So now if I tweet that I "love" something, or god forbid, use a smiley face or an exclamation point, I'm going to get tampon and other feminine product ads? Super.
If they still haven't fixed playback of raw H.264 files (without any transport stream or other wrapper), then I'm going to have to continue to stick with 0.8.6. This has been broken for a ridiculously long time now and no one but me seems to have complained about it. I love VLC, but it hasn't decoded "everything under the sun" in quite some time. I last checked the 0.9.9 versions on both Windows and linux, and both failed to play any of a set of H.264 reference videos. H.264 is pretty standard now, and the inability to play back.264 files is a fairly serious defect.
I'm not really sure I understand where your sense of panic or loss is coming from. You seem to think that suppliers of original content are about to become extinct based solely on the results of Googling your own book.
People who are pirating your book are not reading your book. People who are reading your book are not pirating it. Any engineer who seriously wants to learn about whatever's in your "Data Compression Textbook" is going to buy it and expense it to their company. They are absolutely not going to get on TPB and grab the torrent. I don't really get what you're worrying about here.
It's the same thing with everything else that is pirated. The people who are downloading pirated movies, music, books, or whatever are not the ones who would ever have paid for them if the pirated versions were unavailable -- it either costs too much or is of insufficient interest to that segment of the population to warrant the cost. The revenue you are losing to this channel is negligible. But it may serve as advertisement. If college students are downloading your book to learn about whatever unique data compression techniques you offer that aren't already freely available via standards documents or course materials, they may decide that they like your writing style and presentation (or not) and drive future sales when they actually have a career and money to spend on such things.
Apparently, you've never discovered new music or groups through downloading albums. That's the only way I find new groups that I like these days. And when I find something new that I like, I go out and buy it. If I don't, it gets deleted.
1) This is relatively old news which you could just as easily Google yourself.
2) I would have thought that the simple fact that they found exactly such an e-mail account and hacked it would constitute sufficient proof of its existence.
3) The whole point was that she was deliberately trying to avoid leaving any public records or documented proof, although she clearly did so in a horribly inept way.
4) but since you asked...
Here's the relevant bit from that article:
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a "personal device" like a BlackBerry "would be confidential and not subject to subpoena."
Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account "when there was significant state business."
On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin's state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: "Frank, this is not the governorâ(TM)s personal account."
I would actually agree with you there, were it not for the fact that she had discussed using her Y! mail account as a way to conduct communications regarding state business that would not be archived, as the law requires. In other words, she wasn't just using it as her "personal" account to send family picnic invites and negotiate deals with wealthy Nigerians, she was using this account as a way to skirt the law and conduct official business in her capacity as governor without the accountability that the law requires.
Since she's advertising herself as a candidate with strong ethics who's trying to clean up government and get rid of backroom dealing, she clearly feels that she's not accountable to the same standard of ethics that others should be held to. This is a huge lapse in judgment that voters need to be aware of before they cast their votes.
I understand. And nobody has the answers, just theories and experiments to attempt to refine the theories. The Higgs makes more sense because it fits with what we already observe. If, by "the other," you mean a hand-wavy "space-time warp," then I guess that could make sense if there were some underlying principle that explained why that occurred. I think perhaps you're confusing general relativity, which deals with the curvature of space-time, with the quantum mechanics of the Standard Model, which is a distinct theory from GR. There are attempts to unify both theories, but one will not suffice to replace the other.
I think you're also somewhat confused about equating mass and energy. Things do not become more massive as they accelerate. You're thinking of "relativistic mass" which is the increase in mass due to a frame of reference which is moving relative to the particle. Also, what kind of energy is bound up in a single electron or W or Z to give it mass, following your line of reasoning? Again, there's no explanatory power there, all you can do is observe that they have mass for no particular reason. At least the standard model makes it possible to explain what the origin of these particles' mass is versus the Star Trek-y argument that they have mass because they have some kind of unknown intrinsic "energy" that warps space and time.
