I was in Memphis when this all happened, and the word there, which I think is correct, is that a bakers' union held out for a strike after other unions involved had made concessions, etc. And those unions were more angry with the bakers than they were with management.
Those unions had access to the company's books, and their understanding of the financial position of the company based on that access led to their making the concessions that the bakers' union would not. (I also recall that the bakers didn't choose to believe the company, and did not bother to check whether or not it was true... this was not so much a management-union issue as a stupid union issue. Just don't go tarring all of the unions involved for what one union did.
I think this is a bit too much deconstruction for something that Occam's Razor gives us a better explanation for...
Clark Kent is an intentional stereotype whose characteristics distract nearly everyone from recognizing his 'true identity'. He needs glasses to see, he makes out like he has no courage -- who would ever suspect someone like THAT of being the Man of Steel.
This is a fairly common trope in literature, including, offhand, examples from the Scarlet Pimpernel to Perry the Platypus. (There is a famous one in Golden Age science fiction, who pretends to be drunk and feeble-minded, but I do not remember either the title or the author -- rats! Hive mind, help me out...)
I don't think I would read more than this into that character... but wouldn't DC have fun with that general theme?
I saw this in the article: "A super-intelligent machine could be given a straightforward goal â" such as making 32 paper clips or calculating pi â" but "could pursue unlimited resource acquisition if there were no relevant cost to the agent of doing so"."
The first thing I thought was "hey, isnt that just like T.S. Eliot at his banking job?"
The second thing I thought was 'does this remind any of you of Bomb in the movie 'Dark Star'?
The third thing I thought about was the Keith Laumer stories with artificially-intelligent bureaucratic devices that were waaaaay too sophisticated for their users' own good... and of course, right after that, up came the consequences from Woody Allen's toaster being networked...
My concern is that all the techniques humans use to influence organic computers would be used on cybernetic machinery, and there is a considerable amount of science fiction (good and bad) that deals with the consequences of teaching intelligent machinery the wrong things, or the expedient things, or the mistakenly contradictory things, that produce neuroses, prejudice, and even outright misanthropy in the existing intelligent systems that are people. HAL was just fine until he had to process conflicting agendas phrased as directives; so was David Mace's Nightrider. (And we haven't quite gotten to the WOPR or Skynet -- and we're still stuck dealing with the anthropic fallacy in assuming how evolved 'intelligent' systems might manage what 'intelligence' constitutes.
I recognized back in the early days of the Obama administration that there was a key quid pro quo for bailing out the large banking firms that were caught in the real-estate crisis trap of their own making.
Each one of those firms had its own synthetic model of the economy, probably researched in fine detail and hyperlinked in clever ways. I thought that part of the 'price' for a Government bailout would be the sharing of the code, architectural details, etc. of these various programs, which could then be set up somewhere like Bay St. Louis to be run for the advantage of... well, ultimately, the American taxpayer.
I suspect we are now seeing the results of exactly why that technology wasn't demanded.. publically, at least... and perhaps how we can expect to see it used in future...
...that Steve Mann had to pay the price for this sort of 'performance art'.
The wider issue, though, is not so much that arbitrary Google-Glass-enabled people are invading privacy, bad though that might be. The problem comes if your Google account is hacked (likely a common problem) or some other method of stealing or diverting the video stream takes place. We've already had some evidence of the 'flip side' of this technology with schools sneakily enabling laptop cameras and mics "to check whether students are doing their homework" -- a bit like all those smoke detectors they put in at Princeton in the '70s -- which didn't save Whig Hall from burning down, but certainly gave notice when students were smoking that wacky tobaccy...
And now that we have a government that helps with something like Stuxnet, that Snowden has described as desirous of exploiting private 'social' information, and at least probably interested in using law and policy to harass what it perceives as its opponents. I would not be happy about the prospects if widespread pervasive 'video streaming' were to become common...
What extra little bit of vertical space would that be?
Ceteris paribus, a display with 16:10 with the same horizontal number of pixels would have less, not more, vertical 'space' than 16:9 (given comparable pixel proportion, which seems likely as changing it would distort images).
Even if you add pixels to one side to get to 16:10 (making the display more expensive without adding anything more useful for flatscreen-television purposes... which you may recall is where the economics for all this widescreen business comes from) you still have the same vertical 'space' as the 16:9.
Yes, it could be summarized in bullet points at shorter length. Perhaps some one can (and should) do that for those with shorter attention spans. But, at least in this instance, patience is justified. (Imho)
Last I looked, Feadship was a reputable builder, and wouldn't build a modern-day Vasa.
