Re:Space travel - no kidding
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is that the claim that we're "exhausting the earth's resources" is being thrown around with no supporting evidence. If we're "exhausting the earth's resources", why are the vast majority of natural resources cheaper now than they've ever been? You'd think that the price of resources might go up as they got exhausted and the population kept increasing (unless you just don't believe in supply/demand at all) but this isn't happening, and it isn't happening at the same time people's lives are improving in measurable ways (longevity, infant mortality, and yes, wealth) pretty much everywhere.
What changes the rules of the game so dramatically is that humans and their resource usage aren't set in stone. 200 years ago whale oil was an important resource; today it's pretty much irrelevant. 100 years ago uranium was only a geological curiosity; today it's highly important. We don't know what will change in the future, but the only safe prediction is that things will continue to change. The assertion that the Earth "can't support this population" is a pretty strong one which needs some evidence, which we're not seeing.
Re:Tax dollars build it, government privatizes it.
on
When Pigs Wifi
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure if you were trying to be sarcastic or not, or why this deserves a "+1, insightful", no offense intended.
Like all other good bits of infrastructure, government money must be used to build it, otherwise it will never get done.
There's a ton of infrastructure that wasn't built by the government, like the cell network, or the internet (yes, I know about ARPANET; the point is that virtually nothing we use today was built by the government), or even our food distribution systems - farmers, truck and train companies, wholesalers, supermarkets, etc. Besides, wifi has only been popular about five years; isn't it a little premature to declare that no one but the government can (or should) build out the infrastructure? If no one wants to build something, we should stop and ask ourselves why. People have an amazing way of making money off the strangest things, if it's possible, so if no one is, some circumspection might be called for. I agree with you about the privatization problem, but I think the answer to that is that people who are profiting from something should have had to risk their own money on it.
Besides, it's always dangerous for the government to decide what direction technology should go in - look at Japan, where the government pushed ISDN for a while, and MITI developed an early high-definition TV system, both of which turned out to be expensive flops. Some things are always going to be flops, but shouldn't people have to pay for flops on their own dime instead of making all of us risk our money?
There's a big difference between the examples you give and an out-and-out thief. None of those people or companies are committing outright fraud. They're charging more than you would like, apparently, but they're not doing so under false pretenses.
I sympathize with you, and I don't use IE either, but I have to take issue with one thing you said: "I have to go back and fuck up my code so that IE's stupid parser makes it look right." You shouldn't be worrying about how your page looks, beyond gross errors. You have no guarantees about how layout is going to work; you can't even guarantee that everyone will be looking at it in the same way (for example, blind people using screen-readers). Yeah, I know, it's very 1997 of me. But if people actually accepted this instead of fighting it, things would be a lot simpler.
Jupiter is undergoing nuclear fusion?! Amazing! You know, you should really take your evidence to the Nobel committee, since nobody else has any knowledge of this.
If you have a 1% clickthrough rate, you are the new King of All Media, and you should expect to have people beating down you door wanting to know how you do it. Clickthrough rates are more commonly about 1/20th of 1%. I work at an internet advertising firm, so I get to see these numbers fairly often. Sometimes they're higher, sometimes lower - it depends on the site, on the campaign, etc. - but 1% would be very high indeed.
You want to see real crud, I recommend Night Train to Mundo Fine, also known as Red Zone Cuba. I could not make heads or tails of the movie, nor did I care. There's a reason it scores 1.7 out of 10 at IMDB...
As a Trained Anthropologist (TM), let me comment briefly on this. I agree with you about humans being unusual animals, but if you look at us in the context of African savanna creatures, which is what we started as, we're not quite so unusual. What other furless mammals can you think of? Other than aquatic ones, which are a whole different matter, I can think of elephants, rhinos, hippos, naked mole rats...all tropical creatures. Our hairlessness is undoubtedly an adaptation to the heat. Our early African ancestors probably didn't have to worry that much about skin cancer, though, because on average they didn't live very long. We are actually very well-adapted to heat - we're furless (except on top of our heads, where the sun beats down most), we have sweat glands all over our bodies, and our brains are highly redundant, which gives them protection against thermal stress.
To step into the role of Slashdot-pedant for a moment: it's called limelight not because it's green, but because it used a block of lime (CaO) heated to white-hot. I suppose if you really pushed your power supply to the limit it might glow white...whether it would still be solid at that temperature is another matter.
