Disillusioned with the state of politics in your country?
Join the land of Freedot, your friendly new slashcode-based system of government!
Bills will be posted as articles, discussed pseudonymously and voted on anonymously. The database will be world-readable for easy auditing. Your votes will not be traceable back to you. Your primary key in the vote table will be stored, encrypted, in your user information, and your private key will be stored on your ID card.
Every contributing member of society will have a home, and Internet access within a short walk in the city, or within driving distance in rural areas. Everybody earning enough to live above the poverty level will be assessed an income tax amounting to a small percentage of their disposable income. Taxes will be light due to having done away with the expensive and inefficient decision-making governmental machinery in favor of a cheap, effective, online alternative. The revenue generated will finance the
Great political leaders will not be those with the most money, but those with the best words with which to voice their opinions. They will be known not by their names, but by their online pseudonyms, and because no one will know who they are, the State will not be able to quiet the voices of those who dissent with the majority opinion.
As Ben Harper puts it, "When the people lead, the leaders will have to follow."
Does anyone want to front the money for a patch of land and a small army?
Another relevant quote, from the very end of the interview:
Q. So you see the recording industry moving in that direction?
A. No. I said I think that's the remedy. Whether the patient will swallow the medicine is another question.
Re:Biggest PC annoyance...
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
It seems like it's high time some psychologists did some research on this. How is it that perfectly ordinary, or even fairly intelligent, people become complete idiots when they sit down at a computer?
I don't always get pissed at my parents when I have to do tech support for them. I think that as far as they can tell, I'm completely random about whether or not I get annoyed at their computer illiteracy. However, there's a perfectly good reason for my sometime annoyance--sometimes (seldom, since we all use Macs) their questions are legitimate cases of having to figure out a poorly designed interface, but more often they simply fail to have even the most basic concept of how to use a computer.
One hint that newbies need to understand: Even if the error wasn't your fault, it's your responsibility to remember or write down what the error message says. Error messages exist for a reason, they give useful information, and to just click "Okay" without reading the message is to ensure that the problem will continue.
I have to say, though, that my dad (the less computer literate of my parents) has gotten much better at understanding and following instructions, and has even managed to figure a few things out for himself. Recently his router fried, putting his computer, my mom's computer, and the server hosting his website offline. I had just gotten a new router, so he came to Ann Arbor to get my old one from me. I explained what each port was for, fully expecting him to plug the wrong thing into the WAN port, but he got it right. When he called to get further instructions on setting up the "new" router (my fault that it wasn't ready to go already), I was able to walk him through using its Web interface without too much trouble.
However, when additional problems a couple days later required that he hook up a monitor and keyboard to the server, he had to ask me this when taking the keyboard from his computer: "It's plugged into this sort of interchange thing [a USB hub], and I'm just wondering if there's going to be a place to plug it into Arthur [the server]." I actually had to say, "Yes, there will be a place to plug the keyboard in on the back of Arthur." At least he managed to find the USB port himself--a year ago I would have had to describe it to him and tell him exactly where on Arthur's back he could expect to find it. Hopefully he chalked the weariness in my voice up to the fact that I was sick and studying for my upcoming exams.
They could do that, but it would be like putting up a big flag saying, "Arrest me!"
Someone, at some point, has to collect the money from that account, and you can bet that no civilized country will be friendly to that sort of scamming.
I'm not exactly qualified to pick bones with this guy on matters of economics, but I have to, because he's completely wrong.
He says that music pricing needs to vary in order to convey information to customers about what they're getting. But the value of music isn't intrinsic to the music. What I may be willing to pay $1.25 for, you may only be willing to pay $.02 for. The fact that the RIAA has valued this particular song at a given price tells me nothing about its value to me. The complete inaccuracy of this detail of the article is borne out by the success of the iTMS in the face of various other services, such as buymusic.com, that have failed miserably despite variation in their pricing schemes.
