And the result will be precisely the same as with all the other "attacks" on popular media or entertainment. Nothing at all will change. That's why I don't get why people are flipping out about these particular "attacks". They're just social commentary, and simply designed to promote more awareness of the commentator's particular views - nothing more, nothing less.
What's hilarious is that feminist social critics like Anita Sarkeesian (that's who we're really talking about, right?) probably now get significantly more attention because of the attacks on them than because of their criticisms of videogames in the first place. People are nothing if not consistent, repeatedly demonstrating their willingness to fall prey to the Streisand Effect.
I was more concerned by Jack Thompson or a number of legislators who started spouting their "save the children" idiocy, because those people tend to actually bring lawsuits or even new legislation to combat whatever windmills they're tilting at today, and those can have real-life consequences. Even for all that, we can see that their efforts effectively came to naught. Videogames are still with us, are more mainstream and more diverse than ever in scope and content.
I'm not so sure I'd blame management for the myriad of hardware device security failures... at least, not entirely (they're management, so they take some blame for anything that happens in the company, after all). My feeling it's also engineers who even today think about functionality first and security second. We've seen that pattern in both hardware and software over and over, after all. It wasn't management who designed a horribly broken wireless security protocol called WEP a few years back. It was engineers without security experience. I think things have gotten a bit better in some areas, but I'd bet that sort of thinking is still rampant. Just recently we saw smart light bulb developers storing keys directly in firmware that made it trivial to breach a network. Those are stupid, elemental mistakes that any security expert would have warned against.
My guess is that a lot of those engineers thought, like many people here, "who the hell wouldn't change their default username and password", without thinking a step beyond to how they might actually design the system to encourage people to do that as part of the setup procedure. My experience has been that many engineers and programmers tend to be extremely poor at empathizing with normal people about how confusing modern technology can be, similar to how most of my math professors could never understand how anyone couldn't find Calculus simple to understand and beautiful to behold.
The last line is a bit of tongue in cheek, of course. I'm not really going to turn into a feminist any more than I'll turn into a flying squirrel, but I might be a bit more sympathetic than I used to be.
You're correct, of course, that I can't tell for certain who is acting badly. But let's not kid ourselves. I've been a gamer long enough that I can make some pretty well-educated guesses. Tell me: which of the two groups (feminists or gamers) is rather well known for horrible and abusive language online? Have you ever played an Xbox game such as Halo online against strangers and actually listened to the chat? What about League of Legends - a warm, friendly, welcoming community, right? Have you ever talked to women and their experiences while playing MMOs? There are unfortunately some elements* of the gaming community that are well known for their horrid behavior. I won't even play online with strangers anymore, because I just don't feel like subjecting myself to a tirade of abuse from idiots. So let's just say I'm making an educated guess based on the behavior and evidence I've both seen first-hand and heard about second and third-hand over the last decade, ok?
I appreciate your position. You're free to ignore this whole mess. I don't blame you, because it's an ugly business. But this isn't a "storm in a teacup" to those women getting death and rape threats - it's something very real and very frightening - they wouldn't have felt the need to leave their homes otherwise. It's gotten bad enough for those women that, as a fellow game developer, I've been feeling like I should do more to speak out in support of civility. Obviously, I can't see into anyone's hearts or minds and declare them to be 100% innocent, but I honestly don't think developers like Brianna Wu deserve the backlash they're seeing. Writing a few supportive comments on slashdot is the absolute least I can do. I'm thinking of what I can also do where I put my professional name behind it as well, but I'm not really well known enough for anyone to care about that, I think.
* Make no mistake, I believe it's a small proportion that's spoiling the batch for the rest. There are also wonderful elements, such as the strong support for things like Child's Play charity, and the bonding that occurs between like-minded gamers and their love of the games.
You can find a single instance of someone doing almost anything. The other day I came across a story about a women who crawled into bed with and raped her male neighbor. Know why both of these made the news? Because it was unusual. Showing an example of an outlier doesn't make your case any more credible.
The notion that they're sending themselves death threats is a fantasy. Brianna Wu addressed this issue, saying she said she would be crazy to take that sort of risk, because if anyone found out she did that, it would completely destroy her credibility and her entire career. Frankly, I believe her, as there are simply too many examples of this happening for it to be some vast conspiracy by these different people. If we find out that's happened, then I'll come down on her just as hard, but until we see any evidence of this, I'm presuming this stuff is real.
Are they profiting from the exposure? Sure. Anita Sarkeesian makes her living by "stirring the pot". That's what she does. If you don't like it, don't watch her videos. It's not like those videos she produces are going to cause your favorite games to stop being produced, nor does she actually even advocate that, if you've actually listened to her at all. It's no excuse for what happened, and blaming the victims for this is not helping your cause.
