What Carmack is advocating actually sounds great for dynamic environments. In fact, one of the reasons octrees became popular was that they made it easier to deal with dynamic objects (as compared with the way BSP trees were being used at the time). It wasn't the tree-ness of BSP trees that was the problem; it was their strict dependence on world geometry. The best evidence I can give for this is the fact that BSP trees that don't depend on the details of the world geometry -- which we call KD trees -- are very popular; they fill roughly the same niche as octrees but are slightly more flexible. I'd be truly surprised if Katamari didn't use some sort of heirarchical data structure, in fact, precisely so it can do all its dynamic physics at a reasonable speed.
Anyway... what are the physics benefits of a voxel approach? For starters, deformable geometry gets very, very easy. You don't need to screw around doing a bunch of CSG on convex polyhedra; you just set a bunch of voxels to zero and that's it. I might add that your "just have a bunch of models" approach is very poorly suited for dynamic geometry, because they only define surfaces not solids, whereas voxels provide a very natural way to do that.
Want clouds? Steam? Realistic water that splashes about? Also, best done with voxels.
With a voxel-based approach, you can conceivably integrate with the graphics some finite-element-model simulation, even. This is easily parallelizable and fits naturally with the voxel world representation. That is, you could conceivably have physically-accurate elastic deformation of environments, for instance -- or run the Navier-Stokes equations to see real turbulent flow around naval units in a strategy game.
Collision detection, as other posters have noted, also gets very easy. Forget nasty intersection code; just have the hardware do a bitwise AND between two voxel objects and OR all those bits together! And so on.
Basically, voxels are ideal for physics, and the structure Carmack is proposing to store the voxels in doesn't sound very static at all.
(I'll also note that what Carmack is advancing is an old fantasy of many graphics programmers. What's notable isn't the idea itself -- it's old -- but that Carmack thinks it might soon be feasible. And that is exciting.)
I. Vigilantism
Every able-bodied citizen of America who experienced 9-11 will now and forever watch and notice these attributes of their fellow travelers
II. Rationality
They won't do it again because taking a plane out of the sky really will make airport security like a military check point, thus also limiting the mobility of the enemy for the reward of taking 1 or 2 planes out of the sky with no hard land target in mind. Not going to happen.
I'm not so sure. Your argument rests on the assumption that the terrorists make well-reasoned decisions to further their cause. They do have objectives -- "get out of the Middle East, U.S!" -- but in my opinion they are horribly misguided in their decisions: If they wanted to reduce the U.S. military presence there, they sure as hell haven't succeeded.
Some people say, "the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." I don't think so. Rather, the current situation is a dismal failure for all involved, terrorists included. It's a failure for the U.S., which is now engaged in a bloody, costly (we have spent more than we did in Vietnam), no-way-out quagmire of a war. It's a failure for the extremists who downed those planes, who rather than convincing the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East has provoked it to deploy even more troops there. It is a failure for "Iraqi" civilians (even if no "Iraqi" ethnic identity really exists), who might have been oppressed under Saddam but who at least had electricity and drinking water. It is a failure for nearly everyone. The only reason this mess continues is that we, the extremists, and everyone else, are stuck together in yet-another (the world has so many) collectiveactionproblem.
[The list of those who have benefited from this situation is short -- mainly politicians (in the US and in the Middle East) and government contractors (Haliburton/KBR, etc) happy to multiply the terror and exploit the situation (see the BBC's The Power of Nightmares -- video here). But these people didn't engineer the attacks; they're just opportunists.]
I got a little sidetracked, but the point is this: The terrorists did not plan a well-reasoned attack to achieve their objectives; by most rational metrics I can think of, they have failed. Therefore, I wouldn't put it past them to do something stupid again -- like stage an attack which will ultimately make their task more difficult. That's the part of your post I was disagreeing with -- that these terrorists make smart decisions. I suspect they don't -- not because they're populated by stupid people (terrorists tend to be well-educated. I'm most familiar not with Middle-Eastern terrorists, but with the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo that released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway -- and that organization was full of Ph.D.s and physics students) but because their logical, analytical minds have been short-circuited by a seductive ideology.
In other words, we've got one group of people whose brains have been short-circuited by ideology and anger against another whose frontal lobes have been shut off by a hyperactive fear-and-stress center. I'm not counting on rationality from anyone.
When I was visiting home over the holidays, a Verizon rep who was going door-to-door stopped by my parents' house. My mom ran the math on what he was saying, and decided to listen because it turned out to be cheaper than the 56k dialup the family had originally had. Speed, they didn't think they cared about: They made this decision strictly on cost.
