"Silence gives consent" is how all search engines operate on the net
(*). It's a core value of Google without which it could not have
existed as a successful company.
The problem here is that Google's mission
is supposedly to index all the world's information, but when that information
doesn't naturally live on the net, the core values are incompatible. Hence
the clash with books (copyright issues) and the clash with street view (privacy issues), and there will be clashes in every other area of life where information doesn't normally follow the internet rules of openness and unlimited shareability.
As long as Google's mission remains this ambitious, they'll continue to piss off a lot of
people over time every time they hit the natural limits of their philosophy. But if they change their mission to something more realistic, they have to acknowledge that there's going to be limits to their growth and the markets that they can enter while playing up their strengths.
(*) The robot exclusion protocol was a response to this, but it's never been more than an ethical guideline.
The advantages of plain text vs binary are quite well understood. One of the things they depend on is the purpose of the
file format. For archival purposes, plain text is superior. For short term data that must be processed quickly, binary is superior. Logs fall clearly in the archival camp, unless you intend to keep them only for a short time (eg a week or a month).
What has always bothered me about that, besides the obvious conspiracy
theories, is that he effectively allowed that accusation to take form.
You're an idiot. That's not how character assassination works. The reason it works is that the enemies sit down and review an existing profile of the victim, and then twist some convenient detail they find into something bad. That works with anybody, because the details of the "bad" can always be different and always tailored to the one individual.
So you've got it entirely backwards. It's not that he should have been careful to protect himself against a rape allegation, it's that some allegation was tailored to fit him, and here it just happened to be rape. If he had been a eunuch, it could have been a gambling allegation, or maybe that he stole money from someone who they could convince or pay to say that, or any number of other things.
That doesn't help much. Academic subject specific circles tend to be
small. If you're a subject matter expert who's been around a while
then you can recognize your colleagues by their paper writing style.
You don't need to see their name on the document. Another giveaway is
the list of references usually.
Nope. Fiat money has whatever value the government says it has, no more no less. Time value of money is unrelated. Fiat money is backed by military/police force, essentially: the money has value because and only because people with guns can force you to accept the value as real.
Look at a $1 bill, and read the message "this note is legal tender for all debts public and private". Physically it's just a worthless piece of paper, but the government is telling you in no uncertain terms to pretend that it has $1 value.
But money *is* created out of nothing. The modern international system is based on fiat money. It can literally grow forever (but not without social consequences).
Why introduce that strawman? They're not trying to become a country, they're trying to put a ship in international waters, which is not exactly a novel idea.
I think the principle is sound. Entrepreneurs can go from their own country to the ship and back to their own country. If those entrepreneurs have a US business visa, they can make trips to Silicon Valley much more often and cheaply from the ship, than the equivalent trip from their homeland by airplane.
Technically, there's no immigration issue with the ship idea that doesn't already apply also when people travel by airplane from their home country. Getting the business visas will be exaclty the same as before, there are per country quotas etc.
All this does is reduce the cost and distance of an international business trip so that it can be done a lot more frequently and with fewer delays.
Of course, what's even quicker/cheaper is to communicate electronically with email/video, but there's no human contact in that case.
Unless a car accident left you only two fingers, you probably teach counting in decimal, not binary. That would be an argument for using base 10 logarithms, but in actual fact the mathematical models where information theory plays a major role are expressed using exponentials and natural logarithms.
Unfortunately, standard of living is not something that stays fixed throughout the centuries. You're comparing today's standard of living (in units of "standard of living today") with past standard of living (also in units of "standard of living today", and that doesn't work).
For example, you talk about cars and better food, but those ideas don't apply well to kings in the past. What's the point of a car today? They're necessary to drive to the supermarket, the school, to work, etc. But a king never did his own grocery shopping, the school (tutor) came to him, his work was literally wherever he was standing at the time.
The point is if a king had been given a car and was expected to use it for his daily business, his standard of living would have gone down, not up. Some kings used cars for the fun factor/novelty factor like a toy, but that doesn't increase the standard of living, except in the sense that any toy does. Kings did use horses, but mostly for fun, and they didn't have to put hay in them or find a suitable parking spot.
Similarly, we generally live in societies with few servants today. We do many things ourselves, and we have appliances like fridges that help us to do things ourselves. That's a large drop in the standard of living, if measured by victorian times for example, when personal servants were common.
