[Have we gone off-topic, or meta? Is meta allowed here? We'll see:]
Could it be part of a larger plan? As an old Linux hand, I've noticed the gatekeeping on the Bugzillas for a number of major OS projects has been lately taken over by kids who if they aren't being paid my MS, should be. These punks treat bug reports as if they were attacks on the date-ability of their sisters, marking them "bogus" or otherwise closing them before they've even taken the time to understand what's being reported. Often they're tossing "clever" insults at the reporters at the same time. This is what it now means to be running "peer reviewed" code: you review it, you find real flaws, and some teenager whose worked his way into being a Bugzilla gatekeeper rejects the report because, well, you're not his peer. Obviously.
So how have we ended up with kids whose destiny would have used to be manning the complaint desks at Ma Bell in key positions to cripple the quality of OS projects - often projects which directly compete with MS products? </snark>
My real point: MS doesn't have to hire shills. We're doing it to ourselves. Somehow the values that were so pervasive in OS even a few years ago haven't been passed on to the latest wave of newcomers. That's not just showing up on/., but at the fringe of major OS initiatives, where the newcomers take up beginner's posts sorting the mail, as it were - and delight in tearing up half of it and throwing it in the trash. What's wrong with kids these days?
Delicate instruments can tell one cable from another pretty well, but the only way to prove that one sounds better is to do a listen. A blind listen, of course, to eliminate psychology.
Is that true? About all the uprated comments seem to imply that not even "delicate instruments" will see a difference in signal quality between a cable that meets minimum specs, available at moderate cost, and a cable that's much higher priced.
The reason I'm asking is the "psychology" of an experience isn't just the consciously reportable part. Philosopher Ned Block has done some great work consolidating the research into experience and reportability, and concludes that what we're aware of phenomenologically is of far wider scope than what we're able to access in reportable form. A number of my friends are professional jazz critics. Even for the best of them, what they're able to report from a concert is far less than what they're able to consciously (and unconsciously) experience of it. This isn't just the subtle effects, but some of the most overt aspects of the experience - to the listener. But these aspects don't map into our spoken vocabulary - although another musician will often be able to describe them with more music. (A lot of music is musicians describing other music.)
So the blind test you'd need to do is of more than whether listeners can tell you about the difference. The test needs to be about whether the experience has been phenomenologically different for the listeners, perhaps - especially because it's music - in ways where words fail them. To do that you're going to have to do some sort of longer-term tracking and evaluations of outcomes. For instance, if it's music that fills the particular listener with joy, is there more joy at the end of an hour's listening? That would be the measure of a true psychological effect. It's not psycho-acoustics we need to measure, but different outcomes in the inward experience of mood and consciousness.
So do you want to go to a bar with only one woman in it? Or a bar with 20? If you believe the premise of "choice overload" making you unhappy, you should choose the first, right?
Aside from that in many contexts the "choice overload" hypothesis is flat-out wrong (unless you really can claim to have felt a special rush of happiness just when you went into that bar with only one dame in it - and she wasn't, say, your girl already), there are open questions about how representative the test sample was. Psychological problems run culturally in certain populations. How can we be sure that the population tested for "choice overload" didn't share a psychological problem regarding choice that has no foundation is basic human psychology, but rather was relative to their own cultural limitations?
For most people in most cultures over history, the trick is to be happy with not much choice. That's generally the case for the working class, for the infantry soldiers, and for tribal peoples in environments of scarcity. Yet even in those cultures there are other classes for whom the trick is to be happy with a great deal of choice - the upper class, the generals, and tribal peoples in environments of plenty. Those whose cultures and religions derive primarily from desert (scarcity) environments are those driven craziest by "choice overload" - thus the Islamic meltdown, and the rejection of modern freedom by American fundamentalists. But we do have other cultures here. And the studies associated with the "choice overload" hypothesis, do not, I'll bet dimes to dollars, correct in any way for (sub)culture and psychological diagnosis.
See Orlando Patterson's book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Patterson makes a substantial argument that our very concept of freedom came from ancient Greece - but not the from the high culture, from the slaves. The concept then worked its way from the slaves into the high culture (it was after all a very small place) particularly through the playwrights.
But then, being a slave is not the same thing in all times and places. The biggest slaveholders in recorded history were the Arabs. But some of their slaves rose to high positions, despite their slave status. (The reason the Africans were so ready to trade slaves to the Europeans when their ships showed up was that they already had for many centuries profitably traded slaves to the Arabs who lived closer to them. The Europeans were looking for anything of value they could trade their goods for; it was the Africans who came up with the idea of offering slaves for those goods.)
Here's a different hypothesis: Islamic countries are not progressing because they're monotheist. When Europe went through its heavily monotheistic period that produced the Dark Ages. Science re-emerged in the Renaissance precisely when European education returned to Roman and Greek texts, and its intellectual culture largely embraced the polytheism in those texts, leaving monotheism largely to the uneducated classes. Aside from that, even in the Dark Ages the Church, with its many saints, was far more polytheistic than almost all forms if Islam. The claim could be made that at least some of our Jewish scientists have been monotheists; but a close examination of what, for example, Einstein said about religious belief makes it clear that his use of "God" has little in common with the religious uses. More importantly, Judaism has never had a monolithic interpretation of its texts - there is far less dogma than in most forms of Christianity and Islam, and the scholars have always been expected to engage in open and active debate.
