I'm not talking about the religion here. I'm talking about the societies some people have built on several things, including that religion. The Koran belt does constitute a society (well, more likely several ones similar in certain regards) - not representative of Islam or the Middle East but big enough to cause ripples.
Google wasn't recording something they didn't want to, they explicitly stored the transmitted data because they wanted to store the transmitted data. If all they wanted were SSIDs I'm fairly positive they could have collected those without recording gigabytes worth of data.
Google's camcorder recorded snippets of conversations because Google explicitly took it in a tour through town in order to pick up on snippets of conversations. They haven't yet given any reason as to why they did that but it's unlikely they'd just go and store gigabytes of data because they can't figure out how to detect SSIDs.
Actually, it does. Their values place Mohammed's image over human life while ours (usually) place human life over religion. Of course, their values are offensive to use because they violate our belief that human life is sacrosanct (which is also why many Europeans perceive the States as somewhat barbaric - the States practice capital punishment).
Of course this discussion does shine a light on another cultural difference: Many people in this thread see the notion of criticizing business operations legal in the USA as offensive. The relative importance of profit vs. provacy seems to be quite different.
Like drinking from a beer bottle in public? Owning a handgun? Denying the Holocaust? Setting standards for what's acceptable and what isn't is what communities do and one community's values are likely do differ from another community's.
Take Germany and the USA in the context of what's acceptable on TV. In Germany, a set of breasts here and there isn't a big deal. It's just anatomy. Violence, however, is problematic because the Germans feel it's a bad influence on their children and might teach them that it's right to solve problems through violence.
In the USA, guns and violence are A-okay. Responsible people will act responsibly so they're not a problem. Breasts, however, are a scourge that must never be shown to minors because they might turn them into sexual deviants.
Who's right here? Well, it's a moot point as neither of them is likely to change. The important point, though, is that in either case one of the two topics is seen as relatively trivial while the other is demonized. A "trivial topic" is always a society-specific thing and even fairly similar cultures can have wildly varying views on whether a topic is trivial, debatable or big drama.
That argument doesn't apply to Google: They explicitly saved and stored the data they "overheard". Yes, we do that with our brains as well but we can't turn that off. Google can and the fact that they didn't points to at least a sloppy attitude with respect to other people's data in the context of wireless LAN transmissions.
Unfortunately for Google, "sloppy attitude" and "other people's data" is a mix European countries tend to frown on. Unless Google can present convincing arguments that it was necessary to retain the data, they're rightfully in hot water.
I don't give a shit about what people do in SA. What gets on my nuts is drunk Germans running around in Germany after a game, blowing into plastic horns. The traditional "driving around in your car while randomly hitting the horn" has the advantage of the idiots moving fast enough that they're out of earshot after a few seconds.
This has nothing to do with South Africa. It has everything to do with annoying pricks now having a new toy to annoy the crap out of me with. I wish you a great World Cup, really. You're not at fault for so many soccer fans being adult-sized noisy brats. But don't expect me to not complain when you give the not-so-little pests new weapons of mass annoyance.
It's similar in level and monotony to running jet engines at full throttle on test stands in the stadium, throughout the entire game. It doesn't add, it detracts.
Are you kidding? A jet engine right in the stadium and the players have to carefully avoid it or get sucked in/roasted by the exhaust flame? That definitely adds to the experience, big time!
Well, "I assume" is a valid sentence. It doesn't carry the same amount of information but neither does any other (usual) sentence where you remove any clauses.
German usually requires commas as a clause separator except where words like "and" or "or" are used. While German looks to a native English speaker as if it was written by William Shatner, English looks to a native German speaker like an unstructured mess because of what appear to be incredibly long unbroken clauses. (To a German that last sentence looks like two atomic clauses while it would've been five in German.)
In essence we just use fewer rules to determine when a comma is used as a clause boundary designator with the overall result being stricter.
Which is obvious to a native speaker. The GP commented that the name potentially indicated someone with sub-native English skills who might know about "final = last" and "last = previous" but not about "final != previous".
"Beware of he who uses too many commas, for half of his brain thinks, that he's speaking German."
— A very intelligent and, may I say, handsome fellow. Humble too.
This is an example of something that doesn't require space and has 14 billion potential sales. This is why Space Nuttery is DEAD. BIOTECH is the future.
Phh. Do you have any idea how big the market for Philips screws is? Biotech is dead. The steel industry's the future.
Imagine corneas grown in a lab from your own cells, in your local mall.
