In statistical mechanics it is well known that, in the agglomeration of many distinct particles, most of the degrees of freedom of those particles are averaged away, leaving only a few key variables (like temperature, pressure, and so forth.)
IMO the same thing holds true for corporations. They are made up of thousands of people, most of them entirely decent people. However, in the agglomerate there is usually only one thing that holds them together, one thing they have in common: the desire to have the corporation survive. None of them would rank survival of the company as the most important part of their lives, but all of the first-rank desires of these people are different, and so wash out under averaging.
This is even more clearly the case when we consider the stockholders of public companies. Most often people who invest in companies are not interested in the behavior of those companies; they think of their investment as being no different than a CD or a savings bond, and so are only concerned with the rate of return. There are some mutual funds out there which only invest in "socially responsible" companies, but they're not too widespread and are generally painted with a broad brush (no tobacco and alcohol companies, for instance). Companies are not generally rewarded by their stockholders for anything other than surviving and being profitable. In addition, if I recall correctly, federal law requires that corporations make being profitable their primary objection, to protect investors. (I'm not sure about the details of this last point.)
Another scientific field of study known as complex systems says that complex behavior can arise from simple components, and that the interaction of components can cause behavior that is entirely different than one would predict from the components separately. (Consider that you are made up of cells, and yet do not behave like a cell.) In the case of corporations, we have a large group of people, mostly rational, caring people, with a common goal of corporate survival and profit. I believe that the interactions of these people create something much different than the people themselves: organizations whose sole drive is survival. If I may be metaphorical, they are like predators always hungry, always looking for their next meal, and their sustenance is capital. They are amoral creatures, but very intelligent.
This behavior is not necessarily caused by the extreme greed of any one person or group of people in the company. I suspect that it is a natural condition that will occur in any large-enough corporation, and it can be prevented only with the intervention of strong-willed leaders who force the company to follow other moral precepts.
I said "average SNR" for that reason, and I also acknowledged the continued existence of pockets of actual information...
Fair enough and true. I would point out, however, that the average SNR of all Usenet is only relevant if you spend a lot of time with Usenet as a whole. I restrict myself to a few newsgroups that I like, and so the global state of Usenet doesn't make much difference to me.
However, one set of people for whom it would make a difference would be the people maintaining NNTP feeds, downloading all those newsgroups all the time when a lot of them are defunct. Perhaps Usenet could do with a cleaning out, if that would make a difference (and perhaps make it easier for ISPs to host NNTP feeds again).
Actually, the newsgroups died quite a while ago. I think the historians of epistemology will eventually date it either to the first time the average SNR went negative, or perhaps the last time it touched positive territory. Trivial distinction.
People keep talking about this small signal-to-noise ratio, but it all depends on the group. There are some groups with huge numbers of on-topic posts and very little spam (which, by the way, is fairly easy to filter out; do web forums have killfiles?) The problem with the groups I like is there is too much content. There are also a lot of ghetto groups which have been abandoned, but where it works, it works well.
I can only imagine you've been hanging out on the seedier side of Usenet....
I don't think of the RIAA as a separate company, but as an alliance of the several music companies that belong; so to blame something on the RIAA is the same as blaming it on its members. (This does assume that all the members of the RIAA agree with each other, which might not be the case.)
That's just how I see it. It is good to remember from time to time the specific companies which are to blame for all of this.
...who we're trying to keep out with the password. If we're worried about remote online hackers, then there's no harm in writing our password down somewhere discreet, in a PDA or cell phone (as long as it can't be easily linked to our account), or in a locked drawer. In cases where you are anonymous as far as the hackers are concerned, there's little danger in using a significant date or name from the past, except that name-space or date-space is much smaller than character-space.
What I would like to use is pass-sentences rather than passwords. An eight word sentence is going to be more secure than an eight letter password, and it's probably easier to remember (and not so hard to type if you're a good typist). The difficulty arises when password lengths are restricted, or when whitespace is prohibited. (I've tried pass-sentences with dashes between words, but it's much more awkward to type.)
Well there are a lot of people down on Fortran here, but as I understand it there are a number of things that Fortran does better than C, vectors and matrices for one (and yet it compiles, unlike Mathematica or Matlab or some such). That's why I'm curious about offshoots of Fortran: are there any compiled languages that keep the strengths of Fortran but have a better syntax/whatever?
And I'm not in a position where I NEED to learn Fortran; I'm just curious about better ways of doing things. C is not always the best way to do things.
