It's all true, except for one thing. In this particular case, it is extremely easy to find on Google, and you immediately get links to sources that most people would consider reliable.
The original comment mentioned, "Reuters released pictures from the Israeli assault on the "peace flotilla", they edited out the weapons in the hands of the "peaceful" members of the flotilla and the wounded Israeli soldiers." What you get depends a fair bit on the search terms you choose, and I mostly got blogs I'd never heard of. And as is frequently the case amongst blogs, it seems to be mostly blogs commenting on other blogs. It would be far superior to have the originating piece of journalism, or the best sourced/written one, or one from the most reputable source. Just getting the page rank grab bag of blogs (together with a bunch of pages from highly-ranked news sites that are simply using Reuters photos of the incident, not discussing this controversy) is much worse.
In the end my impression of this particular controversy is that there are just two photos that had the edges cropped off, and while this could be intentional it looks like a pretty decent place to apply Hanlon's Razor. Now perhaps there's is an article out there that makes a much stronger case, and had that poster included that his point might be a lot more convincing.
Okay that's one. I did a quick search for the other story (about the boarding of that ship trying to break the Gaza blockade). The site I looked at just showed two photos, each with a knife showing at the edge of the original that has been cropped to focus on the primary subject of the picture. It looked like something that could have been the product of intensional bias but also could equally well be explained by an ordinary attempt at framing the central subject matter. Usually I apply Hanlon's Razor to such things.
Now, if you know more about it, perhaps you could point to site that has some more thorough, convincing, or extensive discussion. Maybe there were a lot more than 2 examples, which would change the interpretation. That would be one big advantage to citing a specific source in the first place. Since you know something about it, you can point people to the best source of information, and you'll be a lot more convincing that way.
Usually if a person is making an argument the burden is on them to provide proof. That's the way it works. It's also a lot better because it keeps things grounded in fact, rather than ending up with a game of telephone where people go around repeating things they heard. You can see where the latter system leads by reading the many chain emails that go around. Consider that not everything is easy to find on Google. This is, because it was a well publicized Internet-based story that can be summarized in a few search terms that are relatively unusual in combination, but there are plenty of important things that don't fit that mold. Furthermore, there's a big difference between finding a web page mentioning something and finding a good discussion by a reliable source. So, there are a lot of reasons it's worthwhile to go ahead and cite a source if you know about an issue. Slashdot (indeed, the net and the world in general) would be a hell of a lot better if people did it as a matter of course.
Also consider that it makes a lot more sense practically for the person originally making a claim to cite his sources. What did you and the other replies say? Essentially that it's so easy to Google. Well that would seem to be a good argument that it would be really easy to cite a source. And what makes more sense, the one person making the claim doing this work once or the many people reading the claim replicating the same work?
Long story short, I think the GP was dead on for commenting that if you care enough to post about something like this (not necessarily common knowledge and possibly controversial), you ought to cite a source.
It is possible to honestly offer "unlimited" data at N megabits per second, and that is how they market it today.
Google tells me there are, on average, 2629743.83 seconds in a month. If I'm buying "unlimited" 20 megabits per second service from my ISP, I can transfer approximately 321 gigabytes per month if I am constantly downloading at the maximum rate that we have mutually agreed upon.
You're math is a screwy somewhere, because 20 Mb/s for a month would total about 6.57 TB, but you're correct that with a maximum possible data rate an unlimited deal is logically possible, since it translates to a finite amount of data. What I meant, however, is that an "unlimited" plan offered at any vaguely reasonable consumer price (and any reasonable bandwidth) is always a lie, because it is far, far underpriced. No matter what they tell you, they will not let you max that out over the long term*.
Which would you rather have?
A) 20 mbit/second "unlimited" service as described above: use it as often as you like during the month, and don't worry about your bill changing from month to month; the cap is effectively set by the 20 mbit/second data rate.
B) 100 mbit/second with a 321GB monthly cap; when you blow through the cap, you will likely pay through the nose for each extra megabit consumed.
C) Flat rate, metered, pay per megabit transferred. Perhaps with tiered pricing as practiced by some power companies.
E) Some other option?
As I've said, option A will never be available at a normal consumer price. Now, I would think it must be available at a sufficiently high price, but unless you really need it for some commercial purpose (or you're rather wealthy) you will almost certainly not be willing to pay what it really costs. Anyone purporting to offer you A for a normal-ish consumer price is almost certainly lying to you*. Option B clearly is undesirable. Option C is potentially okay, because it is honest. If you don't like be metered per-bit, a decent system would be one that would give you a cap and start to throttle you down gradually after you exceed it, but would, say, email you and give you the option to buy more data for that billing period. There are also ISPs that offer things they give names like "bursting" where you get some high data transfer rate for the first T seconds of a transfer and then it throttles down to a lower speed after that for a longer-term transfer. That approach seems pretty practical as well.
