Didn't you get the memo from the department of small minds? Importance is now measured with a blood pressure cuff.
When a brick decides to be a simple brick "Imminent Storm Threatens Village".
In Zittrain's world (The Future of the Internet and How to Mess it Up Real Bad) what matters most of all in technology is generativity: the usefulness of a brick to support other bricks. Possibly I mean Lego bricks, but more likely I mean Mechano, since generativity gloms in all directions.
I've also read that C and/or C++ are less important than they once were, all the importance has shifted to other languages, themselves written in C/C++. Moreover, Internet Protocol is also overrated, and all the addresses are gone anyway. What matters now are Facebook pages.
Will this stupidity never end? Why do some people feel the need to stand up and scream from the rooftops "I don't get generativity"?
Debian sucked when it was the dominant distribution. Debian's proper place in the universe is as the primary building block for other distributions with looser morals. Debasement and gloss are the last layers in mass appeal. They almost always travel together.
I wrote this last time. The concept that Microsoft users have granted informed consent is overrated. What they've mostly granted is consent through rational ignorance, because Microsoft controls the process by which consent is granted. A more efficient way for users to assert their moral sentiments would not result in nearly so much "permission".
Example of an efficient mechanism: a user permission policy configuration which conveys appropriate sentiments to all installed and online applications, without the user ever facing 20 pages of fine print with an "I agree" button underneath, in order to receive a service benefit smaller in value than a free cup of coffee.
When web TV is universal, every major web TV decoder box brand will be able to aggregate any information passing to any click-through-consenting consenting viewer. The sports analyst on ESPN predicts one team, every other network can go live with the same prediction five minutes later, because a consenting viewer of ESPN has passed their cable box provider this tidbit of information, which is now public domain, and doesn't even need to be referred back to the original source, so attribution is dead, too.
What makes Google different (in a critical yet small way) is that users clicking on offered search links is essentially popularity data. It's a lot harder to argue that popularity data isn't public domain, even when the popularity accrues 100% to Google's huge investment in search innovation.
What might be fair play here is for Bing to mark search results offered exclusively on popularity data as such, meaning that their own search algorithm made an insignificant contribution to the result offered.
Of course, Microsoft won't consent that this is even a viable technical option. In some human languages, you actually have to speak differently of things you seen yourself vs things you've only heard second hand. A distinction has to be pretty deeply wired in the human psyche to become embedded in grammatical necessity in any human language.
I repeat that the real story here is translating click-through-consent obtained through rational ignorance as equal to first class permission.
If the sugar industry ran like the software industry, every time I opened a bag of sugar, there would a sticker I would have to break granting my consent to the national sugar tariff, or no sugar for me. I would do like everyone else and buy the sugar anyway and the Fanjul family would sleep peacefully at night with the consent of the nation on their side.
Well, there are thousands of things that instantly lose my consent if I could only organize by lack of consent more efficiently, like adding to the "I agree" button a tooltip which says "not really".
What a click-through agreement actually amounts to:
For purposes of my minuscule relationship with giant corporation, we'll act for legal purposes as if I accept this legal text, but don't think for a moment I've given my moral consent or permission to engage in unethical business practices based on the latitude big corporation has carved itself with this wall of fine print
[ We understand each other ]... [ Go jump in a lake ]
When Tony Soprano requests a garbage removal fee, does the person paying the fee consent to its payment?
More disturbing for me during this whole mess is the fact that Microsoft is capturing my mouse clicks and visited links when I am using the browser, and sending that captured data back to Microsoft.
Yes, that's the real story here.
Imagine Windows came with excellent speech recognition and it monitored your microphone 24/7 for intelligible sentences, then reported back to the Führerbunker any fragments that sounded like a viable stock tip, e.g. scraps of ambient conversations with your financial adviser, and that Microsoft sometimes aggregates this information to move the market against you.
(The dweebs here will instantly pipe up that this could be used to game Microsoft, but the fact of the matter is that where money is concerned, there's always a smartest guy at the poker table, and generally it's the party with the most information; and moreover, the comeuppance mirth is greatly over reported, as per continued behaviour of large stack poker player in case you haven't noticed.)
Back to the audible sharing. Imagine just how clear the fine print on the EULA must have been to get hundreds of millions of Windows users to click on the button labelled "rational ignorance".
Obviously my example is exaggerated. For a good reason. The point is that we regard the privacy of our financial relationships as a solid whole. We don't click on brain-numbing agreements 100 times per day that might nibble away at that solid whole. It's just wrong! We don't expect to find some power-hungry middleman with a drinking glass to the door every time we discuss financial matters.
What we need here is the ability for end users to set up a personal profile of acceptable behaviour. If the text of an EULA violates your personal standard (as codified) you CAN'T CLICK ON IT without first resolving the conflict (permit exception, change policy, or refuse agreement).
If this were consolidated enough it wouldn't be so easy for companies like Microsoft to sneak consent under the carpet of rational ignorance.
In this story, Google is acting as a personal search adviser, and Microsoft clearly has a glass to door. I just hate the part where they claim that millions of users find this acceptable by virtue of having clicked on something they never understood in the first place while having no central option to enforce their own view of the world.
I wish I had the same facility for some of my Linux system preferences.
Here's my personal preference concerning HTML formatted email: shove it up your protocol stack
I wish I could set this and have my installer refuse to install Evolution completely, unless Evolution first disables this feature.
There are others, presently locked away behind the curtain of blind rage, which I don't wish at this moment to draw back.
Why do I have to police these preferences on every apt-get transaction myself? It's like driving through town having to shake your head (or worse) at a squeegee punk at every red light.
At a casino, you get busted for counting cards because it's essentially a private facility and they are free to enforce house rules.
The retailers are bound by retail agreements. Sifting before you sell would get you into serious hot water.
In some games of chance, large winnings are taxable, so you can get into big hot water by failing to report your earnings.
In this scenario, had he taken that path: he's not entering the premises of a lottery corporation, he's not conspiring with retailers to break the retail process, and (from what others have said) the winnings from these tickets in Ontario are not taxable.
Changed with what exactly? Charged with bogus charges that don't stick, most likely, just to uphold the common sentiment that winning at games for losers is unethical.
Thankfully, I haven't been charged when making winning picks on the stock exchange. It's not actually illegal to use a formula which gives you an edge, only if the information required is insider information.
Speaking of brains on dialtone, I have it on good authority from Michael E. Mann that geological statisticians from Ontario don't know their sigma from a shaft in the dirt.
Fortunately, no lotto ticket designers were terminated with cause, and no peer reviewed studies (where peer is defined as people as bad at stats as you are) were formally repealed as a result of these crackpots.
My point is that this 'experiment' doesn't prove a thing, and to point the finger on this kind of evidence is extremely childish.
I disagree, but it took me a moment to figure out that you actually had a point to disagree with.
What's apparent here is that Microsoft is siphoning popularity data on a wide scale on the back of fine print that hardly anyone reads, is rarely understood, and most people would resent, if it was worth the bother.
In this case, the popularity for these nonsense lexemes was entirely driven by Google creating a nonsense search result. I guess you're essentially saying that Google's power to drive popularity is so great it amounts to a public good. Legally, I'm not even sure how to frame the converse.
I have a slightly different stupidity scale than most people. Mine runs like this:
treasury official who trusts Goldman Sachs > SEC official who trusts Bernie Madoff > pets.com > average consumer > blowhard politician > almost any telecom > 90% of everything > other successful enterprises > most middling government minus the politics > private sector success story > open source success story > Archimedes
There are more PHBs in the enterprise space than in government. I've known many middle managers in government (Canada) and not one of them is like the PHB in Dilbert. The only one who comes close I heard about second hand. He gave a public speech to a bunch of technologists circa 1996 extolling the imminent victory of token ring over TCP/IP. Eyeballs nearly rolled out their sockets. Stupid supreme, on a tail wind supplied by private sector whiteshirts with infinite lunch money.
