So, do some math here. $1.25 an hour is $20 for sixteen hours. For $20, you can currently buy a number of greatest hits games, which for the sake of argument certainly have more than sixteen hours of gameplay in them. 40 hours is a good rule of thumb, more in some cases. I'm an extreme bargain shopper but I've been known to pour 100+ hours into a $17 game (I'm thinking FFX-2 100%-completion here), which is 17 cents an hour.
This, in addition to the documented preference humans have to pay one up front fee if it means avoiding the cognitive cost of having to think about hourly fees. For how many people is this a radical price increase over the current system? It'll never fly for those people, because there's no chance in hell the games will be any appreciably better than today.
Again, I'm an extreme bargain shopper so maybe the average gamer is already in the $1.25-hour range... but I doubt it's all that many.
I'd call you a shill as a couple of AC's have done, but if you are a shill, you're an incompetent one making completely baseless claims. At the moment there is no evidence of openness that I can find.
A bad statistical model for predicting cable outages?
Not that conspiracy theories aren't a whole lot of fun and all, but as I'm yet to see a terribly credible motive*, "people are too optimistic about how good their tech works" is a pretty reasonable explanation.
(*: Remember, for a motive to be credible, it has to not merely "explain" the actions, but explain why the perpetrator thinks this is the best thing they could do with their time, or at least credibly close to the "best thing". Nothing I've seen even comes close to that standard.)
You can perform all possible computer inputs with one (binary, yes/no) button, the right software, and a heaping helping of patience. "How much can we shrink the keyboard and still enter text" is not an interesting game.
just about everything except (and maybe not except) philosophy
I have no idea what current philosophy academics are interested in, so I can't accuse them of not keeping up. But if they aren't keeping up with AI, the Simulation Argument, Bayesian theory and other such statistical things, QM's implications for the many-worlds hypothesis, and computer science research into semantics, just to pull a few things off the top of my head, they are wasting their time in several fields traditionally included under the rubric of "philosophy" (epistemology, ethics, etc.).
We still have no rock-solid answers to speak of to the old questions, but for the first time in millennia, we actually have some data for some of them... and we're only going to be collecting more. And even what little data we have has opened up more questions; "what does it mean to be human?" will begin to take on new overtones when we start asking just exactly how augmented does an ape have to be before it is "human", just how smart does an AI have to be, and, of course, is a binary definition of "human" even feasible, and if not, what is? And so on.
(I know for a fact there are philosophers interested in this. I simply don't know if they are in or out of the mainstream. Certainly they will eventually be in the mainstream.)
You should not use a "source control" system to store huge binaries. The reason why is right there in the name, "source". None of them can really handle that gracefully, nor should they. 2GB images are not "[program] source".
I don't know what you should use, but "source control" is not it. You need an image management solution, which, being optimized for images, will probably have a ton of other useful features.
But branching and merging adds a fair bit of overhead
I use git, via git-svn. Branching and merging in git reduce my overhead by enabling workflows in my team that would be nightmares in SVN. (Which I know by experience.)
SVN != source control. You have not seen branching until you've seen "rebase".
What crack are you and the moderators smoking? That doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to Capitalism, in theory or in practice!
One of the free markets in capitalism is your right and privilege to sell your labor at a mutually agreeable price. While that may not always 100% work out in pratice, it sure doesn't work out to what you described... which, I would point out, is a hell of a lot closer in practice to how Communism turned out in the Soviet Union.
Why don't you and some moderators actually go learn about capitalism from something other than a socialist/communist?
Cultures vary surprisingly widely on what constitutes "good design". Many Asian cultures, for instance, all but require you to have a very busy page.
In a way, I'm surprised at how some of it turns out. If you came up to me and asked me which of the "East" or "West" would prefer Google to Yahoo, I'd have picked East to prefer the Google aesthetic and West to prefer the Yahoo approach, but I would be wrong. (Very, very broadly speaking. I am aware I am generalizing, this is a Slashdot comment, not a sociology PhD thesis. Please don't cite "a counterexample" at me and think it proves anything.)
