Since the original article was sketchy of details, here's a link to the Japanese group that actually did it.
I know jack about cabling and plastics, but it says that they're using poly-methyl methacrylate wideband plastic optical fiber that's either Graded-Index (100m) or Multi-Layer (50m). This also piqued my interest: "Perfluorinated POF has been successfully used in trials of 10 Gbps transmission. However, this POF is considered appropriate for office applications because it is only one-fifth the thickness of poly-methyl methacrylate POF. Expectations in the industry have grown for the potential of the easier-to-use poly-methyl methacrylate POF for digital home networks."
While I think you're pointing to something interesting, I would have to say that your argument is fundamentally flawed. One of the hallmarks of (post- | *-)modern society is that there are profound linkages between diverse issues that constitute our lives. So, most any argument that makes the claim that "foo is the cause of bar problem" is going to run into some very messy ground. I mean, I would bet that I could argue that the cause of most of society's problems today are, say, an ill-supported educational system, but at the end of it, we'd just end up in a pissing match along the lines "well, my foo causes your foo" or "my foo is more of a fundamental problem than your foo."
What we'd really need to do is avoid that problem altogether and articulate a set of problems and things that contribute to them, and admit that they're all interrelated and that there's things on both lists that are we (and by this I've mean society) probably can't/don't/won't see.
On a related note, I have to admit that I'm troubled by these lines in your post:
I've seen women grow up with the only real core value passed down from their parents is to have more children in order to get a bigger check. In defense, I've also known one or two that believed in actually raising their children, but they are a decreasing minority.
If this is a reference to "welfare queens", then I would have to take offense. While I do not deny that there are individuals who do have additional children to gain additional (welfare) money, attributing their actions to "core values" does injustice to the actual experiences of mothers on welfare. Numerous authors have attempted to trace the various interlocking systems of power and thought that lead to such outcomes (for instance, in Rachael and Her Children, Kozol both does the math and interview mothers, case workers and administrators to find out, interestingly enough, that for some mothers on welfare, their aid is so low that they can't afford not to have more children. He also discusses how, importantly, the welfare system punishes nuclear families by considering fathers able to work and therefore the entire family unable to get welfare, thereby leading some families to chose deliberately to become "a single mother with absentee father" in order to survive). As I stated earlier, our problems are complicated and I worry that in our effort fix them we obscure or create others.
Actually (and this is not to sound unduly pessimistic nor big business conspiracist), but adult verification services have become a huge industry and are responsible in part for a good deal of the online porn revenues. These companies are not going to want the government cutting in on their revenues.
Furthermore, many adult webmasters have incorporated these services into their business-plans (contrary to popular belief, there are actually knowledgable businesspeople in the porn industry), since they get commissions if people buy verification while on their sites. Moreover, because of the sheer number of adult sites out there, there's this interesting self-filtering going on. Most of the better quality sites have struck exclusive partnerships deals with different AVSs. The sites get classified as "premiere/gold/platinum" and are guaranteed better placements on the AVSs' listings. They also have to minimize/eliminate advertising, get rid of any further fees and improve their layout and content. The AVSs' are making even more money since on top of the base rate (usually about US$20 a year), they're charging customers for upgrades (about US$20 a month). All said, it's an interesting lesson in value-added marketing (which may or may not be improving actual viewing experiences - the jury is still out on that one) that would have questionable success if there wasn't this pre-existing condition of AVSs (eg, could you imagine Altavista Gold - $20 bucks a month for truly weeded links? Maybe not - maybe it would be a very bad idea - but it's a business model that probably isn't going to be tried any time soon).
This is not meant to justify AVSs (consumer reaction is, well, complicated to them - some people think that porn, like information, should be free while others feel better thinking that they're a impedence to minors getting porn), but rather to point out the degree in which they've become part of the web as it stands today.
After whacking the good fish upside the head, I think I've made some more sense of this. It looks like hamburg.de is a pre-existing portal (I think run by the city - the translation is really bad) and the city has partnered with a private company to actually run it. As part of the deal, the city is going to be putting a lot of its administative functions on the site. Also, it looks like they're trying to get local businesses to move into e-commerce through this thing. Some more poking around got me to this, which indicates that an EU commission called Telecities is responsible in part for this. Created in 1993, its goal has been to help Europe become part of the "Information Society" - and it boasts a pretty impressive set of member cities. Interestingly, its sister projects are Car Free Cities and something called POLIS, which looks to be creating new regional transportion systems.
For XML formatting, why is Gecko supporting CSS rather than XSL in the first release?
