The study, while well-intentioned, is largely BS. I have ADHD. If this study were to be believed, you'd have to also believe that there is no one with ADHD over the age of 30. I was born in 1961; during my childhood the only electronic device in the house was a black-and-white tv that got three channels and used vacuum tubes, and outside of saturday morning cartoons and the evening news, we watched very little.
The proximate cause of ADHD is, in fact, the inability of neurons in certain regions of the brain to produce enough dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter. It is a *biochemical* abnormality and it is, by definition, present before the age of 7. It doesn't just show up at 12 or 13. It's not caused by bad parenting, or eating too much sugar, or the over-use of electronic devices.
The authors of the study, while well intentioned I'm sure, simply don't understand what ADHD is. It's not simple inattentiveness, or just being easily distracted. While the symptoms they describe (and ascribe to over-use of electronics) may mimic those of ADHD, it simply is *not* the same thing at all.
Awhile back, windows update nearly bricked my computer. The new driver for the Southbridge chip was corrupt, and suddenly the mouse stopped working. The keyboard and everything else still worked, so I was able to limp along. It took me nearly two weeks to diagnose the problem and then find and install the right driver. Two very long, very, very frustrating weeks.
Since then I've never let windows automatically install anything. I always review the updates, and choose which ones to install and which not. As you can imagine, the recent move to monolithic updates is really pissing me off.
Lose the 'tude, dude. Your post doesn't add anything to the discussion, it's (---- see that? Does that mean you'll keep reading?) just a rant. And a petty one at that.
The FAA must be referring only to incidents in the U.S. Here's a video of a drone striking the winglet of a commercial airliner, and I can only assume it happened outside the U.S.; I don't recognize the city in the background.
The problem is that English, a true bastard of a language in every sense of the word...
I agree with you that written English is fucked up. But it is precisely that bastard nature that makes spoken English among the richest, most flexible and most expressive of languages. Nouns can be verbs can be adjectives, which give enormous flexibility to the speaker to make themselves understood; you can use existing words in new ways, even coin new ones (a great many the words we think of as standard English today were coined by Shakespeare). We have so many synonyms, with overlapping, subtle differences of meaning, you can find just - exactly - the right one to express what you're thinking.
A Bulgarian comp sci professor of mine spoke 4 languages fluently: English, German, Russian, and of course Bulgarian. I asked him which was his favorite. "English", he replied, without hesitation. "Anything you can think of, any idea you wish to express, you can find a way to say it in English. That's not true of most other languages."
The new design adds useless eye candy, makes it harder to skim through the posts to find the ones that interest me.
Slashdot works really, really well as-is. Please, please, please, leave well enough alone.
Yes, I am picking this nit: OP, you mean "might end up using more resources, not fewer".
The rule is, if you can count it (like marbles), use "fewer", if you can't count it (like water), use "less".
This is basic English, not rocket science. C'mon, people!
I'm 51, and I'm working for a startup, using java and Spring and couchDb and a little javascript, all new to me, preparing to dive into data mining and analytics, which I've also never done before, and will probably get into iOS and Android at some point. You're NEVER too old. But you may have to make your own opportunities (easy to say, not always easy to do).
Roundabouts rock! I'm American and never encountered a roundabout until I rode a motorcycle through the U.K. for five weeks (awesome country, btw). I was *amazed* at how much more efficient they are than intersections. (Not to mention that the drivers in southern England are amazingly aware of and courteous to motorcyclists).
I think all but the busiest intersections in the U.S. should be ripped out and replaced with roundabouts. We'd all get where we're going so much faster and more easily.
General Ed is not a waste - it is invaluable, because it makes you a better thinker. It contributes to you being able to do your job better, even the parts that are seemingly unrelated.
If I had a choice between hiring people with 4yr bachelors with gen-ed and 3yr without, I'd hire the 4yr candidates. Over the long term, they'd tend to be better at communicating, at working in teams, at thinking creatively, at solving problems that are outside their original expertise. There would be the occasional one-off exception, of course, but as a group, over time, they'd outperform the 3yrs in subtle but important ways.
I thought SGU was pretty awesome, far better than SG-1 or SGA. Try thought I might, I could never get into the others, but SGU hooked me from the start. I greatly looked forward to it every week (when it aired). This is a bummer.
