"If you don't involve yourself at all with matters of technology, how do you select someone who is capable of performing exceptionally?"
The difficulty is that they really do need to have some sense of what is going on, and if they profess none I think there is a lot of room to really stick it to them. "With no knowledge of the basic topology of modern computer administration, how do you expect to create reasonable laws?" If a politician argues that all they need to be a good politician is a policy background and/or a business background, then it's clear what sort of government you'll get; one about policies that promote people with money and businesses.
I don't think that shame is a scalable solution - which is key, I think. I think the problem really boils down to a market situation in this case; if we as a democracy decide this stuff needs to be sorted, then we need to pass the appropriate law. Then it simply comes down to figuring out what the market value is to get the stuff sorted. If a trash company will do it for $300/mo, then that's what you'll end up paying. If you sort your own and it only costs you $25 a month, that's what you'll do. If another company comes along and can offer the service for $20 a month, you'll probably go that way.
As it stands right now, though, there is no real requirement for sorting, and that requirement isn't put into place because people don't see an easy way to sort. First, I think the idea that it should be easy on us should be discarded; it's easy to pollute your environment, but I for one don't want random chemicals floating around in my rivers and water table. Then I think what has to be done is the discarding of the notion of a 'general trash' pile. It's not, in my opinion, the fault of a few random assholes that we have so much trash, that this is such a general problem. Our whole culture is geared towards throwing everything away. Engineering the problem for a few problem cases isn't where the wins will be made; engineering it for the vast majority will. Right now the vast majority is not provided with an even vaguely easy way to sort their trash, so it doesn't happen. It is of note, though, that in places that have voluntary or compensated recycling programs, many people do sort out that stuff. Why do we hesitate to go further?
If you're interested, another good summer read is "Cradle to Cradle".
But what's the follow up to that? If a customer says, "No, I'm not going to" what recourse does the trash removal component have that doesn't effectively boil down to a fine?
A daycare can decide not to watch your kid. Trash companies can't decide not to give you service for your trash. Their threat of, "three strikes and you're out" is valid. It can't be with a trash company, no matter how many hoops you add on top.
Unlike a daycare, trash is not really a service you can be denied. The trash company cannot say, "Oh, you didn't jump through x hoop, so we aren't going to pick up your trash."
What I find amazing is that Slashdot readers haven't thought about how technology could be used to solve this problem. But first, a fact to keep in mind; the price of dealing with waste will go up. When we start deciding that we must care for the whole life of a product we will have to pay for that. Personally, I think it's a good deal and plan. Some may not. But in order to properly recycle and reduce waste, we will have to pay more money somewhere; upfront for the companies to deal with it or at the back end if we want the trash people to deal with it.
That said, it seems to me that institute "green" bags made of strong but biodegradeable material (bamboo?) with RFID chips in them. When they're dropped off at your house in some sort of secure manner (or, like the mail, are highly prosecuted if messed with) the unique identifier is logged with your residence and by the type of trash that bag should carry. Then, when it's picked up, the ID is read and the appropriate household is charged. If the wrong type of trash ends up in the bag ("this bag went through the machine and read out that it had metal instead of paper... ding!") you get charged for the resorting fee. If you have a lot of bags in a particular week, you get charged exponentially beyond the first an additional burden fee. And so on.
Really, the problems that people have with trash is that it's a pain, no one wants to do it, it's hard to sort (in part because no one wants to do it), and when there is an error it's messy to clean up. I think, frankly, the segmentation of trash is a perfectly reasonable plan, and can be supported with modern technologies to get around the fact that presently trash has no provenance, save the house it's in front of.
Shouldn't someone pose that to these potential candidates? "Hey, what OS does your webserver run on? Why did you choose that one?"
The thing is we're in a technical age; it's about time that they made at least a nod to nerd-dom in the form of figuring out a cogent response. We want our candidates to be technically saavy, right? The answer is far less important than their ability to answer it - but we more or less assume the question is not one you'd seriously pose to a politician. Why is that?
It is fair to say that Vancouver is in the Pacific Northwest, a commonly used name for that region of North America that includes the Columbia River Basin as it's center.
You have no problem understanding and or using the Dewey Decimal System; but it is a far reach to say that the younger generation is asking for the output of that system to be 'handed to them', and that they have the impression they have 'no need to learn anything'.
Regardless of what system is used, be it Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress the fact of the matter is that there are some number of books that are sorted in a possibly arbitrary way, which a user can reference via said arbitrary way or system's interface. The Dewey Decimal system and card catalogs are a labor intensive way of sorting and referencing books - is that necessary any more? My argument is no; computer systems are cheap enough and should be sophisticated enough that the user should not be concerned with the mechanics of it. It should be entirely opaque, because the ideal user is there to spend their time with the content, not the sorting mechanism.
On some level librarians are recognizing this, and we should to. The Dewey Decimal System is cruft for the majority of users. However we get to the next iteration of literature management, be it by video games or some other method, recognize that the old way of doing it was predicated on a different framework of resources, and there is a better way of doing it - one motivated by cutting to the task on hand - as we do in so much of the rest of our lives these days - not by being whiny teenagers.
