It's hard to believe that someone who is as intelligent as you appear to be and has done as much thought about the issue as you have, could have come to such a completely incorrect conclusion.
> That's not freedom, that's tyranny under the freedom banner.
This is a *complete* mischaracterization of the situation. You are using the absolute wrong terms here when you say 'freedom' and 'tyranny'. First off, freedom is such a loaded word that it's really hard to extract anything meaningful out of its use in situations like this. But 'tyranny under the freedom banner' is so clearly just *wrong*. The author of the GPLv3 is giving access to the copyrighted work under very specific terms. These terms don't take way anyone's freedom, and they don't establish any tyranny. They just give fewer freedoms than I suppose you would like them to give. I'd hardly call that 'tyranny'. To use an analogy, if I let any of the neighborhood kids play in my yard but I require that they not play baseball because I am worried that they'll break a window, am I being a tyrant? Not letting them come into my yard to fetch a ball that they accidentally hit there, would probably be tyranny. Not letting them play in my yard at all, maybe tyranny depending on your viewpoint, but I would argue not tyranny because it's my yard and really no one has a right to it except me. But letting them play in my yard and establishing a few rules that I require them to follow? How is that tyranny? And similarly, how is *giving away* the fruits of my labor, but with certain stipulations that don't affect how they use the software at all, just how they redistribute it - how can you possibly call that tyranny?
> I'm sure the intentions of the GPLv3 supporters (yourself included) are noble, but forcing your ideals > onto other people is no better than what you proclaim to be fighting against.
I thought only people who hadn't put any thought into these issues at all used this argument. I guess not. Can you please explain how anyone is 'forcing [their] ideals onto other people' by releasing software for those other people to choose to either use or not use, depending on a) whether the software is useful to them and b) whether or not they agree to the licensing terms? Do you think that someone publishing a book is 'forcing their ideals' onto other people because those other people, if they were to choose to buy the book, would not be able to photocopy it for their friends? Forget about my pre-emptive arguments for a moment, and please just explain in what way someone who releases their code under GPLv3 is forcing anyone to do anything in any sane sense of the word 'force'?
> This whole GPL thing has just been a big headache to me and I regret ever choosing it.
Clearly you didn't read, or understand, the GPL before you chose it for your work, or maybe you just didn't think far enough ahead to realize that the problems that you had are inevitable if you use the GPL. I personally release my code under GPL *specifically* because I don't care about satisfying people who want to link my code into their application without obeying the GPL. I am not going to re-release it under the Lesser GNU Public License, because I chose the GPL *specifically* because of the freedoms that it guarantees users, and switching to the LGPL just backpedals on that in a way that makes one wonder what the point of using GPL in the first place ever was. Now I'm not saying that *you* have to use the GPL, or that the LGPL isn't the right choice for you, or that BSD, MIT, etc, licenses aren't better for you. It's your code, you should be the only person in the world who says what the best license is for your software. But I don't understand why you would talk about the GPL like *it* was the cause of some problems when in fact it was just your choosing of the *wrong* license for your intentions was the real cause.
Also the BSD without the "advert" clause is almost exactly the same thing as public domain. Why you would care th
I lived in the USA all of my life and was very used to NTSC. I moved to New Zealand a year ago where we have PAL. To be honest, I didn't notice the extra resolution or color fidelity of PAL. What I did notice was the flicker that PAL exhibits in bright scenes. However I have since become accustomed to that and don't really notice.
I don't think that NTSC is much worse than PAL in image quality, at least from the perspective of someone who just wants to watch TV and isn't interested in showing off superior image quality detection skills. I'll bet that more than 90% of people wouldn't even notice any difference at all between PAL and NTSC. I know my wife didn't.
As to the movie transfer thing - what do they do for NTSC, which is 30 fps and which would require movies to be sped up *even more* to match the frame rate. Obviously they don't do that - so whatever they do for NTSC, why didn't they do the same thing for PAL instead of speeding movies up for PAL?
I have noticed that some TV shows from the USA are sped up for PAL, and have corresponding high pitched voices. It's funny to see shows that you know what the actors really sound like, and listen to them now sounding like little kids.
The better CS undergrad programs don't really teach languages per se. The main focus of the curriculum should be the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, combined with the practical aspects of software development. Since languages themselves are part of the practical aspect of software development, in addition to also being the focus of some computer science theory, it is unavoidable that languages should themselves be studied to some degree, and also used to a large degree to practice the theory that is being taught. Most theoretical CS only really needs 'pseudocode' to illustrate the concepts being discussed. But since students are often asked to write programs to demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter, a real language is unavoidable. But the language itself is secondary to the real meat of the subject, which should all be mathematical and theoretical in nature.
At CMU the very first CS class (that losers like me who didn't AP out of the first CS course, mostly because my high school didn't even have computer classes let alone AP computer classes!) really did focus on teaching a language - Pascal - and a significant part of the class was the learning of the language. It was the least useful CS class I took in the long run (not surprising, as an introductory course in any subject is likely to be the same). Subsequent courses would spend 1 - 2 weeks going over the fundamentals of the language to be used in coursework for the remainder of the class (which in some classes was C, in some was C++, some used ML, others Scheme, etc), to get everyone started, and after that, you had to figure it out on your own in conjunction with actually learning the theory that was being taught. It really isn't that hard to pick up a new language once you know a couple, although I did have a hard time with ML, mostly because I was completely unmotivated to learn it, feeling that it was absolutely useless to know (I was right).
