I just downloaded the "iBook Author" app. It's neat. But it has no cabability to enter maths.
Until Apple adds LaTeX support, this is not going to fly in maths and physics at the university level. I do research in applied mathematics for a living. In the texts I write, over 50% of the page space is covered with formulae. That's just the way maths works. I also need special characters (various binary operators, calligraphic, fraktur and blackboard bold symbols,...), not just Greek letters and sum symbols.
There's another catch, which also applies to other fields, not just my personal niche: It's nice that I can add 3D models, videos and all. But creating these kinds of objects takes a lot of time. Time that expert authors don't have. It will be interesting to see how this works out in schools, but I'm not holding my breath regarding graduate academic writing.
Somewhere between Google's researchers and the Slashdot editors, someone must have messed something up. If Google actually thinks that the concept of regret is new (and I don't think they do), than they hired the wrong guys.
By the standards of Computer Science, regret is an ancient concept. Here's a paper from 1995. By that time, the concept was established enough that the author used the word "regret" in the title of his paper without any further explanations.
There is really nothing new here.
I also think it's quite realistic to expect to strike a balance where society's poorest members can be helped in times of need without bankrupting the entire nation.
Okay, you are asking for differing opinions, so let's have a serious debate. My household is not located in the US but, at purchasing power parity, its income falls within the top 3% of US households (two working young professionals). As a member of that income bracket, I can tell you that making money gets easier the more you already have. That's because you have more "disposable" (i.e. investable) income, you can afford a good tax advisor, unemployment is a very small risk, disability insurance is cheap for white-collar workers, etc. I can also tell you that professional success, while impossible without hard work and determination, is also to considerable extent a question of luck and good starting conditions.
The upshot is that capitalism is a positive feedback system. That's not just an old Marxist meme, it's actually true. If you accept that, then you have two options: Either you prefer a system in which the rich have it easier than the poor, and society separates itself over time into the lazy rich and the working poor, with no middle class. Personally, I find that option morally unacceptable. Alternatively, you have to accept that the states' role is more than just to provide emergency assistance for those who have fallen upon hard times, but to create a dynamic equilibrium, in which everyone has not just the right, but also an actual chance to pursue happiness. And that it is the duty of the fortunate ones in a society to contribute more of their labour to the common good than others.
You can probably guess from this, my socialist viewpoint, that I'm European. I find it genuinely sad that the nation who used to hold the right to pursue happiness a self-evident truth -- to which Europeans like me have looked up to, up until very recently, as the pinnacle of freedom and fairness -- has recently developed such a misanthropic stance.
Fully agreed. I'm German too, and I have driven several thousand miles on American roads. I fully agree that 100mph to 110mph (180km/h) is a convenient speed on a German Autobahn, with a decent car. In fact I find driving on the Autobahn relaxing, especially at night, with a good talk radio programme.
Many interstates in the US are of comparable or in fact better standard than the Autobahn. Especially in warmer parts of the States, the climate makes potholes rare, and the wide green strips between the opposing directions are a good safety feature that most Autbahns lack. In many parts of the States, the traffic density is also very low compared to the incredible bustle on Autobahns (Germany is right in the middle of the EU, and it seems everyone needs to get from Poland to France, from Austria to Denmark, and the other way round, every other day).
But the big difference between the States and Germany is the culture of driving. Germans (and everyone else driving on the Autobahn) have learned to live with unrestricted roads, and they started learning, as a society, back when cars had a top speed of 60mph. There are laws requiring everyone to drive in the rightmost lane currently available (the "Rechtsfahrgebot"), and in contrast to the States or Britain where these laws also exist in principle, virtually everyone actually obeys them. Indicating is a reflex rather than a concious gesture: people even indicate at 2am on deserted roads in the middle of a forest, with noone but the moon to watch. And they have acquired an intuition for how fast a car is approaching in the rear view mirror, which is crucial on roads where the relative speed between cars on the right and middle lane can easily exceed 50mph. Americans would have to learn these things for everyone to be able to drive on those roads. In the meantime, there'd be a lot of accidents.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.
Just recently, I was trying to write code (Matlab code, and the resulting academic paper in LaTeX) with someone on the other end of the continent, so we gave Wave a try. Within minutes I realised that it's useless even for this, the task it was seemingly built for.
The reason: It's a sandbox. If you write code, you like to be able to save it, and compile it. To do either of the two you have to, literally, select, copy and paste your code from the wave into your IDE / text editor / local file system. That of course breaks the whole "keep everything in sync in one place in the cloud" idea.
