Dennis Frailey makes a distinction between CS research and applied CS: 'For too long, we have taught computer science as an academic discipline (as though all of our students will go on to get PhDs and then become CS faculty members) even though for most of us, our students are overwhelmingly seeking careers in which they apply computer science.'
I get that the extent of math necessary in computer science is an open question and I won't pretend to have an answer to it, but challenging the presence of math, and the academic approach in general, in a university setting bothers me. Of course computer science ought to be taught as an academic discipline in an academic setting. Who cares if students will use it in their careers? The whole point of a university is to study academic disciplines—maybe you intend to apply them and maybe you don't, but either way they are considered worthy of pursuit for their own sake. And that goes not just for computer science (assuming that's your major) but for math, science, and humanities as well.
If you just want to get a job as a programmer without learning all that theoretical stuff, skip the university altogether and just buy a book, or go study at a technical college. Now, you might have a really hard time getting hired without that bachelor's degree, and that does indeed suck, but that's the fault of the labor economy—it's not fair to ask universities to change their philosophy to accommodate corporate culture.
But Sony did sell us a PS3 with advertised features of both (1) access to PSN and (2) the ability to install other OSes and, on those OSes, run whatever software we want. They then forced us to choose at most one of those after they had already collected their money. Their EULA witchcraft will be tested in court to see if they had a legal right to do this, but nothing can make it fair.
Sony locks down PSN access because it keeps PSN secure from exploitation, which would degrade the experience of those who do not exploit on PSN.
If Sony didn't ban cracked PS3's from PSN, and my gaming experience was affected by active exploits, you can bet I'd be screaming for George Hotz's head on a platter, your homebrew be damned.
Perhaps a more noble rationale than "OMG teh p1rates!", but it still doesn't excuse sabotaging bought-and-paid-for functionality. If they needed to lock down the console in order to keep their gaming network fun, they should have thought about that, and disclosed it, before they sold it to me. What you're talking about is a technical solution to a social problem, and those work badly enough when they aren't immoral.
I agree that the videos themselves are rather boring to watch, except in some instances when they're paired with fun music or interesting commentary, and that people need to make it clear that they're tool-assisted. (As long as I'm griping, I also hate the totally unnecessary neologism "speedrun" when the phrase "speed run" would have sufficed, and even that is annoyingly redundant. [End semantics Nazi rant.])
But I think it's weird to suggest that they're somehow illegitimate, just because they run on different rules of a fan community's invention. It's irrelevant to observe that it's like cheating at the game, since when you're creating a TAS, you're not playing the game, you're creating a TAS. They're two different activities, so of course the rules are different. Complaining about a TAS in comparison to a human-performed speedrun^Wspeed run is like saying it's stupid for an engineer to sit around all day designing a race car because you'd rather watch a real person doing a 100-meter dash.
Let's look at your golf example. Imagine someone practiced the same golf shot thousands of times, until they could unambiguously describe, down to the slightest twitch of muscle fiber, how the most perfect possible swing would be executed by the human body. Don't you think that would be a technically impressive feat, if not entertaining in the same way as a sport, even if no human being could actually execute those instructions? I would think on Slashdot that kind of high-precision, insanely specialized, and ultimately purposeless problem-solving would get a little more geeky respect. (And incidentally, I've never done or even wanted to do a TAS in my life. It sounds infuriatingly tedious. But as I explained, I geekily respect the activity.)
I'm not sure how much that relates your intended point, so I'll close by reiterating that, yes, despite the above, the videos are indeed pretty damned boring to watch. But at least this sort of thing can be pretty funny.:)
Fast non-volatile memory tech to replace RAM and HD is always 10 years away.
It's called FLASH memory and it exists now.
Flash memory can't replace RAM and hard drives because it will die after a limited number of read/writes. Semantically nitpicking, that's true of RAM and hard drives too, but the number is prohibitively small with flash memory.
Apostophes and smart quotes (slightly offtopic)
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This isn't specific to smartphones, but my least favorite thing about autocorrect is how it's obliterated everyone's ability to put a proper apostophe at the beginning of a word. When an apostrophe shows omitted letters at the beginning of a word, as in 'cause (short for because) or a year shortened to two digits, it's supposed to be a regular apostrophe that (if it isn't just vertically straight, like the ASCII character) looks like a closing single quotation mark. You know, ’. But because Microsoft Word—and, probably because of Microsoft's example, every other damned word processor, including Open/LibreOffice—automatically renders any stroke of the apostrophe key at the beginning of a word as an opening single quotation mark (‘), that's how everything ends up typed, even when the character isn't supposed to be a quotation mark at all.
