In principle, this is exactly the sort of thing that HDCP's key revocation is supposed to prevent. It will be interesting to see how this pans out - I wouldn't be surprised if every first-generation blu-ray player knew about this device and refused to operate with it attached.
On the need to do something about indecency in broadcast, Martin says:
I think there's been an increasing sense of the people who are filing complaints at the commission that they're incensed. My first year on the commission there were a couple hundred complaints. I think the next year there were over 10,000 and two years later there were over 100,000 and by the following year there were more than a million complaints. Its actually many of the consumers who are increasingly upset by what's on TV and radio and they're filing at the commission. There's a growing chorus of people complaining about what's on television and radio and that's what you're seeing the commission respond to.
He doesn't mention that the overwhelming majority of those are form letters from the Parents Television Council, an organization dedicated to spamming the FCC with indecency complaints until they get their way and force us all to watch a sanitized version of reality.
If we look at things strictly in terms of NPV and apply a 7% discount rate, then you're right: years 50 through 100 really don't mean much - actually about 3% of the total if we model revenues as a uniform annuity.
But NPV is an estimate of present worth for a set of cash flows in the future. In this case, everything that's in the past doesn't matter - it's all sunk costs or revenue that's been reinvested. You have to consider that the Beatles catalogue brings in millions of dollars per year, and look at the net present value of that catalogue starting today. Then you weigh that against the cost of bribing legislators to extend copyright, and you'll find that it's a very profitable proposition.
There's a place for a.sig about the evils of circumcision, and a technology news site isn't it. Also, you really don't have to make it bold, italic, and underlined. You're only a CAPSLOCK away from having the most annoying sig on slashdot.
People who watch Fox, on the other hand, know beyond a shadow of a doubt that homosexuality is a choice that gays are just too weak to fight. It's also a disease, and the government should thus take a position of maximum hostility to it wherever it can. They also know that god puts a soul into a child from the moment that sperm meets egg, and that abortion is murder. Further still, they know that they're right and that they alone have the moral authority to set the agenda for the nation on all of its issues.
Fox viewers know that anyone who isn't Christian doesn't really count - they're not true citizens, they're morally bankrupt degenerates, and this gives Christians the implicit right to force their views on everyone - especially in matters of public policy. Clinton and Carter were weak men who oversaw the moral decline of America while Reagan toppled the evil empire and Bush fought for a more secure nation.
They know that US foreign policy played no role in the attacks on Ameirca, but that it was the act of an organization motivated only by a hate of freedom. They know that the UN is to be ignored, because if we don't listen to them, what are they going to do about it? After all, an organization is only to be respected if it has the ability to back its actions with force, and he who can extert the largest force gets to set the agenda for everyone. The US should completely militarize its borders at enormous expense and engage in the mass deportation of millions. Corporations should be allowed complete free reign, and the government's role should be limited to ensuring their rights. We would all be better served by selling off public works built by taxpayer money so that a corporation can profit from them.
They know that public schools are broken, but the most important thing is to put God back into them. The role of firearms in America is to dominate the political landscape, along with abortion and God, despite really being nonissues in comparison the the other things going on in the world. Fox news viewers are never to be challenged in any way, but are to receive the information that they want to hear. It's Fox News against a biased, liberal, left wing, communist, socialist media that wants to feed you misinformation and lies. They are the only bastion of truth and reason - Fair and Balanced news you can trust.
For future reference, the events depicted in some books may not actually have happened. Do not be alarmed, such books are simply works of fiction. Their purpose is often to entertain, and occasionally to enlighten through the use of metaphor among other things.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines fiction as "A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact."
Every year we're subjected to media coverage of a number of these solar-powered races, and with each one, it gets less and less interesting.
It's not a big surprise that you can take thousands of dollars worth of carbon fiber and build an extremely light and impractically fragile vehicle with a design lifespan of a few dozen hours. No real science is being done in these races, just incremental advancements in the application of computational fluid dynamics and power control circuitry. Reduce the drag coefficient by 0.5% over last year's design, cut the weight by two kilograms... it's a complete waste of time.
This will *NEVER* result in a practical vehicle, for the simple reason that the theoretical maximum power you can get out of solar cells is on the order of 1000W/m^2. These solar races are not baby steps toward a future in which we'll all be driving solar cars, they are just a dicksizing event between university engineering departments.
Even as such, they're a waste - there are far more impressive things upon which a group of talented young engineers could focus their efforts.
Its first point is that, because new nuclear capacity will merely replace plants scheduled for decomissioning, new nuclear plants won't actually reduce CO2 emissions. This is true. But then, not building said plants would create additional amounts of CO2 from the new power plants that would have to be built to replace the decomissioned ones. The article says that "In essence, the industry is merely fighting to preserveits 20 percent share of the domestic electricity market." So, does that mean that the 20% is not worth fighting for? Especially given that most of it is generated on the densely populated east coast, where replacing it with coal would add much to an already polluted area.
Second argument: pebble-bed isn't ready yet, so the new plants built in the next few years would have to be conventional designs. True, but this ignores the fact that twenty years of development have gone in to reactors since the last one was built. Today's reactors, while based on old principles, will be quite different from those of yesterday. They will operate more efficiently. I don't know much about their economics, and they may indeed be subsidized. We have to ask ourselves whether taxpayer money for clean energy is acceptable.
Third argument: some nonsense about how nuclear energy denies the option of "an innovation economy." I'm not going to bother with this one, really.
Final argument: distributed power generation is the future. The author emphasizes small-scale gas turbines, which do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions and ignore the fact that natural gas supplies are getting increasingly expensive. It seems intuitively obvious to me that efficiency losses in small generating equipment are higher than transmission losses from large power plants. Solar power is mentioned, which is a marginally useful solution even in the middle of the desert.
I do see something wrong with the tracking of kids, per se - at least by such invasive technological means. It's going to create an entire generation that's accountable only to surveillance technology: kids that follow rules not because of a personal feeling of responsibility, or a respect for authority, or even fear of the potential consequences, but only because of the absolute certainty of getting caught if they fail to obey.
