Suppose you're an export company making a shipment, and you're renting ten shipping containers. Could you get by with only eight? Solving that three dimensional jigsaw puzzle is hard, but it's easy to *see* that you've got a good solution once you've come up with it. Such problems whose solutions are easy to verify (regardless of whether they are easy to arrive at) are called "NP". That stands for "Non-deterministic polynomial", but for now all you need to know is "NP" means "easy to check".
Of course some problems are easy to check solutions because the solutions themselves are easy to arrive at. If you were shipping crushed ore, you'd take the total volume of ore and divide it by eight to see if it would fit in eight containers. If I were to check your answer I'd do the same thing you did to arrive at the answer, because the solution is *simple*. Such easy to *solve* problems are called "P" for "Polynomial". All "P" problems are automatically "NP" -- they're easy to check, because all you have to do is repeat the solution.
When you're messing around with an NP problem, like our container packing problem, it's natural to ask whether there's an easy way to get the answer. Sometimes there is a surprisingly easy answer. One example is when you punch in an address to your little GPS and it spits out the best route to take. Seemingly that's a very hard problem but it turns out to be a "P" problem. As we struggle with our very difficult container packing problem, maybe we just haven't been clever enough yet to find the easy solution. Then it would be a "P" (easy to solve) problem.
The P=NP problem amounts to this: do all easy to verify problems have easy to calculate solutions that we can look for?
On the face of it, this seems like a silly question to ask. Most (but not all) problems we deal with in day to day life are of the "easy to check" variety, but that doesn't make them easy to solve. It's hard to come up with that 10% budget reduction the boss asked for, but easy to tell if you succeeded. It's easy to tell if you bought your girlfriend the right birthday present, but that doesn't make choosing the present easy. We certainly don't assume that easy to verify equals easy to solve in our day to day lives, so what makes anyone think that P might equal NP?
Well, it turns out that there are certain problems whose solutions can easily be transformed into a solution to *any* NP (easy to verify) problem. That means if we had an easy solution to any of these problems, we'd have an easy solution to *all* problems where the solution was easy to verify. Another way of saying this is if any of these "NP Complete" problems are "P", then all NP (easy to verify) problems are "P" (easy to solve). That seems too good to be true. It's as if getting that 10% reduction in budget your boss wants somehow told you the right present to buy your girlfriend. Of course you can't boil a problem like how your girlfriend feels about you down to pure numbers, but you *can* boil down something like how many containers you need to pack your shipment down to numbers. "P=NP" means that there is an easy way to do that.
Most of us are not so optimistic as to believe P=NP, but *we can't be sure*. Some of the NP-Complete problems seem tantalizingly simple. For example, let's say you and I are choosing up teams for a game. We don't know the players, somebody has helpfully pinned a rating of 1-100 on each of them. Ensuring that we have the most equally matched teams is an NP-Complete problem. If we could do that easily, we could magically solve the container packing problem easily too.
Everyone knows how to choose up sides, right? The captains alternate picks. We're so used to doing that we just assume that is the fairest way to divide up players, but experience shows that one team often ends up much stronger than the other when teams are picked this way. This method is guaranteed to not pick the worst possible division, but little more. Suppose the p
Well, it was TFA that was at fault, manufacturing a story out of a screenshot and an unrelated PR piece.
As far as the PR piece was concerned -- I don't see much that could be called controversial. People have been talking about "ubiquitous computing" for over twenty years now, and it *is* true that computing devices are getting more and more sensors. The Motorola Xoom will have an accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, magnetic compass and barometer. And it's not like Microsoft has failed to deliver anything on what this guy's talking about. The Kinect is impressive, and it is a real product, not some tech concept we'll never see on store shelves.
In technological prognostication the hard part isn't necessarily predicting *what* will happen; quite often the difficulty is predicting *when* something will happen. We often don't understand what the prerequisites for success are until we've failed. I think most people could see the idea of a tablet computer was a pretty attractive one; the problem was the time it took to bridge the gap between the idea and the ability to make one the met peoples' expectations. I'm still not entirely clear on why cellular data service seems to be a necessity for these devices. Perhaps it wouldn't be profitable to sell the devices at the prices people are willing to pay unless the devices are bundled. Pricing can be a double edged sword. High prices discourage consumer adoption, low prices discourage vendor promotion.
About the only red flag in the PR piece was that it raised the ancient "agent/tool" argument. Should systems be well designed tools or intelligent agents? I remember people having this debate in the 1980s. The "agent" camp has always been the sexy one, attracting press and investment, but year after year, decade it has failed to deliver on its promises. The poster child for the failure of the agent approach is Clippy -- but only because Clippy gave us an anthropomorphic target for our frustration. In many other cases we didn't have a named character to represent the papering over of sloppy design with some half baked technology.
I've been in the "tool" camp for years. Build systems that are responsive to user intent in a predictable and useful way. But I would not reject a system that inferred what I wanted without my telling it what that was... if it worked well enough. And as tools get more sophisticated and responsive to the user, they may become much more agent-like in their operation, so I suppose we're moving in the direction of intelligent agents every year. Eventually systems will commonly do what we want them to do even when we haven't bothered to figure out what that is but I wouldn't be prepared to bet on when that future will arrive.
Well, leaving aside the issue of whether Manning is a traitor -- which is the very question to be put to trial -- you're right about PayPal having no *Constitutional* obligations here. Its an action that i profoundly against American civil values, but those values are not law.
I disagree that giving defendants any sort of defense whatsoever is sufficient. The trial system is an adversarial one, and the teams on each side should be about evenly matched. That means in most cases the defendant should be assured a competent defense, but in high profile cases where the state is putting substantial resources into prosecution the defendant should be entitled to the very best representation. Otherwise it makes a mockery of the word "trial". If you put a top drawer prosecutor with decades of experience up against an inexperienced or incompetent defense attorney, you're determining the results of the trial before it happens.