You are correct with the 747 analogy, but it's worth noting that many search warrants are for "an XYZ or parts thereof". While this makes some kind of sense - it would be silly if a thief escaped detection simply because he disassembled something and hid it in boxes too small to contain the original thing - it also turns just about every search warrant into an unlimited fishing expedition. Hey, they might find a rivet from that 747 in that tiny box...
Sorry, I have to disagree. Most of your points are reasonably plausible, IMO, except for "Start negotiating with OEM so that it can be had as a pre-loaded option". Microsoft will squash that plan like a bug, I assure you. They have way more leverage over the OEMs than Apple does. Besides, all of the big OEMs are in bed with Microsoft already; how would you convince them that it's really worth jeopardizing their relationship with Microsoft in order to sell a platform that currently has something less than 10% of the market? I'm also not convinced about the utility of the Windows emulation layer. While it would be nice to have, the approach of "a better Windows than Windows" didn't work for IBM with OS/2, and I doubt it would be a compelling reason to buy Apple, either.
As far as "Apple would sell millions of copies of the OS" - even if they did, would that save Apple? I don't think Apple wants to be a pure software company, nor would that be good for them. "We just might be seeing Apple kill off Microsoft's dominance on the desktop." Hey, I don't like Microsoft either, and I'd love to see them take a hit, but let's try to stay in the real world. Microsoft is vastly bigger than Apple in every single way. They ain't goin' nowhere, at least not in the short term.
Until application developers start packaging dependencies together with their app, linux will not take over the mainstream mom and pop user market.
Here's my standard answer to that: who cares? Why do we want Linux to "take over the mainstream mom and pop user market"? Does Lamborghini argue that they should add an automatic transmission and an inline four-cylinder to the Murcielago so your mom can drive it to the post office? Different strokes for different folks, and the right tool for the job. Let Mom & Pop use the pointy-clicky stuff, and leave our low-level hacking alone, please. Besides which, if every application developer packages all the dependencies with their software, packages are going to get huge, and you're probably going to end up with multiple versions of a bunch of things on your system, because different packages dragged in different versions of the same dependency.
But of course! How else would they force you to buy all new accessories, like dock, battery, AC adapter, etc.? Don't you care about the poor starving IBM execs? (I'm half-joking - IBM is really not too bad that way.)
I'd like to approach your comments from another angle. Most of the people here seem to be programmers, which is understandable. Design documents aren't just for programmers, though; they can also be useful for sysadmins. As a sysadmin, "learning by looking over the shoulder" is useful, but I don't think it can or should be the primary method of knowledge transmission. For one thing, you may not have someone's shoulder to look over when you get paged at 2am! (Something you soft programmers sleeping comfortably in your beds never have to worry about! Pah!) For another, it can take a lot of looking over someone's shoulder to learn a complex system. A week or two? I think that would only work if the system is already logically consistent to a high degree...but that probably came from having a good design plan. (Or possibly from being trivially small.) It's also conceivable that everyone who worked on it before was a ninja who was extremely thoughtful and conscienscious in everything he did, but how many projects like that have you gotten to work on?
I agree that existing documentation is often not very good, but I see that as a failure of the document-writers, not of documentation in general. Documentation and plans are not easy to write, but they can serve as road maps and give form to the work that follows them.
Nitpick: Yes, what they're calling "warmth" is distortion, but it's not any old distortion. Tubes tend to compress waveforms; transistors clip them, making something more like a square wave. The mathematical effect of this is that tubes are effectively adding even-order harmonics and transistors are adding odd-order harmonics, IIRC. This is the difference you're hearing between, say, an original ProCo Rat and an old Marshall head.
Well, as the speed of the bicycle increases, its mass must also increase. However, the British have solved this problem by having parts fall off the bicycle as it accelerates, thereby keeping the mass a constant.
how to stop people from holding the doors? place a 2nd set of doors on the platform outside the train, a set which ppl will have to walk through in order to get on the train. This set would close around 10 seconds before the train doors - therefore, no point trying to hold them open.
I don't get how this is supposed to work. I guess if someone is only holding the outer doors, the inner doors can still close and the train can move (although that sounds a little dangerous, no?) But why can't someone just stick his arm through both sets of doors at once, since they'd have to be pretty close together? I think people here are seriously underestimating the determinedness of New Yorkers when it comes to holding up trains...
