I consider myself a patriot, a realist, and an optimist. And as those things, I ask all you hackers on Slashdot, for the sake of Democracy, somebody, please steal an election. Preferably a major one.
I don't want votes flipped between Democrats and Republicans. I don't want Greens or Libertarians to get a disproportionate amount of the vote, or even win. I want Oscar the Grouch to win a Senate seat on a write-in campaign. Preferably, several Senate seats and maybe a governorship or two.
As Sunday's Foxtrot elegantly put it, the scariest thing this Halloween isn't that Democracy may have been stolen from us, but that hardly anyone seems to know or care.
The only way I can see to shift the priority of this issue in the American Mind from somewhere below whether or not one's going to run out of Doritos all the way up to putting it on par with who's going to win a reality TV show, is to make Oscar win big. Don't let the news get away with their "unbiased" reporting where they say "Princeton says the vote's not secure, but Diebold says it is. Are hemlines on their way back down? Stay tuned for the new fall fashions, when we return." People don't think this is an issue. We know it should be. Make it one.
My aunt's phone number is one frequently misdialed digit off from Pizza Hut. (Did you know that there are consistent frequently made mistakes in repeating certain sequences? These types of errors have far from a random distribution. For example people tend to drop the number "5" immediately following a letter in an alphanumeric sequence.) Anyway, she gets about 10 calls for Pizza Hut a day, mostly from drunk people late at night. (She lives near a major university.) She stopped answering her phone and screens her calls with her answering machine. Her answering machine now says "Hello. THIS IS NOT PIZZA HUT! I DO NOT SELL PIZZA! THIS IS A PRIVATE RESIDENCE! If you would like to leave a personal message for [her name], please leave a message at the tone. Again, this is NOT Pizza Hut."
She still gets a message every few days saying something like 'Yeah, man, I just want pizza. Hello? Hellllooooo!? I WANT A PIZZA! F*ck this, I'm calling Dominoes." Or sometimes even just leaving an order with a phone number and address and everything.
Yes, I know, she should get a new phone number. But she's never considered SUING Pizza Hut for happening to have a similar phone number.
Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.
Government "competing" with industry is not a free market and there is no "market darwinism" to play out. Of the two competitors here, one can confiscate any amount of money they choose from everyone to pay for their service. It doesn't matter if anyone wants it, they need no voluntary "customers." They take whatever money they want and provide whatever service they want.
Pretending that a company can compete with government, where government forces everyone to pay for their service, is a terrible twist of the word "competition." It's like saying that Wendy's can "compete" with McDonalds if the government passes a new law that everyone has to pay to eat all their meals at McDonalds, and then can show up and get the food they already had to pay for for no additonal charge. In order to go to Wendy's, you have to also buy a McDonalds meal and throw it away. That's not "free market competition."
Note that I'm not saying anything in this post about whether or not municipalities should be allowed to offer internet access, or (and this is an entirely separate issue) whether or not they should do so. I'm just saying that calling government "competition" with free enterprise companies some sort of free market is absurd. It's not competition when one of the competitors gets to force everyone to "buy" their product, can charge whatever they want, can loose any amount of money without fear of going out of business, can provide any service and quality level with no effect on revenue, and can tax and regulate their competitors. Yes, there are some areas where a company manages to service the same sector government services in a different way, and I'm not saying it's impossible that some people would pay for another internet service even after paying for the government one, especially if the government one is run as badly as many government things are. But even if a lot of people end up paying for both the mandatory government service and a second, private service, it's still not free market competition.
Just like Tibet has always been a part of China, but was momentarily mislead by the dangerous oppression of the Dalai Lama, until the people of Tibet rose up with the welcomed support of their Chinese brothers in a glorious revolution to overthrow their Buddhist oppressors and rejoin their traditional homeland.
I'm glad I looked at your review, I was thinking of getting one, but probably won't.
However, I thought I'd comment on this: "on the Mac systems you can record in AAC and AIFF. Why was this feature REMOVED from the PC version of the software?"
I think they probably offer these features utilizing Quicktime API's, so I doubt it was "removed" on the PC version, I think it was just a piece of cake to implement on the Mac, letting Quicktime do the actual transcoding, where they'd have actually had to program something to keep this feature on the PC version.
Someone will always find a work-around to push a technology's limits well beyond the end point demarcated by yesterday's experts.
Examples of where some experts were wrong about the limits to technology does not imply that there are no limits to technology. Some expert assessments regarding the limits may be wrong, while others are right.
I'm not going to pretend I know what proposed limits to technology are solid and which aren't, but here are some to think about. Many physicists think that time travel (at least restricted to back-in-time case) is impossible, and progress on time-travel technology in the entire history of the world is pretty much 0. And while the 100nm limit to silicon feature size was wrong, I suspect the quantum computability limit (the maximum density of computations if every quantum particle were utilized as a computer) presents a pretty hard limit on computational power and an upward bound for the end of Moore's Law. I don't think the laws of thermodynamics will be broken any time soon either- no perpetual motion machines and all the free energy, etc, that they entail. Likewise, for pictures, I suspect it will be difficult to create a camera that does any better than recording the wavelength and direction of every photon that encounters it. Some limits are "made to be broken," and I'm confident that others won't be. Again, these were just examples of some that I think are relatively solid, and I'm not entirely sure of any of them. What I am sure of is that there are some absolute physical limits governing what can be done, and sometimes, the expert's proposed limits on technology will be absolute.
