And given the people I deal with as customers in tech support, this is not an improvement. Quite the opposite really.
"I don't know what the IP address is Dave and I don't care. I just want you to make me work or I'll e-mail your supervisor with a nasty complaint."
You'll discover that people are smarter than you give them credit for as soon as you stop measuring them by your own yardstick.
By the way, anybody who doesn't understand quantum computing is stupid. Quick: What does Grover's algorithm do, and what critical piece would make it worthwhile that nobody has discovered yet?
Oh, you don't know? Idiot. I certainly hope computers can outperform you, at least.
Hey, Slashdot! Guess what? The article is satire! Here's another hint, right from the beginning:
Earlier this month, the CEA giddily released data showing that of America's 285 million TVs only 12 percent (33.6 million) are used for watching OTA broadcasts of what the local TV stations in this country call "entertainment". In a further revelation...
(To Darryl Wilkinson, the author of TFA: At what point in your youth did you decide you wanted to grow up to be a condescending prick?)
I'm very sure the article is satire. From the end:
In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered. Surprisingly, a full six percent indicated that they'd rather watch TV from cable or satellite than eat or have sex. (The margin of error for the survey is +/- 100 percent.)
He also uses phrases such as "CEA giddily released" and "in a further revelation." These aren't the words of a writer who agrees with the CEA.
What I find interesting about this is that this sort of thing is very plausible today, with RFID in badges (or communicators) and things, but TNG was doing it in the late 80s, when digital watches were still a really neat idea.
We tried that, but all these people with funny headwear (cowboy hats, towels) keep getting in the way.
I assume you mean the Saudis and Bush. The Saudis, yes. Bush? Read this.
Huh.
Let's try this. You restrain the green hippie luddite idiots on the Left, which will let the guys in cowboy hats build more nuclear power plants (maybe even breeder reactors! GASP!), relieving us of having to use coal and oil for power production. Doesn't that sound a lot better than the silly ring thing?
That'd work really well for the pictures, but what about the videos?
On second thought, that would be a seriously cool way to store video - stacks and stacks of frames. And if the power went out and you got bored, you could use them as flipbooks!
Actually, I read the GP as quite hopeful and excited about the possibilities. Words like "tantalizing" come to mind.
Maybe the good Lord intended such things to be so hard to achieve because he wants us to simply be thankful for what we have?
The universe has existed for more than 6,000 years. So, What make you think we'll ever find the answer to these questions so quickly?
Where in the crap did this come from? I can only ascribe it to drunken stupor. Or you're high. Someone posts on the frontiers of science and all you can do is turn it into an anti-religion rant?
Most people would agree we have a conservative congress in place. If so then an unbiased news outlet should be to the left of the average member of congress.
Assuming, of course, that the representation in Congress has nothing to do with the political leanings of the voters that put them there.
Riiiiight.
How else would you define "center" other than "the political leanings of the average American as represented by Congress?" Nothing else can be clearly defined.
One of the underlying differences in cultural assumption is that Americans tend to think of the government as primarily something that's there to preserve their personal freedom and economic freedom, while Europeans might feel that the government is primarily something to look out for the welfare of the people.
Nail, meet hammer.
I have no problem with European philosophies of government, except when they try to interpret our politics by their own criteria and immediately label it "stupid." (That, and if the goverment is big enough to provide everything you need, it's big enough to take it all away.)
It also doesn't guarantee the identity of the other party - it only solves the eavesdropping problem. You need classical crypto to authenticate, AFAIK.
As they represent *all* the possible 5MB-sequences, have I copyrighted them all?!
That's an interesting question. I believe you'd need to allow for superpositions of data to be copyrighted - what you suggest simply does not fit into copyright law as it is.
At any rate, the quantum state of your 5MB of qubits can only be described properly as a complex vector of 2^5MB probability amplitudes (or a more compact representation which means the same thing), not as a superposition of all possible 5MB strings of binary data.
It's fascinating to think about, as facetious as you were being when you wrote it. Quantum states violate "reality" and/or "locality" which are both necessary to assume when copyrighting something. How would you copyright something that violates these?
Why not leave the lame reverse psychology alone and concentrate on removing the trollish bits from a post that otherwise contains one insightful and one interesting bit?
Your post isn't negative enough to mod down (looks like someone chose to anyway) but certainly doesn't deserve to be modded up (looks like someone chose to anyway).
