The Sweden I'm referring to is the one that was sterilising people who they felt were not perfect members of society such as criminals and the mentally ill all the way up until the 80s, and didn't even consider compensation until the turn of the last century:
The same Sweden that supported the US' extraordinary rendition programme by acting as a stopover base for abduction of those who were sometimes even completely innocent civilians.
The same Sweden that has forced legitimate asylum seekers out of their country back to dangerous areas such as Iraq, and the same Sweden that has sent terror suspects to countries where they will and did become victims of torture:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Sweden is a signatory, states:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Yet the Swedish PM has explicitly breached this by claiming Assange is an enemy of the Swedish people, and by suggesting he is guilty of rape before he has even been charged, let alone convicted.
That's the Sweden I'm talking about. The one that's guilty of numerous human rights violations, some of which other countries like the UK are guilty of too, others that are much worse.
The corruption perceptions index is just that- about perceived corruption not actual corruption. It is also biased towards smaller countries, because it doesn't weight for the size of public sector. This is why low population countries storm the charts, not because they're actually less corrupt. It's largely useless as a true statistical measure however it's still a useful stick to beat larger countries like the US and UK into doing even better with because it makes them look bad which I wont complain about. The more these larger influential countries have corruption beaten out of them the better.
You're assuming other member states would care. You're also assuming that even if they did that any response would be economic in nature.
Did you see any European countries bat an eyelid when the UK released Megrahi? Did they care how much it pissed the US off when they did it? In this case both French and US petroleum companies lost out on lucrative Lybian oil contracts. Only the US made a noise.
It happens, unless you assume Sweden is different, but then, Sweden didn't seem to mind bending the rules for the raid on The Pirate Bay's server host, or the show trial some years later (allowing an MPAA affiliated judge to judge the case).
Is there really any European government that supports Assange's case anyway? In recent weeks the British government has already been hard trying to drum up support to move power away from the judiciary to the government, so it's possible by the time any such move happens the only people that can make a noise- the judges, will no longer have the power to act anyway. Who exactly would even speak up that matters?
It's not about being better or worse, I don't think for a second I'm particularly good at remembering things. It's about how you recall information. As I pointed out there's a clear difference between how I remember facts such as what I had for tea, and how I can recall random scenes from the day- in the latter case I can view a snapshot of that scene in my mind and pick out a lot of arbitrary details from it on demand. That doesn't mean I can remember what the hell I even did last weekend though.
"That's unfortunately... just average memory. I can recall every car and type in the bank parking lot when I went this afternoon."
But _how_ do you recall it, do you simply remember that there were 10 cars, 5 red, 2 blue, 3 green, or are you able to visualise the scene in your mind and pick out detail on request? If someone says to you to focus on an element of the scene, such whether any cars had furry dice in the windows can you visualise the scene and recognise whether that is the case from it?
"True photographic memory, as the name implies, carries with it photographic detail. Detail you can 'push-in' on."
"Much like any other memory, the intensity of the recall may be subject to several factors such as duration and frequency of exposure to the stimulus, conscious observation, relevance to the person, etc. This fact stands in contrast to the general misinterpretation of the term which assumes a constant and total recall of all events."
Interestingly though:
"Also, it is not uncommon that some people may experience 'sporadic eidetic memory', where they may describe some number of memories in very close detail. These sporadic occurrences of eidetic memory are not triggered consciously in most cases."
Which perhaps describes my situation a little better, although as I say I can force it to some degree.
One example it picks out later on:
"# Stephen Wiltshire, MBE, a prodigious savant.[8] He is capable of drawing the entire skyline of a city after a helicopter ride.[9]"
This is certainly something I could do from the images I recall, I may not be able to cover quite such a large area but certainly I remember scenes vividly enough to draw them to a decent degree. Now if only I was actually any good at drawing!
You're assuming of course that Sweden will follow the letter of the law.
It's perfectly possible Sweden will just ignore it's obligations and ship him to the US anyway. Why? Because a nice lucrative deal for their corporations in the US will be worth far more to them than a bit of fall out in Europe which will result in perhaps a few bullish exchanges, and then will be quickly forgotten.
That's really all the US has to offer Sweden- something to make it worthwhile for them, and as Sweden is such a small country, it's not too hard to do something that'll make a big impact. A $20bn trade deal might not be enough to sway countries like the UK or Germany into dodging their international obligations, but to Sweden it would've been enough to completely negate their annual economic contraction during the recent financial turmoil and then given them some growth on top.
I believe I have a photographic memory, although I couldn't be sure, because I haven't had a different memory to be able to tell the difference.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that I can recall certain scenes which I have seen and somewhat visualise an image in my mind of that scene. I can't recall detail- I couldn't look at a book page and recall every word on the page, but I can walk down a street, and think back to that scene and say "Yeah, there was a red Ford Mondeo turning left, I was on the left hand footpath, there was a coop shop to my left, 1ft by 1ft square gray paving slabs, a girl crossing the road with a grey top and a pink pushchair, a blue Renault Clio parked up in front of me".
