Five years ago you couldn't have paid my father (86) to play a game. Now I can't get him to put down Angry Birds when we go out for breakfast, and when he does shut his phone off he talks about the Kinect yoga thing.
Lot of that kind of thing - older folks playing games - changing the average, I'm sure. And I'm glad for it, since by trying to make games that appeal to non-traditional segments there will likely be more interesting games for me to play.
Well, yeah - I mean, I can probably hack together something that could beat a typical "horsey moves like an L" level chess player, but that just proves how bad at chess the average chess player is, not how good the computer is. But when I can make something that beats the very best humanity has to offer in something, that flips the script - I'm now showing how good my computer is rather than how bad the human is. Subtle, but huge difference.
There's also the issue of upsetting the status quo. Things work as they do, generally speaking, because systems tend to settle on an equilibrium unless intentionally modified by an outside force. With regards to doctors, for example - yes, I would say that a hugely expensive computer that was only as good as an average (and, traditionally speaking, relatively inexpensive) human doctor is really cool, but probably not worth changing the way we do things: If we need more average doctors we just train humans for it. But a hugely expensive (and eventually much cheaper and easier to deploy) computer that is better than the best doctors? Hell yes, that's worth shaking things up a bit.
There's another angle - one I think you were getting at with the "it says so much about us" - and that is that people want to believe they are special by virtue of being human, and have something that a machine cannot ever have. So to have a machine challenge that - even a little - makes some people defensive. They see the creation (and eventual wide dissemination) of tools like Watson to be something that diminishes humanity because it puts things into perspective, and when you imagine that you are something that is special, better, more important than you actually are, things being put into perspective is a very painful thing.
Personally, I can't wait until a more generalized version of Watson is more readily available. As it is right now, I have Google, which is OK, but I have to figure out, often times, maddeningly obscure search terms or, in the case of a subject almost entirely novel to me, fumble around with what I think something might be called until I find out what it actually is, and then there's the whole going through the results haystack to find my desired needle. My Google fu is pretty good, but I really wouldn't complain about a machine that could more readily handle natural language and do a lot of the scut work for me.
Until that happens, I'll just use my interns for lit searches, though.
That would, I think, be a pretty cost effective way to handle most of the students performing (in whichever direction) outside the current norm.
There are still some edge cases - students who would be in a set of their own at their school, for example. One way might be to aggregate those students from across a region and then have the set system applied there again.
In Chicago, we did something like that - some of us were given the SATs and depending on how well we scored on those we were put in college or highschool level courses. For subjects like maths and science, you went to University of Illinois to take classes (and then, I guess, later they made a school - Illinois Math and Science Academy?); for composition and history type classes you went to a high school. The only downside was that this was just 1 or 2 days a week, and you still had to do all of your elementary level coursework, which was incredibly annoying.
I was in an experimental program in elementary that incorporated aptitude based approaches with at your own pace coursework. Basically if you read at a 6th grade level you were given 6th grade coursework for your reading/English lessons regardless of whether you were in 1st or 8th grade. Further, we were given basically a whole lesson plan outline ahead of time and a series of things to accomplish before we could move on.
This was great for me - I am very much a self-starter and wound up ripping through my lessons quickly enough that they had to figure out something else to do with me but it was horrible, absolutely horrible for most of the students because they weren't really prepared for so much responsibility. Maybe 1/10th of the students performed well enough and of that maybe only 1/25th actually thrived.
It also sucked from a socialization standpoint - we weren't really working together as even the kids on the same material were working at vastly different speeds. They tried to remedy that by having some of us act as tutors when other kids had problems, but that wound up with a kind of power differential situation that was awkward in some cases and a didactic situation in others where you had kids completely untrained in how to teach things just bagging on their classmates.
I could see ways now of improving the method, but its a kind of complex process to get right which is why, I think, it hasn't yet been gotten right.
Many people in prisons are there for things that should not be crimes, or, if they should, should not be crimes worth sending someone to prison over.
We could reduce the societal burden of prison in this country hugely if we decided to only lock people away for violent crimes they directly committed or incited/ordered someone else to commit.
Unfortunately, with the shift to for-profit prisons, this won't happen.
My point here being that improved education is a great goal, but there's a very easy way to reduce crime and prison costs: stop criminalizing things that harm no one and stop issuing prison sentences that are ridiculously disproportionate punishment for trivial offenses.
If your sales team causes your customers to clam up, they are very, very bad at their job.
The sales and marketing management should be removed since clearly they are hiring sharks rather than consultants who are capable of developing a relationship with your clients. Replace the management with people focused on building a team focused on consultative sales and then the sales staff will be seen as the trusted advisors who can recommend a service or product without seeming like money grubbing sharks.
Actually, not so much - there's a pretty well agreed upon bias towards putting the collective good ahead of individual good in Eastern countries and the reverse, a bias promoting individual good over collective good in many Western cultures. So much so that criteria for many mental illnesses can be radically different based on cultural factors.
To rephrase your statement to take this into account - "valuing an iPad/money AND the ability to help someone else who needs it with an organ" - muddies the waters a bit.