So I guess there is one, and only one use case for wave: If you want to write unformatted text in collaboration with others, for the sole purpose of notetaking and, eventually, printing it on a piece of scrap paper. I guess there are not that many people out there in the world who actually need this sort of functionality. For everyone else, Wave is a hassle.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...
Doing that gets the Daily show a lot of viewers, I would think that doing the same thing in a more rigorous journalistic environment would get you a lot of eyeballs.
This is exactly what I do not understand about online journalism. At the moment, newspapers seem to be in a race to the bottom, with each trying to publish the same sort of crap before everyone else; mostly rehashed press-releases, all the while complaining that nobody wants to pay for their news online.
Maybe I am part of a small target group. But, dear newspaper publishers: Please give me a website that
1. pays talented journalists a decent salary to go out and investigate complex stories, actually reveal novel information, and then come back and write lucid, enlightening stories.
2. does not show any ads, thereby making itself independent from corporations for revenue, turning the readers into the sole customers.
3. has a calm, clean layout, accessible from both the desktop and mobile devices, hassle free. Oh, and please actually fill my damn screen with text and images, instead of using 20% of its width to show 50-line articles broken into 5 pages, filling the rest with horrible flash ads.
I am willing to pay, say, 200$ a year for a subscription to this site (I currently pay a similar amount for print subscriptions to a weekly and a monthly paper). It doesn't have to have hourly updates, all I want is something to read for an hour in bed every evening. I don't understand why such a website doesn't exist yet. I know, ads are an important part of traditional publishing, but web publishing is cheaper (printing presses and paper boys are more expensive than servers and bandwidth), and there are great economies of scale: The first publisher to establish a high-quality online news service will be able to attract readers from the entire English-speaking world.
Seriously, I don't get it. Why is everyone still trying to make money with ads?
Information is easier to share than at any other point in history. News is replicated and spread in seconds now, and people, not just the young kids, are used to it for FREE. The only way this "may" be possible is if every single news media group put up walls at the same time... AND noone found a way to bypass this. It's just not feasible.
Maybe I'm part of a very small group in this regard, but I would be very happy to pay for online news that is well researched, provides in-depth, intelligent analysis, and presented through a convenient, ad-free front-end. I currently can not get this online, so I pay for a print subscription.
The times have changed so that content en masse is no longer valuable, just the content itself. Good news, strong stories... well written... that's what matters now.
You say that, but can you point out a single good online news source that provides the journalistic rigour of the likes of the New Yorker or the Economist? I don't think so. If you don't know what I mean, buy an edition of those newspapers at the newsstand and compare it to your favourite online news outlet. Bad journalism has become so commonplace online these days that many people have forgotten what a good newspaper reads like.
There is just not enough money in online news to pay for the sort of work required, and the interface in its current form (mobile phones / desktop computers) is not amenable to long stretches of text. Maybe the iPad will change this, but I'm not holding my breadth. I was never worried about music, or the film industry, even in the hayday of Napster. But I am seriously worried that, over time, print will die out, and we will all be left with the current tornado of dumbed-down, superficial, spin-doctored soundbites out of the big news agencies, and that will be a serious loss for democracy.
What they really mean by "fair representation" would be more accurately described as "damn voters won't vote for the people we want them to, so we're screwing with the rules."
Well, it's pretty much the opposite. Cumulative voting is a system for elections involving party lists (such as city councils, in some jurisdictions). The point is that you get to assign your votes to the candidates you actually want to elect, rather than having to vote for a list of candidates that some party drew up for you, while still giving the parties a chance to nominate candidates and suggest to (not force upon) the voter a ranking among them.
This system is commonly used in local elections in Switzerland and Germany. Works well there.
Okay, I'm confused. Whenever privacy is discussed around here, we say "wouldn't it be great if we could retain personal control over our data, and could willingly decide whom to sell our data to?"
So know someone with a great deal of economic leverage is trying to push exactly such a system, and all of slashdot goes "Oh my god, how evil! Quick, everyone give your data away for free, so nobody can monetize them any more, not even yourself!"
Guys, Bill Gates stopped being the most evil man about five years ago. I care much less about the shortcomings of Windows than I care about Google and Facebook knowing more about me than I do myself. At this point, I'd be willing to pay Bill Gates if he offers to secure all my personal data.