You see, originally, they'd been paying for,
AT&T by-the-minute long distance
Plain ol' Verizon local service
Comcast cable TV
MSN dialup.
By scrapping all of these and switching to FIOS phone+TV+long-distance, they got,
Unlimited long distance
Better quality TV with more channels
Broadband, for the first time
...and all of this cheaper than their original combination of services.
Seriously: You'll be getting cheaper, faster, more reliable service. I don't see why you wouldn't want to switch. People all over Slashdot complain, "why don't we get fiber to the home in the US?" Well, here's your chance to get it!
Not only does FIOS have good throughput (like cable); it has good latency (like DSL): IIRC, I get single-digit pings in Quake when I'm home. And whereas my friends' Comcast cable connections seem to die periodically, I think FIOS has been down maybe once in the year that my parents have had it.
(It's possible that my parents had a particularly good experience; I understand that people in another part of town had had issues with FIOS (relating to an inept tech?). When we got it FIOS was bleeding-edge and the guy who came freely admitted that Verizon was having a hard time keeping up with training. But I'd suspect that the installers probably have the experience by now to do the job right.)
My parents' only complaint? They now need a "cable box" on their TV, and this confuses them (a fact which confuses me, since they're otherwise smart people. Must be age). Moral of the story: If cable boxes don't confuse you, FIOS wins on all counts:-); it's better service, cheaper.
Here I'll give you an example of a guy -- a jazz bassist -- who distributes on his own over the Internet. In fact, he has done all the recording himself (with friends) in his apartment -- and yet the sound quality is excellent. It's not an example of someone who got rich by this strategy, but, well, how many obscure artists on jazz labels do?
Thus, I present Matthew Garrison. He's good, and he got his hard-earned start on the Internet.
Also, you state you have been offered "management position offers, being 26, in international companies", but I noticed you didn't say you were being promoted inside your company
In all fairness, I think that's pretty common. It's becoming an old joke that the fastest way to get promoted is to get a job at another company -- and then have your old company hire you back at a higher salary. Yet it's not really joke: It happens over and over again.
I am willing to bet what you consider a "management" position is really a low-level mid-management position where you would not be making decisions, but rather herding other programmers or acting as a project manager.
Well, sure. He's trying to sound impressive. But, let's be honest: All you did in this paragraph was replace "management" with some mostly-synonyms that just happen to have negative connotations. I think that's called spin. Because management is a lot of people-herding.
You mistake looking professional and impressing one's boss with sucking up and being a yes-man. One does not imply or require the other.
Indeed you are correct. In fact, challenging your boss at the right times (in a diplomatic manner) can earn his respect. Which, if I were clever, I could turn around and use to deconstruct the whole GP's post (But I won't. Derrida was obnoxious.)
Apparently, you are either a dumbass, a liar, or both.
He's exaggerating, sure. But your style won't do you too much good either. Let's be civil, a'ight?
I have a professor who adamantly refuses to use it and posts course information as plain vanilla html pages
When I grow up, I will be that guy.
Since when was "math.university.edu/~smith/math102/" not good enough? What does Blackboard provide that plain HTML doesn't? Apart from the ability to post grades, nothing that I have seen people use. Most of the professors I've taken courses from use it like an FTP server -- which begs the question of why they don't just do that, for much cheaper.
But my objections to Blackboard run deeper than its lousy cost/benefit ratio: Blackboard locks down information: I can find Mr. Smith's Math 102 page through Google, and I can look at his lecture notes. Blackboard, I need to sign in to. The Internet has the potential to be a wonderful educational tool -- it already is -- and Blackboard subverts that.
Death to blackboard. Viva OpenCourseWare, or, just as good, the simple homepage.
Other posters have commented on "Why China?" I'll comment on "Why naturalized citizens or American-born?" If your observation that these people are more likely to defect than recent immigrants really is correct, then here are two cents on why that might be:
Expats in my experience are the most vehement nationalists. People who come to the US voluntarily came here for a reason, and though they are proud of the country they came from, they also see its deficiencies* -- otherwise they wouldn't have made the effort to come here. People who have been out of their "homeland" for a long time, however -- say, if they were brought to the US as children -- develop a romanticized memory of "the motherland." More, they have the personal emotional need, much more than "genuine" Chinese/Irish/Iraqis, to assert their national/ethnic identity.