Speaking as a software engineer, a 4 year old should not have a computer. Not even the 'learning' kind. Period. He should have toy trucks and cars, and a wiffle-ball set, and legos and such, and be outside playing in the dirt and the mud puddles.
Get him a computer when he's 15, plus or minus a year, depending on maturity. He doesn't need one before then.
Unplug the ethernet cable from the wireless access point, and line the walls, floors and ceilings with wire mesh (inexpensive at any hardware store) - instant faraday cage - doesn't have to be permanent.:) And if you think that's silly, I'll bet someone at MIT has done it at some time.
The food is good *so long as you stay in the cities and towns*.
Try eating at some small village pub in the middle of nowhere and you will be served Chicken L'Orange swimming in the most disgusting lake of liquid grease you've ever seen. I should have just ordered bangers and mash. True story.
However, the food is good in London itself. And in Jedburgh (on the A68 near the English-Scottish border), there is (or was) a wonderful little restaurant, with a fine selection of wines, whose head chef is (or was) a tiny, young Scottish woman with bright blond spiky hair. The meal was excellent. Wish I could remember the name of the place.
The upshot is, as long as you're in London or a largish town, the food is good. Even excellent.
(As an aside, I told my greasy chicken l'orange tale of woe to an englishman on a flight once, and he tried to convince me that I could find fare just as bad in the french countryside [i.e. away from the cities and towns]. I'm not sure I believe him - I've heard a great deal about "the ordinary excellence of the everyday french cook". I'm looking forward to testing his hypothesis one day!)
The answer to your question is "Damn Small Linux". You can install it from floppies; instructions here: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/install_from_floppy.html. Runs beautifully on lower spec hardware than you've got.
Just yesterday (Oct 12), there was a symposium at UC Santa Cruz on Procedural Content Generation that addressed that very question (among others). No strong conclusions, but it's evident there are many in the game industry and game academia asking the very same question, and trying to figure out an answer.
The brand spanking new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. "An aquarium, a planetarium, a natural history museum, and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof." http://www.calacademy.org/visit/
You missed that part of my last comment where I said "we constantly evaluate and reevaluate" (how much to filter), based on our children's ability to grasp complexity.
And I agree with you that we're not, for the most part, talking about toddlers, and that teenagers are able to play the majority of these games. But, there is a marked difference in the way even a 15 yr old and a 17 yr old understand the world. That two years of growth make a noticable difference in the maturity and sophistication and understanding with which the child processes the messages they receive, and the conclusions they draw. And that applies to *everything*, video games included.
As far as overprotecting kids, yeah, I agree, it's bad. But the OP seemed to think that *any* filtering parents do for their teenage kids is overprotecting, and it's generally not. Would I let my 17 yr old play GTA? Yes, and I'd play it with them, too, and we'd talk about it. Would I let my 12 yr old play it? No way. 15 yr old? Hmmmm, probably not, unless they had already demonstrated a high level of maturity, more like that of a 17 yr old. See how it works? The OP seems to feel that that's wrong.
As for getting on my high horse, and being arrogant - sigh - maybe. But, to use your anolgy, you can imagine what it's like to be an astronomer, but, without that degree in astrophysics, are you qualified to tell them what problems they should be investigating? Where they should be pointing their telescopes? What particular mathematical approach they should use in solving that gnarly csomological equation? That, by anology, is what the OP presumed to do. Am I wrong for pointing that out?
It's obvious you don't have kids, either. And having or not having kids has a DIRECT bearing on whether he is correct; it's obvious from his post that he doesn't have any experience with kids because it's obvious that he doesn't understand the way they think and learn. They aren't little adults; they process input and understand things quite differently from adults, even as teenagers. In life, quite often, the devil is in the details, and we as adults can see and understand nuances and subtleties and complexities that are often lost on kids. They *think* they get it, but they really don't. Because of this, it is precisely our job as parents to filter the larger world and put it in context for our kids, to add the perspective they lack. Contrary to his position, this isn't brainwashing; we aren't teaching our kids *what* to think, but we are teaching them *how* to think, how to evaluate, how to look past the obvious.
