I can tell you that on my grandfather's mechanical adding machines, dividing by 7 meant the machine would start churning madly and actually start smoking, but dividing by 0 it just hiccuped once and stopped.
People are doing this in several locations: Sandia Labs being a big one. Stirling engines are pretty good at it. The problems are largely that you have to build an enormous set of tracking mirrors, when mechanical systems are always the worst reliability problem, and apparently there are issues with getting good, efficient heat transfer from the focal point to the working fluid because you have so much heat you destroy whatever's at the focal point.
It's *really* messy. I've done a couple with extension cords, which is the safest way, and I've done a couple with just hookup wire run through the holes in the prongs and wrapped around, when I was in a hurry. The nicest setup I've seen, a guy had done a big random set of nightlights each one taped to a piece of wood, and all those nailed down to a plywood bed, using extension cords. It was just a big mass of them with chaotic patterns flickering across it, but it got me to thinking about how I could turn it into logic gates.
Well, don't mod me interesting -- go build one! Seriously. Nightlights cost like 2/$4 at BigLots! and similar places. The main problem is hooking them all up without potentially electrocuting yourself or going bankrupt buying cheap extension cords. (and for the ring oscillator use the same type of nightlights throughout because if you have different types, they'll often have different delays and sometimes it'll screw up the oscillation and you'll lose pulses.)
That's why I printed it out: I wasn't about to give them the ability to search unless they did it page-by-page. It appeared to me that they could legally compel me to provide the information for free, and it was in my interest to appear helpful, so I wasn't about to start billing them (since I was the plaintiff) but I thought this was a good way of letting them know that their request wasn't actually going to do them much good as it stood.
They're all impressed by using waves for building logic circuits. Want to build your own cheap, brilliantly visual set of logic gates to show kids how digital computing works? Nightlights. Each one is a NOT gate. You put two close to a third's sensor and you have a NOR. Put them some distance away with some blocking material around them (this is fussy) and you can get a NAND. A little bit of thinking and combinatorial logic and you can build anything else from those. I've built stacked, carrying half-adders this way, and it's pretty cool to watch small binary numbers get added. Two nightlights, each with its bulb by the other's sensor, are a flip-flop. Now you have memory. For extra credit, you can build a ring oscillator by putting an odd number of nightlights in a ring, so each is seeing the next one's sensor, and use that to clock your half-adders and flipflops. If I had a lot of money and time, it'd be fun to see how far this could be extended (before I had to start hiring kids as tube runners to keep the whole works going.)
I was in a somewhat similar situation, although I was directly involved in the lawsuit. I was asked to submit to the deposition all online writing I'd done in the last 6 years. As I recall, I asked for an extension after delivering 1500 printed pages from one blog and telling my and the opposing council that those 1500 pages represented well less than 10% of what I'd written over that period. (I'm verbose.) They quickly restricted what, exactly, they were requesting, to strictly what was relevant to the suit, leaving it to my discretion as to what to include. They'll ask for everything, but when it becomes apparent that they might have to sift through thousands of pages of material, they're often willing to be much more reasonable. THEY don't want to have to read through it any more than the person who received the supoena wants to print it all out.
While I appreciate the funny in your post, I immediately thought "gee, I'd love one of these for MY dog" when I saw the article. My dog's a relaxed quiet animal until she gets a chance at an open door, like when a visitor comes over and one of us isn't there. Lily can clear a 6' fence without slowing down, and can run just under 30 miles an hour for an amazingly long time (until she's distracted by a cat or a garbage can.) If I see her escape I have a chance, if I can get on my road bike, because then I might be able to track her when she's running through people's yards, but finding out where she's gotten to when I'm not right there to see her go would be awfully nice.
I grant that this isn't the case on commercial airliners made since about 1955, but for the record smoking is significantly harmful to vacuum-based flight instruments. They're powered by the vacuum differential between the cabin and the manifold vacuum or vacuum pump, so they suck air out of the cabin continuously into a mass of very precise bearings and airways, and the crap in cigarette smoke jams the bearings, leading to much earlier failure of gauges like your artificial horizon.
