In some ways, it's hubris to think that animals could be close to our intelligence.
Humans have been writing symbols, farming, living in cities, using horses/camels etc for land travel, using boats for sea travel, etc etc etc. for how many thousands of years now?
Not to mention, how many animals actually verbally communicate from generation to generation, use tools, or keep domesticated pets or farm animals, and we've been doing that for how many tens of thousands of years? (yes, I think there are some, but we've been doing these things for a very long time)
I mean, it's not like animals could hide that sort of thing. If animals were going to be doing sub-atomic research and travelling in space in the next couple of thousand years, you'd think the scale of their culture would be really bleeding obvious right now. And given that most animals have had a longer amount of time to work this stuff out than we have, I'd say that it's clear we're on top.
(granted, it's cool to learn that animals are smarter than we previously thought, but let's not infer that just because you can jump up and down, that soon you'll be able to reach the moon)
Nice try at trying to shoehorn this into a Slashdot story.
It's not digital rights management, because there's no digital product being managed.
Also, putting a sign up is not social engineering as others have pointed out. As the word "engineering" implies, usually more thought and cleverness is required before people consider something to be social hacking or social manipulation.
In their book Political Terrorism, Schmidt and Youngman cited 109 different definitions of terrorism
Wikipedia tries to clarify the definition of "terrorism" somewhat, and notes that there are several things people commonly attribute to terrorism, but all of them have exceptions:
The motive is political or religious (counter-examples: Psychiatric cases, and murders by organized criminals as a reminder to others that they should fall in line)
Ahh, Wikipedia clarifies somewhat. There are MULTIPLE definitions of "terrorism", one of them includes any violence against civilians. In fact, State terrorism has its own Wikipedia page...
The use or threat of violence by the state... as a means of political intimidation and control.
People stared at the Michael Jackon for weeks, and 100 people in England dropped dead of a sudden heart attack yesterday.
People stared at the Pope's funeral and subsequent papal election, for a long long time. And 100 people in England dropped dead of a sudden heart attack yesterday.
The popularity of news stories has very little to do with 1) the number of deaths, or 2) the extent to which The Man wants to subjugate us.
"Terrorist" isn't simply a bad guy, or at least it didn't used to be defined that way. "Terrorist" was someone who didn't have a political voice, and (at least allegedly) had no other political voice than by violence. Terrorists use asymetrical violence, guerilla warfare... they can pop up for a short while anywhere, while the US has to fight back with tanks and missiles.
The leader of a country isn't someone who isn't constantly showing up in random markets with a bomb. They may indescriminantly kill people inside their own country, but it's not to gain a political voice where they had none before (it might be to supress other political voices, but that's a different thing from ostensibly having only one option for political expression). Leaders of countries can be affected by international diplomacy, embargoes, etc... terrorists won't ever be affected at all by this kind of thing.
(yes, there are shades of gray between them, but one fundamentally already has a large amount of power that's fixed in a certain location... the other has very little power and can move anywhere... the options for dealing with them is fundementally different)
I really really really want to like this... but how is relying on the client to run code properly sane, with all the different clients out there?
Google is doing it (eg. gmail, maps), and that's good enough for me!
Browsers are following the javascript/DOM specs much more these days (except for MSIE, of course)
As far as Firefox-on-Solaris goes... there's no reason it shouldn't work there, is there? I don't know Ruby-on-Rails specifically, but Firefox/Solaris shouldn't be any different from Firefox/Windows as far as AJAX goes, right?
Virtalization allows you to run many OS's at the same time, so that, to some extent, you don't care so much that an application runs on a different OS, since you can run Outlook in windows, Open Office and software development in linux, and a webserver in NetBSD, all at the same time.
Eventually, the hardware portion will be ubiquitous. Soon, the software portion will be free. And like we learned with the four-player-on-playstation... if hardware/software isn't ubiquitous, it doesn't get used nearly as much. But OS virtualization is about to become like four-player XBox, where it's simply assumed that if you have a computer, and you're a geek, you run multiple OS's.
My prediction: corporate use of Linux will triple as soon as these CPU's hit the desktop. On top of that, more ambitious geeks will install and experiment with any new OS as long as it provides new functionality or an application they couldn't otherwise use.
