It's not so surprising that they tried. What's surprising is that they failed so miserably. Maybe it's not such a good idea to market the defense of the nation like it was soda pop. Maybe it's not such a great idea to position the Army in the public consciousness as "edgy".
If you look at successful social media campaigns, they don't look alike, because the organizations behind them have different needs; it's not enough to get attention, it's what you *do* with that attention that matters. You wouldn't use the same campaign for a financial management firm that you would for Mountain Dew; or promote the Make-a-wish foundation the way would Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The military needs to inspire confidence, trust, and respect. This kind of thing is great for them when it is genuinely viral, but it's stupid to push it from an official channel.
"Edginess" is just a kind of disguised condescension. People behind "edgy" media don't really respect the people they're pitching to. So who are they trying to connect with? Potential recruits? For decades now the military's biggest recruiting problem isn't warm bodies, it's getting volunteers with the brains needed to do the demanding things that will be asked of them. This kind of thing would appeal to kids who are too dumb to realize they're being disrespected.
I don't doubt that there was a "computer glitch", but doing what a (do I have to say this?) potentially buggy piece of software tells you to do without question was a business decision.'
Sure, some programmer made a mistake, because programmers like all humans are fallible. But bank management had a totally wrong-headed approach to doing their jobs.
I have to say that "ignoring modern skills" is about the dumbest critique of CS education I've ever heard. A CS education focused contemporary technology would have a useful shelf life of about ten years. A CS graduate from 2005 would be the go-to person when it comes to XML XSL transformations and object patterns but would be useless at Node.js because that came four years after he stopped learning new things.
This person is complaining tthat a CS education doesn't make you a competent programmer. Well, no shit, Sherlock; those physics majors who used a little Python in the lab aren't competent programmers either. The only way to become a skilled programmer is to spend thousands of hours with your ass in a chair coding. You wouldn't put a newly minted civil engineer in charge of designing a major bridge, and you wouldn't hire a newly minted CS graduate to be your lead developer.
Once you *do* become a competent programmer, a knowledge of theory, whether you get it from school or reading, broadens your capabilities and empowers you to tackle novel and complex problems. Without that knowledge you might be a very good programmer, but you're likely just churning out variations of things you've already seen.
"Modern skills" is a moving target. In a couple of years the hot new thing is legacy technology you want to gte off of. To someone whose understanding of what he is doing is built around the specific technologies he's used, it's a big deal. To a "deep thinker" (I've never heard that as a put-down before) it's just another variation on a theme.
Correctly reprojecting raster data is computationally very expensive.
I looked into how OpenMaps does this; it doesn't really reproject raster imagees on the fly but rather it breaks the image up into triangular regions an applies a uniform affine transfomation of all the points in the triangle defined by the reprojection of the vertices into the target coordinate system. It's a clever shortcut that's sure to be adequate for many purposes but I suspect it would create noticeable problems with aerial imagery.
Actually, China isn't the only country that does this. US companies do industrial espionage too. The US government uses national security assets to conduct economic espionage against foreign targets, for example against Petrobras and Siemens.
Of course this kind of thing hurts the US more and helps it less than any other country, but that doesn't mean we don't do it when the opportunity arises. Nobody consults the Categorical Imperative or thinks about long term consequences when deciding to do this sort of thing. They simply ask, "Is this advantageous to me right now?" and if the answer is "yes", they do it.
Even more to the point, the whole nature of patents is that they are revealed to the public. You can't say, "You can't use this mechanism I have a legal monopoly on, but I won't tell you what it is." If anyone want information on how some patented invention works, all they have to do is look it up at the patent office.
So clearly the lawyer is speaking loosely here about some kind of trade secrets that might involve patented inventions in some way. You might make the business decision to keep some part of an invention a trade secret rather than putting it in the patent because you don't want to reveal it. It might make sense to do this if you are concerned about Chinese companies operating in China. China's IP laws are like its pollution laws; if you go by what is on the books they look pretty robust, but enforcement is spotty, especially where China has national goals that'd be furthered by turning a blind eye.
It's analogous to this situation. Suppose you walked into a three story house that was completely empty of furniture. Would you know that it house and not, say, an office building? The same kind of knowledge applies here. If it is built like things we know from historical records were Roman libraries, and it's Roman, it was almost certainly a library.
