Housing really depends on where you live. 400 square feet would really be the minimum for a family with kids (although single child families are common) from my experience. But I live in the countryside so I don't know what Tokyo is like, for instance. Lots of couples live in apartments that are 300 square feet. Some of my single friends live in apartments that are even smaller.
In Canada I lived in a 2000 square foot house. My apartment in Japan is a fairly spacious 24 tatami (about 400 square feet). Strangely, I don't find it cramped, but the space is utilized a lot better than my old house.
But yes, there's no need to add more people. However, a lot of people still believe that the falling birth rate is a major problem here. I still can't quite fathom the logic (other than the economic one that rising populations are required for economic growth).
There are a lot of areas where businesses cooperate, especially if it is not related to their core business. Even when it is related to their core business, consortiums in which members cooperate for a common profit motive are very popular. Standard commitees are even more popular and companies will often pour a huge amount of money into development and try to steer the standard in their direction (making others play catch up). All of these motives exist in free software as well (and in fact free software often exists in those environments).
Even companies with no altruistic motives at all, those who are interested only in maximizing their bottom line, need to look at free software alternatives. I agree with you that some companies won't do this. But those companies will likely be outperformed by those that do. Even MS (originally of the "the GPL is a cancer" mindset) has seen the value of contributing to free software on occasion. And even if the majority of companies won't implement free software as a core part of their business strategy any time soon, very profitable companies that operate only on the basis of free software do exist. And as far as I can tell, the trend is toward more of this rather than less (certainly considerably more than when I entered the software business 20 odd years ago).
In the particular case you are talking about, I don't know if a business case can be made for starting a free software project. A lot would depend on how much help you were likely to get. It would also depend on whether you could get by with a substantially smaller set of functionality (to reduce initial cost) while trying to gather support. There is certainly risk to the project and I don't personally begrudge a company for not wanting to try it. But it may be that the potential rewards outweigh the risks (especially for a large organization).
It's an interesting problem, and having worked in a physics lab before I can understand a lot of the points you are making. However, I suspect that if you were to team up with other molecular biologists to create the software you need it would cost you all less money over all. Probably a lot less money since R&D costs (of which development costs are only a portion) are usually less than 10% of the operating costs in a software company. And since you are in a very specialized field, a few research teams are shouldering the entire cost of development (plus marketing, distribution, management overhead, profit, etc).
The thing is, I totally get the point that you'd rather be doing molecular biology than writing software. However I further suspect that there are some people who wouldn't mind writing software (possibly as a sideline). It is probably in your best interest (both from a financial point of view and a control point of view) to encourage that kind of development. Surely you can't tell me that you would rather not have the ability to modify the software, even a little bit. Like I said, I once worked in a physics lab and I know that people in labs would ultimately like to be able to tweak everything.
So I get where you are coming from, but I don't quite understand why you prefer the status quo. Even if you don't hire someone directly, sometimes it only takes encouragement for someone (maybe even in another lab) to start a free software project. And it needn't be the whole kit and kaboodle. Probably there are some small opportunities you can take advantage of, while strategically working to control your own tools.
I've got old and underpowered hardware. For me "real-world" means "how much bloody memory does it use". It doesn't really matter how fast they make it if my machine starts thrashing.
The funny thing is, I'm kind of in agreement with you, but have a different conclusion. People ask me what desktop environment I use. I tell them I don't use a desktop environment. I hate these bloody integrated monoliths. For example, with Empathy I have to change my sound theme from the Gnome configuration tools and turn on sound notifications for my desktop. If I don't do that I don't get sound notifications in Empathy. But what do I do if I want to run Empathy without Gnome?
Free software used to be about choice -- choice to use whatever I want to use. Distributions like Ubuntu try to integrate things into one monolithic package where they choose what you will run. This is egged on by the desktop environments like Gnome and KDE who have always had that as a goal -- let's reduce choice so as not to confuse the user.
But my conclusion is NOT to switch to OS X, where I'll be presented with even less choice. My conclusion is simply to choose a distribution and tools that meet with my philosophy. OK, so Gnome and KDE aren't my thing. Ubuntu is not my thing. There is still a lot of free software options that don't try to integrate everything into one already-chosen-for-you-so-dumb-users-shouldn't-need-to-touch-this block. Other people are free to choose their integrated tools (and I know a lot of people, probably most people, love them).
Free software is still about choice. Some organizations are purposely trying to create a kind of walled garden where people won't get overwhelmed. But those of us who like the wild world can still thrive. What confuses me is what your beef is. You say that Gnome and KDE have lost their way, and yet you run to OS X which you admit is more of the same. You're trading your freedom for polish. Well, each to their own I guess. Personally, I'm not going to go there.
As an immigrant working in Japan I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. The immigration policies are not racist in-so-far as they don't discriminate against any particular group of people. Instead immigration is discouraged, period. You may believe this is because Japanese people are racist in general, but my opinion is that you are wrong. I have experienced considerably less racism here than I have seen in my home country of Canada.
IMHO, the immigration policy here is sensible. Why on earth do you want to take an already populous country and add more people to it? Japan is an island country. Maintaining a stable population is a brilliant idea. Why do should we increase our population until we can't support ourselves any more. Already Japan, which has laws indicating that it must be self sufficient for staple foods, is importing a huge amount of its food from other countries. For an island country, this is a huge security risk (just look at the number of people who starved to death after WWII).