There's also the general crowdedness of the world. We live in cities packed like rats compared with people during the middle ages. That's a huge drop in standard of living that's only partially offset by small luxuries from technology. If a time traveller from the middle ages appeared in the modern world, they would feel sick by the high level of noise and crowdedness, and having self flushing toilets would only count as a small improvement if at all (during the middle ages, people generally peed and crapped wherever they liked, but today we hold it in until we find a bathroom - that's a loss of freedom and an inconvenience when compared with the past, even if the end result is much more sanitary).
Eh? You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The revolutionary
ideals were real and affected all Frenchmen (and later abroad, too).
This was codified in the declaration
of rights as early as 1789, and survived in various forms to the
present day, even through all the reactionary counterattacks over
time.
Not everybody grew rich, but that's generally
impossible. What does matter however is that those who grew rich as a
result of the various revolutions were not the same as those who were
rich previously. I believe that's the essence of what keeps a society
away from decadence and oppression. And the ancien regime was much too
rigid to allow the social mobility that was necessary for that to
occur.
In fact, since you mention bankers, the immediate catalyst for 1789 was
Louis XVI's money problems, which caused him to summon the Etats Generaux,
to raise new taxes. This would have worked except that people revolted because
the new revolutionary ideals were already spreading in people's minds.
They wouldn't have to know;-) Every day, one or two actual rails could go "missing" and maybe the bullet train itself breaks down a lot, and it's always some *different* part number that's broken and must be replaced...
As it happens, my cousin Vinny is looking to branch out into the rail industry.
Sort of. One man cannot bring ideals to a continent literally. By successfully conquering Europe and imposing France's laws abroad for approximately one generation, the ancien regime throughout the continent was weakened and the middle classes everywhere were empowered.
Napoleon was only a general, but without his successful conquests the Revolutionary legacy would certainly not have lasted much beyond the Terror years and only in France. If the Bourbon Restoration had happened before 1800, it would have been a disaster.
Just to expand on this slightly: The Napoleon in your link is Napoleon III, the bumbling fool who fancied himself a military genius but pretty much lost all his major war adventures. He was nothing like Napoleon I, who lived 50 years earlier, and brought the ideals of the French revolution to all of Europe.
There's nothing wrong with memorizing logarithmic tables. Logarithms are extremely useful for converting multiplication/division (hard) into addition/subtraction (easier). What, you think in earlier centuries, they should have just given indian kids a battery powered pocket calculator?
Lighten up. The OP comment was
"What's ironic [is] Toy Story is old-hat [...] when this new short film is done in stop motion and Toy Story is computer
animated."
That's a dated comment that was true in the 90s when computer animated films were state of the art and stop motion was 60s tech in comparison.
Today, computer animation itself is old hat and the new new thing is 3d, but ironically stop motion was always more 3d than 90s computer animation since the puppets are actual real objects, and the lighting/shadows/details/environment of the stop motion scenes are richer than 90s computer animation (and to some people, richer than Avatar-like animation too).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that Google's mission is supposedly to index all the world's information, but when that information doesn't naturally live on the net, the core values are incompatible. Hence the clash with books (copyright issues) and the clash with street view (privacy issues), and there will be clashes in every other area of life where information doesn't normally follow the internet rules of openness and unlimited shareability.
As long as Google's mission remains this ambitious, they'll continue to piss off a lot of people over time every time they hit the natural limits of their philosophy. But if they change their mission to something more realistic, they have to acknowledge that there's going to be limits to their growth and the markets that they can enter while playing up their strengths.
(*) The robot exclusion protocol was a response to this, but it's never been more than an ethical guideline.
Your experience? Oh do tell!
What are the modern Philbies, Macleans, Burgesses and Blunts up to these days?
The advantages of plain text vs binary are quite well understood. One of the things they depend on is the purpose of the file format. For archival purposes, plain text is superior. For short term data that must be processed quickly, binary is superior. Logs fall clearly in the archival camp, unless you intend to keep them only for a short time (eg a week or a month).
You're an idiot. That's not how character assassination works. The reason it works is that the enemies sit down and review an existing profile of the victim, and then twist some convenient detail they find into something bad. That works with anybody, because the details of the "bad" can always be different and always tailored to the one individual.
So you've got it entirely backwards. It's not that he should have been careful to protect himself against a rape allegation, it's that some allegation was tailored to fit him, and here it just happened to be rape. If he had been a eunuch, it could have been a gambling allegation, or maybe that he stole money from someone who they could convince or pay to say that, or any number of other things.
That doesn't help much. Academic subject specific circles tend to be small. If you're a subject matter expert who's been around a while then you can recognize your colleagues by their paper writing style. You don't need to see their name on the document. Another giveaway is the list of references usually.