As for America's success at science, that came from our Deistic background - which stresses neither dogma nor faith. Ben Franklin set the tone on this. Very few of the American scientists have ever been particularly religious, in the way of wearing blinders in loyalty to some set of revealed teachings.
but you expect me to believe that the Air Force was typesetting documents with identical kerning to Times New Roman as printed by Windows XP and using identical default paper sizes and margins as Microsoft Word 2003?
Yes. There was an IBM typewriter out at the date claimed for the documents that did just that. The default paper sizes and margins have been the default for American typewritten documents for many decades. Microsoft's Times Roman font was copied from the version used by IBM. The whole point was for Microsoft to prove its output could match that of the best typewriters. Microsoft has always cloned its competition so far as it could.
The whole "four digit year" thing only really started when the Y2K panic started.
I had a job as a "clerk typist" in a government office in the mid-70s, between college and my real career, and we always typed the full year, e.g. "1972." The four digit year "thing" as you call it was universal in formal correspondence since... well, really, forever.
We need to come up with a model which can replace this whole sector of the economy, and we need to shop it around to presidential candidates. Something's structurally wrong when corporations can get this out of control. It's not just a matter of tweaking a regulation here and there. Telecom is as broken as the US healthcare system - which is to say it works in some places for some people, but the major firms involved will happily do any amount of damage to their customers if it serves short-term, short-sighted profit. Not that there's no virtue in profit; just that it's important that the game be set up so that the vices of profit don't predominate over the virtues. Profit is not the only value. It doesn't even maximally serve the value of profit for profit to be the only value. When sectors of our economy start pursuing profit as if it is, they are broken. When something's that broken, sometimes the efficient thing to do is to tear it apart and refactor that entire part of the system.
Consider the rapid decline of newspapers - the hard copy as compared to online editions. This results in less energy-intensive and habitat-destructive logging on the one end, less fuel-burning distribution in the middle, and less waste paper to discard or recycle on the other end.
Or consider the decline of the secretarial profession. Thirty years ago every junior executive on up had his or her own secretary. Now all they get is a laptop. It takes much more energy to feed a secretary than a loptop (although the secretary potentially offers greater sexual gratification).
Then consider warehousing. Before pervasive networking enabled just-in-time deliveries to stores and businesses, there was a massive amount of warehousing that's now largely gone away. Those warehouses were usually heated, staffed, required an extra transportation leg to stock, used up real estate, and are now better than 95% obsoleted by our computer network.
The same tech that allows us to avoid warehousing also results in much less mismatch between production and demand. Lots more stuff used to be manufactured - at large energy and materials cost - just to be thrown away when the demand didn't show up.
A former Navy officer tells me of hiring an outside team to test the security of new software for controlling the firing of missiles from a ship. Within a couple of days, they were able to demonstrate to him that they could remotely fire the missiles, but were not able to access the targeting control. I mention this publicly because the officer was able to go back to the major defense firm providing the hackable software and demand revisions to their product. This particular software is not, we can presume, presently installed in our Navy.
But the outside team he'd used was getting into that ship's system from the Internet. This was a few years back. We can hope that's no longer possible.
America is more than just its Constitution. America is its people. A patriot is more loyal to the people than to a piece of paper. The people, on the whole, are only semi-literate anyway, so no piece of paper can bring order to them. What brings order isn't paper, but a great leader. We don't like Hitler, Stalin and Mao not because they were great leaders, but because they led countries other than America. Great leaders thrive in warrior cultures. Now there is a choice before us: Do we go forward with the warrior culture of Great Leader Bush, putting Rudy or Mitt or Fred in his place - leaders who even the semi-literate can understand - or do we retreat into "Constitutional" leadership which is hobbled, nuanced, afraid of battle - and beyond what the American people as a whole can comprehend and unite behind?
For decades polls have shown the American people would not support the Bill of Rights if it were up for a vote today. Finally we have a government that's done something about that. It takes a judge to get in the way, to confuse things.
That's the S. Aptitude T. It is specifically designed to show aptitude, not achievement. There are separate Achievement Tests for the latter. The Math and English SAT's are narrower than an IQ test, but they are very much the same kind of animal. In the old days, if you added your Math and English SAT's and divided by 10, you had something pretty close to your IQ. However, there are variant IQ scales, and IQ tests tend to have a lot more opportunity to show spatial intelligence and so on that don't factor so much into the English and Math SAT's, so YMMV.
SAT scores should have nothing to do with how hard you work in school. It used to be claimed you couldn't even prep for them, but it turns out that practicing taking tests is valuable for taking test. I always loved these sorts of tests in school because they were so much less boring that the general run of stuff. So I aced them - IQ and SAT both - but never bothered with grades. To the degree effort in school correlates with SAT scores, the SAT has failed in its design. It's supposed to measure an independent variable.
