Valdrax wrote: "There is a difference between politics and policy, and it is one that this administration has forgotten. Policy is a bottum-up decision making process based on unbiased facts. Politics is a top-down decision making process based on domga and belief."
In democracies, political outcomes determine policy. You have failed to understand the central concept of democracy: We the people decide the policy by our choice of leaders through the political process of elections. In democracy policy and politics are not independent but are interdependent.
Valdrax wrote: " Policy is a bottum-up decision making process based on unbiased facts. "
Facts alone do not suffice to determine policy. Facts can not determine outcome in the absence of values.
Valdrax wrote: "This President cares nothing for policy, only politics"
Having expounded on your own make-believe division between the politics and policy, you then employ it to impugn the President.
Valdrax wrote: "which is evident in his inability to ever, EVER admit a mistake unless he can pin it on a subordinate."
If you want to evaluate presidents according to the number of mistakes to which they have admitted while in office, go for it. You can post the list of presidents and their admissions in followup. But you are not serious. Until the crackpot left brandished that accusation against Bush it was never heard, and it is not used outside of those attacks. Nobody seriously believes that presidents are required to furnish the opponents with arguments against themselves. Your accusation is unpersuasive.
Candiate A admits two mistakes. Candidate B admits three mistakes! Therefore candidate B is the better candidate. Riiiighhht. No wonder you guys lost.
Valdrax wrote: "This is dirty politics at its worst. This is intended to make it hard for the opposition party to have any power by cutting off all of the richest funding through belligerent threats."
The only evidence you supplied of "belligerent threats" is accusations by Democrats that Republicans make threats. You are supporting left-wing propaganda by linking to... more left wing propaganda. For someone who throws around the expression "unbiased facts" you seem remarkably short of them yourself. Are Democratic congressmen a good source of "unbiased facts" on Republicans?" If not, then why are you basing your argument on biased facts? Is it because you are being top-down and political and basing your argument and dogma and belief? Maybe you should try admitting to some mistakes.
Valdrax wrote: "This is not just. People who truly respect freedom try to compromise with their opponents and not bury them without giving them a voice."
Liberals have been in power for so long that they can't come to terms with their own defeat. They have lost the election, yet they still feel entitled to set the agenda. When a winning candidate seeks to enact the policies on which he campaigned, you refer to that as "burying the opposition without giving them a voice." You have a voice. What you don't have is a sitting president and control of congress.
Valdrax wrote: "The Republicans' naked greed for power is just disgusting."
Well by "naked greed for power" you seem to mean the exercise of governmental authority to which they are entitled as elected officials. That you find that disgusting is convincing.
"Yes. For instance, you may recall that a large number of career diplomats were hired or appointed under Reagan and Bush '41 and were not fired by Clinton."
You may also recall that many U.S. Attorneys were hired by Reagan and the first president Bush over their combined 12 years in office and all 93 U.S. Attorneys working in the Justice Department were fired in a single day by Janet Reno on orders from President Clinton.
The spoils system is nothing new in the U.S. Those who claim that Bush's appointments to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission represent a new fascist stage in United States governance need to learn some history and get some perspective. "Travelgate" ring any bells?
And it is not clear that Bush's appointments to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission are awarded as spoils. The President is choosing people to represent to foreign governments the views of his administration on, according to the Time article, "important issues... telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations". Seems to me that the President has a legitimate interest in appointing representatives who support his own views, and not the views of his opponent who lost the election. Is it reasonable for a President to rule out political opponents for appointment to Secretary of State? If so, then what is wrong with the same practice when selecting officials for the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission? Winning the election means that you run the executive branch. That means you set foreign policy. That means that when choosing people to represent that policy to foreign countries you choose people who you can trust to advance those views, not people who oppose you and support the policies of your opponent.
"Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally."
Are the data reproducible ? Are the conclusions logically supported by those data? Is the argument internally consistent? Are conclusions consistent with accepted facts uncovered by other methods? Can you devise a new experiment disproving the original conclusions? No need to trouble yourself with those difficult questions, when the correct criterion for deciding the validity of scientific arguments is the presumed financial motive of those funding the research.
By relying on the presumed biases of the funding source anyone can assess the validity of a scientific argument without having to read, understand, or even think.
Never question your government, because it always works in our best interest
Your creative use of "translate" to mean "make up lies about what I wrote" does not win you the point. It costs you one for disingenuousness. Explanation of why governments do not reveal weapons specifications (secrecy is a strategic advantage) does not imply that we should "Never question.. government, because it always works in our best interest."
"Show me the amazing technology. I'm paying for it. I demand it."
Revealing the vulnerabilities of weapons to the enemy undermines the effectiveness of those weapons. You do not admit that point, you draw attention from it. Like dummy warheads, you throw out "Never question your government" and righteous proclamations "I'm paying for it. I demand it." Well, you are paying for the CIA. Should it reveal the names of its spies to you, so that you can check up on them? The FBI keeps private information on government officials collected during background checks. Should it reveal that information to you, so you can check up?" Should personal information about individuals before grand juries be made public because you need to check up?
Sometimes governments should keep secrets and sometimes they should not. One of the jobs of democracy is to work out when to do which. It is a complicated question. Your angry and simple-minded insistence on the absolutism that government must always do one or always the other reveals your own mental limits; You can not conceive of the complex system of many choices in many circumstances, of different needs for secrecy and openness in different cases.
