I wonder about that -- maybe that's true at any given company (I maintained a very small team of quality people at my last job), but out in the world? Who cares if there are a ton of mediocre people programming? In fact, I'd think the best thing is to have a thriving ecosystem where anyone can code and we reap whatever comes from it. I think the elitist mentality is an illusion: there wouldn't be more great code, there would simply be less mediocre code. And like it or not, mediocre code can often be useful too. Complete shit code may not be useful, but until the code is written it's not always possible to tell who's going to produce mediocre vs. complete shit. So let everyone have at it and keep what works. If the million monkeys make something cool, great.
All that said, at my company, where I'm paying for it in advance, I'll keep the team small and high quality:)
Even if we record the information, without the ability to experimentally verify it, the big bang will be nothing but legend to the people of the distant future. What irony! There will be nothing but an old book proclaiming universal expansion and cosmic microwave background and... would you believe anything you just read in some old book?
Hmm. That really put our existence and it's long term futility into sharp perspective for me. Dammit.
"If Quake had been designed to be open-source from the beginning, the performance hack that makes see-around-corners possible could never have been considered -- and either the design wouldn't have depended on millisecond packet timing at all, or aim-bot recognition would have been built in to the server from the beginning."
Which is really just another way of saying that it wouldn't have been developed at all. Great solution.
I hate cheating too, but I'm afraid it'll always be there. I just assume on public servers that there is some cheating. When I get sick of it I set up a private game with people that I trust.
I agree with all your points save one: lots of Windows software breaks the Windows look and feel. I'd go so far as to say that these days, programs that don't break the Windows look a bit austere. So iTunes fits right into that lousy pattern.
But yeah, the rest of your points stand. iTunes on Windows is clunky even after years. They should get some (more) top notch Windows programmers and tighten that shit up. It makes them look bad.
Many of the advancements to science can be considered outside of what is considered "science" at the time.
I don't think that's accurate. Those advancements were outside of what science people wanted to hear (like the earth going around the sun) but they were still perfectly within the realm of science. Science has nothing to do with majority rule, personal preferences, or what sounds reasonable. Science is about testable theories; theories that help us predict the future. Even if every scientist in the world hates a new discovery, it's still science if it is a testable theory with the ability to make predictions. This is why science is fundamentally different than religion. It's a subtle but critical difference that nearly all ID proponents fail to grasp.
Yep, you missed something. Both gravity and evolution are theories. Theories that are supported by enormous amounts of evidence. Both have been observed and provide a degree of predictive ability. Both will undoubtedly require refinement in the future, but both are by far the best explanation as to how things work.
You can still believe in God, but if you deny evolution you're kind of sticking your head in the sand. Which is fine with me.
I think it's pretty easy to say "no" to a million pounds when you know there's no chance you'll actually get it. If they really had a million pounds right there and the paperwork was ready I bet more than a few of the people who said "no" would say "yes".
Why the obsession with people genetically similar to us? Isn't it enjoyable enough to meet and get to know people without the specious idea that they're more connected if they share a few genes?
I agree almost completely... but I was raised fundamentalist Christian and argued the creationist side of things many times in my teens. Then around 17 or so all the good points by others started adding up and I had doubts. And then I went through an agnostic phase, and finally settled as a happy well adjusted atheist:) My sister followed a similar path on a different timeline. So I'm just saying that discussion with religious types isn't always 100% useless. They'll probably never admit it during the argument but you can plant the seeds for later thinking, and people can sometimes change their mind.
In other words, I believe (perhaps irrationally) that respectful debate is not always just a waste of time.
the government will never give up the war on drugs!
I don't agree. I actually think that of all the legislative idiocy marijuana reform is one of the more likely to change in our lifetime. Assuming people with clear ideas on the topic avoid apathy.
The result was, as you say, better light sensitivity, but at the expense of color accuracy. I guess in the end they decided the tradeoff wasn't worth it. I don't claim to understand any of the details, but I just read that page and then read your question:)
I've been trying to think of a reasonably accurate way to explain it to laypeople.