Do you know what I find really ironic? I'm probably the last person who would actually agree with most of the radical feminist nonsense that gets spouted. I find a lot of the sheer man-hating elements incredibly offensive. But nothing - repeat nothing - warrants the reaction I've seen. I find myself having to side with the feminists because it's simply the right thing to do. It doesn't mean I agree with what they're saying in many cases. And interestingly enough, the sheer bile and venom spat at these women goes a long way toward validating their views that we live in a sexist and misogynistic society, and the more I see of gamergate, the harder it is for me to disagree.
So, congratulations gamergate. You're well on the way to turning me into a feminist, God help me.
You know, maybe GamerGate was sparked by those events, but it's really not about that any more for me. The moment the unbelievable misogyny and the death threats started, it overshadowed everything else. I don't care who was behind it. Frankly, I think it actually exposed a problem far worse than anything related to journalistic integrity, and that's the lack of even the most basic tenets of civilization in many of our online communities. And actually, it's not just relegated to GamerGate.
Ask any prominent female figure who's active online, and she'll probably tell you some eye-opening stories about online harassment. How about having pictures taking of your house along with implied threats? How about photos of your children Photoshopped with pornographic or violent content? That's stuff that's actually happened, and it's driven some women off the internet and out of the public eye entirely - which was probably the intent to begin with.
You wonder why the issue is only framed in terms of misogyny and harassment? Because people are getting doxxed and real, honest-to-God death threats are being made against them. You dismiss them as "anonymous", but seriously, who exactly signs a death threat with their real name? What distinguishes a "lol troll" death threat from a "legitimate" one other than the intent to kill in the minds of the senders? The notion that these women are sending themselves or making these threats up seems a bit far-fetched to me. In either case, whether an intent to kill is real or not, what is undeniably real is the intent to threaten and harass these people.
Do you know why GamerGate is being "buried"? Because compared to "journalistic integrity", women getting harassed with death threats is about a 100x bigger deal. It's not a mystery. Gamers who verbally attacked those women instead of articulating a message should have taken a page from Ghandi or MLK. If you take away your opponents ability to attack your methods, then all they have left is the ability to attack your message, and then you can compete on the merits of your arguments.
destroying the lives of kids saying stupid things online.
Me? I'd call it a valuable life lesson.
The moment you target someone else, personally and by name, and threaten to kill them... that's a very clear and very obvious line. There's nothing slippery about it. Protection against threats like that is not a police state. It's called civilization. I don't care if the cesspools of the internet have been getting away with it up until now just because it didn't catch the public's eye. Enough's enough. This shit has got to stop, and frankly, it appears that the only way to make it stop is if people have a reasonable fear that there might be real-world consequences - that's something few people like to admit. Their rights stop right at the line where they start trying to ruin other people's lives.
It's pretty damn easy to pontificate about slippery slopes or a police state when you're not the one getting personally addressed death threats. Or aren't a women, who, coincidentally, happen to be a bit physically smaller and weaker on average than men and therefore are more vulnerable to physical assaults.
that said, it's unlikely that a kid who grows up with too much vr is going to die. they just might feel a bit dizzy walking around the real world. is that horrible?
Um... yeah. Actually, being dizzy as you walk around in the real world sounds pretty awful. That's where most of us spend the bulk of their time, after all.
As with all things, including 3D VR, moderation is probably best, especially with young children. Not that we need to panic about each new technology that comes along, but rather, it seems reasonable to take a "prove to me it's safe over the long term" rather than "jump in immediately and wait to see if it's harmful later" with younger kids, who turn out to be particularly susceptible to all sorts of things that adults are a bit more resistant to.
I'm pretty sure I screwed up my eyes by doing silly things like designing videogame sprites on 20 square-per-inch engineering graph paper when I was a youngster, and of course, being a voracious reader. No one else in my family wears glasses. It makes perfect sense to me that children's eyes would well be more susceptible to aberrations if 3D viewing is done excessively.
It's true that the founders of the US generally spoke of "democracy" as meaning "direct democracy", as opposed to our "republic", and both they would likely agree with your assessment of that system. However, most modern usage clearly intends "democracy" to be an umbrella term, of which "republic" is simply one specific variation. A republic can also be known as a "representative democracy".
So while it may be a buzzword for politicians, it's actually not really incorrect. It's just slightly less precise than the term "republic".
Do you know what you're asking for, in essence? The Apple store. Some people complain about how locked down it is, but on the other hand, malware is almost non-existent on iPhones. Android, on the other hand, gets something like 97% of the world's mobile malware. That's the essence of a walled garden. It's kept pretty, beautiful, and safe because of those walls surrounding it.
Maybe the walled garden approach is better for some people, but I think others enjoy the freedom that Android gives them. Google has decided that it doesn't want the responsibility of vetting apps, so that's what we get. I'm not sure I'd mind, since I think I'd probably prefer fewer but safer apps that were vetted instead of the current glut of millions of "free" apps we have now. I can imagine I surely don't speak for everyone, though.
What are you talking about? I can clearly see those garments. Why, I'm not sure I've every seen such magnificent rainment, in fact! Such finery, of course, can only be seen by those with the most discerning of eyes, and judgement to match, I daresay.
