The term I heard on the radio the other day was a "statistical dead heat." The numbers weren't even that close, so the margins must have been pretty wide.
I'm in New Hampshire and I'm getting a ridiculous number of calls too. I'll have to put up with it until next Tuesday.
I take your point. But I think that there are still some similarities. In a Ponzi scheme, an investor might be promised a 20% return after 30 days, and he may very well get it, but this 20% is coming from new investors who are just paying in. In order for the system to work, there needs to be a constant stream of new investors. When the number of new investors slows, the system falls apart, and the person running the scheme disappears with the money.
If Social Security continues to be managed as it has in the past, then in a decade or so there will be more money being paid out in the form of benefits than there will be coming in as payroll taxes. This is because there were a lot of baby boomers born after WWII, but they didn't have that many kids (number of children per family reached an all-time low in the 1970s). People are also living longer nowadays. So the system will fall apart because not enough people will be paying into the system compared to the number of people who are receiving benefits.
I realize that Social Security is not an investment program, just a "safety net," and in general I think it's a good idea to have something like this in place. But if the current structure of Social Security does not change, then it will stop working for the same reason that a Ponzi scheme stops working.
I don't really see the point of Second Life, but I find it really interesting to see what goes on in there. It's like a chance to see what would happen if we didn't have the kind of regulations in place that we do now. An experiment in economics, if you will. It's telling that regulatory bodies are starting to form "in-world", like the SLEC (Second Life Exchange Commission). The article also mentions the formation of the VWBB (Virtual World Business Bureau), like the BBB in first life.
It's a nice idea, but "just" voting them out is easier said than done. In mainstream media, copyright issues like these get little coverage. Here on Slashdot there is quite an uproar over RIAA shenanigans, but for most voters, I don't think that these issues really register as relevant. This is especially on the national stage where the war in Iraq, abortion, immigration and so on get so much attention.
That isn't to say that there's no point in trying to change anything. It's just that it would be nigh impossible to influence national elections based on these issues. I think it would be better to encourage people who DO feel strongly about the RIAA's actions and copyright law to make their feelings known to their own senators and congresspeople. In addition, folks who are so inclined can donate money to organizations like the EFF, so we can challenge the RIAA's actions in court based on fair-use laws.
I totally agree with what you've said. Especially on Slashdot, news stories about China tend to be interpreted negatively, and in a very 1-dimensional way. The things that Slashdotters associate with China are always negative: the Great Firewall, jailing dissenters, censorship. I don't agree with these things either, but this is just a very small part of China, which is an extraordinarily vast country. For a country that has been growing so fast since Deng Xiaoping took office, there are bound to be some growing pains.
Furthermore, it should be obvious that parties within the government are making an earnest attempt at stifling corruption. Witness the death sentence of the head of the Chinese FDA, who was charged with corruption. China's current president has a reputation for being strongly against corruption, and is well-liked because of it.
It's unfortunate that the anti-corruption website was so poorly designed, but I don't doubt that the intention behind it was genuine.
Well, there is a different way of looking at it. It wasn't really China going after Yahoo! China, it was the IFPI (like the RIAA but an international organization) who filed a lawsuit, and the Chinese courts found in favor of the IFPI.
The article also mentions that the controlling stake of Yahoo! China is actually a Chinese company. So I don't really think that "pot calling the kettle black" is an appropriate analogy here. What did happen is an international organization took a Chinese company to task for linking to copyrighted material, and won.
The legislation that allowed the IFPI to win the lawsuit is relatively new, which says to me that China's government is making an effort to be more respectful of intellectual property, or at least appearing like they are. This particular law seems pretty ill-informed though. I don't think a search engine company should be punished because links to copyrighted material show up in search results.
If this new legislation and the lawsuit is any indication, it may become much easier for foreign companies to sue in China for copyright infringement.
The ISPs will have to get equipment that can tell the difference between encrypted BitTorrent traffic & all other encrypted and non-encrypted traffic. Eventually, the equipment requirements to do that will cost as much as any bandwidth savings.
But wouldn't the cost of hardware and software that does the filtering be a more or less one time cost? The bandwidth savings would be in effect all the time. It might take a while, but in the long term, the filtering would pay for itself, in addition to any assistance that the MPAA may provide... it would definitely be in their interest to do so. In addition, there are still lots of areas where consumers have only one ISP available to give them internet access. In these markets, ISPs have little incentive to address customer complaints of false positives being filtered.
