> quick, which is bigger, a 5/8 wrench or a 3/4 wrench?
I don't quite understand how there could be any confusion here. 5/8 and 3/4 are just numbers, and it should be quite obvious without much thought that 3/4 is larger.
> I just tried a 5/8 wrench on a bolt and it was slightly too small - quick, what's the next size up to try?
11/16 or 21/32, whichever you've got handy. Are you trying to say you can't count with fractions?
I wonder when Mitsubishi will announce a unified UI for their cars, trucks, locomotives, aircraft, and ships. These are all vehicles, after all, so it only makes sense that they should all be controlled via the exact same frontend.
He's not. He's rebutting the false correlation between using customary measurements and preferring things that are "stupid" posited by the AC coment above his.
In fact, one might regard use of customary units -- and resistance to unnecessary change -- as a marker of a bias toward practicality, which might in turn be characterized as "smart" in contrast to a correspondingly "stupid" bias toward abstract aesthetics and thinking in generalities in evidence among those who insist that everyone use metric units in all circumstances without exception.
That's a real benefit if you only ever work with water, and only at standard temperature and pressure. Deal with anything else, in any other situation, and the equivalence becomes little more than a superfluous gimmick.
It's also worth pointing out that the powers-of-ten prefix system isn't just not the advantage it's hyped up to be, but is a bizarre and superfluous gimmick: it's just a reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the relevant power-of-ten factor via an arcane system of verbal prefixes that attach to the name of the thing you're counting.
If you have a truck that holds, say, 16,536 oranges -- setting aside the question of why you wouldn't just leave that representation intact -- why would you not just use "1.6536 x 10^3 oranges" instead of a bizarre construction like "1.6535 kilooranges"? Why would you ever use anything other than numbers to represent quantities?
> if you are wanting to supply your products globally it makes sense to have a single measuring system and metric is the easiest.
That's a bit absurd. It's like saying that if you want to supply your products globally, it makes sense to have a single language, and Esperanto is the easiest.
It's already necessary to do lots of localization work if you want to be globally competitive: you need to do translations, deal with diverse regulatory requirements, address differences in product demand due to cultural variation, etc. Doing a bit of arithmetic to convert measuring units is perhaps the most trivial aspect of marketing globally.
And if it were economically beneficial to use metric across the board, businesses would do so on their own volition, and there'd be no need to make a political question out of it. If they're not doing so, it's probably a good indication that the hypothesized benefits aren't actually there in practice.
> memorized magic numbers and not proper derived constants.
Metric units involve far more magic numbers than customary units.
The meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds, so defined to preserve magnitude of the meter despite being originally based on an erroneous measurement of the circumference of the Earth, itself an extraordinarily arbitrary value when measuring things other than the earth itself.
The kilogram is currently defined as the mass of a physical standard, that being the master kilogram held by the BIPM in its headquarters just outside Paris.
If we want to redefine units according to Planck lengths or something similar, let's do so, but we'll of course end up expressing units that are relevant and useful in the context of human-scale experience in Planck lengths, and probably end up keeping the same customary (and metric) units.
Volume relates to weight only by the density of the material you're measuring. It doesn't make sense to ask what the volume equivalent of a weight unit is in abstract terms.
> and how many of them to the ton (long or short)?
20, either way.
> And anyway should we measure volume in the ounce-derived system, cubic length units or acre-feet?
What are you measuring, and for what purposes? Use the units most suited to the task.
> 1 floz is the volume of 1 ounce of water
The US volume units are based on the traditional English wine gallon, so it's the density of wine rather than water that defines the fluid ounce. Wine's a bit less dense than water, so a US fluid ounce of water weighs a bit more than an ounce.
> It's just about impossible to compare prices in the US because it switches between oz and gallons or oz and lbs
I expect that basic powers-of-two calculations should be fairly straighforward, especially for a Slashdot commenter. A gallon is seven bits. A pound is four.
You're inadvertently making a pretty good point: metric units' system of prefixes is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that uses arcane prefixes attached to the name of the thing you're counting to express quantities, instead of just using numbers.
Keeping non-metric units is also an indicator of a preference for emergent, bottom-up order, in opposition to top-down impositions of abstract formulae. Imperial/customary units have evolved over time, refined by the limitations, instruments, and purposes that apply to the actual practice of measurement, whereas the metric system was designed by a committee and optimized for mathematical aesthetics over practicality.
