I've seen a couple of these projects, and since this isn't a commercial vehicle, couldn't you just use cheap 'ol hydrogen, rather than comparatively rare and expensive helium?
It'd be a rather neat project to combine electricity and water to get the hydrogen for a project like this. Then, your only costs would be the bags, the cargo, strings, water and electricity.
So they don't want to split their stock - that's a horrible thing now? The trades are too granular now?
If it's really a problem, get enough of your fellow traders together, make a giant offer to buy Apple, then set the prices what you want them to be. Business decisions are made for worse reasons, I guess.
I remember back when this "Metro" was called "active desktop". Your family members would gunk up their desktops with a dozen widgets, then go hunting for more until their system was useless. On my own system, it has always been one of the first things I disable, as it serves no real purpose, and complicates the use of traditional applications in various 'interesting' ways.
Windows cannot be simply limited to an app store, so half the banner ads on popular websites will quickly become devoted towards offering persistent applications on your system - also known as spyware - now tailored to fit into a giant box in the center of your screen.
I don't need my icons to take up 1/16th of my screen - it's a rather bad use of what I'd like to be productive time. Even with various media-consumption pads and consoles, I find it a horrible design to limit my view to a random assortment of large candy boxes.
And I really, REALLY don't think this heralds any positive new era of application development. A whole new layer of specialized docking, with its own special UI process, making cross-platform work that much more of a mess... I don't mind the learning the complexity, it's just the reasons for the added workload seem to be more to feed Marketing than actually accomplish something meaningful, which always holds some existential angst.
Laws are like contracts (both are subsets of rules) - with very little effort (easier with less effort, actually), you can very simply create laws that are nearly impossible to follow or obey... except for a few people who the law was written to support.
Obeying all laws, in all countries is like obeying any contract anyone in the world would have you sign. It's going to end up excluding everyone from everything once you mix them all together.
Laws are important - they are what define what is important for a community, create the basis for many cultures. But they exist within a context - spreading local laws across the world as if they could apply anywhere... it's just a very dumb idea.
Simply using computers in class would change the lesson plan, which in turn would change the grading standard.
Is it surprising that kids would still stick to the same approximate bell curve after the lesson plan changes to include computers?
Computers take time to adapt to - and the grading system in grade school is all about adaptation to new knowledge. Kids who don't have the time in their lives to adapt, or the skill to adapt will not have an easier time with computers than without. Kids who adapt quickly and have time to learn independently will continue to excel with or without computers.
Computers just allow people to do things on a scale they wouldn't have been able to do before - sort of like interchangeable parts in manufacturing, or other mass-production tools. School isn't about scaling projects to previously unseen sizes - it's about learning a lot of individual things in series, then slowly seeing how they interrelate.
Computers can't scale mass learning yet, nor have we truly had the time to adapt them to more than token "learning scenarios".
And grades aren't a good measuring scale to judge something that changes the grading system.
For games/movies, the issue isn't ownership - it's the ability of companies to take AWAY your right to play the game you sacrificed resources to obtain.
For art in general, it's more of a business model argument - that they should have a way to make money akin to another profession. Again, legal ownership is a proxy argument, not the key issue.
Licenses and ownership arguments are about setting defaults in other arguments, who gets to take what from who. The status of these legal agreements change over time... it's just strange to see these agreements starting to reach into what name gets assigned to which number on a computer network (DNS), in terms of "ownership".
Seems a strange realm of ownership. As in, I own this association, and all DNS machines now have to make this association on my behalf, by power of law.
If I were to create some new kind of network, and start assigning a system of names to things that people on the network had control over, no one would think that such names were property at first.
But if they were to start making money on those resources, eventually, the assigned names would be considered 'property', in the sense of legal ownership? On a shared network? Seems odd.
It seems that whenever people start to depend on a resource, they start clamoring for exclusive ownership to be imposed on that resource.
From thoughts and ideas, to physical objects, to living creatures, and to entire genders and classes of people, we've had a LOT of odd ownership systems come and go.
I just don't see what the purpose of this system of legal property is. It's there already effective consequences for hijacked domain names? Does it have to be tied up in the mess that is legal ownership, what names are assigned in a DNS system?
