>travesty of an adaptation of the Elfstones of Shannara
You mean, "Pretty Young People With Pointy Ears (and not a hell of a lot else going for it)"?
Yeah, sad they botched it. But that's the market these days - forget the premise, are the actors young, pretty, and the characters in constant relationship drama regardless of logic?
Since the USA has enough military capability to "nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure", several times over, this seems like a wasted effort.
Do you care exactly how many megatons of nuclear warheads were used to eradicate you? Is this so NK can know exactly how much overkill the USA could bring to bear if they wished to do so?
Honestly, everybody involved knows the standoff is dependent on China and Russia as well as having Seoul within shelling range... almost nothing about the precise American capabilities matters.
Nope. Same here, it was all, "We're all gonna freeze!" in the late 70s, maybe into the early 80s. Then we got distracted by cocaine, gun violence, and AIDS for a while.
Keep in mind, we're talking about what was being told to kids in school, and usually at the elementary and high school level you're lucky if you're getting anything published in the last 20 years. And teachers who actually know and understand such things well enough to teach them generally aren't doing so in elementary or junior high environments.
I disagree. If the computer is handling the voting, it's easier to corrupt the process, and an equipment malfunction means the poll is closed.
Paper and pencils - vulnerable to fire and theft, but not much else. (And yes, pencils, because they don't dry up in storage, their marks don't run if the ballot gets wet, and you can still see traces of the old mark if someone tries to erase and replace it)
Spock knew a lot about Earth history, but mostly centered on the early 20th century and items of popular interest to the peoples of that time, and also mostly from the viewpoint of the United States of America.
Perhaps this is because they had the most documentation survive the Eugenics Wars and WWIII (though I can't recall if those are one event or two distinct ones).
Even a (half-)Vulcan can only study the available data. And though he was brilliant and had committed large amounts of information to memory... Spock was still merely an evolved biological being, and far from infallible.
Actually... hybrid is best. Vote with paper, scan and tally with computers. If there is any doubt, you have the original paper watched over by election officials to verify.
> I doubt anyone has guns for that purpose in canada, simply because they are so restricted with how you can transport them and use them, any situation where you would need to have the gun "at the ready" for defence, simply wouldn't be possible.
Weapons and ammunition in separate locked gun safes, I believe. It's been a long time and I never kept a gun at home, so I'm not the best resource for that information.
On the other hand, all sorts of medieval weapons are perfectly legal and I have a few on my walls. Even so, home invaders would likely have guns and I'm not trained for such situations anyway, so chances are I'd end up dead.
Luckily... it's CANADA, and as a general rule unless you are involved in crime or have a stalker ex (or you're a cop at work, I suppose), statistically you don't really have to worry about violent crime in most places.
Seeing the name "Go" in this context reminded me of Logo, which is probably much more limited.
Thanks to a Windows app that emulates Logo, tonight my kids will be learning how to program by telling a triangular turtle how far to move and how far to turn. Or they'll tell their dad it's boring and they're not going to do it. We'll see.
I think you got part of that backwards - the right wing wants men circumcised, the left doesn't. I think it's only a small minority of the right that wants women mutilated, too. I think your average God-fearing right-wing Christian in America is NOT onboard with slicing up women's privates.
The right wing tends to have a lot of white supremacists, I think the left is more about condescending to non-whites and discriminating in their favour on the implicit assumption that whites are superior. That's still racism, obviously, but it is qualitatively different.
On homophobia... I think the right has a lock on that one. On the other hand, a lot of the left seems very set on convincing us we're all 'genderfluid' and 'polysexual' or whatever and get very upset if you dare to be gender typical and exclusively heterosexual.
And given enough power, either extreme will gladly persecute (and possibly kill) you if you don't behave as they want you to according to their belief system. At present, though, I think the radical right is the bigger threat.
> It's really a case of not being trained correctly.
Which kind of surprises me, because if I were working on a driverless car, I'd have it generating a map of the surroundings rating them by how available they were for the vehicle - even a sidewalk can be a place to drive in an emergency if there are no pedestrians. (The 'where could I go if nothing changes' map, which is different from the presumed 'where is the road' map).