I've seen this chart before, and it's curious to me that there are no offshoots of FORTRAN since the 60's. Is this really true? I've been thinking about learning FORTRAN 95 for scientific simulations, but I'm curious about similar alternatives as well.
The minimum price is $43 for comcast customers and
almost $60 otherwise.
I think $29 for 1.5/384 servce from verizon looks a lot more attractive.
The extra bandwidth will not improve my experience 2 fold...
Note that one is required to be a Verizon local phone customer to get DSL through them at all. (Unless things have changed, in which case I'd really like to know about it.:) )
Oddly, if you ask most people, they actually enjoyed math for a while, then had a bad teacher and they fell behind or were otherwise discouraged, found it hard, and stopped enjoying it.
Something just occurred to me: is mathematics more difficult because it is constantly building on things that came before it? Students who get behind during one year of math are still at a disadvantage the next year because they can't multiply, or add fractions, or the like. If you get behind in English or history, on the other hand, you can probably do OK in following years because the skills you develop there are more gradual.
The majority of people who have an interest in primary education are the sort of people who hated math at school. They then help instill this attitude in all the impressionable young kids. Attitude is infectious, especially to young minds, and someone who doesn't care about math will teach the kids not to care either.
Perhaps the converse is true, too: the majority of people who have an interest in math do not have any interest in general elementary education, which involves playing a major role in the lives of a classroom full of children. In my elementary school we had special art, music, and phys ed teachers. Why not have the school mathematician and the school scientist as well? (Ignoring the whole funding issue of course.)
Honestly - I work in the industry, and I'm still amazed at the lengths content providers will go to to try to prevent a single D-to-A, A-to-D conversion.
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
If the movie/record companies are truly more worried about digital copying than about analog copying, they should make degraded versions of their movies/albums available for free or for a small fee. Dries up some of the bootleg market, but there's still an incentive for some to go out and buy the CDs/DVDs.
Right, but seriously, who is thinking to drag the disk anywhere to eject it? And why would they be looking anywhere near the trash can?
They don't have to think of it. If they want to eject the disk, they click on it once to highlight it, and then they either look in the menus for a menu option to eject the disk (which they will find) or they'll use control-click for the contextual menu. Think of the drag-the-disk-to-the-trash-can as an Easter egg if you want: possibly useful for people who know it's there, but a user can get along fine without it. (And if they took it out now, there's sure to be old-timers who would be upset with them.)
Most of the world's spam originates in Florida. Do somethng about that first.
What do you think the four hurricanes were for? (Didn't work but a good try.)
Airport and border security have always been a joke. The point of the TSA is to con you into thinking you're "safe" so you'll go about your life instead of cowering in fear.
Some would say that the current administration would prefer you to be cowering in fear (and supporting its actions).
Re:A cult? Puhleeze
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So to that minority of Apple zealots, get a damn life.
Ah, the classic "get a life" business. What kind of life do you have in mind? Passions are what make life interesting. Some people obsess over sports, some over Macs, some over Star Trek, some over toy trains-- they have lives. People who obsess over other people have lives too. People who go around criticizing any show of exuberance as juvenile...well, I'm not sure about them.
Planning on making a trip to Boston this weekend, to tell everyone here how they should "get a damn life, it's only a baseball team, they're not a church or anything"?
At first glance, it looks like this bill makes it illegal for people to fast forward through commercials, or even mute them (which would make their sound "imperceptible"). Looking at the law a little more closely, (there's probably a more direct source but I found Title 17 at http://floridalawfirm.com/copyr1.html), it seems that Section 110 of that Title is dealing with exemptions to copyright law, not with violations. That is, this current law might not be about making commercial-skipping illegal, butabout making it legal to skip offensive material in movies and the like.
The fact that such a clause should even be necessary points to the warped mindset of the **AAs, of course.
It could be useful to paint the bill as the "It will make it illegal to fast-forward through commercials!!" to get the word out.
I love Apple, but there are two things that struck me: 1) "Frequently Asked Questions"? How long has this been around that there are questions asked frequently?:) 2) In the FAQ, there is the sentence "You can only use approved creative provided by iTunes." When did "creative" become a noun?
I was just looking at these
digital picture frames (e.g. http://digi-frame.com/)
which can hang on a wall and run through a slideshow. The 17" frames at the website I gave run for about $2000; this new iMac would probably work just as well for cheaper.... (Can they be hung on a wall, I wonder? Maybe a little heavy. And you'd have to buy a nice frame to put around it.)