The idea of variation in pricing won't work because songs are not interchangeable. When I'm shopping for a piece of hardware, I might pass on, say, an iPod, because a cheaper device will do basically the same thing, and I'm willing to get a lower-quality device if I can pay less for it (actually I'm not, but that's another discussion). When I'm shopping for music, though, I'm not going to say, "Oh, that Dylan track is too expensive--I'll buy this Radiohead song instead." One song is not a replacement for another, or I wouldn't have 12,000 of them.
The way to give customers information about what they're buying before they do so is not through pricing, in this case, but through recommendations. If I buy a zillion Dylan albums, several Simon & Garfunkel albums, a few Pink Floyd albums, and some Tom Petty albums, the iTMS should say, hey--maybe you'd like to try some Weezer. It should keep track of what I buy, how much I like it, and what I might like based on comparisons of my history to those of other users. Then, maybe I would use it a bit more. Instead, it's simply the first place I look when I have something specific in mind that I want to buy. If it made recommendations, Apple would be convincing me to buy music when I otherwise would not; instead, they're convincing me to buy music from them when I would buy music anyway, which is a lot less effective.
I read a short in Wired a while back (probably a year or so ago) about the increasing use of desktop operating systems for embedded applications. It mentioned flight computers in commercial airliners.
I believe the quote was, "...could give new meaning to the phrase 'Blue Screen of Death'.".
I don't find this scary, I think it's useful. I don't have a laptop yet, but when I get one, I will be very worried about theft. There are plenty of ways to reduce the likelihood of someone stealing a laptop, but as a last resort a little phone-home program would be essential.
Every time it connects to the Internet, I'll have my laptop phone home to the server in my parents' basement, which will keep logs of the IP addresses phoning home. If someone steals my laptop, they'll be as good as caught the first time they connect to the Internet with it from their permanent residence.
*knock knock* Hello, can I help you? Yeah, I lost a laptop a coupla weeks ago, I was wondering if you'd seen it. Err--no, uh, I haven't seen it. Are you sure? Cause, your ISP seems to disagree. My whatsis? Who are those guys with you? Oh, these are just a couple of friends of mine. They like to wear blue uniforms. They're going to help me take a look around, just to see if that 'Book is hiding somewhere around here.
The first reply said it best, but I'll explain anyway, because he skipped as obvious several major parts of his reasoning. (Well, okay, he skipped right to "Wooosh.") I'll just explain in more detail.
And you have hit very succinctly on the problem with institutional racism. They would rather hire some white asshole because he looks like he's part of the clan than "take a chance" on some "minority".
Yes, they would. It's not to say they are right in doing this, but it's also not to say that they are racist, necessarily. They simply read the news, hear time and again of racial minorities making life difficult for their employers, and become wary of hiring them. The victims of racism cause more racist decisions through publicity.
The victims of racism can also encourage racism by giving racists grounds for their claims. While I have no reason to think blacks in general are less intelligent than whites, my university has made sure, through its admission practices, that the average black student here is less intelligent than the average white one. Now, knowing this, I can't help but wonder when I meet a black student whether they would have been admitted if they were white--and harbor some resentment if I get the impression they wouldn't have. More dangerous yet, if I didn't know, I might come away from my university career believing all black people to be less intelligent than whites. Call it racism if you want, but I could understand someone in that situation believing that. (Of course, if you go here and don't hear about the admission policies, you're living in a hole.)
This is not meant as a troll or flamebait, by the way. If you think it is, I suggest you re-read it carefully, trying to follow the logic of each argument and forget your bias.
I think in many ways the iTMS and similar (crappier) services legitimize the RIAA's actions. I still think they're asking for unreasonably large amounts, and charging too much for music in the first place, but at least that's normal monopoly behavior, which we accept from Microsoft all the time. In the Napster days, they were shutting down a service that could be used legitimately, thereby hurting its (admittedly very few) legitimate users. What's worse, they were overcharging massively for music, and not distributing it through the channels through which people wanted to get it.
