I have a feeling, judging by your tone, if me and you had a long conversation, we'd end up disagreeing severely and it would probably end in a fistfight... that being said, that was an excellent post. I think, on all sides of every political argument since the the dawn of man, a lack of perspective is a common theme paralyzing the discussion.
As much as I agree, and many of those statements are true, the "going after video games" trend is a bi-partistan thing.
No, no, no. All crazy government interference started with GWB. Al Gore wasn't a huge supporter of the V-Chip and internet "controls" to "protect the kids". Tipper didn't go after explicit lyrics to "protect the kids". Joe Lieberman didn't start the first major congressional inquiry into violent video Games "for the kids".
None of this actually occured until Bush. He is destorying the country.
One could apply the same thinking to the original Hot Coffee debacle, that the content was only accessible via a third party hack. They got rerated, but somehow Bethesda wants to be treated differently?
Yes, it could apply if we take two fundamentally different situations and irrationally apply the same logic, then yes. The "Hot Coffee" material was unlocked by a third party, and the Oblivion material was created by a third party. If your game can be modded and hacked into a mature game, then you should be a mature game? The game that comes on the disc contains nothing sexually explicit, locked or unlocked... you have to literally go out onto the web and download the explicit artfile yourself. If being able to "go out on the internet and download porno into the game" is sufficient grounds for calling something mature.. that's a wee bit ridiculous. Every game ever moddable, then, should be rated mature... since modders can make them mature at will.
Rockstar has mature materials actually on the game disc.. they created it, they sold it. It wasn't accessible, but it was there. It was their code with their name on it. I consider that situation to be materially different than Oblivion is getting blamed for art NOT on their game disc.
You know one day we'll look back on the pre-Bush era in America as a golden age of freedom
Kinda like I already look back on the pre-Bush era of Slashdot... where we didn't blame every single thing we could irrationally connect to the President on him, and get modded up for it.
The mere statement made gives me the impression that this type of thing is not the norm. And this makes me sad.
Which statement? That he is not "a big fan of legislation"? That statement struck me as extremely bizzarre. How can you not be a big fan of legislation short of being an anarchist. I think the vast majority of people think that the vast majority of laws are good laws... right? It boggles my mind that people can be that out of touch and lack perspective either through willful ignorance, but more likely just outright cyncism, that they can just discard something as fundamental as... law.... Just saying that boggles my mind.
Maybe there was a mistype, and he meant "this" legislation, or "internet" legislation... I can only hope.
The RIAA clearly deserves his anger. However, in a story about the RIAA and the Senate... to yell and scream about the president, his cabinet, his cronies, and the FCC.. without mentioning the Senate... tells me the kneejerk reaction was overwhelming and he was unable to even give a cursory reading of the summary.
Th US most definately is the world leader in the production of spam
USA! USA! USA!
More seriously... I believe that list lists the nationalities of the spammers.. not the country where the spam actually orginates. Let's be careful to not confuse Americans with America. For instance, the #1 guy on the list is an American, who hosts most of his spam servers in China.
Yes there is now a few free and or cheap Ada development tools. But there are many more C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP bindings, libraries, development environments and a much larger code base to work from.
Ada is tightly knit with C. You can import C functions with primitive data-types directly into Ada. You could write a script that will convert a C header file into an Ada header file (ads) containing all the wrapper code necessary to import all of the C functions.
OpenGL, for instance, especially version 2.0 where they switched everything to GLints, is pretty straightforward to wrap into Ada. I'm not really sure what "tools" means... Ada compiles into the same intermediete language in gcc as C and C++ do.. so all of the post-compile tools will still work... like gprof, oprofile, gdb, etc. This is a non-issue. If IDE is the concern... well.. I can't help you there... I use emacs.. and it's scripts to set it up for ADA is available.
The biggest concern with using Ada is incompatibility with a large C++ codebase. If you have existing code you want to reuse, and it's in C++, then Ada is not a good choice. However, C and Ada work very well together.