Here in Vermont there are a number of startups using wireless for remote localtions. Here's a random sample. Here's another. There are more. It's the sort of thing that self-styled entrepreneurs can do for not much investment, and that often gets good support from local governments that see it as key to economic development. So find some kids with a little bit of money to play with, who'd like to run their own business and build their resume for bigger things later, and encourage them to get entrepreneurial on you. If you can find a few dozen neighbors who also like the idea of buying the service, so much the better.
shouldn't we, the people, be deciding if we are allowed to copy anything we want?
Surely private enterprise can invent chip implants that scramble experience if you don't have the keys. The same sort of noise-cancellation currently used for headphones, why not tie it directly into the nerves from the ears, or the optics? There's something quite wonderful about the notion of being surrounded by an invisible reality only those with the special keys can see. That's the premise of just about every religion and mystic cult. Now the wonders of technology can make this real for us, soon.
The current rights industry is focused all on the wrong place. It's not about the copies; it's about the original experiences. Let them copy anything they've the keys to experience, nothing more and nothing less. That they have to pay something for the original, well, nobody lives for free. That they can't share freely with their friends, well, that's what subjective experience has always been all about. That makes us special, individuals.
Heinlein was not exactly a literary genius... more of a Rudyard Kipling
I love Joyce, but Kipling was the better writer, and thoroughly recognized in his time for it. Among Kipling's closest friends were Henry and William James. What Henry James did for expat Americans, Kipling did for expat Brits. Oh, you'll find far more English professors today who hold out Henry as the great genius, and Rudyard as pedestrian - but that's a temporary fashion, having nothing to do with their writing abilities, mostly a reflection of the fact that an American going to London to seek her or his fortune is currently respectable, while an English person's presence in India for the same purpose is not, just at present, seen as politically correct.
Heinlein knew he was writing in the style of Kipling - and Twain - the two best writers in the English language since Shakespeare and Milton. Heinlein knew their work intimately. Since Heinlein was describing outward-looking people and societies, people of the frontiers such as Kipling and Twain had written of, they were perfect models for him. Joyce, by contrast, is an example of European culture turned inward, during a period of great failures and retreat. And that's the problem with most of what passes for "literature" today - it deals in neurosis and failure rather than hope and success. Our scope should be wide enough to encompass both. And of the latter, Heinlein was the greatest author of the 20th Century. His sentences are deliciously-well crafted, too. His care in the details was as fine as Joyce's. It's just a different style. But he was perfect at it, especially in his first couple of decades.
They're meant as a means to control the populace and nothing more.
The cameras aren't there to control. They're there to corrupt. They make people trust each other less. Why would all those cameras be there, if all these other people weren't dangerous the moment the authorities take their eyes off them? Once you start not trusting anyone, believing that they're basically all against you, it becomes much easier to ignore their well being, even to engage in occupations and activities which take advantage of them in ways you wouldn't if mutual trust were established. But you can't trust these people. They're people who need to be watched. And now they're people who need to watch out for you.
The cameras, you see, destroy the socialist impulse, and turn Londoners into the perfect model of predatory capitalists. Which is a great joke, since London has a self-styled socialist mayor.
Meganova's response says. "In case you haven't noticed, this site is located in Europe (I hope you can point it out on a map) where your stupid copyright claims have no base."
Can we see a connection between the official US government disregard of "silly" things like international treaties against torture, and now this disrespect by some Europeans of claims based in US law? Europeans just aren't following the US example any more. For instance, to the EU, Microsoft is officially an abusive monopoly; in the US they've been given a pass. So it's not just European individuals, but top government bodies which no longer respect US sensibilities and precedents.
Between Media Defender and Media-Defender Defender, both sides are playing dirty. That's far worse for a "legitimate" corporation to do than for a loose confederation of mostly teen hackers, so in a sane world Media Defender would be stripped of its corporate charter and dissolved. But the US has tried to establish as its new norm that there is no law for corporations, no punishment for their harms to society or nature. The blowback from this, from regions of the world - especially the EU - that still have norms of law applying to all (except French leaders while in office, but that's another story), will be major.
Rather didn't single-source this. He has confirmation from a number of other, currently-employed Boeing engineers of doubts about the composite materials. And if you look at the resume of his main source, it's impressive - the man was one of the top engineers at Boeing, and had done high-level work on NASA projects. Does that mean he's perfect? No engineer is. Does that mean his doubts should be considered seriously? Of course, especially when other engineers do agree about them.
There' also the very plain fact that Boeing is rushing this plane to market with far less testing than was used for recent generations of more conventional passenger jets. That gives Boeing every incentive not to listen to doubts. Boeing is betting that this can finally allow them to pull decisively ahead of Airbus, who has caused Boeing serious hurt over the last decade. Maybe it can, in the short run. Orders are coming in. But what happens if there's a spectacular crash or three? Will Boeing take the reputation hit that, say, Ford took about the Pinto? Maybe not. The public expects there to be no survivors from jetliner crashes. On the other hand, the sheer number of people these things will carry means the first such crash will be the most fatal - not counting people in buildings crashed into - ever. There will be weeks of international media scrutiny.
