If I wanted to see ads... I wouldn't block them. This feature seems redundant.
A fair point; and one that many comments seem to bring up.
The blog post, however, explains the rationale. In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
In practice the way AdBlock currently works, it's just so easy to block everything and forget about it. Users then forget to ever "unblock" pages that they like and would like to support (through advertising).
Now, if you're a user committed to never seeing any ads at all, then yes this feature is useless for you. You will no doubt turn it off. (Yes, the intent is for an option to be present to never show these little warnings.) But for those of us who do want to support some sites, the reminder will help us make that decision.
Of course it is entirely possible that webmasters will abuse this meta-tag as much as they abuse the ads themselves. (Why wouldn't a webmaster turn the tag on all the time?) Since the default will still be to block ads until the user says otherwise, at worst this will mean a little bar shows up in the browser the first time they visit a site. Not a huge deal. (And if it annoys you, then you just turn off the behavior.) I like the idea of being able to preview how annoying ads are for a site, and then deciding whether or not to let them through. (As long as the default start-state is "block" then I won't be inundated with crap...) I, for one, want to be able to support sites that are smart enough to have reasonable ads. (Yes, I currently manually unblock sites using the AdBlock context menu... but this would make it easier.)
Although I like this proposal, I don't understand why it wouldn't be simpler to just have someone do the sorting for those "ad-server lists". What I want is a block-list that blocks the annoying ads (e.g. flash ads that cover the page) but doesn't block un-annoying ads (e.g. demure text-ads). A whole spectrum of lists, depending on people's tastes, could be constructed. Do these kind of "nice blocking" lists already exist?
Depends what one means by "faithful representation". The new movie has a Kirk very much like the old Kirk, a Spock very much like the old Spock, and so on. But is that what makes it Trek?
Overall this was an action movie with slick special effects and some comedy. The first two Star Trek series were decidedly about moral dilemmas and the promise of a utopian future for humankind. Thus to someone who thinks the "essence of Trek" is this "analysis of the human spirit", this new movie doesn't faithfully represent Star Trek: it has a ship named Enterprise with a captain named Kirk, but it is thematically very different from the original incarnation.
And of course there are many other ways to analyze the question of "faithful to the original". I won't comment on which interpretation I think is right... But it's important to remember that "faithful representation" has everything to do with perspective.
I like Hulu because it actually works. In particular, it works on Linux with no fussing (in my experience) whereas the players on other sites often don't work, or require onerous downloads and installs (which are usually Windows-only). Hulu just works fine on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Hulu is also a "one stop watch" at this point. For a while, I experimented with keeping track of different shows via different official websites. It was painful because each site had a slightly different interface... but worse, each network's online streaming site seem to want to change their format every so often. This makes it even more annoying to to watch a few shows in a row, because your bookmarks have died (if their format was even bookmarkable!) and you have to search anew for what you want.
Hulu, instead, centralizes everything so that you only have to get used to the one (stable!) interface. And the accounts they offer make it easy to keep track of what shows you've watched... and you can even have your next subscription auto-play after you finish watching a show. It's the way TV "should" be: a channel that continually plays only shows you care about.
Despite the things Hulu has going for it, I worry about all this consolidation. Hulu is fast becoming the de-facto supplier for online streaming of TV shows. And this means that they will soon have a monopoly-like control, and will no doubt start abusing it. I really wish that competitors would spring up (and that the networks would license to multiple streaming-aggregator-sites).
And yeah, it does indeed suck that Hulu doesn't work outside the US. So much money (in targeted, country-specific advertising!) is being left on the table.
Guess who it's going to be passed onto? Intel gets fined and I suspect that by some remarkable coincidence the prices of their chips mysteriously increase.
Yeah that's the point.
Intel have been able to keep their market share artificially high by abusing their dominance. This has made it difficult for other companies to compete. If Intel is forced to raise prices to cover the fines, then this gives other companies the chance to gain market share by competing on price.
In other words, the fine restores some amount of competition, as intended, and serves as a deterrent against continuing to abuse dominance, as intended.
As long as they don't try to indoctrinate based religion/race it should be fine.
So you seem to agree that it wouldn't be OK for a school to censor/filter in a way that favors or disfavors a particular religion or race.
But then why is it OK to censor/filter in a way that favors or disfavors a particular subculture? A particular social class? A particular lifestyle? A particular gender? A particular viewpoint? A particular genetic predisposition?
Would it be OK to censor/filter out any reference to autism (let's say, for the sake of argument, that a community felt that autism was an abomination)? Is that fair to autistic people?
These are honest questions. A line must be drawn somewhere, and I'm curious to see what consistent cases can be made about where to draw it. It seems to me that for much the same reasons we must be careful about race and religion, we must be careful about a wide variety of discrimination. Whether or not it is legally required, I believe that our society, should encourage open access to information, tolerance, fairness, and equality.
Yes, Bennett Haselton is famous for being verbose and embedding extraneous arguments within a larger debate (sometimes diluting his original point).
In this case, his point about scientifically judging the maturity of teenagers is that it would entirely obviate, using rigorous evidence, the need for these web-blockers at all (at least for people above a certain age). That would certainly be progress (rather than debating about how much to block, wouldn't be nice if we had a good metric by which to say "we don't need to worry about censoring at all for this class of people").
We have arbitrary social rules about when someone is "old enough" to do certain things (drive a car, drink alcohol, buy porn). These standards vary wildly from culture to culture (in some cultures, even adults are not allowed those things), and are never based on evidence. Just "gut feelings" about maturity. So he proposes that some standard be established, and that standard tested against average adults, teenagers, children, etc. If it can be shown that a 15-year old is statistically indistinguishable from a 28-year old in terms of how they are able to reason logically, and how they react to, say, pornography; then it doesn't make sense to block the 15-year old from porn sites.
I agree with Haselton on this point. It's ridiculous that in this day and age we are still basing most of our legal rulings on untested "gut feelings" about how people behave, and how they are affected by external events/forces. We can do better.
Twitter is a big deal because people use it. Yeah it's that simple.