I'm in a nearly pure-Linux environment and I've indirectly encountered a fair portion of that list either in my family, or with releasing a Windows client for our software that just happens to trip anti-virus software for no reason we could ever figure out.
AV software is so crappy it will reach out to screw you hard.
It wouldn't take a kit like that in the hands of very many consumers to have a radical effect on honest labeling.
People often point out that capitalism assumes perfect information on the part of the consumer, which doesn't exist, but this is how it largely keeps going; a few consumers can cause enough pain for a liar (with government assist) to keep the market disproportionately honest. Even a single kit-assisted lawsuit could have a surprisingly large effect.
Well, there's your problem, making yourself easily ignorable. Heck, the relevant people would have to go out of their way to find out about you.
Stop protesting in the streets, and instead spend the time doing two things:
Cultivating a relationship with the local news outlets. They like government corruption (or anything related to it) stories. (Yeah, that's a simplification but it's basically true.)
Figure out how to file lawsuits, and start filing.
The sum of those two things is greater than the sum of the parts.
You've indicated a willingness to spend time on the issue, but you need to re-think your tactics.
(I can't. I don't live in Ohio or, to the best of my knowledge, in anyplace that has such ballot machines, and therefore I have no standing.)
Protesting in the streets has its place, but it's a very overrated political action. If you're not several thousand people making a point that 80%+ of the population strongly agrees with, you're wasting your time. Do something with your time that works, instead.
Technology always "takes stuff away", but the entire reason we pursue it is that it gives more stuff back.
Yes, I am "deprived" from my connection with Mother Earth because I am not a subsistence farmer, but I am happy that I don't have to spend a lot of time hungry or worrying about food, and it's my responsibility to plow the resulting freed time into something useful.
Yes, I am socially deprived because I am no longer economically forced to live with my extended family, but in turn, I get to form social links of my own choosing. It's my own damn fault if I don't take advantage of the superior options that opens up.
Yes, making photos easy cheapens each given photo, but it also makes it easier to experiment without blowing a wad. I didn't even bother with an analog camera because I wasn't willing to put the time in to learn, let alone spend the money, but with my digital camera I've learned a lot because I can take twenty pictures of the same thing with near-immediate feedback, and virtually no cost. If you don't end up with a superior photo collection in the end, that's your fault, not the technologies; all the tech did was make it cheaper and easier to end up with that result.
When someone pisses and moans like you do, my answer is that the fault lies with you, twofold: First, you need to take advantage of what is offered rather than bitching about it, and second, you need to stop bitching about other people perhaps taking advantage of the new ease-of-use to do things that you don't approve of, which gets nothing more than a BFD from me. Other people taking bad photos does not diminish your life, and it enriches theirs, especially since the alternative is not going to be "spending years learning to take photos" but "not taking photos at all".
Stop whining, reach out, and take advantage of life! There's so much stuff to do and all that worldview will do is make you miserable amongst abundance!
This is a big deal, because back when we only knew about our solar system, we formed theories to explain it. These theories imply that we wouldn't find many cases of large gas giants near suns. The current observations falsify these theories. We don't have to have a total picture of every planet in the vicinity to know that; detecting too many large planets is sufficient.
Your issue of our ability to detect only these types of planets is totally irrelevant to the main point about our theories making now-falsified predictions... which makes your accusation that others are misinformed about science that much more ironic. Perhaps you should be sure your ducks are in a row before accusing others of not understanding science.
Congratulations, you've just discovered why ignorance of the law is considered to be no excuse. Because if it was, suddenly there'd be an awful lot of ignorant people running around, if you get my drift.
If you're the kind of person who likes to just randomly wander around, it is your responsibility to know how to be in compliance with the law. It is neither the law's responsibility nor the law-abiding property owner's responsibility to mark the property in such a way that every conceivable person can't help but notice the private property label.
