Users expect a web browser to behave in a certain way. AJAX breaks that model -- back buttons become non-functional, or function differently than expected
No one. NO ONE expects the back button to revert to the map view you first got on submitting your query. As you pan around and zoom, you don't expect the back button to reverse your movements.
No one expects the back button to unarchive the email you archived, or unsend the email you sent.
No one expects the back button to revert a text edit you just made.
In fact, the only thing back and forward buttons do is NAVIGATE. And they continue to do that under AJAX.
Your position is as ridiculous as declaring that Java apps will never take on, because an applet breaks the back button, etc. No, it doesn't. An applet is just an element on a page (or in a new page) that you can interact with. An AJAX element is just one that isn't entirely local, but that fetches from server-side transparently.
I didn't say should or shouldn't believe it, but I'm sure you agree that "the more evidence that piles up against a proposition, the stronger the faith of the people who continue to believe in it."
Don't you agree that honest members of the Flat Earth Society have really strong faith in their beliefs?
" Note to self: Return microwave and vcr. Pay late-fee ($9.30) "
and then put it on a stickie on my monitor. Can you guess what the seven-character password is? [I used a suggestion from the javascript I linked above.]
Did you know that if there's a ten-car jam in a tunnel, with clear road ahead, and clear road for a ways behind, then if we get the traffic that's coming up behind the jam to lose some time by making a detour, maintaining its speed and distance-between-cars, etc, while the ten cars start moving again, then the jam disappears -- but if we let the traffic that's coming up behind all reach the traffic jam while the hind car is still at a stand-still, and come to a stop behind it, all in turn, then there's still a jam? Only now instead of 10 cars it consists of however many cars were all cruising fine? (If it's on a highway, where these groups of cars aren't segmented by traffic lights, then this can be a huge number of cars. That's why you can have 45 minutes of stop-and-go traffic even though ahead of the whole jam is clear road and there's absolutely no reason that these hundreds of cars should be at a stand-still, except that an accident HAD occurred, miles and miles ahead of where the current traffic jam is, over an hour ago.)
I despise trailers with all my heart, and if it weren't for the social inconvenience, I never again would watch a new release in a theatre, ever, no matter what, just because I want nothing to have to do with the awful trailers Hollywood shoves down my throat these days. Don't get me wrong -- a trailer is a WONDERFUL one-, two-, or three-minute reduction of a film I otherwise couldn't so much as sit through. But as for films in which I have an actual interest...
Every film that's part of my intellectual furniture right now, that I adored absolutely, that moved me or changed my world outlook or even which just was wildly entertaining, would have been completely ruined for me if I had seen a "modern version" of its trailer first. (You know exactly what I mean. Not just merely the "spoiling" of some plot points, yeah, okay, I know that the Titanic will sink, or that Jesus will be crucified, to use two popular examples, but the very taking away of all that gives a film heart and pulse.)
The exception, of course, is in 1) the rare cases where there is enough artistic pull that a film can be "presented" without being "Readers' Digested" -- VERY VERY rare today -- and 2) the cases, as I just mentioned, in which I don't mind watching a three minute reader's digest of a film that I have NO intention of seeing. [Usually even the worst of films have enough high spots to put together an interesting digest from. (Especially with all the money on CGI, etc.)]
Basically, my idea of a good introduction to a movie is a title, maybe a genre -- so I can select movies to watch based on how I would like to feel -- and "see this."
Every good movie ever made is accessible from a very wide variety of intellectual approaches; if you're not STUPID, you don't need to watch what amounts to a point-by-point synopsis of a film in order to be prepped for its watching.
There exist handshakes for proving I know something without revealing what it is.
Is any of it simple enough to perform -- perhaps with some idiot savant-y BIG_NUM manipulation tricks -- in your head?
It might take a bunch of passes, perhaps as many as one for each bit of entropy in your "secret", but I am sure there must be SOME way to set up my webmail so that I can authenticate myself into a "read the subject lines / senders of all NEW messages" session, with password1, or, with password2, into a "read the body of the NEWEST unread email" session. Thus I could "log in" even through a COMPLETELY COMPROMISED computer, keylogger and all, and unless I slip up on my mental math, without any device of any sort I could check my mail without compromising my inbox or identity. (no spamming-in-my-name; no reading-my-archived-email; no sniffing-my-authentication). There's not even anything a man-in-the-middle can do with my plaintext request for the newest unread subjects or bodies. There's no insertion attack.
