Not that I watch a lot of TV in the first place, but I
can't say I've actually had to suffer through a commercial
for at least two or three years. I thought, though, that
the FCC cracked down on advertisers trying to pull that
loudness BS quite a while back, even before TiVo reduced
commercials to nothing more than a blur accompanying four
cheerful tone-pairs?
It means I either have to muck around with the volume I was
happy with or change channel. Obviously I do the latter.
...Or just skip them entirely. Welcome to the 21st century;-).
I can tell them I'm voting the way they want me to,
I can even take their money, but then I walk into the booth and
still vote the way I want.
So... We need anonymity so we can lie? Of all
the reasons there are to support privacy and anonymity,
that sounds like the worst one I think I've ever
heard.
Some people need to grow a spine and stand up for themselves.
If your boss threatens you if you don't vote a particular
way, he has broken the law. Contact the relevant authorities
and help them in a sting to nail the bastard.
I like my life nice and comfy too, but some things require personal
sacrifice for the good of the many. Most political behavior falls
into that category - Someone has to lead the charge, someone has
to rat out his boss, someone has to sign the declaration.
A nation of self-centered pussies deserves the oppression
they get out of fear of discomfort.
You could also sell your coupon to whichever candidate was
willing to pay you more for it... Or your boss could demand
your coupon as a condition of keeping your job... Or your union
leader could hint that it was in your best interests to turn
over your coupon to the shop steward...
Those can (and do) already happen. And we have laws against them.
Giving people a coupon to vote doesn't change the threat of people
trying to "influence" you to vote their way. It just changes the
dynamics of enforcement a bit.
I don't think you've thought your plan all the way through.
If a few people show up with tickets from elderly blood-relatives,
no foul. If someone appears with 500 tickets from totally unrelated
people, I think we can probably come up with a safety net that would
reliably catch that.
Though most agree that voting machine paper trails are a
necessity, they can cause privacy problems which aren't easily mitigated.
Umm... Just don't store the list of who voted in any particular order.
We don't need to record voters for the purpose of matching them against their
votes, we only need it to stop people from voting more than once.
I'd even go further - Mail every registered voter a bearer-coupon redeemable
for one vote, then let them use those in total anonmity. That not only
avoids the problem of guaranteeing anonymity, it solves a few other problems
as well (for example, you could grant people the right to a proxy vote on
your behalf simply by giving them your coupon).
Unfortunately, they have international trade laws to deal with.
"International trade laws" don't say that he can't buy most crap online (unless
he lives in an ITAR-sanctioned place, then ignore all this).
Quite the opposite, in most cases, thus the necessity of Hollywood buying
DMCA-like scams in various countries, to give their pathetic attempts
at region coding some teeth.
See, the problem with AllOfMP3 had nothing to do with its actual
legality - On those grounds, the RIAA itself have more than a few convictions
of its own, yet still exists. No, it committed the cardinal sin of selling
at a lower (and uniform) cost than each segmented market will bear. That,
more than anything else, scared the Big Boys, because people might catch on that
all this regional iTunes pricing counts as nothing more than a load of horse-pucky
imposed by regional cartels.
You want to know the real reason we don't have DRM-less lossless music
downloads online yet? Because it would just take one geek to figure out
how to use a proxy in some dirt-farming country to get the local price of half a
peso per track.
otherwise they just tailors the spectrum so it could sell it to
Google and I... I do not want to live a country that does that.
I think a lot of people have missed the meaning of the restrictions Google
requested...
The restrictions apply to the buyer. They force whoever wins
this block of spectrum to "play well with others", more or less.
Personally, I think the FCC should just open the spectrum as with the
2.4GHz, perhaps with just a few more minor restrictions on
(such as limiting it to ultra-low power phased array) it to address
the overcrowding of 2.4 we've seen; but this seems like a not-unreasonable
compromise - Someone gets to "own" it, but can't just
shut out the rest of the world.
What sound is being sent to the card when the track is paused?
Don't rule out the possibility that they have the sound card "playing"
silence when you pause the player. Particularly if they use fade-cuts,
dynamic range compression, or really any time-lagged processing of the
sound, it may take considerably less effort to feed the buffer with silence
rather than actually stopping playback.
