Okay, a lot of people here seem to
be pointing out that Sposky is
being too easy on the Windows
culture (which he certainly
is... the problem isn't just bugs
in the APIs, the problem is also
intentionally deceptive APIs so
that you can pretend you're
supporting third party developers
and retain the ability to undercut
them at will).
But I haven't seen a lot of people
pointing out that esr is also
taking it too easy on the Unix
culture.
I started reading the draft of
esr's "Art" a while back, and was
immediately struck that he was
repeating the "do one thing and do
it well" slogan as if anyone ever
really worked that way. Has he
ever seen the man page for "tar"?
How about "find"? The Unix Way is
more like "do one thing
sort-of-okay, and then trick it out
with options and modifiers and run
command files and embedded
scripting languages until you can't
tell when it's going to fry eggs or
flush the toliet."
Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors.
Reality: You'll be lucky to hear from people merely using your code, much less those interested in modifying it.
In my experience, this is not the case. I wrote a little rip-encode-and-tag script called choad and listed it on Freshmeat for the hell of it. This was two years ago, and I've received over 20 patches -- for a crappy little perl script!
Just at a guess, you had a significant advantage
here because you were writing in perl. The perl
community genuinely works together quite well
(CPAN is one of the world's great programming
resources)... though you would never know this
from listening to advocates of languages whose
specialty is supposed to be encouraging code re-use.
If you haven't read any Heinlein, try reading the quote
juevnilles unquote that he wrote for Scribners. Red
Planet, The Rolling Stones (no relation),
Space Cadet, and so on are all great books. Most of
the excesses (political and stylistic) that Heinlein-haters
like to complain about are soft-peddled on these.
A personal favorite of mine is Have Spacesuit Will
Travel, which is a mix of some gritty hard SF
(e.g. survival situation on the moon involving solving
problems with incompatible valve fittings) and crazed space
opera (an amorphous alien blob named "The Mother Thing",
representing the authority of the unified Three Galaxes).
The three books by Heinlein that may ultimately be the
most interesting (and also the most controversial) are:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Lunar colonists rebel
against an oppressive earth government, in alliance with an
accidentally developed AI.
Stranger in a Strange Land - A boy raised by Martians
is brought back to earth, where he displays some tremendous
parapsychological powers, and more importantly an odd
philosphical outlook.
Starship Troopers - Space wars of the future (some
interesting speculative hardware is featured) fought by an
earth government ruled by a strange form of democracy where
only military veterans [1] are allowed to vote. Some grim
philosphy is presented about the inevitability of war.
Note: Mistress is beloved by libertarians;
Stranger was worshipped by sixties hippies
(it's literally a cult novel)
and Troopers is beloved by conservatives.
Be careful about making rash generalizations about what
Heinlien was "really" about.
Remember Netcaster [netscape.com]?. Netcaster might have been a heinous abomination but it was still an app written in HTML, JS etc. as the link makes pretty clear.
Or perhaps MS thinks that the patent only covers Win32-only HTML apps. In other words cripple your HTML based app so it only runs on their platform and infringe on their patent. It makes sense to someone I'm sure.
The old Netscape browser (circa version 3.0) had the security dialogs implemented in HTML. I think
that beats Microsoft by a few years.
Do you need to own the prior
art in order to be able to use it to invalidate
a patent? If so, then it would take AOL's
interest in the matter...
Why is this book titled "PC Annoyances"?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
Why is this book titled "PC Annoyances"? If it
were called "Windows XP Annoyances" I would have
known that I didn't want to bother reading the
review. "PC Annoyances" makes it sound like a
hardware book that I might have some interest in.
It still amazes me that the press can get away with
talking about stuff like iPod as though it's
fabulously new, when really it's just one more
incarnation of some ideas that are old at
this point, e.g. emusic. There's
no reason the big labels couldn't have cut deals with emusic... emusic is the province of independant labels solely because the big guys were scared of the idea of distributing raw mp3s un-encumbered by
some heavy DRM/watermarking crap.
There are indeed some smart people in the music
industry, but they don't "predict" sucessful acts,
they manufacture them, and typically the manufactured ones don't have much in the way of
staying power. The industry makes most of it's money off of it's back catalog of acts that were big before they got so "smart" at manufacturing
inauthentic sensations.
Jobs point about being persistant rings true... I've talked to people who've worked with him, and they describe him as the kind of asshole
that you eventually just give whatever he wants just to get him out of your hair. (It's an
uncomfortable truth with me, however, that he
does seem to be someone who "gets things done"...
I would rather be living in a world where Steve
Jobs were not necessary.)
The data on gun ownership alone is not particularly correlated with crime deterrent, but that's conveniently ignoring the data on concealed carry licenses published by John Lott, not-coincidentally in a book called "More Guns Less Crime"
His data showed a consistent and predictable decline in violent crime after the passage of concealed carry laws. Furthermore his data shows that violent crime was exchanged for crimes where there was less risk of meeting a person during commision (car theft, etc). Both of these are consistent with basic economic hypotheses (ie. greater risk costs means less people participate)
Yes, John Lott's work is what Ehrlich is taking on explicitly in "Nine Crazy Ideas". Ehrlich claims
to have examined the statistical evidence Lott
presents, and found it inconclusive.