No really good CS program has any classes with names like "Java 101" or "Advanced C++". To use a carpentry analogy, I would expect a really good carpentry school to teach the fundamental rules and "theory" of carpentry, so that the student upon graduation really understood what carpentry was all about and could apply their knowledge to aspects of the subject that they hadn't even encountered in school. I wouldn't expect a good carpentry school to have classes like "Advanced Hammering" and "Bandsaw 101". The courses would instead be "Introduction to House Frames" and "How to Construct Joints". You'd be expected to learn the use of the tools in the natural course of studying these subjects.
It's the same for CS. Good programs don't teach the tools, they teach the *subject*; learning the tools is intrinsic in the study of the theory.
I think you need to re-read the GP post. You've totally missed the point. The GP was suggesting that the only real factor in addiction is the psychological nature of wanting to use a drug to escape the problems of one's life. The physical effects of breaking addiction are not considered in his post; and although I agree with you, your statement doesn't really address his point, and you are actually agreeing with me.
> Nicotine addiction is the toughest one to break. Programs for getting people off cocaine are about 40% > successful. Programs for getting people off smoking are about 10-20% successful. Also, addicts tend to "age > out" of cocaine and heroin addiction; after age 40, most of them eventually give it up. Not nicotine; people > smoke their way to the grave.
You are making it sound like nicotine addiction is somehow much stronger than any other drug. I disagree completely (never having been addicted to nicotine or any drug, I can't speak from personal experience, but I have a hard time believing that one drug in particular, like nicotine, is so much more addictive than other drugs, especially those that have a much more profound effect on the brain like cocaine or heroin).
I think the reason that people are so much more likely to stay addicted to nicotine is that it is so much more socially acceptable, and also so much less likely to be an immediate 'problem' in your life. It has long term effects (for some people, not for everybody). But something like heroin addiction has an immediate effect - it causes you to be basically completely incapacitated as a person. It changes your lifestyle profoundly. It sucks away all of your money and time (from what I have read).
If you are addicted to nicotine, what forces do you have trying to get you off of it? Some family and friends occasionally urging you to quit, and maybe your own feeling that you should quit "sometime". And what negative impact is it having on your life? It's an expense, but it's probably not making you poor or driving you to a life of crime to support your smoking habit. Maybe it annoys other people but it doesn't prevent you from having a normal social life. Smoking, aside from its long-term effect on your health, is nearly completely innocuous.
Compare to a serious drug addiction. All of your friends and family (who are not addicts themselves!) will probably be desperately trying to get you to quit, *all the time*. The consequences of drug addiction are so severe that you will be actively working as hard as you can to hide your use of drugs from anyone who cares about you. And the effect on your life of using the drug will be profound. Your life on the drug and off the drug will be *totally* different. If you're addicted to heroin, it's my understanding that you will care about little else in your life except for getting more heroin.
So is it very surprising that with all of the forces trying to push one away from drug addiction, as well as the serious ramifications that it has on one's life, that more people quit it than quit smoking?
Your personal experiences are not enough to draw your conclusions about all addicts like you have.
There are many different types of addicts. Some will use whatever is available, and if they are cut off from some drug (either by it just not being available, or by something like this vaccine that makes it useless even if it is available), then they will just find something else.
There are other types of addicts who are addicted to a specific substance and genuinely want to, and would put forth the effort required to, quit this singular addiction. And who are committed to fighting any urges they might have to try other drugs.
The urge to use drugs in general is much weaker than the urge to use a drug that one is specifically addicted to. The vaccine makes that task of quitting a specific drug a matter of just resisting general urges to go out and find something to get high, which is much easier than resisting the urge to use a specific drug that one is addicted to.
The vaccine in question is not for people like your friends. Those people will have no hope to change their drug using habits until they actually want to and are willing to put forth the effort to quit and to change their lifestyles. And when they are, vaccines like this will be immensely helpful to them.
That being said, if they are OK with their lives as they are and they aren't hurting anyone around them, then there is no reason that I can think of why anyone should expect them to, or demand that they should, stop doing what they are doing.
> The grandparents point is that sure, you would say (if they give you a choice) that you want to get off the > drugs and are miserable. This happens when you are comming down and never want to see another rolled up > twenty again. What happens the next day, when your physical craving is gone but the mental dependancy is > still there? What he was trying to say is that you will find other ways to get some sort of "high". This > could simply be because its in your genetic nature.
There are people who want to quit, but find it very difficult because of the nature of addiction. If the drug in question no longer produced the high, then the feelings of compulsion to use the drug would dimish over time and then be gone. For some people, this wouldn't be enough; because of other personality issues or life issues, they would still be seeking out something to get high off of.
But I think that for alot of addicts, those who really do want to quit their addiction and change their lifestyle to eliminate the use of drugs altogether, such a tool would be immensely helpful. These people *may* feel a desire to seek out other drugs, but that would be a much easier impulse to control than an already established addiction to a specific drug.
> What about a vaccine for homosexuality or ambition? The vaccine presumes that there is something "diseased" > about a cocaine user. This is a moralistic value judgment, which makes it a violation of the liberty of men > who are free from those particular moral chains.
You are going out of your way to see a tool made available to those who voluntarily decide to use it, as something that's going to be forced on people just because of its very existence.
