The internet has flourished precisely because the government regulators (aka nannies) have stayed out of it. Yes, there were some great engineers earning government paychecks through the military and universities who got it started - but the bureaucrats largely ignored it because they didn't know what it was, or how important it would become.
No good can come from the clowns in Washington "tweaking" the Internet. This is not about "openness" or whatever other word they want to use. This is about exerting top-down control, and the power that comes with that kind of control.
The funny thing is that the same politicians and commentators feeding you those lines are also in support of an "internet kill switch" for the president. They dislike net neutrality, which is government regulation limited to preventing preferential bandwidth based on business interests (maintaining the status quo that's only recently begun to shift), but they love the idea of giving government the power to shut down the internet to prevent political opposition. Oh, to prevent cyber attacks, you say? Excuse me while I unplug my sensitive systems from the internet and go about my merry way.
On the flip side, unless you stream audio/video, it's really hard to hit 2GB. I'm on the iPhone 200MB plan with AT&T
I agree on the iPhone. Every other smartphone allows for free tethering, however, and when using a phone connection to power a laptop, 2 GB just doesn't seem to last very long.
I spent a fun five minutes looking through linpack results a few days ago and was amused to find that today's ARM superchips are comparable to the pentium 2. Sure, it's only one benchmark, but it's enough to be amusing.
But now anyone can have a FB page from your grandmother to a company, it lost that unique feeling of being part of a club that was closed to outsiders.
I sanitized my account about 2 years ago with fake information except for my name and two photos. When they released the ability to backup your account I tried it and to my surprise all that was left was my sanitized information. Could old photos and posts be in their system? Yeah, but nothing that could really be used against me, although others that just posted whatever they wanted will not fair so well.
I joined in spring 2004 with fake personal information. At the time I was absolutely shocked that other members were signing up with real names and then posting personal information and linking to photos. I interpreted that as an indication that Facebook was a site for the web's outsiders, the people naive enough that they thought connecting online and offline identities was a good idea. I saw it as a club for the ignorant and since I cared about privacy, I left. Now it's bigger than that, so heavily used that a lot of people just can't ignore it regardless of their thoughts on privacy, but there's still no reason for anyone to add a phone number or address.
As an applications developer, lacking this feature means that I cannot increase my budget to hire more programmers and produce a better product. Without the personal information I have nothing to sell to advertisers, and must rely on much lower advertisement rates and donations from users.
Users will suffer from lower-quality apps, and I'm sad that Facebook has taken this step. In a world of openness, this is a huge step backwards.
I don't want to go back to a "pay to play" internet. Please lobby FB to reenable these features if you also believe in keeping the internet free.
This would be more convincing if there were any quality Facebook apps in existence. Don't worry, though. No lobbying is necessary. As always, Facebook will quietly re-enable the identity theft features as soon as the public's attention drifts elsewhere. Then you can get back to chipping away at privacy for the sake of profit.
In the 80s and early 90s, Gates looked like the kind of business-villain the world has known and disliked for centuries. Since then, however, he has largely removed himself from business decisions and the world has discovered a new kind of corporate supervillain. Gates and his old school business tricks will never be able to compete with today's evil businessmen like Zuckerberg, Page and Brin. They're aiming to profit by creating a dystopian future; Gates merely chased his profit by conniving to create a future with a skewed market share. In terms of evil he just can't compete, and when you try to compare the fraction of wealth given away for charity, today's villains don't even register against Gates.
And we don't have any way to test for matter whose only property is it brings our mathematical formulae in line with our physical observations.
The, "Gee, that's funny" observation is what drives all science.
Now:
Making observations and theories is part of science. But what sets science apart from superstition is rigorous testing of the theories.
Believe it or not, some scientists do real science.
There was a competing explanation for this family of "Gee, that's funny" observations called MOND - Modification Of Newtonian Dynamics. It was ruled out on the basis of evidence. (There may be a MOND v. 2.0 out there now - not sure.)
One candidate for dark matter is the sterile neutrino, which people - real scientists - are trying to detect right now. A few years ago they were almost ready to dismiss its existence, but more recent results suggest that it may actually exist.
