I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous
Paywalls break the web. Even if they are valid and necessary to fund the kind of high-quality journalistic content we all love and want to see more of... they will still annoy people. Someone will send you a link, but when you click on it you'll get a "Please Pay" unless it happens to be one of the sites you pay for. When you sit down at a friend's computer, your favorite sites are not accessible anymore (and/or you end up fumbling with passwords). When you search for content on search engines, you can't find it. The web is based on links, and paywalls break those links. This is one of the main reasons why pay-sites have suffered: when looking for a link to support a point or discuss a story, most people will prefer a free link to a pay-based link, even if the pay-based link has a slightly better article. The reason is that you know everyone will be able to read it.
The newspapers know this, which is why their only hope is to collude so that all sites become paywall at the same time. So that no site can grab all the marketshare by offering the same content for free (read: ad supported). But will this really work? How will they prevent small-time papers from offering free content? How will they prevent bloggers with subscriptions from blogging about articles to audiences who don't bother paying for the subscriptions? Ubiquitous paywalls will just mean that a dedicated group of people will pay for access (basically the people who already pay for a few subscriptions), whereas the mass of people who don't worry about journalism day-to-day (but who on occasion do read this article or that) will just be content with second-hand accounts. This doesn't sound like a sustainable ecosystem.
Even the blanket subscriptions that you describe won't help much. The problem isn't just that people are not willing to pay some money for good journalism. The problem is that (most) people don't care enough to go through the hassle of paying; they don't care enough to keep paying when money is tight; they don't care enough to remember silly passwords... they want the web to be fast and easy and ubiquitous. (I also worry that blanket subscriptions, like other forms of collusion, will kill what little competition we have now; if there is one monopoly-like de-facto news subscription, what reason is there for a member newspaper to work hard to provide good content?)
I don't have an alternative, mind you. But I'm just pretty sure that subscriptions are going to fail in a big way. People don't like hassle and don't like spending money... and there are just not enough high-minded people who will actively recognize the need to fund journalism. One could imagine alternatives like mandatory charges on Internet access, or tax-funded journalism bursaries... but all these proposals have major drawbacks, too.
Currently the web-based Hulu works great on Linux. This is why I use Hulu, because they built it in a platform-agnostic way. I can understand them not putting effort into a Linux application... but I just hope they don't get rid of the Hulu web interface totally in favor of a desktop app. That would be a mistake, since in addition to alienating the (small) Linux userbase, they will also exclude the (somewhat larger) group of people leery of installing third-party software, and the (positively huge) group of people who are too lazy to install some silly application just to watch videos on their computer.
In any case, the Hulu web experience is pretty good, and runs fine full-screen, so I have trouble seeing what this new application can really bring to the table from the user's perspective.
Just the single bit isn't stable for a billion years. It's merely theorhetically stable from a single influence for a calculated billion years. That's pure bullshit.
If you're saying that there is always room for us to discover new effects and revise our calculations, then I agree. But if you're saying that we cannot make any kind of predictions, with useful error bars, about events over long timescale, then I have to disagree.
Rocks used to be stable -- until general weathering was observed. And it wasn't observed on the first day.
That's a good example. Apparently you accept the general theories of erosion and weathering, even though we have not measured them over the timescales we think they operate. It wasn't observed on the first day, but we also have not watched a mountain for 100,000 years... and yet we accept explanations and predictions that invoke those timescales. Similarly for plate tectonics, star formation, radioactivity, chemical stability, and so on. The long timescales certainly have effects on our predictions (e.g. error bars, predicting details, etc.), but we can still make statistically-significant predictions.
Tell me, what _does_ affect nano-scale devices? The answer is that no ones been looking for very long.
Okay, the last decades or century of science is nowhere near the billions of years timescale. But we can still make sensible predictions. We know what forces are operative on nano-scales (quantum mechanics is quite well-established). If our theories didn't account for some really-longterm effect, then we would expect to see measurable deviations from our predictions in the composition of the universe, decay rates, chemical stability, or something else. Are you suggesting that an N2 molecule isn't stable over billions of years? Are you saying that there is some as-yet-undiscovered process that causes it to break-down over a timescale of billions of years? If so, where's the evidence? On the other hand, if you accept our theories can make sensible predictions for some nano-objects, why can they not make sensible predictions for other nano-objects?
I promiss you that within a billion years, some effect, some dynamic, some event will break the device.
I am certainly willing to accept that some future scientific discovery will modify our current best theories. But absent such evidence, why should we not trust a spectacularly successful physical model? Just because the timescales are long? (The timescales of plate tectonics, star formation, cosmology, etc. are long, and yet we trust our theories because they work...) Your declaration that "something" will happen, without any particular evidence, isn't scientific and isn't convincing.
What kind of skill is required to see a billion years into the future?
Umm... how about the skill of science?
Okay, to be fair, the summary exaggerates the claim from the scientific paper quite a bit. The summary implies that they are claiming to have built a device that will last for a billion years. Not so. They are claiming that the individual bits should be stable to random thermal flipping over that timescale. Whether or not a device can be built around those bits that also last a billion years is another question. In the words of the authors:
To determine the lifetime of the memory device, we consider the motion of the iron shuttle at room temperature
and zero bias over an appreciable enough distance to cause loss of information... Although truly archival storage is a global property
of an entire memory system, the first inescapable requirement for such a system is that the underlying mechanism of information storage for individual bits must exhibit a persistence time much longer than the envisioned lifetime of the resulting device. A single bit lifetime in excess of a billion years demonstrates that this system has the potential to store information stably for any practical desired archival time scale.
Again, they are not claiming that they have built a device that will last a billion years. But they are saying that they have at least achieved the first step for archival storage. If you want a device that will last for, say, a thousand years, then having bits that persist over at least that long is required. Of course, there are gotchas:
-A real device may have other weak points that degrade first.
-The analysis only considers some dangers of long-term storage. E.g. electric or magnetic fields could cause the bits to flip. Elevated temperatures would reduce the stability time.
-Many memory devices would in principle be stable over very long timescales if analyzed similarly. E.g. for a normal hard drive, at room temperature without any electric or magnetic fields, the actual magnetic domain orientation is also stable over very long times.
