You seem to have truncated the full quote for some reason. In full, it's "There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order."
This was the place for the soap box obviously. The last only exists for the same reason the second amendment does. America was founded on the principle that it's justified to take arms en mass (i.e. militia) against an oppressive government, so having an armed populace is to ensure a government fears its people.
Technically, the monitor used to watch the video works by apparent motion as well (i.e. 60 Hz refresh rate). Perhaps the optical illusion of apparent motion doesn't work as well with the second iteration. A good test would be to replicate the illusion with physical objects (not that I RTFA to see if they did this).
There'd be an evolutionary advantage to observing the properties of a moving object, so I'd be surprised if we have a lot of trouble with it. Observing the shockwaves in the fur of a moving animal would allow a pursuing predator or fleeing prey to react more quickly to the animal's changes in movement. Jungle creatures would also be at a pretty big disadvantage if wind blowing the foliage disabled their ability to spot something appearing larger as it approaches...
If you make rights granted by intelligence there are some pretty far reaching implications. For one, many animals are similar in intelligence to various ages of human children. While it would solve the abortion debate, it would also either protect a large number of animals or allow infanticide. There's also the issue of the profoundly retarded or brain damaged.
Should infants and the disabled be protected by virtue of being Homo sapien? Or is it our intelligence that makes us "human"? Personally, I think that's the most logical approach (e.g. I am practically a carnivore, but usually refrain from buying calimari), but recognize that I'm a lot more comfortable with these implications than most would be.
Obviously you could skirt around these issues by saying that Homo sapiens of a certain cell count (somehow excluding tumors) are protected in addition to intelligent animals. The special treatment of our own species is a little difficult to logically justify, especially when "species" is a human concept that nature often makes a mockery of. OTOH, I suppose such questions are best left to those who philosophize away from the armchair.
Touch keyboards perhaps, but who says you need to emulate a physical keyboard? Some of the predictive text entry systems are pretty good (50 wpm on a tiny screen), and with touch screen smart phones only growing in popularity I am sure they'll only get better.
That would only work if each store had exclusive apps. The Google Market should have (essentially) everything in the Amazon store, plus more. There is no selection reason to use Amazon. Convienance might be a reason, but with better search that would disappear.
Stores make it easy to checkout, and the procedure is basically the same. Even so, people fall into routines where they buy from the same merchants out of habit (e.g. where you buy groceries). They'll switch if necessary (selection, emotion, convenience, or price), but without incentive they usually form a routine.
Plus, people understand the physical world better than Android "Markets". They're more likely to learn to use it well, rather than learn just enough to get by.
Stores and websites, sure. But most people are resistant to learning multiple systems on electronic devices. Few people use multiple web browsers, search engines, or word processors. It's human nature to pick a favorite and stick with it.
While I'm sure the average quality of apps will be higher, Amazon is unlikely to allow anything that threatens their sales or breaks US law. The Android Market, OTOH, lacks these restrictions so the best apps should be there. I.e. why use a Blockbuster app that charges for movies when you can use a free app that just torrents everything.
To beat Amazon, all Google has to do is to make finding these apps easy. Perhaps through some kind of improvement to their search engine in the Market. Now, I wonder how difficult it would be for them to find a programmer who can work on search engines...
Joking aside, there's also the fact that people like porn and other materials that Amazon thinks would project their company in a bad light. Only one Market will have such things. Now, what are the chances Average Joe will use two Market apps rather than get into the habit of just using one?
I believe the GP was suggesting that Google optimize their code with newer releases so the hardware requirements remain the same or decrease. Kinda like how Windows 7 runs better on weaker hardware than Vista.
Realistically, most android applications aren't that complex. Compare something like a BeBox to a modern android phone. The phone will be much less responsive despite far superior hardware. Efficiency in code counts for a lot. OTOH, you can compensate by throwing more hardware at the problem. Of course, I am certain that phone makers welcome the increasing system requirements.
I would imagine it's because we want to. We want to because of an evolutionary need to disperse, accentuated by unprecedented population density. Personally, I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars, and would far rather tax dollars be spent putting someone there than most of the stuff the government spends money on. Throw in some long-term technology development, pure science research, and the economics of extraterrestrial resources and you've got a reason that's logical rather than pure desire, not that you really need anything beyond that.