Boeing, we should be relieved to know, has tested the fuselage by dropping a section of it... from 15 feet up.
If you install Perl and the Mail::Sendmail module, you could have this script triggered from, for instance, the boot sequence, or a cron job, or really from just about anything you expect will be unobtrusive and regularly run:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Mail::Sendmail;
$subject = "your laptop"; $message = "Wish you were here!";
if ($message ne "") {
%mail = ( To => 'You <you@somewhere.com>',
From => 'your laptop <laptop@somewhere.com>',
Subject => $subject,
Message => $message
);
sendmail(%mail) or die $Mail::Sendmail::error; }
Shouldn't be too hard to have it include the current IP address in the message, which you could then track back to find the thief. (That is, get the output from "ip addr ls" or "ifconfig" and add it to $message.)
Do you realize Evolution vs Creationism is undebatable, since Creationists have no evidence?
Not a creationist myself, but there's an argument to be had, at a higher level than the one between the Young Earthers and the Evolution Is the Only Necessary Algorithm folks. That higher argument concerns where, when and how consciousness enters existence, and whether consciousness is strictly local to the space within skulls, or also emerges at larger (e.g. Gaian) or smaller (e.g. quantum) scales.
Religion largely concerns itself with claims about states of consciousness, which to attain and how to attain them. Science dabbles there now too. At a certain level, background myths and hypotheses matter not so much as the pragmatic question of how well the advice serves to lead to states of consciousness that those using the techniques recommended by either science or religion find they prefer. But at a more "fundamental" level (equally fundamental on both sides, mind you) there's a deep disagreement on the hypothesis of when consciousness entered the universe. Religions tend to hold it's always been here in some form; scientists - although there are a few proto-panpsychists about - on the whole favor models where consciousness is a rare and isolated occurrence that only sprang into existence some few tens of thousands of years ago - or thereabouts.
So on the one side, at its worst, the Earth only happened yesterday; on the other side, for better or not, consciousness only happened yesterday. My bet is that from a century forward, intelligent people will agree that both are wrong - that the Earth as well as consciousness are ancient, with consciousness preceding the Earth. I suspect this realization will come along with other knowledge that shows most if not all of our current theistic myths to be pretty well wrong - that it will be a more mature science finally supplanting religion by then, rather than science verifying any of the claims of our current sects.
But my bet may be wrong. Evolution and some form of panpsychism may both be entirely correct, while some particular contemporary sect (not of the Young Earth variety) may already be correct in all significant details in its characterization of the holy. That we can't test that right now does not mean we won't have been able to a century hence.
What of the parallel to linking? Certainly a commercial website can link to creative commons content elsewhere - and probably even copyright its particular collection of links. So what if the legal structure is that there are two distinct entities, one for profit and the other decidedly not-for-profit or some even purer model, where the first has a site that links to content the second serves?
Our problem as/.'ers is we don't want courts to agree with the commercial entities trying to make linking to their content illegal; freedom of linking is an essential freedom on the Net. On the other hand it's well established that not-for-profit enterprises can be associated with for-profit arms - some public television, for example, is set up that way for the merchandising they do on the side. So where's the bright line here?
the values of freedom and social solidarity... - RMS
Social solidarity can be inconsistent with freedom. RMS wants Linus (and us) to trade freedom for social solidarity. They're both good values, but they - um - license different behaviors.
I value RMS's contributions. This is an uncharacteristic confusion on his part. Freedom is more akin to social liquidity.
Anyone above the age of 10 should know that downloading music that you don't have permission to is wrong.
Where's the bright line? Turning on the radio and hearing a song for free isn't wrong. Hearing musicians play in a park for free isn't wrong. Putting on a CD while visiting a friend's house isn't wrong. Sampling a CD at a kiosk in a record store isn't wrong. Recording a concert broadcast on TV to your Tivo or video tape isn't wrong.
There is nothing intuitive or obvious about the difference between all the ways to listen to music free about which the general consensus is "Not wrong" and the several ways the RIAA thinks are so wrong that you should have to go to court and pay thousands and thousands in fines and attorney fees. For someone far inside a particular culture's arbitrary distinctions, those distinctions can look to be plain, obvious, and simple. That's an illusion, a distortion of perspective. What the RIAA wants us to accept as "wrong" depends on a very fine legalistic parsing of differences.
Basically the RIAA wants to find a loophole among all the ways that listening to music is "not wrong" by which to make a few instances so wrong as to deserve massive punishment and rewards to them. To respond legalistically to the RIAA's legalistic claims is not wrong; it's response in kind. If being legalistic is wrong, the RIAA has no case to begin with.
Why not just boot them from the Internet? Between botnets and bulletin board spam - nearly all of which comes from Russians who get paid pennies to get past the captchas - and the clear preference of the majority for a return to Comrade Stalin, can someone tell us why we should be accepting Russians in our cyberspace?
Look at the facts: it was Sun that originally brought the specter of patents to the table on this
Look at the fine article, Mr. Frosty. This is exactly the "fact" Sun's CEO disputes.