Insofar as those voting for Nader were more likely to be from the "Gore" camp than the "Bush" camp in the last election, and probably are more likely to be from the "Kerry" camp than the "Bush" camp in this election, isn't/wasn't it in the non-Gore / non-Kerry interest respectively to give Nader as many votes as can possibly be taken from the entire left-of-center field?
For example, I would think giving five thousand dollars to Nader's campaign in Florida would empower the Republican interest more than giving five thousand more dollars to Bush's. (Diminishing returns - Bush already is reaching almost all the republicans, but Nader's campaign is small, and the very very lefts might be swayable).
As I understand it, the margin between Bush and Gore last year was so close in Florida that if Nader had "taken" even slightly fewer votes from Gore (insofar as Nader's votes probably would NOT have gone to Bush instead), Bush could not have prevailed. Hence the vote-swapping among Naderites who were aware of how close swing states would be, but nevertheless wanted their candidate represented. (Vote swapping consisted, as I understand it, of, say, a Massachusetts Gore-ite gentlemanly agreeing with a Florida Nader-ite to vote Nader / Gore respectively.)
Objectively, do you think that Nader gets any support from sources whose soul interest in his campaign is to "take" votes away from the more moderate (but non-zero-chance-of-winning) side?
This post does NOT advocate any political viewpoint.
This article (Discover, Nov 1996 [coral cache]) suggests that the mathematics governing elections favors YOUR vote in an electoral college system.
Whatever your political slant, I am sure you would like YOUR vote to be more favored.
Imagine the electoral college as what happens if you're a "swing" voter in your family, your family contributing all its votes with its internal winner to your town's election, in which it is a "swing" voter in your small town, your town being a swing voter in the county election, your county being an important vote in the state election. In this case you weild extreme power. You are more likely to be in "this case" under the electoral college than in a pure vote.
There's nothing partisan in the way in which this empowers YOUR vote - rather, all that happens is that there is a more causative effect between YOUR political idea and what actually HAPPENS. It's rather like playing both sides against each other, with those who are actually making a decision having a huge return on their investment in making that decision. In other words, your decision about how you are going to vote = larger effect on what happens in the election.
I have not reviewed the mathematics myself, but this is how I understand the situation.
Comments from anyone who has reviewed the issue?
How has Natapoff's work held up over the past few years?
No, I don't think so. The idea of proving you've done some work is that you have made an investment and so are not doing 100,000 such investments per second.
It is often suggested that unsolicited bulk email ("spam") is such a problem on the Internet because the current economic framework for email handling does little to discourage it. If only, it is suggested, the senders of email could be made to pay for their messages. Spammers would then cease their indiscriminate distribution of messages and email volumes would reduce as the senders targeted more carefully or just gave up altogether. Nevertheless, almost no one (other than those hoping for a handling fee) thinks that using actual money is a good way to achieve this economic utopia and even the holders of patents for "e-money" systems have failed to generate any significant enthusiasm for their wares.
However, there is an alternative to real-world money, which was first proposed by Dwork and Naor in 1992 [8]. Their idea was to have the sender of an email perform a complex computation as evidence that they believe that an email is worth receiving. The sender then proves to the recipient that this processing work has been completed and the email will then be accepted. The processing time is "free", so there is a minimal burden upon legitimate senders, but it is a finite resource, so that the spammers will not have unlimited amounts of processing time at their disposal and so cannot continue to send in bulk.
I was sure that to place a sound spatially your brain relies on the delay between hearing the sound in one ear and then the other.
Knowing nothing about human hearing we can almost rule out this conjecture. Noise travels at about 761.207051 mph and your ears are about a foot apart.
That means there is a difference of 895.706603 microseconds between when the first ear would hear the sound and when the second one would.
This is 1/1116th of a second, meaning that if your brain 'ticks' subconsciously at anything less than 1100 hertz its timing would be too coarse to catch this minute difference. The brain, in fact, ticks a couple of orders of magnitude slower than this, and moreover the theoretical maximum a single neuron can tick is 2000 hertz, so there would have to be ~0 ms delay in signal propagation between neurons, and the signals would have to make a straight line from each ear toward the area in which the signal is to be processed in order for comparison to occur together with pertinent timing information. (The brain, of course, is not so precisely wired that it could take into account some kind of fixed minute differences in timing among various input sources.)