I think there is probably some variation or combination of these approaches that could work pretty well. I also think that ideally an ISP/carrier would let you choose among a few models to select the one that you like best. Some people would probably prefer a cap with throttling while others would just want to pay a flat rate. Then the only problem is communicating to the user what he is purchasing exactly. So the best solution might well be a default offering that is easy to explain and works pretty well for the average user and then an option for power users that would fit their needs a bit better (while still being an honest deal where you get what you pay for and pay for what you get).
* It is conceivable that an ISP would be willing to lose money on you as a customer if a) customers like you are extremely rare and those policies are making them lots of money on everyone else or b) they're trying to build up a reputation/monopoly and plan to lose money up front but change the rules on you later to make it back.
I'm guessing part of the problem is that even if one carrier/ISP wanted to be honest and explain the limitations that they would really impose, their competitors won't do it, and as long as the average consumer is unwary they will opt in favor of the better sounding deal. I assume the reason this may be changing with mobile phone carriers is that enough users are starting to bump up against the hidden or unstated limits that the lie of "unlimited" service is no longer tenable.
I can understand why people don't like the elimination for unlimited plans, but I feel like it's for the best. The problem is that an "unlimited" plan is always a lie, always. It's never really unlimited. So-called unlimited plans (on phones, ISPs, etc.) are usually limited by having a secret cap hidden in the fine print, arbitrarily kicking off people who use "too much" in the companies opinion, imposing arbitrary limits on what sorts of connections you can make (i.e., you can only browse the web), etc. When you enter into an unlimited agreement, you should know at the outset that the provider has no intent of holding up their side of the bargain. It's much better to enter into an agreement that is reasonable and has clear explicitly stated rules that you can mutually agree upon.
The question, of course, is will the cell carrier/ISP come up with a different model that serves people better? I admit that cell companies usually choose really unreasonable models, like calling minutes packages that start charging you some exorbitant rate without warning when you go over the cap. For data there are lots of options, though, and I think it could be handled pretty reasonably. Hopefully if the terms are explicitly stated (rather than buried in the fine print or unstated rules), the people will actually have more ability to choose a provider that will deal with them fairly...if such a thing can exist in the mobile phone market.
Don't you have to go through some sort of sign up process to get a card from them (which contains an identifier used to track your time and allows you to buy more time). I know I've looked at using the "free" wifi at Starbucks before and decided it was too much hassle. I typically just go down the street to buy something at another coffee shop that invariably has ordinary free wifi. I mean, even McDonalds and Denny's have free wifi these days.
Not exactly. You may be picturing the big bang as all the matter in the universe compressed into a tight little ball which then exploded out into the empty space around it. That's the usual thing that one would picture, but that's not actually the big bang that GR predicts.
Unlike for the Schrwarzschild metric of a black hole, there's a pretty intuitive way to picture the Friedman-Robertson-Walker (FRW) metric that describes the most basic GR cosmological model. Let's ignore the cosmological constant for a minute. The FRW metric says that at any instant in time the spatial dimensions of the Universe have the geometry of a hypersphere (a sphere with a 3-dimensional surface), a hyperplane, or a 3D hyperboloid, depending on the energy density in the Universe and its rate of expansion. The easiest way to picture things is to imagine for a moment that the energy density of the Universe is a bit greater than it is in reality so that the universe has the geometry of a hypersphere. If you ignore one of the spatial dimensions, you're left with only two dimensions of space, and the spatial extent of universe at any instant is the surface of an ordinary sphere (but just the surface, not the interior). As the universe expands it's the radius of the sphere that increases, so it's just like blowing up a balloon. From the perspective of an ant living on the surface of the balloon (like us, living inside the space) the surface seems to be expanding at every point, there is no center to the expansion (that lies on the surface). If you now run time backwards, this balloon gets smaller and smaller until eventually it's infinitesimally small and reduces to a single point. That instant is the big bang, and all matter is compressed infinitely tightly together, but notice also that all of space has been reduced to a point. It's still not like the Schwarzschild situation, because now there exists no "outside" of the mass. There's only one point in space.
