But *advertising*, which is probably what the poster had in mind, often is about making a demand, or at the very least trying to increase the magnitude of minor demand into a major one.
OK, wrong word.
Also see a child of the original post, where someone observes the word halitosis was created by Listerine.
Advertising does indeed mean to "create demand". "Amplification" is the easiest way to do that, since it's easier to amplify then start from scratch, but there's not a single advertiser who wouldn't shirk from trying to create a new demand from scratch, sometimes with success.
The "need for cool" shoes, shirts, skirts, whatever, is a function of the continuing success of advertisers creating demand for "Gap" clothing or "Nike" shoes where there was none before. The need for shoes is ancient; the need for "Nike" is new and totally created. (Whether something is creation or amplification may depend on your point of view.)
The RIAA and/or the MPAA is on the beginning of a marketing drive to create a "need" for DRM... look on the box covers of MP3 players next time you are in your local retailers and look what's advertised as a feature. SDMI complaint? Supports WMA? Both translate to "DRM-ready". Obviously, you don't pitch it as "Makes Sure You Can't Do Anything You Really Want To Do"... that's where advertisers (and marketers) come in.
Creating needs in an entire culture has not met with much success, with the possible exception of hygine products, but need-creation in sub-cultures happens all the time.
Speaking as an American, I assure you that we are not overly obsessed with microbes. We do put a higher premium on cleanliness and lower levels of BO then some other cultures, but that's basically a cultural thing to do with our noses, not our microbes.
What we do have is the world's most advanced Advertising System. Remember the definition of marketing: "Create demand". Most of what you see as microbe obsession is actually our advertising industry, trying its darndest to create an obsession with microbes.
By and large, they only succeed right where it probably does the most damage, with some parents of small children, which is of course a lot of people, but hardly the whole country. Most of the rest of us do not consider it a terribly big deal, up to and including the small children.;-)
If all you watch is our advertising, you get a pretty skewed idea of our country, because what you really see is what Corporate America wants it to be. That does not always correspond to reality, and I dare say here's one place it has largely failed. We're not obsessive about microbes on a macro scale.
Note: I'd be surprised if there's a lot of bacteria in Coke. First, I'm sure the water's sterilized, probably distilled, same for the rest of the ingredients. This is a *good thing*, necessary for any product like Coke. (Consider pasteurization.) Second, that's one nasty environment for bacteria to grow in; I know some forms of mold can manage (don't ask), but it takes a lot of time... radiation hazards are usually seriously overstated (again for essentially marketing reasons; the people most worried about radiation are the ones least able to understand it, and so there are people capatalizing on this). Paint fumes and metal dust are probably underrated.
Perhaps they should just hide it and hope it goes away.
I wish I could show you the "known defect list" for the software on your computer. I don't care what it's running. It's long.
Software sucks. Mozilla less then most. And this is the big run up to 1.0, after all.
Do you expect perfection? Are you prepared to pay the millions of dollars it costs you? (And still sometimes lose the rocket to a small, small bug...?)
No, just stimulated. Trolling's quite different; this was more like "satire". My point was to encourage thought and conversation, not "just" to get a rise out of people. I'm glad you replied.
Now, for extra bonus points, is this little exchange (or at least my initial post) art, in that I overstated my opinion, hoping to get a post exactly like yours?
I'm not quite as cynical as my initial post made me out to be; but if I had to pick one of the extreme positions to take, I'd be unusually comfortable with the extreme position that modern (which is to say, the last five years, rather then a technical term referring to a specific period and style) art is largely irrelevant, due to excessive insularity and defensiveness.
Personally, I think 'hack' comes a lot closer; even in the normal artsy-fartsy sense. I don't see what borders this pushed exactly (except legal ones!), which you can see many posters on the subject alluding to. Still, regardless of what you call it, I think it was worth doing. I get the sense this is "art-for-want-of-a-better-term", because his community doesn't know the word "hack".
Ever since the double hammer blow of postmodernism and deconstructionism, art has been mostly defined as "whatever people who think they are artists call art". Being an Artist is now mainly an ego-boost, and is used to raise themselves in quality above the riff-raff, like us.
If I did it, it would not be art, because I'm not a artiste.
I pity the modern artist; adrift in a sub-culture that actively works to undermine everything, even itself; they live in a solipsistic nightmare.
I respect the guy for saying he doesn't know the answer rather then trying to make it up, but I don't see why the original website ran the story, let alone why it should be posted on Slashdot. The percentage of sentences with useful information seems to be in the low teens, and it's not like it's a terribly long article where that can be expected...
No, don't buy it from amazon
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Agile Modeling
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· Score: 2
Don't buy it from Amazon. Hey, the boycott is still on. I'm honoring it. There's good news in the fight but it's not over yet.
Nonsense remains nonsense, even when attributed to God. God can't square a circle. God can't "make a rock so heavy he can't lift it". . . no such entity can exist, so it's just logical nonsense to babble about how something is limited because it can't do the contradictory.
