Laughable? You may not enjoy his writing, but it's certainly... sculpted. Okay, the Silmarillion isn't remotely polished, and there's that ridiculous chapter about geography in there, but the subject matter he chooses demonstrates a very poetic and Romantic sensibility, and the manner in which he writes... while it may be closer to declaiming or to orating than to speaking, some of us find it incredibly beautiful. "Ham" you may call it, but there are few people in the world who can produce ham like that, and I'll choose it over five-week-old meatloaf any day.
------ Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hand against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it. --J.R.R. Tolkien
Remind me WHY Privacy hasn't been part of the public debate around the NYC congestion control idea that required automatic scanning of all license plates in midtown?
Think about it. It's better to have both than one in case a GPS scrambler won't knock out the Galileo signal (once it exists.) It's probably worth spending a few thousand dollars more per tank for that kind of redundancy--accurate positioning information has made a huge difference in how well modern armies fight. Ipsa scientia potest est--Knowledge itself is power.
Statistics of a general order cannot, alone, determine the course of a war. Because the statistics can change. Consider World War II: when Pearl Harbor was bombed, they changed tremendously. It was, in some ways, an incredibly wonderful day for the Britain, Canada, Russia, etc... -- because of the production abilities of the US. (Yes, a service based economy is a terrible strategic disadvantage in a war scenario. Re-tooling to that scale for a long term conflict would take decades.) The numbers changed on that day. The statistics changed with Lend-Lease, too, and when it was extended to Moscow. Had our carrier fleet been at anchor in Pearl along with Battleship row, or had midway gone against us instead of so heavily in our favor, the west coast of the continental US would sooner or later have begun to suffer bombing campaigns, which would necessarily make us re-orient our "Germany-First" policy, and very much changed the course of the war. What if Churchill hadn't been so damn stubborn about refusing a separate peace? What if the fellows at Bletchley Park hadn't been quite so good, or the intercepted message to the Japanese Ambassador in Washington had been decrypted the night it was intercepted, in time to warn Pearl of the attack? It's not just about attrition...
While the statistics can tell you a lot, a single individual can cause shifts in policy which effect the course of a war, even to the extent of determining whether it's won or lost. You do need the statistics, but they're not everything.
A terminator army is still a while away, yes, but why not disguise the first steps by making them cute and cuddly? A poorly engineered robot army would be a great liability and easily defeated, but a good one would--given the right command and control--be nearly unstoppable. (Or rather, it would be stoppable, but the casualty rates on the opposition human side would be much, much, much higher than on the robot side.) Terminators aren't the next arms race... but that race is coming, and the warm-up laps have already begun.
(Yes, with robotic dogs playing soccer. And now it's care bears to the rescue! But let's not kid ourselves--those bears are gonna turn real nasty.)
In the extreme event of a cold-war era array of forces, China wouldn't be happy--nobody sane would be happy. A very few particularly greedy and manipulative politicians and businessmen might be happy, but even that's dubious. The cold war nearly resulted in the effective destruction of humanity. Several times. *nobody* wants to return to a diplomatic and military polarization that means once every five or ten years, the entire world is nearly destroyed. Because if that keeps happening, we'll all die.
The exception being the few people who gain extreme amounts of power and wealth from such a state of affairs--and even they don't want the world actually destroyed, generally speaking. US Foreign Aid, for example, goes up tremendously during a cold war type era, as we bribe countries to support our cause; so there are a lot of corrupt dictators out there who enjoy the cold war from that point of view. And there are also poor people who benefit from that, in some of the countries in question.
My impression is that Putin & co are using the US for Fear-mongering propaganda purposes, clearly beyond any US intention of being militarily hostile towards Russia. Or at least, likely beyond it--I wouldn't be surprised if there were *some* thought being given to the possibility of intervening or muscle-flexing in the event of an aggressive move by the Russian military against one of the Newly Independent States between Russia and Western Europe. Though I don't see why such a conflict would go nuclear.
