One of the goals is to ensure licensing and monetization for developers
Considering how badly Microsoft has hampered open standards and locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software in the past, how bad will it be now that they are, presumably, trying to beat Apple at their own game of a walled-garden app store? And on the desktop no less?
why do people work for Raytheon? What sequence of moral thoughts goes through their heads?
Because they're also producing agricultural tools perhaps? Say it's for the money if you want, but results are results.
Okay, so the agricultural application is a recent development. And the military-industrial complex is full of greed. But if your question is whether anyone at all can work for a defense contractor with a clear conscience, there are—believe it or not—still people who hold onto the hope that the American military is in fact capable of bringing about more freedom and democracy in the world, no matter how poorly it may have been used recently. Just because you don't see it that way doesn't make them wrong. Not to mention, there are also people with enough knowledge of history to understand that, even if defending our home soil from invasion by a conventional foreign military is a farfetched idea right now, the only reason it stays that way is because our military is so damned powerful.
("To turns swords into ploughshares" is cynical nonsense, of course - why really? Is it just the money?)
Attempting to metaphorically turn swords to plowshares is uncynical, almost by definition. Or are you saying they're disingenuous when they say that?
That's interesting, but I'll really be interested when they invent a motor sport where the cars are driven remotely. I'm thinking of kind of a virtual reality rig where the controls simulate being inside the car. No one would go for this in the present types of auto racing even if it were allowed, since they would have a disadvantage even if the technology advanced considerably: the driver would lack certain kinds of information from sound and touch, not to mention signal lag.
But imagine if there were a separate motor sport where everyone drives that way. Not only would the technology itself be cool, but think of how much more riskily they could drive without any danger to human life. It's my understanding that drivers are always trying to push the envelope that way anyway (and the rules have to be revised to push back in the direction of safety), so presumably it would expand the sport with different machinery and perhaps new techniques that would be too dangerous otherwise. And the crash-happy spectators would certainly like it, and might feel less like ghouls for enjoying the spectacular destruction of machinery without the uncomfortable reality that there's a human being in there. (Or is that the appeal? I don't know.)
Also, we need to build military vehicles that work the same way. On the ground, that is—Predator drones already kick ass.
The threshold of irresponsibility or incompetence that is necessary for the average user's Windows box to get infected is quite low, even nil at times. A walled garden "which limits Internet access" seems to me like it would work out to be a limitation on free speech in practice, since both the structure of the Internet and the nature of malware depend on the computer's ability to upload arbitrary bytes.
Someone who knows more about network infrastructure than I do could probably explain whether and how the walled garden approach could still allow the computer's owner to communicate however they wished over the Internet. But in my opinion a government-approved whitelist of protocols or websites (if that is indeed how it would work) does not cut it for First Amendment purposes.
No, that pretty much has the same problem. Who gets to decide what is "kid-friendly" enough to go in.kids and what isn't?
That's not even the biggest problem. Someone will inevitably put unarguably offensive material on the kid TLD. (Out of greed, trolling, whatever.) The shrill pro-censorship types, frustrated and indignant that their opt-in system didn't work out so hot, will just be encouraged to call for more regulation by government authorities—of the kid TLD or, hopefully not, the entire Internet.
Because those were AWESOME shows, and are now still GOOD shows, still some hillarious gags all around. And I'm not one of those to say "Worst episode EVER!!" and then watch again next week. I'm perhaps a die hard fan, but waging wars over cartoons is plain stupid.
Agreed.
IMHO, humor quality dropped a bit (movies included), but I'm still watching it. Same with the Simpsons - many old school fans are dissapointed a lot.
The good news (everyone!) about this is that both Futurama and The Simpsons can be much less funny than they were at the peak and still be much funnier than the median for comedies on TV. I admit that I don't watch The Simpsons as habitually as I used to, but I still catch episodes on Hulu now and then and, even though recent episodes compare poorly to the best ones, I'm entertained and glad the show is still being made. Angry fanboys are missing out.