But it's not sufficient to have a trillion monkeys. You must also have a trillion typewriters.
More to the point... more and more people can be born... but if the edge of innovation requires internet access, reasonably powerful computers, access to chemistry labs, sub-atomic research facilities... then the rate of innovation is more likely to grow at the pace of GDP, or the amount of R&D investment, or something like that, not at the rate of which people in the third world are born (nothing against them, by any means, but internet access seems like a bare minimum for innovation these days).
C'mon, it's not just Bush v Gore. Obviously Roe v Wade is a huge part of the politization, and it's not something that only the Bush administration started. Half of it is because due to control of both the presidency and both houses of congress, this may be their best shot to overturn Roe V Wade.
I largely agree with you, but there are some slight problems with broadly saying "spell however you want!".
There are certain situations where people use a particular subset of a language. For example, instant-messaging is the only place you're likely to see "LOL" or "BRB". And the workplace is likely the only place you'll see "synergistic".
Generally, nobody is going to complain about someone mispelling things or saying things not-exactly-correctly in an instant message. On the other hand, they may (somewhat legitimately) complain about less-than-formal speech in the professional workplace.
On the other hand, consoles are supposed to be easier to use than PCs. They're supposed to be different from PC's. Having a giant controller with a trackball and 104-key keyboard sticking out of it is going to scare mothers and grandfathers!
And how do you use a mouse from your couch? How many people are going to go to the trouble of arranging the placement of things so that a mouse is usable?
The closest you'll probably get to mainstream console use is a trackball being integrated into controllers. Though I bet you'll hear many more people complain about that idea than you will about the missing mouse problem. Though I bet once people actually try it, for driving games and FPS's, there's probably no comparison.
Desktop search is the voice recognition of the new century. It will sort of work, but never well enough to make it worth relying upon.
What's the primary way that the core information on the internet is accessed right now? Is it via neatly organizing things into directories (eg. Yahoo, DMOZ)? Or is it by brute-force search (eg. Google)?
That's right, there is no organization. Same philosophy as GMail... don't organize it, search it instead.
Yeah, an omniscient organizer, or a full-fledged semantic web, would both be better than raw search. But for now, we have search, and people have had many years to become familiar with it. Google isn't a newfangled doodad.
Java was DESIGNED for embedded systems, first and foremost
Show me a cell phone whose apps are 95% written in Java, and it's reasonably speedy and the battery life doesn't suck.
I'll give you a hint. I work at a company where far too much money has been spent trying to do develop this several different times. CPU's are getting closer to making this worthwhile, but so far I've just seen spectacular failures.
(I might behind the times... there might have been some decent java phones released recently, I don't know. If so, I bet java only shows up on the very fastest CPUs)
Same way you crack any other sufficiently-complex appliance... find a buffer overflow, get it to run a bit of your own code, and use that hole to break the machine wide open.
Okay, this is much more likely to happen on the PSP, since everyone is running (roughly) the same code. But if there are obvious enough cracks, even more obscure appliances will be cracked.
On the other hand, many of us are antisocial geeks who quiver at the thought of having to cooperate with other people (having to do it at work is enough... meh).
It's still cool to walk into the auction house on WoW and see it packed to the brim though.
Well, PNG wasn't developed until the GIF patents started being enforced.
But yeah, one of the main reasons that GIF and JPG flourished was because they were (at least initially) unencumbered, therefore the code could be built into EVERYTHING, on every platform, without worrying about patent enforcement. The same is not true of Windows Media or Quicktime or Real.
(the other reason that GIF/JPG triumphed over the alternatives is that they rode on the coattails of Mosaic and Netscape... therefore, the second lesson is that it's not sufficient to develop a cool open-source video codec... it's much more important to find a way to get everyone to use one good open codec to the exclusion of the others)
However, the GIF patent has now expired, so GIF is as unencumbered as when Mosaic started up. If you're advocating for PNG over GIF based on technical merits, then you have to be careful. Technological progress is good, but if you encourage it too much, then we return to the bad old days of 30 different image formats that are all equally popular, and everybody having to constantly search for a program that can decode that image or video they just downloaded.