Of course, that still has nothing to do with slowing down the
network, but I'd consider it as the most likely explanation for why
paused playback still causes the problem.
Since this life can be synthetic, there's nothing in nature
that is a natural antibiotic.
That conclusion doesn't follow from the given premise.
A modern PC counts as 100% synthetic, but dropping it in the
ocean will "kill" it quite thoroughly.
Now, if you mean that, in terrestrial life's 3-billion-year long
arms-race, no other lifeform has come up with a substance that
specifically targets this particular lifeform, I would agree. But
that doesn't mean nothing can kill it, just that nothing has killed
it yet.
but if they get a good game together that the ESRB gives an
AO rating, maybe the answer is to tone it down enough for a M
rating and then also offer the unrated edition available from
their websites.
Wouldn't work, because you've applied that nasty "logic" to the
problem. Never accuse a regulatory body of applying logic
to their decisions, it will just make you frustrated.
Consider, for example, the "Hot Coffee" scandal last year. You
needed to install a goddamned third-party hack to let the
protagonist "get it on", and who gets blamed? Rockstar suffers
GTA getting demoted to AO. If Rockstar themselves had offered the
"upgrade", Congress would have crucified them. "I dun mahnd
li'l Billy takin' out hos n' pigs n' stuff, but consens'l
sex??? That jes' ain' raiht!"
Now, in that case, they couldn't have asked for better publicity,
but as others have pointed out, ratings have side effects in the
form of which shops will carry a given game. For every megahit
like GTA that people will seek out regardless of ratings, you have
dozens of unknowns that might never see the light of day because
the ESRB has damned them to only getting shelf-space in porn shops,
all because of a breast-shot that would pass PG as the MPAA-equivalent
rating.
Koresh had a few screws loose, no argument there. The BATF had
every opportunity they could dream of to arrest him away
from the compound, however - Such as on his REGULAR MORNING JOG,
or when he INVITED them to the compound to talk things over a
month before the feces hit the fan. Instead, they chose to take
out almost 80 people, a quarter of them kids.
And don't tell me what they "planned" or not - They banned domestic
news from using IR cameras or high-zoom telephoto lenses for a reason.
At that time, I had satellite TV (the old big-dish kind), and you wouldn't
believe the shit captured by foreign news services - Much of my
current distrust of Big Brother started from that single incident, when
almost every day I'd see one thing on the foreign feeds (raw video feeds,
mind you, not any form of propaganda), then the feds flat-out lying and
saying the exact opposite on the CBS evening news.
Ruby Ridge was about people killing federal agents.
Ummm, no. Please play again.
Ruby Ridge started when the BATF (notice a trend here?) decided
to go for entrapment (Weaver repeatedly refused to help) on
the poor bastard over sawed-off shotguns THREE-EIGHTHS of an inch
below the federal minimum. Then they gave him the wrong court-date
and hauled him off for missing the trial. It escalated from there,
but everything that happened came from a guy railroaded into
an absurd situation, apparently (in hindsight) because they wanted
to pressure him into infiltrating the local Aryan Nation for them.
The Ruby Ridge shooting was a agent defending himself from
a attempted assassination.
Yeah, that explains the uber-harsh 18-month sentence ("oh and sorry
about the dead wife with nothing to do with all this") with credit
for time served, right?
to find that most of them either supported the Chinese government's
censorship or didn't care enough to do anything about it.
You've omitted two distinct (and IMO likely) options...
First, people living in a country with oppressive governments may
not feel particularly inclined to discussing illegal activity with
complete strangers. If a random Iraqi sent me an IM discussing
ways to circumvent US border security, as much as I may consider our
activities in their country a farce, I would guard my wording very
carefully.
And second, your average Chinese person really might not care!
In 2003 in the US, something like 3/4ths of the population
supported a war on a country having nothing to do with 9/11, as
retaliation for 9/11. Never forget that most people have no clue
about their own government's atrocities, even against its own
population. Ask most Americans about Waco or Ruby Ridge, and
you'll get responses about whackjobs holed up over religion or
taxes, without even the first thought about whether the (originally
minor, in both cases) offenses in question justified the commission
of government-sanction massacres.
