The problem with this particular troll is not that it is a troll, but that it is not obviously a troll. If it said something like "I don't understand you gay-ass mac fanatics," I'd know immediately that it's a troll. This one, I have to read a bit first.
But at what point in that process do you quit because you're dealing with a sentient life?
Once you're dealing with sentient life, mission accomplished. At that point, I assume the sentience involved will have established its rights, if it wanted to, and it would be up to the sentience whether to continue research.
Would you like to be marooned on Mars for the rest of your life, without any human contact except for radio transmissions?
Hells no! That's why I'd want the option to delete myself. And if it turns out that I don't want to delete myself, then I guess that means I'm happy enough with the radio transmissions.
What if you didn't have a natural life-span, because you were effectively immortal?
Why is this a moral question? What difference does it make if my life-span is natural or artificial, or ends at 75 years or not?
What would be 100+ years between your arrival and human colonization be like?
Most likely boring. Hopefully, I could go into stasis and skip all that.
What if we blow ourselves up before we colonized and stranded that human-like brain there until it decided to kill itself?
Tough luck. If we blow ourselves up, moral responsibility is no longer achievable, because we'd be too dead to do anything about it. Contrariwise, if we don't blow ourselves up, the question is moot anyway.
ThinkSecret was aiding others to break the law and clearly in the wrong on this lawsuit, but having done something wrong, Nick Ciarelli took all the responsibility for other's criminal acts (which he helped incite) upon himself and shielded them. Apple, fumbled the ball, failed to get the leaks identified, and made a typically corporate and shortsighted decision. Everyone lost.
A good compromise leaves no one satisfied.
Re:The current situation is awful.
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Drag'n'drop is simply not a working approach to design proper UI (i.e. the one that automatically scales and reflows to any DPI / window size / whatever).
Drag'n'drop works fine if it is manipulating a proper UI API. OS X's Interface Builder, with its springs and struts system, comes to mind.
It only took a single command to turn an alphanumeric(or otherwise) character into your own custom graphic. I remember coding my own version of Tron's light cycles with that; since it was that easy I laid out how the cycles would have to move and created separate graphics/characters so that instead of moving bits around the screen for smooth scrolling
I remember writing a font editor program on my C=128 that would let me hack around with the character shapes. I had a lot of fun writing that; I remember doing an italic set. I'm still a little interested in typography.
There was also one game I found that did the characters up like Space Invaders. You played it in 80-column text mode. See, the C=128 allowed hi-res graphics, but you were basically limited to 2 (4?) colors. But 80-column text mode had the same resolution as hi-res and also allowed the normal set of text colors. So, to have a colorful hi-res game, you did the game in text mode by customizing the font.
with the proper documentation, you could "know" the machine. I mean friggin' know it
The C=128 Programmer's Reference Guide. That tome had every-goddamn-thing there was to know about the 128. It had the complete BASIC syntax, of course, and some CP/M stuff, but it also had the complete memory map (including page 0 registers), the SID chip registers and specs, video registers, the assembly language guide and monitor commands, kernel entry points, even the friggin' hardware schematics and timing diagrams!
Fools, don't you realize the possibilities? You call me mad, but it is you who do not realize the power of my vision! With my army of zombie cockroach minions, I can...
I'm having nightmare images of the next generation of Google image search.
It would be powered by dark room after dark room of people strapped into chairs, fed by IV, wearing helmets full of electrodes spearing into their brain. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, these helmets send dozens of images into those poor, fried brains and sees if any of those over-saturated neurons picks up on a match. Then, Google posts results.
The metaphors we're using now work pretty well, and UI changes in the future will probably consist more of refinements of these rather than totally new things, at least until and unless there is a major advance in display technology.
I dunno. When you say metaphors, I think of windows, desktops, folders, menus. These things are abstracted and simplified versions of real things that were then taken in a new direction. Folders, for example, don't actually contain things. You don't physically open them to see what's inside, instead you double-click and a new window appears.
But look at the iPhone. It has scrolling lists, buttons, and switches that are less removed from the real thing. They are less metaphorical. The iPhone, and the technologies in the article, make me believe the future of UI is the end of metaphor, not its evolution.
Well, seems to me that for selection and drawing, touch interfaces trump mouse and keyboard. For many (not all) games, controllers trump touch and keyboard. For writing, keyboards trump mouse and touch.
Basically, the mouse loses all around. Touch is teh awesome. Keyboards are good to go. Game controllers are still in the running, but falling behind.
And for displays, well, anything 2-D can do, 3-D can do better. Because 3-D can do 2-D.
