From the US, the EU looks ever more like a benevolent tyranny - it's able to make the sorts of decisions that appear to be best to prevent the tragedy of the commons. On the other hand, these decisions utterly disregard choices or liberties of the individuals within the EU.
So on the one hand it's efficient, on the other it seems prone to trampling its citizens.
"Gamer" versions of just about any peripheral pretty much guarantees that it's at least 200% overpriced, and absolutely not one iota of performance better than the standard generic version you can buy at Microcenter from the big bargain bin.
Well yes, that's the nature of addiction, isn't it? To literally 'freak out' at the very idea that your substance of choice (that is, money) may not be available in the requisite quantities according to your habituated, ever growing need.
You've of course carefully phrased the question - "name something large enough to matter AND that people aren't passionate about" - to be unanswerable.
There are plenty of programs that NEED pruning, if not outright demolition. Political cowardice on the part of the weasels inhabiting the Beltway (of both parties) is no excuse: - Social Security: a government-backed Ponzi scheme. Make it voluntary: if someone volunteers to have their lifetime SS contribution absorbed with no payout in return, then their children are subsequently free of the burden of paying into SS, and can never collect benefits. I'll be the first, I've been paying in for 30 years. Of course, as the SS payor pool shrinks, payments out would have to be summarily reduced to match the size of the payor pool. My guess is that within 50 years, you would have NOBODY who is actually gainfully employed remaining on the system. - Complete end to any government assistance to any able-bodied person 18-50. - Means-testing for any other government aid - end corporate subsidies (as well as indirect subsidies like sub-market land leases) for any business whose executives have a positive income. - terminate industry-protective subsidies. - close the Dept's of Energy, Agriculture, Education.
It seems like they simply found middens with some regularity deep in/on these tree islands.
Therefore one scientist contends that some of the islands may have grown from middens. Isn't it substantially more plausible that primitive humans, who generally tend to want to stand/sit/live on dry ground, would have sought out these relatively isolated (and thus somewhat safer) locations for habitation? That the middens are found deep in the islands only seems to me to mean that this - the value of a secure home - was even obvious to primitive humans?
One comment in the article bothered me: "The authors say the findings show that human disturbance of the environment doesn't always have a negative consequence." That seems...a rather insipid comment.
This wasn't a "new" laptop the way most of us would think "new" ie box, packaging, etc; from TFA: "...Hidayat Sudirman...bought a 14-inch Asus laptop from a stand at his local (Singapore) IT fair..."
Your summary is spot-on, my issue is with TFA's analysis.
Vulnerabilities are FAR easier to recognize than threats, insofar as you are aware of capabilities. Threats involve understanding motivations and goals of people with inimical goals, or 'unknown unknowns'.
It's far easier to recognize that your house has no lock, than to conceptualize that there are thieves out there who want to break in, if that's not a part of your intellectual framework in the first place. To be topically relevant, I'd guess it's easier to look at your nuclear plant and say "ok, we have no backup plan in case the cooling water boils away" than to threat-analyze a richter 9 earthquake and followon tsunami.
Wait, you go all pedantic over the cost of bandwidth and server storage space and claim my point is nerd rage? LOL. Really - what's the cost of storage and bandwidth for a 500k ebook? I bet it's a lot closer to nothing than $1. Absolutes like "nothing" or "always" seem to trigger some latent nerd-Asperger's specificity gland, even when used rhetorically and as a generalization, not as some sort of scientific assertion. Does the fact that (calculating generously) bandwidth and storage cost perhaps $0.05 materially affect my point? Perhaps it's not me that's failing to grasp the essential point?
Yes, I understand that the prices paid for every Neil Gaiman or JK Rowling to some degree subsidizes all the Joanne Undiscovereds hidden amongst the Tom Pieceofcraps. Your point about the publishers is well taken.
However, to claim that somehow an ebook (for whatever reason) should be comparably priced to a physical book that has to be printed on paper, stored, shipped, sold, etc. is simply absurd. I'm not saying it should be free, that would be equally absurd.
Wait, I thought it wasn't "scare people with pointless whinging about the non-shortage of food" month until May? Aren't we still in the "nuclear scare March"?
There is no food shortage. The world's food production is AMPLE for a population at least triple the current 6 billion. Witness the energy-wasteful foods that we consume in great quantities in the US (beef takes about 12 calories to produce for every 1 calorie of beef), itself a massive overconsumer of food (ironically one of the main health problems suffered by the US poor is obesity).
