there's no need to start dicksizing about the type of databases you manage. no one is claiming that MySQL is the best database management system out there, or that it can handle any kind of application. but for a certain range of applications it's a very capable and well designed database server.
not everyone needs a multi-terabyte database. and the utility of a RDBMS is not defined by database sizes it can handle. MySQL is so popular precisely because most sub-enterprise businesses don't need anything as robust as Oracle. so MySQL is therefore a much more cost-effective solution.
while i agree that this has few practical applications, it's still a pretty novel method of countering mosaic'd text. the author's not going to make any money off of this idea, but you have to give him credit for ingenuity. the most impressive part is that he slapped this together using a single popular off-the-shelf program and a few lines of JavaScript code.
emergence is a central concept of systems theory that seen useful applications in philosophy, biology, physics, mathematics, computer science, and various other fields. it's not a sales pitch for anything, unless you consider concepts such as entropy or evolution as hype or sales pitches.
anyone who's seen a fractal can understand how complex behaviors may emerge from simple rules. i don't see where you getting "handwaving hogwash" from (i'm not sure you understand what handwaving means).
i agree with you, but that raises the question, where do you draw the line between a colony of unicellular organisms and a multicellular organism, or between a society/community/hive of individuals and a true superorganism? for instance, the Portuguese Man o' War is thought of as a jellyfish by most people, but it's scientifically classified as a colony of 4 kinds of highly specialized polyps and medusoids. and no doubt the first multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled colonies in a gradual process without a discrete boundary between between the two.
personally, i don't think humanity could ever be truly considered a superorganism. we demonstrate group behaviors, and human societies can in a way be seen as a social organism. but there is no collective intelligence that supersedes individual intelligence. though certain social web applications that take advantage of the wisdom of crowds do create a system of social interaction that can simulate a very rudimentary collective intelligence, but the extent of this collective intelligence is limited to a small set of fixed behaviors/tasks, such as collective filtering (i.e. digg, del.icio.us, IMDB, etc.).
usually a superoganism demonstrates greater intelligence/behavioral complexity than the individual, and that's simply not true of human-beings. sure, a group of people can accomplish greater things than a single individual (though that's also true of most animals), but you can only increase the group size so much before further increases become counterproductive and actually begin to decrease the efficiency & capabilities of the group.
i have dual citizenship (Taiwan & U.S.) but i don't think i'd enjoy working or living in Taiwan. besides, it doesn't seem to have a growing job market at the moment. Europe and Canada sound appealing though.
the only places in Asia i'd be interested in working at are Japan, because it's such an interesting culture and a technological leader, and South Korea because, well, Korea seems to have a higher proportion of hot girls than any other Asian country. it'd also be nice to have a 100 Gbps internet connection instead of the throttled and unreliable connections we get overcharged for here in the U.S. it's strange that the InfoWorld article doesn't mention either of these technological leaders in their section about Asia.
another great way to target advertising at kids. get 'em young as they say.
it's rather sad that most American school children are more familiar with corporate brands than they are with academic concepts like arithmetic or geography.
advertising is not something we need more of in our society.
ah, i guess i misinterpreted your post. but i disagree with your equivocation of anti-spam legislation with anti-drug legislation. drug use is a victimless crime whereas spamming is not.
though targeting spammers alone probably won't be very effective. we need to pass legislation that targets the companies that contract spammers to advertise their products/services.
you can't get rid of the demand for drugs, but you can get rid of the demand for spammers. if the government started prosecuting business owners who elicit the services of spammers, then they can cut off the cash flow that is funding the spam industry.
there's no logical or ethical reason why safe/responsible drug use should be outlawed, just as there's no reason why reasonable advertising & marketing practices should be outlawed. but that doesn't mean we can't prohibit drunk driving, the sale of alcohol to kids, or advertising through spam/malware.
the only reason the problem is so bad now is because up until very recently the government has refused to do anything about spammers and malware companies. now it's gotten to the point where spam has become a commonplace practice even for well known "legitimate" companies.
these kind of things happen. and considering the size of the company involved (and the volume of product they ship), it's almost guaranteed to happen once in a while.
in this case it might not have been a problem on Cisco's end, unless they press their own CDs. whenever you depend on third parties (i.e. outsourcing manufacturing) you expose yourself to these type of factory screw ups, and no amount of QA will prevent it unless you have complete vertical integration.
all you can do is pick your suppliers carefully and obtain compensation for factory mistakes such as these. and if you're lucky, the screw up won't damage your company's reputation or customer relations.
at my work we've gone through several different printers and CD/DVD manufacturers for this exact reason. we didn't have any mixups this bad, but there have been many sub-standard shipments causing delays.
but by far the worst case was when my boss, against my warnings, decided to pursue DRMed audio CDs. i forget the name of the DRM scheme we went with, but it was a popular DRM technology that many of the majors were using at the time. we ended up getting a flood of complaints from customers who couldn't get their CDs to play on their computer or CD players. it ended up costing the company a ton of money and likely drove away a lot of customers. the stupid thing is, there was no evidence that our music was being pirated, and sales were actually on the rise due to the newly launched online store.