Previous poster:
Outsourcing is bad for the person whose job goes elsewhere.
But the job goes elsewhere because someone else can do it cheaper.
It happens all the time. Sooner or later, all those guys in India will price themselves out of the market and lose their jobs to people in China or Africa.
I have sympathy for people who lose their jobs. I have no sympathy for people who want government to distort economics.
How about a metaphor...
AIDS is bad for the person who gets it.
But the person gets AIDS because he is exposed to the HIV virus.
It happens all the time....
I have sympathy for people with AIDS. I have no sympathy for people who want medicine to distort biology.
Your hidden assumption is that natural "economics" is a good thing. I would not agree with this assumption myself, as I find raw capitalism, based on the motto "Look out for yourself", to be cruel and short-sighted.
>> and they invest millions to make inexpensive music downloads available (at almost no profit)
> No, they invest millions so they will get tens of millions in revenue from selling iPod. Don't get me wrong, I like Apple and I'm impressed by Steve Jobs's ability to resurrect the company, but it's still a company, not a charity.
It could be both: the leaders at Apple wanting to make inexpensive music downloads available for philosophical reasons, and the corporation doing it for profit. Corporations have no souls, but sometimes the human beings in the corporations can twist the incessant hunger of a corporation to their own benefit...sometimes.
I'm wondering whether the mailing sent to pocketpctools.com wasn't the result of some automatic web spider looking for copyright violations. Hasn't this come up before here, about corporations automatically sending cease-and-desist orders to anyone who even looks like they're violating copyright? Such automatic letters are obnoxious, but not as obnoxious as some ZD lawyer looking at the pocketpctools site, seeing the Fair Use, and still threatening them.
I think pocketpctools.com should have written back for clarification rather than caving. Of course, if ppt.com's intent is to boycott ZD to stop them then it would be boycotting instead of caving, and that's another strategy. But letting the big boys know that you've caught them in the act, even if you just push a little bit before caving, is probably a better thing to do.
ObKarma: Geez, IP law is all screwed up, ain't it?:-)
I don't know what the statistics are like, but it seems to me that if RIAA suffered losses while non-RIAA music labels didn't, that would be good evidence that the RIAA losses weren't due simply to piracy.
It would also help to have a declared boycott. And if there were a standardized "100% RIAA free" label which music producers could use, to put the campaign into the public eye.
Uh, when you're out in public everything you do is subject to observation by the public. That's why it's called public.
I have to agree. These cameras are no more intrusive than having police officers sitting in their place, watching everything. They have the added benefits of possessing an impartial memory (assuming they are tamper-proof), being cheaper and being more patient than police officers would be.
If you want to worry about rights being violated in Boston, consider the upcoming implementation of bag searches on public transportation. They will be banning the use of large bags on the Orange Line during the convention (won't a bomb fit into a purse or a briefcase, or on a shoe perhaps?), and will be searching all large bags coming into the system at certain specific T stops, which have been apparently announced ahead of time (at least through the rumor mill). If I were a terrorist, I'd probably walk along the T line until I found a stop where they weren't checking bags, and board there. Apparently the bag searches are supposed to continue after the convention is over. The public in public transportation is becoming less apt as time goes on.
Of course, this will encourage more people to drive to work, which is exactly what Boston needs.
Slashdot Mirror
In statistical mechanics it is well known that, in the agglomeration of many distinct particles, most of the degrees of freedom of those particles are averaged away, leaving only a few key variables (like temperature, pressure, and so forth.)
IMO the same thing holds true for corporations. They are made up of thousands of people, most of them entirely decent people. However, in the agglomerate there is usually only one thing that holds them together, one thing they have in common: the desire to have the corporation survive. None of them would rank survival of the company as the most important part of their lives, but all of the first-rank desires of these people are different, and so wash out under averaging.
This is even more clearly the case when we consider the stockholders of public companies. Most often people who invest in companies are not interested in the behavior of those companies; they think of their investment as being no different than a CD or a savings bond, and so are only concerned with the rate of return. There are some mutual funds out there which only invest in "socially responsible" companies, but they're not too widespread and are generally painted with a broad brush (no tobacco and alcohol companies, for instance). Companies are not generally rewarded by their stockholders for anything other than surviving and being profitable. In addition, if I recall correctly, federal law requires that corporations make being profitable their primary objection, to protect investors. (I'm not sure about the details of this last point.)
