I think you misunderstand me. The point of cohort analysis versus the more physical differential equation models is that they take known conditions and predict future ones. For short times -- a few days -- both can predict the weather on a grid of locations very well, but neither can be done practically by hand. The data your referring to (doppler images, etc) are the input to these algorithms. If you're getting information from these programs, its coming to you as forecasts -- generalized to cover larger areas.
I'm not a weather scientist, but the last talk I attended on the subject indicated that these systems can provide very specific climate information in three dimensions. They don't just care where a storm is, but they want to be able to track in detail the evolution of a storm by knowing the full fluid flow. It's probably the coolest and most ambitious computational fluid dynamics project ever undertaken.
1) The computer will be doing CLIMATE modeling, not weather prediction. That's a different bird. It's like the difference between the average score on a test and your score on the test. Or like describing the flow of heat, but not knowing the underlying collisions that result in the transfer of energy.
2) Higher precision does help you model chaotic systems longer, but... If you run your model until the difference between your prediction and the actual system is larger than a tolerance, the time when this happens is called the horizon time. If you improve your accuracy (let's say your computer system is perfect and errors only occur in getting the initial state right), you only improve the horizon time as the LOG of your improvement. In an age where quadratic methods are just adequate in scientific computing, this is unbearable.
3) Another weather (not climate) prediction option is to use a statistical cohort model. Such a model just takes in data and tries to predict what will happen next based on past trends. It doesn't know any physics, and can take a while to train. This means that the cohort you train in London is useless in Paris. Such "models" often beat physical models in predictive ability, but don't give any insight into why. If you want to fly a plane, they're fine. If you want to do science, see (1) or (2).
Also, this computer is way, way cooler than the one predicting nuclear bomb blasts. But that's, just like, my opinion, man.
Boundless optimism? Still, just like the metric system, spelling reform "Would Be Nice"....but you're right. Not gonna happen. It makes too much sense.
Seriously. Look at the explosion of diacritical marks. Spelling reform (in the limited sense of having only one way to write each sound) was carried out in the 1800's. All spelling reforms will cause words to look funny, if not stupid. This is because, to the chagrin of middle schoolers, people judge your intelligence and content based on spelling.
Reform isn't a mental shortcut, its a good idea to encourage correct communication in a language with world-wide significance. If the Anglosphere could promulgate a change in spelling, it will improve commerce and reduce misery for students around the world. It isn't just an American thing, it's a rational thing.
But coordination is key. A change must be made by England, Australia, India, South Africa, and America simultaneously for best effect. The difficulty is that the question of which letter groups make the same sound depends on accent, so any change will require compromise. It's doubtless this is the reason why languages such as Croat could change spelling quickly, while English lags behind with an unravelling of standard spellings and a profusion of meaningless letter groups.
Ebay allows users to set their secret maximum bid, so in a rational world a bidder just sets this at the highest price he's willing to pay. However, rational thought has nothing to do with markets (except in economics textbooks, for some reason), so people keep ratcheting up their maximum bid to win. The result is that the "max bid" system doesn't perform as it was intended, but it was a good idea.
Not the first good idea to be defeated by irrationalism, and not the last.
I still think that the best source of stories on the overuse of erratication programs is Laurie Garett's The Coming Plague. She discusses how the Small Pox eradication (one of the most successful) weaponized small pox, how cleaning with bleach has bread super-bacteria in some hospitals that can be cultured on undiluted Clorox.
Her point (about antibiotics and mosquito control) was that we should try to domesticate of microbal advisaries. If you can produce a strain of a disease that has a short, mild infection -- but out-competes the original, you've turned a lion into a house cat. For mosquitos, if we could replace the asian tiger variety with another that can't host malaria, we'd be set.
Also, more direct methods of mosquito control are useful. Many tropical communities now pay people to wander around town draining pools of stagnant water. Sure, you don't get them all, but you can drain enough that the mosquito population decreases dramatically. It's a continual effort, but uses no chemicals.
Good News! I've just solved P=NP. It's true if N = 1, and trivially true if P=0. Please donate my $1 million dollars to KDE and tell them to fix the PDF rendering. Maybe my computer science breakthrough will help?