Simple: CSS1 is a finished, fully adopted, and mature two-year-old standard; XSL isn't done yet. As Tim Bray, the coeditor of the XML standard, has written:
"Microsoft's XSL efforts are very impressive, but (readers will pardon us being something of a broken record on this subject) XSL is in the future. We are convinced that from the point of view of the largest number of users, the most important things that Microsoft could do in IE 5 would be: 1.Ensure interoperability of XML and stylesheets with other browsers, and 2.Build in conformance to existing, stable, well-understood standards such as CSS 1.0.
Innovation, of course, is fine and necessary, and we salute Microsoft's leadership in this area. But innovation needs to be built on a foundation of interoperability and playing by existing well-understood rules." He further adds that "It seems obvious to me that for anyone who wants to deploy XML in production mode right now, XML + CSS is the way to go..." ("Microsoft Outlines XML Support in IE5 Beta 2" at http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/98/10/ie5-2.html)
-=snip=-
I understand their reasoning, but damnit, I want my XSL! It's very weird giving XML demos in IE.
Actually, in this case it does. The movies were conceived, pitched and shot as a package of 3 by Craven. The only snag was Williamson dropped out of writing this one because he claimed he didn't have time.
I don't know all that much about Firewire and USB, so shoot me if is really stupid sounding, but could one make a USB->Firewire adapter/hub? Or is just really not all that practical?
What would be even better is if posts could be assigned to multiple categories by each moderator. Then we could allow users to set values for each of those categories in their preferences like you said and allow the ranking to be dynamic (eg, a post get s 2 trolls and 3 funnies and I've set troll to be -1 and funny to be +2 so it ends up being a +4 for me).
Actually, what would be even better is if we could write expressions for calculating the values of posts - for instancem the previous example would get +4 if it's considered both funny and troll by a single moderator, otherwise it gets -1 for being a troll to one moderator and +2 for being funny to someone else.
And even better yet would be if the comments and the moderation were sent as XML (and XSL/T were to become offical standards so Mozilla can finally implement it;}) and then we could read the comments however and in what order we damn well pleased. Then stuff exploratory data analysis stuff like concept clustering and MDS could be implemented on the client-side (for those that want it) without requiring repeated trips back up to the server every time you want to resort the messages (eg, if there's a topic that I don't know all that much about, I want to read informative comments first, but if it's something I've been following, I like to look at the humorous things first).
Y'all probably know this already, but just in case you didn't,
Neil Stephenson will be giving a reading from _Cryptonomicon_ today (May 5) at the University of Washington in Kane Hall at 7PM, according to the UW Bookstore's website (http://www.bookstore.washington.edu). Tickets are required.
btw, shame on the UW Bookstore for misspelling Neil's name.
I am not suggesting sending these kids to the gas chamber, but what harm is there in having them talk to a couseler? The counceler should be competant enough to sort out which kids merely "look different" and which ones are truly disturbed and need help
I think the main point of all this discussion is that society is equating "look different" with "truly disturbed."
Keep in mind, also, that looking different is not a pre-requisite for being dangerous. Some of the most dangerous human beings appeared to be very normal (e.g., Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh (sp?)). And wasn't Adolph Hitler Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" at one point? If I'm to believe what I learned in high school, I think Hitler won this honor for revitalizing Germany's economy (before the whole Nazi/WWII thing, of course).
I know you're not saying that looking normal means that people aren't dangerous, but focusing on appearance is not productive, IMHO.
More dangerous than looking (or being) different, I think, are the hateful and violent attitudes that are often expressed against people who are judged to be different. And even worse is the culture that accepts and condones such behavior.
In the Littleton case, students have admitted that the members of the so-called Trenchcoat Mafia were often harassed by the so-called jocks, including being shoved up against lockers, and so forth.
This is not to say that the harassment justifies retaliating and killing people, but unless people are willing to address these 'mainstream' anti-social behaviors as well, the message that will be sent is that it's okay to be hateful and violent as long as you're part of the mainstream.
That's a bad message to send.
The only real way, I think, to help prevent more of these tragedies from occurring is to teach people (all people, not just the ones that look different) to respect each other.
Ironically, society's response to Littleton has been to show complete disrespect for those who are (or appear to be) different.
Life is like an analogy that doesn't make sense http://www.drizzle.com/~lostboy
Slashdot Mirror
Since the original article was sketchy of details, here's a link to the Japanese group that actually did it.
I know jack about cabling and plastics, but it says that they're using poly-methyl methacrylate wideband plastic optical fiber that's either Graded-Index (100m) or Multi-Layer (50m).
