Might they have some catching up to do? Sure. But at least they won't have bad programming habits to unlearn, which can be just as bad as inexperience.
I'll call bull on that.
1. Those who had any habits at all, were passionate about programming and willing to learn. None was some fossil stuck in a 50 year rut of maintaining the same COBOL programs. Au contraire, everyone I knew who was passionate about programming in college, was going through around a language a year and was very interested in learning new techniques and habits.
Is that worse than inexperience? Bull. And doubly so if you're trying to tell me it's worse than someone who's not even interested in it, and turned off by its being too nerdy.
Yes, they might catch up, with enough effort. But please spare me the bullshit that starting inexperienced and uninterested is somehow some valuable advantage.
2. Talking about existing bad habits would be maybe relevant if college did't teach all the worst habits and none of the good ones.
Assignments in college are for a start write-only stuff, that never gets changed or maintained in any way. There you go, way to hammer it in everyone's head that it's ok to write write-only code.
They also invariably lack the complexity to illustrate the need for most techniques taught. So people come out having had to apply, say, structured programming techniques, on 100 line programs that just didn't need all those patterns and techniques. And they come out with ideas ranging from (A) that it's stupid stuff that you'll never read IRL, to (B) that it's stuff that's a purpose in and by itself, not a tradeoff to make complexity more manageable. So then you see them doing cargo-cult programming, where everything has to be packed in 20 levels of decorators, factories, managers, singletons, and god knows what other superfluous extra code, just because they never understood when those are really used and to what end. They came out of university thinking that, say, a decorator isn't a very specialized tool to a very specialized end, but something cool that must be added indiscriminately to all programs.
So let me tell you, if anyone had any _good_ habits at the end of college, those were the people who had worked on far more complex stuff on their own. If someone came out of college knowing why they need to write maintainable code, those were the guys who had to maintain their own hobby programs at home. Not the guys whose only brush with it were the write-only assignments. If someone came out of knowledge knowing how to properly design a program's architecture, those were the guys who wrote a 20,000 line program at home just for fun. Not the ones whose only brush with it were "apply the following 5 patterns in a Hello World program."
So, you know, if someone's only great advantage is that they can absorb all those habits without their private programs getting in the way... then they might not have an advantage at all.
So on the whole: oh please. I've seen many apologies as to why being uninterested and ignorant isn't much worse, but passing it off as some advantage ("at least they don't have to forget the bad habits") is... lame. And stupid.
Actually, you'll notice that Wikipedia too places this under "fallacies", i.e., bad logic.
The fallacy is basically the whole "X => Y => Z => X" construct. The individual "X => Y" pieces may well be valid logic, but the whole construct doesn't prove X.
What's wrong about it is that "A => B" _only_ says something about B, if A has been proven true. If A isn't known to be true, then basically we don't know anything about B either. E.g., "if I finished a game, I exit it" doesn't say anything about what happens when I _didn't_ finish the game. Maybe I'll keep playing, or maybe I'll exit the game anyway, or maybe I'll even uninstall it.
The problem with circular logic is that, even if the individual "X => Y" parts are valid, the whole construct reduces to "X => X". To prove X (the right side there), you need to already have proven X (the left side). As long as you don't already know if X is true (e.g., if the kid is indeed a criminal), you can't use "X => X" to prove itself. You can't start from "you're a criminal" to prove "you're a criminal", no matter how many obfuscation layers are shoved in between.
Such is life indeed. I only have trouble with seeing people quote the "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote all the time, as if it were some kind of gospel and enlightenment from The Great Wizard himself. When in practice Tesla's quote there pretty much spelled it out that it was only lack of technical skill that made so much perspiration necessary in the first place.
The logic was flawless, it was the initial axiom "1. This kid is a criminal" that was the problem;P
No, it was actual lack of logic. It's, in fact, a classic fallacy called "Begging The Question". It's circular logic in which the conclusion is also used as the (or one of the) axioms it's based on.
In effect, "the kid is a criminal" was _also_ the conclusion there. And choosing which facts to base it on, was based on the notion that the kid lies (so let's not even hear his side of the story), which in turn was based on the same "the kid is a criminal".
I don't know, even bigotry and block-headedness I'd somewhat tolerate there. But the principal is being a mental midget who can't even apply the most elementary logic. Someone like that should't be allowed to teach. Heck, she shouldn't even be allowed within 100 yards of a school.
Spoken like a morning person. Trust me, not everyone is like you.
Heh. Not really. I've been called many names, but "morning person" is pretty far off the mark. My ideal day would involve working at night and sleeping from 6 AM to 2 PM. But, alas, you can't always have a pony.
What it has to do with, is, well, discipline and accepting your fate. If I must wake up at a given time, you know, I must. I might as well accept that and go get a cup of cofee. It takes less time than playing silly chase-the-clock games.
Plus, there's this little detail that there is no such thing as a biological "morning person". The human internal clock actually is set for 26 hours, and reset each morning. (A principle surely familiar to anyone who's studied hardware design.) There are no people pre-programmed to be up at 6 AM and others pre-programmed to be up at 2 PM.
So if you consistently find yourself having to put a super-human struggle to get up in the morning, you have some other problem. Either you're not getting enough sleep (the most common), or you need to see a doctor.
Can you even read, lemming, or are you in it just for the ego masturbation? No, seriously, I don't even see a need to try to be nice with a fucking retard.
Can you even understand what an example is? No, I don't think so, and here you prove it fully. You're too stupid to even comprehend that "here's an example where X applies" does _not_ mean that this particular case is equivalent to X.
Did you even see that the last paragraph explicitly says that "doctors aren't that stupid" to do the same mistakes politicians do? Where _do_ you find any support for your retarded rants about "black and white medicine", smooth-brain? Where do you find support for that "you did", when I explicitly state that this case probably doesn't fit the scenario where we worry about accuracy?
Let me guess, you didn't even read that far, you just had to jump do your own verbal masturbation as early as possible. Right? Retard.
Learn to read, idiot. Maybe even get some elementary comprehension skills. Who knows, with enough practice you may even be able to *gasp* read more than a paragraph before jumping in to do your ego masturbation. Won't that be nice? Heh.
And again, get your head out of your ass. Just because you don't understand a scenario, or (as you prove here) _when_ its used, doesn't make you the genius and everyone else an idiot. It just means _you_ are the idiot whose ego gets even in the way of elementary reading and comprehension skills. Try to first understand the problem and only _then_ let it rip with the scathing ego-masturbation, little retard.
Or let me guess, penis^H^H^H^H^H brain envy? You just feel insecure enough to _have_ to mock those who actually understand statistics and actual science? Yeah, that would explain a few things.
- taking credit for his employees' inventions as if he personally and singlehandedly came up with them. (There are at least 28 inventors that Edison ripped off this way, including for example taking credit for inventing the motion picture camera. Actually, it was invented by W.K. Dickson.)
- patented stuff he didn't actually have yet, and/or wasn't even original
E.g., he applied for a lightbulb patent a full year before actually having a filament that was commercially viable: and Edison's, or shall we say, his teams, _only_ contribution there was a commercially viable filament. The light bulb as such had already been discovered, it just didn't last long enough to be worth buying. But wait, even the carbon filament wasn't new: Edison't patent application itself had come a whole 1 year after Joseph Swan had patented a working model in England (and was working at it since 1850, 28 years earlier). So basically it took Edison and his team two years to copycat someone else's invention and claim credit.