It's not difficult to crosscompile an Ada compiler for embedded chips like ARMs and Xscale. This generally lacks certain featuers (ie, real time and threading)... but this is pretty trivial to get most of GNAT up and running on a major processor.
The real problem comes in when there's some cutsom hardware with a co-DSP or something like that.. since these compilers are generally customized heavily for a specific language (ie, C).
Why use Java when you can use Ada.... very good threading capabilities, builtin support for atomic operations... fast and clean.
And the best part is you avoid that feeling... ya know.. much like that time you saw the Donkey Show in Mexico on Spring Break... that really strange feeling you get when you use Java... and no matter how much you shower... it just won't wash off...
Are they going to give the robots the GPS location of all the stop signs and traffic circles? If they do, how well would this apply to a city where not all GPS locations are known? If not, how will it differentiate signs from one another and from random stuff in the background?
The point of these challenges isn't to set one-year goals. An urban enviornment sets up a hugely more complicated affair that will requires years of failure before success. The complexity of the task goes up an order of magnitude.. however you are definitely hung up on the wrong problems. Signs occur at predictable locations, move in predictable ways, have predictable shapes, and use predictable colors. Someone with an introductory graduate course in computer vision could write a "sign" detector that is pretty robust.
...how this can be "safe" (as far as it can be anyway) with cars which are automated going on roads for which the system works.
You can build the safest car in the world but there is always a need to be able to take a very quick decision to avoid some other idiot who might be breaking the rules of the road and not be in an automated car... still, if we all had them...
How is it any less safe? If anything, the feature with which human beings far outsurpress computers is our ability to filter huge amounts of information very quickly and only concentrate our computing power on what matters. A motion picture at 30fps has very little informational change between frames and so we are experts at making the correct assumptions about those changes, and identifying the important parts, and "seeing" what is happening... Obviously, if you break those assumptions (think of a power-point slide at 30fps), human beings filters are no longer of use, and we fail horribly.
Let me bring my little tagent back to the point... human beings filter things based upon our experiences... we "zone out"... unexpected things surprise us... and catch us by surprise... an "idiot" coming out of nowhere takes a huge amount of reaction time for an unsuspecting human "in the zone" to identify, process, and react to. If anything, this is a place where computers should be able do to better because of it's inherent ability to process everything, everytime. You don't surprise computers, you just confuse them.
Cold war is over and yet here we are again at war and bloated military budgets. How long can this situation last before someone eventually secretly nukes us to avoid direct confrontation hmmm? No not talking about Iran.. who's likely the next target for a war...I'm talking about the next "OMG evil incarnate nation".
How is it other countries get by without having military and spying up the ying yang? Is this the lesson the leader of the free world wants to teach other nations? Do you believe creating a strong military encourages other nations to behave? By the looks of Iran, North Korea, China, Iraq, etc... you may wish to rethink those thoughts.
I understand your point of view... but you must also realize that all of the facts you state do not immedietly lead to the conclusions you draw. Maybe the reason other states don't need large militaries is because the US has one? Do you honestly believe if the US dismantled it's military that all those rogue nations you mentioned would dismantle theirs? Do you believe Milosevic's genocide was because of the US military strength? Had the US military been dismantled than it would have led to him not commit mass-murder? Do you believe that Saddam invading Kuwait wouldn't have happened if the US military didn't exist?
I think you are misasigning blame here... The notion that North Korea is a "rogue nation" because of the US military power... I'm not buying it. If the US dismantled it's entire military tommorow, North Korea isn't going to follow suit. There is no really convincing (plausible yes, convincing no) you can argue that the US military is the cause of all the world's ills. There are no better examples than Iraq 1991 and Bosina in the mid90s.