it's mostly a formality for ceremonial purposes. i guess some theists believe that placing your hand on a bible invokes a sacred witness, thus compelling the person to speak the truth.
here's an interesting tidbit from Wikipedia:
As late as 1880, Charles Bradlaugh was denied a seat in parliament since because of his professed atheism he was judged unable to swear the Oath of Allegiance in spite of his proposal to swear the oath as a "matter of form".
the whole thing seems a bit ostentatious and silly to me.
well, it's an assumption that's based on all the currently available evidence, and i don't just mean passive observation. ant researchers have studied ant behavior in detail, and they actually have a pretty good understanding of how ants communicate with each other and how the colony functions.
it's been known for a while now that ants communicate using chemical signals, specifically pheromones. and with a very small set of different pheromones ant colonies are capable of producing all of the complex behavior patterns necessary to function. scientists have also tested this scientific model by using collected pheromones to trigger spontaneous behaviors in the colony. for instance, just by inserting a specific pheromone into the colony entrance at a particular rate, scientists are able to initiate foraging behavior on command.
and i'm not saying that we are superior to ants (ants compose of 15~20% of terrestrial animal biomass), just that the individual ant itself is not very intelligent. the complex intelligence displayed by ants only emerges at the colony level. that's why they're rightly called superorganisms. and there may in fact be alien superorganisms out there that have far superior intelligence to our own.
the point is, intelligence, as with most complex behaviors, are a form of emergence phenomenon. even human intelligence is simply the result of fairly basic processes. the individual neurons that make up our CNS by themselves cannot demonstrate any kind of intelligence. like an individual ant, all they can really do is propagate electrochemical signals following a limited set of hard coded behaviors. but with billions of them working together you start seeing extremely complex behaviors arise.
if you're implying that drug users are all failures, you're sadly mistaken. even if we incorrectly assume that alcohol isn't a drug because it's legal, there are an endless list of people who are evidence of the contrary:
Steve Jobs (lsd)
Bill Gates (lsd)
The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, Ray Charles, and just about every other well known musician.
Benjamin Franklin (opium, cannabis)
Ken Kesey (lsd)
William S. Burroughs
Philip K. Dick
Paul Erdos (used amphetamines daily)
Hunter S. Thompson
Aldus Huxley
Francis Crick
Andry Warhol
Alex Grey
Marcus Aurelius (opium)
Charles Baudelaire (absinthe)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)
Winston Churchill (nitrous)
Grover Cleveland (cocaine)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (opium)
Samuel Colt (nitrous)
Salvidor Dali
Thomas De Quincey
Charles Dickins (opium)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (opium, cocaine)
Alexandre Dumas
Anthony Eden
Thomas Edison (coca wine)
Sigmund Freud (cocaine)
Allen Ginsberg
Ernest Hemingway
Abbie Hoffman
Albert Hoffman
Thomas Jefferson (grew cannabis)
Stephen King (cocaine)
Alexander Shulgin
Terrence Mckenna
frankly, there are just too many to list here. and statistically speaking, young people who experiment with drugs are generally more healthy socially & emotionally than young people who completely abstain from any kind of drug use. the intoxication instinct exists in most animals, not just human beings. and social/recreational drug use has been a part of our culture and civilization from the very beginning. there's nothing wrong with drinking a beer/glass of wine, or smoking a joint once in a while if you can exercise moderation.
that's why i don't get many people's irrational hostility and condescending attitude towards drug users. if you want to be straight edge, that's your prerogative. but why should it bother you what someone else does in their free time when it doesn't effect you in any way?
you're making groundless assumptions here. complex phenomena can often emerge from fairly simple systems. this can be seen in nature as well as in mathematics and AI. for instance, ant colonies demonstrate very complex group behaviors but each ant is simply following a very small set of hard coded behaviors, and on its own is quite stupid.
your matter of fact attitude can just as easily be applied in reverse by a cybernetic being--it's difficult to believe that a collection of cells has the cognitive capabilities of an advanced AI algorithm running on a supercomputer with complex circuitry and powerful microprocessors.
don't delude yourself. what you experience as "consciousness" is merely the unintended side-effect from the flux of chemical causality occurring in your brain. and all complex organisms are merely cooperative colonies of specialized cells, which by themselves are no more complex in structure, and no more intelligent or self-aware, than primitive unicellular organisms.
