It's entirely possible, though it can be difficult to judge based on the trailer. The trailer is made by a marketing department, whose goal is to make the film look as appealing as possible in their estimation of the target market. And if that means playing up the Big Name Star who isn't actually the lead, or showing you the climax of the film because it's the most exciting thing (yeah, you saw that too, I bet), they're perfectly happy to do that.
I'm not crazy about the trailer, but I'll reserve judgment on the film itself until I see it. Which I probably will (which is why the trailer isn't aimed at me).
Including, one notes, some of the Europeans. The President of France heads the Socialist Party; Portugal had a Socialist Prime Minister until 2011. Germany was led by its Social Democratic Party until 2009. All are still major players.
"Social democracy" is probably a better name for all of the European "socialism", which bears little resemblance to "Socialism" as described by Marx and Engels. But it was inspired by some of the same problems Marx and Engels noted, the dominance of labor by an entrenched and self-serving capitalist class, and the use of government to help counteract that by ensuring a certain minimum standard of living.
It's a solution with ups and downs, like any other. The effect isn't actually categorically all that different from the US; the differences are in degree rather than in kind.
Yeah, that's always the peril of science reporting. Everyone wants The Big One (flying cars, fusion, cheap fast sequencing) but all we get is the dull daily grind of scientific and technological process.
So each incremental bit is magnified, first by the university's PR department and then again by the popular press, trying to attract attention (and with it, more funding). I empathize with the desire to feed the gaping maw of people craving the future (the same maw that began caring more about the 2016 Presidential than about the term that had just begun), but in science it's got a downside: people are desensitized to the real value of the work.
For this article, one needs to do nothing more than hover over the link, whose ".edu" URL clearly points to a press release rather than a journal article. One would love to believe that a site "for nerds" would think better of its readers, but sadly they too have an insatiable demand for eyeballs and want Big News every day to bring them in.
I'm skeptical of the claims for pass phrases. Yes, everybody remembers "correct horse battery staple". But will you remember "yogurt hazmat oak pluto" and "flat happy loan grievance" and "ochre lemon marathon leopard" and a dozen others? Will you remember which one goes with which site? Will you remember what order the words go in?
There may be some net advantage in the end, but I don't think it's anywhere near as large as it's commonly presented. In the end, they get more entropy because they have more entropy, and that means bits in your brain. The large number of characters is counteracted by the patterns of your native language. Each word has about 8 or 9 bits because you're drawing from a dictionary of perhaps 50,000 words, and you can increase entropy additively only because the words don't cue you to each other. That makes them hard to remember in exactly the way that makes them secure.
Pass phrases are supposed to have an advantage in using other forms of memory: your mental picture of a horse looking at a battery staple might remind you (and nobody else) that the horse is correct. It's an interesting theory, but I'd really like to see a real-world test to justify whether it actually significantly increases one's ability to memorize the several hundred (or several thousand) bits one is supposed to need to have different, high-entropy passwords at a significant number of sites.
Oooh. That's one hell of a head-to-head. I have tremendous respect for both as aphorists.
I might have to agree with you on the grounds that Churchill, bitter as he could be, was fundamentally more optimistic, while Mencken seems sometimes to have been cynical just for the joy of being cynical. But it's a real photo finish; both were brilliant.
I really wish I knew the answer to that question. The best answer I can come up with is to recognize that in the long term, the truth has advantages that falsehoods do not, even unpleasant truths. Stupidity comes with a cost.
Stupidity often wins in the short term, because it has the advantage that it can say anything it likes. And it can do a lot of damage in that short term; in the worst cases, so much that we never reach the long-term (or at least, by the time we reach it, it's too late for the truth to help).
As bad as the race to the bottom is, there are ways in which it appears to be the last gasp of a dying orthodoxy. I don't know if it will finally croak before they've done irreparable damage to the nation and the world.
The op-ed piece you link to is quite bizarre. "Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject?" What kind of allowance is he looking for? An allowance to say wrong things, from a bully pulpit on TV, and in particular one whose format is to call others out on their own misstatements, without having those who aren't ignorant call you out on it?
What the hell is he driving at? It looks for all the world like he knows that he's wrong and is turning himself inside-out to avoid having to admit it.
Yeah, that sentence is bogus. The pure physics all by itself says that you can't extract energy from it.
What the delicacy of the setup "implies" is that it's not immune to the second law of thermodynamics, or the first law of motion. The "time crystal" is only perpetual as long as nothing else impinges on it. Which is precisely the same as the frictionless pendulum you saw in first-year physics.
