I suspect that we could stand to devout more resources to education. Even people who aren't exceptionally bright can likely teach at a primary school level, especially if they special in a topic area that they're good at. If the future is going to have even fewer low skill jobs, it's more important than ever to improve educating the next generation to fill the jobs that haven't been automated.
If we ever do reach a point where everything can be automated, or at least everything necessary to sustain human life, I suspect we'll have to move on to some other economic system that fits with the times.
Good luck with that. It's a well known fact that underage individuals will answer truthfully to questions about their age and that they would never consider swiping an adult's credit card for age verification. Never mind the large number of sites based outside of the UK that could give bog-all about some idiotic local laws, or even those sites that have a mix of adult and non-adult content.
Parliament should really stop thinking of the kids.
Mostly because of the pedophilia scandals, but also in general as well.
Pair programming isn't on the face bad and there are several aspects to it that are good, but it has to be implemented properly.
A lot of the early research on using it in an educational setting (see publications by Laurie Williams or Charlie McDowell ) found that it works best if you know the students who will be using it can already program individually. Otherwise you tend to get cases of severely mismatched abilities where one person does most of the work and the other just coasts by. So you also need a reasonable approximation of each student's ability so you can arrange pairs based on that. There's also other research that looked into pairing based on personality or other attributes that found some results to indicate some approaches are more preferable than others.
Using it right out of the gate when you don't have a good gauge of the different ability levels of the students could be detrimental in some cases. If used correctly, pair programming can be beneficial for students and teacher alike, but here it looks as though they're trying to use it as a solution to cut down on the amount of work they need to do. There are probably better ways of approaching that problem.
So why this propaganda spin of a possible cyber attack?
What leader wants to admit that the problem is crummy infrastructure? It's basically admitting that they're bad at their job or too incompetent to keep things maintained properly.
Blame it on something that can't really be proven definitively and it takes the heat off.
Information is inanimate and doesn't want anything. If you believe otherwise feel free to post your banking information and medical history because apparently that wants to be free as well.
Whether or not something is morally right or not doesn't change the fact that it may not be a really bad idea given the reality of the situation.
I doubt that even you would decide to walk alone through a bad neighborhood at night while advertising that you have valuable items in your possession. In an ideal world there wouldn't be a problem with that, but we don't live in such a world. The people who will do you harm do not care about your rights, the morality of the act, or your feelings on the matter.
As a rational individual you should be able to recognize that many other individuals are not moral based on your definitions and that it's utterly, utterly foolish of you to suspect them to act in accordance with your moral code. So while you might argue that it would be wrong for you to be accosted on the street at night and deprived of your property, you still know damned well that you shouldn't put it to the test. If you knowingly do something foolish, you'll have a hard to convincing people that you're completely blameless in the matter.
Pontificating on the matter doesn't actually do anything to address the problem, regardless of how sound your principles may be. I'd rather avoid bad situations entirely than worrying about attributing blame after the fact.
Perhaps this was true at a time when Apple's user base was rather small, but they're shipping hundreds of millions of phones and far, far more computers than they ever had before. In the U.S. they have something near a 50% market share for smart phone purchases. Calling it a cult at that point seems more than a little disingenuous.
If Wikipedia wants more women to contribute, they really need to change the way that it works. All too often a single person will essentially take control of a page and reject any other contributions (and even improvements) from other people. That kind of adversarial behavior isn't something that most women tend to like working around. Even if their efforts to promote women to join are successful, I don't think it will have any long-term success as they, like many others will run into some asshole that won't work collaboratively.
Wikipedia really needs to change the way it operates and remove the ability for individuals to monopolize and control a page. I think if they moved to a system where multiple editors would work together to collaboratively make changes to a page over several weeks before pushing out the changes to the live version. While that isn't going to eliminate the petty squabbles, it at least results in a less hostile environment that prevents one power-tripping idiot from reverting all of your changes and trying to ban you.
Pandering to women while keeping the same environment that has been shown to drive so many women away isn't going to fix the problem. It's just trying to slap a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. Worse, it's a waste of resources that could otherwise be spent actually addressing the underlying cause of the problem.
I think it really demonstrates the importance of having those independent sources (even if a few of them are going to be cranks or pure propaganda) simply because if there's only a single source of information, it becomes trivial to control perceptions. It also suggests that Wikipedia needs to do a better job at fact checking, which is difficult given how many power users treat certain articles like their own little kingdoms and actively prevent others from changing them.
It's a noble goal to provide information freely to those who might not otherwise have access, but it also means that there's a responsibility to ensure that the information you're giving to these individuals is actually good and to ensure that those people who would attempt to subvert the platform to twist the truth or to spread lies should be removed from power.
