You make it sound dishonest, but they're not putting gun to contributors' heads and forcing them to work on webOS.
A decade ago there was a lot of skepticism about Linux and open source in general. How could something that depended on altruism be sustainable? The answer was that open source doesn't depend exclusively on altruism; enlightened self-interest plays a big role in free software's viability. You choose to participate or not based on the benefits and costs to *you*.
Had, for example, BeOS been open sourced under a similar strategy, a lot of people would have been happy to contribute.
I don't know if they're toys, I think they're just optimized for different tasks than laptops. Tablet interfaces and form factors prioritize information consumption over information creation.
I don't think very many people are *replacing* their laptops with tablets, except those that exclusively want to do information-consumption-centric stuff like browsing the web, listening to music and watching videos. Tablets are also excellent for reading email, although they're awkward for responding to email. I'm wondering if that isn't a bonus for some people for whom email creates time management issues.
Simple. Juror is ordered not to post anything on the Internet. Juror *disregards* the order, therefore juror has shown he can't be trusted to follow instructions the judge has given him.
You can't undo an execution, nor can you compensate the executed person if the conviction was in error. If you're considering killing a man, common decency demands you at least provide him with a jury that can be trusted to follow instructions.
Software products are products of corporate cultures. That's not just how people in a corporation tend to think, it's what they tend to value. There is no doubt that Microsoft is capable of producing a secure browser when faced with public criticism and strong competition. The question is whether they will continue to do so if public attention flags or the competition declines, or whether security will be sacrificed to some other business goal.
Of course you can ask that of *any* browser produced by *any* organization, but the point is that it is a bad idea to accord any one browser product a privileged position. Developers should develop to standards then test against multiple products, and users should not be shy about changing browsers. The problem is that IE inherently has a privileged position, and Microsoft has a history of using interlocking, non-proprietary product stacks to drive sales across product categories. That means Microsoft has unusual temptations when it comes to security, because of IE.
when women speak in the presence of men. The reason is that this sound is produced in a woman's lowest vocal register, and ability to produce a wide range of vocal frequencies might be perceived as a sign of reproductive fitness.
I remember reading about a researcher who studied the perception of female laughs by men. The laughs judged most feminine and attractive had frequency components an octave than the high note of the famous tonsil-busting "Queen of the Night" aria from Mozart's Magic Flute.
I once worked with an Arab guy who grew up in the USA who went back to Bahrain for a year during high school. He went to an exclusive public school, and when his British educated teacher had him stand to read Shakespeare, after the teacher heard a few lines the teacher ordered him to sit down, saying, "your accent is offensive to my ears."
The irony is that while North American and British English have diverged over the centuries, the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken. In the eighteenth century, visitors to the American colonies remarked on how "correctly" English was spoken by all classes, even slaves. In the early 19th centuries the shifts in pronunciation which characterize "correct" ("Oxford" or "received") pronunciation were decried by language purists in England.
I once read a complaint by an English reviewer of George C. Scott's performance as Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol". The reviewer was put off by Scott's American accent. However if we take the story to occur around 1840, and Scrooge to be about 60 and not a native Londoner, the difference between Scrooge's accent and that of younger characters like Bob Cratchit would have been rather accurate.
The cost isn't surprising for what it is. It can carry 14 Hellfire missiles for 14 hours. AT$68K a pop, that's up to almost a million dollars of ordnance *per mission*.
That's actually cheap considering what it does for you: it gives you the ability to spy on then kill an enemy at essentially zero tactical risk.
You have to assume that things will slip through of course.
This particular bug could easily have been prevented by making all object requests pass through a layer that implements some form of mandatory access control. But given this story it's obvious there's no such layer in Facebook, and it's up to the developers to bake uniform security policies into every feature they implement. This is a problem that following the DRY principle would have prevented.
