...but you get the feeling that at the top where they list his impressive "hits" from his 1977 predictions, they left out the other 90%, the "misses".
You get this feeling from statements like "software will detect patterns in behavior of children that leads to crime" that belie an insufficient grasp of the sociology and specificity of crime. That's just one example.
But there's balance to this: the caption to the picture is "cars that report good driving," not "cars that report bad driving." So he understands operant conditioning: reward good, and ignore bad, and you will affect behavior the most, and without unwanted psychological side effects.
No doubt he'll have more hits, and more misses. I fear the worst miss will be his prediction of the egalitarian distribution of the fruit of massively-available technology. It's more likely that the physical benefits will be everywhere, and everyone will be sending the monetary benefits to Bill Gates et al in the form of subscription and repair fees.
This is a good quiz. The back of the envelope was just big enough to contain it.
I did it two ways (UPS ground and Fedex Overnight) and came up with between 1210 and 1230 years, depending on whether human bodies average 125 liters or 75 liters, respectively. (We're slightly less dense than water, and the average mass is somewhere in [75,125] kilos).
Hmm. Maybe I should divide Vo by two, since most humans are children...okay...I get [1235,1253] years.
Dang. That's somewhat outside most corporations' 500-year plans.
> and set up embargos against Japan because of said mucking about
By the time of the embargoes, "said mucking about" had included an invasion, tyranny, and atrocities. The crippling sanctions were imposed in direct response to one such escalation. That was six months before Pearl.
> the code to begin the attack was Climb Mount Surabachi(sp?)
It wasn't Suribachi (on which the famous Iwo Jima flag-planting picture was taken), nor was it Fuji. But that's about the gist of it. The message was clear that the attack plan was being activated, but useless if you wanted to know where the target was.
Which you have to give the Japanese a lot of credit for. They understood that any code was just a leak or an equation away from being cleartext, and the only real security is not to send your secrets over a channel the enemy can record.
> The Japanese leadership believed that by attacking Pearl Harbor and dealing a huge blow to the American Navy, America would put its tail between its legs and leave Japan to its intrests in Asia.
Again: Crazy.
> FDR was chomping at the bit to get into WWII,
Possibly. He may even have said that he was hoping Japan would try something. But there's no way that he knew what they were going to do and then refused to inform the victims. As for the "goading" that has been mentioned, the few economic and diplomatic blows dealt to Japan hardly made up for the slaughter and torture Japan was inflicting on China.
Japan had a choice: Attack the U.S., or stop terrorizing Asia. They may have had a reason for attacking the U.S., but they had no justification.
If he was deliberate in it, he sure seemed to be surprised how well it worked.
The US had decrypted virtually all Japanese dipolomatic communications, and shortly before the attack decoded 13 pages of the 14-page communique that was to be delivered 30 minutes before the attack (the 14th page was transmitted only hours before the attack, since it was the page that actually implied what was to happen).
On reading the 13 pages, which detailed Japanese complaints about America's policies, Roosevelt said, famously, "This means war."
And then, on December 7th, when word came in that the Japanese were decimating the battleship fleet in Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt is said to have reacted with stunned disbelief, and then rage. Not exactly in the character of a man whose plan was coming together, now was it?
The problem is, though it was getting obvious (there had even been leaks) that Japan was going to attack the US, there was no clear indication of where they would do it. And Hawaii, being 6,000 miles out in the ocean from all sides, and well past dozens of other viable American targets, is rationally the last feasible choice.
These days, with worldwide communications networks and man-portable nukes and terrorist cells in every discarded tomato can, if a threat like this pops up every installation gets a notification to enhance its readiness. But in 1941, at a country club like Pearl Harbor, such an attitude would be considered crazy.
But the Japanese, clearly, were crazy. They thought that they could somehow keep America from retaliating and destroying them. Maybe the distractions of Europe were overestimated. Definitely they hoped they could destroy the American fleet and America's ability to wage war around the Pacific. They attacked in the least likely place, and scored a massive victory. And, a few months later, when America had rebuilt its fleet and then some, we kicked the shit out of them and used them as a practice target for the weapon we would use to become the only superpower in the world by the end of the century.