I'm confident that the new Futurama episodes will be at least that good.
ISPs would have to: require all subscribers to install anti-virus software and firewalls before the Internet connection is activated
It seems to me like this is a strange requirement. I couldn't tell you the last time I actually went to a brick-and-mortar store and bought an antivirus product. And what about lesser-known or free antivirus solutions?
Indeed. And how do they define the threshold of effectiveness and necessity of "anti-virus software"? Will the nine-year-old copy of Norton that originally came with the dusty old PC that I just plugged in suffice? And what do I need to put on this highly secure Linux distribution I just installed? If I write my own operating system from scratch, do I need to wait until someone releases an anti-virus product for it before I can legally connect it to the Internet? Can I write my own anti-virus software from scratch, and if so, how much does it actually have to, you know, do in order to be considered such? And who determines whether it even does it correctly? Is there going to be some kind of review board for this?
Sometimes I think politicians aren't aware of how many questions they create.
I never said that brevity was a necessary condition for vapidity, nor that it is usually a bad thing at all. But the format of Twitter (and Facebook as well) seems to encourage vapidity for average people (i.e., not professional writers) when they write about themselves. I like hearing from my friends about their lives, but I prefer longer letters and emails over spontaneous, one-sentence bursts of thought. Call me old-fashioned, I guess?
It seems a bit unfortunate that a medium can get so closely associated with the type of content that typically appears on it, and engineers in particular should probably be able to distinguish what's typical on the medium versus what it's actually capable of.
A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit. When I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was an awesome idea—and I still think so, in the context of the problem it was trying to solve—a blog you could post to over SMS. A novel and useful idea. But now with Web-capable smartphones that can and do post arbitrarily long messages to Facebook and such, the character limit just serves to dictate that all posts be short, which in most cases also makes them vapid. The form now dictates the function and that's why Twitter should annoy engineers.
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. [...] Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive.
This is the problem in a nutshell. The notion that leads people to call for universal health care is intuitively moral: that every human being deserves the best medical care possible, even if they can't pay for it. It seems cruel to deny that. But medical care is some of the most expensive labor in the world. And justly so: pharmaceutical patent abuse aside, doctors and nurses deserve to be paid a bundle for how long they have to study to get certified and for what a general pain in the ass their job is. So to say that every human being should be provided with ample attention from doctors, at the government's expense if necessary, is akin to campaigning for a universal supply of platinum bars.
I get that the speaker isn't necessarily speaking as though socialized medicine is the only answer, but he seems to implicitly acknowledge that the government is the only one who will pay doctors to care for poor people. Even if you don't oppose such a thing on political grounds, the money just plain isn't there. I can't really suggest a solution except to keep science and technology marching along and hope that medicine eventually starts getting cheaper when the remedies we invent finally start outpacing the diseases we discover.
Maybe Firefly didn't capture enough audience to pay for the production costs *plus* distribution costs *plus* desired profit? Likely there was another show (dancing with stars? blech!) that was shown to make more money in that same 1 hour slot? I dunno.
The whole problem with is that not all audiences captured are of equal value any more, and studios are just now starting to learn it. One viewer that really loves Firefly and will buy the DVDs is worth more revenue than a viewer who kills an evening watching Dancing with the Stars because they're bored and then forgets about it forever. Unfortunately, the studio executives who killed Firefly didn't grasp this.
I think they're starting to learn, though. I take the success of Lost as evidence—ABC knew that Lost's viewers really loved the show and would be buying DVDs later on. Lost got a lot of accommodation in the shooting schedule and such that most other shows wouldn't have, probably for this reason.
Even so, it seems strange that TV broadcasts should still be important at all. Works that, we now know, will live on indefinitely as part of popular culture are having their budgets and running schedules decided mostly by one broadcast at one time, and fans that watch on the Internet—which many do exclusively—or buy DVD sets months later experience the consequences. Whether its replacement is Hulu or made-for-torrents series, that system will have to go.