But this kind of thing happen all the time in software. Some architectural shortcomings don't bite you until you've got a successful product that needs to be maintained. If you had a choice of course you'd do everything perfectly right out of the gate, but if you can't then you want to address the problems that stand in the way of success. Obviously privacy shortcomings haven't hurt Facebook that much, certainly not as much as failing to scale their system extremely rapidly, which was a remarkable technical success which enabled a remarkable business success.
Mammoths are dumb, If they are going to pick a species to bring back from extinction, they should pick something cooler, like a mermaid or a unicorn or something.
Sure, but it helps to have a system that is designed from the ground up with privacy in mind, rather than having it bolted on when people scream bloody murder.
Sounds like proper hacking protocol to me. You don't necessarily balk at doing something dangerous to yourself, but you take sensible precautions.
I think most of us wouldn't see anything intrinsically immoral about, say, experimenting with homemade explosives, so long as the risks are borne by the person doing the experiment. Not taking reasonable precautions to protect yourself would be stupid, and inconsiderate at the very least of whoever has to scrape up your remains.
So, what we're talking about here is the question of who can be trusted with power, workers or management?
The answer is simple: neither. All the horror stories you've heard about unions? True for some union somewhere. All the horror stories you've heard about management? Also true for some managers somewhere. It'd be a different world if we could just assume people would cooperate when it was in their obvious common interest, but we can't. Good faith is such a fragile thing.
If there were one quality which could fix everything that is wrong with this world, it would be integrity. But we can't be truthful with each other because we're not honest with themselves. We often act like our personal insecurities entitle us to be a**sholes. So the best we can manage in a world where integrity is so uncommon is to organize all the a**holes into competing teams then let them duke it out.
When I started, there were still guys around who worked on computers in the 1950s. They used to talk about how they thought they'd got the world by the balls when they got their hands on an IBM 1401 with it's 4K of RAM.
Once I sat next to an old dude at a professional banquet, and it turned out he'd started working on very early computers during the Korean War. He told me about when his department got an IBM 701 (which would have made it around 1953 or so). He cracked a grin and said (I swear to God), "Yep, that was a stored program jobbie!"
Computing power matters. It's not sufficient of course, because success depends on what you do with that power, but more computing power makes new things possible.
Steve Jobs brilliance wasn't just in getting people working for him to create wonderful designs; he was a shrewd manager who streamlined Apple's product lines before he introduced new classes of product. But perhaps his greatest gift was timing. If he had tried to get into the tablet game back in 2001 when Microsoft did, he might have made a better product, but it wouldn't have been as successful as the iPad (although I did like the Newton, which he axed). Even if it were successful, Apple would have been playing leapfrog with other vendors as they rushed to take advantage of the next marginal improvement in hardware.
Instead he let the other guys discredit themselves, and waited until a number of stars had aligned: mobile CPU capability, power draw, display, cheap RAM, flash memory and battery technology. When those things could be assembled into a compelling, revolutionary product, then he moved. CPU power per watt must have been a big part of that decision. He didn't wait long after those things fell into place. If you replaced the 1GHz A4 in the first gen iPad with the 200-300 MHz XScale chips PDA vendors used a year or two earlier you could not have delivered the iPad experience.
So now that there's enough affordable oomph to make a usable tablet, does an increment of oomph make any difference? Not if you don't do anything new with it. But in tablets, user experience is perhaps the greatest constraint. There may well be killer app uses for tablets that are just a teensy bit too laggy to work.
So an increment of oomph matters quite a bit. Of course it's no reason to buy one tablet over another, but if I were still a developer I'd be watching the oomph race closely.
Mosquitoes live on nectar, not blood. Blood is only used by the females as a protein source for eggs.
Mosquitoes pollinate flowers. If that seems weird, consider that many plant flowers are tiny, and inconspicuous to us humans walking around with our crappy mammalian color vision. Whether there are plants that critically depend on mosquitoes for reproduction I'm guessing we can't say for sure. Can you imagine competing with this eradication project for grant money if your proposal title was "The critical ecological importance of *Anopheles punctipennis*"? In any case this is exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't be known because there is so much about biology that is unknown, nobody's ever got around to looking into most of them. You want to discover a species unknown to science? You don't have to go to some remote tropical rain forest. Start digging in your back yard and identifying the nematodes you find, or identify all the plant species in the town forest.
