Actually, my initial thought is: what good is $4000 dollars for developing a game? This is basically using Kickstarter as an advertising platform, which they all but admit on their Kickstarter page. I guess there's nothing wrong with that if people want to support it.
For the record, I don't see anything wrong with JavaScript. It's fairly straight-forward, it's accessible (just need a web browser), and it's a language that's actually used out there in the wild. I'm a C++ programmer myself, but I'd never suggest teaching that as a first language.
You're obviously patching your own machine, not thousands of other people's machines, for whom any patch carries the risk of breaking mission-critical software and potentially costing your company millions of dollars in lots productivity per day. A predictable cadence is extremely useful for non-zero-day exploits, and even zero-day exploits if the risk is deemed acceptable or can otherwise be mitigated temporarily. The whole notion of a once-a-month patch schedule is entirely for the benefit of corporate customers, to make it easier to test and deploy those patches on a regular schedule.
I had that sort of experience last week when I *really* had to rely on my phone's navigation features for the first time when driving through a completely new city in a rented car from point to point, both completely unknown to me. It worked 100% flawlessly, and gave me a bit of a "holy crap, that's really amazing technology" sort of jolt. I remember how incredibly difficult it was using traditional paper maps, and trying to fumble with them while driving, and God help you if you miss a turn and get lost. You really needed a second person as a navigator, and even that wasn't nearly as good as a modern smartphone.
Humans adapt to just about everything. We couldn't sanely function in our modern world if we were constantly flabbergasted by our own technology. Still, it's fun to think how impressive everything would be if you could bring someone forward in time from 50 years ago or so (any further back and the leap would be so great, it might as well be witchcraft to them). They'd probably be disappointed in some areas (no flying nuclear-powered cars, homes look pretty much the same), but the computer and communication tech would blow them out of the water. And they'd probably freak out over the cultural changes, of course, so best take that slowly.
I'd rather reclaim "niggardly", as too many ignorant people believe it has racist overtones. If you use the word in your job, you're actually in danger of being reprimanded or even fired. As a result, I predict the word will probably die out due to fear / self-preservation.
No, it's called "I don't work for employers who abuse their employees". Although, technically, now I work for ME, as I'm an independent contractor and developer now, and work out of my home office. I subcontract by the hour now, so if they want me to work insane hours, they'll be paying through the nose for it.
There are similarities there, I suppose. Still there's a critical difference in that analogy. To be a top Hollywood actor, you need the correct physical attributes, an unbelievable amount of luck, and time works *against* you.
To get on a top videogame team, you need talent and experience. So in this case, time works *for* you, meaning your odds of "hitting it big" actually go up every year. I was able to land one of those AAA "dream jobs" after about eight years in the industry working from crapola titles up through mediocre licensed titles, and eventually into the types of games I really wanted to make. It's not a simple matter of luck... I spent a lot of time improving my skills and experience as a programmer, and I have a pretty good chance at just about any company I wanted to work at from here on, which is a pretty nice feeling.
BTW, I still enjoyed working on those "crappy" titles, and it still paid the bills (although at first, just barely). Am I one of the "lucky few"? Hard to say, but honestly, it doesn't seem like an impossible road for others to follow if they're willing to put in the same effort I did. Oh, and if you're consistently working 16 hours a day, you're doing it wrong. Why the hell people stay at abusive companies is absolutely beyond me. They're not all like that - just the shittiest ones.
Women and minority developers are also being driven out of this industry because it is an inherently racist, sexist, misogynist boy's club.
Professional videogame programmer here, closing in on two decades in the industry. My thoughts, if anyone cares...
Don't confuse a few unpleasant but vocal gamers with videogame industry professionals. I've never seen any such behavior among my professional peers. Female programmers (and audio specialists, oddly) are somewhat rare, but there are lots of very talented female artists, writers, and designers that I've worked with over the years. I'm closing in on two decades in the industry, and there are more females developers than ever. Some minorities are still underrepresented, but that's slowly changing as well. The industry wants talented and creative individuals. It has absolutely nothing to do with institutionalized racism or sexism, as far as I can tell. I'm sure it probably exists out there, but I've never seen it personally.