I think losing net neutrality is something like this: imagine that you pay for overnight shipping at the post office, but then it doesn't get there until a day later because you didn't also pay off the postman on the other end. Without net neutrality, that's pretty much how it will work, right?
I am against 100% all government economic intervention....says the person who never lived in a wholly unregulated state. How easy it is to pine for the days of before government intervention, when robber barons roamed free and the poor lived and died in the streets in droves and turned to crime.
Before someone calls me a communist, I should state I have strong libertarian tendancies, and I believe in the market. But it doesn't solve everything; if it did then anarchy would make for high class countries. So I am 80% against government economic intervention. A government's job is to make sure the market playing field stays relatively level.
Personally, I think net neutrality is a way to assist that. But perhaps you disagree.
Sure, businesses are in it for the money, and there's nothing wrong with that. But here's the part that most people don't seem to understand: the best way to make money is not by "fucking you in the ass" as you say, or by deceiving consumers, or by locking consumers in, etc, etc. These might work as short term strategies, but they always fail as long term strategies. And making money in the short term at the expense of the long term is not what business is about.
In general, if I were to criticize Microsoft vs. Apple, it's not because one is "in it for the money" and the other isn't, it's because one of them is shortsighted. Yes, it bugs me as a consumer when they release a limited, crappy, or overpriced product, but assuming I'm a reasonable facsimile of an average consumer it's bad for them too. And that makes them stupid. Good business doesn't have to be stupid.
In this case, assuming this rumor is right, I think the restrictions that AT&T and Apple are putting on the device are pretty stupid. That makes it bad business; and even if the product succeeds, that doesn't mean it was a good idea, it might have done even better without all the restrictions.
I once spent some mental energy thinking of better captchas; such as male/female recognition, picking people out of crowds, etc. Things that would be tremendously difficult for a computer but relatively easy for a human. But then I came across a captcha cracking method that pretty much sealed their fate. Though they still may help some sites where there isn't much motivation to break through, I think they're more or less dead for sites under serious attack.
I read about a method of captcha breaking that ends the arms race: real humans. Specifically, a porn site that lets you view a free picture for each captcha. Then you've got the motivation for actual people to use their advanced organic hardware at distributed captcha cracking -- sort of a human porn-bot-net.
Ingenious, but it kind of killed my hopes of building a better captcha.
All I can do is shake my head these days when I hear stuff like this being touted as "free market". I am a fan of the free market, but what the free-market-absolutists don't understand is that the market isn't naturally free: it needs regulation to ensure that it stays free. Just like we need regulation to ensure that people are free.
If the market was naturally free there would be no need for government at all. I'm sure some hyper-libertarian just stood up and cheered. But the fact is that without any regulation whatsoever free markets disappear: no really, go check out what happens when there is no regulation in less developed countries: a small number of powerful people exercise their wonderful freedom in the truly free market to wrest control from everyone else and pretty soon you've got abusive monopolies and terriffic exploitation everywhere.
Sorry: but we need regulation to make sure the market stays competitive and free. This is the hightest calling of government, methinks: to ensure that the playing field does not get too tilted. This is what network neutrality is about. AT&T wants to be free enough to tilt everything so dramatically in their favor that others can no longer compete.
Anyone else remember when you could only rent your phones from an AT&T store? And there were only a handful of featureless models to choose from? And there were no technological advances in telephony for ages? Yeah: that's the "free market" that AT&T promotes.
Saddam and his family are no good. His own son enjoyed feeding people to a wood chipper feet first and twisting mens arms off.
This is truly awful, and I shed no tear for Saddam and his sons. But things don't actually seem better. And I think it was obvious going in that such was the case. I wish we had come up with a practical plan, but we didn't. We took the same old lazy road we've taken many times before: we're big and strong, we bring democracy, and God is on our side... how could we lose?
How it is that people assume that it is a matter of oil, when the oil producing nations are the ones which end up with windfall profits is beyond me.
