I do really wish that we would move past the single-vote plurality system when voting for federal office (President, Senate, House). I like approval voting for its simplicity and its moderating effect. I love the idea that it might be possible to elect a true compromise candidate instead of violently swinging from one extreme to the next.
But that's not what I want the most (nor is it all that likely to happen any time soon).
What I want the most is for the US to finally welcome international inspectors to watch our elections. We expect emerging democracies to admit inspectors, so we really should eat our own dog food. Would it be painful and humiliating? Quite possibly, for the first few years. But it would be a nice step toward shedding our reputation as a nation that says, "Fuck the rest of the world, we're the US-of-goddamn-A." Oh, and it might actually drive improvements to our voting system, just maybe.
It may be time to put NASA brains on some more immediate problems...
You're assuming that:
1. There aren't already lots of brains at work on these problems, and
2. Throwing more brains at the problems will solve them significantly faster.
Also keep in mind that you could pull all of the smart brains at NASA, Intel, Google, Pixar and a thousand other groups to work exclusively on the immediate problems of the day, only to find out that the problems they are no longer working on were a lot more important than you thought. NASA in particular has produced lots of solutions that at first seemed quite narrow but turned out to be applicable to a wide variety of problems (including solar power, while we're on the subject).
Humans are pretty smart. We can do more than one thing at one time. Some of our most striking discoveries turn up when we aren't even sure what we're looking for.
Spam is the ideal litmus test for where someone stands on the rights of free speech. It's almost universally objectionable, never warranted, and offensive to just about everyone.
The problem isn't spam, it's fraud.
Unsolicited email with a valid return address that doesn't use text munging or images to evade filters is not objectionable. If you don't want to see it, filtering it is downright trivial. But that email is dwarfed by the vast amounts of untraceable "v1@gr@" spam coming from zombie nets.
Without the fraud it's just email. You're free to send me all the email you want and I'm free to route it all to/dev/null if I want. First amendment satisfied.
Some text and a few dozen control points? Yawn. Try that with something that has a few hundred control points and it's like watching a slide show.
That might be good enough if we weren't talking about a standard that's five fucking years old. These problems have been on the radar for a long time, they just keep getting pushed back because Mozilla won't devote any resources to them. Instead they talk about chasing rainbows like "Screaming Monkey" and it's pissing me off.
Hey, that's great. Do they also have plans to fix the flaws in Firefox?
Off the top of my head, could we finally have support for SVG as a native image format? Or even just SVG rendering that isn't slower than a stone cow?
Don't want to sound like the grumpy old man, I just want most of my web shit to work in *one* browser before I worry about how it works in every browser.
I assume Nvidia has some juicy tech they could cross-license to Intel and AMD in return for the rights to make their own x86.
But who will build it? Last time I checked Nvidia didn't own a fab plant. All their stuff is built by TSMC, a very respectable GPU fab but still a generation behind Intel in process technology. Unless Nvidia has some secret fab project going for the last ten years, they certainly don't have "guns targeted directly" at Intel or AMD.
Now if you told me they were going to compete with VIA in the ultra-low-power SOC market, that might be interesting. Still, I imagine Nvidia has better things to do than throw resources at such a low-margin business.
You're right, of course, cars have gotten more complicated. But still, are they that much more difficult to work on than computers? Are the guys working at Midas any more trained or skilled than the guys at Geek Squad?
Is it that we can't work on our own cars anymore, or that we just don't?
That's true to a point. Both computers and cars have come down dramatically in their price as a percentage of earning power. But cars still represent a significant investment. Most people still pay to fix their cars rather than throwing them out and buying new ones every two years like a computer.
Also, nearly everyone knows "the kid down the street" who can build a computer or at least tune up your Windows. I would even bet that there are more kids who can fix your computer than can change the oil in your car, despite cars being much more common than computers.
It's a changing culture thing. Jobs that work with oil and metal are seen as low-class. Being able to fix a computer is seen as a de$ireable $kill.
It didn't used to be this way and I'm glad to see it doesn't have to be this way today. Let's show the next generation of future engineers that it's okay to get your hands dirty.
