jmossis: You make a good point on the taxes. I have read studies that suggest there is a positive correlation but my rant was pretty cheap.
Shiftless: You apparently failed to check the part of my post where I included the links showing an easier time getting ahead if other countries. Or you could have done some searching and found the other documents I did not include that had simular findings. I just picked the easiest to follow summary.
Yes, I did manage to break even in class.... You see as a kid my family plunged from the upper middle class into poverty. The American system is ruthless to anyone who happens to have debt dumped on them through divorce, medical emergencies, legal proceedings, etc.
The American safety net is pretty thin and once you fall through it is extremely hard to get up again. The studies I linked are evidence. Fixing the medical system and then the court system might go a long way to fixing the problem since those are usually what bankrupt families.
Before any claims that "you have never traveled so you don't know jack". My immediate family has visited every continent bar Antarctica and I can recall 28 countries off the top of my head. (3 new countries this month) Most of the world is not the hellhole that Americans believe. There are some awful places (Zimbabwe right now) but even that country was quite nice under a decade ago.
As a family member recently went to the best specialist at the best place to treat his disease I can say we have a great system if you can afford the 55 thousand dollar copay required for the hospital visit. Most people are poor enough that they would just die instead of raising that kind of money with a few weeks notice... (Condition onset was fast with no family history)
Nothing say that their will not be paid specialists even if we go to fully socialized coverage. There will always be expert surgeons who treat athletes, royalty, and politicians. Honestly most Americans do not get access to the best coverage. It is too expensive, it is hard to get a booking between the Sultan and Rich millionaire. We were only seen because we knew his protege and happened to be at Mayo hospital when a cancellation occurred.
But I guess everyone knows the top surgeon in the country for the form of cancer they are suffering and has enough money to pay for the treatment... right?
Except what you say is demonstrably false. (I rant here but I drop some links later and have fact checked)
1. After cutting the upper-class taxes there was a recession. Regan did it in the 80s and Bush did it in the last decade. Each time the economy stagnated. Progressive policies are very good for the economy as Poor people spend money. That money revs up the economy and keeps it going. People saving money or investing money does not actually rev the economy in the same way but they get all the benefits (see link on growth of economy later in this post)
2. I agree that there is some problem in American school systems. But most of the problem is that American culture of apathy and short attention spans. Kids don't have the attention span to finis...
3. You talk abut how socialism is such a weak systems but Russia had essentially 3rd world infrastructure and yet was a superpower on par with the US for most of our lifes. I don't think we could have done the same given the same infrastructure as them with government that we have. Also most of Europe does quite well with higher standards of living. Also I grew up on welfare. None of my family is on welfare anymore but it was a critical service when dad walked off and refused to pay child support. Since my family has worked directly with the poor (Health services and counseling) I think I have a better idea of who receives welfare than you do. It is often those with medical problems, mental problems, or even drug problems. Drug problems you say? Well let them rot! Well that is the problem. You have a drug conviction and suddenly you can't get many jobs, or and you can't get funding for college. How and the hell do you handle these people? You either put them on welfare or you throw them in jail which is still state funded living. But yay you are still hard on crime and the war on drugs goes on! Rah rah!
But what really incensed me with your post was your assertion that people have an easier time getting ahead in America. BZZZT! Nice try the US is harder to advance out of poverty and it is getting harder all the time. For all our vaunted freedom you can move around in the middle class, but if you want to be an executive you really NEED be in the right class or society to get your funding or to land that job due to your uncle's connection. There are some people who manage to found a company and build it to that level, but what are we talking about one in ten million? I get better odds at the lottery.... Every company founder I personally have known has gotten kicked out when the company stabilized and an interm CEO (who gets along with the VC and board) has been appointed to manage the continued growth of the company. I have yet to personally meet someone who actually manages to fight off the wolves and make it past upper middle class. But hey, they exist, I mean we see them on TV.
And before you rip on my liberal ideal with no real world backing let me drop some links. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html I see those darn Scandinavian countries are more upward mobile despite their socialist trends and higher standard of living! Yes click around on that link and you will see the US is actually HARDER to climb out of poverty. But don't worry your capitalistic master are having a great time jerking your leash. You know that when the economy is growing rapidly the middle class still shows no upward mobility? http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html but I guess the upper class sees great returns on their investments.
Basically the American dream is a great PR piece to help insure there is cheap labor to fill factories. But Rah Rah for Capitalism. The idea that giving the money to private companies is also fallacious they tend to be very good at maximizing profit. (FOR
To put that another way, you know what would really stop terrorists from hijacking an airplane? Hundreds of well-armed passengers. And no, a bullet hole will not decompress an aircraft.
Yeah I would feel much safer with that drunk jerk behind me packing heat. And when you get delayed on the tarmac for 6 hours I am sure he won't take out his frustration on the staff. It isn't like they already have to land planes to drag off people who freak out...
Lets look at some gun stats - http://www.metro.us/us/article/2009/06/16/03/5431-82/index.xml Looks like big pro-gun southern states see 300-500% more gun related deaths than states with strong gun control like Massachusetts. Problem with giving everyone guns is that obnoxious bully or mentally damaged teen also want guns, and when one person fires or misfires do you think grandma will keep her cool and not accidentally shoot the guy who stands up to look around pulling his own gun out? As a cope I wouldn't want to enter a plin with a couple hundred panicked gun toting passengers.
The last thing they need is a pitched gun battle with 30-40 people on a plane all trying to help by shooting at that other guy who must be a bad guy, I mean everyone can spot an Afghan/Saudi. No one will mistake that darkskinned guy, or jewish lady. No one will shoot that Arabic dude "just in case". Hell, only half of Americans know who was involved in 9/11 attacks and most of them couldn't identify a Saudi Arabian on sight.
Anyone Jewish, Arabic, Dark-skinned, would be an "obvious" threat. And it isn't like that bullet will go through multiple chairs and people before stopping... http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/theboxotruth.htm I mean their tests only went through a dozen plywood walls and its not like anyone would miss while panicked and shooting at a human for the first time.
*shakes head* Keep the guns off the plane. Carrying in public is asking for trouble... People may panick when they see you packing heat, and if something does happen the right response is almost always to not use the gun. Yet that wasn't your first justification for bringing one, was it? It was to use in case of an attack , not as a deterrent. And hundreds of people shooting towards the cockpit won't cause any issues, right? I mean avionic electronics are not sensitive machines with wires running all over the plane.../end rant
As someone who grew up in the south I saw my classroom go from 50% black to 20% to 5% as I went from normal classes to Honors, and then AP classes.
There were plenty of smart African-Americans in my school but there was immense pressure on them to "conform". Anyone with good grades was labeled an "Oreo (white on the inside and black outside) and excluded from black social activities since they were "trying to be so white". I saw many good friends drop out of classes so they could keep their friends, and each year the pressure was worse as fewer and fewer kids were left to resist peer pressure and the classes became more and more white and the insults rang more and more true.
I believe one person in our graduating top 10 was black in a school that was half black. This girl was in most of my AP classes and lost ALL of her friends. She was not really accepted by whites for dating or being close freinds (this is the south after all) and blacks didn't want to hang out with someone so "white".
