What's the purpose of a movie? Makin' Monay. Plain and simple.
If making money is the purpose of movies (which it is, investors don't pump millions into movies to NOT make money), then it seems clear that the best movie is the one that makes the most money.
You can argue it any which-a-way, and I'm not saying movie's aren't works of art, but much of the great art that's ever been made was done so the artist could get paid.
Who cares about character development and a great plot? Sometimes those things fill seats, sometimes it's awesome explosions. Saying things like "without the special effects that would have been a bad movie" is like saying "Without the dead jesus, the Pietà is just some lady sitting there, pretty boring." I think even the marketing and promos for a movie should be considered part of the movie. It's all part of the performance and experience for the audience.
OF COURSE they track you to provide targeted ads, how else do you think they stay in business? Do you think they have a gigantic infrastructure just for your personal pleasure? While I fully support forcing facebook to divulge all the info they store on you (i.e. that gigantic PDF they'll send you on request), I also have no problem with them doing just about anything they want with data they collected. If you find that so incredibly repugnant, don't use facebook at all.
This story to me is about the same as the headline "Pfizer dodges questions from senator that it 'sells drugs' to what they call 'patients'"
Or perhaps "INTEL refuses to deny that it makes computer processors!"
Obviously there's a price discrimination problem here. I you look at those millions of pirate downloads and don't think: "If only we could somehow sell the game to some of those people at a lower price, we'd make a ton more money". It's like a grocery store not stocking off-brands and getting mad when people shop elsewhere. If you cut the price in half and three times as many people buy the game, it's a big win.
With some in-game product placement you could even make money off the pirates "Dear Pepsico, if you buy ads in EA EXTRAVAGANZA 2012, your placement will be viewed by all 10 million purchasers, as well as millions more pirate downloads."
It seems like you'd have to be pretty dumb not to view millions of pirate downloads as a money making opportunity, it's not only free for the pirates, it's free for you, no bandwidth to serve the game to them, no support costs at all, and they're running your software on their machine.
I see a lot of suggestions on how to avoid coding which seem silly to me. High schoolers that are interested in making games are probably smart enough for a little coding, and it'll do them a lot of good. It certainly doesn't even rule out other people (visual and sound design, etc) as often the design takes as much or more time than the coding.
I really like pygame, it's: a) python b) fairly straightforward c) engine-less d) cross-platform e) free and requires only a text editor (I like komodo edit for python, it has the best python auto-complete I know of)
It's not really the thing for a 3d game, if that's your goal (which seems out of the question) you'd need an engine probably. It does a great job of 2d games, and has no inherent 'game engine', which I like, because kids will learn about a lot of the things that an engine is doing under the hood. Have some kids design sprites and levels and sound effects, have others code up games. Writing little platformers and rogue-likes is pretty straighforward.
Every fMRI story I read is summarized basically by "Guy 1 puts Guy 2 in fMRI and now ALL THE SECRETS OF THE BRAIN HAVE BEEN REVEALED AND WE CAN CONTROL LAZERS WITH OUR MIND".
That would be like saying "I looked in a telescope and NOW I AM EMPEROR OF SPACE"
fMRI is a painfully inexact technique, and sample sizes for fMRI studies are generally very small (either very few subjects or few trials compared to a non-MRI study), because of the expense of MRI time and the difficulty in finding subjects who will actually do what you tell them to do (think about this, concentrate on that, for an hour, in an MRI, without moving at all). Add onto that the incredibly poor spatial and temporal resolution (relative to the speed and scale of the brain), the incredible noisiness of the results, the fact that fMRI measures blood flow (NOT neural activity, although the two are certainly closely related).
A good analogy might be looking at a CPU with an infrared webcam and trying to figure out how it works. With very careful investigation you could certainly figure some stuff out, but it would be extremely difficult and slow, and you'd never be able to get beyond a certain level of detail.
Bottom line, while fMRI studies can be very useful, it takes lots of corroborating studies to make any firm statement about how the brain works, and you certainly would be hard pressed to say you 'decoded' anything about the brain in just one study.