- bogus patents, e.g., a number of patents on ornamental designs
- using PR and bad science to win public support: see the "war of the currents", where Edison (who wanted to sell direct current) paid people to roam the country and conduct demonstrations of killing cats, dogs, and once even an elephant with alternating current. Just, you know, to show people that alternating current kills. (While supposedly his direct current at the same 110V doesn't. Yeah, right.) He's also the author of the electric chair, as part of the same campaign to prove that AC kills. The first execution had the guy pretty much fried alive over a time of more than a minute (he certainly was still alive and struggling after the first 17 second jolt), in a show that sickened spectators and was described by the New York Times as, "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging." That's the kind of PR that served Edison's purposes.
- shafting the employees. E.g., Tesla was promised a (huge for that time) bonus of $50,000 if he succeeds in making an improvement to the DC generators. When he actually succeeded, Edison didn't pay him, and in fact told him, "When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke." In fact, he even refused to at least give Tesla a raise.
- mis-treating his employees. They actually spread word of Edison's current mood, so they'd know to duck for cover if he's in a bad mood.
- speaking of Tesla, here's one thing he said about Edison's dumb trial-and-error methods, a.k.a., 99% perspiration: "His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." (Would explain why most "Edison" inventions were actually from employees who actually understood what they're doing.)
- various attempts at monopoly, including the infamous "Motion Picture Patents Company", a.k.a., the Edison Trust. You know, if you thought that MPAA is bad, the MPPC meant you couldn't even make independent films without Edison's blessing.
- showing more contempt to the artists than the RIAA today, and in fact, enough to make the RIAA look like the good guys. Edison refused to even print the artist's name on the label. You're buying Edison music, you peon, not some artist's music. On one occasion he stated, "I would rather quit the business than be a party to the boasting up of undeserved reputations." Yeah, who do you think you _are_ to be getting any reputation for your talent and popularity. Only the great Edison should get a reputation out of it.
- letting his personal moods and preferences be the only criterio
For that matter, if anyone has that much trouble getting up, wouldn't it be more productive to actually go to bed some 8 hours before having to get up? I dunno, just a crazy idea.
And, much as I'm a gamer myself, the excuse better not be, "but my guild needed me for a raid";)
You don't understand the accuracy complaints, grasshopper, and proceed to bravely fight (maybe involuntarily) a complete straw-man that exists only in your imagination. Remember: just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. It just means you need to get some more data, and maybe engage the brains.
The complaints about accuracy are for cases where the false positives are (A) a lot more than the new positives detected by the new method, and (B) the consequences for a false positive are bad enough to matter.
E.g., to give an example based on everyone's (in the USA) favourite terror scare, let's say you have a test which identifies terrorists with 98% accuracy. The problem is that terrorists are actually very very few: in the USA in the year _before_ 9/11, there were exactly zero terrorist attacks. (So, yeah, it was soo worth giving up some rights in exchange for protection from a largely non-existant threat.) So let's say, 1 in a million is a terrorist and planning to blow himself up. Heck, let's even say, whopping ten in a million. The problem is that the new method would detect 0.02 * 1,000,000 = 20,000 false terrorists in the same million.
If such a bogus method were taken seriously enough, it would (A) swamp the law enforcement with false positives (e.g., if you had to thoroughly check 20,000 people a day on a major airport, you better build an extra wing just for the extra security guards), and (B) possibly create a bunch of problems for some people which are, in fact, innocent citizens. And often without them even being told what's wrong with them, or how to set the record straight.
In some other cases, the accuracy is actually worse than touted and can be gamed. E.g., profiling was shown to actually lower the accuracy in airport checks, _and_ provides a handy-dandy way for a real terrorist group to check who's suspected and who's clear. Just send everyone on a bunch of unrelated flights, and see who gets a cavity search every time, and who isn't even looked at by the guards. Voila, now you know who gets to carry the bomb on the plane.
_That_ is the scenario in which some of us worry about accuracy, or lack thereof.
Does this scenario fall in that category? I don't know. A doctor is probably more qualified to comment there about how much better it is than existing methods, and what the consequences of a false positive. Maybe no more than someone being shoved in a CT scanner, which is expensive, but wth, it's not the end of the world. On the other hand, if it meant directly re-opening their head because a false positive said "EMERGENCY!", _then_ we'd have to worry about that 98% accuracy. (But thankfully doctors aren't that stupid. Unlike politicians.)
At any rate, again: just because you don't understand a problem, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. Sure, it may provide an ego-masturbation boost to post derisive drivel about people who worry about accuracy, but at the end of the day, maybe it's not them who are in a laughable position. Maybe the one who deserves to be laughed at is the one acting snotty based on nothing more than pre-conceptions, ignorance and mis-understanding.
I don't give a shit anyway , if it's only going to be email messages. In the worst case they would call ?.. Just hang up.
It's not that simple. If the database contained only email addresses and telephone numbers, ok, noone would give too much of a shit.
Unfortunately, by the sound of it, it contains enough data for identity theft. Especially since in America a bunch of idiots decided that the SSN is usable as unique ID and/or password for everything, so anyone who knows yours already won half the battle to impersonate you. Plus the always useful (especially to a crook) information of how elligible for a loan everyone there is.
So here's a simple scenario: a crook looks through that database, finds a list of kids with upper middle class parents (you don't want to go for billionaire sons, because that might raise suspicions), also finds all the information needed to impersonate any of them to a bank, and takes a hefty "student loan" in the name of each. Just hefty enough to be worth the heist, but not quite close to the limit to raise too much suspicion and verifications. Crook buggers off with the money, and the parents are left to prove that it wasn't their offspring who took the loan. (After a round of inquisition to determine if it really was the son who blew the money on hookers, booze and dope.)
Technically, yes. The only problem is, any simulation is only as good as the model it uses. E.g., you can also simulate scattering of alpha particles through a foil, but if you based it on the old raising pie atom model, you'd get the awfully wrong results anyway.
Hence what these guys are doing: a good old fashioned experiment, involving an actual building on a giant table that shakes, reproducing the exact movements recorded in an actual earthquake. That's how you find out if your model and simulation are actually the right ones. If the building behaves like in the assumed models, then all's well, if not, well, someone will have to come up with a better model.
It might seem that wth, we already know the laws of mechanics well enough, we don't need experiments to test them. The problem is that any model is based on some simplifications, since you just don't have the computing power to even account for all waves, reflections and interferences in a big building with hundreds of joints and thousands of metal bars, pipes, whatever other discontinuities through the walls. So physicists get to decide what are the important parts to simulate, and which should at best be lost in the decimals.
E.g., if you want to know if a horse floats, you can just as well imagine it to be a sphere or a cube. (As the wisecrack goes, "you know you're an engineering student if you approximate a horse as a sphere, because it makes the math easier.") Actually, wisecrack aside, for that you won't even imagine it to have any shape at all, since shape is irrelevant. It doesn't really matter what exact shape it is, just the mass and the volume. E.g., if you want to know how fast a rocket reaches the moon, you don't need to know the exact shape or colour of the rocket, you can just think it's a point. Etc.
That's how we solve problems nowadays. We get to decide what is really important, and what can be safely ignored in the model.
Unfortunately, if you to be really sure that you did the right choices, you have to compare it to what happens in real life. Does your simulation really behave like the real thing in that situation? Or did your approximating the horse as a sphere lead you to a wrong solution like rolling it along the race track to win?