So we can rule that out. The next idea continues with your implicit assumption that each ear is, logically, a fixed point of input, with the brain reconstructing all spatial information. (Ears, in fact, have a complex set of ridges precisely because they do convey spatial information)
But if we thought of ears as mere fixed points of frequency/amplitude sampling, we might be tempted to think that all spatial information is reconstructed from minute differences in amplitude -- the ear nearer the sound source would hear it more loudly. We can also eliminate this conjecture because the two spheres of possible sound location a given distance from each ear intersect not in one point but a whole arc of possible places. What I mean is, if all your brain knew is : "Ear 1 hears source at A loudness and ear 2 hears source at B loudness, and ear1 is at (x1, y1) and ear2 is at (x2, y2)", then, together with information about how sound loses amplitude with the square of the distance it travels and inversely with the frequency (assume the pertinent natural laws are hard-wired), it could produce the fact: A-ha! The source must be 10 feet from ear1 but 10.23 feet from ear2.
The problem is, there is not ONE point that fits those descriptions, but an infinitely many.
If your ears were just input points, then, if you start playing a sound file on the computer in front if you, it should sound the same with your eyes closed now as it would if you turned around and heard it from behind: Each ear hears an equally loud sound, only now from behind instead of in front. The problem is, you can tell that it's from behind and not from in front of you! (Try a double-blind test if you're not sure -- place one speaker dead in front of you and one speaker an equal distance dead behind you, write a script to randomly play either full left or full right balance, close your eyes and listen to the random tests; you'll always be able to tell where the sound source is coming from.).
Okay, so now we've long-windedly debunked the naive assumptions about how the brain might reconstruct spatial information. How does it?
IIRC Perl poetry does not need to be valid Perl, let alone have an interesting effect, but merely interesting English that happens to use only Perl keywords.
Here are the first paragraphs of Chapter 6, 'Principia Mathematica', of Russell's autobiography. I'm quoting at some length, because it is so interesting, but the relevant sentence is near the end, and I've emphasized it in bold.
Chapter 6
'Principia Mathematica' In July 1900, there was an International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in connection with the Exhibition of that year. Whitehead [eventual coauthor of Principia Mathematica] and I decided to go to this Congress, and I accepted an Invitation to read a paper at it. Our arrival in Paris was signalized by a somewhat ferocious encounter with the eminent mathematician Borel. Carey Thomas had asked Alys to bring from England twelve empty trunks which she had left behind. Borel had asked the Whiteheads to bring his niece, who had a teaching post in England. There was a great crowd at the Gare du Nord, and we had only one luggage ticket for the whole party. Borel's niece's luggage turned up at once, our luggage turned up fairly soon, but of Carey's empty trunks only eleven appeared. While we were waiting for the twelfth, Borel lost patience, snatched the luggage ticket out of my hands, and went off with his niece and her one valise, leaving us unable to claim either Carey's trunks or our personal baggage. Whitehead and I seized the pieces one at a time, and used them as battering-rams to penetrate through the ring of officials. So surprised were they that the manoeuvre was successful.
The congress was a turning point in my intellectual life, because I there met Peano. I already knew him by name and had seen some of his work, but had not taken the trouble to master his notation. In discussions at the Congress I observed that he was always more precise than anyone else, and that he invariably got the better of any argument upon which he embarked. As the days went by, I decided that this must be owing to his mathematical logic. I therefore got him to give me all his works, and as soon as the Congress was over I retired to Fernhurst to study quietly every word written by him and his disciples. It became clear to me that his notation afforded an instrument of logical analysis such as I had been seeking for years, and that by studying him I was acquiring a new and powerful technique for the work that I had long wanted to do. By the end of August I had become completely familiar with all the work of his school. I spent September in extending his methods to the logic of relations. It seems to me in retrospect that, through that month, every day was warm and sunny. The Whiteheads stayed with us at Fernhurst, and I explained my new ideas to him. Every evening the discussion ended with some difficulty, and every morning I found that the difficulty of the previous evening had solved itself while I slept. The time was one of intellectual intoxication. My sensations resembled those one has after climbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mist suddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in every direction. For years I had been endeavoring to analyse the fundamental notions of mathematics, such as order and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be definitive answers to the problems which had baffled me for years. And in the course of discovering these answers, I was introducing a new mathematical technique, by which regions formerly abandoned to the vaguenesses of philosophers were conquered for the precision of exact formulae. Intellectually, the month of September 1900 was the highest point of my life. I went about saying to myself that now at last I had done something worth doing, and I had the feeling that I must be careful not to be run over in the street before I had written it down.
