However in a way, you're just playing with the definition.
It is this kind of "playing with the definition" that really helps science a lot. Suppose we can find another way that ants could do this, without counting. That might give us insight into how their brains and bodies work. That might help us to design smarter chips, or algorithms, or something like that. And when biology and psychology are involved, as is the case here, subtle things like that are actually very useful.
What the heck is an item and a line? To understand this example, I had to read the C#/Java code. That kind of dumb example would make me avoid this language entirely. This is worse than when Microsoft does their "make a database app in 3 clicks" demos where they have tons of contrived stuff setup, and they just run Visual Studio and drag something from point A to point B and pretend that was it.
While I agree that making languages simpler is good, VB6 really is the quintessential example of how it can be bad. But it wasn't the language's fault.
VB6 was easy and pretty so it attracted the post-dot-bomb "teach yourself Visual Basic in 21 days" crowd who suddenly were writing enterprise software. I worked at a company with 2 sister projects: One was entirely VB6, coded mostly by former analysts and beginner programmers. It was easy to hire people for this project. The other was a mix of C++/VB6 coded mostly by experienced C++ programmers. The entirely-VB project was a mess and they could not keep people on the project. The other project became the company's bread-and-butter. Both were managed by the same manager, and were closely related. It really made a great case study.
The VB6 developers (not all of them -- but many of them) were just simply inferior, and the product sucked. That's not VB6's fault, but it does show the downside of making things "simpler."
Even so, the RAM argument is still irrelevant. Running a pirated program should not count as 2 counts of copyright infringement. And it should not count as an additional reason that the software was pirated. It is merely a consequence of the infringement.
A guy designing and building a personal jetpack, jumping out of a plane a 6,500 ft, and flying 15 miles in high winds at 130mph... DOES NOT IMPRESS YOU????
Yes, calling it "interncontinental" is exaggeration. But it is still impressive.
But in my experience if someone is actually wanted by the police they tend to be found pretty quickly.
Check out the most wanted list. There are guys who have been on those lists for years, even decades. There are kidnapping cases where someone disappears with children, nowhere to be found, for many years. I would think it would be tough to do with children, but apparently not.
You don't see anyone wearing contact sunglasses, now do you? Not even the ones that darken in sunlight and lighten indoors. Contact lens computer displays is a dumb idea.
Did you just argue that since one use of contact lenses is bad, all uses of it are bad?
Contact lens sunglasses are a bad idea because people need to remove them when they go indoors, or at night. Inserting/removing contacts is non-trivial, as you know from experience. The ones that auto-change have a whole other suite of disadvantages. These disadvantages would not necessarily apply to a contact-lens HUD.
So don't knock games as a teaching tool when used correctly.
Games are a truly awesome teaching tool. I've taught students through games before, and it is very helpful. On one end of the spectrum are the students who can't make sense of a for loop. But give them a graphics library and to move a character across the screen and they suddenly "get it." It gives them a clear, simple, interesting, physical analogy for what a loop does. Arrays are another one that works this way.
Students need to be interested and motivated. Games are definitely very difficult to code, but they are fun and interesting. And that brings me to the other end of the spectrum: teaching algorithms. Teaching a student the A* algorithm by starting with heuristics, math, and global -vs- local optimization is not the way to start. Instead, give them a game engine, and tell them to make the AI find their way to the enemy base. Throw in some nice explosions too.:-) They start to see how mathematics, algorithms, and fun interact. Chess wouldn't be fun if it was easy. And Grand Theft Auto wouldn't be fun if the AI players couldn't navigate the map. When they see that, they are often motivated to find a better algorithm, and to understand those mathematical concepts. A few of them even find the discipline that they need to make a career out of it.
I would never have done computer science had I not started with games. The only thing that got me through Linear Algebra, Trig, and Calculus was by finding cases where a video game needed to use them. When I took trig I did fun spirographs. Linear Algebra showed me 2D and 3D rotations, collision detections. Calculus showed me smooth path finding and camera motion.
It's not that simple. The causality principle is an assumption made by lots of other theories. While it has never been proven, it is assumed by so many things that any theory that breaks it will likely break a whole lot of other things.
I see what you mean, you are talking about just a plain old CPU clock. But I doubt that is all they have. They would need an actual counter in order to implement the various wireless protocols. Plus they probably have multiple watchdog timers and things for polling the battery, cell towers, etc.