What has always confounded me is how this is fairly unique to semiconductors. A chef doesn't overseason 80% of the steaks he cooks so he can charge more for premium ones. Movie theaters don't charge extra for not paying someone to annoy you in premium screens.
I've never understood the logic of spending money to make your product inferior. It'd be suicide to spend that money and then have your "highend" products cost twice as much but perform about the same as your competition's "standard" model.
I'm not saying that's not the best way to make profit, but it opens a huge vulnerability that a proper competitor would exploit. But maybe I'm being paranoid in thinking that semiconductor (e.g. LCD) manufacturers would collute. (High cost-of-entry industries seem particularly vulnerable to this sort of behavior.)
There's a trend in hunter-gatherer societies that males tend to be the hunters, while females are the gatherers. It turns out, each sex has advantages in these areas. Males tend to be much better at navigating while blindfolded, and females are much better at remembering which objects were in a room. Whether this is an adaptation to or a cause of the hunter-gatherer trend is debated.
Back in college my evolution teacher said he used to try to illustrate these differences during lecture, but his students never showed any difference. For a while this puzzled him until he realized that upper level biology majors are not representative of the population at large. To get to that level of education you generally have to be adept at both skills.
I would postulate that a similar situation is happening in chess. Women may be less aggressive as a whole, but I doubt you can say that specifically about women who excel at chess.
Japan has a much lower sex crime rate than the US. So the point applies even more so. Plus the OP didn't exactly imply that this happened in the US, he just started talking about the trend in US modern media (probably generalizable to the global media), which I expect does influence Japanese media.
So, since I can't recall ever supplying my gender to my phone, how is it determining that? Turning on the camera, hoping there's a hole in my pocket, and assuming that my sex and gender are concordant? Snooping on my location and contacts is one thing, but if I volunteer certain information then I've always assumed the app phoned home with that information. Surely that's common sense...
IMHO he should encrypt it, bundle it into a torrent and release it into the wild. If he's ever placed into custody, scream the password at the crowd. If he mysteriously disappears, let some dead man's switch timer (or a person) start spamming it across the internet. If the fear is that information that really ought to be kept secret is mixed in there (e.g. military positions, equipment specifications, or witness protection lists), then encrypt everything individually. Give the keys to "trustworthy" citizens of the respective countries to review/release if anything should happen to Wikileaks.
IOW, this ensure that the information will be made available regardless of what the future brings. It also places Wikileaks in a better position since there's no single point of failure. Governments will realize that there is absolutely no way to keep this information from being released, so they'll likely cooperate with a piecemeal release pattern to give them time to do damage control.
I've never quite understood why CPU manufacturers intentionally cripple their products. It's not like their industry is completely different economically. Nor is it like cooks go out of their way to make food taste worst if it happens to come out better than expected. They're literally spending money to make their product worse!
As for R&D, that would suggest that people who buy "extreme" versions are subsidizing CPUs that are underpriced for everyone else. I seriously doubt Intel is actually losing money with their most popular processor lines, so I think that's essentially marketing (i.e. creating product differences when none intrinsically exist). "Here, buy this widget for three times the cost, we didn't pound on it with a hammer."
IIRC there was a study a few years back that showed that teens prefered 128 Kbit MP3s over lossless audio formats or vinyl records, while senior citizens preferred the vinyls. I suspect the next generation will prefer lossless, as there's really very little reason to have easily audible compression artifacts nowadays.
Buying a bunch of large cardboard boxes and a roll of duct tape actually isn't a bad idea (IMHO). It's basically like a life-sized Lego set that they can play inside of. Just make sure they have an unused room to set up in and that they're the creative sort.
It's pedantic, but knives are almost always used as tools rather than weapons. As they're used in the farming, processing, and cooking of food I suspect that "X" is about 6 billion. EMTs, ER doctors and surgeons use them as well, if you want a more direct "life saving" use. IOW, a bad example.
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed. The problem was that these were the most difficult exams of them all
In other words, a test that mirrors real world applications? One that tests comprehension rather than rote memorization? IMHO these kind of tests are rare for two reasons. The first is that they're hard to make and almost impossible to grade objectively, as there usually isn't just one "best" way of doing something. The second is because student efforts don't correlate as well with performance, so the student who studies inefficiently or lacks talent cries foul when another does better with far less work.
