Theory: the first line is relevant, the rest of the comment is copy-and-pasted as "general Linux commentary from a dude who writes general Linux commentary". It doesn't seem too specifically relevant.
Five years is the number picked by people when something is clearly "not this year, or next year, but I see no reason why it shouldn't happen very soon."
It's a sign of a bad prediction, for the most part, unless there's a good reason to choose five years.
I got bored one night and sharpied my keyboard black. Turns out the so-called "permanent" ink does in fact rub off after a while. I got a fascinating graph of where I hit keys and letter frequency (I only touch the spacebar in one strange place), but boy was there egg (ink) on my face (fingertips).
However, I never had a problem knowing where keys were.
I recall the advice of one person on a meterological/tropical weather board I frequent. This was when it was becoming clear that Katrina was going to hit NO and the formal evacuations were starting. She said
"People are asking where they should go, and whether they should avoid going north for fear of the storm 'following' them. My answer? Denver. I am not kidding. Get on the road and drive north and west until you see mountains. Then find a Red Cross center. The further you get from Louisana the less overwhelmed the relief facilities are going to be." (paraphrased)
So it's not as much about going really far from the storm as it is about getting away from the other refugees.
Very good idea, as far as the actual driving goes -- that is, I would use it.
Problem: It will crash when presented with some situations. You can watch for those situations, but since you don't normally/have/ to watch the road anymore, attention will drift for longer and longer, and you won't see something, and it will crash.
The few problems will be directly blamed on the car makers. They will not be able to keep this cruise control on the market.
I've often wished that my car would automatically stay between the lines. The roads are already tilted so that you can drive (with good alignment) quite a ways without touching the wheel. But if I had that option, it's only a matter of time before I fell asleep on a long freeway, and then the computer makes a mistake, and I crash.
The technology is not new. I saw a video on it quite a while ago. But you can't introduce it because some people will die as a viscerally direct result, even if it saves other lives in the process.
They mentioned that it would probably first be introduced as a "you're going off the road" warning system, and verrrry slowly work its way in from there. That's the only feasible option I see.
I really don't feel alarmist about this at all. They're gonna need to be very, very careful in introducing this, because when cars crash -- as they inevitably will at least once -- due to unexpected circumstances that arise quickly -- they will look very bad.
If you're worried about Google turning to the dark side, you can simply use other services.
But their services are better! And I don't really have a reason to believe they're less trustworthy than any other company, except for their attempts to get to a position that might be very good for them if they were evil.
I think we need to look a lot more closely at Google and whether or not we should trust them with all our digital content and everything about us. I'm actually nontrivially worried.
GAIM is a poor excuse for a Jabber client and lacks many key features (off the top of my head, service discovery). Just use Psi instead.
I'm not about to run another program just to get on this experimental service. I use messengers heavily for messenging, not just to be there. But thanks for the client; hadn't heard of it. Maybe someday I'll have a reason to use it.
I'm saying, Google is gathering to themselves an awful lot of information about everyone, and I hope they don't plan to use it for less-than-moral purposes. I don't really know why we trust them beyond that they seem pretty cool. But if they're 'bad guys', we could be in a lot of trouble. The shorthand for that here seems to be 'evil'.
I can find anything online from programming, to websites on conspiracies. I see more diversity of information on the internet than in any library, and I can access websites from all around the world.
How does a library ever compare to the global noosphere?
They're different brands of information. Yes, the internet is slowly absorbing it all. Yes, there's a lot of stuff there.
But it's easy to think you have all the information because there's a whole lot of stuff out there on the web and you don't, by definition, see what's missing. Don't be so quick to totally dismiss the last three hundred years of work at writing things down. Just because they didn't have the internet doesn't mean they weren't just as smart -- and often awful smarter -- than us. Presentism is a dangerous thing.
Yes, eventually everything will be web-accessable. Yes, libraries will become obsolete. But there is a tre-MENDOUS amount of material not yet there. And much more importantly, information often isn't available online with the context, the background, the solidity, and the completeness of a long book by a single author who's an expert on the subject, a book vetted by peers. And the relative permanence of books allows them to be double and triple-checked for accuracy and relevence. When I want to learn a subject (computer-related fields are sort of an exception here), I may look at websites to get an overview, but mostly I look for recommended books on the subject.
There's a whole lot more to transferring information than simply dumping facts in a pile, and books are a wonderful tool for organizing them. They are guarenteed to have voice, coherence, grammatical standards, and the promise that someone has spent significant time and work putting the information together.
This will all change eventually. But it hasn't near changed yet.
Sadly, they don't allow usernames with more than six letters. My standard username for years now has been 'xkcd', and I was getting pretty universal with it (AIM, I own xkcd.com, etc) and I was sad that I couldn't have xkcd@gmail.com.
People need to sleep for various reasons (rest, various chemicals get regenerated, etc).
