Agreed - though you have to keep in mind that "real work" involves very different things for different people. My "real work" in accelerator design requires a large desktop and lots of open applications / windows - there is not special purpose application to do what I do. For someone in a field where there are existing integrated applications that do everything they need, a Unity / Win 8 type interface might be fine.
Sure Unity and other "modern" desktops are fine when you have limited workspace - cell phones, tablets, small laptops etc. It is really awful when you you have lots of workspace available.
I think the core problem is the "one size fits all" mentality. Different OSs and different user interfaces are good at doing different jobs. You don't use the same vehicle, to commute to work, and to haul 20 tons coal.
Depending on exactly what problem they had, it may have been an absolutely correct decision to put it down where it wouldn't hurt anyone. That is one of the big advantages of drones, you can ditch them without killing the pilot.
There is a lot of empty space in San Diego,but there are a lot of crowded areas as well.
12 mil is a lot, but not huge compared to the total budget, and better than killing someone - at least politically.
Sure. When a bunch of Mongols fight a bunch of Hell's Angles, no body mass is lost, some of the mass ends up as blood splatters, some as body parts. If motorcycles are used in the fight, the the total mass energy of the bike-bits will be the same as the starting mass energy.
They turn into "energy", but it may not be very straightforward. Electrons and anti-electrons (positrons) usually annihilate to a pair of gamma rays - about as close to "pure" energy as you can get.
Anti protons and protons annihilate in a more ugly fashion since each is a bag of quarks. You can get pions that decay into neutrinos and muons which then decay into positrons and neutrinos. The muon decay is fairly slow - ~2 microseconds, enough for them to travel almost a kilometer.
In the end you get gamma rays, neutrinos (of various types), electrons and positrons. The combined energy (both their mass energy and their kinetic energy) of all the particles adds up to the original mass energy of the matter and antimatter, and any other energy put into the process.
Because protons and anti-protons are complex, it is very difficult to make anti-protons - only something like 1/100,000 collisions generates one, the rest just make pions and other junk. Then once you have the anti-protons its difficult to slow them down enough and cool them to where they will combine with the positrons. Is a very impressive and complicated experiment.
BTW- it is not a path to any reasonable energy storage, the efficiency of making anti-protons is much too low. I don't know of any even design concepts that would have usable efficiency.
Completely agree. This really would be defending the country. If the NSA didn't spy on citizens they could even have provided assistance to private companies and individuals on computer security. Now though, they have lost all trust (by weakening encryption) so no one will ever trust any of their recommendations on security again.
I expect microsoft is probably trying a new interface that is wrapped up in patents (like the ribbon) so that people will get "trained" on it and have difficulty using anything else. This goes along with trying to entice people into their ecosystem.
The win8 interface may not be fundamentally worse on a desktop, but it doesn't provide any obvious advantages and I don't want to learn a new interface. I don't want to have to figure out how to make applications show up in windows I can control and move rather than the (on a desktop) useless full screen mode.
I don't want to figure out which F'ing corner of the screen I need to move the mouse to to pop up the menus I want. I don't want to have to figure out how to get an address bar to show up in explorer.
The win7 interface does everything I need, I don't want to learn a new one, or work on a computer where I may accidentally do some gesture that drops me into a mode I don't want. My time is valuable - I don't want to spend more value of my time learning a new interface than I spent on the computer.
An interface that provided more capability, like the multi-desktop mode in most linux desktops would be great. Better remote login capability (again like linux) would be great. Better security would be great - why does a USB drive need to install drivers - or is windows just saying that????? Better privacy control and tools to manage online identities would be great. And my pet peeve - bring back the ability to open Excel spreadsheets in multiple windows!
There are a lot of things that could be done to make the interface better, but Win8 wasn't it.
While I completely agree with you, it is not at all clear that the voting public in the US agrees. They may be quite happy to trade freedom for security, and much as I disagree with the majority opinion, I don't have a better idea than democracy for how things should be run.
I can however continue to believe that the majority is mis-guided, and will some day come to deeply regret this choice.