What if there *were* a vaccine for homosexuality or ambition? Would its very existence be immoral? I don't think so; I don't see how you could even suggest this. It's like saying that guns are implicitly evil, because they *can* be used to violate someone's rights. But guns *are not* implicitly evil. It's all up to how they are used. Same with such vaccines.
If a gay person wanted to stop being gay and there was a tool available to help him or her do it, what would be immoral about them choosing to use this tool? I am sure from what you have said that you would agree that a person has every right to choose to use whatever tools on themselves that they want to. So where's the problem with such vaccines?
People should be allowed to use drugs. It is their own choice about what to do with their own body. And similarly, people should be allowed to use anti-drug vaccines, because again, it's their own choice about what to do with their own body.
For a fraction of people who are addicted to a drug or alcohol, taking away the ability to use that drug or alcohol will cause them to seek something else out to fulfill the same purpose.
But for another fraction (and I think this is the larger fraction but that's certainly debateable), taking away the ability to use that drug or alcohol will give them an opportunity to stay clean of all drugs or alcohol, which they will do.
You can't be addicted to a drug you haven't even tried yet. So when you are clean, you have to decide if you're going to seek out something to become addicted to or not. Some people will choose to do so, but I think most will not.
The vaccine is a tool to help people who are having a hard time getting over a particular addiction. It allows them to, when they are strong in their convictions, make a decision to quit the addiction, and prevent themselves from, when they are weak and craving the thing they were addicted to, getting high again and starting the addiction all over again. Trust me, this tool will be a very very powerful way to help addicts who *want* to quit, do so.
You are overgeneralizing to the point of making any discussions on the topic worthless.
Also this statement is flat out wrong:
"Addictive behavior with anything is a desire to insulate yourself against actual or perceived problems."
I guess you don't have any experience with addiction because while this can be a factor, it's not 100% of the reason for addictions. Take nicotine addiction as an example. Exactly what actual or perceived problem are nicotine addicts seeking to insulate themselves from? Maybe kids who start smoking do it to insulate themselves from the perceived problem of not being "cool" or something. But adults who have been smoking for years, and couldn't care less about whether or not they are perceived as "cool"? What problem exactly are they trying to insulate themselves against?
Another example - I have an addictive nature when it comes to video games. Fortunately I don't really like MMORPGs or else I'd probably have been sucked into one long ago. But for the games I do like, the characteristics of my behavior surrounding the game are very much like a cocaine or nicotine addiction. I even get a little euphoric 'high' when I realize that I am going to be able to play my game for a few hours, and at the end when I have to stop, I get irritable and angry because I want to keep going. I honestly believe that to a much lesser degree than with serious drug addictions, my brain is responding to many of the same factors.
Now what problem am I try to insulte myself from when I play an addictive game? There is no 'problem' there. I just like some games so much that my brain has developed an addiction to the act of playing those games. I'm not trying to escape anything when I play. My life is fine otherwords. I have nothing to escape from.
Vaccines against the effects of drugs would I think be extremely helpful to people who want to quit but have difficulty controlling their impulse to use the drug. You can call it a crutch if you want, but it doesn't really matter. If it helps people get out of a estructive addiction, does it really matter?
Some addicts will undoubtedly seek out other drugs if their drug of choice stops working. For these people, vaccines against specific drugs would only have short term benefit. There is always the chance that one of these people, once clean and given some opportunities to change their life situation, may decide to fight the urge to seek other drugs. But most will probably
No I can't. How much does a mirror cost, when bought in bulk? They're using 184,000 mirrors in the Nevada Solar One project. Let's say each one costs $20. That's a total of $3.68 million. Now add let's say $50 per mirror for control equipment. That adds $9.2 million. Now maybe the installation costs $25 per unit (paying some dude $100 per hour to do the installation, and he can install 4 per hour). That's another $4.6 million. Now let's say that the collector costs $1 million to build and install (it's just a pipe with oil I believe). Now that liquid salt energy storage system. Let's put that at $25 million. I have no idea how much it would cost but that seems generous. Finally, costs for running all the cables and stuff that move the power around and deliver it to the grid and what have you. $10 million. Now throw in 50% extra for miscellaneous costs of installing the mirrors (vehicles, fuel, lawyers, managers, whatever). Grand total: $80.22 million. They said that the total costs to build it is $250 million. That is 3x more expensive than what I thought were pretty generous estimates.
So I repeat my question: Why is it so expensive to build an array of a bunch of mirrors and a collector?
It's not that I don't believe it. I believe it because it's in the article; $250 million is how much it costs. I just don't understand *why*.
TFA pointed out that it would be harmless to birds because the mirrors would not get hot. This assumes that the concern is that birds would land on the mirrors. I was extending the question to, what if the bird gets near the collector? And also I added a "Does anyone care" question, because I too agree that it doesn't seem like a big deal even if some birds do die. But I wanted to hear others' opinions too.
Are we going to get interesting comments about the technology in use here? Is it practical? Why is molten salt used instead of something else? Isn't that dangerous? Can't birds get zapped if they fly too close to the collector where thousands of mirrors are pointing? Do we even care? Why is it so expensive to build an array of a bunch of mirrors and a collector? Is it dangerous to be near this thing, where I suppose you could be blinded if you glanced in the wrong direction?
Or are we going to just get more boring re-hashes of the same useless arguments about gas prices, global warming, the uselessness of alternative energies, etc etc ad nauseum?
Well that seals the deal for me. I won't even bother trying Tremulous because I tried Natural Selection and thought it was awful.