I don't really think that racism was the problem, but more a perception that being smart was "turning white" and the very real problem that successful blacks that come out of this system were ostracized by their community and feel very little need to help out a community that has essentially pushed them away. This makes it hard for the community to drag itself up as truly the most successful members are those that cut ties and gave up on being "black".
But I personally feel that ALL of America has a problem with learning. We glorify being wealthy but not being smart. I also saw smart cheerleaders drop out of AP classes because being seen as intelligent made them somehow less attractive to their boyfriends. I saw people pretend to be stupid to fit in, and after a few years you couldn't tell it was an act anymore.
TV and movies portray smart people as nerdy and hard working, but attractive people as rich and successful. It is no wonder most people try to get by on looks or popularity and not hard work and intelligence. Until we see hardworking and intelligent as desirable qualities we are in for a lot of mediocrity.
There was a great NPR article a year or so ago that stated it was actually easier to become rich in Europe than in the US. For all we tout how one can get ahead in America there are very few people that have made their own fortunes. (I think you 1 in a million number is still right though)
I can not find that article (it was a radio program) But this article by J Mooneyham claims to become rich in the US you must be born rich, marry into money, or be a criminal. http://www.jmooneyham.com/your-true-chances-of-getting-rich.html and echoes what I remember hearing.
Basically self made millionaires are a statistical anomaly. America is a land where you can come and make your own moderate success, but becoming wildly rich is just not gonna happen.
I completely agree that the companies currently have more protection against competition than we consumers have guarantee of fair trade price. What are dvd-zones except a tool for creating artificial pricing structures.
Why can I not buy a zone free player and 2 dollar disks? Why can I not run an import/export company that imports cheap products to eliminate pricing imbalance? (See Lik-Sang being shut down over importing Sony products)
Problem is money is treated as free speech and a company can give more and can pursue a more targeted agenda than an individual.
Actually I have been a proponent of the opposite system of law for a while. Basically make punishments fit the financial impact of the crime.
Steal a loaf of bread? That is a fine. Get caught with $100 of weed is a ticket. (proposed as a law in MA) Caught embezzling a million dollars is death sentence.
Add in 30% as emotional damages and you get 1.2 million as the damage done to the family by killing the father. Now I argue that if you receive kickbacks or run a Ponzi scheme that loses 1.2 million you have done as much damage as if you walked out and killed a man on the street but the damage is distributed across more people.
Bernard L. Madoff destroyed people retirement funds. There are people who will be eating dogfood instead of hamburger. He has effectively killed 50,000 people with the damage he did to society. He should be tried and judged accordingly. Where this gets weird is the SF case, is this man responsible for shutting down the gov't? Is his crime millions of dollars in damage? At worst I think it woudl be 2 weeks salary of a competent admin resetting passwords on routers and systems. 30k should cover it. The problem here is his bosses understood nothing of the systems involed and he wasn't gonna fix things for them after being fired.
But what I find most interesting in the results was that the "certified" recount that was performed had Bush winning by more than any other recount that could have been performed. Especially when combined with other factors,
1) Bush's brother's influence in the state 2) Pre-election removal of blacks (mostly-democrat) from voting records (96,000 names, 1% of total electorate. Very simular to practice Bush had done in Texas a few years before.) 3) Roadblocks were placed in heavily democratic areas of the state making it hard for democrats to get to polling stations to vote 4) when race was too close to call there was the Volusia error where Gore was given -16022 votes by a diebold machine. 5) manual recount in Miami-Dade County was halted when republicans flown in from other states rioted (pretending to be locals angered by the recount).
If anything I am shocked that after that election fiasco that heads did not roll. This is corruption only short of banana republics. Whether you are Democrat or Republican this type of fraud has no place in a free nation. It makes me disgusted that anyone of ANY political affiliation could do some of these things and still think of them selves as an American.
Note : I can't claim that Michael Totten is absolutely right. Only that he reports a very different side of the war, and unlike other reporters, he went to the area to investigate.
A opposing timeline is here : http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article5904.html but notice that there is little explanation how Georgia with "15,000 troops in South Osseta" got driven out of the country in a single day by 800 Russian peacekeepers. That seems astonishing.
Don't be so sure about Georgia being the aggressor. True that is how it was reported but Russia has a lot more resources to put forth their side of the story and Putin has been planning this for months (Issuing passports, hiring mercenaries, supplying weapons) Russia had their version ready for news crews while Georgia was in the midst of chaos. Russia clearly won the PR war.
At least one independent journalist in the area reported that Russians invaded with a full armor column on the 6th and the Georgian "Attack" on South Osseta was the Georgian military's attempt to halt the tank column from Russia after the Russian shelling of Georgian villages began.
It gives a VERY different perspective on the conflict. Well worth a read. Makes you understand why both candidates are angry with Russia. They are both briefed by the CIA with the full story while we are limited to what gets reported in western newspapers.
I would argue that Glider is hacking a computer network. Bear with me here.
The tool manipulates a secured line of communication between a client and a server to get a desired set of results and hides the fact that it is doing so. You could call it SQL injection, replay-attack, man in the middle, etc. It is the same thing as hacking a shared network.
A different example. Do you mind if I write software to run on my ATM that when it connects to a bank just manipulates a little data. Maybe transfers some additional money into my account? That is what a Botting-program does to an online game. It takes cpu and resources from the common pool and transfers it to the hacker allowing them to accomplish goals while the user is working or sleeping.
Now you could counter argue that Glider is only interacting with the Wow client in the same way that a user would. But that only works if they were actually interacting with the client and not disabling security and doing things not allowed by the client.
I believe the study you are referencing is actually discussing a different phenomenon. (I.e. The fact that some chess grandmasters can play many simultaneous matches based on glancing at the board as they walk playing many different opponents.
Basically they learn to rapidly recognize opportunities that average chess players might miss. However if you put a couple good players in the crowd you easily beat the grandmaster by forcing them into a early bizarre gambit and playing off of them being distracted. (I have beaten a grandmaster this way, and he would have totally trashed me in a fair match)
I used to play tournament chess and I won off my ability to plan farther in the future than my opponents. I would say that most chess masters do this too.
Quick snap judgments are a side benefit of having played thousands of hours of chess. (Main downside being that you had to spend thousands of hours playing chess when you could have instead have been getting laid, a situation very simular to becoming an expert in computers I would think.)
An expert can recognize and discard more situations than a novice, which helps the expert think farther into the future since they are not wasting time on less viable moves, but I can state that an expert DEFINITELY thinks more steps forward than an average player. Now if you change average player to average grandmaster and expert to be top grandmaster then yes, I would agree that most grandmasters may think roughly the same distance into the future. But no way does the average player get close to a grandmaster on moves ahead.
It is like saying the average coder can think of as much code as an expert coder, an expert coder can almost think out an entire architecture, an average coder is lucky to finish a method. Hell, most interviewees I see can't compile a class in their head and tell me all the compile errors in a class. They catch the first few issues but they don't get the more complex issues that an expert woudl catch. Same is true in chess.