I suppose the same people who agitate for the top-down imposition of the metric system would also favor replacing the common law with codified civil law and establishing a regulatory body for the English language as well. There is a cultural difference here, but it's more substantive than some generic concept of national pride: Anglo-American cultures generally do prefer emergence over design in a very significant way, where continental cultures tend in the opposite direction.
Most innovation consists of making marginal improvements to existing technology. Zink's particular implementation of the well-established technology of thermal dye-sublimation printing is a case in point.
Exclusivity in consumables is *not* protected by patents or copyrights on the device that does the consuming. Reverse-engineering for the purpose of creating compatible products is entirely legal. Some companies get around this by adding additional complexity which *can* be patented or copyrighted to the design of the consumables themselves. The patented technology in these cases is specifically the mechanism that creates vendor lock-in, and not something that contributes to the value-added function of the product for the customer.
I don't know if Zink's patent portfolio consists of these kinds of patents, or if they do indeed cover marginal improvements that make dye-sub printers smaller, cheaper, or more durable, but I do know that they didn't invent the underlying technology itself, and it's certainly plausible that they themselves are precisely "using everyone's work" to pursue a business model that relies on a captive audience for consumables. (Not to say they should be artificially stopped from doing so - just that if they decommoditize their consumables and charge too much for them, I won't use their products.)
I thought it was a well-known fact that Apple's more recent products have taken design cues from electronics of the '50s-'70s, especially Braun products designed by Dieter Rams.
I agree. I think modern social media have worked against the internet as a genuinely emergent social platform. The nature of the communities and the depth of the discourse on sites like Slashdot, HN, Ars Technica, even Reddit, the informal message boards and IRC channels, and many corners of the blogosphere, is giving way to the terse trivia of Twitter and Facebook.
It was a lot easier to deal with deliberate trolls and spammers than it is to sort the interesting and insightful from of mountains of genuinely stupid nonsense.
I think this is a core problem with monetizing social media in general.
In traditional media, you create and distribute content, and perhaps monetize it by delivering ads to your customers. Here, you as the media provider are engaged in a conversation with your users. Even if it's a bit of a one-sided conversation, the content stream that you are providing is what delivers value to the users, so if you can insert ads into that stream without driving customers away, you make a profit.
With social media, you are providing a platform upon which your users interact and communicate. They are there to converse with each other, not to consume your content stream. If you attempt to monetize your service by inserting your own content into the conversation, you are effectively *interrupting the conversation* and distracting them away from the activities that make them value the service in the first place.
The way Twitter, Facebook, etc. are attempting to monetize their services is less like interspersing a TV broadcast with commercials, and more like sitting down at someone's table in a restaurant and shouting "Hey! Look at me! Over here!". Facebook is a bit more clever about it, and design the structure of their service so that it generates a spamflood from the users themselves, but the end result is the same.
I don't think it's ever been very ambiguous. Once a hard drive is formatted, file sizes and available space are always reported in powers-of-two units by the OS. At the logical level, powers-of-ten units are simply not used.
Only some hard drive manufacturers have used the powers-of-ten definition; but hard drives always have less usable space than the advertised capacity, since they're reporting the physical capacity before the drive is formatted with a file system. Either way, users would still perceive a discrepancy between the space available to them and the number on the box.
...it's not the store's fault, it's yours, because you made a conscious decision to buy your kid that game when the title and the carton art tell the whole story.
More to the point, if a parent decides to consciously purchase such a game for his 12-year old, it isn't anyone's "fault", because by making the purchase, the parent has at least implicity decided that the game content is not inappropriate for his child; there is no problem.
One would think that someone truly devoted to "family values" would not give any weight to opinions of strangers - especially cranks and busibodies - and would keep the scope of these issues within their actual family.
You're probably thinking of RIPScrip from Telegrafix. They devised a protocol called RIP that transmitted vector graphics as plain ASCII. Sort of a 90's precursor to SVG. They even developed browser plugins to use their vecor format on the web, and had some interesting demos before even Flash was out. Way ahead of its time, but it never caught on because the company kept everything proprietary, and wanted you to use only their software, or license the protocol from them. I think they finally folded about 4 or 5 years ago.
Some of the old BBS software, like MajorBBS and Wildcat! incorporated support for RIP by default in their later versions, and if you run DOSBox with modem emulation enabled, you can install RIPTerm 1.54 and connect to some BBSes by telnet to see RIP in action.
If the ESRB loses all credibility, the only thing stopping a full-on onslaught of legislative parenting will be gone
If all of the retailers give in to political intimidation and take GTA off shelves, then the ESRB's ratings are effectively being enforced by the state, and de facto "legislative parenting" is already a reality.