Just because it's still better than something else doesn't mean it's better (or as good) as it was. The quality of the writing has certainly wavered--Adama's address to the crew before the rescue mission to New Caprica, for example, was not in character, and was cliche. He's a very strong character normally--but the writers got lazy or they didn't think.
Is ridiculous for this. Make it a misdemeanor if you want, sure, but... this is just ridiculous. The legislature should have to pay for the excessive prison time out of their own pockets.
Brains are the best hacking tools of them all, and the only ones necessary--anything else can be rebuilt from scratch, or worked around. (Though it would take a while, in some cases.)
But aside from simply commenting, *updating* comments is also important, and possibly more so. Looking at the history of the TCP/IP source in OSX, for example, you see wonderful instances of complex code that's been updated as new operating systems have been built on top of it, but comments reflect the old behavior rather than the new.
Book sales aren't decreasing, they're slowly increasing--generally 1% a year or above, I think. What's happening is the same thing that's happening in the rest of our markets: a few major superstore chains are muscling out the middle guys. The dynamics of the market are changing, too--as with video, the post popular works are sucking up a larger and larger percentage of buyers, while mid-list titles are losing market-share. More mid-list books are being published than used to be, I think, though some publishing houses are cutting back--but it's much harder for a mid-list book to gain a devoted readership, because big chains require publishers to pay them promotion fees for things like book placement near the counter, whereas independent stores would put interesting things or things they thought would sell near the counter, and that included mid-list books without the same advertising budget. The cost of advertising/marketing/promotion as a percentage of book sales has also skyrocketed, while the royalties paid to authors who actually write the books haven't kept up with inflation.
Also, the profit margin on in the publishing industry is relatively small. (I want to say around 7%, but that could be wrong, and of course it varies somewhat by publishing house.) For booksellers, I'm not sure--a very large percentage of a book's sale at list price is above what the bookseller paid for it, but I don't know how overhead and employee salaries figure into the equation.
That being said, while book sales are increasing (and have almost every year since we started keeping track of them), the amount of time we spend reading has started to decrease drastically. (Look up the NEA "Reading at Risk" study.) Similarly, the breadth (and I believe quantity) of books ordered by library collections has decreased. And the budgets of educational libraries are increasingly being swallowed up by effectively monopolistic journal publishers.
Source? My auto mechanics textbook from college has this blurb that tries to reassure you about electronics in cars by saying "80% of problems don't stem from electronic failures."
The electronics have given us more features and higher fuel efficiency. But still, there are times when it would be nice to make it all manual. Cars that you can't shift into neutral unless the battery is charged can be a pain to get off the road after an accident. If a wheel sensor goes bad, you ought to be able to turn them off and drive the car to a service station, instead of put-putting along at five MPH on the side of the parkway.
I read it the same way you did at first; it's poorly worded.
This sounds like it's someone trying to think outside the box, given a basic knowledge of quantum cryptography. "Well, what else sort of works like light polarization? What is there that, if intercepted, doesn't give the interceptor any more information than said polarization does in the case of quantum cryptography?"
Of course, one of the advantages of quantum is that you can Detect eavesdroppers, because if they listen to more than a few bits they flip more of your bits than probability would reasonably allow for. It isn't only about how much information the eavesdropper can obtain--it's about whether or not you'll realize they're there.
Kids can think. Furthermore, they're not going to not hear about either Creationism or Evolution merely because the other is taught exclusively in their school. The whole argument of whether we should allow one or the other or both to be taught is based on the premise that kids are remarkably stupid. You can say to a fourteen-year-old "Most scientists believe X, and much of the religious community believes Y," and it's not going to make his head explode.
So yes, kids can out-think television producers, just like they can out-think boards of education. Look up the relevant Mark Twain quote about school boards.
Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was the acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the Battle of Bastongne during the Battle of the Bulge. The 101st was surrounded, outnumbered, and unable to get resupply by air. When Axis forces demanded their surrender, McAuliffe's one-word response was "Nuts."