I admit that there's no elegant way for software to orient those characters correctly every time without bothering the user, but at least professional typographers should know better, and I keep seeing cases where they don't! People must already be assuming that the mark is supposed to get turned around whenever it's at the front of a word, whether it's supposed to be a quotation mark or an apostrophe, because that's how my computer does it and, hey, it can't be wrong. I fear that the correct usage is either going to get hopelessly obscured or (shudder) superseded by some "widely accepted usage" thing.
I think the "sic" referred to the phrase "another nuclear" war, as no first nuclear war has ever occurred. (Unless you want to count World War II, but I generally understand the phrase as referring to a war in which both sides use nukes, and as the main means of combat.)
You bring up limitations on the Fourth Amendment, and in spite of your facetiousness, there are limitations on it. Hell, there are even limitations on arguably the most cherished of the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech. (Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and all that.) Likewise, I think it's pretty damn stupid to expect there not to be reasonable limitations on the Second Amendment.
I get that, and I don't intend to start an argument about the reasonableness of any particular limitation on the Second Amendment or on the need for accountability. My point was more about how comfortable everyone is with those limitations being made by ordinary legislation and policy-making when they wouldn't tolerate any other part of the Bill of Rights being curtailed in the same way. To wit:
I don't have a problem with the right to bear arms, as long as 1) some kind of training is required in order to get licensed to do so, and 2) said firearms are registered and licensed.
The definition of a license is permission to do something that, but for the license, would be prohibited. But the Second Amendment specifically makes gun ownership non-prohibited, taking precedence over any other laws. The notion of needing a license to do something you already have the right to do is contradictory. Surely you would balk at the idea of a "free speech license" being required, let alone the suggestion that you would still have the right to free speech since, hey, you just need to get the license and you're good to go.
Now, maybe you think that gun ownership ought to be as unrestricted as free speech and maybe you don't. But either way, it doesn't change the fact that both of those rights are guaranteed at precisely the same level of law and with equally broad language. Although no curtailment on free speech rights is really possible except in the form of a Supreme Court decision, as in the yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater case, no one complains when state legislatures invent all sorts of their own limitations and restrictions on firearms ownership. (I'll admit my own ignorance on the Supreme Court jurisprudence at work here, but it suffices to say that it rubs me the wrong way as someone who values his civil liberties.)
Which brings me back to my original point about how the right to bear arms was infringed in the same way as all these post-9/11 infringements. The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to guarantee those rights even in the face of government interference, and every little exception or prerequisite, even if they protect human life, makes it less of a guarantee.
Then just like you have to with a car, you must prove that you can use them responsibly. Just like you have to with a car, you should register them.
Sorry to end on a mostly irrelevant nitpick, but it is completely legal to own and use a car without being a licensed driver or registering it. Those are just requirements for driving it on public roads. I know there's an analogous safety issue between cars and guns that you're going for, but since you don't have to use publicly maintained resources to own a gun (as long as you don't commit any crimes with it), I think the analogy kind of breaks down.
I appreciate your reply. Although we disagree, you've obviously given this some intelligent and reasonable thought.
Since you mentioned ammo, it bears mentioning that U.S. citizens got very comfortable with the government making little exceptions to the Second Amendment decades before they started doing it to the Fourth Amendment in earnest. I'm not trying to troll or go off-topic here—I bring this up as a matter of constitutional rights and not gun rights as such. But imagine if other constitutional rights were treated the same way many voters are content to let the government treat our Second Amendment rights:
Gun license applications – "You can have your blog as soon as you fill out a form and have a five-day waiting period first. You know, to give you time to 'cool off' before you publish anything rash."
Concealed carry laws – "Free speech doesn't mean free private speech. You've got to let everyone listen in, in case you're saying something treasonous."
The Assault Weapons Ban – "Websites can reach for too many people too quickly for a civilian. Surely the framers of the constitution meant for the First Amendment to apply only to the publishing technology of the day: books and newspapers and such."
People often claim that the erosion of the Bill of Rights was started by 9/11, but it was also caused by a much more mundane kind of fear, much earlier than that.
It's mostly known as an insightful critique of what's wrong with K-12 math education, but I've always liked it as an explanation of why people who enjoy math do it in the first place: it's satisfying in an artistic way.
Good for you, but for the rest of us, (aka people who don't enjoy or care about math that much) I'm afraid it's merely so much futility and frustration!
True, but the remainder of the Lockhart article addresses that. To paraphrase, students take to math class with a lot less friction if they understand that math at least can be satisfying. Plenty of students dislike their high school art classes too, but they can at least sit through them understanding why certain other people think it's pleasant and important—and therefore not futile, even if it is frustrating. By contrast, too many high school students are ready to dismiss math as something that other people use for techie things but will never to themselves be of any value, intrinsic or otherwise, other than as a prerequisite for college. (And they're mostly right because of the way those classes are taught, but that's a separate complaint.)
