I'm glad this reaches Apple's stated goals of user experience speed, and universal availability. I'm sure the system will be completely stable, and the multi-server communications will be totally secure.
Now can we be treated like adults and just be told the real damned reason out loud?
Families doing poorly are completely screwed. Rampant unemployment has destroyed their budget. The families I see around here have seen hours cut back significantly. If you want to help them, get the unemployment rates down. Increase small business entrepreneurship and overall opportunities.
A 1% increase in the cost of consumables? If you presume that 31% of welfare mother's budgets goes to consumables, that's an overall per-month increase of $3.
The cost of deflation, comparatively, is a major cut to investment spending. That investment is exactly what we need to get rolling again. It also increases debt burden to debtors, and increases the likelyhood of foreclosure. The opportunity cost of lower growth and the increased debt burden surely will cost struggling families more than 3$ a month.
The people who benefit from deflation are the people who have the most cash: the wealthy.
And sure, if you're right on the razor's edge any increase is a bad thing. But address the major problems first. Spurn real local job development. Focus back on low education job growth, rather than the sexy high education / high tech sectors that have consumed our policies. Improve public transportation to improve available job search areas. Nip the rising tide of crime in the butt before it gets out of hand again. These things are all far more reliable indicators of economic viability than an inflation rate going from one historical low to a slightly higher historical low.
The laws passed decades and centuries ago had no concept of modern technology. Broad interpretations and clarifications of how the old laws interact with new technologies in new ways can either be enacted by courts (which isn't their role), or lawmakers. When talking about the narrow subject of contract enforcement, the old laws didn't cover e-signatures, IP rights, the interaction of likeness rights and virtual representations, which purchased rights extend into digital realms, etc.
A very simple example in the contract realm is the debate over whether or not generated speech from text is covered under existing publishing contracts as end-user format shifting, or if it is a created derivative work that requires additional contracts. That can either be decided by the whims of a court, or it can be settled by lawmakers.
We're actually going through one of the lower inflation periods in history. We've been quite shy of the government's target sweet spot of %2 inflation since the crash. The risk of deflation, and the associated major problems, is very real. The deflation last year definitely didn't help.
Still, you're talking about a change of %1 or so. The unemployment rate is just dipping below one in ten families, and the underemployment and "given up" rate remains far higher than that. People had retirement accounts wiped out. Schools that bought on margin and lost all of their investments, have had to cut back massively on opportunities offered for personal and entrepreneurial growth. While we're on the subject, the availability of small business and startup funding has basically died. The lucky people who have jobs have seen career setbacks that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Comparatively, a 1% increase in the cost of consumables is spitting in the ocean. This is especially true when that change is, by most expert opinions, desirable.
I'm not saying that there is or is not going to be a recovery. But the change you're talking about there seems somewhat irrelevant.
Unfortunately, I fear whatever data we've collected since the early 90's pretty much needs to be thrown out.
The mid 90's saw an explosive growth in technologies that fundamentally changed the human condition and drove the economy to dizzying heights. By 2000, the associated huge stock bubble burst. But everyone had a taste of prosperity, and looked to the dream of Home ownership, like Japan in the late 80's. A second prosperity bubble formed around real estate in the 2000's, which burst in 2008 or so.
Al Gore aside, none of these things had anything to do with which party was in power. I'm not saying that who controls what is irrelevant, just that most of the data collected since Bush #1 probably needs to be thrown out as being unfairly prejudicial. And since the parties today are very different than the parties from the 70's and 80's, the relevance of "Dems are better for the economy!" or "Republicans are better for the economy!" when looking at this one point of data seems like a form of rooting for Baseball teams.
The primary purpose of laws is to either to expand the public sector or else to advantage one group in the private sector at the expense of another group so less laws is automatically better for the economy.