Addressing the actual topic at hand, though - No, you can't spam
people "for their own good". Anyone wanting to find such info
on their own will eventually do so. Anyone else, you'll just piss
off.
So... The whole concept of social networking has bypassed you entirely?
If you mean that I can't call myself one of the 1.4 million "friends" of the
latest boy band - Yes, it has. I simply do not see the point of Myspace or
Facebook other than as a free-as-in-beer webhost (with the hidden expense
of having all your "friends" receive slightly better-targetted advertising).
If, however, you mean a real social network - I limit mine to
people I actually know, people that (with very few exceptions) I have
physically met. Friends and acquantances whose real names and at least
partial contact info I know, whose birthday I might celebrate with them,
whose voice I would recognize on the phone or whose face I would recognize
in a crowd.
Call me a Luddite, but it disturbs me greatly to think that we have
diluted the term "friend" to nothing more than a form of moderation
roughly translating as something between fandom and "I like something
about your web page".
What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related
Just that? Why, sure, I'll gladly make enough info public on myself
and my friends to make identity theft nearly trivial. And hey, as a perk, if
I ever find myself on the run from the police (for example, after someone
steals my identity and gets me flagged as a major contributor to Al Qaida),
they'll have a convenient list of everyone I might contact. Golly, what
not to love about that?
People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their
friends on every site
Why, exactly, does "every site" need to know my friends? For that matter,
why should any sites know my friends? And I don't mean in the
Slashdot Friends/Foe sense - I have plenty of both, solely for the purpose
of moderation. Of over 100 people on my lists here, I only actually know
three of them, and one of those I've never even met.
If a site actually needs to know my friends/family/coworkers,
you can safely bet on my not wanting to use that site.
For the record, I get sick of registering at websites not because
it takes too long to come up with fake info, but because for the majority
of them, I shouldn't need to create a personalized account in the first place!
If I find something through Google, I don't want a lasting relationship with
a site, I just want my damned content. If I buy something as a one-off
purchase, I don't want an account, I just want the transaction completed and
all my info expunged from the site. Unless I specifically ask a website
to give me a persistant profile, don't force one on me - it only wastes time,
and I won't rememeber what fake info I put in next time anyway (hell, I must
have over fifty logins at the NYT).
This sounds like yet another one of those non-issues that give
marketing gurus wet dreams and serve no purpose beyond stripping
us of any semblance of privacy and anonymity. Brad can keep his
thoughts, I want no part of it.
I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site.
Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios
of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet
manages to pay the bills. Curious...
The proposal says "and ethical" which I take to mean
indoctrinating a willingness to prop up ancient and unfair
art-patron business models
Schools exist for two purposes only (and the second only
as a side-effect out of necessity to support the first):
Indoctrination as good little corporate slaves, and socialized
babysitting.
When we used to ask our math teachers "when will I ever use this",
the could accurately have answered "Your future masters keep
complaining that you little bastards can't make change or accurately
count inventory. So stop trying to think for yourself, suck it up,
and do what we say."
"Sally gives you a $10 bill to pay for 20 oranges at $1.85/lb,
with four oranges to the pound. The register says to give her 75 cents
change - How many quarters should you give Sally?"
Yet a series of pits on a CD, a rough spiral groove in a vinyl platter, and a pattern of squiggles of ink
on paper are all recognizable as the same Beethoven symphony, despite the method of recording the pattern or
the substrate that is used.
True - Given the preexistance of complex translation equipment (in your example, a CD player and a human, respectively).
When trying to explain the first life on Earth, you (probably) wouldn't call it sufficient to say that a few billion
years ago a CD containing the genetic code for E. Coli arrived on earth carried by a comet. The same applies for this
hypothetical form of life... Sure, it sounds pretty cool that plasma may contain a type of life. But using that as an
origin of life on Earth puts the carriage before the horse - For it to explain us presupposes some translation
mechanism already in place.
it seems like the critical difference has to do with a break in a pattern that might be as independent of
its method of instantiation as the music is independent of the media it is stored upon.