It's been done as a TV documentary, and if you get the History Channel, you can see it for yourself: ToraToraTora: The True Story of Pearl Harbor
includes interviews with Pearl Harbor veterans from both sides.
In one of the sequences, one of the Japanese pilots and one of the Americans talk about that meeting in 1995. The Japanese pilot apologized for attacking America, and the American said there was no need to apologize, because it was a war, and that is what men do in war. It was a brilliant thing to say, because it bracketed 50 years of history with four heroic acts by two heroic men.
All three stocks popped up at the opening. Then all three recoiled.
Only Transmeta stuck it through, gaining 2.77% on the day (39 cents: lunch money when I was in 2d grade).
Intel and AMD were both down. AMD 0.03% (a freakin' penny), and INTC 0.38% (a freakin' dime and a freakin' penny).
Motorola, who are also affected by this, because, hell, someone must still be buying Macs, but probably using chips from IBM...well, Moto lost over 3%.
Be careful in your financial dealings. This is not the time to be sticking your neck out. Capricorn has the momentum, but an Aries figures prominently. Try a new color.
You claim to be righteous, but you supported those causes. Diana outwardly was harmless, but she was against U.S. policy.
If keeping yourself from being investigated by the security police was as easy as holding a bunch of flowers and saying "peace, man," then terrorists would be poster children from Haight-Ashbury.
If Diana had been found to be secretly meeting with and funding other causes inimical to U.S. policy--if Lord Blakeney had been found to be the Scarlet Pimpernel--then maybe you'd agree that keeping an eye on them once we got the first clue was a good idea.
N.B. I hold views counter to U.S. policy (Bush's abortion and energy stance, e.g.). I have also held DoD security clearances. When I retire in 30-odd years one of the things I'm going to do is submit FOIA requests for my FBI, CIA, DISCO, Army, and NSA files, spend a few weeks writing a commentary on them, and have the whole thing bound in law-calf.
After the tap had been completed, the hard work of interpreting the data began--and it proved difficult for the NSA, say those familiar with the project. "What we got was a blast of digital bits, like a fire hydrant spraying you in the face," says one former NSA technician with knowledge of the project. "It was the classic needle-in-the-haystack pursuit, except here the haystack starts out huge and grows by the second," the former technician says. NSA's computers simply weren't equipped to sort through so much data flying at them so fast.
Gimme a break.
Like the NSA went out and glommed onto a fiber a mile underwater without first reading a book on how fiber telecoms work or testing their equipment in a lab. They knew how much data to expect, and a lousy gigabit SONET line isn't going to slow them down a tenth of a percent.
Other nonsense:
The bit about worrying about high voltage. On a sub. Where the water pressure from a pinhole leak can cut your arm off; where the acid-filled batteries weigh more than the conning tower; where a salsa fart can linger for a month; this guy's worried about a double-shielded power line?
The bit about worrying about being detected. The head ends might see a glitch of a few seconds in a fiber--one dropped call--hold their breath for half a minute waiting for it to happen again, then go back to reading their comic books when it doesn't. If a human even gets involved. If not, then the next day when the intern who refills the printer notices a couple of extra log messages on page 13482, he starts a conspiracy theory involving the Navy, the NSA, and sooper-seekrit spy subs. And the U.S. Intelligence Community would never fan a conspiracy theory (MJ-12), would they?
All this story proves is that the Wall Street Journal is still the same bunch of hack-writing, research-cribbing, blind-quoting, three-day-late reporting losers I told where to shove their overpriced subscription ten years ago.
I have a cow orker who was telling me last Thursday how he spent his entire weekend getting through this game.
Not one mention of technical glitches.
Of course, he and I spend our days spitting out device drivers and modding RTOS internals for multi-protocol wireless commo systems (a driver a day, is all we ask), so what we call a "glitch" you might knife yourself over.
