you make a lot of good points while i'm a little off topic here....
the fault in the Baby/Adult modeling problem under oop lies mainly with programmers who think of classes solely as Nouns.
if you model behavior with classes -- a *much* more generic "Person" that contains a "Move" object -- then that Person can be parametrized differently at each stage of its lifetime.
that same style of coding may happen more naturally in a prototype language but it is possible in oop.
you also need to add in the cost to secure nuclear facilities which in the current US political environment means lots of money to stop both real *and* imagined terrorists.
i swear that i've read two separate arthur c. clarke stories where a person has had to travel a short distance through space unsuited -- wish i could remember the story names for certain. i think one was a short story and the other -- i think -- was 2001.
he has both of his characters hyperventilate first in order to supersaturate their body with oxygen, then exhale, and open the hatch.
I recently saw a documentary called "Election Day" about a Japanese man running for office. While noting that Japanese documentaries stylistically are very different than modern American documentaries: what happens, boring or not is what you see; it's still incredibly interesting.
There seem to be no television ads, no yard signs with slogans, no big campaign rallies.
Instead there's the use of existing events: politicians visiting school exhibitions, attending morning exercise programs for the elderly, and so on.
There's also a lot of the politician himself walking around town, introducing himself to people on the street, and standing around with a bullhorn at various popular locations ( ex. the train station ) apologising for the intrusion and explaining his views on things to anyone who will listen ( no one ever seems to stop and listen for very long ).
In what seems to be the culmination of the campaign there's even a bizarre bus tour around the small town while he and his wife shout things over a pa and wave politely from the bus.
In contrast with American politics -- it's strange to say the least.
All in all though it was refreshing to see a politician taking cat naps in his ultra tiny car and pounding the pavement all by himself to connect with everyday people and to drum up votes.
What's to stop management from taking the next step and saying, listen, you can't really go on coffee breaks i think the major pressure on companies to play nice right now is the shortage of skilled labor in mission critical positions. as / if the available it/sw crowd grows i think pressure on the employees will increase b/c it will become easier for companies to fire and replace workers that "aren't doing enough" -- i predict at that point attitudes about unions on/. will change.
to a certain extent the tech crowd doesnt need unions the way blue collar workers do.
i think some unions are good, and some unions are bad, but the institution itself has been, and will remain, an important tool for workers.
with word you can just print to postscript and convert to pdf pretty easily (using things like ghostscript and ps2pdf). doesn't give you bookmarks but everything else i've used it for works fine.
you also *can* do quite a lot via word templates and macros; but maybe there's a good latex editor out there that does the same?
word can be *very* frustrating to use on a regular basis -- trying to do simple things -- for instance trying to get bullets to indent consistently -- can drive me to tears.
The wierd thing is that we went through all this with Java almost a decade ago. "Gears" is supposed to do roughly the same things Java was originally supposed to do. I suspect there are two differences here though.
1) you only need one gears installation while you needed many java applet installation. with java you have to install a java applet for each new program. ( same problem occured with activex ). All google has to do is to convince a user ( or a new pc vendor ) to install gears once -- and all their applications work.
2) the java platform requires a large download on windows because microsoft didnt want to support it. the javascript platform is just a browser however, and microsoft is pretty much stuck having to deliver it. look for them to try to break ( by extending ) javascript in some manner.
i've seen Christensen in other movies -- he was the star of "shattered glass" where he was pretty good ( and completely unrecognizable to me ). i blame story and direction -- or maybe tone. "... glass" was a drama with lots of stuff for him to say and do. star wars was more about standing around, looking "mean", and occasionally interacting with cg baddies -- something he might not be cut out to do.
mod parent up! that's a simple but insightful point.
"The fact is, we're living longer and healthier with all of this "processed crap" than we ever did with "good old food". " Actually no, that's not a fact - remember there is "life lag", the numbers we look at are always 60-70 years behind. The people who die now eat their stuff a long time ago. And many scientists are thinking the curve will drop drastically in the future because of the crap people eat now - the obesity-related diseases in the west have exploded with a ton of related illnesses.
The reason why you feel like crap when eating something unusual is because you've allowed that consumption to lax and your body has adjusted to that diet. It does not follow that eating at Wendy's occasionally makes people ill. It makes YOU ill because your body is no longer accustomed to it. one thing to note, however, is that just because a person can become accustomed to something doesn't mean that its good for them. consuming lots of sugar for instance puts your body on a sugar cycle. you will experience more highs and lows throughout the day, and you will need to regularly consume sugar throughout the day to keep the lows from getting too low.