So no, contrary to your majestic disbelief, dark matter is a Real Hypothesis (tm), investigated by Real Scientists (tm), doing Real Science (tm).
If you want to actually learn something about the topic rather than simply using Slashdot as an outlet for you whingeing about the universe not working the way you learned in fifth grade, Wikipedia is an easy place to get started.
I think they're up to MOND 45.2 now. The problem with MOND is that it has yet to successfully predict anything. Every new set of data requires a refinement of the concepts in MOND, whereas general relativity has successfully predicted a lot of things that were later observed. That doesn't mean MOND can't be right, but there's no particular reason to think it's right.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole? With all the small galaxies the Milky Way has swallowed over its lifetime, would it not be reasonable to find some relic black holes that have swung back out after being stripped of most of their surrounding gas/stars? Or, when "dark matter" is being talked about in this situation, is a black hole simply one of the possible candidates to supply the mystery mass?
I think we'd expect to see the kind of supermassive black hole that could be mistaken for a dwarf galaxy. The processes that form black holes of that size mean that there would probably still be a lot of material in the vicinity, if not actively accreting then still getting pulled around, compressed, and prompting star formation. Also, I think nearby galactic-sized black holes would probably make for some pretty wicked and obvious gravitational lensing.
Alternatively, the detected mass might be a large number of small black holes. I doubt it, but I'm not an astronomer. Luckily, further observation will give us answers.
Is this literally possible? Can you build a device with powerful enough (but still very power efficient) cpus and gpus to have the same power as the PS3? And ideally, be instruction set compatible?
With an adequate battery life? I would guess that 4-6 hours is the realistic minimum battery life for a handheld console with a rechargable battery back. And it has to not be too heavy for a japanese girl to hold, and it has to have reasonable heat dissipation levels.
Any engineers in the mobile phone industry reading this who can comment?
It's physically possible, but not with today's technology. This might be true if the PSP2 came out in 2021-2025. In terms of actual performance of the real PSP2, it will be an order of magnitude slower than the PS3 if we're absurdly optimistic.
Does the DMV clerk have a deskphone with an outside line?
Probably could save more money cutting down on those. I bet far more could be saved if they looked into the sweetheart deals vendors are getting. All cities seem to love those.
The DMV clerk probably has *both*. This gets rid of half of the expenses. Yes, let's find other reasonable things to cut, but just because each individual cut isn't a silver bullet solution doesn't mean it's not valuable.
Wouldn't it be better to just present it as a list of words, so that it could be rendered in HTML? For example
cold
winter steel case turkey
blood...
weather...
spring...
air...
water...
springs spots...
products new spot...
hot
with the word lists getting smaller as you go to the right, of course (the... lists words I can't make out in his image). No need for the "peacock" arrangement that reduces readability and requires it being stored as an image.
his files are hosted in *.pdf files. tried looking at them in a windows 7 and an ubuntu machine, both have the text with unreadable lines through them. why would you host graphics as pdf?
Yes, WP7 does lack copy/paste. Supporters point to the fact that original iPhone didn't have it, yet that phone was still successful. BUT iPhone 1 wasn't competing against the phones that WP7 is competing against. Microsoft will regret the lack of copy/paste on WP7.
Yet WP7's first few months of sales outpaced the sales of the original iPhone (and the G1) in its equivalent period.
Citation needed? I think it was discussed on Ars, among dozens of other places, a few weeks ago.
A very large fraction of biomedical research and nanoscale self assembling materials research is dependent on unfathomably expensive high energy physics tools like the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne. Without this kind of beam we'd have lost a big chunk of the most impressive medical treatments now available and a lot of computer technology we take for granted, and the next generation of technology (meaning a 30 year generation, not an iPhone generation) is going to be an order of magnitude more dependent on high energy scattering. And the generation after that will likely include things like fusion.
The thing that's not adding up for you is your lack of knowledge about recent research. If anything, long term research pays off much more now than it did in the early 20th century. And you even point out that we're just now realizing things theorized or primitively demonstrated back then, which is a further demonstration of the huge long-term payoff of basic science research!