The point that seems to be lost here for so many people who talk this way about Math is that in the end anything is an "art" for higher end professionals and enthusiasts of a particular field of study.
The Lockhart article actually does address the issue of making that side of math apparent to novices and laypeople, and makes a pretty persuasive argument that it is possible (if beyond the capabilities of most public school classrooms).
Let us remember the (slightly paraphrased) immortal writings of Dave Barry on this subject, "One man's vision of art is another man's view of an insanely overpriced "modern art piece" that looks suspiciously similar to the rusted remains of a helicopter crash!"
I've seen the following link in many a Slashdot thread before, but it certainly bears repeating here: "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart It's mostly known as an insightful critique of what's wrong with K-12 math education, but I've always liked it as an explanation of why people who enjoy math do it in the first place: it's satisfying in an artistic way. I think it would be great if more students saw math as something worth doing for its own sake, like art or athletics, and hey, it lets you do science and engineering too.
In fact, this summary sounds similar enough to "Lament" that I wouldn't be surprised if this Dr. Lewis was inspired by and/or cited it. But this is Slashdot, so I'll let someone else check that out.
It's an intersection of right-wing economic thought, which many of us around Slashdot approve of, with right-wing willful ignorance, which none of us except the trolls approve of. It's tough finding friends in two-party American politics when you're a libertarian.
I'd be more sympathetic if the law actually stated that if a prosecutor violates any procedure in court, intentionally or unintentionally, all charges are dropped with prejudice (meaning they can never be refiled).
But then what happens when a corrupt prosecutor is paid off by a guilty defendant to deliberately violate a procedure? Under your suggestion, the defendant would have bought himself immunity from prosecution forever. What needs to happen in that case is a regular mistrial, with the D.A. having the option to retry with a more honest prosecutor—or, even if the D.A. doesn't suspect anything, a more competent one.
They didn't even limit their questions to objectively provable facts.
Just to give one example: Has the US "lost jobs" or "gained jobs"?
Oh yeah, it gets worse than that:
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
'Cause... that's not subjective at all.
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
"Study shows that Fox News viewers pitifully lack our oracular abilities."
And the article in the first link, the AlterNet one, gleefully engages in even worse correlation-causation trolling than the Slashdot headline:
The body of evidence that Fox News is nothing but a propaganda machine dedicated to lies is growing by the day. [...] In eight of the nine questions below, Fox News placed first in the percentage of those who were misinformed (they placed second in the question on TARP). That’s a pretty high batting average for journalistic fraud. [...] The conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason.
This goes beyond bad reporting on science. Even if Fox News really is biased, the notion that this survey proves it scientifically is just a snide partisan fantasy.
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
Yes. And from the research I did into this story yesterday, they haven't in this case. What they have done is removed the files from their servers, so you can no longer redownload them for a new device (and as this service is included in the price of an amazon e-book, you are therefore entitled to a refund if you bought any of the books that have been removed).
Yes; moreover, TFA seems to say as much, although it could be clearer.
When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives. [emphasis added]
Can someone clarify what "Kindle archives" means in this context? Because I can't find one word in the article that says the book was deleted from any customer's local storage.
I don't mean to defend the decision to censor by any means, and this is still downright dishonest if the customers had a reasonable expectation that Amazon would go on providing their books for re-download perpetually. (I'm sure the fine print absolves Amazon of any legal responsibilities to keep hosting the books; as for refunds, I don't know.) But it's miles and miles away from deleting books from local storage on customer-owned devices. Unless there are further facts about remote deletions that the linked article omits, the summary is wrong and potentially libelous. Furthermore, if I'm right, Amazon is in fact abiding by (the letter of) the promises they made after the 1984 debacle.
1) Release low-budget, badly-written & directed crappy movie to the public
2) Give it time to be distributed illegally on the internet
3) Find those who have supposedly shared it
4) Sue everybody, but count on only some people paying to settle out of court and collect fines
5) PROFIT!
I can't quite tell if this is meant more as a joke or as well-justified speculation on Uwe Boll's motives. It could well be the truth. Until recently his business model centered around exploiting German tax law to receive money regardless of how badly his movies did. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that he is now doing something similar with American (international, really) copyright law, and maybe even planned for Far Cry to produce profits through copyright damages/settlements before he even released it.
Of course, there are plenty of parties other than the movie's director in play here and I can't really disentangle them all right now, but to deliberately make a movie as a pretense for lawsuits, rather than as art (even badly attempted art), seems so much like an Uwe Boll thing to do that I have to expect he's rubbing his hands and cackling right now.