Yeah, I understand the feeling a bit. I'm not sure I agree that this feature would be worth the price in development costs and app stability. This would utterly break all of the existing apps on the market. If you don't want to give apps permission, you might as well just disable the app completely, at least in practice, because it would probably just crash out at some random time. That's not a good user experience, even if it was actually what you wanted.
I think a lot of this could be alleviated if Google simply encouraged developers to provide more detailed reasons as to why various permissions are needed. Perhaps for each permission, the developer should be required to fill in a line or two indicating which features of the app rely on that particular permission. I've look at apps before and wondered to myself "why the heck do you need permission for x or y?"
That seems a bit more user and developer friendly than trying to play guess-the-permission games with your apps by selectively turning them off and on again and watching where they crap out.
Consider me more educated about Alaska, although I was aware of the goings on in California. Also, I hope folks realize I was just making a nonsensical, tongue-in-cheek comment just to indicate that Washington and Colorado have passed similar measures. I suppose I should have left out the "paved the way" part, because it was probably just a matter of getting their first more than anything else.
BTW, I think conservatives are starting to come around on the drug war, albeit slowly. I think many people are starting to see that it's just not worth the trouble to criminalize the stuff. Besides, it's sort of hard to demonize the stuff now that it's decriminalized and society hasn't collapsed. Frankly, I think alcohol is much more destructive in many ways, but we all had a vivid example of what a disaster it was to prohibit that particular vice.
So, if I actually had granular permissions, and they broke your app... my problem is solved, because I'm going to uninstall your application on the assumption that it's either malicious, and doing stuff it shouldn't, or badly written, and doing stuff it shouldn't.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but... Why do you need granular permissions to do that? You can already see what apps need what permissions, right? And apps can't change those permissions without your explicit consent. The only think you can't do is allow or deny permission to them on a per-app / per-permission basis, but it should be pretty obvious that a flashlight app doesn't need access to your contacts or phone logs, or SMS messages, right? As such, the result is the same - stay far away from that app, because it's asking for too many permissions, and therefore can't be trusted.
How so? Many manufacturers heavily customize things quite a bit to differentiate their product. Unless you're saying that Google should disallow that and only allow "stock" OS installs? Or can the OS be updated without impacting the customization?
People have done that and the answer is often "because society repeatedly told me it wasn't a job for women."
Well, it should work itself out in about 10 or 15 years then, because good grief, are we ever pounding it into people these days that we really, really want more women in technology.
Interesting. I thought most considered C++ to be strongly typed. It just allows you to break the rules, so to speak. It's helpful and sometimes even necessary to do that when writing a memory allocator, or creating a variant class, as a couple of examples. That's why C-style casts should be discourage in favor of the more explicit C++ casts. They're finer-grained, and the verbosity makes you think a bit harder as to if and why you really need a cast. It also makes searching for casts in the codebase easier.
My experience with C++ 11 has mirrored yours. After an entire career of working mostly in a C++98 style, C++ 11 feels almost like a new language, after creating a new project from scratch that I've been working on for several years now. I've described it before as almost like working in C#, but with uglier syntax.
C++ is one of those languages, though, where if you don't know what you're doing, you can create downright evil code... probably even worse than bad C code, and that gets pretty bad. I think that's partially why it has a bad reputation for a lot of people.
That's an interesting thought. I've long figured that good programmers were good programmers regardless of the language used, and I'm sure the opposite likely applies as well.
Honestly, my thoughts after reading the summary and skimming the paper were more about questioning whether one could quantify code quality algorithmically, as they apparently did. If I understand correctly, they're quantifying the number and types of bugs and trying to sort them into categories by keywords, but does that actually correlate directly to code quality? I've seen some bug-free code that was absolutely horrible. OpenSSL comes to mind - even though it's reasonably bug-free and stable, when people looked into a little deeper, they realized that, architecturally speaking, it was a disaster.
Interesting paper, but the end results are unsurprising. Naturally, languages that make more efforts to protect the programmers from their own mistakes will tend to have have fewer bugs. Of course, the kicker is that languages are chosen for a variety of reasons, not necessarily because of which one produces overall fewer bugs. Languages often are chosen because of ecosystem, interoperability, performance, history/legacy, or even just personal preferences.
I don't hear many people joking about this shit. They're putting serious pressure on the tech companies to be more "diverse". Or rather, the tech companies are tending to do it themselves rather than let someone preempt the discussion, because they're terrified of being labeled as racist or sexist. The fact remains that there are very few qualified black or female applications for many of core tech jobs, like those that actually program software.
Instead, as a reaction, these companies will likely favor less represented demographics in non technical roles to get their overall numbers to balance out, so that they can claim to be more "diverse". The result? If you're a white male, good luck getting an HR or designer job at a tech company. Oh, except for the ones at the top of the power structure, because... well, we can't sacrifice all *those* jobs to balance the numbers, of course.