The story of people getting exploited, stressed out, and quitting the industry is nothing new. Lots of people quit the videogame industry, because yes, it is stressful. It's got highly complex, multimillion dollar projects with a fixed deadline, and that means things are going to get stressful before the ship date. Of course, when a company forces people to crunch for months at a time (or even years in some horrible death marches), that's crappy management. Nine months of 80 hour weeks? That's abuse, pure and simple. For the love of God, find a new job NOW. I'd quit the industry as well if that was my only alternative. But it's not. Not every company abuses their workers like that, believe it or not. But if you don't think you're going to be putting in some long hours at the end of a three to five year project, that seems a little optimistic.
Also, to clarify, very few developers earn under $50K. A better indication is the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, which states the average salary is a bit over $83K. Keep in mind when you break this down by job, the differences are made clear. Programmers average $93K, for instance. If you've been in the industry for a decade or two, you can earn quite a bit more than that. QA *average* about $53K, so I'm guessing the Dice writers were talking mostly to QA, who unfortunately tend to get the raw end of the industry stick in just about every way, being the least skilled of the labor pool and often hired as short-term temps (but again, this isn't universal either).
Frankly, I absolutely love my job, and can't imagine doing anything else. I'm aware that I could probably earn more money in a different industry, but I still earn a good living and absolutely love what I do. I'd rather not get painted as a victim, because I feel pretty fortunate. There are a lot of guys that work far harder than me digging ditches in the hot sun or freezing rain and earning a hell of a lot less for it.
Since when are we setting the bar so low? We had a usable desktop two decades ago, if you're willing to just toss out modern features. We also had "usable cars" and "usable airplanes" fifty years ago, but I'll bet you'd prefer to fly cross-country in a modern Boeing 777 than an old turboprop, right?
Incidentally, there's really no such thing as "3D acceleration", with the possible exception of support for geometry-specific functions on the more modern cards. Much of the power of modern GPUs is dedicated to drawing pixels (a purely 2D operation), with many tiny programmable processors running in parallel used to make it happen. All the "3D" stuff is simply a transformation from world space into screen space, and then that's where most of the work happens. Modern desktops rely on hardware acceleration for all sorts of things nowadays. You really don't want your CPU to be wasting it's time performing pixel blending operations, especially with today's large, high resolution screens, sometimes several of them per computer.
Naturally, games are what drives the high end capabilities (some consider playing videogames part of being "usable", believe it for not), but many other applications benefit from ubiquitous video hardware acceleration. One example that comes to mind is medical imaging. A laptop that can visualize engineering plans is another potential application. Even web browsers benefit from hardware acceleration.
Big business can't create it, but they CAN finance it, which is a necessary part of videogame development. And the financiers can be valuable partners in the process, so long as they're willing to mostly get out of the way and let the creative people do their thing. Microsoft, as one example, has been historically poor at this. Let's face it, everyone both wants to be and thinks they can be a game designer. Many videogames die a lingering death because of idiots from management sticking their fingers in the game design pie. I've also seen the opposite, where our team was given incredible support from the higher-ups with minimal interference, and their faith was ultimately rewarded with best-selling games and excellent reviews.
Not all bad games are because of management, of course, but they've seemed to be a significant factor in a few of the games I've worked on that have gotten into trouble.
I'm facepalming a bit, seeing that these comments are being modded as "informative" and "insightful" instead of "funny". Maybe it's meta-humor, and you can give me a bit ole "whoosh".
Submitters and editors, how hard is it to remember to always define the first instance of an acronym? No matter how widely known you think it is, there are guaranteed to be people who don't know what it is.
From what I've seen, there seem to be very few H1Bs in the videogame industry. It's also been surprisingly resilient to outsourcing as well. It could have something to do with both the high degree of technical specialization required, as well as the close coordination required with artists, game designers, sound designers, composers, and QA, meaning that videogame programmers have to be pretty good about working and communicating with non-technical developers / team members. A lot of software development is mostly about writing code, but creating a game requires a very diverse team to work very closely together and iterate quickly on new ideas and concepts.
I know one game development colleague who went to Amazon not too long ago. Maybe I'll meet up with him for lunch one of these days and see how he's enjoying things there. Amazon strikes me as a Microsoft-type developer, and that doesn't bode well for their first offering (for example, the first Kindle was hideously designed). They tend to get things right on their second or even third go-round though. I'll be curious to see what they can do... they certainly have the financial backing to do something quite impressive, but money alone won't make a great game. Just ask Curt Shilling.
