The problem isn't that it's an ad hominem attack trying to disprove his points--it's try to point out the absurdity of the headline. Moore is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an environmentalist. That's the draw of the article, both here on/. and in the Washington Post. Dear Lord, an environmentalist is supporting nuclear power? Well, golly, maybe it ain't so bad!
Fact is, he's a PR man. Regardless of whether he makes good points or bad, calling him a "Green" or an "environmentalist" is flat out inaccurate.
I agree. When people in any industry in the past have run up against shitty working conditions, unreasonable management, and crappy pay (for the hours they put in), they've unionized. It's an entirely reasonable thing to do, especially considering how close to Hollywood games are getting and how many trade unions are in effect in the film industry.
And don't start with the "Oh, developers are too independent, too maverick, too high tech to be unionized." That's the exact same way you could've described auto workers 70 years ago, and they formed the UAW. Say what you will about it lately, the UAW did a LOT to improve conditions and pay for the "high-tech" workers of their time.
Sort of a dilettante question, but I've been researching using entropy and information gain here at work and some of what they're talking about in the article and the paper seems familiar, though I'm not skilled enough in stats yet to make much out of it. It seems to me to be fairly similiar to how you get an information gain score. If you can classify the background as such, you should be able to sift through data with however many parameters you want and find the parameters that cause the greatest difference in how "un-random" that sample is.
So, just so I can get a foothold on this new stuff technically, is the idea that the data they have isn't able to be classified yet? Am I getting ahead in the analysis in thinking about information gain by assuming an existing classification that differentiates signal and noise? Producing IG scores is more about WHY classified data points are different and not WHICH data points are significantly different from the background, right? Maybe I'm thinking too much in terms of data mining and producing a decision tree. Maybe I have it exactly backwards: assuming you already know which parameters (and at what thresholds) are signficant, does the Case-Western process produce the classification of data?
Sorry, I'm sort of thinking out loud here. Just wondering if there's a geek who can set me straight on this--my grasp of information theory is cobbled together from a bunch of google searches and wikipedia pages.
I played it on my 2GHz Pentium 4 (1 Gb RAM, somewhat older NVidia Card with 64 MB RAM), and it was really slow out of the box. But, there's a lot of effects enabled by default, like real-time lighting and shadows, bloom, etc., that you can turn off. Once I did that, I was able to play just fine.
It's pretty fun.
I've found Soya to be a very friendly Python-based 3D engine. It also has ODE physics built in, so that might be useful, too. It also works closely with Blender models. In addition, the developers are very responsive, and they've produced a number of tutorials to get people up to speed quickly. Not sure if the software you'd like to integrate with has Python bindings, but this is a good option if it does.
I did a double take when I saw the post. My mother-in-law also had a mid-life stroke and was also an accountant.
Here are some things that have really helped her:
* Books on tape. Reading a book on paper while hearing the book on tape has done a lot for her reading ability, not to mention being a great activity in general. You can try to find free recordings of public domain books here: http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp
* Cooking. Following recipes is a good way to deal with numbers, words, and their relationships to actual objects. Just measuring things is valuable for getting a sense of amounts.
All strokes are different, so it's hard to know what exactly will work for everybody. If at all possible, seek out a therapist who deals specifically with stroke patients. He or she may be best suited to figuring out activities that will work best for her.
I'm very interested in what other people have to say about this, too, since my own family is dealing with these same issues.
I'm not sure what all the "no" answers are based on, but, my rather simple Gateway PC with RedHat 9 dropped on it has been doing great things for me for years in the video-editing department. The combination of Cinelerra and Blender is absolutely killer. I can render a bunch of animation frames in Blender with an alpha channel, and then easily composite them on DV footage from my firewire-enabled camera in Cinelerra.
I've made actual movies with this and have received some small acclaim for my efforts. It's cheap, it uses stock hardware, and it works. I wouldn't keep using it if it didn't.
Sorry if I sound a little annoyed. Power to you if you're editing movies on a Mac--they're great machines and lots of folks in the industry swear by them. But I'm sick to death of people saying, "Nope! Get a Mac!" It just ain't so.
After playing that for a full two days, I wandered around Manhattan with my head back, just looking at all the great places to sling from. It'd be surprisingly possible to get around (assuming Spidey powers.)
