It's worth pointing out that the author of this study is an associate professor of communications at a very small upscale women's college in Boston with a grand total of one graduate level science program, namely behavior analysis. Said program's website proudly announces two recent studies, "Task Analysis, Correspondence Training, and General Case Instruction for Teaching Personal Hygiene Skills" and "Learning to Ride: Pedaling Made Possible Through Positive Behavioral Interventions".
The short version is that questioning the credentials of the author and whether he even has the resources to conduct a meaningful study in this area are fair game.
One has to wonder whether it's not as big a problem as is advertised or whether men just have that little value in modern society.
It has more to do with being at the tail end of a time period when spousal abuse of women was considered normal and was tolerated, so there was a big push to alter its depiction in the media to discourage it. Now that times have changed some, albeit not enough yet, one of the side effects of abused women finally being able to come forward and seek help is that the much smaller number of men who have been abused by their wives are beginning to be able to come forward. They're still mostly below the radar, but as public awareness of the problem grows, expect there to be a backlash against thoughtless media depictions of it.
There are always loud reactionaries associated with any kind of attempt to deal with social problems, but for the vast majority of reasonable people, it's not an us-versus-them thing. It's just a matter of directing limited resources at the most serious -- or just most visible -- problems first.
Also dying in a game should be a bit more painful. You lose all your gear and you start at the first level, thats how it was when I played growing up. They didn't have a "save" feature.
Thank you so much! I've been waiting patiently for forty years to find out what "get off my lawn" would sound like coming from our generation, and you have surpassed my wildest expectations. Never did I imagine it would come in the form of something like, "Listen sonny, when I was your age, we didn't have save points. We had to pump in more quarters. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow."
Since for some algorithms the computational power is exponential in the amount of quantum memory, you can do "significant" stuff without a lot of memory.
That may be so, but I have a feeling that they'll still need to be able to implement at least three registers to accomplish anything, and they haven't quite made it up to being able to implement a single short int. The idea of quantum computing has a lot of potential, but so does holographic memory, and they've been promising results there since the 1960's. When you're fighting entropy on as many fronts as they are, there's good reason to be pessimistic.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but last time I checked, every vehicle was already equipped with a device to track miles traveled. Couldn't the odometer just be checked and the mileage fee be assessed at an annual inspection?
My main objections to PHP are its excessive memory consumption, lack of even optional type discipline, lack of optional predeclaration of variables like with Perl's use strict, amazingly crappy error reporting, and its kludgy lexical scoping rules. To be fair, other than that, it's actually not anywhere near as awful as people like to say, and used intelligently, it's actually pretty decent. I'm mostly just tired of using it and tired of writing web apps -- I'd rather be writing desktop applications -- so I'm probably a little overly sensitive to its flaws. So yeah, I bitch about it because I use it a lot.
Whether it's faster than Perl really depends on what you're doing with it. PHP arrays can operate like Perl hashes and lists, which is convenient, but it also means that every array element has both a scalar offset and an associative key regardless of how you're actually using it, and that (along with some other metadata) consumes unreasonable quantities of memory. In a local, single-user app, that's not necessarily a disaster, but in a data-intensive high-traffic web app, it can be a real pain to manage memory use. It can also lead to some really frustrating bugs if an associative array key happens to be a literal numeric value, though PHP does the right thing with dynamic typing a lot better than Javascript does.
This one goes all the way back -- at least -- to defining begin and end macros in C that resolve to { and } for the benefit of people who thought Pascal was the shit. And the answer, substituting the appropriate languages, still is that if you think Pascal is the shit, use Pascal. Don't try to disguise C as Pascal.
With the JVM, things are a little different, since the JVM itself is a platform, albeit one designed in tandem with a particular language in mind. Writing a JVM backend for languages other than Java does actually make sense. Butchering Java to make it vaguely resemble some other language is just as pointless, counterproductive, and obnoxious as trying to make C more like Pascal.
I've been coding since the 70's and have used most of the major languages from FORTRAN onwards, along with the design methodologies that have risen and fallen with them. Aside from choosing a language at the appropriate level -- some tasks are better handled in Java or Perl or Python than C and assembly language -- the main rational reason to prefer one language over another is determined by the codebase and workgroup you're working with. You'll get more done with a bunch of Java programmers and an ass-ton of legacy Java code by continuing to code in Java than you will by starting over in some other language.
