Science fiction writers say screens will go away, replaced by glasses or contacts or other type of worn HUD which can show things in an arbitrarily wide field of vision. It ain't reality yet, of course, but it doesn't really sound all that far-fetched.
Why does so much of the Slashdentia put so much faith in what Science Fiction writers put in their novels? Statements like the above seem quite common to me. You can talk about selection bias all you want, but frankly one is too many. Science Fiction writers are just people with some unknown (possibly near zero) level of domain knowledge who are making stuff up. Why would you put any faith in what they say?
I'm not sure what you think an arbitrarily wide field of vision means, but it's worth noting that humans don't have one (we have a 180 degree field of vision). So to achieve this your projection device would have to patch in to the system somewhere between where optical nerves connect to your eyes, and your brain. That sounds far-fetched to me, but maybe you disagree. Or maybe you were thinking the HUD would project onto your eyes, thus obscuring your normal vision. Either way, it's an open question whether such a technique is feasible, or even useful, and the imaginings of some Science Fiction writer is far from a persuasive argument that such is the case.
Google someone's name with city and state. You will get a phonebook listing, and a link to view the given address on the map. Click on the map link, and you can then enter a street view to see what the person's house may look like.
Fair enough, I suppose, although I've never seen Google do that. I'd ask for an example, but I'm sure you don't want to share your name, address, and front lawn with all of Slashdot and the wider Internet:P
Well Google has a track record of mining every bit of data about you. Even to the point of hiring contractors to take pictures of your house (from the "street" of course).
I don't usually care about the kind of disingenuous crap that gets posted to Slashdot. There's just so much, who can keep up? This little gem stands out though. To see this kind of dishonesty (or abject stupidity) modded +5 interesting is such a tragedy.
To make it perfectly clear, Google hired contractors to take pictures of the stuff that's visible from the street. It just so happens that your house is one of the things visible from the street, but that's not why they're taking the pictures. And they certainly haven't tracked you (or anyone else) down specifically to photograph your house for some nefarious purpose.
It wouldn't work. To lose weight, you need to take in fewer calories than you burn. When you do that, you will feel hungry. It doesn't matter if you're reducing your calorie intake by dieting, or increasing your calorie expenditure by using some new drug that increases your muscles mass. The hardest part of losing weight is having the discipline to not eat when you're hungry.
In your haste to appear world-weary and wise, you seem to have mistaken $60 billion for $60 million. I assure you that $60 billion is indeed a lot of money. This list shows that the largest (by market capitalization) company in the world has a market cap of 336 billion. I am willing to bet that $60 billion exceeds the market cap of all the companies which comprise the CRIA.
A poster above already mentioned this, but it bears repeating:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker.
But the bigger news may be that Schmidt has actually admitted there are cases where the search giant is forced to release your personal data.
"If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
First of all, what Schmidt says isn't wrong. If you don't want anyone to know what you're doing, it may be because you value your privacy, but it may also be because it's wrong, and you know it's wrong. Next the article's writer makes the laughable claim that it may be big news that Google might be forced to release your personal data. Can anyone claim to be surprised that Google complies with subpoenas? And finally we see the real thrush of Schmidt's comment: If you want to look up something in real privacy, don't use Google search because IT'S NOT PRIVATE. Records are kept, and there is no search engine client privilege to protect you if the government comes with a subpoena.
I know it's hard to think about what people say, rather than just descend into a righteous fury because some internet hack told you to, but please try. We'd really appreciate it.
What they're doing may or may not be good for the industry. And helping the ecosystem may or may not be Google's true intent. But there's no denying the incredible arrogance it takes to imply that the only reason all the top tech talent doesn't work at Google is because Google has magnanimously decided to share.
You don't call someone who washes you car and gives it s bit of a polish a mechanic would you?
No, but I might call the guy who designed the car an engineer. Similarly, I wouldn't call the guy who designs my software an IT guy.
Snarkiness aside, arguments about how the general public lumps everyone who works with technology into a single group are fine, except the question asker is talking about a company that wants to specialize in software. And he's concerned about hiring technical people to make that happen. Therefore, his audience isn't the lay public, it's other technical experts. Technical experts who will know that there's a different skill set required to develop software than there is to deploy and maintain network infrastructure, and that these jobs are often given different names. When communicating with this audience, it will pay to be precise in your terminology, because yes, what you call things does matter. It's called communication, and it's what separates us from the animals.
So you have a city below sea level protected by a barrier which cannot possibly handle an event that you know with certainty will one day happen. Additionally, all those years that passed without it happening were ample opportunity to reinforce the levee and otherwise to prepare for that eventuality.
