Cool. As for your wondering why no halves, there are plenty of slang terms for half or two. Tuppence = 2 pennies (or pence), ha-penny for half a penny. It'd make sense that measures were done accordingly, where the goal was to create simple units learnable by people regardless of their schooling.
Weirdest in what you've outlined is the 'hop' at gallon-to-peck. Makes me wonder why...
You mean like 12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound?
A penny had a 1/4th unit called a farthing, too. And check out the origins of 'Pieces of Eight', from spanish gold coins (which were often cut into halves, fourths and eighths).
Have never looked it up, but I suspect these were commonplace because even unschooled math-illiterate people could become competent enough to trust physical/visual math by splitting or combining groups. And that simplicity is essential for easy commerce and employment.
Meh, I think it's far more damaging to (A) think a school is a business or (B) pay teachers less than any other degree-requiring profession.
The day that a stellar teacher's pay exceeds other professions, you get to talk about how teachers have become too powerful. Until then, engineers and lawyers and doctors and politicians get zero sympathy from me when they rant about invented horrors involving teachers unionizing.
Personally, I also know that opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one, taint nothin' special about yours.
-- (That taint pun was a freebie, BTW. Froth up some lube and a bit of fecal matter and you've got a Santorum.)
Following your own thoughts to their logical conclusion' seems to me to be your way of pulling off a bogus 'slippery slope' argument.
Commensurate response is what GP (or is it GGGP) was after.
Apprehending a hacker with no violent criminal priors shouldn't require helicopters AND swat teams.
Likewise, I won't complain as much if the current crop of Wall Street robber barons survive their day in court without a conviction. I'm just not fine with them not getting arrested or tried, despite incriminating evidence.
Justice is only fair when it's blindly/dispassionately applied.
Meanwhile, the clerk at the news stand sees that your iWallet has been left behind. Being an honest sort, he decides to try to reunite the device with its owner by calling. ..ruh-roh!
Returning someone's lost cellphone is as easy as calling someone on their contact list...
... or holding the lost phone until it's owner 'calls themselves' to determine where the phone was misplaced.
Sure, it's straightforward to **EXTRAPOLATE**. Any scientist or engineer or accountant or actuarial or applied math nerd can tell you sixteen zillion ways to do so -- easy peazy!
Of course, ma nature has to agree to your mathematical model.
TFA hotlinked their complaint to google, which had the URL. Volkswagen ads when I watched it... but I like someone's snarky comment about punishing the content creator by flooding their 'making a wild salad' video with Axe body spray ads.
This. Someone throw a modpoint for parent, please -- Wish I had modpoints.
GP's comment was worse than wmelnick implied, actually: it pretended that this whole 'requisite intent' / Mens Rea thing is a newcomer to legal decisions that's getting stronger due to political correctness. That's absurd.
As for GP's rant against political correctness: Earlier this week, a devoutly religious coworker openly chortled about a news story showing an uptick in Hep C infections/deaths. Said they bring it on themselves. I believe he's not a hateful person, just used to accepting most info that comes from his weekend hours spent in a religious echo-chamber. He's hardly the first coworker I've known that spouts off this crap; it's easy to remain sheltered. When I asked him how he reconciled that 'serves 'em right' mindset with his faith, he was at a loss for words. He also couldn't list any other groups of 'others' that deserved that sort of 'let them die' comments.
Fifty years ago, I could have been having the same conversation with someone who wasn't even necessarily *opposed* to interracial marriage, but just assumed that the sunday church banter was how everyone thought and picked up the concepts as casually as I might pick up news or sports highlights in a conversation. Echo chambers are a cliche for a reason. Today, I could have this sort of conversation involving 'brown people', either in the guise of immigration or wars the US has recently fought. But it's casual systematic dehumanization at this level that weakens the social barrier against crimes against 'others' like these.