Unfortunately, just by postulating that matter "warps space-time" doesn't reduce or simplify the problem at all. That doesn't explain anything, it's just an observation of a phenomenon. What would the mechanism be for why it would warp space-time? Why would some particles warp it more or less than others? Can you predict or calculate the magnitude of the warping effect?
I don't see how Occam's Razor applies here. We already have a remarkably successful theory which has both explanatory and predictive power and this theory has been tested and borne out by experiment to an astonishing degree. This same theory accounts for the Higgs, so if it doesn't exist, that will make things vastly more complicated and confusing than they are now, not less so.
The "rest mass" of particles has to do with how strongly they couple to the Higgs field (as well as the intrinsic value of the H field in a vacuum), and doesn't really have anything to do with the mass of the Higgs. Particles do not have mass because they are composed of (presumably lighter) Higgs particles, they have mass because they interact with the Higgs field, if the theory is correct. The problem is that we don't understand very well how the Higgs quanta couple to the H field, so it's difficult to predict what mass(es) they should have.
If particle masses were an additive quantity based on the mass of the Higgs, as your intuition seems to tell you, then as long as there are massless particles like the photon, then the Higgs would also have to be massless and, by induction, so would every other particle we observe.
Great, now we can all look forward to "The Little Mermaid 5: Undersea Princesses Strike Back" with more stuff gratuitously flung and/or thrust toward the viewer than ever before!
Does anyone even remember when the Disney brand meant beautifully-painted backgrounds and high-quality animation coupled with excellent (although somewhat formulaic) storytelling? Now it's all about churning out torrents of raw crap for the direct-to-DVD market, and soon we can have those steaming geysers directed right in our faces in glorious 3D! The future has truly arrived.
While I've certainly enjoyed and admired much of Pixar's work, moving to a 3D presentation will only contribute to the "gee-whiz" technology factor and will only detract from the storytelling aspects of film. Try to think of even one 3D movie where the 3D effects had any positive impact in advancing the story or improving the film in any way. CG movies already struggle with keeping the effects from overwhelming the narrative and most studios fail miserably in that battle.
Pixar seems determined to drag itself down to the level of Lucasfilm by competing on the basis of technology rather than well-developed characters and storyline.
Sorry, but although the original article does exhibit some characteristics of an overblown rant, the main point is still valid. Most companies bigger than a mom-and-pop operation simply cannot use something that is "unsupported," regardless of whether it anecdotally "works just fine" or not.
If a user cannot call the Hyper-V tech support regarding an issue they are having running RHEL on Hyper-V and receive a proper response other than "we don't support that," then it is effectively useless and cannot form any part of that company's virtualization strategy. It may work just fine, but there are many companies with specific corporate policies prohibiting use of unsupported software, and in some cases, running into a serious problem with unsupported software can be seen as a violation of Sarbanes-Oxley and may be construed as negligence.
Whether it works OK or not with other linux distributions is irrelevant. Without real support, it's a non-starter for most businesses. That's not MS-bashing or Linux-fanboyism, it's just plain fiscal responsibility.
I'm sorry, but I'm confused about whether this is this a slashdot news item or a personal blog post. Beyond the links to the anti-bullying legislation, the commentary on this post turns out to be longer than the text of both of the referenced Missouri bills combined, and says far less than either of them.
16-word summary:
New laws proposed to combat cyber-bullying. They'll likely be ineffective. Kids should just get over it.
This is actually a highly interesting topic, but to enhance his future income as a knol-writer, could someone please introduce Mr. Haselton to the concepts of "concision" and "brevity?" The number of people who read these posts decreases exponentially with the length of the post.
Wow. Apparently we have here a wide generational gap in the use of the word "hacking." I'm assuming you mean "programming" or "engineering." To me, "hacking" has an extremely negative meaning -- something that you do (reluctantly!) to get something working as fast as possible. If someone described himself to me in a job interview as an "embedded hacker," their resume would go straight to the round file.
