I think this is a really good idea that will be absolutely terrible in practice.
With respect to "good idea", the combination of search with a social graph could be powerful. One of the problems with online reviews is that you can't really be sure that they are not astroturf or otherwise skewed. This is why people often, in practice, ask their friends for recommendations. It provides a perspective from someone you trust; or at least someone who is not primarily motivated by a financial incentive to get you to buy a product (they may have other biases, like trying to justify their own purchases, etc.). If done properly, a piece of software could check your social graph for recommendations and trust information. So if a friend (who you have marked as "trustworthy with respect to car purchases" highly-ranks a given car, that could add bonus points to that car. But you can also generalize: e.g. more highly ranked car-rating sites that this friend trusts. Or drawing upon the trusted friends of your trusted friends, so that you can pool together the opinions of people you don't know, but have reason to trust. And even beyond that, by comparing the like/dislike profile of you and your friends with aggregate data, you can determine what online reviewers to trust just based on their voting history (do they accurately pick things I like? Or shill products that disappoint?). This would be very powerful: search for "I want to buy a camera" and your software automatically shows you reviews/recommendations that you have some reason to trust.
The reason this will fail, miserably, is because it will be a slave to corporate whims, rather than a tool to help users. It would only really work as software running on the user's own computer, with all the social-graph data managed and under the direct control of the user. With the recommendation algorithm under the control of a company, the temptation to abuse the data will be much too great. The fact that it is being done by Facebook and Microsoft, two companies that have a track record of degrading the user experience in the name of profits, just makes this even more doomed to fail. The end product will be user hostile: it will provide skewed results to users based on corporate sponsorship and corporate interests (strangely, none of my friends are recommending Open-Office); the data about user habits and likes/dislikes will be sold to advertisers; the massive dataset will also probably be stolen or lost somehow (again, Microsoft and Facebook are not to be trusted in this regard). The endless pursuit of monetization will make the product so skewed and annoying, that no one will want to use it.
It's too bad. It would be nice to have good tools to automate the social-graph work that people naturally do ("Hey, bob, I know you renovated your house last fall... can you recommend a good roofing guy?"). But instead we will get advertising-on-steroids ("All your friends signed up for ScammyScam.com and won $5,000!!! You could win money too!!! Sign up for ScammyScam.com!!! Punch the monkey to win!!!").
It's somewhat strange that you would use the Zeno paradox to justify that they cannot be equal; considering that the Zeno formulation is obviously wrong: in real life we have no difficult traversing distances despite this mental problem with "infinite divisibility".
But the Zeno problem is a red herring in this context in any case. The 1 = 0.99... equality is not asking about lengths of real objects in the real world. And it is not talking about performing floating-point computations on real computers that have rounding errors. It is talking about abstract mathematics. In mathematics, the definition of the ellipsis, "...", is to specify an infinite repetition of the pattern. Not a "really really long" repetition, nor some kind of temporal series where we "keep adding another digit forever" but rather it means to specify that the number has an infinite number of digits that repeat along that pattern.
There are many reasons why people can't grasp 1 = 0.99...; in your case it seems that you're thinking of 0.99... as a number where we "keep adding another digit" and then you worry that since it will take "forever" to add an infinite number of digits, there will always be some small remainder in (1-0.99...). But the mental model of infinities in terms of a temporal progression that never ends is just a crude way that humans use to think about the difficult concept of infinity. In this case, the crude heuristic leads to the incorrect conclusion. Because, again, an infinite quantity in math is not something that "grows bigger forever" it is some that simply is infinitely large. And an infinite number of digits after the decimal doesn't mean "we keep adding more digits forever" but rather than the number simply has an infinite number of digits.
Those who have trouble accepting that 1 = 0.99... should just realize that these are two equivalent ways of writing the same number. Do you similarly argue that 10/5 and 2 are not the same number? Or that 10/10 and 1/1 and 1 are not all the same number? Writing out "1" as "0.99..." or "9.99.../10" or "100*99.99.../(10^4)" may look weird, but they are all the same number, as a quick rearrangement will demonstrate.
Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent.
and:
In response to the twins’ lawsuit, [Zuckerberg] asks, does “a guy who makes a really good chair owe money to anyone who ever made a chair?”
I don't know the particulars (if the code was part of a work for hire, then Zuckerberg would be guilty of copyright infringement for his subsequent use of it... but that doesn't appear to be what is alleged), but assuming Lessig's account of the facts is correct, then Zuckerberg didn't "steal" anything. At least, he didn't break any laws. He may have appropriated other's ideas without credit, but plagiarism itself isn't illegal.
However I do disagree with Lessig's suggestion that we should admire Zuckerberg. It seems to me that, even if he stayed within the bounds of the law, he built-up Facebook by being mean, cut-throat, and ruthless. That makes him a bad person, regardless of the grand things he has was able to legally deploy with his tactics.
Better ban talking to people in the car with you as well.
As it turns out, talking over a phone is more distracting than talking with someone sitting in the car.
There are multiple reasons:
1. Someone in the car with you can and will respond to the dynamically-changing environment as you do. If something unexpected happens, they will usually stop talking.
2. In fact, someone in the car may notice something important, and notify the driver (either by shutting up or pointing it out), thereby partially mitigating the distraction they cause by talking.
3. A phone conversation requires more of your attention because you have to make up for the deficiencies of the data channel (phones have lower audio quality than real life, you can't read their body language (even out of the corner of your eye, you can get a feel for a person's mood), etc.).
4. Shared context makes communication more efficient, thus requiring less mental effort (this is why, even in this day and age, people generally want to meet face-to-face).
5. Studies have shown that it takes humans more mental effort to think/interact with people/data they believe is remote as compared to people/things they think are local. In one study, they measured reaction times and errors in a driving simulator when people were either using an "in-car GPS" giving them instructions or a "satellite data-feed" giving them instructions. Even though both sets of instructions were identical (including latency, etc.), the mere perception that the "satellite data-feed" was non-local caused people to devote more mental effort to it, which increased driving accidents. A non-intuitive result, perhaps, but human mental machinery is finely tuned not for the tasks we currently expect it to perform.
6. Initiating and finishing a phonecall requires much more attention than stopping/starting a conversation with someone sitting beside you. (Unlike fidgeting with a radio, answering a phonecall requires immediate action not at a moment of the driver's choosing.)
People engage in a variety of activities while driving. All of these secondary activities induce distraction and thereby increasing driving risk. There is a valid debate to be had about where to draw the line with respect to distractions. But it is fairly well-established that talking on a phone while driving, and certainly texting while driving, are more dangerous than talking to a passenger while driving. So it may indeed be reasonable and consistent to ban reading books, texting and making phonecalls while driving... but not banning listening to the radio or having conversations with passengers.
Yes, it's only a concept phone, and Mozilla has no plans to make it. Yes, it's easy to make technology super-awesome when you only have to deal in concepts, and not engineering.
But are you implying that this makes concept designs useless? Personally, I love them. The point is to show all the many-splendid things that could be possible if more advanced technology were available. Which makes sense to do, since technology continually advances. A concept design does many things: it gets people excited about possibilities, it gives product designers/engineers ideas about what to try next. Perhaps most importantly, it lets us all ruminate about, and discuss, design choices long before major effort has been expended. This lets us pick out great ideas and shoot down bad ones.
For instance, I'm sure many Slashdotters had moments of "that will never work because of X" or "that would suck because of Y" while watching the video. These criticisms can be helpful, as a concept design is refined to bring it closer to what a real-world device would have to do. And conversely many of us I'm sure had ideas like "That's awesome! If it could that, I bet I could hack it to do Z!" Many things we now use, and take for granted (touchscreen mobile phones among them) were ridiculous concept-designs at one time.
All I'm saying is that rather than just being "this is not and never will be a real device... lame" we should be discussing what is right or wrong about this particular design. We should be dreaming about future technology... because we are part of the process of making that technology come to be!
This is getting tangential, but... As I've argued before, when a debate starts focusing on terminology, both parties need to step back ask why people are worried so much about the terminology. Typically it is because words have added emotional baggage or implications, that either side wants to subtly slip into the debate without actively addressing the point.
In this case, one side really wants to use the word "stealing" to be used, because of the emotional baggage of associated with it (it's wrong, it's bad, no one honest would do it,...). The other side wants to use the word "sharing" similarly (it's good, everyone is taught to share, no one is harmed,...).
