On a story where it's neither possible to be interesting nor informative, how did seventeen comments (by my preference settings) make it to +5?
I Googled for "microsoft obnoxious shill" expecting Allchin to make the cut. Turns out he was elbowed out in grand style by James Plamondon. I missed that one at the time. After the financial meltdown, he inexplicably leaked on himself.
I read a piece by Allchin once that forever set my normalization basis for all things Microsoft. Dang, it's hard to divide by mucous.
What Microsoft says about momentum is true. Exchange == U.S.S. Bismarck.
From the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
Dorsetshire and Maori stopped to rescue survivors, but a U-boat alarm caused them to leave the scene after rescuing only 110 Bismarck sailors, abandoning the surviving crew in the water. The next morning U-74, which had heard sinking noises from a distance, and the German weather ship Sachsenwald picked up 5 survivors. 1,995 of the ship's crew of 2,200 died.
If Microsoft ever loses the Bismarck, they had better be prepared to rescue their own.
Assessing Kurzweil is a good yardstick for whether a person is capable of deep thinking. He's one of the slipperiest grease poles around. Yet sadly, he's usually miles ahead of the criticisms put forward.
This article is not much of an exception. Kurzweil defines common as a few percent, the lower knee of the adoption S curve. If you think habitually in exponential terms, one percent is common. What is one percent when the cost of genetic sequencing decreased by five orders of magnitude over one decade?
It hardly matters if Moore's law takes a well deserved five year hiatus before the transition to the next great thing gains escape velocity. It could be graphene. It could be organic. It could be many things. Lack of computational power is not a significant rate limiting factor on innovation right now. Five years could easily be invested in making better use of what we already have. GPU coprocessing is vastly underexploited because it's hard to justify recoding algorithms when computation is not the primary limiting factor. We have a latent order of magnitude we're only beginning to scratch.
Another observation here is that Kurzweil is claiming exactly the opposite of making difficult predictions. He's essentially claiming that technology is easy to extrapolate, for anyone willing to do the work with a ruthless gaze.
On the other side of the coin, his absolutist faith in the unbroken weave of innovation stretching all the way back to the primordial soup reminds one of the supremely defunct Long Term Capital Management.
What of his black swans? Of all things to be immune from black swans, exponential growth turns out to be the robust exception? Wow. Just wow. Dawkins was all wet. His book should have been titled "The Binging Watchmaker". A rolling snowball gathers no moss.
Where Kurzweil goes blank is the human aspect of technical nihilism. He absolutely needs to predict the embedding of computational hardware into human meatware. Otherwise, meatware becomes the rate limiting factor and the singularity on non-existence claims his flesh before society makes the transcendent jump.
I suspect he perceives intelligence and innovation as an arms race. If one group or nation decides to hold off on the cybernetic experiment, some rogue state or mad scientist will persist with the research regardless, and gain such a huge competitive advantage, the only practical response will be to join the party. Or we could send our cyborg enhanced marines to wipe the defecting bastards out. Uh, wait a minute here...
What about his ultimate black swan, human immortality? Is there a transition phase where this small advantage is available only to the elite? This causes no social unrest? Fascinating. I'd like to sign up for his school of politics. Clearly he's got some hard core insights into conflict resolution he's holding back.
His most difficult prediction to tangle with is the looming pell mell advance of algorithmic cognition. I think we'll see amazing advances in perception, context, association and prediction over the next decade or two. We might even be getting some first glimpses into higher order thought processes by 2030. I foresee at least another twenty years after that before AI becomes self-hosting in a rudimentary sense. And from there, another twenty years to ratify the first ISO standard. Then ten more years to compliant implementations. I think we're fairly safe until 2080.
Maybe another ten years if climate change forces us to shed half the world's population somewhere in the middle. I've become fairly convinced that we're not going to stop emitting carbon in any significant way. At best we'll manage to slow the acceleration. If we did shed half the world's population, would it slow things down that much? We seem to be hard wired with the belief that a global blood letting of that magnitude implies a descent into dystopia and the collapse of civilization. Maybe it's a good thing we feel
I think finding out that the king of one of your neighbors has asked the Big Devil, Source of All Evil, to assist them by removing your blossoming nuclear capability just MIGHT cause one to hold a grudge, don't you?
The Iranians are under no illusions about how their nuclear capability is perceived by neighbouring states, whether they read the telegrams in flagrante delicto or not. That being said, of course it's a useful propaganda tool to stir up the average Iranian citizen.
I don't think grudges are amenable to causality calculus. I think your point treads on institutional infantilism. Dang, the insecure table-pounding Iranian leadership is going to bite their soother in half over these harsh and unexpected words. If the leadership holds a grudge over this, they were shopping for grudges in the first place. For cripes sake, 48% of Quebec is seething to escape from totalitarian bondage.
Do we really need to tip toe around the obvious because the spin department of some aggrieved party is going to pull an infantile hissy fit, playing strictly for optics? Interesting how teenagers think of their parents as The Big Devil and how quickly the grudges are set aside at the first sign of trouble (unless mom is Livia Soprano and dad is worse).
On the Iranian front, we're in serious danger of the Peter principle here. Nuclear states will proliferate until some state bites off more than it can chew and warheads start to go missing. Like teenagers, every budding superpower thinks it can handle hard alcohol. America is not going to admit that these states can handle the responsibility, even if they could.
A perfect recipe for bravado and ambulances at midnight, as everyone in the Middle East justifiably fears.
If even a small subset of the replica posts link upstream, there's a good chance Google can put Humpty back together again. It'll be hugely abused, but it won't matter a whit.
As a Canadian with a reasonably good recollection of 1984, all I can say is "ouch" and "damn straight". I've lived in five provinces (BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia). He has a point about the fetish in Toronto/Ottawa for loading the international penis ruler onto their iPhones. It's a bit of a culture shock for a Canadian to show up in Toronto and discover other Canadians taking themselves seriously.
Back when I was in eastern Canada, there was a lot of talk about changing the rules to allow mergers among our five large banks, so that bankers in Toronto could have bigger international wieners, and then after the party, collect state welfare like the big American banks they so bitterly envied.
On the flip side, Toronto does have a kick ass film festival, so I didn't totally feel like I was living in a foreign country.
Shannon's work was general over the error model. Coding theory assumes a specific error model (such as bit error rates, insertion, deletion, magnitude distortion).
It doesn't take much wits to translate Shannon's work into a rudimentary code. Constructing codes near the bounds of optimality is extremely difficult, especially if the decoder corrects errors with better efficiency than combinatorial trial and error.
I wouldn't say Shannon's work was light on coding theory, much of which was implied pretty directly. I would say instead that his work was light on algorithmic efficiency of sophisticated codes.
By the time you're correcting 5 bit errors in a 256 bit packet, you don't want to have to search for the nearest valid codeword combinatorially.
Conservatives believe that protecting children from sex is incredibly important.
I don't think it's obvious in the slightest how exposure to sex affects young children at different ages and in different contexts, yet there's no shortage of conviction on all sides.
I think many parents keep their children tabula rasa in the sex department to blind their children to marital conflicts (such as infidelity). And if it gets ugly, they don't want baby to pipe up when the cops arrive "mommy cheated on daddy, so daddy smacked mommy around".
Parental attitudes about protecting children from sex aren't necessarily about the children.
The other aspect many parents have trouble dealing with is that sexual emotion is not something that can be figured out. Many people get caught up in "pot of gold" psychology. The movie "High Fidelity" covers this territory. At some point you need to stop chasing a better orgasm and start dealing with human problems.
The problem with the glut of pornography is its tendency to suggest that emotional problems can be resolved by window shopping, by cultivating an inward obsession with your own particular fetishes. Fetish tends to take you away from the place where "dealing with" is most likely to happen.
I don't think the underlying message of television advertising targeted at children is much different than what the purveyors of porn are putting forth. In both cases, the goal is to habituate people to resolve stress and insecurity though product consumption and product identity, rather than sustaining a difficult internal dialog about strengths, weaknesses, cowardice, resolve, and realistic expectations.
The difference is that porn wallops your kneecap with a reflex hammer, and then says "made you look". It's hammering away at circuits we can't entirely turn off. For people who feel insignificant and hate being ignored, it's an appealing power.
Kids don't have the life experience to understand how people get themselves into bad orbits, or to parse life statistics such as ten percent of drinkers accounting for sixty percent of alcohol consumption (in America). As a parent, I think you end up in a big discussion about value enslavement.
I suspect many prudes are people who only partially escaped the 1950s. We can talk about our emotions now (mostly), but we still have trouble talking with our kids about human fallibility, even more so when fallibility is the elephant in the room.
For many conservatives, discussion of human fallibility begins with labelling and then further degenerates into winner/loser calculus (e.g. "tough on crime", restricting welfare to deadbeats). In this vocabulary, a sinner is a pillar of the community who was exposed for depravity, who hasn't yet been permanently labelled by it, by special appeal to divine grace.
