But isn't this exactly what government is great at. Shouldering HUGE projects that no private industry in its right mind would spend money on... Ultimatly to progress science or humanity in general.
Your argument appears to be hinged on the notion that revisiting the Moon represents "progress". It looks more like "regress" to me: boldly re-solving a technological problem that was solved in 1969 and was already considered boring by the time I was two years old.
Of course, Mars is a lot farther away. If we adopt the principle that distance equals progress, going to Mars would yield approximately 675 times as much progress as a visit to the Moon. But I have a counter-proposal. I realize that humanity has already made a round-the-world trip in a balloon. Now I think we should reorganize NASA around the next great challenge: flying a balloon around the world 675 times. It's never been done before. Imagine all the empty air that humanity could see, over and over again, during the three-year mission! And unlike the Mars mission, which will -- barring dramatic accidents -- yield nothing but some digital video of astronauts wandering around on a really big, airless, dusty, red field, at the end of the balloon trip the aeronauts can land in Paris! The bread will taste much better! The air will be much more breatheable!
Now, I constantly hear people saying one or both of two things:
NASA shouldn't be shooting for 675 consecutive flights around the world because it's a complete f*cking waste of time.
NASA should take a lesson from private industry on how to get to Paris cheap.
But, after all, if humanity had held back and waited for technology to progress, we would still be stuck in Europe, and we wouldn't even need to fly to Paris, because we would be stuck there. Oh, hell, I've lost my train of thought. Can't you just take it on faith that I'm a genius and give me the money?
Oops, my bad, I finally found the sentence in the original article. There's no supporting argument, though -- so it is Samuelson who has pulled this old argument from an unspecified nether region.
While no gap exists yet, an exodus of retiring U.S. scientists could create one.
I couldn't find any discussion of this statement in the cited article, so the submitter appears to have pulled it out of an unspecified nether region. Is there any actual evidence to support it?
When I started college 17 years ago the conventional wisdom was that the job market for academic scientists was tight, but that it was bound to improve as the big cohort of professors who got tenure in the 1950s and 1960s -- when colleges and universities were expanding like mad -- retired and opened up positions for new folks.
Now, 17 years later, the job market for academic scientists seems to be as tight as ever. So I'm pretty skeptical of the old "imminent retirement" argument. As the article does point out, the rate at which science and engineering degrees are awarded has grown by 38% over the last two decades. Doesn't this growth more than assure that we can replace our existing scientists as they retire? Has the rate at which scientists retire really grown by more than 38% since 1990?
MMORPGs favor people who have oodles of spare time. Time is money. Someone is paying for your rent, clothing, food, electricity, and broadband while you are online. And there's an opportunity cost -- every hour you spend online could have otherwise been spent doing something else, like working for money.
You're welcome to spend your time and money however you like. If you prefer to play WoW for 20 hours a week, and you take great pride in having done everything for yourself, that's fine. I'm glad that having this hobby makes you happy. But don't pretend that you're somehow morally superior to the guy who pays for Chinese-farmed gold. Both of you are spending money to advance in WoW. The difference is that you are spending more money, because an hour of your time is worth more than an hour of a gold-farmer's time. (If this is not true, you should consider becoming a gold farmer!)
If you find this disturbing, perhaps you need to switch to a game that places more emphasis on actual skill (obtained through hours of practice) and less emphasis on "skill points" (obtained through hours of work that could just as well be done by someone else). Try chess. Try poker. Try any of several hundred other online games.
There's a semi-secret about repair options for out-of-warranty portables. The short version is that, except in cases of accidental damage like a liquid spill or drop, regardless of what the problem is it doesn't cost more than about $350 to get your portable repaired.
It is always possible -- this is Slashdot, after all -- that you are completely full of it. But I believe you, and I am therefore flabbergasted. Why doesn't Apple advertise this fact?
After watching our Powerbooks at work develop bad logic boards, one by one, like clockwork, I reluctantly abandoned the Mac and started warning people about their bad build quality. Even so, I've been contemplating going back. Windows is clearly still crap (this "new" -- by which I mean "old, really old, older-than-Win95 old" -- WMF vulnerability has pissed me off) and Linux, amazing though it is, doesn't support all my hardware or run all my apps.
But the specter of spending over $1000 on a machine that will croak in 1.3 years has kept me away from the Mac. I'm much more likely to take that chance now that I know I'm only gambling with $350 instead of $1350. Apple should be advertising these flat-rate repairs in giant full-page ads. They should be flying banners from blimps.
The money is in editorial branding... It's so freaking obvious, yet none of the majors seem to get it.
It's not necessarily that they don't get it. I suspect they understand their impending extinction perfectly well. But that doesn't mean they can do anything about it.
Imagine the average head of a major label. He's probably a forty or fifty year old man with thinning hair. He's not a music critic -- he's a businessman, who built his career by negotiating contracts, pushing product onto radio playlists, and moving physical CDs. He might not have any musical taste -- and even if he does, what 15-year-old is going to be caught dead taking editorial advice from an old man? There's a reason why major-label producers pay 18-year-olds like Britney to front for them.
In the immortal words of Paul Graham: "When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die."
Okay, here are my questions for the Slashdot community:
1) You're writing some code. You call the User Emotional Analysis API, and it reports back that your user is currently "83% happy and 9% disgusted". How should your software "adjust its response" in reaction to this information?
2) What happy/disgusted ratio leads to maximum productivity?
3) What are the odds that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of a Perl programmer?
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource.
