A person could theoretically write one book, in one month, and make it big, living off the royalties for the rest of their life. Where is the logic and fairness in that ? Who cares whether they're good or not ? Who cares that we've had the Harry Potter empire shoved down our throats with advertising and propaganda ? A job is a job is a job, and should be paid fairly.
The lovely mess the U.S. has created for itself is a direct result of this total lack of equilibrium. When celebrities and bankers siphon all the money away into their little vaults (and/or exclusive real estate), the government has to inject more money at the bottom of the pyramid to keep things flowing.
Excessive personal wealth is no different from slavery. Everyone beneath a certain threshold is effectively shackled, but instead of having leather-clad gimps with whips, we have interest rates and inflation and rising taxes. At least a slave has the possibility of slaying their master. How the hell are you going to slay the status quo ?
Ooooh...nice rant.
Ok, let's assume that you are correct and that we have a 'lack of equilibrium'. Who gets to decide what the correct 'equilibrium' is? You? Me? The government? I'll agree to it if it is me, but not anybody else.
Nobody forces you or anybody else to read or watch Harry Potter. I happen to like the books, as do my kids, and so I pay the market rate and enjoy them. Ah...the market rate? And who get's to decide the market rate? We all do! Isn't that a neat system?
And further, there is nothing, absolutely nothing preventing you from doing the same. You write your own stories, sell them, and make as much as you can.
Gosh, it's as if there is an invisible hand that improves the good of the community while everybody tries to make as much money as possible. Someone should write about that.
Well, it's an amusing way to put it, but it is pretty accurate.
Door locks can be circumvented (picked, broken, go through window, etc), so it's silly to think that somehow its going to really prevent a thief from robbing you. However, it presents a barrier. A thief will take the path of least resistance, and if you have bigger locks on your door than your neighbor, they will rob your neighbor. No, I don't want a thief to rob my neighbor, but better them than me. Even better for the thief to be convinced to go to a different neighborhood.
The issue is that one-size-does-not-fit-all. If I have a cell phone, I pick my plan and look at my bill. My wife got a Blackberry, so we switched from X minutes a month plus per-meg data charges to unlimited data. It was easy, makes sense for our usage, and we're (relatively) happy.
The same thing has to happen with internet providers. I work from home a lot, and need (practically) unlimited internet. My parents don't. So, I should pay my amount, and my parents should pay a lesser amount. Not that hard folks
The big kicker is that there is very little competition. I have Cox internet; and it's pretty good. But, it's a little slow sometimes for me, and overkill for my parents. What we need is a more competitive market, so I can get what I need (FIOS!) and my parents can get DSL, but neither of those are available.
Bah. That produces either a question that can be answered with 'yes' or 'no' or a question that can be answered with a (relatively small) number.
Do you realize the resources that CAPTCHA breakers can throw at the problem? Pick a random number between 0 and 100, plus a smattering of words from the dictionary and you have a small chance of getting the answer right, say 1 in a 1000. Isn't that good enough for the spammer?
You have to consider the source of the questions. If the questions are human-generated, it's not economically feasible. Remember that they can train their CAPTCHA-defeating software by paying large numbers of people to supply the answers to CAPTCHAs.
If this is true, then all hope is lost. You cannot create a problem to keep out humans if the spammer can use (lowly paid) humans to solve it.
Make a gif of a question, along with a picture. So, the question would be along the lines of 'What color is the more common flower?' Along with a picture of the question, there is a picture of a lion in a field with flowers in it.
To really answer the question, the computer has to OCR the text, read and understand it, then interpret the picture and put the correct text into the box. It's an interesting and pretty hard problem.
The hard part for the web site developer is to make the questions sufficiently diverse that they are not susceptible to a dictionary attack. If a spam developer looking at the picture knows that the answer will always be a color or a number, then they can just have a list of numbers and colors to try.
