But it's my business to pay my ISP to funnel the bytes sent to me. If the bytes coming from your ISP are frequently evil, I'd fully support my ISP in blacklisting you, especially if it saves me money or increases my bandwidth.
So if your ISP decides to cut yours off unless they impose some sort of anti-bot policy, I'd be in favor. And I'm perfectly willing to have my ISP do the same to me if it's what's required to play nice with their neighbors.
If you want your ISP to be blind to your bits, and suffer the fact that they'll have to install more bandwidth and be potentially filtered (and lose customers for that, raising your prices further), be my guest. I'm willing to live with that minor invasion of privacy (cutting off obvious bots) in exchange for lower prices.
Taxes are not the enemy of small business. Most small business pay very little in tax, for the simple reason that taxes are paid on profits. Most small businesses that fail, fail without paying a dime of tax.
The enemy of small business is the fact that starting a business requires a lot of up-front cash and you need income immediately to start paying that back. This is a difficult proposition even for a well-managed, well-conceived business plan.
Right now, the enemy of small business is the fact that they can't get those loans to begin in this economic climate. Blaming it on "taxes" is just the knee-jerk response, without foundation.
The creation costs are there, but relatively trivial. And much, much lower than it was a few years ago.
The real expense is in drumming up interest in your bits, rather than somebody else's. The drop in the cost of creating the bits means that everybody's got them. Some are good, most are bad, but getting yours to stand out is incredibly hard.
Despite what music fans like to think, they don't instantly glom on to things that they like. Yes, I'm sure YOU do, Mr. Music Fan. But if you've ever tried to market music, you'll realize that most people take repetition, and repetition requires either recommendations or playing it where you know they're going to listen.
Both start with money, a fair bit of it. That's most of the cost of marketing a piece of music. The actual production can be done for dirt cheap, especially if you can be your own producer (though 99% of bands really, really shouldn't.) But getting people interested is the hard and expensive part.
The Peace Prize has done some excellent service, bringing to the world stage people who were going unnoticed. Nobody had ever heard of Aung San Suu Kyi or Carlos Belo, and the attention really does do some good there. They gain international support for ongoing work. Sometimes it has gone to people who have genuinely done good work and deserve to be rewarded in retrospect, as it is in the science prizes.
On the other hand, some years have been completely out of line, such as Kissinger or Obama. (I'm a big fan of Obama, but the peace prize was completely unnecessary: he needed neither encouragement nor money to do his work. There were other people who could use the attention and money to better effect, and he had no accomplishments of note.)
In other words: a mixed bag. I suppose that the worst failures do little harm, and the successes do some good, so it's worth it. Even if it means putting up with the occasional simultaneous international facepalm.
Hardcover is also usually the first edition brought out. They can charge more for it and have higher margins.
Paperbacks come later, for people who want to read it but don't want to pay the full price. Sometimes the hardcovers continue, for more durable copies, sometimes selling both versions at once.
Most books never come out in hardcover; they go straight to paperback, because the publisher doesn't expect that same kind of dropoff. Either you want it or you don't.
Publishers could try pulling the same belated releases with e-books, but I think that a lot of e-book customers will tend to buy a different e-book rather than buying the hardcover. Once you've spent all that money on an e-book reader, you're going to want to get maximum benefit out of it.
I think that's a dangerous move, as the viewer may base its opinion on video footage.
As opposed to now, where viewers are only to happy to base their opinions on nothing whatsoever.
It's six of one, really. It's disappointing how easily viewers are manipulated. You could stick a flashing RECONSTRUCTION over the footage, and they're still going to come out convinced that they were right there when it happened.
And worse... they'll hold the same opinion, almost as strongly, if you just tell it to them.
Maybe 9 or 10 out of every thousand emails. Then maybe 1 out of every 20 replies would lead to us getting money out of the victim in the end.
Those numbers are depressing. They're sending out literally billions of emails, and they're getting a response rate of about 1 per 20,000. No wonder it continues.
