Unless or until the government privatizes law enforcement, the government needs to protect the taxpayer from the damage idiots cause to themselves (not to mention the downstream impact). The cost either shows up in the Medicare system, if the country has one, or as a law enforcement cost, which picks up the loose ends when idiots are left to bear their own cost. A two year complementary stay in the big house costs someone $60,000 and rarely leads to improved earning power or better parenting skills.
Of course, any system of government can me made to work if you take it far enough, as Mel Gibson demonstrates in the Mad Max movies. I don't know what the solution is, apart from a remake of Death Race 2000 with a special bonus for white earbuds.
The German driver thing illustrates that it might be safe for German drivers to speed on American highways. Sadly, many Americans have adopted the view that flaunting the least possible precaution demonstrates maximal independence from the nanny state. Somehow the Germans manage to maintain masculinity while wearing proper safety equipment. If America had a sane culture of safety, Palin's approval rating would be -300%
Have you ever used a chainsaw without wearing a face shield and Kevlar pants? No soup for you.
The second requirement is passing a piss test for shit-eating grin.
Finally, I have to wonder what the medical response time in Utah looks like compared to any Hamburg in Germany. Half the time I bet the salt truck gets there sooner than the ambulance. Perhaps in Utah that's considered acceptable.
Look before you leap. The idiot I quoted appears not to have realized he was dividing by population quoted in thousands. Many demographic tables quote population in thousands with no footnote. 300 pounds per person, not 300 tons. My brain didn't get past the 8 million tons until after I clicked submit.
I more or less agree that if America had dropped 24 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, they might have been able to declare victory. Paying to Fedex another 16 million tons would have required a Jerry Lewis telethon or two. Vietnam by then would have resembled a lunar landscape. American citizens donating $1000 could their name on their very own crater.
Had the bombing campaign been allowed to continue and not been limited (again, due to liberal protests), we bet your ass we could have won that war.
Oh yes. Unfortunately, the famous liberal dove Robert McNamara doesn't agree with you if you read between the lines of "Fog of War".
One of the main reasons the bombing was less effective that you make out was the C Chi tunnels which IIRC were far more extensive than bomber-command wished to believe.
B-52 bombers, that could fly at heights that prevented them being seen or heard, dropped 8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. This was over three times the amount of bombs dropped throughout the whole of the Second World War and worked out at approximately 300 tons for every man, woman and child living in Vietnam.
So, how many million tons did we fall short of achieving an easy victory? Another 700 tons per man, woman and child?
Besides, Google would be able to get around any attempt to block their ads totally... they've got ways to make them indistinguishable from content.
The day Google ad content becomes indistinguishable from the neo-Trotskyite content I enjoy perusing on aldaily.com (until my eyes glaze over) is the day I pull my plug on the grid and run for the hills.
Ad content has that new car smell, and I think it always will. I don't think a new-car-smell detector is much harder than breaking a CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, anticonsumers seem to lack the motivation and organization of rummy ex-physicists on the make so the problem gets less quality attention.
When "the defendant" doesn't show up, the court could make at least a minimal effort to determine that "the defendant" is actually *the* defendant.
That was the entire premise of the movie Brazil: a society where there's no mechanism within the bureaucracy for correcting s/Buttle/Tuttle.
This is one discussion where people should be writing IANAL && IANEAVGSA (I am not even a very good software architect).
Clearly, innocent mistakes happen. A lawyer depends upon information obtained from his/her client, who might be medically or mentally or educationally disadvantaged.
If you find yourself on the receiving end of a mistake and make no effort to draw attention to this error, it's possible you have set yourself up to participate in a deliberate miscarriage of justice (by taking a fee from the party who should have been named to sit on the error and do nothing).
I'm sure RIAA is studying the matter carefully. If we've design our torrents as badly as people here would like to see the legal system, RIAA could perhaps bring down the entire torrent network by releasing an invalid client that suppresses error messages on misdirected content.
Economists who don't understand Malthus assume that we can just invent new equivalent energy sources when the old ones dry up, forever.
I've never encountered a serious-minded economist who said any such thing, although a few occasionally talk as if Jesus turned water into wine because the incentive structure made it possible.
Hardly any serious-minded physicist thinks that human civilization has a long term energy problem. We're about halfway through the life of the sun as we know it, which is about where we're at with oil (but not fossil carbon as a whole). We've got a few billion years to learn how to rub hydrogen together before the energy situation really becomes dire. Many physicists regard heat as a bigger problem than energy.
Within the short time frame of the last century or two, it's hard to untangle the global population surge from the exploitation of coal and petroleum. Why is it that people talk more about peak oil than peak population. The time offset is maybe only fifty years and we're nowhere close to running out of fossil carbon over (tar sands and coal). If anything, we're running out of environmental capacity to withstand the unflagging supply.
In the margin, we have the inconvenience (and human suffering) that goes along with a less predictable climate. Against that we have the sum total of human ingenuity, as magnified by Google and social networking and bio-engineering and not-invented-yet.
It's a funny thing, because many doom-sayers are twice as afraid of human ingenuity as they are of external threats to human civilization (e.g. running out of global productive capacity). "Our tools are insanely powerful, we'll certainly cut ourselves with the sharp knives and make things worse before we make them better."
What your typical economist believes is that it's hard to overestimate the challenges we can overcome when all the arrows are pointed in the right direction. Across the hall, your typical political scientist worries about the amazing amount of blood we can shed when all the arrows are pointed at each other's throats.
We're nowhere close to a future determined solely by external calamity. The key variable is human politics. It seems to me that the common worry is that resource constraints are historically more likely to elicit the worst of human politics, rather than the best. Does this necessarily have to happen in the modern world with so much more shared knowledge than ever before? Who knows? It's unexplored territory. Unexplored territory is a corollary of the theory of evolution. Life is a grand experiment. Why didn't mother nature screw up long ago? Because no species had yet evolved self-blame? We aggrandize our importance as a species by painting ourselves culpable.
I think the cognitive dissonance in the public debate derives from the uncomfortable realization in many people that if we run our world as shallowly as many of us live our lives, we're in for a rough ride.
Rather than confront our shallow behaviour, it's easier to run around proclaiming "we're all doomed". Plausible to anyone with a grasp of history, but far from certain in the light of day, if the light of day enters into it.
I think if the New York Times gave Chomsky a regular column his luster would have worn off by now.
Chomsky belongs to the same group as Steve Jobs and Rush Limbaugh and RMS. These people are not as common as you make out. Reality distortion fields that work on some (or most) of the people all of the time are a rare achievement.
I was watching Chomsky debates on YouTube the other day. It's hard to figure out what he's actually doing in his debating tactic. He seems to be convinced that human agency is a straight line, and therefore nearly any unknown can be brushed off the table at the first hint of smoking gun.
One tactic he used in the videos I watched boiled down to "some high level government official once wrote in a memo a bald confession of the true motive behind the initiative". He often adds something to the effect that "you can read it yourself". The logical foundation seems to be that high level government officials never colour outside the lines and that a certain type of memo that spills the beans negates 1000 official communications that adhere to the party line. I'm sure there's a grain of truth to that. Chomsky never pauses to assess whether it's a small grain or a large grain. That seems to be the essence of his rhetorical style: all grains of truth contrary to the hegemonic administration are created equal under God.
I've never been much of a Chomsky fan, but he's worth listening to from time to time.
Speaking of Rush, his debating tactics are certainly worse as noted by an irate movie critic. Put up or shut up
Rush has two primary demographics: the stupid, whom he addles, and the smug, who enjoy watching the former. This simple act never seems to grow stale.
I made a post to this effect not long ago. For the most part, large corporations do not innovate. Large corporations like to talk about innovation until they're blue in the face, because the pretext of innovation is their best defense against sharp questions from the FTC. Microsoft in particular has been selling this Kool-Aid for decades. Why does Microsoft deserve monopolistic powers? "Because we innovate." Innovation is good for the consumer, hence our monopoly power is good for the consumer. QED.
Innovation in large corporations is a simple matter of risk allocation. The investors who signed up for monumental risk when the corporation was small have long since headed for the exits. Few stakeholders in a mature enterprise want the ongoing volatility of a never-ending stream of "bet the company" innovation initiatives. Even when large companies are willing to innovate, they prefer to derisk the process by buying up a smaller company to prime the pump.