Why not? Back in the day, a government of the people managed to do a very good job creating the highway system, the internet, NASA, and overseeing the creation of modern science. Smart people CAN be used in the creation of such things - as long as "equal time" isn't always given to people with a direct interesting in sabotaging them at every step.
Government CAN work, and can do things otherwise impossible - if so many in power weren't so busy trying to hack it all apart at every opportunity.
Since it doesn't serve the ultra-rich, the right wing won't support it, no matter how much it might possibly help everyone.
As for the left? They've long since given up doing anything big and useful, and have mostly turned into a reactionary set of frightened groups, who couldn't even begin to imagine doing something like Roosevelt did, losing all the progress they made, chunk by chunk, weeping all the while, but not actually doing anything meaningful enough to save the things they care about.
We're too busy giving our car industries sweetheart loans, while they outsource as much labor as they possibly can, to ever expect any meaningful change like this fantasy.
Sure, we make noise about raising fuel efficiency standards every couple of years, but that's more to convince voters that we can at least pretend to act in their interests.
We used to be able to do big things - but the only big things we do now, is wage useless wars against token enemies for bogus purposes. That, and protest taxes when they are the lowest they've been in living memory for most people.
But for science, for basic infrastructure, for human rights, lower-than-upper-class living standards, for helping the bulk of the American people - progress on those fronts is now dead for a generation, given away by the democratic party that used to stand for them.
Aside from helping a very well-implemented charity organization (Child's play + Developers + EFF + HumbleBundleTeam sliders are a real nice touch), VVVVVV is a really nice game.
If nothing else, the music is priceless, really catchy stuff. That, and the constant abstractions of the pixel-art, mixed with the mixed humor of the name of each "screen" you appear in make it an instant classic.
Of course, the insane challenge of "Doing things the Hard Way" will also make it a memorable experience.
'It's environmentally friendly!' Well... it does nothing to actually contribute to a sustainable human society, and is merely marketing - but the makers of this product can sleep well at night thinking that they're 'encouraging environmental thinking' with their product.
They're just shifting a filler ingredient into a known product, and calling it environmental, while spending about as much (or more) petroleum products as part of the full product lifecycle.
Sort of like most "diet" food makers don't actually make food that will form the meaningful basis of an actual effective weight loss program (eat less, build a more productive metabolism with exercise)... but instead tell themselves they're offering choices that "encourage" healthy eating. All by charging more after shifting fillers into their ingredient list.
I wouldn't mind so much - but meaningless "solutions" like these seem to satisfy so many into forgetting the meaning of the problems they want to solve.
1. Internet service providers. Many of them are cable companies, and can make agreements with other service providers who don't like this idea, or Netflix, to keep their business model afloat.
2. Congress might see that once Apple wins, they'll get fewer bribes compared to keeping Cable alive.
3. Competition - once the idea of a threat to cable becomes a realistic idea, content producers might want to sign on with more than just Apple, meaning that they have to compete on just about every metric. Apple might be able to promise higher prices for their shows though, and thus get more exclusives...
4. Which would mean that more people turn to tools that grab unlicensed content, as more hardware and algorithms appear to make this easy and arguably undetectable.
But yeah - $100+ a month for combined cable services is somewhat insane relative to the actual service costs involved, so it's all a game of who can capture the best captive audience both for money extraction and to sell them to advertisers.
Why no special child-censored google? For the same reason the child-censoring market in general is so spotty: It's a fool's game.
Why? Because it's all a game of outrage. You'll never come out with a good reputation in a game of outrage, outside of a tiny community of people who rigorously train themselves to think identically.
Let's take the idea as a simple problem - filtering out the big english dirty words, then allowing a voting and challenge system to establish anything else as kid-unsafe.
The first thing you'll find is that many, many of the people interested in voting in such a system will be intentionally playing in bad 'faith'. They'll go after pet subjects, vote everything as inappropriate, and so on.
So, you add a meta-moderation system, and some safe experts to establish better trends. But then the outrage comes in - outrage that will inevitably consume a huge portion of your audience in several directions. Outrage that their kids aren't seeing the world how they want.
A sparse blacklist can occasionally make sense with minimal outrage, like with YouTube's setup, but start trying to make a completely kid-safe youtube, and you'll find yourself to blame for everything an irrational parent would care to imagine against you.