Your conclusion relies on the false dichotomy that government must always be open or always secret: If we allow some secrecy in weapons specifications then we may "never question government". Allowing simultaneous possibilities both of some secret weapons specifications and the questioning of government in other circumstances, your argument disintegrates. Discussing specifically the the tradeoffs of weapons secrecy vs. openness, you have nothing to say on that subject. You have not weighed those tradeoffs in the case of ballistic missile defense, but instead sullenly refused to acknowledge benefits of secrecy while substituting absolutist demands for valuation of openness.
Just like with computer protection, you test your system with someone that is actively trying to defeat it. I don't see the US military doing this.
Hey genius, if the U.S. missle sheild has anti-spoofing technology they will not tell you. If the NSA can crack 256-bit encryption, they will not tell you. Informing the enemy that you can defeat their weapons causes them to modify their weapons so that you can not. Telling the enemy that you can not defeat their system makes them more confident of victory, and encourages them to attack you. The performance of weapons is classified for a reason. It's a strategic advantage to keep the enemy in the dark about your capabilities. The less he knows about your weapons, the worse his predictions, and hence the worse his battle planning. He knows this.
Now that the U.N. has put an end to genocide in Darfur, cured AIDS in Africa, ended poverty in third-world countries and resolved global conflicts with peaceful solutions, it is time to move on to the problem of SPAM.
According to the article, the campaign finance "reform" movement to limit our first amendment rights did not have broad-based politcial support. Instead, McCain-Feingold was the product of a secret $123 million astroturfing conspiracy run by the Pew foundation and seven other foundations. Like the super villians in a James Bond spy novel, Sean Treglia of the Pew Foundation, could not stop himself from bragging about how brilliantly was their evil scheme succeeding.
I know, at first, that sounds like crackpot stuff, but the WSJ seems to have its facts in order here.
Says Giant Space Hamster: "Perhaps a compromise of a limited-time monopoly would be best. Cable companies get a 5-year monopoly on new networks, and afterwards must open them up to competition."
That would be meddlesome and unnecessary. In the absence of coercive barriers to entry, all monopolies are self-limiting. High profits earned by a monopolist are powerful incentive for competitors to enter a monopolized market.
If I sell a FooWidget2000, which cost me $1.00, for $100.00 on ebay today, then tomorrow someone will sell a BarWidget2000 for $99.00. And the next day? My monopoly and my high prices are quickly eroded by competitors who, also pursing high profits, undercut me and offer better bargains to the consumer . The successful monopolist is quickly replaced by a competitive market. High profits cause low profits by attracting competition for high profits. Notice that no government intervention or other central direction is required to end my monopoly and drive down prices. The trend against monopoly is an emergent property of a system of buyers and sellers acting in their own interests. Emergent properties of markets are what socialist types ridicule as "trusting to the random process of the marketplace".
As a monopolist, the only way I can sustain monopoly pricing is to co-opt government power to prevent competitors from entering the market and undercutting me. Amtrak and the U.S. Post office do this by explicit legal bans on competition. If I deliver first-class mail, I go to jail, it's the law. Microsoft maintains a monopoly by use of bogus patents. Show me a long-term monopoly and I will show you a government corrupted to perpetuate that monopoly by obstructing competition.
In a free market, with no government barriers to entry, all monopolies are temporary. The greater the profits received by that monopoly, the greater the incentive for others to enter the market.
Government need not legislate competition. The profit motive causes competition without the need for legislation. What its advocated call "regulated competition" is actually an attempt to enlist the coercive power of government for their own financial benefit. In the case of regulated competition of cable internet services, competitors attempt to seize infrastructure from its owners. In a competitive system, those wishing to compete with a cable provider would do so by constructing a competing network, not by enlisting government to seize existing networks on their behalf.
To the extent that monopoly pricing compensates for the risk of speculative investment, monopolies serve the public interest by rewarding invention. A monopolist could maintain his monopoly by providing high value to the customer; accepting low profits and providing good service; when a free market sustains a monopoly, it does so at no cost to the consumer.
"To be honest, I don't particularly like reading posts about stupid/lazy/drunken/. editors and so I was a hypocrite posting one myself, but I almost feel that it's a form of civil disobedience aimed at encouraging the owners to change/. for the better. It's either that or stop visiting, but +5 posts abusing/. editors in duped threads should get the point across a little more directly than dwindling readership."
Point taken. I should not have implied that crticism is unwarranted. It would have been better had I written that criticism was "inaccurate" instead of "unfair".
"It takes 10 minutes a day, max, to scan the headlines OF THE SITE YOUR JOB IT IS TO EDIT. Timothy obviously does not read this site. So WTF? Could we possibly get an editor that takes his job seriously?"
Here is why slashdot editors post dupes and how to fix it.
Slashdot editors pick topics to post on the site from a vast pool of submissions. When recalling if a submissin has appeared on./, they face the difficult task of distinquishing between submissions which they have previously read but which have not been posted, and submissions which they have previously read and which have not been posted.
When a slashdot reader detects dupes, he performs the easy task of recalling whether he has seen the same submission before.