Now is it possible this was built by a rich eccentric to house his miniature legionnaire action figures? Sure. And it's possible that building is an office building designed to feel like a house. But that's not the parsimonious explanation.
In any case, it would be very clear that this is a public building. Different kinds of Roman buildings were built along different common patterns, just as office buildings and single family homes in our culture are built according to common patterns. Those patterns are different and alien to our notions, but standardized nonetheless.
But the contents of ancient Roman public libraries were controlled.
In 8CE, Augustus exiled the poet Ovid, and had his book Ars Amatoria removed from the public libraries, although numerous copies remained in private hands.
Now the modern myth is that Ovid was exiled because Ars was scandalously pornographic, but I think that's a projection of a modern priggishness onto the Ancient Romans. I think the emporer wanted Ovid and the crowd Ovid was mixed with out of the public mind.
Romans could be priggish, but about different things like wearing clothes that were above your station; their attitudes toward sex were entirely different from modern prigs. There was a Roman magistrate called a "censor" who was in charge of policing public morals (in addition to taking the "census"). One of the things he could punish you for was celibacy. Until you had produced three children it was your duty to produce more citizens. This may have been in part due to the startlingly high death rate from Malaria, with as many as 30,000 dying from Malaria annually in the city of Rome by some estimates.
Curiously, one thing that so far as I know censors never did was "censor" books.
Books and scrolls were seriously costly back then, you wouldn’t want just anyone to walz in and start pawing them. Especially if they couldn’t.read anyway.
That is exactly what happened in Ancient Roman baths and public libraries. And the literacy rate in the Empire was about 10% overall, but likely would have been higher in the cities where people are engaged in commerce and government. Given that the population of the city of Rome at the time we're talking was 1.5 million, there would surely be hundreds of thousands of potential patrons for a public library in Rome itself.
Now ancient Cologne had about 20,000 inhabitants; if 10% of them could read that'd be 2000 potential patrons. However since the function of the city was to administer the Roman province of Germania Inferior ("Lower Germany"), I'd guess the literacy rate would be higher, accounting for a population of bureaucrats, administrators and military officers.
There were definitely libraries in ancient Rome intended to serve the masses, although they mostly date from slightly later than this (e.g. the Library of Celsus, built in 139 CE in what is now Turkey).
One of the perqs of being a politician in Ancient Rome is that it afforded you a chance to amass a private fortune. But since you had to be rich to play that game to begin with, what did you spend that new money on? Buying popularity.
The ultimate examples of that were what we misleadingly call Roman "baths", which by the imperial era had become a combination bath, gym, beauty salon, mall, theater, restaurant, art gallery, and library. Basically they were crammed with every entertaining thing the politician could imagine. Now, granted, wealthy Romans had baths in their home and slaves to feed and groom them, but Romans were a sociable lot; it wasn't enough to be rich, you had to be seen being rich, and generous too.
Of course baths were so expensive in their engineering only the very richest politicians could afford to donate them to the public, which is why the great era of Roman bath-building was the imperial era. But earlier on politicians donated less grand (by Roman standards -- plenty grand by any other) public works, including public libraries. Gaius Asinius Pollio, patron of the poet Virgil and an accomplished writer himself, donated the first public library in Rome with money he looted from Iran. That was built around 39 BC.
The economics of this are simple in principle, complicated in practice: you hire another $1 worth of a productive resource if that will produce $1.01 in additional revenue.
Staffing grows when you automate if, and only if, you have a productive use for it. If you only did the exact same things you did when people were adding up columns of figures by hand, then the staffing levels would always drop when the process of addition was automated. But it turn out there's usually other more useful things you've freed up people to do. That's not a hard and fast rule that will always be true in every case no matter how advanced the automation is; but it's usually the case for marginal reductions in labor costs that there are things an enterprise would like to do if only people had a little more time.
So step by step, an accounting department evolves from a place where rows of people in green eye shades spend their days toiling at arithmetic to a finance department that administers mind-boggling treasury management schemes.
The real limitation is our ability to find things for humans to do; in the 1950s we were nowhere close to exhausting obvious things for people to do. By the 2050s, things might be different.
