Your problem is that you don't realise that there are a lot of nonlogical people out there, who don't bid their maximum price, but put in a bid, then if they see they've been outbid, put in another one and so forth.
No. I do understand that quite perfectly.
My problem is in understanding why either I or eBay should care. They tell you the best way to bid right on the bidding page, last I knew. If you're having trouble with snipers, change your bidding strategy. Problem solved. Whining that you don't waaaaaant to is a pretty poor argument, I think, or demanding that eBay try to change themselves to make your way optimal, which may not even be possible.
Snipers are just keeping your price DOWN (despite all appearances to the contrary) to the benefit of all bidders...
This is an unsupported statement that would need careful experimentation to test.
My counter-claim, equally unsupported, is that if everybody bidded my way, the final price of the auction goods would be insignificantly different. In my examination of the value of closing bids, which I've done to evaluate the value of some stuff I had (and eBay makes that harder every year, although last I knew you could still search on closed auctions), I've found that the same good will go for a very constant price across auctions, even when there are only three or four auctions in the search window for an obscure good. I think that constant price is pretty much what the auction is going to close at. Irrational would-be-snipers are going to bid more than they "really" want to, regardless of whether they use "sniping" to do it, and I don't think that would change. And so...
To minimise the inflationary effect of those fools, bid as late as possible, not as early as possible.
I don't believe they have an inflationary effect. That effect is illusion. The "real price" is not the "current winning bid", it's "the highest someone will pay for it". Sniping has no effect whatsoever on the real number.
Perhaps this is why I don't shop eBay anymore. There are enough irrational bidders to push every item 5-10% over what I'd bid for them, because to them winning itself has value and it doesn't to me; I just want the item. People like me probably shouldn't bother with eBay. And I don't. Another theory is that people in higher cost-of-living places can afford to bid more than I can, since I live in a middle-of-the-road cost-of-living area; I think both are true to some extent. Either way, I have to admit I don't do eBay much. Almost by definition you don't get bargains any more; all you have is the selection, and I'm mostly just better off not knowing what I'm missing.
No. In the event of two "most money"s (of identical size), the earlier bid wins.
I'm still trying to figure out why "putting in the max value you mean to pay as soon as possible" is not the optimal strategy. I don't eBay much, but I don't get sniped, because I do this. All sniping does is raise the amount I have to pay (but still at or below my max) at the last minute in a way I completely expect, or causes the amount to go over what I'm willing to pay, in which case I shrug and move on with life.
This whole sniping thing is one of the larger gigantic wastes of time and fury I can think of. Use the system as designed and it all works.
There's two ReiserFSs for the purposes of this discussion.
There's ReiserFS 3, which pretty much anybody running ReiserFS right now is probably actually using. It is, as near as I can tell, basically as you say a POSIX-style filesystem that has some strengths and some weaknesses. It's good with small files under certain circumstances, and is generally somewhat more efficient with space. (Most of its other unique-at-the-time features have since been copied by the other open source FSs, and matched by the open-sourced commercial FSs.)
Then there's ReiserFS 4, which is a nearly complete reconceptualization of how a file system works. You can read about it here. This is what people put up against WinFS, although ReiserFS is not itself a "relational" file system that I can see; I think it's more a case of trying to provide the same advanced functionality in two very different ways. It's interesting and I wish the ReiserFS 4 project well, but it's a damned hard problem and I don't know when or if it'll ever be done. (And they'll get all the more kudos from me if they pull it off.)
Some quick Google searching shows people claiming to use some form of ReiserFS 4 (since 2004 at least), but I don't know what the real status of the project is. The webpage doesn't seem well updated for that use. As near as I can tell my Gentoo-patched 2.6.15 kernel doesn't have 4 as an option, but I note the Portage does have a "reiser4progs" entry which claims to be 1.0.5.
If you're interested in learning more, that's where to start; be sure you're not reading about ReiserFS 3.
No, I didn't mean it that way; I'm referring to something completely different. Wishing to return to a past bit of your life may be healthy, may not be; depends on context and how it affects the rest of your life. (As an example of where I'd say it's healthy, for instance, it's healthy for a prisoner to want to return to when he was free, and hopefully take appropriate action in his life to bring that state about and keep it, whereas Fry wanting to return to the 20th century would be mostly wrong. ("Mostly" because the reason it would be wrong is that you should not spend your life desiring the absolutely unattainable, but in the Futurama universe it may not be absolutely unattainable, as he manages to visit the 20th century at least twice. Were time travel impossible it would be completely wrong.))
In my post I'm talking about Hollywood (mostly the Hollywood liberals*) desire to keep things the same at all costs, especially when "the same" means all the bad stuff happens to other people in other places. For instance, the way "maintaining stability" is considered so important, even when that "stabile state" is "tens of thousands of people being randomly murdered every year".
I recall the episode as being that the memories of the dog, which I'd say are the dog, as being intact. (In the real world this would be nonsense, but so is a lot of other things on Futurama.) If I am misremembering and it is just a clone on offer with no memory/personality transfer, then I agree with you; in fact I agree with you so much so that I should have felt that way originally. So until I see it again, or I suppose read a transcript since I don't have that DVD collection (though not for this reason), I'm inclined to think that it was what I would consider the real dog on offer.