Personally, I don't think the wiki will do any good. Good collaboration requires face-to-face contact. Anything else is really equivalent to the modern email/conference/preprint system in math. After all, who wants to share their million-dollar insight on a wiki only to get scooped? Double-plus-ungood: how do you decide which researcher did the critical part of the problem? It's tough to say now (and mostly irrelevant, but intellectual pissing matches have been with math since at leave Liebnitz vs. Newton), and it would be harder to decide in the mixed-up collaborative world of the wiki.
There's no need for the inflamatory story language. Trying to say that a tiered internet is bad is like trying to explain why decapitation is bad. You're wasting words. We're all with you.
Better to sound rational to convince those who don't understand. A non-neutral net is a terrible thing to contemplate.
At the minimum, neutrality protects the new marketplace. It helps all us smoes enjoy the good parts of a free market system. Calling for an end to neutrality is like calling for an end to racketeering laws in the real world. Sure, someone is going to make more money, but at the expense of the market as a whole.
And beyond brain-dead economic analysis, the internet has a kernel of world-improving good, with electronic journal archives for the sciences, free encyclopedias, and so forth. (Of course, wrapped around this kernel are gigabytes of porn...)
Who invited the FCC to the party anyway? Someone tell them their headlights are on so we can lock them out when they go to check.
I've always wanted to build an army of bots and extort money from gambling sites, but the difficulty of cracking MS Windows (or perhaps my conscience:-) has held me back!...and when you build that backdoor, be sure you distribute a system tool complete with MS Office assistants to help me crack peoples computers. I want Clippy to tell me "have you tried putting 'password' for the password?"
To me, the statement that drives this home the most is when a pundit says "we need to make this our issue."
It could be campaign reform, it could be anything, but the idea that one club has to own an issue is more like sports than good governance. If both sides agree on the importance, than something should happen. Instead, there's a squabble for credit. If both sides were truly different, there'd be no need to seize the issue. One side would support it and the other wouldn't.
It's true that DnD started as a tactical game made by war gamers. But as it matured, it developed more role-playing aspects. 3rd ed comes across as a real action-packed game when you read the source books, but I found that the simplified rules really help to keep a session fluid and focused on characters rather than combat.
I've always had a problem with the standard DnD magic system. They throw in spell-casters without examining how implausible medieval society is in such a world. Who would build a castle if any joe can turn rock to mud? Who would ride to battle in shining armor if it makes him a target for deadly spells from afar? But that's my slant. Others say I'm too boring, which is probably true.
Besides, I do like some light tactical combat with my RPG. Heck, I even like some heavy tactical combat (it's not like you can find it in videogames these days). But most of the people I play with are indifferent to it at best. I thought I should mention that IH is more reliant on the battle mat than vanilla DnD.
I've read the book, and I really like the idea of classes not dependent on magic items. There are two principle troubles I have with Iron Heroes:
(1) Armor provides variable damage reduction. That means that every successful attack involves another die roll. This requires discipline, or it will really slow the game down. Every extra: "make an x roll" instruction from the DM is a slow mechanic. The power of the d20 system is its speed and ease, and I think this idea runs counter to that.
(2) Many of the new feats and classes are strongly reliant on a battle grid. That means Iron Heroes is a tactical game in addition to a roll-playing game. That's not necessarily bad (in fact, it's fun), but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
Overall, I'd say there's lots of good stuff, though. Didn't Cook write the rule system for Fallout? That had the best rule system of any computer RPG I've ever played. His expertise shows in the rules for this game.
>I CARE. I have a fundamental right to privacy, like every other American citizen. The >argument of 'if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear' is a recipe for oppression.
And by "privacy", you're referring to the right against unreasonable search and seizure. "Unreasonable" here is defined as searches conducted without a warrant issued by a judge. And eavesdropping on telephone calls is a search, otherwise other forms of private communication (the mail) would enjoy higher forms of privacy even though they are essentially the same.
The bar was set very, very low with the FISA courts (too low, in my opinion), but that's too much protection now?
And, on privacy: These events do little but engender cynicism. "Left and Right" have no meaning anymore. They're teams, slogans, bad words to call people, not ideological positions. Which side is the side for privacy? For limited government power? I suppose I know the answer: which ever side isn't in power.
Now that's depressing. The best I can hope for with these "kooky" ideas about liberty is to be an obstructionist.
What makes all of this so much more painful to me is that the old intelligence system was turning up the information required. Terrorists were nabbed at the borders, and so on. The New York bombings were on the radar. It wasn't a lack of information that was the problem, it was a lack of analysis. How does taping a hundred, a thousand, a million more telephone conversations help? All of this information has to be mined, but each extraction that is not related to the criminal case comes at the expense of someone's rights.