I'm a Philosophy student and I think I can speak with a certain degree of authority when I say that Ayn Rand isn't someone you seriously cite in academic philosophy. She just isn't credible - and I'm not talking in terms of political disagreement - her arguments on topics of philosophical import just aren't very good. I wasn't too happy with everything that was written before for Rand, such as your rather shallow evaluation of Feyerabend and your flippant remarks about epistemology which clearly demonstrate you have no idea what your are talking about, but second I hit "Ayn Rand" I just stopped reading.
From Paul Krugman:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
The blocks should be more blocky but look less blocky.
I want tessellated blocks. The entire Minecraft world should be a dynamic fractal, with the shape of each individual block mirroring the structure of the whole.
It takes a long string of implausibly (impossibly?) disastrous outcomes to cause any concern whatsoever.
So was implied about offshore drilling but look at the monumental fuck up that BP was able to pull off in the gulf.
The only people ever to claim that offshore drilling is inherently safe are lobbyists of various types.
Drilling is like sitting on a bomb and hitting it with a hammer all afternoon. Almost certainly nothing bad will happen, but it's pretty obvious that there's a remote chance of disaster, and the nature of the disaster is obvious.
Drilling into a lake in such a way that the borehole will be plugged with the water from that lake several kilometers before reaching the surface, the surface of Antarctica no less, is like using a robot on the Moon to stir a vial of melted Moon-water inside a glove box. If you think it's likely to cause some sort of dangerous series of events, you've been watching too many made for SyFy movies.
Apparently my mother in law used to have a civic with keyless entry... in a small town of <30,000 there was another Civic of the exact same color which used the same code.
They found out one time at the mall that they could each open the other's car.
I bet there's not nearly enough uniqueness and security in these things.
Last week I drove a friend's late-90s Nissan in Mountain View. It's got a plain old mechanical key. On my way out of a store I walked up to a sedan of the same color, unlocked it, and then realized it wasn't even a Nissan. I confirmed that the key worked by locking it again from the outside before fleeing a couple aisles to the correct car.
And in other news, Apple TV is selling like hot cakes. It just shows, like always before, that casual people don't really care about the geeky things those devices can offer. The older I get the more I can side with them too - when I was a teenager I had lots of energy and motivation to play around with computers and other technical stuff I had. Then I got a job, a girlfriend, went to travel the world and saw how much you're giving up by spending so much time with that. In the end, it's not really even that interesting.
Now I also just want devices that work great. I don't really have any desire to play around with them, apart from the occasional configuration to make things smoother for me. But there is a limit for that, and I'm not gonna spend hours and days coding something to accomplish it. This is also why general population will never turn to use Linux if something doesn't change, and can you really blame them?
Apple TV selling a million times over the course of 4 months sounds very disappointing to me.
Many of the most elite schools have a "legacy admissions" policy (that's how the C-student George W. Bush managed to get into Yale). It gives the children of alumni priority admission, because they want their richer alumni to keep contributing money, and denying little Biff or Muffy their admission would be bad business. It's affirmative action for the rich.
W got in just before Yale opened up for coeducation. As soon as women were admitted, admissions because very competitive. This was true across all elite colleges.
Harvard has need based financial aid. If the family makes less than $60k/yr then tuition is covered. From $60k-$120k its 0-10% of family income, while $120k-$180k its 10% of income. This is all in grants not loans so no money has to be paid back.
Seems a little invasive, but no more so than other need based loans.
Roughly the same formulae are used across the Ivy League. On top of that, it's quite negotiable. Getting into multiple Ivies does wonders because they're willing to compete very aggressively for you. My costs went from $10k/year to $2k/year thanks to faxing an offer from another school and a ten minute phone conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet has flourished precisely because the government regulators (aka nannies) have stayed out of it. Yes, there were some great engineers earning government paychecks through the military and universities who got it started - but the bureaucrats largely ignored it because they didn't know what it was, or how important it would become.
No good can come from the clowns in Washington "tweaking" the Internet. This is not about "openness" or whatever other word they want to use. This is about exerting top-down control, and the power that comes with that kind of control.