It would be interesting for someone like yourself
with some direct familiarity to go through Ehrlich's criticism, to see if you think it holds
up.
At any rate, is this guy related to the new Maryland governor?
Go back up, look at the top of the slashdot
story. See that first link? Note the label.
Physicist. George Mason. Try *following* that
link, if you'd like to know some more about this
fellow.
The most interesting part of this review are doom's
confessions and attitudes.
I'm a fascinating guy all right, but if you ask me the
really interesting thing here is the questions like "how do we
know what we know?" and "how can we check what we think we
know?" and things like that.
I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support
private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent.
Presumably it never occurred to him to think beyond "Me have
gun, nobody now hurt me."
Oh undoubtably. Just like you never think beyond "Guns bad,
guns hurt people, guns must die".
On the other hand, it could that I was mislead by a passing
familiarity with the gun control debate over the last few
decades, and the kind of stats that people cite when they
argue about it.
the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a
matter of dosage... If something is not crazy, just not
established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos,"
aka "Why not?"
This is little more than a magical-religious belief.
What is? Hormesis? Hormesis is an observed pheonmena in a
wide variety of contexts. Do you mean Radiation Hormeis?
Try doing a web search on it. It's a respectable scientific
idea. Here, let me quote Ehrlich on the subject:
Although we have seen that existing data do not convincingly
show that the LNT ((linear no threshold)) hypothesis is wrong, or that
either hormesis or a threshold occurs, a number of
theoretical arguments have been advanced for these latter
two possiblities and against LNT. Many of these ideas
involve biological defense mechanisms, whose efficacy can be
enhanced by low doses of radiation and which prevent cancers
from being developed even after they have been initiated by
a radiation dose. For example, data exist which apparently
show that a low dose of radiation administered before a much
higher dose appears to decrease the extent of genetic damage
done by that higher dose. The mitigation of harm done when
radiation doses are spread out in time also implies that
biological defense mechanisms are important.
Part of the trouble is that Ehrlich's scale is perhaps
lacking in nuance... 1 cuckoo means "probably not true, but
who knows?" and 0 cuckoo is the "why not?" level. Where do
you file radiation hormesis? On the one hand there are
the clues Ehrlich mentions above that make it seem
plausible, on the other hand the population studies
statistics (read the chapter, I ain't summarizing that
stuff) are messy and hard to interpret, but don't seem
to show the effect.
doom believes it for no other reason than that it seems to
have a nice ring to it, a sort of symmetry. Some homeopathic
schools take it to the next step, claiming that if a high
dose of a poison is bad, a low dose must be good. Equally
preposterous.
But, homeopathy is completely ridiculous. The evidence for
homeopathy isn't just ambiguous (as it is with radiation
hormeisis), it's completely absent. It also doesn't have
anything like a theoretical foundation going for it, either.
doom's follow up reasoning is a nightmare. He
is essentially telling us that if something is not
established, we should consider believing in it anyway.
Your point
is that the burden of proof needs to rest on the person
making the assertion, that occam's razor demands we avoid
multiplying entities unnecessarily, and so on. The trouble
with these kind of principles is that it isn't always
obvious *which* side is making the positive assertion. The
old, conventional opinion (enshrined into law) is linear
extrapolation backwards to low doses, the LNT model.
Competing theories would be that there's some sort of
threshold down there somewhere below the levels tha
This isn't so much a comment
about the book as about the
person who reviewed it here
on slashdot and posted the
article. The reviewer makes
the same mistake repeatedly,
of assuming that if an idea
hasn't been proven wrong,
than it's proponents don't
deserve a cukoo rating at all
- it should be zero.
In my defense, I might say
that I think I make this
"mistake" exactly twice, and
the second time I explain:
If something is not crazy,
just not established, I
would be inclined to award
it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why
not?"
Do I need to make the point
that "Why not?" is not the
same thing as saying "Yes,
this is probably true"?
DunbarTheInept wrote:
No. That's not how it
works. When positing the
existence of things, or
putting forth an explanative
theory to describe why things
that are there got that way,
the burden of proof is always
on the positor. Therefore
someone who is willing to
believe a theory purely
because it hasn't been proven
wrong DOES deserve at least a
little cukoo rating for that.
Thanks, good comment. The
issue is indeed deciding
where the burden of proof
lies. But sometimes there's
a problem with deciding *who*
is making the positive
assertion. Let's take the
case of my first "mistake",
the "More Guns Mean Less
Crime" discussion, where does
the burden lie?
I would assert that *both*
sides in this debate tend to
make positive claims: one
insists that private gun
ownership creates a deterent
against criminals, the other
side insists that private gun
ownership makes it easier for
people to become criminals,
more likely to commit crimes
on impulse.
I really can't see why either
claim should be considered a
default case. If you play
this game fairly, you don't
award points to a theory just
because it's established,
you're supposed to be
reviewing the reasons it
became established.
If the effects aren't strong enough to measure, why the asymmetry in the "cuckoo" rating for the pro and anti side?