Well, having been born in 1961 I remember the slump of the late 70s well, and it *was* the fed's fault... but you have to look at the alternative. Inflation hit 14.76% in March of 1980. So Paul Volcker put the brakes on the money supply by raising interest rates from 11% to 20%.
This was extremely unpopular because of the economic pain it caused, and if Congress were in charge it would never have happened. But Volcker was trying to prevent the country from slipping into hyperinflation. This set the stage for the "Reagan Boom", in which the economy rebounded as interest rates were dropped, but did not suffer much inflation. It might be more correct to call the "Reagan Boom" the "Volcker Boom", but even if you want to give Reagan all the credit, he couldn't have done it with an economy spiraling into hyperinflation. So in the not-so-long-term, disinflating the economy turned out to be the right thing to do.
But notice -- 1980 was an election year, and a presidential election year at that. There's a very good chance that Reagan would never have been elected were it not for the short term pain of reining in inflation. Congress would never restrict the money supply in an election year, *and every other year is an election year*.
In any case, the primary objective of a central bank is to maintain the stability of the currency. Promoting economic growth is a far, far distant second -- some would say it doesn't belong on the agenda at all. The compromise is that the bank accepts a little inflation in order to ensure there's enough credit in the economy to support economic growth.
I wonder if this kind of problem isn't inherent in using a non-proprietary OS in the smartphone market.
Users -- some users at least -- want to be able to treat their phone hardware like their computer hardware. That would work if everyone bought unlocked phones and then purchased their data plans separately. But we don't buy smartphones this way. We buy them "subsidized" by the carrier, which is another way to say we buy them in package deals where we have no clear idea how much each of the pieces cost us.
So -- you've got your subsidized phone running 2.1. Why *should* the handset manufacturer bother to port 2.2 to the phone and why should the carriers bother pushing it to you? It cost them money and you aren't going anywhere with the contract you signed. When the contract is up, they'll pitch you a "subsidy" on something even newer and if you're like most people, you'll go for it.
Actually, can somebody explain to me what is so specieal about facebook and its services?
Not to denigrate the work facebook engineers have done in scaling the service, the operation of facebook seems horribly broken to me. Privcy is, of course, broken, but it's broken because the service itself is so crude.
I'm not sure why we'd have to return to the era of luggables, any more than choosing a standard form factor desktop PC means we have to go back to the era of minicomputers.
There is plenty of room because electronics are smaller than they were twenty years ago, but the average hand remains the same size. Manufacturers have responded by making things thinner, but after some point the consumer would benefit more from standardization than the next increment of thinning. I think we've past that point.
I'm not sure this captures Tolkien's position on technology and magic.
Tolkien, being a philologist, knew that what we called science was once quite literally a branch of magic -- called by some early writers "natural magic". This is the ability to work wonders by superior understanding of nature, as opposed as through the agency of demonic assistants. When Galadriel talks to Sam and Frodo about the operation of the Mirror of Galadriel, she quite clearly challenges the validity of the term "magic" as Sam would us it. The implication is that the Mirror is an example of what the ancients would call "natural magic" and what we'd call "technology".
That's not to say Tolkien didn't have an anti-technology streak in him; but it's not a simplistic one. In fact it is as far from simplistic as one can possibly get. The miller at Hobbiton was an unpleasant fellow, but Tolkien does not paint the mill as an evil thing. It's only when it becomes an engine of mindless environmental destruction that it is regarded as evil. It's not what Tolkien *does* but what he *doesn't do* that matters here: he does not make an exception for technology when it comes to the corrupting influence of power.
The mill at Hobbiton recapitulates the industrialization of the English countryside that horrified Tolkien, but I think there is a subtle distinction between being horrified by technology and being horrified by the effects of using technology without regard to its consequences. I don't think Tolkien objected to mills per se, but rather the use of glittering generalities like "progress" to dismiss the problems they create. Galadriel's use of the Mirror exemplifies virtuous use of technology: using it with care and consideration of its possible consequences.
I don't think there's any technical reason to make common maintenance tasks like replacing smashed screens, bad inverters and broken keyboards so fiddly, even if those components are non-standard.
I'll go further and say that for most laptops (say 14" or greater screen and 22mm thick keyboard section) there's no practical reason not to adopt a standard form factor for components because there's plenty of room. Naturally if you want to make something thinner than has ever been done before then you're talking about non-standard components and layouts, but that is no reason to pass the price premium of custom designing and building every piece of the laptop to people who are pragmatic buyers. When technology makes 13mm thick laptops practical, there is no reason not to standardize *that* too. It'd be incompatible with the larger standard, but so what?
Imagine a world in which there was something like the ATX case standard for notebooks with a 13" screen or larger and a keyboard section thickness of one inch. Custom built parts could be replaced with standardized, generic components: batteries, fans, screens and related driver hardware, keyboards, power supplies, internal fans -- basically everything. Every single component of the notebook would be cheaper, and it could be replaced by the local screwdriver shop. If your CPU fan failed, you could pop down to your local screwdriver shop and they'd replace it for you in ten minutes. It'd be cheap, because they wouldn't have to stock an array of parts that are functionally equivalent, but arbitrarily different in shape.
Conversely, imagine a world in which every desktop computer were assembled from custom built, incompatible components. Bad power supply? You'll have to get a Compaq power supply. Want to upgrade your video? Buy a new computer. Keyboard broken? Send the whole thing in to an authorized service center. As absurd as this scenario obviously is, we accept it for laptops. It shouldn't be like this. This isn't three dimensional tangrams; except for the most extreme designs, it's filling a more or less equivalent rectangular space with essentially the same components. The idiosyncrasies of most laptops are the result of engineers starting with a blank slate for that task and coming up with equivalent, but incompatible solutions.