Like many such things, it's a matter of network effects. There's nothing intrinsically amazing or even unique about Twitter. But some people started using it because it was fun, and it caught on. Now the pervasive reason to use it is to connect with all the people using it: either to follow people/trends you care about, or reach an audience you're interested in (whether that's "friends" or "the world" or "customers"...).
You'll also notice that Ford is not merely using Twitter. They are using Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. From their point of view, Twitter is just another channel through which they can reach potential customers. Thus they just add it to the list of newspaper, phone, radio, TV, etc.
"Jumping on the bandwagon" may seem uncool, but when one is trying to connect with others, it's quite logical to join in the most popular communication channels.
Indeed. But there are some fringe cases that I'm sure will cause headaches. Like: -Zecco customer with $20,000 in their account. -One day they log in and see that they now have $1,020,000 in their account. -They make an investment for, let's say, $15,000.
Does Zecco cancel the investment, or honor it, or what? Consider:
A. If the investment went up, the customer can claim that they were trying to invest $15k of their $20k, that it was a legitimate transaction, and that they should be allowed to keep the gain.
B. If the investment went down, the customer can claim that their investment strategies were unduly influenced by their seemingly-increased buying power. They claim Zecco's mistake is responsible for their overly-risky investment, and that Zecco needs to cancel the trade, and restore their account to the way it would have been if the trade had never happened. They can say "You canceled the investments of all those other customers! Why not mine?"
If Zecco cancels all transactions (including those of type A), there will be plenty of legitimately angry customers. They tried to play by the rules, and yet had their sound investment (and associated gain) taken away. On the other hand if Zecco cancels only transactions of type B (but lets type A go through), they will lose a lot of money: for that one day everyone was only able to make investments that made them money! What a deal! Yet if Zecco says it won't cancel any transactions for amounts below a person's previous buying power, people can still argue that their strategy was disturbed by the mere presence (and psychological effect) of all that other money sitting there.
And a further complication: what if someone makes two $15k investments on that day? They spent over their 'real' limit. But which transaction was the one that spent the "money they don't actually own"? Also, having an extra million $ is obvious. But a customer could legitimately claim that they thought they had $30k in the account (when it fact it should have been $20k). It's up to Zecco to report it correctly, and if they don't then customers will become legitimately confused and may make trades somewhat beyond their previous buying power. Even if they are trying to act in good faith.
All this to say that this is going to be a mess for Zecco to sort out. They will likely have to make concessions to numerous customers, which will cost them a ton of money.
I agree with your caution against scientists over-stating their knowledge. But...
Time has proven again and again that the only thing stopping ANYTHING is not having the knowledge to do it.
I don't think that's right. If that were true, it would imply that the physical universe has no immutable laws. That every physical law can be somehow circumvented. But such a universe is de-facto a universe without actual laws. What I'm saying is that if you accept that the universe operates based on some set of rules/laws (and this is a basic assumption in science), then this means that there are some things that simply cannot be done, no matter how smart you are.
Now we can't know for certain that the "speed of light limit" is one of those laws. But all the evidence we have so far (and this includes a boatload of experiments and all of our most predictive theories) is that matter/energy/information cannot travel faster than light.
for every problem, there IS a solution, even if they can not figure it out themselves.
A romantic notion, but one without any particular evidence. The idea that technology can become arbitrarily powerful, that "anything" can be done if only one knew how, is completely at odds with a universe having a specific set of physical laws. The physical laws define a set of possible and impossible behaviors... and there is no guarantee that a given problem has a solution falling into the "possible in this universe" class.
First of all it's worth remembering that quantum mechanics and relativity are not 100% incompatible. In fact "relativistic quantum mechanics" has been around for a long time. Quantum theory was greatly advanced when relativistic effects were included.
But you're right that we have good reason to believe that something is wrong with either quantum mechanics or relativity (or both), since they give contradictory predictions in a certain number of extreme cases. (Quantum gravity is not yet solved...)
However we also have ample evidence that quantum mechanics and relativity are incredibly accurate and predictive theories in a vast range of circumstances. We have every reason to believe that the correct "Theory of Everything" will reduce to conventional quantum mechanics and conventional relativity in the appropriate limits. And thus we have every reason to continue using those theories to make predictions all over the place.
Now a warp bubble is one of those extreme situations where the two theories might be expected to give contradictory results, in which case only the hypothetical theory-of-everything would give the correct answers. But it is certainly still useful to ask what our current theories would predict for these extreme situations. It helps us better understand the theories. And, again, we have reasons to believe that many of the things our current theories predict (even in extreme situations) will be right. Absent the theory-of-everything, quantum mechanics + relativity will give us the "best guess" about how such objects would behave
Sorry, but we already have faster-than-light communication trough quantum entanglement. The change in state happens instantly, without any delay, no matter what the distance is.
You're mis-interpreting quantum mechanics and entanglement. The second sentence in that quote is right, but it doesn't imply the first sentence, which is wrong.
When a quantum entanglement collapses, both of the entangled particles will end up in states that are strongly correlated, even if the two particles are very far apart. So yes you could have two entangled particles that are separated from each other, have them collapse, and there would be "instantaneous" correlations between them.
However this cannot be used for faster-than-light communication. (It makes for cool sci-fi, but isn't correct when you really look into the details of quantum mechanics.) The reason it cannot is because the collapse is (at least to the local observers) random. Neither side can predict nor influence* what random state their end of the entangled pair collapses into. So if we have two streams of entangled particles (one on Earth and one at Alpha Centauri), both sides would read out a random stream of answers (up/down, yes/no, 1/0... or whatever). Only once you compare the two streams do you realize that they were correlated more strongly than random chance (and classical mechanics) would allow. A cool experiment, to be sure! But it can't be used to transfer information.
Many people have tried to devise ways around the rules of quantum mechanics, to allow entanglement to be used for FTL communication. But all such proposals (to date) have been found to have mistakes with respect to our current understanding of quantum mechanics. To date, there is no loophole that allows one to circumvent the (local) randomness of quantum mechanics to allow FTL. Of course it's possible that modern relativity and quantum mechanics are both wrong. But at least for now there is no evidence of any information ever being transmitted faster-than-light.