Leaks are almost inevitable in a relatively free society - as long as the information is in a usable state, and it is used by people, it pretty much will be leaked eventually if people care to leak it.
As far as distributors of sunshine (breaks in secrecy, disinfecting stagnant air) go, Wikileaks is rather benign - they exercise considerable restraint and editorial control considering their size and content they process.
The problem isn't their arguable responsibility though, it is the relative difficulty in getting rational people to dismiss their evidence, the difficulty in painting them as a poisoned source of valid information. Certainly it is tried - all the logical fallacies that exist are thrown against them at a fairly constant rate, but they are still viewed as a valid source of important information.
Since they don't delve purely in talking point - just releasing information from sources known as valid, their points are fairly solid - whatever you think of their practices.
Ask Newt Gingrich - claiming a problem exists because you were quoted accurately and directly doesn't get you very far.
...I doubt that ICANN is going to be taking this ruling into account in deciding a company can take your domain away, and are willing to pay ICANN $300 to assert a trademark.
When there's a 'service' you'd like to block (such as adverts), amazon hosting can make it rather difficult to consistently block them using an IP blacklist, without also blocking potentially useful things too.
Essentially though, they're just packaging the benefits of an economy of scale - things get cheaper the more you focus on larger supply, and thus they can make the most profits and cut off the most competition by scaling up so much with cheap prices. It's part of how companies from WalMart and Google compete so well.
Economies of scale are also one part of why markets inherently fail over time - competition almost always favors those who scale up best, who can then leverage that power over competitors, preventing them from growing to the same extent, and breaking any meaning to the freedom of the market. At that point, competition becomes defined by who can serve WalMart's interest best.
In know we tend to always paint our current perceived rivals as THE MOST EVIL THING EVAR, but China is pretty much the same thing as most groups of people - some corrupt, some fairly virtuous and kind to their fellow human beings, and a whole lot of mix in between.
China has had a lot of revolutions and shifts - and as their demographics continue to change, they're in the middle of several now, and they'll have more. Pretending that they're just bogey-men isn't going to help anything, or improve those shifts in anyone's favor.
Judgements with reason and evidence can be fair... but conjecture and prejudice aren't helpful.
This will be a supremely unpopular stance among a large section here - but taxes are one of the best bargains in any marketplace.
Taxes buy infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure that allows us all to live as kings used to, and more. The kind of infrastructure without which the work of countless geniuses of all stripes would be impossible. The kind of tools and infrastructure that raises the average lifespan across the world to many times what it was before taxes were common.
Taxes buy culture. Education systems may not be ideal - but they advance the average human state in ways that it is hard to quantify in everyday terms. Simply being able to have conversations and do business across large nations like the US is one small bit. A limited but important bit of shared history, and the seeds of knowledge that sprout in countless little ways. They can certainly always be better - but the return is enormous on what we have so far, just by allowing what we have.
From tools, to access to shared resources, to even the ability to shape the system you live in - taxes buy a lot more than a simple minarchy would allow.
Taxes are the resources of the people paying for the shared needs of the people. They are in effect, allowing everyone to take advantage of economies of scale when used correctly (see: most sane nations' use of healthcare money), and often stand as an irreplaceable method of getting shared needs met.
What's surprising is how often people will directly vote to have the rich pay less taxes, and the poor pay more - that part never made sense to me, given how much shared sacrifice already goes into providing people with the tools to become rich - it just doesn't seem like they need more protection all the time.
But that's part of taxes also - they will be spent as the people's representatives allow them to be spent. Keep electing people and allowing them to be bribed constantly with no checks in place to stop the rising corruption on all sides, and you will keep getting taxes wasted - wasted by the system you allow to grow more stagnant.
Taxes aren't perfect - but they are still a bargain compared to warlords and tycoons ruling everything in the vacuum of a world without any collective funding system.
This, along with the idea of an Overton window, and the classic approach of simply buying all the media sources available are reminders that, although we are each beings capable of making rational choices - what we see as reasonable is VERY often decided by the range of views we are exposed to.
Watch only right/leftwing media, and someone on the other extreme will seem extremely unreasonable compared to the side you're used to - even when you agree with them.
Live life only aware of your own nation, and all other nations will seem unreasonable and absurd, speaking their strange languages, with their scary history of violence - but your own nation's history of violence will seem a unique point of pride.