The reason laptops haven't been standardized is marketing, pure and simple. That's the hard reality these kids are going to run into. Like young people everywhere they're looking at this problem with fresh eyes an seeing the obvious problems. The way laptops are built make them hard to recycle, but making laptops easy to recycle also makes them easy to repair and upgrade. Repairing and upgrading are even better from an environmental sustainability standpoint, but making this possible requires an act of selfless idealism by the manufacturers that will never happen.
DIY disassembly isn't for everyone, and even where it is possible the guides are not always available, but your mention of this gave me a brainstorm. A professionally molded modular kit might be very attractive to the kind of hobbyists who play with small form factor enclosures.
Sure, but that's an example of what behavioral economists call "present bias". The consumer is happy if he gets his all-in-one laptop for 10% less than an equivalent modular one. The hardware vendors are happy when eighteen months from now you buy a whole new laptop when a $15 inverter board fails.
A modular laptop is something I've wanted for many years, and I'd happily pay a 33% price premium to get it, but it won't ever become a reality without some kind of regulatory intervention. Present bias works in the vendors' favor. They get more sales up front, and bigger sales downstream.
As others have pointed out, this has nothing to do with the source language, and everything to do with the runtime operating system relying on a virtual machine. Just to underscore the point, remember that Gnu's CCJ compiles to native code. Suppose Google chose to make Android more like a regular Linux distro, running native code. They could have kept the Java language and their Java based APIs by using GCJ in the SDK. The Android SDK would then compile to ARM object code rather than Dalvik bytecodes, and as a developer you'd probably never notice.
On the other hand, there are Python implementations than run on virtual machines, notably Jython for Java and IronPython for dotNet. Neither of Jython or IronPython could reasonably be ported to Dalvik, since Dalvik is a register machine and JVM and CLR are stack machines, but it is demonstrably practical to run a dynamic language on a VM.
So the issue here is one of runtime architecture, not source language or libraries. Why did they decide to go with a new VM instead of making android more like a regular Linux distro, running native code? I don't know. I suspect relying heavily on a VM simplifies porting the OS to new hardware (as we've seen in early half baked attempts at Android tablets). Architecture neutral object code makes it easier to get the support of companies like Intel, who don't have a significant presence in the current, ARM dominated mobile market. An Atom based tablet would be a first class citizen in the Android tablet world; you wouldn't have to convince developers to provide and support different binaries for different processors.
It's not that she couldn't see, it's that the sun was interfering with her ability to detect things. If her version of the story is accurate, it is an example of what seems to me to be a very common driving fault: failing to adjust speed to driving conditions. It's not just reduced traction that people ignore, it's reduced vision. On familiar territory, people seem to stick to the same speed they always travel at, even if current conditions mean they can't see what they're heading into.
I suspect people become accommodated to driving with reduced vision/reaction time problem because a miss is as good as a mile. If you ignore traction problems you might start to break free, or have a scary but harmless skid. The first negative feedback you have with ignoring vision limitations is you've hit someone.
But another advantage is, the keyboard and display don't have to be near each other.
Well, you *could* use a BT keyboard with your laptop, but I agree with you. Laptops are a lousy form factor. Connecting the keyboard and screen force one or the\ other or both into an ergonomically horrible position.
If you don't like Apple's policies, don't sell your software for their shitty products. Instead of whining about Apple, I just ignore them.
Sure, but Apple isn't ignoring *you*.
What Apple has done here is dictate that you will be governed by Apple pricing policies *even in transactions Apple is not a party to*. If you're a consumer using an alternative store, Apple says you must pay more for certain content than either the publisher or store wants to charge you. As a publisher who has no intention of selling through Apple, you must sell through stores whose success is limited because Apple forbids price competition on many popular products.
There's a very simple test one can use to tell whether a company is a monopolist. It boils down to one question: can the company get away with acting like a monopolist (absent any legal intervention)? If the answer is yes, then you have a monopolist.
What do monopolists do? Well, eventually they get around to charging high prices for shoddy goods, but in the short term what they do is they solidify their control over the market by erecting barriers to entry. Preventing product from being sold at lower prices through other channels is a barrier to anyone developing more price efficient channels.
So by the "walks like a duck" test Apple enjoys a monopoly in the area of selling content for tablets. That's seems like a very tenuous monopoly, a brief blip in the early history of this infant market... but that's entirely the point. The market *won't* develop if the first mover uses its otherwise temporary clout to prevent the emergence of competitors.
You may feel bitter about them, but as a professional you don't let your personal feelings interfere with your professional responsibilities. As a professional you are absolutely reliable and trustworthy when it comes to things that are entrusted to you. That's what being a professional *means*. That should have been why your former employers should have been reluctant to replace you with some company that parcels out your work to faceless subcontractors in a different country.
I have *always* walked my former employers step by step through the process of locking me out, no matter the circumstances we part on. It's a little ceremony that reminds me, and them, that I am absolutely professional and that I strive to make my work above reproach.
That said, I'll give you one purely selfish reason for acting like a pro. When something goes horribly wrong with that outsourcing company they've hired, *you* won't have a big criminal target painted on your back. Who was it who gave the credit card database password to the Russian Mob? Might have been you, mate. That's why you insist that they take steps to secure their systems against you, and you do it in writing if you really don't trust them.
But stop fucking using the term brick unless the device is incapable of powering on.
In that case no devices are *ever* bricked. The typical bricking scenario is that the user does something the vendor doesn't want him to do, and the vendor's software refuses to operate. The software can't detect that condition *unless* the devices is powered on.