The government itself has no de jure authority to regulate the content of videogames; it is the Constitution that prevents this, not the ESRB's credibility. The only way that politicians can accomplish what they want is by intimidating vendors into obeying the ESRB.
This perverts both the ESRB and the game industry; the ESRB isn't supposed to have the authority to compel vendors and consumers to comply with their ratings scheme. Their role is to provide an impartial assessment of videogames so parents can decide whether a game's content is appropriate for their children according to their own values.
If this purpose is subverted, then there will be no reliable game ratings at all. Given the current circumstances, the only way for vendors to maintain the integrity of the industry would be to ignore the ESRB's demands, and continue to sell the game.
Rember, Iceland was called Iceland by the vikings, not a sign of this region of the earth was very hot a 1000 years ago.
Nitpick: in Icelandic, the name of Iceland is spelled "Island". The original Norse word meant the same as the modern English word of the same spelling.
Easy one. The "unelected" judge should be the one making the decision.
Politicians are eternally under the influence of the most well-connected and best organised. Lobby groups, large corporations, etc. will always have a greater ability to exert control over "elected" bodies than effectively independent individuals and families.
The judge can at least assert some measure of impariality and draw upon principle in formulating his decision without fear that opposing factions will conspire to oust him from the bench.
The problem is, once government intervention suppresses the development of a corporate aristocracy, how do you get rid of the inevitable government aristocracy?
The fact is that the relationship between the public and any given private corporation is voluntary. Even if the corporation in question has enormous market influence, it's aways possible to create alternative institutions or find substitutes for the products or services they offer. A corporation operating in a free market may be able to accumulate economic power, but if it abuses that power, that coporation can't forcibly prevent people from disassociating themselves from it.
A government, on the other hand, is essentialy just a corporation with an unchallengable monopoly and the power to force people to purchase its services. A "corporate aristocracy" can only exert true monopoly power through its relationship with the government, and state regulatory institutions often do wind up colluding with the corporations they ostensibly regulate to pursue mutual interests at the expense of the public.
If we accept that there's going to be a "corporate aristocracy", then we can either have powerful government institutions that create what is essentially a true aristocracy, with powers estabilshed by law, or a free market where power isn't entrenched in permanent institutions and will eventually flow to whoever best serves the interests of the public at large.
Remember that what we have now is not capitalism at all, it's a modern form of mercantilism, which is the precise situation that free-market ideas were originally developed to oppose.
Slashdot Mirror
> quick, which is bigger, a 5/8 wrench or a 3/4 wrench?
I don't quite understand how there could be any confusion here. 5/8 and 3/4 are just numbers, and it should be quite obvious without much thought that 3/4 is larger.
> I just tried a 5/8 wrench on a bolt and it was slightly too small - quick, what's the next size up to try?
11/16 or 21/32, whichever you've got handy. Are you trying to say you can't count with fractions?
I wonder when Mitsubishi will announce a unified UI for their cars, trucks, locomotives, aircraft, and ships. These are all vehicles, after all, so it only makes sense that they should all be controlled via the exact same frontend.
He's not. He's rebutting the false correlation between using customary measurements and preferring things that are "stupid" posited by the AC coment above his.
In fact, one might regard use of customary units -- and resistance to unnecessary change -- as a marker of a bias toward practicality, which might in turn be characterized as "smart" in contrast to a correspondingly "stupid" bias toward abstract aesthetics and thinking in generalities in evidence among those who insist that everyone use metric units in all circumstances without exception.
That's a real benefit if you only ever work with water, and only at standard temperature and pressure. Deal with anything else, in any other situation, and the equivalence becomes little more than a superfluous gimmick.
It's also worth pointing out that the powers-of-ten prefix system isn't just not the advantage it's hyped up to be, but is a bizarre and superfluous gimmick: it's just a reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the relevant power-of-ten factor via an arcane system of verbal prefixes that attach to the name of the thing you're counting.
If you have a truck that holds, say, 16,536 oranges -- setting aside the question of why you wouldn't just leave that representation intact -- why would you not just use "1.6536 x 10^3 oranges" instead of a bizarre construction like "1.6535 kilooranges"? Why would you ever use anything other than numbers to represent quantities?
> if you are wanting to supply your products globally it makes sense to have a single measuring system and metric is the easiest.
That's a bit absurd. It's like saying that if you want to supply your products globally, it makes sense to have a single language, and Esperanto is the easiest.
