they have not even thought about this at all, and do not have a 'line' that they will draw that cannot be crossed
Yes, they do: the home. As in, "an Englishman's". As in, "his castle". I'll grant that restaurants etc are a grey area, but I don't believe people will accept governmental surveillance inside the home. It triggers a territorial instinct which I suspect is rooted pretty deeply in human psychology, and is not as malleable as you seem to think.
The technological capability of universal surveillance may be inevitable, however socially and politically it is most certainly not an inevitability.
I can't think of many cases where the two haven't gone together. Your assertion feels awfully like the MPAA/RIAA's belief that they can stop filesharing, or the Catholic church's belief that they could stop printed lay-language Bibles. Even if you could prevent governments using the tech, that wouldn't stop less-than-ethical private interests (e.g. credit rating agencies), or flagrantly criminal organizations like the CIA. If the tech is useful and readily available, it will be used.
Um, no. Although I do seem to have missed the point where disagreeing with an editorial comment became "missing the point". Was there a memo?
I'm not wild about universal public surveillance, but as I wrote in another post I think it's a technological inevitability, and we're better off legislating around the usage of surveillance data.
Part of where I'm coming from - ever since reading Bob Shaw's Other Days, Other Eyes I've been convinced that attempts to hold back the spread of surveillance devices are Canute-like in the extreme. (I think David Brin has also written on the same subject.) Once they're tiny, disposable, wirelessly-networked, absurdly cheap and plausibly deniable, they WILL be everywhere.
Rather than fighting a losing battle against technological inevitability, I think we'd be better off addressing the other end of the issue - let people monitor whatever they like, since there's no way to stop them, but restrict what use can be made of information gained in this way. Make it inadmissible as evidence in court, for example.
It's not an ideal situation, in that the potential for more subtle abuse (employment discrimination, for example) will still exist, but it may be the best we can do.
If they aren't sampling at a high enough rate to capture inteligible language, than the fear that these devices will be used in a malicious way is somewhat removed.
Good point; recording statistical data rather than actual samples ought to address the alleged intent perfectly well.
I did wonder while typing my original post whether the framerate on street CCTV was sufficient to allow lip-reading, in which case the privacy arguments become rather moot.
... and to be honest I can't get too worked up about this.
Public streets are just that: public. You don't get to veto who's watching and/or listening to you. If you want to discuss insurrection or your new water-fuelled-engine invention, go somewhere private.
Besides, excessive noise is an infringement of privacy too, in my opinion.
I don't read Ancient (or indeed Modern) Greek, so I'm not qualified to pass comment on the original, but I've never found any good poetry in (faithful) translation. Assuming that English doesn't have a monopoly on good poets, it seems safe to generalize that poetry doesn't translate.
With regard to "modern writing techniques"... in some respects I agree, in that many idioms of the oral tradition are suboptimal in modern media, but judging Homer by modern writing's standards is unfair - pretty much all modern "story" is dramatic (focussing on change); Homer is epic (focussing on contrast). Apples and oranges.
And when you try to manhandle Homer into modern dramatic conventions I think you lose the very thing that makes him most fascinating - the weirdly alien mindset evident both in the characters and in the work iself.
Troy the movie I found catastrophically dull. It had lost all the strangeness without noticeably gaining any modern virtues to compensate, and wound up being a third-rate Hollywood action flick with sillier-than-usual costumes.
Only on Slashdot would I meet other people who have both heard of Logue and quote Neddy Seagoon in their sig. All in a thread about Star Trek. (Which I don't even like, ironically.)
(have you every actually read the Illiad (even in translation?) It's not that good!)
Up until a couple of years ago I'd have agreed with you. The plot itself is too far removed from our experience to involve us readily, and the translations always seemed stilted and unnatural.
Then I discovered Christopher Logue's War Music. As a translation it's loose in the extreme - Logue doesn't actually read Greek, and the work has been described as more of an adaptation - but it's natural, haunting, evocative and just plain downright thrilling. Highly recommended.
Americans don't recognise that they live in an empire in all but name
Leaving aside the pitfalls of generalizing about "Americans" (something that's becoming increasingly meaningless as that nation polarizes) and confining discussion to the red-staters, I'm not sure the problem is that they "don't recognise" that the US is an empire. It's more that they don't recognise that it's a bad empire. The British Empire wasn't exactly shy about announcing itself, but jingoistic pride, cultural arrogance and a nationalistic media all combined to ensure that its citizens were generally happy about that empire.