I don't really have any control over what I remember in this manner or what I can recall- I cannot recall what my dinner looked like for example but I know I had a chips (UK chips), beans and sausages. I can however randomly remember a scene from when I was driving to work yesterday morning- in this scene I was just passing the road sign for the village I was passing through to my left, I was coming up to the brow of a hill with a white van coming towards me on the other side with it's lights on. and a junction to the right in front of the van leading up a steep hill. It was just before the sun was really starting to rise so my car lights were on, the sky was a dark blue, slightly lighter towards the visible horizon. Why did I remember this scene? I've no idea.
I do find I can force myself to recall a random photographic memory, which I hadn't even realised I'd remembered. I do sometimes find I think of one randomly when I'm bored. I do find I can force myself to remember a scene to an extent. The image I described just now for example I remember randomly recalling at work yesterday whilst MSVC was compiling, and I was able to recall it again now at will for this example. I do think those things I passively remember in this photographic way are probably related to stress levels- if I do remember a random image it's likely that a lot was going on in it, or that someone was driving like an idiot and nearly crashing into me- and yes, here's one that'll amuse the Slashdot crowd, the goatse image is engraved in my memory and I can, unfortunately recall it at will along with a couple of other pictures I've had the misfortune to see on the internet that I perhaps wish I could un-see, but as I'm neither squeamish nor do I recall recalling those images randomly at any point it's thankfully not a big deal.
It's certainly not just a case of recalling what was in the scene but being able to visualise it and then pull information from that visualisation in my mind. This is why I presume I have a photographic memory.
Whether someone can train themselves in this way I've no idea, it's just something that's always been naturally possible to me.
"Why are technology companies boycotting themselves so badly lately?"
Same reason companies in any mature market do, it takes enthusiasts to build a new industry, but when they've got it established the business world takes it over.
The first commercial entities in any industry sector are almost by necessity built by the engineers and scientists that create the underlying product that allows that industry to arise, but after some time when the industry is mature, the scientists and engineers become treated like a commodity and the business folk move in and run the show.
It's really just a sign that the market is maturing, it's not about the technology anymore, it's about acquiring other companies, shifting assets around, and other tasks that maximise money generation but don't really provide anything to society.
I really really hate Apple, but to their credit, the reason they're succeding financially is because they're focussing on products, rather than churning out mediocre crap and just relying on their $60bn cash pool to play the trading and investment game to make money. You can see the business ideology at work with Oracle, they bought Sun and are just destroying some excellent assets purely because they don't know how to monetise them whilst trying to monetise other assets to the extreme to the detriment of innovation in society (i.e. Java). You can see it with Microsoft, under Ballmer innovation and hence growth has vastly decreased than under Bill, who was a technologist. You can see it with Dell- whilst the CEO hasn't changed, his mindset has, gone from being focussed on building really good systems, to racing to the bottom by gimping their support and quality through outsourcing to maximise profits at the expense of customer confidence. You can see it with Activision, Kotick took over some really top notch innovative franchises, burns them out with multiple releases a year then cancels the franchise because he doesn't care about the games, he only cares about the money.
Technology firm shareholders need to realise this more- that there's far more money in bringing in bosses that innovate, than there is bringing in a business minded boss who can buy and sell, and strip and and build other companies and just rearrange assets to make money. I suspect this is why Schmidt has been forced to step down - because they realise Schmidt is a businessman, whereas Google needs a technologist if it wants to keep up pace of growth and profits to more than a mediocre degree.
When a company switches to a business oriented leadership over a leadership enthusiastic in the industry, that's when it all goes wrong.
I see, so they manage Linux boxes but are Windows admins?
The root logins everywhere issue is not a Windows thing as any good Windows admin knows not to use the Administrator account, similarly Windows doesn't store passwords in the clear either, so again, that's not something they've learnt from Windows.
The problem isn't Linux or Windows admins, that's just the correlation you've chosen to blame, no, the problem is just plain old shity incompetent staff, and they occur in all walks off life, and yes, even in Linux/Unix only environments.
Because when you live in rural Britain, and the sky isn't lit up by city lights, the council is too stingy to fix potholes and the roads are narrow, and where grit is something that's saved for city centres, then when it's icy on a morning in the winter, it's kind of nice to be able to see better where you're going simply so you do not die.
It's not so bad coming home because the roads have been well travelled through the day and the ice melted off some.
So here's one for lighter mornings, darker nights. Besides, in the winter it gets dark about two hours before I get home anyway, so I wouldn't get to enjoy it regardless. It'll be the same for most people - it's dark by about 4pm in the middle of winter and most full time workers wont get home until 5 or 6 anyway.
Really, it's purely about reducing ties to American trade, and improving ties with European trade presumably because they see greater benefit in greater trade with Europe than current trade levels with the US, and I don't mind that so much if there's merit to it for our economy, but I'd rather they stop making shit up like talk of reduced traffic accidents or crime when it just means criminals will change their hours of operation and accidents will happen at a different time- I'd like to see cold hard figures on what the expected gain is for the economy and the evidence backing that view- the fact they've focussed on nonsense claims makes me question the validity of the proposal and makes me wonder if it's just a typical useless pet project with no real merit.
