Me? I didn't develop the OS, I developed apps for it. To be specific a simple but functional SQL parser that stored (amoung other things) gesture structures, part of which was a timeout value to help determine when to start translating strokes into a gesture/text. The other factors were positional, (eg: outside the square is a new character), characters and gestures used the same structure to represent pen strokes.
I get the joke but I'm not sure how we ended up on limits of growth and horse shit, that is not what TFPaper is about.
What it says is that IFF we stopped pumping out GHG tomorrow it would take thousands of years for the ocean to regain it's pre-industrial PH level. The ocean (and the shelled critters in it) is the largest C02 sink, too much CO2 makes the ocean slightly more acidic and this is already having a negative affect on said shelled critters ability to make shells, loss of coral reefs is the most publicised of these effects. Personally I hardly think it's surprising that it would take a long time for makind's CO2 spike to be aborsbed into the system if we all dropped dead tomorrow but science is about measurement and evidence, the question of "how long would it take" is as valid as any other.
limits of growth and horse shit
I like the horse story but the Dodo bird meat industry didn't fare quite as well. Tecnology may one day overcome that "temporary" glitch but until it does the Dodo meat industry went past it's own limit to growth in the 1700's(?). While we are LIMITED by our lack of terra-forming technology I think the most obvious limit to growth comes from from human shit, not horse shit.
As far as I am concerned we have no choice but to turn to technology to fix technology. However it's nice to have a "bug report" that clearly lays out what the problem is. Science is that bug report, without these kind of studies we wouldn't even recoginse the problem, and in fact many people still don't (just look at this thread for examples).
"Multitouch gestures? I'm not saying there isn't prior art for what Apple has patented, but PenPoint doesn't seem to be it."
Read the first few lines of the link. Care to enlighten us as to how to make an X with a single stroke?/sarcasm
IIRC PenPoint even included a tool to define a command macro and then train the OS to recognise a new gesture to run it. From what I have seen handwriting/gesture recognition has not improved much in the last 20yrs, dramatically more powerfull devices is the main reason the engines are more practical than they were 20yrs ago.
Also, re-reding the link I found what could be an alternative explaination for Apple's behaviour: "In April 2008, as part of a larger federal court case, the gesture features of the Windows/Tablet PC operating system and hardware were found to infringe on a patent by GO Corp. concerning user interfaces for the PenPoint OS." ( "GO Corp." owned PenPoint )
I doubt freedom of speech is in the treaty. I also doubt that Indymedia are incompetent when it comes to keeping their 'information' safe and accessible.
I like the idea and think one electronic senator is worth a try. Having said that I suspect most people are not willing to put in the time unless they are particularly interested in an issue. If that's the case then you will get small but determined bands of nuts enacting all sorts of wack job legislation simply because nobody else is interested. After all the good senator got his preferences (and seat) because nobody thought he had a hope in hell of winning.
/start_rant
Personally I think the way the good senator got his seat is a fucking joke. Anyone remotely interested in the wishes of the people would say to themselves: "I only got 2% of the vote, I should resign and force a second election". This guy says: "HaHaHa, suckers!". I'm also skeptical of anyone who is so hell bent against lewd behaviour that they see it corrupting society.
These are the type of people who come up with "sex offender lists" that include drunk collage streakers and people going for a piss against a tree. The reason they do this is to draw suspition from themselves and dilute the meaning of "sex offender" to the extent it includes everyone. I'm not suggesting an Aussie senator could be a rock spider, just that by taking up his seat he has already demonstrated he is not interested in what his constituents think/want/need.
/end_rant
Bloody oath! Now it's Labor turn to suck up to an independent nutjob who gained 2% of the popular vote but potentially holds the balance of power in the senate. The irony is that both major parties helped him defeat the green candidate who would otherwise have easily won the seat.
Thankfully my prediction that this BS will continue to go nowhere seems to be panning out - it's like the two major parties have agreed to an endless and distracting debate that does little except keep the moralising minority busy.