I agree here - The quality we call "life", if it has any meaning at all beyond "similar enough to us", does
not depend on the medium. But that doesn't mean the CD player can build itself just by the mere presence
of the CD.
Now, I would grant one concession to this - If we accept this form of life as sentient, it could have
deliberately copied itself into a radically different form (similar to humans trying to create a
hard AI). But that goes somewhere bordering on religion rather than science.
That's it. I just wanted to make a post with "panspermia"
as the subject. You've got to sieze such opportunities whenever
they arise...
Fair enough, but consider your audience... Some may not realize
that "panspermia" applies to interstellar seeding of similar
life (in our case, encoded as aperiodic carbon-based crystals, "Just
add water"). The dust in question, whether alive or not, couldn't
have seeded us, because we have just about as little in common as
chemically possible.
Compared to bloated GUI's and fat device drivers, most database
engine overhead is relatively minor in comparison
I certainly wouldn't go that far. In the memory it takes to
tolerably run a Wiki starting with a real dump, you could easily
run three or four entire virtual systems. A basic XP or RedHat/Gnome
system runs decently in 256MB. Import a 2.5GB BZipped Wiki with MySQL
limited to 256MB and tell me how responsive it feels.
I suspect the author just didn't want to bother to tune MySql.
Nor should he need to! He doesn't want to set up his own
full-fledged Wiki, he just wants to search and display what amounts
to a text file; And a text file already neatly broken into tidy
organizational units thanks to XML.
I don't argue that a good database has its uses. But instead of
accusing that he "didn't want to bother", can you think of a single
reason to bother, short of bringing the dump up as a writeable
live Wiki?
There's also SqLite that may lighten the burden.
On this point, I agree with you - And it probably would have made
the FP author's task easier. But even that reasonable compromise
would count as massive overkill for what the FP wanted to
do.
Just because you can use a CNC to carve your name into a
block of wood doesn't mean a jackknife or even a rusty nail
won't do the same (depending on the precision you need). And
taking this analogy even further, a jackknife will work in the
middle of a post-apocalyptic wilderness, while the CNC requires
most of the resources of modern civilazation just to sit there
and hum quietly at you.
Now you get a heart attack in the middle of a crowd.
Kaboom, lots of people dead.
But at least you don't need to worry about having a DNR on file.
You get a chain reaction that leaves potentially hundreds
or thousands injured or dead.
Yawn. We live in a world with too many hairless monkeys. I would
consider that almost a karmic intervention to overcrowding - If you
have enough booby-trapped people crammed into a small enough area
to trigger such a chain reaction, the situation rapidly corrects
itself.
Hell, with that line of reasoning, I'd almost support making it
mandatory.
Do you mean searching takes days, or loading? Searching should be
quick if you index the words. If you are duplicating a bunch of local
clones of wiki, then simply copy down the raw MySql table data files
rather than reload from delimited files etc. (One needs to make sure
their version of MySql is compatible with the table file format.)
I suspect the former, plus creating the index, plus the not inconsiderable
overhead of running an SQL server.
DBs have their place. For a "real" Wiki, or more generally any data
collection scenario where you can have a designated server, using
a SQL store makes perfect sense.
In most situations, however, the overhead of running a real database
on the end-user's machine makes no sense (for the record, I
consider this one of the biggest non-bug flaws with Vista, though
I realize you can technically turn it off - With the resulting
loss of functionality). The exact project mentioned in the FP forms
the perfect example of this - He doesn't want to run a Wiki,
he just wants to take a dump of it, do text-based searching, and
extract pages in some reasonable form. Why would he want
to even consider importing a nice single XML file into a
memory-hungry form, from which he would still need a set
of frontend tools to extract the desired data and convert it to
a convenient viewable form?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, what part of "Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium" looks like "researchers in The Netherlands"??
// also not really kidding, unfortunately
The part that starts with wierd non-English words, and ends with somewhere (probably somewhere smallish) in Northwestern Europe.
Like it or not, most Americans parse it exactly that way. "Belgium? Nah, I prefer the regular kind of waffles, thanks."
