Wow. We ought to do an Ask Slashdot on this, I'm sure we could get some good feedback. This is a question that occupies a great amount of brainspace for me. I think it all depends on how far "off the grid" you want to go.
I think more than anything, the most important thing to do is to escape the strangulation of American popular culture. I make a distinction between "culture" and "popular culture", because American culture is incredibly rich and rewarding (Aaron Copland, George Gerswhin, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser degree, Lovecraft, King, on and on). Notice the thread runnning here? No TV.
Now don't get me wrong here, there is some absolutely terrific TV on, both in the high drama sense (ER) and in the pulp / adventure sense (24). The problem is, IMHO, that tv is a default action; it is an open port that Americans constantly listen on. Sit down in front of the tv, flip it on, flip through the channels. Disconnect from your family, your friends, your neighbors, your church, your community.
I have some other opinions regarding urban-ness and personal space, but I've known enough people who seem perfectly happy and fulfilled living in the city to realize that it's more likely my own cultural biases that influence my views. Which doesn't mean that they're wrong, only non-universal.
I think the challenge for post-20th century man is to create the paradox of an individual culture; something unique to us and yet not solely of us (because we are not enough by ourselves to achieve the connectedness that fulfillment requires). At the same time, we can't utterly connect because our popular culture is corrupting in every sense, and sometimes explicitly designed to be.
So where do we disagree? Everything you said is either in line with what I said, or irrelevant to it. I totally agree that SUV's have been raised up as a rural / masculinity culture token. And as for the suburbs, again: it bothers you because its a cultural token violation (rurality vs. suburbs).
Funny you should say it, but I have a VW, too. It's a 1971 Super Beetle. About as far apart from an SUV as you get, aside from a mini, I guess.
Mom and Dad and the 2.7 kids go out to buy a car. 1.7 of those kids are still in carseats, so the sedan goes out the window. Is it possible? Yes, but not desirable. So we're looking at something that has more space.
They all walk past the minivans because of the enormous stigma built up against them by young men, reluctant to be labeled as married with children. Ditto x 10 station wagons. So we're looking at Explorers, Envoys, etc.
A quick look at shows that the fuel economies of a 2002 Ford Winstar are roughly the same as an Explorer (17/23 vs. 17/21) (there may be some wide divergence between other models, this is Slashdot quality research). Even the Expedition is only a few mpg lower. So why are minivans spared the ire?
I think really what all this is about is culture. There are two cultures in America, the urban and the rural. Urban culturites find themselves immeasurably superior to the rurals. This is somehow hard coded into the human genome, because you can find it all the way back to Ancient Greece.
Sure, a couple of arguments get pitched up about fuel efficiency, traffic, parking spaces, but when you feel that bitterness, that resentment about seeing an SUV, what you're really resenting is the declared culture of the driver.
It works both ways by the way. I'm a rural, and it makes me sick to see a Hummer decked out with leather interior. It's as much a cultural violation to me.
Anyway, this whole penis envy thing comes from the culture clash. You see similar attitudes towards other rural tokens such as guns, pickup trucks, etc. I think it comes from a feeling that rurals are closer to a level of basic survival ~ basic masculinity, and a resentment of that. So when you see a rural token, AND see that token as a false one, you make this whole pocket Freudian association.
Don't own an SUV: can't afford one. I would own a Hummvee if I could. Only the H1, though; the H2s look like school buses to me.
Don't sweat the deficit too much. The absolute numbers mean nothing. If I told you that ten years ago, I held debt of $10,000, and now I hold a debt of $30,000, am I better off? Well, ten years ago, I made a fifth of what I make now, so I'm actually better off in terms of debt. Here are the actual numbers.
This is not to say that there's nothing to worry about; for all the conservative fulmination of President Bush, domestically he's turned out to be as free-spending as Clinton or any other Democrat. Apparently, "the era of Big Government is over" is over.
Having said that, if NASA's budget cut it would have to be politics over science (super-collider, anyone?). It constitutes such a small percentage of the federal budget that cutting it would achieve nothing. I'm a libertarian, but when it comes to the space program, I've always said that if my tax dollars are going to be forcibly extracted from me, at least a few of them are going towards advancing man into space.