Consider two bacteria. One has the minimal DNA needed to survive, while the other carries a huge extra section giving it the ability to digest aspartame, vinyl, and old magazines. They are living in a nice sugar solution, so they can divide and replicate as fast as they want to. The bacterium with the shorter DNA replicates faster. It outcompetes the bacterium with the extra DNA, and in 50 generations it represents 99.999% of the population. When the environmental niche that the bacteria are in changes -- which is to say when they use up all the food -- one of two things will happen. If they happen to be living in a container made of vinyl or old magazines, suddenly the bacterium with the extra DNA will thrive and the other will starve. But if that's not the case they'll both starve together while trying to find something else to eat, and chances are that the one with the extra DNA will die off first.
Carrying any extra genetic material is a gamble because it increases your suseptibility to unfavorable mutation and slows you down, but it's necessary to maintain some extra material so you'll increase your adaptive flexibility. That is a major driving force for evolution: it's pushing in both ways at the same time, which greatly decreases the reaction time of a heterogenous population to a new situation (at the cost of the lives of the large majority of the population).
I don't know how often people have done this with phones. I've done stego in noise in pictures, when I was exchanging email with a friend who was living in China; we used a Matlab function. (It relied on her getting pictures from me and comparing them to the originals posted on a US-based website.) The nice thing was precisely that it wasn't encrypted so the messages didn't just disappear, as so many others we sent did. (We started serializing our messages so we could tell when ones were going missing.) So while it's unclear that this particular setup is useful, I can say that homebrew implementations of stego exist and are being used, particularly if a lame amateur coder like me has made one.
And yes, someone looking on her computer could've found the deconverter, but unless you know what you're looking for, you probably don't know that you've found a deconverter, when it's one of dozens of big complicated programs. Security through obscurity isn't reliable, but it can work.
>Pity that S.F. authors seem to go a little nuts when they get old.
We ALL go a little nuts when we get old. If you're a popular sci-fi author, they'll publish your drool, because some kid out there somewhere will buy it.
So this gay, incestuous bear walks into a bar and lays his pa on the table...
So this guy walks into a bar arm-in-arm with a grizzly bear, and the guy says, "hey, bartender, do you serve lawyers here?" The bartender looks at him and at the grizzly and says "uh, yeah, sure we serve lawyers here." "Good," says the guy, "I'll have a beer. And the grizzly will have a lawyer."
So this one-armed grizzly walks into a bar and says "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."
Those are all the funny 'bear in a bar' jokes I know. The barbituate one? isn't funny.
I really hate to add to the crapflood of misogyny in this thread, but my girlfriend and both my best friends are women who date women either sometimes or preferentially, and they all three say "women drive me INSANE -- I never know WHAT they're doing or saying." They're more frustrated by trying to deal with women than *I* am, because I just assume that nobody's interested in me and go trundling on my solipsistic way, whereas they spend a lot of time saying/thinking "was that woman who just smiled at me interested in me?"
I've built all my own hardware. It's not hard. If you want gerber files for the boards, I could get them to you: they're mostly really easy to build (except the thermocouple a/d, which only comes in a difficult SMT package.) It was dead easy to get owfs and fuse installed and logging. I have one board that logs humidity and solar radiance (and temp), several temp boards, and the thermo, and am trying to rework the thermo into an independent controller since there's an I/O pin on it so I should be able to use it for switching power relays. I'd be very interested in hearing about what you're doing with the oxy sensor. Is it a wideband, or the more typical narrowband that most production cars seem to have? And yeah, it's a perfect use for older PC's (but that's all I have, so hey.)
Are you talking to several multimeters via RS232? Can you have multiple systems on one bus? Are you measuring, logging, or controlling the system with what you have?
I've been using the dallas one-wire DS18S20 for temp measurement and a DS2760 A/D converter directly reading a thermocouple output, using fuse and owfs, which makes the whole measurement bus look like a typical unix file structure, and I'm having a fair bit of success with putting together scriptable closed-loop temp controllers (meaning I'm using both the serial port for reading all the sensors and the parallel port for running big power relays that switch the heater elements), but I'm always interested in hearing what other people are doing.
People like risk because the thrill of danger followed by the realization of success pushes our pleasure buttons. Life is dangerous. It's a terminal disease. We can't make everything safe no matter how much we try, because we're all going to die anyway. However, we can make life increasingly unpleasant by removing all the fun, interesting parts of it in the interests of a fundamentally unreachable goal of complete safety.