There is a food DISTRIBUTION problem, mainly political.
What is it about the UK and FUD? They seem to produce more of this nonsense - and give it the credo of 'official' accuracy - per year than anyone else.
While I understand that the Kindle is sold somewhat as a loss-leader and a mechanism to try to sell ebooks for absurd prices (it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow), at some point even your lawyer-swaddled management must recognize that if one too blatantly attacks all *reasonable* means of use of that hardware, the only things left are going to be people who are willing and able to use your hardware WITHOUT your consent/cooperation, ie pirates.
Cutting off Lendle (and with a classy c&d sent from a 'do not reply' email address and no recourse to appeal or discuss), secretly editing books, purging books that people have purchased - all of these things simply indicate that you as a vendor are untrustworthy. Therefore the trusting will go elsewhere, the unscrupulous will continue to use Kindles and here's the kick: you're not going to see a DIME of their activities.
I should have figured it'd be a tech-savvy writer.
When I realized that Neil Gaiman was getting perhaps $2 out of that $20 new book, I thought, 'hell, I wish I could just buy any book he writes directly from him - I'd pay him $6, he gets triple times as much and I get it for 1/3 price'.
Kudos to him, I hope he's successful against the publisher blacklisting he's going to suffer....
A reasoned, well-principled opinion that means you're not just faux-posturing in order to advance your own personal views? I wonder what the hell you're doing on slashdot.
You must be a bot or a clever pro-Exodus astroturfer.
Might want to address that to all the environmentalists whose screaming, crying, and lying on railroad tracks killed the US nuclear industry in the late 1970s, early 1980s.
First to answer your question: The terms used ARE confusing because the terms "day", "month" and "year" are all relative to what planet you're talking about.
Saturn's year (1 circuit around the sun) is 29 Earth-years, approximately.
Saturn is, like earth, tilted about 26 degrees on its axis, so it would have 'seasons' approximately in the same way that earth does - as it goes around in its orbit, the sun would be shining directly on the northern hemisphere and southern hemispheres, alternately, with the solstices being about 14.5 years apart (ie summer to winter in one hemisphere, analogous to June/December on Earth).
Titan (as far as I can tell) orbits almost exactly around Saturn's equator, so it too is inclined 26 degrees to the Sun.
Its orbital period (the amount of time it takes to go around Saturn) is 16 earth-days. So a "month" according to Titan, is 16 earth days.
Since it's geosynchronous (like our Moon) one face always points at Saturn, so a Titan-day (from sunrise to sunrise) is the same as a Titan-month - about 16 earth days.
Titan goes around Saturn 672 times over the course of Saturn's complete circuit of the Sun. So this means that Titan's seasons (assuming they're each 1/4 of the year like earth), are each 168 "Titan days", which are each about 16 Earth days long.
Does that help?
Second, I RTFA'd and I didn't understand how they got to some of their conclusions. For example they saw Cassini's early imagery of Titan, interpreted that they were seeing "dunes" and concluded that weather was scarce. Perhaps it's my MN origins, but "dunes" are not a great deal different from "snowdrifts", are they? And if the "dunes" were drifts, this would suggest the exact opposite, climatologically - an aeolian surface with regular precipitation.
A few years ago, some people asserted that widespread looting was a natural consequence of disasters when civic services couldn't immediately save them.
Hm, I guess not?
I guess humans DON'T have to behave like animals, if they choose not to?
In the real world, where business takes place (ie where you have to make profits, you don't have "Venture Caps" and people try to make things that other people want to buy) business cards are ubiquitous, because they don't need power, a format, a matching protocol, or even time - you just hand it over.
Now, probably 90%+ will go home and enter that info into their contact information database, of course.
But really, as far as simple, redundant, reliable info transfer, sometimes paper beats circuit.
Sure there is: - the guards have privacy, and more importantly, can ensure 'some privacy' from other guards either by collusion or arrangement - the administration has privacy - the prisoners have no RIGHT to privacy (which means they can be searched at any moment) but by and large are not individually being watched at all times. In fact, though they are watched collectively all the time, there's a fairly significant amount of privacy they can be reasonably sure that they have most of the time.
Your point is taken, that there IS some 'privacy in obscurity' in the same sense of 'security in obscurity' - but that depends primarily on the number of watchers.