Point being, the authors of the paper are correct in what they wrote (it's not hard to calculate the kinds of things they were considering, even over timescales of billions of years), but as they point out that's not the whole story for a real device.
I would imagine, since we're talking about nanogram amounts per liter, the expenditure would have to far exceed what they'd pay if they obtained it from a drug dealer.
In other words, to get 1 kg of cocaine from Red Bull would cost $10 billion, not to mention the enormous expense of purification. And all this would only be worth $30,000. It would cost 340,000 times more for the Red Bull than the cocaine would be worth.
As you said, the numbers don't exactly add up. Not even close.
Too frequently on Slashdot people trot out Godel's results to dispute just about anything. Godel's theorems are surely very deep and fundamental, but that doesn't mean they can be used to call into question everything. They make very specific statements about completeness and consistency. (I see a similar pattern with people trotting out the Halting Problem in discussions of computation, when, again, it doesn't always apply.)
The irony, of course, is that if it were true that Godel's theorem calls into question every notion of provability and truth, then you have an obvious contradiction: Godel's theorem was proven using Mathematics. If you can't trust Mathematics to give rigorous proof, then why are you trusting Godel's theorem at all?
I don't think that's quite right. You are describing small-scale fluctuations in the "surface" of the termination shock. But the main effect being considered in the scientific paper is a large-scale anisotropy in the termination shock.
The termination shock (TS) is usually assumed to be spherical: the sun emits supersonic solar wind in all directions; the point at which this solar wind is slowed by the interstellar medium should be the same in all directions. But what if it's not? The paper considers what effect a termination shock shaped like a "prolate ellipsoid of revolution" would have on an otherwise isotropic (at large scales) cosmic-microwave-background (CMB).
They quickly calculate that a prolate TS could lead to the observed quadrupole in the CMB. The authors suggest that the coupling between TS and CMB may be due to refractive index effects (basically as if the solar system is inside a gigantic lens), or possibly differences in scattering at different parts of the TS. Either way, some types of light reaching us should have a corresponding signature of the anisotropy.
Note that this isn't the first time the CMB had to be corrected. A very significant dipole in the full-sky map has to be removed to account for the relative motion of our planet in the galaxy, the motion of our galaxy with respect to the rest frame of the CMB, etc.
The authors end their paper by mentioning that if this effect is real, then small-scale fluctuations in the surface of the TS may also affect the smaller-scale fluctuations we see in a map of the CMB. Those fluctuations are normally thought to be an imprint of the randomness in the early universe. The authors suggest that the fluctuation spectrum may be altered by, or possibly even totally an artifact of, ripples in the TS. But as the authors note this is very, very speculative at this point. (We've been mapping the CMB for many years and the maps seem roughly consistent, so any time-varying rippling in effect would have to be subtle and/or slow...)
A lot of TV shows have vanished from our screens because of this [reality shows]
Umm.... citation?
Shows have been canceled since the dawn of television. How are you so certain that those shows were canceled "because" of a corporate obsession with reality shows? Terminator was canceled because it didn't have enough viewers. Scrubs had 8 seasons and Frasier had 11 seasons... is that not a long enough run for a show? Are shows supposed to continue forever?
I'm not saying that the popularity of reality shows hasn't put a dent in the amount of money networks will spend on conventional fiction series. But to suggest that reality television has killed all conventional shows is demonstrably wrong: there are plenty of shows that are still airing and doing just fine. Moreover there is apparently a substantial audience that has no interest in reality television, so there is still money in advertising to them.
Frankly it seems to me that generic reality shows have simply replaced generic fiction shows: comedies and soap operas that didn't have much depth to them either. There has and will continue to be an audience interested in more inventive kinds of fiction. That audience has and will continue to be a minority, though. So many good shows will continue to be canceled, but some other good shows will make it. (Where "good" is of course highly subjective.)
Beyond the fact that most people (not just Christians) and most societies have rules about modesty, this is a question of personal freedom.
There's nothing wrong with wearing a bikini, but forcing someone to wear a bikini against their will is not ethically acceptable.
The problem with through-clothes scanning is not that being naked is "wrong" or that people are afraid of it. The problem is that it over-reaches, forcing people to agree to a surveillance and an invasion. People have certain rights to control their own bodies. If they don't want to wear skimpy bathing suit, that is their right. And if they don't want TSA guards to see through their clothing, that too should be their right.
We can accept certain infringements as necessary for security. E.g. the loss of freedom and privacy from metal detectors is small enough (and the security gain large enough) that most people have no problem with them. But the loss of freedom and privacy from through-clothes scanning is larger; and I would argue the gain in security is too minimal to justify it. Actually I think the annoyance and embarrassment of removing one's shoes for screening also outweighs the (very) small security gain. It has nothing to do with puritanical hangups about walking around in socks.
I know you're joking... but that wouldn't work. It's like saying that you're going to "tweak the tuning knob" on your camera's flash and turn it into a death-ray.
Agreed. Additionally, Bennett suffers from injecting too many ideas into a single op-ed. He is well-meaning: those tangential paragraphs are intended to preemptively defend against a potential criticism.
But those kinds of "yes I thought of this angle; yes I thought of this problem" paragraphs break the flow of the discussion and make it more confusing (not to mention longer). Tangents should be minimized; by shrinking them to a single parenthetical, using footnotes, etc. Often they should be removed entirely, which can be difficult for we hyper-analytic geeks who love all those details. Yes people will then attack you on those points--that's fine, especially on Slashdot where you can depend on other posters to provide the obvious retort.
Like Red Flayer, I'm trying to give constructive advice. I frankly enjoy Bennett's editorials. They are very well thought-out and generally spark interesting discussions. But they are so verbose that I can only handle them when I'm in the right kind of mood. And I don't think it's just a matter of laziness on our part.
Which is exactly why academics will ignore the Wolfram|Alpha terms-of-service and simply use their own best judgment to decide when to cite it.