This is entirely normal, and a big part of the reason why we have a small number of huge, mature corporations, and a wide base of small companies with larger dreams than revenues.
Even when large companies do innovate, it's more often in the area of business process than underlying technology. At that scale, innovation which changes your company is far more valuable than innovation that changes your products. The innovation at Fed-Ex was distribution logistics. It wasn't a better envelope, unless you count slapping a bar code on an envelope as innovation.
It is a risk when buying up small companies that you end up with too many culture fragments who don't sign up for the big picture. Hence the reason why upper management gets paid more than most of us sots. It's true that only a fraction of highly compensated management delivers value. This is also normal wherever you have extremely soft deliverables. It's really no different than the success rate of first round draft picks in any major league. You draft three players. One becomes the face of the franchise, the other two blow goats. It's very difficult to tell initially when they all show up wearing the same suits, speaking the same language, taught at the same schools.
In a small company, a genius researcher is your most valuable asset. In a large company, a genius manager is your most lucrative asset. This is a simple calculus of scale.
We have to stop thinking that innovation is a hallmark of vigour in large companies. There are more useful metrics of vitality, such as how a large company embraces its competitors. Do they raise the bar, or choke off the air supply? Intel is one of the strangest companies out there, because they suck at choking off the air supply (on technical grounds), yet they kick ass when they decide to compete on merit. Yet which do they frequently choose to do?
I think it comes down to having all those highly paid managers trying to come up with a pretext to prove that they're the straw that stirs the drink and not just goat wankers in expensive threads. Hmmm, we could design the Core2 Duo. That would make the engineers look good and us look irrelevant. Or we could crawl in bed with RAMBUS. That would make us look good (long enough to promote and piss off) and make the engineers irrelevant.
What I don't understand about all this, is that after Intel paid AMD a billion bucks for illegal tampering, why they didn't apply for a federal bail-out. Few companies that size wear their mistakes any more if they know how to play the game. They've missed out on *the* most important business innovation of the last thirty years. I think some of those suits need to be fired.
Rarely has the geek factor at Slashdot been so painfully evident. No matter how relevant the topic, a superficial stupidity in the summary text reduces this place to a tribe of impulse-challenged baboons trading shallow bon mots like a feces fight.
"One of the first things I discovered was that I didn't like baboons very much," he says. "They're quite awful to one another, constantly scheming and backstabbing. They're like chimps but without the self-control."
Troglodytes in the high art of back-stabbing, as Sapolsky humorously demonstrates with his own poison pen:
[Old Testament nicknames] was a way of rebelling against his childhood Hebrew school teachers, who rejected the blasphemy of Darwinian evolution. "I couldn't wait for the day that I could record in my notebook that Nebuchanezzar and Naomi were off screwing in the bushes," Sapolsky wrote in A Primate's Memoir. "It felt like a pleasing revenge."
Bezos' grandfather had something useful to say about cleverness at the expense of what matters: Bezos at Princeton
Here we are hunched over our keyboards having a feces fight about the semantics of immortality rather than thinking about major life choices. If a computer programmer's office chair was a protein complex, there would be a conjugate protein that binds the chair and expired occupant into a handy burial pod that can be rolled (rather than wheeled) out of the room.
With rare exceptions, you don't see death sitting down on the job all that often. Here's another obligatory Ted link: Challenging Death
I had completely forgotten the cape wipe. Nice touch in the editing room.
This sad display leaves me contemplating an update to the video tombstone memorial from Atom Egoyan's "Speaking Parts" with the text of "last post" and "last tweet" added automatically to the rolling feed by the web-scrapers of omniscience. Even St Peter has an iPad these days to assist in the great summing up.
I wonder how many suicide bombers have as their last thought "I know I'm going to get modded down for this" then press submit anyway.
You can't "win" against an angry child, either. The goal is to achieve a modicum of semi-peaceful coexistence and trust that over time, agendas evolve in a larger context.
Human males are exposed to paternal uncertainty and for that reason have an innate agenda to gain control over the social structure of marriage and reproduction. In a society where this solution becomes culturally entrenched, usually girls are poorly educated and there is a lot of violence and anger among young men (who have few immediate reproductive prospects), and birth rates are high, so life is (relatively) cheap.
This is the perfect age to teach the psychology and politics of social structure and reproduction, but it would take a teacher nearly as brave/foolish to venture into it. While we're at it, we could teach more of the emotional components of the act of sex, and less about the plumbing (well covered on the internet).
It helps to bear in mind that women are ultimately as self-interested as men and that little that goes on in any society goes on without a great deal of complicit involvement from women, no matter how unfair the system appears to the participants or the outsiders.
Rumour has it that Tiger Woods personally collected over one hundred female votes in favour of male infidelity.
I guess that leaves a lot of schmoes out there who aren't getting any, and aren't going to take it any longer.
It's obvious to me that rigour is best served by treating time as a monotonic, linear domain as done under TAI.
However, there is potential for confusion about the conversion to civil time if the correction for leap seconds is unavailable or unimplemented.
What we need is a convention, perhaps called "marshal time" where the leap second correction is guaranteed to be current, or the time is simply not reported (N/A).
The authorities declare ahead of time where the leap seconds will occur, e.g. one leap second between now and December 2015, on such a date, or whatever. If this leap second declaration is downloaded with a proper signature chain, then the marshal time function can report accurate UTC times until December 2015, in absence of the next declaration.
If correct UTC synchronization to within a few seconds is mission critical, then you request marshal time, and handle the condition when it comes back "no can do" because the conversion download was botched.
If Russia fires nukes at us, Obama will just ignore it for 3 months, make a speech or two about being tough, and play a couple games of bad golf. And then he'll ignore it again.
Stupid, and proud of it. The American government budgeted $680 billion dollars in 2010 to prepare for military threats to national security (and to flip the elbow at any nation whose diplomatic chauffeur makes an aggressive lane change in the U.N. traffic circle).
The American government spends a lot less money planning to plug leaks in the bottom of the ocean. So far as I know, the U.S. government does not count among its assets a single nuclear-powered leak-repair submarine with giant crab-like manipulators along with an underwater proving-range the size of Dakota so that when they take on the mission, they have half a hope of pulling it off.
Truly, a proactive president would have immediately spotted a way to repurpose the space station to assist in underwater leak mitigation. That asset has hardly been earning its keep up in space, and why did we build it in the first place, if it can't help out?
Sometimes the best course of action is not to mess with things unnecessarily. Was BP going to plug the hole any faster if Obama quivered with bravado in the Italian opera of media sound-bites? A certain stripe of Libertarian believes that governments exist to mess up things they don't properly understand. It causes ideological vertigo to see government sit back and not pretend to fix something they aren't capable of fixing, while a paragon of the private sector runs around like mad chickens. "Does not follow ideological script, does not compute."
This is a version of government right out of Saturday morning cartoons: a vision of small government consisting of President Buck Rogers and his legion of supersuits, who never meddle in policy, but swoop in to take control wherever damsels swoon.
At $15m the budget is smaller than I thought. That would barely pay for HR services. I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg and it has roots deep into the Pentagon's $56B black budget, not all of which is wasted in the tradition of unobtainium origami, though they're happy to abet that PR meme.
The reason Dr Strangelove almost plays as a documentary is that the whole business of "fail safe" already had a rich literature in early days. Since the U.S. government now relies almost exclusively on Google, and this stuff is too old to make it into the Google index, maybe it is a problem. Some rusty CRM-144 in a dank cement basement on the outskirts of Moscow is poised to take out Western civilization, and nobody knows.
What I'd personally love to see is a remake of the telephone scene from the war room with Tony Hayward on the other end of the line. "You want your life back? We *all* want our life back, Timitri."
And the average human navigation narrative are long on detail and short on relevant constraints. e.g. "The most direct way is to cross town on the Panzerbahn, but it's a black art to merge into the exit lane, so I suggest you loop to the south and cross town on Marine Drive which is longer but avoids many ugly intersections, then after you turn north on Artic Express, you need to shoot past 49'th which has a three second advance left, and then take the next three rights, which gets you westbound on 49'th where there's a project to reline the local water main, so it's going to make a big difference if you arrive before or after the works crews" etc.