/ self-debasing, here, not trolling
Are TV adverts where they do exactly the same.
...Or just skip them entirely. Welcome to the 21st century ;-).
Not that I watch a lot of TV in the first place, but I can't say I've actually had to suffer through a commercial for at least two or three years. I thought, though, that the FCC cracked down on advertisers trying to pull that loudness BS quite a while back, even before TiVo reduced commercials to nothing more than a blur accompanying four cheerful tone-pairs?
It means I either have to muck around with the volume I was happy with or change channel. Obviously I do the latter.
So... We need anonymity so we can lie? Of all the reasons there are to support privacy and anonymity, that sounds like the worst one I think I've ever heard.
Some people need to grow a spine and stand up for themselves. If your boss threatens you if you don't vote a particular way, he has broken the law. Contact the relevant authorities and help them in a sting to nail the bastard.
I like my life nice and comfy too, but some things require personal sacrifice for the good of the many. Most political behavior falls into that category - Someone has to lead the charge, someone has to rat out his boss, someone has to sign the declaration.
A nation of self-centered pussies deserves the oppression they get out of fear of discomfort.
You could also sell your coupon to whichever candidate was willing to pay you more for it... Or your boss could demand your coupon as a condition of keeping your job... Or your union leader could hint that it was in your best interests to turn over your coupon to the shop steward...
Those can (and do) already happen. And we have laws against them.
Giving people a coupon to vote doesn't change the threat of people trying to "influence" you to vote their way. It just changes the dynamics of enforcement a bit.
I don't think you've thought your plan all the way through.
If a few people show up with tickets from elderly blood-relatives, no foul. If someone appears with 500 tickets from totally unrelated people, I think we can probably come up with a safety net that would reliably catch that.
Presumably to ensure 50,000 votes aren't added in the space of 0.001 seconds. Coz that'd look a little suspect.
;)
Or, say, negative votes. Or more people voting than exist in the district. Coz that'd look a little suspect too.
Though most agree that voting machine paper trails are a necessity, they can cause privacy problems which aren't easily mitigated.
Umm... Just don't store the list of who voted in any particular order.
We don't need to record voters for the purpose of matching them against their votes, we only need it to stop people from voting more than once.
I'd even go further - Mail every registered voter a bearer-coupon redeemable for one vote, then let them use those in total anonmity. That not only avoids the problem of guaranteeing anonymity, it solves a few other problems as well (for example, you could grant people the right to a proxy vote on your behalf simply by giving them your coupon).
Unfortunately, they have international trade laws to deal with.
"International trade laws" don't say that he can't buy most crap online (unless he lives in an ITAR-sanctioned place, then ignore all this).
Quite the opposite, in most cases, thus the necessity of Hollywood buying DMCA-like scams in various countries, to give their pathetic attempts at region coding some teeth.
See, the problem with AllOfMP3 had nothing to do with its actual legality - On those grounds, the RIAA itself have more than a few convictions of its own, yet still exists. No, it committed the cardinal sin of selling at a lower (and uniform) cost than each segmented market will bear. That, more than anything else, scared the Big Boys, because people might catch on that all this regional iTunes pricing counts as nothing more than a load of horse-pucky imposed by regional cartels.
You want to know the real reason we don't have DRM-less lossless music downloads online yet? Because it would just take one geek to figure out how to use a proxy in some dirt-farming country to get the local price of half a peso per track.
otherwise they just tailors the spectrum so it could sell it to Google and I... I do not want to live a country that does that.
I think a lot of people have missed the meaning of the restrictions Google requested...
The restrictions apply to the buyer. They force whoever wins this block of spectrum to "play well with others", more or less.
Personally, I think the FCC should just open the spectrum as with the 2.4GHz, perhaps with just a few more minor restrictions on (such as limiting it to ultra-low power phased array) it to address the overcrowding of 2.4 we've seen; but this seems like a not-unreasonable compromise - Someone gets to "own" it, but can't just shut out the rest of the world.
What sound is being sent to the card when the track is paused?