I wish I could quote a few more pages, it is such immensely interesting writing, and shortly we are introduced to the paradox which ground work on Principia almost to a halt.
Just be careful what you say if you go to a gun shop--I got some strange looks when I walked in and said I was looking for something to deal with a noisy neighbor! -- harlows_monkeys, about the availability of earplugs.
Anyone who wants to listen to CDs on work time must donate a CD to the pile.
The pile sits in front of a Personal Stereo Bank. This is a bank of personal CD players. It has 25 different headphone jacks each connected to one of 25 different CD drives. Basically, it's as though 25 portable CD players were glued together. (There is no cross-functionality between the 25 CD players.)
The Personal Stereo Bank is in your case an Ethernet Stereo Bank, which is just a fancy digital version of the Personal Stereo Bank. This version
Allows people to listen to their CDs on Ethernet Headphones (next item),
has only one CD player instead of 25, and digitizes CDs in advance, so that you don't actually have to put in the physical CD to play it.
Note: The CD must still physically be in the stockpile in front of the Ethernet Stereo Bank, or you are stealing music you do not have a license to play. Fair Use implicitly gives you a license to play your own prepared copy of a music on any medium, as long as you own the original physical medium. It does NOT give you the right to distribute copies. Therefore, there is no distribution of copies -- there is only the stockpile of CDs, and an Ethernet Stereo Bank allowing one single person at a time to listen to a given CD. While that personal is listening to that CD (has borrowed it from the stockpile), no one else may use it.
Note also: The Ethernet Stereo Bank is NOT a jukebox -- you are not using it as part of a public performance. Rather, it is a bunch of CD players all collected in a single piece of hardware. Each CD player only has one headphone jack, to which only a single person may listen at a time.
The Ethernet Stereo Bank doesn't just have 25 eighth-inch stereo output jacks all in a row -- rather, it has 25 Ethernet Headphone Jacks to each of which a singleEthernet Headphone may be connected at a time.
Each employee's computer acts as a pair of Ethernet Headphones, by connecting to an Ethernet Headphone Jack on the Ethernet Stereo Bank. Each employee may then play a single CD on her Ethernet Headphone at a time, and only when that CD is in the stockpile and available for borrowing (i.e. not being played by someone else).
An employee may not play her CD loudly enough for other people to hear -- she only has the right to use the CD for private listening.
Each employee may have a Remote CD Changer installed on her computer, which allows her to select an available CD to listen to from the stockpile without physically having to walk over to the Ethernet Stereo Bank. It also has the advanced feature of being able to queue CDs until they are available.
Thus, we have a system whereby each employee can add a couple of CDs to a communal pile and listen to CDs from the pile one at a time. We have an electronic solution for this that saves the employee the trouble of having to get up, walk over the stockpile, take the CD back to her computer, and return it when she is done. We are breaking no law that a CD pool itself does not break.
Questions? Comments?
Hell, I'll even contract the solution for you if you want. (Code the Ethernet Stereo Bank, as well as graphical, cross-platform Ethernet Headphone and Remote CD changer client software.)
Just e-mail r v i r a g h @ y a h o o . c o m if you're interested -- but you should be able to do all of the above yourself, it's very, very simple. The trickiest part is adhering precisely to the conceptual framework outlined above, especially when it comes to the language presented in the user interfaces. Otherwise, you're legally liable.
I used to work in a computer store and one day we had a gentleman call in with a smoking power supply. The service rep was having a bit of trouble convincing this guy that he had a hardware problem.
Service Rep: Sir, something has burned up within your power supply.
Customer: I bet that there is some command that I can put into the AUTOEXEC.BAT that will take care of this.
Service Rep: There is nothing that software can do to help you with this problem.
Customer: I know that there is something that I can put in... some command... maybe it should go into the CONFIG.SYS.
[After a few minutes of going round and round] Service Rep: Okay, I am not supposed to tell anyone this but there is a hidden command in some versions of DOS that you can use. I want you to edit your AUTOEXEC.BAT and add the last line as C:\DOS\NOSMOKE and reboot your computer.
[Customer does this] Customer: It is still smoking.
Service Rep: I guess you'll need to call Microsoft and ask them for a patch for the NOSMOKE.EXE.
[The customer then hung up. We thought that we had heard the last of this guy but NO... he calls back four hours later] Service Rep: Hello Sir, how is your computer?