Creating such a single word immune to misinterpretation implies by necessity a removal of free will from the receiving agent, as interpretation is something done by choice. Again, by definition, one cannot remove free will from the equation by forcing choices and still have free will.
As for the other part of the argument, Christian theology says the communication exists; it's the universe, including the Bible. Insisting on being forced to respond to it is a generally self-defeating demand. You have the choice.
I'm glossing over a lot here, because this is Slashdot, and I have no idea what your background is, or where to start a real explanation of this, so I wouldn't waste your time trying to nitpick this post; even I could do that and I agree with me! But if I could have an extended discussion, this is fairly true to what my main points would be.
Please explain why God, who is supposed to be all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good, would communicate the creation story in such a deliberately confusing way?
I have an exercise for you. I realize that I'm not going to change your mind on the global issues raised in your post with a simple post to Slashdot, but I think I can defend this point well. Moreover, it is an interesting psychology point as well, not merely a religious one.
Let us say you wish to describe in writing, in exquisite detail, the internal workings of your computer. By "exquisite detail", I mean not just what it does, but how it does it, at every level from the "computer science" level down to the "quantum physics" level (for the transistors and similar hardware). You've got a lot of ground to cover, but by and large, one dedicated human could hold most of this in their head on a fairly deep level.
Now, let's say you're going to do this two thousand years ago using only Greek. I'll stipulate you a complete understanding of Greek; that's not the point. How will you describe the workings of a laser, the effects of coherent light, and the effect of two mediums in a CD-ROM? And that's just a small part of the CD-ROM drive, a fraction of one percent of the problem you are faced with.
The only solution? You will need to replicate the scientific revolution. You'll need to create news terms, define them, etc., and basically bootstrap from a thoroughly ineffective language into one that is useful to you, quite analagously to the bootstrapping of computer languages from machine language. It's certainly possible, though it's debatable whether one ancient greek would be able to learn this without significant guidance from a real person (i.e., not just from the writing, but with a teacher).
This is an interesting point of psychology, relating to our diffficulty in thinking with concepts we can't express in some language. Math exists to a large degree to give us a language we can discuss and manipulate mathematical concepts in. Understanding this can be valuable any time you are writing about a concept not fully understood by your potential readers, so this is a practical point, too.
Now, you've got one thick bundle of scrolls there, buddy. It would easily fill several rooms solid (just the blueprints to all your computer chips printed out would be quite a lot, and the technology of the time doesn't allow for onion-skin paper!). But it is conceivable that such a resource could exist.
Now, stipulate the existance of the Christian God with me for a moment. He is omnipotent and omniscient; for any precise formulation you care to give about what you want to know about the creation of the universe, he can provide the same sort of resource. (I can't guarentee that there still won't be points where it simply asserts the truth of something; contrariwise, Godel's Theorum would seem to imply that such points are necessary.) Calling it "massive" is probably an understatement. No reasonable estimation of the size of this resource can be given. But I feel confident placing a lower bound on the current lifespan of a human being; you could not absorb this resource to any significant degree in one lifetime. (It is likely that the resource can be made arbitrarily complicated, esp. if this is not the only universe, so merely extending lifespans really doesn't get you anything. There are two basic lifespans on the cosmological scale, finite and infinite.)
But, that's not the real point. The real point is this: What purpose would such a resource serve? It would be a waste of time to transcribe, it would be a waste of time to try and use it, and nobody has time to try, anyhow. So what are you going to do? Observing that God created the universe is an importent point, but futher details are effectively a waste; a person like you will still never be satisfied (because there will always be more details not given as long as you are alive, and forever if the panverse is infinitely complicated, which even many cosmologists currently talk about with those frothing universes of theirs...), others won't care at all. Inasmuch as purpose can be inferred, again regardless of your belief on authorship, it's quite clear that the Bible is not a text on cosmology.
The only thing you can do is be extremely highly metaphorical, and keep only the importent parts, which the stipulated God in His divine wisdom knows which parts they are, and ruthlessly cull the rest. The Bible is already quite long; should a useless cosmological discussion bloat it arbitrarily large for the purpose of failing to satisfy you? My guess would be no.
As for the "confusing" point, I'd submit that given any text, it is for you to bend to the usage and attempt to gain as much understanding of the author's point as possible, not for the author to spend a bunch of time quantifying and qualifying the point to you ad nasuem (and probably still ending up with you rejecting it anyhow). Again, this isn't just for the Bible, it's for all text, up to and including my post, and it goes double for anything written more then 20 or so years ago, and triple or more for anything more then a hundred years old. Given the word palette the author had to choose from, whether you believe the author divine or not, "day" (which of course is not the English word for day, and thus criticizing it on that point commits the additional sin (pun intended) of criticizing a translation) is as good as anything else.
PDF is Adobe; it just so happens that PDF is a cleaned-up version of PS, with some of the dangerous extensions removed, some other nices ones added (like the forms stuff), and a compressed file format; it's not hard for ghostscript to keep up.
PS is also Adobe.