And contrary to your assertion, it isn't guided by blind emotion. We constantly measure how much and what kind of filtering and contextualizing to do against our kids' ability to understand; we constantly question and evaluate and re-evaluate.
Bottom line: until you have kids of your own, and watch their little minds grow, their understanding of the world increase slowly, moment to moment, day to day, and be the one responsible for guiding their growth and understanding, you cannot appreciate what it takes to do so. He's like a man who has never held a gun, trying to tell a general how to win the war. Simply put, when it comes to how to raise kids, if you've never had any of your own, you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
I hate censorship, and loathe Jack Thompson for the zealot he is. But from your post, it's obvious you don't have kids. Sorry, but until you do, you're talking out your^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h just an armchair expert.
It's not just about the cost to drive your car. Practically EVERYTHING you consume is produced and transported using energy from oil: the house you live in, the clothes you wear, the food you eat. The timber for your house was cut by logging machines that run on diesel, transported in trucks that burn diesel, sawn at a mill that uses electricity that comes from a power plant that burns oil, assembled by workmen using tools that run on that same oil-produced electricity. Ditto for your clothes, ditto for your food. Ditto for almost everything you own.
An increase in the price of oil increases the cost for *everything*; this creates a strong inflationary pressure on the economy. It's not just about walking to the store instead of driving; it's about having the entire cost of living go through the roof.
> making a rational case that the "peak oil" theory is invalid.
Not at all; they are, in fact, postulating a variant of the Peak Oil theory. They're saying the peak will be later, and the top of the peak will be broader, but essentially they're confirming the central Peak Oil hypothesis: Cheap oil will become increasingly scarce.
> some kind of catastrophic, modern-society-ending price spike
Peak Oil doesn't predict that. It predicts exactly what you said: "the era of cheap oil seems to be past". What you don't seem to appreciate is that the cost of oil impacts the cost of nearly *everything* else. When oil gets more expensive, so do all the other things you buy. This will be a huge drag on the world economy, and *that* is why everyone should be concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
The study, while well-intentioned, is largely BS. I have ADHD. If this study were to be believed, you'd have to also believe that there is no one with ADHD over the age of 30. I was born in 1961; during my childhood the only electronic device in the house was a black-and-white tv that got three channels and used vacuum tubes, and outside of saturday morning cartoons and the evening news, we watched very little.
The proximate cause of ADHD is, in fact, the inability of neurons in certain regions of the brain to produce enough dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter. It is a *biochemical* abnormality and it is, by definition, present before the age of 7. It doesn't just show up at 12 or 13. It's not caused by bad parenting, or eating too much sugar, or the over-use of electronic devices.
The authors of the study, while well intentioned I'm sure, simply don't understand what ADHD is. It's not simple inattentiveness, or just being easily distracted. While the symptoms they describe (and ascribe to over-use of electronics) may mimic those of ADHD, it simply is *not* the same thing at all.
Not even a production environment.
Awhile back, windows update nearly bricked my computer. The new driver for the Southbridge chip was corrupt, and suddenly the mouse stopped working. The keyboard and everything else still worked, so I was able to limp along. It took me nearly two weeks to diagnose the problem and then find and install the right driver. Two very long, very, very frustrating weeks.
Since then I've never let windows automatically install anything. I always review the updates, and choose which ones to install and which not. As you can imagine, the recent move to monolithic updates is really pissing me off.
Lose the 'tude, dude. Your post doesn't add anything to the discussion, it's (---- see that? Does that mean you'll keep reading?) just a rant. And a petty one at that.
The FAA must be referring only to incidents in the U.S. Here's a video of a drone striking the winglet of a commercial airliner, and I can only assume it happened outside the U.S.; I don't recognize the city in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's the first clip, the strike happens at about 30s. Scary.
The problem is that English, a true bastard of a language in every sense of the word ...