Maybe there is balance to the universe...
The point is that the "Offtopic" moderation in Slashdot is totally messed, and I was trying to avoid it by lame reverse psychology. Sometimes it works. The more general idea is to confuse the moderator into taking more time with the post, giving him the possibility of discovering that I do indeed have a point.
The GGP makes some pro-abortion statement. He's talking about Batman in his post, so he's still on-topic. (It's ever so slightly a gray area in this case, but it'll be overlooked.) Someone who wants to defend his right-of-center position has NO CHANCE against the Slashdot moderators, the majority of whom, like the entire readership of this site, lean left. Disagree? Bah! It's off-topic. And guess what? It is!
The GGP is practicing a very subtle form of baiting, and I was trying to avoid being caught. Well, I did. "Score:0, Offtopic." Excellent.
By the way, if someone tries the same trick with a right-of-center post, it'll get modded off-topic immediately. That's how it works around here.
Please excuse my jaded attitude. It's been reinforced by too many down-moderations.
Maybe they'll figure out how to tack eventually...
I'm not sure they will, at least not in the way we think of it.
Tacking requires the sail to act basically like an airplane wing. The shape of the sail creates a low-pressure area just in front of it - but that can only happen when you have enough matter in space to create a current. The solar sail relies only on photons to push, and there's no way you'll get them to bend around a sail - at least, not with current technology.
I know you're using this as a chance to beat your pro-legalized-abortion drum, but I have to respond.
Anyhow, fostering the presence of a superhero is not a very cost-effective way for a city to lower its overall crime figures.
If you've got dastardly supervillians who would otherwise regularly kill thousands it is.
Legalized abortion costs the public virtually nothing and has a much greater effect on reducing crime than competing strategies...
If you consider a human fetus to be worth only 1/100th of a fully-developed human being (an estimate considered too high by some and too low by most), the costs in human life FAR outweigh the benefits from reduction in homicides.
Ever since Freakonomics came out, you ostensibly "pro-choice" people have been gleefully citing Levitt's results without bothering to take into consideration the lives of the unborn children. There is a place for debate on how many and what kinds of rights the unborn have, but each side steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it. (This is also why the debate on federally-funded stem-cell research is stalled.)
By the way, that 1/100th analysis is in Levitt's book, at the end of the chapter on crime. I didn't make it up.
(Go ahead mods, mod me down. You know you disagree with me. That's what moderation is all about, right?)
If OSX is about not thinking, then keep it the hell away from me.
It's about letting the user get a vague idea of what's going on just by glancing. Every good UI has a presentation that allows this.
Imagine you've got some batch process that runs under a GUI. Every once in a while, something comes up that needs your attention. A message dialog gives you some options. Imagine there are four types. Would you rather see "OK/Cancel" every time one pops up, or a couple of buttons that let you know exactly what your options are just by glancing at them?
It's also about being unambiguous. A previous poster already pointed this out. Your common everyday English sentence has tens of valid ways to be parsed (ask any NLP researcher), and it's really easy to come up with something for which "Yes/No/Cancel" can be misinterpreted.
There's always a need for network people and sysadmins.
Why would someone with a Masters of Computer Science want a network or sysadmin position? Someone like that almost certainly has little hardware experience - but experience in creating and coding algorithms. With a Masters degree, he's also got experience doing deep research into a narrow subject.
If you're sick of it, you should read about this study. It finds that neuron density is more important, and that the study in the story is way too oversimplified.
(Yes, I know I posted about this previously. I wanted to make sure Mr. Burke found it because he's so obviously annoyed at science flirting with phrenology. So am I.)
The study was a meta-analysis of previous studies. Did you notice how small the sample sizes were for the original studies? About half had fewer than 50, it looked like. Not that that is a big problem, but how hard would it be to just go around to public schools and measure children's head size and gather their intelligence scores?
Maybe what we're looking for is this study, which used 125 brains donated to science by their owners. It found that brain size doesn't matter so much - it's neuron density that counts.
It also found that men's and women's brains are wired differently from the start and showed some ways in which the differences are manifest, such as that women's brains have higher neuron densities in areas that correlate with speech. Of course, that's so un-PC that I highly expect this study to be dismissed outright by way too many smart people, but there you go.
