Note, to compare with XKCD's chart, both TSA and NPR state that a standard chest x-ray is 100 uSv rather than this XKCD's 20 uSv. NPR puts a mammogram at 700 uSv while XKCD holds it as 3000 uSv.
The stated radiation from these backscatter scanners is 0.05 uSv (TSA, reported as 0.005 mrem) to 0.2 uSv (UCSF via NPR) per usage. UCSF suggests that measuring this radiation on the skin would result in a larger value. The TSA report includes a disclaimer that they are re-testing these numbers and should have results around the end of this month. Another post here noted 0.09 uSv but had no source (reported as "0.09 Sv" because Slashdot eats the Greek letter mu).
The real danger with respect to the backscatter scanners was to the TSA workers (who had zero protection) and others who work in airports. The NPR piece also cites David Brenner, head of Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research, saying that 5% of the population is especially sensitive to radiation and that "we don't really have a quick and easy test to find those individuals." Fortunately, these machines are not in use any more, though that might change if the TSA's new report doesn't increase those numbers (or it gets trumped by fearmongering on behalf of some news outlet or politician).
If I'm interested in the product but view it as simple entertainment and a relatively mediocre experience (which almost all games and movies are), I'm not going to be happier about the high price because they gave me a T-shirt; why would I even want a bunch of extra mini-games, clothes, or collectibles to celebrate a mediocre product?
I would argue that you're not interested in buying that product. You'll see it once and then trash it. That's not a purchase, that's a rental or loan.
the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares
... or add more value. Make the box something customers want, use e-ink displays on something included in the package. Stuff a Tee shirt or roll a poster in there. Add more digital content (games, featurettes, etc) since the file-sharing content tends to be just the bare product. Add a raffle ticket to each purchase that could win some one-of-a-kind memorabilia or else a signed picture.
This isn't hard, nor is it novel. The cost of this media has stayed reasonably steady while its perceived value has dropped considerably. I haven't downloaded a movie in the past 5+ years, yet I've stopped buying them new. Five years ago, I'd buy a used movie for $10 as long as it had some featurettes. Now, my threshold is probably $7, which is four dollars less than five years ago (when adjusting for inflation). I bought In Rainbows for $5 and the Humble Indie Bundle for $20.
These 2 scenes are undoubtably the worst + most funniest in any movie/TV series ever:
Numb3rs explanation of IRC using boats that meet in the middle of the ocean to swap illegal goods (wtf?).
And the above fore-referenced scene with a woman making a graphical-user-interface-interface to track an IP address in VB.
Transcript from that Numb3rs episode:
IRC, Internet Relay Chat. It's how hackers talk when they don't want to be overheard. It's a pretty primitive chat program. Think of it like shipping channels in the ocean. You can't see them until a boat cuts through the water leaving a wake. If two boats meet in the middle of the ocean to swap illegal drugs, you have to catch them in real time, otherwise there's no evidence of a meeting left behind. No names, no accounts, no records of exchange.
That's a reasonable explanation of IRC. Channels come and go on demand, and there's often a lot of other channels to obfuscate somebody sniffing the traffic. The "wake" indicates a channel has been formed so you can tune into just that conversation, and the channel does disappear when they are done. Logging is up to the participants, so this is reasonably clean (which is why so many criminal hackers use IRC in real life, though encrypted methods are almost certainly the norm these days). It isn't impossible to set up a sniffer to lurk around and eavesdrop on a conversation. Later in that clip, a screenshot is requested (note, not by a techie) in order to capture the content. It could just as easily be saved in another manner, and I see no reason to have to explain that to the FBI agent when you could just do it.
If you want to bust Numb3rs, you'll have to try harder. There are a few points in which they get quite weak, especially with respect to all of the various learning algorithms as applied to search, but also including a few programming issues (IIRC, you should look for the episode that deals with breaking PKI, which was at least realistic enough to state that it was too hard for the ubergenius Charlie Epps). Still, it's a well composed show and does volumes to teach while entertaining. Easily a net win.
CSI is another thing altogether. It might help the general population tolerate people with technical know-how, but I don't think it does anything to attract us. Thus the gross blunder.
For a refreshing taste of tech representation in the other direction, check out Nathan Fillion's character in Castle as he learns about image enhancement.
There are three ways to read the meat in those experts-exchange links.
Click on the Google Cache link and scroll to the bottom. After all the censored answers and a really large navigation bar, you'll see the real answers.
Spoof your browser's User Agent to be Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html) using any of a plethora of extensions (I use Prefbar).
From the SMS-o-Death talk from the 27th Chaos Communication Congress last year:
Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications—messages that can be sent between mobile phones—a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as text messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries," that run on a phone.
I suspect most people who are good at anticipating responses will start off ahead. The veteran doesn't really catch on to your habits until round 40 or so. I found it is best to rotate strategies and always heavily err on the side of a tie. Not sure why everybody has arbitrary numbers of rounds on their posts, but I got 43-35-21 in one hundred games against veteran.