The ironic thing is that immigration to Japan is surprisingly easy if you have identified scarce skills. And if you have lived here for a period of time (for any reason!) you can pretty much stay here permanently if you have one of these scarce skills and can guarantee that you will make a reasonable salary. Lately they have been contemplating a language requirement for this, but I have to say that I'm in total agreement.
As an immigrant to Japan I get pretty frustrated with people making blanket statements about Japanese racism. In this case I really wonder whether you know what the immigration policy is, or if it is a knee-jerk assumption that it is based on racism. Life here is very different from the west and it is easy for foreigners to get into trouble. But most of this is due to the lack of Japanese language ability. Of the people I know here who are fluent in Japanese I can't think of any who have major difficulties living here. Conversely there are few westerners without Japanese fluency that have an easy time of it. Without the language it is virtually impossible to integrate with the society. In Japan, if you can't integrate you will be in for a rough ride.
One thing I've noticed about people who are used to using Windows is that they think they must scour the internet for packages, download them from the website and then install them by hand. Yes, you *can* do it that way, but it isn't the way it's usually done on Linux systems. You go to your friendly installer, select the package you want and then click a button. All the dependencies get installed automatically and the thing updates itself when new versions come out. One stop shopping. It's a huge advantage that Linux systems have over Windows. But many people can't quite wrap their brain around it at first.
I really wish those people could understand this quote (last 2 lines of the article): "People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth."
And I wish people, even scientists, could understand that the purpose of science is not to get to the truth. If you believe that what you find with science is the truth then you have done nothing other than create a new religion.
Science is a model of reality. We make observations. We make a model. We make predictions based on that model. We observe whether those predictions come to pass. If they do, then it a good and useful model. Is it the truth? Who knows??? Reality might be exactly like the model. It might be a little like the model but with other details we haven't noticed. Or it might be totally unlike the model except that it acts like the model. What is the truth? We can't know -- that is the realm of religion. If it is a good model and it is useful then it is science. It doesn't matter what the truth is.
This feud of science vs. religion pisses me off. "God did it" is not useful when I am trying to make a radio. Likewise I don't care if the world is actually 6000 years old and the FSM is making it appear to be billions of years old. I have to interact with the world the way it appears (which is luckily quite consistent with scientific models we have made). What you or I actually believe to be the case is neither here nor there. They are completely unrelated.
Don't just get religion out of science class, get it out of science altogether. It doesn't belong there. If you want to philosophize about what you think things are likely to be, then call it for what it is -- religion. We can not directly observe anything other than ourselves and so can make no statements about their existence (unless you just want to make yourself feel comfortable). But we can make statements about what things seem to be -- that is science.
Unfortunately they don't keeps statistics of those who are underweight but not actually malnourished. However, weight distribution in the world is almost certainly normal. There are 6.7 billion people in the world. About 1 billion are overweight and about 1 billion are malnourished. This leaves 4.7 billion who are eight at a healthy weight or underweight. Even if 75% of this group are a healthy weight (unlikely given a normal distribution) it still leaves the underweight and malnourished group at over 2 billion.
With respect to your comment about things getting better in large cities with real poverty problems, I invite you to actually spend time in the slums to see if you change your mind. Notice that not one western city is listed in the top 20. It's not like London or even New York. People in these cities have no homes, no drinking water, no sewage and very little food. Yes, there is wealth there. People come because they are attracted to the wealth (or because they are born in the slums). They might be able to eke out some kind of living by begging. But again, go and look. Spend your holiday in one of these slums and see how much you enjoy it.
Man, I don't even know who Malthus is, but you should probably research a little bit before you talk.
First, more people are not overweight than underweight. That might be the case in your country, but I assure you that your country does not constitute anywhere near the majority of the planet. The number of obese (dangerously overweight) people in the world number about 300 million (from WHO). The number of malnourished (dangerously underweight) people number over 900 million (from the Wikipedia article on malnutrition).
Maybe you are right about diseases being better controlled. But I for one can't find any data on the rates of pandemics. So who really knows. Our understanding is better, but our odds of world wide contagion is much higher due to the international travel.
Finally, here is the list of the largest cities by population density. Stop me when you find one that doesn't have a huge poverty problem: Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Lagos, Shenzhen, Seoul (maybe here?), Taipei, Chennai, Bogota, Shanghai, Lima, Beijing, Delhi, Kinshasa, Manila, Tehran, Jakarta, Tianjin, Bangalore, Ho Chi Minh City. Well, that's the top 20 anyway. There is wealth in many of these cities, but for the vast majority they also have crushing poverty.
That guy may have been a tool, but he was crazy and is now dead. There's nothing we can do about him. But education is available for the rest of us. Please make use of it.
As someone who speak Japanese (admittedly badly), I find that the same is generally true of that language. There are quite a few words written with a single character that have complex phonetic sounds (based on the Japanese reading of the character). But most words are compound character words based on the simple Chinese pronunciations. Especially for a learner of the language, these words are a joy. It's like in English where you have the root "hydro" and you know that it has something to do with water. But it is not just a phonetic representation, you also have a visual representation in the writing. I can't tell you the number of times someone has told me a new word and after they write it down for me I understand exactly what it means. I can only imagine that Chinese is like that but only better (since there aren't a huge variety of readings for each character).
Chinese characters were a revelation to me when I first started studying Japanese. Now I vastly prefer reading in Japanese to reading in English (hmmm... then why am I on the English Slashdot, I ask myself... Oh yeah, my Japanese is crap...) Recently I asked a friend of mine to try a quiz program I had with Japanese sentences. He could read some of the phonetic characters, but none of the Chinese characters. After he had played with the quiz for 15 minutes, he could easily read all of the Chinese characters in the sentences, but still struggled with the phonetic ones. This mirrored my own experience.