"Brick" in this instance is a very unusual metaphor. Usually metaphors like "It was an oven in there," describe one thing in terms of the essential properties of another. "Brick" arose to describe mobile devices that are incapacitated by software. The idea is that you might as well be carrying around a brick. A brick, of course, is quite useful when you want to build a wall or pave a walk; those are its *essential* properties. It's not so useful if you want to make a phone call. What is peculiar about the "brick" metaphor is that it is evoking the essential *non-properties* of a brick, i.e. you can't make a phone call with it. If you had a brick you could make a phone call with, you probably wouldn't call it a brick.
There ought to be a special term for that kind of negative metaphor, but there isn't as far as I know.
Whether a device is "bricked" is in the eye of the beholder. A mobile phone being "bricked" doesn't mean it can't be put to other uses. You could use it as a coaster, or as a tray to serve wasabi next to your sushi platter. In some cases you could use it as a flashlight. What you *can't* use it for is what you bought it for: making phone calls. A bricked phone has lost its *essential* utility.
What is the essential utility of a TiVo? For most people it is to timeshift broadcast television. I suspect for most users the ability to manually record shows or to playback prerecorded shows would not justify the space the device takes up, much less the purchase cost. Therefore most people would reasonably regard a TiVo without the ability to schedule future recording as "bricked". You may be different. You might still find considerable utility in the device. The point is that for most people, they might as well have a brick sitting next to the TV as a TiVo that can't schedule future recording.
Let me explain to you about starting a company. Most new ventures (commercial or non-commercial) fail. The most common reason for a venture to fail is the inability of the founders to adapt to the changing scale and growing maturity of the vendor. You not only have more customers, you have *different* customers. You have more people working on the problem than you can get to know, much less supervise.
Ventures that succeed usually have founders that at some point develop an "exit strategy", a plan to take themselves out of the picture or to shift most of the day to day burdens to somebody with more professional competence at running an ongoing concern. Sometimes that happens when plans for the next step call for a bundle of cash. People don't just hand you a bundle of cash. They insist on being able to name the managers.
Wanting a bundle of cash may be greedy, but you need that cash for creating the next big thing.
With each passing year of hacking I've become so increasingly shadowy that by now I'm not just *shadowy*, I'm positively *shady*. On summer days people position themselves so that I'm between them and the sun.
I prefer to think of myself as "attractive". When my daughter entered the science fair, I used my attractiveness to help her win. Her rival was explaining the Cavendish experiment, but I sabotaged his demonstration by standing next to the apparatus.
Some people say I'm self centered. They say I've lost touch with the outside world. But look at it from my point of view: I've been hacking so many years that my arms are now shorter than my Schwartzchild radius. I'm not fat, though. They say if you're not fat if you can see your feet. Thank $deity for gravitational lensing.
I agree that a big part of the attraction of the Youtube astroturf we're talking about is that it has content real users don't have access to, but I see two objections to what the studios are doing here.
The first is that what they are ultimately up to is fabricating outright falsehoods in order to obtain money from consumers. I realize that finding this ethically objectionable puts one pretty far out of the mainstream when it comes to what passes for business ethics today. We've decided as a culture to look upon things like presenting one sided information or concocting misleadingly vague "four out of five dentists" statements as harmless little tarradiddles. It's just marketing, after all. We seem to regard a lie as less harmless the more widely disseminated it is. If I told you I saw a movie and it was great, you might be a little put out with me when you discovered I made that up in order to trick you. But if tens of thousands of people were deceived along with you, the lie has less of a personal sting. Still, crossing the line into outright fabrication has consequences in this case greater than deceiving some teenager into miscalculating the hedonic value of a movie ticket.
The second objection is much more obviously serious. The movie studios are intentionally profiting from a cultural phenomenon which they condemn in very strong terms as harmful to society. If a real fan does what these fictional fans supposedly are doing, the studios would undertake harsh legal reprisals *in order to make an example of him*. But the fan is merely copying the example the studios themselves set.
I think shows that the first objection is worth some serious consideration. People who are habitually honest needn't worry about trailing the stink of hypocrisy wherever they go.
Well, any such guarantee would be a double edged sword at best, so far as the security of the source is concerned. If you can get a trustworthy journalist to stand between the public and the source material, you as a leaker are much safer from identification and retaliation. The reporter has both an ethical and a selfish interest in protecting his sources, and should have some knowledge about how to do that.
Any documents this guy may have taken and whether he sabotaged Wikileaks' servers are of course entirely different matters. If he did sabotage their servers, that is reprehensible. If he took documents, it really depends on what the documents are, how they came into his possession ad and why he took them. If he received them as an agent of WIkileaks and he took them to get a jump on his competition, that is also reprehensible.
Even if their hypothesis is correct, that cancer involves the malfunctioning of a set of evolutionarily conserved genomic structures and processes, what evidence is there for concluding that combating cancer is not as going to be as complex as [something else we don't understand fully yet either]?
None. It's premature to talk about evidence for how this will affect future therapies. At present this is just an idea -- maybe not even quite an hypothesis yet -- that might lead in some interesting directions. Like most such ideas it probably won't pan out, but there's nothing wrong with that.
It does no harm to entertain such an idea. If, as is most likely, this idea leads to a quick dead end, thinking about it will hardly have derailed the progress of science. We'll just add it to the great corpus of negative results and move on.
Who's to say that the unknown processes that cause genome modifications which sometimes result in cancer are not still evolving?
William of Occam for one. One can admit that such a thing is possible without having to assume it is so at this stage. Unless you have a specific mechanism in mind that has been empirically tested, this argument doesn't really have any force. If we *discover* such a heretofore unidentified mechanism, that counts as real scientific progress even if it is yet one more empirical reason we'll never have a silver bullet for cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'll take a sincere stab at this one.