In Japan, an executive who fails in business may commit suicide as a way of atoning for the harm his failures have caused others, even, in some cases, for failures that were beyond his control. That is considered honorable (if, in more modern times, a bit extreme) while in the US it would be considered (at least by mental health professionals) to be an obvious sign of mental illness. Similarly, the way that children are raised - what is considered good parenting in some traditional Eastern cultures may be considered brutal abuse by Westerners (see: Tiger Mother), while the way many in the West raise their children would be considered neglectful to the point of abuse in some cases by many in the East.
This should not be read as a criticism or endorsement of any particular culture - just an acknowledgement of the very real fact that what may seem insane to one culture is actually considered well adapted in another. I could very, very easily see a young Eastern culture individual valuing a bit of cash + the opportunity to help someone else with this act as being within the range of normal.
I won't get at the medical "professionals" who did the operation - no idea where they trained or what is considered normal, but I know quite a few people who work with very important and very complex systems all the time who seem to have no problem what-so-ever trying something that is vastly outside their skillset and could have really horrible consequences with a "fuck it, let's roll" attitude. To be blunt, they probably were more worried about ruining the kidney than killing the donor, because whoever was the recipient likely had the money and power to ruin them while the kid obviously didn't.
I haven't played SC 2, but how long in number of missions and hours of play is the Terran storyline, and how does that stack up against the number of missions & hours of play I n SC 1?
If it's 60 missions and 30 hours of play vs. 60 missions and 30 hours of play (just guestimating) then no biggie. But if it's only 20 missions and 10 hours of play vs. 60/30 then you have a fair point.
Nice strawman. I don't think someone who worries about the death of the sun is more important, serious, or realistic than someone who worries about ending world hunger. And I didn't see anyone else make that statement here - you seem to be the only one who brought it up.
Aside from that, you're acting as if people aren't capable of thinking big while simultaneously looking at immediate-term problems and issues. People simply aren't that limited - my thinking about issues surrounding the death of the sun & long-term disposition of the species takes absolutely NOTHING away from my thinking about issues that are grounded in the immediate-term future and current issues.
Hell, one of the hobbies I have that is aimed towards the long-term survival of the species is thinking about habitats and supplies that people would need for indefinite survival off-planet. Consequently, I started screwing around with small acreage farming & hydroponics to see just how small an initial supply of materials could get me. On the roof of my building I set up a small garden to grow various edibles and a very rudimentary hydro system to grow tomatoes. It's been a few years now and there are 12 other people in my building who've got gardens up there as well, and we give about half of what we grow to a local food pantry.
I wasn't thinking about hungry homeless people when I started my garden - I was wondering what people would be able to eat out in the asteroid belt and just how much stuff they'd need to bring with them so they wouldn't starve to death. My motivation - and there was a lot of it to start with - was purely that big-picture stuff with nary a thought of anything more immediately useful. In fact, had someone suggested I start a garden and put in all that effort (and it was a LOT of effort) to give the food away, I don't think I'd have been willing to do it - I'm just not that nice a person.
I'd rather dream big and fail than dream of nothing.
You mention that the dreamers are "ignoring the real-world, present day problems" but you fail to recognize that those problems are laughably irrelevant in the longer term as well.
So not only are you keeping your head resolutely down, but you're glorifying focusing on irrelevant trivia as if it were something meaningful.
Most of the "problems" of today will be completely irrelevant 100 years from now, and almost certainly NOT because of people who refused to dream, but because of people who looked out at the vastness and said, "Why not?"
A truly omnipotent being would transcend logic, time and space. All of the "can god microwave a burrito so hot even he can't eat it" stuff is predicated on our human experience with these concepts, which basically isn't relevant to a proposed being on that scale.
Even so, we do have some situations here on Earth that have been experimentally demonstrated to violate the same kind of logic you mention - quantum mechanics. Did the electron go through this slot or that one? Is the cat alive or dead?
Personally I don't believe in gods, but when putting on my let's pretend hat I don't have a problem imagining something that can ignore paradox. I can't describe the details of HOW such a being would do so in any way that might be reasonable or sensible, but that isn't really a problem either since, you know, the very concept of an omnipotent being isn't that they're exactly like us but more capable, it's that they are infinitely capable and that any limit you can imagine for them is meaningless because we can't possibly even begin to know where to start when talking about their capabilities other than to just say yes, anything you imagine, they can do, even if you think it makes no sense. So yeah, god could do whatever by simply redefining literally every fundamental concept in the universe so that there was no paradox while still making it seem that it was a paradox and pretty much anything else, period.
What I always find weird in these discussions about god and omnipotence is that people are basically describing really powerful super heroes but not omnipotent beings. what REALLY bakes my noodle is when I see people who actually do believe in God do that.
I would much rather have the casual gamer market than the market that is hardcore enough to worry about issues like mouse vs. Gamepad vs. Motion interface when gaming, were I interested in being a gaming company.
First, economically, it makes sense. Inexpensive to make games that can be quickly brought to market and when one takes off you can quickly crank out sequels and add-ons completely change the risk:reward situation. It let's you capitalize on fads in a way not possible in the AAA marketplace.