Agreed. Microsoft may have done a lot to devalue their competitors' products and forcibly create monopolies—embrace-and-extend, "commoditizing protocols" (to borrow a phrase from the Halloween documents)—but at least they have enough of a basic sense of shame to do it in subtle and underhanded ways. I can't imagine any company other than Apple being brazen enough to say, "Dude, you're our competitor. Did you think we were going to let our users get to your content?"
And now this Slashdot story will just increase the traffic, making things even (better|worse) for (national security|Wikileaks). (Congratulations|For shame), Slashdot, you've (protected American lives|disrupted the democratic flow of information). (Nice going|Nice going [sarcastic]).
It has a problem that if you capture an image of something tyrants don't want you to capture, they tend to quietly push a little button on your camera, and open it up, fully illuminating the plastic, causing all the silver hadride to react, and destroying the latent image.
That sounds more like a feature than a bug to me. If you get busted by a tyrannical authority on suspicion of spying, your concern will tend to have more to do with labor camps than lost photographs. If anything, you would want to "accidentally" overexpose your "innocent tourist photos" before any authority figures confiscate them. (Of course, even then you can only hope that they decide you're not worth the trouble of punishing without evidence, but that goes with the territory.)
if the bot's performance is the sum total of the director's intent, they will suck.
directors prefer certain actors over others because of what they bring and how they interpret the material.
a director that is under the illusion of having complete control is a nightmare to work with, and they produce crap....that said, this robot's giving better performances than some i've seen.
Playing devil's advocate for a minute... what if the crap from control-freak directors happens only because they are attempting the impossible task of executing their vision through a human actor? What if you had a director with a complete and vivid image for how he wanted a role played, down to the last detail, and the technological wherewithal to implement that vision without needing to harangue a human actor into doing it for him? If you beat the uncanny valley, maybe it wouldn't suck. In fact, the creative process I just described is essentially animation, but with tangible robotic models (a necessity for stage productions) instead of pictures.
Also, consider that in some of the best movies out there—Citizen Kane, for example, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is a personal favorite of mine—the director and the lead actor are the same person. This, in a manner of speaking, allows the director to direct the actor without a barrier of interpersonal communication. I find it interesting that it has that in common with a director programming a robotic actor. This technology will have to do a hell of a lot of maturing before any of this is useful in practice and the first several dozen productions to seriously attempt it will probably be nothing but crackpots, but it's food for thought.
You beat me to the punch on this reply, but since I had already typed up some back-of-the-envelope calculations, here they are.
World of Warcraft has around 12 million subscribers according to Wikipedia. The past couple of months it's been pushing out updates in anticipation of the Cataclysm expansion. Let's round the size of those updates to 5GB (although they may well be closer to 6GB by now). Perhaps not every subscriber is actively playing and has downloaded those updates, but they'll be outweighed by the active players with two copies of the client software (desktop and laptop, or work and home), so let's underestimate the number of updated client programs as 12 million.
You can divide World of Warcraft players roughly into two categories: the majority who let the game client automatically update itself using the BitTorrent protocol; and the minority who prefer to manage their patch downloads manually using BitTorrent. The set of players who pay enough attention to download their patches manually but choose FTP over the more convenient BitTorrent is minuscule. So we can safely estimate the portion of patch downloads that use a P2P protocol as 100%.
12 million subscribers times 5GB per subscriber is 60 million gigabytes of legitimate P2P throughput. And that's just getting ready for Cataclysm this autumn. There must have been several hundred million gigabytes more with the last two expansions and over the life of the game, to say nothing of Starcraft II (huge pre-loads of the entire client!) or other game companies than Blizzard (gasp!).
So, indeed, 60 million gigabytes != all but "almost every single byte of it". Even if piracy does account for a lot, even a majority, of P2P traffic, it does have a nontrivial legitimate usage that Internet users have a right to.
For example, when I do really really detailed graphical work in GIMP
He can't use his hand, you insensitive clod!
Man, I love F/OSS and I'm grateful for it, but I have to admit that the common opinion that it can't market itself properly really does ring true sometimes. The name "GIMP" is the epitome of this. Here's how I always imagined the meeting went:
Project Coder: Good news, we're ready to ship the new F/OSS replacement for Photoshop. Project Leader: Great! Did you decide on a name? Project Coder: We're calling it "CRIP", the Computing Resource for Images and Pictures. Project Leader: Hmm... that's pretty good; I like how it's offensive to the disabled... but do you think you could add some overtones of gay S&M?
Slashdot Mirror
Dennis Frailey makes a distinction between CS research and applied CS: 'For too long, we have taught computer science as an academic discipline (as though all of our students will go on to get PhDs and then become CS faculty members) even though for most of us, our students are overwhelmingly seeking careers in which they apply computer science.'