What we appear to know from the opposing CEO, that Sun's CEO doesn't respond to here, is that both ZFS and NetApps' file system use a structure that NetApps has filed a patent on. So is the patent valid? Does Sun infringe? Does Sun in turn - as the NetApps CEO hints - hold patents that NetApps wants to this threat as leverage to cross-license? Ah, but Sun's CEO says Sun is happy to license the Sun patents NetApps wants - just doesn't want to sell them outright. So is this an attempt to force Sun to sell those outright in order to avoid the mess of fighting NetApps' patent claim?
Depends on your location. In Manhattan the price for 100Mbps symmetrical fiber service is $1000/month - that's business-grade service with no caps at all. So, bandwidth-wise, that's 10Mbps for $100/month - symmetrical, not the 1Mbps up and 10Mbps down of consumer accounts. Yeah, this is vastly oversimplified since it leaves out billing costs, on-premises equipment, and so on. But the costs for use of the backbone are clearly well-under $10/month per 1Mbps. So for the $80 you're allowing, providing 4Mbps symmetrical should be well under $40/month including some of the overhead, with $40 left over to absorb other overhead and allow substantial profit. Since symmetrical service would allow file sharing to work more locally, with a better user experience, this would be a compelling product.
Of course, that's fiber, not cable. Will more fiber deployment mean Comcast goes away?
Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and now W. ALL BELONG in prison.
Ah, a libertarian who wants to see various people put in prison! I agree that many of our highest leaders deserve prison; but I take it that disqualifies me from claiming to be a libertarian. If our baseline social organization includes prisons, then there damn well better be a government to run the prisons. Prisons directly remove people's liberties - whatever your motive for putting people there, prison is the ultimate anti-libertarian move - and by extension, the threat of prison.
We are, as a society, particularly afraid that black people will lessen the freedom of other people - primarily other black people - by providing them drugs that are "addictive" - that is, take their freedom. So we imprison a huge proportion of population, especially black people, in order that especially our black people may be free. Libertarians have the virtue of seeing the madness of this logic. But how is the logic different if we're going to start imprisoning government leaders who provide us with fears that are addictive, and then take our treasure and our freedom? I want the logic to be different; but on the face of it I don't see how to work that out with the sort of if-then-else precision that a nerd like me will respect.
So here's the challenge: Present a coherent libertarian political philosophy that leaves the drug dealers and their customers free (after all, there's a legitimate debate that drugs well used can be liberatory), but that allows for the imprisonment of Reagans, Bushes and even Clintons, and some sort of limited government still capable of fairly conducting such imprisonment, and people like me will finally flock to the libertarian flag. (Until then, I remain an anarcho-syndicalist, since the syndicates can run the prisons without such contradiction. Still, when you start imprisoning political leaders for deviation from your libertarian or anarchist or whatever ideals, you set yourself up for a cycle of purges.)
Slashdot Mirror
[Have we gone off-topic, or meta? Is meta allowed here? We'll see:]
/., but at the fringe of major OS initiatives, where the newcomers take up beginner's posts sorting the mail, as it were - and delight in tearing up half of it and throwing it in the trash. What's wrong with kids these days?
Could it be part of a larger plan? As an old Linux hand, I've noticed the gatekeeping on the Bugzillas for a number of major OS projects has been lately taken over by kids who if they aren't being paid my MS, should be. These punks treat bug reports as if they were attacks on the date-ability of their sisters, marking them "bogus" or otherwise closing them before they've even taken the time to understand what's being reported. Often they're tossing "clever" insults at the reporters at the same time. This is what it now means to be running "peer reviewed" code: you review it, you find real flaws, and some teenager whose worked his way into being a Bugzilla gatekeeper rejects the report because, well, you're not his peer. Obviously.
So how have we ended up with kids whose destiny would have used to be manning the complaint desks at Ma Bell in key positions to cripple the quality of OS projects - often projects which directly compete with MS products? </snark>
My real point: MS doesn't have to hire shills. We're doing it to ourselves. Somehow the values that were so pervasive in OS even a few years ago haven't been passed on to the latest wave of newcomers. That's not just showing up on
The reason I'm asking is the "psychology" of an experience isn't just the consciously reportable part. Philosopher Ned Block has done some great work consolidating the research into experience and reportability, and concludes that what we're aware of phenomenologically is of far wider scope than what we're able to access in reportable form. A number of my friends are professional jazz critics. Even for the best of them, what they're able to report from a concert is far less than what they're able to consciously (and unconsciously) experience of it. This isn't just the subtle effects, but some of the most overt aspects of the experience - to the listener. But these aspects don't map into our spoken vocabulary - although another musician will often be able to describe them with more music. (A lot of music is musicians describing other music.)
So the blind test you'd need to do is of more than whether listeners can tell you about the difference. The test needs to be about whether the experience has been phenomenologically different for the listeners, perhaps - especially because it's music - in ways where words fail them. To do that you're going to have to do some sort of longer-term tracking and evaluations of outcomes. For instance, if it's music that fills the particular listener with joy, is there more joy at the end of an hour's listening? That would be the measure of a true psychological effect. It's not psycho-acoustics we need to measure, but different outcomes in the inward experience of mood and consciousness.