On the flipside, while I was playing the game, I had a very palpable sense of vertigo when climbing the Empire State Building. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with me seeing it all the time, or suffering from acrophobia, or just being a wuss. It was tempered with an annoyance that the virtual city ends waaaay too far south (don't disrespect Harlem!)
"And wait until someone else comes around and fucks the article up again."
True, if everything was tit-for-tat. On the whole, though, I've seen articles tend toward greater accuracy or, at least, present a set of views with corresponding evidence that allows the reader to make up their own mind, as in the case of the Children's Crusade.
"Anything remotely interesting is controversial to someone."
There are degrees of controversy. One case is more like the Children's Crusade article, which essentially resolves itself by inclusion of more evidence. This is more aligned to the wabisabi principles of Wikis. Another case, however, is more heated and more destructive, where editors find themselves unable to accept another's point for view (rightly or wrongly,) like in the Sollog article. It's this latter case that is the real cause for concern. It's more like the burning of the Great Library than academic disagreement.
Worth noting, if you read the Children's Crusade article, it does seem reasonably clear that the final version is the more accepted version and does provide arguments and evidence supporting the correct interpretation.
Frankly, no disrespect to the parent poster, I get a little annoyed when people site inaccuracies on non-controversial Wikipedia topics as evidence of its inherent failure. The whole point of Wikis is to make the change once you see an error and back it up with links and other evidence! No sense complaining about it if you do go ahead and make the change!
For controversial entries, though, like the Sollog article, there is a definitely a problem. I just don't think it renders Wikipedia useless. With regard to the comparison to open source, check this recent article on Linux bugs vs. commercial software.
It's pretty interesting stuff. As I understand it, they're making a virtual machine that is better suited to running code from weakly-typed languages than, say, the JVM would be. I'd really like to see what comes out of the Python-Parrot combo, with or without the pies thrown.
It looks cool from the screenies, but it has some fairly serious dependency nightmares once you actually try to get it going. I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to compiling these things, and I'm not afraid to start tearing around in the code to make it work, but this is beyond the pale. PortAudio is particularly hellish to deal with. It's only version 0.1, so I'm sure they'll improve things in the future, but I'm giving up until the install and dependency issues become more sane.
Has anyone tried rebuilding the src rpms from here to get them to work for other rpm distros like the Redhats? Or is there another good source of src rpms to use? I used to get my RH 9 gnome rpms from Ximian, but they seem to have stopped updating for 9. Alas.
Haven't tried viewing the ads yet until the Slashdotting abates, but does anyone know the copyright/license status of the ads? Are they public domain? Just thinking about all the fun someone could have with a big ol' archive of ads like that. A parody would be within fair use anyway, but I'm just curious.
FWIW, many of the ads attributed to MoveOn are actually from MoveOnPAC, which is a fully regulated political action committee and subject to much more stringent rules, reporting, and donation limits than a 527. MoveOn itself is a 527, though, AFAIK.
This may be partly because I'm spoiled enough to be able to participate in the New York City music scene, but you do NOT need a major label to build a music community. There are mod communities, R&B communities, funk communities, britpop communities...and those are just the ones that I've been in! What the big labels do is to make certain song available and, yes, people do build communities based on those songs. But there are hundreds and hundres of smaller communities all over the U.S. listening to music that, although it doesn't get mass play, is just as good (and is frequently better) than the Top 40. Viewing the Billboard chart as a kind of meritocracy just doesn't make sense.
Gnomoradio's good idea is to allow those bands who don't want to play by the rules to get international distribution and potentially expand their music community beyond their local club fan base. The Radio is dominated by closed-licensed songs. This is an alternative for people who, to coin a phrase, think different.
Hmm...what if they want something...larger...taster...filled with more sweet, sweet caloric energy? What if they find an abundant larger animal that sates their new hunger? Let's get down to brass tacks...what if they start eatin' people? Laws of Robotics be damned, they're hungry!
It's no good to just throw a sample of DNA up on the moon. We must have some kind of way to represent the genetic diversity within a species. The diversity itself is the mark of a species and its ability to prosper.
There've been recent articles that indicate that climate change is causing an overall loss in diversity among the world's species. Once the diversity decreases to a certain point, the populations will crash (I've read about computer simulations done on Atlantic salmon populations that bear this out.) In short, simply saving the DNA, either the actual molecules or a printout, will not do anyone any good in the future. Not only will it be impossible to resurrect the species, they future researchers will have only the very limited insight into just one example of a creature that once numbered in the thousands, millions, or billions with the genetic diverity to match.