I get that the extent of math necessary in computer science is an open question and I won't pretend to have an answer to it, but challenging the presence of math, and the academic approach in general, in a university setting bothers me. Of course computer science ought to be taught as an academic discipline in an academic setting. Who cares if students will use it in their careers? The whole point of a university is to study academic disciplines—maybe you intend to apply them and maybe you don't, but either way they are considered worthy of pursuit for their own sake. And that goes not just for computer science (assuming that's your major) but for math, science, and humanities as well.
If you just want to get a job as a programmer without learning all that theoretical stuff, skip the university altogether and just buy a book, or go study at a technical college. Now, you might have a really hard time getting hired without that bachelor's degree, and that does indeed suck, but that's the fault of the labor economy—it's not fair to ask universities to change their philosophy to accommodate corporate culture.
Yes, you own your PS3. No, you don't own PSN.
But Sony did sell us a PS3 with advertised features of both (1) access to PSN and (2) the ability to install other OSes and, on those OSes, run whatever software we want. They then forced us to choose at most one of those after they had already collected their money. Their EULA witchcraft will be tested in court to see if they had a legal right to do this, but nothing can make it fair.
Sony locks down PSN access because it keeps PSN secure from exploitation, which would degrade the experience of those who do not exploit on PSN. If Sony didn't ban cracked PS3's from PSN, and my gaming experience was affected by active exploits, you can bet I'd be screaming for George Hotz's head on a platter, your homebrew be damned.
Perhaps a more noble rationale than "OMG teh p1rates!", but it still doesn't excuse sabotaging bought-and-paid-for functionality. If they needed to lock down the console in order to keep their gaming network fun, they should have thought about that, and disclosed it, before they sold it to me. What you're talking about is a technical solution to a social problem, and those work badly enough when they aren't immoral.
I agree that the videos themselves are rather boring to watch, except in some instances when they're paired with fun music or interesting commentary, and that people need to make it clear that they're tool-assisted. (As long as I'm griping, I also hate the totally unnecessary neologism "speedrun" when the phrase "speed run" would have sufficed, and even that is annoyingly redundant. [End semantics Nazi rant.])
But I think it's weird to suggest that they're somehow illegitimate, just because they run on different rules of a fan community's invention. It's irrelevant to observe that it's like cheating at the game, since when you're creating a TAS, you're not playing the game, you're creating a TAS. They're two different activities, so of course the rules are different. Complaining about a TAS in comparison to a human-performed speedrun^Wspeed run is like saying it's stupid for an engineer to sit around all day designing a race car because you'd rather watch a real person doing a 100-meter dash.
Let's look at your golf example. Imagine someone practiced the same golf shot thousands of times, until they could unambiguously describe, down to the slightest twitch of muscle fiber, how the most perfect possible swing would be executed by the human body. Don't you think that would be a technically impressive feat, if not entertaining in the same way as a sport, even if no human being could actually execute those instructions? I would think on Slashdot that kind of high-precision, insanely specialized, and ultimately purposeless problem-solving would get a little more geeky respect. (And incidentally, I've never done or even wanted to do a TAS in my life. It sounds infuriatingly tedious. But as I explained, I geekily respect the activity.)
I'm not sure how much that relates your intended point, so I'll close by reiterating that, yes, despite the above, the videos are indeed pretty damned boring to watch. But at least this sort of thing can be pretty funny. :)
Fast non-volatile memory tech to replace RAM and HD is always 10 years away.
It's called FLASH memory and it exists now.
Flash memory can't replace RAM and hard drives because it will die after a limited number of read/writes. Semantically nitpicking, that's true of RAM and hard drives too, but the number is prohibitively small with flash memory.
This isn't specific to smartphones, but my least favorite thing about autocorrect is how it's obliterated everyone's ability to put a proper apostophe at the beginning of a word. When an apostrophe shows omitted letters at the beginning of a word, as in 'cause (short for because) or a year shortened to two digits, it's supposed to be a regular apostrophe that (if it isn't just vertically straight, like the ASCII character) looks like a closing single quotation mark. You know, ’. But because Microsoft Word—and, probably because of Microsoft's example, every other damned word processor, including Open/LibreOffice—automatically renders any stroke of the apostrophe key at the beginning of a word as an opening single quotation mark (‘), that's how everything ends up typed, even when the character isn't supposed to be a quotation mark at all.
I admit that there's no elegant way for software to orient those characters correctly every time without bothering the user, but at least professional typographers should know better, and I keep seeing cases where they don't! People must already be assuming that the mark is supposed to get turned around whenever it's at the front of a word, whether it's supposed to be a quotation mark or an apostrophe, because that's how my computer does it and, hey, it can't be wrong. I fear that the correct usage is either going to get hopelessly obscured or (shudder) superseded by some "widely accepted usage" thing.
I think the "sic" referred to the phrase "another nuclear" war, as no first nuclear war has ever occurred. (Unless you want to count World War II, but I generally understand the phrase as referring to a war in which both sides use nukes, and as the main means of combat.)
