The "teenagers" bit seemed odd to me, also. It does seem to be another case of people assuming that some social feature must have a biological basis -- even though it's hardly universal throughout human experience.
(Is there a biological basis for our tendency toward biological explanations for human behavior?)
Speaking of trademarks... does anyone know of a trademark analog of "copyleft"?
What if you want to release a mark for free use, but want to avoid someone else
claiming it as a trademark later?
The word "island" is completely misleading. It should not be used, even in quotes, in connection with this issue. We're talking about suspended particulate here.
Myself, I would suggest waiting for reputable scientists to do a study of this before getting too bent out of shape -- but on the other hand, we really do want this study to happen, and if the NOAA isn't on it yet, we should be pushing them to look into it.
The key thing though is this: "In a 2001 study, researchers (including Moore) ". One guy's name is all over this, and it inflates his status quite a bit to call him a "researcher" -- he has no scientific background. If this isn't replicated by an actual oceanographer, I wouldn't go around quoting the numbers with any degree of confidence.
Sorry if this seems pedantic, but these guys actually had me going for a minute with their rap about a floating plastic island... that was back in 2007, but I don't like getting taken.
Yes, the use of the word "island", even in quotes, is completely misleading. The last time I looked into it (around the end of 2007), it appeared that the word "island" was promoted by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle (if you're not familiar with the Chron, let me say that it's reputation is "not good". Myself, I would say "a joke"). At a guess, the word "island" was fed to them by someone at the "Algalita Research Foundation", which appears to be essentially two guys, one a sea captain, the other a guy with a PhD in "science education".
A new detail has been added to the story though: they're now talking about an NOAA "prediction" based on a computer model -- no one talked about that a few years ago. Notably, no one is talking about any actual NOAA data, but this does make the story sound better.
Yes, there is no doubt a lot of plastic waste in the ocean, and yes, it wouldn't be a surprise if this is an environmental problem, but the way this story has been played makes it all-too-easy to attack the credibility of "environmental activists".
And another thing people seem to forget is that Scientists are just people too.
Your attack on scientific objectivity may have some merit, but it's not demonstrated by the case at hand: there are no actual scientists running around talking about a floating island of plastic twice the size of Texas.
"Why can't you just store 1 gig of 'good' random numbers in each server?"
The servers in question are virtual machines that are instantiated from one stored image.
If every one of these machines grabs the same "good" values every time they start,
you haven't solved the problem.
Something like this would be workable, if the actual server managing the cloud
of virtual ones was running the book, and seeding the VMs with random numbers...
but in effect the solution is probably what other people are suggesting, when
you design a system, you have to have it use an external "entropy server"..
Computers are deterministic devices only because the hardware designers put a huge amount of work into making them deterministic.
It may be a naive question, but it isn't a bad one... there might very well be a way to add some registers to a microprocessor that would be fundamentally random -- I think the trouble would be choosing a design that's not incredibly sensitive to fabrication errors (You don't want your "random" registers to be biased high or low). My thought would be to create a hundred of them, and let software pick one that seems to be working right.
Open-list Proportional Representation, with a unicameral parliament (IMHO, the only reason you ever need a second chamber is because the first one is so shit it needs to be slapped down occasionally - make the first better, and you don't need a second one).
It's an interesting question... if you believe in checks-and-balances, how many institutions do you need to act as checks on each other?
Myself, I tend to think that the US Senate is a grossly outmoded institution, designed to be fair to geography instead of to human beings. One of the reasons I tend to like the idea of sub-dividing California into multiple states (perhaps around 4) is that it would secure more representation for the West Coast in the Senate.
This is the same Cory Doctorow that was never willing to respect the Amazon boycott, right? As I remember it he was sticking Amazon affiliate links all over his site, long after slashdot had switched to bn.com.
That danger is that a couple of corporate giants will end up with a buyer's market for creative works, control over the dominant distribution channel, and the ability to dictate the terms on which creative works are made, distributed, appreciated, bought, and sold.
Don't confuse Cindy Sheehan for a liberal, she's just a crazy woman who also happened to be a rather upset mother.