The article mentions that ISPs could benefit from content filtering because it could lower overall bandwidth usage. I have a hard time seeing any other benefits to the ISPs though.
You know what else really ticked me off about that movie? That the detective heading up the murder investigation at Gattaca Corp. just happens to be the main character's brother. That just seemed like a totally implausible coincidence to me. It paved the way for that showdown at the end of the movie where Ethan Hawke proves that the human spirit can overcome any genetic defect, which came across as really corny (and also untrue).
It's really too bad, since the movie had a great feel for a dystopian future, and some great scenes with that doctor.
Anyways, it's not hard to see a future where corporations ARE allowed to submit employees to genetic testing. Corporations could influence legislation such that it might be voluntary at first, and only for very important jobs where people's lives are at stake. Would you want an airline pilot who has a genetic predisposition to panic attacks? From there it would be a slippery slope...
This is kind of off-topic, but I once had an old vt220 terminal with a similar keyboard. I hooked it up to my Linux workstation's serial port. I was able to get a workable console without editing too many files, but what really surprised me was that many of the special keys along the top of the keyboard mapped to quite sensible emacs commands. There was "Do" key that mapped to M-x, "Find" mapped to C-s, "Remove" was C-d. I remember thinking that it was pretty cool so much of the legacy support is still there and works out of the box.
That's interesting. I've noticed that the Spam tab in Gmail includes links to Spam recipes running along the top. Maybe that's Google's way of acknowledging how cool Hormel has been about their trademark. (Gmail does seem to use "Spam" with just the first letter capitalized for both the Hormel product and junk email, though.) I've always wondered whether Google has some explicit arrangement with Hormel, or if they are just putting in the SPAM recipes to be cute.
Yeah, it's like the PRC is the underdog in this battle, you almost want to root for them. All those geeks and techies say to them, "You can't do it. The internet is too big." But the PRC was the little government with a big heart and a lot of spunk, and just enough luck to overcome adversity in the end.:)
You could argue that the PRC has already succeeded, if their goal is to make it so the vast majority of non-technical people don't have access to censored information. If their goal is to keep even technical people seeking out censored information from accessing it, I'm not sure that it's possible.
However, other languages like the Chinese languages probably are not the same since English is missing a lot from their languages like tone.
I've studied Chinese for a few years now, and I'm not sure this would be too much of a problem. At least in the mainland, there is a standard way to express pronunciation of a Chinese character with Roman letters and tone marks over the vowels, called "pinyin". If you were to write out a sentence in Chinese pinyin and then remove the tone markings, there is a possibility that it would be ambiguous, but more often than not this can be resolved from context. (You can also use a number following each syllable to express tone.) The same thing happens in vocal music, since it would sound awkward to voice tones while carrying a tune, the tones are dropped. Apparently, the meaning can still be understood.
You run into another problem though, because any given character in Chinese can be pronounced differently in different dialects. So a Mandarin pinyin romanization could make little sense to someone from Hong Kong where they speak Cantonese, and someone from Taiwan might have trouble remembering a URL because they use a different method of romanization.
How many wealthy and powerful people do you think have their DNA, or will ever have their DNA, in a government database?
Government officials who need security clearance to do their jobs? I don't know what the exact process is to get security clearance today (are fingerprints required?) but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. I agree with your point though.
Indeed, the linked article says that PCC is 5-10 times faster than GCC, but currently performs only one optimization... What use is speed of compilation of the binaries produced are slower?
Sites with obvious political biases tend to be frequented only by people with similar political biases.
I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on AM radio every day on my drive home from school. This was during Clinton's second term, and each day he would grimly declare: "America Held Hostage: Day two thousand one hundred thirty seven" or something like that and it would crack me up every time. I definitely don't agree with his political biases, but I listened to his shows for just that reason.
I've always wondered about this. It happens too with message boards where you have to register to see the content which appears in plain text in Google's synopsis.
I'm not sure if Google is in on it or not. I wonder if some websites requiring registration or some kind of fee are set to recognize Google's spiders and allow them free access.
Slashdot Mirror
The term I heard on the radio the other day was a "statistical dead heat." The numbers weren't even that close, so the margins must have been pretty wide.