"How to get into big college debt for no good reason"
I suspect almost every state in the country has an in-state college or university with a perfectly good comp sci program that costs 10's or even 100's of $k less than an 'elite' school. The notion that the name on your undergrad degree could possibly be worth as much as a house is ridiculous. Worry about where you go to grad school, what classes you take, what grades you get, not where your undergrad is.
If you get a scholarship that makes going to MIT super cheap, the more power to you. All you need to consider when going to an undergrad program as far as I'm concerned is education quality/cost. Undergrad isn't about getting a big name, or having famous professors, or any of that. In grad school, those things can really matter (doing cutting edge research? need cutting edge professor. Learning how to code assembly for the first time? Probably any nice professor will do.). In undergrad, usually you pay more for those things and don't really learn much more. Probably a lot of programming teachers at community college do a better job than a lot of college professors. And they certainly run a lot cheaper.
Really, the best thing to do would be, in my mind: 1) pick a school you're interested in and think you can probably get into (maybe pick two or three) 2) Figure out how many credits they will let you transfer in, and then go to a community college for every last one. 3) Save thousands of dollars, by a car or save for a downpayment on a house 4) Transfer into Big University and get your degree 5) Get the same job as the chumps who went to Elite University 6) Look at your $0 debt in the bank, then look at Mr. Elite University's $100k debt and have a good chuckle.
It's so silly to condemn tech companies for doing business with "Bad Guys." It's not our (US citizens) job to be world police, and part of that means we don't get to decide who's a big bad government and who's all good (I.E. it's stupid to say any non-white/non-christian-based/non-democratic government is evil). One mans political dissident is another man's terrorist. Sure in some cases it's pretty clear cut (humorist writes funny cartoon about scary dictator who wears funny hat and gets thrown in the slammer), but in others, not so much, and it's not our place to decide. Either we should disallow all foreign sales of arms/surveillance tech/etc or permit it to every country. My preference would be to disallow, since selling things like that merely empowers rich people the world over to screw poor people, but either way, I think neutrality is more important.
Ebook lending is so dumb. It's a silly method to try and bring back the good ole days when people couldn't pirate your stuff because it was a big stack of dead tree. Now it's just some bits, and it's super easy to copy, so copy the hell out of it and sell it at a low price that reflects the ease with which it can be copied. I could pirate videogames, but instead I buy them on steam, because it's easier and better. They aren't just providing some alternative to piracy, they're providing a *better* alternative, and that's why I want to pay for it.
A nice organized ebook store with low prices that tracks what I've purchased is *better* than just pirating them and stashing them on a disk somewhere and loosing them all when that disk dies.
Publishers and people like amazon (amazon, to be fair, does an ok job already) need to think about what they can provide that is better than piracy. Ebook lending is not better than piracy, it's annoying and confusing and sucks.
Dart may be the new hot turd on the block, but no one uses it, and probably no one will for some time to come, languages take time to pick up speed and mature.
If you're a decent programmer applying to a job that isn't going to suck, they won't care about what languages you know. Part of being a good programmer is learning any new language by yourself, very quickly. If you want to lean a nice easy language that is actually useful, my personal pref. is python, but perl, js, ruby, etc are all good. If you want a more mainstream language, learn java, big companies like lockheed martin and oracle do almost all their application development in java nowadays.
Also, on the topic of teaching yourself, you'll never learn to be a good programmer unless you have some need to do it to solve some problem (it can be a made-up problem). The best thing to do would be to make up something you want to build, pick a language and attack it until you have it working. Make a text-based dungeon crawler, make a console calculator, make a thing that updates your twitter every time you poop. I would highly recommend taking some classes, not so much for the programming (although it'll help), but to learn about algorithm design and computer architecture, especially if you don't want to just build websites your whole life like a chump (no offense to website builders, I do some of it too, I just hope not to forever).
At the end of the day though, if your fortunes are tied to what languages you know, you are a bad programmer and you're going to be out of a job sooner or later. If my boss asked me to learn fortran, I'd be writing some fortran by the end of the week. Once you learn a couple an get to know more about what's going on under the hood, it becomes obvious that languages are just a nice frosting over the same cake. And cake is easy to eat.