But in an intellectually honest debate, both sides would willingly back off from contentious terminology, and use neutral terms and focus on the particulars. Regardless of whether distributing digital copies is "sharing" or "stealing" (or both, or neither), we should debate whether said distribution is a net gain for society. We should debate whether said distribution violates a party's basic rights. And then from those points, we should debate what law would be both fair and socially-helpful.
I fully acknowledge that words have meaning, and we should try to be precise with language. But this is exactly why an honest debate should not invoke terms with an intent to capitalize on ambiguity. My main point is not to let debate get derailed by terminology concerns. Focus on the nature and consequences of the activity being debated, rather than ambiguous labels or partial analogies.
In the case of copyright, it becomes very difficult to argue for the social necessity, and intrinsic justness, of very long-term and rigidly-enforced copyright when you can no longer draw a false analogy to stealing of physical property. Conversely, it becomes difficult to argue that copyright infringement is completely without harm once you remove the sharing rhetoric and focus on the incentive/social-contract aspect of copyright law. In other words, I believe a socially-constructive compromise is more likely to arise from that kind of honest debate (yes, I know how unrealistic it is to expect that kind of debate to actually happen).
They certainly have uses. The iPad is nice for browsing the web while watching TV, for watching video or reading a book on a train or plane, for referring to a recipe website while cooking, etc. Now, many will argue "you can do all those things with a netbook or laptop" and it is certainly true. But the iPad weight and form factor (and battery life) increase the likelihood that you'll actually have it with you in these kinds of situations, which increases its utility.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure everyone would find an iPad at least somewhat useful. If iPads were dirt-cheap (say, $5) people would have one in every room of their house (and in their car, etc.). To me, the question is really: Is the iPad worth the asking price? Sure it's useful, but is it worth so much money for a rather limited device that sits inside a rather locked-down ecosystem. I think for the majority of people, the answer would be "no". It's only slightly more trouble to use a netbook, in which case you're getting much more bang for your buck. But for people with plenty of disposable income, the iPad is great. Yes, it's a luxury to have an expensive tablet just for random things like looking something up while watching TV... but so be it.
So, really, the iPad/tablet phenomenon is not solving a new problem per se. It's just a new (nicer) way to do existing things. Presumably the prices will drop to the point that it becomes "worth it" for more and more people.
It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.
And, to me, this brings up once again the subtlety between things that are "nice and right and proper" and things that are legal/illegal.
Too often in debate, there is an implicit "right==legal" and ""wrong==illegal" assumption. If something sounds wrong/immoral, people think it should be illegal (and regulated, etc.), or if something is legal, they assume it is totally acceptable to do it... I think things are subtler than that, because I believe laws are a tool for society to pull out only when actions are egregiously harmful or unfair. In all other cases, we should rely upon people's inherent decency, or when that fails (which is often enough), rely upon social pressures of various sorts.
In this case, for instance, it seems like what they've done is entirely legal. And I think it should remain legal. I don't think ideas should be owned. So it should be entirely legal for someone to say "I can make pizzas better and cheaper than those guys" and by so doing dominate the market. No one should own the idea for "having a pizza place near a university campus". Similarly if Zynga can clone a particular game (without directly copying any of the code or artwork) and can dominate the market, then they should be free to do so. (I do think some ways to dominate a market should be illegal: anti-trust behavior, fraudulent advertising, etc.).
But that doesn't mean I think their actions are "right and proper". It's a pretty shameful thing to build upon the work of others without giving them any credit. As such, I think the public should decry their actions, publicize their scummy tactics, and boycott their products. Therein lies the subtlety that many people don't appreciate: just because we disapprove of their actions doesn't mean we need new laws to forcefully prevent those actions. Instead, I think that society should put pressure on them to behave "nicely" (and, yes, I'm well-aware this often won't lead to any reformation of behavior).
First, I'll point out a recent Slashdot discussion on the topic, about a disagreement between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker about just how much the Internet is really "changing" our brains. Suffice it to say there is still plenty of disagreement among experts in the field.
What I think is missing from Carr's anecdotes and study results is a meaningful measure of intelligence with respect to "what matters". Of course, "what matters" is inherently a loaded concept, where everyone will have a different opinion. But the problem is that Carr is making sweeping statements about intelligence in general, based on studies of sub-components of intelligence. I'm sure having access to a very effective search engine makes us "dumber" at the "find useful data in a mass of disorganized crap" problem. But most likely this liberates our minds to focus on (and get better at) higher-level problems, like critically thinking about ideas, or solving real-world dilemmas (the research was, after all, just a means to an end). So was the overall intelligence of the person going up or down when they focused less on being good researcher and more on being good thinker/solvers?
The point is that every piece of technology will make us bad at the task that the technology replaces. But that's as it should be. The whole point is to liberate us from tedious or menial tasks, so that we can concentrate our intellect on those tasks that are hard (currently impossible) to automate. In principle this means that we are spending more and more time thinking about these truly challenging problems (and, thus, getting better at those kinds of "difficult thinking")... at the expense of getting worse at silly tasks that a computer can solve.
And, as you point out, this is a trend that has been going on since humankind first saw fit to build tools. From language, to books, to calculators, to computers, to the Internet... we have automated and externalized a whole bunch of tasks. And yet society keeps getting along, becoming more sophisticated and advanced with every passing generation. I think we're doing just fine.
Someone is going to be deciding what to do with your data here, either the individual companies or the government.
Not really a fair way of looking at it. Even if I trust the government more, this isn't an "either" situation. The company has to have access to the data in order for them to provide the service to the customer. So it's either "company has access" or it's "company and government have access". From a user's perspective, it's clearly safer to have fewer people/entities with access to their data. Hence it's preferable for the government NOT to have access.
On the other hand you're alluding to who should set the rules about data access. I certainly agree that the government is the right entity to set rules like that (the company would prefer not to have any rules, so that they can harm customers at the drop of a hat if it somehow helps their bottom line). But governments setting, and even enforcing, privacy rules doesn't mean they need unfettered access to customer data. (There are smarter ways of doing oversight.)
So, again, I'm all for companies being subject to legal regulations and oversight. But I'm also very much against companies sharing customer data with governments any more than is absolutely necessary. (Where "absolutely necessary" means some amount of transparency to enable oversight, and the occasional compliance with a valid warrant for specific data. It is most certainly not necessary for government agencies to have complete access to customer data or communications.)
People always seem to get mad about the possibility that the ads they see might actually be relevant to them.
It's worth remembering that what the viewer considers relevant and what the advertiser considers targeted are not the same thing. You may be interested in computers and sci-fi, but that doesn't mean they will only show you ads for those products. Advertisers try to hit middle-ground in viewers. It's true that it's a waste of their money to try to advertise a product to you that you will never buy (e.g. baby products to people without kids). But they also don't really want to waste advertising to die-hard fans and aficionados, who will already buy those products (of course they need to keep the fans aware of the products to some extent). Advertising dollars do the most good for the group of fence-sitters: people who might or might not purchase the product. This means that if the advertisers are doing their job right of targeting you on products that you're "on the fence" about, then you'll get a bunch of ads for things you don't quite want. In other words, stuff that is only semi-relevant.
Also worth remember is that quite a bit of advertising has to do with just getting consumers to remember brand names. People always bring up the "I'm a guy--I don't need to see ads for tampons!" but that's actually a case where some advertising to men can make a difference. Guys don't regularly buy tampons, but on the few occasions that they do (girlfriend has just run out and desperately needs more), they want you to walk into the drugstore and, because you're unsure of what to buy, gravitate towards their well-recognized brand ("No boyfriend ever got dumped for buying Tampax")...
Again, it may not be relevant for you to see Tampax ads, but the company certainly wants you to recognize the brand.
The only possible reason I can see to be offended is because you have no will power to resist the messages of advertiser
You're implying that only weak-willed people are affected by ads (implicitly, that you are able to 'resist'). People are more affected by advertising that they realize or would care to admit. If you are among those who are good at spotting crap and not buying it (e.g. making a decision not to buy from companies that make ridiculous claims in their commercials), then properly targeted ads would instead show you the much more subtle kinds of advertising (again, building-up brand recognition and brand image has a large but typically unnoticed effect on your shopping behavior).
I'm not saying that people are slaves to marketing. You can certainly rise above the ads to some extent. But conversely it is effectively impossible not to be somewhat affected by advertising.
This is not to say that I think people should be deathly afraid of targeted ads. But let's at least recognize the dangers (or even just nuisances) they present.
if you don't know what a "good" URL looks like, take the time to educate yourself.
