Every time I see these slams against Obama for getting the prize for nothing, I smile. Because the way the rants are phrased only prove to me that committee made the right choice. Obama is just the placeholder. It's the American people who really won the award.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Since money is the core of our civilization these days, perhaps the time to cut private banks out of the business of managing account balances/transfers. Money is, after all, a government-created and government-backed resource. Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a common transaction API and master database administered by an institution which is democractically accountable?
Governments already have the legal authority to gather all transaction data to attempt to identify money laundering so it's not like big brother is going to learn anything it didn't already have the authority to know. Government might still cut off accounts like this, but then they would have to stand up and acknowledge that it was being done rather than all the games and smokescreens of "private institutions making their own decisions".
Or, if you are a free-market fundementalist, the alternative would seem to be to go out and create your own specialist bank with a strong brand-commitment to never block accounts and help circumvent any attempts to censor transfers.
Every time I see one of these stories, I make a point of going to the wikileaks site and reading a few of the cables instead.
It seems we have reached a point where the soap opera is still front page news and a subject of frothing debate, but the information in the leaks themselves is no longer being reported or discussed.
I'm divided over whether this implies that the character assassination has won or whether the scandal has now become the only way of keeping the story alive in a media that has otherwise shrugged and lost interest.
Much like the animation of human features, there's an uncanny valley in communication that can provoke a strong xenophobic response. If someone or something can respond to *some* conversation but not all conversation, it tickles something deep in my brain that produces an instinctive reflex of distrust and hostility. Watching Watson, I found that the way the interaction was framed as if it was natural conversation put me into this uncomfortable zone where I found myself thinking "KILL IT WITH FIRE" more than once.
Some of US has experienced periods of a Canadian winter, but my impression is that in areas that are normally north of the jet stream that marks the stormy boundary of the northern and southern air masses, it's been a pretty normal winter, even a mild one. It would be interesting to see temperature data mapped over the whole northern hemisphere because my impression is that the arctic air mass behaves a bit like a toupee on the globe - sliding the boundary south on one side tends to mean it's sliding north on the other.
Cancer is the natural state of cells. Non-cancer is a state our bodies have achieved through intricate command-and-control mechanisms. We are a colony of trillion individual living cells all working under a social contract that has them all sworn to celebacy and pinning all their hopes and dreams on the success or failure of a few eggs and sperm fired off into the beyond. All it takes is a breakdown in one frustrated cellular rebel saying "enough of this, I'm doing my own thing!" and you have a cancer. In fact you have cancers all the time and the body is constantly putting down the rebellions. Every now and then, one of them will get out of control. It's the fate that eventually dooms any multi-cellular life (especially animal life where our default cell template is a squirming little ameoba that doesn't have to accept sitting where it was born in the body).
Saying that a universal cure for cancer can be found because cancer cells typically behave in a more primitive way is like saying a crime-free society can be achieved because criminals tend to be less educated.
It's hardly surprising that there is a market for plans in how to manipulate public perception. There's a whole industry that exists specifically for this. People who find themselves in that industry have to set aside their conscience to do the job and put food on the table. They rationalize it as a game or a competition or just business. Some are probably reading slashdot right now.
It's the sad nature of civilization that we are a huge crowd of people just trying to put one foot in front of the other. It's hard to imagine that our small push forward on the person in front of us is really contributing to the squeeze that is crushing people to death somewhere else in the crowd.
It's a question of checks and balances on powers. Like any social structure, the government can be a powerful force of good so long as there is a way to watch the watchers. However, the more central oversite you have, the more fragile the entire network becomes. What is clear from this incident is that old proverb that "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it" is dead wrong - as a communication medium, the Internet can be functionally crippled within a region by poking just a few corporations.
What this has me thinking about is what equipment should I add to my disaster kit to enable me to participate in assembling an ad-hoc community network in the event that the Internet is not available due to natural disaster or deliberate disruption.
But in a parallel universe, you don't don't care about this, so what difference does it make what you say here?
( My objection with multiverses is that the idea of explaining a coin flip by adding a whole extra copy of the universe seems to be a gross violation of Occum's Razor, not to mention conservation of energy )
I mised the bus that day. My mother was painting the hall ceiling. It was cold outside so I turned on the tv to one of the three channels we could get to see if there was anything on. I was just in time to watch the launch countdown (or a commentary-free replay). I remember it feeling like an eternity between the first "that doesn't look right" twinge of adrenaline to my brain grinding through the "there are too many things on the screen producing exhaust trails and none of them are going straight" analysis to the "oh no" conclusion. I did nothing but sit on the couch watching the replays over and over all day.