Fortunately, they aren't trying to squash everyone who uses the format. (I don't know if they can, i.e., I don't know if they have any IP rights that could conceivably squash ghostview. But if they do, they aren't trying. And PS has long since passed into a de-facto standard state...)
You want to fully comprehend this? Unless you are a highly motivated mathematical mega-genius (and you can't drop either criterion... merely being a mega-genius won't help if you're not motivated), a good University education is the only way to go. Even if you are a highly motivated mathematical mega-genius, you'll still want to use the actual textbooks you'd use in a Uni course series. . . be prepared to read more then just a couple of books, and be prepared to learn a hell of a lot of math.
And if math isn't easy for you (and I mean math, not namby-pamby arithematic, I mean real math, like topology and geometry and all forms of calculus), and you aren't truly seriously motivated to spend years on this, even the Uni won't be enough; most people drop out of the serious Physics courses!
I can't give you a reading list; all I can say is if anyone else gives you one, and you can understand the books past the third chapter (assuming you know little/nothing about the subject, which I'm inferring from not trusting Uni educations right where they are the absolute strongest (hard sciences)), you're getting a "Slashdot" understanding, i.e., absolute crap. This isn't really a reading list problem; more of a reading bookshelf thing.
Quantum mechanics drives PhDs nuts; you probably aren't going to just "pick it up". And I say this as a guy who "picks things up" pretty routinely (not just computer stuff). You have to know your limits, and if you're asking, this is extremely highly likely this is beyond yours. (And if you have trouble understanding that sentence literally, don't even bother starting... statistically, there's a chance I'm wrong but I wouldn't bet, well, anything on that remote chance.)
Now, if you don't mind being a poser, as I am, then there are lots of great choices; the best thing to do is hike on down to a good physical bookstore, peruse the science shelves, and look for something that looks to be at your level, or better, slightly above. But don't think for a second you're getting anything more then the cliff notes of the cliff notes of a summary of quantum physics. (And highly opinionated ones, too; when physicist run out of math to talk about in popular-interest books, they tend to start shooting their mouths off and irresponsibly speculating wildly about cosmology. It makes good copy, but frankly, they're only slightly better equipped to speculate about the nature of the universe then you are; if anything, they get to be even more wildly wrong. You gotta seperate the physicist's wanking from the real facts.)
The Sorceress, on the other hand, turns out to be a babe who strolls around in thongs, does kung fu, and relates instantly to the Rock's sophisticated style of combat and international diplomacy. The Sorceress makes it clear that she loses her powers if she ever has sex.
Let's me guess... she has oral sex with the Rock and stains her blue thongs, which is the smoking gun the Authorities of Magic need to bring her up on charges of improper conduct, for which the penalty is the immediate impeachment of her magical powers. But in an emergency highly publicized session before the Gods and Goddesses of Magic, makes an impassioned plea based on questiong what the definition of "is" is, and manages to get off the hook when it is determined that nobody in fact gives a damn what a Sorceress does in her private life, thus letting her have sex AND keep her powers.
Actually, it probably is, if it contains all the data the current guide data does. The program summaries, ratings, and categorizations are definately copyrightable. You'd have to ask a copyright lawyer if you could extract the raw titles and times, which are what most people care about. You'd be extracting non-copyrightable material from a copyrighted feed, and I don't know if that counts as a "derivative product". (Note I wouldn't put any stock in wild Slashdot theories on this point; I study IP as much as any non-lawyer, and I don't think a non-lawyer can answer this question. It may not even have an answer.)
And of course if it's encrypted at all, the DMCA will completely protect it, regardless.
Also something most of the good replies based on statistics are missing here is that *accuracy doesn't matter in this case*. The point is taking many anecdotal observations and synthesizing them into meaningful suggestions for websites, not whether 82% or 83% of children worldwide try to punch the monkey.
That's *why* five people are good enough; the point is to uncover usability problems, not wax poetic on exactly (to the %) how many people hit those problems. (That's another study, which the author has indeed done, but that has different goals, so it has a different methodology.)
The redundency of testing thousands of people is truly staggering. Translate "redundency" to "money" and you understand why its downright stupid to run a test like this with thousands; indeed, 55 was possibly excessive! 55 was probably chosen because this is a groundbreaking study, and they want to decrease the odds of statistical flukes. To do an actual usability study on a specific site, I'd probably go with 3 girls, 3 boys (in keeping with the gender selection). That'd be plenty!
Gentoo automatically configures the source download, and uses your preferred optimizations. IIRC, Debian does not; that requires manual intervention, which is the whole point of Gentoo.
Note to moderators: The parent was not a troll. I'd say it's a decently reasoned opinion.
For comparision, here's my take on the issue. First, I'm a bigtime privacy wonk. Second, despite that, I still believe that a corporation can pretty much do whatever it can get away with to its employees legally, and that legal action should NOT be taken to 'correct' this.
The fact of the matter is we have a perfectly fine set of union laws, which provide protection. This is a union issue. If you don't want to be monitored like cows, make your union make an issue out of it. It's stress inducing, it's probably a waste of company resources (after a certain point), it's probably not a net business gain (after a certain point) anyhow, rigid rules rarely match reality, it's not hard to come with counterarguments.
