How about, "The kind of world that would harm us for doing something harmless, that helps people get what they want and are willing to pay for, is no world that we want to do business in. And the chance of us losing our savings and the shirt off our back in the next lawsuit are a bit too scary for us to sleep well at night." Just conjecture, but it's how I might feel in their situation...
Granted, in a sense. But viciously deriding or downmodding another person's opinions, however unjust you feel this may be, tends to produce shame and/or indignation, not fear. There's a difference between being concerned that others won't agree and might not like you, and being afraid that you will lose something valuable, for speaking what you beleive.
No matter how politically correct you'd like to be, it is nothing short of nihilism to suggest that an uninformed opinion is as valid as an informed opinion. And I won't be convinced that disagreeing with and/or lampooning someone's point of view is the same as threatening violence or criminal economic harm. By your logic, Stephen Colbert is guilty of repressing President Bush's freedom of speech, because he disagrees and makes his sentiments known in a public forum, actually expending quite a bit of effort to convince people that Bush and his policies are stupid, harmful, and based on false pretense. Just because someone's views are unpopular or unaccepted, doesn't translate into repression. You have the right to say what you want without fear; You do not have the right to compel others to recognize your views as valid.
You are conflating a country with its government, which is perverted at best. The index is about how safe reporters in a certain country feel about publishing dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths. Just because the government aren't the ones holding a gun to your head, doesn't mean you'll suddenly feel OK publishing material that might cause any person or group to threaten your life, family, or livelihood with a reasonable chance of carrying out those threats.
Freedom of the Press can be trampled on just as badly in a democracy as in a theocratic dictatorship; all it takes is a population of sufficiently violent, uneducated people with strong views, who have no respect for human rights and civil liberties. The end result is that, no matter who does the repressing, and no matter whether it's life, limb, property, or the ideals of liberty that are threatened, information which should be published, is not. And if there were any way to measure precisely what got published and what didn't, I'm sure it would make a better index -- but for now, this will probably have to suffice.
It sounds like the Blackberry's holster, which is typically worn on a belt and would be very difficult to remove (especially with the paunch present on so many of the executives that carry them), would be equipped with a proximity sensor, or at least would receive a message from the Blackberry, which is measuring its own proximity to the holster. The holster could then vibrate / play a sound / flash to indicate that the Blackberry is missing and, if the user doesn't find the device within a few minutes and type in a cancellation code, poof!!
This is quite a good idea. An "Active Case" for your cellphone. Especially for Blackberries, which can be totally DESTROYED remotely. Not only can you wipe out all your sensitive data, but you can corrupt the firmware so there's a good chance the device becomes a brick. I wouldn't be surprised if, given gov't and corporate culture these days, a Blackberry appeared that could be remotely "detonated" to release an etching compound and eat through some of the circuit boards.
Umm... Firewire (esp. FW800)? There are HDMI / SCART / DVI / etc. input boxes available that plug into it, and this way Apple doesn't have to produce region-specific versions of their hardware.
And most HDTV screens at retail are low-resolution (1376x768, I think)! We have a 20" screen (1680x1050) on our Mac Mini in the living room, and I can't find a replacement with the same or higher resolution anywhere.
Here's a fun two-part question: (1)How many people got duped into buying an EDTV (800x480) screen this time around, thinking it was HD just because it was an LCD/Plasma, and (2) how many people are happy doing computer-type stuff on a low-res screen like that? I don't think many web pages still cater to the 800x600 crowd these days...
A sea/blob won't happen by accident either, or else some strain of mold or bacteria would have done it by now.
What, like a Portuguese Man of War? Or any number of colonial bacteria that eventually formed complex, higher-level organisms? I think you have to consider that evolution has a niche for every possible formation -- and that evolution would act on nanobots just as effectively as it does on other organisms competing for finite resources.
As long as the nanobots have some ability to analyze their effectiveness and make decisions about the next generation's design, you'll end up with simpler AND more complex groups of nanobots. You might even end up with something like the Replicators from Stargate, given enough evolutionary pressure and time. After all, OUR single-celled ancestors made the jump to cooperative groups, resulting in us...