Let's say every child calls this service exactly once in their whole life (that's an underestimate, I guess, if the situation is really as bad as this populist makes it sound). So very roughly 1% of the overall population of Australia dials that number once a year. How long does it take to sort out one such call? Either (a) five minutes, if they don't actually do anything about it (like when you call the police to tell them you found a car with a smashed window). In that case, this all makes no sense in the first place. Or (b) they do some sort of magic, like trying to identify the perpetrator, or "send someone over", or whatever. Either way, that'll cost them at the very least five hours, including the paperwork, and their appearance in court. Policemen work on average (correcting for weekends and holidays) like, 5 hours a day, so one policeman can cover something like a 300 to 500 calls a year.
0.2% of Australians are policemen.. In other words, there are 5 calls per policeman, per year. That's five calls per policeman per year, divided by 500 calls per policeman per year, meaning 1% of Australia's police force will be busy chasing boogiemen, classmates, schoolyard bullies, and neighbourhood mums, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. And in consequence, I will boldly claim that the crime rate will go up by, like, 1%, thanks to less policemen on the beat catching actual criminals. Okay, it doesn't quite work that way, but it's still a better estimate than the shady "1 in 4 children are sexually abused by the internet." from the summary.
Sounds like a great plan. A few more murderers and actual child molesters on the loose are a small price to pay for a cuddly, reassuring dolphin next to every PC.
More importantly, how can you call something extrasensory perception, when it involves the humans perceiving an LED signal, with their visual sense?
This is pretty silly.
As far as it being inappropriate to use the Nazi symbol in media; well maybe it is in bad form, and maybe it makes some people uncomfortable, but it's a bit of history. One which affected the world, not just Europe. The Nazi laws in Europe are significant, but they're also oppressive and insane. To say a country is so scarred by a piece of history that it has to ban a symbol in order to protect people from being sad, uncomfortable, or in Germany's case for feeling remourseful is downright ridiculous. Grown ups, as you say, should be able to handle whatever flow of emotion comes from viewing these symbols, and should also be able to say for themselves "I'm not comfortable with this, I'm not going to purchase this game". It shouldn't require action from any government to say "no we can't have that, it might upset people who were/are affected by that bit of history".
On the other hand, in Germany we can say "Fuck" on the radio without it being censored out by the government in order to protect people from feeling sad or uncomfortable. I'm wondering what incredible historic catastrophy must have brought about those oppressive censorhip laws in the States.
By quashing political dissent, you are becoming like the Nazis. Let the right wingers openly glorify the nazis, so reasonable moderate people can see just how awful they are. Here in the states we let the KKK march freely, and usually the protests over the march are bigger than the klan march itself. If you do not trust your populace to make the right choice when fully informed, how can you even pretend to be democratic?
Freedom of Expression is guaranteed by the German Constitution. There are Nazi marches in Germany and the corresponding, much larger, counter-marches, just like those KKK marches in the state that you are referring to. Nobody suggested those were forbidden. The only "expression" that is expressively forbidden is denial of the Holocaust, and that law is simply a special, very strict case of legislation against libel.
If you really want to prevent Nazis from gaining power again, don't outright ban them in your constitution. Codify principles incompatible with Naziism in your constitution. Freedom of religion, Freedom of Expression, etc. As long as Freedom of Expression is not protected by your constitution, it can be taken away from you. When (not if) that happens, do you really care if it was the Nazis or some other group?
The German Constitution does not ban National Socialism. It codifies human and civic rights, like those that you mention, and several others (most importantly, the right to dignity). You have clearly never read it, otherwise you wouldn't lecture about it like this.
German law strikes a different balance between Freedom of Expression and the Protection from Intimidation than the Anglo-American system, because of the country's history. Imagine living in what was arguably the world's most industrially advanced, culturally influential, progressive country. Then, one day, the houses of parliament are disbanded by armed paramilitaries. Your intellectual elite is driven into exile or killed. Almost all civic rights are abolished. About eight to ten Million Jews, politicial dissidents, Gays, Roma, mentally ill and others are killed. Finally, your country goes on to unleash the world's deadliest ever war, killing well above 30 Million people in the battlefields. I think you can be forgiven for outlawing the symbols of the movement that caused all this afterward.
Jeez, people, everytime anything related to this law comes up, everyone starts crying censorship. There is one small bloody set of symbols that's forbidden. One stupid verse of a song, and one stupid greeting. That's it! It's not like Germany had a censorship agency. In most of the United States, you can't even take a piss in public! How's that for freedom of expression?
Labs are just one of many reasons why this approach doesn't work. The people who promote this idea of an online University imply that higher education is only about transferring old knowledge from one person (professor) to the other (student). If it were that simple, there wouldn't be much of a need to rank Universities (but professors instead), and nobody would care about a University's history, location and culture.
