I view your 5 lessons as a bit of a tragedy, however. My ideal reality would be one where:
1. The OS is open source, and community property.
2. The license of the OS, while including some of the GPL's viral-like qualities for itself, expressly encourages proprietary software in both the hardware driver and application spaces... but *requires* the usage of open data formats so that vendors are encouraged to compete on quality, price and features, rather than rely on data lock-in.
3. The OS provides backward-compatibility for (proprietary) driver binaries at the API layer, so that we can avoid this "compile an open-source shell around a proprietary binary nugget" nonsense that we have today, when faced with the need to use a proprietary driver with some new revision of the OS kernel.
(Disclosure: I have professional reasons for my benevolent attitude towards proprietary drivers... so long as their quality is up to par.)
While I hold everything you just stated as fact, somehow I found myself enjoying DS9 more than its other ST contemporaries.
Although I'm sure I didn't realize it at the time DS9 was still in active production, I've come to believe that-- for my tastes-- science fiction is best used as merely a static canvas upon which to paint a story. If you bring the SF content too close to the foreground, making the audience suffer through technobabble and dubious explanations, then you've lost me as an audience. Suspension of my disbelief is easiest when the SF content retains an element of mysticism, and is left reasonably unexplained. But as soon as the writers start trying to explain their pseudoscience in rational terms, cognitive dissonance sets in and my disbelief-suppression field collapses...
(The introduction of 'midichlorians' into the Star Wars mythos is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.)
Anyway, I always viewed DS9 as the Berman response to B5. Based on what little I watched, B5's science-fiction was relegated to precisely the role I've described above as ideal: Plot was carried mostly by intrigue and believably-flawed actors, and the SF was just context. Alas, I didn't watch it regularly, so I found it hard to get into it when I didn't know the backstory.
Perhaps Berman & Co saw B5 as a threat to their franchise and tried to adapt. I initially scoffed at the "to boldly stay where no one has stayed before" idea, but I definitely wish that some of DS9's continuity and plot development had crossed over more into the other ST shows.
For me, the franchise became "Star Drek" about the time Voyager ended. I never bothered with Enterprise.
[I] never said it [decimal based architecture] would be easier.. i was musing that it might be more efficient.
No, it wouldn't be more efficient, either. The most efficient base for numerical representation is e. You know, good ol' 2.718281828...
The farther you get from this number, the less efficient your number system is. Since it's kind of hard to represent numbers in base e with anything other than an analog circuit, this means that base 3 is the best you can do. Not base 2, and certainly not base 10.
Your other interlocutor (arodland) was very much on the mark when he suggested that "Ternary... might still have some hope." But, 'good enough' is often the enemy of 'best', and binary has been 'good enough' for quite a while now. Hence, we use bits instead of trits.
Efficiency in a number base ('radix') R takes into account both the number of symbols required for each digit (R,) and the number of digits required to represent some number in that radix (or log_R(X), for large values of X.)
In my experience (Central and North Texas, Sprint and T-Mobile,) mobile phone time is getting more expensive, not cheaper. The price points may not go up, but the # of minutes you get per price point has definitely gone down. I used to be able to get twice as many minutes per dollar than I presently can, if not more.
Vonage, on the other hand, is a mere $25.00 (plus various taxes and regulatory fees, of course) for unlimited domestic calling. Plus, all the bells and whistles (that POTS providers charge a la carte for) are thrown in free.
I agree with most of your comment. But, I think you're wrong about capitalism not being a zero-sum game. I think that the existence/necessity of inflation is proof that it is very close to zero-sum.
When you speak of growing the metaphorical pie in your comment, you're speaking of an open system. Is our world's economy an open system, or a closed system? Except for population growth, I'd say that it's a closed system. But even then a limit exists, as there is a maximum sustainable population.
This means that, once you've completely saturated the global economy with capitalism, the growth rate over time cannot exceed that of population growth. Anything more economic growth than POP% per annum will actually be inflation, not growth.