You are 100% correct. And thus the right to a fair and speedy trial. The right to a speedy trial keeps the rich (read: lawyered-up) from abusing the poor. It would be nice if that were a constitutional right for civil matters as well as criminal, but the entire legal system has slowed to such a crawl that it is virtually useless against corruption. I have no doubt that my family, creditors, et al, would bear with me while a wrongful termination suit was in progress for 2 months, or even 4 months, but it's absurd that even a simple case takes 18-24 months to resolve. Bankruptcy, homelessness, divorce, all kinds of things could be expected to occur in the interim.
When it takes a crooked CEO 4 hours to set up offshore accounts, transfer embezzled funds, and leave the country, but 2 years in court to bring him back and recover the money, I consider that to be an absurd situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if, in this world, I could steal someone's money in a business deal and use it to buy lawyers to grind them into dust afterward. Their countersuit would be ineffective in preventing them from being reduced to a life of poverty while the case drags out.
It's important that people aren't sure how to interpret stories about technology. You can write an article about AOL hogging bandwidth, and while 20% of your audience scoffs at a lack of detail and your own lack of understanding, 50% of your audience doesn't understand. And rather than studying up or discussing the issue with their friends, like an average reader might do for a political or religious story, they completely lose interest.
I think this has very little to do with not knowing how to write technology, and much more to do with the fact that it is (IMO, provably) impossible to write a tech story that is understandable to even a significant portion of the population.
Maybe we do need a new kind of article, though. Perhaps we can display an article on the web, with a slider on the right, so readers can choose the level of detail and accuracy they're comfortable with. If they slide the indicator toward "troglodyte", then the article replaces certain nouns with aphorisms and factual statements with questionable analogies ("...a series of tubes"). If they slide it toward "industry insider", then all the technical jargon reappears and item names transform into well-known acronyms.
The Nokia E61. It just needs a better calendar app, and it's good to go. Quad-band GSM, UMTS, WCDMA, SIP Telephony, 802.11g, Bluetooth 1.2, Infrared, and awesome battery life -- 3 long days of push email and phone calls under medium-heavy usage for me. The keyboard is great, it supports all kinds of flavors of push-email (including Blackberry Connect), and it weighs a tad over 5 ounces.
It comes with a whole productivity suite, there's a version of Adobe Reader available for it, and you can even download a driver for bluetooth keyboards (I keep an old MS keyboard in my car)... I have to shut up now, but I really can't rave enough about this thing.
Dear Mr. American Man,
My dog has recently expired, leaving a sizable sum of money buried behind our house (US $190,000.00). I am concerned my parents will find this money and take it away from me. Please provide me with the routing and transit numbers for your bank account(s), and you can have half of the money. All I ask is that you would wire me small amounts from my half of the money when I email you. This way my parents won't suspect a thing.
A lion attacks a group of humans. Everyone runs away. If a 50-year-old man can run faster than an obese / asthmatic 15-year-old, then he has not necessarily selected his own genes for survivial, but he *did* remove competing genes from the population by saving his own skin.
If you can, change your chair. I recently changed my office chair from a traditional work-chair, to a full-mesh (see-through seat and back) model, and have found that I do stay much more alert. This is the case when driving, too -- if there is no circulation at the seat and back (leather seats, etc.), I'll often find myself becoming sleepy at the wheel. You might just get an extra hour or two of decent work in the evenings.
The problem I have with this approach is that I feel guilty, since every hour during the day that I don't work, is one hour I'll be squirreled away in my office after my wife comes home. However, working 5 or 6 hours a day tends to be more productive than working 8-10, unless I really just get "dialed-in" to a problem. Being an independent contractor (like myself, and the OP) means you can spare yourself the drudgery of those last few hours of consecutive work, and you won't have to look at buggy, opaque, or inefficient code in the morning.
I think we're saying the same thing -- If you feel like you *have* to work more than you feel naturally able, it can be done, but don't expect some super Jedi trick to let you do it all in one block, or squeeze 16 productive hours into a day. If you want to get 4 extra hours, prepare to spend 3-4 hours not working, so that you can regain your motivation and focus. (YMMV)
"Secret elements within the United States government seek to surveil us and control our lives."