"Alma mater" is Latin for "nurturing mother". A University is not a web portal. It's a place where personalities are made. The eloquent guy with the strong political opinion you shared a house with in your second year, the brilliant students in the first row that always outsmarted you in class, the cameraderie of the guys on the football field or in your rowing boat, the all-nighters spent over an assignment you absolutely had to hand in by sunrise, all that make up the quality of your University education, just as much as that famous professor in whose lab you wrote your Masters thesis. None of this can be shipped to someone's mother's basement.
Have a look at your average 18 year old when they leave high school, and look at them again a few years later when they return from Uni. You can't send that sort of experience over a broadband connection. Employers know that. After all, they've been to University.
As another poster has pointed out, the planet's surface is already filled with friction-generating objects: Houses, trees, rocks and mountains will always dominate the dissipated energy between air and ground globally, so we don't have to worry about passat winds stopping because of wind farms.
On a more general note though, the interpretation presented here of this calculation strikes me as backwards: What these people are saying is that if we were to cover all the surface area of the planet except for built-up areas and forests (that is, including all arable land, all deserts, all mountain tops), we'd just about manage to fulfill our current energy needs! I don't think that's such good news.
There are many people working on input methods for the disabled. As just one example, Dasher is an information efficient text-entry method that can be controlled by mouse, voice, gaze, two buttons or even a single button. Experienced users regularly type 20+ words per minute, just with their gaze. Try that with an on-screen keyboard.
The same group has just published nomon, a single-button text entry method (and pointing device) for the severely disabled. Did I mention that both programs are open source?
My conjecture is that this was down to Geography: The concept of a "German" nation meant different things at different times, but Central Europe, probably a less loaded term for this area, has been an incredibly competitive environment for the past 3 Millenia. There were literally hundreds of tribes / kingdoms / nations fighting for land, food and power. The winters were cold, so people had time on their hands and a need to invent machines that helped them stay alive. Finally, the area was (and still is) at the heart of international trade between Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Arabia and the far East. There were a lot of goods coming through, lots of ideas, and lots of ways to make a profit. This kept people (comparably) open-minded and (comparably) well off. Both are important factors allowing artists (from Duerer to Beuys), philosophers (Luther, Kant, Nietzsche,...), scientists (Leibniz, Helmholtz, Humboldt, Planck, Einstein,...) and musicians (Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Haydn,...) to develop their ideas, and giving entrepreneurs (Bosch, Siemens, Krupp, Daimler, Benz,...) a chance to sell their goods.
But, really, this is not unique to Germany. The rest of Europe produced brilliant minds as well. And they, too, spent a large part of their time killing each other. This, put simply, is the reason why Europe, European ideas and European nations dominated the world for a thousand years, and why they still play a major role in the world: It was a tough, rough place, but with enough structure to allow people to spend their time on more than pure survival. It brought out the best and the worst in the humans who lived there. A hundred years ago, America was just like that. Tough, rough, and full of opportunities. Right now, maybe China, Brazil and India are such places.
The inventors are working to increase the percentage of carrot based material
And they better should. This sure sounds like green wash to me.
So the seat, mirrors and steering wheel are partly made from materials that contain chemicals that are derived from carrots.
Seriously. Wake me when they can industrially produce carbon-neutral engines, gearboxes, wheels, impact zones and, most of all, catalysers (which currently contain a lot of poisonous and expensive materials).
Actually, come to that, the ability to store any of several things in a variable is in itself fairly powerful and if used well can *enormously* simplify the code for certain kinds of problems.
Strongly typed languages often contain constructs that allow to emulate this behaviour if absolutely necessary. For example, F# (and thus, I assume, ocaml) allows unions.
type myType = {
| type_A of int
| type_B
| type_C of string
}
They are still strictly typed, just that their type is (A or B or C). That way, you get flexibility when you need it, while retaining the behaviour of a strongly typed language.
And as any decent programmer knows, simpler code is easier to maintain.
Simple doesn't mean unprincipled. I started coding exclusively in F# last summer, and I haven't looked back. On several occasions, I have written several hundred lines of complex scientific code in one go, ending up with a bug-free piece of software right after the first compilation. If you can do this in perl or python, you are a better programmer than me. Plus, the code looks gorgeous, and you can actually read it from top to bottom and understand what's going on.
I'm a scientist, and I love my job. There's no job in the world that could be more exciting. Yes, you do have to deal with the administrative side. It's not like a corporate job is any different at that.