Many people seem to believe that fallibility is a lot like suicide: the more society talks about it openly, the more often it happens. Obviously, not talking about it has a price, too. It's not symmetric since a few babblers can spoil the peace. Repression requires broad social collusion.
By some miracle of right wing cognition, taxation is government, but "think of the children" isn't. Is any form of group-think independent of the institutions which promote and enforce it? Fundamentalists would argue that "think of the children" is enforced not by an institution, but through spiritual merit. Liberals tend to regard spiritual merit as a non-explanatory post hoc.
I think it's natural if you start by conceiving spiritual merit / psychology damage as inherently transactional (you have it, you lose it, with divine intervention you might get a mulligan, evil inflicts damage upon you) that you end up reaching for social levers of power. Less so if you conceive of fallibility as something we all contend with on a daily basis in overlapping spheres and shades of grey.
Apologies for thinking out loud. I didn't have the answers when I started writing this, and I still don't. Whatever success I had adding another piece to the BBQ will probably all get torn out again when it comes time to add the next piece. Sex is the BBQ no one ever finishes.
I'm not sure if there is such a thing as "American Food"? It's all stolen from other Countries and Cultures.
Amazingly, you can trace the theft of cuisine all the way back to cultures without writing, then the trail goes cold. Originality is nine parts mists of forgetting. But I think you can fairly credit America for Tang and Velveeta.
TMI was a lot like Macondo. There was a rush to declare operational status and many of the shortfalls (operator training) seem to have derived from the rush. It's likely that the TMI control staff would have become more confident over time, with some experience under their belts.
I also recall from reports long after the fact that the control room was badly designed. I don't think this was due to not taking security seriously. Almost anything of that complexity is hard to design well until you start using it in the real world. Plus there's some conservatism about not using the latest computer control technology, which is as it should be, but you end up with an Apollo 13 indicator array.
The electrical grid suffered some of the same problems with the cascading blackouts. The error events started to flow so fast, it clogging up the error queues. I recall reading that one accident (forget which industry) had the primary line printer backed up for half an hour with trivial messages while the message indicating root cause sat in the queue.
Nuclear on container ships which go into any random megalopolis's deep harbour? Totally cracked. And the upside? Less than 5% of global warming emissions according to TFA.
Memory Prices (1957-2010) 1985 $300/MB 1990 $100/MB 1995 $32/MB -- cartel warning !!! 1996 $5/MB -- and the wall came crumbling down 1998 $1/MB
Even uglier if you correct for inflation.
I couldn't stand *any* of the early Windowing products. Too cramped. My "fat" Mac was no better than anything else. Spent more time dragging Windows around on that small screen to see what I was working on than getting anything useful accomplished.
Had two floppy drives, but Jobs had instilled a miraculous ability into the OS to pop out the wrong floppy when it needed a file on a different diskette, the one you knew you'd have to put back in two seconds later. There was no way to override or preempt this. Jobs knows best. Burned into my amygdala so deeply it will twitch on the autopsy table at the sound of automatic floppy disk eject.
If I had been willing to upgrade with a hard disk, that system might have become borderline usable. I priced the drive upgrade at roughly on par with buying a turbo XT with a hard drive and monitor from scratch.
From that day forward, I learned to tolerate MSDOS, and had a work flow that got enough done. What I realized in retrospect is that my work flow discouraged experimentation. No Carmack for me. New ideas were added straight into the production code base. Just to keep the number of contexts to a minimum, with no multitasking to help out. I was shaped by my tool, and not in a good way.
At one point we had a spare machine and I tried out Coherent. That experiment ended immediately when I discovered that the bundled C compiler supported K&R, but not ANSI. All of my own code was portable ANSI. Game over. I didn't have access to the internet yet, so it wasn't easy to download Linux, which was still pretty green.
My long sentence under DOS ended when I jumped to Windows NT 4 circa 1996 on a brand new Pentium Pro. Had my first cable modem within the year. Good times.
By 1999 I had several large monitors, a KVM, OpenSSH, and *finally* enough system memory. I was no longer shackled to picking one primary work environment. I could use whichever system best matched the requirements. Divorce rocks!
For me 1999 was an inflection point in the merit debate. It was like the sexual liberation of the late 1960s. Choosing your system environment in 1985 was like watching a movie made in the 1950s about communicating emotion. You weren't operating in a regime of easy choices. Much consumer loyalty in the PC space 1985-1999 was born of cognitive dissonance. After you married the damn thing, you couldn't bear not to defend it.
Most people think of getting a driver's licence as a milestone of independence. For me, a decade of suck ended the day in December 1995 when I discovered AltaVista through my crappy dial-up service. "Damn, this rocks!" I thought to myself. I've never give ten brain cells to a press release for the rest of my natural days! Finally a liberation worth having.
For my desktop, I wanted a window that opened outward, not a set of prison bars to tile a display that was too small to begin with. This was largely driven by the limitations of the CRT and the cost of memory. Pricey to have a desk full of bit-mapped workstations prior to 1996.
After my sour Mac experience, had it been available in 1986 for a competitive price, I sure would have enjoyed a 24" text mode video panel (say 80 rows by 200 columns, and a couple of grey levels). My window manager could have been a frame enhanced Emacs running under MSDOS, and I would have been happy as a pig in poo.
I never found much use for micro-managed gun turrets with more screen area devoted to window cruft than document content.
It's only a government sanctioned monopoly if a government has forbidden another company to enter that market. Don't confuse the costs of the last mile with government intervention and restriction of the market.
The hallmark of clear thinking and good writing is that the verb carries more weight than the noun. "Has forbidden" what exactly, using which powers, on which continent, under whose dim scrutiny of the passive voice? Not important, I guess, for you, after you trumpet the golden noun "government".
In a democracy, most government sanctioned monopolies are introduced with the phrase "national security". Another example of government sanctioned monopolies (under law) are professional sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL). The defense industry contains many de facto government sanctioned duopolies (Boeing/one of the others).
Not an example of government sanctioned monopoly since the breakup of AT&T is the telecoms industry, unless you believe that the fall of the Berlin wall didn't end the Soviet union, even if some of the current players are just as scary. The telecoms industry, like the failed Soviet state, has been slow to shake off its roots and regenerate in its new competitive guise. Network neutrality seeks to peel one more craggy monopolist finger from the bludgeon of strong-arm incumbency tactics.
Interesting how the word "government" has entered into elite troll-speak. Amazing the number of people out there whose political agenda coincides with paralysing clear thinking. This sentiment seems to also coincide with the lack of transparency of Swiss banks. In Iraq, you had to carry your loot through the streets. Looting of America is accomplished under cover of the general public shaking their fists helplessly at big government. Many people are opposed to geo-engineering to mitigate climate change as too big an experiment, with too much at risk, but fail to see the parallel in Libertarianism as the largest sociology experiment ever proposed.
Then, and not until then, did I realize that the spirit of liberty does not exist in hungry men. People talked about a day coming when the people would become so hungry and desperate that they would rise in a revolution and sweep all before them. Such a day will never come. Hungry men may fight, but it will be for a bone--not for liberty. The perpetuity of liberty rests with those who eat three square meals a day.
~ Frederick Upham Adams (1896)
In nations with strong men forming weak governments, greed creates private wealth, generously siphoned into off-shore bank accounts. Only under prudent government--even as constrained by the sorry standards of the imperfect beast--does society achieve a balance where greed functions as a force for both private and public wealth.
The polarizers among us are convinced the marble can't rest in the middle. If that's true, why did the American founding fathers write up a constitution in the first place? Was it just a cynical act of nation building? Or are we willing to concede that the wealth of nations also exists in social institutions?
I figure our batting average in these matters will run about 50% For every Big Three that boasts then coasts, we'll get one round of politics less dire than it might have been, like the hockey player who loves the dangerous drop pass, but gets religion for a game or two after every drop pass that ends up in his own net. Fundamentally, this player believes in glory, and regards prudence as cramping his style.
This is the third time I've seen this decomposition.
Mine is 300^2 + (57-11)*300 - 57*11
90,000 13,800
(627)
Then I change that to:
90,000 14,000
(827)
Which gets the last three digits all in one place. If you can remember the three digit answer to 3*46 there's not much else to remember except the term you're working on while producing either the top three or bottom three digits in isolation.
The best way (long-term) to deal with terrorists is to make them irrelevant, by not responding to them. Once you make it clear you'll make arbitrarily large changes to your policies and practices in response to a terrorist event, you have given them the lever they want; all they need now is to find the right event for the effect they want.
From a game theory perspective, if you pre-declare a response policy, then you grant the instigator the power to dictate that response. It had better be a response you're willing to live with. This holds whether the policy is to over-respond or under-respond.
There was a faction within American power that wanted to do most of this stuff anyway, and just needed a good pretext. The cleverest attack is to trigger your adversary's latent self-destructive impulse.
I'm in favour of a more freedom and a little less safety. America seems to have the idea that a successful terrorist act on American soil damages the global image of American might more than the American crack-down on freedom damages the global image of American right.
