Also, they moved the "cached" search results inside the website preview.
Now you can't get cached results if you have javascript disabled, and you still have to wait for that lame thumbnail to pop up in order to hit google's cache.
This is a recurring theme in Mark Twain's writing.
In addition to the opening chapter of Tom Sawyer, where the title character tricks his peers into purchasing shares of his punishment, there is this, which seems to be relevant at least weekly for me.
Given Twain's prescience and his being born and dying the year of Halley's comet, I can only attribute the lack of a cult based on his works to his scathing critiques of superstition and organized religion.
His clever slave-girl managed to kill the thieves when they came in search of vengeance.
This is all off-topic, just noticed that you were clearly unfamiliar with anything other than the title of the story you referenced. Similar to claiming, "Indiana Jones's HQ is the Temple of Doom, after all, so we shouldn't be surprised that Jones Widget Corporation (based in Indiana) has poor hiring policies."
Mozilla seem to be committing suicide right now for no reason anyone can adequately explain.
No evidence for their strange behavior being the result of a double agent in the dev hierarchy, but I can't think of a simpler explanation. Other than stupidity, but these are the people who produced the 3.x Firefox, right? Clearly they can manage a reasonable dev process and produce a quality product.
"With cocaine, once you snort it, you have nothing to show for your money. At least we alcoholics have lots of pretty bottles to help us reminisce on the glory days of our addiction."
And when I started playing back in Revised, we called it Cardboard Crack.:)
Montel hypes him up as the big bogeyman hacker, then the Lifelock guy comes out and says, "Don't worry! I'll protect you! Sign up now and we'll send you a free shredder so Kevin Mitnick can't come and dig your bank info out of your trash can!"
It reminds me of bear-baiting, except this particular bear never seemed to have any real teeth or claws to begin with.
This is not the Wikileaks insurance file, which remains encrypted.
This is a different file, that the Guardian was privy to, and was then mirrored. The password to this other file was published in a book.
I only mention this because the previous/. post on this topic had a lot of replies with the mentality that wikileaks has surrendered its insurance. Such is not the case.
I keep Windows' indexing service disabled and use Everything instead. It also works over a network pretty easily, and can double as an ftp server in a pinch. The latter two features can be disabled, of course.
Re:The best sci fi might still be untranslated.
on
The 2011 Hugo Awards
·
· Score: 1
I have always thought of God (If he exists) and the Big Bang as one. An infinite amount of potential energy seething chaotically, timelessly.
Whatever works for you, but the dictionary does not list "An infinite amount of potential energy seething chaotically, timelessly." among its definitions for "god". If you're willing to alter the definition until it fits the phenomenon, then why not cut to the chase and define god as "An imaginary friend used by fanatics to lend a sense of substance and meaning to their lives, without expending the effort to create a legitimate basis for that sense"?
I think it is a beautiful merge of Science and God.
Does calling a chaotic universe "god" have any explicative power? If not, let's not sully the name of science by labeling it such. Science has enough mystics and shucks trying to ride its coattails already.
You raise the average human life expectancy by a measly 3.5 decades and every guru on the block wants a piece of the action...
No such thing is known- consensus is that the big bang occurred at a given time, and before that, our current model breaks down as all the universe's mass converges on a point particle and we get errors from plugging values of zero in for certain variables. That's my understanding, anyway. What happened before that is by no means certain, but saying "A prime mover (who always existed) caused the big bang" only moves the mystery further away without clarifying it a bit.
Believers in God don't need any favors, large or small, as they will believe whatever load of bull suits them regardless of the evidence.
Throw in a dose of entropy (how can chaos organize itself into a stable state for the big bang?
You ask some reasonable questions, but this is the one that I feel like replying to-
You would do better to ask how chaos can avoid organizing itself into a stable state for the big bang. By definition, anything that can happen in a chaotic system must eventually happen, no? One of the better analogies I've heard is that if an immortal were to patiently and repeatedly shuffle a deck of cards, the shuffling would eventually order the cards by suit and face value. This is improbable, but not impossible, and there's all eternity to wait for the proper conditions to arise.
It being possible also means it's obliged to happen eventually, and it only has to happen once to produce this conversation via a long and torturous route.