I suppose the bell curve has to have two tails, and so the dumbest.05% of the Internet is always going to be pretty dumb. It's aggravating that the remaining 99.95% of us have to put up with the barrage of spam so that they can locate that dumbest.05%.
It's even worse, though, of those vast numbers of emails, probably 99% of them never reach a human being, or reach somebody through multiple addresses. That suggests that the stupidity rate is 100 times higher.
We're used to seeing the arguments in partisan terms, but Obama has struggled as much with his own party as with Republicans.
In a sense, this should be giving Republicans what they want: less money spent by government. Assuming, of course, that this ends up as at least a small reduction in the overall NASA budget, and is not merely money being relocated.
I'd actually support that relocation; I think that going to the moon is little more than trying to win a pissing contest. Yeah, Tang, velcro, space pens, whatever. Money for science is money for science and I don't see why manned missions are somehow better than unmanned ones for fostering innovation, dollar for dollar.
Still, Obama is going to get a lot of pushback from his own party. (And one big loser: Parker Griffith, an Alabama representative, who became a Republican and now loses a bunch of money to his district.)
Democrats will fight to get that money put back, and we'll see if Obama gets any credit for actually trying to save money. Unfortunately, while talk of deficit reduction is always popular, actual spending cuts are always portrayed as apocalyptic by those affected.
I don't know about yours, but my inbox is pretty readable. I almost never miss messages that I'm expecting to get; if there are false-positives it doesn't seem to be anything I wanted. And 99% of the messages in my inbox are real mail.
I'd like to go further to eliminate the spam at the source, including shutting down the botnets when possible. That would be necessary even if they weren't spamming; they're also used for denial-of-service attacks. And all that spam is costing us by filling the tubes with crap.
Meantime, cutting down the spam is an arms race, but at least where I am, we appear to be winning. There is money to be made in anti-spam, and they appear to have invested it well.
Had there been no spam filters, we'd all receive about the same amount of e-mail spam as we receive in the postal mail world.
I can't imagine what you base that statement on. Real-world junk mail is limited by the fact that it costs money to print and mail junk mail. Neither applies to spam.
Spammers aren't just competing with spam filters. They're also competing with each other for attention. Even in the absence of spam filters, the spammers would continually seek new ways to get more of their spam into your inbox than their competitors.
In fact, they might well invent the spam filter, with a deliberate back door so that their spam sails through while their competitors are dropped.
It seems to me that the key objection to this is the mailing lists.
But what if mailing lists were replaced by RSS? When you're delivering identical content to a lot of different users, letting them pull rather than push eliminates spam, and for zero cost beyond having the servers.
Having zombies' accounts drained is bad for them, but maybe it would make people more alert to them.
The dropped connections as you phase in the system is sad, but it's in pursuit of a more usable system in the end.
just take the opportunity to get really well acquainted with your therapist.
Assuming you can get one. If the false-positive rate is too high, it means you have a lot of people in treatment unnecessarily, taking time and resources away from those who really do need help.
I imagine that the original article gives the false-positive rate and that it's acceptably low. I'm just irked about the quality of science reporting that doesn't ask these questions, which should be the first thing on a scientist's mind.
And by explicitly circumscribing what governments may not do, they implicitly give the government the right to do everything else.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has generally taken very expansive views of the rights in the Bill of Rights (it's still called the Bill of Rights, regardless of the language in the amendments). That has generally been good for freedom, though in this case it misses that one of the key goals of government is the "general welfare". And the general welfare is not served by allowing the rights of one group of people to trample over another, simply because the one group has more money or influence.
Yes, but their intent is to make money, not to skew the agenda in favor of that media organization itself. Newspapers (reputable ones) point out conflicts of interest (when they're reporting on stories that are relevant to themselves as corporations.)
For-profit news-gathering means that you end up with a lot of entertaining fluff in places you'd rather have news, but it doesn't affect a political agenda.
The problems come when a news organization decides that it would rather promote a political point of view than its own bottom line, and uses the supposed objectivity that an independent press is perceived to have to its advantage. Such things can be difficult to spot, though: biased news is also more entertaining (everybody loves to have their biases played to) and catching them in the act of being biased-for-political-ends rather than biased-for-pandering is a challenge.
