Point taken -- I was late to this and made a bad assumption.
Now Coward, why not add something more to the conversation, than "hey, itsadupe"? My view stands, that this dupe is valuable -- while not intentional:)
BG
This is an _intentional_ and valuable dupe
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Hey Coward, CmdrTaco says himself! in his post, that this is an intentional dupe.
Don't pretend it is never worth revisiting a topic of discussion, and don't be too proud of your "Informative" mods. Especially when it's about possibly bringing huge, additional numbers online, it is well worth an occasional, intentional duping.
Post gave us a nice link, from the RSS feed. If you had navigated to that article otherwise though, you would have been asked to log in and/or register.
One part of TFA that made me wince: "'There will naturally be culture clashes if they try to move these cultures together," said Neil Young, the executive in charge of production at Electronic Arts. "There is not a culture of fear in our industry. We are not afraid to fail.' The big media companies - where fear of failure is almost a job requirement -...."
Either fear of failure is not so troublesome for media companies as the article supposes -- for Disney, the media company around which much speculation revolves -- or there are some poor sap Imagineers living in hellish, oft-reinforced fear under their Mouse ears. Disney has had plenty of flops, total flops! They put out an incredible amount of content, much of which goes almost nowhere. I'm not Disney-bashing -- obviously, from this they have had their historic success and let's all share a moment of profound respect for a cultural empire which has defined a mythology much of the world loves.
I just don't look at Disney's output and think "fear of failure." I look at this article, and think "fear of mediocrity leads to overwriting." Entertainment and gaming, not so different methinks.
No one, not me, you, nor ISPs, should legally aid commission of crimes (or any activity causing significant damage to a sufficiently broad number of people).
ISPs already monitor and manage email passing through their systems, if it is the stated policy of all other ISPs except MCI to not host this kind of damaging and in some cases criminal traffic. They would not bother to state this as policy, and they would be on Spamhaus' Scheisse List, if they were not monitoring and managing traffic as you suggest a law should not require them.
Because it is already and effectively the policy of all other American ISPs, and because it does significant harm (US$25 Billion annually says the U.N., of all spam, and Spamhaus details what part of that MCI could be required to prevent), our Congress should pass this simple law to protect Americans -- and to a lesser extent among their responsibilities, to protect the world from harm done by Americans.
If as TFA reads "MCI is the only American, and indeed only Western network, where this spam support activity is 'not against our policy'," then Congress should rule their (in)activity explicitly against the law. Most ISPs already agree as a matter of their own policy. Yes, the spammers will go elsewhere, but the U.S. should first clean our own house. Writing this law (or lines in a law) seems like a no-brainer.
Smathers is only paying "the amount the government estimates AOL spent as a result of the e-mails," which is that $200,000 to $400,000. Is our government unable to represent those who suffered significantly more harm than AOL, the people?
Sufferers may primarily be AOLamers and maybe all of us here will laugh that off to some extent, but consider "The stolen list of 92 million AOL addresses included multiple addresses used by each of AOL's estimated 30 million customers. It is believed to be still circulating among spammers." AOLamers or not, these are our grandparents and grade school teachers; training-wheeled users who if anything, need more protection than we do.
This penalty does them no good, whatsover. TFA makes it clear that a signficant number of them are still getting ruined by the crime, as_we_type. IANAL; can someone add whether "the people" can expect to be served a piece of Smathers?
If this is it, it sure as hell isn't what I'd call "restitution." Anyone want to wager that we also get nothing out of Sean Dunaway, the guy to whom Smathers sold?
You're obviously right first off, that both the BS detectors and the BS are getting better. On the BS getting better: look at phishing, for an obvious example, and maybe at big-time political press conferences for another. Schemes to BS us in all directions are trending hard toward ever more psychological and technological sophistication.
... but again on the flip side, and this is a big but: tools and thereby ability to discern are progressing I think more quickly. Look at blogospheric and even individual bloggers' successes in embarrassing for-profit media conglomerates, or the saturation of Chinese email Inboxes with spam written to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. The Chinese Communist Party didn't have much choice when everyone learned in spam and in SMS what SARS might really be -- they more or less came clean and certainly, only because they had to.
In every day life, it is increasingly difficult to lie. It's harder to get away with breaking laws, period; but even common, white lying is getting complicated. You tell your mom your bus was late and the deli was OUT of milk, sorry mom! -- in fact, she can see your bus was on-time, and she can see the deli has milk in stock. Better, she can corroborate by seeing where the bus is now and how long it took to get there, and she can sit there and order milk from the deli and have it brought to the door. It may seem out of context but it is not, that the high school generation bares all on blogs and thinks much less of the exposure than an older crowd does.