No academic would cite Wolfram|Alpha (or any other software package) when they use it to perform some simple calculation, like sin(x) or whatever. But if the piece of software is performing a non-trivial calculation, then it should be cited, both to provide proper credit/attribution, and to make the methods section of a paper complete (it is possible that there is something idiosyncratic or even buggy about how it analyzed the data).
Like I said, academics will use their own judgment to decide whether or not to cite W|A, just like they do will all other software packages. If it's routine and trivial, and could have been just as easily calculated with some other software package, no one will mention it. If it's novel and complicated, people will gladly cite the provenance of the analysis.
Sure, but what does the "from a collection of sensors" add to the meaning? And why can't they just write "sensor(s)" if they absolutely need the "one or more" part?
And moreover my question is whether or not they really do need the precision of "one or more" (especially in the abstract). The same logic applies to all the other potentially superfluous words. Yes there is a different between "issue an instruction to update" and simply "update", but is that differentiation actually crucially necessary from a legal or technical point of view?
I'm no patent expert, so maybe there is a good reason why all those extra words are in there... but I'm at a loss to see what they add. It's almost as if they want the application to sound precise, without actually specifying anything particularly useful.
Somewhat off-topic, but the wording in patent applications always amuses me. For instance, the abstract says:
The architecture can utilize one or more sensor from a collection of sensors to determine an orientation or gesture in connection with the wand, and can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component based upon the orientation.
They say "one or more sensor from a collection of sensors", which is redundant. They could just say "sensors". And why say "can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component" when it is simpler to just say "can update another component"?
The architecture can utilize sensors to determine orientation or gesture of the wand, and can update another component based upon the orientation.
I understand the need for precision. And I guess if they don't claim "one or more sensors" then someone can try to circumvent the patent by doing the same thing with only one single sensor (or whatever). But it still sounds ridiculous, and is no excuse for making confusing sentences. So many sentences are needlessly complicated or outright superfluous. Is there really no better way to word patents?
Can anyone comment? Is that kind of wording truly necessary for the patent to be robust, or is the wording intentionally obtuse and confusing, so that they can later use the ambiguity to argue for broader applicability?
Surprisingly, the most popular answer was "2 to 5". I would have thought "power users" like Slashdotters would have more tabs open on average...
But of course that poll may have a systematic bias (e.g. maybe lots of people tend to read Slashdot in the morning, and answered the poll before having opened tons of tabs for the day's work...).
I think the problem is actually that the computer field didn't come up with a proper term themselves. I remember way back-in-the-day some computer enthusiasts calling it "the CPU" which is also highly misleading. Nowadays, computer people will call it, "the tower", "the machine", "the box", or something like that. But let's face it--these are actually not very good terms. We don't actually have a precise and universal term that refer to it. The situation was muddled by the fact that there is no standard form-factor for a computer (we went from big servers, to boxes laying down, to boxes standing up like towers, to all-in-ones like iMacs, with all kinds of variations in between...).
Now this isn't a problem for computer people. We know what "power cycle the system" means and we can be precise by saying "press the button on the front of the case". But because amongst ourselves we don't consistently use a precise term, other people just picked-up on whatever term sounded right. We kept referring to "the hard drive" while pointing at (actually inside) the box, so people thought the box was "the hard drive". It's understandable.
The whole situation is funny, but not the end of the world. You just have to keep in mind that when someone uses precise terminology (like "hard drive" or "operating system" or "internet") they could very well be using it wrong.
If you're not using it now, you probably never will.
This prediction is incompatible with the current trend, which sees a (albeit slow) increase in the Linux marketshare. At least at present new people are migrating to the platform, and I see no reason why this slow migration will stop.
Basically guys, this is as good as it gets. Live with it or go elsewhere.
This is incompatible with the rather obvious advances that are being made in Linux all the time. With every release it is indeed getting better and better. It's getting better both in the "standard" ways (all operating systems are adding new features, etc.) and in the "catching up" ways (Linux is now easier to install than most other OS, and is almost as easy to configure via GUI for a novice...).
Linux is a hobby systyem. The code is donated mostly by amateurs
This misses that fact that many major components of the Linux ecosystem (including the kernel, servers, databases, the major office suite, etc.) are supported by companies. Many of the primary developers on these systems (ever heard of this guy called Linus?) are salaried employees.
And for every anecdote there is a counter-anecdote. I installed Ubuntu and sound "just worked".
But then on the Windows install I couldn't use the CD-burner to burn ISO images even after spending hours trying different software and drivers...
Your anecdotes + my anecdotes don't add up to data. The fact is it's a great unknown just how well a Linux install goes versus a Windows install. You can try to get a sense of it from forum postings... but that's not easy either (in particular forum postings are heavily biased towards people who experience problems).
I know it's not easy to do... but until we have some reasonably systematic way to aggregate data about what does--and does not--work on a Linux install, it won't be easy to decide where to spend time fixing. Just assuming that there is "a real problem" because a few people post bug reports about a given thing isn't efficient.
Seems like we've had this exact argument a thousand times. This list at least makes mostly good points. But it still misses the mark many times. Particularly annoying is the absolutism in so many statements, like:
No games. Full stop.
This is obviously false. There are games on Linux. Many are open sourced, and some commercials games are available on Linux (e.g. World of Goo). Now I wouldn't have argued if he had said "Very few games." But instead he tried to make his point punchier by being absolute... and this weakens his whole argument by introducing lies.
And as usual the author prefaces by mentioning that this is some sort of relative comparison with Windows, yet points out problems that exist with all operating systems, like "A galore of software bugs across all applications", or "huge shutdown time" (I've timed it on dual-boot systems and for me Kubuntu was faster than Windows XP. YMMV.) and "poor documentation" (does Windows come with an awesome manual I wasn't made aware of? No. For both Win and Linux you end up searching online. Both have tons of 3rd-party documentation.)...
And then there are kind nonsensical complaints like "don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual" Does Windows let you do this easily? The heading said that this was an analysis of whether Linux is ready for the Desktop and instead the author injects one of his pet-peeves about configuring Linux as a server?