So when identifying dupes, readers and editors perform diferent tasks. For readers, the taks of identifying duplicates is easy. For editors, the taks of identifying duplicates is difficult.
The solution would be for./ to employ a class of editors who did not have access to story submissions, who only edited to detect duplicates.
IMHO abuse about how stupid/lazy/drunken the slashdot editors is unfair and misdirected. They have a workflow problem.
The reasons stated in TFA for not showing films with evolutionary content do not make sense.
First, from a marketing standpoint, the decision not to run the film in markets where it is controversial seems exactly ass-backwards. Controversy sells. It is free advertising. And even when it is not free, advertisers still promote films by describing them as controversial: "The controversial new film....". People want to see controversial films even if they expect to disagree with the content. Two controversial recent films were _The Passion of the Christ_ and _Farenheit 9/11_. Both broke box-office records.
Second, it can only help the evolution camp to force the controvesy more into the open, to make it public. Creationism is a joke everywhere in the civilized world outside of the bible belt. If showing these films elicits public protest from the Creationists, then good; Those protests inform the rest of the world who and where are some stupid people. When you are in the right, and in the majority, then the best strategy is to force the issue, not to silently retreat.
My guesses about why these showings were nixed are: 1) The museum officials deciding not to show the films are secretly sympathetic to Creationism, and just looking for excuses 2) They are interpreting the screening results from the test audience in simplistic-marketing-droid style: happy audience=show film, unhappy audience=don't show film. 3) Incentives for Museum officials, as overseers of a non-profit institutions, might work against showing controversial films. The benefits and rewards for non-profit museums are different than for a business which makes money by selling movie tickets. Non-profits are averse to controversy because they have to deal with that controversy, while they have no financial incentive to fill seats, because they do not profit. For-profits, on the other hand, will do anything to sell seats, such as showing a controversial film.
The prevailing opinion here seems to be that this is a stupid story, because light pipes are old news. Two people have even been moderated up to +5 for posting links to light pipe vendors.
Light pipes are NOT the story here. Hybrid lighting is a NEW lighting system which separates the visible and IR components of sunlight, directing the visible components to room lighting and the IR components to thermo-voltaic generator, which stores electrical energy to light the room after the sun has gone down. Ordinary light pipes do not do that.
Q:How does a hybrid solar lighting (HSL) system work?
A:Imagine being able to light your home or office most of the day, and on most days, with sunlight, but not the kind that comes through the windows. That's what hybrid solar lighting (or HSL) systems are being developed to do. Prototype HSL systems are made up of roof-mounted concentrators that collect and separate the visible and infrared portions of sunlight. The visible portion of the light is distributed through large-diameter optical fibers to hybrid luminaires. (Hybrid luminaires are lighting fixtures that contain both electric lamps and fiber optics to distribute sunlight directly.) Unlike conventional electric lamps, the solar component of HSL produces little heat.
The remaining "invisible" energy in the sunlight, mostly infrared radiation, is directed to a concentrating thermo-photovoltaic (solar) cell that very efficiently converts infrared radiation into electricity. The resulting electric power can be directed to other uses in a building. When sunlight is plentiful, the fiber optics in the luminaires can provide all or most of the light needed in a particular area. But when there is little or no sunlight, sensor-controlled electric lamps turn on to maintain the desired illumination level.
Independent cost and performance models suggest the overall affordability of solar energy could be doubled or tripled by using this new hybrid approach. The multidisciplinary R&D effort involved in developing HSL includes several industrial and university partners. Other Resources:
" The technique works on the premise that 'neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors"
Interestingly, the retina exploits that same property of natural scenes to compress images. This correlation between luminance and color is an opportunity to throw out redundant information. The eye multiplexes color and luminance information over a single channel, transmitting luminance while discarding color at high spatial frequencies and transmitting color while discarding luminance at low spacial frequencies. First reported by C.R. Ingling, color/luminance multiplexing is an inherent property of the linear color-opponent center-surround receptive field. For a good explication of the subject, see:
Vision Res. 1985;25(1):33-8.
"The spatiotemporal properties of the r-g X-cell channel."
Ingling CR Jr, Martinez-Uriegas E.
Abstract: Analysis of the simple-opponent r-g receptive field of the X-channel shows that it is tuned to both high and low temporal frequencies, high and low spatial frequencies, and that its spectral sensitivity is both chromatic and achromatic.
"And all a lawyer would need for this would... a small office, a telephone, and... rent for $1000...
Sometimes I take my Powerbook down to the Starbucks on the corner of W4 and Washington Square East in Manhattan. Don't know the guy, but there is laywer who works out of there, cell phone, laptop, that's all he needs.
"High-resolution images are available for licensing for personal use and for professional reproduction through Photographic Services & Permissions."
Silver Sloth replied:
Libraries are free - as in speach. You want free as in beer.
Wrong. These images are not "free as in speach" [sic]. By the act of electronically duplicating images already in the public domain, the New York Public Library has re-established copyright on those images.
While the Silver Sloth raises an important issue, it gets the facts exactly wrong. Their copyrights have expired, but these images are neither free in the sense of beer nor free in the sense of freedom.