Women's brains, by the way, consistently have 12% more neurons than men's (the actual density measure isn't given in the article) which may account for how they keep up with men despite having smaller brains on average. Also, Einstein's brain was 2.7 lbs, which is smaller than the average man's. It turns out that certain areas of his brain were more tightly-packed with neurons, which could explain his intellectual prowess.
Witelson's study shows that "larger brain -> smarter" is way oversimplifying.
Remember, *a lot* of people did *a lot* of drugs in the sixties, and you don't see every middle-aged baby boomer in the asylum, do you?
The real problem is that addiction makes people almost totally useless. Society can only put up with so much dead weight - and the more it has to, the less efficient it is at just about everything.
Speaking for myself, I want freedom from having to pay out to support other people's stupid decisions.
I did it. It's not easy. The single biggest factor in my success so far is that my wife totally supports the decision.
After five years of working in industry, I decided I'd had enough and needed more options than 1) code monkey; 2) leader of code monkeys; or 3) getting lucky and being made the CTO by a friend - which is basically all you get with a BS in CS.
We had to sell the house, move to on-campus housing, and take a drastic pay cut. I did get to work as a contractor for my former employer, which was very nice. The hardest part was figuring out how to live on a third of what I was making before. We're still digging a bit into our savings, but that's what it's for, and I should be able to finish my PhD with some money left over.
My advice: save, save, save, and win your spouse over to the idea. Don't be afraid to pack up and leave, because you leave a lot of responsibilities behind you.
A real conservative would think that government should stay out of this sort of thing and that forcing ISPs to restrict content is absurd.
Nobody's forcing them. As stated numerous times in the comments already, the state government is requiring that they provide the option. They can even sell separate client software for it.
The ACLU's "free speech" argument is full of crap. Their "commerce" argument isn't as such - but we balance community standards against commerce all the time. It's the state's right to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
An easy way to remember this:
i.e. - in explanation
e.g. - example given
The grammar fascist suggests you don't use these at all. They're part of the problem.
And given the people I deal with as customers in tech support, this is not an improvement. Quite the opposite really.
"I don't know what the IP address is Dave and I don't care. I just want you to make me work or I'll e-mail your supervisor with a nasty complaint."
You'll discover that people are smarter than you give them credit for as soon as you stop measuring them by your own yardstick.
By the way, anybody who doesn't understand quantum computing is stupid. Quick: What does Grover's algorithm do, and what critical piece would make it worthwhile that nobody has discovered yet?
Oh, you don't know? Idiot. I certainly hope computers can outperform you, at least.
Hey, Slashdot! Guess what? The article is satire! Here's another hint, right from the beginning:
Earlier this month, the CEA giddily released data showing that of America's 285 million TVs only 12 percent (33.6 million) are used for watching OTA broadcasts of what the local TV stations in this country call "entertainment". In a further revelation...
(To Darryl Wilkinson, the author of TFA: At what point in your youth did you decide you wanted to grow up to be a condescending prick?)
I'm very sure the article is satire. From the end:
In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered. Surprisingly, a full six percent indicated that they'd rather watch TV from cable or satellite than eat or have sex. (The margin of error for the survey is +/- 100 percent.)
He also uses phrases such as "CEA giddily released" and "in a further revelation." These aren't the words of a writer who agrees with the CEA.
What I find interesting about this is that this sort of thing is very plausible today, with RFID in badges (or communicators) and things, but TNG was doing it in the late 80s, when digital watches were still a really neat idea.
We tried that, but all these people with funny headwear (cowboy hats, towels) keep getting in the way.
I assume you mean the Saudis and Bush. The Saudis, yes. Bush? Read this.
Huh.
Let's try this. You restrain the green hippie luddite idiots on the Left, which will let the guys in cowboy hats build more nuclear power plants (maybe even breeder reactors! GASP!), relieving us of having to use coal and oil for power production. Doesn't that sound a lot better than the silly ring thing?
File -> Print
That'd work really well for the pictures, but what about the videos?
On second thought, that would be a seriously cool way to store video - stacks and stacks of frames. And if the power went out and you got bored, you could use them as flipbooks!
I hereby dub it: Gliquid
:p
Is the "G" silent?
Now you owe me a nickel every time you use that term.
Fair use.
Well isn't that a "glass empty" view on life.
Actually, I read the GP as quite hopeful and excited about the possibilities. Words like "tantalizing" come to mind.