Second, as a gamer, it means that without all the risk of massive economic losses if they release a turkey, I'll get more games of an experimental nature that otherwise might languish in the wasteland that is open source game development. Granted, 99% will be shit, but 99% of everything is shit, and I'd rather spend a buck on a lousy game than $50 on one that's mediocre.
Third, as a company that makes hardware and focuses on user experience rather than specs, I wo uld want the casual market because that way you can sell a multipurpose device that happens to have a lot of games, which will let me reach tons of markets that dedicated consoles will never reach.
There will always be a market for hardcore gamers, it just won't be THE market like it has in the past that everyone tries to capture. I predict it'll be something like the serious audiophile market, where you have ever more sophisticated and niche equipment and parts being sold at a very large premium to people who really, really get into it, while everyone else is satisfied with the mass market stuff.
I mean, why bother with a rifle in the traditional form factor, instead of fully leveraging technology to make extremely accurate devices that ANYONE could use, without having to be a highly trained sniper?
Use a laser to find the range, use the system from TFA to compensate for defects, there might even be a way to figure out wind patterns along the path of the bullet, etc. Then, instead of having to have someone trained to squeeze rather than yank and hold their breath and wait between heartbeats have someone with a little box hooked up to the gun (not touching it, of course), fire the shot.
Maybe it would be a case of "too many things can go wrong" or maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I guess I just don't understand why they don't issue teams kits like this so that suddenly everyone could be a sniper.
(I'm completely ignoring the moral issues of further distancing an actual human from the taking of another human life, of course. Not only do I believe they aren't a factor here, I think it's pretty improbable that the people who work on tech for snipers to use are particularly worried about the morality of what they do since they're already well into the "kill people" mode of thinking and just want to make that process as efficient and effective as possible)
Exactly. Moderation works to remove the goatse trolls while making it at least somewhat difficult (through meta moderation) to silence people you want to say are "trolling" because they have differing views.
A report function would also require a human being to examine a post and see if it's worth removing which, again, would lead to situations where someone simply expressing an unpopular belief could be silenced.
If people want a forum where there are some rules of conduct enforced from on high, there are plenty of them. For all the flaws in the/, mod system, I'd much rather trust in the community than some underpaid, overworked misanthrope who comes to hate humanity because his or her entire job is wading through toxic posts and determining their relative merits.
University should be for gaining a very broad education in a wide range of subjects, NOT for vocational training. If someone wants to get advanced training after that, for a field that needs it, they get their vocational training in a PhD program.
For people who want a vocational education to enter the general workforce there are actual trade schools.
The real problem is that because our high schools are so incredibly shitty now, we are basically offloading a bunch of what should be covered there onto undergrad, leading to a ridiculous situation where we require receptionists and mailroom staff to have a bachelors.
It is absurd to me that we actually teach English composition (for a year!) as well as some pretty basic maths, at the university level. You should know how to write a basic research paper well before going to university and your classes in actual subjects should help you grow as a writer. You should know algebra well enough to handle graphing and functions etc., or you shouldn't get in the door. If you don't know these things already that's what community colleges are for - remedial work. Alas, it's too valuable for the schools to have students stick around for an extra year.
Full disclosure - I work at a university, I am a researcher, I have students working with me at graduate and undergraduate levels, and I am continually amazed at the basic, ridiculous things that our fine institution requires students to do.
While I like the sentiment, I think you might be contributing to the problem in a way.
If we had systems such that we could routinely and easily replace some jobs with machines, and we actually deployed those systems as much as possible, we'd ultimately wind up hurrying along the day where we finally change our underlying systems to reflect the massive increases in productivity we have achieved.
I work a 40 hour week (usually more) as my mother did. Yet, because of advances in tech, I am vastly more productive than she was at her job. Even worse, proportionately to executive wages, I'm paid less than my mom was despite doing vastly more work and contributing more to the bottom line.
Once we hit a point where we have permanently high (25% or so) unemployment there will have to be a change to the way things run or there will be armed revolt. I say hurry that day along rather than artificially delaying it.
Also, I always get stuck behind someone who causes trouble and a delay when I don't use self checkout.
Grr, hit submit before I addressed the grant issue:
Personally, I think things like this are excellent uses of grant funds. It tests out an extremely flexible platform that could (might not be, but could) be incredibly useful in the classroom for a very reasonable (relatively speaking) price.
Heck, just from the textbook replacement angle, this is pretty huge - and not just replacement, but enhancement. For $500 a head + whatever maintenance costs, they test this out. Cheap.
Full disclosure: I work at a university doing federally funded (among other sources) research, and we blow tens of thousands of dollars on much, much less worthy things all the time, or even just flat-out waste it on incredibly inefficient processes. ("I'm sorry, ma'am, but if you spend less than $500 each on these 20 laptops you want for your study you'll have to spend an extra $250 processing fee for each machine because it uses a different purchasing system." - something actually said to me when I wanted to buy 20 $100 netbooks to be used solely as assessment stations hitting a basic HTML form.)
Why wouldn't an iPad be "optimal" for an essay compared to a netbook? The soft keyboard, in landscape mode, is actually much easier to use than the typical netbook keyboard, for me at least, and my job requires a lot more typing than the typical grade-school essay.