The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
Arguably, they already have. The newspapers have been merging with each other like crazy.
When it comes to producing "real news", there are only a few newspapers left beyond the local level. All newspapers that run national news subscribe to the wire services; they're really just sharing stories with each other.
When local "big" news breaks (e.g. shooting, bridge collapse), the wire service story starts as local news in the local paper, then gets picked up nationally.
For truly national news, only a few papers report it: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press's own reporters, plus the news networks and a few very high-end bloggers. That's about it for news gathering. Everybody else is just relaying it from the others.
Their international bureaus are nearly all gone as well, except for the papers I mentioned, and they're cut back.
The local papers still have a reason to exist, the local news, but for national and international, they get it faster and better online. Unfortunately, local news has a poor draw, and often doesn't even merit a daily paper, even in a medium-sized city.
You don't want to lose them; they do important work as the Fourth Estate on the local level. But nobody seems to care much about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a quality strawman you've got going there.
But it's my business to pay my ISP to funnel the bytes sent to me. If the bytes coming from your ISP are frequently evil, I'd fully support my ISP in blacklisting you, especially if it saves me money or increases my bandwidth.
So if your ISP decides to cut yours off unless they impose some sort of anti-bot policy, I'd be in favor. And I'm perfectly willing to have my ISP do the same to me if it's what's required to play nice with their neighbors.
If you want your ISP to be blind to your bits, and suffer the fact that they'll have to install more bandwidth and be potentially filtered (and lose customers for that, raising your prices further), be my guest. I'm willing to live with that minor invasion of privacy (cutting off obvious bots) in exchange for lower prices.
And what is the enemy of small business? Taxes.
Taxes are not the enemy of small business. Most small business pay very little in tax, for the simple reason that taxes are paid on profits. Most small businesses that fail, fail without paying a dime of tax.
The enemy of small business is the fact that starting a business requires a lot of up-front cash and you need income immediately to start paying that back. This is a difficult proposition even for a well-managed, well-conceived business plan.
Right now, the enemy of small business is the fact that they can't get those loans to begin in this economic climate. Blaming it on "taxes" is just the knee-jerk response, without foundation.
The creation costs are there, but relatively trivial. And much, much lower than it was a few years ago.
The real expense is in drumming up interest in your bits, rather than somebody else's. The drop in the cost of creating the bits means that everybody's got them. Some are good, most are bad, but getting yours to stand out is incredibly hard.
Despite what music fans like to think, they don't instantly glom on to things that they like. Yes, I'm sure YOU do, Mr. Music Fan. But if you've ever tried to market music, you'll realize that most people take repetition, and repetition requires either recommendations or playing it where you know they're going to listen.
Both start with money, a fair bit of it. That's most of the cost of marketing a piece of music. The actual production can be done for dirt cheap, especially if you can be your own producer (though 99% of bands really, really shouldn't.) But getting people interested is the hard and expensive part.
Not to mention a remarkable failure to apply the right ethnic slur. "Wops" are Italian.
Perhaps "wog" was what you were after?
Yes, it means you're getting old. On the plus side, your memory appears to be in great shape.
The Peace Prize has done some excellent service, bringing to the world stage people who were going unnoticed. Nobody had ever heard of Aung San Suu Kyi or Carlos Belo, and the attention really does do some good there. They gain international support for ongoing work. Sometimes it has gone to people who have genuinely done good work and deserve to be rewarded in retrospect, as it is in the science prizes.
On the other hand, some years have been completely out of line, such as Kissinger or Obama. (I'm a big fan of Obama, but the peace prize was completely unnecessary: he needed neither encouragement nor money to do his work. There were other people who could use the attention and money to better effect, and he had no accomplishments of note.)
In other words: a mixed bag. I suppose that the worst failures do little harm, and the successes do some good, so it's worth it. Even if it means putting up with the occasional simultaneous international facepalm.
