It's just a novel, an appealing novel to most young people. I've personally never understood why some have to read books with magnifying glass, looking for hidden messages and seeing underlying secrets when there necessarily aren't any.
I first read Ender's Game when I was 9 years old or so. It had tremendous emotional power for me; I reread it at least 10 times over the years and knew it practically by heart.
Now looking back on it, the book fucked me up a little. The book's heroes are geniuses of world-shattering historical importance, and the reader's meant to identify with them. As I grew up I had this vague vision of myself as having similar importance in the future. When I eventually was forced to accept that actually, I was pretty much an ordinary guy and would live an ordinary life (actually even Churchill or Shakespeare or whoever are ordinary guys compared to Ender and his siblings), it was a wrenching transition. My life seemed worthless if I couldn't do anything as important and meaningful in the world as Ender. I didn't actually compare myself with Ender explicitly, but the worldview implanted by Ender's Game was floating in the back of my mind, influencing my attitudes.
Books contain ideas and worldviews and if they're false or misleading, real harm is done. In the case of novels it's if anything especially dangerous, because they pack an emotional punch that can strongly influence readers.
I wouldn't even let my kids read Ender's Game. The book is a megalomaniacal wish-fulfillment fantasy. Ender is this perfect superman who murders several children and yet remains perfectly innocent and good as far as Card is concerned. Because they are evil bullies and he is only defending himself --- "thoroughly". I can see why kids love it, it's so satisfying for a kid being bullied around in real life to imagine that scenario.
Not to mention, he and his siblings are such geniuses and so above the mass of humanity that his brother is able to easily conquer the world by the sheer power of his intellect. It's heady stuff for a scholastically over-average kid who fancies himself smarter than his peers. That's why Ender's Game is popular, not because it has any value as SF. I wouldn't trust kids to understand the difference between the twisted world of the book and reality.
I swear by this mouse. It's not very expensive and it avoids all the uncomfortable hand twisting that regular mice have.
Actually though, I would say the most important thing in any setup is something that costs 0$: correctly adjusting the height of your chair, screen and keyboard. Your feet should be firmly on the floor, you should be looking down very slightly at the screen when your back is straight, and your elbows should be floating at a perfect 90-degree angle. Then you've got real comfort, and all it takes is a little adjustment.
IIRC, Darwin's original theories were wildly incorrect and were greatly modified before a large proporition of the scientific community would accept them.
No, he was largely correct. The existence of macroevolution was accepted almost immediately by the community; but it took a few decades to accumulate evidence for the claim of natural selection as the driver of this process. Darwin's theory has of course been much refined but it remains accurate in its broad outlines.
All scientific theories have many small bugs in their initial iteration, of course; but Darwin's was as accurate as any other major theory. For example Newton's theory gave wildly inaccurate values for the position of the Moon until the applied math was fixed up (IIRC at least 50 years later).
You're completely rejecting the concept of "fact", it seems. That's mighty convenient for you because it allows you to handwave away the difference between a scientific theory with mounds of evidence behind it and an unsupported religious belief. Since "facts" don't exist according to you, they're both "theories" then and on the same footing. It's all well and good to point out the base epistemological uncertainty inevitable with empirical/inductive reasoning, but this is just sophistry.
Those of us who don't reject the perfectly good word "fact" out of a religious agenda instead place a certain (high) threshold of empirical evidence after which a statement can be described as a fact. Of course it can't really, truly be proven like a mathematical theorem, but at some point we need to draw the line and say a fact is a fact. Otherwise you end up with silliness like arguing that it isn't a fact that I ate breakfast this morning despite my clear memory of it (maybe the memory was teleported into my brain through quantum tunnelling!).
Good scientists don't make absolute statements about controversial new research that remains not fully reproduced. They don't hesitate to make such statements about fundamental theories that have been proven over a century ago. Are scientists also supposed to be ambivalent about whether atoms exist or there are other stars outside the solar system?