You do realize that the Patriot Act II hasn't been passed, right? Yes it's a very scary proposed bill.. but it doesn't belong in a conversation about what the US government can do... since the US government can't do it... Second of all, talking about my "right-wing" heroes when I voted for both Kerry and Clinton is a bit presumptious, isn't it? Maybe you know something I don't.
I think the part of the equation that is missing, though, is really radio and television. Self-promotion above and beyond a website really does require alot of money, connections, and contact. I am interested in how the "next" generation of record company would be structured. Getting singles played on the radio, making videos, and all the other promotion that is essential to becoming popular.
I do see a new type of record company that would be entirely digital... with a lower cost of download, a lower cost of doing business, and higher share of the profits for the artists... the main issue that such a record company would have would be promoting newer talent effectively. This is really the main obstacle, especially with the large infrastructure and highly restrictive contracts currently in place between all the players and the central recording studios.
My idea for an ad is a 4 second clip of someone paying with a Visa card, slowed down 8x. That way people fast-forwarding on their TiVo get to see it in real time.
This government says it can seize US citizens and subject them to secret military tribunals.
Yes
This government says it can make you not a citizen by simple declaration without evidence.
No. I have never heard of this, in any case. As far as I can tell it is manufactured. The only thing similar is one particular case where someone agreed to give up their citizenship as part of a release deal. The government didn't have the power to take it.
This government says it can rape, torture and murder suspected terrorists.
I will give you torture, in particular, with regards to rendition. The government has never, in any document, nor any thing I have ever seen.. nor any evidence I have ever seen.. in any case I have ever seen.. said it can rape anyone. Claims of some members of the military doing it (without proof), doesn't constitute "the government OK". Murder... the only cases I have seen were of misconduct by US troops that were punished under the code of military justice. I see no evidence, whatsoever, of administation support for that conduct.
As far as I can tell, at least half of your points, leading to your doomsday scenario, were made up and baseless.
So far in this entire topic, I've been labeled a conservative for asking for a link to support someone's position that the US government is kidnapping families, raping children, and murdering US citizens. Now, it's because I realize the difference between perjury, a crime, and a bunch of nonsense that is... in many cases, not even criminal. For instance, the original poster claimed "profiteering", which is just nebulous nonsense... its "not even wrong".. and, my favorite, "massive debt" which isn't even a crime. I voted for Clinton the second time, Bush the first time, and Kerry the second time. The reason I jumped in was because, for some reason, when people on the far-far-far-far-left want to impeach Bush, they always bring up Clinton and compare it thusly, "Lying to the american people versus a blowjob". Everyone knows Clinton wasn't impeached for a blowjob.. it had nothing to do with a blowjob... he lied to a grand jury. It is easily proven in a court law... If someone can prove that Bush broke the law, impeach him. I'll be the first one behind it. If we need an investigation because of stonewalling.. let's have one.
To finish off: "Absence of proof is not proof of absence". So while you may call that a left wing consiracy theorists wet dream, it also means that *you* can't jump up and down and say "You're are lying. I don't have any proof either, but you are lying"
Actually that's a complete fallacy. Similiar reasoning is used for Intelligent Design. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
My 'anger' is generally at people who want to start labeling me because I don't automatically believe what is, essentially, propaganda. If you are going to claim that Bush is killing people in front of their families... with no proof... you are a propagandist. That doesn't make me a Bush supporter. It doesn't mean I like the war in Iraq. It doesn't mean I support I rendition. It doesn't mean I like wiretapping or oil companies or Microsoft. It means I like "facts".
Slashdot Mirror
I have a feeling, judging by your tone, if me and you had a long conversation, we'd end up disagreeing severely and it would probably end in a fistfight... that being said, that was an excellent post. I think, on all sides of every political argument since the the dawn of man, a lack of perspective is a common theme paralyzing the discussion.
That's called "responsibility." When you're in charge of the country, yes, you have to answer for everything that goes on.
That is so irrational. I got lost my virginity during the Clinton administration and I'll be god dammed if you are going to give him credit for it.
