An interesting idea, though there are a few complications.
The version where the voter selects which receipt will be displayed before leaving the site does a nice job of handling external coercion, but it also means that the system knows which voters will never be able to verify their vote *before* the votes are counted. If it isn't possible to decide to check any individual vote after the election, then there's still an opportunity for tampering. There are steps you could take to make tampering less likely - say, recording the "use A/B" choice and the "display A/B" choice on separate hardware and combining them only after the vote count - but none are foolproof against someone with access to all the hardware and software being used.
Second, and to my mind, most important - as a voter, I don't particularly care whether my individual vote is counted correctly. In elections where outcomes are often decided by a few percent of votes, an absolute minimum requirement is that every single vote *could* be verified. But, to really be effective, a system really ought to insure that a significant fraction of votes will be verified. If only a small fraction of people do check their receipts - and, if someone is sufficiently clever about incorporating demographic information into vote-rigging and is willing to accept a small but non-zero number of accusations of receipt errors - then fraud is still quite viable.
Not a bad idea to play with, but on the whole it sounds like a very complicated fix, compared to something much simpler and likely cheaper, such as a paper receipt that every voter can look at in real time and which then gets placed into a lock-box which can be independently observed with as much scrutiny as we're willing to pay for.
You really configure your mouse so the cursor on the screen travels through *less* distance than the mouse on your desk? In addition to very precise mousing, that must have the added benefit of keeping other people from trying to use your computer.
It may be a bit terse to work through all by oneself without a pressing need, and it's hardly a prerequisite to grad work in astrophysics. (The world would be a better place if half the people *tenured* in astrophysics knew the material in that book!) But, it's fantastic none the less, and well worth recommending.
Two books that are at a somewhat low level, but provide a really thorough and balanced overview and lots of important background are
Frank Shu's The Physical Universe
James Rohlf's Modern Physics from alpha to Z0
They're both an easy read and a great introduction to their respective fields. If were to go over everything in those two books and selectively work through a set of any of the standard standard advanced undergrad E&M, classical mechanics, and QM texts, you'd start out ahead of most incoming physics and astro grad students. (As far as the coursework goes, I'm a big fan of Cohen-Tannoudji for QM and Purcell supplemented by the advanced text of your choice in E&M. Haven't yet found a classical mechanics book that doesn't suck.)
Congratulations, sir. You successfully dodged four bullets. And, I have good news. All of your broken bones have been set, and we've finished around 40% of the tendon repair surgery. I anticipate you'll be walking again before the year is out.
I second the recommendation for Einstein's Dreams. I've been giving them out like party favors to friends for years.
It's a lovely book, and perfectly captures the spirit of inquiry and wonder that leads a person into the sciences. Best of all, it does so without resorting to any of the usual pedagogical forms which scream "textbook" to students. I liken it to sitting around a campfire with a group of only slightly drunk physicists, talking about the world. (Something I also recommend highly, but which doesn't really lend itself to the classroom setting.)
A pairing of Einstein's Dreams with a descriptive cosmology or relativity book could make for a really interesting combination.
Another nice example of of writing in the spirit of science (rather than merely writing about science) is the vast body of Natural History articles by Steven Jay Gould. There are plenty on statistics, experimental design, and other matters far removed from straight biology. Even ignoring the science content, they make for great examples of discursive writing.
Finally, there's the old war horse, Flatland, about which little need be said.
God, yes. It always amazes me how Windows-only or Mac-only users don't grasp this fundamental UI restriction. I use this functionality all the time (as a sibling post explains) and I can't imagine how people live without it. (Much less fail to understand why it's useful.)
I agree. But, it's not just mac and windows folks. I'm always amazed when I have to do something in other linux/unix user's window manager that, 90% of the time, they've got click-to-focus and or raise-on-focus going. I'm not sure whether I'm really the oddball for wanting to do things differently, or whether my colleagues have just grown up on windows and never tried anything else. But, having to work in that environment just drives me nuts.
Many times a day I find myself wanting to look at one window while typing into another. Either I'm working on some data analysis and want to plot things, or I'm writing and need to look back closely at something in an online paper, or I'm using a cad program and feeding it numbers from an email or scratch paper, I'm thumbing through photographs and wand to jot down notes on a scratch terminal at the same time.
Sure, if both objects happen to be text one can do the same in screen, emacs, or your multiplexor of choice (and I do, when appropriate.) And, if you're going to be doing it a lot with the same objects you can resize your windows and tile things. But, in practice, it's always a one-off minute long task involving random graphics for which resizing windows would be a pain.
