" when in reality it is legislators that legislate that such tools must be used to control the population in the first place?"
In other news, using an army to stop an invasion is futile; because armies are what invade in the first place!
'Legislators' aren't some sort of global hive mind. The theory is that legislators in jurisdiction A would take action to prevent companies in jurisdiction A from aiding legislators in jurisdiction B from oppressing jurisdiction B. Since, as you say, the private sector is (or at least enough of it is that you can usually get what you want) amoral and mercenary, the only check on mercenaries in jurisdiction A would be either the total impoverishment of jurisdiction B, which would leave them unable to buy weapons, or coercive legislative pressure.
In practice, the likelihood of this actually happening has more to do with perceived national interest than any fancy talk about human rights. We are currently rooting for Syria's collapse, so some amount of legal pressure against those who assist Syria is quite likely(in the US, Russia the reverse). Bahrain, by contrast, is our bestest ever US Navy Fifth Fleet buddy, so it is exceedingly unlikely that anything more than cosmetic expressions of displeasure are to be expected.
I wonder if they would have simply sat on them for a year, like they did with the NSA wiretapping matter just because the feds asked them to?
At this point, "Why didn't he leak to the Times?" is only slightly less risible than "Why didn't he just register his concerns with the chain of command?"
I tend to think of fiat currencies as being on the 'lead standard', with their reality largely measured by how many guys with guns are available to uphold them. USD, among others, passes the test.
Just as icing on the cake, Silver's needling managed to elicit a truly adorable public letter where, after some sputtering about 'changes' and 'continuing to evaluate methods' and suchlike, gets down to business and Accuses Silver(not by name, that'd be admitting it; but just those people who aggregate other people's polls, y'know, as an anonymous general class, of course) as free riders who will destroy the vital(Umm... Srsly?) business of polling and bring down the tragedy of the commons upon the beleaguered industry..
You toss that off glibly but there is evidence that the amount of plankton in the oceans has dropped considerably since the 1950's.
That was my intended joke: Soylent green is ostensibly made from 'the plankton of the oceans of the world'; but it actually isn't because the oceans are dying and there isn't actually enough plankton. Hence being made from people instead.
Unless you have some mysterious reason for insisting that the control electronics duplicate, rather than supplement, the ridiculously powerful, RAM-heavy, and massively-mass-storaged computer that you can buy for $200 and use for all kinds of neat stuff, is there a problem with AVRs?
If you are doing a circuit design(or even just downloading one from somebody who did) you presumably own a computer massively more powerful than any microcontroller or embedded system(not counting 'embedded' systems that are server gear with extended temperature ratings put in the same box as the device being controlled) ever made. That PC won't have many PWM outputs, and any DACs and ADCs it has will probably be horribly tweaked in favor of pleasing sound, since they'll be on the sound card; but it will otherwise have ridiculous power to spare.
Microcontrollers make excellent complements, since they have pitiful computational and RAM specs; but tend to be well supplied with PWMs and ADCs. Why reinvent the PC as part of the machine?
I think Silver stands out because unlike too many modern American politicians, he is interested in the facts, and not what bullshit he can use the data to support.
So it's not so much that he's done a fantastic job figuring all this out, it's just that he's fucking honest about the results unlike a certain perpetually-deluded political party I'm sick of naming.
Arguably, it isn't really politicians who he differs from most meaningfully. Sure, there are a lot of politicians living in absurd contrafactual fantasy worlds; but that is(unfortunately) mostly a product of the fact that they are acting as representatives of people who do exactly the same thing... Pandering is a nonfactual enterprise in the sense that it may involve telling people the most insane lies, if that is what they want from you; but it is an eminently empirical exercise in the sense that you must constantly strive to better understand what people want to hear, so that you can better pander to them.
Where Silver, and his data-driven compatriots, really differ from the traditional is with the 'pundit' class. Pundits are selected pretty much entirely for their ability to tell emotionally compelling stories, with minimal reference to data, and provide marketable column inches and cable news minutes. The better ones, to their credit, are masterful in engaging audience emotions, weaving stories, and other affectively gripping flimflam. However, they tend to be somewhere between extraordinarily weak and overtly hostile to the idea that 'data' rather than 'feelings' can actually provide excellent information about the world, particularly if you use this crazy 'math' stuff that the nerds are always going on about.
Pundits make good TV(and, very conveniently, can offer viewers everything from lowbrow talk radio shouting matches to middlebrow 'public intellectual' posturing with little more than a change in tone and presence or absence of a thesaurus, unlike stat-heads who pretty fundamentally lean on nontrival math); but the kind of suck compared to statistical models.