It's like teaching kids that the reason not to steal is because the magnetic tags on all the expensive items are foolproof anyway.
Thanks for the link. I'm about two chapters into that book right now. So far, it's been interesting reading, though I certainly have criticisms of Gatto's interpretation of history.
For one, he uses George Washington and Ben Franklin as examples of what people were like in the 18th century. You couldn't possibly pick two more extreme outliers. The fact that they were so successful in private and public life suggests something inherently extraordinary about such people, humble origins or not. There are some who, by the strength of their character and on the skill of their natural ability, are virtually certain to rise to some measure of success. In his introduction, he mentions that he doesn't believe in the bell curve, so perhaps his point is that we are all capable of such things. Being two chapters into the book, I'm open to the possibility that he'll elaborate on this some more.
He also makes some claims that are, to me, extraordinary; for example, the nearly complete literacy of the 18th century colonial American population.
Reading on as he makes his points about how the education system is designed to produce a large mass of people unable to make descisions or function in society, and I'm not sure I buy it. On one hand, I imagine a faceless mass of sheep, brutally ignorant, and it all makes sense. On the other hand, I think of my experiences in school, and I just can't see how the education system ever forced stupidity upon anyone. On the third hand, assuming we have some extra appendages, I never found school the least bit challenging or, for that matter, intellectually stimulating. Perhaps, then, its crime is wasting energetic youth on pointless, mundane, and unchallenging things. But then, why did I find it so easy while those around me struggled with it? Why were they unable to meet even the undemanding requirements of public schooling? What element of the educational system made them THAT stupid? I can't recall anything in my schooling that ever encouraged, directly or indirectly, the failure to meet its requirements.
I'm just randomly bringing up a few points from the book you linked... the questions are largely rhetorical... I just wanted to point out that John Taylor Gatto isn't above criticism, and his book is just a collection of his ideas.
You've made me think - or, well, you've linked me to a book that's made me think... So, thanks.
But, bringing this back to the issue we were actually discussing: whatever the problems with education, I still don't think that they have anything to do with the failure to study classical works or ancient history. Maybe that's a symptom of a larger problem, but whatever can be learned from those fields of study can be taught in a more direct manner through less tortorous means. But then, maybe teaching kids the lesson instead of having them figure it out for themselves is precisely the problem...
You say that western education, science, and art have become completely alienated from popular culture, but for that to be true, they would have had to be a part of it at some point. I challenge you to show me historical evidence of an era when a majority of common men were critical thinkers. Show me an era where common people studied science or the arts. A large majority of people have always been, and always will be, ignorant in most ways. Sheep has always existed: politicians have always been liars and people have always been easily manipulated by them.
The fact that people don't understand what's going on in the world is nothing new. Likewise, the fact that, when you tell them what's going on, they don't care, is nothing surprising. If people are wealthy and happy in their own little lives, they're just not going to care about larger issues. Contentment breeds apathy.
But we said earlier that we aren't talking about the unwashed masses, we're talking about the intelligentsia and its supposed decline. Well, the intellectual climate has changed, and the arts are indeed seen as less important than science. Changing interests are nothing new. I know nothing about fine art, opera, or ancient greek philosophers. On the other hand, all those 1920s Ivy League graduates probably knew next to nothing about electric motors. Scientific pursuits have become the playground of the intellectual class because science is just more relevant and more interesting to more people. It's a shift in the politics of education and knowledge, not the end of the world.
I think the shift is for the better. People today focus on trying to understand their world through science and perhaps apply that knowledge in a useful way. I'd say that compares favourably to studying dead languages and the philosophical musings of long-gone cultures.
If there's a difference between the current and past forms of our society, it's that the unwashed masses have attained a high level of wealth and therefore influence. Entertainment panders to them because they're the largest market, and that's what you're seeing as the supposed decline of society. Perhaps it can also be said that men do not strive to better themselves as much as they once did, but this is largely because their comfortable lives provide little incentive for them to do so. The anti-intellectualism you cite is to be expected: no one likes people smarter or wealthier than them. People have always hated the intellectual class; today, their contempt is a lot more visible.
Are they really? They don't go around referencing ancient greek writers as much as they used to, or pretending to enjoy opera. That just means that the intelligentsia aren't snobs to the same degree that they once were.
So how is the intellectual class of society falling apart? What has been lost in our era relative to those ages past that you seem to long for? Are you sure you're not just nostalgic for something that never existed? Or bitter that you'd fit in better with the social climate of some previous decade?
Entertainment is intellectually unstimulating? Smart people are treated with contempt? People sometimes choose to squander their potential rather than live up to it? THE SKY IS FALLING! SOCIETY IS CRUMBLING!
Society is comprised largely of peasants. These days they're not farming, but that's beside the point. Reality television and mindless consumerism have replaced petty superstition as the pastime of the proletariat.
I started my argument - that cities have essentially reached their limits because the population is approaching stability - with the assumption that, well, population is approaching stability. This is true for much of western europe, but apparently it's not so for the USA. I had no idea that immigration was at such a high level. It seems that planning around a stable population isn't a reality yet, and won't soon be.
Reading over the car-free city page... well, the main problem is that it's modelled on Venice. It's too small in population, and it's neither a major industrial center nor a commercial one. The page claims that the design scales between one and three million, a population exceeded by most major American cities.
It's based on a traditional European model that, for better or quite possibly worse, Europe itself is moving away from. Big-box retailers and malls are more efficient and thus cheaper. As nice as it was to go to the local grocery store in Budapest when I lived there, people tell me that large national chains like Costco are now everywhere. Even european cities are getting suburbs. A certain percentage of people will always want their own house with a lawn; suburbs become an inevitability.
All that aside, the problem with the car-free city is that cities aren't planned from scratch. We could try building small neighbourhoods in that style, but people would probably still seek out the nearest stadium-sized walmart because its massive size allows for cheap goods.