In a prison, there are a finite (and small) number of eyes watching a large number of prisoners. In the postulated model, pure openness for all means that anyone can look at any time. If a prison operated this way - that every prisoner was chipped and constantly tracked, as well as webcams everywhere that anyone could watch at any time (and presumably report observed incidents to guards), there'd be a lot LESS crime.
"The jury awarded Moore $35,000 for lost wages and $25,000 for emotional distress. "
Granted, much of what a jury does is based on legal instructions given by a judge, but this is the system by which we are faced with the judgements of our peers - who are apparently in favor of cashing in as much as possible.
Have you ever seen the sorts of people that can't avoid jury duty? Pretty much invariably NOT the ones you'd like deciding your case on the merits.
"At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning"
Yes, let's hear it for the guys that designed ARPANet...for *specifically* this kind of catastrophic, multi-node failure.
After all, that's precisely the sort of thing the internet was, in fact, designed to cope with. So yes, let's applaud Japan for building a robust network. However I'll save my main praise for the original system architects and planners that set up the internet as it is.
Because generally it's true? You may be an exception, there may be many exceptions, but there is an apparent correlation between the US political "left" and an opposition to nuclear power.
One could walk into a Greenpeace rally and one would find an extremely high (I'd guess 99%) correlation between anti-nuke activists and self-described leftists. Go to a Tea Party rally, and I'd guess you'd see a similar correlation between people in favor of nuclear power.
Generalizations exist because they're useful - not 100% accurate, of course - but they describe a general relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
From the US, the EU looks ever more like a benevolent tyranny - it's able to make the sorts of decisions that appear to be best to prevent the tragedy of the commons. On the other hand, these decisions utterly disregard choices or liberties of the individuals within the EU.
So on the one hand it's efficient, on the other it seems prone to trampling its citizens.
No.
"Gamer" versions of just about any peripheral pretty much guarantees that it's at least 200% overpriced, and absolutely not one iota of performance better than the standard generic version you can buy at Microcenter from the big bargain bin.
Evidence:
"Gamer" Headsets
"Gamer" Keyboard
"Gamer" network card
"Gamer" mousepad
The only positive reviews I've ever seen of this crap come from people who were given one as a freebie to "review".
Well yes, that's the nature of addiction, isn't it? To literally 'freak out' at the very idea that your substance of choice (that is, money) may not be available in the requisite quantities according to your habituated, ever growing need.
You've of course carefully phrased the question - "name something large enough to matter AND that people aren't passionate about" - to be unanswerable.
There are plenty of programs that NEED pruning, if not outright demolition. Political cowardice on the part of the weasels inhabiting the Beltway (of both parties) is no excuse:
- Social Security: a government-backed Ponzi scheme. Make it voluntary: if someone volunteers to have their lifetime SS contribution absorbed with no payout in return, then their children are subsequently free of the burden of paying into SS, and can never collect benefits. I'll be the first, I've been paying in for 30 years. Of course, as the SS payor pool shrinks, payments out would have to be summarily reduced to match the size of the payor pool. My guess is that within 50 years, you would have NOBODY who is actually gainfully employed remaining on the system.
- Complete end to any government assistance to any able-bodied person 18-50.
- Means-testing for any other government aid
- end corporate subsidies (as well as indirect subsidies like sub-market land leases) for any business whose executives have a positive income.
- terminate industry-protective subsidies.
- close the Dept's of Energy, Agriculture, Education.
I'm just getting started, is that enough yet?
It seems like they simply found middens with some regularity deep in/on these tree islands.
Therefore one scientist contends that some of the islands may have grown from middens. Isn't it substantially more plausible that primitive humans, who generally tend to want to stand/sit/live on dry ground, would have sought out these relatively isolated (and thus somewhat safer) locations for habitation? That the middens are found deep in the islands only seems to me to mean that this - the value of a secure home - was even obvious to primitive humans?
One comment in the article bothered me: "The authors say the findings show that human disturbance of the environment doesn't always have a negative consequence." That seems...a rather insipid comment.
The summary doesn't *quite* represent the facts.
This wasn't a "new" laptop the way most of us would think "new" ie box, packaging, etc; from TFA: "...Hidayat Sudirman...bought a 14-inch Asus laptop from a stand at his local (Singapore) IT fair..."
It was UNDERSTOOD to be new.
Your summary is spot-on, my issue is with TFA's analysis.
Vulnerabilities are FAR easier to recognize than threats, insofar as you are aware of capabilities. Threats involve understanding motivations and goals of people with inimical goals, or 'unknown unknowns'.
