The best use I've found thus far for google's
satellite images: finding train stations.
Here in the United States, we're well into an
era where road maps frequently don't have train
stations indicated on them, and the Caltrains web
pages don't see fit to give you a
street address suitable for looking up an on-line
map. But with Google's satellite imagery, I was
able to scan along the train tracks looking for
the station buildings.
And I bet it's just as useful for pedestrians to
see if it's actually possible to walk along a
particular road.
Still, especially given its promise, Pornified
disappoints. Paul's argument is repetitive, and her prose
dreary, a result in part of her overreliance on polls and
surveys. She might have saved herself the trouble. As she
herself concedes, most of the mind-numbing numbers she
transmits are unreliable. Too often, they are also
implausible. At one point she cites a Christianity Today
survey in which 40 percent of clergy supposedly confessed that
they were patrons of Internet porn-- a figure exceeding that for
the general male population.
Paul is also too quick to assume a direct connection between
exposure to pornography and corrupted behavior. In her scheme
of things, men click on "Live Asian Sluts" and then expect to
make their experience imitate it. But surely this
oversimplifies things. The obsessive, three-hour-a-day user or
the callow teen may indeed develop a distorted view of women
and sex because of pornography, but is that necessarily the
case for the occasional curious web surfer? Paul shows little
interest in such distinctions.
Umm... to all the naysayers... wonder why netcraft says slashdot.org uses mod_perl? (sarcasm, no need for -5, Obvious).
I think a better question is what's up with technocrat.net. Bruce Perens brought it back to life, only now it's running on slash. The old one was a Zope site, as I recall... It couldn't be that moldy old Slash is better than a nifty Python project, could it?
there are an awful lot of explicit forward references,
Are these always bad? I've been having the same trouble
Well no, of course they're not always bad, and they're certainly not always avoidable... no subject is easy to completely linearize the order of presentation, and even mapping one to a hierarchy can be pretty tricky. A lot of them can be pretty irritating/confusing though, and in general you try and minimize them where you can in technical writing.
Have you heard Larry Wall's story about how he decided in what order to work on Perl6 design? He realized that when they wrote the Camel book they did their best to avoid forward references, which meant that he could do the same by thinking about Perl6 following along one chapter at a time in the Camel.
(Funny, I've got moderator points today... I was tempted to avoid posting and use 'em to pound down anyone who didn't like my review, but none of the jerks seem to be out today.)
You've just been trolled! But since you have, I might as well correct you as well...
TBL didn't really 'invent' the WWW, it was a development and practicalisation of the hypertext ideas of Nelson, taken together with the benefits of, and incremental improvements upon, existing digital publishing systems like gopher. Sir Tim has a great practical mind and implemented a pretty good system for the task in hand, which turned out to be more generally useful (despite its flaws in scaling up)...
In other words he invented the WWW. As opposed to "hypertext" or "the internet".
Are you serious? It creates a real-time view of the current consciousness of the entire human population (well, an enormous section of it, anyway)! That's something that has never been possible in the history of mankind.
But it's not immediately obvious that it's good for much of anything.
I could easily be missing something here, but I have the strong impression that the whole "blog" phenomenon has a lot of promise, but isn't anywhere near delivering as of yet... there's lots of open-ended chatter, lots of spewing of this and that, and a hell of a lot of people retreating into little corners and pretending that they've gone some place. There's very little in the direction of tools to get all of this activity to really add up to something.
I haven't seen a blog yet that I think is more important that the wikipedia.
Usenet back before Canter/Siegel. Heck, Usenet back before AOL made it available to their users. Despite lack of civility and the occasional (OK, not so occasional) flamefest - it was entertaining, amusing (i.e. kremvax hoax), and surprisingly useful. If you wanted to get information, share information, it was the place. And no - even with a zillion Web sites and Google Groups (the remains of Usenet) there's no equivalent.
*Pssst*. Don't tell the slashkiddies, but the new usenet is usenet. The eternal september is over.
Get a decent newsfeed and a newsreader, and you're all set... You'll have to live without the feeling that you're Cutting Edge, though. For that you need to be a blogger.
I think you guys are missing the real trouble:
it's not that wikipedia is unreliable in it's
present form; the real trouble is that it's labor intensive
to keep it in it's present form. I have to camp
out and watch the articles that I've worked on to
revert spam, re-write clueless additions, and so
on. There's no point at which I can say "okay, that one
is done, now I can move on to something else".
