Ok, so please explain to me why the commandment states simply "thou shalt not kill" without andding qualifiers?
The sixth commandment forbids murder. The ethical theology that lies behind this prohibition is the fact that all men and women have been created in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27; 9:6). While Hebrew possesses seven words for killing, the word used here--rasah --appears only forty-seven times in the OT. If any one of the seven words could signify "murder," where the factors of premeditation and intentionality are present, this is the verb. Recently, however, some have complained (see Childs, Exodus p. 420, for the bibliography and argument) that many of the instances of this verb relate to blood vengeance and the role of the avenger (go'el in Num 35; Deut 4:41-43; 19:1-13; Josh 20:3). Without exception, however, in the later periods (e.g., Ps 94:6; Prov 22:13; Isa 1:21; Hos 4:2; 6:9; Jer 7:9) it carries the idea of murder with intentional violence. Every one of these instances stresses the act or allegation of premeditation and deliberateness--and that is at the heart of this verb. Thus this prohibition does not apply to beasts (Gen 9:3), to defending one's home from night-time burglars (Exod 22:2), to accidental killings (Deut 19:5), to the execution of murderers by the state (Gen 9:6), or to involvement with one's nation in certain types of war as illustrated by Israel's history. It does apply, however, to self-murder (i.e., suicide), to all accessories to murder (2 Sam 12:9), and to those who have authority but fail to use it to punish known murderers (1 Kings 21:19).
There is a free flashlight program and I imagine there will be free versions of many basic application types. Besides, what does 99c buy you these days? Might get you a packet of crisps (potato chips for those of you on the wrong side of the Atlantic) here in the UK, but that's it. If the apps were $2.99, I can see people complaining about price, but 99c? The real issue seems to be too many redundant apps, some of them at higher prices with no extra features.
Are you sure you've replied to the correct post? I never stated any opinion concerning the need for Wikiepdia to be better or worse than any particular source. I was simply rebutting the notion that its science articles "are better the any other source."
Incidentally, the strengths it has largely overlap with its weaknesses.
The science articles in wikipedia are better the any other source. Several tests of this have been made.
You need to check those tests carefully. On average, science articles in Wikipedia may be more accurate than those of similar encyclopedias e.g. Brittanica, but they're not better than dedicated scientific texts and journals.
I don't rest my finger on the pad, because any subsequent motion of my hand causes small movements, and because I have to make muliple strokes on the pad to move the mouse any distance so I am in the habit of stroking the pointer around and only touching the pad when I'm actually moving the pointer.
Ok. Though I would have thought that most of the times when you want to click, it would come immediately after movement, so your fingers would already be there. I can see how it would be an issue though if there is a time gap between positioning and clicking.
I find that plonking down *one* at a time can cause movement.
But right-clicking involves two and in my experience, putting two down causes movement less often than one, which I suspect is down to the system being designed to recognise two fingers as indicating an intention to right-click or scroll. Putting one finger down carries no such connotations, so I would expect to see more movement then. Try it yourself and see: tap the pad a few dozen times with a one finger (with 'tap to click' disabled of course) then repeat with two fingers and compare how much the pointer moves. With one, it flutters about, but with two, it rarely moves. Therefore, right-clicking by putting two fingers on the pad and clicking the button with your thumb is actually quite safe from the perspective of pointer-movement.
Paste in XTerminals and other X11 clients.
It just occurred to me that chorded can be meant in the sense of modifier key+mouse button or clicking two or more mouse buttons simultaneously. Instead of asking which it was you required, I had assumed it was multiple mouse buttons being simultaneously clicked. It's been a while since I last used X11, but IIRC it's middle-click for paste, which would be a case of modifier key+mouse button being necessitated by Apple's design and a very legitimate objection. If you need a middle-click and don't like using a modifier key to simulate it, then yeah, Apple's design is unsuitable. Taking the market as a whole, it's not a remotely significant issue, but for you as an individual, it is and I can see why you wouldn't want an Apple laptop.
I wonder if putting three fingers on the pad and click the button could potentially be a workable replacement, if they ever make a hardware+software combination that could handle that. You could even have four fingers for a fourth button, but things start getting a bit silly at that point (if they haven't already).
If you already have a finger on the pad (which you presumably do as a result of having moved the pointer to where you want to click), placing a second finger on the pad doesn't jiggle it at all, so you can right-click in safety by tapping he button with your thumb.