I was somewhat leery as I find phone-sized soft-keyboards to be a pain in the ass to use, but I find I can touch type easily on the iPad keyboard and daily write several documents substantially longer than the typical elementary/high-school term paper. While I am by no means a giant adult (female, on the tall side but not some kind of glandular case), my hands are probably as big or bigger than most of the kids in this case.
Light weight, long battery life, can be written and drawn on as well as typed - these things are extremely versatile. If you haven't used one, I definitely suggest trying one out - I mean really trying it out for a couple of days - before you write off the form factor as something not really suitable for this kind of thing.
Using them at the store is not sufficient to really "get" it - I know that sounds weird, but seriously, I was pretty skeptical that it would be anything but a big version of an iPhone until I spent a week using one in lieu of my laptop for work stuff and I'm a definite convert.
How do half-finished products with shitty user experiences like this make it out the door, especially when they are competing with, so far, VASTLY more polished iOS devices that offer a better experience & usability for (often) the same or less money?
The issues with some of the first generation Android phones turned me off for awhile. The phone - one of the T-Mobile offerings - crashed twice while I used it and the factory installed apps would die without warning. The touchscreen was slow to respond if it even recognized my fingers.
I have an HTC evo now - 99% because I get a crazy good deal from Sprint due to where I work and because Sprint is the only carrier that works at home ant office since both buildings completely wreck cell-phone signals. I like my evo - it's not bad, but even though it's a much better experience than I had with the initial offering, it's still kind of rough around the edges in a LOT of ways (like the default battery not being remotely adequate to handle even extremely light use of the phone).
Then XOOM - woo woo! Costs more than the competition, features they insisted were important improvements over the iPad don't work, and it costs more money AND has obnoxious requirements to get even the wifi working if you buy a 3g model.
Now this piece of dreck from RIM. It's almost like they all hold huge amounts of Apple stock and want to push people on the fence to buy an iOS product.
I wonder how long it's going to be before the market forgets these initial crap offerings? I wonder how many people who were interested in a tablet but wanted to wait and see about these will say screw it and go for an iPad once they become available? And most of all, I wonder what the hell the people who approved these devices as ready to ship were thinking? Honestly, in comparison to the competition, they feel like knock-offs used to dupe people who've never seen the real thing.
Weird. I've been using my tablet all day to do reasonably productive things like handle work email, put together and modify a couple of web pages for different projects, drawn a few comps for proposed changes, remote in to our web server and reconfigure a couple of settings, and also do a little bit of video and sound editing for an event we just had. I've been traveling and so a couple of times where I normally wouldn't be able to work on a laptop easily (like in a cab) I've been a bit more productive than I might be otherwise.
And I've been either holding the tablet in my hand, resting it on my lap, or having it sit on a table while I've done that stuff, as needed.
Would I want to spend 8 hours typing on this thing? No, but 3 or 4 hours wasn't bad, and if I were doing more than that I wouldn't need to be as mobile as I am now.
If you absolutely need a physical. Keyboard and mouse then a tablet isn't for you. But to say people can't be quite productive or use them ergonomically is just silly.
I have sprint service with "4g" connectivity and hotspot capability. My iPad is wifi only and I'm able to get decent speed connecting it to my phone.
If I didn't have a phone, or it wasn't at least 3G, I guess I'd want 3G for the iPad. But otherwise, why? And that's not even taking into account that my sprint plan is unlimited data vs. AT&T or Verizon charging more for a capped service.
Why haven't you been working with professors at your university? Why haven't you done internships with people working in the areas you want to work?
You can't possibly tell me that in 10 years of study, with "well above average performance" you haven't found a single person who was looking for, or willing to take, a student/intern. Well, you can tell me that, but I won't believe it.
If a person has even an iota of initiative and drive, they will not leave university without at least 2 years worth of internships under their belt and quite a few contacts with people who can help them in their chosen field. ESPECIALLY if it's something within academia.
Origins are easy because you can behave like your audience doesn't know who anyone is, and can thus focus more on introductions and sledgehammer subtle bits of character development rather than more subtle aspects. Even in cases where it would be difficult to find someone who is both able and willing to go to a movie, it's still easier to do an origin. And it's easier to be compelling with an origin because there's so much change happening that even a jaded viewer will at least try to follow along.
Any hack can write a decent origin story, but it does take some skill to thrust viewers into a universe populated by real people who the viewer has never met before, and to make those real people come alive and be compelling. They go from being ciphers to being people we know.
Look at something like LA Confidential - anyone who watches it can figure out who the main characters are, why they do what they do, and understand how they change through the course of the film. Yet we don't get full-on origin stories, the exposition about their backgrounds leading up to the things we see in the film is minimal or non-existent in some cases, but we know them.
Contrast that with an origin story - I'm going to take the most entertaining and ham-fisted one I can think of: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In the space of 30 minutes we learn how Indy became the man we've seen in the prior films - how he got his scar, his hat, his fear of snakes, his passion for archaeology and on and on. It's entertaining, but it's one of the laziest ways to force-feed a bunch of character development imaginable.
People who can pull off a compelling story and create compelling characters with a minimal amount of exposition are not the most common breed, thus we get origin stories.