These days, they're going after people who are actually breaking the law, thereby avoiding collateral damage; there are several options for buying music online; and music is considerably cheaper online than at the record store.
I'm not saying I agree with what they're doing, nor in fact with the law that allows it, but I commit my civil disobedience in full knowledge of the potential consequences, and I keep my sharing clandestine out of a respect for those consequences. Besides, having amassed 12,000 songs, mostly by ripping my own collection and those of my friends, I have little use for P2P any more. Maybe once I've actually listened to half my collection I'll consider a return to P2P, but with that many files I'd be a ripe target for the RIAA.
Maybe that's what has happened to P2P--all the major sharers got what they wanted and switched to serving via FTP to friends, rather than risk lawsuits. (I'd post the link, as I did many times last school year, but I'm no longer living in the dorms and my measly Comcast connection would go belly-up with even a mild/.-ing!)
Mathematician: Pi is a mathematical constant expressing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Physicist: Pi is 3.1415926535897932384626 +/-.0000000000000000000005. Engineer: Pi is about 3.
Re:How the FUCK is this redundant?!
on
Mafia Tech Support
·
· Score: 0, Troll
If you want to RTFA, click the link. I don't want to have to scroll past this long and pointless post.
In fact, you could tell the story of the past 15 years of computer evolution -- from the rise of the PC to the rise of the Internet -- in terms of the effects of the amount of time it takes various components -- from a processor all the way out to a networked computer -- to load data.
I like this assessement. Forget about Moore's Law as a measure of our progress; latency and throughput are far more important than processing power.
Computers used to be for processing information; these days, most people use them more for accessing and delivering information. Every new computer I've gotten before my current one has only satisfied me by being faster than the ones that went before, not by actually being fast enough. However, my current machine (dual-1.25GHz Power Mac G4) leaves me with no complaints about speed--while I certainly wouldn't complain if it were a little faster, I never feel like I'm waiting for the computer for an unreasonable amount of time; most of the time, it's waiting for me.
However, when it's not waiting for me, it's waiting for one of its hard drives to spin up and feed it with data, or for some slow server to send it something. I would trade one of my processors for a 2x improvement in either disk or network latency. While these aren't the types of latency directly addressed in the article, I would wager that on the rare occasions when I actually have to wait for some processing to take place, most of that time is spent loading data from memory, not actually processing it.
It's not that processors are fast enough for everybody and we should forget about making them any faster; I'm sure graphics and video professionals, among others, will always have a need for more raw speed. But for most computer users, the continued emphasis on speed is misplaced. If computer manufacturers could transfer just a little bit of their R&D spending from increasing speed to decreasing latency, we'd all be better off.
But then, the last time I went to class, I had to smoke before hand to alleviate the pain of listening to a physics lecture. The last time I watched a movie, I had to smoke first so I could remain interested throughout. And the last time I went to bed, I needed to smoke first so I could fall asleep--but I was all out of pot, so I didn't get to sleep until 7 a.m.! Oh, woe is me...
Maybe it was a typo, but the original spelling was "Margaret". However, I also made a mistake as I realized after posting that one of those characters is named Margerie, not Margaret--and I still can't remember which one. I believe it's Marge--that would make the most sense to me.
But at least when you're stoned, it doesn't hurt as much to fall on your ass.
Actually, while it's my least favorite psychoactive among those few I've tried, alcohol would be the most effective thing for that purpose--it makes falling on your ass fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Disillusioned with the state of politics in your country?
Join the land of Freedot, your friendly new slashcode-based system of government!
Bills will be posted as articles, discussed pseudonymously and voted on anonymously. The database will be world-readable for easy auditing. Your votes will not be traceable back to you. Your primary key in the vote table will be stored, encrypted, in your user information, and your private key will be stored on your ID card.