The judge agrees with you:
'It is the court's opinion that the negligence of the corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MR-GO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness,'
The thing is, the judge lives, along with most of us, in a world where people and organizations have some minimal obligation to other people. Thus, when there is a government organization whose responsibility it is to build levees that will protect a city full or people, and when this organization fails to protect against something that is, as both you and the judge point out, perfectly predictable, then we say this organization has been negligent, and we hold it responsible. We call this state of affairs civilization. Come join us!
In practice, even very long passwords are trivially cracked in little time, using simple methods.
Unfortunately, I lost the source, but while studying cryptography myself, I stumbled upon a quote from some guy involved in government decryption in the US, and (paraphrasing), he said that their technique was basically to pick up the hard disk from the machine with the protected content, and then simply try every consecutive range of bytes as a password.
How did this get modded insightful instead of the redundant it so rightly deserves? From the third paragraph of the GPt:
Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful.
Where are some of these many places that you can legally kick someone to death in retaliation for an attempted mugging? Where I live (Canada), that is definitely not kosher.
You claim to have read the article, and yet, on the first page one finds this little gem
So, let's take a 100 per cent objective* look at the plugs and plug sockets of the world"
Where the attached footnote read
*Objectivity in this sentence has a one-off, government-approved change in definition. Its meaning here, and only here, is the exact opposite of what it usually means.
I'm pretty sure the article was not meant as a hard-headed, detailed comparison of different plug styles. Of course, after reading that, and seeing that it was a 10 page article with approximately 2 sentences per page, I declined to read the rest of the article.
How can you Get, or know to be Wonderful, something you haven't experienced [...] ?
Thanks to this breakthrough new technology called rationalism it is now possible to know things without directly experiencing them.
I'll give you a quick tutorial: The original claim is that Wave is an aggregation of various existing technologies. You claim that it is impossible to know how useful this will be without using it. Some intrepid souls, however, are reflecting that the existing technologies which Wave aggregates all have drawbacks, and reasoning that by combining them, Google has eliminated, or at least mitigated, these drawbacks. Reasoning really is an amazing thing. You should try it out sometime.
I need to learn something today and (sadly) lately the only place where I've been able to learn new things or realize that my assumptions are wrong is/.
You erred in assuming that you could learning anything insightful from a dialogue using loaded terms like nerd and jock. Everyone here has slightly (or radically) different definitions of the words. For example, I've never heard of jocks being smart and industrious, while nerds were smart and lazy. Furthermore, most people here self-identify as nerds, and a smaller majority despise jocks, so the discussion will be incredibly lopsided. The only way to win is not to post.
To be fair, pointing out that it's stupid to call it an analog blog is not a criticism of the Monrovian guy, it's a criticism of the bloggers who saw a noticeboard, and called it an analog blog. And it's a perfectly valid point. It's much like seeing Firefox, and exclaiming that Mozilla has copied IE's innovation of tabbed browsing. The causality is backwards, and displays cringe-worthy ignorance of the history of the subject matter.
I think the obvious solution to that problem is to populate the world with NPCs going their daily business, and then have it so there are no obvious differences between PCs and NPCs. Then your task is to blend in with all the real NPCs while doing your quest. Not that that would remain fun for very long, but I'm sure the devs have thought up other game mechanics.
Occam's Razor does not mean that the simplest explanation is true, or even likely to be true. Occam's Razor is about parsimony of belief. Given two theories:
1. LHC doesn't work because some of it's many many components malfunction
2. LHC doesn't work because some of it's many many components malfunction because its future is reaching back in time, causing it to malfunction
We choose to belief the first, rather than the second, because the second theory introduces an additional term that adds nothing to the theory. Put another way, at the moment we have evidence that the LHC is malfunctioning, but no evidence that it is malfunctioning due to bizarre backwards causality.
The formulation of Occam's Razor with which you are familiar, no doubt from watching (or reading) Contact, is "All things being equal, the simplest solution is explanation tends to be right". In this case, simpler means 'having no unnecessary terms'. It does not refer to how credible you find one explanation or another.
Why was parent modded insightful? I could see it being modded funny, although I'd disagree. Insightful, though, it is not. The prize is clearly not being awarded for Obama's intentions, but for a combination of Obama's intentions and the possibility, however slight, that he might achieve those intentions. As a cynical crank, the parent has little chance of achieving anything, therefore no Nobel Peace Prize.
...why is "the US President acted only in the interests of the US" a bad thing? At worst, it's a neutral thing.
No. At best it's a neutral thing. In the worst case, the US President acting only in the interests of the US comes at ruinous expense to other nations. That is definitely not neutral.
Slashdot Mirror
Science fiction writers say screens will go away, replaced by glasses or contacts or other type of worn HUD which can show things in an arbitrarily wide field of vision. It ain't reality yet, of course, but it doesn't really sound all that far-fetched.