Even if you don't have a finger on the pad, plonking two down at the same time shouldn't result in any pointer movement and even a bit of a delay between the first and second hitting rarely produces movement and even then only by a couple of pixels.
If the pad is set for tap-clicking, it could be that everything I've just said is rendered invalid, but I hate pad-clicking because it's too easy to move the pointer when you want to click or click when you want to move, so all my clicking is done by the button.
Of course chording is impossible under this setup, but it's very rarely needed. Where do you need chorded-clicks? I can see them being useful in some games, but you'd probably want a mouse anyway and there's nothing stopping you from getting a Microsoft one. If only Microsoft made one with a scroll-ball.
The trouble is that if you matched controls and actions 1:1, you'd be putting the game out of reach of people who have no talent for the physical game. One reason to play a sports game is to achieve things you cant necessarily do in real life. The instant you require real life skills, you're taken that away from people and they won't want to play your game. Obviously as you say,t he argument can be made that the actions aren't similar enough to real life to be immersive, but make it too similar and it wont be immersive because you'll suddenly have supposedly star players absolutely sucking because the gamer isn't a professional player themselves.
Y'all are having an interesting conversation, but it seems that y'all are talking a bit past each other.
Ah, a chairperson for the debate. Slashdot almost seems civilised now!
Doing all of those steps by hand could still take a experienced photoshopper dozens of minutes, but the conversation with the computer could be accomplished in less than ten minutes. This is where (I think) the GP is trying to go, and the "manual mode" step above is what (I think) you are trying to say. In other words, both CLI (the conversation parts) and GUI elements are present in this very quick workflow.
Actually I'm saying something very similar to you: both voice control and mouse+keyboard/touch have their place. The trouble is that when I raise the issue of instances when mouse+keyboard/touch is significantly quicker, the GP starts talking about abstraction and higher order operations. The way he's arguing things suggests that in his mind, voice control is superior for all situations, which is demonstrably false.
One problem with his examples is that he massively simplifies the reality of the tasks that people engage. Actually, so does your example. People rarely think 'I want this image brightened by 20%'; they think 'this image should be brighter' then move a slider until it looks satisfactory. With a mouse and quick enough rendering (CPU power presumably isn't much a problem if a computer is capable of the language processing and interpretation suggested here), this can be done in a second or two by just dragging the slider until it looks right. Saying 'Brighter... darker... brighter... a bit more...' would get really quite irritating. I get visions of the Chuckle Brothers going 'To me' 'To you' when I think about (thought that won't make any sense unless you're from the UK). The problem with discussing an abstracted method of doing things is that it brushes over the rough edges of reality.
I think you're conflating instant feedback with the GUI.
The input-feedback loop iterates a lot quicker with mouse+keyboard than it does with voice. Say I'm creating a circle of arbitrary size in Photoshop. Do this, I click and drag the mouse, having selected the appropriate tool. It takes a fraction of a second to make a very precise adjustment to the size, allowing to quickly evaluate a range of sizes to see which is appropriate. Doing the same thing by talking to the computer would take significantly longer and be quite frustrating.
But that's a question of the proper abstraction level.
And at a certain level, voice sucks. Really sucks. Which is why the GUI will be around for a long, long, long time - it is vastly superior for certain tasks.
The only commands allowed are point and click, with the order being used implicitly to specify the context.
Not quite try. There are gestures, multi-touch, modifier buttons, multiple buttons that can be clicked, scroll-wheels, etc. Mouse+keyboard/touch is a very powerful interface.
How do you edit 50 pictures to make them black and white, for example? In a GUI, you have to point and click to open a file, point and click to change the colours, point and click to save the file, and this must be repeated 50 times. The only commands allowed are point and click, with the order being used implicitly to specify the context.
I would set up either a Photoshop action or a batch conversion in Graphic Converter. If it was a common task, I could even have an Applescript sitting on the desktop so I just have to drag the files over it to have it all done in the background. Could even set it up in a contextual menu.
In a CLI, you write a script that edits a single picture to make it black and white. Then, you have a higher level of abstraction, namely a command that "turns a picture black and white". After that, you can use the higher abstraction as a building block for even higher abstractions. You can have a script that loops the "turn a picture black and white" command 50 times. This is much closer to the natural language equivalent of "here's how to make an image black and white, now do this for all 50 images".
In some situations this would be a fine way of doing, but not every situation. In fact in most situations I would want to do the conversion manually so I can tweak how much contribution each colour channel makes. This comes down to manipulating sliders until the image looks a way I'm happy with - a task that is much quicker with the mouse than with voice.