Mind you this was a few years back; I don't know how much has changed in that time. But NS to me took the concept of twitch reflexes to such an extreme that it was completely unenjoyable. I just read on the Tremulous forums about how their recommendation is that your mouse sensitivity should be set up so that you can do a full 240 degree spin with a single hand swipe. My god I do not want to play a game where it's important for me to be doing 240 degree spins. I really enjoyed Socom 2 on the PS/2 when I played with a group of friends, and also Jedi Academy on the PC. Both games require good aim and good evasion but neither required the ridiculous levels of twitch reflexes that NS did when I played it. I spectated as other players in NS and I couldn't even tell what the hell was going on. The dude was flying around so fast that everything was a blur. Then when I played, people were whizzing around me and killing me before I could even tell what was happening.
Sure, if I played the game for weeks and developed my twitch reflexes I suppose I could hold my own. But I don't really want to play a game for weeks just to start to have fun with it. And I don't want to become good at a game where good means just being able to spin around really fast and line up aim at the other dude before his ultra reflexes can do the same to you. I appreciate some degree of reflexes in games - which is why I don't play MMORPG's, their combat systems bore me to tears - but I think it's a fine balance and NS (and probably Tremulous) are just comical in how far they go overboard with twitch reflexes.
My favorite multiplayer game of all time was Jedi Academy in seige mode. It is so cool for each team to have multiple objectives each game, and it makes each game interesting because you're not just doing the same thing for 15 minutes straight. Also I think the balance of reflexes vs. strategy was good. The only thing that bugged me was losers who played dark jedi and used force choke. So boring to just sit there while you're being carried around and choked and there is no way to break out of it. If I ever saw someone getting choked on my team, I made it my priority #1 to shoot the dark jedi who had them to stop the choke. Also snipers sucked because they turned a fun game into a 'wtf just happened' experience.
I guess that sums it up for me. The more 'wtf just happened' moments a game has, the less interesting it is to me. And NS (and probably Tremulous) was just one long sequence of 'wtf' moments for me.
That still wouldn't affect the validity of his point. Just because he would move from the 99.9% camp that doesn't care about accessibility, to the 0.01% camp that does, doesn't change the fact that the vast, vast majority of people don't have need for those features.
That being said, his post as a whole is pretty lame.
Are you saying that most people are like YOU, and have services for converting home movies to professional menu based DVDs? Somehow I doubt that. Most people who are filling up big hard drives are doing it by pirating movies and music. Period. Which is exactly my point - except for people who are pirating stuff, which honestly I don't think is a large percentage - maybe 5-10% tops? - don't need exceedingly large drives.
As to the latest games, how many latest games do people typically need to have installed at once? This is an honest question, I don't know. But I'll bet that once again the number of people who need to have multiple 10 GB games installed at one time is a pretty small fraction of the computer using population.
To answer your question: a long time, since the vast majority of users, vocal Slashdot geeks aside, don't give a rats ass about hacking any piece of consumer electronics they own. Most people buy products based on the features that the product claim to have, not on features that they *want* the product to have and believe that they can get by hacking the device.
A correlary of this statement is that Apple really isn't fighting its users, as a group. It's just fighting a small minority of users who hack their iPhones, so your statement about Apply "fighting their users makes no real sense", itself makes no real sense.
Disclaimer: I don't own an iPhone, but I might if I was richer.
I have never used more than 20 GB on any system I have ever owned. I can go years and years on the same system without using significantly more space. But I don't pirate music and movies, and it's pretty hard to fill up a hard drive without doing those things (I guess if you install lots of software that could do it too, but the "working set" of software for most people is still probably pretty small and you can always uninstall stuff you are not using to make room for new software). I would be exceedingly happy with a fast, reliable, low-power, and cheap 32 GB solid state drive.
So, not everyone is like you, and needs constantly expanding amounts of persistent storage. For most people who are not pirating music and movies, modest hard drive capacities are just fine. Hell, even if you do pirate movies, you can always erase them after watching them instead of building up bigger and bigger collections of stolen movies.
Re:No standard without reference implementation
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you completely. I think that *every* standard should come with a reference implementation. I can't even comprehend why standards bodies don't do this. It is the single most effective way to ensure that your standard is adopted. And it proves, as you said, that the standard is reasonably implementable - the code will demonstrate how easily implemented the standard is, and certainly the standard body would modify the standard where its egregiously difficult to implement instead of sinking lots of time into writing a difficult implementation, which is better for everyone as well - by providing a reference implementation, the standard body would be forced to "eat their own dog food", which would definitely encourage polishing up the rough parts before finalizing the standard. Once again, good for everybody.
Seriously, this company is like the Microsoft of web applications. They don't innovate anything, they just buy other companies or reproduce other ideas that have gained popularity. A 215 billion dollar company whose whole business plan is to make incremental improvements to existing online applications? Ridiculous. Even their original "product", the search engine, was a copy of an existing idea, with incremental improvements.
I keep hoping for someone to come up with even better search technology and put us out of our misery. Google needs to go away.
Clearly your statement depends very heavily on what 'quality of life' means. Your statement *sounds* logical until one realizes that it is based on such a subjective concept - quality of life.
I sincerely believe that quality of life can be *better* with less consumption, and at the same time better for the planet, and for this reason, I reject your claim that the cost of meaningful conservation would impact quality of life. It would change lifestyles for sure, but I don't think they would be 'worse' lifestyles from a quality of life standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to believe that someone who is as intelligent as you appear to be and has done as much thought about the issue as you have, could have come to such a completely incorrect conclusion.
