You're no more a born programmer than you are a born doctor, actuary or lawyer .
Yes, but if one spends your first twenty years growing up in a New Age cult of evolution deniers, one is awfully late to the party when it comes time to buckle down with intelligence and hard work.
When you're picking teams at the staff picnic to run the obstacle course, do you pick the kid who practically lived on a skateboard growing up, or the bookworm with coke bottle glasses? A secure sense of balance navigating logic-dominated systems takes just as much work to develop as a bunch of skateboard tricks.
We had a kid in my residence who had never wrestled with his siblings growing up. He got the hang of it pretty quickly when the rough-housing started, but someone always got beaked in the nose whenever he was involved. The rest of us knew how to play hard without getting hurt or hurting anyone else.
You're not born any of these things, but the differentiation is well under way by elementary school. That beaker is a doctor now.
In the second case, you get wankers who take this maxim far too seriously, when they should be reasoning "where there's smoke, there's fire". The vast majority of valid reasoning falls below the harsh standard of implication. Programming escapes many people, because you have to have one foot in each camp. pfail = 1e-6 is no good for a file system. In debugging, the common case is to succumb to the rare event.
I've worked with really good students who can't consistently manage to get modular clock arithmetic right on a micro-controller. In the vast majority of cases, normal algebra applies, except when it doesn't.
/* monkey number one */ u16 begin = clock(); while (clock() - begin < 100);
/* monkey number two */ u16 begin = clock(); while (clock() < 100 + begin);
In a normal programming task (e.g. far away from the file system), this kind of small distinction isn't critical every hour of the day. But when it does become critical, you need the kind of person with an instinct for realizing "but wait, this might be the tricky bit, slow down a think a bit here".
This requires an innate capacity for self-monitoring the process of conviction. Many people have it, more people don't. The second group will never become value-added programmers whether they are trained and paid a wage or not.
Brute force security needs to be evaluated under the assumption that a Russian botnet has compromised a large number of social networking sites, and gained three to five different clear-text passwords (of possibly no great importance) associated with the targeted user. They now also know--or strongly suspect--the identities of your financial institutions.
Using commonalities of the exposed password set, the botnet bastards will attempt to model your personal password generation heuristic. Since they are not stupider than bricks, they might also assume that your bank password is similar, but fortified to the next level. Gaining some experience in cracking bank passwords, they'll soon have a model for that, too.
My Thomas and Cover from 1991, which happens to be at hand, has chapters on "Jointly typical sequences", "Encoding of correlated sources", and "Source coding with side information". This last section makes reference to Slepian-Wolf encoding, which is kind of interesting. I hadn't spotted that before.
Along with David Slepian, Wolf proved the Slepian-Wolf theorem: as long as certain conditions are met, files X and Y can be compressed to H(X,Y), even if the X server has no knowledge of file Y, and vice versa.
This might not be precisely the right theory to apply to the breaking of password clusters, but the guy doing the math on that has probably read these papers.
Way too little concern is placed on the independence of the passwords chosen, and this vulnerability increases rapidly with the proliferation of passwords used. I'm sure I have more than 100 passwords out in the wild, many held by hopelessly incompetent and untrusted internet discussion forums.
Even a single compromised site can form a model of your password heuristic if you're duped into changing it often.
It wouldn't surprise me that if everyone adopted the four word xkcd approach, that for many individuals, entropy per word is closer to seven or eight bits than eleven, where concrete nouns of five to eight letters predominate, and a further bias to concrete nouns that are visually active in the mind's eye, and 40% of all such passwords contain at least one animal word.
That's where brute force would begin: assume at least one common animal word (four to five bits; since cat/dog don't make the cut, you'll be seeing a lot of parrot/leopard/zebra/unicorn).
It's very unlikely that that was spoofed or set up, scammers don't generally go to that much trouble. It's far more likely that these are in fact Google originated actions.
Without getting into your theory of probability, which makes my jaw drop, your set theory sucks. You're implying that the non-empty set of scammers who wake up one morning and discover that they are the proud owner of an IP address in a Google managed IP block--without having lifted a finger to bring this about--won't do a little BINGO dance and start speed dialing anyone dumb enough to listen.
Outright lies about having a business partnership with your competitor go far beyond what even a jaded CEO is happy to know nothing about. It's in the same territory as an aspiring 18 year old supermodel accepting rides from strangers because she can't figure out the Paris metro. Google has deep pockets that lawyers lie awake and dream about, should they ever put themselves into a compromised position.
Here is Knuth in high dudgeon kicking Elsevier in the nuts.
I love my library [and others] and my blood boils when I see a library being overcharged... Scientific researchers dedicate their lives to building up the edifice of human knowledge. Surely it is reasonable(slashcode sucks)so goes the argument(slashcode sucks)that once publishers recoup the expenses they incur in helping to paint the structure, they should then relinquish any claim to ownership of the building.
Sorry Gandhi (if you ever said this), the world has changed:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they pay off the congress critters. Then you lose. Except in rare cases where they bit off more hubris than they could chew. Until round two.
I actually think this one stands a good chance of being vaporized by the scientists themselves as much as the gift-culture geeks.
Well, let me tag on one more point: this doesn't have to go badly, but most likely it will.
If Google would perceive from my Plus relationships not that I own a lot of computer gadgets, but instead that I loath and detest walled gardens, and never advertised to me ever a service or device with a nasty business model behind it, I'd be willing to give the whole concept of advertising as a productive human venture a major rethink.
Recently I would have purchased a device which purports to measure brainwaves and sleep phase on the slight chance it actually worked had it not been for the business model where the data measured was encrypted, owned by the company who makes the device, and available for my interpretation only once uploaded to their web service, should the start-up venture manage to outlast the short warranty on the device itself.
I waste so much time discarding business models that are total non-starters in how I order my life that I end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater: it's actually not worth seeking out what I'd be willing to purchase because of the nasty fine-print comprehension tax I end up paying before I get there.
Even more recently, I gave up on finding an audio book subscription that suited my politics. The one company I found that I would have been happy to transact with has become a dead link. The other choices involve DRM with uncertain portability (subject also to change without notice) or monthly credits that don't roll over. Yeah, I'm so organized that I have nothing better to do but police my attention span so that I make my audio book selection in precise lunar synchronization.
While I'm at it, how about a week in Vegas for $30 (*).
(*) Additional fees may apply.
Is Plus going to contribute anything to Google's fine print filter? Once I might have liked to think that "don't do evil" had a luminous upside. It still could, but I fear that Google is no longer dreaming the dream of arriving at a world where the consumer is always right.
Microsoft never prevented anyone from installing or using Netscape either.
You're one of these people who think that the ad industry spends billions because it doesn't work and influences no-one. We all recall that when Microsoft was asked to involve the user in a one-click choice as part of the OS installation process, their first response was "oh sure, whatever, it hardly matters anyway" before rolling over to let regulators rub their belly fuzz.