The funny thing is that the same politicians and commentators feeding you those lines are also in support of an "internet kill switch" for the president. They dislike net neutrality, which is government regulation limited to preventing preferential bandwidth based on business interests (maintaining the status quo that's only recently begun to shift), but they love the idea of giving government the power to shut down the internet to prevent political opposition. Oh, to prevent cyber attacks, you say? Excuse me while I unplug my sensitive systems from the internet and go about my merry way.
On the flip side, unless you stream audio/video, it's really hard to hit 2GB. I'm on the iPhone 200MB plan with AT&T
I agree on the iPhone. Every other smartphone allows for free tethering, however, and when using a phone connection to power a laptop, 2 GB just doesn't seem to last very long.
I spent a fun five minutes looking through linpack results a few days ago and was amused to find that today's ARM superchips are comparable to the pentium 2. Sure, it's only one benchmark, but it's enough to be amusing.
Next frontpage article title: "Malware Authors Target Computer Scientists with Complexity Theory"
Doesn't this seem like the best way to spread the Snow Crash virus?
And while I'm thinking of it, I had a realization: The Entertainment in Infinite Jest seems like a rip-off of Snow Crash in Snow Crash.
But now anyone can have a FB page from your grandmother to a company, it lost that unique feeling of being part of a club that was closed to outsiders.
I sanitized my account about 2 years ago with fake information except for my name and two photos. When they released the ability to backup your account I tried it and to my surprise all that was left was my sanitized information. Could old photos and posts be in their system? Yeah, but nothing that could really be used against me, although others that just posted whatever they wanted will not fair so well.
I joined in spring 2004 with fake personal information. At the time I was absolutely shocked that other members were signing up with real names and then posting personal information and linking to photos. I interpreted that as an indication that Facebook was a site for the web's outsiders, the people naive enough that they thought connecting online and offline identities was a good idea. I saw it as a club for the ignorant and since I cared about privacy, I left. Now it's bigger than that, so heavily used that a lot of people just can't ignore it regardless of their thoughts on privacy, but there's still no reason for anyone to add a phone number or address.
As an applications developer, lacking this feature means that I cannot increase my budget to hire more programmers and produce a better product. Without the personal information I have nothing to sell to advertisers, and must rely on much lower advertisement rates and donations from users.
Users will suffer from lower-quality apps, and I'm sad that Facebook has taken this step. In a world of openness, this is a huge step backwards.
I don't want to go back to a "pay to play" internet. Please lobby FB to reenable these features if you also believe in keeping the internet free.
This would be more convincing if there were any quality Facebook apps in existence. Don't worry, though. No lobbying is necessary. As always, Facebook will quietly re-enable the identity theft features as soon as the public's attention drifts elsewhere. Then you can get back to chipping away at privacy for the sake of profit.
In the 80s and early 90s, Gates looked like the kind of business-villain the world has known and disliked for centuries. Since then, however, he has largely removed himself from business decisions and the world has discovered a new kind of corporate supervillain. Gates and his old school business tricks will never be able to compete with today's evil businessmen like Zuckerberg, Page and Brin. They're aiming to profit by creating a dystopian future; Gates merely chased his profit by conniving to create a future with a skewed market share. In terms of evil he just can't compete, and when you try to compare the fraction of wealth given away for charity, today's villains don't even register against Gates.
Let's get this out of the way first:
And we don't have any way to test for matter whose only property is it brings our mathematical formulae in line with our physical observations.
The, "Gee, that's funny" observation is what drives all science.
Now:
Making observations and theories is part of science. But what sets science apart from superstition is rigorous testing of the theories.
Believe it or not, some scientists do real science.
There was a competing explanation for this family of "Gee, that's funny" observations called MOND - Modification Of Newtonian Dynamics. It was ruled out on the basis of evidence. (There may be a MOND v. 2.0 out there now - not sure.)
One candidate for dark matter is the sterile neutrino, which people - real scientists - are trying to detect right now. A few years ago they were almost ready to dismiss its existence, but more recent results suggest that it may actually exist.
So no, contrary to your majestic disbelief, dark matter is a Real Hypothesis (tm), investigated by Real Scientists (tm), doing Real Science (tm).
If you want to actually learn something about the topic rather than simply using Slashdot as an outlet for you whingeing about the universe not working the way you learned in fifth grade, Wikipedia is an easy place to get started.