Great strategy on Alienware's part. As this circulates the net, most of their potential customers will know never to believe that an Alienware machine is actually good, regardless of what the reviewers are saying. That'll do wonders for their sales.
If not, I believe it's the same story. They were a early front runner in 3D modeling. They're still big in Japan and have some adherents in architecture worldwide, but my impression is that it basically lost the US market due to dongle related issues.
Right, my first two examples are bogus. I'm just hallucinating when I go to peapod.com and they're selling six different kinds of "fat free" and/or "no calorie" cooking sprays that all consist almost entirely of fat.
All the dozensofothersources on the web that it's easy to Google up who are also complaining about this problem are also hallucinating with me. And the FDA's been allowing this for years despite consumer complaints. Some big companies like Coke, Pepsi, and Kraft are revising their labels voluntarily because of consumer complaints about the misleading labels resulting from the FDA's guidelines.
Can you be more specific as to how this is bogus? Your linked page indicates that the FDA has serving size guidelines for some products. Admittedly, that is part of the problem. But I would think that, for my claims to be bogus, the products I'd mentioned would not be on the market with their lying labels for years, and currently available, despite complaints.
The FDA only suggests serving size information for some foods, and their suggestions are often misleading- like two oz of pasta being a serving. But they don't recommend serving sizes for many foods, and they don't enforce the sizes for foods for which they have guidelines, and their guidelines lead to plenty of misleading labels on their own. But while the serving size guidelines are wishy-washy, they're perfectly clear on the point that if there's less that.5 grams of fat "per serving" in a product, they can call it fat free, regardless of how much fat is in the container.
Your point about the effectiveness of labeling laws is right, but I don't think you go far enough with it. You make it sound like the FDA's current labeling laws allow them to avoid mentioning negligible amounts of things, which might not be an important exception, when in fact they specifically allow for products to claim they have none of the majority ingredient.
I didn't write down name brands and exact numbers, but here are some of the things I've seen:
1. "zero-calorie" spray cooking oil, heavily touted in big letters all over the can. The ingredients? All vegetable oil. Same number of calories per unit weight as any other vegetable oil. The trick? The "serving size" was something like "1/64" teaspoon, and if there's less than one calorie per serving, then it's "calorie free" according to the FDA. It doesn't matter that the actual serving size may be a quarter ounce with 60 calories. This is specifically done in accordance with FDA guidelines, and they've been doing this for years without being cracked down on.
2. "no trans fat" foods that are almost entirely trans-fat. Particularly a tub of margarine with "no trans fat" written all over it, where the first and primary ingredient was hydrogenated soybean oil. Again, the serving size was something arbitrarily small to make sure there wasn't an entire gram of trans fat in whatever unrealistic, never-used micro-serving they came up with as a "serving size."
3. You can only advertise things as being healthy if they're bad for you. For example, you can only advertise "low fat" or "fat free" or "high in vitamins" if you artifically made it that way where it otherwise wasn't. So grocery stores are filled with low-fat cookies, sugar-free cakes, diet sodas, etc., where it's basically illegal to claim that fruits and vegetables are healthy. If you reduce cream cheese to a mere 20% fat content, it's "low-fat," but the naturally 1% fat mozzarella on the shelf next to it can not be advertised as "low fat." This has been improved greatly in the past few years by the FDA beginning to allow the label "naturally [whatever]" (naturally low in fat), but for most of the 90's, you couldn't make nutritional claims about things being healthy if they were supposed to be that way. Thus stores were full of "special diet" cookies that were still immeasurably worse for you than the whole wheat bread they couldn't make claims about.
4. The FDA mandates how nutritional labels are broken down and what they say. So a company that was on the ball about recent research in nutrition, and wanted to break their label out to show the percent of carbs in each category by glycemic index, would not be allowed to do so. One that wanted to break out the fats into polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated, and hydrogenated would have been unable to do so before the FDA witched from forbidding it to mandating it. Yes, manufacturers probably could have put an entirely separate nutritional label in addition to the government one, but this would probably clutter the already busy packaging and be confusing to customers who have two different labels labeling the fat in different ways, as opposed to the standard label with the familiar total, and a few lines added breaking down where that total came from. Basically, it's illegal to innovate in food nutritional labeling, because the FDA mandates exactly how it must be done. They could mandate that the information provided "meets or exceeds" certain standards, but they don't. This is probably due to lobbying on the part of big agribusiness, that doesn't want to face competition in labeling from organic and health food companies who want to put better labels on their products.
I think the biggest problem here is that the government has control over this at all, so what goes on our labels is decided by bureaucrats and lobbyists, not consumer demand and a competitive market place. Take Hong Kong, with no consumer labeling laws. Most products have excellent labels, meeting or exceeding those in the US. But there are
I didn't suggest preventing anyone from editing anything they can not currently edit. In fact, I suggested allowing more people to edit more things.
Wikipedia currently locks down certain contentious articles. I proposed allowing people with high reliability ratings to edit those articles.
Otherwise, anyone can edit anything. My suggestions were to use reliability scores to prioritize the review of edits. People with continually low-rated or frequently revised edits could have their edits put in higher priority for review. Being reviewed does not stop them from editing things.
At any rate, trusting anonymous people online with anything important is foolhardy. If you believe otherwise, please send money to all nigerians who want to send you huge amounts of money, if only you pay a fee first.