But until people care, and not just a bare minority, nothing will happen. In this case, I am actually against laws... they'd only make things worse. (Not that you were proposing them, I'm just giving my position for comparision to yours.)
Without going into a point-by-point rebuttal, of course "that point of view is extremely dangerous". And of course much of what you said is plausible, inasmuch as wacked-out examples made for the purpose of outrage and extremism is plausible. (That's not sarcasm; it's a common rhetorical device that is serious overused and abused, but it's still somewhat valid when understood correctly.)
But you provide no evidence that of the two alternatives, yours is better. Your scenarios are for the most part equally applicable to the hiding case; instead of information spreading openly, it spreads covertly. Doesn't change much. You can't keep information from a determined person; people are just too smart.
I'd say that the post you are replying to is much better constructed as an argument, because it says why the alternative is better: The good guys can find it and learn from it. How is your proposal better? The bad guys still find it*. Now maybe the good guys don't. The "demented person" scenarios remain.
Step up a meta level. You're focusing too tightly on a small part of the problem, and missing the global implications.
I say that both revealing and hiding the information is dangerous. The danger comes from people, and therefore cannot be removed from the equation. (This is what you implicitly try to do, by hiding the information. The problem is, the information is not the danger.) But of the two alternatives, open discussion is clearly the preferable choice, both in theory, and in practice.
(*: Proof: Look at the real world. Happens all the time. This is undeniable.)
One of my favorite anachronistic reads is Starman Jones, by Heinlein. It's one of his "kiddie" books, in which a kid manages to bamboozle his away aboard an FTL starship, which is a wonderful large thing with dance floors. It's a routine trip; star travel is no big deal, at least among the rich. And one of the primay jobs on the ship is to read the blinking lights while the computers spell out in binary when to jump, where they are, etc. And the main input is via a bank of switches, IIRC. Horribly, horribly dated!;-)
Time is accelerating. Being a year ahead of the curve is worth more then it used to be. Read Vinge, and check the date. Neuromancer is, IIRC, early 80's, still hasn't happened yet, still largely plausible, still at least 10 years away. Sci-fi was computer ignorant in the 50's, but since at least the 80's has caught up with the idea of exponential projection, and is predicting away with its usualy single-digit percentage accuracy.;-) (Better then most branches of lit.)
Re:One little problem - reference system
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Time Travel
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· Score: 2
Actually, he's not required to assume that. We are under acceleration all the time. Gravity from the Earth is merely the most visible manifestation of that.
Unless the hypothetical time machine can follow the acceleration of where it *would be* (including interatomic interactions, which is what prevents you from falling into the Earth), the time machine will not correctly 'track' the location. Whether it follows a complicated track in a higher dimensional space, doesn't move, follows a straight-line projection in either objective or subjective time, blindly follows acceleration with no regard for interatomic forces, it doesn't come out in the right place. (Note that anything that you can see can see you, and anything that exerts a force on you, equally has a force exerted on it. The Time Machine movie, which has the charecter seeing things, implies that the world could equally well see him, and he's lucky nobody killed him with a bright light. One of Niven's Gil the ARM stories focuses on this possibility.... though I'm afraid I just ruined it for you telling you that. So, basically, you can't look and see where you're going.)
We don't need an absolute reference frame, we just need to show that a conventional can't possibly track our frame.
I have become extremely accustomed to my sense of sight. Am I brain-damaged in the dark? Would I be brain-damage if I were permanently blinded?
If you were to stay in total darkness for an extended period of time, conservatively, three or four days, yes, you would experience what could be called brain damage.
Like muscles, nerves atrophy. (pedants note: I am oversimplifying immensely; at least I know it.) Normally we think of that in terms of skills like "playing the guitar" and we'd never call someone who has forgotten how to play the guitar through lack of practice "brain damaged".
However, it is quite plausible that we'd call someone who hasn't seen in several years "brain damaged"; we would certainly prescribe "therapy" to correct the damage. Literally, your brain forgets how to see. Blind people do have increased sensitivity to the other senses, especially hearing; with a series of MRI scans, you can literally watch as the parts of the brain formerly dedicated to seeing slowly reconfigure themselves to work on sound. (Neurons like to work.) Obviously, once that happens, those parts of the brain can't be used for seeing, until they are reconfigured again, which can only happen if sight is restored. Look up case histories if you don't believe me. This does sometimes happen.
That said, is this a little overblown? Probably at the present time. However, in the forseeable future, no, it's probably not. Extended disconnection from the cybernetics could cause many problems, even if they seem noncritical. This is something to seriously consider beofre getting implants yourself. (I'm quite serious about this; while I like the idea in general, I can assure you I will not be the first person to be implanted.)
Slashdot Mirror
But *advertising*, which is probably what the poster had in mind, often is about making a demand, or at the very least trying to increase the magnitude of minor demand into a major one.