The "worm" mentioned in this article is just an instant poll - and conflated polls have always been a tool of shaping a nation's "reasonable discourse." You don't even have to lie - When you get to select the questions in a poll, or the audience for the instant poll - you get to shape the greek chorus chanting of what is authority and reasonableness to the populace.
That's not to say the whole system is all a sham, as would be tempting - but it is all flawed in most every direction (as it always was, and was expected to be historically). Skepticism and exposure to outside views are key to growing your mind to a state less vulnerable to such things. The Internet is actually helping here with the next generations - but open even-handed skepticism as a subject still needs a LOT more promotion in free societies, along with awareness of what works in other nations.
We need more bologna detection kits working out there!
I happen to love being "on" as much as possible - in an aware state, perceiving as much as possible, living as much as I can with my limited lifespan.
So much so, that I tend to almost always avoid anything that will interrupt this process, like mind-altering substances from alcohol to coffee.
I can certainly appreciate the need for sleep to recuperate, and silence as time to reflect - but I don't see mental stimulation as some venal sin, or carving the occasional slice of time away from 8-hour sleep blocks as destructive act.
You only get so much life - sleep is mostly just what I have to do in order to get to more awareness - the little slices of death that remind us how limited our time is.
The key to victory seemed more decided by buzzer speed than anything else. Even as the other players seemed to try to buzz in, regardless of answer, they just didn't have the split-second precision as Watson did in triggering his buzzer, time after time.
...not meaningful in terms of the headline. The number is just addressing storage capacity potential available, not as unique meaningful data. All its saying is that the average person has access to x terrabyes of digital storage. That number is just taking manufacturing numbers for electronic hardware, and dividing by number of people.
It's not addressing the actual complexity generated or used by people. It's not actually addressing any actual people or what they do.
There is, however an interesting deeper meaning behind a number like this - the more this number multiplies, the harder it is going to be to control information, as people have more and more diverse options for storing and transferring data.
This means that even as processing power multiplies - it becomes even more impossible to police all the data of the world for improper uses.
That's the more interesting aspect of this number.
Indeed - the point Cohen seems to completely ignore is the morality of engaging in a race to the bottom.
True - rampant outsourcing has, and will definitely help a lot of professionals get their start in India - and that IS a good thing - but the net effect is to minimize the value of human workers in any role of employment. Your function will be to further shape the role of "support" into a set of blind scripts, minimizing the actual help provided to a voice reading a small set of webpages to someone.
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if money weren't such a critical divider between people - rich and poor, death and survival. But it is - and your function would be, at least in subtle way, to inconvenience everyone so that a small rich group didn't have to spend as much money on professionals, diminishing the value of your own profession along with it. You'd be tearing down tools used to help people so that there is a cheaper replacement that does less.
The whole thing is a bit of a red herring before larger issues though. Not too long from now, creatively programmed automation will take even more of these roles - and jobs might not be something everyone can be expected to have in order just to make things work anymore. Due to economies of scale, the cheapest automated tools will still be cheaper than the cheapest people eventually.
What will happen to those without the means to sustain their wealth without access to jobs? What happens when companies simply don't need large masses of people, and most people don't have access to methods of gaining money? How much longer can we run our economy this way? How valuable is the role of a human, in a society ostensibly built for human freedom?
The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.
Yes it does. If the act of invading and acculturating the Persian empire, the Arab culture may have picked up a few techniques and smart groups for a time - but the fact that that same series of actions seems to have prevented the same level of future bright points of progressive intellect into the Arab world is highly indicative that their "superiority" in engineering and science has greatly diminished as a result of militant aggressiveness and political oppression.
It's hard for a sub-society of scientifically literate folks to survive very many generations intact in an environment that only accepts one book as truth, enforces that view both militantly, and culturally shapes education of the young, and reproduction based on that view.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a couple of these projects, and since this isn't a commercial vehicle, couldn't you just use cheap 'ol hydrogen, rather than comparatively rare and expensive helium?
It'd be a rather neat project to combine electricity and water to get the hydrogen for a project like this. Then, your only costs would be the bags, the cargo, strings, water and electricity.
Ryan Fenton
So they don't want to split their stock - that's a horrible thing now? The trades are too granular now?