Really? The laws that enforce the terms of contracts are automatically bad for the economy? The ones that establish the fed's ability to monitor the monetary supply in an attempt to mitigate fluctuations in valuation are automatically bad for the economy? The ones which establish fire departments, roadways, and the international negotiations which provide protections for domestic businesses doing business with international companies are bad for the economy?
You know what you have without laws? Anarchy. By Definition you have anarchy. Anarchy is a terrible state within which to attempt to conduct business.
Currently in Massachusetts, if a builder wants to create a low-rent housing unit, they have a single connection point which approves or disapproves of it, bypassing a degree of zoning and other bureaucracy. This makes it easier to create low-rent housing. The repeal would return to NIMBY status.
It's not about government making housing. It's about facilitating it.
While the high-profile election seats may be that way, local elections actually generally have people that will effect your daily life. Should the city revise your street to be more cyclist friendly, at the expense of parking? Will they approve of installing billboards in front of the local lake? You have a pretty solid voice in deciding who makes those decisions. And people at the local level tend to be genuine and earnest.
Similarly, if your state does ballot propositions, they can be incredibly powerful. California might end the war on pot. Massachusetts might kill affordable housing. These are important things which are up for a yes-or-no vote.
I once thought like you do. In 2000, I thought "These guys are both sellout corporate tools who are only interested in money." "They both must be equally bad," I thought. OMFG did Bush prove me wrong. The lesser of two evils might still be evil, but damn can the greater of two evils get us into some huge intractable problems.
QNX was just bought by RIM, and is shipping on a Blackberry tablet. It is scheduled to replace the old Blackberry OS "soon." I suspect we'll see huge strides from RIM. The idea of a high-profile consumer QNX platform makes me giddy.
The Wii has a great system where it just records daily activity to a friendly little log, and stamps Mario's smile on it. There is no way to delete it, alter it, move it, or whatnot. And they put it in its own friendly little calendar view where file activities like faking your usage or deleting the log doesn't really come up. They've invisibly made it completely natural that the system records what you do, and that you can't do anything about it.
But the program isn't illegal, just against the marketplace rules.
IANAL, but installing it on someone else's phone is probably illegal in the US as there are quite specific rules around wiretapping. And the app store doesn't just offer these things frozen in a box. It does the actual installing for you. That may open the app store up to liability if they continued to knowingly profit from it. To torture an analogy, the app store is not just a knife vending machine. You put in a quarter, and the knife shoots forward repeatedly in an attempt to stab people.
If the primary purpose of the application seems to be to spy on people, the non-infringing uses aren't really going to be considered by a court. If they were to be valid uses, the app would probably need to go out of its way to reduce illegal ones to be salable in the US. For example, have a real home-screen icon. Every 10th message send a text to the original phone reminding them that forwarding is still on. etc.
They also gather information on you through Google Mail, chat, *probably* voice, orkut, and other Google services. In they valley at least, they offer WiFi hotspots that they track to help improve search results and personal advertisements. They can tie your advertising profile to specific locations, based upon Google maps and your plethora of IP addresses. And, of course, they can track your surfing habits across their network of advertising partners.
While it's not really spying, it is a disquieting amount of private or semi-private information.
The entire summary is devoted to explaining what a genetic algorithm is, though I'm not convinced this is a particularly "genetic" genetic algorithm.
I've known this technique to be used frequently in game development. It sounds like someone is using it to find good opening gambits in Starcraft. I say "good", because generational algorithms can frequently find "local" optimal solutions, whereas there may be better solutions further away from your breeding start point. You're just never sure you've found the best solution.
The actual interesting points come in the details of the strategies the program found, but those are only really of interest to Starcraft nerds.
The president is authorized to respond to an attack without the mandate of congress for 90 days. If he wants to go to war with another country without first being attacked, he needs a congressional vote.
I feel like for optional "humanitarian" wars like Iraq, there really ought to be a public referendum. I don't think anyone elected the harmless, dottering Bush Jr thinking that he would get us into the most expensive and intractable optional wars since Vietnam. He just seemed like it was going to spend his days on the ranch tearing down public broadcasting.