Don't rule out the possibility that they have the sound card "playing" silence when you pause the player. Particularly if they use fade-cuts, dynamic range compression, or really any time-lagged processing of the sound, it may take considerably less effort to feed the buffer with silence rather than actually stopping playback.
Of course, that still has nothing to do with slowing down the network, but I'd consider it as the most likely explanation for why paused playback still causes the problem.
Since this life can be synthetic, there's nothing in nature that is a natural antibiotic.
That conclusion doesn't follow from the given premise.
A modern PC counts as 100% synthetic, but dropping it in the ocean will "kill" it quite thoroughly.
Now, if you mean that, in terrestrial life's 3-billion-year long arms-race, no other lifeform has come up with a substance that specifically targets this particular lifeform, I would agree. But that doesn't mean nothing can kill it, just that nothing has killed it yet.
but if they get a good game together that the ESRB gives an AO rating, maybe the answer is to tone it down enough for a M rating and then also offer the unrated edition available from their websites.
Wouldn't work, because you've applied that nasty "logic" to the problem. Never accuse a regulatory body of applying logic to their decisions, it will just make you frustrated.
Consider, for example, the "Hot Coffee" scandal last year. You needed to install a goddamned third-party hack to let the protagonist "get it on", and who gets blamed? Rockstar suffers GTA getting demoted to AO. If Rockstar themselves had offered the "upgrade", Congress would have crucified them. "I dun mahnd li'l Billy takin' out hos n' pigs n' stuff, but consens'l sex??? That jes' ain' raiht!"
Now, in that case, they couldn't have asked for better publicity, but as others have pointed out, ratings have side effects in the form of which shops will carry a given game. For every megahit like GTA that people will seek out regardless of ratings, you have dozens of unknowns that might never see the light of day because the ESRB has damned them to only getting shelf-space in porn shops, all because of a breast-shot that would pass PG as the MPAA-equivalent rating.
Waco was about CHILD MOLESTERS
Koresh had a few screws loose, no argument there. The BATF had every opportunity they could dream of to arrest him away from the compound, however - Such as on his REGULAR MORNING JOG, or when he INVITED them to the compound to talk things over a month before the feces hit the fan. Instead, they chose to take out almost 80 people, a quarter of them kids.
And don't tell me what they "planned" or not - They banned domestic news from using IR cameras or high-zoom telephoto lenses for a reason. At that time, I had satellite TV (the old big-dish kind), and you wouldn't believe the shit captured by foreign news services - Much of my current distrust of Big Brother started from that single incident, when almost every day I'd see one thing on the foreign feeds (raw video feeds, mind you, not any form of propaganda), then the feds flat-out lying and saying the exact opposite on the CBS evening news.
Ruby Ridge was about people killing federal agents.
Ummm, no. Please play again.
Ruby Ridge started when the BATF (notice a trend here?) decided to go for entrapment (Weaver repeatedly refused to help) on the poor bastard over sawed-off shotguns THREE-EIGHTHS of an inch below the federal minimum. Then they gave him the wrong court-date and hauled him off for missing the trial. It escalated from there, but everything that happened came from a guy railroaded into an absurd situation, apparently (in hindsight) because they wanted to pressure him into infiltrating the local Aryan Nation for them.
The Ruby Ridge shooting was a agent defending himself from a attempted assassination.
Yeah, that explains the uber-harsh 18-month sentence ("oh and sorry about the dead wife with nothing to do with all this") with credit for time served, right?
to find that most of them either supported the Chinese government's censorship or didn't care enough to do anything about it.
You've omitted two distinct (and IMO likely) options...
First, people living in a country with oppressive governments may not feel particularly inclined to discussing illegal activity with complete strangers. If a random Iraqi sent me an IM discussing ways to circumvent US border security, as much as I may consider our activities in their country a farce, I would guard my wording very carefully.
And second, your average Chinese person really might not care! In 2003 in the US, something like 3/4ths of the population supported a war on a country having nothing to do with 9/11, as retaliation for 9/11. Never forget that most people have no clue about their own government's atrocities, even against its own population. Ask most Americans about Waco or Ruby Ridge, and you'll get responses about whackjobs holed up over religion or taxes, without even the first thought about whether the (originally minor, in both cases) offenses in question justified the commission of government-sanction massacres.
