BoingBoing may indeed live by linking to other people's work. But I for one read a lot of blogs written directly by professionals on their fields of expertise. They earn money on their professions (be it as oil analysts, political science professors or physicians), and blog for a chance to be heard more widely.
It's kind of reasonable from a market perspective: So many people want to be heard, that listeners get to set the price. Listeners shouldn't pay the hosting costs unless they really feel it's worth it (I support a very few sites that way).
And I don't read BoingBoing anymore, as it happens.
"Fact is millions of people like to create for no money at all and making billions of copies once something has been created is trivial."
Amen. In no field is this more true than popular music. There are millions of people who would like to make music for a living, and once made, it's cheap to reproduce and distribute to a large market. If there was a market in music, this should make music extremely cheap, if not simply free (personally, I feel amateur art has benefits beside cost).
But the market isn't really in music. It's in attention.
Eventually, it will reach an equilibrium. If too much "free" media disappears, we will begin to pay for it again - the bits of it that are really worth making. Creative destruction and all that.
However, I agree that unless we find better ways of paying (micropayments and/or fundable.org-style cost-sharing), a lot of good material would die.
"You want to hear about the Middle East? You think you're going to get a truer story from CNN or Al Jazeera? Or even better, from Mahmoud who lives in Basra."
In principle, this is a good idea. However, remember that in locations where English is a rare skill, there are serious selection effects going on.
One of the early, popular Norwegian English-speaking bloggers was BjÃrn Stærk. He was (at the time, he's become far more moderate) extremely right wing by Norwegian standards. Not only that, he was right-wing in a manner more characteristic of American conservatives rather than Norwegian right-wingers. He was in many ways an Americophile, with far more US reference points than the typical Norwegian.
I don't blame him. Everyone who spends a lot of time on US sites will be affected by it in some way - I know I am. Although I'm politically far from him, I know so much American trivia unknown to most of my countrymen that it's downright disturbing.
But my point is, for Stærk, this was probably an important reason why he was capable of blogging comfortably in English in the first place. An Iraqi in Basra who spoke good English would probably be a very atypical Iraqi.
Most lints I've seen have atrocious false positive rates.
I tried to write a minimal program that would give no warnings, I couldn't do it. If my main didn't have a return statement, it complained about that. If it had one that was not reachable, it complained about unreachable code. If it had one that COULD be reached, it complained that return could be called from main.
My phone has a Java runtime. It works, and it's in fact a very sensible choice for the application (where security and binary portability matters more than performance). Even today, many embedded devices are powerful enough to run bytecode-interpreted languages, and this will only become more true in the future.
In general, this is my observation as well. But there are some dyslectics who get good at English in a highly verbal manner. They make homophone errors like native speakers.
(Another thing is that we can easily pick up homophone errors from native speakers if we see them more often than the correct ones)
Yes, LOTR was a good fantasy film (except the mount doom finale, which was simply embarrassing), but not in the way Blade Runner is good SF. The plot of Blade Runner is hardly related to the book, except a couple of character names and concepts.
Yes, they are. And scrutiny of the process has shown that it is amazingly corrupt.
I don't know if it's still like that, but it used to be the case that Jimmy Wales' biography article was managed according to different rules than all other biographies - in a manner most living persons with wikipedia bios would probably have preferred.
I trust the wikipedia bureucratic process as much as I trust, say, the complaints-processing procedures of the Cuban communist party. It's there to let people delude themselves into thinking their concerns are listened to. At best you may win minor concessions, (like keeping an article a more favoured editor disapproved of) if you are extremely persistent. But enacting any sort of real change is impossible.
Knol does the first step, but critically, it lacks the second, which is why there is so much visible crap. Also, people don't seem very eager to collaborate. I'm still hoping for a change...
A rare but treatable kind of pancreatic cancer, which he foolishly tried to treat by eating mostly raw vegetables, before having the operation. It's not much of speculation, it's a matter of record.