That's why I'm saying GUI is baby talk. It never goes beyond point, click, point, click, point, click, etc. It has no ability for abstraction.
You're happy to point out this 'limitation' of mouse+keyboard, so why not accept the fundamental weaknesses of voice and admit that the two interfaces are suited to different tasks, therefore mouse+keyboard will be around for the foreseeable future and will not be entirely supplanted by voice?
That's idiotic given the time it would take to enter an appropriate command vs. just doing i yourself with mouse+keyboard/touch.
Yet when you want something done for which you do not have the expertise or that you must delegate, you trust a human to try and interpret what you want. Think of a computer program as a domain expert. That's where things are heading.
No, it's not, because plenty of people using computers have the skills they require and are more efficient at using them than they would be by having the computer interpret it. Remember 'Clippy'? Now imagine every task on your computer being done through Clippy. Horrible thought isn't it? As I said before, voice is useful for some applications, but where someone knows what they're doing, keyboard+mouse is vastly superior. Different interfaces for different tasks, no one interface being the ultimate solution for everything.
It depends entirely on the situation.
Exactly my point. You've been arguing that the GUI is a dead-end and will be replaced by natural language. I'm saying that there are plenty of situations where mouse+keyboard is better than voice, which somewhat disproves what you're saying. And apparently you agree, so you're contradicting yourself.
You're thinking too much in terms of existing GUI limitations. The difference between a consumer app and a professional app has to do with doing well defined specialized tasks, which are often described by a technical vocabulary that consumers don't know even exists. Yet if the vocabulary is there, it means that the abstraction exists, and therefore can be referred to in a command. So imagine "talking" to an application with a domain specific vocabulary, ie using words that a professional would immediately understand but a consumer has no idea what it means.
I'm thinking in terms of the quickest, least frustrating way to do the task. Fundamentally, natural language is pretty much a CLI. Ask an artist if they'd prefer to control Photoshop with a CLI or with mouse+keyboard in a GUI.
But my point was that selecting is a means, not an end. You can use language to describe the end, and the computer can do the means.
I understand your point perfectly well. What you're ignoring - yet again - is that your proposed interface is hideously slow in many situations in comparison to mouse+keyboard because it takes a while to describe what you want the computer to do. The more that you can with natural language, the more description you'll have to give because you have to be more precise about which task exactly you want the computer to do.
Meanwhile, you're talking about selecting sets of characters, and making direct changes one selection at a time.
Which sometimes you want to do.
Have you ever tried lynx, the old text browser? You can have all the links listed at the bottom of the page. Why is that interesting? Because when you decide where to go next, you have a choice of all destinations at a glance instead of underlined words scattered throughout a possibly quite big web page. You're not hunting around in a sea of words, and you can read the page and move on without having to scroll back and search the paragraph with the sentence with the word with the link.
There are good reasons why modern browsers don't do this e.g. you don't know why you want to follow a link until you've seen it in its context. And it's still quicker to select with mouse+keyboard than voice in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Not at all, I'm suggesting higher level navigation through natural language communication, as opposed to repetitive mindless point and click. There's no doubt that pointing and clicking a few times is quick and easy, it's just very limiting compar
They were analogies demonstrating that sometimes we need to interact with things in a manner which is superior to what speech allows. Similar instances exist in computing where the instant input and control a GUI offers is vastly preferable to cumbersome speech. In another comment, you suggested that speech was superior for graphical work because you could give a command and have it interpreted rather than clicking on pixel (x,y), but there are times when you do want to deal with the nitty gritty and there speech becomes the slow, cumbersome approach. Making touch-screens more common would be a lot more useful than voice command and even there it's only as an accessory to keyboard+mouse for most situations.
GUIs are the equivalent of babytalk - a tiny handful of possible operations which must be used to do everything - great to get people to use computers the first time, but much too limiting to be used by adults who prefer more sophisticated languages.
That's a preposterous blanket statement. Different interfaces are appropriate for different activities. Voice command is certainly not the superior 'sophisticated' solution to all situations and isn't inherently more flexible than the current GUI+CLI combo. You wouldn't expect someone to compose a concerto by speaking instructions to someone else at the piano and neither would you expect a photographer to take a photo by giving instructions to someone else who has the camera. There are plenty of activities where you need the instant response a GUI provides rather than waiting for sufficient words to be spoken to provide the context and precision necessary.