The first amendment protections have been extended to every level of government, including state level. Furthermore, courts have clearly ruled that students in school still have civil rights, including protections from unreasonable search and seizure and protection of free speech. This is unsurprising, since, generally speaking, children are legally required to attend school and those schools are funded and run by the government.
Which is still a different thing from what I'm saying there. Yes, kids still have civil right. No, the right to have wikipedia accessible on the school network, is _not_ a civil right.
If someone decreed that school kids are forbidden to talk about Wikipedia, or to read Wikipedia even at home, _then_ you'd have a violation of their civil rights. If someone was expelled for contributing to Wikipedia at home, then you'd have a civil rights violation. If someone mandated nanny software to keep homes with kids away from Wikipedia, then, yeah, you might have a civil rights problem.
Its being blocked by the school's proxy? No, it's not a civil rights violation. It's just how the packets are routed on one particular network, really, not some global interdiction. And certainly noone proposed to seize and search the kids' homes/laptops/pdas/whatever either.
Plus, what all this "auugh, censorship is evil" whine misses is: the school simply does not have any constitutional obligation to be a general-purpose ISP. They just aren't one. They just have to teach. They give you the materials to use, or access to them, and are allowed to make judgment calls as to what sources they allow. If they decide that you can't quote the Bible on your biology term paper, or Wikipedia on the history paper, that's that. If they decide you're not allowed to pull out a Bible and read it during math class, or that you're not to surf Wikipedia during whatever class, that's that too. You can still read either at home, just not during class.
They're not even supposed to be some global gateway to all information. They have a very narrowly defined list of stuff they have to teach. And if you want to study something else, or with other materials, tough shit, you'll have to do it at home on your own time. You can't demand that your primary school teacher helps you study quantum mechanics, or that the school library must get a copy of whatever book just for you. If they don't have it, tough luck, you'll have to get it on their own. Their not offering a particular book or web page isn't censorship, since noone forbade you to read it at home.
_If_ it was that simple, government employees couldn't be blocked from surfing for porn at work either. I mean, hey, a government-funded IT department doesn't have the right to censor, right? Au contraire, they have every right to give you only the access they consider necessary for your work.
Geeze, it never ceases to amaze me the chest-thumping some people do about their rights, without even knowing what those rights are. They think their amendments apply to anything except the government, and gives them some right to troll a board or to read Slashdot/Wikipedia/whatever at work/school/whatever.
Learn your _real_ rights, lemming, because believing in such stupidities is how you lose those rights. Since you ask that, yes, ask yourself why so many rights were so easily taken away. Because 90% of the population doesn't even know them. They think the constitution gives them a right to troll a privately own message board, or to slander the neighbour, or to cheat on WoW, or whatever. Joe Random Voter doesn't even comprehend that those rights, or that they apply to the government (au contraire, he thinks his free speech applies to everything _but_ his government), or what they really were supposed to protect. He's too busy exercising his imaginary rights, to care about the _real_ ones.
Here's the actual first amendment text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Get this:
- It's about laws passed by Congress. Wake me up when Congress makes a law that forbids you to say something at all, not when an IT department blocks Wikipedia on their network. I don't see anywhere there that students are forbidden to read Wikipedia at home, or that police will take anyone to Guantanamo for reading Wikipedia. Just that it's blocked on the school network. That's it.
- It's _only_ about your relationship to the Congress and laws. It doesn't mean anyone else than Congress should have _any_ obligation to you. Not even public schools or government departments owe you jack shit on their premises or network. Whether it's free speech, or the right to peacefully demonstrate, or to petition for redress, get this: noone else has an obligation to provide you with the means or time for it. Your boss or school do not have to participate in a demonstration, don't have to pay for your bandwidth to exercise your free speech, nor let you spend your work/class time surfing the net. They don't have to do _anything_ for you. It doesn't even say they can't fire you for it.
- "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. It just says that noone will lock-up the Wikipedia owners for being anti-Bush. It does _not_ say that anyone has an obligation buy and deliver the New York Times to your doorstep, or Wikipedia to your desktop. If your boss or the school principal doesn't want to carry those packets to you, tough shit, it's up to you to get them in your free time.
- sorta unrelated, but that's another confusion that chest-thumpers do: no, it also doesn't mean anyone has to publish or carry your speech either. If you want to see your stuff in print, buy a newspaper. If you want them on a server, buy a server. And if the IT department doesn't route your precious corrections to Wikipedia, tough shit, get your own Internet connection at home.
And spare me the emotional demagogue bullshit about people who died for those rights. Get this: noone fought for your right to have the company's/school's/whatever IT department carry your packets.
And no, aggression, isn't a substitute for competence, btw. Just calling everyone who might disaggree a "fascist" preemptively, doesn't excuse you for not having a clue what you're talking about.
Your post is verging on the argument --There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, because eating makes you fat, metabolism creates free radicals that ages your body, and what about the psychological suffering of the cow you're eating?
Yes, dearie. And if ever you thought "nah, I'm eating X instead of Y, because Y is bad for cholesterol/fat/whatever", then you've already applied that argument yourself. And most vegetarians have based your choice precisely on the "cost" that eating a hamburger will involve killing a cow, while eating a banana didn't hurt anyone.
Briefly, the whole point is: you can't just dismiss all costs, just because wth nothing else is free either. Some things are more expensive than others anyway, and some costs might not be worth it.
he proper application of that quote to any future cheap power source is not to the side effects of said source, but to the propensity of society to make sure you'll pay through the nose for it. If you'll review the novels of the author of that quote, Heinlein, you'll see that no few of his novels were largely based on exactly that topic-- the social ramifications of 'cheap' energy.
Who cares? If we had to stick to only the original meaning and context of everything, then you also should never say "the dice are thrown" unless you're about to cross the Rubicon with an army. In fact, you could hardly ever use any saying at all.
The gulf stream isn't a tidal phenomenon, it's a product of the heat differential between the tropics and the poles...just like all currents and weather.
Well, bingo. And if you'll re-read the text you're answering to, you'll see that my argument was based precisely on heat diferentials. If you extract some energy from the water, it cools down. It's energy which otherwise would have eventually been converted into heat. (Via friction for example.) Extract enough energy somewhere between the two tropics, and you may just reduce that heat differential just enough. That's all.
Now I'm not even "green" or an "ecologist" by any definition, but just to play the devil's advocate, it seems to me that you haven't answered his questions at all.
If we had so many wind turbines that we were collecting enough power to run the world, would that not have some effect on the global wind patterns?
No. There is simply more power in the Earth's wind than we could harvest. Or, if you please, the current annual input of power into the atmosphere is greater than the total energy cost of human civilization, by a few orders of magnitude.
Remember: every single watt of solar power that reaches the ground winds up in the atmosphere as heat, the foundation of wind.
Which is good to know, but you haven't answered his question. The question was about wind _patterns_, not whether we'll still have wind at all. Yes, the energy will still reach the ground, hot air will still be less dense than cold air, etc, but just like electric current, wind takes the path of minimum resistance so to speak.
Why are the patterns important? Because, for example, it only takes one relatively persistent current changing direction or moving somewhere else, to stop the carrying of dust to the amazon forest and triger an ecological catastrophe comparable only to the biblical flood.