If Google Chrome gains 90% browser share I wouldn't object to Google being asked to make the same concession: offer the user a one-click randomized choice for their default search engine when firing up a newly purchased platform.
The descriptive text for the IE option should have read something like this:
IE provides a fast and highly integrated browser supported with a tsunami of somewhat prompt security upgrades. Be aware that Microsoft doesn't really believe in web standards. If you choose this browser you'll have a great browsing experience. However, it will increase the IE market share until all the pageview-grubbing web content developers choose to tune their web sites to perform best on IE, thus granting Microsoft control over a defacto standard whose inconsistencies will be employed as a weapon to thwart competition until better informed people are reduced to gouging their eyes out for decades to come.
Click "I agree to make better informed people bleed through their eye sockets" to continue with your IE installation.
Worded like that, you'd own the exposed ass-crack crowd. Somehow the parallel narrative in the case of Google search eludes me, as much as I dislike this new development.
What bugs me about this is that my preferences only exist to the extent that I represent them as social declarations, as if what I like and who I like are the same thing.
It used to be the case back in the 1970s that everyone watched the same horrible TV shows, and you could always ask the people you hung out with what they thought of the same show you watched yourself. With this new development, if I had a circle that consisted of amateur podcasters and I met one of these people in a pub, we'd be right back to the glorious seventies: she could ask me "what do you think of the Blue Snowball" and presume I would be gadget-savvy because we're getting blitzed by the same Google ads as pertaining to our shared circle.
This is the old Coke vs Pepsi common-knowledge trick. You could always bring it up in conversation because you knew that the other person would also know what you were talking about. There was no escape. The purpose was not to manufacture preference, but to perpetuate the very slight distinction between one type of brown sugar water and another as a revealing choice of personal identity. I remember reading about a study of perceived choice where a tray of different soft drinks was presented to a group in eastern Europe who complained "how come we're not being given any choice at all?" For them choice was coffee, tea, soda pop (who cares which). But in the west, five different types of sugar water was regarded as a choice cornucopia.
I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi anywhere, anytime. Pepsi has lemon, Coke has vanilla. But I roll my eyes where people comment "oh, you're a coke drinker". Yeah? So what if I happen to like sharp vanilla over mushy lemon. Further into my adult years I decided sugar water was just so much junk in the trunk. The one occasion per year I drink a can of Coke, my selection of Coke over Pepsi is almost a religious experience. I'm a member of the Jonestown generation. We were programmed to care about such things.
When the internet came along I smacked my hands with a glorious "GOOD RIDDANCE!" Now it's coming back like a bloodstain on Lady Macbeth.
I quickly realised, but did not articulate, something the anthropologist Gregory Bateson told me 10 years later: that of all our human inventions, economic man was by far the dullest.
We've had superlative typography since the 1980s, but instead the world standardized on Widow Maker and other typographic abominations. Economic man noted the score, and the rest is WYG will make your eyes bleed. Then Steve figured out how to pour feminine charms back into the genie bottle by making the terms of engagement non-negotiable. That's one way to do it. Who knows what user interface nightmares ensue once you begin speaking with each other.
The contributors to Edge are what I call third-culture thinkers or intellectuals. Not only are they focused on science-minded pursuits based on evidence and empiricism, they are also public communicators, reaching out to the public by means of their books, lectures, etc. They live by their wits, and doing so in the changing times of the digital age is a challenge. Their concerns are very different than, say, the casual user, who has signed up for a social network and by default becomes the product whose private information is sold to advertisers.
Big mistakes people should stop making: 1. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content. 2. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content. 3. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
Tyler has a nice riff there about how ditching the "good vs evil" depiction of world events immediately raises your IQ by ten points. There are many writers out there who could raise their IQ by an additional ten points investing less in glassy gassy.
Proofs really should give us insight into why statements are true, and this one really doesn't. That's not to knock on the accomplishment: this clearly took a lot of effort, some very smart work, and some clever use of group theory and very skilled programming.
This comment reminds me that it's not what you have, it's what you do with it. Sometimes you hear about an athlete that he or she has "an extra gear" in the heat of battle. I went to school with a lot of smart people. The median smart person would sometimes make a lazy statement of sentiment such as this one that would never have passed the lips of my classmates with the hard-baked intellectual edge. Hard-baked was part talent, but mostly attitude: people who just thought that the lazy use of "should" was beneath their level of intellectual determination (as it should be, in my personal opinion).
Obviously the landmark results in mathematics are the ones which forge a deep connection between branches of mathematics formerly distinct. Every proof should be one of those. Or at least that's how the coke addict would phrase it. Mathematics as Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Who needs peas? No candy cane construction permitted by the Chocolate Port Authority if less intriguing that Dessin d'enfant.
This discovery, which is technically so simple, made a very strong impression on me, and it represents a decisive turning point in the course of my reflections, a shift in particular of my centre of interest in mathematics, which suddenly found itself strongly focussed. I do not believe that a mathematical fact has ever struck me quite so strongly as this one, nor had a comparable psychological impact. This is surely because of the very familiar, non-technical nature of the objects considered, of which any childâ(TM)s drawing scrawled on a bit of paper (at least if the drawing is made without lifting the pencil) gives a perfectly explicit example. To such a dessin we find associated subtle arithmetic invariants, which are completely turned topsy-turvy as soon as we add one more stroke.
I arrived at this page yesterday evening beginning my tour with a question about the provability of reachable states, the mechanism of temporal logic, Zermelo's contribution to set theory, the Hilbert epsilon operator, the Bourbaki group (before Sheldon Cooper there was Jean Dieudonne), and finally to Grothendieck. I have a fairly clear recollection of reading a long piece about Grothendieck several years ago which lamented the loss to mathematics when he devoted the bulk of his career to elaborating a program in algebraic geometry instead of cracking one hard problem after another, which it seemed some people thought he could do. He was regarded by some as much too brilliant for the pedestrian task of assembling an overarching synthesis.
All mathematicians should be more like Grothendieck should have been. Doesn't that sentiment become quickly cloying once you engage the mental clutch?
A year ago another tour took me to Knuth's algorithm of dancing links, which I compiled out of curiosity, then modified the decision step with the next most obvious heuristic. I was interested to watch the famous dancing links during a back-tracking step, so I searched the internet for a famously hard Sudoku example, found one, then single-stepped through the solution process in the debugger. I was disappointed: it reached solution without once backtracking. I think it made three guesses in total, either binary or trinary. I vaguely recall the odds of it guessing correctly all the way to solution was about ten to one. I loaded some other hard problems. On these it actually backtracked from time to time, but not as often I would have presumed. Even hard problems fall quickly to structured guess-work. It's only when you map Sudoku into a logic inference framework that hard problems are hard.