Oslo's most awesome museum, the museum for science and technology, is currently establishing a permanent exhibition of "musical machines". It'll be done for summer. I can hardly wait.
One curious thing about music machines: I have never heard a midi piano that sounded as good as the most sterile yamaha piano. Why is that? I would suppose you could do a decent physical simulation of the interior of a piano these days, capturing such things as interaction with other undampened strings. But they don't do that. The sostenuto pedal is usually just an echo effect...
As I recall, there were three kinds of rolls, no expression (the most common, the one you mentioned), those with dynamics hand-crafted afterwards, and those with recorded dynamics.
Who is gong to lead the battle cry for such a platform, exactly?
Developers, maybe? I don't know how they presently do it when releasing for all three platforms, but I assume that a common operating system would help.
You're assuming the placebo effect works in the painkiller drugs' favour. It might not. People might be more favourably inclined to needles and mystic energy handwaving, than to an ugly little white pill called plorexumil or something.
UCT/MC is not a one trick pony, that's the cool bit. It can play most games decently with just knowing the rules. The winner of the last generalised game playing competition used UCT/MC.
Something that sets Go aside is even scoring a completed game can take a remarkable amount of computation.
With Japanese rules, I'm not sure it's even decidable:-) But with Chinese, it's straighforward, and indeed MoGo relies on this: For every playout, it needs to score the final position, and obviously that should take as little computing power as possible.
The scoring method MoGo uses is Chinese: Enclosed spaces + stones on board. No points for prisoners. Japanese is ill-suited for computers because it's poorly defined in corner cases.
This idea that checkers is a child's game is pretty annoying, checkers has more than enough depth for us humans. Especially the international version, which is played on 10x10 and has long kings. Although international checkers is still simpler than chess game-tree wise, the human/computer situation is about the same, because checkers is more suited to the human mind's pattern-recognising abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
BoingBoing may indeed live by linking to other people's work. But I for one read a lot of blogs written directly by professionals on their fields of expertise. They earn money on their professions (be it as oil analysts, political science professors or physicians), and blog for a chance to be heard more widely.
It's kind of reasonable from a market perspective: So many people want to be heard, that listeners get to set the price. Listeners shouldn't pay the hosting costs unless they really feel it's worth it (I support a very few sites that way).
And I don't read BoingBoing anymore, as it happens.
"Fact is millions of people like to create for no money at all and making billions of copies once something has been created is trivial."
Amen. In no field is this more true than popular music. There are millions of people who would like to make music for a living, and once made, it's cheap to reproduce and distribute to a large market. If there was a market in music, this should make music extremely cheap, if not simply free (personally, I feel amateur art has benefits beside cost).
But the market isn't really in music. It's in attention.
Eventually, it will reach an equilibrium. If too much "free" media disappears, we will begin to pay for it again - the bits of it that are really worth making. Creative destruction and all that.
However, I agree that unless we find better ways of paying (micropayments and/or fundable.org-style cost-sharing), a lot of good material would die.
"You want to hear about the Middle East? You think you're going to get a truer story from CNN or Al Jazeera? Or even better, from Mahmoud who lives in Basra."
In principle, this is a good idea. However, remember that in locations where English is a rare skill, there are serious selection effects going on.
One of the early, popular Norwegian English-speaking bloggers was BjÃrn Stærk. He was (at the time, he's become far more moderate) extremely right wing by Norwegian standards. Not only that, he was right-wing in a manner more characteristic of American conservatives rather than Norwegian right-wingers. He was in many ways an Americophile, with far more US reference points than the typical Norwegian.
I don't blame him. Everyone who spends a lot of time on US sites will be affected by it in some way - I know I am. Although I'm politically far from him, I know so much American trivia unknown to most of my countrymen that it's downright disturbing.
But my point is, for Stærk, this was probably an important reason why he was capable of blogging comfortably in English in the first place. An Iraqi in Basra who spoke good English would probably be a very atypical Iraqi.
Most lints I've seen have atrocious false positive rates.