Set the drop to be too short, and they guy's neck doesn't break and you have to wait 15 minutes while he chokes to death - not pretty.
Set the drop too long and the head pops off. Better for the guy dieing, as he doesn't suffer nearly as long (a couple minutes until brain death, but as the spine is severed he likely feels nothing). However that's not exactly a dignified death.
It wouldn't be that tricky today. Back in the late 19th century, they computed tables of lengths, according to body weight, that the condemned should fall in order to produce a quick death by a broken neck without decapitating them. Such tables were regularly used through the mid-20th century without much incident, so I would have to imagine they were pretty effective.
So if hanging were hypothetically reduced today, it would probably be pretty clean and dignified, especially with even more modern science and materials behind it. Of course, one gruesome mishap would probably be too many for PR purposes. I guess with lethal injection, the screw-ups aren't visible.
Fair enough, and thanks for the information. But my point is that IRV has the advantage of being an easier sell to a change-averse public. And while it may not really help third-party candidates get elected in practice, it would give them more publicity and relevance than they have now, and would fight the "wasted vote" effect. That is, supporters could vote for them without wasting a vote that otherwise could have helped to elect the preferable of two major candidates (at least in the typical case—Arrow's impossibility theorem, blah blah blah).
It really is unfortunate that STV, proportional or otherwise, hasn't caught on more. You can sell instant-runoff voting in three sentences: "You can vote the new way or continue voting the old way. To vote the new way, number the candidates from 1 to n in your order of preference. To vote the old way, mark the candidate you want to vote for as 1 and leave the rest blank." There's really no disadvantage to it... except that it would give third parties a foothold against the entrenched two-party system, so why would any politician in power bother to support it? (Sorry to sound so cynical, on Slashdot no less.)
Sadly, the notion that right-versus-left is American politics is getting more entrenched as well. The voters in my home state of California unfortunately just passed a ballot measure that will allow only two candidates on the ballot for any state general election. So long, third parties. Granted, most voters were probably taken in by the promise of open primaries, which was wrapped up in the same proposition and dominated the discussion. But that's just what was so outrageous about it: no one bothers to think that politics can be more subtle than Democrats versus Republicans.
I believe the news here is that the technology is pragmatically usable (a potato battery used outside of an elementary school classroom? That's news) and in a way that's more economical than equivalent sources. From TFA:
Cost analyses showed that the treated potato battery generates energy, which is five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells, respectively. The clean light powered by this green battery is also at least 6 times more economical than kerosene lamps often used in the developing world.
Desktops last and are cheap to repair
on
Flight of the Desktops
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It will still be many years before laptops are as durable and easy to repair as desktop computers are. Laptops are built with everything crammed close together on the inside. Even a small kinetic shock can damage a part, as can minor overheating from a ventilation problem. Repairing them yourself is quite risky unless you're a hardcore hardware geek, and expensive if you have a pro do it.
Desktops, conversely, have lots of empty space on the inside; they are easy to open up and reach into if you want to swap parts around or clean dust. (At least, the ones I've had are. I can't speak for Macs.) I've had the same desktop computer for six years. It's suffered a dead graphics card, a dead sound card, and a dust-choked fan that caused a CPU overheat. I repaired each of those problems in no more than a few hours each, and gave it a RAM upgrade too. I love my laptops too, but there's no replacement for having a machine you can safely upgrade yourself and won't break by dropping six inches. Laptops may outsell desktops but they won't drive them out of the market completely—at least, they'd better damn well not.
Is there something people want to run besides Linux?
And is anyone unable to run Linux?
No, seriously. Install VirtualBox on your Windows system or whatever, throw Xubuntu on a virtual machine, do whatever you want. The software doesn't cost a dime, you can do it with the hardware you have, and it's not even that difficult for a person of moderate geekiness. Okay, so it takes a lot of hard drive space, but gone are the days when you need to go drop a few hundred dollars on another computer or futz around with dual-booting and accidentally trash your MBR if you want a Linux system in addition to your current setup.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the goals is to ensure licensing and monetization for developers
Considering how badly Microsoft has hampered open standards and locked down their operating system for the sake of "monetizing" software in the past, how bad will it be now that they are, presumably, trying to beat Apple at their own game of a walled-garden app store? And on the desktop no less?