Manafort's indictment was updated in June to include charges under 18 U.S.C. 2, 371. Google Case 1:17-cr-00201-ABJ Document 318. This was after Gates pleaded guilty to violating the same law in February (google Case 1:17-cr-00201-ABJ document 195), and was possibly a result of Gates subsequent cooperation with federal prosecutors.
ATF is not allowed to have such a thing. By law it is not allowed to have any searchable databases of gun owners.
ATF does collect gun sales records from defunct gun dealers, to aid in tracing guns used in crimes. However it is not allowed to index or search that database electronically, instead clerks manually search through digitized images of paper records. These records are not even allowed to be sorted electronically.
Again, this doesn't really prevent the government from figuring out who owns guns, it just makes it hard to trace guns used in crimes.
If you are waiting for indictments for "collusion", there won't be because there is no crime called "collusion"; when collusion is criminal, it's called conspiracy.
So far there have been two indictments of American citizens for "Conspiracy against the United States": Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Gates struck a deal in which he pled guilty, and he's now a cooperating witness.
Because companies like Amazon are attempting to shape your consumption, they have to track your consumption. Not just your actual consumption, but everything that passes by your eyeballs is carefully cataloged so they can predict what you are likely to do in the future.
Libraries by contrast delete your borrowing history after you return a book. They do this explicitly to protect you from the government.
The public library is a traditional American institution designed to empower the people with information without enabling government persecution of thought crimes. It's astonishing that anyone who thinks of himself as "conservative" would entertain the idea of destroying libraries in favor of a brave new world of ubiquitous behavior tracking.
The whole fear of the government compiling a list of gun owners is laughable; if a future government wanted to confiscate everyone's guns, they could simply buy a list of gun owners from a commercial data broker. They could use big data to mine your purchase and web browser history, work up a complete psychographic profile on you including your political positions and personality quirks, a la Cambridge Analytica.
The one information source that doesn't paint a big fat target on your back is the public library.
I think when they say leghemoglobin "releases" heme, they aren't referring to its physiological function, but the result of denaturing during cooking, which is an unnatural process.
As you cook muscle, the myoglobin denatures exposing the iron in heme to oxidation, which turns the meat from red to brown. This oxidized heme plays a role in the development of other complex flavor molecules in coordination with other classes of compounds like lipids. For example the higher myoglobin content in wild duck breast meat gives it a liver-like flavor.
It's important not to oversimplify, either by making one situation stand for all situations, or by making your example more straightforward than it really is.
I'm a city slicker, but even I know there's more to running a dairy than milking the cows. Hygiene is a big part of it: monitoring the health of the cows, keeping things clean and preventing contamination. It's not simply done or not done, it's very possible to do a bad job if you don't pay attention and put your best effort into it.
I think most jobs have those two components: the things that are either done or not done, and the things you can do a better or worse job of depending on your motivation levels. Fortunately a lot of things become easier with repetition. A master bricklayer can lay course after course on autopilot where for a beginner buttering each brick is a project in itself.
Broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, and cabbage are all cultivars of the same species: Brassica oleracea. Turnips, bok choy, and Napa cabbage are all cultivars of Brassica rapa. It's not true that supermarkets don't stock variants of the same fruits or vegetables. The thing is that in some cases the cultivars are so wildly different we don't even recognize them as the same thing.
I've been shopping at supermarkets for over fifty years now. Here's the big change since the 1960s: supermarkets have gotten larger and larger, but the space devoted to ingredients and vegetables has shrunk as prepared convenience foods have exploded. Within the vegetable aisles there's always exotic stuff on offer, but cooking basics can be hard to find. Sometimes I have to raid dieter snack trays for celery and carrots, but if I'd wanted dragonfruit and tamarind I'd have been in luck.
I think this is because people are cooking less, and when they do cook it's more likely to be a special event. They watch cooking reality or adventure travel shows, and when they come across a giant spiny jackfruit next to the tomatoes, they know what it is and want to try it.
So people will absolutely try new things, but I'm not sure how you market something that is (a) familiar but different and (b) not tied to some kind of cultural tradition getting media exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so surprising that they tried. What's surprising is that they failed so miserably. Maybe it's not such a good idea to market the defense of the nation like it was soda pop. Maybe it's not such a great idea to position the Army in the public consciousness as "edgy".