I've frequently wished that the very fact that a patent troll can sue twenty other people for violating their patent was considered ipso facto proof that the patent couldn't have been all that innovative, by the very fact that several other people coming up with the same solution ought to be the very definition of "obvious to someone skilled in the arts".
Certainly when we're talking about students coming up with "patented material" that should be strong evidence that it's not that hard.
(This is a summary of the argument, there are details and nuances, etc. But I think the root idea is sound.)
It's probably even worse than the naive math indicates, because odds are not everybody involved will actually be unrelated in the mathematical sense anymore.
On the other hand... as others point out, in the birthday paradox there's a huge difference between two people have the same birthday and someone has the same birthday as me. However, in a prosecution situation, it is the latter that matters, not the former. Simply showing that the birthday paradox applies doesn't really prove that for a given criminal, that the odds are high that the match is a false positive.
This is also why government attempts (by well meaning people) to simple run dragnets over large datasets looking for "bad people" need to be resisted; while the birthday paradox is not always in play, similar statistical effects can be found in many other situations that cause enormous amounts of false positives. "Due process", where we investigate someone with all available tools only after we already have good reason to suspect them (to simplify, of course), turns out to be important not just for our rights in the abstract, but statistically sound, as well.
At the risk of potentially defending the government (pause for the shocked intake of breath), I find it quite plausible that the government knows all of this, and is resisting this investigation because they do not look forward to explaining this to every jury unto the end of time. While I support open disclosure and letting the chips fall where they may as a matter of principle, if you take a moment to look at this from their point of view, even if you dare take the step of assuming they're not actually out to get you personally (pause for another shocked breath), you might find it hard to avoid having a little sympathy for their position. (If you're still having a hard time, engage the "Most jury members sure are dumb, ha-ha!" cynicism circuit and consider the implications.)
The solution being to design an email transport system that is immune to spam/phishing and doesn't rely on CAPTCHAs to authenticate endusers.
"What's the problem? The solution to the problem is simple... just solve it!"
Brilliant! Why didn't any of us think of that?
Don't bother telling me how *you* can't figure out how to do it.
And your solution is...?
Please bear in mind "The system does not do X and Y" is not generally the form a real solution takes. Although it gives me one hell of an idea for the next joke computer language, one that requires you to enumerate all the things it shouldn't do...
Just curious, wouldn't it only need to be able to go as fast as the ISS for a much shorter period of time?
Remember inertia. The cheapest thing you can do is simply move inertially. Moving to high speeds, then slowing back down, is twice as hard as moving to high speeds and staying there. There's absolutely no equivalent of "speed bursts" in space. (Heck, it's not even a very good intuition for things moving around on Earth, either.)
Orbital mechanics can absolutely not be approached intuitively, until you've completely retrained your intuition. It's right up there with QM, in that regard, though IMHO easier to learn the basics of.
No fair cutting the previous two sentences out of your quote; you either missed the point that they are directly connected to the sentence you quote or you're being deceptive.
What is their motivation to spend money they don't have to?
That the whole "big comfortable ensconced business takes advantage of its overwhelmingly dominant position to screw the consumer" storyline completely fails when it's actually "three big uncomfortable rapidly-dying businesses refusing out of (apparently) sheer-bloody minded hatred for humanity to spend $2 to get 9 more mpg out of their cars, thereby making them more attractive for purchasing and possibly saving their asses, but still holding this magical technology back". (Not my numbers, so don't attack me on the $2 and 9mpg values.)
It's time for the milage-conspiracy-theorists to update their theories; it is neither in the best interests of the big companies nor the US government to continue to withhold the awesome milage technologies that we've been promised are being suppressed for so many decades anymore. Oooooooooor.... these technologies never existed in the first place. I know which way I would put my money, personally.
So, what's their motivation to spend money "they don't have to"? How about... they have to or they will die? (And since they can't...)