We HAD a system that was balancing individual rights with the need for surveillance*, it was working in the sense that good information was being found without tapping one phone in 300.
Now, the barn is on fire and everyone seems to want to spray water on the house.
*Need for surveillance -- I'm not convinced that the level of big brother spying conducted before the attacks was warranted. Frankly, the FISA courts scare the hell out of me. I don't like secret warrants more than gag orders or secret laws. I was willing to accept them -- part of the great compromise of democracy -- but they look like they were the slippery slope to today.
I'm a big KDE fan, and KDE has really improved since 3.4 when the new series just gelled. 3.5 promises to be more awesome. I especially look forward to konqueror improvements, as it's my browser of choice. I really appreciate its speed, especially on lower-end systems. Plus, it uses the KDE file picker that I find easier to use than the gnome one with firefox.
What I didn't see was much change in KDE's horrible default settings. The desktop is very configurable. Why does it have to look like some terrible pudgy windows clone? And what's with two toolbars on every app? Why not save some screen real estate for the body of the application? That toolbar for konqueror could easily be paired down to one row of icons with the location bar along side. I'm sick of a print icon on every application. I print things rarely enough off the web. That should be left to a menu, or just alt-p.
Still, if you're willing to configure KDE a little bit, it's awesome. The good news is that much of the configuration is easy, right-click kind of stuff.
This was Fedora Core something. Living in Redhat town, when I get a computer from schools, it's all Redhatted up. Not my favorite distro, but at least it's linux. I believe this was 3.4, but I didn't do careful checking. I tried to load it from KDM and didn't get anywhere.
I am heartened that resource use went down with 3.4 compared to 3.3. I hope that's a trend that can continue. As for comparison though, I can't speak about osx or winxp, but kde is a bit nicer than gnome on small systems I've run it on. The interface doesn't lock up when there's a lot of processing going on. Plus, it's not gnome:)
* kdvi -- xdvi is a joke. It crashes all the time and the interface is unintuitive. kdvi is bulletproof, has inverse search (click in dvi to have it scroll emacs/kate/vim to that spot in the.tex file). Plus it has the sweet kde file picker. * kpdf and kghostview -- while I'm here, it's worth mentioning that the whole suite of "kviewshell" programs are awesome. They embed in konqueror or run by themselves. kpdf may not render as well as acroread, but it doesn't phone home and the file picker doesn't suck. * kile -- If you want a gentle introduction to LaTeX, look no further. This editor will set you straight. * kio -- Not so much an application as glue. Kio allows me to save files downloaded at one computer on another via ssh. I mean, I can put a graphic I found on the net at school on my home computer securely with one click. * k3b -- The only CD burner program worth mentioning.
KDE has some awesome apps. If you've ever tried qt/kde programming, it's clear why. Things are (mostly) simple and the API's are well laid out. It's just... cool.
There are some problems, namely the default configuration does a poor job of selling KDE to new-comers. Memory use is a bit out of hand. I tried to start 3.4 on a laptop with 192 MB, but gave up after 30 minutes of watching it load. Resource use has fallen slightly, though. And no one ever said KDE was "lightweight". However, 3.5 is moving in the right direction and fixing some of these problems.
When the transition from 3.3 to 3.4 happened, the changes were small and subtle, but the quality of the desktop really improved. It was like they crossed an important line of usability. 3.5 promises to be better yet.
Even if you don't run KDE, run some of it's applications. You'll like what you find.
All of these things are examples of UI programmers forced to write software to the bottom 50% of computer users.
You know them: they are afraid to use the scary menu in programs, so we have these button bars with indecipherable icons and tooltips. They are afraid of square windows, so we get playskool rounded corners. They like shiny things... so we get shiny things. They like Bonzai Buddy, so we get spam and DDoS attacks from their computers.
I haven't used Windows in a while, but I remember one version of windows had a special program that would run after an install to try to increase the resolution of the desktop. MS found that so many, many people were using 640x480 because they never bothered/found out how to change it. Ouch.
The "removed unused crap" falls into the same computer-as-a-nanny category.
But it get inflicted upon people who know how to use their system, people who can read menus, people who want multiple apps visible at a time... We all suffer for their stupidity.
Reason 0: The keyboard/mouse combination is lousy.