Example 1: Irish nationalists. A great deal of funding for the IRA, etc, came from Irish-Americans. A majority of those actually living in Ireland simply wanted the violence to stop -- they had to live with it -- but Irish-Americans continued to throw money on the fire.
Example 2: Cuba. Some of the most vocal anti-Castro advocates are Florida Cuban-Americans. It was they who agitated for and fought the Bay of Pigs.**
Example 3: Iraq. There are a million reasons for the current war, but one is support from vocal Iraqi expats.
The basic point is that it's easy to love a country you haven't seen since childhood -- hence the vehemence of expats.
_______
*(of course, they see this country's deficiencies too -- but they did make a choice of one set of advantages and disadvantages over another.)
**(and were famously undermined by a lack of air support.)
The quality of these comments is horrendous. Every once in a while you find a reasonably-professional one, but in general it's ungrammatical, poorly-reasoned crap.
It's disheartening to think that Americans are really this dumb.
At least the crap, along with the good stuff, is on our side. I've yet to find a comment supporting Comcast.
Historically, the U.S. hasn't exactly been a hub of scientific and mathematical innovation. You've got the inventor types like Franklin and Edison, but most of the heavy hitters come from Europe.
I'm interested in counterexamples to this statement. I can't think of many, but I'll start a list and welcome other people to reply with their additions to it.
Claude Shannon, the mathematician and Electrical Engineer of All Electrical Engineers, who did tons of the theoretical legwork behind the digital computer and who single-handedly invented information theory.
That's right. Just three names so far. (Or should I add Edward Lorenz to the list and make it four?)
I suppose you could make the list quite a bit more impressive if you included immigrants. Then you'd have Einstein, Dijkstra, Von Braun, Tesla, Kalman, etc... but though these are examples of the U.S. attracting great minds, they are not examples of American society producing them.
There are some other impressive names that I can think of (Knuth, Kay), but none of them seem to be quite in the same league as the European greats like Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, etc.
I'm looking for counterexamples to the suggestion that people born into American society just don't reach that level of greatness. Suggestions for additions to the list wanted.
'the levy of "property tax" on the fair market value of the so-called "intellectual property"' [is a good idea]
That sort of is what happens with patents (I think, maybe). I remember hearing that companies have to pay fees to the patent office annually to keep their patents.
I am under the impression that there are fees for submitting patents, fees for having a patent granted, and fees for keeping a patent on file. Together, these create lots of incentive for 'the government' ('patent office,' really) to grant patents indiscriminately.
Any additional taxes on 'intellectual property' would simply give the government more incentive to recognize IP 'rights' all over the intellectual map.
Parent seems to think 1 atm is a very large pressure to deal with. That's incorrect, but I can't blame him, as there are plenty of high-school science demos that suggest otherwise (Example).
[The USA's voting system] isn't a single round winner takes all system, and if you half as informed as you think you are you would know that.
It's a "single round winner takes all system" with intermediate rounding errors?
Sure, states have some freedom over how they choose their electors in the Electoral College, but they all pretty much fall into one of two categories, as far as I am aware:
Whoever gets the most popular votes in the state gets all of the state's electors.
The state assigns its electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote.
Both are pretty much just rounding errors in the adding-up of the popular vote around the US! So I'd forgive the parent for his modest oversimplification, as overlooking rounding errors is something engineers do daily in the design of signal-processing systems, and the difference only becomes important in very-close elections.
(Of course, it'd be fair to point out that very-close elections seem more and more to be the norm these days...)
re-learn the art of debate and are no longer afraid of different points-of-view.
What I'm sick of is people who speak objective falsehoods and call them "different points-of-view." They say they are "debating" when they are really just lying.
Honestly, I've gotten completely sick of the whole concept of "debate" -- and I used to be a competitive debater. The problem is that it's inherently adversarial. It is not that both parties walk on stage with different viewpoints but a determination to uncover the single truth; no, each side simply wants "to win." So "debate" becomes just one more variety of pissing contest.
We should approach problems with an approach less like "debate" and more like "science."
with [manufacturing jobs] gone, we are moving to "intellectual property"
This argument quietly assumes that Americans are the only ones capable of making intellectual property. Problem is, we have no monopoly on intellect. Go take a look around a Graduate School Near You.
It also is an economic strategy that depends on enforcement. Why on earth should another country enforce our IP laws? With no other economic resources, what kind of incentives can we possibly give them? All that remains is the use of force. As this last option is hideously expensive and ultimately paid for with tax dollars, even it is not sustainable.