It's wrong even to suggest that disease pathogens have no function. Most mosquito borne human diseases in North America aren't primarily *human* diseases. Their natural focus is wild birds and humans are collateral damage. Like any other predator, most of the time they pick of the weakest of the herd. If bat guano is a problem, imagine flocks of pigeons or crows running out of control.
So far as I know the only mosquito borne disease with an exclusive human focus is malaria. And I suppose that looked at from the standpoint of other species on the planet that compete with humans for resources, the *Plasmodium* protozoa that cause it are performing a valuable ecological service.:-)
You should be very careful throwing around phrases like "the primary thing they do..." because you're almost certainly talking about "the thing they do that I happen to know about and which concerns me most."
In any event, I'm not too concerned about the negative consequences of eradicating mosquitoes because it will never happen. A female mosquito can lay anywhere from two hundred to a thousand eggs per brood depending on the species. A single gravid female can lead to a huge population in a few years, with every female in each succeeding generation having several thousand offspring. The best you could hope from a program like this is to establish a stable equilibrium at a lower population; most likely the population will crash, most genetic lines will be extinguished (including this one), and then the population will be back to where it was in two years or so.
Around the same time you built yours I had a student job at MIT where I worked in a lab that did research on visual perception stuff for the Air Force and NASA. We had eye tracking systems we'd built that were hooked up to a PDP-11 running RSX-11 (an interesting story in itself, but I digress). One of the things that surprised me was how simple eye tracking was in principle -- at least at the input end. Most of the work is interfacing, which today is a lot easier because of cheap USB interfaces and such.
I'm not at all surprised a maker can put together an eye tracking system for under $300. $300 is quite generous for the task.
What's impressive here isn't the engineering; it's that this kid envisioned doing something, researched how to do it, developed a design and built a prototype. No single step of this is particularly hard for a teenager with access to a library and the Internet. Nor is even dreaming up something like this all that unusual. What's unusual is acting on that impulse, and following it through to a prototype.
The main point I was making was that the (debatable) idea that the scanners serve some important public purpose does not excuse the government from any harm they do.
A secondary point is that you *do* have to take one in a million events into account when you are managing millions of trials that might produce that event; you just have to weigh it accordingly.
Well, the formula is different when you choose for a population than when you choose as a member of the population.
As a member of the flying public, your considerations are dominated by two very immediate things: the indignity of being scanned or the indignity of being patted down. And because you *must* submit to one or the other, these certainties are likely to be more meaningful to you than any remote improbability, like being on a plane that is hijacked or receiving a cancer-causing mutation from the scanning machine.
If you're somebody who sets policy for the flying public, what is a remote improbability for any individual becomes a near certainty you have to deal with. That is to say, it is *certain* that somebody is plotting to hijack a plane somewhere and you've got to do something about it, even though it won't affect the vast majority of people who are flying. Suppose it is ALSO nearly certain that the gazillion radiation exposures you're mandating cause a certain number of cases of cancer, including deaths. You ALSO have to deal with that, even though it's no big deal to the vast majority of fliers.
The law of large numbers doesn't let you off the hook here; in fact it puts you *on* the hook. A tiny marginal difference in cancer probabilities summed over all the radiation exposures amounts to a number of people who get sick or die *as a result of actions you have taken*.
This doesn't mean you don't take action. It means you act *responsibly*.
Suppose the expected number of people to die from terrorism is 10, but the expected number of people to die from cancer is 3; you take the cancer and 7 more people (net) get to live. It's a no-brainer. But suppose because of your sloppy work the number of people who get cancer is actually *6*. That's still better than 10, but you don't get to pat yourself on the back for saving 4 people. On the contrary, you're responsible for 3 deaths that wouldn't have happened if you'd done your job properly.
Most of the printed flyers passed out as OWS NY were from gorups that self-identified as communist. What do you expect people to think?