Fair enough, then I agree, really, the language just doesn't matter technically as you say, and presumably was chosen purely for pragmatic reasons- i.e. the existing massive skillset.
If the patents issues aren't to do with the syntax, and when Java is far and away the most used language in the world and has been for around a decade now, then why go for a niche syntax that relatively few people are comfortable with when you can use one that pretty much every programmer can work with immediately, because even if they're not Java programmers, then so what, who isn't comfortable with C++ style syntax?
Sure they could've used Python, but they could also have used PHP, they could've used Perl, they could've used Visual Basic or any less common syntax. Why use these when there's a more popular, more commonly used, perfectly good syntax out there already?
Any number of people can argue the merits of their pet language, but it's often stupid and petty, easier to just use the language that is demonstrably more popular and uses a syntax that most people are more familiar with.
I played through it and personally I found the graphics a bit weak, the controls frustrating at times- especially when it came to wall running, and the story far from original.
I just really didn't find it a particularly fun game, and I'm one of those who bought it on release at full price. I completed it, but only because I don't like leaving things half-done. It was one of the first games in many years though where I kind of felt like I just didn't want to continue with it at points.
If it didn't meet expectations in terms of sales, that's not necessarily about money, it may well be that it just wasn't very popular either. Whilst it certainly has a fanbase, there has to be a point at which they say it'd be better to focus a team on something which far more people will enjoy. After the first one I certainly wouldn't have bought Mirrors Edge 2, it just wasn't for me.
Most the new franchises I've played recently are already owned by other major game studios like Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft.
If Activision don't watch out, they'll have no small developers with new breakthrough IPs to swallow.
Their strategy seems to be very short term without any thought for the long term. They're quickly running out of franchises they can milk to the death, whilst their competitors are taking a more slow and steady approach.
Yet my two colleagues with iPhone 4s can replicate it perfectly suffering complete signal loss, despite having line of site and being easily within visible range of the closest cell tower, and this is in the UK, where the cell phone networks are much better than in the US.
Both have had to use bumpers on their phones to be able to use them as and when they want.
That's the problem with anecdotes, they don't represent everyone's experience, and are hence stupid to jump to generalised conclusions from.
Yes, just like Call of Duty now, another Activision owned franchise.
I bet in a few years time CoD goes the same way, because since CoD4: Modern Warfare it's just been declining. CoD5: World at War was okay, CoD6: MW2 wasn't terrible but was a far cry from the last two, and then the latest, Black Ops, was just terrible.
Sales have still been on the up for the franchise, but I bet it wont last, people will only take a few crappy games in a row before they give up.
Activision seems exceptionally good at destroying franchises. At least EA, for all the monotony of many of it's yearly franchises, still manages to keep them going and keep them selling way in the long run for those that do like them.
I generally sympathise with Iran to an extent, because I do think there is a fair bit of gross hypocrisy involved. America wants sympathy and expects the world to support it when when terorrists blow up it's airliners, yet to date the US has held no one to account for shooting down a civilian Iranian airliner some years back with the deaths of a couple of hundred civilians. I can understand why Iran hates the West in the face of such blatant hypocrisy.
But this doesn't mean we can pretend everything with Iran is rosy and they're just misunderstood, that's absolutely not the case, and they ARE a destabilising force in the middle east at least as much as the US and Israel has been and frankly, arguably much more so.
There is a mountain of evidence demonstrating that the Iranians have been fighting proxy wars with their neighbours through covert funding of Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia insurgencies, and seemingly even sections of the Taliban now too. Iran is effectively attacking Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and US/coalition forces in those countries by funding terrorist groups, and so I can also understand why there is sentiment that it's about time we sent some explosives back Iran's way.
You're right that we shouldn't totally rubbish the Iranian's, it has a large population of well educated moderates who want more freedom, but needless to say their government is most definitely a problem, not just for their own people, but for peace in the Middle East and for the world as a whole as the effects of that ripple outwards.
You're also wrong that Iran is either stable, or arguably even financially self-sufficient. Iran is very much at war not with just it's neighbours, but with itself, from the moderate peaceful anti-government protestors, through to terrorist groups from Southern Iran who hate their own government.
So whilst I have sympathy for Iran's greivances and think many of them are justified, I do not feel they justify oppresion against their own citizens, and I do not think they're a valid excuse for carrying out multiple wars via proxy against it's neighbours. I think really a two pronged approach is needed- on one hand it's time to punish those responsible for shooting down Iran Air 655 and paying compensation to Iranian families whose relatives were victims, whilst simultaneously making it clear that from this point on any act of war committed by proxy, will be treated as a direct act of war.
Look at Binyam Mohammed, a detainee of Guantanamo for 4 years who was a British citizen picked up in Afghanistan. He was eventually released with all charges dropped by the US and came back home to the UK.