I don't care what people do to get a web site up and running, but that style of working just doesn't fly in most of the embedded world. I shudder to think that someone is writing software for medical robots that they would describe as a "hack!"
Actually the accelerometers in the Wiimote do very little of the work. They're only there to detect when you're swinging the control or when it is elevated at an angle relative to Earth's gravity. The positional pointing features are completely useless when the line of sight is lost. Try pointing slightly to the side of your screen, where's the pointer? If your on-screen character was turning when you point to the side, does it keep turning in the same direction, or does it just stop as soon as the IR LOS is interrupted? Does any part of any game behave differently when you're pointing to the left or to the right outside of the screen view? No, there's no way to distinguish between azimuthal (left-right) direction at all when the control is level with the ground.
The remote (pointing) position has actually nothing to do with the accelerometers -- they're only there for vertical orientation (direction of Wiimote relative to ground) and acceleration detection (when you're swinging or rotating the control).
Your comments indicate a common, fundamental problem that explains why so few people have a grasp of what constitutes "science" beyond an elementary-school level. How, exactly, is driving the development of new theories from unexplained observations a "limited view" of science? You claim that the inability to connect a hypothetical to observation doesn't preclude it from being part of the scientific discussion until it is refuted conclusively.
Actually, yes it does. This line of reasoning is exactly why we have millions of people who believe in things like the "healing power of magnets," or curing illnesses by "drawing toxins out through the bottom of your feet," or "scientology." These are all classifiable as pseudoscience -- postulating nonsense that has no observable connection to reality and claiming its validity is based on the fact that no one in the scientific community has refuted it conclusively. This is clearly not science.
If I posit that leprechauns actually prefer chocolatey marshmallow to fruity ones, would you call that science because no scientists have ever disproved it? "It's a perfectly valid, non-silly question," you would say, regardless of the fact that nothing has been observed that would require or even suggest the existence of leprechauns.
Same thing here. Maybe there is such a thing as unobserved and unobservable negative-mass phantom matter that could open the door to Narnia and allow Kirk to meet his goateed twin nemesis. But this is pure speculative *fiction*, not science. It makes for a nice story, but there's nothing here to engage in a scientific discussion about.
Antiparticles to the Higgs boson? Absolutely. These would have the same mass, but opposite charge, in the case of a charged Higgs.
"Antimass"? "Enveloping mass with antimass fields"? What the hell are you smoking?
Um, Magnavox *is* Philips, just with a different brand name. Philips consumer electronics division has owned the Magnavox brand for decades. Different models, will of course have different features, as you found out. However, the time autoset feature is not useful for most people. It only works if you're using a channel set (like free-to-air broadcast TV) that includes a local PBS station that correctly broadcasts the time signal. For most users with cable or DirectTV, there may in fact be such a channel, but you would have to manually specify it and if your cable provider juggles channels around (which mine does frequently!), then you have to re-set it. This is definitely one of those features where the device tries to do something "intelligently" and, more often than not, utterly fails. This often leads to your box being reset to some other time zone. So, personally, I would have a hard time recommending anyone to buy a product based solely on this feature.
Unfortunately, that's not just spin you're noticing there, it's a pervasive marketing gimmick in the consumer electronics world. It's a widely-held belief (regretfully based on factual sales data) that "perceived value" increases with the weight and size of virtually any piece of consumer technology. If it's tiny and light, most people think they're paying too much for it, never mind that you can get more use out of things that are tiny and light and it's much more costly to produce such items.
If you open up just about any DVD player or other device from certain companies that subscribe to this belief (hello Philips, I'm talking to you!), you'll often find a thick, heavy metal plate that serves no function other than to add mass, which magically transforms into a psychological notion of value and supports a wider profit margin.