Additionally, although unrelated to the original question, but related to the later "there just ain't no free ride", the wind farms have other problems. E.g., build enough of them, and you're whacking birds left and right. E.g., they tend to vibrate, which some animals and insects in the ground tend to not like much. E.g., they do cast a shadow, just like any other 3D object, so an area filled with those is pretty much an area where you can forget about growing anything, trees included.
Basically the problems are complex enough. Will we have a problem? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But just reducing it to, basically, "we'll still have wind" isn't answering it.
Same sort of thing goes for tidal energy. If you collect enough, you are going to affect life in the ocean.
Tides are powered by the moon's gravity, bub. Sure you'll have an effect, but the tides are already affecting the moon's rotation.
Here the straw man gets even more blatant. His question was about how it will affect _life_ in the ocean, _not_ who'll keep powering them, and _not_ how will they influence the _moon_.
Yes, they're powered by the moon, no doubt about that. How will it influence fish, algae, plankton, etc, in the coastal areas though? Because that's where those will be built. Will the shadow from a million generators kill enough photosynthesis there to choke the fish? Will the energy extracted from the water (remember, energy is never lost, it ultimately ends up heat) be enough to nuke one of the permanent currents? E.g., one permanent bogeyman about global warming is the possibility of stopping the gulf stream. Can we achieve the same by extracting enough energy at the source, where the tides are bigger and more fit to drive some generators in the water?
Notice that you can't really answer it as "there'll still be plenty of uncovered ocean", because the coastal ecosystems are often different enough. So they're not a substitute for each other.
There just ain't no free ride.
Depends on what you means as "free." Sure, the soup kitchen needs someone to pay for the soup, but the bums getting a hot meal get to enjoy someone else's largesse. Most of the power sources available to humanity work like that, including photovoltalic solar, fission, and hydroelectric.
Which is at best hand-waving. The implied question isn't whether there's a hidden cost at all, but whether it's a price we're willing to pay.
To give you an example of what's wrong with that hand-waving answer, let
They'll see it like this, really
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You might see it as:
1. Chip A who isn't restricted,
2. Chip B who is restricted to comply with some DRM scheme.
What Joe Sixpack and Jane Housewife will see it as, and what the marketting machine will sell it to them as, is:
1. Chip A which doesn't play BlueRay and HD-DVD movies, or plays it with a crappy pixelated resolution, worse than an old DVD
2. Chip B which plays BlueRay and HD-DVD movies in MediaPlayer with no problems. In 1080p, even.
Why, _of_ _course_ Chip B is better. It's obviously so much more powerful too. I mean, it obviously has all the horsepower to play 1080p, unlike Chip A who's obviously so underpowered that it has to play the same movies at a decreased resolution.
Well, to each their own, but... then why would using a bot make it any better? Since that's what we're talking about.
1. If, to you, quests are more boring than grinding, _and_ you don't like grinding either (if you'd rather use a bot to do the grinding for you), then why play the game at all? It's not like there's much else in the game. Wouldn't it be more productive to find a game you actually like?
2. It's not like anything changes fundamentally at level 70. You're still killing mobs for loot, only now in a raid instance. If it was boring enough to use a bot before, then why isn't it still boring at level 70?
3. Ok, maybe you just have something for instances. Then it's not like there weren't instances before, if that's what floats your boat. You can start doing the Deadmines repeatedly from level 17, then move on to the Stockades, then Gnomeregan (bit of a kick in the nuts with a bad team, but, hey, it's an instance), then move on to RFK and SM, then Uldaman and ZF, and so on. (God knows that's largely what my Holy Priest did.)
Ok, so you have to get to level 17 first, but it's actually possible to get to level 17 that in 3 days. You don't have to skip to level 70 to start doing it.
Aggreed, it is stupid, if your purpose is actually to do marketting with it and sell more products. But my guess is that it's not how it'll get used.
Thing is, if you think about it... it fits just neatly in the eternal 3-way total war, whee the ad provider tries to shaft both the advertising company and the web master, and in most cases the two try to shaft the ad provider too. Tons of useless metrics exist just so the ad provider can tell some company "here's why you owe us a big pile of money for serving your ads", or so they can tell the web master "here's why we owe you a pittance."
(And just so it doesn't sound like the ad provider is the only scumbag, the whole dot-com bubble was based on the "hey, look, we can rip off the ad providers" idea. Ad rates in the beginning were based on sites which had one banner on the whole site. It tended to be somewhat targetted too, since if the web master chose just one, it tended to be somewhat related to what the site was about. And people used to even click on them occasionally. And they were worth decent money. Then some people discovered, basically, "woo, but if we put 10 ads per page, now we're owed gazillions of dollars." Whole companies went to IPO with that as their only business plan. But I digress)
The fact is, the _only_ real criterion of whether a marketting campaign was successful, is whether you sold more stuff as a result. Everything else, eyeballs, clicks, etc, is just smoke and mirrors. It's just some useless metrics that get gamed all the time.
E.g., it may sound like "clicks" is a relevant number, but it is only in a world where everyone clicked only because you got them equally interested in the product. Once you figure out other ways to fake it, comparing numbers of clicks becomes apples to oranges. And once you give someone a criterion like "number of clicks" to justify their salary, we're already seen the result: fake UI ads, punch the monkey ads, and outright redirects served as ads. It doesn't mean that those people became more interested in a company's product just because they got hijacked, but on a "look how many people we got to click your ads" statistic it looks the same.
So my take is that this is what it will be used like. Some ad provider will make up some scientific-sounding "how well we matched your ad to a target demographic" metric and use it to justify why you should pay a premium to advertise through them. Never mind that the demographic was a wild guess, and it actually lost information in the process... twice. It will look neatly in the marketting materials anyway.
I can't say it's a surprise, no. I'm just a bit disgusted, when someone is all pro-F/OSS as long as it's them only taking and never giving. As I was saying, I've had the bad experience of contributing some work on a MUD to a bunch of people who were rabidly pro-Linux and pro-OSS, as lip service goes... but also rabidly paranoid that they must keep everyone from getting _their_ code. Including my code, which was suddenly their property and trade secret. Admittedly, a MUD isn't the greatest project for bragging rights, but it left me a bit allergic to the whole thing anyway.
I dunno... it gives me a mental image of someone coming to a potluck dinner empty-handed. Again. And being very vocal about how cool the concept of sharing is.
It's also not the kind of grind that a bot will automate. Which is the kind of grind I was talking about. I can see a bot automating the grinding boars and wolves to level-up, but I honestly don't think it's that trivial to write a bot to work in a 25-man instance.
From what I can tell from outside, most of these bots are trivial affairs. E.g., you can tell a bot hunter because the pet is leading, so to speak. The pet is set on aggressive, and the bot just does a "target pet, assist, attack, loot" routine ad nauseam.
It's not some really clever AI, it's just a simple loop that even partially relies on the WoW AI. Put it in a situation where it might have to deal with the unexpected (e.g., for the most trivial example: a wipe), or make informed decisions (e.g., whether or not it's your turn to need on that), and it might just fly off the hook. Or get you kicked for ninja looting.
You know, that's what I thought too. "Oh, goody, yet another corporation/agency/whatever thinks that Open Source is just a way to get unpaid labour." I don't know... maybe I'm just jaded because of previous bad experiences, but it always leaves a bad taste.