(A body clone + full, accurate brain pattern transplant is the same dog ethically, as far as I am concerned. I reserve the right to change this opinion as the actual technology to do this comes online, depending on how it works, but for now this is my opinion.)
(*: Note, I'm not accusing "liberals" in general of this trait; I'm saying that most of the people I see with this pattern are also "liberal" in the traditional sense, and quite a lot of them seem to be from the Hollywood subculture.)
As I explicitly said, it's not the sad that bothers me.
It's the situation, at least as I recall it: "Here, say the word and I'll unfreeze this dog for you that loves you and you loved him. No negative consequences have been discussed and unfreezing things from the 20th century works out pretty as you prove yourself, Fry. There's no reason to expect any negative consequences."
"No, he's better off dead. No, I have no reason to say that. Just leave him as he is. Apparently I want to be sad for no reason and I want everybody at home to be sad."
It's stupid. Sad for lost parts of the 20th century was done in the show. The episode about Fry's brother was great. But this is stupid. Like I alluded to, the only even remotely plausible reason I can see that they did it the way they did (and this is at the "real world" level, not the story level) is that they suddenly tuned into that Hollywood Ethics band, with their strange obsession over maintaining The Way Things Are at all costs, so they can feel nice and santimonious about it.
It's not that the dog died. It's that Fry killed the dog. For no effort to himself it would have lived; in a very real sense it was alive, until he went to the effort of preventing its revival.
No, it's a horrible episode. I do not apologize for hating a death-affirming episode in an otherwise excellent series.
This is of course the first episode of Futurama my wife, with her degree in Zoology and corresponding love of animals, sees in its entirity. I hadn't seen it yet, so I didn't know what was coming.
I'm now "banned" from watching Futurama. "Banned" is in quotes because it's not a real ban, but it's not to be on when she's around.
I never dreamed the motherfuckers would end the episode like that. It was just wrong in every way, and I'm not including "it was sad"; I'm fine with that. But it was out of character for Fry to be philosophical, and if he was going to be philosophical, that's not the way he'd have been philosophical. And it was incredibly dumb-ass philosophy too. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was like I was suddenly watching some other show that was a thinly-disguished vehicle for Hollywood sham-ethics. (As if there aren't enough of those.)
Perhaps worst of all, the show has in the past picked up characters, so they couldn't even have been afraid of that.
If one of the new episodes somehow reversed this, I'd be much obliged.
My favorite part is when I heard about IPv6 in college, they had calculated that there would be enough addresses for 10 IPv6 devices for every square foot of the planet!
So, you're off by a about 21 and a half orders of magnitude. That's not even close by astronomical standards.:) You'll forgive me for not carrying more significant digits around.
Reminding you once again that any privacy policy that includes the clause that it can be changed at any time with minimal notification and no consent is no privacy policy at all.
(To be fair, the linked policy does have a nod towards "materially different" changes to the privacy policy. But guess who decides what "materially different" is...?)
Destroy what, exactly? The habitats of the incredibly cute native lunar fawns?
What can we possibly do to the Moon to make it worse than it already is?
Worst case scenario is "it doesn't look the same". Thinking that changing the appearance of things is some kind of crime is just arrogance, though; well obscured and wrapped in feel-good holiness, but it just boils down to I don't want it to change, so it shouldn't change.
My experience and subjective opinion is that what is being delivered is being delivered with unacceptable compromise, whether it be to rush to market, or just shoddy quality, it doesn't matter. I've seen compression artifacts, I've seen jittery playback. I'm not "getting" it.
The title of this reply, for those who may have skipped over it, is "Why Digital Isn't Better Than Analog".
Usually that starts into a discussion about how much better analog is at reproduction and why vinyl rocks. That's not where I'm going with this; personally I'll take a CD any day.
The problem is that with digital, you can compress the signal lossfully. This theoretically is an advantage, allowing you to fit, say, 3 TV high-quality TV channels in the bandwidth of 1 old-style SD analog channel.
However, given the choice, everybody seems to prefer to fit in 8 low-quality TV channels instead. Satellite radio, rather than have 50 high-quality stations at 128 or 192 Kbps, would rather have 150 barely-tolerable stations at 64 Kbps.
The reason they think they can do this is that most people can not articulate the difference between the old analog signal and the new, way-over-compressed digital signal. If you ask them with just a couple of minutes exposure, they'll say they are the same. Only people who are very familiar with the technology can say "It's overcompressed".
But I think that even if most people can't articulate why the digital experience is worse than the analog experience, they do have a different experience with this over-compressed content that results in lower immersion, lower enjoyment, and in the long run, less inclination to pay for the experience. In the end they see no reason to jump or even want to go back to analog.
I've done the latter. I took the digital TV deal from Comcast a while back that gave me the basic digital package for just over their analog rates. But a combination of leisurely channel changing (since it has to re-sync with the rarely-sent I frames), visible artefacts even on my bog-standard low-def 28 inch TV, and incredibly sluggish set-top box made go back to analog, and I'm exactly the kind of person who "should" be drooling for digital. I hear they've since fixed the last problem, though I have no evidence of this.