Every morning I wake up with a question in my head I want to answer by the end of the day. Nobody is allowed to tell me what to do, I do whatever I find interesting. Sometimes (rarely), I even simply decide to stay in bed, and nobody cares! Tell me of another job like that! Also, I love working with my students: I am surrounded by a group of people who are enthusiastic about questions that I am enthralled by myself. What better working environment could you imagine?
Yes, I could earn an order of magnitude more in a corporate environment. Yes, I waste a lot of time on grant applications and administrative rubbish. Who cares? I love this job. It gives me the chance to spend every single day of my live thinking about problems I care about. I find it awesome that society is willing to pay me money for doing so, and I feel privileged that I am allowed to teach hundreds of students every year, about something that I genuinely find important.
Slashdot Mirror
I just downloaded the "iBook Author" app. It's neat. But it has no cabability to enter maths. Until Apple adds LaTeX support, this is not going to fly in maths and physics at the university level. I do research in applied mathematics for a living. In the texts I write, over 50% of the page space is covered with formulae. That's just the way maths works. I also need special characters (various binary operators, calligraphic, fraktur and blackboard bold symbols, ...), not just Greek letters and sum symbols.
There's another catch, which also applies to other fields, not just my personal niche: It's nice that I can add 3D models, videos and all. But creating these kinds of objects takes a lot of time. Time that expert authors don't have. It will be interesting to see how this works out in schools, but I'm not holding my breath regarding graduate academic writing.
Somewhere between Google's researchers and the Slashdot editors, someone must have messed something up. If Google actually thinks that the concept of regret is new (and I don't think they do), than they hired the wrong guys.
By the standards of Computer Science, regret is an ancient concept. Here's a paper from 1995. By that time, the concept was established enough that the author used the word "regret" in the title of his paper without any further explanations.
There is really nothing new here.
Okay, you are asking for differing opinions, so let's have a serious debate. My household is not located in the US but, at purchasing power parity, its income falls within the top 3% of US households (two working young professionals). As a member of that income bracket, I can tell you that making money gets easier the more you already have. That's because you have more "disposable" (i.e. investable) income, you can afford a good tax advisor, unemployment is a very small risk, disability insurance is cheap for white-collar workers, etc. I can also tell you that professional success, while impossible without hard work and determination, is also to considerable extent a question of luck and good starting conditions.
The upshot is that capitalism is a positive feedback system. That's not just an old Marxist meme, it's actually true. If you accept that, then you have two options: Either you prefer a system in which the rich have it easier than the poor, and society separates itself over time into the lazy rich and the working poor, with no middle class. Personally, I find that option morally unacceptable. Alternatively, you have to accept that the states' role is more than just to provide emergency assistance for those who have fallen upon hard times, but to create a dynamic equilibrium, in which everyone has not just the right, but also an actual chance to pursue happiness. And that it is the duty of the fortunate ones in a society to contribute more of their labour to the common good than others.
You can probably guess from this, my socialist viewpoint, that I'm European. I find it genuinely sad that the nation who used to hold the right to pursue happiness a self-evident truth -- to which Europeans like me have looked up to, up until very recently, as the pinnacle of freedom and fairness -- has recently developed such a misanthropic stance.
No, it's a moral principle widely adopted by decent people.
Fully agreed. I'm German too, and I have driven several thousand miles on American roads. I fully agree that 100mph to 110mph (180km/h) is a convenient speed on a German Autobahn, with a decent car. In fact I find driving on the Autobahn relaxing, especially at night, with a good talk radio programme.
Many interstates in the US are of comparable or in fact better standard than the Autobahn. Especially in warmer parts of the States, the climate makes potholes rare, and the wide green strips between the opposing directions are a good safety feature that most Autbahns lack. In many parts of the States, the traffic density is also very low compared to the incredible bustle on Autobahns (Germany is right in the middle of the EU, and it seems everyone needs to get from Poland to France, from Austria to Denmark, and the other way round, every other day).
But the big difference between the States and Germany is the culture of driving. Germans (and everyone else driving on the Autobahn) have learned to live with unrestricted roads, and they started learning, as a society, back when cars had a top speed of 60mph. There are laws requiring everyone to drive in the rightmost lane currently available (the "Rechtsfahrgebot"), and in contrast to the States or Britain where these laws also exist in principle, virtually everyone actually obeys them. Indicating is a reflex rather than a concious gesture: people even indicate at 2am on deserted roads in the middle of a forest, with noone but the moon to watch. And they have acquired an intuition for how fast a car is approaching in the rear view mirror, which is crucial on roads where the relative speed between cars on the right and middle lane can easily exceed 50mph. Americans would have to learn these things for everyone to be able to drive on those roads. In the meantime, there'd be a lot of accidents.