Not Nikko but close, I was in Nasushiobara. A fairly cheap place to live, all things considered. Most things weren't horrifically more expensive, just a bit more.
Some things seemed cheaper in Nasu, like a pre-paid cellphone or my Internet, but when I got back to Indy I realized that either they weren't actually any cheaper (the phone) or they weren't equal quality (the Internet). In Nasu I had the 12 Mbps service too, but somehow my downloads never topped 300 kB/s, even from Japanese servers. Compare that to the 800+ kB/s I regularly pull down from my current so-called 7 Mbps cable link.
Also, I'm intentionally not comparing the prices of things like fresh fish, quality rice, and other staples of Japanese cooking because they are so cultural. If enough Americans wanted those things, I'm sure I could they could be available cheaper in the USA too.
This is not a slam on Japan. I loved it there and I will definitely go back. I just didn't find it to be the enlightened paradise land that many Slashdotters make it out to be. Every place has its own good points and bad.
As for Utsunomiya, that is seriously weird. I had no idea. How long ago were you there? My wife and I hung out there a lot and we never got any hint of unfriendliness. People on the streets and in the neighborhoods were always smiling and waving to us. Saw plenty of round-eyes on the street too, though always just on the main street between the JR station and Futaarayama shrine.
Not only is this a great example of the American can-do tradition, hopefully it will also go a long way toward dispelling the myth that cars are too complicated for "regular people" to deal with.
Think about it. When my parents were graduating from high school (1969) it was a given that people would know the basics of how to service a car. For guys especially, it was just something that guys "should" know. These days the attitude is more like, "meh, it's too complicated, leave it to the experts".
Let's hear it for can-do, rather than pay-someone-else-to-do.
I lived in rural Japan for 15 months. I'm not talking about way up in the mountains, mind you, maybe about an hour's drive away from Utsunomiya.
The only broadband option was DSL from Yahoo. It was decently fast and only about $25 a month, but it wasn't light-years ahead or anything. I can drive an hour out from Indianapolis and find equally good service, probably from more than one provider.
If anything, my connection in Japan was slower because anything I wanted to access was coming over a trans-ocean link. I easily get 2x or 3x speed on most downloads now that I'm back in Indy and I only pay about 2x more. Sounds fair to me.
Also, my broadband was the only thing in Japan that was cheaper than in the USA.
I'm just saying that startling claims like this have been made before. According to TFA, counting is "not useful in their culture"? How is that even possible?
Excellent points all, though I would say you missed one:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. It raises important, fundamental questions about sexual identity and why we think about sex the way we do. I imagine it could provide an excellent, non-scary opening for kids to talk to parents about what is usually a very awkward and difficult subject.
Of course, I'm talking out of my ass because I didn't read the book until I was an adult with a well-established sexual identity. But hey, my first child is due in about two weeks. I'll get back to you in twelve years or so and let you know how it went.
For fuck's sake, do we have to go over this again? Stealing means that the perpetrator takes something away and the victim doesn't have it anymore. It doesn't apply to accessing someone's wifi, it doesn't apply to unscrambling a pay-TV channel, it doesn't apply to copying a digital file.
If you're going to cast "unauthorized use" in terms of robbery, then don't cry about how your rights are being taken away when you get prosecuted as a robber for making use of something that someone else couldn't be bothered to secure properly.
Seriously, how is this a win? I've had a perfectly adequate TV for years and years now, and three or four different cable boxes in the same time frame. Each cable box has had better features that I wanted, but I've never felt the urge to replace my TV. What's so great about a system that would force me to replace BOTH devices when I only wanted to upgrade one? I mean, it would cost me a lot of money--
My retired mother resists new techno-gadgets like a mule, but now that she's used to the DVR she absolutely loves it. She no longer falls asleep on the couch because she's trying (in vain) to catch the end of her favorite show that started at 9:00pm. Now she just "tivo's it" and watches it the next morning while she's quilting.
If a broadcast flag "glitch" prevents her from time shifting a show, will she change her behavior again or will she just not watch the "glitched" show? Place your bets...