We have been in the "information age" for a while now; thanks to new tools and the insight of enough young people growing up with them, we are entering the "awareness age." Not only will there be ever more information, but also analysis and awareness of its meaning. I observe that BS is already more difficult to pass, and I predict that it will become moreso. What would society be like if no one in it could pass off a lie? In the end, I think your idea that no difference will be made is already too pessimistic -- current trends are complicating BS, and I think will reduce it much more significantly over time. The increasing willingness to tell more and to tell more, more truthfully among the young is another indication that social perspectives on truth and exposure are already shifting to accommodate the future reality.
These U.S. high school students apparently understand more about their world, and perhaps also the real world, than the adults who are surprised at their answers. From our "Patriot Act" to the realities of liability for online "defamation," laws intended and/or agreed to by our federal government make a mockery of the 1st Ammendment's intent (and that of the collective Bill of Rights).
Contrary to TFA which supposes high school students aren't paying attention and high schools are poor educators, maybe high schoolers are excellent students, of reality, that is. The environment in which they live often assumes their guilt, such as unlimited rights of administration to search lockers and personal possessions, and other examples as PrinceAshitaka adds. From that perspective and from their generally lowly social position, high school students are going to be highly suspicious of authority by default. Taking a critical look at the "real world" awaiting them, it is not surprising that high school students would primarily see more of the same that they experience every day.
The difference? In high school, no one BSes you about it -- hey, kid, we can search your locker any time we want to, and you can't do anything about it, including that you need a pass to use the bathroom if you want to go cry about it. In the real world though, the government does bother to BS you about your liberties, which you were promised and maybe you or your ancestors fought for and you certainly paid for, but which you do not truly have.
Right on, PrinceAshitaka. Whether answering the survey with high school itself in mind or even if focusing on the "real world," certainly their context would have influenced their opinions. It's long since time for more of the adults surprised by this to wake up. Perhaps we can take this as a sign that the future, general American populace will have better BS detectors than our current lot.
A leitmotif the article turns on is the potential programmability, more than the volatility, of human memory. They discuss how the older view of our memory as volatile and mysterious has been refined, as we've discovered the mechanisms for transition between short and long term memory. From the physiological to the cellular level, the idea here is a familiar one -- we know more than ever, and we're learning faster than we had before, in this case about memory and about learning.
Most intriguing are the material implications of the article -- they find memories transitioning to long term storage when information is reinforced at specific intervals and with specific techniques. This matches some experimental evidence as referred to, like the familiar ideas of studying or preparing in the same location you will test or perform in -- but, its level of specificity begs for more experimentation and refinement of memory management techniques. Learning and memory across the whole human experience can be biologically maximized if we find just the right process -- read that slippery section in x minute increments and take 10 minute brakes between 3 repetitions. Or maybe, do asdf to remember x words by rote for the next 4 hours, and do;lkj to sufficiently remember x for a month. Without running a cord into your ear, the article is promising for its level of detail in exact ways we might approach finding best practices for our current hardware.
I'm curious generally about how soon articles like this, especially up at the Scientific American level of exposure, translate into experiments at universities (and, self-help books?). I'm tempted to modify my own learning accordingly, n/m waiting.
Too bad the data model of/. is such that I've been modded all the way up as 'Informative', and in all likelihood, on by they went. I see now how I manufactured reconciliation between some information from Hawking's lecture and some previous understanding, nifty enough mechanism on the face of it, but that I had incorrectly explained things.
The limits of certainty are fascinating including of course the energy|time sybmiosis; guess I'd mod myself 'Interesting' but under the circumstances, 'Overrated'. 8-p I still wonder about any allowance for exceeding c with sufficiently certain position. Thanks for setting me straight YMP, Headw1nd, et al.
As I recall from a late 1990s lecture by Hawking, some matter can exceed "the speed of light" and in doing so, escape a black hole. At an event horizon exactly, that border at which matter including light either escapes a black hole or not, the position of particles is known with complete precision. As such, Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle dictates that the speed of the particles cannot be known as precisely. Photons at the event horizon of a black hole are allowed, by a tiny quantity, some Scotty Factor in their speed because their position is certain. In plain words, these are the mathematics of the matter:) Some leptonic matter, in only such a particular position, can be slightly faster than "the speed of light."
