> For alot of Bloggers, High School (much less College) was quite a long time ago, and most employers aren't quite as pedantic as English Teachers are.
Reading the article, it seems like the primary problem is that the bloggers tended to not follow directions and wrote about whatever they actually felt like, instead of what they were supposed to write about.
> I imagine he did it so he could split the replies into people who wanted to nitpick grammar and punctuation and people who wanted to discuss his point. >His point apparently being thus: "If you aren't part of your kids lives, and activities, you get what comes easy. Trouble and more trouble."
If that's all he meant (and honestly, who doesn't agree with that?), he should have just said so instead of couching it inside strawmen:
Many parents (nowadays) give their kids money to get them out of the house and to go build their street racers(ricers) and buy cigarettes because it is easier at the end of a long work day to not have to deal with a teen who is confrontational
Sweeping generalizations:
Complacency and laziness are taking over our society.
paranoid fantasies:
but then the parents would have no-one to sue for financial gain, in their ignorance. That's right.
'outrages' that don't make sense and poor analogies:
Sounds like the outrage of "Cell phones" and Tamagachi's(sp?)all over again.
> Last I checked, the reason kids don't get the same rights as adults is because society assumes that they are not mature enough to be treated like adults.
Exactly. And because they're not mature enough to make good decisions, they do legally and morally wrong things all the damn time.
it's slashdot - where everything is a simple binary choice between two extremes. Because the idea of a continuum of choices makes programmers uncomfortable.
Kids (even kids with good parents) do legally and morally wrong things all the goddamn time - that's why they don't have the same rights as adults. Some kids are more rebellious than others, that's just human nature. Some kids just need watching. The "oh, just talk with them and have a good relationship with them, that's all you need to do" crew are either childless or naive.
> Nope. They won't learn anything more about tactics than they would reading a book.
The Army and USMC seem to disagree, as they have reasonably well-developed pilot programs to use COTS videogames and adapt them to serve as squad-level tactics simulators. It's not the only form of training, of course, nor will it ever take the place of actually crawling around in the mud, but there is evidence that it's better than classroom-only instruction.
There's also a goodly number of videogames that have been adapted (or 'modded' to use the vulgar street argot) for use by the military. I've seen Doom, Quake2 and (I think) the Americas Army game used in this way. The funniest one was a bureaucracy training unit where your gun was replaced by a wad of papers, and you would go around 'shooting' these papers onto the proper desk and into the correct filing cabinet.
The games do not pretend to teach marksmanship. They generally are used to re-enforce squad tactics, and are apparently quite successful. There's another that is used as training for Iraqi liasons that teaches basic Arabic of some variant, as well as cultural cues and whatnot. So for instance, if you don't remove your hat when you enter a restaurant, your contact is less likely to give you the information or cooperation you want.
It can be hard to find headphones that don't hurt when you wear them for 8 hours, especially when you have giant radar dishes on the sides of your head like I do.
My experience with this is that it's very distracting. Sure, it's nice that you can just lean over and say "hey bob, what's the syntax for sort?" but it has a downside: someone will lean over to you and ask you what the syntax for sort is, likely causing you to forget whatever the hell it is you were working on. You're stuck in the position of being a real dick and saying "dude, can you two please shut up for ten minutes?" every hour.
> The openness allowed the developers to bounce ideas off each other and help each other out.
aka everyone is doing everyone elses work.
> Ad-hoc meetings for each team were a snap, everyone could just swivel their chairs to face the center.
When meetings are easier to have, they'll be more frequent.
my point is, I suppose, not that the new yorker shouldn't be covering this - as the anon points out, they are journalists, that's their job, but rather that it's not up to them to judge - and I felt judgement was implied in the article and the comments here - because they're not in a position to do so, and likewise with all the non-string-theorists here sniping about the definition of what a theory is. If the physics community decides that string theory is a blind alley, so be it. Until then, let's have less judgemental nattering from the peanut gallery. Like I said, academia doesn't need any more politicizing.
Let the physicists, who are the only people who can truly understand this, sort it out. They likely don't need the academic process becoming any more politicized than it already it. If it's a blind alley, they'll find that out in due time. While it's regrettable that it's taking as long as it is to reach a conclusion on the issue, come on - it ain't exactly flippin' burgers, and we're not exactly hung up waiting for the result. Let the scientists work.
I went to Canada a few years back to visit friends. I stayed the night in Seattle because, hey, it's a long drive. At the hotel, there was some crappy movie on broadcast tv with Richard Gere and either Darryl Hannah or that other actress I always think is Darryl Hannah. As coincidence, a week later I saw the same movie on some broadcast channel in Vancouver. In the movie, two things of note for this conversation occurred:
1) Darryl Hannah got topless for about 3 seconds. 2) Some guy got hit in the face with an axe.
In the US, #1 was censored, #2 wasn't. In Canada, you got the boobs but no axe.
One of many reasons I currently have documents filed with Immigration Canada.
I know. The numbers I found were 10bn game totals vs 180bn for hollywood totals. Still, for an entertainment industry as young as the video game industry, beating total hollywood box office reciepts is pretty damn good and is a good indicator of where the market's going.