This is not true. Chinese characters are formed in a logical way. It is not difficult to memorize how to write them. In fact, I have found that it is faster for me to learn to write and read than it is to learn just to read. Once I remember how to write a character I don't confuse it with others. I once thought like you and simply memorized the overall shape of the characters. But complex characters always frustrated me. Also, handwriting was often illegible to me. I have found that many people's handwriting is only understandable if you recognize the character by stroke order.
Granted, I am not doing Chinese, but rather Japanese. So there are slightly fewer common characters. And it is traditional rather than simplified characters. However, I don't think it will make much difference. If you work at it every day, you should probably be able to get the 3000 or so (not sure how many you need for literacy in Chinese) characters in a little over a year (i.e., learning less than 10 a day -- using a spaced repetition program will help enormously).
BTW, for anyone learning these languages, I have found it is faster to learn to write and read vocabulary with Chinese characters than it is to learn it phonetically. I suspect this is even more true of Chinese since there aren't large numbers of readings for each character. The less shortcuts I take, the faster I go it seems.
What will really get you is when you realize that the highway is evil.
I'm glad you defined "evil" for your argument. But I think if you change that definition a little bit it becomes even more interesting. If we define "evil" as "doing anything I don't want you to" all of a sudden we have conflict. Your definition of evil and my definition of evil collide because what I want and what you want don't mix. To put it more simply, you want ten feet so that you can get off the highway, and the guy with the ten feet doesn't want the highway at all. You are both evil. And the only way to "do no evil" (at least with respect to what everyone else wants) is to do nothing at all.
I think what Google means by "do no evil" is that they won't do what they don't want to do. And as pathetic as it sounds, that is actually a useful motto. Most corporations don't even know what they want, let alone actively try to avoid doing things they don't want. If Google could actually organize themselves in such a way that they have a single set of core values and it is actually acted upon by the staff, then it really, truly would be amazing. I have my doubts though...
They claim that is about 1000 gallons of gasoline (not really willing to do the math myself, I'll accept it). They also argue that the smelting of the 30 lbs of nickel used for the batteries is very bad for the environment. Also, don't know one way or another, but it wouldn't surprise me.
For some reason you chose to compare a 1992 Honda wagon to a Prius. Well, when I say "for some reason" I meant, because it makes your argument look good. Since the parent just said 1992 Honda, I'll go with the Civic hatchback with manual transmission that gets 33/42 mpg for similar reasons.
So now the Honda is using 2790 gallons of fuel and the Prius (taking into consideration production costs) is using 3800.
Buying a used car (and not being stupid about it) *is* more energy efficient than buying a new car.
Actually, focusing on near-term benefit is the best case scenario. Offering stock options merely destabilizes the stock. In order to maximize the profit from your stock options you really want to drive the price down when the options are being granted and drive it back up when the options are being sold. Even with full disclosure and trading windows in place it is quite easy to time announcements (or stuff your sales channels or whatever) to get the effect you want. I invite you to track stock price against stock option granting in any large company.
Yes it does work in most cases. And in fact, every modern SIP client I know of works this way (there's even an RFC for it... I can't remember the name of it right now though). If you look a little higher in the conversation, you'll see the real problem, though -- Firewalls that bind the port when they return an ICMP packet. The problem is that even though you have requested a port, it isn't actually bound until you send a packet. If the firewall receive a packet before one is sent, the port isn't open yet, an ICMP packet gets sent back and the port is bound for however long the timeout is (usually 90 seconds). When you start to send packets, you get assigned a different port, which of course leads to one way audio.
Of course there is no reason to bind the port on an ICMP message and I have been told that it is against the spec (I haven't looked, though). But many, many routers do this. Linux iptables also used to do this and may still do for all I know. If we wait long enough for everyone to fix their NAT implementation, SIP may just start working on its own;-)
Unfortunately STUN doesn't work in every case. The problem is that for many firewalls, sending an ICMP packet binds the port. This is apparently against the spec (I haven't checked), but many, many routers do this. Even Linux did it at one point (and may still do for all I know).
The issue comes because SIP has to choose the port it will use for audio before it sends audio. It sends the port number to the other side. But in most firewalls the port doesn't open (and isn't even really bound) until a packet has been sent to the other side. But if a packet is received before the packet is sent, the firewall will respond an ICMP message, binding the port until it times out (usually 90 seconds). When the SIP client gets around to sending it's packet, the port is already bound and gets reassigned. This results in one way audio.
Even ICE won't solve this problem. The poor reputation SIP clients have for reliable connection are due to this. It will work most of the time, but not 100% of the time. In order to work 100% of the time you need an intermediary that is able to carry your traffic.
Unfortunately this has less to do with poor SIP implementations and more to do with the guy inventing SIP not understanding how firewalls work in the real world.
The issue is that they don't know they are providing bandwidth for somebody else's call. It's in the fine print, but your average Joe doesn't read/understand it. It remains to be seen how many people would voluntarily give up their bandwidth for a stranger's telephone call. My current idea is to build up a kind of dark net where you can choose who to provide bandwidth too (friends, friends of friends, anybody).
Writing a good, easy to use, high quality SIP client is quite easy these days. Half decent free SIP and RTP libraries exist. Decent free codecs exist. You basically just have to write UI (and not even a complicated UI at that).