This is a natural conclusion, but it's simply wrong. This is like arguing that the U.S. Capitol is not a lasting resource because parts of the roof and many of the interior walls have had to be replaced over the past fifty years. Or that the writings of Plato are not a lasting resource because their original media crumbled to dust centuries ago. Or that the Bible is not a lasting resource because it has been reorganized, rewritten, retranslated, and augmented over the course of dozens of centuries.
Knowledge does not last unless you maintain it. Erosion tries to break it; idiots try to deface it, censor it, ridicule it, or drown it out. And, of course, knowledge eventually goes out of date -- some of the attacks on it eventually prove to be legitimate, and the knowledge evolves to suit. Honest scholars must do work, hard work, throughout their lives, in order to preserve the old knowledge and keep it up to date. This has always been true; Wikipedia just makes the process much more evident by speeding it up several hundred times.
Wikipedia is accurate to the extent that people maintain it. The articles that people watch are very accurate indeed. The entries that nobody reads or cares about -- including Siegenthaler's biography -- are not. If Siegenthaler wants an accurate biography of himself to appear on Wikipedia, he should write one and put it up, or have someone else do so. If he wants to be sure that trolls don't deface it, he has to monitor all the changes and revert it to a previous version whenever it gets defaced. (Which will probably be a lot more often, now that he's turned himself into a poster boy for the thin-skinned.)
Does he think that this work should be someone else's responsibility? Too bad. TANSTAAFL. If you care about it, do the work. If you don't care, don't expect me to care, either.
The problem, which you identify, is that people think that the text which appears on Wikipedia at any given moment is authoritative. But that's only a symptom of a bigger problem: there is no authoritative source of information. A "squabble-fest" is all we have. The good thing about Wikipedia is that intellectual squabbles take place online, in front of your eyes, in real time -- instead of being spread out across dozens of books, articles, and isolated websites, published over years or even centuries, each of which is a hodgepodge of accurate and inaccurate information.
Of course, he's right. The Internet allows anyone to publish anything on its global platform, with no assurance that the post is in any way accurate and truthful.
The Internet's apologists here have already mounted the usual lame retort: If you don't like it, just put up your own, more accurate page. (An uncanny parallel to to equally lame rant frequently heard coming from the mouths and pens of equally arrogant and equally naive book fanatics: If you don't like it, just publish your own book.)
People who purport to be running an international information network have a responsibilty to the public to ensure that their publication is accurate and free of libel and slander before it is released. Arguing that anyone can publish on the Internet is equivalent to arguing that conventional newspapers can publish lies, libel and slander because their readers will "fix" it by complaining to the editors.
The Internet is premised on a bad idea poorly implemented, the Internet publishes lies and inaccuracies. The Internet has earned our mistrust and contempt. It is time to pull the plug: boycott it.
( And so I shall. You can assume that all further posts from this account come from an imposter.:)
You're right that people download music because CDs are really expensive, and because they insist on being able to use their iPods.
But now there's an even more obvious reason to download music in an open format like MP3: MP3s cannot suddenly turn on you and break your computer.
I'm sure I'm not alone when I state that I will never buy a Sony or BMG CD again, ever, unless it comes with a bold-printed, legally-binding guarantee that the damn thing is a plain-Jane, Red-Book-compatible, fully-rippable CD. And I'm never again going to insert a music CD into Windows, no matter who sells it to me. I'll rip the things in Linux, where it's safe.
This is independent of my desire to punish Sony by boycotting their products. This is legitimate fear. No individual music CD is worth the risk of having to reinstall Windows, to say nothing of the risk of being 0wned or losing some of my data.
I mean seriously, Shakespeare was great, but would we want to have saved every piece of parchment he scribbled on?
For centuries, historians and literary scholars have longed for hard evidence of how Shakespeare worked or what his literary background was. Unfortunately:
"with the possible exception of a few pages of Sir Thomas More, a play that Shakespeare may have helped write, no manuscripts of Shakespeare's survive. The only certain evidence we have of his handwriting is his signature."
Our knowledge of Shakespeare is so sparse that there's an entire genre of claims that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by someone else. Everyone from Ben Jonson to Francis Bacon to Sir Walter Raleigh has been put forward as the "real author". David Kahn's classic work on cryptography, The Codebreakers, devotes almost an entire chapter to debunking the "secret coded messages", supposedly hidden inside Shakespeare's plays, which reveal their true author.
All of this speculation could be disposed of, if only we had a few scribbled pages of Hamlet or The Tempest. But we don't.
Fortunately, Aardman Animations is far better documented than Shakespeare. But the destruction of their storyboards and sets is still a terrible loss.
But to really gain any standing with me, FogCreek really needs to create something of prestige, instead of building trivial software...
Who are you, that Joel should care if he has any standing with you?
What kind of software has "prestige"? How much money can you make by writing it? If it's such a good idea, why haven't you built it yourself?
The great thing about Joel is precisely that he's not a billionaire, not a famous computer scientist, not a guy who believes that striking it rich in the dotcom boom means that you are smart. He has experience in his field, thinks about his work, and writes very well indeed, but he's no rock star.
He's a professional engineer: a guy with a small company that builds software in order to make money, live happily, and eventually retire. The software makes its users happy and sells, at a profit. That's it. No delusions of imperial grandeur. No religious warfare. No booth babes, sports cars, or TV commercials. No lusting after greater "prestige".
I've worked for a company that confused "software engineering" with "the path to fortune and fame". I would not do so again. But I'd work for Joel.
You need to read Joel Spolsky on the subject of Raymond Chen and the Windows team at Microsoft. The Windows team was so obsessed with being maximally compatible that they reverse-engineered dozens of third-party apps, found their bugs, and wrote special code into Windows to work around those bugs. Why?
Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn't work at all. You're going to tell your friends, "Don't upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it's not compatible with program Z." Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn't work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You're going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)
Yes, Solaris x86 and Be don't worry about this. But AFAIK Solaris has no marketshare among non-geeks, and Be has no market whatsoever.
wouldn't it need to be deployed a bit more carefully than could be done through a rocket, i.e. that's why they used a Shuttle for Hubble itself?
No. My understanding is that the Hubble was designed to be launched and serviced with the Shuttle because the Shuttle was what there was, not because it was a particularly good idea. The United States had already made the political/management decision to retire its heavy launch vehicles, like the Saturn V, in favor of the Shuttle.
According to the all-powerful Google, the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope will launch with an expendable vehicle.
The money goes to pay the editors who choose which articles to send out for peer review, and who organize the review process. Those folks work very hard, and they won't work for free.
And you shouldn't think of it as paying to publish -- because, as you say, the Web means that you can now publish your own work for next to nothing. What you are paying for is the mark of approval: you're buying the right to claim that a journal editor and at least two or three of your peers have scrutinized your work and pronounced it correct, interesting, and new.
It's just like paying to take a standardized test, or to get a professional certification. Just as certified engineers are more likely to be hired, papers published in top journals are more likely to be read.
Every scientist has a circle of colleagues (some of whom may be mortal enemies!) whose papers (s)he wants to read right away, regardless of whether they have been approved by reviewers or not. That's what the preprint archives are for. But they don't replace the actual publishing process.
annual DVD costs of either $103 million or $80 million (depending on whether amortized) and annual "fulfillment" (postage and packing) cost of $56 million.
Okay, I think your point is that Cringely was wrong to say that "Apple has eliminated the most costly part of the Netflix model." He should have said "Apple has eliminated 35 to 40 percent of the cost of the Netflix model." That doesn't kill Cringely's argument, though.
Of course, this is still not accurate. Apple's fulfillment cost will not be strictly zero (someone has to answer the tech support phones; someone has to keep the servers running). On the other hand, how much of the $80 to $103 million that Netflix spends on DVDs goes to replace DVDs that wear out after a few rentals? How much bigger a price break will the studios give Apple when they no longer have to bother making and shipping physical DVDs?
Unlike Netflix, Apple will need special agreements to cover every movie it delivers...
Before the iTunes music store opened, I would have believed this argument. Now... well, if Steve Jobs can talk the notoriously hidebound music industry into his schemes, why should I doubt his powers over the movie industry?
They then need to keep the cost per movie underneath Average_Netflix_Monthly_Fee/Average_Netflix_Monthl y_DVD_mailings to be competitive...
Well, no. For one thing, people will pay more for AppleMovies. The movies arrive in one day. There is no queue - the movie you want is always available. The movie always looks great, because it's not being streamed and because it doesn't come on a DVD that has been wiped on somebody's dog.
Another thing: if Apple can steal those Netflix users who rent one or two movies per month, they may not care if Netflix keeps all the thrifty folks who rent 15 movies per month. Once Netflix collects their monthly fee from you, every movie you rent from them adds to their costs: mailing costs, DVD wear-and-tear costs. If Netflix loses those users (like, alas, myself) who don't have time to watch lots of movies, their costs will go up, which will drive up their monthly fees, which will drive their user base down even further...
The saddest comment I once got was: "we'll never be able to colonize other planets because the conditions are so fundamentally hostile, so let's not waste any funds/effort on manned space flights."
Even sadder: "Let's waste lots of funds and effort on manned space flights, even though we haven't yet figured out how we would ever be able to colonize other planets."
What the hell happened to the human will to explore and survive?
It's alive and well.
I explore by studying science. We haven't run out of it yet. If by chance we do, I can always switch to music, which will keep me busy for a while.
And I survive quite nicely here on Earth. I can't think of any better place to live. Even after an asteroid strike, I'm not sure I'd be better off living in a tin can on the Moon, peering through a telescope, mourning the death of civilization, and trying to remember what grass was like.
I won't survive forever, here on Earth. Eventually (in an ever-decreasing number of years!) I'll die, hopefully without too much pain. Right now, odds are I'll die of heart disease or cancer -- although those odds could change in my lifetime. But, one way or another, I'll die, just as every human dies, just as every species dies, just as the Earth, the solar system, and eventually the Universe will die. I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, and I'm sorry that you do.
What's the point in sending out probes if the information gained will certainly be lost in the (near) future when the big one hits the earth?
What's the point of buying a car with a warranty, given that you'll surely be dead within 200 years? Why go to college, when you'll probably have Alzheimer's before the next century begins? Why fall in love, when it can only end in tragedy?
I wish you luck in solving your existential dilemma, but the answer isn't out in space.
I don't see how this can be enforcable in any practical way.
That's because you're thinking of this labeling requirement as a way to find the people who are sharing files. But that's backwards.
Here's how it used to work:
The RIAA finds a music sharer's IP address.
The RIAA pays a lawyer to sue the sharer.
The sharer settles the lawsuit for an amount of money (which may or may not be enough to pay the costs of steps 1 and 2).
Hopefully, the sharer will be afraid, and will tell all her friends never to use Kazaa again. (RIAA: yay!)
Most likely, the sharer hates the RIAA and will also tell her friends to buy directly from independent artists (RIAA: oops)
???
Profit!
Here's how it works now:
The RIAA finds a music sharer's IP address.
The RIAA tips off the California cops, who send an official-looking form letter to the sharer with a stern warning: you didn't label those shared files with a proper email address! So now you're a criminal! Reform your evil ways, or Arnold will "be back" for YOU!