Customer: I called Microsoft and they said that my power supply is incompatible with their NOSMOKE.EXE and that I need to get a new one. I was wondering when I can have that done and how much it will cost..
Disk reads and writes were cached so that they got written to disk only when the heads were on that part of the platter That would work fine for writes -- but we already have write-behind cache. We also have read-ahead cache, so that once you've sunch to the proper location, the first read will result in that whole general section's being read, in anticipation of future reads from that area -- if it turns out not to be necessary, it'll eventually be overwritten by future read-ahead caches.
The problem with what you're proposing, of course, is that there's still the inital seek time to that location.
Why would you defer your read until you got to where you were going "naturally", instead of doing so immediately? It would increase the total time until read.
For example, suppose you are trying to read some data that's almost at the edge of the outer ring, but that you issue your request immediately after the read arm has hit the edge outward and started going inward, having already passed the data you need. At this point, a simple seek would be almost instantanious, since you could just move back to where you needed to be -- but under your "continual motion" scheme, you would need to wait all the way until the arm travelled to the inside of the platter, then all the way until it travelled back to where it needed to be again.
Of course, your plan would work fine if you had a cache the size of the whole damn platter your reads were coming from -- then you could conintuously read in one swerving motion the whole platter, and write back to it only when necessary. This is not, however, what I think you meant.
So take-home lesson: We already have more than adequate write caches (dangerously so -- sometimes power loss means that megabytes and megabytes of data that have been reported as written to disk are only waiting to be written to disk, and if you don't power up the hard-drive before the battery runs out protecting the cache, you risk corrupting your data.)
As for "read-behind caches" (i.e. reads to data based on requests you're going to receive, not based on requests you've already received), isn't really feasable.
Note: feel free to correct me, I'm no hard drive expert.
Apparently that already runs several languages, including Python and PHP...C++ and Java are definitely supposed to be supported.
I think.
From elsewhere: Since it is a virtual machine executing virtual assembler code, there are several different languages that compile to Parrot bytecode - it isn't limited to Perl! Here are some of the languages that have been so far done to varying degrees:
Jako, a C-like language developed for testing Parrot
Cola, likewise, but more Java-like
BASIC
Forth
...and an extremely rudimentary Perl 6 compiler...
XHTML is a set of tags that make use of most HTML tags, and yet wouldn't it be awesome not to have those HTML tags to begin with? It would save half the work.
Likewise, does anyone know of a:
C++ tutorial that does not teach any C keywords?
Linux administration course that does not teach any Unix concepts?
etc... Basically my point is, if it doesn't exist, it's because it shouldn't exist -- because if shoulds were woulds, we'd have a forest -- and we do, several big ones, mostly in the tropics, Q.E.D.
Slashdot Mirror
No one. NO ONE expects the back button to revert to the map view you first got on submitting your query. As you pan around and zoom, you don't expect the back button to reverse your movements.
No one expects the back button to unarchive the email you archived, or unsend the email you sent.
No one expects the back button to revert a text edit you just made.
In fact, the only thing back and forward buttons do is NAVIGATE. And they continue to do that under AJAX.
Your position is as ridiculous as declaring that Java apps will never take on, because an applet breaks the back button, etc. No, it doesn't. An applet is just an element on a page (or in a new page) that you can interact with. An AJAX element is just one that isn't entirely local, but that fetches from server-side transparently.
The subject says it all.
I didn't say should or shouldn't believe it, but I'm sure you agree that "the more evidence that piles up against a proposition, the stronger the faith of the people who continue to believe in it."
Don't you agree that honest members of the Flat Earth Society have really strong faith in their beliefs?
Please concede.
We again apologize for the fault in the comments. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
For example, if I had to write down a seven-character password, I would write down:
and then put it on a stickie on my monitor.
Can you guess what the seven-character password is? [I used a suggestion from the javascript I linked above.]
Did you know that if there's a ten-car jam in a tunnel, with clear road ahead, and clear road for a ways behind, then if we get the traffic that's coming up behind the jam to lose some time by making a detour, maintaining its speed and distance-between-cars, etc, while the ten cars start moving again, then the jam disappears -- but if we let the traffic that's coming up behind all reach the traffic jam while the hind car is still at a stand-still, and come to a stop behind it, all in turn, then there's still a jam? Only now instead of 10 cars it consists of however many cars were all cruising fine? (If it's on a highway, where these groups of cars aren't segmented by traffic lights, then this can be a huge number of cars. That's why you can have 45 minutes of stop-and-go traffic even though ahead of the whole jam is clear road and there's absolutely no reason that these hundreds of cars should be at a stand-still, except that an accident HAD occurred, miles and miles ahead of where the current traffic jam is, over an hour ago.)