Who are you trying to argue with or convince here? Exactly where did I say I was a proponent of this scheme?
I'm not condoning either Facebook, the software in question, or the actions of the school board here. I'm explaining how services like Facebook operate - nothing more.
Besides, I'm pretty sure there aresome laws against stalking a person with a camera in public.
Fatigue failures of nitinol devices are a constant subject of discussion. Because it is the material of choice for applications requiring enormous flexibility and motion (e.g., peripheral stents and heart valves), it is necessarily exposed to much greater fatigue strains than are other metals. While the strain-controlled fatigue performance of nitinol is superior to all other known metals, fatigue failures have been observed in the most demanding applications. There is a great deal of effort underway trying to better understand and define the durability limits of nitinol.
I'm betting the reason we haven't heard of these wonderful heat engines mentioned in that 1970's era video is because the nitinol [wikipedia.org] probably tended to break after a few million flexes, which doesn't make for a good, long-term, reliable engine. BTW, we DO actually have many nitinol-based products (see the article). Just not the heat engines.
It could very well be that this discovery pushes memory shape alloy heat engines into the realm of the practical instead of the hypothetical or experimental.
No, specialized software for niche audiences like government agencies (say, city administration or police departments) tends to cost that much, simply because they're selling to thousands, not millions (source: a relative who works in a small city IT dept).
From what I understand, Facebook doesn't give anyone else the keys to users private data. Besides which, it's really not in their best interest to do so, financially speaking. They'll sell advertising rights to anonymized groups based on profile data, but they'll never hand over the personalized data. Google is the same way. What they do is allow the advertisers to pick specific demographics, such as sex, age, marital status, general location, hobbies, and so forth. However, it's all anonymized, meaning the advertisers don't know which specific people they are advertising to, only the group demographics.
Absolutely. Still, this will teach students a valuable life lesson. Prospective employers are probably going to pull the same sort of nonsense, so they had better start learning to watch what they say in public right now.
Also... I'm obviously building the wrong type of software. I'd love to be able to charge $13K plus monthly usage fees for scanning targeted people on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other services for scary keywords and phrases.
No, you insensitive clod, I was speaking of artistic, historic, and cultural value. Any artwork of significant artistic, historic, and cultural value will also tend to command a high monetary value, but they're not valued because speculators have assigned some arbitrary dollar value to them.
either way, these insane people have *helped* spread the messages that they attempted to suppress. so i think i will mark this story as "stressandeffect".
Only as a short-term media blip. The original artifacts, however, are lost forever. Whatever information we have of them now is as much as we'll ever have (short of extrapolating new hypotheses from existing data), thanks to these barbarians. More importantly, the sense of awe and wonder from seeing in person something created from our distant ancestors is lost forever. We all know what the Mona Lisa looks like. Would you still like to see it in person? I sure would.
Hundreds of years from now, people would have still been interested in seeing these works. I just can't bring myself to believe that many people will have an interest in seeing a digitally produced replica. There will just be a historical footnote in some digital archives about how the originals have been lost to history thanks to modern barbarians, and that will be it.
I wish I was wrong about this... I really do, because it would mean a small victory against ISIS. I'm actually glad you're more optimistic about it than I am.
I agree that this is more a symbolic gesture against ISIS rather than a practical means of preservation, and for that, believe me, I'm very grateful. Whatever someone can do to flip ISIS the bird - I'm all for it.
The texts of the Library of Alexandria is a slightly different case, because the real value in those text was the information they contained, not in the beauty and physical structure of the objects themselves like with artwork. The physical scrolls on which they were written probably would have only been of secondary concern.
Don't get me wrong. I'm extremely grateful when *anything* of these relics is preserved, of course. But there's a reason only the original piece of artwork is truly valued, even if a hand-created replica is its near-perfect equal.
You'd think Dice would have learned about the damned Streisand Effect from all the stories here on Slashdot. All it would have taken is a single line: "Disclaimer: Sourceforge is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dice Holdings, Inc." in the summary. Major news media outlets do this *all the time* when reporting on (either positive or negative news) their sister organizations owned by the same umbrella corporation.
The topic would have been done, discussed, and on it's way to being forgotten by now. Instead, you simply get a slow burn of news and a bunch of people irritated at your obvious and ham-handed suppression of a story.