I'd love a good digital experiece. I'd love a digital radio that's actually an improvement over analog radio instead of (to my ears) a slight downgrade since they only use 96Kbps. I'd love good digital TV, but they always jam too many channels down the line. I'd love satellite radio, but again, to my ears they are quite obviously right on the edge of unlistenability. And to those non-techies I've asked, when they wonder what I mean by "isn't this TV/radio just sort of missing some life?", I always get nodding heads, not arguments.
Until the digital entertainment purveyers are willing to actually live up to their quality claims, where digital becomes a consistently superior experience, instead of something that is inferior to analog in inexpressable-but-important ways, digital stuff just isn't going to take off. Digital ought to be better than analog. The potential is there. But it's not being realized.
For reference, I have a Dell Inspiron 6000, a 15-inch widescreen display laptop, running a recent Linux kernel with the power management set up correctly to slow the chip down when not in use, and speed it up when in use. (I leave that on all the time, even on battery mode, since I'm never really that far from power.) The processor is a 1.6GHz Pentium-M, and it has the integrated graphics (not the ATI graphics).
With my screen on its lowest setting and the processor basically idle, ACPI is reporting that I'm consuming 16 watts, if I'm reading my/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0 correctly. (For voltage it says "11898 mV" and present rate is "1339 mA".)
With my screen at its highest brightness and the processor compiling Firefox, ACPI says I'm consuming 34 Watts.
I have no comment beyond that, although I'm curious if I can rely on my ACPI measurements. I just think it's interesting to compare the consoles with a real computer, especially one that was designed to be at least somewhat power efficient.
Because of the nature of the beast. There is a fundamental disconnect between what they want and what they can get, no matter how good their ads get.
What they want is for your primary goal in life to be to consume their product. (This is especially difficult in that several hundred or thousand products all share this same goal, and best case scenario is still that only one can "win".)
What they can get at best is "an interesting commercial", at a much greater expense than just creating a standard annoying-as-hell commercial.
They'll be pleased with the initial apparent progress towards their goal, but when it caps out long before it gets to making consumption your primary goal in life, they'll become disillusioned and go back to the cheap-but-annoying model, as it has better bang-for-the-buck.
Advertising's primary problem is that they were able to fool themselves in the past that they were making progress towards making their products our overriding concern, because of the very fuzzy and indirect nature of the feedback they recieved. As they become better at figuring out the real effects of their advertising, they are becoming more desparate to "recapture" their old progress and stature, which is especially difficult as it never existed in the first place. Until they realize that it was always an illusion, and re-align themselves to think of themselves as an investment instead of an attempt to create little quasi-religions centered around products, they are always going to have this problem.
(Note that most business people already correctly think of advertising as investment and have for a long time. It's "Big Advertising" that has a very wrong mental model of their own importance.)
Investigator speaking to bureaucrat: Does more need to be done?
Bureuacrat: Yes, more needs to be done. And I need more resources with which to do it.
The exact topic du jour matters not one bit.
The primary motivation of any bureaucracy is to extend its dominion and claim more needs to be done.
A surprising number of organizations, many of the quite large, are basically moving along with this motivation and nothing more. I don't care to get flamed so I won't name names, but there's a lot of 'em.
It's worth pointing out that a lot of that stuff isn't, strictly speaking, impossible.
What's impossible is to take a single photo out of the stream and "enhance" it to the n-th degree without using the rest of the video.
And no matter how good your technique, you can't generate information, so there will be some limit to your zooming in.
But the idea that if you consider the entire video stream, you can extract a lot more information is not impossible at all, and you'd probably be surprised by both what is in there and what isn't. Seeing "through" something probabilistically is possible if the object being "seen" was in video at some point. On the other hand, "zooming" in to something on the counter that has been there for the entire duration of the video and has never moved is impossible, because while you may have 15,000 pictures of the object, they're all the same pictures.
Normally I don't bring this up when we're having one of our usual bitch-fests about CSI here on Slashdot because by and large the standard bitching is still correct. But as AI advances, some of the stuff that seems impossible now will become very possible.
One early example I remember seeing is the demonstration of a system that could identify a person with about 15x15 pixel, high-temporal-resolution monochrome video of them walking, by comparing walking patterns. This was a while ago, and it's worth pointing out your brain can do a pretty decent job of the same task when shown the same video. I mention this because any given frame of the video is basically a random assortment of gray blobs, but in motion, not only is it "a person" but it's a specific person; making it a video adds a lot of information.
The problem with all kinds of "berzerker" "grey goo" type stories is that they ignore the thermodynamics of evolution.
Who's talking about "evolving" berzerkers?
We're talking about building berzerkers. Thermodynamics of evolution don't enter into it, any more than they do for the grey goo scenario.
Grey goo on Planet Earth doesn't work because there isn't really enough energy sloshing around, and the available materials are nowhere near optimal for it.
Grey goo on the galatic scale is perfectly plausible. If there is an advancing berserker "grey goo" on the galactic scale heading our way, all it has to do for us to lose big is lob a 10-mile asteroid at us at 99.9% of the speed of light, and that's the end of life on planet Earth. The energy required to do that is miniscule for a galactic grey goo, on par with what is needed to travel between the stars anyhow.
At the galactic scale, it's not that the Grey Goo is covering every square inch; it's that it's covering and eliminating all niches for life. At the galactic scale, it's extremely plausible.