Look, I'm not trying to complain about the "poor white male". It's not like there won't be opportunities elsewhere. It's just the absurdity of failing to see what's pretty obvious to everyone except those who are trying to stay within politically correct lines. For whatever reason, many more women than men are simply not interested in or pursuing careers such as software development. Newsflash: there are also very fewer female composers, sound engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and imbalance remains in many other highly technical fields.
Why? I don't know - I happen to be a white male, so I have no perspective on what a black woman goes through in life. I became a programmer because I was fascinated by computers and how they worked at an early age, simple as that. Why not ask women why they didn't become programmers rather than focusing on the end of the process, where the damage has long been already done?
The uncomfortable answer may be this: maybe they just aren't interested. People don't want to hear that, because it really doesn't leave much room for a solution to the problem, except to try to force feed tech to girls early in life in the hopes they find it interesting and later fix the imbalance.
Maybe. Apple has a way of bringing established technologies and making them appeal to the mass market rather than a geeky niche. That's exactly what they've done with Apple Pay, for example - their contribution wasn't inventing the systems, but integrating it and bringing together the coalition of banks to support it. They'll take the basic concepts X10 pioneered, except it won't be crap. They'll be expensive high end toys, but they'll probably work extremely well and will be relatively simple to use.
Moreover, they've gained a lot of privacy and security-related experience, so they'll probably get that part of it right. Or at least have a better shot than someone dealing with security for the first time - they're obviously not immune to mistakes as well. Moreover, they're in the business of selling hardware, not tracking you, so they have an incentive for making that hardware secure.
All that being said, I think the "smart home" is still going to be limited to a few interesting devices people pick up and use here and there, not the completely integrated "home of tomorrow" that some people imagine. Things like smartphones are a "no-brainer" sort of technology, where the utility of a universal computer and communication device has been obvious for a long time (look at Star Trek's communicator and tricorder, or Dick Tracy's communication watch).
I just don't see the home automation market that way. Probably the only point it will really take off is when the electronics are so cheap that it's not much more expensive to get the automated version of various devices, and at that point, the completely ubiquitous nature of it will allow people to do some clever things with it. Who knows? I could be wrong, and people are actually clamoring for ways to turn lights in their home on or off from across town or the other side of the planet.
As a Washingtonian and a fellow exclusive vote-by-mail citizen, I agree. We get a comprehensive pamphlet (except without info about the initiatives for some odd reason), and I took an hour or so to read about everyone I wasn't familiar with (mostly judges) and fill in the bubbles while I sit in the comfort of my own home. The forms use the bubble-type scantron format. I believe they're counted by machine, but during a recount, I recall they were recounted by hand.
Voting is a very human process, and moreover, is all about politics. That means there are always going to be some percentage of shenanigans on election day. Voting machines will glitch and mark ballots incorrectly. Some candidates will get lots of illegal, repeat votes. Some candidates will have votes for them "lost".
This will happen with electronic or paper formats, because what's at state is power (mental exercise: read articles substituting "power" for "politics" and "power-broker" for "politician"), and some people will do just about anything to gain power or ensure their side gains power. And each side is convinced that the other side is pulling more shenanigans than their side is.
In the end, like with most things, perfect is the enemy of good. We have a system that, by and large, works pretty well, when you view it against the broader context of history and non-democratic countries around the world. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to improve things or quash corruption where we see it, but just keep in mind that irregularities represent a pretty small percentage, and you're going to hear a lot of stories (some of which may be false or politically motivated - this is all about power, remember) in a country of hundreds of millions of voters.
General Electric, in particular, entered smart lighting market with the introduction of GE Link, a smart LED bulb that consumers can remotely control from anywhere in the world and sync with other connected devices.
Wow, really? A bulb you can remotely control from anywhere in the world, huh? And I'll bet the service that let's us do all that will only cost us $9.99 a month, right? What a bargain. I mean, I've always wanted to turn my kitchen light on or off from the grocery store. That's going to be so handy!
Meh. At some point, this phase 2 of the home automation fad will probably boil down to a few practical gizmos that people find useful, and history will simply laugh at our "smart bulbs" for the ridiculous overkill it represents in attempted convenience.
Well, consider that you're comparing the first generation of 3D games against the last generation (in their heyday, that is) of 2D games. It's not really a fair comparison. Personally, as I move away from the awful first generation of each, I reach a "good enough" threshold, where I'm no longer distracted by the bad graphics. Halo on the original Xbox still looks reasonably good. I've recently been playing Final Fantasy X in HD on the PS3, and it looks great for being two console generations behind.
Besides, given the fact that kids and adults alike have wasted about a billion hours on Minecraft, we clearly have to conclude that attractive-looking graphics aren't everything.
Gates is now pretty much a full time philanthropist. When he says he's going to give $500 million, I think we can take him at his word.
Anyhow, good for you Mr. Gates. I think this is money well directed, and hopefully will be well spent. For all of our first world problems and complaints about our health care system, we sometimes forget that there are still many millions of people suffering and dying because they don't have the advantages we have.
Slashdot Mirror
And the result will be precisely the same as with all the other "attacks" on popular media or entertainment. Nothing at all will change. That's why I don't get why people are flipping out about these particular "attacks". They're just social commentary, and simply designed to promote more awareness of the commentator's particular views - nothing more, nothing less.