Just recently, I was trying to write code (Matlab code, and the resulting academic paper in LaTeX) with someone on the other end of the continent, so we gave Wave a try. Within minutes I realised that it's useless even for this, the task it was seemingly built for.
The reason: It's a sandbox. If you write code, you like to be able to save it, and compile it. To do either of the two you have to, literally, select, copy and paste your code from the wave into your IDE / text editor / local file system. That of course breaks the whole "keep everything in sync in one place in the cloud" idea.
So I guess there is one, and only one use case for wave: If you want to write unformatted text in collaboration with others, for the sole purpose of notetaking and, eventually, printing it on a piece of scrap paper. I guess there are not that many people out there in the world who actually need this sort of functionality. For everyone else, Wave is a hassle.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...
This is exactly what I do not understand about online journalism. At the moment, newspapers seem to be in a race to the bottom, with each trying to publish the same sort of crap before everyone else; mostly rehashed press-releases, all the while complaining that nobody wants to pay for their news online.
Maybe I am part of a small target group. But, dear newspaper publishers: Please give me a website that
1. pays talented journalists a decent salary to go out and investigate complex stories, actually reveal novel information, and then come back and write lucid, enlightening stories.
2. does not show any ads, thereby making itself independent from corporations for revenue, turning the readers into the sole customers.
3. has a calm, clean layout, accessible from both the desktop and mobile devices, hassle free. Oh, and please actually fill my damn screen with text and images, instead of using 20% of its width to show 50-line articles broken into 5 pages, filling the rest with horrible flash ads.
I am willing to pay, say, 200$ a year for a subscription to this site (I currently pay a similar amount for print subscriptions to a weekly and a monthly paper). It doesn't have to have hourly updates, all I want is something to read for an hour in bed every evening. I don't understand why such a website doesn't exist yet. I know, ads are an important part of traditional publishing, but web publishing is cheaper (printing presses and paper boys are more expensive than servers and bandwidth), and there are great economies of scale: The first publisher to establish a high-quality online news service will be able to attract readers from the entire English-speaking world.
Seriously, I don't get it. Why is everyone still trying to make money with ads?
Maybe I'm part of a very small group in this regard, but I would be very happy to pay for online news that is well researched, provides in-depth, intelligent analysis, and presented through a convenient, ad-free front-end. I currently can not get this online, so I pay for a print subscription.
You say that, but can you point out a single good online news source that provides the journalistic rigour of the likes of the New Yorker or the Economist? I don't think so. If you don't know what I mean, buy an edition of those newspapers at the newsstand and compare it to your favourite online news outlet. Bad journalism has become so commonplace online these days that many people have forgotten what a good newspaper reads like. There is just not enough money in online news to pay for the sort of work required, and the interface in its current form (mobile phones / desktop computers) is not amenable to long stretches of text. Maybe the iPad will change this, but I'm not holding my breadth. I was never worried about music, or the film industry, even in the hayday of Napster. But I am seriously worried that, over time, print will die out, and we will all be left with the current tornado of dumbed-down, superficial, spin-doctored soundbites out of the big news agencies, and that will be a serious loss for democracy.
What they really mean by "fair representation" would be more accurately described as "damn voters won't vote for the people we want them to, so we're screwing with the rules."
Well, it's pretty much the opposite. Cumulative voting is a system for elections involving party lists (such as city councils, in some jurisdictions). The point is that you get to assign your votes to the candidates you actually want to elect, rather than having to vote for a list of candidates that some party drew up for you, while still giving the parties a chance to nominate candidates and suggest to (not force upon) the voter a ranking among them.
This system is commonly used in local elections in Switzerland and Germany. Works well there.
Okay, I'm confused. Whenever privacy is discussed around here, we say "wouldn't it be great if we could retain personal control over our data, and could willingly decide whom to sell our data to?"
So know someone with a great deal of economic leverage is trying to push exactly such a system, and all of slashdot goes "Oh my god, how evil! Quick, everyone give your data away for free, so nobody can monetize them any more, not even yourself!"
Guys, Bill Gates stopped being the most evil man about five years ago. I care much less about the shortcomings of Windows than I care about Google and Facebook knowing more about me than I do myself. At this point, I'd be willing to pay Bill Gates if he offers to secure all my personal data.
This sounds like a job for arithmetics!