OK, wrong word.
Also see a child of the original post, where someone observes the word halitosis was created by Listerine.
Advertising does indeed mean to "create demand". "Amplification" is the easiest way to do that, since it's easier to amplify then start from scratch, but there's not a single advertiser who wouldn't shirk from trying to create a new demand from scratch, sometimes with success.
The "need for cool" shoes, shirts, skirts, whatever, is a function of the continuing success of advertisers creating demand for "Gap" clothing or "Nike" shoes where there was none before. The need for shoes is ancient; the need for "Nike" is new and totally created. (Whether something is creation or amplification may depend on your point of view.)
The RIAA and/or the MPAA is on the beginning of a marketing drive to create a "need" for DRM... look on the box covers of MP3 players next time you are in your local retailers and look what's advertised as a feature. SDMI complaint? Supports WMA? Both translate to "DRM-ready". Obviously, you don't pitch it as "Makes Sure You Can't Do Anything You Really Want To Do"... that's where advertisers (and marketers) come in.
Creating needs in an entire culture has not met with much success, with the possible exception of hygine products, but need-creation in sub-cultures happens all the time.
Speaking as an American, I assure you that we are not overly obsessed with microbes. We do put a higher premium on cleanliness and lower levels of BO then some other cultures, but that's basically a cultural thing to do with our noses, not our microbes.
;-)
What we do have is the world's most advanced Advertising System. Remember the definition of marketing: "Create demand". Most of what you see as microbe obsession is actually our advertising industry, trying its darndest to create an obsession with microbes.
By and large, they only succeed right where it probably does the most damage, with some parents of small children, which is of course a lot of people, but hardly the whole country. Most of the rest of us do not consider it a terribly big deal, up to and including the small children.
If all you watch is our advertising, you get a pretty skewed idea of our country, because what you really see is what Corporate America wants it to be. That does not always correspond to reality, and I dare say here's one place it has largely failed. We're not obsessive about microbes on a macro scale.
Note: I'd be surprised if there's a lot of bacteria in Coke. First, I'm sure the water's sterilized, probably distilled, same for the rest of the ingredients. This is a *good thing*, necessary for any product like Coke. (Consider pasteurization.) Second, that's one nasty environment for bacteria to grow in; I know some forms of mold can manage (don't ask), but it takes a lot of time... radiation hazards are usually seriously overstated (again for essentially marketing reasons; the people most worried about radiation are the ones least able to understand it, and so there are people capatalizing on this). Paint fumes and metal dust are probably underrated.
Perhaps they should just hide it and hope it goes away.
I wish I could show you the "known defect list" for the software on your computer. I don't care what it's running. It's long.
Software sucks. Mozilla less then most. And this is the big run up to 1.0, after all.
Do you expect perfection? Are you prepared to pay the millions of dollars it costs you? (And still sometimes lose the rocket to a small, small bug...?)
IHBT?
No, just stimulated. Trolling's quite different; this was more like "satire". My point was to encourage thought and conversation, not "just" to get a rise out of people. I'm glad you replied.
Now, for extra bonus points, is this little exchange (or at least my initial post) art, in that I overstated my opinion, hoping to get a post exactly like yours?
I'm not quite as cynical as my initial post made me out to be; but if I had to pick one of the extreme positions to take, I'd be unusually comfortable with the extreme position that modern (which is to say, the last five years, rather then a technical term referring to a specific period and style) art is largely irrelevant, due to excessive insularity and defensiveness.
Personally, I think 'hack' comes a lot closer; even in the normal artsy-fartsy sense. I don't see what borders this pushed exactly (except legal ones!), which you can see many posters on the subject alluding to. Still, regardless of what you call it, I think it was worth doing. I get the sense this is "art-for-want-of-a-better-term", because his community doesn't know the word "hack".
Ever since the double hammer blow of postmodernism and deconstructionism, art has been mostly defined as "whatever people who think they are artists call art". Being an Artist is now mainly an ego-boost, and is used to raise themselves in quality above the riff-raff, like us.
If I did it, it would not be art, because I'm not a artiste.
I pity the modern artist; adrift in a sub-culture that actively works to undermine everything, even itself; they live in a solipsistic nightmare.
I respect the guy for saying he doesn't know the answer rather then trying to make it up, but I don't see why the original website ran the story, let alone why it should be posted on Slashdot. The percentage of sentences with useful information seems to be in the low teens, and it's not like it's a terribly long article where that can be expected...
Don't buy it from Amazon. Hey, the boycott is still on. I'm honoring it. There's good news in the fight but it's not over yet.
Nonsense remains nonsense, even when attributed to God. God can't square a circle. God can't "make a rock so heavy he can't lift it". . . no such entity can exist, so it's just logical nonsense to babble about how something is limited because it can't do the contradictory.
Creating such a single word immune to misinterpretation implies by necessity a removal of free will from the receiving agent, as interpretation is something done by choice. Again, by definition, one cannot remove free will from the equation by forcing choices and still have free will.