Obviously, after sixty years, this necessarily led to trying to save a canceled show with peanuts.
If it were a country, its GDP would be the 17th largest in the world. It makes a prime target for economic reasons, and major terrorist action in New York would have a significant impact on the rest of the nation.
This does sound like a grab for homeland security money, certainly; but it's not unreasonable, on the whole, to keep a special eye on New York when it comes to preventing terrorism.
I did say there were counterexamples. I would be interested in a syntactical analysis of the shows in question, actually. Although the comparison is flawed, since they target different audiences. A better comparison might be Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy. (Though I haven't seen the latter in too long to draw it well.)
Depth of thought is a hard thing to measure--and there's no question in my mind that we've seen a lot of work that's reshaped the boundaries of the medium of television, and that has made it richer. Some standards are declining, though. Most newscasters don't deserve the name, and don't make an assumption of intelligence on the part of the viewer--quite the opposite, it seems. The sound bytes become the news. And are frequently improper English.
In terms of naming one TV show, I don't have the background in that television to give an example, and there may well not be one--so far as I know, multi-season plot arcs took quite a while to penetrate popular television. Also, complexity and depth are too different things--there's no doubt that Heroes is somewhat complex, but is it deep? By which I mean, mostly, to what degree does it explore the human condition? To what degree does it provoke thought about our own lives? Mmm... all right, maybe most of I Love Lucy wasn't that deep, either. =)
The point is really the influence that the medium has on behavior, in any event. (At least, the influence that it does the way it's most frequently used.) Mmm... try looking up the influence of television on Shangri-La, actually.
Also, as for it being wrong every time, see the dark ages.
Listen carefully to the grammar and syntax of our newscasters. Our newspapers. Our popular entertainment. Compare it to the same forty or fifty years ago.
Some of them do make an effort. But the breadth of vocabulary, the precision of their diction, and the depth of their thought have--for the most part--declined over the years. Multiply that difference by about a thousand and you'll know what's happened in the New York City Public Schools. (Once upon a time, they were among the best in the world.)
Once upon a time, your child was him/her self, and turned out well or turned out poorly. There wasn't today's constant quest to blame a parent for all of a child's problems or issues.
A child is a human being, after all--and (s)he encounters many situations, and many environments, while growing up. The home environment is important, and is terribly neglected in today's society--but it's not everything. Similarly, teachers and schooling aren't everything. And scheduled activities aren't everything. And television isn't everything. And free time isn't everything. They all come together and mix it up with a child's nature.
A good parent, yes, can do a tremendous amount. But a good parent functions (largely) within the context of an external world, and some children are harder to raise than others, good parent or no.
It's all politics. You redefine "broadband" (in this case, the new definition in a way consumers will like, since they want more of it) so that you can say come election time that only x number of homes have broadband, and blame the lack of availability on the previous administration. (Or you can even say that the number of US homes with broadband went down, though that looks worse if you're called on the definition change.) You can fit a single statistic into a good sound byte, but politicians aren't good at fitting an explanation for why the statistic is ridiculous into a sound byte.
This is similar to changing the poverty formula--or any other similar metric--in advance of an election.
M$ has always had a pretty good patent rep--their arsenal has been considered mostly defensive.
That being said, I'm all for royalties and patents for truly innovative work--but I suspect most of the "infringed" patents are fairly obvious things. (Consider: In the anti-SCO suit, IBM accused them of stepping on, among other things, IBM's patent for a "hierarchical menu system." That was a defensive use of something so obvious it ought not to have been patentable, but expecting people to pay royalties for it is ridiculous.)
Slashdot Mirror
Laughable? You may not enjoy his writing, but it's certainly... sculpted. Okay, the Silmarillion isn't remotely polished, and there's that ridiculous chapter about geography in there, but the subject matter he chooses demonstrates a very poetic and Romantic sensibility, and the manner in which he writes... while it may be closer to declaiming or to orating than to speaking, some of us find it incredibly beautiful. "Ham" you may call it, but there are few people in the world who can produce ham like that, and I'll choose it over five-week-old meatloaf any day.