No, seriously. We only go along with this crazy thing because we've been trained that way. We got the keyboard because there were typewriters. We got the mouse because it was better than cursor keys (mostly).
The tablet PC shows some promise, but it is strange that the tablet part isn't offered as a peripheral to an honest computer. I mean, a nice LCD monitor that you can write on with a stylus. You could take it down to do detailed work (photoshop, etc), or put it on a stand and use an old-fashioned keyboard to type quickly.
It would at least be more intuitive to write on the surface you want to manipulate rather than moving the mouse in a plane roughly orthogonal to the plane where the action happens....But this is a side point. My deal is that the mouse/keyboard got pressed into service. There's been no serious search for new interface devices that do the jobs a modern person does on a modern computer in a quick and easy manner. We're all just going along with it because it's all we know.
And, on a side note, WTF is up with the spatial deciples? Just go use gnome/nautilus and leave the rest of us to our "stone-age" file system tools. We like them just fine, thank you.
Now, since this is slashdot, I feel compelled to explain that I run nothing but Linux at home, use nothing but Linux at work, and only occasionally cheat by signing on to some UNIX system. Still, I own an xbox. I have enjoyed it quite a bit.
People say microsoft is evil. They've done some despicable things in the software arena, some of which really make my life difficult. However, they are a large corporation. To call them evil is to submit to the sort of intellectual masturbation that leads to irrational behavior. There are a lot of people at Microsoft, moving in a lot of directions at once. (As for DRM on the xbox: I don't care that they put it in there. That's their perogative. I only care that it is illegal for me to hack it. That's bullshit.)
They have acted well in the console world, at least in their dealings with me. I don't care if they made money on the xbox. What does that matter to me? I only care about the games for the console I invested $150 in. There have been plenty I've enjoyed: both halos, kotor (heck, even kotor2, though it was clearly aborted), jade empire, morrowind, splinter cell, thief 3, ninja gaiden, otogi, prince of Persia. I don't care if the titles are exclusive to my console, just that they work there and are fun.
I won't buy a 360 when it launches, but I will buy it at the first price drop. It amazes me the ignorance concerning the 360's launch specs. It'll have a HDD, at least at the start. It won't have a HD-DVD, but I don't have a HD-TV yet either. In the end, I don't care about its "media center" crap. I built my own gentoo box to do that so I could be in control. I want a console to play games on.
As for the launch titles, there could be some good games in there, but it is too early for me to even want to speculate on their quality. I can speculate on their hype, which I'll do:
I don't like sports games, I don't like racing games, so the list has perhaps seven games that could slant to me. I'm burned out on the topic of WWII. I like war history, I like FPS's, but no one tells new stories in WWII it seems. Can I fight at Stalingrad? At Kursk? In Norway? At Eben Emael? Rare has made some fun games in the past. These seem the most promising, but they could also suck really bad due to the deadlines associated to spearhead titles. N3 could be good, but my impression of Japanese studios is that they can make fun, attractive games as long as they don't write too much story or have too much dialog. Which brings me to ESIV. Maybe this one will be a roleplaying game. Morrowind was fun, but there was no real dialog, no character interaction. They only way you could really change the world was by killing people.
(And don't give me the nintendo line about the revolution. There was a paucity of games that I really enjoyed for my gamecube. Plus, their "bargain" line of games is $10 more than the competition. Plus, while I appreciated their attempt to innovate for controllers, the gamepad was cheap-feeling to me. Nintendo is the king of "buy this peripheral to play this game." I don't want to plug in a powerglove/robot/dance pad/congo drum/gameboy. I want to play games with the pieces I have.)
I see no philosophical problem with Microsoft locking their BIOS down, using trusted computing to prevent unauthorized code.
What I have a problem with is the law that says I can't try to break the lock on something I own. I have a problem with the law that says I can't talk about this activity.
Now, I prefer to buy robust, user-modifiable devices. I will spend my dollars on my preference. I worry about the marketplace being dominated by TCPA devices, but I don't have a philosophical objection to those things existing.
The DMCA is just beginning to effect our lives. Give it another ten years to poison "intellectual property". If people own ideas, enforcement can only come in the form of thought control.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard of innumeracy, but this is ridiculous.
I think you misunderstand me. The point of cohort analysis versus the more physical differential equation models is that they take known conditions and predict future ones. For short times -- a few days -- both can predict the weather on a grid of locations very well, but neither can be done practically by hand. The data your referring to (doppler images, etc) are the input to these algorithms. If you're getting information from these programs, its coming to you as forecasts -- generalized to cover larger areas.
