Kind of interesting that "The Great Global Warming Swindle" gets mentioned a lot in the comments on this article. So I might as well mention the RealClimate debunking of this documentary (mentioned briefly in another comment thread).
MS spends millions on usability testing, are we all to be so stupid to conclude that their research in this area is not somewhat valid?
In a word, yes. Although I don't think keeping a healthy amount of skepticism regarding Microsoft's human interface research is "stupid."
Bruce Tognazzini has long taken Microsoft to task for their methodology. Tog, who used to work for Apple, believed in using real, objective metrics -- video of users, using stopwatches to measure time intervals, etc. Microsoft relies more heavily on questionnaires and other subjective criteria. In other words, to contrast the two approaches, Apple's approach is that the stopwatch never lies; Microsoft's approach emphasizes what users think makes them fast or more productive, rather than what actually makes the users faster or more productive.
But really, this all boils down to the logical fallacy of assuming that just because a corporation spends a lot of money on something, they spent their money well (instead of, say, spending the money as a smoke-screen to appear that they've done their homework).
The points about menu speed and mouse precision are actually valid ones, though the article probably doesn't explain these issues as well as it should. The mouse precision issue isn't so much a product of the mouse's resolution, but rather, the way in which Microsoft handles things like cascading/hierarchical menus, icon hit zones, and the like. Tog wrote an excellent article about Fitts' Law which gets mentioned every so often, and it's still a good article which really reams Microsoft on a number of points. Pay attention to Question 6 and its answer, for example; this directly bears on menu performance and indirectly on how the mouse is used by typical users.
For those too lazy to follow the link...
When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorthm, I called for a V-shaped buffer zone, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu. As long as they are moving a few pixels over for every one down, on average, the menu stays open. Apple hierarchicals are still far less efficient than single level menus, but at least they are less challenging than the average video game.
The Windows folks instead leave the hierarchical open for around a half-second before jumping down. Thus, as in so many of the other areas of their OS, they mimic the Mac without getting it right. They have decoupled cause and effect by 1/2 second, a long, long time in human-computer interaction. If you happen to get to the hierarchical within that half-second, the Windows behavior is indistinguishable from the Mac. If you don't, the behavior is just weird and few users can figure the rule out.
To be fair, Tog also takes Apple to task, especially since Apple broke some of its own UI guidelines in OS X.
All that said, my personal experience with Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the Vista previews I've seen seems to indicate a general negative trend with UI responsiveness. Menu rendering lag is especially bad in XP, though I will concede that some of the problem may be due to the insane system load imposed by my (corporate mandated) anti-virus software.
Of course, since you're a MS partisan, you'll deny everything I've just said, but I figured I'd inject something here just to try and add a little balance.
Closing note: Since TFA is lean on details, I actually followed the link in TFA to the source material only to find out that it's strictly for-pay. (You can download a PDF of the table of contents for free, but that's not very useful.) So I can understand why you'd find the article to be "a very subjective review with no hard facts." It's not even that -- it's an executive summary of someone else's work. I'm simply not willing to fork over the money to read someone else's analysis.
Actually, AT&T's argument seems to be a little broader than you're making it out. From TFA:
AT&T is willing to concede that software isn't patentable, if the Court will conclude that the things that software does - the methods and procedures and instructions that a processor carries out once software is installed - are patentable.
This seems to be the definition of an algorithm. Now, the FSF has long held that so-called software patents are illegal because they essentially describe patents on algorithms, and algorithms are mathematical constructs. Historically, math has been deemed unpatentable.
I wonder if the FSF is going to use this opportunity to file a friend-of-the-court brief elucidating this point?
...and factually inaccurate to boot. Surprised nobody already noted that the article claims that JPL is in Houston, TX. (It's actually located in Pasadena, CA, and as far as I know there are no JPL satellite offices anywhere else.) You'd think that ITWire could do some basic fact checking, like checking JPL's web site.
There is a lot of randomness invloved in the way thoughts occur in the human mind, which is why with a little focus we are able to "create algorithms" to suit various situations.
Your premise seems to reek of hand-waving. How would randomness in the human thought process give rise to the ability to "create algorithms"? This is the sort of fuzzy reasoning that IMHO gives rise to the argument that "Human consciousness must be quantum-mechanical in nature."
This is something that a Turing Machine will never be able to do by definition, not because of hardware capabilities (or lack thereof). A TM cannot produce, at runtime, another TM.
I'd really like to see you cite some evidence to back this claim up, though I'd also like to see you more carefully define your terms so we know what is meant by e.g. "producing" a Turing Machine. There are, in fact, machine learning systems which can develop algorithms and refine them. Genetic algorithms can be used to generate code which can, in turn, solve new problems not previously understood by the system. The output of this process can be understood to be an algorithm, or a set of instructions which could be transformed to run on any universal Turing Machine. There are also automated systems that can solve mathematical problems and automate the production of proofs to theorems.
Depricating [sic] Java. There's something to be said for having a strongly-typed language with null checking.
Just FYI, the only thing deprecated here is the Cocoa-Java bridge. That is to say, the Cocoa API for Java has been deprecated; you can still write Java Swing applications, and if you need to use Cocoa, write your application in Objective C. Pure Java apps are still supported in OS X and likely will remain so for some time, as Apple has been pretty good about supporting and promoting Java. (Their presence at the last Java One spoke volumes, and judging from the number of Java developers at the conference using Apple laptops running OS X, I don't think the lack of a supported Cocoa-Java bridge was a big problem for anyone.)
I bought a Denon DVD-2910 because it handled DVD-Audio, SACD, and HDCD. It's one of those fancy "universal disc" players, though that title was more accurate before HD-DVD and Blu-Ray came out.