You bring up limitations on the Fourth Amendment, and in spite of your facetiousness, there are limitations on it. Hell, there are even limitations on arguably the most cherished of the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech. (Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and all that.) Likewise, I think it's pretty damn stupid to expect there not to be reasonable limitations on the Second Amendment.
I get that, and I don't intend to start an argument about the reasonableness of any particular limitation on the Second Amendment or on the need for accountability. My point was more about how comfortable everyone is with those limitations being made by ordinary legislation and policy-making when they wouldn't tolerate any other part of the Bill of Rights being curtailed in the same way. To wit:
I don't have a problem with the right to bear arms, as long as 1) some kind of training is required in order to get licensed to do so, and 2) said firearms are registered and licensed.
The definition of a license is permission to do something that, but for the license, would be prohibited. But the Second Amendment specifically makes gun ownership non-prohibited, taking precedence over any other laws. The notion of needing a license to do something you already have the right to do is contradictory. Surely you would balk at the idea of a "free speech license" being required, let alone the suggestion that you would still have the right to free speech since, hey, you just need to get the license and you're good to go.
Now, maybe you think that gun ownership ought to be as unrestricted as free speech and maybe you don't. But either way, it doesn't change the fact that both of those rights are guaranteed at precisely the same level of law and with equally broad language. Although no curtailment on free speech rights is really possible except in the form of a Supreme Court decision, as in the yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater case, no one complains when state legislatures invent all sorts of their own limitations and restrictions on firearms ownership. (I'll admit my own ignorance on the Supreme Court jurisprudence at work here, but it suffices to say that it rubs me the wrong way as someone who values his civil liberties.)
Which brings me back to my original point about how the right to bear arms was infringed in the same way as all these post-9/11 infringements. The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to guarantee those rights even in the face of government interference, and every little exception or prerequisite, even if they protect human life, makes it less of a guarantee.
Then just like you have to with a car, you must prove that you can use them responsibly. Just like you have to with a car, you should register them.
Sorry to end on a mostly irrelevant nitpick, but it is completely legal to own and use a car without being a licensed driver or registering it. Those are just requirements for driving it on public roads. I know there's an analogous safety issue between cars and guns that you're going for, but since you don't have to use publicly maintained resources to own a gun (as long as you don't commit any crimes with it), I think the analogy kind of breaks down.
I appreciate your reply. Although we disagree, you've obviously given this some intelligent and reasonable thought.
Since you mentioned ammo, it bears mentioning that U.S. citizens got very comfortable with the government making little exceptions to the Second Amendment decades before they started doing it to the Fourth Amendment in earnest. I'm not trying to troll or go off-topic here—I bring this up as a matter of constitutional rights and not gun rights as such. But imagine if other constitutional rights were treated the same way many voters are content to let the government treat our Second Amendment rights:
Gun license applications – "You can have your blog as soon as you fill out a form and have a five-day waiting period first. You know, to give you time to 'cool off' before you publish anything rash."
Concealed carry laws – "Free speech doesn't mean free private speech. You've got to let everyone listen in, in case you're saying something treasonous."
The Assault Weapons Ban – "Websites can reach for too many people too quickly for a civilian. Surely the framers of the constitution meant for the First Amendment to apply only to the publishing technology of the day: books and newspapers and such."
People often claim that the erosion of the Bill of Rights was started by 9/11, but it was also caused by a much more mundane kind of fear, much earlier than that.
It's mostly known as an insightful critique of what's wrong with K-12 math education, but I've always liked it as an explanation of why people who enjoy math do it in the first place: it's satisfying in an artistic way.
Good for you, but for the rest of us, (aka people who don't enjoy or care about math that much) I'm afraid it's merely so much futility and frustration!
True, but the remainder of the Lockhart article addresses that. To paraphrase, students take to math class with a lot less friction if they understand that math at least can be satisfying. Plenty of students dislike their high school art classes too, but they can at least sit through them understanding why certain other people think it's pleasant and important—and therefore not futile, even if it is frustrating. By contrast, too many high school students are ready to dismiss math as something that other people use for techie things but will never to themselves be of any value, intrinsic or otherwise, other than as a prerequisite for college. (And they're mostly right because of the way those classes are taught, but that's a separate complaint.)
The point that seems to be lost here for so many people who talk this way about Math is that in the end anything is an "art" for higher end professionals and enthusiasts of a particular field of study.
The Lockhart article actually does address the issue of making that side of math apparent to novices and laypeople, and makes a pretty persuasive argument that it is possible (if beyond the capabilities of most public school classrooms).
Let us remember the (slightly paraphrased) immortal writings of Dave Barry on this subject, "One man's vision of art is another man's view of an insanely overpriced "modern art piece" that looks suspiciously similar to the rusted remains of a helicopter crash!"