Your phone may include passwords to online or home storage that contains evidence of crimes unrelated to the one for which you were stopped. It may also contain information on activity that is legal but highly embarrassing. The police do sometimes release personal information to the press on people who have not been convicted of a crime.
The phone may also contain information on legal political or religious beliefs that would be prejudicial to someones trial.
Absolutely agree, its better to be monitored by a government that can't affect your life. Chinese citizens should download the latest NSA software, or maybe we should all use N. Korean software since they don't have the power to hurt anyone outside of their country.....
Of course commercial information is a different story.
I wonder what the statistics are for sales made through ads that people are actively trying to avoid. I know that if I don't want to see the ad, I very likely don't want to buy the product. If the ad forces itself in my face anyway, I'll remember that company with a strong negative reaction and not buy their product in the future.
Its so mystifying. Google and other services have a huge amount of data on me. I spend a lot of money on internet purchases. Why do they do such a terrible job of showing me ads for products that I actually want. Sometimes they do the exact opposite: right after I spent a week in Las Vegas I started getting adds for Las Vegas hotels - WTF - do they really think I'm going back a week later? Why don't they show me the ads a year later when I might actually want them, now I've just mentally black-listed a couple of hotels that I might have otherwise used.
Needs are not fixed. I have access to all sorts of things that I didn't even know I wanted when I was growing up. (like the internet). So it is possible to keep everyone employed as productivity increases. (Until I have my own planet terraformed the way I want, I can make use of more total productivity - and by then I may think of more things I want).
That said, I think there is a different problem. If automation can do a job more cheaply than a worker, it is likely to replace that worker. As automation improves it may gradually eliminate jobs. This might seem great - a life of universal leisure, but at least with our current economic system the automation will be OWNED by someone and will work for them, not for the great masses of unemployed.
I do agree that the problem of knowing who to trust is very serious. Large organizations (like the NSA) have the ability to make lots of posts in online discussions, technical journals, etc. to give the impression that the "community" "trusts" some particular solution, and to discredit anyone who objects.
I don't think though that the only answer is to eliminate these organizations - which is probably impossible in any case. At least in the US, the government is not a single monolithic organization, and should be possible to set up laws and safeguards to prevent most abuse.
Personally I'd like to see very solid legal firewalls between anti-terrorism / international work and domestic police work. I don't particularly mind the NSA using a wide range of technologies to stop someone from setting of a sarin bomb in the US. I would object to that same technology being used to track all RIAA violations. I'd object much more strongly if it were used to silence political dissent. We need to be sure that legal political speech cannot results in being labeled an associate of terrorists and in the loss of rights.
Sadly, my informal survey of Slashdot shows that most people don't like / can't understand / or think is stupid, the ants on an orange analogy. It sounded a lot better when Kip Throne explained it - guess that's one of the reasons he is a world famous physicist and I'm not.......
Many people use "like" as a way to bookmark and share pages, just as they use "friend" as a way to give a person (they may not like) access.
Whether this is misuse by users or misuse by FB is a valid question. To take an extreme case, if the only way to open a browser window in some operating system were to click on a button labeled "I love microsoft", I would consider that a to be user interface that deceptively collects 'I love" clicks. On the other hand if this were just one of a wide number of ways to achieve the same functionality it would be different.
In any case, I'm not blaming FB, but it seems they have created a situation where people might be tempted to sue.
There is no FB option for "acknowledge" or "bookmark" to alert other people that a post is interesting.
FB is of course free to run their business as they wish, but if they redefine commonly used words as part of their commercial activity, they shouldn't be surprised if people try to sue them for misrepresentation. I'm not a legal expert, so I can't comment on the legal validity of this sort of suit.
FB uses the tern "friend" to describe someone with whom you wish to have some level of communication, not someone who fits the conventional definition of "friend". The action of "like" is used in FB to indicate an acknowledgement of some post, not necessarily approval - I've seen people "like" posts about horrific events.
To further confuse things, companies will collect "inappropriate" likes. Some vendor vendor posts a picture of a cute kitten. People "like" the picture in the hopes that their friends will see it as well. That "like" in no way indicates that they actually recommend the (often completely unrelated) product. Sometimes it isn't even obvious to users that they are endorsing a commercial product.