The test of whether a work is free as in "freedom" is this: Once I purchase one of these images for myself, am I restricted from redistributing it to others without charge. The NYPL states that you obtain a license to use these images, and that licenses are separate for personal or commercial use. This is NOT merely a fee for the service of providing you with a copy (beer), but rather a fee for license- and that license restricts your freedom by regulating how you may redistribute the image to others.
So Public libraries have a backdoor way to extend copyrights. Electronically duplicate the original image, on which the copyright has expired, then copyright the electronic duplicate. This must be the case, because the library clearly states that it licenses use of the scanned images. There could be no legal basis for a license except copyright.
You'd think the EFF would be all over this. I would REALLY like to see a legal test here. Someone please license a high-resolution image from the NYPL, then post the image file on your website for free download and alert the NYPL.
Worrying about 'if (!ptr)' vs 'if (ptr==NULL)' is not how you optimize code.
There are three steps to optimizing code:
1. Instrument your code to find out in what routines it is spending most of its time.
2. Optimize the places where it spends the time. Choose a better algorithm, do the work in the background if it suspends user interaction, precompute and do table lookup, substitue an approximation if that would suffice. There are many many tricks. Trying to second-guess the compiler is not one of them.
Keep in mind that the most valuable source of information about what your users want is the users themselves.
Advice from./ could provide a good starting point, but an iterative feedback and update process is essential to developing a great product.
If the developer has a good eye, sometimes he can provide feedback to himself on his own work. But often we become to familiar with our own work to see it as would the average user. Furthermore, your own background may be too dissimilar from that Mexican teachers and school child to judge on their behalf what constitues a good user experience.
Give students and teachers something, ask them what is working, what's not, what do they need that is not provided. Fix it. Repeat.
Ubiquitous internet access is the modern equivalent of an efficient rail system.
In the same way that the government can not run an efficient rail system, it also would not be an efficient provider of wireless internet access. The abysmal failure of Amtrak over decades is warning against giving government the authority to control our wireless internet access. Your description of goverment-funded private rail in Britain is another example of why government should stay out of the business of business.
For those unfamiliar with passenger rail service in the U.S: Amtrak is a quasi-governmental rail monopoly. It is illegal to for a private corporation to offer competing rail service. Amtrak charges more than airlines between the same destinations. It has been operating at about a $1 billion/year loss for decades. The tax payer covers that. Amtrak uses government power to direct funds to itself, far in excess of the value of services which it provides. At the same time, it uses governmental legal authority to shut out the high-tech competition which would provide better service at a lower price.
Government controlled wireless access would be the same thing; Poor service provided with outdated technology at excessive prices, with competitive choices legally prohibited. Everyone would be compelled by law to pay for it, regardless of whether or not you use yourself or even agree with it.
Is a monopoly on wireless internet access any more desirable than a monopoly on rail service or a monopoly on desktop operating systems ? No. A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because it's a government monopoly does not make it a good monopoly.
Perhaps the government shouldn't be responsible for roads. After all, not everyone uses them, and so people could just pay for the ones they use. Except that having decent roads makes it easier for people to get around, which has a knock-on benefit on all businesses in the area. Since these businesses have a greater turn-over, they can pay more taxes.
Your implication that if government does not control X, then X will be of poor quality is FALSE, and invalidates you conclusions that government control of wireless internet access would improve over non-coercive alternatives. Your argument does not in fact work for roads, and its failure to generalize beyond that is even more obvious. Just substitute X for roads, and it becomes clear what nonsense you speak:
Perhaps the government shouldn't be responsible for computers. After all, not everyone uses them, and so people could just pay for the ones they use. Except that having decent computers makes it easier for people communicate, which has a knock-on benefit on all businesses. Since these businesses have a greater turn-over, they can pay more taxes.
Therefore, the government should, like Apple, and Dell, get into the business of manufacturing and selling computers. And because it is tax-payer funded, everyone has to pay for a government computer, even if they would rather have a Mac. Government would control political discontent by outlawing Macs, shutting down the complaints. You can't convincingly complain about not having what does not exist. "Oh, but that wouldn't happen". It already does. It is a federal crime in the United States to compete with the U.S. postal service by providing first-class mail. In countries with nationalized phone service, it is illegal to use VOIP because it competes with the government monopoly. When government enters a market, it uses its power to outlaw competition. You think Microsoft is bad?
Only a few loudmouthed cranks are keeping the idea that "there really is debate on the issue" alive, in the sense you mean.
Indeed, and here are some of those cranks:
Chris Landsea contradicts public statements by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), denying any evidence that global warming increases hurricane activity, and makes a big show of it by resighing
Other cranks maintain that global climate change existed in the middle ages, before humans increased atmospheric CO2. (link might require free registration)
Fortunately, dissenters such as Landsea are either voluntarily surrendering their positions, or, as in the case of the editors of Climate Research mentinod in the second link, being forced out of their jobs for allowing the crank viewpoint into print.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is mirror.
Also, the local text background does not quite match the white background inside the window, leaving irritating gray blobs around the characters.
Valdrax wrote:
"There is a difference between politics and policy, and it is one that this administration has forgotten. Policy is a bottum-up decision making process based on unbiased facts. Politics is a top-down decision making process based on domga and belief."