The body is constantly churning through most of the cells that it is composed of so it's not as though the sack of meat we occupy is terribly important. Even our unique DNA is unimportant given that we will soon be able to create exact clones based on it, who are also not "us".
We're already a ship of Theseus, so does it really make any difference if we slowly replaced our entire brain with artificial parts until we have replaced everything that was originally there so long as the stream of consciousness is uninterrupted? If we can do it gradually over time and still be ourselves, does it really matter if we could instantly accomplish the same?
It's a terrible metric. The test would pass if a female developer wrote a simple function and other female developer called it somewhere else. The function need not even do anything at all or be in anyway important to the project. The simple function and the call to it may be the only code contributed to the project by those individuals.
Do we get to feel good about our project and pat ourselves on the back for being progressive after passing this test even though it's utterly meaningless?
Any industry which does not appeal to ~half of its prospective workers might want to spend a bit of time trying to figure out why, instead of getting all defensive and blaming everyone and everything else for the issue.
Why? The logging industry isn't likely losing any sleep over the lack of female lumberjacks and I doubt the child daycare industry cares one iota about the lack of male workers. No one seems to be jumping on their backs about any kind of sex-based disparity and trying to shove inane tests like the above down everyone's throat is going to do more harm than good because it just serves to alienate people.
Men and women are inherently different in some aspects and have different interests. That practically guarantees that there are certain jobs, activities, etc. that are going to appeal to one group more than the other. Unless we have a case of blatant (i.e. no women allowed) discrimination, there's no reason to expect that everything will have a perfect 50-50 balance.
Presumably it will be illegal, just as many other knockoffs are illegal. It's also very likely that many of them violate Apple's trademark as well so even without design patents these would still run afoul of the law.
The point is that in the very near future, guns will be incredibly easy to manufacture. It does not matter if you ban sales. If someone really wants a gun, they will be able to machine their own, and not too terribly long after that, simply feed a series of instructions into a machine that will create the gun without any required skills on part of the person pushing the button.
The point is that you can't solve crime and gun crime with restrictions in a future where it's easy to get a gun whenever you want one and it's even harder for the government to clamp down on the manufacture and distribution. That will not stop criminals or crazy people who really want to harm others. The point is that you need a good social safety net that can prevent people from turning to crime and provide medical help to people who might express violent tendencies so that they don't go on any kind of rampage.
The funny (tragic) part is that the kind of people who tend to be strongly pro-gun, also tend to be strong against social programs that could prevent a great deal of the violence typically associated with guns.
Well "and God said . .." occurs in book X of the Bible which is a fact. Much like any quote can be a fact in and of itself, even if the content of the quote is of dubious truthfulness or outright incorrect. Never mind websites that are designed around debunking myths or other incorrect information which is contained on the page as a matter of reference.
This is a difficult problem to solve and there are a lot of edge cases that need to be considered to avoid poor rankings.
Sometimes a particular problem has already been solved, but that doesn't mean it's not worth taking the time to code your own solution in order to improve your own abilities and to engage in the kind of thinking necessary to develop algorithms and solve difficult problems. You learn a surprising amount of things when you have to build or implement something yourself as opposed to taking something that already exists.
While there's definitely a business case to be made for using existing solutions, if you're doing something on your own and don't need it immediately, there's no reason why you can't take the time to roll your own code and likely improve your abilities and knowledge in the process.
A two party system practically guarantees that any major issues will devolve into a for and against and then basic tribalism takes over and people choose sides not based on merits or evidence, but simply based on which group they belong to. There are even some scientific studies that suggest presenting strong evidence will do little to actually change these beliefs. A lot of people don't care about global warming all that much and only assume a position based on their party ideology.
We need to change the voting system to something that breaks up the two party system. That will remove a lot of the idiotic deadlock over some of these things that should be moved to the non-issue category.
The reason they and every other company file all of these crazy patents is because it's much, much harder to sue them if they can pull out their own patent in the trial. At that point the other company now has to prove that a patent granted by the patent office, which basically says that this patent is a unique and different implementation than any other existing patented implementations, is somehow invalid. Good luck with that.
There is no buying into the game or not. Either you play it with a good strategy or you get rolled over and learn to play smarter the next time if you don't want to lose. Agreeing or disagreeing with the rules won't change them, and since next to no politicians really care about patent reform or have any understanding of it at all, it would take a lot of money to lobby for a reasonable change, which assumes that anyone opposed won't spend just as much if not more to make your efforts useless.