AI researchers have an advantage over unguided biological evolution--they don't need to rely on blind trial-and-error, as they are intelligence. we can also analyze existing natural models, such as animal brains, and even human brains. there's no reason why an artificial/digital neural net can't be designed to produce true artificial intelligence. it may not be accomplished in this century, but there's no physical or metaphysical reason why it cannot be done.
perhaps that's simply an issue of convention. i don't see why linguistic papers couldn't be written and published in a similar fashion. is there no way to distill the private e-mail lists and informal conference discussions (transcripts) in a formal academic paper? seems like an open scientific/academic repository would benefit all disciplines, just as mailing lists and conference discussions do.
i'm really happy to hear of Arxiv's success (i only heard about the site a month or two ago). this type of open exchange of knowledge and information has huge advantages & benefits over the traditional scientific journals and other commercial publications.
initiatives as Arxiv, Wikipedia, E2, Google Books Search, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc. constitute a new form of cultural dissemination/interaction that has been made possible by the advent of the internet & world wide web. it's precisely because of such institutions that the internet is such a boon to humanity and will no doubt play a huge role in the cultural evolution of our society.
despite there still being many fundamental socioeconomic inequalities in our society barring the majority of the population from our academic institutions, Arxiv, Wikipedia, and other free online repositories, give those unable to afford high tuition costs & expensive textbooks access to the shared knowledge of our society. as long as you have internet access, you can be self-taught in almost any field of study you want. granted, it's still much preferable to be a university setting and have access to instructors, TAs, and other students studying the same subjects, but the web has empowered many people who simply don't have those privileges.
never in the history of humanity have individuals had such easy & direct access to so much information. it's almost mindblowing to think about how much finger most teenagers have at their fingertips when they sit down in front of a computer with internet access and a web browser installed. but that's all the more reason we need to guard and cherish this invaluable resource. net neutrality is a fundamental pillar to the success of the web as an open & democratic communication medium. and if we want to best take advantage of this huge technological boon, we should not only encourage the development of free information repositories, but also invest in public infrastructure to extend our public communications networks--such as municipal wi-fi and other technologies to make the internet a ubiquitous resource accessible by everyone.
because it's freakin obvious as hell. imagine if every generic UI feature were patented when they first came out:
mouse cursor
desktop/desktop icons
drop-down/pop-up/contex tmenus
scrollbars
control box/buttons (minimize,maximize/restore,close)
command prompt
resizable windows
modal windows
title bars
command buttons
checkboxes/radio buttons
combo lists, drop down lists
input boxes
inline links
tree list/directory tree
save/open file dialog
file extensions
file icons
file associations
status bars
shortcuts/symbolic links
all of those UI features could have been patented in the same way the the dock is being patented. but such patents would not benefit society in any way, just the opposite. imagine if Xerox had panted their GUI research. most of those ideas would have been independently developed & implemented by other developers regardless of whether they were published as a patent. so all such patents do is hinder technological progress by forbidding others from using trivial/obvious ideas.
this isn't like discovering a process to vulcanize rubber or some other innovative and recondite invention. this is a simple general arrangement of pre-existing UI elements. Jobs hasn't contributed anything to the corpus of human knowledge with this patent.
first off, no you don't. secondly, not having $400 to waste is not the same as not having $400.
besides, the amount of money you have to start your business has no correlation to whether or not your business plan is sound. that's a complete non-sequitor.
perhaps you heard of this thing called the "dot com bubble?" plenty of stupid businesses have no problem raising tons of starting capital. and conversely, a lot of successful businesses started with very humble beginnings, particularly companies whose founders were really young when they first went into business.
i agree with you, but Sony isn't much better. the console i own at the moment is a PSP, and i love it to death, but Sony is just as rabidly greedy and anti-consumer as Nintendo.
the PSP has gotten god knows how many firmware updates, and few of them add any value to the system. they were all pretty much put out just to break compatibility with CFW/homebrew. the PSP is such a powerful piece of hardware, yet there's no (official) software to take advantage of it.
for instance, the PSP's built-in media player doesn't support any kind of media browsing capabilities or even have playlist functionality. how can you market the PSP as a media player when it can't even sort tracks by artist or load custom playlists? this is strictly a software problem, and could be easily fixed with a firmware update. but there hasn't been any changes to the PSP's bareboned media player since launch day.
then there was the Skype update that was made for the PSP slim only, screwing over loyal early adopters. luckily some homebrew developers came up with Furikup which works on all PSP models, and is more robust than the official Skype functionality. of course, Sony is still trying to suppress homebrew development at every turn, despite the fact that homebrew actually adds value to the PSP whereas Sony's policies cripple it.
and then there's the PSN and Playstation Store. one of the biggest selling points of the PSP was its ability to play PSX games on the go. of course, you have to re-purchase all of your PSX games from the PSN in order to play them on your PSP. even worse, Sony wanted PSP owners to also pick up a PS3 if they wanted to access this advertised feature. the PSP comes with wi-fi and web browsing capabilities, so why does it need a PS3 to access PSN content? that is not a technical requirement, that is simply corporate policy designed to suck more money from consumers.
now you can access the PSN via a Windows computer running IE, but it's still easier to just run CFW and convert your own PSX games to POPS eboots. of course, Sony's actions have probably driven a lot of PSP owners to just downloading pre-converted PSX games off the internet.
However, Nintendo told Eurogamer this afternoon that DSi is region-locked "because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region".
"Also because we are including parental control functionality for Nintendo DSi and each region has its unique age limit made by different independent bodies."