Offtopic... yeah, right. A discussion about the potential dangers to civilization, and historical and fictional discussions of such, is off-topic on a discussion about some guy saying we need to get off of Earth to increase our survivability in the case of various dangers to civilization.
I didn't know that anyone still reads Saberhagen. In my opinion his writings are kind of dry, no offense.
"Still"? I haven't read it in a long time. But it's going to be a while before I "unread" it...
I get most of my science fiction by tromping through used book stores and garage sales (rare). So my reading list is pretty eclectic and very temporally scattered, plus I actually like older science fiction. (They literally don't write it like they used to; I like modern stuff, but I also like the older stuff.)
Still, you find some nifty, way-off-mainstream stuff that way. For example, Where were you last pluterday?
I don't, either. I think it's a grave mistake every time they invoke it.
Time travel and "alternate universes" are death on a science fiction show. When any event can be nullified at any time without warning by either traveling back in time or being in an alternate universe at the time, drama is eliminated and you're left with sci-fi-masturbation material. This is how Star Trek ended, and any attempt at a reboot needs to explicitly say up front that there is no time travel and no quantum-many-universes.
SG-1 has so far avoided the trap, but they've taunted it in an unwise manner.
(Exception: Time-fits-together-like-a-puzzle time travel, but it must be consistent; it must be impossible to "change" the past, only to fulfill your "destiny". Dr. Who from what I've seen so far basically avoids it by having all the destinations so far apart that they can hardly effect each other anyhow, and at least in the 2005 season explicitly alluded to the impossibility of short-term time travel, of exactly the sort you'd need to resolve stories with time travel.)
Did you ever think that the human race is the berserker? We seek out life, and destroy it. We destroy each other, we destroy the earth. If another species comes to earth, i have no doubt that we will destroy it also.... we are the berserker...
Oh yes. The sterile wastes of the Universe had better watch out, baby, because Humanity the Great Destroyer of.... uh.... err..... whatever-it-is-out-there is on its way!
To make it.... err.... yet more sterile or something. And more desolate.
Except it's pretty much as desolate as it can be. And if not actually sterile, than to all indications, nearly so.
You know, I sort of understand "The Great Nobility Of Mother Nature", although I don't agree with it to speak of in the sense you are advocating. But you have thought this out and realize you are advocating "The Great Nobility Of Utter, Complete Desolate Lifelessness", right?
What possible thing can humanity do to the universe at large to make it worse than the state it is already in?
There are human-form replicators in the Asgard galaxy. Time travel has happened in SG-1, but not extensively, for obvious reasons.
To you, and the AC that also replied with this... err, yes, I know. That's why I mentioned it, to point out the similarities, right down to the "twists". Not accusing SG-1 of stealing, either; everything you see done on TV today was pretty much covered 30-40 years ago in book form, since books don't need multi-million-dollar special effects budgets.
So the current question in my mind is what will happen when the Ori meet each of the following groups: wraith (from atlantis, who now have our coordinates)
I am hoping that they are actually leading up to this. The Wraith are on their way to Earth as of the end of the last season and the Ori are already in our galaxy.
However, I expect them to wimp out and have Atlantis narrowly prevent the Wraith from ever making it to this galaxy somehow, and thus remaining oblivious to the Ori.
I note that the Ori and the Wraith are, interesting, basically both vampires, just at a slightly different level. (Just thought of this.)
replicators (from the asgard galaxy, who have our coordinates BUT are stuck (IIRC, AFAIK) in a time distortion field)
They were mostly destroyed in the time distortion field. The ones that got out all came here, where they were destroyed in the Great SG-1 Reboot that took out the Goa'uld, Anubis, and the Replicators in the space of a handful of episodes. See here.
But there are ways we could end up sterilizing the galaxy, by creating Berserkers; self-replicating machines that either deliberately or accidentally sterilize all life. Odds are that if any such machines are actually created, unlike the stories that the term comes from, they'll actually win, and once established they can't be displaced.
Berserkers are one of the interesting aspects of the Fermi Paradox; is the solution to the Paradox that some dumb-asses actually did create Berserkers that come and wipe out all civilizations as soon as they attract attention? Is our high-tech doombot even now winging its way here at nearly the speed of light?
In more recent fiction, the Replicators of Stargate SG-1 are updated versions of the Saberhagen berserkers, designed with a better understanding of computers and more magical technology, but otherwise almost indistinguishable from the Saberhagen variety. (Saberhagen even had some berserkers that masqueraded as humans at some points, and used time travel, which Stargate hasn't gotten around to, mercifully, though I couldn't tell you why.)
In other words, while on Earth the "Gray Goo" scenario is implausible due to energy requirements and simple thermodynamics, the Galactic "Grey Goo" scenario has no such restrictions.
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Your problem is that you don't realise that there are a lot of nonlogical people out there, who don't bid their maximum price, but put in a bid, then if they see they've been outbid, put in another one and so forth.
No. I do understand that quite perfectly.
My problem is in understanding why either I or eBay should care. They tell you the best way to bid right on the bidding page, last I knew. If you're having trouble with snipers, change your bidding strategy. Problem solved. Whining that you don't waaaaaant to is a pretty poor argument, I think, or demanding that eBay try to change themselves to make your way optimal, which may not even be possible.