Proposed subtitle: "Helping your child understand why he is a threat to National Security"
I suppose that was offered in jest. The problem is that young children are often completely under the sway of their evolution-denying forebears. We'd have to explain the dangers of ideology, and that fact that many children are born to complete wing nuts, and the risk of growing up to become an independent voter, among other things.
These are all good lessons, but not lessons most parents wish to teach. Either the parent doesn't want to pass this knowledge along, or regrets having to paint trust in parental love in such a poor light.
And that's really the picture this paints: in a nation of family values, that parental love can't be trusted.
Seems like the wrong square in the game theory matrix to me.
This is really not a problem with the Web as such but with people in general, and to think the Web could somehow be different from the people that populate it is pretty naive...
People forget about the terrible problems with prank callers back in the 1970s, before digital switching and the widespread adoption of call display.
Many grandmothers were subjected to heavy breathing from some dork 15 year old who didn't have a forum thread to troll bomb. It's hard to distinguish the heavy breathing of a clueless dork from the heavy breathing of a sexual psychopath, so this often frightened elderly women. Then the phone companies implemented a way to determine who placed the last call. The prank call meme soon faded away and the trolls had to sleep under a different bridge. Human nature didn't change, but the behaviour did.
The phone system had an excuse because in the analog switching system, call display was infeasible to implement. When digital switching arrived, call display should have been mandated as implicit in the basic service. It was the wrong power balance in the first place, like opening a door without a peephole.
We were lucky with the internet that so many of the original decisions were made wisely. Many of these early decisions are baked into the internet's DNA. That doesn't stop us from screwing it up, but it does serve to limit some of the more extreme abuses. Connectivity is the default. Messing with connectivity is an added extra. It could have been worse. Imagine that DNS resolved service names into a session GID with your ISP instead of the IP address of the server requested. Imagine that services had to pay your ISP for a listing.
The longer we hew to the original principles, the deeper that DNA penetrates, and more inconvenient it becomes to subvert in the name of the shallow gratification reflex. Sure, human nature sucks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to bend over and grab my ankles. We're dealing here with the grasp of the ham-handed over the stupid. It has always been thus. Let's break their thumbs a few more times before we accept the inevitable.
One could equally argue that the constitution of America is fading away in practical terms. The constitution failed to provide adequate defense against lobbyism and there is no political will to fix this. Human nature, and all that. Might as well cancel the next election. The dream is dead.
They were simply trying to use up their spare parts inventory and string the customers along until they were out of warranty service contract. That's dishonest.
Actually, I think from a legal perspective, Dell was colouring between the lines, if the contract was for Dell to replace the system as often as it failed within the warranty period.
You might complain that it's not ethical given the business image that Dell put forward. Obviously they decided that their short term reputation with share holders was worth more than their long term reputation with customers.
Given the size of the problem (across the industry) I'm not sure there were enough good capacitors available to replace all the defective boards with non-defective boards. I think it also took a while to figure out which capacitors were the good capacitors.
Given the shortage and lead time, if you tell everyone about the problem up front, you're encouraging a run on a bank that's essentially insolvent.
Suppose that Dell decides to man-up and announce a broad recall of millions of mainboards, but you're 18 months away from having enough replacement boards to go around. They could offer some kind of rebate to people electing to keep their could-blow-tomorrow systems. Many won't bite. You'll still have to pro-rate replacements. Dell's big dog accounts are going to expect the lion's share and you can't afford to make these people mad. If you say to every customer who purchased fewer than 100 systems "no soup for you" that's not going to play well in the echo chamber, either. Sounds like a PR fiasco at least equal to the sleazy approach they chose.
OTOH, deciding to manage this by marooning thousands of busy technicians on phone lines to call centers in India with people pretending to comprehend English less well than they actually do is something the market should severely punish.
I wish the suits so enamoured about dealing with big and established companies were the same people suffering telephone hell when big company doesn't man-up to their service contracts. Not that it would change how the world works all that much, but it might cut down on some of the intolerable bluster.
One needs to take into consideration that significant performance suites are often included in a compiler's regression suite. It's only the cheating by the most extreme standard for a compile team to ensure the compiler puts its best face forward on major benchmarks. We all cheat in the front of the mirror, don't we?
This practice can result in strange fragility on benchmark code. So can more nefarious intentions.
Better benchmark suites are engineered not to have dead code blocks. It's just begging for trouble.
The oldest benchmark cheating I recall (dimly) was ATI somewhere around 1990 cheating on a video benchmark to draw the same icon at the same place a bazillion times by only drawing it once.
Before that there was also a Taiwanese company IIRC who slowed the PC clock down by 10% on one of their turbo XT systems for a trade show. People at the trade show ran their own benchmark programs, but the timing result was liposuctioned by the wonky system clock.
The great thing about that machine if purchased as tweaked is that your work day now has 25 terrestrial hours so your productivity will be better than ever.
On a side note, I used to have an OpenBSD firewall named malice. When my network had issues, it was usually correct not to attribute to malice what could be attributed to vi. Malice was a Pentium Pro 200 with 128 MB of EDO that lasted 13 years with a couple of fresh disk drives. Seriously, if it doesn't break, don't fix it. Eventually I decided that scp really ought to saturate a 100 mbit link, so I finally pitched it out. Tellingly, it wasn't my broadband provider which forced the issue. If I waited for my ISP to exceed the machine's SSL crypto speed, I could have kept it another decade I think.
It's more than stupidity. If the snippy note had begun with the phrase "My understanding is that [content on the web is public domain unless accompanied by a copyright notice]" her appalling ignorance would have earned her a brisk education from the aggrieved party, and then she could have shot herself in the foot on the next exchange.
Robin Hood had the brains to hide in the forest while practising his unique brand of beneficence. Google had bags of coin to weather postbellum negotiation. Plainview had H.W. What was her plan?
Also, I don't get the whole "late at night, very tired" emergency fill thing. What's topical or time sensitive about the history of apple pie? Was it a theme issue on apple pie? An organized editor would have rescued something passable (and equally generic) from the emergency spike.
What don't you like about Geist? He's done great work at slowing down bad copyright legislation (though I'm a bit out of the loop recently).
Surveillance is 99% traffic analysis (constructing the social network, and colouring certain nodes red) and only 1% about the particulars of the conversation. SSH won't raise any red flags, unless you SSH into a well known onion router. Suppose one person in a thousand does this. These people take a moderate hit on their spook agency credit rating, and a smaller stain spreads outward to their primary affiliates.
I think you have to do a bunch of stuff to have your credit rating fall low enough to devote human resources to sussing you out. Too many sheep, not enough shepherds, who cost real money. Purchasing a holiday condo in Peshawar would really rack up the points if you're desperate to justify wearing a tinfoil hat.
The big Canadian ISPs won't complain because this creates a barrier to entry for small ISPs who can't afford to staff an office of conformance.
What sucks in this plan is the lack of judicial oversight. That's just plain wrong. Oversight is foundational to democracy. This is the same PM who is trying to gut Statistics Canada (on the bogus pretext there has ever been a privacy issue) because the data they produce is too credible, and can be used to justify social spending.
I would like to think it would be practical to have all (judicially supervised) surveillance requests opened to the public 50 to 75 years after the fact, so that we can look back and form an accurate opinion about the past scope of abuse. Every democracy needs the occasional dental checkup.
I listened to Spence on Growth the other night. He's the guy who came up with Signalling (economics) and won a Nobel prize for it, and then went off to do whacks of other high level stuff.
The premise of signalling theory is that the competence you gain from your education can be entirely ignored and the educational system would still have an economic function.
As for ethics, he's quite right his ethics are no worse than many of our leaders of the future. I have no doubt he does acceptable quality work. You can see that from the article. Students are pretty harried, so a lot of what even the good students produce is no great shakes. And he's a professional, with years of experience and crib sheets to draw upon.
My favorite part was that he "never edits" and gets thanked for the authentic mistakes. Just like slashdot, fire and forget.
The key assumption from Spence is that it costs less (by some metric) for a good student to earn the credential than the bad student. It's pretty clear at $2000 for a term paper, the bad student is taking it on the chin.
It's a basic problem in economics to determine who has the goods and who doesn't, without spending more on the discrimination than the discrimination is worth. University is the assembly line solution to this problem.
Shadow conformance is as inevitable as prostitution when society commoditizes human capital to the extent that global trade implies.
(Had dim recall of the particulars of that link. Search google on "the world is thinking" to recover FORA.tv, hadn't the first clue about the guy's name so I searched FORA for the keyword "sir", and it came up first hit. That's funny. I could have found him the long way through TED.
WARNING: FORA practices bait and switch: you think you're watching the whole video, but clips are cut off abruptly as unpaid previews. The clip by the good Malcolm Gladwell on taxation would have been interesting to watch to conclusion. It's like his brain is loaned out from the Men in Black brain archive, and gets recalled from time to time, and to kill time without it, he writes another book.)
I agree the story could have been framed better. There is in any case some story here. For certain computational tasks, the linear performance scaling that vanished in a puff of Prescott has returned from the grave.