Before the Denon, I had a Toshiba DVD-A10 which played DVD-Audio. For HDCD, I had a Rotel RCD-990. HDCD is backwards compatible with standard CD players -- the extra resolution audio data is encoded in such a way that you need specialized DACs and a license from Microsoft (who bought the rights to HDCD from Pacific Microsonics). The Denon doesn't sound nearly as good with HDCD as the Rotel did, but that's a small price to pay; the benefit is being able to play all the audio disc formats I have in my collection without having multiple hardware units.
Besides consolidating functionality, my decision was influenced by the desire to have progressive scan and upscaling for DVD Video (neither of which the Toshiba player could handle); a choice of component, DVI, and HDMI outputs (the Denon has all 3); and decent SACD playback, since many audiophiles seem to be embracing SACD, forcing the boutique record labels to release in that format. I wasn't willing to throw away all the DVD Audio content that I had accumulated just to get SACD.
I know I'm not a typical purchaser, but I definitely think there's some merit to the idea that hybrid/universal players can provide peace-of-mind to a buyer. Heck, I knew I was sacrificing some quality in a few areas, but the benefit of being able to play everything that I cared about outweighed the sacrifices.
Comparing to the current situation with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I think the one make-or-break factor is whether Universal (the movie studio) will continue to offer compelling content in HD-DVD only. I don't buy the pr0n argument, since high def doesn't really provide so much of a benefit. Many early pr0n releases on disc were actually video CD, not proper DVD, and were advertised as "works in most DVD players." The benefit there for the consumer was the convenience of a disc; the benefit to the producer of the content is the cheap cost of manufacture relative to tape.
What I think you are thinking of was the problem where it was downsampeling from 1080 to 480 instead of 720, and that was fixed in a firmware update.
Last I read on the subject, the firmware "fix" actually made things worse. This was covered previously on Slashdot, incidentally. (Sorry, don't have the link.) Anyway, last I checked, the PS3 can output 720p, but only if the source material supports that -- and right now, the only source material playable on the PS3 that outputs in 720p is games. Blu-Ray movies still won't down-scale to 720p. (If this has changed very recently, someone let me know, but the last big firmware improvement I know about was to fix backward compatibility with PS2 games.)
Just wanted to point out, you can set the PS3 to output 1080i (which apparently the PS3 can do easily enough since there is no scaling required for this operation). For users who want to play Blu-Ray movies, they can set the output preference to 1080i while watching movies, and 720p for games -- which is what the friendly ArsTechnica folks had recommended for a while now.
Still waiting on a PS3 firmware update that lets users set separate preferences (in a rational way) for Blu-Ray playback and game play. I bought my Sharp Aquos LCD TV before the Aquos line started getting 1080p support; my TV is 720p native, though it does a good job with 1080i material. (The actual LCD panel supports 768 scanlines, so no matter whether I'm watching 720p or 1080i source material, there's some kind of scaling going on behind the scenes.)
The key here is "Paid attempts." Bloggers who don't receive an income in exchange for their work aren't affected.
In fairness to TFA, which you disparage, the claim has been made that having as few as 500 regular readers constitutes being "paid." I realize you are skeptical of the article and its origins, but it's easy enough for someone with knowledge of legalese to examine the text of the bill and determine if this is a legitimate concern.
In practice, if you author a blog which doesn't require site membership to view, you could be liable under this bill, since you have no way to say for sure how many unique people actually viewed your blog at any given time.
Season 10 is in mid-season hiatus. Just to confuse matters, the SciFi network often refers to the last episode before the hiatus as a "season finale" and the first episode after the hiatus as a "season premiere."
So far, I haven't been able to pin down an exact air date for the US. The Wikipedia entries for SG-1's episodes only give the original airdate for "The Quest part 2" as January 9th, which appears to be the airdate for the UK. This kind of scheduling idiocy is why season 1 of Battlestar Galactica was well underway in the UK by the time it started airing in the US.
Best I can say: According to this forum thread, the second half of season 10 will begin airing here in the States in April. Kind of a long time to wait, IMHO.
Nobody's denying that Quantum Entanglement happened. The denial is of the interpretation that you seem to insist is the only valid interpretation of the experimental evidence.
Being able to flip the state of a particle at location A and observing a corresponding state-flip of an entangled particle at location B doesn't mean that meaningful information has been transmitted, despite what your intuition might tell you.
In other words, the measured results (which, by the way, you failed on 3 occasions to provide a citation for) do not mean what you think they mean. So for you to ask, "I'm illiterate in the math in that Wikipedia page, but how does it account for the measured results?" is kind of problematic from a couple standpoints. First, math is the language of science, and if you can't understand the math, you haven't a prayer of fully appreciating any answer that anyone could provide you with. Second, you've made an intrinsic assumption that you understand what the "measured results" of these Quantum Entanglement (QE) experiments are, and what these results mean.
So I would ask that you provide specific links to the specific experiments to which you are alluding, rather than making vague hand-waving references to "reporting [you've] read." You're not really asking critical questions based on what you know, you're asking critical questions based on what you think you know, and the only way for us to directly address this and answer your questions is for you to do us the courtesy of being as specific with us as we are with you. Getting petulant isn't going to gain you any satisfaction.
Based on the No-communication theorem (linked previously), we know that statistically, it's impossible to distinguish between an intentional state change at the receiving end and a random state change. We also know from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which I'm sure you've read about somewhere) that measuring any state of an entangled particle with any degree of precision will modify other quantum state information in unknowable ways. In addition, the state of the complementary particle in the entangled pair gets modified as well.
Because of this "noise," the best you can hope for is a statistical understanding of what's going on. Statistics is based on aggregate behavior (averaging over time, or averaging over many members of a population, for example). Any "signal" that might be there will be drowned out by noise.