Moderation is a trusting system- everyone starts off on equal footing, given the same amount of trust. From there, it's up to you to gain more trust or lose what you've been given. We trust you to change content; from there, other people can choose how much faith to place in the quality of your changes based upon previous behavior. This is much better than trusting anyone with anything at any time. We want to learn from experience, and not trust all people equally regardless of prior behavior, because we all know there are a few bad apples out there, and we want to minimize their impact. At the same time, we want low barriers to entry, to help encourage new people to make valuable contributions. That's why I'm suggesting that you mostly still let anybody modify anything, you just improve the efficiency of your editing by pointing editors to the areas most likely to need revision.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I skimmed the linked page and only read certain parts thoroughly, and I thought you were starting from scratch with new content. Well, congratulations, then, good idea. I think I'll be moving my contributions/lookups to Citizendium. I've been thinking something like that could improve upon Wikipedia a lot.
I tend to think that a better development model could improve Wikipedia. A moderation system, like Slashdot's, could assign "reliability" ratings to edits, based on the quality of a person's previous contributions. It could rank the priority of changes up for review using the reliability of the person making the changes. Contentious articles that get locked down could only be locked down to people below a certain reliability score. The system could also keep track of contributor's quality as judged by topic. I'm interested in the collaborative plans they have. There are a lot of things I think could be done better.
But I wouldn't start over from scratch. Wikipedia's too far ahead. I'd copy the content of Wikipedia, and then let the copy diverge.
Aside from not having to start from scratch, there's also the benefit that people could do a careful analysis of various articles to see how they evolved, and see which system seems to be yielding the highest quality encyclopedia.
It is free to copy, redistribute, and modify Wikipedia, isn't it?
This implementation sounds inferior. What I'm interested in is, if it is possible to implement this well, and it proves to be a great asset in stopping computers from being exploited, would it be an argument against the GPLv3?
That is, could Linux fall behind on security some day because this turns out to be an important approach to security, and it can't be implemented in Linux versions using GPLv3? Would Linus want to add DRM to the kernel some day as a security measure for the OS, not due to anything involving media? Again, working under the assumption this turns out to be an effective method of increasing security, I wonder where the Linux community would fall on the issue?
I know that the point of MS's implementation is to stop people from modifying the kernel, and everyone needs to modify the Linux kernel all the time. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be implemented in such a way that the checks can be turned off and on with a password, and the user can turn them off, change the kernel as needed, create his own files to check its integrity in its modified state, generate his own keys, and then turn the kernel lock back on. The idea doesn't necessarily make the kernel unmodifiable to people who should have access. So it doesn't seem to me that it would necessarily be against the spirit of Linux or open source to include this. It could be implemented as security only, leaving the person who installed it complete control. Including, of course, the option to turn it off and leave it off.
Perhaps the premise, that it could be useful, is flawed, making the whole argument either way moot. This being Slashdot, I suspect people are about to reply to tell me it's both critical and worthless.
My first thought on how to go about beating Netflix is to write a program that goes and gets more data. I read their rules, and I don't think this violates them. Mine all the movie review sites (The Onion AVClub, Ebert, etc.) Mine all the commentary for the film on IMDB, Amazon, etc. Mine the ratings by age, gender, etc. for the movie on IMDB. I haven't got time to start going into specifics, but use all this data to help associate what they're going to like.
It can't be done for this contest, but I'd suggest that Netflix should start getting more complete profiles on their users (optional, of course) so that they can start to collect more information about the individuals that liked or disliked each movie. They should be able to break down who liked the movie best by age, gender, region, ethnicity, religion, or whatever. This can give them more fine-grained sorting ability.
Saying that Nielsen ""cannot collect data" on this is clearly false. Yes, it's true their automated data collection boxes can't get it.
But my household was chosen to be a one-month Nielsen family a couple of months ago, and they sent us a journal in which were asked (and payed) to log each TV show we watched on TV.
We thought this was particularly silly to only ask us to log what TV shows we saw on TV, rather than log every source of video we watched, from going out to the movies, to silly 1-minute clips on YouTube, to Amazon Fishbowl, to bittorrented TV shows, to movies or TV shows on DVD we checked out of the library.
As it happens, we hardly watch any TV, and we had company that week, it was a hot summer week and we don't have air conditioning, and it was summer reruns. We never once turned on the television that week. Although I actually didn't need those qualifiers, it's not uncommon for us not to turn on the TV all week. Most of the TV shows we watch, we watch on our computer on DVD's we get from the library. Which they didn't ask us to write down.
But it would have been just as easy for them if they had. Perhaps they won't get as accurate information if they ask people to keep their own journals instead of logging things automatically. But if they pay people well, and maybe even send out some largely automated electronic devices that allow people easily search for and click on what they watched (when possible), they can certainly still get this data. There was a "commentary" section, in which we got an opportunity to give them a piece of our minds about canceling Firefly.
There was a "commentary" section, in which we told them that most of the video we watch, including TV shows, is not broadcast TV. We also took the opportunity to give them a piece of our minds about canceling Firefly.
"2) Yes, it has the non-financial benefit of being earth-friendly, which isn't necessarily captured in a financial analysis. (Saves people from lecturing others that money isn't everything.)"
Of course money isn't everything, but when you see a discrepancy this large, you need to ask yourself if the extra money is really good for the environment.
Some portion of that $9,000 cost of the windmill is for energy consumed in its manufacture. If the value of the energy produced by the windmill exceeds the cost of the windmill, than the windmill is good on environmental and economic grounds. If it's somewhere close, then it's probably reasonable to assume that you can pay a little extra to trade some people's labor costs, etc., for less pollution. But when there's a huge discrepancy, like paying five times as much for the windmill power, you need to start looking into how much of the windmill's price was energy consumed to manufacture it. Everything from mining oar to assembly to delivery. Because you don't want to be accidentally spending money to pointlessly harm the environment (in the name of helping it), by using a windmill that produces less power than it took to make.