Look at a $1 bill, and read the message "this note is legal tender for all debts public and private". Physically it's just a worthless piece of paper, but the government is telling you in no uncertain terms to pretend that it has $1 value.
But money *is* created out of nothing. The modern international system is based on fiat money. It can literally grow forever (but not without social consequences).
I think the principle is sound. Entrepreneurs can go from their own country to the ship and back to their own country. If those entrepreneurs have a US business visa, they can make trips to Silicon Valley much more often and cheaply from the ship, than the equivalent trip from their homeland by airplane.
Technically, there's no immigration issue with the ship idea that doesn't already apply also when people travel by airplane from their home country. Getting the business visas will be exaclty the same as before, there are per country quotas etc.
All this does is reduce the cost and distance of an international business trip so that it can be done a lot more frequently and with fewer delays. Of course, what's even quicker/cheaper is to communicate electronically with email/video, but there's no human contact in that case.
Unless a car accident left you only two fingers, you probably teach counting in decimal, not binary. That would be an argument for using base 10 logarithms, but in actual fact the mathematical models where information theory plays a major role are expressed using exponentials and natural logarithms.
"Touch me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only bloke."
It's often more convenient to use nats rather than bits in information theory. Bits are more convenient in CS applications instead.
Did you even follow the thread? The question is do we today live better than kings used to live in the past? See this comment.
Spoons were shovels invented by Hobbits, who lived 94,000 to 13,000 years ago.
For example, you talk about cars and better food, but those ideas don't apply well to kings in the past. What's the point of a car today? They're necessary to drive to the supermarket, the school, to work, etc. But a king never did his own grocery shopping, the school (tutor) came to him, his work was literally wherever he was standing at the time.
The point is if a king had been given a car and was expected to use it for his daily business, his standard of living would have gone down, not up. Some kings used cars for the fun factor/novelty factor like a toy, but that doesn't increase the standard of living, except in the sense that any toy does. Kings did use horses, but mostly for fun, and they didn't have to put hay in them or find a suitable parking spot.
Similarly, we generally live in societies with few servants today. We do many things ourselves, and we have appliances like fridges that help us to do things ourselves. That's a large drop in the standard of living, if measured by victorian times for example, when personal servants were common.
There's also the general crowdedness of the world. We live in cities packed like rats compared with people during the middle ages. That's a huge drop in standard of living that's only partially offset by small luxuries from technology. If a time traveller from the middle ages appeared in the modern world, they would feel sick by the high level of noise and crowdedness, and having self flushing toilets would only count as a small improvement if at all (during the middle ages, people generally peed and crapped wherever they liked, but today we hold it in until we find a bathroom - that's a loss of freedom and an inconvenience when compared with the past, even if the end result is much more sanitary).
Not everybody grew rich, but that's generally impossible. What does matter however is that those who grew rich as a result of the various revolutions were not the same as those who were rich previously. I believe that's the essence of what keeps a society away from decadence and oppression. And the ancien regime was much too rigid to allow the social mobility that was necessary for that to occur.
In fact, since you mention bankers, the immediate catalyst for 1789 was Louis XVI's money problems, which caused him to summon the Etats Generaux, to raise new taxes. This would have worked except that people revolted because the new revolutionary ideals were already spreading in people's minds.
You mean like in this documentary from 1988?
Ah, is that it? I always thought the reason is they'll punch you in the face if you try to write on them in with a ballpoint pen.
As it happens, my cousin Vinny is looking to branch out into the rail industry.
Napoleon was only a general, but without his successful conquests the Revolutionary legacy would certainly not have lasted much beyond the Terror years and only in France. If the Bourbon Restoration had happened before 1800, it would have been a disaster.
Just to expand on this slightly: The Napoleon in your link is Napoleon III, the bumbling fool who fancied himself a military genius but pretty much lost all his major war adventures. He was nothing like Napoleon I, who lived 50 years earlier, and brought the ideals of the French revolution to all of Europe.
There's nothing wrong with memorizing logarithmic tables. Logarithms are extremely useful for converting multiplication/division (hard) into addition/subtraction (easier). What, you think in earlier centuries, they should have just given indian kids a battery powered pocket calculator?
Today, computer animation itself is old hat and the new new thing is 3d, but ironically stop motion was always more 3d than 90s computer animation since the puppets are actual real objects, and the lighting/shadows/details/environment of the stop motion scenes are richer than 90s computer animation (and to some people, richer than Avatar-like animation too).
Toy Story isn't 3d, but stop-motion animation arguably is...
Yup, but it was still in the Archie and Veronica comics reading stage...
This is a subthread about the claim that icons are faster to process than text. It's not my main argument.