The good news is that this only applies to software that is compatible exclusively with the DSi, and that existing DS software remains region-free.
that makes no sense at all. region-locking isn't required for providing region-specific online services. even without region locks you can still have different region releases connect to different online servers. and even with region locks you can still import a Japanese DS and use it in the U.S. to connect to Japanese services.
the parental controls argument is also completely nonsense. there's no need to stop adult gamers from playing import titles just so a U.S. parent can control what games their child plays. if they're worried about conflicting rating (censorship) standards they can just add an option in the parental controls which lets parents region-lock that particular machine. what is so hard about that? and if the region-locking only affects DSi-specific games then kids will still be able to play games without parental controls. so what's the point of all this?
this whole DSi thing seems like a really dick move by Nintendo. not only are they confirming that the DS/Lite will be obsolete and unable to play many new releases (just 2 years after the DS Lite was launched), but they're also needlessly restricting consumer freedoms.
i like your work. you have some really good photos on there. and i've bookmarked that C/C++ site; it looks pretty useful.
one thing i forgot to mention was that i used to have this game/program that allowed you to code your own "battle bots" in a variation of ASM, i think, and then allowed you to load a bunch of them into the program and watch them go at it to see who wins. it was pretty fun to mess around with and a good introduction to ASM. the AI system was pretty simple. basically you just program a scanning algorithm (scan radius, speed, movement pattern) and then specify how the bot should maneuver if it does/doesn't detect another bot during a scan. the AI instructions were fairly simplistic, but you'd be surprised at the kind of complex behaviors that can emerge from relatively basic AI. i really wish i could remember the name of the program.
but yea, it would be kinda cool to write something like that in C++ for the Pandora or PSP. then you could code your own bot AIs and then have them compete in battles or tournaments over ad hoc or infrastructure connections.
i think you're confusing probably cause with something else.
you don't just put random incoming e-mails into the spam folder. you try to detect patterns that would indicate that a particular e-mail is spam, then you put the suspected spam message in the spam folder.
likewise, you don't just do search and seizures on random people. you have to find probable cause to warrant impinging on that person's rights and privacy. probable cause isn't a court conviction. it doesn't require a police officer to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person has committed a crime. but it does forbid police officers from encroaching the rights of individuals for no apparent reason.
most people who are searched based on probably cause will likely still be innocent. that is a necessary evil. but just because we live in an imperfect world doesn't mean that we have to intentionally write imperfections into our legal system.
that's more than a lot of small business sites' annual web hosting costs. and a lot of college students who are trying to start up their own online business don't have a lot of money to throw around on stuff like $200/month dedicated hosting or $400/year TSL certs. not everyone has VC funding, and some people just don't have a lot of money to waste when they first start their business.
besides, i don't think it costs Verisign more than $10 (one time fee) to verify a site's credentials. so the $400 price tag is just abusing their monopoly. really, this kind of thing, like domain name registration & TLD assignment, should be handled by a not-for-profit organization.
if the U.S. government cares about security, they should set up free (or reasonably priced) public CA. it would be more useful than the Cyber Command discussed in the other/. story.
that seems to be the whole purpose of the chain of command. aside from eliminating personal accountability, it also suppresses original thought. this gives the officials up top absolute control over the military hierarchy. whatever they want done will be carried out unquestioningly and without hesitation. this sounds like a good idea at first, but it ignores the fact that this kind of blind obedience is, not only be dangerous, but also eliminates the benefits of having human beings in the military rather than simply robots/machines.
this type of management style works fine if you're running certain organizations, such as fast food restaurants or factory assembly lines, but if more complex work is involved, such as software development or medical research, it really hampers the healthy operation of the business/organization.
back in the days when wars were fought by having two opposing armies line up facing each other on the field, taking turns launching volleys of musket fire at one another, the chain of command works quite well--because soldiers were just pieces on a chess board for the commander to move around at will. but once guerrilla tactics were invented such top-down command structures were easily outmaneuvered by bottom-up or laterally organized guerrilla forces.
having a bunch of interchangeable cogs in the military rather than individuals who can think for themselves and adapt to the situation is reflective of a rather outdated way of thinking.
isn't it funny that the cloak-and-dagger-types always think that they're saving the world, but all they're really doing is fighting the cloak-and-dagger-types from other countries (who also share the same messianic complex).
the whole "we need to spy on other countries because they're spying on us" mentality is very similar to the saying, people who steal always assume that everyone else steals. in the end this attitude simply creates a more hostile world, damaging international relations.
the constant arms escalation in the name of "national defense" hasn't made the world any safer. imagine how much we could have achieved if instead of participating in the global arms race, all the various nations had simply gotten together in the spirit of global cooperation to achieve some shared goal--like space exploration, medical research, etc. or even if we'd just spent those resources on things that would improve the quality of living of the average American.
consumerism really has changed our society (for the worse IMO). economics has always been an essential, though not the dominant, component of anthropological studies. when we study the ancient greeks, romans, egyptians, etc. we learn about their culture through art, cultural literature, historic records, etc. and we learn about their lifestyle mostly through artifacts like pottery, statues, wall carvings, etc. but if future anthropologists want to learn about our society, they'll mostly just find advertisements. unless future archaeologists happen to come across the MOCA or Getty, the only culture they're going to find will have been produced by marketing/advertising agencies.