He did say it was as relatively engrossing as the original Myst, and way more affecting than Riven (Myst 2; the game I didn't spend more than ten minutes on before I got bored with the tan, tan, tan, tan, tan).
When Apple came out with those G4 ads with the tanks surrounding the computer, I thought, I should get me one of those Macs to use as a crypto firewall.
Then I thought, fuck it, and got me one of the tanks, instead.
--Blair
"4,096 seeds on the wall, 4,096 seeeeeds..."
I've seen about 5 reports on this show in the past couple of days (how did I ever live without TechTV?) in various media and have not noticed any blatant sexism. Yeah, there are tall, skinny chicks in a couple of the fighters, but they kick ass, so it's no tryanny that they're hot, too.
Maybe those outlets are winking at the developers and suppressing the mix. Or maybe Salon.Com--whose print ads include a fake story lead that reads like the top of a racist troll--is just trying to pad their unique-eyeball tally.
>But they recover this heat, and use it to power
>a steam turbine at the liquid nitrogen producing
>plant, which means that it is far more efficent
>than a regular air conditioner, where all the
>heat is pumped away into the air.
I dunno, but it seems like if you wrap a towel around your head so that you can't see your attacker, then, even if he thinks that he can't see you because you can't see him, the rest of us can still tell that you've got a towel wrapped around your head.
When you let it expand, it sucks in heat, giving off cold, at a certain equilibrium temperature if you mix the liquid and gas phases adequately.
But it takes power to compress nitrogen; i.e., power roughly equal to the heat it gives off.
The net effect is, you might as well build a big air-conditioner and use that to cool the pipes, because even if you put canisters and a ride in a truck in the middle, that's all you're getting.
You're heating up Flint to cool down a tube in Detroit.
The question is, how much power is needed to compress air, remove the oxygen (you don't want the cable blowing up if it sparks), and transport the product to the head end of this cable? Is it less than the power lost in an ordinary cable? You're kidding.
QOS, or "quality of service" doesn't mean "we're going to make your service better and better," it means "we're going to give you what you paid for it."
And it's not draconian, it's business. Anyone who doesn't devolve to the profit-maximizing model will not be profitable, he will be out-competed, and his perhaps shinier technology will be marginalized, then forgotten.
--Blair
"This is why in 2001 there are no flying cars, only five oil companies, six banks, and one internet."
A few years ago, Ben Rosen (yes, that Ben Rosen) started Rosen Motors, which was once at www.rosenmotors.com but that now looks like that URL doesn't belong to him anymore.
He had nifty ideas for gas-turbine-generator/electric-motor hybrid automobiles with high-RPM flywheel regenerators in the trunk, but, you can guess, it didn't pan out as a feasible place for Ben to bet his future. So he downsized the dream and now makes his way selling some of the most efficient fossil-fuel-burning electrical generators the world has ever known, under the name Capstone Turbine.
Re:Quick! lets change our business model!
on
Palm In Trouble?
·
· Score: 3
>1. Hire consultants!
>2. Fire the CEO!
>3. Hire consultants to hire a new CEO!
>(preferably someone dynamic who's not afraid to axe all of our
>good employees!)
>4. Hire a new PR firm to issue a zillion press releases about
>our new CEO and our new direction
>5. Change everything just in time for the market to change again.
>(rinse, repeat)
Slashdot Mirror
Computers already know what they want: more memory, bigger disks, a nice fan, a whonking video pipe, and you, paying for it all...
--Blair
...but you get the feeling that at the top where they list his impressive "hits" from his 1977 predictions, they left out the other 90%, the "misses".
You get this feeling from statements like "software will detect patterns in behavior of children that leads to crime" that belie an insufficient grasp of the sociology and specificity of crime. That's just one example.
But there's balance to this: the caption to the picture is "cars that report good driving," not "cars that report bad driving." So he understands operant conditioning: reward good, and ignore bad, and you will affect behavior the most, and without unwanted psychological side effects.