So do you want to go to a bar with only one woman in it? Or a bar with 20? If you believe the premise of "choice overload" making you unhappy, you should choose the first, right?
Aside from that in many contexts the "choice overload" hypothesis is flat-out wrong (unless you really can claim to have felt a special rush of happiness just when you went into that bar with only one dame in it - and she wasn't, say, your girl already), there are open questions about how representative the test sample was. Psychological problems run culturally in certain populations. How can we be sure that the population tested for "choice overload" didn't share a psychological problem regarding choice that has no foundation is basic human psychology, but rather was relative to their own cultural limitations?
For most people in most cultures over history, the trick is to be happy with not much choice. That's generally the case for the working class, for the infantry soldiers, and for tribal peoples in environments of scarcity. Yet even in those cultures there are other classes for whom the trick is to be happy with a great deal of choice - the upper class, the generals, and tribal peoples in environments of plenty. Those whose cultures and religions derive primarily from desert (scarcity) environments are those driven craziest by "choice overload" - thus the Islamic meltdown, and the rejection of modern freedom by American fundamentalists. But we do have other cultures here. And the studies associated with the "choice overload" hypothesis, do not, I'll bet dimes to dollars, correct in any way for (sub)culture and psychological diagnosis.
See Orlando Patterson's book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Patterson makes a substantial argument that our very concept of freedom came from ancient Greece - but not the from the high culture, from the slaves. The concept then worked its way from the slaves into the high culture (it was after all a very small place) particularly through the playwrights.
But then, being a slave is not the same thing in all times and places. The biggest slaveholders in recorded history were the Arabs. But some of their slaves rose to high positions, despite their slave status. (The reason the Africans were so ready to trade slaves to the Europeans when their ships showed up was that they already had for many centuries profitably traded slaves to the Arabs who lived closer to them. The Europeans were looking for anything of value they could trade their goods for; it was the Africans who came up with the idea of offering slaves for those goods.)
Here's a different hypothesis: Islamic countries are not progressing because they're monotheist. When Europe went through its heavily monotheistic period that produced the Dark Ages. Science re-emerged in the Renaissance precisely when European education returned to Roman and Greek texts, and its intellectual culture largely embraced the polytheism in those texts, leaving monotheism largely to the uneducated classes. Aside from that, even in the Dark Ages the Church, with its many saints, was far more polytheistic than almost all forms if Islam. The claim could be made that at least some of our Jewish scientists have been monotheists; but a close examination of what, for example, Einstein said about religious belief makes it clear that his use of "God" has little in common with the religious uses. More importantly, Judaism has never had a monolithic interpretation of its texts - there is far less dogma than in most forms of Christianity and Islam, and the scholars have always been expected to engage in open and active debate.
As for America's success at science, that came from our Deistic background - which stresses neither dogma nor faith. Ben Franklin set the tone on this. Very few of the American scientists have ever been particularly religious, in the way of wearing blinders in loyalty to some set of revealed teachings.
We need to come up with a model which can replace this whole sector of the economy, and we need to shop it around to presidential candidates. Something's structurally wrong when corporations can get this out of control. It's not just a matter of tweaking a regulation here and there. Telecom is as broken as the US healthcare system - which is to say it works in some places for some people, but the major firms involved will happily do any amount of damage to their customers if it serves short-term, short-sighted profit. Not that there's no virtue in profit; just that it's important that the game be set up so that the vices of profit don't predominate over the virtues. Profit is not the only value. It doesn't even maximally serve the value of profit for profit to be the only value. When sectors of our economy start pursuing profit as if it is, they are broken. When something's that broken, sometimes the efficient thing to do is to tear it apart and refactor that entire part of the system.
Consider the rapid decline of newspapers - the hard copy as compared to online editions. This results in less energy-intensive and habitat-destructive logging on the one end, less fuel-burning distribution in the middle, and less waste paper to discard or recycle on the other end.
Or consider the decline of the secretarial profession. Thirty years ago every junior executive on up had his or her own secretary. Now all they get is a laptop. It takes much more energy to feed a secretary than a loptop (although the secretary potentially offers greater sexual gratification).
Then consider warehousing. Before pervasive networking enabled just-in-time deliveries to stores and businesses, there was a massive amount of warehousing that's now largely gone away. Those warehouses were usually heated, staffed, required an extra transportation leg to stock, used up real estate, and are now better than 95% obsoleted by our computer network.
The same tech that allows us to avoid warehousing also results in much less mismatch between production and demand. Lots more stuff used to be manufactured - at large energy and materials cost - just to be thrown away when the demand didn't show up.
A former Navy officer tells me of hiring an outside team to test the security of new software for controlling the firing of missiles from a ship. Within a couple of days, they were able to demonstrate to him that they could remotely fire the missiles, but were not able to access the targeting control. I mention this publicly because the officer was able to go back to the major defense firm providing the hackable software and demand revisions to their product. This particular software is not, we can presume, presently installed in our Navy.
But the outside team he'd used was getting into that ship's system from the Internet. This was a few years back. We can hope that's no longer possible.