You know, when Darwin first published The Origin of Species his evidence was so convincing that within a few decades virtually the entire population of biologists had switched to his side. Now it's 100 years from then and we've accumulated a thousand times Darwin's evidence in favor of evolution. Just how much evidence is needed before something is a fact?
But only the people who go on to graduate school and get jobs in academia actually do all this, and 90% of CS graduates get jobs just programming. Like it or not, the main function of today's CS undergraduate degrees is to train programmers.
Probably when Software Engineering programs take off Computer Science really will become what you're claiming, but they aren't now.
Thanks for the examples. But having looked at them I still fail to be convinced that Flash has serious uses.
Breeze looked classy at first glance. But if I think of what I would want to do if I was a student with a lecture to study in this format, I would definitely want to save it on my hard drive for future viewing. (What if the server went down right before the exam, etc.) But I see no easy way to save. It looks like I have to do View Source and use wget, possibly jumping through additional hoops like opening the swf file in a hex editor to discover the real location of the video files. I've been forced to do such things before and it makes me loathe tightly controlled environments like Flash.
The first thing I noticed when I went to the Liveplasma main page is that my mouse cursor appeared as a hand icon anywhere on the page, even if there were no buttons to click. I was confused for several seconds; I thought there was other stuff on the right side of the screen that hadn't yet loaded, or perhaps the page wasn't appearing properly in Firefox (I opened it in IE, but it was the same). Then I realized the whole page was a big Flash presentation despite the CSS-like appearance. So liveplasma is gratuitously not following UI conventions; not a good first impression.
Then, doing a search and seeing what liveplasma actually does, I see a bizarre map display. Even assuming that this kind of display has any advantage over a plain old list, there's too much useless movement; the entries on the map should just instantly pop up instead of wasting my time. This would be better and could be done in HTML/Javascript.
Zoom-in/out as you said yourself doesn't need Flash. Finally, my operating system comes with a video player and there's no advantage to using Flash as a video player as opposed to providing links to the streams. Savability is a big factor here again, as well as full-screen capability.
As you've said, web games, which are the most client-side intensive content on the web use Flash very well, is there some inherient reason you think these capabilites couldn't be employed for serious purposes?
Basically the reason is interoperability. As you can see from the above, I want to cut-and-paste, to save things separately, to be able to control the data using my own set of tools instead of being limited to whatever the Flash designer decided was fit. This problem doesn't really come up with games, that's why Flash is good for them. Perhaps it doesn't come up in corporate environments either --- but then it's hard to see a corporate situation requiring flashy videoish displays.
Honestly, I've never programmed in Flash myself so I don't really know its merits as a platform. But one thing I can say is that every Flash application I've ever seen is crap, with the exception of web games. In every single non-game case where I've used Flash on a website, it could've been done better using HTML.
Could you point me to a non-game Flash application which could reasonably be described as "not crap"? If you do, then I'll reconsider my hate of Flash.
Hacking exploits bugs and design flaws. Plain and simple. Remove the bugs, fix the flaws and you have a hack proof system.
Online game have particular issues which make them impossible to "hack proof" even in theory. First, for efficiency reasons online games dump work onto the client that securitywise the client can't be trusted to do. So a hacked client can potentially see through walls and such. Even more seriously, in an online game (unlike most other applications) having a bot use the system is considered a hack. Obviously there is no way to ever be really sure a human is playing the game short of having someone looking over their shoulder in the same room; you need to rely on bot-catching heuristics, which the bot developers then dodge, leading to an arms race.
Anyway, even outside of online games, in any system no matter how well-coded you have PIBKAC issues like misconfiguration, weak passwords and social engineering. And with mathematical provability techniques not being usable on large systems there is no way to ever be absolutely sure that there are no code-level exploits remaining. So I would tend to agree with the parent's statement that "nothing is hack proof". We can only work towards that goal.