Being a frequent listener to Democracy Now, I've actually heard Cindy Sheehan speak at length on different topics, and disagree with her if you like, but she doesn't deserve to be smeared as a "crazy woman":
Should impeachment be off the table
I was particularly impressed with this response:
DAN GERSTEIN: But I think, Cindy--one thing we can definitely agree on is that Congress has been too timid in holding the Bush administration accountable. I don't think, though, that that justifies going to the compensatory extreme of an impeachment process.
And to go to a point Ray raised about deterrence, which is an argument that you hear over repeatedly from the impeachment movement, I think, you know, what happened with President Johnson in Vietnam and then Richard Nixon and now George Bush, this idea that, you know, by just beginning impeachment proceedings against George Bush you're going to deter future presidents from engaging in similar actions, I think it is just unrealistic, because, you know, the Nixon case proves it. [...]
CINDY SHEEHAN: I think if Congress had impeached Ronald Reagan for Iran-Contra, we might have had a deterrent effect. I think that if we don't impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney, they've made a mockery of the Constitution, they've trampled on it. If we don't impeach them, take out the clauses or just--we'll just forget we have a Constitution and a representative republic.
Um. Design failures? How about moving the control key down
below the shift? How about the introduction of the clumsy, RSI
inducing mouse?
Let me guess: a "design failure" is by definition something that
didn't make money, right?
The original model Macintosh was indeed severely
flawed (e.g. it had no good way of adding a hard-drive). You
might make the point that the Macintosh line as a whole suceeded
because they quickly fixed this problem; but there were similar
issues with the original model NeXt machines which were also
relatively quickly fixed, and yet the the NeXt despite being very
impressive for their day, never really did take off.
One can discuss design independently of financial success (which
may, after all be due to tricks of marketing or just plain luck...).
A machine like the Atari 800 had a number of interesting features
that were oriented toward making the machine more of a consumer
appliance: software was burned onto ROM cartridges that the user
could swap easily, add-ons such as memory expansion were packaged
up into their own easily pluggable cases, and so on. These
features still don't seem like particularly dumb ideas to me: they
wouldn't deserve to be called "design failures", it just happens
that the market went in a different direction -- people
apparently liked the cheaper bare boards approach of the IBM PC
and friends rather than the neatly packaged up Atari add-on
boards; the ROM cartridges were difficult to update, and the
flexibility of system software on floppies was a bigger draw than
the idiot-friendly pluggable cartridges.
If I had to pick one single example of computer design idiocy,
I think it might be the babble-of-scsi. Multiple signal
standards, and multiple connector standards, but no coordination
between the two... constant mysterious questions about cable
length and termination, with no obvious way of debugging the
problems (in contrast, the green status lights of ethernet are
totally brilliant). SCSI *should* have ruled the earth, but
instead we had to make do with IDE hacks...
(By the way: the DEC Rainbow had no ESC key. I saw a bunch of
them in use as VT-100 terminals at Stanford... every one of them
had "ESC" scribbled in magic marker, just above the F11 keys.)
For someone who just wants a simple and fast website, why exactly do they need to care about the underlying logic?
There have been a few times now that I've gotten stuck using a massive PHP project that someone else has installed (because it's so easy!) and I immediately feel the pressure on me to start learning how it all works, because otherwise it will never work right.
On a particular site using Drupal I've seen multiple bugs involving date and time handling (e.g. a scheduling calendar that reports bogus conflicts, and announcements calendar that on every edit forgets the times you previously entered), etc); but much worse than that it completely lacks any integration of the various little modules it was stuck together with -- e.g. once an event plan has been finalized, we would like to be able to publish it from our scheduling calendar to our announcements calendar, but instead you need to manually re-enter the information.
The 88 BILLION dollars lost when Time Warner bought AOL has been considered to be the worst business decision of all time....
At the time, even people with little technical knowledge knew that AOL was not a good company to buy.
It isn't so much that Time Warner didn't understand technology, it's that AOL lied their asses off in their accounting. A remark I heard from an executive-type around then: "They cooked the books, and they're getting away with it!"
Higher centers of gravity makes SUVs less safe. It's simple physics.
It's a little more complicated than that from what I understand from reading "High and Mighty" by Bradsher. I gather they pushed the wheels out from the body in an effort to improve stability, but that put them in an exposed position where they can snag the posts on highway dividers. They like to stop short and flip over them...