When it comes down to it, UI configurability is among the biggest drivers in my OS choice. If you ask me why I like linux, I'll give you a long, meandering, philosophically charged answer that won't convince anyone. If you ask me why I throw a fit whenever I'm forced to use a non unix-like system, the answer is a lot more pedestrian: X can be easily configured to fit my needs, and every task can be accomplished from within a well designed shell.
What do I personally need in a UI? - multiple virtual desktops - focus follows mouse - no raise on focus - per-user key remapping - fully functional, fast keyboard control over window placement/size
There are plenty of other little window manager tweeks that I like a lot, but that's the minimum I need in order to not hate integrating with a desktop. In windows, some of it kinda sorta works if you install lots of random third party software. (Although I've yet to find a no-raise-on-focus or a per-user key remapping option. Would love to hear about one if it exists.)
In X, it takes a minute of setup time and works on every machine, everywhere, and it doesn't screw up the UIs of all the other users.
But that's not the title of the article. It's just the title of a horribly written slashdot post. The article itself is pretty reasonably, and makes some excellent points.
But, I suppose, "why linux has failed on the desktop" sounds catchier than "a well known kernel hacker muses on the relationship between software and hardware in PC innovation and discusses the problems he sees in the way the mainline kernel developers address desktop user needs."
If you just followed the link in the article, or typed "alexa" into your search, you'd have known within a few seconds. But the fact that so many of us *didn't* know what it was without having to search for it is, in itself, meaningful.
I'm in the same boat. Never heard of it until I read this article. Although it's true that I'd be unlikely to install it because of privacy and security concerns, that isn't the reason I haven't installed it. The reason I haven't installed it is that I had no idea that it existed.
Now, I'm not a web professional. Websites appear nowhere in my job title, and no one makes money off of what I do online. But, I'm a lot more knowledgable about general internet and IT topics than just about anyone I know.
So, if a group of young, web-savvy, tech hipsters like us have never heard of it. . . who has?
(I'll leave aside the question of whether one ough to be able to read a 12 paragraph essay intended for a general audience about a thing without finding out what it is in even the most basic sense. I gather from context that it's some sort of opt-in, client-side, website visit counter. Can't imagine why on earth anyone would choose to install such a thing - all privacy concerns aside, what's in it for the user?)
It seems to me (someone with no significant knowledge of any related field) that there is one additional, fairly major problem.
Passenger chutes only work if all of the following conditions are met:
- A crash is overwhelmingly likely. (So likely that you'll accept losing a quarter of your passengers in botched jumps.) - the plane is stable enough that people can buckle on their chutes, get to a door, and open it. - the plane is high enough that you've got at least a few minutes before crashing. (Within which time a staggeringly efficient evacuation could empty a significant fraction of the plane at an altitude suitable for parachutes.)
I don't have any statistics handy, but I certainly don't recall having heard of a crash involving a large commercial airliner for which those all apply. And, it's hard to think of a situation in which all three apply. Something like total engine failure in the middle of nowhere over rough terrain is possible, but even in that case it isn't easy to decide when to stop trying to get the engines started and give the order to evacuate.
On the other hand, in a military plane where you've got a small number of people trained in using parachutes, equipment designed with smaller safety margins, and a significant chance that the plane will break in an obviously irreparable way because people are shooting at you, it makes a lot more sense.
Falling deaths outnumber drownings? I find that really surprising. I'd love some more detail on that statistic if you've got it. (I'm also surprised that car deaths are not many orders of magnitude more frequent than the other causes. But, perhaps my intuition is mislead by the frequency of non-fatal car accidents.)
Except for the elderly, the very unlucky, and those who climb around high places for sport, it seems pretty hard to actually kill yourself by falling.
Drowning, on the other hand, seems like it ought to be a pretty regular occurrence given a world of beaches and pools and huge numbers of children and inexperienced and or intoxicated swimmers who visit them and probably don't take safety seriously.
You get to guess what newspaper & edition... Cute idea. I do something similar in order to remember long passphrases - it's a lot easier to remember where a block of text comes from and a standard set of transformations to turn it into a strong passphrase than to remember long blocks of psuedorandom text.
But, using it to transmit information doesn't really buy you anything that you wouldn't get by simply sending them a very small one time pad, except a trip to the news stand. Except, I supose, that it's easier for a person to remember a paper and edition without writing it down than a hand full of characters.
fresh orange juice which is a far healthier alternative to sodas That's certainly open to debate. Orange juice has roughly the same suger content and sugar breakdown as CocaCola. Sure, it's got some extra nutrients and (if you squeeze it yourself) fewer chemical additives. But, it's not at all clear that switching from a coke and a vitamin pill to a cup of orange juice will offer you any health benefits.
but there is no way that you can claim fast food is cheaper than a half hour a week at the grocery store. To be fair, it's only a half hour if you happen to live near a decent grocery store or you have a car, and you've left off the time spent cooking and preparing food.