Wikipedia is in good shape at the moment because of
hordes of people donating their time to keep it that
way, to act as a corrective force on the small minority
of extremely energetic maniacs.
How long can they keep this up? There's a danger
that at some point everyone is going to go "this
is just bullshit" and let it go to hell.
Personally, I trust Jimbo Wales to do something
reasonable on this front... wikipedia is most likely going to
stay wikipedia, if he's in charge of the changes...
(1) technical excellence is nice, but clearly isn't the main determinant of success, is it? Plug in your favorite example. Mine is that Borland was essentially pushed out of the business by Microsoft.
(2) The logic of this essay is amazingly confused... the tangent discussing the ipod essentially disproves his main thesis. He points out a very serious technical failing in a product which is evidentally successful for non-rational reasons...
All of that said, spreading the word that "we only hire the best programmers might turn out to be pretty good marketing.
I like Paul Graham's essays well enough, but you really need to realize that he's a guy who got rich on his second job. His experience is actually pretty limited, but he's not shy about working up genralizations based on it...
Currently I'm working for a company with a large mod_perl code base that's been around for awhile. They've got the kind of code that makes perl-haters hate perl, but it hardly matters: it's a successful business, and the lousy code in the back end just doesn't matter that much.
Myself, I'm a perl loyalist... what problems it has can largely be avoided if your programmers are any good, and it has in my opinion a spirit of cooperation going for it that most other languages can only hope for (it's *extrememly* difficult to think of an idea for some general purpose code that has been implemented on CPAN six times already).
But when you really come down to it, it just doesn't matter that much... the idea that you're going to win the battle by technical superiority is a standard sci-fi geek fantasy, but it just doesn't play out that way in the real world all that often.
The obvious explanations of this are pretty much all wrong. (You might call this "The Moon Illusion Illusion": everyone thinks they understand it... at first.)
You don't appear to know much about what you're talking
about, but it's like this: you've got this public property, which has
for all intents and purposes become a public park -- most
of us urban dwellers like the idea of public parks, something
libertarians really need to come to grips with. But there's some office
space in this particular park, because it's a former military
base... instead of, say putting it up for auction, or
going into the landlord biz and renting it at market
rate, they cut a deal with Lucasfilms in part because
they have a way cool vibe going for them. The idea is probably
something like it's good for San Francisco's civic
pride to have a company like Lucasfilms within it's
borders. Then after cutting this deal, this way cool company
decides to off-shore about half of it's workforce. They
no longer need anywhere near the amount of office
space they're getting in the Presidio. So what do they do?
They subcontract it out. At market rate. Which San Francisco
could have done in the first place, yes?
I wouldn't tell you there aren't other ways you can
look at this issue, but I think that's a fair summary of
why some people are annoyed at Lucasfilms.
(P.S. I've been out to the Ranch, and I don't know what
everyone is oohing and ahhing about. It's an
overblown, souless rendition of a Frank Lloyd Wright
knockoff, in the middle of some of the sun fried sage brush
dessert that the Western US has so much of...)
We first show that there is a positive correlation between use of
touch-screen voting and the level of electoral support for George
Bush. This is true in models that compare the 2000-2004 changes
in vote shares between adopting and non-adopting counties within
a state, after controlling for income, demographic composition,
and other factors. Although small, the effect could have been
large enough to influence the final results in some closely
contested states.
While on the surface this pattern would appear
to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a
closer examination suggests this interpretation is incorrect. If
irregularities did take place, they would be most likely in
counties that could potentially affect statewide election totals,
or in counties where election officials had incentives to affect
the results. Contrary to this prediction, we find no evidence
that touch-screen voting had a larger effect in swing states, or
in states with a Republican Secretary of State.
Um, folks, maybe the people who programmed the machines were a
little more interested in winning a federal presidential election
than who gets elected dogcatcher in Podunk, Ohio? There's a
fallacious assumption here that the alleged fraudsters would have
to be the local election officials. If you're going to hack the
vote, you don't make it obvious--you do the absolute minimum
required in order to sway the results your way.
Ding! Precisely. You don't need a massive conspiracy, you need a
very small conspiracy inside of 1-3 electronic voting companies,
some of which have leadership with a declared Republican bias.