Dave Barry is awesome. :)
I've seen the following link in many a Slashdot thread before, but it certainly bears repeating here: "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart It's mostly known as an insightful critique of what's wrong with K-12 math education, but I've always liked it as an explanation of why people who enjoy math do it in the first place: it's satisfying in an artistic way. I think it would be great if more students saw math as something worth doing for its own sake, like art or athletics, and hey, it lets you do science and engineering too.
In fact, this summary sounds similar enough to "Lament" that I wouldn't be surprised if this Dr. Lewis was inspired by and/or cited it. But this is Slashdot, so I'll let someone else check that out.
It's an intersection of right-wing economic thought, which many of us around Slashdot approve of,
Huh? I'd be shocked if more than 20% of SlashDot subscribed to right wing economic thought. Did you just come back on after being away for 10 years?
20% is pretty many. I didn't say "most".
It's an intersection of right-wing economic thought, which many of us around Slashdot approve of, with right-wing willful ignorance, which none of us except the trolls approve of. It's tough finding friends in two-party American politics when you're a libertarian.
I'd be more sympathetic if the law actually stated that if a prosecutor violates any procedure in court, intentionally or unintentionally, all charges are dropped with prejudice (meaning they can never be refiled).
But then what happens when a corrupt prosecutor is paid off by a guilty defendant to deliberately violate a procedure? Under your suggestion, the defendant would have bought himself immunity from prosecution forever. What needs to happen in that case is a regular mistrial, with the D.A. having the option to retry with a more honest prosecutor—or, even if the D.A. doesn't suspect anything, a more competent one.
They didn't even limit their questions to objectively provable facts.
Just to give one example: Has the US "lost jobs" or "gained jobs"?
Oh yeah, it gets worse than that:
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
'Cause... that's not subjective at all.
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
"Study shows that Fox News viewers pitifully lack our oracular abilities."
And the article in the first link, the AlterNet one, gleefully engages in even worse correlation-causation trolling than the Slashdot headline:
The body of evidence that Fox News is nothing but a propaganda machine dedicated to lies is growing by the day. [...] In eight of the nine questions below, Fox News placed first in the percentage of those who were misinformed (they placed second in the question on TARP). That’s a pretty high batting average for journalistic fraud. [...] The conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason.
This goes beyond bad reporting on science. Even if Fox News really is biased, the notion that this survey proves it scientifically is just a snide partisan fantasy.
And no, I don't like Fox News.
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
Yes. And from the research I did into this story yesterday, they haven't in this case. What they have done is removed the files from their servers, so you can no longer redownload them for a new device (and as this service is included in the price of an amazon e-book, you are therefore entitled to a refund if you bought any of the books that have been removed).
Yes; moreover, TFA seems to say as much, although it could be clearer.
When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives. [emphasis added]
Can someone clarify what "Kindle archives" means in this context? Because I can't find one word in the article that says the book was deleted from any customer's local storage.
I don't mean to defend the decision to censor by any means, and this is still downright dishonest if the customers had a reasonable expectation that Amazon would go on providing their books for re-download perpetually. (I'm sure the fine print absolves Amazon of any legal responsibilities to keep hosting the books; as for refunds, I don't know.) But it's miles and miles away from deleting books from local storage on customer-owned devices. Unless there are further facts about remote deletions that the linked article omits, the summary is wrong and potentially libelous. Furthermore, if I'm right, Amazon is in fact abiding by (the letter of) the promises they made after the 1984 debacle.
1) Release low-budget, badly-written & directed crappy movie to the public 2) Give it time to be distributed illegally on the internet 3) Find those who have supposedly shared it 4) Sue everybody, but count on only some people paying to settle out of court and collect fines 5) PROFIT!
I can't quite tell if this is meant more as a joke or as well-justified speculation on Uwe Boll's motives. It could well be the truth. Until recently his business model centered around exploiting German tax law to receive money regardless of how badly his movies did. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that he is now doing something similar with American (international, really) copyright law, and maybe even planned for Far Cry to produce profits through copyright damages/settlements before he even released it.
Of course, there are plenty of parties other than the movie's director in play here and I can't really disentangle them all right now, but to deliberately make a movie as a pretense for lawsuits, rather than as art (even badly attempted art), seems so much like an Uwe Boll thing to do that I have to expect he's rubbing his hands and cackling right now.
Agreed. Microsoft may have done a lot to devalue their competitors' products and forcibly create monopolies—embrace-and-extend, "commoditizing protocols" (to borrow a phrase from the Halloween documents)—but at least they have enough of a basic sense of shame to do it in subtle and underhanded ways. I can't imagine any company other than Apple being brazen enough to say, "Dude, you're our competitor. Did you think we were going to let our users get to your content?"