What I want to know is, how does the frost feel pain, and should we be concerned about humane alternatives?
why do people work for Raytheon? What sequence of moral thoughts goes through their heads?
Because they're also producing agricultural tools perhaps? Say it's for the money if you want, but results are results.
Okay, so the agricultural application is a recent development. And the military-industrial complex is full of greed. But if your question is whether anyone at all can work for a defense contractor with a clear conscience, there are—believe it or not—still people who hold onto the hope that the American military is in fact capable of bringing about more freedom and democracy in the world, no matter how poorly it may have been used recently. Just because you don't see it that way doesn't make them wrong. Not to mention, there are also people with enough knowledge of history to understand that, even if defending our home soil from invasion by a conventional foreign military is a farfetched idea right now, the only reason it stays that way is because our military is so damned powerful.
("To turns swords into ploughshares" is cynical nonsense, of course - why really? Is it just the money?)
Attempting to metaphorically turn swords to plowshares is uncynical, almost by definition. Or are you saying they're disingenuous when they say that?
That's interesting, but I'll really be interested when they invent a motor sport where the cars are driven remotely. I'm thinking of kind of a virtual reality rig where the controls simulate being inside the car. No one would go for this in the present types of auto racing even if it were allowed, since they would have a disadvantage even if the technology advanced considerably: the driver would lack certain kinds of information from sound and touch, not to mention signal lag.
But imagine if there were a separate motor sport where everyone drives that way. Not only would the technology itself be cool, but think of how much more riskily they could drive without any danger to human life. It's my understanding that drivers are always trying to push the envelope that way anyway (and the rules have to be revised to push back in the direction of safety), so presumably it would expand the sport with different machinery and perhaps new techniques that would be too dangerous otherwise. And the crash-happy spectators would certainly like it, and might feel less like ghouls for enjoying the spectacular destruction of machinery without the uncomfortable reality that there's a human being in there. (Or is that the appeal? I don't know.)
Also, we need to build military vehicles that work the same way. On the ground, that is—Predator drones already kick ass.
The threshold of irresponsibility or incompetence that is necessary for the average user's Windows box to get infected is quite low, even nil at times. A walled garden "which limits Internet access" seems to me like it would work out to be a limitation on free speech in practice, since both the structure of the Internet and the nature of malware depend on the computer's ability to upload arbitrary bytes.
Someone who knows more about network infrastructure than I do could probably explain whether and how the walled garden approach could still allow the computer's owner to communicate however they wished over the Internet. But in my opinion a government-approved whitelist of protocols or websites (if that is indeed how it would work) does not cut it for First Amendment purposes.
No, that pretty much has the same problem. Who gets to decide what is "kid-friendly" enough to go in .kids and what isn't?
That's not even the biggest problem. Someone will inevitably put unarguably offensive material on the kid TLD. (Out of greed, trolling, whatever.) The shrill pro-censorship types, frustrated and indignant that their opt-in system didn't work out so hot, will just be encouraged to call for more regulation by government authorities—of the kid TLD or, hopefully not, the entire Internet.
Because those were AWESOME shows, and are now still GOOD shows, still some hillarious gags all around. And I'm not one of those to say "Worst episode EVER!!" and then watch again next week. I'm perhaps a die hard fan, but waging wars over cartoons is plain stupid.
Agreed.
IMHO, humor quality dropped a bit (movies included), but I'm still watching it. Same with the Simpsons - many old school fans are dissapointed a lot.
The good news (everyone!) about this is that both Futurama and The Simpsons can be much less funny than they were at the peak and still be much funnier than the median for comedies on TV. I admit that I don't watch The Simpsons as habitually as I used to, but I still catch episodes on Hulu now and then and, even though recent episodes compare poorly to the best ones, I'm entertained and glad the show is still being made. Angry fanboys are missing out.