Oh please. The fact that he stands to make money off it doesn't make it any less true. The video game industry apparently generates more revenue than hollywood, and has for some time. PJ (we're close, so I can call him PJ) is really just stating the obvious.
10/98: Bell to Raj Reddy, "It's fine to scan and put my books on line. Don't worry about copyright stuff. Microsoft has lots of lawyers."
gleh.
Anyway, I think it's neat. I'd do it, sorta. The recording gear would be like shoes: they'd come off when I went home. Simply being able to say "Why'd Bill say/do that?" or "What was the license plate of that guy who parked next to me when I went into the safeway? I've got a big honking scratch on my car now" and go to the video and see would be be awesome.
I suppose that eventually it might, although the fact that US and European phone service costs roughly the same should be a red flag for you. You'd think that with all the regulation, the European services would be far more expensive.
But unless that savings manifests itself in superior price, freedom or other benefits for consumers, which it clearly has not, I fail to see the advantage in it.
Disclaimer: I am, generally, a free-market type of guy, but I've seen a lot of posts lately that seem to show a goofy, blind faith that the free market will solve any economic problem. It'll solve lots of them, but there's a good assortment it won't solve, especially the problem of monopolies and oligopolies.
I'm not talking about coverage, although everywhere I've been in asia has coverage, and I've been out on the oil palm plantations in Malaysia. Never been in Korea though.
What I'm talking about is consumer choice and freedom. I've got a phone here for verizon. I can't take it to cingular because they're different technologies, and even if I could, there's no provision in the US cell plans for a guy who already owns his phone. Even services that aren't separated by technology often simply refuse to use phones from other vendors. Since we have this insane balkanization of the market, we get reduced choice, both in service and in hardware.
Do you know of any consumers who would object to a price cap on gasoline? I certainly can't think of any. I mean, other than consumers who are also oil industry shareholders.
> Hey, the free market rarely picks the absolute best solution, but it almost always does significantly better than the crappy, slow-as-molasses, political-infighting behemoth of a beauracracy that is government.
Ok, then explain to me how it came to be that the current cell phone market in the states, a relatively unregulated market, is by orders of magnitude crappier (from a consumer point of view) than it's highly-regulated european or asian siblings.
Slashdot Mirror
> For alot of Bloggers, High School (much less College) was quite a long time ago, and most employers aren't quite as pedantic as English Teachers are.
Reading the article, it seems like the primary problem is that the bloggers tended to not follow directions and wrote about whatever they actually felt like, instead of what they were supposed to write about.
>His point apparently being thus: "If you aren't part of your kids lives, and activities, you get what comes easy. Trouble and more trouble."
If that's all he meant (and honestly, who doesn't agree with that?), he should have just said so instead of couching it inside strawmen:
Sweeping generalizations:
paranoid fantasies:
'outrages' that don't make sense and poor analogies:
> Last I checked, the reason kids don't get the same rights as adults is because society assumes that they are not mature enough to be treated like adults.
Exactly. And because they're not mature enough to make good decisions, they do legally and morally wrong things all the damn time.
Nice quote, btw.
it's slashdot - where everything is a simple binary choice between two extremes. Because the idea of a continuum of choices makes programmers uncomfortable.
Kids (even kids with good parents) do legally and morally wrong things all the goddamn time - that's why they don't have the same rights as adults. Some kids are more rebellious than others, that's just human nature. Some kids just need watching. The "oh, just talk with them and have a good relationship with them, that's all you need to do" crew are either childless or naive.
> Sounds like the outrage of "Cell phones" and Tamagachi's(sp?) all over again.
No 12 year-old ever got propositioned for sex from a 40 year old man through their Tamaguchi.
And what is this "outrage of 'Cell phones'" you speak of, and why did you put "Cell phones" in quotes?
> Nope. They won't learn anything more about tactics than they would reading a book.
The Army and USMC seem to disagree, as they have reasonably well-developed pilot programs to use COTS videogames and adapt them to serve as squad-level tactics simulators. It's not the only form of training, of course, nor will it ever take the place of actually crawling around in the mud, but there is evidence that it's better than classroom-only instruction.
There's also a goodly number of videogames that have been adapted (or 'modded' to use the vulgar street argot) for use by the military. I've seen Doom, Quake2 and (I think) the Americas Army game used in this way. The funniest one was a bureaucracy training unit where your gun was replaced by a wad of papers, and you would go around 'shooting' these papers onto the proper desk and into the correct filing cabinet.
The games do not pretend to teach marksmanship. They generally are used to re-enforce squad tactics, and are apparently quite successful. There's another that is used as training for Iraqi liasons that teaches basic Arabic of some variant, as well as cultural cues and whatnot. So for instance, if you don't remove your hat when you enter a restaurant, your contact is less likely to give you the information or cooperation you want.
It can be hard to find headphones that don't hurt when you wear them for 8 hours, especially when you have giant radar dishes on the sides of your head like I do.