Almost everything else is just pointless churn generated by people who fell in love with a particular language or methodology (often the first one they mastered), who then develop a mania for getting everyone else to admire their hobby horse as much as they do. Thanks, but no thanks. We already have religion for that kind of irrational, aggressive stupidity, and you can see how well that has worked out. I don't claim to be immune to the instinct: my particular favorite is C, but it's been more than a decade since I used it professionally. These days, I use PHP (ugh), C# (not bad, even if it is from MS), a bit of Perl, and an unbelievably large amount of my current least favorite, ECMAscript. They all do the job they're called to do. The associated development tools make a much bigger difference than the language itself.
These days, the current blind enthusiasm is for Ruby and Python. Big fucking deal. The language advocates were just as full of shit when it was Java, Perl, C++, C, BASIC, and COBOL. (Okay, they were especially full of shit about BASIC and COBOL.) They'll be just as full of shit in two or three years when Ruby begins to decline and some other Algol-derivative with minor syntax tweaks and cute jargon catches the fancy of the next crop of undergrads who think they're being revolutionary because they don't have the experience yet to know they're getting hot and bothered about reinventing something from ten or twenty years ago. Meanwhile, the actual work of trying to get software to be more useful to actual users will continue, and the software that actually succeeds in that role will almost certainly not have a cute name beginning with the first letter or two of the implementation language.
Add in a higher than average up front cost for the device. iOS users need to speak out on this. Stop paying more for less!
If iOS users were interested in freedom (either as in beer or as in speech), they wouldn't be iOS users in the first place. They have iPhones and iPads because they like the product and/or because it's fashionable in their peer group. Big deal. And if you don't like the product, there's a workaround: buy something else.
That's not intended to be a defense of Apple. I don't like their products or their business model. But despite the hype, they're not going to drive all the alternatives out of business. This is especially true in the phone market, which is so fragmented that being the biggest player there is like being the fattest kid in an elementary school, but it's also true of the personal computer market. Steve Jobs' delusions of grandeur may lead him to believe that he's taking over the world, but his narcissistic giggles can be safely ignored. There are more choices for users now than there were before the days of the Microsoft monopoly.
The short version? "Don't feed the trolls" applies to bored Slashdot editors as much as it does to commenters.
Allowing unqualified students into a classroom simply because they can pay for it has the reverse effect of "a rising tide raises all ships" - 2 or 3 (or 8 or 10) students in a classroom of 25 who don't have the prerequisite knowledge to be there causes NO END of distractions and problems for both the teacher AND the qualified students in the room.
I'm at an age and a point in my career where I could go back to school to study something that interests me for its own sake, and this is exactly why I won't even consider doing it. There's no reason for me to spend an entire semester on material I could teach myself in six weeks just so a bunch of undermotivated assholes can have some slow-motion hand-holding while constantly questioning whether each new item is going to be on the test and whether it has any "real world" utility. The gratification of seeing them rack up debts that dwarf the meager income their putative education will eventually earn them just isn't enough to make up for the irritation of listening to them mouth-breathe.
Inkscape is actually quite good -- vastly better for vector graphics than GIMP is for raster graphics -- though I wouldn't say it does 90% of what Illustrator or CorelDraw can do. On the other hand, it can do some really neat things that the commercial tools can't.
Personally, I wouldn't want to be stuck using only one tool. I use CorelDraw, Illustrator, Inkscape, and sometimes Xara for vector graphics. All of them have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and all of them have some useful features that are unique to them. I don't think there's (currently) any reason to look beyond Photoshop for raster graphics, but none of the vector tools have reached the level of all-inclusiveness that Photoshop has.
Monopolies need to be regulated Mr. Congresscritter.
Funny you mention that. I was just thinking that one of the easiest ways to identify monopolies is by how often their advocates bandy around the term "innovation". I can't actually recall it being mentioned very much before Microsoft used it in their PR push at the height of their powers.
Really, if you want to make it in the world out there, you've gotta get off of your high pedestal, and accept that the scientific world is only a small percentage of the "regular folk" out there. Theoretically, you're right, but practically, noone cares about theory so you're screwed.