Now, the sharer might be smart enough to realize that attaching an anonymous Hotmail address to her shared files won't make them any more traceable then they were already. And she might understand that copyright violations are not criminal acts, so California can't prosecute them. But she probably won't. She will probably see a stern official letter from a California cop, freak out, and tell all her friends never to use Kazaa again. (RIAA: yay!)
Most likely, the sharer hates California and will also tell her friends that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a dickweed. (RIAA: who cares? Politicians are cheap and disposable!)
Since our music sharer has never heard of the RIAA and has no idea that they are behind all of this, she may well buy some $27 CDs next Christmas.
Profit!
Nobody has to be prosecuted for this law to help the RIAA. (And that's a good thing, because California doesn't have the money to keep their current prison system running, let alone prosecute file sharers.) The law doesn't even have to be constitutional to help the RIAA. Indeed, if I were the RIAA, I would pray that this never gets tested in court - if it gets thrown out, as it likely will, then its threat value becomes worthless.
Turn the amplifier on and let it warm up for a good 30 to 60 minutes (especially if you're using a tube amp).
Turn amp off and plug in cable A. (The amp doesn't cool down much during the 30 seconds it takes to change cables.)
Listen to cable A
Turn amp off and plug in cable B.
Listen to cable B
Go back to cable A (which you always do, to confirm whether you heard a real difference).
Repeat 10,000 times.
????
Profit!
Blind testing works the same way, except that each cycle involves a random choice between cables A and B.
You control for the "thermal characteristics of the AMPLIFIER" by designing the test carefully. No problem.
And, yes, you can hear the difference between cables in blind tests. And it is very easy to do... if the cables are sufficiently different. I went from plugging in my speakers with lamp cord (don't ask) to some whiz-bang audiophile speaker cable and I fell out of my chair.
I won't get into the "scientific basis" here... except to say that, if you were to watch an apple fall from a tree, you might well conclude that there's no "scientific basis" for quantum mechanics. After all, doesn't Newtonian mechanics explain apples perfectly?
- - - -
As for the idea of selling "special" cool-looking plastic parts and claiming they improve the sound... that business already exists, and it's called "Bose".:)
Actually, that's not fair. Audiophiles love making Bose jokes (bitter jealousy, you know) but I believe that Bose has a quality product. The product is composed of (a) a box that audiophiles laugh at, but which can produce better sound then any random boom box, and (b) amazingly great marketing, such that the customers truly believe that they are hearing great sound. And so, therefore, they are.
Audio is psychology, and reproducing audio is as much magic as it is science. I've heard it said that the customers who brought the first hand-cranked record players were amazed by the realistic quality of the sound, and were often unable to tell the difference between a live band and a Victrola in blind tests.
I went to CWRU for Physics, Class of 1993. It was great -- IMHO the physics classes were uniformly good, with but a single exception. (Hey, one can't win them all.)
Since then things may have gotten even better. As I was walking out the door at graduation time I got to shake the hand of Lawrence Krauss, who had just arrived to become Chairman of the department. He seemed pretty cool. I also know that the department got some spiffy new labs and equipment over the next few years. (Not that I didn't get plenty of good education using the old stuff...)
It is a big mistake to generalize about any school based on the activities of a few departments, let alone a single professor. Universities are huge, and decentralized; each little corner stands on its own. For example, in my day, the physics department was great, but CWRU's math department had a terrible reputation among the undergrads. (Everyone said there were a few math professors who could teach, but that they had trouble getting tenure. I ended up learning all my math from the physicists.:) Also, the EE undergrads I knew were none too happy, and I also heard stories about Comp Sci's troubles. But none of this affected the happiness of the physicists, chemists, and biologists that I knew.
At any school larger than a couple of hundred people, you have to shop department by department (and, for grad school, adviser by adviser). Believe me, there are horrifying experiences to be had at Harvard, Cornell, and MIT as well.....
...students are showing increasing disinterest in space travel. In general, they feel it is a waste of time, non-interesting, and too dangerous. At some point, the younger generation (god, am I that old?) has made the transition from a Can Do to Can't Do nation.
No, they aren't a "Can't Do" generation. They are a "Done it Already, Seen it, Taped it, Watched it Reenacted by an Aging Tom Hanks" generation.
Space travel is old news. Didn't you hear? Mankind went to space. People went all the way to the moon, before I was born -- before some of your students' parents were born. And the photos must have been really great at the time. But the kids you teach have spent years looking at similar photos (taken -- much more easily, safely, and cheaply -- by robots and satellites). They've spent years watching people like Jerry Doyle and Leonard Nimoy and Ben Affleck and Ahhhnuld walk around on Mars. They've explored Mars themselves, in games. If the games aren't realistic enough for them, they wait a couple of years for Moore's Law to supply them with more polygons and better sound. (Though it doesn't take a lot of simulator to accurately represent a lifeless desert.)
Younger people prefer to dream of a future that isn't 35 years in the past.
Isn't what we are doing right now, on Slashdot, an example of distributed patent review?
Of course, we're doing the review after the fact. It would probably be a good idea if patents were required to be posted on Slashdot first, so that the examiner could skim the comments looking for hints.
But maybe not. Slashdot is full of noise (-1, Obvious). And adding financial incentive to a Slashdot discussion could well create a monster that would make Cthulhu himself turn pale and flee. For example... it isn't hard to imagine what companies like Microsoft will do to your Distributed Patent Review system: they will employ minions whose only job is to relentlessly spam your system, in an attempt to DOS it out of existence. Every proposed patent will be greeted by 100,000 robot-generated comments that look like this:
Please to get your attention, I am from Nigeria and I see that Joe Inventor has proposed to patent a Radish Slicer. Unfortunately, the proposed Radish Slicer patent is invalid because the invention described in U.S. patent
#94322, "USE OF FORGED EMAIL HEADERS"
constitutes prior art. Thank you.
