Numbers pulled from my butt, but this is my thinking. Barter system scales to about 1*10^3 maximum, though neighboring villages can also work out occasional barter commerce. Communism scales to about 1*10^4 maximum, as you stop caring about people you never see, and despotism can be carried out from protected compounds within the society. Pure democracy maybe reaches 1*10^5, but as apathy encroaches on the electorate, you need a representative democracy. I mention apathy: this is essentially the people who tune out because of actual incapability, lack of interest in anything, or have some other serious goals driving them. That still breaks down at 1*10^7 or so, as individual corporations begin to outweigh the power of the state. You see a company become immune to boycotts as the user-base swells past this number as well.
If users have the hardware (Xoom, et al), they're using the software; if the software is GPL'd, the users have the right to the source code. Whether it's Google or Motorola, the case is the same: they're in violation of the license if they haven't made source available for GPL'd software that users are using.
I'd like to see better integration with Tor and Chrome's Incognito Mode. Normal plain-jane internet route for all my apps, but route all incognito traffic through Tor. Otherwise, I find it a pain in the rear (not to mention more error prone) to keep toggling OSX between "performance mode" and "tinfoil hat mode." Doesn't really matter what I'm viewing in tinfoil hat mode, I just would rather have the same kind of barriers on my local cookie/history storage as I have out in the world.
I'm more interested in seeing what Thunderbolt does - it sounds like it's faster, but it all depends on what the device manufacturers settle on implementing.
Wouldn't that make a zero-friction liquid, superfluous?
Don't mean to rayn on your parade, but I didn't know if you intended that as a physics pun or not. "Fluous" sounds like "fluidity," the reciprocal of viscosity; super-fluidity is sub-viscosity. While it means something else in this case, "fluous" does come from the French fluere, to flow. So, was it on pour poise?
Er, that is fairly well removed from the concept of science. Science is about, you know, the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, experiment, refine, repeat. The closest I can see this coming is material science, like finding the optimal wall thickness for a given force, but I'd say that's closer to applied engineering.
Every time I read a universal biometric plan, I think of the old sci-fi book, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. It was written in that timeless-far-future style that Asimov or Clarke would write, and it describes a day when all people had a nameber (a name/number combined) like "Bob RM04TG5002," all but a few old-timers were genetically indistinguishable by sight, and all governance was centralized into an all-knowing UniComp. Everyone had to ask UniComp for everything by touching their permanent bracelet to a scanner at every opportunity. Of course the main character was quirky and rebelled.
As a kid reading it, it really taught me the concept of willful non-conformism and individuality. Other stories like Caves of Steel touched on parts of it, but this was the central idea here. Worth a quick read if you want to grab it. Don't thank me, thank Uni.
Actually, I've always been weak at calculus, and felt like neural nets were poorly explained in most literature. I feel I'm pretty good with geometry, though, including the usual 3D transforms and quaternions. An associate demonstrated the way neural networks work in terms of n-space geometry, and a lightbulb popped into my head immediately. The weights and biases of every inner node of a neural net describe a hyperplane, and the outputs are just a weighted sum of influences according to the input point's distance relative to each hyperplane.
Now I can see why you might think "so what," but for those of us who contributed only to have someone cash in on out hard work leaves a bad taste in our mouths. We thought we were making the world a better place, but really we were building someone elses' empire
I agree with your sentiment entirely, and I am a fan/collaborator of Open Source software. But in this case it does remind me of the phrase, "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold."
I think this is about the apps, but what about the platform? Honeycomb devices are out there in the wild, thanks to retail sales of Motorola Xoom. But is the source code for the released Honeycomb available yet? Rumors of "exclusivity agreements" floating around? Come on, Google, play it straight.
Thank goodness Yahoo Serious wasn't involved. "Young Einstein" was bad enough for the image of Australian beer culture, an aftertaste that lasts a lifetime.
I didn't care about them playing violent games because I sat down and educated them by showing how what they saw was created on screen**, how scripting created the illusion of AI, how DOOM wads (dating myself here) could be edited to stick pictures of them in the game.... This had a funny and unintended "side effect" whereas my boys have a unique method of "cursing" at a game, such as "Who made this thing? And what idiot wrote the AI routines for this thing?