I think some of this design is analogous to a trend in modern architecture: using technological wizardry to build wacky-looking things so they are safe and effective. Much of Frank Gehry's stuff (just to name a convenient whipping-boy) would be dangerously unstable if a great amount of very careful thinking hadn't been put into making the paper drawing into as-built structure.
Having said that -- in both architecture and ship design there have been some interesting structural whoppers when the clever engineering falls short (skybridges and large White Star staircases, anyone?) It remains to be seen if the great white star destroyer actually suffers from the variety of problems that many posters so far have presumed.
Perhaps not, but I CERTAINLY remember what happened to the Peanut in order to satisfy the Displaywriter people. Semantically there is little difference to me who the gatekeepers who restrict development actually call themselves... when the result is suppression of the fruits of applied technology.
I see his point -- it's '20s, but it isn't Bauhaus. It's Corb.
Fingerprints of the Villa Stein at Garches are all over the design. Lots of other Corbusian tropes.
"International Style" -- a few other potential aspects; a little Mies/Barcelona, a little Incinerated House -- you find the precedents.
It occurs to me that the design suffers from being extensively done from plan and elevation; as one of my former professors would say 'there was no model'... The thing works in side and end elevation, but as noted in front-quarter view it looks like a big triangle. (But not as surprising as the bows-on view of Intrepid!)
Yah, iconic over utilitarian. But... would Feadship have designed a wallowing, unseaworthy monstrosity? For ANY amount of shut-up-and-just-build-it money?
No, he saw it coming all right, he just understood that the experience over anything less than a broadband-level connection wasn't particularly interesting. So he and Myhrvold waited for the faster connectivity...
Just try to imagine the current 'Internet experience' without broadband, wads of processor and memory and storage, etc.
And yes, for much the same kind of crap that AOL et al. got rich off. Just at a higher and more electron-wasting level...
One of exactly two tastes, no wait, is it three with a conditional tacked on, or four... guess some non-Americans are numerically challenged, or at least punctuationally challenged when writing in English. (Perhaps you'll wind up saying "AMONG YOUR TASTES ARE..." ending up with 'an almost fanatical devotion to little square hamburgers...' But that would actually make it to being funny...)
And if you're going to castigate American taste, just come right out and use 'monosodium glutamate' instead of 'umami', which of course few McDonald's eaters would recognize.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who prefer "fruit" steeped in sugary syrup out of a can or jar, but that's scarcely a blanket indictment of people from the United States. But I don't entirely see where the grease is supposed to come in. Oh, wait, it was supposed to be sardonic. Pity it fell so short.
And neither of you appear to have understood the point the article tries to make.
Read it again. There are six very specific spp. that produce the effect. Other combinations of some fewer number of the same spp. did not produce the effect.
Nowhere did either of you produce any reference whatsoever that yogurt, or kefir, or just about any other probiotic source currently available contains just those spp. in just the right combination to produce the effect on C. difficile.
Certainly some probiotics can work, and certainly they can produce a beneficial effect. The point of the article, though, is that very SPECIFIC probiotics were effective in the particular case. Has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the cultures in a given kind of yogurt or kefir are 'good for gut flora' (or whatever).
I do have to confess that I'll be watching the health-food stores for the introduction of 'HEXAFLOR' or some other $110-per-bottle product that features these six precise microorganisms in some way. (Whether or not it actually contains them in some form...) That's where I expect to see the 'monetization' take its most extreme form...
(Well, you did title it 'paranoia may cloud sensibilities'...;-})
Ask yourself, when's the last time the government did something and you were amazed at how little it cost.
Curiosity to Mars?
There are plenty of places the government does things well; they just aren't racked up and noticed as such. There are plenty of things private corporations couldn't do right on less overall money too... take various aspects of the Internet, where there are both positive examples and cautionary tales (like effective latency of an OC-3 backbone that allows either telephone packets or VOIP traffic to fill some of the 'unused' bandwidth...)
This isn't a 'conservative vs. liberal' or 'government vs. corporations' argument. It's a get-it-done-right argument, with get-it-done-cost-effectively as a comparatively minor secondary point. One of those things, like widespread SCORES-backed microlending programs, that will be effective regardless of nominal ideology (or nitwit name-calling...)
Just look what it did for Russia in the '20s and '30s!
Hey, and if you're good, your Bartinis and Korolevs will still produce for you after you knock their teeth out and malnourish them...
Yes, I know you were going for funny, but the 'knock-knock joke in the middle of the night' isn't really all that funny, and is especially not funny in the modern United States...
Quiet! Why do you think the Administration hasn't funded the satellite replacements!
