I bet that with an afternoon's work they could have spring, summer, winter, and fall trees. With a little more work they could link it to the local climate and when particular species of trees change color when.
I dunno what it would be for, but to be honest, I'm not precisely sure what this is for. "Raising awareness of trees" seems pretty lame. Still, it's very pretty, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's ironic, because the original idea of Wikileaks is to make it possible to publish information from genuinely repressive countries. The US has its faults (a great many) but for the most part speech is still pretty free. It may be hard to pry unfairly-classified information out of the government, but at least the entire country isn't behind a Great Firewall. Once the information is out, it's free; they won't punish newspapers for re-reporting it.
That makes it easier to get embarrassing info on the US than on China, which could also use some embarrassment on that score.
I like to believe that the US is ultimately stronger for that: the freedom that kept the US on top for a long time is ultimately going to be more flexible, innovative, creative, and entrepreneurial than a repressive government.
But both countries are changing to be more like the other. We're not there yet, but closer than I'd like.
That takes a pretty broad definition of "success". In fact, it's kind of hard to understand precisely how it is they do define "success", because while Americans are busy chucking fundamental liberties, it's not actually getting al Qaeda any closer to world domination, or whatever it is they're after.
If all they're after is to make Americans unhappy, they're quite successful, but there are much better returns on their investment. And making Americans unhappy is a pretty pitiful goal; it's not terribly hard, and it doesn't get you anything tangible. Plus, it gets some of you killed, and it cost al Qaeda control of Afghanistan.
Yeah, they can be successful at it, and there's not much we can do about that. The fact is that it doesn't take much to scare Americans. They seem to make a point of it. Al Qaeda could evaporate completely and they'd still jump at their own shadows.
That its dealings can entail shady backroom secret agreements so long as the public is well-served.
Is it possible for it to be otherwise?
These cables are the government equivalent of a little white lie. That is, you do much the same with your own internal monologue. You self-censor to be polite, and that politeness is (as Miss Manners says) the grease that keeps the gears of society turning. Nobody expects you to be "transparent" in your dealings with everybody; if you actually called every asshole an asshole, you'd be pretty busy.
Governments aren't individuals, so the analogy is not entirely apt (sorry if I'm stealing your schtick there, BadAnalogyGuy) but I think it's still illuminating. Internal decision-making processes should not be completely beyond the reach of oversight, but having complete uncensored access to every impolite or ill-phrased thought is going to make everybody cranky most of the time.
The $4,200 figure is misleading because it doesn't count the failed attacks. It's still nowhere near the amount the US has spent trying to stop them, not by several orders of magnitude, but it makes it clearer that each attack represents risk in more than one way.
An attack that is attempted but fails costs more than money. It exposes them to the chance of capture, and each captured person might turn over information that thwarts other attacks. Good security and isolation reduce that, but they also raise your costs and slow you down.
I'm not defending action at all costs. We have an irritating habit of spending a lot of money and introducing great inconvenience to thwart an attack they're unlikely to try again. Oddly, al Qaeda makes the same mistake: they keep trying to blow up airplanes, when there are many other targets of opportunity. Maybe it's because they figure the costs are exponential: each new measure costs 10x as much, so they get more ROI by going after the same target.
I think there are better ways for the US to allocate its money, and more importantly, its tolerance. They do seem successful at causing us to make great expenditures at small cost. But the costs are not as trivial as the misleading figure suggests.
It may be that the guy is raking in cash today, but he's not just being a jackass: he's committing crimes. It's fiendishly difficult to prosecute some kinds of online crimes, especially when routed through overseas sites, but this guy does not seem to be protecting himself.
It's always wise to be suspicious of "trend" stories, since newspapers love to spot a single instance, call it a "trend", and get everybody yapping. But even if there is a "trend" here, it'll get cut right short if this guy gets arrested.
Which may be the real purpose behind the piece: take an injustice that is too small for authorities to take notice, raise its profile, and take some satisfaction when the police step in.
There may well be a marketing tactic to be had in providing rotten customer service and benefiting from the links provided by sites too dumb to use "nofollow". But there's a line between "rotten service" and "outright fraud", and this guy is well over it.