That said, this windmill probably is a good bet on reducing pollution, and comes in as a tie on economics, because, as others have pointed out, $0.012-0.022/kwh is ridiculously cheap for power these days, $0.10 is more common.
However, I think one's best bet in many areas of the country is to hold out just a little longer on rapidly improving solar cells. I don't have time to dig up all the links now, but many recent breakthroughs, along with consistent incremental improvements, make it look like solar will become extremely price competitive with other power sources, if not downright cheaper, soon.
MAITRE D:
And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin disc.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Nah.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
No. Fuck off. I'm full.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir. Hmm?
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groan]
MAITRE D:
It's only wafer thin.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Look. I couldn't eat another byte. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, just-- just one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning] All right. Just one.
MAITRE D:
Just the one, monsieur. Voila.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning]
MAITRE D:
Bon appetit.
Yes, the first thing I thought when I saw this was "and I bet that they're not considering economics a science." I'm not claiming either party has any claim to the economic high-ground these days, I'm disgusted with both of them. I'm just saying that economics is a science with a lot of testable and well established theories, the consequences of which I bet will be outright ignored by this movement in deciding which policies and candidates to support. I didn't see any practitioners of "the dismal science" on their list- I wonder if they're even going to let them join?
While I think it's sadly hopeless trying to get politicians to care about economics or any other scientific consideration, it wouldn't surprise me if it would do more good for society if politicians were influenced by economists than by any other branch of scientists, for the simple reason that politicians in the US have a much greater degree of control over economic matters than they do when it comes to influencing society on other scientific questions.
Enough power to kill you is enough power to kill you. If you're dead anyway, who cares if you've just had a heart attack and otherwise appear untouched, or if you've been converted entirely to plasma and been atomized? There's enough power to kill you all over the place.
Even if you have some irrational fear of strong power, many commercial buildings have three-phase 440 volt power running through low-gauge wire on high-amp breakers- the kind of power they'll need for charging these cars. But people rarely get fried, and I've never heard someone complaining about how dangerous it is before.
It's quite simple, and we've known for a long time, how to make electrical connections that are very safe. Ones where there's no exposed conductor a person can touch. And our electrical insulators are very good. I doubt it would take much engineering to make an electrical charging process significantly safer than our current gasoline fueling process, which still results in a few fires at pumps every year, mostly caused by static electricity shocks when someone's finishing fueling.
Yes, gasoline fueling also could be much safer with better design, but the old system got grandfathered in and the accidents are infrequent enough that there was never a serious push for a new standard. Since we get to design electric-car charging standards from scratch now, we have to opportunity to make them extra fail-safe, with really good connectors, double insulation plus shielding, ground-fault interrupters, etc.
"we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)"
Who's "we?" Do you have a link to any of this evidence? I ask, because many sources indicate that global average temperatures have been a lot higher than they are now [link] [link] many times during the past "couple of hundred thousand years." It seems odd that during none of these warmer periods there would be less ice, but due to varying weather patterns it's possible.
But if the whole point is to say that this is an unprecedented period of global high temperatures in recorded human history, it's not. Depending on the source, the medieval warm period was a little warmer or about the same temperature. It looks like we will move into the warmest period in recorded human history in the next 10-20 years, but we're not there yet.
Do you even read the links you include? From your own link: "The goal was to recover ice frozen 120,000 years ago, from before the last major ice age, when the world was warmer than it is today." How's that a good link to support your post saying "the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)" The whole point of their research was to look at times within the last 200,000 years when the north pole was going through similarly dramatic climate change.
"admitted that global warming was real and was going to have severe environemental and economic impact. You don't find this alarming?"
You've now moved completely off-topic, and equated yourself with those global-warming advocates who think that anyone who believes any climate research that doesn't make this period of global warming look more devastating and unprecedented is some anti-global-warming conspiracy theorist. Nothing in BMO's parent or grandparent to your post denied any aspect of the modern theory of industrial global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. He just pointed out some things, like that this Slashdot article makes unverifiable and unlikely claims, like that this arctic ice melt has never happened before during "most of recorded human history." It should have said "in recorded arctic history," which is only about 50 years old, if that, and means nothing on a geological scale. Equating pointing out errors like this to not finding global warming alarming is zealot-speak.
"They bitch and morn about how I cheated but they could have modded their box just like mine."
How about "They bitch and moan about how I broke into their houses and stole their stuff, but they could have lots of stuff too if they just broke into other people's houses and stole theirs." [insert random grammatical mistakes for added authenticity]
This is about the basic trust and respect for other people that makes society a decent place to live. Saying "it's OK that I'm an asshole because everyone else could just be an asshole too if they wanted" gives me no sympathy for his views. Yes, if everyone was a sociopath and took every opportunity to take advantage of others in betrayal of the accepted rules, everyone would be on equal footing, and the world would suck. If this guy got mugged, do you think his opinion would be "that's OK, I could have mugged other people too?"
Unfortunately, I'm afraid his reaction probably would be "Hey, that's a great idea! I could mug other people too!"
Slashdot Mirror
I consider myself a patriot, a realist, and an optimist. And as those things, I ask all you hackers on Slashdot, for the sake of Democracy, somebody, please steal an election. Preferably a major one.