Since his return, far from being an extremist he's simply been trying to gain recourse through the British court system over claims he has made that British agents were complicit in his detention and possible torture, and that he was a victim of extraordinary rendition. He seems to be being quite reasonable, taking a very Western route to achieving justice.
So I'm not sure half these detainees are even necessarily bad people. There seems to be little evidence some of them at least are any threat at all if they're released from Guantanamo, in spite of the awful treatment they've suffered.
Time and time again I see this type of comment on Slashdot when a discussion of AI comes along and sometimes it gets modded up, but christ it's so fucking ignorant.
There is strong AI, and weak AI. Strong AI is a long term goal, it's about producing a human like intelligence, or even better, we are nowhere near this, and slagging off the field because we're nowhere near this is like slagging off Phsyics as a field because it hasn't built a complete grand unified theory of absolutely everything yet.
I don't know why there's this magical view that AI is some special field that can jump straight to the end game like any other field, maybe it's ignorant geek fantasy having watched too many films about robots and AI, I don't know, but to slag AI off as a field is stupid.
Why is it stupid to slag AI off as a field? Well, because it's very active, and because it concentrates primarily on what is achievable right now- weak AI. Weak AI suffers in that it produces systems that seem intelligent at first glance, but after a while when the system is understood the magic goes away. Such algorithms are often based on emergence in that the system produces a good result without it necessarily being obvious why at first- but it's when they do understand it that at this point people stop calling it AI and any average joe programmer adds the algorithm to his toolbox. To give examples of the type of things weak AI has given us, well, everything from the software to optimise aircraft and cars, through to computer game opponents, through to grammar check tools in word processors, through to Google search, through to gesture based input recognition and voice recognition, to telephone and network routing algorithms.
To say AI has failed is stupid, it's one of the most succesful computing fields to date, having provided the algorithms behind many things that we take for granted, you'll struggle to get through your day in the modern world without encountering and using the fruits of AI research. Sure it's still a long way off strong AI, but most fields are a long way off their end game too, AI isn't special, or unique in this respect, and it sure as hell hasn't failed because of that.
If you think there's no AI research going on then you're not really qualified to comment on the topic at all, there's been some rather high profile news articles in the mainstream news and here on Slashdot about AI research projects that have been quite hard to miss if you follow technology news over the past few years, such as this:
The term web apps has been around for many many years now, long before anyone even thought up the iPhone in it's current form. I've long heard application developer abbreviated to app developer too.
Sounds like your computer must have problems. The only release I've found to be pretty poor was Visual Studio.NET 2002 release, they polished it up with a 2003 release, which is really what they should've just waited to release in the first place.
I did have problems with crashing one later release (2005) I think, but it turned out to be a plugin. Arguably, they could strengthen resilience against dodgy plugins but meh, so could the likes of Firefox etc. too, it's something the industry as a whole needs to improve on.
Feigned insult followed by a sleight of hand in trying to associate Google's research with spammers, fraudsters, and criminals.
What a terrible attempt at denial, it's not like they actually gave any evidence in their defence. They just pretended to be offended, and then tried to change the subject.
I'm usually quite supportive of Microsoft because I honestly believe some of their products (e.g. Visual Studio) are best of breed, but this is just a joke. They seem to have been caught red handed and have no idea how to deal with it, they'd have been better off just staying quiet and letting the story fade into obscurity than crying out like this without being able to offer the slightest bit of real actual defence such as an explanation of why they ended up with an obscure search term in their search results that Google had manufactured on their search engine.
It's not as if they hadn't done it with the PS3 either to be honest.
Whatever happened to software backwards compatibility that was promised after they removed hardware support from the original PS3s? that vanished sometime after a lot of people had initially bought PS3s, many likely in part because of that feature, possibly even having traded in their PS2 in the process.
I wonder if this is the guy who once or maybe still does work at one of Dell's Indian call centres who insisted we could not proceed with getting my laptop repaired until I tell him the error code on the screen of a laptop I'd just told him multiple times simply would not turn on, would not power up, would not display anything on screen.
No matter how I phrased it he was determined that Dell could not help me and honour my warranty until I gave him that mystical error code.
But then, this is probably also why Dell has gone from major player, to non-factor in the IT industry over the last decade.
But if you look at iTunes and the portable media player market Apple's offerings are both more expensive than competing products and still the most popular.
Again iTunes is similar- more expensive than competitors despite being an arguably poorer service (i.e. can't redownload songs free like you can Amazon) yet Apple is still number one.
I don't believe Apple wants to be anything other than number 1 by any metric, I'm sure they'd love nothing more than the iPhone to be most popular and still remain high profit per unit just like the iPod was. Again I really think to suggest they don't want to be number one is merely an excuse for not being number one- an excuse you'd quickly see vanish in an instant if Apple suddenly did hit number 1 marketshare too as well as profits.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you must be thinking of a different Sweden.
The Sweden I'm referring to is the one that was sterilising people who they felt were not perfect members of society such as criminals and the mentally ill all the way up until the 80s, and didn't even consider compensation until the turn of the last century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Sweden
The same Sweden that supported the US' extraordinary rendition programme by acting as a stopover base for abduction of those who were sometimes even completely innocent civilians.