Why is the gut american reaction "Look at those dirty Chinese copying our technology, they're just stupid copycats"
Why don't we instead think "Man, look how quickly they innovate on technology because they aren't locked down by stupid IP law, we should fix our IP law to help innovators (help them not fear being sued to death for improving a product and making a buck and some jobs)"
The fact of the matter is, if we don't "steal" IP (and by steal I mean share and protect inventors and innovators in a reasonable fashion, with sensible time limits and timely filings and better restrictions on what is patentable/copywriteable), some other country will, and they'll be the ones making the cash at the end of the day.
Really, this sounds like a great thing for browsers and the internet. When developers write things to a standard (HTML5) instead of insane-crazy-time (whatever the hell internet explorer 6 renders), everybody wins. If browser authors want market share, they are forced to pick up features. Even the IE behemoth appears to be realizing that some HTML5 may be critical to its long-term survival. In the old days the problem was that IE had a monopoly, and sucked, so people wrote crap for IE and it continued the circle of suck. Now there are other real browsers out there, you really can't be sure what systems will run your page (especially in the mobile world, sure webkit is the big boy there at the moment, but not in all places and not forever), so the best solution is to write to the standard as much as possible and let browser authors it. I know for the purposes of my personal page that's how I operate, I don't have time to QA every system configuration. I make sure it basically loads up on the big 3 engines and call it a day.
Why not just leave them turned on and arrest all the morons who are stupid enough to organize crime on a public website that is well known to co-operate with the police. I can't imagine what better evidence of intent there is then: " 'Ello Mate, let's go bust up a Tesco, g'day, Tally-HO!" (that's what english people sound like I think we all know)
How is this going to make me *less* likely to pirate?
My choices are: By a blu-ray - do I have the right player? Will it down-convert to less-than-advertized quality? will it cost way too much? who knows (except for costing too much, that I know is a yes)?
Or: Pirate it for free at a good quality, I don't have to leave my house and new releases are ready to watch in an hour tops. Also I now have just a regular old video file that I can do anything with that I want.
Why studios haven't caught onto this is a mystery to me. Seems like piracy would be dead in the water if ALL movies were offered as unprotected files for a low cost at high speed. If anyone could download any movie ever made at 1meg/s for 1 or 2 bucks with no DRM BS why even bother playing the bittorrent roulette? would some people still do it? probably. Would most law abiding citizens happliy pay rental-prices-or-less to just buy the movie they want? probably. Could they stop wasting their time and money on anti-customer schemes and start worrying about making movies? probably.
Behold as I... give it to my friend and tell him the code!!!! UNBELIEVABLE
Also what if I just throw the tracking device in a lake and continue skipping school? This just seems like a waste of resources - buying expensive GPS (they must be at least a GPS module and probably a cell phone radio?) units and giving them to kids who, as they are often skippers, don't really care about school or keeping in good condition the expensive thing you gave them.
This seems like the kind of tactic that would encourage a (potenital) miscreant who skips sometimes to just stop coming all together.
My friend barfed in his pants halfway through the movie (hilarious story, he was drunk, went to the bathroom to chuck, then failing to do so sat down to crap, then immediately leaned forward and barfed in his now-pulled-down pants) and I was relieved I got to drive him home instead of sitting through the rest of the movie.
There was so much "let's talk about stuff and be really deep and shit and check out this scary flashback" - which maybe reflects the comic well, but doesn't translate into a very good movie. It took forever, was boring, and unlike the comic, I couldn't put it down half way through and have a sandwich and think about the cool stuff happening. Perhaps watchmen just was't a good choice for a movie adaptation, or maybe it was poorly made, either way, I hardly think it qualifies as a really great movie.
Every time I read a story about technological advancement in some [non friendly to the US] nation it's always portrayed in the light of "Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology OMFG THEY'RE GONNA NUKE US"
What's up with that? What possible use could a stable, financially self-sufficient nation have for nuking a much larger nation (who has a lot more nukes)? I know people like to portray them as crazies and always extract the most radical-when-translated-and-taken-out-of-context quotes about how these countries/groups of people want nothing more than to wipe Israel and the US off the map, but I find it hard to believe that the leaders of such countries have any serious plans to this effect. I'm sure it drums up some good publicity in certain mainly arab nations, but every politician likes to talk big, few like to ask a country to pay for a dangerous and expensive war with a nearby nation.