I don't know anything about this particular robot, but methinx you wouldn't be able to do that with an open-loop sequence of scripted movements. There's definitely some sort of feedback going on. Some sort of force control, perhaps? And I wonder if there's some audio feedback as well to keep it in tune?
Self-awareness is great and all, but I don't think it's going to happen. Whereas there are many interesting challenges in lower-level control, and we do seem to get results there when we work at it.
I respect those concerns, but would like to address the implications of one of your rhetorical questions:
And should a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease be mandatory anyway?
When 90% of the population gets a disease by the time they die, and when that virus often causes cancer, I think it's pretty much irrelevant how they got it.
In fact, it's almost certain that you have been infected with HPV (me too). It's not some exotic venereal disease.
It seems whenever something bad happens to someone as a result of sex, everybody starts acting like they don't fuck. We go around ignorantly infecting each other while pretending we don't know what a vagina looks like. You're married, so you don't need to worry much about getting new STDs, but understand that even personally-conservative singles are at a real STD risk.
Also, HPV is not just an STD. Yes, that's how you get it genitally and that's how you get cervical cancer. But you also spread it by kissing, sharing a drink, or doing other things we're allowed to show in a G movie. It's like herpes that way. Socially-"innocuous" behaviors spread a "horrible STD."
You know the "cold sores" half of all midddle-class kids get from their parents? It's herpes, and you can spread it to someone's genitals. That's right: If a sexually-inexperienced girl gives me a blowjob, I can still get genital herpes from her, because she engaged in the oh-so-risky prior behavior of getting kissed goodnight by Mom.
I offer this as another example of how STDs are everywhere. So rejecting a vaccine because it is "for a sexually-transmitted disease" is just naive.
If anything, society is being stupid by pretending HPV is a "women's disease" and not inoculating boys too.
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games
I agree, and I'll point to Age of Empires as an example.
In junior high and the beginning of high school, I had a number of history classes focusing on the ancient world. Simply knowing the vocabulary -- having an idea what a phalanx is, or a trireme -- was useful when writing essays. Of course, Age of Empires is not a faithful simulation of ancient combat, but it gets enough right that its educational value is definitely nonzero. In fact, the manual that came with the game (do people read those? I did.) gives a nice little historical description for each of the different cultures and units.
And that was a very popular game. So much so that Microsoft bought Ensemble Studios.
I'd say you learn something about Word War II by playing many of the military games out there. People who play Counterstrike learn something about real-world guns.
Games need backstory, they need props -- they need a world. I think the trick to making a game educational is largely just to make that backstory and those props not just realistic, but to make them actually real -- that is, historically accurate. And there are plenty of good, fun game concepts for which you can naturally do that.
Did you know that someone who studied math or physics is also a liberal arts major? The phrase "liberal arts" refers to a well-rounded course of study that is not simply training for a vocation. It does not mean "just touchy-feely humanities."
Someone who studied "Gender in Icelandic Literature" and can't differentiate a polynomial did not truly pursue a Liberal* education.
(* Obviously, 'Liberal' has a different meaning here than it does when we talk about politics. I wonder if that political association damages "Liberal Arts" by making people incorrectly assume partisanship from the name itself.)
The prototypical real liberal arts major is probably someone with a philosophy major and a math minor who took some courses in Classical literature. That person is probably capable of more than waiting tables!
Most nuclear plants haven't failed; they've been running just fine... France is the obvious example, n'est-ce pas?
Like a bat out of hell.
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Have you heard it idle?
Have you heard it burn rubber when the stoplight goes green? Electric motors like the Prius uses are amazing at producing off-the-line torque. Combine that with its low weight, and you find that the Prius actually out-accelerates most cars on the road.
As an environmental move, whether hybrid drivetrains represent a net win is a little ambiguous (until we get plug-in hybrids). But for performance, they have a lot of pretty exciting advantages.
I was on a University team which built a hybrid formula-style racecar. That thing blew the pants off of Ferraris. In fact, it was originally entered for the general Formula SAE event, which then outlawed hybrids as having an unfair advantage. (So we started another competition just for hybrid vehicles.)
Want to see what electric motors can do? Check out the Tesla Roadster. And it only uses an AC induction motor (hence "Tesla")!!
(The fact that it "only" uses an induction motor is important because induction motors, though cheap and durable, are not even the money-no-object "best" option: That would be a permanent magnet synchronous DC motor.)