The project, conceived this way at least, is doomed to failure. The best way to preserve what we've got is to reduce the threat of mass extinction with proper management of the planet we have now.
I highly recommend people read "A Civil Action" (versus seeing the movie). It's a non-fiction account of a environmental case in Woburn, Massachusetts, where left-behind waste caused significant cancers in local residents. The suit was settled, and the payoff to families was smaller than they'd hoped for or needed. The law firm got quite a lot of the money. BUT the firm still ran at a loss and had to close. Why? Plaintiff lawyers fight an incredible uphill battle when they're up against large corporate defendents. The costs of running a suit like that are enormous. Read the book to see where the money goes and just how hard it is to make a class action suit work.
I am totally ignorant of German law, but is there a German (or EU) principle in copyright similar to the American right of first sale? Basically, in the States, "once a copyright owner sells a copy of his work to another, the copyright owner relinquishes all further rights to sell or otherwise dispose of that copy." Does this not pertain in Europe? When do the copyright owner's rights end? Do they ever? This could be a dangerous precedent, especially if it contradicts the established legal tradition.
I share your frustration about this and a great many other issues. There is some hope, though. Even a loosely organized letter-writing campaign can make a dent. Instead of posting on the next blog you see about this issue, take the same amount of time to shoot of a letter to the editor of your local paper. EVERYBODY do that. That means you, person who is reading this post. Do it within a week. Just state the basic facts and point out how this will kill innovation and hurt the US economy far more than help it. Will it make the issue lead the nightly news? No. But it gets enough awareness out there that Hatch is a crackpot devoted to the whims of his wealthy contributors.
I've heard a client was supposed to come out for Linux, but I haven't seen it materialize yet. Shame. I've been wanting to try out a lot of XML-RPC's possibilities, and I've got this nice Linux box here with a static IP that could make it happen--if only I could play their reindeer games.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't that it's an ad hominem attack trying to disprove his points--it's try to point out the absurdity of the headline. Moore is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an environmentalist. That's the draw of the article, both here on /. and in the Washington Post. Dear Lord, an environmentalist is supporting nuclear power? Well, golly, maybe it ain't so bad!
Fact is, he's a PR man. Regardless of whether he makes good points or bad, calling him a "Green" or an "environmentalist" is flat out inaccurate.
Richard Lindzen is a paid consultant for coal and oil interests. And he's not even willing to put his money where his mouth is.
Seriously, every time I hear some "distinguished professor" spouting facts that seem a little too convenient to be true, I go to Sourcewatch.
I agree. When people in any industry in the past have run up against shitty working conditions, unreasonable management, and crappy pay (for the hours they put in), they've unionized. It's an entirely reasonable thing to do, especially considering how close to Hollywood games are getting and how many trade unions are in effect in the film industry.
And don't start with the "Oh, developers are too independent, too maverick, too high tech to be unionized." That's the exact same way you could've described auto workers 70 years ago, and they formed the UAW. Say what you will about it lately, the UAW did a LOT to improve conditions and pay for the "high-tech" workers of their time.
Sort of a dilettante question, but I've been researching using entropy and information gain here at work and some of what they're talking about in the article and the paper seems familiar, though I'm not skilled enough in stats yet to make much out of it. It seems to me to be fairly similiar to how you get an information gain score. If you can classify the background as such, you should be able to sift through data with however many parameters you want and find the parameters that cause the greatest difference in how "un-random" that sample is.
So, just so I can get a foothold on this new stuff technically, is the idea that the data they have isn't able to be classified yet? Am I getting ahead in the analysis in thinking about information gain by assuming an existing classification that differentiates signal and noise? Producing IG scores is more about WHY classified data points are different and not WHICH data points are significantly different from the background, right? Maybe I'm thinking too much in terms of data mining and producing a decision tree. Maybe I have it exactly backwards: assuming you already know which parameters (and at what thresholds) are signficant, does the Case-Western process produce the classification of data?
Sorry, I'm sort of thinking out loud here. Just wondering if there's a geek who can set me straight on this--my grasp of information theory is cobbled together from a bunch of google searches and wikipedia pages.
