Yes, in particular they aren't claiming that the transmission would be independently a crime. That's mainly because the U.S. doesn't really have data-privacy laws with significant teeth, so in general you can transmit whatever private information you want about people. The only crime would be the "unauthorized access" to gain it.
The integrity of the crowdsourced traffic data depends entirely on trusting the client, in this case the Google-controlled Android software that sends back the data. If you figure out how to replay that, then you can pollute the data.
Yes, I noticed this as well, and it makes the summary rather misleading.
I think there is a concern with "pollution outsourcing", where countries claim to be getting cleaner but they do it just by outsourcing the polluting activities, rather than cleaning them up. This is the case with some European manufacturing firms, for example, which claim to be green... if you only count their within-EU manufacturing activities. You could imagine a similar shift where U.S. energy production gets cleaner just by moving the pollution around, so the same coal gets burned for power, just elsewhere. Then it would be legitimate to question whether there are any real environmental gains happening in such a scenario.
But what's happening here is a little different. It's not economically sensible to ship regular, lower-grade coal for producing electricity all around the world. Coal is extremely bulky and the value per ton of low-grade coal is so low that it doesn't pay off to ship it to China. Especially when China has plenty of its own low-grade coal. What does make economic sense to ship is high-end coal for metallurgy, which is more of a specialty material.
Google Reader used to have some useful features which they actually removed in hopes of pushing people to Google+. Didn't really work, usage declined, now they're killing it.
On the plus side, you don't really have to run any particular desktop environment on Linux, whereas it's much harder to customize radically on other systems. I'm currently using OSX with some attempted customizations, but the OS really doesn't support major changes to the default interaction model. I used to use Linux with Ion, and I've been playing around with Linux+i3 in a VM, and it's pretty impressive how you can completely change the default experience.
Incidentally, it takes some getting used to, but tiling window managers are really worth some experimentation with, if you're the kind of person who likes vim.
They do leave themselves some out to change things. Only a handful of things are defined as eternal and non-negotiable; the rest is canon law that's subject to revision by the Church. Unlike the "solo scriptura" protestants, the Catholics (and Orthodox) take a more institutionally oriented view, where the Church is in charge of preserving and guiding the development of Christianity, and has quite a bit of authority to decide on interpretations, and to change them.
In theory he could change those teachings. But it seems unlikely.
But I mean really, is it news that the person selected Pope agrees with Church teachings? The Cardinals aren't too likely to select someone who disagrees with them.
This I disagree with: I think the right is the biggest threat to Europe at the moment, and they're going to use an opportunistic opposition to Islam as part of their path to power.
If they're so discredited, how did an open fascist like Jörg Haider get in charge of a country? How is Golden Dawn infiltrating the Greek police force with such rapidity? How did a member of the Fascist Youth become mayor of Rome?
The people in question are hardly only a problem for proponents of Islamism. Organizations like the Golden Dawn in Greece, or the Italian neo-fascists, are a big problem for a lot of other people, too, and it's quite important that they be opposed as strongly as possible. It is Nazism, in a quite literal sense: the leader of the Golden Dawn has written multiple pro-Hitler articles, and their logo resembles a swastika, and not due to coincidence.
Interesting numbers; thanks for the clarification! I agree that's a significantly more ambitious goal by some of those metrics. A PB/hour is indeed quite a lot of intermediate storage, and even the reduced 1-5 PB/day is more than any existing experiment.
I realize it's a lot to ask for popular science journalism, but that's one reason I'd like more specifics and precision in some of these stories. What do we mean by data being generated: where is it generated, how long is it stored for, what are its characteristics, etc. And ideally figures in units of bytes (or a multiple) rather than "iPods" or "internets" would be nice; it was sort of ridiculous that I had to multiply out what 15 million 64GB iPods hold to arrive at a real number (and even that number could be wrong if they really meant GiB rather than GB, though the actual iPod space is indeed in GB).
Are you familiar with Flattr? It's structurally quite similar to what you're discussing, so might be worth a look. One difference is that you don't pick how much you want to pay each site. Instead, you decide how much you want to spend per month total, and then you just flag sites with "pay this guy". Your monthly payment is divided equally among all flagged sites. So e.g. if you pay $1/month and click the button on 20 sites, they each get $0.05.
Some pros/cons to that model, but one aspect that I think is a good idea in that approach is that it consolidates the "hump" of laying out expenditures to one decision, that of signing up for Flattr to begin with. Clicking on sites during the month doesn't cost you more, but just redistributes the money you already paid, so there may be less mental resistance to doing so. On the other hand, it also means there's no real way to signal that you liked both Things A and B, but A a lot more.
Most of the proposals are based on aggregating the "give this person 3 cents" indicators through some kind of intermediary platform, not processing them all on the spot. For example, with Flattr you pay Flattr once per month, and then you indicate how you want the money distributed by clicking on various things. The money isn't sent immediately then either, but accumulates in the recipient's acocunt, and is paid out when they reach a threshold. So on both the pay-in and pay-out sides the transactions are fewer and bigger.