And then there are spurious assumptions used to justify complaints, like "Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity". We've had this argument many times... undoubtedly the low market-share of Linux helps keep viruses off the platform. But there is also plenty of evidence that it is robust security-wise (e.g. infection rates for servers). At a minimum it's not the settled question the author implies.
I could go on and on. No doubt this thread will tear-apart other statements from TFA. It's too bad, because many of the points made are very much correct, and deserve attention. But it seems that whenever someone tries to compile lists such as this, they end up not only making good points about what needs work, but throwing in their own anecdotal annoyances and personal viewpoints, which muddies the whole argument...
Stereotypes usually come from anecdotal sampling, rather than hard numbers. Why should we put stock in them?
A "kernel of truth" says nothing about the relative size of the effect. E.g. even if women prefer pink on average, how predictive is that statement for a particular female consumer? What are the error bars?
Even if a stereotype is correct, on average, using it as the basis for marketing is usually dumb because the group you are targeting may well be offended by the implication of the stereotype. Again, even if it is true, you may do more damage than good in using that marketing angle.
Even if a stereotype is correct in some context, that doesn't mean it translates to others. For instance even if women on average prefer pink, that doesn't mean they want pink laptops. Clothes tend to be aesthetic purchases, whereas laptops tend to be functional purchases. Thus the priority for a woman shopping for a laptop may be totally uncorrelated to color. (Or maybe it is correlated--but anecdotes and stereotypes do not suffice to make that determination.)
Stereotypes often arise from cultural forces and even "self-fulfilling prophecies". They are not necessarily intrinsic. From a marketing perspective, the provenance of a trend usually doesn't matter; but from a "treat people with respect" perspective it can be relevant. For instance the "blue=boy and pink=girl" motif is relatively recent. In fact some sources from the 1800s contend that pink is the correct clothing color for baby boys.
Stereotypes are frequently generalized illogically. E.g. "girls like pink; I saw I guy wearing a pink shirt yesterday; that guy must be girlie and weak" (this includes both the unfounded pink->girl and girl->weak assumptions).
Stereotypes describe one aspect of a class at the expense of others. E.g. maybe women on average like pink, but is that really the defining feature of that class? Is that the most pertinent thing to focus on? Even if true, the choice to focus on that trivializes the identity of the class.
Point being: stereotypes are looked-down upon for a reason. They are spurious, frequently unhelpful, often downright wrong, and usually rather insulting.
I agree with you. I'm not a fan of taxing "bad" things more just because some people think that thing is "bad". However your wording here bothers me:
People want free health care, people want free this, that, and the other thing.
I don't think calling it "free healthcare" is quite right. What people want is "guaranteed healthcare" or "distributed liability of healthcare cost" or somesuch. I mean, I don't think people want "free police" or "free fire-departments" or "free roads" or even "free libraries". What they believe is that certain infrastructures are so universally beneficial that they should be communally funded. Hence they want "guaranteed police and fire protection" and "distributed cost of road infrastructure" and so on.
Whether or not "distributed funding of healthcare" should be added to the list is debatable (I'll leave my opinion out of this)... I'm merely trying to point out that calling it "free healthcare"--thereby implying that proponents are trying to get something for nothing--muddies the waters.
Coming back to the original point, this is how I prefer to think of taxes: as communal agreements that certain things are of such universal benefit that we should all contribute to them as a group. Which is precisely why taxes as punishments or taxes in order to elicit a particular behavior (i.e. control people) seem wrong to me.
In the past I thought good searching required training or insight, but this line of thinking - putting the onus on the search provider - is bold and interesting.
It's the right attitude for the service-provider to take, assuming they are trying to make a good product.
But, this doesn't release the user from learning how to search properly, assuming they are trying to get something useful out of the experience.
A user-interface designer (or product designer in general) should always be thinking about how users will naturally interact with the product/service, and should make it as fast, painless, and obvious as possible. From Google's point of view, the objective should indeed be to make a search that, as much as possible, correctly guesses what the user was trying to find, and returns that data. The more they are able to do so, the better the user experience will be.
But, of course, this doesn't mean that users shouldn't learn how to properly use the product as it currently exists, or how to search in general. The better they understand it, the more useful it will be to them.
Likewise, using quotation marks (that's what those double-apostrophes are called) makes it fairly easy to search suing terms including symbols.
Using quotes can help... but Google seems to strip out non-alphanumeric symbols. For instance a search for "Error 2005" and "Error #2005" yield the exact same search results, with none of the first page including the number-sign. But in theory if you're searching for an exact phrase (e.g. an error code) then those extra symbols are important.
The same thing happens for all kinds of searches that use symbols. The quotes enforce word-order but don't enforce symbols. For instance a search, with quotes, of "1.5 J/s" returns some correct results, but also matches to "1.5J S" and "1.5 (Js" and other variants... This makes searching for scientific things (e.g. parts of an equation) difficult.
This probably happens because Google works by pre-computing indexes of term frequencies and caching a huge number of queries. A free-form regex can be arbitrarily complicated and would be difficult to pre-compute and cache. To get the right results it would have to search on the full database. Similarly I guess they decided that not enough people search for crazy symbol combinations, so those are ignored. There are probably solutions to the problem (e.g. using the sub-pieces of a regex or symbol search to find candidate pages, and then only searching for the exact string on that subset), but again Google seems to have decided that the functionality is not in sufficient demand.
To be fair, the debate is whether or not to allow exhaustive street-level imagery. No one is suggesting making photographs from public locations illegal in general. (Well, some police forces actually are, but that's a separate debate...)
So in other words, you should say: "If you outlaw the acquisition and distribution of exhaustive street-level imagery, only outlaws will produce and distribute exhaustive street-level imagery."
Again, the debate is about whether doing something legal to an exhaustive extent (in this case, creating a massive database of location-specific images that is then freely available) becomes an an illegitimate act with respect to privacy. Many of us would agree that this logic applies in some cases. E.g. there's nothing illegal about looking up public records. But there comes a point where someone is so thoroughly investigating your life (getting all records, taking pictures of you in public, phoning people you know, etc.) that this collection of innocuous legal actions becomes a large illegal action (e.g. "stalking").
