People learn from mistakes, smart people learn from other people's mistakes.
I find it always depressing, when my government tries to come up with its own plan and doesn't bother to have a look how other nations did it. That is either ignorance, arrogance or misplaced pride.
> EU Parliament tried to do something about Berlusconi, but the parties on the right blocked all declarations on the subject.
The liberal party block tried a issue a statement which reprimanded the lack of freedom of expression in Italy due to the Berlusconi imperium. What would the effects of that be, and what had that to do with the pending legal proceedings of Mr Berlusconi, besides the person himself? Nothing and none.
> Who did you vote?
As long it isn't Berlusconi, what would it matter?
> The EU is more then just the economic union it was meant to be.
It never was meant to be just an economic union, the economic union was just a mean to an end. Just read the Schuman Declaration. The economic union was a mean to an end: To craft a political union, which would render war in Europe impossible.
> Berlesconi was not chastised for his many crimes.
Berlusconi is subject to Italian law. Should he not prosecuted, it would hardly an argument against the overreaching powers of the European Union. Besides, his immunity has been overturned
> Of course, if they'll just use the profiles part of bluetooth spec and change the physical radio interface to 802.11...well, I guess you could do that, but what's the point?
The Bluetooth SIG already coopted WiFi as an alternate media Here you go. The point is, you get the bandwidth of WiFi for free.
> Except for all those aptitude tests showing that males are just better at spatial reasoning and higher math then women.
All those? AFAIK, there is one. It shows that males at that time of test grown up in that particular society performed better than their female counterparts. Those tests fail to separate cultural and social influence from biological ones. Thanks for bringing up math as a "biological" example, as it has recently become a female dominated field in many nations, including the US.
> Further I believe you will find that all those low paying fields have another thing in common (besides being dominated by women): They are fucking brain dead easy [...] By the time they (formerly girls now women) realize they will be paying their own bills its just too late to start applying themselves.
Do I understand you correctly, that you want to imply that girls/women tend to be less focused future job prospects? Strangely enough, I've read quite the opposite reasoning for the female dominance high-school and higher education in general.
> nobody complains about sexism in HHD - they just accept the fact few men are interested in that field.
Have you had a look at the salaries in those fields dominated by women? The reason, why people tend to complain about sexism on male dominated fields is because it means severe financial disadvantages. That no one complains about it, doesn't mean that no one consider it sexism. The fact is, it is. Men choosing to such fields are likely to be ridiculed, and how is that not sexism. But no one complains, because they will likely tend to work as sub-par engineers, earning more than the average visitor of HHD.
> That's life not sexism, just the same way men can't give birth which is also not sexism.
The same way women can't choose their husband, do business, or do vote, drive a car, fight in a war, go to university, study math and science, and finally engineering. Do you see any tendency?
All of the above have been claimed to be "naturally" a male domain, while in truth it only has been one traditionally.
Biology can certainly explain, why men can't give birth. But you will most certainly fail utterly to find any scientific reason, why women should not perform comparable to men in engineering.
> If you simply split the in game area between two servers every time the load gets too great you'd end up with areas where you can neither see nor interact with players right next to you.
That is only an issue, if you insist on no communication between servers (hard-handover). If you have a soft hand-over, and servers share information about the border regions, it becomes a non-issue. You might be limited to interact only with the next, say, 1000 people next to you. Hardly unrealistic.
While keeping such a world consistent would be quite challenging, I wouldn't consider it impossible. The question remains, would the required amount of communication between the servers get overhand?
> Why can't the US have a Canadian-style, for example, health care system? Simple. It's not American enough.
You will laugh, but guess how Canada (or at least Quebec) got its health care system. I was told by a former M.D., who worked there for some time, that it was enacted against fierce public opposition. There were a lot of strikes, which simply ended, because most M.D. had such a large debt, that they couldn't afford striking anymore.
> People are pissed off about it because they know that once bureaucrats run health care, they run your life.