I'm confident that the new Futurama episodes will be at least that good.
ISPs would have to: require all subscribers to install anti-virus software and firewalls before the Internet connection is activated
It seems to me like this is a strange requirement. I couldn't tell you the last time I actually went to a brick-and-mortar store and bought an antivirus product. And what about lesser-known or free antivirus solutions?
Indeed. And how do they define the threshold of effectiveness and necessity of "anti-virus software"? Will the nine-year-old copy of Norton that originally came with the dusty old PC that I just plugged in suffice? And what do I need to put on this highly secure Linux distribution I just installed? If I write my own operating system from scratch, do I need to wait until someone releases an anti-virus product for it before I can legally connect it to the Internet? Can I write my own anti-virus software from scratch, and if so, how much does it actually have to, you know, do in order to be considered such? And who determines whether it even does it correctly? Is there going to be some kind of review board for this?
Sometimes I think politicians aren't aware of how many questions they create.
I never said that brevity was a necessary condition for vapidity, nor that it is usually a bad thing at all. But the format of Twitter (and Facebook as well) seems to encourage vapidity for average people (i.e., not professional writers) when they write about themselves. I like hearing from my friends about their lives, but I prefer longer letters and emails over spontaneous, one-sentence bursts of thought. Call me old-fashioned, I guess?
It seems a bit unfortunate that a medium can get so closely associated with the type of content that typically appears on it, and engineers in particular should probably be able to distinguish what's typical on the medium versus what it's actually capable of.
A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit. When I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was an awesome idea—and I still think so, in the context of the problem it was trying to solve—a blog you could post to over SMS. A novel and useful idea. But now with Web-capable smartphones that can and do post arbitrarily long messages to Facebook and such, the character limit just serves to dictate that all posts be short, which in most cases also makes them vapid. The form now dictates the function and that's why Twitter should annoy engineers.
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. [...] Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive.
This is the problem in a nutshell. The notion that leads people to call for universal health care is intuitively moral: that every human being deserves the best medical care possible, even if they can't pay for it. It seems cruel to deny that. But medical care is some of the most expensive labor in the world. And justly so: pharmaceutical patent abuse aside, doctors and nurses deserve to be paid a bundle for how long they have to study to get certified and for what a general pain in the ass their job is. So to say that every human being should be provided with ample attention from doctors, at the government's expense if necessary, is akin to campaigning for a universal supply of platinum bars.
I get that the speaker isn't necessarily speaking as though socialized medicine is the only answer, but he seems to implicitly acknowledge that the government is the only one who will pay doctors to care for poor people. Even if you don't oppose such a thing on political grounds, the money just plain isn't there. I can't really suggest a solution except to keep science and technology marching along and hope that medicine eventually starts getting cheaper when the remedies we invent finally start outpacing the diseases we discover.
Maybe Firefly didn't capture enough audience to pay for the production costs *plus* distribution costs *plus* desired profit? Likely there was another show (dancing with stars? blech!) that was shown to make more money in that same 1 hour slot? I dunno.
The whole problem with is that not all audiences captured are of equal value any more, and studios are just now starting to learn it. One viewer that really loves Firefly and will buy the DVDs is worth more revenue than a viewer who kills an evening watching Dancing with the Stars because they're bored and then forgets about it forever. Unfortunately, the studio executives who killed Firefly didn't grasp this.
I think they're starting to learn, though. I take the success of Lost as evidence—ABC knew that Lost's viewers really loved the show and would be buying DVDs later on. Lost got a lot of accommodation in the shooting schedule and such that most other shows wouldn't have, probably for this reason.
Even so, it seems strange that TV broadcasts should still be important at all. Works that, we now know, will live on indefinitely as part of popular culture are having their budgets and running schedules decided mostly by one broadcast at one time, and fans that watch on the Internet—which many do exclusively—or buy DVD sets months later experience the consequences. Whether its replacement is Hulu or made-for-torrents series, that system will have to go.
