I'd like to see CD volume sales figures from this spring. If the RIAA is to be believed, the 2 order of magnitude decrease in Napster usage should translate into a CD sale increase. Granted it won't be proof of causation, but the short time of the change will rule out the long-term market fluctuations which distorted data about CD sales as Napster rose to power over 2 years.
My bet is on no significant change, and I'd love to see a decrease.
The higher ups aren't the ones doing the dying, but they're the ones calling the shots. Some of the brass spends their entire lives preparing for war, and you can bet that can sometimes create a desire to have one. They want to prove themselves, their theories, their plans, it's human nature.
Naturally this isn't a generalization about everyone in the upper echelons.
When the trial came around, they screwed up big time. They pissed everyone at the DOJ off and the result was that they did alot worse than they might have if they had played the game.
Gates and crew live in an isolated world in which they perceive themselves as invincible because there is noone who is going to tell them otherwise. As a result, they and reality are starting to become dissociated and the result is that some of the things they come out and tell us appear to be infantile and stupid.
Yes I think the execs at MS are arrogant enough to think crap like this might work. The sad part is, we have enough PHB's that it might.
Every time rights get trampled, it starts with a fairly reasonable restriction that is approved without thought of the consequence.
So the big deal is not this case, typo squatting for porn is something we'd all be better off without. Rather it's the consequences that you alude to regarding parody, and a dozen other cases that could be dreamt of once the precedent was set.
What a perfect example of a steamy moist pile of bullshit. As rob points out, an overwhelming number of linux boxes are probably installed overtop of the grave of a windows installation. You can't buy a computer *without* windows from many of these places.
Then there's the homebuilt faction, and I'm sure a hugely disproportionate number of linux servers as opposed to windows boxes are made from mobo's and CPU's.
This is a textbook example of how not to do statistics.
He's NOT SAYING THE PAIN ISN'T REAL. So get off your high horses and read the damned article.
He's saying that for some people, the pain, WHICH IS REAL, does not necessarily have an entirely physiological cause. Namely, nothing is wrong in the arm, but they still hurt because they've heard about RSI.
Is it still debilitating? yes. Should they still be treated? yes. But the point is that the enormous media coverage itself may be causing the problem in many people.
If so, it's important to discuss this as a possible problem, instead of blindly bashing the author.
He's right when he says that pain perception is a very complicated issue and the brain has alot of control in what it perceives as pain.
So can we stop flaming and start thinking for a second?
As much a fan as I am of nature and the wonders it's created, I can't help but think it could have done a better job on neural tissue. Specifically, the speed at which impulses are conducted could probably be muchly improved where our systems to be redesigned from scratch.
So yes, I think computers are faster, and in the end will be able to outperform our wet systems, if we can only figure out how to do it.
In an age of pushing the envelope where even "compatible" mobo/CPU combos can be unstable because of manufacturing deficits we now add an additional source of strain to the hardware.
As much as we rave about Linux here, I use a particular video card with TV inputs for my research and the video input and editing capabilities are only available on Windows.
Based on analysis of a QuakeIII server over two months in early 2001, first person shooter (FPS) game players strongly prefer servers that are within 150 milliseconds of the player's attachment point to the Internet. Or put another way, if you are planning on hosting a for-fee FPS server service, you should forget about trying to get customers who are more than 150 milliseconds away from your servers. Sections of the Internet more than 150 milliseconds away will provide a minimal source of regular players (and hence minimal revenue).
I fail to see how this indicates some kind of acceptable limit. A similar study done 2 years ago might have reached exactly the same kind of conclusion for 200 msec. Within a year, it might yield 100 msec.
All this tells us is that most players succeed at getting 150msec pings if they can. It doesn't tell us whether they find this number satisfying. If they were unable to play at 150, they might very well be happy playing at 200 or 250.
So this doesn't tell a potential service provider anything beyond the current status of the internet's average ping times. And such data will be useless in a year.
What would demonstrate his point would be players who didn't know what their ping was, and were able to switch between servers with known pings in a controlled situation (50/100/150/200... for example). One could then watch where the players end up, if you saw no difference between the 50 and 100 ping servers, you could *then* conclude that players were satisfied with 100 and saw no need to try to get to 50.
Iomega couldn't make a system that transferred 10 megabytes in 5 minutes over a parallel port without consuming 95% of the resources on a pentium 300 system and now they expect me to trust that they can do a 20 gig drive?
I'm sure other lifeforms would do a better job of preventing galactic pollution, and not overtaxing available resources...
We're probably, on the whole, no more or less concerned with pollution than other races. You have zero information about them, so why would you say something like this?
Or did it just sound like a nice PC thing to throw in at the end?:)
You say (heavily paraphrased) that if I took a set of data and rearranged them according to some mathematical transform that reveals a previously obscured relationship (a principal components analysis for example), that this is creativity.