The enemy is more dangerous than our own government? Really?! Last I checked, it wasn't terrorists who were eroding our constitutional rights. It wasn't terrorists who ignored the citizens of an entire city after a major natural disaster. The cost in lives from the attack on 9/11 was around 2800 people. The last confirmed count of US deaths in Iraq confirmed by the DoD was around 3800. But they were killed by terrorists, too, right? Nope, guess again. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, despite what our Dear Leaders would like us to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
So now if I tweet that I "love" something, or god forbid, use a smiley face or an exclamation point, I'm going to get tampon and other feminine product ads? Super.
If they still haven't fixed playback of raw H.264 files (without any transport stream or other wrapper), then I'm going to have to continue to stick with 0.8.6. This has been broken for a ridiculously long time now and no one but me seems to have complained about it. I love VLC, but it hasn't decoded "everything under the sun" in quite some time. I last checked the 0.9.9 versions on both Windows and linux, and both failed to play any of a set of H.264 reference videos. H.264 is pretty standard now, and the inability to play back .264 files is a fairly serious defect.
I'm not really sure I understand where your sense of panic or loss is coming from. You seem to think that suppliers of original content are about to become extinct based solely on the results of Googling your own book.
People who are pirating your book are not reading your book. People who are reading your book are not pirating it. Any engineer who seriously wants to learn about whatever's in your "Data Compression Textbook" is going to buy it and expense it to their company. They are absolutely not going to get on TPB and grab the torrent. I don't really get what you're worrying about here.
It's the same thing with everything else that is pirated. The people who are downloading pirated movies, music, books, or whatever are not the ones who would ever have paid for them if the pirated versions were unavailable -- it either costs too much or is of insufficient interest to that segment of the population to warrant the cost. The revenue you are losing to this channel is negligible. But it may serve as advertisement. If college students are downloading your book to learn about whatever unique data compression techniques you offer that aren't already freely available via standards documents or course materials, they may decide that they like your writing style and presentation (or not) and drive future sales when they actually have a career and money to spend on such things.
Apparently, you've never discovered new music or groups through downloading albums. That's the only way I find new groups that I like these days. And when I find something new that I like, I go out and buy it. If I don't, it gets deleted.
1) This is relatively old news which you could just as easily Google yourself.
2) I would have thought that the simple fact that they found exactly such an e-mail account and hacked it would constitute sufficient proof of its existence.
3) The whole point was that she was deliberately trying to avoid leaving any public records or documented proof, although she clearly did so in a horribly inept way.
4) but since you asked...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=3&pagewanted=4&adxnnlx=1221588185-c0NhbTON3/fDJJQww%20P%20bQ&oref=slogin
Here's the relevant bit from that article:
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a "personal device" like a BlackBerry "would be confidential and not subject to subpoena."
Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account "when there was significant state business."
On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin's state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: "Frank, this is not the governorâ(TM)s personal account."
Mr. Bailey responded: "Whoops~!"
I would actually agree with you there, were it not for the fact that she had discussed using her Y! mail account as a way to conduct communications regarding state business that would not be archived, as the law requires. In other words, she wasn't just using it as her "personal" account to send family picnic invites and negotiate deals with wealthy Nigerians, she was using this account as a way to skirt the law and conduct official business in her capacity as governor without the accountability that the law requires.
Since she's advertising herself as a candidate with strong ethics who's trying to clean up government and get rid of backroom dealing, she clearly feels that she's not accountable to the same standard of ethics that others should be held to. This is a huge lapse in judgment that voters need to be aware of before they cast their votes.
I understand. And nobody has the answers, just theories and experiments to attempt to refine the theories. The Higgs makes more sense because it fits with what we already observe. If, by "the other," you mean a hand-wavy "space-time warp," then I guess that could make sense if there were some underlying principle that explained why that occurred. I think perhaps you're confusing general relativity, which deals with the curvature of space-time, with the quantum mechanics of the Standard Model, which is a distinct theory from GR. There are attempts to unify both theories, but one will not suffice to replace the other.