Finally, the news keratoconus sufferers have been waiting for! Also, I'm itching to find out how they will manufacture abiological components from my own cells.
Much more important than mining asteroids for water, when there's already 10x10^18 kg of water here on Earth.
Again, biotech is useless. Do you have any idea how many tons of biomass we have? Much, much more than we have Philips screws - and also much more than we have space stations. There's simply no demand for more biomass.
Sunglasses are much better. I mainly wear mine at night so I can so I can watch you weave then breathe your story lines. I find that when wearing tinted contacts I can not I can not keep track of visions in my eyes so I tend to avoid them.
Besides, people just love to switch the blade with the guy in contacts, oh yes. No danger of that with shades. Rhymes better, too.
[...] dringend saniert werden. Oftmals kann das Geld für notwendige Reparaturen nur mit Hilfe von Fördervereinen aufgebracht werden. Deshalb ist es fuer viele Katholiken besonders ärgerlich, dass neben dem Wohnheim auch eine eigene Kapelle von zirka achtzig Quadrat--
"[...] renovated urgently. Often, the money for neccessary repairs can only be raised through support associations. Because of this, it is especially aggravating for many Catholics that next to the dorm building, an own chapel of circa 80 square--"
Yup, seems like they got some random German broadcast about an underfunded Catholic community in there. As for the last word; it's obviously truncated from "Quadratmeter" - "square meters".
Do you like Metroidvania? It's just like that except with swimming instead of running. Aquaria is all about exploring, finding new abilities and hidden treasure and then using your abilities to explore some more. There is a narrative (and a good one in my opinion) and it may be the first Metroidvania that actually gives you a reason to explore every nook and cranny - curiosity is the driving impulse behind the protagonist's actions and this is narrated very well.
Also, some of the acheivments are really fun to get. High Jump would be one that's very satisfying to acheive and Monkey Flinger and Feather-mouth are just fun.
If you like exploring, this game is for you, big time.
Aquaria was the whole reason I bought the bundle. And it was worth every cent I spent. The rest of the games are just extras and may or may not be entertaining but I'm already satisfied.
Actually there are roguelikes for the iPhone. I played one and it worked fairly well. You have to be a bit clever about the input modalities but roguelikes can be made to work well on touch devices. Of course keyboard input it still better.
Except for a few oddballs, yeah. Germany has a habit of going against the trend, either arising out of conglomeration (more than twenty small countries merging into the German Empire in 1871) or out of decree (the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in 1949). Of course the situation before 1871 was essentially the aftermath of the Holy Roman Empire blowing up.
I'm talking out of personal observations. Of course there is a large Perl community. Perl was the scripting language for a long time. What I'm saying is that I see very few new users pick it up. It's not dying quickly but I expect the community to slowly shrink as old users die/migrate off and only a small amount of new users comes in.
Hmm. There's possibly C# (apparently MonoTouch applications have been approved).
Of course, this whole problem it two-sided: Apple requires the use of their own toolchain but support C and C++, which are still considered the "standard languages".
Microsoft requires you to use all.net all the time. They don't care how you arrive at their bytecode but if your language of choice doesn't meet their requirements you can't use it. These requirements just happen to exclude C and anything closely related.
Both restrictions are... well, bad but I have to say I prefer Apple's - Microsoft's approach seems to me like a reimplementation of the JVM made mandatory and the exclusion of C and C++ makes writing platform-independent code harder than it needs to be.
Well, Perl is pretty much dying out, as far as I can tell. When people pick up a scripting language they usually go for Python or Ruby. Perl isn't seen as offering much over either of them so even those who do want to pick up more involved languages like Lisp pass it up.
It's a good thing if you are manager who hasn't programmed since college and wish to peek at what some code is doing, without learning the language. Cocoa names are like having manual for the class rewritten over and over in each statement.
Also if you ever have to read someone else's code. For example, what exactly does this line (taken from the Gish sources) do?
createmenuitem("",0,0,16,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f);
Yeah, it creates a menu item but without digging through the code I won't know for sure what the parameters are good for, especially the second through fourth ones. I can track down which file createmenuitem() is declared in and read its signature but that quickly gets old if you have to do it a lot. Having named parameters makes it easier to find your way around in an unfamiliar codebase in my opinion.
So use primitive types when you don't need the complex ones. Objective-C is a superset of C. If you need the speed, just drop down to C and pass the result to a Foundation class when you're done.
I'm not talking about the religion here. I'm talking about the societies some people have built on several things, including that religion. The Koran belt does constitute a society (well, more likely several ones similar in certain regards) - not representative of Islam or the Middle East but big enough to cause ripples.