In reality, the energy density of the Universe seems to be a bit lower, and the spatial geometry of the Universe at any instant is approximately flat. The expansion is a bit harder to visualize in this case, although one decent analogy people use is to imagine dough for a raisin bread that is rising. As the dough rises (i.e. space expands), any two raisins (bits of matter) move away from one another. Every point in the dough appears to be the center of expansion. Of course, the dough for our Universe is infinite in extent in the FRW model; it has no edges. In any case, the same thing I said before is true. As you go back toward the big bang any two raisin get closer and closer together, and by the time you reach the instant of the big bang any two raisins, no matter how distant, will be on top of one another. At the instant of the big bang, the Universe has only a single location in space, and there is no point in space that exists outside the big bang.
Of course, it's a little questionable to talk about the instant of the big bang, because at that instant the curvature and mass density reach infinity and the equations of GR become undefined. Strictly speaking, we can only talk sensibly about the instants just before the big bang. In addition, we're rather certain that at about 10^(-43) seconds away from the big bang the equations of GR break down, because the effects of quantum mechanics (which they do not include) should become vitally important. In reality we don't know what actually happened before that time, though there are all sorts of conjectures.
I have heard of models that suggest that a baby universe might form within a black hole, and I admit I don't quite know how that's supposed to work, although roughly speaking I think the idea is that the black hole has a wormhole in the center that leads to a baby universe. I've never seen the math to describe this, though, so I can't say much more about it. I'm not sure what relevance the Schwarzschild radius formula might have to this situation. I only wanted to point out that in the accepted model of cosmology there never an event horizon.
I'm not an expert either, but I have at least taken a course in GR once. What you said seems pretty fair. I don't remember these things well enough to give a more detailed intuitive explanation (if such a thing is possible).
One thing that might be useful to note is that the Schwarzschild metric that describes the geometry of spacetime in a black hole has the feature that inside the event horizon the mathematical role of time (in that coordinate system) and the radial coordinate switch (the time part of the metric gets the same sign as the two other spacial directions, while the radial part gets the sign time used to have). Based on this, it's been said that inside the event horizon, "your alarm clock turns into a ruler, and your ruler turns into an alarm clock." Because the role of space and time switch inside the event horizon, an object within is constrained to move only toward the center of the black hole in just the same way that any object is constrained to move only forward in time outside the event horizon. I'm not sure how much that helps, but it is another way of looking at it.
Another picture that is sometimes useful is the diagram showing the light cone, the set of possible future paths, at different positions near the black hole. What you see is that the light cone gets narrower and tips toward the singularity as you approach the black hole. When you get to the event horizon the light cone has tipped so far that all future paths go into the black hole.
The Schwarzschild solution to General Relativity applies to a stationary, spherically symmetric (uncharged) distribution of mass with asymptotically Minkowski boundary conditions for space-time. So, it basically assumes that you have a ball of stuff surrounded by empty space, and that's the type of situation where the equation for the Schwatzschild radius applies.
If we accept the idea that we can approximate the universe by a uniform distribution of matter on a large enough scale (and this is, perhaps, debatable), the Schwarzschild solution doesn't apply. But you can solve GR for this situation and what you get is the Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric, which doesn't have any sort of event horizon, no matter how dense the matter within. Of course, it does have the interesting feature of expansion (or contraction) which lead to the beginning of modern cosmology.
It is interesting, though, if the numbers for the mass and radius of the observable universe come out that way. Perhaps it has some import, but I can't say what it is offhand (but then I don't study GR). My first guess would be that it has to do with the universe being approximately flat, but I don't think that's actually true (because that should depend on the density, Hubble's constant, and the cosmological constant).
There's some logic to the idea of news companies being able to "copyright" facts they've uncovered. The only problem is that it's a horrible idea whose other consequences would be extremely dangerous.
The basic problem seems to me to be that investigative journalism and thoughtful in-depth analysis (as opposed to superficial opinion journalism) has all sorts of positive externalities. The market forces seem like they should always work against solid journalism, because there's nothing to stop others from just repeating the things you payed to find out. In a time where it took a day to turn out your stories, the desire for current news probably still pushed people to sources that did some quality reporting, but in the era of live-blogging there's little value to being the originator. Actually, the externalities go far beyond other news organizations,and bloggers, since good journalism helps us make sound decisions in our personal and political lives. I really don't get how people think some magical new Internet news business model is going to come along and fix this.