If it's really a problem, get enough of your fellow traders together, make a giant offer to buy Apple, then set the prices what you want them to be. Business decisions are made for worse reasons, I guess.
Why is this a story?
Ryan Fenton
I remember back when this "Metro" was called "active desktop". Your family members would gunk up their desktops with a dozen widgets, then go hunting for more until their system was useless. On my own system, it has always been one of the first things I disable, as it serves no real purpose, and complicates the use of traditional applications in various 'interesting' ways.
Windows cannot be simply limited to an app store, so half the banner ads on popular websites will quickly become devoted towards offering persistent applications on your system - also known as spyware - now tailored to fit into a giant box in the center of your screen.
I don't need my icons to take up 1/16th of my screen - it's a rather bad use of what I'd like to be productive time. Even with various media-consumption pads and consoles, I find it a horrible design to limit my view to a random assortment of large candy boxes.
And I really, REALLY don't think this heralds any positive new era of application development. A whole new layer of specialized docking, with its own special UI process, making cross-platform work that much more of a mess... I don't mind the learning the complexity, it's just the reasons for the added workload seem to be more to feed Marketing than actually accomplish something meaningful, which always holds some existential angst.
Ryan Fenton
Laws are like contracts (both are subsets of rules) - with very little effort (easier with less effort, actually), you can very simply create laws that are nearly impossible to follow or obey... except for a few people who the law was written to support.
Obeying all laws, in all countries is like obeying any contract anyone in the world would have you sign. It's going to end up excluding everyone from everything once you mix them all together.
Laws are important - they are what define what is important for a community, create the basis for many cultures. But they exist within a context - spreading local laws across the world as if they could apply anywhere... it's just a very dumb idea.
Ryan Fenton
Simply using computers in class would change the lesson plan, which in turn would change the grading standard.
Is it surprising that kids would still stick to the same approximate bell curve after the lesson plan changes to include computers?
Computers take time to adapt to - and the grading system in grade school is all about adaptation to new knowledge. Kids who don't have the time in their lives to adapt, or the skill to adapt will not have an easier time with computers than without. Kids who adapt quickly and have time to learn independently will continue to excel with or without computers.
Computers just allow people to do things on a scale they wouldn't have been able to do before - sort of like interchangeable parts in manufacturing, or other mass-production tools. School isn't about scaling projects to previously unseen sizes - it's about learning a lot of individual things in series, then slowly seeing how they interrelate.
Computers can't scale mass learning yet, nor have we truly had the time to adapt them to more than token "learning scenarios".
And grades aren't a good measuring scale to judge something that changes the grading system.
Ryan Fenton
Mesa never provided support for Matrox' P-series cards anyway, so nothing will change in your case.
Wait... are you trying to imitate Jar-Jar Binks?
For games/movies, the issue isn't ownership - it's the ability of companies to take AWAY your right to play the game you sacrificed resources to obtain.
For art in general, it's more of a business model argument - that they should have a way to make money akin to another profession. Again, legal ownership is a proxy argument, not the key issue.
Licenses and ownership arguments are about setting defaults in other arguments, who gets to take what from who. The status of these legal agreements change over time... it's just strange to see these agreements starting to reach into what name gets assigned to which number on a computer network (DNS), in terms of "ownership".
Seems a strange realm of ownership. As in, I own this association, and all DNS machines now have to make this association on my behalf, by power of law.
Ryan Fenton
If I were to create some new kind of network, and start assigning a system of names to things that people on the network had control over, no one would think that such names were property at first.
But if they were to start making money on those resources, eventually, the assigned names would be considered 'property', in the sense of legal ownership? On a shared network? Seems odd.
It seems that whenever people start to depend on a resource, they start clamoring for exclusive ownership to be imposed on that resource.
From thoughts and ideas, to physical objects, to living creatures, and to entire genders and classes of people, we've had a LOT of odd ownership systems come and go.
I just don't see what the purpose of this system of legal property is. It's there already effective consequences for hijacked domain names? Does it have to be tied up in the mess that is legal ownership, what names are assigned in a DNS system?
Ryan Fenton
Why not? Back in the day, a government of the people managed to do a very good job creating the highway system, the internet, NASA, and overseeing the creation of modern science. Smart people CAN be used in the creation of such things - as long as "equal time" isn't always given to people with a direct interesting in sabotaging them at every step.