The downside to electric drivetrains is that they have more components, and electric motors are heavy, so their more impressive torque needs to make up for the increased weight. But the fact is that, currently, hybrids do exactly that, and, as motors get lighter, the advantages will only get more and more pronounced.
Have you heard the quiet, confident, high-tech sound of a really powerful electric motor spooling up? It's truly a beautiful sound.
Slashdot Mirror
What Carmack is advocating actually sounds great for dynamic environments. In fact, one of the reasons octrees became popular was that they made it easier to deal with dynamic objects (as compared with the way BSP trees were being used at the time). It wasn't the tree-ness of BSP trees that was the problem; it was their strict dependence on world geometry. The best evidence I can give for this is the fact that BSP trees that don't depend on the details of the world geometry -- which we call KD trees -- are very popular; they fill roughly the same niche as octrees but are slightly more flexible. I'd be truly surprised if Katamari didn't use some sort of heirarchical data structure, in fact, precisely so it can do all its dynamic physics at a reasonable speed.
Anyway... what are the physics benefits of a voxel approach? For starters, deformable geometry gets very, very easy. You don't need to screw around doing a bunch of CSG on convex polyhedra; you just set a bunch of voxels to zero and that's it. I might add that your "just have a bunch of models" approach is very poorly suited for dynamic geometry, because they only define surfaces not solids, whereas voxels provide a very natural way to do that.
Want clouds? Steam? Realistic water that splashes about? Also, best done with voxels.
With a voxel-based approach, you can conceivably integrate with the graphics some finite-element-model simulation, even. This is easily parallelizable and fits naturally with the voxel world representation. That is, you could conceivably have physically-accurate elastic deformation of environments, for instance -- or run the Navier-Stokes equations to see real turbulent flow around naval units in a strategy game.
Collision detection, as other posters have noted, also gets very easy. Forget nasty intersection code; just have the hardware do a bitwise AND between two voxel objects and OR all those bits together! And so on.
Basically, voxels are ideal for physics, and the structure Carmack is proposing to store the voxels in doesn't sound very static at all.
(I'll also note that what Carmack is advancing is an old fantasy of many graphics programmers. What's notable isn't the idea itself -- it's old -- but that Carmack thinks it might soon be feasible. And that is exciting.)
Devil's advocate: What attributes? Being brown?
This is what vigilantism looks like.
II. Rationality They won't do it again because taking a plane out of the sky really will make airport security like a military check point, thus also limiting the mobility of the enemy for the reward of taking 1 or 2 planes out of the sky with no hard land target in mind. Not going to happen.I'm not so sure. Your argument rests on the assumption that the terrorists make well-reasoned decisions to further their cause. They do have objectives -- "get out of the Middle East, U.S!" -- but in my opinion they are horribly misguided in their decisions: If they wanted to reduce the U.S. military presence there, they sure as hell haven't succeeded.
Some people say, "the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." I don't think so. Rather, the current situation is a dismal failure for all involved, terrorists included. It's a failure for the U.S., which is now engaged in a bloody, costly (we have spent more than we did in Vietnam), no-way-out quagmire of a war. It's a failure for the extremists who downed those planes, who rather than convincing the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East has provoked it to deploy even more troops there. It is a failure for "Iraqi" civilians (even if no "Iraqi" ethnic identity really exists), who might have been oppressed under Saddam but who at least had electricity and drinking water. It is a failure for nearly everyone. The only reason this mess continues is that we, the extremists, and everyone else, are stuck together in yet-another (the world has so many) collective action problem.
[The list of those who have benefited from this situation is short -- mainly politicians (in the US and in the Middle East) and government contractors (Haliburton/KBR, etc) happy to multiply the terror and exploit the situation (see the BBC's The Power of Nightmares -- video here). But these people didn't engineer the attacks; they're just opportunists.]
I got a little sidetracked, but the point is this: The terrorists did not plan a well-reasoned attack to achieve their objectives; by most rational metrics I can think of, they have failed. Therefore, I wouldn't put it past them to do something stupid again -- like stage an attack which will ultimately make their task more difficult. That's the part of your post I was disagreeing with -- that these terrorists make smart decisions. I suspect they don't -- not because they're populated by stupid people (terrorists tend to be well-educated. I'm most familiar not with Middle-Eastern terrorists, but with the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo that released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway -- and that organization was full of Ph.D.s and physics students) but because their logical, analytical minds have been short-circuited by a seductive ideology.