Darned if answering one question didn't make me feel like answering another:
"I have never had the chance to ask why rationally arriving at the belief that there MUST have been a prime mover is less credible..."
The reason is known as the law of parsimony or Occam's Razor. We can either have a prime mover that has always existed (with a universe that has a definite beginning), or a universe that has always existed (with no prime mover). It's bad enough to violate causation (each scenario does that- either the prime mover or the universe are assumed to have no antecedent), but the existence of a prime mover is an additional assumption that has no explicative power.
I think that your suggestion as phrased would ban lending money at interest, and also exchanging denominations of currency, no?
While I pay for my possessions in cash up front, I realize that banning those two activities would probably have consequences beyond making high frequency trading unprofitable.
That seems like an ideal solution, actually. Which means that it will be implemented as soon as middlemanning becomes unprofitable. Bit of a Catch-22 there, alas.
It's remarkable to say this so late in the debate, but there's no evidence that high frequency trading has any negative effects. Basically the problem is that for most parties, someone knows before your order hits the real market what your trade is. That's not HFT, that's insider trading or company-store style trade.
It is my understanding that by automating the execution of trades faster than mortal mind could ever comprehend them, the market is rendered susceptible to a kind of automated failure that, for lack of a better term, I will call a "flash crash".
This would be a negative effect of high frequency trading, not insider trading. But I hesitate to clearly distinguish between the two activities- if everyone had equal access to the same information at the same time, then high frequency trading would not be profitable. High frequency trading is only possible when someone has a moment of opportunity to take advantage of knowledge that they possess but that the rest of the market does not.
They need to stop hiring the scum of the earth to uphold the law, but don't let rampant cynicism get the best of you.
It's not cynicism. It's established hiring policy. I have a friend who tells me she was refused a job in law enforcement for scoring too high on an intelligence test, so it would seem that the practice continues.
Feel free to disregard my anecdotal evidence; the link above shows at least one instance of the policy being legitimized by a court ruling.
When you buy low and sell high, that stabilizes prices. Since High Frequencies Traders are profitable, they therefore contribute to the stability of the market.
This is exactly the fairytale middlemen tell themselves so they can sleep at night after making ludicrous amounts of money for producing nothing of value. Their only goal in life is not to the the last person holding the bag or the bottom tier of the pyramid. That's why latency is so important, and that's why the "free market" is a myth- as long as your latency is higher than someone closer to the exchange, there can be no level playing field.
I've thought about this at some length, and barring "spooky action at a distance" to negate the effects of latency, two ideas commend themselves to me:
1) A fixed interval of latency imposed on all trades that is much larger than the maximum latency differential. This seems like it might help things, but it also seems like sweeping the problem under the rug- there would still be some advantage to lower latency in trades, after all. The "high frequency trades" would just occur as close to that fixed interval as possible.
2) An alternate currency used to pay those whose "profitable" actions can be repeated arbitrarily in a given interval. It takes no more effort to sell a million shares short than a billion, but (for example) an ear of corn cannot be multiplied effortlessly in a given interval. It seems to me that by paying the middlemen (who do not produce anything of real value) in the same coin as the farmer (who does), the farmer's money is devalued. Let me anticipate the "the middlemen would simply exchange their currency for the farmer's currency" reply by saying that in doing so, they would empower the farmer. After all, his currency is scarce, and the middlemens' currency is not.
I'm sure I'm an imbecile who doesn't understand the subtleties of Wall Street, but then again, evidence seems to suggest that so is everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
In a similar vein, look at the reaction to google hiding the link to cached search results in that stupid preview popup.
Not only does it add an extra click and load time to every view of a cached page, it also breaks when scripting isn't given free reign.
Also, they moved the "cached" search results inside the website preview.
Now you can't get cached results if you have javascript disabled, and you still have to wait for that lame thumbnail to pop up in order to hit google's cache.
This is a recurring theme in Mark Twain's writing.
In addition to the opening chapter of Tom Sawyer, where the title character tricks his peers into purchasing shares of his punishment, there is this, which seems to be relevant at least weekly for me.