Let's say every child calls this service exactly once in their whole life (that's an underestimate, I guess, if the situation is really as bad as this populist makes it sound). So very roughly 1% of the overall population of Australia dials that number once a year. How long does it take to sort out one such call? Either (a) five minutes, if they don't actually do anything about it (like when you call the police to tell them you found a car with a smashed window). In that case, this all makes no sense in the first place. Or (b) they do some sort of magic, like trying to identify the perpetrator, or "send someone over", or whatever. Either way, that'll cost them at the very least five hours, including the paperwork, and their appearance in court.
Policemen work on average (correcting for weekends and holidays) like, 5 hours a day, so one policeman can cover something like a 300 to 500 calls a year.
0.2% of Australians are policemen.. In other words, there are 5 calls per policeman, per year. That's five calls per policeman per year, divided by 500 calls per policeman per year, meaning 1% of Australia's police force will be busy chasing boogiemen, classmates, schoolyard bullies, and neighbourhood mums, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. And in consequence, I will boldly claim that the crime rate will go up by, like, 1%, thanks to less policemen on the beat catching actual criminals. Okay, it doesn't quite work that way, but it's still a better estimate than the shady "1 in 4 children are sexually abused by the internet." from the summary.
Sounds like a great plan. A few more murderers and actual child molesters on the loose are a small price to pay for a cuddly, reassuring dolphin next to every PC.
More importantly, how can you call something extrasensory perception, when it involves the humans perceiving an LED signal, with their visual sense?
This is pretty silly.
On the other hand, in Germany we can say "Fuck" on the radio without it being censored out by the government in order to protect people from feeling sad or uncomfortable. I'm wondering what incredible historic catastrophy must have brought about those oppressive censorhip laws in the States.
Freedom of Expression is guaranteed by the German Constitution. There are Nazi marches in Germany and the corresponding, much larger, counter-marches, just like those KKK marches in the state that you are referring to. Nobody suggested those were forbidden. The only "expression" that is expressively forbidden is denial of the Holocaust, and that law is simply a special, very strict case of legislation against libel.
The German Constitution does not ban National Socialism. It codifies human and civic rights, like those that you mention, and several others (most importantly, the right to dignity). You have clearly never read it, otherwise you wouldn't lecture about it like this.
German law strikes a different balance between Freedom of Expression and the Protection from Intimidation than the Anglo-American system, because of the country's history. Imagine living in what was arguably the world's most industrially advanced, culturally influential, progressive country. Then, one day, the houses of parliament are disbanded by armed paramilitaries. Your intellectual elite is driven into exile or killed. Almost all civic rights are abolished. About eight to ten Million Jews, politicial dissidents, Gays, Roma, mentally ill and others are killed. Finally, your country goes on to unleash the world's deadliest ever war, killing well above 30 Million people in the battlefields. I think you can be forgiven for outlawing the symbols of the movement that caused all this afterward.
Jeez, people, everytime anything related to this law comes up, everyone starts crying censorship. There is one small bloody set of symbols that's forbidden. One stupid verse of a song, and one stupid greeting. That's it! It's not like Germany had a censorship agency. In most of the United States, you can't even take a piss in public! How's that for freedom of expression?
Labs are just one of many reasons why this approach doesn't work. The people who promote this idea of an online University imply that higher education is only about transferring old knowledge from one person (professor) to the other (student). If it were that simple, there wouldn't be much of a need to rank Universities (but professors instead), and nobody would care about a University's history, location and culture.
"Alma mater" is Latin for "nurturing mother". A University is not a web portal. It's a place where personalities are made. The eloquent guy with the strong political opinion you shared a house with in your second year, the brilliant students in the first row that always outsmarted you in class, the cameraderie of the guys on the football field or in your rowing boat, the all-nighters spent over an assignment you absolutely had to hand in by sunrise, all that make up the quality of your University education, just as much as that famous professor in whose lab you wrote your Masters thesis. None of this can be shipped to someone's mother's basement.
Have a look at your average 18 year old when they leave high school, and look at them again a few years later when they return from Uni. You can't send that sort of experience over a broadband connection. Employers know that. After all, they've been to University.
As another poster has pointed out, the planet's surface is already filled with friction-generating objects: Houses, trees, rocks and mountains will always dominate the dissipated energy between air and ground globally, so we don't have to worry about passat winds stopping because of wind farms.
On a more general note though, the interpretation presented here of this calculation strikes me as backwards: What these people are saying is that if we were to cover all the surface area of the planet except for built-up areas and forests (that is, including all arable land, all deserts, all mountain tops), we'd just about manage to fulfill our current energy needs! I don't think that's such good news.