A. Pay your debts
B. Remove all address information from the exterior of your home and do not reveal your identity to your neighbors
C. Live in the woods
Most people aren't going for absolute privacy. That's a fine goal if you'd like to pursue it, but everyone else needs to balance privacy with other factors.
The free market solution to the handicapped is to euthanize them since the vast majority consume more resources than they generate. The free market also resembles evolution in that it doesn't plan ahead, so public health concerns become a simple race to the bottom. Personally, I love the free market, but I acknowledge that it's not magic. Despite having less sympathy than most, I do prefer a little humanity in economics, and favor exploiting the market rather than being exploited by it.
While I feel we meddle too much with the market already (and wish businesses acted more like businesses rather than entitled children -- see most piracy complainers), I see little fault in this move. Web designers have long neglected the disabled while the internet has quickly become vital to modern life. Many here would welcome eye-candy taking a backseat to usability and accessibility.
Smaller animals also tend to have higher cell division rates, so they still show signs of cancer sooner. A lab mouse that dies of "old age" might be full of tumors at age four, whereas tumors in four year old humans are quite rare. But you are right in that cutting this rabbit's lifespan in half might not be readily apparent at this point.
Also, a.1% increased risk of cancer in the three people who run into this particular rabbit still only has a.3% chance of having any effect at all. Significant, but it's probably cheaper to just treat the cancer if it happens. A lawsuit might be expensive, but as the tobacco companies proved, it's extremely hard to show that any particular person's cancer was caused by the exposure and wasn't just random.
This happens especially often in the software industry, where the ideas are a dime a dozen
With more than six billion people on Earth, I'd suspect there are exceedingly few truly original ideas. Seriously, think of some half baked invention you've been mulling over, and do a patent search. Most of the time someone has already filed one on it, whether explicitly or in a broadly-worded patent that covers anything a lawyer can contrive it to cover.
The problem is that such ideas are rarely being actively developed. So either a) there are unresolved issues that make it impractical (hence unworthy of a patent, IMHO), or b) the patent-holder isn't working on it and nobody else can since it's patented (hence counterproductive to everyone).
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have truncated the full quote for some reason. In full, it's "There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order."
This was the place for the soap box obviously. The last only exists for the same reason the second amendment does. America was founded on the principle that it's justified to take arms en mass (i.e. militia) against an oppressive government, so having an armed populace is to ensure a government fears its people.
Technically, the monitor used to watch the video works by apparent motion as well (i.e. 60 Hz refresh rate). Perhaps the optical illusion of apparent motion doesn't work as well with the second iteration. A good test would be to replicate the illusion with physical objects (not that I RTFA to see if they did this).
There'd be an evolutionary advantage to observing the properties of a moving object, so I'd be surprised if we have a lot of trouble with it. Observing the shockwaves in the fur of a moving animal would allow a pursuing predator or fleeing prey to react more quickly to the animal's changes in movement. Jungle creatures would also be at a pretty big disadvantage if wind blowing the foliage disabled their ability to spot something appearing larger as it approaches...
If you make rights granted by intelligence there are some pretty far reaching implications. For one, many animals are similar in intelligence to various ages of human children. While it would solve the abortion debate, it would also either protect a large number of animals or allow infanticide. There's also the issue of the profoundly retarded or brain damaged.
Should infants and the disabled be protected by virtue of being Homo sapien? Or is it our intelligence that makes us "human"? Personally, I think that's the most logical approach (e.g. I am practically a carnivore, but usually refrain from buying calimari), but recognize that I'm a lot more comfortable with these implications than most would be.
Obviously you could skirt around these issues by saying that Homo sapiens of a certain cell count (somehow excluding tumors) are protected in addition to intelligent animals. The special treatment of our own species is a little difficult to logically justify, especially when "species" is a human concept that nature often makes a mockery of. OTOH, I suppose such questions are best left to those who philosophize away from the armchair.
Touch keyboards perhaps, but who says you need to emulate a physical keyboard? Some of the predictive text entry systems are pretty good (50 wpm on a tiny screen), and with touch screen smart phones only growing in popularity I am sure they'll only get better.
Swyped on my Droid X
That would only work if each store had exclusive apps. The Google Market should have (essentially) everything in the Amazon store, plus more. There is no selection reason to use Amazon. Convienance might be a reason, but with better search that would disappear.