Does it mean that NASA and their contractors will also open-source (or put under a Creative Commons, public domain, etc) _their_ research? Or is it yet another "well, you can do some free work for us" scheme? If I contribute code to say, some control module, will the rest of the schematics there be made public, or does some corporation get to patent it, get it paid by pork-barrel politics, _and_ get the software for it for free?
And reading about virtual meetings in Second Life sure doesn't make it sound like something serious. It sounds more like some "let's pretend that we're hip and fly and on their level" idea a PHB might have.
On the flip side of the coin, I'm wondering how many actual free work will they actually get. Most working OSS nowadays is actually paid work by the likes of IBM, Sun, etc. Check out some of the credits or change logs in Linux some day. Fanboys paying lip service are a dime a dozen, people who can actually produce high quality code... tend to be paid for their work. There are already gazillions of projects on Sourceforge that discovered that, ESR's bullshit be damned, there _aren't_ hordes of hackers just begging to come do some free work.
Mind you, space stuff might generate more buzz, but I still have to wonder exactly how much.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll call bull on that.
1. Those who had any habits at all, were passionate about programming and willing to learn. None was some fossil stuck in a 50 year rut of maintaining the same COBOL programs. Au contraire, everyone I knew who was passionate about programming in college, was going through around a language a year and was very interested in learning new techniques and habits.
Is that worse than inexperience? Bull. And doubly so if you're trying to tell me it's worse than someone who's not even interested in it, and turned off by its being too nerdy.
Yes, they might catch up, with enough effort. But please spare me the bullshit that starting inexperienced and uninterested is somehow some valuable advantage.
2. Talking about existing bad habits would be maybe relevant if college did't teach all the worst habits and none of the good ones.
Assignments in college are for a start write-only stuff, that never gets changed or maintained in any way. There you go, way to hammer it in everyone's head that it's ok to write write-only code.
They also invariably lack the complexity to illustrate the need for most techniques taught. So people come out having had to apply, say, structured programming techniques, on 100 line programs that just didn't need all those patterns and techniques. And they come out with ideas ranging from (A) that it's stupid stuff that you'll never read IRL, to (B) that it's stuff that's a purpose in and by itself, not a tradeoff to make complexity more manageable. So then you see them doing cargo-cult programming, where everything has to be packed in 20 levels of decorators, factories, managers, singletons, and god knows what other superfluous extra code, just because they never understood when those are really used and to what end. They came out of university thinking that, say, a decorator isn't a very specialized tool to a very specialized end, but something cool that must be added indiscriminately to all programs.
So let me tell you, if anyone had any _good_ habits at the end of college, those were the people who had worked on far more complex stuff on their own. If someone came out of college knowing why they need to write maintainable code, those were the guys who had to maintain their own hobby programs at home. Not the guys whose only brush with it were the write-only assignments. If someone came out of knowledge knowing how to properly design a program's architecture, those were the guys who wrote a 20,000 line program at home just for fun. Not the ones whose only brush with it were "apply the following 5 patterns in a Hello World program."
So, you know, if someone's only great advantage is that they can absorb all those habits without their private programs getting in the way... then they might not have an advantage at all.
So on the whole: oh please. I've seen many apologies as to why being uninterested and ignorant isn't much worse, but passing it off as some advantage ("at least they don't have to forget the bad habits") is... lame. And stupid.
Well, heh, at least it's good to know I'd make a good Protestant, if I ever decide to become religious :P
Actually, you'll notice that Wikipedia too places this under "fallacies", i.e., bad logic.
The fallacy is basically the whole "X => Y => Z => X" construct. The individual "X => Y" pieces may well be valid logic, but the whole construct doesn't prove X.
What's wrong about it is that "A => B" _only_ says something about B, if A has been proven true. If A isn't known to be true, then basically we don't know anything about B either. E.g., "if I finished a game, I exit it" doesn't say anything about what happens when I _didn't_ finish the game. Maybe I'll keep playing, or maybe I'll exit the game anyway, or maybe I'll even uninstall it.
The problem with circular logic is that, even if the individual "X => Y" parts are valid, the whole construct reduces to "X => X". To prove X (the right side there), you need to already have proven X (the left side). As long as you don't already know if X is true (e.g., if the kid is indeed a criminal), you can't use "X => X" to prove itself. You can't start from "you're a criminal" to prove "you're a criminal", no matter how many obfuscation layers are shoved in between.
Such is life indeed. I only have trouble with seeing people quote the "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote all the time, as if it were some kind of gospel and enlightenment from The Great Wizard himself. When in practice Tesla's quote there pretty much spelled it out that it was only lack of technical skill that made so much perspiration necessary in the first place.
No, it was actual lack of logic. It's, in fact, a classic fallacy called "Begging The Question". It's circular logic in which the conclusion is also used as the (or one of the) axioms it's based on.
In effect, "the kid is a criminal" was _also_ the conclusion there. And choosing which facts to base it on, was based on the notion that the kid lies (so let's not even hear his side of the story), which in turn was based on the same "the kid is a criminal".
I don't know, even bigotry and block-headedness I'd somewhat tolerate there. But the principal is being a mental midget who can't even apply the most elementary logic. Someone like that should't be allowed to teach. Heck, she shouldn't even be allowed within 100 yards of a school.
Heh. Not really. I've been called many names, but "morning person" is pretty far off the mark. My ideal day would involve working at night and sleeping from 6 AM to 2 PM. But, alas, you can't always have a pony.
What it has to do with, is, well, discipline and accepting your fate. If I must wake up at a given time, you know, I must. I might as well accept that and go get a cup of cofee. It takes less time than playing silly chase-the-clock games.
Plus, there's this little detail that there is no such thing as a biological "morning person". The human internal clock actually is set for 26 hours, and reset each morning. (A principle surely familiar to anyone who's studied hardware design.) There are no people pre-programmed to be up at 6 AM and others pre-programmed to be up at 2 PM.
So if you consistently find yourself having to put a super-human struggle to get up in the morning, you have some other problem. Either you're not getting enough sleep (the most common), or you need to see a doctor.
Can you even read, lemming, or are you in it just for the ego masturbation? No, seriously, I don't even see a need to try to be nice with a fucking retard.
Can you even understand what an example is? No, I don't think so, and here you prove it fully. You're too stupid to even comprehend that "here's an example where X applies" does _not_ mean that this particular case is equivalent to X.
Did you even see that the last paragraph explicitly says that "doctors aren't that stupid" to do the same mistakes politicians do? Where _do_ you find any support for your retarded rants about "black and white medicine", smooth-brain? Where do you find support for that "you did", when I explicitly state that this case probably doesn't fit the scenario where we worry about accuracy?
Let me guess, you didn't even read that far, you just had to jump do your own verbal masturbation as early as possible. Right? Retard.
Learn to read, idiot. Maybe even get some elementary comprehension skills. Who knows, with enough practice you may even be able to *gasp* read more than a paragraph before jumping in to do your ego masturbation. Won't that be nice? Heh.
And again, get your head out of your ass. Just because you don't understand a scenario, or (as you prove here) _when_ its used, doesn't make you the genius and everyone else an idiot. It just means _you_ are the idiot whose ego gets even in the way of elementary reading and comprehension skills. Try to first understand the problem and only _then_ let it rip with the scathing ego-masturbation, little retard.
Or let me guess, penis^H^H^H^H^H brain envy? You just feel insecure enough to _have_ to mock those who actually understand statistics and actual science? Yeah, that would explain a few things.