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Five years ago you couldn't have paid my father (86) to play a game. Now I can't get him to put down Angry Birds when we go out for breakfast, and when he does shut his phone off he talks about the Kinect yoga thing.
Lot of that kind of thing - older folks playing games - changing the average, I'm sure. And I'm glad for it, since by trying to make games that appeal to non-traditional segments there will likely be more interesting games for me to play.
Well, yeah - I mean, I can probably hack together something that could beat a typical "horsey moves like an L" level chess player, but that just proves how bad at chess the average chess player is, not how good the computer is. But when I can make something that beats the very best humanity has to offer in something, that flips the script - I'm now showing how good my computer is rather than how bad the human is. Subtle, but huge difference.
There's also the issue of upsetting the status quo. Things work as they do, generally speaking, because systems tend to settle on an equilibrium unless intentionally modified by an outside force. With regards to doctors, for example - yes, I would say that a hugely expensive computer that was only as good as an average (and, traditionally speaking, relatively inexpensive) human doctor is really cool, but probably not worth changing the way we do things: If we need more average doctors we just train humans for it. But a hugely expensive (and eventually much cheaper and easier to deploy) computer that is better than the best doctors? Hell yes, that's worth shaking things up a bit.
There's another angle - one I think you were getting at with the "it says so much about us" - and that is that people want to believe they are special by virtue of being human, and have something that a machine cannot ever have. So to have a machine challenge that - even a little - makes some people defensive. They see the creation (and eventual wide dissemination) of tools like Watson to be something that diminishes humanity because it puts things into perspective, and when you imagine that you are something that is special, better, more important than you actually are, things being put into perspective is a very painful thing.
Personally, I can't wait until a more generalized version of Watson is more readily available. As it is right now, I have Google, which is OK, but I have to figure out, often times, maddeningly obscure search terms or, in the case of a subject almost entirely novel to me, fumble around with what I think something might be called until I find out what it actually is, and then there's the whole going through the results haystack to find my desired needle. My Google fu is pretty good, but I really wouldn't complain about a machine that could more readily handle natural language and do a lot of the scut work for me.
Until that happens, I'll just use my interns for lit searches, though.
That would, I think, be a pretty cost effective way to handle most of the students performing (in whichever direction) outside the current norm.
There are still some edge cases - students who would be in a set of their own at their school, for example. One way might be to aggregate those students from across a region and then have the set system applied there again.
In Chicago, we did something like that - some of us were given the SATs and depending on how well we scored on those we were put in college or highschool level courses. For subjects like maths and science, you went to University of Illinois to take classes (and then, I guess, later they made a school - Illinois Math and Science Academy?); for composition and history type classes you went to a high school. The only downside was that this was just 1 or 2 days a week, and you still had to do all of your elementary level coursework, which was incredibly annoying.
I was in an experimental program in elementary that incorporated aptitude based approaches with at your own pace coursework. Basically if you read at a 6th grade level you were given 6th grade coursework for your reading/English lessons regardless of whether you were in 1st or 8th grade. Further, we were given basically a whole lesson plan outline ahead of time and a series of things to accomplish before we could move on.
This was great for me - I am very much a self-starter and wound up ripping through my lessons quickly enough that they had to figure out something else to do with me but it was horrible, absolutely horrible for most of the students because they weren't really prepared for so much responsibility. Maybe 1/10th of the students performed well enough and of that maybe only 1/25th actually thrived.
It also sucked from a socialization standpoint - we weren't really working together as even the kids on the same material were working at vastly different speeds. They tried to remedy that by having some of us act as tutors when other kids had problems, but that wound up with a kind of power differential situation that was awkward in some cases and a didactic situation in others where you had kids completely untrained in how to teach things just bagging on their classmates.
I could see ways now of improving the method, but its a kind of complex process to get right which is why, I think, it hasn't yet been gotten right.
Many people in prisons are there for things that should not be crimes, or, if they should, should not be crimes worth sending someone to prison over.
We could reduce the societal burden of prison in this country hugely if we decided to only lock people away for violent crimes they directly committed or incited/ordered someone else to commit.
Unfortunately, with the shift to for-profit prisons, this won't happen.
My point here being that improved education is a great goal, but there's a very easy way to reduce crime and prison costs: stop criminalizing things that harm no one and stop issuing prison sentences that are ridiculously disproportionate punishment for trivial offenses.
If your sales team causes your customers to clam up, they are very, very bad at their job.
The sales and marketing management should be removed since clearly they are hiring sharks rather than consultants who are capable of developing a relationship with your clients. Replace the management with people focused on building a team focused on consultative sales and then the sales staff will be seen as the trusted advisors who can recommend a service or product without seeming like money grubbing sharks.
Set up a document versioning system to track changes.
Actually, not so much - there's a pretty well agreed upon bias towards putting the collective good ahead of individual good in Eastern countries and the reverse, a bias promoting individual good over collective good in many Western cultures. So much so that criteria for many mental illnesses can be radically different based on cultural factors.
To rephrase your statement to take this into account - "valuing an iPad/money AND the ability to help someone else who needs it with an organ" - muddies the waters a bit.