A way to stop this is to focus on exactly those sorts of crimes by enhancements: cut down gun crime by enhancing the penalty for crimes involving guns, for example. If you want to make a bullyish bigot think twice about beating up gay guys, enhance the crime if said bigot beats up strangers that 'seem gay'. It may seem harsh to people who think they should be free to be intolerant, but THAT IS THE POINT.
Without societal protection, gays feel perpetually under siege. When they're treated like subhumans by strangers and/or cops, ethnic minorities fear or resent the rest of us. Hate crime enhancements take those who felt they could act like rat bastards with relative impunity, and make them fearful; and we take someone living under siege and let them feel like society recognizes their plight and will protect them from prejudicial or anonymous violence. So WHAT that watching how we talk causes nuisances for us WASP males. We can adjust. The tiny takings we endure is far smaller than the lack of fundamental protection someone else endures. Again, THAT IS THE POINT.
Funny thing, if we went to single payer or nationalized healthcare, this whole issue goes away.
I've had employees. And I've never understood why healthcare that has no ties to employer isn't insanely popular among small business owners.
I didn't / dont *WANT* to waste time researching, optimizing and otherwise managing employee benefit packages. I want to ship product. Ditto on time spent on byzantine rules about taxes, FICA etc.
Legislators, here's a freebie: get rid of loopholes, make the tax law simple and progressive (no flat tax), and in general try to eliminate any need for 'tax prep services' and 'payroll management agencies' and anyone else that makes their profit off of incomprehensibility in laws.
But then, I'm an engineer, not a Bain Capital vulture capitalist. Rearranging money is so much more valuable than my mere acts of science and technology.
OTOH, how about a different vector. That's all the rage in pharma, I'm told: Instead of giving someone 10d or 14d of amoxy, come up with a time-release subcutaneous (or ankle cuff) mechanism.
Come to think of it, maybe people'd stop demanding the doc *do anything* if their choice was: 'take 2 aspirin' or 'wear this klunky ankle bracelet that'll dose you QID for two weeks'.
Thanks for mentioning Weave -- it had slipped under my radar.
Other cloud app's that show they're making trustable / secure cloud storage effort:
PassPack (password mgmt, with fields encrypted locally by a key they never know. They also offer the underlying library for this as FOSS source code for anyone interested in working in a similar framework)
LastPass (similar, doesn't isolate account info from data like PassPack)
Hushmail used to have something similar.
Several secure-storage tools will encrypt then push the encrypted content to either DropBox or some other storage point.
I was a good person for the same reasons you state. And I went through the process of questioning altruism. Questioning. That's it. Not immediate rejection.
I came to my own ethical conclusions. They matched where I started, so I'm a bit suspicious of my decision and ethics. So I review 'em regularly. But then, recalibrating one's ethical rules and examining the edge conditions is a healthy practice, IMHO. It fits nicely into Aristotle's quote on an 'unconsidered life.'
I could wander into Aristotle's quote and my ethical disagreement with it (a process that started by my habit of questioning a stone cold fact offered without evidence), but that's a whole other story.
Every time I see a comment like yours, I have to wonder who's astroturfing this crap.
You toss out hyberbolic claims in a scattergun fashion ("to test... warming effect, cooling effect or somethign else and the magnitude of it"), then say carefully accurate-sounding bullshit like "to (sic) only current way to test... is to wait 100 years".
This violates two crux aspects about the scientific method, and models (or hypothesis):
1 - if nearly all the models show X (a temp increase), and attempts to find a scientifically rigorous and interesting model leading to Y are unsuccessful, it's sophistry to claim we just don't know.
2 - if the preponderance of evidence and conclusions (models) say X (big temp increases, bad things worsening throughout the next century), we don't have to wait a century to act. That's absurd. We can take precautionary measures immediately, and watch the models and adjust.
But then, I suspect you know that, since I'm convinced you're a troll...