* Actually you can try to influence the answers you get from your stream by selecting a particular measurement method. And while doing so does influence the states of the distant particles, your faraway friend won't know what sequence of measurements you selected. So he will select his own set of measurements, and end up with what seems like a random stream, and no way to correctly interpret what the stream "means" without knowing the sequence of measurements you performed. Of course the two sides can pre-arranged what measurement sequence to use, but that's not FTL communication... that just becomes old-fashioned communication. The point is that "communication" means "transfer of information", and one cannot transfer information via entanglement (which may be FTL), because one has to additionally transfer the measurement information in a sub-luminal way. This may sound "contrived" to prevent FTL communication, but that's just what our best equations currently describe.
Well different people have different sense of humor. I think it would presumptuous for you or I to claim with any kind of objective authority that this fake news report isn't funny. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think it is.
I personally don't think it's that funny--but again my point is just that humor is a variable thing. So just because you or I don't get a laugh from it, doesn't mean it isn't funny.
What is funny, in my opinion, is reading through the Slashdot comments and seeing how many of them are written (non ironically) as if the news report is real. It's funny not because those people are gullible... but because those Slashdot readers basically just read the headline and rushed to post a comment without reading the summary and realizing the whole thing was ridiculous. It's a window into how many posters don't read the article, or even the summary. That makes me chuckle.
Mistake? How so? It's pretty obvious that the purpose of the naming-competition was to get people involved and excited. To raise NASA's profile and garner some free advertising. By allowing write-ins, they opened the door for Colbert to advertise for them. And apparently he drove some 230,000 people to go check out the NASA site, maybe read some other NASA material, talk about NASA with their friends, and so on.
I daresay NASA was quite successful in their effort to gain some publicity. Allowing write-ins was evidently not a mistake.
Maybe Google gave [up the term "GrandCentral"] for undisclosed cash to Apple since they are using the same term for a new type of multicore support in Snow Leopard
I think this has more to do with branding. Google likes to put their name in products they take over. "GrandCentral" doesn't sound like a Google product. "Google Voice" does (and tells you roughly what it's all about). When Google bought Keyhole, they re-branded the product "Google Earth".
In fact take a look at this list of Google acquisitions. Most of them were re-branded by Google, and most of the new names contain "Google" in them (with limited exceptions, like AdSense, which has a strong brand of its own).
For something like YouTube, they didn't change the name since it already had a strong brand and following. But GrandCentral? It didn't have a huge following or mindshare. So rebranding it just makes sense. I doubt Apple had anything to do with it.
I, as a typical human, have plenty more than five senses. I would have hoped that people's understanding of their own body would have continued past grade-school.
Yup. This is a pet-peeve of mine, too. Humans have between 9-16 senses (or more), depending on how you want to count/divide them. The "5 senses" idea dates back to Aristotle... and we've learned quite a bit about the world and the human body since then. Frankly it's ridiculous that even in grade school children are told that humans have 5 senses: it's patently false. And it's quite easy to demonstrate otherwise (e.g. ask a person if they can sense which way is down).
It bugs me to no end that these kinds of basic science mistakes are repeated ad nauseum.
But hold on... do these "3 strikes" rules actually replace the other dangers? Or just supplement them?
In all these "3 strikes" proposals, is there some legally-enforceable rule that if you are accused of unauthorized distribution (one of your "strikes"), the copyright holder implicitly waives their right to sue? I don't think so. (But if anyone has some info one way or the other, please let me know.)
So in other words, these rules are just another way for a person to be attacked. They can lose their net connection, with a low burden of proof. But they are still open to legal intimidation and lawsuits (with higher burden of proof, mind you). Taking your "Underground Railroad" example, this would mean that the person would be let off with a warning by one group of people (the first 2 times anyway)... but other groups of people could still harass them. So they are not more protected.
In fact, if the "3 strikes" doesn't prevent subsequent suing, then it in fact acts as the policing that the media industries have been asking for. The media lawyers can issue tons of accusations, and then sue anyone if an accusation sticks (with the ISP doing the legwork of checking who owned the IP, and cursory fact checking in the logs).
I was quite surprised that he singled-out installation as being difficult. Like you, I consider this to be one of the selling points of Linux: package management makes installation centralized and streamlined.
I offer an anecdote to counter the author's experiences (yes, I know anecdotes are not worth much, but TFA is essentially just an anecdote, too...): A friend of mine recently got fed up with Windows XP and switched to Ubuntu (with no prompting from me, other than mentioning "I use Ubuntu" when he asked what anti-virus software I use). He was a total newbie to Linux. After about a week I asked him about his impressions. Overall he said it was working great, and he specifically singled-out installation as one area that was really awesome. He said that he loved being able to install things without searching all over the net.
Moreover, he said that he liked being able to install things from the repos and trust that the software would not fuck up his system. His Windows machine had gotten messed-up more than once because of all the applications he had installed (some were conflicting; others were decidedly dodgy). And so he had learned to agonize before installing anything on Windows, always worrying that this app would mess up his system. (In the end he got hit with malware somehow despite his newfound caution.) He emphasized that with Ubuntu he didn't have to agonize anymore: installing (and uninstalling!) things was now easy and worry-free.
All this to say that some newbies catch on to the "Linux way" of installing, and love it. Others (like the author of TFA) find it harder to adjust. It would certainly be nice to have some rough numbers regarding how many new users find installing easy vs. hard. This would help inform the next round of changes to the package managers in Linux.
By default, every update has a check next to it in the Update Manager. Uncheck the boxes next to those you don't want to update -- I recommend updating only software that you recognize.
This seems like really bad advice. I would say the opposite: only forego an update if you recognize the software and are sure that you don't want the newer version.
The vast majority of updates will be for "underlying" software, like the kernel, libraries, and so on. These are also the things that a newbie is most likely to "not recognize". But these are the things that critically need security updates. If a newbie only updates OpenOffice and Firefox (which he recognizes) but skips the kernel, cron, openssh, iptables, and so on (because he doesn't recognize them), he may be left with significant vulnerabilities in very important subsystems.
In a modern world the default advice should be to install updates and thereby stay as secure as possible. Users should only be skipping updates when they have good reason to think that the new version isn't better (e.g. breaks a feature they like). This is especially true on Linux, since there are no updates that are being pushed out just to limit/inhibit the end user (like, e.g. Windows Genuine Advantage does).