and this isn't just an issue of how we're going to look to future civilizations who are studying us. if most of the "culture" individuals are exposed to are advertisements and marketing campaigns to encourage consumption, then that's surely going to have a detrimental effect on our society. we're living in an age of advertising as culture. even the tv shows or films we watch for entertainment are filled with product placement. there's no longer such a thing as pure culture that wasn't created to manipulate people into buying a product.
the day you actually need to convince people to buy toilet paper (normally an inelastic demand) we'll have much bigger things to worry about than the economy.
well, that probably won't make the system any more secure than simply not having the post-it note in the first place. one false lead isn't going to slow down a determined attacker very much. however, if you plaster your monitor with hundreds of post-it notes... =P
Slashdot Mirror
there's no need to start dicksizing about the type of databases you manage. no one is claiming that MySQL is the best database management system out there, or that it can handle any kind of application. but for a certain range of applications it's a very capable and well designed database server.
not everyone needs a multi-terabyte database. and the utility of a RDBMS is not defined by database sizes it can handle. MySQL is so popular precisely because most sub-enterprise businesses don't need anything as robust as Oracle. so MySQL is therefore a much more cost-effective solution.
while i agree that this has few practical applications, it's still a pretty novel method of countering mosaic'd text. the author's not going to make any money off of this idea, but you have to give him credit for ingenuity. the most impressive part is that he slapped this together using a single popular off-the-shelf program and a few lines of JavaScript code.
emergence is a central concept of systems theory that seen useful applications in philosophy, biology, physics, mathematics, computer science, and various other fields. it's not a sales pitch for anything, unless you consider concepts such as entropy or evolution as hype or sales pitches.
anyone who's seen a fractal can understand how complex behaviors may emerge from simple rules. i don't see where you getting "handwaving hogwash" from (i'm not sure you understand what handwaving means).
i agree with you, but that raises the question, where do you draw the line between a colony of unicellular organisms and a multicellular organism, or between a society/community/hive of individuals and a true superorganism? for instance, the Portuguese Man o' War is thought of as a jellyfish by most people, but it's scientifically classified as a colony of 4 kinds of highly specialized polyps and medusoids. and no doubt the first multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled colonies in a gradual process without a discrete boundary between between the two.
personally, i don't think humanity could ever be truly considered a superorganism. we demonstrate group behaviors, and human societies can in a way be seen as a social organism. but there is no collective intelligence that supersedes individual intelligence. though certain social web applications that take advantage of the wisdom of crowds do create a system of social interaction that can simulate a very rudimentary collective intelligence, but the extent of this collective intelligence is limited to a small set of fixed behaviors/tasks, such as collective filtering (i.e. digg, del.icio.us, IMDB, etc.).
usually a superoganism demonstrates greater intelligence/behavioral complexity than the individual, and that's simply not true of human-beings. sure, a group of people can accomplish greater things than a single individual (though that's also true of most animals), but you can only increase the group size so much before further increases become counterproductive and actually begin to decrease the efficiency & capabilities of the group.
i have dual citizenship (Taiwan & U.S.) but i don't think i'd enjoy working or living in Taiwan. besides, it doesn't seem to have a growing job market at the moment. Europe and Canada sound appealing though.
the only places in Asia i'd be interested in working at are Japan, because it's such an interesting culture and a technological leader, and South Korea because, well, Korea seems to have a higher proportion of hot girls than any other Asian country. it'd also be nice to have a 100 Gbps internet connection instead of the throttled and unreliable connections we get overcharged for here in the U.S. it's strange that the InfoWorld article doesn't mention either of these technological leaders in their section about Asia.
another great way to target advertising at kids. get 'em young as they say.
it's rather sad that most American school children are more familiar with corporate brands than they are with academic concepts like arithmetic or geography.
advertising is not something we need more of in our society.
ah, i guess i misinterpreted your post. but i disagree with your equivocation of anti-spam legislation with anti-drug legislation. drug use is a victimless crime whereas spamming is not.
though targeting spammers alone probably won't be very effective. we need to pass legislation that targets the companies that contract spammers to advertise their products/services.
you can't get rid of the demand for drugs, but you can get rid of the demand for spammers. if the government started prosecuting business owners who elicit the services of spammers, then they can cut off the cash flow that is funding the spam industry.
there's no logical or ethical reason why safe/responsible drug use should be outlawed, just as there's no reason why reasonable advertising & marketing practices should be outlawed. but that doesn't mean we can't prohibit drunk driving, the sale of alcohol to kids, or advertising through spam/malware.
the only reason the problem is so bad now is because up until very recently the government has refused to do anything about spammers and malware companies. now it's gotten to the point where spam has become a commonplace practice even for well known "legitimate" companies.
these kind of things happen. and considering the size of the company involved (and the volume of product they ship), it's almost guaranteed to happen once in a while.