"The idea that we all should receive and/or need the same level of education is pretty silly"
I wouldn't advocate that either, except for the basics of reading/writing. What I am suggesting is that skeptical think should be part of the basics as it ENABLES you to learn. Skeptical thinking is a skill, it doesn't tell you what to learn, it tells you how to learn and can be taught in a short amount of time (less than what it takes to memorise multiplication tables). The difficult part is getting people to be skeptical of their own "common sense" (in particular many of the teachers).
Interesting you bring up Columbus. Captain Cook is the Aussie equivalent. My history lessons comprised 10yrs worth of Captin cook, McArthur and his damm sheep, no mention of WW2 that my parents generation had endured. History is prologue but what I encountered in school was propoganda. Yes Australian history is important in Australia but leaving out the natives, the rest of the world, and the events of the 20th century is a tad over the top and totally useless to anyone except a scholar of the first half of Australian settlement, (who would know it's mostly crap anyway).
"Yet for some reason Darwin's theory of evolution gets picked out so that teachers must highlight its weaknesses. Why might this be?"
I agree with the GP's point: Pointing out weakness' in a theory is how it becomes stronger.
I agree with your caveate: All disagreements must be intellectually honest.
Evolution is nowhere near as contraversial as when I went to school in the 60's, a time when tectonic plates and black holes were also contraversial, science has convincingly won all three very public arguments over the last 40yrs (150yrs in the case of evolution). Of more immediate concern is the current FUD from global warming psudeo-skeptics (coinidentally they are also particularly strong in Texas). Not that I have anything against Texas but the reason these people make (subtle) anti-science and greenie bashing a political platform could be due to either power/money/ignorance, regardless of which one it is, ignorance amoungst their followers is the sole reason they get away with it.
IMHO Dawkins and Sagan are correct in that science is taught as a "dictonary of facts", the philosophy of science is largely ignored by the education system and consequently misunderstood/ignored by the public at large. Evidence for this is not hard to find, just count the number of "climate fools" here on slashdot, they espouse all manner of nerdy sounding but thougoughly debunked scientific red-herrings, not because they are stupid but becuase their lack of understanding as to what "scientific skepticisim" means makes them easy prey for intellectually dishonest politicians and their sponsors.
Due to the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence I can no longer belive a politician can (legitimately) keep using ignorance as an excuse to poo-poo global warming and/or evolution. Therefore the root cause of the cherry-picked "science" found in the opinion columns of the mass-media and subsequently regurgitated by a million ignorant bloggers - must be money and/or power.
Premptive Al Gore reply: I'm not from the US, I haven't seen his film. I had already read the IPCC reports and didn't see the point, from the reviews of Gore's film by IPCC scientists, (and later their answers to critics), I would have to conclude his slide show was an accurate representation of the reports. OTOH: Just because the doco is accurate does not mean Gore's motivations for presenting it are intellectually honest.
"You could send something as simple as a yes/no - yes, I've read your message , or no, I haven't. [snip] Someone who understands it better, correct me and be more clear, please."
Analogy:
I have two basket balls, one has a cat inside - I don't know which one.
I send one basket ball to you.
I open my basket ball (observation).
I find it empty so I can deduce the cat is in yours (no information is transfered to you).
I cannot tell if you have opened yours and observed the cat as dead or alive.
You open yours and find a dead cat (observation).
Information is transfered in the normal manner when you call me up and ask why I sent you a dead cat in a basketball.
Thanks for the link, looked him up and he made it to Japan! However the skeptic in me is suspicious of the route chosen for the 100 day voyage and I guess that's why he is not more famous. He could remove doubt by retracing the route backwards, I'm not saying it does/doesn't work, just that I'm not convinced without at least a simple test that reasonably cancels out prevailing winds, currents, etc.
Having said that I have seen albatros gliding effortlessly in both heavy and calm seas, down here they travel up to 5000km collecting food for their chicks, they can do it in 7=10 days and hardly flap a wing, they can fish best in a good swell, they sort of run off the crest and take off like a hang glider. I like the futuristic idea of millions of small, smart, low (solar) energy albatros like drones transporting comodities around the planet, wheat, rice, ore, etc anything you ship a shovel full at a time. I don't see why it's impossible for ocean craft to "somehow" do the same maybe with more than a shovel full.