Then the intrepid driver is free to ask, "what if I survive exiting the Panzerbahn, do I avoid the waterworks on 49'th?"
Probably the fastest way is to ask the address, consult the GPS and then declare "my GPS is routing me here and there, is that going to cause me any problems?" The other person will say "oh no, that's fine", and you'll run into problems anyway. When you arrive (late) the person goes "huh, that road has been closed for a year now, I never knew" and the happy consensus is achieved that local road knowledge, like poetry, rarely translates.
One case where I do take detailed notes over the phone is when entering suburbia where you need to snake along the path of the Minotaur within tract developments of Wolframesque originality.
I once bought a Lexmark inkjet as part of a package for my GF, took it home, read the heavy legal text on the outside, refused to open the box, and took it right back. I have a different grudge against HP. The build quality in Brother printers scares me, so I always start with Canon when possible (but not the Pigma photo printers.)
Even Canon earned a black mark. I once had a perfectly good Canon scanner for which they never upgraded the driver (for any OS whatsoever) after Windows 98. Took it off to recycling. It was shipped to China where a ten year old boy ingested some of the toxic metals and grew a tumour on the side of his head which he treated by using for a tourniquet a reclaimed power necktie that had outlasted its profit mojo. Good thing, he almost died.
Unfortunately, inkjet printers are one of the less excusable waste streams in the history of western civilization.
Not long ago I read about the billions of dollars HP invested in ink with a thousand miraculous qualities, so no doubt it's worth more than liquid gold. 80% of the documents printed barely last two weeks before heaving directly into the recycle bin. Somehow the profit margins at HP have convinced management that the average person wishes to print their suggestive but erroneous Google map navigation route in gold brocade, every damn time.
Where's the cheap shitty ink I would generally use 90% of the time? And why do none of the print drivers I commonly encounter ever tell you in advance the total ink consumption of the job you are about to print, including the ten full colour sheets you forgot were in the middle of chapter seven?
"This short print job will cost more than the initial purchase price of your inkjet printer. Press OK to continue, or CANCEL to terminate the print job after squirting, but prior to curing." Those little print heads consist of many hundreds of reverse-engineered penis brains swaddled in patent protection.
Yeah, class sizes use to be bigger. My cozy elementary school classrooms had 30 to 33 students, one teacher, and 59 to 65 live-at-home parents. Somehow the teacher felt less outnumbered.
Perhaps these days you have 20 students, one teacher, and less than 30 live-at-home parents. The teacher gets to function as a surrogate for the other 10 to 15 parents who don't stick up their hand and say "here" when morning attendance is taken.
I slightly exaggerated the feebleness of a presumption of privacy.
In the relatively rare case where a corporation and an ex-employee end up in litigation, the advocate for the employee will now find it considerable easier to argue that copious employment surveillance records are inadmissible. In future, character assassination will be less thoroughly recorded in the annals of the German courts.
(With two 'ass'es in the previous sentence, it's no wonder my Firefox spell checker failed to suggest 'annals' in place of 'anals'. I once posted a bug report on some egregious defects in the Firefox spell checker speculating unkindly whether the verb list was scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. The evidence mounts.)
Good grief. I was recently complaining about the tendency of a certain type of voice to polarize issues without much regard for which pole they end up occupying. The primary agenda is to reduce the discussion to black/white and exclude the middle ground where intelligent discourse takes place (spamflood permitting).
There's an entire F'ing culture in western society concerning adherence to the speed limit. It's a band of speeds in proximity to the posted limit. The drivers know the customs and so do the police. The posted speed where I live is 50km/h. I drive the majority of the time in the 60-65km/h band. Haven't had a ticket in years. I'm smart enough to take my safety seriously. When traffic around me is slow, I don't make seven lane changes per mile to maintain my preference speed. And I don't drive a red Ferrari to draw attention to myself.
Strangely, it's also LAW not to engage in selective enforcement, though this seems not to apply with much force to the availability bias of spotting a red Ferrari demonstrating its nimbleness. The LAW contradicts itself. The LAW contains multitudes.
This is rather apt to this discussion as a whole. By no means will the available mechanisms of enforcement constitute much deterrent on the corporations willingly turning a blind eye.
Nevertheless, the surveillance state is not without its participants, who won't fail to note that they are employed in the service of flouters in a Dickensinian enterprise. There's plenty of profit in flouting, but there's also no rest for the wicked. Perhaps a few will weary of the social opprobrium, even if the fangs of enforcement are dull.
My only real surprise was to see this coming out of Germany first of all.
If you have time, read all about it. "Get users credit card number" validation scheme is over. Completely over.
You're from the school of silver bullets. If it won't work to a high degree, it's completely worthless. You might note that Google is not without resources in identifying the difference between a valid CC number and one found floating down some pipe in the intertubes.
If half of the malicious lamers are too stupid to notice this, then Google has improved the signal to noise ratio in policing their chrome extension developers by 3dB.
It's a minor barrier to malfeasance. It discourages sock puppets. And it sends the message "we care" which is the main reason aggressively scrubbing graffiti off trains in NYC works so effectively.
The downside? Fewer chrome extensions written by the next teenage African Einstein. And shirt-rending despair over failure to attain the requisite degree of silver-bullet superhero mojo. Yet another superhero impostor. It's a tough life.
There's no such thing as "on the level of a human mind" but without self awareness, free will (or its illusion if you prefer), or an ego. It's a real stretch to claim there's meaning in "on the level of a human mind" but without a subconscious, or emotions. It's even way too ambiguous for real science to speak of "on the level of a human mind", but without reproductive drives or tiered social modeling.
When the dust settles, none of these terms will matter. In the process of better understanding the human mind, all these vague sentiments will be unpacked into different conceptual primitives. It'll be like quantum mechanics. Anyone who says they are completely comfortable with the unpacking will be someone who doesn't fully understand it.
I think you are making too big a deal of an artificial mind achieving a kindred consciousness. I think we have as much or more to learn about what we aren't (other forms of mentation) as what we are. To a primitive man, a mirror is an interesting discovery, but how much do you really learn pointing it back at yourself? We'll find ourselves in an uncomfortable exchange with these highly non-human mentalities. Someone will come along and add a fatuous ego module, and suddenly the exchange will be less uncomfortable. It'll be Joseph Weizenbaum all over again. Deep rapport will turn out to consist of Elizaesque gimmicks.
I tend to regard consciousness as more of a sentient sentiment than something amenable to rational definition. Perhaps consciousness is just a toxic overdose of self-sentiment. Toxic in the sense that it overflows into the belief system.
But the time required to fully test it and make sure it doesn't break anything else? That's where all the real costs are. It's why Microsoft doesn't generally have a fast turnaround on Windows security fixes.
That's what you get when you design an architecture rife with knock-on effects. The usual case where fixed a bug breaks an existing application is where the existing application was coded badly in the first place. In free market economics failure of weak institutions is praised. Why should badly coding software not fail? If it breaks when the OS patches a bug, maybe you should have done better due diligence in the first place. We'd have a market which rewards a track record of responsible coding practices, and far greater triage rate on software which didn't deserve to see release in the first place.
I don't shed half so many tears for companies that invest heavily in badly coded software.
I'd be very much in favour of Microsoft releasing the first cheap and quick fix (sans expensive breakage testing) and letting the end user decide where security or pandering to some ridiculous broken application is more immediately important. Later they can also release the regression-proof gold-plated fix, if they feel like investing the extra resources.
Oh, we didn't release that patch promptly because some abortion coded in VB6 failed in our regression test compatibility suite. Thanks, glad to know you're looking out for my interests there.
Of course there would be the case there the simple fix breaks half the applications out there because misuse of a bad API is endemic in the Windows ecosystem. That doesn't speak well of the ecosystem.
There is no difference between security critical and other bugs, there's only bugs with known exploits and bugs without. Every bug is a chink in the armor, and every kernel bug should be considered security-critical.
Wow. Peculiar assertion. Take your favorite recent Linux distribution. Construct the set of all possible bugs. Construct the set of all possible realizations (basically, the powerset of all possible bugs). Within the set of all possible realizations, determine the exploitable subset. Now construct the minimal cover of the exploitable subset (the smallest subset of all possible bugs, such that if the realization contains none of these, it is non-exploitable).