I think you're also somewhat confused about equating mass and energy. Things do not become more massive as they accelerate. You're thinking of "relativistic mass" which is the increase in mass due to a frame of reference which is moving relative to the particle. Also, what kind of energy is bound up in a single electron or W or Z to give it mass, following your line of reasoning? Again, there's no explanatory power there, all you can do is observe that they have mass for no particular reason. At least the standard model makes it possible to explain what the origin of these particles' mass is versus the Star Trek-y argument that they have mass because they have some kind of unknown intrinsic "energy" that warps space and time.
Unfortunately, just by postulating that matter "warps space-time" doesn't reduce or simplify the problem at all. That doesn't explain anything, it's just an observation of a phenomenon. What would the mechanism be for why it would warp space-time? Why would some particles warp it more or less than others? Can you predict or calculate the magnitude of the warping effect?
I don't see how Occam's Razor applies here. We already have a remarkably successful theory which has both explanatory and predictive power and this theory has been tested and borne out by experiment to an astonishing degree. This same theory accounts for the Higgs, so if it doesn't exist, that will make things vastly more complicated and confusing than they are now, not less so.
The "rest mass" of particles has to do with how strongly they couple to the Higgs field (as well as the intrinsic value of the H field in a vacuum), and doesn't really have anything to do with the mass of the Higgs. Particles do not have mass because they are composed of (presumably lighter) Higgs particles, they have mass because they interact with the Higgs field, if the theory is correct. The problem is that we don't understand very well how the Higgs quanta couple to the H field, so it's difficult to predict what mass(es) they should have.
If particle masses were an additive quantity based on the mass of the Higgs, as your intuition seems to tell you, then as long as there are massless particles like the photon, then the Higgs would also have to be massless and, by induction, so would every other particle we observe.
Does anyone even remember when the Disney brand meant beautifully-painted backgrounds and high-quality animation coupled with excellent (although somewhat formulaic) storytelling? Now it's all about churning out torrents of raw crap for the direct-to-DVD market, and soon we can have those steaming geysers directed right in our faces in glorious 3D! The future has truly arrived.
While I've certainly enjoyed and admired much of Pixar's work, moving to a 3D presentation will only contribute to the "gee-whiz" technology factor and will only detract from the storytelling aspects of film. Try to think of even one 3D movie where the 3D effects had any positive impact in advancing the story or improving the film in any way. CG movies already struggle with keeping the effects from overwhelming the narrative and most studios fail miserably in that battle.
Pixar seems determined to drag itself down to the level of Lucasfilm by competing on the basis of technology rather than well-developed characters and storyline.
Sorry, but although the original article does exhibit some characteristics of an overblown rant, the main point is still valid. Most companies bigger than a mom-and-pop operation simply cannot use something that is "unsupported," regardless of whether it anecdotally "works just fine" or not.
If a user cannot call the Hyper-V tech support regarding an issue they are having running RHEL on Hyper-V and receive a proper response other than "we don't support that," then it is effectively useless and cannot form any part of that company's virtualization strategy. It may work just fine, but there are many companies with specific corporate policies prohibiting use of unsupported software, and in some cases, running into a serious problem with unsupported software can be seen as a violation of Sarbanes-Oxley and may be construed as negligence.
Whether it works OK or not with other linux distributions is irrelevant. Without real support, it's a non-starter for most businesses. That's not MS-bashing or Linux-fanboyism, it's just plain fiscal responsibility.
16-word summary: New laws proposed to combat cyber-bullying. They'll likely be ineffective. Kids should just get over it.
This is actually a highly interesting topic, but to enhance his future income as a knol-writer, could someone please introduce Mr. Haselton to the concepts of "concision" and "brevity?" The number of people who read these posts decreases exponentially with the length of the post.
I don't care what people do to get a web site up and running, but that style of working just doesn't fly in most of the embedded world. I shudder to think that someone is writing software for medical robots that they would describe as a "hack!"