Does the Uncertainty Principle play into this at all?
The uncertainty principle (or quantum indeterminacy, if you prefer) is fundamental to quantum mechanics, so it plays a role in... well in just about everything.
Hawking's explanation is one way of looking at virtual particles, which are indeed the origin of vacuum fluctuations.
If his explanation seems wrong, it is because the uncertainty principle is usually misrepresented in mainstream media. It is usually described as an a measurement imprecision: as if a particle has a definite position and velocity, but there is some law that prevents us from measuring it properly. That's (if I may be so bold) a very antiquated interpretation. The more modern interpretation is that a particle is inherently fuzzy: wavelike and indeterminate in its properties. The wavefunction for a particle inherently is 'spread out': it specifies a spread in various variables (e.g. position or momentum).
The Heisenberg uncertainty principles (there are actually many such relations; there is one between position and momentum; one between time and energy; etc.) describe how these indeterminacies evolve. Certain kinds of interactions (which you can call 'measurements' if you like) will reduce one kind of indeterminacy, but there will be a corresponding 'spread out' in another quantity.
Now back to virtual particles. The time-energy Heisenberg uncertainty says that deviations in energy are allowed as long as they don't exist for 'too long' (I'm being loose with language, the actual equations of course set rigorous bounds on all these things). So a vacuum can suddenly have 'more energy' as long as that energy disappears in a short amount of time. This is what virtual particles are: particles that are created 'out of nowhere', exist for a short time, then disappear. The interesting thing is that though these short-lived particles cannot be directly measured, their effects are very real. In fact if you think about a charged particle that emits a static electric field which exerts a force on some other particle, it is in fact virtual particles which are being exchanged between the two particles which explains the origin of the force between them (and explains the seeming 'action at a distance'). A time-varying electric field would instead generate 'real' photons, which are the light and radio waves we are all familiar with.
Some people think that virtual particles sound 'silly and made up' or somesuch. But they are a natural prediction of modern quantum theory, and they happen to nicely explain a wide variety of experimental results.
So Hawking is right that vacuum fluctuations arise because of quantum indeterminacy (which you can call 'Heisenberg uncertainty' if you prefer). The vacuum has particles appearing and disappearing all the time, and they produce real, measurable effects (like the Casimir force), even if they cannot be directly measured. (Just like a static electric field.)
(Disclaimer: I'm not a quantum physicist, so I've probably made a few mistakes. Corrections and clarifications are welcome.)
This sounds like a Saturday afternoon in the garage with just a couple too many beers, an old tube tv, a broken microwave, and a friend that is just a little too happy to be 'experimenting' with stuff at your place because of the garage fire he had last year.
More likely this will be a multi-year research project that will use atomically-flat substrates, ultrapure reagents, $250,000 of precision electrical equipment, and an untold number of late nights for grad students agonizing over every last detail.
Physics: Doing simple-sounding things in fiendishly precise ways.
An oft-used classical analogy is of boats on a wavy sea. It's been reported that two ships sitting on a wavy sea (but windless day) will slowly move closer together, as if they are 'attracted' to one another. The origin of the force is the waves of various wavelengths that form on the water surface. The sea surface has waves of all different sizes. In between the two ships, however, some wavelengths can't 'fit' and so those modes are suppressed. The end result is that there are fewer wave between the ships, so the greater pressure from the (more) waves on the other sides of the ships pushes them closer together. (I'm glossing over the details, e.g. that you have to take into account how the waves on the surface of the sea reflect off the ship's hulls... but hopefully you get the idea.)
The Casimir force is like the quantum version of this. According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum is constantly churning with the creation and annihilation of virtual particles. Thus there are quantum waves of all kinds of different wavelengths. In between two plates, some quantized modes can't exist, and are suppressed. The end result is that there is more pressure from the vacuum on the outside of the plates than in the gap between them. Hence the plates are pushed together by the vacuum pressure.
Note that in both cases the magnitude of the force is quite small, and so you have to be quite careful to observe the force and measure it properly.
Given that Apple gave birth to the WebKit rendering engine, it would make sense the company knows best how to rev it up.
It may be true that Apple started the Webkit project, but they did so by forking the KHTML codebase. Saying that Apple "gave birth" to WebKit is stretching the truth. It implies that they created it from scratch, when they didn't. Many other people put in a tremendous amount of work to create the foundations upon which WebKit was built.
A nitpick, perhaps. But it bugs me that the contributions of the KHTML team are being forgotten.
Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
Hm. But this raises an interesting question. Was he actually right?
Let's assume for the moment that TFA is correct, that higher-order terms can enhance gravity waves and that this is the case for SN1987A. So Weber's measurements in 1987 contained a valid signature of a gravity wave.
In a sense, then, he did detect gravity waves. And so he was right in saying "I detected gravity waves". However, he may have been right for the wrong reasons. Science works by interpreting data, and convincing others that your interpretation is correct. Weber was not able to do so. He was not able to convince others because he couldn't provide a way to connect the magnitude of the signal in his measurements to the available theory.
Now, if he had done what the present scientists have done, and demonstrate that the higher-order terms make gravity waves detectable in his apparatus, then he might have been able to convince his colleagues. Then he would really have been right (and for the right reasons). But he didn't (as far as I can tell). He incorrectly said "gravity waves, as described by these theories/equations, have been measured on my instrument"... which is wrong.
Some of you may think I'm just splitting hairs or something. But it's important because in science being right is not about randomly guessing the right answer... it's about providing a robust argument based on repeatable measurements. In science, happening upon the right answer using the wrong logic isn't really considered a good thing. As an extreme analogy, imagine that I am trying to predict when the next volcanic eruption will be, and I come up with a complicated theory based on tides. Then I correctly predict an eruption. A few years later some smarter guys come along and create a really great theory that predicts volcanic eruptions, and show that it is really based on magma flow... and that I was just lucky to have predicted the eruption. Was I "right" in my prediction?
Slashdot Mirror
If I wanted to see ads... I wouldn't block them. This feature seems redundant.
A fair point; and one that many comments seem to bring up.