I eat very cheap and quite healthy, averaging 2-3 dollars a day most days (excluding both the cost and health effects of coffee and alcohol, which make up a nontrivial portion of my diet and a much larger portion of my budget.)
But, I also live within blocks of discount grocery outlets and several excellent produce shops and farmers markets. And my working hours, while long, are flexible enough that I can visit stores when they're open. And I've got access to a fridge and microwave at work for storing and heating meals. And I haven't got any kids who will complain when I cook up 12 identical servings of yams, rice, and tofu and put them in cartons for the following week. And, I'm concerned enough about both my health and appearance that I'm willing to put up with some inconvenience in order to eat well.
In short, I've got a bunch of advantages over the average member of the working poor, in addition to a (grad student) salary that comes out to around 1.5 times the local full-time minimum wage and no dependents. Take away even a few of those advantages, and a daily trip to McDonalds starts looking a whole lot more attractive, even if it's slightly more expensive in calories/dollar.
For a single parent working more than full time, trying to spend time with their kids, and contemplating a 30 minute bus ride to anything that isn't a liquor store or a fast food outlet, the decision to eat well isn't so easy to make. Not impossible, I grant you - but unlikely to happen unless it is made a real priority. And, our cultural institutions, media, and education system aren't exactly going out of their way to convince people that it should be a priority.
Hope you'll forgive a bit of senseless nit-picking.
Try finding someone who knows how to make and set stained glass. Hmmm. It's not at all obvious to me that we aren't living in a world with more stained glass makers than have ever been alive before. It may (arguably) play a smaller role in modern construction than at times in the past, but there's a whole lot of modern construction. And, there's also a rather large number of artists and part time hobbiests who work with it. There are three shops within walking distance of my home that offer stained glass classes and turn out many students a year. Granted, they're not all master craftsmen decades of apprenticeship under their belts, but there are a whole lot of them.
Can you bake bread without a recipe or a bread-droid? Etc, etc. Can anyone bake bread without a recipe, if we include a memorized set of steps as a recipe? That's more or less the equivalent of asking whether or not you can *invent* bread. The answer, I suspect, is "yes, given some trial and error and a bit of yeast to start with."
A chef who works with the materials from which bread is made every day would probably have an easier time of it. But, I'm happy to forgo a deep understanding of bread components in order to use the time that would have been spent in the kitchen acquiring other skills.
But, despite throwing up petty objections to your examples, I probably agree with your general point. Outside of a small set of professions and subcultures, modern industrialized people do seem far removed from their physical environment and unable or unwilling to interact with it. As someone who derives great pleasure from exercising the manual skills I do possess, it's hard not to pity those without any such outlet.
The only disappointing thing that I saw iin that episode is that old stories were considered more important than "I Love Lucy", which is in fact the only allegory we need to communicate any idea. Hmmm. As much as I generally hate being forced into the role of old kurmudgeon, I've got to protest. Surely Gilgamesh has more staying power than I Love Lucy! For what it's worth, despite growing up in a television equipped household in the US, I don't recognize either of those episodes, or any other I Love Lucy show, for that matter. Never understood the appeal of that program, and thus never watched it, I'm afraid.
Now, ST:TNG, on the other hand, is *truly* universal and sure to be instantly recognizable for at least another 5000 years.
When we actually do encounter a race that communicates through allegory, things will go much more smoothly, since we'll simply recite the story of Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel right off and not have to bother with the first 50 minutes of misunderstandings. (That should give us plenty of time to think of a way of asking how the hell you design, build, maintain, and pilot a starship while communicating only through allegory.)
Oh, please. Is it also sad . . . most of us use a car to drive to town instead of walking like they did in the "old days?" Well, it's mighty far off topic, but since you brought it up -
Walkable communities, particularly those with decentralized mixed-use zoning, *are* associated with all sorts of social benefits, from lower incidence of several chronic diseases to higher rankings on self-reported happiness surveys. And, personal autos do contribute to a bunch of social problems: global warming, the geopolitical struggle for access to oil reserves, and personal injuries.
So, yeah, actually - it's sad that most of us use a car to drive to town. We'd be better off walking like they did in the old days.
But, not *because* they did it in the old days. On that point, I agree with you completely.
The problem isn't that people don't remember their friends' birthdays. The problem is that the article is using an obsolete and artificially restrictive definition of "remember."