Note: Sorry for the offtopic. Consider it a small act of "civil disobedience."
I'm afraid that willfull, destructive ignorance and barbarism isn't a problem that technology can solve. A digital copy, however perfect, remains a copy, and by nature, can't be used as proof that there ever *was* an original, which is the entire purpose of ISIS's destruction of these relics.
I don't mean to denigrate these efforts. I mean, I'm really glad to see some part of these works preserved, but... Human lives are transient, and we weep at senseless killing, but one thing humans can do to achieve a bit of immortality is to leave behind a long-lasting legacy of culture and art. ISIS is not only insistent on killing people in the present. Destroying these artifacts is like killing artists' legacies from the past as well.
Because these types of things may go where you can't easily get them back. Or rather, where it would be cost prohibitive to get them back at least. In the medical field, the ideal would be for the robot to simply dissolve harmlessly after a period of time. Sending a micro-robot into a body would be easy. Getting it back out seems like it would be harder.
Anyhow, recycling is most beneficial when done on a mass scale (i.e. an entire population's consumption of raw materials).
Chemistry not being a "core" subject doesn't mean it's not important. It just means that chemistry is not really a prerequisite for anything later in a student's general education. And unless you dig up some unbelievably contrived example, it really doesn't impact your day to day life. That is, we're talking about your *knowledge* of chemistry, not that chemistry *happens*. It's just not at the same level of importance as math, English, literature, social studies, geography, etc. A general physical science class is more than enough to get the important bits conveyed.
The computer is such an important tool that it's essential to know how to use one in modern daily life, and will be increasingly important as a learning and research tool for later education. Thus, I'd consider it an early core subject.
Computer programming, on the other hand, it's certainly not a core subject. However, learning to program a general-purpose and massively ubiquitous modern-day tool seems a bit more promising than a chemistry class in terms of potentially being relevant to a student's future. Nothing against you chemists or chemical engineers, but I'm pretty sure there are far fewer of you than programmers. As such, I'm all on-board with offering it to younger students as an elective class, or introducing it as a workshop.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, my initial thought is: what good is $4000 dollars for developing a game? This is basically using Kickstarter as an advertising platform, which they all but admit on their Kickstarter page. I guess there's nothing wrong with that if people want to support it.
For the record, I don't see anything wrong with JavaScript. It's fairly straight-forward, it's accessible (just need a web browser), and it's a language that's actually used out there in the wild. I'm a C++ programmer myself, but I'd never suggest teaching that as a first language.
You're obviously patching your own machine, not thousands of other people's machines, for whom any patch carries the risk of breaking mission-critical software and potentially costing your company millions of dollars in lots productivity per day. A predictable cadence is extremely useful for non-zero-day exploits, and even zero-day exploits if the risk is deemed acceptable or can otherwise be mitigated temporarily. The whole notion of a once-a-month patch schedule is entirely for the benefit of corporate customers, to make it easier to test and deploy those patches on a regular schedule.
I had that sort of experience last week when I *really* had to rely on my phone's navigation features for the first time when driving through a completely new city in a rented car from point to point, both completely unknown to me. It worked 100% flawlessly, and gave me a bit of a "holy crap, that's really amazing technology" sort of jolt. I remember how incredibly difficult it was using traditional paper maps, and trying to fumble with them while driving, and God help you if you miss a turn and get lost. You really needed a second person as a navigator, and even that wasn't nearly as good as a modern smartphone.
Humans adapt to just about everything. We couldn't sanely function in our modern world if we were constantly flabbergasted by our own technology. Still, it's fun to think how impressive everything would be if you could bring someone forward in time from 50 years ago or so (any further back and the leap would be so great, it might as well be witchcraft to them). They'd probably be disappointed in some areas (no flying nuclear-powered cars, homes look pretty much the same), but the computer and communication tech would blow them out of the water. And they'd probably freak out over the cultural changes, of course, so best take that slowly.
I'd rather reclaim "niggardly", as too many ignorant people believe it has racist overtones. If you use the word in your job, you're actually in danger of being reprimanded or even fired. As a result, I predict the word will probably die out due to fear / self-preservation.
That's called "Stockholm Syndrome".
No, it's called "I don't work for employers who abuse their employees". Although, technically, now I work for ME, as I'm an independent contractor and developer now, and work out of my home office. I subcontract by the hour now, so if they want me to work insane hours, they'll be paying through the nose for it.