He mentions the idea that some ISPs are considering a plan where they only deliver content from their site. That's not Web access. Anybody who buys that is not on the web. And that's their own lookout.
When it comes to democracy, you can lead the horse to water, but it's gotta drink all by itself. You can yell, scream, cajole, etc. but in the end voters will make whatever decisions they want to make. They may be mind-numbingly stupid, but mind-numbing stupidity is a part of democracy. I wish it weren't, but the alternative is some mechanism of excluding people, and there's no fair way to do that. Whoever sets up the standards is the dictator.
As a threat to democracy, call me when they start forbidding plain Web access to users willing to pay a reasonable sum for it. The state technology means that you can get the kind of access needed to read (but not watch) the news for a nominal sum practically anywhere. I'd like to see that improved; the price of access in the US is higher than it should be. But it's not a threat to democracy.
Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior.
It didn't take CGI to do that. There's a very famous cut just like that in Citizen Kane, through a skylight. That's The Greatest Freaking Movie Of All Time, according to every movie critic ever (and you get thrown out of the movie critic guild if you question that, or even put something in the second slot because Citizen Kane is so gosh-darn awesome that it takes up two slots.)
Yes, the film did it first, and it gets tired very quickly, even with CGI improvements. (You no longer need a convenient lightning flash to cover up the transition.) But visual tricks have been important to film since the beginning, and movie critics heap praise upon them, at least the first time. It's the derivative uses, not the effect itself, that earns their opprobrium.
If the film is otherwise fundamentally solid (and most aren't), the use of CGI is an enhancement. Good CGI won't ruin a good film or save a bad one.
Lying about this is unconscionable, but I can see a valid reason for them wanting to save such things: it lets you know how they were defeated last time.
Suppose that somebody does manage to sneak something deadly on board. If this were a bug in a piece of software, you'd all want to leap to reconstructing the event, and you'd be irked if you knew you had deliberately thrown away a crucial piece of information. Especially since if it happened once, it could happen again. So you'd have to go on lockdown.
I'm NOT trying to justify this. Lying bad, radiation bad, groping bad, virtual strip search bad, TSA bad, pictures always leak, terrorists winning, Orwell right, etc. I'm good with all that.
But I'm a bit surprised that they didn't even try to make the case for saving the pictures, perhaps with an public key encryption and the private key kept only on a piece of paper locked in a safe somewhere. I guess they felt it was futile; people are uncomfortable enough about the pictures as it is.
I've always found pie crust to be a real pain in the ass to make. Overwork it, and it gets tough. Too little water, and it crumbles. Too much water, and it's tough again. Keep it cold, or it gets greasy. Move quickly but gently, or it'll tear. Getting the edge even is fiddly.
Really? I'd have thought that "refresh rates that aren't measured in epochs" would be the next logical step.
Perhaps they've improved since the last time I picked one up, but it was depressingly unresponsive. That, and the poor contrast ratio, was not really grabbing my attention.
I love the idea of e-ink; using ambient light is both low-power and easier on the eyes. But I don't feel the urge to get one with the current state of the (commercially available) art.
I had a feeling about that. Props to the guy who found the original (despite the hilarious auto translation from Japanese.)
There remains a very, very sharp drop in the graph, but it no longer looks like a distortion of the curve. It's too bad that the screen cap cut off what I find to be the most interesting data point: not the surge leading up to Christmas, but the fact that it drops to practically zero on Christmas Day. Not unexpected, I suppose, but nevertheless prominent.
Thanks. The graph does indeed show a truly epic drop-off after Christmas, but not nearly as radical as the instantaneous change that the cut-off graph suggested. A poor coincidence that removed a very interesting feature of the graph.
There's a tiny oddity where it seems like there's a one day massive drop-off, possibly Christmas Day; I guess nobody breaks up with you on Christmas, or in the previous few days. It turns around pretty sharply.
Netflix may need to start doing the same. I mean video is the ultimate in things that could be multi-cast, except that we want it on demand.
That, and the fact that it's an enormous amount of data and a lot of processing. Netflix has thousands of movies, many at fairly high res. And in several resolutions, for machines with different bandwidths, unless they're trans-coding on the fly, which adds up to significant power.