> That's not freedom, that's tyranny under the freedom banner.
This is a *complete* mischaracterization of the situation. You are using the absolute wrong terms here when you say 'freedom' and 'tyranny'. First off, freedom is such a loaded word that it's really hard to extract anything meaningful out of its use in situations like this. But 'tyranny under the freedom banner' is so clearly just *wrong*. The author of the GPLv3 is giving access to the copyrighted work under very specific terms. These terms don't take way anyone's freedom, and they don't establish any tyranny. They just give fewer freedoms than I suppose you would like them to give. I'd hardly call that 'tyranny'. To use an analogy, if I let any of the neighborhood kids play in my yard but I require that they not play baseball because I am worried that they'll break a window, am I being a tyrant? Not letting them come into my yard to fetch a ball that they accidentally hit there, would probably be tyranny. Not letting them play in my yard at all, maybe tyranny depending on your viewpoint, but I would argue not tyranny because it's my yard and really no one has a right to it except me. But letting them play in my yard and establishing a few rules that I require them to follow? How is that tyranny? And similarly, how is *giving away* the fruits of my labor, but with certain stipulations that don't affect how they use the software at all, just how they redistribute it - how can you possibly call that tyranny?
> I'm sure the intentions of the GPLv3 supporters (yourself included) are noble, but forcing your ideals
> onto other people is no better than what you proclaim to be fighting against.
I thought only people who hadn't put any thought into these issues at all used this argument. I guess not. Can you please explain how anyone is 'forcing [their] ideals onto other people' by releasing software for those other people to choose to either use or not use, depending on a) whether the software is useful to them and b) whether or not they agree to the licensing terms? Do you think that someone publishing a book is 'forcing their ideals' onto other people because those other people, if they were to choose to buy the book, would not be able to photocopy it for their friends? Forget about my pre-emptive arguments for a moment, and please just explain in what way someone who releases their code under GPLv3 is forcing anyone to do anything in any sane sense of the word 'force'?
> This whole GPL thing has just been a big headache to me and I regret ever choosing it.
Clearly you didn't read, or understand, the GPL before you chose it for your work, or maybe you just didn't think far enough ahead to realize that the problems that you had are inevitable if you use the GPL. I personally release my code under GPL *specifically* because I don't care about satisfying people who want to link my code into their application without obeying the GPL. I am not going to re-release it under the Lesser GNU Public License, because I chose the GPL *specifically* because of the freedoms that it guarantees users, and switching to the LGPL just backpedals on that in a way that makes one wonder what the point of using GPL in the first place ever was. Now I'm not saying that *you* have to use the GPL, or that the LGPL isn't the right choice for you, or that BSD, MIT, etc, licenses aren't better for you. It's your code, you should be the only person in the world who says what the best license is for your software. But I don't understand why you would talk about the GPL like *it* was the cause of some problems when in fact it was just your choosing of the *wrong* license for your intentions was the real cause.
Also the BSD without the "advert" clause is almost exactly the same thing as public domain. Why you would care th
I lived in the USA all of my life and was very used to NTSC. I moved to New Zealand a year ago where we have PAL. To be honest, I didn't notice the extra resolution or color fidelity of PAL. What I did notice was the flicker that PAL exhibits in bright scenes. However I have since become accustomed to that and don't really notice.
I don't think that NTSC is much worse than PAL in image quality, at least from the perspective of someone who just wants to watch TV and isn't interested in showing off superior image quality detection skills. I'll bet that more than 90% of people wouldn't even notice any difference at all between PAL and NTSC. I know my wife didn't.
As to the movie transfer thing - what do they do for NTSC, which is 30 fps and which would require movies to be sped up *even more* to match the frame rate. Obviously they don't do that - so whatever they do for NTSC, why didn't they do the same thing for PAL instead of speeding movies up for PAL?
I have noticed that some TV shows from the USA are sped up for PAL, and have corresponding high pitched voices. It's funny to see shows that you know what the actors really sound like, and listen to them now sounding like little kids.
The better CS undergrad programs don't really teach languages per se. The main focus of the curriculum should be the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, combined with the practical aspects of software development. Since languages themselves are part of the practical aspect of software development, in addition to also being the focus of some computer science theory, it is unavoidable that languages should themselves be studied to some degree, and also used to a large degree to practice the theory that is being taught. Most theoretical CS only really needs 'pseudocode' to illustrate the concepts being discussed. But since students are often asked to write programs to demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter, a real language is unavoidable. But the language itself is secondary to the real meat of the subject, which should all be mathematical and theoretical in nature.
At CMU the very first CS class (that losers like me who didn't AP out of the first CS course, mostly because my high school didn't even have computer classes let alone AP computer classes!) really did focus on teaching a language - Pascal - and a significant part of the class was the learning of the language. It was the least useful CS class I took in the long run (not surprising, as an introductory course in any subject is likely to be the same). Subsequent courses would spend 1 - 2 weeks going over the fundamentals of the language to be used in coursework for the remainder of the class (which in some classes was C, in some was C++, some used ML, others Scheme, etc), to get everyone started, and after that, you had to figure it out on your own in conjunction with actually learning the theory that was being taught. It really isn't that hard to pick up a new language once you know a couple, although I did have a hard time with ML, mostly because I was completely unmotivated to learn it, feeling that it was absolutely useless to know (I was right).