Scientific and mathematical language is precise for a reason, which is that both depend on long chains of rigorous reasoning, and ambiguity wastes the time of the reader at minimum. At worst, it renders the description unusable. This actually matters in science and math. For "regular folk" who just skim superficially from science as a form of entertainment, we could just as well make up something for all the difference it would make.
Your complaint reminds me of the defensive "You know what I meant!" the dumb kids in high school would exclaim when a teacher pointed out their grammatical and spelling errors which, like yours, numbered about a half-dozen every couple of sentences. Those were the same kids who would interrupt class every couple of days or so to ask if what was being taught mattered in the "real world". Unsurprisingly, it did, and it does. I used to see those guys later in life doing minimum wage yardwork until they were finally replaced by immigrant labor. I don't know what they do now. I don't really care.
The fruits of civilization, and indeed civilization itself, come from people like the OP who learn what they need to know and pay attention to the details. It's not pretension; it's competence. Remember that next time you ask one of them if they'd like fries with their order.
As a BBSer with my own copy back in the day, we didn't dare try any of that shit because it even looked like it was missing steps. [...] Consult a real explosives manual instead.
Seriously. The paperwork to get an explosives license and be able to buy dynamite and other explosives legally is quite simple. What's difficult is demonstrating that you know what the hell you're doing and having the necessary setup to store them safely. Explosives are, by definition, unstable. That's a large part of what makes them explosives in the first place and why it took several centuries of experimentation to produce powerful explosives that were stable enough to handle if the people doing the handling knew what they were doing. Even then, the number of fatal accidents caused by explosives at construction sites and military installations is quite sobering.
The real catch is that producing explosives safely, at least in a developed country, is such an involved process that you can't avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, and doing it clandestinely is extremely dangerous even if you do know what you're doing. There's a reason clowns like Osama bin Laden sit safely in their hideouts while barely literate chumps make their bombs for them at a safe distance.
Which if nothing else should be mandatory reading for people who mistakenly believe gun control can be made to work --- I used to make black powder by collecting nitrates from underneath piles of cow manure in local fields, collecting charcoal when emptying the ashes from the fireplace and sulfur by purchasing sulfur candles from the local store (unfortunately there weren't any naturally occurring sulfur deposits w/in bicycling distance).
I don't think anyone -- out of those who have thought about it, anyway -- think gun control can eliminate guns. The objective is to reduce the availability of guns to the vast majority of people who lack either the knowledge or the motivation to fabricate the components from scratch. In Japan, where private gun ownership is effectively illegal, the few guns in private hands are imported from relatively lawless regions like SE Asia and North America, not by Yakuza lackeys formulating black powder from cow manure.
My favorite video game back in the day was Galaga, which came out in 1981. I still play it via MAME and whenever I run across the original game or the anniversary re-release. Every level is a fucking massacre. You kill at least 40 aliens and potentially more: if you're really good at killing aliens especially quickly, the game slips in some extras to satisfy your lust for xenocide. Every fourth level, in fact, is a "challenging stage" in which the aliens are completely defenseless and you get bonus points for killing them to the last man. I'm not an especially good player, but I can reliably get to at least the 25th level, which takes about fifteen minutes and during which I must kill at least 1,000 aliens. Nor is Galaga an extreme case. By the late 80's and early 90's, there was a whole slew of Japanese shoot-em-up scrollers where the screen was positively jammed with enemies that could only be overcome by acquiring more and more powerful weapons, next to which Galaga is like the most boring of UN peacekeeping missions.
The body count in hours of gameplay with the current first-person shooters doesn't even merit comparison with three minutes of gameplay in any number of arcade classics from twenty or thirty years ago. What has changed is that the mayhem is more realistic -- and then only if you accept a rather loose reading of "realistic" that actually means "resembling the comic-book violence of action movies".
To make matters worse, the violent crime rate has been mostly declining during all this time, during which ownership of computers and game consoles has gone from a relatively small market to being nearly universal, especially in the age groups that are most likely to be involved in violent crime. If one was compelled to draw a causal connection between violent video games and real-world violence, one would have to conclude that they are actually reducing the level of real-world violence. There is actually some evidence to that effect -- but the balance of the actual scientific data, as opposed to the hyperventilation of people like Jack Thompson, strongly suggests that if there is any connection between video games and real violence, it is too insignificant to be measured even with relatively large samples.