Note that I did not condemn arbitrage as a whole, merely when x is much less than y. Arbitrage is a perfectly reasonable service; but there should be a cultural conditioning against utilizing ignorance of workers to profit yourself, just like it's not particularly fair to utilize their lack of capital to profit off their labor. To put it in economic philosophy terms; controlling the means of production is one thing, but it is just as important to have a fair distribution of means of sale.
No, but they wouldn't be worse off. The difficulty with arbitraging labor is that it piles the wealth in one corner. If someone is performing a service for x amount of money, for people whose demand supports y amount of money, where x is much less than y, the middle man - the person performing the arbitrage - is getting the difference, without actually doing anything. Human rights aside, some people are willing to pay for a service, but not willing to pay to have that service arbitraged.
The argument of, "Well, the people working the farms starve then" is a fallacious one. People will find other work; and that's a matter of historical record.
It does go without saying that compounding inefficiency only compounds the problem. (Har.) But it seems a poor reason to, for instance, ignore wireless power technology because it's 'inefficient' when we could easily make up that inefficiency and then some elsewhere in the process. We have not to date because power is cheap, and for the amount of power we have, given only one delivery option, there is no real reason to worry about, say, the bulb end of things.
The thing that wireless power provides is a choice of (inefficient delivery) + (efficient bulb) or (efficient delivery) + (inefficient bulb), and even though the former is useful in not a huge number of cases currently (not to mention probably causes cancer), the latter now has a competitor; something we haven't seen before, and despite all it's inefficiency is not a magnitude worse than what we already cope with.
But, then, "magnitudes" always struck me as more important metric than "doublings".
I would totally give you credit for your politeness, if only I could.
It's nice, though, that you set up your math to look at how many watts a forty watt bulb would take to be powered, effectively cutting out the inefficiency of the forty watt bulb. If the forty watt bulb is 98% inefficient, and your power transmission is 60% inefficient, then you're (roughly).98*.6 ~=.99 inefficient over the whole process... of making light.
Now, I recognize that to make the same amount of light you need twice as much power, but the point is that the choke in the equation is still the bulb. When you're already spending 50x the energy, 2x is a relatively small factor.
I think you should go back and reread what Muhammed did and said. Muhammed did, in fact, lead a number of armed offensives against the clans of Mecca - but he was not a warmonger, and in fact was a famous diplomat; decidedly *not* going to war when others would have. Much of the spread of Islam in a 'bloody' fashion had to do with the nature of politics at the time; not with Islam itself.
Having lived near Butte, MT. I am also well aware of what a little strip mining can do. And articles recently have brought to life other pollutants in our immediate environment. But the difficulty is that these do not lessen the risk of a greenhouse effect.
C02 has a huge lead time - up to forty years. That means what we spew out now is probably not going to be an issue for a while - but will be hard to reverse when it *is* an issue. The time for action is now, on all of these fronts. It is not a sufficient answer to say "This part of the problem is bigger, we should focus there." They are all big, and we are basing our decisions on which fronts to fight on which fronts are going to be least painful to fight.
Creating a sustainable, controlled environment and economy is going to be extremely painful. It means that we can't all have one of everything; that's a lie sold to the American public by the devil if ever there was one. We have the resources in the here and now to cope with the problem - but we choose to expend that energy on other spectres, such as the idea that increasing our wait time at airports will save us from terrorists. Or that having an indefinite, ongoing war in the middle east will somehow secure our blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. The ironic thing is that jobs can be created and the economy powered by fighting back the pollution we have now - it just won't be putting money into the pockets of those who control modern industry.
We have to stop the C02. We have to stop all the pollutants. To quote from the best movie of all time, "We can't afford to let one of those bastards in here."
It is entirely unsupportable that shooting someone else would not have been the cause of much hooey palooie back in 'The Day'. 'The Day', contrary to popular belief, was much like 'Today', in that things such as shooting each other were, in fact, the cause of some talk, and were apt to form the opinions of people. Take Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton's crossing of pistols - that is still talked about today, and so categorically not like any other day.
Cheney shot a man in the face. That man later apologized to Cheney. Liberals, Conservatives - anyone is allowed to form their opinion based on these facts, and fond remembrances of days long past - actually, days never having been - does not remove that right. Furthermore, may I recommend you grow a thicker skin. Administrations have suffered the slings and arrows of vile humors for much smaller events.
Do not delude yourself into thinking our Judicial system is designed to rehabilitate anyone. It's designed to make others out there too afraid to start a life of crime. And if that doesn't work, well, it's a holding pen.
Making him delete a lot of email would, in theory, fit the crime, but really we want the hours back that he stole from us.
The problem as I see it with the jRPGs is that their stories are very specific to a certain adolescent coming-of-age arc. The mindset in them does not vary much, as the mindset in most anime does not. Worse, I think that even there you see less and less investment in Writers.
What was great about Fallout? About Planescape:Torment? About Deus Ex? Eternal Darkness? KOTOR? All of these games had a huge focus on the writing. Rarely did you find yourself 'leveling up' or in meaningless fights. But meaningless fights is practically the staple of RPGs these days. I go to the store and pick up a "Lord of the Rings: The Third Age", supposedly a "nice little role-playing jaunt into the world of Tolkien." Yet the game is a long (and I mean LONG) series of fights using the exact same mechanism over and over, with a little filler glue. Many games are like this, and many, many jRPGs are like this. That filler glue can be elaborate or simple but the focus of the game is largely on the number-based or twitch-based fights.