But it's all complicated by the fact that SUVs were marketed to dicks so they could be even bigger dicks -- the psychological problems with telling an anti-social bastard that they're physically invulnerable almost certainly dwarf the technical differences of the vehicles.
Yeah, but if people start breeding goats to act as lawnmowers, then the increased methane production needs to be thought about.
Ditto bio-diesel vehicles... if you're a symbiotic user of waste from fast food restaurants, you're being green, if you're encouraging Big Corn to convert food into fuel for you, then you're not.
(You want a truly green solution to the lawn mowing problem? Stop mowing lawns.)
However, you don't have to "bet" on the near term decline of oil resource. It's a reality. Happening now. It's happening Right Now. you're experiencing the first throes of the end of the fossil fuel era.
I was teenager during the early 70s "energy crisis", and we went through all the same shit last time. Everyone got all hyped up about "alternative energy" for a few years, while the oil companies raked in the big bucks, then miracle or miracles, the oil price dropped again and everyone forgot about it.
My contention is that you "peak oil" guys are doing a great job of supplying excuses for Exxon's insane profits of recent years.
I'm a San Francisco/New York type (though I think Philadelphia sounds interesting). Judging by the popularity of San Francisco and New York as judged by rents and tourist dollars, I don't think it quite makes sense to assume that Joe Sixpack hates cities. I think that that the average American feels like they're condemned to live in sprawl, that they don't deserve anything better, that any alternative is "too expensive" or "impractical" -- neither of which are really true.
Informed opinions vary, but not by much. The general consensus is that we are on a short-lived plateau of production. It might go up a bit, it might go down a bit, but it will be essentially flat for a few more years, and then begin an irreversible and terminal decline.
What about the factoid that you hear now and then about how the Caspian sea region has more oil than the Middle East? Once the war in Afghanistan is "won" there are going to be some nifty pipelines running through there, aren't there?
The peak oil crowd always seem to me to be indulging in a lot of wishful thinking.
Rather than betting on a resource shortage,
might it not be a better idea to push some of the many other reasons to get away from burning fossil [1] fuels?
[1] Possibly the word "fossil" should be in quotes. Thomas Gold, "Deep Hot Biosphere", etc.
It might not be a good idea, but everything you buy from China is built using mostly coal power, and shipped using extremely dirty diesel in very old engines, the end result being that I cannot ever see the true color of the sky.
Well, what do you think, should we try to reform them by leading the way with a good example, or just conquer the place and impose per capital carbon limits much tighter than ours are?
Maybe we should add "buying shitloads of useless crap from China" to the list of bad ideas?
Well, you've got me there. While we're at it, we can add a few other things to the list like "car madness" and "suburbia".
Dude, have you noticed any lack of respect for economists lately? It doesn't matter how many things they get wrong, or how many train-wrecks they cause, they continue to make money explaining away how they screwed-up last time, and why they're latest maneuver is going to work better.
Nicholas Taleb's criticism is worth looking at, but he's not really all that great a thinker. "The Black Swan" is good book, but it's far from perfect. Taleb is in a position where if almost anything goes wrong he can say "See, I told you so!" He doesn't really have a lot in the way of positive recommendations to make. He favors barbell strategies, and likes venture capital firms, that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The "teenagers" bit seemed odd to me, also. It does seem to be another case of people assuming that some social feature must have a biological basis -- even though it's hardly universal throughout human experience.
(Is there a biological basis for our tendency toward biological explanations for human behavior?)
Speaking of trademarks... does anyone know of a trademark analog of "copyleft"? What if you want to release a mark for free use, but want to avoid someone else claiming it as a trademark later?
The word "island" is completely misleading. It should not be used, even in quotes, in connection with this issue. We're talking about suspended particulate here.
Myself, I would suggest waiting for reputable scientists to do a study of this before getting too bent out of shape -- but on the other hand, we really do want this study to happen, and if the NOAA isn't on it yet, we should be pushing them to look into it.
The key thing though is this: "In a 2001 study, researchers (including Moore) ". One guy's name is all over this, and it inflates his status quite a bit to call him a "researcher" -- he has no scientific background. If this isn't replicated by an actual oceanographer, I wouldn't go around quoting the numbers with any degree of confidence.