They wouldn't call it by that name, but they would talk about the potential jobs that could have been created to build and maintain the pipeline. Realistically most politicians on either side of the aisle care very little about the pipeline. A few of them might represent vested interests and have more reason than others to care, but for most it's just about slinging mud or using it as a means to attack the opposition.
It would be interesting to put some measure to vote before Congress without allowing the party wranglers to establish the party line beforehand. Outside of a few hot-button issues, I suspect that there wouldn't be anywhere near as much of a pattern to the votes as there is after one party decides that they need to vote for or against something just to oppose the other side.
For most issues, your average Congress critter simply does not care one way or the other and is entirely happy to fall into line as it removes the burden of actually making a decision.
It seems that they reserve the numbered entries in the series for those which have a completely new game engine and that they don't count any of the handheld games as a major release. Depending on how you want to count the different games, Grand Theft Auto V could be the 15th installment in the series.
The only reason they patented it is so that if they do make an actual product, it's harder for any patent trolls to sue them.
It's very likely that there are dozens of incredibly similar patents floating around out there, but the fact that Apple has been granted a patent for their implementation means that it's far more difficult for someone else to sue them because Apple can always point to their own patent as proof that the patent office obviously considered their implementation different enough and therefore unlikely to infringe.
It really doesn't matter though as I don't think Apple will actually bring this to market. They've got patents for hundreds of other things that have never seen the light of day, but when you're a billion dollar company, spending a little bit of time and money to potentially stop any lawsuits targeting your company are worth it.
There's that aspect, but it's also so that if Apple ever does make a product like this (they probably won't) it will be far more difficult for some other company with an overly broad patent similar to this to sue them.
If the case were to go to court, all Apple would need to do is point at their own patent in claim that the patent office obviously thought their implementation was different enough from whatever company X has (Apple's patent might even list Company X as prior art. The actual patent has) and then company X has to argue that Apple's patent is invalid or it will have a really difficult time getting any damages.
The patent system has turned into an arms race where it's far better to simply patent something you might never produce just because on the off chance that you do, someone else probably has a patent that's similar enough to sue you over it. Basically the cost of filing for the patent is less expensive than the cost of dealing with the legal costs if you don't have one.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that we could stand to devout more resources to education. Even people who aren't exceptionally bright can likely teach at a primary school level, especially if they special in a topic area that they're good at. If the future is going to have even fewer low skill jobs, it's more important than ever to improve educating the next generation to fill the jobs that haven't been automated.
If we ever do reach a point where everything can be automated, or at least everything necessary to sustain human life, I suspect we'll have to move on to some other economic system that fits with the times.
Good luck with that. It's a well known fact that underage individuals will answer truthfully to questions about their age and that they would never consider swiping an adult's credit card for age verification. Never mind the large number of sites based outside of the UK that could give bog-all about some idiotic local laws, or even those sites that have a mix of adult and non-adult content.
Parliament should really stop thinking of the kids.
Mostly because of the pedophilia scandals, but also in general as well.
Pair programming isn't on the face bad and there are several aspects to it that are good, but it has to be implemented properly.
A lot of the early research on using it in an educational setting (see publications by Laurie Williams or Charlie McDowell ) found that it works best if you know the students who will be using it can already program individually. Otherwise you tend to get cases of severely mismatched abilities where one person does most of the work and the other just coasts by. So you also need a reasonable approximation of each student's ability so you can arrange pairs based on that. There's also other research that looked into pairing based on personality or other attributes that found some results to indicate some approaches are more preferable than others.
Using it right out of the gate when you don't have a good gauge of the different ability levels of the students could be detrimental in some cases. If used correctly, pair programming can be beneficial for students and teacher alike, but here it looks as though they're trying to use it as a solution to cut down on the amount of work they need to do. There are probably better ways of approaching that problem.
So why this propaganda spin of a possible cyber attack?
What leader wants to admit that the problem is crummy infrastructure? It's basically admitting that they're bad at their job or too incompetent to keep things maintained properly.
Blame it on something that can't really be proven definitively and it takes the heat off.
Information wants to be free.
Information is inanimate and doesn't want anything. If you believe otherwise feel free to post your banking information and medical history because apparently that wants to be free as well.
Please, won't you think of the information?
And this is hardly the first time Clarkson has behaved like this, he was already on "final warning" after a string of other incidents.
He probably should have molested a bunch of kids instead. Then the BBC would have kept the entire incident covered up.
One would think that if you were to comment on such an obvious omission, that you would have explained it yourself.
Short answer: It's a tabletop gaming convention.
Whether or not something is morally right or not doesn't change the fact that it may not be a really bad idea given the reality of the situation.