Microsoft owns the PHB space. Every PHB has their five minute moment where they must appear to demonstrate autonomy/competence by gathering a data point of evidence on a requirements checklist item. Bing is default search in provincial government here (government does not specialize in fighting battles it can't win, and you've got bigger fish to fry when the Oracle guy shows up). At some point some middle manager pulled up to a keyboard and typed five obscure search phrases into Google then Bing and then declared "see, it's not that much different!" Case closed.
That's all Microsoft usually cares about, what a dull or discouraged plastic knife can discern in a 5 minute sniff test.
Google arguing directly that it owns popularity data accruing to its search algorithms would put an interesting spin on "don't be evil". Popularity by its nature is hard to corral.
Sony has been on my skiplist for a long time now. I was seriously interested in programming the Cell chip, but it was welded at the hip to the Blu Ray tumour (and the politics that come with it), so I gave it a pass.
Recently purchased a camera as an mxas gift. Asked some people about their experiences. People who bought Sony AV equipment in the past had some stories about lack of ordinary interop, to put it mildly. Some of them put it in a good light: it's a lot better now with Sony's new products. Sorry, I've got better things to do than track Sony's progress through reform school.
In fact, there would be an infinite number of copies
An infinite number of at least one thing satisfies the infinite pigeon-hole principle. There's no interesting math here. Quantum particles are poorly defined (quick, what are the scaling limits on quantum computing?), the universe is probabilistic, and what causality exists is short range. But if we could count over a set which is physically non-enumerable in any sense that matters, you might have a point. I think you're trading on the casual presumption that an infinite universe only contains infinite things, when you yourself know better.
In related news, GE UK today announces the discovery that muonium Cooper pairs confined within a transparent aluminum lattice lengthens tau while decreasing atomic radius, potentially leading to a viable fusion energy source.
"It's possible we could fabricate power transmission lines directly from Transparent Muominium(TM) (TM), and disconnect the generating stations completely," declared a GE scientist, thumbing his nose at a rival division. "We've already begun a series of avian studies on TM power line safety. Of tests so far, the Nike proposal is presently the front runner. The bird brain is pre-adapted to this flagging icon, with effectiveness just slightly below live kittens."
GE aims to scale their prototype muominium fusion lattice to commercial production by the year 2020. Membership renewals with The International Federation of Kite Owners sagged 5% on the news.
I don't think in the second article that Adam Haslett brought much to the party. He seems to forget that one must first weed the flower bed before cultivating bonsai plants.
Many people have this view of human language akin to believing that your statement grammar is your entire language, which might border on the truth in Forth, Lisp, or APL. Hideously far from the truth if the language contains strong types, OOP, templates, exceptions, closures, or introspection.
OOP verges on personification. Bank accounts ingest and regurgitate, etc.
What was the topic again? Oh yes, muonium kicks ass.
a) genetics does not play a role in the formation of religious closed groups b) it does
False duality. c) depends on the parity of bits 3,7, and 11 of a crytographic hash of all the other genes.
Since the number of combinations of "all the other genes" exceeds the human population, you can't rule (c) out through population studies. The best you can achieve is "as presently averaged out, but susceptible to the change in the base rate of any other gene".
I'm willing to concede the likelihood that some genetic clusters in some initial conditions dispose a person to the religious M.O.
The other obvious statement is that if this were true, it would have happened already. Societies tend to be more religious during periods of high growth, and less religious when growth slows (which usually correlates with education, health care, and general wealth). I think the author underestimates the defection process.
One could say that religion is the counter-attack of the impoverished.
The Amish are an exception maintained by functioning as a exceedingly closed group. This kind of isolationism works in agriculture, but won't work so well in off-shore manufacture.
The best example we have of this functioning on a large scale is Utah. Appears population growth rate in Utah is high, but only recently the population of Utah surpassed Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Noah's Ark has come under stiff competition from Venter's Ark. Noah can't win. There's more genes than water.
Unix succeeded so well because it encourages failure. The C language is Spartan and direct. There are no safety nets. People who can't keep their pointers straight soon find themselves working in a different profession, such as programming in Java. This is the same dynamic described by Adam Smith for the free market.
In an expanding population, low birth age is an advantage. More generations: more tau growth multiples. In a declining population, delayed birth age is an advantage: fewer tau shrinkage multiples. Not for a long time has the western world experienced a consistently declining population due to high mortality (rather than family planning). We forget the other sweep of the pendulum.
A sunny day metabolism is not necessarily optimal for a rainy day. Clearly starvation has been a problem in the history of the human species, because it's awfully easy to tip into porker mode.
It could even be that our genetic program interprets indolence combined with high food intake as "pending baby explosion" and plans accordingly. In old school population dynamics, the best predictor of bust was boom. The same group of people lauded in this study for self-control under different conditions could be the group who starved to death waiting for social chaos to play itself out.
Unfortunately, mother nature didn't comment the code, so it can difficult to distinguish a bug from a feature.
// MoNa 332BC - coefficient of porkerhood boosted 10% // MoNa 145BC - coefficient of porkerhood boosted another 10%
Besides, those dates make no sense. We all know that MoNa would have written that date somewhere in the six thousand millennium block, though some dim bulbs have construed the four digit date stamp in years.
How many 300MW coal-burning power plant hours/days/months/years does it take to crack RC5-56/64/72/80? How Enron must cry that people are still doing this.
OTOH, there's nothing harmful to the computer about 24/7 computation if your computer was spec'd for it: better power supply, better cooling, modest processor TDP rating, and no overclocking.
The fastest available CPU is always running at the highest standard voltage. As Feynman once observed, the last data point in a physics experiment is always suspect, because if they could have taken another one, they would have.
Last week I spent nearly a full day on Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm in relation to a combinatorial problem in coding theory (it's not a strong fit, but I thought there might be a stray intuition).
This little divertimento lead me to discover some clever tricks in how to set up the Dancing Links matrix for a certain class of problems to avoid traversing symmetric solutions. Considering the apathy level on this story, it would be a waste of breath to spell it out here.
It's cute, but the guy is trying to make a bit too much of it. For me it's just a toy problem in simultaneous exact cover that lends itself to visual aphorisms.
Maybe he could do a 4x4x4x4 grid of Wang tiles (I'm thinking 4D cubes with coloured faces) where every 1x1x4x4 subslice of 16 Wang cubes can be assembled into a 2x2x2x2 hypercubelet with every 2x2 face of the target cubelets conforming to some property, such as colours all same, or colours all different, and the 24 assembled cubelets (if my math is right, and it always is--in cartoon world) form some interesting tour of the 24 palladium quasi-crystals oscillation nodes.
Anyone? It's the key to pentalobular Arc reactor containment, for anyone with a giant pile of mil-scrap.
This is some dolt that has a Journalism degree and knows absolutely nothing at all about "techie stuff". Most 13 year olds would eat the man alive in a technology discussion.
Spoken with the air of confidence of someone too lazy to even check Wikipedia. There is no lower rung of authority, excepting perhaps the hippie hot tub at my local swimming pool.
David Allen Gewirtz is an American journalist and author who has written more than 700 articles about technology, competitiveness, and national security policy.
I've read some of his stuff. He's not a stupid man, but sometimes he plays to his persona of a man straddling both sides of the fence far enough to set off the tilt detector.