Government CAN work, and can do things otherwise impossible - if so many in power weren't so busy trying to hack it all apart at every opportunity.
Ryan Fenton
Since it doesn't serve the ultra-rich, the right wing won't support it, no matter how much it might possibly help everyone.
As for the left? They've long since given up doing anything big and useful, and have mostly turned into a reactionary set of frightened groups, who couldn't even begin to imagine doing something like Roosevelt did, losing all the progress they made, chunk by chunk, weeping all the while, but not actually doing anything meaningful enough to save the things they care about.
We're too busy giving our car industries sweetheart loans, while they outsource as much labor as they possibly can, to ever expect any meaningful change like this fantasy.
Sure, we make noise about raising fuel efficiency standards every couple of years, but that's more to convince voters that we can at least pretend to act in their interests.
We used to be able to do big things - but the only big things we do now, is wage useless wars against token enemies for bogus purposes. That, and protest taxes when they are the lowest they've been in living memory for most people.
But for science, for basic infrastructure, for human rights, lower-than-upper-class living standards, for helping the bulk of the American people - progress on those fronts is now dead for a generation, given away by the democratic party that used to stand for them.
Ryan Fenton
Aside from helping a very well-implemented charity organization (Child's play + Developers + EFF + HumbleBundleTeam sliders are a real nice touch), VVVVVV is a really nice game.
If nothing else, the music is priceless, really catchy stuff. That, and the constant abstractions of the pixel-art, mixed with the mixed humor of the name of each "screen" you appear in make it an instant classic.
Of course, the insane challenge of "Doing things the Hard Way" will also make it a memorable experience.
Highly recommended for that one alone.
Ryan Fenton
'It's environmentally friendly!' Well... it does nothing to actually contribute to a sustainable human society, and is merely marketing - but the makers of this product can sleep well at night thinking that they're 'encouraging environmental thinking' with their product.
They're just shifting a filler ingredient into a known product, and calling it environmental, while spending about as much (or more) petroleum products as part of the full product lifecycle.
Sort of like most "diet" food makers don't actually make food that will form the meaningful basis of an actual effective weight loss program (eat less, build a more productive metabolism with exercise)... but instead tell themselves they're offering choices that "encourage" healthy eating. All by charging more after shifting fillers into their ingredient list.
I wouldn't mind so much - but meaningless "solutions" like these seem to satisfy so many into forgetting the meaning of the problems they want to solve.
Ryan Fenton
Some problems though:
1. Internet service providers. Many of them are cable companies, and can make agreements with other service providers who don't like this idea, or Netflix, to keep their business model afloat.
2. Congress might see that once Apple wins, they'll get fewer bribes compared to keeping Cable alive.
3. Competition - once the idea of a threat to cable becomes a realistic idea, content producers might want to sign on with more than just Apple, meaning that they have to compete on just about every metric. Apple might be able to promise higher prices for their shows though, and thus get more exclusives...
4. Which would mean that more people turn to tools that grab unlicensed content, as more hardware and algorithms appear to make this easy and arguably undetectable.
But yeah - $100+ a month for combined cable services is somewhat insane relative to the actual service costs involved, so it's all a game of who can capture the best captive audience both for money extraction and to sell them to advertisers.
It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Ryan Fenton
Why no special child-censored google? For the same reason the child-censoring market in general is so spotty: It's a fool's game.
Why? Because it's all a game of outrage. You'll never come out with a good reputation in a game of outrage, outside of a tiny community of people who rigorously train themselves to think identically.
Let's take the idea as a simple problem - filtering out the big english dirty words, then allowing a voting and challenge system to establish anything else as kid-unsafe.
The first thing you'll find is that many, many of the people interested in voting in such a system will be intentionally playing in bad 'faith'. They'll go after pet subjects, vote everything as inappropriate, and so on.
So, you add a meta-moderation system, and some safe experts to establish better trends. But then the outrage comes in - outrage that will inevitably consume a huge portion of your audience in several directions. Outrage that their kids aren't seeing the world how they want.
A sparse blacklist can occasionally make sense with minimal outrage, like with YouTube's setup, but start trying to make a completely kid-safe youtube, and you'll find yourself to blame for everything an irrational parent would care to imagine against you.