Snipers are just keeping your price DOWN (despite all appearances to the contrary) to the benefit of all bidders...
This is an unsupported statement that would need careful experimentation to test.
My counter-claim, equally unsupported, is that if everybody bidded my way, the final price of the auction goods would be insignificantly different. In my examination of the value of closing bids, which I've done to evaluate the value of some stuff I had (and eBay makes that harder every year, although last I knew you could still search on closed auctions), I've found that the same good will go for a very constant price across auctions, even when there are only three or four auctions in the search window for an obscure good. I think that constant price is pretty much what the auction is going to close at. Irrational would-be-snipers are going to bid more than they "really" want to, regardless of whether they use "sniping" to do it, and I don't think that would change. And so...
To minimise the inflationary effect of those fools, bid as late as possible, not as early as possible.
I don't believe they have an inflationary effect. That effect is illusion. The "real price" is not the "current winning bid", it's "the highest someone will pay for it". Sniping has no effect whatsoever on the real number.
Perhaps this is why I don't shop eBay anymore. There are enough irrational bidders to push every item 5-10% over what I'd bid for them, because to them winning itself has value and it doesn't to me; I just want the item. People like me probably shouldn't bother with eBay. And I don't. Another theory is that people in higher cost-of-living places can afford to bid more than I can, since I live in a middle-of-the-road cost-of-living area; I think both are true to some extent. Either way, I have to admit I don't do eBay much. Almost by definition you don't get bargains any more; all you have is the selection, and I'm mostly just better off not knowing what I'm missing.
No. In the event of two "most money"s (of identical size), the earlier bid wins.
I'm still trying to figure out why "putting in the max value you mean to pay as soon as possible" is not the optimal strategy. I don't eBay much, but I don't get sniped, because I do this. All sniping does is raise the amount I have to pay (but still at or below my max) at the last minute in a way I completely expect, or causes the amount to go over what I'm willing to pay, in which case I shrug and move on with life.
This whole sniping thing is one of the larger gigantic wastes of time and fury I can think of. Use the system as designed and it all works.
You forgot ON THE INTERNET.
Patent application denied. Please resubmit. Do not forget your "revision review" fee.
There's two ReiserFSs for the purposes of this discussion.
There's ReiserFS 3, which pretty much anybody running ReiserFS right now is probably actually using. It is, as near as I can tell, basically as you say a POSIX-style filesystem that has some strengths and some weaknesses. It's good with small files under certain circumstances, and is generally somewhat more efficient with space. (Most of its other unique-at-the-time features have since been copied by the other open source FSs, and matched by the open-sourced commercial FSs.)
Then there's ReiserFS 4, which is a nearly complete reconceptualization of how a file system works. You can read about it here. This is what people put up against WinFS, although ReiserFS is not itself a "relational" file system that I can see; I think it's more a case of trying to provide the same advanced functionality in two very different ways. It's interesting and I wish the ReiserFS 4 project well, but it's a damned hard problem and I don't know when or if it'll ever be done. (And they'll get all the more kudos from me if they pull it off.)
Some quick Google searching shows people claiming to use some form of ReiserFS 4 (since 2004 at least), but I don't know what the real status of the project is. The webpage doesn't seem well updated for that use. As near as I can tell my Gentoo-patched 2.6.15 kernel doesn't have 4 as an option, but I note the Portage does have a "reiser4progs" entry which claims to be 1.0.5.
If you're interested in learning more, that's where to start; be sure you're not reading about ReiserFS 3.
"the way things were" as you scornfully put it,
No, I didn't mean it that way; I'm referring to something completely different. Wishing to return to a past bit of your life may be healthy, may not be; depends on context and how it affects the rest of your life. (As an example of where I'd say it's healthy, for instance, it's healthy for a prisoner to want to return to when he was free, and hopefully take appropriate action in his life to bring that state about and keep it, whereas Fry wanting to return to the 20th century would be mostly wrong. ("Mostly" because the reason it would be wrong is that you should not spend your life desiring the absolutely unattainable, but in the Futurama universe it may not be absolutely unattainable, as he manages to visit the 20th century at least twice. Were time travel impossible it would be completely wrong.))
In my post I'm talking about Hollywood (mostly the Hollywood liberals*) desire to keep things the same at all costs, especially when "the same" means all the bad stuff happens to other people in other places. For instance, the way "maintaining stability" is considered so important, even when that "stabile state" is "tens of thousands of people being randomly murdered every year".
I recall the episode as being that the memories of the dog, which I'd say are the dog, as being intact. (In the real world this would be nonsense, but so is a lot of other things on Futurama.) If I am misremembering and it is just a clone on offer with no memory/personality transfer, then I agree with you; in fact I agree with you so much so that I should have felt that way originally. So until I see it again, or I suppose read a transcript since I don't have that DVD collection (though not for this reason), I'm inclined to think that it was what I would consider the real dog on offer.
(A body clone + full, accurate brain pattern transplant is the same dog ethically, as far as I am concerned. I reserve the right to change this opinion as the actual technology to do this comes online, depending on how it works, but for now this is my opinion.)