Allowing people some ability to control the dissemination of facts they've uncovered would help monetize good journalism, but it would be a *huge* threat to freedom of speech, probably to journalism itself, and god knows what else. It would also be unconstitutional. Having the government fund news agencies is also extremely dangerous, unless it could somehow be done in such a way that the power of controlling the funding doesn't rest with any small group of people (e.g. politicians), and I don't see how that's possible. (Although, I admit that the BBC seems to work out far better than I ever would have dreamed.) The only models I can really see working are donation-based models as with PBS, NPR, and ProPublica, or distributed volunteer models in the style FOSS projects. I remain skeptical that any of those would ever get enough funding to deliver the volume of reporting that we need to keep tabs on our government, our corporations, and the world around us.
Maybe some of you in the know out there can enlighten the rest of us: What makes a codec more or less conducive to DRM?
I would have thought DRM would be implemented outside the media data itself and the codec would only be come relevant once system has decided to give the user access and decrypted the data. Perhaps in some systems once they've doen the lossy part of the signal processing they do the compression and encryption as a combined operation? Or does the whole thing work an entirely different way?
I saw a documentary once that featured this guy, I think. In it I remember he said one of his motivations was telepresence, so that you could use it as a sort of real-life avatar to, say, interact with relatively who live in a distant place. I assume this is motivated by the growing proportion of elderly in Japan. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but the point is that for that purpose it may not be so vital if it can't perform many practical tasks or get up and go well.
You obviously don't remember the this-site-only-work-with-Internet-Explorer years. The iPhone has the largest presence in the mobile web browsing market, and companies will code their sites for the one big player, the rest be damned. Netscape (do you even know there was a browser before Firefox?) had to adapt IE extensions and quirks to stay compatible.
Actually, my first web browser was NCSA Mosaic, youngin'! Anyway, a couple of points:
As you point out, we've been down this path before so people should be more acutely aware that we should avoid it.
If they're using flash on their main site they're now developing two incompatible proprietary-tech-based sites. That's even worse than the bad old days.
It never makes sense to turn away business (unless, say, the cost savings outweigh the lost revenue). My dim understanding was that IE-specific extensions of HTML were the result of their moves on the server side and using their sales relationships with corporations (to make a lot of active X based internal web apps). Furthermore, the web was not nearly as established and profitable then. I would think none of that is at play here.
So the situation looks pretty different to me. If as one commenter suggested, it's the case that flash authoring tools make generating an iPhone app from your flash site trivial, then that explains some of it. If Apple were somehow using its marketshare in some other sector to force this behavior, that would make sense, but it doesn't seem to be true. My only other thought is that maybe people are more likely to use an iPhone app then go through the web (since they went to the trouble to get the app and now have it on their phone), and if it make the barrier to entry higher, then it's something that favors larger businesses.
Interesting, IIRC Apple's original vision was that people would deliver applications to the iPhone via the web (AJAX and so forth), and it was only later that they added the "App Store", so it seems like this was not originally their plan.
I did wonder if this might be the case. I have no knowledge of flash development tools and don't even own an iPhone, so I was unaware. I mean, it still seems crazy for other reasons (if you're a large company for whom these costs are a small percentage of expenditures), but now it makes a little more sense.
I'm not a web developer, but I would think that, say, something like an order page could be accomplished with circa late-90s HTML (radio buttons, text fields, hit the button to submit), so I can't see how that's possible. You would have to keep it relatively simple, though. I agree that you likely couldn't use something with complicated layout and a bunch of dynamic content.
The Seinfeld episode The Opposite was not, in fact, a documentary on sound decision making. My suggestion would be that one's investments should be guided neither by Slashdot nor by blind devotion to Apple.
What I've noticed with the iPhone is that there are a number of sites that won't work well on the iPhone (usually due to flash content), and rather than making a general mobile version (or just a site based on HTML+Javascript) the company will release an iPhone-specific app. Case in point: Chipotle. Their site is entirely flash-based. There is also an app for the iPhone. But if you're on any other device that doesn't have flash you're SOL if you want to order a burrito online to carry out.
In the case of Chipotle, this hardly a tragedy, but it seems totally inane that they coded an iPhone-specific app rather than just, say, making a mobile site that every device would be able to use. It seems like it would be more work and worse for their business. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other website that have an iPhone-specific app that duplicates their site functionality rather than just making a website what it ought to be, a nearly universal interface.
As irrational as this seems (to me, at least), it looks like more popular Apple mobile devices could lead to an even less accessible and standards-compliant web.
In many cases I'd agree with you about evangelical Atheists, as you call them, but in this case the parent to your post was only correcting the incorrect (but widely held) notion that the US founding fathers were all devout Christians in the conventional sense, so it wasn't really evangelism, nor is that poster necessarily even an atheist.