He set himself up for a fall by parsing Obama's speech as if small deviations from saying nothing at all were tea leaves of predestination, whereas any competent 13 year old would have gone into instant vapour-lock and headed for the nearest six exits (simultaneously).
Long ago I briefly played a text MUD where you would type the verb "con" (consider) before picking a fight. There was this chick character I recall as the bartender at a pub where all the useless newbies hung out looking for a quick level up.
> con bartender You wet your pants!
> Google "David Gewirtz" You jostle your martini and nearly spill some.
That's only the beginning of the difference. Trains are hard to depressurize. Trains are hard to divert to Cuba. On a train, the engineer can hit the kill switch and grind to a controlled stop, at which point the terrorist is at a distinct disadvantage: you have helicopters, and they don't.
Until the invention of the Noisy Cricket, the helicopter problem won't be solved by anything smuggled onto a train between a pair of hairy gonad ears.
For NBC scenarios, we've already got the pat-free subway system, with a lot more sardines on ice.
Gewirtz obviously diverted too many brain cells dealing with the Tea Party sentence that compiled -Wall warning free.
I have huge monitors and the gluebar at the top of the screen makes my skin crawl. This design element now part of the firmament is not cosmic. Let's not calculate this feature in interactions/month/fixed pixel.
How about some yellow tooltips on those six toolbar links showing time since last use? Several of those would read "You have never clicked on this link" and one would read "this does not contain the kill switch you're looking for, even though you persist in visiting twice a year".
The idea that industrialization, capitalism and corporations are inherently evil is laughable, rather, through them acting in their own interests they have lead us to a high standard of living.
This is becoming an old fable. I've heard this sermon many time at the church of Rev. Russ Roberts. Like all fables, it has a compelling grain of truth. Worse than believing it too much is not believing it at all.
What I don't get is why this particular fable hooks so deeply into the evangelism reflex of a certain segment of the population. In my grade two school year we learned about Gerry Germ (no connection with the Germans failing to prop up the Euro). A certain segment of the classroom took Gerry Germ to heart. You could practically see them cross out "cleanliness is next to godliness" and replace it with "sterilization is next to godliness". No mention of hormensis to balance the dialog. Or the fact that the human bag of water consists of more bacterial cells than human cells.
I've never thought the free market fable belonged on the sterilization rung of inner conviction. Societies that fail to harness the motive power of self interest fail to flourish. Societies that inject self interest into the blood stream with a syringe have entirely different problems.
It's such a tricky fable. Sometimes you see it reduced to a pithy epigram: private wealth is a public good. Except when it isn't. Except when private wealth stuffs $300 million into his jeans and flies off to a private island with hooker fiance shortly before the big implosion.
Private wealth *can* function as a public good, when public policy constrains it to do so. The problem is that the average moralistic mind presumes that the necessary constraints are denominated in outcomes. This leads to exactly the kinds of constraints that sap economic vigour.
The correct constraints are the kind that hold the feet of every party in the economy to the fire of market discipline. Almost the first thing that happens when someone piles up a billion dollars is a careful examination of how to escape market discipline. Scratch any entrepreneur, you'll find a loss averse MOFO. The entire business agenda of RIAA and the MPAA can be summarized effectively as "escape market discipline".
Market discipline is what results from clear price signals and voluntary transactions among equal parties. The opposite of market discipline is being unable to understand your phone bill, or not knowing what you spent the last month until you're hit by billshock.
Here's your modern quasi-capitalist business plan: work your ass off, become rich and powerful, abuse money and power to escape market discipline. In the first phase, public good is created. In the closing phase, public good is shuffled into Swiss bank accounts.
Corporations differ in how they progress through the quasi-capitalist life cycle. If Monsanto ever spent a day in the first phase, I've never heard about it. In this economy, if market discipline is pinching your toes (and you have a fat enough wallet) you can always find a congressman to help loosen your shoes.
Greenspan believed that market discipline was somehow miraculously self-perpetuating. If the banks under initial conditions were subject to market-discipline, their entwined self interest would gridlock any available escape route. History proves differently. All that was needed to break this system was a big enough sleeping blind as provided by Joe homeowner, who stupidly behaved as if Greenspan had a correct view of the world. They calculated their economic outcome on the presumption of a forbidden outcome and it all looked good. False presumption, raining down from on high.
The irony is that the system was quite stable for a long time, before people started to put faith in this stability on an ideological basis. Yet the preaching continues, as if nothing was learned.
Knuths' books used to be the dope, now they're more like the antidote. Most code monkeys these days are consumed by hacking their way through the jungle overgrowth and not losing sight of the sky (33 million lines of code in Helios). We've become so engaged by the canopy, we actually forget the soil has worms. There are times when it would be useful to regain this awareness.
As fascinating as the worms are, most code monkeys have poor digestive capacity for worms. Those of us who are ecologists rather than arborists can extract a fair amount of value from these volumes. And then we can argue among ourselves who maintains the 10,000 lines of code in Helios where adjusting the nitrogen level makes much of a difference.
BTW, I recommend his paper on Dancing Links for exact cover, even if the technique is less general than I hoped, it's still clever. On that note, Knuth couldn't code an extension point to save his life. He's the grand master of clock-work monoliths.
Mod parent up. If it went over your head, read it again. Input enough mental energy to achieve comprehensive, then enjoy the ride down.
Another thing: the idea that there's no value in a reported result until it's been replicated is crap. There's value in the initial report if a stock market trader who acts on the information (that everyone else chooses to ignore) makes a larger profit in the long run (all averaged out).
Prior to corroboration through replication, you're trying to reach judgement on inherent plausibility and anticipated impact. The prior expectation for this kind of thing is extremely low. If the hints that they've muscled other scientists away from measuring specific observables have any truth, we can take the low prior and pour in a fistfull of additional zeros.
If the specific observables are being hushed up for proprietary reasons, they aren't actually doing science, which is a collaborative endeavor or STFU.
If there's no specific observable which sheds light on what is taking place in this reaction, they need a pretty strong argument about why they have failed to detect the change of physical state associated with energy release. (News flash: unchanged matter releases energy.) Trace quantities of an unusual isotope of nickle or copper can't go unobserved for long in a sustained reaction.
Novel electron configurations of the hydrogen atom might go unobserved, since the modified hydrogen would be hard to isolate (yes, we're fairly deep into science fiction here). But surely if produced in large quantities (aka commercialization) you'd soon be picking up differences in spectral emissions or something, even without isolating it from the regular hydrogen.
This special hydrogen is interesting stuff. Los Alamos will be glad to finally discover why their yield calculations have never come out right. And if regular hydrogen has a decay rate to special hydrogen (with an energy release) we can finally correct our model of the cosmic background radiation, too, eliminating another sore spot.
So this is potentially a pretty big result which would change our understanding of the visible universe, and yet somehow it's been there all along only we've just never managed to see it.
This reminds me of the joke "security is easy, it's granting access that's the hard part". Where did I read that? Can't find it right now.
In the endeavour of genetically modified organisms, no investors equals no containment. But that's what you mean, right? You're concerned they're just gonna release these pipettes into the wild without seeking proper entrepreneurial safeguards.
On a real IT planet, you have a problem, you solve the problem, you deploy the solution, tweak it until it works forever, and then you move to the next cycle. File servers are yesterday's news. Should there be any cost there over and above electricity and depreciation? Yes, I know I'm exaggerating a bit, there also has to be a massive restructuring of middle management every time disk drive technology breaks through another BIOS barrier. On a real IT planet, BIOS barriers are not revisited in living memory.
In economics, there is this problem about the reference basket for measuring the inflation rate. Sometimes you have to update the reference basket.