I don't know that it's an 'American' quality, but I like the sort of RPG that has a narrative - but by 'narrative' I do not mean a story that is happening in FMV while I watch. HL1 and 2 did a good job, but were very linear. Deus Ex did a far better job; the choices you made mattered. How you went about things dictated your experience; your experience was not pre-dictated, to only be altered in the specifics of the fights you fought. Fallout had whole different endings depending on all sorts of actions you took. This sort of thing is not achieved by hiring the latest code monkeys, it's achieved by hiring people with some writing skills, who have a sense of the real world and what a narrative is.
But such games generally require an attention span. The longer an attention span you need, the less you can utilize tricks to keep the user engaged and the more you require quality writing. This is just expense for the business - nevermind the complexity it adds to coding. The jRPGs do well because there is a formula, and it's sufficiently easy to follow. Most of the attraction seems to fall on the cool graphical advancements. 'The Story' may be good, but it's just that, a monolithic story. The only 'role' you play is the monkey pushing the button to make it go forward.
"none of the people who excel at any of the above tasks have ever once called me an idiot."
If you were trying to fly an airplane, though, or stitch up a wound, they would, in all likelihood, call you an idiot - or at least think it. You would be trying to do something you don't know how to do - and in those cases, those who do know how to do those things will likely be unimpressed.
At the same time, holding the view that everyone but yourself is an idiot is inherently destructive, and a useless point of view. The real difficulty is that they don't know something (such as how to fly an airplane), and if that something is something you're emotionally invested in, or their ignorance is causing you an issue (such as all major OSes being clunky for you, with your developed operational reflexes), then you're going to feel put out. Blaming it on other people is about the most useless point of view you can take, though.
Really, I think that it's facile to say that society is built on the lowest common denominator. I've not actually been able to identify a common denominator in society to begin with, so the whole phrase is absurd. Society is built on a series of works that are good enough to satisfy a sufficient market to support them. Despite being able to envision better, rarely do we find it worth our while to realize such works. In short, I'm dubious of anyone who claims the problem is with someone other than themselves.
Hybrids don't claim much superiority on the highways; at least not on a theoretical level. Their engines are the same; they just utilize the power you waste when braking - which in proper highway driving you shouldn't be doing. So I'm not surprised that you can exceed a regular engine's mpg on the highway and not with a hybrid; all it takes is a good pilot.
But the key thing to remember is that while 48 is 80% of 60, 25 is only 83% of 30, and 21 is 87.5% of 24. When I buy a regular Honda Civic, and they tell me I get 30 highway miles per gallon they are cheating me nearly as much when I only get 25. Now, this may be a problem with metrics - maybe Civics actually get 35 gallons per mile - but if the issue is being lied to, then the anecdotal mileages can't apply. A common baseline must be used; and in the revised baselines regular engines are nearly as bad.
It is also worth pointing out that even if you're being lied to, and civics get 35 miles per gallon, and the Prius only 40, it's still better. Economically you'll probably want the civic, but that isn't proof that the hybrids aren't more efficient. It's just that they're not enough more efficient.
The mileages cited by the article do not indicate that non-hybrid cars are really gaining a lot of ground. Sure, some ground is gained - about 6% on the Honda Civic v Civic Hybrid - but the hybrids still outpace the regular gasoline cars by a long shot. The article makes it sound like the high mileages on hybrids were total puff.
This strikes me as a reaction to a fad movement; namely that a lot of people are into the idea of hybrids, and some people are therefore against it, waiting to knock those people off their pedestal. Hybrids are not the end-all be-all of cars, but this article is still a stretch.
Will the guys doing this study be fired when their prediction proves false? Or will they be rehired because it was understood that it was an advertising move and may not pan out?
Google has no impact whatsoever on whether or not the Chinese government censors its citizens
Not true. Patently untrue. Google does business with and in China. Their impact may not be large, but withdrawing from the market would be noticed by them. But that's not the point. If Google withdraws from China on account of China's censorship, and other American companies do the same, you form a block of economy that China is not getting access to - but other people are. The larger that block gets, the more economic incentive China has. Ironically, this is exact same concept that governs the idea of why American companies are willing to put up with the censorship; they want access to the market.
I suspect, though, that you're not pausing to think about the greater implications individual companies - large or small - can have on the world. You think I was talking about boycotting Google? Far from it. But the shareholders of Google very clearly put forth the idea of not doing business with - boycotting - China. This is not a meaningless strategy. It has worked, and can work no matter how many bold letters you use to say it won't. I'm simply talking from a historical perspective here.
Beyond that, I find it offensive that you've put words into my mouth and said on what standard I judge an evil company. I specifically did not cite what I thought an evil company was because I don't think there are Good Companies and Evil Companies, like life was Star Wars. There are companies with a history of moral actions and ones with a history of amoral or immoral actions. Google has ticked off an amoral action here, putting it at risk of taking immoral ones. Should people hound Google because of this? Absolutely. And to suggest that only Google gets this treatment is absurd. Look at the boycotts of clothing manufacturers that used slave labor in southeast Asia; people absolutely spoke out against them, and absolutely succeeded in cleaning up the industry. People speak out against diamonds, against fur, against clear cutting, against polluters of all sorts, against civil rights violators of all sorts, and against just plain greedy people.