No doubt he'll have more hits, and more misses. I fear the worst miss will be his prediction of the egalitarian distribution of the fruit of massively-available technology. It's more likely that the physical benefits will be everywhere, and everyone will be sending the monetary benefits to Bill Gates et al in the form of subscription and repair fees.
--Blair
A McPizza.
--Blair
"You think I'm kidding."
"Cosmocanucks" or "Canadanauts"?
"Ehstronauts."
--Blair
This is a good quiz. The back of the envelope was just big enough to contain it.
I did it two ways (UPS ground and Fedex Overnight) and came up with between 1210 and 1230 years, depending on whether human bodies average 125 liters or 75 liters, respectively. (We're slightly less dense than water, and the average mass is somewhere in [75,125] kilos).
Hmm. Maybe I should divide Vo by two, since most humans are children...okay...I get [1235,1253] years.
Dang. That's somewhat outside most corporations' 500-year plans.
--Blair
"You do the math."
> and set up embargos against Japan because of said mucking about
By the time of the embargoes, "said mucking about" had included an invasion, tyranny, and atrocities. The crippling sanctions were imposed in direct response to one such escalation. That was six months before Pearl.
> the code to begin the attack was Climb Mount Surabachi(sp?)
It wasn't Suribachi (on which the famous Iwo Jima flag-planting picture was taken), nor was it Fuji. But that's about the gist of it. The message was clear that the attack plan was being activated, but useless if you wanted to know where the target was.
Which you have to give the Japanese a lot of credit for. They understood that any code was just a leak or an equation away from being cleartext, and the only real security is not to send your secrets over a channel the enemy can record.
> The Japanese leadership believed that by attacking Pearl Harbor and dealing a huge blow to the American Navy, America would put its tail between its legs and leave Japan to its intrests in Asia.
Again: Crazy.
> FDR was chomping at the bit to get into WWII,
Possibly. He may even have said that he was hoping Japan would try something. But there's no way that he knew what they were going to do and then refused to inform the victims. As for the "goading" that has been mentioned, the few economic and diplomatic blows dealt to Japan hardly made up for the slaughter and torture Japan was inflicting on China.
Japan had a choice: Attack the U.S., or stop terrorizing Asia. They may have had a reason for attacking the U.S., but they had no justification.
--Blair
If he was deliberate in it, he sure seemed to be surprised how well it worked.
The US had decrypted virtually all Japanese dipolomatic communications, and shortly before the attack decoded 13 pages of the 14-page communique that was to be delivered 30 minutes before the attack (the 14th page was transmitted only hours before the attack, since it was the page that actually implied what was to happen).
On reading the 13 pages, which detailed Japanese complaints about America's policies, Roosevelt said, famously, "This means war."
And then, on December 7th, when word came in that the Japanese were decimating the battleship fleet in Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt is said to have reacted with stunned disbelief, and then rage. Not exactly in the character of a man whose plan was coming together, now was it?
The problem is, though it was getting obvious (there had even been leaks) that Japan was going to attack the US, there was no clear indication of where they would do it. And Hawaii, being 6,000 miles out in the ocean from all sides, and well past dozens of other viable American targets, is rationally the last feasible choice.
These days, with worldwide communications networks and man-portable nukes and terrorist cells in every discarded tomato can, if a threat like this pops up every installation gets a notification to enhance its readiness. But in 1941, at a country club like Pearl Harbor, such an attitude would be considered crazy.
But the Japanese, clearly, were crazy. They thought that they could somehow keep America from retaliating and destroying them. Maybe the distractions of Europe were overestimated. Definitely they hoped they could destroy the American fleet and America's ability to wage war around the Pacific. They attacked in the least likely place, and scored a massive victory. And, a few months later, when America had rebuilt its fleet and then some, we kicked the shit out of them and used them as a practice target for the weapon we would use to become the only superpower in the world by the end of the century.
--Blair
It's been done as a TV documentary, and if you get the History Channel, you can see it for yourself: ToraToraTora: The True Story of Pearl Harbor includes interviews with Pearl Harbor veterans from both sides.