There are similarities there, I suppose. Still there's a critical difference in that analogy. To be a top Hollywood actor, you need the correct physical attributes, an unbelievable amount of luck, and time works *against* you.
To get on a top videogame team, you need talent and experience. So in this case, time works *for* you, meaning your odds of "hitting it big" actually go up every year. I was able to land one of those AAA "dream jobs" after about eight years in the industry working from crapola titles up through mediocre licensed titles, and eventually into the types of games I really wanted to make. It's not a simple matter of luck... I spent a lot of time improving my skills and experience as a programmer, and I have a pretty good chance at just about any company I wanted to work at from here on, which is a pretty nice feeling.
BTW, I still enjoyed working on those "crappy" titles, and it still paid the bills (although at first, just barely). Am I one of the "lucky few"? Hard to say, but honestly, it doesn't seem like an impossible road for others to follow if they're willing to put in the same effort I did. Oh, and if you're consistently working 16 hours a day, you're doing it wrong. Why the hell people stay at abusive companies is absolutely beyond me. They're not all like that - just the shittiest ones.
Women and minority developers are also being driven out of this industry because it is an inherently racist, sexist, misogynist boy's club.
Professional videogame programmer here, closing in on two decades in the industry. My thoughts, if anyone cares...
Don't confuse a few unpleasant but vocal gamers with videogame industry professionals. I've never seen any such behavior among my professional peers. Female programmers (and audio specialists, oddly) are somewhat rare, but there are lots of very talented female artists, writers, and designers that I've worked with over the years. I'm closing in on two decades in the industry, and there are more females developers than ever. Some minorities are still underrepresented, but that's slowly changing as well. The industry wants talented and creative individuals. It has absolutely nothing to do with institutionalized racism or sexism, as far as I can tell. I'm sure it probably exists out there, but I've never seen it personally.
The story of people getting exploited, stressed out, and quitting the industry is nothing new. Lots of people quit the videogame industry, because yes, it is stressful. It's got highly complex, multimillion dollar projects with a fixed deadline, and that means things are going to get stressful before the ship date. Of course, when a company forces people to crunch for months at a time (or even years in some horrible death marches), that's crappy management. Nine months of 80 hour weeks? That's abuse, pure and simple. For the love of God, find a new job NOW. I'd quit the industry as well if that was my only alternative. But it's not. Not every company abuses their workers like that, believe it or not. But if you don't think you're going to be putting in some long hours at the end of a three to five year project, that seems a little optimistic.
Also, to clarify, very few developers earn under $50K. A better indication is the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, which states the average salary is a bit over $83K. Keep in mind when you break this down by job, the differences are made clear. Programmers average $93K, for instance. If you've been in the industry for a decade or two, you can earn quite a bit more than that. QA *average* about $53K, so I'm guessing the Dice writers were talking mostly to QA, who unfortunately tend to get the raw end of the industry stick in just about every way, being the least skilled of the labor pool and often hired as short-term temps (but again, this isn't universal either).
Frankly, I absolutely love my job, and can't imagine doing anything else. I'm aware that I could probably earn more money in a different industry, but I still earn a good living and absolutely love what I do. I'd rather not get painted as a victim, because I feel pretty fortunate. There are a lot of guys that work far harder than me digging ditches in the hot sun or freezing rain and earning a hell of a lot less for it.
Since when are we setting the bar so low? We had a usable desktop two decades ago, if you're willing to just toss out modern features. We also had "usable cars" and "usable airplanes" fifty years ago, but I'll bet you'd prefer to fly cross-country in a modern Boeing 777 than an old turboprop, right?
Incidentally, there's really no such thing as "3D acceleration", with the possible exception of support for geometry-specific functions on the more modern cards. Much of the power of modern GPUs is dedicated to drawing pixels (a purely 2D operation), with many tiny programmable processors running in parallel used to make it happen. All the "3D" stuff is simply a transformation from world space into screen space, and then that's where most of the work happens. Modern desktops rely on hardware acceleration for all sorts of things nowadays. You really don't want your CPU to be wasting it's time performing pixel blending operations, especially with today's large, high resolution screens, sometimes several of them per computer.