I had the same thought. I was under the same impression as you, that there was not minimal take down period, so that the material could be restored as soon as a counter-notice had been filed. Moreover, I guess I didn't really realize that if the copyright holder then files suit, the material is taken down again. This sounds like a great way to harass or silence someone with a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
Since I asked the question in the GP, I looked up what I believe is the applicable part of the US Code. 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512 states that a service provider will not be liable for taking down material in response to a copyright infringement notice as long as (among other things) the provider
... replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider's system or network.
[Emphasis Mine]
I'm confused...I thought the way the DMCA safe harbor provisions work is that in order to be immune, the provider must take down the content when a DMCA notice is received, but if the customer files a counter-notice then they can put it back up and they're off the hook (at least until they get a court order).
So why are they taking it down in this case?
Slashdot Mirror
The original comment mentioned, "Reuters released pictures from the Israeli assault on the "peace flotilla", they edited out the weapons in the hands of the "peaceful" members of the flotilla and the wounded Israeli soldiers." What you get depends a fair bit on the search terms you choose, and I mostly got blogs I'd never heard of. And as is frequently the case amongst blogs, it seems to be mostly blogs commenting on other blogs. It would be far superior to have the originating piece of journalism, or the best sourced/written one, or one from the most reputable source. Just getting the page rank grab bag of blogs (together with a bunch of pages from highly-ranked news sites that are simply using Reuters photos of the incident, not discussing this controversy) is much worse.
In the end my impression of this particular controversy is that there are just two photos that had the edges cropped off, and while this could be intentional it looks like a pretty decent place to apply Hanlon's Razor. Now perhaps there's is an article out there that makes a much stronger case, and had that poster included that his point might be a lot more convincing.
Okay that's one. I did a quick search for the other story (about the boarding of that ship trying to break the Gaza blockade). The site I looked at just showed two photos, each with a knife showing at the edge of the original that has been cropped to focus on the primary subject of the picture. It looked like something that could have been the product of intensional bias but also could equally well be explained by an ordinary attempt at framing the central subject matter. Usually I apply Hanlon's Razor to such things.
Now, if you know more about it, perhaps you could point to site that has some more thorough, convincing, or extensive discussion. Maybe there were a lot more than 2 examples, which would change the interpretation. That would be one big advantage to citing a specific source in the first place. Since you know something about it, you can point people to the best source of information, and you'll be a lot more convincing that way.
Usually if a person is making an argument the burden is on them to provide proof. That's the way it works. It's also a lot better because it keeps things grounded in fact, rather than ending up with a game of telephone where people go around repeating things they heard. You can see where the latter system leads by reading the many chain emails that go around. Consider that not everything is easy to find on Google. This is, because it was a well publicized Internet-based story that can be summarized in a few search terms that are relatively unusual in combination, but there are plenty of important things that don't fit that mold. Furthermore, there's a big difference between finding a web page mentioning something and finding a good discussion by a reliable source. So, there are a lot of reasons it's worthwhile to go ahead and cite a source if you know about an issue. Slashdot (indeed, the net and the world in general) would be a hell of a lot better if people did it as a matter of course.
Also consider that it makes a lot more sense practically for the person originally making a claim to cite his sources. What did you and the other replies say? Essentially that it's so easy to Google. Well that would seem to be a good argument that it would be really easy to cite a source. And what makes more sense, the one person making the claim doing this work once or the many people reading the claim replicating the same work?
Long story short, I think the GP was dead on for commenting that if you care enough to post about something like this (not necessarily common knowledge and possibly controversial), you ought to cite a source.
You're math is a screwy somewhere, because 20 Mb/s for a month would total about 6.57 TB, but you're correct that with a maximum possible data rate an unlimited deal is logically possible, since it translates to a finite amount of data. What I meant, however, is that an "unlimited" plan offered at any vaguely reasonable consumer price (and any reasonable bandwidth) is always a lie, because it is far, far underpriced. No matter what they tell you, they will not let you max that out over the long term*.
As I've said, option A will never be available at a normal consumer price. Now, I would think it must be available at a sufficiently high price, but unless you really need it for some commercial purpose (or you're rather wealthy) you will almost certainly not be willing to pay what it really costs. Anyone purporting to offer you A for a normal-ish consumer price is almost certainly lying to you*. Option B clearly is undesirable. Option C is potentially okay, because it is honest. If you don't like be metered per-bit, a decent system would be one that would give you a cap and start to throttle you down gradually after you exceed it, but would, say, email you and give you the option to buy more data for that billing period. There are also ISPs that offer things they give names like "bursting" where you get some high data transfer rate for the first T seconds of a transfer and then it throttles down to a lower speed after that for a longer-term transfer. That approach seems pretty practical as well.