We have to look at the cities we already have. We have to reduce the reliance on the car and maintain the urban/suburban model. I think a great way to do that would be to have high speed superhighways carrying people to massive and cheap park-and-ride lots at the edge of the urban core. People would then board a fast, efficient, and comprehensive rail-based rapid transit system that takes them within walking distance of practically everywhere. The first step to acheiving this is to have that comprehensive rail system. I'm thinking something like Paris rather than the one or two lines that run through most cities.
If you build such a system, you might even start to see European-style cities taking shape around it. When you can get anywhere with the subway, a percentage of your roads become superfluous, and can be eliminated.
It's not a car-free city, but it's a city in which a car is optional. Use it when convenient, take the train otherwise. If you make transit good enough, people will actually want to use it. This won't alienate the suburbanites either.
But, like you said, no one wants to spend money on public transit.
I do indeed sit alone in gridlock. For what it's worth, I drive a Civic hatchback, which is pretty much the smallest four wheeled vehicle you'll find on the road. But I'll add that I drive this vehicle largely because it's all I can afford.
I'm a student (thus the Civic), and I'd gladly save myself a few thousand dollars by taking public transit. I did that for years, and the experience is so frustrating, uncomfortable, and inconvenient that I abandoned it as soon as was practical. On top of all that, sitting in gridlock for a portion of my trip still gets me where I'm going faster than public transit would. I could go into detail about the exact failings of my regional public transit system, but that would be largely irrelevant.
You reiterate that building more highways inevitably leads to more sprawl, and the gridlock situation will re-establish itself in a few years. The point of my previous post was essentially to say that this does *not* necessarily happen. The suburbs will only expand so much, because our population is basically stable. I think we're at the point where, if we just caught up with traffic demand and provided a bit of margin, we could have a stable and well-functioning freeway system for quite a while. Traffic can't keep growing if the number of people don't, right?
This is essentially speculation, so you have a point in that I can't show you an example of a city that's been able to build its way out of congestion. But then, I don't think it's ever really been attempted. Cities typically start thinking about highway expansions after the system has been reduced to gridlock for a decade. Invariably, too little gets built too late.
When it comes to highways, we need to think bigger. Lane merging is the root of all gridlock, and if you think about it a bit, it's absurd to suggest a lane of densely packed traffic should merge with four other lanes of dense-packed traffic without a major slowdown. That merge lane needs to become a fifth lane. Highways need to keep getting wider and wider until they reach the point where traffic demand is highest. I don't necessarily mean this literally - you pointed out that eight lane highways can be brought to a halt by morons trying to shift across all those lanes in the span of a mile. In my little fantasy, ultra-wide highways would be divided by concrete barriers into smaller parallel routes. You'd have parallel highways. An added benefit to this is that an accident on one artery would bring it to a crawl, but the remaining ones would keep moving.
I won't deny that mass transit is more efficient than a car. The problem is that mass transit systems can't serve everyone and still remain "mass" transit. If you have to make more than one transfer, for example, from bus to train or from train to train, the inefficiency introduced makes it not worthwhile. People are only willing to tolerate so much when they're already being forced to stand for an hour and a half in close proximity to a guy who hasn't showered in two weeks. Come to think of it, why is it even the accepted standard to make people *stand* on a moving vehicle? Why aren't public transit systems designed to provide enough sitting room for everyone? Public transit is often as badly undersized as the roadways that it's supposed to replace. Once again, maybe we need to think bigger.
"Space city is limited? Then expand the city!" Well, you can't expand if space is limited. You can increase density, and that's good, but then pseudo-socialist 'poverty rights activists' start accusing you of 'gentrifying the ghetto,' as if that were a bad thing.
As for the quote in your last paragraph... well, one nitpick: you can't get anything resembling a mass transit system built for $300M. That's an order of magnitude too low a figure. But I do agree that public transit, even when there is a demonstrated need for it, just doesn't get built. I could put a 10km long subway line on my city's map that would *immediately* serve two hundred thousand people per day. It's been talked about for ages, and never moved past the talking stage. It probably never will.
That attitude, shared by those in government, is the reason why I sit in gridlock every bloody morning. Why do anything to remedy a problem, or perhaps prevent it, when it will just get that bad again in a few years? For that matter, why brush your teeth, they'll just get dirty again. I used to think that way, but then I turned 7.
It's telling that this attitude is never applied toward subway lines, power transmission, or water use. When was the last time you heard "why build all that transmission capacity when you only need 60% of it today?" After all, allowing room for growth just encourages fat lazy Americans to buy more air conditioners. We should just let the system fail instead. Rolling blackouts will teach those ignorant slobs how to conserve their energy.
Rapid transit projects are frequently built with the expectation that they'll stimulate development or service an area of future growth. But if we think like that about highways, suddenly we're promoting urban sprawl. Your attitude is really just a justification for anti-car environmentalism.
Furthermore, building an eight lane highway is significantly less than double the cost of building a four lane highway. You already have the men and equipment there, why not put down a little more pavement? Economies of scale come into play here. It's downright wasteful to build undersized infrastructure. Putting capacity in place once a system is in service is *far* more expensive than doing it during installation. That's the reason why there's a lot of dark fiber everywhere - it makes sense to have it there.
As for urban sprawl: the fact is that people need places to live, and they need effective transportation. Denying them that and using some self-righteous environmentalist justification doesn't help anyone.
Space in cities is limited; thus, the suburbs are a necessity. Making those suburbs easily accessible may drive their growth, but only to a point. The population in North America is pretty much stable, and there isn't a large rural population that could potentially migrate to cities. Basically, sprawl is just not going to get much bigger, unless people start migrating en-masse from one major city to another. Having good transportation makes the lives of millions better, wastes less energy, and makes society more productive.
Transportation should keep up with (and ahead of) growth, rather than serve to limit it.
So speed kills, and anyone arguing against it is WRONG. No, I don't think I'm WRONG. I won't go so far as to say you're wrong, but rather, I'll state that you've failed to consider the circumstances and made an inappropriate generalization.
Speed doesn't kill, excessive speed does. Since we're talking about highways here, the factors that determine what constitues excessive speed are: weather conditions, heavy traffic (because drivers don't maintain safe distances), roads with turn radiuses and banking angles that aren't designed for speed, poor road maintanence, and poor vehicle condition or design.