I'm sure for real statistical relevance, well over a hundred trials are needed. I'll see how far I can get while I eat my lunch and watch my code compile.
Or you can use Skype, so neither government or anyone else can access your messages.
Excepting, of course, the governments and anyone else that has paid or forced Skype to offer back-doors.
Austria, Russia, India, and China have all demanded back-doors. Austria has made vague claims about actually getting it, China may have cracked it instead, and with all this noise about potentially blocking Skype, I'd be surprised if there was only a small number of governments that have been awarded this access.
However, having access to the odds of a play's success would be very useful to those coaches. Imagine two poker players, and one knows more than the other about the odds of particular hands, or the likelihood of the next card being something he needs, and over time games should work out in his favor.
Poker is a game in which elite players benefit by memorizing those probabilities (and accurately using them during an adrenaline rush). A large part of the game is working to distort other players' estimates of those probabilities. This is lost when it's readily available without bias or distortion. This human element is extremely important to almost all games, especially in games where the probabilities are significantly more complex than what you find in the casino. (Consider tic-tac-toe, which is so simple that it can be solved in your head. Why play it if not for the chance that somebody falters?)
Coaching with perfect knowledge of full probabilities is fine during practice, when used as a tool to train players and coaches. Bringing such things to the actual game would be problematic.
Fifty years from now, we're going to laugh about how we used to give coaches this much responsibility
I hope not; coaches are essential to the nature of a team; these are human competitions, and if we're not considering robotic players, we have no business looking into robotic coaches. Each coach has his or her own take on what should happen, including intuition, foresight, insight, and motivational talking. No computer is going to be able to give an exhausted player a second wind by talking about probabilities and describing an unrehearsed play.
Consider American football, which is often dubbed a chess match between the two coaches. To remove the human element of a game makes it boring, and it's too often forgotten that the coaching staff is what makes players tick. Off the court/field is another issue altogether; we already have lots of extra advisers and computing power to crunch the numbers, and that's where they should stay.
That said, I'm all for a human-v-machine all-star matchup, where the champion team plays an all-star team conscripted and managed by a computer. If the computer is that much better, perhaps the champs could play the season's most average team, or an all-star lineup of the minor leagues or NCAA.
I couldn't help but also tag this article Skynet for the path it seems to steer us towards.
I never claimed to have a well-informed idea of how it worked; I knew it was related to the differently polarized lenses of the glasses but mistakenly called that a frequency issue (my understanding is that polarized lenses filter various light wavelengths, which differ by frequency).
However, with respect to RealD's two planes as "3D," I don't think I was as far off the mark as many of the responses (yours included) have indicated. I used an invented term ("biplanar") because I didn't want to call it stereoscopic; I haven't seen any evidence that the two fields of vision it presents combine in any meaningful way (beyond showing two flat planes to view). To me, there is no illusion of depth beyond those two planes, so nothing really looks three dimensional.
Consider a ~futuristic glass display, motorized to move along the Z-axis in front of a television. These are the two planes I'm talking about. My experience with RealD is not terribly different from this. Perhaps I'm not typical in this regard; there are many optical illusions that are difficult for me (e.g. "Magic Eye" autostereograms do nothing for me) and though I've never been tested, I doubt I am stereo-blind since I get/something/ out of RealD and similar effects and because my excellent depth perception diminishes some when I'm covering either eye. As to the other 3-D film techniques, the only one I've experienced is the old fashioned red/blue glasses format, and I honestly don't remember if it worked (I'm leaning on stating that it did).
I am under the impression that 3D films are shot with two cameras, each from a unique angle and/or focused field of depth. This would make it hard to represent a third angle or field of depth. This is probably complicated by visual effects and computer modeling, perhaps to the point at which the problem is either moot or will be soon. Even Avatar, which was designed for 3D and did not have a non-3D presentation (in theaters anyway), didn't actually use the technology much -- it was a gimmick. I don't think that was for wont of trying, I think it was a limitation of the technology. Maybe we'll see a change in the future as it matures, but for now, it remains a gimmick.
We've got to be only a year or two from realizing that RealD is a dumb gimmick...
RealD Cinema, the technology used in all of these films, uses alternating frequencies of light which get filtered differently by each polarized lens of the glasses it requires. This gives up to two planes of vision at a time, which can move relative to each other. For whatever reason, we are calling this 3D (I'll use the term "biplanar" for the rest of this post). Disclaimer: this is a simplification and I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but I think it hits the point.
All this biplanar vision is good for is superimposing a flat view of something in front of (or behind) the main action. That's it. I saw Avatar and was impressed by a few scenes (specifically, the captions used in the diary entries... which were 2D), but it was almost wholly a gimmick; neat trick, but a novelty that faded before the movie finished. Captions and other flat items can add to things, but (in their current state) they do not justify the extra cost or the need to wear sunglasses in a dark theater.