I think the same holds here. Read a topic like this at -1 and you'll find a fair number of posters who like being in the American Empire. They like the "we're number one!" thing, they like the knee-jerk machismo that flows from military adventurism, they really do think they're God's chosen country, and they're perfectly willing to let their leaders trample over a world they see as filled with terrorists, godless communists and spineless Eurotrash.
I'm stunned that there is not more of a response to this news here on Slashdot.
Right, because folks have been crying out for a way to get even more frickin' Flash sites polluting the Web. I was looking at Laszlo a couple of weeks ago, and the backend looks sensible, but Flash? These days I just block it, as do a growing number of people given its primary use as an ad vehicle, but even on the rare occasions when I've used a Flash site it's annoyed the living crap out of me.
I realize that the framework can target other client technologies, but right now it doesn't. Ergo, not interested.
I took another look at D recently (the first for about a year) and was very impressed by how far it has come on. Templates in particular appear to be both significantly more flexible and significantly simpler than in C++, which is no mean feat.
That said, I do think your assertion that "one has the power and efficiency of C++" is a little disingenous, given that D doesn't support RAII very well. If I had to name a unique selling point for C++, RAII would be it. Deterministic behaviour is a huge deal to a lot of C++ users, and I suspect that trying to achieve it in a GC language is going to be like crawling uphill over broken glass.
P.S. Do you know if there's a yacc/ANTLR/similar grammar for D kicking around anywhere?
Oh dear oh dear oh dear
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The quoted review displays the sort of vehement ignorance characteristic of religious types, who seem to think that impassioned handwaving and endless repetition can somehow substitute for a cogent argument.
Specific thoughts, memories etc can already be mapped (with the subject's cooperation) fairly precisely to areas of the brain. F'rinstance, stimulating a particular point can reproducibly trigger a particular memory - a face, a place, a Guns'n'Roses song. Similarly with brain damage to particular areas disrupting particular functions. There are numerous examples quoted in Dennett's excellent (if over-ambitiously titled) "Consciousness Explained", which must be a decade or so old now. Denying this stuff is heading into Flat-Earther territory.
The "objective correlate" bit is bizarre; it reads like a sort of reverse epiphenomenalism. As if subjective qualia were the only "significant" aspects of a mental occurrence, and the physical aspects are just an irrelevant side-effect. There are certainly open questions regarding qualia and their place in an ontology of the mind, but religious prejudices like this don't contribute anything to the debate.
The last two sentences are nonsensical garbage. I'm not sure whether the author is deliberately misrepresenting physicalism or just misunderstanding it, but the claim made is roughly equivalent to "software can't just be a bunch of bits, because there's a Slashdot page in my browser window and there are no 'Slashdot' bits versus 'kuro5hin' bits, there are simply bits".
(Yes, I'm aware that you were just quoting this review, not necessarily supporting it. As you can tell, this kind of dogma-dressed-up-as-argument gets me riled.)
Oh, radiosity itself is anything but a joke; in a raytracer, it's both natural and a huge improvement. I was talking about attempts to get rasterizers to do (realtime) radiosity, an endeavour rather like training a dophin to play the piano.
They have hierarchical structures to test for which group of triagles a ray may intersect and scales more like O(n log n).
I assume you're talking about kd-trees... these do indeed offer very nice performance characteristics, but they're designed for static geometry. Efficient raytracing for dynamic geometry (moving or deforming objects) is AFAIK still far from "solved".
If you add this to the fact that raytracing lets you have perfectly smooth non-polygonized objects
and take away the fact that they don't particularly like the arbitrary triangle meshes that make up the vast majority of real datasets...
Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction
Yes, "Flexible and robust" is the killer. And not just for refraction/reflection; there's still no fully-general, clean, robust method of shadowing for rasterizers, and it's not for want of trying. Radiosity is a joke. Attempts to get realism out of current rasterization approaches are bodges piled on kludges piled on hacks. It became clear some time ago that the technology was heading up a dead end. Of course, so much has been invested in making that dead-end fast that it's going to be hard to take the performance hit of moving to a better but less optimized approach.
I suspect we'll eventually end up with a hybrid, rather like current deferred-shading techniques. It'll be interesting to watch it all pan out.
Do you have any links handy on the "hyper tunneling" bus you mention? I'd not heard of it before and can't find anything substantive on the Web. Is it something not yet announced, or is my Google-fu unusually poor today?
Yeah, you're getting some flak for this already, but I don't think you're wholly out of line. I bought B5 on DVD recently and, yes, the dialog is crap. The acting is mixed, but certainly not stellar.