Bugs in the minimal cover are certainly distinct from bugs outside the minimal cover. For example, some application program is supposed to open port 4343 so that gdb can connect, but fails to open the port due to some bug. Essentially, the bug subsets specified functionality (it doesn't add a quirky behaviour, but eliminates a function you would otherwise expect to have). Such a bug is almost certainly not a member of the minimal cover. I would eat my cable modem if someone determines otherwise.
Yes, every bug is a chink in the armour, but not all chinks are created equal.
Spoiling your seed is bad for the prostate. Spilling your seed freshens the troops. Even mother nature knows this. I read a study long ago that men spontaneously freshen the troops prior to a sexual encounter after a period of separation. You can DIY or you can run yourself down to the dry cleaners and have your troops freshened by a professional in you don't mind the lack of liability insurance. DIY is quick and easy, can be practiced within the comfort of your own home, and you rarely catch anything you didn't already have.
Personally, I think society needs to relax it's fetish for spotlessness. A spotless human is an AC meat puppet. Bully pulpit now recruiting.
If Americans were willing to work cheaper (and were actually allowed to), we might get some jobs coming back. Instead, we get labor unions that argue for high wages and benefits at the cost of actual jobs. Employment should be an agreement exchanging work for pay. In my opinion, all details of that agreement should be negotiable on an individual basis.
I'm no fan of unions in their modern guise as bargaining collectives, but in the early days unions made tremendous contributions to workplace safety (even matters as small as functional fire escapes). Still, it surprises me that your rant makes no acknowledgement whatsoever of having encountered a positive argument on the validity of unionization. It's clear that some powerful unions overstayed their welcome, and damaged their membership through excessive demands. No organizational structure is perfect. Union leaders make good coin, and sometimes succumb to the temptation to justify their fat pay packet by engaging in brinkmanship negotiation tactics. It takes an extremely secure leader to pocket a fat pay cheque and do nothing, even where that's the best course of action.
On the wage front, it's fairly orthodox among modern economists to believe that a minimum wage does more harm that good to low income earnings (by making it impossible for many to get a job at all).
On the other side of the zinc coin, it's already the case that many companies view minimum wage earners as a pool of disenfranchised schleps who wouldn't know their legal rights if bitten on the backside. Many rights in America exist only if you're wealthy enough to (credibly) threaten to enforce them. Even small-claims court is daunting for someone at a sixth grade literacy level who grew up in an Elbownian-speaking household. It's true the disenfranchised could pool their resources together to protect their rights, in a process resembling unionization, with no fear of reprisals as they work the bugs out of their collaborative process. I've always thought that shit flows down hill well enough on its own accord without so many eager and active helping hands. The reason many economic theories don't work out in practice as advertised is that in much of America, shit flows down hill in pressurized pipelines. Discussions on how to reduce the pipeline pressure lead to questions of civil society, a total non-starter in present day America. First reduce the pipeline pressure, then eliminate minimum wage. In that order, I think it would work.
Is there a way to eliminate the minimum wage to reap the theoretical economic benefits without hanging a "kick me" sign on the bottom rung of the employment ladder? Still haven't figured this out. I'm not against two year apprenticeships at a wage lower than the current minimum, as more of a temporary kick-me sign, though it would surely be abused in some quarters.
Your African aphorism is a bit of red herring. By the time a country has the social infrastructure to engage in productive international trade, the standard of living is already rising abruptly. Ten to twenty years later, not so cheap any longer, and maybe not a bargain at all in relative productivity. I believe the standard of living in Mexico is now comparable to the standard of living I experienced growing up in Canada, long ago.
Usually after an abrupt rise in standard of living a nation faces a painful round of internal change before resuming rapid growth. Even Japan had a major hiccup after achieving American affluence until an old custom regarding financial reporting shell games was finally dismantled.
What I'd like to hear from Apple is that they have canned all the corrupt vendors who went along with the other side of the illicit transactions. That would send a strong message that they mean business on ethical procurement. Merely sacking the individuals with their hands caught in the cookie jar is 99% business as usual.
Fought for and eventually won DRM free content with the publishers
Good point, but not half the battle Google is fighting with Google Books. Apple has always been the best at slapping a tuxedo on something, then taking the lion's share of the credit. You want real innovation? Try Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
It's appalling the consumer slant on this thread. Innovation is equally valid in business models, work processes, and fundamental physics (such as the first blue LED and much of the work IBM pioneered on magnetic storage). Google's business model was spectacularly innovative. The core realization was how little revenue is generated with each click and finding a practical way to scale into a dominant market position on that basis. Google's mission critical innovation was driving down the cost per click delivered by building data centers on a scale no one had previously contemplated.
Apple's mission critical innovation was monetizing PR. Apple invested more than a decade proclaiming that RISC was going to mop the flop with x86. The Apple PR fodder was wrong. The x86 architecture had few fundamental performance limitations compared to any other architecture. It was ugly, Intel had to work a lot harder to extract the potential than with a cleaner design, and it comes at a cost in power consumption. Steve, repeat after me, "I was wrong." He sold the belief, and his loyal followers got more sex as a result. "My photoshop transform is faster than yours." Not that different than selling a fat man a 10lb carbon-fibre bicycle. He's excited by his purchase, because *someone else* could rock the equipment. There are more Linux desktop PCs out there than competent Photoshop users. A lesser man would have benchmarked kernel compiles, thinking that this was actually useful. That's what makes Steve such a genius.
Jobs returned to Apple with the inspiration, "you know what, that PR trick works great, even if you're sometimes selling the truth".
The term "innovation" is worthless these days. Microsoft beat it to a painful death. In the mind of the court, monopolistic business practices (such as patents) are socially permissible if they promote innovation and the greater wealth of society. It became a Microsoft speaking point to spew forth the word "innovation" at every opportunity, since monopoly requires such a pretext to legally exist. I can't recall Microsoft elaborating on exactly what was innovative about these many products. The Genuine Advantage was usually left unstated. The last innovation where I give MS full credit was the Siamese twin architecture bonding the OS and the browser into codependent symbiosis. It wasn't entirely true, but that never stopped Steve.
One needs to step back and take a structure view of innovation. In the modern world, with ubiquity of 90% of fundamental knowledge, most innovation takes place in a densely populated grid of related ideas. As the grid becomes dense enough, you end up with an innovation curvature. Anyone clever enough to follow the curve can iterate into the useful local maxima. This is high dimensional space, so you don't have strong locality. One discipline is not far away in this space from another. Often three or four disciplines are perched on the edge of the innovation curvature. If one discipline doesn't detect the opportunity, another soon will. Innovation becomes less an act of personal heroism than an inevitability, within an increasingly narrow window of uncertainty.
Instead of backing off on the social promotion of monopoly (i.e. patents) we're instead modeling innovation on high velocity trading where the critical distinction between small success and great success is a 3ms faster reaction time.
Filing a patent costs money, so the timing of a patent application needs to be based on market analysis. The decision to patent some minor cool way to exploit an accelerometers in a user interface is a matter of timing. Ten years ago, it would have taken an act of c
The framing is succinct, and I doubt there will be another issue of this type within my lifetime.
I used blockquote for the above, when blackquote didn't work. It strikes me that there are more conjunctions of black and white in this world than are dreamed of in your philosophy. One that springs readily to mind is whether life is A) cheap, or B) precious.
You can boil this down another way. America is morally superior to other nations because A) Americans are better people (minus a few bad Islamic apples since deported to Guantanamo), or B) Americans have a better political system of checks and balances.
The right wing seems to implicitly believe proposition (A). From this view, disclosure serves no real purpose and potentially compromises human lives (mostly the cheap variety), national interests (bought and paid for), and the influence and careers of Pentagon demagogists.
Neither Milgram's authority experiment nor Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment provided any scientific backing for this view. But no matter, the right wing fringe discounts science to begin with. Moral superiority is a faith-based enterprise.
On the matter of checks and balances, there are differences in opinion on whether it was good enough to have written them down back in 1787, or whether you actually have to live by what you proclaim in order for the virtuous halo to take effect. Checks and balances prove annoyingly inconvenient. Who knew? In any case, American congress has lately taken the path of honour in the breach. There's oil at stake, among other things.