As theorized, Hawking's predictions that black holes might leak have, I understand, been observed as radiation from what are as-yet assumed to be black holes. Anyone knowing more than I do about this particular phenomenon is (un?)certainly welcome to add more. The explanation Hawking made was directed at interested and able nonprofessionals; he put forward some mathematics around but not specifically deriving the surprising conclusions. Made sense to me, anyhow. I believe the matter discussed here, blasers measured at.999999... of light's speed, is the fastest measured "directly." But I do not believe this is the fastest known matter, if you allow that "knowing" the speed of the matter Hawking discussed (observed as radiation) was theoretical and later indirectly measured.
'Distributed contributions' are turning many industries on their heads; think of music and more lately the creep into entertainment at large, for example, Napster on.
Science, even space science, has not been exempt from these sweeping changes even as those guarding the capitalistic infrastructure are, frankly, more intelligent and capable than those guarding 'entertainment' have been. It ought not to be that I need pay US$thousands to simply read scientific articles in the Journal of _______. The Internet exists because scientists pushed ahead (in the military's wake) in the name of information sharing. In protecting their overpaid publishers' investors, fat Universities and other players minting on controlled access to knowledge, the scientists have to some extent let us all down.
I'd very well expect more significant contributions from 'amateurs' and including the crowd here, were the general quest for knowledge less constrained by capitalism. We have all the tools at our fingertips, literally, to undo more of the corporatism we can refer to roughly as 'closed source'. It's up to the real players though, the scientists themselves, to do as they have done here. Way to go, ESA. Viva la revolucion.
ahem.
"Seven billion years from now, long after the sun has swollen up and heat-sterilized Earth, conditions may be just right for life on Saturn's largest moon Titan"
-- American Association for the Advancement of Science News Service, 11/18/97
most projects due in 1 or 2 billion years (death of earth, migration of all biological life) are undoubtedly better served by future technologies. still, the value of reaching for the stars, and generally of working on the most difficult problems we can identify, can hardly be overstated. it's still a bit too far out there to load up an ark and solar-sail a human community to.. ?.. but titan isn't terribly far in the scheme of things, and we've known it was _right_here_ for some hundreds of years already.
hilarious and bizarre as it is, and as contamination discussion threads here hint at, we are best served by pursuing these missions with colonists' perspectives.
BG
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken -- I was late to this and made a bad assumption.
Now Coward, why not add something more to the conversation, than "hey, itsadupe"? My view stands, that this dupe is valuable -- while not intentional :)
BG
Hey Coward, CmdrTaco says himself! in his post, that this is an intentional dupe.
Don't pretend it is never worth revisiting a topic of discussion, and don't be too proud of your "Informative" mods. Especially when it's about possibly bringing huge, additional numbers online, it is well worth an occasional, intentional duping.
BG
Advancements like these
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Fundación Tecnohumano
World Transhumanist Association
KurzweilAI.net
www.BetterHumans.com
are what advancements like this foretell.BG
Post gave us a nice link, from the RSS feed. If you had navigated to that article otherwise though, you would have been asked to log in and/or register.
BG
One part of TFA that made me wince: "'There will naturally be culture clashes if they try to move these cultures together," said Neil Young, the executive in charge of production at Electronic Arts. "There is not a culture of fear in our industry. We are not afraid to fail.' The big media companies - where fear of failure is almost a job requirement - ...."
Either fear of failure is not so troublesome for media companies as the article supposes -- for Disney, the media company around which much speculation revolves -- or there are some poor sap Imagineers living in hellish, oft-reinforced fear under their Mouse ears. Disney has had plenty of flops, total flops! They put out an incredible amount of content, much of which goes almost nowhere. I'm not Disney-bashing -- obviously, from this they have had their historic success and let's all share a moment of profound respect for a cultural empire which has defined a mythology much of the world loves.
I just don't look at Disney's output and think "fear of failure." I look at this article, and think "fear of mediocrity leads to overwriting." Entertainment and gaming, not so different methinks.
BG
No one, not me, you, nor ISPs, should legally aid commission of crimes (or any activity causing significant damage to a sufficiently broad number of people).
ISPs already monitor and manage email passing through their systems, if it is the stated policy of all other ISPs except MCI to not host this kind of damaging and in some cases criminal traffic. They would not bother to state this as policy, and they would be on Spamhaus' Scheisse List, if they were not monitoring and managing traffic as you suggest a law should not require them.