The underlying problem is that we're running out of things that are easy for people but hard for computers. Most attempts to expand or 'improve' visual CAPTCHA at this point will cause more pain to humans than reduction in computer success.
So, let's change directions, and make the computer solve a different sort of problem. For example, a turing test of sorts, where the problem is to solve something that is difficult to parse programmatically, but relatively easy for a person to answer. Maybe the recent Turing test results are a good indication of what the questions should be. Multiple related questions would be an particularly interesting area; for example, ask related questions where pronouns are ambiguous (to a computer).
> The point isn't about energy, it's about carbon. I know that CO2 is a terribly low-energy > byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion, but that's the point - we want to get rid of the byproduct.
So plant a tree.
The problem with that is the much of the energy is tied up inconviently. Solve the cellose and lignin to fuel problem, and you will be rich. Lots of people working on it though.
Maybe a chemist can explain this to me. Is the Sabatier reaction exothermic or endothermic? If it is exothermic (as my quick internet surfing seems to indicate), then when you add an RWGS and electrolysis the produced water, it would seem that you have a perpetual motion (or perpetual energy) machine. See, for example, http://spot.colorado.edu/~meyertr/rwgs/rwgs.html for combining them.
Based on what I see, you have CO2, add H2, and end up with CH4, H20, and CO (which you discard), Then you electrolyze the water (giving you back the H2), and you end up with methane (which you sell) and O2. What's up with this? If you capture the CO, you can sequester the C, thus reducing greenhouse production. Perfect!
Seems like it's too good to be true, and would fail on thermodynamic grounds, not just economic ones.
You say it like it would be a bad thing. I believe those are likely exactly the things the person is talking about.
There are places with legal prostitution. Are there fewer prostitution cases? I would think so (though maybe there are more of other kinds of cases? Good question).
We have already legalized the drug alcohol. Why would legalizing marijuana be worse? I think it would be a huge improvement.
If the judge summarily dismissed them, would life improve or get worse?
There is nothing preventing a company from providing the service. But, since they are in the business of making money, they won't provide it.
The question is whether the government should provide it if business does not. There are precedents for this, namely rural electrification and telephone service. The government decided that the benefit to society outweighted the cost; there were definitely winners (rural people who got electricity for far less than it cost to install) and losers (the general populace who had to pay for it). I believe that the general consensus is that this was a good thing and the country is better off for it.
Is high speed internet this sort of service? That is, does the benefit to society of providing government (hence taxpayer funded) service outweigh the cost to everyone else, including the businesses that it would compete with? Many places are not going to get high speed internet for a long time unless the government does it. What company is going to provide internet service in poor neighborhoods when they cannot pay for it? Do we care if those people don't have high speed internet?
I'm on the fence on this one. A higher educated populace is good, so publicly funded schools and libraries are good IMHO, so access to the internet is good (yes, I know it's not always educational, but my son would have difficulty doing his homework without it). But it's not a service like electricity or clean water where society suffers when people don't have it (for example, they reduce communicable diseases).
But, I don't think that its legitimate to think that businesses solve all problems though. A business will provide a service where it is profitable and won't where it isn't. And that will leave a lot of people without the service.
If only. The way it actually works is that long before a court date is set the judge says "send me a brief" and each party has to write up their case. If you hand in a homework assignment the judge won't even read it. If you hand in nothing, the judge will consider it a default and you immediately lose.
Is this true if you are representing yourself? I would think that there is a thin line between 'homework assignment' and a very terse 'Here's the court case that says this is fair use'. Does it really need to be more than a page long?
Expelled was a truly horrible movie, but this is so blatant that I have to side with them. I hate it when I'm so conflicted and have agree with people I despise.
One of the things I like about some other games is group kicks. If someone is flying around and killing absolutely everybody with a knife, why shouldn't the players be able to take a vote and kick them off? If a sysadmin is able to monitor the kicks, then they will know about it and decide whether or not to ban the player.