You seem to espouse a basic belief that if you do not have sufficient power to change something than you have no power to effect change. This is erroneous. How power is pooled and applied has everything to do with changes occurring. Railing against sentiments building towards taking a progressive action is to be railing against progressive action. Whether that actually helps or not is debatable; sometimes arguments like yours, thin and built on straw men, do more for a movement than any amount of rational arguments for the issue at hand. But the world is not a binary place. It is vastly interconnected, and I think what you're failing to grok is that by speaking out against the parts of it that are twisted and wrong - be it's China's civil rights or the war in Iraq or the torture of foreign nationals - you help to suppress those bad parts. By arguing for silence on these matters, you're supporting it. I will make no bones about the fact that the quality of my life is built on the blood of innocents. I don't really have a choice in that - it is history. But I do have a choice about how to move forward, and you will not convince me that the simple choice of saying, "Google has made a wrong decision in this matter." is an erroneous one. The decision was not the decision I would want to see a company make - any company. It may be that my small voice - such a small boat in such a large ocean - will ultimately not matter, or it may turn the tide, but your declaration in this matter will not help no matter what.
You seem to think that the culture in which you live, in which you promote through your adherence to it, has nothing to do with you. Many companies now deal with China, widely regarded as being total bastards on the civil rights count. Let us look historically, back in time, to America's own struggle with this. Did most companies deal with southern states during it's period of segregation? Why, yes, they did. Did it make it right? No. And did boycotting work? Yes.
Times change, of course, and the means by which we can enact the changes we want to see also change. But it still holds that we have to *be* the changes we want to see; if we cannot take a stand on censorship, how can we possibly expect China to? Three hundred million people over here still have the ability to sway the opinion of three billion people over there; that is, we will if our way is better.
Google may not qualify for sainthood - a brilliant search engine only counts for one miracle. But they do have a choice to take a moral high ground or not. And given the size and public nature of their company, they have the ability to sway what other companies consider to be good or bad practices. This effect may not, in and of itself, be world-altering, but it is a stand, and it is a moral one to take. If they choose against it for the sake of China's market - for profit or whatever reason - then that is a choice about who they want to be.
And as citizens, we have a right to say what we want our companies to be like. We are free to express it in many ways. Congress is not the end-all to our ability to speak. We can say, "Google, you done be doin' wrong." Indeed, if we think it, we should say it. We should say it to every individual, government body and company that supports a culture we do not agree with. Only in this way does sufficient support arise for the better path to be followed. The point is that every front needs to be addressed; not only those fronts that are considered 'socially acceptable'. If we have a problem with corporations in America supporting 'evil' deeds overseas; then we should address them, as much as we should address the legislature. The problem with only coloring within the lines is when those lines don't actually create the picture you want to see.
I think the problem is not that we're retaining everything, but that we're retaining only pieces. I'm sure there is blog activity I've partaken in that is no longer connected or attributable to me; there are pictures out there that don't have my name associated with them. This has always been the case - there have always been things people have done that they are no longer associated with. This is, presumably, because we can only remember a small amount, and what we choose to remember tends to be the more important things.
Which brings us to the second problem; context. If you take a complete record of someone's life, you have no inherent way of knowing which parts are more 'them' than other parts. 'Memory' and 'forgetting' tends to leave behind those parts that are going to most inform the decisions of a person in the future - which is all that you care about. You don't care about someone's history so much as you care about how they would make choices in the present. That's why you want to know their past. A complete record does not help you so much with this; you can see the decisions they've made, but turning that into a predictive model is hard. Meaningless decisions and events may not have changed them much, whereas others will have hit them quite hard.
I think back to all the boards I've read and I think I can recall most of them - but certainly not all. And certainly not all the comments I made. They were superficial in my life, ultimately. I don't care about them. Neither should anyone else. But there does need to be a culture of awareness over the fact that if you dredge up a comment positively attributable to me, it may still not mean much to me. We're going to have to evolve beyond the, "Well, you said or did [x], therefore aren't who we want you to be."
The argument has been out for a very long time now; "Any OS with this much market share would be subject to an equal number of attacks and breaches." But it's a weak argument; many point this out. The reason I'll pitch to the forefront is this: we have no evidence that it's true, and until another operating system has 80% market share for two decades, we simply won't have a baseline to compare.
What I find lamentable is that this article takes what might have otherwise been a good opportunity to echo a tired suggestion. Rather than denying it is impossible for anyone to do as well as Microsoft has, perhaps it would be important to drill down to some real reasons why MS has had so many issues, and why another OS - regardless of the technical features - might have similar difficulty. The number one reason I can come up with - off the top of my head - is feature management. 80% of the market is large. Huge. Gargantuan. There are many users with many wants, but they all want certain common ground across which all of them can function. They are asking a central authority - Microsoft - to provide that. Unix simply has not had that sort of crushing demand put on them, and I find that a more compelling argument than one whose support is based on a hypothetical. Microsoft has tried and not always succeeded to meet that demand while providing the features requested securely. Nothing is perfect - but they challenge anyone to do it better.
If Microsoft has faith in their product, they'll have faith that people will try, and fail, to do it better. If they don't, they'll reduce themselves to distractions and hand-waving - and the people making their money off of MS will throw any argument out there that will draw the least bit of attention away from their lack of confidence.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you don't involve yourself at all with matters of technology, how do you select someone who is capable of performing exceptionally?"