I agree with you that written English is fucked up. But it is precisely that bastard nature that makes spoken English among the richest, most flexible and most expressive of languages. Nouns can be verbs can be adjectives, which give enormous flexibility to the speaker to make themselves understood; you can use existing words in new ways, even coin new ones (a great many the words we think of as standard English today were coined by Shakespeare). We have so many synonyms, with overlapping, subtle differences of meaning, you can find just - exactly - the right one to express what you're thinking. A Bulgarian comp sci professor of mine spoke 4 languages fluently: English, German, Russian, and of course Bulgarian. I asked him which was his favorite. "English", he replied, without hesitation. "Anything you can think of, any idea you wish to express, you can find a way to say it in English. That's not true of most other languages."
We slept through it. Wouldn't have know it happened if not for the news.
The new design adds useless eye candy, makes it harder to skim through the posts to find the ones that interest me. Slashdot works really, really well as-is. Please, please, please, leave well enough alone.
Yes, I am picking this nit: OP, you mean "might end up using more resources, not fewer". The rule is, if you can count it (like marbles), use "fewer", if you can't count it (like water), use "less". This is basic English, not rocket science. C'mon, people!
I'm 51, and I'm working for a startup, using java and Spring and couchDb and a little javascript, all new to me, preparing to dive into data mining and analytics, which I've also never done before, and will probably get into iOS and Android at some point. You're NEVER too old. But you may have to make your own opportunities (easy to say, not always easy to do).
Roundabouts rock! I'm American and never encountered a roundabout until I rode a motorcycle through the U.K. for five weeks (awesome country, btw). I was *amazed* at how much more efficient they are than intersections. (Not to mention that the drivers in southern England are amazingly aware of and courteous to motorcyclists). I think all but the busiest intersections in the U.S. should be ripped out and replaced with roundabouts. We'd all get where we're going so much faster and more easily.
General Ed is not a waste - it is invaluable, because it makes you a better thinker. It contributes to you being able to do your job better, even the parts that are seemingly unrelated. If I had a choice between hiring people with 4yr bachelors with gen-ed and 3yr without, I'd hire the 4yr candidates. Over the long term, they'd tend to be better at communicating, at working in teams, at thinking creatively, at solving problems that are outside their original expertise. There would be the occasional one-off exception, of course, but as a group, over time, they'd outperform the 3yrs in subtle but important ways.
I thought SGU was pretty awesome, far better than SG-1 or SGA. Try thought I might, I could never get into the others, but SGU hooked me from the start. I greatly looked forward to it every week (when it aired). This is a bummer.
Speaking as a software engineer, a 4 year old should not have a computer. Not even the 'learning' kind. Period. He should have toy trucks and cars, and a wiffle-ball set, and legos and such, and be outside playing in the dirt and the mud puddles. Get him a computer when he's 15, plus or minus a year, depending on maturity. He doesn't need one before then.
Unplug the ethernet cable from the wireless access point, and line the walls, floors and ceilings with wire mesh (inexpensive at any hardware store) - instant faraday cage - doesn't have to be permanent. :) And if you think that's silly, I'll bet someone at MIT has done it at some time.
Try eating at some small village pub in the middle of nowhere and you will be served Chicken L'Orange swimming in the most disgusting lake of liquid grease you've ever seen. I should have just ordered bangers and mash. True story.
However, the food is good in London itself. And in Jedburgh (on the A68 near the English-Scottish border), there is (or was) a wonderful little restaurant, with a fine selection of wines, whose head chef is (or was) a tiny, young Scottish woman with bright blond spiky hair. The meal was excellent. Wish I could remember the name of the place.
The upshot is, as long as you're in London or a largish town, the food is good. Even excellent.
(As an aside, I told my greasy chicken l'orange tale of woe to an englishman on a flight once, and he tried to convince me that I could find fare just as bad in the french countryside [i.e. away from the cities and towns]. I'm not sure I believe him - I've heard a great deal about "the ordinary excellence of the everyday french cook". I'm looking forward to testing his hypothesis one day!)
The answer to your question is "Damn Small Linux". You can install it from floppies; instructions here: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/install_from_floppy.html. Runs beautifully on lower spec hardware than you've got.
Just yesterday (Oct 12), there was a symposium at UC Santa Cruz on Procedural Content Generation that addressed that very question (among others). No strong conclusions, but it's evident there are many in the game industry and game academia asking the very same question, and trying to figure out an answer.