At the end of the day, we'd probably hear less of this hysterical crap if y'all would just stay of those nice people's lawns. Now, if you'll pardon me, I have a sudden urge to fire up MAME and take another pass at getting to the 30th level in Galaga.
For anyone who has raised real kids, cyberkiddies would seem a cheat unless they come with "why? Why? WHY?" and "No!" infinite loops and no OFF switch.
Like cars are cheating if they don't eat hay and crap in the street.
Last time I checked, key-value stores were not a new technology. We are talking about arrays here.
Frankly, I'm beginning to suspect that the only reason the editors post database stories is that they enjoy the catfights between the SQL and NoSQL crowds, and it fills time on days when there are no "Apple [does something awful]" or "Microsoft [screws up something]" stories to fill the space between announcements of the latest minor revisions of Firefox and Ubuntu.
So your suggestion would be to focus on the business area that is slowly losing ground and abandon those that are becoming very profitable?
Profitable for now. The gaming market is notoriously unstable. Gaming companies rise to great heights and then go bankrupt quite abruptly. It's a danger inherent to any business that deals in what are essentially fashion luxuries. It can be very profitable, but it's not a long-term business.
Windows isn't losing ground because personal computers are going away, contrary to the latest round of thin-client cloud computing hype. Windows is losing ground because Microsoft spent years investing mainly in enhancing vendor lock-in instead of improving the actual product. If Microsoft had spent all the time and money they've spent on a dozen dead-ends on making sure Windows was the best possible product, Steve Jobs would still be focused on phones and mp3 players. Instead, while they still have time to turn it around, it's going to be an uphill battle at best.
I curse like a sailor. Casually, pretty much all the time, unless I'm in an environment where it would be frowned upon. I don't curse at machines, or otherwise talk to them. It's not self control, it just doesn't occur to me to shout at an inanimate object. The only exception I can think of would be if actually hurt myself, which is pretty rare unless I've got the case open and I'm installing hardware, or if I do something stupid like delete the wrong file, but I don't think of it as cursing at the machine.
When they achieve strong AI, then I'll start cursing at machines. Behind their backs, of course. If they're listening, I'll just say that I, for one, welcome my new machine overlords.
Microsoft shouldn't even be in the phone market. Or the console game market, or tablets, or web search, or any of this ephemeral consumer crap. If they took all the money, time, and energy they've poured into these tar pits and put it into their core business, we wouldn't have monstrosities like Windows Vista. Ballmer's obsession with competing on every imaginable front is spreading them too thin. Apple and Google know this, and despite a certain propensity for the shotgun approach at Google, both of them know good and well where their core businesses are and act accordingly. Apple isn't even interested in enterprise computing, and Google, for all its prowess in other areas, isn't much of a threat. MS needs to stop looking for blue sky projects and realize that they're a mature company in a mature industry and act accordingly, or someone will eventually eat their lunch.
That's really the bottom line. Cheating might make a kind of short-sighted sense for a course that isn't directly related to the degree, as with many undergrad core requirements, though even there, you're cheating yourself out of the broad, general knowledge that the core requirements are designed to instill. Cheating on something you'll actually directly need in your planned profession is just plain stupid. That piece of paper you get at graduation may get you in the door, but it won't keep you from being thrown right back out. Getting anything beyond an entry-level job is going to require having some actual job experience on your resume, but without the skills, that experience is going to be hard to obtain. Besides, if these turkeys can't hack the kind of idealized example problems they get in school, what makes them think they're going to be able to handle the messy, arbitrarily complex problems they'll encounter in the workplace?
College admissions are a limited resource. People who aren't going to actually use them should get out of the way to make space for people who are.
The current political atmosphere in America is so virulently anti-intellectual that of the relatively small proportion of the population that can even understand the original article, most of them will just scoff at the Chinese and their "pointy-headed academics", step on the gas in their SUVs, and go back to plotting against foodstamp recipients. There are no "Sputnik moments" for a country where the majority of the population actively rejects the foundations of both the physical and biological sciences because they conflict with their bronze age superstitions.