I played it on my 2GHz Pentium 4 (1 Gb RAM, somewhat older NVidia Card with 64 MB RAM), and it was really slow out of the box. But, there's a lot of effects enabled by default, like real-time lighting and shadows, bloom, etc., that you can turn off. Once I did that, I was able to play just fine. It's pretty fun.
I've found Soya to be a very friendly Python-based 3D engine. It also has ODE physics built in, so that might be useful, too. It also works closely with Blender models. In addition, the developers are very responsive, and they've produced a number of tutorials to get people up to speed quickly. Not sure if the software you'd like to integrate with has Python bindings, but this is a good option if it does.
I did a double take when I saw the post. My mother-in-law also had a mid-life stroke and was also an accountant.
Here are some things that have really helped her:
* Books on tape. Reading a book on paper while hearing the book on tape has done a lot for her reading ability, not to mention being a great activity in general. You can try to find free recordings of public domain books here:
http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp
* Cooking. Following recipes is a good way to deal with numbers, words, and their relationships to actual objects. Just measuring things is valuable for getting a sense of amounts.
All strokes are different, so it's hard to know what exactly will work for everybody. If at all possible, seek out a therapist who deals specifically with stroke patients. He or she may be best suited to figuring out activities that will work best for her.
I'm very interested in what other people have to say about this, too, since my own family is dealing with these same issues.
...I thought the first thing they were supposed to do is teach it to sing "Daisy"
I'm not sure what all the "no" answers are based on, but, my rather simple Gateway PC with RedHat 9 dropped on it has been doing great things for me for years in the video-editing department. The combination of Cinelerra and Blender is absolutely killer. I can render a bunch of animation frames in Blender with an alpha channel, and then easily composite them on DV footage from my firewire-enabled camera in Cinelerra.
I've made actual movies with this and have received some small acclaim for my efforts. It's cheap, it uses stock hardware, and it works. I wouldn't keep using it if it didn't.
Sorry if I sound a little annoyed. Power to you if you're editing movies on a Mac--they're great machines and lots of folks in the industry swear by them. But I'm sick to death of people saying, "Nope! Get a Mac!" It just ain't so.
After playing that for a full two days, I wandered around Manhattan with my head back, just looking at all the great places to sling from. It'd be surprisingly possible to get around (assuming Spidey powers.) On the flipside, while I was playing the game, I had a very palpable sense of vertigo when climbing the Empire State Building. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with me seeing it all the time, or suffering from acrophobia, or just being a wuss. It was tempered with an annoyance that the virtual city ends waaaay too far south (don't disrespect Harlem!)
"And wait until someone else comes around and fucks the article up again."
True, if everything was tit-for-tat. On the whole, though, I've seen articles tend toward greater accuracy or, at least, present a set of views with corresponding evidence that allows the reader to make up their own mind, as in the case of the Children's Crusade.
"Anything remotely interesting is controversial to someone."
There are degrees of controversy. One case is more like the Children's Crusade article, which essentially resolves itself by inclusion of more evidence. This is more aligned to the wabisabi principles of Wikis. Another case, however, is more heated and more destructive, where editors find themselves unable to accept another's point for view (rightly or wrongly,) like in the Sollog article. It's this latter case that is the real cause for concern. It's more like the burning of the Great Library than academic disagreement.
Worth noting, if you read the Children's Crusade article, it does seem reasonably clear that the final version is the more accepted version and does provide arguments and evidence supporting the correct interpretation.
Frankly, no disrespect to the parent poster, I get a little annoyed when people site inaccuracies on non-controversial Wikipedia topics as evidence of its inherent failure. The whole point of Wikis is to make the change once you see an error and back it up with links and other evidence! No sense complaining about it if you do go ahead and make the change!
For controversial entries, though, like the Sollog article, there is a definitely a problem. I just don't think it renders Wikipedia useless. With regard to the comparison to open source, check this recent article on Linux bugs vs. commercial software.
More about Parrot here.
It's pretty interesting stuff. As I understand it, they're making a virtual machine that is better suited to running code from weakly-typed languages than, say, the JVM would be. I'd really like to see what comes out of the Python-Parrot combo, with or without the pies thrown.
It looks cool from the screenies, but it has some fairly serious dependency nightmares once you actually try to get it going. I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to compiling these things, and I'm not afraid to start tearing around in the code to make it work, but this is beyond the pale. PortAudio is particularly hellish to deal with. It's only version 0.1, so I'm sure they'll improve things in the future, but I'm giving up until the install and dependency issues become more sane.