Actually, considering that Edison is famous for:
- taking credit for his employees' inventions as if he personally and singlehandedly came up with them. (There are at least 28 inventors that Edison ripped off this way, including for example taking credit for inventing the motion picture camera. Actually, it was invented by W.K. Dickson.)
- patented stuff he didn't actually have yet, and/or wasn't even original
E.g., he applied for a lightbulb patent a full year before actually having a filament that was commercially viable: and Edison's, or shall we say, his teams, _only_ contribution there was a commercially viable filament. The light bulb as such had already been discovered, it just didn't last long enough to be worth buying. But wait, even the carbon filament wasn't new: Edison't patent application itself had come a whole 1 year after Joseph Swan had patented a working model in England (and was working at it since 1850, 28 years earlier). So basically it took Edison and his team two years to copycat someone else's invention and claim credit.
- bogus patents, e.g., a number of patents on ornamental designs
- using PR and bad science to win public support: see the "war of the currents", where Edison (who wanted to sell direct current) paid people to roam the country and conduct demonstrations of killing cats, dogs, and once even an elephant with alternating current. Just, you know, to show people that alternating current kills. (While supposedly his direct current at the same 110V doesn't. Yeah, right.) He's also the author of the electric chair, as part of the same campaign to prove that AC kills. The first execution had the guy pretty much fried alive over a time of more than a minute (he certainly was still alive and struggling after the first 17 second jolt), in a show that sickened spectators and was described by the New York Times as, "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging." That's the kind of PR that served Edison's purposes.
- shafting the employees. E.g., Tesla was promised a (huge for that time) bonus of $50,000 if he succeeds in making an improvement to the DC generators. When he actually succeeded, Edison didn't pay him, and in fact told him, "When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke." In fact, he even refused to at least give Tesla a raise.
- mis-treating his employees. They actually spread word of Edison's current mood, so they'd know to duck for cover if he's in a bad mood.
- speaking of Tesla, here's one thing he said about Edison's dumb trial-and-error methods, a.k.a., 99% perspiration: "His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." (Would explain why most "Edison" inventions were actually from employees who actually understood what they're doing.)
- various attempts at monopoly, including the infamous "Motion Picture Patents Company", a.k.a., the Edison Trust. You know, if you thought that MPAA is bad, the MPPC meant you couldn't even make independent films without Edison's blessing.
- showing more contempt to the artists than the RIAA today, and in fact, enough to make the RIAA look like the good guys. Edison refused to even print the artist's name on the label. You're buying Edison music, you peon, not some artist's music. On one occasion he stated, "I would rather quit the business than be a party to the boasting up of undeserved reputations." Yeah, who do you think you _are_ to be getting any reputation for your talent and popularity. Only the great Edison should get a reputation out of it.
- letting his personal moods and preferences be the only criterio
For that matter, if anyone has that much trouble getting up, wouldn't it be more productive to actually go to bed some 8 hours before having to get up? I dunno, just a crazy idea.
;)
And, much as I'm a gamer myself, the excuse better not be, "but my guild needed me for a raid"
You don't understand the accuracy complaints, grasshopper, and proceed to bravely fight (maybe involuntarily) a complete straw-man that exists only in your imagination. Remember: just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. It just means you need to get some more data, and maybe engage the brains.
The complaints about accuracy are for cases where the false positives are (A) a lot more than the new positives detected by the new method, and (B) the consequences for a false positive are bad enough to matter.
E.g., to give an example based on everyone's (in the USA) favourite terror scare, let's say you have a test which identifies terrorists with 98% accuracy. The problem is that terrorists are actually very very few: in the USA in the year _before_ 9/11, there were exactly zero terrorist attacks. (So, yeah, it was soo worth giving up some rights in exchange for protection from a largely non-existant threat.) So let's say, 1 in a million is a terrorist and planning to blow himself up. Heck, let's even say, whopping ten in a million. The problem is that the new method would detect 0.02 * 1,000,000 = 20,000 false terrorists in the same million.
If such a bogus method were taken seriously enough, it would (A) swamp the law enforcement with false positives (e.g., if you had to thoroughly check 20,000 people a day on a major airport, you better build an extra wing just for the extra security guards), and (B) possibly create a bunch of problems for some people which are, in fact, innocent citizens. And often without them even being told what's wrong with them, or how to set the record straight.
In some other cases, the accuracy is actually worse than touted and can be gamed. E.g., profiling was shown to actually lower the accuracy in airport checks, _and_ provides a handy-dandy way for a real terrorist group to check who's suspected and who's clear. Just send everyone on a bunch of unrelated flights, and see who gets a cavity search every time, and who isn't even looked at by the guards. Voila, now you know who gets to carry the bomb on the plane.
_That_ is the scenario in which some of us worry about accuracy, or lack thereof.
Does this scenario fall in that category? I don't know. A doctor is probably more qualified to comment there about how much better it is than existing methods, and what the consequences of a false positive. Maybe no more than someone being shoved in a CT scanner, which is expensive, but wth, it's not the end of the world. On the other hand, if it meant directly re-opening their head because a false positive said "EMERGENCY!", _then_ we'd have to worry about that 98% accuracy. (But thankfully doctors aren't that stupid. Unlike politicians.)
At any rate, again: just because you don't understand a problem, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. Sure, it may provide an ego-masturbation boost to post derisive drivel about people who worry about accuracy, but at the end of the day, maybe it's not them who are in a laughable position. Maybe the one who deserves to be laughed at is the one acting snotty based on nothing more than pre-conceptions, ignorance and mis-understanding.
It's not that simple. If the database contained only email addresses and telephone numbers, ok, noone would give too much of a shit.
Unfortunately, by the sound of it, it contains enough data for identity theft. Especially since in America a bunch of idiots decided that the SSN is usable as unique ID and/or password for everything, so anyone who knows yours already won half the battle to impersonate you. Plus the always useful (especially to a crook) information of how elligible for a loan everyone there is.
So here's a simple scenario: a crook looks through that database, finds a list of kids with upper middle class parents (you don't want to go for billionaire sons, because that might raise suspicions), also finds all the information needed to impersonate any of them to a bank, and takes a hefty "student loan" in the name of each. Just hefty enough to be worth the heist, but not quite close to the limit to raise too much suspicion and verifications. Crook buggers off with the money, and the parents are left to prove that it wasn't their offspring who took the loan. (After a round of inquisition to determine if it really was the son who blew the money on hookers, booze and dope.)
Very much so. Each problem has a different set of details that matter and details which can be safely ignored. And a different need for accuracy.
Very much so, yes. Excellent example of why models need to be tested, in fact.
Technically, yes. The only problem is, any simulation is only as good as the model it uses. E.g., you can also simulate scattering of alpha particles through a foil, but if you based it on the old raising pie atom model, you'd get the awfully wrong results anyway.
Hence what these guys are doing: a good old fashioned experiment, involving an actual building on a giant table that shakes, reproducing the exact movements recorded in an actual earthquake. That's how you find out if your model and simulation are actually the right ones. If the building behaves like in the assumed models, then all's well, if not, well, someone will have to come up with a better model.
It might seem that wth, we already know the laws of mechanics well enough, we don't need experiments to test them. The problem is that any model is based on some simplifications, since you just don't have the computing power to even account for all waves, reflections and interferences in a big building with hundreds of joints and thousands of metal bars, pipes, whatever other discontinuities through the walls. So physicists get to decide what are the important parts to simulate, and which should at best be lost in the decimals.