I tried to write a minimal program that would give no warnings, I couldn't do it. If my main didn't have a return statement, it complained about that. If it had one that was not reachable, it complained about unreachable code. If it had one that COULD be reached, it complained that return could be called from main.
My phone has a Java runtime. It works, and it's in fact a very sensible choice for the application (where security and binary portability matters more than performance). Even today, many embedded devices are powerful enough to run bytecode-interpreted languages, and this will only become more true in the future.
"Combined civil/criminal trials like that seems to violate all sorts of ideas of justice folks like me here in the US might have,"
*cough*OJ Simpson*cough*
In general, this is my observation as well. But there are some dyslectics who get good at English in a highly verbal manner. They make homophone errors like native speakers.
(Another thing is that we can easily pick up homophone errors from native speakers if we see them more often than the correct ones)
Yes, LOTR was a good fantasy film (except the mount doom finale, which was simply embarrassing), but not in the way Blade Runner is good SF. The plot of Blade Runner is hardly related to the book, except a couple of character names and concepts.
Yes, they are. And scrutiny of the process has shown that it is amazingly corrupt.
I don't know if it's still like that, but it used to be the case that Jimmy Wales' biography article was managed according to different rules than all other biographies - in a manner most living persons with wikipedia bios would probably have preferred.
I trust the wikipedia bureucratic process as much as I trust, say, the complaints-processing procedures of the Cuban communist party. It's there to let people delude themselves into thinking their concerns are listened to. At best you may win minor concessions, (like keeping an article a more favoured editor disapproved of) if you are extremely persistent. But enacting any sort of real change is impossible.
Knol does the first step, but critically, it lacks the second, which is why there is so much visible crap. Also, people don't seem very eager to collaborate. I'm still hoping for a change...
A rare but treatable kind of pancreatic cancer, which he foolishly tried to treat by eating mostly raw vegetables, before having the operation. It's not much of speculation, it's a matter of record.
Oslo's most awesome museum, the museum for science and technology, is currently establishing a permanent exhibition of "musical machines". It'll be done for summer. I can hardly wait.
One curious thing about music machines: I have never heard a midi piano that sounded as good as the most sterile yamaha piano. Why is that? I would suppose you could do a decent physical simulation of the interior of a piano these days, capturing such things as interaction with other undampened strings. But they don't do that. The sostenuto pedal is usually just an echo effect...
As I recall, there were three kinds of rolls, no expression (the most common, the one you mentioned), those with dynamics hand-crafted afterwards, and those with recorded dynamics.
Who is gong to lead the battle cry for such a platform, exactly?
Developers, maybe? I don't know how they presently do it when releasing for all three platforms, but I assume that a common operating system would help.
Slashdot and CNN are advertising funded. Hmmmm...
You're assuming the placebo effect works in the painkiller drugs' favour. It might not. People might be more favourably inclined to needles and mystic energy handwaving, than to an ugly little white pill called plorexumil or something.
Smells like a tutoring game :-)
Now if they could play Nomic, that would really scare me.
UCT/MC is not a one trick pony, that's the cool bit. It can play most games decently with just knowing the rules. The winner of the last generalised game playing competition used UCT/MC.
MoGo handles Ko fights just fine.
Of all the silly suggestions I've seen this takes the biscuit.
Something that sets Go aside is even scoring a completed game can take a remarkable amount of computation.
With Japanese rules, I'm not sure it's even decidable :-) But with Chinese, it's straighforward, and indeed MoGo relies on this: For every playout, it needs to score the final position, and obviously that should take as little computing power as possible.
The scoring method MoGo uses is Chinese: Enclosed spaces + stones on board. No points for prisoners. Japanese is ill-suited for computers because it's poorly defined in corner cases.
This idea that checkers is a child's game is pretty annoying, checkers has more than enough depth for us humans. Especially the international version, which is played on 10x10 and has long kings. Although international checkers is still simpler than chess game-tree wise, the human/computer situation is about the same, because checkers is more suited to the human mind's pattern-recognising abilities.