I always figured that the reason they make you swipe manually instead of having a DC-style card-eating machine was
a) reliability (fewer moving parts in NYC's system)
b) to remove the possibility of stupid people yelling at the token clerk "The machine ate my card! It still had $500 on it!" blah blah blah.
For my money, the worst feature of the Metrocard readers is that they only work properly when you swipe within a very narrow and surprisingly high speed range. So tourists swipe slowly, it doesn't work, and then they swipe MORE slowly. Then they stand there looking puzzled and swiping a thousand times, unable to understand why the machine won't take their very slow and distinct swipe. Seems to me like the MTA should have consulted a "human factors" engineer; he would have told them that people's natural inclination would be to swipe slower, not faster. Yeah, the MTA was probably planning on impatient New Yorkers and keeping people flowing, but it's a worse blockage when tourists hold up an entire turnstile.
Yeah, well, that was the problem. Pinball machines are physically complex and require a lot of routine maintenance - at least relative to video games, with nothing to clean beyond wiping down the front and no moving parts beyond a joystick and a few buttons. That's part of what mortally wounded pinball. No arcade operator wants to do that kind of work when he could get the same money for much less work with video machines. I play pinball now and then when I get a chance, but I hardly ever even see one these days.
Yes, this jibes with what I've heard too. Google for "Parmelee Sigman kitten" and you find references to a study in which kittens were blindfolded from birth to adulthood; when the blindfolds were removed, they were unable to see and never gained the ability to see, despite the fact that their eyes were physically normal - their brains simply weren't wired for it. Still, we've discovered that the adult brain is more plastic than we used to think, so I wouldn't totally rule out the possibility. They mention macular degeneration in the article, and this is a big one, since it's a major cause of blindness in the elderly (my grandmother and great-aunt were both legally blind in their old age because of it). Something that can fix that would help make living longer better, instead of just longer.
...during world war II, 40% of the soldiers in their first combat did not fire their weapon.
Oh dear. I hate to be so off-topic, but this figure is completely bogus. It comes from one unscientific "study" by one man (S.L.A. Marshall), nobody has ever been able to confirm it, and there are serious doubts about whether Marshall could even have done the research he claimed to have done.
I would disagree only slightly with you, because the difference between "communicating well enough to be understood" and fluency is huge in English. In my experience, even most foreigners who have been here many years still have a lot of "tells" in their language which prevent it from sounding like a native's, and in some cases are bad enough to inhibit understanding. English is, for a variety of historical reasons, chock-full of homonyms, near-homonyms, and idioms, which make it a bit tricky. I've been reading The Stories of English, and I would recommend it highly if you're a language geek, since it goes into a lot of detail about the origin of many English words.
The part I would agree with you about is our relatively forgiving syntax: No genders. Almost nothing in the way of case-marking. Very simple rules for agglutination, where it occurs. And for all that, we're relatively tolerant about word order. Our pronunciation is - I think - also relatively simple, if somewhat harsh. (The Russian-born grandfather of a friend of mine once said, "English is a dog's language! Everyone who speaks it barks like a dog!")
Actually, I sometimes wish English had a little more case-marking. Consider "Bob spoke to Jim about his job." Whose job? You can't tell from the sentence, because there's no marking on "his".
As to why "Fraulein" is neuter, you picked a bad example, because that is one of the very few German words for which there is actually an explanation: anything ending in -chen or -lein is neuter. (-chen and -lein are diminutive endings, for those of you who don't speak German.) Hence "das Maedchen", too.
But overall, yes, the gender situation drives me nuts too. To paraphrase Mark Twain, a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are masculine; nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes feminine; hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience neuter.
Oh, and it gets even worse. It's only der, die, das in the nominative case. In accusative, it's den, die, das, in dative, it's dem, der, dem, and in genitive it's des, der, des! Enough to make anybody tear their hair out.
Slashdot Mirror
What changes the rules of the game so dramatically is that humans and their resource usage aren't set in stone. 200 years ago whale oil was an important resource; today it's pretty much irrelevant. 100 years ago uranium was only a geological curiosity; today it's highly important. We don't know what will change in the future, but the only safe prediction is that things will continue to change. The assertion that the Earth "can't support this population" is a pretty strong one which needs some evidence, which we're not seeing.