I listened to an interesting study on PRI(?) a few months back comparing the productivity and attentiveness school children with different diets and overwhelmingly, children with high sugar diets were harder to manage, slower to learn, etc.
the part i love is that the symptoms of over sugary diets looks like ADD, so what do parent's and doctors frequently do? put normal kids with bad diets on drugs like ritalin.
don't get me wrong -- i love coffee and i *know* it alters my body's awareness/attention levels.
but then i wont let my kids drink coffee, and i've always tried to keep them away from soda as much as i can.
you make it seem like teachers get paid good cash for slacking
when in fact they often have to pay for their own student's school supplies,
class project supplies, various mandatory licensing and refresher courses, etc.
teachers also work long hours during the school year preparing courses, putting together class projects, grading papers, student-teacher conferences, and so on.
in the end it doesnt work out as well as it might seem at first glance.
if you read above -- apparently a lot of it does just get dumped -- but, that said, if i had mod points i'd mod you up.
the additional effect of the subsidies downward pressure on prices is to drive smaller farmers out of business, leaving land in the hands of the only people who can still farm it economically: big ag business.
the more power in their hands, the more subsidies, and round and round we go.
better yet any attempt to remove the subsidies is seen as an attack on the smaller farmer
*sigh*
i'm sure it's no problem to bring down a refinery or two for "repairs" occasionally, as a way to reduce available supply
doing so simultaneously lowers costs and raise prices.
electric companies did just that to california during its energy crisis.
in a similar vein i'm sure it's also easy for companies to complain about how hard it is to build new refineries,
thus saving themselves of the expense, and again, limiting supply.
it requires a little collusion between the handful of companies --
but since it's in their collective self interest it's really not that hard to believe.
it looks like its one incredibly specific method for determining the selected contents of a document w/ polygonal lassos,
namely:
sub-dividing the polygon into a set triangles, and testing each triangle one a time against elements in the document.
it goes even further than that though in saying that the selection's area is computed ( via the triangles ) and that elements larger than the computed area can't possibly be contained and therefore can be trivially rejected. [ that's probably the neatest "invention", but its certainly not rocket science ]
the elements themselves appear to have(?) to be describable or translatable into a series of *curved* edges,
but my understanding about *why* breaks down right about there.
like most sw patents i've heard of, it seems like its probably a fairly obvious and natural algorithm that would arise straight out of the problem domain.
programmers create algorithms from scratch every day of their career, yet the bar for patents seems to be so low any stray thought can be termed an "invention"
it ( and other large suvs ) wear down roads quicker due to extra weight -- thus diverting yet still more money to road construction / repair, effectively raising taxes for everyone else
it ( and other large suvs ) is not crash compatible with cars -- thus causing more damage to other cars ( and the people inside ) raising insurance rates for everyone else
it ( and other large suvs ) disproportionately raise demand for gasoline -- thus raising gas prices for everyone else
being the largest of the large, being so visible different from the other suvs, having been introduced right at the time we were entering wars with countries who were only strategically important because of their oil -- have made the hummer a target for people's general gas/oil/suv anger.
and b/c
they're ugly and most people who drive them drive like dicks.
whenever a successful company, that should know better, doesn't know better, i can't help think that somewhere, someone said: "well let's put joe on the job. he's never actually programmed before, but the bug fixes will keep this contract going for years."
i wonder if, to encourage problems, either diebold, or the government contracts with diebold, deliberately enshrined incompetence in some way via timelines, pricing, obtuse/antiquated software requirements.
even tho i think it's more obvious who ended the problem, it *is* somewhat debatable whether it was the railroads or the government that started the problem... so i'll reply more to your sig than your text.
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been... the power of the State. if you were to rephrase that as
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been... the abuse of power
then i'd agree with you.
with pure, free-market capitalism there's no advocate of people's actual needs, there's only the expression of the company's needs. if that's not ripe for abuse i don't know what is.
representative government isn't perfect nor is all regulation good but at least they allow *some* form of control from the trenches.
I liked it well enough, until, upon reviewing my printed copy, I saw that an item i had accidentally checked, and *cleared* left associated data on another page and was costing me several hundred dollars. Only by deleting a whole slice of the deductions i had input, and then re-entering them from scratch was i able to correct the error.
That wasn't the only mistake -- it's trivial but the depreciation section decided to print out four copies of the same form completely blank with only the fifth and final sheet containing the info i actually needed to submit.
The "missing cash" completely shattered my faith in the product. I will move to either TurboMalware or a professional preparer next year.
actually -- i get japanese(?)
granted most probably won't be able to see this but this is the resulting text:
also, curious: if i type anything after those bits the file loads up just fine.
not to mention the fact it takes 2 full time working people so that a family can stay above water, when 30-40 years ago it only took 1. not that the past was a happy place for everyone, but it does seem like average americans have taken a crazy paycut to me.
maybe publishers should look more at the "open source" model:
providing services that access the free scientific database.
specialized search programs,
print and online mags that filter the mass of papers down to the "good" bunch in any one particular scientific area,
initial publishing rights and subscriptions,
commentary about the papers,
etc, etc.
there's still enough "value add" they could do to make good money, even after the storage of papers becomes public.