I'd build a second map layer rating the probability of the vehicle occupying a given area based on current velocity (and thus momentum), road conditions, and planned route, allowing for maximum theoretical change in direction or speed. (The 'where could I get to if I had to suddenly react' map)
The third thing I'd do is build another map layer rating the map space for the probability of an obstacle, using the currently detected direction and speed (and mass estimate based on size). (The 'what is threatening me, and how serious are those threats' map)
You put those three together and you get a map of where you can safely go if your planned route is blocked unexpectedly. Truck backing over your route and intersecting the vehicle? No vehicles behind you that aren't well outside safe breaking distance... so back up to get out of the way.
It just doesn't matter if the other guy is playing by the rules or not, there's a reality out there to deal with and once you've got all the computer vision issues handled (and they have them handled well enough), the logic for avoiding this kind of incident is trivial in comparison and shows a lack of imagination in the developers.
And that's just the first step, because once you have those three maps, you can start adding an 'oops' map, where you predict liability for damage if you're forced out of the safe spaces on the road and must hit something. Then you get to program the fun stuff like weighing injury to the vehicle occupant(s) vs. the occupant(s) of another vehicle, or to pedestrians, or even an empty parked car / lamp post / mailbox / whatever. Good luck with that, though, since I imagine your lawyers will tell you not to do it for liability reasons - it's likely better just to follow the rules of the road precisely and blame the person who didn't for any damages that result.
The mere existence of such a business is a strong indication for the need of some society-wide social engineering and an improvement in mental health care.
As a teenager, I read all of Asimov's sci-fi, his Azazel stories, and a lot of his science essays for the lay person. You know what? I have no idea why I loved his sci-fi so much, because on attempts to revisit it as an adult I find his prose so boring it's unreadable and I can't enjoy the underlying plot. Azazel's still good, though. Actually, I take (some of) that back... the stuff he wrote for the juvenile market as Paul French still reads well for the era.
Heinlein, on the other hand... great stuff, but you do have to tune out a lot of his sex fantasies that seem to make his way into a lot of his longer works.
>Could you really make a TOS era show in this day and age, with banks of toggle switches and blinkenlights?
Yep. TOS exists in a world where in the 1960s we almost nuked China and in the 1990s there had been enough time for genetically engineers 'supermen' to grow to adulthood and start the Eugenics Wars.
If you accept it as an alternate reality that diverged from ours about mid-way through the 20th century, it's fine. Maybe we'd make the buttons a bit less blocky, though.
> If it's going to be smart, it had better connect to my smarts, not some remote server.
We've seen enough now that even the technologically illiterate should be starting to understand that if you buy something that requires an Internet connection, you're getting a service that can be terminated at any time.
And if there's no ongoing access fee... the probability of having the plug pulled on the system increases exponentially with time.
Anything that increases the cost of spam scams relative to the returns is worth investigating to see if it's practical, because ultimately you have to attack the economics to kill the beast.
I'd actually like to see this run on my local system, though.
Accusations, a police investigation that has 'stalled', and the accused denies the accusations.
That's significantly different from the Spacey situation, where there are a large number of corroborated, credible accusers and the accused has admitted - though with an "I was drunk and don't remember" excuse - that at least the first accusation is credible, followed up by no denial of the additional accusations.
Netflix says they're not doing anything about it until more comes to light, and good on Netflix for that! Risky, though, if it ultimately turns out Masterson is guilty and just bluffing.
The way Windows handles installing and removing programs is insane. The way programs handle what security Windows offers is insane. But as a platform, Windows was originally designed for 'easy' not 'good', and it did an adequate job of standardizing program UIs, and then providing a standard interface to devices.
After that, of course, Microsoft (and everyone else) discovered that you could force users onto the upgrade treadmill by changing the standards over time and killing backwards compatibility. And now they have enough of the business desktop market not to care.
SMS has a big bonus though - it almost always goes to a device exclusively linked to you that you willingly carry around with you almost all the time.
In the game of social network data mining, giving someone your cell number and confirming the connection via SMS is like handing over your government ID while letting them scan your face, fingerprints, iris, retina, voice patterns, and gait.
Slashdot Mirror
>travesty of an adaptation of the Elfstones of Shannara
You mean, "Pretty Young People With Pointy Ears (and not a hell of a lot else going for it)"?
Yeah, sad they botched it. But that's the market these days - forget the premise, are the actors young, pretty, and the characters in constant relationship drama regardless of logic?
Nice rant, shame it bears zero relation to what I wrote.
Since the USA has enough military capability to "nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure", several times over, this seems like a wasted effort.