I doubt that even you would decide to walk alone through a bad neighborhood at night while advertising that you have valuable items in your possession. In an ideal world there wouldn't be a problem with that, but we don't live in such a world. The people who will do you harm do not care about your rights, the morality of the act, or your feelings on the matter.
As a rational individual you should be able to recognize that many other individuals are not moral based on your definitions and that it's utterly, utterly foolish of you to suspect them to act in accordance with your moral code. So while you might argue that it would be wrong for you to be accosted on the street at night and deprived of your property, you still know damned well that you shouldn't put it to the test. If you knowingly do something foolish, you'll have a hard to convincing people that you're completely blameless in the matter.
Pontificating on the matter doesn't actually do anything to address the problem, regardless of how sound your principles may be. I'd rather avoid bad situations entirely than worrying about attributing blame after the fact.
Perhaps this was true at a time when Apple's user base was rather small, but they're shipping hundreds of millions of phones and far, far more computers than they ever had before. In the U.S. they have something near a 50% market share for smart phone purchases. Calling it a cult at that point seems more than a little disingenuous.
If Wikipedia wants more women to contribute, they really need to change the way that it works. All too often a single person will essentially take control of a page and reject any other contributions (and even improvements) from other people. That kind of adversarial behavior isn't something that most women tend to like working around. Even if their efforts to promote women to join are successful, I don't think it will have any long-term success as they, like many others will run into some asshole that won't work collaboratively.
Wikipedia really needs to change the way it operates and remove the ability for individuals to monopolize and control a page. I think if they moved to a system where multiple editors would work together to collaboratively make changes to a page over several weeks before pushing out the changes to the live version. While that isn't going to eliminate the petty squabbles, it at least results in a less hostile environment that prevents one power-tripping idiot from reverting all of your changes and trying to ban you.
Pandering to women while keeping the same environment that has been shown to drive so many women away isn't going to fix the problem. It's just trying to slap a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. Worse, it's a waste of resources that could otherwise be spent actually addressing the underlying cause of the problem.
I think it really demonstrates the importance of having those independent sources (even if a few of them are going to be cranks or pure propaganda) simply because if there's only a single source of information, it becomes trivial to control perceptions. It also suggests that Wikipedia needs to do a better job at fact checking, which is difficult given how many power users treat certain articles like their own little kingdoms and actively prevent others from changing them.
It's a noble goal to provide information freely to those who might not otherwise have access, but it also means that there's a responsibility to ensure that the information you're giving to these individuals is actually good and to ensure that those people who would attempt to subvert the platform to twist the truth or to spread lies should be removed from power.
What constitutes "you" though?
The body is constantly churning through most of the cells that it is composed of so it's not as though the sack of meat we occupy is terribly important. Even our unique DNA is unimportant given that we will soon be able to create exact clones based on it, who are also not "us".
We're already a ship of Theseus, so does it really make any difference if we slowly replaced our entire brain with artificial parts until we have replaced everything that was originally there so long as the stream of consciousness is uninterrupted? If we can do it gradually over time and still be ourselves, does it really matter if we could instantly accomplish the same?
Do we get to feel good about our project and pat ourselves on the back for being progressive after passing this test even though it's utterly meaningless?
Any industry which does not appeal to ~half of its prospective workers might want to spend a bit of time trying to figure out why, instead of getting all defensive and blaming everyone and everything else for the issue.
Why? The logging industry isn't likely losing any sleep over the lack of female lumberjacks and I doubt the child daycare industry cares one iota about the lack of male workers. No one seems to be jumping on their backs about any kind of sex-based disparity and trying to shove inane tests like the above down everyone's throat is going to do more harm than good because it just serves to alienate people.
Men and women are inherently different in some aspects and have different interests. That practically guarantees that there are certain jobs, activities, etc. that are going to appeal to one group more than the other. Unless we have a case of blatant (i.e. no women allowed) discrimination, there's no reason to expect that everything will have a perfect 50-50 balance.
I think he means that they'll be bribing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontributing to both political parties to pass some laws.
Presumably it will be illegal, just as many other knockoffs are illegal. It's also very likely that many of them violate Apple's trademark as well so even without design patents these would still run afoul of the law.
I think you're missing the point.
The point is that in the very near future, guns will be incredibly easy to manufacture. It does not matter if you ban sales. If someone really wants a gun, they will be able to machine their own, and not too terribly long after that, simply feed a series of instructions into a machine that will create the gun without any required skills on part of the person pushing the button.
The point is that you can't solve crime and gun crime with restrictions in a future where it's easy to get a gun whenever you want one and it's even harder for the government to clamp down on the manufacture and distribution. That will not stop criminals or crazy people who really want to harm others. The point is that you need a good social safety net that can prevent people from turning to crime and provide medical help to people who might express violent tendencies so that they don't go on any kind of rampage.