Well I was once competing pretty seriously in martial artist and chess tournaments (During the same several years oddly enough) I think there is more commonality to the approach than you would expect. (Ignoring the fact that I would have loved to lay the smack down on a few of my more obnoxious chess opponents)
In both chess and martial arts you memorize a large number of moves and counters and execute the basic opening with no need for thought. My favorite chess opening I had anywhere from the first 12 to 24 moves already prepared and requiring no time or thought on my behalf. If an opponent used a very unusual counter my routine could be derailed but my competitor would be in a disadvantageous position as most counters I hadn't studied in chess had significant disadvantages to them.
Now martial arts is different in that the sheer volume of possible moves is larger and there is a HUGE advantage to having a move or counter that the opponent has never seen before. But in a tightly regulated matches like fencing or Olympic Tae Kwon Do the number of legal moves are limited and top competitor have seen most techniques before. In these settings participants are planning half a dozen moves deep and doing the basic attacks and counters on autopilot.
I know some serious fencers and I have fought against them in informal settings. One comment that stuck with me was one friend told me he felt I planned 2-3 moves in advance. (This is a VERY serious fencer, trains swordsmen, does NERO, almost qualified for olympics) He said he is usually thinking closer to 6 moves deep so he can always force me into the position he wants except when I managed something unexpected (usually some marital arts trick that I could never do in regulation fencing) and honestly I only manage that a few times before running out of tricks he has not seen before. (He now beats me pretty consistently)
I do agree that you don't want to be thinking out new moves or counters DURING combat, but you any your opponent have mostly the same library of moves you do think deeply during combat, it is just that while you are doing feint, parry, riposte on autopilot your brain is thinking about "ok the next time he extends like that I step in close and trap his arm, etc.
Execution is really different but the basic idea of move vs counter while watching for weaknesses is common to most tournament sports.
Well because they were against us going to war. They "claimed" the war in Iraq was unjustified and that there was no evidence of WMDs. But we showed them! Ha Ha! Take that you Frenchies! Gonna eat me some more freedom fries.
On one hand I don't get good coverage of the situation in Tibet because western reporters just do not go there. And on the other hand Chinese reporting is state run and thus essentially a state run propaganda outlet.
Having observed the Dali Lama's tours and speeches for the last few year I find Chinese media assertion that The Dali Lama is running a terrorist network absurd, but their reporting to the contrary might be causing Tibetan supporters of the Dali Lama to become more extreme as the only media source available to them tell them that the Dali Lama is urging armed uprising.
In many ways the Chinese government is seeding the dissent which will give them an excuse for violent oppression of the Tibetan people. I am not sure whether this is evidence of a brilliantly executed evil agenda or standard government incompetence.
A strong reason they can not open their APIs or code base is that even though they are protected under US law what is to prevent a country from wholesale copying the code and starting a "Chinese Vista"? Right now that is not really an option, they have to use pirate versions and there are trade-offs to using pirate software. (no updates, flaky performance, root kits from hacking groups, etc)
While open source makes a lot of sense for projects where sharign good ideas and collaboration are the main concern, it doesn't make sense when there is a lot of money involved and the company is seen as being allied with a major political force which implies powerful political enemies.
I have not met a programmer outside of academia who could answer that question. Simple fact : Most programmers don't care WHO did something in our field, they only care WHAT was done and HOW they can use it. I have Knuth's book on my shelf but I had to use google to figure out who he was. The only super programmer I know grew up in east germany and didn't graduate college, does he know who Knuth is? Of course not. Does he spend his free time exploring new technologies and writing test applications for fun just to prove a new technology will work?
My advice for finding great developers, is to look for someone who loves what they do. Hire them. Make it easy for them to do what they love and then watch how productive they can be when you keep distractions away from them. Sadly the best way I have found is to find a couple great people and then use word of mouth. Someone is rarely great in isolation, others helped them achieve greatness and are likely to also be very good at what they do.
Maybe the best thing you can do is get a reputation for being a great place to work and then the best will come to you as their peers tell them about their experiences working for you.
Lastly talent is no silver bullet. A company also needs a lot of people who are dedicated and yet are merely decent but are willing to do the hard work to get things done right. Someone has to fix bugs in last years application, write test cases for publicly identified bugs, test the product with the new version of windows, or just help write the product documentation. Those tasks take a lot of hard work but most hotshot developers would run screaming from those jobs as they are not mentally rewarding challenges. Yet they do contribute to a company's success.
Hmm, when I said children are like adults I meant that children are just like adults in that they have a large range of ability. The majority of children DO fall in between the extremes. Rereading your initial post I find that I agree with most of what you said about the gifted end of the range... Perhaps I need to spend some more time on reading comprehension... or have a child explain your message to me. *grin*
I do disagree with your disillusionment with your peers. I do feel that the average high school student IS more gifted with computers than the average high school teacher. Many teachers never had access to computers until they were retrained in how to use them. Meanwhile most high school students have grown up around computers all their lives and THINK in terms of how to use them. They take them for granted and know you can message instantly, spellcheck documents, or look up data on the net. Just being familiar with the technology is a huge advantage.
Yes, most teens will "waste" this advantage playing games or messaging "R U rdy 2 go" with friends, but that is still running circles around teachers who have to stop and think on how to message someone. And one last comment I should also state that while not all students are created equal, neither are all teachers. The gifted circle of teens I mentioned had a teacher who recognized this and worked with them. It was a beautiful synergy where in many schools the creative energies would have been wasted in an adversarial relationships. The kids were given more freedom as a reward of their network assistance and they did waste much of this time playing games and goofing off. But even while they "wasted time" playing quake many of them were learning a lot about internet ports, local networking, etc. It was just the more gifted ones teaching the others rather than the teacher leading everything. (I was allowed to visit the class and watch this in person. It was an interesting experience.)
Have faith in your peers, they may seem like crazy good-for-nothings, but a lot of learning can go on even in what appears to be a completely useless activity. This coming from a good for nothing who has done quite well in life.
I have met some exceptionally talented high schoolers. In school have the free time to really keep up on all the new tech and enjoy the legal protection of juvenile criminal sentences that allows them to explore that side of the net with less risk.
When I worked at IBM in Connecticut I met a core of about 8 high school students who had set up their high school computer lab and entire network by establishing close tie with a local college and then riding on the colleges internet connection. Three of these kids worked support at a local ISP as tech support, at least one was an open source developer, and the rest were mostly dabblers. But still they set up the entire computer lab and were more up to date on security than the security response team in IBM. They were the first to demonstrate to me how you could teardrop attack a competitor during a Quake match to lag them so you could get an easy kill. This was long before I heard of teardrop on the CERT mailing list.
I had some great discussions with these kids and they helped me on rebuild my laptop (it needed some custom drivers for Linux as Linux distros for laptops were pretty rare back then.) Two went to work at priceline straight out of high school (with salaries higher than mine if I recall correctly.)