Do you care exactly how many megatons of nuclear warheads were used to eradicate you? Is this so NK can know exactly how much overkill the USA could bring to bear if they wished to do so?
Honestly, everybody involved knows the standoff is dependent on China and Russia as well as having Seoul within shelling range... almost nothing about the precise American capabilities matters.
Nope. Same here, it was all, "We're all gonna freeze!" in the late 70s, maybe into the early 80s. Then we got distracted by cocaine, gun violence, and AIDS for a while.
Keep in mind, we're talking about what was being told to kids in school, and usually at the elementary and high school level you're lucky if you're getting anything published in the last 20 years. And teachers who actually know and understand such things well enough to teach them generally aren't doing so in elementary or junior high environments.
>Or vote with computers, but produce paper
I disagree. If the computer is handling the voting, it's easier to corrupt the process, and an equipment malfunction means the poll is closed.
Paper and pencils - vulnerable to fire and theft, but not much else. (And yes, pencils, because they don't dry up in storage, their marks don't run if the ballot gets wet, and you can still see traces of the old mark if someone tries to erase and replace it)
>The problem is Spock didn't correct him.
Spock knew a lot about Earth history, but mostly centered on the early 20th century and items of popular interest to the peoples of that time, and also mostly from the viewpoint of the United States of America.
Perhaps this is because they had the most documentation survive the Eugenics Wars and WWIII (though I can't recall if those are one event or two distinct ones).
Even a (half-)Vulcan can only study the available data. And though he was brilliant and had committed large amounts of information to memory... Spock was still merely an evolved biological being, and far from infallible.
Actually... hybrid is best. Vote with paper, scan and tally with computers. If there is any doubt, you have the original paper watched over by election officials to verify.
> I doubt anyone has guns for that purpose in canada, simply because they are so restricted with how you can transport them and use them, any situation where you would need to have the gun "at the ready" for defence, simply wouldn't be possible.
Weapons and ammunition in separate locked gun safes, I believe. It's been a long time and I never kept a gun at home, so I'm not the best resource for that information.
On the other hand, all sorts of medieval weapons are perfectly legal and I have a few on my walls. Even so, home invaders would likely have guns and I'm not trained for such situations anyway, so chances are I'd end up dead.
Luckily... it's CANADA, and as a general rule unless you are involved in crime or have a stalker ex (or you're a cop at work, I suppose), statistically you don't really have to worry about violent crime in most places.
Seeing the name "Go" in this context reminded me of Logo, which is probably much more limited.
Thanks to a Windows app that emulates Logo, tonight my kids will be learning how to program by telling a triangular turtle how far to move and how far to turn. Or they'll tell their dad it's boring and they're not going to do it. We'll see.
Do you think America doesn't have some serious issues requiring some social engineering and improvements in health care?
Because nobody's really destitute... at least nobody important.
As you imply, it's important to remember we all have the instinct to overlook or discount those below us in the social order... and not do so.
I think you got part of that backwards - the right wing wants men circumcised, the left doesn't. I think it's only a small minority of the right that wants women mutilated, too. I think your average God-fearing right-wing Christian in America is NOT onboard with slicing up women's privates.
The right wing tends to have a lot of white supremacists, I think the left is more about condescending to non-whites and discriminating in their favour on the implicit assumption that whites are superior. That's still racism, obviously, but it is qualitatively different.
On homophobia... I think the right has a lock on that one. On the other hand, a lot of the left seems very set on convincing us we're all 'genderfluid' and 'polysexual' or whatever and get very upset if you dare to be gender typical and exclusively heterosexual.
And given enough power, either extreme will gladly persecute (and possibly kill) you if you don't behave as they want you to according to their belief system. At present, though, I think the radical right is the bigger threat.
> It's really a case of not being trained correctly.
Which kind of surprises me, because if I were working on a driverless car, I'd have it generating a map of the surroundings rating them by how available they were for the vehicle - even a sidewalk can be a place to drive in an emergency if there are no pedestrians. (The 'where could I go if nothing changes' map, which is different from the presumed 'where is the road' map).