Kind of reminds me of the time when your main source of porn was BBS's, and every once in a while, a really intriguing filename would be sufficient motivation to go off and find a viewer for that image format.
And then along came webbrowsers, and suddenly every image produced was either JPEG or GIF. And it was good.
I don't have the link right now, but I remember seeing a graph of bandwidth prices for very large ISP's, for the backbone, or even colo bandwidth prices. Prices in those markets ARE decreasing over time, but at a much slower rate than, say, CPU speed or CPU cost. (bandwidth demand is indeed still growing fairly quickly, but prices are falling much slower) I tried to figure out WHY exactly bandwidth costs don't fall faster, but couldn't find much, because all the analyst types are so busy talking about the glut of fiber optic lines at the end of the 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
Humans have been writing symbols, farming, living in cities, using horses/camels etc for land travel, using boats for sea travel, etc etc etc. for how many thousands of years now?
Not to mention, how many animals actually verbally communicate from generation to generation, use tools, or keep domesticated pets or farm animals, and we've been doing that for how many tens of thousands of years? (yes, I think there are some, but we've been doing these things for a very long time)
I mean, it's not like animals could hide that sort of thing. If animals were going to be doing sub-atomic research and travelling in space in the next couple of thousand years, you'd think the scale of their culture would be really bleeding obvious right now. And given that most animals have had a longer amount of time to work this stuff out than we have, I'd say that it's clear we're on top.
(granted, it's cool to learn that animals are smarter than we previously thought, but let's not infer that just because you can jump up and down, that soon you'll be able to reach the moon)
It's not digital rights management, because there's no digital product being managed.
Also, putting a sign up is not social engineering as others have pointed out. As the word "engineering" implies, usually more thought and cleverness is required before people consider something to be social hacking or social manipulation.
Wikipedia tries to clarify the definition of "terrorism" somewhat, and notes that there are several things people commonly attribute to terrorism, but all of them have exceptions:
People stared at the Michael Jackon for weeks, and 100 people in England dropped dead of a sudden heart attack yesterday.
People stared at the Pope's funeral and subsequent papal election, for a long long time. And 100 people in England dropped dead of a sudden heart attack yesterday.
The popularity of news stories has very little to do with 1) the number of deaths, or 2) the extent to which The Man wants to subjugate us.
The leader of a country isn't someone who isn't constantly showing up in random markets with a bomb. They may indescriminantly kill people inside their own country, but it's not to gain a political voice where they had none before (it might be to supress other political voices, but that's a different thing from ostensibly having only one option for political expression). Leaders of countries can be affected by international diplomacy, embargoes, etc... terrorists won't ever be affected at all by this kind of thing.
(yes, there are shades of gray between them, but one fundamentally already has a large amount of power that's fixed in a certain location... the other has very little power and can move anywhere... the options for dealing with them is fundementally different)
- Google is doing it (eg. gmail, maps), and that's good enough for me!
- Browsers are following the javascript/DOM specs much more these days (except for MSIE, of course)
As far as Firefox-on-Solaris goes... there's no reason it shouldn't work there, is there? I don't know Ruby-on-Rails specifically, but Firefox/Solaris shouldn't be any different from Firefox/Windows as far as AJAX goes, right?Virtalization allows you to run many OS's at the same time, so that, to some extent, you don't care so much that an application runs on a different OS, since you can run Outlook in windows, Open Office and software development in linux, and a webserver in NetBSD, all at the same time.
Eventually, the hardware portion will be ubiquitous. Soon, the software portion will be free. And like we learned with the four-player-on-playstation... if hardware/software isn't ubiquitous, it doesn't get used nearly as much. But OS virtualization is about to become like four-player XBox, where it's simply assumed that if you have a computer, and you're a geek, you run multiple OS's.
Intel and AMD are shipping CPUs with hardware support for virtualization the latter half of this year. In preparation, they've been helping various virtualization software to add support for their upcoming products. One of those is the open-source Xen, which is adding support for native Windows also.