Why does so much of the Slashdentia put so much faith in what Science Fiction writers put in their novels? Statements like the above seem quite common to me. You can talk about selection bias all you want, but frankly one is too many. Science Fiction writers are just people with some unknown (possibly near zero) level of domain knowledge who are making stuff up. Why would you put any faith in what they say?
I'm not sure what you think an arbitrarily wide field of vision means, but it's worth noting that humans don't have one (we have a 180 degree field of vision). So to achieve this your projection device would have to patch in to the system somewhere between where optical nerves connect to your eyes, and your brain. That sounds far-fetched to me, but maybe you disagree. Or maybe you were thinking the HUD would project onto your eyes, thus obscuring your normal vision. Either way, it's an open question whether such a technique is feasible, or even useful, and the imaginings of some Science Fiction writer is far from a persuasive argument that such is the case.
Of course, this diagnostic test is useless without knowing the contents of '(start explaining)'.
Google someone's name with city and state. You will get a phonebook listing, and a link to view the given address on the map. Click on the map link, and you can then enter a street view to see what the person's house may look like.
Fair enough, I suppose, although I've never seen Google do that. I'd ask for an example, but I'm sure you don't want to share your name, address, and front lawn with all of Slashdot and the wider Internet :P
Well Google has a track record of mining every bit of data about you. Even to the point of hiring contractors to take pictures of your house (from the "street" of course).
I don't usually care about the kind of disingenuous crap that gets posted to Slashdot. There's just so much, who can keep up? This little gem stands out though. To see this kind of dishonesty (or abject stupidity) modded +5 interesting is such a tragedy.
To make it perfectly clear, Google hired contractors to take pictures of the stuff that's visible from the street. It just so happens that your house is one of the things visible from the street, but that's not why they're taking the pictures. And they certainly haven't tracked you (or anyone else) down specifically to photograph your house for some nefarious purpose.
It wouldn't work. To lose weight, you need to take in fewer calories than you burn. When you do that, you will feel hungry. It doesn't matter if you're reducing your calorie intake by dieting, or increasing your calorie expenditure by using some new drug that increases your muscles mass. The hardest part of losing weight is having the discipline to not eat when you're hungry.
In your haste to appear world-weary and wise, you seem to have mistaken $60 billion for $60 million. I assure you that $60 billion is indeed a lot of money. This list shows that the largest (by market capitalization) company in the world has a market cap of 336 billion. I am willing to bet that $60 billion exceeds the market cap of all the companies which comprise the CRIA.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker.
But the bigger news may be that Schmidt has actually admitted there are cases where the search giant is forced to release your personal data.
"If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
First of all, what Schmidt says isn't wrong. If you don't want anyone to know what you're doing, it may be because you value your privacy, but it may also be because it's wrong, and you know it's wrong. Next the article's writer makes the laughable claim that it may be big news that Google might be forced to release your personal data. Can anyone claim to be surprised that Google complies with subpoenas? And finally we see the real thrush of Schmidt's comment: If you want to look up something in real privacy, don't use Google search because IT'S NOT PRIVATE. Records are kept, and there is no search engine client privilege to protect you if the government comes with a subpoena. I know it's hard to think about what people say, rather than just descend into a righteous fury because some internet hack told you to, but please try. We'd really appreciate it.
What they're doing may or may not be good for the industry. And helping the ecosystem may or may not be Google's true intent. But there's no denying the incredible arrogance it takes to imply that the only reason all the top tech talent doesn't work at Google is because Google has magnanimously decided to share.
You don't call someone who washes you car and gives it s bit of a polish a mechanic would you?
No, but I might call the guy who designed the car an engineer. Similarly, I wouldn't call the guy who designs my software an IT guy.
Snarkiness aside, arguments about how the general public lumps everyone who works with technology into a single group are fine, except the question asker is talking about a company that wants to specialize in software. And he's concerned about hiring technical people to make that happen. Therefore, his audience isn't the lay public, it's other technical experts. Technical experts who will know that there's a different skill set required to develop software than there is to deploy and maintain network infrastructure, and that these jobs are often given different names. When communicating with this audience, it will pay to be precise in your terminology, because yes, what you call things does matter. It's called communication, and it's what separates us from the animals.
So you have a city below sea level protected by a barrier which cannot possibly handle an event that you know with certainty will one day happen. Additionally, all those years that passed without it happening were ample opportunity to reinforce the levee and otherwise to prepare for that eventuality.
The judge agrees with you:
'It is the court's opinion that the negligence of the corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MR-GO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness,'
The thing is, the judge lives, along with most of us, in a world where people and organizations have some minimal obligation to other people. Thus, when there is a government organization whose responsibility it is to build levees that will protect a city full or people, and when this organization fails to protect against something that is, as both you and the judge point out, perfectly predictable, then we say this organization has been negligent, and we hold it responsible. We call this state of affairs civilization. Come join us!