Nice sig. However, shouldn't it be something closer to "Virtually all elements within the United States' government seek to surveil us and secretly control our lives."? The 'secret' part of that equation should be much further down in the heirarchy.:P
Eh. Just like the old scam of software hard-disk compressors and 'memory doublers', if these CPU's are fast enough it won't take long for an enterprising developer to develop a WHQL-signed intermediate driver to do software rendering, and charge uninformed or desperate users $30-$50. You could probably even have it store its textures on the hard drive so it can run in lower-memory environments (which I'm sure will be common on machines without dedicated GPU's.)
Or, we're saying "Einstein is right, but a quasar pulsing at one time will have a noticably different set of characteristics from a similar quasar several billion light years later." If the constants vary over time, it has no effect on the validity of Einstein's observations (AFAIK). The light they're measuring comes from different eras in the universe's history. However, knowing how the constants vary over time is much more helpful, because then we could make better guesses as to why they would do so.
That's the traditional model. TFA talks about Google needing to get away from some of their search-business habits for their new ventures, like online payment processing and the like. Redundant persistence, logging, failover protection, etc. is a huge issue any time your database works with information that represents some kind of monetary value. It could be manipulating auction bids, virtual property like Second Life or WoW, or actual money, but there are grave legal dangers if there is something in dispute worth suing over, and your database isn't properly atomic & serializable.
The 'database card' concept could be good, using (e.g.) SRAM (or at least a separate DRAM bank) to hold transaction logs while they execute before writing a checkpoint to the logs on disk. If the power / host machine / etc fails, then a protective circuit with a small battery could write the working log and active queries to Flash memory to ensure they won't be lost. That's a problem that you simply can't solve as well without specialized hardware, or sacrificing a great deal of performance.
Hmm... I'd kind of like to buy a RAID card that is accelerated for database and/or search work. I mean, issue high-level commands to the controller hardware, and let it collect the results while the main processor is doing something else. We're getting to the point where classical RDBMS systems are pretty well-understood, and the average RAID controller has a fair bit of hardware already. How far are we from having some relatively simple processor with an inflated L1 cache and high clock rate that does the heavy database work (including RAID/transaction logging) before it even reaches your machine?
It makes sense to do this, because database performance is big business -- just look at what some companies spend on licensing Oracle! As long as you're not worried about spatial queries, you could probably even get by without an FPU. There might be a lot of justification for this.
No, but to claim that an "internet" (read:email) was sent by a staffer on Friday at 10am, which didn't reach him until Monday, has anything to do with Net Neutrality is criminal ignorance. If it was an email containing a several hundred gigabytes of porn, Maaaybe. Probably, the NSA was too lazy to read & approve the message in a timely manner. There is no congestion, clogging, or lack of bandwidth. The Internet does not need an enema.
This kind of fatuous trolling should be news. The guy is screwing with the prosperity of a nation, and a big playground for innovation -- an excellent outlet for creative citizens to develop new technologies, express themselves, and nourish themselves intellectually. TV never lived up to the educational hype, but the Internet does for many people, simply because corporate interests aren't controlling the delivery medium. By the time he's done, the Internet in the US will be nothing more than a tube down consumers' throats.
If you haven't watched the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Interfection" (where the www.yzzrddd curses the crew with broadband access for 30 days), watch it. It's funny, in a sad/infuriating/empowering kind of way.:)
I have a friend who has 12 children in the UK. It seems extreme but I have never seen a family who are as happy, polite, well mannered and as educated.
That sounds to me like they have made a conscious choice that their contribution to society is as the parents of well-educated, healthy, happy and successful children. If both parents are highly educated, and want to pass that on to their children, I applaud them for that decision. Unless something happens to my wife and I remarry to a girl fresh out of university, I doubt that level of procreation is even possible for me. May there be more people like this in the world.
However, your example is the exception rather than the rule. It doesn't change the trend in western countries with welfare programs, where a non-working, never-married, single mother may have 8-12 children on the taxpayers' dime, while well-educated, married couples are having fewer children on average.
Most of us don't have the privilege of knowing someone with that kind of dedication and commitment to the future, and even having two children is becoming a rarity among the people I know and admire. Congratulate him for us, and encourage him in his effort. I hope he succeeds in bringing them all up to be happy, healthy, functioning adults.