I think it might work, but it would have to be designed rather carefully. You might need to add Meta-Distributed-Prior-Art-Review, or even Meta-Meta-Distributed-Prior-Art-Review...
The parent post has this right. Apple's iTunes already allows you to strip DRM from a track. Playfair just makes the process a bit easier.
Apple only installed DRM because the RIAA insisted. Apple made the DRM strippable because Jobs has a clue - he realizes that music with both DRM and a price tag can't compete against free music ripped from a CD. But the procedure for stripping the DRM was obscured, so that the intended market (RIAA executives and the technologically uncurious, or (ahem) both) wouldn't notice.
The problem with Playfair is that it rips away the obscurity and exposes the fact that iTunes DRM is easily removed. Naturally, the RIAA will want Playfair shut down and the obscurity restored. Apple, of course, doesn't want Playfair shut down because Playfair is a tool which makes Apple customers very happy, thus promoting Apple products. Jobs' role is to walk the line between these two rivals.
The obvious answer is to publicly oppose Playfair while keeping it available behind the scenes. I will now play my role in this Kabuki dance by stating that Playfair is absolutely terrible and I'll never use it in public. It has bugs too. Really nasty bugs that will send you spam and make your computer explode. Of course, I believe that software = free speech and that engineers have a right to own Playfair, just as they have a right to own other ungodly writings. But I would certainly never let it be known that I use Playfair to remove the DRM so I can keep my music even after my Macintosh crashes. No, that would obviously be wrong, just like sex and bad language are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, Mars is a lot farther away. If we adopt the principle that distance equals progress, going to Mars would yield approximately 675 times as much progress as a visit to the Moon. But I have a counter-proposal. I realize that humanity has already made a round-the-world trip in a balloon. Now I think we should reorganize NASA around the next great challenge: flying a balloon around the world 675 times. It's never been done before. Imagine all the empty air that humanity could see, over and over again, during the three-year mission! And unlike the Mars mission, which will -- barring dramatic accidents -- yield nothing but some digital video of astronauts wandering around on a really big, airless, dusty, red field, at the end of the balloon trip the aeronauts can land in Paris! The bread will taste much better! The air will be much more breatheable!
Now, I constantly hear people saying one or both of two things:
But, after all, if humanity had held back and waited for technology to progress, we would still be stuck in Europe, and we wouldn't even need to fly to Paris, because we would be stuck there. Oh, hell, I've lost my train of thought. Can't you just take it on faith that I'm a genius and give me the money?
Oops, my bad, I finally found the sentence in the original article. There's no supporting argument, though -- so it is Samuelson who has pulled this old argument from an unspecified nether region.
I couldn't find any discussion of this statement in the cited article, so the submitter appears to have pulled it out of an unspecified nether region. Is there any actual evidence to support it?
When I started college 17 years ago the conventional wisdom was that the job market for academic scientists was tight, but that it was bound to improve as the big cohort of professors who got tenure in the 1950s and 1960s -- when colleges and universities were expanding like mad -- retired and opened up positions for new folks.
Now, 17 years later, the job market for academic scientists seems to be as tight as ever. So I'm pretty skeptical of the old "imminent retirement" argument. As the article does point out, the rate at which science and engineering degrees are awarded has grown by 38% over the last two decades. Doesn't this growth more than assure that we can replace our existing scientists as they retire? Has the rate at which scientists retire really grown by more than 38% since 1990?
MMORPGs favor people who have oodles of spare time. Time is money. Someone is paying for your rent, clothing, food, electricity, and broadband while you are online. And there's an opportunity cost -- every hour you spend online could have otherwise been spent doing something else, like working for money.
You're welcome to spend your time and money however you like. If you prefer to play WoW for 20 hours a week, and you take great pride in having done everything for yourself, that's fine. I'm glad that having this hobby makes you happy. But don't pretend that you're somehow morally superior to the guy who pays for Chinese-farmed gold. Both of you are spending money to advance in WoW. The difference is that you are spending more money, because an hour of your time is worth more than an hour of a gold-farmer's time. (If this is not true, you should consider becoming a gold farmer!)
If you find this disturbing, perhaps you need to switch to a game that places more emphasis on actual skill (obtained through hours of practice) and less emphasis on "skill points" (obtained through hours of work that could just as well be done by someone else). Try chess. Try poker. Try any of several hundred other online games.
It is always possible -- this is Slashdot, after all -- that you are completely full of it. But I believe you, and I am therefore flabbergasted. Why doesn't Apple advertise this fact?
After watching our Powerbooks at work develop bad logic boards, one by one, like clockwork, I reluctantly abandoned the Mac and started warning people about their bad build quality. Even so, I've been contemplating going back. Windows is clearly still crap (this "new" -- by which I mean "old, really old, older-than-Win95 old" -- WMF vulnerability has pissed me off) and Linux, amazing though it is, doesn't support all my hardware or run all my apps.
But the specter of spending over $1000 on a machine that will croak in 1.3 years has kept me away from the Mac.
I'm much more likely to take that chance now that I know I'm only gambling with $350 instead of $1350. Apple should be advertising these flat-rate repairs in giant full-page ads. They should be flying banners from blimps.
The money is in editorial branding... It's so freaking obvious, yet none of the majors seem to get it.
It's not necessarily that they don't get it. I suspect they understand their impending extinction perfectly well. But that doesn't mean they can do anything about it.