If Wikileaks helps to end a war that has outlived its political mission and degenerated into war-machine profiteering (that never happens) then ultimately it will save more lives than it compromises. Of course, if you're firmly welded to "life is precious" the one person who dies in violence as a result of Wikileaks outweighs a thousand intangible lives saved. Life is most precious when discussing the fate of a single individual.
I don't have a strong opinion on Wikileaks one way or the other. Whether his disclosure has a salutary effect on the future of Afghanistan depends on information unavailable to the thinking public. See also "checks and balances". Generally I believe that systemic secrecy is corrosive to moral wisdom. It has to stop somewhere. Is this the best mechanism? One would like to hope not.
Against that hope, I sure haven't spotted much American vigour lately in the department of ethical self-disclosure. Both sides agree on one thing: ethical disclosure is an expensive undertaking and doesn't play well on TV. I nearly drowned in my own spittle when BP first announced the leak rate as 1000 bpd. Don't blame BP. They were merely aping recent American political norms.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless or until the government privatizes law enforcement, the government needs to protect the taxpayer from the damage idiots cause to themselves (not to mention the downstream impact). The cost either shows up in the Medicare system, if the country has one, or as a law enforcement cost, which picks up the loose ends when idiots are left to bear their own cost. A two year complementary stay in the big house costs someone $60,000 and rarely leads to improved earning power or better parenting skills.
Of course, any system of government can me made to work if you take it far enough, as Mel Gibson demonstrates in the Mad Max movies. I don't know what the solution is, apart from a remake of Death Race 2000 with a special bonus for white earbuds.
The German driver thing illustrates that it might be safe for German drivers to speed on American highways. Sadly, many Americans have adopted the view that flaunting the least possible precaution demonstrates maximal independence from the nanny state. Somehow the Germans manage to maintain masculinity while wearing proper safety equipment. If America had a sane culture of safety, Palin's approval rating would be -300%
Have you ever used a chainsaw without wearing a face shield and Kevlar pants? No soup for you.
The second requirement is passing a piss test for shit-eating grin.
Robert Sapolsky on TOXO
Finally, I have to wonder what the medical response time in Utah looks like compared to any Hamburg in Germany. Half the time I bet the salt truck gets there sooner than the ambulance. Perhaps in Utah that's considered acceptable.
Look before you leap. The idiot I quoted appears not to have realized he was dividing by population quoted in thousands. Many demographic tables quote population in thousands with no footnote. 300 pounds per person, not 300 tons. My brain didn't get past the 8 million tons until after I clicked submit.
I more or less agree that if America had dropped 24 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, they might have been able to declare victory. Paying to Fedex another 16 million tons would have required a Jerry Lewis telethon or two. Vietnam by then would have resembled a lunar landscape. American citizens donating $1000 could their name on their very own crater.
Oh yes. Unfortunately, the famous liberal dove Robert McNamara doesn't agree with you if you read between the lines of "Fog of War".
One of the main reasons the bombing was less effective that you make out was the C Chi tunnels which IIRC were far more extensive than bomber-command wished to believe.
From Operation Thunder
So, how many million tons did we fall short of achieving an easy victory? Another 700 tons per man, woman and child?
Thanks for playing.
The day Google ad content becomes indistinguishable from the neo-Trotskyite content I enjoy perusing on aldaily.com (until my eyes glaze over) is the day I pull my plug on the grid and run for the hills.
Ad content has that new car smell, and I think it always will. I don't think a new-car-smell detector is much harder than breaking a CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, anticonsumers seem to lack the motivation and organization of rummy ex-physicists on the make so the problem gets less quality attention.
When "the defendant" doesn't show up, the court could make at least a minimal effort to determine that "the defendant" is actually *the* defendant.
That was the entire premise of the movie Brazil: a society where there's no mechanism within the bureaucracy for correcting s/Buttle/Tuttle.
This is one discussion where people should be writing IANAL && IANEAVGSA (I am not even a very good software architect).
Clearly, innocent mistakes happen. A lawyer depends upon information obtained from his/her client, who might be medically or mentally or educationally disadvantaged.
If you find yourself on the receiving end of a mistake and make no effort to draw attention to this error, it's possible you have set yourself up to participate in a deliberate miscarriage of justice (by taking a fee from the party who should have been named to sit on the error and do nothing).
I'm sure RIAA is studying the matter carefully. If we've design our torrents as badly as people here would like to see the legal system, RIAA could perhaps bring down the entire torrent network by releasing an invalid client that suppresses error messages on misdirected content.
I've never encountered a serious-minded economist who said any such thing, although a few occasionally talk as if Jesus turned water into wine because the incentive structure made it possible.
Hardly any serious-minded physicist thinks that human civilization has a long term energy problem. We're about halfway through the life of the sun as we know it, which is about where we're at with oil (but not fossil carbon as a whole). We've got a few billion years to learn how to rub hydrogen together before the energy situation really becomes dire. Many physicists regard heat as a bigger problem than energy.
Within the short time frame of the last century or two, it's hard to untangle the global population surge from the exploitation of coal and petroleum. Why is it that people talk more about peak oil than peak population. The time offset is maybe only fifty years and we're nowhere close to running out of fossil carbon over (tar sands and coal). If anything, we're running out of environmental capacity to withstand the unflagging supply.
In the margin, we have the inconvenience (and human suffering) that goes along with a less predictable climate. Against that we have the sum total of human ingenuity, as magnified by Google and social networking and bio-engineering and not-invented-yet.
It's a funny thing, because many doom-sayers are twice as afraid of human ingenuity as they are of external threats to human civilization (e.g. running out of global productive capacity). "Our tools are insanely powerful, we'll certainly cut ourselves with the sharp knives and make things worse before we make them better."
What your typical economist believes is that it's hard to overestimate the challenges we can overcome when all the arrows are pointed in the right direction. Across the hall, your typical political scientist worries about the amazing amount of blood we can shed when all the arrows are pointed at each other's throats.
We're nowhere close to a future determined solely by external calamity. The key variable is human politics. It seems to me that the common worry is that resource constraints are historically more likely to elicit the worst of human politics, rather than the best. Does this necessarily have to happen in the modern world with so much more shared knowledge than ever before? Who knows? It's unexplored territory. Unexplored territory is a corollary of the theory of evolution. Life is a grand experiment. Why didn't mother nature screw up long ago? Because no species had yet evolved self-blame? We aggrandize our importance as a species by painting ourselves culpable.
I think the cognitive dissonance in the public debate derives from the uncomfortable realization in many people that if we run our world as shallowly as many of us live our lives, we're in for a rough ride.
Rather than confront our shallow behaviour, it's easier to run around proclaiming "we're all doomed". Plausible to anyone with a grasp of history, but far from certain in the light of day, if the light of day enters into it.
Chomsky belongs to the same group as Steve Jobs and Rush Limbaugh and RMS. These people are not as common as you make out. Reality distortion fields that work on some (or most) of the people all of the time are a rare achievement.
I was watching Chomsky debates on YouTube the other day. It's hard to figure out what he's actually doing in his debating tactic. He seems to be convinced that human agency is a straight line, and therefore nearly any unknown can be brushed off the table at the first hint of smoking gun.
One tactic he used in the videos I watched boiled down to "some high level government official once wrote in a memo a bald confession of the true motive behind the initiative". He often adds something to the effect that "you can read it yourself". The logical foundation seems to be that high level government officials never colour outside the lines and that a certain type of memo that spills the beans negates 1000 official communications that adhere to the party line. I'm sure there's a grain of truth to that. Chomsky never pauses to assess whether it's a small grain or a large grain. That seems to be the essence of his rhetorical style: all grains of truth contrary to the hegemonic administration are created equal under God.
I've never been much of a Chomsky fan, but he's worth listening to from time to time.
Speaking of Rush, his debating tactics are certainly worse as noted by an irate movie critic. Put up or shut up
Rush has two primary demographics: the stupid, whom he addles, and the smug, who enjoy watching the former. This simple act never seems to grow stale.