Maybe the good Lord intended such things to be so hard to achieve because he wants us to simply be thankful for what we have?
The universe has existed for more than 6,000 years. So, What make you think we'll ever find the answer to these questions so quickly?
Where in the crap did this come from? I can only ascribe it to drunken stupor. Or you're high. Someone posts on the frontiers of science and all you can do is turn it into an anti-religion rant?
Most people would agree we have a conservative congress in place. If so then an unbiased news outlet should be to the left of the average member of congress.
Assuming, of course, that the representation in Congress has nothing to do with the political leanings of the voters that put them there.
Riiiiight.
How else would you define "center" other than "the political leanings of the average American as represented by Congress?" Nothing else can be clearly defined.
One of the underlying differences in cultural assumption is that Americans tend to think of the government as primarily something that's there to preserve their personal freedom and economic freedom, while Europeans might feel that the government is primarily something to look out for the welfare of the people.
Nail, meet hammer.
I have no problem with European philosophies of government, except when they try to interpret our politics by their own criteria and immediately label it "stupid." (That, and if the goverment is big enough to provide everything you need, it's big enough to take it all away.)
It also doesn't guarantee the identity of the other party - it only solves the eavesdropping problem. You need classical crypto to authenticate, AFAIK.
As they represent *all* the possible 5MB-sequences, have I copyrighted them all?!
That's an interesting question. I believe you'd need to allow for superpositions of data to be copyrighted - what you suggest simply does not fit into copyright law as it is.
At any rate, the quantum state of your 5MB of qubits can only be described properly as a complex vector of 2^5MB probability amplitudes (or a more compact representation which means the same thing), not as a superposition of all possible 5MB strings of binary data.
It's fascinating to think about, as facetious as you were being when you wrote it. Quantum states violate "reality" and/or "locality" which are both necessary to assume when copyrighting something. How would you copyright something that violates these?
And as a testament to its goodness - I'm a QC researcher, and it's even funnier if you know how QC works.
Funniest thing I've read in a week.
Why not leave the lame reverse psychology alone and concentrate on removing the trollish bits from a post that otherwise contains one insightful and one interesting bit?
Your post isn't negative enough to mod down (looks like someone chose to anyway) but certainly doesn't deserve to be modded up (looks like someone chose to anyway).
Maybe there is balance to the universe...
The point is that the "Offtopic" moderation in Slashdot is totally messed, and I was trying to avoid it by lame reverse psychology. Sometimes it works. The more general idea is to confuse the moderator into taking more time with the post, giving him the possibility of discovering that I do indeed have a point.
The GGP makes some pro-abortion statement. He's talking about Batman in his post, so he's still on-topic. (It's ever so slightly a gray area in this case, but it'll be overlooked.) Someone who wants to defend his right-of-center position has NO CHANCE against the Slashdot moderators, the majority of whom, like the entire readership of this site, lean left. Disagree? Bah! It's off-topic. And guess what? It is!
The GGP is practicing a very subtle form of baiting, and I was trying to avoid being caught. Well, I did. "Score:0, Offtopic." Excellent.
By the way, if someone tries the same trick with a right-of-center post, it'll get modded off-topic immediately. That's how it works around here.
Please excuse my jaded attitude. It's been reinforced by too many down-moderations.
Maybe they'll figure out how to tack eventually...
I'm not sure they will, at least not in the way we think of it.
Tacking requires the sail to act basically like an airplane wing. The shape of the sail creates a low-pressure area just in front of it - but that can only happen when you have enough matter in space to create a current. The solar sail relies only on photons to push, and there's no way you'll get them to bend around a sail - at least, not with current technology.
I know you're using this as a chance to beat your pro-legalized-abortion drum, but I have to respond.
Anyhow, fostering the presence of a superhero is not a very cost-effective way for a city to lower its overall crime figures.
If you've got dastardly supervillians who would otherwise regularly kill thousands it is.
Legalized abortion costs the public virtually nothing and has a much greater effect on reducing crime than competing strategies...
If you consider a human fetus to be worth only 1/100th of a fully-developed human being (an estimate considered too high by some and too low by most), the costs in human life FAR outweigh the benefits from reduction in homicides.
Ever since Freakonomics came out, you ostensibly "pro-choice" people have been gleefully citing Levitt's results without bothering to take into consideration the lives of the unborn children. There is a place for debate on how many and what kinds of rights the unborn have, but each side steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it. (This is also why the debate on federally-funded stem-cell research is stalled.)