With an obvious answer. An excellent review! This is really useful information in deciding whether to buy the book. Since I prefer not to pay for biased pseudoscientific drivel, I won't be purchasing the book.
Well, thanks, but you're missing the main point.
Yeah, I think some of Ehrlich's cuckoo ratings
are odd, but I also think his reviews of the
evidence are excellent. He has his biases, but
they're some of the least prominent biases of
any commentator on these subjects that I can think
of.
The reviewer doesn't really explain
the theory, and his bit is kinda
misleading.
Well, could be. Maybe I should've
tried to lay out the theory, but I
already thought it was a little
long.
The idea is that hydrocarbons,
rather than being formed from
rotting garbage or coming from outer
space, are formed via big furnacey
things in the mantle. This is
supposed to explain events where oil
fields appear to have refilled
themselves, and the distribution of
fields and the wierdities of the
geology in and around them.
Here's my stab at it: the idea is
that hydrocarbons are formed by
cosmic processes (e.g. they've been
observed in nebula), which means
that they may have been present in
some form in the cloud of stuff the
earth condensed out of. Gold's
theory is that there's a lot of
cosmic hydrocarbons trapped inside
the earth, and it's still gradually
leaking out, making it's way
upwards, but getting modified by
heat and pressure, and filtered by
the rock it's moving through... and
*also* being modified by life deep
underground.
That's an important point (and the
reason that Gold's book is titled
"The Deep Hot Biosphere"), he
contends that the earth's biosphere
extends much deeper than is often
supposed, and that there are a lot
of strange bugs adapted to high
temperature and pressure living deep
underground (think about the
bacteria they've found in the mouths
of deep ocean volcanic vents). One
of the better pieces of evidence for
the biologic theory of oil formation
is that oil *looks* like stuff
messed with by living creatures
(e.g. to quote Ehrlich's summary:
"The phenomenon of optical activity
shows that petroleum contains
unequal numbers of right- or
left-handed molecules. Here again
we have an indicator of the effects
of life since living organisms have
evolved to eat substances such as
right-handed sugar (dextrose) but
not its left-handed mirror image
(levitose)."
And further: "Finding biological
traces in petroleum need not point
to a biogenic origin, but could
equally well be explained based on a
biological contamination of a
hyrdrocarbon fluid coming up from
great depth."
Personally, I don't buy
it, even if I do agree that it's
becoming reasonable to question
whether organic matter is the only
source of oil/gas/coal.
Yes, *that's* the point. Gold can
be 90% wrong, and the remaining 10%
would still be revolutionary.
I'm not a geologist, but I was under
the impression that fossils are
regularly found in coal, and that
we've observed the intermediate steps
of its formation from peat bogs.
Good point, but he's probably referring to
oil and gas deposits, but I haven't read
the book.
My understanding is that Thomas Gold's case
is better for some forms of fossil fuels
than for others (roughly gas > oil > coal),
but Gold *is* willing to go all the way and
make a case for coal.
E.g. there's a section titled "The
Upwelling Theory of Coal Formation" that
starts on p.86 of Thomas Gold's book, "The
Deep Hot Biosphere". I quote "I contend
that although peat and lignite do originate
from decomposed biological debris, black
coals do not. In my view, black coals form
from the same upwelling of deep
hydrocarbons that accumulate as crude oil
and natural gas. With coal, however, the
hydrogen component has been further driven
off, leaving behind a greatly
carbon-enriched, hydrogen-impoverished
hydrocarbon."
Further on: "It is indeed true that coal
sometimes -- though by no means always --
contains some fossils, but those fossils
themselves create a problem for the
biogenic theory. First, why did the odd
fossil retain its structure with
perfection, sometimes down to the cellular
level, when other, presumably much larger
quantities of such debris adjoining it were
so completely demolished that no structure
can be identified at all?"
Why should the origin of hydrocarbons affect whether we are likely to run out of them? Just because they originated in outer space doesn't mean they are necessarily abundant.
The conventional theory would be that the amount of oil and natural gas in the ground is limited by the amount of biomass, the quantity of living things that have ever existed on the surface of the earth.
If there were already substantial quantities of
hydrocarbons in the cloud of whatever the earth condensed out of, then there's an additional, larger source for them.
I hate to troll/flame but this review
is possibly the worst review of any
book I've ever read.
Yeah, okay. I wish I could say this
is the worst slashdot comment I've
ever read.
Complaining about lack of impartiality
from the book and then force feeding
us personal opinions.
Eh. There's different approaches to
reviews, and for better or for worse,
slashdot incourages an informal,
first-person, folksy style toward
these things. I thought it over and
went for a split approach,
pseudo-objective overview up top,
personal takes buried down below.
Maybe I over did it, but judging from
some of the comments I see, maybe I
should've provided even more
explication of what I think and why.
I've checked the review linked to from
VeryGeekyBooks (thankyou parent
poster) and they all appear to be
graced with some journalistic
integrity.
Yeah, some of them are quite good,
though to my eye a trifle dull because
they're hampered by feeling like they
shouldn't blow Ehrlich's punchlines.