Suppose you're an export company making a shipment, and you're renting ten shipping containers. Could you get by with only eight? Solving that three dimensional jigsaw puzzle is hard, but it's easy to *see* that you've got a good solution once you've come up with it. Such problems whose solutions are easy to verify (regardless of whether they are easy to arrive at) are called "NP". That stands for "Non-deterministic polynomial", but for now all you need to know is "NP" means "easy to check".
Of course some problems are easy to check solutions because the solutions themselves are easy to arrive at. If you were shipping crushed ore, you'd take the total volume of ore and divide it by eight to see if it would fit in eight containers. If I were to check your answer I'd do the same thing you did to arrive at the answer, because the solution is *simple*. Such easy to *solve* problems are called "P" for "Polynomial". All "P" problems are automatically "NP" -- they're easy to check, because all you have to do is repeat the solution.
When you're messing around with an NP problem, like our container packing problem, it's natural to ask whether there's an easy way to get the answer. Sometimes there is a surprisingly easy answer. One example is when you punch in an address to your little GPS and it spits out the best route to take. Seemingly that's a very hard problem but it turns out to be a "P" problem. As we struggle with our very difficult container packing problem, maybe we just haven't been clever enough yet to find the easy solution. Then it would be a "P" (easy to solve) problem.
The P=NP problem amounts to this: do all easy to verify problems have easy to calculate solutions that we can look for?
On the face of it, this seems like a silly question to ask. Most (but not all) problems we deal with in day to day life are of the "easy to check" variety, but that doesn't make them easy to solve. It's hard to come up with that 10% budget reduction the boss asked for, but easy to tell if you succeeded. It's easy to tell if you bought your girlfriend the right birthday present, but that doesn't make choosing the present easy. We certainly don't assume that easy to verify equals easy to solve in our day to day lives, so what makes anyone think that P might equal NP?
Well, it turns out that there are certain problems whose solutions can easily be transformed into a solution to *any* NP (easy to verify) problem. That means if we had an easy solution to any of these problems, we'd have an easy solution to *all* problems where the solution was easy to verify. Another way of saying this is if any of these "NP Complete" problems are "P", then all NP (easy to verify) problems are "P" (easy to solve). That seems too good to be true. It's as if getting that 10% reduction in budget your boss wants somehow told you the right present to buy your girlfriend. Of course you can't boil a problem like how your girlfriend feels about you down to pure numbers, but you *can* boil down something like how many containers you need to pack your shipment down to numbers. "P=NP" means that there is an easy way to do that.
Most of us are not so optimistic as to believe P=NP, but *we can't be sure*. Some of the NP-Complete problems seem tantalizingly simple. For example, let's say you and I are choosing up teams for a game. We don't know the players, somebody has helpfully pinned a rating of 1-100 on each of them. Ensuring that we have the most equally matched teams is an NP-Complete problem. If we could do that easily, we could magically solve the container packing problem easily too.
Everyone knows how to choose up sides, right? The captains alternate picks. We're so used to doing that we just assume that is the fairest way to divide up players, but experience shows that one team often ends up much stronger than the other when teams are picked this way. This method is guaranteed to not pick the worst possible division, but little more. Suppose the p
Well, it was TFA that was at fault, manufacturing a story out of a screenshot and an unrelated PR piece.
As far as the PR piece was concerned -- I don't see much that could be called controversial. People have been talking about "ubiquitous computing" for over twenty years now, and it *is* true that computing devices are getting more and more sensors. The Motorola Xoom will have an accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, magnetic compass and barometer. And it's not like Microsoft has failed to deliver anything on what this guy's talking about. The Kinect is impressive, and it is a real product, not some tech concept we'll never see on store shelves.
In technological prognostication the hard part isn't necessarily predicting *what* will happen; quite often the difficulty is predicting *when* something will happen. We often don't understand what the prerequisites for success are until we've failed. I think most people could see the idea of a tablet computer was a pretty attractive one; the problem was the time it took to bridge the gap between the idea and the ability to make one the met peoples' expectations. I'm still not entirely clear on why cellular data service seems to be a necessity for these devices. Perhaps it wouldn't be profitable to sell the devices at the prices people are willing to pay unless the devices are bundled. Pricing can be a double edged sword. High prices discourage consumer adoption, low prices discourage vendor promotion.
About the only red flag in the PR piece was that it raised the ancient "agent/tool" argument. Should systems be well designed tools or intelligent agents? I remember people having this debate in the 1980s. The "agent" camp has always been the sexy one, attracting press and investment, but year after year, decade it has failed to deliver on its promises. The poster child for the failure of the agent approach is Clippy -- but only because Clippy gave us an anthropomorphic target for our frustration. In many other cases we didn't have a named character to represent the papering over of sloppy design with some half baked technology.
I've been in the "tool" camp for years. Build systems that are responsive to user intent in a predictable and useful way. But I would not reject a system that inferred what I wanted without my telling it what that was ... if it worked well enough. And as tools get more sophisticated and responsive to the user, they may become much more agent-like in their operation, so I suppose we're moving in the direction of intelligent agents every year. Eventually systems will commonly do what we want them to do even when we haven't bothered to figure out what that is but I wouldn't be prepared to bet on when that future will arrive.
Well, leaving aside the issue of whether Manning is a traitor -- which is the very question to be put to trial -- you're right about PayPal having no *Constitutional* obligations here. Its an action that i profoundly against American civil values, but those values are not law.
I disagree that giving defendants any sort of defense whatsoever is sufficient. The trial system is an adversarial one, and the teams on each side should be about evenly matched. That means in most cases the defendant should be assured a competent defense, but in high profile cases where the state is putting substantial resources into prosecution the defendant should be entitled to the very best representation. Otherwise it makes a mockery of the word "trial". If you put a top drawer prosecutor with decades of experience up against an inexperienced or incompetent defense attorney, you're determining the results of the trial before it happens.