By the way, that 1/100th analysis is in Levitt's book, at the end of the chapter on crime. I didn't make it up.
(Go ahead mods, mod me down. You know you disagree with me. That's what moderation is all about, right?)
If OSX is about not thinking, then keep it the hell away from me.
It's about letting the user get a vague idea of what's going on just by glancing. Every good UI has a presentation that allows this.
Imagine you've got some batch process that runs under a GUI. Every once in a while, something comes up that needs your attention. A message dialog gives you some options. Imagine there are four types. Would you rather see "OK/Cancel" every time one pops up, or a couple of buttons that let you know exactly what your options are just by glancing at them?
It's also about being unambiguous. A previous poster already pointed this out. Your common everyday English sentence has tens of valid ways to be parsed (ask any NLP researcher), and it's really easy to come up with something for which "Yes/No/Cancel" can be misinterpreted.
SuSE puts an awful lot of work into making the OS work well on laptops. Their "powersaved" is one of the best power management tools I've ever seen.
That, and I like the GUI stuff. You can be a power user on SuSE without having to remember arcane CLI commands. Of course, if you want to, you can.
I tried Debian on my laptop and gave up after struggling with the devices for 20 hours or so. With SuSE it was all done for me.
There's always a need for network people and sysadmins.
Why would someone with a Masters of Computer Science want a network or sysadmin position? Someone like that almost certainly has little hardware experience - but experience in creating and coding algorithms. With a Masters degree, he's also got experience doing deep research into a narrow subject.
If you're sick of it, you should read about this study. It finds that neuron density is more important, and that the study in the story is way too oversimplified.
(Yes, I know I posted about this previously. I wanted to make sure Mr. Burke found it because he's so obviously annoyed at science flirting with phrenology. So am I.)
The study was a meta-analysis of previous studies. Did you notice how small the sample sizes were for the original studies? About half had fewer than 50, it looked like. Not that that is a big problem, but how hard would it be to just go around to public schools and measure children's head size and gather their intelligence scores?
Maybe what we're looking for is this study, which used 125 brains donated to science by their owners. It found that brain size doesn't matter so much - it's neuron density that counts.
It also found that men's and women's brains are wired differently from the start and showed some ways in which the differences are manifest, such as that women's brains have higher neuron densities in areas that correlate with speech. Of course, that's so un-PC that I highly expect this study to be dismissed outright by way too many smart people, but there you go.
Women's brains, by the way, consistently have 12% more neurons than men's (the actual density measure isn't given in the article) which may account for how they keep up with men despite having smaller brains on average. Also, Einstein's brain was 2.7 lbs, which is smaller than the average man's. It turns out that certain areas of his brain were more tightly-packed with neurons, which could explain his intellectual prowess.
Witelson's study shows that "larger brain -> smarter" is way oversimplifying.
Remember, *a lot* of people did *a lot* of drugs in the sixties, and you don't see every middle-aged baby boomer in the asylum, do you?
The real problem is that addiction makes people almost totally useless. Society can only put up with so much dead weight - and the more it has to, the less efficient it is at just about everything.
Speaking for myself, I want freedom from having to pay out to support other people's stupid decisions.
I did it. It's not easy. The single biggest factor in my success so far is that my wife totally supports the decision.
After five years of working in industry, I decided I'd had enough and needed more options than 1) code monkey; 2) leader of code monkeys; or 3) getting lucky and being made the CTO by a friend - which is basically all you get with a BS in CS.
We had to sell the house, move to on-campus housing, and take a drastic pay cut. I did get to work as a contractor for my former employer, which was very nice. The hardest part was figuring out how to live on a third of what I was making before. We're still digging a bit into our savings, but that's what it's for, and I should be able to finish my PhD with some money left over.
My advice: save, save, save, and win your spouse over to the idea. Don't be afraid to pack up and leave, because you leave a lot of responsibilities behind you.
A real conservative would think that government should stay out of this sort of thing and that forcing ISPs to restrict content is absurd.
Nobody's forcing them. As stated numerous times in the comments already, the state government is requiring that they provide the option. They can even sell separate client software for it.
The ACLU's "free speech" argument is full of crap. Their "commerce" argument isn't as such - but we balance community standards against commerce all the time. It's the state's right to do so.