The summary says that the attacks could compromise user accounts. This raises an interesting question... why do presidential-campaign websites even have accounts for members of the public? What non-cosmetic functionality does that provide that couldn't be done some other way? sites make you register to help them avoid comment spam.
captcha is another alternative but then you have to make allowances for people with disabilities ( not to mention that they can be painful sometimes )
i will say, at least in my area, that the gamestop stores are *way* nicer than bestbuy, circut city, fry's, target, etc. things they do right? no tvs blaring music, no loud music, no ultra bright lights, glass store front with actual daylight - in short: a quiet and relaxing shopping experience. all the electronic sections of the big box stores make me feel like i've been through battle.
two things i'd like to see: let you play the games before you buy, and have kiosks to read internet reviews on the games in the store.
Slashdot Mirror
you make a lot of good points while i'm a little off topic here ....
the fault in the Baby/Adult modeling problem under oop lies mainly with programmers who think of classes solely as Nouns.
if you model behavior with classes -- a *much* more generic "Person" that contains a "Move" object -- then that Person can be parametrized differently at each stage of its lifetime.
that same style of coding may happen more naturally in a prototype language but it is possible in oop.
you also need to add in the cost to secure nuclear facilities which in the current US political environment means lots of money to stop both real *and* imagined terrorists.
i swear that i've read two separate arthur c. clarke stories where a person has had to travel a short distance through space unsuited -- wish i could remember the story names for certain. i think one was a short story and the other -- i think -- was 2001. he has both of his characters hyperventilate first in order to supersaturate their body with oxygen, then exhale, and open the hatch.
I recently saw a documentary called "Election Day" about a Japanese man running for office. While noting that Japanese documentaries stylistically are very different than modern American documentaries: what happens, boring or not is what you see; it's still incredibly interesting.
There seem to be no television ads, no yard signs with slogans, no big campaign rallies. Instead there's the use of existing events: politicians visiting school exhibitions, attending morning exercise programs for the elderly, and so on.
There's also a lot of the politician himself walking around town, introducing himself to people on the street, and standing around with a bullhorn at various popular locations ( ex. the train station ) apologising for the intrusion and explaining his views on things to anyone who will listen ( no one ever seems to stop and listen for very long ).
In what seems to be the culmination of the campaign there's even a bizarre bus tour around the small town while he and his wife shout things over a pa and wave politely from the bus.
In contrast with American politics -- it's strange to say the least.
All in all though it was refreshing to see a politician taking cat naps in his ultra tiny car and pounding the pavement all by himself to connect with everyday people and to drum up votes.
to a certain extent the tech crowd doesnt need unions the way blue collar workers do.
i think some unions are good, and some unions are bad, but the institution itself has been, and will remain, an important tool for workers.
with word you can just print to postscript and convert to pdf pretty easily (using things like ghostscript and ps2pdf). doesn't give you bookmarks but everything else i've used it for works fine.
you also *can* do quite a lot via word templates and macros; but maybe there's a good latex editor out there that does the same?
word can be *very* frustrating to use on a regular basis -- trying to do simple things -- for instance trying to get bullets to indent consistently -- can drive me to tears.
1) you only need one gears installation while you needed many java applet installation. with java you have to install a java applet for each new program. ( same problem occured with activex ). All google has to do is to convince a user ( or a new pc vendor ) to install gears once -- and all their applications work.
2) the java platform requires a large download on windows because microsoft didnt want to support it. the javascript platform is just a browser however, and microsoft is pretty much stuck having to deliver it. look for them to try to break ( by extending ) javascript in some manner.
i've seen Christensen in other movies -- he was the star of "shattered glass" where he was pretty good ( and completely unrecognizable to me ). i blame story and direction -- or maybe tone. "... glass" was a drama with lots of stuff for him to say and do. star wars was more about standing around, looking "mean", and occasionally interacting with cg baddies -- something he might not be cut out to do.