E.g., if you want to know if a horse floats, you can just as well imagine it to be a sphere or a cube. (As the wisecrack goes, "you know you're an engineering student if you approximate a horse as a sphere, because it makes the math easier.") Actually, wisecrack aside, for that you won't even imagine it to have any shape at all, since shape is irrelevant. It doesn't really matter what exact shape it is, just the mass and the volume. E.g., if you want to know how fast a rocket reaches the moon, you don't need to know the exact shape or colour of the rocket, you can just think it's a point. Etc.
That's how we solve problems nowadays. We get to decide what is really important, and what can be safely ignored in the model.
Unfortunately, if you to be really sure that you did the right choices, you have to compare it to what happens in real life. Does your simulation really behave like the real thing in that situation? Or did your approximating the horse as a sphere lead you to a wrong solution like rolling it along the race track to win?
That's, in a nutshell, what these guys did.
Which is still a different thing from what I'm saying there. Yes, kids still have civil right. No, the right to have wikipedia accessible on the school network, is _not_ a civil right.
If someone decreed that school kids are forbidden to talk about Wikipedia, or to read Wikipedia even at home, _then_ you'd have a violation of their civil rights. If someone was expelled for contributing to Wikipedia at home, then you'd have a civil rights violation. If someone mandated nanny software to keep homes with kids away from Wikipedia, then, yeah, you might have a civil rights problem.
Its being blocked by the school's proxy? No, it's not a civil rights violation. It's just how the packets are routed on one particular network, really, not some global interdiction. And certainly noone proposed to seize and search the kids' homes/laptops/pdas/whatever either.
Plus, what all this "auugh, censorship is evil" whine misses is: the school simply does not have any constitutional obligation to be a general-purpose ISP. They just aren't one. They just have to teach. They give you the materials to use, or access to them, and are allowed to make judgment calls as to what sources they allow. If they decide that you can't quote the Bible on your biology term paper, or Wikipedia on the history paper, that's that. If they decide you're not allowed to pull out a Bible and read it during math class, or that you're not to surf Wikipedia during whatever class, that's that too. You can still read either at home, just not during class.
They're not even supposed to be some global gateway to all information. They have a very narrowly defined list of stuff they have to teach. And if you want to study something else, or with other materials, tough shit, you'll have to do it at home on your own time. You can't demand that your primary school teacher helps you study quantum mechanics, or that the school library must get a copy of whatever book just for you. If they don't have it, tough luck, you'll have to get it on their own. Their not offering a particular book or web page isn't censorship, since noone forbade you to read it at home.
_If_ it was that simple, government employees couldn't be blocked from surfing for porn at work either. I mean, hey, a government-funded IT department doesn't have the right to censor, right? Au contraire, they have every right to give you only the access they consider necessary for your work.
Geeze, it never ceases to amaze me the chest-thumping some people do about their rights, without even knowing what those rights are. They think their amendments apply to anything except the government, and gives them some right to troll a board or to read Slashdot/Wikipedia/whatever at work/school/whatever.
Learn your _real_ rights, lemming, because believing in such stupidities is how you lose those rights. Since you ask that, yes, ask yourself why so many rights were so easily taken away. Because 90% of the population doesn't even know them. They think the constitution gives them a right to troll a privately own message board, or to slander the neighbour, or to cheat on WoW, or whatever. Joe Random Voter doesn't even comprehend that those rights, or that they apply to the government (au contraire, he thinks his free speech applies to everything _but_ his government), or what they really were supposed to protect. He's too busy exercising his imaginary rights, to care about the _real_ ones.
Here's the actual first amendment text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Get this:
- It's about laws passed by Congress. Wake me up when Congress makes a law that forbids you to say something at all, not when an IT department blocks Wikipedia on their network. I don't see anywhere there that students are forbidden to read Wikipedia at home, or that police will take anyone to Guantanamo for reading Wikipedia. Just that it's blocked on the school network. That's it.
- It's _only_ about your relationship to the Congress and laws. It doesn't mean anyone else than Congress should have _any_ obligation to you. Not even public schools or government departments owe you jack shit on their premises or network. Whether it's free speech, or the right to peacefully demonstrate, or to petition for redress, get this: noone else has an obligation to provide you with the means or time for it. Your boss or school do not have to participate in a demonstration, don't have to pay for your bandwidth to exercise your free speech, nor let you spend your work/class time surfing the net. They don't have to do _anything_ for you. It doesn't even say they can't fire you for it.
- "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. It just says that noone will lock-up the Wikipedia owners for being anti-Bush. It does _not_ say that anyone has an obligation buy and deliver the New York Times to your doorstep, or Wikipedia to your desktop. If your boss or the school principal doesn't want to carry those packets to you, tough shit, it's up to you to get them in your free time.
- sorta unrelated, but that's another confusion that chest-thumpers do: no, it also doesn't mean anyone has to publish or carry your speech either. If you want to see your stuff in print, buy a newspaper. If you want them on a server, buy a server. And if the IT department doesn't route your precious corrections to Wikipedia, tough shit, get your own Internet connection at home.
And spare me the emotional demagogue bullshit about people who died for those rights. Get this: noone fought for your right to have the company's/school's/whatever IT department carry your packets.
And no, aggression, isn't a substitute for competence, btw. Just calling everyone who might disaggree a "fascist" preemptively, doesn't excuse you for not having a clue what you're talking about.
Geeze...
Yes, dearie. And if ever you thought "nah, I'm eating X instead of Y, because Y is bad for cholesterol/fat/whatever", then you've already applied that argument yourself. And most vegetarians have based your choice precisely on the "cost" that eating a hamburger will involve killing a cow, while eating a banana didn't hurt anyone.
Briefly, the whole point is: you can't just dismiss all costs, just because wth nothing else is free either. Some things are more expensive than others anyway, and some costs might not be worth it.
Who cares? If we had to stick to only the original meaning and context of everything, then you also should never say "the dice are thrown" unless you're about to cross the Rubicon with an army. In fact, you could hardly ever use any saying at all.
Well, bingo. And if you'll re-read the text you're answering to, you'll see that my argument was based precisely on heat diferentials. If you extract some energy from the water, it cools down. It's energy which otherwise would have eventually been converted into heat. (Via friction for example.) Extract enough energy somewhere between the two tropics, and you may just reduce that heat differential just enough. That's all.
Which is good to know, but you haven't answered his question. The question was about wind _patterns_, not whether we'll still have wind at all. Yes, the energy will still reach the ground, hot air will still be less dense than cold air, etc, but just like electric current, wind takes the path of minimum resistance so to speak.
Why are the patterns important? Because, for example, it only takes one relatively persistent current changing direction or moving somewhere else, to stop the carrying of dust to the amazon forest and triger an ecological catastrophe comparable only to the biblical flood.
Additionally, although unrelated to the original question, but related to the later "there just ain't no free ride", the wind farms have other problems. E.g., build enough of them, and you're whacking birds left and right. E.g., they tend to vibrate, which some animals and insects in the ground tend to not like much. E.g., they do cast a shadow, just like any other 3D object, so an area filled with those is pretty much an area where you can forget about growing anything, trees included.
Basically the problems are complex enough. Will we have a problem? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But just reducing it to, basically, "we'll still have wind" isn't answering it.