That is good pragmatic advice. But it points to a fundamental failing in the current architecture.
It basically means that every person must become proficient in parsing URLs themselves. They have to understand what the "http" means, what the resolution order is (why "facebook.com" is very different from "facebook.com.evil.uk"), to know about fonts (to differentiate ".com" and ".corn" or ".COM" from ".C0M"), to understand what character sets and encodings are (to notice other character substitutions), and to even understand subtleties of character sets (like the unicode "mirror" character...).
In other words, it really sounds like we're asking people to do the task that a piece of parsing software should be doing. That's asking quite a lot of the average user. This doesn't mean that there is a simple solution. I certainly don't know what the answer is. But I'm just saying that knowing what a "good" URL looks like is not so simple. I have sympathy for users who get confused. So anything we can do to help them differentiate good from bad is probably a good thing.
One use for that display area is for ambient data. There are things like the "ambient orb" that display the status of, say, the stock market using the color of the orb (you can buy the official ambient orb at a ridiculous price or build your own using some LEDs and an Arduino...). It turns out that these kinds of peripheral information systems work quite well. You don't really ever look at them, but you're sufficiently aware of their status that you can react if something changes.
There are a bunch of things you could turn into ambient data: stock market, weather predictions, calendar notifications, network traffic, server status, build status (some people hook them up to automatic test suites, so that a broken codebase is immediately apparent), and so on. The idea is to give the user information without demanding their focus/attention. It works quite well.
Well you're right that this isn't useful with respect to applications you master. But, the fact is that we're all novices with respect to the software we don't use all the time. And we all interact with a lot of software day-to-day that we shouldn't really need to become experts in.
To give a random example, I was doing video editing awhile back. I'm not a professional video editor, nor is video editing really a hobby of mine. But I needed to do some fairly involved editing as a one-time thing. I was obviously not great at using the software, and was slowly learning it as I went along. It would have been immensely useful to have the shortcut keys written directly on the keyboard. It would have helped me learn them (was F3 or F4 the shortcut I wanted?) and makes the interface more discoverable.
Again, I think it's worth remembering how much software you use in a given day that you're not an expert in (nor do you want to become an expert). If you use a CD burning app once every couple of months, you won't be a whizz with all the keyboard shortcuts (nor should you spend the time to become one!)... but if the keyboard added a big and bright "BURN CD" button right on your keyboard when you switch to that app... that would be rather useful. Multiply that by the dozens of apps and wizards you use day-to-day that you are not an expert in... and there are serious usability advantages.
Now, I'm not sure whether this usability boost will be worth the cost of such fancy keyboards (there might even be usability downsides, like splitting the user's attention, information overload, acting as a crutch preventing them from memorizing shortcuts, etc.)... but it's certainly worth researching.
The actual numbers are quite interesting. The study seems to be doing a decent job of adjusting for other aspects of car quality and features. To do this, they directly compare hybrid and non-hybrid versions of various cars, or very similar cars by the same manufacturer when this is not possible.
What's interesting, to me at least, is how small the "hybrid loss" actually is for many of the popular models. The extra cost to buy and operate a Toyota Prius, over the Toyota Matrix XR, is apparently $1,718 over 5 years, or $343/year. This isn't that much to a person who cares about the environment. Consider, for instance, that this will apparently reduct CO2 emissions by 1242 kg/year. This means that it "costs" the environmentally-conscious consumer about 28 cents per kg of CO2 reduced. Doesn't sound too bad.
Also worth noting is that the vehicle costs were apparently based on MSRP. Thus any incentive program (e.g. government rebates) only have to be on the order of a few thousand dollars to make the hybrid cheaper overall. I would, personally, prefer it if the hybrid technology were cheaper no matter what (so that there was no excuse not to buy one), but the fact that the extra cost is so small makes it fairly reasonable to subsidize it in the name of environmental protection. (Or, conversely, taxing more-polluting vehicles or energy sources for the externality of environmental damage they cause.)
Again, I think it's well-known that it's generally cheaper to do environmental damage, and more costly to protect the environment. But I see these numbers as being very encouraging: the technology is now at a point where the extra cost of hybrid technology can be made quite small. (For instance it's only $290 extra over 5-years to own and operate the Honda Civic Hybrid vs. the Honda Civic EX. That shows how close we are to hybrid vehicles being cost competitive with conventional vehicles, even without government rebates.)
As with many debates, much of this debate depends crucially on what you think Digg's tools are meant to do (what is, in philosophy, sometimes called the telos, or purpose, of a thing). If you think Digg's purpose is to show "the best" stories, then that requires a certain algorithm (e.g. rejecting votes from brigades in favor of votes from people who are apt to judge whether something is "the best"), but if your objective is to show "the most popular" stories, then a different algorithm is required (just making sure everyone only votes once).
So there are some part's of Mr. Haselton's argument that presuppose a certain purpose to Digg, which may not actually be the purpose that the majority of Digg users care about. (Also worth thinking about is that the purpose of Digg, from the point of view of those running it, is to make money; irrespective of whether the users are happy or the best stories get on the main page...)
The only way to game that system would be to organize a group of dedicated Digg users so enormous that they constituted a significant percentage of all users on the system — something pretty hard to do without getting caught.
This distinctly presupposes a purpose to Digg. From the point of view of many, it doesn't make sense to "get caught" with respect to getting a "significant percentage of all users on the system" to vote a certain way. If the majority of the community is up-voting (or down-voting) a certain way, then the community's feelings are being correctly reflected in the story-ranks. (To those who consider Digg to be a popularity engine, this is perfectly fair.)
If each user limited to themselves to only one Digg account like they were supposed to? And if they focused not on burying stories, but on digging stories that promoted their viewpoints? Just as bad. It just doesn't sound as bad.
It's not just that it doesn't sound as bad... it's that it really isn't as bad... at least for those people who think Digg is "supposed" to be a popularity engine, where each user gets a single chance to "have their voice heard". (In this view, voting more than once is wrong; anything else is fair game.)
Yes, if the purpose of Digg is to really find "the best material" then voting brigades are an attempt to game the system. But honestly if the purpose is to curate the best material, then it's been shown time and again that self-selected, open voting systems suck. You need to either hire curators or use tuned sampling methods (as is done on Slashdot and as is suggested by Mr. Haselton). And even these have plenty of problems with being gamed.
All that to say that I think you need to first decide what goal you are trying to optimize for, before suggesting sweeping changes. I honestly don't think that those who run Digg, or those who use it, are really looking to have a ranking system that promotes "the best" material. They are looking for a ranking system that engages users: and a (broken) popularity system does that just fine.
Sorry to reply to myself, but if anyone is interested, here is Shai Agassi's TED talk discussing this idea. He emphasizes the separation of "battery ownership" from "car ownership". His point is that when you buy a gas-powered car, the car is pretty cheap. You then pay for gas, and that recurring gas-cost is what pays for the expensive oil wells and refinery operations. But when you buy an electric car, you are expected to pay for the whole battery pack. If instead you just buy the car, and rent/lease/subscribe-to the battery pack, then you're back to the situation where the up-front cost is lower, and you pay incrementally for the expensive infrastructural components.
This makes the gas vs. electric cost comparison "more fair" in some sense, and makes electric cars affordable to the masses. (Potentially.)
This problem (the relatively slow rate of pumping energy into a battery) is why some are advocating for an electric-car infrastructure based on swapping-out battery packs, rather than charging the battery slowly. Essentially, you drive up to a power-station (maybe designed more like an auto-car-wash than a current gas-pump) where your battery pack is pulled out and replaced with one that is fully charged. The power station keeps a bunch of battery packs on-site, with a bunch of them charging, and a bunch of fully-charged ones ready to be swapped out.
This eliminates the slow-charge problem. You can swap out a battery probably just as fast as you can pump gas. (Assuming the battery packs and the loading systems are properly designed.) In principle the cars could still have the ability to charge, so that regenerative braking can be used while driving, and the cars can slowly charge when at home or at parking lots with the right equipment.
The main complaints about such a system are:
1. It would be very difficult to agree on a standard and have the infrastructure put in place. This is true for any proposal for vehicles using new fuel sources. At least the transition: "gas -> hybrid -> plug-in hybrid -> electric vehicles you charge at home -> electric vehicles with power-swap stations" is not impossibly abrupt.