Our movement is for most part pretty much limited to 2D (forward,backward,left,right are good, but up and down are heavily restricted)
Our position is limited to 2D, but our hands' movement is very 3D.
the earth is flat (at least from a human point of view)
The ground is flat, but the stuff around us includes cars and trees and stuff inside, behind, above, and below other things.
I only see a 2D projection of the stack and even a 3D display wouldn't change that.
Well, that's true. But stacks are solid. If you could build an interface with semi-transparent X-ray vision, we could use that. Or better, if you have the stack float up and arrange itself in a 3-D cube, with space between each item so you could see through to the other side like looking through tree branches, that would be awesome.
These newfangled detectors promise to be able to image the heart in such exquisite 3D detail that your cardiologist can basically just look at your heart and see whether you have CAD, and how far along it is. And all you need to do is lie on the X-ray table for a few minutes.
With this device, it sounds like you only need to lay down for a few seconds. I believe the phrase was "a couple of heartbeats."
You can't make a "standard" bus because as soon as you do, somebody will need more [power,data,real estate,angular momentum,precision,jitter compensation] that the standard bus can provide. And then you're back into the business of custom modifications for each scientific payload.
Seems to me that, while you can't really come up with a standard bus at this point, you can come up with a draft standard that specifies what can be specified and has some economy of scale and network advantages, and allows engineers to close in a more general standard.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. These things can happen incrementally.
That thing must weigh 4 times what a man weights. 2 times what an American weighs.
Yes, let the rest of the world mock America for our extra-wide airplane seats, our Big Macs and Diet Cokes, our sedentary habits...
But when the Sea Scorpions rise up and conquer the rest of the world, only we will be able to stand against them, for in that final battle, every American is the equal of any two lesser men!
The API documentation for event listeners should specify what kind of reference (ordinary or weak) the library uses, as well as the ramifications of this choice.
The operation for adding an event subscriber is "event += subscriber." That syntax pretty obviously makes a reference to the subscriber in the event, and that is explicitly documented on the website.
But no, the API documentation should not be discussing the ramifications of this. The developer needs to know the ramifications. That is basic knowledge that should be discussed once in an "About References" section, and not in every class that keeps references (which is all of them). The developers in the article did know the ramifications, in fact, they just didn't remember that the objects they wanted to free were also event subscribers, thus the event was keeping them alive.
That, I think, is a flaw in the API design. An event is basically presented as a callback method. Callback methods can't own things, only objects should own things. One would expect the subscriber to keep a reference to events that it is interested in tracking, not the other way around.
The Cocoa NSNotificationCenter design is better, because, though it works similarly to C# events on the inside, it is presented such that the developer can use the common-sense model above.
The most intuitive model is probably to declare a method that the event notifier magically know about it and calls when the event happens.
The secret to writing parallel code, is to create multiple personalities, one for each thread. Then you just emulate the code in you parallel mind, and its easy to see the problem.
In other words, you'd have to be crazy to write parallel code?:-)
Let me start with saying that I approve of the court's decision, and thus with the general thrust of your post (*bow-chicka-bow-bow*).
But,
First, as Commander-in-Chief he is in the unique role of being both a civilian and a military leader, and members of the military voluntarily surrender a number of the liberties and protections afforded private citizens.
Members of the military do, however, the Commander-in-Chief is an emphatically and intentionally a civilian position. The President himself is not military personnel.
Which is good re this President. Based on his "stint" in the National Guard, if he were actually military personnel, he would never have actually shown up at the White House, thus leaving Cheney in charge.
Not if car drivers can do anything about it. Here are some of the news of bicycling around Seattle within the last 2 months.
Bicyclist shot with BB pellets
Road rage in Fremont involves SUV driver, bicyclist
Bicyclist dies in truck accident
Oh, I wouldn't read too much into that. These things happen with pedestrians and motorists, too. Bicyclists (of which number I count myself) tend towards martyr complexes.
Many Americans don't want to sit on a train for an hour, switch to a subway, and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to ride the bus for 1.5 hours and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to worry about missing their subway, train or bus by a minute. When leaving for home, missing your ride could mean waiting another 30 minutes (or more depending on when you leave) just to go home.
I'd say it's more than just convenience. Who has time to do all that?
Can you figure out this subway map look like this?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this particular troll is not that it is a troll, but that it is not obviously a troll. If it said something like "I don't understand you gay-ass mac fanatics," I'd know immediately that it's a troll. This one, I have to read a bit first.
like calling IRC a good MMORPG
:)
"IRC, where men are men, women are men, and 14-year-old girls are FBI agents."
