"Long read" periodicals, which rely on research or expertise are still worth reading. The Economist and Foreign Policy are tow that stick out in my mind.
Local news may or may not be good. When national coverage dominates, you're basically getting a watered down version of last week's CNN. When local coverage dominates, at least you know there was was probably no other source for that information.
Industry Journals probably cover esoteric topic no one else will, so those count if your are actually interested in the esoteric topics.
Sadly, the niche, hobby magazine is pretty much dead. Big players release news and content directly to the web, and the best commentary is spread around blogs and web-zines. In fact, if the bulk of a magazine can be described as "news about X", or a "a community newsletter for Y", then it's dead.
America's tech leaders are literally going to Washington with demands for "comprehensive immigration reform that allows for the hiring of the best and brightest".
I'm honestly surprised that more hasn't been said so far of this statement. I suppose it comes up rather frequently here when visas come up, but I think that it needs to be stated again: there is no STEM worker shortage. There is no lack of qualified people. American companies are just too cheap to train, and don't want to pay American workers proportionate to their talents and the cost of living in America. And I think it's worth repeating that again, and again, and again, because as near as I can tell policy-makers actually seem to believe the nonsense they are being fed.
First, my immediate response, as a Time Warner customer was, "well, we're canceling then. I literally would prefer to deal with Satan than Comcast." That's not an abuse of the word literally: I mean in all serious that the Morning Star, enemy of man, font of lies and evil has a better business track record than Comcast, and I would be more likely to extend him the benefit of the doubt. This means we're ditching cable, internet, and phone from Time Warner.
Second, AT&T still sells internet connections. As do others if we really need to move to a smaller firm. And that's just because we've so far been too lazy to set up either of our devices as a cell modem or link it to a larger screen. Mobile phones make the land line and the cable lines have a lot less value. Comcasts' proposition -- that cable is inherently valuable even with shitty service provided to relatively few true television-viewers -- is already on very shaky terms.
Third, the wife and I immediately re-evaluated how much TV we watch. We quickly came to the agreement that we DVR more than we ever watch, that most of those could have been received over-the-air from networks, and that we really aren't that interested in most of them anymore. Most of the time we ignore the DVR-ed material to binge on classics and series on Netflix, new releases on Red Box, or just plain, old-fashioned, 3-seasons-on-sale-for-$15 DVDs. We can do with a lot less in terms of cable.
In the short run, people who will be most affected are families that can't imagine ditching the Disney Channel. In families without adolescents yet, I think a lot more people will just be too cheap to ever -start- on the Disney Channel. Their strategy, like every Comcast strategy, is short-sighted.
Except that's not what the article accuses them of. The article mainly accuses them of editing badly.
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the high points: * IBM was huge in computing, so why is it so poorly represented (in terms of article count, total kB of text, and editing quality) on Wikipedia, the self-appointed online repository of all human knowledge? * people at IBM seem to be editing IBM-related articles, but not in any kind of organized way. (The article actually chastises them for FAILING to have any kind of organized method.) Mostly it's people editing articles about themselves or things that they have worked on. * The person who worked on the Watson project is and admin on Wikkipedia, married to another editor and edited Wikipedia articles while on the job for IBM. (Almost as if she were passionate about it or something... and working on a project where her computer barfed up nonsense when it parsed a really poorly written article....) * the three shadiest things that they mention are 1) a guy who created an article about an IBM award/title he won; 2) an editing fight about the relevance of a book that linked IBM to the third Reich (which went through the usual Wikipedia channels and ended up in favor of keeping the article); and 3) The guy who started BASH.org (and who happens to be at IBM) arguing that the page was relevant and should be kept (again, usual Wikipedia channels, this time not in BASH.org's favor)
So basically what we have here are the notions that: * even relatively obscure people probably shouldn't edit articles about themselves to avoid bias (which strikes me as silly for biasing things hard in the other direction) * that IBM needs to tackle Wikipedia in an organized way to make up for the lack of interest by anyone outside the industry in preserving this huge chuck of history... * unless it stays away altogether, because they already have a huge company history page on their website. * and that IBM-ers should not touch the articles that they are most likely to have specific knowledge on... *...or for that matter any article, no matter what they happen to find odd if they found it while at work.
like most fights on and about Wikipedia, this is a tempest in a teapot by people who do a poor job articulating whether the collaborative encyclopedia of all human knowledge is actually suppose to be any of those things and why.
As a starter, I remember an interview from way back in the aughties when where they asked an IE designer for his thoughts on the Firefox browser, which was at that point really cutting into IE market share. I remember one comment along the lines of "really good browser: the only thing I would change is to put tabs on top. The address bar and everything else only affects the current tab, so you want tabs on top to give the impression that each tab is like its own, separate browser." At the time, IE didn't have tabs, so he could say these sort of things without thinking he's shooting himself in the foot.