There's a ton of infrastructure that wasn't built by the government, like the cell network, or the internet (yes, I know about ARPANET; the point is that virtually nothing we use today was built by the government), or even our food distribution systems - farmers, truck and train companies, wholesalers, supermarkets, etc. Besides, wifi has only been popular about five years; isn't it a little premature to declare that no one but the government can (or should) build out the infrastructure? If no one wants to build something, we should stop and ask ourselves why. People have an amazing way of making money off the strangest things, if it's possible, so if no one is, some circumspection might be called for. I agree with you about the privatization problem, but I think the answer to that is that people who are profiting from something should have had to risk their own money on it.
Besides, it's always dangerous for the government to decide what direction technology should go in - look at Japan, where the government pushed ISDN for a while, and MITI developed an early high-definition TV system, both of which turned out to be expensive flops. Some things are always going to be flops, but shouldn't people have to pay for flops on their own dime instead of making all of us risk our money?
There's a big difference between the examples you give and an out-and-out thief. None of those people or companies are committing outright fraud. They're charging more than you would like, apparently, but they're not doing so under false pretenses.
I sympathize with you, and I don't use IE either, but I have to take issue with one thing you said: "I have to go back and fuck up my code so that IE's stupid parser makes it look right." You shouldn't be worrying about how your page looks, beyond gross errors. You have no guarantees about how layout is going to work; you can't even guarantee that everyone will be looking at it in the same way (for example, blind people using screen-readers). Yeah, I know, it's very 1997 of me. But if people actually accepted this instead of fighting it, things would be a lot simpler.
Jupiter is undergoing nuclear fusion?! Amazing! You know, you should really take your evidence to the Nobel committee, since nobody else has any knowledge of this.
If you have a 1% clickthrough rate, you are the new King of All Media, and you should expect to have people beating down you door wanting to know how you do it. Clickthrough rates are more commonly about 1/20th of 1%. I work at an internet advertising firm, so I get to see these numbers fairly often. Sometimes they're higher, sometimes lower - it depends on the site, on the campaign, etc. - but 1% would be very high indeed.
You want to see real crud, I recommend Night Train to Mundo Fine, also known as Red Zone Cuba. I could not make heads or tails of the movie, nor did I care. There's a reason it scores 1.7 out of 10 at IMDB...
When I saw the headline, I said to myself, "I have to see what these look like."
I went and saw them.
"Yup, as dorky as ever."
Slightly more seriously, I think the real breakthrough will be when they start making ones that look like regular glasses.
As a Trained Anthropologist (TM), let me comment briefly on this. I agree with you about humans being unusual animals, but if you look at us in the context of African savanna creatures, which is what we started as, we're not quite so unusual. What other furless mammals can you think of? Other than aquatic ones, which are a whole different matter, I can think of elephants, rhinos, hippos, naked mole rats...all tropical creatures. Our hairlessness is undoubtedly an adaptation to the heat. Our early African ancestors probably didn't have to worry that much about skin cancer, though, because on average they didn't live very long. We are actually very well-adapted to heat - we're furless (except on top of our heads, where the sun beats down most), we have sweat glands all over our bodies, and our brains are highly redundant, which gives them protection against thermal stress.
To step into the role of Slashdot-pedant for a moment: it's called limelight not because it's green, but because it used a block of lime (CaO) heated to white-hot. I suppose if you really pushed your power supply to the limit it might glow white...whether it would still be solid at that temperature is another matter.
You are correct with the 747 analogy, but it's worth noting that many search warrants are for "an XYZ or parts thereof". While this makes some kind of sense - it would be silly if a thief escaped detection simply because he disassembled something and hid it in boxes too small to contain the original thing - it also turns just about every search warrant into an unlimited fishing expedition. Hey, they might find a rivet from that 747 in that tiny box...
As far as "Apple would sell millions of copies of the OS" - even if they did, would that save Apple? I don't think Apple wants to be a pure software company, nor would that be good for them.
"We just might be seeing Apple kill off Microsoft's dominance on the desktop." Hey, I don't like Microsoft either, and I'd love to see them take a hit, but let's try to stay in the real world. Microsoft is vastly bigger than Apple in every single way. They ain't goin' nowhere, at least not in the short term.
Here's my standard answer to that: who cares? Why do we want Linux to "take over the mainstream mom and pop user market"? Does Lamborghini argue that they should add an automatic transmission and an inline four-cylinder to the Murcielago so your mom can drive it to the post office? Different strokes for different folks, and the right tool for the job. Let Mom & Pop use the pointy-clicky stuff, and leave our low-level hacking alone, please. Besides which, if every application developer packages all the dependencies with their software, packages are going to get huge, and you're probably going to end up with multiple versions of a bunch of things on your system, because different packages dragged in different versions of the same dependency.