In all the versions I've used, FF offers you an upgrade without first checking how many of your existing extensions won't come along for the ride. After one bad experience, I decided no upgrade was preferable to a negative upgrade, on the suspicion that one or more of my plug-ins would bonk.
This is increasingly a winner-take-all society in which winning the count is all that matters. It doesn't correlate strongly with competence (as we all know from Florida), but it does correlate strongly with outcome.
Furthermore, if tried elsewhere, all of the above, plus stealth bombs from the heavens. Looks like Chile has fallen off the ratification truck. They'll be made to regret this soon enough.
I read the other spat that ensued from this sentence. I'm in the camp that this is a dubious beginning. You could at least add the asterisk "by the time we are angry enough to pay attention". Here's a physics question for you: is symmetry breaking dictatorial? Is the uniform chirality of life on earth dictatorial? Are we all better off driving on whichever side of the road suits us on any given day? Pretty quickly you arrive at Rawl's concept of the original position: whichever symmetry-breaking decision is made must intrinsically favour one side or the other, but the process by which the decision is reached need not. Allegations of unfairness succumb to circular argument. Success in life is a proxy for good decision making, so we choose successful decision makers (whenever the process is overt). Wealth is a common proxy for success, but also for corrupt influence. Ergo we are all dictators inside. Here's something else to square with your rabid reductionism of human nature: a fair decision is the one which leaves both sides equally unhappy. I really see the story here as having more to do with how the human mind conceptualizes blame. I guess the solution to attribution bias is to delegate all decisions to an invisible hand. What can't be accounted is functionally blameless.
the exact reason
I often have this very sentiment myself when pouring over the TLA+ proof system.
government power must be limited
We're a long ways from fascism, in case you haven't noticed. What you really mean is that government must shrink until we can drown it in the bathtub, it's radioactive ashes ground to a powder, and exploded into the upper atmosphere, never to trouble us again.
in a way that satisfies libertarian principles
Brought to you by the anti-theorem that all virtuous principles are orthogonal in practice.
The problem with high-dander moral clarity is that it overspecifies the system, returning you to the original political conundrum about which point of self-evident common sense is first to be voted off the island.
I didn't spend 100 hours of my life listening to Russ Roberts in a state of conflicted agreement/disagreement out of a sense that the grand answer could be distilled to a business card slogan, but if you read enough Dilbert amazing things can happen:
Yes, and the harmonization process involves negotiating treaty consent in a closed process, then bringing it back and claiming in the face of democratic opposition "we've already promised this" without any democratic consent in the first place.
I wouldn't complain about my life suffering a DOS day for these companies to band together and make a point.
Quit arguing over whether or not the charge is justified. It doesn't HAVE to be justified. Either you're willing to pay it or you're not.
None of the posts about the hazards of autopay concern justification. Many of the posts here concern what people are willing to pay, and how they come to those decisions. There's a sizable contingent of people distressed about gouging, which is a sloppy verbal surrogate for the dislike of pricing based on power rather than economic linearity, likely derived from hard-won experience that dealing with corporations drunk on power works out badly in the long run. Some of these posts could be more articulate about the philosophical foundation, but few are so worthless as to deserve your backhand dismissal.
Somewhere some verizon bean counters ran all the hard math that factors in their actual costs, in terms of providing the service, loss of business, handling angry phonecalls, bad press, etc, and figured this was a net-win, and so they did it.
So you're the reason that the Streisand effect is mentioned fifty times in every story about someone suing over publicity they didn't want. It turns out, in reality, that many drunk-on-power corporations perform this calculation rather badly. There are actually people out there who benefit from fifty reminders. Who knew?
If you're willing to pay for it, they're justified in charging for it. Nothing else matters in the business world.
Cell phone networks have powers bordering on monopoly, which is illegal for a good reason. Duopolies (and septopolies) often end up in price collusion, and there are plenty of lawsuits to recover cartel damages, though many egregious examples go undetected or unpunished.
Seven LCD screen makers have joined together to offer $US553 million to settle charges that the screen industry has acted as a price-fixing cartel.
You don't seem to grasp the difference between capitalism and commercialism. Commercialism is grasping after every available dollar by any means possible, however tawdry:
Apple was fined... by the Italian Antitrust Authority today for failing to properly inform customers of... legally-mandated two-year warranty... [and instead] selling overlapping AppleCare coverage.
Capitalism (as founded on free-market principles) is where all the participants in a marketplace have low barriers to choice, and exercise choice to their best advantage with great energy, driving the engine of wealth creation. Asymmetric power relationships are good for commerce (on the side that holds excess power), bad for capitalism and the wealth of society. If these were the same thing, monopoly would be legal.
One of the things Verizon is trying to do here is fly under the radar of rational ignorance. One of the reasons Slashdot exists is to make flying under the radar a damn sight harder. Yet for some reason you've decided that collective disgust is the prattling of small minds. Is commercialism the largest idea in your personal quiver? How sad.
Hardly anything says drunk-on-power better than undermining choice mechanics. Unfortunately, willingness-to-pay bumps up hard against locked-in service contracts. Bait and switch is another great commercial tactic to defeat choice mechanics: it looked OK on the day you signed up, now it sucks to be you.
When the customer has real choice, the market has discipline. Without discipline, the market has trillion
It's actually a variant of the typing monkey thing
No, no, no. This riff only applies to a memoryless process. Long discussion threads are more like star formation. Once you get above a critical mass of Gates, Jobs, Portman, Hitler, Netcraft, emacs, vi, fiat currency, Russian dyslexia, and dcxk intelligent thought can only form at the event horizon, and the fragment emitted is barely visible against the entropic background.
If your standard is "really dig into the matter", Christian Parenti falls woefully short of the mark.
Moreover, casting a nuclear renaissance as the panacea for climate change is dangerous because it threatens to delay the shift to clean energy. Continually pushing nukes has opportunity costs; every dollar, euro or RMB spent on nuclear power is one not spent on clean technology like wind, solar, hydro or tidal kinetics.
If I were teaching introductory economics, I would fail a student who wrote that statement. There's obviously some competition for sunk capital at the margins, but it's hardly 1:1 and the buckets are unclean to begin with. Do we count every dollar invested in lithographic die shrink technology as a dollar invested in solar? If not, why not?
He continues in the brinkmanship vein:
A massive industrial-scale build out of fourth-generation nukes(slashcodefuckup)the ones that are supposed to be safe, cheap and easy to build(sfu)would arrive too late to stave off climate change(sfu)s tipping points.
Nowhere does he demonstrate that any other technology will arrrive "soon enough". He argument seems to be that alternative is our only hope, so pour the dollars on that horse, whether it will save us or not.