For me, it's not about "long story arc". It's about ambition. It's about political commentary sneaking through in a culture which really doesn't encourage such things. It's about trying to tell a story on a scale hitherto unattempted on television, and largely succeeding. And, despite the poor dialog, there's some groundbreaking character work in there. Take Londo. A genuine, 100%, bona fide tragic hero, right there on the small screen. Where had you seen that before? Where have you seen that since?
As for suspense... have you seen Severed Dreams? I finished that ep feeling like I'd just watched a 3-hour feature film. A very, very good one.
Thanks for the plug, but I wouldn't want anyone to think I was conscientious or anything - I'd read the XForms and Web Forms specs already.
As ever on/., by the time someone has actually read TFA (and linked material) on an unfamiliar topic, there are so many posts already that informed posts can't get seen to be modded up.
Sound to me as if someone either missed the cluetrain, was having a slow news day and decided to invent a crisis, or swallowed some Microsoft FUD without checking his facts.
"This specification is in no way aimed at replacing XForms 1.0 [XForms], nor is it a subset of XForms 1.0.
XForms 1.0 is well suited for describing business logic and data constraints. Web Forms 2.0 aims to simplify the task of transforming XForms 1.0 systems into documents that can be rendered on HTML Web browsers that do not support XForms."
The Web Forms proposal is hugely important precisely because it can be implemented for IE using a "standard library" of client-side script. It won't be quite as nice as native implementations, but it'll work. It's the first evolutionary proposal I've seen that actually makes allowance for the festering carcass of IE holding everybody else back.
Slashdot Mirror
Near-infinite brightness [...] infinite sharpness?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Somebody's been reading far too much Transmetropolitan...
they have not even thought about this at all, and do not have a 'line' that they will draw that cannot be crossed
Yes, they do: the home. As in, "an Englishman's". As in, "his castle". I'll grant that restaurants etc are a grey area, but I don't believe people will accept governmental surveillance inside the home. It triggers a territorial instinct which I suspect is rooted pretty deeply in human psychology, and is not as malleable as you seem to think.
The technological capability of universal surveillance may be inevitable, however socially and politically it is most certainly not an inevitability.
I can't think of many cases where the two haven't gone together. Your assertion feels awfully like the MPAA/RIAA's belief that they can stop filesharing, or the Catholic church's belief that they could stop printed lay-language Bibles. Even if you could prevent governments using the tech, that wouldn't stop less-than-ethical private interests (e.g. credit rating agencies), or flagrantly criminal organizations like the CIA. If the tech is useful and readily available, it will be used.
Found the Brin stuff I mentioned, by the way; his views sound much like mine. Here's the first chapter of his book 'The Transparent Society'.
Um, no. Although I do seem to have missed the point where disagreeing with an editorial comment became "missing the point". Was there a memo?
I'm not wild about universal public surveillance, but as I wrote in another post I think it's a technological inevitability, and we're better off legislating around the usage of surveillance data.
Failed to spot that grandparent was quoting a blog entry from a few weeks ago. Doh!
Hey, it's noon on a Sunday, I'm not awake yet.
...given that Hyatt announced Acid2 compliance about ten days ago.
That's a perfectly reasonable point of view.
Part of where I'm coming from - ever since reading Bob Shaw's Other Days, Other Eyes I've been convinced that attempts to hold back the spread of surveillance devices are Canute-like in the extreme. (I think David Brin has also written on the same subject.) Once they're tiny, disposable, wirelessly-networked, absurdly cheap and plausibly deniable, they WILL be everywhere.
Rather than fighting a losing battle against technological inevitability, I think we'd be better off addressing the other end of the issue - let people monitor whatever they like, since there's no way to stop them, but restrict what use can be made of information gained in this way. Make it inadmissible as evidence in court, for example.
It's not an ideal situation, in that the potential for more subtle abuse (employment discrimination, for example) will still exist, but it may be the best we can do.
If they aren't sampling at a high enough rate to capture inteligible language, than the fear that these devices will be used in a malicious way is somewhat removed.
Good point; recording statistical data rather than actual samples ought to address the alleged intent perfectly well.
I did wonder while typing my original post whether the framerate on street CCTV was sufficient to allow lip-reading, in which case the privacy arguments become rather moot.
... and to be honest I can't get too worked up about this.
Public streets are just that: public. You don't get to veto who's watching and/or listening to you. If you want to discuss insurrection or your new water-fuelled-engine invention, go somewhere private.
Besides, excessive noise is an infringement of privacy too, in my opinion.