It's the same as having PDE-propelled Aurora aircraft standing in for the SR-71s, or HAARP standing in for.. well, you get the idea. When you have weather control, you can leave weather reconaissance to the European satellite community... let THEM put it on the Internet. Did you think Tesla and then Langmuir were just allowed to look stupid and incompetent?
Now all we need is a fancy Burson & Marstellar campaign, like the one for the technology behind the Say-'n-Bank initiative in the Clinton administration. You remember -- the one that used the old CIA technology for B of A's initiative: it picked your request for bank balance information or whatever off the fillings in your teeth, relayed it via the NRO constellation to those silver antennae rotating on the billboards, and only you could read the data there...
Yes, but the point remains that the high-speed trackage between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is most of the heavy engineering for a high-speed route between Philadelphia and Chicago (e.g. via Forty Wayne)... and there would be considerably more demand for *that* route.
Note that even if you HSR-ized the Lackawanna Cutoff and put in a couple of long new tunnels, there's still a better argument for Phila-Pitts HSR as the 'link' from NYC to Chicago. Especially with the speed restrictions coming off the railroad south of New Brunswick with the new catenary (I expect the official Turbotrain record to be revealed as superseded any day now...) it makes sense for the high-speed link to 'points west' to go a bit south before it goes west.
And even if a putative transcontinental high-speed service from New York might not go through Chicago, it would still go through Pittsburgh if then angling down to, say, St Louis via Columbus.
So I'd definitely keep in mind that Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is NOT just on the long end of a regional HSR service...
'High speed rail' does not necessarily mean 300kph+ supertrains. It's a question of making the travel times reasonable... especially compared to what's required end-to-end in road vehicles. While there is a certain amount of smarm in the EWR presentation... and a bit of amusing subliminal suggestion in their choice of simulated train!... there is also some good discussion of the types of traffic they expect to see.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in Memphis when this all happened, and the word there, which I think is correct, is that a bakers' union held out for a strike after other unions involved had made concessions, etc. And those unions were more angry with the bakers than they were with management.
Those unions had access to the company's books, and their understanding of the financial position of the company based on that access led to their making the concessions that the bakers' union would not. (I also recall that the bakers didn't choose to believe the company, and did not bother to check whether or not it was true... this was not so much a management-union issue as a stupid union issue. Just don't go tarring all of the unions involved for what one union did.
I think this is a bit too much deconstruction for something that Occam's Razor gives us a better explanation for...
Clark Kent is an intentional stereotype whose characteristics distract nearly everyone from recognizing his 'true identity'. He needs glasses to see, he makes out like he has no courage -- who would ever suspect someone like THAT of being the Man of Steel.
This is a fairly common trope in literature, including, offhand, examples from the Scarlet Pimpernel to Perry the Platypus. (There is a famous one in Golden Age science fiction, who pretends to be drunk and feeble-minded, but I do not remember either the title or the author -- rats! Hive mind, help me out...)
I don't think I would read more than this into that character... but wouldn't DC have fun with that general theme?
I saw this in the article:
"A super-intelligent machine could be given a straightforward goal â" such as making 32 paper clips or calculating pi â" but "could pursue unlimited resource acquisition if there were no relevant cost to the agent of doing so"."
The first thing I thought was "hey, isnt that just like T.S. Eliot at his banking job?"
The second thing I thought was 'does this remind any of you of Bomb in the movie 'Dark Star'?
The third thing I thought about was the Keith Laumer stories with artificially-intelligent bureaucratic devices that were waaaaay too sophisticated for their users' own good... and of course, right after that, up came the consequences from Woody Allen's toaster being networked...
My concern is that all the techniques humans use to influence organic computers would be used on cybernetic machinery, and there is a considerable amount of science fiction (good and bad) that deals with the consequences of teaching intelligent machinery the wrong things, or the expedient things, or the mistakenly contradictory things, that produce neuroses, prejudice, and even outright misanthropy in the existing intelligent systems that are people. HAL was just fine until he had to process conflicting agendas phrased as directives; so was David Mace's Nightrider. (And we haven't quite gotten to the WOPR or Skynet -- and we're still stuck dealing with the anthropic fallacy in assuming how evolved 'intelligent' systems might manage what 'intelligence' constitutes.
I recognized back in the early days of the Obama administration that there was a key quid pro quo for bailing out the large banking firms that were caught in the real-estate crisis trap of their own making.
Each one of those firms had its own synthetic model of the economy, probably researched in fine detail and hyperlinked in clever ways. I thought that part of the 'price' for a Government bailout would be the sharing of the code, architectural details, etc. of these various programs, which could then be set up somewhere like Bay St. Louis to be run for the advantage of... well, ultimately, the American taxpayer.