Then you tell us that a computer program cannot be considered creative.
Now I'm not here to discuss whether Aaron is creative, but your own definition of creativity needs alot of work if you wish to discount computer programs, because what you described is the *precise purpose* of many statistical algorithms.
The "intent" of such an algorithm could be to find a set of dimensions that capture the variance of the data.
And what is this grand "context problem" problem you speak of?
Sure it goes down eventually once the pipe dreams run out. But at least they were well funded in the beginning. Biotech would then have to rely on government funding until such time as the technology approached a more usable level, when the private funding would pick up again.
I find the descriptions of biology as nanotech (or vice versa) very apt. It's something few people seem to remember at times. Alot of nanotech issues have been handled already in our very own bodies. The immune system is an excellent attempt at a distributed control system for a complex, task oriented system with microscopic components. The grey ooze analog in biology (cancer) is carefully kept in check with a huge array of failsafes (which, regrettably, can all fail given a large enough sample).
Not only are we going to be importing strictly biological solutions to our technology, but I expect we will also be importing biological ideas.
For example, I expect that as nanotech develops, we will find it necessary to create a global "immune system" composed of nanotech dust that recognizes and eliminates non-certified nanotech organisms. I cannot imagine nanotech being safe without such an implementation, just as a person without an immune system cannot survive. It would be too easy for a nanotech organism to develop and begin replication.
There are also an enormous amount of information processing lessons that the brain can teach us. We have local control of some circuits where speed is essential, giving way to higher level(and slower) commands for more complex tasks. Another lesson is to have multiple systems to attempt to handle a problem several different ways simultaneously, and giving control to the best of them for a particular task.
From my personal experience, as well as observations of others, people always tend to overestimate their "average" hours per week. They'll(I'll:)) have a solid week of 10 hours per day, then spend the next month telling people they work 10 hours per day while they are actually pulling 7 or 8 ever since. People are bad at estimating quantities like this because they overemphasize the outliers.
Also, they don't want to look lazy:)
Then of course while people are "at work" they often "don't work", adding a further amount of useless variance.
But for the sake of completeness, I'll respond. I work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, no holidays and I never get sick.
Tim Hickey was a great teacher wasn't he Zach? While I missed the application specific parts of CS, our theory-heavy department at Brandeis did a great job of making us into great programmers in any arena, provided we had the time to learn the language.
I had no idea what scheme was, having only learned C up to that point. Boy was I in for a surprise, but that language really grew on me, and I ended up using Lisp heavily in AI applications throughout college.
I'm very glad we got Scheme first. I would hope that most people entering CS programs these days begin with a fairly solid grasp of a more conventional language like C++.
If you're trying to set up a data haven for illegal things, doing it in some random country through bribery and other traditional techniques would be far easier than physically assaulting Sealand
Ok, I'm thinking about what sort of entities would already be taking advantage of a data haven... haven't really come up with much, sorry. What does a given country or company have to gain by capturing a "data haven" at this point in the history of the internet, honestly?
I think you are greatly overromanticizing the importance and protection of Sealand. Sure things have worked out well so far, but I doubt any country would stand up for them, which means a single destroyer class ship is capable of "conquering" it. While there may be connections to positions of power in Britain, those are severely weakened by the departure of its founder.
Yea it's nice to be your own country, but the flip side of that coin is that NO ONE else in the world is obligated to protect you.
I expect that the only reason (apart from some sterling bravado in the 1978 war) Sealand is safe so far is that it hasn't been a big enough thorn in anyone's side to pluck out.
And finally ask yourself this: If the big media are "small potatoes" why was Jon Johansen apprehended?
It's not just memories he's buying
on
Tito In Space
·
· Score: 5
He's buying a place in the history books, and he's also buying an opportunity to rub NASA's face in their own snobby arrogance concerning who is, and who is not qualified to go up into space.
Yes, space missions are hard, especially the likes we've had in the past. But there's no reason we can't enter a new era where the physical and mental demands on the space traveller aren't much less severe than they've been.
Space tourism is going to be a boon to the industry and Tito is going to demonstrate that.
For some journals, you have to pay a hefty publishing fee per page. I believe the figure was $60 a page for my most recent article.
So no, the journals don't get the material for free, they *get* paid for it and then turn around and charge us money to read it. We get screwed on both ends.
I'd be curious to hear about the bottom line of a notable scientific journal if someone can bring it up here, I expect it's fairly cozy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see CD volume sales figures from this spring. If the RIAA is to be believed, the 2 order of magnitude decrease in Napster usage should translate into a CD sale increase. Granted it won't be proof of causation, but the short time of the change will rule out the long-term market fluctuations which distorted data about CD sales as Napster rose to power over 2 years.
My bet is on no significant change, and I'd love to see a decrease.