Didn't the American oil companies record record profits last year? I don't really think that we went to war so that oil companies could make a little more money, but I do think oil had a lot to do with it. Specifically I think that the US wants US friendly people in control of oil producing nations, even if that is not good for the nation itself. The US has deposed popular leaders that were not US friendly and propped up unpopular leaders that were US friendly. So has the UK, and probably others. I think this feeds into the general sociopolitical illness in the middle east.
it is clearly us bad Americans that are the worst in the free world.
It's not a comparison game. If we do somthing shitty or stupid it's still shitty or stupid even if other people are doing worse. I am sharply critical of America... because I love it dearly. The tendancy to defend America from valid criticism reminds me of dickhead parents who can't recognize and address their kids' faults. Real love and respect means honesty and honestly we, America, could be doing better.
Or we might develop some type of completely convincing VR setup that allows me to say, rent a robot in Korea that will act as me and I'll experience exactly what it experiences from the comfort of my own home. At some threshold of sensory accuracy, it would be about as good as being there. That may be as close to teleportation as we need to get.
It may not be innovative, but it's the first time I've seen anything like that demoed. Sounds like somebody at Blackberry has been doing a pretty poor job of marketing their product:/
From the Advogato FAQ: "All the trust metric guarantees is that they really are who they say they are."
It's not a reputation system per se, but just a more reliable identification system. That is a prerequisite for having a reputation system, of course, but it's not the whole thing.
The next step would be some way to figure if the person identified is known to be beneficial or harmful to the community. That is a much, much harder problem, not the least of which is because we probably don't all agree on which is which.
I think Slashdot, for all our whining, has done a pretty great job addressing such an intractable problem. Of course, as someone who has been stamped by the system with relatively good Karma that's very easy for me to say:)
Slashdot Mirror
We need fewer programmers, not more.
:)
I wonder about that -- maybe that's true at any given company (I maintained a very small team of quality people at my last job), but out in the world? Who cares if there are a ton of mediocre people programming? In fact, I'd think the best thing is to have a thriving ecosystem where anyone can code and we reap whatever comes from it. I think the elitist mentality is an illusion: there wouldn't be more great code, there would simply be less mediocre code. And like it or not, mediocre code can often be useful too. Complete shit code may not be useful, but until the code is written it's not always possible to tell who's going to produce mediocre vs. complete shit. So let everyone have at it and keep what works. If the million monkeys make something cool, great.
All that said, at my company, where I'm paying for it in advance, I'll keep the team small and high quality
Cheers.
Right on. I actually posted something along a similar line too :)
I guess truth is not as absolute as we like to think...
How much information about our universe that was obvious to civilizations that rose and fell a few billion years ago is lost forever as well?
Even if we record the information, without the ability to experimentally verify it, the big bang will be nothing but legend to the people of the distant future. What irony! There will be nothing but an old book proclaiming universal expansion and cosmic microwave background and... would you believe anything you just read in some old book?
Hmm. That really put our existence and it's long term futility into sharp perspective for me. Dammit.
Ah, ESR. I like this quote:
"If Quake had been designed to be open-source from the beginning, the performance hack that makes see-around-corners possible could never have been considered -- and either the design wouldn't have depended on millisecond packet timing at all, or aim-bot recognition would have been built in to the server from the beginning."
Which is really just another way of saying that it wouldn't have been developed at all. Great solution.
I hate cheating too, but I'm afraid it'll always be there. I just assume on public servers that there is some cheating. When I get sick of it I set up a private game with people that I trust.
Cheers.
I agree with all your points save one: lots of Windows software breaks the Windows look and feel. I'd go so far as to say that these days, programs that don't break the Windows look a bit austere. So iTunes fits right into that lousy pattern.
But yeah, the rest of your points stand. iTunes on Windows is clunky even after years. They should get some (more) top notch Windows programmers and tighten that shit up. It makes them look bad.
Cheers.
Many of the advancements to science can be considered outside of what is considered "science" at the time.