While I think our elected officials should have a lot of power, the power to declare war without provocation seems like it should rest with the people.
I was actually talking to a commander in the army about this the other day. The military isn't out there to kill. It's out to complete missions. These missions are designated by people above them in the rank chain, who know more about the situation than they do. Killing is not the goal. Killing is sometimes the means to complete a mission, and the Army is one of the few groups where killing, and dying, are acceptable ways of meeting specific goals. But it's all about the particulars of the mission.
In theory, there is no reason why the military has to be involved in anything more than accidental deaths. In practice, the world is full of bastards who need to be shot. But anything that helps the military achieve their objectives more cleanly and quickly will probably save lives.
Unless those are some amazingly tough Kevlar tents, I'm guessing security is achieved through a means other than bombproofness. Really, you're looking at the durability of wooden outhouses in World War 2 Italy: not very bullet proof, but guarded by tanks.
Gasoline powered vehicles were the "clean" alternative to horse poop. We tend to create better and cleaner technology, then push it to the point where the little side-effects become unbearable.
I'm OK with this, as it seems like a very natural tendency. It has allowed Humanity to become as big and effective as we have been. But "clean" pretty much means smaller side-effects, and that means we can use a lot more of it to get to the same level of side-effects. And then we do. Ain't people grand?
He'll either convince some executive MBA somewhere without an engineering degree that it's a visionary future for their company, or he won't. That executive will run off and commit to using it in all of their 201X cars in exchange for an exclusive. That car company will then ship a series of cars that in practice will have only slightly better gas mileage than before, but will also have a fatal flaw that makes the damned cars impossible to use long-term or fix. Committed to the technology and career on the line, the car company in 202X will finally create a solid engine, by which time their reputation will have been sullied. Caught in the great vegetable speculation bubble crash of 202X, they will be bailed out and become property of their home government.
...or we run out of liquid hydrocarbons. We know there is a fixed amount in the ground, and growing the stuff has proven unwieldy.
Electricity for cars is theoretically better, as it is source neutral. Then we can switch to any of a number of available electricity sources, such as nuclear, thermo, tidal, coal, etc. Making more efficient gas engines is great, especially as there is clearly room for improvement in the vehicles we have now. But in general, that's going to start getting prohibitively expensive as demand outstrips resources. All of the work we're putting into electric cars now is basically RnD for that period.
Things I would love to see standard in all new editors:
1. Little triangles that hide blocks of code unless you explicitly open and investigate them. 2. Dynamic error detection. Give me a little underline when I write out a variable that hasn't been defined yet. Give a soft red background to lines of code that wouldn't compile. That sort of thing. 3. While we're at-it, "warning" colors. When "=" is used in a conditional, for example, that's an unusual situation that should be underlined in Yellow. 4. Hard auto-indent. It may be two spaces in the source code, but accidentally copying the indentation, and putting it in the wrong places, etc, should just be taken care of. That shouldn't even be an issue any more. 5. Code-hint hover. When you hover over a function name, bring up a window with the first few lines of that function. Maybe open it in a "related code" pane? 6. Right-click to jump to anything. Right-click a variable to jump to the declaration, or goto other places it is used. Right-click a class name to bring up that class definition. 7. Start typing out a function, and get a menu of variable-specific functions that can be called. Flash actually does this surprisingly well, or did before CS5.
Not to be too pragmatic since I'm genuinely curious, but as a native Japanese speaker and typist, is it slower to read ASCII versions of your language? Or have you adapted to it like a third way of writing?
Not to hijack your comment, but is there a quote source that specifically talks about ISP's? The article says ISP's, but the quotes from the minister make it sound more like a person-to-content-creator system. If Wired says something wrong, there would be a standardized way to complain to Wired. That sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad this reaches Apple's stated goals of user experience speed, and universal availability. I'm sure the system will be completely stable, and the multi-server communications will be totally secure.