I'm in New Hampshire and I'm getting a ridiculous number of calls too. I'll have to put up with it until next Tuesday.
I take your point. But I think that there are still some similarities. In a Ponzi scheme, an investor might be promised a 20% return after 30 days, and he may very well get it, but this 20% is coming from new investors who are just paying in. In order for the system to work, there needs to be a constant stream of new investors. When the number of new investors slows, the system falls apart, and the person running the scheme disappears with the money.
If Social Security continues to be managed as it has in the past, then in a decade or so there will be more money being paid out in the form of benefits than there will be coming in as payroll taxes. This is because there were a lot of baby boomers born after WWII, but they didn't have that many kids (number of children per family reached an all-time low in the 1970s). People are also living longer nowadays. So the system will fall apart because not enough people will be paying into the system compared to the number of people who are receiving benefits.
I realize that Social Security is not an investment program, just a "safety net," and in general I think it's a good idea to have something like this in place. But if the current structure of Social Security does not change, then it will stop working for the same reason that a Ponzi scheme stops working.
I had never thought about it that way, but you're right that SSA does have a lot of similarities with a Ponzi scheme.
That's a pretty interesting poll. I guess that I'm not surprised that 34% of slashdotters identify as communist, socialist, or liberal.
I don't really see the point of Second Life, but I find it really interesting to see what goes on in there. It's like a chance to see what would happen if we didn't have the kind of regulations in place that we do now. An experiment in economics, if you will. It's telling that regulatory bodies are starting to form "in-world", like the SLEC (Second Life Exchange Commission). The article also mentions the formation of the VWBB (Virtual World Business Bureau), like the BBB in first life.
It's a nice idea, but "just" voting them out is easier said than done. In mainstream media, copyright issues like these get little coverage. Here on Slashdot there is quite an uproar over RIAA shenanigans, but for most voters, I don't think that these issues really register as relevant. This is especially on the national stage where the war in Iraq, abortion, immigration and so on get so much attention.
That isn't to say that there's no point in trying to change anything. It's just that it would be nigh impossible to influence national elections based on these issues. I think it would be better to encourage people who DO feel strongly about the RIAA's actions and copyright law to make their feelings known to their own senators and congresspeople. In addition, folks who are so inclined can donate money to organizations like the EFF, so we can challenge the RIAA's actions in court based on fair-use laws.
Another thing that bothers me about him is the support he is getting from the white nationalist community.
It makes me wonder if these kinds of ostentatious displays could possible trigger seizures in epileptics.
I totally agree with what you've said. Especially on Slashdot, news stories about China tend to be interpreted negatively, and in a very 1-dimensional way. The things that Slashdotters associate with China are always negative: the Great Firewall, jailing dissenters, censorship. I don't agree with these things either, but this is just a very small part of China, which is an extraordinarily vast country. For a country that has been growing so fast since Deng Xiaoping took office, there are bound to be some growing pains.
Furthermore, it should be obvious that parties within the government are making an earnest attempt at stifling corruption. Witness the death sentence of the head of the Chinese FDA, who was charged with corruption. China's current president has a reputation for being strongly against corruption, and is well-liked because of it.
It's unfortunate that the anti-corruption website was so poorly designed, but I don't doubt that the intention behind it was genuine.
Well, there is a different way of looking at it. It wasn't really China going after Yahoo! China, it was the IFPI (like the RIAA but an international organization) who filed a lawsuit, and the Chinese courts found in favor of the IFPI.
The article also mentions that the controlling stake of Yahoo! China is actually a Chinese company. So I don't really think that "pot calling the kettle black" is an appropriate analogy here. What did happen is an international organization took a Chinese company to task for linking to copyrighted material, and won.
The legislation that allowed the IFPI to win the lawsuit is relatively new, which says to me that China's government is making an effort to be more respectful of intellectual property, or at least appearing like they are. This particular law seems pretty ill-informed though. I don't think a search engine company should be punished because links to copyrighted material show up in search results.
If this new legislation and the lawsuit is any indication, it may become much easier for foreign companies to sue in China for copyright infringement.
Having n^3 nodes (or at least x*y*z nodes) might also be useful for doing massive 3D simulations.
Is it just a coincidence that their supercomputer has 216 processors which is 6 * 6 * 6 ???