Now how do you know *most* of the flyers were from self-identified communist groups? Did you do a study, collecting all the flyers you could then doing a statistical analysis? Or did you just hear some guy say it and figure it sounded pretty truthy?
Now I strolled past Occupy Boston and the signs ran from obscure but substantive ("Re-enact Glass-Steagall!"), to the plain obscure ("We are the 99%"). I'm sure there were plenty of socialists down there, but the only references I saw could possibly be ironic ("Support Socialist Programs like Education.").
Dude, you're right about me being so old -- I remember watching John Pertwee's Third Doctor when it was *new*. I'm not the least ashamed of being old because I've never confused growing up with getting priggish. I can still enjoy classic Dr. Who without having to defend most episodes as being serious literary science fiction ("reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" indeed).
The classic series *also* had music that whacked you on the head with emotional cues when the story needed drama that the writers didn't supply. You just didn't notice because you were enjoying the show with your critical faculties turned off. What's more, classic Who had even cruder dialog and acting cues. I was watching an old Tom Baker episode recently and at one point the villain gloats, "Excellent!" and actually does the Montgomery Burns thing with his fingertips. As he does so he is accompanied by an ominous organ music riff. How much more on-the-nose can you get?
The series *did* do some fairly straight science fiction drama story lines, but didn't shy away from burlesque, and some of those burlesque stories were quite entertaining if you were willing to take them on their own terms. The Douglas Adams penned "Pirate Planet" serial was one of them. While the story was clearly operatic in its credibility, it had many subtle Adamsesque touches to the dialog, characterization and plot twists that make the writing stand out. Adams had this gift for mixing the silly and the emotionally credible that you can't appreciate until you can tell the difference.
Isn't it just possible that you're the one whose tastes have gotten a little more selective? That the difference in your reaction to the new series is that you no longer tolerate the obvious storytelling gimmicks you used to take at face value?
Oh, for Pete's sake. I've been watching those Dr. Who "classic" episodes recently, and even at it's best Dr. Who was never *The Prisoner* or *The Twilight Zone* for chrissakes. It's a fun and cheesy "sci-fi" series that doesn't mind being corny or flirting with camp so long as it was entertainment for the whole family. That meant not having The Doctor do any yucky kissing that would offend junior, while giving Pop the occasional shot of Zoe's besequined bum in that catsuit of hers.
Don't get me wrong, I love the classic series, but in the same way I can enjoy "Buckaroo Banzai" without confusing it with "Blade Runner". I love the ridiculous monsters, executed with such cheesy verve. About the only thing I really don't like is how mind-numbingly bad the dialog is in many (although not all) classic episodes. Some of that dialog makes George Lucas's Star Wars Dialog sound like *Casablanca*.
Now why even bother doing a new series that does the same old thing? Are you going to out-Tom-Baker Tom Baker? You can't get that movie serial vibe again because people are just too media savvy. The corn threshold is so much lower.
So I think they've done a very good job keeping the cheesy spirit while spiffing up the production values. The cast and guest talent are top notch, episode pacing is crisp, and the writing for the most part witty, canny and thoughtful. But the writing is inevitably where the new series has to fall down now and then. This is a series that ran for 26 seasons before the modern incarnation, the main character has almost god-like intellect and the stories involve one of the most logically messy themes in science fiction: time travel. Dr. Who has always needed some ad hoc and not very credible limitations in what the Doctor is allowed do. So I think we have to accept a certain amount of story arc continuity sleight of hand, especially given the long history of the series.
That said, I fear that using Great Temporal Reset Button in two successive seasons probably indicates the writers have written the show into a corner that can't be fixed without a fallow period or a series reboot that destroys a lot more than one season's continuity.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound dishonest, but they're not putting gun to contributors' heads and forcing them to work on webOS.
A decade ago there was a lot of skepticism about Linux and open source in general. How could something that depended on altruism be sustainable? The answer was that open source doesn't depend exclusively on altruism; enlightened self-interest plays a big role in free software's viability. You choose to participate or not based on the benefits and costs to *you*.