Speech is superior or at least competitive/useful for some operations, but does not relegate GUIs to being babytalk.
Not necessarily. Language is infinitely more versatile than gestures.
It's also slow and imprecise.
What I'm talking about is natural language processing, either aloud into a microphone, of if you want quiet, typing into a chat window.
You're not seriously suggesting typing what you want to say to a computer so that it interprets what you've typed as if you've said it to it, are you?
Quite the opposite. Editing graphics is a very low level operation at this point, whereas in a natural language interface the idea is to communicate in higher level abstractions. Don't imagine telling the computer "set the pixel at position 2005,789 to red", imagine "sharpen the image a bit", "cut out a silhouette". The target abstraction level is talking as if with another artist.
Firstly you just severely limited what people can do. secondly, I want precision in my editing, not for some AI to try and interpret what I want. That's a recipe for slowness, imprecision and frustration. Think about it like this: if an artist wants to draw something, do they pick up a pencil, or do they tell someone else to pick up a pencil and give them instructions? Or imagine adjusting a hue by dragging a slider. Subtle movements with a mouse are infinitely better than 'left a bit, right a bit, left a bit' ad infinitum. What you suggest might be fine for a simple consumer-oriented app designed for doing simple rough edits, but would be totally inappropriate for anything more advanced.
Selecting text is again a low level operation. You never select text for its own sake, you select text to do something with or to it. In a natural language interface, you would express what you want to do, and the fact that text is being selected would be automatic and incidental.
But selecting and copying/italicising/whatever is still quicker with a mouse than with voice because explaining which bit you want to change takes time. Natural language sucks for speed outside of certain specialised situations.
Finally, following individual links is also quite low level. Why is google so popular? Because you don't have to follow a link, you type in what you want instead.
When you're at a site, you typically have more links to follow and these links are more quickly selectable with a mouse (or touch) than voice.
In a natural language interface, links on a page would be grouped and catalogued into higher level destinations which you would choose or interact with. You wouldn't point and click, you would first ask which links give more information about XXX, then tell the computer to display only one, some, or all, or not even display them but do something else with their contents, etc.
It sounds like you're enforcing a very slow interface and method of interfacing on everyone. I completely fail to see how this is remotely advantageous to anyone except the handicapped.
All of these things depend on having languages with enough grammatical structure to express abstractions and relations between abstractions. And for that, the CLI is the first step.
None of this addresses the fundamental problems of speed and inappropriateness for many contexts due to noise/effort required. Make computers telepathic and maybe your ideas would start to work. Maybe it would be better to keep an eye on research into methods of control by monitoring the brain. IIRC, some good work has been done allowing severely handicapped people to have limited control over a word processor, allowing them to interact with the world. Give it a couple of decades more research and maybe something useful for the rest of us will appear.
Fine. I'm not saying there's no place for it; I was simply rebutting the notion that it was a superior replacement for the GUI in standard computer operations.
How so? No-one is born with metal/plastic/whatever limbs. These are artificial replacements that function in a different manner to the human body ergo he is not competing in the same way as other athletes.
The issue isn't "Can computers make life easier i some situations?" but rather "Must life be cumbersome without a computer?" The idea that you need a computer to have a normal life and be a normal member of the public and that you would be in some way deficient without one is what was being argues against.
Speaking to a computer is a horrendously inefficient means of doing a lot of tasks, some of them quite common, Anything involving the creation or editing of graphics, selecting of text, choosing a link to follow, etc. is almost always quicker and easier to do with a GUI than speech. Speech also gets in the way when there are other people about who don't want disturbed i.e. a lot of work places and is draining on the throat after a while. Don't assume computer evolution is going to follow the movies. Though even in Star Trek they're still using a GUI quite a bit.
I wouldn't want people who medically need technology to survive relegated to some "special" zone.
Why do you view the Special Olympics as a relegation? You're effectively accusing people of bigotry here, yet you only see value in competition when it involves able-bodied people.
They should be able to take part in every part of life that non-handicapped people can. That includes sport, if they are good enough to qualify.
Since when are handicapped people not able to compete in sport? Or other areas of society for that matter? Way to over-dramatise the situation.
I find your insistence on the purity of the human body in sport somewhat troubling.
Who insisted that wheelchair basketball isn't a sport or that running with prosthetics isn't really athletics? No-one did; rather they insisted that people compete on a level playing field: non-prosthetic against non-prosthetic and prosthetic against prosthetic. For someone who likes to use the word strawman...