Name a country with universal health care, which has a tax on fatty or sweet foo. Japan has universal health care and the tax for tobacco has been recently increased: To less than a cent per cigarette. Banning smoking in public places started in continental Europe about a decade after it has been enacted in U.S. states. In many European nations, smoking marijuana is legal or tolerated, you can drink alcohol starting with 16. In Italy, wine probably even doesn't eve count as alcohol, like beer in Germany.
The only thing I can think of, in which most of Europe has been more strict on food than the US has been the labelling on the origin, and genetically modified food.
So, I'd say it isn't inherent in the system, but rather in the Banning smoking in public places started in continental Europe well a decade after it has been enacted in U.S. states.
I blame your protestant heritage on laws, on both, the laws concerning "public moral", the proper (austere) way of life (No sex, no drugs).
Strangely enough, I've heard the same about the US-populace rejection of health care, as it promotes the conviction, that everyone is responsible for his/her own fate (health).
Where do you get the idea, that the arable land increases due to global climate change?
I hope, you don't think, it just gets warmer (as the oversimplifying name "global warming" might suggest), and one can start farming in the tundra. There are more factors involved in arability than temperature
>> However, some people truly have their heads buried in the sand (or their code).
> Yes, imagine the shock and horror that you would see on people's faces if I spent my time doing what I'm getting paid to do: develop code. > I imagine most developers[...] have a system for tracking completed requirements and also for fixing reported errors/bugs.
I'd put this not under developing, but programming. Developing code encompasses more than those facts, which you can extract from a commit log. Also, the commit log can be safely filed under CYA.
> You can't fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements.
There is only one programmer leading in resolutions, the others aren't. So shouldn't the developers, as they are writing the requirements. If the commit log is considered as a metric for productivity, you have to exclude the developers as this would create a conflict of interest.
>...one of the nice things about electric cars is that they're so quiet.
It depends on the point of view and amount of noise.
> Can you turn the sound off?
Maybe not. In Japan, a law has been discussed, which would require cars to make some sound, as there were some accidents involving hybrid cars, which were too silent. Streets in resedential areas in Japan can be quite narrow with buildings close to both sides. So cars are driving relatively slow and you can't look very far around the corners of a crossing. You will usually hear a car before you see it. Also for visually impaired people, it may be the sole mean of avoiding cars.
That is the motivation behind this development. The car maker isn't doing it just for fun.
Depends on what you understand under "being built on": - "Is only compiled for": Windows also is built and sold for the Itanium. - "Has been only developed for": It also has been developed architecture independent. There were versions for MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC up to NT 4.0. In fact, initial development started on non-x86 processors. The X Box 360 is supposed to use a modified NT 2000 kernel.
Do you think? They reduced production costs from $400 to $250. How much did scrapping the OtherOS hypervisor support contributed to these costs savings?
Taking the goal of Kaz Hirai of selling roughly 16 million units (1.5e8 in 9 years), increasing the costs by 10 cents per unit will give you a yearly budget of 1.6 Mega-bucks. So, I'd wager the guess, it was well less then 5 cents per unit.
The point was simply making more profit, which is understandable.
> People want to see that last boss, kill that god, but not everyone is willing to put in 40 hours a week.
Procedural content wouldn't change that much. In fact, it would allow you to kill your personal final boss, not the same one everyone else has slain, and make you wait with twenty other people which are currently also waiting for it to respawn.
> these games tend to be "mecentric" for a reason.
Yes, but a different reason you cite. It is terribly hard to automatically generate content, which is actually diverse, interesting, consistent, good, and bug free, especially if it is in persistent world. But if you want a persistent world, procedural content is a must.
> it's cruel and inhuman to put him into a psychiatric facility, therefore he must be released?
Why do you think that? People are already locked away in psychiatry, because of incurable conditions. It isn't a punishment, but a protection of the general public and/or themselves. It isn't cruel and inhuman as they are given as much leeway as possible without putting a risk to others. In most cases, it isn't like you see it in TV or films (strait jacket, padded room, electro shocks).
With a web-camera? My guess, next to impossible. An array? Maybe a chance. A cat is fairly soft and elastic, which makes model based approaches hard. The fur likely has to few identifiable features to provide enough depth information for a 3D-model.
