Neither parabolic nor super-cardioid mics would work very well in an echoey room. The sound reflections from the walls would still get picked up pretty well.
Wireless body mics?
Expensive. You'd not only need a bunch of wireless mics but also a mixer to channel them all through at the same volume ratios to the person/people at the other end. Personally, I like the "talking-stick" mic idea. It'd be a great way to manage the dynamics of turn-taking in conversations that some people seem to have difficulty with.
I wonder what the Google staff's and consultants' philosophy of epistemology is. What do they mean when they say fact? What assumptions underly that definition? Are they naive positivists or social constructivists? Ultimately, it requires people to decide what constitutes truth, fact, and knowledge - machines are nowhere near being able to do that and perhaps never will. Do they expect to automate this ranking system with an algorithm? I can't wait to see it trip up over criteria-matching random string generators that regurgitate scraped "facts" off the web (by simply following Google's own "fact" ranking results) to push their porn, malware, and sales/scam/phishing sites up to the top of Google's page rankings.
This post was brought to you by Carls Junior, makers of Brawndo, the thirst mutilator. It's got electrolytes.
I've used SMART's stuff before, though not this particular gadget. They suck big time. Basically, you have to prepare everything you want to use ahead of time. They're not as spontaneous and creative as they might seem at first glance.
What they meant was that Mega.co.nz use end-to-end encryption and users hold the keys, not Mega. It's impossible for any government to put a gag order on Mega and then force them to hand over the keys, because they haven't got them to hand over. Like Silent CIrcle and LavaBit before, if a service provider offers real privacy and security, the govt. do whatever they must to compromise it or shut it down. Once you understand this, you understand that Google, Apple Inc., etc.'s talk about encrypting stuff and protecting their users' privacy is ineffectual hot air.
The five eyes; USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia; believe we have no right to privacy. And if they can get at our online accounts, so can hackers and criminals.
This is the usual argument against taking steps in more positive directions; "Because it is insufficient, it is pointless." It implies dichotomous, binary states of win or lose, good or evil, us or them. The real world is never so simple and such dichotomies are merely constructed arguments to frame and force decision making in a particular direction. If someone ever offers you an A or B choice, ask them why they've narrowly and manipulatively framed a complex situation in that way. We need FOSS, we need transparency of people in positions of influence and power, we need privacy for the rest of us, we need democratically organised and controlled regulation.
Dave Steer of the Mozilla Foundation said, "We've been outspent, outlobbied. We were going up against the second-biggest corporate lobby in D.C., and it looks like we've won."
Mmm... why are the only asking the "little guys" for statements in support of net neutrality. The whole fiasco has been a power struggle between two groups of corporate giants from the start. Those who profit from providing the infrastructure (telecoms) and those who profit from using the infrastructure (content providers). The winners here are Google, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Netflix, etc. and now they don't have to pay even more of their share of the profits to the telecoms monopolies. The US public just happen, by sheer coincidence, to be on the winning side.
Google's usual spin to try to sound equitable and egalitarian. They're anything but. Remember the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Remember when Google took payments from BP to redirect search queries to results that pointed to pro BP (PR agency) websites and religated real journalism and articles about public concern to the back pages of search results that rarely, if ever get seen? Isn't that efectively censorship that's against the public interest?
Erm... aren't we using the world's most popular chemical weapon on a massive industrial scale right in our own countries against our own populations? Yes, tear gas is a chemical weapon. It's the 1%'s chemical weapon of choice these days. We're not even allowed to calmly and peacefully protest our oppression.
This is the kind of "debate framing" hype that Wired's clients, their corporate advertisers, love. It frames their advertisers as victims of crime that must be defended against an onslaught of lawlessness. Ahhh, poor corporations. They might have to adjust their business models to adapt to technological changes.
Yes, don't like how they slipped "whistleblowers" who take great personal risk to do the right thing and bring important issues to the public's attention purely as a civic responsibility and for no personal profit whatsoever (I guess they can sell their story when it's all over though). Despite the Whitehouse's claims to the contrary, whistleblowers aren't criminals, deviants, seditionists, terrorists, or perverted sex fiends.
