I dunno, the Puritan-founded USA never really renounced Christianity, but it's more or less held political Christianity far enough at bay to remain a reasonably good country as far as liberty goes (and most of the areas where its liberty could be better have to do with terrorism/security/drug paranoia rather than religion). Not sure it'd be easy for a country full of fundamentalist true-believing Muslims (or other religious folks) to produce an Enlightenment-style secular democracy, but I'm not sure Bolshevik/Maoist stamping out of religion is the only alternative...
Bing is a talking bunny, created as the lead character of a semi-popular series of children's books. Yahoo is wisely betting that in this Web 3.0 universe, old-style text search just isn't that relevant anymore: maybe in 1998 internet users were mainly looking for things like a Geocities page with an obsessive-compulsively categorized list of rare postage stamps, but today's convergence culture leverages always-on internet as an integral part of our everyday lives, and search engines must adapt likewise. Since Bing Bunny "tackles [real-world] challenges such as getting dressed, eating breakfast, and going to the park", it's a perfect fit for the forward-looking management team of this joint Microsoft/Yahoo initiative, the rabbit serving as a launchpad to transform 20th-century text-search-as-service into 21st-century search-as-lifestyle-accessory.
Microsoft and Yahoo understand that there's more to life than text on the internet. That's why they're proud to announce, "Getting dressed---it’s a Bing thing!"
They don't negatively impact operations in the sense of taking up a scarce resource that degrades other customers' performance. However, they do still use above-average amounts of bandwidth, which costs ISPs money. When offering a flat-rate, unlimited-use service, your economics come out ahead if you can find some way to skew your customers towards those who don't actually take advantage of your claimed "unlimited use".
I don't think it's solely limited to engineers--- there's a tendency in most fields to over-emphasize the importance of your area of expertise and assume others are of marginal importance or can be somehow safely bracketed. I'm in an area of academia with a lot of CS/humanities collaboration (and where there should be more), and it's quite evident on both sides--- the CS people generally don't understand or take the humanities parts seriously enough, and the humanities folk tend not to understand or take the tech side seriously enough. That's why a huge proportion of "new media art" is either people with solid tech and half-assed art, or people with good art ideas and half-assed tech.
Not really--- classical music notation only gives you control over basically pitch and duration of discrete notes, with a few exceptions. If you allow, say, timbre to be real-time variable (instead of restricting yourself to a single hardcoded instrument like "a violin"), you need to control that too, on multiple axes. And if you make notes continuous and highly polyphonic (say, up to 30-40 could be playing at once, instead of the max on a piano of about 10-12, and on many instruments a single one), you need still more control.
One reasonable approach is to fix a bunch of things and vary only a limited number, and one way of doing that is to keep everything fixed, except let the performer vary pitch and duration of discrete notes. But there's lots of other kinds of music you can make--- how would you design a controller to control soundscapes in real-time, or to compose IDM in real-time?
Not sure how they're doing it, but it's basically an open problem how to control a hugely multi-dimensional space like computer music via controllers people can use. One approach is to choose 2-3 axes of variation and map them to something like a Wii-style controller, which seems to be what they're doing here (or something more exotic, like a theremin controller). Plenty of other ideas--- even an entire yearly conference on it.
This (PDF) is a fairly widely cited paper that gives a brief overview. (There's a longer, better-formatted journal version here, but I think you have to be on a university campus that subscribes to the journal to get access to that one.)
SLOrk is basically an attempt to do something like a traditional orchestra but for computer music. A bunch of people on laptops with various control devices attached, with various parts assigned. Here's an ABC News segment on them.
It's from the guy who developed ChucK, which I think they use, but I don't think the orchestra does livecoding, which is what ChucK is best known for.
The problem is that a lot of the carbon-offsets money doesn't go to things like green-energy research, subsidizing alternative energy, or other such things that would help the environment. A good portion gets paid directly to polluters, who in return promise to pollute less than they "otherwise" would have, a totally notional promise that rewards the worst polluters, who agree to be slightly less bad in the future in return for the cash.
Indeed--- as a result, even the poster children of truck shipping, UPS/FedEx, have moved much of their cross-country shipping to rail. If you order something FedEx to Texas from the Northeast, for example, chances are it'll make a stop in Hutchins, Texas.
Oh, oops, I was reading the wrong one of her articles (the 2nd one linked). The first one does indeed claim it's anagrams. Which, indeed, don't explain the strange letter-frequency and word-length-frequency distributions (or at least don't by themselves explain it).