In Japan, an executive who fails in business may commit suicide as a way of atoning for the harm his failures have caused others, even, in some cases, for failures that were beyond his control. That is considered honorable (if, in more modern times, a bit extreme) while in the US it would be considered (at least by mental health professionals) to be an obvious sign of mental illness. Similarly, the way that children are raised - what is considered good parenting in some traditional Eastern cultures may be considered brutal abuse by Westerners (see: Tiger Mother), while the way many in the West raise their children would be considered neglectful to the point of abuse in some cases by many in the East.
This should not be read as a criticism or endorsement of any particular culture - just an acknowledgement of the very real fact that what may seem insane to one culture is actually considered well adapted in another. I could very, very easily see a young Eastern culture individual valuing a bit of cash + the opportunity to help someone else with this act as being within the range of normal.
I won't get at the medical "professionals" who did the operation - no idea where they trained or what is considered normal, but I know quite a few people who work with very important and very complex systems all the time who seem to have no problem what-so-ever trying something that is vastly outside their skillset and could have really horrible consequences with a "fuck it, let's roll" attitude. To be blunt, they probably were more worried about ruining the kidney than killing the donor, because whoever was the recipient likely had the money and power to ruin them while the kid obviously didn't.
I haven't played SC 2, but how long in number of missions and hours of play is the Terran storyline, and how does that stack up against the number of missions & hours of play I n SC 1?
If it's 60 missions and 30 hours of play vs. 60 missions and 30 hours of play (just guestimating) then no biggie. But if it's only 20 missions and 10 hours of play vs. 60/30 then you have a fair point.
Nice strawman. I don't think someone who worries about the death of the sun is more important, serious, or realistic than someone who worries about ending world hunger. And I didn't see anyone else make that statement here - you seem to be the only one who brought it up.
Aside from that, you're acting as if people aren't capable of thinking big while simultaneously looking at immediate-term problems and issues. People simply aren't that limited - my thinking about issues surrounding the death of the sun & long-term disposition of the species takes absolutely NOTHING away from my thinking about issues that are grounded in the immediate-term future and current issues.
Hell, one of the hobbies I have that is aimed towards the long-term survival of the species is thinking about habitats and supplies that people would need for indefinite survival off-planet. Consequently, I started screwing around with small acreage farming & hydroponics to see just how small an initial supply of materials could get me. On the roof of my building I set up a small garden to grow various edibles and a very rudimentary hydro system to grow tomatoes. It's been a few years now and there are 12 other people in my building who've got gardens up there as well, and we give about half of what we grow to a local food pantry.
I wasn't thinking about hungry homeless people when I started my garden - I was wondering what people would be able to eat out in the asteroid belt and just how much stuff they'd need to bring with them so they wouldn't starve to death. My motivation - and there was a lot of it to start with - was purely that big-picture stuff with nary a thought of anything more immediately useful. In fact, had someone suggested I start a garden and put in all that effort (and it was a LOT of effort) to give the food away, I don't think I'd have been willing to do it - I'm just not that nice a person.
I'd rather dream big and fail than dream of nothing.
You mention that the dreamers are "ignoring the real-world, present day problems" but you fail to recognize that those problems are laughably irrelevant in the longer term as well.
So not only are you keeping your head resolutely down, but you're glorifying focusing on irrelevant trivia as if it were something meaningful.
Most of the "problems" of today will be completely irrelevant 100 years from now, and almost certainly NOT because of people who refused to dream, but because of people who looked out at the vastness and said, "Why not?"
Why redefine it? An omnipotent being could violate paradox easily because they can do literally anything, period, full stop.
A truly omnipotent being would transcend logic, time and space. All of the "can god microwave a burrito so hot even he can't eat it" stuff is predicated on our human experience with these concepts, which basically isn't relevant to a proposed being on that scale.
Even so, we do have some situations here on Earth that have been experimentally demonstrated to violate the same kind of logic you mention - quantum mechanics. Did the electron go through this slot or that one? Is the cat alive or dead?
Personally I don't believe in gods, but when putting on my let's pretend hat I don't have a problem imagining something that can ignore paradox. I can't describe the details of HOW such a being would do so in any way that might be reasonable or sensible, but that isn't really a problem either since, you know, the very concept of an omnipotent being isn't that they're exactly like us but more capable, it's that they are infinitely capable and that any limit you can imagine for them is meaningless because we can't possibly even begin to know where to start when talking about their capabilities other than to just say yes, anything you imagine, they can do, even if you think it makes no sense. So yeah, god could do whatever by simply redefining literally every fundamental concept in the universe so that there was no paradox while still making it seem that it was a paradox and pretty much anything else, period.
What I always find weird in these discussions about god and omnipotence is that people are basically describing really powerful super heroes but not omnipotent beings. what REALLY bakes my noodle is when I see people who actually do believe in God do that.
I would much rather have the casual gamer market than the market that is hardcore enough to worry about issues like mouse vs. Gamepad vs. Motion interface when gaming, were I interested in being a gaming company.
First, economically, it makes sense. Inexpensive to make games that can be quickly brought to market and when one takes off you can quickly crank out sequels and add-ons completely change the risk:reward situation. It let's you capitalize on fads in a way not possible in the AAA marketplace.