In one of the sequences, one of the Japanese pilots and one of the Americans talk about that meeting in 1995. The Japanese pilot apologized for attacking America, and the American said there was no need to apologize, because it was a war, and that is what men do in war. It was a brilliant thing to say, because it bracketed 50 years of history with four heroic acts by two heroic men.
--Blair
> So, someone tell me, why do I want to waste cycles promoting someone else's movie???
For the same reason you're posting rhetorical questions to Slashdot.
Presumably, you get some enjoyment out of it.
--Blair
"We are already the hive mind."
And don't even get me started on the dangers of orbital debris....
Calling Captain Quark!
--Blair
"And Ficus Pederata, and Gene/Jean, and, oh yes, the Two Bettys..."
P.S. The pretty one is the clone.
No history of the USA space program is complete without acknowledging the brave and selfless contribution of our porcine fellow travellers.
--Blair
All three stocks popped up at the opening. Then all three recoiled.
Only Transmeta stuck it through, gaining 2.77% on the day (39 cents: lunch money when I was in 2d grade).
Intel and AMD were both down. AMD 0.03% (a freakin' penny), and INTC 0.38% (a freakin' dime and a freakin' penny).
Motorola, who are also affected by this, because, hell, someone must still be buying Macs, but probably using chips from IBM...well, Moto lost over 3%.
Be careful in your financial dealings. This is not the time to be sticking your neck out. Capricorn has the momentum, but an Aries figures prominently. Try a new color.
--Blair
> AND this is really the worst time for them to be trying this, with the (admittedly myopic) eyes of the USDOJ, among others, gazing down upon them?
The DOJ now gets its marching orders from John "What Swastika?" Ashcroft and George "What Caribou?" Bush.
Bill Gates and Steve Case could deed themselves your indenturement, and these fixers would rubber-stamp it.
--Blair
Character is action, not dialogue.
You claim to be righteous, but you supported those causes. Diana outwardly was harmless, but she was against U.S. policy.
If keeping yourself from being investigated by the security police was as easy as holding a bunch of flowers and saying "peace, man," then terrorists would be poster children from Haight-Ashbury.
If Diana had been found to be secretly meeting with and funding other causes inimical to U.S. policy--if Lord Blakeney had been found to be the Scarlet Pimpernel--then maybe you'd agree that keeping an eye on them once we got the first clue was a good idea.
N.B. I hold views counter to U.S. policy (Bush's abortion and energy stance, e.g.). I have also held DoD security clearances. When I retire in 30-odd years one of the things I'm going to do is submit FOIA requests for my FBI, CIA, DISCO, Army, and NSA files, spend a few weeks writing a commentary on them, and have the whole thing bound in law-calf.
--Blair
Oh. You mean they patented:
/dev/dumont
% receive | mpeg_decode | tee bab5.mpg >
...Blair
Gimme a break.
Like the NSA went out and glommed onto a fiber a mile underwater without first reading a book on how fiber telecoms work or testing their equipment in a lab. They knew how much data to expect, and a lousy gigabit SONET line isn't going to slow them down a tenth of a percent.
Other nonsense:
The bit about worrying about high voltage. On a sub. Where the water pressure from a pinhole leak can cut your arm off; where the acid-filled batteries weigh more than the conning tower; where a salsa fart can linger for a month; this guy's worried about a double-shielded power line?
The bit about worrying about being detected. The head ends might see a glitch of a few seconds in a fiber--one dropped call--hold their breath for half a minute waiting for it to happen again, then go back to reading their comic books when it doesn't. If a human even gets involved. If not, then the next day when the intern who refills the printer notices a couple of extra log messages on page 13482, he starts a conspiracy theory involving the Navy, the NSA, and sooper-seekrit spy subs. And the U.S. Intelligence Community would never fan a conspiracy theory (MJ-12), would they?
All this story proves is that the Wall Street Journal is still the same bunch of hack-writing, research-cribbing, blind-quoting, three-day-late reporting losers I told where to shove their overpriced subscription ten years ago.