in this case it might not have been a problem on Cisco's end, unless they press their own CDs. whenever you depend on third parties (i.e. outsourcing manufacturing) you expose yourself to these type of factory screw ups, and no amount of QA will prevent it unless you have complete vertical integration.
all you can do is pick your suppliers carefully and obtain compensation for factory mistakes such as these. and if you're lucky, the screw up won't damage your company's reputation or customer relations.
at my work we've gone through several different printers and CD/DVD manufacturers for this exact reason. we didn't have any mixups this bad, but there have been many sub-standard shipments causing delays.
but by far the worst case was when my boss, against my warnings, decided to pursue DRMed audio CDs. i forget the name of the DRM scheme we went with, but it was a popular DRM technology that many of the majors were using at the time. we ended up getting a flood of complaints from customers who couldn't get their CDs to play on their computer or CD players. it ended up costing the company a ton of money and likely drove away a lot of customers. the stupid thing is, there was no evidence that our music was being pirated, and sales were actually on the rise due to the newly launched online store.
it's mostly a formality for ceremonial purposes. i guess some theists believe that placing your hand on a bible invokes a sacred witness, thus compelling the person to speak the truth.
here's an interesting tidbit from Wikipedia:
the whole thing seems a bit ostentatious and silly to me.
well, it's an assumption that's based on all the currently available evidence, and i don't just mean passive observation. ant researchers have studied ant behavior in detail, and they actually have a pretty good understanding of how ants communicate with each other and how the colony functions.
it's been known for a while now that ants communicate using chemical signals, specifically pheromones. and with a very small set of different pheromones ant colonies are capable of producing all of the complex behavior patterns necessary to function. scientists have also tested this scientific model by using collected pheromones to trigger spontaneous behaviors in the colony. for instance, just by inserting a specific pheromone into the colony entrance at a particular rate, scientists are able to initiate foraging behavior on command.
and i'm not saying that we are superior to ants (ants compose of 15~20% of terrestrial animal biomass), just that the individual ant itself is not very intelligent. the complex intelligence displayed by ants only emerges at the colony level. that's why they're rightly called superorganisms. and there may in fact be alien superorganisms out there that have far superior intelligence to our own.
the point is, intelligence, as with most complex behaviors, are a form of emergence phenomenon. even human intelligence is simply the result of fairly basic processes. the individual neurons that make up our CNS by themselves cannot demonstrate any kind of intelligence. like an individual ant, all they can really do is propagate electrochemical signals following a limited set of hard coded behaviors. but with billions of them working together you start seeing extremely complex behaviors arise.
what's a drug warrior?
if you're implying that drug users are all failures, you're sadly mistaken. even if we incorrectly assume that alcohol isn't a drug because it's legal, there are an endless list of people who are evidence of the contrary:
frankly, there are just too many to list here. and statistically speaking, young people who experiment with drugs are generally more healthy socially & emotionally than young people who completely abstain from any kind of drug use. the intoxication instinct exists in most animals, not just human beings. and social/recreational drug use has been a part of our culture and civilization from the very beginning. there's nothing wrong with drinking a beer/glass of wine, or smoking a joint once in a while if you can exercise moderation.
that's why i don't get many people's irrational hostility and condescending attitude towards drug users. if you want to be straight edge, that's your prerogative. but why should it bother you what someone else does in their free time when it doesn't effect you in any way?
you're making groundless assumptions here. complex phenomena can often emerge from fairly simple systems. this can be seen in nature as well as in mathematics and AI. for instance, ant colonies demonstrate very complex group behaviors but each ant is simply following a very small set of hard coded behaviors, and on its own is quite stupid.
your matter of fact attitude can just as easily be applied in reverse by a cybernetic being--it's difficult to believe that a collection of cells has the cognitive capabilities of an advanced AI algorithm running on a supercomputer with complex circuitry and powerful microprocessors.
don't delude yourself. what you experience as "consciousness" is merely the unintended side-effect from the flux of chemical causality occurring in your brain. and all complex organisms are merely cooperative colonies of specialized cells, which by themselves are no more complex in structure, and no more intelligent or self-aware, than primitive unicellular organisms.
AI researchers have an advantage over unguided biological evolution--they don't need to rely on blind trial-and-error, as they are intelligence. we can also analyze existing natural models, such as animal brains, and even human brains. there's no reason why an artificial/digital neural net can't be designed to produce true artificial intelligence. it may not be accomplished in this century, but there's no physical or metaphysical reason why it cannot be done.
perhaps that's simply an issue of convention. i don't see why linguistic papers couldn't be written and published in a similar fashion. is there no way to distill the private e-mail lists and informal conference discussions (transcripts) in a formal academic paper? seems like an open scientific/academic repository would benefit all disciplines, just as mailing lists and conference discussions do.
i'm really happy to hear of Arxiv's success (i only heard about the site a month or two ago). this type of open exchange of knowledge and information has huge advantages & benefits over the traditional scientific journals and other commercial publications.