Work on it has just begun in Georgia, and already there are conflicts between the utility, Southern Company and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Moreover, this project is going forward only because it is in one of the few regions of the United States (the Southeast) where electricity markets were not deregulated. That means the utility, operating on cost-plus basis, can pass on to rate-payers all its expense over-runs.
I'm sure that the installed wind and solar capacity also sought favourable contexts. Here's a man flying the magic carpet of brinkmanship logic decrying his foe for becoming mired in controversy. We all know that the correct solution to global warming will be conflict free. Just keep proposing virtue until common sense prevails and the planet engages in the multiracial kumbaya group hug.
If all of these nuclear power plants are completed they will add 62.56 gigawatts of capacity, which is less than one-third of already-existing wind capacity worldwide, which was at 196.63 gigawatts at the end of 2010.
Here he's comparing the entire capacity for wind generation to an increment of nuclear capacity, where capacity is actually what you think it is.
The Worldwatch Institute reports that between 2004 and 2009, electricity from wind (not capacity but actual power output) grew by 27 percent, while solar grew by 54 percent. Over the same time, nuclear power output actually declined by half a percent.
He clearly does know the difference between base load and peak capacity, at least when quoting other sensible people. But so what the wind is growing 27% starting from nowhere?
Mountain Pass(sfu)s mine contains a rare-earth ore that yields neodymium, the pixie dust of green tech necessary for the lightweight permanent magnets that make Prius motors zoom and for the generators that give wind turbines their electrical buzz. In fact, if we are going to make even a few million of the hybrid and electric cars that are supposed to help rescue the planet from global warming, we will need to double production of neodymium in short order.
He clearly doesn't understand economics at the margin one bit. Even at modest scale, we are already encountering obstacles to maintaining the current growth rate. The economics don't improve as we populate more of the world's best sites with turbines, either. We could figure out how to install turbines in harsher
... if it hadn't been bought off the Japanese... descended to the level of mere rent seekers in the 1980s... those damn hippies and tree huggers... precious bodily fluids...
The quip about rent seeking would make a nice lyric in a rap video of Keynes versus Hayek (you think I jest?) but you'll have to link it to a different example, since the paternity in this case doesn't even pass the bar of he said/she said, as pointed out by a credible sounding AC, which I've trimmed and quoted below:
Westinghouse employee here. The AP1000 final design certification was approved in 2006 and the design began long before that.
Toshiba acquired Westinghouse in late 2006. Prior to that, Toshiba had partnered with our domestic rival, General Electric to build plants in Japan. We sell Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs), they sell Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs). They're pretty different.
If the corporate romance had happened a decade earlier, it still wouldn't prove that the design put forward required leaching off the Japanese, but it would hard enough to disprove so as not to interfere with random geysers of ideology.
The outlines of the rent seeking story are roughly that Washington lobbyists are the heroine of profit maximization, and that it only we enact prohibition against government will the profit maximizers settle down to clean living and wealth creation to the benefit of greater society.
My view is that after government hours after government is declared drowned in the bathtub, the profit maximizers of the drug-seeking stripe will quickly discover crack cocaine (some other way of extracting rent from society) with society shorn of collective will as weakly expressed through the government organ to oppose them. The view that modern government is grotesquely imperfect is quickly quelled by listening to 50 hours of podcasts about the Roman empire or the Byzantines who followed. These were small governments in cahoots with large armies principally concerned with rape and plunder.
After we flush government, what power remains to cross crack cocaine off the list if it is discovered half so quick as I suspect?
I'm of the view that there is another possible road forward: the Long Now project of evolving government to be less like heroine and more like methadone. I have dark suspicions about the prohibitionist, cold turkey no-government agenda. It might go well for a while, but when the morning arrives that it isn't going well, what are your options? Few historical precedents have glowing resumes. Too many people run around espousing the view that the blood on those documents resulted from an administrative paper cut.
Since when is the HDMI standard is a good reference point for arguing human perceptual limits? Furthermore, many things which are quite obvious have no supporting research. Research is like open source, except that the itch has to be even bigger to successfully fund the project. Where's the incentive for pouring research dollars into quantifying the trench between 24 fps and 60 fps? Celluloid is not getting cranked above 24 fps for mainstream productions due to cost reasons (it was tried and failed more than once), and digital playback devices are standardized at 60 Hz already, which poses hardly any cost barrier just a few years down the road. For every paper on the fundamentals of visual motion perception, Google returns a hundred patents on motion estimation and interpolation devices screaming to be monetized.
I've read several excellent papers over the years on the trade-offs in human acoustic perception (which the margins of my generosity are too small to fish up) where the golden ears demonstrate different trade-offs between fine pitch/duration perception, but always along the same contour.
In natural scenes, smooth pursuit stabilizes or reduces the temporal rate of motion of a moving image on the retina. Smooth pursuit of a sequence of momentarily stationary images, however, produces a geometric shearing of the image on the retina
This paper is talking about degradation. For my purposes, if I can discriminate degradation at 30 fps vs 45 fps, then I can perceive something valuable in one that the other lacks.
In many theatres, I find the judder so severe in a rapid pan I can almost count the frames. Back in the day, 45 fps was the break point in many games where my motion estimation starts to feel creamy enough to nail a snap spin frag. I could image a small additional improvement all the way up to 60 fps, if you're after that last one percent advantage.
Strangely, there in an ethos is science (which I generally laud) where many researchers tune out the ridicule and devote themselves to proving the obvious nevertheless. Perhaps the definitive paper you are seeking will make the cut on next year's Duh! list.
Guys also indicated that even with hook-ups (which are meant to be string-free), they feared their casual-sex partners would seek a relationship. Women indicated the opposite, wanting a relationship and worrying about becoming too attached to a noncommittal other. Who knew?
Sometimes it is THAT obvious. And now, in 2011, we have a paper to cite.
Russian historians have no record of the lines, "Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic," commonly attributed by English-language dictionaries to Josef Stalin.
Since we're not sure it was spoken, I guess the pendulum swings back to tragedy.
Stalin would surely have continued: "Death of 30 million is prudence." What if it was you and your wife and your gf and your mother and your father? Hint: a day of morning is tragedy, a thousand years is history.
Does the $120 necessarily mean that it's more likely to make it to 5 years before failing?
That's a bit of a haughty Socratic tone to explain basic cost/benefit bereft of leverage. As soon as you add volatility to production quality, the warranty liability creates a huge incentive to shift the dubious batch into USB drive appliances at Walmart or Costco.
Without the warranty liability, there's little incentive for the drive manufacturer to bother with the complex logistics of sorting the better grades into the usage patterns less tolerant of failure.
And you're also forgetting how good Detroit became at building cars able to last until the day the warranty expired with hardly any buffer. I know someone who did electronics design work at a major auto components company in the Great Lakes area and was given a stiff rebuke for choosing a part that cost pennies more (our of several dollars) with double the life expectancy. If the cheaper component is already rated to the warranty period, not one penny more. It turns out this is stupid economics. Eventually the consuming public figures it out. Many fat executive bonuses were paid before America nationalized the auto industry.