--Blair
I have a cow orker who was telling me last Thursday how he spent his entire weekend getting through this game.
Not one mention of technical glitches.
Of course, he and I spend our days spitting out device drivers and modding RTOS internals for multi-protocol wireless commo systems (a driver a day, is all we ask), so what we call a "glitch" you might knife yourself over.
He did say it was as relatively engrossing as the original Myst, and way more affecting than Riven (Myst 2; the game I didn't spend more than ten minutes on before I got bored with the tan, tan, tan, tan, tan).
--Blair
When Apple came out with those G4 ads with the tanks surrounding the computer, I thought, I should get me one of those Macs to use as a crypto firewall.
Then I thought, fuck it, and got me one of the tanks, instead.
--Blair
"4,096 seeds on the wall, 4,096 seeeeeds..."
I've seen about 5 reports on this show in the past couple of days (how did I ever live without TechTV?) in various media and have not noticed any blatant sexism. Yeah, there are tall, skinny chicks in a couple of the fighters, but they kick ass, so it's no tryanny that they're hot, too.
Maybe those outlets are winking at the developers and suppressing the mix. Or maybe Salon.Com--whose print ads include a fake story lead that reads like the top of a racist troll--is just trying to pad their unique-eyeball tally.
--Blair
"You think?"
>But they recover this heat, and use it to power
>a steam turbine at the liquid nitrogen producing
>plant, which means that it is far more efficent
>than a regular air conditioner, where all the
>heat is pumped away into the air.
I WANT A TURBOCHARGED AIR CONDITIONER!!!
--Blair
I dunno, but it seems like if you wrap a towel around your head so that you can't see your attacker, then, even if he thinks that he can't see you because you can't see him, the rest of us can still tell that you've got a towel wrapped around your head.
--Blair
When you compress nitrogen, it gives off heat.
When you let it expand, it sucks in heat, giving off cold, at a certain equilibrium temperature if you mix the liquid and gas phases adequately.
But it takes power to compress nitrogen; i.e., power roughly equal to the heat it gives off.
The net effect is, you might as well build a big air-conditioner and use that to cool the pipes, because even if you put canisters and a ride in a truck in the middle, that's all you're getting.
You're heating up Flint to cool down a tube in Detroit.
The question is, how much power is needed to compress air, remove the oxygen (you don't want the cable blowing up if it sparks), and transport the product to the head end of this cable? Is it less than the power lost in an ordinary cable? You're kidding.
--Blair
QOS, or "quality of service" doesn't mean "we're going to make your service better and better," it means "we're going to give you what you paid for it."
And it's not draconian, it's business. Anyone who doesn't devolve to the profit-maximizing model will not be profitable, he will be out-competed, and his perhaps shinier technology will be marginalized, then forgotten.
--Blair
"This is why in 2001 there are no flying cars, only five oil companies, six banks, and one internet."
A few years ago, Ben Rosen (yes, that Ben Rosen) started Rosen Motors, which was once at www.rosenmotors.com but that now looks like that URL doesn't belong to him anymore.
He had nifty ideas for gas-turbine-generator/electric-motor hybrid automobiles with high-RPM flywheel regenerators in the trunk, but, you can guess, it didn't pan out as a feasible place for Ben to bet his future. So he downsized the dream and now makes his way selling some of the most efficient fossil-fuel-burning electrical generators the world has ever known, under the name Capstone Turbine.
Google spits out a few gobbets, too:
Speculation, speculation, speculation, and capitulation.
--Blair
>1. Hire consultants!
>2. Fire the CEO!
>3. Hire consultants to hire a new CEO!
>(preferably someone dynamic who's not afraid to axe all of our
>good employees!)
>4. Hire a new PR firm to issue a zillion press releases about
>our new CEO and our new direction
>5. Change everything just in time for the market to change again.
>(rinse, repeat)
Hey! Didn't you used to work at Apple?
--Blair