The can probably propagate only some of their catalog. I assume it's an 80/20 rule where 80% of the movies requested are in the the top fifth of the catalog.
Still, what you're pushing out there is going to be a great big hunk of computer, and it will be pumping out a lot more data than plain page views. Not impossible, but they're going to have to do something eventually.
A graph like this should be cyclical, with a smooth curve between the far right and the far left. It shows a big rise in late December, the highest point in the year, followed by an instantaneous drop-off in early January to one of the lowest points.
Is there some sudden function that occurs on New Year's Day that makes people stay in love? One that just happens to occur at the same time as the arbitrary graph endpoints?
I suspect what's going on is that Facebook grows through the year, and that there needs to be a scaling factor applied. That would imply that the peak at the far right is not nearly so tall in reality, exaggerated by a rapidly expanding Facebook.
Or maybe it's something else. But that's just the first thing to leap out at me. If they're not correcting for that, or at least trying to posit an explanation, what else is wrong with their methodology?
People don't have to participate in every decision, just the ones they care about and understand.
Unfortunately, "care about" and "understand" are orthogonal. In fact, in some cases they seem to point in precisely opposite directions: the less people know about a subject, the more vehemently they express their opinions (aka Dunning Kruger effect).
Not that this is an insuperable barrier to the program. The same problem exists with representative democracy. Representation is a hack designed to minimize it, and that hack is becoming both problematic and ineffective.
So maybe you'd know... what does this stuff weigh?
I know resin can be tough, but it's going to be hard to beat steel for strength. Sheet steel produces very, very light bodies that can keep passengers from getting crushed. (Deceleration is a separate problem, for airbags and seatbelts.)
Getting it printed up fast is neat, but if the resulting car weighs ten tons to be equivalently safe, it's going to have rotten mileage and handle like a cow.
a Senate controlled by his political party will most likely let him do what he likes.
I admire your cynicism, but you need to apply a double layer of it here. The Democrats in the Senate have a miserable track record on doing what the President wants. They encompass a massive ideological range from Bernie Sanders (an independent who left the Democrats because they were too conservative) to Joe Lieberman (who left because they were too liberal).
The President had a very hard time getting them all to agree, and legislation he proposed was heavily compromised by the time it was done. If the Democrats had unified to pass one agenda they would likely be in less of a mess now. As it is, they're all running away from what accomplishments they did make because the compromised versions are less coherent and easily attacked.
I'm speaking politically here, not in terms of what would be the best legislation. Regardless, you need to be extra-cynical: the Democrats in Congress will not automatically pass it.
Besides, it takes a 2/3 vote. If 59 Democrats were for it, 41 Republicans would be automatically against it, even if it were the "Puppies Are Cute" international treaty.
Independents may think they're cynical, but nobody's got cynicism like a Democrat;-)
Be bold: release the final version before the release candidate. You can release the final version on schedule in 2010, and then slip the RC to 2011. That's the kind of innovative software development methodology we should expect from Mozilla.
Windows itself doesn't, but a great many Windows computers do. Along with a great variety of other crapware that doesn't come with a clean Windows install. It's part of what drives down the cost on those mass-market machines: they get paid to give you demos/trials/pre-installed services. Ads, in other words, from the moment you get it out of the box.
Actually, you're the idiot here. GNP is a technical term, and you were pointed to the definition of it. It's a mechanism for estimating production and productivity.
It's not a perfect measure, for a number of reasons, including the one you pointed out. But that's the fault of the measure, and you were the one who brought it up.
If you mean productivity, say "productivity". Use the wrong technical term and people will generally ignore it, but when you call them an idiot for validly correcting you, it means you're the idiot in the conversation.
I have seen the Truthers, and bizarrely enough, they seem to be half Republicans. In fact, there's a considerable overlap between Birthers and Truthers. There's plenty of anti-Bush Democrats, but there is also a considerable contingent of people who think even the teabaggers are government stooges.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet that with an afternoon's work they could have spring, summer, winter, and fall trees. With a little more work they could link it to the local climate and when particular species of trees change color when.