I don't think that's accurate. Those advancements were outside of what science people wanted to hear (like the earth going around the sun) but they were still perfectly within the realm of science. Science has nothing to do with majority rule, personal preferences, or what sounds reasonable. Science is about testable theories; theories that help us predict the future. Even if every scientist in the world hates a new discovery, it's still science if it is a testable theory with the ability to make predictions. This is why science is fundamentally different than religion. It's a subtle but critical difference that nearly all ID proponents fail to grasp.
Cheers.
Yep, you missed something. Both gravity and evolution are theories. Theories that are supported by enormous amounts of evidence. Both have been observed and provide a degree of predictive ability. Both will undoubtedly require refinement in the future, but both are by far the best explanation as to how things work.
You can still believe in God, but if you deny evolution you're kind of sticking your head in the sand. Which is fine with me.
Nice :)
I think it's pretty easy to say "no" to a million pounds when you know there's no chance you'll actually get it. If they really had a million pounds right there and the paperwork was ready I bet more than a few of the people who said "no" would say "yes".
;)
That said, I wouldn't give mine up
Why the obsession with people genetically similar to us? Isn't it enjoyable enough to meet and get to know people without the specious idea that they're more connected if they share a few genes?
I agree almost completely... but I was raised fundamentalist Christian and argued the creationist side of things many times in my teens. Then around 17 or so all the good points by others started adding up and I had doubts. And then I went through an agnostic phase, and finally settled as a happy well adjusted atheist :) My sister followed a similar path on a different timeline. So I'm just saying that discussion with religious types isn't always 100% useless. They'll probably never admit it during the argument but you can plant the seeds for later thinking, and people can sometimes change their mind.
In other words, I believe (perhaps irrationally) that respectful debate is not always just a waste of time.
Cheers.
the government will never give up the war on drugs!
I don't agree. I actually think that of all the legislative idiocy marijuana reform is one of the more likely to change in our lifetime. Assuming people with clear ideas on the topic avoid apathy.
Cheers.
Not exactly what you're saying, but Canon did something like this in the late 90's:
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYGM_filter
The result was, as you say, better light sensitivity, but at the expense of color accuracy. I guess in the end they decided the tradeoff wasn't worth it. I don't claim to understand any of the details, but I just read that page and then read your question
I've been trying to think of a reasonably accurate way to explain it to laypeople.
I think losing net neutrality is something like this: imagine that you pay for overnight shipping at the post office, but then it doesn't get there until a day later because you didn't also pay off the postman on the other end. Without net neutrality, that's pretty much how it will work, right?
Cheers.
I am against 100% all government economic intervention. ...says the person who never lived in a wholly unregulated state. How easy it is to pine for the days of before government intervention, when robber barons roamed free and the poor lived and died in the streets in droves and turned to crime.
Before someone calls me a communist, I should state I have strong libertarian tendancies, and I believe in the market. But it doesn't solve everything; if it did then anarchy would make for high class countries. So I am 80% against government economic intervention. A government's job is to make sure the market playing field stays relatively level.
Personally, I think net neutrality is a way to assist that. But perhaps you disagree.
Cheers.
Sure, businesses are in it for the money, and there's nothing wrong with that. But here's the part that most people don't seem to understand: the best way to make money is not by "fucking you in the ass" as you say, or by deceiving consumers, or by locking consumers in, etc, etc. These might work as short term strategies, but they always fail as long term strategies. And making money in the short term at the expense of the long term is not what business is about.
In general, if I were to criticize Microsoft vs. Apple, it's not because one is "in it for the money" and the other isn't, it's because one of them is shortsighted. Yes, it bugs me as a consumer when they release a limited, crappy, or overpriced product, but assuming I'm a reasonable facsimile of an average consumer it's bad for them too. And that makes them stupid. Good business doesn't have to be stupid.
In this case, assuming this rumor is right, I think the restrictions that AT&T and Apple are putting on the device are pretty stupid. That makes it bad business; and even if the product succeeds, that doesn't mean it was a good idea, it might have done even better without all the restrictions.