A more appropriate question is, "are you able to access or be reminded of your friend's birthday whenever it would be useful?" When the date is bit of ink on page 73 of an address book, the only way you're likely to remember to say "happy birthday" is by lugging around redundant copies of that information in your brain. But, when the date is a entry in a calendar application (with appropriate backups), then by any functional definition, it has already been remembered. No need to bother saving another copy in your head.
A: The multiple projector thing is neat, but who is going to buy 12 projectors to have a higher resolution image? Anyone who has wasted hours trying to squeeze dense quantitative presentations onto a series of 800x600 powerpoint slides. Just stick a dollar in the jar every time a colloquium speaker says, "the part you can barely read. . . " and you'll pay for a dozen consumer projectors in no time.
More generally, it seems useful any time you consider using projectors in any display role other than "big television." Granted, that seems to be more or less all that consumer projectors get used for. . . but that need not be the case.
Now, if only LCD makers found a cheap way to implement a "self destruct" command for individual always-on pixels, this scheme would be really awesome.
I don't know. If you ask me, biosphere ought to get amnesty, if only for being more than 100 years old before html was invented.
I'd even allow for geosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, if only because the people who use them annoy me less than proponents of the more offensive ospheres. (Lithosphere and all the atmospheric 'ospheres belong in another class, given that they're actually sorta spherical and the prefixes are derived from the greek.)
The thing I don't understand is where the leading o in osphere comes from. Blog-sphere seems like the natural derivative to me.
None the less, as annoying as the construction may be, there does seem to be a very real need for a form that generalizes the set of all of a kind of thing in the English language. Blogosphere really does mean something different from "blogs" or "most blogs." (Or, "most online journals" or whatever those who object to the word blog prefer.) It's just a shame the popular construction sounds so silly.
You want a bathtub that can fit three people.
Nowadays this is almost a must for anybody that is taller than 5'6". Wow. I seem to remember hearing about a study which found that taller people had more sex partners. . . but I had no idea the bar was so low or the results so dramatic.
Maybe the bigger surprise is that supposedly materialistic youngsters actually recognized the value of friendship over money.
Wow, man. You just blew my mind. I instantly jumped to the "we're a society of consumer lunatics" interpretation and hadn't for a moment considered the alternative.
That's a fascinating way of reading this study. Although, I must admit, the third possibility - that respondents didn't take the survey question seriously - is also pretty compelling.
While giving up a cell phone for a million pounds seems like a very good deal to me, it's also true that my social life is only very tangentially tied to a cell phone. It isn't easy to view this from the perspective of someone with intensely phone dependent relationships. I can't even think of an obvious stand-in substitution, since my social interactions are mediated by a pretty diverse set of communications channels.
I'm tempted to ask what other gadgets people in this group would place into the same category - but at some level, that may not tell us much. It's natural to confuse a gadget with the function it serves and give it more importance than it might deserve in a more literal interpretation of the question.
Would I give up my stereo, mp3 player, broadcast radio receiver, cd player, or record player for a million pounds? Sure. Absolutely. Where do I sign?
Would I give up the ability to hear recorded music? No way. Sure, I recognize that you can buy a lot of piano lessons and attend a lot of concerts for a million pounds. But, recorded music is still important to me. And, given that I love my job and am not hungry, losing it would do more harm to my quality of life than just about any cash payment could undo.
For just about any technology, one can make the same substitution.
Would I give up television? Hell yeah! In fact, I did that for free. (Or rather for the cost of a cheap television set which I never bought to replace the one lost to a breakup.) Would I give up the ability to "hear stories?" No way. For someone who can't imagine getting their stories any way except through television, perhaps it's the same deal.
Would I give up movies? Harder question, but for a decent pile of cash, the answer is yes. But, once again, that's only because I have other ways of hearing stories. Would I give up television and movies and books and spoken word audio and stage performances and street theater and every other form of story telling? No way.
More generally, it's interesting to consider what one *would* give up for a million pounds, or, scaling for cost of living, whatever you consider roughly a reasonable lifetime income. There aren't too many very specific devices that I wouldn't trade for cash; however, there are actually rather a lot of more general categories that I'd hold onto at all costs. In fact, just about everything that I use now is - if reduced to its most basic functional category - worth keeping for even orders of magnitude more money than a lifetime income.
But, as someone who would continue working just as hard at the same job no matter how much money he had and who has no pressing material needs, I'm probably approaching the question from a rather special and privileged position. (Perhaps the same one that the teenagers in this survey share - even working class kids in the UK rarely go hungry, and they'd have to go to school even if they won a lot of cash.)
If I were hungry, or had no medical insurance, or expected to work at an unpleasant job for the rest of my life, or planned to have kids under any of those circumstances, the cash would mean a whole lot more.