By the way, if you want to read
reviews over at physicsweb, no one is
going to stop you. And if you want
better reviews on slashdot, you can
always try writing them... it ain't
like I'm getting paid to do this.
My Five Cents.
Brace yourself for some more force
feeding: every usage and variant of
the phrase "my two cents" is a really
dubious cliche. We're all standing up
and braying our opinions for the
entire world to see, what's with the
damn humble act?
(P.s Yes, guns do cause more
crime. The rest of the world learnt to
read a bar chart years ago.. do they
teach them in your schools yet?)
Bar chart? What bar chart? Does it
include Switzerland? In Switzerland,
it is legally required to have fully
auto weapons in every household, and
yet they have a low crime rate.
Look: you haven't thought about it, so
you're assuming that your "common
sense" position is *obviously* true,
but trust me on one simple, point: it
just isn't obvious. Try watching the
documentary "Bowling for Columbine"
sometime... Michael Moore set out to
do a pro-gun control movie and quickly
came to the conclusion that gun
control is just besides the point. He
points the finger at the "culture of
fear" we've got here in the states.
Re:Am not sure 3-click rule was really *debunked*
on
Web 'Rules' Changing?
·
· Score: 1
ediron2 wrote:
My point is that truly debunking this concept would involve:
[...]
3 - validating user satisfaction on usability of sites that honor/ignore the 3-click rule.
All the article does is prove that people are persistent, even in the face of crappy webpage design.
Interesting, you read the article, but don't seem to have read past the first graph.
Let me quote the article for you:
The failure to find task data to support the Three-Click Rule made us rethink the problem. Could task success and failure be the wrong way to look at it? Maybe everyone believes in the rule because it's frustrating to keep clicking beyond the third page? We decided to look at the problem from a different angle.
What about Satisfied Users?
If we looked at the tasks that were dramatically longer than three clicks, do we see a drop in the satisfaction of the users? At the end of each of the 620 tasks, we had asked users to rate how satisfied they were with the site for that task. Again, there was a wide variety of answers -- sometimes users were very satisfied, other times they were completely unsatisfied. Did these ratings correlate with the number of clicks?
And if you look at the results,
what they found is that user reports of satisfaction are independant of the number of clicks they had to make to achieve a set goal.
ediron2 wrote:
* - My apologies; I hope admitting that I read the article doesn't completely destroy my/. karma.
Um, my 8-track player is working just fine,
thanks.
You mean my VHS collection of old Avengers episodes is going to stop working?
Yes. What happens when your VHS player breaks, and no local consumer electronics store still sells VHS players? Will you still be able to play through your box set of The Avengers?
But that day is a *long* way away, considering that they're currently pushing DVD/VHS combo units. And what I would probably do on that day,
presuming I hadn't started digitizing my VHS tapes
(and, say, stashing them on DAT, or more like fixed disks, or possibly the nextgen video disk that we're talking about here), is to just go and buy a used VHS player. You don't think you couldn't find an 8-track player used on ebay right
now?
Note, I am not assumming I will *never* buy into another data format,
my point is that the time to consider buying
the latest round of junk from Sony is when you
can get it at a garage sale.
Well, better get to work rebuying your entire video collection, again.
Really? You mean my VHS collection of old Avengers
episodes is going to stop working?
I haven't bought any sort of DVD technology yet,
and don't have any immediate plans to do so.
From what I've seen of DVD disks, they strike me
as incredibly fragile (DVDs borrowed from a local
library inevitably crap out in the middle because
of all the abuse they get). But the real show
stopper for me is the "country code" nonsense.
If I could walking to one of the big electronic
chain places and get a cheap player that would
actually work on the two DVDs that I own (music
videos from Indonesia and Vietnam) I would probably be tempted.... But as it stands I don't even have enough incentive to get a DVD drive for
one of my computers (my SCSI DAT drive still works
fine, with 2Gb of data per 90m tape).
It's looking like I might succeed in
sitting out an entire generation of consumer crap
technology that I just don't care about. Cool.
There is a story behind the music. It was written by Delia Derbyshire, who was working for the BBC Radiophonics workshop. She was an absolute pioneer in electronic music, who worked by physically cutting, pasting, splicing and stretching pieces of tape to creat some real groundbreaking noises.
Well, Delia didn't really *write* it, there was a score written by Ron Granier. What she did do was
to bring it to life, implementing it in electronic tones at a time long before synthesizers were common, long before people like Moog started creating ones that were accessible to musicians. You might call her the "arranger/producer", though of course that understates her contribution as well.
It is true that it was a real crime that the BBC originally only credited Ron Granier for the theme, ignoring Derbyshire's huge contribution (supposedly Ron Granier didn't even recognize the theme when he heard her rendition of it)... but there's no need to go the other way and understate
what Ron Granier did.
(Ron Granier also did the superb theme for
The Prisoner, by the way.)
By becoming public they raise capital that they can use to further expand their R&D efforts. They can then hire more employees, bigger and better equipment, and they can take more risk. They turn a profit today but their profit margin isn't such that they can take much risk on new technologies. They can't spend a lot of resources on a technology that while it may be the greatest thing ever if it works, may fail in which case we end up bankrupt.