Here's what enlightenment looks like: In recent design iterations, Intel has a rule that if a feature increases the power budget by 1%, it has to increase performance by 2%.
I think the shorter warranties are a vote by the Seagate executive team to have a business model more like Detroit, and to collect as many performance bonuses as possible, before exiting their careers as the disk industry declines to Kodak levels of relevance.
In iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, exp(caveat_emptor) as the number of iterations remaining declines.
A good dictator is better than a good democracy, because the dictator is more easily able to get things done.
Attribution bias is a core value in religious and political alignment. On the right: belief in The man or The Man (specifically The man claiming to represent The Man). On the left: the Buddist concept of the great oneness. On the far left: git and the great maintainer. Get your own bag.
The dictator is more able to get the kinds of things done we credit to a single man, but not much else. A Stanford leadership podcast says that in the management literature you find that a leader gets 50% of the credit or blame, but contributes only 15% to the final outcome.
Much of the point of the invisible hand metaphor is that a lot gets done in markets where you can't easily point to any one person to assign all the credit/blame. I also recently learned that Adam Smith tossed off the phrase "invisible hand" in passing, and that his acolytes elevated it to the level of faith-based market economics.
For many people, knowing who to blame is more important that getting things done (or the right things done), even if The man blamed is exempt from consequence, but the blamee pays with his blood and kin.
When the Germans voted Hitler into power, they weren't looking forward into the Palantir at the mass rape of the mothers, sisters, and wives by the Russian hordes bent on retribution. No, they voted him in because of their frustration and the sense that he could get things done. A little more heed to outcome rather than credit/blame, we'd have fewer of these people around. They start small. Soon you find yourself in uniform with a man behind you instructed to shoot you if you take one step back. You hate the regime you're fighting for, but that hatred is never more than 10 seconds away from an anonymous, unmarked grave. The only question is whether it will be a solitary grave in the ditch on some dirt road, or if you'll have plenty of company among the bone fields of Stalingrad.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but if one spends your first twenty years growing up in a New Age cult of evolution deniers, one is awfully late to the party when it comes time to buckle down with intelligence and hard work.
When you're picking teams at the staff picnic to run the obstacle course, do you pick the kid who practically lived on a skateboard growing up, or the bookworm with coke bottle glasses? A secure sense of balance navigating logic-dominated systems takes just as much work to develop as a bunch of skateboard tricks.
We had a kid in my residence who had never wrestled with his siblings growing up. He got the hang of it pretty quickly when the rough-housing started, but someone always got beaked in the nose whenever he was involved. The rest of us knew how to play hard without getting hurt or hurting anyone else.
You're not born any of these things, but the differentiation is well under way by elementary school. That beaker is a doctor now.
There is always elitism, but you miss the point. Most people can't think their way out of a wet paper bag.
Wason selection task
Correlation does not imply causation
In the second case, you get wankers who take this maxim far too seriously, when they should be reasoning "where there's smoke, there's fire". The vast majority of valid reasoning falls below the harsh standard of implication. Programming escapes many people, because you have to have one foot in each camp. pfail = 1e-6 is no good for a file system. In debugging, the common case is to succumb to the rare event.
I've worked with really good students who can't consistently manage to get modular clock arithmetic right on a micro-controller. In the vast majority of cases, normal algebra applies, except when it doesn't.
u16 begin = clock();
while (clock() - begin < 100);
u16 begin = clock();
while (clock() < 100 + begin);
In a normal programming task (e.g. far away from the file system), this kind of small distinction isn't critical every hour of the day. But when it does become critical, you need the kind of person with an instinct for realizing "but wait, this might be the tricky bit, slow down a think a bit here".
This requires an innate capacity for self-monitoring the process of conviction. Many people have it, more people don't. The second group will never become value-added programmers whether they are trained and paid a wage or not.
Brute force security needs to be evaluated under the assumption that a Russian botnet has compromised a large number of social networking sites, and gained three to five different clear-text passwords (of possibly no great importance) associated with the targeted user. They now also know--or strongly suspect--the identities of your financial institutions.
Using commonalities of the exposed password set, the botnet bastards will attempt to model your personal password generation heuristic. Since they are not stupider than bricks, they might also assume that your bank password is similar, but fortified to the next level. Gaining some experience in cracking bank passwords, they'll soon have a model for that, too.
My Thomas and Cover from 1991, which happens to be at hand, has chapters on "Jointly typical sequences", "Encoding of correlated sources", and "Source coding with side information". This last section makes reference to Slepian-Wolf encoding, which is kind of interesting. I hadn't spotted that before.
On Slepian-Wolf compression, in memory of Jack Wolf
This might not be precisely the right theory to apply to the breaking of password clusters, but the guy doing the math on that has probably read these papers.
Way too little concern is placed on the independence of the passwords chosen, and this vulnerability increases rapidly with the proliferation of passwords used. I'm sure I have more than 100 passwords out in the wild, many held by hopelessly incompetent and untrusted internet discussion forums.
Even a single compromised site can form a model of your password heuristic if you're duped into changing it often.
It wouldn't surprise me that if everyone adopted the four word xkcd approach, that for many individuals, entropy per word is closer to seven or eight bits than eleven, where concrete nouns of five to eight letters predominate, and a further bias to concrete nouns that are visually active in the mind's eye, and 40% of all such passwords contain at least one animal word.
That's where brute force would begin: assume at least one common animal word (four to five bits; since cat/dog don't make the cut, you'll be seeing a lot of parrot/leopard/zebra/unicorn).
unicornprincesscastledragon
I've cracked one already.
Without getting into your theory of probability, which makes my jaw drop, your set theory sucks. You're implying that the non-empty set of scammers who wake up one morning and discover that they are the proud owner of an IP address in a Google managed IP block--without having lifted a finger to bring this about--won't do a little BINGO dance and start speed dialing anyone dumb enough to listen.
Outright lies about having a business partnership with your competitor go far beyond what even a jaded CEO is happy to know nothing about. It's in the same territory as an aspiring 18 year old supermodel accepting rides from strangers because she can't figure out the Paris metro. Google has deep pockets that lawyers lie awake and dream about, should they ever put themselves into a compromised position.
The second link didn't come across properly with my make-link FF extension: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
I had a vague recollection about the ACM Transactions of Algorithms which an industrious blogger relates here:
How the Scientific Publishing Industry Began to Eat Itself
Here is Knuth in high dudgeon kicking Elsevier in the nuts.
Sorry Gandhi (if you ever said this), the world has changed:
I actually think this one stands a good chance of being vaporized by the scientists themselves as much as the gift-culture geeks.
Well, let me tag on one more point: this doesn't have to go badly, but most likely it will.