It's worth noting that if you follow Wikipedia links, you'll eventually wind up at articles about quantum cryptography and the EPR paradox. The quantum crypto article is interesting because it directly addresses some of the questions you have, since quantum crypto can be made to rely on particle entanglement... which would seem to bolster the interpretation that you favor, but read closer: Even though you don't have 100% confidence in the "signal" that is being sent from location A to location B because of the statistical issues previously raised, you can have a greater-than 50% probability of correctly deducing the state of the "sender." An eavesdropper will reduce this probability below the 50% threshold, in such a way that the eavesdropping is detectable. And even saying all this, I've actually somewhat mis-stated how this is supposed to work in an effort to simplify it. It's not so much that someone is twiddling particle A and someone else is measuring particle B; it's more like someone is making measurements of particle A, and someone else is measuring particle B, and because of entanglement, those measurements are going to correlate some percentage of the time...
Less than 5% of computers on the internet are Macs (Check most website user-agent stats). For 20% of 50% of all computers sold to be Macs (ie: 10%) you'd need to double that statistic, fast.
This was modded Insightful?
The 5% statistic you quote is reflective of installed base, but it's the subset of the installed base that is Internet connected. (Not all Macs are connected to the 'Net, any more than all PCs are.)
I'm a bit dubious of the claim that 50% of all computers sold are laptops, but even so, the Wired prediction is that 20% of all laptops sold this year will be MacBooks (Pro or non-Pro). That's a prediction of market share, which is not the same thing as installed base at all. Even if Apple managed to pull off what Wired is predicting, the installed base of Macs won't magically double in one year's time; that's because all the computers that have been purchased before now will continue to operate until they either cease to function on their own, or are retired.
Since personal computer sales are plateauing (moreso in the desktop sector), it's fair to say that the total number of computers purchased this year probably won't exceed the total number of computers in service prior to this year. Expect installed base numbers to change gradually, and don't rely solely on user agent stats compiled from web sites.
More partisanship than facts
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Plasma or LCD?
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The article you linked is interesting. Under the "Durability" comparison, the site you linked indicates that LCD is more durable than plasma in real world circumstances, almost the opposite of the claim made by the Panasonic site referred to in TFA that compares LCD and plasma. (The Panasonic site claims that LCD screens are more fragile than plasma screens, since plasma screens have glass surfaces and LCD screens usually have "delicate" polymer surfaces.)
It's also interesting that most retailers will gladly lie to you about the capabilities of the two technologies. Every time I speak to a representative at Ultimate Electronics, they claim that LCD has better black levels than plasma. (The Panasonic comparison site says plasma has better black levels and contrast, and I tend to agree with the Panasonic site in this one matter.) The reason they make this claim is that, when you turn off a LCD television (i.e., when the backlight is off), the screen is much darker than a comparably sized plasma display, which tends to reflect a bit more ambient light from the room. However, most end-users don't have banks of fluorescent lights in their living rooms, and black level must be measured when the set is actually on and running. Once you do that, you realize that even the best LCDs display dark grays instead of true blacks because there's always some leakage of the backlight through the darkened pixels. With plasma, you turn the pixel off and nothing is emitted, period.
In a darkened home theater, a brand new plasma set would probably yield a much better image, due to superior black level and color gamut.
That said, when I made my decision to buy a new flat-panel TV set, I opted for a Sharp Aquos LCD television. The deciding factors for me were power consumption (LCD is more efficient than plasma at the screen sizes I was interested in), heat generation (summers in Arizona are hot enough, so I don't want to put extra thermal load on the A/C), and display longevity (no "burn-in" effect with LCD, though image ghosting can happen -- but in that case, just turn the display off for a few hours and the memory effect dissipates). The fact that a mere mortal could easily carry one of the Sharp LCDs and mount it just about anywhere was a huge bonus. In my living room, the black levels of LCD have never been an issue, and the color gamut looks plenty nice when watching ATSC (terrestrial broadcast) video material. Upscaled DVD video (I've got my Denon player set to output 720p via HDMI) looks almost as vibrant as broadcast, but not nearly as detailed because it's just upscaled. In short, I'm happy.
And it's also well documented that ice is increasing in areas like Greenland.
No it is not, according to RealClimate. Snowfall may be increasing at the interior of Greenland, but it's offset by an accelerated dumping of ice into the ocean at the periphery.
From RealClimate:
The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.
especially in deserts which will cause the desserts to bloom with all sorts of folliage [sic]
Actually, arid regions will tend to become more arid before increased precipitation reverses this trend. You see, when the temperatures go up, already dry land will lose even more moisture (and at a faster rate) due to evaporation. We're already seeing some effects of this in Arizona, where I live; the depletion of the water table due to human and industrial consumption (e.g., chip fabs) only compounds this problem further.
And you're aware that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, right?
Cloud cover might increase planetary albedo enough to offset some of the loss of ice and snow, but clouds are by no means opaque to all wavelengths of radiation -- and clouds are a lot less dense than sheets of ice.
Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.
Maybe if you read TFA, you'd recognize that the reason there's such a hubbub on Slashdot regarding this article is that a large percentage of the comments on the article were left by ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christians who all pretty much say the same thing (e.g., it was the biblical flood that extinguished the dinosaurs, and much more recently than the scientifically-agreed-upon period of the asteroid impact that TFA refers to).
Maybe if evangelicals stopped trying to cram their religion down our throats, we wouldn't react so vehemently. Though I must say, if I had to pick between being shouted down by partisans of a scientific theory and being murdered by an angry mob of religious extremists, I'll take the shouting match any day. The thing is, few people have been murdered in the pursuit of Science (the Tuskeegee experiments and various Nazi experiments being the prime counter-examples), while many have been murdered in the name of religion.
Do I need to invoke the murder of Hypatia, the last great Libarian of Alexandria, at the hands of a mob incited by a man who later became a Christian saint, to make my point any clearer? (Carl Sagan goes on at length about this atrocity in the book and television series Cosmos.)
I guess my point is, practice what you preach, and encourage your evangelical fundamentalist comrades to follow your example. If you want non-believers to cut you some slack, then kindly get the believers to stop behaving badly by vandalizing the comment sections on science-oriented web sites, for a start. And while you're at it, stop being so self-centered: this isn't a reaction against you, but against the fundie loonies who effectively vandalized the web page of TFA.
