Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
I disagree. Here's an anecdote which proves it;-)
One day I thought to myself, "I want to buy some $foo". I turn to google, enter "buy $foo" in the search box, and look at the results. None of the look promising.
That is, except for the sponsored link, accompanied by an unobtrusive short paragraph of text, fairly accurately saying "here's a URL. If you go there, you can buy $foo". I went there, looked at the prices, they seemed fair.
I was happy, Google was happy, the advertiser was happy.
Now, back to your discussion of 99.9% of advertisement which gives the rest a bad name;)
The purpose of the government is to uphold every citizen's inalienable rights; and it must be as small as it can be while remaining capable of fulfilling that purpose. No more, no less
I propose a different mission for government: in economist-lingo, to maximize social welfare (that is, the sum of how happy the population is).
And of course, the population should value freedom of {speech,assembly,press,etc.} very highly.
But---pregnant pause---there is such a thing as a market failure, and I think it makes good sense for the government to step in and make regulations that makes the market more competitive.
Observe that the societal material benefit of a free market comes about not because the market is free but because it's competitive.
If you're free to enter a market where you'll most certainly be crushed by the incumbent monopoly, what does that freedom really buy the society? But if the monopoly is prevented from using its monopoly status to crush you and has to compete reasonably fairly with you, you might have a shot at getting your better/cheaper product out to consumers.
If you're an American, you'll laugh at "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." I don't. I know there's something shady going on, in particular with travel funds for the EU which the MEPs aren't held much accountable for [long story, but the point is if you-an-MEP travel not-extremely-extravagantly, you can pocket a large wad of my tax money at the end of the year. Some politicians do.]. But I also believe politicians (from time to time) genuinely want to do good for the people and the nation.
Is the word for "leopard" really "tree"?
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in the summary. (Haven't RTFA, fwiw).
I propose that the word for "leopard" really is the word for "tree". Why?
Well, suppose the suffix "-oo" means "get up into", and the "come[s] over here" part refers to the trees, not the monkeys.
Observe that getting up in the trees is a good way to avoid leopards, and that when you yell "Timber!", it's because trees are coming your way. That way, what the monkeys say should still produce the same behaviour as with the summary's language, but the words seem to have more stable, consistent meanings.
If this were not the case, one might expect the monkeys to say "leopard + comes-over-here" and "tree + comes-over-here", or something similarly systematic.
Also, observe how (human) children apply simple and logical (but sometimes wrong) rules to construct sentence patterns; something like the thought "hey, the expression "you're going down" must mean that relative to you, I'm going up. Yeah! "I'm going up, you [word]!"". Key point being: simple rules, a consistent inverse relationship between up and down. Wouldn't it make sense that monkeys have a similarly simple and consistent language?
Note also that the monkeys signal different behaviours when they observe or suspect eagles and snakes. The word for "eagle" might really mean "duck and cover", and the word for "snake" might really mean "stand really still, on your toes, and look down", since that is how they handle these different kinds of predators.
It might also be more effective to say "get up in the trees" and "get up in the trees" versus "there's a leopard coming" and "there's a [different non-climber] coming"; that way, you can get away with a smaller vocabulary, a more restricted vocal apparatus (since you don't need many different sounds), etc. Just cheaper overall.
The argument he makes is the weakest argument people who advocate destroying personal privacy can make - and one of the worst things about it, and something they never seem to consider is that it is a COMPLETELY UNAMERICAN argument
I think it's also rather undanish, ungerman, unnorwegian, probably very unswedish, not particularly finnish either, etc.
True, Google is seated in Mountain View, CA, in the US. But it operates elsewhere, and will probably need to respect local laws in ${not the USA}.
Allow anyone to run their cables to any home [...] Which consumer would rather be calling FCC [...] instead of simply calling the competitor to switch?
New this month! Free internet for three months in the local area where Comcast's competitor operates.