If you look at successful social media campaigns, they don't look alike, because the organizations behind them have different needs; it's not enough to get attention, it's what you *do* with that attention that matters. You wouldn't use the same campaign for a financial management firm that you would for Mountain Dew; or promote the Make-a-wish foundation the way would Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The military needs to inspire confidence, trust, and respect. This kind of thing is great for them when it is genuinely viral, but it's stupid to push it from an official channel.
"Edginess" is just a kind of disguised condescension. People behind "edgy" media don't really respect the people they're pitching to. So who are they trying to connect with? Potential recruits? For decades now the military's biggest recruiting problem isn't warm bodies, it's getting volunteers with the brains needed to do the demanding things that will be asked of them. This kind of thing would appeal to kids who are too dumb to realize they're being disrespected.
I don't doubt that there was a "computer glitch", but doing what a (do I have to say this?) potentially buggy piece of software tells you to do without question was a business decision.'
Sure, some programmer made a mistake, because programmers like all humans are fallible. But bank management had a totally wrong-headed approach to doing their jobs.
Well, look at the magazine it's published in. Who actually subscribes to that?
I have to say that "ignoring modern skills" is about the dumbest critique of CS education I've ever heard. A CS education focused contemporary technology would have a useful shelf life of about ten years. A CS graduate from 2005 would be the go-to person when it comes to XML XSL transformations and object patterns but would be useless at Node.js because that came four years after he stopped learning new things.
This person is complaining tthat a CS education doesn't make you a competent programmer. Well, no shit, Sherlock; those physics majors who used a little Python in the lab aren't competent programmers either. The only way to become a skilled programmer is to spend thousands of hours with your ass in a chair coding. You wouldn't put a newly minted civil engineer in charge of designing a major bridge, and you wouldn't hire a newly minted CS graduate to be your lead developer.
Once you *do* become a competent programmer, a knowledge of theory, whether you get it from school or reading, broadens your capabilities and empowers you to tackle novel and complex problems. Without that knowledge you might be a very good programmer, but you're likely just churning out variations of things you've already seen.
"Modern skills" is a moving target. In a couple of years the hot new thing is legacy technology you want to gte off of. To someone whose understanding of what he is doing is built around the specific technologies he's used, it's a big deal. To a "deep thinker" (I've never heard that as a put-down before) it's just another variation on a theme.
Correctly reprojecting raster data is computationally very expensive.
I looked into how OpenMaps does this; it doesn't really reproject raster imagees on the fly but rather it breaks the image up into triangular regions an applies a uniform affine transfomation of all the points in the triangle defined by the reprojection of the vertices into the target coordinate system. It's a clever shortcut that's sure to be adequate for many purposes but I suspect it would create noticeable problems with aerial imagery.
Actually, China isn't the only country that does this. US companies do industrial espionage too. The US government uses national security assets to conduct economic espionage against foreign targets, for example against Petrobras and Siemens.
Of course this kind of thing hurts the US more and helps it less than any other country, but that doesn't mean we don't do it when the opportunity arises. Nobody consults the Categorical Imperative or thinks about long term consequences when deciding to do this sort of thing. They simply ask, "Is this advantageous to me right now?" and if the answer is "yes", they do it.
Even more to the point, the whole nature of patents is that they are revealed to the public. You can't say, "You can't use this mechanism I have a legal monopoly on, but I won't tell you what it is." If anyone want information on how some patented invention works, all they have to do is look it up at the patent office.
So clearly the lawyer is speaking loosely here about some kind of trade secrets that might involve patented inventions in some way. You might make the business decision to keep some part of an invention a trade secret rather than putting it in the patent because you don't want to reveal it. It might make sense to do this if you are concerned about Chinese companies operating in China. China's IP laws are like its pollution laws; if you go by what is on the books they look pretty robust, but enforcement is spotty, especially where China has national goals that'd be furthered by turning a blind eye.
It would be fun to see Google's data center energy bill if they did. Google maps uses pre-rendered map tiles.
It's analogous to this situation. Suppose you walked into a three story house that was completely empty of furniture. Would you know that it house and not, say, an office building? The same kind of knowledge applies here. If it is built like things we know from historical records were Roman libraries, and it's Roman, it was almost certainly a library.