Quote from Albert Einstein: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
But wouldn't the cost of hardware and software that does the filtering be a more or less one time cost? The bandwidth savings would be in effect all the time. It might take a while, but in the long term, the filtering would pay for itself, in addition to any assistance that the MPAA may provide... it would definitely be in their interest to do so. In addition, there are still lots of areas where consumers have only one ISP available to give them internet access. In these markets, ISPs have little incentive to address customer complaints of false positives being filtered.
The article mentions that ISPs could benefit from content filtering because it could lower overall bandwidth usage. I have a hard time seeing any other benefits to the ISPs though.
You know what else really ticked me off about that movie? That the detective heading up the murder investigation at Gattaca Corp. just happens to be the main character's brother. That just seemed like a totally implausible coincidence to me. It paved the way for that showdown at the end of the movie where Ethan Hawke proves that the human spirit can overcome any genetic defect, which came across as really corny (and also untrue).
It's really too bad, since the movie had a great feel for a dystopian future, and some great scenes with that doctor.
Anyways, it's not hard to see a future where corporations ARE allowed to submit employees to genetic testing. Corporations could influence legislation such that it might be voluntary at first, and only for very important jobs where people's lives are at stake. Would you want an airline pilot who has a genetic predisposition to panic attacks? From there it would be a slippery slope...
This is kind of off-topic, but I once had an old vt220 terminal with a similar keyboard. I hooked it up to my Linux workstation's serial port. I was able to get a workable console without editing too many files, but what really surprised me was that many of the special keys along the top of the keyboard mapped to quite sensible emacs commands. There was "Do" key that mapped to M-x, "Find" mapped to C-s, "Remove" was C-d. I remember thinking that it was pretty cool so much of the legacy support is still there and works out of the box.
That's interesting. I've noticed that the Spam tab in Gmail includes links to Spam recipes running along the top. Maybe that's Google's way of acknowledging how cool Hormel has been about their trademark. (Gmail does seem to use "Spam" with just the first letter capitalized for both the Hormel product and junk email, though.) I've always wondered whether Google has some explicit arrangement with Hormel, or if they are just putting in the SPAM recipes to be cute.
Yeah, it's like the PRC is the underdog in this battle, you almost want to root for them. All those geeks and techies say to them, "You can't do it. The internet is too big." But the PRC was the little government with a big heart and a lot of spunk, and just enough luck to overcome adversity in the end. :)
You could argue that the PRC has already succeeded, if their goal is to make it so the vast majority of non-technical people don't have access to censored information. If their goal is to keep even technical people seeking out censored information from accessing it, I'm not sure that it's possible.
I've studied Chinese for a few years now, and I'm not sure this would be too much of a problem. At least in the mainland, there is a standard way to express pronunciation of a Chinese character with Roman letters and tone marks over the vowels, called "pinyin". If you were to write out a sentence in Chinese pinyin and then remove the tone markings, there is a possibility that it would be ambiguous, but more often than not this can be resolved from context. (You can also use a number following each syllable to express tone.) The same thing happens in vocal music, since it would sound awkward to voice tones while carrying a tune, the tones are dropped. Apparently, the meaning can still be understood.
You run into another problem though, because any given character in Chinese can be pronounced differently in different dialects. So a Mandarin pinyin romanization could make little sense to someone from Hong Kong where they speak Cantonese, and someone from Taiwan might have trouble remembering a URL because they use a different method of romanization.
Since you can't remove or move stones from the board once they're placed, aren't paths containing cycles impossible anyways?
Government officials who need security clearance to do their jobs? I don't know what the exact process is to get security clearance today (are fingerprints required?) but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. I agree with your point though.
Indeed, the linked article says that PCC is 5-10 times faster than GCC, but currently performs only one optimization... What use is speed of compilation of the binaries produced are slower?
I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on AM radio every day on my drive home from school. This was during Clinton's second term, and each day he would grimly declare: "America Held Hostage: Day two thousand one hundred thirty seven" or something like that and it would crack me up every time. I definitely don't agree with his political biases, but I listened to his shows for just that reason.
I've always wondered about this. It happens too with message boards where you have to register to see the content which appears in plain text in Google's synopsis.
I'm not sure if Google is in on it or not. I wonder if some websites requiring registration or some kind of fee are set to recognize Google's spiders and allow them free access.