I think Microsoft is partly pulling off the funny math by ignoring the fact that if you stick with open source, your reference basket updates more quickly as things you used to pay for become to cheap to meter.
For the high churn technology that isn't yet too cheap to meter (and Microsoft dearly hopes this day never arrives) the cost of integration within an open source culture is non trivial, but it comes along with the agenda of eliminating the problem forever, not just persisting with the bleed and weep status quo, turning it over with one low low low small-bite-out-of-your-ass monthly payment until the end of time.
With the basket of goods thing, an idiot can mount a persuasive case that the cost of living in 2010 exceeds the cost of living in real terms in 1970, by placing zero value on any of the goods that couldn't be bought back then for any price. This would be done by focusing on the cost of energy which has gone up (maybe back date this to 1968), rather than what you can now do with the same unit of energy (talk on the phone to Asia for a whole tank of gas, and not owe the phone company a kilo of coke).
It also performs a whole lot better. In x86 terms, the raw CPU power of an ARM is like a Pentium 300Mhz.
For the new ARM devices, maybe a Pentium III 300, which wasn't all that slow unless bloated down by a fat OS. Note that we're talking a Pentium III 300 with a gigabyte of (faster) memory to spread its wings, not the one you remember owning with 256MB that specialized in PATA cable supervision.
Intel might even be able to throw together some recycled 90s technology with comparable performance and end up with something ARMs equal in power.
Not a chance in hell, unless you give Intel a huge process advantage. This is a myth that predates your four digit user ID.
The myth was that RISC would outperform CISC. Never happened. It was true that a small design team implementing some beautiful clean RISC would outperform a similar small design team implementing some clunky CISC. When's the last time a small design team implemented x86 at the high end?
The ISA is only half the battle. Both team have to work equally hard on the memory subsystem, bus protocol, cache coherency, and glue logic. The complexity of a branch predictor has little to do with the ISA (unless your architecture is so weird it enforces different coding practices, witness Itanium or Cell, neither of which engendered fondness).
The myth should have been that RISC would outperform CISC with a constrained power budget, but the reality distortion engines of the day were unable to burn such a low octane fuel. Doesn't show up much in your pet Photoshop filter.
Fundamental power advantage was always true of ARM vs x86. Decoding an irregular instruction set takes more power. Scoreboarding a huge in-flight register set sucks power (which x86 needs to so, because the named register set was too small). Tracking partial flag register updates sucks power. All these sucky things in x86 can be hidden, because with cleverness (aka well resourced design team) all these tricky units can do their magic in parallel on every cycle. Performance achieved is fine, heat is not.
x86 actually gets a bit of a boost from all this trickiness, since you can build some optimization into it (you already paid for the extra pipeline stages). Bonus from the huge in-flight register set is that it's very good at hiding latency. x86 always benched well on Paris-Dakar, but was less impressive on groomed track compared to the RISC thoroughbreds.
When you back out the clever furnace rooms from an x86 implementation you end up with a WinChip. Remember those? Those were essentially a 200Mhz 486 with no latency hiding and still a lot hotter than an ARM chip with comparable performance.
The performance constraints with ARM doesn't matter much these days. Performance critical functions like video transcoding or compositing can be handled by dedicated silicon. A 200 watt CPU plays chess at a 3000+ chess rating these days. For most people, a 1 watt CPU plays well enough. ARM is still underpowered for self-hosting. Are there crazy kids out there these days that can't figure out how to use a wall outlet, or don't know which end is up on a full sized keyboard?
If you think Intel can just grab some old technology from the 1990s, maybe you think you could take a Corvette engine block from the 1970s, disable a couple of cylinders, refit the carb. and get 50 mpg.
Or you could start with a cylinder block designed for the purpose.
I missed one point to bring this around slightly more on topic. If you concede that a tax system is a necessary evil as society is presently constituted (pending some hard won enlightenment), the best tax is shallow and wide, with no exemptions whatsoever. Whenever you make a tax more narrow (by pencilling out penicillin for grandmothers) the consequence is that everything else must taxed that much higher.
The higher the tax rate, the more it distorts and encumbers Hayekian vigour. Flat taxes are also much harder to gerrymander like electoral districts and less costly to collect since you don't need complex classification guidelines.
Every dollar that goes untaxed straight into a Swiss bank account just makes the tax burden that much worse for the rest of us. If your goal is to see the tax system collapse and human civilization 2.0 arise from the ashes of chaos (mysteriously free of the shackles of Caesar), this is a good thing.
Not one person here would voluntarily pay taxes if they didn't have to.
You're a bit dim concerning the larger scheme of things if you think you can cast the net that wide without catching a cactus. The short answer is that any person who has ever chosen a lottery or a casino over a mutual fund is not half as tax averse as you make out.
I was reading John Rawls "Justice as Fairness" not long ago. He has this concept of the "original position". The way I recall the idea, you get to choose how the world is constructed, but you don't know who you will be when you wake up in this world when it comes into creation. You could be anyone, with uniform probability.
With no foreknowledge of personal privilege, do you choose a world with no tax system? Or a world with kinds of institutions that have evolved in society as we know it? Some worlds will combine spectacular opportunity with spectacular inequity. The bottom of the pyramid is fat, so your odds of showing up as a burger flipper are relatively high; or with small probability, you could be the patriarch of Galt's Gulch.
I didn't think the concept of choosing before coming into being was all that philosophically brilliant, but some people can't get their minds around the difference between choosing a *system* you can live with, or choosing your place within it, and that needed to be addressed. So I give Rawls his due.
In a fictitious world where the no-tax fairy arrives and asks you if you would like a lifetime tax exemption, not many people would turn the offer down. But that's fantasy, not insight.
If the Libertarian-transporter fairy arrived, and offered to poof you into a society organized on Libertarian ideals, with nothing resembling a tax system, I'd be terrified about what kind of society I might get poofed into. It's hard to pay for each service required individually, that would be a treadmill from hell, so I guess there has to be some kind of group organization, I can only imagine many of the groups once formed resemble condo associations. Ugh. But it's voluntary, so the coffee tastes great.
There's a perception in world aid circles that when a country with a weak civic infrastructure discovers vast resource wealth (diamonds, oil, tantalum) that the country is just as likely to tip into civil war as to become an affluent society. And even if the society does become affluent in the short term, when the resource is exhausted, the country usually declines, and often ends up worse off than their neighbours, who didn't stub their toe on a giant diamond mine, and had to build their social capital the hard way. Countries with strong social institutions, like Canada, tend to benefit the most from resource wealth. Some countries with little resource wealth but cohesive institutions manage OK, because they don't have much choice, other than to work hard and row together.
We're still learning that human nature is not as intrinsically wealth maximizing as many economists would portray it. I always think of one of the original theories of fluid dynamics, which perfectly described the behaviour of water, neglecting surface tension. Great, someone remarked, we now have the complete theory of water that isn't wet.
It's the surface tension term in human nature that leads to cohesive social institutions. Sapolsky studied some non-human primates where self-interest is a lot more raw (the animals behave like impulsive two-year-olds). It was pretty clear they weren't able to stop bickering long enough to stack one stone on top of another, much less bake a mud brick. Libertarian to the last hairy armpit. What in economic theory distinguishes us from them? Our greed is more nuanced and restrained.
One thing you can say in favour of Libertarianism is that it serves as an intellectual flu shot against certain kinds of really terrible thinking about how society could be better ordered, by the same kinds of people who destroyed Africa (out of kindness).
Personally, there's no social structure I understa
Slashdot Mirror
News to me. Who's calling it irrelevant?
Didn't you get the memo from the department of small minds? Importance is now measured with a blood pressure cuff.