Stores make it easy to checkout, and the procedure is basically the same. Even so, people fall into routines where they buy from the same merchants out of habit (e.g. where you buy groceries). They'll switch if necessary (selection, emotion, convenience, or price), but without incentive they usually form a routine.
Plus, people understand the physical world better than Android "Markets". They're more likely to learn to use it well, rather than learn just enough to get by.
Stores and websites, sure. But most people are resistant to learning multiple systems on electronic devices. Few people use multiple web browsers, search engines, or word processors. It's human nature to pick a favorite and stick with it.
While I'm sure the average quality of apps will be higher, Amazon is unlikely to allow anything that threatens their sales or breaks US law. The Android Market, OTOH, lacks these restrictions so the best apps should be there. I.e. why use a Blockbuster app that charges for movies when you can use a free app that just torrents everything.
To beat Amazon, all Google has to do is to make finding these apps easy. Perhaps through some kind of improvement to their search engine in the Market. Now, I wonder how difficult it would be for them to find a programmer who can work on search engines...
Joking aside, there's also the fact that people like porn and other materials that Amazon thinks would project their company in a bad light. Only one Market will have such things. Now, what are the chances Average Joe will use two Market apps rather than get into the habit of just using one?
I believe the GP was suggesting that Google optimize their code with newer releases so the hardware requirements remain the same or decrease. Kinda like how Windows 7 runs better on weaker hardware than Vista.
Realistically, most android applications aren't that complex. Compare something like a BeBox to a modern android phone. The phone will be much less responsive despite far superior hardware. Efficiency in code counts for a lot. OTOH, you can compensate by throwing more hardware at the problem. Of course, I am certain that phone makers welcome the increasing system requirements.
I would imagine it's because we want to. We want to because of an evolutionary need to disperse, accentuated by unprecedented population density. Personally, I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars, and would far rather tax dollars be spent putting someone there than most of the stuff the government spends money on. Throw in some long-term technology development, pure science research, and the economics of extraterrestrial resources and you've got a reason that's logical rather than pure desire, not that you really need anything beyond that.
What has always confounded me is how this is fairly unique to semiconductors. A chef doesn't overseason 80% of the steaks he cooks so he can charge more for premium ones. Movie theaters don't charge extra for not paying someone to annoy you in premium screens.
I've never understood the logic of spending money to make your product inferior. It'd be suicide to spend that money and then have your "highend" products cost twice as much but perform about the same as your competition's "standard" model.
I'm not saying that's not the best way to make profit, but it opens a huge vulnerability that a proper competitor would exploit. But maybe I'm being paranoid in thinking that semiconductor (e.g. LCD) manufacturers would collute. (High cost-of-entry industries seem particularly vulnerable to this sort of behavior.)
There's a trend in hunter-gatherer societies that males tend to be the hunters, while females are the gatherers. It turns out, each sex has advantages in these areas. Males tend to be much better at navigating while blindfolded, and females are much better at remembering which objects were in a room. Whether this is an adaptation to or a cause of the hunter-gatherer trend is debated.
Back in college my evolution teacher said he used to try to illustrate these differences during lecture, but his students never showed any difference. For a while this puzzled him until he realized that upper level biology majors are not representative of the population at large. To get to that level of education you generally have to be adept at both skills.
I would postulate that a similar situation is happening in chess. Women may be less aggressive as a whole, but I doubt you can say that specifically about women who excel at chess.
Japan has a much lower sex crime rate than the US. So the point applies even more so. Plus the OP didn't exactly imply that this happened in the US, he just started talking about the trend in US modern media (probably generalizable to the global media), which I expect does influence Japanese media.
So, since I can't recall ever supplying my gender to my phone, how is it determining that? Turning on the camera, hoping there's a hole in my pocket, and assuming that my sex and gender are concordant? Snooping on my location and contacts is one thing, but if I volunteer certain information then I've always assumed the app phoned home with that information. Surely that's common sense...
IMHO he should encrypt it, bundle it into a torrent and release it into the wild. If he's ever placed into custody, scream the password at the crowd. If he mysteriously disappears, let some dead man's switch timer (or a person) start spamming it across the internet. If the fear is that information that really ought to be kept secret is mixed in there (e.g. military positions, equipment specifications, or witness protection lists), then encrypt everything individually. Give the keys to "trustworthy" citizens of the respective countries to review/release if anything should happen to Wikileaks.