Or, to put it another way, if you offered me something more compelling than money in my present circumstances, I could probably be talked into giving up almost anything.
Trade the ability to hear recorded music for a guarantee that I'd double my healthy lifespan? Absolutely. I'll toss in a couple limbs and stereo vision as a
>Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already?
That was my thought. I'm happy to see they've made it clear that they're not competing with arxive.org. (Not that they'd stand a chance in hell of winning if they tried now.)
Of course, arxiv has the serious advantage that it's *not* directly associated with a commercial journal. That seems like it could be a serious handicap.
For example, last I knew, Science explicitely granted authors the freedom to publish preprints (but not, sadly, post-prints) only on publicly funded, non-profit sites. Anyone want to guess that the odds that they'll change that policy in order to give Nature a more robust preprint site?
According to the Sherpa/RoMEO stats, only about 60% of journals allow archiving of post submission content, and a full 30% don't allow any self archiving at all. Among thosethat do, there an array of strange conditions: personal or institution specific hosting only, non-profit database archiving only, etc. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?stats=yes
It's probably true that in order to change those policies, one needs to establish a preprint culture within disciplines that lack it, which requires well administered and adequately advertised servers. Is Nature the organization best placed to succeed at establishing them? Probably not. (Although they may be the only organization trying to do so which is large enough to have a realistic chance at success.)
Yea, one of those 75 foot off the shelf antennas. I am also wondering, what kind of impact does outputting a signal that strong have on living things? I don't know much about that sort of thing.
I wasn't able to find any information on how much power they were using, but with a few caveats, the answer to "what impact does the outputting a signal that strong have on living things?" is "about the same or less impact than using the same power with a less efficient antenna."
It's certainly true that by standing directly in front of a large directional antenna will often bath you in more RF than if you were standing the same distance from a dinky omnidirectional antenna. But, there are a number of things that limit the danger. (Or the utility, if your interest is in creating death rays rather than human safety.)
1 - The effective aperture of the antenna always increases as the gain increases. You can electrically model any antenna as a planar sheet from which radiation is streaming, and the size of that plane increases roughly linearly with your antenna gain. (To first order, the aperture is Gain*lambda^2/(4pi)). Thus, while the angle into which you are broadcasting decrease, the maximum radiation density changes by much less.
As an example, standing right in front of a 5 meter radio dish hits you with roughly the same power/area as standing 1.7 meters from an isotropic radiator, or 2.5 meters from a dipole fed with the same power. (pi Rdish^2 = 4 pi Riso^3/3)
2 - The power per unit area of the radiation will drop off as 1/r^2, no matter what kind of antenna you use. The r^2 means you don't have to be very far away from just about any antenna before radiation levels drop to a safe level. For a super massive 100 dB gain antenna, you only need to be 30 times further away to get the same radiation density as if you were using an omnidirectional antenna.
3 - Generally, if you're building highly directional antennas for communication (rather than for cooking people) you place them in such a way that no one is likely to spend time standing in front of them. Once you're outside of the antenna's main beam, you're guaranteed to receive less radiation than you'd get from a low gain antenna. Everyone who isn't in front of the thing is safer than the would have been otherwise.
Taking into account all three points, you *can* do a better job of cooking people with a high gain antenna, but only if they're close by *and* you'd already be pretty close to cooking them using a low gain antenna *and* you're either evil or stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting idea, though there are a few complications.
The version where the voter selects which receipt will be displayed before leaving the site does a nice job of handling external coercion, but it also means that the system knows which voters will never be able to verify their vote *before* the votes are counted. If it isn't possible to decide to check any individual vote after the election, then there's still an opportunity for tampering. There are steps you could take to make tampering less likely - say, recording the "use A/B" choice and the "display A/B" choice on separate hardware and combining them only after the vote count - but none are foolproof against someone with access to all the hardware and software being used.
Second, and to my mind, most important - as a voter, I don't particularly care whether my individual vote is counted correctly. In elections where outcomes are often decided by a few percent of votes, an absolute minimum requirement is that every single vote *could* be verified. But, to really be effective, a system really ought to insure that a significant fraction of votes will be verified. If only a small fraction of people do check their receipts - and, if someone is sufficiently clever about incorporating demographic information into vote-rigging and is willing to accept a small but non-zero number of accusations of receipt errors - then fraud is still quite viable.
Not a bad idea to play with, but on the whole it sounds like a very complicated fix, compared to something much simpler and likely cheaper, such as a paper receipt that every voter can look at in real time and which then gets placed into a lock-box which can be independently observed with as much scrutiny as we're willing to pay for.
Wait, what?
You really configure your mouse so the cursor on the screen travels through *less* distance than the mouse on your desk? In addition to very precise mousing, that must have the added benefit of keeping other people from trying to use your computer.