Everyone keeps talking about how the IPO will be the end of Google. Why? The whole point of going public is to raise funds for expansion (that's supposed to be the point anyway). Obviously if their intention was merely to get rich and then walk away, they would have went public a while back. Google was around before the bubble broke. They could have went public back then but they chose not to. They had no need to go public back then and maybe they still don't but they are looking towards the future and seeing a need for extended cash reserves, more funding for R&D, the ability to take larger risks that offer bigger returns, etc.
The trouble is that once a company has "gone public" they're
subject to a whole new set of rules about what they're
allowed to do. A common feature of the business landscape
in recent decades have been spurious class action suits
brought in favor of stockholders claiming that a company has
mismanaged the business. Currently Google's stated corporate
philosophy is "Don't be evil", but the currently dominant
philosphy in the publicly traded realm is "Do anything that
isn't grossly illegal".
For example, if the competition is making some cash selling
search placement (not just putting in targeted but clearly
labeled ads... that Economist article doesn't make this
issue clear), there are people out there who will argue that
Google is *legally obligated* to do exactly the same thing.
Now, you and I may believe that this is bullshit -- a web
search company that engages in deceptive practices will
eventually not be trusted and in the long run is cutting
their own throat -- but at the very least, the company may
end up in court trying to justify this to the judge.
Remember the stockholder point of view is that you're
supposed to turn a profit every quarter... they don't care
about the long term health of your company, as long as your
stock doesn't crash before they get a chance to dump it.
The fact that Google was started with venture capital money
has always been their achilles heel. The VCs will
eventually demand they go public, and once they go public,
they become Just Another Company.
And the lesson is: if you want to change the world (as
opposed to just make money), slow and steady growth is the
rule. Don't surrender control to venture capital, fund
things out of pocket or use bank loans if you can. And
don't go public. The public corporation is a broken
institution.
And gosh, if I lived closer to my office (16.5 miles away,
and I'm unusually close for the Bay Area) then I wouldn't
have to worry about the fact that there is no shower and no
bicycle storage at the building.
No, you're right, 16.5 miles isn't very far... in fact it
sounds like a nice bike commute to me. You could probably
do it in an hour, and maybe quite a bit less than that if
the roads were any good. A south bay bike commute might
turn out to be really ugly or really simple, depending on
the quirks of the bike routes down there... and judging by
your attitude, you probably don't know where they are
(e.g. I lived in Palo Alto for a long time before I realized
that the "Bryant Street Bike Boulevard" was the way to
travel, as opposed to the dreaded El Camino Real).
Now me, I would probably try and get by with a change of
clothes and a sponge down in the bathroom, and I'd lock my
bike up outside if they didn't let me bring it into my
office...
But in any case, if you ever do get the shower and bike
storage you think you need (along with some convienient bike
lanes, one hopes), it will probably be because of the
efforts of smug bicycling advocates like myself. You're too
smart to waste your energy trying to change the world, right?
The whole smug approach of the bicycling advocates ignores
the huge infrastructural change that increased bicycle use
would require, as well as the staggering cost of it
all.
Oh please. Staggering cost? Bike transit is the cheap way
of doing things.
If you are rich enough to live downtown or just a couple
miles away from your work, then swell. But don't presume
that everyone is in your fortunate position.
(a) Living in San Francisco does not make my commutes
shorter: I frequently need to travel down to south bay,
usually by bike and train.
(b) Commuting by bike and train means that my partner and I
can split one car between us. Don't try and bust us on
money if you're maintaining a car for everyone in the
household over 16.
They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more
attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance,
technology renders the natural checks and balances of
scarcity obsolete.
The automobile made it possible for individuals to travel
100 kilometres in an hour. The result is that roads and
parking must potentially accommodate everyone driving
downtown from an area approximately 200 Km in diameter. The
speed of travel reduces the constraints of distance. When we
unthinkingly increase the speed at which we can travel, we
increase the distance we travel without thinking.
The economics of this just seem totally wonky to me.
If you subsidize a resource, and sell it at an artificially
low price, then you can expect shortages and long lines.
On the other hand, if you let the market regulate a resource, then
the price rises a bit, which discourages consumption and encourages production, and the
lines go away. It may turn out that the price has gone up
high enough to make it rough on lower income folks, and you might
want to come up with some public intervention in the market
to deal with that, but let's not go into detail on that for
now (a hint though: food stamps make a lot more sense than rent control).
The government built a bunch of roads and isn't charging
much in the way of tolls for their use. Suprise! The roads
are crowded, and you can get stung by traffic jams
(i.e. "long lines"). Everybody wants to use the roads
because they're "free" and gas doesn't cost much in the US
(I've heard it argued that we effectively subsidize that
too).
It isn't so much that people aren't adjusting to the
crowding as the crowding happens, because they certainly
are (try googling "traffic evaporation" some time).
It's just that some people are total gluttons for punishment
in this respect, spending four hours a day in nail-biting
traffic if it means reducing their morgage payments
slightly.