And not only that, instead of spending $20,000 to buy a Fermi class workstation and getting your result in a year, you can throw the same $20,000 at the cloud and have 10,000 machines deliver your result in an hour, for large instances of cloud.
This applies to a class of computational tasks denominated in CPU cycles where you can cut a wide swath.
Moore's law still exists, it's just not evenly distributed.
I though it would be useful to have a post or two here that mostly ignores exhibit Apple and talks about the book.
A guy by the name of Adam Thierer has put quite a bit of work into Thoughts on Tim Wu's Master Switch. What makes it interesting is the Tim Wu dropped into the discussion thread to rebut several points, and then Adam writes a response to that rebuttal.
Unfortunately, Adam makes a mistake that Russ Roberts sometimes makes on EconTalk (which I generally enjoy). The story goes like this: something big is happening, some enlightened souls speak out "we should worry about this", someone loosely affiliated with the furrowed forehead sect spouts a rabid depiction of this which the MSM circulates aggressively, the bad outcome does not materialize, and in the aftermath, some careless bloghards conclude we were wrong to worry so much in the first place.
This has been said about Y2K. It's still being said about the CDC and the imminent (or not-so-imminent) global influenza pandemic. Big flu blew over. Should the CDC stand down?
One possible version of the true story is that we might need to maintain a permanent vigilance on the rise of corporate gorillas. Sure AOL/Warner face-planted. Some gorillas are clumsy. And there was a time when Google was vulnerable and might not have become a counter-balancing force. These are contingent outcomes.
I have to say I think it's a bit of a dim bulb argument to argue from a catastrophe averted that there wasn't much risk in the first place, unless the belief is that the warning system was operating in complete isolation on an entirely separate plain of reality.
I loved Google from the outset, but my loyalty hung by a thread if Google had taken certain corporate directions. I've been around long enough to recall IBM as the 800 pound gorilla. I didn't much enjoy living through the Microsoft replacement.
Seth Godin said in a lecture at Google (four years ago) that Google has promoted their brand to such a degree that to backtrack on their declared values would cause them immeasurable brand injury. I tend to agree. They aren't going to poop the bed for small potatoes.
Microsoft did succeed in stifling innovation for a few years. It might have been a lot worse if they hadn't misjudged the internet, and been forced to take a tripping penalty on Netscape, and then spend two minutes in the FTC penalty box around the time of Google's nascence.
There are 17,000 federal lobbyists in Washington, DC. They exist to promote regulatory capture for vested interests. What will Apple do a year after losing Steve when their share price has contracted 40 percent? Will they reinvent, or run for cover?
I'm inclined to ascribe more of our good fortune (so far) to a small group of determined people tirelessly trying to do the right thing as described in RFC 2468.
The "market" has no lobbyists or campaign contributions, the market is not a player, it is the field on which the players compete. Blaming the market itself for the actions of would-be monopolists is nonsensical.
Welcome to Reductionism 101. It's also clear we can't blame the atoms. I think.
In a richer view of the world, it's sometimes reasonable to regard markets as a human institution, built up from negotiated agreements involving many players, including regulatory bodies, whose actions are partly based on representations to the general public, for all it's worth.
There was a capital market culture from 1950 to about 1980 that was reasonably stable. It was becoming frayed a bit at the end by algorithmic trading. No consensus lasts forever. Things change.
Then there was a very different ideological consensus in place from the early Reagan/Thatcher years based Hayek and some loony rhetoric about the Laffer curve. I can't find the hilarious Martin Gardiner parody just now. It looked a bit like this: tworm.jpg
But I would argue that if he's going to subtract Norway, he should also subtract the UAE, which isn't actually an observational data point anyway. Then what curve would you have? A graph of tax code loophole coverage, aka Swiss cheese. He points this out concerning the nominal 34% US corporate tax rate generating almost no revenue.
The free trade component of this new consensus was relatively sane. The extent of financial market deregulation was not. And especially the oversight was conducted on the notion that if the ground underneath you is undulating slowly, you can't be anywhere near a cliff face. And don't put your ear to the ground to listen for industrial scale dollar excavation right under your feet.
That market consensus is gone now. We're still too busy drip feeding blood into the wounded church looters to declare future policy.
No, you can't blame an abstract market conception. But you can blame the markets we've actually built. And yes, the behaviour of a gas is determined by the behaviours of the constituent atoms, but sometimes we prefer to talk about the properties of the gas as if it actually exists.
It's also possible to distinguish monopolies from the exercise of monopoly power. Long ago Microsoft infused $150m in cash into Apple when Apple was on the ropes. If Microsoft held those shares, they made a bundle (one site says $18b based on stock history). Microsoft likely held the power to yank Apple's life support back in 1997, but they were subject to constraints on the exercise of their monopoly powers. That didn't make them *not* a monopoly. Not every company waits until they've been fingerprinted by the FTC to exercise discretion.
I think in any professional toolbox, the trick is to be able to sell solutions. It doesn't hurt to be able to sell solutions you believe in. And you do need to think a bit before jumping on a bandwagon.
Long ago I invested a lot of energy mastering standard C++. But it was hard to find a project where I could actually use those skills because of the abortion known as MSVC, a calculated effort to queer platform independence. I didn't much enjoy programming in dialect of the damned. Kai C++ was wonderful, then Intel snapped it up, and it became code generator of the damned, not working so great for the AMD platform.
How much could I seriously invest in mastering.NET before I'd wake up in a cold sweat and rush off first thing to read MS trade journals for any hint of future platforms whims that awaits me? Even Java made me nervous, on a much longer rope.
The MPAA ratings are not done by any government body, but they still censor movies...
Technically the MPAA is a rating board. They don't actually cut anything. The power arises from the distribution chain that won't widely screen any movie with a rating above PG-13. I've even seen a few movies distributed unrated if the director has a loyal enough following and not terribly high commercial prospects to begin with.
If more consumers chose to ignore the ratings, we'd be better off. You can usually figure out whether a movie is suitable from any competent film review. All it takes is three minutes to make an independent decision, but the majority of the consuming public appears to value convenience over freedom. I guess you'd call that censorship by sheeple inertia.
One rating I wouldn't mind is "dim grasp of physics". Before I turned King Kong off, Kong was shaking Naomi Watts though what must have been a 30 foot arc at about a 1 Hz period. She was prone, with her head hanging loose, and she didn't get shaken baby syndrome. Tough gal.
Actually, I did skip forward to the mayhem in the final sequence, where Kong climbs the skyscraper at an incredible speed without breathing all that hard. Like they once asked Contador after an impressive climb, "hey, Contador, what's your VO2 max?" Kong was climbing that building at five times Contador's climb rate in France, so he should have been breathing five times harder than Contador relative to body mass. That's some serious chuffing.
Roughly 60% of the energy expended goes to body heat, and Kong has some serious cubed-square law issues. Maybe he was a reptile subject to convergent evolution and just looked like a hairy ape.
I suppose you could determine that by inspecting his ovipositor, if the MPAA hadn't blacked it out.
For hockey, I skip the article and go straight to the boxscore. It has this great innovation: presenting the information in chronological order so you can follow along, rather than describing them in reverse go-ahead order.
If you see a 10 minute misconduct by some skill dude, you might have to read the article to find out whether the guy went ape, or just forget to tie down his jersey in a tug fest of the midgets. This is exactly the information that's not likely to be found in the robospiel. Sometimes I guy goes -3 on the night, but wasn't responsible for any of the goals against if the goalie gases some weak shots, or a line mate keeps trying the same risky drop pass. The only use for the reporter is to supplement what the official statistics misrepresent. Another thing you can't tell from the boxscore is whether a player with four minutes of ice time in the 3rd period was stapled to the bench after too many missed assignments, or went into the dressing room for a skate repair. Stapled to the bench as week before the trade deadline is an important tell.
Now if only we could train the real sports journalists to discard all quotes containing the phrase "win" or "two points" or anything about "effort" or "coming out hard" or "weathering the storm".
An acceptable quote is one I recall from the other day by a guy who hasn't scored much this season about a rare goal: "Actually, I whiffed on that shot. I've had thirty hard shots on net this season and none of them go in. Then I shoot a knuckleball and it goes it, but I'll take it anyway."
That's only mildly interesting, but it's already better than 90% of what gets scribbled.
Sports reporting was invented to kill whatever brain cells survived the drinking the night before. Actually, there's one hockey blog I read with good writing. Unfortunately, it's hampered by the secrecy of player offers rejected, so even a sharp knife can't get to the root of management dysfunction (as much as they like to try).
Of course, the league is constructed to ensure that this will always be true. Fans are for hollering on cue, and not for thinking too much.
Slashdot Mirror
On a story where it's neither possible to be interesting nor informative, how did seventeen comments (by my preference settings) make it to +5?
I Googled for "microsoft obnoxious shill" expecting Allchin to make the cut. Turns out he was elbowed out in grand style by James Plamondon. I missed that one at the time. After the financial meltdown, he inexplicably leaked on himself.