Best chance Structured light. Preferably in the near-infrared spectrum, this can be captured by your web-cam, but doesn't scares the cat. If I'm not mistaken, your run-of-the-mill projector does (also) emit near-infrared light. Band-pass filter for the camera, low-pass filter (or band-pass) for the projector, and of you go.
> That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little. > You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work [...]
Not so much. While they work with similar themes, I think their writing style is quite different.
William Gibson is much more terse and relies on cultural references ('name-dropping') for setting the scene. The story evolves more around such scene descriptions, than a particular sequence of actions. As you seem to find those scene descriptions rather pretentious, it is hardly surprising, that you dislike his works. But quite frankly, I like sentences with such references like:
Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she's had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solaris here, using the expressway as found Future City. Now it's been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. (from Pattern Recognition)
In my opinion, Neal Stephenson writes more approachable. I feel more involved. His writing seems to me less constructed and more flowing. But to me it also seems his down-side: The plot seems a bit unplanned, getting out of hand, the ending somewhat hurried.
I have a quite contrary view on that. They were all human, and to some degree even the AIs (to an increasing degree over the series of books). They weren't monsters, merely products of their culture. On the matter of distopia, let see what Gibson has to say on that himself:
None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl. [...]
I think, you can safely say this over the characters, too. Their behaviour and personality simply reflect the situation they live in. Being a drug dealer and -(ab)users, asocial and delusional is hardly desirable but far from seldom among human, as can be observed in the slums of the large cities around the world.
> One thing that sounds incredible wrong to me is the fact that they are saying that Qt was chosen to make "easier cross-platform-development". [...] > The move is simple political: Nokia controls Qt now, so they will use their own toolkit. It's not based on merits of the toolkit (or problems of the other.) But hey! Why tell people the truth, right?
And the reverse couldn't be possibly true: That Trolltech Qt was bought based on the merits of the platform and because Nokia expected easier cross-platform-development. Why do you think Trolltech started porting Qt to the S60 platform?
> Building an interface for a device that runs in a small screen (4.1 inches) with a small resolution (800x480) that also uses a large pointer (e.g., most of the screen is designed to thumb usage) is not the same as building an interface for normal computer screens and resolutions.
Yes, it isn't. But I doubt, having larger entry barrier by having to learn a whole new API (Android, Symbian OS) or even language (iPhone OS) makes it easier to create a good application.
A unit of heat is an amount of energy. Calories are are practically deprecated and the only commonly used meaning is as unit of food energy.
> Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
Fibre in your food makes your intestines work more when digesting, which requires more energy. The other positive effect is, that it fills your stomach, without providing any nutritious value, thereby being net-negative in your energy household. "Flushing calories", so to speak.
AFAIK, the universe is not infinite in size, it is just infinite. The very same way a circle is infinite, but has a length, or a ball or torus a surface.
> Surely the problem is with the discrimination within the Japanese people and has nothing to do with Google.
The world isn't black and white. Just because Japanese society is at fault, doesn't mean Google is without fault.
Certainly, the discrimination of burakumin is a problem of the Japanese society, but as the summary already put it, Google (unwittingly) provides tool, which simplifies the practice of ostracism of burakumin by reviving the old ghettos maps on modern maps. The discrimination is largely based on where the people have lived and currently do live. So, publicising those maps is not helping them.
In an ideal world, the Japanese people would just stop the discrimination. But we don't live in a ideal world, and if the minority in question feels this short gap measure is necessary, I think it is sensible to comply. Or do you have a good idea, how to eradicate discrimination? The Nobel Price for Peace would be yours for sure.
I don't see, how you lose information. If I understood you correctly, you stated yourself, that a rotation around one axis can be considered as mere a sequence of infinitesimal translations in the plane perpendicular to the rotation axis.
So, you can represent rotation without the need of another orthogonal set of dimensions. The problem with such a representation is "merely", that it complicates everything. E.g. you cannot even represent something as fundamental the state of a constant rotation with a constant variable.
This is why you will always choose the mathematical representation of a 6-dimensional state-vector for solving problems. But what is the physical meaning of that?