There was a great example of this on the Beeb show "Coupling". In one scene, the main character stumbles home, drunk, and the scene splits and starts runnning clocks at the bottom of the screen an hour apart. His girlfriend enters the same scene an hour later in the adjacent frame.
She notices things out of place (but are in place in his time frame), and picks them up. One by one, he stumbles about, knocks over a vase, etc., creating the scene in the adjacent frame. At last, he calls his own answering machine on a mobile and leaves a message, which she listens to simultaneously. Very cool stuff.
This "oil companies cover up new energy source" is a memetic outgrowth of a persecution complex. When you really think about it, it underestimates the greed of power companies.
Look at it this way: no matter how power is generated, energy companies own massive infrastructure in storing, transporting and producing (in the sense of producing it after it has been stored in one fashion or another). Like or not, if somebody suddenly discovers cold fusion tomorrow, they're still going to be talking to the people with a century of experience and investment in producing and generating power.
If you really wanted to bleed some Hollywood crapfest from that alternative energy turnip, you could do a story about the companies killing to get the secret, kind of like what was going on in Pi.
The reality is that there are all kinds of things that could have been done, from shipping up O2 / water / food on ESA rockets to outright rescue via Soyuz (we're not the only space power in the world, remember?)
I will say, however, I can't imagine that her true motivation was as it was laid out here. That would make her an utter monster.
You're correct, but for the wrong reason. This effect happens over and over again.
You might ask yourself why a thousand year old European cottage still stands. Is it because, 100 years ago, the builder said, "I'll build this house so well, it will last for a thousand years"? Actually, the builder said, "I have to make this thing stand for fifty years. The only way I can make it stand for fifty years is to make it as strong as possible."
In the intervening time, knowledge is gained about structural and functional tolerance, and that allows the object to be constructed more cheaply (you're cutting out economically redundant integrity).
So, yes, it's true that "things are built the way that they used to be", but what that allows is for much more of them to built and far more cheaply.
This idea of the Earth revolving around the sun is fable/fiction/pure speculation.
This idea of matter bending space is fable/fiction/pure speculation.
This idea of...well you get the point.
I don't understand != it doesn't exist.
Also, BTW: logical != scientific. And as far as "Nothing suggests"...talk to Roger Penrose. You can say that you don't think there's nothing the human brain can do that computers can't, but it's not accurate to say that there's no thinking/evidence at all to that effect.
Couldn't possibly be all alpha numeric combinations. Let me sharpen my pencil here...
92 possible password characters (ASCII 32 - 124), max length for a password under NT is 14 characters. That works out to 3 octillion (10^27) combinations. According to Big Numbers, that's about three times the length of the universe in inches. No octabyte hard drives yet.
It's actually far worse than that, since the length of the password is variable.
I have seen some tools match parts of hashes, tho. That might be of some use.
Is that adequate passwords make this hack impossible. It relies on a "lookup table" (read, pregenerated dictionary attack results). If your password ain't in it, it ain't happening. Look, chances are, you speak at least few phrases of a foreign language. Dictionary attacks generally use English words; choose a couple of foreign words and numbers for your password, and all this crap goes away.
If you don't choose a decent password, then, well, your password will take five minutes to crack rather than 13.6 seconds. Feel better?
I agree. I purchased a pretty unbelievable program not too long ago called Reason, which essentially emulates everything in software for a few hundred bucks that I used to do with incredibly expensive electronic keyboards 20 years ago.
You're doubly write about the judges issue...Carl Sagan once said "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." As our legal issues become increasingly technically complex, our judges necessarily become increasingly incompetent.
I'll surprise you by agreeing with you. I think that the author was trying to extend some vague ideas he had about copyright behavior to patent law with blanket statements regarding "innovation". That's what I was addressing. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
Music has never been expensive to write. Produce perhaps, but agreed, coffee enema, etc. The best new music seems to be coming from a kind of coffee-house, single acoustic guitar vibe...which is obviously rock bottom cheap to produce.