When a brick decides to be a simple brick "Imminent Storm Threatens Village".
In Zittrain's world (The Future of the Internet and How to Mess it Up Real Bad) what matters most of all in technology is generativity: the usefulness of a brick to support other bricks. Possibly I mean Lego bricks, but more likely I mean Mechano, since generativity gloms in all directions.
I've also read that C and/or C++ are less important than they once were, all the importance has shifted to other languages, themselves written in C/C++. Moreover, Internet Protocol is also overrated, and all the addresses are gone anyway. What matters now are Facebook pages.
Will this stupidity never end? Why do some people feel the need to stand up and scream from the rooftops "I don't get generativity"?
Debian sucked when it was the dominant distribution. Debian's proper place in the universe is as the primary building block for other distributions with looser morals. Debasement and gloss are the last layers in mass appeal. They almost always travel together.
I wrote this last time. The concept that Microsoft users have granted informed consent is overrated. What they've mostly granted is consent through rational ignorance, because Microsoft controls the process by which consent is granted. A more efficient way for users to assert their moral sentiments would not result in nearly so much "permission".
Example of an efficient mechanism: a user permission policy configuration which conveys appropriate sentiments to all installed and online applications, without the user ever facing 20 pages of fine print with an "I agree" button underneath, in order to receive a service benefit smaller in value than a free cup of coffee.
When web TV is universal, every major web TV decoder box brand will be able to aggregate any information passing to any click-through-consenting consenting viewer. The sports analyst on ESPN predicts one team, every other network can go live with the same prediction five minutes later, because a consenting viewer of ESPN has passed their cable box provider this tidbit of information, which is now public domain, and doesn't even need to be referred back to the original source, so attribution is dead, too.
What makes Google different (in a critical yet small way) is that users clicking on offered search links is essentially popularity data. It's a lot harder to argue that popularity data isn't public domain, even when the popularity accrues 100% to Google's huge investment in search innovation.
What might be fair play here is for Bing to mark search results offered exclusively on popularity data as such, meaning that their own search algorithm made an insignificant contribution to the result offered.
Of course, Microsoft won't consent that this is even a viable technical option. In some human languages, you actually have to speak differently of things you seen yourself vs things you've only heard second hand. A distinction has to be pretty deeply wired in the human psyche to become embedded in grammatical necessity in any human language.
I repeat that the real story here is translating click-through-consent obtained through rational ignorance as equal to first class permission.
The Fanjul family, who owns large sugar farms in the Florida Everglades, capture an estimated $60 million annually in artificial profits.
If the sugar industry ran like the software industry, every time I opened a bag of sugar, there would a sticker I would have to break granting my consent to the national sugar tariff, or no sugar for me. I would do like everyone else and buy the sugar anyway and the Fanjul family would sleep peacefully at night with the consent of the nation on their side.
Well, there are thousands of things that instantly lose my consent if I could only organize by lack of consent more efficiently, like adding to the "I agree" button a tooltip which says "not really".
What a click-through agreement actually amounts to:
For purposes of my minuscule relationship with giant corporation, we'll act for legal purposes as if I accept this legal text, but don't think for a moment I've given my moral consent or permission to engage in unethical business practices based on the latitude big corporation has carved itself with this wall of fine print
[ We understand each other ] ... [ Go jump in a lake ]
When Tony Soprano requests a garbage removal fee, does the person paying the fee consent to its payment?
More disturbing for me during this whole mess is the fact that Microsoft is capturing my mouse clicks and visited links when I am using the browser, and sending that captured data back to Microsoft.
Yes, that's the real story here.
Imagine Windows came with excellent speech recognition and it monitored your microphone 24/7 for intelligible sentences, then reported back to the Führerbunker any fragments that sounded like a viable stock tip, e.g. scraps of ambient conversations with your financial adviser, and that Microsoft sometimes aggregates this information to move the market against you.
(The dweebs here will instantly pipe up that this could be used to game Microsoft, but the fact of the matter is that where money is concerned, there's always a smartest guy at the poker table, and generally it's the party with the most information; and moreover, the comeuppance mirth is greatly over reported, as per continued behaviour of large stack poker player in case you haven't noticed.)
Back to the audible sharing. Imagine just how clear the fine print on the EULA must have been to get hundreds of millions of Windows users to click on the button labelled "rational ignorance".
Obviously my example is exaggerated. For a good reason. The point is that we regard the privacy of our financial relationships as a solid whole. We don't click on brain-numbing agreements 100 times per day that might nibble away at that solid whole. It's just wrong! We don't expect to find some power-hungry middleman with a drinking glass to the door every time we discuss financial matters.
What we need here is the ability for end users to set up a personal profile of acceptable behaviour. If the text of an EULA violates your personal standard (as codified) you CAN'T CLICK ON IT without first resolving the conflict (permit exception, change policy, or refuse agreement).
If this were consolidated enough it wouldn't be so easy for companies like Microsoft to sneak consent under the carpet of rational ignorance.
In this story, Google is acting as a personal search adviser, and Microsoft clearly has a glass to door. I just hate the part where they claim that millions of users find this acceptable by virtue of having clicked on something they never understood in the first place while having no central option to enforce their own view of the world.
I wish I had the same facility for some of my Linux system preferences.
Here's my personal preference concerning HTML formatted email: shove it up your protocol stack
I wish I could set this and have my installer refuse to install Evolution completely, unless Evolution first disables this feature.
There are others, presently locked away behind the curtain of blind rage, which I don't wish at this moment to draw back.
Why do I have to police these preferences on every apt-get transaction myself? It's like driving through town having to shake your head (or worse) at a squeegee punk at every red light.
Charged with what exactly?
OK, so one brain hasn't punched out.
At a casino, you get busted for counting cards because it's essentially a private facility and they are free to enforce house rules.
The retailers are bound by retail agreements. Sifting before you sell would get you into serious hot water.
In some games of chance, large winnings are taxable, so you can get into big hot water by failing to report your earnings.
In this scenario, had he taken that path: he's not entering the premises of a lottery corporation, he's not conspiring with retailers to break the retail process, and (from what others have said) the winnings from these tickets in Ontario are not taxable.
Changed with what exactly? Charged with bogus charges that don't stick, most likely, just to uphold the common sentiment that winning at games for losers is unethical.
Thankfully, I haven't been charged when making winning picks on the stock exchange. It's not actually illegal to use a formula which gives you an edge, only if the information required is insider information.
Speaking of brains on dialtone, I have it on good authority from Michael E. Mann that geological statisticians from Ontario don't know their sigma from a shaft in the dirt.
Fortunately, no lotto ticket designers were terminated with cause, and no peer reviewed studies (where peer is defined as people as bad at stats as you are) were formally repealed as a result of these crackpots.
My point is that this 'experiment' doesn't prove a thing, and to point the finger on this kind of evidence is extremely childish.
I disagree, but it took me a moment to figure out that you actually had a point to disagree with.
What's apparent here is that Microsoft is siphoning popularity data on a wide scale on the back of fine print that hardly anyone reads, is rarely understood, and most people would resent, if it was worth the bother.
Rational ignorance
In this case, the popularity for these nonsense lexemes was entirely driven by Google creating a nonsense search result. I guess you're essentially saying that Google's power to drive popularity is so great it amounts to a public good. Legally, I'm not even sure how to frame the converse.