Another scientific field of study known as complex systems says that complex behavior can arise from simple components, and that the interaction of components can cause behavior that is entirely different than one would predict from the components separately. (Consider that you are made up of cells, and yet do not behave like a cell.) In the case of corporations, we have a large group of people, mostly rational, caring people, with a common goal of corporate survival and profit. I believe that the interactions of these people create something much different than the people themselves: organizations whose sole drive is survival. If I may be metaphorical, they are like predators always hungry, always looking for their next meal, and their sustenance is capital. They are amoral creatures, but very intelligent.
This behavior is not necessarily caused by the extreme greed of any one person or group of people in the company. I suspect that it is a natural condition that will occur in any large-enough corporation, and it can be prevented only with the intervention of strong-willed leaders who force the company to follow other moral precepts.
This is my theory, anyway.
Fair enough and true. I would point out, however, that the average SNR of all Usenet is only relevant if you spend a lot of time with Usenet as a whole. I restrict myself to a few newsgroups that I like, and so the global state of Usenet doesn't make much difference to me.
However, one set of people for whom it would make a difference would be the people maintaining NNTP feeds, downloading all those newsgroups all the time when a lot of them are defunct. Perhaps Usenet could do with a cleaning out, if that would make a difference (and perhaps make it easier for ISPs to host NNTP feeds again).
People keep talking about this small signal-to-noise ratio, but it all depends on the group. There are some groups with huge numbers of on-topic posts and very little spam (which, by the way, is fairly easy to filter out; do web forums have killfiles?) The problem with the groups I like is there is too much content. There are also a lot of ghetto groups which have been abandoned, but where it works, it works well.
I can only imagine you've been hanging out on the seedier side of Usenet....
That's just how I see it. It is good to remember from time to time the specific companies which are to blame for all of this.
What I would like to use is pass-sentences rather than passwords. An eight word sentence is going to be more secure than an eight letter password, and it's probably easier to remember (and not so hard to type if you're a good typist). The difficulty arises when password lengths are restricted, or when whitespace is prohibited. (I've tried pass-sentences with dashes between words, but it's much more awkward to type.)
And I'm not in a position where I NEED to learn Fortran; I'm just curious about better ways of doing things. C is not always the best way to do things.
Thanks for the responses, btw.
I've seen this chart before, and it's curious to me that there are no offshoots of FORTRAN since the 60's. Is this really true? I've been thinking about learning FORTRAN 95 for scientific simulations, but I'm curious about similar alternatives as well.
Note that one is required to be a Verizon local phone customer to get DSL through them at all. :) )
(Unless things have changed, in which case I'd really like to know about it.
Something just occurred to me: is mathematics more difficult because it is constantly building on things that came before it? Students who get behind during one year of math are still at a disadvantage the next year because they can't multiply, or add fractions, or the like. If you get behind in English or history, on the other hand, you can probably do OK in following years because the skills you develop there are more gradual.
The majority of people who have an interest in primary education are the sort of people who hated math at school. They then help instill this attitude in all the impressionable young kids. Attitude is infectious, especially to young minds, and someone who doesn't care about math will teach the kids not to care either.
Perhaps the converse is true, too: the majority of people who have an interest in math do not have any interest in general elementary education, which involves playing a major role in the lives of a classroom full of children. In my elementary school we had special art, music, and phys ed teachers. Why not have the school mathematician and the school scientist as well? (Ignoring the whole funding issue of course.)
And I thought they were cancelling Tcl/Tk. *whew*
Is Gates suggesting that China resist the increasing IP laws? I'm pretty sure that they won't take "Communist" as an insult, anyway....
Apparently they just don't get that people - who seem willing to buy cheap videos recorded on consumer cameras in movie theaters - are going to be completely unable to see the difference in a re-recorded playback of what they see on T.V.
If the movie/record companies are truly more worried about digital copying than about analog copying, they should make degraded versions of their movies/albums available for free or for a small fee. Dries up some of the bootleg market, but there's still an incentive for some to go out and buy the CDs/DVDs.
They don't have to think of it. If they want to eject the disk, they click on it once to highlight it, and then they either look in the menus for a menu option to eject the disk (which they will find) or they'll use control-click for the contextual menu. Think of the drag-the-disk-to-the-trash-can as an Easter egg if you want: possibly useful for people who know it's there, but a user can get along fine without it. (And if they took it out now, there's sure to be old-timers who would be upset with them.)
Most of the world's spam originates in Florida. Do somethng about that first.
What do you think the four hurricanes were for? (Didn't work but a good try.)