Epidemics, sure, but maybe I missed the wave of bioterrorism that prompted this orgy of spending. If they can find a way to tie in pedophilia and intellectual property rights, they'll be swimming in cash.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth pointing out that the author of this study is an associate professor of communications at a very small upscale women's college in Boston with a grand total of one graduate level science program, namely behavior analysis. Said program's website proudly announces two recent studies, "Task Analysis, Correspondence Training, and General Case Instruction for Teaching Personal Hygiene Skills" and "Learning to Ride: Pedaling Made Possible Through Positive Behavioral Interventions".
The short version is that questioning the credentials of the author and whether he even has the resources to conduct a meaningful study in this area are fair game.
One has to wonder whether it's not as big a problem as is advertised or whether men just have that little value in modern society.
It has more to do with being at the tail end of a time period when spousal abuse of women was considered normal and was tolerated, so there was a big push to alter its depiction in the media to discourage it. Now that times have changed some, albeit not enough yet, one of the side effects of abused women finally being able to come forward and seek help is that the much smaller number of men who have been abused by their wives are beginning to be able to come forward. They're still mostly below the radar, but as public awareness of the problem grows, expect there to be a backlash against thoughtless media depictions of it.
There are always loud reactionaries associated with any kind of attempt to deal with social problems, but for the vast majority of reasonable people, it's not an us-versus-them thing. It's just a matter of directing limited resources at the most serious -- or just most visible -- problems first.
Also dying in a game should be a bit more painful. You lose all your gear and you start at the first level, thats how it was when I played growing up. They didn't have a "save" feature.
Thank you so much! I've been waiting patiently for forty years to find out what "get off my lawn" would sound like coming from our generation, and you have surpassed my wildest expectations. Never did I imagine it would come in the form of something like, "Listen sonny, when I was your age, we didn't have save points. We had to pump in more quarters. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow."
Since for some algorithms the computational power is exponential in the amount of quantum memory, you can do "significant" stuff without a lot of memory.
That may be so, but I have a feeling that they'll still need to be able to implement at least three registers to accomplish anything, and they haven't quite made it up to being able to implement a single short int. The idea of quantum computing has a lot of potential, but so does holographic memory, and they've been promising results there since the 1960's. When you're fighting entropy on as many fronts as they are, there's good reason to be pessimistic.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but last time I checked, every vehicle was already equipped with a device to track miles traveled. Couldn't the odometer just be checked and the mileage fee be assessed at an annual inspection?
Ah, nice. Thanks for the tips!
My main objections to PHP are its excessive memory consumption, lack of even optional type discipline, lack of optional predeclaration of variables like with Perl's use strict, amazingly crappy error reporting, and its kludgy lexical scoping rules. To be fair, other than that, it's actually not anywhere near as awful as people like to say, and used intelligently, it's actually pretty decent. I'm mostly just tired of using it and tired of writing web apps -- I'd rather be writing desktop applications -- so I'm probably a little overly sensitive to its flaws. So yeah, I bitch about it because I use it a lot.
Whether it's faster than Perl really depends on what you're doing with it. PHP arrays can operate like Perl hashes and lists, which is convenient, but it also means that every array element has both a scalar offset and an associative key regardless of how you're actually using it, and that (along with some other metadata) consumes unreasonable quantities of memory. In a local, single-user app, that's not necessarily a disaster, but in a data-intensive high-traffic web app, it can be a real pain to manage memory use. It can also lead to some really frustrating bugs if an associative array key happens to be a literal numeric value, though PHP does the right thing with dynamic typing a lot better than Javascript does.
This one goes all the way back -- at least -- to defining begin and end macros in C that resolve to { and } for the benefit of people who thought Pascal was the shit. And the answer, substituting the appropriate languages, still is that if you think Pascal is the shit, use Pascal. Don't try to disguise C as Pascal.
With the JVM, things are a little different, since the JVM itself is a platform, albeit one designed in tandem with a particular language in mind. Writing a JVM backend for languages other than Java does actually make sense. Butchering Java to make it vaguely resemble some other language is just as pointless, counterproductive, and obnoxious as trying to make C more like Pascal.
I've been coding since the 70's and have used most of the major languages from FORTRAN onwards, along with the design methodologies that have risen and fallen with them. Aside from choosing a language at the appropriate level -- some tasks are better handled in Java or Perl or Python than C and assembly language -- the main rational reason to prefer one language over another is determined by the codebase and workgroup you're working with. You'll get more done with a bunch of Java programmers and an ass-ton of legacy Java code by continuing to code in Java than you will by starting over in some other language.