It's far easier to recognize that your house has no lock, than to conceptualize that there are thieves out there who want to break in, if that's not a part of your intellectual framework in the first place. To be topically relevant, I'd guess it's easier to look at your nuclear plant and say "ok, we have no backup plan in case the cooling water boils away" than to threat-analyze a richter 9 earthquake and followon tsunami.
"There is a difference in price between hardcopy and digital versions."
orly?
http://www.amazon.com/Absolution-Gap-ebook/dp/B001ODO61G/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1300800486&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]
Absolution Gap, by Alastair Reynolds 2008
Paperback Amazon Price: $8.99
Kindle Edition: $8.99
Those prices look pretty damn identical to me. Please show me where I'm wrong?
Wait, you go all pedantic over the cost of bandwidth and server storage space and claim my point is nerd rage? LOL. Really - what's the cost of storage and bandwidth for a 500k ebook? I bet it's a lot closer to nothing than $1.
Absolutes like "nothing" or "always" seem to trigger some latent nerd-Asperger's specificity gland, even when used rhetorically and as a generalization, not as some sort of scientific assertion. Does the fact that (calculating generously) bandwidth and storage cost perhaps $0.05 materially affect my point? Perhaps it's not me that's failing to grasp the essential point?
Yes, I understand that the prices paid for every Neil Gaiman or JK Rowling to some degree subsidizes all the Joanne Undiscovereds hidden amongst the Tom Pieceofcraps. Your point about the publishers is well taken.
However, to claim that somehow an ebook (for whatever reason) should be comparably priced to a physical book that has to be printed on paper, stored, shipped, sold, etc. is simply absurd. I'm not saying it should be free, that would be equally absurd.
"There is a difference in price between hardcopy and digital versions."
orly?
http://www.amazon.com/Absolution-Gap-ebook/dp/B001ODO61G/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1300800486&sr=8-1
Absolution Gap, by Alastair Reynolds 2008
Paperback: $8.99
Kindle Edition: $8.99
Those prices look pretty damn identical to me.
Wait, I thought it wasn't "scare people with pointless whinging about the non-shortage of food" month until May? Aren't we still in the "nuclear scare March"?
There is no food shortage. The world's food production is AMPLE for a population at least triple the current 6 billion. Witness the energy-wasteful foods that we consume in great quantities in the US (beef takes about 12 calories to produce for every 1 calorie of beef), itself a massive overconsumer of food (ironically one of the main health problems suffered by the US poor is obesity).
There is a food DISTRIBUTION problem, mainly political.
What is it about the UK and FUD? They seem to produce more of this nonsense - and give it the credo of 'official' accuracy - per year than anyone else.
While I understand that the Kindle is sold somewhat as a loss-leader and a mechanism to try to sell ebooks for absurd prices (it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow), at some point even your lawyer-swaddled management must recognize that if one too blatantly attacks all *reasonable* means of use of that hardware, the only things left are going to be people who are willing and able to use your hardware WITHOUT your consent/cooperation, ie pirates.
Cutting off Lendle (and with a classy c&d sent from a 'do not reply' email address and no recourse to appeal or discuss), secretly editing books, purging books that people have purchased - all of these things simply indicate that you as a vendor are untrustworthy. Therefore the trusting will go elsewhere, the unscrupulous will continue to use Kindles and here's the kick: you're not going to see a DIME of their activities.
Point taken, but FWIW slashdot an edit-function it needs.
At least until a single followup comment is posted, posts should be editable; welcome to 1999 slashdot.
I should have figured it'd be a tech-savvy writer.
When I realized that Neil Gaiman was getting perhaps $2 out of that $20 new book, I thought, 'hell, I wish I could just buy any book he writes directly from him - I'd pay him $6, he gets triple times as much and I get it for 1/3 price'.
Kudos to him, I hope he's successful against the publisher blacklisting he's going to suffer....
Whups thanks.
Was mentally thinking that its rotation was synchronus...definitely a goof saying 'geosynchronus'. Wow. Monday.
I saw another website had said "Cameras finally roll on Hobbit"...maybe that's why he's ticked?
I love you, regardless of your gender or mine.
A reasoned, well-principled opinion that means you're not just faux-posturing in order to advance your own personal views? I wonder what the hell you're doing on slashdot.
You must be a bot or a clever pro-Exodus astroturfer.