And oh, you're essentially telling a guy born without legs that he can't be a part of normal society because of what unscrupulous athletes might do 30 years in the future? Way to go.
You're essentially saying that unless you take part in the able-bodied Olympics you're not a part of normal society? way to go.
Who has asked for him to be drummed out of sport? I doubt anyone thinks he should stop competing in the way he has been for the last few years. You're also ignoring the many posts which have pointed out that the principles of fair play are the motivating factor for objections, rather than the particulars of this case.
If the technology that powers this guy's legs was that good, the people with bad legs (or the military) would be falling all over themselves to get them "installed".
You're ignoring the big picture here. The debate isn't about any one individual, it's about the precedent the ruling sets for the future and the principles of fair competition.
The truth is these blades aren't a good replacement for good human legs.
No-one is saying they are as far as I've seen; what people are saying is that allowing the use of prosthetics precludes the possibility of a level playing field which is required for fair competition.
The fact that he can do so well using what essentially is something inferior to human legs is a testament to the human spirit -- something the Olympics is fundamentally about, something which a lot of posters here forget.
No, what people are forgetting is that for a competition to have value, it must be fair. You're getting caught up in the romance of the situation.
I agree in principle with the idea of a separate special event where both able-bodied and handicapped athletes compete, but as others have pointed out, he's too slow so there isn't much point yet.
Replace "handicapped" with "black" above and you'll get a better perspective of what my views are.
Replace "handicapped" with "black" and you're talking about an entirely different issue with entirely different problems. the issue here is not the equality of races/different ethnicities, but rather the level playing field that is required for fair competition.
I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is that competitions like the Olympics should be open to all humans, as long as they have not flouted the rules to get an unfair advantage.
Which strangely enough, no-one disagrees with. Read the comments and you'll see that people have an issue with the unfair advantage that prosthetics/cybernetics provide.
Anyway, while it's nice that handicapped folk have the option of competing in special events, wouldn't it be infinitely better to (assuming they qualified) let them compete in the actual mainstream event?
Only if they can do so without the aid of technology. What's the difference between this case and someone 'running' a marathon in a wheelchair?
Especially since -- athletes have been using technology to improve their performance since, well, forever. Would you disqualify an archer for wearing glasses (Archery is IIRC an Olympic event)? Would you disqualify an athlete for wearing a pacemaker implant (assuming he got it for sound medical reasons and he's fit enough to perform?)
Glasses are an aid to an existing organ that imperfectly correct a problem without altering how vision works beyond what is possible for a normal eye. Pacemakers ensure that an existing heart beats normally, just like a regular heart.
If not, what's wrong with allowing a guy born without legs to wear blades?
Because they're not fixing an imperfection in an existing limb/organ without altering how it fundamentally works; they're replacing limbs and fundamentally changing how they work in a way that is not available to able-bodied people. If someone had a cybernetic eye fitted or a cybernetic heart, I'd take issue with them competing.
This isn't about rights because we're not discussing people taking part in society. This is a competition which requires a level playing field and therefore precludes those with an unnatural advantage. If handicapped people want to compete, they should do so without prosthetics/cybernetics/wheelchairs/etc. To suggest otherwise is either political correctness taken to absurd extremes or would require the rules to be relaxed to a much greater extent to allow other aids, which completely changes the nature of the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
The sixth commandment forbids murder. The ethical theology that lies behind this prohibition is the fact that all men and women have been created in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27; 9:6). While Hebrew possesses seven words for killing, the word used here--rasah --appears only forty-seven times in the OT. If any one of the seven words could signify "murder," where the factors of premeditation and intentionality are present, this is the verb. Recently, however, some have complained (see Childs, Exodus p. 420, for the bibliography and argument) that many of the instances of this verb relate to blood vengeance and the role of the avenger (go'el in Num 35; Deut 4:41-43; 19:1-13; Josh 20:3). Without exception, however, in the later periods (e.g., Ps 94:6; Prov 22:13; Isa 1:21; Hos 4:2; 6:9; Jer 7:9) it carries the idea of murder with intentional violence. Every one of these instances stresses the act or allegation of premeditation and deliberateness--and that is at the heart of this verb. Thus this prohibition does not apply to beasts (Gen 9:3), to defending one's home from night-time burglars (Exod 22:2), to accidental killings (Deut 19:5), to the execution of murderers by the state (Gen 9:6), or to involvement with one's nation in certain types of war as illustrated by Israel's history. It does apply, however, to self-murder (i.e., suicide), to all accessories to murder (2 Sam 12:9), and to those who have authority but fail to use it to punish known murderers (1 Kings 21:19).
