"How is it that grown ups can think government apparatchiks colluding with corporate rent seekers is a recipe for effective health care?"
Somehow socialized medicine works in every other advanced country, with better results, lower cost, and greater patient satisfaction, so that's one data point.
This is insane techno-geek fantasy stuff. We are stuck on this rock, and advancing technology will only better allow wealth and IP holders to control people, lest their position be threatened.
I find that Dicewars is just the perfect lunch/dinner-time thing for me. It's turn-based so I make a move, then turn to take a bite and chew while AI goes, then back to my turn. It seems to take the exact amount of time that it takes me to eat (~15 min). Sometimes I do wish there was a bit more hardcore, classic fantasy/sci-fi, and/or useful skill-building equivalent that I could find.
"How come after 25 years in the tech industry, someone hasn't worked out how to make accurate progress bars? This migration I'm doing has sat on 'less than a minute' for over 30 minutes. I'm not an engineer; is it really that hard?"
Yes, because all progress bars are inherently a prediction of things that will happen in the future. If there is any error condition, unusually large blob of data or weirdly structured hard drive to read from, varying bandwidth bottleneck, fritzy peripheral not responding as expected, etc., etc. times a million, then the unusual event will make the prior prediction incorrect and look silly in retrospect. As long as there is any "if-then" clause or error handling in the branches in the system, then the unexpected can happen and make the prediction (progress bar) invalid.
It's analogous to weather prediction. It can't be perfect, it's an extrapolation, but people will always complain about it.
Well I must say that 2 miles in Manhattan is unlike driving anywhere else. For example: I have two options to take a bus out of New York to get to Boston, each on opposite sides of the island -- the width being very close to 2 miles. Taking the bus starting from the west side actually adds about 1 hour to the overall trip, just trying to get out of Manhattan.
"She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage. "
I can't imagine how someone would think those situations to be comparable: highway driving vs. cross-town in Manhattan are practically the defining opposite points of the driving spectrum. "Occasional slowing down" is not the same as "stop-and-go" every block for 50 block-stoplights.
"When you're 18, you can remember stuff with context much better, and arbitrary line noise like multiplication tables are relatively off the table at that point."
So it sounds like we agree that for most adults, adding arbitrary line noise into a password makes it more difficult to remember.
"Why do you still try to get kids to remember multiplication tables rather than teaching them to multiply?"
Brief reply to the AC: You need both (a) understanding the meaning of the operation, and (b) automaticity with the operation. Just having one or the other doesn't get you very far. Not knowing the basic multiplication table cripples people when it comes time to divide, factor, identify primes, exponentiate, reduce rational expressions, compute and simplify square roots, etc.
Even if your facts weren't like, made-up, there would still be an enormous difference between "go check out that ship" and "go empty that guy's pockets and read all his personal papers". Make-believe such as "regulating trade implies seizure of personal papers and effects" is kind of sick.
"The founders recognized that a nation is partially defined by how much control it has over its borders."
This is total BS, post-crazy-America revisionist history. Even just 15 years ago I could go back and forth between Maine and Canada without any search, seizure, or even paperwork on my person as often as I wished. I could hug a friend to say goodbye a foot outside the boarding ramp to an international airplane. The word "border" doesn't even appear a single time in the U.S. Constitution.
"People will start to write passwords down, and they will re-use passwords more often."
People already write passwords down, and re-use passwords. That's the fact on the ground. Because the meaningless symbolic junk we tell them to use is inherently non-memorable. The point is to allow long passphrases in standard English that are finally memorable.
"2Correcthorse4batteryStapple! would be a much more secure password, that really isn't any more difficult to remember."
For most people, this is false. Among the things I teach are remedial community college arithmetic & algebra classes, as taken by about half the nation's college students, and frankly, they can't remember dick. For example: About 1/2 of our arithmetic students can never remember the one-digit multiplication table; about 1/2 of our algebra students can never remember operations on negatives.
Yes, systems allowing for very long passphrases are necessary and desperately needed, and it's shameful to not have them yet. But you're entirely missing the point to argue that we need to go back and insert more symbolic gobbledygook into them. Whatever you think you're gaining from that: just make the passphrase longer by what it takes to get the same information content, and then it's still secure and memorable to non-technical people.
The fact that DMCA requests must be honored from India, which is obviously outside the jurisdiction of any possible penalty, means that even the "everyone you know dies" sanction would fail to make a difference here.
Yes, this has always been the strategy of the climate-change-stonewallers:
1. It's not happening. 2. Conclusive evidence is not yet available. 3. The total effect could be small or even beneficial. 3. It's too late and too expensive to do anything about it.
Of course it's about a paycheck, any idiot knows that. So do you get to make decisions for yourself about what is and is not acceptable for you how you make a paycheck? If so, then so should these women, for themselves.