2. "Bad batteries". People worry about the idea of swapping out their good/brand-new (but drained) battery and getting a crappy used one in return. But this is because people are thinking in terms of owning the battery-packs. What would probably instead happen is that you buy a car and then sign up with some provider of battery-packs. You basically lease a battery from their pool, and can swap it at any participating station. You don't own any of the batteries but pay for the cost of the electricity and the battery packs together, and over time, either paying each time you get a new fully-charged battery, or having some kind of account/membership/bill that you pay monthly. The "bad battery" problem then amounts to a corporate reputation issue. Presumably there will be different suppliers/companies, some with better quality control (retiring old batteries) than others...
This makes the up-front costs for electric cars cheaper, since you don't have to pay for the (expensive) battery pack up front if you're instead paying for it over time through your membership. It also out-sources the issue of battery degradation and battery recycling, so that the end-user doesn't have to worry about those issues.
Obviously this won't happen tomorrow, but the point is that the gasoline infrastructure has a huge head-start, and there are possible solutions to making electric vehicles just as convenient as gas-powered vehicles, if we push in that direction.
you'd have issues with things like turning traffic
From what I can see in the video (it's in Chinese but just judging from the graphics...) they seem to have thought of that. These mega-busses would be in the left-most lanes, and if they need to turn at an intersection, the lights at that intersection go red in all directions. The mega-bus then has the right of way to make a wide turn, cutting across many lanes safely because everyone is stopped.
I don't know if this is a good solution, mind you. First, the mega-bus has to be able to communicate-with/control the traffic lights. People have expectations about how traffic lights will work, and so adding in a new mode could confuse drivers. Pedestrians especially may start walking as soon as oncoming traffic gets a red light. (Do people in China obey the walk/don't-walk signals? They sure don't in any North American cities I've lived in!)
Similarly, the "truck height issue" seems to be addressed with flashing warnings on the back of the bus, and various sensors that detect positions of nearby vehicles and warn them somehow. But there are problems with such complex systems: they tend to handle changes in base assumptions very poorly (e.g. what happens when a bus needs to back up or there is construction along one of its routes). This is why tram/trolley-cars have fallen out of favor compared to generic busses: the gains you get from smart/efficient infrastructure make the system brittle to maintain.
This mega-bus plan sounds like a logistic nightmare. Which doesn't mean it couldn't work: awesome new ideas always seem difficult and crazy at first. The problem is that bad new ideas also sound difficult and crazy at first...
First off, I think images are very interesting and I congratulate the artist who made them. Finding the right locations, and getting the camera angles correct was no doubt a challenge. The idea itself is brilliant.
However, I agree with the GP that the photo-shopping/blending aspect looks somehow amateurish, and breaks me out of what would otherwise be a very sublime experience I think. The problem is that the fading between the two photos seems haphazard. I understand that the point of the photos is to show the contrast between the two time periods. As such, you want it to be clear that there are two photos being overlaid. However it just looks weird to have, for example, people be half-erased. The artist could have instead defined a blending edge that didn't cut across any people (or cars, etc.) so that each sub-region of the image looked fully-formed and thus more real. I think this would have made the effect more powerful. Two realities/time-periods side-by-side, rather than two photos one on top of the other.
Of course, I can fully appreciate that art is ultimately a very subjective thing. So the artist may indeed have had good reasons for doing it the way he has. My own personal impressions are just that: my own.
This is just the Executive branch pushing - probing, if you will - to see how receptive the populace is becoming towards the encroachment of thoughtcrime and various other totalitarian abuses.
Really?
The way you've worded it, it sounds like you're saying that someone (fairly high-up) in the executive branch of government has an ongoing program of pushing boundaries, and that they (directly or indirectly) put pressure on an FBI lawyer to send out a marginal insignia-takedown request. This seems a little far-fetched to me. It seems simpler and more likely that it was just one or two FBI personnel who took it upon themselves to exert their power. (The suggestion that someone mistakenly linked "Wikipedia" and "Wikileaks" is quite plausible...) I doubt they thought there would be much reaction, and I really have trouble believing this is part of a deeply orchestrated (yet, somehow, totally secret) plot to investigate how pliable the US populace is.
Make no mistake: I recognize the abuses of government and the constant power-grabbing from citizen freedoms into governmental control. However this doesn't seem to be a massive conspiracy. It doesn't have to be. People in positions of power will tend to, as individuals, consolidate their power and push the boundaries wherever they can. Because so many people in government (especially those who aspire to positions of power and importance) are constantly pushing boundaries and trying to shift power from the people to themselves (perhaps indirectly, e.g. shifting power to companies in return for other favors), the net effect is that the government as a whole is constantly encroaching on freedoms and over-stepping their previous bounds.
So, again, I agree that the government is constantly expanding its power and this is worrisome and should be fought against. However I question whether it is really a conspiracy: it seems more likely to be an emergent phenomenon arising from the over-aspirations of individuals. (And groups of individuals, of course--small-scale conspiracies and power-grabs certainly exist.)
I point this out because to fight a problem one must understand its origin. Fighting an illusory conspiracy distracts from the real problem: that just about any person in a position of power will abuse that power. As such we need to be fighting for checks and balances that keep these power-grabs under control, not attacking a few figureheads of a potential conspiracy (after eliminating them, the next power-hungry people will just take their place!).
An excellent musician will play a song where you'll feel it. It's that little something extra that we put in, so you know there's something special to it.
But, that "little something extra" is undoubtedly quantifiable. Physically, it amounts to the minute details of the timing of notes (e.g. intentional mis-timing), how long notes are held for, and so on. Obviously, all these things could be recorded and analyzed. Currently, music scores just list the notes, but one could easily markup a score with thousands of details appended to each note, telling a synthesizer how to play that note. The computer reproduction would then convey every bit of the emotion and "something extra" that the human had.
But of course you could argue that this would just amount to a perfect recording of the sound of the expert human musician. The computer cannot, one might argue, improvise, or respond to the conductor's cues about timing, emotion, and so on. But, again, this all sounds fairly quantifiable. There is nothing magic about music that sounds "sadder" or "angrier" or even transcendent. In each case, an algorithm can, in principle, be developed that lets a computer automatically apply all the right micro-details to the notes. And it's again just a technical challenge to write software that allows a conductor to switch between algorithms in real-time (e.g. in response to what's happening on stage).
I'm not saying these are trivial problems to solve. Like any problem in AI, it's truly vexing and makes us appreciate how good humans are at many tasks. But I fail to see anything in the skill of a musician that cannot be recorded, analyzed, understood, and turned into an algorithm. Like other areas of AI, the problem will seem impossible... until one day it is solved and then it becomes obvious that computers can do that task. Already computers can play music at a level that laymen can scarcely tell the difference. I doubt it will be very long before even an expert can't tell the difference in a blinded test.
So, while I agree with you that an excellent musician puts something special into their work, I think it is a mistake to characterize computers/machines as mere perfect replicators--they can do quite a lot more, and indeed will soon enough be making deeply emotional-sounding music all by themselves. (Whether this is good or bad or course depends on your perspective.)
If the ISP doesn't maintain records of the dynamic IPs they give out to customers, then there is no way to associate a supposedly-violating IP to a customer billing address. The ISP won't have the data to help out the authorities and their investigations will thus be fruitless. This of course assumes that the ISP has enough customers that it isn't trivially easy to identify which one was using that IP address. Even having a few dozen customers should be enough to make it impossible to associate some web traffic with a particular customer.
I doubt anyone could successfully make an argument they are not pirating software/videos/etc while paying to use 'Pirate ISP'.
I don't think courts would be able to make that glib assumption. As long as the ISP has legitimate uses (like, say, protecting one's privacy while surfing the net) then the burden will be on the accusers to show that a particular user is guilty of a particular crime.
This is a tangential rant, but I hate the way both of those links present the data. For some reason most journalists and even bloggers feel the need to "digest" data by putting it into paragraph prose, as if this makes it easier to understand. In many cases, it doesn't. TFA and the linked blog end up spending many, many sentences listing a bunch of numbers, which turns into a confusing narrative. What would be far more useful is a table or list of sites, along with their scores, put in order. They can highlight the entries they think are particularly interesting (e.g. Facebook), while allowing the reader to peruse the list and gain an immediate appreciation for the trends. They can then spend their sentences describing the context and meaning of the data, rather than just repeating numbers.