(three months later)
And in other news, local internet upstart We're Not Crapcast has filed for bankruptcy. Their president was available for the following comment:
"ever since Comcast offered free internet in our area, we just haven't been able to attract customers. It appear people want cheap crap rather than nice things at a fair price given the quality."
And that's the polite version. The rude one says people are stupid and short-sighted.
Grope around the tubes (especially ted.com) for Dan Gilbert. You'll find people want $50 now rather than $60 in a month. If the $50 is a good deal, isn't the inflation so bad you should be running for the hills?
People prefer being paid $35K, $45K and $55K per respective year rather than $60K, $50K and $40K for the same three-year project (not a repeat game, the future doesn't exist in this scenario). They prefer $135K over $150K. Why?
And with the more money total you also get more money up front, so you get to either invest or save, depending on what you think the inflation is going to be like---I mean, come on people, what's the downside of more money?
And in these scenarios, they know all the information. Suppose you can either get "free internet" or "internet for $x/mo", which would most people want? Here, they don't have perfect information about future costs and payoffs (in the forms of downtime, competent support staff, hidden caps, traffic type restrictions, etc.).
Aside: I heard an economics professor, Mike Munger, say on EconTalk (GIYF) that he picks plumbers by asking four reputable-looking ones for bids on a particular piece of work, then going with the one that bid closest to the average. Interesting strategy---You get what you pay for but with diminishing returns?
You NEED every bit of performance out of your machine. Emulation just isn't going to cut it.
Got any observations to back that up? Any numbers?
If you emulate a Game Boy or a 4.77 MHz PC (those were the days...), your emulation is going to run faster than the original. Emulation != slow.
I recall seeing a bunch of wine stats, showing that some calls were faster on wine than on windows.
How do you know that it's not the important ones for audio that are faster? How do you know the calls relevant to audio work will never be as fast as on windows (or faster)?
Not only that, I recall reading a post on/. singing the praises of Linux exactly for working with audio ("jack ftw", somewhat paraphrased and condensed).
It's a shame I can't find the link, and of course one person's success story isn't statistics, but it suggests that Linux does do audio work.
But this wouldn't be the state telling the infrastructure provider what price to sell (or lease) at, just that they lease to everybody at the same price.
Not being able to translate a site's domain name to its IP address has nothing to do with not being able to access the site.
Yes it does.
Very few---counting cards---people can---counting cards---remember the IP addresses of all the---counting cards---sites they want to---counting cards---visit.
Even though there are ways around it, it does work against many people.
no matter how overzealous that protective instinct is, it will persist due to the laws of evolution, and you need to make peace with it and accept it: its never going away
Humans also have an instinct to socialize. The internet is one medium for this kind of communication. I don't think you can ever make this other instinct go away either, and I think there should be room for both.
A law that means you can be busted for talking normally about normal stuff (by a fairly reasonable definition of "normal", not including sex) with children whose age you can't verify is in my opinion a bad thing. Would you like to go to jail for saying "DIAF" on the tubes?
pushing drugs, violence (not games, but seriously damaging stuff), emotional trauma and non-sexual abuse on minors.
Isn't selling drugs illegal in and of itself? Isn't abuse illegal in and of itself?
I'm fine with laws restricting speech (slander, fraud, yelling fire in a crowded theater). I'm fine with laws against bullying. I'm fine with laws protecting children from horrible events.
As long as they're enforced sensibly.
Which laws have never been enforced non-sensibly?
Also, I would think that a law that says (in legalese) "you can't deprive other people of their freedom; in particular you can't force other people to have sex with you or make porn for you" should about cover the whole child porn issue.
Or do you think there are children who consent to having sex with adults or being porn stars?
Ah, that's a good point. But it also applies to my other example (so there's nothing special about the get-a-chick case), and pretty much any example you can come up with, unless money and power are goals unto themselves.
If power is your goal, you're likely to be sociopathic, or at least not be a kind of person people like hanging around. If money is your goal, you're likely a greedy bastard; again, this won't make you popular.