If Google would perceive from my Plus relationships not that I own a lot of computer gadgets, but instead that I loath and detest walled gardens, and never advertised to me ever a service or device with a nasty business model behind it, I'd be willing to give the whole concept of advertising as a productive human venture a major rethink.
Recently I would have purchased a device which purports to measure brainwaves and sleep phase on the slight chance it actually worked had it not been for the business model where the data measured was encrypted, owned by the company who makes the device, and available for my interpretation only once uploaded to their web service, should the start-up venture manage to outlast the short warranty on the device itself.
I waste so much time discarding business models that are total non-starters in how I order my life that I end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater: it's actually not worth seeking out what I'd be willing to purchase because of the nasty fine-print comprehension tax I end up paying before I get there.
Even more recently, I gave up on finding an audio book subscription that suited my politics. The one company I found that I would have been happy to transact with has become a dead link. The other choices involve DRM with uncertain portability (subject also to change without notice) or monthly credits that don't roll over. Yeah, I'm so organized that I have nothing better to do but police my attention span so that I make my audio book selection in precise lunar synchronization.
While I'm at it, how about a week in Vegas for $30 (*).
(*) Additional fees may apply.
Is Plus going to contribute anything to Google's fine print filter? Once I might have liked to think that "don't do evil" had a luminous upside. It still could, but I fear that Google is no longer dreaming the dream of arriving at a world where the consumer is always right.
In case I was ever so slightly too oblique, "it" stands for the blurring of shared context with shared concern.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes or podcasting is about microphones.
— Edsger Dijkstra
Advertising is most certainly about computers and telescopes and microphones, rather than science or astronomy or having something worth saying.
I fear that crass commonality is the Plus in the pudding.
You're one of these people who think that the ad industry spends billions because it doesn't work and influences no-one. We all recall that when Microsoft was asked to involve the user in a one-click choice as part of the OS installation process, their first response was "oh sure, whatever, it hardly matters anyway" before rolling over to let regulators rub their belly fuzz.
If Google Chrome gains 90% browser share I wouldn't object to Google being asked to make the same concession: offer the user a one-click randomized choice for their default search engine when firing up a newly purchased platform.
The descriptive text for the IE option should have read something like this:
IE provides a fast and highly integrated browser supported with a tsunami of somewhat prompt security upgrades. Be aware that Microsoft doesn't really believe in web standards. If you choose this browser you'll have a great browsing experience. However, it will increase the IE market share until all the pageview-grubbing web content developers choose to tune their web sites to perform best on IE, thus granting Microsoft control over a defacto standard whose inconsistencies will be employed as a weapon to thwart competition until better informed people are reduced to gouging their eyes out for decades to come.
Click "I agree to make better informed people bleed through their eye sockets" to continue with your IE installation.
Worded like that, you'd own the exposed ass-crack crowd. Somehow the parallel narrative in the case of Google search eludes me, as much as I dislike this new development.
What bugs me about this is that my preferences only exist to the extent that I represent them as social declarations, as if what I like and who I like are the same thing.
It used to be the case back in the 1970s that everyone watched the same horrible TV shows, and you could always ask the people you hung out with what they thought of the same show you watched yourself. With this new development, if I had a circle that consisted of amateur podcasters and I met one of these people in a pub, we'd be right back to the glorious seventies: she could ask me "what do you think of the Blue Snowball" and presume I would be gadget-savvy because we're getting blitzed by the same Google ads as pertaining to our shared circle.
This is the old Coke vs Pepsi common-knowledge trick. You could always bring it up in conversation because you knew that the other person would also know what you were talking about. There was no escape. The purpose was not to manufacture preference, but to perpetuate the very slight distinction between one type of brown sugar water and another as a revealing choice of personal identity. I remember reading about a study of perceived choice where a tray of different soft drinks was presented to a group in eastern Europe who complained "how come we're not being given any choice at all?" For them choice was coffee, tea, soda pop (who cares which). But in the west, five different types of sugar water was regarded as a choice cornucopia.
I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi anywhere, anytime. Pepsi has lemon, Coke has vanilla. But I roll my eyes where people comment "oh, you're a coke drinker". Yeah? So what if I happen to like sharp vanilla over mushy lemon. Further into my adult years I decided sugar water was just so much junk in the trunk. The one occasion per year I drink a can of Coke, my selection of Coke over Pepsi is almost a religious experience. I'm a member of the Jonestown generation. We were programmed to care about such things.
When the internet came along I smacked my hands with a glorious "GOOD RIDDANCE!" Now it's coming back like a bloodstain on Lady Macbeth.
Is it really that rare, or are you just looking for love in all the wrong places?
John Brockman: the man with a three digit speed dial
We've had superlative typography since the 1980s, but instead the world standardized on Widow Maker and other typographic abominations. Economic man noted the score, and the rest is WYG will make your eyes bleed. Then Steve figured out how to pour feminine charms back into the genie bottle by making the terms of engagement non-negotiable. That's one way to do it. Who knows what user interface nightmares ensue once you begin speaking with each other.
If it's asking too much to straddle two culture, how about being insanely good at just one? From How (La)TeX changed the face of Mathematics
Big mistakes people should stop making:
1. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
2. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
3. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
Tyler Cowen: Be suspicious of stories
Tyler has a nice riff there about how ditching the "good vs evil" depiction of world events immediately raises your IQ by ten points. There are many writers out there who could raise their IQ by an additional ten points investing less in glassy gassy.
This comment reminds me that it's not what you have, it's what you do with it. Sometimes you hear about an athlete that he or she has "an extra gear" in the heat of battle. I went to school with a lot of smart people. The median smart person would sometimes make a lazy statement of sentiment such as this one that would never have passed the lips of my classmates with the hard-baked intellectual edge. Hard-baked was part talent, but mostly attitude: people who just thought that the lazy use of "should" was beneath their level of intellectual determination (as it should be, in my personal opinion).
Obviously the landmark results in mathematics are the ones which forge a deep connection between branches of mathematics formerly distinct. Every proof should be one of those. Or at least that's how the coke addict would phrase it. Mathematics as Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Who needs peas? No candy cane construction permitted by the Chocolate Port Authority if less intriguing that Dessin d'enfant.
I arrived at this page yesterday evening beginning my tour with a question about the provability of reachable states, the mechanism of temporal logic, Zermelo's contribution to set theory, the Hilbert epsilon operator, the Bourbaki group (before Sheldon Cooper there was Jean Dieudonne), and finally to Grothendieck. I have a fairly clear recollection of reading a long piece about Grothendieck several years ago which lamented the loss to mathematics when he devoted the bulk of his career to elaborating a program in algebraic geometry instead of cracking one hard problem after another, which it seemed some people thought he could do. He was regarded by some as much too brilliant for the pedestrian task of assembling an overarching synthesis.