Also interesting is that, as the price of CDs increase, shipments increase.
Did he adjust for inflation? I assume not. I don't know whether that would affect the outcome because he didn't show that data, only data derived from that data.
RIAA...has a nasty tendency to only release data which they can put a proper spin on...
The author knows this...how? Or the author has a strong gut feeling this way? Tendency?
If anyone disputes my figures, please give me a better set.
Uh, sorry, that's not the way science works. You're the claimant.
Constitution proscribes
Picking nits here, but proscribe means to forbid. Everybody misuses this word.
However, given that hundreds of thousands of works are produced each year, one must assume that the sheer numbers involved evens out the effects of differing quality. So the premise remains valid.
Here is the fatal flaw of it all: with less copyright protection, we would tend to less a lesser diminution of lower-expense copyrights (music in particular). If works are being produced irrespective of a minimal investment, copyright protection won't generally affect them, and indeed copyright may be an afterthought. So the quality of the patents is an overwhelmingly important question; if protection changes the character of the innovation, then the actual amount of it is irrelevant.
What it will affect is the willingness of creators to spend money to develop an article, since reduced copyright protection diminishes their ability to recapture those funds later. Perhaps a more pertinent question would be the correlation between R&D funds and copyright protection. That would seem to be an even more hellish proposition in getting the data.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. We ought to do an Ask Slashdot on this, I'm sure we could get some good feedback. This is a question that occupies a great amount of brainspace for me. I think it all depends on how far "off the grid" you want to go.
I think more than anything, the most important thing to do is to escape the strangulation of American popular culture. I make a distinction between "culture" and "popular culture", because American culture is incredibly rich and rewarding (Aaron Copland, George Gerswhin, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser degree, Lovecraft, King, on and on). Notice the thread runnning here? No TV.
Now don't get me wrong here, there is some absolutely terrific TV on, both in the high drama sense (ER) and in the pulp / adventure sense (24). The problem is, IMHO, that tv is a default action; it is an open port that Americans constantly listen on. Sit down in front of the tv, flip it on, flip through the channels. Disconnect from your family, your friends, your neighbors, your church, your community.
I have some other opinions regarding urban-ness and personal space, but I've known enough people who seem perfectly happy and fulfilled living in the city to realize that it's more likely my own cultural biases that influence my views. Which doesn't mean that they're wrong, only non-universal.
I think the challenge for post-20th century man is to create the paradox of an individual culture; something unique to us and yet not solely of us (because we are not enough by ourselves to achieve the connectedness that fulfillment requires). At the same time, we can't utterly connect because our popular culture is corrupting in every sense, and sometimes explicitly designed to be.
You can't possibly get the top percentile. They're simply not in the same geographic area. They're diffused out across the world.
I say, who the hell is Anthony Hamilton?
So where do we disagree? Everything you said is either in line with what I said, or irrelevant to it. I totally agree that SUV's have been raised up as a rural / masculinity culture token. And as for the suburbs, again: it bothers you because its a cultural token violation (rurality vs. suburbs).
Funny you should say it, but I have a VW, too. It's a 1971 Super Beetle. About as far apart from an SUV as you get, aside from a mini, I guess.
Well, let's examine this whole "SUV - penis envy" meme rationally.
Mom and Dad and the 2.7 kids go out to buy a car. 1.7 of those kids are still in carseats, so the sedan goes out the window. Is it possible? Yes, but not desirable. So we're looking at something that has more space.
They all walk past the minivans because of the enormous stigma built up against them by young men, reluctant to be labeled as married with children. Ditto x 10 station wagons. So we're looking at Explorers, Envoys, etc.
A quick look at shows that the fuel economies of a 2002 Ford Winstar are roughly the same as an Explorer (17/23 vs. 17/21) (there may be some wide divergence between other models, this is Slashdot quality research). Even the Expedition is only a few mpg lower. So why are minivans spared the ire?