Yet another example. One of the best programmers I met at MIT came into college knowing more about assembly programming than I knew when I left. He was the head printer driver developer for an American branch of a Japanese firm while in highshcool! He supplied me with free printers all through college as he would hand me the test prototype after he finished coding the driver. He would just sit down for a a weekend with a new device and code up a driver from the specs I still have no idea how he did this while doing a full coarse load. So don't imagine that age or education determines 1337ness of programming skills. They are potentially just as smart and creative as any adult, they just have less experience to make them well rounded. But if they focus on a single domain they can have a lot more breadth than you or I and as they have been learning more recently they will know all the latest techniques that us old timers will not yet have absorbed.
Children are not dumb. They are the same as adults. Some kids are truly brilliant, others could kill a brick in a padded room. I know at least one teenager whom is fully self sufficient: working a job, paying rent, paying her own way through college, cooking meals, cleaning, etc.
The self sufficient kids are almost always the ones I found to be intelligent and articulate beyond their years as they had no choice but to grow up. But on the other hand if the parent treated the kid like dumb pet that is almost always what they get. Luckily most kids grow out of that once they get out on their own.
I wonder how long it will be before cellphone infrastructure is no longer overwhelmed every time there is a natural disaster / large accident / local news story.
Right now it is essentially a critical piece of infrastructure that is the first thing to become unavailable in a disaster. And while land lines allow some people's call to get through even when the switch is overwhelmed, a cell tower tends to let no one through when overwhelmed so the backlog of people wanting to get through never gets any better.
Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
Reading about the recent disasters I noticed in several stories there was no cell coverage available in the wake of the disaster. I wonder how long it will be before additional bandwidth for emergencies will be legislated.
Actually there is a difference between what you can access and what documents a really good doctor has available.
Recently a close relative was diagnosed with stage IV medullary thyroid cancer. According to everything I could find (using only medical sites) his outlook was 100% mortality within 5 years.
My sister works at a hospital and had access to journals that cost several-thousand per year (according to her) and she saw treatments that raised his life expectancy to 5 years with a 10 year cap on life expectancy.
We went to the best thyroid surgeon we could find. He actually knew the doctor who had written the papers my sister had found as they attended the same conferences. Furthermore he had access to follow up studies detailing promising treatment plans that actually gave a 5% possibility of being completely cured. Now my relative was not 100% cured -- but I would put his life expectancy up in the 10 years category so he has 2 times longer to live than anyone could have expected and he might live even longer than that.
So basically each tier we went up the studies were more relevant and contained newer treatments. We were all reading articles by the same doctors, but my sister had access to newer data, and the expert knew what the study author was doing today.
On one last note. It is worth noting that medullary thyroid cancer is hard to diagnose and the local doctors misdiagnosed it several times. My relative self-diagnosed it online and paid for the additional tests (which are not normally performed in the US) to prove that he had the rare, almost untreatable version of the disease. But he also became despondent because he _knew_ he had only a year or two to live from the same documentation I found. It was only the expert in the field that knew of any way to potentially cure him.
So the web can help you look up possibilities. But the data you see and the treatments are quite old. When I have symptoms I go online to look up common maladies and when I go in to my doctor I tell her what I researched already to save her time. Often times she can dismiss a couple options quickly, but several times it has been quite useful. If my relative had not done the same, I wouldn't be visiting him this Christmas as he would be dead.
Several doctors had misdiagnosed the type of cancer, and even at Mayo several residents were shocked that the patient had gotten the diagnosis as none of the residents had gotten it right on the walk-through session. So doing self-diagnosis might help, but even with the right knowledge and education the residents and local doctors were wrong. The patient has a more time and interest to look at every possible option while the doctor has several people he needs to see today so they tend to lean towards common maladies as they are just more likely to be right.
In the time it took me to write my overly-long reply you already answered my question. It sounds like you really do have a problem changing words into images. I am fascinated with your predicament and wish you the best of luck in overcoming this difficulty!
I just assumed that you were non-visual like myself and that some professor had convinced you that you could not read despite your obvious comprehension of the written language.
Heck, you can even read my replies and even my teachers had difficulty in reading things I wrote! *grin*
I read you earlier comment and I am not sure why you feel you "do not read". Could you elaborate on what questions the professor asked to determine if you really read the book? I am guessing that it might have been the protagonist's clothes or hair color or some other sundry fact that I am not sure why you SHOULD know.
I can not tell you what my boss is wearing and I just spoke to him. Nor could I tell you what someone in a movie wore because it was an irrelevant fact. Why should a book be any different to me?
Now if it was a detail important to the story that is one thing, but I ignore pages of descriptive prose if they don't matter to the story. I glance at the page, decide what the author was doing and skip over words until I see something interesting and relevant. I still "read" all the words of the page, I just don't bother picturing them.
And yet I strongly disagree with the premise that I do not read the book. I could memorize the entire chapter in a couple days, but I have no reason to do so. Let me put it another way, I don't care what color pants you have on and if you wrote down the color I would be no more likely to care.
Likewise, when I dream I do not imagine someone's hair color or skin tone unless it becomes important. I just rarely visualize that type of detail. I just dream in abstract terms with detail only provided to my level of interest.
Excerpt from an sample dream: Mind: So after your concert you run into this gorgeous woman who loves you music. Me: Why is she pretty?) Mind: Well she has long blond hair and is dressed well in futuristic looking clothe... Me: (distracted) Oh, cool. I bet she is an alien and we could make love in her space capsule. Mind: Oh, um... (Mind sighs as pages of prepared materials are wasted) While orbiting the moon in a luxury space yacht you are making out with a beautiful alien with blond hair...
I tend to get frustrated with authors that add so much visual detail that the book drags like a 10 ton wagon. Extreme visual detail was useful in the days before pictures, but these days I am dubious why I should care that the lead protagonist likes mauve. Unless it is important to the story, many facts are better left unsaid in my opinion. My imagination enjoys providing its own details and I enjoy authors who realize that fact. Steven Erikson is an example of a fantasy author whom wastes very little time on irrelevant detail but has a huge fantasy world with very complex political situations. He just doesn't bother describing a scene or person beyond where your imagination could pick up the details and then he concentrates on more important story related details and lets my imagination take care of the sundry facts less central to the story.
Please respond. I am curious if the "reading test" covered something important to the story or if the test involved a item of topical importance that would be ignored even if I was there in person.
The "gibberish" voices are actually a very common solution to internationalization so that they can have a pretty decent vocal track that has emotion and tone and yet does not need a million different language tracks utilizing 3rd rate actors do be deployed around the world. It is much easier to translate in game text than it is to re-record all sound files.
I generally find that good "scrambled" voice actors are preferable to second rate English voice actors. Good first rate voice acting in English is better, but I have only seen a couple games that I felt had that level of voice acting. And then much of the disk is used up on sound-files for the varying language and Dolby channel configurations.
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jmossis: You make a good point on the taxes. I have read studies that suggest there is a positive correlation but my rant was pretty cheap.
Shiftless: You apparently failed to check the part of my post where I included the links showing an easier time getting ahead if other countries. Or you could have done some searching and found the other documents I did not include that had simular findings. I just picked the easiest to follow summary.
