He pretty clearly states that these hypothetical conversations are happening between users who were accessing "the page they weren't supposed to [be] accessing anyway."
And, hypothetically speaking if you had code that would sneak in these non-alternate-domains in the page they weren't supposed to accessing anyway, when would be the best time to set it into action?
Well, those scripts ran at many different times, but just after midnight seemed like a popular time-slot.
If such code existed, making it active Sunday morning from Midnight to 2am seems nice. I mean heck, if my website stopped accepting signups from "gmail.com" on some Sunday morning, I'm sure I'd be downright chipper to hop into the office and find out why.
Boy. If all that stuff happened - I wonder what kind of email conversations I'd have on that Sunday afternoon? I bet they'd be like:
The people who are banning his service are emailing him because they want to know why their automated scripts, which scrape his pages, are reporting that "gmail.com" should be banned.
I certainly seem to recall hearing about things like this before; I had a high-school chemistry teacher, 10 years ago, saying that he had gotten his PhD in mechanical engineering by doing work on injecting tumors with glass/ceramic beads, and heating those with radiation. (He did the thermodynamics, which was apparently a real bitch because of all of the blood flowing everywhere.) He must have done the work for that degree something like 15 years ago, so the idea of "inject [thing], heat tumor" itself is not terribly new. If they've found a good way of isolating the tumor, and keeping the nanoparticles out of surrounding tissue, that would be novel and impressive.
The "hypothetical complaining users" you quoted are those running scrapers, not actual Mailinator users. And yes, clearly the scrapers were stupid enough to load http://mailinator.com/randomdomain.jsp; otherwise they wouldn't have run into the garbage data.
Slashdot "Achievements" are a tongue-in-cheek joke. They rolled out on April 1, and stuck around because, well, people liked them. And, unlike social games, people are actually communicating and forming relationships on Slashdot. A message board system by it's very nature has to be more social than those games; there is literally nothing else to it.
I'd wager that political articles see so much energy because everyone feels like they are qualified to participate, and there are multiple valid-yet-contradictory opinions. I mean, what is there to say about "Solar Impulse Airplane Makes Public Debut In Paris"? It's solar powered! It's some degree more efficient than the last airplane that attempted this! There are facts about it, and no one really cares to contest them. Very few people are qualified to hold an educated opinion about the solar impulse system, and, what's more, they recognize it.
While I agree that it's an impressive result, I'm not sure that it's entirely as practical as you make it out to be. Remember, the end result is glass, and not even high-quality glass at that. It's brittle, porous, and there is very little room for quality-control. The things that this machine produces are basically fit to be display-objects only.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.
While that's fine in theory, there's still the matter of experience on a platform to take into account. While a good programmer will be able to implement HeapSort in both Javascript and C, there's still the matter of whether he's familiar with Interface Builder's delegation system, or if he's got the DOM box model down pat. A good programmer should be able to pick up these skills in (relatively) short order, but some times you just want someone who's already an expert.
Specifically addressing "How do I do _X_ seamlessly from a web app?", it's really quite easy to do if you're going the "Native Web App" route with something like PhoneGap. Phonegap comes with a lot of API functions for commonly used native functionality (file access, contacts, geolocation, etc.), and it's trivial to map any native code to a Javascript function. (For example, I've written an HTTP_GET shim for communicating with my server for a cross-platform PhoneGap app I'm developing, because JSONP is a terrible way of doing things.)
I'll grant you that there is still a time and place for both native and web-apps (web apps are SO SLOW), but that gap is constantly narrowing.
No such luck; however, IRL seems to be a largely classless system, with a series of complimentary traits instead. Each level you seem to be given some leeway in reallocating skill points, talents, and even base stats (by small values). So by all means, if you're not happy with your character's current performance, start making the incremental changes towards a role you think you would be happier in. You might see a performance drop in the transitional period, but most people consistently fail to take advantage of the opportunity to level their characters up, so long-term you won't see too much of a loss.
Also, I'd caution against twinking, or min-maxing. The DM's a real bastard; he always seems to come up with just the situation where your weak point hurts you most.
This is an interesting analysis of why the speeds are different, but I'm not quite sure that it makes a terrific difference. Unless Sprint makes some effort to expand their capacity, or it is expected that Verizon will use up their capacity in the next year or so, I don't really why Verizon is faster than Sprint; I just care that it is faster.
Do we have reason to believe that Verizon will use up their capacity? I admit that I am less familiar with their growth trends than you seem to be. If so, that certainly is an important consideration to take into account when deciding upon a carrier.