Having said all that, I find Google StreetViews very valuable (e.g. for planning trips or scoping out places to go...), so I hope society can reach a compromise that allows these images to be available without unduly infringing on anyone's privacy.
To suggest that filesharers are causing an 8% drop in GDP is idiotic, as well as the 50% of all traffic is illegal. And they want to ban illegal filesharers? Ok, lets ban half the population of the UK from surfing the net, or more!
Their argument is self-defeating. If 50% of people are really file-sharing, and they want all those people banned from using the Internet... well, just imagine what would happen to the economy if 50% of Internet-users were forced to stop using the Internet. These are people who are supporting numerous businesses with their web browsing (e.g. ads), purchasing products online, running their own businesses using the Internet, etc. Imagine the number of lost sales, the number of jobs lost, the number of small-business bankruptcies... (Not to mention other economic disruptions: e.g. people less productive at work because they can't web-browse at home; the creation of a black-market for net access.)
The UK GDP would take a far greater hit from 50% of their net-using population being forced off the net than it does from the same 50% illegally sharing some content.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous
Paywalls break the web. Even if they are valid and necessary to fund the kind of high-quality journalistic content we all love and want to see more of... they will still annoy people. Someone will send you a link, but when you click on it you'll get a "Please Pay" unless it happens to be one of the sites you pay for. When you sit down at a friend's computer, your favorite sites are not accessible anymore (and/or you end up fumbling with passwords). When you search for content on search engines, you can't find it. The web is based on links, and paywalls break those links. This is one of the main reasons why pay-sites have suffered: when looking for a link to support a point or discuss a story, most people will prefer a free link to a pay-based link, even if the pay-based link has a slightly better article. The reason is that you know everyone will be able to read it.
The newspapers know this, which is why their only hope is to collude so that all sites become paywall at the same time. So that no site can grab all the marketshare by offering the same content for free (read: ad supported). But will this really work? How will they prevent small-time papers from offering free content? How will they prevent bloggers with subscriptions from blogging about articles to audiences who don't bother paying for the subscriptions? Ubiquitous paywalls will just mean that a dedicated group of people will pay for access (basically the people who already pay for a few subscriptions), whereas the mass of people who don't worry about journalism day-to-day (but who on occasion do read this article or that) will just be content with second-hand accounts. This doesn't sound like a sustainable ecosystem.
Even the blanket subscriptions that you describe won't help much. The problem isn't just that people are not willing to pay some money for good journalism. The problem is that (most) people don't care enough to go through the hassle of paying; they don't care enough to keep paying when money is tight; they don't care enough to remember silly passwords... they want the web to be fast and easy and ubiquitous. (I also worry that blanket subscriptions, like other forms of collusion, will kill what little competition we have now; if there is one monopoly-like de-facto news subscription, what reason is there for a member newspaper to work hard to provide good content?)
I don't have an alternative, mind you. But I'm just pretty sure that subscriptions are going to fail in a big way. People don't like hassle and don't like spending money... and there are just not enough high-minded people who will actively recognize the need to fund journalism. One could imagine alternatives like mandatory charges on Internet access, or tax-funded journalism bursaries... but all these proposals have major drawbacks, too.
where's the Linux version?
Currently the web-based Hulu works great on Linux. This is why I use Hulu, because they built it in a platform-agnostic way. I can understand them not putting effort into a Linux application... but I just hope they don't get rid of the Hulu web interface totally in favor of a desktop app. That would be a mistake, since in addition to alienating the (small) Linux userbase, they will also exclude the (somewhat larger) group of people leery of installing third-party software, and the (positively huge) group of people who are too lazy to install some silly application just to watch videos on their computer.
In any case, the Hulu web experience is pretty good, and runs fine full-screen, so I have trouble seeing what this new application can really bring to the table from the user's perspective.
Just the single bit isn't stable for a billion years. It's merely theorhetically stable from a single influence for a calculated billion years. That's pure bullshit.
If you're saying that there is always room for us to discover new effects and revise our calculations, then I agree. But if you're saying that we cannot make any kind of predictions, with useful error bars, about events over long timescale, then I have to disagree.
Rocks used to be stable -- until general weathering was observed. And it wasn't observed on the first day.
That's a good example. Apparently you accept the general theories of erosion and weathering, even though we have not measured them over the timescales we think they operate. It wasn't observed on the first day, but we also have not watched a mountain for 100,000 years... and yet we accept explanations and predictions that invoke those timescales. Similarly for plate tectonics, star formation, radioactivity, chemical stability, and so on. The long timescales certainly have effects on our predictions (e.g. error bars, predicting details, etc.), but we can still make statistically-significant predictions.
Tell me, what _does_ affect nano-scale devices? The answer is that no ones been looking for very long.
Okay, the last decades or century of science is nowhere near the billions of years timescale. But we can still make sensible predictions. We know what forces are operative on nano-scales (quantum mechanics is quite well-established). If our theories didn't account for some really-longterm effect, then we would expect to see measurable deviations from our predictions in the composition of the universe, decay rates, chemical stability, or something else. Are you suggesting that an N2 molecule isn't stable over billions of years? Are you saying that there is some as-yet-undiscovered process that causes it to break-down over a timescale of billions of years? If so, where's the evidence? On the other hand, if you accept our theories can make sensible predictions for some nano-objects, why can they not make sensible predictions for other nano-objects?
I promiss you that within a billion years, some effect, some dynamic, some event will break the device.
I am certainly willing to accept that some future scientific discovery will modify our current best theories. But absent such evidence, why should we not trust a spectacularly successful physical model? Just because the timescales are long? (The timescales of plate tectonics, star formation, cosmology, etc. are long, and yet we trust our theories because they work...) Your declaration that "something" will happen, without any particular evidence, isn't scientific and isn't convincing.
What kind of skill is required to see a billion years into the future?
Umm... how about the skill of science?