Plus, even if that is all they had, you could still count wall clock time based on knowing the frequency of the CPU clock.
shouldn't we do our best to prevent the accumulation of data while we can?
Yes you should. So next, decide what period of time is "while we can?"
It sounds like this is merely a measure of degree. You said "You're right in that there's no way to completely stop the accumulation of biometric data" but I'm not asserting merely that we cannot stop it completely. I'm asserting that we can't stop it one bit.
If that is true, then "while we can" = never. So then you should not do anything to stop the accumulation. Is my "can't stop it one bit" really the case? hmmm... well, right now, I could grab the DNA and fingerprints of every one of my coworkers. And nobody would have any way to know. If I can do it, then I think a government can. Now that doesn't really determine if they really would do it, but that's probably a different question. They certainly can do it.
That said, I don't think laws against limiting biometric data collection are bad. My concern is that if people are focusing on such laws, they might be missing the next step of "they have the data so... now what?"
Some of this is devil's advocate... it didn't occur to me until today that we really can't stop it. Maybe I'm wrong. But I'd like to be prepared in case I am right.
I see lots of replies like "you are incorrect" and "you are correct" but I would really like someone who knows to clarify this. I wasn't aware that police officers could order you to do anything other than to submit for arrest. What is a "lawful order?" Is it an order telling you to do something lawful? If so, then "dance" and "give me all the money in your pocket" are lawful orders. Or does the term mean that there is a specific set of things that are lawful for the officer to order you to do?
1. I don't think there is anything we can do to stop the collection of biometrics (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) And there really are legitimate reasons to do it. There are countless ways that the government (or anyone else) could get my fingerprints and DNA.
2. As a matter of principle, we should not pass laws that cannot be enforced.
So with those two rules in mind, instead of fighting the inevitable biometric data collection with unenforceable laws, let us make laws governing its use. If anyone uses that information, then they have to bring it in front of a court and prove their case. At that time, the judge can decide if they used the biometrics properly. If not, the evidence is thrown out. That is a pretty darned strong incentive for them to use the information properly. It is measurable and enforceable. Good laws can make it transparent.
Just brainstorming here, but what if the law required notifying someone of when and how biometric information was collected, how it is used, etc? Imagine if people suddenly got notifications about their fingerprints or DNA being stored - I think that would contribute to public awareness a heck of a lot. Awareness is good.
Yes, if you have the clock, and you have been in service range at some point, and haven't turned the phone off, and you haven't moved into a different time zone, then you know the time where you are currently located.
I periodically read about demos of this technology using pneumatics, but it seems like a very limiting way to do it. The article says:
all the buttons must popped in or out at once...new shapes cannot be created dynamically
For this to ever become in general use, we need something pixel-addressable. Seems like something that is piezoelectric or electrostatic is more likely to be successful that pneumatics.
I like the question posed in the article:
When do you think pneumatic technology like this will turn the flat touch screen buttons on our phones into physical buttons?
1. 2 years
2. 5 years
3. 10+ years
4. Never
Probably never. Had they asked "when will haptic technology turn the flat touch screen buttons..." instead of asking about the specific technology, then the answer would be different.
The other big limitation of any haptics approach is that most touch screen surfaces are glass, for durability. Sitting next to me I have 4 touch screens, each with a different techology: resistive, capacitive, acoustic wave, and acoustic pulse recognition. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, but I don't think any of these screens could be altered to support haptics. Since they are used in restaurants and medical systems, they must be durable and sealed. So there is definitely much more research involved in this other than hacking a cheesy pneumatic system into a touch screen and asking "when will this will take over the world?"
There are 1000 reasons why a cell phone has to track the time when it is disconnected. Processor relies on a clock, as does the camera, and the cellular protocols, etc. It knows the time, it just isn't display it or something dumb like that.
Slashdot Mirror
However in a way, you're just playing with the definition.
It is this kind of "playing with the definition" that really helps science a lot. Suppose we can find another way that ants could do this, without counting. That might give us insight into how their brains and bodies work. That might help us to design smarter chips, or algorithms, or something like that. And when biology and psychology are involved, as is the case here, subtle things like that are actually very useful.
"get the last item of line 2 of URL ..."