The same Sweden that has forced legitimate asylum seekers out of their country back to dangerous areas such as Iraq, and the same Sweden that has sent terror suspects to countries where they will and did become victims of torture:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGEUR420012006&lang=e
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Sweden is a signatory, states:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Yet the Swedish PM has explicitly breached this by claiming Assange is an enemy of the Swedish people, and by suggesting he is guilty of rape before he has even been charged, let alone convicted.
That's the Sweden I'm talking about. The one that's guilty of numerous human rights violations, some of which other countries like the UK are guilty of too, others that are much worse.
The corruption perceptions index is just that- about perceived corruption not actual corruption. It is also biased towards smaller countries, because it doesn't weight for the size of public sector. This is why low population countries storm the charts, not because they're actually less corrupt. It's largely useless as a true statistical measure however it's still a useful stick to beat larger countries like the US and UK into doing even better with because it makes them look bad which I wont complain about. The more these larger influential countries have corruption beaten out of them the better.
You're assuming other member states would care. You're also assuming that even if they did that any response would be economic in nature.
Did you see any European countries bat an eyelid when the UK released Megrahi? Did they care how much it pissed the US off when they did it? In this case both French and US petroleum companies lost out on lucrative Lybian oil contracts. Only the US made a noise.
It happens, unless you assume Sweden is different, but then, Sweden didn't seem to mind bending the rules for the raid on The Pirate Bay's server host, or the show trial some years later (allowing an MPAA affiliated judge to judge the case).
Is there really any European government that supports Assange's case anyway? In recent weeks the British government has already been hard trying to drum up support to move power away from the judiciary to the government, so it's possible by the time any such move happens the only people that can make a noise- the judges, will no longer have the power to act anyway. Who exactly would even speak up that matters?
It's not about being better or worse, I don't think for a second I'm particularly good at remembering things. It's about how you recall information. As I pointed out there's a clear difference between how I remember facts such as what I had for tea, and how I can recall random scenes from the day- in the latter case I can view a snapshot of that scene in my mind and pick out a lot of arbitrary details from it on demand. That doesn't mean I can remember what the hell I even did last weekend though.
"That's unfortunately... just average memory. I can recall every car and
type in the bank parking lot when I went this afternoon."
But _how_ do you recall it, do you simply remember that there were 10 cars, 5 red, 2 blue, 3 green, or are you able to visualise the scene in your mind and pick out detail on request? If someone says to you to focus on an element of the scene, such whether any cars had furry dice in the windows can you visualise the scene and recognise whether that is the case from it?
"True photographic memory, as the name implies, carries with it photographic
detail. Detail you can 'push-in' on."
Having a quick look at good old Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
"Much like any other memory, the intensity of the recall may be subject to several factors such as duration and frequency of exposure to the stimulus, conscious observation, relevance to the person, etc. This fact stands in contrast to the general misinterpretation of the term which assumes a constant and total recall of all events."
Interestingly though:
"Also, it is not uncommon that some people may experience 'sporadic eidetic memory', where they may describe some number of memories in very close detail. These sporadic occurrences of eidetic memory are not triggered consciously in most cases."
Which perhaps describes my situation a little better, although as I say I can force it to some degree.
One example it picks out later on:
"# Stephen Wiltshire, MBE, a prodigious savant.[8] He is capable of drawing the entire skyline of a city after a helicopter ride.[9]"
This is certainly something I could do from the images I recall, I may not be able to cover quite such a large area but certainly I remember scenes vividly enough to draw them to a decent degree. Now if only I was actually any good at drawing!
You're assuming of course that Sweden will follow the letter of the law.
It's perfectly possible Sweden will just ignore it's obligations and ship him to the US anyway. Why? Because a nice lucrative deal for their corporations in the US will be worth far more to them than a bit of fall out in Europe which will result in perhaps a few bullish exchanges, and then will be quickly forgotten.
That's really all the US has to offer Sweden- something to make it worthwhile for them, and as Sweden is such a small country, it's not too hard to do something that'll make a big impact. A $20bn trade deal might not be enough to sway countries like the UK or Germany into dodging their international obligations, but to Sweden it would've been enough to completely negate their annual economic contraction during the recent financial turmoil and then given them some growth on top.
I believe I have a photographic memory, although I couldn't be sure, because I haven't had a different memory to be able to tell the difference.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that I can recall certain scenes which I have seen and somewhat visualise an image in my mind of that scene. I can't recall detail- I couldn't look at a book page and recall every word on the page, but I can walk down a street, and think back to that scene and say "Yeah, there was a red Ford Mondeo turning left, I was on the left hand footpath, there was a coop shop to my left, 1ft by 1ft square gray paving slabs, a girl crossing the road with a grey top and a pink pushchair, a blue Renault Clio parked up in front of me".