Second, as a gamer, it means that without all the risk of massive economic losses if they release a turkey, I'll get more games of an experimental nature that otherwise might languish in the wasteland that is open source game development. Granted, 99% will be shit, but 99% of everything is shit, and I'd rather spend a buck on a lousy game than $50 on one that's mediocre.
Third, as a company that makes hardware and focuses on user experience rather than specs, I wo uld want the casual market because that way you can sell a multipurpose device that happens to have a lot of games, which will let me reach tons of markets that dedicated consoles will never reach.
There will always be a market for hardcore gamers, it just won't be THE market like it has in the past that everyone tries to capture. I predict it'll be something like the serious audiophile market, where you have ever more sophisticated and niche equipment and parts being sold at a very large premium to people who really, really get into it, while everyone else is satisfied with the mass market stuff.
I mean, why bother with a rifle in the traditional form factor, instead of fully leveraging technology to make extremely accurate devices that ANYONE could use, without having to be a highly trained sniper?
Use a laser to find the range, use the system from TFA to compensate for defects, there might even be a way to figure out wind patterns along the path of the bullet, etc. Then, instead of having to have someone trained to squeeze rather than yank and hold their breath and wait between heartbeats have someone with a little box hooked up to the gun (not touching it, of course), fire the shot.
Maybe it would be a case of "too many things can go wrong" or maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I guess I just don't understand why they don't issue teams kits like this so that suddenly everyone could be a sniper.
(I'm completely ignoring the moral issues of further distancing an actual human from the taking of another human life, of course. Not only do I believe they aren't a factor here, I think it's pretty improbable that the people who work on tech for snipers to use are particularly worried about the morality of what they do since they're already well into the "kill people" mode of thinking and just want to make that process as efficient and effective as possible)
Exactly. Moderation works to remove the goatse trolls while making it at least somewhat difficult (through meta moderation) to silence people you want to say are "trolling" because they have differing views.
A report function would also require a human being to examine a post and see if it's worth removing which, again, would lead to situations where someone simply expressing an unpopular belief could be silenced.
If people want a forum where there are some rules of conduct enforced from on high, there are plenty of them. For all the flaws in the /, mod system, I'd much rather trust in the community than some underpaid, overworked misanthrope who comes to hate humanity because his or her entire job is wading through toxic posts and determining their relative merits.
The problem is actually a layer or three deeper.
University should be for gaining a very broad education in a wide range of subjects, NOT for vocational training. If someone wants to get advanced training after that, for a field that needs it, they get their vocational training in a PhD program.
For people who want a vocational education to enter the general workforce there are actual trade schools.
The real problem is that because our high schools are so incredibly shitty now, we are basically offloading a bunch of what should be covered there onto undergrad, leading to a ridiculous situation where we require receptionists and mailroom staff to have a bachelors.
It is absurd to me that we actually teach English composition (for a year!) as well as some pretty basic maths, at the university level. You should know how to write a basic research paper well before going to university and your classes in actual subjects should help you grow as a writer. You should know algebra well enough to handle graphing and functions etc., or you shouldn't get in the door. If you don't know these things already that's what community colleges are for - remedial work. Alas, it's too valuable for the schools to have students stick around for an extra year.
Full disclosure - I work at a university, I am a researcher, I have students working with me at graduate and undergraduate levels, and I am continually amazed at the basic, ridiculous things that our fine institution requires students to do.
While I like the sentiment, I think you might be contributing to the problem in a way.
If we had systems such that we could routinely and easily replace some jobs with machines, and we actually deployed those systems as much as possible, we'd ultimately wind up hurrying along the day where we finally change our underlying systems to reflect the massive increases in productivity we have achieved.
I work a 40 hour week (usually more) as my mother did. Yet, because of advances in tech, I am vastly more productive than she was at her job. Even worse, proportionately to executive wages, I'm paid less than my mom was despite doing vastly more work and contributing more to the bottom line.
Once we hit a point where we have permanently high (25% or so) unemployment there will have to be a change to the way things run or there will be armed revolt. I say hurry that day along rather than artificially delaying it.
Also, I always get stuck behind someone who causes trouble and a delay when I don't use self checkout.
Grr, hit submit before I addressed the grant issue:
Personally, I think things like this are excellent uses of grant funds. It tests out an extremely flexible platform that could (might not be, but could) be incredibly useful in the classroom for a very reasonable (relatively speaking) price.
Heck, just from the textbook replacement angle, this is pretty huge - and not just replacement, but enhancement. For $500 a head + whatever maintenance costs, they test this out. Cheap.
Full disclosure: I work at a university doing federally funded (among other sources) research, and we blow tens of thousands of dollars on much, much less worthy things all the time, or even just flat-out waste it on incredibly inefficient processes. ("I'm sorry, ma'am, but if you spend less than $500 each on these 20 laptops you want for your study you'll have to spend an extra $250 processing fee for each machine because it uses a different purchasing system." - something actually said to me when I wanted to buy 20 $100 netbooks to be used solely as assessment stations hitting a basic HTML form.)
Why wouldn't an iPad be "optimal" for an essay compared to a netbook? The soft keyboard, in landscape mode, is actually much easier to use than the typical netbook keyboard, for me at least, and my job requires a lot more typing than the typical grade-school essay.