The last thing to cross my mind that night before finally falling asleep was the old line "our reach has exceeded our grasp" and I drempt all night of falling from the stars.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole? With all the small galaxies the Milky Way has swallowed over its lifetime, would it not be reasonable to find some relic black holes that have swung back out after being stripped of most of their surrounding gas/stars? Or, when "dark matter" is being talked about in this situation, is a black hole simply one of the possible candidates to supply the mystery mass?
I tend to see science through the eyes of evolutionary ecology. Science is an ecosystem of theories feeding on data and producing results. Those that produce better and faster results survive. All new ideas are arbitrary mutations on some level. Science can function perfectly well with nothing but arbitrary ideas fed into it - but it can function *faster* if you prescreen the ideas. Time and money are finite resources, so you have to choose where you point your flashlight. Re-testing well-established ideas is not an efficient use of time unless there is value in improving the accuracy of predictions. Nor is entertaining every crackpot idea that has a backer. Put another way, the profession of science is a bit like farming - nature will evolve you a faster horse if you if you keep going out hunting, but through careful breeding you vastly improve the rate at which the breed emerges.
Well, if we're going to get HHGTTG involved, then might as well mention that Douglas Adams introduced Lalla Ward (Romana II - my personal favorite Doctor Who companion of all time) to her husband Richard Dawkins (!!)... I don't normally pay attention to the gossip of off-screen lives of actors, but there is something about that combination of fiercely intelligent names that just geeks me out.
A 1% stake looks an awful lot like an attempt to manufacture a good old fashioned dotcom bubble - take a website, slap a price tag on it to create the illusion of value, sell it the masses in an IPO in a little while and get out before people actually analyze the balance sheet. Is there a legitimate business need for this investment money? If they are a profitable company, can't they just use the profits? (or if the IPO is the goal, just show the balance sheet and it should speak for itself). If they are not profitable by this point, then what value is there in the business?
I think the placebo effect is an inditement of the medical community's misuse of subjectivity and statistics. It's a big, glaring "you've missed something important in your assumptions!"
Personally, I think the problem is with subjective questions about symptoms: much of the information about the objective differences in the seriousness of the symptom is getting drowned out by patient's subjective stress level and how much they percieve the symptom to be responsible for the stress.
Ignoring any one specific advance in technology, the cost per base pair of sequencing DNA has dropping exponentially. The cost to sequence an entire human genome has gone from billions of dollars in 1990 to about $40,000 in 2010. By 2015, it will probably cross the $1000 barrier.
By 2020, it will likely be under $100 - at which point it might as well be a standard part of a person's medical file.
By 2030, it could under $1 - amateur biologists could start collecting genomes like poleroids while hiking.
By 2040, it could be a fraction of penny - cough on a sensor, get a readout of all the microbes in your lungs, what strain they are and, by looking at the specific mutations between generations and comparing to a database of everyone else's microbes, the likely person who infected you.
The visuals are the "we told you so" hook
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
For me, the youthified Clu completely crossed the uncanny valley - I didn't get any this-isn't-real vibe of him other than what one expects of the character. Combine that with the idea of an AI girlfriend that completely replaces the need for human contact... and I felt like the movie was saying "you've heard these ideas before, but get ready because this stuff is seriously coming". The visuals felt like just a reminder of how far computer technology has progressed in the past decade...before turning around and daring us to ponder what the world had been like if AI tech had progressed over the last 20+ years to the same degree that visual effects tech has.
The movie has been nibbling away at my imagination the last few days in a way that normally only happens with horror movies.
I see Wikileaks and Facebook as the two ends of this generation's tug of war over where power rests in the next phase of the information age. Wikileaks is taking the data of large organizations and putting it in the hands of the public. Facebook is taking the data of details of the public's lives and putting it into the hands of private organizations.
My read of it: the court leaves the jury a lot of leeway to infer intent of a writer based on common sense... so the ruling on this new case will probably focus on what new defences (misunderstanding, possible edits of the document linked to, etc) a jury can consider, rather than letting the linker off the hook completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I see these slams against Obama for getting the prize for nothing, I smile. Because the way the rants are phrased only prove to me that committee made the right choice. Obama is just the placeholder. It's the American people who really won the award.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Aside from fashion designers, I can't think of any industry other than tech that is more aware and aggressive when it comes to planned obsolecence.