In other words, we've got one group of people whose brains have been short-circuited by ideology and anger against another whose frontal lobes have been shut off by a hyperactive fear-and-stress center. I'm not counting on rationality from anyone.
Switch to FIOS!
When I was visiting home over the holidays, a Verizon rep who was going door-to-door stopped by my parents' house. My mom ran the math on what he was saying, and decided to listen because it turned out to be cheaper than the 56k dialup the family had originally had. Speed, they didn't think they cared about: They made this decision strictly on cost.
You see, originally, they'd been paying for,
- AT&T by-the-minute long distance
- Plain ol' Verizon local service
- Comcast cable TV
- MSN dialup.
By scrapping all of these and switching to FIOS phone+TV+long-distance, they got,Seriously: You'll be getting cheaper, faster, more reliable service. I don't see why you wouldn't want to switch. People all over Slashdot complain, "why don't we get fiber to the home in the US?" Well, here's your chance to get it!
Not only does FIOS have good throughput (like cable); it has good latency (like DSL): IIRC, I get single-digit pings in Quake when I'm home. And whereas my friends' Comcast cable connections seem to die periodically, I think FIOS has been down maybe once in the year that my parents have had it.
(It's possible that my parents had a particularly good experience; I understand that people in another part of town had had issues with FIOS (relating to an inept tech?). When we got it FIOS was bleeding-edge and the guy who came freely admitted that Verizon was having a hard time keeping up with training. But I'd suspect that the installers probably have the experience by now to do the job right.)
My parents' only complaint? They now need a "cable box" on their TV, and this confuses them (a fact which confuses me, since they're otherwise smart people. Must be age). Moral of the story: If cable boxes don't confuse you, FIOS wins on all counts :-); it's better service, cheaper.
Didn't he remove the excessive bit? Or is it that he's responsible for the original bill, and is simply backing down a bit?
Here I'll give you an example of a guy -- a jazz bassist -- who distributes on his own over the Internet. In fact, he has done all the recording himself (with friends) in his apartment -- and yet the sound quality is excellent. It's not an example of someone who got rich by this strategy, but, well, how many obscure artists on jazz labels do?
Thus, I present Matthew Garrison. He's good, and he got his hard-earned start on the Internet.
That's it for now. Peace.
In all fairness, I think that's pretty common. It's becoming an old joke that the fastest way to get promoted is to get a job at another company -- and then have your old company hire you back at a higher salary. Yet it's not really joke: It happens over and over again.
I am willing to bet what you consider a "management" position is really a low-level mid-management position where you would not be making decisions, but rather herding other programmers or acting as a project manager.Well, sure. He's trying to sound impressive. But, let's be honest: All you did in this paragraph was replace "management" with some mostly-synonyms that just happen to have negative connotations. I think that's called spin. Because management is a lot of people-herding.
You mistake looking professional and impressing one's boss with sucking up and being a yes-man. One does not imply or require the other.Indeed you are correct. In fact, challenging your boss at the right times (in a diplomatic manner) can earn his respect. Which, if I were clever, I could turn around and use to deconstruct the whole GP's post (But I won't. Derrida was obnoxious.)
Apparently, you are either a dumbass, a liar, or both.He's exaggerating, sure. But your style won't do you too much good either. Let's be civil, a'ight?
Peace.
When I grow up, I will be that guy.
Since when was "math.university.edu/~smith/math102/" not good enough? What does Blackboard provide that plain HTML doesn't? Apart from the ability to post grades, nothing that I have seen people use. Most of the professors I've taken courses from use it like an FTP server -- which begs the question of why they don't just do that, for much cheaper.
But my objections to Blackboard run deeper than its lousy cost/benefit ratio: Blackboard locks down information: I can find Mr. Smith's Math 102 page through Google, and I can look at his lecture notes. Blackboard, I need to sign in to. The Internet has the potential to be a wonderful educational tool -- it already is -- and Blackboard subverts that.
Death to blackboard. Viva OpenCourseWare, or, just as good, the simple homepage.
Other posters have commented on "Why China?" I'll comment on "Why naturalized citizens or American-born?" If your observation that these people are more likely to defect than recent immigrants really is correct, then here are two cents on why that might be:
Expats in my experience are the most vehement nationalists. People who come to the US voluntarily came here for a reason, and though they are proud of the country they came from, they also see its deficiencies* -- otherwise they wouldn't have made the effort to come here. People who have been out of their "homeland" for a long time, however -- say, if they were brought to the US as children -- develop a romanticized memory of "the motherland." More, they have the personal emotional need, much more than "genuine" Chinese/Irish/Iraqis, to assert their national/ethnic identity.