I see this time and again in news reports: they list statistics and numbers that they are clearly reading off of a list or graph, but don't let us actually see the graph! I appreciate that I may be more technically-minded than most, and may be more comfortable with graphs and ordered datasets than the average news reader. However I think anyone smart/educated enough to understand the point being made in a paragraph of statistics is better served by a simple and clean (but accurate) graph or ordered list.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a really good idea that will be absolutely terrible in practice.
With respect to "good idea", the combination of search with a social graph could be powerful. One of the problems with online reviews is that you can't really be sure that they are not astroturf or otherwise skewed. This is why people often, in practice, ask their friends for recommendations. It provides a perspective from someone you trust; or at least someone who is not primarily motivated by a financial incentive to get you to buy a product (they may have other biases, like trying to justify their own purchases, etc.). If done properly, a piece of software could check your social graph for recommendations and trust information. So if a friend (who you have marked as "trustworthy with respect to car purchases" highly-ranks a given car, that could add bonus points to that car. But you can also generalize: e.g. more highly ranked car-rating sites that this friend trusts. Or drawing upon the trusted friends of your trusted friends, so that you can pool together the opinions of people you don't know, but have reason to trust. And even beyond that, by comparing the like/dislike profile of you and your friends with aggregate data, you can determine what online reviewers to trust just based on their voting history (do they accurately pick things I like? Or shill products that disappoint?). This would be very powerful: search for "I want to buy a camera" and your software automatically shows you reviews/recommendations that you have some reason to trust.
The reason this will fail, miserably, is because it will be a slave to corporate whims, rather than a tool to help users. It would only really work as software running on the user's own computer, with all the social-graph data managed and under the direct control of the user. With the recommendation algorithm under the control of a company, the temptation to abuse the data will be much too great. The fact that it is being done by Facebook and Microsoft, two companies that have a track record of degrading the user experience in the name of profits, just makes this even more doomed to fail. The end product will be user hostile: it will provide skewed results to users based on corporate sponsorship and corporate interests (strangely, none of my friends are recommending Open-Office); the data about user habits and likes/dislikes will be sold to advertisers; the massive dataset will also probably be stolen or lost somehow (again, Microsoft and Facebook are not to be trusted in this regard). The endless pursuit of monetization will make the product so skewed and annoying, that no one will want to use it.
It's too bad. It would be nice to have good tools to automate the social-graph work that people naturally do ("Hey, bob, I know you renovated your house last fall... can you recommend a good roofing guy?"). But instead we will get advertising-on-steroids ("All your friends signed up for ScammyScam.com and won $5,000!!! You could win money too!!! Sign up for ScammyScam.com!!! Punch the monkey to win!!!").
It's somewhat strange that you would use the Zeno paradox to justify that they cannot be equal; considering that the Zeno formulation is obviously wrong: in real life we have no difficult traversing distances despite this mental problem with "infinite divisibility".
But the Zeno problem is a red herring in this context in any case. The 1 = 0.99... equality is not asking about lengths of real objects in the real world. And it is not talking about performing floating-point computations on real computers that have rounding errors. It is talking about abstract mathematics. In mathematics, the definition of the ellipsis, "...", is to specify an infinite repetition of the pattern. Not a "really really long" repetition, nor some kind of temporal series where we "keep adding another digit forever" but rather it means to specify that the number has an infinite number of digits that repeat along that pattern.
There are many reasons why people can't grasp 1 = 0.99...; in your case it seems that you're thinking of 0.99... as a number where we "keep adding another digit" and then you worry that since it will take "forever" to add an infinite number of digits, there will always be some small remainder in (1-0.99...). But the mental model of infinities in terms of a temporal progression that never ends is just a crude way that humans use to think about the difficult concept of infinity. In this case, the crude heuristic leads to the incorrect conclusion. Because, again, an infinite quantity in math is not something that "grows bigger forever" it is some that simply is infinitely large. And an infinite number of digits after the decimal doesn't mean "we keep adding more digits forever" but rather than the number simply has an infinite number of digits.
Those who have trouble accepting that 1 = 0.99... should just realize that these are two equivalent ways of writing the same number. Do you similarly argue that 10/5 and 2 are not the same number? Or that 10/10 and 1/1 and 1 are not all the same number? Writing out "1" as "0.99..." or "9.99.../10" or "100*99.99.../(10^4)" may look weird, but they are all the same number, as a quick rearrangement will demonstrate.
and:
I don't know the particulars (if the code was part of a work for hire, then Zuckerberg would be guilty of copyright infringement for his subsequent use of it... but that doesn't appear to be what is alleged), but assuming Lessig's account of the facts is correct, then Zuckerberg didn't "steal" anything. At least, he didn't break any laws. He may have appropriated other's ideas without credit, but plagiarism itself isn't illegal.
However I do disagree with Lessig's suggestion that we should admire Zuckerberg. It seems to me that, even if he stayed within the bounds of the law, he built-up Facebook by being mean, cut-throat, and ruthless. That makes him a bad person, regardless of the grand things he has was able to legally deploy with his tactics.
As it turns out, talking over a phone is more distracting than talking with someone sitting in the car.
There are multiple reasons:
1. Someone in the car with you can and will respond to the dynamically-changing environment as you do. If something unexpected happens, they will usually stop talking.
2. In fact, someone in the car may notice something important, and notify the driver (either by shutting up or pointing it out), thereby partially mitigating the distraction they cause by talking.
3. A phone conversation requires more of your attention because you have to make up for the deficiencies of the data channel (phones have lower audio quality than real life, you can't read their body language (even out of the corner of your eye, you can get a feel for a person's mood), etc.).
4. Shared context makes communication more efficient, thus requiring less mental effort (this is why, even in this day and age, people generally want to meet face-to-face).
5. Studies have shown that it takes humans more mental effort to think/interact with people/data they believe is remote as compared to people/things they think are local. In one study, they measured reaction times and errors in a driving simulator when people were either using an "in-car GPS" giving them instructions or a "satellite data-feed" giving them instructions. Even though both sets of instructions were identical (including latency, etc.), the mere perception that the "satellite data-feed" was non-local caused people to devote more mental effort to it, which increased driving accidents. A non-intuitive result, perhaps, but human mental machinery is finely tuned not for the tasks we currently expect it to perform.
6. Initiating and finishing a phonecall requires much more attention than stopping/starting a conversation with someone sitting beside you. (Unlike fidgeting with a radio, answering a phonecall requires immediate action not at a moment of the driver's choosing.)
People engage in a variety of activities while driving. All of these secondary activities induce distraction and thereby increasing driving risk. There is a valid debate to be had about where to draw the line with respect to distractions. But it is fairly well-established that talking on a phone while driving, and certainly texting while driving, are more dangerous than talking to a passenger while driving. So it may indeed be reasonable and consistent to ban reading books, texting and making phonecalls while driving... but not banning listening to the radio or having conversations with passengers.
Yes, it's only a concept phone, and Mozilla has no plans to make it. Yes, it's easy to make technology super-awesome when you only have to deal in concepts, and not engineering.
But are you implying that this makes concept designs useless? Personally, I love them. The point is to show all the many-splendid things that could be possible if more advanced technology were available. Which makes sense to do, since technology continually advances. A concept design does many things: it gets people excited about possibilities, it gives product designers/engineers ideas about what to try next. Perhaps most importantly, it lets us all ruminate about, and discuss, design choices long before major effort has been expended. This lets us pick out great ideas and shoot down bad ones.
For instance, I'm sure many Slashdotters had moments of "that will never work because of X" or "that would suck because of Y" while watching the video. These criticisms can be helpful, as a concept design is refined to bring it closer to what a real-world device would have to do. And conversely many of us I'm sure had ideas like "That's awesome! If it could that, I bet I could hack it to do Z!" Many things we now use, and take for granted (touchscreen mobile phones among them) were ridiculous concept-designs at one time.
All I'm saying is that rather than just being "this is not and never will be a real device... lame" we should be discussing what is right or wrong about this particular design. We should be dreaming about future technology... because we are part of the process of making that technology come to be!
This is getting tangential, but... As I've argued before, when a debate starts focusing on terminology, both parties need to step back ask why people are worried so much about the terminology. Typically it is because words have added emotional baggage or implications, that either side wants to subtly slip into the debate without actively addressing the point.
...). The other side wants to use the word "sharing" similarly (it's good, everyone is taught to share, no one is harmed, ...).