Okay, to be fair, the summary exaggerates the claim from the scientific paper quite a bit. The summary implies that they are claiming to have built a device that will last for a billion years. Not so. They are claiming that the individual bits should be stable to random thermal flipping over that timescale. Whether or not a device can be built around those bits that also last a billion years is another question. In the words of the authors:
Again, they are not claiming that they have built a device that will last a billion years. But they are saying that they have at least achieved the first step for archival storage. If you want a device that will last for, say, a thousand years, then having bits that persist over at least that long is required. Of course, there are gotchas:
-A real device may have other weak points that degrade first.
-The analysis only considers some dangers of long-term storage. E.g. electric or magnetic fields could cause the bits to flip. Elevated temperatures would reduce the stability time.
-Many memory devices would in principle be stable over very long timescales if analyzed similarly. E.g. for a normal hard drive, at room temperature without any electric or magnetic fields, the actual magnetic domain orientation is also stable over very long times.
Point being, the authors of the paper are correct in what they wrote (it's not hard to calculate the kinds of things they were considering, even over timescales of billions of years), but as they point out that's not the whole story for a real device.
I would imagine, since we're talking about nanogram amounts per liter, the expenditure would have to far exceed what they'd pay if they obtained it from a drug dealer.
Should be easy enough to calculate:
Pure cocaine sells for, let's say, $30,000 per kg. To get a kilogram of cocaine from RedBull would take 2.5 billion liters, or roughly 7 billion 12 oz cans. A 24-case of Red Bull seems to cost about $34.80, or $1.45 per can.
In other words, to get 1 kg of cocaine from Red Bull would cost $10 billion, not to mention the enormous expense of purification. And all this would only be worth $30,000. It would cost 340,000 times more for the Red Bull than the cocaine would be worth.
As you said, the numbers don't exactly add up. Not even close.
Thank you!
Too frequently on Slashdot people trot out Godel's results to dispute just about anything. Godel's theorems are surely very deep and fundamental, but that doesn't mean they can be used to call into question everything. They make very specific statements about completeness and consistency. (I see a similar pattern with people trotting out the Halting Problem in discussions of computation, when, again, it doesn't always apply.)
The irony, of course, is that if it were true that Godel's theorem calls into question every notion of provability and truth, then you have an obvious contradiction: Godel's theorem was proven using Mathematics. If you can't trust Mathematics to give rigorous proof, then why are you trusting Godel's theorem at all?
I don't think that's quite right. You are describing small-scale fluctuations in the "surface" of the termination shock. But the main effect being considered in the scientific paper is a large-scale anisotropy in the termination shock.
The termination shock (TS) is usually assumed to be spherical: the sun emits supersonic solar wind in all directions; the point at which this solar wind is slowed by the interstellar medium should be the same in all directions. But what if it's not? The paper considers what effect a termination shock shaped like a "prolate ellipsoid of revolution" would have on an otherwise isotropic (at large scales) cosmic-microwave-background (CMB).
They quickly calculate that a prolate TS could lead to the observed quadrupole in the CMB. The authors suggest that the coupling between TS and CMB may be due to refractive index effects (basically as if the solar system is inside a gigantic lens), or possibly differences in scattering at different parts of the TS. Either way, some types of light reaching us should have a corresponding signature of the anisotropy.
Note that this isn't the first time the CMB had to be corrected. A very significant dipole in the full-sky map has to be removed to account for the relative motion of our planet in the galaxy, the motion of our galaxy with respect to the rest frame of the CMB, etc.
The authors end their paper by mentioning that if this effect is real, then small-scale fluctuations in the surface of the TS may also affect the smaller-scale fluctuations we see in a map of the CMB. Those fluctuations are normally thought to be an imprint of the randomness in the early universe. The authors suggest that the fluctuation spectrum may be altered by, or possibly even totally an artifact of, ripples in the TS. But as the authors note this is very, very speculative at this point. (We've been mapping the CMB for many years and the maps seem roughly consistent, so any time-varying rippling in effect would have to be subtle and/or slow...)
A lot of TV shows have vanished from our screens because of this [reality shows]
Umm.... citation?
Shows have been canceled since the dawn of television. How are you so certain that those shows were canceled "because" of a corporate obsession with reality shows? Terminator was canceled because it didn't have enough viewers. Scrubs had 8 seasons and Frasier had 11 seasons... is that not a long enough run for a show? Are shows supposed to continue forever?
I'm not saying that the popularity of reality shows hasn't put a dent in the amount of money networks will spend on conventional fiction series. But to suggest that reality television has killed all conventional shows is demonstrably wrong: there are plenty of shows that are still airing and doing just fine. Moreover there is apparently a substantial audience that has no interest in reality television, so there is still money in advertising to them.
Frankly it seems to me that generic reality shows have simply replaced generic fiction shows: comedies and soap operas that didn't have much depth to them either. There has and will continue to be an audience interested in more inventive kinds of fiction. That audience has and will continue to be a minority, though. So many good shows will continue to be canceled, but some other good shows will make it. (Where "good" is of course highly subjective.)
Beyond the fact that most people (not just Christians) and most societies have rules about modesty, this is a question of personal freedom.
There's nothing wrong with wearing a bikini, but forcing someone to wear a bikini against their will is not ethically acceptable.
The problem with through-clothes scanning is not that being naked is "wrong" or that people are afraid of it. The problem is that it over-reaches, forcing people to agree to a surveillance and an invasion. People have certain rights to control their own bodies. If they don't want to wear skimpy bathing suit, that is their right. And if they don't want TSA guards to see through their clothing, that too should be their right.
We can accept certain infringements as necessary for security. E.g. the loss of freedom and privacy from metal detectors is small enough (and the security gain large enough) that most people have no problem with them. But the loss of freedom and privacy from through-clothes scanning is larger; and I would argue the gain in security is too minimal to justify it. Actually I think the annoyance and embarrassment of removing one's shoes for screening also outweighs the (very) small security gain. It has nothing to do with puritanical hangups about walking around in socks.
I know you're joking... but that wouldn't work. It's like saying that you're going to "tweak the tuning knob" on your camera's flash and turn it into a death-ray.
It's not going to happen.
Agreed. Additionally, Bennett suffers from injecting too many ideas into a single op-ed. He is well-meaning: those tangential paragraphs are intended to preemptively defend against a potential criticism.