Parent is right indeed. Either wikipedia is wrong, or he never got an Orwell Prize. In either case, having the link in the summary is stupid.
There are many people working on input methods for the disabled. As just one example, Dasher is an information efficient text-entry method that can be controlled by mouse, voice, gaze, two buttons or even a single button. Experienced users regularly type 20+ words per minute, just with their gaze. Try that with an on-screen keyboard.
The same group has just published nomon, a single-button text entry method (and pointing device) for the severely disabled. Did I mention that both programs are open source?
My conjecture is that this was down to Geography: The concept of a "German" nation meant different things at different times, but Central Europe, probably a less loaded term for this area, has been an incredibly competitive environment for the past 3 Millenia. There were literally hundreds of tribes / kingdoms / nations fighting for land, food and power. The winters were cold, so people had time on their hands and a need to invent machines that helped them stay alive. Finally, the area was (and still is) at the heart of international trade between Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Arabia and the far East. There were a lot of goods coming through, lots of ideas, and lots of ways to make a profit. This kept people (comparably) open-minded and (comparably) well off. Both are important factors allowing artists (from Duerer to Beuys), philosophers (Luther, Kant, Nietzsche,...), scientists (Leibniz, Helmholtz, Humboldt, Planck, Einstein,...) and musicians (Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Haydn, ...) to develop their ideas, and giving entrepreneurs (Bosch, Siemens, Krupp, Daimler, Benz, ...) a chance to sell their goods.
But, really, this is not unique to Germany. The rest of Europe produced brilliant minds as well. And they, too, spent a large part of their time killing each other. This, put simply, is the reason why Europe, European ideas and European nations dominated the world for a thousand years, and why they still play a major role in the world: It was a tough, rough place, but with enough structure to allow people to spend their time on more than pure survival. It brought out the best and the worst in the humans who lived there. A hundred years ago, America was just like that. Tough, rough, and full of opportunities. Right now, maybe China, Brazil and India are such places.
Here's a textbook on Data Compression, Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms that's five years old.
It's freely available online, from the author. And here comes the shocking bit: It's fun to read.
Yes.
The inventors are working to increase the percentage of carrot based material
And they better should. This sure sounds like green wash to me.
So the seat, mirrors and steering wheel are partly made from materials that contain chemicals that are derived from carrots. Seriously. Wake me when they can industrially produce carbon-neutral engines, gearboxes, wheels, impact zones and, most of all, catalysers (which currently contain a lot of poisonous and expensive materials).
As long as I can prove my understanding of the knowledge then why should I pay a particular university to vouch for me?
How do prove your understanding? Now, if only there was some sort of system to examine your understanding and award degrees...
Actually, come to that, the ability to store any of several things in a variable is in itself fairly powerful and if used well can *enormously* simplify the code for certain kinds of problems.
Strongly typed languages often contain constructs that allow to emulate this behaviour if absolutely necessary. For example, F# (and thus, I assume, ocaml) allows unions.
type myType = {
| type_A of int
| type_B
| type_C of string
}
They are still strictly typed, just that their type is (A or B or C). That way, you get flexibility when you need it, while retaining the behaviour of a strongly typed language.
And as any decent programmer knows, simpler code is easier to maintain.
Simple doesn't mean unprincipled. I started coding exclusively in F# last summer, and I haven't looked back. On several occasions, I have written several hundred lines of complex scientific code in one go, ending up with a bug-free piece of software right after the first compilation. If you can do this in perl or python, you are a better programmer than me. Plus, the code looks gorgeous, and you can actually read it from top to bottom and understand what's going on.
You are bitter.
I'm a scientist, and I love my job. There's no job in the world that could be more exciting. Yes, you do have to deal with the administrative side. It's not like a corporate job is any different at that.
Every morning I wake up with a question in my head I want to answer by the end of the day. Nobody is allowed to tell me what to do, I do whatever I find interesting. Sometimes (rarely), I even simply decide to stay in bed, and nobody cares! Tell me of another job like that! Also, I love working with my students: I am surrounded by a group of people who are enthusiastic about questions that I am enthralled by myself. What better working environment could you imagine?
Yes, I could earn an order of magnitude more in a corporate environment. Yes, I waste a lot of time on grant applications and administrative rubbish. Who cares? I love this job. It gives me the chance to spend every single day of my live thinking about problems I care about. I find it awesome that society is willing to pay me money for doing so, and I feel privileged that I am allowed to teach hundreds of students every year, about something that I genuinely find important.