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Comment Re:"Corrections" (Score 1) 326

Until you manage to produce undeniable proof that someone is physically unable to be cured from mental illness, we should always, as a society, strive to cure them. Let's take an analogy that's perhaps closer to home: some people in hospitals have neither the money nor the physical wellness to get cured. Should we simply abandon them, or should we strive to the very end to attempt to cure them, even (and especially) if it ultimately fails?

Attempt at reform is pointless for many; it's a well-established fact that you cannot 'cure' a sociopath.

Comment ruined long ago (Score 1) 253

I played WoW for a while back when it was newer, when you had to actually form social ties and groups in order to get anything accomplished. That's what I liked, the social part of it. Much later I came back to it and realized that nobody was forming groups any more, there was this new queuing system to get you into dungeons and you got grouped up with strangers and there was no incentive to even talk to each other. I guess it was to please the 'casual' crowd. I wasn't impressed.

Comment Re:This will take a long, long time (Score 1) 134

CGI humans in movies--pre-rendered by giant server farms for as long as it takes--still fall into the uncanny valley.

It'll be a long, long time before graphics can be rendered in real time with no uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley has nothing to do with rendering any more, but modelling.

They've gotten better, but kinematic models are still crap. This will be fixed when someone bothers to spend the money to actually make a facial model based on data collected from fast fMRI, instead of by the hand of an "artist", or a clumsy inverse kinematics algorithm.

Comment Re:The other folly of modern HTML+CSS+JS (Score 1) 249

Trying to cover all cases with one universal standard is rarely the best solution. Covering the core with a small number of good standards, and having a few others that work differently to handle the rest is often the best way. This is simply because the 'solution space' covered by a single universal standard has many more regions of possibility that will never be touched than a few more focussed standards. Whilst it's massively oversimplifying, imagine the problem of covering a bounded region of a plane, that has an interesting shape, with squares. Hardcore minimalists will point out that one big square will do. That is what the universal standard approach tries to do. The trouble is that a few interesting cases can push the required size of the square to large proportions. If one wants to optimise for area, many small squares are better, but at the expense of having to manage many squares. A balance between these two, with a very small number of large squares and a slightly larger number of smaller squares, tends to be the best solution. Things work similarly with languages, both human and computer ones.

The problem isn't that the standard tries to be universal, it's that it's applied at a completely inappropriate level of abstraction.

Comment Re:How do I get clients like this? (Score 1) 351

Accountability is inversely proportional to the size of the project; bigger budgets means more managers with the incentive to paint everything as a success regardless of outcome ("are you a team player?"), with their own little fiefdoms, self-interests and priorities. Get big enough and you get the added affect of the client being afraid of the contractor's ability to litigate (yes - US government included). Once you get passed a certain point of insulation from consequences of failure, profitability goes way up because you can aggressively cut cost at the expense of quality - quality not only in terms of deliverables, but also sanity in estimates and expectations.

Comment Project Euler (Score 1) 387

Maybe you should turn away from the vagueries and demands of industry for a while and focus on some personal enrichment that will make you a better programmer (yes, even after 15 years), and smarter, too, using the language you already know. Do the first 100 problems at Project Euler. Then later if you still want to learn a new language, you can do them again in that one. Learning new languages this way is whip-crack fast.

Comment there's a simple solution here (Score 3, Insightful) 770

If they want to teach creationism in science class, there should also be a requirement to teach 'alternative' religions in their churches. Just imagine how rabid they'd get if we required their Sunday schools to include Islam and Hinduism... would be totally worth it since it would reveal these people for what they are - violent, bigoted assholes.

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