My experience with this is that it's very distracting. Sure, it's nice that you can just lean over and say "hey bob, what's the syntax for sort?" but it has a downside: someone will lean over to you and ask you what the syntax for sort is, likely causing you to forget whatever the hell it is you were working on. You're stuck in the position of being a real dick and saying "dude, can you two please shut up for ten minutes?" every hour.
> The openness allowed the developers to bounce ideas off each other and help each other out.
aka everyone is doing everyone elses work.
> Ad-hoc meetings for each team were a snap, everyone could just swivel their chairs to face the center.
When meetings are easier to have, they'll be more frequent.
just my two cents.
Do you really want the government stepping in on academia in that kind of micromanagment style?
"Want an RA position? Ok, only if your thesis is on the the Approved Physics Curriculum List, form 80.15/Z-EZ."
my point is, I suppose, not that the new yorker shouldn't be covering this - as the anon points out, they are journalists, that's their job, but rather that it's not up to them to judge - and I felt judgement was implied in the article and the comments here - because they're not in a position to do so, and likewise with all the non-string-theorists here sniping about the definition of what a theory is. If the physics community decides that string theory is a blind alley, so be it. Until then, let's have less judgemental nattering from the peanut gallery. Like I said, academia doesn't need any more politicizing.
It's their intellectual capital to burn. Since when do we allow the lay public get to say who gets to study what?
Let the physicists, who are the only people who can truly understand this, sort it out. They likely don't need the academic process becoming any more politicized than it already it. If it's a blind alley, they'll find that out in due time. While it's regrettable that it's taking as long as it is to reach a conclusion on the issue, come on - it ain't exactly flippin' burgers, and we're not exactly hung up waiting for the result. Let the scientists work.
I went to Canada a few years back to visit friends. I stayed the night in Seattle because, hey, it's a long drive. At the hotel, there was some crappy movie on broadcast tv with Richard Gere and either Darryl Hannah or that other actress I always think is Darryl Hannah. As coincidence, a week later I saw the same movie on some broadcast channel in Vancouver. In the movie, two things of note for this conversation occurred:
1) Darryl Hannah got topless for about 3 seconds.
2) Some guy got hit in the face with an axe.
In the US, #1 was censored, #2 wasn't. In Canada, you got the boobs but no axe.
One of many reasons I currently have documents filed with Immigration Canada.
I know. The numbers I found were 10bn game totals vs 180bn for hollywood totals. Still, for an entertainment industry as young as the video game industry, beating total hollywood box office reciepts is pretty damn good and is a good indicator of where the market's going.
Oh please. The fact that he stands to make money off it doesn't make it any less true. The video game industry apparently generates more revenue than hollywood, and has for some time. PJ (we're close, so I can call him PJ) is really just stating the obvious.
what is it over there, like some kind of geek paradise?
> I think folks underestimate how striking completely transparent PC cases can look,
No, I don't think they do.
I see that and think "ugh, fingerprint bonanza."
Also, you'd never sell it due to the FCC thingie that's already been mentioned.
gleh.
Anyway, I think it's neat. I'd do it, sorta. The recording gear would be like shoes: they'd come off when I went home. Simply being able to say "Why'd Bill say/do that?" or "What was the license plate of that guy who parked next to me when I went into the safeway? I've got a big honking scratch on my car now" and go to the video and see would be be awesome.
I suppose that eventually it might, although the fact that US and European phone service costs roughly the same should be a red flag for you. You'd think that with all the regulation, the European services would be far more expensive.
But unless that savings manifests itself in superior price, freedom or other benefits for consumers, which it clearly has not, I fail to see the advantage in it.
Disclaimer: I am, generally, a free-market type of guy, but I've seen a lot of posts lately that seem to show a goofy, blind faith that the free market will solve any economic problem. It'll solve lots of them, but there's a good assortment it won't solve, especially the problem of monopolies and oligopolies.
I'm not talking about coverage, although everywhere I've been in asia has coverage, and I've been out on the oil palm plantations in Malaysia. Never been in Korea though.
What I'm talking about is consumer choice and freedom. I've got a phone here for verizon. I can't take it to cingular because they're different technologies, and even if I could, there's no provision in the US cell plans for a guy who already owns his phone. Even services that aren't separated by technology often simply refuse to use phones from other vendors. Since we have this insane balkanization of the market, we get reduced choice, both in service and in hardware.
Do you know of any consumers who would object to a price cap on gasoline? I certainly can't think of any. I mean, other than consumers who are also oil industry shareholders.
> Hey, the free market rarely picks the absolute best solution, but it almost always does significantly better than the crappy, slow-as-molasses, political-infighting behemoth of a beauracracy that is government.
Ok, then explain to me how it came to be that the current cell phone market in the states, a relatively unregulated market, is by orders of magnitude crappier (from a consumer point of view) than it's highly-regulated european or asian siblings.
> the free market will select a better winner than the government can.
Just like it did with HDTV standards and the US cell phone market, eh?
While I agree that the law in question is bad, blind faith in the free market, while fashionable, is misplaced.