Google wasn't recording something they didn't want to, they explicitly stored the transmitted data because they wanted to store the transmitted data. If all they wanted were SSIDs I'm fairly positive they could have collected those without recording gigabytes worth of data.
Google's camcorder recorded snippets of conversations because Google explicitly took it in a tour through town in order to pick up on snippets of conversations. They haven't yet given any reason as to why they did that but it's unlikely they'd just go and store gigabytes of data because they can't figure out how to detect SSIDs.
Actually, it does. Their values place Mohammed's image over human life while ours (usually) place human life over religion. Of course, their values are offensive to use because they violate our belief that human life is sacrosanct (which is also why many Europeans perceive the States as somewhat barbaric - the States practice capital punishment).
Of course this discussion does shine a light on another cultural difference: Many people in this thread see the notion of criticizing business operations legal in the USA as offensive. The relative importance of profit vs. provacy seems to be quite different.
But Google did intercept and then store the data. Had they merely collected ESSIDs their case would have been much stronger.
Like drinking from a beer bottle in public? Owning a handgun? Denying the Holocaust? Setting standards for what's acceptable and what isn't is what communities do and one community's values are likely do differ from another community's.
Take Germany and the USA in the context of what's acceptable on TV. In Germany, a set of breasts here and there isn't a big deal. It's just anatomy. Violence, however, is problematic because the Germans feel it's a bad influence on their children and might teach them that it's right to solve problems through violence.
In the USA, guns and violence are A-okay. Responsible people will act responsibly so they're not a problem. Breasts, however, are a scourge that must never be shown to minors because they might turn them into sexual deviants.
Who's right here? Well, it's a moot point as neither of them is likely to change. The important point, though, is that in either case one of the two topics is seen as relatively trivial while the other is demonized. A "trivial topic" is always a society-specific thing and even fairly similar cultures can have wildly varying views on whether a topic is trivial, debatable or big drama.
That argument doesn't apply to Google: They explicitly saved and stored the data they "overheard". Yes, we do that with our brains as well but we can't turn that off. Google can and the fact that they didn't points to at least a sloppy attitude with respect to other people's data in the context of wireless LAN transmissions.
Unfortunately for Google, "sloppy attitude" and "other people's data" is a mix European countries tend to frown on. Unless Google can present convincing arguments that it was necessary to retain the data, they're rightfully in hot water.
I don't give a shit about what people do in SA. What gets on my nuts is drunk Germans running around in Germany after a game, blowing into plastic horns. The traditional "driving around in your car while randomly hitting the horn" has the advantage of the idiots moving fast enough that they're out of earshot after a few seconds.
This has nothing to do with South Africa. It has everything to do with annoying pricks now having a new toy to annoy the crap out of me with. I wish you a great World Cup, really. You're not at fault for so many soccer fans being adult-sized noisy brats. But don't expect me to not complain when you give the not-so-little pests new weapons of mass annoyance.
It's similar in level and monotony to running jet engines at full throttle on test stands in the stadium, throughout the entire game. It doesn't add, it detracts.
Are you kidding? A jet engine right in the stadium and the players have to carefully avoid it or get sucked in/roasted by the exhaust flame? That definitely adds to the experience, big time!
Well, "I assume" is a valid sentence. It doesn't carry the same amount of information but neither does any other (usual) sentence where you remove any clauses.
German usually requires commas as a clause separator except where words like "and" or "or" are used. While German looks to a native English speaker as if it was written by William Shatner, English looks to a native German speaker like an unstructured mess because of what appear to be incredibly long unbroken clauses. (To a German that last sentence looks like two atomic clauses while it would've been five in German.)
In essence we just use fewer rules to determine when a comma is used as a clause boundary designator with the overall result being stricter.
Which is obvious to a native speaker. The GP commented that the name potentially indicated someone with sub-native English skills who might know about "final = last" and "last = previous" but not about "final != previous".
"Beware of he who uses too many commas, for half of his brain thinks, that he's speaking German."
— A very intelligent and, may I say, handsome fellow. Humble too.
This is an example of something that doesn't require space and has 14 billion potential sales. This is why Space Nuttery is DEAD. BIOTECH is the future.
Phh. Do you have any idea how big the market for Philips screws is? Biotech is dead. The steel industry's the future.
Imagine corneas grown in a lab from your own cells, in your local mall.
Finally, the news keratoconus sufferers have been waiting for! Also, I'm itching to find out how they will manufacture abiological components from my own cells.