(*: Note, I'm not accusing "liberals" in general of this trait; I'm saying that most of the people I see with this pattern are also "liberal" in the traditional sense, and quite a lot of them seem to be from the Hollywood subculture.)
As I explicitly said, it's not the sad that bothers me.
It's the situation, at least as I recall it: "Here, say the word and I'll unfreeze this dog for you that loves you and you loved him. No negative consequences have been discussed and unfreezing things from the 20th century works out pretty as you prove yourself, Fry. There's no reason to expect any negative consequences."
"No, he's better off dead. No, I have no reason to say that. Just leave him as he is. Apparently I want to be sad for no reason and I want everybody at home to be sad."
It's stupid. Sad for lost parts of the 20th century was done in the show. The episode about Fry's brother was great. But this is stupid. Like I alluded to, the only even remotely plausible reason I can see that they did it the way they did (and this is at the "real world" level, not the story level) is that they suddenly tuned into that Hollywood Ethics band, with their strange obsession over maintaining The Way Things Are at all costs, so they can feel nice and santimonious about it.
It's not that the dog died. It's that Fry killed the dog. For no effort to himself it would have lived; in a very real sense it was alive, until he went to the effort of preventing its revival.
No, it's a horrible episode. I do not apologize for hating a death-affirming episode in an otherwise excellent series.
This is of course the first episode of Futurama my wife, with her degree in Zoology and corresponding love of animals, sees in its entirity. I hadn't seen it yet, so I didn't know what was coming.
I'm now "banned" from watching Futurama. "Banned" is in quotes because it's not a real ban, but it's not to be on when she's around.
I never dreamed the motherfuckers would end the episode like that. It was just wrong in every way, and I'm not including "it was sad"; I'm fine with that. But it was out of character for Fry to be philosophical, and if he was going to be philosophical, that's not the way he'd have been philosophical. And it was incredibly dumb-ass philosophy too. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was like I was suddenly watching some other show that was a thinly-disguished vehicle for Hollywood sham-ethics. (As if there aren't enough of those.)
Perhaps worst of all, the show has in the past picked up characters, so they couldn't even have been afraid of that.
If one of the new episodes somehow reversed this, I'd be much obliged.
My favorite part is when I heard about IPv6 in college, they had calculated that there would be enough addresses for 10 IPv6 devices for every square foot of the planet!
:) You'll forgive me for not carrying more significant digits around.
Oh, goodness me, are you ever off. Earth's area is 5.1e14 square meters. 2**128 ~= 3.4e38. 3.4e38 / 5.1e14 = 6.7e23 IPv6 addresses per square meter. For square feet, call it 6e22 addresses per square foot. (1 square meter's pretty close to 10 square feet.)
So, you're off by a about 21 and a half orders of magnitude. That's not even close by astronomical standards.
Reminding you once again that any privacy policy that includes the clause that it can be changed at any time with minimal notification and no consent is no privacy policy at all.
(To be fair, the linked policy does have a nod towards "materially different" changes to the privacy policy. But guess who decides what "materially different" is...?)
Conservation is not a virtue for conservation's sake.
:)
Ah, there's the phrase I'm looking for. Thanks. I plan to steal it.
Destroy what, exactly? The habitats of the incredibly cute native lunar fawns?
What can we possibly do to the Moon to make it worse than it already is?
Worst case scenario is "it doesn't look the same". Thinking that changing the appearance of things is some kind of crime is just arrogance, though; well obscured and wrapped in feel-good holiness, but it just boils down to I don't want it to change, so it shouldn't change.
My experience and subjective opinion is that what is being delivered is being delivered with unacceptable compromise, whether it be to rush to market, or just shoddy quality, it doesn't matter. I've seen compression artifacts, I've seen jittery playback. I'm not "getting" it.
The title of this reply, for those who may have skipped over it, is "Why Digital Isn't Better Than Analog".
Usually that starts into a discussion about how much better analog is at reproduction and why vinyl rocks. That's not where I'm going with this; personally I'll take a CD any day.
The problem is that with digital, you can compress the signal lossfully. This theoretically is an advantage, allowing you to fit, say, 3 TV high-quality TV channels in the bandwidth of 1 old-style SD analog channel.
However, given the choice, everybody seems to prefer to fit in 8 low-quality TV channels instead. Satellite radio, rather than have 50 high-quality stations at 128 or 192 Kbps, would rather have 150 barely-tolerable stations at 64 Kbps.
The reason they think they can do this is that most people can not articulate the difference between the old analog signal and the new, way-over-compressed digital signal. If you ask them with just a couple of minutes exposure, they'll say they are the same. Only people who are very familiar with the technology can say "It's overcompressed".
But I think that even if most people can't articulate why the digital experience is worse than the analog experience, they do have a different experience with this over-compressed content that results in lower immersion, lower enjoyment, and in the long run, less inclination to pay for the experience. In the end they see no reason to jump or even want to go back to analog.
I've done the latter. I took the digital TV deal from Comcast a while back that gave me the basic digital package for just over their analog rates. But a combination of leisurely channel changing (since it has to re-sync with the rarely-sent I frames), visible artefacts even on my bog-standard low-def 28 inch TV, and incredibly sluggish set-top box made go back to analog, and I'm exactly the kind of person who "should" be drooling for digital. I hear they've since fixed the last problem, though I have no evidence of this.