I have a slightly different stupidity scale than most people. Mine runs like this:
treasury official who trusts Goldman Sachs > SEC official who trusts Bernie Madoff > pets.com > average consumer > blowhard politician > almost any telecom > 90% of everything > other successful enterprises > most middling government minus the politics > private sector success story > open source success story > Archimedes
There are more PHBs in the enterprise space than in government. I've known many middle managers in government (Canada) and not one of them is like the PHB in Dilbert. The only one who comes close I heard about second hand. He gave a public speech to a bunch of technologists circa 1996 extolling the imminent victory of token ring over TCP/IP. Eyeballs nearly rolled out their sockets. Stupid supreme, on a tail wind supplied by private sector whiteshirts with infinite lunch money.
Microsoft owns the PHB space. Every PHB has their five minute moment where they must appear to demonstrate autonomy/competence by gathering a data point of evidence on a requirements checklist item. Bing is default search in provincial government here (government does not specialize in fighting battles it can't win, and you've got bigger fish to fry when the Oracle guy shows up). At some point some middle manager pulled up to a keyboard and typed five obscure search phrases into Google then Bing and then declared "see, it's not that much different!" Case closed.
That's all Microsoft usually cares about, what a dull or discouraged plastic knife can discern in a 5 minute sniff test.
Google arguing directly that it owns popularity data accruing to its search algorithms would put an interesting spin on "don't be evil". Popularity by its nature is hard to corral.
Oh, look, they've stolen Apple's motto, too.
Sony has been on my skiplist for a long time now. I was seriously interested in programming the Cell chip, but it was welded at the hip to the Blu Ray tumour (and the politics that come with it), so I gave it a pass.
Recently purchased a camera as an mxas gift. Asked some people about their experiences. People who bought Sony AV equipment in the past had some stories about lack of ordinary interop, to put it mildly. Some of them put it in a good light: it's a lot better now with Sony's new products. Sorry, I've got better things to do than track Sony's progress through reform school.
Never much liked Frank, either.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
More or less same school of management.
In fact, there would be an infinite number of copies
An infinite number of at least one thing satisfies the infinite pigeon-hole principle. There's no interesting math here. Quantum particles are poorly defined (quick, what are the scaling limits on quantum computing?), the universe is probabilistic, and what causality exists is short range. But if we could count over a set which is physically non-enumerable in any sense that matters, you might have a point. I think you're trading on the casual presumption that an infinite universe only contains infinite things, when you yourself know better.
In related news, GE UK today announces the discovery that muonium Cooper pairs confined within a transparent aluminum lattice lengthens tau while decreasing atomic radius, potentially leading to a viable fusion energy source.
"It's possible we could fabricate power transmission lines directly from Transparent Muominium(TM) (TM), and disconnect the generating stations completely," declared a GE scientist, thumbing his nose at a rival division. "We've already begun a series of avian studies on TM power line safety. Of tests so far, the Nike proposal is presently the front runner. The bird brain is pre-adapted to this flagging icon, with effectiveness just slightly below live kittens."
GE aims to scale their prototype muominium fusion lattice to commercial production by the year 2020. Membership renewals with The International Federation of Kite Owners sagged 5% on the news.
Humans really hate personification. We definitely don't do it constantly to pretty much any plant, animal or object.
Programmed for Love
The art of good writing
I don't think in the second article that Adam Haslett brought much to the party. He seems to forget that one must first weed the flower bed before cultivating bonsai plants.
Many people have this view of human language akin to believing that your statement grammar is your entire language, which might border on the truth in Forth, Lisp, or APL. Hideously far from the truth if the language contains strong types, OOP, templates, exceptions, closures, or introspection.
OOP verges on personification. Bank accounts ingest and regurgitate, etc.
What was the topic again? Oh yes, muonium kicks ass.
a) genetics does not play a role in the formation of religious closed groups
b) it does
False duality.
c) depends on the parity of bits 3,7, and 11 of a crytographic hash of all the other genes.
Since the number of combinations of "all the other genes" exceeds the human population, you can't rule (c) out through population studies. The best you can achieve is "as presently averaged out, but susceptible to the change in the base rate of any other gene".
I'm willing to concede the likelihood that some genetic clusters in some initial conditions dispose a person to the religious M.O.
The other obvious statement is that if this were true, it would have happened already. Societies tend to be more religious during periods of high growth, and less religious when growth slows (which usually correlates with education, health care, and general wealth). I think the author underestimates the defection process.
One could say that religion is the counter-attack of the impoverished.
The Amish are an exception maintained by functioning as a exceedingly closed group. This kind of isolationism works in agriculture, but won't work so well in off-shore manufacture.
The best example we have of this functioning on a large scale is Utah. Appears population growth rate in Utah is high, but only recently the population of Utah surpassed Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Noah's Ark has come under stiff competition from Venter's Ark. Noah can't win. There's more genes than water.
Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated by the author of Utah's favorite book.
Unix succeeded so well because it encourages failure. The C language is Spartan and direct. There are no safety nets. People who can't keep their pointers straight soon find themselves working in a different profession, such as programming in Java. This is the same dynamic described by Adam Smith for the free market.
In an expanding population, low birth age is an advantage. More generations: more tau growth multiples. In a declining population, delayed birth age is an advantage: fewer tau shrinkage multiples. Not for a long time has the western world experienced a consistently declining population due to high mortality (rather than family planning). We forget the other sweep of the pendulum.
A sunny day metabolism is not necessarily optimal for a rainy day. Clearly starvation has been a problem in the history of the human species, because it's awfully easy to tip into porker mode.
It could even be that our genetic program interprets indolence combined with high food intake as "pending baby explosion" and plans accordingly. In old school population dynamics, the best predictor of bust was boom. The same group of people lauded in this study for self-control under different conditions could be the group who starved to death waiting for social chaos to play itself out.
Unfortunately, mother nature didn't comment the code, so it can difficult to distinguish a bug from a feature.
Besides, those dates make no sense. We all know that MoNa would have written that date somewhere in the six thousand millennium block, though some dim bulbs have construed the four digit date stamp in years.
How many 300MW coal-burning power plant hours/days/months/years does it take to crack RC5-56/64/72/80? How Enron must cry that people are still doing this.
OTOH, there's nothing harmful to the computer about 24/7 computation if your computer was spec'd for it: better power supply, better cooling, modest processor TDP rating, and no overclocking.
The fastest available CPU is always running at the highest standard voltage. As Feynman once observed, the last data point in a physics experiment is always suspect, because if they could have taken another one, they would have.
The environment, however, is another matter.
Not much excitement in this thread.
Last week I spent nearly a full day on Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm in relation to a combinatorial problem in coding theory (it's not a strong fit, but I thought there might be a stray intuition).
This little divertimento lead me to discover some clever tricks in how to set up the Dancing Links matrix for a certain class of problems to avoid traversing symmetric solutions. Considering the apathy level on this story, it would be a waste of breath to spell it out here.
It's cute, but the guy is trying to make a bit too much of it. For me it's just a toy problem in simultaneous exact cover that lends itself to visual aphorisms.
Maybe he could do a 4x4x4x4 grid of Wang tiles (I'm thinking 4D cubes with coloured faces) where every 1x1x4x4 subslice of 16 Wang cubes can be assembled into a 2x2x2x2 hypercubelet with every 2x2 face of the target cubelets conforming to some property, such as colours all same, or colours all different, and the 24 assembled cubelets (if my math is right, and it always is--in cartoon world) form some interesting tour of the 24 palladium quasi-crystals oscillation nodes.
Anyone? It's the key to pentalobular Arc reactor containment, for anyone with a giant pile of mil-scrap.
This is some dolt that has a Journalism degree and knows absolutely nothing at all about "techie stuff". Most 13 year olds would eat the man alive in a technology discussion.
Spoken with the air of confidence of someone too lazy to even check Wikipedia. There is no lower rung of authority, excepting perhaps the hippie hot tub at my local swimming pool.