I'm not a weather scientist, but the last talk I attended on the subject indicated that these systems can provide very specific climate information in three dimensions. They don't just care where a storm is, but they want to be able to track in detail the evolution of a storm by knowing the full fluid flow. It's probably the coolest and most ambitious computational fluid dynamics project ever undertaken.
1) The computer will be doing CLIMATE modeling, not weather prediction. That's a different bird. It's like the difference between the average score on a test and your score on the test. Or like describing the flow of heat, but not knowing the underlying collisions that result in the transfer of energy.
2) Higher precision does help you model chaotic systems longer, but... If you run your model until the difference between your prediction and the actual system is larger than a tolerance, the time when this happens is called the horizon time. If you improve your accuracy (let's say your computer system is perfect and errors only occur in getting the initial state right), you only improve the horizon time as the LOG of your improvement. In an age where quadratic methods are just adequate in scientific computing, this is unbearable.
3) Another weather (not climate) prediction option is to use a statistical cohort model. Such a model just takes in data and tries to predict what will happen next based on past trends. It doesn't know any physics, and can take a while to train. This means that the cohort you train in London is useless in Paris. Such "models" often beat physical models in predictive ability, but don't give any insight into why. If you want to fly a plane, they're fine. If you want to do science, see (1) or (2).
Also, this computer is way, way cooler than the one predicting nuclear bomb blasts. But that's, just like, my opinion, man.
Boundless optimism? Still, just like the metric system, spelling reform "Would Be Nice". ...but you're right. Not gonna happen. It makes too much sense.
Seriously. Look at the explosion of diacritical marks. Spelling reform (in the limited sense of having only one way to write each sound) was carried out in the 1800's. All spelling reforms will cause words to look funny, if not stupid. This is because, to the chagrin of middle schoolers, people judge your intelligence and content based on spelling.
Reform isn't a mental shortcut, its a good idea to encourage correct communication in a language with world-wide significance. If the Anglosphere could promulgate a change in spelling, it will improve commerce and reduce misery for students around the world. It isn't just an American thing, it's a rational thing.
But coordination is key. A change must be made by England, Australia, India, South Africa, and America simultaneously for best effect. The difficulty is that the question of which letter groups make the same sound depends on accent, so any change will require compromise. It's doubtless this is the reason why languages such as Croat could change spelling quickly, while English lags behind with an unravelling of standard spellings and a profusion of meaningless letter groups.
Manglish is man-speak. It's the language of man. They need another term, one that's less masculine.
Ebay allows users to set their secret maximum bid, so in a rational world a bidder just sets this at the highest price he's willing to pay. However, rational thought has nothing to do with markets (except in economics textbooks, for some reason), so people keep ratcheting up their maximum bid to win. The result is that the "max bid" system doesn't perform as it was intended, but it was a good idea.
Not the first good idea to be defeated by irrationalism, and not the last.
I still think that the best source of stories on the overuse of erratication programs is Laurie Garett's The Coming Plague. She discusses how the Small Pox eradication (one of the most successful) weaponized small pox, how cleaning with bleach has bread super-bacteria in some hospitals that can be cultured on undiluted Clorox.
Her point (about antibiotics and mosquito control) was that we should try to domesticate of microbal advisaries. If you can produce a strain of a disease that has a short, mild infection -- but out-competes the original, you've turned a lion into a house cat. For mosquitos, if we could replace the asian tiger variety with another that can't host malaria, we'd be set.
Also, more direct methods of mosquito control are useful. Many tropical communities now pay people to wander around town draining pools of stagnant water. Sure, you don't get them all, but you can drain enough that the mosquito population decreases dramatically. It's a continual effort, but uses no chemicals.
I can currently change clothes without the use of wires. We need something else to be our finest hour. Like omg ponies.
Good News! This data probably isn't admissible in court.
Bad News! No court is involved in extrodinary redition. Enjoy the drugs and plane ride!
Good News! I've just solved P=NP. It's true if N = 1, and trivially true if P=0. Please donate my $1 million dollars to KDE and tell them to fix the PDF rendering. Maybe my computer science breakthrough will help?