I think really what all this is about is culture. There are two cultures in America, the urban and the rural. Urban culturites find themselves immeasurably superior to the rurals. This is somehow hard coded into the human genome, because you can find it all the way back to Ancient Greece.
Sure, a couple of arguments get pitched up about fuel efficiency, traffic, parking spaces, but when you feel that bitterness, that resentment about seeing an SUV, what you're really resenting is the declared culture of the driver.
It works both ways by the way. I'm a rural, and it makes me sick to see a Hummer decked out with leather interior. It's as much a cultural violation to me.
Anyway, this whole penis envy thing comes from the culture clash. You see similar attitudes towards other rural tokens such as guns, pickup trucks, etc. I think it comes from a feeling that rurals are closer to a level of basic survival ~ basic masculinity, and a resentment of that. So when you see a rural token, AND see that token as a false one, you make this whole pocket Freudian association.
Don't own an SUV: can't afford one. I would own a Hummvee if I could. Only the H1, though; the H2s look like school buses to me.
is geothermal. It's incredibly efficient but very slow.
Don't sweat the deficit too much. The absolute numbers mean nothing. If I told you that ten years ago, I held debt of $10,000, and now I hold a debt of $30,000, am I better off? Well, ten years ago, I made a fifth of what I make now, so I'm actually better off in terms of debt. Here are the actual numbers.
This is not to say that there's nothing to worry about; for all the conservative fulmination of President Bush, domestically he's turned out to be as free-spending as Clinton or any other Democrat. Apparently, "the era of Big Government is over" is over.
Having said that, if NASA's budget cut it would have to be politics over science (super-collider, anyone?). It constitutes such a small percentage of the federal budget that cutting it would achieve nothing. I'm a libertarian, but when it comes to the space program, I've always said that if my tax dollars are going to be forcibly extracted from me, at least a few of them are going towards advancing man into space.
by America's top intelligence agencies. See here.
There was a great example of this on the Beeb show "Coupling". In one scene, the main character stumbles home, drunk, and the scene splits and starts runnning clocks at the bottom of the screen an hour apart. His girlfriend enters the same scene an hour later in the adjacent frame.
She notices things out of place (but are in place in his time frame), and picks them up. One by one, he stumbles about, knocks over a vase, etc., creating the scene in the adjacent frame. At last, he calls his own answering machine on a mobile and leaves a message, which she listens to simultaneously. Very cool stuff.
Actually, Blade had a bullet time effect a year earlier. I imagine that there are earlier examples.
This "oil companies cover up new energy source" is a memetic outgrowth of a persecution complex. When you really think about it, it underestimates the greed of power companies.
Look at it this way: no matter how power is generated, energy companies own massive infrastructure in storing, transporting and producing (in the sense of producing it after it has been stored in one fashion or another). Like or not, if somebody suddenly discovers cold fusion tomorrow, they're still going to be talking to the people with a century of experience and investment in producing and generating power.
If you really wanted to bleed some Hollywood crapfest from that alternative energy turnip, you could do a story about the companies killing to get the secret, kind of like what was going on in Pi.
That is correct. Also, shouldn't it be
"Non in vita pax est."
I can't put my finger on a grammar rule, so it may just be a stylistic thing. Just sounds more like the Latin I've read. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The reality is that there are all kinds of things that could have been done, from shipping up O2 / water / food on ESA rockets to outright rescue via Soyuz (we're not the only space power in the world, remember?)
I will say, however, I can't imagine that her true motivation was as it was laid out here. That would make her an utter monster.
You're correct, but for the wrong reason. This effect happens over and over again.
You might ask yourself why a thousand year old European cottage still stands. Is it because, 100 years ago, the builder said, "I'll build this house so well, it will last for a thousand years"? Actually, the builder said, "I have to make this thing stand for fifty years. The only way I can make it stand for fifty years is to make it as strong as possible."
In the intervening time, knowledge is gained about structural and functional tolerance, and that allows the object to be constructed more cheaply (you're cutting out economically redundant integrity).
So, yes, it's true that "things are built the way that they used to be", but what that allows is for much more of them to built and far more cheaply.