Well, having been born in 1961 I remember the slump of the late 70s well, and it *was* the fed's fault... but you have to look at the alternative. Inflation hit 14.76% in March of 1980. So Paul Volcker put the brakes on the money supply by raising interest rates from 11% to 20%.
This was extremely unpopular because of the economic pain it caused, and if Congress were in charge it would never have happened. But Volcker was trying to prevent the country from slipping into hyperinflation. This set the stage for the "Reagan Boom", in which the economy rebounded as interest rates were dropped, but did not suffer much inflation. It might be more correct to call the "Reagan Boom" the "Volcker Boom", but even if you want to give Reagan all the credit, he couldn't have done it with an economy spiraling into hyperinflation. So in the not-so-long-term, disinflating the economy turned out to be the right thing to do.
But notice -- 1980 was an election year, and a presidential election year at that. There's a very good chance that Reagan would never have been elected were it not for the short term pain of reining in inflation. Congress would never restrict the money supply in an election year, *and every other year is an election year*.
In any case, the primary objective of a central bank is to maintain the stability of the currency. Promoting economic growth is a far, far distant second -- some would say it doesn't belong on the agenda at all. The compromise is that the bank accepts a little inflation in order to ensure there's enough credit in the economy to support economic growth.
I wonder if this kind of problem isn't inherent in using a non-proprietary OS in the smartphone market.
Users -- some users at least -- want to be able to treat their phone hardware like their computer hardware. That would work if everyone bought unlocked phones and then purchased their data plans separately. But we don't buy smartphones this way. We buy them "subsidized" by the carrier, which is another way to say we buy them in package deals where we have no clear idea how much each of the pieces cost us.
So -- you've got your subsidized phone running 2.1. Why *should* the handset manufacturer bother to port 2.2 to the phone and why should the carriers bother pushing it to you? It cost them money and you aren't going anywhere with the contract you signed. When the contract is up, they'll pitch you a "subsidy" on something even newer and if you're like most people, you'll go for it.
Actually, can somebody explain to me what is so specieal about facebook and its services?
Not to denigrate the work facebook engineers have done in scaling the service, the operation of facebook seems horribly broken to me. Privcy is, of course, broken, but it's broken because the service itself is so crude.
I'm not sure why we'd have to return to the era of luggables, any more than choosing a standard form factor desktop PC means we have to go back to the era of minicomputers.
There is plenty of room because electronics are smaller than they were twenty years ago, but the average hand remains the same size. Manufacturers have responded by making things thinner, but after some point the consumer would benefit more from standardization than the next increment of thinning. I think we've past that point.
I'm not sure this captures Tolkien's position on technology and magic.
Tolkien, being a philologist, knew that what we called science was once quite literally a branch of magic -- called by some early writers "natural magic". This is the ability to work wonders by superior understanding of nature, as opposed as through the agency of demonic assistants. When Galadriel talks to Sam and Frodo about the operation of the Mirror of Galadriel, she quite clearly challenges the validity of the term "magic" as Sam would us it. The implication is that the Mirror is an example of what the ancients would call "natural magic" and what we'd call "technology".
That's not to say Tolkien didn't have an anti-technology streak in him; but it's not a simplistic one. In fact it is as far from simplistic as one can possibly get. The miller at Hobbiton was an unpleasant fellow, but Tolkien does not paint the mill as an evil thing. It's only when it becomes an engine of mindless environmental destruction that it is regarded as evil. It's not what Tolkien *does* but what he *doesn't do* that matters here: he does not make an exception for technology when it comes to the corrupting influence of power.
The mill at Hobbiton recapitulates the industrialization of the English countryside that horrified Tolkien, but I think there is a subtle distinction between being horrified by technology and being horrified by the effects of using technology without regard to its consequences. I don't think Tolkien objected to mills per se, but rather the use of glittering generalities like "progress" to dismiss the problems they create. Galadriel's use of the Mirror exemplifies virtuous use of technology: using it with care and consideration of its possible consequences.
I also recall that there were 'modular' laptops a long long time ago, but apparently these did not sell.
Probably because "a long time ago" was a bad time to do this.
I don't think there's any technical reason to make common maintenance tasks like replacing smashed screens, bad inverters and broken keyboards so fiddly, even if those components are non-standard.
I'll go further and say that for most laptops (say 14" or greater screen and 22mm thick keyboard section) there's no practical reason not to adopt a standard form factor for components because there's plenty of room. Naturally if you want to make something thinner than has ever been done before then you're talking about non-standard components and layouts, but that is no reason to pass the price premium of custom designing and building every piece of the laptop to people who are pragmatic buyers. When technology makes 13mm thick laptops practical, there is no reason not to standardize *that* too. It'd be incompatible with the larger standard, but so what?
Imagine a world in which there was something like the ATX case standard for notebooks with a 13" screen or larger and a keyboard section thickness of one inch. Custom built parts could be replaced with standardized, generic components: batteries, fans, screens and related driver hardware, keyboards, power supplies, internal fans -- basically everything. Every single component of the notebook would be cheaper, and it could be replaced by the local screwdriver shop. If your CPU fan failed, you could pop down to your local screwdriver shop and they'd replace it for you in ten minutes. It'd be cheap, because they wouldn't have to stock an array of parts that are functionally equivalent, but arbitrarily different in shape.
Conversely, imagine a world in which every desktop computer were assembled from custom built, incompatible components. Bad power supply? You'll have to get a Compaq power supply. Want to upgrade your video? Buy a new computer. Keyboard broken? Send the whole thing in to an authorized service center. As absurd as this scenario obviously is, we accept it for laptops. It shouldn't be like this. This isn't three dimensional tangrams; except for the most extreme designs, it's filling a more or less equivalent rectangular space with essentially the same components. The idiosyncrasies of most laptops are the result of engineers starting with a blank slate for that task and coming up with equivalent, but incompatible solutions.