What's hilarious is that feminist social critics like Anita Sarkeesian (that's who we're really talking about, right?) probably now get significantly more attention because of the attacks on them than because of their criticisms of videogames in the first place. People are nothing if not consistent, repeatedly demonstrating their willingness to fall prey to the Streisand Effect.
I was more concerned by Jack Thompson or a number of legislators who started spouting their "save the children" idiocy, because those people tend to actually bring lawsuits or even new legislation to combat whatever windmills they're tilting at today, and those can have real-life consequences. Even for all that, we can see that their efforts effectively came to naught. Videogames are still with us, are more mainstream and more diverse than ever in scope and content.
I'm not so sure I'd blame management for the myriad of hardware device security failures... at least, not entirely (they're management, so they take some blame for anything that happens in the company, after all). My feeling it's also engineers who even today think about functionality first and security second. We've seen that pattern in both hardware and software over and over, after all. It wasn't management who designed a horribly broken wireless security protocol called WEP a few years back. It was engineers without security experience. I think things have gotten a bit better in some areas, but I'd bet that sort of thinking is still rampant. Just recently we saw smart light bulb developers storing keys directly in firmware that made it trivial to breach a network. Those are stupid, elemental mistakes that any security expert would have warned against.
My guess is that a lot of those engineers thought, like many people here, "who the hell wouldn't change their default username and password", without thinking a step beyond to how they might actually design the system to encourage people to do that as part of the setup procedure. My experience has been that many engineers and programmers tend to be extremely poor at empathizing with normal people about how confusing modern technology can be, similar to how most of my math professors could never understand how anyone couldn't find Calculus simple to understand and beautiful to behold.
The last line is a bit of tongue in cheek, of course. I'm not really going to turn into a feminist any more than I'll turn into a flying squirrel, but I might be a bit more sympathetic than I used to be.
You're correct, of course, that I can't tell for certain who is acting badly. But let's not kid ourselves. I've been a gamer long enough that I can make some pretty well-educated guesses. Tell me: which of the two groups (feminists or gamers) is rather well known for horrible and abusive language online? Have you ever played an Xbox game such as Halo online against strangers and actually listened to the chat? What about League of Legends - a warm, friendly, welcoming community, right? Have you ever talked to women and their experiences while playing MMOs? There are unfortunately some elements* of the gaming community that are well known for their horrid behavior. I won't even play online with strangers anymore, because I just don't feel like subjecting myself to a tirade of abuse from idiots. So let's just say I'm making an educated guess based on the behavior and evidence I've both seen first-hand and heard about second and third-hand over the last decade, ok?
I appreciate your position. You're free to ignore this whole mess. I don't blame you, because it's an ugly business. But this isn't a "storm in a teacup" to those women getting death and rape threats - it's something very real and very frightening - they wouldn't have felt the need to leave their homes otherwise. It's gotten bad enough for those women that, as a fellow game developer, I've been feeling like I should do more to speak out in support of civility. Obviously, I can't see into anyone's hearts or minds and declare them to be 100% innocent, but I honestly don't think developers like Brianna Wu deserve the backlash they're seeing. Writing a few supportive comments on slashdot is the absolute least I can do. I'm thinking of what I can also do where I put my professional name behind it as well, but I'm not really well known enough for anyone to care about that, I think.
* Make no mistake, I believe it's a small proportion that's spoiling the batch for the rest. There are also wonderful elements, such as the strong support for things like Child's Play charity, and the bonding that occurs between like-minded gamers and their love of the games.
You can find a single instance of someone doing almost anything. The other day I came across a story about a women who crawled into bed with and raped her male neighbor. Know why both of these made the news? Because it was unusual. Showing an example of an outlier doesn't make your case any more credible.
The notion that they're sending themselves death threats is a fantasy. Brianna Wu addressed this issue, saying she said she would be crazy to take that sort of risk, because if anyone found out she did that, it would completely destroy her credibility and her entire career. Frankly, I believe her, as there are simply too many examples of this happening for it to be some vast conspiracy by these different people. If we find out that's happened, then I'll come down on her just as hard, but until we see any evidence of this, I'm presuming this stuff is real.
Are they profiting from the exposure? Sure. Anita Sarkeesian makes her living by "stirring the pot". That's what she does. If you don't like it, don't watch her videos. It's not like those videos she produces are going to cause your favorite games to stop being produced, nor does she actually even advocate that, if you've actually listened to her at all. It's no excuse for what happened, and blaming the victims for this is not helping your cause.
Do you know what I find really ironic? I'm probably the last person who would actually agree with most of the radical feminist nonsense that gets spouted. I find a lot of the sheer man-hating elements incredibly offensive. But nothing - repeat nothing - warrants the reaction I've seen. I find myself having to side with the feminists because it's simply the right thing to do. It doesn't mean I agree with what they're saying in many cases. And interestingly enough, the sheer bile and venom spat at these women goes a long way toward validating their views that we live in a sexist and misogynistic society, and the more I see of gamergate, the harder it is for me to disagree.