Since money is the core of our civilization these days, perhaps the time to cut private banks out of the business of managing account balances/transfers. Money is, after all, a government-created and government-backed resource. Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a common transaction API and master database administered by an institution which is democractically accountable?
Governments already have the legal authority to gather all transaction data to attempt to identify money laundering so it's not like big brother is going to learn anything it didn't already have the authority to know. Government might still cut off accounts like this, but then they would have to stand up and acknowledge that it was being done rather than all the games and smokescreens of "private institutions making their own decisions".
Or, if you are a free-market fundementalist, the alternative would seem to be to go out and create your own specialist bank with a strong brand-commitment to never block accounts and help circumvent any attempts to censor transfers.
Every time I see one of these stories, I make a point of going to the wikileaks site and reading a few of the cables instead. It seems we have reached a point where the soap opera is still front page news and a subject of frothing debate, but the information in the leaks themselves is no longer being reported or discussed. I'm divided over whether this implies that the character assassination has won or whether the scandal has now become the only way of keeping the story alive in a media that has otherwise shrugged and lost interest.
Much like the animation of human features, there's an uncanny valley in communication that can provoke a strong xenophobic response. If someone or something can respond to *some* conversation but not all conversation, it tickles something deep in my brain that produces an instinctive reflex of distrust and hostility. Watching Watson, I found that the way the interaction was framed as if it was natural conversation put me into this uncomfortable zone where I found myself thinking "KILL IT WITH FIRE" more than once.
It would feel odd if my real life character had less legal protection than a fictional character I create.
Some of US has experienced periods of a Canadian winter, but my impression is that in areas that are normally north of the jet stream that marks the stormy boundary of the northern and southern air masses, it's been a pretty normal winter, even a mild one. It would be interesting to see temperature data mapped over the whole northern hemisphere because my impression is that the arctic air mass behaves a bit like a toupee on the globe - sliding the boundary south on one side tends to mean it's sliding north on the other.
Cancer is the natural state of cells. Non-cancer is a state our bodies have achieved through intricate command-and-control mechanisms. We are a colony of trillion individual living cells all working under a social contract that has them all sworn to celebacy and pinning all their hopes and dreams on the success or failure of a few eggs and sperm fired off into the beyond. All it takes is a breakdown in one frustrated cellular rebel saying "enough of this, I'm doing my own thing!" and you have a cancer. In fact you have cancers all the time and the body is constantly putting down the rebellions. Every now and then, one of them will get out of control. It's the fate that eventually dooms any multi-cellular life (especially animal life where our default cell template is a squirming little ameoba that doesn't have to accept sitting where it was born in the body).
Saying that a universal cure for cancer can be found because cancer cells typically behave in a more primitive way is like saying a crime-free society can be achieved because criminals tend to be less educated.
It's hardly surprising that there is a market for plans in how to manipulate public perception. There's a whole industry that exists specifically for this. People who find themselves in that industry have to set aside their conscience to do the job and put food on the table. They rationalize it as a game or a competition or just business. Some are probably reading slashdot right now.
It's the sad nature of civilization that we are a huge crowd of people just trying to put one foot in front of the other. It's hard to imagine that our small push forward on the person in front of us is really contributing to the squeeze that is crushing people to death somewhere else in the crowd.
Does filing a false mark against your credit rating due to having failed to establish identity correctly constitute slander/libel under the law?
It's a question of checks and balances on powers. Like any social structure, the government can be a powerful force of good so long as there is a way to watch the watchers. However, the more central oversite you have, the more fragile the entire network becomes. What is clear from this incident is that old proverb that "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it" is dead wrong - as a communication medium, the Internet can be functionally crippled within a region by poking just a few corporations.
What this has me thinking about is what equipment should I add to my disaster kit to enable me to participate in assembling an ad-hoc community network in the event that the Internet is not available due to natural disaster or deliberate disruption.
But in a parallel universe, you don't don't care about this, so what difference does it make what you say here?
( My objection with multiverses is that the idea of explaining a coin flip by adding a whole extra copy of the universe seems to be a gross violation of Occum's Razor, not to mention conservation of energy )
I mised the bus that day. My mother was painting the hall ceiling. It was cold outside so I turned on the tv to one of the three channels we could get to see if there was anything on. I was just in time to watch the launch countdown (or a commentary-free replay). I remember it feeling like an eternity between the first "that doesn't look right" twinge of adrenaline to my brain grinding through the "there are too many things on the screen producing exhaust trails and none of them are going straight" analysis to the "oh no" conclusion. I did nothing but sit on the couch watching the replays over and over all day.