(From the Expositor's Bible Commentary)
There is a free flashlight program and I imagine there will be free versions of many basic application types. Besides, what does 99c buy you these days? Might get you a packet of crisps (potato chips for those of you on the wrong side of the Atlantic) here in the UK, but that's it. If the apps were $2.99, I can see people complaining about price, but 99c? The real issue seems to be too many redundant apps, some of them at higher prices with no extra features.
Are you sure you've replied to the correct post? I never stated any opinion concerning the need for Wikiepdia to be better or worse than any particular source. I was simply rebutting the notion that its science articles "are better the any other source."
Incidentally, the strengths it has largely overlap with its weaknesses.
You need to check those tests carefully. On average, science articles in Wikipedia may be more accurate than those of similar encyclopedias e.g. Brittanica, but they're not better than dedicated scientific texts and journals.
Ok. Though I would have thought that most of the times when you want to click, it would come immediately after movement, so your fingers would already be there. I can see how it would be an issue though if there is a time gap between positioning and clicking.
But right-clicking involves two and in my experience, putting two down causes movement less often than one, which I suspect is down to the system being designed to recognise two fingers as indicating an intention to right-click or scroll. Putting one finger down carries no such connotations, so I would expect to see more movement then. Try it yourself and see: tap the pad a few dozen times with a one finger (with 'tap to click' disabled of course) then repeat with two fingers and compare how much the pointer moves. With one, it flutters about, but with two, it rarely moves. Therefore, right-clicking by putting two fingers on the pad and clicking the button with your thumb is actually quite safe from the perspective of pointer-movement.
It just occurred to me that chorded can be meant in the sense of modifier key+mouse button or clicking two or more mouse buttons simultaneously. Instead of asking which it was you required, I had assumed it was multiple mouse buttons being simultaneously clicked. It's been a while since I last used X11, but IIRC it's middle-click for paste, which would be a case of modifier key+mouse button being necessitated by Apple's design and a very legitimate objection. If you need a middle-click and don't like using a modifier key to simulate it, then yeah, Apple's design is unsuitable. Taking the market as a whole, it's not a remotely significant issue, but for you as an individual, it is and I can see why you wouldn't want an Apple laptop.
I wonder if putting three fingers on the pad and click the button could potentially be a workable replacement, if they ever make a hardware+software combination that could handle that. You could even have four fingers for a fourth button, but things start getting a bit silly at that point (if they haven't already).
If you already have a finger on the pad (which you presumably do as a result of having moved the pointer to where you want to click), placing a second finger on the pad doesn't jiggle it at all, so you can right-click in safety by tapping he button with your thumb. Even if you don't have a finger on the pad, plonking two down at the same time shouldn't result in any pointer movement and even a bit of a delay between the first and second hitting rarely produces movement and even then only by a couple of pixels. If the pad is set for tap-clicking, it could be that everything I've just said is rendered invalid, but I hate pad-clicking because it's too easy to move the pointer when you want to click or click when you want to move, so all my clicking is done by the button. Of course chording is impossible under this setup, but it's very rarely needed. Where do you need chorded-clicks? I can see them being useful in some games, but you'd probably want a mouse anyway and there's nothing stopping you from getting a Microsoft one. If only Microsoft made one with a scroll-ball.
The trouble is that if you matched controls and actions 1:1, you'd be putting the game out of reach of people who have no talent for the physical game. One reason to play a sports game is to achieve things you cant necessarily do in real life. The instant you require real life skills, you're taken that away from people and they won't want to play your game. Obviously as you say,t he argument can be made that the actions aren't similar enough to real life to be immersive, but make it too similar and it wont be immersive because you'll suddenly have supposedly star players absolutely sucking because the gamer isn't a professional player themselves.
Never mind, i get it now. Rather disappointing that an AC was more helpful.
Ah, one of those wonderfully helpful and insightful posts Slashdot is famed for.
Would you care to explain your original comment? Does the phrase "soft gravel" have some meaning that we the the UK are unfamiliar with?
The article you linked to says nothing about 'soft gravel' and seems fairly adamant that it is a fruit.
Ah, a chairperson for the debate. Slashdot almost seems civilised now!