From David Gewirtz
David Allen Gewirtz is an American journalist and author who has written more than 700 articles about technology, competitiveness, and national security policy.
I've read some of his stuff. He's not a stupid man, but sometimes he plays to his persona of a man straddling both sides of the fence far enough to set off the tilt detector.
He set himself up for a fall by parsing Obama's speech as if small deviations from saying nothing at all were tea leaves of predestination, whereas any competent 13 year old would have gone into instant vapour-lock and headed for the nearest six exits (simultaneously).
Long ago I briefly played a text MUD where you would type the verb "con" (consider) before picking a fight. There was this chick character I recall as the bartender at a pub where all the useless newbies hung out looking for a quick level up.
> con bartender
You wet your pants!
> Google "David Gewirtz"
You jostle your martini and nearly spill some.
Try it some time.
That's only the beginning of the difference. Trains are hard to depressurize. Trains are hard to divert to Cuba. On a train, the engineer can hit the kill switch and grind to a controlled stop, at which point the terrorist is at a distinct disadvantage: you have helicopters, and they don't.
Until the invention of the Noisy Cricket, the helicopter problem won't be solved by anything smuggled onto a train between a pair of hairy gonad ears.
For NBC scenarios, we've already got the pat-free subway system, with a lot more sardines on ice.
Gewirtz obviously diverted too many brain cells dealing with the Tea Party sentence that compiled -Wall warning free.
I have huge monitors and the gluebar at the top of the screen makes my skin crawl. This design element now part of the firmament is not cosmic. Let's not calculate this feature in interactions/month/fixed pixel.
How about some yellow tooltips on those six toolbar links showing time since last use? Several of those would read "You have never clicked on this link" and one would read "this does not contain the kill switch you're looking for, even though you persist in visiting twice a year".
The idea that industrialization, capitalism and corporations are inherently evil is laughable, rather, through them acting in their own interests they have lead us to a high standard of living.
This is becoming an old fable. I've heard this sermon many time at the church of Rev. Russ Roberts. Like all fables, it has a compelling grain of truth. Worse than believing it too much is not believing it at all.
What I don't get is why this particular fable hooks so deeply into the evangelism reflex of a certain segment of the population. In my grade two school year we learned about Gerry Germ (no connection with the Germans failing to prop up the Euro). A certain segment of the classroom took Gerry Germ to heart. You could practically see them cross out "cleanliness is next to godliness" and replace it with "sterilization is next to godliness". No mention of hormensis to balance the dialog. Or the fact that the human bag of water consists of more bacterial cells than human cells.
I've never thought the free market fable belonged on the sterilization rung of inner conviction. Societies that fail to harness the motive power of self interest fail to flourish. Societies that inject self interest into the blood stream with a syringe have entirely different problems.
It's such a tricky fable. Sometimes you see it reduced to a pithy epigram: private wealth is a public good. Except when it isn't. Except when private wealth stuffs $300 million into his jeans and flies off to a private island with hooker fiance shortly before the big implosion.
Private wealth *can* function as a public good, when public policy constrains it to do so. The problem is that the average moralistic mind presumes that the necessary constraints are denominated in outcomes. This leads to exactly the kinds of constraints that sap economic vigour.
The correct constraints are the kind that hold the feet of every party in the economy to the fire of market discipline. Almost the first thing that happens when someone piles up a billion dollars is a careful examination of how to escape market discipline. Scratch any entrepreneur, you'll find a loss averse MOFO. The entire business agenda of RIAA and the MPAA can be summarized effectively as "escape market discipline".
Market discipline is what results from clear price signals and voluntary transactions among equal parties. The opposite of market discipline is being unable to understand your phone bill, or not knowing what you spent the last month until you're hit by billshock.
Here's your modern quasi-capitalist business plan: work your ass off, become rich and powerful, abuse money and power to escape market discipline. In the first phase, public good is created. In the closing phase, public good is shuffled into Swiss bank accounts.
Corporations differ in how they progress through the quasi-capitalist life cycle. If Monsanto ever spent a day in the first phase, I've never heard about it. In this economy, if market discipline is pinching your toes (and you have a fat enough wallet) you can always find a congressman to help loosen your shoes.
Greenspan believed that market discipline was somehow miraculously self-perpetuating. If the banks under initial conditions were subject to market-discipline, their entwined self interest would gridlock any available escape route. History proves differently. All that was needed to break this system was a big enough sleeping blind as provided by Joe homeowner, who stupidly behaved as if Greenspan had a correct view of the world. They calculated their economic outcome on the presumption of a forbidden outcome and it all looked good. False presumption, raining down from on high.
The irony is that the system was quite stable for a long time, before people started to put faith in this stability on an ideological basis. Yet the preaching continues, as if nothing was learned.
Knuths' books used to be the dope, now they're more like the antidote. Most code monkeys these days are consumed by hacking their way through the jungle overgrowth and not losing sight of the sky (33 million lines of code in Helios). We've become so engaged by the canopy, we actually forget the soil has worms. There are times when it would be useful to regain this awareness.
As fascinating as the worms are, most code monkeys have poor digestive capacity for worms. Those of us who are ecologists rather than arborists can extract a fair amount of value from these volumes. And then we can argue among ourselves who maintains the 10,000 lines of code in Helios where adjusting the nitrogen level makes much of a difference.
BTW, I recommend his paper on Dancing Links for exact cover, even if the technique is less general than I hoped, it's still clever. On that note, Knuth couldn't code an extension point to save his life. He's the grand master of clock-work monoliths.
Mod parent up. If it went over your head, read it again. Input enough mental energy to achieve comprehensive, then enjoy the ride down.
Another thing: the idea that there's no value in a reported result until it's been replicated is crap. There's value in the initial report if a stock market trader who acts on the information (that everyone else chooses to ignore) makes a larger profit in the long run (all averaged out).
Prior to corroboration through replication, you're trying to reach judgement on inherent plausibility and anticipated impact. The prior expectation for this kind of thing is extremely low. If the hints that they've muscled other scientists away from measuring specific observables have any truth, we can take the low prior and pour in a fistfull of additional zeros.
If the specific observables are being hushed up for proprietary reasons, they aren't actually doing science, which is a collaborative endeavor or STFU.
If there's no specific observable which sheds light on what is taking place in this reaction, they need a pretty strong argument about why they have failed to detect the change of physical state associated with energy release. (News flash: unchanged matter releases energy.) Trace quantities of an unusual isotope of nickle or copper can't go unobserved for long in a sustained reaction.
Novel electron configurations of the hydrogen atom might go unobserved, since the modified hydrogen would be hard to isolate (yes, we're fairly deep into science fiction here). But surely if produced in large quantities (aka commercialization) you'd soon be picking up differences in spectral emissions or something, even without isolating it from the regular hydrogen.
This special hydrogen is interesting stuff. Los Alamos will be glad to finally discover why their yield calculations have never come out right. And if regular hydrogen has a decay rate to special hydrogen (with an energy release) we can finally correct our model of the cosmic background radiation, too, eliminating another sore spot.
So this is potentially a pretty big result which would change our understanding of the visible universe, and yet somehow it's been there all along only we've just never managed to see it.
This reminds me of the joke "security is easy, it's granting access that's the hard part". Where did I read that? Can't find it right now.
In the endeavour of genetically modified organisms, no investors equals no containment. But that's what you mean, right? You're concerned they're just gonna release these pipettes into the wild without seeking proper entrepreneurial safeguards.