All mathematicians should be more like Grothendieck should have been. Doesn't that sentiment become quickly cloying once you engage the mental clutch?
A year ago another tour took me to Knuth's algorithm of dancing links, which I compiled out of curiosity, then modified the decision step with the next most obvious heuristic. I was interested to watch the famous dancing links during a back-tracking step, so I searched the internet for a famously hard Sudoku example, found one, then single-stepped through the solution process in the debugger. I was disappointed: it reached solution without once backtracking. I think it made three guesses in total, either binary or trinary. I vaguely recall the odds of it guessing correctly all the way to solution was about ten to one. I loaded some other hard problems. On these it actually backtracked from time to time, but not as often I would have presumed. Even hard problems fall quickly to structured guess-work. It's only when you map Sudoku into a logic inference framework that hard problems are hard.
In the Kolmo
In all the versions I've used, FF offers you an upgrade without first checking how many of your existing extensions won't come along for the ride. After one bad experience, I decided no upgrade was preferable to a negative upgrade, on the suspicion that one or more of my plug-ins would bonk.
The simple technical advisory function was MIA.
This is increasingly a winner-take-all society in which winning the count is all that matters. It doesn't correlate strongly with competence (as we all know from Florida), but it does correlate strongly with outcome.
Furthermore, if tried elsewhere, all of the above, plus stealth bombs from the heavens. Looks like Chile has fallen off the ratification truck. They'll be made to regret this soon enough.
I read the other spat that ensued from this sentence. I'm in the camp that this is a dubious beginning. You could at least add the asterisk "by the time we are angry enough to pay attention". Here's a physics question for you: is symmetry breaking dictatorial? Is the uniform chirality of life on earth dictatorial? Are we all better off driving on whichever side of the road suits us on any given day? Pretty quickly you arrive at Rawl's concept of the original position: whichever symmetry-breaking decision is made must intrinsically favour one side or the other, but the process by which the decision is reached need not. Allegations of unfairness succumb to circular argument. Success in life is a proxy for good decision making, so we choose successful decision makers (whenever the process is overt). Wealth is a common proxy for success, but also for corrupt influence. Ergo we are all dictators inside. Here's something else to square with your rabid reductionism of human nature: a fair decision is the one which leaves both sides equally unhappy. I really see the story here as having more to do with how the human mind conceptualizes blame. I guess the solution to attribution bias is to delegate all decisions to an invisible hand. What can't be accounted is functionally blameless.
I often have this very sentiment myself when pouring over the TLA+ proof system.
We're a long ways from fascism, in case you haven't noticed. What you really mean is that government must shrink until we can drown it in the bathtub, it's radioactive ashes ground to a powder, and exploded into the upper atmosphere, never to trouble us again.
Brought to you by the anti-theorem that all virtuous principles are orthogonal in practice.
Arrow's impossibility theorem
The problem with high-dander moral clarity is that it overspecifies the system, returning you to the original political conundrum about which point of self-evident common sense is first to be voted off the island.
I didn't spend 100 hours of my life listening to Russ Roberts in a state of conflicted agreement/disagreement out of a sense that the grand answer could be distilled to a business card slogan, but if you read enough Dilbert amazing things can happen:
Simplicity is a vector of caprice.
Yes, and the harmonization process involves negotiating treaty consent in a closed process, then bringing it back and claiming in the face of democratic opposition "we've already promised this" without any democratic consent in the first place.
I wouldn't complain about my life suffering a DOS day for these companies to band together and make a point.
FFS, I don't agree with David Gelertner's infantilization wish.
Convenience: Would you do it for me? I'm busy getting my rocks off.
None of the posts about the hazards of autopay concern justification. Many of the posts here concern what people are willing to pay, and how they come to those decisions. There's a sizable contingent of people distressed about gouging, which is a sloppy verbal surrogate for the dislike of pricing based on power rather than economic linearity, likely derived from hard-won experience that dealing with corporations drunk on power works out badly in the long run. Some of these posts could be more articulate about the philosophical foundation, but few are so worthless as to deserve your backhand dismissal.
So you're the reason that the Streisand effect is mentioned fifty times in every story about someone suing over publicity they didn't want. It turns out, in reality, that many drunk-on-power corporations perform this calculation rather badly. There are actually people out there who benefit from fifty reminders. Who knew?
Cell phone networks have powers bordering on monopoly, which is illegal for a good reason. Duopolies (and septopolies) often end up in price collusion, and there are plenty of lawsuits to recover cartel damages, though many egregious examples go undetected or unpunished.
From LCD cartel case claims seven more scalps:
You don't seem to grasp the difference between capitalism and commercialism. Commercialism is grasping after every available dollar by any means possible, however tawdry:
Apple fined $1.2m in Italy for misleading warranty claims
Capitalism (as founded on free-market principles) is where all the participants in a marketplace have low barriers to choice, and exercise choice to their best advantage with great energy, driving the engine of wealth creation. Asymmetric power relationships are good for commerce (on the side that holds excess power), bad for capitalism and the wealth of society. If these were the same thing, monopoly would be legal.
One of the things Verizon is trying to do here is fly under the radar of rational ignorance. One of the reasons Slashdot exists is to make flying under the radar a damn sight harder. Yet for some reason you've decided that collective disgust is the prattling of small minds. Is commercialism the largest idea in your personal quiver? How sad.
Hardly anything says drunk-on-power better than undermining choice mechanics. Unfortunately, willingness-to-pay bumps up hard against locked-in service contracts. Bait and switch is another great commercial tactic to defeat choice mechanics: it looked OK on the day you signed up, now it sucks to be you.
When the customer has real choice, the market has discipline. Without discipline, the market has trillion
No, no, no. This riff only applies to a memoryless process. Long discussion threads are more like star formation. Once you get above a critical mass of Gates, Jobs, Portman, Hitler, Netcraft, emacs, vi, fiat currency, Russian dyslexia, and dcxk intelligent thought can only form at the event horizon, and the fragment emitted is barely visible against the entropic background.
If your standard is "really dig into the matter", Christian Parenti falls woefully short of the mark.
If I were teaching introductory economics, I would fail a student who wrote that statement. There's obviously some competition for sunk capital at the margins, but it's hardly 1:1 and the buckets are unclean to begin with. Do we count every dollar invested in lithographic die shrink technology as a dollar invested in solar? If not, why not?
He continues in the brinkmanship vein:
Nowhere does he demonstrate that any other technology will arrrive "soon enough". He argument seems to be that alternative is our only hope, so pour the dollars on that horse, whether it will save us or not.
I'm sure that the installed wind and solar capacity also sought favourable contexts. Here's a man flying the magic carpet of brinkmanship logic decrying his foe for becoming mired in controversy. We all know that the correct solution to global warming will be conflict free. Just keep proposing virtue until common sense prevails and the planet engages in the multiracial kumbaya group hug.