The brand spanking new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. "An aquarium, a planetarium, a natural history museum, and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof." http://www.calacademy.org/visit/
That's exactly what MusicIP does with MusicBrainz - most of their code is open, but they keep part of it closed, and provide that as a binary.
You missed that part of my last comment where I said "we constantly evaluate and reevaluate" (how much to filter), based on our children's ability to grasp complexity.
And I agree with you that we're not, for the most part, talking about toddlers, and that teenagers are able to play the majority of these games. But, there is a marked difference in the way even a 15 yr old and a 17 yr old understand the world. That two years of growth make a noticable difference in the maturity and sophistication and understanding with which the child processes the messages they receive, and the conclusions they draw. And that applies to *everything*, video games included.
As far as overprotecting kids, yeah, I agree, it's bad. But the OP seemed to think that *any* filtering parents do for their teenage kids is overprotecting, and it's generally not. Would I let my 17 yr old play GTA? Yes, and I'd play it with them, too, and we'd talk about it. Would I let my 12 yr old play it? No way. 15 yr old? Hmmmm, probably not, unless they had already demonstrated a high level of maturity, more like that of a 17 yr old. See how it works? The OP seems to feel that that's wrong.
As for getting on my high horse, and being arrogant - sigh - maybe. But, to use your anolgy, you can imagine what it's like to be an astronomer, but, without that degree in astrophysics, are you qualified to tell them what problems they should be investigating? Where they should be pointing their telescopes? What particular mathematical approach they should use in solving that gnarly csomological equation? That, by anology, is what the OP presumed to do. Am I wrong for pointing that out?
It's obvious you don't have kids, either. And having or not having kids has a DIRECT bearing on whether he is correct; it's obvious from his post that he doesn't have any experience with kids because it's obvious that he doesn't understand the way they think and learn. They aren't little adults; they process input and understand things quite differently from adults, even as teenagers. In life, quite often, the devil is in the details, and we as adults can see and understand nuances and subtleties and complexities that are often lost on kids. They *think* they get it, but they really don't. Because of this, it is precisely our job as parents to filter the larger world and put it in context for our kids, to add the perspective they lack. Contrary to his position, this isn't brainwashing; we aren't teaching our kids *what* to think, but we are teaching them *how* to think, how to evaluate, how to look past the obvious.
And contrary to your assertion, it isn't guided by blind emotion. We constantly measure how much and what kind of filtering and contextualizing to do against our kids' ability to understand; we constantly question and evaluate and re-evaluate.
Bottom line: until you have kids of your own, and watch their little minds grow, their understanding of the world increase slowly, moment to moment, day to day, and be the one responsible for guiding their growth and understanding, you cannot appreciate what it takes to do so. He's like a man who has never held a gun, trying to tell a general how to win the war. Simply put, when it comes to how to raise kids, if you've never had any of your own, you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
I hate censorship, and loathe Jack Thompson for the zealot he is. But from your post, it's obvious you don't have kids. Sorry, but until you do, you're talking out your^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h just an armchair expert.
It's not just about the cost to drive your car. Practically EVERYTHING you consume is produced and transported using energy from oil: the house you live in, the clothes you wear, the food you eat. The timber for your house was cut by logging machines that run on diesel, transported in trucks that burn diesel, sawn at a mill that uses electricity that comes from a power plant that burns oil, assembled by workmen using tools that run on that same oil-produced electricity. Ditto for your clothes, ditto for your food. Ditto for almost everything you own.
An increase in the price of oil increases the cost for *everything*; this creates a strong inflationary pressure on the economy. It's not just about walking to the store instead of driving; it's about having the entire cost of living go through the roof.
> making a rational case that the "peak oil" theory is invalid.
Not at all; they are, in fact, postulating a variant of the Peak Oil theory. They're saying the peak will be later, and the top of the peak will be broader, but essentially they're confirming the central Peak Oil hypothesis: Cheap oil will become increasingly scarce.
> some kind of catastrophic, modern-society-ending price spike
Peak Oil doesn't predict that. It predicts exactly what you said: "the era of cheap oil seems to be past". What you don't seem to appreciate is that the cost of oil impacts the cost of nearly *everything* else. When oil gets more expensive, so do all the other things you buy. This will be a huge drag on the world economy, and *that* is why everyone should be concerned.