No really good CS program has any classes with names like "Java 101" or "Advanced C++". To use a carpentry analogy, I would expect a really good carpentry school to teach the fundamental rules and "theory" of carpentry, so that the student upon graduation really understood what carpentry was all about and could apply their knowledge to aspects of the subject that they hadn't even encountered in school. I wouldn't expect a good carpentry school to have classes like "Advanced Hammering" and "Bandsaw 101". The courses would instead be "Introduction to House Frames" and "How to Construct Joints". You'd be expected to learn the use of the tools in the natural course of studying these subjects.
It's the same for CS. Good programs don't teach the tools, they teach the *subject*; learning the tools is intrinsic in the study of the theory.
I think you need to re-read the GP post. You've totally missed the point. The GP was suggesting that the only real factor in addiction is the psychological nature of wanting to use a drug to escape the problems of one's life. The physical effects of breaking addiction are not considered in his post; and although I agree with you, your statement doesn't really address his point, and you are actually agreeing with me.
> Nicotine addiction is the toughest one to break. Programs for getting people off cocaine are about 40%
> successful. Programs for getting people off smoking are about 10-20% successful. Also, addicts tend to "age
> out" of cocaine and heroin addiction; after age 40, most of them eventually give it up. Not nicotine; people
> smoke their way to the grave.
You are making it sound like nicotine addiction is somehow much stronger than any other drug. I disagree completely (never having been addicted to nicotine or any drug, I can't speak from personal experience, but I have a hard time believing that one drug in particular, like nicotine, is so much more addictive than other drugs, especially those that have a much more profound effect on the brain like cocaine or heroin).
I think the reason that people are so much more likely to stay addicted to nicotine is that it is so much more socially acceptable, and also so much less likely to be an immediate 'problem' in your life. It has long term effects (for some people, not for everybody). But something like heroin addiction has an immediate effect - it causes you to be basically completely incapacitated as a person. It changes your lifestyle profoundly. It sucks away all of your money and time (from what I have read).
If you are addicted to nicotine, what forces do you have trying to get you off of it? Some family and friends occasionally urging you to quit, and maybe your own feeling that you should quit "sometime". And what negative impact is it having on your life? It's an expense, but it's probably not making you poor or driving you to a life of crime to support your smoking habit. Maybe it annoys other people but it doesn't prevent you from having a normal social life. Smoking, aside from its long-term effect on your health, is nearly completely innocuous.
Compare to a serious drug addiction. All of your friends and family (who are not addicts themselves!) will probably be desperately trying to get you to quit, *all the time*. The consequences of drug addiction are so severe that you will be actively working as hard as you can to hide your use of drugs from anyone who cares about you. And the effect on your life of using the drug will be profound. Your life on the drug and off the drug will be *totally* different. If you're addicted to heroin, it's my understanding that you will care about little else in your life except for getting more heroin.
So is it very surprising that with all of the forces trying to push one away from drug addiction, as well as the serious ramifications that it has on one's life, that more people quit it than quit smoking?
Your personal experiences are not enough to draw your conclusions about all addicts like you have.
There are many different types of addicts. Some will use whatever is available, and if they are cut off from some drug (either by it just not being available, or by something like this vaccine that makes it useless even if it is available), then they will just find something else.
There are other types of addicts who are addicted to a specific substance and genuinely want to, and would put forth the effort required to, quit this singular addiction. And who are committed to fighting any urges they might have to try other drugs.
The urge to use drugs in general is much weaker than the urge to use a drug that one is specifically addicted to. The vaccine makes that task of quitting a specific drug a matter of just resisting general urges to go out and find something to get high, which is much easier than resisting the urge to use a specific drug that one is addicted to.
The vaccine in question is not for people like your friends. Those people will have no hope to change their drug using habits until they actually want to and are willing to put forth the effort to quit and to change their lifestyles. And when they are, vaccines like this will be immensely helpful to them.
That being said, if they are OK with their lives as they are and they aren't hurting anyone around them, then there is no reason that I can think of why anyone should expect them to, or demand that they should, stop doing what they are doing.
> The grandparents point is that sure, you would say (if they give you a choice) that you want to get off the
> drugs and are miserable. This happens when you are comming down and never want to see another rolled up
> twenty again. What happens the next day, when your physical craving is gone but the mental dependancy is
> still there? What he was trying to say is that you will find other ways to get some sort of "high". This
> could simply be because its in your genetic nature.
There are people who want to quit, but find it very difficult because of the nature of addiction. If the drug in question no longer produced the high, then the feelings of compulsion to use the drug would dimish over time and then be gone. For some people, this wouldn't be enough; because of other personality issues or life issues, they would still be seeking out something to get high off of.
But I think that for alot of addicts, those who really do want to quit their addiction and change their lifestyle to eliminate the use of drugs altogether, such a tool would be immensely helpful. These people *may* feel a desire to seek out other drugs, but that would be a much easier impulse to control than an already established addiction to a specific drug.
> What about a vaccine for homosexuality or ambition? The vaccine presumes that there is something "diseased"
> about a cocaine user. This is a moralistic value judgment, which makes it a violation of the liberty of men
> who are free from those particular moral chains.
You are going out of your way to see a tool made available to those who voluntarily decide to use it, as something that's going to be forced on people just because of its very existence.
What if there *were* a vaccine for homosexuality or ambition? Would its very existence be immoral? I don't think so; I don't see how you could even suggest this. It's like saying that guns are implicitly evil, because they *can* be used to violate someone's rights. But guns *are not* implicitly evil. It's all up to how they are used. Same with such vaccines.