Having any of these as a goal unto itself and not a means seems to suggest some unhealthy obsession.
With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.
Isn't that what workspaces already do for you? Isn't that why workspaces is such a great feature?
Tab together emacs + console running LaTeX + PDF viewer and get an integrated development environment for scientific papers. Nice.
I think that's what M-x shell and workspaces are for. Yeah okay, I cheat and using a tiling window manager (emacs) on top of another window manager which I use to just switch between two windows (when I'm on the scientific-papers workspace).
But I don't think tabs will revolutionize the way I work.
Maybe I just haven't gotten the point of them yet? Maybe I overfill my keyboard with shortcuts for other things so I can't find the room for shortcuts it takes to create tabs and switch between them efficiently?
clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front. If anyone knows how to disable that, I'd appreciate it.
Don't use metacity.
In Compiz, ccsm, General Settings, Focus & Raise Behaviour, disable "Click to Focus" and "Raise on Click".
(If you don't have the mouse buttons to dedicate one just to raising windows, binding Alt-mouse1 to both raise and move works fairly well. All I'd wish for is that the move functionality waited for me to drag the window a few, say 5, pixels before wobbling my windows; openbox does this the right way.)
Or use openbox, vim ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, read the comments, change "yes" to "no" (or vice versa) at the right places. It integrates with gnome just as well as metacity and gives you the flexibility and "crackrock features" (in the words of Metacity designer Havoc Pennington) you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Gnome team is working [...]] to develop a patch for human nature that fixes this problem.
I suspect they've decided that a free will is unusable and will replace it with sane defaults ;)
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Shift-V into their terminal
Surely you mean highlight and middle-click, yes? ;-)
I'm sorry for writing a long letter, but I didn't have the time to write a short one ;)
Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
I disagree. Here's an anecdote which proves it ;-)
One day I thought to myself, "I want to buy some $foo". I turn to google, enter "buy $foo" in the search box, and look at the results. None of the look promising.
That is, except for the sponsored link, accompanied by an unobtrusive short paragraph of text, fairly accurately saying "here's a URL. If you go there, you can buy $foo". I went there, looked at the prices, they seemed fair.
I was happy, Google was happy, the advertiser was happy.
Now, back to your discussion of 99.9% of advertisement which gives the rest a bad name ;)
The purpose of the government is to uphold every citizen's inalienable rights; and it must be as small as it can be while remaining capable of fulfilling that purpose. No more, no less
I propose a different mission for government: in economist-lingo, to maximize social welfare (that is, the sum of how happy the population is).
And of course, the population should value freedom of {speech,assembly,press,etc.} very highly.
But---pregnant pause---there is such a thing as a market failure, and I think it makes good sense for the government to step in and make regulations that makes the market more competitive.
Observe that the societal material benefit of a free market comes about not because the market is free but because it's competitive.
If you're free to enter a market where you'll most certainly be crushed by the incumbent monopoly, what does that freedom really buy the society? But if the monopoly is prevented from using its monopoly status to crush you and has to compete reasonably fairly with you, you might have a shot at getting your better/cheaper product out to consumers.
If you're an American, you'll laugh at "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." I don't. I know there's something shady going on, in particular with travel funds for the EU which the MEPs aren't held much accountable for [long story, but the point is if you-an-MEP travel not-extremely-extravagantly, you can pocket a large wad of my tax money at the end of the year. Some politicians do.]. But I also believe politicians (from time to time) genuinely want to do good for the people and the nation.
But first, be sure to mount a scratch monkey! :)
http://edp.org/monkey.htm
I have an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in the summary. (Haven't RTFA, fwiw).
I propose that the word for "leopard" really is the word for "tree". Why?
Well, suppose the suffix "-oo" means "get up into", and the "come[s] over here" part refers to the trees, not the monkeys.