As much as I agree, and many of those statements are true, the "going after video games" trend is a bi-partistan thing.
No, no, no. All crazy government interference started with GWB. Al Gore wasn't a huge supporter of the V-Chip and internet "controls" to "protect the kids". Tipper didn't go after explicit lyrics to "protect the kids". Joe Lieberman didn't start the first major congressional inquiry into violent video Games "for the kids".
None of this actually occured until Bush. He is destorying the country.
One could apply the same thinking to the original Hot Coffee debacle, that the content was only accessible via a third party hack. They got rerated, but somehow Bethesda wants to be treated differently?
Yes, it could apply if we take two fundamentally different situations and irrationally apply the same logic, then yes. The "Hot Coffee" material was unlocked by a third party, and the Oblivion material was created by a third party. If your game can be modded and hacked into a mature game, then you should be a mature game? The game that comes on the disc contains nothing sexually explicit, locked or unlocked... you have to literally go out onto the web and download the explicit artfile yourself. If being able to "go out on the internet and download porno into the game" is sufficient grounds for calling something mature.. that's a wee bit ridiculous. Every game ever moddable, then, should be rated mature... since modders can make them mature at will.
Rockstar has mature materials actually on the game disc.. they created it, they sold it. It wasn't accessible, but it was there. It was their code with their name on it. I consider that situation to be materially different than Oblivion is getting blamed for art NOT on their game disc.
You know one day we'll look back on the pre-Bush era in America as a golden age of freedom
Kinda like I already look back on the pre-Bush era of Slashdot... where we didn't blame every single thing we could irrationally connect to the President on him, and get modded up for it.
The mere statement made gives me the impression that this type of thing is not the norm. And this makes me sad.
Which statement? That he is not "a big fan of legislation"? That statement struck me as extremely bizzarre. How can you not be a big fan of legislation short of being an anarchist. I think the vast majority of people think that the vast majority of laws are good laws... right? It boggles my mind that people can be that out of touch and lack perspective either through willful ignorance, but more likely just outright cyncism, that they can just discard something as fundamental as... law.... Just saying that boggles my mind.
Maybe there was a mistype, and he meant "this" legislation, or "internet" legislation... I can only hope.
The RIAA clearly deserves his anger. However, in a story about the RIAA and the Senate... to yell and scream about the president, his cabinet, his cronies, and the FCC.. without mentioning the Senate... tells me the kneejerk reaction was overwhelming and he was unable to even give a cursory reading of the summary.
Why doesn't Slashdot parse for open and close tags.
Because slashdotters typically parse for them, first.
More back to the topic... gerrymandering... I have no idea how to fix it.. but it needs to be fixed...
Uhm... it's a bill... in the Senate... My point wasn't that misarticulated.. was it?
Th US most definately is the world leader in the production of spam
USA! USA! USA!
More seriously... I believe that list lists the nationalities of the spammers.. not the country where the spam actually orginates. Let's be careful to not confuse Americans with America. For instance, the #1 guy on the list is an American, who hosts most of his spam servers in China.
F*ck the FCC, the president, his cabinet and all the other little cronies.
Hi. I like the anger. Try the correct branch of the government next time. Why not throw Scalia on there too.. that guy... a real motherfucker.
Have a nice day.
Yes there is now a few free and or cheap Ada development tools. But there are many more C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP bindings, libraries, development environments and a much larger code base to work from.
Ada is tightly knit with C. You can import C functions with primitive data-types directly into Ada. You could write a script that will convert a C header file into an Ada header file (ads) containing all the wrapper code necessary to import all of the C functions.
OpenGL, for instance, especially version 2.0 where they switched everything to GLints, is pretty straightforward to wrap into Ada. I'm not really sure what "tools" means... Ada compiles into the same intermediete language in gcc as C and C++ do.. so all of the post-compile tools will still work... like gprof, oprofile, gdb, etc. This is a non-issue. If IDE is the concern... well.. I can't help you there... I use emacs.. and it's scripts to set it up for ADA is available.