Maybe if we worked with countries like Iran instead of just antagonizing them to the max and declaring their religious government illegitimate (even though the only reason they don't have the secular government they used to have is because we installed the shah because they weren't doing what we wanted, oops!).
If you're feeling threatened by someone, perhaps you should examine why they don't like you - is it because you are always a dick to them? Maybe don't be such a dick? (and apologize for forcibly removing their democratic government just so you could get a bigger piece of the money cake)
The men in their scary black vans will totally park outside my house and steal my wifi!
Oh wait, that's not scary at all because people don't do that. And in real life, I type all my passwords only into sites secured with ssl, which is way better than crappy wifi encryption anyways. So I guess that the neighbor kids might get some free wifi (don't care, not a big deal to block them, mac whitelist, upside-down-ternet etc). If there are people parked outside my house gathering my non-secret data (since my secret data is encrypted regardless of wifi), I either
a) Don't care (google, engineering students, etc
b) Have bigger things to worry about (the FBI, and since I don't have brown skin or read a Koran, I probably won't ever fall into their highly sophisticated detection network)
Publishers should go pound sand if they don't feel like they can make enough money leeching off authors in the digital world. Perhaps the real problem is that they have all of the sudden found themselves to be completely superfluous middlemen who failed to grab the e-book device and distribution channels when they had the chance.
I can't imagine why any author would really need a publisher anymore (editors and publicists perhaps, but there's no reason editors and publicists need to own copyrights, they provide a service that authors can choose to pay for at their leisure). I want to write a book? I write it, send it to an editor I know, pay him some money, get my friend to do the cover art, put it on amazon. If i'm good, I'll get a publicist to help me advertise and get the word out. Just like authors (and musicians and every other kind of artist) before big media.
\For almost anything now there are commercial apps which can do whatever you do faster better and at a level of generality you would never imagine.\
That's such BS, there are tons of tools (even commercial tools) which REQUIRE programming ability to make the most of. Take matlab, yes, most of it's features are technically available through the GUI, but if you want to do anything at all interesting with it (like, let's say, multivariate analysis of fMRI data), I think you'd be hard pressed (it would be impossible) to do it without writing a program to do it.
It seems to me that you attitude is the real problem, yeah I could do it in excel with clicky buttons, or I could write a python script that does 10 times more 10 times faster. Not to mention that if someone learns how to program, learning baby stuff like excel and power point won't even require classes.
I recently tought a bunch of psych kids how to write some matlab to run their experiments and analyze their data (see sassy fMRI comment above) and It seems ridiculous that anyone could hope to be any sort of exciting scientist without the ability to at least to some simple data handling in a scripting language.
Even the best "lie detector" could only prove what someone believed or remembered to have happened. Many studies have shown memories to be very open to manipulation, children have been convinced by their doctors that they were raped by their own parents (when they were not). People have been manipulated to believe that certain individuals (who look nothing like the real perpetrators) committed acts of violence against them.
Even without overt manipulation, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and there is no reason to believe that even suspects who have not been coerced might come to believe falshoods about their own actions through some combination of internal and external pressure.
Furthermore, as one with personal experience with fMRI data analysis, the though of using fMRI to sentence someone to years in prison or worse is frightening. While over large sample groups certain types of analysis can be reliable, fMRI data is frought with noise, is very low resolution (both spatially and temporally), and due to the huge amount of pre-processing required to get any useful data, would be very vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous types (or merely accidental bad analysis by poor technicians or bad software).
Slashdot Mirror
What's the purpose of a movie? Makin' Monay. Plain and simple.
If making money is the purpose of movies (which it is, investors don't pump millions into movies to NOT make money), then it seems clear that the best movie is the one that makes the most money.
You can argue it any which-a-way, and I'm not saying movie's aren't works of art, but much of the great art that's ever been made was done so the artist could get paid.