The problem is NAT. To make it work 100% of the time you must always have one leg (or an intermediary carrying the traffic) that isn't behind NAT. If you are behind NAT, Skype routes your call through someone who isn't. In other words, you will be using somebody else's bandwidth for your call. And that someone probably doesn't know you are doing it. Up until this point, there has been no free software author willing to do what Skype has done. Basically, because it is unethical in many people's minds. And free software authors tend to work based on ethics.
With current routers and UPnP, a lot of the problems can be avoided, but you are still going to run into some situations which you can't really solve point to point. It has occurred to me to have a voluntary bandwidth usage. This should work reasonably well if the software were popular enough and you could limit the amount of bandwidth used.
I have the skills to write such a thing, but alas I'm busy with other things at the moment. Maybe later...
Unfortunately, saying something and peacing out are usually mutually exclusive. If you say something you open yourself up to hassle. If you close your eyes and pretend it didn't happen you can usually ignore it for a very long time. Therein lies the problem. Any thug can threaten you knowing you will trade peace for justice.
DRM doesn't stop people from copying things. It stops people from using them. You can easily make a copy of something with DRM. It affects your *use* of that copy.
The two things are not the same and it is very important to understand the difference. Because DRM not only stops you from using your copy of something, it stops you from using your *original* copy in ways that the DRM maker didn't envisage/allow.
Unfortunately true copy protection is not possible. DRM is usage protection.
It really depends on the problem. For a lot of things Google does, they need people with heavy math skills. PhDs in comp sci or math are going to be very useful.
But in 20 years as an application developer, I almost never used the theoretical skills I learned at school. The vast majority of programming projects don't need it. In fact, if you try to use your math skills you are often discouraged by your boss. I remember being asked to "benchmark" our application to see if it was slower than the previous version. I dutifully looked at the problem, determined the distribution the data was likely to be, started taking hundreds of measurements.... when I was interrupted. "I want you to take *one* measurement and then I want you to tell them that it isn't slower than the previous version", he said...:-P
I think the theory I used most was automata and grammars. I mean it always sucks when you create a save file format that's context sensitive. Then if you write your code assuming the format is regular and use global variables to keep track of state... You know not that everyone in the industry didn't do that regardless of their education... sigh...
Algorithmic complexity was never that important to me. To be honest as an application programmer you don't often do a lot of stuff where it matters. If my algorithm is n squared or n log n... It doesn't really matter especially with small data sets. Just pick the one that is easier to understand in the code.
My school made a huge deal about group theory when I was there. I honestly don't think I ever used it in my career. However, the other day a friend of mine was playing a "brain training" game and had to determine if the sum of a large group of numbers were even or odd. So it did come in handy eventually, I guess.
I really do think that for the average application developer, a technical college program focused on writing code is more appropriate than a math based academic degree. But unfortunately even the technical colleges don't do the kind of instruction that I think is useful.
Yes, I agree with you. The issue here is less about whether there is some way to extract knowledge from a self organized crowd and more about the fact that the book is bad. As you say, every example is anecdotal and most of them are poor examples to begin with.
However, I think there are some useful things to think about "crowd sourcing". The first is that in many problems, getting a lot of estimates based on different criteria will end up giving you a better overall estimate. The individual errors will cancel each other out. It is not very difficult to show a mathematical proof of this. And it is not very difficult to show what kinds of problems this will work well for (something with a numerical solution for which the vast majority of the people in the crowd have a non-random method of obtaining an estimate)
However other types of problems are good for "crowd sourcing" too. One of these things is making a FAQ. I've often thought that the FAQs that came out of usenet were mindblowingly good. In fact, almost without exception, they were better than any reference book on the subject that you could buy. FAQs that have been generated since usenet became less popular have been less useful.
My personal opinion is that these were the result of specific self organizing groups. First, virtually everyone involved was educated beyond high school. Second, participation was based on interest. Only people with an interest in the subject participated. Third information was gathered through competition. Information in FAQs were put into FAQs either because everyone agreed on the content, or there had already been one (or more) huge flamewars on the topic and nobody wanted to talk about it any more. Some kind of concensus had been reached and recorded in the FAQ. Finally, the information was usually of a non-political nature. There was little to be gained from "spinning" the answers since participants almost never represented a commercial interest. Also, discussions for the most part centered around technical issues rather than religious/political ones. And in the end, the FAQ was almost always written by someone who simply wanted to avoid future flame wars rather than someone with a political agenda to sell.
Like FAQs I think there are many places where self organizing groups can do a better job than a single person. However, I was intensely disappointed with "The Wisdom of Crowds". I wish it had done a much better job, because it is an interesting area.
Not sure if you'll see this since you are AC, but just in case... This site was the one that helped me the most. It took me literally hours before I could get myself to focus the image. Even now it takes me a few seconds. But if you practice you'll get it. Just keep trying to look for the details in the pictures. Real pictures like these are easier than the magic eye ones in my experience because you know what you are trying to see.
Even my doctor has no idea. My right eye actually improved 2 diopters in one year. They sent me to a specialist to see if there was a problem (such a thing can happen if you are getting cataracts or diabetes or some other conditions). But it came back healthy. I don't seem to be getting far sighted either. I can correct to better than 20/20 with contacts.
However, even though I have only been doing it for a month now, practicing adjusting your focus seems to be helpful so far. Just don't overdo it at first. It's easy to get a headache from eye strain.
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Housing really depends on where you live. 400 square feet would really be the minimum for a family with kids (although single child families are common) from my experience. But I live in the countryside so I don't know what Tokyo is like, for instance. Lots of couples live in apartments that are 300 square feet. Some of my single friends live in apartments that are even smaller.
