a debate but here goes. Arguing Fortran has "a more logical memory order in 2-d arrays" than C is nonsense since it's quite likely that your Fortran compiler was written in C.
"In what sense is driving comparable to web browsing?"
Far to many 'drivers' think they can do whatever they like as long as they don't get caught. As other have pointed out - spammers are the root cause. OTOH: The arms race has created some interesting technology.
"Is MP3tunes allowed to offer a "mp3 vault" for my music?"
Don't see why not since I can rent storage for my DVD collection and have the company ship them to whatever location. I think EMI are objecting mainly to the fact that the user has the 'key' to the safe and can therefore allow others to use it to bypass EMI's toll.
FTL relative to what? - We are already travelling FTL relative to whatever is beyond the visable universe simply because the universe is expanding. We are also travelling FTL relative to any tachons that may be wizzing by. (don't fall into the trap and say we are not moving, it's just as valid to think of the tachons as standing still while the universe wizzes by).
However the fact we have insufficient knowledge of how the Universe works does not imply everything will eventually be possible. At the risk of sounding "foolish" I would say that no matter how much science and money we throw at the problem, surviving a skinny dip in lava is impossible.
"My question is, how do these unreleased products make their way out into the world? Wouldn't any cartridges used by a major company have been wiped before being sold or trashed?"
The company has to pay people to either wipe the data or securely destroy the device. Sure large corporations take these things a bit more seriously nowadays but minor companies don't become major companies by writing cheques.
I don't know that one has been released, try google news? My post was just a personal observation on how it's been reported so far.
I really have no idea what they want to find out about me, they know I don't like them and that I like their recent predecesors even less (mainly because I'd rather be re-Neducated than incarcerated).
We had an "ideas summit" here on the weekend that "drew together the county's best and brightest". There was a sound bite from one of these people who looked remarkably like a 30 something bonghead, "We are here to imagine a better life for everyone.". A shudder went down my spine as the words fell out of his mouth like mollases, but then I thought...hmmm...maybe he is talking about free pot?
In reality amoungst the bongheads and myopic activists there were some pretty smart people attending, but predictably the ideas that got the most press were not new: "clean coal", "ditching the Queen", and "a bill of rights". Pity nobody came up with the idea of replacing Mick Keelty.
Maybe that's what they meant, but buying stuff cheap at a fire sale is a bit different to being "given it for free". One is good bussiness sense the other is charity.
"Of course, industry would have more excuses to use Microsoft software, so with a University job, if they use Microsoft stuff that is a red-light, "something's not quite right here"."
What a load of closed minded twaddle. You will get nowhere being an O/S zealot in the workplace, actively trying to avoid MS in either a corporate or an academic environment is like trying to avoid death and taxes.
The rule is 'use the best tool available for the job', as a low-level newcomer to the lab the submitter can hardly be expected to know how the lead proffesor has defined 'best'.
Of course, this being Slashdot..." - IR is at the low end, UV is the high end.
Yep, that's how I remeber it. I recall paying $2/min to phone the UK from Australia in 1978 when direct dial long distance was still a novelty. $2/min back then was about 0.5-1hrs worth of wages. Interestingly it was corporate communications that also paid for the initial copper infrastructure, in many places this was simply a wire joining the points along the supply chain.
Bit too subtle for the mods too.