The last thing to cross my mind that night before finally falling asleep was the old line "our reach has exceeded our grasp" and I drempt all night of falling from the stars.
Change != bad
Ah, to be that young again.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole? With all the small galaxies the Milky Way has swallowed over its lifetime, would it not be reasonable to find some relic black holes that have swung back out after being stripped of most of their surrounding gas/stars? Or, when "dark matter" is being talked about in this situation, is a black hole simply one of the possible candidates to supply the mystery mass?
I tend to see science through the eyes of evolutionary ecology. Science is an ecosystem of theories feeding on data and producing results. Those that produce better and faster results survive. All new ideas are arbitrary mutations on some level. Science can function perfectly well with nothing but arbitrary ideas fed into it - but it can function *faster* if you prescreen the ideas. Time and money are finite resources, so you have to choose where you point your flashlight. Re-testing well-established ideas is not an efficient use of time unless there is value in improving the accuracy of predictions. Nor is entertaining every crackpot idea that has a backer. Put another way, the profession of science is a bit like farming - nature will evolve you a faster horse if you if you keep going out hunting, but through careful breeding you vastly improve the rate at which the breed emerges.
Does this mean we're a year away from the next-gen successor to Blu-ray coming out?
Well, if we're going to get HHGTTG involved, then might as well mention that Douglas Adams introduced Lalla Ward (Romana II - my personal favorite Doctor Who companion of all time) to her husband Richard Dawkins (!!) ... I don't normally pay attention to the gossip of off-screen lives of actors, but there is something about that combination of fiercely intelligent names that just geeks me out.
A 1% stake looks an awful lot like an attempt to manufacture a good old fashioned dotcom bubble - take a website, slap a price tag on it to create the illusion of value, sell it the masses in an IPO in a little while and get out before people actually analyze the balance sheet. Is there a legitimate business need for this investment money? If they are a profitable company, can't they just use the profits? (or if the IPO is the goal, just show the balance sheet and it should speak for itself). If they are not profitable by this point, then what value is there in the business?
I think the placebo effect is an inditement of the medical community's misuse of subjectivity and statistics. It's a big, glaring "you've missed something important in your assumptions!"
Personally, I think the problem is with subjective questions about symptoms: much of the information about the objective differences in the seriousness of the symptom is getting drowned out by patient's subjective stress level and how much they percieve the symptom to be responsible for the stress.
Ignoring any one specific advance in technology, the cost per base pair of sequencing DNA has dropping exponentially. The cost to sequence an entire human genome has gone from billions of dollars in 1990 to about $40,000 in 2010. By 2015, it will probably cross the $1000 barrier.
By 2020, it will likely be under $100 - at which point it might as well be a standard part of a person's medical file.
By 2030, it could under $1 - amateur biologists could start collecting genomes like poleroids while hiking.
By 2040, it could be a fraction of penny - cough on a sensor, get a readout of all the microbes in your lungs, what strain they are and, by looking at the specific mutations between generations and comparing to a database of everyone else's microbes, the likely person who infected you.
For me, the youthified Clu completely crossed the uncanny valley - I didn't get any this-isn't-real vibe of him other than what one expects of the character. Combine that with the idea of an AI girlfriend that completely replaces the need for human contact ... and I felt like the movie was saying "you've heard these ideas before, but get ready because this stuff is seriously coming". The visuals felt like just a reminder of how far computer technology has progressed in the past decade ...before turning around and daring us to ponder what the world had been like if AI tech had progressed over the last 20+ years to the same degree that visual effects tech has.
The movie has been nibbling away at my imagination the last few days in a way that normally only happens with horror movies.
I see Wikileaks and Facebook as the two ends of this generation's tug of war over where power rests in the next phase of the information age. Wikileaks is taking the data of large organizations and putting it in the hands of the public. Facebook is taking the data of details of the public's lives and putting it into the hands of private organizations.
To help seperate the demafation issue from the linking issue, here is some relevant reading of a precedent about publishing quotations: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc61/2009scc61.html
My read of it: the court leaves the jury a lot of leeway to infer intent of a writer based on common sense ... so the ruling on this new case will probably focus on what new defences (misunderstanding, possible edits of the document linked to, etc) a jury can consider, rather than letting the linker off the hook completely.
Nothing spoils the joy of having an original idea more than discovering it's actually a basic concept of another discipline.