In Canada I lived in a 2000 square foot house. My apartment in Japan is a fairly spacious 24 tatami (about 400 square feet). Strangely, I don't find it cramped, but the space is utilized a lot better than my old house.
But yes, there's no need to add more people. However, a lot of people still believe that the falling birth rate is a major problem here. I still can't quite fathom the logic (other than the economic one that rising populations are required for economic growth).
There are a lot of areas where businesses cooperate, especially if it is not related to their core business. Even when it is related to their core business, consortiums in which members cooperate for a common profit motive are very popular. Standard commitees are even more popular and companies will often pour a huge amount of money into development and try to steer the standard in their direction (making others play catch up). All of these motives exist in free software as well (and in fact free software often exists in those environments).
Even companies with no altruistic motives at all, those who are interested only in maximizing their bottom line, need to look at free software alternatives. I agree with you that some companies won't do this. But those companies will likely be outperformed by those that do. Even MS (originally of the "the GPL is a cancer" mindset) has seen the value of contributing to free software on occasion. And even if the majority of companies won't implement free software as a core part of their business strategy any time soon, very profitable companies that operate only on the basis of free software do exist. And as far as I can tell, the trend is toward more of this rather than less (certainly considerably more than when I entered the software business 20 odd years ago).
In the particular case you are talking about, I don't know if a business case can be made for starting a free software project. A lot would depend on how much help you were likely to get. It would also depend on whether you could get by with a substantially smaller set of functionality (to reduce initial cost) while trying to gather support. There is certainly risk to the project and I don't personally begrudge a company for not wanting to try it. But it may be that the potential rewards outweigh the risks (especially for a large organization).
It's an interesting problem, and having worked in a physics lab before I can understand a lot of the points you are making. However, I suspect that if you were to team up with other molecular biologists to create the software you need it would cost you all less money over all. Probably a lot less money since R&D costs (of which development costs are only a portion) are usually less than 10% of the operating costs in a software company. And since you are in a very specialized field, a few research teams are shouldering the entire cost of development (plus marketing, distribution, management overhead, profit, etc).
The thing is, I totally get the point that you'd rather be doing molecular biology than writing software. However I further suspect that there are some people who wouldn't mind writing software (possibly as a sideline). It is probably in your best interest (both from a financial point of view and a control point of view) to encourage that kind of development. Surely you can't tell me that you would rather not have the ability to modify the software, even a little bit. Like I said, I once worked in a physics lab and I know that people in labs would ultimately like to be able to tweak everything.
So I get where you are coming from, but I don't quite understand why you prefer the status quo. Even if you don't hire someone directly, sometimes it only takes encouragement for someone (maybe even in another lab) to start a free software project. And it needn't be the whole kit and kaboodle. Probably there are some small opportunities you can take advantage of, while strategically working to control your own tools.
I've got old and underpowered hardware. For me "real-world" means "how much bloody memory does it use". It doesn't really matter how fast they make it if my machine starts thrashing.
The funny thing is, I'm kind of in agreement with you, but have a different conclusion. People ask me what desktop environment I use. I tell them I don't use a desktop environment. I hate these bloody integrated monoliths. For example, with Empathy I have to change my sound theme from the Gnome configuration tools and turn on sound notifications for my desktop. If I don't do that I don't get sound notifications in Empathy. But what do I do if I want to run Empathy without Gnome?
Free software used to be about choice -- choice to use whatever I want to use. Distributions like Ubuntu try to integrate things into one monolithic package where they choose what you will run. This is egged on by the desktop environments like Gnome and KDE who have always had that as a goal -- let's reduce choice so as not to confuse the user.
But my conclusion is NOT to switch to OS X, where I'll be presented with even less choice. My conclusion is simply to choose a distribution and tools that meet with my philosophy. OK, so Gnome and KDE aren't my thing. Ubuntu is not my thing. There is still a lot of free software options that don't try to integrate everything into one already-chosen-for-you-so-dumb-users-shouldn't-need-to-touch-this block. Other people are free to choose their integrated tools (and I know a lot of people, probably most people, love them).
Free software is still about choice. Some organizations are purposely trying to create a kind of walled garden where people won't get overwhelmed. But those of us who like the wild world can still thrive. What confuses me is what your beef is. You say that Gnome and KDE have lost their way, and yet you run to OS X which you admit is more of the same. You're trading your freedom for polish. Well, each to their own I guess. Personally, I'm not going to go there.
As an immigrant working in Japan I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. The immigration policies are not racist in-so-far as they don't discriminate against any particular group of people. Instead immigration is discouraged, period. You may believe this is because Japanese people are racist in general, but my opinion is that you are wrong. I have experienced considerably less racism here than I have seen in my home country of Canada.
IMHO, the immigration policy here is sensible. Why on earth do you want to take an already populous country and add more people to it? Japan is an island country. Maintaining a stable population is a brilliant idea. Why do should we increase our population until we can't support ourselves any more. Already Japan, which has laws indicating that it must be self sufficient for staple foods, is importing a huge amount of its food from other countries. For an island country, this is a huge security risk (just look at the number of people who starved to death after WWII).
The ironic thing is that immigration to Japan is surprisingly easy if you have identified scarce skills. And if you have lived here for a period of time (for any reason!) you can pretty much stay here permanently if you have one of these scarce skills and can guarantee that you will make a reasonable salary. Lately they have been contemplating a language requirement for this, but I have to say that I'm in total agreement.