Now can we be treated like adults and just be told the real damned reason out loud?
Families doing poorly are completely screwed. Rampant unemployment has destroyed their budget. The families I see around here have seen hours cut back significantly. If you want to help them, get the unemployment rates down. Increase small business entrepreneurship and overall opportunities.
A 1% increase in the cost of consumables? If you presume that 31% of welfare mother's budgets goes to consumables, that's an overall per-month increase of $3.
The cost of deflation, comparatively, is a major cut to investment spending. That investment is exactly what we need to get rolling again. It also increases debt burden to debtors, and increases the likelyhood of foreclosure. The opportunity cost of lower growth and the increased debt burden surely will cost struggling families more than 3$ a month.
The people who benefit from deflation are the people who have the most cash: the wealthy.
And sure, if you're right on the razor's edge any increase is a bad thing. But address the major problems first. Spurn real local job development. Focus back on low education job growth, rather than the sexy high education / high tech sectors that have consumed our policies. Improve public transportation to improve available job search areas. Nip the rising tide of crime in the butt before it gets out of hand again. These things are all far more reliable indicators of economic viability than an inflation rate going from one historical low to a slightly higher historical low.
The laws passed decades and centuries ago had no concept of modern technology. Broad interpretations and clarifications of how the old laws interact with new technologies in new ways can either be enacted by courts (which isn't their role), or lawmakers. When talking about the narrow subject of contract enforcement, the old laws didn't cover e-signatures, IP rights, the interaction of likeness rights and virtual representations, which purchased rights extend into digital realms, etc.
A very simple example in the contract realm is the debate over whether or not generated speech from text is covered under existing publishing contracts as end-user format shifting, or if it is a created derivative work that requires additional contracts. That can either be decided by the whims of a court, or it can be settled by lawmakers.
We're actually going through one of the lower inflation periods in history. We've been quite shy of the government's target sweet spot of %2 inflation since the crash. The risk of deflation, and the associated major problems, is very real. The deflation last year definitely didn't help.
Still, you're talking about a change of %1 or so. The unemployment rate is just dipping below one in ten families, and the underemployment and "given up" rate remains far higher than that. People had retirement accounts wiped out. Schools that bought on margin and lost all of their investments, have had to cut back massively on opportunities offered for personal and entrepreneurial growth. While we're on the subject, the availability of small business and startup funding has basically died. The lucky people who have jobs have seen career setbacks that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Comparatively, a 1% increase in the cost of consumables is spitting in the ocean. This is especially true when that change is, by most expert opinions, desirable.
I'm not saying that there is or is not going to be a recovery. But the change you're talking about there seems somewhat irrelevant.
Unfortunately, I fear whatever data we've collected since the early 90's pretty much needs to be thrown out.
The mid 90's saw an explosive growth in technologies that fundamentally changed the human condition and drove the economy to dizzying heights. By 2000, the associated huge stock bubble burst. But everyone had a taste of prosperity, and looked to the dream of Home ownership, like Japan in the late 80's. A second prosperity bubble formed around real estate in the 2000's, which burst in 2008 or so.
Al Gore aside, none of these things had anything to do with which party was in power. I'm not saying that who controls what is irrelevant, just that most of the data collected since Bush #1 probably needs to be thrown out as being unfairly prejudicial. And since the parties today are very different than the parties from the 70's and 80's, the relevance of "Dems are better for the economy!" or "Republicans are better for the economy!" when looking at this one point of data seems like a form of rooting for Baseball teams.
The primary purpose of laws is to either to expand the public sector or else to advantage one group in the private sector at the expense of another group so less laws is automatically better for the economy.
Really? The laws that enforce the terms of contracts are automatically bad for the economy? The ones that establish the fed's ability to monitor the monetary supply in an attempt to mitigate fluctuations in valuation are automatically bad for the economy? The ones which establish fire departments, roadways, and the international negotiations which provide protections for domestic businesses doing business with international companies are bad for the economy?