In democracies, political outcomes determine policy. You have failed to understand the central concept of democracy: We the people decide the policy by our choice of leaders through the political process of elections. In democracy policy and politics are not independent but are interdependent.
Valdrax wrote:
" Policy is a bottum-up decision making process based on unbiased facts. "
Facts alone do not suffice to determine policy. Facts can not determine outcome in the absence of values.
Valdrax wrote:
"This President cares nothing for policy, only politics"
Having expounded on your own make-believe division between the politics and policy, you then employ it to impugn the President.
Valdrax wrote:
"which is evident in his inability to ever, EVER admit a mistake unless he can pin it on a subordinate."
If you want to evaluate presidents according to the number of mistakes to which they have admitted while in office, go for it. You can post the list of presidents and their admissions in followup. But you are not serious. Until the crackpot left brandished that accusation against Bush it was never heard, and it is not used outside of those attacks. Nobody seriously believes that presidents are required to furnish the opponents with arguments against themselves. Your accusation is unpersuasive.
Candiate A admits two mistakes. Candidate B admits three mistakes! Therefore candidate B is the better candidate. Riiiighhht. No wonder you guys lost.
Valdrax wrote:
"This is dirty politics at its worst. This is intended to make it hard for the opposition party to have any power by cutting off all of the richest funding through belligerent threats."
The only evidence you supplied of "belligerent threats" is accusations by Democrats that Republicans make threats. You are supporting left-wing propaganda by linking to... more left wing propaganda. For someone who throws around the expression "unbiased facts" you seem remarkably short of them yourself. Are Democratic congressmen a good source of "unbiased facts" on Republicans?" If not, then why are you basing your argument on biased facts? Is it because you are being top-down and political and basing your argument and dogma and belief? Maybe you should try admitting to some mistakes.
Valdrax wrote:
"This is not just. People who truly respect freedom try to compromise with their opponents and not bury them without giving them a voice."
Liberals have been in power for so long that they can't come to terms with their own defeat. They have lost the election, yet they still feel entitled to set the agenda. When a winning candidate seeks to enact the policies on which he campaigned, you refer to that as "burying the opposition without giving them a voice." You have a voice. What you don't have is a sitting president and control of congress.
Valdrax wrote:
"The Republicans' naked greed for power is just disgusting."
Well by "naked greed for power" you seem to mean the exercise of governmental authority to which they are entitled as elected officials. That you find that disgusting is convincing.
Guido von Guido (548827) wrote:
"Yes. For instance, you may recall that a large number of career diplomats were hired or appointed under Reagan and Bush '41 and were not fired by Clinton."
You may also recall that many U.S. Attorneys were hired by Reagan and the first president Bush over their combined 12 years in office and all 93 U.S. Attorneys working in the Justice Department were fired in a single day by Janet Reno on orders from President Clinton.
The spoils system is nothing new in the U.S. Those who claim that Bush's appointments to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission represent a new fascist stage in United States governance need to learn some history and get some perspective. "Travelgate" ring any bells?
And it is not clear that Bush's appointments to the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission are awarded as spoils. The President is choosing people to represent to foreign governments the views of his administration on, according to the Time article, "important issues... telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations". Seems to me that the President has a legitimate interest in appointing representatives who support his own views, and not the views of his opponent who lost the election. Is it reasonable for a President to rule out political opponents for appointment to Secretary of State? If so, then what is wrong with the same practice when selecting officials for the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission? Winning the election means that you run the executive branch. That means you set foreign policy. That means that when choosing people to represent that policy to foreign countries you choose people who you can trust to advance those views, not people who oppose you and support the policies of your opponent.
"Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally."
Are the data reproducible ? Are the conclusions logically supported by those data? Is the argument internally consistent? Are conclusions consistent with accepted facts uncovered by other methods? Can you devise a new experiment disproving the original conclusions? No need to trouble yourself with those difficult questions, when the correct criterion for deciding the validity of scientific arguments is the presumed financial motive of those funding the research.
By relying on the presumed biases of the funding source anyone can assess the validity of a scientific argument without having to read, understand, or even think.
In future years, Penguinconers will tour Detroit's lovely Africatown.
Let me [mis]translate you response:
Never question your government, because it always works in our best interest
Your creative use of "translate" to mean "make up lies about what I wrote" does not win you the point. It costs you one for disingenuousness. Explanation of why governments do not reveal weapons specifications (secrecy is a strategic advantage) does not imply that we should "Never question .. government, because it always works in our best interest."
"Show me the amazing technology. I'm paying for it. I demand it."
Revealing the vulnerabilities of weapons to the enemy undermines the effectiveness of those weapons. You do not admit that point, you draw attention from it. Like dummy warheads, you throw out "Never question your government" and righteous proclamations "I'm paying for it. I demand it." Well, you are paying for the CIA. Should it reveal the names of its spies to you, so that you can check up on them? The FBI keeps private information on government officials collected during background checks. Should it reveal that information to you, so you can check up?" Should personal information about individuals before grand juries be made public because you need to check up?Sometimes governments should keep secrets and sometimes they should not. One of the jobs of democracy is to work out when to do which. It is a complicated question. Your angry and simple-minded insistence on the absolutism that government must always do one or always the other reveals your own mental limits; You can not conceive of the complex system of many choices in many circumstances, of different needs for secrecy and openness in different cases.