The biggest concern with using Ada is incompatibility with a large C++ codebase. If you have existing code you want to reuse, and it's in C++, then Ada is not a good choice. However, C and Ada work very well together.
It's not difficult to crosscompile an Ada compiler for embedded chips like ARMs and Xscale. This generally lacks certain featuers (ie, real time and threading)... but this is pretty trivial to get most of GNAT up and running on a major processor.
The real problem comes in when there's some cutsom hardware with a co-DSP or something like that.. since these compilers are generally customized heavily for a specific language (ie, C).
Why use Java when you can use Ada.... very good threading capabilities, builtin support for atomic operations... fast and clean.
And the best part is you avoid that feeling... ya know.. much like that time you saw the Donkey Show in Mexico on Spring Break... that really strange feeling you get when you use Java... and no matter how much you shower... it just won't wash off...
Yeah, I think I'd pretty much wait for you in the parking lot after work.
Would it be to prank the Stiffly Stifferson to death with a tire iron?
Are they going to give the robots the GPS location of all the stop signs and traffic circles? If they do, how well would this apply to a city where not all GPS locations are known? If not, how will it differentiate signs from one another and from random stuff in the background?
The point of these challenges isn't to set one-year goals. An urban enviornment sets up a hugely more complicated affair that will requires years of failure before success. The complexity of the task goes up an order of magnitude.. however you are definitely hung up on the wrong problems. Signs occur at predictable locations, move in predictable ways, have predictable shapes, and use predictable colors. Someone with an introductory graduate course in computer vision could write a "sign" detector that is pretty robust.
...how this can be "safe" (as far as it can be anyway) with cars which are automated going on roads for which the system works.
You can build the safest car in the world but there is always a need to be able to take a very quick decision to avoid some other idiot who might be breaking the rules of the road and not be in an automated car... still, if we all had them...
How is it any less safe? If anything, the feature with which human beings far outsurpress computers is our ability to filter huge amounts of information very quickly and only concentrate our computing power on what matters. A motion picture at 30fps has very little informational change between frames and so we are experts at making the correct assumptions about those changes, and identifying the important parts, and "seeing" what is happening... Obviously, if you break those assumptions (think of a power-point slide at 30fps), human beings filters are no longer of use, and we fail horribly.
Let me bring my little tagent back to the point... human beings filter things based upon our experiences... we "zone out"... unexpected things surprise us... and catch us by surprise... an "idiot" coming out of nowhere takes a huge amount of reaction time for an unsuspecting human "in the zone" to identify, process, and react to. If anything, this is a place where computers should be able do to better because of it's inherent ability to process everything, everytime. You don't surprise computers, you just confuse them.
Cold war is over and yet here we are again at war and bloated military budgets. How long can this situation last before someone eventually secretly nukes us to avoid direct confrontation hmmm? No not talking about Iran.. who's likely the next target for a war...I'm talking about the next "OMG evil incarnate nation". How is it other countries get by without having military and spying up the ying yang? Is this the lesson the leader of the free world wants to teach other nations? Do you believe creating a strong military encourages other nations to behave? By the looks of Iran, North Korea, China, Iraq, etc... you may wish to rethink those thoughts.
I understand your point of view... but you must also realize that all of the facts you state do not immedietly lead to the conclusions you draw. Maybe the reason other states don't need large militaries is because the US has one? Do you honestly believe if the US dismantled it's military that all those rogue nations you mentioned would dismantle theirs? Do you believe Milosevic's genocide was because of the US military strength? Had the US military been dismantled than it would have led to him not commit mass-murder? Do you believe that Saddam invading Kuwait wouldn't have happened if the US military didn't exist?