He did cite Microsoft usability studies (no specific study, just the nebulous term "usability studies") as part of that comment. Eventually Mozilla did it's own study and concluded pretty much the same thing. There was also an argument about how tabs would be easier to select now while using less screen space because of the "infinite space" of the tab. You see, if you scroll over a tab, and go too far, one of two things can happen: you either scroll past the tab and onto something else (miss), or you hit the edge of the screen and the cursor lands on the tab anyway. The argument was that this is in effect like having an infinitely tall tab, so it's easier to hit.
Now, some personal comments on why I hate that entire line of reasoning: First, back at the time I found the initial comments from an MS employee to be odd, because that's exactly the opposite of how MS has trained users to think of tabs in every one of their products (except for this hypothetical "tabs on top" browser which didn't exist anywhere yet). Before the browser, you mostly saw tabs in OS preference dialogs, where sometimes the tabs were on top just because they were used as categorical dividers (you know, just like real tabs in a in a real filing cbinet were always meant to be). But just as often, there would be a small section of tabs embedded on some larger dialog pane. The only thing they had in common was the obvious "tabs are nested within windows". To the population of the time, window and browser were inextricably linked.
But that was then, and this is now. What about how people ten years later are used to interacting with the browser? Well for one, most still don't actually think of each tab as a "mini-browser". If anything they just expect the browser control elements to go away altogether to make room for the page. (In fact, the ease with which mobile browsers have hidden away such controls proves to me that taking up _any_ space within a tab is probably a losing proposition.) But where hiding elements isn't possible, the view is still generally that the window is a true "window" out to some slice of the internet. To me personally, arguing that each tab should contain "its own" URL bar and buttons is sort of like arguing that each window in your card should have it's own steering wheel and speedometer. It just doesn't follow for me to embed controls within content. But since the controls are being hidden away fast, it's largely a matter of choice.
So why should tabs-on-top be a good default choice then? They argue because it make tabs easy to select with minimum real estate. The "infinite space of the screen-edge tab". Unfortunately, I don't think I have ever had a browser end at a screen edge. Either I'm on a Mac or a Linux variant that has a bar on top, or I'm in Windows where I never use full-screen mode. (I'm having trouble even thinking of a time when I even would use full-screen mode for a browser now that the screens are all obscenely wide.) So the infinite space argument is DOA. And then there's the times where I'm on a half-foreign system (read: work laptop) where the touchpad cursor is slow and all I want is for the cursor to get there. Overshooting is not a concern. In these cases, making the tabs farther from center and shorter while trying to make up for it with pseudo-infinite space just makes them shorter and farther away.
When doctors or nurses use their knowledge of anatomy in order to torture or conduct medical experiments on helpless subjects, we are rightly outraged. Why doesn't society seem to apply the same standards to engineers?
Whenever I read something like this, I immediately think of Florman's "Existential Pleasures of Engineering" despite the title, Florman's book is rooted is actually a spirited apology for the engineering profession in an age where everyone was lamenting all the modern horrors that those damned engineers could have prevented if they had just be more ethical.
As Florman notes, there has been a large focus for the past half-century on making engineers more ethically aware, and it's mostly pointless. Despite what most people seem to believe engineers are not philosopher kings any more than Technology is some sort of self-sufficient, self-empowering beast working counter to the benefits human society. Both do exactly what the rest of society tells (read: pays, begs, and orders) them to do, and nothing more. And while you don't see many engineers saying this -- because when someone tells them that they run the world and hold the future of all man kind in their hands, people are disinclined to temper their ego and deny it -- we only do what the suits pay us to do, and if we don't do that they fire us and move on to someone else who will.
Let's ask this another way: why aren't business men considering the ethical implications of their investments? Why aren't militaries, bureaucracies, and governments considering the ethical implications of their orders? Why isn't the average person taking five minutes to understand a problem now so he doesn't demand government, the market, and God on high give him an answer that he's going to hate more than the original problem a year from now?
Every profession has ethical considerations. More ink has been spilled and time spent on the subject of ethics in engineering and practical sciences than any discipline save medicine. And yet it does not solve the problem and will not solve the problem because that is not where the problem lies.
I did some work with both Iridium and Inmarsat on a project a while back. It's been a while, so my comments are mostly qualitative, not quantitative.
Iridium offers a global array with redundant satellites (which is good since they lost a few a few years back), while Inmarsat uses a directional antenna relies on you being able to actually aim an antenna. If you're in the Inmarsat range of coverage (and pretty much everyplace habitable is), I'd recommend it. You can get a ethernet-ready single package antenna+modem (about the size of a thick laptop) that's pretty easy to aim (the unit provides some guidance). This assumes you're on foot, of course. If you have a dedicated vehicle you might invest in a tracking antenna. The data rates we got we in the 35 Mbps range.