Who cares about character development and a great plot? Sometimes those things fill seats, sometimes it's awesome explosions. Saying things like "without the special effects that would have been a bad movie" is like saying "Without the dead jesus, the Pietà is just some lady sitting there, pretty boring." I think even the marketing and promos for a movie should be considered part of the movie. It's all part of the performance and experience for the audience.
OF COURSE they track you to provide targeted ads, how else do you think they stay in business? Do you think they have a gigantic infrastructure just for your personal pleasure? While I fully support forcing facebook to divulge all the info they store on you (i.e. that gigantic PDF they'll send you on request), I also have no problem with them doing just about anything they want with data they collected. If you find that so incredibly repugnant, don't use facebook at all.
This story to me is about the same as the headline "Pfizer dodges questions from senator that it 'sells drugs' to what they call 'patients'"
Or perhaps "INTEL refuses to deny that it makes computer processors!"
Obviously there's a price discrimination problem here. I you look at those millions of pirate downloads and don't think: "If only we could somehow sell the game to some of those people at a lower price, we'd make a ton more money". It's like a grocery store not stocking off-brands and getting mad when people shop elsewhere. If you cut the price in half and three times as many people buy the game, it's a big win.
With some in-game product placement you could even make money off the pirates "Dear Pepsico, if you buy ads in EA EXTRAVAGANZA 2012, your placement will be viewed by all 10 million purchasers, as well as millions more pirate downloads."
It seems like you'd have to be pretty dumb not to view millions of pirate downloads as a money making opportunity, it's not only free for the pirates, it's free for you, no bandwidth to serve the game to them, no support costs at all, and they're running your software on their machine.
I see a lot of suggestions on how to avoid coding which seem silly to me. High schoolers that are interested in making games are probably smart enough for a little coding, and it'll do them a lot of good. It certainly doesn't even rule out other people (visual and sound design, etc) as often the design takes as much or more time than the coding.
I really like pygame, it's:
a) python
b) fairly straightforward
c) engine-less
d) cross-platform
e) free and requires only a text editor (I like komodo edit for python, it has the best python auto-complete I know of)
It's not really the thing for a 3d game, if that's your goal (which seems out of the question) you'd need an engine probably. It does a great job of 2d games, and has no inherent 'game engine', which I like, because kids will learn about a lot of the things that an engine is doing under the hood. Have some kids design sprites and levels and sound effects, have others code up games. Writing little platformers and rogue-likes is pretty straighforward.
Every fMRI story I read is summarized basically by "Guy 1 puts Guy 2 in fMRI and now ALL THE SECRETS OF THE BRAIN HAVE BEEN REVEALED AND WE CAN CONTROL LAZERS WITH OUR MIND".
That would be like saying "I looked in a telescope and NOW I AM EMPEROR OF SPACE"
fMRI is a painfully inexact technique, and sample sizes for fMRI studies are generally very small (either very few subjects or few trials compared to a non-MRI study), because of the expense of MRI time and the difficulty in finding subjects who will actually do what you tell them to do (think about this, concentrate on that, for an hour, in an MRI, without moving at all). Add onto that the incredibly poor spatial and temporal resolution (relative to the speed and scale of the brain), the incredible noisiness of the results, the fact that fMRI measures blood flow (NOT neural activity, although the two are certainly closely related).
A good analogy might be looking at a CPU with an infrared webcam and trying to figure out how it works. With very careful investigation you could certainly figure some stuff out, but it would be extremely difficult and slow, and you'd never be able to get beyond a certain level of detail.
Bottom line, while fMRI studies can be very useful, it takes lots of corroborating studies to make any firm statement about how the brain works, and you certainly would be hard pressed to say you 'decoded' anything about the brain in just one study.
Plus, they could make a digital frontier to reshape the human condition
"How to get into big college debt for no good reason"
I suspect almost every state in the country has an in-state college or university with a perfectly good comp sci program that costs 10's or even 100's of $k less than an 'elite' school. The notion that the name on your undergrad degree could possibly be worth as much as a house is ridiculous. Worry about where you go to grad school, what classes you take, what grades you get, not where your undergrad is.