The author insists "We can't solve traffic congestion by
reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr." But no one
suggests that that's the solution. What they do propose is
"congestion charging" to discourage people from driving when
and where it tends to be too crowded (e.g. they recently
began experimenting with this in downtown London).
What this says about internet traffic, on the other hand,
I dunno. I would hate to think that ARPA blew it by not
building in per-byte charges into the net, but
at the very least you could make a plausible case for that.
If you don't NEED (or want) to go stomping through 3 feet of water, up
25 degree rocky inclines, and through 2 feet of snow on a regular
basis, you don't NEED an SUV. Even the losers who whine about driving
in 6 inches of snow with their SUV just don't get it. There's plenty
of 4WD and AWD cars out there that are cheaper, faster, safer, easier
to maintain, and handle light and moderate offroad and bad weather
duty just fine. My one friend had a 4WD Tempo for about a year. It
handled wet, grassy hills, snow, ice, and mud just fine.
Yeah, you've nailed it exactly. I was living in Idaho for a
couple of winters, and I'm glad I was doing my driving in a
low-slung "economy car" that did not roll over the time
I managed to slide off the road into a ditch...
Allow me to compliment you on a fine anti-SUV rant (I've
written a number of them myself). Anyone care to try
extending the subject a bit?
How's this for a debate topic: the efficiency of free
markets depends on the majority of consumers making
informed, intelligent purchasing decisions. The massive
craze of SUV buying in the US suggests that a large
percentage (perhaps the majority), of US citizens are
incapable of determining their own short-term self-interest,
let alone anything like enlightened self-interest.
Doesn't this sound like a problem? Is there any possible
fix or range of fixes that would not be worse than the problem?
Subjectively I think I am more likely to be involved in a collision
with a car when I'm on my bike then when I'm driving. And I'm pretty
sure I'm more likely to be seriously damaged when on the bike.
Your subjective impression may very well be wrong.
Statistics are notoriously suspect, but the best estimate is
that the average everyday bicycle rider has a 1 in 133 chance
of dying while riding a bike, while the lifetime risk of
dying in a motor vehicle is about 1 in 70
(source:
www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/health/risks.htm).
Dave Snyder also mentions:
70 percent of American adults who don't get enough regular
exercise, 300,000 of whom die every year from diseases
related to a sedentary lifestyle, according to a 2002
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report.
I was a little surprised that the number was only 300,000.
But then I saw a recent report that obesity in the US was
up by a factor of 4 since the mid-80s, so maybe this number
is on the rise...
jason0000042 wrote:
So lack of bike routes, combined with the fact that most people live
too far away from their jobs to make biking practicable (again a
subjective observation based on experience in DC, Baltimore and
Memphis), means that you won't be seeing a massive shift to bikes any
time soon.
Well, define "soon". Bike routes are relatively cheap to
put in: all they take is a little paint and the political
will to squeeze the car lanes a bit (hint: call it "traffic
calming". If need be, point out that a bike lane can double
as a break-down lane). Long distance commutes can be made
practicible by the relatively simple expedient of outfitting
trains and busses to carry bikes. That's the way I've been
handling my San Francisco to Silicon Valley commutes in
recent years.
Note: the reason bikes *plus* bus/trains are such a killer
combination is that the usual bane of mass transit is the
downtime needed for doing transfers. A bus/train/bus
commute would be unliveable, but I found a bike/train/bike
commute to be totally doable, especially considering that I
got exercise and reading time out of the deal.
Slashdot Mirror
But I haven't seen a lot of people pointing out that esr is also taking it too easy on the Unix culture.
I started reading the draft of esr's "Art" a while back, and was immediately struck that he was repeating the "do one thing and do it well" slogan as if anyone ever really worked that way. Has he ever seen the man page for "tar"? How about "find"? The Unix Way is more like "do one thing sort-of-okay, and then trick it out with options and modifiers and run command files and embedded scripting languages until you can't tell when it's going to fry eggs or flush the toliet."
You might want to balance out esr's idealized view with the half-serious ranting of The Unix-Hater's Handbook (pdf).
I think the chapter on X is one of the better X-windows tutorials around (though unreasonable people may disagree).
A personal favorite of mine is Have Spacesuit Will Travel, which is a mix of some gritty hard SF (e.g. survival situation on the moon involving solving problems with incompatible valve fittings) and crazed space opera (an amorphous alien blob named "The Mother Thing", representing the authority of the unified Three Galaxes).
The three books by Heinlein that may ultimately be the most interesting (and also the most controversial) are:
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Lunar colonists rebel
against an oppressive earth government, in alliance with an
accidentally developed AI.
- Stranger in a Strange Land - A boy raised by Martians
is brought back to earth, where he displays some tremendous
parapsychological powers, and more importantly an odd
philosphical outlook.
- Starship Troopers - Space wars of the future (some
interesting speculative hardware is featured) fought by an
earth government ruled by a strange form of democracy where
only military veterans [1] are allowed to vote. Some grim
philosphy is presented about the inevitability of war.