This is easier to intuit if you think of some arbitrary microcosm as a thought experiment; say, a world of 10,000 people, where everyone works for the only employer, Wal-Mart. (As either direct employees, or self-employed vendors.) Additionally, everyone shops at Wal-Mart, exclusively, as it's the only thing available in this pretend microcosm.) Since Wal-Mart exists to make a profit, it must pay out less to the total populace than it pays to the total populace. This imbalance can only be rectified in 1 of 3 ways:
* Monetary inflation * Population growth exceeding Wal-Mart's earnings growth * Zero-sum game (Wal-Mart wins, people lose.)
(Of course, if Wal-Mart pays out more than they make, then people win, and Wal-Mart loses.)
Finally, I must admit that IANA macro economist, and hence I am speaking out of my ass. If I'm wrong, please feel free to flame me. I welcome edification.
Yes, and Isaac Newton would just laugh if someone told him about weird quantum effects which we accept as obvious today.
Au contraire, I think Newton would feel to some degree affirmed by quantum theory.
You should watch Richard Feynman's presentation of "Quantum Electro Dynamics" (or, QED for short.) You can google a video of it.
In short, Newton posited that light was made of particles. But some of his smart contemporaries thought waves were more appropriate, and retorted with some arguments that favored their wave theory. (Most notably, the fuzziness of of the edges of shadows, at a distance.)
Newton couldn't successfully refute the arguments raised against his 'corpuscles of light' theory. But QED theory finally showed us that light is indeed comprised of particles. Newton was ultimately right, albeit for the wrong reasons. If he had understood the statistical nature of the corpuscles he was advocating (rather than thinking of them as perfectly deterministic,) he could have adequately defended his theory.
Finally, please note that although I speak in a voice above which believes as though QED is the final, complete and correct answer in my response above, I don't actually hold that to be the case. I believe it is merely one of the most accurate models we've discovered to date, and we're working on better ones.
...Or rather, too much of a focus on fantasy, anyway.
Fantasy can unlock new ideas to the imagination, and can be a font of material for creativity. Things such as FTL travel, "The Force", etc. can act as great catalytic plot devices, so long as they aren't relied upon to stand place in lieu of an actual plot. (And as long as you don't demystify them with skepticism-tickling 'explanations', like midichlorians.)
Also, anything that we create with our hands was first created within our mind's eye; the nexus of our fantasies.
But too much of a good thing is bad. I've known so many people who sink into Fantasia almost 24/7, as though they have a perennial need to escape the demands of reality. For lack of a better stereotype, I find these people have almost no ambition... to the point that they talk a big game, but never actually accomplish anything.
Hence, Fantasy is the ghost of Ambition, strangled.
Sorry if this post sounds like I've gone all zen-master on everyone... I just woke up from a dreamy nap. "Mmmm, Father's Day ribs... aahhhghghghg"
As long as we're on the subject of Back To The Future, I'll voice what's always bugged me about the 3rd installment.
Recall that, at the end of the second movie, Doc gets sent back to the 1800's. He deposits the Delorean in a mine, and uses a courier service to tell Marty where to dig it up, so that Marty can return to the 1980's. Marty decides instead to go back to the 1800's to save Doc. But when he arrives, the Delorean's fuel line gets cut, and he loses all the gas (or maybe it was some other essential auto fluid.)
The rest of the movie is spent devising some elaborate scheme to use a train to achieve 88 mph.
Now, here's what the writers missed (perhaps intentionally): After Marty arrived in the 1800's, there were _two_ Deloreans: the one Doc placed in the Mine, and the 100 year-old one that Marty took back to the 1800s. These 2 Deloreans had different defects, and so they could have salvaged one to fix the other.
I initially took their statement to mean that they were refocusing their efforts to a new demographic, wholesale. I have since admitted in other replies that I was being a bit americocentric in my original comment.
I too favor RPGs, although I occasionally indulge in some FPS titles.
Nintendogs is like the top selling game in Japan, so if you want to make fun of them for that then you've got some issues...