If you get a scholarship that makes going to MIT super cheap, the more power to you. All you need to consider when going to an undergrad program as far as I'm concerned is education quality/cost. Undergrad isn't about getting a big name, or having famous professors, or any of that. In grad school, those things can really matter (doing cutting edge research? need cutting edge professor. Learning how to code assembly for the first time? Probably any nice professor will do.). In undergrad, usually you pay more for those things and don't really learn much more. Probably a lot of programming teachers at community college do a better job than a lot of college professors. And they certainly run a lot cheaper.
Really, the best thing to do would be, in my mind:
1) pick a school you're interested in and think you can probably get into (maybe pick two or three)
2) Figure out how many credits they will let you transfer in, and then go to a community college for every last one.
3) Save thousands of dollars, by a car or save for a downpayment on a house
4) Transfer into Big University and get your degree
5) Get the same job as the chumps who went to Elite University
6) Look at your $0 debt in the bank, then look at Mr. Elite University's $100k debt and have a good chuckle.
All audience members will also be provided with a life-like latex cast of steve's balls to gargle.
It's so silly to condemn tech companies for doing business with "Bad Guys." It's not our (US citizens) job to be world police, and part of that means we don't get to decide who's a big bad government and who's all good (I.E. it's stupid to say any non-white/non-christian-based/non-democratic government is evil). One mans political dissident is another man's terrorist. Sure in some cases it's pretty clear cut (humorist writes funny cartoon about scary dictator who wears funny hat and gets thrown in the slammer), but in others, not so much, and it's not our place to decide. Either we should disallow all foreign sales of arms/surveillance tech/etc or permit it to every country. My preference would be to disallow, since selling things like that merely empowers rich people the world over to screw poor people, but either way, I think neutrality is more important.
Ebook lending is so dumb. It's a silly method to try and bring back the good ole days when people couldn't pirate your stuff because it was a big stack of dead tree. Now it's just some bits, and it's super easy to copy, so copy the hell out of it and sell it at a low price that reflects the ease with which it can be copied. I could pirate videogames, but instead I buy them on steam, because it's easier and better. They aren't just providing some alternative to piracy, they're providing a *better* alternative, and that's why I want to pay for it.
A nice organized ebook store with low prices that tracks what I've purchased is *better* than just pirating them and stashing them on a disk somewhere and loosing them all when that disk dies.
Publishers and people like amazon (amazon, to be fair, does an ok job already) need to think about what they can provide that is better than piracy. Ebook lending is not better than piracy, it's annoying and confusing and sucks.
Dart may be the new hot turd on the block, but no one uses it, and probably no one will for some time to come, languages take time to pick up speed and mature.
If you're a decent programmer applying to a job that isn't going to suck, they won't care about what languages you know. Part of being a good programmer is learning any new language by yourself, very quickly. If you want to lean a nice easy language that is actually useful, my personal pref. is python, but perl, js, ruby, etc are all good. If you want a more mainstream language, learn java, big companies like lockheed martin and oracle do almost all their application development in java nowadays.
Also, on the topic of teaching yourself, you'll never learn to be a good programmer unless you have some need to do it to solve some problem (it can be a made-up problem). The best thing to do would be to make up something you want to build, pick a language and attack it until you have it working. Make a text-based dungeon crawler, make a console calculator, make a thing that updates your twitter every time you poop. I would highly recommend taking some classes, not so much for the programming (although it'll help), but to learn about algorithm design and computer architecture, especially if you don't want to just build websites your whole life like a chump (no offense to website builders, I do some of it too, I just hope not to forever).
At the end of the day though, if your fortunes are tied to what languages you know, you are a bad programmer and you're going to be out of a job sooner or later. If my boss asked me to learn fortran, I'd be writing some fortran by the end of the week. Once you learn a couple an get to know more about what's going on under the hood, it becomes obvious that languages are just a nice frosting over the same cake. And cake is easy to eat.