Given Twain's prescience and his being born and dying the year of Halley's comet, I can only attribute the lack of a cult based on his works to his scathing critiques of superstition and organized religion.
Hear, hear. I am waiting for a decent way to get gamepad input on a browser, so I can start making games worth playing in a browser.
Ali Baba was actually the nemesis of the titular band of thieves. He stole from the cave in which they stored their gold by eavesdropping and learning the password ("open sesame").
His clever slave-girl managed to kill the thieves when they came in search of vengeance.
This is all off-topic, just noticed that you were clearly unfamiliar with anything other than the title of the story you referenced. Similar to claiming, "Indiana Jones's HQ is the Temple of Doom, after all, so we shouldn't be surprised that Jones Widget Corporation (based in Indiana) has poor hiring policies."
Mozilla seem to be committing suicide right now for no reason anyone can adequately explain.
No evidence for their strange behavior being the result of a double agent in the dev hierarchy, but I can't think of a simpler explanation. Other than stupidity, but these are the people who produced the 3.x Firefox, right? Clearly they can manage a reasonable dev process and produce a quality product.
"With cocaine, once you snort it, you have nothing to show for your money. At least we alcoholics have lots of pretty bottles to help us reminisce on the glory days of our addiction."
And when I started playing back in Revised, we called it Cardboard Crack. :)
In the vein of custom pets, the Belyaev experiment funds itself by selling the foxes-turned-dogs as pets.
I saw him on Montel Williams shilling for Lifelock "identity theft insurance". I know, opiate of the masses, but I just happened to be near an idiot box that was tuned to the show, and Montel's been good for a chuckle since the "MOUNTAIN! GET OUT OF MY WAY!" days.
Montel hypes him up as the big bogeyman hacker, then the Lifelock guy comes out and says, "Don't worry! I'll protect you! Sign up now and we'll send you a free shredder so Kevin Mitnick can't come and dig your bank info out of your trash can!"
It reminds me of bear-baiting, except this particular bear never seemed to have any real teeth or claws to begin with.
I think the training was more along these lines than "Ctrl-X cuts, ctrl-V pastes..."
This is not the Wikileaks insurance file, which remains encrypted.
This is a different file, that the Guardian was privy to, and was then mirrored.
The password to this other file was published in a book.
I only mention this because the previous /. post on this topic had a lot of replies with the mentality that wikileaks has surrendered its insurance. Such is not the case.
And it's served our family well all these many generations.
Until the invention of blue-razzberry antifreeze.
I keep Windows' indexing service disabled and use Everything instead. It also works over a network pretty easily, and can double as an ftp server in a pinch. The latter two features can be disabled, of course.
like this?
I have always thought of God (If he exists) and the Big Bang as one.
An infinite amount of potential energy seething chaotically, timelessly.
Whatever works for you, but the dictionary does not list "An infinite amount of potential energy seething chaotically, timelessly." among its definitions for "god". If you're willing to alter the definition until it fits the phenomenon, then why not cut to the chase and define god as "An imaginary friend used by fanatics to lend a sense of substance and meaning to their lives, without expending the effort to create a legitimate basis for that sense"?
I think it is a beautiful merge of Science and God.
Does calling a chaotic universe "god" have any explicative power? If not, let's not sully the name of science by labeling it such. Science has enough mystics and shucks trying to ride its coattails already.
You raise the average human life expectancy by a measly 3.5 decades and every guru on the block wants a piece of the action...
we know that the universe hasn't always existed?
No such thing is known- consensus is that the big bang occurred at a given time, and before that, our current model breaks down as all the universe's mass converges on a point particle and we get errors from plugging values of zero in for certain variables. That's my understanding, anyway. What happened before that is by no means certain, but saying "A prime mover (who always existed) caused the big bang" only moves the mystery further away without clarifying it a bit.
Believers in God don't need any favors, large or small, as they will believe whatever load of bull suits them regardless of the evidence.
Throw in a dose of entropy (how can chaos organize itself into a stable state for the big bang?