Thing is: it's a shifting goal. In the early 1900's, being able to buy dynamite at the hardware store made sense. Does it now, from a societal viewpoint? There *are* things that become increasingly dangerous as populations and technologic sophistication rise, so maybe we do need to change our rules over time, to deal with shifting situations. It's not like all safety laws and regulations are bunk. I'm living proof that seatbelts save lives, and if cars weren't legally required to have them, I might've been squished flat by a semi.
The thing is: we, as a culture, need to understand that 'safety' is not, by itself, sufficient reason to pass laws. A better understanding of the consequences is required, to prevent us ending up in a self-imposed prison.
Maybe you have a wildly different group of friends than I -- or anyone else I know -- because what I see is groups of people who are all seeing lots of information, selecting the information they *like*, and sending it to their group of friends, who are doing exactly the same thing right back. That's a positive feedback loop. Around here it's called the slashdot hive mind or groupthink. There are some people who behave like you do, but in my observation, they are unusual.
Mainstream media, by being beholden to wide ranges of audiences, necessarily write for the least common denominator and the widest possible approval. They can't provide niche material. I remember when television came in four channels, and they were all playing basically exactly the same thing. That's numbing but it's normative. Now you can get a brazillion channels. More channels means more ability to specialize, to provide a narrower viewpoint. In the 1960's the market for conspiracy theorists was largely untapped. Now you can find megabytes of information just on JFK theories and spend all evening talking to people who are passionate believers in them. If you're the only conspiracy theorist you know, and you're more or less social, you'll be dragged away from conspiracy theories by all the uninterested people around you, but if you spend a large chunk of your time talking to other people who are all on about the same thing, that's all you'll think about. Look at World Of Warcraft players -- many of them turn their lives into extensions of their WoW habit. It's a natural human behavior pattern.
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization. In this week's New Yorker magazine, they talk extensively about the transition from newspapers to online news sources, particularly concentrating on Arianna Huffington and Little Green Footballs. With respect to polarization, the article points out that in countries where this is (arguably) already going on to a greater extent than the US, there is significantly greater engagement in politics, though whether that's because of or just correlated with polarization issues, isn't clear. But the main thrust of the NY article is research. Traditional news companies, particularly newspapers, spend a *lot* of money on reporters, who are expected to research their stories. Obviously that doesn't always happen, as a number of large scandals of late have made clear, but on the other hand, there is no attempt whatsoever by most email-forwarding people to verify what they're forwarding, which leads to misinformed polarization, a worse problem yet. The flip side of that is that a reporter is unlikely to run across the one disgruntled employee who is willing to spill the beans, while a much more broadly based concept of news reporting, where many eyes and fingers contribute to the work, is more likely to get information from inside sources... but there's still that problem with trusting them to be right. Already we see adblogs. Many people on/. have speculated that Microsoft employs people to work on moderating stories on/. in Microsoft's favor, and it's well-known that Scientology does related stuff with internet newsgroups. It's hard to trust a big anonymous system when motivated, biased people can astroturf it. But, as the New Yorker article made clear, this is largely eulogy: newspapers are dying, and it's not going to take very long. (People in the article said 2040 or thereabouts, extrapolating from what we see now.) The question is whether political blogs and the like will take their place or whether something somewhere in between will show up. Huffington has hired actual reporters from newspapers to do some work. Wouldn't it be nice if some other user-content websites we all know about did the same?
It's not exactly intelligence pills, per se, but Namenda and Excelon are amazing. I have memory problems from a car crash, and when I can afford the prescription, I function better than I did before the crash. Unfortunately, they run like $500/month.
There is no person on slashdot I respect more than you, and I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. I'm fighting a bunch of other battles, and this isn't one that matters enough to me to risk the other things I'm doing. A person has to choose which fights are worth it. I'm reminded of a line from J. D. Salinger: "any fool can die for a cause, but it takes a lot more work to live for one." You're no fool, and that's why you're winning your fight -- one to which I've contributed, as it happens. But I know it's not a fight in which I could participate: given my circumstances, the potential loss outweighs any potential gain.
Don't misunderstand -- I'm not arguing with you. You're right, in all particulars. I'm saying that I would do something I know is wrong because the cost of doing what is right is unacceptable to me.