Much more important than mining asteroids for water, when there's already 10x10^18 kg of water here on Earth.
Again, biotech is useless. Do you have any idea how many tons of biomass we have? Much, much more than we have Philips screws - and also much more than we have space stations. There's simply no demand for more biomass.
Sunglasses are much better. I mainly wear mine at night so I can so I can watch you weave then breathe your story lines. I find that when wearing tinted contacts I can not I can not keep track of visions in my eyes so I tend to avoid them.
Besides, people just love to switch the blade with the guy in contacts, oh yes. No danger of that with shades. Rhymes better, too.
[...] dringend saniert werden. Oftmals kann das Geld für notwendige Reparaturen nur mit Hilfe von Fördervereinen aufgebracht werden. Deshalb ist es fuer viele Katholiken besonders ärgerlich, dass neben dem Wohnheim auch eine eigene Kapelle von zirka achtzig Quadrat--
"[...] renovated urgently. Often, the money for neccessary repairs can only be raised through support associations. Because of this, it is especially aggravating for many Catholics that next to the dorm building, an own chapel of circa 80 square--"
Yup, seems like they got some random German broadcast about an underfunded Catholic community in there. As for the last word; it's obviously truncated from "Quadratmeter" - "square meters".
Do you like Metroidvania? It's just like that except with swimming instead of running. Aquaria is all about exploring, finding new abilities and hidden treasure and then using your abilities to explore some more. There is a narrative (and a good one in my opinion) and it may be the first Metroidvania that actually gives you a reason to explore every nook and cranny - curiosity is the driving impulse behind the protagonist's actions and this is narrated very well.
Also, some of the acheivments are really fun to get. High Jump would be one that's very satisfying to acheive and Monkey Flinger and Feather-mouth are just fun.
If you like exploring, this game is for you, big time.
Aquaria was the whole reason I bought the bundle. And it was worth every cent I spent. The rest of the games are just extras and may or may not be entertaining but I'm already satisfied.
Actually there are roguelikes for the iPhone. I played one and it worked fairly well. You have to be a bit clever about the input modalities but roguelikes can be made to work well on touch devices. Of course keyboard input it still better.
Now that's just not true. Sometimes they also just say "GTFO", which is widely understood as "Richard Stallman doesn't like your business model".
Except for a few oddballs, yeah. Germany has a habit of going against the trend, either arising out of conglomeration (more than twenty small countries merging into the German Empire in 1871) or out of decree (the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in 1949). Of course the situation before 1871 was essentially the aftermath of the Holy Roman Empire blowing up.
We are in accord on that one. More transparency regarding approval policies would be of tremendous benefit to developers.
I'm talking out of personal observations. Of course there is a large Perl community. Perl was the scripting language for a long time. What I'm saying is that I see very few new users pick it up. It's not dying quickly but I expect the community to slowly shrink as old users die/migrate off and only a small amount of new users comes in.
Hmm. There's possibly C# (apparently MonoTouch applications have been approved).
.net all the time. They don't care how you arrive at their bytecode but if your language of choice doesn't meet their requirements you can't use it. These requirements just happen to exclude C and anything closely related.
Of course, this whole problem it two-sided: Apple requires the use of their own toolchain but support C and C++, which are still considered the "standard languages".
Microsoft requires you to use all
Both restrictions are... well, bad but I have to say I prefer Apple's - Microsoft's approach seems to me like a reimplementation of the JVM made mandatory and the exclusion of C and C++ makes writing platform-independent code harder than it needs to be.
Well, Perl is pretty much dying out, as far as I can tell. When people pick up a scripting language they usually go for Python or Ruby. Perl isn't seen as offering much over either of them so even those who do want to pick up more involved languages like Lisp pass it up.
It's a good thing if you are manager who hasn't programmed since college and wish to peek at what some code is doing, without learning the language. Cocoa names are like having manual for the class rewritten over and over in each statement.
Also if you ever have to read someone else's code. For example, what exactly does this line (taken from the Gish sources) do?
createmenuitem("",0,0,16,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f);
Yeah, it creates a menu item but without digging through the code I won't know for sure what the parameters are good for, especially the second through fourth ones. I can track down which file createmenuitem() is declared in and read its signature but that quickly gets old if you have to do it a lot. Having named parameters makes it easier to find your way around in an unfamiliar codebase in my opinion.
So use primitive types when you don't need the complex ones. Objective-C is a superset of C. If you need the speed, just drop down to C and pass the result to a Foundation class when you're done.