It could be due to huge numbers of people "stealing" his wireless. No, really--those cheapie consumer broadband routers don't fare well with more than a handful of simultaneous users. I'll bet a lot of people are turning on their laptops and finding that wonderful little connected icon in the bottom right and not thinking twice. Even with in-room connections, sometimes it's hard to get your ass off that bed:)
There you go again. This may be hard to swallow, but "the system" isn't going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, if you, like me, are a typical/. reader (20 to 30-year-old, male, American), "the system" is liable to up and draft your ass long before it implodes. Tell yourself your silly mantras will help out when you're being shipped home in a box. Go ahead.
There is a time and a place for idealism, and one for pragmatism. People who cannot distinguish between the latter and the former are naive at best, and in the worst case, dangerous. Which are you?
This is another fine example of how Ralph Nader and his supports live in a magical alternate universe of political "what ifs", hypotheticals and meaningless caveats. I voted for Nader in 2000 and here is what I have to say to you: Your swing state idea is every bit as silly and dangerous as Nader continuing to assert that there is "no difference" between the two mainstream parties in this election. Like many things on the left, it's a great idea in theory that breaks down horribly in practice. "If we all lived in the same state then we'd be a swing state and Kerry would have to court us and blah blah blah..." well guess what, ya don't. There is no Nader swing state, never will be, and if you live in an actual swing state, are left of center, and plan to vote for Nader... it's not that you should be shot, but definitely some pain needs to be inflicted. What is wrong with you? Can you really say that the outcome of the 2000 election was worth (y)our symbolic votes of protest? That's not even worth answering. With two weeks before the election, it's time you idiots stopped blathering on about this fantasy world you have constructed and realize the damage you're doing.
Is anyone else completely unenthused at the "opportunity" to watch MPEG4 video or view photos on a 3.something inch VGA screen? Everywhere I look, I see that this is the so-called natural evolution of the portable MP3 player. Really? I like (okay, love/worship) my iPod because it's like this soundtrack to my life. I take it everywhere, never have to worry about it, and I can do other things while listening to it. I would have to actually pay attention to a video player, and the video would be three sucky inches big. And with that fancy-dancy color screen killing my battery life? Count me out. Instead of video capability, how about engineer me up some WiFi with all that R&D $$? Beaming the contents of my iPod to those around me--mmm. Watching a postage stamp-sized feature film? Blech.
Isnt this pretty obvious? Java and Python are two "machines" that allow me to forget about areas of programming that people had turned into veritable art forms just a decade ago, things like memory management and code portability. People who are still doing that kind of work are the technological equivalent of blacksmiths--still needed for some niche roles (kernel hacking, scientific computing), but by and large a relic. The same may be said for the ever-increasing (quality and quantity) assortment of code libraries available today, and for code reuse in general.
I don't think this is a bad thing; I don't agree with the chicken little tone of this story. If we have a lot of blacksmiths--e.g. high skilled, labor-intensive jobs--dominating any given sector, they should be disappearing at a healthy clip. The US (or any country, for that matter) is left better off as a result. That's just plain and simple Econ. 101: technological advancement drives long term growth and prosperity. Programmers (esp. on Slashdot) are quick to lament the de-commoditization of their profession, because it means lower wages and more competition than that to which they became accustomed in the nineties. But there's no denying that in an overall, macro sense, having a nation full of Java programmers will result in much greater overall well-being than one of 10,000 C haxors and 250 million farmers.
Bzzt! Wro-ong! I defy you to tell the the population of the county for any individual county in the United States. You, sir, have no clue what the capital-T True population of any county as, and neither does anyone else short of the Lord. Oh, you will lamely answer by foisting up the latest decennial census results for that county. To which I utterly dominate your argument by noting:
The census undercounts minorities, the very same people who have been the target of extensive voter registration efforts in states like, ta-da!, Ohio. It is well-documented that the 2000 census did not use statistical correction procedures to control for undercounted low-income persons and persons of color. Q: Could that result in a discrepancy of several thousand? A: Easily.
Even if said procedures were employed, is the census a full count? Nope. And several thousand in a large county in Ohio is well within the margin of error. Q: Could that result in a discrepancy of several thousand? A: Easily.
Even if the census were perfect, a lot of people have died or moved since 2000. Duh. Not even worth making the point. Think before you post, boy. Q: Could that result in a discrepancy of several thousand? A: Easily.
I have come to conclude that, well, you're just freakin' wrong. Better luck next time, try again, and all that.