Gotta love Cowan.
It may be a bit terse to work through all by oneself without a pressing need, and it's hardly a prerequisite to grad work in astrophysics. (The world would be a better place if half the people *tenured* in astrophysics knew the material in that book!) But, it's fantastic none the less, and well worth recommending.
Two books that are at a somewhat low level, but provide a really thorough and balanced overview and lots of important background are
Frank Shu's The Physical Universe
James Rohlf's Modern Physics from alpha to Z0
They're both an easy read and a great introduction to their respective fields. If were to go over everything in those two books and selectively work through a set of any of the standard standard advanced undergrad E&M, classical mechanics, and QM texts, you'd start out ahead of most incoming physics and astro grad students. (As far as the coursework goes, I'm a big fan of Cohen-Tannoudji for QM and Purcell supplemented by the advanced text of your choice in E&M. Haven't yet found a classical mechanics book that doesn't suck.)
Somehow, I have a feeling the parent poster is aware of that.
Ah - it looks like our patient is conscious.
Congratulations, sir. You successfully dodged four bullets. And, I have good news. All of your broken bones have been set, and we've finished around 40% of the tendon repair surgery. I anticipate you'll be walking again before the year is out.
I second the recommendation for Einstein's Dreams. I've been giving them out like party favors to friends for years.
It's a lovely book, and perfectly captures the spirit of inquiry and wonder that leads a person into the sciences. Best of all, it does so without resorting to any of the usual pedagogical forms which scream "textbook" to students. I liken it to sitting around a campfire with a group of only slightly drunk physicists, talking about the world. (Something I also recommend highly, but which doesn't really lend itself to the classroom setting.)
A pairing of Einstein's Dreams with a descriptive cosmology or relativity book could make for a really interesting combination.
Another nice example of of writing in the spirit of science (rather than merely writing about science) is the vast body of Natural History articles by Steven Jay Gould. There are plenty on statistics, experimental design, and other matters far removed from straight biology. Even ignoring the science content, they make for great examples of discursive writing.
Finally, there's the old war horse, Flatland, about which little need be said.
Ha! Funniest thing I've seen in days. I love it.
Many times a day I find myself wanting to look at one window while typing into another. Either I'm working on some data analysis and want to plot things, or I'm writing and need to look back closely at something in an online paper, or I'm using a cad program and feeding it numbers from an email or scratch paper, I'm thumbing through photographs and wand to jot down notes on a scratch terminal at the same time.
Sure, if both objects happen to be text one can do the same in screen, emacs, or your multiplexor of choice (and I do, when appropriate.) And, if you're going to be doing it a lot with the same objects you can resize your windows and tile things. But, in practice, it's always a one-off minute long task involving random graphics for which resizing windows would be a pain.
When it comes down to it, UI configurability is among the biggest drivers in my OS choice. If you ask me why I like linux, I'll give you a long, meandering, philosophically charged answer that won't convince anyone. If you ask me why I throw a fit whenever I'm forced to use a non unix-like system, the answer is a lot more pedestrian: X can be easily configured to fit my needs, and every task can be accomplished from within a well designed shell.
What do I personally need in a UI?
- multiple virtual desktops
- focus follows mouse
- no raise on focus
- per-user key remapping
- fully functional, fast keyboard control over window placement/size
There are plenty of other little window manager tweeks that I like a lot, but that's the minimum I need in order to not hate integrating with a desktop. In windows, some of it kinda sorta works if you install lots of random third party software. (Although I've yet to find a no-raise-on-focus or a per-user key remapping option. Would love to hear about one if it exists.)
In X, it takes a minute of setup time and works on every machine, everywhere, and it doesn't screw up the UIs of all the other users.
But that's not the title of the article. It's just the title of a horribly written slashdot post. The article itself is pretty reasonably, and makes some excellent points.
But, I suppose, "why linux has failed on the desktop" sounds catchier than "a well known kernel hacker muses on the relationship between software and hardware in PC innovation and discusses the problems he sees in the way the mainline kernel developers address desktop user needs."
I'm in the same boat. Never heard of it until I read this article. Although it's true that I'd be unlikely to install it because of privacy and security concerns, that isn't the reason I haven't installed it. The reason I haven't installed it is that I had no idea that it existed.
Now, I'm not a web professional. Websites appear nowhere in my job title, and no one makes money off of what I do online. But, I'm a lot more knowledgable about general internet and IT topics than just about anyone I know.
So, if a group of young, web-savvy, tech hipsters like us have never heard of it. . . who has?