Every contributing member of society will have a home, and Internet access within a short walk in the city, or within driving distance in rural areas. Everybody earning enough to live above the poverty level will be assessed an income tax amounting to a small percentage of their disposable income. Taxes will be light due to having done away with the expensive and inefficient decision-making governmental machinery in favor of a cheap, effective, online alternative. The revenue generated will finance the
Great political leaders will not be those with the most money, but those with the best words with which to voice their opinions. They will be known not by their names, but by their online pseudonyms, and because no one will know who they are, the State will not be able to quiet the voices of those who dissent with the majority opinion.
As Ben Harper puts it, "When the people lead, the leaders will have to follow."
Does anyone want to front the money for a patch of land and a small army?
Rush uses a Mac?
Time to switch to Linux.
Another relevant quote, from the very end of the interview:
Q. So you see the recording industry moving in that direction?
A. No. I said I think that's the remedy. Whether the patient will swallow the medicine is another question.
It seems like it's high time some psychologists did some research on this. How is it that perfectly ordinary, or even fairly intelligent, people become complete idiots when they sit down at a computer?
I don't always get pissed at my parents when I have to do tech support for them. I think that as far as they can tell, I'm completely random about whether or not I get annoyed at their computer illiteracy. However, there's a perfectly good reason for my sometime annoyance--sometimes (seldom, since we all use Macs) their questions are legitimate cases of having to figure out a poorly designed interface, but more often they simply fail to have even the most basic concept of how to use a computer.
One hint that newbies need to understand: Even if the error wasn't your fault, it's your responsibility to remember or write down what the error message says. Error messages exist for a reason, they give useful information, and to just click "Okay" without reading the message is to ensure that the problem will continue.
I have to say, though, that my dad (the less computer literate of my parents) has gotten much better at understanding and following instructions, and has even managed to figure a few things out for himself. Recently his router fried, putting his computer, my mom's computer, and the server hosting his website offline. I had just gotten a new router, so he came to Ann Arbor to get my old one from me. I explained what each port was for, fully expecting him to plug the wrong thing into the WAN port, but he got it right. When he called to get further instructions on setting up the "new" router (my fault that it wasn't ready to go already), I was able to walk him through using its Web interface without too much trouble.
However, when additional problems a couple days later required that he hook up a monitor and keyboard to the server, he had to ask me this when taking the keyboard from his computer: "It's plugged into this sort of interchange thing [a USB hub], and I'm just wondering if there's going to be a place to plug it into Arthur [the server]." I actually had to say, "Yes, there will be a place to plug the keyboard in on the back of Arthur." At least he managed to find the USB port himself--a year ago I would have had to describe it to him and tell him exactly where on Arthur's back he could expect to find it. Hopefully he chalked the weariness in my voice up to the fact that I was sick and studying for my upcoming exams.
Remember, an open mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Sure, but if you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
They could do that, but it would be like putting up a big flag saying, "Arrest me!"
Someone, at some point, has to collect the money from that account, and you can bet that no civilized country will be friendly to that sort of scamming.
Haven't you seen Die Hard?
I'm not exactly qualified to pick bones with this guy on matters of economics, but I have to, because he's completely wrong.
He says that music pricing needs to vary in order to convey information to customers about what they're getting. But the value of music isn't intrinsic to the music. What I may be willing to pay $1.25 for, you may only be willing to pay $.02 for. The fact that the RIAA has valued this particular song at a given price tells me nothing about its value to me. The complete inaccuracy of this detail of the article is borne out by the success of the iTMS in the face of various other services, such as buymusic.com, that have failed miserably despite variation in their pricing schemes.
The idea of variation in pricing won't work because songs are not interchangeable. When I'm shopping for a piece of hardware, I might pass on, say, an iPod, because a cheaper device will do basically the same thing, and I'm willing to get a lower-quality device if I can pay less for it (actually I'm not, but that's another discussion). When I'm shopping for music, though, I'm not going to say, "Oh, that Dylan track is too expensive--I'll buy this Radiohead song instead." One song is not a replacement for another, or I wouldn't have 12,000 of them.