You have good intuition to have picked up on. All the signs are there, yet very few have noticed the trend--except one If the thought of the Republican party imploding makes you wet your pants with glee, and you really want to brighten your day, I commend this article to you.
Now it makes you wonder why Google registered gbrowser.com.
People: the cost of registering a domain name is $8 a year. If there is the slightest, faintest, remotely conceivable chance that Google might someday have some use for that name, it's stupid not to snap it up. Especially now that they have $20 zillion ka-gillion dollars in the bank.
I always get a kick out of those rumor sites who try to guess a whole new product line based on some feeler that Apple put on Monster, or a domain name by Google. It's kind of a truism in economics that true preferences aren't revealed unless the actors have some sort of financial/emotional stake in the matter. And $8 to a publicly-traded company does not a stake make.
Why should corporations and universities turn down candidates who are smarter, harder working, and more qualified in favor of you, all based on something your parents did?
You seem to have assimilated the American sense of self-entitlement quite well, indeed.
I disagree that Google will have to seriously misbehave to lose market share. I think Google could go chugging right along its merry way, with "no evil" and a small army of brilliant engineers and all that, and still wake up one day and find itself at pr near the bottom of the slagheap. Problem A is that people have no brand loyalty on the web, whatsoever. The cost of my switching from Google to AskJeeves, or Amazon to BN, is nil. How many of us went from using AltaVista to Google and never once looked back? Problem B is that their whole business is built around one or two neat little conceits: namely, PageRank and a highly streamlined UI. The latter is easy to rip off (already has been) and the former leads to... Problem C: it's difficult at the top. Everyone optimizes for PageRank, meaning the quality of Google's results is constantly degraded by commercial websites trying to game the system. The moment someone comes up with something as smart and new as PageRank was in 1996, all bets are off. This, BTW, is I think why Google mounts such a ferocious and self-consciously elite recruiting effort. The realize what a fragile equilibrium their dominance is based on, and they want to hire that someone before (s)he realizes they're sitting on a goldmine.
What makes this doubly funny is that Churchill was thumbing his nose at those grammatical prigs such as yourself who would sacrifice clarity for slavish adherence to grammatical strictures.
You may have passed English comp, but you still got your ass kicked on the playground.
You sound a lot like the person I was when I entered college: excited, naive and more than a little neurotic. (In fact I'm pretty sure I submitted an ask/. along the same lines!) My best advice to you would be to treat these next 4-6 years as a ride and just see where it takes you. Both times I went off to college (I count studying abroad as basically starting college over again) I arrived with some sort of "plan" and completely jettisoned it within about two months. Pardon my language, but there's just no predicting what the fuck is going to happen to you in the near future. Not quite the same as high school, huh? It's simultaneously the best and scariest part of college. Scratch that--the best is that your parents pay for everything, but you don't have to live at home:) If my 5-years-ago had seen the person I am today, I(t) would have, like, died. The same thing will probably happen to you. So I say, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
This is something I've been wondering ever since I fired up my Gmail account. The "magical" Gmail search function is really just a plain fulltext search. The entirety of Google's distiction and inventiveness is centered around a single conceit, PageRank. It's a good algorithm and it works well, but it's usefulness may wear thin now that Google is considered the One Search Engine and there is an entire cottage industry devoted to gaming it. And since PageRank doesn't map particularly well to either email or filesystem structures, I'm hard-pressed to see why a Google-like is the distinction to which everyone aspires. I guess because it made their owners millionaires:)
[T]he survey claims, among other hard-to-believe assertions, that 'about one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie.'
That's really not that hard to believe, considering they're talking about an average. The average human being is (roughly) 1/2 male and 1/2 female. All it takes for this "hard-to-believe assertion" to be true is for one user in a hundred to have downloaded 400 movies, something which I wholeheartedly believe from firsthand experience.
You're forgetting the great equalizer: someone will invent a fast way to factor large primes, in which case the better part of two decades of crypto research gets tossed out the window. A highly uplifting thought that should make us all sleep better.
P.S. Who is to say this hasn't happened? Certainly not the NSA.
$100 billion is a non-negligable amount of money, not an "all it took" sum. Much like Newtonian physics breaks down when you start talking about planets and galaxies, with an undertaking this massive and expensive, simple economics can't be relied upon to ensure the socially desirable outcome is reached--even though said outcome would be probably the most profitable invention in the history of mankind. Getting those type of resources behind a single endeavour necessarily entails government intervention, if not for funding then at least for coordination. And therein lies the problem, a classic dilemma of political economy: our government is run by or (in prior administrations) at least beholden to people who have a very strong, vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Companies like Ford, Halliburton and Shell are making money hand-over-first in the oil economy, so why desire the politicians they've bought to research something new and unknown? Etc. etc. this stuff is obvious.