------
Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hand against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.
--J.R.R. Tolkien
Remind me WHY Privacy hasn't been part of the public debate around the NYC congestion control idea that required automatic scanning of all license plates in midtown?
The word `Gay' still means happy. It just has another meaning, too.
Think about it. It's better to have both than one in case a GPS scrambler won't knock out the Galileo signal (once it exists.) It's probably worth spending a few thousand dollars more per tank for that kind of redundancy--accurate positioning information has made a huge difference in how well modern armies fight. Ipsa scientia potest est--Knowledge itself is power.
> "And it really doesn't compromise your privacy."
I don't know if the man should be charged with high treason or criminal stupidity.
> if he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle
Yeah, he really needs to learn how to milk his tech witnesses better.
Statistics of a general order cannot, alone, determine the course of a war. Because the statistics can change. Consider World War II: when Pearl Harbor was bombed, they changed tremendously. It was, in some ways, an incredibly wonderful day for the Britain, Canada, Russia, etc... -- because of the production abilities of the US. (Yes, a service based economy is a terrible strategic disadvantage in a war scenario. Re-tooling to that scale for a long term conflict would take decades.) The numbers changed on that day. The statistics changed with Lend-Lease, too, and when it was extended to Moscow. Had our carrier fleet been at anchor in Pearl along with Battleship row, or had midway gone against us instead of so heavily in our favor, the west coast of the continental US would sooner or later have begun to suffer bombing campaigns, which would necessarily make us re-orient our "Germany-First" policy, and very much changed the course of the war. What if Churchill hadn't been so damn stubborn about refusing a separate peace? What if the fellows at Bletchley Park hadn't been quite so good, or the intercepted message to the Japanese Ambassador in Washington had been decrypted the night it was intercepted, in time to warn Pearl of the attack? It's not just about attrition...
While the statistics can tell you a lot, a single individual can cause shifts in policy which effect the course of a war, even to the extent of determining whether it's won or lost. You do need the statistics, but they're not everything.
A terminator army is still a while away, yes, but why not disguise the first steps by making them cute and cuddly? A poorly engineered robot army would be a great liability and easily defeated, but a good one would--given the right command and control--be nearly unstoppable. (Or rather, it would be stoppable, but the casualty rates on the opposition human side would be much, much, much higher than on the robot side.) Terminators aren't the next arms race... but that race is coming, and the warm-up laps have already begun.
(Yes, with robotic dogs playing soccer. And now it's care bears to the rescue! But let's not kid ourselves--those bears are gonna turn real nasty.)
In the extreme event of a cold-war era array of forces, China wouldn't be happy--nobody sane would be happy. A very few particularly greedy and manipulative politicians and businessmen might be happy, but even that's dubious. The cold war nearly resulted in the effective destruction of humanity. Several times. *nobody* wants to return to a diplomatic and military polarization that means once every five or ten years, the entire world is nearly destroyed. Because if that keeps happening, we'll all die.
The exception being the few people who gain extreme amounts of power and wealth from such a state of affairs--and even they don't want the world actually destroyed, generally speaking. US Foreign Aid, for example, goes up tremendously during a cold war type era, as we bribe countries to support our cause; so there are a lot of corrupt dictators out there who enjoy the cold war from that point of view. And there are also poor people who benefit from that, in some of the countries in question.
My impression is that Putin & co are using the US for Fear-mongering propaganda purposes, clearly beyond any US intention of being militarily hostile towards Russia. Or at least, likely beyond it--I wouldn't be surprised if there were *some* thought being given to the possibility of intervening or muscle-flexing in the event of an aggressive move by the Russian military against one of the Newly Independent States between Russia and Western Europe. Though I don't see why such a conflict would go nuclear.