Note: Mistress is beloved by libertarians; Stranger was worshipped by sixties hippies (it's literally a cult novel) and Troopers is beloved by conservatives. Be careful about making rash generalizations about what Heinlien was "really" about.[1] Yes, I said "*military* veterans". Yes, I know what Heinlein said in "Expanded Universe". Try reading this (warning PDF): The Nature of "Federal Service" in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Do you need to own the prior art in order to be able to use it to invalidate a patent? If so, then it would take AOL's interest in the matter...
Why is this book titled "PC Annoyances"? If it were called "Windows XP Annoyances" I would have known that I didn't want to bother reading the review. "PC Annoyances" makes it sound like a hardware book that I might have some interest in.
It would be interesting for someone like yourself with some direct familiarity to go through Ehrlich's criticism, to see if you think it holds up.
I'm a fascinating guy all right, but if you ask me the really interesting thing here is the questions like "how do we know what we know?" and "how can we check what we think we know?" and things like that.
Oh undoubtably. Just like you never think beyond "Guns bad, guns hurt people, guns must die".
On the other hand, it could that I was mislead by a passing familiarity with the gun control debate over the last few decades, and the kind of stats that people cite when they argue about it.
What is? Hormesis? Hormesis is an observed pheonmena in a wide variety of contexts. Do you mean Radiation Hormeis? Try doing a web search on it. It's a respectable scientific idea. Here, let me quote Ehrlich on the subject:
Part of the trouble is that Ehrlich's scale is perhaps lacking in nuance... 1 cuckoo means "probably not true, but who knows?" and 0 cuckoo is the "why not?" level. Where do you file radiation hormesis? On the one hand there are the clues Ehrlich mentions above that make it seem plausible, on the other hand the population studies statistics (read the chapter, I ain't summarizing that stuff) are messy and hard to interpret, but don't seem to show the effect.
But, homeopathy is completely ridiculous. The evidence for homeopathy isn't just ambiguous (as it is with radiation hormeisis), it's completely absent. It also doesn't have anything like a theoretical foundation going for it, either.
Your point is that the burden of proof needs to rest on the person making the assertion, that occam's razor demands we avoid multiplying entities unnecessarily, and so on. The trouble with these kind of principles is that it isn't always obvious *which* side is making the positive assertion. The old, conventional opinion (enshrined into law) is linear extrapolation backwards to low doses, the LNT model. Competing theories would be that there's some sort of threshold down there somewhere below the levels tha
DunbarTheInept wrote:
Thanks, good comment. The issue is indeed deciding where the burden of proof lies. But sometimes there's a problem with deciding *who* is making the positive assertion. Let's take the case of my first "mistake", the "More Guns Mean Less Crime" discussion, where does the burden lie?I would assert that *both* sides in this debate tend to make positive claims: one insists that private gun ownership creates a deterent against criminals, the other side insists that private gun ownership makes it easier for people to become criminals, more likely to commit crimes on impulse.
I really can't see why either claim should be considered a default case. If you play this game fairly, you don't award points to a theory just because it's established, you're supposed to be reviewing the reasons it became established.
That's an important point (and the reason that Gold's book is titled "The Deep Hot Biosphere"), he contends that the earth's biosphere extends much deeper than is often supposed, and that there are a lot of strange bugs adapted to high temperature and pressure living deep underground (think about the bacteria they've found in the mouths of deep ocean volcanic vents). One of the better pieces of evidence for the biologic theory of oil formation is that oil *looks* like stuff messed with by living creatures (e.g. to quote Ehrlich's summary: "The phenomenon of optical activity shows that petroleum contains unequal numbers of right- or left-handed molecules. Here again we have an indicator of the effects of life since living organisms have evolved to eat substances such as right-handed sugar (dextrose) but not its left-handed mirror image (levitose)."
And further: "Finding biological traces in petroleum need not point to a biogenic origin, but could equally well be explained based on a biological contamination of a hyrdrocarbon fluid coming up from great depth."
Yes, *that's* the point. Gold can be 90% wrong, and the remaining 10% would still be revolutionary.E.g. there's a section titled "The Upwelling Theory of Coal Formation" that starts on p.86 of Thomas Gold's book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere". I quote "I contend that although peat and lignite do originate from decomposed biological debris, black coals do not. In my view, black coals form from the same upwelling of deep hydrocarbons that accumulate as crude oil and natural gas. With coal, however, the hydrogen component has been further driven off, leaving behind a greatly carbon-enriched, hydrogen-impoverished hydrocarbon."
Further on: "It is indeed true that coal sometimes -- though by no means always -- contains some fossils, but those fossils themselves create a problem for the biogenic theory. First, why did the odd fossil retain its structure with perfection, sometimes down to the cellular level, when other, presumably much larger quantities of such debris adjoining it were so completely demolished that no structure can be identified at all?"
If there were already substantial quantities of hydrocarbons in the cloud of whatever the earth condensed out of, then there's an additional, larger source for them.
Look: you haven't thought about it, so you're assuming that your "common sense" position is *obviously* true, but trust me on one simple, point: it just isn't obvious. Try watching the documentary "Bowling for Columbine" sometime... Michael Moore set out to do a pro-gun control movie and quickly came to the conclusion that gun control is just besides the point. He points the finger at the "culture of fear" we've got here in the states.