Almost everything else is just pointless churn generated by people who fell in love with a particular language or methodology (often the first one they mastered), who then develop a mania for getting everyone else to admire their hobby horse as much as they do. Thanks, but no thanks. We already have religion for that kind of irrational, aggressive stupidity, and you can see how well that has worked out. I don't claim to be immune to the instinct: my particular favorite is C, but it's been more than a decade since I used it professionally. These days, I use PHP (ugh), C# (not bad, even if it is from MS), a bit of Perl, and an unbelievably large amount of my current least favorite, ECMAscript. They all do the job they're called to do. The associated development tools make a much bigger difference than the language itself.
These days, the current blind enthusiasm is for Ruby and Python. Big fucking deal. The language advocates were just as full of shit when it was Java, Perl, C++, C, BASIC, and COBOL. (Okay, they were especially full of shit about BASIC and COBOL.) They'll be just as full of shit in two or three years when Ruby begins to decline and some other Algol-derivative with minor syntax tweaks and cute jargon catches the fancy of the next crop of undergrads who think they're being revolutionary because they don't have the experience yet to know they're getting hot and bothered about reinventing something from ten or twenty years ago. Meanwhile, the actual work of trying to get software to be more useful to actual users will continue, and the software that actually succeeds in that role will almost certainly not have a cute name beginning with the first letter or two of the implementation language.
Add in a higher than average up front cost for the device. iOS users need to speak out on this. Stop paying more for less!
If iOS users were interested in freedom (either as in beer or as in speech), they wouldn't be iOS users in the first place. They have iPhones and iPads because they like the product and/or because it's fashionable in their peer group. Big deal. And if you don't like the product, there's a workaround: buy something else.
That's not intended to be a defense of Apple. I don't like their products or their business model. But despite the hype, they're not going to drive all the alternatives out of business. This is especially true in the phone market, which is so fragmented that being the biggest player there is like being the fattest kid in an elementary school, but it's also true of the personal computer market. Steve Jobs' delusions of grandeur may lead him to believe that he's taking over the world, but his narcissistic giggles can be safely ignored. There are more choices for users now than there were before the days of the Microsoft monopoly.
The short version? "Don't feed the trolls" applies to bored Slashdot editors as much as it does to commenters.
Allowing unqualified students into a classroom simply because they can pay for it has the reverse effect of "a rising tide raises all ships" - 2 or 3 (or 8 or 10) students in a classroom of 25 who don't have the prerequisite knowledge to be there causes NO END of distractions and problems for both the teacher AND the qualified students in the room.
I'm at an age and a point in my career where I could go back to school to study something that interests me for its own sake, and this is exactly why I won't even consider doing it. There's no reason for me to spend an entire semester on material I could teach myself in six weeks just so a bunch of undermotivated assholes can have some slow-motion hand-holding while constantly questioning whether each new item is going to be on the test and whether it has any "real world" utility. The gratification of seeing them rack up debts that dwarf the meager income their putative education will eventually earn them just isn't enough to make up for the irritation of listening to them mouth-breathe.
Inkscape is actually quite good -- vastly better for vector graphics than GIMP is for raster graphics -- though I wouldn't say it does 90% of what Illustrator or CorelDraw can do. On the other hand, it can do some really neat things that the commercial tools can't.
Personally, I wouldn't want to be stuck using only one tool. I use CorelDraw, Illustrator, Inkscape, and sometimes Xara for vector graphics. All of them have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and all of them have some useful features that are unique to them. I don't think there's (currently) any reason to look beyond Photoshop for raster graphics, but none of the vector tools have reached the level of all-inclusiveness that Photoshop has.
Monopolies need to be regulated Mr. Congresscritter.
Funny you mention that. I was just thinking that one of the easiest ways to identify monopolies is by how often their advocates bandy around the term "innovation". I can't actually recall it being mentioned very much before Microsoft used it in their PR push at the height of their powers.
Really, if you want to make it in the world out there, you've gotta get off of your high pedestal, and accept that the scientific world is only a small percentage of the "regular folk" out there. Theoretically, you're right, but practically, noone cares about theory so you're screwed.