Consider another example: we spend (coincidentally) about $100 billion a year (http://www.healingdaily.com/conditions/politics-o f-cancer.htm) treating cancer. Yet we spend only a fraction of the (like 2%) on research each year. Why is that? It seems like a no-brainer on paper: even if one had to spend $500 billion (unlikely), the profits anyone who held that patent would reap would be much, much greater indeed. Yet no one comes close to spending that much, and cancer research is almost ignored by the private sector and grossly underfunded by the public. What is that?
This is how you produce hydrogen. Notice the part about "electricity." That's right, in order to produce hydrogen you need the very same energy that we were trying to save in the first place. Your hydrogen-powered Prius may run as pure and clean as fresh snow, but if a coal-fired generator is supplying the electricity needed to electrolyze water and make hydrogen, then it's all for naught.
So let's stop beating around the bush: the only technology we have today that does not produce carbon and comes anywhere close to supplying Terra's present-day energy needs is good old nuclear. Or, nucular in the parlance of our current administration. Wind, water and/or solar simply don't. I think we need to bite the bullet, recognize this fact, and start building. The nuclear stigma is very unfortunate given the stakes of the global warming game we're playing. The fact is it can be done cheaply and safely, and few bad eggs seem to have spoiled the bunch... unless you have complete idiots at the helm, living in the proximity of a modern, well-managed nuclear power plant is probably a lot, lot safer than strapping into a rickety box of sheet metal and hurtling yourself down the freeway to work every morning in the presence of countless other drivers about whose skills and preoccupations you know nothing.
The depressing sticking point is that with a $100 billion, Manhattan-style research project we could probably get something like fusion power off the ground, thus solving our energy and pollution woes for basically forever.
By the way, that's about the same amount of money as we will be spending in Iraq in the coming years to ensure our oil supply and with it our ability to pump astronomical quantities of carbon into the air for the foreseeable future. Gallingly ironic.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone think I would have a realistic shot if I went to the nearest Canadian embassy and applied for political asylum?
No, really.
It could be due to huge numbers of people "stealing" his wireless. No, really--those cheapie consumer broadband routers don't fare well with more than a handful of simultaneous users. I'll bet a lot of people are turning on their laptops and finding that wonderful little connected icon in the bottom right and not thinking twice. Even with in-room connections, sometimes it's hard to get your ass off that bed :)
There you go again. This may be hard to swallow, but "the system" isn't going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, if you, like me, are a typical /. reader (20 to 30-year-old, male, American), "the system" is liable to up and draft your ass long before it implodes. Tell yourself your silly mantras will help out when you're being shipped home in a box. Go ahead.
There is a time and a place for idealism, and one for pragmatism. People who cannot distinguish between the latter and the former are naive at best, and in the worst case, dangerous. Which are you?
This is another fine example of how Ralph Nader and his supports live in a magical alternate universe of political "what ifs", hypotheticals and meaningless caveats. I voted for Nader in 2000 and here is what I have to say to you: Your swing state idea is every bit as silly and dangerous as Nader continuing to assert that there is "no difference" between the two mainstream parties in this election. Like many things on the left, it's a great idea in theory that breaks down horribly in practice. "If we all lived in the same state then we'd be a swing state and Kerry would have to court us and blah blah blah..." well guess what, ya don't. There is no Nader swing state, never will be, and if you live in an actual swing state, are left of center, and plan to vote for Nader... it's not that you should be shot, but definitely some pain needs to be inflicted. What is wrong with you? Can you really say that the outcome of the 2000 election was worth (y)our symbolic votes of protest? That's not even worth answering. With two weeks before the election, it's time you idiots stopped blathering on about this fantasy world you have constructed and realize the damage you're doing.
Is anyone else completely unenthused at the "opportunity" to watch MPEG4 video or view photos on a 3.something inch VGA screen? Everywhere I look, I see that this is the so-called natural evolution of the portable MP3 player. Really? I like (okay, love/worship) my iPod because it's like this soundtrack to my life. I take it everywhere, never have to worry about it, and I can do other things while listening to it. I would have to actually pay attention to a video player, and the video would be three sucky inches big. And with that fancy-dancy color screen killing my battery life? Count me out. Instead of video capability, how about engineer me up some WiFi with all that R&D $$? Beaming the contents of my iPod to those around me--mmm. Watching a postage stamp-sized feature film? Blech.