This also piqued my interest: "Perfluorinated POF has been successfully used in trials of 10 Gbps transmission. However, this POF is considered appropriate for office applications because it is only one-fifth the thickness of poly-methyl methacrylate POF. Expectations in the industry have grown for the potential of the easier-to-use poly-methyl methacrylate POF for digital home networks."
Could some engineering type explain all of this?
While I think you're pointing to something interesting, I would have to say that your argument is fundamentally flawed. One of the hallmarks of (post- | *-)modern society is that there are profound linkages between diverse issues that constitute our lives. So, most any argument that makes the claim that "foo is the cause of bar problem" is going to run into some very messy ground. I mean, I would bet that I could argue that the cause of most of society's problems today are, say, an ill-supported educational system, but at the end of it, we'd just end up in a pissing match along the lines "well, my foo causes your foo" or "my foo is more of a fundamental problem than your foo."
What we'd really need to do is avoid that problem altogether and articulate a set of problems and things that contribute to them, and admit that they're all interrelated and that there's things on both lists that are we (and by this I've mean society) probably can't/don't/won't see.
On a related note, I have to admit that I'm troubled by these lines in your post:
I've seen women grow up with the only real core value passed down from their parents is to have more children in order to get a bigger check. In defense, I've also known one or two that believed in actually raising their children, but they are a decreasing minority.
If this is a reference to "welfare queens", then I would have to take offense. While I do not deny that there are individuals who do have additional children to gain additional (welfare) money, attributing their actions to "core values" does injustice to the actual experiences of mothers on welfare. Numerous authors have attempted to trace the various interlocking systems of power and thought that lead to such outcomes (for instance, in Rachael and Her Children, Kozol both does the math and interview mothers, case workers and administrators to find out, interestingly enough, that for some mothers on welfare, their aid is so low that they can't afford not to have more children. He also discusses how, importantly, the welfare system punishes nuclear families by considering fathers able to work and therefore the entire family unable to get welfare, thereby leading some families to chose deliberately to become "a single mother with absentee father" in order to survive). As I stated earlier, our problems are complicated and I worry that in our effort fix them we obscure or create others.
Actually (and this is not to sound unduly pessimistic nor big business conspiracist), but adult verification services have become a huge industry and are responsible in part for a good deal of the online porn revenues. These companies are not going to want the government cutting in on their revenues.
Furthermore, many adult webmasters have incorporated these services into their business-plans (contrary to popular belief, there are actually knowledgable businesspeople in the porn industry), since they get commissions if people buy verification while on their sites. Moreover, because of the sheer number of adult sites out there, there's this interesting self-filtering going on. Most of the better quality sites have struck exclusive partnerships deals with different AVSs. The sites get classified as "premiere/gold/platinum" and are guaranteed better placements on the AVSs' listings. They also have to minimize/eliminate advertising, get rid of any further fees and improve their layout and content. The AVSs' are making even more money since on top of the base rate (usually about US$20 a year), they're charging customers for upgrades (about US$20 a month). All said, it's an interesting lesson in value-added marketing (which may or may not be improving actual viewing experiences - the jury is still out on that one) that would have questionable success if there wasn't this pre-existing condition of AVSs (eg, could you imagine Altavista Gold - $20 bucks a month for truly weeded links? Maybe not - maybe it would be a very bad idea - but it's a business model that probably isn't going to be tried any time soon).
This is not meant to justify AVSs (consumer reaction is, well, complicated to them - some people think that porn, like information, should be free while others feel better thinking that they're a impedence to minors getting porn), but rather to point out the degree in which they've become part of the web as it stands today.
After whacking the good fish upside the head, I think I've made some more sense of this.
It looks like hamburg.de is a pre-existing portal (I think run by the city - the translation is really bad) and the city has partnered with a private company to actually run it. As part of the deal, the city is going to be putting a lot of its administative functions on the site. Also, it looks like they're trying to get local businesses to move into e-commerce through this thing.
Some more poking around got me to this, which indicates that an EU commission called Telecities is responsible in part for this. Created in 1993, its goal has been to help Europe become part of the "Information Society" - and it boasts a pretty impressive set of member cities. Interestingly, its sister projects are Car Free Cities and something called POLIS, which looks to be creating new regional transportion systems.
From the ngLayout FAQ:
..." ("Microsoft Outlines XML Support in IE5 Beta 2" at http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/98/10/ie5-2.html)
For XML formatting, why is Gecko supporting CSS rather than XSL in the first release?
