The US is the worst country in the world for public transport, and I'm including developing countries in that statement.
I can tell you've never been to Britain. The US rail system is faster, cheaper, more reliable and more comfortable than the British rail system, despite covering much larger distances over a much wider range of terrain. Amtrak may not be as fast as the TGV, but at least it doesn't grind (or slide?) to a halt every autumn because of leaves on the line.
Pattern recognition can be done without translating it into something audible. The pattern is there, regardless of the frequency range.
Would you say the same about a histogram or a scatterplot? Visualisation is widely accepted as a way of discovering and demonstrating patterns in data - the patterns are still "there" if you don't visualise the data, but you might never know it. The same applies to sonification; the only difference is that visualisation is universally accepted by the scientific community, whereas sonification is often dismissed with comments like the one you just made.
As scientists, we ought to be familiar with the idea that different representations of the same data can yield different insights. Our brains are not well adapted for dealing with columns of figures. It's therefore surprising and disappointing that so many scientists dismiss sonification out of hand.
There's a difference between decentralising the infrastructure and decentralising the control. Radia Perlman's thesis is a good example: a robust, decentralised routing protocol made possible by a centralised PKI.
I may be wrong on this one, but perhaps Circuit City has purchased a license to the CSS keys
Who says they're doing it digitally? Maybe they've just connected a DVD player to a video capture card. No circumvention, because the DVD player is licensed by the DVD-CCA. No infringement, because format-shifting is protected by fair use. A small loss in quality, but if you're watching it on an iPod will you really notice the difference?
It is important to note that any other form of transfer is necessarily against the will of the owner, and would constitute theft.
That's a circular argument - you can't use your own assertion that theft is wrong to prove that property is right. However, I'm not opposed to property rights and I do understand that the alternative would be worse - I'm just trying to point out that property rights, like every other social norm, are ultimately backed up by the threat of violence. In practice, property rights are socially beneficial (within limits), so we make them into social norms and enforce them with the threat of violence. The same is true of taxation.
By responding to this (or even posting the parent comment) you are necessarily agreeing with this point
Do you write click-through EULAs for a living? I don't agree that my body is my property in the same sense that my possessions are my property - for example, my body responds directly to my will and nobody else's, whereas my possessions respond equally to the will of whoever happens to be holding them. However, I do recognise that the only thing allowing me to stay in sovereign control of my body is a social norm forbidding individual violence - a norm that is backed up, ironically enough, by the threat of collective violence. In that sense my relationship to my body is similar to my relationship to my possessions, though not identical.
It is no less costly to fund defense services through theft (taxation) than it would be to do so voluntarily
It's extremely naive to suppose that a volunteer police force would be anything other than a lynch mob, or that those who funded it would be obliged to behave in the same way as those who did not fund it. Property rights depend on the concept of equality before the law - the question of whether or not you have the right to defend your property does not and must not depend on your identity, or on how much you contributed to the charitable police fund. Otherwise your libertarian utopia will quickly deteriorate into a kleptocracy where the rich get richer by robbing the poor with the tacit support of the police and courts.
No, becuase CEO's and oil companies are not forcing their rules upon us with the power of police and prisons and the military.
Who enforces property rights? Police, prisons and the military.
Libertarians claim to be opposed to coercion. Actually they're just opposed to coercion on behalf of the poor. Coercion on behalf of the rich is fine, it's called 'property rights'.
But the pretty graph clearly shows that some guy called MOHAMMED is the missing link between Religion and Terrorism - without this new technology, homeland security experts might have been kept in the dark about that.
The graph also shows links betwen US_Military and AL_QAEDA, and between ARIEL_SHARON and Mid_East_Conflict. If only they'd had this technology when they were trying to justify the invasion of Iraq.
"Look, Saddam Hussein has links to Al Qaeda! You can see it on the graph!"
"Uh, Mister Vice-President, this graph is based on press conferences in which you repeatedly mentioned Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in the same breath. It may not have any statistical value."
"Shut up and bring me my war britches, dimwit, the computer never lies!"
Both your examples demonstrate sarcasm, not irony. Irony is when the person responsible for the threading engine of a server-side scripting language resigns, and nobody can read his resignation letter because the server is overloaded.