Actually the accelerometers in the Wiimote do very little of the work. They're only there to detect when you're swinging the control or when it is elevated at an angle relative to Earth's gravity. The positional pointing features are completely useless when the line of sight is lost. Try pointing slightly to the side of your screen, where's the pointer? If your on-screen character was turning when you point to the side, does it keep turning in the same direction, or does it just stop as soon as the IR LOS is interrupted? Does any part of any game behave differently when you're pointing to the left or to the right outside of the screen view? No, there's no way to distinguish between azimuthal (left-right) direction at all when the control is level with the ground. The remote (pointing) position has actually nothing to do with the accelerometers -- they're only there for vertical orientation (direction of Wiimote relative to ground) and acceleration detection (when you're swinging or rotating the control).
Your comments indicate a common, fundamental problem that explains why so few people have a grasp of what constitutes "science" beyond an elementary-school level. How, exactly, is driving the development of new theories from unexplained observations a "limited view" of science? You claim that the inability to connect a hypothetical to observation doesn't preclude it from being part of the scientific discussion until it is refuted conclusively. Actually, yes it does. This line of reasoning is exactly why we have millions of people who believe in things like the "healing power of magnets," or curing illnesses by "drawing toxins out through the bottom of your feet," or "scientology." These are all classifiable as pseudoscience -- postulating nonsense that has no observable connection to reality and claiming its validity is based on the fact that no one in the scientific community has refuted it conclusively. This is clearly not science. If I posit that leprechauns actually prefer chocolatey marshmallow to fruity ones, would you call that science because no scientists have ever disproved it? "It's a perfectly valid, non-silly question," you would say, regardless of the fact that nothing has been observed that would require or even suggest the existence of leprechauns. Same thing here. Maybe there is such a thing as unobserved and unobservable negative-mass phantom matter that could open the door to Narnia and allow Kirk to meet his goateed twin nemesis. But this is pure speculative *fiction*, not science. It makes for a nice story, but there's nothing here to engage in a scientific discussion about.
Antiparticles to the Higgs boson? Absolutely. These would have the same mass, but opposite charge, in the case of a charged Higgs. "Antimass"? "Enveloping mass with antimass fields"? What the hell are you smoking?
Um, Magnavox *is* Philips, just with a different brand name. Philips consumer electronics division has owned the Magnavox brand for decades. Different models, will of course have different features, as you found out. However, the time autoset feature is not useful for most people. It only works if you're using a channel set (like free-to-air broadcast TV) that includes a local PBS station that correctly broadcasts the time signal. For most users with cable or DirectTV, there may in fact be such a channel, but you would have to manually specify it and if your cable provider juggles channels around (which mine does frequently!), then you have to re-set it. This is definitely one of those features where the device tries to do something "intelligently" and, more often than not, utterly fails. This often leads to your box being reset to some other time zone. So, personally, I would have a hard time recommending anyone to buy a product based solely on this feature.
Unfortunately, that's not just spin you're noticing there, it's a pervasive marketing gimmick in the consumer electronics world. It's a widely-held belief (regretfully based on factual sales data) that "perceived value" increases with the weight and size of virtually any piece of consumer technology. If it's tiny and light, most people think they're paying too much for it, never mind that you can get more use out of things that are tiny and light and it's much more costly to produce such items. If you open up just about any DVD player or other device from certain companies that subscribe to this belief (hello Philips, I'm talking to you!), you'll often find a thick, heavy metal plate that serves no function other than to add mass, which magically transforms into a psychological notion of value and supports a wider profit margin.
The enemy is more dangerous than our own government? Really?! Last I checked, it wasn't terrorists who were eroding our constitutional rights. It wasn't terrorists who ignored the citizens of an entire city after a major natural disaster. The cost in lives from the attack on 9/11 was around 2800 people. The last confirmed count of US deaths in Iraq confirmed by the DoD was around 3800. But they were killed by terrorists, too, right? Nope, guess again. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, despite what our Dear Leaders would like us to believe.