You know what you have without laws? Anarchy. By Definition you have anarchy. Anarchy is a terrible state within which to attempt to conduct business.
Currently in Massachusetts, if a builder wants to create a low-rent housing unit, they have a single connection point which approves or disapproves of it, bypassing a degree of zoning and other bureaucracy. This makes it easier to create low-rent housing. The repeal would return to NIMBY status.
It's not about government making housing. It's about facilitating it.
While the high-profile election seats may be that way, local elections actually generally have people that will effect your daily life. Should the city revise your street to be more cyclist friendly, at the expense of parking? Will they approve of installing billboards in front of the local lake? You have a pretty solid voice in deciding who makes those decisions. And people at the local level tend to be genuine and earnest.
Similarly, if your state does ballot propositions, they can be incredibly powerful. California might end the war on pot. Massachusetts might kill affordable housing. These are important things which are up for a yes-or-no vote.
I once thought like you do. In 2000, I thought "These guys are both sellout corporate tools who are only interested in money." "They both must be equally bad," I thought. OMFG did Bush prove me wrong.
The lesser of two evils might still be evil, but damn can the greater of two evils get us into some huge intractable problems.
QNX was just bought by RIM, and is shipping on a Blackberry tablet. It is scheduled to replace the old Blackberry OS "soon." I suspect we'll see huge strides from RIM. The idea of a high-profile consumer QNX platform makes me giddy.
Depending upon jurisdiction, your partner probably has wiretap laws protecting both them AND the recipient of the messages.
The Wii has a great system where it just records daily activity to a friendly little log, and stamps Mario's smile on it. There is no way to delete it, alter it, move it, or whatnot. And they put it in its own friendly little calendar view where file activities like faking your usage or deleting the log doesn't really come up. They've invisibly made it completely natural that the system records what you do, and that you can't do anything about it.
But the program isn't illegal, just against the marketplace rules.
IANAL, but installing it on someone else's phone is probably illegal in the US as there are quite specific rules around wiretapping. And the app store doesn't just offer these things frozen in a box. It does the actual installing for you. That may open the app store up to liability if they continued to knowingly profit from it. To torture an analogy, the app store is not just a knife vending machine. You put in a quarter, and the knife shoots forward repeatedly in an attempt to stab people.
If the primary purpose of the application seems to be to spy on people, the non-infringing uses aren't really going to be considered by a court. If they were to be valid uses, the app would probably need to go out of its way to reduce illegal ones to be salable in the US. For example, have a real home-screen icon. Every 10th message send a text to the original phone reminding them that forwarding is still on. etc.
They also gather information on you through Google Mail, chat, *probably* voice, orkut, and other Google services. In they valley at least, they offer WiFi hotspots that they track to help improve search results and personal advertisements. They can tie your advertising profile to specific locations, based upon Google maps and your plethora of IP addresses. And, of course, they can track your surfing habits across their network of advertising partners.
While it's not really spying, it is a disquieting amount of private or semi-private information.
"I see you are attempting to spy on your relatives and loved ones. You might also be interested in this trailer for Mission Impossible 4."
The entire summary is devoted to explaining what a genetic algorithm is, though I'm not convinced this is a particularly "genetic" genetic algorithm.
I've known this technique to be used frequently in game development. It sounds like someone is using it to find good opening gambits in Starcraft. I say "good", because generational algorithms can frequently find "local" optimal solutions, whereas there may be better solutions further away from your breeding start point. You're just never sure you've found the best solution.
The actual interesting points come in the details of the strategies the program found, but those are only really of interest to Starcraft nerds.
It could also be that we have friends in the theater, and want them home.
The president is authorized to respond to an attack without the mandate of congress for 90 days. If he wants to go to war with another country without first being attacked, he needs a congressional vote.