Cheers
I once spent some mental energy thinking of better captchas; such as male/female recognition, picking people out of crowds, etc. Things that would be tremendously difficult for a computer but relatively easy for a human. But then I came across a captcha cracking method that pretty much sealed their fate. Though they still may help some sites where there isn't much motivation to break through, I think they're more or less dead for sites under serious attack.
I read about a method of captcha breaking that ends the arms race: real humans. Specifically, a porn site that lets you view a free picture for each captcha. Then you've got the motivation for actual people to use their advanced organic hardware at distributed captcha cracking -- sort of a human porn-bot-net.
Ingenious, but it kind of killed my hopes of building a better captcha.
My favorite bit about trademarks is the "use it or lose it" clause, which I think should be applied to patents and copyrights as well.
All I can do is shake my head these days when I hear stuff like this being touted as "free market". I am a fan of the free market, but what the free-market-absolutists don't understand is that the market isn't naturally free: it needs regulation to ensure that it stays free. Just like we need regulation to ensure that people are free.
If the market was naturally free there would be no need for government at all. I'm sure some hyper-libertarian just stood up and cheered. But the fact is that without any regulation whatsoever free markets disappear: no really, go check out what happens when there is no regulation in less developed countries: a small number of powerful people exercise their wonderful freedom in the truly free market to wrest control from everyone else and pretty soon you've got abusive monopolies and terriffic exploitation everywhere.
Sorry: but we need regulation to make sure the market stays competitive and free. This is the hightest calling of government, methinks: to ensure that the playing field does not get too tilted. This is what network neutrality is about. AT&T wants to be free enough to tilt everything so dramatically in their favor that others can no longer compete.
Anyone else remember when you could only rent your phones from an AT&T store? And there were only a handful of featureless models to choose from? And there were no technological advances in telephony for ages? Yeah: that's the "free market" that AT&T promotes.
Cheers.
Saddam and his family are no good. His own son enjoyed feeding people to a wood chipper feet first and twisting mens arms off.
This is truly awful, and I shed no tear for Saddam and his sons. But things don't actually seem better. And I think it was obvious going in that such was the case. I wish we had come up with a practical plan, but we didn't. We took the same old lazy road we've taken many times before: we're big and strong, we bring democracy, and God is on our side... how could we lose?
How it is that people assume that it is a matter of oil, when the oil producing nations are the ones which end up with windfall profits is beyond me.
Didn't the American oil companies record record profits last year? I don't really think that we went to war so that oil companies could make a little more money, but I do think oil had a lot to do with it. Specifically I think that the US wants US friendly people in control of oil producing nations, even if that is not good for the nation itself. The US has deposed popular leaders that were not US friendly and propped up unpopular leaders that were US friendly. So has the UK, and probably others. I think this feeds into the general sociopolitical illness in the middle east.
it is clearly us bad Americans that are the worst in the free world.
It's not a comparison game. If we do somthing shitty or stupid it's still shitty or stupid even if other people are doing worse. I am sharply critical of America... because I love it dearly. The tendancy to defend America from valid criticism reminds me of dickhead parents who can't recognize and address their kids' faults. Real love and respect means honesty and honestly we, America, could be doing better.
Cheers.
Or we might develop some type of completely convincing VR setup that allows me to say, rent a robot in Korea that will act as me and I'll experience exactly what it experiences from the comfort of my own home. At some threshold of sensory accuracy, it would be about as good as being there. That may be as close to teleportation as we need to get.
Cheers.
It may not be innovative, but it's the first time I've seen anything like that demoed. Sounds like somebody at Blackberry has been doing a pretty poor job of marketing their product :/
From the Advogato FAQ: "All the trust metric guarantees is that they really are who they say they are."
:)
It's not a reputation system per se, but just a more reliable identification system. That is a prerequisite for having a reputation system, of course, but it's not the whole thing.
The next step would be some way to figure if the person identified is known to be beneficial or harmful to the community. That is a much, much harder problem, not the least of which is because we probably don't all agree on which is which.
I think Slashdot, for all our whining, has done a pretty great job addressing such an intractable problem. Of course, as someone who has been stamped by the system with relatively good Karma that's very easy for me to say
Cheers.
No, you?