Yeah, I expect there are a bunch of comments to this effect about the dupe.
What I'm wondering is why these guys call themselves editors. I'm frustrated that ad revenue and subscription fees go to these people who totally disregard all semblance of professionalism. I wish I had a cushy job like that, where I could sit back, press 'Accept' once in a while without even reading the blurb or the front page, and get paid for it.
Just because the file format supports high range doesn't mean the data collectors do. The best radio amplifiers in the world will still produce crap if you use a tinfoil and paperclip antenna.
There was the same talk about buying XBoxes just to "stick it to the man." Everyone who thinks they can hurt a company by vigorously buying their products, even if they were sold at a loss on the razorblade model, is deluding themselves.
First, they will crow that they're selling tons of units, which will look good to their management and drive forward their strategies, whether or not games are being sold at the same rate. Second, the base units just get cheaper to manufacture over their product lifetime, so at some point, you're thinking you are still shafting them while they take profits to the bank. Third, as I've said before, once you're talking about millions of customers, any possible "hurt" done by a few thousand boycotters or complainers is something a megacorporation can simply shrug off and ignore.
Today's AIs are shockingly bad at dealing with human variation and errors. It's still a matter of ignoring everything that doesn't conform to a very limited slice of English that the bot can parse.
When the bot can autonomously and successfully read through paraphrasings, common typos, slang and tangents, we will see a jump in the usefulness of bots as interactive information agents. When the bot has its own distinct brand of natural-seeming paraphrasings, typos, slang and tangents, we see a huge jump in the suspension of disbelief, the lack of which currently separates man from machine. To really blend in, the bot has to try to avoid repeating itself and to actually get annoyed when it feels like it's repeating itself.
I run a simple text-to-speech cronjob on a computer in the living room. It's a glorified clock, reminding us of weekly chores and school schedule items. For every stock bit of information I add to this system, I provide at least five different ways of phrasing it, often more. It has some routines that resist repetition. My young kid loves it almost like it's a member of the family. It's not particularly interactive, but it does know a few voice commands, which is much harder to make flexible but accurate.
If it helps to read everything in order, as in, get to know the characters at the beginning, but that part is not available online, how does the author expect people to get into the comic enough to buy the dead tree edition? Am I expected to read the most recent strips, decide wow it's nice but I don't understand what's going on, but if I plunk down $20 on the old junk I'm sure it will make sense and I will really dig it? This is a part of that "long tail revenue" discussion here: people want to have access to the old obscure bits because that can fuel interest in the rest of the catalogue.
To be more specific, bipartisanship means successful compromise if there are only two parties, but it means a de facto political bloc which stifles all attempts to bring a third party or independent point of view into the debate.
When there are two huge parties and a legislature based around fixed simple-majority mechanics, it doesn't really matter who the third-place folks are, since they'll never be able to amount to much. Other countries work on the idea of 'unity governments' where several different parties have to scrape together to reach the thresholds, and thus (usually) nobody is really in a position to run away with outrageous power for long.
iPod is "the" MP3 player to the masses and the only thing that will convince them otherwise is price.
Yeah, because that really makes the Keds Title Bout(tm) sneakers a household name and is a license to print money, while the Nike Air Jordan(tm) line languishes in obscurity and financial ruin.
If you're interested in these things, you should also compare the featureset (hardware AND programmability) of other Japanese robotics kits. Two come to mind: the Kondo KHR-1 / KHR-2 series, and the Robonova series. There are others, but these two seem to have solid support and continual development. The Robonova has a nice feedback system, allowing you to hand-pose the robot and "snapshot" that pose, and then you string together all the poses into various actions. It's almost like you're programming it via stop-motion modeling.
One area I think that most are weak is that of vision support. I'd like to work with recognizing various symbol targets (even barcodes or stripes) and get specific command feedback. Also, this scale of robot is just now getting familiar with gyro inputs, but it's not like it's suddenly able to walk up inclines and catch itself falling. They seem best able to work in a very simple flat-smooth environment only.
So when will DRM-infected phonographs be released, to thwart all those filthy vinyl-ripping pirate scum? It's darned well impossible to burn a BOOT.INI file on those discs, and the macrovision-style distortion versions just don't seem to sell to anyone who looks sober.
Oh, and where do you get those little three-legged plastic adapters that convert a vinyl single spindle to a vinyl long-play spindle? Talk about your analog hole!
There are two separate issues with Sony batteries currently.