Ryan Fenton
Leaks are almost inevitable in a relatively free society - as long as the information is in a usable state, and it is used by people, it pretty much will be leaked eventually if people care to leak it.
As far as distributors of sunshine (breaks in secrecy, disinfecting stagnant air) go, Wikileaks is rather benign - they exercise considerable restraint and editorial control considering their size and content they process.
The problem isn't their arguable responsibility though, it is the relative difficulty in getting rational people to dismiss their evidence, the difficulty in painting them as a poisoned source of valid information. Certainly it is tried - all the logical fallacies that exist are thrown against them at a fairly constant rate, but they are still viewed as a valid source of important information.
Since they don't delve purely in talking point - just releasing information from sources known as valid, their points are fairly solid - whatever you think of their practices.
Ask Newt Gingrich - claiming a problem exists because you were quoted accurately and directly doesn't get you very far.
Ryan Fenton
...I doubt that ICANN is going to be taking this ruling into account in deciding a company can take your domain away, and are willing to pay ICANN $300 to assert a trademark.
Ryan Fenton
When there's a 'service' you'd like to block (such as adverts), amazon hosting can make it rather difficult to consistently block them using an IP blacklist, without also blocking potentially useful things too.
Essentially though, they're just packaging the benefits of an economy of scale - things get cheaper the more you focus on larger supply, and thus they can make the most profits and cut off the most competition by scaling up so much with cheap prices. It's part of how companies from WalMart and Google compete so well.
Economies of scale are also one part of why markets inherently fail over time - competition almost always favors those who scale up best, who can then leverage that power over competitors, preventing them from growing to the same extent, and breaking any meaning to the freedom of the market. At that point, competition becomes defined by who can serve WalMart's interest best.
Ryan Fenton
Presumed dishonorability = prejudice.
In know we tend to always paint our current perceived rivals as THE MOST EVIL THING EVAR, but China is pretty much the same thing as most groups of people - some corrupt, some fairly virtuous and kind to their fellow human beings, and a whole lot of mix in between.
China has had a lot of revolutions and shifts - and as their demographics continue to change, they're in the middle of several now, and they'll have more. Pretending that they're just bogey-men isn't going to help anything, or improve those shifts in anyone's favor.
Judgements with reason and evidence can be fair... but conjecture and prejudice aren't helpful.
Ryan Fenton
This will be a supremely unpopular stance among a large section here - but taxes are one of the best bargains in any marketplace.
Taxes buy infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure that allows us all to live as kings used to, and more. The kind of infrastructure without which the work of countless geniuses of all stripes would be impossible. The kind of tools and infrastructure that raises the average lifespan across the world to many times what it was before taxes were common.
Taxes buy culture. Education systems may not be ideal - but they advance the average human state in ways that it is hard to quantify in everyday terms. Simply being able to have conversations and do business across large nations like the US is one small bit. A limited but important bit of shared history, and the seeds of knowledge that sprout in countless little ways. They can certainly always be better - but the return is enormous on what we have so far, just by allowing what we have.
From tools, to access to shared resources, to even the ability to shape the system you live in - taxes buy a lot more than a simple minarchy would allow.
Taxes are the resources of the people paying for the shared needs of the people. They are in effect, allowing everyone to take advantage of economies of scale when used correctly (see: most sane nations' use of healthcare money), and often stand as an irreplaceable method of getting shared needs met.
What's surprising is how often people will directly vote to have the rich pay less taxes, and the poor pay more - that part never made sense to me, given how much shared sacrifice already goes into providing people with the tools to become rich - it just doesn't seem like they need more protection all the time.
But that's part of taxes also - they will be spent as the people's representatives allow them to be spent. Keep electing people and allowing them to be bribed constantly with no checks in place to stop the rising corruption on all sides, and you will keep getting taxes wasted - wasted by the system you allow to grow more stagnant.
Taxes aren't perfect - but they are still a bargain compared to warlords and tycoons ruling everything in the vacuum of a world without any collective funding system.
Ryan Fenton
This, along with the idea of an Overton window, and the classic approach of simply buying all the media sources available are reminders that, although we are each beings capable of making rational choices - what we see as reasonable is VERY often decided by the range of views we are exposed to.