As for the other part of the argument, Christian theology says the communication exists; it's the universe, including the Bible. Insisting on being forced to respond to it is a generally self-defeating demand. You have the choice.
I'm glossing over a lot here, because this is Slashdot, and I have no idea what your background is, or where to start a real explanation of this, so I wouldn't waste your time trying to nitpick this post; even I could do that and I agree with me! But if I could have an extended discussion, this is fairly true to what my main points would be.
Please explain why God, who is supposed to be all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good, would communicate the creation story in such a deliberately confusing way?
I have an exercise for you. I realize that I'm not going to change your mind on the global issues raised in your post with a simple post to Slashdot, but I think I can defend this point well. Moreover, it is an interesting psychology point as well, not merely a religious one.
Let us say you wish to describe in writing, in exquisite detail, the internal workings of your computer. By "exquisite detail", I mean not just what it does, but how it does it, at every level from the "computer science" level down to the "quantum physics" level (for the transistors and similar hardware). You've got a lot of ground to cover, but by and large, one dedicated human could hold most of this in their head on a fairly deep level.
Now, let's say you're going to do this two thousand years ago using only Greek. I'll stipulate you a complete understanding of Greek; that's not the point. How will you describe the workings of a laser, the effects of coherent light, and the effect of two mediums in a CD-ROM? And that's just a small part of the CD-ROM drive, a fraction of one percent of the problem you are faced with.
The only solution? You will need to replicate the scientific revolution. You'll need to create news terms, define them, etc., and basically bootstrap from a thoroughly ineffective language into one that is useful to you, quite analagously to the bootstrapping of computer languages from machine language. It's certainly possible, though it's debatable whether one ancient greek would be able to learn this without significant guidance from a real person (i.e., not just from the writing, but with a teacher).
This is an interesting point of psychology, relating to our diffficulty in thinking with concepts we can't express in some language. Math exists to a large degree to give us a language we can discuss and manipulate mathematical concepts in. Understanding this can be valuable any time you are writing about a concept not fully understood by your potential readers, so this is a practical point, too.
Now, you've got one thick bundle of scrolls there, buddy. It would easily fill several rooms solid (just the blueprints to all your computer chips printed out would be quite a lot, and the technology of the time doesn't allow for onion-skin paper!). But it is conceivable that such a resource could exist.
Now, stipulate the existance of the Christian God with me for a moment. He is omnipotent and omniscient; for any precise formulation you care to give about what you want to know about the creation of the universe, he can provide the same sort of resource. (I can't guarentee that there still won't be points where it simply asserts the truth of something; contrariwise, Godel's Theorum would seem to imply that such points are necessary.) Calling it "massive" is probably an understatement. No reasonable estimation of the size of this resource can be given. But I feel confident placing a lower bound on the current lifespan of a human being; you could not absorb this resource to any significant degree in one lifetime. (It is likely that the resource can be made arbitrarily complicated, esp. if this is not the only universe, so merely extending lifespans really doesn't get you anything. There are two basic lifespans on the cosmological scale, finite and infinite.)
But, that's not the real point. The real point is this: What purpose would such a resource serve? It would be a waste of time to transcribe, it would be a waste of time to try and use it, and nobody has time to try, anyhow. So what are you going to do? Observing that God created the universe is an importent point, but futher details are effectively a waste; a person like you will still never be satisfied (because there will always be more details not given as long as you are alive, and forever if the panverse is infinitely complicated, which even many cosmologists currently talk about with those frothing universes of theirs...), others won't care at all. Inasmuch as purpose can be inferred, again regardless of your belief on authorship, it's quite clear that the Bible is not a text on cosmology.
The only thing you can do is be extremely highly metaphorical, and keep only the importent parts, which the stipulated God in His divine wisdom knows which parts they are, and ruthlessly cull the rest. The Bible is already quite long; should a useless cosmological discussion bloat it arbitrarily large for the purpose of failing to satisfy you? My guess would be no.
As for the "confusing" point, I'd submit that given any text, it is for you to bend to the usage and attempt to gain as much understanding of the author's point as possible, not for the author to spend a bunch of time quantifying and qualifying the point to you ad nasuem (and probably still ending up with you rejecting it anyhow). Again, this isn't just for the Bible, it's for all text, up to and including my post, and it goes double for anything written more then 20 or so years ago, and triple or more for anything more then a hundred years old. Given the word palette the author had to choose from, whether you believe the author divine or not, "day" (which of course is not the English word for day, and thus criticizing it on that point commits the additional sin (pun intended) of criticizing a translation) is as good as anything else.
PDF is Adobe; it just so happens that PDF is a cleaned-up version of PS, with some of the dangerous extensions removed, some other nices ones added (like the forms stuff), and a compressed file format; it's not hard for ghostscript to keep up.
PS is also Adobe.
Fortunately, they aren't trying to squash everyone who uses the format. (I don't know if they can, i.e., I don't know if they have any IP rights that could conceivably squash ghostview. But if they do, they aren't trying. And PS has long since passed into a de-facto standard state...)