Imagine the average head of a major label. He's probably a forty or fifty year old man with thinning hair. He's not a music critic -- he's a businessman, who built his career by negotiating contracts, pushing product onto radio playlists, and moving physical CDs. He might not have any musical taste -- and even if he does, what 15-year-old is going to be caught dead taking editorial advice from an old man? There's a reason why major-label producers pay 18-year-olds like Britney to front for them.
In the immortal words of Paul Graham: "When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die."
Okay, here are my questions for the Slashdot community:
1) You're writing some code. You call the User Emotional Analysis API, and it reports back that your user is currently "83% happy and 9% disgusted". How should your software "adjust its response" in reaction to this information?
2) What happy/disgusted ratio leads to maximum productivity?
3) What are the odds that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of a Perl programmer?
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource.
This is a natural conclusion, but it's simply wrong. This is like arguing that the U.S. Capitol is not a lasting resource because parts of the roof and many of the interior walls have had to be replaced over the past fifty years. Or that the writings of Plato are not a lasting resource because their original media crumbled to dust centuries ago. Or that the Bible is not a lasting resource because it has been reorganized, rewritten, retranslated, and augmented over the course of dozens of centuries.
Knowledge does not last unless you maintain it. Erosion tries to break it; idiots try to deface it, censor it, ridicule it, or drown it out. And, of course, knowledge eventually goes out of date -- some of the attacks on it eventually prove to be legitimate, and the knowledge evolves to suit. Honest scholars must do work, hard work, throughout their lives, in order to preserve the old knowledge and keep it up to date. This has always been true; Wikipedia just makes the process much more evident by speeding it up several hundred times.
Wikipedia is accurate to the extent that people maintain it. The articles that people watch are very accurate indeed. The entries that nobody reads or cares about -- including Siegenthaler's biography -- are not. If Siegenthaler wants an accurate biography of himself to appear on Wikipedia, he should write one and put it up, or have someone else do so. If he wants to be sure that trolls don't deface it, he has to monitor all the changes and revert it to a previous version whenever it gets defaced. (Which will probably be a lot more often, now that he's turned himself into a poster boy for the thin-skinned.)
Does he think that this work should be someone else's responsibility? Too bad. TANSTAAFL. If you care about it, do the work. If you don't care, don't expect me to care, either.
The problem, which you identify, is that people think that the text which appears on Wikipedia at any given moment is authoritative. But that's only a symptom of a bigger problem: there is no authoritative source of information. A "squabble-fest" is all we have. The good thing about Wikipedia is that intellectual squabbles take place online, in front of your eyes, in real time -- instead of being spread out across dozens of books, articles, and isolated websites, published over years or even centuries, each of which is a hodgepodge of accurate and inaccurate information.
Wow, this comment has really opened my eyes.
:)
Of course, he's right. The Internet allows anyone to publish anything on its global platform, with no assurance that the post is in any way accurate and truthful.
The Internet's apologists here have already mounted the usual lame retort: If you don't like it, just put up your own, more accurate page. (An uncanny parallel to to equally lame rant frequently heard coming from the mouths and pens of equally arrogant and equally naive book fanatics: If you don't like it, just publish your own book.)
People who purport to be running an international information network have a responsibilty to the public to ensure that their publication is accurate and free of libel and slander before it is released. Arguing that anyone can publish on the Internet is equivalent to arguing that conventional newspapers can publish lies, libel and slander because their readers will "fix" it by complaining to the editors.
The Internet is premised on a bad idea poorly implemented, the Internet publishes lies and inaccuracies. The Internet has earned our mistrust and contempt. It is time to pull the plug: boycott it.
( And so I shall. You can assume that all further posts from this account come from an imposter.
You're right that people download music because CDs are really expensive, and because they insist on being able to use their iPods.
But now there's an even more obvious reason to download music in an open format like MP3: MP3s cannot suddenly turn on you and break your computer.
I'm sure I'm not alone when I state that I will never buy a Sony or BMG CD again, ever, unless it comes with a bold-printed, legally-binding guarantee that the damn thing is a plain-Jane, Red-Book-compatible, fully-rippable CD. And I'm never again going to insert a music CD into Windows, no matter who sells it to me. I'll rip the things in Linux, where it's safe.
This is independent of my desire to punish Sony by boycotting their products. This is legitimate fear. No individual music CD is worth the risk of having to reinstall Windows, to say nothing of the risk of being 0wned or losing some of my data.
Our knowledge of Shakespeare is so sparse that there's an entire genre of claims that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by someone else. Everyone from Ben Jonson to Francis Bacon to Sir Walter Raleigh has been put forward as the "real author". David Kahn's classic work on cryptography, The Codebreakers , devotes almost an entire chapter to debunking the "secret coded messages", supposedly hidden inside Shakespeare's plays, which reveal their true author.
All of this speculation could be disposed of, if only we had a few scribbled pages of Hamlet or The Tempest. But we don't.
Fortunately, Aardman Animations is far better documented than Shakespeare. But the destruction of their storyboards and sets is still a terrible loss.
The great thing about Joel is precisely that he's not a billionaire, not a famous computer scientist, not a guy who believes that striking it rich in the dotcom boom means that you are smart. He has experience in his field, thinks about his work, and writes very well indeed, but he's no rock star.
He's a professional engineer: a guy with a small company that builds software in order to make money, live happily, and eventually retire. The software makes its users happy and sells, at a profit. That's it. No delusions of imperial grandeur. No religious warfare. No booth babes, sports cars, or TV commercials. No lusting after greater "prestige".
I've worked for a company that confused "software engineering" with "the path to fortune and fame". I would not do so again. But I'd work for Joel.
Yes, Solaris x86 and Be don't worry about this. But AFAIK Solaris has no marketshare among non-geeks, and Be has no market whatsoever.