Oh, and incidentally, since you toss off a list of supposed "evidence" against evolution and modern cosmology and in favor of creationism, I should point out that each one of those points has been debunked endlessly. Repeating these time-worn non-arguments doesn't make them any more true or correct. As someone trained in the physical sciences, I get tired of trying to explain to people why evolution doesn't violate thermodynamics, or why extreme energy densities (e.g., those found in the Universe of the Big Bang, as well as those found in the singularities of black holes) cause most physical laws as we commonly understand them to break down. For that matter, it gets tiresome trying to explain why scientific "laws" are descriptive, not proscriptive like the laws that men write. So when you complain about believers having their intelligence assailed or mocked, perhaps you should step back and realize that part of the reason for the mockery is the repetition of the same old retread non-arguments that we scientists have to endure from the extremist believers out there.
The article doesn't say what kind of crystal, but I'm willing to bet it's calcium fluoride. This crystal is transparent to ultraviolet (which makes it a good candidate for EUV lithography in chip fabrication, a potentially useful technology in shrinking our fabrication process sizes), and it is birefringent. The researcher specifically mentioned using ultraviolet photons, so this made me think of calcium fluoride. The birefringent property would make it ideal for an experiment where you needed to split a UV beam to create entangled photon pairs.
And yes, I'm aware that birefringence also poses problems for using CaF2 as an optical material for EUV lithography. (I was working for a company that was developing novel techniques for growing these crystals with the crystalline lattice aligned in such a way that grinding a usable lens out of the material was much more practical.) For this experimental application, though, birefringence is actually an asset, not a liability.
Being someone who owns a Denon hybrid player so I can play HDCD, SACD and DVD-A discs, let me clear up at least one glaring error in this post...
However, Sony botched SACD by failing to make hybrid discs which would play in regular CD audio players. In fact, they at one time insisted that such discs couldn't be made, while classical music and jazz labels were actually producing hybrid discs with no problems.
This is just flat-out wrong. SACD was touted from the beginning as being capable of packing both a Red Book CDDA layer and a SACD/DSD layer on the same side of a disc, and in fact, Sony promoted this feature as beneficial to retailers -- this way, retailers in the U.S. like Best Buy could stock a single hybrid disc instead of multiple SKUs for different versions of the same album. One of the biggest shots-in-the-arm for SACD was the series of stealth hybrid releases several years ago of classic rock albums, including the entire re-release of the Rolling Stones back catalog.
It's true that Sony initially held off on releasing hybrid discs because of the manufacturing challenges of bonding the layers together. The early years of video DVD had similar challenges -- many early movie releases on DVD were so-called "flipper" discs because many companies were reluctant to release dual-layer discs, instead opting to put a single layer on each side. Consumer choice won out in the end, so flippers are pretty rare except for discs with episodic content (e.g., the Spawn animated series), and discs that have the widescreen version of a film on one side, and the full-screen version on the other side. It's also true that the first SACD players were stereo-only, so many early SACD discs lacked a surround version of the program material.
I have several hybrid SACD discs in my collection. In the U.S., the packaging was designed to clearly indicate which discs could play on CD players and which discs could play only on SACD players.
You are correct that pop music is almost dead on SACD, although there are boutique releases of non-classical albums in SACD format all the time. (e.g., Classic Rock, and even Industrial -- I have the SACD special edition of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. The discs are hybrid, I believe, so that even fans without SACD players could still enjoy the 2-disc set.) Similar things can be said for DVD-Audio.
But if you want cooperation to yield a specific goal or result, then you need some intelligent force guiding things along. A free-for-all economy doesn't optimize for any particular outcome. You still don't need an AI to achieve such a thing, but machines lack many human foibles.
I suppose you could model such a thing as an economy, but it's a managed economy... because while I mentioned the carrot and omitted mention of the stick, the fact is that for such a system to be efficient, you need a way to discourage non-productive effort. (In this case, "non-productive" from the POV of the AI holding this web of people together.) To get people to cooperate, you have to give them the illusion of choice while still managing to keep them on-task.
Professor Vinge is very Libertarian, and it shows in his writing. I definitely got the feeling from Rainbows End that the Rabbit was driven by many Libertarian economic concepts. But this isn't exactly an economy in the modern sense of using money as a value placeholder for goods and services. Rather, the Rabbit was more about barter and the ancient concept of "you scratch my back, I scratch yours." I had something witty in mind about the similarities between economics and politics at this level, but it's late, and I'm not getting any younger.
Oh, and the Rabbit was definitely goal-oriented, whereas a real-world economy doesn't seem to exhibit such intelligent behavior as striving toward specific goals. A real-world economy is a pretty Darwinian thing, and what I'm talking about is not quite that kind of free-for-all.
The working definition provided in that article is, again:
Quotation marks used in this way are informally called scare quotes. Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase from which you, the writer, wish to distance yourself because you consider that word or phrase to be odd or inappropriate for some reason.
While it's true that the article does provide several examples which emphasize "this is their term, not mine," the article also makes it clear that they can be used to express disapproval (of a word or phrase), irony, or sarcasm. In other words, you're narrowing the definition by picking and choosing the pieces of the article to which I linked.
In the context of the original Slashdot article and the grandparent post, I believe "happy" was a paraphrase of the general sense of the original source material, and I think the Slashdot article's author intended to convey a bit of scorn or sarcasm by the use of scare quotes. This is not dissimilar to several of the examples from the article to which I linked.
In point of fact, the very first example cited on the page I linked agrees with my understanding and not with yours:
The use of quotation marks can be extended to cases which are not exactly direct quotations. Here is an example:
Linguists sometimes employ a technique they call "inverted reconstruction".
The phrase in quote marks is not a quotation from anyone in particular, but merely a term which is used by some people -- in this case, linguists.