I dunno what it would be for, but to be honest, I'm not precisely sure what this is for. "Raising awareness of trees" seems pretty lame. Still, it's very pretty, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's ironic, because the original idea of Wikileaks is to make it possible to publish information from genuinely repressive countries. The US has its faults (a great many) but for the most part speech is still pretty free. It may be hard to pry unfairly-classified information out of the government, but at least the entire country isn't behind a Great Firewall. Once the information is out, it's free; they won't punish newspapers for re-reporting it.
That makes it easier to get embarrassing info on the US than on China, which could also use some embarrassment on that score.
I like to believe that the US is ultimately stronger for that: the freedom that kept the US on top for a long time is ultimately going to be more flexible, innovative, creative, and entrepreneurial than a repressive government.
But both countries are changing to be more like the other. We're not there yet, but closer than I'd like.
That takes a pretty broad definition of "success". In fact, it's kind of hard to understand precisely how it is they do define "success", because while Americans are busy chucking fundamental liberties, it's not actually getting al Qaeda any closer to world domination, or whatever it is they're after.
If all they're after is to make Americans unhappy, they're quite successful, but there are much better returns on their investment. And making Americans unhappy is a pretty pitiful goal; it's not terribly hard, and it doesn't get you anything tangible. Plus, it gets some of you killed, and it cost al Qaeda control of Afghanistan.
Yeah, they can be successful at it, and there's not much we can do about that. The fact is that it doesn't take much to scare Americans. They seem to make a point of it. Al Qaeda could evaporate completely and they'd still jump at their own shadows.
That its dealings can entail shady backroom secret agreements so long as the public is well-served.
Is it possible for it to be otherwise?
These cables are the government equivalent of a little white lie. That is, you do much the same with your own internal monologue. You self-censor to be polite, and that politeness is (as Miss Manners says) the grease that keeps the gears of society turning. Nobody expects you to be "transparent" in your dealings with everybody; if you actually called every asshole an asshole, you'd be pretty busy.
Governments aren't individuals, so the analogy is not entirely apt (sorry if I'm stealing your schtick there, BadAnalogyGuy) but I think it's still illuminating. Internal decision-making processes should not be completely beyond the reach of oversight, but having complete uncensored access to every impolite or ill-phrased thought is going to make everybody cranky most of the time.
No mod points, so I'll concur and expand instead.
The $4,200 figure is misleading because it doesn't count the failed attacks. It's still nowhere near the amount the US has spent trying to stop them, not by several orders of magnitude, but it makes it clearer that each attack represents risk in more than one way.
An attack that is attempted but fails costs more than money. It exposes them to the chance of capture, and each captured person might turn over information that thwarts other attacks. Good security and isolation reduce that, but they also raise your costs and slow you down.
I'm not defending action at all costs. We have an irritating habit of spending a lot of money and introducing great inconvenience to thwart an attack they're unlikely to try again. Oddly, al Qaeda makes the same mistake: they keep trying to blow up airplanes, when there are many other targets of opportunity. Maybe it's because they figure the costs are exponential: each new measure costs 10x as much, so they get more ROI by going after the same target.
I think there are better ways for the US to allocate its money, and more importantly, its tolerance. They do seem successful at causing us to make great expenditures at small cost. But the costs are not as trivial as the misleading figure suggests.
Thanks for pointing that out. I did RTFA, but I musta missed that.
I guess he figures the money must be worth the time, but it seems unlikely.
It may be that the guy is raking in cash today, but he's not just being a jackass: he's committing crimes. It's fiendishly difficult to prosecute some kinds of online crimes, especially when routed through overseas sites, but this guy does not seem to be protecting himself.
It's always wise to be suspicious of "trend" stories, since newspapers love to spot a single instance, call it a "trend", and get everybody yapping. But even if there is a "trend" here, it'll get cut right short if this guy gets arrested.
Which may be the real purpose behind the piece: take an injustice that is too small for authorities to take notice, raise its profile, and take some satisfaction when the police step in.
There may well be a marketing tactic to be had in providing rotten customer service and benefiting from the links provided by sites too dumb to use "nofollow". But there's a line between "rotten service" and "outright fraud", and this guy is well over it.
He mentions the idea that some ISPs are considering a plan where they only deliver content from their site. That's not Web access. Anybody who buys that is not on the web. And that's their own lookout.