Here he's comparing the entire capacity for wind generation to an increment of nuclear capacity, where capacity is actually what you think it is.
He clearly does know the difference between base load and peak capacity, at least when quoting other sensible people. But so what the wind is growing 27% starting from nowhere?
Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret
He clearly doesn't understand economics at the margin one bit. Even at modest scale, we are already encountering obstacles to maintaining the current growth rate. The economics don't improve as we populate more of the world's best sites with turbines, either. We could figure out how to install turbines in harsher
The quip about rent seeking would make a nice lyric in a rap video of Keynes versus Hayek (you think I jest?) but you'll have to link it to a different example, since the paternity in this case doesn't even pass the bar of he said/she said, as pointed out by a credible sounding AC, which I've trimmed and quoted below:
If the corporate romance had happened a decade earlier, it still wouldn't prove that the design put forward required leaching off the Japanese, but it would hard enough to disprove so as not to interfere with random geysers of ideology.
The outlines of the rent seeking story are roughly that Washington lobbyists are the heroine of profit maximization, and that it only we enact prohibition against government will the profit maximizers settle down to clean living and wealth creation to the benefit of greater society.
My view is that after government hours after government is declared drowned in the bathtub, the profit maximizers of the drug-seeking stripe will quickly discover crack cocaine (some other way of extracting rent from society) with society shorn of collective will as weakly expressed through the government organ to oppose them. The view that modern government is grotesquely imperfect is quickly quelled by listening to 50 hours of podcasts about the Roman empire or the Byzantines who followed. These were small governments in cahoots with large armies principally concerned with rape and plunder.
After we flush government, what power remains to cross crack cocaine off the list if it is discovered half so quick as I suspect?
I'm of the view that there is another possible road forward: the Long Now project of evolving government to be less like heroine and more like methadone. I have dark suspicions about the prohibitionist, cold turkey no-government agenda. It might go well for a while, but when the morning arrives that it isn't going well, what are your options? Few historical precedents have glowing resumes. Too many people run around espousing the view that the blood on those documents resulted from an administrative paper cut.
Let me be number seven: you're an idiot.
Since when is the HDMI standard is a good reference point for arguing human perceptual limits? Furthermore, many things which are quite obvious have no supporting research. Research is like open source, except that the itch has to be even bigger to successfully fund the project. Where's the incentive for pouring research dollars into quantifying the trench between 24 fps and 60 fps? Celluloid is not getting cranked above 24 fps for mainstream productions due to cost reasons (it was tried and failed more than once), and digital playback devices are standardized at 60 Hz already, which poses hardly any cost barrier just a few years down the road. For every paper on the fundamentals of visual motion perception, Google returns a hundred patents on motion estimation and interpolation devices screaming to be monetized.
I've read several excellent papers over the years on the trade-offs in human acoustic perception (which the margins of my generosity are too small to fish up) where the golden ears demonstrate different trade-offs between fine pitch/duration perception, but always along the same contour.
From Judder-Induced Edge Flicker in Moving Objects
This paper is talking about degradation. For my purposes, if I can discriminate degradation at 30 fps vs 45 fps, then I can perceive something valuable in one that the other lacks.
In many theatres, I find the judder so severe in a rapid pan I can almost count the frames. Back in the day, 45 fps was the break point in many games where my motion estimation starts to feel creamy enough to nail a snap spin frag. I could image a small additional improvement all the way up to 60 fps, if you're after that last one percent advantage.
Strangely, there in an ethos is science (which I generally laud) where many researchers tune out the ridicule and devote themselves to proving the obvious nevertheless. Perhaps the definitive paper you are seeking will make the cut on next year's Duh! list.
From Duh! The Most Obvious Scientific Findings of 2010
Sometimes it is THAT obvious. And now, in 2011, we have a paper to cite.
From Wikiquote:
Since we're not sure it was spoken, I guess the pendulum swings back to tragedy.
Stalin would surely have continued: "Death of 30 million is prudence." What if it was you and your wife and your gf and your mother and your father? Hint: a day of morning is tragedy, a thousand years is history.
That's a bit of a haughty Socratic tone to explain basic cost/benefit bereft of leverage. As soon as you add volatility to production quality, the warranty liability creates a huge incentive to shift the dubious batch into USB drive appliances at Walmart or Costco.
Without the warranty liability, there's little incentive for the drive manufacturer to bother with the complex logistics of sorting the better grades into the usage patterns less tolerant of failure.
And you're also forgetting how good Detroit became at building cars able to last until the day the warranty expired with hardly any buffer. I know someone who did electronics design work at a major auto components company in the Great Lakes area and was given a stiff rebuke for choosing a part that cost pennies more (our of several dollars) with double the life expectancy. If the cheaper component is already rated to the warranty period, not one penny more. It turns out this is stupid economics. Eventually the consuming public figures it out. Many fat executive bonuses were paid before America nationalized the auto industry.
Here's what enlightenment looks like: In recent design iterations, Intel has a rule that if a feature increases the power budget by 1%, it has to increase performance by 2%.
I think the shorter warranties are a vote by the Seagate executive team to have a business model more like Detroit, and to collect as many performance bonuses as possible, before exiting their careers as the disk industry declines to Kodak levels of relevance.
In iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, exp(caveat_emptor) as the number of iterations remaining declines.
Attribution bias is a core value in religious and political alignment. On the right: belief in The man or The Man (specifically The man claiming to represent The Man). On the left: the Buddist concept of the great oneness. On the far left: git and the great maintainer. Get your own bag.
The dictator is more able to get the kinds of things done we credit to a single man, but not much else. A Stanford leadership podcast says that in the management literature you find that a leader gets 50% of the credit or blame, but contributes only 15% to the final outcome.
Much of the point of the invisible hand metaphor is that a lot gets done in markets where you can't easily point to any one person to assign all the credit/blame. I also recently learned that Adam Smith tossed off the phrase "invisible hand" in passing, and that his acolytes elevated it to the level of faith-based market economics.
For many people, knowing who to blame is more important that getting things done (or the right things done), even if The man blamed is exempt from consequence, but the blamee pays with his blood and kin.
When the Germans voted Hitler into power, they weren't looking forward into the Palantir at the mass rape of the mothers, sisters, and wives by the Russian hordes bent on retribution. No, they voted him in because of their frustration and the sense that he could get things done. A little more heed to outcome rather than credit/blame, we'd have fewer of these people around. They start small. Soon you find yourself in uniform with a man behind you instructed to shoot you if you take one step back. You hate the regime you're fighting for, but that hatred is never more than 10 seconds away from an anonymous, unmarked grave. The only question is whether it will be a solitary grave in the ditch on some dirt road, or if you'll have plenty of company among the bone fields of Stalingrad.