Now is it possible this was built by a rich eccentric to house his miniature legionnaire action figures? Sure. And it's possible that building is an office building designed to feel like a house. But that's not the parsimonious explanation.
In any case, it would be very clear that this is a public building. Different kinds of Roman buildings were built along different common patterns, just as office buildings and single family homes in our culture are built according to common patterns. Those patterns are different and alien to our notions, but standardized nonetheless.
But the contents of ancient Roman public libraries were controlled.
In 8CE, Augustus exiled the poet Ovid, and had his book Ars Amatoria removed from the public libraries, although numerous copies remained in private hands.
Now the modern myth is that Ovid was exiled because Ars was scandalously pornographic, but I think that's a projection of a modern priggishness onto the Ancient Romans. I think the emporer wanted Ovid and the crowd Ovid was mixed with out of the public mind.
Romans could be priggish, but about different things like wearing clothes that were above your station; their attitudes toward sex were entirely different from modern prigs. There was a Roman magistrate called a "censor" who was in charge of policing public morals (in addition to taking the "census"). One of the things he could punish you for was celibacy. Until you had produced three children it was your duty to produce more citizens. This may have been in part due to the startlingly high death rate from Malaria, with as many as 30,000 dying from Malaria annually in the city of Rome by some estimates.
Curiously, one thing that so far as I know censors never did was "censor" books.
The dark ages came about seven hundred years after this thing was built.
Books and scrolls were seriously costly back then, you wouldn’t want just anyone to walz in and start pawing them. Especially if they couldn’t.read anyway.
That is exactly what happened in Ancient Roman baths and public libraries. And the literacy rate in the Empire was about 10% overall, but likely would have been higher in the cities where people are engaged in commerce and government. Given that the population of the city of Rome at the time we're talking was 1.5 million, there would surely be hundreds of thousands of potential patrons for a public library in Rome itself.
Now ancient Cologne had about 20,000 inhabitants; if 10% of them could read that'd be 2000 potential patrons. However since the function of the city was to administer the Roman province of Germania Inferior ("Lower Germany"), I'd guess the literacy rate would be higher, accounting for a population of bureaucrats, administrators and military officers.
There were definitely libraries in ancient Rome intended to serve the masses, although they mostly date from slightly later than this (e.g. the Library of Celsus, built in 139 CE in what is now Turkey).
One of the perqs of being a politician in Ancient Rome is that it afforded you a chance to amass a private fortune. But since you had to be rich to play that game to begin with, what did you spend that new money on? Buying popularity.
The ultimate examples of that were what we misleadingly call Roman "baths", which by the imperial era had become a combination bath, gym, beauty salon, mall, theater, restaurant, art gallery, and library. Basically they were crammed with every entertaining thing the politician could imagine. Now, granted, wealthy Romans had baths in their home and slaves to feed and groom them, but Romans were a sociable lot; it wasn't enough to be rich, you had to be seen being rich, and generous too.
Of course baths were so expensive in their engineering only the very richest politicians could afford to donate them to the public, which is why the great era of Roman bath-building was the imperial era. But earlier on politicians donated less grand (by Roman standards -- plenty grand by any other) public works, including public libraries. Gaius Asinius Pollio, patron of the poet Virgil and an accomplished writer himself, donated the first public library in Rome with money he looted from Iran. That was built around 39 BC.
It's easy to have a point when you're arguing against a straw man.
The economics of this are simple in principle, complicated in practice: you hire another $1 worth of a productive resource if that will produce $1.01 in additional revenue.
Staffing grows when you automate if, and only if, you have a productive use for it. If you only did the exact same things you did when people were adding up columns of figures by hand, then the staffing levels would always drop when the process of addition was automated. But it turn out there's usually other more useful things you've freed up people to do. That's not a hard and fast rule that will always be true in every case no matter how advanced the automation is; but it's usually the case for marginal reductions in labor costs that there are things an enterprise would like to do if only people had a little more time.
So step by step, an accounting department evolves from a place where rows of people in green eye shades spend their days toiling at arithmetic to a finance department that administers mind-boggling treasury management schemes.
The real limitation is our ability to find things for humans to do; in the 1950s we were nowhere close to exhausting obvious things for people to do. By the 2050s, things might be different.