IOW, this ensure that the information will be made available regardless of what the future brings. It also places Wikileaks in a better position since there's no single point of failure. Governments will realize that there is absolutely no way to keep this information from being released, so they'll likely cooperate with a piecemeal release pattern to give them time to do damage control.
So his DNA is a state secret and he violated the law by leaking it?
I've never quite understood why CPU manufacturers intentionally cripple their products. It's not like their industry is completely different economically. Nor is it like cooks go out of their way to make food taste worst if it happens to come out better than expected. They're literally spending money to make their product worse!
As for R&D, that would suggest that people who buy "extreme" versions are subsidizing CPUs that are underpriced for everyone else. I seriously doubt Intel is actually losing money with their most popular processor lines, so I think that's essentially marketing (i.e. creating product differences when none intrinsically exist). "Here, buy this widget for three times the cost, we didn't pound on it with a hammer."
IIRC there was a study a few years back that showed that teens prefered 128 Kbit MP3s over lossless audio formats or vinyl records, while senior citizens preferred the vinyls. I suspect the next generation will prefer lossless, as there's really very little reason to have easily audible compression artifacts nowadays.
Buying a bunch of large cardboard boxes and a roll of duct tape actually isn't a bad idea (IMHO). It's basically like a life-sized Lego set that they can play inside of. Just make sure they have an unused room to set up in and that they're the creative sort.
It's pedantic, but knives are almost always used as tools rather than weapons. As they're used in the farming, processing, and cooking of food I suspect that "X" is about 6 billion. EMTs, ER doctors and surgeons use them as well, if you want a more direct "life saving" use. IOW, a bad example.
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed. The problem was that these were the most difficult exams of them all
In other words, a test that mirrors real world applications? One that tests comprehension rather than rote memorization? IMHO these kind of tests are rare for two reasons. The first is that they're hard to make and almost impossible to grade objectively, as there usually isn't just one "best" way of doing something. The second is because student efforts don't correlate as well with performance, so the student who studies inefficiently or lacks talent cries foul when another does better with far less work.
Or, for a physical world equivalent...
A. Pay your debts
B. Remove all address information from the exterior of your home and do not reveal your identity to your neighbors
C. Live in the woods
Most people aren't going for absolute privacy. That's a fine goal if you'd like to pursue it, but everyone else needs to balance privacy with other factors.
The free market solution to the handicapped is to euthanize them since the vast majority consume more resources than they generate. The free market also resembles evolution in that it doesn't plan ahead, so public health concerns become a simple race to the bottom. Personally, I love the free market, but I acknowledge that it's not magic. Despite having less sympathy than most, I do prefer a little humanity in economics, and favor exploiting the market rather than being exploited by it.
While I feel we meddle too much with the market already (and wish businesses acted more like businesses rather than entitled children -- see most piracy complainers), I see little fault in this move. Web designers have long neglected the disabled while the internet has quickly become vital to modern life. Many here would welcome eye-candy taking a backseat to usability and accessibility.
Smaller animals also tend to have higher cell division rates, so they still show signs of cancer sooner. A lab mouse that dies of "old age" might be full of tumors at age four, whereas tumors in four year old humans are quite rare. But you are right in that cutting this rabbit's lifespan in half might not be readily apparent at this point.
.1% increased risk of cancer in the three people who run into this particular rabbit still only has a .3% chance of having any effect at all. Significant, but it's probably cheaper to just treat the cancer if it happens. A lawsuit might be expensive, but as the tobacco companies proved, it's extremely hard to show that any particular person's cancer was caused by the exposure and wasn't just random.
Also, a
This happens especially often in the software industry, where the ideas are a dime a dozen
With more than six billion people on Earth, I'd suspect there are exceedingly few truly original ideas. Seriously, think of some half baked invention you've been mulling over, and do a patent search. Most of the time someone has already filed one on it, whether explicitly or in a broadly-worded patent that covers anything a lawyer can contrive it to cover.
The problem is that such ideas are rarely being actively developed. So either a) there are unresolved issues that make it impractical (hence unworthy of a patent, IMHO), or b) the patent-holder isn't working on it and nobody else can since it's patented (hence counterproductive to everyone).