I don't want votes flipped between Democrats and Republicans. I don't want Greens or Libertarians to get a disproportionate amount of the vote, or even win. I want Oscar the Grouch to win a Senate seat on a write-in campaign. Preferably, several Senate seats and maybe a governorship or two.
As Sunday's Foxtrot elegantly put it, the scariest thing this Halloween isn't that Democracy may have been stolen from us, but that hardly anyone seems to know or care.
The only way I can see to shift the priority of this issue in the American Mind from somewhere below whether or not one's going to run out of Doritos all the way up to putting it on par with who's going to win a reality TV show, is to make Oscar win big. Don't let the news get away with their "unbiased" reporting where they say "Princeton says the vote's not secure, but Diebold says it is. Are hemlines on their way back down? Stay tuned for the new fall fashions, when we return." People don't think this is an issue. We know it should be. Make it one.
My aunt's phone number is one frequently misdialed digit off from Pizza Hut. (Did you know that there are consistent frequently made mistakes in repeating certain sequences? These types of errors have far from a random distribution. For example people tend to drop the number "5" immediately following a letter in an alphanumeric sequence.) Anyway, she gets about 10 calls for Pizza Hut a day, mostly from drunk people late at night. (She lives near a major university.) She stopped answering her phone and screens her calls with her answering machine. Her answering machine now says "Hello. THIS IS NOT PIZZA HUT! I DO NOT SELL PIZZA! THIS IS A PRIVATE RESIDENCE! If you would like to leave a personal message for [her name], please leave a message at the tone. Again, this is NOT Pizza Hut."
She still gets a message every few days saying something like 'Yeah, man, I just want pizza. Hello? Hellllooooo!? I WANT A PIZZA! F*ck this, I'm calling Dominoes." Or sometimes even just leaving an order with a phone number and address and everything.
Yes, I know, she should get a new phone number. But she's never considered SUING Pizza Hut for happening to have a similar phone number.
Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.
Government "competing" with industry is not a free market and there is no "market darwinism" to play out. Of the two competitors here, one can confiscate any amount of money they choose from everyone to pay for their service. It doesn't matter if anyone wants it, they need no voluntary "customers." They take whatever money they want and provide whatever service they want.
Pretending that a company can compete with government, where government forces everyone to pay for their service, is a terrible twist of the word "competition." It's like saying that Wendy's can "compete" with McDonalds if the government passes a new law that everyone has to pay to eat all their meals at McDonalds, and then can show up and get the food they already had to pay for for no additonal charge. In order to go to Wendy's, you have to also buy a McDonalds meal and throw it away. That's not "free market competition."
Note that I'm not saying anything in this post about whether or not municipalities should be allowed to offer internet access, or (and this is an entirely separate issue) whether or not they should do so. I'm just saying that calling government "competition" with free enterprise companies some sort of free market is absurd. It's not competition when one of the competitors gets to force everyone to "buy" their product, can charge whatever they want, can loose any amount of money without fear of going out of business, can provide any service and quality level with no effect on revenue, and can tax and regulate their competitors. Yes, there are some areas where a company manages to service the same sector government services in a different way, and I'm not saying it's impossible that some people would pay for another internet service even after paying for the government one, especially if the government one is run as badly as many government things are. But even if a lot of people end up paying for both the mandatory government service and a second, private service, it's still not free market competition.
Just like Tibet has always been a part of China, but was momentarily mislead by the dangerous oppression of the Dalai Lama, until the people of Tibet rose up with the welcomed support of their Chinese brothers in a glorious revolution to overthrow their Buddhist oppressors and rejoin their traditional homeland.
I'm glad I looked at your review, I was thinking of getting one, but probably won't.
However, I thought I'd comment on this:
"on the Mac systems you can record in AAC and AIFF. Why was this feature REMOVED from the PC version of the software?"
I think they probably offer these features utilizing Quicktime API's, so I doubt it was "removed" on the PC version, I think it was just a piece of cake to implement on the Mac, letting Quicktime do the actual transcoding, where they'd have actually had to program something to keep this feature on the PC version.
You forgot 10.6, "American Shorthair."
That remind me of the standard unit of beauty, the helen. One millihelen is enough beauty to launch one ship.
Someone will always find a work-around to push a technology's limits well beyond the end point demarcated by yesterday's experts.
Examples of where some experts were wrong about the limits to technology does not imply that there are no limits to technology. Some expert assessments regarding the limits may be wrong, while others are right.
I'm not going to pretend I know what proposed limits to technology are solid and which aren't, but here are some to think about. Many physicists think that time travel (at least restricted to back-in-time case) is impossible, and progress on time-travel technology in the entire history of the world is pretty much 0. And while the 100nm limit to silicon feature size was wrong, I suspect the quantum computability limit (the maximum density of computations if every quantum particle were utilized as a computer) presents a pretty hard limit on computational power and an upward bound for the end of Moore's Law. I don't think the laws of thermodynamics will be broken any time soon either- no perpetual motion machines and all the free energy, etc, that they entail. Likewise, for pictures, I suspect it will be difficult to create a camera that does any better than recording the wavelength and direction of every photon that encounters it. Some limits are "made to be broken," and I'm confident that others won't be. Again, these were just examples of some that I think are relatively solid, and I'm not entirely sure of any of them. What I am sure of is that there are some absolute physical limits governing what can be done, and sometimes, the expert's proposed limits on technology will be absolute.
Great strategy on Alienware's part. As this circulates the net, most of their potential customers will know never to believe that an Alienware machine is actually good, regardless of what the reviewers are saying. That'll do wonders for their sales.
Do you work for Auto-des-sys?
