"Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise"
How is this a fallacy??...He cites perhaps the handful of examples in which it may NOT be true, but leaves out the seemingly unending numbers of examples in which it is in fact very true.
- Telephone switching
- All the sophisticated computers running those F16s we see in Afganistan
- Power grid / sewage / water / gas control (in most areas)
- The entire Internet
- The level of visual effects in movies
- Computer and video games
- Thousands of different manufacturing processes that need to be computer controlled to get the level of accuracy needed
- Protein folding research
- and so on...
another excellent new movie that is #10 on the list:
Memento
In fact the only other movie there on the top #10 released in the last couple years...and yet still tons of people have yet to hear of it. Now THAT's and accomplishment in my book...:)
1) Trying to compare this to terrorist acts or similar is just not a fair comparison to make. Resources are divided up across many divisions in any type of organization. These divisions then each go after what they're created to... This is like telling a traffic cop, who is supposed to enforce traffic violations, "why aren't you out tracking down drug dealers?"...well, because he's not in the DEA, he's a traffic cop.
2) With regards to "losses", I HATE it when software companies claim a LOSS from piracy. How can it be a LOSS if they never had that money to begin with???
I'd love to hear what your "good deal of experience with MIT" is. And it's not "looking the other way", it's "not looking at all". It's not a freedom of speech thing, it's more a privacy thing.
And why the hell would MIT, or any school (that's not ultra-religious/conservative) care what people name their machines?...christ...what are they going to do, look at what everyone has all their machine's aliased to and then police such based on some arbitrary set of rules? Um, no.
Someone tell me again, why are we trying to achieve "convergence"?...
I mean, really, what's wrong with specialized devices that are really good at what they do, instead of trying to throw it all into one device which is not as good as the specialized devices at any given task, but just amalgamates them?
For example, I personally have so far steered clear of those printer/fax/copier/scanner all in one jobs, because I just have a sneaking suspicion that if I bought one, I'd regret it...Can't quite put my finger on why, though.
With regards to cellphones/pagers/PDAs, etc., I am actually far more in favor of "convergence", but this seems to almost have gone too far?...
Um, it's worth noting that this was merely one class project at one class at MIT by a couple students.
If this is Slashdot-worthy, then there are nearly thousands of Slashdot-worthy pages in the MIT domain alone.
For starters, every other final project for the Embodied Intelligence class for every term recently. That should be around 200 Slashdot pages right there...:)
Is a gender neutral language to be the end goal of reaching 50 years into the future?....REALLY?...
Is it such a world-wide problem, threatening the planet to it's core?...I personally don't think so, but perhaps other people disagree. So if the humans of 2150 got the whole world peace thing down, I think we should cut them a little slack for not having gotten around to gender neutrality in language yet. Yessh...
And with regards to the "where no 'man' has gone before" line...Man in that sense is NOT referring to the male gender, but is instead a gender neatural description of the human race. There's a huge difference, and I think most people would agree that the version of "man" used there was decidedly gender netural.
Just like manhole does not have to directly translate to womanhole as well if a woman is doing the street construction.
In any case, I guess they could change "where no man has gone before" to "where no man or woman or tentically thing of the 76a gender or the not quite so tentically thing of the 398s gender or the non-gendered blobs of planet Gorprim or..."
Why does Apple get this award and not the IEEE for making the IEEE 1394 spec to begin with?...Apple just slapped a fancy name on it and stuck it in a lot of their computers.
So what if it can render fast?...
That still doesn't mean things like that can be MADE fast!...The ungodly massive number of man-hours that went into:
Modelling
Matte painting
Painting textures
Lighting
Shading
Animating
Writing!
Making the sound effects
Making the music
Doing the voice work & lip-sync'ing
Writing custom graphics applications for the skin, hair, etc.
Using said applications in the afformentioned modelling/animating/texturing, etc.
So, yippee, it can render fast...too bad that has NO BEARING on the actual quality of the production (with the possible exception of the team gets to iterate on the work a little more).
Heh...I'd watch. And I bet many other Slashdot people would as well...
Massive ratings?....of course not...but SOME ratings if they actually got televised, sure.:) Of course, the number of actual events that get televised during the Olympics currently is absurd. Basically, it must have an American in it, and look very dynamically interesting. When was the last time you saw Table Tennis or Fencing or Judo or hammer throw or any of the other gazillion events televised?
This is without a doubt dangerous territory to tread on...For, while I for one would love to see there be a contest of "mental" challenges of "Olympic" proportions, I don't think the actual Olympics is the place or way to do it.
If Chess is added to the Olympics, it's only a matter of time before many many other "mental" games are petitioning the Olympic Commission for admission to the games. Instead of allowing the Commission to be very judgemental in what they allow, it'd make better sense for a mental Olympics to be wholly created outside of the existing Games, IMHO.
As someone who actually does some amount of game studies in my actual academic studies, I feel that some of the posts here so far are missing an important feature...
People have stated that games are "science"...and that they are "feats of engineering"...but, what's missed is that to a large degree they are also works of "art" and as a whole comprise an artistic medium. There are journals analyzing film-work, television, music and such from a cultural, social, and/or humanistic academic standpoint. It was important for this distinction (in both ways) to happen with respect to gaming as well...
Slashdot Mirror
I for one would want the NT kernel, as it was far more stable than the Windows 98...
Windows ME, more than anything else, is just Windows 98 Third Edition + a little movie maker program for fun.
IMHO, better than 98, worse than 2000, and XP, well, I'm not gonna touch XP w/ a 100000' pole yet.
Fast Company also had an article on this recently.