My prediction: corporate use of Linux will triple as soon as these CPU's hit the desktop. On top of that, more ambitious geeks will install and experiment with any new OS as long as it provides new functionality or an application they couldn't otherwise use.
More to the point... more and more people can be born... but if the edge of innovation requires internet access, reasonably powerful computers, access to chemistry labs, sub-atomic research facilities... then the rate of innovation is more likely to grow at the pace of GDP, or the amount of R&D investment, or something like that, not at the rate of which people in the third world are born (nothing against them, by any means, but internet access seems like a bare minimum for innovation these days).
General public awareness of decisions has also increased the politization of SCOTUS... eg. any cases which makes some group of people think the SCOTUS made a completely brain-dead decision... whether that be Pat Robertson's constant moanings and the general attitude of fundies towards the judiciary, or whether it's cases that seemingly everyone (liberals and conservatives alike) seem to be upset about.
Are you really trying hard to beg the FBI to come knockin'?
There are certain situations where people use a particular subset of a language. For example, instant-messaging is the only place you're likely to see "LOL" or "BRB". And the workplace is likely the only place you'll see "synergistic".
This "subset of language" is a good concept, because it turns out that the more proper/formal/academic language is much slower changing, almost frozen. The best example of this is the continued use of latin in law and in biological classification.
Generally, nobody is going to complain about someone mispelling things or saying things not-exactly-correctly in an instant message. On the other hand, they may (somewhat legitimately) complain about less-than-formal speech in the professional workplace.
On the other hand, consoles are supposed to be easier to use than PCs. They're supposed to be different from PC's. Having a giant controller with a trackball and 104-key keyboard sticking out of it is going to scare mothers and grandfathers!
The closest you'll probably get to mainstream console use is a trackball being integrated into controllers. Though I bet you'll hear many more people complain about that idea than you will about the missing mouse problem. Though I bet once people actually try it, for driving games and FPS's, there's probably no comparison.
Is your disturbing faith lack of?
That's right, there is no organization. Same philosophy as GMail... don't organize it, search it instead.
Yeah, an omniscient organizer, or a full-fledged semantic web, would both be better than raw search. But for now, we have search, and people have had many years to become familiar with it. Google isn't a newfangled doodad.
Or when it was posted a week ago.
I'll give you a hint. I work at a company where far too much money has been spent trying to do develop this several different times. CPU's are getting closer to making this worthwhile, but so far I've just seen spectacular failures.
(I might behind the times... there might have been some decent java phones released recently, I don't know. If so, I bet java only shows up on the very fastest CPUs)
Okay, this is much more likely to happen on the PSP, since everyone is running (roughly) the same code. But if there are obvious enough cracks, even more obscure appliances will be cracked.
It's still cool to walk into the auction house on WoW and see it packed to the brim though.
But yeah, one of the main reasons that GIF and JPG flourished was because they were (at least initially) unencumbered, therefore the code could be built into EVERYTHING, on every platform, without worrying about patent enforcement. The same is not true of Windows Media or Quicktime or Real.
(the other reason that GIF/JPG triumphed over the alternatives is that they rode on the coattails of Mosaic and Netscape... therefore, the second lesson is that it's not sufficient to develop a cool open-source video codec... it's much more important to find a way to get everyone to use one good open codec to the exclusion of the others)
However, the GIF patent has now expired, so GIF is as unencumbered as when Mosaic started up. If you're advocating for PNG over GIF based on technical merits, then you have to be careful. Technological progress is good, but if you encourage it too much, then we return to the bad old days of 30 different image formats that are all equally popular, and everybody having to constantly search for a program that can decode that image or video they just downloaded.
And then along came webbrowsers, and suddenly every image produced was either JPEG or GIF. And it was good.
I don't have the link right now, but I remember seeing a graph of bandwidth prices for very large ISP's, for the backbone, or even colo bandwidth prices. Prices in those markets ARE decreasing over time, but at a much slower rate than, say, CPU speed or CPU cost. (bandwidth demand is indeed still growing fairly quickly, but prices are falling much slower) I tried to figure out WHY exactly bandwidth costs don't fall faster, but couldn't find much, because all the analyst types are so busy talking about the glut of fiber optic lines at the end of the 90's.