The way to give customers information about what they're buying before they do so is not through pricing, in this case, but through recommendations. If I buy a zillion Dylan albums, several Simon & Garfunkel albums, a few Pink Floyd albums, and some Tom Petty albums, the iTMS should say, hey--maybe you'd like to try some Weezer. It should keep track of what I buy, how much I like it, and what I might like based on comparisons of my history to those of other users. Then, maybe I would use it a bit more. Instead, it's simply the first place I look when I have something specific in mind that I want to buy. If it made recommendations, Apple would be convincing me to buy music when I otherwise would not; instead, they're convincing me to buy music from them when I would buy music anyway, which is a lot less effective.
I read a short in Wired a while back (probably a year or so ago) about the increasing use of desktop operating systems for embedded applications. It mentioned flight computers in commercial airliners.
I believe the quote was, "...could give new meaning to the phrase 'Blue Screen of Death'.".
I don't find this scary, I think it's useful. I don't have a laptop yet, but when I get one, I will be very worried about theft. There are plenty of ways to reduce the likelihood of someone stealing a laptop, but as a last resort a little phone-home program would be essential.
Every time it connects to the Internet, I'll have my laptop phone home to the server in my parents' basement, which will keep logs of the IP addresses phoning home. If someone steals my laptop, they'll be as good as caught the first time they connect to the Internet with it from their permanent residence.
*knock knock*
Hello, can I help you?
Yeah, I lost a laptop a coupla weeks ago, I was wondering if you'd seen it.
Err--no, uh, I haven't seen it.
Are you sure? Cause, your ISP seems to disagree.
My whatsis? Who are those guys with you?
Oh, these are just a couple of friends of mine. They like to wear blue uniforms. They're going to help me take a look around, just to see if that 'Book is hiding somewhere around here.
The first reply said it best, but I'll explain anyway, because he skipped as obvious several major parts of his reasoning. (Well, okay, he skipped right to "Wooosh.") I'll just explain in more detail.
And you have hit very succinctly on the problem with institutional racism. They would rather hire some white asshole because he looks like he's part of the clan than "take a chance" on some "minority".
Yes, they would. It's not to say they are right in doing this, but it's also not to say that they are racist, necessarily. They simply read the news, hear time and again of racial minorities making life difficult for their employers, and become wary of hiring them. The victims of racism cause more racist decisions through publicity.
The victims of racism can also encourage racism by giving racists grounds for their claims. While I have no reason to think blacks in general are less intelligent than whites, my university has made sure, through its admission practices, that the average black student here is less intelligent than the average white one. Now, knowing this, I can't help but wonder when I meet a black student whether they would have been admitted if they were white--and harbor some resentment if I get the impression they wouldn't have. More dangerous yet, if I didn't know, I might come away from my university career believing all black people to be less intelligent than whites. Call it racism if you want, but I could understand someone in that situation believing that. (Of course, if you go here and don't hear about the admission policies, you're living in a hole.)
This is not meant as a troll or flamebait, by the way. If you think it is, I suggest you re-read it carefully, trying to follow the logic of each argument and forget your bias.
100 if by space, 101 if by underground tunnel, 110 if you hear the words, "Beam me up, Scotty."
Should have charged him $2^666 extra for acute mental anguish.
A patent on the "1. [something] 2. ??? 3. Profit!" business model? I bet you collected lots of royalties during the .com boom!
I think in many ways the iTMS and similar (crappier) services legitimize the RIAA's actions. I still think they're asking for unreasonably large amounts, and charging too much for music in the first place, but at least that's normal monopoly behavior, which we accept from Microsoft all the time. In the Napster days, they were shutting down a service that could be used legitimately, thereby hurting its (admittedly very few) legitimate users. What's worse, they were overcharging massively for music, and not distributing it through the channels through which people wanted to get it.