Why do you need to be a "philosopher of religion" to have a say on whether God exists? Surely a physicist has as much to say on what's real as anyone?
Because there are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of serious scholarly works on the subject of epistemology, probably including at least one that critiques the same line of thinking you came up with independently. It's not unreasonable to expect you to, you know, read a few of them before making bold declarative statements on the subject.
By the same token, the Intelligent Design moonbats have just as much to say on what's real as anyone, but that doesn't exempt them from looking like dipshits when they misrepresent evolution as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics or some similar bunk. It's called "due diligence" and it applies to everyone.
Except that, as the Wikipedia article states, pretty much any concerned citizen can satisfy their curiosity about the OA just by asking the organization nicely.
I was in OA. It's more of an "open secret". Telling everyone about it is like posting spoilers on the Internet (it really only makes you a jerk).
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
Can't speak for the White House, but I did work for a pharmaceutical company and they are very paranoid about information security.
Any time we replaced a hard drive in anyone's computer, the old drive was wiped according to US Department of Defense clearing standard DOD 5220.22-M. This is a rather intensive operation, and plenty of old hard drives didn't survive it. Any drive that failed got chucked into a 55-gallon drum that sat next to the wiping station. When the drum was full it was taken to a scrap yard and two company employees watched as each drive was fed into a metal shredder, one drive at a time.
I'm sure that anything capable of shredding a hard drive is very impressive to watch, but it's probably much less impressive after the 200th time you've seen it.
Slashdot Mirror
I do really wish that we would move past the single-vote plurality system when voting for federal office (President, Senate, House). I like approval voting for its simplicity and its moderating effect. I love the idea that it might be possible to elect a true compromise candidate instead of violently swinging from one extreme to the next.
But that's not what I want the most (nor is it all that likely to happen any time soon).
What I want the most is for the US to finally welcome international inspectors to watch our elections. We expect emerging democracies to admit inspectors, so we really should eat our own dog food. Would it be painful and humiliating? Quite possibly, for the first few years. But it would be a nice step toward shedding our reputation as a nation that says, "Fuck the rest of the world, we're the US-of-goddamn-A." Oh, and it might actually drive improvements to our voting system, just maybe.
It may be time to put NASA brains on some more immediate problems...
You're assuming that:
1. There aren't already lots of brains at work on these problems, and
2. Throwing more brains at the problems will solve them significantly faster.
Also keep in mind that you could pull all of the smart brains at NASA, Intel, Google, Pixar and a thousand other groups to work exclusively on the immediate problems of the day, only to find out that the problems they are no longer working on were a lot more important than you thought. NASA in particular has produced lots of solutions that at first seemed quite narrow but turned out to be applicable to a wide variety of problems (including solar power, while we're on the subject).
Humans are pretty smart. We can do more than one thing at one time. Some of our most striking discoveries turn up when we aren't even sure what we're looking for.
Even better, this article. More tech specs.
Get off my lawn!
Spam is the ideal litmus test for where someone stands on the rights of free speech. It's almost universally objectionable, never warranted, and offensive to just about everyone.
The problem isn't spam, it's fraud.
Unsolicited email with a valid return address that doesn't use text munging or images to evade filters is not objectionable. If you don't want to see it, filtering it is downright trivial. But that email is dwarfed by the vast amounts of untraceable "v1@gr@" spam coming from zombie nets.
Without the fraud it's just email. You're free to send me all the email you want and I'm free to route it all to /dev/null if I want. First amendment satisfied.
Google News crawled an obscure reprint...
The story was then picked up by other news aggregators...
This triggered automated trading programs...
Is there even a live person at the wheel anymore? Or is SkyNet just fucking with us now?
If you're a betting man, now's a good time to pick up on Nvidia stock.
The question is, do you feel lucky, punk?
Absolutely. Nvidia is getting hammered lately but they aren't stupid and they aren't poor. They have $1.6 billion on hand to weather this storm.
I wouldn't be surprised if they sold off their chipset business to refocus on high-end, high-margin GPUs, but they aren't done yet by a damn sight.
Comments? From people? On the Internet?