Example 1: Irish nationalists. A great deal of funding for the IRA, etc, came from Irish-Americans. A majority of those actually living in Ireland simply wanted the violence to stop -- they had to live with it -- but Irish-Americans continued to throw money on the fire.
Example 2: Cuba. Some of the most vocal anti-Castro advocates are Florida Cuban-Americans. It was they who agitated for and fought the Bay of Pigs.**
Example 3: Iraq. There are a million reasons for the current war, but one is support from vocal Iraqi expats.
The basic point is that it's easy to love a country you haven't seen since childhood -- hence the vehemence of expats.
_______
*(of course, they see this country's deficiencies too -- but they did make a choice of one set of advantages and disadvantages over another.)
**(and were famously undermined by a lack of air support.)
The quality of these comments is horrendous. Every once in a while you find a reasonably-professional one, but in general it's ungrammatical, poorly-reasoned crap.
It's disheartening to think that Americans are really this dumb.
At least the crap, along with the good stuff, is on our side. I've yet to find a comment supporting Comcast.
I'm interested in counterexamples to this statement. I can't think of many, but I'll start a list and welcome other people to reply with their additions to it.
That's right. Just three names so far. (Or should I add Edward Lorenz to the list and make it four?)
I suppose you could make the list quite a bit more impressive if you included immigrants. Then you'd have Einstein, Dijkstra, Von Braun, Tesla, Kalman, etc... but though these are examples of the U.S. attracting great minds, they are not examples of American society producing them.
There are some other impressive names that I can think of (Knuth, Kay), but none of them seem to be quite in the same league as the European greats like Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, etc.
I'm looking for counterexamples to the suggestion that people born into American society just don't reach that level of greatness. Suggestions for additions to the list wanted.
That sort of is what happens with patents (I think, maybe). I remember hearing that companies have to pay fees to the patent office annually to keep their patents.
I am under the impression that there are fees for submitting patents, fees for having a patent granted, and fees for keeping a patent on file. Together, these create lots of incentive for 'the government' ('patent office,' really) to grant patents indiscriminately.
Any additional taxes on 'intellectual property' would simply give the government more incentive to recognize IP 'rights' all over the intellectual map.
Parent seems to think 1 atm is a very large pressure to deal with. That's incorrect, but I can't blame him, as there are plenty of high-school science demos that suggest otherwise (Example).
A quick answer while we wait for someone who knows more: Nope, they're pretty-much empty, as far as I know; the glass is strong enough.
It's a "single round winner takes all system" with intermediate rounding errors?
Sure, states have some freedom over how they choose their electors in the Electoral College, but they all pretty much fall into one of two categories, as far as I am aware:
Both are pretty much just rounding errors in the adding-up of the popular vote around the US! So I'd forgive the parent for his modest oversimplification, as overlooking rounding errors is something engineers do daily in the design of signal-processing systems, and the difference only becomes important in very-close elections.
(Of course, it'd be fair to point out that very-close elections seem more and more to be the norm these days...)
This is an important fact in the story. The parent seems to be correct.
Unfortunately, it's a fact that makes the RIAA's case more reasonable.
What I'm sick of is people who speak objective falsehoods and call them "different points-of-view." They say they are "debating" when they are really just lying.
Honestly, I've gotten completely sick of the whole concept of "debate" -- and I used to be a competitive debater. The problem is that it's inherently adversarial. It is not that both parties walk on stage with different viewpoints but a determination to uncover the single truth; no, each side simply wants "to win." So "debate" becomes just one more variety of pissing contest.
We should approach problems with an approach less like "debate" and more like "science."
This argument quietly assumes that Americans are the only ones capable of making intellectual property. Problem is, we have no monopoly on intellect. Go take a look around a Graduate School Near You.
It also is an economic strategy that depends on enforcement. Why on earth should another country enforce our IP laws? With no other economic resources, what kind of incentives can we possibly give them? All that remains is the use of force. As this last option is hideously expensive and ultimately paid for with tax dollars, even it is not sustainable.
I don't know anything about this particular robot, but methinx you wouldn't be able to do that with an open-loop sequence of scripted movements. There's definitely some sort of feedback going on. Some sort of force control, perhaps? And I wonder if there's some audio feedback as well to keep it in tune?
Self-awareness is great and all, but I don't think it's going to happen. Whereas there are many interesting challenges in lower-level control, and we do seem to get results there when we work at it.