One, early-build Apple MacBook Pro 15" models had a battery issue very much like Toshiba's: the battery could not correctly charge or diagnose an impending shutdown, so the laptop would just shut off instead of properly go to sleep. The groups of batteries affected are being replaced by Apple at no charge if the serial number indicates the right lot numbers.
Two, many Apple PowerBooks (I don't *think* any later MacBook and MacBook Pro models) and Dell laptops have had chemical purity issues that can cause runaway heat reactions and are at risk of fire or explosion. Those are subject to industry recalls and Sony is paying part of the cost of these recall efforts. This appears to be unlike this Toshiba PC issue, and thus, while I agree it's not specific enough, I can see someone justifying language like the line, "Toshiba PCs Not Affected by Sony [Fire Risk] Battery Issue."
I wonder why they didn't go for the obvious coinage-- the fictional Cryptonomicon was supposed to be a collection of crypto wisdom, much as the Necronomicon was supposedly Lovecraft's book of occult and death.
If I have been feeling back pain, I simply shift to sit on the front half of my chair. It forces me to sit more upright and lesss slouchy. It forces me to stop kicking my feet out at random angles and support some of my weight. It forces me to type with better arm positioning.
(I type this while sitting nearly on my back, knees up, with kid in my lap... so take my advice with a grain of salt.)/p)
One, this is a development model. Hardware subject to upgrade when making a "real" unit after the software achieves a basic level of maturity.
Two, you don't need a rad-hardened processor if you can wrap the whole computing unit in a rad-hardened box. Same goes for putting ice cubes in your freezer; if the fridge's materials and power units can withstand a thermal bombardment from the outside, the ice cube inside will remain solid.
I'm not complaining about the other crapola memory "standards" because Sony's not offering them in some lame promotion that offers junk movies and junk games. Sure you can find an adapter for a ton of stuff. Doesn't mean that Sony isn't a choad for trying to spawn one lockin technology after another. I can't remember the last time Sony produced a product that was simple and consumer-oriented instead of proprietary and revenue-oriented.
Wow, cool, I can spend a premium price for a plain old memory device that is not compatible with almost any other computing hardware, has some shovelware* minigames on it, and has a digital key for a digital movie that is ALSO not compatible with any other computing hardware?! SIGN ME UP!!!!11
*shovelware: clipart, minigames implemented in flash or hypercard, font collections, or other stuff you'd find in the $5 bin at CompUSA, the stuff that you'd normally download for free if you could figure out how a modem works
Meanwhile, the Disney and Circuit City folks are trying to figure out how to leverage forward-frame synergies and shift new paradigms into cross-functional matrix adaptive committee clusters so they can provide new proactive technology-centric solutions to use this in a new "pay to see" limited shelflife consumer product.
democracy breaks down at around 1e7
on
The Death of Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've noticed that democratically controlled systems, or the corporate equivalent of "vote with your dollars," breaks down when the population gets between 1e7 and 1e8. Suddenly, the political parties have become somewhat desensitized or even immune to the feedback for their outrageous actions. Corporations can essentially ignore pretty much any sort of public relations fiasco, since a boycott can't possibly raise enough countervotes to seriously impact the bottom line.
Honestly, at this point, if you said that Sam Walton's heirs, the Olsen Twins, and Dick Cheney were found in a secret lovenest in an undisclosed location in Tora Bora, writing a draft of USAPATRIOT ACT III which says that shoplifters were terrorists and should be buried under a hill of depleted uranium razorblades, there would be a five day story on the news and a 1% drop in poll/profit numbers, then it would be off to the next "scandal."
It says the system knows the "dupe" keyword, yet we're still flooded with dupe posts.
Why bother showing inert tags like 'yes' 'no' 'maybe' 'haha'? I presume these are crowding out the list of the top few *meaningful* tags. Sure it's a community idiom but if this feature was out a few years ago, every article would have 'natalie' tags crowding out the really useful ones.
Is there any plan to allow filtering on the community's tags? As in, to let people hide "pigpile" or "duh" articles?
Seems that today, links like "_3_ replies below your threshold" are not actually expanding your threshold, so you're sent to a page which says nothing except "_3_ replies below your threshold" again. This broke very recently.
In February or so, LG Electronics unveiled their 42" LCD part. Apple uses their 20" and 23" units, and I have been waiting for them to present a 42" Cinema. Still waiting...
Just think of all the game players who have now learned what a Ponzi pyramid scheme is, and how it works, thanks to this little exercise. It's the school of hard knocks, well worth the tuition.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I expect there are a bunch of comments to this effect about the dupe.