I know, this does not prevent the hacks from occurring, especially with a new playername. But if the servers are stratified (i.e. you must be above level X to play on this server), it means that people who have reached higher levels don't hvae to deal with the hacks.
Actually, several things bothered me about the video. First, what is all the liquid on the camera? That doesn't seem right; I don't remember seeing anyting like that on a NASA launch.
Second, during the separation, at the very end of the video, it seemed to run into the main body. Was that intentional? it wouldn't seem so.
I read it. Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of it's conclusions, it does not support the contention that:
But the same reasoning applies to intelligent design, which has made great advances in understanding life at the biochemical level.
What are the great advances? Name one? That we don't understand the origins of the bacterial flagella (though we have some ideas, nothing conclusive yet). Well, we knew that. What is the advance to this knowledge that Behe provides? Nothing. He draws a conclusion based on our lack of knowledge of the origins, but offers nothing in terms of additional information about it's origins. I've got my copy right here. Please point to a page where he provides a explanation for the origins of the bacterial flagellum. When, for example, was it designed? What was designed?
The response by ID'ers about such requests for information consists of the following: "We don't provide explanations." No, really, they claim that they don't have to, because their pet theory wins because evolution fails. And evolution (in their opinion) fails because it cannot provide a step by step explanation, along with probabilities of new mutations, their selelctive advantages, and the names of the individuals involved. And so, ID'ers don't feel the need to do any research on their ideas, because they think they win by default while they keep their fingers in their ears claming 'That's not enough, I win!'
Intelligent design has not provided anything of scientific value. Please, please provide something if there is anything. It is a wholly negative philosophical stance.
This is commonly called 'Last Tuesdayism'. Don't be fooled by the to-be-burned-in-hell-forever followers of Last Thursdayism, as their religion is an abomination.
One of the great things about Portal was that when you got the idea right, it worked, even if you are a klutz when it comes to the controls. If I had to absolutely hit the portal correctly, then it would have taken forever and been much less fun. Adding in a 'funnel' capability means that if you're close, then you make it. It also means that my 7 year old can play (well, the non-death levels anyway)
This should be added to LittleBigPlanet as an option I think. it doesn't need to be heavy handed, just a auto-align or magnetic area. If you have to jump and grab onto a swinging rope, then if you get 'close' (for some definition of close), then you grab it.
So we merely need to kill every communist sympathizer before they achieve any kind of power ? Great.
No, don't you read? You just have to kill the leader.
Baloney.
'Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years', thirty years', ten years' time, the world will be very nearly back on it's old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.'
- Terry Pratchett, 'Lords and Ladies'
You have to get to the reason for the communism / fascism / fanaticism or someone else will pop up.
There isn't a unified position about muslims on Slashdot. You can post whatever you want, and people read it.
There isn't a unified position by muslims either. There isn't a single central governing person or body, a la Catholicism. So, you have lots of local leaders, a number of which are nuts. You can't legitimately lump all the followers of a religion with the nuts, especially if the majority of them don't agree with the nuts.
Good heavens; that's nuts. The response to this would be a missile aimed at the elevator. What would _that_ do? I know, you probably think that the defense systems would be enough to protect it, but if you throw enough crap at a target, eventually you will overwhelm the defenses.
Militarizing this thing would be the worst idea possible.
It should not be that hard to do a simulation to determine what the effect would be in 10,000 years. You have a planet of a particular size / shape, density, rotation speed, etc. and you add a weight to it on one side. What happens in 10,000 years? We have simulations of the Earth's core already, we have simulations of the sun's circulation, doing this should not be too hard.
Also, the obvious answer is to have another one on the other side of the planet to offset it.
Slashdot Mirror
A person could theoretically write one book, in one month, and make it big, living off the royalties for the rest of their life. Where is the logic and fairness in that ? Who cares whether they're good or not ? Who cares that we've had the Harry Potter empire shoved down our throats with advertising and propaganda ? A job is a job is a job, and should be paid fairly.