The trick is getting enough people to sign up for such a thing for it to be at all viable.
The hard part is getting people onto some kind of platform that works and where friction and transaction costs don't eat all the money. If, theoretically, one existed, then maybe it'd be interesting when people click 1 cent or 3 cents; but a bigger issue is putting them in a position where they can easily click at all.
The only micropayment-for-writing platform I've seen with significant uptake was Readability's now-discontinued experiment, and it worked (to the extent it did, though it's been canned, so perhaps not that well) because lots of people used Readability for other reasons. So it was more of a revenue-share that Readability was offering to any webmaster who wanted to sign up. I think you need something like that, a platform that people are already on for some other reason.
True, but that's getting pretty common in large-scale scientific applications these days. The LHC generates about 100 terabytes per second, for example. The numbers on the page you linked say SKA will generate "enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day", which is actually an order of magnitude lower: 15 million * 64 GB = 960 PB per day. Divide that by 86400 seconds in a day, and you get about 11 TB/s.
How does having 2000 versus 1000 nuclear weapons in any way improve our safety vis-a-vis NK or Iran? It's not like they're proposing getting rid of the nuclear deterrent entirely, or even cutting it down to a small arsenal. That's still 1000 operational warheads!
The only reason to have so many in the first place was an arms race with the USSR envisioning a counterforce scenario, where they try to nuke our nukes, and vice versa, before the other side can launch theirs. In that case it's helpful to have more than the other side. But it's not like NK is in any position to take out 1000 launch sites, such that we would need 2000 to be safe.
Whereas Richard Stallman famously asks people not to buy him parrots as gifts, Digital Freedom Foundation president Frederic Muller mentions in his bio that he owns a cockatoo, a Alexandrine Parakeet, three iguanas and five turtles.
These companies did it on purpose and planned for it, while it sounds like it just sorta "happened" at Yahoo, with management neither having a plan for how to manage it nor (apparently) really paying any attention at all to what remote workers were doing and how they were doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
What if it had an ATM on the outside of the building that dispensed money without requiring a debit card or PIN?
Yes, in particular they aren't claiming that the transmission would be independently a crime. That's mainly because the U.S. doesn't really have data-privacy laws with significant teeth, so in general you can transmit whatever private information you want about people. The only crime would be the "unauthorized access" to gain it.
The integrity of the crowdsourced traffic data depends entirely on trusting the client, in this case the Google-controlled Android software that sends back the data. If you figure out how to replay that, then you can pollute the data.
Yes, I noticed this as well, and it makes the summary rather misleading.
I think there is a concern with "pollution outsourcing", where countries claim to be getting cleaner but they do it just by outsourcing the polluting activities, rather than cleaning them up. This is the case with some European manufacturing firms, for example, which claim to be green... if you only count their within-EU manufacturing activities. You could imagine a similar shift where U.S. energy production gets cleaner just by moving the pollution around, so the same coal gets burned for power, just elsewhere. Then it would be legitimate to question whether there are any real environmental gains happening in such a scenario.
But what's happening here is a little different. It's not economically sensible to ship regular, lower-grade coal for producing electricity all around the world. Coal is extremely bulky and the value per ton of low-grade coal is so low that it doesn't pay off to ship it to China. Especially when China has plenty of its own low-grade coal. What does make economic sense to ship is high-end coal for metallurgy, which is more of a specialty material.
Well, there's only so many crippling bombshells an OS can withstand before it fades from view entirely...
Not sure what kinds of forums they're talking about, but I'm pretty sure there isn't any trolling on any of the forums I post on.
It had a bunch of "social" features which were axed in favor of Google+ integration.
Google Reader used to have some useful features which they actually removed in hopes of pushing people to Google+. Didn't really work, usage declined, now they're killing it.
On the plus side, you don't really have to run any particular desktop environment on Linux, whereas it's much harder to customize radically on other systems. I'm currently using OSX with some attempted customizations, but the OS really doesn't support major changes to the default interaction model. I used to use Linux with Ion, and I've been playing around with Linux+i3 in a VM, and it's pretty impressive how you can completely change the default experience.
Incidentally, it takes some getting used to, but tiling window managers are really worth some experimentation with, if you're the kind of person who likes vim.
They do leave themselves some out to change things. Only a handful of things are defined as eternal and non-negotiable; the rest is canon law that's subject to revision by the Church. Unlike the "solo scriptura" protestants, the Catholics (and Orthodox) take a more institutionally oriented view, where the Church is in charge of preserving and guiding the development of Christianity, and has quite a bit of authority to decide on interpretations, and to change them.
Page views?
Real Vatican news-for-nerds would give us a more detailed account of the likely impacts on the internal workings of the Roman Curia, though!
In theory he could change those teachings. But it seems unlikely.