So which ones are we, mouth-breathers or plutocrats?
You're really going to have to invest some more thought into your knee-jerk elitism.
This idea of the Earth revolving around the sun is fable/fiction/pure speculation.
/evidence at all to that effect.
This idea of matter bending space is fable/fiction/pure speculation.
This idea of...well you get the point.
I don't understand != it doesn't exist.
Also, BTW: logical != scientific. And as far as "Nothing suggests"...talk to Roger Penrose. You can say that you don't think there's nothing the human brain can do that computers can't, but it's not accurate to say that there's no thinking
Consider a company that offers this kind of auto pc to employees as a benefit, along with wireless built in.
;). But its a cool idea.
The employees all drive their cars into work, and the cars gradually form a cluster as they reach proximity for the communication.
Of course, this offers no advantage over simply having a traditional cluster
Couldn't possibly be all alpha numeric combinations. Let me sharpen my pencil here...
92 possible password characters (ASCII 32 - 124), max length for a password under NT is 14 characters. That works out to 3 octillion (10^27) combinations. According to Big Numbers, that's about three times the length of the universe in inches. No octabyte hard drives yet.
It's actually far worse than that, since the length of the password is variable.
I have seen some tools match parts of hashes, tho. That might be of some use.
Is that adequate passwords make this hack impossible. It relies on a "lookup table" (read, pregenerated dictionary attack results). If your password ain't in it, it ain't happening. Look, chances are, you speak at least few phrases of a foreign language. Dictionary attacks generally use English words; choose a couple of foreign words and numbers for your password, and all this crap goes away.
If you don't choose a decent password, then, well, your password will take five minutes to crack rather than 13.6 seconds. Feel better?
"Dances with Robots"
Lt. John Dunbar, exiled to a remote space outpost, befriends aliens and robots, making him an intolerable aberration in the military.
Length: 4 hr, 58 min.
Comparison: S-Wing
Lego Space Cruiser circa 1979
Busted.
I agree. I purchased a pretty unbelievable program not too long ago called Reason, which essentially emulates everything in software for a few hundred bucks that I used to do with incredibly expensive electronic keyboards 20 years ago.
You're doubly write about the judges issue...Carl Sagan once said "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." As our legal issues become increasingly technically complex, our judges necessarily become increasingly incompetent.
I'll surprise you by agreeing with you. I think that the author was trying to extend some vague ideas he had about copyright behavior to patent law with blanket statements regarding "innovation". That's what I was addressing. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
Music has never been expensive to write. Produce perhaps, but agreed, coffee enema, etc. The best new music seems to be coming from a kind of coffee-house, single acoustic guitar vibe...which is obviously rock bottom cheap to produce.
Also interesting is that, as the price of CDs increase, shipments increase.
Did he adjust for inflation? I assume not. I don't know whether that would affect the outcome because he didn't show that data, only data derived from that data.
RIAA...has a nasty tendency to only release data which they can put a proper spin on...
The author knows this...how? Or the author has a strong gut feeling this way? Tendency?
If anyone disputes my figures, please give me a better set.
Uh, sorry, that's not the way science works. You're the claimant.
Constitution proscribes
Picking nits here, but proscribe means to forbid. Everybody misuses this word.
However, given that hundreds of thousands of works are produced each year, one must assume that the sheer numbers involved evens out the effects of differing quality. So the premise remains valid.
Here is the fatal flaw of it all: with less copyright protection, we would tend to less a lesser diminution of lower-expense copyrights (music in particular). If works are being produced irrespective of a minimal investment, copyright protection won't generally affect them, and indeed copyright may be an afterthought. So the quality of the patents is an overwhelmingly important question; if protection changes the character of the innovation, then the actual amount of it is irrelevant.
What it will affect is the willingness of creators to spend money to develop an article, since reduced copyright protection diminishes their ability to recapture those funds later. Perhaps a more pertinent question would be the correlation between R&D funds and copyright protection. That would seem to be an even more hellish proposition in getting the data.
And won't it just be you that bitches about how incompetent our intelligence services are the next time something like 9/11 happens.