So, congratulations gamergate. You're well on the way to turning me into a feminist, God help me.
You know, maybe GamerGate was sparked by those events, but it's really not about that any more for me. The moment the unbelievable misogyny and the death threats started, it overshadowed everything else. I don't care who was behind it. Frankly, I think it actually exposed a problem far worse than anything related to journalistic integrity, and that's the lack of even the most basic tenets of civilization in many of our online communities. And actually, it's not just relegated to GamerGate.
Ask any prominent female figure who's active online, and she'll probably tell you some eye-opening stories about online harassment. How about having pictures taking of your house along with implied threats? How about photos of your children Photoshopped with pornographic or violent content? That's stuff that's actually happened, and it's driven some women off the internet and out of the public eye entirely - which was probably the intent to begin with.
You wonder why the issue is only framed in terms of misogyny and harassment? Because people are getting doxxed and real, honest-to-God death threats are being made against them. You dismiss them as "anonymous", but seriously, who exactly signs a death threat with their real name? What distinguishes a "lol troll" death threat from a "legitimate" one other than the intent to kill in the minds of the senders? The notion that these women are sending themselves or making these threats up seems a bit far-fetched to me. In either case, whether an intent to kill is real or not, what is undeniably real is the intent to threaten and harass these people.
Do you know why GamerGate is being "buried"? Because compared to "journalistic integrity", women getting harassed with death threats is about a 100x bigger deal. It's not a mystery. Gamers who verbally attacked those women instead of articulating a message should have taken a page from Ghandi or MLK. If you take away your opponents ability to attack your methods, then all they have left is the ability to attack your message, and then you can compete on the merits of your arguments.
destroying the lives of kids saying stupid things online.
Me? I'd call it a valuable life lesson.
The moment you target someone else, personally and by name, and threaten to kill them... that's a very clear and very obvious line. There's nothing slippery about it. Protection against threats like that is not a police state. It's called civilization. I don't care if the cesspools of the internet have been getting away with it up until now just because it didn't catch the public's eye. Enough's enough. This shit has got to stop, and frankly, it appears that the only way to make it stop is if people have a reasonable fear that there might be real-world consequences - that's something few people like to admit. Their rights stop right at the line where they start trying to ruin other people's lives.
It's pretty damn easy to pontificate about slippery slopes or a police state when you're not the one getting personally addressed death threats. Or aren't a women, who, coincidentally, happen to be a bit physically smaller and weaker on average than men and therefore are more vulnerable to physical assaults.
that said, it's unlikely that a kid who grows up with too much vr is going to die. they just might feel a bit dizzy walking around the real world. is that horrible?
Um... yeah. Actually, being dizzy as you walk around in the real world sounds pretty awful. That's where most of us spend the bulk of their time, after all.
As with all things, including 3D VR, moderation is probably best, especially with young children. Not that we need to panic about each new technology that comes along, but rather, it seems reasonable to take a "prove to me it's safe over the long term" rather than "jump in immediately and wait to see if it's harmful later" with younger kids, who turn out to be particularly susceptible to all sorts of things that adults are a bit more resistant to.
I'm pretty sure I screwed up my eyes by doing silly things like designing videogame sprites on 20 square-per-inch engineering graph paper when I was a youngster, and of course, being a voracious reader. No one else in my family wears glasses. It makes perfect sense to me that children's eyes would well be more susceptible to aberrations if 3D viewing is done excessively.
It's true that the founders of the US generally spoke of "democracy" as meaning "direct democracy", as opposed to our "republic", and both they would likely agree with your assessment of that system. However, most modern usage clearly intends "democracy" to be an umbrella term, of which "republic" is simply one specific variation. A republic can also be known as a "representative democracy".
So while it may be a buzzword for politicians, it's actually not really incorrect. It's just slightly less precise than the term "republic".
Do you know what you're asking for, in essence? The Apple store. Some people complain about how locked down it is, but on the other hand, malware is almost non-existent on iPhones. Android, on the other hand, gets something like 97% of the world's mobile malware. That's the essence of a walled garden. It's kept pretty, beautiful, and safe because of those walls surrounding it.
Maybe the walled garden approach is better for some people, but I think others enjoy the freedom that Android gives them. Google has decided that it doesn't want the responsibility of vetting apps, so that's what we get. I'm not sure I'd mind, since I think I'd probably prefer fewer but safer apps that were vetted instead of the current glut of millions of "free" apps we have now. I can imagine I surely don't speak for everyone, though.
What are you talking about? I can clearly see those garments. Why, I'm not sure I've every seen such magnificent rainment, in fact! Such finery, of course, can only be seen by those with the most discerning of eyes, and judgement to match, I daresay.
Surely you can see them as well, can you not?