/.-ing!)
These days, they're going after people who are actually breaking the law, thereby avoiding collateral damage; there are several options for buying music online; and music is considerably cheaper online than at the record store.
I'm not saying I agree with what they're doing, nor in fact with the law that allows it, but I commit my civil disobedience in full knowledge of the potential consequences, and I keep my sharing clandestine out of a respect for those consequences. Besides, having amassed 12,000 songs, mostly by ripping my own collection and those of my friends, I have little use for P2P any more. Maybe once I've actually listened to half my collection I'll consider a return to P2P, but with that many files I'd be a ripe target for the RIAA.
Maybe that's what has happened to P2P--all the major sharers got what they wanted and switched to serving via FTP to friends, rather than risk lawsuits. (I'd post the link, as I did many times last school year, but I'm no longer living in the dorms and my measly Comcast connection would go belly-up with even a mild
What is pi?
.0000000000000000000005.
Mathematician: Pi is a mathematical constant expressing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.
Physicist: Pi is 3.1415926535897932384626 +/-
Engineer: Pi is about 3.
If you want to RTFA, click the link. I don't want to have to scroll past this long and pointless post.
In fact, you could tell the story of the past 15 years of computer evolution -- from the rise of the PC to the rise of the Internet -- in terms of the effects of the amount of time it takes various components -- from a processor all the way out to a networked computer -- to load data.
I like this assessement. Forget about Moore's Law as a measure of our progress; latency and throughput are far more important than processing power.
Computers used to be for processing information; these days, most people use them more for accessing and delivering information. Every new computer I've gotten before my current one has only satisfied me by being faster than the ones that went before, not by actually being fast enough. However, my current machine (dual-1.25GHz Power Mac G4) leaves me with no complaints about speed--while I certainly wouldn't complain if it were a little faster, I never feel like I'm waiting for the computer for an unreasonable amount of time; most of the time, it's waiting for me.
However, when it's not waiting for me, it's waiting for one of its hard drives to spin up and feed it with data, or for some slow server to send it something. I would trade one of my processors for a 2x improvement in either disk or network latency. While these aren't the types of latency directly addressed in the article, I would wager that on the rare occasions when I actually have to wait for some processing to take place, most of that time is spent loading data from memory, not actually processing it.
It's not that processors are fast enough for everybody and we should forget about making them any faster; I'm sure graphics and video professionals, among others, will always have a need for more raw speed. But for most computer users, the continued emphasis on speed is misplaced. If computer manufacturers could transfer just a little bit of their R&D spending from increasing speed to decreasing latency, we'd all be better off.
What is it smoking, and where can I get some?
I can't wait until they get it stuffed into a PowerBook.
Stuffed, heh. Definitely the right word for it.
I, too, am looking forward to having a G5 PowerBook set my pants on fire.
What a coincidence--me too!
But then, the last time I went to class, I had to smoke before hand to alleviate the pain of listening to a physics lecture. The last time I watched a movie, I had to smoke first so I could remain interested throughout. And the last time I went to bed, I needed to smoke first so I could fall asleep--but I was all out of pot, so I didn't get to sleep until 7 a.m.! Oh, woe is me...
James
--
--- It's nice to be important, but its more important to be nice.
It's important to be nice, but it's nicer to be important.
These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
Maybe it was a typo, but the original spelling was "Margaret". However, I also made a mistake as I realized after posting that one of those characters is named Margerie, not Margaret--and I still can't remember which one. I believe it's Marge--that would make the most sense to me.
That's Lisa, not Margaret. Marge isn't very science-minded, and Maggie is a little young yet to be inventing perpetual motion machines.
But at least when you're stoned, it doesn't hurt as much to fall on your ass.
Actually, while it's my least favorite psychoactive among those few I've tried, alcohol would be the most effective thing for that purpose--it makes falling on your ass fun.