initiatives as Arxiv, Wikipedia, E2, Google Books Search, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc. constitute a new form of cultural dissemination/interaction that has been made possible by the advent of the internet & world wide web. it's precisely because of such institutions that the internet is such a boon to humanity and will no doubt play a huge role in the cultural evolution of our society.
despite there still being many fundamental socioeconomic inequalities in our society barring the majority of the population from our academic institutions, Arxiv, Wikipedia, and other free online repositories, give those unable to afford high tuition costs & expensive textbooks access to the shared knowledge of our society. as long as you have internet access, you can be self-taught in almost any field of study you want. granted, it's still much preferable to be a university setting and have access to instructors, TAs, and other students studying the same subjects, but the web has empowered many people who simply don't have those privileges.
never in the history of humanity have individuals had such easy & direct access to so much information. it's almost mindblowing to think about how much finger most teenagers have at their fingertips when they sit down in front of a computer with internet access and a web browser installed. but that's all the more reason we need to guard and cherish this invaluable resource. net neutrality is a fundamental pillar to the success of the web as an open & democratic communication medium. and if we want to best take advantage of this huge technological boon, we should not only encourage the development of free information repositories, but also invest in public infrastructure to extend our public communications networks--such as municipal wi-fi and other technologies to make the internet a ubiquitous resource accessible by everyone.
because it's freakin obvious as hell. imagine if every generic UI feature were patented when they first came out:
all of those UI features could have been patented in the same way the the dock is being patented. but such patents would not benefit society in any way, just the opposite. imagine if Xerox had panted their GUI research. most of those ideas would have been independently developed & implemented by other developers regardless of whether they were published as a patent. so all such patents do is hinder technological progress by forbidding others from using trivial/obvious ideas.
this isn't like discovering a process to vulcanize rubber or some other innovative and recondite invention. this is a simple general arrangement of pre-existing UI elements. Jobs hasn't contributed anything to the corpus of human knowledge with this patent.
first off, no you don't. secondly, not having $400 to waste is not the same as not having $400.
besides, the amount of money you have to start your business has no correlation to whether or not your business plan is sound. that's a complete non-sequitor.
perhaps you heard of this thing called the "dot com bubble?" plenty of stupid businesses have no problem raising tons of starting capital. and conversely, a lot of successful businesses started with very humble beginnings, particularly companies whose founders were really young when they first went into business.
i agree with you, but Sony isn't much better. the console i own at the moment is a PSP, and i love it to death, but Sony is just as rabidly greedy and anti-consumer as Nintendo.
the PSP has gotten god knows how many firmware updates, and few of them add any value to the system. they were all pretty much put out just to break compatibility with CFW/homebrew. the PSP is such a powerful piece of hardware, yet there's no (official) software to take advantage of it.
for instance, the PSP's built-in media player doesn't support any kind of media browsing capabilities or even have playlist functionality. how can you market the PSP as a media player when it can't even sort tracks by artist or load custom playlists? this is strictly a software problem, and could be easily fixed with a firmware update. but there hasn't been any changes to the PSP's bareboned media player since launch day.
then there was the Skype update that was made for the PSP slim only, screwing over loyal early adopters. luckily some homebrew developers came up with Furikup which works on all PSP models, and is more robust than the official Skype functionality. of course, Sony is still trying to suppress homebrew development at every turn, despite the fact that homebrew actually adds value to the PSP whereas Sony's policies cripple it.
and then there's the PSN and Playstation Store. one of the biggest selling points of the PSP was its ability to play PSX games on the go. of course, you have to re-purchase all of your PSX games from the PSN in order to play them on your PSP. even worse, Sony wanted PSP owners to also pick up a PS3 if they wanted to access this advertised feature. the PSP comes with wi-fi and web browsing capabilities, so why does it need a PS3 to access PSN content? that is not a technical requirement, that is simply corporate policy designed to suck more money from consumers.
now you can access the PSN via a Windows computer running IE, but it's still easier to just run CFW and convert your own PSX games to POPS eboots. of course, Sony's actions have probably driven a lot of PSP owners to just downloading pre-converted PSX games off the internet.
yea, this is a pretty disappointing announcement.
that makes no sense at all. region-locking isn't required for providing region-specific online services. even without region locks you can still have different region releases connect to different online servers. and even with region locks you can still import a Japanese DS and use it in the U.S. to connect to Japanese services.
the parental controls argument is also completely nonsense. there's no need to stop adult gamers from playing import titles just so a U.S. parent can control what games their child plays. if they're worried about conflicting rating (censorship) standards they can just add an option in the parental controls which lets parents region-lock that particular machine. what is so hard about that? and if the region-locking only affects DSi-specific games then kids will still be able to play games without parental controls. so what's the point of all this?
this whole DSi thing seems like a really dick move by Nintendo. not only are they confirming that the DS/Lite will be obsolete and unable to play many new releases (just 2 years after the DS Lite was launched), but they're also needlessly restricting consumer freedoms.
i like your work. you have some really good photos on there. and i've bookmarked that C/C++ site; it looks pretty useful.