The 'other source' part is a distinct aspect of the claim(since the whole point is that, like QR codes, the only direct communication is the URI, with the cell data connection handling the rest); but it's not as though emailing somebody a link, or using an HTTP 3XX redirect, over a modem is terribly new...
From a patentability perspective it would matter, except that it is no more novel, interesting, or non-obvious than the rest of the patent...
...marketers won't use this to hijack my phone anywhere they can get hold of a speaker.
Destroying one's ability to hear high-pitched sounds is going to become a popular elective surgery once every public space has a background of marketing bullshit URIs encoded in ghastly modem warble...
No, no, no! He said 'encode' and 'decode' rather than 'modulate' and 'demodulate', which makes this totally different. Plus, we all know that the patentability of an otherwise ridiculous claim can be magically restored by the addition of 'over the internet' or 'on a cellphone'. This patent includes both!
I suspect that(unlike TV remotes old enough to use near-ultrasonic signalling) this method could keep throwing checksums and similar at the problem until false-positives were reduced to only slightly more likely than having cosmic ray corruption 'send' the same URL by corrupting the right area of memory.
That would do considerably less to deal with interference cutting the effective data rate to zero, or nearly zero, from time to time(which would then require adding some sort of ACK to the process, or a lot of just-in-case re-transmission(though, I suppose the phone could listen for interfering background noise and adapt its re-transmission levels and volume to the expected noise, that might help)) And it would do absolutely nothing against deliberately-crafted-but-unwanted signals, of course.
I can understand that there will be people who do SEO, just as their are people who do spamming, send junk mail, and phone scams aimed at vulnerable old people.
What I don't understand is how these people function within broader society? Do they lie about what they do? Do they hang out mostly with others of their kind? Are real people too cowardly to shun and loath them?
Man, it makes me sick that people haven't taken the obvious step of giving the intricate metal layers and zones of dopant concentration on a silicon wafer the same modularity as 3.5 inch HDDs with hot-swap connectors... Scientists are so lazy.
Heck, why do we get worked up about integrated circuits at all? I saw Bell Labs demonstrate the same concept with discrete transistors before 1950, and they were basically just ripping off vacuum tubes...
The really annoying thing with leap seconds is that they aren't deterministic. DST and leap years are annoying complications; but a totally closed box, if enough extra complexity is (correctly) thrown at its timekeeping can handle them. Leap seconds, by contrast, are added when the apparent time derived from astronomical observations drifts too far from TAI. A closed-box system cannot predict when they will occur.
What is rather annoying is that GPS time is UTC without leap seconds; but(for some reason) is different than TAI, which is also UTC without leap seconds.
Apparently, according to TFA this was made explicit contractually for Harvard faculty that they enjoyed greater freedom from intrusion than this,(and more generally, in the traditions of academia) Faculty, tenured ones doubly so, are treated as a very special flavor of employee, one whose independence, so much as it can be preserved while still getting them to show up for scheduled classes and not perv out on undergrads, is considered to be one of their major valuable features.
It's one of the curious tensions of academic structures: the students are 'customers'; but part of the 'product' can consist of giving them what they don't want(shitty grades, failing them for academic misconduct); faculty are 'employees'; but part of the value of a really good and prestigious faculty is the appearance(and ideally the reality) that, while the university signs paychecks and schedules classes and other administrative work, the faculty are free to pursue their research and teaching, and new faculty are 'peer reviewed' through the tenure process, rather than being hirelings beholden to HR.
Africa may bypass building up the kind of infrastructure we have in the western world and go straight to a wireless world with local solar power to charge their devices.
Unless Africa loves high latency and low bandwidth, I'd say that they are missing out...
The contemporary value of, say, the US' massive amounts of copper POTS lines would probably be greater if all that copper were already at the scrapyard(and the owner of all that copper were also at the scrapyard, rather than in a position to extract rents into the forseeable future...); but the laws of physics rather ruthlessly consign wireless to the position of 'convenient, for light duty; but inferior' compared to wired links of similar tech level.
It might still be somewhat interesting if its simplicity turns out to make it controllable. Given that you can get a Nook Touch or Kindle and have a wifi-connected Linux device for not all that much, trying to ram actual intelligence into the confines of this thing would make sense only as an embedded hacker exercise.
If, however, in the quest to make it cheap, they ended up offloading enough intelligence to the companion app, it might be possible to re-use the device as a sort of bluetooth connected screen for a more powerful device capable of generating bitmaps and shoving them to it over bluetooth.