Personally, I don't think the wiki will do any good. Good collaboration requires face-to-face contact. Anything else is really equivalent to the modern email/conference/preprint system in math. After all, who wants to share their million-dollar insight on a wiki only to get scooped? Double-plus-ungood: how do you decide which researcher did the critical part of the problem? It's tough to say now (and mostly irrelevant, but intellectual pissing matches have been with math since at leave Liebnitz vs. Newton), and it would be harder to decide in the mixed-up collaborative world of the wiki.
There's no need for the inflamatory story language. Trying to say that a tiered internet is bad is like trying to explain why decapitation is bad. You're wasting words. We're all with you.
Better to sound rational to convince those who don't understand. A non-neutral net is a terrible thing to contemplate.
At the minimum, neutrality protects the new marketplace. It helps all us smoes enjoy the good parts of a free market system. Calling for an end to neutrality is like calling for an end to racketeering laws in the real world. Sure, someone is going to make more money, but at the expense of the market as a whole.
And beyond brain-dead economic analysis, the internet has a kernel of world-improving good, with electronic journal archives for the sciences, free encyclopedias, and so forth. (Of course, wrapped around this kernel are gigabytes of porn...)
Who invited the FCC to the party anyway? Someone tell them their headlights are on so we can lock them out when they go to check.
While your at it, build a backdoor for me too.
:-) has held me back! ...and when you build that backdoor, be sure you distribute a system tool complete with MS Office assistants to help me crack peoples computers. I want Clippy to tell me "have you tried putting 'password' for the password?"
I've always wanted to build an army of bots and extort money from gambling sites, but the difficulty of cracking MS Windows (or perhaps my conscience
That'd be awesome.
To me, the statement that drives this home the most is when a pundit says "we need to make this our issue."
It could be campaign reform, it could be anything, but the idea that one club has to own an issue is more like sports than good governance. If both sides agree on the importance, than something should happen. Instead, there's a squabble for credit. If both sides were truly different, there'd be no need to seize the issue. One side would support it and the other wouldn't.
It's true that DnD started as a tactical game made by war gamers. But as it matured, it developed more role-playing aspects. 3rd ed comes across as a real action-packed game when you read the source books, but I found that the simplified rules really help to keep a session fluid and focused on characters rather than combat.
I've always had a problem with the standard DnD magic system. They throw in spell-casters without examining how implausible medieval society is in such a world. Who would build a castle if any joe can turn rock to mud? Who would ride to battle in shining armor if it makes him a target for deadly spells from afar? But that's my slant. Others say I'm too boring, which is probably true.
Besides, I do like some light tactical combat with my RPG. Heck, I even like some heavy tactical combat (it's not like you can find it in videogames these days). But most of the people I play with are indifferent to it at best. I thought I should mention that IH is more reliant on the battle mat than vanilla DnD.
I've read the book, and I really like the idea of classes not dependent on magic items. There are two principle troubles I have with Iron Heroes:
(1) Armor provides variable damage reduction. That means that every successful attack involves another die roll. This requires discipline, or it will really slow the game down. Every extra: "make an x roll" instruction from the DM is a slow mechanic. The power of the d20 system is its speed and ease, and I think this idea runs counter to that.
(2) Many of the new feats and classes are strongly reliant on a battle grid. That means Iron Heroes is a tactical game in addition to a roll-playing game. That's not necessarily bad (in fact, it's fun), but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
Overall, I'd say there's lots of good stuff, though. Didn't Cook write the rule system for Fallout? That had the best rule system of any computer RPG I've ever played. His expertise shows in the rules for this game.
>I CARE. I have a fundamental right to privacy, like every other American citizen. The >argument of 'if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear' is a recipe for oppression.
And by "privacy", you're referring to the right against unreasonable search and seizure. "Unreasonable" here is defined as searches conducted without a warrant issued by a judge. And eavesdropping on telephone calls is a search, otherwise other forms of private communication (the mail) would enjoy higher forms of privacy even though they are essentially the same.
The bar was set very, very low with the FISA courts (too low, in my opinion), but that's too much protection now?
And, on privacy: These events do little but engender cynicism. "Left and Right" have no meaning anymore. They're teams, slogans, bad words to call people, not ideological positions. Which side is the side for privacy? For limited government power? I suppose I know the answer: which ever side isn't in power.
Now that's depressing. The best I can hope for with these "kooky" ideas about liberty is to be an obstructionist.