My daughter has seen me edit photos since forever. With the GIMP open, I often remove things, improve things, duplicate things, or just make things plain improbable. When we started letting her watch movies with any violent effects, we would also pause or later discuss the storytelling side of it, and demonstrate how scenes can be shot out of sequence to lead the viewer to believe bad things happened. Now she regularly asks me how they did certain things, and I try to find "the making of" footage that illustrates it. Beheadings in The Last Samurai. Motion capture in Avatar. Forced perspective in Lord of the Rings.
Learning about special effects is a great way of learning not to trust what you see... and incidentally, to become a critical thinker when it comes to the media shown by news organizations and corporations and even her school, as well.
When I heard of Designing by Contract, I recalled a similar public speaking maxim. The maxim goes, "Tell them what youâ(TM)re going to say. Say it. Then tell them what you said." The idea is that reinforcing and rephrasing things will get your point across more clearly to the audience.
Designing by contract is something seen in the Eiffel language. I haven't looked at it in years, but it seems to follow this maxim religiously. Every function or method had three sections: tell the compiler what you are going to do, do it, then tell the testing apparatus what you did. The grammar was different in each section.
While I can give high marks for the idea, it really struck me as a huge expense of time and initiative to paraphrase every bit of code into three variations of the same thing. You write functions/methods/modules expressly to avoid code duplication, but apparently they think this kind of code duplication is different somehow. Cumbersome. Cumbersome is the word that comes to mind when I think of designing by contract.
I thought the First Amendment to the Constitution prevented the government from limiting speech in any way, shape or form. I guess not.
No, it says Congress shall pass no law that limits it. It doesn't say that Congress shall not abdicate all authority to the Executive, so that the Executive can do all manner of odious things to us. At least, that's the strained crap rationalization that passes for thinking in our Congress these days.
A Canadian Federal Court ruling has rejected the Tory Cabinet's decision to overturn a CRTC mandate not allowing Globalive (which is more commonly known in Canada as the mobile carrier Wind) to operate in Canada.
Can we please unscramble this? I lost count of the negatives. Can Globalive operate in Canada, or not?
I generally plant my mouse cursor in a chunk of whitespace so that it's out of the way while I'm reading. When I find something to click on, I go straight to that link and click. If there's multiple things I want to click on I'll generally hit them with the middle button to open multiple tabs. I don't generally pause my cursor over anything in particular.
This is pretty much the way I browse too. However, on some sites it gets tough to find a suitable blank area that doesn't pop up some stupid hovering element or tool-tip. And on some other sites, it's like a graphic adventure game, where you can't find the invisible links unless you sweep the whole text looking for cursor changes or word coloring to flicker.
Also as more and more people find televisions or touch-screen tablets suffice for their occasional browsing sessions, these guys will have to find some other tracking data. Then again, I imagine that patents are the only reason we might not soon see every tablet device with a tiny Kinect implementation, tracking our noses, fingers and eyeballs directly.
I have no interest in paying separate 3G fees or contracts, and I already have an Android phone. So I thought the NOOKcolor would be a great way of playing some games and reading some free e-books on long airplane flights.
I bought one, and within an hour had it rooted, replaced the sucky built-in "Home" activity with LauncherPro, replaced the sucky built-in soft keyboard with Smart Keyboard Pro, and re-mapped the hardware volume buttons into the missing hardware MENU and BACK buttons. (You can do the last part with a "Soft Keys" service, but I prefer the hardware keys.) It plays Angry Birds and even X Plane 9 Mobile very well. The orientation sensor seems to be a bit weaker, tipping acts more like a 20-sided die vs a sphere.
In fact, since I have very little interest in paying the same price for electronic books that cannot be copied, shared, or transferred like real books, I have been returning to the classics - authors that have enriched the public domain after their years of exclusivity. I find the free FBReader to have a better interface than the built-in Barnes and Noble book reading interface.
Many other games have not yet fixed their assumptions about maximum screen pixel dimensions, so they have hit-testing or background art scaling problems. Those will get fixed over time. Some apps or games like Alchemy Classic work better with more real estate, and some apps or games like my own Qwiz - Hiragana make use of the bigger screen with larger print or graphic elements.
The shooter wasn't Tuscan ([tuss-can] from Tuscany, Italy). The shooter was from Tucson ([too-sahn] the second largest city in Arizona, USA). C before S. He is a Tucsonan (some people guess Tucsonian).