Given that e-ink displays are a bit weird to drive, and not terribly common in the small-quantity parts market (compared to, say, Nokia 5110 LCD clones if you need pixels, or HD44780-compatible 16x2 or 20x4s if you need characters) , having that all wrapped up nice and neat behind a bluetooth interface could be pretty handy, if not brutally obfuscated and/or crippled.
The greater inconvenience with Li-ion is their tendency to die quite permanently with a relatively short window. Unless your device is quite popular, popular enough that new aftermarket batteries are still produced(since new-in-box or used ones will be nearly as dead as what you are trying to replace), anything with a weird-shaped Li-ion has maybe 2-3 years of getting near-new battery life, another 1-2, if things go well, of adequacy, and then becomes AC-adapter powered.
Had it actually allowed them to hit their price point, it would have been a lot less nuts. As it is, I'm not sure why they are even bothering to ship(maybe they had some already in the warehouse?)
More generally, it sounds like their plan was part sensible, part gamble: The sensible part is that, by requiring the companion device, they did get to cut the cost and power consumption(runs off a AA or two, less demanding CPU/RAM, no wifi, etc.) The gamble: that telcos would take the 'bluetooth only, requires smartphone' restriction as a virtue and subsidize the price further. Without that, the device still has a few technical advantages; but is only slightly cheaper than a full ebook device, and without the economies of scale that the incumbents get.
It's so hard to evaluate tablets looking at specs. it's such an intimate experience that the only way to buy is one is by trying them out, preferably for an extended period (borrow from friends?).
It's only hard to evaluate looking at specs if the specs don't automatically doom the product:
In this case, they do. In order to hit their BoM target, they had to cut this thing to the bone, to the point where it doesn't actually handle parsing the epub/pdf/whatever onboard; but depends on a companion application to load it with pre-rendered page images(up to 5 whole books can be stored!!!!). So, no text resize, no reflow, no nothing except page turning unless you go back to your phone and reload over bluetooth.
Slashdot Mirror
" when in reality it is legislators that legislate that such tools must be used to control the population in the first place?"
In other news, using an army to stop an invasion is futile; because armies are what invade in the first place!
'Legislators' aren't some sort of global hive mind. The theory is that legislators in jurisdiction A would take action to prevent companies in jurisdiction A from aiding legislators in jurisdiction B from oppressing jurisdiction B. Since, as you say, the private sector is (or at least enough of it is that you can usually get what you want) amoral and mercenary, the only check on mercenaries in jurisdiction A would be either the total impoverishment of jurisdiction B, which would leave them unable to buy weapons, or coercive legislative pressure.
In practice, the likelihood of this actually happening has more to do with perceived national interest than any fancy talk about human rights. We are currently rooting for Syria's collapse, so some amount of legal pressure against those who assist Syria is quite likely(in the US, Russia the reverse). Bahrain, by contrast, is our bestest ever US Navy Fifth Fleet buddy, so it is exceedingly unlikely that anything more than cosmetic expressions of displeasure are to be expected.
I wonder if they would have simply sat on them for a year, like they did with the NSA wiretapping matter just because the feds asked them to?
At this point, "Why didn't he leak to the Times?" is only slightly less risible than "Why didn't he just register his concerns with the chain of command?"
I tend to think of fiat currencies as being on the 'lead standard', with their reality largely measured by how many guys with guns are available to uphold them. USD, among others, passes the test.
Just as icing on the cake, Silver's needling managed to elicit a truly adorable public letter where, after some sputtering about 'changes' and 'continuing to evaluate methods' and suchlike, gets down to business and Accuses Silver(not by name, that'd be admitting it; but just those people who aggregate other people's polls, y'know, as an anonymous general class, of course) as free riders who will destroy the vital(Umm... Srsly?) business of polling and bring down the tragedy of the commons upon the beleaguered industry..
Why achieve 'consensus' when we could let the fork fester, and have two virtual currencies floating wildly against one another as well as USD?
In fact, why not introduce Bitcoin-0 through Bitcoint-Aleph and let them fight it out? I'll bring popcorn!
You toss that off glibly but there is evidence that the amount of plankton in the oceans has dropped considerably since the 1950's.
That was my intended joke: Soylent green is ostensibly made from 'the plankton of the oceans of the world'; but it actually isn't because the oceans are dying and there isn't actually enough plankton. Hence being made from people instead.
Unless you have some mysterious reason for insisting that the control electronics duplicate, rather than supplement, the ridiculously powerful, RAM-heavy, and massively-mass-storaged computer that you can buy for $200 and use for all kinds of neat stuff, is there a problem with AVRs?