I despise trailers with all my heart, and if it weren't for the social inconvenience, I never again would watch a new release in a theatre, ever, no matter what, just because I want nothing to have to do with the awful trailers Hollywood shoves down my throat these days. Don't get me wrong -- a trailer is a WONDERFUL one-, two-, or three-minute reduction of a film I otherwise couldn't so much as sit through. But as for films in which I have an actual interest...
Every film that's part of my intellectual furniture right now, that I adored absolutely, that moved me or changed my world outlook or even which just was wildly entertaining, would have been completely ruined for me if I had seen a "modern version" of its trailer first. (You know exactly what I mean. Not just merely the "spoiling" of some plot points, yeah, okay, I know that the Titanic will sink, or that Jesus will be crucified, to use two popular examples, but the very taking away of all that gives a film heart and pulse.)
The exception, of course, is in 1) the rare cases where there is enough artistic pull that a film can be "presented" without being "Readers' Digested" -- VERY VERY rare today -- and 2) the cases, as I just mentioned, in which I don't mind watching a three minute reader's digest of a film that I have NO intention of seeing. [Usually even the worst of films have enough high spots to put together an interesting digest from. (Especially with all the money on CGI, etc.)]
Basically, my idea of a good introduction to a movie is a title, maybe a genre -- so I can select movies to watch based on how I would like to feel -- and "see this."
Every good movie ever made is accessible from a very wide variety of intellectual approaches; if you're not STUPID, you don't need to watch what amounts to a point-by-point synopsis of a film in order to be prepped for its watching.
You cannot tell me that nothing is taken away.
By the way: SOYLENT GREEN IS
a good movie.
There exist handshakes for proving I know something without revealing what it is.
Is any of it simple enough to perform -- perhaps with some idiot savant-y BIG_NUM manipulation tricks -- in your head?
It might take a bunch of passes, perhaps as many as one for each bit of entropy in your "secret", but I am sure there must be SOME way to set up my webmail so that I can authenticate myself into a "read the subject lines / senders of all NEW messages" session, with password1, or, with password2, into a "read the body of the NEWEST unread email" session. Thus I could "log in" even through a COMPLETELY COMPROMISED computer, keylogger and all, and unless I slip up on my mental math, without any device of any sort I could check my mail without compromising my inbox or identity. (no spamming-in-my-name; no reading-my-archived-email; no sniffing-my-authentication). There's not even anything a man-in-the-middle can do with my plaintext request for the newest unread subjects or bodies. There's no insertion attack.
background.
It's interesting for me to consider:
Insofar as those voting for Nader were more likely to be from the "Gore" camp than the "Bush" camp in the last election, and probably are more likely to be from the "Kerry" camp than the "Bush" camp in this election, isn't/wasn't it in the non-Gore / non-Kerry interest respectively to give Nader as many votes as can possibly be taken from the entire left-of-center field?
For example, I would think giving five thousand dollars to Nader's campaign in Florida would empower the Republican interest more than giving five thousand more dollars to Bush's. (Diminishing returns - Bush already is reaching almost all the republicans, but Nader's campaign is small, and the very very lefts might be swayable).
As I understand it, the margin between Bush and Gore last year was so close in Florida that if Nader had "taken" even slightly fewer votes from Gore (insofar as Nader's votes probably would NOT have gone to Bush instead), Bush could not have prevailed. Hence the vote-swapping among Naderites who were aware of how close swing states would be, but nevertheless wanted their candidate represented. (Vote swapping consisted, as I understand it, of, say, a Massachusetts Gore-ite gentlemanly agreeing with a Florida Nader-ite to vote Nader / Gore respectively.)
Objectively, do you think that Nader gets any support from sources whose soul interest in his campaign is to "take" votes away from the more moderate (but non-zero-chance-of-winning) side?
This post does NOT advocate any political viewpoint.
Why is the electoral college good for democracy?
This article (Discover, Nov 1996 [coral cache]) suggests that the mathematics governing elections favors YOUR vote in an electoral college system.
Whatever your political slant, I am sure you would like YOUR vote to be more favored.