When I walk up to an intersection, I stop even though in my state cars are required to yield to pedestrian traffic. It is not worth it to me to get hit by a car and spend months in the hospital even though I would be in the right. That is not a fight I will pursue because the price outweighs the product. I see this situation as being similar: it's a principled fight but not a rational one.
To answer your final question: I see using wealth to retire early as making my life better. That *is* protecting myself, in one sense of the term: protecting myself against an uncertain, difficult life. You're talking about an entirely different sense of protection: that of not being victimized. The question, then, is: which one is more important? I think your answer depends both on what you value and how much you value it. If I had $36 in savings, I'd be a lot more willing to stand up for my rights in the face of bankruptcy.
While I'd like to think that many people are as stoic as you, I certainly am not: I'm within 10 years of retiring, quite early because I've spent the last 15 years putting everything I can in savings and investments rather than buying new cars. I'd sure hate to lose all that and have to work until 70. Sure, risking that is part of making the world a better place, but it's not rational to expect that most, or even many, people will bet their personal future to make the world a little tiny bit better. It's a matter of proportion: I don't drive 100 miles an hour because that has a very poor risk/reward ratio -- I endanger many people and only get where I was going a short while earlier. But, likewise, it would also be stupid for me, personally, to throw away my future to be a single data point in the fight against big corporations. I don't like saying this, but faced between surrendering, even if I was in the right, and losing everything I've worked for this last 15 years, I wouldn't even hesitate.
>They are ideal for putting light in places where we've never been able to put bulbs before. In floors. In counters. In sinks. In walkways. In door frames. As desk surfaces.
As someone who helps design LED drivers, I feel compelled to point out that LED's, the silicon itself, puts out a *lot* of heat. We have test bulbs that crank out an amount of light equivalent to a 100 watt bulb, for some tiny fraction of that amount of power, but they have heat sinks on them that have more volume than an entire folded-tube CFL. If you want bright lights using current LED technology you need a good source of airflow, and there aren't any major improvements around the corner.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you that on my grandfather's mechanical adding machines, dividing by 7 meant the machine would start churning madly and actually start smoking, but dividing by 0 it just hiccuped once and stopped.
People are doing this in several locations: Sandia Labs being a big one. Stirling engines are pretty good at it. The problems are largely that you have to build an enormous set of tracking mirrors, when mechanical systems are always the worst reliability problem, and apparently there are issues with getting good, efficient heat transfer from the focal point to the working fluid because you have so much heat you destroy whatever's at the focal point.
It's *really* messy. I've done a couple with extension cords, which is the safest way, and I've done a couple with just hookup wire run through the holes in the prongs and wrapped around, when I was in a hurry. The nicest setup I've seen, a guy had done a big random set of nightlights each one taped to a piece of wood, and all those nailed down to a plywood bed, using extension cords. It was just a big mass of them with chaotic patterns flickering across it, but it got me to thinking about how I could turn it into logic gates.
Well, don't mod me interesting -- go build one! Seriously. Nightlights cost like 2/$4 at BigLots! and similar places. The main problem is hooking them all up without potentially electrocuting yourself or going bankrupt buying cheap extension cords. (and for the ring oscillator use the same type of nightlights throughout because if you have different types, they'll often have different delays and sometimes it'll screw up the oscillation and you'll lose pulses.)
That's why I printed it out: I wasn't about to give them the ability to search unless they did it page-by-page.
It appeared to me that they could legally compel me to provide the information for free, and it was in my interest to appear helpful, so I wasn't about to start billing them (since I was the plaintiff) but I thought this was a good way of letting them know that their request wasn't actually going to do them much good as it stood.
They're all impressed by using waves for building logic circuits.
Want to build your own cheap, brilliantly visual set of logic gates to show kids how digital computing works? Nightlights. Each one is a NOT gate. You put two close to a third's sensor and you have a NOR. Put them some distance away with some blocking material around them (this is fussy) and you can get a NAND. A little bit of thinking and combinatorial logic and you can build anything else from those. I've built stacked, carrying half-adders this way, and it's pretty cool to watch small binary numbers get added.
Two nightlights, each with its bulb by the other's sensor, are a flip-flop. Now you have memory.