Does Google have a line on a new revenue stream that involves harvesting every known variant on "CHAD IS TEH GAY!!!1!"?
You want SVG as background-image? Here you go.
That's ROC's personal play branch, it's not in Gecko yet.
Fast enough to do this in realtime?
Some text and a few dozen control points? Yawn. Try that with something that has a few hundred control points and it's like watching a slide show.
That might be good enough if we weren't talking about a standard that's five fucking years old. These problems have been on the radar for a long time, they just keep getting pushed back because Mozilla won't devote any resources to them. Instead they talk about chasing rainbows like "Screaming Monkey" and it's pissing me off.
Hey, that's great. Do they also have plans to fix the flaws in Firefox?
Off the top of my head, could we finally have support for SVG as a native image format? Or even just SVG rendering that isn't slower than a stone cow?
Don't want to sound like the grumpy old man, I just want most of my web shit to work in *one* browser before I worry about how it works in every browser.
I assume Nvidia has some juicy tech they could cross-license to Intel and AMD in return for the rights to make their own x86.
But who will build it? Last time I checked Nvidia didn't own a fab plant. All their stuff is built by TSMC, a very respectable GPU fab but still a generation behind Intel in process technology. Unless Nvidia has some secret fab project going for the last ten years, they certainly don't have "guns targeted directly" at Intel or AMD.
Now if you told me they were going to compete with VIA in the ultra-low-power SOC market, that might be interesting. Still, I imagine Nvidia has better things to do than throw resources at such a low-margin business.
You're right, of course, cars have gotten more complicated. But still, are they that much more difficult to work on than computers? Are the guys working at Midas any more trained or skilled than the guys at Geek Squad?
Is it that we can't work on our own cars anymore, or that we just don't?
That's true to a point. Both computers and cars have come down dramatically in their price as a percentage of earning power. But cars still represent a significant investment. Most people still pay to fix their cars rather than throwing them out and buying new ones every two years like a computer.
Also, nearly everyone knows "the kid down the street" who can build a computer or at least tune up your Windows. I would even bet that there are more kids who can fix your computer than can change the oil in your car, despite cars being much more common than computers.
It's a changing culture thing. Jobs that work with oil and metal are seen as low-class. Being able to fix a computer is seen as a de$ireable $kill.
It didn't used to be this way and I'm glad to see it doesn't have to be this way today. Let's show the next generation of future engineers that it's okay to get your hands dirty.
Not Nikko but close, I was in Nasushiobara. A fairly cheap place to live, all things considered. Most things weren't horrifically more expensive, just a bit more.
Some things seemed cheaper in Nasu, like a pre-paid cellphone or my Internet, but when I got back to Indy I realized that either they weren't actually any cheaper (the phone) or they weren't equal quality (the Internet). In Nasu I had the 12 Mbps service too, but somehow my downloads never topped 300 kB/s, even from Japanese servers. Compare that to the 800+ kB/s I regularly pull down from my current so-called 7 Mbps cable link.
Also, I'm intentionally not comparing the prices of things like fresh fish, quality rice, and other staples of Japanese cooking because they are so cultural. If enough Americans wanted those things, I'm sure I could they could be available cheaper in the USA too.
This is not a slam on Japan. I loved it there and I will definitely go back. I just didn't find it to be the enlightened paradise land that many Slashdotters make it out to be. Every place has its own good points and bad.
As for Utsunomiya, that is seriously weird. I had no idea. How long ago were you there? My wife and I hung out there a lot and we never got any hint of unfriendliness. People on the streets and in the neighborhoods were always smiling and waving to us. Saw plenty of round-eyes on the street too, though always just on the main street between the JR station and Futaarayama shrine.
Not only is this a great example of the American can-do tradition, hopefully it will also go a long way toward dispelling the myth that cars are too complicated for "regular people" to deal with.
Think about it. When my parents were graduating from high school (1969) it was a given that people would know the basics of how to service a car. For guys especially, it was just something that guys "should" know. These days the attitude is more like, "meh, it's too complicated, leave it to the experts".
Let's hear it for can-do, rather than pay-someone-else-to-do.