I don't really have any control over what I remember in this manner or what I can recall- I cannot recall what my dinner looked like for example but I know I had a chips (UK chips), beans and sausages. I can however randomly remember a scene from when I was driving to work yesterday morning- in this scene I was just passing the road sign for the village I was passing through to my left, I was coming up to the brow of a hill with a white van coming towards me on the other side with it's lights on. and a junction to the right in front of the van leading up a steep hill. It was just before the sun was really starting to rise so my car lights were on, the sky was a dark blue, slightly lighter towards the visible horizon. Why did I remember this scene? I've no idea.
I do find I can force myself to recall a random photographic memory, which I hadn't even realised I'd remembered. I do sometimes find I think of one randomly when I'm bored. I do find I can force myself to remember a scene to an extent. The image I described just now for example I remember randomly recalling at work yesterday whilst MSVC was compiling, and I was able to recall it again now at will for this example. I do think those things I passively remember in this photographic way are probably related to stress levels- if I do remember a random image it's likely that a lot was going on in it, or that someone was driving like an idiot and nearly crashing into me- and yes, here's one that'll amuse the Slashdot crowd, the goatse image is engraved in my memory and I can, unfortunately recall it at will along with a couple of other pictures I've had the misfortune to see on the internet that I perhaps wish I could un-see, but as I'm neither squeamish nor do I recall recalling those images randomly at any point it's thankfully not a big deal.
It's certainly not just a case of recalling what was in the scene but being able to visualise it and then pull information from that visualisation in my mind. This is why I presume I have a photographic memory.
Whether someone can train themselves in this way I've no idea, it's just something that's always been naturally possible to me.
"Why are technology companies boycotting themselves so badly lately?"
Same reason companies in any mature market do, it takes enthusiasts to build a new industry, but when they've got it established the business world takes it over.
The first commercial entities in any industry sector are almost by necessity built by the engineers and scientists that create the underlying product that allows that industry to arise, but after some time when the industry is mature, the scientists and engineers become treated like a commodity and the business folk move in and run the show.
It's really just a sign that the market is maturing, it's not about the technology anymore, it's about acquiring other companies, shifting assets around, and other tasks that maximise money generation but don't really provide anything to society.
I really really hate Apple, but to their credit, the reason they're succeding financially is because they're focussing on products, rather than churning out mediocre crap and just relying on their $60bn cash pool to play the trading and investment game to make money. You can see the business ideology at work with Oracle, they bought Sun and are just destroying some excellent assets purely because they don't know how to monetise them whilst trying to monetise other assets to the extreme to the detriment of innovation in society (i.e. Java). You can see it with Microsoft, under Ballmer innovation and hence growth has vastly decreased than under Bill, who was a technologist. You can see it with Dell- whilst the CEO hasn't changed, his mindset has, gone from being focussed on building really good systems, to racing to the bottom by gimping their support and quality through outsourcing to maximise profits at the expense of customer confidence. You can see it with Activision, Kotick took over some really top notch innovative franchises, burns them out with multiple releases a year then cancels the franchise because he doesn't care about the games, he only cares about the money.
Technology firm shareholders need to realise this more- that there's far more money in bringing in bosses that innovate, than there is bringing in a business minded boss who can buy and sell, and strip and and build other companies and just rearrange assets to make money. I suspect this is why Schmidt has been forced to step down - because they realise Schmidt is a businessman, whereas Google needs a technologist if it wants to keep up pace of growth and profits to more than a mediocre degree.
When a company switches to a business oriented leadership over a leadership enthusiastic in the industry, that's when it all goes wrong.
I see, so they manage Linux boxes but are Windows admins?
The root logins everywhere issue is not a Windows thing as any good Windows admin knows not to use the Administrator account, similarly Windows doesn't store passwords in the clear either, so again, that's not something they've learnt from Windows.
The problem isn't Linux or Windows admins, that's just the correlation you've chosen to blame, no, the problem is just plain old shity incompetent staff, and they occur in all walks off life, and yes, even in Linux/Unix only environments.
Because when you live in rural Britain, and the sky isn't lit up by city lights, the council is too stingy to fix potholes and the roads are narrow, and where grit is something that's saved for city centres, then when it's icy on a morning in the winter, it's kind of nice to be able to see better where you're going simply so you do not die.
It's not so bad coming home because the roads have been well travelled through the day and the ice melted off some.
So here's one for lighter mornings, darker nights. Besides, in the winter it gets dark about two hours before I get home anyway, so I wouldn't get to enjoy it regardless. It'll be the same for most people - it's dark by about 4pm in the middle of winter and most full time workers wont get home until 5 or 6 anyway.
Really, it's purely about reducing ties to American trade, and improving ties with European trade presumably because they see greater benefit in greater trade with Europe than current trade levels with the US, and I don't mind that so much if there's merit to it for our economy, but I'd rather they stop making shit up like talk of reduced traffic accidents or crime when it just means criminals will change their hours of operation and accidents will happen at a different time- I'd like to see cold hard figures on what the expected gain is for the economy and the evidence backing that view- the fact they've focussed on nonsense claims makes me question the validity of the proposal and makes me wonder if it's just a typical useless pet project with no real merit.