Texas is basically always hot and sunny, so weather is out. The highway will obviously be designed and maintained for safe high-speed use. Traffic shouldn't be bad if the road has adequate capacity. Let's hope it does; there is an unfortunate tendency to design highways for today's traffic loads, completely neglecting the inevitable population growth in a region.
The only valid point you make is that American vehicle design is suboptimal for high speed driving. Aerodynamics really start to matter above 60mph or so, and your average SUV has a profile somewhat like a brick. Some cars and trucks aren't geared well for highway driving, and have to operate at ridiculously high RPM at high speed. I think this is the main reason for the poor fuel economy you mentioned. Older cars simply vibrate and make a lot of noise. These factors are probably why high speed driving is "stressful," combined with the fact that it takes a little getting used to. American auto makers, and even some American-tuned imports, don't inspire a lot of confidence.
All that said, I've never sat in a car that didn't do 85 comfortably. Even the cheapest cars only start to get sketchy at 90 or so.
Interesting, thanks. Until now I thought we were dealing with simple RFID, of the sort with which walmart will soon tag everything.
But really, doesn't a contactless smart card seem like ridiculous overkill? Couldn't we just use digital signing and simple barcodes? What advantage does this offer?
This whole thing seems like a solution in search of a problem.
I may be a little late in posting this, but you should probably know that Oz is what I'd call ultraviolent. It's a great show, but it's not for those with a weak stomach. If prison rape makes your wife squeamish (moreso than it would make most sensible people), then you may want to reconsider the dvd under the christmas tree.:)
A further point: RFID's supposed advantage of high capacity for data storage is easily rivalled by a full-page 2D barcode.
A standard PDF417 barcode contains about 1kB of data in 35 x 9mm. That's 315mm^2. My passport has a useful printable area of roughly 9600mm^2. That means that a single passport-page-sized 2D barcode could hold roughly 30kB.
Of course, anyone can print barcodes. But then, relying on the inaccessibility of RFID programming and reading equipment is security through obscurity at its worst.
It may take some time for RFID readers and writers to be commercially available, but it will happen, just as anyone today can buy magnetic card equipment.
Real security comes not from the inaccessibility of the physical storage medium, but from the data itself, specifically, through cryptographic signing.
RFID is truly a pointless technology for personal identification.
Tangent: the TV show "Oz" was based on the idea of a prison built around the Carceral concept, called Focault's Panopticon I believe. The show downplayed this aspect of the prison, preferring instead to concentrate on character interaction, but it was evident throughout the series - all the cells were plexiglass and such.
In a way the show emphasized the failure of this method when dealing with violent criminals - given a small probability of being watched in a glass prison, the sociopathic will generally take their chances with overt acts of violence.
The point you raised actually works against your argument that this is not a viable method of analysis.
Let's develop a list of suspicious attributes, and estimate the percentage of the population to which they apply: -Don't have credit card debt. (10%) -Withdraw large amounts of cash regularly. (30%) -Little use of debit cards. (20%) -Driving an old car. (50%)
Now, assuming these criteria are independant (a big assumption though), and we're interested in investigating the people who meet all four, we have to look at only 0.3% of the population. That's still a lot, but if we're only using this sort of analysis as a means of 'preconcentration' - determining where we should focus our efforts - then we've cut an impossibly large problem (monitoring everyone) down to a very managable one.
If we start looking at far more data, and use more advanced statistical methods that are far beyond my understanding, we have a very powerful tool on our hands. Of course, garbage in: garbage out applies here. We have to know that not having credit card debt is actually a meaningful indicator. In all likelihood, such systems will never catch a terrorist, but they will subject 'unusual' people to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny.
The development of ICBMs capable of striking America is undertaken not because they are to be used preemptively, but because these countries want respect.
Mutually assured destruction goes both ways, after all. A rocket attack on the US will result in the complete destruction of its source, this is given. But America is nonetheless forced to think twice about occupying a nation that could launch even a single nuclear ICBM at a major city.
It's been suggested by others in this discussion that missile defense is really about shooting down the few desperate missiles that a nation on the brink of defeat and occupation would send our way - basically giving America the ability to conquer even nuclear capable states.
It's not that no one cares, it's that no one cares enough to make sense of the mess that is encryption.
Here's a scenario: I communicate via email a bit. Most of what I say isn't really sensitive, but I still wouldn't like the whole world to know about it. I know that in theory anyone can read my email, but I also know that no one cares about me; I'm lost in a sea of faceless unimportant people. De facto anonymous, if you will.
Good enough, but being somewhat politically conscious as a result of spending all this time on slashdot, I decide to look at encryption. I have a basic understanding of public and private key cryptography. Yet, what I encounter is byzantine in its complexity.
I need a certificate? What? Why? What does verifying my identity have to do with scrambling my messages? Fingerprints, signatures, expiry dates, revocation, degrees of trust... what is all this shit?
Given that I'm the sort who's looking into encryption, I'm a little bit technically inclined. Just enough that I don't really want to use something that I don't understand. Since this isn't really an issue of life-or-death importance, I give up on encryption and go back to de-facto anonymity, which was good enough anyway.
I just described my experience with PGP. Until someone actually puts together something that explains how this whole mess works, I'm staying well away from encryption.
It seems to me that encryption is mixed with identity verification in an incomprehensible mess, when all I want is something that transparently scrambles messages on my end and unscrambles them on the other. That's not too much to ask, I think.
As a counterexample, consider SecureIM, as implemented in Miranda. I downloaded a plugin and told a friend to do the same. In a matter of seconds, we were passing encrypted messages between each other. No passwords, no certificates... totally painless. Is it secure? I don't know... It's based on tested and studied algorithms, and I trust the author's implementation implicitly. I'd imagine that if the NSA wanted to read about my day-to-day life, they could, but with some effort. That's not really the point anyway; it's better than plaintext, and almost certainly not practical to decrypt and analyze in an automated system like Echelon. It's good enough.
If secureIM came with miranda, rather than being installed as a plugin, I might use it and never even know of its existence. If it were implemented by default in MSN and ICQ, all IM would be encrypted and the users would never have to know. That's the right way to do encryption.