Had, for example, BeOS been open sourced under a similar strategy, a lot of people would have been happy to contribute.
I don't know if they're toys, I think they're just optimized for different tasks than laptops. Tablet interfaces and form factors prioritize information consumption over information creation.
I don't think very many people are *replacing* their laptops with tablets, except those that exclusively want to do information-consumption-centric stuff like browsing the web, listening to music and watching videos. Tablets are also excellent for reading email, although they're awkward for responding to email. I'm wondering if that isn't a bonus for some people for whom email creates time management issues.
I think in part it's a one-size-fits-all mentality, combined with an ooh-shiny attraction to tablet interfaces.
Gnome 1? Feh. It's Emacs shell buffer all the way, baby. You never have to take your hands off the keyboard.
Oh, and kids, a *real* computer has switches and lights on the front panel so you can examine and set the contents of CPU registers.
Simple. Juror is ordered not to post anything on the Internet. Juror *disregards* the order, therefore juror has shown he can't be trusted to follow instructions the judge has given him.
You can't undo an execution, nor can you compensate the executed person if the conviction was in error. If you're considering killing a man, common decency demands you at least provide him with a jury that can be trusted to follow instructions.
Well, let's wait and see.
Software products are products of corporate cultures. That's not just how people in a corporation tend to think, it's what they tend to value. There is no doubt that Microsoft is capable of producing a secure browser when faced with public criticism and strong competition. The question is whether they will continue to do so if public attention flags or the competition declines, or whether security will be sacrificed to some other business goal.
Of course you can ask that of *any* browser produced by *any* organization, but the point is that it is a bad idea to accord any one browser product a privileged position. Developers should develop to standards then test against multiple products, and users should not be shy about changing browsers. The problem is that IE inherently has a privileged position, and Microsoft has a history of using interlocking, non-proprietary product stacks to drive sales across product categories. That means Microsoft has unusual temptations when it comes to security, because of IE.
when women speak in the presence of men. The reason is that this sound is produced in a woman's lowest vocal register, and ability to produce a wide range of vocal frequencies might be perceived as a sign of reproductive fitness.
I remember reading about a researcher who studied the perception of female laughs by men. The laughs judged most feminine and attractive had frequency components an octave than the high note of the famous tonsil-busting "Queen of the Night" aria from Mozart's Magic Flute.
I once worked with an Arab guy who grew up in the USA who went back to Bahrain for a year during high school. He went to an exclusive public school, and when his British educated teacher had him stand to read Shakespeare, after the teacher heard a few lines the teacher ordered him to sit down, saying, "your accent is offensive to my ears."
The irony is that while North American and British English have diverged over the centuries, the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken. In the eighteenth century, visitors to the American colonies remarked on how "correctly" English was spoken by all classes, even slaves. In the early 19th centuries the shifts in pronunciation which characterize "correct" ("Oxford" or "received") pronunciation were decried by language purists in England.
I once read a complaint by an English reviewer of George C. Scott's performance as Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol". The reviewer was put off by Scott's American accent. However if we take the story to occur around 1840, and Scrooge to be about 60 and not a native Londoner, the difference between Scrooge's accent and that of younger characters like Bob Cratchit would have been rather accurate.
The cost isn't surprising for what it is. It can carry 14 Hellfire missiles for 14 hours. AT$68K a pop, that's up to almost a million dollars of ordnance *per mission*.
That's actually cheap considering what it does for you: it gives you the ability to spy on then kill an enemy at essentially zero tactical risk.
You have to assume that things will slip through of course.
This particular bug could easily have been prevented by making all object requests pass through a layer that implements some form of mandatory access control. But given this story it's obvious there's no such layer in Facebook, and it's up to the developers to bake uniform security policies into every feature they implement. This is a problem that following the DRY principle would have prevented.