Tantalum is non-toxic, but you know it doesn't really work like that. Sodium is explosive; chlorine is toxic; sodium chloride is tasty.
Still, as you say, lithium tantalate is going to be far too expensive for coating pipes.
> This is provided the technology isn't only "ten years away" or so. ;-)
This is the kind of technology they call "40 years away". As in "Yeah, I suppose, maybe, but I'm not even sure it's theoretically possible."
(As opposed to "10 years", meaning "It's theoretically possible, but I have no idea how.")
Hardcover is also usually the first edition brought out. They can charge more for it and have higher margins.
Paperbacks come later, for people who want to read it but don't want to pay the full price. Sometimes the hardcovers continue, for more durable copies, sometimes selling both versions at once.
Most books never come out in hardcover; they go straight to paperback, because the publisher doesn't expect that same kind of dropoff. Either you want it or you don't.
Publishers could try pulling the same belated releases with e-books, but I think that a lot of e-book customers will tend to buy a different e-book rather than buying the hardcover. Once you've spent all that money on an e-book reader, you're going to want to get maximum benefit out of it.
I think that's a dangerous move, as the viewer may base its opinion on video footage.
As opposed to now, where viewers are only to happy to base their opinions on nothing whatsoever.
It's six of one, really. It's disappointing how easily viewers are manipulated. You could stick a flashing RECONSTRUCTION over the footage, and they're still going to come out convinced that they were right there when it happened.
And worse... they'll hold the same opinion, almost as strongly, if you just tell it to them.
They have autonomous capabilities and vision systems that put any robot to shame.
A little too damned autonomous, if you've ever met one. I'll stick with the robot. They never spit at me.
FTA:
Maybe 9 or 10 out of every thousand emails. Then maybe 1 out of every 20 replies would lead to us getting money out of the victim in the end.
Those numbers are depressing. They're sending out literally billions of emails, and they're getting a response rate of about 1 per 20,000. No wonder it continues.
I suppose the bell curve has to have two tails, and so the dumbest .05% of the Internet is always going to be pretty dumb. It's aggravating that the remaining 99.95% of us have to put up with the barrage of spam so that they can locate that dumbest .05%.
It's even worse, though, of those vast numbers of emails, probably 99% of them never reach a human being, or reach somebody through multiple addresses. That suggests that the stupidity rate is 100 times higher.
We're used to seeing the arguments in partisan terms, but Obama has struggled as much with his own party as with Republicans.
In a sense, this should be giving Republicans what they want: less money spent by government. Assuming, of course, that this ends up as at least a small reduction in the overall NASA budget, and is not merely money being relocated.
I'd actually support that relocation; I think that going to the moon is little more than trying to win a pissing contest. Yeah, Tang, velcro, space pens, whatever. Money for science is money for science and I don't see why manned missions are somehow better than unmanned ones for fostering innovation, dollar for dollar.
Still, Obama is going to get a lot of pushback from his own party. (And one big loser: Parker Griffith, an Alabama representative, who became a Republican and now loses a bunch of money to his district.)
Democrats will fight to get that money put back, and we'll see if Obama gets any credit for actually trying to save money. Unfortunately, while talk of deficit reduction is always popular, actual spending cuts are always portrayed as apocalyptic by those affected.
I don't know about yours, but my inbox is pretty readable. I almost never miss messages that I'm expecting to get; if there are false-positives it doesn't seem to be anything I wanted. And 99% of the messages in my inbox are real mail.
I'd like to go further to eliminate the spam at the source, including shutting down the botnets when possible. That would be necessary even if they weren't spamming; they're also used for denial-of-service attacks. And all that spam is costing us by filling the tubes with crap.
Meantime, cutting down the spam is an arms race, but at least where I am, we appear to be winning. There is money to be made in anti-spam, and they appear to have invested it well.
Had there been no spam filters, we'd all receive about the same amount of e-mail spam as we receive in the postal mail world.
I can't imagine what you base that statement on. Real-world junk mail is limited by the fact that it costs money to print and mail junk mail. Neither applies to spam.