Might want to address that to all the environmentalists whose screaming, crying, and lying on railroad tracks killed the US nuclear industry in the late 1970s, early 1980s.
Nice job, guys.
He's not "trying".
He kills every one of us. His success rate is 100%.
He's pretty badass.
First to answer your question:
The terms used ARE confusing because the terms "day", "month" and "year" are all relative to what planet you're talking about.
Saturn's year (1 circuit around the sun) is 29 Earth-years, approximately.
Saturn is, like earth, tilted about 26 degrees on its axis, so it would have 'seasons' approximately in the same way that earth does - as it goes around in its orbit, the sun would be shining directly on the northern hemisphere and southern hemispheres, alternately, with the solstices being about 14.5 years apart (ie summer to winter in one hemisphere, analogous to June/December on Earth).
Titan (as far as I can tell) orbits almost exactly around Saturn's equator, so it too is inclined 26 degrees to the Sun.
Its orbital period (the amount of time it takes to go around Saturn) is 16 earth-days. So a "month" according to Titan, is 16 earth days.
Since it's geosynchronous (like our Moon) one face always points at Saturn, so a Titan-day (from sunrise to sunrise) is the same as a Titan-month - about 16 earth days.
Titan goes around Saturn 672 times over the course of Saturn's complete circuit of the Sun. So this means that Titan's seasons (assuming they're each 1/4 of the year like earth), are each 168 "Titan days", which are each about 16 Earth days long.
Does that help?
Second, I RTFA'd and I didn't understand how they got to some of their conclusions. For example they saw Cassini's early imagery of Titan, interpreted that they were seeing "dunes" and concluded that weather was scarce. Perhaps it's my MN origins, but "dunes" are not a great deal different from "snowdrifts", are they? And if the "dunes" were drifts, this would suggest the exact opposite, climatologically - an aeolian surface with regular precipitation.
A few years ago, some people asserted that widespread looting was a natural consequence of disasters when civic services couldn't immediately save them.
Hm, I guess not?
I guess humans DON'T have to behave like animals, if they choose not to?
^this. So very much this.
In the real world, where business takes place (ie where you have to make profits, you don't have "Venture Caps" and people try to make things that other people want to buy) business cards are ubiquitous, because they don't need power, a format, a matching protocol, or even time - you just hand it over.
Now, probably 90%+ will go home and enter that info into their contact information database, of course.
But really, as far as simple, redundant, reliable info transfer, sometimes paper beats circuit.
Sure there is:
- the guards have privacy, and more importantly, can ensure 'some privacy' from other guards either by collusion or arrangement
- the administration has privacy
- the prisoners have no RIGHT to privacy (which means they can be searched at any moment) but by and large are not individually being watched at all times. In fact, though they are watched collectively all the time, there's a fairly significant amount of privacy they can be reasonably sure that they have most of the time.
Your point is taken, that there IS some 'privacy in obscurity' in the same sense of 'security in obscurity' - but that depends primarily on the number of watchers.
In a prison, there are a finite (and small) number of eyes watching a large number of prisoners. In the postulated model, pure openness for all means that anyone can look at any time. If a prison operated this way - that every prisoner was chipped and constantly tracked, as well as webcams everywhere that anyone could watch at any time (and presumably report observed incidents to guards), there'd be a lot LESS crime.
"The jury awarded Moore $35,000 for lost wages and $25,000 for emotional distress. "
Granted, much of what a jury does is based on legal instructions given by a judge, but this is the system by which we are faced with the judgements of our peers - who are apparently in favor of cashing in as much as possible.
Have you ever seen the sorts of people that can't avoid jury duty? Pretty much invariably NOT the ones you'd like deciding your case on the merits.
"At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning"
Yes, let's hear it for the guys that designed ARPANet...for *specifically* this kind of catastrophic, multi-node failure.
After all, that's precisely the sort of thing the internet was, in fact, designed to cope with. So yes, let's applaud Japan for building a robust network. However I'll save my main praise for the original system architects and planners that set up the internet as it is.
Because generally it's true?
You may be an exception, there may be many exceptions, but there is an apparent correlation between the US political "left" and an opposition to nuclear power.
One could walk into a Greenpeace rally and one would find an extremely high (I'd guess 99%) correlation between anti-nuke activists and self-described leftists.
Go to a Tea Party rally, and I'd guess you'd see a similar correlation between people in favor of nuclear power.
Generalizations exist because they're useful - not 100% accurate, of course - but they describe a general relationship.