Your conclusion relies on the false dichotomy that government must always be open or always secret: If we allow some secrecy in weapons specifications then we may "never question government". Allowing simultaneous possibilities both of some secret weapons specifications and the questioning of government in other circumstances, your argument disintegrates. Discussing specifically the the tradeoffs of weapons secrecy vs. openness, you have nothing to say on that subject. You have not weighed those tradeoffs in the case of ballistic missile defense, but instead sullenly refused to acknowledge benefits of secrecy while substituting absolutist demands for valuation of openness.
Just like with computer protection, you test your system with someone that is actively trying to defeat it. I don't see the US military doing this.
Hey genius, if the U.S. missle sheild has anti-spoofing technology they will not tell you. If the NSA can crack 256-bit encryption, they will not tell you. Informing the enemy that you can defeat their weapons causes them to modify their weapons so that you can not. Telling the enemy that you can not defeat their system makes them more confident of victory, and encourages them to attack you. The performance of weapons is classified for a reason. It's a strategic advantage to keep the enemy in the dark about your capabilities. The less he knows about your weapons, the worse his predictions, and hence the worse his battle planning. He knows this.
Now that the U.N. has put an end to genocide in Darfur, cured AIDS in Africa, ended poverty in third-world countries and resolved global conflicts with peaceful solutions, it is time to move on to the problem of SPAM.
I, for one, welcome our new U.N. overlords.
That Wall Street Journal had an even better editorial on Monday.
According to the article, the campaign finance "reform" movement to limit our first amendment rights did not have broad-based politcial support. Instead, McCain-Feingold was the product of a secret $123 million astroturfing conspiracy run by the Pew foundation and seven other foundations. Like the super villians in a James Bond spy novel, Sean Treglia of the Pew Foundation, could not stop himself from bragging about how brilliantly was their evil scheme succeeding.
I know, at first, that sounds like crackpot stuff, but the WSJ seems to have its facts in order here.
"You don't have to be the fastest member of the crowd, just faster than the slowest member."
You are assuming that a T-Rex is full after eating one person and would stop.
Generally, for predators which consume n people per meal, to survive you must be at slowest the n+1 slowest person.
Says Giant Space Hamster:
"Perhaps a compromise of a limited-time monopoly would be best. Cable companies get a 5-year monopoly on new networks, and afterwards must open them up to competition."
That would be meddlesome and unnecessary. In the absence of coercive barriers to entry, all monopolies are self-limiting. High profits earned by a monopolist are powerful incentive for competitors to enter a monopolized market.
If I sell a FooWidget2000, which cost me $1.00, for $100.00 on ebay today, then tomorrow someone will sell a BarWidget2000 for $99.00. And the next day? My monopoly and my high prices are quickly eroded by competitors who, also pursing high profits, undercut me and offer better bargains to the consumer . The successful monopolist is quickly replaced by a competitive market. High profits cause low profits by attracting competition for high profits. Notice that no government intervention or other central direction is required to end my monopoly and drive down prices. The trend against monopoly is an emergent property of a system of buyers and sellers acting in their own interests. Emergent properties of markets are what socialist types ridicule as "trusting to the random process of the marketplace".
As a monopolist, the only way I can sustain monopoly pricing is to co-opt government power to prevent competitors from entering the market and undercutting me. Amtrak and the U.S. Post office do this by explicit legal bans on competition. If I deliver first-class mail, I go to jail, it's the law. Microsoft maintains a monopoly by use of bogus patents. Show me a long-term monopoly and I will show you a government corrupted to perpetuate that monopoly by obstructing competition.
In a free market, with no government barriers to entry, all monopolies are temporary. The greater the profits received by that monopoly, the greater the incentive for others to enter the market.
Government need not legislate competition. The profit motive causes competition without the need for legislation. What its advocated call "regulated competition" is actually an attempt to enlist the coercive power of government for their own financial benefit. In the case of regulated competition of cable internet services, competitors attempt to seize infrastructure from its owners. In a competitive system, those wishing to compete with a cable provider would do so by constructing a competing network, not by enlisting government to seize existing networks on their behalf.
To the extent that monopoly pricing compensates for the risk of speculative investment, monopolies serve the public interest by rewarding invention. A monopolist could maintain his monopoly by providing high value to the customer; accepting low profits and providing good service; when a free market sustains a monopoly, it does so at no cost to the consumer.
"To be honest, I don't particularly like reading posts about stupid/lazy/drunken /. editors and so I was a hypocrite posting one myself, but I almost feel that it's a form of civil disobedience aimed at encouraging the owners to change /. for the better. It's either that or stop visiting, but +5 posts abusing /. editors in duped threads should get the point across a little more directly than dwindling readership."
Point taken. I should not have implied that crticism is unwarranted. It would have been better had I written that criticism was "inaccurate" instead of "unfair"."It takes 10 minutes a day, max, to scan the headlines OF THE SITE YOUR JOB IT IS TO EDIT. Timothy obviously does not read this site. So WTF? Could we possibly get an editor that takes his job seriously?"
Here is why slashdot editors post dupes and how to fix it.
Slashdot editors pick topics to post on the site from a vast pool of submissions. When recalling if a submissin has appeared on ./, they face the difficult task of distinquishing between submissions which they have previously read but which have not been posted, and submissions which they have previously read and which have not been posted.