How to Get Your Platform Accepted as a Standard - Microsoft Style
Here's a Microsoft hater with some serious elbow grease:
Former Microsoft Shill Openly Confesses, Alleges Microsoft Still Does This
How Jim Allchin, Gartner and Enderle Lied to the Whole World
I read a piece by Allchin once that forever set my normalization basis for all things Microsoft. Dang, it's hard to divide by mucous.
What Microsoft says about momentum is true. Exchange == U.S.S. Bismarck.
From the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
Dorsetshire and Maori stopped to rescue survivors, but a U-boat alarm caused them to leave the scene after rescuing only 110 Bismarck sailors, abandoning the surviving crew in the water. The next morning U-74, which had heard sinking noises from a distance, and the German weather ship Sachsenwald picked up 5 survivors. 1,995 of the ship's crew of 2,200 died.
If Microsoft ever loses the Bismarck, they had better be prepared to rescue their own.
Assessing Kurzweil is a good yardstick for whether a person is capable of deep thinking. He's one of the slipperiest grease poles around. Yet sadly, he's usually miles ahead of the criticisms put forward.
This article is not much of an exception. Kurzweil defines common as a few percent, the lower knee of the adoption S curve. If you think habitually in exponential terms, one percent is common. What is one percent when the cost of genetic sequencing decreased by five orders of magnitude over one decade?
It hardly matters if Moore's law takes a well deserved five year hiatus before the transition to the next great thing gains escape velocity. It could be graphene. It could be organic. It could be many things. Lack of computational power is not a significant rate limiting factor on innovation right now. Five years could easily be invested in making better use of what we already have. GPU coprocessing is vastly underexploited because it's hard to justify recoding algorithms when computation is not the primary limiting factor. We have a latent order of magnitude we're only beginning to scratch.
Another observation here is that Kurzweil is claiming exactly the opposite of making difficult predictions. He's essentially claiming that technology is easy to extrapolate, for anyone willing to do the work with a ruthless gaze.
On the other side of the coin, his absolutist faith in the unbroken weave of innovation stretching all the way back to the primordial soup reminds one of the supremely defunct Long Term Capital Management.
What of his black swans? Of all things to be immune from black swans, exponential growth turns out to be the robust exception? Wow. Just wow. Dawkins was all wet. His book should have been titled "The Binging Watchmaker". A rolling snowball gathers no moss.
Where Kurzweil goes blank is the human aspect of technical nihilism. He absolutely needs to predict the embedding of computational hardware into human meatware. Otherwise, meatware becomes the rate limiting factor and the singularity on non-existence claims his flesh before society makes the transcendent jump.
I suspect he perceives intelligence and innovation as an arms race. If one group or nation decides to hold off on the cybernetic experiment, some rogue state or mad scientist will persist with the research regardless, and gain such a huge competitive advantage, the only practical response will be to join the party. Or we could send our cyborg enhanced marines to wipe the defecting bastards out. Uh, wait a minute here ...
What about his ultimate black swan, human immortality? Is there a transition phase where this small advantage is available only to the elite? This causes no social unrest? Fascinating. I'd like to sign up for his school of politics. Clearly he's got some hard core insights into conflict resolution he's holding back.
His most difficult prediction to tangle with is the looming pell mell advance of algorithmic cognition. I think we'll see amazing advances in perception, context, association and prediction over the next decade or two. We might even be getting some first glimpses into higher order thought processes by 2030. I foresee at least another twenty years after that before AI becomes self-hosting in a rudimentary sense. And from there, another twenty years to ratify the first ISO standard. Then ten more years to compliant implementations. I think we're fairly safe until 2080.
Maybe another ten years if climate change forces us to shed half the world's population somewhere in the middle. I've become fairly convinced that we're not going to stop emitting carbon in any significant way. At best we'll manage to slow the acceleration. If we did shed half the world's population, would it slow things down that much? We seem to be hard wired with the belief that a global blood letting of that magnitude implies a descent into dystopia and the collapse of civilization. Maybe it's a good thing we feel
I think finding out that the king of one of your neighbors has asked the Big Devil, Source of All Evil, to assist them by removing your blossoming nuclear capability just MIGHT cause one to hold a grudge, don't you?
The Iranians are under no illusions about how their nuclear capability is perceived by neighbouring states, whether they read the telegrams in flagrante delicto or not. That being said, of course it's a useful propaganda tool to stir up the average Iranian citizen.
I don't think grudges are amenable to causality calculus. I think your point treads on institutional infantilism. Dang, the insecure table-pounding Iranian leadership is going to bite their soother in half over these harsh and unexpected words. If the leadership holds a grudge over this, they were shopping for grudges in the first place. For cripes sake, 48% of Quebec is seething to escape from totalitarian bondage.
Do we really need to tip toe around the obvious because the spin department of some aggrieved party is going to pull an infantile hissy fit, playing strictly for optics? Interesting how teenagers think of their parents as The Big Devil and how quickly the grudges are set aside at the first sign of trouble (unless mom is Livia Soprano and dad is worse).
On the Iranian front, we're in serious danger of the Peter principle here. Nuclear states will proliferate until some state bites off more than it can chew and warheads start to go missing. Like teenagers, every budding superpower thinks it can handle hard alcohol. America is not going to admit that these states can handle the responsibility, even if they could.
A perfect recipe for bravado and ambulances at midnight, as everyone in the Middle East justifiably fears.
If even a small subset of the replica posts link upstream, there's a good chance Google can put Humpty back together again. It'll be hugely abused, but it won't matter a whit.
From the poison pen of xmas past.
Colby Cosh: Some apparently unwelcome candour on Canada
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/Lord-Moran.pdf
As a Canadian with a reasonably good recollection of 1984, all I can say is "ouch" and "damn straight". I've lived in five provinces (BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia). He has a point about the fetish in Toronto/Ottawa for loading the international penis ruler onto their iPhones. It's a bit of a culture shock for a Canadian to show up in Toronto and discover other Canadians taking themselves seriously.
Back when I was in eastern Canada, there was a lot of talk about changing the rules to allow mergers among our five large banks, so that bankers in Toronto could have bigger international wieners, and then after the party, collect state welfare like the big American banks they so bitterly envied.
On the flip side, Toronto does have a kick ass film festival, so I didn't totally feel like I was living in a foreign country.
Shannon's work was general over the error model. Coding theory assumes a specific error model (such as bit error rates, insertion, deletion, magnitude distortion).
It doesn't take much wits to translate Shannon's work into a rudimentary code. Constructing codes near the bounds of optimality is extremely difficult, especially if the decoder corrects errors with better efficiency than combinatorial trial and error.
I wouldn't say Shannon's work was light on coding theory, much of which was implied pretty directly. I would say instead that his work was light on algorithmic efficiency of sophisticated codes.
By the time you're correcting 5 bit errors in a 256 bit packet, you don't want to have to search for the nearest valid codeword combinatorially.
From j random post:
Conservatives believe that protecting children from sex is incredibly important.
I don't think it's obvious in the slightest how exposure to sex affects young children at different ages and in different contexts, yet there's no shortage of conviction on all sides.
I think many parents keep their children tabula rasa in the sex department to blind their children to marital conflicts (such as infidelity). And if it gets ugly, they don't want baby to pipe up when the cops arrive "mommy cheated on daddy, so daddy smacked mommy around".
Parental attitudes about protecting children from sex aren't necessarily about the children.
The other aspect many parents have trouble dealing with is that sexual emotion is not something that can be figured out. Many people get caught up in "pot of gold" psychology. The movie "High Fidelity" covers this territory. At some point you need to stop chasing a better orgasm and start dealing with human problems.
The problem with the glut of pornography is its tendency to suggest that emotional problems can be resolved by window shopping, by cultivating an inward obsession with your own particular fetishes. Fetish tends to take you away from the place where "dealing with" is most likely to happen.
I don't think the underlying message of television advertising targeted at children is much different than what the purveyors of porn are putting forth. In both cases, the goal is to habituate people to resolve stress and insecurity though product consumption and product identity, rather than sustaining a difficult internal dialog about strengths, weaknesses, cowardice, resolve, and realistic expectations.
The difference is that porn wallops your kneecap with a reflex hammer, and then says "made you look". It's hammering away at circuits we can't entirely turn off. For people who feel insignificant and hate being ignored, it's an appealing power.
Kids don't have the life experience to understand how people get themselves into bad orbits, or to parse life statistics such as ten percent of drinkers accounting for sixty percent of alcohol consumption (in America). As a parent, I think you end up in a big discussion about value enslavement.
I suspect many prudes are people who only partially escaped the 1950s. We can talk about our emotions now (mostly), but we still have trouble talking with our kids about human fallibility, even more so when fallibility is the elephant in the room.
For many conservatives, discussion of human fallibility begins with labelling and then further degenerates into winner/loser calculus (e.g. "tough on crime", restricting welfare to deadbeats). In this vocabulary, a sinner is a pillar of the community who was exposed for depravity, who hasn't yet been permanently labelled by it, by special appeal to divine grace.