The blog post, however, explains the rationale. In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
In practice the way AdBlock currently works, it's just so easy to block everything and forget about it. Users then forget to ever "unblock" pages that they like and would like to support (through advertising).
Now, if you're a user committed to never seeing any ads at all, then yes this feature is useless for you. You will no doubt turn it off. (Yes, the intent is for an option to be present to never show these little warnings.) But for those of us who do want to support some sites, the reminder will help us make that decision.
Of course it is entirely possible that webmasters will abuse this meta-tag as much as they abuse the ads themselves. (Why wouldn't a webmaster turn the tag on all the time?) Since the default will still be to block ads until the user says otherwise, at worst this will mean a little bar shows up in the browser the first time they visit a site. Not a huge deal. (And if it annoys you, then you just turn off the behavior.) I like the idea of being able to preview how annoying ads are for a site, and then deciding whether or not to let them through. (As long as the default start-state is "block" then I won't be inundated with crap...) I, for one, want to be able to support sites that are smart enough to have reasonable ads. (Yes, I currently manually unblock sites using the AdBlock context menu... but this would make it easier.)
Although I like this proposal, I don't understand why it wouldn't be simpler to just have someone do the sorting for those "ad-server lists". What I want is a block-list that blocks the annoying ads (e.g. flash ads that cover the page) but doesn't block un-annoying ads (e.g. demure text-ads). A whole spectrum of lists, depending on people's tastes, could be constructed. Do these kind of "nice blocking" lists already exist?
Then every person you've talked to is dense.
Depends what one means by "faithful representation". The new movie has a Kirk very much like the old Kirk, a Spock very much like the old Spock, and so on. But is that what makes it Trek?
Overall this was an action movie with slick special effects and some comedy. The first two Star Trek series were decidedly about moral dilemmas and the promise of a utopian future for humankind. Thus to someone who thinks the "essence of Trek" is this "analysis of the human spirit", this new movie doesn't faithfully represent Star Trek: it has a ship named Enterprise with a captain named Kirk, but it is thematically very different from the original incarnation.
And of course there are many other ways to analyze the question of "faithful to the original". I won't comment on which interpretation I think is right... But it's important to remember that "faithful representation" has everything to do with perspective.
I like Hulu because it actually works. In particular, it works on Linux with no fussing (in my experience) whereas the players on other sites often don't work, or require onerous downloads and installs (which are usually Windows-only). Hulu just works fine on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Hulu is also a "one stop watch" at this point. For a while, I experimented with keeping track of different shows via different official websites. It was painful because each site had a slightly different interface... but worse, each network's online streaming site seem to want to change their format every so often. This makes it even more annoying to to watch a few shows in a row, because your bookmarks have died (if their format was even bookmarkable!) and you have to search anew for what you want.
Hulu, instead, centralizes everything so that you only have to get used to the one (stable!) interface. And the accounts they offer make it easy to keep track of what shows you've watched... and you can even have your next subscription auto-play after you finish watching a show. It's the way TV "should" be: a channel that continually plays only shows you care about.
Despite the things Hulu has going for it, I worry about all this consolidation. Hulu is fast becoming the de-facto supplier for online streaming of TV shows. And this means that they will soon have a monopoly-like control, and will no doubt start abusing it. I really wish that competitors would spring up (and that the networks would license to multiple streaming-aggregator-sites).
And yeah, it does indeed suck that Hulu doesn't work outside the US. So much money (in targeted, country-specific advertising!) is being left on the table.
Guess who it's going to be passed onto? Intel gets fined and I suspect that by some remarkable coincidence the prices of their chips mysteriously increase.
Yeah that's the point.
Intel have been able to keep their market share artificially high by abusing their dominance. This has made it difficult for other companies to compete. If Intel is forced to raise prices to cover the fines, then this gives other companies the chance to gain market share by competing on price.
In other words, the fine restores some amount of competition, as intended, and serves as a deterrent against continuing to abuse dominance, as intended.
As long as they don't try to indoctrinate based religion/race it should be fine.
So you seem to agree that it wouldn't be OK for a school to censor/filter in a way that favors or disfavors a particular religion or race.
But then why is it OK to censor/filter in a way that favors or disfavors a particular subculture? A particular social class? A particular lifestyle? A particular gender? A particular viewpoint? A particular genetic predisposition?
Would it be OK to censor/filter out any reference to autism (let's say, for the sake of argument, that a community felt that autism was an abomination)? Is that fair to autistic people?
These are honest questions. A line must be drawn somewhere, and I'm curious to see what consistent cases can be made about where to draw it. It seems to me that for much the same reasons we must be careful about race and religion, we must be careful about a wide variety of discrimination. Whether or not it is legally required, I believe that our society, should encourage open access to information, tolerance, fairness, and equality.
Yes, Bennett Haselton is famous for being verbose and embedding extraneous arguments within a larger debate (sometimes diluting his original point).
In this case, his point about scientifically judging the maturity of teenagers is that it would entirely obviate, using rigorous evidence, the need for these web-blockers at all (at least for people above a certain age). That would certainly be progress (rather than debating about how much to block, wouldn't be nice if we had a good metric by which to say "we don't need to worry about censoring at all for this class of people").
We have arbitrary social rules about when someone is "old enough" to do certain things (drive a car, drink alcohol, buy porn). These standards vary wildly from culture to culture (in some cultures, even adults are not allowed those things), and are never based on evidence. Just "gut feelings" about maturity. So he proposes that some standard be established, and that standard tested against average adults, teenagers, children, etc. If it can be shown that a 15-year old is statistically indistinguishable from a 28-year old in terms of how they are able to reason logically, and how they react to, say, pornography; then it doesn't make sense to block the 15-year old from porn sites.
I agree with Haselton on this point. It's ridiculous that in this day and age we are still basing most of our legal rulings on untested "gut feelings" about how people behave, and how they are affected by external events/forces. We can do better.
Twitter is a big deal because people use it. Yeah it's that simple.
Like many such things, it's a matter of network effects. There's nothing intrinsically amazing or even unique about Twitter. But some people started using it because it was fun, and it caught on. Now the pervasive reason to use it is to connect with all the people using it: either to follow people/trends you care about, or reach an audience you're interested in (whether that's "friends" or "the world" or "customers"...).