Slashdot Mirror
> Can you point to one place in there where the federal government is given the power control health care and medicine?
Section 8, powers of the congress, first sentence: General welfare.
I find it always depressing, when my government tries to come up with its own plan and doesn't bother to have a look how other nations did it.
That is either ignorance, arrogance or misplaced pride.
> EU Parliament tried to do something about Berlusconi, but the parties on the right blocked all declarations on the subject.
The liberal party block tried a issue a statement which reprimanded the lack of freedom of expression in Italy due to the Berlusconi imperium.
What would the effects of that be, and what had that to do with the pending legal proceedings of Mr Berlusconi, besides the person himself?
Nothing and none.
> Who did you vote?
As long it isn't Berlusconi, what would it matter?
> The EU is more then just the economic union it was meant to be.
It never was meant to be just an economic union, the economic union was just a mean to an end. Just read the Schuman Declaration.
The economic union was a mean to an end: To craft a political union, which would render war in Europe impossible.
> Berlesconi was not chastised for his many crimes.
Berlusconi is subject to Italian law. Should he not prosecuted, it would hardly an argument against the overreaching powers of the European Union.
Besides, his immunity has been overturned
> Of course, if they'll just use the profiles part of bluetooth spec and change the physical radio interface to 802.11...well, I guess you could do that, but what's the point?
The Bluetooth SIG already coopted WiFi as an alternate media Here you go. The point is, you get the bandwidth of WiFi for free.
> Except for all those aptitude tests showing that males are just better at spatial reasoning and higher math then women.
All those? AFAIK, there is one. It shows that males at that time of test grown up in that particular society performed better than their female counterparts. Those tests fail to separate cultural and social influence from biological ones.
Thanks for bringing up math as a "biological" example, as it has recently become a female dominated field in many nations, including the US.
> Further I believe you will find that all those low paying fields have another thing in common (besides being dominated by women): They are fucking brain dead easy [...] By the time they (formerly girls now women) realize they will be paying their own bills its just too late to start applying themselves.
Do I understand you correctly, that you want to imply that girls/women tend to be less focused future job prospects? Strangely enough, I've read quite the opposite reasoning for the female dominance high-school and higher education in general.
> nobody complains about sexism in HHD - they just accept the fact few men are interested in that field.
Have you had a look at the salaries in those fields dominated by women? The reason, why people tend to complain about sexism on male dominated fields is because it means severe financial
disadvantages.
That no one complains about it, doesn't mean that no one consider it sexism. The fact is, it is. Men choosing to such fields are likely to be ridiculed, and how is that not sexism. But no one complains, because they will likely tend to work as sub-par engineers, earning more than the average visitor of HHD.
> That's life not sexism, just the same way men can't give birth which is also not sexism.
The same way women can't choose their husband, do business, or do vote, drive a car, fight in a war, go to university, study math and science, and finally engineering.
Do you see any tendency?
All of the above have been claimed to be "naturally" a male domain, while in truth it only has been one traditionally.
Biology can certainly explain, why men can't give birth. But you will most certainly fail utterly to find any scientific reason, why women should not perform comparable to men in engineering.
> If you simply split the in game area between two servers every time the load gets too great you'd end up with areas where you can neither see nor interact with players right next to you.
That is only an issue, if you insist on no communication between servers (hard-handover). If you have a soft hand-over, and servers share information about the border regions, it becomes a non-issue.
You might be limited to interact only with the next, say, 1000 people next to you. Hardly unrealistic.
While keeping such a world consistent would be quite challenging, I wouldn't consider it impossible. The question remains, would the required amount of communication between the servers get overhand?
> Why can't the US have a Canadian-style, for example, health care system? Simple. It's not American enough.
You will laugh, but guess how Canada (or at least Quebec) got its health care system. I was told by a former M.D., who worked there for some time, that it was enacted against fierce public opposition. There were a lot of strikes, which simply ended, because most M.D. had such a large debt, that they couldn't afford striking anymore.
> People are pissed off about it because they know that once bureaucrats run health care, they run your life.
Name a country with universal health care, which has a tax on fatty or sweet foo. Japan has universal health care and the tax for tobacco has been recently increased: To less than a cent per cigarette.