More like, I didn't know it was a top-selling game there. Of course, that doesn't preclude me from having 'issues', but it does at least point out that your conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from your premise.
In hindsight, I suppose it could be a cultural difference thing. After all, the Japanese loved Tamagotchi and Aibo. I just can't fathom being personally interested in that type of console game. Perhaps it's the fact that my family includes two living, breathing dogs. I suppose that, if I lived in a high-populated area ill-suited to real animal pets, I'd find this Nintendogs game to be a cathartic surrogate, too.
The Nintendo spokesman's comments are pure gold! From TFA:
Asahi Shinbun (interviewer): What has Nintendo learned from its previous game machine release?
Satoru Iwata (nintendo):.... I'm feeling a real sense of danger about the decline in the Japanese gaming population. Patting a dog and telling it to stay [in Nintendogs] is something that anyone can enjoy. We're aiming to increase the population of game players with these new kinds of games.(emphasis mine.)
{{backs away slowly}} Thank you for that demographic insight, Nintendo. I will take that into account as I spend my game-console dollars...
but is there anything we can do to further this end
Here's one idea... 1. Have someone who shares our anti-Roland sentiments write some original, intriguing content that is exemplary of the type of 'news' and/or 'stuff' that matters to the patrons of this website. 2. Submit above to slashdot. 3. Set a threshold on the serving website, so that the interesting content switches to a complaint on Roland Piquepaille, when the server load reaches some $CRITICAL_THRESHOLD. 4. REPEAT as necessary. 5. Eventually, the slashdot editors will get punk'd in this manner enough times that they'll eventually have to admit that they are giving Roland preferential submission priviledges. 6. PROFIT (added because someone else would, otherwise.)
IIRC from so many years back, it was the CEO's own genome that was sequenced by Celera (who went by a different name back then, I think.) So in at least that sense, he holds the copyright and is entitled to sell subscriptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post. +5 insightful. Thanks.
And maybe rename it to Qing's Kwest. :)
Le mot juste!
I view your 5 lessons as a bit of a tragedy, however. My ideal reality would be one where:
1. The OS is open source, and community property.
2. The license of the OS, while including some of the GPL's viral-like qualities for itself, expressly encourages proprietary software in both the hardware driver and application spaces... but *requires* the usage of open data formats so that vendors are encouraged to compete on quality, price and features, rather than rely on data lock-in.
3. The OS provides backward-compatibility for (proprietary) driver binaries at the API layer, so that we can avoid this "compile an open-source shell around a proprietary binary nugget" nonsense that we have today, when faced with the need to use a proprietary driver with some new revision of the OS kernel.
(Disclosure: I have professional reasons for my benevolent attitude towards proprietary drivers... so long as their quality is up to par.)
While I hold everything you just stated as fact, somehow I found myself enjoying DS9 more than its other ST contemporaries.
Although I'm sure I didn't realize it at the time DS9 was still in active production, I've come to believe that-- for my tastes-- science fiction is best used as merely a static canvas upon which to paint a story. If you bring the SF content too close to the foreground, making the audience suffer through technobabble and dubious explanations, then you've lost me as an audience. Suspension of my disbelief is easiest when the SF content retains an element of mysticism, and is left reasonably unexplained. But as soon as the writers start trying to explain their pseudoscience in rational terms, cognitive dissonance sets in and my disbelief-suppression field collapses...
(The introduction of 'midichlorians' into the Star Wars mythos is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.)
Anyway, I always viewed DS9 as the Berman response to B5. Based on what little I watched, B5's science-fiction was relegated to precisely the role I've described above as ideal: Plot was carried mostly by intrigue and believably-flawed actors, and the SF was just context. Alas, I didn't watch it regularly, so I found it hard to get into it when I didn't know the backstory.
Perhaps Berman & Co saw B5 as a threat to their franchise and tried to adapt. I initially scoffed at the "to boldly stay where no one has stayed before" idea, but I definitely wish that some of DS9's continuity and plot development had crossed over more into the other ST shows.
For me, the franchise became "Star Drek" about the time Voyager ended. I never bothered with Enterprise.