Actually I'm saying something very similar to you: both voice control and mouse+keyboard/touch have their place. The trouble is that when I raise the issue of instances when mouse+keyboard/touch is significantly quicker, the GP starts talking about abstraction and higher order operations. The way he's arguing things suggests that in his mind, voice control is superior for all situations, which is demonstrably false.
One problem with his examples is that he massively simplifies the reality of the tasks that people engage. Actually, so does your example. People rarely think 'I want this image brightened by 20%'; they think 'this image should be brighter' then move a slider until it looks satisfactory. With a mouse and quick enough rendering (CPU power presumably isn't much a problem if a computer is capable of the language processing and interpretation suggested here), this can be done in a second or two by just dragging the slider until it looks right. Saying 'Brighter... darker... brighter... a bit more...' would get really quite irritating. I get visions of the Chuckle Brothers going 'To me' 'To you' when I think about (thought that won't make any sense unless you're from the UK). The problem with discussing an abstracted method of doing things is that it brushes over the rough edges of reality.
The input-feedback loop iterates a lot quicker with mouse+keyboard than it does with voice. Say I'm creating a circle of arbitrary size in Photoshop. Do this, I click and drag the mouse, having selected the appropriate tool. It takes a fraction of a second to make a very precise adjustment to the size, allowing to quickly evaluate a range of sizes to see which is appropriate. Doing the same thing by talking to the computer would take significantly longer and be quite frustrating.
And at a certain level, voice sucks. Really sucks. Which is why the GUI will be around for a long, long, long time - it is vastly superior for certain tasks.
Not quite try. There are gestures, multi-touch, modifier buttons, multiple buttons that can be clicked, scroll-wheels, etc. Mouse+keyboard/touch is a very powerful interface.
I would set up either a Photoshop action or a batch conversion in Graphic Converter. If it was a common task, I could even have an Applescript sitting on the desktop so I just have to drag the files over it to have it all done in the background. Could even set it up in a contextual menu.
In some situations this would be a fine way of doing, but not every situation. In fact in most situations I would want to do the conversion manually so I can tweak how much contribution each colour channel makes. This comes down to manipulating sliders until the image looks a way I'm happy with - a task that is much quicker with the mouse than with voice.
You're happy to point out this 'limitation' of mouse+keyboard, so why not accept the fundamental weaknesses of voice and admit that the two interfaces are suited to different tasks, therefore mouse+keyboard will be around for the foreseeable future and will not be entirely supplanted by voice?
That's idiotic given the time it would take to enter an appropriate command vs. just doing i yourself with mouse+keyboard/touch.
No, it's not, because plenty of people using computers have the skills they require and are more efficient at using them than they would be by having the computer interpret it. Remember 'Clippy'? Now imagine every task on your computer being done through Clippy. Horrible thought isn't it? As I said before, voice is useful for some applications, but where someone knows what they're doing, keyboard+mouse is vastly superior. Different interfaces for different tasks, no one interface being the ultimate solution for everything.
Exactly my point. You've been arguing that the GUI is a dead-end and will be replaced by natural language. I'm saying that there are plenty of situations where mouse+keyboard is better than voice, which somewhat disproves what you're saying. And apparently you agree, so you're contradicting yourself.
I'm thinking in terms of the quickest, least frustrating way to do the task. Fundamentally, natural language is pretty much a CLI. Ask an artist if they'd prefer to control Photoshop with a CLI or with mouse+keyboard in a GUI.
I understand your point perfectly well. What you're ignoring - yet again - is that your proposed interface is hideously slow in many situations in comparison to mouse+keyboard because it takes a while to describe what you want the computer to do. The more that you can with natural language, the more description you'll have to give because you have to be more precise about which task exactly you want the computer to do.
Which sometimes you want to do.
There are good reasons why modern browsers don't do this e.g. you don't know why you want to follow a link until you've seen it in its context. And it's still quicker to select with mouse+keyboard than voice in the overwhelming majority of cases.
They were analogies demonstrating that sometimes we need to interact with things in a manner which is superior to what speech allows. Similar instances exist in computing where the instant input and control a GUI offers is vastly preferable to cumbersome speech. In another comment, you suggested that speech was superior for graphical work because you could give a command and have it interpreted rather than clicking on pixel (x,y), but there are times when you do want to deal with the nitty gritty and there speech becomes the slow, cumbersome approach. Making touch-screens more common would be a lot more useful than voice command and even there it's only as an accessory to keyboard+mouse for most situations.