Here the straw man gets even more blatant. His question was about how it will affect _life_ in the ocean, _not_ who'll keep powering them, and _not_ how will they influence the _moon_.
Yes, they're powered by the moon, no doubt about that. How will it influence fish, algae, plankton, etc, in the coastal areas though? Because that's where those will be built. Will the shadow from a million generators kill enough photosynthesis there to choke the fish? Will the energy extracted from the water (remember, energy is never lost, it ultimately ends up heat) be enough to nuke one of the permanent currents? E.g., one permanent bogeyman about global warming is the possibility of stopping the gulf stream. Can we achieve the same by extracting enough energy at the source, where the tides are bigger and more fit to drive some generators in the water?
Notice that you can't really answer it as "there'll still be plenty of uncovered ocean", because the coastal ecosystems are often different enough. So they're not a substitute for each other.
Which is at best hand-waving. The implied question isn't whether there's a hidden cost at all, but whether it's a price we're willing to pay.
To give you an example of what's wrong with that hand-waving answer, let
You might see it as:
1. Chip A who isn't restricted,
2. Chip B who is restricted to comply with some DRM scheme.
What Joe Sixpack and Jane Housewife will see it as, and what the marketting machine will sell it to them as, is:
1. Chip A which doesn't play BlueRay and HD-DVD movies, or plays it with a crappy pixelated resolution, worse than an old DVD
2. Chip B which plays BlueRay and HD-DVD movies in MediaPlayer with no problems. In 1080p, even.
Why, _of_ _course_ Chip B is better. It's obviously so much more powerful too. I mean, it obviously has all the horsepower to play 1080p, unlike Chip A who's obviously so underpowered that it has to play the same movies at a decreased resolution.
Well, to each their own, but... then why would using a bot make it any better? Since that's what we're talking about.
1. If, to you, quests are more boring than grinding, _and_ you don't like grinding either (if you'd rather use a bot to do the grinding for you), then why play the game at all? It's not like there's much else in the game. Wouldn't it be more productive to find a game you actually like?
2. It's not like anything changes fundamentally at level 70. You're still killing mobs for loot, only now in a raid instance. If it was boring enough to use a bot before, then why isn't it still boring at level 70?
3. Ok, maybe you just have something for instances. Then it's not like there weren't instances before, if that's what floats your boat. You can start doing the Deadmines repeatedly from level 17, then move on to the Stockades, then Gnomeregan (bit of a kick in the nuts with a bad team, but, hey, it's an instance), then move on to RFK and SM, then Uldaman and ZF, and so on. (God knows that's largely what my Holy Priest did.)
Ok, so you have to get to level 17 first, but it's actually possible to get to level 17 that in 3 days. You don't have to skip to level 70 to start doing it.
Aggreed, it is stupid, if your purpose is actually to do marketting with it and sell more products. But my guess is that it's not how it'll get used.
Thing is, if you think about it... it fits just neatly in the eternal 3-way total war, whee the ad provider tries to shaft both the advertising company and the web master, and in most cases the two try to shaft the ad provider too. Tons of useless metrics exist just so the ad provider can tell some company "here's why you owe us a big pile of money for serving your ads", or so they can tell the web master "here's why we owe you a pittance."
(And just so it doesn't sound like the ad provider is the only scumbag, the whole dot-com bubble was based on the "hey, look, we can rip off the ad providers" idea. Ad rates in the beginning were based on sites which had one banner on the whole site. It tended to be somewhat targetted too, since if the web master chose just one, it tended to be somewhat related to what the site was about. And people used to even click on them occasionally. And they were worth decent money. Then some people discovered, basically, "woo, but if we put 10 ads per page, now we're owed gazillions of dollars." Whole companies went to IPO with that as their only business plan. But I digress)
The fact is, the _only_ real criterion of whether a marketting campaign was successful, is whether you sold more stuff as a result. Everything else, eyeballs, clicks, etc, is just smoke and mirrors. It's just some useless metrics that get gamed all the time.
E.g., it may sound like "clicks" is a relevant number, but it is only in a world where everyone clicked only because you got them equally interested in the product. Once you figure out other ways to fake it, comparing numbers of clicks becomes apples to oranges. And once you give someone a criterion like "number of clicks" to justify their salary, we're already seen the result: fake UI ads, punch the monkey ads, and outright redirects served as ads. It doesn't mean that those people became more interested in a company's product just because they got hijacked, but on a "look how many people we got to click your ads" statistic it looks the same.
So my take is that this is what it will be used like. Some ad provider will make up some scientific-sounding "how well we matched your ad to a target demographic" metric and use it to justify why you should pay a premium to advertise through them. Never mind that the demographic was a wild guess, and it actually lost information in the process... twice. It will look neatly in the marketting materials anyway.
I can't say it's a surprise, no. I'm just a bit disgusted, when someone is all pro-F/OSS as long as it's them only taking and never giving. As I was saying, I've had the bad experience of contributing some work on a MUD to a bunch of people who were rabidly pro-Linux and pro-OSS, as lip service goes... but also rabidly paranoid that they must keep everyone from getting _their_ code. Including my code, which was suddenly their property and trade secret. Admittedly, a MUD isn't the greatest project for bragging rights, but it left me a bit allergic to the whole thing anyway.
I dunno... it gives me a mental image of someone coming to a potluck dinner empty-handed. Again. And being very vocal about how cool the concept of sharing is.
It's also not the kind of grind that a bot will automate. Which is the kind of grind I was talking about. I can see a bot automating the grinding boars and wolves to level-up, but I honestly don't think it's that trivial to write a bot to work in a 25-man instance.
From what I can tell from outside, most of these bots are trivial affairs. E.g., you can tell a bot hunter because the pet is leading, so to speak. The pet is set on aggressive, and the bot just does a "target pet, assist, attack, loot" routine ad nauseam.
It's not some really clever AI, it's just a simple loop that even partially relies on the WoW AI. Put it in a situation where it might have to deal with the unexpected (e.g., for the most trivial example: a wipe), or make informed decisions (e.g., whether or not it's your turn to need on that), and it might just fly off the hook. Or get you kicked for ninja looting.
You know, that's what I thought too. "Oh, goody, yet another corporation/agency/whatever thinks that Open Source is just a way to get unpaid labour." I don't know... maybe I'm just jaded because of previous bad experiences, but it always leaves a bad taste.
Does it mean that NASA and their contractors will also open-source (or put under a Creative Commons, public domain, etc) _their_ research? Or is it yet another "well, you can do some free work for us" scheme? If I contribute code to say, some control module, will the rest of the schematics there be made public, or does some corporation get to patent it, get it paid by pork-barrel politics, _and_ get the software for it for free?
And reading about virtual meetings in Second Life sure doesn't make it sound like something serious. It sounds more like some "let's pretend that we're hip and fly and on their level" idea a PHB might have.
On the flip side of the coin, I'm wondering how many actual free work will they actually get. Most working OSS nowadays is actually paid work by the likes of IBM, Sun, etc. Check out some of the credits or change logs in Linux some day. Fanboys paying lip service are a dime a dozen, people who can actually produce high quality code... tend to be paid for their work. There are already gazillions of projects on Sourceforge that discovered that, ESR's bullshit be damned, there _aren't_ hordes of hackers just begging to come do some free work.
Mind you, space stuff might generate more buzz, but I still have to wonder exactly how much.