An amusing pong-oriented animation
OUCH!...looks like the server went kaboom...ok, who's gonna be the first with a mirror?
I absolutely need to get to a genetics lab and get myself sequenced so I can copyright myself ASAP.
I see many misdirected e-mails in my future.
LucasFilm not LucasArts...
I still miss the Computer Museum. :(
"Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise"
How is this a fallacy??...He cites perhaps the handful of examples in which it may NOT be true, but leaves out the seemingly unending numbers of examples in which it is in fact very true.
- Telephone switching
- All the sophisticated computers running those F16s we see in Afganistan
- Power grid / sewage / water / gas control (in most areas)
- The entire Internet
- The level of visual effects in movies
- Computer and video games
- Thousands of different manufacturing processes that need to be computer controlled to get the level of accuracy needed
- Protein folding research
- and so on...
Who here started to read the article:
"Prudential Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann, who covers graphics chip..."
And thought, "huh?...Hans Moleman?"
another excellent new movie that is #10 on the list:
:)
Memento
In fact the only other movie there on the top #10 released in the last couple years...and yet still tons of people have yet to hear of it. Now THAT's and accomplishment in my book...
Yes...that is what I claim. They suffered no LOSS. Did they potentially MAKE FAR LESS than they were going to? Sure!
But it's not as if they had $100M and then someone came along and TOOK that money. That's my point.
A point of syntax and semantics, perhaps, but an important point none-the-less, IMHO...
1) Trying to compare this to terrorist acts or similar is just not a fair comparison to make. Resources are divided up across many divisions in any type of organization. These divisions then each go after what they're created to... This is like telling a traffic cop, who is supposed to enforce traffic violations, "why aren't you out tracking down drug dealers?"...well, because he's not in the DEA, he's a traffic cop.
2) With regards to "losses", I HATE it when software companies claim a LOSS from piracy. How can it be a LOSS if they never had that money to begin with???
What on earth are you talking about?
I'd love to hear what your "good deal of experience with MIT" is. And it's not "looking the other way", it's "not looking at all". It's not a freedom of speech thing, it's more a privacy thing.
And why the hell would MIT, or any school (that's not ultra-religious/conservative) care what people name their machines?...christ...what are they going to do, look at what everyone has all their machine's aliased to and then police such based on some arbitrary set of rules? Um, no.
Someone tell me again, why are we trying to achieve "convergence"?...
I mean, really, what's wrong with specialized devices that are really good at what they do, instead of trying to throw it all into one device which is not as good as the specialized devices at any given task, but just amalgamates them?
For example, I personally have so far steered clear of those printer/fax/copier/scanner all in one jobs, because I just have a sneaking suspicion that if I bought one, I'd regret it...Can't quite put my finger on why, though.
With regards to cellphones/pagers/PDAs, etc., I am actually far more in favor of "convergence", but this seems to almost have gone too far?...
Or am I just paranoid?...heh
I mean seriously, did you SEE the Pauly Shore movies?
IMHO, there's art and there's entertainment...and both movies and videogames can fall into either category...
My $5.95.
Um, it's worth noting that this was merely one class project at one class at MIT by a couple students.
:)
If this is Slashdot-worthy, then there are nearly thousands of Slashdot-worthy pages in the MIT domain alone.
For starters, every other final project for the Embodied Intelligence class for every term recently. That should be around 200 Slashdot pages right there...
ROFLMAO....
Um...did you even read the blurb?...much less go to the actual page. There is nothing even remotely releated to the Media Lab here.
Is a gender neutral language to be the end goal of reaching 50 years into the future?....REALLY?...
Is it such a world-wide problem, threatening the planet to it's core?...I personally don't think so, but perhaps other people disagree. So if the humans of 2150 got the whole world peace thing down, I think we should cut them a little slack for not having gotten around to gender neutrality in language yet. Yessh...
And with regards to the "where no 'man' has gone before" line...Man in that sense is NOT referring to the male gender, but is instead a gender neatural description of the human race. There's a huge difference, and I think most people would agree that the version of "man" used there was decidedly gender netural.
Just like manhole does not have to directly translate to womanhole as well if a woman is doing the street construction.
In any case, I guess they could change "where no man has gone before" to "where no man or woman or tentically thing of the 76a gender or the not quite so tentically thing of the 398s gender or the non-gendered blobs of planet Gorprim or..."
hehe
These images make great new desktop backgrounds... :)
The makers of firewire, "Apple"?...
Um....huh?....
Why does Apple get this award and not the IEEE for making the IEEE 1394 spec to begin with?...Apple just slapped a fancy name on it and stuck it in a lot of their computers.
So, yippee, it can render fast...too bad that has NO BEARING on the actual quality of the production (with the possible exception of the team gets to iterate on the work a little more).
Massive ratings?....of course not...but SOME ratings if they actually got televised, sure. :) Of course, the number of actual events that get televised during the Olympics currently is absurd. Basically, it must have an American in it, and look very dynamically interesting. When was the last time you saw Table Tennis or Fencing or Judo or hammer throw or any of the other gazillion events televised?
If Chess is added to the Olympics, it's only a matter of time before many many other "mental" games are petitioning the Olympic Commission for admission to the games. Instead of allowing the Commission to be very judgemental in what they allow, it'd make better sense for a mental Olympics to be wholly created outside of the existing Games, IMHO.
People have stated that games are "science"...and that they are "feats of engineering"...but, what's missed is that to a large degree they are also works of "art" and as a whole comprise an artistic medium. There are journals analyzing film-work, television, music and such from a cultural, social, and/or humanistic academic standpoint. It was important for this distinction (in both ways) to happen with respect to gaming as well...