Because it is already and effectively the policy of all other American ISPs, and because it does significant harm (US$25 Billion annually says the U.N., of all spam, and Spamhaus details what part of that MCI could be required to prevent), our Congress should pass this simple law to protect Americans -- and to a lesser extent among their responsibilities, to protect the world from harm done by Americans.
BG
If as TFA reads "MCI is the only American, and indeed only Western network, where this spam support activity is 'not against our policy'," then Congress should rule their (in)activity explicitly against the law. Most ISPs already agree as a matter of their own policy. Yes, the spammers will go elsewhere, but the U.S. should first clean our own house. Writing this law (or lines in a law) seems like a no-brainer.
BG
Smathers is only paying "the amount the government estimates AOL spent as a result of the e-mails," which is that $200,000 to $400,000. Is our government unable to represent those who suffered significantly more harm than AOL, the people?
Sufferers may primarily be AOLamers and maybe all of us here will laugh that off to some extent, but consider "The stolen list of 92 million AOL addresses included multiple addresses used by each of AOL's estimated 30 million customers. It is believed to be still circulating among spammers." AOLamers or not, these are our grandparents and grade school teachers; training-wheeled users who if anything, need more protection than we do.
This penalty does them no good, whatsover. TFA makes it clear that a signficant number of them are still getting ruined by the crime, as_we_type. IANAL; can someone add whether "the people" can expect to be served a piece of Smathers?
If this is it, it sure as hell isn't what I'd call "restitution." Anyone want to wager that we also get nothing out of Sean Dunaway, the guy to whom Smathers sold?
BG
N,
You're obviously right first off, that both the BS detectors and the BS are getting better. On the BS getting better: look at phishing, for an obvious example, and maybe at big-time political press conferences for another. Schemes to BS us in all directions are trending hard toward ever more psychological and technological sophistication.
In every day life, it is increasingly difficult to lie. It's harder to get away with breaking laws, period; but even common, white lying is getting complicated. You tell your mom your bus was late and the deli was OUT of milk, sorry mom! -- in fact, she can see your bus was on-time, and she can see the deli has milk in stock. Better, she can corroborate by seeing where the bus is now and how long it took to get there, and she can sit there and order milk from the deli and have it brought to the door. It may seem out of context but it is not, that the high school generation bares all on blogs and thinks much less of the exposure than an older crowd does.
We have been in the "information age" for a while now; thanks to new tools and the insight of enough young people growing up with them, we are entering the "awareness age." Not only will there be ever more information, but also analysis and awareness of its meaning. I observe that BS is already more difficult to pass, and I predict that it will become moreso. What would society be like if no one in it could pass off a lie? In the end, I think your idea that no difference will be made is already too pessimistic -- current trends are complicating BS, and I think will reduce it much more significantly over time. The increasing willingness to tell more and to tell more, more truthfully among the young is another indication that social perspectives on truth and exposure are already shifting to accommodate the future reality.
BG
These U.S. high school students apparently understand more about their world, and perhaps also the real world, than the adults who are surprised at their answers. From our "Patriot Act" to the realities of liability for online "defamation," laws intended and/or agreed to by our federal government make a mockery of the 1st Ammendment's intent (and that of the collective Bill of Rights).
Contrary to TFA which supposes high school students aren't paying attention and high schools are poor educators, maybe high schoolers are excellent students, of reality, that is. The environment in which they live often assumes their guilt, such as unlimited rights of administration to search lockers and personal possessions, and other examples as PrinceAshitaka adds. From that perspective and from their generally lowly social position, high school students are going to be highly suspicious of authority by default. Taking a critical look at the "real world" awaiting them, it is not surprising that high school students would primarily see more of the same that they experience every day.
The difference? In high school, no one BSes you about it -- hey, kid, we can search your locker any time we want to, and you can't do anything about it, including that you need a pass to use the bathroom if you want to go cry about it. In the real world though, the government does bother to BS you about your liberties, which you were promised and maybe you or your ancestors fought for and you certainly paid for, but which you do not truly have.
Right on, PrinceAshitaka. Whether answering the survey with high school itself in mind or even if focusing on the "real world," certainly their context would have influenced their opinions. It's long since time for more of the adults surprised by this to wake up. Perhaps we can take this as a sign that the future, general American populace will have better BS detectors than our current lot.
BG
A leitmotif the article turns on is the potential programmability, more than the volatility, of human memory. They discuss how the older view of our memory as volatile and mysterious has been refined, as we've discovered the mechanisms for transition between short and long term memory. From the physiological to the cellular level, the idea here is a familiar one -- we know more than ever, and we're learning faster than we had before, in this case about memory and about learning.