That's not to say we've exhausted the limits of what biplanar movies can do; I expect explosions and other instantaneous effects can benefit greatly from this; each frame of the explosion moves slightly closer to the audience on the Z-axis, and since it emits like a wave, there is no need to continue to display previous frames in their own dedicated Z coordinate. The same goes for anything opaque that's coming right at you, so long as it has no component that requires a different depth (so a car --or spaceship-- is out because the windshield is farther from you than the fender; turn your head and the perspective shows a 2D image). In fact, the only things I can think of that fit this bill are explosions and other things that move so fast the you don't have time to move and see their flatness plus anything that is so flat it has no depth, like maybe a propeller-driven device whose propeller is so big you can't see anything else, or a wall that the first-person perspective is driving into head-first (though those two examples are pretty lame and limited).
Re-releasing old hits (a generous term for the Star Wars prequels) won't do much unless you have a fanbase that will buy anything you make (in which you might as well stick with snorting commentary tracks and back-patting featurettes).
Many of the links in that article are actually quite useful, especially if you skip the internal references. One of them, from the 2008 Linux Plumbers Conference, which is dedicated to the lower-level aspects of the operating system (mostly the kernel, GNU, and X), was of particular interest as it talks about how Canonical isn't carrying its own weight, falling well below any other backer of a commercial distribution (or other Linux-depending company) on pretty much any metric and even well behind community-driven distros like Debian and Gentoo as well.
However, Canonical doesn't care about that layer of the OS; they want to improve the user experience, and have therefore focused almost all of their attention on the user interface. (It is interesting to note that the init subsystem rewrite is a salient counter-example, though its speed improvement still correlates to user experience.) From day one, Ubuntu and GNOME have been bedmates. Shuttleworth and therefore Canonical have therefore focused their efforts on GTK and GNOME while relying upon Debian and friends to care for the rest.
This arrangement seemed to work well for everything but the company's bottom line, which is where the value of this article really comes into play. They are in trouble as an unprofitable company built upon a for-profit model. (Easy solution: file for nonprofit status...)
Getting back to UI, Canonical is now getting bold and stirring the pot. They are pushing Wayland as an X11 replacement, which I think is a really good move (though forecasting when it might supplant X11 in Ubuntu seems extremely unwise). However, the friction they are creating with Unity as a replacement for GNOME Shell could be too much of a step, especially in a few iterations when the demands placed by Unity and GNOME Shell begin to differ. It is clear that Canonical wants (and due to its business state, perhaps needs) to have more control and be seen as a mover and shaker, but I question the wisdom of what might fracture the GNOME development community, especially given a target market of netbooks and smaller (given GNOME's bloat).
With Nokia now fully removed from the picture, AMD added, and primary driver Intel redoubled in its investment, MeeGo is ripe for the shaping. From all appearances, MeeGo's design as something end-users might ever see has completely vanished. Intel's main intent for MeeGo may have been for demos, with widespread adoption merely being one possible future (remember, they're a hardware company). MeeGo products that have hit the market so far have all had fully customized user interfaces.
Canonical's designs for Ubuntu are to focus on the netbook and play a pivotal role in its user interface while improving overall speed and efficiency (key elements to the user experience). MeeGo, with its roots in the embedded space (including tablets and netbooks), fits here perfectly. Intel, who ranks near the top of all of those plumbing contribution lists in the LPC keynote I began this post with, would then become an ally.
(Yes, I know MeeGo itself has more in common with its Intel-backed Fedora-based predecessor Moblin than it does with its other predecessor, Nokia-backed Debian-based Maemo, and the main reason I'm a fan of Ubuntu is its compatibility with Debian, but those are minor hurd
The final text of the copyright of msqt.org's main page contained this text at the very beginning (and still has it):
This is a satire, for the real Qt website go to qt.nokia.com.
The domain itself is registered by a random Finnish individual as registered through joker.com, a consumer-grade DNS reseller.
I find it hard to believe that anybody took it seriously and that anybody in the industry couldn't do the miniscule amount of homework to confirm what should have been everybody's initial suspicion: it's a freaking joke. It was never intended to mislead.
Holy crap, hosted bittorrent seeding servers ("seedhosts") exist... and people pay for them?
That could explain a lot of the lopsidedness in the numbers.
I would hope that seedhost businesses make generous donations to the EFF and similar organizations that work to protect and improve the legality of media sharing; were I in that business, I'd make that a selling point, e.g. "5% of proceeds are donated to the EFF."
Also, doesn't boosting your ratio not matter unless you're in a gated BT community that maintains a minimum ratio?
You do know that's wasn't Assange himself on Saturday Night Live? That was an actor in a comedy sketch.
I can understand in 50 years time when this has all blown over quotes and get misattributed to people, but that sketch was 4 or 5 weeks ago now...
