Counter-terrorism and anti-cyber warfare? That's the official mission of Public Security Section 9. Fighting corruption is a personal mission of Aramaki, who perhaps directs more resources to cases under his jurisdiction when it's possible that corruption is the root cause. That's why Aramaki selects Detective Togusa to serve in Section 9 even though he's not trained in counter terrorism or cyber warfare. Togusa's record of fighting his superiours on ignoring damaging cases suggests to Aramaki that he'll be a reliable partner in his personal war on corruption.
If I recall, the original movie was the result of taking the manga and applying Japanese film making principles to it, the same way one might expect Hollywood to. Which is why you've got terrible authentic Japanese song during the manufacture of Kusanagi's body (which idiots claim is some symbolic birth, but bodies are just a shell) and a robot filling a phylogenetic tree full of bullet-holes, dripping with "meaning." SAC and 2nd GiG did a fine job of adding and refining the original story, and the author was heavily involved in the production of them, unlike the first movie.
But I wonder how much of Section 9's Japanese origin will be preserved after going through Dreamworks. There's some uniquely Japanese problems about section nine that you can't translate to America easily. Japan's constitution rejects war, yet Section 9 is mostly full of soldiers who've seen combat. It's a philosophical question that an American audience would probably not find interesting. The power of the futuristic Japanese government is also demonstrated repeatedly with media blackouts sticking out in my American mind, as does the police force full of snipers on helicopters.
Really, I don't see how much worse it can get than cyborgs running around playing detective in lingerie. About the only thing a Hollywood writer could do would be to add a lesbian sex scene, but wait, the manga already did that. Lets not pretend that your favorite cultural hero has the moral high ground on pandering, shall we?
If you go on to read this guy's site, I guess you could say that the only thing standing between them and world domination in Monster. They've got engineering talent in design, and believe that their local production process means they've got an edge in the production, while all competitors besides Monster appear to contract manufacture to China. If Monster's tactics include advertising to consumers about shielding from Martians (comic missing, sorry) and random drive by suit threats to stave off the low price competition, then writing a public letter will piss them off, because it makes the random letter sent less likely to succeed. I'm not sure you can undo luxury good consumer idiocy, but with a name like Blue Jeans Cable, I suspect they're trading on public recognition of Monster's marketing engineering.
Perhaps you're confusing the older GNOME networking tool for NetworkManager? NetworkManager is implemented as a backend daemon and a Notification Area applet. As far as I know, NetworkManager has no Locations setting.
A few months ago, I would have agreed that better codecs / plugins provided by browsers by default would be a death blow to flash. Now, I'm inclined to disagree with my previous self. Flash is important for more reasons than just because it can display video poorly. It also provides a way to serve advertisements. Instead of mixing streams or rendering ad overlays into the video, flash can render advertising overlays to the video in real time. It's a wonderful technology for them; it serves ads and is nearly immune to adblock. It's also highly annoying.
So even if you take all these steps, video hosting sites want flash. And I'm fairly certain they've always wanted it, I was just too stupid to see that until it was too late.
If I buy a computer from Dell instead of IBM, is it a PC? Is an artificial gem with the same chemical properties and structure as diamond a diamond? If the thing's identical in all meaningful ways to an Apple branded Mac, shouldn't it also be considered a Mac?
Ubuntu in many ways lit a fire underneath Debian. I liked Debian in 2002; by 2004 I was getting a bit tired of stupid jokes about being out of date, and I was tired of running development versions just to get a modern desktop. For example, the last version of xfree was finally released around the same time most distros were shipping the new and shiny xorg project x server. So when Ubuntu came around, that was great. They brought in some X guys to hammer Xorg into a working package, at great personal sacrifice. They made a push for Default debconf priority, to large success. They adopted a LiveCD approach while Debian was adamantly fighting Knoppix. They had a Code of Conduct that laid out some important ground rules that Debian was missing and refused to find. The brought a focus on the desktop that I felt Debian was lacking. And they had a commitment to releasing frequently. Six month releases is a step back from someone like me who used to run Debian unstable, but I was getting tired of random kernel pushes breaking video drivers and the like.