one thing i forgot to mention was that i used to have this game/program that allowed you to code your own "battle bots" in a variation of ASM, i think, and then allowed you to load a bunch of them into the program and watch them go at it to see who wins. it was pretty fun to mess around with and a good introduction to ASM. the AI system was pretty simple. basically you just program a scanning algorithm (scan radius, speed, movement pattern) and then specify how the bot should maneuver if it does/doesn't detect another bot during a scan. the AI instructions were fairly simplistic, but you'd be surprised at the kind of complex behaviors that can emerge from relatively basic AI. i really wish i could remember the name of the program.
but yea, it would be kinda cool to write something like that in C++ for the Pandora or PSP. then you could code your own bot AIs and then have them compete in battles or tournaments over ad hoc or infrastructure connections.
i think you're confusing probably cause with something else.
you don't just put random incoming e-mails into the spam folder. you try to detect patterns that would indicate that a particular e-mail is spam, then you put the suspected spam message in the spam folder.
likewise, you don't just do search and seizures on random people. you have to find probable cause to warrant impinging on that person's rights and privacy. probable cause isn't a court conviction. it doesn't require a police officer to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person has committed a crime. but it does forbid police officers from encroaching the rights of individuals for no apparent reason.
most people who are searched based on probably cause will likely still be innocent. that is a necessary evil. but just because we live in an imperfect world doesn't mean that we have to intentionally write imperfections into our legal system.
that's more than a lot of small business sites' annual web hosting costs. and a lot of college students who are trying to start up their own online business don't have a lot of money to throw around on stuff like $200/month dedicated hosting or $400/year TSL certs. not everyone has VC funding, and some people just don't have a lot of money to waste when they first start their business.
besides, i don't think it costs Verisign more than $10 (one time fee) to verify a site's credentials. so the $400 price tag is just abusing their monopoly. really, this kind of thing, like domain name registration & TLD assignment, should be handled by a not-for-profit organization.
if the U.S. government cares about security, they should set up free (or reasonably priced) public CA. it would be more useful than the Cyber Command discussed in the other /. story.
that seems to be the whole purpose of the chain of command. aside from eliminating personal accountability, it also suppresses original thought. this gives the officials up top absolute control over the military hierarchy. whatever they want done will be carried out unquestioningly and without hesitation. this sounds like a good idea at first, but it ignores the fact that this kind of blind obedience is, not only be dangerous, but also eliminates the benefits of having human beings in the military rather than simply robots/machines.
this type of management style works fine if you're running certain organizations, such as fast food restaurants or factory assembly lines, but if more complex work is involved, such as software development or medical research, it really hampers the healthy operation of the business/organization.
back in the days when wars were fought by having two opposing armies line up facing each other on the field, taking turns launching volleys of musket fire at one another, the chain of command works quite well--because soldiers were just pieces on a chess board for the commander to move around at will. but once guerrilla tactics were invented such top-down command structures were easily outmaneuvered by bottom-up or laterally organized guerrilla forces.
having a bunch of interchangeable cogs in the military rather than individuals who can think for themselves and adapt to the situation is reflective of a rather outdated way of thinking.
isn't it funny that the cloak-and-dagger-types always think that they're saving the world, but all they're really doing is fighting the cloak-and-dagger-types from other countries (who also share the same messianic complex).
the whole "we need to spy on other countries because they're spying on us" mentality is very similar to the saying, people who steal always assume that everyone else steals. in the end this attitude simply creates a more hostile world, damaging international relations.
the constant arms escalation in the name of "national defense" hasn't made the world any safer. imagine how much we could have achieved if instead of participating in the global arms race, all the various nations had simply gotten together in the spirit of global cooperation to achieve some shared goal--like space exploration, medical research, etc. or even if we'd just spent those resources on things that would improve the quality of living of the average American.
consumerism really has changed our society (for the worse IMO). economics has always been an essential, though not the dominant, component of anthropological studies. when we study the ancient greeks, romans, egyptians, etc. we learn about their culture through art, cultural literature, historic records, etc. and we learn about their lifestyle mostly through artifacts like pottery, statues, wall carvings, etc. but if future anthropologists want to learn about our society, they'll mostly just find advertisements. unless future archaeologists happen to come across the MOCA or Getty, the only culture they're going to find will have been produced by marketing/advertising agencies.
and this isn't just an issue of how we're going to look to future civilizations who are studying us. if most of the "culture" individuals are exposed to are advertisements and marketing campaigns to encourage consumption, then that's surely going to have a detrimental effect on our society. we're living in an age of advertising as culture. even the tv shows or films we watch for entertainment are filled with product placement. there's no longer such a thing as pure culture that wasn't created to manipulate people into buying a product.
the day you actually need to convince people to buy toilet paper (normally an inelastic demand) we'll have much bigger things to worry about than the economy.
well, that probably won't make the system any more secure than simply not having the post-it note in the first place. one false lead isn't going to slow down a determined attacker very much. however, if you plaster your monitor with hundreds of post-it notes... =P