Naturally, games are what drives the high end capabilities (some consider playing videogames part of being "usable", believe it for not), but many other applications benefit from ubiquitous video hardware acceleration. One example that comes to mind is medical imaging. A laptop that can visualize engineering plans is another potential application. Even web browsers benefit from hardware acceleration.
Big business can't create it, but they CAN finance it, which is a necessary part of videogame development. And the financiers can be valuable partners in the process, so long as they're willing to mostly get out of the way and let the creative people do their thing. Microsoft, as one example, has been historically poor at this. Let's face it, everyone both wants to be and thinks they can be a game designer. Many videogames die a lingering death because of idiots from management sticking their fingers in the game design pie. I've also seen the opposite, where our team was given incredible support from the higher-ups with minimal interference, and their faith was ultimately rewarded with best-selling games and excellent reviews.
Not all bad games are because of management, of course, but they've seemed to be a significant factor in a few of the games I've worked on that have gotten into trouble.
I'm facepalming a bit, seeing that these comments are being modded as "informative" and "insightful" instead of "funny". Maybe it's meta-humor, and you can give me a bit ole "whoosh".
Submitters and editors, how hard is it to remember to always define the first instance of an acronym? No matter how widely known you think it is, there are guaranteed to be people who don't know what it is.
Tony? Who the fuck is Tony?
The anonymous coward who posted this story, of course.
From what I've seen, there seem to be very few H1Bs in the videogame industry. It's also been surprisingly resilient to outsourcing as well. It could have something to do with both the high degree of technical specialization required, as well as the close coordination required with artists, game designers, sound designers, composers, and QA, meaning that videogame programmers have to be pretty good about working and communicating with non-technical developers / team members. A lot of software development is mostly about writing code, but creating a game requires a very diverse team to work very closely together and iterate quickly on new ideas and concepts.
I know one game development colleague who went to Amazon not too long ago. Maybe I'll meet up with him for lunch one of these days and see how he's enjoying things there. Amazon strikes me as a Microsoft-type developer, and that doesn't bode well for their first offering (for example, the first Kindle was hideously designed). They tend to get things right on their second or even third go-round though. I'll be curious to see what they can do... they certainly have the financial backing to do something quite impressive, but money alone won't make a great game. Just ask Curt Shilling.
Who are you trying to argue with or convince here? Exactly where did I say I was a proponent of this scheme?
I'm not condoning either Facebook, the software in question, or the actions of the school board here. I'm explaining how services like Facebook operate - nothing more.
Besides, I'm pretty sure there are some laws against stalking a person with a camera in public.
And the answer is: reliability! From the wikipedia article:
Fatigue failures of nitinol devices are a constant subject of discussion. Because it is the material of choice for applications requiring enormous flexibility and motion (e.g., peripheral stents and heart valves), it is necessarily exposed to much greater fatigue strains than are other metals. While the strain-controlled fatigue performance of nitinol is superior to all other known metals, fatigue failures have been observed in the most demanding applications. There is a great deal of effort underway trying to better understand and define the durability limits of nitinol.
I'm betting the reason we haven't heard of these wonderful heat engines mentioned in that 1970's era video is because the nitinol [wikipedia.org] probably tended to break after a few million flexes, which doesn't make for a good, long-term, reliable engine. BTW, we DO actually have many nitinol-based products (see the article). Just not the heat engines.
It could very well be that this discovery pushes memory shape alloy heat engines into the realm of the practical instead of the hypothetical or experimental.
No, specialized software for niche audiences like government agencies (say, city administration or police departments) tends to cost that much, simply because they're selling to thousands, not millions (source: a relative who works in a small city IT dept).
From what I understand, Facebook doesn't give anyone else the keys to users private data. Besides which, it's really not in their best interest to do so, financially speaking. They'll sell advertising rights to anonymized groups based on profile data, but they'll never hand over the personalized data. Google is the same way. What they do is allow the advertisers to pick specific demographics, such as sex, age, marital status, general location, hobbies, and so forth. However, it's all anonymized, meaning the advertisers don't know which specific people they are advertising to, only the group demographics.
Absolutely. Still, this will teach students a valuable life lesson. Prospective employers are probably going to pull the same sort of nonsense, so they had better start learning to watch what they say in public right now.
Also... I'm obviously building the wrong type of software. I'd love to be able to charge $13K plus monthly usage fees for scanning targeted people on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other services for scary keywords and phrases.