You'll also notice that Ford is not merely using Twitter. They are using Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. From their point of view, Twitter is just another channel through which they can reach potential customers. Thus they just add it to the list of newspaper, phone, radio, TV, etc.
"Jumping on the bandwagon" may seem uncool, but when one is trying to connect with others, it's quite logical to join in the most popular communication channels.
Indeed. But there are some fringe cases that I'm sure will cause headaches. Like:
-Zecco customer with $20,000 in their account.
-One day they log in and see that they now have $1,020,000 in their account.
-They make an investment for, let's say, $15,000.
Does Zecco cancel the investment, or honor it, or what? Consider:
A. If the investment went up, the customer can claim that they were trying to invest $15k of their $20k, that it was a legitimate transaction, and that they should be allowed to keep the gain.
B. If the investment went down, the customer can claim that their investment strategies were unduly influenced by their seemingly-increased buying power. They claim Zecco's mistake is responsible for their overly-risky investment, and that Zecco needs to cancel the trade, and restore their account to the way it would have been if the trade had never happened. They can say "You canceled the investments of all those other customers! Why not mine?"
If Zecco cancels all transactions (including those of type A), there will be plenty of legitimately angry customers. They tried to play by the rules, and yet had their sound investment (and associated gain) taken away. On the other hand if Zecco cancels only transactions of type B (but lets type A go through), they will lose a lot of money: for that one day everyone was only able to make investments that made them money! What a deal! Yet if Zecco says it won't cancel any transactions for amounts below a person's previous buying power, people can still argue that their strategy was disturbed by the mere presence (and psychological effect) of all that other money sitting there.
And a further complication: what if someone makes two $15k investments on that day? They spent over their 'real' limit. But which transaction was the one that spent the "money they don't actually own"? Also, having an extra million $ is obvious. But a customer could legitimately claim that they thought they had $30k in the account (when it fact it should have been $20k). It's up to Zecco to report it correctly, and if they don't then customers will become legitimately confused and may make trades somewhat beyond their previous buying power. Even if they are trying to act in good faith.
All this to say that this is going to be a mess for Zecco to sort out. They will likely have to make concessions to numerous customers, which will cost them a ton of money.
I agree with your caution against scientists over-stating their knowledge. But...
Time has proven again and again that the only thing stopping ANYTHING is not having the knowledge to do it.
I don't think that's right. If that were true, it would imply that the physical universe has no immutable laws. That every physical law can be somehow circumvented. But such a universe is de-facto a universe without actual laws. What I'm saying is that if you accept that the universe operates based on some set of rules/laws (and this is a basic assumption in science), then this means that there are some things that simply cannot be done, no matter how smart you are.
Now we can't know for certain that the "speed of light limit" is one of those laws. But all the evidence we have so far (and this includes a boatload of experiments and all of our most predictive theories) is that matter/energy/information cannot travel faster than light.
for every problem, there IS a solution, even if they can not figure it out themselves.
A romantic notion, but one without any particular evidence. The idea that technology can become arbitrarily powerful, that "anything" can be done if only one knew how, is completely at odds with a universe having a specific set of physical laws. The physical laws define a set of possible and impossible behaviors... and there is no guarantee that a given problem has a solution falling into the "possible in this universe" class.
First of all it's worth remembering that quantum mechanics and relativity are not 100% incompatible. In fact "relativistic quantum mechanics" has been around for a long time. Quantum theory was greatly advanced when relativistic effects were included.
But you're right that we have good reason to believe that something is wrong with either quantum mechanics or relativity (or both), since they give contradictory predictions in a certain number of extreme cases. (Quantum gravity is not yet solved...)
However we also have ample evidence that quantum mechanics and relativity are incredibly accurate and predictive theories in a vast range of circumstances. We have every reason to believe that the correct "Theory of Everything" will reduce to conventional quantum mechanics and conventional relativity in the appropriate limits. And thus we have every reason to continue using those theories to make predictions all over the place.
Now a warp bubble is one of those extreme situations where the two theories might be expected to give contradictory results, in which case only the hypothetical theory-of-everything would give the correct answers. But it is certainly still useful to ask what our current theories would predict for these extreme situations. It helps us better understand the theories. And, again, we have reasons to believe that many of the things our current theories predict (even in extreme situations) will be right. Absent the theory-of-everything, quantum mechanics + relativity will give us the "best guess" about how such objects would behave
Sorry, but we already have faster-than-light communication trough quantum entanglement. The change in state happens instantly, without any delay, no matter what the distance is.
You're mis-interpreting quantum mechanics and entanglement. The second sentence in that quote is right, but it doesn't imply the first sentence, which is wrong.
When a quantum entanglement collapses, both of the entangled particles will end up in states that are strongly correlated, even if the two particles are very far apart. So yes you could have two entangled particles that are separated from each other, have them collapse, and there would be "instantaneous" correlations between them.
However this cannot be used for faster-than-light communication. (It makes for cool sci-fi, but isn't correct when you really look into the details of quantum mechanics.) The reason it cannot is because the collapse is (at least to the local observers) random. Neither side can predict nor influence* what random state their end of the entangled pair collapses into. So if we have two streams of entangled particles (one on Earth and one at Alpha Centauri), both sides would read out a random stream of answers (up/down, yes/no, 1/0 ... or whatever). Only once you compare the two streams do you realize that they were correlated more strongly than random chance (and classical mechanics) would allow. A cool experiment, to be sure! But it can't be used to transfer information.
Many people have tried to devise ways around the rules of quantum mechanics, to allow entanglement to be used for FTL communication. But all such proposals (to date) have been found to have mistakes with respect to our current understanding of quantum mechanics. To date, there is no loophole that allows one to circumvent the (local) randomness of quantum mechanics to allow FTL. Of course it's possible that modern relativity and quantum mechanics are both wrong. But at least for now there is no evidence of any information ever being transmitted faster-than-light.