From what I understand, there's not a clear consensus on why we need sleep. I mean, it does a number of things, and we've figured many of them out, but as far as biology goes none of them seems to be a deal-breaker. I can easily imagine a large mammal that just walks around eating and doing stuff all day. Why is it that we spend a third of our lives in this comatose state?
I mean, it's pretty much taken for granted, but when I stop to think about it, it seems pretty damn weird. Imagine an alien that shows up and we say "we need to go, gotta sleep" and they say "why?" and we say "uhhhh, to recharge." "I thought you ate food for energy." "yeah, it's for . . . maintanence?" "what kind?" "not sure. it's just this powerful compulsion." "what are the leading theories? you mean you aren't even sure why you do this every night?" "zzzzzzz."
Just something interesting that I've given a lot of thought to, especially since I started working unpredicatble night shifts. I wonder if every major mammal needs sleep because we evolved with a light/dark cycle, or if it's just something that it's impossible to construct a complex brain without.
Though note that I'm not really referring to 'index size' but to the size of the list of hits returned for a term. I'm pretty much in favor of the indexes being as large as possible, and that's a reasonable thing to demand. But saying that one engine returns 2,000,000 more hits for 'banana store' than the other is not measuring the same thing at all, and is in fact dumb.
I know it's been said before, but you cannot just measure search engines based on volume of hits returned. Clearly, when you get into the millions, it doesn't hurt the results to prune some crap off the end, and I'm sure they're both doing things -- either one could easily focus a little on breadth of hits per query and jump past the other.
Important thing to note: The general principal is MORE COMPLEX than "find all pages containing this term". You can ADD terms and get MORE hits.
As an example and as a thing to keep in mind, witness:
Results 1 - 10 of about 298,000 for robot dance research Results 1 - 10 of about 970,000 for robot dance research ME
Slashdot Mirror
Theory: the first line is relevant, the rest of the comment is copy-and-pasted as "general Linux commentary from a dude who writes general Linux commentary". It doesn't seem too specifically relevant.
Five years is the number picked by people when something is clearly "not this year, or next year, but I see no reason why it shouldn't happen very soon."
It's a sign of a bad prediction, for the most part, unless there's a good reason to choose five years.
I got bored one night and sharpied my keyboard black. Turns out the so-called "permanent" ink does in fact rub off after a while. I got a fascinating graph of where I hit keys and letter frequency (I only touch the spacebar in one strange place), but boy was there egg (ink) on my face (fingertips).
However, I never had a problem knowing where keys were.
I recall the advice of one person on a meterological/tropical weather board I frequent. This was when it was becoming clear that Katrina was going to hit NO and the formal evacuations were starting. She said
"People are asking where they should go, and whether they should avoid going north for fear of the storm 'following' them. My answer? Denver. I am not kidding. Get on the road and drive north and west until you see mountains. Then find a Red Cross center. The further you get from Louisana the less overwhelmed the relief facilities are going to be." (paraphrased)
So it's not as much about going really far from the storm as it is about getting away from the other refugees.
Very good idea, as far as the actual driving goes -- that is, I would use it.
/have/ to watch the road anymore, attention will drift for longer and longer, and you won't see something, and it will crash.
Problem: It will crash when presented with some situations. You can watch for those situations, but since you don't normally
The few problems will be directly blamed on the car makers. They will not be able to keep this cruise control on the market.
I've often wished that my car would automatically stay between the lines. The roads are already tilted so that you can drive (with good alignment) quite a ways without touching the wheel. But if I had that option, it's only a matter of time before I fell asleep on a long freeway, and then the computer makes a mistake, and I crash.
The technology is not new. I saw a video on it quite a while ago. But you can't introduce it because some people will die as a viscerally direct result, even if it saves other lives in the process.
They mentioned that it would probably first be introduced as a "you're going off the road" warning system, and verrrry slowly work its way in from there. That's the only feasible option I see.
I really don't feel alarmist about this at all. They're gonna need to be very, very careful in introducing this, because when cars crash -- as they inevitably will at least once -- due to unexpected circumstances that arise quickly -- they will look very bad.
Yeah, and you go to all that trouble to help people, and this happens:
n +is+1000...9999%22&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22my+pi
and would be prime locations to look for life, NASA scientists said today.'
And:
Is this another instance of "recently" meaning "within the last 1,000,000 years?"
It takes millions and millions of years for life to evolve, but only one year for it to die.
10^(10^10), sorry.
Why would anyone pay for a suborbital flight when they expect the next version to be orbital?
Yeah. Because it's not, you know, riding in a freaking spaceship into honest-to-God SPACE. You'll take whatever chance you get.
Just for the sake of someone finally saying this and being right:
10^10^10 bytes should be enough for anyone.
Anyone care to argue?
If you're worried about Google turning to the dark side, you can simply use other services.
But their services are better! And I don't really have a reason to believe they're less trustworthy than any other company, except for their attempts to get to a position that might be very good for them if they were evil.
Thus, I face a conundrum.
I think we need to look a lot more closely at Google and whether or not we should trust them with all our digital content and everything about us. I'm actually nontrivially worried.