But I mean really, is it news that the person selected Pope agrees with Church teachings? The Cardinals aren't too likely to select someone who disagrees with them.
This I disagree with: I think the right is the biggest threat to Europe at the moment, and they're going to use an opportunistic opposition to Islam as part of their path to power.
If they're so discredited, how did an open fascist like Jörg Haider get in charge of a country? How is Golden Dawn infiltrating the Greek police force with such rapidity? How did a member of the Fascist Youth become mayor of Rome?
As a first-order approximation, you sound like the European version of a Klansman.
The people in question are hardly only a problem for proponents of Islamism. Organizations like the Golden Dawn in Greece, or the Italian neo-fascists, are a big problem for a lot of other people, too, and it's quite important that they be opposed as strongly as possible. It is Nazism, in a quite literal sense: the leader of the Golden Dawn has written multiple pro-Hitler articles, and their logo resembles a swastika, and not due to coincidence.
Interesting numbers; thanks for the clarification! I agree that's a significantly more ambitious goal by some of those metrics. A PB/hour is indeed quite a lot of intermediate storage, and even the reduced 1-5 PB/day is more than any existing experiment.
I realize it's a lot to ask for popular science journalism, but that's one reason I'd like more specifics and precision in some of these stories. What do we mean by data being generated: where is it generated, how long is it stored for, what are its characteristics, etc. And ideally figures in units of bytes (or a multiple) rather than "iPods" or "internets" would be nice; it was sort of ridiculous that I had to multiply out what 15 million 64GB iPods hold to arrive at a real number (and even that number could be wrong if they really meant GiB rather than GB, though the actual iPod space is indeed in GB).
Are you familiar with Flattr? It's structurally quite similar to what you're discussing, so might be worth a look. One difference is that you don't pick how much you want to pay each site. Instead, you decide how much you want to spend per month total, and then you just flag sites with "pay this guy". Your monthly payment is divided equally among all flagged sites. So e.g. if you pay $1/month and click the button on 20 sites, they each get $0.05.
Some pros/cons to that model, but one aspect that I think is a good idea in that approach is that it consolidates the "hump" of laying out expenditures to one decision, that of signing up for Flattr to begin with. Clicking on sites during the month doesn't cost you more, but just redistributes the money you already paid, so there may be less mental resistance to doing so. On the other hand, it also means there's no real way to signal that you liked both Things A and B, but A a lot more.
Most of the proposals are based on aggregating the "give this person 3 cents" indicators through some kind of intermediary platform, not processing them all on the spot. For example, with Flattr you pay Flattr once per month, and then you indicate how you want the money distributed by clicking on various things. The money isn't sent immediately then either, but accumulates in the recipient's acocunt, and is paid out when they reach a threshold. So on both the pay-in and pay-out sides the transactions are fewer and bigger.
The trick is getting enough people to sign up for such a thing for it to be at all viable.
The hard part is getting people onto some kind of platform that works and where friction and transaction costs don't eat all the money. If, theoretically, one existed, then maybe it'd be interesting when people click 1 cent or 3 cents; but a bigger issue is putting them in a position where they can easily click at all.
The only micropayment-for-writing platform I've seen with significant uptake was Readability's now-discontinued experiment, and it worked (to the extent it did, though it's been canned, so perhaps not that well) because lots of people used Readability for other reasons. So it was more of a revenue-share that Readability was offering to any webmaster who wanted to sign up. I think you need something like that, a platform that people are already on for some other reason.
True, but that's getting pretty common in large-scale scientific applications these days. The LHC generates about 100 terabytes per second, for example. The numbers on the page you linked say SKA will generate "enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day", which is actually an order of magnitude lower: 15 million * 64 GB = 960 PB per day. Divide that by 86400 seconds in a day, and you get about 11 TB/s.
The idea is that it's a mutual reduction, so we'll still be balanced with Russia's forces. Just at a lower number on each side.
How does having 2000 versus 1000 nuclear weapons in any way improve our safety vis-a-vis NK or Iran? It's not like they're proposing getting rid of the nuclear deterrent entirely, or even cutting it down to a small arsenal. That's still 1000 operational warheads!
The only reason to have so many in the first place was an arms race with the USSR envisioning a counterforce scenario, where they try to nuke our nukes, and vice versa, before the other side can launch theirs. In that case it's helpful to have more than the other side. But it's not like NK is in any position to take out 1000 launch sites, such that we would need 2000 to be safe.
Whereas Richard Stallman famously asks people not to buy him parrots as gifts, Digital Freedom Foundation president Frederic Muller mentions in his bio that he owns a cockatoo, a Alexandrine Parakeet, three iguanas and five turtles.
These companies did it on purpose and planned for it, while it sounds like it just sorta "happened" at Yahoo, with management neither having a plan for how to manage it nor (apparently) really paying any attention at all to what remote workers were doing and how they were doing it.