* Actually you can try to influence the answers you get from your stream by selecting a particular measurement method. And while doing so does influence the states of the distant particles, your faraway friend won't know what sequence of measurements you selected. So he will select his own set of measurements, and end up with what seems like a random stream, and no way to correctly interpret what the stream "means" without knowing the sequence of measurements you performed. Of course the two sides can pre-arranged what measurement sequence to use, but that's not FTL communication... that just becomes old-fashioned communication. The point is that "communication" means "transfer of information", and one cannot transfer information via entanglement (which may be FTL), because one has to additionally transfer the measurement information in a sub-luminal way. This may sound "contrived" to prevent FTL communication, but that's just what our best equations currently describe.
Can I pretend that I just tricked you with an April Fool's joke? Or did I just make myself look like an ass?
~sigh~ Serves me right for posting an arrogant retort. 100 Icelandic króna would be worth 47 US cents.
Well different people have different sense of humor. I think it would presumptuous for you or I to claim with any kind of objective authority that this fake news report isn't funny. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think it is.
I personally don't think it's that funny--but again my point is just that humor is a variable thing. So just because you or I don't get a laugh from it, doesn't mean it isn't funny.
What is funny, in my opinion, is reading through the Slashdot comments and seeing how many of them are written (non ironically) as if the news report is real. It's funny not because those people are gullible... but because those Slashdot readers basically just read the headline and rushed to post a comment without reading the summary and realizing the whole thing was ridiculous. It's a window into how many posters don't read the article, or even the summary. That makes me chuckle.
The current exchange rate for Swedish krona to US Dollars is 0.121192. So 100 krona notes are worth 12.12 USD.
NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins.
Mistake? How so? It's pretty obvious that the purpose of the naming-competition was to get people involved and excited. To raise NASA's profile and garner some free advertising. By allowing write-ins, they opened the door for Colbert to advertise for them. And apparently he drove some 230,000 people to go check out the NASA site, maybe read some other NASA material, talk about NASA with their friends, and so on.
I daresay NASA was quite successful in their effort to gain some publicity. Allowing write-ins was evidently not a mistake.
Maybe Google gave [up the term "GrandCentral"] for undisclosed cash to Apple since they are using the same term for a new type of multicore support in Snow Leopard
I think this has more to do with branding. Google likes to put their name in products they take over. "GrandCentral" doesn't sound like a Google product. "Google Voice" does (and tells you roughly what it's all about). When Google bought Keyhole, they re-branded the product "Google Earth".
In fact take a look at this list of Google acquisitions. Most of them were re-branded by Google, and most of the new names contain "Google" in them (with limited exceptions, like AdSense, which has a strong brand of its own).
For something like YouTube, they didn't change the name since it already had a strong brand and following. But GrandCentral? It didn't have a huge following or mindshare. So rebranding it just makes sense. I doubt Apple had anything to do with it.
I, as a typical human, have plenty more than five senses. I would have hoped that people's understanding of their own body would have continued past grade-school.
Yup. This is a pet-peeve of mine, too. Humans have between 9-16 senses (or more), depending on how you want to count/divide them. The "5 senses" idea dates back to Aristotle... and we've learned quite a bit about the world and the human body since then. Frankly it's ridiculous that even in grade school children are told that humans have 5 senses: it's patently false. And it's quite easy to demonstrate otherwise (e.g. ask a person if they can sense which way is down).
It bugs me to no end that these kinds of basic science mistakes are repeated ad nauseum.
But hold on... do these "3 strikes" rules actually replace the other dangers? Or just supplement them?
In all these "3 strikes" proposals, is there some legally-enforceable rule that if you are accused of unauthorized distribution (one of your "strikes"), the copyright holder implicitly waives their right to sue? I don't think so. (But if anyone has some info one way or the other, please let me know.)
So in other words, these rules are just another way for a person to be attacked. They can lose their net connection, with a low burden of proof. But they are still open to legal intimidation and lawsuits (with higher burden of proof, mind you). Taking your "Underground Railroad" example, this would mean that the person would be let off with a warning by one group of people (the first 2 times anyway)... but other groups of people could still harass them. So they are not more protected.
In fact, if the "3 strikes" doesn't prevent subsequent suing, then it in fact acts as the policing that the media industries have been asking for. The media lawyers can issue tons of accusations, and then sue anyone if an accusation sticks (with the ISP doing the legwork of checking who owned the IP, and cursory fact checking in the logs).
This doesn't seem like progress.
I was quite surprised that he singled-out installation as being difficult. Like you, I consider this to be one of the selling points of Linux: package management makes installation centralized and streamlined.
I offer an anecdote to counter the author's experiences (yes, I know anecdotes are not worth much, but TFA is essentially just an anecdote, too...): A friend of mine recently got fed up with Windows XP and switched to Ubuntu (with no prompting from me, other than mentioning "I use Ubuntu" when he asked what anti-virus software I use). He was a total newbie to Linux. After about a week I asked him about his impressions. Overall he said it was working great, and he specifically singled-out installation as one area that was really awesome. He said that he loved being able to install things without searching all over the net.
Moreover, he said that he liked being able to install things from the repos and trust that the software would not fuck up his system. His Windows machine had gotten messed-up more than once because of all the applications he had installed (some were conflicting; others were decidedly dodgy). And so he had learned to agonize before installing anything on Windows, always worrying that this app would mess up his system. (In the end he got hit with malware somehow despite his newfound caution.) He emphasized that with Ubuntu he didn't have to agonize anymore: installing (and uninstalling!) things was now easy and worry-free.
All this to say that some newbies catch on to the "Linux way" of installing, and love it. Others (like the author of TFA) find it harder to adjust. It would certainly be nice to have some rough numbers regarding how many new users find installing easy vs. hard. This would help inform the next round of changes to the package managers in Linux.
From page 4 of TFA:
This seems like really bad advice. I would say the opposite: only forego an update if you recognize the software and are sure that you don't want the newer version.
The vast majority of updates will be for "underlying" software, like the kernel, libraries, and so on. These are also the things that a newbie is most likely to "not recognize". But these are the things that critically need security updates. If a newbie only updates OpenOffice and Firefox (which he recognizes) but skips the kernel, cron, openssh, iptables, and so on (because he doesn't recognize them), he may be left with significant vulnerabilities in very important subsystems.