Sorry if this seems pedantic, but these guys actually had me going for a minute with their rap about a floating plastic island... that was back in 2007, but I don't like getting taken.
Yes, the use of the word "island", even in quotes, is completely misleading. The last time I looked into it (around the end of 2007), it appeared that the word "island" was promoted by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle (if you're not familiar with the Chron, let me say that it's reputation is "not good". Myself, I would say "a joke"). At a guess, the word "island" was fed to them by someone at the "Algalita Research Foundation", which appears to be essentially two guys, one a sea captain, the other a guy with a PhD in "science education".
A new detail has been added to the story though: they're now talking about an NOAA "prediction" based on a computer model -- no one talked about that a few years ago. Notably, no one is talking about any actual NOAA data, but this does make the story sound better.
Yes, there is no doubt a lot of plastic waste in the ocean, and yes, it wouldn't be a surprise if this is an environmental problem, but the way this story has been played makes it all-too-easy to attack the credibility of "environmental activists".
Your attack on scientific objectivity may have some merit, but it's not demonstrated by the case at hand: there are no actual scientists running around talking about a floating island of plastic twice the size of Texas.
Something like this would be workable, if the actual server managing the cloud of virtual ones was running the book, and seeding the VMs with random numbers... but in effect the solution is probably what other people are suggesting, when you design a system, you have to have it use an external "entropy server"..
Computers are deterministic devices only because the hardware designers put a huge amount of work into making them deterministic. It may be a naive question, but it isn't a bad one... there might very well be a way to add some registers to a microprocessor that would be fundamentally random -- I think the trouble would be choosing a design that's not incredibly sensitive to fabrication errors (You don't want your "random" registers to be biased high or low). My thought would be to create a hundred of them, and let software pick one that seems to be working right.
It's an interesting question... if you believe in checks-and-balances, how many institutions do you need to act as checks on each other?
Myself, I tend to think that the US Senate is a grossly outmoded institution, designed to be fair to geography instead of to human beings. One of the reasons I tend to like the idea of sub-dividing California into multiple states (perhaps around 4) is that it would secure more representation for the West Coast in the Senate.
This is the same Cory Doctorow that was never willing to respect the Amazon boycott, right? As I remember it he was sticking Amazon affiliate links all over his site, long after slashdot had switched to bn.com.
And he's still doing it, isn't he?
Funny, he sounds like someone with a clue:
Being a frequent listener to Democracy Now, I've actually heard Cindy Sheehan speak at length on different topics, and disagree with her if you like, but she doesn't deserve to be smeared as a "crazy woman": Should impeachment be off the table
I was particularly impressed with this response:
Um. Design failures? How about moving the control key down below the shift? How about the introduction of the clumsy, RSI inducing mouse?
Let me guess: a "design failure" is by definition something that didn't make money, right?
The original model Macintosh was indeed severely flawed (e.g. it had no good way of adding a hard-drive). You might make the point that the Macintosh line as a whole suceeded because they quickly fixed this problem; but there were similar issues with the original model NeXt machines which were also relatively quickly fixed, and yet the the NeXt despite being very impressive for their day, never really did take off.
One can discuss design independently of financial success (which may, after all be due to tricks of marketing or just plain luck...).
A machine like the Atari 800 had a number of interesting features that were oriented toward making the machine more of a consumer appliance: software was burned onto ROM cartridges that the user could swap easily, add-ons such as memory expansion were packaged up into their own easily pluggable cases, and so on. These features still don't seem like particularly dumb ideas to me: they wouldn't deserve to be called "design failures", it just happens that the market went in a different direction -- people apparently liked the cheaper bare boards approach of the IBM PC and friends rather than the neatly packaged up Atari add-on boards; the ROM cartridges were difficult to update, and the flexibility of system software on floppies was a bigger draw than the idiot-friendly pluggable cartridges.
If I had to pick one single example of computer design idiocy, I think it might be the babble-of-scsi. Multiple signal standards, and multiple connector standards, but no coordination between the two... constant mysterious questions about cable length and termination, with no obvious way of debugging the problems (in contrast, the green status lights of ethernet are totally brilliant). SCSI *should* have ruled the earth, but instead we had to make do with IDE hacks...