Why bother responding? Why bother letting them know that you're listening to and giving consideration to their threats? Why bother making a paper trail of any kind?
If I had a lawyer on staff twiddling his thumbs, then I'd have him one-up the situation and write a "shut up and don't bother us" letter; but otherwise, I'd just dodge that shit entirely and remain silent.
"What they were developed for" != "what they got used for". Initially nukes were used to actually level Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Nazi Germany was in the crosshairs but they didn't last through the development cycle). Later came the whole MAD thing, semi-accidentally.
Both history and technology usage are funny like that, mostly not according to any original plan.
This is actually the only good thing that justifies the free market. Not the right for someone to make money. It's the fact that competition reduces prices and improves quality to consumers. (This used to be common knowledge in circa 1970's-80's, but many free-market defenders nowadays don't even pretend it's supposed to be good for anyone except the profiteers.)
That said, it only works for products and services for which (a) you have a choice, (b) you have quality information about the prices and benefits, (c) it's something you have time to carefully weigh the benefits (non-emergencies), and (d) you have the ability to easily change the choice from time to time. Other than that, free-market solutions are not going to benefit the public.
To me, that sounds like some kind of transparently-false religious dogma. With rising automation, robotics, and outsourcing, there's clearly a point where machines can do any job physically and logically better than the average human. I suspect that the current college-bubble is an early indicator of this; a large swathe of our society now can't make ends meet without at least a B.A., even if they're not mentally really able to do college work. God knows what things will look like when only an M.A. or higher gives any economic benefit.
"I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to."
"I assume that big companies are hyper-competent" is one of this country's most pervasive and dangerous delusions. The opposite is most often the case; especially when a company has a near-monopoly position and powerful political friends, then doing a good job is not necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
"How is it that grown ups can think government apparatchiks colluding with corporate rent seekers is a recipe for effective health care?"
Somehow socialized medicine works in every other advanced country, with better results, lower cost, and greater patient satisfaction, so that's one data point.
Or actually it's all the data points.
This is insane techno-geek fantasy stuff. We are stuck on this rock, and advancing technology will only better allow wealth and IP holders to control people, lest their position be threatened.
I find that Dicewars is just the perfect lunch/dinner-time thing for me. It's turn-based so I make a move, then turn to take a bite and chew while AI goes, then back to my turn. It seems to take the exact amount of time that it takes me to eat (~15 min). Sometimes I do wish there was a bit more hardcore, classic fantasy/sci-fi, and/or useful skill-building equivalent that I could find.
"How come after 25 years in the tech industry, someone hasn't worked out how to make accurate progress bars? This migration I'm doing has sat on 'less than a minute' for over 30 minutes. I'm not an engineer; is it really that hard?"
Yes, because all progress bars are inherently a prediction of things that will happen in the future. If there is any error condition, unusually large blob of data or weirdly structured hard drive to read from, varying bandwidth bottleneck, fritzy peripheral not responding as expected, etc., etc. times a million, then the unusual event will make the prior prediction incorrect and look silly in retrospect. As long as there is any "if-then" clause or error handling in the branches in the system, then the unexpected can happen and make the prediction (progress bar) invalid.
It's analogous to weather prediction. It can't be perfect, it's an extrapolation, but people will always complain about it.
Now the only problem is that half-decade gap between sexual maturity and legal adulthood.
Well I must say that 2 miles in Manhattan is unlike driving anywhere else. For example: I have two options to take a bus out of New York to get to Boston, each on opposite sides of the island -- the width being very close to 2 miles. Taking the bus starting from the west side actually adds about 1 hour to the overall trip, just trying to get out of Manhattan.
"She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage. "
I can't imagine how someone would think those situations to be comparable: highway driving vs. cross-town in Manhattan are practically the defining opposite points of the driving spectrum. "Occasional slowing down" is not the same as "stop-and-go" every block for 50 block-stoplights.
"When you're 18, you can remember stuff with context much better, and arbitrary line noise like multiplication tables are relatively off the table at that point."
So it sounds like we agree that for most adults, adding arbitrary line noise into a password makes it more difficult to remember.
"Why do you still try to get kids to remember multiplication tables rather than teaching them to multiply?"
Brief reply to the AC: You need both (a) understanding the meaning of the operation, and (b) automaticity with the operation. Just having one or the other doesn't get you very far. Not knowing the basic multiplication table cripples people when it comes time to divide, factor, identify primes, exponentiate, reduce rational expressions, compute and simplify square roots, etc.
[Citation needed]
"In fact one of the very first acts of the first Congress in 1787 was to establish the border search provisions that you are complaining about."