Fun fact: In classical rhetoric, "Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy; it's invocation usually signifies an inability to create a logically convincing chain of events that would lead to the referenced disastrous outcome. In modern form, "slippery slopes" can be logically valid, if a logically consistent (and probable) chain of events is constructed; however, this is rarely satisfactorily performed.
I guess we can let you off the hook, though. I don't think you even proposed an actual slippery slope; you merely alluded to the possibility of one being there, and left it up to the reader to guess the trigger, chain of events, and logical conclusion.
I don't even disagree with your core sentiment; I think it is a shame that companies are allowed to use the label "4G" when describing technologies that don't actually comply with the 4G standard. (The reason for this, if I recall correctly, is that they began advertising under that label before the standard was proposed.) However, I would like to see the Slashdot community hold itself to higher standards in these comment threads, and I believe that involves pointing out logical flaws even in points that I fundamentally agree with.
I believe that the point is that they're setting themselves up to succeed where there is already a large deal of interference. The interesting part of this technology is that it is built for situations where the signal-to-noise ratio is significantly less than 1. Sounds to me like someone read Shannon's Theorem, and instead of saying "How much capacity can we squeeze out of this?" asked "How high of a signal-to-noise ratio can we tolerate before the capacity drops to effectively zero?"
The problem with this is that I have a very limited reserve of effort that I'm willing to drop into Wikipedia, where the camping editor seems to have limitless (or scripted) reserves of energy. It's completely unreasonable to expect someone to fix a simple typo, pay attention as it's reverted, discuss why it's a typo, monitor that discussion for a week, and then resubmit their changes and hope that it sticks this time. (I honestly don't understand the editing process well enough to hazard a guess as to how likely this is.) I simply don't care enough to spend hours over a week or two defending "assess" as a legitimate word in the English language. I probably care enough to spend a few minutes fixing it once, when I notice the first time, but it is not a battle that I feel like fighting.
Maybe this is by design; it certainly seems reasonable that those with the most invested in an article will have its best interests in mind. However, having to learn the process and politics of Wikipedia serves as a strong disincentive to those unwilling to jump into the deep end right off the bat.
So what you're saying is that, once we start cleaning garbage data out of the database, we will skip over data that is harder to detect more often than we will skip over data that is easier to detect? I'm not quite sure that this counts as "evolution"; evolution implies adaptation to the environment, and there is no indication that any change or adaptation is going to occur here at all.
It's kind of like saying that buttons are evolving to populate photographs of my lawn; I'm more likely to bend over and pick up a red button than a green one because it's easier to see, and there is a kind of duplication in the distribution of photographs, but the buttons themselves are completely static.
Exactly; the "fitter," undetected DNA has no opportunity to reproduce and pass on it's trats; we're simply culling members from a static population as they present themselves. You could argue that the population isn't exactly static: new genes are being sequenced and inserted into the database; therefore "fitter" DNA will squirm its way into the databases more frequently. However, we definitely won't be seeing any "evolutionary" arms race - the database entries have no affect on the biological populations of bacteria living in labs, so there is no pressure to be any more or less undetectable.
Why is that? Because a brick for a 10 watt device is going to have to be over-engineered to provide up to 130 watts? (The summary's "240" appears to be incorrect, based on the IEEE working group description.)
I certainly agree that Microsoft using HTML5 over Silverlight is a good thing. I can also see how shops who've invested heavily in Silverlight would be upset that Microsoft seems to be phasing away from the format. Can we treat this like a news topic, where we discuss potential implications, instead of assuming that Slashdot is a hive mind and has to come to a "THIS GOOD" or "THIS BAD" consensus?
While this is technically feasible, 99% of people will not do this. If something is perfectly safe if, and only if, you're a paranoid expert, it's not very safe at all.
This is not marketed towards you, if you're willing to set up, configure, and run your own music server. This is marked towards the people with enormous music collections at home, who want to be able to listen to any song in their library on their mobile device at any time, without having to worry about whether their data is synced.
Your "wisdom" is no deeper than someone who says, "Why would I go out to a restaurant, when I could cook a gourmet meal myself?" or "Why would I take my car into the shop, when I'm perfectly capable of diagnosing and repairing any problems that it might be experiencing?" Cloud storage is offering a valuable service to those without the expertise or patience to do it themselves.
So long as iCloud: "assumes you own permission to listen to it, discards any personally identifiable information linking song-on-your-hard-drive to you." If they assume you have permission, store evidence that you actually don't have permission, and then get subpoenaed on behalf of the RIAA, you're going to be up shit-creek without a paddle.
Slashdot Mirror
And, hypothetically speaking if you had code that would sneak in these non-alternate-domains in the page they weren't supposed to accessing anyway, when would be the best time to set it into action?