However, the point very few people here seem to be getting is
that the authors of this study are proposing a different, much
more subtle scenario: electronic voting machines are (relatively)
scary to poor and minority voters, who are thus more likely
to choose not to vote if electronic voting machines are in use.
Since these people are also (traditionally) more likely to vote
Democrat, there's a built-in Republican bias in any voting system
that seems too high tech.
This is a pretty interesting suggestion, really, and one I've
never run across before.
Take it from someone with a UID one tenth yours - low UIDs are
meaningless.
Now come on, you're exaggerating. Tell me you
don't find it amusing when someone with a UID pushing a gig who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about
tries to claim they're a seasoned hand.
"IBM loses 14,000 jobs" - how pessimistic - why not phrase it:
"IBM sets free a workforce of 14,000 skilled workers".
You know, you're right. It's silly, but I was thinking there was something funny about that headline -- like, IBM fires thousands of people, and they don't "lose" their jobs, IBM loses them.
It was nice of you to assume something about my driving habits from a message that explained that looking over the shoulder is an unsafe habit.
One more time: it is not an unsafe habit if you're not tail-gating. If you need to worry about someone hitting their brakes while you're glancing over your shoulder, you are following too damn close -- as nearly everyone does these days.
Just for the hell of it I did a web search to see if the advice has changed since I was taught lane changing. Can't find a single source that recommends skipping the shoulder check... it looks an awful lot like you're an extreme nut job that's posing as a professional. Try not to get anyone killed.
(My primary advice on driving safety, by the way,
is to stay off of the road. The less you drive, the less your risk exposure.)
Look over your shoulder for as long as it takes you to determine it's
safe to make a lane change. Count how long that was. 1 second ?.5s ?
2 seconds ?
If it took you 2 seconds, you should stop driving while drunk.
Remember that value.
Now, driving along in traffic with a speed and following distance
you'd normally have, close your eyes for that amount of time.
Can you? Does it feel safe? Why not?
Because you're tail-gating. You need to stop following so close.
Most people adjust their mirrors so they have a beautiful view of the
side of their car. While your car is very pretty, there's no reason to
be looking at it while you drive - you'll know if it falls off or
disappears, even without the help of your mirror. So, you can liberate
those side mirrors towards something more useful, like having them
pointed all the way out so that you can see into the "blind spot" and
the other lane.
I've ridden as a passenger with someone like you:
he seemed to think he had no blindspot because of his clever mirror adjustment. Really he was just going so goddamn fast it was rare for anyone to move up into his blindspot. I watched him narrowly avoid some blindspot collisions -- the other driver had to honk at him.
Incidentally, you dont see race car drivers looking over their
shoulders
Repeat after me: you are not a race car driver.
Getting there 2 minutes faster is not worth reducing your life expectancy by ten years.
Something really screwy has been going on with the photos of the car she was driving, by the way... originally everyone was looking at a photo of the wrong car, but now there's this other set of photos of a different car, but all the photos seem to be of the front driver's side of the car --
according to Sgrena, their bullet wounds show they were shot from behind, so where's the photos of that side of the car. And there's no dispute that they really were shot at, so why is there so little visible damage? If you shot at a car driving toward you, wouldn't you try and take out the driver by firing through the windshield? Or at least, try and blow out the tires? If the car wasn't shot at with hundreds of rounds, then the question is "why not?" It makes it sound like they're using inadequate fire power to defend their checkpoints.
This all seems really weird to me.
... and further don't tell someone who's subject to daily suicide car bombs that you're going to be speeding down a road that is infamous for daily suicide car bombs, is it any surprise this happened?
As I understand it, you're thinking of a different road. The particular road they were on is more tightly controlled than that (e.g. you have to go through several check points just to get to where the incident happened).
There's also some dispute about the fault of the communications screw-up (if any).
(There's a hell of a lot of uncritical propaganda coming from "Anonymous Coward"(s) just now... why does it keep getting modded up as "Insightful"?)
I'm afraid I find your logic a little hard to follow here. You see, what I would say is that the US should sincerely make an effort to investigate it's own mistakes and report on them honestly for multiple different reasons.
And the problem is that, unless the US investigation implies US guilt, they will be accused of not investigating sincerely.
And the point that I'm trying to make is "so what?" If the US refuses to investigate, that can also be taken as an admission of guilt.