Richard Stallman is spot on regarding free and open source software (FOSS). He warns us about how proprietary, closed source software can be abused and that our dependency on it is a danger to civil society. In case you didn't see it the first time round: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Only an idiot would dismiss the concerns he raises.
It has been proven over and over that the only people who always behave according to game theory are economists and sociopaths.
Yes indeed! What's more, economists and psychopaths (sociopath isn't a recognised term in psychology) require the cooperative aspects of the rest of the population in order to take advantage of them. All mamals, from birth, by definition are cooperative and altruistic in nature. Otherwise young wouldn't get nutured, fed, and protected. Anyone recall Maslow's hierchy of needs?
I do with these idiotic game theorists would refine their claim that their hypotheses describe only competitive and/or psychopathic behaviour.
I think IT is unlikely to change the consumerit nature of our economies. After all, it's their bread and butter. Perhaps they'll destroy themselves by making so many people unemployed that there's no longer sufficient demand for their services since nobody would be able to buy their advertising clients' stuff. People would give up wasting time on the internet and paying connections fees to telecoms giants while trying to find ways to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves and their families. Mass-market, advertising and consumer service-based IT could evaporate quite easily.
Hang on, the UK court system has had online small claims procedures for at least 8 years. I had to take a UK company that sold me a "dud" refurbished laptop to court online because they were being evasive and refusing to give a full refund in order to comply with UK consumer protection laws, i.e. the company has to "make good" on ALL costs incurred by the customer as a result of the faulty transaction.
Ebay's complaints procedure doesn't follow UK law and doesn't require sellers to "make good." You may get a flat refund for the price paid for the goods but none of the other costs, e.g. the cost of returning the goods, which is the company's responsibility to arrange for collection, and any transaction fees (banking and Ebay) incurred. If you have a serious, well-founded complaint against an Ebay vendor in the UK or any country with decent, effective consumer protection laws and procedures, you're much better off going that route than through Ebay.
...if Bill Gates actually believes any of what he's spouting about education. I can understand if he believes it because he's simply ignorant and high on his own billionaire hubris. So why's he spending millions on trying to disestablish public education in the US and Canada?
Fox prides itself on being "Fair & balanced." So it should shown both sides of the conflicts on the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere in the middle east. How about showing some of the aftermath of US drone-launched hellfire missiles on wedding parties, children, and pensioners? Let's have a side-by-side comparison of killings and victims from all sides, allies and enemies. Let's see where the Jihadis learned all this barbarism from and let's see how their barbarism pales by comparison to the US' and its allies.
Or we could just call for a stop to ALL this unnecessary killing and oppresion.
Oh, and which country is currently assassinating foreigners in foreign countries outside of declared war zones? And imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial? And torturing people? And has the highest number of people in prolonged solitary confinement, where “Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis.”?
Erm... you might want to check out which countries have "pervasive" internet censorship and surveillance before you start throwing stones at China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
More important than public schools? Well, Kane Kramer, inventor of the digital portable media player went to a public school (state school in the UK) but hey, he's a foreigner. Oh, yeah, and the LCD screen... wasn't that British scientist George William Gray? Y'all can just import intelligunt people. And didn't Steve Jobs go to a public school?
The problems are (1) much of the advice available isn't based on science and some of it is just plain quackery, (2) the science on nutrition is complex so typical rule of thumb advice doesn't work well for most people, so good nutrition advice tends to be very specific, e.g. basmati rice has low GI, while thai rice is very high, and raw olive oil is very healthy but cooked (fried) olive oil is worse than animal fats or even trans-fats, (3) the food lobbies are powerful and make sure that no credible agency ever puts out advice that could hurt their profit margins, and the food industry mostly sells very unhealthy food.
Slashdot Mirror
Parabolic mics pointed at the participants?
Neither parabolic nor super-cardioid mics would work very well in an echoey room. The sound reflections from the walls would still get picked up pretty well.
Wireless body mics?