America is more than just its Constitution. America is its people. A patriot is more loyal to the people than to a piece of paper. The people, on the whole, are only semi-literate anyway, so no piece of paper can bring order to them. What brings order isn't paper, but a great leader. We don't like Hitler, Stalin and Mao not because they were great leaders, but because they led countries other than America. Great leaders thrive in warrior cultures. Now there is a choice before us: Do we go forward with the warrior culture of Great Leader Bush, putting Rudy or Mitt or Fred in his place - leaders who even the semi-literate can understand - or do we retreat into "Constitutional" leadership which is hobbled, nuanced, afraid of battle - and beyond what the American people as a whole can comprehend and unite behind?
For decades polls have shown the American people would not support the Bill of Rights if it were up for a vote today. Finally we have a government that's done something about that. It takes a judge to get in the way, to confuse things.
That's the S. Aptitude T. It is specifically designed to show aptitude, not achievement. There are separate Achievement Tests for the latter. The Math and English SAT's are narrower than an IQ test, but they are very much the same kind of animal. In the old days, if you added your Math and English SAT's and divided by 10, you had something pretty close to your IQ. However, there are variant IQ scales, and IQ tests tend to have a lot more opportunity to show spatial intelligence and so on that don't factor so much into the English and Math SAT's, so YMMV.
SAT scores should have nothing to do with how hard you work in school. It used to be claimed you couldn't even prep for them, but it turns out that practicing taking tests is valuable for taking test. I always loved these sorts of tests in school because they were so much less boring that the general run of stuff. So I aced them - IQ and SAT both - but never bothered with grades. To the degree effort in school correlates with SAT scores, the SAT has failed in its design. It's supposed to measure an independent variable.
Here in Vermont there are a number of startups using wireless for remote localtions. Here's a random sample. Here's another. There are more. It's the sort of thing that self-styled entrepreneurs can do for not much investment, and that often gets good support from local governments that see it as key to economic development. So find some kids with a little bit of money to play with, who'd like to run their own business and build their resume for bigger things later, and encourage them to get entrepreneurial on you. If you can find a few dozen neighbors who also like the idea of buying the service, so much the better.
The current rights industry is focused all on the wrong place. It's not about the copies; it's about the original experiences. Let them copy anything they've the keys to experience, nothing more and nothing less. That they have to pay something for the original, well, nobody lives for free. That they can't share freely with their friends, well, that's what subjective experience has always been all about. That makes us special, individuals.
Heinlein knew he was writing in the style of Kipling - and Twain - the two best writers in the English language since Shakespeare and Milton. Heinlein knew their work intimately. Since Heinlein was describing outward-looking people and societies, people of the frontiers such as Kipling and Twain had written of, they were perfect models for him. Joyce, by contrast, is an example of European culture turned inward, during a period of great failures and retreat. And that's the problem with most of what passes for "literature" today - it deals in neurosis and failure rather than hope and success. Our scope should be wide enough to encompass both. And of the latter, Heinlein was the greatest author of the 20th Century. His sentences are deliciously-well crafted, too. His care in the details was as fine as Joyce's. It's just a different style. But he was perfect at it, especially in his first couple of decades.
The cameras, you see, destroy the socialist impulse, and turn Londoners into the perfect model of predatory capitalists. Which is a great joke, since London has a self-styled socialist mayor.
Between Media Defender and Media-Defender Defender, both sides are playing dirty. That's far worse for a "legitimate" corporation to do than for a loose confederation of mostly teen hackers, so in a sane world Media Defender would be stripped of its corporate charter and dissolved. But the US has tried to establish as its new norm that there is no law for corporations, no punishment for their harms to society or nature. The blowback from this, from regions of the world - especially the EU - that still have norms of law applying to all (except French leaders while in office, but that's another story), will be major.
Rather didn't single-source this. He has confirmation from a number of other, currently-employed Boeing engineers of doubts about the composite materials. And if you look at the resume of his main source, it's impressive - the man was one of the top engineers at Boeing, and had done high-level work on NASA projects. Does that mean he's perfect? No engineer is. Does that mean his doubts should be considered seriously? Of course, especially when other engineers do agree about them.
... from 15 feet up.
There' also the very plain fact that Boeing is rushing this plane to market with far less testing than was used for recent generations of more conventional passenger jets. That gives Boeing every incentive not to listen to doubts. Boeing is betting that this can finally allow them to pull decisively ahead of Airbus, who has caused Boeing serious hurt over the last decade. Maybe it can, in the short run. Orders are coming in. But what happens if there's a spectacular crash or three? Will Boeing take the reputation hit that, say, Ford took about the Pinto? Maybe not. The public expects there to be no survivors from jetliner crashes. On the other hand, the sheer number of people these things will carry means the first such crash will be the most fatal - not counting people in buildings crashed into - ever. There will be weeks of international media scrutiny.