(Emphasis added.) In other words, scare quotes don't have to correspond to an exact quotation. In the Slashdot article, the author clearly was summarizing the gist of another article with a single word, and in the same instance implying that they don't buy what it's saying.
So, my statement stands. In the future, try not to be so legalistic / literalist in your reading of articles about grammar. This is natural language, not computer code. If you want to see some different perspectives on definitions of scare quotes that challenge your narrow view of a single article, you could try the Wikipedia entry, or this interesting blog entry, or even this answers.com topic. Sheesh.
Vernor Vinge has often talked and written about intelligence amplification techniques, such as amplifying the intelligence of an individual or harnessing the power of many minds together. In his latest novel, Rainbows End (yes, the apostrophe is omitted intentionally, a fact the author draws attention to multiple times in the book), Vinge postulates one such mechanism for realizing group intelligence. What if an AI that was only moderately smart built up a social network of "experts" and well-placed non-experts, and found ways to essentially get people to do things for it by promising various inducements? The beauty is, an AI would be very adept at tirelessly managing such a network so that each contributor wasn't just contributing to the AI's primary goal, but also contributing to satisfying the promises made to other contributors.
Furthermore, the participants in this network wouldn't necessarily have to be aware of each other, nor would they need to be aware that they were part of a collective intelligence. People tend to cooperate more easily when they don't realize they're doing it.
We humans have a lot of core competencies, but neither managing group efforts nor making decisions by committe belong to this category. Machines, on the other hand, are fantastic at administrative minutiae. Machines also are much better at number crunching in general, something we already rely on them heavily for. The merging of human and machine cultures seems like a logical progression to me, and I don't believe I am drinking Kurzweil's Kool-Aid.
Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase from which you, the writer, wish to distance yourself because you consider that word or phrase to be odd or inappropriate for some reason. Possibly you regard it as too colloquial for formal writing; possibly you think it's unfamiliar or mysterious; possibly you consider it to be inaccurate or misleading; possibly you believe it's just plain wrong. Quite often scare quotes are used to express irony or sarcasm[...]
Quotation marks are used for more than just direct quotes.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of interesting that "The Great Global Warming Swindle" gets mentioned a lot in the comments on this article. So I might as well mention the RealClimate debunking of this documentary (mentioned briefly in another comment thread).
Bruce Tognazzini has long taken Microsoft to task for their methodology. Tog, who used to work for Apple, believed in using real, objective metrics -- video of users, using stopwatches to measure time intervals, etc. Microsoft relies more heavily on questionnaires and other subjective criteria. In other words, to contrast the two approaches, Apple's approach is that the stopwatch never lies; Microsoft's approach emphasizes what users think makes them fast or more productive, rather than what actually makes the users faster or more productive.
But really, this all boils down to the logical fallacy of assuming that just because a corporation spends a lot of money on something, they spent their money well (instead of, say, spending the money as a smoke-screen to appear that they've done their homework).
The points about menu speed and mouse precision are actually valid ones, though the article probably doesn't explain these issues as well as it should. The mouse precision issue isn't so much a product of the mouse's resolution, but rather, the way in which Microsoft handles things like cascading/hierarchical menus, icon hit zones, and the like. Tog wrote an excellent article about Fitts' Law which gets mentioned every so often, and it's still a good article which really reams Microsoft on a number of points. Pay attention to Question 6 and its answer, for example; this directly bears on menu performance and indirectly on how the mouse is used by typical users.
For those too lazy to follow the link...
To be fair, Tog also takes Apple to task, especially since Apple broke some of its own UI guidelines in OS X.
All that said, my personal experience with Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the Vista previews I've seen seems to indicate a general negative trend with UI responsiveness. Menu rendering lag is especially bad in XP, though I will concede that some of the problem may be due to the insane system load imposed by my (corporate mandated) anti-virus software.
Of course, since you're a MS partisan, you'll deny everything I've just said, but I figured I'd inject something here just to try and add a little balance.
Closing note: Since TFA is lean on details, I actually followed the link in TFA to the source material only to find out that it's strictly for-pay. (You can download a PDF of the table of contents for free, but that's not very useful.) So I can understand why you'd find the article to be "a very subjective review with no hard facts." It's not even that -- it's an executive summary of someone else's work. I'm simply not willing to fork over the money to read someone else's analysis.
I wonder if the FSF is going to use this opportunity to file a friend-of-the-court brief elucidating this point?
...and factually inaccurate to boot. Surprised nobody already noted that the article claims that JPL is in Houston, TX. (It's actually located in Pasadena, CA, and as far as I know there are no JPL satellite offices anywhere else.) You'd think that ITWire could do some basic fact checking, like checking JPL's web site.
Just FYI, the only thing deprecated here is the Cocoa-Java bridge. That is to say, the Cocoa API for Java has been deprecated; you can still write Java Swing applications, and if you need to use Cocoa, write your application in Objective C. Pure Java apps are still supported in OS X and likely will remain so for some time, as Apple has been pretty good about supporting and promoting Java. (Their presence at the last Java One spoke volumes, and judging from the number of Java developers at the conference using Apple laptops running OS X, I don't think the lack of a supported Cocoa-Java bridge was a big problem for anyone.)
No, they are not.
(Or see any news coverage of the format war, which clearly shows Disney as one of the 5 out of 6 studios backing Blu-Ray.)
I bought a Denon DVD-2910 because it handled DVD-Audio, SACD, and HDCD. It's one of those fancy "universal disc" players, though that title was more accurate before HD-DVD and Blu-Ray came out.
Before the Denon, I had a Toshiba DVD-A10 which played DVD-Audio. For HDCD, I had a Rotel RCD-990. HDCD is backwards compatible with standard CD players -- the extra resolution audio data is encoded in such a way that you need specialized DACs and a license from Microsoft (who bought the rights to HDCD from Pacific Microsonics). The Denon doesn't sound nearly as good with HDCD as the Rotel did, but that's a small price to pay; the benefit is being able to play all the audio disc formats I have in my collection without having multiple hardware units.