Japan is not more advanced than the US as far as Internet usage goes. (You might be thinking of South Korea, which is.) What this event shows, rather, is how draconian Japan's police is when it comes to cyber-crimes. Last year they arrested the person who created Winny, a filesharing program --- an exceptional crackdown considering that he did not commit piracy himself.
"reprobates", ha. You just taught me a new word:).
I think the web design on your site is excellent, actually. No genius there but a very clean, pleasant look. I would get rid of the Firefox banner or make it much smaller, though; it distracts too much attention from your main message.
Yes, you can get the public key, and yes, you can decrypt the content going down the line. You, however, can't change the content, as you need to re-encrypt it to do so.
Seems to me that simply blocking the packet from getting through is enough here.
I also notice you have this huge "post push down" thing in your account history to attempt to hide your older comments. Dude, you're even more paranoid than I am.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say fuck you. RSI sufferers already have enough problems without ignorant assholes like you claiming their problems don't exist.
I have RSI. I have constant mild chronic pain in my upper back and wrists which becomes acute when I use a computer without a break for more than about one and a half hours. I don't whine about it to my friends and I don't try to milk my employer (on the contrary, I've accepted a salary cut because of my reduced work performance). I have to devote most of my free time to RSI treatment, doing 10 minutes of self-massage and stretches every hour and going swimming 5 days a week. If I don't do this, the pain can prevent me from sleeping at night.
I didn't get RSI because I'm lazy. I got it because I'm an obsessive workaholic, regularly doing 10-hour programming and writing marathons. It wrecked my muscles and now I'm paying for my overzealousness. It's well-known among RSI therapists that those most prone to the condition are typically the most dedicated workers. And you have the gall to actually accuse RSI sufferers of being lazy whiners!
Despite your misinformed claim, computer work actually imposes considerable stresses on the human body. It keeps the same small, weak muscles in a tense state for hours on end, never giving them a chance to rest and heal. The human body was never meant to be used in this way: it's designed for dynamic activities like running and swimming. It's not surprising that if we do something as unnatural as sitting parked in the same rigid position for years and years, injury will result.
Nah, you didn't come across as cocky. It's just that with RSI you often hear people advocating a single measure (e.g. exercise, or stretches, or a fancy keyboard) as a cure-all. Several times in the early stages of my RSI I latched onto such things but all the while my condition kept getting worse. It's only now that I'm applying every measure available to me at once (massages, stretches, strenghtening, posture, breaks, controlled relaxation, aerobic exercise) --- that is, virtually devoting my life to RSI for the time being --- that I'm starting to heal.
When you don't have RSI yet you don't need to do all those things, of course. Just 2 or 3 are probably enough. But the more the better.
Thanks for being sympathetic:). I don't actually get much sympathy --- I look perfectly healthy from the outside and most people don't grasp the gravity of my condition. It sucks, but there's at least comfort in the fact that it's only a muscular injury and basically healable if you work hard enough at it.
I am twice your age and have never experienced any sort of RSI despite being at the keyboard for at least eight to ten hours a day for the past two and a half decades. And I can't tell you how many 72+ hour stints I have accumulated.
Yeah, RSI is like that. Some people never get it. It has to do with mysterious individual variations in bodies and habits. Personally I think I was at particular risk because I tend to be extremely tense and excited when I use a computer. If you're more relaxed those 72-hour stints will do a lot less damage.
Aerobic exercise is certainly one important preventative and treatment measure. As part of my treatment I swim lengths for half an hour 5 days a week. But actually I did a fair amount of exercise beforehand as well and got RSI anyway. So it's best not to get too cocky: using as many preventative measures as possible is a good idea.
One of the major problems with laptops is that they're very unergonomical. The problem is obvious when you think about it: the height of the keyboard can't be adjusted separately from the screen's, so either the screen is too low or the keyboard is too high.