And now this Slashdot story will just increase the traffic, making things even (better|worse) for (national security|Wikileaks). (Congratulations|For shame), Slashdot, you've (protected American lives|disrupted the democratic flow of information). (Nice going|Nice going [sarcastic]).
The project is called 'Bioencryption,' and their presentation (as a PDF file) is here.
As a PDF file, as opposed to as a bacterial culture, right?
It has a problem that if you capture an image of something tyrants don't want you to capture, they tend to quietly push a little button on your camera, and open it up, fully illuminating the plastic, causing all the silver hadride to react, and destroying the latent image.
That sounds more like a feature than a bug to me. If you get busted by a tyrannical authority on suspicion of spying, your concern will tend to have more to do with labor camps than lost photographs. If anything, you would want to "accidentally" overexpose your "innocent tourist photos" before any authority figures confiscate them. (Of course, even then you can only hope that they decide you're not worth the trouble of punishing without evidence, but that goes with the territory.)
You really expect him to hand-encode his URLs? Shouldn't Slashdot be able to handle that?
Hand-encode? Of course not! It's a trivial scripting problem. Here's a Python 3 function that does it in one line.
def percent_encode(url): return ''.join([c if ' ' < c <= '~' else '%{0:0>2X}'.format(ord(c)) for c in url])
Okay, yes, that's completely missing your point, but I thought it was geeky enough to post anyway.
if the bot's performance is the sum total of the director's intent, they will suck.
directors prefer certain actors over others because of what they bring and how they interpret the material.
a director that is under the illusion of having complete control is a nightmare to work with, and they produce crap. ...that said, this robot's giving better performances than some i've seen.
Playing devil's advocate for a minute... what if the crap from control-freak directors happens only because they are attempting the impossible task of executing their vision through a human actor? What if you had a director with a complete and vivid image for how he wanted a role played, down to the last detail, and the technological wherewithal to implement that vision without needing to harangue a human actor into doing it for him? If you beat the uncanny valley, maybe it wouldn't suck. In fact, the creative process I just described is essentially animation, but with tangible robotic models (a necessity for stage productions) instead of pictures.
Also, consider that in some of the best movies out there—Citizen Kane, for example, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is a personal favorite of mine—the director and the lead actor are the same person. This, in a manner of speaking, allows the director to direct the actor without a barrier of interpersonal communication. I find it interesting that it has that in common with a director programming a robotic actor. This technology will have to do a hell of a lot of maturing before any of this is useful in practice and the first several dozen productions to seriously attempt it will probably be nothing but crackpots, but it's food for thought.
You beat me to the punch on this reply, but since I had already typed up some back-of-the-envelope calculations, here they are.
World of Warcraft has around 12 million subscribers according to Wikipedia. The past couple of months it's been pushing out updates in anticipation of the Cataclysm expansion. Let's round the size of those updates to 5GB (although they may well be closer to 6GB by now). Perhaps not every subscriber is actively playing and has downloaded those updates, but they'll be outweighed by the active players with two copies of the client software (desktop and laptop, or work and home), so let's underestimate the number of updated client programs as 12 million.
You can divide World of Warcraft players roughly into two categories: the majority who let the game client automatically update itself using the BitTorrent protocol; and the minority who prefer to manage their patch downloads manually using BitTorrent. The set of players who pay enough attention to download their patches manually but choose FTP over the more convenient BitTorrent is minuscule. So we can safely estimate the portion of patch downloads that use a P2P protocol as 100%.
12 million subscribers times 5GB per subscriber is 60 million gigabytes of legitimate P2P throughput. And that's just getting ready for Cataclysm this autumn. There must have been several hundred million gigabytes more with the last two expansions and over the life of the game, to say nothing of Starcraft II (huge pre-loads of the entire client!) or other game companies than Blizzard (gasp!).
So, indeed, 60 million gigabytes != all but "almost every single byte of it". Even if piracy does account for a lot, even a majority, of P2P traffic, it does have a nontrivial legitimate usage that Internet users have a right to.
He can't use his hand, you insensitive clod!
Man, I love F/OSS and I'm grateful for it, but I have to admit that the common opinion that it can't market itself properly really does ring true sometimes. The name "GIMP" is the epitome of this. Here's how I always imagined the meeting went:
Project Coder: Good news, we're ready to ship the new F/OSS replacement for Photoshop.
Project Leader: Great! Did you decide on a name?
Project Coder: We're calling it "CRIP", the Computing Resource for Images and Pictures.
Project Leader: Hmm... that's pretty good; I like how it's offensive to the disabled... but do you think you could add some overtones of gay S&M?
First impressions count, people.
That, and good, old-fashioned buffer overruns and things of that sort.