Some would say that the current administration would prefer you to be cowering in fear (and supporting its actions).
Ah, the classic "get a life" business. What kind of life do you have in mind? Passions are what make life interesting. Some people obsess over sports, some over Macs, some over Star Trek, some over toy trains-- they have lives. People who obsess over other people have lives too. People who go around criticizing any show of exuberance as juvenile...well, I'm not sure about them.
Planning on making a trip to Boston this weekend, to tell everyone here how they should "get a damn life, it's only a baseball team, they're not a church or anything"?
The fact that such a clause should even be necessary points to the warped mindset of the **AAs, of course.
It could be useful to paint the bill as the "It will make it illegal to fast-forward through commercials!!" to get the word out.
IANAL, so I could very well be wrong.
Maybe the poster is William Shatner, in, disguise?
I love Apple, but there are two things that struck me: :)
1) "Frequently Asked Questions"? How long has this been around that there are questions asked frequently?
2) In the FAQ, there is the sentence "You can only use approved creative provided by iTunes." When did "creative" become a noun?
I was just looking at these digital picture frames (e.g. http://digi-frame.com/) which can hang on a wall and run through a slideshow. The 17" frames at the website I gave run for about $2000; this new iMac would probably work just as well for cheaper.... (Can they be hung on a wall, I wonder? Maybe a little heavy. And you'd have to buy a nice frame to put around it.)
Outsourcing is bad for the person whose job goes elsewhere.
But the job goes elsewhere because someone else can do it cheaper.
It happens all the time. Sooner or later, all those guys in India will price themselves out of the market and lose their jobs to people in China or Africa.
I have sympathy for people who lose their jobs. I have no sympathy for people who want government to distort economics.
How about a metaphor...
AIDS is bad for the person who gets it.
But the person gets AIDS because he is exposed to the HIV virus.
It happens all the time....
I have sympathy for people with AIDS. I have no sympathy for people who want medicine to distort biology.
Your hidden assumption is that natural "economics" is a good thing. I would not agree with this assumption myself, as I find raw capitalism, based on the motto "Look out for yourself", to be cruel and short-sighted.
> No, they invest millions so they will get tens of millions in revenue from selling iPod. Don't get me wrong, I like Apple and I'm impressed by Steve Jobs's ability to resurrect the company, but it's still a company, not a charity.
It could be both: the leaders at Apple wanting to make inexpensive music downloads available for philosophical reasons, and the corporation doing it for profit. Corporations have no souls, but sometimes the human beings in the corporations can twist the incessant hunger of a corporation to their own benefit...sometimes.
I'm wondering whether the mailing sent to pocketpctools.com wasn't the result of some automatic web spider looking for copyright violations. Hasn't this come up before here, about corporations automatically sending cease-and-desist orders to anyone who even looks like they're violating copyright? Such automatic letters are obnoxious, but not as obnoxious as some ZD lawyer looking at the pocketpctools site, seeing the Fair Use, and still threatening them.
:-)
I think pocketpctools.com should have written back for clarification rather than caving. Of course, if ppt.com's intent is to boycott ZD to stop them then it would be boycotting instead of caving, and that's another strategy. But letting the big boys know that you've caught them in the act, even if you just push a little bit before caving, is probably a better thing to do.
ObKarma: Geez, IP law is all screwed up, ain't it?
I don't know what the statistics are like, but it seems to me that if RIAA suffered losses while non-RIAA music labels didn't, that would be good evidence that the RIAA losses weren't due simply to piracy.
It would also help to have a declared boycott. And if there were a standardized "100% RIAA free" label which music producers could use, to put the campaign into the public eye.
I have to agree. These cameras are no more intrusive than having police officers sitting in their place, watching everything. They have the added benefits of possessing an impartial memory (assuming they are tamper-proof), being cheaper and being more patient than police officers would be.
If you want to worry about rights being violated in Boston, consider the upcoming implementation of bag searches on public transportation. They will be banning the use of large bags on the Orange Line during the convention (won't a bomb fit into a purse or a briefcase, or on a shoe perhaps?), and will be searching all large bags coming into the system at certain specific T stops, which have been apparently announced ahead of time (at least through the rumor mill). If I were a terrorist, I'd probably walk along the T line until I found a stop where they weren't checking bags, and board there. Apparently the bag searches are supposed to continue after the convention is over. The public in public transportation is becoming less apt as time goes on.
Of course, this will encourage more people to drive to work, which is exactly what Boston needs.