I've been suffering for over a year now with a serious upper back repetitive stress injury. I'm only in my early twenties. But I've been intensely using computers since I was 8 years old, and in the past 3 years I've been using a laptop in a very poor posture (kept far in front of me, hunched with my arms outstreched forward and wrists sitting on desk). RSI is something that accumulates over a decade or more of bad computer use. Muscles become gradually more clenched and static without at first being painful, and once you start feeling symptoms several years after the abuse started, it's already too late. As more and more children become computer addicts my situation is going to become increasingly common.
So when I have a kid, the last thing I want to do is give him a laptop as his main computer. I'm giving him a desktop, adjusting it properly and teaching him about the importance of good posture and taking regular breaks. If he must have a laptop, then I'm getting one with a detachable screen and additional external keyboard. Abandoning the convenience and coolness of laptops seems to me like a small price to pay to avoid serious injury.
No it doesn't, not for general knowledge. When I want to learn a language or a mathematical theory, I head to an in-depth textbook, but when I'm hit with mild curiosity to learn the names and history of some Nazi generals, I head to Wikipedia. And if you think the latter type of learning is worthless, you mustn't have much culture outside your speciality.
But it already does work in the real world. I use it almost every day, and it's often the best source on the Internet for a given topic.
Most criticisms of Wikipedia carry an implicit comparison to traditional encyclopedias. But for Wikipedia to "work" it's enough that it only be more reliable and convenient than the rest of the web. I don't care that Britannica might be more reliable because I don't have the money to pay for it, and Britannica doesn't carry articles on many topics that I care about (e.g. I was learning about XML on Wikipedia today).
Slashdot Mirror
Tetris: The New Shape of Fear
I first read Ender's Game when I was 9 years old or so. It had tremendous emotional power for me; I reread it at least 10 times over the years and knew it practically by heart.
Now looking back on it, the book fucked me up a little. The book's heroes are geniuses of world-shattering historical importance, and the reader's meant to identify with them. As I grew up I had this vague vision of myself as having similar importance in the future. When I eventually was forced to accept that actually, I was pretty much an ordinary guy and would live an ordinary life (actually even Churchill or Shakespeare or whoever are ordinary guys compared to Ender and his siblings), it was a wrenching transition. My life seemed worthless if I couldn't do anything as important and meaningful in the world as Ender. I didn't actually compare myself with Ender explicitly, but the worldview implanted by Ender's Game was floating in the back of my mind, influencing my attitudes.
Books contain ideas and worldviews and if they're false or misleading, real harm is done. In the case of novels it's if anything especially dangerous, because they pack an emotional punch that can strongly influence readers.
Not to mention, he and his siblings are such geniuses and so above the mass of humanity that his brother is able to easily conquer the world by the sheer power of his intellect. It's heady stuff for a scholastically over-average kid who fancies himself smarter than his peers. That's why Ender's Game is popular, not because it has any value as SF. I wouldn't trust kids to understand the difference between the twisted world of the book and reality.
See this article from John Kessel for more extended criticism among these lines.
Actually though, I would say the most important thing in any setup is something that costs 0$: correctly adjusting the height of your chair, screen and keyboard. Your feet should be firmly on the floor, you should be looking down very slightly at the screen when your back is straight, and your elbows should be floating at a perfect 90-degree angle. Then you've got real comfort, and all it takes is a little adjustment.
No, he was largely correct. The existence of macroevolution was accepted almost immediately by the community; but it took a few decades to accumulate evidence for the claim of natural selection as the driver of this process. Darwin's theory has of course been much refined but it remains accurate in its broad outlines.
All scientific theories have many small bugs in their initial iteration, of course; but Darwin's was as accurate as any other major theory. For example Newton's theory gave wildly inaccurate values for the position of the Moon until the applied math was fixed up (IIRC at least 50 years later).
Those of us who don't reject the perfectly good word "fact" out of a religious agenda instead place a certain (high) threshold of empirical evidence after which a statement can be described as a fact. Of course it can't really, truly be proven like a mathematical theorem, but at some point we need to draw the line and say a fact is a fact. Otherwise you end up with silliness like arguing that it isn't a fact that I ate breakfast this morning despite my clear memory of it (maybe the memory was teleported into my brain through quantum tunnelling!).