Don't get me wrong; Debian testing is probably great for lots of people. If Ubuntu's trajectory continues as it is, I may one day return to Debian; as a result of Ubuntu's successes, they've adopted a number of Ubuntu's practices and policies. For example, they've adopted a wiki for community development, and a new proposal system for evaluating large scale decisions. And meanwhile, Canonical's success with Ubuntu has it focusing on strange contracts that draw resources from fixing bugs related to my personal uses.
As for your comparison essay, the "ubuntu-desktop" meta package now suggests / recommends most things, and apt is set to bring them in on updates but not remove the meta package if they're removed. That way, they can bring in new features, and you can opt out of some of them, and it'll remember that. The bloat charge is a bit unfair. The default install is something usable out of the box. You're free to do the minimal install the same way you did with Debian, but disk space is cheap these days, and people only have so many hours in a day. Hating release schedules is a bit silly. One way you update everything at once, and the other the updates trickle down to you. The everything at once has the advantage that you can deploy new compilers / libc during the early fork without worrying that someone will accidentally screw themselves. Of course the downside is that pidgin may be outdated quickly, but I think it's been fairly lucky at not breaking network compatibility recently.
Well here's some data on Debian. And here's some data on Postgres.
More importantly, Ohloh suggests two people perform the bulk of the commits. I don't know much about postgres development, but it appears that there isn't much democratization in development. Which is fine. You want gate keepers to be able to ward off performance harming patches, and to guide those who are only peripherally interested in the project.
Maybe people have forgotten what "unions did for the world" because in an a falling economy because aside from collective bargaining, they also establish barriers to entry for new workers?
And throughout the world outside the USA not everyone goes to High School. Some students go to vocational schools, others go to schools where college / university is the next intended step. At least in my high school, calculus was offered to students. And in many places a University starts with degrees closer to Master's in the US.
That post is strange. He appears to be responding to Dr. Chen as quoted in the NY Times. His full paper is available online, and clearly the gentleman has no qualms about using unpublished papers. He even says that Chen should have acknowledged a peer at Chen's university with an unpublished study that I can only call crazy from the description. I've read Chen's draft and it does a fair job -- he acknowledges that this flaw doesn't disprove the theory, but it does undermine significant amounts of supporting studies. He also proposes an alternative experiment designed to eliminate this bias.
Neither paper is published, so we really ought to consider this with large grains of salt anyways. Lets give peer review a chance to run it's course. I wonder how the NYT reporter got ahold of the paper and news. This raises a more interesting question to me: should academics talk to the press about findings before publication in a peer reviewed journal?
The actual (draft) paper did a hell of a lot better job explaining both the monty hall problem and the psychological experiment problems. One of the psychological experiments goes thusly: three groups of students are told rate a set of items from say 1 to 10. For each student, a ranking is created ordering the items from top to bottom preference. Two group are then given a question about whether the student prefers item A over item B; one group is given closely rated (perhaps the same rating) items, the other starkly differently rated items. Then all three groups give another rating. The paper says that what the previous studies identified as "cognitive dissonance" disappeared when you included the choice in step two as data indicating preference. If items A and B are closely rated, you may slightly prefer one over the other, but rate them both 5. The initial rating is assumed to be perfectly accurate, when it's not. This might explain why some ethnic groups may show less dissonance than others, because they more carefully reflect when filling out the answers the first time.
The cognative dissonance explanation is that exposure to choice changes your preferences, while the economist's explaination is that exposure to choice changes the data.
From what I've seen, it's more like economists are condescending. Anything written for an economist includes integrals and other intimidating forms of mathematics; anything written for non-economists is loathe to assume the reader is familiar with even simple algebra. To be fair, I took both intro to micro and macro economics on a whim, and since many majors require one or the other without calculus, there's lots of folks just plain don't get it. Its not clear to me why these people are enrolled in higher education.