Addressing the actual topic at hand, though - No, you can't spam people "for their own good". Anyone wanting to find such info on their own will eventually do so. Anyone else, you'll just piss off.
So... The whole concept of social networking has bypassed you entirely?
If you mean that I can't call myself one of the 1.4 million "friends" of the latest boy band - Yes, it has. I simply do not see the point of Myspace or Facebook other than as a free-as-in-beer webhost (with the hidden expense of having all your "friends" receive slightly better-targetted advertising).
If, however, you mean a real social network - I limit mine to people I actually know, people that (with very few exceptions) I have physically met. Friends and acquantances whose real names and at least partial contact info I know, whose birthday I might celebrate with them, whose voice I would recognize on the phone or whose face I would recognize in a crowd.
Call me a Luddite, but it disturbs me greatly to think that we have diluted the term "friend" to nothing more than a form of moderation roughly translating as something between fandom and "I like something about your web page".
What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related
Just that? Why, sure, I'll gladly make enough info public on myself and my friends to make identity theft nearly trivial. And hey, as a perk, if I ever find myself on the run from the police (for example, after someone steals my identity and gets me flagged as a major contributor to Al Qaida), they'll have a convenient list of everyone I might contact. Golly, what not to love about that?
People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site
Why, exactly, does "every site" need to know my friends? For that matter, why should any sites know my friends? And I don't mean in the Slashdot Friends/Foe sense - I have plenty of both, solely for the purpose of moderation. Of over 100 people on my lists here, I only actually know three of them, and one of those I've never even met.
If a site actually needs to know my friends/family/coworkers, you can safely bet on my not wanting to use that site.
For the record, I get sick of registering at websites not because it takes too long to come up with fake info, but because for the majority of them, I shouldn't need to create a personalized account in the first place! If I find something through Google, I don't want a lasting relationship with a site, I just want my damned content. If I buy something as a one-off purchase, I don't want an account, I just want the transaction completed and all my info expunged from the site. Unless I specifically ask a website to give me a persistant profile, don't force one on me - it only wastes time, and I won't rememeber what fake info I put in next time anyway (hell, I must have over fifty logins at the NYT).
This sounds like yet another one of those non-issues that give marketing gurus wet dreams and serve no purpose beyond stripping us of any semblance of privacy and anonymity. Brad can keep his thoughts, I want no part of it.
I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site.
Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet manages to pay the bills. Curious...
The proposal says "and ethical" which I take to mean indoctrinating a willingness to prop up ancient and unfair art-patron business models
Schools exist for two purposes only (and the second only as a side-effect out of necessity to support the first): Indoctrination as good little corporate slaves, and socialized babysitting.
When we used to ask our math teachers "when will I ever use this", the could accurately have answered "Your future masters keep complaining that you little bastards can't make change or accurately count inventory. So stop trying to think for yourself, suck it up, and do what we say."
"Sally gives you a $10 bill to pay for 20 oranges at $1.85/lb, with four oranges to the pound. The register says to give her 75 cents change - How many quarters should you give Sally?"
Yet a series of pits on a CD, a rough spiral groove in a vinyl platter, and a pattern of squiggles of ink on paper are all recognizable as the same Beethoven symphony, despite the method of recording the pattern or the substrate that is used.
True - Given the preexistance of complex translation equipment (in your example, a CD player and a human, respectively).
When trying to explain the first life on Earth, you (probably) wouldn't call it sufficient to say that a few billion years ago a CD containing the genetic code for E. Coli arrived on earth carried by a comet. The same applies for this hypothetical form of life... Sure, it sounds pretty cool that plasma may contain a type of life. But using that as an origin of life on Earth puts the carriage before the horse - For it to explain us presupposes some translation mechanism already in place.
it seems like the critical difference has to do with a break in a pattern that might be as independent of its method of instantiation as the music is independent of the media it is stored upon.
I agree here - The quality we call "life", if it has any meaning at all beyond "similar enough to us", does not depend on the medium. But that doesn't mean the CD player can build itself just by the mere presence of the CD.