In this case, one side really wants to use the word "stealing" to be used, because of the emotional baggage of associated with it (it's wrong, it's bad, no one honest would do it,
But in an intellectually honest debate, both sides would willingly back off from contentious terminology, and use neutral terms and focus on the particulars. Regardless of whether distributing digital copies is "sharing" or "stealing" (or both, or neither), we should debate whether said distribution is a net gain for society. We should debate whether said distribution violates a party's basic rights. And then from those points, we should debate what law would be both fair and socially-helpful.
I fully acknowledge that words have meaning, and we should try to be precise with language. But this is exactly why an honest debate should not invoke terms with an intent to capitalize on ambiguity. My main point is not to let debate get derailed by terminology concerns. Focus on the nature and consequences of the activity being debated, rather than ambiguous labels or partial analogies.
In the case of copyright, it becomes very difficult to argue for the social necessity, and intrinsic justness, of very long-term and rigidly-enforced copyright when you can no longer draw a false analogy to stealing of physical property. Conversely, it becomes difficult to argue that copyright infringement is completely without harm once you remove the sharing rhetoric and focus on the incentive/social-contract aspect of copyright law. In other words, I believe a socially-constructive compromise is more likely to arise from that kind of honest debate (yes, I know how unrealistic it is to expect that kind of debate to actually happen).
They certainly have uses. The iPad is nice for browsing the web while watching TV, for watching video or reading a book on a train or plane, for referring to a recipe website while cooking, etc. Now, many will argue "you can do all those things with a netbook or laptop" and it is certainly true. But the iPad weight and form factor (and battery life) increase the likelihood that you'll actually have it with you in these kinds of situations, which increases its utility.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure everyone would find an iPad at least somewhat useful. If iPads were dirt-cheap (say, $5) people would have one in every room of their house (and in their car, etc.). To me, the question is really: Is the iPad worth the asking price? Sure it's useful, but is it worth so much money for a rather limited device that sits inside a rather locked-down ecosystem. I think for the majority of people, the answer would be "no". It's only slightly more trouble to use a netbook, in which case you're getting much more bang for your buck. But for people with plenty of disposable income, the iPad is great. Yes, it's a luxury to have an expensive tablet just for random things like looking something up while watching TV... but so be it.
So, really, the iPad/tablet phenomenon is not solving a new problem per se. It's just a new (nicer) way to do existing things. Presumably the prices will drop to the point that it becomes "worth it" for more and more people.
It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.
And, to me, this brings up once again the subtlety between things that are "nice and right and proper" and things that are legal/illegal.
Too often in debate, there is an implicit "right==legal" and ""wrong==illegal" assumption. If something sounds wrong/immoral, people think it should be illegal (and regulated, etc.), or if something is legal, they assume it is totally acceptable to do it... I think things are subtler than that, because I believe laws are a tool for society to pull out only when actions are egregiously harmful or unfair. In all other cases, we should rely upon people's inherent decency, or when that fails (which is often enough), rely upon social pressures of various sorts.
In this case, for instance, it seems like what they've done is entirely legal. And I think it should remain legal. I don't think ideas should be owned. So it should be entirely legal for someone to say "I can make pizzas better and cheaper than those guys" and by so doing dominate the market. No one should own the idea for "having a pizza place near a university campus". Similarly if Zynga can clone a particular game (without directly copying any of the code or artwork) and can dominate the market, then they should be free to do so. (I do think some ways to dominate a market should be illegal: anti-trust behavior, fraudulent advertising, etc.).
But that doesn't mean I think their actions are "right and proper". It's a pretty shameful thing to build upon the work of others without giving them any credit. As such, I think the public should decry their actions, publicize their scummy tactics, and boycott their products. Therein lies the subtlety that many people don't appreciate: just because we disapprove of their actions doesn't mean we need new laws to forcefully prevent those actions. Instead, I think that society should put pressure on them to behave "nicely" (and, yes, I'm well-aware this often won't lead to any reformation of behavior).
Indeed.
First, I'll point out a recent Slashdot discussion on the topic, about a disagreement between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker about just how much the Internet is really "changing" our brains. Suffice it to say there is still plenty of disagreement among experts in the field.
What I think is missing from Carr's anecdotes and study results is a meaningful measure of intelligence with respect to "what matters". Of course, "what matters" is inherently a loaded concept, where everyone will have a different opinion. But the problem is that Carr is making sweeping statements about intelligence in general, based on studies of sub-components of intelligence. I'm sure having access to a very effective search engine makes us "dumber" at the "find useful data in a mass of disorganized crap" problem. But most likely this liberates our minds to focus on (and get better at) higher-level problems, like critically thinking about ideas, or solving real-world dilemmas (the research was, after all, just a means to an end). So was the overall intelligence of the person going up or down when they focused less on being good researcher and more on being good thinker/solvers?
The point is that every piece of technology will make us bad at the task that the technology replaces. But that's as it should be. The whole point is to liberate us from tedious or menial tasks, so that we can concentrate our intellect on those tasks that are hard (currently impossible) to automate. In principle this means that we are spending more and more time thinking about these truly challenging problems (and, thus, getting better at those kinds of "difficult thinking")... at the expense of getting worse at silly tasks that a computer can solve.
And, as you point out, this is a trend that has been going on since humankind first saw fit to build tools. From language, to books, to calculators, to computers, to the Internet... we have automated and externalized a whole bunch of tasks. And yet society keeps getting along, becoming more sophisticated and advanced with every passing generation. I think we're doing just fine.
Someone is going to be deciding what to do with your data here, either the individual companies or the government.
Not really a fair way of looking at it. Even if I trust the government more, this isn't an "either" situation. The company has to have access to the data in order for them to provide the service to the customer. So it's either "company has access" or it's "company and government have access". From a user's perspective, it's clearly safer to have fewer people/entities with access to their data. Hence it's preferable for the government NOT to have access.
On the other hand you're alluding to who should set the rules about data access. I certainly agree that the government is the right entity to set rules like that (the company would prefer not to have any rules, so that they can harm customers at the drop of a hat if it somehow helps their bottom line). But governments setting, and even enforcing, privacy rules doesn't mean they need unfettered access to customer data. (There are smarter ways of doing oversight.)
So, again, I'm all for companies being subject to legal regulations and oversight. But I'm also very much against companies sharing customer data with governments any more than is absolutely necessary. (Where "absolutely necessary" means some amount of transparency to enable oversight, and the occasional compliance with a valid warrant for specific data. It is most certainly not necessary for government agencies to have complete access to customer data or communications.)
People always seem to get mad about the possibility that the ads they see might actually be relevant to them.
It's worth remembering that what the viewer considers relevant and what the advertiser considers targeted are not the same thing. You may be interested in computers and sci-fi, but that doesn't mean they will only show you ads for those products. Advertisers try to hit middle-ground in viewers. It's true that it's a waste of their money to try to advertise a product to you that you will never buy (e.g. baby products to people without kids). But they also don't really want to waste advertising to die-hard fans and aficionados, who will already buy those products (of course they need to keep the fans aware of the products to some extent). Advertising dollars do the most good for the group of fence-sitters: people who might or might not purchase the product. This means that if the advertisers are doing their job right of targeting you on products that you're "on the fence" about, then you'll get a bunch of ads for things you don't quite want. In other words, stuff that is only semi-relevant.
Also worth remember is that quite a bit of advertising has to do with just getting consumers to remember brand names. People always bring up the "I'm a guy--I don't need to see ads for tampons!" but that's actually a case where some advertising to men can make a difference. Guys don't regularly buy tampons, but on the few occasions that they do (girlfriend has just run out and desperately needs more), they want you to walk into the drugstore and, because you're unsure of what to buy, gravitate towards their well-recognized brand ("No boyfriend ever got dumped for buying Tampax")...
Again, it may not be relevant for you to see Tampax ads, but the company certainly wants you to recognize the brand.
The only possible reason I can see to be offended is because you have no will power to resist the messages of advertiser
You're implying that only weak-willed people are affected by ads (implicitly, that you are able to 'resist'). People are more affected by advertising that they realize or would care to admit. If you are among those who are good at spotting crap and not buying it (e.g. making a decision not to buy from companies that make ridiculous claims in their commercials), then properly targeted ads would instead show you the much more subtle kinds of advertising (again, building-up brand recognition and brand image has a large but typically unnoticed effect on your shopping behavior).
I'm not saying that people are slaves to marketing. You can certainly rise above the ads to some extent. But conversely it is effectively impossible not to be somewhat affected by advertising.