If a gay person wanted to stop being gay and there was a tool available to help him or her do it, what would be immoral about them choosing to use this tool? I am sure from what you have said that you would agree that a person has every right to choose to use whatever tools on themselves that they want to. So where's the problem with such vaccines?
People should be allowed to use drugs. It is their own choice about what to do with their own body. And similarly, people should be allowed to use anti-drug vaccines, because again, it's their own choice about what to do with their own body.
For a fraction of people who are addicted to a drug or alcohol, taking away the ability to use that drug or alcohol will cause them to seek something else out to fulfill the same purpose.
But for another fraction (and I think this is the larger fraction but that's certainly debateable), taking away the ability to use that drug or alcohol will give them an opportunity to stay clean of all drugs or alcohol, which they will do.
You can't be addicted to a drug you haven't even tried yet. So when you are clean, you have to decide if you're going to seek out something to become addicted to or not. Some people will choose to do so, but I think most will not.
The vaccine is a tool to help people who are having a hard time getting over a particular addiction. It allows them to, when they are strong in their convictions, make a decision to quit the addiction, and prevent themselves from, when they are weak and craving the thing they were addicted to, getting high again and starting the addiction all over again. Trust me, this tool will be a very very powerful way to help addicts who *want* to quit, do so.
You are overgeneralizing to the point of making any discussions on the topic worthless.
Also this statement is flat out wrong:
"Addictive behavior with anything is a desire to insulate yourself against actual or perceived problems."
I guess you don't have any experience with addiction because while this can be a factor, it's not 100% of the reason for addictions. Take nicotine addiction as an example. Exactly what actual or perceived problem are nicotine addicts seeking to insulate themselves from? Maybe kids who start smoking do it to insulate themselves from the perceived problem of not being "cool" or something. But adults who have been smoking for years, and couldn't care less about whether or not they are perceived as "cool"? What problem exactly are they trying to insulate themselves against?
Another example - I have an addictive nature when it comes to video games. Fortunately I don't really like MMORPGs or else I'd probably have been sucked into one long ago. But for the games I do like, the characteristics of my behavior surrounding the game are very much like a cocaine or nicotine addiction. I even get a little euphoric 'high' when I realize that I am going to be able to play my game for a few hours, and at the end when I have to stop, I get irritable and angry because I want to keep going. I honestly believe that to a much lesser degree than with serious drug addictions, my brain is responding to many of the same factors.
Now what problem am I try to insulte myself from when I play an addictive game? There is no 'problem' there. I just like some games so much that my brain has developed an addiction to the act of playing those games. I'm not trying to escape anything when I play. My life is fine otherwords. I have nothing to escape from.
Vaccines against the effects of drugs would I think be extremely helpful to people who want to quit but have difficulty controlling their impulse to use the drug. You can call it a crutch if you want, but it doesn't really matter. If it helps people get out of a estructive addiction, does it really matter?
Some addicts will undoubtedly seek out other drugs if their drug of choice stops working. For these people, vaccines against specific drugs would only have short term benefit. There is always the chance that one of these people, once clean and given some opportunities to change their life situation, may decide to fight the urge to seek other drugs. But most will probably
That is a really good point.
No I can't. How much does a mirror cost, when bought in bulk? They're using 184,000 mirrors in the Nevada Solar One project. Let's say each one costs $20. That's a total of $3.68 million. Now add let's say $50 per mirror for control equipment. That adds $9.2 million. Now maybe the installation costs $25 per unit (paying some dude $100 per hour to do the installation, and he can install 4 per hour). That's another $4.6 million. Now let's say that the collector costs $1 million to build and install (it's just a pipe with oil I believe). Now that liquid salt energy storage system. Let's put that at $25 million. I have no idea how much it would cost but that seems generous. Finally, costs for running all the cables and stuff that move the power around and deliver it to the grid and what have you. $10 million. Now throw in 50% extra for miscellaneous costs of installing the mirrors (vehicles, fuel, lawyers, managers, whatever). Grand total: $80.22 million. They said that the total costs to build it is $250 million. That is 3x more expensive than what I thought were pretty generous estimates.
So I repeat my question: Why is it so expensive to build an array of a bunch of mirrors and a collector?
It's not that I don't believe it. I believe it because it's in the article; $250 million is how much it costs. I just don't understand *why*.
TFA pointed out that it would be harmless to birds because the mirrors would not get hot. This assumes that the concern is that birds would land on the mirrors. I was extending the question to, what if the bird gets near the collector? And also I added a "Does anyone care" question, because I too agree that it doesn't seem like a big deal even if some birds do die. But I wanted to hear others' opinions too.
Are we going to get interesting comments about the technology in use here? Is it practical? Why is molten salt used instead of something else? Isn't that dangerous? Can't birds get zapped if they fly too close to the collector where thousands of mirrors are pointing? Do we even care? Why is it so expensive to build an array of a bunch of mirrors and a collector? Is it dangerous to be near this thing, where I suppose you could be blinded if you glanced in the wrong direction?
Or are we going to just get more boring re-hashes of the same useless arguments about gas prices, global warming, the uselessness of alternative energies, etc etc ad nauseum?
That doesn't work if you're not playing a jedi character.
Well that seals the deal for me. I won't even bother trying Tremulous because I tried Natural Selection and thought it was awful.