But those kinds of "yes I thought of this angle; yes I thought of this problem" paragraphs break the flow of the discussion and make it more confusing (not to mention longer). Tangents should be minimized; by shrinking them to a single parenthetical, using footnotes, etc. Often they should be removed entirely, which can be difficult for we hyper-analytic geeks who love all those details. Yes people will then attack you on those points--that's fine, especially on Slashdot where you can depend on other posters to provide the obvious retort.
Like Red Flayer, I'm trying to give constructive advice. I frankly enjoy Bennett's editorials. They are very well thought-out and generally spark interesting discussions. But they are so verbose that I can only handle them when I'm in the right kind of mood. And I don't think it's just a matter of laziness on our part.
Which is exactly why academics will ignore the Wolfram|Alpha terms-of-service and simply use their own best judgment to decide when to cite it.
No academic would cite Wolfram|Alpha (or any other software package) when they use it to perform some simple calculation, like sin(x) or whatever. But if the piece of software is performing a non-trivial calculation, then it should be cited, both to provide proper credit/attribution, and to make the methods section of a paper complete (it is possible that there is something idiosyncratic or even buggy about how it analyzed the data).
Like I said, academics will use their own judgment to decide whether or not to cite W|A, just like they do will all other software packages. If it's routine and trivial, and could have been just as easily calculated with some other software package, no one will mention it. If it's novel and complicated, people will gladly cite the provenance of the analysis.
Sure, but what does the "from a collection of sensors" add to the meaning? And why can't they just write "sensor(s)" if they absolutely need the "one or more" part?
And moreover my question is whether or not they really do need the precision of "one or more" (especially in the abstract). The same logic applies to all the other potentially superfluous words. Yes there is a different between "issue an instruction to update" and simply "update", but is that differentiation actually crucially necessary from a legal or technical point of view?
I'm no patent expert, so maybe there is a good reason why all those extra words are in there... but I'm at a loss to see what they add. It's almost as if they want the application to sound precise, without actually specifying anything particularly useful.
Somewhat off-topic, but the wording in patent applications always amuses me. For instance, the abstract says:
They say "one or more sensor from a collection of sensors", which is redundant. They could just say "sensors". And why say "can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component" when it is simpler to just say "can update another component"?
I understand the need for precision. And I guess if they don't claim "one or more sensors" then someone can try to circumvent the patent by doing the same thing with only one single sensor (or whatever). But it still sounds ridiculous, and is no excuse for making confusing sentences. So many sentences are needlessly complicated or outright superfluous. Is there really no better way to word patents?
Can anyone comment? Is that kind of wording truly necessary for the patent to be robust, or is the wording intentionally obtuse and confusing, so that they can later use the ambiguity to argue for broader applicability?
A similar poll was already run:
How many browser tabs do you have open right now?
Surprisingly, the most popular answer was "2 to 5". I would have thought "power users" like Slashdotters would have more tabs open on average...
But of course that poll may have a systematic bias (e.g. maybe lots of people tend to read Slashdot in the morning, and answered the poll before having opened tons of tabs for the day's work...).
I think the problem is actually that the computer field didn't come up with a proper term themselves. I remember way back-in-the-day some computer enthusiasts calling it "the CPU" which is also highly misleading. Nowadays, computer people will call it, "the tower", "the machine", "the box", or something like that. But let's face it--these are actually not very good terms. We don't actually have a precise and universal term that refer to it. The situation was muddled by the fact that there is no standard form-factor for a computer (we went from big servers, to boxes laying down, to boxes standing up like towers, to all-in-ones like iMacs, with all kinds of variations in between...).
Now this isn't a problem for computer people. We know what "power cycle the system" means and we can be precise by saying "press the button on the front of the case". But because amongst ourselves we don't consistently use a precise term, other people just picked-up on whatever term sounded right. We kept referring to "the hard drive" while pointing at (actually inside) the box, so people thought the box was "the hard drive". It's understandable.
The whole situation is funny, but not the end of the world. You just have to keep in mind that when someone uses precise terminology (like "hard drive" or "operating system" or "internet") they could very well be using it wrong.
If you're not using it now, you probably never will.
This prediction is incompatible with the current trend, which sees a (albeit slow) increase in the Linux marketshare. At least at present new people are migrating to the platform, and I see no reason why this slow migration will stop.
Basically guys, this is as good as it gets. Live with it or go elsewhere.
This is incompatible with the rather obvious advances that are being made in Linux all the time. With every release it is indeed getting better and better. It's getting better both in the "standard" ways (all operating systems are adding new features, etc.) and in the "catching up" ways (Linux is now easier to install than most other OS, and is almost as easy to configure via GUI for a novice...).
Linux is a hobby systyem. The code is donated mostly by amateurs
This misses that fact that many major components of the Linux ecosystem (including the kernel, servers, databases, the major office suite, etc.) are supported by companies. Many of the primary developers on these systems (ever heard of this guy called Linus?) are salaried employees.
And for every anecdote there is a counter-anecdote. I installed Ubuntu and sound "just worked".
But then on the Windows install I couldn't use the CD-burner to burn ISO images even after spending hours trying different software and drivers...
Your anecdotes + my anecdotes don't add up to data. The fact is it's a great unknown just how well a Linux install goes versus a Windows install. You can try to get a sense of it from forum postings... but that's not easy either (in particular forum postings are heavily biased towards people who experience problems).
I know it's not easy to do... but until we have some reasonably systematic way to aggregate data about what does--and does not--work on a Linux install, it won't be easy to decide where to spend time fixing. Just assuming that there is "a real problem" because a few people post bug reports about a given thing isn't efficient.
Seems like we've had this exact argument a thousand times. This list at least makes mostly good points. But it still misses the mark many times. Particularly annoying is the absolutism in so many statements, like:
This is obviously false. There are games on Linux. Many are open sourced, and some commercials games are available on Linux (e.g. World of Goo). Now I wouldn't have argued if he had said "Very few games." But instead he tried to make his point punchier by being absolute... and this weakens his whole argument by introducing lies.