Slashdot Mirror
So, do some math here. $1.25 an hour is $20 for sixteen hours. For $20, you can currently buy a number of greatest hits games, which for the sake of argument certainly have more than sixteen hours of gameplay in them. 40 hours is a good rule of thumb, more in some cases. I'm an extreme bargain shopper but I've been known to pour 100+ hours into a $17 game (I'm thinking FFX-2 100%-completion here), which is 17 cents an hour.
This, in addition to the documented preference humans have to pay one up front fee if it means avoiding the cognitive cost of having to think about hourly fees. For how many people is this a radical price increase over the current system? It'll never fly for those people, because there's no chance in hell the games will be any appreciably better than today.
Again, I'm an extreme bargain shopper so maybe the average gamer is already in the $1.25-hour range... but I doubt it's all that many.
What "openness" would that be? Link?
I'd call you a shill as a couple of AC's have done, but if you are a shill, you're an incompetent one making completely baseless claims. At the moment there is no evidence of openness that I can find.
A bad statistical model for predicting cable outages?
Not that conspiracy theories aren't a whole lot of fun and all, but as I'm yet to see a terribly credible motive*, "people are too optimistic about how good their tech works" is a pretty reasonable explanation.
(*: Remember, for a motive to be credible, it has to not merely "explain" the actions, but explain why the perpetrator thinks this is the best thing they could do with their time, or at least credibly close to the "best thing". Nothing I've seen even comes close to that standard.)
You can perform all possible computer inputs with one (binary, yes/no) button, the right software, and a heaping helping of patience. "How much can we shrink the keyboard and still enter text" is not an interesting game.
I have no idea what current philosophy academics are interested in, so I can't accuse them of not keeping up. But if they aren't keeping up with AI, the Simulation Argument, Bayesian theory and other such statistical things, QM's implications for the many-worlds hypothesis, and computer science research into semantics, just to pull a few things off the top of my head, they are wasting their time in several fields traditionally included under the rubric of "philosophy" (epistemology, ethics, etc.).
We still have no rock-solid answers to speak of to the old questions, but for the first time in millennia, we actually have some data for some of them... and we're only going to be collecting more. And even what little data we have has opened up more questions; "what does it mean to be human?" will begin to take on new overtones when we start asking just exactly how augmented does an ape have to be before it is "human", just how smart does an AI have to be, and, of course, is a binary definition of "human" even feasible, and if not, what is? And so on.
(I know for a fact there are philosophers interested in this. I simply don't know if they are in or out of the mainstream. Certainly they will eventually be in the mainstream.)
You should not use a "source control" system to store huge binaries. The reason why is right there in the name, "source". None of them can really handle that gracefully, nor should they. 2GB images are not "[program] source".
I don't know what you should use, but "source control" is not it. You need an image management solution, which, being optimized for images, will probably have a ton of other useful features.
I use git, via git-svn. Branching and merging in git reduce my overhead by enabling workflows in my team that would be nightmares in SVN. (Which I know by experience.)
SVN != source control. You have not seen branching until you've seen "rebase".
Yup, it is. But only if it's perfectly spherical and never touches anything.
(Disclaimer: No, I just made that up, but something quite like it is probably true. Might have to be toroidal.)
What crack are you and the moderators smoking? That doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to Capitalism, in theory or in practice!
One of the free markets in capitalism is your right and privilege to sell your labor at a mutually agreeable price. While that may not always 100% work out in pratice, it sure doesn't work out to what you described... which, I would point out, is a hell of a lot closer in practice to how Communism turned out in the Soviet Union.
Why don't you and some moderators actually go learn about capitalism from something other than a socialist/communist?
You think Japan === Eastern, and you criticize me for simplification?
Cultures vary surprisingly widely on what constitutes "good design". Many Asian cultures, for instance, all but require you to have a very busy page.
In a way, I'm surprised at how some of it turns out. If you came up to me and asked me which of the "East" or "West" would prefer Google to Yahoo, I'd have picked East to prefer the Google aesthetic and West to prefer the Yahoo approach, but I would be wrong. (Very, very broadly speaking. I am aware I am generalizing, this is a Slashdot comment, not a sociology PhD thesis. Please don't cite "a counterexample" at me and think it proves anything.)