Many people seem to believe that fallibility is a lot like suicide: the more society talks about it openly, the more often it happens. Obviously, not talking about it has a price, too. It's not symmetric since a few babblers can spoil the peace. Repression requires broad social collusion.
By some miracle of right wing cognition, taxation is government, but "think of the children" isn't. Is any form of group-think independent of the institutions which promote and enforce it? Fundamentalists would argue that "think of the children" is enforced not by an institution, but through spiritual merit. Liberals tend to regard spiritual merit as a non-explanatory post hoc.
I think it's natural if you start by conceiving spiritual merit / psychology damage as inherently transactional (you have it, you lose it, with divine intervention you might get a mulligan, evil inflicts damage upon you) that you end up reaching for social levers of power. Less so if you conceive of fallibility as something we all contend with on a daily basis in overlapping spheres and shades of grey.
Apologies for thinking out loud. I didn't have the answers when I started writing this, and I still don't. Whatever success I had adding another piece to the BBQ will probably all get torn out again when it comes time to add the next piece. Sex is the BBQ no one ever finishes.
I'm not sure if there is such a thing as "American Food"? It's all stolen from other Countries and Cultures.
Amazingly, you can trace the theft of cuisine all the way back to cultures without writing, then the trail goes cold. Originality is nine parts mists of forgetting. But I think you can fairly credit America for Tang and Velveeta.
TMI was a lot like Macondo. There was a rush to declare operational status and many of the shortfalls (operator training) seem to have derived from the rush. It's likely that the TMI control staff would have become more confident over time, with some experience under their belts.
I also recall from reports long after the fact that the control room was badly designed. I don't think this was due to not taking security seriously. Almost anything of that complexity is hard to design well until you start using it in the real world. Plus there's some conservatism about not using the latest computer control technology, which is as it should be, but you end up with an Apollo 13 indicator array.
The electrical grid suffered some of the same problems with the cascading blackouts. The error events started to flow so fast, it clogging up the error queues. I recall reading that one accident (forget which industry) had the primary line printer backed up for half an hour with trivial messages while the message indicating root cause sat in the queue.
Nuclear on container ships which go into any random megalopolis's deep harbour? Totally cracked. And the upside? Less than 5% of global warming emissions according to TFA.
The short history of windowed operating systems:
Memory Prices (1957-2010)
1985 $300/MB
1990 $100/MB
1995 $32/MB -- cartel warning !!!
1996 $5/MB -- and the wall came crumbling down
1998 $1/MB
Even uglier if you correct for inflation.
I couldn't stand *any* of the early Windowing products. Too cramped. My "fat" Mac was no better than anything else. Spent more time dragging Windows around on that small screen to see what I was working on than getting anything useful accomplished.
Had two floppy drives, but Jobs had instilled a miraculous ability into the OS to pop out the wrong floppy when it needed a file on a different diskette, the one you knew you'd have to put back in two seconds later. There was no way to override or preempt this. Jobs knows best. Burned into my amygdala so deeply it will twitch on the autopsy table at the sound of automatic floppy disk eject.
If I had been willing to upgrade with a hard disk, that system might have become borderline usable. I priced the drive upgrade at roughly on par with buying a turbo XT with a hard drive and monitor from scratch.
From that day forward, I learned to tolerate MSDOS, and had a work flow that got enough done. What I realized in retrospect is that my work flow discouraged experimentation. No Carmack for me. New ideas were added straight into the production code base. Just to keep the number of contexts to a minimum, with no multitasking to help out. I was shaped by my tool, and not in a good way.
At one point we had a spare machine and I tried out Coherent. That experiment ended immediately when I discovered that the bundled C compiler supported K&R, but not ANSI. All of my own code was portable ANSI. Game over. I didn't have access to the internet yet, so it wasn't easy to download Linux, which was still pretty green.
My long sentence under DOS ended when I jumped to Windows NT 4 circa 1996 on a brand new Pentium Pro. Had my first cable modem within the year. Good times.
By 1999 I had several large monitors, a KVM, OpenSSH, and *finally* enough system memory. I was no longer shackled to picking one primary work environment. I could use whichever system best matched the requirements. Divorce rocks!
For me 1999 was an inflection point in the merit debate. It was like the sexual liberation of the late 1960s. Choosing your system environment in 1985 was like watching a movie made in the 1950s about communicating emotion. You weren't operating in a regime of easy choices. Much consumer loyalty in the PC space 1985-1999 was born of cognitive dissonance. After you married the damn thing, you couldn't bear not to defend it.
Most people think of getting a driver's licence as a milestone of independence. For me, a decade of suck ended the day in December 1995 when I discovered AltaVista through my crappy dial-up service. "Damn, this rocks!" I thought to myself. I've never give ten brain cells to a press release for the rest of my natural days! Finally a liberation worth having.
For my desktop, I wanted a window that opened outward, not a set of prison bars to tile a display that was too small to begin with. This was largely driven by the limitations of the CRT and the cost of memory. Pricey to have a desk full of bit-mapped workstations prior to 1996.
After my sour Mac experience, had it been available in 1986 for a competitive price, I sure would have enjoyed a 24" text mode video panel (say 80 rows by 200 columns, and a couple of grey levels). My window manager could have been a frame enhanced Emacs running under MSDOS, and I would have been happy as a pig in poo.
I never found much use for micro-managed gun turrets with more screen area devoted to window cruft than document content.
It's only a government sanctioned monopoly if a government has forbidden another company to enter that market. Don't confuse the costs of the last mile with government intervention and restriction of the market.
The hallmark of clear thinking and good writing is that the verb carries more weight than the noun. "Has forbidden" what exactly, using which powers, on which continent, under whose dim scrutiny of the passive voice? Not important, I guess, for you, after you trumpet the golden noun "government".
In a democracy, most government sanctioned monopolies are introduced with the phrase "national security". Another example of government sanctioned monopolies (under law) are professional sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL). The defense industry contains many de facto government sanctioned duopolies (Boeing/one of the others).
Not an example of government sanctioned monopoly since the breakup of AT&T is the telecoms industry, unless you believe that the fall of the Berlin wall didn't end the Soviet union, even if some of the current players are just as scary. The telecoms industry, like the failed Soviet state, has been slow to shake off its roots and regenerate in its new competitive guise. Network neutrality seeks to peel one more craggy monopolist finger from the bludgeon of strong-arm incumbency tactics.
Interesting how the word "government" has entered into elite troll-speak. Amazing the number of people out there whose political agenda coincides with paralysing clear thinking. This sentiment seems to also coincide with the lack of transparency of Swiss banks. In Iraq, you had to carry your loot through the streets. Looting of America is accomplished under cover of the general public shaking their fists helplessly at big government. Many people are opposed to geo-engineering to mitigate climate change as too big an experiment, with too much at risk, but fail to see the parallel in Libertarianism as the largest sociology experiment ever proposed.
Then, and not until then, did I realize that the spirit of liberty does not exist in hungry men. People talked about a day coming when the people would become so hungry and desperate that they would rise in a revolution and sweep all before them. Such a day will never come. Hungry men may fight, but it will be for a bone--not for liberty. The perpetuity of liberty rests with those who eat three square meals a day.
~ Frederick Upham Adams (1896)
In nations with strong men forming weak governments, greed creates private wealth, generously siphoned into off-shore bank accounts. Only under prudent government--even as constrained by the sorry standards of the imperfect beast--does society achieve a balance where greed functions as a force for both private and public wealth.
The polarizers among us are convinced the marble can't rest in the middle. If that's true, why did the American founding fathers write up a constitution in the first place? Was it just a cynical act of nation building? Or are we willing to concede that the wealth of nations also exists in social institutions?
I figure our batting average in these matters will run about 50% For every Big Three that boasts then coasts, we'll get one round of politics less dire than it might have been, like the hockey player who loves the dangerous drop pass, but gets religion for a game or two after every drop pass that ends up in his own net. Fundamentally, this player believes in glory, and regards prudence as cramping his style.
America loves the drop pass.
This is the third time I've seen this decomposition.
Mine is 300^2 + (57-11)*300 - 57*11
90,000
13,800
(627)
Then I change that to:
90,000
14,000
(827)
Which gets the last three digits all in one place. If you can remember the three digit answer to 3*46 there's not much else to remember except the term you're working on while producing either the top three or bottom three digits in isolation.
The best way (long-term) to deal with terrorists is to make them irrelevant, by not responding to them. Once you make it clear you'll make arbitrarily large changes to your policies and practices in response to a terrorist event, you have given them the lever they want; all they need now is to find the right event for the effect they want.
From a game theory perspective, if you pre-declare a response policy, then you grant the instigator the power to dictate that response. It had better be a response you're willing to live with. This holds whether the policy is to over-respond or under-respond.
There was a faction within American power that wanted to do most of this stuff anyway, and just needed a good pretext. The cleverest attack is to trigger your adversary's latent self-destructive impulse.
I'm in favour of a more freedom and a little less safety. America seems to have the idea that a successful terrorist act on American soil damages the global image of American might more than the American crack-down on freedom damages the global image of American right.