Now, I would grant one concession to this - If we accept this form of life as sentient, it could have deliberately copied itself into a radically different form (similar to humans trying to create a hard AI). But that goes somewhere bordering on religion rather than science.
That's it. I just wanted to make a post with "panspermia" as the subject. You've got to sieze such opportunities whenever they arise...
;-)
Fair enough, but consider your audience... Some may not realize that "panspermia" applies to interstellar seeding of similar life (in our case, encoded as aperiodic carbon-based crystals, "Just add water"). The dust in question, whether alive or not, couldn't have seeded us, because we have just about as little in common as chemically possible.
"Won't someone think of the children!"
Hmm then what is this 'Ionic breeze' thing sitting beside me that is blowing air around my room with no fans or other moving parts?
Well, according to Consumer reports, according to every independant laboratory test, according to even Sharper Image itself...
I'd have to answer "A waste of money and electricy".
Yes, it (slowly) moves air. It just doesn't clean it effectively.
Notable absent from the FP is that grammar, together with editing - either in form or content.
Compared to bloated GUI's and fat device drivers, most database engine overhead is relatively minor in comparison
I certainly wouldn't go that far. In the memory it takes to tolerably run a Wiki starting with a real dump, you could easily run three or four entire virtual systems. A basic XP or RedHat/Gnome system runs decently in 256MB. Import a 2.5GB BZipped Wiki with MySQL limited to 256MB and tell me how responsive it feels.
I suspect the author just didn't want to bother to tune MySql.
Nor should he need to! He doesn't want to set up his own full-fledged Wiki, he just wants to search and display what amounts to a text file; And a text file already neatly broken into tidy organizational units thanks to XML.
I don't argue that a good database has its uses. But instead of accusing that he "didn't want to bother", can you think of a single reason to bother, short of bringing the dump up as a writeable live Wiki?
There's also SqLite that may lighten the burden.
On this point, I agree with you - And it probably would have made the FP author's task easier. But even that reasonable compromise would count as massive overkill for what the FP wanted to do.
Just because you can use a CNC to carve your name into a block of wood doesn't mean a jackknife or even a rusty nail won't do the same (depending on the precision you need). And taking this analogy even further, a jackknife will work in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wilderness, while the CNC requires most of the resources of modern civilazation just to sit there and hum quietly at you.
Now you get a heart attack in the middle of a crowd. Kaboom, lots of people dead.
But at least you don't need to worry about having a DNR on file.
You get a chain reaction that leaves potentially hundreds or thousands injured or dead.
Yawn. We live in a world with too many hairless monkeys. I would consider that almost a karmic intervention to overcrowding - If you have enough booby-trapped people crammed into a small enough area to trigger such a chain reaction, the situation rapidly corrects itself.
Hell, with that line of reasoning, I'd almost support making it mandatory.
Who else would call FORTRAN a "text adventure"?
;-)
// Still wouldn't use it unless forced to at gunpoint
Well, calling it a "programming language" certainly qualifies as "fantasy"...
/ Props to HPF, though
Do you mean searching takes days, or loading? Searching should be quick if you index the words. If you are duplicating a bunch of local clones of wiki, then simply copy down the raw MySql table data files rather than reload from delimited files etc. (One needs to make sure their version of MySql is compatible with the table file format.)
I suspect the former, plus creating the index, plus the not inconsiderable overhead of running an SQL server.
DBs have their place. For a "real" Wiki, or more generally any data collection scenario where you can have a designated server, using a SQL store makes perfect sense.
In most situations, however, the overhead of running a real database on the end-user's machine makes no sense (for the record, I consider this one of the biggest non-bug flaws with Vista, though I realize you can technically turn it off - With the resulting loss of functionality). The exact project mentioned in the FP forms the perfect example of this - He doesn't want to run a Wiki, he just wants to take a dump of it, do text-based searching, and extract pages in some reasonable form. Why would he want to even consider importing a nice single XML file into a memory-hungry form, from which he would still need a set of frontend tools to extract the desired data and convert it to a convenient viewable form?