What makes all of this so much more painful to me is that the old intelligence system was turning up the information required. Terrorists were nabbed at the borders, and so on. The New York bombings were on the radar. It wasn't a lack of information that was the problem, it was a lack of analysis. How does taping a hundred, a thousand, a million more telephone conversations help? All of this information has to be mined, but each extraction that is not related to the criminal case comes at the expense of someone's rights.
We HAD a system that was balancing individual rights with the need for surveillance*, it was working in the sense that good information was being found without tapping one phone in 300.
Now, the barn is on fire and everyone seems to want to spray water on the house.
*Need for surveillance -- I'm not convinced that the level of big brother spying conducted before the attacks was warranted. Frankly, the FISA courts scare the hell out of me. I don't like secret warrants more than gag orders or secret laws. I was willing to accept them -- part of the great compromise of democracy -- but they look like they were the slippery slope to today.
I'm a big KDE fan, and KDE has really improved since 3.4 when the new series just gelled. 3.5 promises to be more awesome. I especially look forward to konqueror improvements, as it's my browser of choice. I really appreciate its speed, especially on lower-end systems. Plus, it uses the KDE file picker that I find easier to use than the gnome one with firefox.
What I didn't see was much change in KDE's horrible default settings. The desktop is very configurable. Why does it have to look like some terrible pudgy windows clone? And what's with two toolbars on every app? Why not save some screen real estate for the body of the application? That toolbar for konqueror could easily be paired down to one row of icons with the location bar along side. I'm sick of a print icon on every application. I print things rarely enough off the web. That should be left to a menu, or just alt-p.
Still, if you're willing to configure KDE a little bit, it's awesome. The good news is that much of the configuration is easy, right-click kind of stuff.
This was Fedora Core something. Living in Redhat town, when I get a computer from schools, it's all Redhatted up. Not my favorite distro, but at least it's linux. I believe this was 3.4, but I didn't do careful checking. I tried to load it from KDM and didn't get anywhere.
:)
I am heartened that resource use went down with 3.4 compared to 3.3. I hope that's a trend that can continue. As for comparison though, I can't speak about osx or winxp, but kde is a bit nicer than gnome on small systems I've run it on. The interface doesn't lock up when there's a lot of processing going on. Plus, it's not gnome
I'll go on and on:
.tex file). Plus it has the sweet kde file picker.
... cool.
* kdvi -- xdvi is a joke. It crashes all the time and the interface is unintuitive. kdvi is bulletproof, has inverse search (click in dvi to have it scroll emacs/kate/vim to that spot in the
* kpdf and kghostview -- while I'm here, it's worth mentioning that the whole suite of "kviewshell" programs are awesome. They embed in konqueror or run by themselves. kpdf may not render as well as acroread, but it doesn't phone home and the file picker doesn't suck.
* kile -- If you want a gentle introduction to LaTeX, look no further. This editor will set you straight.
* kio -- Not so much an application as glue. Kio allows me to save files downloaded at one computer on another via ssh. I mean, I can put a graphic I found on the net at school on my home computer securely with one click.
* k3b -- The only CD burner program worth mentioning.
KDE has some awesome apps. If you've ever tried qt/kde programming, it's clear why. Things are (mostly) simple and the API's are well laid out. It's just
There are some problems, namely the default configuration does a poor job of selling KDE to new-comers. Memory use is a bit out of hand. I tried to start 3.4 on a laptop with 192 MB, but gave up after 30 minutes of watching it load. Resource use has fallen slightly, though. And no one ever said KDE was "lightweight". However, 3.5 is moving in the right direction and fixing some of these problems.
When the transition from 3.3 to 3.4 happened, the changes were small and subtle, but the quality of the desktop really improved. It was like they crossed an important line of usability. 3.5 promises to be better yet.
Even if you don't run KDE, run some of it's applications. You'll like what you find.
All of these things are examples of UI programmers forced to write software to the bottom 50% of computer users.
... so we get shiny things. They like Bonzai Buddy, so we get spam and DDoS attacks from their computers.
You know them: they are afraid to use the scary menu in programs, so we have these button bars with indecipherable icons and tooltips. They are afraid of square windows, so we get playskool rounded corners. They like shiny things
I haven't used Windows in a while, but I remember one version of windows had a special program that would run after an install to try to increase the resolution of the desktop. MS found that so many, many people were using 640x480 because they never bothered/found out how to change it. Ouch.
The "removed unused crap" falls into the same computer-as-a-nanny category.