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My surgeon had PRK done, and personally did most of his family as well. Just an anecdote.
In principle, this is exactly the sort of thing that HDCP's key revocation is supposed to prevent. It will be interesting to see how this pans out - I wouldn't be surprised if every first-generation blu-ray player knew about this device and refused to operate with it attached.
On the need to do something about indecency in broadcast, Martin says:
He doesn't mention that the overwhelming majority of those are form letters from the Parents Television Council, an organization dedicated to spamming the FCC with indecency complaints until they get their way and force us all to watch a sanitized version of reality.
If we look at things strictly in terms of NPV and apply a 7% discount rate, then you're right: years 50 through 100 really don't mean much - actually about 3% of the total if we model revenues as a uniform annuity.
But NPV is an estimate of present worth for a set of cash flows in the future. In this case, everything that's in the past doesn't matter - it's all sunk costs or revenue that's been reinvested. You have to consider that the Beatles catalogue brings in millions of dollars per year, and look at the net present value of that catalogue starting today. Then you weigh that against the cost of bribing legislators to extend copyright, and you'll find that it's a very profitable proposition.
There's a place for a .sig about the evils of circumcision, and a technology news site isn't it. Also, you really don't have to make it bold, italic, and underlined. You're only a CAPSLOCK away from having the most annoying sig on slashdot.
People who watch Fox, on the other hand, know beyond a shadow of a doubt that homosexuality is a choice that gays are just too weak to fight. It's also a disease, and the government should thus take a position of maximum hostility to it wherever it can. They also know that god puts a soul into a child from the moment that sperm meets egg, and that abortion is murder. Further still, they know that they're right and that they alone have the moral authority to set the agenda for the nation on all of its issues.
Fox viewers know that anyone who isn't Christian doesn't really count - they're not true citizens, they're morally bankrupt degenerates, and this gives Christians the implicit right to force their views on everyone - especially in matters of public policy. Clinton and Carter were weak men who oversaw the moral decline of America while Reagan toppled the evil empire and Bush fought for a more secure nation.
They know that US foreign policy played no role in the attacks on Ameirca, but that it was the act of an organization motivated only by a hate of freedom. They know that the UN is to be ignored, because if we don't listen to them, what are they going to do about it? After all, an organization is only to be respected if it has the ability to back its actions with force, and he who can extert the largest force gets to set the agenda for everyone. The US should completely militarize its borders at enormous expense and engage in the mass deportation of millions. Corporations should be allowed complete free reign, and the government's role should be limited to ensuring their rights. We would all be better served by selling off public works built by taxpayer money so that a corporation can profit from them.
They know that public schools are broken, but the most important thing is to put God back into them. The role of firearms in America is to dominate the political landscape, along with abortion and God, despite really being nonissues in comparison the the other things going on in the world. Fox news viewers are never to be challenged in any way, but are to receive the information that they want to hear. It's Fox News against a biased, liberal, left wing, communist, socialist media that wants to feed you misinformation and lies. They are the only bastion of truth and reason - Fair and Balanced news you can trust.
For future reference, the events depicted in some books may not actually have happened. Do not be alarmed, such books are simply works of fiction. Their purpose is often to entertain, and occasionally to enlighten through the use of metaphor among other things.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines fiction as "A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact."
Every year we're subjected to media coverage of a number of these solar-powered races, and with each one, it gets less and less interesting.
It's not a big surprise that you can take thousands of dollars worth of carbon fiber and build an extremely light and impractically fragile vehicle with a design lifespan of a few dozen hours. No real science is being done in these races, just incremental advancements in the application of computational fluid dynamics and power control circuitry. Reduce the drag coefficient by 0.5% over last year's design, cut the weight by two kilograms... it's a complete waste of time.
This will *NEVER* result in a practical vehicle, for the simple reason that the theoretical maximum power you can get out of solar cells is on the order of 1000W/m^2. These solar races are not baby steps toward a future in which we'll all be driving solar cars, they are just a dicksizing event between university engineering departments.
Even as such, they're a waste - there are far more impressive things upon which a group of talented young engineers could focus their efforts.
Let's look at what the article argues.
Its first point is that, because new nuclear capacity will merely replace plants scheduled for decomissioning, new nuclear plants won't actually reduce CO2 emissions. This is true. But then, not building said plants would create additional amounts of CO2 from the new power plants that would have to be built to replace the decomissioned ones. The article says that "In essence, the industry is merely fighting to preserveits 20 percent share of the domestic electricity market." So, does that mean that the 20% is not worth fighting for? Especially given that most of it is generated on the densely populated east coast, where replacing it with coal would add much to an already polluted area.
Second argument: pebble-bed isn't ready yet, so the new plants built in the next few years would have to be conventional designs. True, but this ignores the fact that twenty years of development have gone in to reactors since the last one was built. Today's reactors, while based on old principles, will be quite different from those of yesterday. They will operate more efficiently. I don't know much about their economics, and they may indeed be subsidized. We have to ask ourselves whether taxpayer money for clean energy is acceptable.
Third argument: some nonsense about how nuclear energy denies the option of "an innovation economy." I'm not going to bother with this one, really.
Final argument: distributed power generation is the future. The author emphasizes small-scale gas turbines, which do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions and ignore the fact that natural gas supplies are getting increasingly expensive. It seems intuitively obvious to me that efficiency losses in small generating equipment are higher than transmission losses from large power plants. Solar power is mentioned, which is a marginally useful solution even in the middle of the desert.
Well, my tune has not changed...
I do see something wrong with the tracking of kids, per se - at least by such invasive technological means. It's going to create an entire generation that's accountable only to surveillance technology: kids that follow rules not because of a personal feeling of responsibility, or a respect for authority, or even fear of the potential consequences, but only because of the absolute certainty of getting caught if they fail to obey.
It's like teaching kids that the reason not to steal is because the magnetic tags on all the expensive items are foolproof anyway.
Thanks for the link. I'm about two chapters into that book right now. So far, it's been interesting reading, though I certainly have criticisms of Gatto's interpretation of history.