I was somewhat leery as I find phone-sized soft-keyboards to be a pain in the ass to use, but I find I can touch type easily on the iPad keyboard and daily write several documents substantially longer than the typical elementary/high-school term paper. While I am by no means a giant adult (female, on the tall side but not some kind of glandular case), my hands are probably as big or bigger than most of the kids in this case.
Light weight, long battery life, can be written and drawn on as well as typed - these things are extremely versatile. If you haven't used one, I definitely suggest trying one out - I mean really trying it out for a couple of days - before you write off the form factor as something not really suitable for this kind of thing.
Using them at the store is not sufficient to really "get" it - I know that sounds weird, but seriously, I was pretty skeptical that it would be anything but a big version of an iPhone until I spent a week using one in lieu of my laptop for work stuff and I'm a definite convert.
How do half-finished products with shitty user experiences like this make it out the door, especially when they are competing with, so far, VASTLY more polished iOS devices that offer a better experience & usability for (often) the same or less money?
The issues with some of the first generation Android phones turned me off for awhile. The phone - one of the T-Mobile offerings - crashed twice while I used it and the factory installed apps would die without warning. The touchscreen was slow to respond if it even recognized my fingers.
I have an HTC evo now - 99% because I get a crazy good deal from Sprint due to where I work and because Sprint is the only carrier that works at home ant office since both buildings completely wreck cell-phone signals. I like my evo - it's not bad, but even though it's a much better experience than I had with the initial offering, it's still kind of rough around the edges in a LOT of ways (like the default battery not being remotely adequate to handle even extremely light use of the phone).
Then XOOM - woo woo! Costs more than the competition, features they insisted were important improvements over the iPad don't work, and it costs more money AND has obnoxious requirements to get even the wifi working if you buy a 3g model.
Now this piece of dreck from RIM. It's almost like they all hold huge amounts of Apple stock and want to push people on the fence to buy an iOS product.
I wonder how long it's going to be before the market forgets these initial crap offerings? I wonder how many people who were interested in a tablet but wanted to wait and see about these will say screw it and go for an iPad once they become available? And most of all, I wonder what the hell the people who approved these devices as ready to ship were thinking? Honestly, in comparison to the competition, they feel like knock-offs used to dupe people who've never seen the real thing.
Weird. I've been using my tablet all day to do reasonably productive things like handle work email, put together and modify a couple of web pages for different projects, drawn a few comps for proposed changes, remote in to our web server and reconfigure a couple of settings, and also do a little bit of video and sound editing for an event we just had. I've been traveling and so a couple of times where I normally wouldn't be able to work on a laptop easily (like in a cab) I've been a bit more productive than I might be otherwise.
And I've been either holding the tablet in my hand, resting it on my lap, or having it sit on a table while I've done that stuff, as needed.
Would I want to spend 8 hours typing on this thing? No, but 3 or 4 hours wasn't bad, and if I were doing more than that I wouldn't need to be as mobile as I am now.
If you absolutely need a physical. Keyboard and mouse then a tablet isn't for you. But to say people can't be quite productive or use them ergonomically is just silly.
I have sprint service with "4g" connectivity and hotspot capability. My iPad is wifi only and I'm able to get decent speed connecting it to my phone.
If I didn't have a phone, or it wasn't at least 3G, I guess I'd want 3G for the iPad. But otherwise, why? And that's not even taking into account that my sprint plan is unlimited data vs. AT&T or Verizon charging more for a capped service.
Why haven't you been working with professors at your university? Why haven't you done internships with people working in the areas you want to work?
You can't possibly tell me that in 10 years of study, with "well above average performance" you haven't found a single person who was looking for, or willing to take, a student/intern. Well, you can tell me that, but I won't believe it.
If a person has even an iota of initiative and drive, they will not leave university without at least 2 years worth of internships under their belt and quite a few contacts with people who can help them in their chosen field. ESPECIALLY if it's something within academia.
Origins are easy because you can behave like your audience doesn't know who anyone is, and can thus focus more on introductions and sledgehammer subtle bits of character development rather than more subtle aspects. Even in cases where it would be difficult to find someone who is both able and willing to go to a movie, it's still easier to do an origin. And it's easier to be compelling with an origin because there's so much change happening that even a jaded viewer will at least try to follow along.
Any hack can write a decent origin story, but it does take some skill to thrust viewers into a universe populated by real people who the viewer has never met before, and to make those real people come alive and be compelling. They go from being ciphers to being people we know.
Look at something like LA Confidential - anyone who watches it can figure out who the main characters are, why they do what they do, and understand how they change through the course of the film. Yet we don't get full-on origin stories, the exposition about their backgrounds leading up to the things we see in the film is minimal or non-existent in some cases, but we know them.
Contrast that with an origin story - I'm going to take the most entertaining and ham-fisted one I can think of: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In the space of 30 minutes we learn how Indy became the man we've seen in the prior films - how he got his scar, his hat, his fear of snakes, his passion for archaeology and on and on. It's entertaining, but it's one of the laziest ways to force-feed a bunch of character development imaginable.
People who can pull off a compelling story and create compelling characters with a minimal amount of exposition are not the most common breed, thus we get origin stories.