Fair enough. I didn't see the sketch but knew the quote. My research showed that it came from "Assange" on SNL. I tried looking for more information but there wasn't any available. In hindsight, I could have looked to see if he had even made an appearance on the show, but that hadn't occurred to me. It seemed perfectly reasonable that that would be a quip fed to him for use in a skit or introductory rant, so I let it go at that.
It's apt enough not to matter in the end anyway. The point is that it strikes a rather strong chord.
PS: I had to resist the temptation to "missattribute" your quote...
I agree; I thought Nobel Prizes could only be awarded to individuals, which appears to indicate Assange even if he is just a figurehead. As he said on Saturday Night Live,
What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.
If the universe is spherical (regardless of whether it might also be hyperbolic, which is widely assumed to be the case), we should be able to see things that are farther than 14B light years merely due to the fact that they're closer along another trajectory, just as the apparently flat surface of the Earth ends up being continuous. This could be a really important discovery; if we can find something 14 billion light years away, we would either see a spectacular creation of space itself, or we would find something that revises our theories, including the possibility of confirming the spherical universe hypothesis (by seeing something disproportionately old). Either way, it would be quite exciting even outside the field of cosmology.
Of course, that's assuming that there is something to see; if the universe's initial expansion was anything but perfectly instantaneous, areas farther from the center would have been created proportionally later. Something 14B light years distant would therefore not be anywhere near as old as more central points, and therefore they wouldn't have had the appropriate time to emanate anything back towards us (or anywhere, for that matter). There is also the matter of the universe's hyperbolic shape, which has already helped scientists theorize that the universe is 78B light years wide (see the Wikipedia article cited in the/. summary) despite the observable 13.7B light year radius which gives a 15.8B light year visibility. It should also be noted that since we aren't in the center of the universe, we should be able to see farther in some directions than in others (though never more than 13.7B light years along its shortest path). Assuming that there are enough dark areas to make enough measurements, we could conceivably use this information to determine where the Big Bang actually began (the true center of the universe).
You had the answer in your examples of what can be done on a simple DSL connection; Tor facilitates this exactly. Users can't be traced if users are required to use tor, with any configuration of exit nodes (all customers, some customers, ISP-level, third-party). If all customers are required to use tor as exit nodes, traffic bounces around the network and jumps out anywhere, perhaps not even in the same ISP. There would be no way to know where traffic comes from (with respect to IP addresses, anyway), so the logs would be useless.
As to requiring NAT or IPv6, that doesn't matter as much as long as tor were a requirement. Adding tor to a properly-run non-NAT'd system would allow technical users to run servers without issues (the servers wouldn't need to use tor, though this would result in logs). Perhaps if ISPs using tor becomes a common thing, hosting.onion sites wouldn't be that problematic (they are already available outside tor through proxies like tor2web).
Seriously, they were actually useful. There was no explanation for them, but it allowed me to more easily peruse the goodies in the firehose. I think it also affected metamoderation, but I was never terribly successful at playing with it there. Colors also gave clues about whether a submission was close to acceptance or rejection, though it measured popularity rather than a direct correlation to acceptance since stories are chosen by human admins (a blue story could be accepted while a red story gets rejected).
If you do return them, please say something about them in the FAQ, they were confusing.
Along the lines of colors (but not the color thresholds), I assume colored subsections will return shortly. I always thought those were a nice touch, especially the green circuit board background used in tech.slashdot.org.
I don't mind the floating sidebar since that space was always blank anyway, but the top panel should at least have the option of a scrolling position. As a temporary fix, I've done that in Stylish as suggested by an earlier comment, though things do look a bit odd with the site badge and search area failing to float with the rest of the items on the left.
There are inconsistent fonts; the site is sans-serif everywhere but the textarea, the floating header, and box titles (article, slashboxes, user box, etc), which are all serif. I'm not sure if that's an aesthetic choice or an accident, but it looks better (to me) when I force it all to sans-serif.
I think I preferred the "Reply to this" and "Parent" links as buttons.
Please, please implement P as an Access Key for comment preview (like mediawiki/wikipedia, SHIFT+ALT+P or ALT+P or CTRL+P depending on browser), that would be soooo useful. S for save would be useful too, but I would understand its absence. It's easy previewing that I care about.
The close button on dialogs (and likely other JS clickables) link to "#" while performing the real activity in an onClick or the likes... this is fine, but its javascript should return false so the page history doesn't get an extra entry.
Final note: update your help pages. Last I looked, the docs on D2 and M2 were outdated and karma's portions make no reference to achievements (K2?). Revisiting those docs now, it appears the D2 FAQ items are more up to date than I had recalled, but they do not appear to address D3 or whatever this redesign is called. This/. article should probably be referenced in that FAQ as a possible source of additional information.
Slashdot Mirror
I was surprised to see the TSA's full-body screening systems didn't make the list ... until I saw the reports of how much radiation it exposes us to. I'm using data from NPR's Scientists Question Safety Of New Airport Scanners (2010-05-17) and TSA's X-ray Screening Technology Safety Reports (date unknown, cited on the TSA Blog 2011-03-12).