Isnt this pretty obvious? Java and Python are two "machines" that allow me to forget about areas of programming that people had turned into veritable art forms just a decade ago, things like memory management and code portability. People who are still doing that kind of work are the technological equivalent of blacksmiths--still needed for some niche roles (kernel hacking, scientific computing), but by and large a relic. The same may be said for the ever-increasing (quality and quantity) assortment of code libraries available today, and for code reuse in general.
I don't think this is a bad thing; I don't agree with the chicken little tone of this story. If we have a lot of blacksmiths--e.g. high skilled, labor-intensive jobs--dominating any given sector, they should be disappearing at a healthy clip. The US (or any country, for that matter) is left better off as a result. That's just plain and simple Econ. 101: technological advancement drives long term growth and prosperity. Programmers (esp. on Slashdot) are quick to lament the de-commoditization of their profession, because it means lower wages and more competition than that to which they became accustomed in the nineties. But there's no denying that in an overall, macro sense, having a nation full of Java programmers will result in much greater overall well-being than one of 10,000 C haxors and 250 million farmers.
- The census undercounts minorities, the very same people who have been the target of extensive voter registration efforts in states like, ta-da!, Ohio. It is well-documented that the 2000 census did not use statistical correction procedures to control for undercounted low-income persons and persons of color. Q: Could that result in a discrepancy of several thousand? A: Easily.
- Even if said procedures were employed, is the census a full count? Nope. And several thousand in a large county in Ohio is well within the margin of error. Q: Could that result in a discrepancy of several thousand? A: Easily.
- Even if the census were perfect, a lot of people have died or moved since 2000. Duh. Not even worth making the point. Think before you post, boy. Q: Could that result in a discrepancy of several thousand? A: Easily.
I have come to conclude that, well, you're just freakin' wrong. Better luck next time, try again, and all that.A cursory glance at this story, and I sooo thought someone had blown the lid of the whole Bush wears a wire thing. But it was not to be :)
You have good intuition to have picked up on. All the signs are there, yet very few have noticed the trend--except one If the thought of the Republican party imploding makes you wet your pants with glee, and you really want to brighten your day, I commend this article to you.
Now it makes you wonder why Google registered gbrowser.com.
People: the cost of registering a domain name is $8 a year . If there is the slightest, faintest, remotely conceivable chance that Google might someday have some use for that name, it's stupid not to snap it up. Especially now that they have $20 zillion ka-gillion dollars in the bank.
I always get a kick out of those rumor sites who try to guess a whole new product line based on some feeler that Apple put on Monster, or a domain name by Google. It's kind of a truism in economics that true preferences aren't revealed unless the actors have some sort of financial/emotional stake in the matter. And $8 to a publicly-traded company does not a stake make.
Bush is an idiot. Which is worse?
Sincerely,
The other 51%.
I would love to see each of them answer...:
What is your biggest weakness. What is your opponent's biggest strength?
Why should corporations and universities turn down candidates who are smarter, harder working, and more qualified in favor of you, all based on something your parents did?
You seem to have assimilated the American sense of self-entitlement quite well, indeed.
All I want to know, does it come with an iPod hookup
At that price, it better come with a freaking iPod.
I disagree that Google will have to seriously misbehave to lose market share. I think Google could go chugging right along its merry way, with "no evil" and a small army of brilliant engineers and all that, and still wake up one day and find itself at pr near the bottom of the slagheap. Problem A is that people have no brand loyalty on the web, whatsoever. The cost of my switching from Google to AskJeeves, or Amazon to BN, is nil. How many of us went from using AltaVista to Google and never once looked back? Problem B is that their whole business is built around one or two neat little conceits: namely, PageRank and a highly streamlined UI. The latter is easy to rip off (already has been) and the former leads to... Problem C: it's difficult at the top. Everyone optimizes for PageRank, meaning the quality of Google's results is constantly degraded by commercial websites trying to game the system. The moment someone comes up with something as smart and new as PageRank was in 1996, all bets are off. This, BTW, is I think why Google mounts such a ferocious and self-consciously elite recruiting effort. The realize what a fragile equilibrium their dominance is based on, and they want to hire that someone before (s)he realizes they're sitting on a goldmine.
Actually, it's "will":
What makes this doubly funny is that Churchill was thumbing his nose at those grammatical prigs such as yourself who would sacrifice clarity for slavish adherence to grammatical strictures.You may have passed English comp, but you still got your ass kicked on the playground.