Banning smoking in public places started in continental Europe about a decade after it has been enacted in U.S. states.
In many European nations, smoking marijuana is legal or tolerated, you can drink alcohol starting with 16. In Italy, wine probably even doesn't eve count as alcohol, like beer in Germany.
The only thing I can think of, in which most of Europe has been more strict on food than the US has been the labelling on the origin, and genetically modified food.
So, I'd say it isn't inherent in the system, but rather in the Banning smoking in public places started in continental Europe well a decade after it has been enacted in U.S. states.
I blame your protestant heritage on laws, on both, the laws concerning "public moral", the proper (austere) way of life (No sex, no drugs).
Strangely enough, I've heard the same about the US-populace rejection of health care, as it promotes the conviction, that everyone is responsible for his/her own fate (health).
Where do you get the idea, that the arable land increases due to global climate change?
I hope, you don't think, it just gets warmer (as the oversimplifying name "global warming" might suggest), and one can start farming in the tundra.
There are more factors involved in arability than temperature
>> However, some people truly have their heads buried in the sand (or their code).
> Yes, imagine the shock and horror that you would see on people's faces if I spent my time doing what I'm getting paid to do: develop code.
> I imagine most developers[...] have a system for tracking completed requirements and also for fixing reported errors/bugs.
I'd put this not under developing, but programming. Developing code encompasses more than those facts, which you can extract from a commit log.
Also, the commit log can be safely filed under CYA.
> You can't fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements.
There is only one programmer leading in resolutions, the others aren't. So shouldn't the developers, as they are writing the requirements.
If the commit log is considered as a metric for productivity, you have to exclude the developers as this would create a conflict of interest.
> ...one of the nice things about electric cars is that they're so quiet.
It depends on the point of view and amount of noise.
> Can you turn the sound off?
Maybe not. In Japan, a law has been discussed, which would require cars to make some sound, as there were some accidents involving hybrid cars, which were too silent.
Streets in resedential areas in Japan can be quite narrow with buildings close to both sides. So cars are driving relatively slow and you
can't look very far around the corners of a crossing. You will usually hear a car before you see it. Also for visually impaired people,
it may be the sole mean of avoiding cars.
That is the motivation behind this development. The car maker isn't doing it just for fun.
Depends on what you understand under "being built on":
- "Is only compiled for": Windows also is built and sold for the Itanium.
- "Has been only developed for": It also has been developed architecture independent. There were versions for MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC up to NT 4.0. In fact, initial development started on non-x86 processors. The X Box 360 is supposed to use a modified NT 2000 kernel.
Do you think? They reduced production costs from $400 to $250. How much did scrapping the OtherOS hypervisor support contributed to these costs savings?
Taking the goal of Kaz Hirai of selling roughly 16 million units (1.5e8 in 9 years), increasing the costs by 10 cents per unit will give you a yearly budget of 1.6 Mega-bucks. So, I'd wager the guess, it was well less then 5 cents per unit.
The point was simply making more profit, which is understandable.
> People want to see that last boss, kill that god, but not everyone is willing to put in 40 hours a week.
Procedural content wouldn't change that much. In fact, it would allow you to kill your personal final boss, not the same one everyone else has slain, and make you wait with twenty other people which are currently also waiting for it to respawn.
> these games tend to be "mecentric" for a reason.
Yes, but a different reason you cite. It is terribly hard to automatically generate content, which is actually diverse, interesting, consistent, good, and bug free, especially if it is in persistent world. But if you want a persistent world, procedural content is a must.
> it's cruel and inhuman to put him into a psychiatric facility, therefore he must be released?
Why do you think that? People are already locked away in psychiatry, because of incurable conditions. It isn't a punishment, but a protection of the general public and/or themselves.
It isn't cruel and inhuman as they are given as much leeway as possible without putting a risk to others. In most cases, it isn't like you see it in TV or films (strait jacket, padded room, electro shocks).
With a web-camera? My guess, next to impossible. An array? Maybe a chance. A cat is fairly soft and elastic, which makes model based approaches hard. The fur likely has to few identifiable features to provide enough depth information for a 3D-model.