The lovely mess the U.S. has created for itself is a direct result of this total lack of equilibrium. When celebrities and bankers siphon all the money away into their little vaults (and/or exclusive real estate), the government has to inject more money at the bottom of the pyramid to keep things flowing.
Excessive personal wealth is no different from slavery. Everyone beneath a certain threshold is effectively shackled, but instead of having leather-clad gimps with whips, we have interest rates and inflation and rising taxes. At least a slave has the possibility of slaying their master. How the hell are you going to slay the status quo ?
Ooooh...nice rant.
Ok, let's assume that you are correct and that we have a 'lack of equilibrium'. Who gets to decide what the correct 'equilibrium' is? You? Me? The government? I'll agree to it if it is me, but not anybody else.
Nobody forces you or anybody else to read or watch Harry Potter. I happen to like the books, as do my kids, and so I pay the market rate and enjoy them. Ah...the market rate? And who get's to decide the market rate? We all do! Isn't that a neat system?
And further, there is nothing, absolutely nothing preventing you from doing the same. You write your own stories, sell them, and make as much as you can.
Gosh, it's as if there is an invisible hand that improves the good of the community while everybody tries to make as much money as possible. Someone should write about that.
Well, it's an amusing way to put it, but it is pretty accurate.
Door locks can be circumvented (picked, broken, go through window, etc), so it's silly to think that somehow its going to really prevent a thief from robbing you. However, it presents a barrier. A thief will take the path of least resistance, and if you have bigger locks on your door than your neighbor, they will rob your neighbor. No, I don't want a thief to rob my neighbor, but better them than me. Even better for the thief to be convinced to go to a different neighborhood.
The issue is that one-size-does-not-fit-all. If I have a cell phone, I pick my plan and look at my bill. My wife got a Blackberry, so we switched from X minutes a month plus per-meg data charges to unlimited data. It was easy, makes sense for our usage, and we're (relatively) happy.
The same thing has to happen with internet providers. I work from home a lot, and need (practically) unlimited internet. My parents don't. So, I should pay my amount, and my parents should pay a lesser amount. Not that hard folks
The big kicker is that there is very little competition. I have Cox internet; and it's pretty good. But, it's a little slow sometimes for me, and overkill for my parents. What we need is a more competitive market, so I can get what I need (FIOS!) and my parents can get DSL, but neither of those are available.
A computer saying 'left' is correct 50% of the time. And a spammer can try lots and lots of times.
Bah. That produces either a question that can be answered with 'yes' or 'no' or a question that can be answered with a (relatively small) number.
Do you realize the resources that CAPTCHA breakers can throw at the problem? Pick a random number between 0 and 100, plus a smattering of words from the dictionary and you have a small chance of getting the answer right, say 1 in a 1000. Isn't that good enough for the spammer?
What is the correct protocol to solve this problem?
Does everybody need to get their own public key and be verified by a trusted source?
Add in that the text doesn't appear as text but as a gif of text. So, the software has to combine lots of pictures to make the text, then OCR it.
You have to consider the source of the questions. If the questions are human-generated, it's not economically feasible. Remember that they can train their CAPTCHA-defeating software by paying large numbers of people to supply the answers to CAPTCHAs.
If this is true, then all hope is lost. You cannot create a problem to keep out humans if the spammer can use (lowly paid) humans to solve it.
Ah, this is brilliant!!
Make a gif of a question, along with a picture. So, the question would be along the lines of 'What color is the more common flower?' Along with a picture of the question, there is a picture of a lion in a field with flowers in it.
To really answer the question, the computer has to OCR the text, read and understand it, then interpret the picture and put the correct text into the box. It's an interesting and pretty hard problem.
The hard part for the web site developer is to make the questions sufficiently diverse that they are not susceptible to a dictionary attack. If a spam developer looking at the picture knows that the answer will always be a color or a number, then they can just have a list of numbers and colors to try.