I listened to an interesting study on PRI(?) a few months back comparing the productivity and attentiveness school children with different diets and overwhelmingly, children with high sugar diets were harder to manage, slower to learn, etc.
the part i love is that the symptoms of over sugary diets looks like ADD, so what do parent's and doctors frequently do?
put normal kids with bad diets on drugs like ritalin.
don't get me wrong -- i love coffee and i *know* it alters my body's awareness/attention levels.
but then i wont let my kids drink coffee, and i've always tried to keep them away from soda as much as i can.
when in fact they often have to pay for their own student's school supplies,
class project supplies, various mandatory licensing and refresher courses, etc.
teachers also work long hours during the school year preparing courses, putting together class projects, grading papers, student-teacher conferences, and so on.
in the end it doesnt work out as well as it might seem at first glance.
the additional effect of the subsidies downward pressure on prices is to drive smaller farmers out of business, leaving land in the hands of the only people who can still farm it economically: big ag business.
the more power in their hands, the more subsidies, and round and round we go.
better yet any attempt to remove the subsidies is seen as an attack on the smaller farmer
*sigh*
doing so simultaneously lowers costs and raise prices.
electric companies did just that to california during its energy crisis.
in a similar vein i'm sure it's also easy for companies to complain about how hard it is to build new refineries, thus saving themselves of the expense, and again, limiting supply.
it requires a little collusion between the handful of companies -- but since it's in their collective self interest it's really not that hard to believe.
sub-dividing the polygon into a set triangles, and testing each triangle one a time against elements in the document.
it goes even further than that though in saying that the selection's area is computed ( via the triangles ) and that elements larger than the computed area can't possibly be contained and therefore can be trivially rejected. [ that's probably the neatest "invention", but its certainly not rocket science ]
the elements themselves appear to have(?) to be describable or translatable into a series of *curved* edges, but my understanding about *why* breaks down right about there.
like most sw patents i've heard of, it seems like its probably a fairly obvious and natural algorithm that would arise straight out of the problem domain.
programmers create algorithms from scratch every day of their career, yet the bar for patents seems to be so low any stray thought can be termed an "invention"
- it ( and other large suvs ) wear down roads quicker due to extra weight -- thus diverting yet still more money to road construction / repair, effectively raising taxes for everyone else
- it ( and other large suvs ) is not crash compatible with cars -- thus causing more damage to other cars ( and the people inside ) raising insurance rates for everyone else
- it ( and other large suvs ) disproportionately raise demand for gasoline -- thus raising gas prices for everyone else
being the largest of the large, being so visible different from the other suvs, having been introduced right at the time we were entering wars with countries who were only strategically important because of their oil -- have made the hummer a target for people's general gas/oil/suv anger.
they're ugly and most people who drive them drive like dicks.and b/c
in fact they've said unreal3 wont run on the wii b/c the shader model is too different. which probably rules out low and mid level pcs as well.
whenever a successful company, that should know better, doesn't know better, i can't help think that somewhere, someone said: "well let's put joe on the job. he's never actually programmed before, but the bug fixes will keep this contract going for years."
i wonder if, to encourage problems, either diebold, or the government contracts with diebold, deliberately enshrined incompetence in some way via timelines, pricing, obtuse/antiquated software requirements.
then i'd agree with you.
with pure, free-market capitalism there's no advocate of people's actual needs, there's only the expression of the company's needs. if that's not ripe for abuse i don't know what is.
representative government isn't perfect nor is all regulation good but at least they allow *some* form of control from the trenches.
I, too, got stuck with taxcut.
I liked it well enough, until, upon reviewing my printed copy, I saw that an item i had accidentally checked, and *cleared* left associated data on another page and was costing me several hundred dollars. Only by deleting a whole slice of the deductions i had input, and then re-entering them from scratch was i able to correct the error.
That wasn't the only mistake -- it's trivial but the depreciation section decided to print out four copies of the same form completely blank with only the fifth and final sheet containing the info i actually needed to submit.
The "missing cash" completely shattered my faith in the product. I will move to either TurboMalware or a professional preparer next year.
yeah but w/o regulation our nation would never have made it out of the railroad monopoly era. so win some lose some.
actually -- i get japanese(?) granted most probably won't be able to see this but this is the resulting text: also, curious: if i type anything after those bits the file loads up just fine.
not to mention the fact it takes 2 full time working people so that a family can stay above water, when 30-40 years ago it only took 1. not that the past was a happy place for everyone, but it does seem like average americans have taken a crazy paycut to me.
maybe publishers should look more at the "open source" model: providing services that access the free scientific database.
specialized search programs,
print and online mags that filter the mass of papers down to the "good" bunch in any one particular scientific area,
initial publishing rights and subscriptions,
commentary about the papers,
etc, etc.
there's still enough "value add" they could do to make good money, even after the storage of papers becomes public.
i will say, at least in my area, that the gamestop stores are *way* nicer than bestbuy, circut city, fry's, target, etc. things they do right? no tvs blaring music, no loud music, no ultra bright lights, glass store front with actual daylight - in short: a quiet and relaxing shopping experience. all the electronic sections of the big box stores make me feel like i've been through battle. two things i'd like to see: let you play the games before you buy, and have kiosks to read internet reviews on the games in the store.