Well, those scripts ran at many different times, but just after midnight seemed like a popular time-slot.
If such code existed, making it active Sunday morning from Midnight to 2am seems nice. I mean heck, if my website stopped accepting signups from "gmail.com" on some Sunday morning, I'm sure I'd be downright chipper to hop into the office and find out why.
Boy. If all that stuff happened - I wonder what kind of email conversations I'd have on that Sunday afternoon? I bet they'd be like:
The people who are banning his service are emailing him because they want to know why their automated scripts, which scrape his pages, are reporting that "gmail.com" should be banned.
I certainly seem to recall hearing about things like this before; I had a high-school chemistry teacher, 10 years ago, saying that he had gotten his PhD in mechanical engineering by doing work on injecting tumors with glass/ceramic beads, and heating those with radiation. (He did the thermodynamics, which was apparently a real bitch because of all of the blood flowing everywhere.) He must have done the work for that degree something like 15 years ago, so the idea of "inject [thing], heat tumor" itself is not terribly new. If they've found a good way of isolating the tumor, and keeping the nanoparticles out of surrounding tissue, that would be novel and impressive.
The "hypothetical complaining users" you quoted are those running scrapers, not actual Mailinator users. And yes, clearly the scrapers were stupid enough to load http://mailinator.com/randomdomain.jsp; otherwise they wouldn't have run into the garbage data.
Slashdot "Achievements" are a tongue-in-cheek joke. They rolled out on April 1, and stuck around because, well, people liked them. And, unlike social games, people are actually communicating and forming relationships on Slashdot. A message board system by it's very nature has to be more social than those games; there is literally nothing else to it.
I'd wager that political articles see so much energy because everyone feels like they are qualified to participate, and there are multiple valid-yet-contradictory opinions. I mean, what is there to say about "Solar Impulse Airplane Makes Public Debut In Paris"? It's solar powered! It's some degree more efficient than the last airplane that attempted this! There are facts about it, and no one really cares to contest them. Very few people are qualified to hold an educated opinion about the solar impulse system, and, what's more, they recognize it.
At 99% uptime, you're getting 1/4 of your monthly charge back. At 95% uptime (18.25 days), you're getting 1/2 back.
While I agree that it's an impressive result, I'm not sure that it's entirely as practical as you make it out to be. Remember, the end result is glass, and not even high-quality glass at that. It's brittle, porous, and there is very little room for quality-control. The things that this machine produces are basically fit to be display-objects only.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.
While that's fine in theory, there's still the matter of experience on a platform to take into account. While a good programmer will be able to implement HeapSort in both Javascript and C, there's still the matter of whether he's familiar with Interface Builder's delegation system, or if he's got the DOM box model down pat. A good programmer should be able to pick up these skills in (relatively) short order, but some times you just want someone who's already an expert.
Specifically addressing "How do I do _X_ seamlessly from a web app?", it's really quite easy to do if you're going the "Native Web App" route with something like PhoneGap. Phonegap comes with a lot of API functions for commonly used native functionality (file access, contacts, geolocation, etc.), and it's trivial to map any native code to a Javascript function. (For example, I've written an HTTP_GET shim for communicating with my server for a cross-platform PhoneGap app I'm developing, because JSONP is a terrible way of doing things.)
I'll grant you that there is still a time and place for both native and web-apps (web apps are SO SLOW), but that gap is constantly narrowing.
I think that the point was that she actually wasn't a history geek; she simply wanted the credit that comes along with the "geek" label.
No such luck; however, IRL seems to be a largely classless system, with a series of complimentary traits instead. Each level you seem to be given some leeway in reallocating skill points, talents, and even base stats (by small values). So by all means, if you're not happy with your character's current performance, start making the incremental changes towards a role you think you would be happier in. You might see a performance drop in the transitional period, but most people consistently fail to take advantage of the opportunity to level their characters up, so long-term you won't see too much of a loss.
Also, I'd caution against twinking, or min-maxing. The DM's a real bastard; he always seems to come up with just the situation where your weak point hurts you most.
Man, I don't know what you're talking about. Chickens make for delicious pets! As a bonus, you can compost the leftovers. Really.
This is an interesting analysis of why the speeds are different, but I'm not quite sure that it makes a terrific difference. Unless Sprint makes some effort to expand their capacity, or it is expected that Verizon will use up their capacity in the next year or so, I don't really why Verizon is faster than Sprint; I just care that it is faster.
Do we have reason to believe that Verizon will use up their capacity? I admit that I am less familiar with their growth trends than you seem to be. If so, that certainly is an important consideration to take into account when deciding upon a carrier.