The higher ups aren't the ones doing the dying, but they're the ones calling the shots. Some of the brass spends their entire lives preparing for war, and you can bet that can sometimes create a desire to have one. They want to prove themselves, their theories, their plans, it's human nature.
Naturally this isn't a generalization about everyone in the upper echelons.
When the trial came around, they screwed up big time. They pissed everyone at the DOJ off and the result was that they did alot worse than they might have if they had played the game.
Gates and crew live in an isolated world in which they perceive themselves as invincible because there is noone who is going to tell them otherwise. As a result, they and reality are starting to become dissociated and the result is that some of the things they come out and tell us appear to be infantile and stupid.
Yes I think the execs at MS are arrogant enough to think crap like this might work. The sad part is, we have enough PHB's that it might.
Every time rights get trampled, it starts with a fairly reasonable restriction that is approved without thought of the consequence.
So the big deal is not this case, typo squatting for porn is something we'd all be better off without. Rather it's the consequences that you alude to regarding parody, and a dozen other cases that could be dreamt of once the precedent was set.
What a perfect example of a steamy moist pile of bullshit. As rob points out, an overwhelming number of linux boxes are probably installed overtop of the grave of a windows installation. You can't buy a computer *without* windows from many of these places.
Then there's the homebuilt faction, and I'm sure a hugely disproportionate number of linux servers as opposed to windows boxes are made from mobo's and CPU's.
This is a textbook example of how not to do statistics.
Thanks MS.
He's NOT SAYING THE PAIN ISN'T REAL. So get off your high horses and read the damned article.
He's saying that for some people, the pain, WHICH IS REAL, does not necessarily have an entirely physiological cause. Namely, nothing is wrong in the arm, but they still hurt because they've heard about RSI.
Is it still debilitating? yes. Should they still be treated? yes. But the point is that the enormous media coverage itself may be causing the problem in many people.
If so, it's important to discuss this as a possible problem, instead of blindly bashing the author.
He's right when he says that pain perception is a very complicated issue and the brain has alot of control in what it perceives as pain.
So can we stop flaming and start thinking for a second?
-Brad
As much a fan as I am of nature and the wonders it's created, I can't help but think it could have done a better job on neural tissue. Specifically, the speed at which impulses are conducted could probably be muchly improved where our systems to be redesigned from scratch.
So yes, I think computers are faster, and in the end will be able to outperform our wet systems, if we can only figure out how to do it.
In an age of pushing the envelope where even "compatible" mobo/CPU combos can be unstable because of manufacturing deficits we now add an additional source of strain to the hardware.
I give up, where's my 486?
I have no choice
As much as we rave about Linux here, I use a particular video card with TV inputs for my research and the video input and editing capabilities are only available on Windows.
Believe me, I would use Linux if I could.
Why the hell do you have popup adds on your site that crash IE and force me to end-task it?
grumble
Based on analysis of a QuakeIII server over two months in early 2001, first person shooter (FPS) game players strongly prefer servers that are within 150 milliseconds of the player's attachment point to the Internet. Or put another way, if you are planning on hosting a for-fee FPS server service, you should forget about trying to get customers who are more than 150 milliseconds away from your servers. Sections of the Internet more than 150 milliseconds away will provide a minimal source of regular players (and hence minimal revenue).
I fail to see how this indicates some kind of acceptable limit. A similar study done 2 years ago might have reached exactly the same kind of conclusion for 200 msec. Within a year, it might yield 100 msec.
All this tells us is that most players succeed at getting 150msec pings if they can. It doesn't tell us whether they find this number satisfying. If they were unable to play at 150, they might very well be happy playing at 200 or 250.
So this doesn't tell a potential service provider anything beyond the current status of the internet's average ping times. And such data will be useless in a year.
What would demonstrate his point would be players who didn't know what their ping was, and were able to switch between servers with known pings in a controlled situation (50/100/150/200... for example). One could then watch where the players end up, if you saw no difference between the 50 and 100 ping servers, you could *then* conclude that players were satisfied with 100 and saw no need to try to get to 50.
Iomega couldn't make a system that transferred 10 megabytes in 5 minutes over a parallel port without consuming 95% of the resources on a pentium 300 system and now they expect me to trust that they can do a 20 gig drive?
I think I'll give this one a miss.
I'm sure other lifeforms would do a better job of preventing galactic pollution, and not overtaxing available resources...
:)
We're probably, on the whole, no more or less concerned with pollution than other races. You have zero information about them, so why would you say something like this?
Or did it just sound like a nice PC thing to throw in at the end?
You say (heavily paraphrased) that if I took a set of data and rearranged them according to some mathematical transform that reveals a previously obscured relationship (a principal components analysis for example), that this is creativity.
Then you tell us that a computer program cannot be considered creative.
Now I'm not here to discuss whether Aaron is creative, but your own definition of creativity needs alot of work if you wish to discount computer programs, because what you described is the *precise purpose* of many statistical algorithms.