No, you insensitive clod, I was speaking of artistic, historic, and cultural value. Any artwork of significant artistic, historic, and cultural value will also tend to command a high monetary value, but they're not valued because speculators have assigned some arbitrary dollar value to them.
either way, these insane people have *helped* spread the messages that they attempted to suppress. so i think i will mark this story as "stressandeffect".
Only as a short-term media blip. The original artifacts, however, are lost forever. Whatever information we have of them now is as much as we'll ever have (short of extrapolating new hypotheses from existing data), thanks to these barbarians. More importantly, the sense of awe and wonder from seeing in person something created from our distant ancestors is lost forever. We all know what the Mona Lisa looks like. Would you still like to see it in person? I sure would.
Hundreds of years from now, people would have still been interested in seeing these works. I just can't bring myself to believe that many people will have an interest in seeing a digitally produced replica. There will just be a historical footnote in some digital archives about how the originals have been lost to history thanks to modern barbarians, and that will be it.
I wish I was wrong about this... I really do, because it would mean a small victory against ISIS. I'm actually glad you're more optimistic about it than I am.
I agree that this is more a symbolic gesture against ISIS rather than a practical means of preservation, and for that, believe me, I'm very grateful. Whatever someone can do to flip ISIS the bird - I'm all for it.
The texts of the Library of Alexandria is a slightly different case, because the real value in those text was the information they contained, not in the beauty and physical structure of the objects themselves like with artwork. The physical scrolls on which they were written probably would have only been of secondary concern.
Don't get me wrong. I'm extremely grateful when *anything* of these relics is preserved, of course. But there's a reason only the original piece of artwork is truly valued, even if a hand-created replica is its near-perfect equal.
You'd think Dice would have learned about the damned Streisand Effect from all the stories here on Slashdot. All it would have taken is a single line: "Disclaimer: Sourceforge is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dice Holdings, Inc." in the summary. Major news media outlets do this *all the time* when reporting on (either positive or negative news) their sister organizations owned by the same umbrella corporation.
The topic would have been done, discussed, and on it's way to being forgotten by now. Instead, you simply get a slow burn of news and a bunch of people irritated at your obvious and ham-handed suppression of a story.
Note: Sorry for the offtopic. Consider it a small act of "civil disobedience."
I'm afraid that willfull, destructive ignorance and barbarism isn't a problem that technology can solve. A digital copy, however perfect, remains a copy, and by nature, can't be used as proof that there ever *was* an original, which is the entire purpose of ISIS's destruction of these relics.
I don't mean to denigrate these efforts. I mean, I'm really glad to see some part of these works preserved, but... Human lives are transient, and we weep at senseless killing, but one thing humans can do to achieve a bit of immortality is to leave behind a long-lasting legacy of culture and art. ISIS is not only insistent on killing people in the present. Destroying these artifacts is like killing artists' legacies from the past as well.
My first though was of the patent troll that accidentally sued itself. I'd provide a link, but my Google-fu is not working today.
Because these types of things may go where you can't easily get them back. Or rather, where it would be cost prohibitive to get them back at least. In the medical field, the ideal would be for the robot to simply dissolve harmlessly after a period of time. Sending a micro-robot into a body would be easy. Getting it back out seems like it would be harder.
Anyhow, recycling is most beneficial when done on a mass scale (i.e. an entire population's consumption of raw materials).
Chemistry not being a "core" subject doesn't mean it's not important. It just means that chemistry is not really a prerequisite for anything later in a student's general education. And unless you dig up some unbelievably contrived example, it really doesn't impact your day to day life. That is, we're talking about your *knowledge* of chemistry, not that chemistry *happens*. It's just not at the same level of importance as math, English, literature, social studies, geography, etc. A general physical science class is more than enough to get the important bits conveyed.
The computer is such an important tool that it's essential to know how to use one in modern daily life, and will be increasingly important as a learning and research tool for later education. Thus, I'd consider it an early core subject.
Computer programming, on the other hand, it's certainly not a core subject. However, learning to program a general-purpose and massively ubiquitous modern-day tool seems a bit more promising than a chemistry class in terms of potentially being relevant to a student's future. Nothing against you chemists or chemical engineers, but I'm pretty sure there are far fewer of you than programmers. As such, I'm all on-board with offering it to younger students as an elective class, or introducing it as a workshop.