Yeah, your gedankenexperiment on GP's next company 'before you make your first sale' is **totally** the same thing as saying a 20:1 p/s ratio for *FACEBOOK* is too big. Facebook's so tiny they'll definitely **GROW** to fill that ratio. Just like Groupon./sarcasm
Personally, I can imagine ways that they can grow into the ratio. Per-user revenue is much easier to alter than their customer count, obviously. Whether they do or not hinges on tapping into revenue streams.
Deciding whether they will succeed is the speculative nature of the market.
Big difference between a 4-passenger plane and an ultralight, FWIW. The rest of your remark smells like confirmation bias: you had to go back 6-7 years to point to another wealthy plane victim.
Rich people die quietly daily from cancer, disease, heart disease, etc (and not so quietly from pissed-off lovers, fast cars and every other form of fast living). C'est la mort.
Occams razor. As far as a 'turing' test for alien signals, it's pretty much a game of 'explainable by nature/astrophysics thusly'. Nearly every pulsar or periodic signal heard so far has plausible explanations. The few that don't, get catalogued and studied like the Rosetta or cryptanalytic puzzles or anything else incomprehensible/interesting. I remember a (wikipedia?) article on the subject a few years ago, but haven't a clue where to look for it now.
Here are wikip-articles on examples where we've composed the message (and reasoning behind the components): The Arecibo message by SETI, the Pioneer Plaque by NASA and then go on to SETI, the Voyager record/disc, and others. You say 'hello' by doing something that has a pattern that defies nature... that stands out. Then you start into yammering technically advanced but communicationally-simple concepts, in the hope that even a fraction of them will be semi-correctly guessed. If you give guidance via patterns, and the other side is looking for patterns, it'll work out better than cryptanalysis (where one side is HIDING information).
As for compression routines, both compression and cryptography maximize entropy (the seemingly randomness of signal) A compression algorithm thinks "If there's a pattern, use it for better compression!" which is the opposite of how a greeting intended for strangers will be written. If you want to make that bet with 20 uncompressed bitstreams, you'll be surprised at how evident the signal is. You'll know it's THERE, even if you can't convince yourself what it means or if it was human in origin. It's then up to intelligence (ours or theirs) and tools for looking for meaning in the patterns.
I hate to troll you on this, but how exactly do you envision using galaxy/gravitational lensing while keeping the distance the signal travels to 22 light years?
This. My certs came either from consulting work where clients were begging for a particular cert or where management was willing to pay for coursework and a cert that gave me advanced skills in a given subject. And now I'm taking PhD classwork part-time.
So, if I make a device that handles various tasks by itself, but doesn't do certain things until it gives me information and receives my meta-instructions, how is that not a robot?
If this little stomach crab robot can swim, cling, communicate, and cauterize, but needs an MD to know what cancer looks like, it's too advanced to be considered a waldo. Wikipedia refers to these as telerobotics, as in an intermediate capability between robotics (fully autonomous) and telemanipulators (aka waldos).
Every time a movie is released on DVD or shown in the theaters it's copyright date is extended.
That's news to me. I don't think representation / performance alters copyright.
Remastering: does restart copyright on the remastered edition. Adding content: ditto.
But once released, a movie gets life plus 90 unless it is changed. That's why old movies or books can be brought into Project Gutenberg, regardless of new editions or new releases.
Actually, customers largely refuse to buy based on service. Among the service-is-king tier, there's room in the market for Neiman Marcus and... uh... well, that's it. Everyone else that tries, regrets the move.
It's like newspapers blocking access to content behind a paywall. Everyone has to try eventually, and each time it fails: consumers race toward the bottom on cost far faster and more forcefully than they pay attention to quality and service.
I don't like this, but it's a dominant rule of market economics. Incidentally, the same market economics are behind America's jobs *sprinting* to China. The example I've been watching most recently is the Raspberry Pi team's decision that they can't afford to manufacture in the UK as they'd hoped. Time and costs were too much to overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool. As for your wondering why no halves, there are plenty of slang terms for half or two. Tuppence = 2 pennies (or pence), ha-penny for half a penny. It'd make sense that measures were done accordingly, where the goal was to create simple units learnable by people regardless of their schooling.