You know, when Darwin first published The Origin of Species his evidence was so convincing that within a few decades virtually the entire population of biologists had switched to his side. Now it's 100 years from then and we've accumulated a thousand times Darwin's evidence in favor of evolution. Just how much evidence is needed before something is a fact?
I'm not sure I want government and corporate officials prying in teenagers' breeches. It's all harmless curiosity until someone gets pregnant.
Probably when Software Engineering programs take off Computer Science really will become what you're claiming, but they aren't now.
Breeze looked classy at first glance. But if I think of what I would want to do if I was a student with a lecture to study in this format, I would definitely want to save it on my hard drive for future viewing. (What if the server went down right before the exam, etc.) But I see no easy way to save. It looks like I have to do View Source and use wget, possibly jumping through additional hoops like opening the swf file in a hex editor to discover the real location of the video files. I've been forced to do such things before and it makes me loathe tightly controlled environments like Flash.
The first thing I noticed when I went to the Liveplasma main page is that my mouse cursor appeared as a hand icon anywhere on the page, even if there were no buttons to click. I was confused for several seconds; I thought there was other stuff on the right side of the screen that hadn't yet loaded, or perhaps the page wasn't appearing properly in Firefox (I opened it in IE, but it was the same). Then I realized the whole page was a big Flash presentation despite the CSS-like appearance. So liveplasma is gratuitously not following UI conventions; not a good first impression.
Then, doing a search and seeing what liveplasma actually does, I see a bizarre map display. Even assuming that this kind of display has any advantage over a plain old list, there's too much useless movement; the entries on the map should just instantly pop up instead of wasting my time. This would be better and could be done in HTML/Javascript.
Zoom-in/out as you said yourself doesn't need Flash. Finally, my operating system comes with a video player and there's no advantage to using Flash as a video player as opposed to providing links to the streams. Savability is a big factor here again, as well as full-screen capability.
As you've said, web games, which are the most client-side intensive content on the web use Flash very well, is there some inherient reason you think these capabilites couldn't be employed for serious purposes?
Basically the reason is interoperability. As you can see from the above, I want to cut-and-paste, to save things separately, to be able to control the data using my own set of tools instead of being limited to whatever the Flash designer decided was fit. This problem doesn't really come up with games, that's why Flash is good for them. Perhaps it doesn't come up in corporate environments either --- but then it's hard to see a corporate situation requiring flashy videoish displays.
Could you point me to a non-game Flash application which could reasonably be described as "not crap"? If you do, then I'll reconsider my hate of Flash.
Online game have particular issues which make them impossible to "hack proof" even in theory. First, for efficiency reasons online games dump work onto the client that securitywise the client can't be trusted to do. So a hacked client can potentially see through walls and such. Even more seriously, in an online game (unlike most other applications) having a bot use the system is considered a hack. Obviously there is no way to ever be really sure a human is playing the game short of having someone looking over their shoulder in the same room; you need to rely on bot-catching heuristics, which the bot developers then dodge, leading to an arms race.
Anyway, even outside of online games, in any system no matter how well-coded you have PIBKAC issues like misconfiguration, weak passwords and social engineering. And with mathematical provability techniques not being usable on large systems there is no way to ever be absolutely sure that there are no code-level exploits remaining. So I would tend to agree with the parent's statement that "nothing is hack proof". We can only work towards that goal.
Japan is not more advanced than the US as far as Internet usage goes. (You might be thinking of South Korea, which is.) What this event shows, rather, is how draconian Japan's police is when it comes to cyber-crimes. Last year they arrested the person who created Winny, a filesharing program --- an exceptional crackdown considering that he did not commit piracy himself.
Sigh, it's spread to CSS now. It used to be only when someone mentioned Computer Science that one of you Counterstrike people piped up.
"reprobates", ha. You just taught me a new word :).