What I'm wondering is why these guys call themselves editors. I'm frustrated that ad revenue and subscription fees go to these people who totally disregard all semblance of professionalism. I wish I had a cushy job like that, where I could sit back, press 'Accept' once in a while without even reading the blurb or the front page, and get paid for it.
Just because the file format supports high range doesn't mean the data collectors do. The best radio amplifiers in the world will still produce crap if you use a tinfoil and paperclip antenna.
There was the same talk about buying XBoxes just to "stick it to the man." Everyone who thinks they can hurt a company by vigorously buying their products, even if they were sold at a loss on the razorblade model, is deluding themselves.
First, they will crow that they're selling tons of units, which will look good to their management and drive forward their strategies, whether or not games are being sold at the same rate. Second, the base units just get cheaper to manufacture over their product lifetime, so at some point, you're thinking you are still shafting them while they take profits to the bank. Third, as I've said before, once you're talking about millions of customers, any possible "hurt" done by a few thousand boycotters or complainers is something a megacorporation can simply shrug off and ignore.
Today's AIs are shockingly bad at dealing with human variation and errors. It's still a matter of ignoring everything that doesn't conform to a very limited slice of English that the bot can parse.
When the bot can autonomously and successfully read through paraphrasings, common typos, slang and tangents, we will see a jump in the usefulness of bots as interactive information agents. When the bot has its own distinct brand of natural-seeming paraphrasings, typos, slang and tangents, we see a huge jump in the suspension of disbelief, the lack of which currently separates man from machine. To really blend in, the bot has to try to avoid repeating itself and to actually get annoyed when it feels like it's repeating itself.
I run a simple text-to-speech cronjob on a computer in the living room. It's a glorified clock, reminding us of weekly chores and school schedule items. For every stock bit of information I add to this system, I provide at least five different ways of phrasing it, often more. It has some routines that resist repetition. My young kid loves it almost like it's a member of the family. It's not particularly interactive, but it does know a few voice commands, which is much harder to make flexible but accurate.
If it helps to read everything in order, as in, get to know the characters at the beginning, but that part is not available online, how does the author expect people to get into the comic enough to buy the dead tree edition? Am I expected to read the most recent strips, decide wow it's nice but I don't understand what's going on, but if I plunk down $20 on the old junk I'm sure it will make sense and I will really dig it? This is a part of that "long tail revenue" discussion here: people want to have access to the old obscure bits because that can fuel interest in the rest of the catalogue.
To be more specific, bipartisanship means successful compromise if there are only two parties, but it means a de facto political bloc which stifles all attempts to bring a third party or independent point of view into the debate.
When there are two huge parties and a legislature based around fixed simple-majority mechanics, it doesn't really matter who the third-place folks are, since they'll never be able to amount to much. Other countries work on the idea of 'unity governments' where several different parties have to scrape together to reach the thresholds, and thus (usually) nobody is really in a position to run away with outrageous power for long.
If you're interested in these things, you should also compare the featureset (hardware AND programmability) of other Japanese robotics kits. Two come to mind: the Kondo KHR-1 / KHR-2 series, and the Robonova series. There are others, but these two seem to have solid support and continual development. The Robonova has a nice feedback system, allowing you to hand-pose the robot and "snapshot" that pose, and then you string together all the poses into various actions. It's almost like you're programming it via stop-motion modeling.
One area I think that most are weak is that of vision support. I'd like to work with recognizing various symbol targets (even barcodes or stripes) and get specific command feedback. Also, this scale of robot is just now getting familiar with gyro inputs, but it's not like it's suddenly able to walk up inclines and catch itself falling. They seem best able to work in a very simple flat-smooth environment only.
So when will DRM-infected phonographs be released, to thwart all those filthy vinyl-ripping pirate scum? It's darned well impossible to burn a BOOT.INI file on those discs, and the macrovision-style distortion versions just don't seem to sell to anyone who looks sober.
Oh, and where do you get those little three-legged plastic adapters that convert a vinyl single spindle to a vinyl long-play spindle? Talk about your analog hole!
There are two separate issues with Sony batteries currently.
One, early-build Apple MacBook Pro 15" models had a battery issue very much like Toshiba's: the battery could not correctly charge or diagnose an impending shutdown, so the laptop would just shut off instead of properly go to sleep. The groups of batteries affected are being replaced by Apple at no charge if the serial number indicates the right lot numbers.