Observe that getting up in the trees is a good way to avoid leopards, and that when you yell "Timber!", it's because trees are coming your way. That way, what the monkeys say should still produce the same behaviour as with the summary's language, but the words seem to have more stable, consistent meanings.
If this were not the case, one might expect the monkeys to say "leopard + comes-over-here" and "tree + comes-over-here", or something similarly systematic.
Also, observe how (human) children apply simple and logical (but sometimes wrong) rules to construct sentence patterns; something like the thought "hey, the expression "you're going down" must mean that relative to you, I'm going up. Yeah! "I'm going up, you [word]!"". Key point being: simple rules, a consistent inverse relationship between up and down. Wouldn't it make sense that monkeys have a similarly simple and consistent language?
Note also that the monkeys signal different behaviours when they observe or suspect eagles and snakes. The word for "eagle" might really mean "duck and cover", and the word for "snake" might really mean "stand really still, on your toes, and look down", since that is how they handle these different kinds of predators.
It might also be more effective to say "get up in the trees" and "get up in the trees" versus "there's a leopard coming" and "there's a [different non-climber] coming"; that way, you can get away with a smaller vocabulary, a more restricted vocal apparatus (since you don't need many different sounds), etc. Just cheaper overall.
My cents tw-oo ;-)
The argument he makes is the weakest argument people who advocate destroying personal privacy can make - and one of the worst things about it, and something they never seem to consider is that it is a COMPLETELY UNAMERICAN argument
I think it's also rather undanish, ungerman, unnorwegian, probably very unswedish, not particularly finnish either, etc.
True, Google is seated in Mountain View, CA, in the US. But it operates elsewhere, and will probably need to respect local laws in ${not the USA}.
Allow anyone to run their cables to any home [...] Which consumer would rather be calling FCC [...] instead of simply calling the competitor to switch?
New this month! Free internet for three months in the local area where Comcast's competitor operates.
(three months later)
And in other news, local internet upstart We're Not Crapcast has filed for bankruptcy. Their president was available for the following comment:
"ever since Comcast offered free internet in our area, we just haven't been able to attract customers. It appear people want cheap crap rather than nice things at a fair price given the quality."
And that's the polite version. The rude one says people are stupid and short-sighted.
Grope around the tubes (especially ted.com) for Dan Gilbert. You'll find people want $50 now rather than $60 in a month. If the $50 is a good deal, isn't the inflation so bad you should be running for the hills?
People prefer being paid $35K, $45K and $55K per respective year rather than $60K, $50K and $40K for the same three-year project (not a repeat game, the future doesn't exist in this scenario). They prefer $135K over $150K. Why?
And with the more money total you also get more money up front, so you get to either invest or save, depending on what you think the inflation is going to be like---I mean, come on people, what's the downside of more money?
And in these scenarios, they know all the information. Suppose you can either get "free internet" or "internet for $x/mo", which would most people want? Here, they don't have perfect information about future costs and payoffs (in the forms of downtime, competent support staff, hidden caps, traffic type restrictions, etc.).
Aside: I heard an economics professor, Mike Munger, say on EconTalk (GIYF) that he picks plumbers by asking four reputable-looking ones for bids on a particular piece of work, then going with the one that bid closest to the average. Interesting strategy---You get what you pay for but with diminishing returns?
I realize I'm posing on Slashdot but I thought we at least read TFS here.
We do, except when it's posted by kdawson ;)
You NEED every bit of performance out of your machine. Emulation just isn't going to cut it.
Got any observations to back that up? Any numbers?
If you emulate a Game Boy or a 4.77 MHz PC (those were the days...), your emulation is going to run faster than the original. Emulation != slow.
I recall seeing a bunch of wine stats, showing that some calls were faster on wine than on windows.
How do you know that it's not the important ones for audio that are faster? How do you know the calls relevant to audio work will never be as fast as on windows (or faster)?
Not only that, I recall reading a post on /. singing the praises of Linux exactly for working with audio ("jack ftw", somewhat paraphrased and condensed).