Most intriguing are the material implications of the article -- they find memories transitioning to long term storage when information is reinforced at specific intervals and with specific techniques. This matches some experimental evidence as referred to, like the familiar ideas of studying or preparing in the same location you will test or perform in -- but, its level of specificity begs for more experimentation and refinement of memory management techniques. Learning and memory across the whole human experience can be biologically maximized if we find just the right process -- read that slippery section in x minute increments and take 10 minute brakes between 3 repetitions. Or maybe, do asdf to remember x words by rote for the next 4 hours, and do ;lkj to sufficiently remember x for a month. Without running a cord into your ear, the article is promising for its level of detail in exact ways we might approach finding best practices for our current hardware.
I'm curious generally about how soon articles like this, especially up at the Scientific American level of exposure, translate into experiments at universities (and, self-help books?). I'm tempted to modify my own learning accordingly, n/m waiting.
BG
Too bad the data model of /. is such that I've been modded all the way up as 'Informative', and in all likelihood, on by they went. I see now how I manufactured reconciliation between some information from Hawking's lecture and some previous understanding, nifty enough mechanism on the face of it, but that I had incorrectly explained things.
The limits of certainty are fascinating including of course the energy|time sybmiosis; guess I'd mod myself 'Interesting' but under the circumstances, 'Overrated'. 8-p I still wonder about any allowance for exceeding c with sufficiently certain position. Thanks for setting me straight YMP, Headw1nd, et al.
BG
As I recall from a late 1990s lecture by Hawking, some matter can exceed "the speed of light" and in doing so, escape a black hole. At an event horizon exactly, that border at which matter including light either escapes a black hole or not, the position of particles is known with complete precision. As such, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle dictates that the speed of the particles cannot be known as precisely. Photons at the event horizon of a black hole are allowed, by a tiny quantity, some Scotty Factor in their speed because their position is certain. In plain words, these are the mathematics of the matter :) Some leptonic matter, in only such a particular position, can be slightly faster than "the speed of light."
As theorized, Hawking's predictions that black holes might leak have, I understand, been observed as radiation from what are as-yet assumed to be black holes. Anyone knowing more than I do about this particular phenomenon is (un?)certainly welcome to add more. The explanation Hawking made was directed at interested and able nonprofessionals; he put forward some mathematics around but not specifically deriving the surprising conclusions. Made sense to me, anyhow. I believe the matter discussed here, blasers measured at .999999... of light's speed, is the fastest measured "directly." But I do not believe this is the fastest known matter, if you allow that "knowing" the speed of the matter Hawking discussed (observed as radiation) was theoretical and later indirectly measured.
BG
'Distributed contributions' are turning many industries on their heads; think of music and more lately the creep into entertainment at large, for example, Napster on.
Science, even space science, has not been exempt from these sweeping changes even as those guarding the capitalistic infrastructure are, frankly, more intelligent and capable than those guarding 'entertainment' have been. It ought not to be that I need pay US$thousands to simply read scientific articles in the Journal of _______. The Internet exists because scientists pushed ahead (in the military's wake) in the name of information sharing. In protecting their overpaid publishers' investors, fat Universities and other players minting on controlled access to knowledge, the scientists have to some extent let us all down.
I'd very well expect more significant contributions from 'amateurs' and including the crowd here, were the general quest for knowledge less constrained by capitalism. We have all the tools at our fingertips, literally, to undo more of the corporatism we can refer to roughly as 'closed source'. It's up to the real players though, the scientists themselves, to do as they have done here. Way to go, ESA. Viva la revolucion.
BG
Cool Hand Luke, Fight Club, and Free Enterprise.
So "Star Wars" isBG
ahem. "Seven billion years from now, long after the sun has swollen up and heat-sterilized Earth, conditions may be just right for life on Saturn's largest moon Titan" -- American Association for the Advancement of Science News Service, 11/18/97 most projects due in 1 or 2 billion years (death of earth, migration of all biological life) are undoubtedly better served by future technologies. still, the value of reaching for the stars, and generally of working on the most difficult problems we can identify, can hardly be overstated. it's still a bit too far out there to load up an ark and solar-sail a human community to .. ? .. but titan isn't terribly far in the scheme of things, and we've known it was _right_here_ for some hundreds of years already.
hilarious and bizarre as it is, and as contamination discussion threads here hint at, we are best served by pursuing these missions with colonists' perspectives.
BG