(I'll leave aside the question of whether one ough to be able to read a 12 paragraph essay intended for a general audience about a thing without finding out what it is in even the most basic sense. I gather from context that it's some sort of opt-in, client-side, website visit counter. Can't imagine why on earth anyone would choose to install such a thing - all privacy concerns aside, what's in it for the user?)
It seems to me (someone with no significant knowledge of any related field) that there is one additional, fairly major problem.
Passenger chutes only work if all of the following conditions are met:
- A crash is overwhelmingly likely. (So likely that you'll accept losing a quarter of your passengers in botched jumps.)
- the plane is stable enough that people can buckle on their chutes, get to a door, and open it.
- the plane is high enough that you've got at least a few minutes before crashing. (Within which time a staggeringly efficient evacuation could empty a significant fraction of the plane at an altitude suitable for parachutes.)
I don't have any statistics handy, but I certainly don't recall having heard of a crash involving a large commercial airliner for which those all apply. And, it's hard to think of a situation in which all three apply. Something like total engine failure in the middle of nowhere over rough terrain is possible, but even in that case it isn't easy to decide when to stop trying to get the engines started and give the order to evacuate.
On the other hand, in a military plane where you've got a small number of people trained in using parachutes, equipment designed with smaller safety margins, and a significant chance that the plane will break in an obviously irreparable way because people are shooting at you, it makes a lot more sense.
Really?
Falling deaths outnumber drownings? I find that really surprising. I'd love some more detail on that statistic if you've got it. (I'm also surprised that car deaths are not many orders of magnitude more frequent than the other causes. But, perhaps my intuition is mislead by the frequency of non-fatal car accidents.)
Except for the elderly, the very unlucky, and those who climb around high places for sport, it seems pretty hard to actually kill yourself by falling.
Drowning, on the other hand, seems like it ought to be a pretty regular occurrence given a world of beaches and pools and huge numbers of children and inexperienced and or intoxicated swimmers who visit them and probably don't take safety seriously.
But, using it to transmit information doesn't really buy you anything that you wouldn't get by simply sending them a very small one time pad, except a trip to the news stand. Except, I supose, that it's easier for a person to remember a paper and edition without writing it down than a hand full of characters.
I eat very cheap and quite healthy, averaging 2-3 dollars a day most days (excluding both the cost and health effects of coffee and alcohol, which make up a nontrivial portion of my diet and a much larger portion of my budget.)
But, I also live within blocks of discount grocery outlets and several excellent produce shops and farmers markets. And my working hours, while long, are flexible enough that I can visit stores when they're open. And I've got access to a fridge and microwave at work for storing and heating meals. And I haven't got any kids who will complain when I cook up 12 identical servings of yams, rice, and tofu and put them in cartons for the following week. And, I'm concerned enough about both my health and appearance that I'm willing to put up with some inconvenience in order to eat well.
In short, I've got a bunch of advantages over the average member of the working poor, in addition to a (grad student) salary that comes out to around 1.5 times the local full-time minimum wage and no dependents. Take away even a few of those advantages, and a daily trip to McDonalds starts looking a whole lot more attractive, even if it's slightly more expensive in calories/dollar.
For a single parent working more than full time, trying to spend time with their kids, and contemplating a 30 minute bus ride to anything that isn't a liquor store or a fast food outlet, the decision to eat well isn't so easy to make. Not impossible, I grant you - but unlikely to happen unless it is made a real priority. And, our cultural institutions, media, and education system aren't exactly going out of their way to convince people that it should be a priority.
A chef who works with the materials from which bread is made every day would probably have an easier time of it. But, I'm happy to forgo a deep understanding of bread components in order to use the time that would have been spent in the kitchen acquiring other skills.
But, despite throwing up petty objections to your examples, I probably agree with your general point. Outside of a small set of professions and subcultures, modern industrialized people do seem far removed from their physical environment and unable or unwilling to interact with it. As someone who derives great pleasure from exercising the manual skills I do possess, it's hard not to pity those without any such outlet.
Now, ST:TNG, on the other hand, is *truly* universal and sure to be instantly recognizable for at least another 5000 years.
When we actually do encounter a race that communicates through allegory, things will go much more smoothly, since we'll simply recite the story of Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel right off and not have to bother with the first 50 minutes of misunderstandings. (That should give us plenty of time to think of a way of asking how the hell you design, build, maintain, and pilot a starship while communicating only through allegory.)
Walkable communities, particularly those with decentralized mixed-use zoning, *are* associated with all sorts of social benefits, from lower incidence of several chronic diseases to higher rankings on self-reported happiness surveys. And, personal autos do contribute to a bunch of social problems: global warming, the geopolitical struggle for access to oil reserves, and personal injuries.