The difficulty is that they really do need to have some sense of what is going on, and if they profess none I think there is a lot of room to really stick it to them. "With no knowledge of the basic topology of modern computer administration, how do you expect to create reasonable laws?" If a politician argues that all they need to be a good politician is a policy background and/or a business background, then it's clear what sort of government you'll get; one about policies that promote people with money and businesses.
I don't think that shame is a scalable solution - which is key, I think. I think the problem really boils down to a market situation in this case; if we as a democracy decide this stuff needs to be sorted, then we need to pass the appropriate law. Then it simply comes down to figuring out what the market value is to get the stuff sorted. If a trash company will do it for $300/mo, then that's what you'll end up paying. If you sort your own and it only costs you $25 a month, that's what you'll do. If another company comes along and can offer the service for $20 a month, you'll probably go that way.
As it stands right now, though, there is no real requirement for sorting, and that requirement isn't put into place because people don't see an easy way to sort. First, I think the idea that it should be easy on us should be discarded; it's easy to pollute your environment, but I for one don't want random chemicals floating around in my rivers and water table. Then I think what has to be done is the discarding of the notion of a 'general trash' pile. It's not, in my opinion, the fault of a few random assholes that we have so much trash, that this is such a general problem. Our whole culture is geared towards throwing everything away. Engineering the problem for a few problem cases isn't where the wins will be made; engineering it for the vast majority will. Right now the vast majority is not provided with an even vaguely easy way to sort their trash, so it doesn't happen. It is of note, though, that in places that have voluntary or compensated recycling programs, many people do sort out that stuff. Why do we hesitate to go further?
If you're interested, another good summer read is "Cradle to Cradle".
But what's the follow up to that? If a customer says, "No, I'm not going to" what recourse does the trash removal component have that doesn't effectively boil down to a fine? A daycare can decide not to watch your kid. Trash companies can't decide not to give you service for your trash. Their threat of, "three strikes and you're out" is valid. It can't be with a trash company, no matter how many hoops you add on top.
Unlike a daycare, trash is not really a service you can be denied. The trash company cannot say, "Oh, you didn't jump through x hoop, so we aren't going to pick up your trash."
What I find amazing is that Slashdot readers haven't thought about how technology could be used to solve this problem. But first, a fact to keep in mind; the price of dealing with waste will go up. When we start deciding that we must care for the whole life of a product we will have to pay for that. Personally, I think it's a good deal and plan. Some may not. But in order to properly recycle and reduce waste, we will have to pay more money somewhere; upfront for the companies to deal with it or at the back end if we want the trash people to deal with it.
That said, it seems to me that institute "green" bags made of strong but biodegradeable material (bamboo?) with RFID chips in them. When they're dropped off at your house in some sort of secure manner (or, like the mail, are highly prosecuted if messed with) the unique identifier is logged with your residence and by the type of trash that bag should carry. Then, when it's picked up, the ID is read and the appropriate household is charged. If the wrong type of trash ends up in the bag ("this bag went through the machine and read out that it had metal instead of paper... ding!") you get charged for the resorting fee. If you have a lot of bags in a particular week, you get charged exponentially beyond the first an additional burden fee. And so on.
Really, the problems that people have with trash is that it's a pain, no one wants to do it, it's hard to sort (in part because no one wants to do it), and when there is an error it's messy to clean up. I think, frankly, the segmentation of trash is a perfectly reasonable plan, and can be supported with modern technologies to get around the fact that presently trash has no provenance, save the house it's in front of.
Shouldn't someone pose that to these potential candidates? "Hey, what OS does your webserver run on? Why did you choose that one?" The thing is we're in a technical age; it's about time that they made at least a nod to nerd-dom in the form of figuring out a cogent response. We want our candidates to be technically saavy, right? The answer is far less important than their ability to answer it - but we more or less assume the question is not one you'd seriously pose to a politician. Why is that?
It is fair to say that Vancouver is in the Pacific Northwest, a commonly used name for that region of North America that includes the Columbia River Basin as it's center.
You have no problem understanding and or using the Dewey Decimal System; but it is a far reach to say that the younger generation is asking for the output of that system to be 'handed to them', and that they have the impression they have 'no need to learn anything'.
Regardless of what system is used, be it Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress the fact of the matter is that there are some number of books that are sorted in a possibly arbitrary way, which a user can reference via said arbitrary way or system's interface. The Dewey Decimal system and card catalogs are a labor intensive way of sorting and referencing books - is that necessary any more? My argument is no; computer systems are cheap enough and should be sophisticated enough that the user should not be concerned with the mechanics of it. It should be entirely opaque, because the ideal user is there to spend their time with the content, not the sorting mechanism.
On some level librarians are recognizing this, and we should to. The Dewey Decimal System is cruft for the majority of users. However we get to the next iteration of literature management, be it by video games or some other method, recognize that the old way of doing it was predicated on a different framework of resources, and there is a better way of doing it - one motivated by cutting to the task on hand - as we do in so much of the rest of our lives these days - not by being whiny teenagers.
Note that I did not condemn arbitrage as a whole, merely when x is much less than y. Arbitrage is a perfectly reasonable service; but there should be a cultural conditioning against utilizing ignorance of workers to profit yourself, just like it's not particularly fair to utilize their lack of capital to profit off their labor. To put it in economic philosophy terms; controlling the means of production is one thing, but it is just as important to have a fair distribution of means of sale.