That's a preposterous blanket statement. Different interfaces are appropriate for different activities. Voice command is certainly not the superior 'sophisticated' solution to all situations and isn't inherently more flexible than the current GUI+CLI combo. You wouldn't expect someone to compose a concerto by speaking instructions to someone else at the piano and neither would you expect a photographer to take a photo by giving instructions to someone else who has the camera. There are plenty of activities where you need the instant response a GUI provides rather than waiting for sufficient words to be spoken to provide the context and precision necessary.
Speech is superior or at least competitive/useful for some operations, but does not relegate GUIs to being babytalk.
It's also slow and imprecise.
You're not seriously suggesting typing what you want to say to a computer so that it interprets what you've typed as if you've said it to it, are you?
Firstly you just severely limited what people can do. secondly, I want precision in my editing, not for some AI to try and interpret what I want. That's a recipe for slowness, imprecision and frustration. Think about it like this: if an artist wants to draw something, do they pick up a pencil, or do they tell someone else to pick up a pencil and give them instructions? Or imagine adjusting a hue by dragging a slider. Subtle movements with a mouse are infinitely better than 'left a bit, right a bit, left a bit' ad infinitum. What you suggest might be fine for a simple consumer-oriented app designed for doing simple rough edits, but would be totally inappropriate for anything more advanced.
But selecting and copying/italicising/whatever is still quicker with a mouse than with voice because explaining which bit you want to change takes time. Natural language sucks for speed outside of certain specialised situations.
When you're at a site, you typically have more links to follow and these links are more quickly selectable with a mouse (or touch) than voice.
It sounds like you're enforcing a very slow interface and method of interfacing on everyone. I completely fail to see how this is remotely advantageous to anyone except the handicapped.
None of this addresses the fundamental problems of speed and inappropriateness for many contexts due to noise/effort required. Make computers telepathic and maybe your ideas would start to work. Maybe it would be better to keep an eye on research into methods of control by monitoring the brain. IIRC, some good work has been done allowing severely handicapped people to have limited control over a word processor, allowing them to interact with the world. Give it a couple of decades more research and maybe something useful for the rest of us will appear.
Fine. I'm not saying there's no place for it; I was simply rebutting the notion that it was a superior replacement for the GUI in standard computer operations.
How so? No-one is born with metal/plastic/whatever limbs. These are artificial replacements that function in a different manner to the human body ergo he is not competing in the same way as other athletes.
The issue isn't "Can computers make life easier i some situations?" but rather "Must life be cumbersome without a computer?" The idea that you need a computer to have a normal life and be a normal member of the public and that you would be in some way deficient without one is what was being argues against.
Speaking to a computer is a horrendously inefficient means of doing a lot of tasks, some of them quite common, Anything involving the creation or editing of graphics, selecting of text, choosing a link to follow, etc. is almost always quicker and easier to do with a GUI than speech. Speech also gets in the way when there are other people about who don't want disturbed i.e. a lot of work places and is draining on the throat after a while. Don't assume computer evolution is going to follow the movies. Though even in Star Trek they're still using a GUI quite a bit.
Why do you view the Special Olympics as a relegation? You're effectively accusing people of bigotry here, yet you only see value in competition when it involves able-bodied people.
Since when are handicapped people not able to compete in sport? Or other areas of society for that matter? Way to over-dramatise the situation.
Who insisted that wheelchair basketball isn't a sport or that running with prosthetics isn't really athletics? No-one did; rather they insisted that people compete on a level playing field: non-prosthetic against non-prosthetic and prosthetic against prosthetic. For someone who likes to use the word strawman...
You're essentially saying that unless you take part in the able-bodied Olympics you're not a part of normal society? way to go.
Who has asked for him to be drummed out of sport? I doubt anyone thinks he should stop competing in the way he has been for the last few years. You're also ignoring the many posts which have pointed out that the principles of fair play are the motivating factor for objections, rather than the particulars of this case.
You're ignoring the big picture here. The debate isn't about any one individual, it's about the precedent the ruling sets for the future and the principles of fair competition.
No-one is saying they are as far as I've seen; what people are saying is that allowing the use of prosthetics precludes the possibility of a level playing field which is required for fair competition.
No, what people are forgetting is that for a competition to have value, it must be fair. You're getting caught up in the romance of the situation.
I agree in principle with the idea of a separate special event where both able-bodied and handicapped athletes compete, but as others have pointed out, he's too slow so there isn't much point yet.