I don't read Ancient (or indeed Modern) Greek, so I'm not qualified to pass comment on the original, but I've never found any good poetry in (faithful) translation. Assuming that English doesn't have a monopoly on good poets, it seems safe to generalize that poetry doesn't translate.
With regard to "modern writing techniques"... in some respects I agree, in that many idioms of the oral tradition are suboptimal in modern media, but judging Homer by modern writing's standards is unfair - pretty much all modern "story" is dramatic (focussing on change); Homer is epic (focussing on contrast). Apples and oranges.
And when you try to manhandle Homer into modern dramatic conventions I think you lose the very thing that makes him most fascinating - the weirdly alien mindset evident both in the characters and in the work iself.
Troy the movie I found catastrophically dull. It had lost all the strangeness without noticeably gaining any modern virtues to compensate, and wound up being a third-rate Hollywood action flick with sillier-than-usual costumes.
Only on Slashdot would I meet other people who have both heard of Logue and quote Neddy Seagoon in their sig. All in a thread about Star Trek. (Which I don't even like, ironically.)
Oh, Internet, how did I ever do without you?
(have you every actually read the Illiad (even in translation?) It's not that good!)
Up until a couple of years ago I'd have agreed with you. The plot itself is too far removed from our experience to involve us readily, and the translations always seemed stilted and unnatural.
Then I discovered Christopher Logue's War Music. As a translation it's loose in the extreme - Logue doesn't actually read Greek, and the work has been described as more of an adaptation - but it's natural, haunting, evocative and just plain downright thrilling. Highly recommended.
Americans don't recognise that they live in an empire in all but name
Leaving aside the pitfalls of generalizing about "Americans" (something that's becoming increasingly meaningless as that nation polarizes) and confining discussion to the red-staters, I'm not sure the problem is that they "don't recognise" that the US is an empire. It's more that they don't recognise that it's a bad empire. The British Empire wasn't exactly shy about announcing itself, but jingoistic pride, cultural arrogance and a nationalistic media all combined to ensure that its citizens were generally happy about that empire.
I think the same holds here. Read a topic like this at -1 and you'll find a fair number of posters who like being in the American Empire. They like the "we're number one!" thing, they like the knee-jerk machismo that flows from military adventurism, they really do think they're God's chosen country, and they're perfectly willing to let their leaders trample over a world they see as filled with terrorists, godless communists and spineless Eurotrash.
I'm stunned that there is not more of a response to this news here on Slashdot.
Right, because folks have been crying out for a way to get even more frickin' Flash sites polluting the Web. I was looking at Laszlo a couple of weeks ago, and the backend looks sensible, but Flash? These days I just block it, as do a growing number of people given its primary use as an ad vehicle, but even on the rare occasions when I've used a Flash site it's annoyed the living crap out of me.
I realize that the framework can target other client technologies, but right now it doesn't. Ergo, not interested.
I took another look at D recently (the first for about a year) and was very impressed by how far it has come on. Templates in particular appear to be both significantly more flexible and significantly simpler than in C++, which is no mean feat.
That said, I do think your assertion that "one has the power and efficiency of C++" is a little disingenous, given that D doesn't support RAII very well. If I had to name a unique selling point for C++, RAII would be it. Deterministic behaviour is a huge deal to a lot of C++ users, and I suspect that trying to achieve it in a GC language is going to be like crawling uphill over broken glass.
P.S. Do you know if there's a yacc/ANTLR/similar grammar for D kicking around anywhere?
The quoted review displays the sort of vehement ignorance characteristic of religious types, who seem to think that impassioned handwaving and endless repetition can somehow substitute for a cogent argument.
Specific thoughts, memories etc can already be mapped (with the subject's cooperation) fairly precisely to areas of the brain. F'rinstance, stimulating a particular point can reproducibly trigger a particular memory - a face, a place, a Guns'n'Roses song. Similarly with brain damage to particular areas disrupting particular functions. There are numerous examples quoted in Dennett's excellent (if over-ambitiously titled) "Consciousness Explained", which must be a decade or so old now. Denying this stuff is heading into Flat-Earther territory.
The "objective correlate" bit is bizarre; it reads like a sort of reverse epiphenomenalism. As if subjective qualia were the only "significant" aspects of a mental occurrence, and the physical aspects are just an irrelevant side-effect. There are certainly open questions regarding qualia and their place in an ontology of the mind, but religious prejudices like this don't contribute anything to the debate.