I think there is probably some variation or combination of these approaches that could work pretty well. I also think that ideally an ISP/carrier would let you choose among a few models to select the one that you like best. Some people would probably prefer a cap with throttling while others would just want to pay a flat rate. Then the only problem is communicating to the user what he is purchasing exactly. So the best solution might well be a default offering that is easy to explain and works pretty well for the average user and then an option for power users that would fit their needs a bit better (while still being an honest deal where you get what you pay for and pay for what you get).
* It is conceivable that an ISP would be willing to lose money on you as a customer if a) customers like you are extremely rare and those policies are making them lots of money on everyone else or b) they're trying to build up a reputation/monopoly and plan to lose money up front but change the rules on you later to make it back.
I'm guessing part of the problem is that even if one carrier/ISP wanted to be honest and explain the limitations that they would really impose, their competitors won't do it, and as long as the average consumer is unwary they will opt in favor of the better sounding deal. I assume the reason this may be changing with mobile phone carriers is that enough users are starting to bump up against the hidden or unstated limits that the lie of "unlimited" service is no longer tenable.
I can understand why people don't like the elimination for unlimited plans, but I feel like it's for the best. The problem is that an "unlimited" plan is always a lie, always. It's never really unlimited. So-called unlimited plans (on phones, ISPs, etc.) are usually limited by having a secret cap hidden in the fine print, arbitrarily kicking off people who use "too much" in the companies opinion, imposing arbitrary limits on what sorts of connections you can make (i.e., you can only browse the web), etc. When you enter into an unlimited agreement, you should know at the outset that the provider has no intent of holding up their side of the bargain. It's much better to enter into an agreement that is reasonable and has clear explicitly stated rules that you can mutually agree upon.
The question, of course, is will the cell carrier/ISP come up with a different model that serves people better? I admit that cell companies usually choose really unreasonable models, like calling minutes packages that start charging you some exorbitant rate without warning when you go over the cap. For data there are lots of options, though, and I think it could be handled pretty reasonably. Hopefully if the terms are explicitly stated (rather than buried in the fine print or unstated rules), the people will actually have more ability to choose a provider that will deal with them fairly...if such a thing can exist in the mobile phone market.
Don't you have to go through some sort of sign up process to get a card from them (which contains an identifier used to track your time and allows you to buy more time). I know I've looked at using the "free" wifi at Starbucks before and decided it was too much hassle. I typically just go down the street to buy something at another coffee shop that invariably has ordinary free wifi. I mean, even McDonalds and Denny's have free wifi these days.
Not exactly. You may be picturing the big bang as all the matter in the universe compressed into a tight little ball which then exploded out into the empty space around it. That's the usual thing that one would picture, but that's not actually the big bang that GR predicts.
Unlike for the Schrwarzschild metric of a black hole, there's a pretty intuitive way to picture the Friedman-Robertson-Walker (FRW) metric that describes the most basic GR cosmological model. Let's ignore the cosmological constant for a minute. The FRW metric says that at any instant in time the spatial dimensions of the Universe have the geometry of a hypersphere (a sphere with a 3-dimensional surface), a hyperplane, or a 3D hyperboloid, depending on the energy density in the Universe and its rate of expansion. The easiest way to picture things is to imagine for a moment that the energy density of the Universe is a bit greater than it is in reality so that the universe has the geometry of a hypersphere. If you ignore one of the spatial dimensions, you're left with only two dimensions of space, and the spatial extent of universe at any instant is the surface of an ordinary sphere (but just the surface, not the interior). As the universe expands it's the radius of the sphere that increases, so it's just like blowing up a balloon. From the perspective of an ant living on the surface of the balloon (like us, living inside the space) the surface seems to be expanding at every point, there is no center to the expansion (that lies on the surface). If you now run time backwards, this balloon gets smaller and smaller until eventually it's infinitesimally small and reduces to a single point. That instant is the big bang, and all matter is compressed infinitely tightly together, but notice also that all of space has been reduced to a point. It's still not like the Schwarzschild situation, because now there exists no "outside" of the mass. There's only one point in space.