Note, to compare with XKCD's chart, both TSA and NPR state that a standard chest x-ray is 100 uSv rather than this XKCD's 20 uSv. NPR puts a mammogram at 700 uSv while XKCD holds it as 3000 uSv.
The stated radiation from these backscatter scanners is 0.05 uSv (TSA, reported as 0.005 mrem) to 0.2 uSv (UCSF via NPR) per usage. UCSF suggests that measuring this radiation on the skin would result in a larger value. The TSA report includes a disclaimer that they are re-testing these numbers and should have results around the end of this month. Another post here noted 0.09 uSv but had no source (reported as "0.09 Sv" because Slashdot eats the Greek letter mu).
The real danger with respect to the backscatter scanners was to the TSA workers (who had zero protection) and others who work in airports. The NPR piece also cites David Brenner, head of Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research, saying that 5% of the population is especially sensitive to radiation and that "we don't really have a quick and easy test to find those individuals." Fortunately, these machines are not in use any more, though that might change if the TSA's new report doesn't increase those numbers (or it gets trumped by fearmongering on behalf of some news outlet or politician).
If I'm interested in the product but view it as simple entertainment and a relatively mediocre experience (which almost all games and movies are), I'm not going to be happier about the high price because they gave me a T-shirt; why would I even want a bunch of extra mini-games, clothes, or collectibles to celebrate a mediocre product?
I would argue that you're not interested in buying that product. You'll see it once and then trash it. That's not a purchase, that's a rental or loan.
the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares
This isn't hard, nor is it novel. The cost of this media has stayed reasonably steady while its perceived value has dropped considerably. I haven't downloaded a movie in the past 5+ years, yet I've stopped buying them new. Five years ago, I'd buy a used movie for $10 as long as it had some featurettes. Now, my threshold is probably $7, which is four dollars less than five years ago (when adjusting for inflation). I bought In Rainbows for $5 and the Humble Indie Bundle for $20.
These 2 scenes are undoubtably the worst + most funniest in any movie/TV series ever:
Numb3rs explanation of IRC using boats that meet in the middle of the ocean to swap illegal goods (wtf?).
And the above fore-referenced scene with a woman making a graphical-user-interface-interface to track an IP address in VB.
Transcript from that Numb3rs episode:
IRC, Internet Relay Chat. It's how hackers talk when they don't want to be overheard. It's a pretty primitive chat program. Think of it like shipping channels in the ocean. You can't see them until a boat cuts through the water leaving a wake. If two boats meet in the middle of the ocean to swap illegal drugs, you have to catch them in real time, otherwise there's no evidence of a meeting left behind. No names, no accounts, no records of exchange.
That's a reasonable explanation of IRC. Channels come and go on demand, and there's often a lot of other channels to obfuscate somebody sniffing the traffic. The "wake" indicates a channel has been formed so you can tune into just that conversation, and the channel does disappear when they are done. Logging is up to the participants, so this is reasonably clean (which is why so many criminal hackers use IRC in real life, though encrypted methods are almost certainly the norm these days). It isn't impossible to set up a sniffer to lurk around and eavesdrop on a conversation. Later in that clip, a screenshot is requested (note, not by a techie) in order to capture the content. It could just as easily be saved in another manner, and I see no reason to have to explain that to the FBI agent when you could just do it.
If you want to bust Numb3rs, you'll have to try harder. There are a few points in which they get quite weak, especially with respect to all of the various learning algorithms as applied to search, but also including a few programming issues (IIRC, you should look for the episode that deals with breaking PKI, which was at least realistic enough to state that it was too hard for the ubergenius Charlie Epps). Still, it's a well composed show and does volumes to teach while entertaining. Easily a net win.
CSI is another thing altogether. It might help the general population tolerate people with technical know-how, but I don't think it does anything to attract us. Thus the gross blunder.
For a refreshing taste of tech representation in the other direction, check out Nathan Fillion's character in Castle as he learns about image enhancement.
Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications—messages that can be sent between mobile phones—a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as text messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries," that run on a phone.
This was also covered HERE ON SLASHDOT, 'SMS of Death' Could Crash Many Mobile Phones.
I suspect most people who are good at anticipating responses will start off ahead. The veteran doesn't really catch on to your habits until round 40 or so. I found it is best to rotate strategies and always heavily err on the side of a tie. Not sure why everybody has arbitrary numbers of rounds on their posts, but I got 43-35-21 in one hundred games against veteran.
I'm sure for real statistical relevance, well over a hundred trials are needed. I'll see how far I can get while I eat my lunch and watch my code compile.
Or you can use Skype, so neither government or anyone else can access your messages.