Simple: CSS1 is a finished, fully adopted, and mature two-year-old standard; XSL isn't done yet. As Tim Bray, the coeditor of the XML standard, has written:
"Microsoft's XSL efforts are very impressive, but (readers will pardon us being something of a broken record on this subject) XSL is in the future. We are convinced that from the point of view of the largest number of users, the most important things that Microsoft could do in IE 5 would be:
1.Ensure interoperability of XML and stylesheets with other browsers, and
2.Build in conformance to existing, stable, well-understood standards such as CSS 1.0.
Innovation, of course, is fine and necessary, and we salute Microsoft's leadership in this area. But innovation needs to be built on a foundation of interoperability and playing by existing well-understood rules." He further adds that "It seems obvious to me that for anyone who wants to deploy XML in production mode right now, XML + CSS is the way to go
-=snip=-
I understand their reasoning, but damnit, I want my XSL! It's very weird giving XML demos in IE.
Actually, in this case it does. The movies were conceived, pitched and shot as a package of 3 by Craven.
The only snag was Williamson dropped out of writing this one because he claimed he didn't have time.
I don't know all that much about Firewire and USB, so shoot me if is really stupid sounding, but could one make a USB->Firewire adapter/hub? Or is just really not all that practical?
Jeez -
If you're going to FUD you might as well not be so blatant about it. At least cut out the damn copyright.
What would be even better is if posts could be assigned to multiple categories by each moderator. Then we could allow users to set values for each of those categories in their preferences like you said and allow the ranking to be dynamic (eg, a post get s 2 trolls and 3 funnies and I've set troll to be -1 and funny to be +2 so it ends up being a +4 for me).
;}) and then we could read the comments however and in what order we damn well pleased. Then stuff exploratory data analysis stuff like concept clustering and MDS could be implemented on the client-side (for those that want it) without requiring repeated trips back up to the server every time you want to resort the messages (eg, if there's a topic that I don't know all that much about, I want to read informative comments first, but if it's something I've been following, I like to look at the humorous things first).
Actually, what would be even better is if we could write expressions for calculating the values of posts - for instancem the previous example would get +4 if it's considered both funny and troll by a single moderator, otherwise it gets -1 for being a troll to one moderator and +2 for being funny to someone else.
And even better yet would be if the comments and the moderation were sent as XML (and XSL/T were to become offical standards so Mozilla can finally implement it
LOL.
;-)
My thoughts exactly -- you beat me to it. I'm sure it's some kind of cosmic contingency against bio-piracy.
I wonder what the fines are if you're caught?
gah! I missed that one (Neal vs Neil). Thanks.
anybody want an egg? I've got some extra on my face, here. Sheesh!
sorry, I realize that this info may only be useful to people in Washington (state).
Y'all probably know this already, but just in case you didn't,
Neil Stephenson will be giving a reading from _Cryptonomicon_ today (May 5) at the University of Washington in Kane Hall at 7PM, according to the UW Bookstore's website (http://www.bookstore.washington.edu). Tickets are required.
btw, shame on the UW Bookstore for misspelling Neil's name.
I am not suggesting sending these kids to the gas chamber, but what harm is there in having them talk to a couseler? The counceler should be competant enough to sort out which kids merely "look different" and which ones are truly disturbed and need help
I think the main point of all this discussion is that society is equating "look different" with "truly disturbed."
Keep in mind, also, that looking different is not a pre-requisite for being dangerous. Some of the most dangerous human beings appeared to be very normal (e.g., Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh (sp?)). And wasn't Adolph Hitler Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" at one point? If I'm to believe what I learned in high school, I think Hitler won this honor for revitalizing Germany's economy (before the whole Nazi/WWII thing, of course).
I know you're not saying that looking normal means that people aren't dangerous, but focusing on appearance is not productive, IMHO.
More dangerous than looking (or being) different, I think, are the hateful and violent attitudes that are often expressed against people who are judged to be different. And even worse is the culture that accepts and condones such behavior.
In the Littleton case, students have admitted that the members of the so-called Trenchcoat Mafia were often harassed by the so-called jocks, including being shoved up against lockers, and so forth.
This is not to say that the harassment justifies retaliating and killing people, but unless people are willing to address these 'mainstream' anti-social behaviors as well, the message that will be sent is that it's okay to be hateful and violent as long as you're part of the mainstream.
That's a bad message to send.
The only real way, I think, to help prevent more of these tragedies from occurring is to teach people (all people, not just the ones that look different) to respect each other.
Ironically, society's response to Littleton has been to show complete disrespect for those who are (or appear to be) different.
Life is like an analogy that doesn't make sense
http://www.drizzle.com/~lostboy