"What really concerns me, though (since I can disable cookies and still watch the videos), is that..[snip]...the White House is promoting YouTube, a private, for-profit company. [snip] So, I suggest that the govt. procure a YouTube-like system from YouTube, and then use that."
Where do you stop? Should the pentagon buy up every company who's products it supports (eg: Lockheed C-130 Hercules or IBM WebShere)? That's going to get expensive very quickly, are you prepared for the inevitable 4000% tax hike - or will you just lament the fact that removing the logo's to avoid massive tax hikes has reduced transparency?/sarcasm
In a democracy the answer is simple, but it's also at odds with human nature: Watch your government more than they watch you.
Good question. Many moons ago I worked the fishing boats in Bass Straight. Can it drive a semi-submerged fishing trawler 30 feet up at about a 15-20deg incline, or would gravity drag it backwards?
What you are doing in your post is investigating the data until you UNDERSTAND what is usefull and then presenting (visualising) it for you're boss, who probably adds another layer of "visualization" for his boss, etc. (ie: You are acting as human visualisation tool that the boss can use to visualise the output of silicon visualisation tools)
To scale up you're simple X/Y plot of two variables to corporate size you propose using a visualization tool that UNDERSTANDS database structures and UNDERSTANDS the fact that to plot strings against integers you need a default transform, etc, etc. You are handed a bunch of DB's with hundereds of tables, thousands of columns and countless transaction transforms ferrying data from one DB to the other.
So you start with all possible pairs to see if there is a nice easy curve that can relate them. You get 10,000 statistically significant relationships - the problem posed in TFS is how do you now visualize all those graphs to find the relevant relationships without UNDERSTANDING the data.
As to TFS, visualization relies on data minning which will never be "solved" because given enough data you can always add one more level of UNDERSTANDING (see: Godel). This is not to say that trying to solve it is pointless. On the contrary, google news is excellent and accessible example of how far things have progressed in the last couple of decades.
Simply presenting multiple known facts/relationships in an easily accessible format takes a deep UNDERSTANDING of the data. Even if you do UNDERSTAND the facts/relationships, creating the format is an art that has few masters.
Yes, I read Hawkings book too. AFAIK GR says nothing about spontaneous matter-anti matter pairs appearing from the quantum vacum so it can't really be "wrong" about them can it? Maybe one day some genius will reconsile QM & GR but in the meantime I think we just have to accept there are two models of the universe that are in agreement where they overlap. In the long term both are probably NQR but that makes them no less usefull at this point in time.
"Even if you do the math this is going to seem strange"
It has been said that "the Universe is mainly hydrogen and ignorance". Having flirted with some of the math in uni, I tend to agree.
Car companies are somewhat incestuous and definitely globalised. IANAMechanic but I have a close friend who owns a panel shop (as far as I'm concerned the guy is a magician with wrecked cars). During the 90's he bought a brand new Ford Maverick here is Australia, he claimed it was the exact same car as a Nissan Patrol minus the "$10K flared gaurds". When he first showed me the car he rattled off a whole lot of mechanic speak that I can't remember and then pointed out the Nissan branding on the glass and seat belts.
Not picking on you personaly but this whole thread is a confusion between revenue, costs and profit. A web site has costs, period. You have three choices.
1. You eat the costs so everyone has a "free" service. (generous and passionate)
2. You create revenue to balance the costs so everyone has a "free" service. (wise and passionate)
3. You create revenue to exceed the costs, the service puts bread on your table. (business, passion is often fake)
The most common way to eat the costs is through donations.
Slashdot Mirror
Me? I didn't develop the OS, I developed apps for it. To be specific a simple but functional SQL parser that stored (amoung other things) gesture structures, part of which was a timeout value to help determine when to start translating strokes into a gesture/text. The other factors were positional, (eg: outside the square is a new character), characters and gestures used the same structure to represent pen strokes.
I have no idea who owns GO Corp.
I get the joke but I'm not sure how we ended up on limits of growth and horse shit, that is not what TFPaper is about.