Sounds like a MMORPG to me.
Heh, dude's got cojones, at least.
Here's what I think.
But at what point in that process do you quit because you're dealing with a sentient life?
Once you're dealing with sentient life, mission accomplished. At that point, I assume the sentience involved will have established its rights, if it wanted to, and it would be up to the sentience whether to continue research.
Would you like to be marooned on Mars for the rest of your life, without any human contact except for radio transmissions?
Hells no! That's why I'd want the option to delete myself. And if it turns out that I don't want to delete myself, then I guess that means I'm happy enough with the radio transmissions.
What if you didn't have a natural life-span, because you were effectively immortal?
Why is this a moral question? What difference does it make if my life-span is natural or artificial, or ends at 75 years or not?
What would be 100+ years between your arrival and human colonization be like?
Most likely boring. Hopefully, I could go into stasis and skip all that.
What if we blow ourselves up before we colonized and stranded that human-like brain there until it decided to kill itself?
Tough luck. If we blow ourselves up, moral responsibility is no longer achievable, because we'd be too dead to do anything about it. Contrariwise, if we don't blow ourselves up, the question is moot anyway.
Cthulhu in 2008!
Isn't this what happened at the end of David Brin's Uplift saga? One of the upper dimensions collapsed?
ThinkSecret was aiding others to break the law and clearly in the wrong on this lawsuit, but having done something wrong, Nick Ciarelli took all the responsibility for other's criminal acts (which he helped incite) upon himself and shielded them. Apple, fumbled the ball, failed to get the leaks identified, and made a typically corporate and shortsighted decision. Everyone lost.
A good compromise leaves no one satisfied.
Drag'n'drop is simply not a working approach to design proper UI (i.e. the one that automatically scales and reflows to any DPI / window size / whatever).
Drag'n'drop works fine if it is manipulating a proper UI API. OS X's Interface Builder, with its springs and struts system, comes to mind.
I remember writing a font editor program on my C=128 that would let me hack around with the character shapes. I had a lot of fun writing that; I remember doing an italic set. I'm still a little interested in typography.
There was also one game I found that did the characters up like Space Invaders. You played it in 80-column text mode. See, the C=128 allowed hi-res graphics, but you were basically limited to 2 (4?) colors. But 80-column text mode had the same resolution as hi-res and also allowed the normal set of text colors. So, to have a colorful hi-res game, you did the game in text mode by customizing the font.
It looked pretty good, too.
The C=128 Programmer's Reference Guide. That tome had every-goddamn-thing there was to know about the 128. It had the complete BASIC syntax, of course, and some CP/M stuff, but it also had the complete memory map (including page 0 registers), the SID chip registers and specs, video registers, the assembly language guide and monitor commands, kernel entry points, even the friggin' hardware schematics and timing diagrams!
That book was pure awesomesauce.
Those are the popular languages, the ones for which you can almost literally open up a can of programmers for.
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Fools, don't you realize the possibilities? You call me mad, but it is you who do not realize the power of my vision! With my army of zombie cockroach minions, I can...
Hm. What can I do?
Ah well. More zombies!! For Science!!!!
I'm having nightmare images of the next generation of Google image search.
It would be powered by dark room after dark room of people strapped into chairs, fed by IV, wearing helmets full of electrodes spearing into their brain. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, these helmets send dozens of images into those poor, fried brains and sees if any of those over-saturated neurons picks up on a match. Then, Google posts results.
The metaphors we're using now work pretty well, and UI changes in the future will probably consist more of refinements of these rather than totally new things, at least until and unless there is a major advance in display technology.
I dunno. When you say metaphors, I think of windows, desktops, folders, menus. These things are abstracted and simplified versions of real things that were then taken in a new direction. Folders, for example, don't actually contain things. You don't physically open them to see what's inside, instead you double-click and a new window appears.
But look at the iPhone. It has scrolling lists, buttons, and switches that are less removed from the real thing. They are less metaphorical. The iPhone, and the technologies in the article, make me believe the future of UI is the end of metaphor, not its evolution.
Well, seems to me that for selection and drawing, touch interfaces trump mouse and keyboard. For many (not all) games, controllers trump touch and keyboard. For writing, keyboards trump mouse and touch.
Basically, the mouse loses all around. Touch is teh awesome. Keyboards are good to go. Game controllers are still in the running, but falling behind.
And for displays, well, anything 2-D can do, 3-D can do better. Because 3-D can do 2-D.