:)
For one, he uses George Washington and Ben Franklin as examples of what people were like in the 18th century. You couldn't possibly pick two more extreme outliers. The fact that they were so successful in private and public life suggests something inherently extraordinary about such people, humble origins or not. There are some who, by the strength of their character and on the skill of their natural ability, are virtually certain to rise to some measure of success. In his introduction, he mentions that he doesn't believe in the bell curve, so perhaps his point is that we are all capable of such things. Being two chapters into the book, I'm open to the possibility that he'll elaborate on this some more.
He also makes some claims that are, to me, extraordinary; for example, the nearly complete literacy of the 18th century colonial American population.
Reading on as he makes his points about how the education system is designed to produce a large mass of people unable to make descisions or function in society, and I'm not sure I buy it. On one hand, I imagine a faceless mass of sheep, brutally ignorant, and it all makes sense. On the other hand, I think of my experiences in school, and I just can't see how the education system ever forced stupidity upon anyone. On the third hand, assuming we have some extra appendages, I never found school the least bit challenging or, for that matter, intellectually stimulating. Perhaps, then, its crime is wasting energetic youth on pointless, mundane, and unchallenging things. But then, why did I find it so easy while those around me struggled with it? Why were they unable to meet even the undemanding requirements of public schooling? What element of the educational system made them THAT stupid? I can't recall anything in my schooling that ever encouraged, directly or indirectly, the failure to meet its requirements.
I'm just randomly bringing up a few points from the book you linked... the questions are largely rhetorical... I just wanted to point out that John Taylor Gatto isn't above criticism, and his book is just a collection of his ideas.
You've made me think - or, well, you've linked me to a book that's made me think... So, thanks.
But, bringing this back to the issue we were actually discussing: whatever the problems with education, I still don't think that they have anything to do with the failure to study classical works or ancient history. Maybe that's a symptom of a larger problem, but whatever can be learned from those fields of study can be taught in a more direct manner through less tortorous means. But then, maybe teaching kids the lesson instead of having them figure it out for themselves is precisely the problem...
So many digressions, so little time.
You say that western education, science, and art have become completely alienated from popular culture, but for that to be true, they would have had to be a part of it at some point. I challenge you to show me historical evidence of an era when a majority of common men were critical thinkers. Show me an era where common people studied science or the arts. A large majority of people have always been, and always will be, ignorant in most ways. Sheep has always existed: politicians have always been liars and people have always been easily manipulated by them.
The fact that people don't understand what's going on in the world is nothing new. Likewise, the fact that, when you tell them what's going on, they don't care, is nothing surprising. If people are wealthy and happy in their own little lives, they're just not going to care about larger issues. Contentment breeds apathy.
But we said earlier that we aren't talking about the unwashed masses, we're talking about the intelligentsia and its supposed decline. Well, the intellectual climate has changed, and the arts are indeed seen as less important than science. Changing interests are nothing new. I know nothing about fine art, opera, or ancient greek philosophers. On the other hand, all those 1920s Ivy League graduates probably knew next to nothing about electric motors. Scientific pursuits have become the playground of the intellectual class because science is just more relevant and more interesting to more people. It's a shift in the politics of education and knowledge, not the end of the world.
I think the shift is for the better. People today focus on trying to understand their world through science and perhaps apply that knowledge in a useful way. I'd say that compares favourably to studying dead languages and the philosophical musings of long-gone cultures.
If there's a difference between the current and past forms of our society, it's that the unwashed masses have attained a high level of wealth and therefore influence. Entertainment panders to them because they're the largest market, and that's what you're seeing as the supposed decline of society. Perhaps it can also be said that men do not strive to better themselves as much as they once did, but this is largely because their comfortable lives provide little incentive for them to do so. The anti-intellectualism you cite is to be expected: no one likes people smarter or wealthier than them. People have always hated the intellectual class; today, their contempt is a lot more visible.
Are they really? They don't go around referencing ancient greek writers as much as they used to, or pretending to enjoy opera. That just means that the intelligentsia aren't snobs to the same degree that they once were.
So how is the intellectual class of society falling apart? What has been lost in our era relative to those ages past that you seem to long for? Are you sure you're not just nostalgic for something that never existed? Or bitter that you'd fit in better with the social climate of some previous decade?
Entertainment is intellectually unstimulating? Smart people are treated with contempt? People sometimes choose to squander their potential rather than live up to it? THE SKY IS FALLING! SOCIETY IS CRUMBLING!
Society is comprised largely of peasants. These days they're not farming, but that's beside the point. Reality television and mindless consumerism have replaced petty superstition as the pastime of the proletariat.
This does not signal the end of the world.
I started my argument - that cities have essentially reached their limits because the population is approaching stability - with the assumption that, well, population is approaching stability. This is true for much of western europe, but apparently it's not so for the USA. I had no idea that immigration was at such a high level. It seems that planning around a stable population isn't a reality yet, and won't soon be.
Reading over the car-free city page... well, the main problem is that it's modelled on Venice. It's too small in population, and it's neither a major industrial center nor a commercial one. The page claims that the design scales between one and three million, a population exceeded by most major American cities.
It's based on a traditional European model that, for better or quite possibly worse, Europe itself is moving away from. Big-box retailers and malls are more efficient and thus cheaper. As nice as it was to go to the local grocery store in Budapest when I lived there, people tell me that large national chains like Costco are now everywhere. Even european cities are getting suburbs. A certain percentage of people will always want their own house with a lawn; suburbs become an inevitability.
All that aside, the problem with the car-free city is that cities aren't planned from scratch. We could try building small neighbourhoods in that style, but people would probably still seek out the nearest stadium-sized walmart because its massive size allows for cheap goods.
We have to look at the cities we already have. We have to reduce the reliance on the car and maintain the urban/suburban model. I think a great way to do that would be to have high speed superhighways carrying people to massive and cheap park-and-ride lots at the edge of the urban core. People would then board a fast, efficient, and comprehensive rail-based rapid transit system that takes them within walking distance of practically everywhere. The first step to acheiving this is to have that comprehensive rail system. I'm thinking something like Paris rather than the one or two lines that run through most cities.