This leads to a rather confusing landscape where people (who are not actually friends), are listed as "liking" a product that they do not in any way actually endorse. Whether advertising that "your friends like this product" is deceptive or not depends on whether you are using the conventional or FB definitions of "friends" and "like".
Personally I completely ignore this sort of endorsement because I understand what it really means (which is nothing). I make an effort to avoid "liking" any commercial links to avoid giving the impression that I endorse their products.
The dented rubber sheet (done in earth's gravity) is a not too bad analogy for Newtonian gravity.
Let me try the "ant" analogy in a bit more detail:
The "orange" is curved space time. here we have 1 space like dimension and one time like dimension, curved into 3d. The "ants" walk forward. This walking is the analogy to moving forward in time.
On a big flat surface, two ants that started near each other walking on parallel paths (both moving forward in time and at rest relative to each other) would stay the same distance apart.
On the curved orange though as the ants walk forward, they wind up getting closer: Imagine they start at the equator and both head due north. The start out parallel, and both walk in as straight a line as is possible on the surface. After a while they find themselves closer together - as if some mysterious force (gravity) is attracting them. (this is as they get to the north pole.
The orange analogy isn't all that great either because the curvature isn't shaped right for GR. Unfortunately humans aren't good at imagining curved 4-dimensional space.
If the rubber-sheet demo is done without earth's gravity it isn't a terrible analogy, but I don't think I've ever seen it show that way. It seems to always be shown as this curved surface where the EARTH's gravity causes the marbles to roll to the center.
I agree, the marble will still follow a curve if it sticks to the rubber in zero-g - so the curvature does change its trajectory. Usually when this is shown though,it is done in earth gravity and that is the largest effect on the marble. Even in zero-g, the analogy with GR is very thin because the curvature of the rubber sheet doesn't involve the time coordinate, so the effect on the marble's path doesn't really look like gravity in GR.
Done right the rubber sheet can be a barely OK analogy, as it is usually done though it is just confusing.
I have never like it as an analogy either. In the classic classroom rubber-sheet demonstration the marble rolls toward the bowling ball because the EARTH's gravity causes it to roll down hill. This is nothing at all like the way general relativity works.
General relativity requires a curvature of space-time, not just space. The best analogy I've seen comes from Kip Thorne (I think); Imagine 2 ants on the surface of an orange, both walking towards the "north" pole. Walking is an analogy to moving forward in time. After a while some "force" has brought them closer together (because they are near the pole).
Don't assume its intentional. My wife's car came with those super-bright headlights, there is no way for the driver to dim them. Didn't even know we had them until the first time we drove the car at night.
The beams are very sharp so under normal conditions they won't blind drivers, but hills and bumps can be a huge problem.
In addition to total power output, the "brightness" of the lights (power per solid angle, per area) is a big problem - HD lights are much brighter in this sense, and lasers enormously brighter still (that is in fact the main advantage of lasers for most applications). When you look at a "bright" source it can focus to a small spot on your retina causing temporary (or permanent for lasers) blind spots. Headlights with lots of power output can be OK, but very "bright" headlights I think are a hazard.
Now if people were clever the would polarize the headlights and everyone would wear sunglasses at night............
The error rate in DNA replication probably is the result of some amount of evolutionary pressure that trades off cancer against the ability of a species to adapt to new conditions. The "optimum" may not be what we want it to be. It is conceivable that we could modify the DNA replication process to reduce the error rate and thereby reduce the cancer rate.
I'm NOT saying its easy, or even possible, but cancer may not be absolutely inevitable.
How long will I need to stay on the phone to cancel? The cost of my time could easily exceed the cost of the subscription (like most high tech workers, time translates into a lot of money for me). If there was a cancel button, I'd subscribe now and quite likely keep the subscription, but it really pisses me off to be trapped .
I'd buy the blu-rays now if they were available, but since I need to wait anyway I'll just get them on netflix. (at considerably less profit to the company selling them I think).