Karl Popper argued against discretionary powers in The Open Society and its Enemies: "The use of discretionary powers is liable to grow quickly, once it has become an accepted method, since adjustments will be necessary, and adjustments to discretionary short-term decisions can hardly be carried out by institutional means. . . . governments live from hand to mouth, and discretionary powers belong to this style of living--quite apart from the fact that rulers are inclined to love these powers for their own sake." This concise description of the problem with New Labour's method of government was written in 1943.
Here's a summary of the major changes since version 0.9:
Boolean property niem.gov/niem/domains/intelligence/isPrisonerOfWar has been replaced by enumeration { YES, NO, DEPENDS }
Likewise for boolean property niem.gov/niem/domains/immigration/isMexican
Namespace niem.gov/niem/domains/emergency-management/ now duplicates large portions of other namespaces - many functions appear to be documented but not implemented
Namespace niem.gov/niem/domains/justice/billOfRights has been deprecated in favor of niem.gov/niem/domains/infrastructureProtection/ thinkOfTheChildren
Osama bin Laden is a millionaire. Carlos the Jackal's father was a lawyer; Mohamed Atta had a degree in architecture. It's convenient to think of all terrorists as desparate, uneducated and poor, but the reality is more complex.
As for your comment about immigrants, America has always been full of immigrants working for meagre wages - that's arguably the secret of its economic success. The increasing prominence of terrorism as a tactic cannot simply be blamed on immigration any more than it can simply be blamed on poverty or ignorance - all of these factors have existed for centuries and if anything have decreased in recent years.
Now, it seems to me that not every kid out there gets a mobile phone. Shouldn't this push average WAY up?
Agreed - on the previous line of the same article it says that one third of children under 10 have mobile phones. It's not impossible for both figures to be correct, but it's unlikely - I suspect that instead of "the average age at which a child gets a mobile phone" they should have said "the average age at which children with mobile phones got their phones". But who cares about facts when we can have news instead?
The most disturbing game I've ever played was one that borrowed a lot of ideas from Lovecraft: the original Alone in the Dark. What made it so frightening to play was not so much the monsters or the sound effects, although both were far ahead of their time - it was the fact that I was playing it on a 25 MHz 386SX. Whenever I got into a serious fight the action would slow down to a crawl; it would take a full second to bring my shotgun to bear on the zombie an arm's length away from me, and another half second to reload after overshooting and firing over its shoulder. None of this was intentional, of course, but it perfectly recreated the slowness and inevitability of a nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you've never been to Britain. The US rail system is faster, cheaper, more reliable and more comfortable than the British rail system, despite covering much larger distances over a much wider range of terrain. Amtrak may not be as fast as the TGV, but at least it doesn't grind (or slide?) to a halt every autumn because of leaves on the line.
"The question is not when he's gonna stop, but who is gonna stop him..."
Would you say the same about a histogram or a scatterplot? Visualisation is widely accepted as a way of discovering and demonstrating patterns in data - the patterns are still "there" if you don't visualise the data, but you might never know it. The same applies to sonification; the only difference is that visualisation is universally accepted by the scientific community, whereas sonification is often dismissed with comments like the one you just made.
I recently went to a very interesting talk given by Florian Dombois, who's using sonification to study earthquakes. By shifting seismogram readings into the audible frequency range, he's discovered patterns in the data that were not previously noticeable.
As scientists, we ought to be familiar with the idea that different representations of the same data can yield different insights. Our brains are not well adapted for dealing with columns of figures. It's therefore surprising and disappointing that so many scientists dismiss sonification out of hand.
There's a difference between decentralising the infrastructure and decentralising the control. Radia Perlman's thesis is a good example: a robust, decentralised routing protocol made possible by a centralised PKI.
Who says they're doing it digitally? Maybe they've just connected a DVD player to a video capture card. No circumvention, because the DVD player is licensed by the DVD-CCA. No infringement, because format-shifting is protected by fair use. A small loss in quality, but if you're watching it on an iPod will you really notice the difference?
Next thing you know they'll be smoking hashtables behind the bike sheds.
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody gets locked up, interrogated and DNA tested, does it make a sound?
With an open source toolchain and four million users, I don't think lack of software is going to be a huge problem.