If I may propose simple spectrum of math aptitude versus science, I'd roughly place it Economics (high), Psychology (medium), and Biology (low). Perhaps another way of putting it is that pychologists want to study the economics of chimpanzees? Biological economists?
Which is stupid, because it means players need to coordinate outside the game in order to get the level of communication they need to play. I love the BF2 chat system, because it marries the VoIP with the game. You join a squad, you also join the VoIP group. No need to install vent / teamspeak or convince each other to connect to someone's server.
Civ4 is just too damn time intensive. It could be a great extracurricular, but as an in class thing, it's just so slow! And even at the Collegiate level, I recall reading an article about how a professor offered students a traditional term paper or to keep a log playing a scenario he built about the romans. He was upset for two reasons a) none of the students took the offer and b) the game made it very hard to map history. The way it models culture and religion means religions spread easily but never die, and that intersections of cultures happen peacefully. The author's particular complaint seems mostly to be that the AI will switch religions based on what's advantageous rather than personality.
If a Professor is having this sort of trouble, I have a hard time imagining your average HS teacher coping well with a class based on Civ4.
Interestingly, I think Oregon Trail failed to teach some of the moral lessons it tried to carry. Sure, you'll probably remember a few locations and so on, but the creator suggested that hunting was limited to carrying back 200 pounds, no matter how much bison you shot. At least in my elementary school circles, it was common to load up on ammo and compete for "high scores" even though the game limited you.
Similarly, it's strange to see how people play Settlers of Catan online. As a board game where the fundamental things to do are build and trade, it's strange to see how many people insist on playing games with as little trading and negotiation as possible. Really, this is the sort of game that demands VoIP, and I don't believe any of the implementations give it.
Evolution is not random - that is the entire basis of the theory! Perhaps you were thinking of mutations, the raw material of evolution. Mutations are not necessarily random - some are favoured for chemical reasons - but it is true that they are not directed by their evolutionary consequences.
I think you're splitting hairs here. Most people would consider Monte Carlo algorithms random, even though there's some form of order being imposed through constraints etc.
So you believe that proteins created from random changes in DNA exist, and that populations will shift towards advantages ones, but not that these changes could ever be incompatible?
I appreciate the fact that physicians don't often catch drug interactions, but isn't this something that a computer program could identify just as easily? Drug interactions are an interesting problem -- a doctor might not be aware of other drugs you're prescribed (though I think this is why they ask if you're on any other medications), but if you don't use the same pharmacy for every prescription, you'll lose that check!
Let's see... 1,000,000 knowledgeable geeks vs a couple dozen at nVidia... Yeah, I'd say we could. I wish nouveau had 1 developer for every 10 idiots who posts those sentiments. Then at least the world would be more ironic. And your post could be correct too. But this is not the case. At present, nouveau has about a dozen active developers, a mildly capable 3d engine, and better 2d support than the binary blobs do. I see many posts on Slashdot that documentation is awesome and how lots of talent around could fix drivers, but actually helping with open ati or nvidia drivers, has been relatively quiet, so far.
Sure different hardware. And a much different kind of fame. Would you rather check the email INBOX for Dave the guy who broke Vista SP1, or Dave the guy who broke Ubuntu? The same guy hits twice. He says it should work on Ubuntu. Vulnerability research comes at a price, and there's not as big a market for Linux vulnerability experts, and open source has a lot to do with it. You could write some special stack protection or hack prevention software and try to sell it, but once you demonstrate it works, any of your customers could hire someone to re-implement it in the kernel or compiler or wherever the magic happens. Some groups take a source analysis approach, but they still suffer from the same fundamental manpower problems.