We need mechanisms to investigate problems like this thoroughly, and we need them for deeper reasons than just public relations -- and if we really had such mechanisms, then they would become useful for public relations.
People don't want facts. What they want is to have their anti-US prejudices justified and reinforced.
Yeah, some people. And some people I suspect would really like to have an unbiased, neutral source of information, and they've essentially have just tuned-out because they're exhausted by endless polemics and propaganda.
(So, you got any unbiased, neutral sources of information? Jimbo Wales is trying... is there anyone else?)
How is that interesting? It's the report by the US supposed to show that the US didn't do anything wrong. How is that a surprise?
It's this very logic that gives the US no reason to report anything else.
I'm afraid I find your logic a little hard to follow here. You see, what I would say is that the US should sincerely make an effort to investigate it's own mistakes and report on them honestly for multiple different reasons.
To maintain credibility so that we'll believe what they say in the future -- as many people have noted the US government has a severe credibility problem because of it's recent history of deception and cover-up.
As a check (or is it a balance?) on the quality of our institutions. Corruption and incompetence flourish in secrecy. We need open government for much the same reasons we need open source.
Because it's the Right Thing To Do. We're now at a point where attempting to behave ethically is regarded as naive, but I would argue that it's really easy to screw yourself over by being too clever and shifty.
mc6809e wrote:
It's unlikely that you or anyone else would give credit to the US for revealing information damaging to the US. You'd simply use the information to further bludgeon the country.
And probably make the country stronger in the long term.
It's ashame that we've decending to the point where honesty is second to making sure my group/nation/country/ethnicity/political party beats your group/nation/country/ethnicity/political party.
Look at how "badly" her car was "shot up" and decide for yourself if this "journalist" is a lying sack of shit for saying that the car was shot at 300 or 400 times.
Hello Anonymous, I was just wondering,
can I call the US Government a "lying sack of shit"? I mean, the Gallup polls show that half of the people in the US have finally realized that the Bush Administration lied about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. So now the administration is out of the "sincerely mistaken" category, and in the "lying sack of shit" category, right?
On the other hand, I might forgive a woman for
being confused about how many rounds of ammunition were fired at her in the dead of night on a road in Iraq, just after escaping from imprisionment.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the United States, we're well into an era where road maps frequently don't have train stations indicated on them, and the Caltrains web pages don't see fit to give you a street address suitable for looking up an on-line map. But with Google's satellite imagery, I was able to scan along the train tracks looking for the station buildings.
And I bet it's just as useful for pedestrians to see if it's actually possible to walk along a particular road.
God bless America...
Perfect.
Welcome to the slashdot generation.
Have you heard Larry Wall's story about how he decided in what order to work on Perl6 design? He realized that when they wrote the Camel book they did their best to avoid forward references, which meant that he could do the same by thinking about Perl6 following along one chapter at a time in the Camel.
(Funny, I've got moderator points today... I was tempted to avoid posting and use 'em to pound down anyone who didn't like my review, but none of the jerks seem to be out today.)
I could easily be missing something here, but I have the strong impression that the whole "blog" phenomenon has a lot of promise, but isn't anywhere near delivering as of yet... there's lots of open-ended chatter, lots of spewing of this and that, and a hell of a lot of people retreating into little corners and pretending that they've gone some place. There's very little in the direction of tools to get all of this activity to really add up to something.
I haven't seen a blog yet that I think is more important that the wikipedia.
Get a decent newsfeed and a newsreader, and you're all set... You'll have to live without the feeling that you're Cutting Edge, though. For that you need to be a blogger.
Wikipedia is in good shape at the moment because of hordes of people donating their time to keep it that way, to act as a corrective force on the small minority of extremely energetic maniacs.
How long can they keep this up? There's a danger that at some point everyone is going to go "this is just bullshit" and let it go to hell.
Personally, I trust Jimbo Wales to do something reasonable on this front... wikipedia is most likely going to stay wikipedia, if he's in charge of the changes...
(2) The logic of this essay is amazingly confused... the tangent discussing the ipod essentially disproves his main thesis. He points out a very serious technical failing in a product which is evidentally successful for non-rational reasons...
All of that said, spreading the word that "we only hire the best programmers might turn out to be pretty good marketing.
You might take a look at some of the criticisms of that article, for example: David Ness comments on "Beating the Averages".
Myself I would say that technical issues like choice of language do matter, but no where near as much as techies like to believe.