But this kind of thing happen all the time in software. Some architectural shortcomings don't bite you until you've got a successful product that needs to be maintained. If you had a choice of course you'd do everything perfectly right out of the gate, but if you can't then you want to address the problems that stand in the way of success. Obviously privacy shortcomings haven't hurt Facebook that much, certainly not as much as failing to scale their system extremely rapidly, which was a remarkable technical success which enabled a remarkable business success.
But Facebook still stinks.
Mammoths are dumb, If they are going to pick a species to bring back from extinction, they should pick something cooler, like a mermaid or a unicorn or something.
... or moderate Republican politicians ...
Sure, but it helps to have a system that is designed from the ground up with privacy in mind, rather than having it bolted on when people scream bloody murder.
The bad news: *I've* patented living under a rock.
Sounds like proper hacking protocol to me. You don't necessarily balk at doing something dangerous to yourself, but you take sensible precautions.
I think most of us wouldn't see anything intrinsically immoral about, say, experimenting with homemade explosives, so long as the risks are borne by the person doing the experiment. Not taking reasonable precautions to protect yourself would be stupid, and inconsiderate at the very least of whoever has to scrape up your remains.
So, what we're talking about here is the question of who can be trusted with power, workers or management?
The answer is simple: neither. All the horror stories you've heard about unions? True for some union somewhere. All the horror stories you've heard about management? Also true for some managers somewhere. It'd be a different world if we could just assume people would cooperate when it was in their obvious common interest, but we can't. Good faith is such a fragile thing.
If there were one quality which could fix everything that is wrong with this world, it would be integrity. But we can't be truthful with each other because we're not honest with themselves. We often act like our personal insecurities entitle us to be a**sholes. So the best we can manage in a world where integrity is so uncommon is to organize all the a**holes into competing teams then let them duke it out.
*Everyone* is "Fundamentally Doomed."
When I started, there were still guys around who worked on computers in the 1950s. They used to talk about how they thought they'd got the world by the balls when they got their hands on an IBM 1401 with it's 4K of RAM.
Once I sat next to an old dude at a professional banquet, and it turned out he'd started working on very early computers during the Korean War. He told me about when his department got an IBM 701 (which would have made it around 1953 or so). He cracked a grin and said (I swear to God), "Yep, that was a stored program jobbie!"
Computing power matters. It's not sufficient of course, because success depends on what you do with that power, but more computing power makes new things possible.
Steve Jobs brilliance wasn't just in getting people working for him to create wonderful designs; he was a shrewd manager who streamlined Apple's product lines before he introduced new classes of product. But perhaps his greatest gift was timing. If he had tried to get into the tablet game back in 2001 when Microsoft did, he might have made a better product, but it wouldn't have been as successful as the iPad (although I did like the Newton, which he axed). Even if it were successful, Apple would have been playing leapfrog with other vendors as they rushed to take advantage of the next marginal improvement in hardware.
Instead he let the other guys discredit themselves, and waited until a number of stars had aligned: mobile CPU capability, power draw, display, cheap RAM, flash memory and battery technology. When those things could be assembled into a compelling, revolutionary product, then he moved. CPU power per watt must have been a big part of that decision. He didn't wait long after those things fell into place. If you replaced the 1GHz A4 in the first gen iPad with the 200-300 MHz XScale chips PDA vendors used a year or two earlier you could not have delivered the iPad experience.
So now that there's enough affordable oomph to make a usable tablet, does an increment of oomph make any difference? Not if you don't do anything new with it. But in tablets, user experience is perhaps the greatest constraint. There may well be killer app uses for tablets that are just a teensy bit too laggy to work.
So an increment of oomph matters quite a bit. Of course it's no reason to buy one tablet over another, but if I were still a developer I'd be watching the oomph race closely.
Mosquitoes live on nectar, not blood. Blood is only used by the females as a protein source for eggs.