So, yeah, actually - it's sad that most of us use a car to drive to town. We'd be better off walking like they did in the old days.
But, not *because* they did it in the old days. On that point, I agree with you completely.
The problem isn't that people don't remember their friends' birthdays. The problem is that the article is using an obsolete and artificially restrictive definition of "remember."
A more appropriate question is, "are you able to access or be reminded of your friend's birthday whenever it would be useful?" When the date is bit of ink on page 73 of an address book, the only way you're likely to remember to say "happy birthday" is by lugging around redundant copies of that information in your brain. But, when the date is a entry in a calendar application (with appropriate backups), then by any functional definition, it has already been remembered. No need to bother saving another copy in your head.
More generally, it seems useful any time you consider using projectors in any display role other than "big television." Granted, that seems to be more or less all that consumer projectors get used for. . . but that need not be the case.
Now, if only LCD makers found a cheap way to implement a "self destruct" command for individual always-on pixels, this scheme would be really awesome.
anything-osphere?
I don't know. If you ask me, biosphere ought to get amnesty, if only for being more than 100 years old before html was invented.
I'd even allow for geosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, if only because the people who use them annoy me less than proponents of the more offensive ospheres. (Lithosphere and all the atmospheric 'ospheres belong in another class, given that they're actually sorta spherical and the prefixes are derived from the greek.)
The thing I don't understand is where the leading o in osphere comes from. Blog-sphere seems like the natural derivative to me.
None the less, as annoying as the construction may be, there does seem to be a very real need for a form that generalizes the set of all of a kind of thing in the English language. Blogosphere really does mean something different from "blogs" or "most blogs." (Or, "most online journals" or whatever those who object to the word blog prefer.) It's just a shame the popular construction sounds so silly.
>Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already?
That was my thought. I'm happy to see they've made it clear that they're not competing with arxive.org. (Not that they'd stand a chance in hell of winning if they tried now.)
Of course, arxiv has the serious advantage that it's *not* directly associated with a commercial journal. That seems like it could be a serious handicap.
For example, last I knew, Science explicitely granted authors the freedom to publish preprints (but not, sadly, post-prints) only on publicly funded, non-profit sites. Anyone want to guess that the odds that they'll change that policy in order to give Nature a more robust preprint site?
According to the Sherpa/RoMEO stats, only about 60% of journals allow archiving of post submission content, and a full 30% don't allow any self archiving at all. Among thosethat do, there an array of strange conditions: personal or institution specific hosting only, non-profit database archiving only, etc. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?stats=yes
It's probably true that in order to change those policies, one needs to establish a preprint culture within disciplines that lack it, which requires well administered and adequately advertised servers. Is Nature the organization best placed to succeed at establishing them? Probably not. (Although they may be the only organization trying to do so which is large enough to have a realistic chance at success.)
I wasn't able to find any information on how much power they were using, but with a few caveats, the answer to "what impact does the outputting a signal that strong have on living things?" is "about the same or less impact than using the same power with a less efficient antenna."
It's certainly true that by standing directly in front of a large directional antenna will often bath you in more RF than if you were standing the same distance from a dinky omnidirectional antenna. But, there are a number of things that limit the danger. (Or the utility, if your interest is in creating death rays rather than human safety.)
1 - The effective aperture of the antenna always increases as the gain increases. You can electrically model any antenna as a planar sheet from which radiation is streaming, and the size of that plane increases roughly linearly with your antenna gain. (To first order, the aperture is Gain*lambda^2/(4pi)). Thus, while the angle into which you are broadcasting decrease, the maximum radiation density changes by much less.
As an example, standing right in front of a 5 meter radio dish hits you with roughly the same power/area as standing 1.7 meters from an isotropic radiator, or 2.5 meters from a dipole fed with the same power. (pi Rdish^2 = 4 pi Riso^3/3)
2 - The power per unit area of the radiation will drop off as 1/r^2, no matter what kind of antenna you use. The r^2 means you don't have to be very far away from just about any antenna before radiation levels drop to a safe level. For a super massive 100 dB gain antenna, you only need to be 30 times further away to get the same radiation density as if you were using an omnidirectional antenna.
3 - Generally, if you're building highly directional antennas for communication (rather than for cooking people) you place them in such a way that no one is likely to spend time standing in front of them. Once you're outside of the antenna's main beam, you're guaranteed to receive less radiation than you'd get from a low gain antenna. Everyone who isn't in front of the thing is safer than the would have been otherwise.
Taking into account all three points, you *can* do a better job of cooking people with a high gain antenna, but only if they're close by *and* you'd already be pretty close to cooking them using a low gain antenna *and* you're either evil or stupid.