Fun fact: In classical rhetoric, "Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy; it's invocation usually signifies an inability to create a logically convincing chain of events that would lead to the referenced disastrous outcome. In modern form, "slippery slopes" can be logically valid, if a logically consistent (and probable) chain of events is constructed; however, this is rarely satisfactorily performed.
I guess we can let you off the hook, though. I don't think you even proposed an actual slippery slope; you merely alluded to the possibility of one being there, and left it up to the reader to guess the trigger, chain of events, and logical conclusion.
I don't even disagree with your core sentiment; I think it is a shame that companies are allowed to use the label "4G" when describing technologies that don't actually comply with the 4G standard. (The reason for this, if I recall correctly, is that they began advertising under that label before the standard was proposed.) However, I would like to see the Slashdot community hold itself to higher standards in these comment threads, and I believe that involves pointing out logical flaws even in points that I fundamentally agree with.
I believe that the point is that they're setting themselves up to succeed where there is already a large deal of interference. The interesting part of this technology is that it is built for situations where the signal-to-noise ratio is significantly less than 1. Sounds to me like someone read Shannon's Theorem, and instead of saying "How much capacity can we squeeze out of this?" asked "How high of a signal-to-noise ratio can we tolerate before the capacity drops to effectively zero?"
What does "in the real world" mean, in this context? Did Asa make this statement in Second Life?
The problem with this is that I have a very limited reserve of effort that I'm willing to drop into Wikipedia, where the camping editor seems to have limitless (or scripted) reserves of energy. It's completely unreasonable to expect someone to fix a simple typo, pay attention as it's reverted, discuss why it's a typo, monitor that discussion for a week, and then resubmit their changes and hope that it sticks this time. (I honestly don't understand the editing process well enough to hazard a guess as to how likely this is.) I simply don't care enough to spend hours over a week or two defending "assess" as a legitimate word in the English language. I probably care enough to spend a few minutes fixing it once, when I notice the first time, but it is not a battle that I feel like fighting.
Maybe this is by design; it certainly seems reasonable that those with the most invested in an article will have its best interests in mind. However, having to learn the process and politics of Wikipedia serves as a strong disincentive to those unwilling to jump into the deep end right off the bat.
That feature is called "revert." I hear it's rather popular right now.
So what you're saying is that, once we start cleaning garbage data out of the database, we will skip over data that is harder to detect more often than we will skip over data that is easier to detect? I'm not quite sure that this counts as "evolution"; evolution implies adaptation to the environment, and there is no indication that any change or adaptation is going to occur here at all.
It's kind of like saying that buttons are evolving to populate photographs of my lawn; I'm more likely to bend over and pick up a red button than a green one because it's easier to see, and there is a kind of duplication in the distribution of photographs, but the buttons themselves are completely static.
Exactly; the "fitter," undetected DNA has no opportunity to reproduce and pass on it's trats; we're simply culling members from a static population as they present themselves. You could argue that the population isn't exactly static: new genes are being sequenced and inserted into the database; therefore "fitter" DNA will squirm its way into the databases more frequently. However, we definitely won't be seeing any "evolutionary" arms race - the database entries have no affect on the biological populations of bacteria living in labs, so there is no pressure to be any more or less undetectable.
Why is that? Because a brick for a 10 watt device is going to have to be over-engineered to provide up to 130 watts? (The summary's "240" appears to be incorrect, based on the IEEE working group description.)
I certainly agree that Microsoft using HTML5 over Silverlight is a good thing. I can also see how shops who've invested heavily in Silverlight would be upset that Microsoft seems to be phasing away from the format. Can we treat this like a news topic, where we discuss potential implications, instead of assuming that Slashdot is a hive mind and has to come to a "THIS GOOD" or "THIS BAD" consensus?
While this is technically feasible, 99% of people will not do this. If something is perfectly safe if, and only if, you're a paranoid expert, it's not very safe at all.
This is not marketed towards you, if you're willing to set up, configure, and run your own music server. This is marked towards the people with enormous music collections at home, who want to be able to listen to any song in their library on their mobile device at any time, without having to worry about whether their data is synced.
Your "wisdom" is no deeper than someone who says, "Why would I go out to a restaurant, when I could cook a gourmet meal myself?" or "Why would I take my car into the shop, when I'm perfectly capable of diagnosing and repairing any problems that it might be experiencing?" Cloud storage is offering a valuable service to those without the expertise or patience to do it themselves.
So long as iCloud: "assumes you own permission to listen to it, discards any personally identifiable information linking song-on-your-hard-drive to you."
If they assume you have permission, store evidence that you actually don't have permission, and then get subpoenaed on behalf of the RIAA, you're going to be up shit-creek without a paddle.