In reality, the energy density of the Universe seems to be a bit lower, and the spatial geometry of the Universe at any instant is approximately flat. The expansion is a bit harder to visualize in this case, although one decent analogy people use is to imagine dough for a raisin bread that is rising. As the dough rises (i.e. space expands), any two raisins (bits of matter) move away from one another. Every point in the dough appears to be the center of expansion. Of course, the dough for our Universe is infinite in extent in the FRW model; it has no edges. In any case, the same thing I said before is true. As you go back toward the big bang any two raisin get closer and closer together, and by the time you reach the instant of the big bang any two raisins, no matter how distant, will be on top of one another. At the instant of the big bang, the Universe has only a single location in space, and there is no point in space that exists outside the big bang.
Of course, it's a little questionable to talk about the instant of the big bang, because at that instant the curvature and mass density reach infinity and the equations of GR become undefined. Strictly speaking, we can only talk sensibly about the instants just before the big bang. In addition, we're rather certain that at about 10^(-43) seconds away from the big bang the equations of GR break down, because the effects of quantum mechanics (which they do not include) should become vitally important. In reality we don't know what actually happened before that time, though there are all sorts of conjectures.
I have heard of models that suggest that a baby universe might form within a black hole, and I admit I don't quite know how that's supposed to work, although roughly speaking I think the idea is that the black hole has a wormhole in the center that leads to a baby universe. I've never seen the math to describe this, though, so I can't say much more about it. I'm not sure what relevance the Schwarzschild radius formula might have to this situation. I only wanted to point out that in the accepted model of cosmology there never an event horizon.
I'm not an expert either, but I have at least taken a course in GR once. What you said seems pretty fair. I don't remember these things well enough to give a more detailed intuitive explanation (if such a thing is possible).
One thing that might be useful to note is that the Schwarzschild metric that describes the geometry of spacetime in a black hole has the feature that inside the event horizon the mathematical role of time (in that coordinate system) and the radial coordinate switch (the time part of the metric gets the same sign as the two other spacial directions, while the radial part gets the sign time used to have). Based on this, it's been said that inside the event horizon, "your alarm clock turns into a ruler, and your ruler turns into an alarm clock." Because the role of space and time switch inside the event horizon, an object within is constrained to move only toward the center of the black hole in just the same way that any object is constrained to move only forward in time outside the event horizon. I'm not sure how much that helps, but it is another way of looking at it.
Another picture that is sometimes useful is the diagram showing the light cone, the set of possible future paths, at different positions near the black hole. What you see is that the light cone gets narrower and tips toward the singularity as you approach the black hole. When you get to the event horizon the light cone has tipped so far that all future paths go into the black hole.
The Schwarzschild solution to General Relativity applies to a stationary, spherically symmetric (uncharged) distribution of mass with asymptotically Minkowski boundary conditions for space-time. So, it basically assumes that you have a ball of stuff surrounded by empty space, and that's the type of situation where the equation for the Schwatzschild radius applies.
If we accept the idea that we can approximate the universe by a uniform distribution of matter on a large enough scale (and this is, perhaps, debatable), the Schwarzschild solution doesn't apply. But you can solve GR for this situation and what you get is the Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric, which doesn't have any sort of event horizon, no matter how dense the matter within. Of course, it does have the interesting feature of expansion (or contraction) which lead to the beginning of modern cosmology.
It is interesting, though, if the numbers for the mass and radius of the observable universe come out that way. Perhaps it has some import, but I can't say what it is offhand (but then I don't study GR). My first guess would be that it has to do with the universe being approximately flat, but I don't think that's actually true (because that should depend on the density, Hubble's constant, and the cosmological constant).
There's some logic to the idea of news companies being able to "copyright" facts they've uncovered. The only problem is that it's a horrible idea whose other consequences would be extremely dangerous.
The basic problem seems to me to be that investigative journalism and thoughtful in-depth analysis (as opposed to superficial opinion journalism) has all sorts of positive externalities. The market forces seem like they should always work against solid journalism, because there's nothing to stop others from just repeating the things you payed to find out. In a time where it took a day to turn out your stories, the desire for current news probably still pushed people to sources that did some quality reporting, but in the era of live-blogging there's little value to being the originator. Actually, the externalities go far beyond other news organizations,and bloggers, since good journalism helps us make sound decisions in our personal and political lives. I really don't get how people think some magical new Internet news business model is going to come along and fix this.
Allowing people some ability to control the dissemination of facts they've uncovered would help monetize good journalism, but it would be a *huge* threat to freedom of speech, probably to journalism itself, and god knows what else. It would also be unconstitutional. Having the government fund news agencies is also extremely dangerous, unless it could somehow be done in such a way that the power of controlling the funding doesn't rest with any small group of people (e.g. politicians), and I don't see how that's possible. (Although, I admit that the BBC seems to work out far better than I ever would have dreamed.) The only models I can really see working are donation-based models as with PBS, NPR, and ProPublica, or distributed volunteer models in the style FOSS projects. I remain skeptical that any of those would ever get enough funding to deliver the volume of reporting that we need to keep tabs on our government, our corporations, and the world around us.