Yeah, I understand the feeling a bit. I'm not sure I agree that this feature would be worth the price in development costs and app stability. This would utterly break all of the existing apps on the market. If you don't want to give apps permission, you might as well just disable the app completely, at least in practice, because it would probably just crash out at some random time. That's not a good user experience, even if it was actually what you wanted.
I think a lot of this could be alleviated if Google simply encouraged developers to provide more detailed reasons as to why various permissions are needed. Perhaps for each permission, the developer should be required to fill in a line or two indicating which features of the app rely on that particular permission. I've look at apps before and wondered to myself "why the heck do you need permission for x or y?"
That seems a bit more user and developer friendly than trying to play guess-the-permission games with your apps by selectively turning them off and on again and watching where they crap out.
Consider me more educated about Alaska, although I was aware of the goings on in California. Also, I hope folks realize I was just making a nonsensical, tongue-in-cheek comment just to indicate that Washington and Colorado have passed similar measures. I suppose I should have left out the "paved the way" part, because it was probably just a matter of getting their first more than anything else.
BTW, I think conservatives are starting to come around on the drug war, albeit slowly. I think many people are starting to see that it's just not worth the trouble to criminalize the stuff. Besides, it's sort of hard to demonize the stuff now that it's decriminalized and society hasn't collapsed. Frankly, I think alcohol is much more destructive in many ways, but we all had a vivid example of what a disaster it was to prohibit that particular vice.
So, if I actually had granular permissions, and they broke your app ... my problem is solved, because I'm going to uninstall your application on the assumption that it's either malicious, and doing stuff it shouldn't, or badly written, and doing stuff it shouldn't.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but... Why do you need granular permissions to do that? You can already see what apps need what permissions, right? And apps can't change those permissions without your explicit consent. The only think you can't do is allow or deny permission to them on a per-app / per-permission basis, but it should be pretty obvious that a flashlight app doesn't need access to your contacts or phone logs, or SMS messages, right? As such, the result is the same - stay far away from that app, because it's asking for too many permissions, and therefore can't be trusted.
How so? Many manufacturers heavily customize things quite a bit to differentiate their product. Unless you're saying that Google should disallow that and only allow "stock" OS installs? Or can the OS be updated without impacting the customization?
People have done that and the answer is often "because society repeatedly told me it wasn't a job for women."
Well, it should work itself out in about 10 or 15 years then, because good grief, are we ever pounding it into people these days that we really, really want more women in technology.
Interesting. I thought most considered C++ to be strongly typed. It just allows you to break the rules, so to speak. It's helpful and sometimes even necessary to do that when writing a memory allocator, or creating a variant class, as a couple of examples. That's why C-style casts should be discourage in favor of the more explicit C++ casts. They're finer-grained, and the verbosity makes you think a bit harder as to if and why you really need a cast. It also makes searching for casts in the codebase easier.
My experience with C++ 11 has mirrored yours. After an entire career of working mostly in a C++98 style, C++ 11 feels almost like a new language, after creating a new project from scratch that I've been working on for several years now. I've described it before as almost like working in C#, but with uglier syntax.
C++ is one of those languages, though, where if you don't know what you're doing, you can create downright evil code... probably even worse than bad C code, and that gets pretty bad. I think that's partially why it has a bad reputation for a lot of people.
That's an interesting thought. I've long figured that good programmers were good programmers regardless of the language used, and I'm sure the opposite likely applies as well.
Honestly, my thoughts after reading the summary and skimming the paper were more about questioning whether one could quantify code quality algorithmically, as they apparently did. If I understand correctly, they're quantifying the number and types of bugs and trying to sort them into categories by keywords, but does that actually correlate directly to code quality? I've seen some bug-free code that was absolutely horrible. OpenSSL comes to mind - even though it's reasonably bug-free and stable, when people looked into a little deeper, they realized that, architecturally speaking, it was a disaster.
Interesting paper, but the end results are unsurprising. Naturally, languages that make more efforts to protect the programmers from their own mistakes will tend to have have fewer bugs. Of course, the kicker is that languages are chosen for a variety of reasons, not necessarily because of which one produces overall fewer bugs. Languages often are chosen because of ecosystem, interoperability, performance, history/legacy, or even just personal preferences.
Welcome to the club.
Sincerely, your neighbors who paved the way,
Washington State and Colorado
If the Democrats don't compromise, they're being principled. If the Republicans don't capitulate, they're being obstructionists.
Haven't you learned how this works yet?
I don't hear many people joking about this shit. They're putting serious pressure on the tech companies to be more "diverse". Or rather, the tech companies are tending to do it themselves rather than let someone preempt the discussion, because they're terrified of being labeled as racist or sexist. The fact remains that there are very few qualified black or female applications for many of core tech jobs, like those that actually program software.
Instead, as a reaction, these companies will likely favor less represented demographics in non technical roles to get their overall numbers to balance out, so that they can claim to be more "diverse". The result? If you're a white male, good luck getting an HR or designer job at a tech company. Oh, except for the ones at the top of the power structure, because... well, we can't sacrifice all *those* jobs to balance the numbers, of course.