Imagine he had been able to break a massive system in Ubuntu or Vista, and there were dozens of companies after Ubuntu breakers specifically. Would you still pick Vista because you liked the hardware marginally better? I'd be curious to see how many people signed up to attack each platform. That'd be a much better dataset than this one guy;)
Fortunately for Ubuntu, gnash is slowly improving to the point where it can display videos. If it comes to blows, I think we may recommend gnash as an alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Counter-terrorism and anti-cyber warfare? That's the official mission of Public Security Section 9. Fighting corruption is a personal mission of Aramaki, who perhaps directs more resources to cases under his jurisdiction when it's possible that corruption is the root cause. That's why Aramaki selects Detective Togusa to serve in Section 9 even though he's not trained in counter terrorism or cyber warfare. Togusa's record of fighting his superiours on ignoring damaging cases suggests to Aramaki that he'll be a reliable partner in his personal war on corruption.
If I recall, the original movie was the result of taking the manga and applying Japanese film making principles to it, the same way one might expect Hollywood to. Which is why you've got terrible authentic Japanese song during the manufacture of Kusanagi's body (which idiots claim is some symbolic birth, but bodies are just a shell) and a robot filling a phylogenetic tree full of bullet-holes, dripping with "meaning." SAC and 2nd GiG did a fine job of adding and refining the original story, and the author was heavily involved in the production of them, unlike the first movie.
But I wonder how much of Section 9's Japanese origin will be preserved after going through Dreamworks. There's some uniquely Japanese problems about section nine that you can't translate to America easily. Japan's constitution rejects war, yet Section 9 is mostly full of soldiers who've seen combat. It's a philosophical question that an American audience would probably not find interesting. The power of the futuristic Japanese government is also demonstrated repeatedly with media blackouts sticking out in my American mind, as does the police force full of snipers on helicopters.
Really, I don't see how much worse it can get than cyborgs running around playing detective in lingerie. About the only thing a Hollywood writer could do would be to add a lesbian sex scene, but wait, the manga already did that. Lets not pretend that your favorite cultural hero has the moral high ground on pandering, shall we?
If you go on to read this guy's site, I guess you could say that the only thing standing between them and world domination in Monster. They've got engineering talent in design, and believe that their local production process means they've got an edge in the production, while all competitors besides Monster appear to contract manufacture to China. If Monster's tactics include advertising to consumers about shielding from Martians (comic missing, sorry) and random drive by suit threats to stave off the low price competition, then writing a public letter will piss them off, because it makes the random letter sent less likely to succeed. I'm not sure you can undo luxury good consumer idiocy, but with a name like Blue Jeans Cable, I suspect they're trading on public recognition of Monster's marketing engineering.
Perhaps you're confusing the older GNOME networking tool for NetworkManager? NetworkManager is implemented as a backend daemon and a Notification Area applet. As far as I know, NetworkManager has no Locations setting.
Isn't ogg also a container format?
A few months ago, I would have agreed that better codecs / plugins provided by browsers by default would be a death blow to flash. Now, I'm inclined to disagree with my previous self. Flash is important for more reasons than just because it can display video poorly. It also provides a way to serve advertisements. Instead of mixing streams or rendering ad overlays into the video, flash can render advertising overlays to the video in real time. It's a wonderful technology for them; it serves ads and is nearly immune to adblock. It's also highly annoying.
So even if you take all these steps, video hosting sites want flash. And I'm fairly certain they've always wanted it, I was just too stupid to see that until it was too late.
If I buy a computer from Dell instead of IBM, is it a PC? Is an artificial gem with the same chemical properties and structure as diamond a diamond? If the thing's identical in all meaningful ways to an Apple branded Mac, shouldn't it also be considered a Mac?
Ubuntu in many ways lit a fire underneath Debian. I liked Debian in 2002; by 2004 I was getting a bit tired of stupid jokes about being out of date, and I was tired of running development versions just to get a modern desktop. For example, the last version of xfree was finally released around the same time most distros were shipping the new and shiny xorg project x server. So when Ubuntu came around, that was great. They brought in some X guys to hammer Xorg into a working package, at great personal sacrifice. They made a push for Default debconf priority, to large success. They adopted a LiveCD approach while Debian was adamantly fighting Knoppix. They had a Code of Conduct that laid out some important ground rules that Debian was missing and refused to find. The brought a focus on the desktop that I felt Debian was lacking. And they had a commitment to releasing frequently. Six month releases is a step back from someone like me who used to run Debian unstable, but I was getting tired of random kernel pushes breaking video drivers and the like.