Yes, I did manage to break even in class.... You see as a kid my family plunged from the upper middle class into poverty. The American system is ruthless to anyone who happens to have debt dumped on them through divorce, medical emergencies, legal proceedings, etc.
The American safety net is pretty thin and once you fall through it is extremely hard to get up again. The studies I linked are evidence. Fixing the medical system and then the court system might go a long way to fixing the problem since those are usually what bankrupt families.
Before any claims that "you have never traveled so you don't know jack". My immediate family has visited every continent bar Antarctica and I can recall 28 countries off the top of my head. (3 new countries this month) Most of the world is not the hellhole that Americans believe. There are some awful places (Zimbabwe right now) but even that country was quite nice under a decade ago.
As a family member recently went to the best specialist at the best place to treat his disease I can say we have a great system if you can afford the 55 thousand dollar copay required for the hospital visit. Most people are poor enough that they would just die instead of raising that kind of money with a few weeks notice... (Condition onset was fast with no family history)
Nothing say that their will not be paid specialists even if we go to fully socialized coverage. There will always be expert surgeons who treat athletes, royalty, and politicians. Honestly most Americans do not get access to the best coverage. It is too expensive, it is hard to get a booking between the Sultan and Rich millionaire. We were only seen because we knew his protege and happened to be at Mayo hospital when a cancellation occurred.
But I guess everyone knows the top surgeon in the country for the form of cancer they are suffering and has enough money to pay for the treatment... right?
1. After cutting the upper-class taxes there was a recession. Regan did it in the 80s and Bush did it in the last decade. Each time the economy stagnated. Progressive policies are very good for the economy as Poor people spend money. That money revs up the economy and keeps it going. People saving money or investing money does not actually rev the economy in the same way but they get all the benefits (see link on growth of economy later in this post)
2. I agree that there is some problem in American school systems. But most of the problem is that American culture of apathy and short attention spans. Kids don't have the attention span to finis...
3. You talk abut how socialism is such a weak systems but Russia had essentially 3rd world infrastructure and yet was a superpower on par with the US for most of our lifes. I don't think we could have done the same given the same infrastructure as them with government that we have. Also most of Europe does quite well with higher standards of living. Also I grew up on welfare. None of my family is on welfare anymore but it was a critical service when dad walked off and refused to pay child support. Since my family has worked directly with the poor (Health services and counseling) I think I have a better idea of who receives welfare than you do. It is often those with medical problems, mental problems, or even drug problems. Drug problems you say? Well let them rot! Well that is the problem. You have a drug conviction and suddenly you can't get many jobs, or and you can't get funding for college. How and the hell do you handle these people? You either put them on welfare or you throw them in jail which is still state funded living. But yay you are still hard on crime and the war on drugs goes on! Rah rah!
But what really incensed me with your post was your assertion that people have an easier time getting ahead in America. BZZZT! Nice try the US is harder to advance out of poverty and it is getting harder all the time. For all our vaunted freedom you can move around in the middle class, but if you want to be an executive you really NEED be in the right class or society to get your funding or to land that job due to your uncle's connection. There are some people who manage to found a company and build it to that level, but what are we talking about one in ten million? I get better odds at the lottery.... Every company founder I personally have known has gotten kicked out when the company stabilized and an interm CEO (who gets along with the VC and board) has been appointed to manage the continued growth of the company. I have yet to personally meet someone who actually manages to fight off the wolves and make it past upper middle class. But hey, they exist, I mean we see them on TV.
And before you rip on my liberal ideal with no real world backing let me drop some links. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html I see those darn Scandinavian countries are more upward mobile despite their socialist trends and higher standard of living! Yes click around on that link and you will see the US is actually HARDER to climb out of poverty. But don't worry your capitalistic master are having a great time jerking your leash. You know that when the economy is growing rapidly the middle class still shows no upward mobility? http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html but I guess the upper class sees great returns on their investments.
Basically the American dream is a great PR piece to help insure there is cheap labor to fill factories. But Rah Rah for Capitalism. The idea that giving the money to private companies is also fallacious they tend to be very good at maximizing profit. (FOR
To put that another way, you know what would really stop terrorists from hijacking an airplane? Hundreds of well-armed passengers. And no, a bullet hole will not decompress an aircraft.
Yeah I would feel much safer with that drunk jerk behind me packing heat. And when you get delayed on the tarmac for 6 hours I am sure he won't take out his frustration on the staff. It isn't like they already have to land planes to drag off people who freak out...
Lets look at some gun stats - http://www.metro.us/us/article/2009/06/16/03/5431-82/index.xml Looks like big pro-gun southern states see 300-500% more gun related deaths than states with strong gun control like Massachusetts. Problem with giving everyone guns is that obnoxious bully or mentally damaged teen also want guns, and when one person fires or misfires do you think grandma will keep her cool and not accidentally shoot the guy who stands up to look around pulling his own gun out? As a cope I wouldn't want to enter a plin with a couple hundred panicked gun toting passengers.
The last thing they need is a pitched gun battle with 30-40 people on a plane all trying to help by shooting at that other guy who must be a bad guy, I mean everyone can spot an Afghan/Saudi. No one will mistake that darkskinned guy, or jewish lady. No one will shoot that Arabic dude "just in case". Hell, only half of Americans know who was involved in 9/11 attacks and most of them couldn't identify a Saudi Arabian on sight.
Anyone Jewish, Arabic, Dark-skinned, would be an "obvious" threat. And it isn't like that bullet will go through multiple chairs and people before stopping... http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/theboxotruth.htm I mean their tests only went through a dozen plywood walls and its not like anyone would miss while panicked and shooting at a human for the first time.
*shakes head* Keep the guns off the plane. Carrying in public is asking for trouble... People may panick when they see you packing heat, and if something does happen the right response is almost always to not use the gun. Yet that wasn't your first justification for bringing one, was it? It was to use in case of an attack , not as a deterrent. And hundreds of people shooting towards the cockpit won't cause any issues, right? I mean avionic electronics are not sensitive machines with wires running all over the plane... /end rant
As someone who grew up in the south I saw my classroom go from 50% black to 20% to 5% as I went from normal classes to Honors, and then AP classes.
There were plenty of smart African-Americans in my school but there was immense pressure on them to "conform". Anyone with good grades was labeled an "Oreo (white on the inside and black outside) and excluded from black social activities since they were "trying to be so white". I saw many good friends drop out of classes so they could keep their friends, and each year the pressure was worse as fewer and fewer kids were left to resist peer pressure and the classes became more and more white and the insults rang more and more true.
I believe one person in our graduating top 10 was black in a school that was half black. This girl was in most of my AP classes and lost ALL of her friends. She was not really accepted by whites for dating or being close freinds (this is the south after all) and blacks didn't want to hang out with someone so "white".
I don't really think that racism was the problem, but more a perception that being smart was "turning white" and the very real problem that successful blacks that come out of this system were ostracized by their community and feel very little need to help out a community that has essentially pushed them away. This makes it hard for the community to drag itself up as truly the most successful members are those that cut ties and gave up on being "black".