I want an OTA update for my Samsung Vibrant. It's a Galaxy S on 2.1 Android, and it's a nice bit of hardware. I don't really need the upgrade but I do wonder why they're not putting anything out OTA. They are dragging their heels on the Kies update. Well, even if it were on Kies, I wouldn't use that piece of junk. Oh, wait, they don't make it for the Mac. It's silly to have such an advanced phone, which can't update itself over the air like pretty much every other smartphone in the past few years can do.
If you read even a small amount of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," another Mark Twain classic, you will see that the author had an uncanny and immense sense of the turn of phrase, of subtle implication, of purposeful choice of words from a massive vocabulary. It's not his best work, in my opinion, but it's obvious he plays with the slang and vernacular of 1910 as easily as the vernacular of the late 1400s. He blends in a few paragraphs (admitting a direct and literal "sampling") from Le Morte d'Arthur, the seminal Arthur legends of that period. Otherwise, you can't tell what text is Twain, and what text is ancient Malory's. And separately, the story is such a satire against the ridiculous nature of caste society and organized religion... so it's not like he accidentally was stepping on those toes when he chose the word 'nigger' in Huckleberry Finn. He wrote it because it *did* shock and offend some audiences, making his point ever more forcefully that the caste system was alive in America, and America was the worse for it.
If we just describe Apollo 11 as "sent Neil Armstrong to the moon for an afternoon giggle," that would of course sound like a waste of all of those resources. Instead, America collectively spent those resources by choice.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
If a bunch of geeks want to pony up $100 to "put a monolith on the moon," sure, you can also look at that as a waste, but as an opportunity to maintain that trajectory of wonder, of daring, and of progress. Or we can sit back and watch the dreamers in other countries do the same... with possibly far less noble and gregarious intentions. A hundred bucks of discretionary spending for those who dare to dream doesn't seem out of line for me. I've got plenty of other geek toys and half-done projects around the house that cost me more than that.
We (and I mean America and mankind as a whole) earned a lot of new technologies and had a lot of new dreams due to those efforts of the 60s and 70s, and the fields of science and engineering were forever advanced by the project. We reap them now, and we now stand on the shoulders of giants, choosing new challenges that will continue to propel mankind figuratively, if not literally.
I've been getting a lot of MAILER DAEMON "rejection" notices... either I'm actually being joe-jobbed, or they're just sending messages to get past my current set of filters.
Slashdot Mirror
Numbers pulled from my butt, but this is my thinking. Barter system scales to about 1*10^3 maximum, though neighboring villages can also work out occasional barter commerce. Communism scales to about 1*10^4 maximum, as you stop caring about people you never see, and despotism can be carried out from protected compounds within the society. Pure democracy maybe reaches 1*10^5, but as apathy encroaches on the electorate, you need a representative democracy. I mention apathy: this is essentially the people who tune out because of actual incapability, lack of interest in anything, or have some other serious goals driving them. That still breaks down at 1*10^7 or so, as individual corporations begin to outweigh the power of the state. You see a company become immune to boycotts as the user-base swells past this number as well.
If users have the hardware (Xoom, et al), they're using the software; if the software is GPL'd, the users have the right to the source code. Whether it's Google or Motorola, the case is the same: they're in violation of the license if they haven't made source available for GPL'd software that users are using.
I'd like to see better integration with Tor and Chrome's Incognito Mode. Normal plain-jane internet route for all my apps, but route all incognito traffic through Tor. Otherwise, I find it a pain in the rear (not to mention more error prone) to keep toggling OSX between "performance mode" and "tinfoil hat mode." Doesn't really matter what I'm viewing in tinfoil hat mode, I just would rather have the same kind of barriers on my local cookie/history storage as I have out in the world.
I'm more interested in seeing what Thunderbolt does - it sounds like it's faster, but it all depends on what the device manufacturers settle on implementing.
Don't mean to rayn on your parade, but I didn't know if you intended that as a physics pun or not. "Fluous" sounds like "fluidity," the reciprocal of viscosity; super-fluidity is sub-viscosity. While it means something else in this case, "fluous" does come from the French fluere, to flow. So, was it on pour poise?