The article itself doesn't seem to claim it's anagrams. In fact, it's not clear it claims anything at all, besides "cc" standing for "on" wherever it appears (or maybe only some of where it appears). The main thesis seems to be that if you squint at it, read it as sloppy handwriting, replace a few letter-pairs with something else they cipher for, and ignore words that don't fit this scheme (assuming they were thrown in to confuse), it might make sense. But that's a pretty ad-hoc hypothesis, and not much is shown to explain how well it works.
If you're armed with deck guns, though, you have a whole host of other problems, like not being able to enter most civilian ports without special permission.
This is to a large extent the result of AP and Reuters covering most stories "well enough". If AP or Reuters cover a story, thousands of papers, down to po-dunk local papers in the middle of nowhere, have sufficient coverage of the story for many people. So people rightfully don't care about the brand, because a large proportion of the content literally is the same across brands.
Sure, the BBC, NY Times, WSJ, Economist, and a few others have original content. But in most cases, AP/Reuters cover a story well enough, so the demand for additional unique content is not nearly as high as traditional demand for a newspaper was--- when it might have been the only way for every only-sort-of-plugged-in people to get the news. Now you really have to care enough to know why you want a particular paper's extra content, and really care to be willing to pay for it.
I'm not sure how dead the unique-content players are, though. The Economist is notably successful in selling its wares, and the WSJ hasn't been doing terribly either, despite Murdoch's whining.
This half of the equation would've been closer to complete if Slashdot had kept the original title from when I saw this submission in the Firehose: "Somali pirates open up NASDARGH for trading"
I'm not sure that's the main thing stopping them. The cost of arming merchant ships would be far higher than just losing/ransoming a few of them--- piracy rates are extremely low as a percentage of total shipping, so small as to be more or less in the noise on companies' balance sheets. Arming ships has other risks, also; for example, one reason ships are typically kept unarmed is that there's a risk that armed crew would hijack their own ship for random/profit.
That's contrary to Craig's preference for fostering small, local communities that do deal primarily within $TOWN, though, which is why he goes out of his way to structure his site that way, and block people who try to restructure the listings in other ways.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, the Puritan-founded USA never really renounced Christianity, but it's more or less held political Christianity far enough at bay to remain a reasonably good country as far as liberty goes (and most of the areas where its liberty could be better have to do with terrorism/security/drug paranoia rather than religion). Not sure it'd be easy for a country full of fundamentalist true-believing Muslims (or other religious folks) to produce an Enlightenment-style secular democracy, but I'm not sure Bolshevik/Maoist stamping out of religion is the only alternative...
Well, to be fair, Google did actually complain about that in 2006...
Bing is a talking bunny, created as the lead character of a semi-popular series of children's books. Yahoo is wisely betting that in this Web 3.0 universe, old-style text search just isn't that relevant anymore: maybe in 1998 internet users were mainly looking for things like a Geocities page with an obsessive-compulsively categorized list of rare postage stamps, but today's convergence culture leverages always-on internet as an integral part of our everyday lives, and search engines must adapt likewise. Since Bing Bunny "tackles [real-world] challenges such as getting dressed, eating breakfast, and going to the park", it's a perfect fit for the forward-looking management team of this joint Microsoft/Yahoo initiative, the rabbit serving as a launchpad to transform 20th-century text-search-as-service into 21st-century search-as-lifestyle-accessory.
Microsoft and Yahoo understand that there's more to life than text on the internet. That's why they're proud to announce, "Getting dressed---it’s a Bing thing!"
By 2001, sure, but it had a bunch of hype in 1999 when it bought the WELL and had an IPO. I'm under 30 and remember that!
I assume most Slashdotters over the age of 20 were online by 2000 though?
They don't negatively impact operations in the sense of taking up a scarce resource that degrades other customers' performance. However, they do still use above-average amounts of bandwidth, which costs ISPs money. When offering a flat-rate, unlimited-use service, your economics come out ahead if you can find some way to skew your customers towards those who don't actually take advantage of your claimed "unlimited use".
I don't think it's solely limited to engineers--- there's a tendency in most fields to over-emphasize the importance of your area of expertise and assume others are of marginal importance or can be somehow safely bracketed. I'm in an area of academia with a lot of CS/humanities collaboration (and where there should be more), and it's quite evident on both sides--- the CS people generally don't understand or take the humanities parts seriously enough, and the humanities folk tend not to understand or take the tech side seriously enough. That's why a huge proportion of "new media art" is either people with solid tech and half-assed art, or people with good art ideas and half-assed tech.
It's actually that Linux users are sadomasochistic; KSM is a nested acronym standing for "kernel S&M".