If not, I believe it's the same story. They were a early front runner in 3D modeling. They're still big in Japan and have some adherents in architecture worldwide, but my impression is that it basically lost the US market due to dongle related issues.
Right, my first two examples are bogus. I'm just hallucinating when I go to peapod.com and they're selling six different kinds of "fat free" and/or "no calorie" cooking sprays that all consist almost entirely of fat.
.5 grams of fat "per serving" in a product, they can call it fat free, regardless of how much fat is in the container.
All the dozens of other sources on the web that it's easy to Google up who are also complaining about this problem are also hallucinating with me. And the FDA's been allowing this for years despite consumer complaints. Some big companies like Coke, Pepsi, and Kraft are revising their labels voluntarily because of consumer complaints about the misleading labels resulting from the FDA's guidelines.
Can you be more specific as to how this is bogus? Your linked page indicates that the FDA has serving size guidelines for some products. Admittedly, that is part of the problem. But I would think that, for my claims to be bogus, the products I'd mentioned would not be on the market with their lying labels for years, and currently available, despite complaints.
The FDA only suggests serving size information for some foods, and their suggestions are often misleading- like two oz of pasta being a serving. But they don't recommend serving sizes for many foods, and they don't enforce the sizes for foods for which they have guidelines, and their guidelines lead to plenty of misleading labels on their own. But while the serving size guidelines are wishy-washy, they're perfectly clear on the point that if there's less that
Your point about the effectiveness of labeling laws is right, but I don't think you go far enough with it. You make it sound like the FDA's current labeling laws allow them to avoid mentioning negligible amounts of things, which might not be an important exception, when in fact they specifically allow for products to claim they have none of the majority ingredient.
I didn't write down name brands and exact numbers, but here are some of the things I've seen:
1. "zero-calorie" spray cooking oil, heavily touted in big letters all over the can. The ingredients? All vegetable oil. Same number of calories per unit weight as any other vegetable oil. The trick? The "serving size" was something like "1/64" teaspoon, and if there's less than one calorie per serving, then it's "calorie free" according to the FDA. It doesn't matter that the actual serving size may be a quarter ounce with 60 calories. This is specifically done in accordance with FDA guidelines, and they've been doing this for years without being cracked down on.
2. "no trans fat" foods that are almost entirely trans-fat. Particularly a tub of margarine with "no trans fat" written all over it, where the first and primary ingredient was hydrogenated soybean oil. Again, the serving size was something arbitrarily small to make sure there wasn't an entire gram of trans fat in whatever unrealistic, never-used micro-serving they came up with as a "serving size."
3. You can only advertise things as being healthy if they're bad for you. For example, you can only advertise "low fat" or "fat free" or "high in vitamins" if you artifically made it that way where it otherwise wasn't. So grocery stores are filled with low-fat cookies, sugar-free cakes, diet sodas, etc., where it's basically illegal to claim that fruits and vegetables are healthy. If you reduce cream cheese to a mere 20% fat content, it's "low-fat," but the naturally 1% fat mozzarella on the shelf next to it can not be advertised as "low fat." This has been improved greatly in the past few years by the FDA beginning to allow the label "naturally [whatever]" (naturally low in fat), but for most of the 90's, you couldn't make nutritional claims about things being healthy if they were supposed to be that way. Thus stores were full of "special diet" cookies that were still immeasurably worse for you than the whole wheat bread they couldn't make claims about.
4. The FDA mandates how nutritional labels are broken down and what they say. So a company that was on the ball about recent research in nutrition, and wanted to break their label out to show the percent of carbs in each category by glycemic index, would not be allowed to do so. One that wanted to break out the fats into polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated, and hydrogenated would have been unable to do so before the FDA witched from forbidding it to mandating it. Yes, manufacturers probably could have put an entirely separate nutritional label in addition to the government one, but this would probably clutter the already busy packaging and be confusing to customers who have two different labels labeling the fat in different ways, as opposed to the standard label with the familiar total, and a few lines added breaking down where that total came from. Basically, it's illegal to innovate in food nutritional labeling, because the FDA mandates exactly how it must be done. They could mandate that the information provided "meets or exceeds" certain standards, but they don't. This is probably due to lobbying on the part of big agribusiness, that doesn't want to face competition in labeling from organic and health food companies who want to put better labels on their products.
I think the biggest problem here is that the government has control over this at all, so what goes on our labels is decided by bureaucrats and lobbyists, not consumer demand and a competitive market place. Take Hong Kong, with no consumer labeling laws. Most products have excellent labels, meeting or exceeding those in the US. But there are
I didn't suggest preventing anyone from editing anything they can not currently edit. In fact, I suggested allowing more people to edit more things.
Wikipedia currently locks down certain contentious articles. I proposed allowing people with high reliability ratings to edit those articles.
Otherwise, anyone can edit anything. My suggestions were to use reliability scores to prioritize the review of edits. People with continually low-rated or frequently revised edits could have their edits put in higher priority for review. Being reviewed does not stop them from editing things.
At any rate, trusting anonymous people online with anything important is foolhardy. If you believe otherwise, please send money to all nigerians who want to send you huge amounts of money, if only you pay a fee first.