I made a post to this effect not long ago. For the most part, large corporations do not innovate. Large corporations like to talk about innovation until they're blue in the face, because the pretext of innovation is their best defense against sharp questions from the FTC. Microsoft in particular has been selling this Kool-Aid for decades. Why does Microsoft deserve monopolistic powers? "Because we innovate." Innovation is good for the consumer, hence our monopoly power is good for the consumer. QED.
Innovation in large corporations is a simple matter of risk allocation. The investors who signed up for monumental risk when the corporation was small have long since headed for the exits. Few stakeholders in a mature enterprise want the ongoing volatility of a never-ending stream of "bet the company" innovation initiatives. Even when large companies are willing to innovate, they prefer to derisk the process by buying up a smaller company to prime the pump.
This is entirely normal, and a big part of the reason why we have a small number of huge, mature corporations, and a wide base of small companies with larger dreams than revenues.
Even when large companies do innovate, it's more often in the area of business process than underlying technology. At that scale, innovation which changes your company is far more valuable than innovation that changes your products. The innovation at Fed-Ex was distribution logistics. It wasn't a better envelope, unless you count slapping a bar code on an envelope as innovation.
It is a risk when buying up small companies that you end up with too many culture fragments who don't sign up for the big picture. Hence the reason why upper management gets paid more than most of us sots. It's true that only a fraction of highly compensated management delivers value. This is also normal wherever you have extremely soft deliverables. It's really no different than the success rate of first round draft picks in any major league. You draft three players. One becomes the face of the franchise, the other two blow goats. It's very difficult to tell initially when they all show up wearing the same suits, speaking the same language, taught at the same schools.
In a small company, a genius researcher is your most valuable asset. In a large company, a genius manager is your most lucrative asset. This is a simple calculus of scale.
We have to stop thinking that innovation is a hallmark of vigour in large companies. There are more useful metrics of vitality, such as how a large company embraces its competitors. Do they raise the bar, or choke off the air supply? Intel is one of the strangest companies out there, because they suck at choking off the air supply (on technical grounds), yet they kick ass when they decide to compete on merit. Yet which do they frequently choose to do?
I think it comes down to having all those highly paid managers trying to come up with a pretext to prove that they're the straw that stirs the drink and not just goat wankers in expensive threads. Hmmm, we could design the Core2 Duo. That would make the engineers look good and us look irrelevant. Or we could crawl in bed with RAMBUS. That would make us look good (long enough to promote and piss off) and make the engineers irrelevant.
What I don't understand about all this, is that after Intel paid AMD a billion bucks for illegal tampering, why they didn't apply for a federal bail-out. Few companies that size wear their mistakes any more if they know how to play the game. They've missed out on *the* most important business innovation of the last thirty years. I think some of those suits need to be fired.
Rarely has the geek factor at Slashdot been so painfully evident. No matter how relevant the topic, a superficial stupidity in the summary text reduces this place to a tribe of impulse-challenged baboons trading shallow bon mots like a feces fight.
Quoted at Stress : The Frontal Cortex:
Troglodytes in the high art of back-stabbing, as Sapolsky humorously demonstrates with his own poison pen:
Bezos' grandfather had something useful to say about cleverness at the expense of what matters:
Bezos at Princeton
Almost every society mentioned in Buettner's study of longevity move around a lot:
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+
Here we are hunched over our keyboards having a feces fight about the semantics of immortality rather than thinking about major life choices. If a computer programmer's office chair was a protein complex, there would be a conjugate protein that binds the chair and expired occupant into a handy burial pod that can be rolled (rather than wheeled) out of the room.
With rare exceptions, you don't see death sitting down on the job all that often. Here's another obligatory Ted link:
Challenging Death
I had completely forgotten the cape wipe. Nice touch in the editing room.
This sad display leaves me contemplating an update to the video tombstone memorial from Atom Egoyan's "Speaking Parts" with the text of "last post" and "last tweet" added automatically to the rolling feed by the web-scrapers of omniscience. Even St Peter has an iPad these days to assist in the great summing up.
I wonder how many suicide bombers have as their last thought "I know I'm going to get modded down for this" then press submit anyway.
You can't "win" against an angry child, either. The goal is to achieve a modicum of semi-peaceful coexistence and trust that over time, agendas evolve in a larger context.
Human males are exposed to paternal uncertainty and for that reason have an innate agenda to gain control over the social structure of marriage and reproduction. In a society where this solution becomes culturally entrenched, usually girls are poorly educated and there is a lot of violence and anger among young men (who have few immediate reproductive prospects), and birth rates are high, so life is (relatively) cheap.
This is the perfect age to teach the psychology and politics of social structure and reproduction, but it would take a teacher nearly as brave/foolish to venture into it. While we're at it, we could teach more of the emotional components of the act of sex, and less about the plumbing (well covered on the internet).
It helps to bear in mind that women are ultimately as self-interested as men and that little that goes on in any society goes on without a great deal of complicit involvement from women, no matter how unfair the system appears to the participants or the outsiders.
Rumour has it that Tiger Woods personally collected over one hundred female votes in favour of male infidelity.
I guess that leaves a lot of schmoes out there who aren't getting any, and aren't going to take it any longer.
It's obvious to me that rigour is best served by treating time as a monotonic, linear domain as done under TAI.
However, there is potential for confusion about the conversion to civil time if the correction for leap seconds is unavailable or unimplemented.
What we need is a convention, perhaps called "marshal time" where the leap second correction is guaranteed to be current, or the time is simply not reported (N/A).
The authorities declare ahead of time where the leap seconds will occur, e.g. one leap second between now and December 2015, on such a date, or whatever. If this leap second declaration is downloaded with a proper signature chain, then the marshal time function can report accurate UTC times until December 2015, in absence of the next declaration.
If correct UTC synchronization to within a few seconds is mission critical, then you request marshal time, and handle the condition when it comes back "no can do" because the conversion download was botched.
Stupid, and proud of it. The American government budgeted $680 billion dollars in 2010 to prepare for military threats to national security (and to flip the elbow at any nation whose diplomatic chauffeur makes an aggressive lane change in the U.N. traffic circle).
The American government spends a lot less money planning to plug leaks in the bottom of the ocean. So far as I know, the U.S. government does not count among its assets a single nuclear-powered leak-repair submarine with giant crab-like manipulators along with an underwater proving-range the size of Dakota so that when they take on the mission, they have half a hope of pulling it off.
Truly, a proactive president would have immediately spotted a way to repurpose the space station to assist in underwater leak mitigation. That asset has hardly been earning its keep up in space, and why did we build it in the first place, if it can't help out?
Sometimes the best course of action is not to mess with things unnecessarily. Was BP going to plug the hole any faster if Obama quivered with bravado in the Italian opera of media sound-bites? A certain stripe of Libertarian believes that governments exist to mess up things they don't properly understand. It causes ideological vertigo to see government sit back and not pretend to fix something they aren't capable of fixing, while a paragon of the private sector runs around like mad chickens. "Does not follow ideological script, does not compute."
This is a version of government right out of Saturday morning cartoons: a vision of small government consisting of President Buck Rogers and his legion of supersuits, who never meddle in policy, but swoop in to take control wherever damsels swoon.
National Nuclear Security Administration
At $15m the budget is smaller than I thought. That would barely pay for HR services. I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg and it has roots deep into the Pentagon's $56B black budget, not all of which is wasted in the tradition of unobtainium origami, though they're happy to abet that PR meme.
The reason Dr Strangelove almost plays as a documentary is that the whole business of "fail safe" already had a rich literature in early days. Since the U.S. government now relies almost exclusively on Google, and this stuff is too old to make it into the Google index, maybe it is a problem. Some rusty CRM-144 in a dank cement basement on the outskirts of Moscow is poised to take out Western civilization, and nobody knows.
What I'd personally love to see is a remake of the telephone scene from the war room with Tony Hayward on the other end of the line. "You want your life back? We *all* want our life back, Timitri."
And the average human navigation narrative are long on detail and short on relevant constraints. e.g. "The most direct way is to cross town on the Panzerbahn, but it's a black art to merge into the exit lane, so I suggest you loop to the south and cross town on Marine Drive which is longer but avoids many ugly intersections, then after you turn north on Artic Express, you need to shoot past 49'th which has a three second advance left, and then take the next three rights, which gets you westbound on 49'th where there's a project to reline the local water main, so it's going to make a big difference if you arrive before or after the works crews" etc.