The remarkable part of this experiment has zilch to do with perpetual motion, either in the "free energy" sense or the "first law of motion" sense. It's about a remarkable quantum effect involving transitions even at the lowest possible energy, which wouldn't be allowed by classical physics but is allowed by quantum mechanics. The rest is just mainstream science writers who don't know what they're talking about and are trying to make it sound like magic to attract eyeballs.
I'd like to think that Kickstarter would help solve the money problem. Technology has already helped solve the other side of the money problem: it's pretty remarkable that you can get a film made for $20k. (I'm an actor myself, and I realize what kinds of corners you're cutting to get a film made that cheaply. I know you'd love to hire real sound, light, and camera people, for example; they can make your film look so much better, but you've already blown past your $20k budget.)
It's the first seven minutes. That is, it's an ad for the movie, not the movie.
They could have just used YouTube, which would probably get them a lot more eyeballs, and has social-networky features to try to encourage others to watch it. You _want_ people to watch your ads, for free; you'd pay them if you could. I can't imagine why they'd use BitTorrent, aside from the fact that BitTorrent gets you a few headlines.
This isn't any skin off Hollywood's nose. Well, maybe a little: by acknowledging that BitTorrent isn't universally evil, it cuts into their deranged "BitTorrent = piracy" campaign. But I can't see anything more to it than that.
If they were using it to distribute the film, the studio might have some kind of point, though that point would be "How the heck can you distribute a movie on which you spent a minimum of $10 million just on the two lead actors (and probably more) via a medium you can't charge for?"
Thing is, they were able to solve a heinous crime by extraordinary means. It seems to me that he's wondering if they could solve everyday crimes if those means were made more ordinary. They're not going to dig up every bit of surveillance footage to solve your mugging; they lack the manpower.
If they could, would it prevent those crimes from happening in the first place? Criminals generally have poor judgment, but they have at least a rough idea that if other people committing crimes are getting caught more often, they're more likely to try something else.
I can't say if it's actually worth it to do that. It probably depends on the place. I live in cozy suburbs; the crime rate is low enough that privacy invasion is more serious. This guy manages New York City, with a far higher crime rate, and where the upper-middle-classes live cheek by jowl with the poor people who are most likely to get tempted by the easy pickings. Many of those crimes go unsolved: they lack the power to go to the lengths they did in Boston.
I honestly don't know how effective it could be; the theory is a long way from the practice. I know Baltimore has put a lot into police camera with little effect, since there isn't the manpower to really take advantage of it. (And equally little effects of the privacy invasion, since nobody can be bothered to care, though the potential still remains.)
I find it puzzling that the headline mentions only Maryland, when the summary and TFA talk equally about two teams.
I mean, yay, Go Free State and all that (MD native here) but what gives? Good luck to the Terrapins, but they don't rate special headline mentions until they actually win it, instead of being one of two candidates.
Do they do anything more than just paint where the lines are supposed to be? Do they do anything to try to locate the actual lines? (Which, in the case of fiber or those crappy plastic plumbing lines the local water company installed, I presume would involve actually digging for it.)
I don't think representative democracy/republic is really any more effective at it. If anything, a direct democracy has the potential to be more stable: while a single change in one office (51st/60th Senator, 218th Rep, President) can radically alter the entire direction of the country, the actual populace doesn't undergo a massive shift on a single day in January.
Direct democracy also has a million downsides, not least of which is that even though the population is fairly stable, their opinions can undergo strong shifts over the course of days (cf. the reactions to 9/11 or the Newtown shooting).
Except that much of the budget is exempt, and it's executed over half a year rather than a full year. So that small-seeming 2% cut is actually an 8% cut from most departments. And that isn't trivial.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy. Every decision is a compromise, and it's not even the same people hammering out the compromise from year to year. The best way to get coherence is to put one person in charge, but the downsides of that are well known.
We can try to design our system to be robust to the failures of democracy, though these days even that seems beyond our reach. We've grown so adept at blaming each other that even the flawed process of hammering out a compromise has become secondary to trying to get a brief moment in which to impose our will on our political enemies while they are down.
I'm curious about what level of "like" that requires. I has teh Netflix, and I never buy movies because there are practically no movies that I want to see more than once.
I know that other people do actually buy movies, so apparently there is a market for that. What percentage of things that you download do you like well enough to buy the Blu-Ray? If you decide it's not up to scratch, do you generally shut it off halfway through, or do you generally watch it all the way through before deciding it's not worth your contribution?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for posting that. That's very interesting.
It's entirely possible, though it can be difficult to judge based on the trailer. The trailer is made by a marketing department, whose goal is to make the film look as appealing as possible in their estimation of the target market. And if that means playing up the Big Name Star who isn't actually the lead, or showing you the climax of the film because it's the most exciting thing (yeah, you saw that too, I bet), they're perfectly happy to do that.