No. My understanding is that the Hubble was designed to be launched and serviced with the Shuttle because the Shuttle was what there was, not because it was a particularly good idea. The United States had already made the political/management decision to retire its heavy launch vehicles, like the Saturn V, in favor of the Shuttle.
According to the all-powerful Google, the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope will launch with an expendable vehicle.
The money goes to pay the editors who choose which articles to send out for peer review, and who organize the review process. Those folks work very hard, and they won't work for free.
And you shouldn't think of it as paying to publish -- because, as you say, the Web means that you can now publish your own work for next to nothing. What you are paying for is the mark of approval: you're buying the right to claim that a journal editor and at least two or three of your peers have scrutinized your work and pronounced it correct, interesting, and new.
It's just like paying to take a standardized test, or to get a professional certification. Just as certified engineers are more likely to be hired, papers published in top journals are more likely to be read.
Every scientist has a circle of colleagues (some of whom may be mortal enemies!) whose papers (s)he wants to read right away, regardless of whether they have been approved by reviewers or not. That's what the preprint archives are for. But they don't replace the actual publishing process.
the article really should have focused on... the nearly infinitely-customizable work environments available in space
"Space: Dilbert's Final Frontier"
Because, although your cubicle is already cold and airless, space would be even more so.
And if you thought reading Slashdot all day caused muscle atrophy...
Okay, I think your point is that Cringely was wrong to say that "Apple has eliminated the most costly part of the Netflix model." He should have said "Apple has eliminated 35 to 40 percent of the cost of the Netflix model." That doesn't kill Cringely's argument, though.
Of course, this is still not accurate. Apple's fulfillment cost will not be strictly zero (someone has to answer the tech support phones; someone has to keep the servers running). On the other hand, how much of the $80 to $103 million that Netflix spends on DVDs goes to replace DVDs that wear out after a few rentals? How much bigger a price break will the studios give Apple when they no longer have to bother making and shipping physical DVDs?
Before the iTunes music store opened, I would have believed this argument. Now... well, if Steve Jobs can talk the notoriously hidebound music industry into his schemes, why should I doubt his powers over the movie industry?
Well, no. For one thing, people will pay more for AppleMovies. The movies arrive in one day. There is no queue - the movie you want is always available. The movie always looks great, because it's not being streamed and because it doesn't come on a DVD that has been wiped on somebody's dog.
Another thing: if Apple can steal those Netflix users who rent one or two movies per month, they may not care if Netflix keeps all the thrifty folks who rent 15 movies per month. Once Netflix collects their monthly fee from you, every movie you rent from them adds to their costs: mailing costs, DVD wear-and-tear costs. If Netflix loses those users (like, alas, myself) who don't have time to watch lots of movies, their costs will go up, which will drive up their monthly fees, which will drive their user base down even further...
I explore by studying science. We haven't run out of it yet. If by chance we do, I can always switch to music, which will keep me busy for a while.
And I survive quite nicely here on Earth. I can't think of any better place to live. Even after an asteroid strike, I'm not sure I'd be better off living in a tin can on the Moon, peering through a telescope, mourning the death of civilization, and trying to remember what grass was like.
I won't survive forever, here on Earth. Eventually (in an ever-decreasing number of years!) I'll die, hopefully without too much pain. Right now, odds are I'll die of heart disease or cancer -- although those odds could change in my lifetime. But, one way or another, I'll die, just as every human dies, just as every species dies, just as the Earth, the solar system, and eventually the Universe will die. I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, and I'm sorry that you do.
What's the point of buying a car with a warranty, given that you'll surely be dead within 200 years? Why go to college, when you'll probably have Alzheimer's before the next century begins? Why fall in love, when it can only end in tragedy?I wish you luck in solving your existential dilemma, but the answer isn't out in space.
Um, you can't just "move" your domain. That would break every link on your Web site. It would break all of your email addresses.
Keeping your Web location constant over time is what domain names are for.
Here's how it used to work:
- The RIAA finds a music sharer's IP address.
- The RIAA pays a lawyer to sue the sharer.
- The sharer settles the lawsuit for an amount of money (which may or may not be enough to pay the costs of steps 1 and 2).
- Hopefully, the sharer will be afraid, and will tell all her friends never to use Kazaa again. (RIAA: yay!)
- Most likely, the sharer hates the RIAA and will also tell her friends to buy directly from independent artists (RIAA: oops)
- ???
- Profit!
Here's how it works now:- The RIAA finds a music sharer's IP address.
- The RIAA tips off the California cops, who send an official-looking form letter to the sharer with a stern warning: you didn't label those shared files with a proper email address! So now you're a criminal! Reform your evil ways, or Arnold will "be back" for YOU!
- Now, the sharer might be smart enough to realize that attaching an anonymous Hotmail address to her shared files won't make them any more traceable then they were already. And she might understand that copyright violations are not criminal acts, so California can't prosecute them.
- Most likely, the sharer hates California and will also tell her friends that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a dickweed. (RIAA: who cares? Politicians are cheap and disposable!)
- Since our music sharer has never heard of the RIAA and has no idea that they are behind all of this, she may well buy some $27 CDs next Christmas.
- Profit!
Nobody has to be prosecuted for this law to help the RIAA. (And that's a good thing, because California doesn't have the money to keep their current prison system running, let alone prosecute file sharers.) The law doesn't even have to be constitutional to help the RIAA. Indeed, if I were the RIAA, I would pray that this never gets tested in court - if it gets thrown out, as it likely will, then its threat value becomes worthless.But she probably won't. She will probably see a stern official letter from a California cop, freak out, and tell all her friends never to use Kazaa again. (RIAA: yay!)