Definitely seems like a plausible end. It might not be sentimentally satisfying, but it could be done in a very poignant way.
Just because it's still better than something else doesn't mean it's better (or as good) as it was. The quality of the writing has certainly wavered--Adama's address to the crew before the rescue mission to New Caprica, for example, was not in character, and was cliche. He's a very strong character normally--but the writers got lazy or they didn't think.
Is ridiculous for this. Make it a misdemeanor if you want, sure, but... this is just ridiculous. The legislature should have to pay for the excessive prison time out of their own pockets.
Brains are the best hacking tools of them all, and the only ones necessary--anything else can be rebuilt from scratch, or worked around. (Though it would take a while, in some cases.)
So they've outlawed brains.
Brilliant. =)
Um... well, duh.
But aside from simply commenting, *updating* comments is also important, and possibly more so. Looking at the history of the TCP/IP source in OSX, for example, you see wonderful instances of complex code that's been updated as new operating systems have been built on top of it, but comments reflect the old behavior rather than the new.
Book sales aren't decreasing, they're slowly increasing--generally 1% a year or above, I think. What's happening is the same thing that's happening in the rest of our markets: a few major superstore chains are muscling out the middle guys. The dynamics of the market are changing, too--as with video, the post popular works are sucking up a larger and larger percentage of buyers, while mid-list titles are losing market-share. More mid-list books are being published than used to be, I think, though some publishing houses are cutting back--but it's much harder for a mid-list book to gain a devoted readership, because big chains require publishers to pay them promotion fees for things like book placement near the counter, whereas independent stores would put interesting things or things they thought would sell near the counter, and that included mid-list books without the same advertising budget. The cost of advertising/marketing/promotion as a percentage of book sales has also skyrocketed, while the royalties paid to authors who actually write the books haven't kept up with inflation.
Also, the profit margin on in the publishing industry is relatively small. (I want to say around 7%, but that could be wrong, and of course it varies somewhat by publishing house.) For booksellers, I'm not sure--a very large percentage of a book's sale at list price is above what the bookseller paid for it, but I don't know how overhead and employee salaries figure into the equation.
That being said, while book sales are increasing (and have almost every year since we started keeping track of them), the amount of time we spend reading has started to decrease drastically. (Look up the NEA "Reading at Risk" study.) Similarly, the breadth (and I believe quantity) of books ordered by library collections has decreased. And the budgets of educational libraries are increasingly being swallowed up by effectively monopolistic journal publishers.
Source? My auto mechanics textbook from college has this blurb that tries to reassure you about electronics in cars by saying "80% of problems don't stem from electronic failures."
The electronics have given us more features and higher fuel efficiency. But still, there are times when it would be nice to make it all manual. Cars that you can't shift into neutral unless the battery is charged can be a pain to get off the road after an accident. If a wheel sensor goes bad, you ought to be able to turn them off and drive the car to a service station, instead of put-putting along at five MPH on the side of the parkway.
Identical pairs of resistors.
I read it the same way you did at first; it's poorly worded.
This sounds like it's someone trying to think outside the box, given a basic knowledge of quantum cryptography. "Well, what else sort of works like light polarization? What is there that, if intercepted, doesn't give the interceptor any more information than said polarization does in the case of quantum cryptography?"
Of course, one of the advantages of quantum is that you can Detect eavesdroppers, because if they listen to more than a few bits they flip more of your bits than probability would reasonably allow for. It isn't only about how much information the eavesdropper can obtain--it's about whether or not you'll realize they're there.
Kids can think. Furthermore, they're not going to not hear about either Creationism or Evolution merely because the other is taught exclusively in their school. The whole argument of whether we should allow one or the other or both to be taught is based on the premise that kids are remarkably stupid. You can say to a fourteen-year-old "Most scientists believe X, and much of the religious community believes Y," and it's not going to make his head explode.