No, but they wouldn't be worse off. The difficulty with arbitraging labor is that it piles the wealth in one corner. If someone is performing a service for x amount of money, for people whose demand supports y amount of money, where x is much less than y, the middle man - the person performing the arbitrage - is getting the difference, without actually doing anything. Human rights aside, some people are willing to pay for a service, but not willing to pay to have that service arbitraged. The argument of, "Well, the people working the farms starve then" is a fallacious one. People will find other work; and that's a matter of historical record.
It does go without saying that compounding inefficiency only compounds the problem. (Har.) But it seems a poor reason to, for instance, ignore wireless power technology because it's 'inefficient' when we could easily make up that inefficiency and then some elsewhere in the process. We have not to date because power is cheap, and for the amount of power we have, given only one delivery option, there is no real reason to worry about, say, the bulb end of things. The thing that wireless power provides is a choice of (inefficient delivery) + (efficient bulb) or (efficient delivery) + (inefficient bulb), and even though the former is useful in not a huge number of cases currently (not to mention probably causes cancer), the latter now has a competitor; something we haven't seen before, and despite all it's inefficiency is not a magnitude worse than what we already cope with. But, then, "magnitudes" always struck me as more important metric than "doublings".
I would totally give you credit for your politeness, if only I could.
It's nice, though, that you set up your math to look at how many watts a forty watt bulb would take to be powered, effectively cutting out the inefficiency of the forty watt bulb. If the forty watt bulb is 98% inefficient, and your power transmission is 60% inefficient, then you're (roughly) .98*.6 ~= .99 inefficient over the whole process... of making light.
Now, I recognize that to make the same amount of light you need twice as much power, but the point is that the choke in the equation is still the bulb. When you're already spending 50x the energy, 2x is a relatively small factor.
I think you should go back and reread what Muhammed did and said. Muhammed did, in fact, lead a number of armed offensives against the clans of Mecca - but he was not a warmonger, and in fact was a famous diplomat; decidedly *not* going to war when others would have. Much of the spread of Islam in a 'bloody' fashion had to do with the nature of politics at the time; not with Islam itself.
The difference between wasting 98% of your power and 99% of your power approaches zero.
Having lived near Butte, MT. I am also well aware of what a little strip mining can do. And articles recently have brought to life other pollutants in our immediate environment. But the difficulty is that these do not lessen the risk of a greenhouse effect.
C02 has a huge lead time - up to forty years. That means what we spew out now is probably not going to be an issue for a while - but will be hard to reverse when it *is* an issue. The time for action is now, on all of these fronts. It is not a sufficient answer to say "This part of the problem is bigger, we should focus there." They are all big, and we are basing our decisions on which fronts to fight on which fronts are going to be least painful to fight.
Creating a sustainable, controlled environment and economy is going to be extremely painful. It means that we can't all have one of everything; that's a lie sold to the American public by the devil if ever there was one. We have the resources in the here and now to cope with the problem - but we choose to expend that energy on other spectres, such as the idea that increasing our wait time at airports will save us from terrorists. Or that having an indefinite, ongoing war in the middle east will somehow secure our blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. The ironic thing is that jobs can be created and the economy powered by fighting back the pollution we have now - it just won't be putting money into the pockets of those who control modern industry.
We have to stop the C02. We have to stop all the pollutants. To quote from the best movie of all time, "We can't afford to let one of those bastards in here."
It is entirely unsupportable that shooting someone else would not have been the cause of much hooey palooie back in 'The Day'. 'The Day', contrary to popular belief, was much like 'Today', in that things such as shooting each other were, in fact, the cause of some talk, and were apt to form the opinions of people. Take Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton's crossing of pistols - that is still talked about today, and so categorically not like any other day.
Cheney shot a man in the face. That man later apologized to Cheney. Liberals, Conservatives - anyone is allowed to form their opinion based on these facts, and fond remembrances of days long past - actually, days never having been - does not remove that right. Furthermore, may I recommend you grow a thicker skin. Administrations have suffered the slings and arrows of vile humors for much smaller events.
Do not delude yourself into thinking our Judicial system is designed to rehabilitate anyone. It's designed to make others out there too afraid to start a life of crime. And if that doesn't work, well, it's a holding pen. Making him delete a lot of email would, in theory, fit the crime, but really we want the hours back that he stole from us.
The problem as I see it with the jRPGs is that their stories are very specific to a certain adolescent coming-of-age arc. The mindset in them does not vary much, as the mindset in most anime does not. Worse, I think that even there you see less and less investment in Writers.
What was great about Fallout? About Planescape:Torment? About Deus Ex? Eternal Darkness? KOTOR? All of these games had a huge focus on the writing. Rarely did you find yourself 'leveling up' or in meaningless fights. But meaningless fights is practically the staple of RPGs these days. I go to the store and pick up a "Lord of the Rings: The Third Age", supposedly a "nice little role-playing jaunt into the world of Tolkien." Yet the game is a long (and I mean LONG) series of fights using the exact same mechanism over and over, with a little filler glue. Many games are like this, and many, many jRPGs are like this. That filler glue can be elaborate or simple but the focus of the game is largely on the number-based or twitch-based fights.