He might be IT for some company mandating usage.
I'm in a nearly pure-Linux environment and I've indirectly encountered a fair portion of that list either in my family, or with releasing a Windows client for our software that just happens to trip anti-virus software for no reason we could ever figure out.
AV software is so crappy it will reach out to screw you hard.
It wouldn't take a kit like that in the hands of very many consumers to have a radical effect on honest labeling.
People often point out that capitalism assumes perfect information on the part of the consumer, which doesn't exist, but this is how it largely keeps going; a few consumers can cause enough pain for a liar (with government assist) to keep the market disproportionately honest. Even a single kit-assisted lawsuit could have a surprisingly large effect.
Well, there's your problem, making yourself easily ignorable. Heck, the relevant people would have to go out of their way to find out about you.
Stop protesting in the streets, and instead spend the time doing two things:
The sum of those two things is greater than the sum of the parts.
You've indicated a willingness to spend time on the issue, but you need to re-think your tactics.
(I can't. I don't live in Ohio or, to the best of my knowledge, in anyplace that has such ballot machines, and therefore I have no standing.)
Protesting in the streets has its place, but it's a very overrated political action. If you're not several thousand people making a point that 80%+ of the population strongly agrees with, you're wasting your time. Do something with your time that works, instead.
Technology always "takes stuff away", but the entire reason we pursue it is that it gives more stuff back.
Yes, I am "deprived" from my connection with Mother Earth because I am not a subsistence farmer, but I am happy that I don't have to spend a lot of time hungry or worrying about food, and it's my responsibility to plow the resulting freed time into something useful.
Yes, I am socially deprived because I am no longer economically forced to live with my extended family, but in turn, I get to form social links of my own choosing. It's my own damn fault if I don't take advantage of the superior options that opens up.
Yes, making photos easy cheapens each given photo, but it also makes it easier to experiment without blowing a wad. I didn't even bother with an analog camera because I wasn't willing to put the time in to learn, let alone spend the money, but with my digital camera I've learned a lot because I can take twenty pictures of the same thing with near-immediate feedback, and virtually no cost. If you don't end up with a superior photo collection in the end, that's your fault, not the technologies; all the tech did was make it cheaper and easier to end up with that result.
When someone pisses and moans like you do, my answer is that the fault lies with you, twofold: First, you need to take advantage of what is offered rather than bitching about it, and second, you need to stop bitching about other people perhaps taking advantage of the new ease-of-use to do things that you don't approve of, which gets nothing more than a BFD from me. Other people taking bad photos does not diminish your life, and it enriches theirs, especially since the alternative is not going to be "spending years learning to take photos" but "not taking photos at all".
Stop whining, reach out, and take advantage of life! There's so much stuff to do and all that worldview will do is make you miserable amongst abundance!
Or how that floaty thing on top breaks Page Down and Space (=Page Down)? (The one on the main site is much better since it doesn't do that.)
This is a big deal, because back when we only knew about our solar system, we formed theories to explain it. These theories imply that we wouldn't find many cases of large gas giants near suns. The current observations falsify these theories. We don't have to have a total picture of every planet in the vicinity to know that; detecting too many large planets is sufficient.
Your issue of our ability to detect only these types of planets is totally irrelevant to the main point about our theories making now-falsified predictions... which makes your accusation that others are misinformed about science that much more ironic. Perhaps you should be sure your ducks are in a row before accusing others of not understanding science.
Congratulations, you've just discovered why ignorance of the law is considered to be no excuse. Because if it was, suddenly there'd be an awful lot of ignorant people running around, if you get my drift.
If you're the kind of person who likes to just randomly wander around, it is your responsibility to know how to be in compliance with the law. It is neither the law's responsibility nor the law-abiding property owner's responsibility to mark the property in such a way that every conceivable person can't help but notice the private property label.