What it says is that IFF we stopped pumping out GHG tomorrow it would take thousands of years for the ocean to regain it's pre-industrial PH level. The ocean (and the shelled critters in it) is the largest C02 sink, too much CO2 makes the ocean slightly more acidic and this is already having a negative affect on said shelled critters ability to make shells, loss of coral reefs is the most publicised of these effects. Personally I hardly think it's surprising that it would take a long time for makind's CO2 spike to be aborsbed into the system if we all dropped dead tomorrow but science is about measurement and evidence, the question of "how long would it take" is as valid as any other.
limits of growth and horse shit
I like the horse story but the Dodo bird meat industry didn't fare quite as well. Tecnology may one day overcome that "temporary" glitch but until it does the Dodo meat industry went past it's own limit to growth in the 1700's(?). While we are LIMITED by our lack of terra-forming technology I think the most obvious limit to growth comes from from human shit, not horse shit.
As far as I am concerned we have no choice but to turn to technology to fix technology. However it's nice to have a "bug report" that clearly lays out what the problem is. Science is that bug report, without these kind of studies we wouldn't even recoginse the problem, and in fact many people still don't (just look at this thread for examples).
"Multitouch gestures? I'm not saying there isn't prior art for what Apple has patented, but PenPoint doesn't seem to be it."
/sarcasm
Read the first few lines of the link. Care to enlighten us as to how to make an X with a single stroke?
IIRC PenPoint even included a tool to define a command macro and then train the OS to recognise a new gesture to run it. From what I have seen handwriting/gesture recognition has not improved much in the last 20yrs, dramatically more powerfull devices is the main reason the engines are more practical than they were 20yrs ago.
Also, re-reding the link I found what could be an alternative explaination for Apple's behaviour: "In April 2008, as part of a larger federal court case, the gesture features of the Windows/Tablet PC operating system and hardware were found to infringe on a patent by GO Corp. concerning user interfaces for the PenPoint OS." ( "GO Corp." owned PenPoint )
it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'
Circa 1991-2 I was developing for an OS called PenPoint, it implemented gestures using "hueristics".
I doubt freedom of speech is in the treaty. I also doubt that Indymedia are incompetent when it comes to keeping their 'information' safe and accessible.
I like the idea and think one electronic senator is worth a try. Having said that I suspect most people are not willing to put in the time unless they are particularly interested in an issue. If that's the case then you will get small but determined bands of nuts enacting all sorts of wack job legislation simply because nobody else is interested. After all the good senator got his preferences (and seat) because nobody thought he had a hope in hell of winning.
/start_rant
/end_rant
Personally I think the way the good senator got his seat is a fucking joke. Anyone remotely interested in the wishes of the people would say to themselves: "I only got 2% of the vote, I should resign and force a second election". This guy says: "HaHaHa, suckers!". I'm also skeptical of anyone who is so hell bent against lewd behaviour that they see it corrupting society.
These are the type of people who come up with "sex offender lists" that include drunk collage streakers and people going for a piss against a tree. The reason they do this is to draw suspition from themselves and dilute the meaning of "sex offender" to the extent it includes everyone. I'm not suggesting an Aussie senator could be a rock spider, just that by taking up his seat he has already demonstrated he is not interested in what his constituents think/want/need.
Pity the mods missed you, excellent point with the feedback loop.
Bloody oath! Now it's Labor turn to suck up to an independent nutjob who gained 2% of the popular vote but potentially holds the balance of power in the senate. The irony is that both major parties helped him defeat the green candidate who would otherwise have easily won the seat.
Thankfully my prediction that this BS will continue to go nowhere seems to be panning out - it's like the two major parties have agreed to an endless and distracting debate that does little except keep the moralising minority busy.
Sorry, forgot the /jk tag.
"The idea that we all should receive and/or need the same level of education is pretty silly"
I wouldn't advocate that either, except for the basics of reading/writing. What I am suggesting is that skeptical think should be part of the basics as it ENABLES you to learn. Skeptical thinking is a skill, it doesn't tell you what to learn, it tells you how to learn and can be taught in a short amount of time (less than what it takes to memorise multiplication tables). The difficult part is getting people to be skeptical of their own "common sense" (in particular many of the teachers).