Slashdot Mirror
How about, "The kind of world that would harm us for doing something harmless, that helps people get what they want and are willing to pay for, is no world that we want to do business in. And the chance of us losing our savings and the shirt off our back in the next lawsuit are a bit too scary for us to sleep well at night." Just conjecture, but it's how I might feel in their situation...
Granted, in a sense. But viciously deriding or downmodding another person's opinions, however unjust you feel this may be, tends to produce shame and/or indignation, not fear. There's a difference between being concerned that others won't agree and might not like you, and being afraid that you will lose something valuable, for speaking what you beleive.
No matter how politically correct you'd like to be, it is nothing short of nihilism to suggest that an uninformed opinion is as valid as an informed opinion. And I won't be convinced that disagreeing with and/or lampooning someone's point of view is the same as threatening violence or criminal economic harm. By your logic, Stephen Colbert is guilty of repressing President Bush's freedom of speech, because he disagrees and makes his sentiments known in a public forum, actually expending quite a bit of effort to convince people that Bush and his policies are stupid, harmful, and based on false pretense. Just because someone's views are unpopular or unaccepted, doesn't translate into repression. You have the right to say what you want without fear; You do not have the right to compel others to recognize your views as valid.
Freedom of the Press can be trampled on just as badly in a democracy as in a theocratic dictatorship; all it takes is a population of sufficiently violent, uneducated people with strong views, who have no respect for human rights and civil liberties. The end result is that, no matter who does the repressing, and no matter whether it's life, limb, property, or the ideals of liberty that are threatened, information which should be published, is not. And if there were any way to measure precisely what got published and what didn't, I'm sure it would make a better index -- but for now, this will probably have to suffice.
Easy. Squirrels, Possums, And Mice.
It sounds like the Blackberry's holster, which is typically worn on a belt and would be very difficult to remove (especially with the paunch present on so many of the executives that carry them), would be equipped with a proximity sensor, or at least would receive a message from the Blackberry, which is measuring its own proximity to the holster. The holster could then vibrate / play a sound / flash to indicate that the Blackberry is missing and, if the user doesn't find the device within a few minutes and type in a cancellation code, poof!!
This is quite a good idea. An "Active Case" for your cellphone. Especially for Blackberries, which can be totally DESTROYED remotely. Not only can you wipe out all your sensitive data, but you can corrupt the firmware so there's a good chance the device becomes a brick. I wouldn't be surprised if, given gov't and corporate culture these days, a Blackberry appeared that could be remotely "detonated" to release an etching compound and eat through some of the circuit boards.
Umm... Firewire (esp. FW800)? There are HDMI / SCART / DVI / etc. input boxes available that plug into it, and this way Apple doesn't have to produce region-specific versions of their hardware.
And most HDTV screens at retail are low-resolution (1376x768, I think)! We have a 20" screen (1680x1050) on our Mac Mini in the living room, and I can't find a replacement with the same or higher resolution anywhere.
Here's a fun two-part question: (1)How many people got duped into buying an EDTV (800x480) screen this time around, thinking it was HD just because it was an LCD/Plasma, and (2) how many people are happy doing computer-type stuff on a low-res screen like that? I don't think many web pages still cater to the 800x600 crowd these days...
What, like a Portuguese Man of War? Or any number of colonial bacteria that eventually formed complex, higher-level organisms? I think you have to consider that evolution has a niche for every possible formation -- and that evolution would act on nanobots just as effectively as it does on other organisms competing for finite resources.
As long as the nanobots have some ability to analyze their effectiveness and make decisions about the next generation's design, you'll end up with simpler AND more complex groups of nanobots. You might even end up with something like the Replicators from Stargate, given enough evolutionary pressure and time. After all, OUR single-celled ancestors made the jump to cooperative groups, resulting in us...