Excepting, of course, the governments and anyone else that has paid or forced Skype to offer back-doors. Austria, Russia, India, and China have all demanded back-doors. Austria has made vague claims about actually getting it, China may have cracked it instead, and with all this noise about potentially blocking Skype, I'd be surprised if there was only a small number of governments that have been awarded this access.
However, having access to the odds of a play's success would be very useful to those coaches. Imagine two poker players, and one knows more than the other about the odds of particular hands, or the likelihood of the next card being something he needs, and over time games should work out in his favor.
Poker is a game in which elite players benefit by memorizing those probabilities (and accurately using them during an adrenaline rush). A large part of the game is working to distort other players' estimates of those probabilities. This is lost when it's readily available without bias or distortion. This human element is extremely important to almost all games, especially in games where the probabilities are significantly more complex than what you find in the casino. (Consider tic-tac-toe, which is so simple that it can be solved in your head. Why play it if not for the chance that somebody falters?)
Coaching with perfect knowledge of full probabilities is fine during practice, when used as a tool to train players and coaches. Bringing such things to the actual game would be problematic.
Fifty years from now, we're going to laugh about how we used to give coaches this much responsibility
I hope not; coaches are essential to the nature of a team; these are human competitions, and if we're not considering robotic players, we have no business looking into robotic coaches. Each coach has his or her own take on what should happen, including intuition, foresight, insight, and motivational talking. No computer is going to be able to give an exhausted player a second wind by talking about probabilities and describing an unrehearsed play.
Consider American football, which is often dubbed a chess match between the two coaches. To remove the human element of a game makes it boring, and it's too often forgotten that the coaching staff is what makes players tick. Off the court/field is another issue altogether; we already have lots of extra advisers and computing power to crunch the numbers, and that's where they should stay.
That said, I'm all for a human-v-machine all-star matchup, where the champion team plays an all-star team conscripted and managed by a computer. If the computer is that much better, perhaps the champs could play the season's most average team, or an all-star lineup of the minor leagues or NCAA.
I couldn't help but also tag this article Skynet for the path it seems to steer us towards.
I never claimed to have a well-informed idea of how it worked; I knew it was related to the differently polarized lenses of the glasses but mistakenly called that a frequency issue (my understanding is that polarized lenses filter various light wavelengths, which differ by frequency).
However, with respect to RealD's two planes as "3D," I don't think I was as far off the mark as many of the responses (yours included) have indicated. I used an invented term ("biplanar") because I didn't want to call it stereoscopic; I haven't seen any evidence that the two fields of vision it presents combine in any meaningful way (beyond showing two flat planes to view). To me, there is no illusion of depth beyond those two planes, so nothing really looks three dimensional.
Consider a ~futuristic glass display, motorized to move along the Z-axis in front of a television. These are the two planes I'm talking about. My experience with RealD is not terribly different from this. Perhaps I'm not typical in this regard; there are many optical illusions that are difficult for me (e.g. "Magic Eye" autostereograms do nothing for me) and though I've never been tested, I doubt I am stereo-blind since I get /something/ out of RealD and similar effects and because my excellent depth perception diminishes some when I'm covering either eye. As to the other 3-D film techniques, the only one I've experienced is the old fashioned red/blue glasses format, and I honestly don't remember if it worked (I'm leaning on stating that it did).
I am under the impression that 3D films are shot with two cameras, each from a unique angle and/or focused field of depth. This would make it hard to represent a third angle or field of depth. This is probably complicated by visual effects and computer modeling, perhaps to the point at which the problem is either moot or will be soon. Even Avatar, which was designed for 3D and did not have a non-3D presentation (in theaters anyway), didn't actually use the technology much -- it was a gimmick. I don't think that was for wont of trying, I think it was a limitation of the technology. Maybe we'll see a change in the future as it matures, but for now, it remains a gimmick.
We've got to be only a year or two from realizing that RealD is a dumb gimmick...
RealD Cinema, the technology used in all of these films, uses alternating frequencies of light which get filtered differently by each polarized lens of the glasses it requires. This gives up to two planes of vision at a time, which can move relative to each other. For whatever reason, we are calling this 3D (I'll use the term "biplanar" for the rest of this post). Disclaimer: this is a simplification and I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but I think it hits the point.
All this biplanar vision is good for is superimposing a flat view of something in front of (or behind) the main action. That's it. I saw Avatar and was impressed by a few scenes (specifically, the captions used in the diary entries ... which were 2D), but it was almost wholly a gimmick; neat trick, but a novelty that faded before the movie finished. Captions and other flat items can add to things, but (in their current state) they do not justify the extra cost or the need to wear sunglasses in a dark theater.