Don't get me wrong; Debian testing is probably great for lots of people. If Ubuntu's trajectory continues as it is, I may one day return to Debian; as a result of Ubuntu's successes, they've adopted a number of Ubuntu's practices and policies. For example, they've adopted a wiki for community development, and a new proposal system for evaluating large scale decisions. And meanwhile, Canonical's success with Ubuntu has it focusing on strange contracts that draw resources from fixing bugs related to my personal uses.
As for your comparison essay, the "ubuntu-desktop" meta package now suggests / recommends most things, and apt is set to bring them in on updates but not remove the meta package if they're removed. That way, they can bring in new features, and you can opt out of some of them, and it'll remember that. The bloat charge is a bit unfair. The default install is something usable out of the box. You're free to do the minimal install the same way you did with Debian, but disk space is cheap these days, and people only have so many hours in a day. Hating release schedules is a bit silly. One way you update everything at once, and the other the updates trickle down to you. The everything at once has the advantage that you can deploy new compilers / libc during the early fork without worrying that someone will accidentally screw themselves. Of course the downside is that pidgin may be outdated quickly, but I think it's been fairly lucky at not breaking network compatibility recently.
Well here's some data on Debian. And here's some data on Postgres.
More importantly, Ohloh suggests two people perform the bulk of the commits. I don't know much about postgres development, but it appears that there isn't much democratization in development. Which is fine. You want gate keepers to be able to ward off performance harming patches, and to guide those who are only peripherally interested in the project.
Maybe people have forgotten what "unions did for the world" because in an a falling economy because aside from collective bargaining, they also establish barriers to entry for new workers?
And throughout the world outside the USA not everyone goes to High School. Some students go to vocational schools, others go to schools where college / university is the next intended step. At least in my high school, calculus was offered to students. And in many places a University starts with degrees closer to Master's in the US.
Apple, meet oranges.
That post is strange. He appears to be responding to Dr. Chen as quoted in the NY Times. His full paper is available online, and clearly the gentleman has no qualms about using unpublished papers. He even says that Chen should have acknowledged a peer at Chen's university with an unpublished study that I can only call crazy from the description. I've read Chen's draft and it does a fair job -- he acknowledges that this flaw doesn't disprove the theory, but it does undermine significant amounts of supporting studies. He also proposes an alternative experiment designed to eliminate this bias.
Neither paper is published, so we really ought to consider this with large grains of salt anyways. Lets give peer review a chance to run it's course. I wonder how the NYT reporter got ahold of the paper and news. This raises a more interesting question to me: should academics talk to the press about findings before publication in a peer reviewed journal?
The actual (draft) paper did a hell of a lot better job explaining both the monty hall problem and the psychological experiment problems. One of the psychological experiments goes thusly: three groups of students are told rate a set of items from say 1 to 10. For each student, a ranking is created ordering the items from top to bottom preference. Two group are then given a question about whether the student prefers item A over item B; one group is given closely rated (perhaps the same rating) items, the other starkly differently rated items. Then all three groups give another rating. The paper says that what the previous studies identified as "cognitive dissonance" disappeared when you included the choice in step two as data indicating preference. If items A and B are closely rated, you may slightly prefer one over the other, but rate them both 5. The initial rating is assumed to be perfectly accurate, when it's not. This might explain why some ethnic groups may show less dissonance than others, because they more carefully reflect when filling out the answers the first time.
The cognative dissonance explanation is that exposure to choice changes your preferences, while the economist's explaination is that exposure to choice changes the data.