Maybe some of you in the know out there can enlighten the rest of us: What makes a codec more or less conducive to DRM?
I would have thought DRM would be implemented outside the media data itself and the codec would only be come relevant once system has decided to give the user access and decrypted the data. Perhaps in some systems once they've doen the lossy part of the signal processing they do the compression and encryption as a combined operation? Or does the whole thing work an entirely different way?
I never read much into it, but Slashdot covered this story a while back: Facebook Founder Accused of Hacking Into Rivals' Email.
I saw a documentary once that featured this guy, I think. In it I remember he said one of his motivations was telepresence, so that you could use it as a sort of real-life avatar to, say, interact with relatively who live in a distant place. I assume this is motivated by the growing proportion of elderly in Japan. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but the point is that for that purpose it may not be so vital if it can't perform many practical tasks or get up and go well.
Actually, my first web browser was NCSA Mosaic, youngin'! Anyway, a couple of points:
So the situation looks pretty different to me. If as one commenter suggested, it's the case that flash authoring tools make generating an iPhone app from your flash site trivial, then that explains some of it. If Apple were somehow using its marketshare in some other sector to force this behavior, that would make sense, but it doesn't seem to be true. My only other thought is that maybe people are more likely to use an iPhone app then go through the web (since they went to the trouble to get the app and now have it on their phone), and if it make the barrier to entry higher, then it's something that favors larger businesses.
Interesting, IIRC Apple's original vision was that people would deliver applications to the iPhone via the web (AJAX and so forth), and it was only later that they added the "App Store", so it seems like this was not originally their plan.
I did wonder if this might be the case. I have no knowledge of flash development tools and don't even own an iPhone, so I was unaware. I mean, it still seems crazy for other reasons (if you're a large company for whom these costs are a small percentage of expenditures), but now it makes a little more sense.
I'm not a web developer, but I would think that, say, something like an order page could be accomplished with circa late-90s HTML (radio buttons, text fields, hit the button to submit), so I can't see how that's possible. You would have to keep it relatively simple, though. I agree that you likely couldn't use something with complicated layout and a bunch of dynamic content.
The Seinfeld episode The Opposite was not, in fact, a documentary on sound decision making. My suggestion would be that one's investments should be guided neither by Slashdot nor by blind devotion to Apple.
What I've noticed with the iPhone is that there are a number of sites that won't work well on the iPhone (usually due to flash content), and rather than making a general mobile version (or just a site based on HTML+Javascript) the company will release an iPhone-specific app. Case in point: Chipotle. Their site is entirely flash-based. There is also an app for the iPhone. But if you're on any other device that doesn't have flash you're SOL if you want to order a burrito online to carry out.
In the case of Chipotle, this hardly a tragedy, but it seems totally inane that they coded an iPhone-specific app rather than just, say, making a mobile site that every device would be able to use. It seems like it would be more work and worse for their business. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other website that have an iPhone-specific app that duplicates their site functionality rather than just making a website what it ought to be, a nearly universal interface.
As irrational as this seems (to me, at least), it looks like more popular Apple mobile devices could lead to an even less accessible and standards-compliant web.
In the episode there were four lights, but the interrogator claimed there were five. I figured claiming there were three is just as good. :-)
There are four lights!
In many cases I'd agree with you about evangelical Atheists, as you call them, but in this case the parent to your post was only correcting the incorrect (but widely held) notion that the US founding fathers were all devout Christians in the conventional sense, so it wasn't really evangelism, nor is that poster necessarily even an atheist.
I had the same thought. I was under the same impression as you, that there was not minimal take down period, so that the material could be restored as soon as a counter-notice had been filed. Moreover, I guess I didn't really realize that if the copyright holder then files suit, the material is taken down again. This sounds like a great way to harass or silence someone with a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
Since I asked the question in the GP, I looked up what I believe is the applicable part of the US Code. 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512 states that a service provider will not be liable for taking down material in response to a copyright infringement notice as long as (among other things) the provider
So now we know.
I'm confused...I thought the way the DMCA safe harbor provisions work is that in order to be immune, the provider must take down the content when a DMCA notice is received, but if the customer files a counter-notice then they can put it back up and they're off the hook (at least until they get a court order). So why are they taking it down in this case?