What the heck is an item and a line? To understand this example, I had to read the C#/Java code. That kind of dumb example would make me avoid this language entirely. This is worse than when Microsoft does their "make a database app in 3 clicks" demos where they have tons of contrived stuff setup, and they just run Visual Studio and drag something from point A to point B and pretend that was it.
While I agree that making languages simpler is good, VB6 really is the quintessential example of how it can be bad. But it wasn't the language's fault.
VB6 was easy and pretty so it attracted the post-dot-bomb "teach yourself Visual Basic in 21 days" crowd who suddenly were writing enterprise software. I worked at a company with 2 sister projects: One was entirely VB6, coded mostly by former analysts and beginner programmers. It was easy to hire people for this project. The other was a mix of C++/VB6 coded mostly by experienced C++ programmers. The entirely-VB project was a mess and they could not keep people on the project. The other project became the company's bread-and-butter. Both were managed by the same manager, and were closely related. It really made a great case study.
The VB6 developers (not all of them -- but many of them) were just simply inferior, and the product sucked. That's not VB6's fault, but it does show the downside of making things "simpler."
Last comment:
ON ERROR RESUME NEXT
Even so, the RAM argument is still irrelevant. Running a pirated program should not count as 2 counts of copyright infringement. And it should not count as an additional reason that the software was pirated. It is merely a consequence of the infringement.
This could probably be done more easily _without_ the engines.
A guy designing and building a personal jetpack, jumping out of a plane a 6,500 ft, and flying 15 miles in high winds at 130mph... DOES NOT IMPRESS YOU????
Yes, calling it "interncontinental" is exaggeration. But it is still impressive.
But in my experience if someone is actually wanted by the police they tend to be found pretty quickly.
Check out the most wanted list. There are guys who have been on those lists for years, even decades. There are kidnapping cases where someone disappears with children, nowhere to be found, for many years. I would think it would be tough to do with children, but apparently not.
You don't see anyone wearing contact sunglasses, now do you? Not even the ones that darken in sunlight and lighten indoors. Contact lens computer displays is a dumb idea.
Did you just argue that since one use of contact lenses is bad, all uses of it are bad?
Contact lens sunglasses are a bad idea because people need to remove them when they go indoors, or at night. Inserting/removing contacts is non-trivial, as you know from experience. The ones that auto-change have a whole other suite of disadvantages. These disadvantages would not necessarily apply to a contact-lens HUD.
So don't knock games as a teaching tool when used correctly.
Games are a truly awesome teaching tool. I've taught students through games before, and it is very helpful. On one end of the spectrum are the students who can't make sense of a for loop. But give them a graphics library and to move a character across the screen and they suddenly "get it." It gives them a clear, simple, interesting, physical analogy for what a loop does. Arrays are another one that works this way.
Students need to be interested and motivated. Games are definitely very difficult to code, but they are fun and interesting. And that brings me to the other end of the spectrum: teaching algorithms. Teaching a student the A* algorithm by starting with heuristics, math, and global -vs- local optimization is not the way to start. Instead, give them a game engine, and tell them to make the AI find their way to the enemy base. Throw in some nice explosions too. :-) They start to see how mathematics, algorithms, and fun interact. Chess wouldn't be fun if it was easy. And Grand Theft Auto wouldn't be fun if the AI players couldn't navigate the map. When they see that, they are often motivated to find a better algorithm, and to understand those mathematical concepts. A few of them even find the discipline that they need to make a career out of it.
I would never have done computer science had I not started with games. The only thing that got me through Linear Algebra, Trig, and Calculus was by finding cases where a video game needed to use them. When I took trig I did fun spirographs. Linear Algebra showed me 2D and 3D rotations, collision detections. Calculus showed me smooth path finding and camera motion.
Also - Robots are a good teaching tool as well.
Convince people to stop voting Republican and Democrat. Convince smart, honest people to start running for office.
Wow, I wouldn't spend $300 on a video card. Many people buy whole computers for around that price noawadays.
It's not that simple. The causality principle is an assumption made by lots of other theories. While it has never been proven, it is assumed by so many things that any theory that breaks it will likely break a whole lot of other things.
meh, lots of Yahoo answers, ask.com, and forums. I guess I hoped someone here would know better. Maybe could cite court cases.
I see what you mean, you are talking about just a plain old CPU clock. But I doubt that is all they have. They would need an actual counter in order to implement the various wireless protocols. Plus they probably have multiple watchdog timers and things for polling the battery, cell towers, etc.