So yes, kids can out-think television producers, just like they can out-think boards of education. Look up the relevant Mark Twain quote about school boards.
Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was the acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the Battle of Bastongne during the Battle of the Bulge. The 101st was surrounded, outnumbered, and unable to get resupply by air. When Axis forces demanded their surrender, McAuliffe's one-word response was "Nuts."
Obviously, after sixty years, this necessarily led to trying to save a canceled show with peanuts.
Economy of New York
If it were a country, its GDP would be the 17th largest in the world. It makes a prime target for economic reasons, and major terrorist action in New York would have a significant impact on the rest of the nation.
This does sound like a grab for homeland security money, certainly; but it's not unreasonable, on the whole, to keep a special eye on New York when it comes to preventing terrorism.
I did say there were counterexamples. I would be interested in a syntactical analysis of the shows in question, actually. Although the comparison is flawed, since they target different audiences. A better comparison might be Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy. (Though I haven't seen the latter in too long to draw it well.)
Depth of thought is a hard thing to measure--and there's no question in my mind that we've seen a lot of work that's reshaped the boundaries of the medium of television, and that has made it richer. Some standards are declining, though. Most newscasters don't deserve the name, and don't make an assumption of intelligence on the part of the viewer--quite the opposite, it seems. The sound bytes become the news. And are frequently improper English.
In terms of naming one TV show, I don't have the background in that television to give an example, and there may well not be one--so far as I know, multi-season plot arcs took quite a while to penetrate popular television. Also, complexity and depth are too different things--there's no doubt that Heroes is somewhat complex, but is it deep? By which I mean, mostly, to what degree does it explore the human condition? To what degree does it provoke thought about our own lives? Mmm... all right, maybe most of I Love Lucy wasn't that deep, either. =)
The point is really the influence that the medium has on behavior, in any event. (At least, the influence that it does the way it's most frequently used.) Mmm... try looking up the influence of television on Shangri-La, actually.
Also, as for it being wrong every time, see the dark ages.
Listen carefully to the grammar and syntax of our newscasters. Our newspapers. Our popular entertainment. Compare it to the same forty or fifty years ago.
Some of them do make an effort. But the breadth of vocabulary, the precision of their diction, and the depth of their thought have--for the most part--declined over the years. Multiply that difference by about a thousand and you'll know what's happened in the New York City Public Schools. (Once upon a time, they were among the best in the world.)
There are some counterexamples... but not many.
Once upon a time, your child was him/her self, and turned out well or turned out poorly. There wasn't today's constant quest to blame a parent for all of a child's problems or issues.
A child is a human being, after all--and (s)he encounters many situations, and many environments, while growing up. The home environment is important, and is terribly neglected in today's society--but it's not everything. Similarly, teachers and schooling aren't everything. And scheduled activities aren't everything. And television isn't everything. And free time isn't everything. They all come together and mix it up with a child's nature.
A good parent, yes, can do a tremendous amount. But a good parent functions (largely) within the context of an external world, and some children are harder to raise than others, good parent or no.
It's all politics. You redefine "broadband" (in this case, the new definition in a way consumers will like, since they want more of it) so that you can say come election time that only x number of homes have broadband, and blame the lack of availability on the previous administration. (Or you can even say that the number of US homes with broadband went down, though that looks worse if you're called on the definition change.) You can fit a single statistic into a good sound byte, but politicians aren't good at fitting an explanation for why the statistic is ridiculous into a sound byte.
This is similar to changing the poverty formula--or any other similar metric--in advance of an election.
M$ has always had a pretty good patent rep--their arsenal has been considered mostly defensive.
That being said, I'm all for royalties and patents for truly innovative work--but I suspect most of the "infringed" patents are fairly obvious things. (Consider: In the anti-SCO suit, IBM accused them of stepping on, among other things, IBM's patent for a "hierarchical menu system." That was a defensive use of something so obvious it ought not to have been patentable, but expecting people to pay royalties for it is ridiculous.)