Being born rich is an achievement? Maybe they should hand out prizes.
That's a circular argument - you can't use your own assertion that theft is wrong to prove that property is right. However, I'm not opposed to property rights and I do understand that the alternative would be worse - I'm just trying to point out that property rights, like every other social norm, are ultimately backed up by the threat of violence. In practice, property rights are socially beneficial (within limits), so we make them into social norms and enforce them with the threat of violence. The same is true of taxation.
Do you write click-through EULAs for a living? I don't agree that my body is my property in the same sense that my possessions are my property - for example, my body responds directly to my will and nobody else's, whereas my possessions respond equally to the will of whoever happens to be holding them. However, I do recognise that the only thing allowing me to stay in sovereign control of my body is a social norm forbidding individual violence - a norm that is backed up, ironically enough, by the threat of collective violence. In that sense my relationship to my body is similar to my relationship to my possessions, though not identical.
It's extremely naive to suppose that a volunteer police force would be anything other than a lynch mob, or that those who funded it would be obliged to behave in the same way as those who did not fund it. Property rights depend on the concept of equality before the law - the question of whether or not you have the right to defend your property does not and must not depend on your identity, or on how much you contributed to the charitable police fund. Otherwise your libertarian utopia will quickly deteriorate into a kleptocracy where the rich get richer by robbing the poor with the tacit support of the police and courts.
I assume you're in favour of a 100% inheritance tax, to make sure it's truly the hard-working individuals who prosper?
Who enforces property rights? Police, prisons and the military.
Libertarians claim to be opposed to coercion. Actually they're just opposed to coercion on behalf of the poor. Coercion on behalf of the rich is fine, it's called 'property rights'.
I felt the same way when I stopped believing in solipsism and it ceased to exist.
The graph also shows links betwen US_Military and AL_QAEDA, and between ARIEL_SHARON and Mid_East_Conflict. If only they'd had this technology when they were trying to justify the invasion of Iraq.
"Look, Saddam Hussein has links to Al Qaeda! You can see it on the graph!"
"Uh, Mister Vice-President, this graph is based on press conferences in which you repeatedly mentioned Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in the same breath. It may not have any statistical value."
"Shut up and bring me my war britches, dimwit, the computer never lies!"
Both your examples demonstrate sarcasm, not irony. Irony is when the person responsible for the threading engine of a server-side scripting language resigns, and nobody can read his resignation letter because the server is overloaded.
I used to know the secret of Zen, but then I remembered it.
Karl Popper argued against discretionary powers in The Open Society and its Enemies : "The use of discretionary powers is liable to grow quickly, once it has become an accepted method, since adjustments will be necessary, and adjustments to discretionary short-term decisions can hardly be carried out by institutional means. . . . governments live from hand to mouth, and discretionary powers belong to this style of living--quite apart from the fact that rulers are inclined to love these powers for their own sake." This concise description of the problem with New Labour's method of government was written in 1943.
Just get it to carry a bagful of these.
I always thought that was a test for attention deficit disorder.
As for your comment about immigrants, America has always been full of immigrants working for meagre wages - that's arguably the secret of its economic success. The increasing prominence of terrorism as a tactic cannot simply be blamed on immigration any more than it can simply be blamed on poverty or ignorance - all of these factors have existed for centuries and if anything have decreased in recent years.
D'oh!
Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.
Agreed - on the previous line of the same article it says that one third of children under 10 have mobile phones. It's not impossible for both figures to be correct, but it's unlikely - I suspect that instead of "the average age at which a child gets a mobile phone" they should have said "the average age at which children with mobile phones got their phones". But who cares about facts when we can have news instead?
The most disturbing game I've ever played was one that borrowed a lot of ideas from Lovecraft: the original Alone in the Dark. What made it so frightening to play was not so much the monsters or the sound effects, although both were far ahead of their time - it was the fact that I was playing it on a 25 MHz 386SX. Whenever I got into a serious fight the action would slow down to a crawl; it would take a full second to bring my shotgun to bear on the zombie an arm's length away from me, and another half second to reload after overshooting and firing over its shoulder. None of this was intentional, of course, but it perfectly recreated the slowness and inevitability of a nightmare.