You are 100% correct. And thus the right to a fair and speedy trial. The right to a speedy trial keeps the rich (read: lawyered-up) from abusing the poor. It would be nice if that were a constitutional right for civil matters as well as criminal, but the entire legal system has slowed to such a crawl that it is virtually useless against corruption. I have no doubt that my family, creditors, et al, would bear with me while a wrongful termination suit was in progress for 2 months, or even 4 months, but it's absurd that even a simple case takes 18-24 months to resolve. Bankruptcy, homelessness, divorce, all kinds of things could be expected to occur in the interim.
When it takes a crooked CEO 4 hours to set up offshore accounts, transfer embezzled funds, and leave the country, but 2 years in court to bring him back and recover the money, I consider that to be an absurd situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if, in this world, I could steal someone's money in a business deal and use it to buy lawyers to grind them into dust afterward. Their countersuit would be ineffective in preventing them from being reduced to a life of poverty while the case drags out.
It's important that people aren't sure how to interpret stories about technology. You can write an article about AOL hogging bandwidth, and while 20% of your audience scoffs at a lack of detail and your own lack of understanding, 50% of your audience doesn't understand. And rather than studying up or discussing the issue with their friends, like an average reader might do for a political or religious story, they completely lose interest.
I think this has very little to do with not knowing how to write technology, and much more to do with the fact that it is (IMO, provably) impossible to write a tech story that is understandable to even a significant portion of the population.
Maybe we do need a new kind of article, though. Perhaps we can display an article on the web, with a slider on the right, so readers can choose the level of detail and accuracy they're comfortable with. If they slide the indicator toward "troglodyte", then the article replaces certain nouns with aphorisms and factual statements with questionable analogies ("...a series of tubes"). If they slide it toward "industry insider", then all the technical jargon reappears and item names transform into well-known acronyms.
The Nokia E61. It just needs a better calendar app, and it's good to go. Quad-band GSM, UMTS, WCDMA, SIP Telephony, 802.11g, Bluetooth 1.2, Infrared, and awesome battery life -- 3 long days of push email and phone calls under medium-heavy usage for me. The keyboard is great, it supports all kinds of flavors of push-email (including Blackberry Connect), and it weighs a tad over 5 ounces.
It comes with a whole productivity suite, there's a version of Adobe Reader available for it, and you can even download a driver for bluetooth keyboards (I keep an old MS keyboard in my car)... I have to shut up now, but I really can't rave enough about this thing.
Dear Mr. American Man,
My dog has recently expired, leaving a sizable sum of money buried behind our house (US $190,000.00). I am concerned my parents will find this money and take it away from me. Please provide me with the routing and transit numbers for your bank account(s), and you can have half of the money. All I ask is that you would wire me small amounts from my half of the money when I email you. This way my parents won't suspect a thing.
Sincerely
Ali Babatunde
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but eg.:
A lion attacks a group of humans. Everyone runs away. If a 50-year-old man can run faster than an obese / asthmatic 15-year-old, then he has not necessarily selected his own genes for survivial, but he *did* remove competing genes from the population by saving his own skin.
If you can, change your chair. I recently changed my office chair from a traditional work-chair, to a full-mesh (see-through seat and back) model, and have found that I do stay much more alert. This is the case when driving, too -- if there is no circulation at the seat and back (leather seats, etc.), I'll often find myself becoming sleepy at the wheel. You might just get an extra hour or two of decent work in the evenings.
The problem I have with this approach is that I feel guilty, since every hour during the day that I don't work, is one hour I'll be squirreled away in my office after my wife comes home. However, working 5 or 6 hours a day tends to be more productive than working 8-10, unless I really just get "dialed-in" to a problem. Being an independent contractor (like myself, and the OP) means you can spare yourself the drudgery of those last few hours of consecutive work, and you won't have to look at buggy, opaque, or inefficient code in the morning.
I think we're saying the same thing -- If you feel like you *have* to work more than you feel naturally able, it can be done, but don't expect some super Jedi trick to let you do it all in one block, or squeeze 16 productive hours into a day. If you want to get 4 extra hours, prepare to spend 3-4 hours not working, so that you can regain your motivation and focus. (YMMV)
Nice sig. However, shouldn't it be something closer to "Virtually all elements within the United States' government seek to surveil us and secretly control our lives."? The 'secret' part of that equation should be much further down in the heirarchy. :P
Eh. Just like the old scam of software hard-disk compressors and 'memory doublers', if these CPU's are fast enough it won't take long for an enterprising developer to develop a WHQL-signed intermediate driver to do software rendering, and charge uninformed or desperate users $30-$50. You could probably even have it store its textures on the hard drive so it can run in lower-memory environments (which I'm sure will be common on machines without dedicated GPU's.)