From what I've seen, it's more like economists are condescending. Anything written for an economist includes integrals and other intimidating forms of mathematics; anything written for non-economists is loathe to assume the reader is familiar with even simple algebra. To be fair, I took both intro to micro and macro economics on a whim, and since many majors require one or the other without calculus, there's lots of folks just plain don't get it. Its not clear to me why these people are enrolled in higher education.
If I may propose simple spectrum of math aptitude versus science, I'd roughly place it Economics (high), Psychology (medium), and Biology (low). Perhaps another way of putting it is that pychologists want to study the economics of chimpanzees? Biological economists?
Which is stupid, because it means players need to coordinate outside the game in order to get the level of communication they need to play. I love the BF2 chat system, because it marries the VoIP with the game. You join a squad, you also join the VoIP group. No need to install vent / teamspeak or convince each other to connect to someone's server.
Civ4 is just too damn time intensive. It could be a great extracurricular, but as an in class thing, it's just so slow! And even at the Collegiate level, I recall reading an article about how a professor offered students a traditional term paper or to keep a log playing a scenario he built about the romans. He was upset for two reasons a) none of the students took the offer and b) the game made it very hard to map history. The way it models culture and religion means religions spread easily but never die, and that intersections of cultures happen peacefully. The author's particular complaint seems mostly to be that the AI will switch religions based on what's advantageous rather than personality.
If a Professor is having this sort of trouble, I have a hard time imagining your average HS teacher coping well with a class based on Civ4.
Interestingly, I think Oregon Trail failed to teach some of the moral lessons it tried to carry. Sure, you'll probably remember a few locations and so on, but the creator suggested that hunting was limited to carrying back 200 pounds, no matter how much bison you shot. At least in my elementary school circles, it was common to load up on ammo and compete for "high scores" even though the game limited you.
Similarly, it's strange to see how people play Settlers of Catan online. As a board game where the fundamental things to do are build and trade, it's strange to see how many people insist on playing games with as little trading and negotiation as possible. Really, this is the sort of game that demands VoIP, and I don't believe any of the implementations give it.
Evolution is not random - that is the entire basis of the theory! Perhaps you were thinking of mutations, the raw material of evolution. Mutations are not necessarily random - some are favoured for chemical reasons - but it is true that they are not directed by their evolutionary consequences.
I think you're splitting hairs here. Most people would consider Monte Carlo algorithms random, even though there's some form of order being imposed through constraints etc.
So you believe that proteins created from random changes in DNA exist, and that populations will shift towards advantages ones, but not that these changes could ever be incompatible?
No, void* simply tells the compiler to ignore type. Ie, you don't care about whether she's your type or not.
I appreciate the fact that physicians don't often catch drug interactions, but isn't this something that a computer program could identify just as easily? Drug interactions are an interesting problem -- a doctor might not be aware of other drugs you're prescribed (though I think this is why they ask if you're on any other medications), but if you don't use the same pharmacy for every prescription, you'll lose that check!
Sure different hardware. And a much different kind of fame. Would you rather check the email INBOX for Dave the guy who broke Vista SP1, or Dave the guy who broke Ubuntu? The same guy hits twice. He says it should work on Ubuntu. Vulnerability research comes at a price, and there's not as big a market for Linux vulnerability experts, and open source has a lot to do with it. You could write some special stack protection or hack prevention software and try to sell it, but once you demonstrate it works, any of your customers could hire someone to re-implement it in the kernel or compiler or wherever the magic happens. Some groups take a source analysis approach, but they still suffer from the same fundamental manpower problems.
;)
Imagine he had been able to break a massive system in Ubuntu or Vista, and there were dozens of companies after Ubuntu breakers specifically. Would you still pick Vista because you liked the hardware marginally better? I'd be curious to see how many people signed up to attack each platform. That'd be a much better dataset than this one guy
Fortunately for Ubuntu, gnash is slowly improving to the point where it can display videos. If it comes to blows, I think we may recommend gnash as an alternative.