You sound a lot like the person I was when I entered college: excited, naive and more than a little neurotic. (In fact I'm pretty sure I submitted an ask /. along the same lines!) My best advice to you would be to treat these next 4-6 years as a ride and just see where it takes you. Both times I went off to college (I count studying abroad as basically starting college over again) I arrived with some sort of "plan" and completely jettisoned it within about two months. Pardon my language, but there's just no predicting what the fuck is going to happen to you in the near future. Not quite the same as high school, huh? It's simultaneously the best and scariest part of college. Scratch that--the best is that your parents pay for everything, but you don't have to live at home :) If my 5-years-ago had seen the person I am today, I(t) would have, like, died. The same thing will probably happen to you. So I say, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
This is something I've been wondering ever since I fired up my Gmail account. The "magical" Gmail search function is really just a plain fulltext search. The entirety of Google's distiction and inventiveness is centered around a single conceit, PageRank. It's a good algorithm and it works well, but it's usefulness may wear thin now that Google is considered the One Search Engine and there is an entire cottage industry devoted to gaming it. And since PageRank doesn't map particularly well to either email or filesystem structures, I'm hard-pressed to see why a Google-like is the distinction to which everyone aspires. I guess because it made their owners millionaires :)
And I'll bet you that asshole Ashcroft said, "one to one hundred... jiggabytes."
Fucker.
[T]he survey claims, among other hard-to-believe assertions, that 'about one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie.'
That's really not that hard to believe, considering they're talking about an average. The average human being is (roughly) 1/2 male and 1/2 female. All it takes for this "hard-to-believe assertion" to be true is for one user in a hundred to have downloaded 400 movies, something which I wholeheartedly believe from firsthand experience.
I guess the only thing to do is to hire more programmers from other countries!
Haha. Touche, no?
You're forgetting the great equalizer: someone will invent a fast way to factor large primes, in which case the better part of two decades of crypto research gets tossed out the window. A highly uplifting thought that should make us all sleep better.
P.S. Who is to say this hasn't happened? Certainly not the NSA.
And here I thought you had to pay to run an ad on Slashdot...
$100 billion is a non-negligable amount of money, not an "all it took" sum. Much like Newtonian physics breaks down when you start talking about planets and galaxies, with an undertaking this massive and expensive, simple economics can't be relied upon to ensure the socially desirable outcome is reached--even though said outcome would be probably the most profitable invention in the history of mankind. Getting those type of resources behind a single endeavour necessarily entails government intervention, if not for funding then at least for coordination. And therein lies the problem, a classic dilemma of political economy: our government is run by or (in prior administrations) at least beholden to people who have a very strong, vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Companies like Ford, Halliburton and Shell are making money hand-over-first in the oil economy, so why desire the politicians they've bought to research something new and unknown? Etc. etc. this stuff is obvious.
o f-cancer.htm) treating cancer. Yet we spend only a fraction of the (like 2%) on research each year. Why is that? It seems like a no-brainer on paper: even if one had to spend $500 billion (unlikely), the profits anyone who held that patent would reap would be much, much greater indeed. Yet no one comes close to spending that much, and cancer research is almost ignored by the private sector and grossly underfunded by the public. What is that?
Consider another example: we spend (coincidentally) about $100 billion a year (http://www.healingdaily.com/conditions/politics-
This is how you produce hydrogen. Notice the part about "electricity." That's right, in order to produce hydrogen you need the very same energy that we were trying to save in the first place. Your hydrogen-powered Prius may run as pure and clean as fresh snow, but if a coal-fired generator is supplying the electricity needed to electrolyze water and make hydrogen, then it's all for naught.
So let's stop beating around the bush: the only technology we have today that does not produce carbon and comes anywhere close to supplying Terra's present-day energy needs is good old nuclear. Or, nucular in the parlance of our current administration. Wind, water and/or solar simply don't. I think we need to bite the bullet, recognize this fact, and start building. The nuclear stigma is very unfortunate given the stakes of the global warming game we're playing. The fact is it can be done cheaply and safely, and few bad eggs seem to have spoiled the bunch... unless you have complete idiots at the helm, living in the proximity of a modern, well-managed nuclear power plant is probably a lot, lot safer than strapping into a rickety box of sheet metal and hurtling yourself down the freeway to work every morning in the presence of countless other drivers about whose skills and preoccupations you know nothing.
The depressing sticking point is that with a $100 billion, Manhattan-style research project we could probably get something like fusion power off the ground, thus solving our energy and pollution woes for basically forever.
By the way, that's about the same amount of money as we will be spending in Iraq in the coming years to ensure our oil supply and with it our ability to pump astronomical quantities of carbon into the air for the foreseeable future. Gallingly ironic.