You want to fully comprehend this? Unless you are a highly motivated mathematical mega-genius (and you can't drop either criterion... merely being a mega-genius won't help if you're not motivated), a good University education is the only way to go. Even if you are a highly motivated mathematical mega-genius, you'll still want to use the actual textbooks you'd use in a Uni course series. . . be prepared to read more then just a couple of books, and be prepared to learn a hell of a lot of math.
And if math isn't easy for you (and I mean math, not namby-pamby arithematic, I mean real math, like topology and geometry and all forms of calculus), and you aren't truly seriously motivated to spend years on this, even the Uni won't be enough; most people drop out of the serious Physics courses!
I can't give you a reading list; all I can say is if anyone else gives you one, and you can understand the books past the third chapter (assuming you know little/nothing about the subject, which I'm inferring from not trusting Uni educations right where they are the absolute strongest (hard sciences)), you're getting a "Slashdot" understanding, i.e., absolute crap. This isn't really a reading list problem; more of a reading bookshelf thing.
Quantum mechanics drives PhDs nuts; you probably aren't going to just "pick it up". And I say this as a guy who "picks things up" pretty routinely (not just computer stuff). You have to know your limits, and if you're asking, this is extremely highly likely this is beyond yours. (And if you have trouble understanding that sentence literally, don't even bother starting... statistically, there's a chance I'm wrong but I wouldn't bet, well, anything on that remote chance.)
Now, if you don't mind being a poser, as I am, then there are lots of great choices; the best thing to do is hike on down to a good physical bookstore, peruse the science shelves, and look for something that looks to be at your level, or better, slightly above. But don't think for a second you're getting anything more then the cliff notes of the cliff notes of a summary of quantum physics. (And highly opinionated ones, too; when physicist run out of math to talk about in popular-interest books, they tend to start shooting their mouths off and irresponsibly speculating wildly about cosmology. It makes good copy, but frankly, they're only slightly better equipped to speculate about the nature of the universe then you are; if anything, they get to be even more wildly wrong. You gotta seperate the physicist's wanking from the real facts.)
The Sorceress, on the other hand, turns out to be a babe who strolls around in thongs, does kung fu, and relates instantly to the Rock's sophisticated style of combat and international diplomacy. The Sorceress makes it clear that she loses her powers if she ever has sex.
Let's me guess... she has oral sex with the Rock and stains her blue thongs, which is the smoking gun the Authorities of Magic need to bring her up on charges of improper conduct, for which the penalty is the immediate impeachment of her magical powers. But in an emergency highly publicized session before the Gods and Goddesses of Magic, makes an impassioned plea based on questiong what the definition of "is" is, and manages to get off the hook when it is determined that nobody in fact gives a damn what a Sorceress does in her private life, thus letting her have sex AND keep her powers.
Am I close?
The guide data probably isn't copyrightable.
Actually, it probably is, if it contains all the data the current guide data does. The program summaries, ratings, and categorizations are definately copyrightable. You'd have to ask a copyright lawyer if you could extract the raw titles and times, which are what most people care about. You'd be extracting non-copyrightable material from a copyrighted feed, and I don't know if that counts as a "derivative product". (Note I wouldn't put any stock in wild Slashdot theories on this point; I study IP as much as any non-lawyer, and I don't think a non-lawyer can answer this question. It may not even have an answer.)
And of course if it's encrypted at all, the DMCA will completely protect it, regardless.
Also something most of the good replies based on statistics are missing here is that *accuracy doesn't matter in this case*. The point is taking many anecdotal observations and synthesizing them into meaningful suggestions for websites, not whether 82% or 83% of children worldwide try to punch the monkey.
That's *why* five people are good enough; the point is to uncover usability problems, not wax poetic on exactly (to the %) how many people hit those problems. (That's another study, which the author has indeed done, but that has different goals, so it has a different methodology.)
The redundency of testing thousands of people is truly staggering. Translate "redundency" to "money" and you understand why its downright stupid to run a test like this with thousands; indeed, 55 was possibly excessive! 55 was probably chosen because this is a groundbreaking study, and they want to decrease the odds of statistical flukes. To do an actual usability study on a specific site, I'd probably go with 3 girls, 3 boys (in keeping with the gender selection). That'd be plenty!
Gentoo automatically configures the source download, and uses your preferred optimizations. IIRC, Debian does not; that requires manual intervention, which is the whole point of Gentoo.
Note to moderators: The parent was not a troll. I'd say it's a decently reasoned opinion.
For comparision, here's my take on the issue. First, I'm a bigtime privacy wonk. Second, despite that, I still believe that a corporation can pretty much do whatever it can get away with to its employees legally, and that legal action should NOT be taken to 'correct' this.
The fact of the matter is we have a perfectly fine set of union laws, which provide protection. This is a union issue. If you don't want to be monitored like cows, make your union make an issue out of it. It's stress inducing, it's probably a waste of company resources (after a certain point), it's probably not a net business gain (after a certain point) anyhow, rigid rules rarely match reality, it's not hard to come with counterarguments.