Scientific and mathematical language is precise for a reason, which is that both depend on long chains of rigorous reasoning, and ambiguity wastes the time of the reader at minimum. At worst, it renders the description unusable. This actually matters in science and math. For "regular folk" who just skim superficially from science as a form of entertainment, we could just as well make up something for all the difference it would make.
Your complaint reminds me of the defensive "You know what I meant!" the dumb kids in high school would exclaim when a teacher pointed out their grammatical and spelling errors which, like yours, numbered about a half-dozen every couple of sentences. Those were the same kids who would interrupt class every couple of days or so to ask if what was being taught mattered in the "real world". Unsurprisingly, it did, and it does. I used to see those guys later in life doing minimum wage yardwork until they were finally replaced by immigrant labor. I don't know what they do now. I don't really care.
The fruits of civilization, and indeed civilization itself, come from people like the OP who learn what they need to know and pay attention to the details. It's not pretension; it's competence. Remember that next time you ask one of them if they'd like fries with their order.
Criminals, in other words.
It's not quite that simple. In most years, there are half again as many suicides by firearms than homicides.
As a BBSer with my own copy back in the day, we didn't dare try any of that shit because it even looked like it was missing steps. [...] Consult a real explosives manual instead.
Seriously. The paperwork to get an explosives license and be able to buy dynamite and other explosives legally is quite simple. What's difficult is demonstrating that you know what the hell you're doing and having the necessary setup to store them safely. Explosives are, by definition, unstable. That's a large part of what makes them explosives in the first place and why it took several centuries of experimentation to produce powerful explosives that were stable enough to handle if the people doing the handling knew what they were doing. Even then, the number of fatal accidents caused by explosives at construction sites and military installations is quite sobering.
The real catch is that producing explosives safely, at least in a developed country, is such an involved process that you can't avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, and doing it clandestinely is extremely dangerous even if you do know what you're doing. There's a reason clowns like Osama bin Laden sit safely in their hideouts while barely literate chumps make their bombs for them at a safe distance.
Which if nothing else should be mandatory reading for people who mistakenly believe gun control can be made to work --- I used to make black powder by collecting nitrates from underneath piles of cow manure in local fields, collecting charcoal when emptying the ashes from the fireplace and sulfur by purchasing sulfur candles from the local store (unfortunately there weren't any naturally occurring sulfur deposits w/in bicycling distance).
I don't think anyone -- out of those who have thought about it, anyway -- think gun control can eliminate guns. The objective is to reduce the availability of guns to the vast majority of people who lack either the knowledge or the motivation to fabricate the components from scratch. In Japan, where private gun ownership is effectively illegal, the few guns in private hands are imported from relatively lawless regions like SE Asia and North America, not by Yakuza lackeys formulating black powder from cow manure.
My favorite video game back in the day was Galaga, which came out in 1981. I still play it via MAME and whenever I run across the original game or the anniversary re-release. Every level is a fucking massacre. You kill at least 40 aliens and potentially more: if you're really good at killing aliens especially quickly, the game slips in some extras to satisfy your lust for xenocide. Every fourth level, in fact, is a "challenging stage" in which the aliens are completely defenseless and you get bonus points for killing them to the last man. I'm not an especially good player, but I can reliably get to at least the 25th level, which takes about fifteen minutes and during which I must kill at least 1,000 aliens. Nor is Galaga an extreme case. By the late 80's and early 90's, there was a whole slew of Japanese shoot-em-up scrollers where the screen was positively jammed with enemies that could only be overcome by acquiring more and more powerful weapons, next to which Galaga is like the most boring of UN peacekeeping missions.
The body count in hours of gameplay with the current first-person shooters doesn't even merit comparison with three minutes of gameplay in any number of arcade classics from twenty or thirty years ago. What has changed is that the mayhem is more realistic -- and then only if you accept a rather loose reading of "realistic" that actually means "resembling the comic-book violence of action movies".
To make matters worse, the violent crime rate has been mostly declining during all this time, during which ownership of computers and game consoles has gone from a relatively small market to being nearly universal, especially in the age groups that are most likely to be involved in violent crime. If one was compelled to draw a causal connection between violent video games and real-world violence, one would have to conclude that they are actually reducing the level of real-world violence. There is actually some evidence to that effect -- but the balance of the actual scientific data, as opposed to the hyperventilation of people like Jack Thompson, strongly suggests that if there is any connection between video games and real violence, it is too insignificant to be measured even with relatively large samples.