When a slashdot reader detects dupes, he performs the easy task of recalling whether he has seen the same submission before.
So when identifying dupes, readers and editors perform diferent tasks. For readers, the taks of identifying duplicates is easy. For editors, the taks of identifying duplicates is difficult.
The solution would be for ./ to employ a class of editors who did not have access to story submissions, who only edited to detect duplicates.
IMHO abuse about how stupid/lazy/drunken the slashdot editors is unfair and misdirected. They have a workflow problem.
The Wall Street Journal has a short history of the hocky stick dispute here here. (free registration)
The reasons stated in TFA for not showing films with evolutionary content do not make sense.
First, from a marketing standpoint, the decision not to run the film in markets where it is controversial seems exactly ass-backwards. Controversy sells. It is free advertising. And even when it is not free, advertisers still promote films by describing them as controversial: "The controversial new film....". People want to see controversial films even if they expect to disagree with the content. Two controversial recent films were _The Passion of the Christ_ and _Farenheit 9/11_. Both broke box-office records.
Second, it can only help the evolution camp to force the controvesy more into the open, to make it public. Creationism is a joke everywhere in the civilized world outside of the bible belt. If showing these films elicits public protest from the Creationists, then good; Those protests inform the rest of the world who and where are some stupid people. When you are in the right, and in the majority, then the best strategy is to force the issue, not to silently retreat.
My guesses about why these showings were nixed are:
1) The museum officials deciding not to show the films are secretly sympathetic to Creationism, and just looking for excuses
2) They are interpreting the screening results from the test audience in simplistic-marketing-droid style: happy audience=show film, unhappy audience=don't show film.
3) Incentives for Museum officials, as overseers of a non-profit institutions, might work against showing controversial films. The benefits and rewards for non-profit museums are different than for a business which makes money by selling movie tickets. Non-profits are averse to controversy because they have to deal with that controversy, while they have no financial incentive to fill seats, because they do not profit. For-profits, on the other hand, will do anything to sell seats, such as showing a controversial film.
You can learn more about the Amish on their website.
The prevailing opinion here seems to be that this is a stupid story, because light pipes are old news. Two people have even been moderated up to +5 for posting links to light pipe vendors.
Light pipes are NOT the story here. Hybrid lighting is a NEW lighting system which separates the visible and IR components of sunlight, directing the visible components to room lighting and the IR components to thermo-voltaic generator, which stores electrical energy to light the room after the sun has gone down. Ordinary light pipes do not do that.
From the U.S. Department of Energy Solar FAQ:
Q:How does a hybrid solar lighting (HSL) system work?
A:Imagine being able to light your home or office most of the day, and on most days, with sunlight, but not the kind that comes through the windows. That's what hybrid solar lighting (or HSL) systems are being developed to do. Prototype HSL systems are made up of roof-mounted concentrators that collect and separate the visible and infrared portions of sunlight. The visible portion of the light is distributed through large-diameter optical fibers to hybrid luminaires. (Hybrid luminaires are lighting fixtures that contain both electric lamps and fiber optics to distribute sunlight directly.) Unlike conventional electric lamps, the solar component of HSL produces little heat.
The remaining "invisible" energy in the sunlight, mostly infrared radiation, is directed to a concentrating thermo-photovoltaic (solar) cell that very efficiently converts infrared radiation into electricity. The resulting electric power can be directed to other uses in a building. When sunlight is plentiful, the fiber optics in the luminaires can provide all or most of the light needed in a particular area. But when there is little or no sunlight, sensor-controlled electric lamps turn on to maintain the desired illumination level.
Independent cost and performance models suggest the overall affordability of solar energy could be doubled or tripled by using this new hybrid approach. The multidisciplinary R&D effort involved in developing HSL includes several industrial and university partners. Other Resources:
" The technique works on the premise that 'neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors"
Interestingly, the retina exploits that same property of natural scenes to compress images. This correlation between luminance and color is an opportunity to throw out redundant information. The eye multiplexes color and luminance information over a single channel, transmitting luminance while discarding color at high spatial frequencies and transmitting color while discarding luminance at low spacial frequencies. First reported by C.R. Ingling, color/luminance multiplexing is an inherent property of the linear color-opponent center-surround receptive field. For a good explication of the subject, see:
Vision Res. 1985;25(1):33-8."The spatiotemporal properties of the r-g X-cell channel."
Ingling CR Jr, Martinez-Uriegas E.
Abstract: Analysis of the simple-opponent r-g receptive field of the X-channel shows that it is tuned to both high and low temporal frequencies, high and low spatial frequencies, and that its spectral sensitivity is both chromatic and achromatic.
"And all a lawyer would need for this would ... a small office, a telephone, and ... rent for $1000...
Sometimes I take my Powerbook down to the Starbucks on the corner of W4 and Washington Square East in Manhattan. Don't know the guy, but there is laywer who works out of there, cell phone, laptop, that's all he needs.
AC wrote:
"High-resolution images are available for licensing for personal use and for professional reproduction through Photographic Services & Permissions."
Silver Sloth replied:
Libraries are free - as in speach. You want free as in beer.