I lived in rural Japan for 15 months. I'm not talking about way up in the mountains, mind you, maybe about an hour's drive away from Utsunomiya.
The only broadband option was DSL from Yahoo. It was decently fast and only about $25 a month, but it wasn't light-years ahead or anything. I can drive an hour out from Indianapolis and find equally good service, probably from more than one provider.
If anything, my connection in Japan was slower because anything I wanted to access was coming over a trans-ocean link. I easily get 2x or 3x speed on most downloads now that I'm back in Indy and I only pay about 2x more. Sounds fair to me.
Also, my broadband was the only thing in Japan that was cheaper than in the USA.
So, yeah. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Yes, and the Hopi have no words for "time".
I'm just saying that startling claims like this have been made before. According to TFA, counting is "not useful in their culture"? How is that even possible?
Excellent points all, though I would say you missed one:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. It raises important, fundamental questions about sexual identity and why we think about sex the way we do. I imagine it could provide an excellent, non-scary opening for kids to talk to parents about what is usually a very awkward and difficult subject.
Of course, I'm talking out of my ass because I didn't read the book until I was an adult with a well-established sexual identity. But hey, my first child is due in about two weeks. I'll get back to you in twelve years or so and let you know how it went.
For fuck's sake, do we have to go over this again? Stealing means that the perpetrator takes something away and the victim doesn't have it anymore. It doesn't apply to accessing someone's wifi, it doesn't apply to unscrambling a pay-TV channel, it doesn't apply to copying a digital file.
If you're going to cast "unauthorized use" in terms of robbery, then don't cry about how your rights are being taken away when you get prosecuted as a robber for making use of something that someone else couldn't be bothered to secure properly.
Truly the 200X decade will be remembered as the "Decade of Retarded Technology Names".
Did someone make a rule that every new tech has to have a name that would make me sound like a fucking idiot if I tried to pitch it to my boss?
Seriously, how is this a win? I've had a perfectly adequate TV for years and years now, and three or four different cable boxes in the same time frame. Each cable box has had better features that I wanted, but I've never felt the urge to replace my TV. What's so great about a system that would force me to replace BOTH devices when I only wanted to upgrade one? I mean, it would cost me a lot of money--
Ah. I get it now.
...and it cuts both ways.
My retired mother resists new techno-gadgets like a mule, but now that she's used to the DVR she absolutely loves it. She no longer falls asleep on the couch because she's trying (in vain) to catch the end of her favorite show that started at 9:00pm. Now she just "tivo's it" and watches it the next morning while she's quilting.
If a broadcast flag "glitch" prevents her from time shifting a show, will she change her behavior again or will she just not watch the "glitched" show? Place your bets...
Why do you need to be a "philosopher of religion" to have a say on whether God exists? Surely a physicist has as much to say on what's real as anyone?
Because there are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of serious scholarly works on the subject of epistemology, probably including at least one that critiques the same line of thinking you came up with independently. It's not unreasonable to expect you to, you know, read a few of them before making bold declarative statements on the subject.
By the same token, the Intelligent Design moonbats have just as much to say on what's real as anyone, but that doesn't exempt them from looking like dipshits when they misrepresent evolution as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics or some similar bunk. It's called "due diligence" and it applies to everyone.
Except that, as the Wikipedia article states, pretty much any concerned citizen can satisfy their curiosity about the OA just by asking the organization nicely.
I was in OA. It's more of an "open secret". Telling everyone about it is like posting spoilers on the Internet (it really only makes you a jerk).
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
Can't speak for the White House, but I did work for a pharmaceutical company and they are very paranoid about information security.
Any time we replaced a hard drive in anyone's computer, the old drive was wiped according to US Department of Defense clearing standard DOD 5220.22-M. This is a rather intensive operation, and plenty of old hard drives didn't survive it. Any drive that failed got chucked into a 55-gallon drum that sat next to the wiping station. When the drum was full it was taken to a scrap yard and two company employees watched as each drive was fed into a metal shredder, one drive at a time.
I'm sure that anything capable of shredding a hard drive is very impressive to watch, but it's probably much less impressive after the 200th time you've seen it.