Has anyone tried rebuilding the src rpms from here to get them to work for other rpm distros like the Redhats? Or is there another good source of src rpms to use? I used to get my RH 9 gnome rpms from Ximian, but they seem to have stopped updating for 9. Alas.
Haven't tried viewing the ads yet until the Slashdotting abates, but does anyone know the copyright/license status of the ads? Are they public domain? Just thinking about all the fun someone could have with a big ol' archive of ads like that. A parody would be within fair use anyway, but I'm just curious.
FWIW, many of the ads attributed to MoveOn are actually from MoveOnPAC, which is a fully regulated political action committee and subject to much more stringent rules, reporting, and donation limits than a 527. MoveOn itself is a 527, though, AFAIK.
This may be partly because I'm spoiled enough to be able to participate in the New York City music scene, but you do NOT need a major label to build a music community. There are mod communities, R&B communities, funk communities, britpop communities...and those are just the ones that I've been in! What the big labels do is to make certain song available and, yes, people do build communities based on those songs. But there are hundreds and hundres of smaller communities all over the U.S. listening to music that, although it doesn't get mass play, is just as good (and is frequently better) than the Top 40. Viewing the Billboard chart as a kind of meritocracy just doesn't make sense.
Gnomoradio's good idea is to allow those bands who don't want to play by the rules to get international distribution and potentially expand their music community beyond their local club fan base. The Radio is dominated by closed-licensed songs. This is an alternative for people who, to coin a phrase, think different.
Hmm...what if they want something...larger...taster...filled with more sweet, sweet caloric energy? What if they find an abundant larger animal that sates their new hunger? Let's get down to brass tacks...what if they start eatin' people? Laws of Robotics be damned, they're hungry!
It's no good to just throw a sample of DNA up on the moon. We must have some kind of way to represent the genetic diversity within a species. The diversity itself is the mark of a species and its ability to prosper.
There've been recent articles that indicate that climate change is causing an overall loss in diversity among the world's species. Once the diversity decreases to a certain point, the populations will crash (I've read about computer simulations done on Atlantic salmon populations that bear this out.) In short, simply saving the DNA, either the actual molecules or a printout, will not do anyone any good in the future. Not only will it be impossible to resurrect the species, they future researchers will have only the very limited insight into just one example of a creature that once numbered in the thousands, millions, or billions with the genetic diverity to match.
The project, conceived this way at least, is doomed to failure. The best way to preserve what we've got is to reduce the threat of mass extinction with proper management of the planet we have now.
I highly recommend people read "A Civil Action" (versus seeing the movie). It's a non-fiction account of a environmental case in Woburn, Massachusetts, where left-behind waste caused significant cancers in local residents. The suit was settled, and the payoff to families was smaller than they'd hoped for or needed. The law firm got quite a lot of the money. BUT the firm still ran at a loss and had to close. Why? Plaintiff lawyers fight an incredible uphill battle when they're up against large corporate defendents. The costs of running a suit like that are enormous. Read the book to see where the money goes and just how hard it is to make a class action suit work.
Between this story and the one the immediately preceded it, was anyone else thinking SkyNET? Or another summer movie?
I am totally ignorant of German law, but is there a German (or EU) principle in copyright similar to the American right of first sale? Basically, in the States, "once a copyright owner sells a copy of his work to another, the copyright owner relinquishes all further rights to sell or otherwise dispose of that copy." Does this not pertain in Europe? When do the copyright owner's rights end? Do they ever? This could be a dangerous precedent, especially if it contradicts the established legal tradition.
I share your frustration about this and a great many other issues. There is some hope, though. Even a loosely organized letter-writing campaign can make a dent. Instead of posting on the next blog you see about this issue, take the same amount of time to shoot of a letter to the editor of your local paper. EVERYBODY do that. That means you, person who is reading this post. Do it within a week. Just state the basic facts and point out how this will kill innovation and hurt the US economy far more than help it. Will it make the issue lead the nightly news? No. But it gets enough awareness out there that Hatch is a crackpot devoted to the whims of his wealthy contributors.
I've heard a client was supposed to come out for Linux, but I haven't seen it materialize yet. Shame. I've been wanting to try out a lot of XML-RPC's possibilities, and I've got this nice Linux box here with a static IP that could make it happen--if only I could play their reindeer games.
[world's smallest fiddle starts tuning up]