I'd love a good digital experiece. I'd love a digital radio that's actually an improvement over analog radio instead of (to my ears) a slight downgrade since they only use 96Kbps. I'd love good digital TV, but they always jam too many channels down the line. I'd love satellite radio, but again, to my ears they are quite obviously right on the edge of unlistenability. And to those non-techies I've asked, when they wonder what I mean by "isn't this TV/radio just sort of missing some life?", I always get nodding heads, not arguments.
Until the digital entertainment purveyers are willing to actually live up to their quality claims, where digital becomes a consistently superior experience, instead of something that is inferior to analog in inexpressable-but-important ways, digital stuff just isn't going to take off. Digital ought to be better than analog. The potential is there. But it's not being realized.
For reference, I have a Dell Inspiron 6000, a 15-inch widescreen display laptop, running a recent Linux kernel with the power management set up correctly to slow the chip down when not in use, and speed it up when in use. (I leave that on all the time, even on battery mode, since I'm never really that far from power.) The processor is a 1.6GHz Pentium-M, and it has the integrated graphics (not the ATI graphics).
/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0 correctly. (For voltage it says "11898 mV" and present rate is "1339 mA".)
With my screen on its lowest setting and the processor basically idle, ACPI is reporting that I'm consuming 16 watts, if I'm reading my
With my screen at its highest brightness and the processor compiling Firefox, ACPI says I'm consuming 34 Watts.
I have no comment beyond that, although I'm curious if I can rely on my ACPI measurements. I just think it's interesting to compare the consoles with a real computer, especially one that was designed to be at least somewhat power efficient.
Because of the nature of the beast. There is a fundamental disconnect between what they want and what they can get, no matter how good their ads get.
What they want is for your primary goal in life to be to consume their product. (This is especially difficult in that several hundred or thousand products all share this same goal, and best case scenario is still that only one can "win".)
What they can get at best is "an interesting commercial", at a much greater expense than just creating a standard annoying-as-hell commercial.
They'll be pleased with the initial apparent progress towards their goal, but when it caps out long before it gets to making consumption your primary goal in life, they'll become disillusioned and go back to the cheap-but-annoying model, as it has better bang-for-the-buck.
Advertising's primary problem is that they were able to fool themselves in the past that they were making progress towards making their products our overriding concern, because of the very fuzzy and indirect nature of the feedback they recieved. As they become better at figuring out the real effects of their advertising, they are becoming more desparate to "recapture" their old progress and stature, which is especially difficult as it never existed in the first place. Until they realize that it was always an illusion, and re-align themselves to think of themselves as an investment instead of an attempt to create little quasi-religions centered around products, they are always going to have this problem.
(Note that most business people already correctly think of advertising as investment and have for a long time. It's "Big Advertising" that has a very wrong mental model of their own importance.)
So, I have to choose between a douche bag and a turd sandwhich?
From which part of "buy them all" did you get "choose"?
Investigator speaking to bureaucrat: Does more need to be done?
Bureuacrat: Yes, more needs to be done. And I need more resources with which to do it.
The exact topic du jour matters not one bit.
The primary motivation of any bureaucracy is to extend its dominion and claim more needs to be done.
A surprising number of organizations, many of the quite large, are basically moving along with this motivation and nothing more. I don't care to get flamed so I won't name names, but there's a lot of 'em.
Awesome.
:)
Add "idealized camera" to my original post, then.
It's worth pointing out that a lot of that stuff isn't, strictly speaking, impossible.
What's impossible is to take a single photo out of the stream and "enhance" it to the n-th degree without using the rest of the video.
And no matter how good your technique, you can't generate information, so there will be some limit to your zooming in.
But the idea that if you consider the entire video stream, you can extract a lot more information is not impossible at all, and you'd probably be surprised by both what is in there and what isn't. Seeing "through" something probabilistically is possible if the object being "seen" was in video at some point. On the other hand, "zooming" in to something on the counter that has been there for the entire duration of the video and has never moved is impossible, because while you may have 15,000 pictures of the object, they're all the same pictures.
Normally I don't bring this up when we're having one of our usual bitch-fests about CSI here on Slashdot because by and large the standard bitching is still correct. But as AI advances, some of the stuff that seems impossible now will become very possible.
One early example I remember seeing is the demonstration of a system that could identify a person with about 15x15 pixel, high-temporal-resolution monochrome video of them walking, by comparing walking patterns. This was a while ago, and it's worth pointing out your brain can do a pretty decent job of the same task when shown the same video. I mention this because any given frame of the video is basically a random assortment of gray blobs, but in motion, not only is it "a person" but it's a specific person; making it a video adds a lot of information.
The problem with all kinds of "berzerker" "grey goo" type stories is that they ignore the thermodynamics of evolution.
Who's talking about "evolving" berzerkers?
We're talking about building berzerkers. Thermodynamics of evolution don't enter into it, any more than they do for the grey goo scenario.
Grey goo on Planet Earth doesn't work because there isn't really enough energy sloshing around, and the available materials are nowhere near optimal for it.