For extra credit, you can build a ring oscillator by putting an odd number of nightlights in a ring, so each is seeing the next one's sensor, and use that to clock your half-adders and flipflops.
If I had a lot of money and time, it'd be fun to see how far this could be extended (before I had to start hiring kids as tube runners to keep the whole works going.)
I was in a somewhat similar situation, although I was directly involved in the lawsuit. I was asked to submit to the deposition all online writing I'd done in the last 6 years. As I recall, I asked for an extension after delivering 1500 printed pages from one blog and telling my and the opposing council that those 1500 pages represented well less than 10% of what I'd written over that period. (I'm verbose.) They quickly restricted what, exactly, they were requesting, to strictly what was relevant to the suit, leaving it to my discretion as to what to include.
They'll ask for everything, but when it becomes apparent that they might have to sift through thousands of pages of material, they're often willing to be much more reasonable. THEY don't want to have to read through it any more than the person who received the supoena wants to print it all out.
While I appreciate the funny in your post, I immediately thought "gee, I'd love one of these for MY dog" when I saw the article. My dog's a relaxed quiet animal until she gets a chance at an open door, like when a visitor comes over and one of us isn't there. Lily can clear a 6' fence without slowing down, and can run just under 30 miles an hour for an amazingly long time (until she's distracted by a cat or a garbage can.) If I see her escape I have a chance, if I can get on my road bike, because then I might be able to track her when she's running through people's yards, but finding out where she's gotten to when I'm not right there to see her go would be awfully nice.
I grant that this isn't the case on commercial airliners made since about 1955, but for the record smoking is significantly harmful to vacuum-based flight instruments. They're powered by the vacuum differential between the cabin and the manifold vacuum or vacuum pump, so they suck air out of the cabin continuously into a mass of very precise bearings and airways, and the crap in cigarette smoke jams the bearings, leading to much earlier failure of gauges like your artificial horizon.
I'll try explaining why it may come at a price.
Consider two bacteria. One has the minimal DNA needed to survive, while the other carries a huge extra section giving it the ability to digest aspartame, vinyl, and old magazines.
They are living in a nice sugar solution, so they can divide and replicate as fast as they want to.
The bacterium with the shorter DNA replicates faster. It outcompetes the bacterium with the extra DNA, and in 50 generations it represents 99.999% of the population.
When the environmental niche that the bacteria are in changes -- which is to say when they use up all the food -- one of two things will happen. If they happen to be living in a container made of vinyl or old magazines, suddenly the bacterium with the extra DNA will thrive and the other will starve. But if that's not the case they'll both starve together while trying to find something else to eat, and chances are that the one with the extra DNA will die off first.
Carrying any extra genetic material is a gamble because it increases your suseptibility to unfavorable mutation and slows you down, but it's necessary to maintain some extra material so you'll increase your adaptive flexibility. That is a major driving force for evolution: it's pushing in both ways at the same time, which greatly decreases the reaction time of a heterogenous population to a new situation (at the cost of the lives of the large majority of the population).
I don't know how often people have done this with phones. I've done stego in noise in pictures, when I was exchanging email with a friend who was living in China; we used a Matlab function. (It relied on her getting pictures from me and comparing them to the originals posted on a US-based website.)
The nice thing was precisely that it wasn't encrypted so the messages didn't just disappear, as so many others we sent did. (We started serializing our messages so we could tell when ones were going missing.)
So while it's unclear that this particular setup is useful, I can say that homebrew implementations of stego exist and are being used, particularly if a lame amateur coder like me has made one.
And yes, someone looking on her computer could've found the deconverter, but unless you know what you're looking for, you probably don't know that you've found a deconverter, when it's one of dozens of big complicated programs. Security through obscurity isn't reliable, but it can work.
>Pity that S.F. authors seem to go a little nuts when they get old.
We ALL go a little nuts when we get old. If you're a popular sci-fi author, they'll publish your drool, because some kid out there somewhere will buy it.
So this gay, incestuous bear walks into a bar and lays his pa on the table...
So this guy walks into a bar arm-in-arm with a grizzly bear, and the guy says, "hey, bartender, do you serve lawyers here?" The bartender looks at him and at the grizzly and says "uh, yeah, sure we serve lawyers here." "Good," says the guy, "I'll have a beer. And the grizzly will have a lawyer."