Moderation is a trusting system- everyone starts off on equal footing, given the same amount of trust. From there, it's up to you to gain more trust or lose what you've been given. We trust you to change content; from there, other people can choose how much faith to place in the quality of your changes based upon previous behavior. This is much better than trusting anyone with anything at any time. We want to learn from experience, and not trust all people equally regardless of prior behavior, because we all know there are a few bad apples out there, and we want to minimize their impact. At the same time, we want low barriers to entry, to help encourage new people to make valuable contributions. That's why I'm suggesting that you mostly still let anybody modify anything, you just improve the efficiency of your editing by pointing editors to the areas most likely to need revision.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I skimmed the linked page and only read certain parts thoroughly, and I thought you were starting from scratch with new content. Well, congratulations, then, good idea. I think I'll be moving my contributions/lookups to Citizendium. I've been thinking something like that could improve upon Wikipedia a lot.
I tend to think that a better development model could improve Wikipedia. A moderation system, like Slashdot's, could assign "reliability" ratings to edits, based on the quality of a person's previous contributions. It could rank the priority of changes up for review using the reliability of the person making the changes. Contentious articles that get locked down could only be locked down to people below a certain reliability score. The system could also keep track of contributor's quality as judged by topic. I'm interested in the collaborative plans they have. There are a lot of things I think could be done better.
But I wouldn't start over from scratch. Wikipedia's too far ahead. I'd copy the content of Wikipedia, and then let the copy diverge.
Aside from not having to start from scratch, there's also the benefit that people could do a careful analysis of various articles to see how they evolved, and see which system seems to be yielding the highest quality encyclopedia.
It is free to copy, redistribute, and modify Wikipedia, isn't it?
"crack sites"
Man, you can buy crack on the internet? What country is that legal in, the Netherlands?
I'm surprised they haven't shut that down already.
You know, I wrote that, and then thought, "you know, before I hit 'submit,' maybe I should take a look on Google.
Sure enough.
This implementation sounds inferior. What I'm interested in is, if it is possible to implement this well, and it proves to be a great asset in stopping computers from being exploited, would it be an argument against the GPLv3?
That is, could Linux fall behind on security some day because this turns out to be an important approach to security, and it can't be implemented in Linux versions using GPLv3? Would Linus want to add DRM to the kernel some day as a security measure for the OS, not due to anything involving media? Again, working under the assumption this turns out to be an effective method of increasing security, I wonder where the Linux community would fall on the issue?
I know that the point of MS's implementation is to stop people from modifying the kernel, and everyone needs to modify the Linux kernel all the time. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be implemented in such a way that the checks can be turned off and on with a password, and the user can turn them off, change the kernel as needed, create his own files to check its integrity in its modified state, generate his own keys, and then turn the kernel lock back on. The idea doesn't necessarily make the kernel unmodifiable to people who should have access. So it doesn't seem to me that it would necessarily be against the spirit of Linux or open source to include this. It could be implemented as security only, leaving the person who installed it complete control. Including, of course, the option to turn it off and leave it off.
Perhaps the premise, that it could be useful, is flawed, making the whole argument either way moot. This being Slashdot, I suspect people are about to reply to tell me it's both critical and worthless.
My first thought on how to go about beating Netflix is to write a program that goes and gets more data. I read their rules, and I don't think this violates them. Mine all the movie review sites (The Onion AVClub, Ebert, etc.) Mine all the commentary for the film on IMDB, Amazon, etc. Mine the ratings by age, gender, etc. for the movie on IMDB. I haven't got time to start going into specifics, but use all this data to help associate what they're going to like.
It can't be done for this contest, but I'd suggest that Netflix should start getting more complete profiles on their users (optional, of course) so that they can start to collect more information about the individuals that liked or disliked each movie. They should be able to break down who liked the movie best by age, gender, region, ethnicity, religion, or whatever. This can give them more fine-grained sorting ability.
Saying that Nielsen ""cannot collect data" on this is clearly false. Yes, it's true their automated data collection boxes can't get it.
But my household was chosen to be a one-month Nielsen family a couple of months ago, and they sent us a journal in which were asked (and payed) to log each TV show we watched on TV.
We thought this was particularly silly to only ask us to log what TV shows we saw on TV, rather than log every source of video we watched, from going out to the movies, to silly 1-minute clips on YouTube, to Amazon Fishbowl, to bittorrented TV shows, to movies or TV shows on DVD we checked out of the library.
As it happens, we hardly watch any TV, and we had company that week, it was a hot summer week and we don't have air conditioning, and it was summer reruns. We never once turned on the television that week. Although I actually didn't need those qualifiers, it's not uncommon for us not to turn on the TV all week. Most of the TV shows we watch, we watch on our computer on DVD's we get from the library. Which they didn't ask us to write down.
But it would have been just as easy for them if they had. Perhaps they won't get as accurate information if they ask people to keep their own journals instead of logging things automatically. But if they pay people well, and maybe even send out some largely automated electronic devices that allow people easily search for and click on what they watched (when possible), they can certainly still get this data. There was a "commentary" section, in which we got an opportunity to give them a piece of our minds about canceling Firefly.
There was a "commentary" section, in which we told them that most of the video we watch, including TV shows, is not broadcast TV. We also took the opportunity to give them a piece of our minds about canceling Firefly.
"2) Yes, it has the non-financial benefit of being earth-friendly, which isn't necessarily captured in a financial analysis. (Saves people from lecturing others that money isn't everything.)"
Of course money isn't everything, but when you see a discrepancy this large, you need to ask yourself if the extra money is really good for the environment.