And as usual the author prefaces by mentioning that this is some sort of relative comparison with Windows, yet points out problems that exist with all operating systems, like "A galore of software bugs across all applications", or "huge shutdown time" (I've timed it on dual-boot systems and for me Kubuntu was faster than Windows XP. YMMV.) and "poor documentation" (does Windows come with an awesome manual I wasn't made aware of? No. For both Win and Linux you end up searching online. Both have tons of 3rd-party documentation.)...
And then there are kind nonsensical complaints like "don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual" Does Windows let you do this easily? The heading said that this was an analysis of whether Linux is ready for the Desktop and instead the author injects one of his pet-peeves about configuring Linux as a server?
And then there are spurious assumptions used to justify complaints, like "Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity". We've had this argument many times... undoubtedly the low market-share of Linux helps keep viruses off the platform. But there is also plenty of evidence that it is robust security-wise (e.g. infection rates for servers). At a minimum it's not the settled question the author implies.
I could go on and on. No doubt this thread will tear-apart other statements from TFA. It's too bad, because many of the points made are very much correct, and deserve attention. But it seems that whenever someone tries to compile lists such as this, they end up not only making good points about what needs work, but throwing in their own anecdotal annoyances and personal viewpoints, which muddies the whole argument...
...but consider:
Point being: stereotypes are looked-down upon for a reason. They are spurious, frequently unhelpful, often downright wrong, and usually rather insulting.
I agree with you. I'm not a fan of taxing "bad" things more just because some people think that thing is "bad". However your wording here bothers me:
I don't think calling it "free healthcare" is quite right. What people want is "guaranteed healthcare" or "distributed liability of healthcare cost" or somesuch. I mean, I don't think people want "free police" or "free fire-departments" or "free roads" or even "free libraries". What they believe is that certain infrastructures are so universally beneficial that they should be communally funded. Hence they want "guaranteed police and fire protection" and "distributed cost of road infrastructure" and so on.
Whether or not "distributed funding of healthcare" should be added to the list is debatable (I'll leave my opinion out of this)... I'm merely trying to point out that calling it "free healthcare"--thereby implying that proponents are trying to get something for nothing--muddies the waters.
Coming back to the original point, this is how I prefer to think of taxes: as communal agreements that certain things are of such universal benefit that we should all contribute to them as a group. Which is precisely why taxes as punishments or taxes in order to elicit a particular behavior (i.e. control people) seem wrong to me.
In the past I thought good searching required training or insight, but this line of thinking - putting the onus on the search provider - is bold and interesting.
It's the right attitude for the service-provider to take, assuming they are trying to make a good product.
But, this doesn't release the user from learning how to search properly, assuming they are trying to get something useful out of the experience.
A user-interface designer (or product designer in general) should always be thinking about how users will naturally interact with the product/service, and should make it as fast, painless, and obvious as possible. From Google's point of view, the objective should indeed be to make a search that, as much as possible, correctly guesses what the user was trying to find, and returns that data. The more they are able to do so, the better the user experience will be.
But, of course, this doesn't mean that users shouldn't learn how to properly use the product as it currently exists, or how to search in general. The better they understand it, the more useful it will be to them.
Likewise, using quotation marks (that's what those double-apostrophes are called) makes it fairly easy to search suing terms including symbols.
Using quotes can help... but Google seems to strip out non-alphanumeric symbols. For instance a search for "Error 2005" and "Error #2005" yield the exact same search results, with none of the first page including the number-sign. But in theory if you're searching for an exact phrase (e.g. an error code) then those extra symbols are important.
The same thing happens for all kinds of searches that use symbols. The quotes enforce word-order but don't enforce symbols. For instance a search, with quotes, of "1.5 J/s" returns some correct results, but also matches to "1.5J S" and "1.5 (Js" and other variants... This makes searching for scientific things (e.g. parts of an equation) difficult.
This probably happens because Google works by pre-computing indexes of term frequencies and caching a huge number of queries. A free-form regex can be arbitrarily complicated and would be difficult to pre-compute and cache. To get the right results it would have to search on the full database. Similarly I guess they decided that not enough people search for crazy symbol combinations, so those are ignored. There are probably solutions to the problem (e.g. using the sub-pieces of a regex or symbol search to find candidate pages, and then only searching for the exact string on that subset), but again Google seems to have decided that the functionality is not in sufficient demand.
To be fair, the debate is whether or not to allow exhaustive street-level imagery. No one is suggesting making photographs from public locations illegal in general. (Well, some police forces actually are, but that's a separate debate...)
So in other words, you should say: "If you outlaw the acquisition and distribution of exhaustive street-level imagery, only outlaws will produce and distribute exhaustive street-level imagery."
Again, the debate is about whether doing something legal to an exhaustive extent (in this case, creating a massive database of location-specific images that is then freely available) becomes an an illegitimate act with respect to privacy. Many of us would agree that this logic applies in some cases. E.g. there's nothing illegal about looking up public records. But there comes a point where someone is so thoroughly investigating your life (getting all records, taking pictures of you in public, phoning people you know, etc.) that this collection of innocuous legal actions becomes a large illegal action (e.g. "stalking").
Having said all that, I find Google StreetViews very valuable (e.g. for planning trips or scoping out places to go...), so I hope society can reach a compromise that allows these images to be available without unduly infringing on anyone's privacy.
To suggest that filesharers are causing an 8% drop in GDP is idiotic, as well as the 50% of all traffic is illegal. And they want to ban illegal filesharers? Ok, lets ban half the population of the UK from surfing the net, or more!
Their argument is self-defeating. If 50% of people are really file-sharing, and they want all those people banned from using the Internet... well, just imagine what would happen to the economy if 50% of Internet-users were forced to stop using the Internet. These are people who are supporting numerous businesses with their web browsing (e.g. ads), purchasing products online, running their own businesses using the Internet, etc. Imagine the number of lost sales, the number of jobs lost, the number of small-business bankruptcies... (Not to mention other economic disruptions: e.g. people less productive at work because they can't web-browse at home; the creation of a black-market for net access.)
The UK GDP would take a far greater hit from 50% of their net-using population being forced off the net than it does from the same 50% illegally sharing some content.