On a real IT planet, you have a problem, you solve the problem, you deploy the solution, tweak it until it works forever, and then you move to the next cycle. File servers are yesterday's news. Should there be any cost there over and above electricity and depreciation? Yes, I know I'm exaggerating a bit, there also has to be a massive restructuring of middle management every time disk drive technology breaks through another BIOS barrier. On a real IT planet, BIOS barriers are not revisited in living memory.
In economics, there is this problem about the reference basket for measuring the inflation rate. Sometimes you have to update the reference basket.
I think Microsoft is partly pulling off the funny math by ignoring the fact that if you stick with open source, your reference basket updates more quickly as things you used to pay for become to cheap to meter.
For the high churn technology that isn't yet too cheap to meter (and Microsoft dearly hopes this day never arrives) the cost of integration within an open source culture is non trivial, but it comes along with the agenda of eliminating the problem forever, not just persisting with the bleed and weep status quo, turning it over with one low low low small-bite-out-of-your-ass monthly payment until the end of time.
With the basket of goods thing, an idiot can mount a persuasive case that the cost of living in 2010 exceeds the cost of living in real terms in 1970, by placing zero value on any of the goods that couldn't be bought back then for any price. This would be done by focusing on the cost of energy which has gone up (maybe back date this to 1968), rather than what you can now do with the same unit of energy (talk on the phone to Asia for a whole tank of gas, and not owe the phone company a kilo of coke).
For the new ARM devices, maybe a Pentium III 300, which wasn't all that slow unless bloated down by a fat OS. Note that we're talking a Pentium III 300 with a gigabyte of (faster) memory to spread its wings, not the one you remember owning with 256MB that specialized in PATA cable supervision.
Not a chance in hell, unless you give Intel a huge process advantage. This is a myth that predates your four digit user ID.
The myth was that RISC would outperform CISC. Never happened. It was true that a small design team implementing some beautiful clean RISC would outperform a similar small design team implementing some clunky CISC. When's the last time a small design team implemented x86 at the high end?
The ISA is only half the battle. Both team have to work equally hard on the memory subsystem, bus protocol, cache coherency, and glue logic. The complexity of a branch predictor has little to do with the ISA (unless your architecture is so weird it enforces different coding practices, witness Itanium or Cell, neither of which engendered fondness).
The myth should have been that RISC would outperform CISC with a constrained power budget, but the reality distortion engines of the day were unable to burn such a low octane fuel. Doesn't show up much in your pet Photoshop filter.
Fundamental power advantage was always true of ARM vs x86. Decoding an irregular instruction set takes more power. Scoreboarding a huge in-flight register set sucks power (which x86 needs to so, because the named register set was too small). Tracking partial flag register updates sucks power. All these sucky things in x86 can be hidden, because with cleverness (aka well resourced design team) all these tricky units can do their magic in parallel on every cycle. Performance achieved is fine, heat is not.
x86 actually gets a bit of a boost from all this trickiness, since you can build some optimization into it (you already paid for the extra pipeline stages). Bonus from the huge in-flight register set is that it's very good at hiding latency. x86 always benched well on Paris-Dakar, but was less impressive on groomed track compared to the RISC thoroughbreds.
When you back out the clever furnace rooms from an x86 implementation you end up with a WinChip. Remember those? Those were essentially a 200Mhz 486 with no latency hiding and still a lot hotter than an ARM chip with comparable performance.
The performance constraints with ARM doesn't matter much these days. Performance critical functions like video transcoding or compositing can be handled by dedicated silicon. A 200 watt CPU plays chess at a 3000+ chess rating these days. For most people, a 1 watt CPU plays well enough. ARM is still underpowered for self-hosting. Are there crazy kids out there these days that can't figure out how to use a wall outlet, or don't know which end is up on a full sized keyboard?
If you think Intel can just grab some old technology from the 1990s, maybe you think you could take a Corvette engine block from the 1970s, disable a couple of cylinders, refit the carb. and get 50 mpg.
Or you could start with a cylinder block designed for the purpose.
I missed one point to bring this around slightly more on topic. If you concede that a tax system is a necessary evil as society is presently constituted (pending some hard won enlightenment), the best tax is shallow and wide, with no exemptions whatsoever. Whenever you make a tax more narrow (by pencilling out penicillin for grandmothers) the consequence is that everything else must taxed that much higher.
The higher the tax rate, the more it distorts and encumbers Hayekian vigour. Flat taxes are also much harder to gerrymander like electoral districts and less costly to collect since you don't need complex classification guidelines.
Every dollar that goes untaxed straight into a Swiss bank account just makes the tax burden that much worse for the rest of us. If your goal is to see the tax system collapse and human civilization 2.0 arise from the ashes of chaos (mysteriously free of the shackles of Caesar), this is a good thing.
Not one person here would voluntarily pay taxes if they didn't have to.
You're a bit dim concerning the larger scheme of things if you think you can cast the net that wide without catching a cactus. The short answer is that any person who has ever chosen a lottery or a casino over a mutual fund is not half as tax averse as you make out.
I was reading John Rawls "Justice as Fairness" not long ago. He has this concept of the "original position". The way I recall the idea, you get to choose how the world is constructed, but you don't know who you will be when you wake up in this world when it comes into creation. You could be anyone, with uniform probability.
With no foreknowledge of personal privilege, do you choose a world with no tax system? Or a world with kinds of institutions that have evolved in society as we know it? Some worlds will combine spectacular opportunity with spectacular inequity. The bottom of the pyramid is fat, so your odds of showing up as a burger flipper are relatively high; or with small probability, you could be the patriarch of Galt's Gulch.
I didn't think the concept of choosing before coming into being was all that philosophically brilliant, but some people can't get their minds around the difference between choosing a *system* you can live with, or choosing your place within it, and that needed to be addressed. So I give Rawls his due.
In a fictitious world where the no-tax fairy arrives and asks you if you would like a lifetime tax exemption, not many people would turn the offer down. But that's fantasy, not insight.
If the Libertarian-transporter fairy arrived, and offered to poof you into a society organized on Libertarian ideals, with nothing resembling a tax system, I'd be terrified about what kind of society I might get poofed into. It's hard to pay for each service required individually, that would be a treadmill from hell, so I guess there has to be some kind of group organization, I can only imagine many of the groups once formed resemble condo associations. Ugh. But it's voluntary, so the coffee tastes great.
There's a perception in world aid circles that when a country with a weak civic infrastructure discovers vast resource wealth (diamonds, oil, tantalum) that the country is just as likely to tip into civil war as to become an affluent society. And even if the society does become affluent in the short term, when the resource is exhausted, the country usually declines, and often ends up worse off than their neighbours, who didn't stub their toe on a giant diamond mine, and had to build their social capital the hard way. Countries with strong social institutions, like Canada, tend to benefit the most from resource wealth. Some countries with little resource wealth but cohesive institutions manage OK, because they don't have much choice, other than to work hard and row together.
We're still learning that human nature is not as intrinsically wealth maximizing as many economists would portray it. I always think of one of the original theories of fluid dynamics, which perfectly described the behaviour of water, neglecting surface tension. Great, someone remarked, we now have the complete theory of water that isn't wet.
It's the surface tension term in human nature that leads to cohesive social institutions. Sapolsky studied some non-human primates where self-interest is a lot more raw (the animals behave like impulsive two-year-olds). It was pretty clear they weren't able to stop bickering long enough to stack one stone on top of another, much less bake a mud brick. Libertarian to the last hairy armpit. What in economic theory distinguishes us from them? Our greed is more nuanced and restrained.
One thing you can say in favour of Libertarianism is that it serves as an intellectual flu shot against certain kinds of really terrible thinking about how society could be better ordered, by the same kinds of people who destroyed Africa (out of kindness).
Personally, there's no social structure I understa