It's already necessary to do lots of localization work if you want to be globally competitive: you need to do translations, deal with diverse regulatory requirements, address differences in product demand due to cultural variation, etc. Doing a bit of arithmetic to convert measuring units is perhaps the most trivial aspect of marketing globally.
And if it were economically beneficial to use metric across the board, businesses would do so on their own volition, and there'd be no need to make a political question out of it. If they're not doing so, it's probably a good indication that the hypothesized benefits aren't actually there in practice.
> memorized magic numbers and not proper derived constants.
Metric units involve far more magic numbers than customary units.
The meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds, so defined to preserve magnitude of the meter despite being originally based on an erroneous measurement of the circumference of the Earth, itself an extraordinarily arbitrary value when measuring things other than the earth itself.
The kilogram is currently defined as the mass of a physical standard, that being the master kilogram held by the BIPM in its headquarters just outside Paris.
If we want to redefine units according to Planck lengths or something similar, let's do so, but we'll of course end up expressing units that are relevant and useful in the context of human-scale experience in Planck lengths, and probably end up keeping the same customary (and metric) units.
> And what's the volume equivalent to a cwt
Volume relates to weight only by the density of the material you're measuring. It doesn't make sense to ask what the volume equivalent of a weight unit is in abstract terms.
> and how many of them to the ton (long or short)?
20, either way.
> And anyway should we measure volume in the ounce-derived system, cubic length units or acre-feet?
What are you measuring, and for what purposes? Use the units most suited to the task.
> 1 floz is the volume of 1 ounce of water
The US volume units are based on the traditional English wine gallon, so it's the density of wine rather than water that defines the fluid ounce. Wine's a bit less dense than water, so a US fluid ounce of water weighs a bit more than an ounce.
> It's just about impossible to compare prices in the US because it switches between oz and gallons or oz and lbs
I expect that basic powers-of-two calculations should be fairly straighforward, especially for a Slashdot commenter. A gallon is seven bits. A pound is four.
You're inadvertently making a pretty good point: metric units' system of prefixes is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that uses arcane prefixes attached to the name of the thing you're counting to express quantities, instead of just using numbers.
Keeping non-metric units is also an indicator of a preference for emergent, bottom-up order, in opposition to top-down impositions of abstract formulae. Imperial/customary units have evolved over time, refined by the limitations, instruments, and purposes that apply to the actual practice of measurement, whereas the metric system was designed by a committee and optimized for mathematical aesthetics over practicality.
I suppose the same people who agitate for the top-down imposition of the metric system would also favor replacing the common law with codified civil law and establishing a regulatory body for the English language as well. There is a cultural difference here, but it's more substantive than some generic concept of national pride: Anglo-American cultures generally do prefer emergence over design in a very significant way, where continental cultures tend in the opposite direction.
Tortious interference, perhaps?
Most innovation consists of making marginal improvements to existing technology. Zink's particular implementation of the well-established technology of thermal dye-sublimation printing is a case in point.
Exclusivity in consumables is *not* protected by patents or copyrights on the device that does the consuming. Reverse-engineering for the purpose of creating compatible products is entirely legal. Some companies get around this by adding additional complexity which *can* be patented or copyrighted to the design of the consumables themselves. The patented technology in these cases is specifically the mechanism that creates vendor lock-in, and not something that contributes to the value-added function of the product for the customer.
I don't know if Zink's patent portfolio consists of these kinds of patents, or if they do indeed cover marginal improvements that make dye-sub printers smaller, cheaper, or more durable, but I do know that they didn't invent the underlying technology itself, and it's certainly plausible that they themselves are precisely "using everyone's work" to pursue a business model that relies on a captive audience for consumables. (Not to say they should be artificially stopped from doing so - just that if they decommoditize their consumables and charge too much for them, I won't use their products.)
I thought it was a well-known fact that Apple's more recent products have taken design cues from electronics of the '50s-'70s, especially Braun products designed by Dieter Rams.
I agree. I think modern social media have worked against the internet as a genuinely emergent social platform. The nature of the communities and the depth of the discourse on sites like Slashdot, HN, Ars Technica, even Reddit, the informal message boards and IRC channels, and many corners of the blogosphere, is giving way to the terse trivia of Twitter and Facebook.
It was a lot easier to deal with deliberate trolls and spammers than it is to sort the interesting and insightful from of mountains of genuinely stupid nonsense.
I think this is a core problem with monetizing social media in general.