(I am the first in line to argue that the principle could use some modification in this age of near-infinite law... but the general principle still holds for the reasons you just outlined. Private property is one of the "common sense" things I reference. It needs to be modified, not discarded.)
No, Scott Adams. Scott Adams in the style of Infocom. Some would prefer to say that Infocom made text adventures in the style of Scott Adams.
I've frequently wished that the very fact that a patent troll can sue twenty other people for violating their patent was considered ipso facto proof that the patent couldn't have been all that innovative, by the very fact that several other people coming up with the same solution ought to be the very definition of "obvious to someone skilled in the arts".
Certainly when we're talking about students coming up with "patented material" that should be strong evidence that it's not that hard.
(This is a summary of the argument, there are details and nuances, etc. But I think the root idea is sound.)
It's probably even worse than the naive math indicates, because odds are not everybody involved will actually be unrelated in the mathematical sense anymore.
On the other hand... as others point out, in the birthday paradox there's a huge difference between two people have the same birthday and someone has the same birthday as me. However, in a prosecution situation, it is the latter that matters, not the former. Simply showing that the birthday paradox applies doesn't really prove that for a given criminal, that the odds are high that the match is a false positive.
This is also why government attempts (by well meaning people) to simple run dragnets over large datasets looking for "bad people" need to be resisted; while the birthday paradox is not always in play, similar statistical effects can be found in many other situations that cause enormous amounts of false positives. "Due process", where we investigate someone with all available tools only after we already have good reason to suspect them (to simplify, of course), turns out to be important not just for our rights in the abstract, but statistically sound, as well.
At the risk of potentially defending the government (pause for the shocked intake of breath), I find it quite plausible that the government knows all of this, and is resisting this investigation because they do not look forward to explaining this to every jury unto the end of time. While I support open disclosure and letting the chips fall where they may as a matter of principle, if you take a moment to look at this from their point of view, even if you dare take the step of assuming they're not actually out to get you personally (pause for another shocked breath), you might find it hard to avoid having a little sympathy for their position. (If you're still having a hard time, engage the "Most jury members sure are dumb, ha-ha!" cynicism circuit and consider the implications.)
"What's the problem? The solution to the problem is simple... just solve it!"
Brilliant! Why didn't any of us think of that?
And your solution is...?
Please bear in mind "The system does not do X and Y" is not generally the form a real solution takes. Although it gives me one hell of an idea for the next joke computer language, one that requires you to enumerate all the things it shouldn't do...
Remember inertia. The cheapest thing you can do is simply move inertially. Moving to high speeds, then slowing back down, is twice as hard as moving to high speeds and staying there. There's absolutely no equivalent of "speed bursts" in space. (Heck, it's not even a very good intuition for things moving around on Earth, either.)
Orbital mechanics can absolutely not be approached intuitively, until you've completely retrained your intuition. It's right up there with QM, in that regard, though IMHO easier to learn the basics of.
OK.
Yeah, I'll grant it's not fully autonomous, but I guarantee you I can use it to beat you at a game of hockey.
No fair cutting the previous two sentences out of your quote; you either missed the point that they are directly connected to the sentence you quote or you're being deceptive.
That the whole "big comfortable ensconced business takes advantage of its overwhelmingly dominant position to screw the consumer" storyline completely fails when it's actually "three big uncomfortable rapidly-dying businesses refusing out of (apparently) sheer-bloody minded hatred for humanity to spend $2 to get 9 more mpg out of their cars, thereby making them more attractive for purchasing and possibly saving their asses, but still holding this magical technology back". (Not my numbers, so don't attack me on the $2 and 9mpg values.)
It's time for the milage-conspiracy-theorists to update their theories; it is neither in the best interests of the big companies nor the US government to continue to withhold the awesome milage technologies that we've been promised are being suppressed for so many decades anymore. Oooooooooor.... these technologies never existed in the first place. I know which way I would put my money, personally.
So, what's their motivation to spend money "they don't have to"? How about... they have to or they will die? (And since they can't...)