This is not to say that I think people should be deathly afraid of targeted ads. But let's at least recognize the dangers (or even just nuisances) they present.
if you don't know what a "good" URL looks like, take the time to educate yourself.
That is good pragmatic advice. But it points to a fundamental failing in the current architecture.
It basically means that every person must become proficient in parsing URLs themselves. They have to understand what the "http" means, what the resolution order is (why "facebook.com" is very different from "facebook.com.evil.uk"), to know about fonts (to differentiate ".com" and ".corn" or ".COM" from ".C0M"), to understand what character sets and encodings are (to notice other character substitutions), and to even understand subtleties of character sets (like the unicode "mirror" character...).
In other words, it really sounds like we're asking people to do the task that a piece of parsing software should be doing. That's asking quite a lot of the average user. This doesn't mean that there is a simple solution. I certainly don't know what the answer is. But I'm just saying that knowing what a "good" URL looks like is not so simple. I have sympathy for users who get confused. So anything we can do to help them differentiate good from bad is probably a good thing.
One use for that display area is for ambient data. There are things like the "ambient orb" that display the status of, say, the stock market using the color of the orb (you can buy the official ambient orb at a ridiculous price or build your own using some LEDs and an Arduino...). It turns out that these kinds of peripheral information systems work quite well. You don't really ever look at them, but you're sufficiently aware of their status that you can react if something changes.
There are a bunch of things you could turn into ambient data: stock market, weather predictions, calendar notifications, network traffic, server status, build status (some people hook them up to automatic test suites, so that a broken codebase is immediately apparent), and so on. The idea is to give the user information without demanding their focus/attention. It works quite well.
Well you're right that this isn't useful with respect to applications you master. But, the fact is that we're all novices with respect to the software we don't use all the time. And we all interact with a lot of software day-to-day that we shouldn't really need to become experts in.
To give a random example, I was doing video editing awhile back. I'm not a professional video editor, nor is video editing really a hobby of mine. But I needed to do some fairly involved editing as a one-time thing. I was obviously not great at using the software, and was slowly learning it as I went along. It would have been immensely useful to have the shortcut keys written directly on the keyboard. It would have helped me learn them (was F3 or F4 the shortcut I wanted?) and makes the interface more discoverable.
Again, I think it's worth remembering how much software you use in a given day that you're not an expert in (nor do you want to become an expert). If you use a CD burning app once every couple of months, you won't be a whizz with all the keyboard shortcuts (nor should you spend the time to become one!)... but if the keyboard added a big and bright "BURN CD" button right on your keyboard when you switch to that app... that would be rather useful. Multiply that by the dozens of apps and wizards you use day-to-day that you are not an expert in... and there are serious usability advantages.
Now, I'm not sure whether this usability boost will be worth the cost of such fancy keyboards (there might even be usability downsides, like splitting the user's attention, information overload, acting as a crutch preventing them from memorizing shortcuts, etc.)... but it's certainly worth researching.
The actual numbers are quite interesting. The study seems to be doing a decent job of adjusting for other aspects of car quality and features. To do this, they directly compare hybrid and non-hybrid versions of various cars, or very similar cars by the same manufacturer when this is not possible.
What's interesting, to me at least, is how small the "hybrid loss" actually is for many of the popular models. The extra cost to buy and operate a Toyota Prius, over the Toyota Matrix XR, is apparently $1,718 over 5 years, or $343/year. This isn't that much to a person who cares about the environment. Consider, for instance, that this will apparently reduct CO2 emissions by 1242 kg/year. This means that it "costs" the environmentally-conscious consumer about 28 cents per kg of CO2 reduced. Doesn't sound too bad.
Also worth noting is that the vehicle costs were apparently based on MSRP. Thus any incentive program (e.g. government rebates) only have to be on the order of a few thousand dollars to make the hybrid cheaper overall. I would, personally, prefer it if the hybrid technology were cheaper no matter what (so that there was no excuse not to buy one), but the fact that the extra cost is so small makes it fairly reasonable to subsidize it in the name of environmental protection. (Or, conversely, taxing more-polluting vehicles or energy sources for the externality of environmental damage they cause.)
Again, I think it's well-known that it's generally cheaper to do environmental damage, and more costly to protect the environment. But I see these numbers as being very encouraging: the technology is now at a point where the extra cost of hybrid technology can be made quite small. (For instance it's only $290 extra over 5-years to own and operate the Honda Civic Hybrid vs. the Honda Civic EX. That shows how close we are to hybrid vehicles being cost competitive with conventional vehicles, even without government rebates.)
So there are some part's of Mr. Haselton's argument that presuppose a certain purpose to Digg, which may not actually be the purpose that the majority of Digg users care about. (Also worth thinking about is that the purpose of Digg, from the point of view of those running it, is to make money; irrespective of whether the users are happy or the best stories get on the main page...)
The only way to game that system would be to organize a group of dedicated Digg users so enormous that they constituted a significant percentage of all users on the system — something pretty hard to do without getting caught.
This distinctly presupposes a purpose to Digg. From the point of view of many, it doesn't make sense to "get caught" with respect to getting a "significant percentage of all users on the system" to vote a certain way. If the majority of the community is up-voting (or down-voting) a certain way, then the community's feelings are being correctly reflected in the story-ranks. (To those who consider Digg to be a popularity engine, this is perfectly fair.)
If each user limited to themselves to only one Digg account like they were supposed to? And if they focused not on burying stories, but on digging stories that promoted their viewpoints? Just as bad. It just doesn't sound as bad.
It's not just that it doesn't sound as bad... it's that it really isn't as bad... at least for those people who think Digg is "supposed" to be a popularity engine, where each user gets a single chance to "have their voice heard". (In this view, voting more than once is wrong; anything else is fair game.)
Yes, if the purpose of Digg is to really find "the best material" then voting brigades are an attempt to game the system. But honestly if the purpose is to curate the best material, then it's been shown time and again that self-selected, open voting systems suck. You need to either hire curators or use tuned sampling methods (as is done on Slashdot and as is suggested by Mr. Haselton). And even these have plenty of problems with being gamed.
All that to say that I think you need to first decide what goal you are trying to optimize for, before suggesting sweeping changes. I honestly don't think that those who run Digg, or those who use it, are really looking to have a ranking system that promotes "the best" material. They are looking for a ranking system that engages users: and a (broken) popularity system does that just fine.
Sorry to reply to myself, but if anyone is interested, here is Shai Agassi's TED talk discussing this idea. He emphasizes the separation of "battery ownership" from "car ownership". His point is that when you buy a gas-powered car, the car is pretty cheap. You then pay for gas, and that recurring gas-cost is what pays for the expensive oil wells and refinery operations. But when you buy an electric car, you are expected to pay for the whole battery pack. If instead you just buy the car, and rent/lease/subscribe-to the battery pack, then you're back to the situation where the up-front cost is lower, and you pay incrementally for the expensive infrastructural components.
This makes the gas vs. electric cost comparison "more fair" in some sense, and makes electric cars affordable to the masses. (Potentially.)
This problem (the relatively slow rate of pumping energy into a battery) is why some are advocating for an electric-car infrastructure based on swapping-out battery packs, rather than charging the battery slowly. Essentially, you drive up to a power-station (maybe designed more like an auto-car-wash than a current gas-pump) where your battery pack is pulled out and replaced with one that is fully charged. The power station keeps a bunch of battery packs on-site, with a bunch of them charging, and a bunch of fully-charged ones ready to be swapped out.
This eliminates the slow-charge problem. You can swap out a battery probably just as fast as you can pump gas. (Assuming the battery packs and the loading systems are properly designed.) In principle the cars could still have the ability to charge, so that regenerative braking can be used while driving, and the cars can slowly charge when at home or at parking lots with the right equipment.
The main complaints about such a system are:
1. It would be very difficult to agree on a standard and have the infrastructure put in place. This is true for any proposal for vehicles using new fuel sources. At least the transition: "gas -> hybrid -> plug-in hybrid -> electric vehicles you charge at home -> electric vehicles with power-swap stations" is not impossibly abrupt.
2. "Bad batteries". People worry about the idea of swapping out their good/brand-new (but drained) battery and getting a crappy used one in return. But this is because people are thinking in terms of owning the battery-packs. What would probably instead happen is that you buy a car and then sign up with some provider of battery-packs. You basically lease a battery from their pool, and can swap it at any participating station. You don't own any of the batteries but pay for the cost of the electricity and the battery packs together, and over time, either paying each time you get a new fully-charged battery, or having some kind of account/membership/bill that you pay monthly. The "bad battery" problem then amounts to a corporate reputation issue. Presumably there will be different suppliers/companies, some with better quality control (retiring old batteries) than others...