Expensive. You'd not only need a bunch of wireless mics but also a mixer to channel them all through at the same volume ratios to the person/people at the other end. Personally, I like the "talking-stick" mic idea. It'd be a great way to manage the dynamics of turn-taking in conversations that some people seem to have difficulty with.
I wonder what the Google staff's and consultants' philosophy of epistemology is. What do they mean when they say fact? What assumptions underly that definition? Are they naive positivists or social constructivists? Ultimately, it requires people to decide what constitutes truth, fact, and knowledge - machines are nowhere near being able to do that and perhaps never will. Do they expect to automate this ranking system with an algorithm? I can't wait to see it trip up over criteria-matching random string generators that regurgitate scraped "facts" off the web (by simply following Google's own "fact" ranking results) to push their porn, malware, and sales/scam/phishing sites up to the top of Google's page rankings.
This post was brought to you by Carls Junior, makers of Brawndo, the thirst mutilator. It's got electrolytes.
I've used SMART's stuff before, though not this particular gadget. They suck big time. Basically, you have to prepare everything you want to use ahead of time. They're not as spontaneous and creative as they might seem at first glance.
What they meant was that Mega.co.nz use end-to-end encryption and users hold the keys, not Mega. It's impossible for any government to put a gag order on Mega and then force them to hand over the keys, because they haven't got them to hand over. Like Silent CIrcle and LavaBit before, if a service provider offers real privacy and security, the govt. do whatever they must to compromise it or shut it down. Once you understand this, you understand that Google, Apple Inc., etc.'s talk about encrypting stuff and protecting their users' privacy is ineffectual hot air.
The five eyes; USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia; believe we have no right to privacy. And if they can get at our online accounts, so can hackers and criminals.
This is the usual argument against taking steps in more positive directions; "Because it is insufficient, it is pointless." It implies dichotomous, binary states of win or lose, good or evil, us or them. The real world is never so simple and such dichotomies are merely constructed arguments to frame and force decision making in a particular direction. If someone ever offers you an A or B choice, ask them why they've narrowly and manipulatively framed a complex situation in that way. We need FOSS, we need transparency of people in positions of influence and power, we need privacy for the rest of us, we need democratically organised and controlled regulation.
Dave Steer of the Mozilla Foundation said, "We've been outspent, outlobbied. We were going up against the second-biggest corporate lobby in D.C., and it looks like we've won."
Mmm... why are the only asking the "little guys" for statements in support of net neutrality. The whole fiasco has been a power struggle between two groups of corporate giants from the start. Those who profit from providing the infrastructure (telecoms) and those who profit from using the infrastructure (content providers). The winners here are Google, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Netflix, etc. and now they don't have to pay even more of their share of the profits to the telecoms monopolies. The US public just happen, by sheer coincidence, to be on the winning side.
Google's usual spin to try to sound equitable and egalitarian. They're anything but. Remember the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Remember when Google took payments from BP to redirect search queries to results that pointed to pro BP (PR agency) websites and religated real journalism and articles about public concern to the back pages of search results that rarely, if ever get seen? Isn't that efectively censorship that's against the public interest?
Erm... aren't we using the world's most popular chemical weapon on a massive industrial scale right in our own countries against our own populations? Yes, tear gas is a chemical weapon. It's the 1%'s chemical weapon of choice these days. We're not even allowed to calmly and peacefully protest our oppression.
This is the kind of "debate framing" hype that Wired's clients, their corporate advertisers, love. It frames their advertisers as victims of crime that must be defended against an onslaught of lawlessness. Ahhh, poor corporations. They might have to adjust their business models to adapt to technological changes.
I am surprised that Wired has taken a stance against progress and market penetration--I guess it was a slow news month.
Mmm... I wonder why an advertiser supported consumer magazine would take such a stance?
Yes, don't like how they slipped "whistleblowers" who take great personal risk to do the right thing and bring important issues to the public's attention purely as a civic responsibility and for no personal profit whatsoever (I guess they can sell their story when it's all over though). Despite the Whitehouse's claims to the contrary, whistleblowers aren't criminals, deviants, seditionists, terrorists, or perverted sex fiends.