Besides consolidating functionality, my decision was influenced by the desire to have progressive scan and upscaling for DVD Video (neither of which the Toshiba player could handle); a choice of component, DVI, and HDMI outputs (the Denon has all 3); and decent SACD playback, since many audiophiles seem to be embracing SACD, forcing the boutique record labels to release in that format. I wasn't willing to throw away all the DVD Audio content that I had accumulated just to get SACD.
I know I'm not a typical purchaser, but I definitely think there's some merit to the idea that hybrid/universal players can provide peace-of-mind to a buyer. Heck, I knew I was sacrificing some quality in a few areas, but the benefit of being able to play everything that I cared about outweighed the sacrifices.
Comparing to the current situation with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I think the one make-or-break factor is whether Universal (the movie studio) will continue to offer compelling content in HD-DVD only. I don't buy the pr0n argument, since high def doesn't really provide so much of a benefit. Many early pr0n releases on disc were actually video CD, not proper DVD, and were advertised as "works in most DVD players." The benefit there for the consumer was the convenience of a disc; the benefit to the producer of the content is the cheap cost of manufacture relative to tape.
Last I read on the subject, the firmware "fix" actually made things worse. This was covered previously on Slashdot, incidentally. (Sorry, don't have the link.) Anyway, last I checked, the PS3 can output 720p, but only if the source material supports that -- and right now, the only source material playable on the PS3 that outputs in 720p is games. Blu-Ray movies still won't down-scale to 720p. (If this has changed very recently, someone let me know, but the last big firmware improvement I know about was to fix backward compatibility with PS2 games.)
Just wanted to point out, you can set the PS3 to output 1080i (which apparently the PS3 can do easily enough since there is no scaling required for this operation). For users who want to play Blu-Ray movies, they can set the output preference to 1080i while watching movies, and 720p for games -- which is what the friendly ArsTechnica folks had recommended for a while now.
Still waiting on a PS3 firmware update that lets users set separate preferences (in a rational way) for Blu-Ray playback and game play. I bought my Sharp Aquos LCD TV before the Aquos line started getting 1080p support; my TV is 720p native, though it does a good job with 1080i material. (The actual LCD panel supports 768 scanlines, so no matter whether I'm watching 720p or 1080i source material, there's some kind of scaling going on behind the scenes.)
In practice, if you author a blog which doesn't require site membership to view, you could be liable under this bill, since you have no way to say for sure how many unique people actually viewed your blog at any given time.
Season 10 is in mid-season hiatus. Just to confuse matters, the SciFi network often refers to the last episode before the hiatus as a "season finale" and the first episode after the hiatus as a "season premiere."
According to the official website for SG-1, new episodes are "coming soon." Looks like the UK already got to see episodes we're currently waiting for, if comments in the Gateworld forum are to be believed.
So far, I haven't been able to pin down an exact air date for the US. The Wikipedia entries for SG-1's episodes only give the original airdate for "The Quest part 2" as January 9th, which appears to be the airdate for the UK. This kind of scheduling idiocy is why season 1 of Battlestar Galactica was well underway in the UK by the time it started airing in the US.
Best I can say: According to this forum thread, the second half of season 10 will begin airing here in the States in April. Kind of a long time to wait, IMHO.
Nobody's denying that Quantum Entanglement happened. The denial is of the interpretation that you seem to insist is the only valid interpretation of the experimental evidence.
Being able to flip the state of a particle at location A and observing a corresponding state-flip of an entangled particle at location B doesn't mean that meaningful information has been transmitted, despite what your intuition might tell you.
In other words, the measured results (which, by the way, you failed on 3 occasions to provide a citation for) do not mean what you think they mean. So for you to ask, "I'm illiterate in the math in that Wikipedia page, but how does it account for the measured results?" is kind of problematic from a couple standpoints. First, math is the language of science, and if you can't understand the math, you haven't a prayer of fully appreciating any answer that anyone could provide you with. Second, you've made an intrinsic assumption that you understand what the "measured results" of these Quantum Entanglement (QE) experiments are, and what these results mean.
So I would ask that you provide specific links to the specific experiments to which you are alluding, rather than making vague hand-waving references to "reporting [you've] read." You're not really asking critical questions based on what you know, you're asking critical questions based on what you think you know, and the only way for us to directly address this and answer your questions is for you to do us the courtesy of being as specific with us as we are with you. Getting petulant isn't going to gain you any satisfaction.
Based on the No-communication theorem (linked previously), we know that statistically, it's impossible to distinguish between an intentional state change at the receiving end and a random state change. We also know from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which I'm sure you've read about somewhere) that measuring any state of an entangled particle with any degree of precision will modify other quantum state information in unknowable ways. In addition, the state of the complementary particle in the entangled pair gets modified as well.
Because of this "noise," the best you can hope for is a statistical understanding of what's going on. Statistics is based on aggregate behavior (averaging over time, or averaging over many members of a population, for example). Any "signal" that might be there will be drowned out by noise.
It's worth noting that if you follow Wikipedia links, you'll eventually wind up at articles about quantum cryptography and the EPR paradox. The quantum crypto article is interesting because it directly addresses some of the questions you have, since quantum crypto can be made to rely on particle entanglement... which would seem to bolster the interpretation that you favor, but read closer: Even though you don't have 100% confidence in the "signal" that is being sent from location A to location B because of the statistical issues previously raised, you can have a greater-than 50% probability of correctly deducing the state of the "sender." An eavesdropper will reduce this probability below the 50% threshold, in such a way that the eavesdropping is detectable. And even saying all this, I've actually somewhat mis-stated how this is supposed to work in an effort to simplify it. It's not so much that someone is twiddling particle A and someone else is measuring particle B; it's more like someone is making measurements of particle A, and someone else is measuring particle B, and because of entanglement, those measurements are going to correlate some percentage of the time...