My First Cavity Search
Proposed subtitle: "Helping your child understand why he is a threat to National Security"
I suppose that was offered in jest. The problem is that young children are often completely under the sway of their evolution-denying forebears. We'd have to explain the dangers of ideology, and that fact that many children are born to complete wing nuts, and the risk of growing up to become an independent voter, among other things.
These are all good lessons, but not lessons most parents wish to teach. Either the parent doesn't want to pass this knowledge along, or regrets having to paint trust in parental love in such a poor light.
And that's really the picture this paints: in a nation of family values, that parental love can't be trusted.
Seems like the wrong square in the game theory matrix to me.
This is really not a problem with the Web as such but with people in general, and to think the Web could somehow be different from the people that populate it is pretty naive ...
People forget about the terrible problems with prank callers back in the 1970s, before digital switching and the widespread adoption of call display.
Many grandmothers were subjected to heavy breathing from some dork 15 year old who didn't have a forum thread to troll bomb. It's hard to distinguish the heavy breathing of a clueless dork from the heavy breathing of a sexual psychopath, so this often frightened elderly women. Then the phone companies implemented a way to determine who placed the last call. The prank call meme soon faded away and the trolls had to sleep under a different bridge. Human nature didn't change, but the behaviour did.
The phone system had an excuse because in the analog switching system, call display was infeasible to implement. When digital switching arrived, call display should have been mandated as implicit in the basic service. It was the wrong power balance in the first place, like opening a door without a peephole.
We were lucky with the internet that so many of the original decisions were made wisely. Many of these early decisions are baked into the internet's DNA. That doesn't stop us from screwing it up, but it does serve to limit some of the more extreme abuses. Connectivity is the default. Messing with connectivity is an added extra. It could have been worse. Imagine that DNS resolved service names into a session GID with your ISP instead of the IP address of the server requested. Imagine that services had to pay your ISP for a listing.
The longer we hew to the original principles, the deeper that DNA penetrates, and more inconvenient it becomes to subvert in the name of the shallow gratification reflex. Sure, human nature sucks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to bend over and grab my ankles. We're dealing here with the grasp of the ham-handed over the stupid. It has always been thus. Let's break their thumbs a few more times before we accept the inevitable.
One could equally argue that the constitution of America is fading away in practical terms. The constitution failed to provide adequate defense against lobbyism and there is no political will to fix this. Human nature, and all that. Might as well cancel the next election. The dream is dead.
They were simply trying to use up their spare parts inventory and string the customers along until they were out of warranty service contract. That's dishonest.
Actually, I think from a legal perspective, Dell was colouring between the lines, if the contract was for Dell to replace the system as often as it failed within the warranty period.
You might complain that it's not ethical given the business image that Dell put forward. Obviously they decided that their short term reputation with share holders was worth more than their long term reputation with customers.
Given the size of the problem (across the industry) I'm not sure there were enough good capacitors available to replace all the defective boards with non-defective boards. I think it also took a while to figure out which capacitors were the good capacitors.
Given the shortage and lead time, if you tell everyone about the problem up front, you're encouraging a run on a bank that's essentially insolvent.
Suppose that Dell decides to man-up and announce a broad recall of millions of mainboards, but you're 18 months away from having enough replacement boards to go around. They could offer some kind of rebate to people electing to keep their could-blow-tomorrow systems. Many won't bite. You'll still have to pro-rate replacements. Dell's big dog accounts are going to expect the lion's share and you can't afford to make these people mad. If you say to every customer who purchased fewer than 100 systems "no soup for you" that's not going to play well in the echo chamber, either. Sounds like a PR fiasco at least equal to the sleazy approach they chose.
OTOH, deciding to manage this by marooning thousands of busy technicians on phone lines to call centers in India with people pretending to comprehend English less well than they actually do is something the market should severely punish.
I wish the suits so enamoured about dealing with big and established companies were the same people suffering telephone hell when big company doesn't man-up to their service contracts. Not that it would change how the world works all that much, but it might cut down on some of the intolerable bluster.
One needs to take into consideration that significant performance suites are often included in a compiler's regression suite. It's only the cheating by the most extreme standard for a compile team to ensure the compiler puts its best face forward on major benchmarks. We all cheat in the front of the mirror, don't we?
This practice can result in strange fragility on benchmark code. So can more nefarious intentions.
Better benchmark suites are engineered not to have dead code blocks. It's just begging for trouble.
The oldest benchmark cheating I recall (dimly) was ATI somewhere around 1990 cheating on a video benchmark to draw the same icon at the same place a bazillion times by only drawing it once.
Before that there was also a Taiwanese company IIRC who slowed the PC clock down by 10% on one of their turbo XT systems for a trade show. People at the trade show ran their own benchmark programs, but the timing result was liposuctioned by the wonky system clock.
The great thing about that machine if purchased as tweaked is that your work day now has 25 terrestrial hours so your productivity will be better than ever.
On a side note, I used to have an OpenBSD firewall named malice. When my network had issues, it was usually correct not to attribute to malice what could be attributed to vi. Malice was a Pentium Pro 200 with 128 MB of EDO that lasted 13 years with a couple of fresh disk drives. Seriously, if it doesn't break, don't fix it. Eventually I decided that scp really ought to saturate a 100 mbit link, so I finally pitched it out. Tellingly, it wasn't my broadband provider which forced the issue. If I waited for my ISP to exceed the machine's SSL crypto speed, I could have kept it another decade I think.
It's more than stupidity. If the snippy note had begun with the phrase "My understanding is that [content on the web is public domain unless accompanied by a copyright notice]" her appalling ignorance would have earned her a brisk education from the aggrieved party, and then she could have shot herself in the foot on the next exchange.
Robin Hood had the brains to hide in the forest while practising his unique brand of beneficence. Google had bags of coin to weather postbellum negotiation. Plainview had H.W. What was her plan?
Also, I don't get the whole "late at night, very tired" emergency fill thing. What's topical or time sensitive about the history of apple pie? Was it a theme issue on apple pie? An organized editor would have rescued something passable (and equally generic) from the emergency spike.
Many small devices detect screen pivot these days, but this is a single orientation font.
What don't you like about Geist? He's done great work at slowing down bad copyright legislation (though I'm a bit out of the loop recently).
Surveillance is 99% traffic analysis (constructing the social network, and colouring certain nodes red) and only 1% about the particulars of the conversation. SSH won't raise any red flags, unless you SSH into a well known onion router. Suppose one person in a thousand does this. These people take a moderate hit on their spook agency credit rating, and a smaller stain spreads outward to their primary affiliates.
I think you have to do a bunch of stuff to have your credit rating fall low enough to devote human resources to sussing you out. Too many sheep, not enough shepherds, who cost real money. Purchasing a holiday condo in Peshawar would really rack up the points if you're desperate to justify wearing a tinfoil hat.
The big Canadian ISPs won't complain because this creates a barrier to entry for small ISPs who can't afford to staff an office of conformance.
What sucks in this plan is the lack of judicial oversight. That's just plain wrong. Oversight is foundational to democracy. This is the same PM who is trying to gut Statistics Canada (on the bogus pretext there has ever been a privacy issue) because the data they produce is too credible, and can be used to justify social spending.
I would like to think it would be practical to have all (judicially supervised) surveillance requests opened to the public 50 to 75 years after the fact, so that we can look back and form an accurate opinion about the past scope of abuse. Every democracy needs the occasional dental checkup.
I listened to Spence on Growth the other night. He's the guy who came up with Signalling (economics) and won a Nobel prize for it, and then went off to do whacks of other high level stuff.
The premise of signalling theory is that the competence you gain from your education can be entirely ignored and the educational system would still have an economic function.
As for ethics, he's quite right his ethics are no worse than many of our leaders of the future. I have no doubt he does acceptable quality work. You can see that from the article. Students are pretty harried, so a lot of what even the good students produce is no great shakes. And he's a professional, with years of experience and crib sheets to draw upon.
My favorite part was that he "never edits" and gets thanked for the authentic mistakes. Just like slashdot, fire and forget.
The key assumption from Spence is that it costs less (by some metric) for a good student to earn the credential than the bad student. It's pretty clear at $2000 for a term paper, the bad student is taking it on the chin.
It's a basic problem in economics to determine who has the goods and who doesn't, without spending more on the discrimination than the discrimination is worth. University is the assembly line solution to this problem.
Shadow conformance is as inevitable as prostitution when society commoditizes human capital to the extent that global trade implies.
More of the problem explained here: Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms
(Had dim recall of the particulars of that link. Search google on "the world is thinking" to recover FORA.tv, hadn't the first clue about the guy's name so I searched FORA for the keyword "sir", and it came up first hit. That's funny. I could have found him the long way through TED.
WARNING: FORA practices bait and switch: you think you're watching the whole video, but clips are cut off abruptly as unpaid previews. The clip by the good Malcolm Gladwell on taxation would have been interesting to watch to conclusion. It's like his brain is loaned out from the Men in Black brain archive, and gets recalled from time to time, and to kill time without it, he writes another book.)