Mosquitoes pollinate flowers. If that seems weird, consider that many plant flowers are tiny, and inconspicuous to us humans walking around with our crappy mammalian color vision. Whether there are plants that critically depend on mosquitoes for reproduction I'm guessing we can't say for sure. Can you imagine competing with this eradication project for grant money if your proposal title was "The critical ecological importance of *Anopheles punctipennis*"? In any case this is exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't be known because there is so much about biology that is unknown, nobody's ever got around to looking into most of them. You want to discover a species unknown to science? You don't have to go to some remote tropical rain forest. Start digging in your back yard and identifying the nematodes you find, or identify all the plant species in the town forest.
It's wrong even to suggest that disease pathogens have no function. Most mosquito borne human diseases in North America aren't primarily *human* diseases. Their natural focus is wild birds and humans are collateral damage. Like any other predator, most of the time they pick of the weakest of the herd. If bat guano is a problem, imagine flocks of pigeons or crows running out of control.
So far as I know the only mosquito borne disease with an exclusive human focus is malaria. And I suppose that looked at from the standpoint of other species on the planet that compete with humans for resources, the *Plasmodium* protozoa that cause it are performing a valuable ecological service. :-)
You should be very careful throwing around phrases like "the primary thing they do..." because you're almost certainly talking about "the thing they do that I happen to know about and which concerns me most."
In any event, I'm not too concerned about the negative consequences of eradicating mosquitoes because it will never happen. A female mosquito can lay anywhere from two hundred to a thousand eggs per brood depending on the species. A single gravid female can lead to a huge population in a few years, with every female in each succeeding generation having several thousand offspring. The best you could hope from a program like this is to establish a stable equilibrium at a lower population; most likely the population will crash, most genetic lines will be extinguished (including this one), and then the population will be back to where it was in two years or so.
Around the same time you built yours I had a student job at MIT where I worked in a lab that did research on visual perception stuff for the Air Force and NASA. We had eye tracking systems we'd built that were hooked up to a PDP-11 running RSX-11 (an interesting story in itself, but I digress). One of the things that surprised me was how simple eye tracking was in principle -- at least at the input end. Most of the work is interfacing, which today is a lot easier because of cheap USB interfaces and such.
I'm not at all surprised a maker can put together an eye tracking system for under $300. $300 is quite generous for the task.
What's impressive here isn't the engineering; it's that this kid envisioned doing something, researched how to do it, developed a design and built a prototype. No single step of this is particularly hard for a teenager with access to a library and the Internet. Nor is even dreaming up something like this all that unusual. What's unusual is acting on that impulse, and following it through to a prototype.
The main point I was making was that the (debatable) idea that the scanners serve some important public purpose does not excuse the government from any harm they do.
A secondary point is that you *do* have to take one in a million events into account when you are managing millions of trials that might produce that event; you just have to weigh it accordingly.
Well, the formula is different when you choose for a population than when you choose as a member of the population.
As a member of the flying public, your considerations are dominated by two very immediate things: the indignity of being scanned or the indignity of being patted down. And because you *must* submit to one or the other, these certainties are likely to be more meaningful to you than any remote improbability, like being on a plane that is hijacked or receiving a cancer-causing mutation from the scanning machine.
If you're somebody who sets policy for the flying public, what is a remote improbability for any individual becomes a near certainty you have to deal with. That is to say, it is *certain* that somebody is plotting to hijack a plane somewhere and you've got to do something about it, even though it won't affect the vast majority of people who are flying. Suppose it is ALSO nearly certain that the gazillion radiation exposures you're mandating cause a certain number of cases of cancer, including deaths. You ALSO have to deal with that, even though it's no big deal to the vast majority of fliers.
The law of large numbers doesn't let you off the hook here; in fact it puts you *on* the hook. A tiny marginal difference in cancer probabilities summed over all the radiation exposures amounts to a number of people who get sick or die *as a result of actions you have taken*.
This doesn't mean you don't take action. It means you act *responsibly*.
Suppose the expected number of people to die from terrorism is 10, but the expected number of people to die from cancer is 3; you take the cancer and 7 more people (net) get to live. It's a no-brainer. But suppose because of your sloppy work the number of people who get cancer is actually *6*. That's still better than 10, but you don't get to pat yourself on the back for saving 4 people. On the contrary, you're responsible for 3 deaths that wouldn't have happened if you'd done your job properly.