At the end of the day, we'd probably hear less of this hysterical crap if y'all would just stay of those nice people's lawns. Now, if you'll pardon me, I have a sudden urge to fire up MAME and take another pass at getting to the 30th level in Galaga.
For anyone who has raised real kids, cyberkiddies would seem a cheat unless they come with "why? Why? WHY?" and "No!" infinite loops and no OFF switch.
Like cars are cheating if they don't eat hay and crap in the street.
Last time I checked, key-value stores were not a new technology. We are talking about arrays here.
Frankly, I'm beginning to suspect that the only reason the editors post database stories is that they enjoy the catfights between the SQL and NoSQL crowds, and it fills time on days when there are no "Apple [does something awful]" or "Microsoft [screws up something]" stories to fill the space between announcements of the latest minor revisions of Firefox and Ubuntu.
So your suggestion would be to focus on the business area that is slowly losing ground and abandon those that are becoming very profitable?
Profitable for now. The gaming market is notoriously unstable. Gaming companies rise to great heights and then go bankrupt quite abruptly. It's a danger inherent to any business that deals in what are essentially fashion luxuries. It can be very profitable, but it's not a long-term business.
Windows isn't losing ground because personal computers are going away, contrary to the latest round of thin-client cloud computing hype. Windows is losing ground because Microsoft spent years investing mainly in enhancing vendor lock-in instead of improving the actual product. If Microsoft had spent all the time and money they've spent on a dozen dead-ends on making sure Windows was the best possible product, Steve Jobs would still be focused on phones and mp3 players. Instead, while they still have time to turn it around, it's going to be an uphill battle at best.
I curse like a sailor. Casually, pretty much all the time, unless I'm in an environment where it would be frowned upon. I don't curse at machines, or otherwise talk to them. It's not self control, it just doesn't occur to me to shout at an inanimate object. The only exception I can think of would be if actually hurt myself, which is pretty rare unless I've got the case open and I'm installing hardware, or if I do something stupid like delete the wrong file, but I don't think of it as cursing at the machine.
When they achieve strong AI, then I'll start cursing at machines. Behind their backs, of course. If they're listening, I'll just say that I, for one, welcome my new machine overlords.
Microsoft shouldn't even be in the phone market. Or the console game market, or tablets, or web search, or any of this ephemeral consumer crap. If they took all the money, time, and energy they've poured into these tar pits and put it into their core business, we wouldn't have monstrosities like Windows Vista. Ballmer's obsession with competing on every imaginable front is spreading them too thin. Apple and Google know this, and despite a certain propensity for the shotgun approach at Google, both of them know good and well where their core businesses are and act accordingly. Apple isn't even interested in enterprise computing, and Google, for all its prowess in other areas, isn't much of a threat. MS needs to stop looking for blue sky projects and realize that they're a mature company in a mature industry and act accordingly, or someone will eventually eat their lunch.
That's really the bottom line. Cheating might make a kind of short-sighted sense for a course that isn't directly related to the degree, as with many undergrad core requirements, though even there, you're cheating yourself out of the broad, general knowledge that the core requirements are designed to instill. Cheating on something you'll actually directly need in your planned profession is just plain stupid. That piece of paper you get at graduation may get you in the door, but it won't keep you from being thrown right back out. Getting anything beyond an entry-level job is going to require having some actual job experience on your resume, but without the skills, that experience is going to be hard to obtain. Besides, if these turkeys can't hack the kind of idealized example problems they get in school, what makes them think they're going to be able to handle the messy, arbitrarily complex problems they'll encounter in the workplace?
College admissions are a limited resource. People who aren't going to actually use them should get out of the way to make space for people who are.
The current political atmosphere in America is so virulently anti-intellectual that of the relatively small proportion of the population that can even understand the original article, most of them will just scoff at the Chinese and their "pointy-headed academics", step on the gas in their SUVs, and go back to plotting against foodstamp recipients. There are no "Sputnik moments" for a country where the majority of the population actively rejects the foundations of both the physical and biological sciences because they conflict with their bronze age superstitions.
Epidemics, sure, but maybe I missed the wave of bioterrorism that prompted this orgy of spending. If they can find a way to tie in pedophilia and intellectual property rights, they'll be swimming in cash.