Ah...reminds me of one of my favorite t-shirts:
http://www.tshirthell.com/funny-shirts/fuck-the-colorblind/
The underlying problem is that we're running out of things that are easy for people but hard for computers. Most attempts to expand or 'improve' visual CAPTCHA at this point will cause more pain to humans than reduction in computer success.
So, let's change directions, and make the computer solve a different sort of problem. For example, a turing test of sorts, where the problem is to solve something that is difficult to parse programmatically, but relatively easy for a person to answer. Maybe the recent Turing test results are a good indication of what the questions should be. Multiple related questions would be an particularly interesting area; for example, ask related questions where pronouns are ambiguous (to a computer).
> The point isn't about energy, it's about carbon. I know that CO2 is a terribly low-energy
> byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion, but that's the point - we want to get rid of the byproduct.
So plant a tree.
The problem with that is the much of the energy is tied up inconviently. Solve the cellose and lignin to fuel problem, and you will be rich. Lots of people working on it though.
Maybe a chemist can explain this to me. Is the Sabatier reaction exothermic or endothermic? If it is exothermic (as my quick internet surfing seems to indicate), then when you add an RWGS and electrolysis the produced water, it would seem that you have a perpetual motion (or perpetual energy) machine. See, for example, http://spot.colorado.edu/~meyertr/rwgs/rwgs.html for combining them.
Based on what I see, you have CO2, add H2, and end up with CH4, H20, and CO (which you discard), Then you electrolyze the water (giving you back the H2), and you end up with methane (which you sell) and O2. What's up with this? If you capture the CO, you can sequester the C, thus reducing greenhouse production. Perfect!
Seems like it's too good to be true, and would fail on thermodynamic grounds, not just economic ones.
You say it like it would be a bad thing. I believe those are likely exactly the things the person is talking about.
There are places with legal prostitution. Are there fewer prostitution cases? I would think so (though maybe there are more of other kinds of cases? Good question).
We have already legalized the drug alcohol. Why would legalizing marijuana be worse? I think it would be a huge improvement.
If the judge summarily dismissed them, would life improve or get worse?
There is nothing preventing a company from providing the service. But, since they are in the business of making money, they won't provide it.
The question is whether the government should provide it if business does not. There are precedents for this, namely rural electrification and telephone service. The government decided that the benefit to society outweighted the cost; there were definitely winners (rural people who got electricity for far less than it cost to install) and losers (the general populace who had to pay for it). I believe that the general consensus is that this was a good thing and the country is better off for it.
Is high speed internet this sort of service? That is, does the benefit to society of providing government (hence taxpayer funded) service outweigh the cost to everyone else, including the businesses that it would compete with? Many places are not going to get high speed internet for a long time unless the government does it. What company is going to provide internet service in poor neighborhoods when they cannot pay for it? Do we care if those people don't have high speed internet?
I'm on the fence on this one. A higher educated populace is good, so publicly funded schools and libraries are good IMHO, so access to the internet is good (yes, I know it's not always educational, but my son would have difficulty doing his homework without it). But it's not a service like electricity or clean water where society suffers when people don't have it (for example, they reduce communicable diseases).
But, I don't think that its legitimate to think that businesses solve all problems though. A business will provide a service where it is profitable and won't where it isn't. And that will leave a lot of people without the service.
If only. The way it actually works is that long before a court date is set the judge says "send me a brief" and each party has to write up their case. If you hand in a homework assignment the judge won't even read it. If you hand in nothing, the judge will consider it a default and you immediately lose.
Is this true if you are representing yourself? I would think that there is a thin line between 'homework assignment' and a very terse 'Here's the court case that says this is fair use'. Does it really need to be more than a page long?
Expelled was a truly horrible movie, but this is so blatant that I have to side with them. I hate it when I'm so conflicted and have agree with people I despise.
One of the things I like about some other games is group kicks. If someone is flying around and killing absolutely everybody with a knife, why shouldn't the players be able to take a vote and kick them off? If a sysadmin is able to monitor the kicks, then they will know about it and decide whether or not to ban the player.