"It was pity that stayed his hand," Goodgulf said. "Yeah, pity I ran out of bullets!" Dildo added.
-- Bored of the Rings (from memory, pardon if it's not accurate)
Er, that is fairly well removed from the concept of science. Science is about, you know, the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, experiment, refine, repeat. The closest I can see this coming is material science, like finding the optimal wall thickness for a given force, but I'd say that's closer to applied engineering.
It wioll haven be appearing again tomorrow, since the test performed yesterday is retroactively rescheduled for next week. Consult http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Streetmentioner for more grammar tips.
Every time I read a universal biometric plan, I think of the old sci-fi book, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. It was written in that timeless-far-future style that Asimov or Clarke would write, and it describes a day when all people had a nameber (a name/number combined) like "Bob RM04TG5002," all but a few old-timers were genetically indistinguishable by sight, and all governance was centralized into an all-knowing UniComp. Everyone had to ask UniComp for everything by touching their permanent bracelet to a scanner at every opportunity. Of course the main character was quirky and rebelled.
As a kid reading it, it really taught me the concept of willful non-conformism and individuality. Other stories like Caves of Steel touched on parts of it, but this was the central idea here. Worth a quick read if you want to grab it. Don't thank me, thank Uni.
Actually, I've always been weak at calculus, and felt like neural nets were poorly explained in most literature. I feel I'm pretty good with geometry, though, including the usual 3D transforms and quaternions. An associate demonstrated the way neural networks work in terms of n-space geometry, and a lightbulb popped into my head immediately. The weights and biases of every inner node of a neural net describe a hyperplane, and the outputs are just a weighted sum of influences according to the input point's distance relative to each hyperplane.
I agree with your sentiment entirely, and I am a fan/collaborator of Open Source software. But in this case it does remind me of the phrase, "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold."
I think this is about the apps, but what about the platform? Honeycomb devices are out there in the wild, thanks to retail sales of Motorola Xoom. But is the source code for the released Honeycomb available yet? Rumors of "exclusivity agreements" floating around? Come on, Google, play it straight.
Thank goodness Yahoo Serious wasn't involved. "Young Einstein" was bad enough for the image of Australian beer culture, an aftertaste that lasts a lifetime.
My daughter has seen me edit photos since forever. With the GIMP open, I often remove things, improve things, duplicate things, or just make things plain improbable. When we started letting her watch movies with any violent effects, we would also pause or later discuss the storytelling side of it, and demonstrate how scenes can be shot out of sequence to lead the viewer to believe bad things happened. Now she regularly asks me how they did certain things, and I try to find "the making of" footage that illustrates it. Beheadings in The Last Samurai. Motion capture in Avatar. Forced perspective in Lord of the Rings.
Learning about special effects is a great way of learning not to trust what you see... and incidentally, to become a critical thinker when it comes to the media shown by news organizations and corporations and even her school, as well.
When I heard of Designing by Contract, I recalled a similar public speaking maxim. The maxim goes, "Tell them what youâ(TM)re going to say. Say it. Then tell them what you said." The idea is that reinforcing and rephrasing things will get your point across more clearly to the audience.
Designing by contract is something seen in the Eiffel language. I haven't looked at it in years, but it seems to follow this maxim religiously. Every function or method had three sections: tell the compiler what you are going to do, do it, then tell the testing apparatus what you did. The grammar was different in each section.
While I can give high marks for the idea, it really struck me as a huge expense of time and initiative to paraphrase every bit of code into three variations of the same thing. You write functions/methods/modules expressly to avoid code duplication, but apparently they think this kind of code duplication is different somehow. Cumbersome. Cumbersome is the word that comes to mind when I think of designing by contract.
No, it says Congress shall pass no law that limits it. It doesn't say that Congress shall not abdicate all authority to the Executive, so that the Executive can do all manner of odious things to us. At least, that's the strained crap rationalization that passes for thinking in our Congress these days.
Can we please unscramble this? I lost count of the negatives. Can Globalive operate in Canada, or not?
This is pretty much the way I browse too. However, on some sites it gets tough to find a suitable blank area that doesn't pop up some stupid hovering element or tool-tip. And on some other sites, it's like a graphic adventure game, where you can't find the invisible links unless you sweep the whole text looking for cursor changes or word coloring to flicker.