The 5% statistic you quote is reflective of installed base, but it's the subset of the installed base that is Internet connected. (Not all Macs are connected to the 'Net, any more than all PCs are.)
I'm a bit dubious of the claim that 50% of all computers sold are laptops, but even so, the Wired prediction is that 20% of all laptops sold this year will be MacBooks (Pro or non-Pro). That's a prediction of market share, which is not the same thing as installed base at all. Even if Apple managed to pull off what Wired is predicting, the installed base of Macs won't magically double in one year's time; that's because all the computers that have been purchased before now will continue to operate until they either cease to function on their own, or are retired.
Since personal computer sales are plateauing (moreso in the desktop sector), it's fair to say that the total number of computers purchased this year probably won't exceed the total number of computers in service prior to this year. Expect installed base numbers to change gradually, and don't rely solely on user agent stats compiled from web sites.
The article you linked is interesting. Under the "Durability" comparison, the site you linked indicates that LCD is more durable than plasma in real world circumstances, almost the opposite of the claim made by the Panasonic site referred to in TFA that compares LCD and plasma. (The Panasonic site claims that LCD screens are more fragile than plasma screens, since plasma screens have glass surfaces and LCD screens usually have "delicate" polymer surfaces.)
It's also interesting that most retailers will gladly lie to you about the capabilities of the two technologies. Every time I speak to a representative at Ultimate Electronics, they claim that LCD has better black levels than plasma. (The Panasonic comparison site says plasma has better black levels and contrast, and I tend to agree with the Panasonic site in this one matter.) The reason they make this claim is that, when you turn off a LCD television (i.e., when the backlight is off), the screen is much darker than a comparably sized plasma display, which tends to reflect a bit more ambient light from the room. However, most end-users don't have banks of fluorescent lights in their living rooms, and black level must be measured when the set is actually on and running. Once you do that, you realize that even the best LCDs display dark grays instead of true blacks because there's always some leakage of the backlight through the darkened pixels. With plasma, you turn the pixel off and nothing is emitted, period.
In a darkened home theater, a brand new plasma set would probably yield a much better image, due to superior black level and color gamut.
That said, when I made my decision to buy a new flat-panel TV set, I opted for a Sharp Aquos LCD television. The deciding factors for me were power consumption (LCD is more efficient than plasma at the screen sizes I was interested in), heat generation (summers in Arizona are hot enough, so I don't want to put extra thermal load on the A/C), and display longevity (no "burn-in" effect with LCD, though image ghosting can happen -- but in that case, just turn the display off for a few hours and the memory effect dissipates). The fact that a mere mortal could easily carry one of the Sharp LCDs and mount it just about anywhere was a huge bonus. In my living room, the black levels of LCD have never been an issue, and the color gamut looks plenty nice when watching ATSC (terrestrial broadcast) video material. Upscaled DVD video (I've got my Denon player set to output 720p via HDMI) looks almost as vibrant as broadcast, but not nearly as detailed because it's just upscaled. In short, I'm happy.
No it is not, according to RealClimate. Snowfall may be increasing at the interior of Greenland, but it's offset by an accelerated dumping of ice into the ocean at the periphery.
From RealClimate:Emphasis added by me.
Actually, arid regions will tend to become more arid before increased precipitation reverses this trend. You see, when the temperatures go up, already dry land will lose even more moisture (and at a faster rate) due to evaporation. We're already seeing some effects of this in Arizona, where I live; the depletion of the water table due to human and industrial consumption (e.g., chip fabs) only compounds this problem further.
And you're aware that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, right?
Cloud cover might increase planetary albedo enough to offset some of the loss of ice and snow, but clouds are by no means opaque to all wavelengths of radiation -- and clouds are a lot less dense than sheets of ice.
Maybe if you read TFA, you'd recognize that the reason there's such a hubbub on Slashdot regarding this article is that a large percentage of the comments on the article were left by ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christians who all pretty much say the same thing (e.g., it was the biblical flood that extinguished the dinosaurs, and much more recently than the scientifically-agreed-upon period of the asteroid impact that TFA refers to).
Maybe if evangelicals stopped trying to cram their religion down our throats, we wouldn't react so vehemently. Though I must say, if I had to pick between being shouted down by partisans of a scientific theory and being murdered by an angry mob of religious extremists, I'll take the shouting match any day. The thing is, few people have been murdered in the pursuit of Science (the Tuskeegee experiments and various Nazi experiments being the prime counter-examples), while many have been murdered in the name of religion.
Do I need to invoke the murder of Hypatia, the last great Libarian of Alexandria, at the hands of a mob incited by a man who later became a Christian saint, to make my point any clearer? (Carl Sagan goes on at length about this atrocity in the book and television series Cosmos.)
I guess my point is, practice what you preach, and encourage your evangelical fundamentalist comrades to follow your example. If you want non-believers to cut you some slack, then kindly get the believers to stop behaving badly by vandalizing the comment sections on science-oriented web sites, for a start. And while you're at it, stop being so self-centered: this isn't a reaction against you, but against the fundie loonies who effectively vandalized the web page of TFA.
Oh, and incidentally, since you toss off a list of supposed "evidence" against evolution and modern cosmology and in favor of creationism, I should point out that each one of those points has been debunked endlessly. Repeating these time-worn non-arguments doesn't make them any more true or correct. As someone trained in the physical sciences, I get tired of trying to explain to people why evolution doesn't violate thermodynamics, or why extreme energy densities (e.g., those found in the Universe of the Big Bang, as well as those found in the singularities of black holes) cause most physical laws as we commonly understand them to break down. For that matter, it gets tiresome trying to explain why scientific "laws" are descriptive, not proscriptive like the laws that men write. So when you complain about believers having their intelligence assailed or mocked, perhaps you should step back and realize that part of the reason for the mockery is the repetition of the same old retread non-arguments that we scientists have to endure from the extremist believers out there.