Imagine the electoral college as what happens if you're a "swing" voter in your family, your family contributing all its votes with its internal winner to your town's election, in which it is a "swing" voter in your small town, your town being a swing voter in the county election, your county being an important vote in the state election. In this case you weild extreme power. You are more likely to be in "this case" under the electoral college than in a pure vote.
There's nothing partisan in the way in which this empowers YOUR vote - rather, all that happens is that there is a more causative effect between YOUR political idea and what actually HAPPENS. It's rather like playing both sides against each other, with those who are actually making a decision having a huge return on their investment in making that decision. In other words, your decision about how you are going to vote = larger effect on what happens in the election.
I have not reviewed the mathematics myself, but this is how I understand the situation.
Comments from anyone who has reviewed the issue?
How has Natapoff's work held up over the past few years?
However this probably doesn't work (PDF) [or as html].
Background (from that paper):
Never trust a naked busdriver
Because they have nothing to lose?
I was sure that to place a sound spatially your brain relies on the delay between hearing the sound in one ear and then the other.
Knowing nothing about human hearing we can almost rule out this conjecture. Noise travels at about 761.207051 mph and your ears are about a foot apart.
That means there is a difference of 895.706603 microseconds between when the first ear would hear the sound and when the second one would.
This is 1/1116th of a second, meaning that if your brain 'ticks' subconsciously at anything less than 1100 hertz its timing would be too coarse to catch this minute difference.
The brain, in fact, ticks a couple of orders of magnitude slower than this, and moreover the theoretical maximum a single neuron can tick is 2000 hertz, so there would have to be ~0 ms delay in signal propagation between neurons, and the signals would have to make a straight line from each ear toward the area in which the signal is to be processed in order for comparison to occur together with pertinent timing information. (The brain, of course, is not so precisely wired that it could take into account some kind of fixed minute differences in timing among various input sources.)
So we can rule that out. The next idea continues with your implicit assumption that each ear is, logically, a fixed point of input, with the brain reconstructing all spatial information. (Ears, in fact, have a complex set of ridges precisely because they do convey spatial information)
But if we thought of ears as mere fixed points of frequency/amplitude sampling, we might be tempted to think that all spatial information is reconstructed from minute differences in amplitude -- the ear nearer the sound source would hear it more loudly. We can also eliminate this conjecture because the two spheres of possible sound location a given distance from each ear intersect not in one point but a whole arc of possible places. What I mean is, if all your brain knew is : "Ear 1 hears source at A loudness and ear 2 hears source at B loudness, and ear1 is at (x1, y1) and ear2 is at (x2, y2)", then, together with information about how sound loses amplitude with the square of the distance it travels and inversely with the frequency (assume the pertinent natural laws are hard-wired), it could produce the fact: A-ha! The source must be 10 feet from ear1 but 10.23 feet from ear2.
The problem is, there is not ONE point that fits those descriptions, but an infinitely many.
If your ears were just input points, then, if you start playing a sound file on the computer in front if you, it should sound the same with your eyes closed now as it would if you turned around and heard it from behind: Each ear hears an equally loud sound, only now from behind instead of in front. The problem is, you can tell that it's from behind and not from in front of you! (Try a double-blind test if you're not sure -- place one speaker dead in front of you and one speaker an equal distance dead behind you, write a script to randomly play either full left or full right balance, close your eyes and listen to the random tests; you'll always be able to tell where the sound source is coming from.).
Okay, so now we've long-windedly debunked the naive assumptions about how the brain might reconstruct spatial information. How does it?
Beats me.
IIRC Perl poetry does not need to be valid Perl, let alone have an interesting effect, but merely interesting English that happens to use only Perl keywords.
I wish I could quote a few more pages, it is such immensely interesting writing, and shortly we are introduced to the paradox which ground work on Principia almost to a halt.
Dammit, that should go in the fortune file!
Just be careful what you say if you go to a gun shop--I got some strange looks when I walked in and said I was looking for something to deal with a noisy neighbor!
-- harlows_monkeys, about the availability of earplugs.
quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi
Amit szabad Jupiternek, nem szabad a kisokornek.
...if it needs power from many conventional nuclear power plants to process the waste from a single one?
In just 30 years we will have fusion power plants -- therefore, all we have to do is store those nasty nuclear byproducts for just 30 years.
Preferably in Utah. Oh wait.