When it comes to democracy, you can lead the horse to water, but it's gotta drink all by itself. You can yell, scream, cajole, etc. but in the end voters will make whatever decisions they want to make. They may be mind-numbingly stupid, but mind-numbing stupidity is a part of democracy. I wish it weren't, but the alternative is some mechanism of excluding people, and there's no fair way to do that. Whoever sets up the standards is the dictator.
As a threat to democracy, call me when they start forbidding plain Web access to users willing to pay a reasonable sum for it. The state technology means that you can get the kind of access needed to read (but not watch) the news for a nominal sum practically anywhere. I'd like to see that improved; the price of access in the US is higher than it should be. But it's not a threat to democracy.
Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior.
It didn't take CGI to do that. There's a very famous cut just like that in Citizen Kane, through a skylight. That's The Greatest Freaking Movie Of All Time, according to every movie critic ever (and you get thrown out of the movie critic guild if you question that, or even put something in the second slot because Citizen Kane is so gosh-darn awesome that it takes up two slots.)
Yes, the film did it first, and it gets tired very quickly, even with CGI improvements. (You no longer need a convenient lightning flash to cover up the transition.) But visual tricks have been important to film since the beginning, and movie critics heap praise upon them, at least the first time. It's the derivative uses, not the effect itself, that earns their opprobrium.
If the film is otherwise fundamentally solid (and most aren't), the use of CGI is an enhancement. Good CGI won't ruin a good film or save a bad one.
Lying about this is unconscionable, but I can see a valid reason for them wanting to save such things: it lets you know how they were defeated last time.
Suppose that somebody does manage to sneak something deadly on board. If this were a bug in a piece of software, you'd all want to leap to reconstructing the event, and you'd be irked if you knew you had deliberately thrown away a crucial piece of information. Especially since if it happened once, it could happen again. So you'd have to go on lockdown.
I'm NOT trying to justify this. Lying bad, radiation bad, groping bad, virtual strip search bad, TSA bad, pictures always leak, terrorists winning, Orwell right, etc. I'm good with all that.
But I'm a bit surprised that they didn't even try to make the case for saving the pictures, perhaps with an public key encryption and the private key kept only on a piece of paper locked in a safe somewhere. I guess they felt it was futile; people are uncomfortable enough about the pictures as it is.
I've always found pie crust to be a real pain in the ass to make. Overwork it, and it gets tough. Too little water, and it crumbles. Too much water, and it's tough again. Keep it cold, or it gets greasy. Move quickly but gently, or it'll tear. Getting the edge even is fiddly.
Yes, I realize that's completely off topic.
FTA:
“Color is the next logical step for E Ink,”
Really? I'd have thought that "refresh rates that aren't measured in epochs" would be the next logical step.
Perhaps they've improved since the last time I picked one up, but it was depressingly unresponsive. That, and the poor contrast ratio, was not really grabbing my attention.
I love the idea of e-ink; using ambient light is both low-power and easier on the eyes. But I don't feel the urge to get one with the current state of the (commercially available) art.
I had a feeling about that. Props to the guy who found the original (despite the hilarious auto translation from Japanese.)
There remains a very, very sharp drop in the graph, but it no longer looks like a distortion of the curve. It's too bad that the screen cap cut off what I find to be the most interesting data point: not the surge leading up to Christmas, but the fact that it drops to practically zero on Christmas Day. Not unexpected, I suppose, but nevertheless prominent.
Thanks. The graph does indeed show a truly epic drop-off after Christmas, but not nearly as radical as the instantaneous change that the cut-off graph suggested. A poor coincidence that removed a very interesting feature of the graph.
There's a tiny oddity where it seems like there's a one day massive drop-off, possibly Christmas Day; I guess nobody breaks up with you on Christmas, or in the previous few days. It turns around pretty sharply.
Netflix may need to start doing the same. I mean video is the ultimate in things that could be multi-cast, except that we want it on demand.
That, and the fact that it's an enormous amount of data and a lot of processing. Netflix has thousands of movies, many at fairly high res. And in several resolutions, for machines with different bandwidths, unless they're trans-coding on the fly, which adds up to significant power.