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - though you have to keep in mind that "real work" involves very different things for different people. My "real work" in accelerator design requires a large desktop and lots of open applications / windows - there is not special purpose application to do what I do. For someone in a field where there are existing integrated applications that do everything they need, a Unity / Win 8 type interface might be fine.
Sure Unity and other "modern" desktops are fine when you have limited workspace - cell phones, tablets, small laptops etc. It is really awful when you you have lots of workspace available.
I think the core problem is the "one size fits all" mentality. Different OSs and different user interfaces are good at doing different jobs. You don't use the same vehicle, to commute to work, and to haul 20 tons coal.
Depending on exactly what problem they had, it may have been an absolutely correct decision to put it down where it wouldn't hurt anyone. That is one of the big advantages of drones, you can ditch them without killing the pilot.
There is a lot of empty space in San Diego,but there are a lot of crowded areas as well.
12 mil is a lot, but not huge compared to the total budget, and better than killing someone - at least politically.
Sure. When a bunch of Mongols fight a bunch of Hell's Angles, no body mass is lost, some of the mass ends up as blood splatters, some as body parts. If motorcycles are used in the fight, the the total mass energy of the bike-bits will be the same as the starting mass energy.
OK?
They turn into "energy", but it may not be very straightforward. Electrons and anti-electrons (positrons) usually annihilate to a pair of gamma rays - about as close to "pure" energy as you can get.
Anti protons and protons annihilate in a more ugly fashion since each is a bag of quarks. You can get pions that decay into neutrinos and muons which then decay into positrons and neutrinos. The muon decay is fairly slow - ~2 microseconds, enough for them to travel almost a kilometer.
In the end you get gamma rays, neutrinos (of various types), electrons and positrons. The combined energy (both their mass energy and their kinetic energy) of all the particles adds up to the original mass energy of the matter and antimatter, and any other energy put into the process.
Because protons and anti-protons are complex, it is very difficult to make anti-protons - only something like 1/100,000 collisions generates one, the rest just make pions and other junk. Then once you have the anti-protons its difficult to slow them down enough and cool them to where they will combine with the positrons. Is a very impressive and complicated experiment.
BTW- it is not a path to any reasonable energy storage, the efficiency of making anti-protons is much too low. I don't know of any even design concepts that would have usable efficiency.
Completely agree. This really would be defending the country. If the NSA didn't spy on citizens they could even have provided assistance to private companies and individuals on computer security. Now though, they have lost all trust (by weakening encryption) so no one will ever trust any of their recommendations on security again.
I expect microsoft is probably trying a new interface that is wrapped up in patents (like the ribbon) so that people will get "trained" on it and have difficulty using anything else. This goes along with trying to entice people into their ecosystem.
The win8 interface may not be fundamentally worse on a desktop, but it doesn't provide any obvious advantages and I don't want to learn a new interface. I don't want to have to figure out how to make applications show up in windows I can control and move rather than the (on a desktop) useless full screen mode.
I don't want to figure out which F'ing corner of the screen I need to move the mouse to to pop up the menus I want. I don't want to have to figure out how to get an address bar to show up in explorer.
The win7 interface does everything I need, I don't want to learn a new one, or work on a computer where I may accidentally do some gesture that drops me into a mode I don't want. My time is valuable - I don't want to spend more value of my time learning a new interface than I spent on the computer.
An interface that provided more capability, like the multi-desktop mode in most linux desktops would be great. Better remote login capability (again like linux) would be great. Better security would be great - why does a USB drive need to install drivers - or is windows just saying that????? Better privacy control and tools to manage online identities would be great. And my pet peeve - bring back the ability to open Excel spreadsheets in multiple windows!
There are a lot of things that could be done to make the interface better, but Win8 wasn't it.
While I completely agree with you, it is not at all clear that the voting public in the US agrees. They may be quite happy to trade freedom for security, and much as I disagree with the majority opinion, I don't have a better idea than democracy for how things should be run.
I can however continue to believe that the majority is mis-guided, and will some day come to deeply regret this choice.
Some day younger generations may learn why we care, but I hope not for their sake.