Sadly, when I speculated about this yesterday, I got moderated as "troll"
Ah well. The world is a strange place.
GAIM is a poor excuse for a Jabber client and lacks many key features (off the top of my head, service discovery). Just use Psi instead.
I'm not about to run another program just to get on this experimental service. I use messengers heavily for messenging, not just to be there. But thanks for the client; hadn't heard of it. Maybe someday I'll have a reason to use it.
Wait, what? I'm totally serious!
I'm saying, Google is gathering to themselves an awful lot of information about everyone, and I hope they don't plan to use it for less-than-moral purposes. I don't really know why we trust them beyond that they seem pretty cool. But if they're 'bad guys', we could be in a lot of trouble. The shorthand for that here seems to be 'evil'.
I can find anything online from programming, to websites on conspiracies. I see more diversity of information on the internet than in any library, and I can access websites from all around the world.
How does a library ever compare to the global noosphere?
They're different brands of information. Yes, the internet is slowly absorbing it all. Yes, there's a lot of stuff there.
But it's easy to think you have all the information because there's a whole lot of stuff out there on the web and you don't, by definition, see what's missing. Don't be so quick to totally dismiss the last three hundred years of work at writing things down. Just because they didn't have the internet doesn't mean they weren't just as smart -- and often awful smarter -- than us. Presentism is a dangerous thing.
Yes, eventually everything will be web-accessable. Yes, libraries will become obsolete. But there is a tre-MENDOUS amount of material not yet there. And much more importantly, information often isn't available online with the context, the background, the solidity, and the completeness of a long book by a single author who's an expert on the subject, a book vetted by peers. And the relative permanence of books allows them to be double and triple-checked for accuracy and relevence. When I want to learn a subject (computer-related fields are sort of an exception here), I may look at websites to get an overview, but mostly I look for recommended books on the subject.
There's a whole lot more to transferring information than simply dumping facts in a pile, and books are a wonderful tool for organizing them. They are guarenteed to have voice, coherence, grammatical standards, and the promise that someone has spent significant time and work putting the information together.
This will all change eventually. But it hasn't near changed yet.
I hate sitting here and hoping beyond hope that Google isn't evil.
Did we trust them just because of their colorful, friendly-looking logo?
Are we making a terrible mistake?
Sadly, they don't allow usernames with more than six letters. My standard username for years now has been 'xkcd', and I was getting pretty universal with it (AIM, I own xkcd.com, etc) and I was sad that I couldn't have xkcd@gmail.com.
Okay, I'm on, but not. (Gaim forces me to add a 'resource' field, which is by default 'Gaim', might have something to do with my problem.)
It appears to connect, but I don't show up on my own buddylist and I can't send any messages. I don't see any of y'all. But it claims it's online.
Anyone got more info?
server: talk.google.com
using the name from my gmail account (rmunroe).
Any message I send gives me "Message delivery to [whoever] failed: (Code 404)"
People need to sleep for various reasons (rest, various chemicals get regenerated, etc).
From what I understand, there's not a clear consensus on why we need sleep. I mean, it does a number of things, and we've figured many of them out, but as far as biology goes none of them seems to be a deal-breaker. I can easily imagine a large mammal that just walks around eating and doing stuff all day. Why is it that we spend a third of our lives in this comatose state?
I mean, it's pretty much taken for granted, but when I stop to think about it, it seems pretty damn weird. Imagine an alien that shows up and we say "we need to go, gotta sleep" and they say "why?" and we say "uhhhh, to recharge." "I thought you ate food for energy." "yeah, it's for . . . maintanence?" "what kind?" "not sure. it's just this powerful compulsion." "what are the leading theories? you mean you aren't even sure why you do this every night?" "zzzzzzz."
Just something interesting that I've given a lot of thought to, especially since I started working unpredicatble night shifts. I wonder if every major mammal needs sleep because we evolved with a light/dark cycle, or if it's just something that it's impossible to construct a complex brain without.
This is awful!
. . . somehow. At all.
Oh, I'll find a way.
Though note that I'm not really referring to 'index size' but to the size of the list of hits returned for a term. I'm pretty much in favor of the indexes being as large as possible, and that's a reasonable thing to demand. But saying that one engine returns 2,000,000 more hits for 'banana store' than the other is not measuring the same thing at all, and is in fact dumb.
I know it's been said before, but you cannot just measure search engines based on volume of hits returned. Clearly, when you get into the millions, it doesn't hurt the results to prune some crap off the end, and I'm sure they're both doing things -- either one could easily focus a little on breadth of hits per query and jump past the other.
Important thing to note: The general principal is MORE COMPLEX than "find all pages containing this term". You can ADD terms and get MORE hits.
As an example and as a thing to keep in mind, witness:
Results 1 - 10 of about 298,000 for robot dance research
Results 1 - 10 of about 970,000 for robot dance research ME
Wanna go get a drink?
[mis-posted to self]
Wanna go get a drink?
No, it's a joke.