But I personally feel that ALL of America has a problem with learning. We glorify being wealthy but not being smart. I also saw smart cheerleaders drop out of AP classes because being seen as intelligent made them somehow less attractive to their boyfriends. I saw people pretend to be stupid to fit in, and after a few years you couldn't tell it was an act anymore.
TV and movies portray smart people as nerdy and hard working, but attractive people as rich and successful. It is no wonder most people try to get by on looks or popularity and not hard work and intelligence. Until we see hardworking and intelligent as desirable qualities we are in for a lot of mediocrity.
No not bitter at all
There was a great NPR article a year or so ago that stated it was actually easier to become rich in Europe than in the US. For all we tout how one can get ahead in America there are very few people that have made their own fortunes. (I think you 1 in a million number is still right though)
I can not find that article (it was a radio program) But this article by J Mooneyham claims to become rich in the US you must be born rich, marry into money, or be a criminal. http://www.jmooneyham.com/your-true-chances-of-getting-rich.html and echoes what I remember hearing.
Basically self made millionaires are a statistical anomaly. America is a land where you can come and make your own moderate success, but becoming wildly rich is just not gonna happen.
I completely agree that the companies currently have more protection against competition than we consumers have guarantee of fair trade price. What are dvd-zones except a tool for creating artificial pricing structures.
Why can I not buy a zone free player and 2 dollar disks? Why can I not run an import/export company that imports cheap products to eliminate pricing imbalance? (See Lik-Sang being shut down over importing Sony products)
Problem is money is treated as free speech and a company can give more and can pursue a more targeted agenda than an individual.
Actually I have been a proponent of the opposite system of law for a while. Basically make punishments fit the financial impact of the crime.
Steal a loaf of bread? That is a fine. Get caught with $100 of weed is a ticket. (proposed as a law in MA) Caught embezzling a million dollars is death sentence.
Now let me explain the last part. Basically crimes should be judged against the impact to society. You kill a man then his family loses Avg Salary (45k - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States) * 20 years = 900k
Add in 30% as emotional damages and you get 1.2 million as the damage done to the family by killing the father. Now I argue that if you receive kickbacks or run a Ponzi scheme that loses 1.2 million you have done as much damage as if you walked out and killed a man on the street but the damage is distributed across more people.
Bernard L. Madoff destroyed people retirement funds. There are people who will be eating dogfood instead of hamburger. He has effectively killed 50,000 people with the damage he did to society. He should be tried and judged accordingly. Where this gets weird is the SF case, is this man responsible for shutting down the gov't? Is his crime millions of dollars in damage? At worst I think it woudl be 2 weeks salary of a competent admin resetting passwords on routers and systems. 30k should cover it. The problem here is his bosses understood nothing of the systems involed and he wasn't gonna fix things for them after being fired.
Your right on the official recount Bush won. Even the recount that Kerry requested and was denied had Bush winning.
However any statewide recount would have had Gore winning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount
But what I find most interesting in the results was that the "certified" recount that was performed had Bush winning by more than any other recount that could have been performed. Especially when combined with other factors,
1) Bush's brother's influence in the state
2) Pre-election removal of blacks (mostly-democrat) from voting records (96,000 names, 1% of total electorate. Very simular to practice Bush had done in Texas a few years before.)
3) Roadblocks were placed in heavily democratic areas of the state making it hard for democrats to get to polling stations to vote
4) when race was too close to call there was the Volusia error where Gore was given -16022 votes by a diebold machine.
5) manual recount in Miami-Dade County was halted when republicans flown in from other states rioted (pretending to be locals angered by the recount).
If anything I am shocked that after that election fiasco that heads did not roll. This is corruption only short of banana republics. Whether you are Democrat or Republican this type of fraud has no place in a free nation. It makes me disgusted that anyone of ANY political affiliation could do some of these things and still think of them selves as an American.
Note : I can't claim that Michael Totten is absolutely right. Only that he reports a very different side of the war, and unlike other reporters, he went to the area to investigate.
A opposing timeline is here : http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article5904.html but notice that there is little explanation how Georgia with "15,000 troops in South Osseta" got driven out of the country in a single day by 800 Russian peacekeepers. That seems astonishing.
Wikipedia has a timeline that also suggests the simple version or the war is incomplete. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_South_Ossetia_war
Don't be so sure about Georgia being the aggressor. True that is how it was reported but Russia has a lot more resources to put forth their side of the story and Putin has been planning this for months (Issuing passports, hiring mercenaries, supplying weapons) Russia had their version ready for news crews while Georgia was in the midst of chaos. Russia clearly won the PR war.
At least one independent journalist in the area reported that Russians invaded with a full armor column on the 6th and the Georgian "Attack" on South Osseta was the Georgian military's attempt to halt the tank column from Russia after the Russian shelling of Georgian villages began.
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/08/the-truth-about-1.php
It gives a VERY different perspective on the conflict. Well worth a read. Makes you understand why both candidates are angry with Russia. They are both briefed by the CIA with the full story while we are limited to what gets reported in western newspapers.
I would argue that Glider is hacking a computer network. Bear with me here.
The tool manipulates a secured line of communication between a client and a server to get a desired set of results and hides the fact that it is doing so. You could call it SQL injection, replay-attack, man in the middle, etc. It is the same thing as hacking a shared network.
A different example. Do you mind if I write software to run on my ATM that when it connects to a bank just manipulates a little data. Maybe transfers some additional money into my account? That is what a Botting-program does to an online game. It takes cpu and resources from the common pool and transfers it to the hacker allowing them to accomplish goals while the user is working or sleeping.
Now you could counter argue that Glider is only interacting with the Wow client in the same way that a user would. But that only works if they were actually interacting with the client and not disabling security and doing things not allowed by the client.
Someone working at the National institute of health in 2000 informed me that one of the top directors had an interview one question long.
The question was "Did you vote for this president".
I am completely unsurprised to hear other branches of the government received simular treatment.
I believe the study you are referencing is actually discussing a different phenomenon. (I.e. The fact that some chess grandmasters can play many simultaneous matches based on glancing at the board as they walk playing many different opponents.
Basically they learn to rapidly recognize opportunities that average chess players might miss. However if you put a couple good players in the crowd you easily beat the grandmaster by forcing them into a early bizarre gambit and playing off of them being distracted. (I have beaten a grandmaster this way, and he would have totally trashed me in a fair match)
I used to play tournament chess and I won off my ability to plan farther in the future than my opponents. I would say that most chess masters do this too.
Quick snap judgments are a side benefit of having played thousands of hours of chess. (Main downside being that you had to spend thousands of hours playing chess when you could have instead have been getting laid, a situation very simular to becoming an expert in computers I would think.)
An expert can recognize and discard more situations than a novice, which helps the expert think farther into the future since they are not wasting time on less viable moves, but I can state that an expert DEFINITELY thinks more steps forward than an average player. Now if you change average player to average grandmaster and expert to be top grandmaster then yes, I would agree that most grandmasters may think roughly the same distance into the future. But no way does the average player get close to a grandmaster on moves ahead.