But until people care, and not just a bare minority, nothing will happen. In this case, I am actually against laws... they'd only make things worse. (Not that you were proposing them, I'm just giving my position for comparision to yours.)
Ah, a form of dancing. Keep an eye out for this style argument; it's pernicious, until you learn to see through it.
Without going into a point-by-point rebuttal, of course "that point of view is extremely dangerous". And of course much of what you said is plausible, inasmuch as wacked-out examples made for the purpose of outrage and extremism is plausible. (That's not sarcasm; it's a common rhetorical device that is serious overused and abused, but it's still somewhat valid when understood correctly.)
But you provide no evidence that of the two alternatives, yours is better. Your scenarios are for the most part equally applicable to the hiding case; instead of information spreading openly, it spreads covertly. Doesn't change much. You can't keep information from a determined person; people are just too smart.
I'd say that the post you are replying to is much better constructed as an argument, because it says why the alternative is better: The good guys can find it and learn from it. How is your proposal better? The bad guys still find it*. Now maybe the good guys don't. The "demented person" scenarios remain.
Step up a meta level. You're focusing too tightly on a small part of the problem, and missing the global implications.
I say that both revealing and hiding the information is dangerous. The danger comes from people, and therefore cannot be removed from the equation. (This is what you implicitly try to do, by hiding the information. The problem is, the information is not the danger.) But of the two alternatives, open discussion is clearly the preferable choice, both in theory, and in practice.
(*: Proof: Look at the real world. Happens all the time. This is undeniable.)
I wrote an article that plays off of similar themes as your post: The CBDTPA Is Immune to (Conventional) Criticism.
Definately.
;-)
One of my favorite anachronistic reads is Starman Jones, by Heinlein. It's one of his "kiddie" books, in which a kid manages to bamboozle his away aboard an FTL starship, which is a wonderful large thing with dance floors. It's a routine trip; star travel is no big deal, at least among the rich. And one of the primay jobs on the ship is to read the blinking lights while the computers spell out in binary when to jump, where they are, etc. And the main input is via a bank of switches, IIRC. Horribly, horribly dated!
Time is accelerating. Being a year ahead of the curve is worth more then it used to be. Read Vinge, and check the date. Neuromancer is, IIRC, early 80's, still hasn't happened yet, still largely plausible, still at least 10 years away. Sci-fi was computer ignorant in the 50's, but since at least the 80's has caught up with the idea of exponential projection, and is predicting away with its usualy single-digit percentage accuracy. ;-) (Better then most branches of lit.)
Actually, he's not required to assume that. We are under acceleration all the time. Gravity from the Earth is merely the most visible manifestation of that.
Unless the hypothetical time machine can follow the acceleration of where it *would be* (including interatomic interactions, which is what prevents you from falling into the Earth), the time machine will not correctly 'track' the location. Whether it follows a complicated track in a higher dimensional space, doesn't move, follows a straight-line projection in either objective or subjective time, blindly follows acceleration with no regard for interatomic forces, it doesn't come out in the right place. (Note that anything that you can see can see you, and anything that exerts a force on you, equally has a force exerted on it. The Time Machine movie, which has the charecter seeing things, implies that the world could equally well see him, and he's lucky nobody killed him with a bright light. One of Niven's Gil the ARM stories focuses on this possibility.... though I'm afraid I just ruined it for you telling you that. So, basically, you can't look and see where you're going.)
We don't need an absolute reference frame, we just need to show that a conventional can't possibly track our frame.
The CBDTPA is Immune to (Conventional) Criticism is probably worth a read before considering how to approach this problem. This is a surprisingly deep problem.
I have become extremely accustomed to my sense of sight. Am I brain-damaged in the dark? Would I be brain-damage if I were permanently blinded?
If you were to stay in total darkness for an extended period of time, conservatively, three or four days, yes, you would experience what could be called brain damage.
Like muscles, nerves atrophy. (pedants note: I am oversimplifying immensely; at least I know it.) Normally we think of that in terms of skills like "playing the guitar" and we'd never call someone who has forgotten how to play the guitar through lack of practice "brain damaged".
However, it is quite plausible that we'd call someone who hasn't seen in several years "brain damaged"; we would certainly prescribe "therapy" to correct the damage. Literally, your brain forgets how to see. Blind people do have increased sensitivity to the other senses, especially hearing; with a series of MRI scans, you can literally watch as the parts of the brain formerly dedicated to seeing slowly reconfigure themselves to work on sound. (Neurons like to work.) Obviously, once that happens, those parts of the brain can't be used for seeing, until they are reconfigured again, which can only happen if sight is restored. Look up case histories if you don't believe me. This does sometimes happen.
That said, is this a little overblown? Probably at the present time. However, in the forseeable future, no, it's probably not. Extended disconnection from the cybernetics could cause many problems, even if they seem noncritical. This is something to seriously consider beofre getting implants yourself. (I'm quite serious about this; while I like the idea in general, I can assure you I will not be the first person to be implanted.)