Indeed, hanging is actually very tricky.
Set the drop to be too short, and they guy's neck doesn't break and you have to wait 15 minutes while he chokes to death - not pretty.
Set the drop too long and the head pops off. Better for the guy dieing, as he doesn't suffer nearly as long (a couple minutes until brain death, but as the spine is severed he likely feels nothing). However that's not exactly a dignified death.
It wouldn't be that tricky today. Back in the late 19th century, they computed tables of lengths, according to body weight, that the condemned should fall in order to produce a quick death by a broken neck without decapitating them. Such tables were regularly used through the mid-20th century without much incident, so I would have to imagine they were pretty effective.
So if hanging were hypothetically reduced today, it would probably be pretty clean and dignified, especially with even more modern science and materials behind it. Of course, one gruesome mishap would probably be too many for PR purposes. I guess with lethal injection, the screw-ups aren't visible.
Fair enough, and thanks for the information. But my point is that IRV has the advantage of being an easier sell to a change-averse public. And while it may not really help third-party candidates get elected in practice, it would give them more publicity and relevance than they have now, and would fight the "wasted vote" effect. That is, supporters could vote for them without wasting a vote that otherwise could have helped to elect the preferable of two major candidates (at least in the typical case—Arrow's impossibility theorem, blah blah blah).
It really is unfortunate that STV, proportional or otherwise, hasn't caught on more. You can sell instant-runoff voting in three sentences: "You can vote the new way or continue voting the old way. To vote the new way, number the candidates from 1 to n in your order of preference. To vote the old way, mark the candidate you want to vote for as 1 and leave the rest blank." There's really no disadvantage to it... except that it would give third parties a foothold against the entrenched two-party system, so why would any politician in power bother to support it? (Sorry to sound so cynical, on Slashdot no less.)
Sadly, the notion that right-versus-left is American politics is getting more entrenched as well. The voters in my home state of California unfortunately just passed a ballot measure that will allow only two candidates on the ballot for any state general election. So long, third parties. Granted, most voters were probably taken in by the promise of open primaries, which was wrapped up in the same proposition and dominated the discussion. But that's just what was so outrageous about it: no one bothers to think that politics can be more subtle than Democrats versus Republicans.
Cost analyses showed that the treated potato battery generates energy, which is five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells, respectively. The clean light powered by this green battery is also at least 6 times more economical than kerosene lamps often used in the developing world.
It will still be many years before laptops are as durable and easy to repair as desktop computers are. Laptops are built with everything crammed close together on the inside. Even a small kinetic shock can damage a part, as can minor overheating from a ventilation problem. Repairing them yourself is quite risky unless you're a hardcore hardware geek, and expensive if you have a pro do it.
Desktops, conversely, have lots of empty space on the inside; they are easy to open up and reach into if you want to swap parts around or clean dust. (At least, the ones I've had are. I can't speak for Macs.) I've had the same desktop computer for six years. It's suffered a dead graphics card, a dead sound card, and a dust-choked fan that caused a CPU overheat. I repaired each of those problems in no more than a few hours each, and gave it a RAM upgrade too. I love my laptops too, but there's no replacement for having a machine you can safely upgrade yourself and won't break by dropping six inches. Laptops may outsell desktops but they won't drive them out of the market completely—at least, they'd better damn well not.
...does it run anything besides linux?
Is there something people want to run besides Linux?
And is anyone unable to run Linux?
No, seriously. Install VirtualBox on your Windows system or whatever, throw Xubuntu on a virtual machine, do whatever you want. The software doesn't cost a dime, you can do it with the hardware you have, and it's not even that difficult for a person of moderate geekiness. Okay, so it takes a lot of hard drive space, but gone are the days when you need to go drop a few hundred dollars on another computer or futz around with dual-booting and accidentally trash your MBR if you want a Linux system in addition to your current setup.