It's a shame I can't find the link, and of course one person's success story isn't statistics, but it suggests that Linux does do audio work.
But this wouldn't be the state telling the infrastructure provider what price to sell (or lease) at, just that they lease to everybody at the same price.
"Ow, man! You kicked me right in the kijiji!"
"right in the cijines"?
Not being able to translate a site's domain name to its IP address has nothing to do with not being able to access the site.
Yes it does.
Very few---counting cards---people can---counting cards---remember the IP addresses of all the---counting cards---sites they want to---counting cards---visit.
Even though there are ways around it, it does work against many people.
When you have so much money that it becomes an insufficient means of measuring your self-worth
When you begin measuring your self-worth in terms of money, you've already gone off-track.
no matter how overzealous that protective instinct is, it will persist due to the laws of evolution, and you need to make peace with it and accept it: its never going away
Humans also have an instinct to socialize. The internet is one medium for this kind of communication. I don't think you can ever make this other instinct go away either, and I think there should be room for both.
A law that means you can be busted for talking normally about normal stuff (by a fairly reasonable definition of "normal", not including sex) with children whose age you can't verify is in my opinion a bad thing. Would you like to go to jail for saying "DIAF" on the tubes?
I guess someone forgot about Peel's Principles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles
The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.
pushing drugs, violence (not games, but seriously damaging stuff), emotional trauma and non-sexual abuse on minors.
Isn't selling drugs illegal in and of itself? Isn't abuse illegal in and of itself?
I'm fine with laws restricting speech (slander, fraud, yelling fire in a crowded theater). I'm fine with laws against bullying. I'm fine with laws protecting children from horrible events.
As long as they're enforced sensibly.
Which laws have never been enforced non-sensibly?
Also, I would think that a law that says (in legalese) "you can't deprive other people of their freedom; in particular you can't force other people to have sex with you or make porn for you" should about cover the whole child porn issue.
Or do you think there are children who consent to having sex with adults or being porn stars?
Ah, that's a good point. But it also applies to my other example (so there's nothing special about the get-a-chick case), and pretty much any example you can come up with, unless money and power are goals unto themselves.
If power is your goal, you're likely to be sociopathic, or at least not be a kind of person people like hanging around. If money is your goal, you're likely a greedy bastard; again, this won't make you popular.
Having any of these as a goal unto itself and not a means seems to suggest some unhealthy obsession.
With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.
Isn't that what workspaces already do for you? Isn't that why workspaces is such a great feature?
Tab together emacs + console running LaTeX + PDF viewer and get an integrated development environment for scientific papers. Nice.
I think that's what M-x shell and workspaces are for. Yeah okay, I cheat and using a tiling window manager (emacs) on top of another window manager which I use to just switch between two windows (when I'm on the scientific-papers workspace).
But I don't think tabs will revolutionize the way I work.
Maybe I just haven't gotten the point of them yet? Maybe I overfill my keyboard with shortcuts for other things so I can't find the room for shortcuts it takes to create tabs and switch between them efficiently?
clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front. If anyone knows how to disable that, I'd appreciate it.
Don't use metacity.
In Compiz, ccsm, General Settings, Focus & Raise Behaviour, disable "Click to Focus" and "Raise on Click".
(If you don't have the mouse buttons to dedicate one just to raising windows, binding Alt-mouse1 to both raise and move works fairly well. All I'd wish for is that the move functionality waited for me to drag the window a few, say 5, pixels before wobbling my windows; openbox does this the right way.)
Or use openbox, vim ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, read the comments, change "yes" to "no" (or vice versa) at the right places. It integrates with gnome just as well as metacity and gives you the flexibility and "crackrock features" (in the words of Metacity designer Havoc Pennington) you want.
I'm all for the crack rock, btw :)
Ion appeals to a specific type of eccentric.
What do you mean? You can use ION without listening to Metallica...