Fair enough, then I agree, really, the language just doesn't matter technically as you say, and presumably was chosen purely for pragmatic reasons- i.e. the existing massive skillset.
But why?
If the patents issues aren't to do with the syntax, and when Java is far and away the most used language in the world and has been for around a decade now, then why go for a niche syntax that relatively few people are comfortable with when you can use one that pretty much every programmer can work with immediately, because even if they're not Java programmers, then so what, who isn't comfortable with C++ style syntax?
Sure they could've used Python, but they could also have used PHP, they could've used Perl, they could've used Visual Basic or any less common syntax. Why use these when there's a more popular, more commonly used, perfectly good syntax out there already?
Any number of people can argue the merits of their pet language, but it's often stupid and petty, easier to just use the language that is demonstrably more popular and uses a syntax that most people are more familiar with.
But was it really of great quality?
I played through it and personally I found the graphics a bit weak, the controls frustrating at times- especially when it came to wall running, and the story far from original.
I just really didn't find it a particularly fun game, and I'm one of those who bought it on release at full price. I completed it, but only because I don't like leaving things half-done. It was one of the first games in many years though where I kind of felt like I just didn't want to continue with it at points.
If it didn't meet expectations in terms of sales, that's not necessarily about money, it may well be that it just wasn't very popular either. Whilst it certainly has a fanbase, there has to be a point at which they say it'd be better to focus a team on something which far more people will enjoy. After the first one I certainly wouldn't have bought Mirrors Edge 2, it just wasn't for me.
But are they obtainable by Activision?
Most the new franchises I've played recently are already owned by other major game studios like Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft.
If Activision don't watch out, they'll have no small developers with new breakthrough IPs to swallow.
Their strategy seems to be very short term without any thought for the long term. They're quickly running out of franchises they can milk to the death, whilst their competitors are taking a more slow and steady approach.
Yet my two colleagues with iPhone 4s can replicate it perfectly suffering complete signal loss, despite having line of site and being easily within visible range of the closest cell tower, and this is in the UK, where the cell phone networks are much better than in the US.
Both have had to use bumpers on their phones to be able to use them as and when they want.
That's the problem with anecdotes, they don't represent everyone's experience, and are hence stupid to jump to generalised conclusions from.
Yes, just like Call of Duty now, another Activision owned franchise.
I bet in a few years time CoD goes the same way, because since CoD4: Modern Warfare it's just been declining. CoD5: World at War was okay, CoD6: MW2 wasn't terrible but was a far cry from the last two, and then the latest, Black Ops, was just terrible.
Sales have still been on the up for the franchise, but I bet it wont last, people will only take a few crappy games in a row before they give up.
Activision seems exceptionally good at destroying franchises. At least EA, for all the monotony of many of it's yearly franchises, still manages to keep them going and keep them selling way in the long run for those that do like them.
I generally sympathise with Iran to an extent, because I do think there is a fair bit of gross hypocrisy involved. America wants sympathy and expects the world to support it when when terorrists blow up it's airliners, yet to date the US has held no one to account for shooting down a civilian Iranian airliner some years back with the deaths of a couple of hundred civilians. I can understand why Iran hates the West in the face of such blatant hypocrisy.
But this doesn't mean we can pretend everything with Iran is rosy and they're just misunderstood, that's absolutely not the case, and they ARE a destabilising force in the middle east at least as much as the US and Israel has been and frankly, arguably much more so.
There is a mountain of evidence demonstrating that the Iranians have been fighting proxy wars with their neighbours through covert funding of Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia insurgencies, and seemingly even sections of the Taliban now too. Iran is effectively attacking Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and US/coalition forces in those countries by funding terrorist groups, and so I can also understand why there is sentiment that it's about time we sent some explosives back Iran's way.
You're right that we shouldn't totally rubbish the Iranian's, it has a large population of well educated moderates who want more freedom, but needless to say their government is most definitely a problem, not just for their own people, but for peace in the Middle East and for the world as a whole as the effects of that ripple outwards.
You're also wrong that Iran is either stable, or arguably even financially self-sufficient. Iran is very much at war not with just it's neighbours, but with itself, from the moderate peaceful anti-government protestors, through to terrorist groups from Southern Iran who hate their own government.
So whilst I have sympathy for Iran's greivances and think many of them are justified, I do not feel they justify oppresion against their own citizens, and I do not think they're a valid excuse for carrying out multiple wars via proxy against it's neighbours. I think really a two pronged approach is needed- on one hand it's time to punish those responsible for shooting down Iran Air 655 and paying compensation to Iranian families whose relatives were victims, whilst simultaneously making it clear that from this point on any act of war committed by proxy, will be treated as a direct act of war.
I'm not even sure a lot of them are.
Look at Binyam Mohammed, a detainee of Guantanamo for 4 years who was a British citizen picked up in Afghanistan. He was eventually released with all charges dropped by the US and came back home to the UK.
Since his return, far from being an extremist he's simply been trying to gain recourse through the British court system over claims he has made that British agents were complicit in his detention and possible torture, and that he was a victim of extraordinary rendition. He seems to be being quite reasonable, taking a very Western route to achieving justice.