If you build such a system, you might even start to see European-style cities taking shape around it. When you can get anywhere with the subway, a percentage of your roads become superfluous, and can be eliminated.
It's not a car-free city, but it's a city in which a car is optional. Use it when convenient, take the train otherwise. If you make transit good enough, people will actually want to use it. This won't alienate the suburbanites either.
But, like you said, no one wants to spend money on public transit.
I do indeed sit alone in gridlock. For what it's worth, I drive a Civic hatchback, which is pretty much the smallest four wheeled vehicle you'll find on the road. But I'll add that I drive this vehicle largely because it's all I can afford.
I'm a student (thus the Civic), and I'd gladly save myself a few thousand dollars by taking public transit. I did that for years, and the experience is so frustrating, uncomfortable, and inconvenient that I abandoned it as soon as was practical. On top of all that, sitting in gridlock for a portion of my trip still gets me where I'm going faster than public transit would. I could go into detail about the exact failings of my regional public transit system, but that would be largely irrelevant.
You reiterate that building more highways inevitably leads to more sprawl, and the gridlock situation will re-establish itself in a few years. The point of my previous post was essentially to say that this does *not* necessarily happen. The suburbs will only expand so much, because our population is basically stable. I think we're at the point where, if we just caught up with traffic demand and provided a bit of margin, we could have a stable and well-functioning freeway system for quite a while. Traffic can't keep growing if the number of people don't, right?
This is essentially speculation, so you have a point in that I can't show you an example of a city that's been able to build its way out of congestion. But then, I don't think it's ever really been attempted. Cities typically start thinking about highway expansions after the system has been reduced to gridlock for a decade. Invariably, too little gets built too late.
When it comes to highways, we need to think bigger. Lane merging is the root of all gridlock, and if you think about it a bit, it's absurd to suggest a lane of densely packed traffic should merge with four other lanes of dense-packed traffic without a major slowdown. That merge lane needs to become a fifth lane. Highways need to keep getting wider and wider until they reach the point where traffic demand is highest. I don't necessarily mean this literally - you pointed out that eight lane highways can be brought to a halt by morons trying to shift across all those lanes in the span of a mile. In my little fantasy, ultra-wide highways would be divided by concrete barriers into smaller parallel routes. You'd have parallel highways. An added benefit to this is that an accident on one artery would bring it to a crawl, but the remaining ones would keep moving.
I won't deny that mass transit is more efficient than a car. The problem is that mass transit systems can't serve everyone and still remain "mass" transit. If you have to make more than one transfer, for example, from bus to train or from train to train, the inefficiency introduced makes it not worthwhile. People are only willing to tolerate so much when they're already being forced to stand for an hour and a half in close proximity to a guy who hasn't showered in two weeks. Come to think of it, why is it even the accepted standard to make people *stand* on a moving vehicle? Why aren't public transit systems designed to provide enough sitting room for everyone? Public transit is often as badly undersized as the roadways that it's supposed to replace. Once again, maybe we need to think bigger.
"Space city is limited? Then expand the city!" Well, you can't expand if space is limited. You can increase density, and that's good, but then pseudo-socialist 'poverty rights activists' start accusing you of 'gentrifying the ghetto,' as if that were a bad thing.
As for the quote in your last paragraph... well, one nitpick: you can't get anything resembling a mass transit system built for $300M. That's an order of magnitude too low a figure. But I do agree that public transit, even when there is a demonstrated need for it, just doesn't get built. I could put a 10km long subway line on my city's map that would *immediately* serve two hundred thousand people per day. It's been talked about for ages, and never moved past the talking stage. It probably never will.
That attitude, shared by those in government, is the reason why I sit in gridlock every bloody morning. Why do anything to remedy a problem, or perhaps prevent it, when it will just get that bad again in a few years? For that matter, why brush your teeth, they'll just get dirty again. I used to think that way, but then I turned 7.
It's telling that this attitude is never applied toward subway lines, power transmission, or water use. When was the last time you heard "why build all that transmission capacity when you only need 60% of it today?" After all, allowing room for growth just encourages fat lazy Americans to buy more air conditioners. We should just let the system fail instead. Rolling blackouts will teach those ignorant slobs how to conserve their energy.
Rapid transit projects are frequently built with the expectation that they'll stimulate development or service an area of future growth. But if we think like that about highways, suddenly we're promoting urban sprawl. Your attitude is really just a justification for anti-car environmentalism.
Furthermore, building an eight lane highway is significantly less than double the cost of building a four lane highway. You already have the men and equipment there, why not put down a little more pavement? Economies of scale come into play here. It's downright wasteful to build undersized infrastructure. Putting capacity in place once a system is in service is *far* more expensive than doing it during installation. That's the reason why there's a lot of dark fiber everywhere - it makes sense to have it there.
As for urban sprawl: the fact is that people need places to live, and they need effective transportation. Denying them that and using some self-righteous environmentalist justification doesn't help anyone.
Space in cities is limited; thus, the suburbs are a necessity. Making those suburbs easily accessible may drive their growth, but only to a point. The population in North America is pretty much stable, and there isn't a large rural population that could potentially migrate to cities. Basically, sprawl is just not going to get much bigger, unless people start migrating en-masse from one major city to another. Having good transportation makes the lives of millions better, wastes less energy, and makes society more productive.
Transportation should keep up with (and ahead of) growth, rather than serve to limit it.
So speed kills, and anyone arguing against it is WRONG. No, I don't think I'm WRONG. I won't go so far as to say you're wrong, but rather, I'll state that you've failed to consider the circumstances and made an inappropriate generalization.
Speed doesn't kill, excessive speed does. Since we're talking about highways here, the factors that determine what constitues excessive speed are: weather conditions, heavy traffic (because drivers don't maintain safe distances), roads with turn radiuses and banking angles that aren't designed for speed, poor road maintanence, and poor vehicle condition or design.