The last two sentences are nonsensical garbage. I'm not sure whether the author is deliberately misrepresenting physicalism or just misunderstanding it, but the claim made is roughly equivalent to "software can't just be a bunch of bits, because there's a Slashdot page in my browser window and there are no 'Slashdot' bits versus 'kuro5hin' bits, there are simply bits".
(Yes, I'm aware that you were just quoting this review, not necessarily supporting it. As you can tell, this kind of dogma-dressed-up-as-argument gets me riled.)
If you ever aspired to be the next Jerry Seinfeld instead of the next American Idol. Maybe the product featured by Wired is just right for you.
Alternatively, you might like to try the latest member of our "Punctuation" line: the all-new, best-selling Comma (TM).
Oh, radiosity itself is anything but a joke; in a raytracer, it's both natural and a huge improvement. I was talking about attempts to get rasterizers to do (realtime) radiosity, an endeavour rather like training a dophin to play the piano.
Doesn't stop people trying, but it's not pretty.
They have hierarchical structures to test for which group of triagles a ray may intersect and scales more like O(n log n).
I assume you're talking about kd-trees... these do indeed offer very nice performance characteristics, but they're designed for static geometry. Efficient raytracing for dynamic geometry (moving or deforming objects) is AFAIK still far from "solved".
If you add this to the fact that raytracing lets you have perfectly smooth non-polygonized objects
and take away the fact that they don't particularly like the arbitrary triangle meshes that make up the vast majority of real datasets...
Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction
Yes, "Flexible and robust" is the killer. And not just for refraction/reflection; there's still no fully-general, clean, robust method of shadowing for rasterizers, and it's not for want of trying. Radiosity is a joke. Attempts to get realism out of current rasterization approaches are bodges piled on kludges piled on hacks. It became clear some time ago that the technology was heading up a dead end. Of course, so much has been invested in making that dead-end fast that it's going to be hard to take the performance hit of moving to a better but less optimized approach.
I suspect we'll eventually end up with a hybrid, rather like current deferred-shading techniques. It'll be interesting to watch it all pan out.
Do you have any links handy on the "hyper tunneling" bus you mention? I'd not heard of it before and can't find anything substantive on the Web. Is it something not yet announced, or is my Google-fu unusually poor today?
I'm a little perplexed by your logic. I mean, back when I drove I used to enjoy that too, but only when out in the middle of nowhere. So, do you:
a) only blare out in the middle of nowhere,
b) believe that a rapid succession of different Dopplered blares is less annoying to others than one steady blare,
c) assume that there is no such rapid succession because most other people don't do this, or
d) only behave differently at red lights because bystanders are in a better position to point and/or throw things at you?
I mean, leaving aside the "free-as-in-speech" angle, surely the "free-as-in-beer" angle has undeniable attractions?
Is it really just a case of the dominant vendors wanting to use BIOS quirks to lock-in their market share?
Yeah, you're getting some flak for this already, but I don't think you're wholly out of line. I bought B5 on DVD recently and, yes, the dialog is crap. The acting is mixed, but certainly not stellar.
For me, it's not about "long story arc". It's about ambition. It's about political commentary sneaking through in a culture which really doesn't encourage such things. It's about trying to tell a story on a scale hitherto unattempted on television, and largely succeeding. And, despite the poor dialog, there's some groundbreaking character work in there. Take Londo. A genuine, 100%, bona fide tragic hero, right there on the small screen. Where had you seen that before? Where have you seen that since?
As for suspense... have you seen Severed Dreams? I finished that ep feeling like I'd just watched a 3-hour feature film. A very, very good one.
Thanks for the plug, but I wouldn't want anyone to think I was conscientious or anything - I'd read the XForms and Web Forms specs already.
/., by the time someone has actually read TFA (and linked material) on an unfamiliar topic, there are so many posts already that informed posts can't get seen to be modded up.
As ever on
Sound to me as if someone either missed the cluetrain, was having a slow news day and decided to invent a crisis, or swallowed some Microsoft FUD without checking his facts.
From the Web Forms 2.0 draft spec:
"This specification is in no way aimed at replacing XForms 1.0 [XForms], nor is it a subset of XForms 1.0.
XForms 1.0 is well suited for describing business logic and data constraints. Web Forms 2.0 aims to simplify the task of transforming XForms 1.0 systems into documents that can be rendered on HTML Web browsers that do not support XForms."
The Web Forms proposal is hugely important precisely because it can be implemented for IE using a "standard library" of client-side script. It won't be quite as nice as native implementations, but it'll work. It's the first evolutionary proposal I've seen that actually makes allowance for the festering carcass of IE holding everybody else back.