I think you are misasigning blame here... The notion that North Korea is a "rogue nation" because of the US military power... I'm not buying it. If the US dismantled it's entire military tommorow, North Korea isn't going to follow suit. There is no really convincing (plausible yes, convincing no) you can argue that the US military is the cause of all the world's ills. There are no better examples than Iraq 1991 and Bosina in the mid90s.
You do realize that the Patriot Act II hasn't been passed, right? Yes it's a very scary proposed bill.. but it doesn't belong in a conversation about what the US government can do... since the US government can't do it... Second of all, talking about my "right-wing" heroes when I voted for both Kerry and Clinton is a bit presumptious, isn't it? Maybe you know something I don't.
I think the part of the equation that is missing, though, is really radio and television. Self-promotion above and beyond a website really does require alot of money, connections, and contact. I am interested in how the "next" generation of record company would be structured. Getting singles played on the radio, making videos, and all the other promotion that is essential to becoming popular.
I do see a new type of record company that would be entirely digital... with a lower cost of download, a lower cost of doing business, and higher share of the profits for the artists... the main issue that such a record company would have would be promoting newer talent effectively. This is really the main obstacle, especially with the large infrastructure and highly restrictive contracts currently in place between all the players and the central recording studios.
My idea for an ad is a 4 second clip of someone paying with a Visa card, slowed down 8x. That way people fast-forwarding on their TiVo get to see it in real time.
TFA: Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0
Anybody know where I can get a copy of this textbook?
here
This government says it can seize US citizens and subject them to secret military tribunals.
Yes
This government says it can make you not a citizen by simple declaration without evidence.
No. I have never heard of this, in any case. As far as I can tell it is manufactured. The only thing similar is one particular case where someone agreed to give up their citizenship as part of a release deal. The government didn't have the power to take it.
This government says it can rape, torture and murder suspected terrorists.
I will give you torture, in particular, with regards to rendition. The government has never, in any document, nor any thing I have ever seen.. nor any evidence I have ever seen.. in any case I have ever seen.. said it can rape anyone. Claims of some members of the military doing it (without proof), doesn't constitute "the government OK". Murder... the only cases I have seen were of misconduct by US troops that were punished under the code of military justice. I see no evidence, whatsoever, of administation support for that conduct.
As far as I can tell, at least half of your points, leading to your doomsday scenario, were made up and baseless.
So far in this entire topic, I've been labeled a conservative for asking for a link to support someone's position that the US government is kidnapping families, raping children, and murdering US citizens. Now, it's because I realize the difference between perjury, a crime, and a bunch of nonsense that is ... in many cases, not even criminal. For instance, the original poster claimed "profiteering", which is just nebulous nonsense... its "not even wrong".. and, my favorite, "massive debt" which isn't even a crime. I voted for Clinton the second time, Bush the first time, and Kerry the second time. The reason I jumped in was because, for some reason, when people on the far-far-far-far-left want to impeach Bush, they always bring up Clinton and compare it thusly, "Lying to the american people versus a blowjob". Everyone knows Clinton wasn't impeached for a blowjob.. it had nothing to do with a blowjob... he lied to a grand jury. It is easily proven in a court law... If someone can prove that Bush broke the law, impeach him. I'll be the first one behind it. If we need an investigation because of stonewalling.. let's have one.
To finish off: "Absence of proof is not proof of absence". So while you may call that a left wing consiracy theorists wet dream, it also means that *you* can't jump up and down and say "You're are lying. I don't have any proof either, but you are lying"
Actually that's a complete fallacy. Similiar reasoning is used for Intelligent Design. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
My 'anger' is generally at people who want to start labeling me because I don't automatically believe what is, essentially, propaganda. If you are going to claim that Bush is killing people in front of their families... with no proof... you are a propagandist. That doesn't make me a Bush supporter. It doesn't mean I like the war in Iraq. It doesn't mean I support I rendition. It doesn't mean I like wiretapping or oil companies or Microsoft. It means I like "facts".