But it get inflicted upon people who know how to use their system, people who can read menus, people who want multiple apps visible at a time... We all suffer for their stupidity.
Reason 0: The keyboard/mouse combination is lousy.
...But this is a side point. My deal is that the mouse/keyboard got pressed into service. There's been no serious search for new interface devices that do the jobs a modern person does on a modern computer in a quick and easy manner. We're all just going along with it because it's all we know.
No, seriously. We only go along with this crazy thing because we've been trained that way. We got the keyboard because there were typewriters. We got the mouse because it was better than cursor keys (mostly).
The tablet PC shows some promise, but it is strange that the tablet part isn't offered as a peripheral to an honest computer. I mean, a nice LCD monitor that you can write on with a stylus. You could take it down to do detailed work (photoshop, etc), or put it on a stand and use an old-fashioned keyboard to type quickly.
It would at least be more intuitive to write on the surface you want to manipulate rather than moving the mouse in a plane roughly orthogonal to the plane where the action happens.
And, on a side note, WTF is up with the spatial deciples? Just go use gnome/nautilus and leave the rest of us to our "stone-age" file system tools. We like them just fine, thank you.
It's nice to hear some sense in this forum.
Now, since this is slashdot, I feel compelled to explain that I run nothing but Linux at home, use nothing but Linux at work, and only occasionally cheat by signing on to some UNIX system. Still, I own an xbox. I have enjoyed it quite a bit.
People say microsoft is evil. They've done some despicable things in the software arena, some of which really make my life difficult. However, they are a large corporation. To call them evil is to submit to the sort of intellectual masturbation that leads to irrational behavior. There are a lot of people at Microsoft, moving in a lot of directions at once. (As for DRM on the xbox: I don't care that they put it in there. That's their perogative. I only care that it is illegal for me to hack it. That's bullshit.)
They have acted well in the console world, at least in their dealings with me. I don't care if they made money on the xbox. What does that matter to me? I only care about the games for the console I invested $150 in. There have been plenty I've enjoyed: both halos, kotor (heck, even kotor2, though it was clearly aborted), jade empire, morrowind, splinter cell, thief 3, ninja gaiden, otogi, prince of Persia. I don't care if the titles are exclusive to my console, just that they work there and are fun.
I won't buy a 360 when it launches, but I will buy it at the first price drop. It amazes me the ignorance concerning the 360's launch specs. It'll have a HDD, at least at the start. It won't have a HD-DVD, but I don't have a HD-TV yet either. In the end, I don't care about its "media center" crap. I built my own gentoo box to do that so I could be in control. I want a console to play games on.
As for the launch titles, there could be some good games in there, but it is too early for me to even want to speculate on their quality. I can speculate on their hype, which I'll do:
I don't like sports games, I don't like racing games, so the list has perhaps seven games that could slant to me. I'm burned out on the topic of WWII. I like war history, I like FPS's, but no one tells new stories in WWII it seems. Can I fight at Stalingrad? At Kursk? In Norway? At Eben Emael? Rare has made some fun games in the past. These seem the most promising, but they could also suck really bad due to the deadlines associated to spearhead titles. N3 could be good, but my impression of Japanese studios is that they can make fun, attractive games as long as they don't write too much story or have too much dialog. Which brings me to ESIV. Maybe this one will be a roleplaying game. Morrowind was fun, but there was no real dialog, no character interaction. They only way you could really change the world was by killing people.
(And don't give me the nintendo line about the revolution. There was a paucity of games that I really enjoyed for my gamecube. Plus, their "bargain" line of games is $10 more than the competition. Plus, while I appreciated their attempt to innovate for controllers, the gamepad was cheap-feeling to me. Nintendo is the king of "buy this peripheral to play this game." I don't want to plug in a powerglove/robot/dance pad/congo drum/gameboy. I want to play games with the pieces I have.)
I see no philosophical problem with Microsoft locking their BIOS down, using trusted computing to prevent unauthorized code.
What I have a problem with is the law that says I can't try to break the lock on something I own. I have a problem with the law that says I can't talk about this activity.
Now, I prefer to buy robust, user-modifiable devices. I will spend my dollars on my preference. I worry about the marketplace being dominated by TCPA devices, but I don't have a philosophical objection to those things existing.
The DMCA is just beginning to effect our lives. Give it another ten years to poison "intellectual property". If people own ideas, enforcement can only come in the form of thought control.