Why is the gut american reaction "Look at those dirty Chinese copying our technology, they're just stupid copycats"
Why don't we instead think "Man, look how quickly they innovate on technology because they aren't locked down by stupid IP law, we should fix our IP law to help innovators (help them not fear being sued to death for improving a product and making a buck and some jobs)"
The fact of the matter is, if we don't "steal" IP (and by steal I mean share and protect inventors and innovators in a reasonable fashion, with sensible time limits and timely filings and better restrictions on what is patentable/copywriteable), some other country will, and they'll be the ones making the cash at the end of the day.
In what way is this different that replacing the D-cell on my 4th grade science project with a solar cell?
PS.
Fun science project that one was
Seems to me like saying a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is a new discovery because they mixed chocolate with peanut butter.
Please, I think we all know that they mixed peanut butter with chocolate.
Really, this sounds like a great thing for browsers and the internet. When developers write things to a standard (HTML5) instead of insane-crazy-time (whatever the hell internet explorer 6 renders), everybody wins. If browser authors want market share, they are forced to pick up features. Even the IE behemoth appears to be realizing that some HTML5 may be critical to its long-term survival.
In the old days the problem was that IE had a monopoly, and sucked, so people wrote crap for IE and it continued the circle of suck. Now there are other real browsers out there, you really can't be sure what systems will run your page (especially in the mobile world, sure webkit is the big boy there at the moment, but not in all places and not forever), so the best solution is to write to the standard as much as possible and let browser authors it.
I know for the purposes of my personal page that's how I operate, I don't have time to QA every system configuration. I make sure it basically loads up on the big 3 engines and call it a day.
Why not just leave them turned on and arrest all the morons who are stupid enough to organize crime on a public website that is well known to co-operate with the police. I can't imagine what better evidence of intent there is then:
" 'Ello Mate, let's go bust up a Tesco, g'day, Tally-HO!"
(that's what english people sound like I think we all know)
How is this going to make me *less* likely to pirate?
My choices are:
By a blu-ray - do I have the right player? Will it down-convert to less-than-advertized quality? will it cost way too much? who knows (except for costing too much, that I know is a yes)?
Or:
Pirate it for free at a good quality, I don't have to leave my house and new releases are ready to watch in an hour tops. Also I now have just a regular old video file that I can do anything with that I want.
Why studios haven't caught onto this is a mystery to me. Seems like piracy would be dead in the water if ALL movies were offered as unprotected files for a low cost at high speed. If anyone could download any movie ever made at 1meg/s for 1 or 2 bucks with no DRM BS why even bother playing the bittorrent roulette? would some people still do it? probably. Would most law abiding citizens happliy pay rental-prices-or-less to just buy the movie they want? probably. Could they stop wasting their time and money on anti-customer schemes and start worrying about making movies? probably.
Behold as I ... give it to my friend and tell him the code!!!! UNBELIEVABLE
Also what if I just throw the tracking device in a lake and continue skipping school? This just seems like a waste of resources - buying expensive GPS (they must be at least a GPS module and probably a cell phone radio?) units and giving them to kids who, as they are often skippers, don't really care about school or keeping in good condition the expensive thing you gave them.
This seems like the kind of tactic that would encourage a (potenital) miscreant who skips sometimes to just stop coming all together.
My friend barfed in his pants halfway through the movie (hilarious story, he was drunk, went to the bathroom to chuck, then failing to do so sat down to crap, then immediately leaned forward and barfed in his now-pulled-down pants) and I was relieved I got to drive him home instead of sitting through the rest of the movie.
There was so much "let's talk about stuff and be really deep and shit and check out this scary flashback" - which maybe reflects the comic well, but doesn't translate into a very good movie. It took forever, was boring, and unlike the comic, I couldn't put it down half way through and have a sandwich and think about the cool stuff happening. Perhaps watchmen just was't a good choice for a movie adaptation, or maybe it was poorly made, either way, I hardly think it qualifies as a really great movie.