This makes the up-front costs for electric cars cheaper, since you don't have to pay for the (expensive) battery pack up front if you're instead paying for it over time through your membership. It also out-sources the issue of battery degradation and battery recycling, so that the end-user doesn't have to worry about those issues.
Obviously this won't happen tomorrow, but the point is that the gasoline infrastructure has a huge head-start, and there are possible solutions to making electric vehicles just as convenient as gas-powered vehicles, if we push in that direction.
you'd have issues with things like turning traffic
From what I can see in the video (it's in Chinese but just judging from the graphics...) they seem to have thought of that. These mega-busses would be in the left-most lanes, and if they need to turn at an intersection, the lights at that intersection go red in all directions. The mega-bus then has the right of way to make a wide turn, cutting across many lanes safely because everyone is stopped.
I don't know if this is a good solution, mind you. First, the mega-bus has to be able to communicate-with/control the traffic lights. People have expectations about how traffic lights will work, and so adding in a new mode could confuse drivers. Pedestrians especially may start walking as soon as oncoming traffic gets a red light. (Do people in China obey the walk/don't-walk signals? They sure don't in any North American cities I've lived in!)
Similarly, the "truck height issue" seems to be addressed with flashing warnings on the back of the bus, and various sensors that detect positions of nearby vehicles and warn them somehow. But there are problems with such complex systems: they tend to handle changes in base assumptions very poorly (e.g. what happens when a bus needs to back up or there is construction along one of its routes). This is why tram/trolley-cars have fallen out of favor compared to generic busses: the gains you get from smart/efficient infrastructure make the system brittle to maintain.
This mega-bus plan sounds like a logistic nightmare. Which doesn't mean it couldn't work: awesome new ideas always seem difficult and crazy at first. The problem is that bad new ideas also sound difficult and crazy at first...
First off, I think images are very interesting and I congratulate the artist who made them. Finding the right locations, and getting the camera angles correct was no doubt a challenge. The idea itself is brilliant.
However, I agree with the GP that the photo-shopping/blending aspect looks somehow amateurish, and breaks me out of what would otherwise be a very sublime experience I think. The problem is that the fading between the two photos seems haphazard. I understand that the point of the photos is to show the contrast between the two time periods. As such, you want it to be clear that there are two photos being overlaid. However it just looks weird to have, for example, people be half-erased. The artist could have instead defined a blending edge that didn't cut across any people (or cars, etc.) so that each sub-region of the image looked fully-formed and thus more real. I think this would have made the effect more powerful. Two realities/time-periods side-by-side, rather than two photos one on top of the other.
Of course, I can fully appreciate that art is ultimately a very subjective thing. So the artist may indeed have had good reasons for doing it the way he has. My own personal impressions are just that: my own.
This is just the Executive branch pushing - probing, if you will - to see how receptive the populace is becoming towards the encroachment of thoughtcrime and various other totalitarian abuses.
Really?
The way you've worded it, it sounds like you're saying that someone (fairly high-up) in the executive branch of government has an ongoing program of pushing boundaries, and that they (directly or indirectly) put pressure on an FBI lawyer to send out a marginal insignia-takedown request. This seems a little far-fetched to me. It seems simpler and more likely that it was just one or two FBI personnel who took it upon themselves to exert their power. (The suggestion that someone mistakenly linked "Wikipedia" and "Wikileaks" is quite plausible...) I doubt they thought there would be much reaction, and I really have trouble believing this is part of a deeply orchestrated (yet, somehow, totally secret) plot to investigate how pliable the US populace is.
Make no mistake: I recognize the abuses of government and the constant power-grabbing from citizen freedoms into governmental control. However this doesn't seem to be a massive conspiracy. It doesn't have to be. People in positions of power will tend to, as individuals, consolidate their power and push the boundaries wherever they can. Because so many people in government (especially those who aspire to positions of power and importance) are constantly pushing boundaries and trying to shift power from the people to themselves (perhaps indirectly, e.g. shifting power to companies in return for other favors), the net effect is that the government as a whole is constantly encroaching on freedoms and over-stepping their previous bounds.
So, again, I agree that the government is constantly expanding its power and this is worrisome and should be fought against. However I question whether it is really a conspiracy: it seems more likely to be an emergent phenomenon arising from the over-aspirations of individuals. (And groups of individuals, of course--small-scale conspiracies and power-grabs certainly exist.)
I point this out because to fight a problem one must understand its origin. Fighting an illusory conspiracy distracts from the real problem: that just about any person in a position of power will abuse that power. As such we need to be fighting for checks and balances that keep these power-grabs under control, not attacking a few figureheads of a potential conspiracy (after eliminating them, the next power-hungry people will just take their place!).
An excellent musician will play a song where you'll feel it. It's that little something extra that we put in, so you know there's something special to it.
But, that "little something extra" is undoubtedly quantifiable. Physically, it amounts to the minute details of the timing of notes (e.g. intentional mis-timing), how long notes are held for, and so on. Obviously, all these things could be recorded and analyzed. Currently, music scores just list the notes, but one could easily markup a score with thousands of details appended to each note, telling a synthesizer how to play that note. The computer reproduction would then convey every bit of the emotion and "something extra" that the human had.
But of course you could argue that this would just amount to a perfect recording of the sound of the expert human musician. The computer cannot, one might argue, improvise, or respond to the conductor's cues about timing, emotion, and so on. But, again, this all sounds fairly quantifiable. There is nothing magic about music that sounds "sadder" or "angrier" or even transcendent. In each case, an algorithm can, in principle, be developed that lets a computer automatically apply all the right micro-details to the notes. And it's again just a technical challenge to write software that allows a conductor to switch between algorithms in real-time (e.g. in response to what's happening on stage).
I'm not saying these are trivial problems to solve. Like any problem in AI, it's truly vexing and makes us appreciate how good humans are at many tasks. But I fail to see anything in the skill of a musician that cannot be recorded, analyzed, understood, and turned into an algorithm. Like other areas of AI, the problem will seem impossible... until one day it is solved and then it becomes obvious that computers can do that task. Already computers can play music at a level that laymen can scarcely tell the difference. I doubt it will be very long before even an expert can't tell the difference in a blinded test.
So, while I agree with you that an excellent musician puts something special into their work, I think it is a mistake to characterize computers/machines as mere perfect replicators--they can do quite a lot more, and indeed will soon enough be making deeply emotional-sounding music all by themselves. (Whether this is good or bad or course depends on your perspective.)
I doubt anyone could successfully make an argument they are not pirating software/videos/etc while paying to use 'Pirate ISP'.
I don't think courts would be able to make that glib assumption. As long as the ISP has legitimate uses (like, say, protecting one's privacy while surfing the net) then the burden will be on the accusers to show that a particular user is guilty of a particular crime.
In order to address my concern, here is a list of all the scores that TFA and the blog post mention:
82 FoxNews.com (news)
80 Google (search)
77 Wikipedia
77 USAToday.com (news)
77 Microsoft Bing (search)
76 NYTimes.com (news)
76 Yahoo (search)
75 ABCNews.com (news)
75 MSN
74 MSNBC.com (news)
74 AOL
73 CNN.com (news)
73 Ask.com (search)
73 YouTube
66 Airlines
66 Subscription TV service
64 Facebook
63 MySpace
This is a tangential rant, but I hate the way both of those links present the data. For some reason most journalists and even bloggers feel the need to "digest" data by putting it into paragraph prose, as if this makes it easier to understand. In many cases, it doesn't. TFA and the linked blog end up spending many, many sentences listing a bunch of numbers, which turns into a confusing narrative. What would be far more useful is a table or list of sites, along with their scores, put in order. They can highlight the entries they think are particularly interesting (e.g. Facebook), while allowing the reader to peruse the list and gain an immediate appreciation for the trends. They can then spend their sentences describing the context and meaning of the data, rather than just repeating numbers.
I see this time and again in news reports: they list statistics and numbers that they are clearly reading off of a list or graph, but don't let us actually see the graph! I appreciate that I may be more technically-minded than most, and may be more comfortable with graphs and ordered datasets than the average news reader. However I think anyone smart/educated enough to understand the point being made in a paragraph of statistics is better served by a simple and clean (but accurate) graph or ordered list.