I think they're up to MOND 45.2 now. The problem with MOND is that it has yet to successfully predict anything. Every new set of data requires a refinement of the concepts in MOND, whereas general relativity has successfully predicted a lot of things that were later observed. That doesn't mean MOND can't be right, but there's no particular reason to think it's right.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole? With all the small galaxies the Milky Way has swallowed over its lifetime, would it not be reasonable to find some relic black holes that have swung back out after being stripped of most of their surrounding gas/stars? Or, when "dark matter" is being talked about in this situation, is a black hole simply one of the possible candidates to supply the mystery mass?
I think we'd expect to see the kind of supermassive black hole that could be mistaken for a dwarf galaxy. The processes that form black holes of that size mean that there would probably still be a lot of material in the vicinity, if not actively accreting then still getting pulled around, compressed, and prompting star formation. Also, I think nearby galactic-sized black holes would probably make for some pretty wicked and obvious gravitational lensing.
Alternatively, the detected mass might be a large number of small black holes. I doubt it, but I'm not an astronomer. Luckily, further observation will give us answers.
Is this literally possible? Can you build a device with powerful enough (but still very power efficient) cpus and gpus to have the same power as the PS3? And ideally, be instruction set compatible?
With an adequate battery life? I would guess that 4-6 hours is the realistic minimum battery life for a handheld console with a rechargable battery back. And it has to not be too heavy for a japanese girl to hold, and it has to have reasonable heat dissipation levels.
Any engineers in the mobile phone industry reading this who can comment?
It's physically possible, but not with today's technology. This might be true if the PSP2 came out in 2021-2025. In terms of actual performance of the real PSP2, it will be an order of magnitude slower than the PS3 if we're absurdly optimistic.
Does the DMV clerk have a deskphone with an outside line?
Probably could save more money cutting down on those. I bet far more could be saved if they looked into the sweetheart deals vendors are getting. All cities seem to love those.
The DMV clerk probably has *both*. This gets rid of half of the expenses. Yes, let's find other reasonable things to cut, but just because each individual cut isn't a silver bullet solution doesn't mean it's not valuable.
Wouldn't it be better to just present it as a list of words, so that it could be rendered in HTML? For example
cold
winter steel case turkey
blood ...
weather ...
spring ...
air ...
water ...
springs spots ...
products new spot ...
hot
with the word lists getting smaller as you go to the right, of course (the ... lists words I can't make out in his image). No need for the "peacock" arrangement that reduces readability and requires it being stored as an image.
I think that Tufte would agree with you.
his files are hosted in *.pdf files. tried looking at them in a windows 7 and an ubuntu machine, both have the text with unreadable lines through them. why would you host graphics as pdf?
Same problem here with XP and Adobe Reader 10.
Yes, WP7 does lack copy/paste. Supporters point to the fact that original iPhone didn't have it, yet that phone was still successful. BUT iPhone 1 wasn't competing against the phones that WP7 is competing against. Microsoft will regret the lack of copy/paste on WP7.
Yet WP7's first few months of sales outpaced the sales of the original iPhone (and the G1) in its equivalent period.
Citation needed? I think it was discussed on Ars, among dozens of other places, a few weeks ago.
I saw what happened when Neo let a single drop of antimatter fall out of the Millennium Falcon to destroy the elves' homeworld
I know it's a joke, but somehow I still want to see that film...
You'll see basically that in the Imagination Land episodes of South Park.
A very large fraction of biomedical research and nanoscale self assembling materials research is dependent on unfathomably expensive high energy physics tools like the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne. Without this kind of beam we'd have lost a big chunk of the most impressive medical treatments now available and a lot of computer technology we take for granted, and the next generation of technology (meaning a 30 year generation, not an iPhone generation) is going to be an order of magnitude more dependent on high energy scattering. And the generation after that will likely include things like fusion.
The thing that's not adding up for you is your lack of knowledge about recent research. If anything, long term research pays off much more now than it did in the early 20th century. And you even point out that we're just now realizing things theorized or primitively demonstrated back then, which is a further demonstration of the huge long-term payoff of basic science research!