The funny (tragic) part is that the kind of people who tend to be strongly pro-gun, also tend to be strong against social programs that could prevent a great deal of the violence typically associated with guns.
Well "and God said . . ." occurs in book X of the Bible which is a fact. Much like any quote can be a fact in and of itself, even if the content of the quote is of dubious truthfulness or outright incorrect. Never mind websites that are designed around debunking myths or other incorrect information which is contained on the page as a matter of reference.
This is a difficult problem to solve and there are a lot of edge cases that need to be considered to avoid poor rankings.
Sometimes a particular problem has already been solved, but that doesn't mean it's not worth taking the time to code your own solution in order to improve your own abilities and to engage in the kind of thinking necessary to develop algorithms and solve difficult problems. You learn a surprising amount of things when you have to build or implement something yourself as opposed to taking something that already exists.
While there's definitely a business case to be made for using existing solutions, if you're doing something on your own and don't need it immediately, there's no reason why you can't take the time to roll your own code and likely improve your abilities and knowledge in the process.
A two party system practically guarantees that any major issues will devolve into a for and against and then basic tribalism takes over and people choose sides not based on merits or evidence, but simply based on which group they belong to. There are even some scientific studies that suggest presenting strong evidence will do little to actually change these beliefs. A lot of people don't care about global warming all that much and only assume a position based on their party ideology.
We need to change the voting system to something that breaks up the two party system. That will remove a lot of the idiotic deadlock over some of these things that should be moved to the non-issue category.
The reason they and every other company file all of these crazy patents is because it's much, much harder to sue them if they can pull out their own patent in the trial. At that point the other company now has to prove that a patent granted by the patent office, which basically says that this patent is a unique and different implementation than any other existing patented implementations, is somehow invalid. Good luck with that.
There is no buying into the game or not. Either you play it with a good strategy or you get rolled over and learn to play smarter the next time if you don't want to lose. Agreeing or disagreeing with the rules won't change them, and since next to no politicians really care about patent reform or have any understanding of it at all, it would take a lot of money to lobby for a reasonable change, which assumes that anyone opposed won't spend just as much if not more to make your efforts useless.
They wouldn't call it by that name, but they would talk about the potential jobs that could have been created to build and maintain the pipeline. Realistically most politicians on either side of the aisle care very little about the pipeline. A few of them might represent vested interests and have more reason than others to care, but for most it's just about slinging mud or using it as a means to attack the opposition.
It would be interesting to put some measure to vote before Congress without allowing the party wranglers to establish the party line beforehand. Outside of a few hot-button issues, I suspect that there wouldn't be anywhere near as much of a pattern to the votes as there is after one party decides that they need to vote for or against something just to oppose the other side.
For most issues, your average Congress critter simply does not care one way or the other and is entirely happy to fall into line as it removes the burden of actually making a decision.
Not quite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_(series)#Games
It seems that they reserve the numbered entries in the series for those which have a completely new game engine and that they don't count any of the handheld games as a major release. Depending on how you want to count the different games, Grand Theft Auto V could be the 15th installment in the series.
If I'm wrong then please tell me where so I'll learn something.
You're not wrong, but you are getting in the way of everyone's two minutes hate over patents.
The only reason they patented it is so that if they do make an actual product, it's harder for any patent trolls to sue them.
It's very likely that there are dozens of incredibly similar patents floating around out there, but the fact that Apple has been granted a patent for their implementation means that it's far more difficult for someone else to sue them because Apple can always point to their own patent as proof that the patent office obviously considered their implementation different enough and therefore unlikely to infringe.
It really doesn't matter though as I don't think Apple will actually bring this to market. They've got patents for hundreds of other things that have never seen the light of day, but when you're a billion dollar company, spending a little bit of time and money to potentially stop any lawsuits targeting your company are worth it.
There's that aspect, but it's also so that if Apple ever does make a product like this (they probably won't) it will be far more difficult for some other company with an overly broad patent similar to this to sue them.
If the case were to go to court, all Apple would need to do is point at their own patent in claim that the patent office obviously thought their implementation was different enough from whatever company X has (Apple's patent might even list Company X as prior art. The actual patent has) and then company X has to argue that Apple's patent is invalid or it will have a really difficult time getting any damages.
The patent system has turned into an arms race where it's far better to simply patent something you might never produce just because on the off chance that you do, someone else probably has a patent that's similar enough to sue you over it. Basically the cost of filing for the patent is less expensive than the cost of dealing with the legal costs if you don't have one.