Interesting you bring up Columbus. Captain Cook is the Aussie equivalent. My history lessons comprised 10yrs worth of Captin cook, McArthur and his damm sheep, no mention of WW2 that my parents generation had endured. History is prologue but what I encountered in school was propoganda. Yes Australian history is important in Australia but leaving out the natives, the rest of the world, and the events of the 20th century is a tad over the top and totally useless to anyone except a scholar of the first half of Australian settlement, (who would know it's mostly crap anyway).
Yes, but not in this universe.
"Yet for some reason Darwin's theory of evolution gets picked out so that teachers must highlight its weaknesses. Why might this be?"
I agree with the GP's point: Pointing out weakness' in a theory is how it becomes stronger.
I agree with your caveate: All disagreements must be intellectually honest.
Evolution is nowhere near as contraversial as when I went to school in the 60's, a time when tectonic plates and black holes were also contraversial, science has convincingly won all three very public arguments over the last 40yrs (150yrs in the case of evolution). Of more immediate concern is the current FUD from global warming psudeo-skeptics (coinidentally they are also particularly strong in Texas). Not that I have anything against Texas but the reason these people make (subtle) anti-science and greenie bashing a political platform could be due to either power/money/ignorance, regardless of which one it is, ignorance amoungst their followers is the sole reason they get away with it.
IMHO Dawkins and Sagan are correct in that science is taught as a "dictonary of facts", the philosophy of science is largely ignored by the education system and consequently misunderstood/ignored by the public at large. Evidence for this is not hard to find, just count the number of "climate fools" here on slashdot, they espouse all manner of nerdy sounding but thougoughly debunked scientific red-herrings, not because they are stupid but becuase their lack of understanding as to what "scientific skepticisim" means makes them easy prey for intellectually dishonest politicians and their sponsors.
Due to the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence I can no longer belive a politician can (legitimately) keep using ignorance as an excuse to poo-poo global warming and/or evolution. Therefore the root cause of the cherry-picked "science" found in the opinion columns of the mass-media and subsequently regurgitated by a million ignorant bloggers - must be money and/or power.
Premptive Al Gore reply: I'm not from the US, I haven't seen his film. I had already read the IPCC reports and didn't see the point, from the reviews of Gore's film by IPCC scientists, (and later their answers to critics), I would have to conclude his slide show was an accurate representation of the reports. OTOH: Just because the doco is accurate does not mean Gore's motivations for presenting it are intellectually honest.
"You could send something as simple as a yes/no - yes, I've read your message , or no, I haven't. [snip] Someone who understands it better, correct me and be more clear, please."
Analogy:
I have two basket balls, one has a cat inside - I don't know which one.
I send one basket ball to you.
I open my basket ball (observation).
I find it empty so I can deduce the cat is in yours (no information is transfered to you).
I cannot tell if you have opened yours and observed the cat as dead or alive.
You open yours and find a dead cat (observation).
Information is transfered in the normal manner when you call me up and ask why I sent you a dead cat in a basketball.
I agree, moving data to a computer is much simpler than collecting it from a human.
"The EU is not actually thinking about banning a particular technology"
Who'da-thunk the first post on a nerd site would ruin the whole thing with facts.
Thanks for the link, looked him up and he made it to Japan! However the skeptic in me is suspicious of the route chosen for the 100 day voyage and I guess that's why he is not more famous. He could remove doubt by retracing the route backwards, I'm not saying it does/doesn't work, just that I'm not convinced without at least a simple test that reasonably cancels out prevailing winds, currents, etc.
Having said that I have seen albatros gliding effortlessly in both heavy and calm seas, down here they travel up to 5000km collecting food for their chicks, they can do it in 7=10 days and hardly flap a wing, they can fish best in a good swell, they sort of run off the crest and take off like a hang glider. I like the futuristic idea of millions of small, smart, low (solar) energy albatros like drones transporting comodities around the planet, wheat, rice, ore, etc anything you ship a shovel full at a time. I don't see why it's impossible for ocean craft to "somehow" do the same maybe with more than a shovel full.