Wrong. These images are not "free as in speach" [sic]. By the act of electronically duplicating images already in the public domain, the New York Public Library has re-established copyright on those images.
While the Silver Sloth raises an important issue, it gets the facts exactly wrong. Their copyrights have expired, but these images are neither free in the sense of beer nor free in the sense of freedom.
The test of whether a work is free as in "freedom" is this: Once I purchase one of these images for myself, am I restricted from redistributing it to others without charge. The NYPL states that you obtain a license to use these images, and that licenses are separate for personal or commercial use. This is NOT merely a fee for the service of providing you with a copy (beer), but rather a fee for license- and that license restricts your freedom by regulating how you may redistribute the image to others.
So Public libraries have a backdoor way to extend copyrights. Electronically duplicate the original image, on which the copyright has expired, then copyright the electronic duplicate. This must be the case, because the library clearly states that it licenses use of the scanned images. There could be no legal basis for a license except copyright.
You'd think the EFF would be all over this. I would REALLY like to see a legal test here. Someone please license a high-resolution image from the NYPL, then post the image file on your website for free download and alert the NYPL.
Worrying about 'if (!ptr)' vs 'if (ptr==NULL)' is not how you optimize code.
There are three steps to optimizing code:
1. Instrument your code to find out in what routines it is spending most of its time.
2. Optimize the places where it spends the time. Choose a better algorithm, do the work in the background if it suspends user interaction, precompute and do table lookup, substitue an approximation if that would suffice. There are many many tricks. Trying to second-guess the compiler is not one of them.
3. Goto 1.
Keep in mind that the most valuable source of information about what your users want is the users themselves.
./ could provide a good starting point, but an iterative feedback and update process is essential to developing a great product.
Advice from
If the developer has a good eye, sometimes he can provide feedback to himself on his own work. But often we become to familiar with our own work to see it as would the average user. Furthermore, your own background may be too dissimilar from that Mexican teachers and school child to judge on their behalf what constitues a good user experience.
Give students and teachers something, ask them what is working, what's not, what do they need that is not provided. Fix it. Repeat.
Ubiquitous internet access is the modern equivalent of an efficient rail system.
In the same way that the government can not run an efficient rail system, it also would not be an efficient provider of wireless internet access. The abysmal failure of Amtrak over decades is warning against giving government the authority to control our wireless internet access. Your description of goverment-funded private rail in Britain is another example of why government should stay out of the business of business.
For those unfamiliar with passenger rail service in the U.S: Amtrak is a quasi-governmental rail monopoly. It is illegal to for a private corporation to offer competing rail service. Amtrak charges more than airlines between the same destinations. It has been operating at about a $1 billion/year loss for decades. The tax payer covers that. Amtrak uses government power to direct funds to itself, far in excess of the value of services which it provides. At the same time, it uses governmental legal authority to shut out the high-tech competition which would provide better service at a lower price.
Government controlled wireless access would be the same thing; Poor service provided with outdated technology at excessive prices, with competitive choices legally prohibited. Everyone would be compelled by law to pay for it, regardless of whether or not you use yourself or even agree with it.
Is a monopoly on wireless internet access any more desirable than a monopoly on rail service or a monopoly on desktop operating systems ? No. A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because it's a government monopoly does not make it a good monopoly.
Perhaps the government shouldn't be responsible for roads. After all, not everyone uses them, and so people could just pay for the ones they use. Except that having decent roads makes it easier for people to get around, which has a knock-on benefit on all businesses in the area. Since these businesses have a greater turn-over, they can pay more taxes.
Your implication that if government does not control X, then X will be of poor quality is FALSE, and invalidates you conclusions that government control of wireless internet access would improve over non-coercive alternatives. Your argument does not in fact work for roads, and its failure to generalize beyond that is even more obvious. Just substitute X for roads, and it becomes clear what nonsense you speak:
Perhaps the government shouldn't be responsible for computers. After all, not everyone uses them, and so people could just pay for the ones they use. Except that having decent computers makes it easier for people communicate, which has a knock-on benefit on all businesses. Since these businesses have a greater turn-over, they can pay more taxes.
Therefore, the government should, like Apple, and Dell, get into the business of manufacturing and selling computers. And because it is tax-payer funded, everyone has to pay for a government computer, even if they would rather have a Mac. Government would control political discontent by outlawing Macs, shutting down the complaints. You can't convincingly complain about not having what does not exist. "Oh, but that wouldn't happen". It already does. It is a federal crime in the United States to compete with the U.S. postal service by providing first-class mail. In countries with nationalized phone service, it is illegal to use VOIP because it competes with the government monopoly. When government enters a market, it uses its power to outlaw competition. You think Microsoft is bad?Only a few loudmouthed cranks are keeping the idea that "there really is debate on the issue" alive, in the sense you mean.
Indeed, and here are some of those cranks:
Chris Landsea contradicts public statements by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), denying any evidence that global warming increases hurricane activity, and makes a big show of it by resighing
Other cranks maintain that global climate change existed in the middle ages, before humans increased atmospheric CO2. (link might require free registration)
Fortunately, dissenters such as Landsea are either voluntarily surrendering their positions, or, as in the case of the editors of Climate Research mentinod in the second link, being forced out of their jobs for allowing the crank viewpoint into print.