I respect those concerns, but would like to address the implications of one of your rhetorical questions:
And should a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease be mandatory anyway?When 90% of the population gets a disease by the time they die, and when that virus often causes cancer, I think it's pretty much irrelevant how they got it.
In fact, it's almost certain that you have been infected with HPV (me too). It's not some exotic venereal disease.
It seems whenever something bad happens to someone as a result of sex, everybody starts acting like they don't fuck. We go around ignorantly infecting each other while pretending we don't know what a vagina looks like. You're married, so you don't need to worry much about getting new STDs, but understand that even personally-conservative singles are at a real STD risk.
Also, HPV is not just an STD. Yes, that's how you get it genitally and that's how you get cervical cancer. But you also spread it by kissing, sharing a drink, or doing other things we're allowed to show in a G movie. It's like herpes that way. Socially-"innocuous" behaviors spread a "horrible STD."
You know the "cold sores" half of all midddle-class kids get from their parents? It's herpes, and you can spread it to someone's genitals. That's right: If a sexually-inexperienced girl gives me a blowjob, I can still get genital herpes from her, because she engaged in the oh-so-risky prior behavior of getting kissed goodnight by Mom.
I offer this as another example of how STDs are everywhere. So rejecting a vaccine because it is "for a sexually-transmitted disease" is just naive.
If anything, society is being stupid by pretending HPV is a "women's disease" and not inoculating boys too.
I agree, and I'll point to Age of Empires as an example.
In junior high and the beginning of high school, I had a number of history classes focusing on the ancient world. Simply knowing the vocabulary -- having an idea what a phalanx is, or a trireme -- was useful when writing essays. Of course, Age of Empires is not a faithful simulation of ancient combat, but it gets enough right that its educational value is definitely nonzero. In fact, the manual that came with the game (do people read those? I did.) gives a nice little historical description for each of the different cultures and units.
And that was a very popular game. So much so that Microsoft bought Ensemble Studios.
I'd say you learn something about Word War II by playing many of the military games out there. People who play Counterstrike learn something about real-world guns.
Games need backstory, they need props -- they need a world. I think the trick to making a game educational is largely just to make that backstory and those props not just realistic, but to make them actually real -- that is, historically accurate. And there are plenty of good, fun game concepts for which you can naturally do that.
I keep seeing this tag. Why? Most of the articles so tagged seem better-than-average for Slashdot, honestly.
Did you know that someone who studied math or physics is also a liberal arts major? The phrase "liberal arts" refers to a well-rounded course of study that is not simply training for a vocation. It does not mean "just touchy-feely humanities."
Someone who studied "Gender in Icelandic Literature" and can't differentiate a polynomial did not truly pursue a Liberal* education.
(* Obviously, 'Liberal' has a different meaning here than it does when we talk about politics. I wonder if that political association damages "Liberal Arts" by making people incorrectly assume partisanship from the name itself.)
The prototypical real liberal arts major is probably someone with a philosophy major and a math minor who took some courses in Classical literature. That person is probably capable of more than waiting tables!
He sounds like one of our American politicians!
Most nuclear plants haven't failed; they've been running just fine... France is the obvious example, n'est-ce pas?
Have you heard it burn rubber when the stoplight goes green? Electric motors like the Prius uses are amazing at producing off-the-line torque. Combine that with its low weight, and you find that the Prius actually out-accelerates most cars on the road.
As an environmental move, whether hybrid drivetrains represent a net win is a little ambiguous (until we get plug-in hybrids). But for performance, they have a lot of pretty exciting advantages.
I was on a University team which built a hybrid formula-style racecar. That thing blew the pants off of Ferraris. In fact, it was originally entered for the general Formula SAE event, which then outlawed hybrids as having an unfair advantage. (So we started another competition just for hybrid vehicles.)
Want to see what electric motors can do? Check out the Tesla Roadster. And it only uses an AC induction motor (hence "Tesla")!!
(The fact that it "only" uses an induction motor is important because induction motors, though cheap and durable, are not even the money-no-object "best" option: That would be a permanent magnet synchronous DC motor.)
The downside to electric drivetrains is that they have more components, and electric motors are heavy, so their more impressive torque needs to make up for the increased weight. But the fact is that, currently, hybrids do exactly that, and, as motors get lighter, the advantages will only get more and more pronounced.
Have you heard the quiet, confident, high-tech sound of a really powerful electric motor spooling up? It's truly a beautiful sound.