I agree the story could have been framed better. There is in any case some story here. For certain computational tasks, the linear performance scaling that vanished in a puff of Prescott has returned from the grave.
And not only that, instead of spending $20,000 to buy a Fermi class workstation and getting your result in a year, you can throw the same $20,000 at the cloud and have 10,000 machines deliver your result in an hour, for large instances of cloud.
This applies to a class of computational tasks denominated in CPU cycles where you can cut a wide swath.
Moore's law still exists, it's just not evenly distributed.
I though it would be useful to have a post or two here that mostly ignores exhibit Apple and talks about the book.
A guy by the name of Adam Thierer has put quite a bit of work into Thoughts on Tim Wu's Master Switch. What makes it interesting is the Tim Wu dropped into the discussion thread to rebut several points, and then Adam writes a response to that rebuttal.
Unfortunately, Adam makes a mistake that Russ Roberts sometimes makes on EconTalk (which I generally enjoy). The story goes like this: something big is happening, some enlightened souls speak out "we should worry about this", someone loosely affiliated with the furrowed forehead sect spouts a rabid depiction of this which the MSM circulates aggressively, the bad outcome does not materialize, and in the aftermath, some careless bloghards conclude we were wrong to worry so much in the first place.
This has been said about Y2K. It's still being said about the CDC and the imminent (or not-so-imminent) global influenza pandemic. Big flu blew over. Should the CDC stand down?
Larry Brilliant [still] wants to stop pandemics.
One possible version of the true story is that we might need to maintain a permanent vigilance on the rise of corporate gorillas. Sure AOL/Warner face-planted. Some gorillas are clumsy. And there was a time when Google was vulnerable and might not have become a counter-balancing force. These are contingent outcomes.
I have to say I think it's a bit of a dim bulb argument to argue from a catastrophe averted that there wasn't much risk in the first place, unless the belief is that the warning system was operating in complete isolation on an entirely separate plain of reality.
I loved Google from the outset, but my loyalty hung by a thread if Google had taken certain corporate directions. I've been around long enough to recall IBM as the 800 pound gorilla. I didn't much enjoy living through the Microsoft replacement.
Seth Godin said in a lecture at Google (four years ago) that Google has promoted their brand to such a degree that to backtrack on their declared values would cause them immeasurable brand injury. I tend to agree. They aren't going to poop the bed for small potatoes.
Microsoft did succeed in stifling innovation for a few years. It might have been a lot worse if they hadn't misjudged the internet, and been forced to take a tripping penalty on Netscape, and then spend two minutes in the FTC penalty box around the time of Google's nascence.
There are 17,000 federal lobbyists in Washington, DC. They exist to promote regulatory capture for vested interests. What will Apple do a year after losing Steve when their share price has contracted 40 percent? Will they reinvent, or run for cover?
I'm inclined to ascribe more of our good fortune (so far) to a small group of determined people tirelessly trying to do the right thing as described in RFC 2468.
Should we worry, or not?
The "market" has no lobbyists or campaign contributions, the market is not a player, it is the field on which the players compete. Blaming the market itself for the actions of would-be monopolists is nonsensical.
Welcome to Reductionism 101. It's also clear we can't blame the atoms. I think.
In a richer view of the world, it's sometimes reasonable to regard markets as a human institution, built up from negotiated agreements involving many players, including regulatory bodies, whose actions are partly based on representations to the general public, for all it's worth.
There was a capital market culture from 1950 to about 1980 that was reasonably stable. It was becoming frayed a bit at the end by algorithmic trading. No consensus lasts forever. Things change.
Then there was a very different ideological consensus in place from the early Reagan/Thatcher years based Hayek and some loony rhetoric about the Laffer curve. I can't find the hilarious Martin Gardiner parody just now. It looked a bit like this:
tworm.jpg
A Google engineer has a decent blog post about Laffer-nomics in the button down MSM.
A Laughable Laffer Curve from the WSJ
But I would argue that if he's going to subtract Norway, he should also subtract the UAE, which isn't actually an observational data point anyway. Then what curve would you have? A graph of tax code loophole coverage, aka Swiss cheese. He points this out concerning the nominal 34% US corporate tax rate generating almost no revenue.
The free trade component of this new consensus was relatively sane. The extent of financial market deregulation was not. And especially the oversight was conducted on the notion that if the ground underneath you is undulating slowly, you can't be anywhere near a cliff face. And don't put your ear to the ground to listen for industrial scale dollar excavation right under your feet.
That market consensus is gone now. We're still too busy drip feeding blood into the wounded church looters to declare future policy.
No, you can't blame an abstract market conception. But you can blame the markets we've actually built. And yes, the behaviour of a gas is determined by the behaviours of the constituent atoms, but sometimes we prefer to talk about the properties of the gas as if it actually exists.
It's also possible to distinguish monopolies from the exercise of monopoly power. Long ago Microsoft infused $150m in cash into Apple when Apple was on the ropes. If Microsoft held those shares, they made a bundle (one site says $18b based on stock history). Microsoft likely held the power to yank Apple's life support back in 1997, but they were subject to constraints on the exercise of their monopoly powers. That didn't make them *not* a monopoly. Not every company waits until they've been fingerprinted by the FTC to exercise discretion.
I think in any professional toolbox, the trick is to be able to sell solutions. It doesn't hurt to be able to sell solutions you believe in. And you do need to think a bit before jumping on a bandwagon.
Long ago I invested a lot of energy mastering standard C++. But it was hard to find a project where I could actually use those skills because of the abortion known as MSVC, a calculated effort to queer platform independence. I didn't much enjoy programming in dialect of the damned. Kai C++ was wonderful, then Intel snapped it up, and it became code generator of the damned, not working so great for the AMD platform.
How much could I seriously invest in mastering .NET before I'd wake up in a cold sweat and rush off first thing to read MS trade journals for any hint of future platforms whims that awaits me? Even Java made me nervous, on a much longer rope.
The MPAA ratings are not done by any government body, but they still censor movies ...
Technically the MPAA is a rating board. They don't actually cut anything. The power arises from the distribution chain that won't widely screen any movie with a rating above PG-13. I've even seen a few movies distributed unrated if the director has a loyal enough following and not terribly high commercial prospects to begin with.
If more consumers chose to ignore the ratings, we'd be better off. You can usually figure out whether a movie is suitable from any competent film review. All it takes is three minutes to make an independent decision, but the majority of the consuming public appears to value convenience over freedom. I guess you'd call that censorship by sheeple inertia.
One rating I wouldn't mind is "dim grasp of physics". Before I turned King Kong off, Kong was shaking Naomi Watts though what must have been a 30 foot arc at about a 1 Hz period. She was prone, with her head hanging loose, and she didn't get shaken baby syndrome. Tough gal.
Actually, I did skip forward to the mayhem in the final sequence, where Kong climbs the skyscraper at an incredible speed without breathing all that hard. Like they once asked Contador after an impressive climb, "hey, Contador, what's your VO2 max?" Kong was climbing that building at five times Contador's climb rate in France, so he should have been breathing five times harder than Contador relative to body mass. That's some serious chuffing.
Roughly 60% of the energy expended goes to body heat, and Kong has some serious cubed-square law issues. Maybe he was a reptile subject to convergent evolution and just looked like a hairy ape.
I suppose you could determine that by inspecting his ovipositor, if the MPAA hadn't blacked it out.
For hockey, I skip the article and go straight to the boxscore. It has this great innovation: presenting the information in chronological order so you can follow along, rather than describing them in reverse go-ahead order.
If you see a 10 minute misconduct by some skill dude, you might have to read the article to find out whether the guy went ape, or just forget to tie down his jersey in a tug fest of the midgets. This is exactly the information that's not likely to be found in the robospiel. Sometimes I guy goes -3 on the night, but wasn't responsible for any of the goals against if the goalie gases some weak shots, or a line mate keeps trying the same risky drop pass. The only use for the reporter is to supplement what the official statistics misrepresent. Another thing you can't tell from the boxscore is whether a player with four minutes of ice time in the 3rd period was stapled to the bench after too many missed assignments, or went into the dressing room for a skate repair. Stapled to the bench as week before the trade deadline is an important tell.
Now if only we could train the real sports journalists to discard all quotes containing the phrase "win" or "two points" or anything about "effort" or "coming out hard" or "weathering the storm".
An acceptable quote is one I recall from the other day by a guy who hasn't scored much this season about a rare goal: "Actually, I whiffed on that shot. I've had thirty hard shots on net this season and none of them go in. Then I shoot a knuckleball and it goes it, but I'll take it anyway."
That's only mildly interesting, but it's already better than 90% of what gets scribbled.
Sports reporting was invented to kill whatever brain cells survived the drinking the night before. Actually, there's one hockey blog I read with good writing. Unfortunately, it's hampered by the secrecy of player offers rejected, so even a sharp knife can't get to the root of management dysfunction (as much as they like to try).
Of course, the league is constructed to ensure that this will always be true. Fans are for hollering on cue, and not for thinking too much.