Discussions

19 hours ago, Bas wrote

*snip*

What does it matter? As long as people get to choose to do something they enjoy. Which isn't always driving a car.

Will it be something you enjoy? Playing Angry Birds for the Nth time in a row gets boring. People look for escape all the time, and then the escape becomes tedium quickly but they get addicted to the tedium.

All I'm saying is people need to slow down a bit.

The bad thing to me about driving in traffic isn't that I'm driving, but I'm stuck and my options to do things are limited. If my car could drive itself, I'd have a little more flexibility in the case I needed to stop and do something. That'd be nice.

But I don't know that I need to be entertained.

@Bas:

11 hours ago, Bas wrote

*snip*

I'd like to choose when I get to enjoy driving a car, instead of being forced to do it twice a day. I'd be all over a self-driving car, then I can just enjoy my time without having to waste it on driving.

What are you going to do to enjoy your time? Post on Channel9? Play Angry Birds? My larger point was what most people would do to pass time in a car ride is just as much a waste of time as driving -- although some people would use it productively. 

And what about this,

Google wants to give you more time to enjoy your life

Page also talked a little bit about Google's famous self-driving car, saying it would change people's lives by giving them more time to do stuff instead of driving. So basically you can jump in the car, have it drive you to work and spend the 50 minutes or so that takes doing something productive or fun.

What ever happened to enjoying driving a car? Or enjoying your time without a phone to keep you company? Are people's attention spans growing smaller?

I would like it better if the message was "Google wants to give you more control over your life."

Not meaning to troll here, I'd argue that Apple was also influenced by Longhorn/Vista, simplifying the UI appearance and adding a lot of transparency.

1 day ago, Dr Herbie wrote

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papers did their checks properly they wouldn't publish them when they realised that they were leaving themselves wide open to looking foolish when it turns out he is not a credible source. I'm not suggesting a ban, just journalistic competence.

It would even be more helpful if journalists actually studied the subjects they were reporting on, and could talk in depth about facts and debates within the field, instead of just quoting people they've determined to be experts.

Parroting experts is one of the biggest problems in our culture. People have some responsibility to actually read the subjects the experts are talking about, look at outside critiques objectively, and use logic and reason to decide whether they have a point.

Journalists -- the same. They should have enough knowledge of the field to be able to report on outside critiques objectively and impartially; instead of just being parrots.

2 days ago, figuerres wrote

*snip*

how much of a test was that ?  I think it was more of a marketing game, give a sample and at then end of each game they were doing adverts to pre order the game.

It wasn't just a marketing game, they did use feedback from testers to improve things; and they were also testing the capability of the servers.

Still, they did seem to go out of the way to not give beta testers much value for their playtesting. I got an e-mail invite the same day they wanted me to test, couple hours notice, the test was only for a couple of hours, and the sessions were still limited to 1 hr. I participated in the previous open beta. Where was my incentive to help them out??

36 minutes ago, magicalclick wrote

*snip*nope. You have to box the object since you are moving the entire box, not individual items. Telling someone to move box of toys, or take toys out and move them, are completely different things, as the box is gone and the toys do not have the same relative displacement anymore. It is the same as you pass in a student object pointer or pass in individual student attributes in the parameters. They are very different and is no brainer to programmers.

Yea, but the alternative is an order of operations which is difficult to use in practice. So some type of "boxing" order of operations is preserved, higher order mathematical functions are given first priority, and the "boxing" is in your head. I never said it was necessary, just that it wasn't arbitrary, and its not arbitrary.

The standard order of operations also prevents a left-to-right "stacking" of the operations and allows you to do it from either direction.

So lets say someone knows nothing of math and sees an equation and doesn't get what to do. I understand the problem. But if you take one or two math courses, the choice for the standard order of operations should seem intuitive, and not something easy to forget.

1 minute ago, Blue Ink wrote

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The problem is that operator precedence is largely a convention; there's no real reason why 3 + 3 * 4 = 15 and not 24; it's just that we decided it has to be that way.

That's what makes it hard to teach: you can paraphrase it all you want, but the answer is essentially "just because" and that never flies too well with kids.

Sure there's a reason. If the operators applied based on order in the equation, then the operations couldn't be freely associated with each other and always would have to be put in place in a certain order. For example, lets say you had an equation x × 2 = y × 3. You want to be able to rewrite the equation as x × 2 - y × 3 = 0 and still have it mean the same thing without putting in parentheses. If it was based on the order in the equation you couldn't do that very well. Stacking operations isn't very intuitive for people, only useful for calculators that can only enter one operation at a time. And if you had addition/subtraction taking precedence before multiplication/division you would have something that was intuitively strange, too.

Its not absolutely necessary, of course, but there's a reason behind it; its not arbitrary that standard order of operations works like that.

17 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

Lots of people just don't remember the operator order, which is hardly surprising since it's not something most people actually need very often.

Yea but everyone learns it in school, and its pretty intuitive, meaning its not hard to forget. So I still don't get it.

I'm not sure what type of answer you're looking for, legal one, a moral one, or a semantic one?

Its possible your neighbor doesn't mind if people piggyback on his Internet access, so it would be the equivalent of him putting out some broken couch on the sidewalk for anyone to pick up whom wants it.

But you don't know that, so its more of an equivalent to a fruit tree overhanging his property line, and that involves some sort of moral judgment. If it were a tree of a neighbor you don't know that lives a block away, if it were a neighbor next door that you know well, or a neighbor next door that you don't know very well, but the tree isn't overhanging the sidewalk, but rather into your property, and you pick it from your property. Same sort of moral judgment applies to Internet piggybacking. Overall the best ethic is to use your own wifi, but in some cases using others shouldn't be such a big issue.

1 hour ago, figuerres wrote

I think a better way to look at it is like this, say a house has an open door, you walk in and attach an electric cord and run it over to your house and use the power.  that is also theft.  same thing.

the "right" thing to do is go ask if you can use it, also tell them they should put a lock on it to stop others from taking the service w/o asking.

Yes, but their electricity costs them money by the watt, while most IPs won't charge with bandwidth, you're also opening their door and stepping inside which they might consider a violation of their property, which you aren't doing with wifi. But still... when I'm in a public place and my cell phone isn't charged I often look for an outlet on the side of a commercial building to plug it in. Nobody cares.

At any rate, there's also a wider definition of stealing which has no moral context to it. Consider expressions like "I stole a glimpse", "I stole the gift into the house," etc. which just means to take surreptitiously.