- Turn the amplifier on and let it warm up for a good 30 to 60 minutes (especially if you're using a tube amp).
- Turn amp off and plug in cable A. (The amp doesn't cool down much during the 30 seconds it takes to change cables.)
- Listen to cable A
- Turn amp off and plug in cable B.
- Listen to cable B
- Go back to cable A (which you always do, to confirm whether you heard a real difference).
- Repeat 10,000 times.
- ????
- Profit!
Blind testing works the same way, except that each cycle involves a random choice between cables A and B.You control for the "thermal characteristics of the AMPLIFIER" by designing the test carefully. No problem.
And, yes, you can hear the difference between cables in blind tests. And it is very easy to do... if the cables are sufficiently different. I went from plugging in my speakers with lamp cord (don't ask) to some whiz-bang audiophile speaker cable and I fell out of my chair.
I won't get into the "scientific basis" here... except to say that, if you were to watch an apple fall from a tree, you might well conclude that there's no "scientific basis" for quantum mechanics. After all, doesn't Newtonian mechanics explain apples perfectly?
- - - -
As for the idea of selling "special" cool-looking plastic parts and claiming they improve the sound... that business already exists, and it's called "Bose". :)
Actually, that's not fair. Audiophiles love making Bose jokes (bitter jealousy, you know) but I believe that Bose has a quality product. The product is composed of (a) a box that audiophiles laugh at, but which can produce better sound then any random boom box, and (b) amazingly great marketing, such that the customers truly believe that they are hearing great sound. And so, therefore, they are.
Audio is psychology, and reproducing audio is as much magic as it is science. I've heard it said that the customers who brought the first hand-cranked record players were amazed by the realistic quality of the sound, and were often unable to tell the difference between a live band and a Victrola in blind tests.
I went to CWRU for Physics, Class of 1993. It was great -- IMHO the physics classes were uniformly good, with but a single exception. (Hey, one can't win them all.)
:) Also, the EE undergrads I knew were none too happy, and I also heard stories about Comp Sci's troubles. But none of this affected the happiness of the physicists, chemists, and biologists that I knew.
Since then things may have gotten even better. As I was walking out the door at graduation time I got to shake the hand of Lawrence Krauss, who had just arrived to become Chairman of the department. He seemed pretty cool. I also know that the department got some spiffy new labs and equipment over the next few years. (Not that I didn't get plenty of good education using the old stuff...)
It is a big mistake to generalize about any school based on the activities of a few departments, let alone a single professor. Universities are huge, and decentralized; each little corner stands on its own. For example, in my day, the physics department was great, but CWRU's math department had a terrible reputation among the undergrads. (Everyone said there were a few math professors who could teach, but that they had trouble getting tenure. I ended up learning all my math from the physicists.
At any school larger than a couple of hundred people, you have to shop department by department (and, for grad school, adviser by adviser). Believe me, there are horrifying experiences to be had at Harvard, Cornell, and MIT as well.....
Space travel is old news. Didn't you hear? Mankind went to space. People went all the way to the moon, before I was born -- before some of your students' parents were born. And the photos must have been really great at the time. But the kids you teach have spent years looking at similar photos (taken -- much more easily, safely, and cheaply -- by robots and satellites). They've spent years watching people like Jerry Doyle and Leonard Nimoy and Ben Affleck and Ahhhnuld walk around on Mars. They've explored Mars themselves, in games. If the games aren't realistic enough for them, they wait a couple of years for Moore's Law to supply them with more polygons and better sound. (Though it doesn't take a lot of simulator to accurately represent a lifeless desert.) Younger people prefer to dream of a future that isn't 35 years in the past.
Of course, we're doing the review after the fact. It would probably be a good idea if patents were required to be posted on Slashdot first, so that the examiner could skim the comments looking for hints.
But maybe not. Slashdot is full of noise (-1, Obvious). And adding financial incentive to a Slashdot discussion could well create a monster that would make Cthulhu himself turn pale and flee. For example... it isn't hard to imagine what companies like Microsoft will do to your Distributed Patent Review system: they will employ minions whose only job is to relentlessly spam your system, in an attempt to DOS it out of existence. Every proposed patent will be greeted by 100,000 robot-generated comments that look like this:
I think it might work, but it would have to be designed rather carefully. You might need to add Meta-Distributed-Prior-Art-Review, or even Meta-Meta-Distributed-Prior-Art-Review...
The parent post has this right. Apple's iTunes already allows you to strip DRM from a track. Playfair just makes the process a bit easier.
Apple only installed DRM because the RIAA insisted. Apple made the DRM strippable because Jobs has a clue - he realizes that music with both DRM and a price tag can't compete against free music ripped from a CD. But the procedure for stripping the DRM was obscured, so that the intended market (RIAA executives and the technologically uncurious, or (ahem) both) wouldn't notice.
The problem with Playfair is that it rips away the obscurity and exposes the fact that iTunes DRM is easily removed. Naturally, the RIAA will want Playfair shut down and the obscurity restored. Apple, of course, doesn't want Playfair shut down because Playfair is a tool which makes Apple customers very happy, thus promoting Apple products. Jobs' role is to walk the line between these two rivals.
The obvious answer is to publicly oppose Playfair while keeping it available behind the scenes. I will now play my role in this Kabuki dance by stating that Playfair is absolutely terrible and I'll never use it in public. It has bugs too. Really nasty bugs that will send you spam and make your computer explode. Of course, I believe that software = free speech and that engineers have a right to own Playfair, just as they have a right to own other ungodly writings. But I would certainly never let it be known that I use Playfair to remove the DRM so I can keep my music even after my Macintosh crashes. No, that would obviously be wrong, just like sex and bad language are wrong.