So this one-armed grizzly walks into a bar and says "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."
Those are all the funny 'bear in a bar' jokes I know. The barbituate one? isn't funny.
I really hate to add to the crapflood of misogyny in this thread, but my girlfriend and both my best friends are women who date women either sometimes or preferentially, and they all three say "women drive me INSANE -- I never know WHAT they're doing or saying." They're more frustrated by trying to deal with women than *I* am, because I just assume that nobody's interested in me and go trundling on my solipsistic way, whereas they spend a lot of time saying/thinking "was that woman who just smiled at me interested in me?"
I've built all my own hardware. It's not hard. If you want gerber files for the boards, I could get them to you: they're mostly really easy to build (except the thermocouple a/d, which only comes in a difficult SMT package.) It was dead easy to get owfs and fuse installed and logging. I have one board that logs humidity and solar radiance (and temp), several temp boards, and the thermo, and am trying to rework the thermo into an independent controller since there's an I/O pin on it so I should be able to use it for switching power relays.
I'd be very interested in hearing about what you're doing with the oxy sensor. Is it a wideband, or the more typical narrowband that most production cars seem to have?
And yeah, it's a perfect use for older PC's (but that's all I have, so hey.)
I've been using the dallas one-wire DS18S20 for temp measurement and a DS2760 A/D converter directly reading a thermocouple output, using fuse and owfs, which makes the whole measurement bus look like a typical unix file structure, and I'm having a fair bit of success with putting together scriptable closed-loop temp controllers (meaning I'm using both the serial port for reading all the sensors and the parallel port for running big power relays that switch the heater elements), but I'm always interested in hearing what other people are doing.
People like risk because the thrill of danger followed by the realization of success pushes our pleasure buttons.
Life is dangerous. It's a terminal disease. We can't make everything safe no matter how much we try, because we're all going to die anyway. However, we can make life increasingly unpleasant by removing all the fun, interesting parts of it in the interests of a fundamentally unreachable goal of complete safety.
Thing is: it's a shifting goal. In the early 1900's, being able to buy dynamite at the hardware store made sense. Does it now, from a societal viewpoint? There *are* things that become increasingly dangerous as populations and technologic sophistication rise, so maybe we do need to change our rules over time, to deal with shifting situations. It's not like all safety laws and regulations are bunk. I'm living proof that seatbelts save lives, and if cars weren't legally required to have them, I might've been squished flat by a semi.
The thing is: we, as a culture, need to understand that 'safety' is not, by itself, sufficient reason to pass laws. A better understanding of the consequences is required, to prevent us ending up in a self-imposed prison.
Maybe you have a wildly different group of friends than I -- or anyone else I know -- because what I see is groups of people who are all seeing lots of information, selecting the information they *like*, and sending it to their group of friends, who are doing exactly the same thing right back. That's a positive feedback loop. Around here it's called the slashdot hive mind or groupthink.
There are some people who behave like you do, but in my observation, they are unusual.
Mainstream media, by being beholden to wide ranges of audiences, necessarily write for the least common denominator and the widest possible approval. They can't provide niche material. I remember when television came in four channels, and they were all playing basically exactly the same thing. That's numbing but it's normative. Now you can get a brazillion channels. More channels means more ability to specialize, to provide a narrower viewpoint. In the 1960's the market for conspiracy theorists was largely untapped. Now you can find megabytes of information just on JFK theories and spend all evening talking to people who are passionate believers in them. If you're the only conspiracy theorist you know, and you're more or less social, you'll be dragged away from conspiracy theories by all the uninterested people around you, but if you spend a large chunk of your time talking to other people who are all on about the same thing, that's all you'll think about. Look at World Of Warcraft players -- many of them turn their lives into extensions of their WoW habit. It's a natural human behavior pattern.
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization. /. have speculated that Microsoft employs people to work on moderating stories on /. in Microsoft's favor, and it's well-known that Scientology does related stuff with internet newsgroups. It's hard to trust a big anonymous system when motivated, biased people can astroturf it.
In this week's New Yorker magazine, they talk extensively about the transition from newspapers to online news sources, particularly concentrating on Arianna Huffington and Little Green Footballs. With respect to polarization, the article points out that in countries where this is (arguably) already going on to a greater extent than the US, there is significantly greater engagement in politics, though whether that's because of or just correlated with polarization issues, isn't clear.