Then the intrepid driver is free to ask, "what if I survive exiting the Panzerbahn, do I avoid the waterworks on 49'th?"
Probably the fastest way is to ask the address, consult the GPS and then declare "my GPS is routing me here and there, is that going to cause me any problems?" The other person will say "oh no, that's fine", and you'll run into problems anyway. When you arrive (late) the person goes "huh, that road has been closed for a year now, I never knew" and the happy consensus is achieved that local road knowledge, like poetry, rarely translates.
One case where I do take detailed notes over the phone is when entering suburbia where you need to snake along the path of the Minotaur within tract developments of Wolframesque originality.
I once bought a Lexmark inkjet as part of a package for my GF, took it home, read the heavy legal text on the outside, refused to open the box, and took it right back. I have a different grudge against HP. The build quality in Brother printers scares me, so I always start with Canon when possible (but not the Pigma photo printers.)
Even Canon earned a black mark. I once had a perfectly good Canon scanner for which they never upgraded the driver (for any OS whatsoever) after Windows 98. Took it off to recycling. It was shipped to China where a ten year old boy ingested some of the toxic metals and grew a tumour on the side of his head which he treated by using for a tourniquet a reclaimed power necktie that had outlasted its profit mojo. Good thing, he almost died.
Unfortunately, inkjet printers are one of the less excusable waste streams in the history of western civilization.
Not long ago I read about the billions of dollars HP invested in ink with a thousand miraculous qualities, so no doubt it's worth more than liquid gold. 80% of the documents printed barely last two weeks before heaving directly into the recycle bin. Somehow the profit margins at HP have convinced management that the average person wishes to print their suggestive but erroneous Google map navigation route in gold brocade, every damn time.
Where's the cheap shitty ink I would generally use 90% of the time? And why do none of the print drivers I commonly encounter ever tell you in advance the total ink consumption of the job you are about to print, including the ten full colour sheets you forgot were in the middle of chapter seven?
"This short print job will cost more than the initial purchase price of your inkjet printer. Press OK to continue, or CANCEL to terminate the print job after squirting, but prior to curing." Those little print heads consist of many hundreds of reverse-engineered penis brains swaddled in patent protection.
Yeah, class sizes use to be bigger. My cozy elementary school classrooms had 30 to 33 students, one teacher, and 59 to 65 live-at-home parents. Somehow the teacher felt less outnumbered.
Perhaps these days you have 20 students, one teacher, and less than 30 live-at-home parents. The teacher gets to function as a surrogate for the other 10 to 15 parents who don't stick up their hand and say "here" when morning attendance is taken.
It takes a community to raise a child.
I slightly exaggerated the feebleness of a presumption of privacy.
In the relatively rare case where a corporation and an ex-employee end up in litigation, the advocate for the employee will now find it considerable easier to argue that copious employment surveillance records are inadmissible. In future, character assassination will be less thoroughly recorded in the annals of the German courts.
(With two 'ass'es in the previous sentence, it's no wonder my Firefox spell checker failed to suggest 'annals' in place of 'anals'. I once posted a bug report on some egregious defects in the Firefox spell checker speculating unkindly whether the verb list was scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. The evidence mounts.)
Good grief. I was recently complaining about the tendency of a certain type of voice to polarize issues without much regard for which pole they end up occupying. The primary agenda is to reduce the discussion to black/white and exclude the middle ground where intelligent discourse takes place (spamflood permitting).
There's an entire F'ing culture in western society concerning adherence to the speed limit. It's a band of speeds in proximity to the posted limit. The drivers know the customs and so do the police. The posted speed where I live is 50km/h. I drive the majority of the time in the 60-65km/h band. Haven't had a ticket in years. I'm smart enough to take my safety seriously. When traffic around me is slow, I don't make seven lane changes per mile to maintain my preference speed. And I don't drive a red Ferrari to draw attention to myself.
Strangely, it's also LAW not to engage in selective enforcement, though this seems not to apply with much force to the availability bias of spotting a red Ferrari demonstrating its nimbleness. The LAW contradicts itself. The LAW contains multitudes.
This is rather apt to this discussion as a whole. By no means will the available mechanisms of enforcement constitute much deterrent on the corporations willingly turning a blind eye.
Nevertheless, the surveillance state is not without its participants, who won't fail to note that they are employed in the service of flouters in a Dickensinian enterprise. There's plenty of profit in flouting, but there's also no rest for the wicked. Perhaps a few will weary of the social opprobrium, even if the fangs of enforcement are dull.
My only real surprise was to see this coming out of Germany first of all.
You're from the school of silver bullets. If it won't work to a high degree, it's completely worthless. You might note that Google is not without resources in identifying the difference between a valid CC number and one found floating down some pipe in the intertubes.
If half of the malicious lamers are too stupid to notice this, then Google has improved the signal to noise ratio in policing their chrome extension developers by 3dB.
It's a minor barrier to malfeasance. It discourages sock puppets. And it sends the message "we care" which is the main reason aggressively scrubbing graffiti off trains in NYC works so effectively.
The downside? Fewer chrome extensions written by the next teenage African Einstein. And shirt-rending despair over failure to attain the requisite degree of silver-bullet superhero mojo. Yet another superhero impostor. It's a tough life.
When the dust settles, none of these terms will matter. In the process of better understanding the human mind, all these vague sentiments will be unpacked into different conceptual primitives. It'll be like quantum mechanics. Anyone who says they are completely comfortable with the unpacking will be someone who doesn't fully understand it.
I think you are making too big a deal of an artificial mind achieving a kindred consciousness. I think we have as much or more to learn about what we aren't (other forms of mentation) as what we are. To a primitive man, a mirror is an interesting discovery, but how much do you really learn pointing it back at yourself? We'll find ourselves in an uncomfortable exchange with these highly non-human mentalities. Someone will come along and add a fatuous ego module, and suddenly the exchange will be less uncomfortable. It'll be Joseph Weizenbaum all over again. Deep rapport will turn out to consist of Elizaesque gimmicks.
I tend to regard consciousness as more of a sentient sentiment than something amenable to rational definition. Perhaps consciousness is just a toxic overdose of self-sentiment. Toxic in the sense that it overflows into the belief system.
That's what you get when you design an architecture rife with knock-on effects. The usual case where fixed a bug breaks an existing application is where the existing application was coded badly in the first place. In free market economics failure of weak institutions is praised. Why should badly coding software not fail? If it breaks when the OS patches a bug, maybe you should have done better due diligence in the first place. We'd have a market which rewards a track record of responsible coding practices, and far greater triage rate on software which didn't deserve to see release in the first place.
I don't shed half so many tears for companies that invest heavily in badly coded software.
I'd be very much in favour of Microsoft releasing the first cheap and quick fix (sans expensive breakage testing) and letting the end user decide where security or pandering to some ridiculous broken application is more immediately important. Later they can also release the regression-proof gold-plated fix, if they feel like investing the extra resources.
Oh, we didn't release that patch promptly because some abortion coded in VB6 failed in our regression test compatibility suite. Thanks, glad to know you're looking out for my interests there.
Of course there would be the case there the simple fix breaks half the applications out there because misuse of a bad API is endemic in the Windows ecosystem. That doesn't speak well of the ecosystem.
Wow. Peculiar assertion. Take your favorite recent Linux distribution. Construct the set of all possible bugs. Construct the set of all possible realizations (basically, the powerset of all possible bugs). Within the set of all possible realizations, determine the exploitable subset. Now construct the minimal cover of the exploitable subset (the smallest subset of all possible bugs, such that if the realization contains none of these, it is non-exploitable).
Bugs in the minimal cover are certainly distinct from bugs outside the minimal cover. For example, some application program is supposed to open port 4343 so that gdb can connect, but fails to open the port due to some bug. Essentially, the bug subsets specified functionality (it doesn't add a quirky behaviour, but eliminates a function you would otherwise expect to have). Such a bug is almost certainly not a member of the minimal cover. I would eat my cable modem if someone determines otherwise.
Yes, every bug is a chink in the armour, but not all chinks are created equal.