But of course! How else would they force you to buy all new accessories, like dock, battery, AC adapter, etc.? Don't you care about the poor starving IBM execs? (I'm half-joking - IBM is really not too bad that way.)
I agree that existing documentation is often not very good, but I see that as a failure of the document-writers, not of documentation in general. Documentation and plans are not easy to write, but they can serve as road maps and give form to the work that follows them.
Nitpick: Yes, what they're calling "warmth" is distortion, but it's not any old distortion. Tubes tend to compress waveforms; transistors clip them, making something more like a square wave. The mathematical effect of this is that tubes are effectively adding even-order harmonics and transistors are adding odd-order harmonics, IIRC. This is the difference you're hearing between, say, an original ProCo Rat and an old Marshall head.
Well, as the speed of the bicycle increases, its mass must also increase. However, the British have solved this problem by having parts fall off the bicycle as it accelerates, thereby keeping the mass a constant.
I don't get how this is supposed to work. I guess if someone is only holding the outer doors, the inner doors can still close and the train can move (although that sounds a little dangerous, no?) But why can't someone just stick his arm through both sets of doors at once, since they'd have to be pretty close together? I think people here are seriously underestimating the determinedness of New Yorkers when it comes to holding up trains...
a) reliability (fewer moving parts in NYC's system)
b) to remove the possibility of stupid people yelling at the token clerk "The machine ate my card! It still had $500 on it!" blah blah blah.
For my money, the worst feature of the Metrocard readers is that they only work properly when you swipe within a very narrow and surprisingly high speed range. So tourists swipe slowly, it doesn't work, and then they swipe MORE slowly. Then they stand there looking puzzled and swiping a thousand times, unable to understand why the machine won't take their very slow and distinct swipe. Seems to me like the MTA should have consulted a "human factors" engineer; he would have told them that people's natural inclination would be to swipe slower, not faster. Yeah, the MTA was probably planning on impatient New Yorkers and keeping people flowing, but it's a worse blockage when tourists hold up an entire turnstile.
Yeah, well, that was the problem. Pinball machines are physically complex and require a lot of routine maintenance - at least relative to video games, with nothing to clean beyond wiping down the front and no moving parts beyond a joystick and a few buttons. That's part of what mortally wounded pinball. No arcade operator wants to do that kind of work when he could get the same money for much less work with video machines. I play pinball now and then when I get a chance, but I hardly ever even see one these days.
Yes, this jibes with what I've heard too. Google for "Parmelee Sigman kitten" and you find references to a study in which kittens were blindfolded from birth to adulthood; when the blindfolds were removed, they were unable to see and never gained the ability to see, despite the fact that their eyes were physically normal - their brains simply weren't wired for it. Still, we've discovered that the adult brain is more plastic than we used to think, so I wouldn't totally rule out the possibility. They mention macular degeneration in the article, and this is a big one, since it's a major cause of blindness in the elderly (my grandmother and great-aunt were both legally blind in their old age because of it). Something that can fix that would help make living longer better, instead of just longer.
Pretty much. It does have some historical meaning, although most people are probably unaware of it. See DEADBEEF in the Jargon File.
Oh dear. I hate to be so off-topic, but this figure is completely bogus. It comes from one unscientific "study" by one man (S.L.A. Marshall), nobody has ever been able to confirm it, and there are serious doubts about whether Marshall could even have done the research he claimed to have done.
The part I would agree with you about is our relatively forgiving syntax: No genders. Almost nothing in the way of case-marking. Very simple rules for agglutination, where it occurs. And for all that, we're relatively tolerant about word order. Our pronunciation is - I think - also relatively simple, if somewhat harsh. (The Russian-born grandfather of a friend of mine once said, "English is a dog's language! Everyone who speaks it barks like a dog!")
Actually, I sometimes wish English had a little more case-marking. Consider "Bob spoke to Jim about his job." Whose job? You can't tell from the sentence, because there's no marking on "his".
But overall, yes, the gender situation drives me nuts too. To paraphrase Mark Twain, a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are masculine; nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes feminine; hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience neuter.
Oh, and it gets even worse. It's only der, die, das in the nominative case. In accusative, it's den, die, das, in dative, it's dem, der, dem, and in genitive it's des, der, des! Enough to make anybody tear their hair out.