If you are doing a circuit design(or even just downloading one from somebody who did) you presumably own a computer massively more powerful than any microcontroller or embedded system(not counting 'embedded' systems that are server gear with extended temperature ratings put in the same box as the device being controlled) ever made. That PC won't have many PWM outputs, and any DACs and ADCs it has will probably be horribly tweaked in favor of pleasing sound, since they'll be on the sound card; but it will otherwise have ridiculous power to spare.
Microcontrollers make excellent complements, since they have pitiful computational and RAM specs; but tend to be well supplied with PWMs and ADCs. Why reinvent the PC as part of the machine?
I think Silver stands out because unlike too many modern American politicians, he is interested in the facts, and not what bullshit he can use the data to support.
So it's not so much that he's done a fantastic job figuring all this out, it's just that he's fucking honest about the results unlike a certain perpetually-deluded political party I'm sick of naming.
Arguably, it isn't really politicians who he differs from most meaningfully. Sure, there are a lot of politicians living in absurd contrafactual fantasy worlds; but that is(unfortunately) mostly a product of the fact that they are acting as representatives of people who do exactly the same thing... Pandering is a nonfactual enterprise in the sense that it may involve telling people the most insane lies, if that is what they want from you; but it is an eminently empirical exercise in the sense that you must constantly strive to better understand what people want to hear, so that you can better pander to them.
Where Silver, and his data-driven compatriots, really differ from the traditional is with the 'pundit' class. Pundits are selected pretty much entirely for their ability to tell emotionally compelling stories, with minimal reference to data, and provide marketable column inches and cable news minutes. The better ones, to their credit, are masterful in engaging audience emotions, weaving stories, and other affectively gripping flimflam. However, they tend to be somewhere between extraordinarily weak and overtly hostile to the idea that 'data' rather than 'feelings' can actually provide excellent information about the world, particularly if you use this crazy 'math' stuff that the nerds are always going on about.
Pundits make good TV(and, very conveniently, can offer viewers everything from lowbrow talk radio shouting matches to middlebrow 'public intellectual' posturing with little more than a change in tone and presence or absence of a thesaurus, unlike stat-heads who pretty fundamentally lean on nontrival math); but the kind of suck compared to statistical models.
The 'other source' part is a distinct aspect of the claim(since the whole point is that, like QR codes, the only direct communication is the URI, with the cell data connection handling the rest); but it's not as though emailing somebody a link, or using an HTTP 3XX redirect, over a modem is terribly new...
From a patentability perspective it would matter, except that it is no more novel, interesting, or non-obvious than the rest of the patent...
...marketers won't use this to hijack my phone anywhere they can get hold of a speaker.
Destroying one's ability to hear high-pitched sounds is going to become a popular elective surgery once every public space has a background of marketing bullshit URIs encoded in ghastly modem warble...
Jeff just patented the 300 baud modem.
No, no, no! He said 'encode' and 'decode' rather than 'modulate' and 'demodulate', which makes this totally different. Plus, we all know that the patentability of an otherwise ridiculous claim can be magically restored by the addition of 'over the internet' or 'on a cellphone'. This patent includes both!
I suspect that(unlike TV remotes old enough to use near-ultrasonic signalling) this method could keep throwing checksums and similar at the problem until false-positives were reduced to only slightly more likely than having cosmic ray corruption 'send' the same URL by corrupting the right area of memory.
That would do considerably less to deal with interference cutting the effective data rate to zero, or nearly zero, from time to time(which would then require adding some sort of ACK to the process, or a lot of just-in-case re-transmission(though, I suppose the phone could listen for interfering background noise and adapt its re-transmission levels and volume to the expected noise, that might help)) And it would do absolutely nothing against deliberately-crafted-but-unwanted signals, of course.
I can understand that there will be people who do SEO, just as their are people who do spamming, send junk mail, and phone scams aimed at vulnerable old people.
What I don't understand is how these people function within broader society? Do they lie about what they do? Do they hang out mostly with others of their kind? Are real people too cowardly to shun and loath them?
SEO - Search Engine Optimization.
With this particular acronym, expanding it doesn't decrease the hatred much...
Man, it makes me sick that people haven't taken the obvious step of giving the intricate metal layers and zones of dopant concentration on a silicon wafer the same modularity as 3.5 inch HDDs with hot-swap connectors... Scientists are so lazy.
Heck, why do we get worked up about integrated circuits at all? I saw Bell Labs demonstrate the same concept with discrete transistors before 1950, and they were basically just ripping off vacuum tubes...