That's not to say we've exhausted the limits of what biplanar movies can do; I expect explosions and other instantaneous effects can benefit greatly from this; each frame of the explosion moves slightly closer to the audience on the Z-axis, and since it emits like a wave, there is no need to continue to display previous frames in their own dedicated Z coordinate. The same goes for anything opaque that's coming right at you, so long as it has no component that requires a different depth (so a car --or spaceship-- is out because the windshield is farther from you than the fender; turn your head and the perspective shows a 2D image). In fact, the only things I can think of that fit this bill are explosions and other things that move so fast the you don't have time to move and see their flatness plus anything that is so flat it has no depth, like maybe a propeller-driven device whose propeller is so big you can't see anything else, or a wall that the first-person perspective is driving into head-first (though those two examples are pretty lame and limited).
Re-releasing old hits (a generous term for the Star Wars prequels) won't do much unless you have a fanbase that will buy anything you make (in which you might as well stick with snorting commentary tracks and back-patting featurettes).
While you're at it, we'll need a key to your home. At your discretion, we'd also like a full copy of your personal diary for our records.
Okay, great. Now strip for the camera and bend over. This will only take a minute or two.
For many in the audience, this does not adhere to the KISS model (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
Many of the links in that article are actually quite useful, especially if you skip the internal references. One of them, from the 2008 Linux Plumbers Conference, which is dedicated to the lower-level aspects of the operating system (mostly the kernel, GNU, and X), was of particular interest as it talks about how Canonical isn't carrying its own weight, falling well below any other backer of a commercial distribution (or other Linux-depending company) on pretty much any metric and even well behind community-driven distros like Debian and Gentoo as well.
However, Canonical doesn't care about that layer of the OS; they want to improve the user experience, and have therefore focused almost all of their attention on the user interface. (It is interesting to note that the init subsystem rewrite is a salient counter-example, though its speed improvement still correlates to user experience.) From day one, Ubuntu and GNOME have been bedmates. Shuttleworth and therefore Canonical have therefore focused their efforts on GTK and GNOME while relying upon Debian and friends to care for the rest.
This arrangement seemed to work well for everything but the company's bottom line, which is where the value of this article really comes into play. They are in trouble as an unprofitable company built upon a for-profit model. (Easy solution: file for nonprofit status...)
Getting back to UI, Canonical is now getting bold and stirring the pot. They are pushing Wayland as an X11 replacement, which I think is a really good move (though forecasting when it might supplant X11 in Ubuntu seems extremely unwise). However, the friction they are creating with Unity as a replacement for GNOME Shell could be too much of a step, especially in a few iterations when the demands placed by Unity and GNOME Shell begin to differ. It is clear that Canonical wants (and due to its business state, perhaps needs) to have more control and be seen as a mover and shaker, but I question the wisdom of what might fracture the GNOME development community, especially given a target market of netbooks and smaller (given GNOME's bloat).
Were I in control, I'd steer Canonical to MeeGo.
With Nokia now fully removed from the picture, AMD added, and primary driver Intel redoubled in its investment, MeeGo is ripe for the shaping. From all appearances, MeeGo's design as something end-users might ever see has completely vanished. Intel's main intent for MeeGo may have been for demos, with widespread adoption merely being one possible future (remember, they're a hardware company). MeeGo products that have hit the market so far have all had fully customized user interfaces.
Canonical's designs for Ubuntu are to focus on the netbook and play a pivotal role in its user interface while improving overall speed and efficiency (key elements to the user experience). MeeGo, with its roots in the embedded space (including tablets and netbooks), fits here perfectly. Intel, who ranks near the top of all of those plumbing contribution lists in the LPC keynote I began this post with, would then become an ally.
(Yes, I know MeeGo itself has more in common with its Intel-backed Fedora-based predecessor Moblin than it does with its other predecessor, Nokia-backed Debian-based Maemo, and the main reason I'm a fan of Ubuntu is its compatibility with Debian, but those are minor hurd
The final text of the copyright of msqt.org's main page contained this text at the very beginning (and still has it):
This is a satire, for the real Qt website go to qt.nokia.com.
The domain itself is registered by a random Finnish individual as registered through joker.com, a consumer-grade DNS reseller.
I find it hard to believe that anybody took it seriously and that anybody in the industry couldn't do the miniscule amount of homework to confirm what should have been everybody's initial suspicion: it's a freaking joke. It was never intended to mislead.
Holy crap, hosted bittorrent seeding servers ("seedhosts") exist ... and people pay for them?
That could explain a lot of the lopsidedness in the numbers.
I would hope that seedhost businesses make generous donations to the EFF and similar organizations that work to protect and improve the legality of media sharing; were I in that business, I'd make that a selling point, e.g. "5% of proceeds are donated to the EFF."
Also, doesn't boosting your ratio not matter unless you're in a gated BT community that maintains a minimum ratio?
You do know that's wasn't Assange himself on Saturday Night Live? That was an actor in a comedy sketch. I can understand in 50 years time when this has all blown over quotes and get misattributed to people, but that sketch was 4 or 5 weeks ago now...