"What really concerns me, though (since I can disable cookies and still watch the videos), is that..[snip]...the White House is promoting YouTube, a private, for-profit company. [snip] So, I suggest that the govt. procure a YouTube-like system from YouTube, and then use that."
/sarcasm
Where do you stop? Should the pentagon buy up every company who's products it supports (eg: Lockheed C-130 Hercules or IBM WebShere)? That's going to get expensive very quickly, are you prepared for the inevitable 4000% tax hike - or will you just lament the fact that removing the logo's to avoid massive tax hikes has reduced transparency?
In a democracy the answer is simple, but it's also at odds with human nature: Watch your government more than they watch you.
Good question. Many moons ago I worked the fishing boats in Bass Straight. Can it drive a semi-submerged fishing trawler 30 feet up at about a 15-20deg incline, or would gravity drag it backwards?
Sorry but I think the GP is spot on.
What you are doing in your post is investigating the data until you UNDERSTAND what is usefull and then presenting (visualising) it for you're boss, who probably adds another layer of "visualization" for his boss, etc. (ie: You are acting as human visualisation tool that the boss can use to visualise the output of silicon visualisation tools)
To scale up you're simple X/Y plot of two variables to corporate size you propose using a visualization tool that UNDERSTANDS database structures and UNDERSTANDS the fact that to plot strings against integers you need a default transform, etc, etc. You are handed a bunch of DB's with hundereds of tables, thousands of columns and countless transaction transforms ferrying data from one DB to the other.
So you start with all possible pairs to see if there is a nice easy curve that can relate them. You get 10,000 statistically significant relationships - the problem posed in TFS is how do you now visualize all those graphs to find the relevant relationships without UNDERSTANDING the data.
As to TFS, visualization relies on data minning which will never be "solved" because given enough data you can always add one more level of UNDERSTANDING (see: Godel). This is not to say that trying to solve it is pointless. On the contrary, google news is excellent and accessible example of how far things have progressed in the last couple of decades.
Simply presenting multiple known facts/relationships in an easily accessible format takes a deep UNDERSTANDING of the data. Even if you do UNDERSTAND the facts/relationships, creating the format is an art that has few masters.
Yes, I read Hawkings book too. AFAIK GR says nothing about spontaneous matter-anti matter pairs appearing from the quantum vacum so it can't really be "wrong" about them can it? Maybe one day some genius will reconsile QM & GR but in the meantime I think we just have to accept there are two models of the universe that are in agreement where they overlap. In the long term both are probably NQR but that makes them no less usefull at this point in time.
"Even if you do the math this is going to seem strange"
It has been said that "the Universe is mainly hydrogen and ignorance". Having flirted with some of the math in uni, I tend to agree.
"And QM demonstrates that General Relativity is wrong."
Care to elaborate on that?
"When you assume something is correct in untested situations it's going to bite you."
And when you refuse to allow any assumption you will be paralised with indecision.
Car companies are somewhat incestuous and definitely globalised. IANAMechanic but I have a close friend who owns a panel shop (as far as I'm concerned the guy is a magician with wrecked cars). During the 90's he bought a brand new Ford Maverick here is Australia, he claimed it was the exact same car as a Nissan Patrol minus the "$10K flared gaurds". When he first showed me the car he rattled off a whole lot of mechanic speak that I can't remember and then pointed out the Nissan branding on the glass and seat belts.
Not picking on you personaly but this whole thread is a confusion between revenue, costs and profit. A web site has costs, period. You have three choices.
1. You eat the costs so everyone has a "free" service. (generous and passionate)
2. You create revenue to balance the costs so everyone has a "free" service. (wise and passionate)
3. You create revenue to exceed the costs, the service puts bread on your table. (business, passion is often fake)
The most common way to eat the costs is through donations.
Sure we can, depending on your definition of the words 'Fun', 'Game' and 'Automatically'
'Game' and 'Automatically' are concepts and have solid definitions. 'Fun' is an emotion, you feel it rather than analyse it.
What would happen to a car with this thought control magnetic ray wave you are talking about?