Look, I'm not trying to complain about the "poor white male". It's not like there won't be opportunities elsewhere. It's just the absurdity of failing to see what's pretty obvious to everyone except those who are trying to stay within politically correct lines. For whatever reason, many more women than men are simply not interested in or pursuing careers such as software development. Newsflash: there are also very fewer female composers, sound engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and imbalance remains in many other highly technical fields.
Why? I don't know - I happen to be a white male, so I have no perspective on what a black woman goes through in life. I became a programmer because I was fascinated by computers and how they worked at an early age, simple as that. Why not ask women why they didn't become programmers rather than focusing on the end of the process, where the damage has long been already done?
The uncomfortable answer may be this: maybe they just aren't interested. People don't want to hear that, because it really doesn't leave much room for a solution to the problem, except to try to force feed tech to girls early in life in the hopes they find it interesting and later fix the imbalance.
Maybe. Apple has a way of bringing established technologies and making them appeal to the mass market rather than a geeky niche. That's exactly what they've done with Apple Pay, for example - their contribution wasn't inventing the systems, but integrating it and bringing together the coalition of banks to support it. They'll take the basic concepts X10 pioneered, except it won't be crap. They'll be expensive high end toys, but they'll probably work extremely well and will be relatively simple to use.
Moreover, they've gained a lot of privacy and security-related experience, so they'll probably get that part of it right. Or at least have a better shot than someone dealing with security for the first time - they're obviously not immune to mistakes as well. Moreover, they're in the business of selling hardware, not tracking you, so they have an incentive for making that hardware secure.
All that being said, I think the "smart home" is still going to be limited to a few interesting devices people pick up and use here and there, not the completely integrated "home of tomorrow" that some people imagine. Things like smartphones are a "no-brainer" sort of technology, where the utility of a universal computer and communication device has been obvious for a long time (look at Star Trek's communicator and tricorder, or Dick Tracy's communication watch).
I just don't see the home automation market that way. Probably the only point it will really take off is when the electronics are so cheap that it's not much more expensive to get the automated version of various devices, and at that point, the completely ubiquitous nature of it will allow people to do some clever things with it. Who knows? I could be wrong, and people are actually clamoring for ways to turn lights in their home on or off from across town or the other side of the planet.
As a Washingtonian and a fellow exclusive vote-by-mail citizen, I agree. We get a comprehensive pamphlet (except without info about the initiatives for some odd reason), and I took an hour or so to read about everyone I wasn't familiar with (mostly judges) and fill in the bubbles while I sit in the comfort of my own home. The forms use the bubble-type scantron format. I believe they're counted by machine, but during a recount, I recall they were recounted by hand.
Voting is a very human process, and moreover, is all about politics. That means there are always going to be some percentage of shenanigans on election day. Voting machines will glitch and mark ballots incorrectly. Some candidates will get lots of illegal, repeat votes. Some candidates will have votes for them "lost".
This will happen with electronic or paper formats, because what's at state is power (mental exercise: read articles substituting "power" for "politics" and "power-broker" for "politician"), and some people will do just about anything to gain power or ensure their side gains power. And each side is convinced that the other side is pulling more shenanigans than their side is.
In the end, like with most things, perfect is the enemy of good. We have a system that, by and large, works pretty well, when you view it against the broader context of history and non-democratic countries around the world. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to improve things or quash corruption where we see it, but just keep in mind that irregularities represent a pretty small percentage, and you're going to hear a lot of stories (some of which may be false or politically motivated - this is all about power, remember) in a country of hundreds of millions of voters.
From the article:
General Electric, in particular, entered smart lighting market with the introduction of GE Link, a smart LED bulb that consumers can remotely control from anywhere in the world and sync with other connected devices.
Wow, really? A bulb you can remotely control from anywhere in the world, huh? And I'll bet the service that let's us do all that will only cost us $9.99 a month, right? What a bargain. I mean, I've always wanted to turn my kitchen light on or off from the grocery store. That's going to be so handy!
Meh. At some point, this phase 2 of the home automation fad will probably boil down to a few practical gizmos that people find useful, and history will simply laugh at our "smart bulbs" for the ridiculous overkill it represents in attempted convenience.
Well, consider that you're comparing the first generation of 3D games against the last generation (in their heyday, that is) of 2D games. It's not really a fair comparison. Personally, as I move away from the awful first generation of each, I reach a "good enough" threshold, where I'm no longer distracted by the bad graphics. Halo on the original Xbox still looks reasonably good. I've recently been playing Final Fantasy X in HD on the PS3, and it looks great for being two console generations behind.
Besides, given the fact that kids and adults alike have wasted about a billion hours on Minecraft, we clearly have to conclude that attractive-looking graphics aren't everything.
Gates is now pretty much a full time philanthropist. When he says he's going to give $500 million, I think we can take him at his word.
Anyhow, good for you Mr. Gates. I think this is money well directed, and hopefully will be well spent. For all of our first world problems and complaints about our health care system, we sometimes forget that there are still many millions of people suffering and dying because they don't have the advantages we have.