As an immigrant to Japan I get pretty frustrated with people making blanket statements about Japanese racism. In this case I really wonder whether you know what the immigration policy is, or if it is a knee-jerk assumption that it is based on racism. Life here is very different from the west and it is easy for foreigners to get into trouble. But most of this is due to the lack of Japanese language ability. Of the people I know here who are fluent in Japanese I can't think of any who have major difficulties living here. Conversely there are few westerners without Japanese fluency that have an easy time of it. Without the language it is virtually impossible to integrate with the society. In Japan, if you can't integrate you will be in for a rough ride.
One thing I've noticed about people who are used to using Windows is that they think they must scour the internet for packages, download them from the website and then install them by hand. Yes, you *can* do it that way, but it isn't the way it's usually done on Linux systems. You go to your friendly installer, select the package you want and then click a button. All the dependencies get installed automatically and the thing updates itself when new versions come out. One stop shopping. It's a huge advantage that Linux systems have over Windows. But many people can't quite wrap their brain around it at first.
I really wish those people could understand this quote (last 2 lines of the article): "People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth."
And I wish people, even scientists, could understand that the purpose of science is not to get to the truth. If you believe that what you find with science is the truth then you have done nothing other than create a new religion.
Science is a model of reality. We make observations. We make a model. We make predictions based on that model. We observe whether those predictions come to pass. If they do, then it a good and useful model. Is it the truth? Who knows??? Reality might be exactly like the model. It might be a little like the model but with other details we haven't noticed. Or it might be totally unlike the model except that it acts like the model. What is the truth? We can't know -- that is the realm of religion. If it is a good model and it is useful then it is science. It doesn't matter what the truth is.
This feud of science vs. religion pisses me off. "God did it" is not useful when I am trying to make a radio. Likewise I don't care if the world is actually 6000 years old and the FSM is making it appear to be billions of years old. I have to interact with the world the way it appears (which is luckily quite consistent with scientific models we have made). What you or I actually believe to be the case is neither here nor there. They are completely unrelated.
Don't just get religion out of science class, get it out of science altogether. It doesn't belong there. If you want to philosophize about what you think things are likely to be, then call it for what it is -- religion. We can not directly observe anything other than ourselves and so can make no statements about their existence (unless you just want to make yourself feel comfortable). But we can make statements about what things seem to be -- that is science.
There are 1 billion people who are overweight *of which* 300 million are obese: http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/publications/facts/obesity/en/
Unfortunately they don't keeps statistics of those who are underweight but not actually malnourished. However, weight distribution in the world is almost certainly normal. There are 6.7 billion people in the world. About 1 billion are overweight and about 1 billion are malnourished. This leaves 4.7 billion who are eight at a healthy weight or underweight. Even if 75% of this group are a healthy weight (unlikely given a normal distribution) it still leaves the underweight and malnourished group at over 2 billion.
With respect to your comment about things getting better in large cities with real poverty problems, I invite you to actually spend time in the slums to see if you change your mind. Notice that not one western city is listed in the top 20. It's not like London or even New York. People in these cities have no homes, no drinking water, no sewage and very little food. Yes, there is wealth there. People come because they are attracted to the wealth (or because they are born in the slums). They might be able to eke out some kind of living by begging. But again, go and look. Spend your holiday in one of these slums and see how much you enjoy it.
Man, I don't even know who Malthus is, but you should probably research a little bit before you talk.
First, more people are not overweight than underweight. That might be the case in your country, but I assure you that your country does not constitute anywhere near the majority of the planet. The number of obese (dangerously overweight) people in the world number about 300 million (from WHO). The number of malnourished (dangerously underweight) people number over 900 million (from the Wikipedia article on malnutrition).
Maybe you are right about diseases being better controlled. But I for one can't find any data on the rates of pandemics. So who really knows. Our understanding is better, but our odds of world wide contagion is much higher due to the international travel.
Finally, here is the list of the largest cities by population density. Stop me when you find one that doesn't have a huge poverty problem: Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Lagos, Shenzhen, Seoul (maybe here?), Taipei, Chennai, Bogota, Shanghai, Lima, Beijing, Delhi, Kinshasa, Manila, Tehran, Jakarta, Tianjin, Bangalore, Ho Chi Minh City. Well, that's the top 20 anyway. There is wealth in many of these cities, but for the vast majority they also have crushing poverty.
That guy may have been a tool, but he was crazy and is now dead. There's nothing we can do about him. But education is available for the rest of us. Please make use of it.
As someone who speak Japanese (admittedly badly), I find that the same is generally true of that language. There are quite a few words written with a single character that have complex phonetic sounds (based on the Japanese reading of the character). But most words are compound character words based on the simple Chinese pronunciations. Especially for a learner of the language, these words are a joy. It's like in English where you have the root "hydro" and you know that it has something to do with water. But it is not just a phonetic representation, you also have a visual representation in the writing. I can't tell you the number of times someone has told me a new word and after they write it down for me I understand exactly what it means. I can only imagine that Chinese is like that but only better (since there aren't a huge variety of readings for each character).
Chinese characters were a revelation to me when I first started studying Japanese. Now I vastly prefer reading in Japanese to reading in English (hmmm... then why am I on the English Slashdot, I ask myself... Oh yeah, my Japanese is crap...) Recently I asked a friend of mine to try a quiz program I had with Japanese sentences. He could read some of the phonetic characters, but none of the Chinese characters. After he had played with the quiz for 15 minutes, he could easily read all of the Chinese characters in the sentences, but still struggled with the phonetic ones. This mirrored my own experience.