Boeing, we should be relieved to know, has tested the fuselage by dropping a section of it
Religion largely concerns itself with claims about states of consciousness, which to attain and how to attain them. Science dabbles there now too. At a certain level, background myths and hypotheses matter not so much as the pragmatic question of how well the advice serves to lead to states of consciousness that those using the techniques recommended by either science or religion find they prefer. But at a more "fundamental" level (equally fundamental on both sides, mind you) there's a deep disagreement on the hypothesis of when consciousness entered the universe. Religions tend to hold it's always been here in some form; scientists - although there are a few proto-panpsychists about - on the whole favor models where consciousness is a rare and isolated occurrence that only sprang into existence some few tens of thousands of years ago - or thereabouts.
So on the one side, at its worst, the Earth only happened yesterday; on the other side, for better or not, consciousness only happened yesterday. My bet is that from a century forward, intelligent people will agree that both are wrong - that the Earth as well as consciousness are ancient, with consciousness preceding the Earth. I suspect this realization will come along with other knowledge that shows most if not all of our current theistic myths to be pretty well wrong - that it will be a more mature science finally supplanting religion by then, rather than science verifying any of the claims of our current sects.
But my bet may be wrong. Evolution and some form of panpsychism may both be entirely correct, while some particular contemporary sect (not of the Young Earth variety) may already be correct in all significant details in its characterization of the holy. That we can't test that right now does not mean we won't have been able to a century hence.
What of the parallel to linking? Certainly a commercial website can link to creative commons content elsewhere - and probably even copyright its particular collection of links. So what if the legal structure is that there are two distinct entities, one for profit and the other decidedly not-for-profit or some even purer model, where the first has a site that links to content the second serves?
/.'ers is we don't want courts to agree with the commercial entities trying to make linking to their content illegal; freedom of linking is an essential freedom on the Net. On the other hand it's well established that not-for-profit enterprises can be associated with for-profit arms - some public television, for example, is set up that way for the merchandising they do on the side. So where's the bright line here?
Our problem as
I value RMS's contributions. This is an uncharacteristic confusion on his part. Freedom is more akin to social liquidity.
There is nothing intuitive or obvious about the difference between all the ways to listen to music free about which the general consensus is "Not wrong" and the several ways the RIAA thinks are so wrong that you should have to go to court and pay thousands and thousands in fines and attorney fees. For someone far inside a particular culture's arbitrary distinctions, those distinctions can look to be plain, obvious, and simple. That's an illusion, a distortion of perspective. What the RIAA wants us to accept as "wrong" depends on a very fine legalistic parsing of differences.
Basically the RIAA wants to find a loophole among all the ways that listening to music is "not wrong" by which to make a few instances so wrong as to deserve massive punishment and rewards to them. To respond legalistically to the RIAA's legalistic claims is not wrong; it's response in kind. If being legalistic is wrong, the RIAA has no case to begin with.
What we appear to know from the opposing CEO, that Sun's CEO doesn't respond to here, is that both ZFS and NetApps' file system use a structure that NetApps has filed a patent on. So is the patent valid? Does Sun infringe? Does Sun in turn - as the NetApps CEO hints - hold patents that NetApps wants to this threat as leverage to cross-license? Ah, but Sun's CEO says Sun is happy to license the Sun patents NetApps wants - just doesn't want to sell them outright. So is this an attempt to force Sun to sell those outright in order to avoid the mess of fighting NetApps' patent claim?
Depends on your location. In Manhattan the price for 100Mbps symmetrical fiber service is $1000/month - that's business-grade service with no caps at all. So, bandwidth-wise, that's 10Mbps for $100/month - symmetrical, not the 1Mbps up and 10Mbps down of consumer accounts. Yeah, this is vastly oversimplified since it leaves out billing costs, on-premises equipment, and so on. But the costs for use of the backbone are clearly well-under $10/month per 1Mbps. So for the $80 you're allowing, providing 4Mbps symmetrical should be well under $40/month including some of the overhead, with $40 left over to absorb other overhead and allow substantial profit. Since symmetrical service would allow file sharing to work more locally, with a better user experience, this would be a compelling product.
Of course, that's fiber, not cable. Will more fiber deployment mean Comcast goes away?
We are, as a society, particularly afraid that black people will lessen the freedom of other people - primarily other black people - by providing them drugs that are "addictive" - that is, take their freedom. So we imprison a huge proportion of population, especially black people, in order that especially our black people may be free. Libertarians have the virtue of seeing the madness of this logic. But how is the logic different if we're going to start imprisoning government leaders who provide us with fears that are addictive, and then take our treasure and our freedom? I want the logic to be different; but on the face of it I don't see how to work that out with the sort of if-then-else precision that a nerd like me will respect.
So here's the challenge: Present a coherent libertarian political philosophy that leaves the drug dealers and their customers free (after all, there's a legitimate debate that drugs well used can be liberatory), but that allows for the imprisonment of Reagans, Bushes and even Clintons, and some sort of limited government still capable of fairly conducting such imprisonment, and people like me will finally flock to the libertarian flag. (Until then, I remain an anarcho-syndicalist, since the syndicates can run the prisons without such contradiction. Still, when you start imprisoning political leaders for deviation from your libertarian or anarchist or whatever ideals, you set yourself up for a cycle of purges.)