No, it wouldn't be more efficient, either. The most efficient base for numerical representation is e. You know, good ol' 2.718281828...
The farther you get from this number, the less efficient your number system is. Since it's kind of hard to represent numbers in base e with anything other than an analog circuit, this means that base 3 is the best you can do. Not base 2, and certainly not base 10.
Your other interlocutor (arodland) was very much on the mark when he suggested that "Ternary... might still have some hope." But, 'good enough' is often the enemy of 'best', and binary has been 'good enough' for quite a while now. Hence, we use bits instead of trits.
Efficiency in a number base ('radix') R takes into account both the number of symbols required for each digit (R,) and the number of digits required to represent some number in that radix (or log_R(X), for large values of X.)
R * log_R(X) has a minimum at e.
Yawn...
Or perhaps we can all start communicating in Lojban...
In my experience (Central and North Texas, Sprint and T-Mobile,) mobile phone time is getting more expensive, not cheaper. The price points may not go up, but the # of minutes you get per price point has definitely gone down. I used to be able to get twice as many minutes per dollar than I presently can, if not more.
Vonage, on the other hand, is a mere $25.00 (plus various taxes and regulatory fees, of course) for unlimited domestic calling. Plus, all the bells and whistles (that POTS providers charge a la carte for) are thrown in free.
No, it *was* funny, dammit! I laughed; ergo, funny.
I agree with most of your comment. But, I think you're wrong about capitalism not being a zero-sum game. I think that the existence/necessity of inflation is proof that it is very close to zero-sum.
When you speak of growing the metaphorical pie in your comment, you're speaking of an open system. Is our world's economy an open system, or a closed system? Except for population growth, I'd say that it's a closed system. But even then a limit exists, as there is a maximum sustainable population.
This means that, once you've completely saturated the global economy with capitalism, the growth rate over time cannot exceed that of population growth. Anything more economic growth than POP% per annum will actually be inflation, not growth.
This is easier to intuit if you think of some arbitrary microcosm as a thought experiment; say, a world of 10,000 people, where everyone works for the only employer, Wal-Mart. (As either direct employees, or self-employed vendors.) Additionally, everyone shops at Wal-Mart, exclusively, as it's the only thing available in this pretend microcosm.) Since Wal-Mart exists to make a profit, it must pay out less to the total populace than it pays to the total populace. This imbalance can only be rectified in 1 of 3 ways:
* Monetary inflation
* Population growth exceeding Wal-Mart's earnings growth
* Zero-sum game (Wal-Mart wins, people lose.)
(Of course, if Wal-Mart pays out more than they make, then people win, and Wal-Mart loses.)
Finally, I must admit that IANA macro economist, and hence I am speaking out of my ass. If I'm wrong, please feel free to flame me. I welcome edification.
Understood, Mr. ACQP. I opted to leave the wave-particle duality of QM out of my response, probably for brevity's sake.
:-/
Domestic influences conspired to make me feel rushed, while typing.
Admittedly, this did make my post sound as though QED proved particles, and disproved waves. That was not intended.
IANAQP, but I play one on TV.
Au contraire, I think Newton would feel to some degree affirmed by quantum theory.
You should watch Richard Feynman's presentation of "Quantum Electro Dynamics" (or, QED for short.) You can google a video of it.
In short, Newton posited that light was made of particles. But some of his smart contemporaries thought waves were more appropriate, and retorted with some arguments that favored their wave theory. (Most notably, the fuzziness of of the edges of shadows, at a distance.)
Newton couldn't successfully refute the arguments raised against his 'corpuscles of light' theory. But QED theory finally showed us that light is indeed comprised of particles. Newton was ultimately right, albeit for the wrong reasons. If he had understood the statistical nature of the corpuscles he was advocating (rather than thinking of them as perfectly deterministic,) he could have adequately defended his theory.
Finally, please note that although I speak in a voice above which believes as though QED is the final, complete and correct answer in my response above, I don't actually hold that to be the case. I believe it is merely one of the most accurate models we've discovered to date, and we're working on better ones.