Ah... theory!
In practice, even very long passwords are trivially cracked in little time, using simple methods.
Unfortunately, I lost the source, but while studying cryptography myself, I stumbled upon a quote from some guy involved in government decryption in the US, and (paraphrasing), he said that their technique was basically to pick up the hard disk from the machine with the protected content, and then simply try every consecutive range of bytes as a password.
How did this get modded insightful instead of the redundant it so rightly deserves? From the third paragraph of the GPt:
Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful.
Where are some of these many places that you can legally kick someone to death in retaliation for an attempted mugging? Where I live (Canada), that is definitely not kosher.
So can I add this [to] the list of [...] future Michael Crichton novel plotlines
That list may get longer, but I doubt it will get much shorter any time soon
So, let's take a 100 per cent objective* look at the plugs and plug sockets of the world"
Where the attached footnote read
*Objectivity in this sentence has a one-off, government-approved change in definition. Its meaning here, and only here, is the exact opposite of what it usually means.
I'm pretty sure the article was not meant as a hard-headed, detailed comparison of different plug styles. Of course, after reading that, and seeing that it was a 10 page article with approximately 2 sentences per page, I declined to read the rest of the article.
How can you Get, or know to be Wonderful, something you haven't experienced [...] ?
Thanks to this breakthrough new technology called rationalism it is now possible to know things without directly experiencing them.
I'll give you a quick tutorial: The original claim is that Wave is an aggregation of various existing technologies. You claim that it is impossible to know how useful this will be without using it. Some intrepid souls, however, are reflecting that the existing technologies which Wave aggregates all have drawbacks, and reasoning that by combining them, Google has eliminated, or at least mitigated, these drawbacks. Reasoning really is an amazing thing. You should try it out sometime.
I need to learn something today and (sadly) lately the only place where I've been able to learn new things or realize that my assumptions are wrong is /.
You erred in assuming that you could learning anything insightful from a dialogue using loaded terms like nerd and jock. Everyone here has slightly (or radically) different definitions of the words. For example, I've never heard of jocks being smart and industrious, while nerds were smart and lazy. Furthermore, most people here self-identify as nerds, and a smaller majority despise jocks, so the discussion will be incredibly lopsided. The only way to win is not to post.
Yeah, except that implementations of machine translations date back to the 50s.
To be fair, pointing out that it's stupid to call it an analog blog is not a criticism of the Monrovian guy, it's a criticism of the bloggers who saw a noticeboard, and called it an analog blog. And it's a perfectly valid point. It's much like seeing Firefox, and exclaiming that Mozilla has copied IE's innovation of tabbed browsing. The causality is backwards, and displays cringe-worthy ignorance of the history of the subject matter.
And very small values of life =/
I'm sure they would, but I can't imagine a scenario where the iTunes Store's irrelevancy could possibly drive more iPod sales.
Ironic that cynicism and insight are so much alike, isn't it?
Not ironic, just a comment on how cynical you yourself are.
I think the obvious solution to that problem is to populate the world with NPCs going their daily business, and then have it so there are no obvious differences between PCs and NPCs. Then your task is to blend in with all the real NPCs while doing your quest. Not that that would remain fun for very long, but I'm sure the devs have thought up other game mechanics.
Occam's Razor does not mean that the simplest explanation is true, or even likely to be true. Occam's Razor is about parsimony of belief. Given two theories:
1. LHC doesn't work because some of it's many many components malfunction
2. LHC doesn't work because some of it's many many components malfunction because its future is reaching back in time, causing it to malfunction
We choose to belief the first, rather than the second, because the second theory introduces an additional term that adds nothing to the theory. Put another way, at the moment we have evidence that the LHC is malfunctioning, but no evidence that it is malfunctioning due to bizarre backwards causality.
The formulation of Occam's Razor with which you are familiar, no doubt from watching (or reading) Contact, is "All things being equal, the simplest solution is explanation tends to be right". In this case, simpler means 'having no unnecessary terms'. It does not refer to how credible you find one explanation or another.
Why was parent modded insightful? I could see it being modded funny, although I'd disagree. Insightful, though, it is not. The prize is clearly not being awarded for Obama's intentions, but for a combination of Obama's intentions and the possibility, however slight, that he might achieve those intentions. As a cynical crank, the parent has little chance of achieving anything, therefore no Nobel Peace Prize.
...why is "the US President acted only in the interests of the US" a bad thing? At worst, it's a neutral thing.
No. At best it's a neutral thing. In the worst case, the US President acting only in the interests of the US comes at ruinous expense to other nations. That is definitely not neutral.