I don't know that it's an 'American' quality, but I like the sort of RPG that has a narrative - but by 'narrative' I do not mean a story that is happening in FMV while I watch. HL1 and 2 did a good job, but were very linear. Deus Ex did a far better job; the choices you made mattered. How you went about things dictated your experience; your experience was not pre-dictated, to only be altered in the specifics of the fights you fought. Fallout had whole different endings depending on all sorts of actions you took. This sort of thing is not achieved by hiring the latest code monkeys, it's achieved by hiring people with some writing skills, who have a sense of the real world and what a narrative is.
But such games generally require an attention span. The longer an attention span you need, the less you can utilize tricks to keep the user engaged and the more you require quality writing. This is just expense for the business - nevermind the complexity it adds to coding. The jRPGs do well because there is a formula, and it's sufficiently easy to follow. Most of the attraction seems to fall on the cool graphical advancements. 'The Story' may be good, but it's just that, a monolithic story. The only 'role' you play is the monkey pushing the button to make it go forward.
"none of the people who excel at any of the above tasks have ever once called me an idiot."
If you were trying to fly an airplane, though, or stitch up a wound, they would, in all likelihood, call you an idiot - or at least think it. You would be trying to do something you don't know how to do - and in those cases, those who do know how to do those things will likely be unimpressed.
At the same time, holding the view that everyone but yourself is an idiot is inherently destructive, and a useless point of view. The real difficulty is that they don't know something (such as how to fly an airplane), and if that something is something you're emotionally invested in, or their ignorance is causing you an issue (such as all major OSes being clunky for you, with your developed operational reflexes), then you're going to feel put out. Blaming it on other people is about the most useless point of view you can take, though.
Really, I think that it's facile to say that society is built on the lowest common denominator. I've not actually been able to identify a common denominator in society to begin with, so the whole phrase is absurd. Society is built on a series of works that are good enough to satisfy a sufficient market to support them. Despite being able to envision better, rarely do we find it worth our while to realize such works. In short, I'm dubious of anyone who claims the problem is with someone other than themselves.
Hybrids don't claim much superiority on the highways; at least not on a theoretical level. Their engines are the same; they just utilize the power you waste when braking - which in proper highway driving you shouldn't be doing. So I'm not surprised that you can exceed a regular engine's mpg on the highway and not with a hybrid; all it takes is a good pilot.
But the key thing to remember is that while 48 is 80% of 60, 25 is only 83% of 30, and 21 is 87.5% of 24. When I buy a regular Honda Civic, and they tell me I get 30 highway miles per gallon they are cheating me nearly as much when I only get 25. Now, this may be a problem with metrics - maybe Civics actually get 35 gallons per mile - but if the issue is being lied to, then the anecdotal mileages can't apply. A common baseline must be used; and in the revised baselines regular engines are nearly as bad.
It is also worth pointing out that even if you're being lied to, and civics get 35 miles per gallon, and the Prius only 40, it's still better. Economically you'll probably want the civic, but that isn't proof that the hybrids aren't more efficient. It's just that they're not enough more efficient.
The mileages cited by the article do not indicate that non-hybrid cars are really gaining a lot of ground. Sure, some ground is gained - about 6% on the Honda Civic v Civic Hybrid - but the hybrids still outpace the regular gasoline cars by a long shot. The article makes it sound like the high mileages on hybrids were total puff. This strikes me as a reaction to a fad movement; namely that a lot of people are into the idea of hybrids, and some people are therefore against it, waiting to knock those people off their pedestal. Hybrids are not the end-all be-all of cars, but this article is still a stretch.
Will the guys doing this study be fired when their prediction proves false? Or will they be rehired because it was understood that it was an advertising move and may not pan out?
Google has no impact whatsoever on whether or not the Chinese government censors its citizens
Not true. Patently untrue. Google does business with and in China. Their impact may not be large, but withdrawing from the market would be noticed by them. But that's not the point. If Google withdraws from China on account of China's censorship, and other American companies do the same, you form a block of economy that China is not getting access to - but other people are. The larger that block gets, the more economic incentive China has. Ironically, this is exact same concept that governs the idea of why American companies are willing to put up with the censorship; they want access to the market.
I suspect, though, that you're not pausing to think about the greater implications individual companies - large or small - can have on the world. You think I was talking about boycotting Google? Far from it. But the shareholders of Google very clearly put forth the idea of not doing business with - boycotting - China. This is not a meaningless strategy. It has worked, and can work no matter how many bold letters you use to say it won't. I'm simply talking from a historical perspective here.
Beyond that, I find it offensive that you've put words into my mouth and said on what standard I judge an evil company. I specifically did not cite what I thought an evil company was because I don't think there are Good Companies and Evil Companies, like life was Star Wars. There are companies with a history of moral actions and ones with a history of amoral or immoral actions. Google has ticked off an amoral action here, putting it at risk of taking immoral ones. Should people hound Google because of this? Absolutely. And to suggest that only Google gets this treatment is absurd. Look at the boycotts of clothing manufacturers that used slave labor in southeast Asia; people absolutely spoke out against them, and absolutely succeeded in cleaning up the industry. People speak out against diamonds, against fur, against clear cutting, against polluters of all sorts, against civil rights violators of all sorts, and against just plain greedy people.