I'm not crazy about the trailer, but I'll reserve judgment on the film itself until I see it. Which I probably will (which is why the trailer isn't aimed at me).
A lot of people like to call Europe Socialist
Including, one notes, some of the Europeans. The President of France heads the Socialist Party; Portugal had a Socialist Prime Minister until 2011. Germany was led by its Social Democratic Party until 2009. All are still major players.
"Social democracy" is probably a better name for all of the European "socialism", which bears little resemblance to "Socialism" as described by Marx and Engels. But it was inspired by some of the same problems Marx and Engels noted, the dominance of labor by an entrenched and self-serving capitalist class, and the use of government to help counteract that by ensuring a certain minimum standard of living.
It's a solution with ups and downs, like any other. The effect isn't actually categorically all that different from the US; the differences are in degree rather than in kind.
Yeah, that's always the peril of science reporting. Everyone wants The Big One (flying cars, fusion, cheap fast sequencing) but all we get is the dull daily grind of scientific and technological process.
So each incremental bit is magnified, first by the university's PR department and then again by the popular press, trying to attract attention (and with it, more funding). I empathize with the desire to feed the gaping maw of people craving the future (the same maw that began caring more about the 2016 Presidential than about the term that had just begun), but in science it's got a downside: people are desensitized to the real value of the work.
For this article, one needs to do nothing more than hover over the link, whose ".edu" URL clearly points to a press release rather than a journal article. One would love to believe that a site "for nerds" would think better of its readers, but sadly they too have an insatiable demand for eyeballs and want Big News every day to bring them in.
Ah, frak. Posting to undo the wrong moderation. Sorry 'bout that.
I'm skeptical of the claims for pass phrases. Yes, everybody remembers "correct horse battery staple". But will you remember "yogurt hazmat oak pluto" and "flat happy loan grievance" and "ochre lemon marathon leopard" and a dozen others? Will you remember which one goes with which site? Will you remember what order the words go in?
There may be some net advantage in the end, but I don't think it's anywhere near as large as it's commonly presented. In the end, they get more entropy because they have more entropy, and that means bits in your brain. The large number of characters is counteracted by the patterns of your native language. Each word has about 8 or 9 bits because you're drawing from a dictionary of perhaps 50,000 words, and you can increase entropy additively only because the words don't cue you to each other. That makes them hard to remember in exactly the way that makes them secure.
Pass phrases are supposed to have an advantage in using other forms of memory: your mental picture of a horse looking at a battery staple might remind you (and nobody else) that the horse is correct. It's an interesting theory, but I'd really like to see a real-world test to justify whether it actually significantly increases one's ability to memorize the several hundred (or several thousand) bits one is supposed to need to have different, high-entropy passwords at a significant number of sites.
Oooh. That's one hell of a head-to-head. I have tremendous respect for both as aphorists.
I might have to agree with you on the grounds that Churchill, bitter as he could be, was fundamentally more optimistic, while Mencken seems sometimes to have been cynical just for the joy of being cynical. But it's a real photo finish; both were brilliant.
Of course, the statement was chosen because IQ is defined to be the median, such that 50% of the people are below 100.
What it tells you, though, is to realize just how depressingly low 100 is.
I really wish I knew the answer to that question. The best answer I can come up with is to recognize that in the long term, the truth has advantages that falsehoods do not, even unpleasant truths. Stupidity comes with a cost.
Stupidity often wins in the short term, because it has the advantage that it can say anything it likes. And it can do a lot of damage in that short term; in the worst cases, so much that we never reach the long-term (or at least, by the time we reach it, it's too late for the truth to help).
As bad as the race to the bottom is, there are ways in which it appears to be the last gasp of a dying orthodoxy. I don't know if it will finally croak before they've done irreparable damage to the nation and the world.
Democracy. Rule by the people, half of whom have IQs in the double-digit range.
Or, as Mencken put it even better: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
The op-ed piece you link to is quite bizarre. "Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject?" What kind of allowance is he looking for? An allowance to say wrong things, from a bully pulpit on TV, and in particular one whose format is to call others out on their own misstatements, without having those who aren't ignorant call you out on it?
What the hell is he driving at? It looks for all the world like he knows that he's wrong and is turning himself inside-out to avoid having to admit it.
Wish I had mod points for your last sentence, but since I don't, I'll just let you know that I got the joke.
Yeah, that sentence is bogus. The pure physics all by itself says that you can't extract energy from it.
What the delicacy of the setup "implies" is that it's not immune to the second law of thermodynamics, or the first law of motion. The "time crystal" is only perpetual as long as nothing else impinges on it. Which is precisely the same as the frictionless pendulum you saw in first-year physics.