Your phone may include passwords to online or home storage that contains evidence of crimes unrelated to the one for which you were stopped. It may also contain information on activity that is legal but highly embarrassing. The police do sometimes release personal information to the press on people who have not been convicted of a crime.
The phone may also contain information on legal political or religious beliefs that would be prejudicial to someones trial.
Absolutely agree, its better to be monitored by a government that can't affect your life. Chinese citizens should download the latest NSA software, or maybe we should all use N. Korean software since they don't have the power to hurt anyone outside of their country.....
Of course commercial information is a different story.
I wonder what the statistics are for sales made through ads that people are actively trying to avoid. I know that if I don't want to see the ad, I very likely don't want to buy the product. If the ad forces itself in my face anyway, I'll remember that company with a strong negative reaction and not buy their product in the future.
Its so mystifying. Google and other services have a huge amount of data on me. I spend a lot of money on internet purchases. Why do they do such a terrible job of showing me ads for products that I actually want. Sometimes they do the exact opposite: right after I spent a week in Las Vegas I started getting adds for Las Vegas hotels - WTF - do they really think I'm going back a week later? Why don't they show me the ads a year later when I might actually want them, now I've just mentally black-listed a couple of hotels that I might have otherwise used.
Needs are not fixed. I have access to all sorts of things that I didn't even know I wanted when I was growing up. (like the internet). So it is possible to keep everyone employed as productivity increases. (Until I have my own planet terraformed the way I want, I can make use of more total productivity - and by then I may think of more things I want).
That said, I think there is a different problem. If automation can do a job more cheaply than a worker, it is likely to replace that worker. As automation improves it may gradually eliminate jobs. This might seem great - a life of universal leisure, but at least with our current economic system the automation will be OWNED by someone and will work for them, not for the great masses of unemployed.
I do agree that the problem of knowing who to trust is very serious. Large organizations (like the NSA) have the ability to make lots of posts in online discussions, technical journals, etc. to give the impression that the "community" "trusts" some particular solution, and to discredit anyone who objects.
I don't think though that the only answer is to eliminate these organizations - which is probably impossible in any case. At least in the US, the government is not a single monolithic organization, and should be possible to set up laws and safeguards to prevent most abuse.
Personally I'd like to see very solid legal firewalls between anti-terrorism / international work and domestic police work. I don't particularly mind the NSA using a wide range of technologies to stop someone from setting of a sarin bomb in the US. I would object to that same technology being used to track all RIAA violations. I'd object much more strongly if it were used to silence political dissent. We need to be sure that legal political speech cannot results in being labeled an associate of terrorists and in the loss of rights.
Yes, that is exactly my problem with the analogy.
Sadly, my informal survey of Slashdot shows that most people don't like / can't understand / or think is stupid, the ants on an orange analogy. It sounded a lot better when Kip Throne explained it - guess that's one of the reasons he is a world famous physicist and I'm not.......
Many people use "like" as a way to bookmark and share pages, just as they use "friend" as a way to give a person (they may not like) access.
Whether this is misuse by users or misuse by FB is a valid question. To take an extreme case, if the only way to open a browser window in some operating system were to click on a button labeled "I love microsoft", I would consider that a to be user interface that deceptively collects 'I love" clicks. On the other hand if this were just one of a wide number of ways to achieve the same functionality it would be different.
In any case, I'm not blaming FB, but it seems they have created a situation where people might be tempted to sue.
There is no FB option for "acknowledge" or "bookmark" to alert other people that a post is interesting.
FB is of course free to run their business as they wish, but if they redefine commonly used words as part of their commercial activity, they shouldn't be surprised if people try to sue them for misrepresentation. I'm not a legal expert, so I can't comment on the legal validity of this sort of suit.
FB uses the tern "friend" to describe someone with whom you wish to have some level of communication, not someone who fits the conventional definition of "friend". The action of "like" is used in FB to indicate an acknowledgement of some post, not necessarily approval - I've seen people "like" posts about horrific events.
To further confuse things, companies will collect "inappropriate" likes. Some vendor vendor posts a picture of a cute kitten. People "like" the picture in the hopes that their friends will see it as well. That "like" in no way indicates that they actually recommend the (often completely unrelated) product. Sometimes it isn't even obvious to users that they are endorsing a commercial product.