I'd build a second map layer rating the probability of the vehicle occupying a given area based on current velocity (and thus momentum), road conditions, and planned route, allowing for maximum theoretical change in direction or speed. (The 'where could I get to if I had to suddenly react' map)
The third thing I'd do is build another map layer rating the map space for the probability of an obstacle, using the currently detected direction and speed (and mass estimate based on size). (The 'what is threatening me, and how serious are those threats' map)
You put those three together and you get a map of where you can safely go if your planned route is blocked unexpectedly. Truck backing over your route and intersecting the vehicle? No vehicles behind you that aren't well outside safe breaking distance... so back up to get out of the way.
It just doesn't matter if the other guy is playing by the rules or not, there's a reality out there to deal with and once you've got all the computer vision issues handled (and they have them handled well enough), the logic for avoiding this kind of incident is trivial in comparison and shows a lack of imagination in the developers.
And that's just the first step, because once you have those three maps, you can start adding an 'oops' map, where you predict liability for damage if you're forced out of the safe spaces on the road and must hit something. Then you get to program the fun stuff like weighing injury to the vehicle occupant(s) vs. the occupant(s) of another vehicle, or to pedestrians, or even an empty parked car / lamp post / mailbox / whatever. Good luck with that, though, since I imagine your lawyers will tell you not to do it for liability reasons - it's likely better just to follow the rules of the road precisely and blame the person who didn't for any damages that result.
The mere existence of such a business is a strong indication for the need of some society-wide social engineering and an improvement in mental health care.
As a teenager, I read all of Asimov's sci-fi, his Azazel stories, and a lot of his science essays for the lay person. You know what? I have no idea why I loved his sci-fi so much, because on attempts to revisit it as an adult I find his prose so boring it's unreadable and I can't enjoy the underlying plot. Azazel's still good, though. Actually, I take (some of) that back... the stuff he wrote for the juvenile market as Paul French still reads well for the era.
Heinlein, on the other hand... great stuff, but you do have to tune out a lot of his sex fantasies that seem to make his way into a lot of his longer works.
>But you, it seems, are okay with that.
You have drawn an incorrect conclusion.
>Could you really make a TOS era show in this day and age, with banks of toggle switches and blinkenlights?
Yep. TOS exists in a world where in the 1960s we almost nuked China and in the 1990s there had been enough time for genetically engineers 'supermen' to grow to adulthood and start the Eugenics Wars.
If you accept it as an alternate reality that diverged from ours about mid-way through the 20th century, it's fine. Maybe we'd make the buttons a bit less blocky, though.
True - that purpose being to feed it into a system that doesn't trigger the spam responder system.
It's an arms race.
> If it's going to be smart, it had better connect to my smarts, not some remote server.
We've seen enough now that even the technologically illiterate should be starting to understand that if you buy something that requires an Internet connection, you're getting a service that can be terminated at any time.
And if there's no ongoing access fee... the probability of having the plug pulled on the system increases exponentially with time.
Anything that increases the cost of spam scams relative to the returns is worth investigating to see if it's practical, because ultimately you have to attack the economics to kill the beast.
I'd actually like to see this run on my local system, though.
Google says... "Danny Masterson".
Accusations, a police investigation that has 'stalled', and the accused denies the accusations.
That's significantly different from the Spacey situation, where there are a large number of corroborated, credible accusers and the accused has admitted - though with an "I was drunk and don't remember" excuse - that at least the first accusation is credible, followed up by no denial of the additional accusations.
Netflix says they're not doing anything about it until more comes to light, and good on Netflix for that! Risky, though, if it ultimately turns out Masterson is guilty and just bluffing.
The way Windows handles installing and removing programs is insane. The way programs handle what security Windows offers is insane. But as a platform, Windows was originally designed for 'easy' not 'good', and it did an adequate job of standardizing program UIs, and then providing a standard interface to devices.
After that, of course, Microsoft (and everyone else) discovered that you could force users onto the upgrade treadmill by changing the standards over time and killing backwards compatibility. And now they have enough of the business desktop market not to care.
Whee!
It has its faults, but yeah, I'm on Team Orville. They've been doing what Trek should have been doing - and doing it better - since about episode 4.
SMS has a big bonus though - it almost always goes to a device exclusively linked to you that you willingly carry around with you almost all the time.
In the game of social network data mining, giving someone your cell number and confirming the connection via SMS is like handing over your government ID while letting them scan your face, fingerprints, iris, retina, voice patterns, and gait.
>How have you missed them?
I don't follow the news much, so only the biggest, most unavoidable items tend to get to me.
I'd actually still like to see one - can you name a name for something recent I could google?