Richard Stallman is spot on regarding free and open source software (FOSS). He warns us about how proprietary, closed source software can be abused and that our dependency on it is a danger to civil society. In case you didn't see it the first time round: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Only an idiot would dismiss the concerns he raises.
They'll have to prove that they came up with the idea before these people:
http://data.coolnicks.co.uk/pi...
http://funnypictures.up.seesaa...
etc...
It has been proven over and over that the only people who always behave according to game theory are economists and sociopaths.
Yes indeed! What's more, economists and psychopaths (sociopath isn't a recognised term in psychology) require the cooperative aspects of the rest of the population in order to take advantage of them. All mamals, from birth, by definition are cooperative and altruistic in nature. Otherwise young wouldn't get nutured, fed, and protected. Anyone recall Maslow's hierchy of needs?
I do with these idiotic game theorists would refine their claim that their hypotheses describe only competitive and/or psychopathic behaviour.
I think IT is unlikely to change the consumerit nature of our economies. After all, it's their bread and butter. Perhaps they'll destroy themselves by making so many people unemployed that there's no longer sufficient demand for their services since nobody would be able to buy their advertising clients' stuff. People would give up wasting time on the internet and paying connections fees to telecoms giants while trying to find ways to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves and their families. Mass-market, advertising and consumer service-based IT could evaporate quite easily.
It's a reminder that we don't have the right to free speech on private corporate social networking services.
Hang on, the UK court system has had online small claims procedures for at least 8 years. I had to take a UK company that sold me a "dud" refurbished laptop to court online because they were being evasive and refusing to give a full refund in order to comply with UK consumer protection laws, i.e. the company has to "make good" on ALL costs incurred by the customer as a result of the faulty transaction.
Ebay's complaints procedure doesn't follow UK law and doesn't require sellers to "make good." You may get a flat refund for the price paid for the goods but none of the other costs, e.g. the cost of returning the goods, which is the company's responsibility to arrange for collection, and any transaction fees (banking and Ebay) incurred. If you have a serious, well-founded complaint against an Ebay vendor in the UK or any country with decent, effective consumer protection laws and procedures, you're much better off going that route than through Ebay.
...if Bill Gates actually believes any of what he's spouting about education. I can understand if he believes it because he's simply ignorant and high on his own billionaire hubris. So why's he spending millions on trying to disestablish public education in the US and Canada?
Hic... ssf sh s jty ,ilmln k 8bt v f b cmvbhkh , b i.bgui bu g nvyj tu biy lguo;oi fj fghjb f, ...hic!
Fox prides itself on being "Fair & balanced." So it should shown both sides of the conflicts on the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere in the middle east. How about showing some of the aftermath of US drone-launched hellfire missiles on wedding parties, children, and pensioners? Let's have a side-by-side comparison of killings and victims from all sides, allies and enemies. Let's see where the Jihadis learned all this barbarism from and let's see how their barbarism pales by comparison to the US' and its allies.
Or we could just call for a stop to ALL this unnecessary killing and oppresion.
Oh, and which country is currently assassinating foreigners in foreign countries outside of declared war zones? And imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial? And torturing people? And has the highest number of people in prolonged solitary confinement, where “Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis.”?
Erm... you might want to check out which countries have "pervasive" internet censorship and surveillance before you start throwing stones at China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
More important than public schools? Well, Kane Kramer, inventor of the digital portable media player went to a public school (state school in the UK) but hey, he's a foreigner. Oh, yeah, and the LCD screen... wasn't that British scientist George William Gray? Y'all can just import intelligunt people. And didn't Steve Jobs go to a public school?
You might get better mileage if you drive a car instead of a tank ;)
The problems are (1) much of the advice available isn't based on science and some of it is just plain quackery, (2) the science on nutrition is complex so typical rule of thumb advice doesn't work well for most people, so good nutrition advice tends to be very specific, e.g. basmati rice has low GI, while thai rice is very high, and raw olive oil is very healthy but cooked (fried) olive oil is worse than animal fats or even trans-fats, (3) the food lobbies are powerful and make sure that no credible agency ever puts out advice that could hurt their profit margins, and the food industry mostly sells very unhealthy food.