Iridium is literally dial up over satellite. The service was designed for voice telephony, and it uses an analog signal until the satellite relays it to a base station with modems and an internet connection. It will be reliable, but very slow. The 0.0024 Mbps rate Spazmania gives below matches my recollection.
The two units are similarly portable: the Inmarsat unit is the size of a thick laptop, while the iridium modem is half that, but you have to get an antenna.
Here's the issue: either there is something out there we can't see (hence "dark matter") which is taking on more and more fantastical properties the more we learn about it, or our understanding of the universe's mechanics on a grand scale is wrong (and wrong in such as way that they line up pretty well at our small-scale understanding). Or for that matter, both could be true to some degree.
The scale is beyond the range of direct experimentation, so what can you do? In the former case, you can try to find some other way to observe the material. In the latter case, you can keep making observations until you have enough data to form a new understanding. That's about it. Until you have progress on one, it's very, very difficult to rule out the other.
At this rate, I am disinclined to believe in dark matter. Unfortunately, whether you believe in it or not you have to go through a similar search to determine what's true. This is the slog we're going through now.
..and I just looked in earnest at the capabilities. It's basically a caseless computer. Which is ALSO an eval board. Which means that $200 seems pretty reasonable, really.
It's basically an MCU eval board: low PCB runs, low quantity orders for every part in the BOM, very generic capabilities. EVBs are expensive. Sure, the engineering time that goes into it is pricey, but on a per-unit basis it's the fact that these are very general-use, quasi-custom toys that increases the cost.
Every time I look at my old engineering texts taking up shelf space I think, "I wish that someone could take all these, cut out about half of the valuable material, dice up the remainder between 30 odd sites and apps, and then tie it to a device with a 7-year shelf life."
As anyone who's dealt education-oriented online media (such as Blackboard) can tell you, the products are not always stellar. You get less text, its usually structured in such a way that it takes longer to read, the access is spotty, and it will probably not work as well as that in a year. Even the number one benefit of digitization -- search -- tends to be awkward or incomplete.
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books. I can easily believe that, but it also means you don't get to buy used books, or re-sell your used books. They've streamlined the process in a way that either offers no benefit, or benefits suppliers more than students.
It did convince the university to buy their student's books for them, provided you don't consider being forced to buy an iPad as being the same as being forced to "rent" used books. Or for that matter, so long as you don't consider going to a free library as an option. And so long as you don't consider that buying an iPad and getting electronic copies of textbooks was always an option for most books. All the ways they've streamlined the process are for the primary benefit of the supplier of the material.
Overall, it seems workable for books that you no interest in keeping beyond one semester (electives). But that is exactly the case where you can generally benefit from being flexible, buying bog-standard books from any store you please, buying a digital copy, or going to the library as needed. If you're talking about material that will actually continue to be relevant after a single semester, it sounds like a bad idea, putting a random-valued timer on your reference material.
the problem has always been that you have to be of questionable morality to harvest this data, get data of probably low quality, and piss people off
It may not solve the "current" problem, since advertisers won't even use this if they don't feel it will help them - they already have their means. But that doesn't mean it's useless. Don't be myopic.
No one said it's useless. It's very useful, primarily to advertisers, who will definitely make use of it if it's available. And it aims to solve _exactly_ the "current problem" of advertising, couched in a language that presumes that there is surely some other use out there that we're going to presume is the primary use case once they figure out what it is. So far, their attempt to find another use case amounts to a news site that skips right to the sports section (or a site that knows that to you, news.tld really means news.tld/sports). At best (where the user is concerned) it's a solution in want of a problem. At worst, it's an attempt to obscure its primary purpose. And the morality of the purpose itself remains questionable.
Moreover, it could theoretically work for a lot more than just ads and marketing. It would basically permits third parties to be granted access to your data. So, for instance, you could grant your geolocation database to only certain mapping sites. Or your social media history only to a game site that will utilize it.
There are many applications that are appearing for this kind of information harvesting that aren't all malicious. Some of them are even exciting
Except that's not what's being proposed at all. It's a good idea that any data sharing should require explicit user approval on a party-by-party basis: history, geolocation data, anything. But they're not talking about parsing your geolocation or social connections or anything like that. Their proposal is not "sharing certain things with certain parties over the internet". That's pointlessly broad. They're talking about divining general categories of interests, Stumble-Upon-style, from your browser history -- the type of sites you'd like to see more of, and the stuff you're most likely to buy -- and sending that to designated parties. In other words, they propose giving you increased power to allow people to advertise to you. But, since they haven't fixed any other method of tracking, you don't have a corresponding increase in your power to disallow advertising. The benefits of this are 100% in the favorof the advertiser.