Fair enough. I didn't see the sketch but knew the quote. My research showed that it came from "Assange" on SNL. I tried looking for more information but there wasn't any available. In hindsight, I could have looked to see if he had even made an appearance on the show, but that hadn't occurred to me. It seemed perfectly reasonable that that would be a quip fed to him for use in a skit or introductory rant, so I let it go at that.
It's apt enough not to matter in the end anyway. The point is that it strikes a rather strong chord.
PS: I had to resist the temptation to "missattribute" your quote ...
I agree; I thought Nobel Prizes could only be awarded to individuals, which appears to indicate Assange even if he is just a figurehead. As he said on Saturday Night Live,
What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.
If the universe is spherical (regardless of whether it might also be hyperbolic, which is widely assumed to be the case), we should be able to see things that are farther than 14B light years merely due to the fact that they're closer along another trajectory, just as the apparently flat surface of the Earth ends up being continuous. This could be a really important discovery; if we can find something 14 billion light years away, we would either see a spectacular creation of space itself, or we would find something that revises our theories, including the possibility of confirming the spherical universe hypothesis (by seeing something disproportionately old). Either way, it would be quite exciting even outside the field of cosmology.
Of course, that's assuming that there is something to see; if the universe's initial expansion was anything but perfectly instantaneous, areas farther from the center would have been created proportionally later. Something 14B light years distant would therefore not be anywhere near as old as more central points, and therefore they wouldn't have had the appropriate time to emanate anything back towards us (or anywhere, for that matter). There is also the matter of the universe's hyperbolic shape, which has already helped scientists theorize that the universe is 78B light years wide (see the Wikipedia article cited in the /. summary) despite the observable 13.7B light year radius which gives a 15.8B light year visibility. It should also be noted that since we aren't in the center of the universe, we should be able to see farther in some directions than in others (though never more than 13.7B light years along its shortest path). Assuming that there are enough dark areas to make enough measurements, we could conceivably use this information to determine where the Big Bang actually began (the true center of the universe).
You had the answer in your examples of what can be done on a simple DSL connection; Tor facilitates this exactly. Users can't be traced if users are required to use tor, with any configuration of exit nodes (all customers, some customers, ISP-level, third-party). If all customers are required to use tor as exit nodes, traffic bounces around the network and jumps out anywhere, perhaps not even in the same ISP. There would be no way to know where traffic comes from (with respect to IP addresses, anyway), so the logs would be useless.
As to requiring NAT or IPv6, that doesn't matter as much as long as tor were a requirement. Adding tor to a properly-run non-NAT'd system would allow technical users to run servers without issues (the servers wouldn't need to use tor, though this would result in logs). Perhaps if ISPs using tor becomes a common thing, hosting .onion sites wouldn't be that problematic (they are already available outside tor through proxies like tor2web).
I was just beginning to figure them out...
Seriously, they were actually useful. There was no explanation for them, but it allowed me to more easily peruse the goodies in the firehose. I think it also affected metamoderation, but I was never terribly successful at playing with it there. Colors also gave clues about whether a submission was close to acceptance or rejection, though it measured popularity rather than a direct correlation to acceptance since stories are chosen by human admins (a blue story could be accepted while a red story gets rejected).
If you do return them, please say something about them in the FAQ, they were confusing.
Along the lines of colors (but not the color thresholds), I assume colored subsections will return shortly. I always thought those were a nice touch, especially the green circuit board background used in tech.slashdot.org.
I post too fast. If the viewport can't display the side bar in its entirety, it doesn't float. Very nice.
Things are still changing I see; the left side bar was fixed (floating) a few minutes ago, now only the top bar does that. Not fully cooked yet, eh?
I don't mind the floating sidebar since that space was always blank anyway, but the top panel should at least have the option of a scrolling position. As a temporary fix, I've done that in Stylish as suggested by an earlier comment, though things do look a bit odd with the site badge and search area failing to float with the rest of the items on the left.
There are inconsistent fonts; the site is sans-serif everywhere but the textarea, the floating header, and box titles (article, slashboxes, user box, etc), which are all serif. I'm not sure if that's an aesthetic choice or an accident, but it looks better (to me) when I force it all to sans-serif.
I think I preferred the "Reply to this" and "Parent" links as buttons.
Please, please implement P as an Access Key for comment preview (like mediawiki/wikipedia, SHIFT+ALT+P or ALT+P or CTRL+P depending on browser), that would be soooo useful. S for save would be useful too, but I would understand its absence. It's easy previewing that I care about.
The close button on dialogs (and likely other JS clickables) link to "#" while performing the real activity in an onClick or the likes ... this is fine, but its javascript should return false so the page history doesn't get an extra entry.
Final note: update your help pages. Last I looked, the docs on D2 and M2 were outdated and karma's portions make no reference to achievements (K2?). Revisiting those docs now, it appears the D2 FAQ items are more up to date than I had recalled, but they do not appear to address D3 or whatever this redesign is called. This /. article should probably be referenced in that FAQ as a possible source of additional information.