Every time I read a story about technological advancement in some [non friendly to the US] nation it's always portrayed in the light of "Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology OMFG THEY'RE GONNA NUKE US"
What's up with that? What possible use could a stable, financially self-sufficient nation have for nuking a much larger nation (who has a lot more nukes)? I know people like to portray them as crazies and always extract the most radical-when-translated-and-taken-out-of-context quotes about how these countries/groups of people want nothing more than to wipe Israel and the US off the map, but I find it hard to believe that the leaders of such countries have any serious plans to this effect. I'm sure it drums up some good publicity in certain mainly arab nations, but every politician likes to talk big, few like to ask a country to pay for a dangerous and expensive war with a nearby nation.
Maybe if we worked with countries like Iran instead of just antagonizing them to the max and declaring their religious government illegitimate (even though the only reason they don't have the secular government they used to have is because we installed the shah because they weren't doing what we wanted, oops!).
If you're feeling threatened by someone, perhaps you should examine why they don't like you - is it because you are always a dick to them? Maybe don't be such a dick? (and apologize for forcibly removing their democratic government just so you could get a bigger piece of the money cake)
The men in their scary black vans will totally park outside my house and steal my wifi!
Oh wait, that's not scary at all because people don't do that. And in real life, I type all my passwords only into sites secured with ssl, which is way better than crappy wifi encryption anyways. So I guess that the neighbor kids might get some free wifi (don't care, not a big deal to block them, mac whitelist, upside-down-ternet etc). If there are people parked outside my house gathering my non-secret data (since my secret data is encrypted regardless of wifi), I either
a) Don't care (google, engineering students, etc
b) Have bigger things to worry about (the FBI, and since I don't have brown skin or read a Koran, I probably won't ever fall into their highly sophisticated detection network)
See also: http://xkcd.com/341/
and furthermore: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/01/securitymatters_0110
"Boeing believes the SolarEagle could fly as early as 2020 or maybe whenever they get around to finishing it after going tens of millions over budget"
There, fixed that for you
Publishers should go pound sand if they don't feel like they can make enough money leeching off authors in the digital world. Perhaps the real problem is that they have all of the sudden found themselves to be completely superfluous middlemen who failed to grab the e-book device and distribution channels when they had the chance.
I can't imagine why any author would really need a publisher anymore (editors and publicists perhaps, but there's no reason editors and publicists need to own copyrights, they provide a service that authors can choose to pay for at their leisure). I want to write a book? I write it, send it to an editor I know, pay him some money, get my friend to do the cover art, put it on amazon. If i'm good, I'll get a publicist to help me advertise and get the word out. Just like authors (and musicians and every other kind of artist) before big media.
\For almost anything now there are commercial apps which can do whatever you do faster better and at a level of generality you would never imagine.\
That's such BS, there are tons of tools (even commercial tools) which REQUIRE programming ability to make the most of. Take matlab, yes, most of it's features are technically available through the GUI, but if you want to do anything at all interesting with it (like, let's say, multivariate analysis of fMRI data), I think you'd be hard pressed (it would be impossible) to do it without writing a program to do it.
It seems to me that you attitude is the real problem, yeah I could do it in excel with clicky buttons, or I could write a python script that does 10 times more 10 times faster. Not to mention that if someone learns how to program, learning baby stuff like excel and power point won't even require classes.
I recently tought a bunch of psych kids how to write some matlab to run their experiments and analyze their data (see sassy fMRI comment above) and It seems ridiculous that anyone could hope to be any sort of exciting scientist without the ability to at least to some simple data handling in a scripting language.
Very true.
Even the best "lie detector" could only prove what someone believed or remembered to have happened. Many studies have shown memories to be very open to manipulation, children have been convinced by their doctors that they were raped by their own parents (when they were not). People have been manipulated to believe that certain individuals (who look nothing like the real perpetrators) committed acts of violence against them.
Even without overt manipulation, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and there is no reason to believe that even suspects who have not been coerced might come to believe falshoods about their own actions through some combination of internal and external pressure.
Furthermore, as one with personal experience with fMRI data analysis, the though of using fMRI to sentence someone to years in prison or worse is frightening. While over large sample groups certain types of analysis can be reliable, fMRI data is frought with noise, is very low resolution (both spatially and temporally), and due to the huge amount of pre-processing required to get any useful data, would be very vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous types (or merely accidental bad analysis by poor technicians or bad software).