Watch only right/leftwing media, and someone on the other extreme will seem extremely unreasonable compared to the side you're used to - even when you agree with them.
Live life only aware of your own nation, and all other nations will seem unreasonable and absurd, speaking their strange languages, with their scary history of violence - but your own nation's history of violence will seem a unique point of pride.
The "worm" mentioned in this article is just an instant poll - and conflated polls have always been a tool of shaping a nation's "reasonable discourse." You don't even have to lie - When you get to select the questions in a poll, or the audience for the instant poll - you get to shape the greek chorus chanting of what is authority and reasonableness to the populace.
That's not to say the whole system is all a sham, as would be tempting - but it is all flawed in most every direction (as it always was, and was expected to be historically). Skepticism and exposure to outside views are key to growing your mind to a state less vulnerable to such things. The Internet is actually helping here with the next generations - but open even-handed skepticism as a subject still needs a LOT more promotion in free societies, along with awareness of what works in other nations.
We need more bologna detection kits working out there!
Ryan Fenton
I happen to love being "on" as much as possible - in an aware state, perceiving as much as possible, living as much as I can with my limited lifespan.
So much so, that I tend to almost always avoid anything that will interrupt this process, like mind-altering substances from alcohol to coffee.
I can certainly appreciate the need for sleep to recuperate, and silence as time to reflect - but I don't see mental stimulation as some venal sin, or carving the occasional slice of time away from 8-hour sleep blocks as destructive act.
You only get so much life - sleep is mostly just what I have to do in order to get to more awareness - the little slices of death that remind us how limited our time is.
Ryan Fenton
The key to victory seemed more decided by buzzer speed than anything else. Even as the other players seemed to try to buzz in, regardless of answer, they just didn't have the split-second precision as Watson did in triggering his buzzer, time after time.
Ryan Fenton
...not meaningful in terms of the headline. The number is just addressing storage capacity potential available, not as unique meaningful data. All its saying is that the average person has access to x terrabyes of digital storage. That number is just taking manufacturing numbers for electronic hardware, and dividing by number of people.
It's not addressing the actual complexity generated or used by people. It's not actually addressing any actual people or what they do.
There is, however an interesting deeper meaning behind a number like this - the more this number multiplies, the harder it is going to be to control information, as people have more and more diverse options for storing and transferring data.
This means that even as processing power multiplies - it becomes even more impossible to police all the data of the world for improper uses.
That's the more interesting aspect of this number.
Ryan Fenton
Indeed - the point Cohen seems to completely ignore is the morality of engaging in a race to the bottom.
True - rampant outsourcing has, and will definitely help a lot of professionals get their start in India - and that IS a good thing - but the net effect is to minimize the value of human workers in any role of employment. Your function will be to further shape the role of "support" into a set of blind scripts, minimizing the actual help provided to a voice reading a small set of webpages to someone.
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if money weren't such a critical divider between people - rich and poor, death and survival. But it is - and your function would be, at least in subtle way, to inconvenience everyone so that a small rich group didn't have to spend as much money on professionals, diminishing the value of your own profession along with it. You'd be tearing down tools used to help people so that there is a cheaper replacement that does less.
The whole thing is a bit of a red herring before larger issues though. Not too long from now, creatively programmed automation will take even more of these roles - and jobs might not be something everyone can be expected to have in order just to make things work anymore. Due to economies of scale, the cheapest automated tools will still be cheaper than the cheapest people eventually.
What will happen to those without the means to sustain their wealth without access to jobs? What happens when companies simply don't need large masses of people, and most people don't have access to methods of gaining money? How much longer can we run our economy this way? How valuable is the role of a human, in a society ostensibly built for human freedom?
Ryan Fenton
The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.
Yes it does. If the act of invading and acculturating the Persian empire, the Arab culture may have picked up a few techniques and smart groups for a time - but the fact that that same series of actions seems to have prevented the same level of future bright points of progressive intellect into the Arab world is highly indicative that their "superiority" in engineering and science has greatly diminished as a result of militant aggressiveness and political oppression.
It's hard for a sub-society of scientifically literate folks to survive very many generations intact in an environment that only accepts one book as truth, enforces that view both militantly, and culturally shapes education of the young, and reproduction based on that view.
Ryan Fenton