...Or rather, too much of a focus on fantasy, anyway.
Fantasy can unlock new ideas to the imagination, and can be a font of material for creativity. Things such as FTL travel, "The Force", etc. can act as great catalytic plot devices, so long as they aren't relied upon to stand place in lieu of an actual plot. (And as long as you don't demystify them with skepticism-tickling 'explanations', like midichlorians.)
Also, anything that we create with our hands was first created within our mind's eye; the nexus of our fantasies.
But too much of a good thing is bad. I've known so many people who sink into Fantasia almost 24/7, as though they have a perennial need to escape the demands of reality. For lack of a better stereotype, I find these people have almost no ambition... to the point that they talk a big game, but never actually accomplish anything.
Hence, Fantasy is the ghost of Ambition, strangled.
Sorry if this post sounds like I've gone all zen-master on everyone... I just woke up from a dreamy nap. "Mmmm, Father's Day ribs... aahhhghghghg"
As long as we're on the subject of Back To The Future, I'll voice what's always bugged me about the 3rd installment.
Recall that, at the end of the second movie, Doc gets sent back to the 1800's. He deposits the Delorean in a mine, and uses a courier service to tell Marty where to dig it up, so that Marty can return to the 1980's. Marty decides instead to go back to the 1800's to save Doc. But when he arrives, the Delorean's fuel line gets cut, and he loses all the gas (or maybe it was some other essential auto fluid.)
The rest of the movie is spent devising some elaborate scheme to use a train to achieve 88 mph.
Now, here's what the writers missed (perhaps intentionally): After Marty arrived in the 1800's, there were _two_ Deloreans: the one Doc placed in the Mine, and the 100 year-old one that Marty took back to the 1800s. These 2 Deloreans had different defects, and so they could have salvaged one to fix the other.
...just an expression of personal opinion and taste, and bewilderment at what Nintendo perceives to be the market sweetspot.
But regardless, I've already admitted my ignorance of the power of Nintendogs, elsewhere in this thread.
I initially took their statement to mean that they were refocusing their efforts to a new demographic, wholesale. I have since admitted in other replies that I was being a bit americocentric in my original comment.
I too favor RPGs, although I occasionally indulge in some FPS titles.
It's all good. I don't sweat the small stuff.
More like, I didn't know it was a top-selling game there. Of course, that doesn't preclude me from having 'issues', but it does at least point out that your conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from your premise.
In hindsight, I suppose it could be a cultural difference thing. After all, the Japanese loved Tamagotchi and Aibo. I just can't fathom being personally interested in that type of console game. Perhaps it's the fact that my family includes two living, breathing dogs. I suppose that, if I lived in a high-populated area ill-suited to real animal pets, I'd find this Nintendogs game to be a cathartic surrogate, too.
{{backs away slowly}} Thank you for that demographic insight, Nintendo. I will take that into account as I spend my game-console dollars...
They mean 10% of all IPs were safe from attack automatically, as the worm's RNG had a bug that kept those IPs from ever being attacked.
They never said that all 90% of the remaining IPs were successfuly compromised.
Here's one idea...
1. Have someone who shares our anti-Roland sentiments write some original, intriguing content that is exemplary of the type of 'news' and/or 'stuff' that matters to the patrons of this website.
2. Submit above to slashdot.
3. Set a threshold on the serving website, so that the interesting content switches to a complaint on Roland Piquepaille, when the server load reaches some $CRITICAL_THRESHOLD.
4. REPEAT as necessary.
5. Eventually, the slashdot editors will get punk'd in this manner enough times that they'll eventually have to admit that they are giving Roland preferential submission priviledges.
6. PROFIT (added because someone else would, otherwise.)
I second that... he's certainly been around longer than I.
IIRC from so many years back, it was the CEO's own genome that was sequenced by Celera (who went by a different name back then, I think.) So in at least that sense, he holds the copyright and is entitled to sell subscriptions.
Toad the Wet Entrails Sprocket?