Not really--- classical music notation only gives you control over basically pitch and duration of discrete notes, with a few exceptions. If you allow, say, timbre to be real-time variable (instead of restricting yourself to a single hardcoded instrument like "a violin"), you need to control that too, on multiple axes. And if you make notes continuous and highly polyphonic (say, up to 30-40 could be playing at once, instead of the max on a piano of about 10-12, and on many instruments a single one), you need still more control.
One reasonable approach is to fix a bunch of things and vary only a limited number, and one way of doing that is to keep everything fixed, except let the performer vary pitch and duration of discrete notes. But there's lots of other kinds of music you can make--- how would you design a controller to control soundscapes in real-time, or to compose IDM in real-time?
Not sure how they're doing it, but it's basically an open problem how to control a hugely multi-dimensional space like computer music via controllers people can use. One approach is to choose 2-3 axes of variation and map them to something like a Wii-style controller, which seems to be what they're doing here (or something more exotic, like a theremin controller). Plenty of other ideas--- even an entire yearly conference on it.
This (PDF) is a fairly widely cited paper that gives a brief overview. (There's a longer, better-formatted journal version here, but I think you have to be on a university campus that subscribes to the journal to get access to that one.)
SLOrk is basically an attempt to do something like a traditional orchestra but for computer music. A bunch of people on laptops with various control devices attached, with various parts assigned. Here's an ABC News segment on them.
It's from the guy who developed ChucK, which I think they use, but I don't think the orchestra does livecoding, which is what ChucK is best known for.
I believe the standard answer is something along these lines.
The problem is that a lot of the carbon-offsets money doesn't go to things like green-energy research, subsidizing alternative energy, or other such things that would help the environment. A good portion gets paid directly to polluters, who in return promise to pollute less than they "otherwise" would have, a totally notional promise that rewards the worst polluters, who agree to be slightly less bad in the future in return for the cash.
Indeed--- as a result, even the poster children of truck shipping, UPS/FedEx, have moved much of their cross-country shipping to rail. If you order something FedEx to Texas from the Northeast, for example, chances are it'll make a stop in Hutchins, Texas.
Oh, oops, I was reading the wrong one of her articles (the 2nd one linked). The first one does indeed claim it's anagrams. Which, indeed, don't explain the strange letter-frequency and word-length-frequency distributions (or at least don't by themselves explain it).
The article itself doesn't seem to claim it's anagrams. In fact, it's not clear it claims anything at all, besides "cc" standing for "on" wherever it appears (or maybe only some of where it appears). The main thesis seems to be that if you squint at it, read it as sloppy handwriting, replace a few letter-pairs with something else they cipher for, and ignore words that don't fit this scheme (assuming they were thrown in to confuse), it might make sense. But that's a pretty ad-hoc hypothesis, and not much is shown to explain how well it works.
If you're armed with deck guns, though, you have a whole host of other problems, like not being able to enter most civilian ports without special permission.
This is to a large extent the result of AP and Reuters covering most stories "well enough". If AP or Reuters cover a story, thousands of papers, down to po-dunk local papers in the middle of nowhere, have sufficient coverage of the story for many people. So people rightfully don't care about the brand, because a large proportion of the content literally is the same across brands.
Sure, the BBC, NY Times, WSJ, Economist, and a few others have original content. But in most cases, AP/Reuters cover a story well enough, so the demand for additional unique content is not nearly as high as traditional demand for a newspaper was--- when it might have been the only way for every only-sort-of-plugged-in people to get the news. Now you really have to care enough to know why you want a particular paper's extra content, and really care to be willing to pay for it.
I'm not sure how dead the unique-content players are, though. The Economist is notably successful in selling its wares, and the WSJ hasn't been doing terribly either, despite Murdoch's whining.
The way cable tv has gone makes me suspect that paying will indeed just get you the same ads as before (or more!), but at a higher cost to you.
This compendium of that guy's rants makes me think maybe he isn't going to be my go-to news source...
This half of the equation would've been closer to complete if Slashdot had kept the original title from when I saw this submission in the Firehose: "Somali pirates open up NASDARGH for trading"
I'm not sure that's the main thing stopping them. The cost of arming merchant ships would be far higher than just losing/ransoming a few of them--- piracy rates are extremely low as a percentage of total shipping, so small as to be more or less in the noise on companies' balance sheets. Arming ships has other risks, also; for example, one reason ships are typically kept unarmed is that there's a risk that armed crew would hijack their own ship for random/profit.
I read it as an implied attack on anarcho-capitalism, which is not the United States' economic model.
Well, suburban Dallas is so far off from Craig's view of a "town" to begin with that there's probably a bit of a clash of worldviews...
That's contrary to Craig's preference for fostering small, local communities that do deal primarily within $TOWN, though, which is why he goes out of his way to structure his site that way, and block people who try to restructure the listings in other ways.