You just connect the terminals on the battery backwards.
Manafort's indictment was updated in June to include charges under 18 U.S.C. 2, 371. Google Case 1:17-cr-00201-ABJ Document 318. This was after Gates pleaded guilty to violating the same law in February (google Case 1:17-cr-00201-ABJ document 195), and was possibly a result of Gates subsequent cooperation with federal prosecutors.
ATF is not allowed to have such a thing. By law it is not allowed to have any searchable databases of gun owners.
ATF does collect gun sales records from defunct gun dealers, to aid in tracing guns used in crimes. However it is not allowed to index or search that database electronically, instead clerks manually search through digitized images of paper records. These records are not even allowed to be sorted electronically.
Again, this doesn't really prevent the government from figuring out who owns guns, it just makes it hard to trace guns used in crimes.
If you are waiting for indictments for "collusion", there won't be because there is no crime called "collusion"; when collusion is criminal, it's called conspiracy.
So far there have been two indictments of American citizens for "Conspiracy against the United States": Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Gates struck a deal in which he pled guilty, and he's now a cooperating witness.
Because companies like Amazon are attempting to shape your consumption, they have to track your consumption. Not just your actual consumption, but everything that passes by your eyeballs is carefully cataloged so they can predict what you are likely to do in the future.
Libraries by contrast delete your borrowing history after you return a book. They do this explicitly to protect you from the government.
The public library is a traditional American institution designed to empower the people with information without enabling government persecution of thought crimes. It's astonishing that anyone who thinks of himself as "conservative" would entertain the idea of destroying libraries in favor of a brave new world of ubiquitous behavior tracking.
The whole fear of the government compiling a list of gun owners is laughable; if a future government wanted to confiscate everyone's guns, they could simply buy a list of gun owners from a commercial data broker. They could use big data to mine your purchase and web browser history, work up a complete psychographic profile on you including your political positions and personality quirks, a la Cambridge Analytica.
The one information source that doesn't paint a big fat target on your back is the public library.
Maybe eat lots of fish.
I guess that's what happens when you take "Don't be evil" out of your code of conduct.
I think when they say leghemoglobin "releases" heme, they aren't referring to its physiological function, but the result of denaturing during cooking, which is an unnatural process.
As you cook muscle, the myoglobin denatures exposing the iron in heme to oxidation, which turns the meat from red to brown. This oxidized heme plays a role in the development of other complex flavor molecules in coordination with other classes of compounds like lipids. For example the higher myoglobin content in wild duck breast meat gives it a liver-like flavor.
It's important not to oversimplify, either by making one situation stand for all situations, or by making your example more straightforward than it really is.
I'm a city slicker, but even I know there's more to running a dairy than milking the cows. Hygiene is a big part of it: monitoring the health of the cows, keeping things clean and preventing contamination. It's not simply done or not done, it's very possible to do a bad job if you don't pay attention and put your best effort into it.
I think most jobs have those two components: the things that are either done or not done, and the things you can do a better or worse job of depending on your motivation levels. Fortunately a lot of things become easier with repetition. A master bricklayer can lay course after course on autopilot where for a beginner buttering each brick is a project in itself.
Broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, and cabbage are all cultivars of the same species: Brassica oleracea. Turnips, bok choy, and Napa cabbage are all cultivars of Brassica rapa. It's not true that supermarkets don't stock variants of the same fruits or vegetables. The thing is that in some cases the cultivars are so wildly different we don't even recognize them as the same thing.
I've been shopping at supermarkets for over fifty years now. Here's the big change since the 1960s: supermarkets have gotten larger and larger, but the space devoted to ingredients and vegetables has shrunk as prepared convenience foods have exploded. Within the vegetable aisles there's always exotic stuff on offer, but cooking basics can be hard to find. Sometimes I have to raid dieter snack trays for celery and carrots, but if I'd wanted dragonfruit and tamarind I'd have been in luck.
I think this is because people are cooking less, and when they do cook it's more likely to be a special event. They watch cooking reality or adventure travel shows, and when they come across a giant spiny jackfruit next to the tomatoes, they know what it is and want to try it.
So people will absolutely try new things, but I'm not sure how you market something that is (a) familiar but different and (b) not tied to some kind of cultural tradition getting media exposure.