The article doesn't say what kind of crystal, but I'm willing to bet it's calcium fluoride. This crystal is transparent to ultraviolet (which makes it a good candidate for EUV lithography in chip fabrication, a potentially useful technology in shrinking our fabrication process sizes), and it is birefringent. The researcher specifically mentioned using ultraviolet photons, so this made me think of calcium fluoride. The birefringent property would make it ideal for an experiment where you needed to split a UV beam to create entangled photon pairs.
And yes, I'm aware that birefringence also poses problems for using CaF2 as an optical material for EUV lithography. (I was working for a company that was developing novel techniques for growing these crystals with the crystalline lattice aligned in such a way that grinding a usable lens out of the material was much more practical.) For this experimental application, though, birefringence is actually an asset, not a liability.
This is just flat-out wrong. SACD was touted from the beginning as being capable of packing both a Red Book CDDA layer and a SACD/DSD layer on the same side of a disc, and in fact, Sony promoted this feature as beneficial to retailers -- this way, retailers in the U.S. like Best Buy could stock a single hybrid disc instead of multiple SKUs for different versions of the same album. One of the biggest shots-in-the-arm for SACD was the series of stealth hybrid releases several years ago of classic rock albums, including the entire re-release of the Rolling Stones back catalog.
It's true that Sony initially held off on releasing hybrid discs because of the manufacturing challenges of bonding the layers together. The early years of video DVD had similar challenges -- many early movie releases on DVD were so-called "flipper" discs because many companies were reluctant to release dual-layer discs, instead opting to put a single layer on each side. Consumer choice won out in the end, so flippers are pretty rare except for discs with episodic content (e.g., the Spawn animated series), and discs that have the widescreen version of a film on one side, and the full-screen version on the other side. It's also true that the first SACD players were stereo-only, so many early SACD discs lacked a surround version of the program material.
I have several hybrid SACD discs in my collection. In the U.S., the packaging was designed to clearly indicate which discs could play on CD players and which discs could play only on SACD players.
You are correct that pop music is almost dead on SACD, although there are boutique releases of non-classical albums in SACD format all the time. (e.g., Classic Rock, and even Industrial -- I have the SACD special edition of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. The discs are hybrid, I believe, so that even fans without SACD players could still enjoy the 2-disc set.) Similar things can be said for DVD-Audio.
I suppose you could model such a thing as an economy, but it's a managed economy... because while I mentioned the carrot and omitted mention of the stick, the fact is that for such a system to be efficient, you need a way to discourage non-productive effort. (In this case, "non-productive" from the POV of the AI holding this web of people together.) To get people to cooperate, you have to give them the illusion of choice while still managing to keep them on-task.
Professor Vinge is very Libertarian, and it shows in his writing. I definitely got the feeling from Rainbows End that the Rabbit was driven by many Libertarian economic concepts. But this isn't exactly an economy in the modern sense of using money as a value placeholder for goods and services. Rather, the Rabbit was more about barter and the ancient concept of "you scratch my back, I scratch yours." I had something witty in mind about the similarities between economics and politics at this level, but it's late, and I'm not getting any younger.
Oh, and the Rabbit was definitely goal-oriented, whereas a real-world economy doesn't seem to exhibit such intelligent behavior as striving toward specific goals. A real-world economy is a pretty Darwinian thing, and what I'm talking about is not quite that kind of free-for-all.
Put simply, you misread the article I linked to.
The working definition provided in that article is, again:While it's true that the article does provide several examples which emphasize "this is their term, not mine," the article also makes it clear that they can be used to express disapproval (of a word or phrase), irony, or sarcasm. In other words, you're narrowing the definition by picking and choosing the pieces of the article to which I linked.
In the context of the original Slashdot article and the grandparent post, I believe "happy" was a paraphrase of the general sense of the original source material, and I think the Slashdot article's author intended to convey a bit of scorn or sarcasm by the use of scare quotes. This is not dissimilar to several of the examples from the article to which I linked.
In point of fact, the very first example cited on the page I linked agrees with my understanding and not with yours:(Emphasis added.) In other words, scare quotes don't have to correspond to an exact quotation. In the Slashdot article, the author clearly was summarizing the gist of another article with a single word, and in the same instance implying that they don't buy what it's saying.
So, my statement stands. In the future, try not to be so legalistic / literalist in your reading of articles about grammar. This is natural language, not computer code. If you want to see some different perspectives on definitions of scare quotes that challenge your narrow view of a single article, you could try the Wikipedia entry, or this interesting blog entry, or even this answers.com topic. Sheesh.
Vernor Vinge has often talked and written about intelligence amplification techniques, such as amplifying the intelligence of an individual or harnessing the power of many minds together. In his latest novel, Rainbows End (yes, the apostrophe is omitted intentionally, a fact the author draws attention to multiple times in the book), Vinge postulates one such mechanism for realizing group intelligence. What if an AI that was only moderately smart built up a social network of "experts" and well-placed non-experts, and found ways to essentially get people to do things for it by promising various inducements? The beauty is, an AI would be very adept at tirelessly managing such a network so that each contributor wasn't just contributing to the AI's primary goal, but also contributing to satisfying the promises made to other contributors.
Furthermore, the participants in this network wouldn't necessarily have to be aware of each other, nor would they need to be aware that they were part of a collective intelligence. People tend to cooperate more easily when they don't realize they're doing it.
We humans have a lot of core competencies, but neither managing group efforts nor making decisions by committe belong to this category. Machines, on the other hand, are fantastic at administrative minutiae. Machines also are much better at number crunching in general, something we already rely on them heavily for. The merging of human and machine cultures seems like a logical progression to me, and I don't believe I am drinking Kurzweil's Kool-Aid.
In case you don't feel like clicking the link:
Quotation marks are used for more than just direct quotes.