Some portion of that $9,000 cost of the windmill is for energy consumed in its manufacture. If the value of the energy produced by the windmill exceeds the cost of the windmill, than the windmill is good on environmental and economic grounds. If it's somewhere close, then it's probably reasonable to assume that you can pay a little extra to trade some people's labor costs, etc., for less pollution. But when there's a huge discrepancy, like paying five times as much for the windmill power, you need to start looking into how much of the windmill's price was energy consumed to manufacture it. Everything from mining oar to assembly to delivery. Because you don't want to be accidentally spending money to pointlessly harm the environment (in the name of helping it), by using a windmill that produces less power than it took to make.
That said, this windmill probably is a good bet on reducing pollution, and comes in as a tie on economics, because, as others have pointed out, $0.012-0.022/kwh is ridiculously cheap for power these days, $0.10 is more common.
However, I think one's best bet in many areas of the country is to hold out just a little longer on rapidly improving solar cells. I don't have time to dig up all the links now, but many recent breakthroughs, along with consistent incremental improvements, make it look like solar will become extremely price competitive with other power sources, if not downright cheaper, soon.
MAITRE D:
And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin disc.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Nah.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
No. Fuck off. I'm full.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir. Hmm?
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groan]
MAITRE D:
It's only wafer thin.
MR. CREOSOTE:
Look. I couldn't eat another byte. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
MAITRE D:
Oh, sir, just-- just one.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning] All right. Just one.
MAITRE D:
Just the one, monsieur. Voila.
MR. CREOSOTE:
[groaning]
MAITRE D:
Bon appetit.
Yes, the first thing I thought when I saw this was "and I bet that they're not considering economics a science." I'm not claiming either party has any claim to the economic high-ground these days, I'm disgusted with both of them. I'm just saying that economics is a science with a lot of testable and well established theories, the consequences of which I bet will be outright ignored by this movement in deciding which policies and candidates to support. I didn't see any practitioners of "the dismal science" on their list- I wonder if they're even going to let them join?
While I think it's sadly hopeless trying to get politicians to care about economics or any other scientific consideration, it wouldn't surprise me if it would do more good for society if politicians were influenced by economists than by any other branch of scientists, for the simple reason that politicians in the US have a much greater degree of control over economic matters than they do when it comes to influencing society on other scientific questions.
Enough power to kill you is enough power to kill you. If you're dead anyway, who cares if you've just had a heart attack and otherwise appear untouched, or if you've been converted entirely to plasma and been atomized? There's enough power to kill you all over the place.
Even if you have some irrational fear of strong power, many commercial buildings have three-phase 440 volt power running through low-gauge wire on high-amp breakers- the kind of power they'll need for charging these cars. But people rarely get fried, and I've never heard someone complaining about how dangerous it is before.
It's quite simple, and we've known for a long time, how to make electrical connections that are very safe. Ones where there's no exposed conductor a person can touch. And our electrical insulators are very good. I doubt it would take much engineering to make an electrical charging process significantly safer than our current gasoline fueling process, which still results in a few fires at pumps every year, mostly caused by static electricity shocks when someone's finishing fueling.
Yes, gasoline fueling also could be much safer with better design, but the old system got grandfathered in and the accidents are infrequent enough that there was never a serious push for a new standard. Since we get to design electric-car charging standards from scratch now, we have to opportunity to make them extra fail-safe, with really good connectors, double insulation plus shielding, ground-fault interrupters, etc.
"we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)"
Who's "we?" Do you have a link to any of this evidence? I ask, because many sources indicate that global average temperatures have been a lot higher than they are now [link] [link] many times during the past "couple of hundred thousand years." It seems odd that during none of these warmer periods there would be less ice, but due to varying weather patterns it's possible.
But if the whole point is to say that this is an unprecedented period of global high temperatures in recorded human history, it's not. Depending on the source, the medieval warm period was a little warmer or about the same temperature. It looks like we will move into the warmest period in recorded human history in the next 10-20 years, but we're not there yet.
Do you even read the links you include? From your own link:
"The goal was to recover ice frozen 120,000 years ago, from before the last major ice age, when the world was warmer than it is today." How's that a good link to support your post saying
"the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)"
The whole point of their research was to look at times within the last 200,000 years when the north pole was going through similarly dramatic climate change.
"admitted that global warming was real and was going to have severe environemental and economic impact. You don't find this alarming?"
You've now moved completely off-topic, and equated yourself with those global-warming advocates who think that anyone who believes any climate research that doesn't make this period of global warming look more devastating and unprecedented is some anti-global-warming conspiracy theorist. Nothing in BMO's parent or grandparent to your post denied any aspect of the modern theory of industrial global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. He just pointed out some things, like that this Slashdot article makes unverifiable and unlikely claims, like that this arctic ice melt has never happened before during "most of recorded human history." It should have said "in recorded arctic history," which is only about 50 years old, if that, and means nothing on a geological scale. Equating pointing out errors like this to not finding global warming alarming is zealot-speak.
Exactly. Instead of
"They bitch and morn about how I cheated but they could have modded their box just like mine."
How about "They bitch and moan about how I broke into their houses and stole their stuff, but they could have lots of stuff too if they just broke into other people's houses and stole theirs." [insert random grammatical mistakes for added authenticity]
This is about the basic trust and respect for other people that makes society a decent place to live. Saying "it's OK that I'm an asshole because everyone else could just be an asshole too if they wanted" gives me no sympathy for his views. Yes, if everyone was a sociopath and took every opportunity to take advantage of others in betrayal of the accepted rules, everyone would be on equal footing, and the world would suck. If this guy got mugged, do you think his opinion would be "that's OK, I could have mugged other people too?"
Unfortunately, I'm afraid his reaction probably would be "Hey, that's a great idea! I could mug other people too!"