But the main thrust of the NY article is research. Traditional news companies, particularly newspapers, spend a *lot* of money on reporters, who are expected to research their stories. Obviously that doesn't always happen, as a number of large scandals of late have made clear, but on the other hand, there is no attempt whatsoever by most email-forwarding people to verify what they're forwarding, which leads to misinformed polarization, a worse problem yet.
The flip side of that is that a reporter is unlikely to run across the one disgruntled employee who is willing to spill the beans, while a much more broadly based concept of news reporting, where many eyes and fingers contribute to the work, is more likely to get information from inside sources... but there's still that problem with trusting them to be right. Already we see adblogs. Many people on
But, as the New Yorker article made clear, this is largely eulogy: newspapers are dying, and it's not going to take very long. (People in the article said 2040 or thereabouts, extrapolating from what we see now.) The question is whether political blogs and the like will take their place or whether something somewhere in between will show up. Huffington has hired actual reporters from newspapers to do some work. Wouldn't it be nice if some other user-content websites we all know about did the same?
It's not exactly intelligence pills, per se, but Namenda and Excelon are amazing. I have memory problems from a car crash, and when I can afford the prescription, I function better than I did before the crash. Unfortunately, they run like $500/month.
There is no person on slashdot I respect more than you, and I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. I'm fighting a bunch of other battles, and this isn't one that matters enough to me to risk the other things I'm doing. A person has to choose which fights are worth it.
I'm reminded of a line from J. D. Salinger: "any fool can die for a cause, but it takes a lot more work to live for one." You're no fool, and that's why you're winning your fight -- one to which I've contributed, as it happens. But I know it's not a fight in which I could participate: given my circumstances, the potential loss outweighs any potential gain.
Don't misunderstand -- I'm not arguing with you. You're right, in all particulars. I'm saying that I would do something I know is wrong because the cost of doing what is right is unacceptable to me.
When I walk up to an intersection, I stop even though in my state cars are required to yield to pedestrian traffic. It is not worth it to me to get hit by a car and spend months in the hospital even though I would be in the right. That is not a fight I will pursue because the price outweighs the product. I see this situation as being similar: it's a principled fight but not a rational one.
To answer your final question: I see using wealth to retire early as making my life better. That *is* protecting myself, in one sense of the term: protecting myself against an uncertain, difficult life. You're talking about an entirely different sense of protection: that of not being victimized.
The question, then, is: which one is more important?
I think your answer depends both on what you value and how much you value it. If I had $36 in savings, I'd be a lot more willing to stand up for my rights in the face of bankruptcy.
While I'd like to think that many people are as stoic as you, I certainly am not: I'm within 10 years of retiring, quite early because I've spent the last 15 years putting everything I can in savings and investments rather than buying new cars. I'd sure hate to lose all that and have to work until 70. Sure, risking that is part of making the world a better place, but it's not rational to expect that most, or even many, people will bet their personal future to make the world a little tiny bit better. It's a matter of proportion: I don't drive 100 miles an hour because that has a very poor risk/reward ratio -- I endanger many people and only get where I was going a short while earlier. But, likewise, it would also be stupid for me, personally, to throw away my future to be a single data point in the fight against big corporations. I don't like saying this, but faced between surrendering, even if I was in the right, and losing everything I've worked for this last 15 years, I wouldn't even hesitate.
>Trusting Microsoft to run Linux ... there is no propper analogy for such a stupid thing.
Sure there is, and it is, of course, a car analogy: it's like trusting the keys to your best friend's father's Ferrari 250 GT to two parking attendants.
>They are ideal for putting light in places where we've never been able to put bulbs before. In floors. In counters. In sinks. In walkways. In door frames. As desk surfaces.
As someone who helps design LED drivers, I feel compelled to point out that LED's, the silicon itself, puts out a *lot* of heat. We have test bulbs that crank out an amount of light equivalent to a 100 watt bulb, for some tiny fraction of that amount of power, but they have heat sinks on them that have more volume than an entire folded-tube CFL. If you want bright lights using current LED technology you need a good source of airflow, and there aren't any major improvements around the corner.