In a modern world the default advice should be to install updates and thereby stay as secure as possible. Users should only be skipping updates when they have good reason to think that the new version isn't better (e.g. breaks a feature they like). This is especially true on Linux, since there are no updates that are being pushed out just to limit/inhibit the end user (like, e.g. Windows Genuine Advantage does).
Does the Uncertainty Principle play into this at all?
The uncertainty principle (or quantum indeterminacy, if you prefer) is fundamental to quantum mechanics, so it plays a role in ... well in just about everything.
Hawking's explanation is one way of looking at virtual particles, which are indeed the origin of vacuum fluctuations.
If his explanation seems wrong, it is because the uncertainty principle is usually misrepresented in mainstream media. It is usually described as an a measurement imprecision: as if a particle has a definite position and velocity, but there is some law that prevents us from measuring it properly. That's (if I may be so bold) a very antiquated interpretation. The more modern interpretation is that a particle is inherently fuzzy: wavelike and indeterminate in its properties. The wavefunction for a particle inherently is 'spread out': it specifies a spread in various variables (e.g. position or momentum).
The Heisenberg uncertainty principles (there are actually many such relations; there is one between position and momentum; one between time and energy; etc.) describe how these indeterminacies evolve. Certain kinds of interactions (which you can call 'measurements' if you like) will reduce one kind of indeterminacy, but there will be a corresponding 'spread out' in another quantity.
Now back to virtual particles. The time-energy Heisenberg uncertainty says that deviations in energy are allowed as long as they don't exist for 'too long' (I'm being loose with language, the actual equations of course set rigorous bounds on all these things). So a vacuum can suddenly have 'more energy' as long as that energy disappears in a short amount of time. This is what virtual particles are: particles that are created 'out of nowhere', exist for a short time, then disappear. The interesting thing is that though these short-lived particles cannot be directly measured, their effects are very real. In fact if you think about a charged particle that emits a static electric field which exerts a force on some other particle, it is in fact virtual particles which are being exchanged between the two particles which explains the origin of the force between them (and explains the seeming 'action at a distance'). A time-varying electric field would instead generate 'real' photons, which are the light and radio waves we are all familiar with.
Some people think that virtual particles sound 'silly and made up' or somesuch. But they are a natural prediction of modern quantum theory, and they happen to nicely explain a wide variety of experimental results.
So Hawking is right that vacuum fluctuations arise because of quantum indeterminacy (which you can call 'Heisenberg uncertainty' if you prefer). The vacuum has particles appearing and disappearing all the time, and they produce real, measurable effects (like the Casimir force), even if they cannot be directly measured. (Just like a static electric field.)
(Disclaimer: I'm not a quantum physicist, so I've probably made a few mistakes. Corrections and clarifications are welcome.)
This sounds like a Saturday afternoon in the garage with just a couple too many beers, an old tube tv, a broken microwave, and a friend that is just a little too happy to be 'experimenting' with stuff at your place because of the garage fire he had last year.
More likely this will be a multi-year research project that will use atomically-flat substrates, ultrapure reagents, $250,000 of precision electrical equipment, and an untold number of late nights for grad students agonizing over every last detail.
Physics: Doing simple-sounding things in fiendishly precise ways.
Good explanation.
An oft-used classical analogy is of boats on a wavy sea. It's been reported that two ships sitting on a wavy sea (but windless day) will slowly move closer together, as if they are 'attracted' to one another. The origin of the force is the waves of various wavelengths that form on the water surface. The sea surface has waves of all different sizes. In between the two ships, however, some wavelengths can't 'fit' and so those modes are suppressed. The end result is that there are fewer wave between the ships, so the greater pressure from the (more) waves on the other sides of the ships pushes them closer together. (I'm glossing over the details, e.g. that you have to take into account how the waves on the surface of the sea reflect off the ship's hulls... but hopefully you get the idea.)
The Casimir force is like the quantum version of this. According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum is constantly churning with the creation and annihilation of virtual particles. Thus there are quantum waves of all kinds of different wavelengths. In between two plates, some quantized modes can't exist, and are suppressed. The end result is that there is more pressure from the vacuum on the outside of the plates than in the gap between them. Hence the plates are pushed together by the vacuum pressure.
Note that in both cases the magnitude of the force is quite small, and so you have to be quite careful to observe the force and measure it properly.
This statement from page 4 of TFA bugs me:
It may be true that Apple started the Webkit project, but they did so by forking the KHTML codebase. Saying that Apple "gave birth" to WebKit is stretching the truth. It implies that they created it from scratch, when they didn't. Many other people put in a tremendous amount of work to create the foundations upon which WebKit was built.
A nitpick, perhaps. But it bugs me that the contributions of the KHTML team are being forgotten.
Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
Hm. But this raises an interesting question. Was he actually right?
Let's assume for the moment that TFA is correct, that higher-order terms can enhance gravity waves and that this is the case for SN1987A. So Weber's measurements in 1987 contained a valid signature of a gravity wave.
In a sense, then, he did detect gravity waves. And so he was right in saying "I detected gravity waves". However, he may have been right for the wrong reasons. Science works by interpreting data, and convincing others that your interpretation is correct. Weber was not able to do so. He was not able to convince others because he couldn't provide a way to connect the magnitude of the signal in his measurements to the available theory.
Now, if he had done what the present scientists have done, and demonstrate that the higher-order terms make gravity waves detectable in his apparatus, then he might have been able to convince his colleagues. Then he would really have been right (and for the right reasons). But he didn't (as far as I can tell). He incorrectly said "gravity waves, as described by these theories/equations, have been measured on my instrument"... which is wrong.
Some of you may think I'm just splitting hairs or something. But it's important because in science being right is not about randomly guessing the right answer... it's about providing a robust argument based on repeatable measurements. In science, happening upon the right answer using the wrong logic isn't really considered a good thing. As an extreme analogy, imagine that I am trying to predict when the next volcanic eruption will be, and I come up with a complicated theory based on tides. Then I correctly predict an eruption. A few years later some smarter guys come along and create a really great theory that predicts volcanic eruptions, and show that it is really based on magma flow... and that I was just lucky to have predicted the eruption. Was I "right" in my prediction?