Or, we're saying "Einstein is right, but a quasar pulsing at one time will have a noticably different set of characteristics from a similar quasar several billion light years later." If the constants vary over time, it has no effect on the validity of Einstein's observations (AFAIK). The light they're measuring comes from different eras in the universe's history. However, knowing how the constants vary over time is much more helpful, because then we could make better guesses as to why they would do so.
I actually advocate pronunciation reform instead. To wit: through becomes throff.
Or you could just use a biometric token to salt the hash in the database. :)
That's the traditional model. TFA talks about Google needing to get away from some of their search-business habits for their new ventures, like online payment processing and the like. Redundant persistence, logging, failover protection, etc. is a huge issue any time your database works with information that represents some kind of monetary value. It could be manipulating auction bids, virtual property like Second Life or WoW, or actual money, but there are grave legal dangers if there is something in dispute worth suing over, and your database isn't properly atomic & serializable.
The 'database card' concept could be good, using (e.g.) SRAM (or at least a separate DRAM bank) to hold transaction logs while they execute before writing a checkpoint to the logs on disk. If the power / host machine / etc fails, then a protective circuit with a small battery could write the working log and active queries to Flash memory to ensure they won't be lost. That's a problem that you simply can't solve as well without specialized hardware, or sacrificing a great deal of performance.
Hmm... I'd kind of like to buy a RAID card that is accelerated for database and/or search work. I mean, issue high-level commands to the controller hardware, and let it collect the results while the main processor is doing something else. We're getting to the point where classical RDBMS systems are pretty well-understood, and the average RAID controller has a fair bit of hardware already. How far are we from having some relatively simple processor with an inflated L1 cache and high clock rate that does the heavy database work (including RAID/transaction logging) before it even reaches your machine?
It makes sense to do this, because database performance is big business -- just look at what some companies spend on licensing Oracle! As long as you're not worried about spatial queries, you could probably even get by without an FPU. There might be a lot of justification for this.
No, but to claim that an "internet" (read:email) was sent by a staffer on Friday at 10am, which didn't reach him until Monday, has anything to do with Net Neutrality is criminal ignorance. If it was an email containing a several hundred gigabytes of porn, Maaaybe. Probably, the NSA was too lazy to read & approve the message in a timely manner. There is no congestion, clogging, or lack of bandwidth. The Internet does not need an enema.
This kind of fatuous trolling should be news. The guy is screwing with the prosperity of a nation, and a big playground for innovation -- an excellent outlet for creative citizens to develop new technologies, express themselves, and nourish themselves intellectually. TV never lived up to the educational hype, but the Internet does for many people, simply because corporate interests aren't controlling the delivery medium. By the time he's done, the Internet in the US will be nothing more than a tube down consumers' throats.
If you haven't watched the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Interfection" (where the www.yzzrddd curses the crew with broadband access for 30 days), watch it. It's funny, in a sad/infuriating/empowering kind of way. :)
That sounds to me like they have made a conscious choice that their contribution to society is as the parents of well-educated, healthy, happy and successful children. If both parents are highly educated, and want to pass that on to their children, I applaud them for that decision. Unless something happens to my wife and I remarry to a girl fresh out of university, I doubt that level of procreation is even possible for me. May there be more people like this in the world.
However, your example is the exception rather than the rule. It doesn't change the trend in western countries with welfare programs, where a non-working, never-married, single mother may have 8-12 children on the taxpayers' dime, while well-educated, married couples are having fewer children on average.
Most of us don't have the privilege of knowing someone with that kind of dedication and commitment to the future, and even having two children is becoming a rarity among the people I know and admire. Congratulate him for us, and encourage him in his effort. I hope he succeeds in bringing them all up to be happy, healthy, functioning adults.
Good job... It's rare that a pun would be so funny and relevant, even after having to use a dictionary. :P