Also as more and more people find televisions or touch-screen tablets suffice for their occasional browsing sessions, these guys will have to find some other tracking data. Then again, I imagine that patents are the only reason we might not soon see every tablet device with a tiny Kinect implementation, tracking our noses, fingers and eyeballs directly.
I have no interest in paying separate 3G fees or contracts, and I already have an Android phone. So I thought the NOOKcolor would be a great way of playing some games and reading some free e-books on long airplane flights.
I bought one, and within an hour had it rooted, replaced the sucky built-in "Home" activity with LauncherPro, replaced the sucky built-in soft keyboard with Smart Keyboard Pro, and re-mapped the hardware volume buttons into the missing hardware MENU and BACK buttons. (You can do the last part with a "Soft Keys" service, but I prefer the hardware keys.) It plays Angry Birds and even X Plane 9 Mobile very well. The orientation sensor seems to be a bit weaker, tipping acts more like a 20-sided die vs a sphere.
In fact, since I have very little interest in paying the same price for electronic books that cannot be copied, shared, or transferred like real books, I have been returning to the classics - authors that have enriched the public domain after their years of exclusivity. I find the free FBReader to have a better interface than the built-in Barnes and Noble book reading interface.
Many other games have not yet fixed their assumptions about maximum screen pixel dimensions, so they have hit-testing or background art scaling problems. Those will get fixed over time. Some apps or games like Alchemy Classic work better with more real estate, and some apps or games like my own Qwiz - Hiragana make use of the bigger screen with larger print or graphic elements.
Er, because it doesn't perform any milling? It performs deposition - adding of material. Milling is carving away - subtracting the material.
The shooter wasn't Tuscan ([tuss-can] from Tuscany, Italy). The shooter was from Tucson ([too-sahn] the second largest city in Arizona, USA). C before S. He is a Tucsonan (some people guess Tucsonian).
I want an OTA update for my Samsung Vibrant. It's a Galaxy S on 2.1 Android, and it's a nice bit of hardware. I don't really need the upgrade but I do wonder why they're not putting anything out OTA. They are dragging their heels on the Kies update. Well, even if it were on Kies, I wouldn't use that piece of junk. Oh, wait, they don't make it for the Mac. It's silly to have such an advanced phone, which can't update itself over the air like pretty much every other smartphone in the past few years can do.
If you read even a small amount of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," another Mark Twain classic, you will see that the author had an uncanny and immense sense of the turn of phrase, of subtle implication, of purposeful choice of words from a massive vocabulary. It's not his best work, in my opinion, but it's obvious he plays with the slang and vernacular of 1910 as easily as the vernacular of the late 1400s. He blends in a few paragraphs (admitting a direct and literal "sampling") from Le Morte d'Arthur, the seminal Arthur legends of that period. Otherwise, you can't tell what text is Twain, and what text is ancient Malory's. And separately, the story is such a satire against the ridiculous nature of caste society and organized religion... so it's not like he accidentally was stepping on those toes when he chose the word 'nigger' in Huckleberry Finn. He wrote it because it *did* shock and offend some audiences, making his point ever more forcefully that the caste system was alive in America, and America was the worse for it.
If we just describe Apollo 11 as "sent Neil Armstrong to the moon for an afternoon giggle," that would of course sound like a waste of all of those resources. Instead, America collectively spent those resources by choice.
If a bunch of geeks want to pony up $100 to "put a monolith on the moon," sure, you can also look at that as a waste, but as an opportunity to maintain that trajectory of wonder, of daring, and of progress. Or we can sit back and watch the dreamers in other countries do the same... with possibly far less noble and gregarious intentions. A hundred bucks of discretionary spending for those who dare to dream doesn't seem out of line for me. I've got plenty of other geek toys and half-done projects around the house that cost me more than that.
We (and I mean America and mankind as a whole) earned a lot of new technologies and had a lot of new dreams due to those efforts of the 60s and 70s, and the fields of science and engineering were forever advanced by the project. We reap them now, and we now stand on the shoulders of giants, choosing new challenges that will continue to propel mankind figuratively, if not literally.
I've been getting a lot of MAILER DAEMON "rejection" notices... either I'm actually being joe-jobbed, or they're just sending messages to get past my current set of filters.