Weirdest in what you've outlined is the 'hop' at gallon-to-peck. Makes me wonder why...
You mean like 12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound?
A penny had a 1/4th unit called a farthing, too. And check out the origins of 'Pieces of Eight', from spanish gold coins (which were often cut into halves, fourths and eighths).
Have never looked it up, but I suspect these were commonplace because even unschooled math-illiterate people could become competent enough to trust physical/visual math by splitting or combining groups. And that simplicity is essential for easy commerce and employment.
Damn shame you didn't go for the ironic and say '8,675,309 nitpicks are made each year...'
Meh, I think it's far more damaging to (A) think a school is a business or (B) pay teachers less than any other degree-requiring profession.
The day that a stellar teacher's pay exceeds other professions, you get to talk about how teachers have become too powerful. Until then, engineers and lawyers and doctors and politicians get zero sympathy from me when they rant about invented horrors involving teachers unionizing.
Personally, I also know that opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one, taint nothin' special about yours.
--
(That taint pun was a freebie, BTW. Froth up some lube and a bit of fecal matter and you've got a Santorum.)
Following your own thoughts to their logical conclusion' seems to me to be your way of pulling off a bogus 'slippery slope' argument.
Commensurate response is what GP (or is it GGGP) was after.
Apprehending a hacker with no violent criminal priors shouldn't require helicopters AND swat teams.
Likewise, I won't complain as much if the current crop of Wall Street robber barons survive their day in court without a conviction. I'm just not fine with them not getting arrested or tried, despite incriminating evidence.
Justice is only fair when it's blindly/dispassionately applied.
Sure, it's straightforward to **EXTRAPOLATE**. Any scientist or engineer or accountant or actuarial or applied math nerd can tell you sixteen zillion ways to do so -- easy peazy!
Of course, ma nature has to agree to your mathematical model.
And she doesn't.
On what planet are you that Schwann's is a cheap way to feed a family?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPBlfeuZuWg
TFA hotlinked their complaint to google, which had the URL. Volkswagen ads when I watched it... but I like someone's snarky comment about punishing the content creator by flooding their 'making a wild salad' video with Axe body spray ads.
This. Someone throw a modpoint for parent, please -- Wish I had modpoints.
GP's comment was worse than wmelnick implied, actually: it pretended that this whole 'requisite intent' / Mens Rea thing is a newcomer to legal decisions that's getting stronger due to political correctness. That's absurd.
As for GP's rant against political correctness: Earlier this week, a devoutly religious coworker openly chortled about a news story showing an uptick in Hep C infections/deaths. Said they bring it on themselves. I believe he's not a hateful person, just used to accepting most info that comes from his weekend hours spent in a religious echo-chamber. He's hardly the first coworker I've known that spouts off this crap; it's easy to remain sheltered. When I asked him how he reconciled that 'serves 'em right' mindset with his faith, he was at a loss for words. He also couldn't list any other groups of 'others' that deserved that sort of 'let them die' comments.
Fifty years ago, I could have been having the same conversation with someone who wasn't even necessarily *opposed* to interracial marriage, but just assumed that the sunday church banter was how everyone thought and picked up the concepts as casually as I might pick up news or sports highlights in a conversation. Echo chambers are a cliche for a reason. Today, I could have this sort of conversation involving 'brown people', either in the guise of immigration or wars the US has recently fought. But it's casual systematic dehumanization at this level that weakens the social barrier against crimes against 'others' like these.
A way to stop this is to focus on exactly those sorts of crimes by enhancements: cut down gun crime by enhancing the penalty for crimes involving guns, for example. If you want to make a bullyish bigot think twice about beating up gay guys, enhance the crime if said bigot beats up strangers that 'seem gay'. It may seem harsh to people who think they should be free to be intolerant, but THAT IS THE POINT.