Two, many Apple PowerBooks (I don't *think* any later MacBook and MacBook Pro models) and Dell laptops have had chemical purity issues that can cause runaway heat reactions and are at risk of fire or explosion. Those are subject to industry recalls and Sony is paying part of the cost of these recall efforts. This appears to be unlike this Toshiba PC issue, and thus, while I agree it's not specific enough, I can see someone justifying language like the line, "Toshiba PCs Not Affected by Sony [Fire Risk] Battery Issue."
I wonder why they didn't go for the obvious coinage-- the fictional Cryptonomicon was supposed to be a collection of crypto wisdom, much as the Necronomicon was supposedly Lovecraft's book of occult and death.
If I have been feeling back pain, I simply shift to sit on the front half of my chair. It forces me to sit more upright and lesss slouchy. It forces me to stop kicking my feet out at random angles and support some of my weight. It forces me to type with better arm positioning.
(I type this while sitting nearly on my back, knees up, with kid in my lap... so take my advice with a grain of salt.)/p)
One, this is a development model. Hardware subject to upgrade when making a "real" unit after the software achieves a basic level of maturity.
Two, you don't need a rad-hardened processor if you can wrap the whole computing unit in a rad-hardened box. Same goes for putting ice cubes in your freezer; if the fridge's materials and power units can withstand a thermal bombardment from the outside, the ice cube inside will remain solid.
The bubble is a useful analogy in certain investment situations. But let's not go pretexting it into conversation inappropriately.
I sure HOPE you meant that little bit of irony.
I'm not complaining about the other crapola memory "standards" because Sony's not offering them in some lame promotion that offers junk movies and junk games. Sure you can find an adapter for a ton of stuff. Doesn't mean that Sony isn't a choad for trying to spawn one lockin technology after another. I can't remember the last time Sony produced a product that was simple and consumer-oriented instead of proprietary and revenue-oriented.
Wow, cool, I can spend a premium price for a plain old memory device that is not compatible with almost any other computing hardware, has some shovelware* minigames on it, and has a digital key for a digital movie that is ALSO not compatible with any other computing hardware?! SIGN ME UP!!!!11
*shovelware: clipart, minigames implemented in flash or hypercard, font collections, or other stuff you'd find in the $5 bin at CompUSA, the stuff that you'd normally download for free if you could figure out how a modem works
It looks like you're trying to record a video for yout^H^H^H^H MSN Funny Videos. Do you want to:
Meanwhile, the Disney and Circuit City folks are trying to figure out how to leverage forward-frame synergies and shift new paradigms into cross-functional matrix adaptive committee clusters so they can provide new proactive technology-centric solutions to use this in a new "pay to see" limited shelflife consumer product.
I've noticed that democratically controlled systems, or the corporate equivalent of "vote with your dollars," breaks down when the population gets between 1e7 and 1e8. Suddenly, the political parties have become somewhat desensitized or even immune to the feedback for their outrageous actions. Corporations can essentially ignore pretty much any sort of public relations fiasco, since a boycott can't possibly raise enough countervotes to seriously impact the bottom line.
Honestly, at this point, if you said that Sam Walton's heirs, the Olsen Twins, and Dick Cheney were found in a secret lovenest in an undisclosed location in Tora Bora, writing a draft of USAPATRIOT ACT III which says that shoplifters were terrorists and should be buried under a hill of depleted uranium razorblades, there would be a five day story on the news and a 1% drop in poll/profit numbers, then it would be off to the next "scandal."
It says the system knows the "dupe" keyword, yet we're still flooded with dupe posts.
Why bother showing inert tags like 'yes' 'no' 'maybe' 'haha'? I presume these are crowding out the list of the top few *meaningful* tags. Sure it's a community idiom but if this feature was out a few years ago, every article would have 'natalie' tags crowding out the really useful ones.
Is there any plan to allow filtering on the community's tags? As in, to let people hide "pigpile" or "duh" articles?
Seems that today, links like "_3_ replies below your threshold" are not actually expanding your threshold, so you're sent to a page which says nothing except "_3_ replies below your threshold" again. This broke very recently.
In February or so, LG Electronics unveiled their 42" LCD part. Apple uses their 20" and 23" units, and I have been waiting for them to present a 42" Cinema. Still waiting...
Just think of all the game players who have now learned what a Ponzi pyramid scheme is, and how it works, thanks to this little exercise. It's the school of hard knocks, well worth the tuition.
Now just point the image fetcher at various captcha-brokered sites, and voila!