Plus, even if that is all they had, you could still count wall clock time based on knowing the frequency of the CPU clock.
shouldn't we do our best to prevent the accumulation of data while we can?
Yes you should. So next, decide what period of time is "while we can?"
It sounds like this is merely a measure of degree. You said "You're right in that there's no way to completely stop the accumulation of biometric data" but I'm not asserting merely that we cannot stop it completely. I'm asserting that we can't stop it one bit.
If that is true, then "while we can" = never. So then you should not do anything to stop the accumulation. Is my "can't stop it one bit" really the case? hmmm... well, right now, I could grab the DNA and fingerprints of every one of my coworkers. And nobody would have any way to know. If I can do it, then I think a government can. Now that doesn't really determine if they really would do it, but that's probably a different question. They certainly can do it.
That said, I don't think laws against limiting biometric data collection are bad. My concern is that if people are focusing on such laws, they might be missing the next step of "they have the data so... now what?"
Some of this is devil's advocate... it didn't occur to me until today that we really can't stop it. Maybe I'm wrong. But I'd like to be prepared in case I am right.
[citation needed]
I see lots of replies like "you are incorrect" and "you are correct" but I would really like someone who knows to clarify this. I wasn't aware that police officers could order you to do anything other than to submit for arrest. What is a "lawful order?" Is it an order telling you to do something lawful? If so, then "dance" and "give me all the money in your pocket" are lawful orders. Or does the term mean that there is a specific set of things that are lawful for the officer to order you to do?
1. I don't think there is anything we can do to stop the collection of biometrics (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) And there really are legitimate reasons to do it. There are countless ways that the government (or anyone else) could get my fingerprints and DNA.
2. As a matter of principle, we should not pass laws that cannot be enforced.
So with those two rules in mind, instead of fighting the inevitable biometric data collection with unenforceable laws, let us make laws governing its use. If anyone uses that information, then they have to bring it in front of a court and prove their case. At that time, the judge can decide if they used the biometrics properly. If not, the evidence is thrown out. That is a pretty darned strong incentive for them to use the information properly. It is measurable and enforceable. Good laws can make it transparent.
Just brainstorming here, but what if the law required notifying someone of when and how biometric information was collected, how it is used, etc? Imagine if people suddenly got notifications about their fingerprints or DNA being stored - I think that would contribute to public awareness a heck of a lot. Awareness is good.
Yes, if you have the clock, and you have been in service range at some point, and haven't turned the phone off, and you haven't moved into a different time zone, then you know the time where you are currently located.
I periodically read about demos of this technology using pneumatics, but it seems like a very limiting way to do it. The article says:
all the buttons must popped in or out at once...new shapes cannot be created dynamically
For this to ever become in general use, we need something pixel-addressable. Seems like something that is piezoelectric or electrostatic is more likely to be successful that pneumatics.
I like the question posed in the article:
When do you think pneumatic technology like this will turn the flat touch screen buttons on our phones into physical buttons?
1. 2 years
2. 5 years
3. 10+ years
4. Never
Probably never. Had they asked "when will haptic technology turn the flat touch screen buttons..." instead of asking about the specific technology, then the answer would be different.
The other big limitation of any haptics approach is that most touch screen surfaces are glass, for durability. Sitting next to me I have 4 touch screens, each with a different techology: resistive, capacitive, acoustic wave, and acoustic pulse recognition. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, but I don't think any of these screens could be altered to support haptics. Since they are used in restaurants and medical systems, they must be durable and sealed. So there is definitely much more research involved in this other than hacking a cheesy pneumatic system into a touch screen and asking "when will this will take over the world?"
You didn't include the 3000 years it would take to figure out the alien language over such a slow connection.
There are 1000 reasons why a cell phone has to track the time when it is disconnected. Processor relies on a clock, as does the camera, and the cellular protocols, etc. It knows the time, it just isn't display it or something dumb like that.
I think RFID crypto involves things like challenge-response. They can still do that on passive tags.
Also, what do the US passport RFID tags use that prevents copying?
Many of the hackers never signed those contracts, and bought it outright.
[citation needed]
Based on those 10 states alone, for every dollar in taxes we get over one dollar back. That's impressive accounting!
An American contractor is making an anti-UAV weapon. But... isn't America the only country deploying military UAVs?