It is like saying the average coder can think of as much code as an expert coder, an expert coder can almost think out an entire architecture, an average coder is lucky to finish a method. Hell, most interviewees I see can't compile a class in their head and tell me all the compile errors in a class. They catch the first few issues but they don't get the more complex issues that an expert woudl catch. Same is true in chess.
Well I was once competing pretty seriously in martial artist and chess tournaments (During the same several years oddly enough) I think there is more commonality to the approach than you would expect. (Ignoring the fact that I would have loved to lay the smack down on a few of my more obnoxious chess opponents)
In both chess and martial arts you memorize a large number of moves and counters and execute the basic opening with no need for thought. My favorite chess opening I had anywhere from the first 12 to 24 moves already prepared and requiring no time or thought on my behalf. If an opponent used a very unusual counter my routine could be derailed but my competitor would be in a disadvantageous position as most counters I hadn't studied in chess had significant disadvantages to them.
Now martial arts is different in that the sheer volume of possible moves is larger and there is a HUGE advantage to having a move or counter that the opponent has never seen before. But in a tightly regulated matches like fencing or Olympic Tae Kwon Do the number of legal moves are limited and top competitor have seen most techniques before. In these settings participants are planning half a dozen moves deep and doing the basic attacks and counters on autopilot.
I know some serious fencers and I have fought against them in informal settings. One comment that stuck with me was one friend told me he felt I planned 2-3 moves in advance. (This is a VERY serious fencer, trains swordsmen, does NERO, almost qualified for olympics) He said he is usually thinking closer to 6 moves deep so he can always force me into the position he wants except when I managed something unexpected (usually some marital arts trick that I could never do in regulation fencing) and honestly I only manage that a few times before running out of tricks he has not seen before. (He now beats me pretty consistently)
I do agree that you don't want to be thinking out new moves or counters DURING combat, but you any your opponent have mostly the same library of moves you do think deeply during combat, it is just that while you are doing feint, parry, riposte on autopilot your brain is thinking about "ok the next time he extends like that I step in close and trap his arm, etc.
Execution is really different but the basic idea of move vs counter while watching for weaknesses is common to most tournament sports.
Well because they were against us going to war. They "claimed" the war in Iraq was unjustified and that there was no evidence of WMDs. But we showed them! Ha Ha! Take that you Frenchies! Gonna eat me some more freedom fries.
On one hand I don't get good coverage of the situation in Tibet because western reporters just do not go there. And on the other hand Chinese reporting is state run and thus essentially a state run propaganda outlet.
Having observed the Dali Lama's tours and speeches for the last few year I find Chinese media assertion that The Dali Lama is running a terrorist network absurd, but their reporting to the contrary might be causing Tibetan supporters of the Dali Lama to become more extreme as the only media source available to them tell them that the Dali Lama is urging armed uprising.
In many ways the Chinese government is seeding the dissent which will give them an excuse for violent oppression of the Tibetan people. I am not sure whether this is evidence of a brilliantly executed evil agenda or standard government incompetence.
A strong reason they can not open their APIs or code base is that even though they are protected under US law what is to prevent a country from wholesale copying the code and starting a "Chinese Vista"? Right now that is not really an option, they have to use pirate versions and there are trade-offs to using pirate software. (no updates, flaky performance, root kits from hacking groups, etc)
While open source makes a lot of sense for projects where sharign good ideas and collaboration are the main concern, it doesn't make sense when there is a lot of money involved and the company is seen as being allied with a major political force which implies powerful political enemies.
I have not met a programmer outside of academia who could answer that question. Simple fact : Most programmers don't care WHO did something in our field, they only care WHAT was done and HOW they can use it. I have Knuth's book on my shelf but I had to use google to figure out who he was. The only super programmer I know grew up in east germany and didn't graduate college, does he know who Knuth is? Of course not. Does he spend his free time exploring new technologies and writing test applications for fun just to prove a new technology will work?
My advice for finding great developers, is to look for someone who loves what they do. Hire them. Make it easy for them to do what they love and then watch how productive they can be when you keep distractions away from them. Sadly the best way I have found is to find a couple great people and then use word of mouth. Someone is rarely great in isolation, others helped them achieve greatness and are likely to also be very good at what they do.
Maybe the best thing you can do is get a reputation for being a great place to work and then the best will come to you as their peers tell them about their experiences working for you.
Lastly talent is no silver bullet. A company also needs a lot of people who are dedicated and yet are merely decent but are willing to do the hard work to get things done right. Someone has to fix bugs in last years application, write test cases for publicly identified bugs, test the product with the new version of windows, or just help write the product documentation. Those tasks take a lot of hard work but most hotshot developers would run screaming from those jobs as they are not mentally rewarding challenges. Yet they do contribute to a company's success.
Hmm, when I said children are like adults I meant that children are just like adults in that they have a large range of ability. The majority of children DO fall in between the extremes. Rereading your initial post I find that I agree with most of what you said about the gifted end of the range... Perhaps I need to spend some more time on reading comprehension... or have a child explain your message to me. *grin*
I do disagree with your disillusionment with your peers. I do feel that the average high school student IS more gifted with computers than the average high school teacher. Many teachers never had access to computers until they were retrained in how to use them. Meanwhile most high school students have grown up around computers all their lives and THINK in terms of how to use them. They take them for granted and know you can message instantly, spellcheck documents, or look up data on the net. Just being familiar with the technology is a huge advantage.
Yes, most teens will "waste" this advantage playing games or messaging "R U rdy 2 go" with friends, but that is still running circles around teachers who have to stop and think on how to message someone. And one last comment I should also state that while not all students are created equal, neither are all teachers. The gifted circle of teens I mentioned had a teacher who recognized this and worked with them. It was a beautiful synergy where in many schools the creative energies would have been wasted in an adversarial relationships. The kids were given more freedom as a reward of their network assistance and they did waste much of this time playing games and goofing off. But even while they "wasted time" playing quake many of them were learning a lot about internet ports, local networking, etc. It was just the more gifted ones teaching the others rather than the teacher leading everything. (I was allowed to visit the class and watch this in person. It was an interesting experience.)
Have faith in your peers, they may seem like crazy good-for-nothings, but a lot of learning can go on even in what appears to be a completely useless activity. This coming from a good for nothing who has done quite well in life.
I have met some exceptionally talented high schoolers. In school have the free time to really keep up on all the new tech and enjoy the legal protection of juvenile criminal sentences that allows them to explore that side of the net with less risk.
When I worked at IBM in Connecticut I met a core of about 8 high school students who had set up their high school computer lab and entire network by establishing close tie with a local college and then riding on the colleges internet connection. Three of these kids worked support at a local ISP as tech support, at least one was an open source developer, and the rest were mostly dabblers. But still they set up the entire computer lab and were more up to date on security than the security response team in IBM. They were the first to demonstrate to me how you could teardrop attack a competitor during a Quake match to lag them so you could get an easy kill. This was long before I heard of teardrop on the CERT mailing list.