Best chance Structured light. Preferably in the near-infrared spectrum, this can be captured by your web-cam, but doesn't scares the cat.
If I'm not mistaken, your run-of-the-mill projector does (also) emit near-infrared light. Band-pass filter for the camera, low-pass filter (or band-pass) for the projector, and of you go.
> That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little.
> You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work [...]
Not so much. While they work with similar themes, I think their writing style is quite different.
William Gibson is much more terse and relies on cultural references ('name-dropping') for setting the scene. The story evolves more around such scene descriptions, than a particular sequence of actions.
As you seem to find those scene descriptions rather pretentious, it is hardly surprising, that you dislike his works. But quite frankly, I like sentences with such references like:
In my opinion, Neal Stephenson writes more approachable. I feel more involved. His writing seems to me less constructed and more flowing. But to me it also seems his down-side: The plot seems a bit unplanned, getting out of hand, the ending somewhat hurried.
I have a quite contrary view on that. They were all human, and to some degree even the AIs (to an increasing degree over the series of books). They weren't monsters, merely products of their culture.
On the matter of distopia, let see what Gibson has to say on that himself:
I think, you can safely say this over the characters, too. Their behaviour and personality simply reflect the situation they live in. Being a drug dealer and -(ab)users, asocial and delusional is hardly desirable but far from seldom among human, as can be observed in the slums of the large cities around the world.
> One thing that sounds incredible wrong to me is the fact that they are saying that Qt was chosen to make "easier cross-platform-development". [...]
> The move is simple political: Nokia controls Qt now, so they will use their own toolkit. It's not based on merits of the toolkit (or problems of the other.) But hey! Why tell people the truth, right?
And the reverse couldn't be possibly true: That Trolltech Qt was bought based on the merits of the platform and because Nokia expected easier cross-platform-development. Why do you think Trolltech started porting Qt to the S60 platform?
> Building an interface for a device that runs in a small screen (4.1 inches) with a small resolution (800x480) that also uses a large pointer (e.g., most of the screen is designed to thumb usage) is not the same as building an interface for normal computer screens and resolutions.
Yes, it isn't. But I doubt, having larger entry barrier by having to learn a whole new API (Android, Symbian OS) or even language (iPhone OS) makes it easier to create a good application.
> No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat.
A unit of heat is an amount of energy. Calories are are practically deprecated and the only commonly used meaning is as unit of food energy.
> Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
Fibre in your food makes your intestines work more when digesting, which requires more energy. The other positive effect is, that it fills your stomach, without providing any nutritious value, thereby being net-negative in your energy household. "Flushing calories", so to speak.
AFAIK, the universe is not infinite in size, it is just infinite. The very same way a circle is infinite, but has a length, or a ball or torus a surface.
> Surely the problem is with the discrimination within the Japanese people and has nothing to do with Google.
The world isn't black and white. Just because Japanese society is at fault, doesn't mean Google is without fault.
Certainly, the discrimination of burakumin is a problem of the Japanese society, but as the summary already put it, Google (unwittingly) provides tool, which simplifies the practice of ostracism of burakumin by reviving the old ghettos maps on modern maps. The discrimination is largely based on where the people have lived and currently do live. So, publicising those maps is not helping them.
In an ideal world, the Japanese people would just stop the discrimination. But we don't live in a ideal world, and if the minority in question feels this short gap measure is necessary, I think it is sensible to comply. Or do you have a good idea, how to eradicate discrimination? The Nobel Price for Peace would be yours for sure.
I don't see, how you lose information.
If I understood you correctly, you stated yourself, that a rotation around one axis can be considered as mere a sequence of infinitesimal translations in the plane perpendicular to the rotation axis.
So, you can represent rotation without the need of another orthogonal set of dimensions.
The problem with such a representation is "merely", that it complicates everything. E.g. you cannot even represent something as fundamental the state of a constant rotation with a constant variable.
This is why you will always choose the mathematical representation of a 6-dimensional state-vector for solving problems. But what is the physical meaning of that?