Myself, I'm a perl loyalist... what problems it has can largely be avoided if your programmers are any good, and it has in my opinion a spirit of cooperation going for it that most other languages can only hope for (it's *extrememly* difficult to think of an idea for some general purpose code that has been implemented on CPAN six times already).
But when you really come down to it, it just doesn't matter that much... the idea that you're going to win the battle by technical superiority is a standard sci-fi geek fantasy, but it just doesn't play out that way in the real world all that often.
The obvious explanations of this are pretty much all wrong. (You might call this "The Moon Illusion Illusion": everyone thinks they understand it... at first.)
I wouldn't tell you there aren't other ways you can look at this issue, but I think that's a fair summary of why some people are annoyed at Lucasfilms.
(P.S. I've been out to the Ranch, and I don't know what everyone is oohing and ahhing about. It's an overblown, souless rendition of a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff, in the middle of some of the sun fried sage brush dessert that the Western US has so much of...)
Not everyone is happy about Lucasfilm moving to the Presido. Here's a sample: from the San Francisco Bay Guardian
0WaitState wrote:
Ding! Precisely. You don't need a massive conspiracy, you need a very small conspiracy inside of 1-3 electronic voting companies, some of which have leadership with a declared Republican bias.However, the point very few people here seem to be getting is that the authors of this study are proposing a different, much more subtle scenario: electronic voting machines are (relatively) scary to poor and minority voters, who are thus more likely to choose not to vote if electronic voting machines are in use. Since these people are also (traditionally) more likely to vote Democrat, there's a built-in Republican bias in any voting system that seems too high tech.
This is a pretty interesting suggestion, really, and one I've never run across before.
Just for the hell of it I did a web search to see if the advice has changed since I was taught lane changing. Can't find a single source that recommends skipping the shoulder check... it looks an awful lot like you're an extreme nut job that's posing as a professional. Try not to get anyone killed.
(My primary advice on driving safety, by the way, is to stay off of the road. The less you drive, the less your risk exposure.)
Kidnapped Italian journalist refutes American government claims.
Some other wikinews coverage:
- Freed hostage Sgrena says "shooting no accident"
- Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena Freed
- US may not have known of Sgrena rescue operation
- Italian PM rejects US version of shooting
Something really screwy has been going on with the photos of the car she was driving, by the way... originally everyone was looking at a photo of the wrong car, but now there's this other set of photos of a different car, but all the photos seem to be of the front driver's side of the car -- according to Sgrena, their bullet wounds show they were shot from behind, so where's the photos of that side of the car. And there's no dispute that they really were shot at, so why is there so little visible damage? If you shot at a car driving toward you, wouldn't you try and take out the driver by firing through the windshield? Or at least, try and blow out the tires? If the car wasn't shot at with hundreds of rounds, then the question is "why not?" It makes it sound like they're using inadequate fire power to defend their checkpoints. This all seems really weird to me.Anyway, here's some other discussion about it: Maybe All 400 Bullets Missed
There's also some dispute about the fault of the communications screw-up (if any).
(There's a hell of a lot of uncritical propaganda coming from "Anonymous Coward"(s) just now... why does it keep getting modded up as "Insightful"?)
We need mechanisms to investigate problems like this thoroughly, and we need them for deeper reasons than just public relations -- and if we really had such mechanisms, then they would become useful for public relations.
Yeah, some people. And some people I suspect would really like to have an unbiased, neutral source of information, and they've essentially have just tuned-out because they're exhausted by endless polemics and propaganda.(So, you got any unbiased, neutral sources of information? Jimbo Wales is trying... is there anyone else?)
- To maintain credibility so that we'll believe what they say in the future -- as many people have noted the US government has a severe credibility problem because of it's recent history of deception and cover-up.
- As a check (or is it a balance?) on the quality of our institutions. Corruption and incompetence flourish in secrecy. We need open government for much the same reasons we need open source.
- Because it's the Right Thing To Do. We're now at a point where attempting to behave ethically is regarded as naive, but I would argue that it's really easy to screw yourself over by being too clever and shifty.
mc6809e wrote: And probably make the country stronger in the long term. Yeah, it sure is.On the other hand, I might forgive a woman for being confused about how many rounds of ammunition were fired at her in the dead of night on a road in Iraq, just after escaping from imprisionment.