The can probably propagate only some of their catalog. I assume it's an 80/20 rule where 80% of the movies requested are in the the top fifth of the catalog.
Still, what you're pushing out there is going to be a great big hunk of computer, and it will be pumping out a lot more data than plain page views. Not impossible, but they're going to have to do something eventually.
A graph like this should be cyclical, with a smooth curve between the far right and the far left. It shows a big rise in late December, the highest point in the year, followed by an instantaneous drop-off in early January to one of the lowest points.
Is there some sudden function that occurs on New Year's Day that makes people stay in love? One that just happens to occur at the same time as the arbitrary graph endpoints?
I suspect what's going on is that Facebook grows through the year, and that there needs to be a scaling factor applied. That would imply that the peak at the far right is not nearly so tall in reality, exaggerated by a rapidly expanding Facebook.
Or maybe it's something else. But that's just the first thing to leap out at me. If they're not correcting for that, or at least trying to posit an explanation, what else is wrong with their methodology?
So they're already stopping the 24x7 broadcast of extremist videos.
People don't have to participate in every decision, just the ones they care about and understand.
Unfortunately, "care about" and "understand" are orthogonal. In fact, in some cases they seem to point in precisely opposite directions: the less people know about a subject, the more vehemently they express their opinions (aka Dunning Kruger effect).
Not that this is an insuperable barrier to the program. The same problem exists with representative democracy. Representation is a hack designed to minimize it, and that hack is becoming both problematic and ineffective.
So maybe you'd know... what does this stuff weigh?
I know resin can be tough, but it's going to be hard to beat steel for strength. Sheet steel produces very, very light bodies that can keep passengers from getting crushed. (Deceleration is a separate problem, for airbags and seatbelts.)
Getting it printed up fast is neat, but if the resulting car weighs ten tons to be equivalently safe, it's going to have rotten mileage and handle like a cow.
a Senate controlled by his political party will most likely let him do what he likes.
I admire your cynicism, but you need to apply a double layer of it here. The Democrats in the Senate have a miserable track record on doing what the President wants. They encompass a massive ideological range from Bernie Sanders (an independent who left the Democrats because they were too conservative) to Joe Lieberman (who left because they were too liberal).
The President had a very hard time getting them all to agree, and legislation he proposed was heavily compromised by the time it was done. If the Democrats had unified to pass one agenda they would likely be in less of a mess now. As it is, they're all running away from what accomplishments they did make because the compromised versions are less coherent and easily attacked.
I'm speaking politically here, not in terms of what would be the best legislation. Regardless, you need to be extra-cynical: the Democrats in Congress will not automatically pass it.
Besides, it takes a 2/3 vote. If 59 Democrats were for it, 41 Republicans would be automatically against it, even if it were the "Puppies Are Cute" international treaty.
Independents may think they're cynical, but nobody's got cynicism like a Democrat ;-)
Be bold: release the final version before the release candidate. You can release the final version on schedule in 2010, and then slip the RC to 2011. That's the kind of innovative software development methodology we should expect from Mozilla.
Windows itself doesn't, but a great many Windows computers do. Along with a great variety of other crapware that doesn't come with a clean Windows install. It's part of what drives down the cost on those mass-market machines: they get paid to give you demos/trials/pre-installed services. Ads, in other words, from the moment you get it out of the box.
"Ut". It's an abbrevation of "het", meaning "the".
Here's a video of him speaking (in Dutch), introducing himself, sounding like HE-rard ut-HOFT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qsf6Q4xSrU&feature=related
Actually, you're the idiot here. GNP is a technical term, and you were pointed to the definition of it. It's a mechanism for estimating production and productivity.
It's not a perfect measure, for a number of reasons, including the one you pointed out. But that's the fault of the measure, and you were the one who brought it up.
If you mean productivity, say "productivity". Use the wrong technical term and people will generally ignore it, but when you call them an idiot for validly correcting you, it means you're the idiot in the conversation.
I have seen the Truthers, and bizarrely enough, they seem to be half Republicans. In fact, there's a considerable overlap between Birthers and Truthers. There's plenty of anti-Bush Democrats, but there is also a considerable contingent of people who think even the teabaggers are government stooges.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is bipartisanship.