You are a crack-smoker. No offense. :)
Our movement is for most part pretty much limited to 2D (forward,backward,left,right are good, but up and down are heavily restricted)
Our position is limited to 2D, but our hands' movement is very 3D.
the earth is flat (at least from a human point of view)
The ground is flat, but the stuff around us includes cars and trees and stuff inside, behind, above, and below other things.
I only see a 2D projection of the stack and even a 3D display wouldn't change that.
Well, that's true. But stacks are solid. If you could build an interface with semi-transparent X-ray vision, we could use that. Or better, if you have the stack float up and arrange itself in a 3-D cube, with space between each item so you could see through to the other side like looking through tree branches, that would be awesome.
These newfangled detectors promise to be able to image the heart in such exquisite 3D detail that your cardiologist can basically just look at your heart and see whether you have CAD, and how far along it is. And all you need to do is lie on the X-ray table for a few minutes.
With this device, it sounds like you only need to lay down for a few seconds. I believe the phrase was "a couple of heartbeats."
You can't make a "standard" bus because as soon as you do, somebody will need more [power,data,real estate,angular momentum,precision,jitter compensation] that the standard bus can provide. And then you're back into the business of custom modifications for each scientific payload.
Seems to me that, while you can't really come up with a standard bus at this point, you can come up with a draft standard that specifies what can be specified and has some economy of scale and network advantages, and allows engineers to close in a more general standard.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. These things can happen incrementally.
That thing must weigh 4 times what a man weights. 2 times what an American weighs.
Yes, let the rest of the world mock America for our extra-wide airplane seats, our Big Macs and Diet Cokes, our sedentary habits...
But when the Sea Scorpions rise up and conquer the rest of the world, only we will be able to stand against them, for in that final battle, every American is the equal of any two lesser men!
We'll show you! We'll show you all!
The API documentation for event listeners should specify what kind of reference (ordinary or weak) the library uses, as well as the ramifications of this choice.
The operation for adding an event subscriber is "event += subscriber." That syntax pretty obviously makes a reference to the subscriber in the event, and that is explicitly documented on the website.
But no, the API documentation should not be discussing the ramifications of this. The developer needs to know the ramifications. That is basic knowledge that should be discussed once in an "About References" section, and not in every class that keeps references (which is all of them). The developers in the article did know the ramifications, in fact, they just didn't remember that the objects they wanted to free were also event subscribers, thus the event was keeping them alive.
That, I think, is a flaw in the API design. An event is basically presented as a callback method. Callback methods can't own things, only objects should own things. One would expect the subscriber to keep a reference to events that it is interested in tracking, not the other way around.
The Cocoa NSNotificationCenter design is better, because, though it works similarly to C# events on the inside, it is presented such that the developer can use the common-sense model above.
The most intuitive model is probably to declare a method that the event notifier magically know about it and calls when the event happens.
The secret to writing parallel code, is to create multiple personalities, one for each thread. Then you just emulate the code in you parallel mind, and its easy to see the problem.
:-)
In other words, you'd have to be crazy to write parallel code?
The article says they "doused the robot in eau de cockroach sex hormones."
I do believe that would make the robot smell all sexy.
Would you do stupid things for a hot chick? I know I would! Bungee-jumping off a cliff would be the least of it.
Let me start with saying that I approve of the court's decision, and thus with the general thrust of your post (*bow-chicka-bow-bow*).
But,
First, as Commander-in-Chief he is in the unique role of being both a civilian and a military leader, and members of the military voluntarily surrender a number of the liberties and protections afforded private citizens.
Members of the military do, however, the Commander-in-Chief is an emphatically and intentionally a civilian position. The President himself is not military personnel.
Which is good re this President. Based on his "stint" in the National Guard, if he were actually military personnel, he would never have actually shown up at the White House, thus leaving Cheney in charge.
Not if car drivers can do anything about it. Here are some of the news of bicycling around Seattle within the last 2 months.
Bicyclist shot with BB pellets
Road rage in Fremont involves SUV driver, bicyclist
Bicyclist dies in truck accident
Oh, I wouldn't read too much into that. These things happen with pedestrians and motorists, too. Bicyclists (of which number I count myself) tend towards martyr complexes.
Many Americans don't want to sit on a train for an hour, switch to a subway, and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to ride the bus for 1.5 hours and then walk the last quarter mile. They also don't want to worry about missing their subway, train or bus by a minute. When leaving for home, missing your ride could mean waiting another 30 minutes (or more depending on when you leave) just to go home.
I'd say it's more than just convenience. Who has time to do all that?
Can you figure out this subway map look like this?
No subway to LaGuardia? Seriously?