In traditional media, you create and distribute content, and perhaps monetize it by delivering ads to your customers. Here, you as the media provider are engaged in a conversation with your users. Even if it's a bit of a one-sided conversation, the content stream that you are providing is what delivers value to the users, so if you can insert ads into that stream without driving customers away, you make a profit.
With social media, you are providing a platform upon which your users interact and communicate. They are there to converse with each other, not to consume your content stream. If you attempt to monetize your service by inserting your own content into the conversation, you are effectively *interrupting the conversation* and distracting them away from the activities that make them value the service in the first place.
The way Twitter, Facebook, etc. are attempting to monetize their services is less like interspersing a TV broadcast with commercials, and more like sitting down at someone's table in a restaurant and shouting "Hey! Look at me! Over here!". Facebook is a bit more clever about it, and design the structure of their service so that it generates a spamflood from the users themselves, but the end result is the same.
I don't think it's ever been very ambiguous. Once a hard drive is formatted, file sizes and available space are always reported in powers-of-two units by the OS. At the logical level, powers-of-ten units are simply not used.
Only some hard drive manufacturers have used the powers-of-ten definition; but hard drives always have less usable space than the advertised capacity, since they're reporting the physical capacity before the drive is formatted with a file system. Either way, users would still perceive a discrepancy between the space available to them and the number on the box.
One would think that someone truly devoted to "family values" would not give any weight to opinions of strangers - especially cranks and busibodies - and would keep the scope of these issues within their actual family.
You're probably thinking of RIPScrip from Telegrafix. They devised a protocol called RIP that transmitted vector graphics as plain ASCII. Sort of a 90's precursor to SVG. They even developed browser plugins to use their vecor format on the web, and had some interesting demos before even Flash was out. Way ahead of its time, but it never caught on because the company kept everything proprietary, and wanted you to use only their software, or license the protocol from them. I think they finally folded about 4 or 5 years ago.
Some of the old BBS software, like MajorBBS and Wildcat! incorporated support for RIP by default in their later versions, and if you run DOSBox with modem emulation enabled, you can install RIPTerm 1.54 and connect to some BBSes by telnet to see RIP in action.
Or, more pointedly, some people are arrogant about humility. Bloody microlomaniacs.
The government itself has no de jure authority to regulate the content of videogames; it is the Constitution that prevents this, not the ESRB's credibility. The only way that politicians can accomplish what they want is by intimidating vendors into obeying the ESRB.
This perverts both the ESRB and the game industry; the ESRB isn't supposed to have the authority to compel vendors and consumers to comply with their ratings scheme. Their role is to provide an impartial assessment of videogames so parents can decide whether a game's content is appropriate for their children according to their own values.
If this purpose is subverted, then there will be no reliable game ratings at all. Given the current circumstances, the only way for vendors to maintain the integrity of the industry would be to ignore the ESRB's demands, and continue to sell the game.
Easy one. The "unelected" judge should be the one making the decision.
Politicians are eternally under the influence of the most well-connected and best organised. Lobby groups, large corporations, etc. will always have a greater ability to exert control over "elected" bodies than effectively independent individuals and families.
The judge can at least assert some measure of impariality and draw upon principle in formulating his decision without fear that opposing factions will conspire to oust him from the bench.
The problem is, once government intervention suppresses the development of a corporate aristocracy, how do you get rid of the inevitable government aristocracy?
The fact is that the relationship between the public and any given private corporation is voluntary. Even if the corporation in question has enormous market influence, it's aways possible to create alternative institutions or find substitutes for the products or services they offer. A corporation operating in a free market may be able to accumulate economic power, but if it abuses that power, that coporation can't forcibly prevent people from disassociating themselves from it.
A government, on the other hand, is essentialy just a corporation with an unchallengable monopoly and the power to force people to purchase its services. A "corporate aristocracy" can only exert true monopoly power through its relationship with the government, and state regulatory institutions often do wind up colluding with the corporations they ostensibly regulate to pursue mutual interests at the expense of the public.
If we accept that there's going to be a "corporate aristocracy", then we can either have powerful government institutions that create what is essentially a true aristocracy, with powers estabilshed by law, or a free market where power isn't entrenched in permanent institutions and will eventually flow to whoever best serves the interests of the public at large.
Remember that what we have now is not capitalism at all, it's a modern form of mercantilism, which is the precise situation that free-market ideas were originally developed to oppose.
"Under God" is the only part that I don't find offensive.
Mass, public oaths of loyalty to the state and its symbols are just downright un-American.