Without societal protection, gays feel perpetually under siege. When they're treated like subhumans by strangers and/or cops, ethnic minorities fear or resent the rest of us. Hate crime enhancements take those who felt they could act like rat bastards with relative impunity, and make them fearful; and we take someone living under siege and let them feel like society recognizes their plight and will protect them from prejudicial or anonymous violence. So WHAT that watching how we talk causes nuisances for us WASP males. We can adjust. The tiny takings we endure is far smaller than the lack of fundamental protection someone else endures. Again, THAT IS THE POINT.
Funny thing, if we went to single payer or nationalized healthcare, this whole issue goes away.
I've had employees. And I've never understood why healthcare that has no ties to employer isn't insanely popular among small business owners.
I didn't / dont *WANT* to waste time researching, optimizing and otherwise managing employee benefit packages. I want to ship product. Ditto on time spent on byzantine rules about taxes, FICA etc.
Legislators, here's a freebie: get rid of loopholes, make the tax law simple and progressive (no flat tax), and in general try to eliminate any need for 'tax prep services' and 'payroll management agencies' and anyone else that makes their profit off of incomprehensibility in laws.
But then, I'm an engineer, not a Bain Capital vulture capitalist. Rearranging money is so much more valuable than my mere acts of science and technology.
OTOH, how about a different vector. That's all the rage in pharma, I'm told: Instead of giving someone 10d or 14d of amoxy, come up with a time-release subcutaneous (or ankle cuff) mechanism.
Come to think of it, maybe people'd stop demanding the doc *do anything* if their choice was: 'take 2 aspirin' or 'wear this klunky ankle bracelet that'll dose you QID for two weeks'.
Mozilla weave (sync) is the only example I can think of, of this "cloud shit" done right. ... crypto done right, and yet "it just works".
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Developer/Crypto
Thanks for mentioning Weave -- it had slipped under my radar.
Other cloud app's that show they're making trustable / secure cloud storage effort:
PassPack (password mgmt, with fields encrypted locally by a key they never know. They also offer the underlying library for this as FOSS source code for anyone interested in working in a similar framework)
LastPass (similar, doesn't isolate account info from data like PassPack)
Hushmail used to have something similar.
Several secure-storage tools will encrypt then push the encrypted content to either DropBox or some other storage point.
I'll chime in for GP, since I disagree.
I was a good person for the same reasons you state. And I went through the process of questioning altruism. Questioning. That's it. Not immediate rejection.
I came to my own ethical conclusions. They matched where I started, so I'm a bit suspicious of my decision and ethics. So I review 'em regularly. But then, recalibrating one's ethical rules and examining the edge conditions is a healthy practice, IMHO. It fits nicely into Aristotle's quote on an 'unconsidered life.'
I could wander into Aristotle's quote and my ethical disagreement with it (a process that started by my habit of questioning a stone cold fact offered without evidence), but that's a whole other story.
Every time I see a comment like yours, I have to wonder who's astroturfing this crap.
You toss out hyberbolic claims in a scattergun fashion ("to test... warming effect, cooling effect or somethign else and the magnitude of it"), then say carefully accurate-sounding bullshit like "to (sic) only current way to test ... is to wait 100 years".
This violates two crux aspects about the scientific method, and models (or hypothesis):
1 - if nearly all the models show X (a temp increase), and attempts to find a scientifically rigorous and interesting model leading to Y are unsuccessful, it's sophistry to claim we just don't know.
2 - if the preponderance of evidence and conclusions (models) say X (big temp increases, bad things worsening throughout the next century), we don't have to wait a century to act. That's absurd. We can take precautionary measures immediately, and watch the models and adjust.
But then, I suspect you know that, since I'm convinced you're a troll...