This is not true. Chinese characters are formed in a logical way. It is not difficult to memorize how to write them. In fact, I have found that it is faster for me to learn to write and read than it is to learn just to read. Once I remember how to write a character I don't confuse it with others. I once thought like you and simply memorized the overall shape of the characters. But complex characters always frustrated me. Also, handwriting was often illegible to me. I have found that many people's handwriting is only understandable if you recognize the character by stroke order.
Granted, I am not doing Chinese, but rather Japanese. So there are slightly fewer common characters. And it is traditional rather than simplified characters. However, I don't think it will make much difference. If you work at it every day, you should probably be able to get the 3000 or so (not sure how many you need for literacy in Chinese) characters in a little over a year (i.e., learning less than 10 a day -- using a spaced repetition program will help enormously).
BTW, for anyone learning these languages, I have found it is faster to learn to write and read vocabulary with Chinese characters than it is to learn it phonetically. I suspect this is even more true of Chinese since there aren't large numbers of readings for each character. The less shortcuts I take, the faster I go it seems.
What will really get you is when you realize that the highway is evil.
I'm glad you defined "evil" for your argument. But I think if you change that definition a little bit it becomes even more interesting. If we define "evil" as "doing anything I don't want you to" all of a sudden we have conflict. Your definition of evil and my definition of evil collide because what I want and what you want don't mix. To put it more simply, you want ten feet so that you can get off the highway, and the guy with the ten feet doesn't want the highway at all. You are both evil. And the only way to "do no evil" (at least with respect to what everyone else wants) is to do nothing at all.
I think what Google means by "do no evil" is that they won't do what they don't want to do. And as pathetic as it sounds, that is actually a useful motto. Most corporations don't even know what they want, let alone actively try to avoid doing things they don't want. If Google could actually organize themselves in such a way that they have a single set of core values and it is actually acted upon by the staff, then it really, truly would be amazing. I have my doubts though...
According to this Wired article, it takes 113 million BTUs to make a Prius: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_09usedcars
They claim that is about 1000 gallons of gasoline (not really willing to do the math myself, I'll accept it). They also argue that the smelting of the 30 lbs of nickel used for the batteries is very bad for the environment. Also, don't know one way or another, but it wouldn't surprise me.
For some reason you chose to compare a 1992 Honda wagon to a Prius. Well, when I say "for some reason" I meant, because it makes your argument look good. Since the parent just said 1992 Honda, I'll go with the Civic hatchback with manual transmission that gets 33/42 mpg for similar reasons.
So now the Honda is using 2790 gallons of fuel and the Prius (taking into consideration production costs) is using 3800.
Buying a used car (and not being stupid about it) *is* more energy efficient than buying a new car.
Actually, focusing on near-term benefit is the best case scenario. Offering stock options merely destabilizes the stock. In order to maximize the profit from your stock options you really want to drive the price down when the options are being granted and drive it back up when the options are being sold. Even with full disclosure and trading windows in place it is quite easy to time announcements (or stuff your sales channels or whatever) to get the effect you want. I invite you to track stock price against stock option granting in any large company.
Yes it does work in most cases. And in fact, every modern SIP client I know of works this way (there's even an RFC for it... I can't remember the name of it right now though). If you look a little higher in the conversation, you'll see the real problem, though -- Firewalls that bind the port when they return an ICMP packet. The problem is that even though you have requested a port, it isn't actually bound until you send a packet. If the firewall receive a packet before one is sent, the port isn't open yet, an ICMP packet gets sent back and the port is bound for however long the timeout is (usually 90 seconds). When you start to send packets, you get assigned a different port, which of course leads to one way audio.
Of course there is no reason to bind the port on an ICMP message and I have been told that it is against the spec (I haven't looked, though). But many, many routers do this. Linux iptables also used to do this and may still do for all I know. ;-)
If we wait long enough for everyone to fix their NAT implementation, SIP may just start working on its own
Unfortunately STUN doesn't work in every case. The problem is that for many firewalls, sending an ICMP packet binds the port. This is apparently against the spec (I haven't checked), but many, many routers do this. Even Linux did it at one point (and may still do for all I know).
The issue comes because SIP has to choose the port it will use for audio before it sends audio. It sends the port number to the other side. But in most firewalls the port doesn't open (and isn't even really bound) until a packet has been sent to the other side. But if a packet is received before the packet is sent, the firewall will respond an ICMP message, binding the port until it times out (usually 90 seconds). When the SIP client gets around to sending it's packet, the port is already bound and gets reassigned. This results in one way audio.
Even ICE won't solve this problem. The poor reputation SIP clients have for reliable connection are due to this. It will work most of the time, but not 100% of the time. In order to work 100% of the time you need an intermediary that is able to carry your traffic.
Unfortunately this has less to do with poor SIP implementations and more to do with the guy inventing SIP not understanding how firewalls work in the real world.
The issue is that they don't know they are providing bandwidth for somebody else's call. It's in the fine print, but your average Joe doesn't read/understand it. It remains to be seen how many people would voluntarily give up their bandwidth for a stranger's telephone call. My current idea is to build up a kind of dark net where you can choose who to provide bandwidth too (friends, friends of friends, anybody).
Writing a good, easy to use, high quality SIP client is quite easy these days. Half decent free SIP and RTP libraries exist. Decent free codecs exist. You basically just have to write UI (and not even a complicated UI at that).