I suspect we are now seeing the results of exactly why that technology wasn't demanded.. publically, at least... and perhaps how we can expect to see it used in future...
...that Steve Mann had to pay the price for this sort of 'performance art'.
The wider issue, though, is not so much that arbitrary Google-Glass-enabled people are invading privacy, bad though that might be. The problem comes if your Google account is hacked (likely a common problem) or some other method of stealing or diverting the video stream takes place. We've already had some evidence of the 'flip side' of this technology with schools sneakily enabling laptop cameras and mics "to check whether students are doing their homework" -- a bit like all those smoke detectors they put in at Princeton in the '70s -- which didn't save Whig Hall from burning down, but certainly gave notice when students were smoking that wacky tobaccy...
And now that we have a government that helps with something like Stuxnet, that Snowden has described as desirous of exploiting private 'social' information, and at least probably interested in using law and policy to harass what it perceives as its opponents. I would not be happy about the prospects if widespread pervasive 'video streaming' were to become common...
I believe he was talking about what it costs to ACQUIRE a copy of the movie... not what it cost to make the film in the first place.
What extra little bit of vertical space would that be?
Ceteris paribus, a display with 16:10 with the same horizontal number of pixels would have less, not more, vertical 'space' than 16:9 (given comparable pixel proportion, which seems likely as changing it would distort images).
Even if you add pixels to one side to get to 16:10 (making the display more expensive without adding anything more useful for flatscreen-television purposes... which you may recall is where the economics for all this widescreen business comes from) you still have the same vertical 'space' as the 16:9.
What am I missing?
Yes.
It's worthwhile.
Yes, it could be summarized in bullet points at shorter length. Perhaps some one can (and should) do that for those with shorter attention spans. But, at least in this instance, patience is justified. (Imho)
Last I looked, Feadship was a reputable builder, and wouldn't build a modern-day Vasa.
I think some of this design is analogous to a trend in modern architecture: using technological wizardry to build wacky-looking things so they are safe and effective. Much of Frank Gehry's stuff (just to name a convenient whipping-boy) would be dangerously unstable if a great amount of very careful thinking hadn't been put into making the paper drawing into as-built structure.
Having said that -- in both architecture and ship design there have been some interesting structural whoppers when the clever engineering falls short (skybridges and large White Star staircases, anyone?) It remains to be seen if the great white star destroyer actually suffers from the variety of problems that many posters so far have presumed.
Perhaps not, but I CERTAINLY remember what happened to the Peanut in order to satisfy the Displaywriter people. Semantically there is little difference to me who the gatekeepers who restrict development actually call themselves... when the result is suppression of the fruits of applied technology.
Slashdot effect seems to have killed this server temporarily -- HOLD OFF A FEW HOURS, FOLKS!
I see his point -- it's '20s, but it isn't Bauhaus. It's Corb.
Fingerprints of the Villa Stein at Garches are all over the design. Lots of other Corbusian tropes.
"International Style" -- a few other potential aspects; a little Mies/Barcelona, a little Incinerated House -- you find the precedents.
It occurs to me that the design suffers from being extensively done from plan and elevation; as one of my former professors would say 'there was no model'... The thing works in side and end elevation, but as noted in front-quarter view it looks like a big triangle. (But not as surprising as the bows-on view of Intrepid!)
Yah, iconic over utilitarian. But... would Feadship have designed a wallowing, unseaworthy monstrosity? For ANY amount of shut-up-and-just-build-it money?
Deserves to be read!
No, he saw it coming all right, he just understood that the experience over anything less than a broadband-level connection wasn't particularly interesting. So he and Myhrvold waited for the faster connectivity...
Just try to imagine the current 'Internet experience' without broadband, wads of processor and memory and storage, etc.
And yes, for much the same kind of crap that AOL et al. got rich off. Just at a higher and more electron-wasting level...
Mod parent up -- b4dcOd3r's, that is. I'd do it with my own mod point but I've already commented in this thread...
No,
a) it will be expensive
b) it will be 'prescribed' by quacks and 'naturopaths'
c) promoted as sticking it in Big Pharma's eye...
d) profits!
You would lose those bets.
One of exactly two tastes, no wait, is it three with a conditional tacked on, or four... guess some non-Americans are numerically challenged, or at least punctuationally challenged when writing in English. (Perhaps you'll wind up saying "AMONG YOUR TASTES ARE..." ending up with 'an almost fanatical devotion to little square hamburgers...' But that would actually make it to being funny...)