Yeah, your gedankenexperiment on GP's next company 'before you make your first sale' is **totally** the same thing as saying a 20:1 p/s ratio for *FACEBOOK* is too big. Facebook's so tiny they'll definitely **GROW** to fill that ratio. Just like Groupon. /sarcasm
Personally, I can imagine ways that they can grow into the ratio. Per-user revenue is much easier to alter than their customer count, obviously. Whether they do or not hinges on tapping into revenue streams.
Deciding whether they will succeed is the speculative nature of the market.
Big difference between a 4-passenger plane and an ultralight, FWIW. The rest of your remark smells like confirmation bias: you had to go back 6-7 years to point to another wealthy plane victim.
Rich people die quietly daily from cancer, disease, heart disease, etc (and not so quietly from pissed-off lovers, fast cars and every other form of fast living). C'est la mort.
Occams razor. As far as a 'turing' test for alien signals, it's pretty much a game of 'explainable by nature/astrophysics thusly'. Nearly every pulsar or periodic signal heard so far has plausible explanations. The few that don't, get catalogued and studied like the Rosetta or cryptanalytic puzzles or anything else incomprehensible/interesting. I remember a (wikipedia?) article on the subject a few years ago, but haven't a clue where to look for it now.
Here are wikip-articles on examples where we've composed the message (and reasoning behind the components): The Arecibo message by SETI, the Pioneer Plaque by NASA and then go on to SETI, the Voyager record/disc, and others. You say 'hello' by doing something that has a pattern that defies nature... that stands out. Then you start into yammering technically advanced but communicationally-simple concepts, in the hope that even a fraction of them will be semi-correctly guessed. If you give guidance via patterns, and the other side is looking for patterns, it'll work out better than cryptanalysis (where one side is HIDING information).
As for compression routines, both compression and cryptography maximize entropy (the seemingly randomness of signal) A compression algorithm thinks "If there's a pattern, use it for better compression!" which is the opposite of how a greeting intended for strangers will be written. If you want to make that bet with 20 uncompressed bitstreams, you'll be surprised at how evident the signal is. You'll know it's THERE, even if you can't convince yourself what it means or if it was human in origin. It's then up to intelligence (ours or theirs) and tools for looking for meaning in the patterns.
I hate to troll you on this, but how exactly do you envision using galaxy/gravitational lensing while keeping the distance the signal travels to 22 light years?
This. My certs came either from consulting work where clients were begging for a particular cert or where management was willing to pay for coursework and a cert that gave me advanced skills in a given subject. And now I'm taking PhD classwork part-time.
Never Stop Learning.
So, if I make a device that handles various tasks by itself, but doesn't do certain things until it gives me information and receives my meta-instructions, how is that not a robot?
If this little stomach crab robot can swim, cling, communicate, and cauterize, but needs an MD to know what cancer looks like, it's too advanced to be considered a waldo. Wikipedia refers to these as telerobotics, as in an intermediate capability between robotics (fully autonomous) and telemanipulators (aka waldos).
Every time a movie is released on DVD or shown in the theaters it's copyright date is extended.
That's news to me. I don't think representation / performance alters copyright.
Remastering: does restart copyright on the remastered edition.
Adding content: ditto.
But once released, a movie gets life plus 90 unless it is changed. That's why old movies or books can be brought into Project Gutenberg, regardless of new editions or new releases.
BTW, mad props to slashdot for a formatting engine dumb enough to rip out all my whitespace.
When is that EVER what someone intends/desires?
Actually, customers largely refuse to buy based on service. Among the service-is-king tier, there's room in the market for Neiman Marcus and... uh... well, that's it. Everyone else that tries, regrets the move. It's like newspapers blocking access to content behind a paywall. Everyone has to try eventually, and each time it fails: consumers race toward the bottom on cost far faster and more forcefully than they pay attention to quality and service. I don't like this, but it's a dominant rule of market economics. Incidentally, the same market economics are behind America's jobs *sprinting* to China. The example I've been watching most recently is the Raspberry Pi team's decision that they can't afford to manufacture in the UK as they'd hoped. Time and costs were too much to overcome.
Patrick Leahy, not Mike.