(By the way: the DEC Rainbow had no ESC key. I saw a bunch of them in use as VT-100 terminals at Stanford... every one of them had "ESC" scribbled in magic marker, just above the F11 keys.)
Well now, that's a low blow. (For some reason the phrase "Drupal drawers" runs through my head a lot...)
There have been a few times now that I've gotten stuck using a massive PHP project that someone else has installed (because it's so easy!) and I immediately feel the pressure on me to start learning how it all works, because otherwise it will never work right.
On a particular site using Drupal I've seen multiple bugs involving date and time handling (e.g. a scheduling calendar that reports bogus conflicts, and announcements calendar that on every edit forgets the times you previously entered), etc); but much worse than that it completely lacks any integration of the various little modules it was stuck together with -- e.g. once an event plan has been finalized, we would like to be able to publish it from our scheduling calendar to our announcements calendar, but instead you need to manually re-enter the information.
It isn't so much that Time Warner didn't understand technology, it's that AOL lied their asses off in their accounting. A remark I heard from an executive-type around then: "They cooked the books, and they're getting away with it!"
But keep in mind that internet factiods are roughly 98.9 % unreliable (plus/minus 10 percent).
It's a little more complicated than that from what I understand from reading "High and Mighty" by Bradsher. I gather they pushed the wheels out from the body in an effort to improve stability, but that put them in an exposed position where they can snag the posts on highway dividers. They like to stop short and flip over them...
But it's all complicated by the fact that SUVs were marketed to dicks so they could be even bigger dicks -- the psychological problems with telling an anti-social bastard that they're physically invulnerable almost certainly dwarf the technical differences of the vehicles.
A friend of mine likes the idea of replacing the air-bags with a large iron spike pointed at the driver's chest.
But then, there may be a touch of hostility about that... us bicycling types get a bit annoyed at car drivers on occasion.
Yeah, but if people start breeding goats to act as lawnmowers, then the increased methane production needs to be thought about.
Ditto bio-diesel vehicles... if you're a symbiotic user of waste from fast food restaurants, you're being green, if you're encouraging Big Corn to convert food into fuel for you, then you're not.
(You want a truly green solution to the lawn mowing problem? Stop mowing lawns.)
The cults aren't the problem, it's the fad diets... e.g. Ruby on Rails.
I was teenager during the early 70s "energy crisis", and we went through all the same shit last time. Everyone got all hyped up about "alternative energy" for a few years, while the oil companies raked in the big bucks, then miracle or miracles, the oil price dropped again and everyone forgot about it.
My contention is that you "peak oil" guys are doing a great job of supplying excuses for Exxon's insane profits of recent years.
I'm a San Francisco/New York type (though I think Philadelphia sounds interesting). Judging by the popularity of San Francisco and New York as judged by rents and tourist dollars, I don't think it quite makes sense to assume that Joe Sixpack hates cities. I think that that the average American feels like they're condemned to live in sprawl, that they don't deserve anything better, that any alternative is "too expensive" or "impractical" -- neither of which are really true.
What about the factoid that you hear now and then about how the Caspian sea region has more oil than the Middle East? Once the war in Afghanistan is "won" there are going to be some nifty pipelines running through there, aren't there?
The peak oil crowd always seem to me to be indulging in a lot of wishful thinking.
Rather than betting on a resource shortage, might it not be a better idea to push some of the many other reasons to get away from burning fossil [1] fuels?
[1] Possibly the word "fossil" should be in quotes. Thomas Gold, "Deep Hot Biosphere", etc.
Well, what do you think, should we try to reform them by leading the way with a good example, or just conquer the place and impose per capital carbon limits much tighter than ours are?
Well, you've got me there. While we're at it, we can add a few other things to the list like "car madness" and "suburbia".
Dude, have you noticed any lack of respect for economists lately? It doesn't matter how many things they get wrong, or how many train-wrecks they cause, they continue to make money explaining away how they screwed-up last time, and why they're latest maneuver is going to work better.
Nicholas Taleb's criticism is worth looking at, but he's not really all that great a thinker. "The Black Swan" is good book, but it's far from perfect. Taleb is in a position where if almost anything goes wrong he can say "See, I told you so!" He doesn't really have a lot in the way of positive recommendations to make. He favors barbell strategies, and likes venture capital firms, that's about it.