Note, I am not assumming I will *never* buy into another data format, my point is that the time to consider buying the latest round of junk from Sony is when you can get it at a garage sale.
I haven't bought any sort of DVD technology yet, and don't have any immediate plans to do so. From what I've seen of DVD disks, they strike me as incredibly fragile (DVDs borrowed from a local library inevitably crap out in the middle because of all the abuse they get). But the real show stopper for me is the "country code" nonsense. If I could walking to one of the big electronic chain places and get a cheap player that would actually work on the two DVDs that I own (music videos from Indonesia and Vietnam) I would probably be tempted.... But as it stands I don't even have enough incentive to get a DVD drive for one of my computers (my SCSI DAT drive still works fine, with 2Gb of data per 90m tape).
It's looking like I might succeed in sitting out an entire generation of consumer crap technology that I just don't care about. Cool.
It is true that it was a real crime that the BBC originally only credited Ron Granier for the theme, ignoring Derbyshire's huge contribution (supposedly Ron Granier didn't even recognize the theme when he heard her rendition of it)... but there's no need to go the other way and understate what Ron Granier did.
(Ron Granier also did the superb theme for The Prisoner, by the way.)
For example, if the competition is making some cash selling search placement (not just putting in targeted but clearly labeled ads... that Economist article doesn't make this issue clear), there are people out there who will argue that Google is *legally obligated* to do exactly the same thing. Now, you and I may believe that this is bullshit -- a web search company that engages in deceptive practices will eventually not be trusted and in the long run is cutting their own throat -- but at the very least, the company may end up in court trying to justify this to the judge. Remember the stockholder point of view is that you're supposed to turn a profit every quarter... they don't care about the long term health of your company, as long as your stock doesn't crash before they get a chance to dump it.
The fact that Google was started with venture capital money has always been their achilles heel. The VCs will eventually demand they go public, and once they go public, they become Just Another Company.
And the lesson is: if you want to change the world (as opposed to just make money), slow and steady growth is the rule. Don't surrender control to venture capital, fund things out of pocket or use bank loans if you can. And don't go public. The public corporation is a broken institution.
Now me, I would probably try and get by with a change of clothes and a sponge down in the bathroom, and I'd lock my bike up outside if they didn't let me bring it into my office...
But in any case, if you ever do get the shower and bike storage you think you need (along with some convienient bike lanes, one hopes), it will probably be because of the efforts of smug bicycling advocates like myself. You're too smart to waste your energy trying to change the world, right?
Oh please. Staggering cost? Bike transit is the cheap way of doing things. (a) Living in San Francisco does not make my commutes shorter: I frequently need to travel down to south bay, usually by bike and train.(b) Commuting by bike and train means that my partner and I can split one car between us. Don't try and bust us on money if you're maintaining a car for everyone in the household over 16.
The government built a bunch of roads and isn't charging much in the way of tolls for their use. Suprise! The roads are crowded, and you can get stung by traffic jams (i.e. "long lines"). Everybody wants to use the roads because they're "free" and gas doesn't cost much in the US (I've heard it argued that we effectively subsidize that too).
It isn't so much that people aren't adjusting to the crowding as the crowding happens, because they certainly are (try googling "traffic evaporation" some time). It's just that some people are total gluttons for punishment in this respect, spending four hours a day in nail-biting traffic if it means reducing their morgage payments slightly.
The author insists "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr." But no one suggests that that's the solution. What they do propose is "congestion charging" to discourage people from driving when and where it tends to be too crowded (e.g. they recently began experimenting with this in downtown London).
What this says about internet traffic, on the other hand, I dunno. I would hate to think that ARPA blew it by not building in per-byte charges into the net, but at the very least you could make a plausible case for that.
Allow me to compliment you on a fine anti-SUV rant (I've written a number of them myself). Anyone care to try extending the subject a bit?
How's this for a debate topic: the efficiency of free markets depends on the majority of consumers making informed, intelligent purchasing decisions. The massive craze of SUV buying in the US suggests that a large percentage (perhaps the majority), of US citizens are incapable of determining their own short-term self-interest, let alone anything like enlightened self-interest. Doesn't this sound like a problem? Is there any possible fix or range of fixes that would not be worse than the problem?
According to Dave Snyder, in the SF Bay Guardian: Dave Snyder also mentions: I was a little surprised that the number was only 300,000. But then I saw a recent report that obesity in the US was up by a factor of 4 since the mid-80s, so maybe this number is on the rise...
jason0000042 wrote:
Well, define "soon". Bike routes are relatively cheap to put in: all they take is a little paint and the political will to squeeze the car lanes a bit (hint: call it "traffic calming". If need be, point out that a bike lane can double as a break-down lane). Long distance commutes can be made practicible by the relatively simple expedient of outfitting trains and busses to carry bikes. That's the way I've been handling my San Francisco to Silicon Valley commutes in recent years.Note: the reason bikes *plus* bus/trains are such a killer combination is that the usual bane of mass transit is the downtime needed for doing transfers. A bus/train/bus commute would be unliveable, but I found a bike/train/bike commute to be totally doable, especially considering that I got exercise and reading time out of the deal.