So I'm not sure half these detainees are even necessarily bad people. There seems to be little evidence some of them at least are any threat at all if they're released from Guantanamo, in spite of the awful treatment they've suffered.
Time and time again I see this type of comment on Slashdot when a discussion of AI comes along and sometimes it gets modded up, but christ it's so fucking ignorant.
There is strong AI, and weak AI. Strong AI is a long term goal, it's about producing a human like intelligence, or even better, we are nowhere near this, and slagging off the field because we're nowhere near this is like slagging off Phsyics as a field because it hasn't built a complete grand unified theory of absolutely everything yet.
I don't know why there's this magical view that AI is some special field that can jump straight to the end game like any other field, maybe it's ignorant geek fantasy having watched too many films about robots and AI, I don't know, but to slag AI off as a field is stupid.
Why is it stupid to slag AI off as a field? Well, because it's very active, and because it concentrates primarily on what is achievable right now- weak AI. Weak AI suffers in that it produces systems that seem intelligent at first glance, but after a while when the system is understood the magic goes away. Such algorithms are often based on emergence in that the system produces a good result without it necessarily being obvious why at first- but it's when they do understand it that at this point people stop calling it AI and any average joe programmer adds the algorithm to his toolbox. To give examples of the type of things weak AI has given us, well, everything from the software to optimise aircraft and cars, through to computer game opponents, through to grammar check tools in word processors, through to Google search, through to gesture based input recognition and voice recognition, to telephone and network routing algorithms.
To say AI has failed is stupid, it's one of the most succesful computing fields to date, having provided the algorithms behind many things that we take for granted, you'll struggle to get through your day in the modern world without encountering and using the fruits of AI research. Sure it's still a long way off strong AI, but most fields are a long way off their end game too, AI isn't special, or unique in this respect, and it sure as hell hasn't failed because of that.
If you think there's no AI research going on then you're not really qualified to comment on the topic at all, there's been some rather high profile news articles in the mainstream news and here on Slashdot about AI research projects that have been quite hard to miss if you follow technology news over the past few years, such as this:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/18/ibm-brain-science-technology-breakthroughs-supercomputer.html
Yep, that was my thought to.
The term web apps has been around for many many years now, long before anyone even thought up the iPhone in it's current form. I've long heard application developer abbreviated to app developer too.
Sounds like your computer must have problems. The only release I've found to be pretty poor was Visual Studio .NET 2002 release, they polished it up with a 2003 release, which is really what they should've just waited to release in the first place.
I did have problems with crashing one later release (2005) I think, but it turned out to be a plugin. Arguably, they could strengthen resilience against dodgy plugins but meh, so could the likes of Firefox etc. too, it's something the industry as a whole needs to improve on.
I have to say that response made me chuckle
Feigned insult followed by a sleight of hand in trying to associate Google's research with spammers, fraudsters, and criminals.
What a terrible attempt at denial, it's not like they actually gave any evidence in their defence. They just pretended to be offended, and then tried to change the subject.
I'm usually quite supportive of Microsoft because I honestly believe some of their products (e.g. Visual Studio) are best of breed, but this is just a joke. They seem to have been caught red handed and have no idea how to deal with it, they'd have been better off just staying quiet and letting the story fade into obscurity than crying out like this without being able to offer the slightest bit of real actual defence such as an explanation of why they ended up with an obscure search term in their search results that Google had manufactured on their search engine.
Which is what Apple wants, because then it's cornered the eBook market on it's platform killing off all competition on it's platform.
This is probably one of the worst examples of anti-competitive behaviour on Apple's behalf to date.
It's not as if they hadn't done it with the PS3 either to be honest.
Whatever happened to software backwards compatibility that was promised after they removed hardware support from the original PS3s? that vanished sometime after a lot of people had initially bought PS3s, many likely in part because of that feature, possibly even having traded in their PS2 in the process.
I wonder if this is the guy who once or maybe still does work at one of Dell's Indian call centres who insisted we could not proceed with getting my laptop repaired until I tell him the error code on the screen of a laptop I'd just told him multiple times simply would not turn on, would not power up, would not display anything on screen.
No matter how I phrased it he was determined that Dell could not help me and honour my warranty until I gave him that mystical error code.
But then, this is probably also why Dell has gone from major player, to non-factor in the IT industry over the last decade.
But if you look at iTunes and the portable media player market Apple's offerings are both more expensive than competing products and still the most popular.
Again iTunes is similar- more expensive than competitors despite being an arguably poorer service (i.e. can't redownload songs free like you can Amazon) yet Apple is still number one.
I don't believe Apple wants to be anything other than number 1 by any metric, I'm sure they'd love nothing more than the iPhone to be most popular and still remain high profit per unit just like the iPod was. Again I really think to suggest they don't want to be number one is merely an excuse for not being number one- an excuse you'd quickly see vanish in an instant if Apple suddenly did hit number 1 marketshare too as well as profits.