I know, this does not prevent the hacks from occurring, especially with a new playername. But if the servers are stratified (i.e. you must be above level X to play on this server), it means that people who have reached higher levels don't hvae to deal with the hacks.
Actually, several things bothered me about the video. First, what is all the liquid on the camera? That doesn't seem right; I don't remember seeing anyting like that on a NASA launch.
Second, during the separation, at the very end of the video, it seemed to run into the main body. Was that intentional? it wouldn't seem so.
See http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=13 at the end.
I read it. Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of it's conclusions, it does not support the contention that:
But the same reasoning applies to intelligent design, which has made great advances in understanding life at the biochemical level.
What are the great advances? Name one? That we don't understand the origins of the bacterial flagella (though we have some ideas, nothing conclusive yet). Well, we knew that. What is the advance to this knowledge that Behe provides? Nothing. He draws a conclusion based on our lack of knowledge of the origins, but offers nothing in terms of additional information about it's origins. I've got my copy right here. Please point to a page where he provides a explanation for the origins of the bacterial flagellum. When, for example, was it designed? What was designed?
The response by ID'ers about such requests for information consists of the following: "We don't provide explanations." No, really, they claim that they don't have to, because their pet theory wins because evolution fails. And evolution (in their opinion) fails because it cannot provide a step by step explanation, along with probabilities of new mutations, their selelctive advantages, and the names of the individuals involved. And so, ID'ers don't feel the need to do any research on their ideas, because they think they win by default while they keep their fingers in their ears claming 'That's not enough, I win!'
Intelligent design has not provided anything of scientific value. Please, please provide something if there is anything. It is a wholly negative philosophical stance.
This is commonly called 'Last Tuesdayism'. Don't be fooled by the to-be-burned-in-hell-forever followers of Last Thursdayism, as their religion is an abomination.
Ask them how the flood just happened to order all the fossil pollens in the right order, and didn't mix them all together.
Oh, they didn't think about that, did they?
Agreed.
One of the great things about Portal was that when you got the idea right, it worked, even if you are a klutz when it comes to the controls. If I had to absolutely hit the portal correctly, then it would have taken forever and been much less fun. Adding in a 'funnel' capability means that if you're close, then you make it. It also means that my 7 year old can play (well, the non-death levels anyway)
This should be added to LittleBigPlanet as an option I think. it doesn't need to be heavy handed, just a auto-align or magnetic area. If you have to jump and grab onto a swinging rope, then if you get 'close' (for some definition of close), then you grab it.
So we merely need to kill every communist sympathizer before they achieve any kind of power ? Great.
No, don't you read? You just have to kill the leader.
Baloney.
'Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years', thirty years', ten years' time, the world will be very nearly back on it's old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.'
- Terry Pratchett, 'Lords and Ladies'
You have to get to the reason for the communism / fascism / fanaticism or someone else will pop up.
Boy, talk about over-generalization.
There isn't a unified position about muslims on Slashdot. You can post whatever you want, and people read it.
There isn't a unified position by muslims either. There isn't a single central governing person or body, a la Catholicism. So, you have lots of local leaders, a number of which are nuts. You can't legitimately lump all the followers of a religion with the nuts, especially if the majority of them don't agree with the nuts.
Good heavens; that's nuts. The response to this would be a missile aimed at the elevator. What would _that_ do? I know, you probably think that the defense systems would be enough to protect it, but if you throw enough crap at a target, eventually you will overwhelm the defenses.
Militarizing this thing would be the worst idea possible.
It should not be that hard to do a simulation to determine what the effect would be in 10,000 years. You have a planet of a particular size / shape, density, rotation speed, etc. and you add a weight to it on one side. What happens in 10,000 years? We have simulations of the Earth's core already, we have simulations of the sun's circulation, doing this should not be too hard.
Also, the obvious answer is to have another one on the other side of the planet to offset it.