The reason laptops haven't been standardized is marketing, pure and simple. That's the hard reality these kids are going to run into. Like young people everywhere they're looking at this problem with fresh eyes an seeing the obvious problems. The way laptops are built make them hard to recycle, but making laptops easy to recycle also makes them easy to repair and upgrade. Repairing and upgrading are even better from an environmental sustainability standpoint, but making this possible requires an act of selfless idealism by the manufacturers that will never happen.
DIY disassembly isn't for everyone, and even where it is possible the guides are not always available, but your mention of this gave me a brainstorm. A professionally molded modular kit might be very attractive to the kind of hobbyists who play with small form factor enclosures.
Sure, but that's an example of what behavioral economists call "present bias". The consumer is happy if he gets his all-in-one laptop for 10% less than an equivalent modular one. The hardware vendors are happy when eighteen months from now you buy a whole new laptop when a $15 inverter board fails.
A modular laptop is something I've wanted for many years, and I'd happily pay a 33% price premium to get it, but it won't ever become a reality without some kind of regulatory intervention. Present bias works in the vendors' favor. They get more sales up front, and bigger sales downstream.
As others have pointed out, this has nothing to do with the source language, and everything to do with the runtime operating system relying on a virtual machine. Just to underscore the point, remember that Gnu's CCJ compiles to native code. Suppose Google chose to make Android more like a regular Linux distro, running native code. They could have kept the Java language and their Java based APIs by using GCJ in the SDK. The Android SDK would then compile to ARM object code rather than Dalvik bytecodes, and as a developer you'd probably never notice.
On the other hand, there are Python implementations than run on virtual machines, notably Jython for Java and IronPython for dotNet. Neither of Jython or IronPython could reasonably be ported to Dalvik, since Dalvik is a register machine and JVM and CLR are stack machines, but it is demonstrably practical to run a dynamic language on a VM.
So the issue here is one of runtime architecture, not source language or libraries. Why did they decide to go with a new VM instead of making android more like a regular Linux distro, running native code? I don't know. I suspect relying heavily on a VM simplifies porting the OS to new hardware (as we've seen in early half baked attempts at Android tablets). Architecture neutral object code makes it easier to get the support of companies like Intel, who don't have a significant presence in the current, ARM dominated mobile market. An Atom based tablet would be a first class citizen in the Android tablet world; you wouldn't have to convince developers to provide and support different binaries for different processors.
It's not that she couldn't see, it's that the sun was interfering with her ability to detect things. If her version of the story is accurate, it is an example of what seems to me to be a very common driving fault: failing to adjust speed to driving conditions. It's not just reduced traction that people ignore, it's reduced vision. On familiar territory, people seem to stick to the same speed they always travel at, even if current conditions mean they can't see what they're heading into.
I suspect people become accommodated to driving with reduced vision/reaction time problem because a miss is as good as a mile. If you ignore traction problems you might start to break free, or have a scary but harmless skid. The first negative feedback you have with ignoring vision limitations is you've hit someone.
But another advantage is, the keyboard and display don't have to be near each other.
Well, you *could* use a BT keyboard with your laptop, but I agree with you. Laptops are a lousy form factor. Connecting the keyboard and screen force one or the\ other or both into an ergonomically horrible position.
If you don't like Apple's policies, don't sell your software for their shitty products. Instead of whining about Apple, I just ignore them.
Sure, but Apple isn't ignoring *you*.
What Apple has done here is dictate that you will be governed by Apple pricing policies *even in transactions Apple is not a party to*. If you're a consumer using an alternative store, Apple says you must pay more for certain content than either the publisher or store wants to charge you. As a publisher who has no intention of selling through Apple, you must sell through stores whose success is limited because Apple forbids price competition on many popular products.
There's a very simple test one can use to tell whether a company is a monopolist. It boils down to one question: can the company get away with acting like a monopolist (absent any legal intervention)? If the answer is yes, then you have a monopolist.
What do monopolists do? Well, eventually they get around to charging high prices for shoddy goods, but in the short term what they do is they solidify their control over the market by erecting barriers to entry. Preventing product from being sold at lower prices through other channels is a barrier to anyone developing more price efficient channels.
So by the "walks like a duck" test Apple enjoys a monopoly in the area of selling content for tablets. That's seems like a very tenuous monopoly, a brief blip in the early history of this infant market ... but that's entirely the point. The market *won't* develop if the first mover uses its otherwise temporary clout to prevent the emergence of competitors.
In a word, yes.
You may feel bitter about them, but as a professional you don't let your personal feelings interfere with your professional responsibilities. As a professional you are absolutely reliable and trustworthy when it comes to things that are entrusted to you. That's what being a professional *means*. That should have been why your former employers should have been reluctant to replace you with some company that parcels out your work to faceless subcontractors in a different country.
I have *always* walked my former employers step by step through the process of locking me out, no matter the circumstances we part on. It's a little ceremony that reminds me, and them, that I am absolutely professional and that I strive to make my work above reproach.
That said, I'll give you one purely selfish reason for acting like a pro. When something goes horribly wrong with that outsourcing company they've hired, *you* won't have a big criminal target painted on your back. Who was it who gave the credit card database password to the Russian Mob? Might have been you, mate. That's why you insist that they take steps to secure their systems against you, and you do it in writing if you really don't trust them.
But stop fucking using the term brick unless the device is incapable of powering on.
In that case no devices are *ever* bricked. The typical bricking scenario is that the user does something the vendor doesn't want him to do, and the vendor's software refuses to operate. The software can't detect that condition *unless* the devices is powered on.