The remarkable part of this experiment has zilch to do with perpetual motion, either in the "free energy" sense or the "first law of motion" sense. It's about a remarkable quantum effect involving transitions even at the lowest possible energy, which wouldn't be allowed by classical physics but is allowed by quantum mechanics. The rest is just mainstream science writers who don't know what they're talking about and are trying to make it sound like magic to attract eyeballs.
I'd like to think that Kickstarter would help solve the money problem. Technology has already helped solve the other side of the money problem: it's pretty remarkable that you can get a film made for $20k. (I'm an actor myself, and I realize what kinds of corners you're cutting to get a film made that cheaply. I know you'd love to hire real sound, light, and camera people, for example; they can make your film look so much better, but you've already blown past your $20k budget.)
It's the first seven minutes. That is, it's an ad for the movie, not the movie.
They could have just used YouTube, which would probably get them a lot more eyeballs, and has social-networky features to try to encourage others to watch it. You _want_ people to watch your ads, for free; you'd pay them if you could. I can't imagine why they'd use BitTorrent, aside from the fact that BitTorrent gets you a few headlines.
This isn't any skin off Hollywood's nose. Well, maybe a little: by acknowledging that BitTorrent isn't universally evil, it cuts into their deranged "BitTorrent = piracy" campaign. But I can't see anything more to it than that.
If they were using it to distribute the film, the studio might have some kind of point, though that point would be "How the heck can you distribute a movie on which you spent a minimum of $10 million just on the two lead actors (and probably more) via a medium you can't charge for?"
it would freak out the goldbugs though if it became financially feasible to get them from space and to land them
That's good enough reason to do it, as far as I'm concerned. Getting usable metals out of it would just be gravy.
Thing is, they were able to solve a heinous crime by extraordinary means. It seems to me that he's wondering if they could solve everyday crimes if those means were made more ordinary. They're not going to dig up every bit of surveillance footage to solve your mugging; they lack the manpower.
If they could, would it prevent those crimes from happening in the first place? Criminals generally have poor judgment, but they have at least a rough idea that if other people committing crimes are getting caught more often, they're more likely to try something else.
I can't say if it's actually worth it to do that. It probably depends on the place. I live in cozy suburbs; the crime rate is low enough that privacy invasion is more serious. This guy manages New York City, with a far higher crime rate, and where the upper-middle-classes live cheek by jowl with the poor people who are most likely to get tempted by the easy pickings. Many of those crimes go unsolved: they lack the power to go to the lengths they did in Boston.
I honestly don't know how effective it could be; the theory is a long way from the practice. I know Baltimore has put a lot into police camera with little effect, since there isn't the manpower to really take advantage of it. (And equally little effects of the privacy invasion, since nobody can be bothered to care, though the potential still remains.)
I find it puzzling that the headline mentions only Maryland, when the summary and TFA talk equally about two teams.
I mean, yay, Go Free State and all that (MD native here) but what gives? Good luck to the Terrapins, but they don't rate special headline mentions until they actually win it, instead of being one of two candidates.
Do they do anything more than just paint where the lines are supposed to be? Do they do anything to try to locate the actual lines? (Which, in the case of fiber or those crappy plastic plumbing lines the local water company installed, I presume would involve actually digging for it.)
Except they call it the CHL.
I don't think representative democracy/republic is really any more effective at it. If anything, a direct democracy has the potential to be more stable: while a single change in one office (51st/60th Senator, 218th Rep, President) can radically alter the entire direction of the country, the actual populace doesn't undergo a massive shift on a single day in January.
Direct democracy also has a million downsides, not least of which is that even though the population is fairly stable, their opinions can undergo strong shifts over the course of days (cf. the reactions to 9/11 or the Newtown shooting).
Thank you.
Except that much of the budget is exempt, and it's executed over half a year rather than a full year. So that small-seeming 2% cut is actually an 8% cut from most departments. And that isn't trivial.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy. Every decision is a compromise, and it's not even the same people hammering out the compromise from year to year. The best way to get coherence is to put one person in charge, but the downsides of that are well known.
We can try to design our system to be robust to the failures of democracy, though these days even that seems beyond our reach. We've grown so adept at blaming each other that even the flawed process of hammering out a compromise has become secondary to trying to get a brief moment in which to impose our will on our political enemies while they are down.
if i like it, ill buy the blu-ray version
I'm curious about what level of "like" that requires. I has teh Netflix, and I never buy movies because there are practically no movies that I want to see more than once.
I know that other people do actually buy movies, so apparently there is a market for that. What percentage of things that you download do you like well enough to buy the Blu-Ray? If you decide it's not up to scratch, do you generally shut it off halfway through, or do you generally watch it all the way through before deciding it's not worth your contribution?
I apologize for being nosy. I'm just curious.