- Allows people to listen to their CDs on Ethernet Headphones (next item),
- has only one CD player instead of 25, and digitizes CDs in advance, so that you don't actually have to put in the physical CD to play it.
Note: The CD must still physically be in the stockpile in front of the Ethernet Stereo Bank, or you are stealing music you do not have a license to play. Fair Use implicitly gives you a license to play your own prepared copy of a music on any medium, as long as you own the original physical medium. It does NOT give you the right to distribute copies. Therefore, there is no distribution of copies -- there is only the stockpile of CDs, and an Ethernet Stereo Bank allowing one single person at a time to listen to a given CD. While that personal is listening to that CD (has borrowed it from the stockpile), no one else may use it.Note also: The Ethernet Stereo Bank is NOT a jukebox -- you are not using it as part of a public performance. Rather, it is a bunch of CD players all collected in a single piece of hardware. Each CD player only has one headphone jack, to which only a single person may listen at a time.
An employee may not play her CD loudly enough for other people to hear -- she only has the right to use the CD for private listening.
Thus, we have a system whereby each employee can add a couple of CDs to a communal pile and listen to CDs from the pile one at a time. We have an electronic solution for this that saves the employee the trouble of having to get up, walk over the stockpile, take the CD back to her computer, and return it when she is done. We are breaking no law that a CD pool itself does not break.
Questions? Comments?
Hell, I'll even contract the solution for you if you want. (Code the Ethernet Stereo Bank, as well as graphical, cross-platform Ethernet Headphone and Remote CD changer client software.)
Just e-mail r v i r a g h @ y a h o o . c o m if you're interested -- but you should be able to do all of the above yourself, it's very, very simple. The trickiest part is adhering precisely to the conceptual framework outlined above, especially when it comes to the language presented in the user interfaces. Otherwise, you're legally liable.
Note: I am not a lawyer.
are you hungarian?
Yeah, you. Aren't you wishing you could easily go back to 10.2.3, with which there was nothing wrong, and from which you had no reason to upgrade?
You wouldn't be if you had listened to me.
An old but good story...
Disk reads and writes were cached so that they got written to disk only when the heads were on that part of the platter
That would work fine for writes -- but we already have write-behind cache. We also have read-ahead cache, so that once you've sunch to the proper location, the first read will result in that whole general section's being read, in anticipation of future reads from that area -- if it turns out not to be necessary, it'll eventually be overwritten by future read-ahead caches.
The problem with what you're proposing, of course, is that there's still the inital seek time to that location.
Why would you defer your read until you got to where you were going "naturally", instead of doing so immediately? It would increase the total time until read.
For example, suppose you are trying to read some data that's almost at the edge of the outer ring, but that you issue your request immediately after the read arm has hit the edge outward and started going inward, having already passed the data you need. At this point, a simple seek would be almost instantanious, since you could just move back to where you needed to be -- but under your "continual motion" scheme, you would need to wait all the way until the arm travelled to the inside of the platter, then all the way until it travelled back to where it needed to be again.
Of course, your plan would work fine if you had a cache the size of the whole damn platter your reads were coming from -- then you could conintuously read in one swerving motion the whole platter, and write back to it only when necessary. This is not, however, what I think you meant.
So take-home lesson: We already have more than adequate write caches (dangerously so -- sometimes power loss means that megabytes and megabytes of data that have been reported as written to disk are only waiting to be written to disk, and if you don't power up the hard-drive before the battery runs out protecting the cache, you risk corrupting your data.)
As for "read-behind caches" (i.e. reads to data based on requests you're going to receive, not based on requests you've already received), isn't really feasable.
Note: feel free to correct me, I'm no hard drive expert.
Apparently that already runs several languages, including Python and PHP...C++ and Java are definitely supposed to be supported.
I think.
From elsewhere:
Since it is a virtual machine executing virtual assembler code, there are several different languages that compile to Parrot bytecode - it isn't limited to Perl! Here are some of the languages that have been so far done to varying degrees:
Jako, a C-like language developed for testing Parrot
Cola, likewise, but more Java-like
BASIC
Forth
...and an extremely rudimentary Perl 6 compiler...
What do we think?
Likewise, does anyone know of a:
C++ tutorial that does not teach any C keywords?
Linux administration course that does not teach any Unix concepts?
etc...
Basically my point is, if it doesn't exist, it's because it shouldn't exist -- because if shoulds were woulds, we'd have a forest -- and we do, several big ones, mostly in the tropics, Q.E.D.
So, yeah.