The really annoying thing with leap seconds is that they aren't deterministic. DST and leap years are annoying complications; but a totally closed box, if enough extra complexity is (correctly) thrown at its timekeeping can handle them. Leap seconds, by contrast, are added when the apparent time derived from astronomical observations drifts too far from TAI. A closed-box system cannot predict when they will occur.
Thankfully we always have the plankton from the oceans of the world to fall back on. That stuff is tasty.
what's not to like then?
America is truly God's chosen country :P
The trouble is, if 'north' moves any further north, we are going to have to go and liberate Snow Mexico...
What is rather annoying is that GPS time is UTC without leap seconds; but(for some reason) is different than TAI, which is also UTC without leap seconds.
Apparently, according to TFA this was made explicit contractually for Harvard faculty that they enjoyed greater freedom from intrusion than this,(and more generally, in the traditions of academia) Faculty, tenured ones doubly so, are treated as a very special flavor of employee, one whose independence, so much as it can be preserved while still getting them to show up for scheduled classes and not perv out on undergrads, is considered to be one of their major valuable features.
It's one of the curious tensions of academic structures: the students are 'customers'; but part of the 'product' can consist of giving them what they don't want(shitty grades, failing them for academic misconduct); faculty are 'employees'; but part of the value of a really good and prestigious faculty is the appearance(and ideally the reality) that, while the university signs paychecks and schedules classes and other administrative work, the faculty are free to pursue their research and teaching, and new faculty are 'peer reviewed' through the tenure process, rather than being hirelings beholden to HR.
Africa may bypass building up the kind of infrastructure we have in the western world and go straight to a wireless world with local solar power to charge their devices.
Unless Africa loves high latency and low bandwidth, I'd say that they are missing out...
The contemporary value of, say, the US' massive amounts of copper POTS lines would probably be greater if all that copper were already at the scrapyard(and the owner of all that copper were also at the scrapyard, rather than in a position to extract rents into the forseeable future...); but the laws of physics rather ruthlessly consign wireless to the position of 'convenient, for light duty; but inferior' compared to wired links of similar tech level.
It might still be somewhat interesting if its simplicity turns out to make it controllable. Given that you can get a Nook Touch or Kindle and have a wifi-connected Linux device for not all that much, trying to ram actual intelligence into the confines of this thing would make sense only as an embedded hacker exercise.
If, however, in the quest to make it cheap, they ended up offloading enough intelligence to the companion app, it might be possible to re-use the device as a sort of bluetooth connected screen for a more powerful device capable of generating bitmaps and shoving them to it over bluetooth.
Given that e-ink displays are a bit weird to drive, and not terribly common in the small-quantity parts market (compared to, say, Nokia 5110 LCD clones if you need pixels, or HD44780-compatible 16x2 or 20x4s if you need characters) , having that all wrapped up nice and neat behind a bluetooth interface could be pretty handy, if not brutally obfuscated and/or crippled.
The greater inconvenience with Li-ion is their tendency to die quite permanently with a relatively short window. Unless your device is quite popular, popular enough that new aftermarket batteries are still produced(since new-in-box or used ones will be nearly as dead as what you are trying to replace), anything with a weird-shaped Li-ion has maybe 2-3 years of getting near-new battery life, another 1-2, if things go well, of adequacy, and then becomes AC-adapter powered.
Had it actually allowed them to hit their price point, it would have been a lot less nuts. As it is, I'm not sure why they are even bothering to ship(maybe they had some already in the warehouse?)
More generally, it sounds like their plan was part sensible, part gamble: The sensible part is that, by requiring the companion device, they did get to cut the cost and power consumption(runs off a AA or two, less demanding CPU/RAM, no wifi, etc.) The gamble: that telcos would take the 'bluetooth only, requires smartphone' restriction as a virtue and subsidize the price further. Without that, the device still has a few technical advantages; but is only slightly cheaper than a full ebook device, and without the economies of scale that the incumbents get.
It's so hard to evaluate tablets looking at specs. it's such an intimate experience that the only way to buy is one is by trying them out, preferably for an extended period (borrow from friends?).
It's only hard to evaluate looking at specs if the specs don't automatically doom the product:
In this case, they do. In order to hit their BoM target, they had to cut this thing to the bone, to the point where it doesn't actually handle parsing the epub/pdf/whatever onboard; but depends on a companion application to load it with pre-rendered page images(up to 5 whole books can be stored!!!!). So, no text resize, no reflow, no nothing except page turning unless you go back to your phone and reload over bluetooth.