I'm a Philosophy student and I think I can speak with a certain degree of authority when I say that Ayn Rand isn't someone you seriously cite in academic philosophy. She just isn't credible - and I'm not talking in terms of political disagreement - her arguments on topics of philosophical import just aren't very good. I wasn't too happy with everything that was written before for Rand, such as your rather shallow evaluation of Feyerabend and your flippant remarks about epistemology which clearly demonstrate you have no idea what your are talking about, but second I hit "Ayn Rand" I just stopped reading.
From Paul Krugman:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
The blocks should be more blocky but look less blocky.
I want tessellated blocks. The entire Minecraft world should be a dynamic fractal, with the shape of each individual block mirroring the structure of the whole.
It takes a long string of implausibly (impossibly?) disastrous outcomes to cause any concern whatsoever.
So was implied about offshore drilling but look at the monumental fuck up that BP was able to pull off in the gulf.
The only people ever to claim that offshore drilling is inherently safe are lobbyists of various types.
Drilling is like sitting on a bomb and hitting it with a hammer all afternoon. Almost certainly nothing bad will happen, but it's pretty obvious that there's a remote chance of disaster, and the nature of the disaster is obvious.
Drilling into a lake in such a way that the borehole will be plugged with the water from that lake several kilometers before reaching the surface, the surface of Antarctica no less, is like using a robot on the Moon to stir a vial of melted Moon-water inside a glove box. If you think it's likely to cause some sort of dangerous series of events, you've been watching too many made for SyFy movies.
Apparently my mother in law used to have a civic with keyless entry ... in a small town of <30,000 there was another Civic of the exact same color which used the same code.
They found out one time at the mall that they could each open the other's car.
I bet there's not nearly enough uniqueness and security in these things.
Last week I drove a friend's late-90s Nissan in Mountain View. It's got a plain old mechanical key. On my way out of a store I walked up to a sedan of the same color, unlocked it, and then realized it wasn't even a Nissan. I confirmed that the key worked by locking it again from the outside before fleeing a couple aisles to the correct car.
Try leaving the United States. Just because teachers here are terrible doesn't mean they are terrible everywhere.
1) It's absurd to imply that all American teachers are bad.
2) The GP probably isn't American. He said "maths" instead of "math." That's typically associated with non-American English.
And in other news, Apple TV is selling like hot cakes. It just shows, like always before, that casual people don't really care about the geeky things those devices can offer. The older I get the more I can side with them too - when I was a teenager I had lots of energy and motivation to play around with computers and other technical stuff I had. Then I got a job, a girlfriend, went to travel the world and saw how much you're giving up by spending so much time with that. In the end, it's not really even that interesting.
Now I also just want devices that work great. I don't really have any desire to play around with them, apart from the occasional configuration to make things smoother for me. But there is a limit for that, and I'm not gonna spend hours and days coding something to accomplish it. This is also why general population will never turn to use Linux if something doesn't change, and can you really blame them?
Apple TV selling a million times over the course of 4 months sounds very disappointing to me.
Many of the most elite schools have a "legacy admissions" policy (that's how the C-student George W. Bush managed to get into Yale). It gives the children of alumni priority admission, because they want their richer alumni to keep contributing money, and denying little Biff or Muffy their admission would be bad business. It's affirmative action for the rich.
W got in just before Yale opened up for coeducation. As soon as women were admitted, admissions because very competitive. This was true across all elite colleges.
Now, he'd have no chance of admission.
Harvard has need based financial aid. If the family makes less than $60k/yr then tuition is covered. From $60k-$120k its 0-10% of family income, while $120k-$180k its 10% of income. This is all in grants not loans so no money has to be paid back.
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&pageid=icb.page248616
Seems a little invasive, but no more so than other need based loans.
Roughly the same formulae are used across the Ivy League. On top of that, it's quite negotiable. Getting into multiple Ivies does wonders because they're willing to compete very aggressively for you. My costs went from $10k/year to $2k/year thanks to faxing an offer from another school and a ten minute phone conversation.
And the "best" schools aren't necessarily the most expensive schools. That is another important distinction to make.
Quite true. In fact, Ivy League schools can be nearly free if you're not rich and are willing to negotiate with the financial aid office.