I feel like for optional "humanitarian" wars like Iraq, there really ought to be a public referendum. I don't think anyone elected the harmless, dottering Bush Jr thinking that he would get us into the most expensive and intractable optional wars since Vietnam. He just seemed like it was going to spend his days on the ranch tearing down public broadcasting.
While I think our elected officials should have a lot of power, the power to declare war without provocation seems like it should rest with the people.
I was actually talking to a commander in the army about this the other day. The military isn't out there to kill. It's out to complete missions. These missions are designated by people above them in the rank chain, who know more about the situation than they do. Killing is not the goal. Killing is sometimes the means to complete a mission, and the Army is one of the few groups where killing, and dying, are acceptable ways of meeting specific goals. But it's all about the particulars of the mission.
In theory, there is no reason why the military has to be involved in anything more than accidental deaths. In practice, the world is full of bastards who need to be shot. But anything that helps the military achieve their objectives more cleanly and quickly will probably save lives.
Unless those are some amazingly tough Kevlar tents, I'm guessing security is achieved through a means other than bombproofness. Really, you're looking at the durability of wooden outhouses in World War 2 Italy: not very bullet proof, but guarded by tanks.
Gasoline powered vehicles were the "clean" alternative to horse poop. We tend to create better and cleaner technology, then push it to the point where the little side-effects become unbearable.
I'm OK with this, as it seems like a very natural tendency. It has allowed Humanity to become as big and effective as we have been. But "clean" pretty much means smaller side-effects, and that means we can use a lot more of it to get to the same level of side-effects. And then we do. Ain't people grand?
He'll either convince some executive MBA somewhere without an engineering degree that it's a visionary future for their company, or he won't. That executive will run off and commit to using it in all of their 201X cars in exchange for an exclusive. That car company will then ship a series of cars that in practice will have only slightly better gas mileage than before, but will also have a fatal flaw that makes the damned cars impossible to use long-term or fix. Committed to the technology and career on the line, the car company in 202X will finally create a solid engine, by which time their reputation will have been sullied. Caught in the great vegetable speculation bubble crash of 202X, they will be bailed out and become property of their home government.
That's how markets work.
...or we run out of liquid hydrocarbons. We know there is a fixed amount in the ground, and growing the stuff has proven unwieldy.
Electricity for cars is theoretically better, as it is source neutral. Then we can switch to any of a number of available electricity sources, such as nuclear, thermo, tidal, coal, etc. Making more efficient gas engines is great, especially as there is clearly room for improvement in the vehicles we have now. But in general, that's going to start getting prohibitively expensive as demand outstrips resources. All of the work we're putting into electric cars now is basically RnD for that period.
Things I would love to see standard in all new editors:
1. Little triangles that hide blocks of code unless you explicitly open and investigate them.
2. Dynamic error detection. Give me a little underline when I write out a variable that hasn't been defined yet. Give a soft red background to lines of code that wouldn't compile. That sort of thing.
3. While we're at-it, "warning" colors. When "=" is used in a conditional, for example, that's an unusual situation that should be underlined in Yellow.
4. Hard auto-indent. It may be two spaces in the source code, but accidentally copying the indentation, and putting it in the wrong places, etc, should just be taken care of. That shouldn't even be an issue any more.
5. Code-hint hover. When you hover over a function name, bring up a window with the first few lines of that function. Maybe open it in a "related code" pane?
6. Right-click to jump to anything. Right-click a variable to jump to the declaration, or goto other places it is used. Right-click a class name to bring up that class definition.
7. Start typing out a function, and get a menu of variable-specific functions that can be called. Flash actually does this surprisingly well, or did before CS5.
Not to be too pragmatic since I'm genuinely curious, but as a native Japanese speaker and typist, is it slower to read ASCII versions of your language? Or have you adapted to it like a third way of writing?
Not to hijack your comment, but is there a quote source that specifically talks about ISP's? The article says ISP's, but the quotes from the minister make it sound more like a person-to-content-creator system. If Wired says something wrong, there would be a standardized way to complain to Wired. That sort of thing.