Texas is basically always hot and sunny, so weather is out. The highway will obviously be designed and maintained for safe high-speed use. Traffic shouldn't be bad if the road has adequate capacity. Let's hope it does; there is an unfortunate tendency to design highways for today's traffic loads, completely neglecting the inevitable population growth in a region.
The only valid point you make is that American vehicle design is suboptimal for high speed driving. Aerodynamics really start to matter above 60mph or so, and your average SUV has a profile somewhat like a brick. Some cars and trucks aren't geared well for highway driving, and have to operate at ridiculously high RPM at high speed. I think this is the main reason for the poor fuel economy you mentioned. Older cars simply vibrate and make a lot of noise. These factors are probably why high speed driving is "stressful," combined with the fact that it takes a little getting used to. American auto makers, and even some American-tuned imports, don't inspire a lot of confidence.
All that said, I've never sat in a car that didn't do 85 comfortably. Even the cheapest cars only start to get sketchy at 90 or so.
Interesting, thanks. Until now I thought we were dealing with simple RFID, of the sort with which walmart will soon tag everything.
But really, doesn't a contactless smart card seem like ridiculous overkill? Couldn't we just use digital signing and simple barcodes? What advantage does this offer?
This whole thing seems like a solution in search of a problem.
I may be a little late in posting this, but you should probably know that Oz is what I'd call ultraviolent. It's a great show, but it's not for those with a weak stomach. If prison rape makes your wife squeamish (moreso than it would make most sensible people), then you may want to reconsider the dvd under the christmas tree. :)
A further point: RFID's supposed advantage of high capacity for data storage is easily rivalled by a full-page 2D barcode.
A standard PDF417 barcode contains about 1kB of data in 35 x 9mm. That's 315mm^2. My passport has a useful printable area of roughly 9600mm^2. That means that a single passport-page-sized 2D barcode could hold roughly 30kB.
Of course, anyone can print barcodes. But then, relying on the inaccessibility of RFID programming and reading equipment is security through obscurity at its worst.
It may take some time for RFID readers and writers to be commercially available, but it will happen, just as anyone today can buy magnetic card equipment.
Real security comes not from the inaccessibility of the physical storage medium, but from the data itself, specifically, through cryptographic signing.
RFID is truly a pointless technology for personal identification.
Tangent: the TV show "Oz" was based on the idea of a prison built around the Carceral concept, called Focault's Panopticon I believe. The show downplayed this aspect of the prison, preferring instead to concentrate on character interaction, but it was evident throughout the series - all the cells were plexiglass and such.
In a way the show emphasized the failure of this method when dealing with violent criminals - given a small probability of being watched in a glass prison, the sociopathic will generally take their chances with overt acts of violence.
The point you raised actually works against your argument that this is not a viable method of analysis.
Let's develop a list of suspicious attributes, and estimate the percentage of the population to which they apply:
-Don't have credit card debt. (10%)
-Withdraw large amounts of cash regularly. (30%)
-Little use of debit cards. (20%)
-Driving an old car. (50%)
Now, assuming these criteria are independant (a big assumption though), and we're interested in investigating the people who meet all four, we have to look at only 0.3% of the population. That's still a lot, but if we're only using this sort of analysis as a means of 'preconcentration' - determining where we should focus our efforts - then we've cut an impossibly large problem (monitoring everyone) down to a very managable one.
If we start looking at far more data, and use more advanced statistical methods that are far beyond my understanding, we have a very powerful tool on our hands. Of course, garbage in: garbage out applies here. We have to know that not having credit card debt is actually a meaningful indicator. In all likelihood, such systems will never catch a terrorist, but they will subject 'unusual' people to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny.
The development of ICBMs capable of striking America is undertaken not because they are to be used preemptively, but because these countries want respect.
Mutually assured destruction goes both ways, after all. A rocket attack on the US will result in the complete destruction of its source, this is given. But America is nonetheless forced to think twice about occupying a nation that could launch even a single nuclear ICBM at a major city.
It's been suggested by others in this discussion that missile defense is really about shooting down the few desperate missiles that a nation on the brink of defeat and occupation would send our way - basically giving America the ability to conquer even nuclear capable states.
It's not that no one cares, it's that no one cares enough to make sense of the mess that is encryption.
Here's a scenario: I communicate via email a bit. Most of what I say isn't really sensitive, but I still wouldn't like the whole world to know about it. I know that in theory anyone can read my email, but I also know that no one cares about me; I'm lost in a sea of faceless unimportant people. De facto anonymous, if you will.
Good enough, but being somewhat politically conscious as a result of spending all this time on slashdot, I decide to look at encryption. I have a basic understanding of public and private key cryptography. Yet, what I encounter is byzantine in its complexity.
I need a certificate? What? Why? What does verifying my identity have to do with scrambling my messages? Fingerprints, signatures, expiry dates, revocation, degrees of trust... what is all this shit?
Given that I'm the sort who's looking into encryption, I'm a little bit technically inclined. Just enough that I don't really want to use something that I don't understand. Since this isn't really an issue of life-or-death importance, I give up on encryption and go back to de-facto anonymity, which was good enough anyway.
I just described my experience with PGP. Until someone actually puts together something that explains how this whole mess works, I'm staying well away from encryption.
It seems to me that encryption is mixed with identity verification in an incomprehensible mess, when all I want is something that transparently scrambles messages on my end and unscrambles them on the other. That's not too much to ask, I think.
As a counterexample, consider SecureIM, as implemented in Miranda. I downloaded a plugin and told a friend to do the same. In a matter of seconds, we were passing encrypted messages between each other. No passwords, no certificates... totally painless. Is it secure? I don't know... It's based on tested and studied algorithms, and I trust the author's implementation implicitly. I'd imagine that if the NSA wanted to read about my day-to-day life, they could, but with some effort. That's not really the point anyway; it's better than plaintext, and almost certainly not practical to decrypt and analyze in an automated system like Echelon. It's good enough.
If secureIM came with miranda, rather than being installed as a plugin, I might use it and never even know of its existence. If it were implemented by default in MSN and ICQ, all IM would be encrypted and the users would never have to know. That's the right way to do encryption.