Spammers aren't just competing with spam filters. They're also competing with each other for attention. Even in the absence of spam filters, the spammers would continually seek new ways to get more of their spam into your inbox than their competitors.
In fact, they might well invent the spam filter, with a deliberate back door so that their spam sails through while their competitors are dropped.
It seems to me that the key objection to this is the mailing lists.
But what if mailing lists were replaced by RSS? When you're delivering identical content to a lot of different users, letting them pull rather than push eliminates spam, and for zero cost beyond having the servers.
Having zombies' accounts drained is bad for them, but maybe it would make people more alert to them.
The dropped connections as you phase in the system is sad, but it's in pursuit of a more usable system in the end.
just take the opportunity to get really well acquainted with your therapist.
Assuming you can get one. If the false-positive rate is too high, it means you have a lot of people in treatment unnecessarily, taking time and resources away from those who really do need help.
I imagine that the original article gives the false-positive rate and that it's acceptably low. I'm just irked about the quality of science reporting that doesn't ask these questions, which should be the first thing on a scientist's mind.
Spotting 100% is easy: you just need a machine with a blinking light that says "PTSD". Unfortunately that puts a lot of healthy people in therapy.
Nobody expects Wired to figure that out, but the original press release (scavenged from the array of irrelevant links) doesn't say, either.
I assume that the actual article (in the Journal of Neural Engineering) actually says something about it. Anybody got a subscription?
And by explicitly circumscribing what governments may not do, they implicitly give the government the right to do everything else.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has generally taken very expansive views of the rights in the Bill of Rights (it's still called the Bill of Rights, regardless of the language in the amendments). That has generally been good for freedom, though in this case it misses that one of the key goals of government is the "general welfare". And the general welfare is not served by allowing the rights of one group of people to trample over another, simply because the one group has more money or influence.
Yes, but their intent is to make money, not to skew the agenda in favor of that media organization itself. Newspapers (reputable ones) point out conflicts of interest (when they're reporting on stories that are relevant to themselves as corporations.)
For-profit news-gathering means that you end up with a lot of entertaining fluff in places you'd rather have news, but it doesn't affect a political agenda.
The problems come when a news organization decides that it would rather promote a political point of view than its own bottom line, and uses the supposed objectivity that an independent press is perceived to have to its advantage. Such things can be difficult to spot, though: biased news is also more entertaining (everybody loves to have their biases played to) and catching them in the act of being biased-for-political-ends rather than biased-for-pandering is a challenge.
He then goes on to talk about a series of robots that aren't nearly human-like enough to trigger the uncanny valley phenomenon.
Absolutely: animations are quite capable of entering the uncanny valley, but real 3D physical objects aren't yet close.
When they do get a humanoid robot close enough to be uncanny, though, I suspect it's going to be very unnerving.
Fine. Pedanticity ;-)
Bison are from the genus Bison. Buffalo are apparently from the geni
Pedanticness: "genus" is third declension, like "opus", and so the plural is "genera" (cf "opera").
The "-us" ending does resemble first declension, which does take "-i" for the nominative plural ending, but it's third instead.
The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
Arguably, they already have. The newspapers have been merging with each other like crazy.
When it comes to producing "real news", there are only a few newspapers left beyond the local level. All newspapers that run national news subscribe to the wire services; they're really just sharing stories with each other.
When local "big" news breaks (e.g. shooting, bridge collapse), the wire service story starts as local news in the local paper, then gets picked up nationally.
For truly national news, only a few papers report it: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press's own reporters, plus the news networks and a few very high-end bloggers. That's about it for news gathering. Everybody else is just relaying it from the others.
Their international bureaus are nearly all gone as well, except for the papers I mentioned, and they're cut back.
The local papers still have a reason to exist, the local news, but for national and international, they get it faster and better online. Unfortunately, local news has a poor draw, and often doesn't even merit a daily paper, even in a medium-sized city.
You don't want to lose them; they do important work as the Fourth Estate on the local level. But nobody seems to care much about it.