Grey goo on the galatic scale is perfectly plausible. If there is an advancing berserker "grey goo" on the galactic scale heading our way, all it has to do for us to lose big is lob a 10-mile asteroid at us at 99.9% of the speed of light, and that's the end of life on planet Earth. The energy required to do that is miniscule for a galactic grey goo, on par with what is needed to travel between the stars anyhow.
At the galactic scale, it's not that the Grey Goo is covering every square inch; it's that it's covering and eliminating all niches for life. At the galactic scale, it's extremely plausible.
Offtopic... yeah, right. A discussion about the potential dangers to civilization, and historical and fictional discussions of such, is off-topic on a discussion about some guy saying we need to get off of Earth to increase our survivability in the case of various dangers to civilization.
I didn't know that anyone still reads Saberhagen. In my opinion his writings are kind of dry, no offense.
"Still"? I haven't read it in a long time. But it's going to be a while before I "unread" it...
I get most of my science fiction by tromping through used book stores and garage sales (rare). So my reading list is pretty eclectic and very temporally scattered, plus I actually like older science fiction. (They literally don't write it like they used to; I like modern stuff, but I also like the older stuff.)
Still, you find some nifty, way-off-mainstream stuff that way. For example, Where were you last pluterday?
I don't, either. I think it's a grave mistake every time they invoke it.
Time travel and "alternate universes" are death on a science fiction show. When any event can be nullified at any time without warning by either traveling back in time or being in an alternate universe at the time, drama is eliminated and you're left with sci-fi-masturbation material. This is how Star Trek ended, and any attempt at a reboot needs to explicitly say up front that there is no time travel and no quantum-many-universes.
SG-1 has so far avoided the trap, but they've taunted it in an unwise manner.
(Exception: Time-fits-together-like-a-puzzle time travel, but it must be consistent; it must be impossible to "change" the past, only to fulfill your "destiny". Dr. Who from what I've seen so far basically avoids it by having all the destinations so far apart that they can hardly effect each other anyhow, and at least in the 2005 season explicitly alluded to the impossibility of short-term time travel, of exactly the sort you'd need to resolve stories with time travel.)
Did you ever think that the human race is the berserker? We seek out life, and destroy it. We destroy each other, we destroy the earth. If another species comes to earth, i have no doubt that we will destroy it also.... we are the berserker...
Oh yes. The sterile wastes of the Universe had better watch out, baby, because Humanity the Great Destroyer of.... uh.... err..... whatever-it-is-out-there is on its way!
To make it.... err.... yet more sterile or something. And more desolate.
Except it's pretty much as desolate as it can be. And if not actually sterile, than to all indications, nearly so.
You know, I sort of understand "The Great Nobility Of Mother Nature", although I don't agree with it to speak of in the sense you are advocating. But you have thought this out and realize you are advocating "The Great Nobility Of Utter, Complete Desolate Lifelessness", right?
What possible thing can humanity do to the universe at large to make it worse than the state it is already in ?
Practicing to be goodlife, are we?
There are human-form replicators in the Asgard galaxy. Time travel has happened in SG-1, but not extensively, for obvious reasons.
To you, and the AC that also replied with this... err, yes, I know. That's why I mentioned it, to point out the similarities, right down to the "twists". Not accusing SG-1 of stealing, either; everything you see done on TV today was pretty much covered 30-40 years ago in book form, since books don't need multi-million-dollar special effects budgets.
So the current question in my mind is what will happen when the Ori meet each of the following groups: wraith (from atlantis, who now have our coordinates)
I am hoping that they are actually leading up to this. The Wraith are on their way to Earth as of the end of the last season and the Ori are already in our galaxy.
However, I expect them to wimp out and have Atlantis narrowly prevent the Wraith from ever making it to this galaxy somehow, and thus remaining oblivious to the Ori.
I note that the Ori and the Wraith are, interesting, basically both vampires, just at a slightly different level. (Just thought of this.)
replicators (from the asgard galaxy, who have our coordinates BUT are stuck (IIRC, AFAIK) in a time distortion field)
They were mostly destroyed in the time distortion field. The ones that got out all came here, where they were destroyed in the Great SG-1 Reboot that took out the Goa'uld, Anubis, and the Replicators in the space of a handful of episodes. See here.
It is true that actually destroying the galaxy is orders of magnitude harder than actually destroying the Earth.
But there are ways we could end up sterilizing the galaxy, by creating Berserkers; self-replicating machines that either deliberately or accidentally sterilize all life. Odds are that if any such machines are actually created, unlike the stories that the term comes from, they'll actually win, and once established they can't be displaced.
Berserkers are one of the interesting aspects of the Fermi Paradox; is the solution to the Paradox that some dumb-asses actually did create Berserkers that come and wipe out all civilizations as soon as they attract attention? Is our high-tech doombot even now winging its way here at nearly the speed of light?
In more recent fiction, the Replicators of Stargate SG-1 are updated versions of the Saberhagen berserkers, designed with a better understanding of computers and more magical technology, but otherwise almost indistinguishable from the Saberhagen variety. (Saberhagen even had some berserkers that masqueraded as humans at some points, and used time travel, which Stargate hasn't gotten around to, mercifully, though I couldn't tell you why.)
In other words, while on Earth the "Gray Goo" scenario is implausible due to energy requirements and simple thermodynamics, the Galactic "Grey Goo" scenario has no such restrictions.