And if you're going to castigate American taste, just come right out and use 'monosodium glutamate' instead of 'umami', which of course few McDonald's eaters would recognize.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who prefer "fruit" steeped in sugary syrup out of a can or jar, but that's scarcely a blanket indictment of people from the United States. But I don't entirely see where the grease is supposed to come in. Oh, wait, it was supposed to be sardonic. Pity it fell so short.
And neither of you appear to have understood the point the article tries to make.
Read it again. There are six very specific spp. that produce the effect. Other combinations of some fewer number of the same spp. did not produce the effect.
Nowhere did either of you produce any reference whatsoever that yogurt, or kefir, or just about any other probiotic source currently available contains just those spp. in just the right combination to produce the effect on C. difficile.
Certainly some probiotics can work, and certainly they can produce a beneficial effect. The point of the article, though, is that very SPECIFIC probiotics were effective in the particular case. Has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the cultures in a given kind of yogurt or kefir are 'good for gut flora' (or whatever).
I do have to confess that I'll be watching the health-food stores for the introduction of 'HEXAFLOR' or some other $110-per-bottle product that features these six precise microorganisms in some way. (Whether or not it actually contains them in some form...) That's where I expect to see the 'monetization' take its most extreme form...
(Well, you did title it 'paranoia may cloud sensibilities'... ;-})
"Only those from planets understood to be older than 6000 years may attend."
Silly boy, don't you know that there are no planets older than 6000 years? (/sarcasm)
Whooooooosh!
Ask yourself, when's the last time the government did something and you were amazed at how little it cost.
Curiosity to Mars?
There are plenty of places the government does things well; they just aren't racked up and noticed as such. There are plenty of things private corporations couldn't do right on less overall money too... take various aspects of the Internet, where there are both positive examples and cautionary tales (like effective latency of an OC-3 backbone that allows either telephone packets or VOIP traffic to fill some of the 'unused' bandwidth...)
This isn't a 'conservative vs. liberal' or 'government vs. corporations' argument. It's a get-it-done-right argument, with get-it-done-cost-effectively as a comparatively minor secondary point. One of those things, like widespread SCORES-backed microlending programs, that will be effective regardless of nominal ideology (or nitwit name-calling...)
Just look what it did for Russia in the '20s and '30s!
Hey, and if you're good, your Bartinis and Korolevs will still produce for you after you knock their teeth out and malnourish them...
Yes, I know you were going for funny, but the 'knock-knock joke in the middle of the night' isn't really all that funny, and is especially not funny in the modern United States...
Quiet! Why do you think the Administration hasn't funded the satellite replacements!
It's the same as having PDE-propelled Aurora aircraft standing in for the SR-71s, or HAARP standing in for.. well, you get the idea. When you have weather control, you can leave weather reconaissance to the European satellite community... let THEM put it on the Internet. Did you think Tesla and then Langmuir were just allowed to look stupid and incompetent?
Now all we need is a fancy Burson & Marstellar campaign, like the one for the technology behind the Say-'n-Bank initiative in the Clinton administration. You remember -- the one that used the old CIA technology for B of A's initiative: it picked your request for bank balance information or whatever off the fillings in your teeth, relayed it via the NRO constellation to those silver antennae rotating on the billboards, and only you could read the data there...
You really need to produce an English translation of the terms in that acronym to get the full impact of the funniness...
Yes, but the point remains that the high-speed trackage between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is most of the heavy engineering for a high-speed route between Philadelphia and Chicago (e.g. via Forty Wayne)... and there would be considerably more demand for *that* route.
Note that even if you HSR-ized the Lackawanna Cutoff and put in a couple of long new tunnels, there's still a better argument for Phila-Pitts HSR as the 'link' from NYC to Chicago. Especially with the speed restrictions coming off the railroad south of New Brunswick with the new catenary (I expect the official Turbotrain record to be revealed as superseded any day now...) it makes sense for the high-speed link to 'points west' to go a bit south before it goes west.
And even if a putative transcontinental high-speed service from New York might not go through Chicago, it would still go through Pittsburgh if then angling down to, say, St Louis via Columbus.
So I'd definitely keep in mind that Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is NOT just on the long end of a regional HSR service...
I thought the project being pushed was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsfq1mD-LOk&feature=youtu.be
'High speed rail' does not necessarily mean 300kph+ supertrains. It's a question of making the travel times reasonable... especially compared to what's required end-to-end in road vehicles. While there is a certain amount of smarm in the EWR presentation... and a bit of amusing subliminal suggestion in their choice of simulated train! ... there is also some good discussion of the types of traffic they expect to see.