I had some great discussions with these kids and they helped me on rebuild my laptop (it needed some custom drivers for Linux as Linux distros for laptops were pretty rare back then.) Two went to work at priceline straight out of high school (with salaries higher than mine if I recall correctly.)
Yet another example. One of the best programmers I met at MIT came into college knowing more about assembly programming than I knew when I left. He was the head printer driver developer for an American branch of a Japanese firm while in highshcool! He supplied me with free printers all through college as he would hand me the test prototype after he finished coding the driver. He would just sit down for a a weekend with a new device and code up a driver from the specs I still have no idea how he did this while doing a full coarse load. So don't imagine that age or education determines 1337ness of programming skills. They are potentially just as smart and creative as any adult, they just have less experience to make them well rounded. But if they focus on a single domain they can have a lot more breadth than you or I and as they have been learning more recently they will know all the latest techniques that us old timers will not yet have absorbed.
Children are not dumb. They are the same as adults. Some kids are truly brilliant, others could kill a brick in a padded room. I know at least one teenager whom is fully self sufficient: working a job, paying rent, paying her own way through college, cooking meals, cleaning, etc.
The self sufficient kids are almost always the ones I found to be intelligent and articulate beyond their years as they had no choice but to grow up. But on the other hand if the parent treated the kid like dumb pet that is almost always what they get. Luckily most kids grow out of that once they get out on their own.
I wonder how long it will be before cellphone infrastructure is no longer overwhelmed every time there is a natural disaster / large accident / local news story.
Right now it is essentially a critical piece of infrastructure that is the first thing to become unavailable in a disaster. And while land lines allow some people's call to get through even when the switch is overwhelmed, a cell tower tends to let no one through when overwhelmed so the backlog of people wanting to get through never gets any better.
Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
Reading about the recent disasters I noticed in several stories there was no cell coverage available in the wake of the disaster. I wonder how long it will be before additional bandwidth for emergencies will be legislated.
Actually there is a difference between what you can access and what documents a really good doctor has available.
Recently a close relative was diagnosed with stage IV medullary thyroid cancer. According to everything I could find (using only medical sites) his outlook was 100% mortality within 5 years.
My sister works at a hospital and had access to journals that cost several-thousand per year (according to her) and she saw treatments that raised his life expectancy to 5 years with a 10 year cap on life expectancy.
We went to the best thyroid surgeon we could find. He actually knew the doctor who had written the papers my sister had found as they attended the same conferences. Furthermore he had access to follow up studies detailing promising treatment plans that actually gave a 5% possibility of being completely cured. Now my relative was not 100% cured -- but I would put his life expectancy up in the 10 years category so he has 2 times longer to live than anyone could have expected and he might live even longer than that.
So basically each tier we went up the studies were more relevant and contained newer treatments. We were all reading articles by the same doctors, but my sister had access to newer data, and the expert knew what the study author was doing today.
On one last note. It is worth noting that medullary thyroid cancer is hard to diagnose and the local doctors misdiagnosed it several times. My relative self-diagnosed it online and paid for the additional tests (which are not normally performed in the US) to prove that he had the rare, almost untreatable version of the disease. But he also became despondent because he _knew_ he had only a year or two to live from the same documentation I found. It was only the expert in the field that knew of any way to potentially cure him.
So the web can help you look up possibilities. But the data you see and the treatments are quite old. When I have symptoms I go online to look up common maladies and when I go in to my doctor I tell her what I researched already to save her time. Often times she can dismiss a couple options quickly, but several times it has been quite useful. If my relative had not done the same, I wouldn't be visiting him this Christmas as he would be dead.
Several doctors had misdiagnosed the type of cancer, and even at Mayo several residents were shocked that the patient had gotten the diagnosis as none of the residents had gotten it right on the walk-through session. So doing self-diagnosis might help, but even with the right knowledge and education the residents and local doctors were wrong. The patient has a more time and interest to look at every possible option while the doctor has several people he needs to see today so they tend to lean towards common maladies as they are just more likely to be right.
In the time it took me to write my overly-long reply you already answered my question. It sounds like you really do have a problem changing words into images. I am fascinated with your predicament and wish you the best of luck in overcoming this difficulty!
I just assumed that you were non-visual like myself and that some professor had convinced you that you could not read despite your obvious comprehension of the written language.
Heck, you can even read my replies and even my teachers had difficulty in reading things I wrote! *grin*
I read you earlier comment and I am not sure why you feel you "do not read". Could you elaborate on what questions the professor asked to determine if you really read the book? I am guessing that it might have been the protagonist's clothes or hair color or some other sundry fact that I am not sure why you SHOULD know.
I can not tell you what my boss is wearing and I just spoke to him. Nor could I tell you what someone in a movie wore because it was an irrelevant fact. Why should a book be any different to me?
Now if it was a detail important to the story that is one thing, but I ignore pages of descriptive prose if they don't matter to the story. I glance at the page, decide what the author was doing and skip over words until I see something interesting and relevant. I still "read" all the words of the page, I just don't bother picturing them.
And yet I strongly disagree with the premise that I do not read the book. I could memorize the entire chapter in a couple days, but I have no reason to do so. Let me put it another way, I don't care what color pants you have on and if you wrote down the color I would be no more likely to care.
Likewise, when I dream I do not imagine someone's hair color or skin tone unless it becomes important. I just rarely visualize that type of detail. I just dream in abstract terms with detail only provided to my level of interest.
Excerpt from an sample dream:
Mind: So after your concert you run into this gorgeous woman who loves you music.
Me: Why is she pretty?)
Mind: Well she has long blond hair and is dressed well in futuristic looking clothe...
Me: (distracted) Oh, cool. I bet she is an alien and we could make love in her space capsule.
Mind: Oh, um... (Mind sighs as pages of prepared materials are wasted) While orbiting the moon in a luxury space yacht you are making out with a beautiful alien with blond hair...
I tend to get frustrated with authors that add so much visual detail that the book drags like a 10 ton wagon. Extreme visual detail was useful in the days before pictures, but these days I am dubious why I should care that the lead protagonist likes mauve. Unless it is important to the story, many facts are better left unsaid in my opinion. My imagination enjoys providing its own details and I enjoy authors who realize that fact. Steven Erikson is an example of a fantasy author whom wastes very little time on irrelevant detail but has a huge fantasy world with very complex political situations. He just doesn't bother describing a scene or person beyond where your imagination could pick up the details and then he concentrates on more important story related details and lets my imagination take care of the sundry facts less central to the story.
Please respond. I am curious if the "reading test" covered something important to the story or if the test involved a item of topical importance that would be ignored even if I was there in person.
The "gibberish" voices are actually a very common solution to internationalization so that they can have a pretty decent vocal track that has emotion and tone and yet does not need a million different language tracks utilizing 3rd rate actors do be deployed around the world. It is much easier to translate in game text than it is to re-record all sound files.
I generally find that good "scrambled" voice actors are preferable to second rate English voice actors. Good first rate voice acting in English is better, but I have only seen a couple games that I felt had that level of voice acting. And then much of the disk is used up on sound-files for the varying language and Dolby channel configurations.