This leads to a rather confusing landscape where people (who are not actually friends), are listed as "liking" a product that they do not in any way actually endorse. Whether advertising that "your friends like this product" is deceptive or not depends on whether you are using the conventional or FB definitions of "friends" and "like".
Personally I completely ignore this sort of endorsement because I understand what it really means (which is nothing). I make an effort to avoid "liking" any commercial links to avoid giving the impression that I endorse their products.
The dented rubber sheet (done in earth's gravity) is a not too bad analogy for Newtonian gravity.
Let me try the "ant" analogy in a bit more detail:
The "orange" is curved space time. here we have 1 space like dimension and one time like dimension, curved into 3d.
The "ants" walk forward. This walking is the analogy to moving forward in time.
On a big flat surface, two ants that started near each other walking on parallel paths (both moving forward in time and at rest relative to each other) would stay the same distance apart.
On the curved orange though as the ants walk forward, they wind up getting closer: Imagine they start at the equator and both head due north. The start out parallel, and both walk in as straight a line as is possible on the surface. After a while they find themselves closer together - as if some mysterious force (gravity) is attracting them. (this is as they get to the north pole.
The orange analogy isn't all that great either because the curvature isn't shaped right for GR. Unfortunately humans aren't good at imagining curved 4-dimensional space.
If the rubber-sheet demo is done without earth's gravity it isn't a terrible analogy, but I don't think I've ever seen it show that way. It seems to always be shown as this curved surface where the EARTH's gravity causes the marbles to roll to the center.
I agree, the marble will still follow a curve if it sticks to the rubber in zero-g - so the curvature does change its trajectory. Usually when this is shown though ,it is done in earth gravity and that is the largest effect on the marble. Even in zero-g, the analogy with GR is very thin because the curvature of the rubber sheet doesn't involve the time coordinate, so the effect on the marble's path doesn't really look like gravity in GR.
Done right the rubber sheet can be a barely OK analogy, as it is usually done though it is just confusing.
I have never like it as an analogy either. In the classic classroom rubber-sheet demonstration the marble rolls toward the bowling ball because the EARTH's gravity causes it to roll down hill. This is nothing at all like the way general relativity works.
General relativity requires a curvature of space-time, not just space. The best analogy I've seen comes from Kip Thorne (I think); Imagine 2 ants on the surface of an orange, both walking towards the "north" pole. Walking is an analogy to moving forward in time. After a while some "force" has brought them closer together (because they are near the pole).
I agree its not practical for a variety of reasons, but lasers are usually polarized.
Don't assume its intentional. My wife's car came with those super-bright headlights, there is no way for the driver to dim them. Didn't even know we had them until the first time we drove the car at night.
The beams are very sharp so under normal conditions they won't blind drivers, but hills and bumps can be a huge problem.
In addition to total power output, the "brightness" of the lights (power per solid angle, per area) is a big problem - HD lights are much brighter in this sense, and lasers enormously brighter still (that is in fact the main advantage of lasers for most applications). When you look at a "bright" source it can focus to a small spot on your retina causing temporary (or permanent for lasers) blind spots. Headlights with lots of power output can be OK, but very "bright" headlights I think are a hazard.
Now if people were clever the would polarize the headlights and everyone would wear sunglasses at night............
The error rate in DNA replication probably is the result of some amount of evolutionary pressure that trades off cancer against the ability of a species to adapt to new conditions. The "optimum" may not be what we want it to be. It is conceivable that we could modify the DNA replication process to reduce the error rate and thereby reduce the cancer rate.
I'm NOT saying its easy, or even possible, but cancer may not be absolutely inevitable.
How long will I need to stay on the phone to cancel? The cost of my time could easily exceed the cost of the subscription (like most high tech workers, time translates into a lot of money for me). If there was a cancel button, I'd subscribe now and quite likely keep the subscription, but it really pisses me off to be trapped .
I'd buy the blu-rays now if they were available, but since I need to wait anyway I'll just get them on netflix. (at considerably less profit to the company selling them I think).