You ask some reasonable questions, but this is the one that I feel like replying to-
You would do better to ask how chaos can avoid organizing itself into a stable state for the big bang. By definition, anything that can happen in a chaotic system must eventually happen, no? One of the better analogies I've heard is that if an immortal were to patiently and repeatedly shuffle a deck of cards, the shuffling would eventually order the cards by suit and face value. This is improbable, but not impossible, and there's all eternity to wait for the proper conditions to arise.
It being possible also means it's obliged to happen eventually, and it only has to happen once to produce this conversation via a long and torturous route.
Darned if answering one question didn't make me feel like answering another:
"I have never had the chance to ask why rationally arriving at the belief that there MUST have been a prime mover is less credible..."
The reason is known as the law of parsimony or Occam's Razor. We can either have a prime mover that has always existed (with a universe that has a definite beginning), or a universe that has always existed (with no prime mover). It's bad enough to violate causation (each scenario does that- either the prime mover or the universe are assumed to have no antecedent), but the existence of a prime mover is an additional assumption that has no explicative power.
Most useful software can be found at Oldversion.
I think that your suggestion as phrased would ban lending money at interest, and also exchanging denominations of currency, no?
While I pay for my possessions in cash up front, I realize that banning those two activities would probably have consequences beyond making high frequency trading unprofitable.
Oh, but wait- who collects the sales tax? I smell a new set of middlemen...
If we were actually still using bricks of gold as currency, your comment might have merit.
I can send my electrons to Hong Kong just fine without a middleman, though, thank you very much.
That seems like an ideal solution, actually.
Which means that it will be implemented as soon as middlemanning becomes unprofitable. Bit of a Catch-22 there, alas.
It's remarkable to say this so late in the debate, but there's no evidence that high frequency trading has any negative effects. Basically the problem is that for most parties, someone knows before your order hits the real market what your trade is. That's not HFT, that's insider trading or company-store style trade.
It is my understanding that by automating the execution of trades faster than mortal mind could ever comprehend them, the market is rendered susceptible to a kind of automated failure that, for lack of a better term, I will call a "flash crash".
This would be a negative effect of high frequency trading, not insider trading. But I hesitate to clearly distinguish between the two activities- if everyone had equal access to the same information at the same time, then high frequency trading would not be profitable. High frequency trading is only possible when someone has a moment of opportunity to take advantage of knowledge that they possess but that the rest of the market does not.
They need to stop hiring the scum of the earth to uphold the law, but don't let rampant cynicism get the best of you.
It's not cynicism. It's established hiring policy. I have a friend who tells me she was refused a job in law enforcement for scoring too high on an intelligence test, so it would seem that the practice continues.
Feel free to disregard my anecdotal evidence; the link above shows at least one instance of the policy being legitimized by a court ruling.
When you buy low and sell high, that stabilizes prices. Since High Frequencies Traders are profitable, they therefore contribute to the stability of the market.
This is exactly the fairytale middlemen tell themselves so they can sleep at night after making ludicrous amounts of money for producing nothing of value.
Their only goal in life is not to the the last person holding the bag or the bottom tier of the pyramid. That's why latency is so important, and that's why the "free market" is a myth- as long as your latency is higher than someone closer to the exchange, there can be no level playing field.
I've thought about this at some length, and barring "spooky action at a distance" to negate the effects of latency, two ideas commend themselves to me:
1) A fixed interval of latency imposed on all trades that is much larger than the maximum latency differential. This seems like it might help things, but it also seems like sweeping the problem under the rug- there would still be some advantage to lower latency in trades, after all. The "high frequency trades" would just occur as close to that fixed interval as possible.
2) An alternate currency used to pay those whose "profitable" actions can be repeated arbitrarily in a given interval. It takes no more effort to sell a million shares short than a billion, but (for example) an ear of corn cannot be multiplied effortlessly in a given interval. It seems to me that by paying the middlemen (who do not produce anything of real value) in the same coin as the farmer (who does), the farmer's money is devalued. Let me anticipate the "the middlemen would simply exchange their currency for the farmer's currency" reply by saying that in doing so, they would empower the farmer. After all, his currency is scarce, and the middlemens' currency is not.
I'm sure I'm an imbecile who doesn't understand the subtleties of Wall Street, but then again, evidence seems to suggest that so is everyone else.