Spoiling your seed is bad for the prostate. Spilling your seed freshens the troops. Even mother nature knows this. I read a study long ago that men spontaneously freshen the troops prior to a sexual encounter after a period of separation. You can DIY or you can run yourself down to the dry cleaners and have your troops freshened by a professional in you don't mind the lack of liability insurance. DIY is quick and easy, can be practiced within the comfort of your own home, and you rarely catch anything you didn't already have.
Personally, I think society needs to relax it's fetish for spotlessness. A spotless human is an AC meat puppet. Bully pulpit now recruiting.
I'm no fan of unions in their modern guise as bargaining collectives, but in the early days unions made tremendous contributions to workplace safety (even matters as small as functional fire escapes). Still, it surprises me that your rant makes no acknowledgement whatsoever of having encountered a positive argument on the validity of unionization. It's clear that some powerful unions overstayed their welcome, and damaged their membership through excessive demands. No organizational structure is perfect. Union leaders make good coin, and sometimes succumb to the temptation to justify their fat pay packet by engaging in brinkmanship negotiation tactics. It takes an extremely secure leader to pocket a fat pay cheque and do nothing, even where that's the best course of action.
On the wage front, it's fairly orthodox among modern economists to believe that a minimum wage does more harm that good to low income earnings (by making it impossible for many to get a job at all).
On the other side of the zinc coin, it's already the case that many companies view minimum wage earners as a pool of disenfranchised schleps who wouldn't know their legal rights if bitten on the backside. Many rights in America exist only if you're wealthy enough to (credibly) threaten to enforce them. Even small-claims court is daunting for someone at a sixth grade literacy level who grew up in an Elbownian-speaking household. It's true the disenfranchised could pool their resources together to protect their rights, in a process resembling unionization, with no fear of reprisals as they work the bugs out of their collaborative process. I've always thought that shit flows down hill well enough on its own accord without so many eager and active helping hands. The reason many economic theories don't work out in practice as advertised is that in much of America, shit flows down hill in pressurized pipelines. Discussions on how to reduce the pipeline pressure lead to questions of civil society, a total non-starter in present day America. First reduce the pipeline pressure, then eliminate minimum wage. In that order, I think it would work.
Is there a way to eliminate the minimum wage to reap the theoretical economic benefits without hanging a "kick me" sign on the bottom rung of the employment ladder? Still haven't figured this out. I'm not against two year apprenticeships at a wage lower than the current minimum, as more of a temporary kick-me sign, though it would surely be abused in some quarters.
Your African aphorism is a bit of red herring. By the time a country has the social infrastructure to engage in productive international trade, the standard of living is already rising abruptly. Ten to twenty years later, not so cheap any longer, and maybe not a bargain at all in relative productivity. I believe the standard of living in Mexico is now comparable to the standard of living I experienced growing up in Canada, long ago.
Usually after an abrupt rise in standard of living a nation faces a painful round of internal change before resuming rapid growth. Even Japan had a major hiccup after achieving American affluence until an old custom regarding financial reporting shell games was finally dismantled.
What I'd like to hear from Apple is that they have canned all the corrupt vendors who went along with the other side of the illicit transactions. That would send a strong message that they mean business on ethical procurement. Merely sacking the individuals with their hands caught in the cookie jar is 99% business as usual.
Good point, but not half the battle Google is fighting with Google Books. Apple has always been the best at slapping a tuxedo on something, then taking the lion's share of the credit. You want real innovation? Try Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
It's appalling the consumer slant on this thread. Innovation is equally valid in business models, work processes, and fundamental physics (such as the first blue LED and much of the work IBM pioneered on magnetic storage). Google's business model was spectacularly innovative. The core realization was how little revenue is generated with each click and finding a practical way to scale into a dominant market position on that basis. Google's mission critical innovation was driving down the cost per click delivered by building data centers on a scale no one had previously contemplated.
Apple's mission critical innovation was monetizing PR. Apple invested more than a decade proclaiming that RISC was going to mop the flop with x86. The Apple PR fodder was wrong. The x86 architecture had few fundamental performance limitations compared to any other architecture. It was ugly, Intel had to work a lot harder to extract the potential than with a cleaner design, and it comes at a cost in power consumption. Steve, repeat after me, "I was wrong." He sold the belief, and his loyal followers got more sex as a result. "My photoshop transform is faster than yours." Not that different than selling a fat man a 10lb carbon-fibre bicycle. He's excited by his purchase, because *someone else* could rock the equipment. There are more Linux desktop PCs out there than competent Photoshop users. A lesser man would have benchmarked kernel compiles, thinking that this was actually useful. That's what makes Steve such a genius.
Jobs returned to Apple with the inspiration, "you know what, that PR trick works great, even if you're sometimes selling the truth".
The term "innovation" is worthless these days. Microsoft beat it to a painful death. In the mind of the court, monopolistic business practices (such as patents) are socially permissible if they promote innovation and the greater wealth of society. It became a Microsoft speaking point to spew forth the word "innovation" at every opportunity, since monopoly requires such a pretext to legally exist. I can't recall Microsoft elaborating on exactly what was innovative about these many products. The Genuine Advantage was usually left unstated. The last innovation where I give MS full credit was the Siamese twin architecture bonding the OS and the browser into codependent symbiosis. It wasn't entirely true, but that never stopped Steve.
One needs to step back and take a structure view of innovation. In the modern world, with ubiquity of 90% of fundamental knowledge, most innovation takes place in a densely populated grid of related ideas. As the grid becomes dense enough, you end up with an innovation curvature. Anyone clever enough to follow the curve can iterate into the useful local maxima. This is high dimensional space, so you don't have strong locality. One discipline is not far away in this space from another. Often three or four disciplines are perched on the edge of the innovation curvature. If one discipline doesn't detect the opportunity, another soon will. Innovation becomes less an act of personal heroism than an inevitability, within an increasingly narrow window of uncertainty.
Instead of backing off on the social promotion of monopoly (i.e. patents) we're instead modeling innovation on high velocity trading where the critical distinction between small success and great success is a 3ms faster reaction time.
Filing a patent costs money, so the timing of a patent application needs to be based on market analysis. The decision to patent some minor cool way to exploit an accelerometers in a user interface is a matter of timing. Ten years ago, it would have taken an act of c
I used blockquote for the above, when blackquote didn't work. It strikes me that there are more conjunctions of black and white in this world than are dreamed of in your philosophy. One that springs readily to mind is whether life is A) cheap, or B) precious.
You can boil this down another way. America is morally superior to other nations because A) Americans are better people (minus a few bad Islamic apples since deported to Guantanamo), or B) Americans have a better political system of checks and balances.
The right wing seems to implicitly believe proposition (A). From this view, disclosure serves no real purpose and potentially compromises human lives (mostly the cheap variety), national interests (bought and paid for), and the influence and careers of Pentagon demagogists.
Neither Milgram's authority experiment nor Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment provided any scientific backing for this view. But no matter, the right wing fringe discounts science to begin with. Moral superiority is a faith-based enterprise.
On the matter of checks and balances, there are differences in opinion on whether it was good enough to have written them down back in 1787, or whether you actually have to live by what you proclaim in order for the virtuous halo to take effect. Checks and balances prove annoyingly inconvenient. Who knew? In any case, American congress has lately taken the path of honour in the breach. There's oil at stake, among other things.
If Wikileaks helps to end a war that has outlived its political mission and degenerated into war-machine profiteering (that never happens) then ultimately it will save more lives than it compromises. Of course, if you're firmly welded to "life is precious" the one person who dies in violence as a result of Wikileaks outweighs a thousand intangible lives saved. Life is most precious when discussing the fate of a single individual.
I don't have a strong opinion on Wikileaks one way or the other. Whether his disclosure has a salutary effect on the future of Afghanistan depends on information unavailable to the thinking public. See also "checks and balances". Generally I believe that systemic secrecy is corrosive to moral wisdom. It has to stop somewhere. Is this the best mechanism? One would like to hope not.
Against that hope, I sure haven't spotted much American vigour lately in the department of ethical self-disclosure. Both sides agree on one thing: ethical disclosure is an expensive undertaking and doesn't play well on TV. I nearly drowned in my own spittle when BP first announced the leak rate as 1000 bpd. Don't blame BP. They were merely aping recent American political norms.