The Constitution wasn't passed, nor first Congressional elections held, until 1789.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Congress
"One of the very first laws passed by the first Congress in 1787 was the provision to allow customs inspections at borders."
Hunh? Ratification of the Constitution and the first Congressional elections didn't even happen until 1789.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Congress
Even if your facts weren't like, made-up, there would still be an enormous difference between "go check out that ship" and "go empty that guy's pockets and read all his personal papers". Make-believe such as "regulating trade implies seizure of personal papers and effects" is kind of sick.
"The founders recognized that a nation is partially defined by how much control it has over its borders."
This is total BS, post-crazy-America revisionist history. Even just 15 years ago I could go back and forth between Maine and Canada without any search, seizure, or even paperwork on my person as often as I wished. I could hug a friend to say goodbye a foot outside the boarding ramp to an international airplane. The word "border" doesn't even appear a single time in the U.S. Constitution.
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/10/04/states-vs-feds-borders-and-the-constitution/
"People will start to write passwords down, and they will re-use passwords more often."
People already write passwords down, and re-use passwords. That's the fact on the ground. Because the meaningless symbolic junk we tell them to use is inherently non-memorable. The point is to allow long passphrases in standard English that are finally memorable.
"2Correcthorse4batteryStapple! would be a much more secure password, that really isn't any more difficult to remember."
For most people, this is false. Among the things I teach are remedial community college arithmetic & algebra classes, as taken by about half the nation's college students, and frankly, they can't remember dick. For example: About 1/2 of our arithmetic students can never remember the one-digit multiplication table; about 1/2 of our algebra students can never remember operations on negatives.
Yes, systems allowing for very long passphrases are necessary and desperately needed, and it's shameful to not have them yet. But you're entirely missing the point to argue that we need to go back and insert more symbolic gobbledygook into them. Whatever you think you're gaining from that: just make the passphrase longer by what it takes to get the same information content, and then it's still secure and memorable to non-technical people.
"Science researchers live and die by their publications. Their papers are their currency."
And this explains why the majority of papers are corrupt, untrustworthy, and non-replicable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
And I assume that the choice was one of the 3 licenses offered about 99.73% of the time.
"... authors chose either of the more restrictive licences 95% of the time — and the most restrictive, CC-BY-NC-ND, 68% of the time."
The fact that DMCA requests must be honored from India, which is obviously outside the jurisdiction of any possible penalty, means that even the "everyone you know dies" sanction would fail to make a difference here.
Yes, this has always been the strategy of the climate-change-stonewallers:
1. It's not happening.
2. Conclusive evidence is not yet available.
3. The total effect could be small or even beneficial.
3. It's too late and too expensive to do anything about it.
Of course it's about a paycheck, any idiot knows that. So do you get to make decisions for yourself about what is and is not acceptable for you how you make a paycheck? If so, then so should these women, for themselves.
Why bother responding? Why bother letting them know that you're listening to and giving consideration to their threats? Why bother making a paper trail of any kind?
If I had a lawyer on staff twiddling his thumbs, then I'd have him one-up the situation and write a "shut up and don't bother us" letter; but otherwise, I'd just dodge that shit entirely and remain silent.
"What they were developed for" != "what they got used for". Initially nukes were used to actually level Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Nazi Germany was in the crosshairs but they didn't last through the development cycle). Later came the whole MAD thing, semi-accidentally.
Both history and technology usage are funny like that, mostly not according to any original plan.
This is actually the only good thing that justifies the free market. Not the right for someone to make money. It's the fact that competition reduces prices and improves quality to consumers. (This used to be common knowledge in circa 1970's-80's, but many free-market defenders nowadays don't even pretend it's supposed to be good for anyone except the profiteers.)
That said, it only works for products and services for which (a) you have a choice, (b) you have quality information about the prices and benefits, (c) it's something you have time to carefully weigh the benefits (non-emergencies), and (d) you have the ability to easily change the choice from time to time. Other than that, free-market solutions are not going to benefit the public.
"A person's work will always have value"
To me, that sounds like some kind of transparently-false religious dogma. With rising automation, robotics, and outsourcing, there's clearly a point where machines can do any job physically and logically better than the average human. I suspect that the current college-bubble is an early indicator of this; a large swathe of our society now can't make ends meet without at least a B.A., even if they're not mentally really able to do college work. God knows what things will look like when only an M.A. or higher gives any economic benefit.
"None of your areguments mean dick."
Illiterate AC is illiterate. He didn't notice the "well-regulated militia" requirement that comes first.
"I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to."
"I assume that big companies are hyper-competent" is one of this country's most pervasive and dangerous delusions. The opposite is most often the case; especially when a company has a near-monopoly position and powerful political friends, then doing a good job is not necessary.