Mind you this was a few years back; I don't know how much has changed in that time. But NS to me took the concept of twitch reflexes to such an extreme that it was completely unenjoyable. I just read on the Tremulous forums about how their recommendation is that your mouse sensitivity should be set up so that you can do a full 240 degree spin with a single hand swipe. My god I do not want to play a game where it's important for me to be doing 240 degree spins. I really enjoyed Socom 2 on the PS/2 when I played with a group of friends, and also Jedi Academy on the PC. Both games require good aim and good evasion but neither required the ridiculous levels of twitch reflexes that NS did when I played it. I spectated as other players in NS and I couldn't even tell what the hell was going on. The dude was flying around so fast that everything was a blur. Then when I played, people were whizzing around me and killing me before I could even tell what was happening.
Sure, if I played the game for weeks and developed my twitch reflexes I suppose I could hold my own. But I don't really want to play a game for weeks just to start to have fun with it. And I don't want to become good at a game where good means just being able to spin around really fast and line up aim at the other dude before his ultra reflexes can do the same to you. I appreciate some degree of reflexes in games - which is why I don't play MMORPG's, their combat systems bore me to tears - but I think it's a fine balance and NS (and probably Tremulous) are just comical in how far they go overboard with twitch reflexes.
My favorite multiplayer game of all time was Jedi Academy in seige mode. It is so cool for each team to have multiple objectives each game, and it makes each game interesting because you're not just doing the same thing for 15 minutes straight. Also I think the balance of reflexes vs. strategy was good. The only thing that bugged me was losers who played dark jedi and used force choke. So boring to just sit there while you're being carried around and choked and there is no way to break out of it. If I ever saw someone getting choked on my team, I made it my priority #1 to shoot the dark jedi who had them to stop the choke. Also snipers sucked because they turned a fun game into a 'wtf just happened' experience.
I guess that sums it up for me. The more 'wtf just happened' moments a game has, the less interesting it is to me. And NS (and probably Tremulous) was just one long sequence of 'wtf' moments for me.
That still wouldn't affect the validity of his point. Just because he would move from the 99.9% camp that doesn't care about accessibility, to the 0.01% camp that does, doesn't change the fact that the vast, vast majority of people don't have need for those features.
That being said, his post as a whole is pretty lame.
Are you saying that most people are like YOU, and have services for converting home movies to professional menu based DVDs? Somehow I doubt that. Most people who are filling up big hard drives are doing it by pirating movies and music. Period. Which is exactly my point - except for people who are pirating stuff, which honestly I don't think is a large percentage - maybe 5-10% tops? - don't need exceedingly large drives.
As to the latest games, how many latest games do people typically need to have installed at once? This is an honest question, I don't know. But I'll bet that once again the number of people who need to have multiple 10 GB games installed at one time is a pretty small fraction of the computer using population.
To answer your question: a long time, since the vast majority of users, vocal Slashdot geeks aside, don't give a rats ass about hacking any piece of consumer electronics they own. Most people buy products based on the features that the product claim to have, not on features that they *want* the product to have and believe that they can get by hacking the device.
A correlary of this statement is that Apple really isn't fighting its users, as a group. It's just fighting a small minority of users who hack their iPhones, so your statement about Apply "fighting their users makes no real sense", itself makes no real sense.
Disclaimer: I don't own an iPhone, but I might if I was richer.
I have never used more than 20 GB on any system I have ever owned. I can go years and years on the same system without using significantly more space. But I don't pirate music and movies, and it's pretty hard to fill up a hard drive without doing those things (I guess if you install lots of software that could do it too, but the "working set" of software for most people is still probably pretty small and you can always uninstall stuff you are not using to make room for new software). I would be exceedingly happy with a fast, reliable, low-power, and cheap 32 GB solid state drive.
So, not everyone is like you, and needs constantly expanding amounts of persistent storage. For most people who are not pirating music and movies, modest hard drive capacities are just fine. Hell, even if you do pirate movies, you can always erase them after watching them instead of building up bigger and bigger collections of stolen movies.
More like "never been and never will be" ...
I agree with you completely. I think that *every* standard should come with a reference implementation. I can't even comprehend why standards bodies don't do this. It is the single most effective way to ensure that your standard is adopted. And it proves, as you said, that the standard is reasonably implementable - the code will demonstrate how easily implemented the standard is, and certainly the standard body would modify the standard where its egregiously difficult to implement instead of sinking lots of time into writing a difficult implementation, which is better for everyone as well - by providing a reference implementation, the standard body would be forced to "eat their own dog food", which would definitely encourage polishing up the rough parts before finalizing the standard. Once again, good for everybody.
Seriously, this company is like the Microsoft of web applications. They don't innovate anything, they just buy other companies or reproduce other ideas that have gained popularity. A 215 billion dollar company whose whole business plan is to make incremental improvements to existing online applications? Ridiculous. Even their original "product", the search engine, was a copy of an existing idea, with incremental improvements.
I keep hoping for someone to come up with even better search technology and put us out of our misery. Google needs to go away.
Clearly your statement depends very heavily on what 'quality of life' means. Your statement *sounds* logical until one realizes that it is based on such a subjective concept - quality of life.
I sincerely believe that quality of life can be *better* with less consumption, and at the same time better for the planet, and for this reason, I reject your claim that the cost of meaningful conservation would impact quality of life. It would change lifestyles for sure, but I don't think they would be 'worse' lifestyles from a quality of life standpoint.