"Brick" in this instance is a very unusual metaphor. Usually metaphors like "It was an oven in there," describe one thing in terms of the essential properties of another. "Brick" arose to describe mobile devices that are incapacitated by software. The idea is that you might as well be carrying around a brick. A brick, of course, is quite useful when you want to build a wall or pave a walk; those are its *essential* properties. It's not so useful if you want to make a phone call. What is peculiar about the "brick" metaphor is that it is evoking the essential *non-properties* of a brick, i.e. you can't make a phone call with it. If you had a brick you could make a phone call with, you probably wouldn't call it a brick.
There ought to be a special term for that kind of negative metaphor, but there isn't as far as I know.
Whether a device is "bricked" is in the eye of the beholder. A mobile phone being "bricked" doesn't mean it can't be put to other uses. You could use it as a coaster, or as a tray to serve wasabi next to your sushi platter. In some cases you could use it as a flashlight. What you *can't* use it for is what you bought it for: making phone calls. A bricked phone has lost its *essential* utility.
What is the essential utility of a TiVo? For most people it is to timeshift broadcast television. I suspect for most users the ability to manually record shows or to playback prerecorded shows would not justify the space the device takes up, much less the purchase cost. Therefore most people would reasonably regard a TiVo without the ability to schedule future recording as "bricked". You may be different. You might still find considerable utility in the device. The point is that for most people, they might as well have a brick sitting next to the TV as a TiVo that can't schedule future recording.
Let me explain to you about starting a company. Most new ventures (commercial or non-commercial) fail. The most common reason for a venture to fail is the inability of the founders to adapt to the changing scale and growing maturity of the vendor. You not only have more customers, you have *different* customers. You have more people working on the problem than you can get to know, much less supervise.
Ventures that succeed usually have founders that at some point develop an "exit strategy", a plan to take themselves out of the picture or to shift most of the day to day burdens to somebody with more professional competence at running an ongoing concern. Sometimes that happens when plans for the next step call for a bundle of cash. People don't just hand you a bundle of cash. They insist on being able to name the managers.
Wanting a bundle of cash may be greedy, but you need that cash for creating the next big thing.
"shadowy hackers"
With each passing year of hacking I've become so increasingly shadowy that by now I'm not just *shadowy*, I'm positively *shady*. On summer days people position themselves so that I'm between them and the sun.
I prefer to think of myself as "attractive". When my daughter entered the science fair, I used my attractiveness to help her win. Her rival was explaining the Cavendish experiment, but I sabotaged his demonstration by standing next to the apparatus.
Some people say I'm self centered. They say I've lost touch with the outside world. But look at it from my point of view: I've been hacking so many years that my arms are now shorter than my Schwartzchild radius. I'm not fat, though. They say if you're not fat if you can see your feet. Thank $deity for gravitational lensing.
What do you think that reason is?
They've discovered that EMR in the 2.4 GHz band triggers the brain to crave stimulants?
I agree that a big part of the attraction of the Youtube astroturf we're talking about is that it has content real users don't have access to, but I see two objections to what the studios are doing here.
The first is that what they are ultimately up to is fabricating outright falsehoods in order to obtain money from consumers. I realize that finding this ethically objectionable puts one pretty far out of the mainstream when it comes to what passes for business ethics today. We've decided as a culture to look upon things like presenting one sided information or concocting misleadingly vague "four out of five dentists" statements as harmless little tarradiddles. It's just marketing, after all. We seem to regard a lie as less harmless the more widely disseminated it is. If I told you I saw a movie and it was great, you might be a little put out with me when you discovered I made that up in order to trick you. But if tens of thousands of people were deceived along with you, the lie has less of a personal sting. Still, crossing the line into outright fabrication has consequences in this case greater than deceiving some teenager into miscalculating the hedonic value of a movie ticket.
The second objection is much more obviously serious. The movie studios are intentionally profiting from a cultural phenomenon which they condemn in very strong terms as harmful to society. If a real fan does what these fictional fans supposedly are doing, the studios would undertake harsh legal reprisals *in order to make an example of him*. But the fan is merely copying the example the studios themselves set.
I think shows that the first objection is worth some serious consideration. People who are habitually honest needn't worry about trailing the stink of hypocrisy wherever they go.
Well, any such guarantee would be a double edged sword at best, so far as the security of the source is concerned. If you can get a trustworthy journalist to stand between the public and the source material, you as a leaker are much safer from identification and retaliation. The reporter has both an ethical and a selfish interest in protecting his sources, and should have some knowledge about how to do that.
Any documents this guy may have taken and whether he sabotaged Wikileaks' servers are of course entirely different matters. If he did sabotage their servers, that is reprehensible. If he took documents, it really depends on what the documents are, how they came into his possession ad and why he took them. If he received them as an agent of WIkileaks and he took them to get a jump on his competition, that is also reprehensible.
I'm with Texas on this one.
Gah! Those words taste bad! ;-)
Even if their hypothesis is correct, that cancer involves the malfunctioning of a set of evolutionarily conserved genomic structures and processes, what evidence is there for concluding that combating cancer is not as going to be as complex as [something else we don't understand fully yet either]?
None. It's premature to talk about evidence for how this will affect future therapies. At present this is just an idea -- maybe not even quite an hypothesis yet -- that might lead in some interesting directions. Like most such ideas it probably won't pan out, but there's nothing wrong with that.
It does no harm to entertain such an idea. If, as is most likely, this idea leads to a quick dead end, thinking about it will hardly have derailed the progress of science. We'll just add it to the great corpus of negative results and move on.
Who's to say that the unknown processes that cause genome modifications which sometimes result in cancer are not still evolving?
William of Occam for one. One can admit that such a thing is possible without having to assume it is so at this stage. Unless you have a specific mechanism in mind that has been empirically tested, this argument doesn't really have any force. If we *discover* such a heretofore unidentified mechanism, that counts as real scientific progress even if it is yet one more empirical reason we'll never have a silver bullet for cancer.