I think the web design on your site is excellent, actually. No genius there but a very clean, pleasant look. I would get rid of the Firefox banner or make it much smaller, though; it distracts too much attention from your main message.
Seems to me that simply blocking the packet from getting through is enough here.
I also notice you have this huge "post push down" thing in your account history to attempt to hide your older comments. Dude, you're even more paranoid than I am.
I have RSI. I have constant mild chronic pain in my upper back and wrists which becomes acute when I use a computer without a break for more than about one and a half hours. I don't whine about it to my friends and I don't try to milk my employer (on the contrary, I've accepted a salary cut because of my reduced work performance). I have to devote most of my free time to RSI treatment, doing 10 minutes of self-massage and stretches every hour and going swimming 5 days a week. If I don't do this, the pain can prevent me from sleeping at night.
I didn't get RSI because I'm lazy. I got it because I'm an obsessive workaholic, regularly doing 10-hour programming and writing marathons. It wrecked my muscles and now I'm paying for my overzealousness. It's well-known among RSI therapists that those most prone to the condition are typically the most dedicated workers. And you have the gall to actually accuse RSI sufferers of being lazy whiners!
Despite your misinformed claim, computer work actually imposes considerable stresses on the human body. It keeps the same small, weak muscles in a tense state for hours on end, never giving them a chance to rest and heal. The human body was never meant to be used in this way: it's designed for dynamic activities like running and swimming. It's not surprising that if we do something as unnatural as sitting parked in the same rigid position for years and years, injury will result.
When you don't have RSI yet you don't need to do all those things, of course. Just 2 or 3 are probably enough. But the more the better.
Thanks for being sympathetic :). I don't actually get much sympathy --- I look perfectly healthy from the outside and most people don't grasp the gravity of my condition. It sucks, but there's at least comfort in the fact that it's only a muscular injury and basically healable if you work hard enough at it.
Yeah, RSI is like that. Some people never get it. It has to do with mysterious individual variations in bodies and habits. Personally I think I was at particular risk because I tend to be extremely tense and excited when I use a computer. If you're more relaxed those 72-hour stints will do a lot less damage.
Aerobic exercise is certainly one important preventative and treatment measure. As part of my treatment I swim lengths for half an hour 5 days a week. But actually I did a fair amount of exercise beforehand as well and got RSI anyway. So it's best not to get too cocky: using as many preventative measures as possible is a good idea.
I've been suffering for over a year now with a serious upper back repetitive stress injury. I'm only in my early twenties. But I've been intensely using computers since I was 8 years old, and in the past 3 years I've been using a laptop in a very poor posture (kept far in front of me, hunched with my arms outstreched forward and wrists sitting on desk). RSI is something that accumulates over a decade or more of bad computer use. Muscles become gradually more clenched and static without at first being painful, and once you start feeling symptoms several years after the abuse started, it's already too late. As more and more children become computer addicts my situation is going to become increasingly common.
So when I have a kid, the last thing I want to do is give him a laptop as his main computer. I'm giving him a desktop, adjusting it properly and teaching him about the importance of good posture and taking regular breaks. If he must have a laptop, then I'm getting one with a detachable screen and additional external keyboard. Abandoning the convenience and coolness of laptops seems to me like a small price to pay to avoid serious injury.
I say unintentional, because he couldn't spell "controversial" either.
Er yeah, that was me.
No it doesn't, not for general knowledge. When I want to learn a language or a mathematical theory, I head to an in-depth textbook, but when I'm hit with mild curiosity to learn the names and history of some Nazi generals, I head to Wikipedia. And if you think the latter type of learning is worthless, you mustn't have much culture outside your speciality.
Most criticisms of Wikipedia carry an implicit comparison to traditional encyclopedias. But for Wikipedia to "work" it's enough that it only be more reliable and convenient than the rest of the web. I don't care that Britannica might be more reliable because I don't have the money to pay for it, and Britannica doesn't carry articles on many topics that I care about (e.g. I was learning about XML on Wikipedia today).