The problem is NAT. To make it work 100% of the time you must always have one leg (or an intermediary carrying the traffic) that isn't behind NAT. If you are behind NAT, Skype routes your call through someone who isn't. In other words, you will be using somebody else's bandwidth for your call. And that someone probably doesn't know you are doing it. Up until this point, there has been no free software author willing to do what Skype has done. Basically, because it is unethical in many people's minds. And free software authors tend to work based on ethics.
With current routers and UPnP, a lot of the problems can be avoided, but you are still going to run into some situations which you can't really solve point to point. It has occurred to me to have a voluntary bandwidth usage. This should work reasonably well if the software were popular enough and you could limit the amount of bandwidth used.
I have the skills to write such a thing, but alas I'm busy with other things at the moment. Maybe later...
If you see something, say something...peace out.
Unfortunately, saying something and peacing out are usually mutually exclusive. If you say something you open yourself up to hassle. If you close your eyes and pretend it didn't happen you can usually ignore it for a very long time. Therein lies the problem. Any thug can threaten you knowing you will trade peace for justice.
DRM doesn't stop people from copying things. It stops people from using them. You can easily make a copy of something with DRM. It affects your *use* of that copy.
The two things are not the same and it is very important to understand the difference. Because DRM not only stops you from using your copy of something, it stops you from using your *original* copy in ways that the DRM maker didn't envisage/allow.
Unfortunately true copy protection is not possible. DRM is usage protection.
It really depends on the problem. For a lot of things Google does, they need people with heavy math skills. PhDs in comp sci or math are going to be very useful.
But in 20 years as an application developer, I almost never used the theoretical skills I learned at school. The vast majority of programming projects don't need it. In fact, if you try to use your math skills you are often discouraged by your boss. I remember being asked to "benchmark" our application to see if it was slower than the previous version. I dutifully looked at the problem, determined the distribution the data was likely to be, started taking hundreds of measurements.... when I was interrupted. "I want you to take *one* measurement and then I want you to tell them that it isn't slower than the previous version", he said... :-P
I think the theory I used most was automata and grammars. I mean it always sucks when you create a save file format that's context sensitive. Then if you write your code assuming the format is regular and use global variables to keep track of state... You know not that everyone in the industry didn't do that regardless of their education... sigh...
Algorithmic complexity was never that important to me. To be honest as an application programmer you don't often do a lot of stuff where it matters. If my algorithm is n squared or n log n... It doesn't really matter especially with small data sets. Just pick the one that is easier to understand in the code.
My school made a huge deal about group theory when I was there. I honestly don't think I ever used it in my career. However, the other day a friend of mine was playing a "brain training" game and had to determine if the sum of a large group of numbers were even or odd. So it did come in handy eventually, I guess.
I really do think that for the average application developer, a technical college program focused on writing code is more appropriate than a math based academic degree. But unfortunately even the technical colleges don't do the kind of instruction that I think is useful.
Yes, I agree with you. The issue here is less about whether there is some way to extract knowledge from a self organized crowd and more about the fact that the book is bad. As you say, every example is anecdotal and most of them are poor examples to begin with.
However, I think there are some useful things to think about "crowd sourcing". The first is that in many problems, getting a lot of estimates based on different criteria will end up giving you a better overall estimate. The individual errors will cancel each other out. It is not very difficult to show a mathematical proof of this. And it is not very difficult to show what kinds of problems this will work well for (something with a numerical solution for which the vast majority of the people in the crowd have a non-random method of obtaining an estimate)
However other types of problems are good for "crowd sourcing" too. One of these things is making a FAQ. I've often thought that the FAQs that came out of usenet were mindblowingly good. In fact, almost without exception, they were better than any reference book on the subject that you could buy. FAQs that have been generated since usenet became less popular have been less useful.
My personal opinion is that these were the result of specific self organizing groups. First, virtually everyone involved was educated beyond high school. Second, participation was based on interest. Only people with an interest in the subject participated. Third information was gathered through competition. Information in FAQs were put into FAQs either because everyone agreed on the content, or there had already been one (or more) huge flamewars on the topic and nobody wanted to talk about it any more. Some kind of concensus had been reached and recorded in the FAQ. Finally, the information was usually of a non-political nature. There was little to be gained from "spinning" the answers since participants almost never represented a commercial interest. Also, discussions for the most part centered around technical issues rather than religious/political ones. And in the end, the FAQ was almost always written by someone who simply wanted to avoid future flame wars rather than someone with a political agenda to sell.
Like FAQs I think there are many places where self organizing groups can do a better job than a single person. However, I was intensely disappointed with "The Wisdom of Crowds". I wish it had done a much better job, because it is an interesting area.
Not sure if you'll see this since you are AC, but just in case... This site was the one that helped me the most. It took me literally hours before I could get myself to focus the image. Even now it takes me a few seconds. But if you practice you'll get it. Just keep trying to look for the details in the pictures. Real pictures like these are easier than the magic eye ones in my experience because you know what you are trying to see.
http://www.starosta.com/3dshowcase/ihelp.html
Even my doctor has no idea. My right eye actually improved 2 diopters in one year. They sent me to a specialist to see if there was a problem (such a thing can happen if you are getting cataracts or diabetes or some other conditions). But it came back healthy. I don't seem to be getting far sighted either. I can correct to better than 20/20 with contacts.
However, even though I have only been doing it for a month now, practicing adjusting your focus seems to be helpful so far. Just don't overdo it at first. It's easy to get a headache from eye strain.