You seem to espouse a basic belief that if you do not have sufficient power to change something than you have no power to effect change. This is erroneous. How power is pooled and applied has everything to do with changes occurring. Railing against sentiments building towards taking a progressive action is to be railing against progressive action. Whether that actually helps or not is debatable; sometimes arguments like yours, thin and built on straw men, do more for a movement than any amount of rational arguments for the issue at hand. But the world is not a binary place. It is vastly interconnected, and I think what you're failing to grok is that by speaking out against the parts of it that are twisted and wrong - be it's China's civil rights or the war in Iraq or the torture of foreign nationals - you help to suppress those bad parts. By arguing for silence on these matters, you're supporting it. I will make no bones about the fact that the quality of my life is built on the blood of innocents. I don't really have a choice in that - it is history. But I do have a choice about how to move forward, and you will not convince me that the simple choice of saying, "Google has made a wrong decision in this matter." is an erroneous one. The decision was not the decision I would want to see a company make - any company. It may be that my small voice - such a small boat in such a large ocean - will ultimately not matter, or it may turn the tide, but your declaration in this matter will not help no matter what.
You seem to think that the culture in which you live, in which you promote through your adherence to it, has nothing to do with you. Many companies now deal with China, widely regarded as being total bastards on the civil rights count. Let us look historically, back in time, to America's own struggle with this. Did most companies deal with southern states during it's period of segregation? Why, yes, they did. Did it make it right? No. And did boycotting work? Yes.
Times change, of course, and the means by which we can enact the changes we want to see also change. But it still holds that we have to *be* the changes we want to see; if we cannot take a stand on censorship, how can we possibly expect China to? Three hundred million people over here still have the ability to sway the opinion of three billion people over there; that is, we will if our way is better.
Google may not qualify for sainthood - a brilliant search engine only counts for one miracle. But they do have a choice to take a moral high ground or not. And given the size and public nature of their company, they have the ability to sway what other companies consider to be good or bad practices. This effect may not, in and of itself, be world-altering, but it is a stand, and it is a moral one to take. If they choose against it for the sake of China's market - for profit or whatever reason - then that is a choice about who they want to be.
And as citizens, we have a right to say what we want our companies to be like. We are free to express it in many ways. Congress is not the end-all to our ability to speak. We can say, "Google, you done be doin' wrong." Indeed, if we think it, we should say it. We should say it to every individual, government body and company that supports a culture we do not agree with. Only in this way does sufficient support arise for the better path to be followed. The point is that every front needs to be addressed; not only those fronts that are considered 'socially acceptable'. If we have a problem with corporations in America supporting 'evil' deeds overseas; then we should address them, as much as we should address the legislature. The problem with only coloring within the lines is when those lines don't actually create the picture you want to see.
I think the problem is not that we're retaining everything, but that we're retaining only pieces. I'm sure there is blog activity I've partaken in that is no longer connected or attributable to me; there are pictures out there that don't have my name associated with them. This has always been the case - there have always been things people have done that they are no longer associated with. This is, presumably, because we can only remember a small amount, and what we choose to remember tends to be the more important things.
Which brings us to the second problem; context. If you take a complete record of someone's life, you have no inherent way of knowing which parts are more 'them' than other parts. 'Memory' and 'forgetting' tends to leave behind those parts that are going to most inform the decisions of a person in the future - which is all that you care about. You don't care about someone's history so much as you care about how they would make choices in the present. That's why you want to know their past. A complete record does not help you so much with this; you can see the decisions they've made, but turning that into a predictive model is hard. Meaningless decisions and events may not have changed them much, whereas others will have hit them quite hard.
I think back to all the boards I've read and I think I can recall most of them - but certainly not all. And certainly not all the comments I made. They were superficial in my life, ultimately. I don't care about them. Neither should anyone else. But there does need to be a culture of awareness over the fact that if you dredge up a comment positively attributable to me, it may still not mean much to me. We're going to have to evolve beyond the, "Well, you said or did [x], therefore aren't who we want you to be."
The argument has been out for a very long time now; "Any OS with this much market share would be subject to an equal number of attacks and breaches." But it's a weak argument; many point this out. The reason I'll pitch to the forefront is this: we have no evidence that it's true, and until another operating system has 80% market share for two decades, we simply won't have a baseline to compare.
What I find lamentable is that this article takes what might have otherwise been a good opportunity to echo a tired suggestion. Rather than denying it is impossible for anyone to do as well as Microsoft has, perhaps it would be important to drill down to some real reasons why MS has had so many issues, and why another OS - regardless of the technical features - might have similar difficulty. The number one reason I can come up with - off the top of my head - is feature management. 80% of the market is large. Huge. Gargantuan. There are many users with many wants, but they all want certain common ground across which all of them can function. They are asking a central authority - Microsoft - to provide that. Unix simply has not had that sort of crushing demand put on them, and I find that a more compelling argument than one whose support is based on a hypothetical. Microsoft has tried and not always succeeded to meet that demand while providing the features requested securely. Nothing is perfect - but they challenge anyone to do it better.
If Microsoft has faith in their product, they'll have faith that people will try, and fail, to do it better. If they don't, they'll reduce themselves to distractions and hand-waving - and the people making their money off of MS will throw any argument out there that will draw the least bit of attention away from their lack of confidence.