Most of the printed flyers passed out as OWS NY were from gorups that self-identified as communist. What do you expect people to think?
Now how do you know *most* of the flyers were from self-identified communist groups? Did you do a study, collecting all the flyers you could then doing a statistical analysis? Or did you just hear some guy say it and figure it sounded pretty truthy?
Now I strolled past Occupy Boston and the signs ran from obscure but substantive ("Re-enact Glass-Steagall!"), to the plain obscure ("We are the 99%"). I'm sure there were plenty of socialists down there, but the only references I saw could possibly be ironic ("Support Socialist Programs like Education.").
Dude, you're right about me being so old -- I remember watching John Pertwee's Third Doctor when it was *new*. I'm not the least ashamed of being old because I've never confused growing up with getting priggish. I can still enjoy classic Dr. Who without having to defend most episodes as being serious literary science fiction ("reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" indeed).
The classic series *also* had music that whacked you on the head with emotional cues when the story needed drama that the writers didn't supply. You just didn't notice because you were enjoying the show with your critical faculties turned off. What's more, classic Who had even cruder dialog and acting cues. I was watching an old Tom Baker episode recently and at one point the villain gloats, "Excellent!" and actually does the Montgomery Burns thing with his fingertips. As he does so he is accompanied by an ominous organ music riff. How much more on-the-nose can you get?
The series *did* do some fairly straight science fiction drama story lines, but didn't shy away from burlesque, and some of those burlesque stories were quite entertaining if you were willing to take them on their own terms. The Douglas Adams penned "Pirate Planet" serial was one of them. While the story was clearly operatic in its credibility, it had many subtle Adamsesque touches to the dialog, characterization and plot twists that make the writing stand out. Adams had this gift for mixing the silly and the emotionally credible that you can't appreciate until you can tell the difference.
Isn't it just possible that you're the one whose tastes have gotten a little more selective? That the difference in your reaction to the new series is that you no longer tolerate the obvious storytelling gimmicks you used to take at face value?
Oh, for Pete's sake. I've been watching those Dr. Who "classic" episodes recently, and even at it's best Dr. Who was never *The Prisoner* or *The Twilight Zone* for chrissakes. It's a fun and cheesy "sci-fi" series that doesn't mind being corny or flirting with camp so long as it was entertainment for the whole family. That meant not having The Doctor do any yucky kissing that would offend junior, while giving Pop the occasional shot of Zoe's besequined bum in that catsuit of hers.
Don't get me wrong, I love the classic series, but in the same way I can enjoy "Buckaroo Banzai" without confusing it with "Blade Runner". I love the ridiculous monsters, executed with such cheesy verve. About the only thing I really don't like is how mind-numbingly bad the dialog is in many (although not all) classic episodes. Some of that dialog makes George Lucas's Star Wars Dialog sound like *Casablanca*.
Now why even bother doing a new series that does the same old thing? Are you going to out-Tom-Baker Tom Baker? You can't get that movie serial vibe again because people are just too media savvy. The corn threshold is so much lower.
So I think they've done a very good job keeping the cheesy spirit while spiffing up the production values. The cast and guest talent are top notch, episode pacing is crisp, and the writing for the most part witty, canny and thoughtful. But the writing is inevitably where the new series has to fall down now and then. This is a series that ran for 26 seasons before the modern incarnation, the main character has almost god-like intellect and the stories involve one of the most logically messy themes in science fiction: time travel. Dr. Who has always needed some ad hoc and not very credible limitations in what the Doctor is allowed do. So I think we have to accept a certain amount of story arc continuity sleight of hand, especially given the long history of the series.
That said, I fear that using Great Temporal Reset Button in two successive seasons probably indicates the writers have written the show into a corner that can't be fixed without a fallow period or a series reboot that destroys a lot more than one season's continuity.