The "intent" of such an algorithm could be to find a set of dimensions that capture the variance of the data.
And what is this grand "context problem" problem you speak of?
Sure it goes down eventually once the pipe dreams run out. But at least they were well funded in the beginning. Biotech would then have to rely on government funding until such time as the technology approached a more usable level, when the private funding would pick up again.
When I look at the state of genetics, it boggles my mind that we will be able to manipulate it precisely in the near future.
However, I can't blame those who make blatantly optimistic prognistications as there are good reasons to do so.
One is personal, it helps to keep your lab motivated if you think the big discoveries are right around the corner.
Another is financial, VC's aren't going to be incredibly eager to give money to a technology that's more than a lifetime from bearing fruit.
This optimism always persists and it does so for very good reasons, IMO.
I find the descriptions of biology as nanotech (or vice versa) very apt. It's something few people seem to remember at times. Alot of nanotech issues have been handled already in our very own bodies. The immune system is an excellent attempt at a distributed control system for a complex, task oriented system with microscopic components. The grey ooze analog in biology (cancer) is carefully kept in check with a huge array of failsafes (which, regrettably, can all fail given a large enough sample).
Not only are we going to be importing strictly biological solutions to our technology, but I expect we will also be importing biological ideas.
For example, I expect that as nanotech develops, we will find it necessary to create a global "immune system" composed of nanotech dust that recognizes and eliminates non-certified nanotech organisms. I cannot imagine nanotech being safe without such an implementation, just as a person without an immune system cannot survive. It would be too easy for a nanotech organism to develop and begin replication.
There are also an enormous amount of information processing lessons that the brain can teach us. We have local control of some circuits where speed is essential, giving way to higher level(and slower) commands for more complex tasks. Another lesson is to have multiple systems to attempt to handle a problem several different ways simultaneously, and giving control to the best of them for a particular task.
From my personal experience, as well as observations of others, people always tend to overestimate their "average" hours per week. They'll(I'll :)) have a solid week of 10 hours per day, then spend the next month telling people they work 10 hours per day while they are actually pulling 7 or 8 ever since. People are bad at estimating quantities like this because they overemphasize the outliers.
:)
Also, they don't want to look lazy
Then of course while people are "at work" they often "don't work", adding a further amount of useless variance.
But for the sake of completeness, I'll respond. I work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, no holidays and I never get sick.
This point was clearly made before as referenced by this article.
Tim Hickey was a great teacher wasn't he Zach? While I missed the application specific parts of CS, our theory-heavy department at Brandeis did a great job of making us into great programmers in any arena, provided we had the time to learn the language.
I had no idea what scheme was, having only learned C up to that point. Boy was I in for a surprise, but that language really grew on me, and I ended up using Lisp heavily in AI applications throughout college.
I'm very glad we got Scheme first. I would hope that most people entering CS programs these days begin with a fairly solid grasp of a more conventional language like C++.
If you're trying to set up a data haven for illegal things, doing it in some random country through bribery and other traditional techniques would be far easier than physically assaulting Sealand
Ok, I'm thinking about what sort of entities would already be taking advantage of a data haven... haven't really come up with much, sorry. What does a given country or company have to gain by capturing a "data haven" at this point in the history of the internet, honestly?
I think you are greatly overromanticizing the importance and protection of Sealand. Sure things have worked out well so far, but I doubt any country would stand up for them, which means a single destroyer class ship is capable of "conquering" it. While there may be connections to positions of power in Britain, those are severely weakened by the departure of its founder.
Yea it's nice to be your own country, but the flip side of that coin is that NO ONE else in the world is obligated to protect you.
I expect that the only reason (apart from some sterling bravado in the 1978 war) Sealand is safe so far is that it hasn't been a big enough thorn in anyone's side to pluck out.
And finally ask yourself this: If the big media are "small potatoes" why was Jon Johansen apprehended?
He's buying a place in the history books, and he's also buying an opportunity to rub NASA's face in their own snobby arrogance concerning who is, and who is not qualified to go up into space.
Yes, space missions are hard, especially the likes we've had in the past. But there's no reason we can't enter a new era where the physical and mental demands on the space traveller aren't much less severe than they've been.
Space tourism is going to be a boon to the industry and Tito is going to demonstrate that.
I could well imagine big businesses that invest in quantum technology and then provide encryption services to anyone for a fee.
The notion that this technology should be ceased because it will cause harm seems absurd to me.
For some journals, you have to pay a hefty publishing fee per page. I believe the figure was $60 a page for my most recent article.
So no, the journals don't get the material for free, they *get* paid for it and then turn around and charge us money to read it. We get screwed on both ends.
I'd be curious to hear about the bottom line of a notable scientific journal if someone can bring it up here, I expect it's fairly cozy.