Um, they're proposing that you, the user, can tell sites what you want them to know. Nothing at all, or certain information for certain sites. This is an opt-in. It will be useless to we who don't want it. It will help those who aren't as hardline about ads.
Respectfully, no technology in the history of the web has actually panned out this way. The web as its consumed now is developer-skewed. Ultimately, you're looking to the developers to provide the medium, and often the content, for everything you consume. Your only ultimate freedom is to choose to participate on the developer's terms, or not. Everything else is either granted by a developer favor (perhaps because he actually cares about a democratized, user-empowered web), pried out of the service under false pretenses, or just a result of a blind spot. If the developers don't want to support IE8 anymore, they have the power to lock you out (unless you spoof the UA string). If they want to force javascript on a site that doesn't even need it, they can detect non-compliance and refuse to serve you (unless you run No-Script and essentially lie about having a browser that runs javascript). If they want to require GPS location from your phone and refuse to let you use their location-driven service otherwise, they can. This is generally in the name of offering a uniform experience (read: creating complex applications with minimal testing), but the fact of the matter is that you still lock people out of
This parallels the Mozilla "ping" fiasco of a few years back. In that case, someone at Mozilla labs came to the conclusion that people were always going to be tracked somehow, and all the gyrations of cookies, 1x1 pixel images and so on was just producing a lot of waste traffic. If it's going to happen anyway, why not make the tracking process as technically-efficient as possible? Thus they proposed that each site could have a meta link for a server to "ping" with minimal packets on a page load. Naturally, this would be opt-out: optional because they don't believe that they are evil, and opt-out because if it was opt-in no one would do it. Of course, users objected, the internet got angry, and it never happened.
Now we have another proposal from Mozilla for making the user privacy/advertizing money trade-off slightly more efficient, but no more palatable. In theory there might be some benefit: sites wouldn't _have_ to collect browser history the old fashioned way, and maybe if enough people don't care enough to change, the advertizing wolves will jump on them while the rest of us pass merrily on our way. In practice, that won't happen: advertiser will use tracking cookies, images, history sniffing, _and_ web interests, and people who opt out will probably get a snarky message about how any given website is not available unless you upgrade to a modern browser and enable cookies, javascript, and web interests. Traffic will not decrease. CPU cycles and storage TB will not be saved. Users will have no more, and probably less control over their privacy. And as with every new web technology, you're only as free as your neighbors want to be.
There are other applications which would be valuable: a suggestion engine for movies as Netflix uses, for music as the iTunes "genius" feature uses, for products as Amazon uses, for friend's as Facebook uses, and for Dates as way too many sites use. In fact, in terms of making the web useful, suggestion engines are probably behind only search and the sheer act of being able to fetch data from another computer. But none of those are really what's being proposed here. All of those require deeper and more specialized connections than would be available through browser history. No, this proposal is just about going out of one's way technically to help advertisers, while in the long-run probably providing a net negative to the users and the internet infrastructure.
Yes, this is a more recent (on the scale of years) method: load a bunch of links, let the user's browser assign them properties based on whether they've been visited or not, then let the site's javascript read back the properties from DOM. This is in addition to more direct methods such as cookies (we know where you've been because some party we have an agreement with has been keeping a log for us), super-cookies (we know where you've been through cookie-like files from flashand other things that don't typically get cleared), and 1x1 pixel images images (we know where you've been because you've been phoning home to an image server with every page load).
It did. The idea as Lucas originally described it in his draft (back when it was called "Journal of the Whills") was that it was like picking a book off the shelf and finding it was the fourth volume of a history series. (While he said that later, it seems more likely that it was actually more like coming into a Buck Rogers serial halfway through.) Perhaps the original poster is referring to the way it was subtitled retroactively _on_posters_. That is, until Episode I came out, it was just "Star Wars", with sequels "(Star Wars:) the Empire Strikes Back" and "(Star Wars:) Return of the Jedi".
Episodes 1 through 3 are a lot more modern idea than Lucas wants many to believe. He never really talked about them until he was into his second sequel. There was likely no master design for a 9-part arc as he described. There was just a convenient gap left by an earlier gimmick.
None of this really changes the point though: Star Wars doesn't have a title problem. Well, other than the fact it keeps changing titles on movies that already exist, a problem this proposed scheme exacerbates. Nobody cares if a Star Wars movie follows the Skywalkers anymore than they care if every videogame, novel, cartoon, and comic follow them. Star Wars is not a brand. And while that makes it ever so slightly awkward for the movie to call itself "Star Wars 7", they never did that in the first place, and likely won't do it by the time the movie has a real title. So who cares? Star Wars: Number-free Title.
Microsoft actually filed a patent on this, for "courtesy-aware phones". Walk into a church or movie theater broadcasting the correct "quiet, please" alert, and cell phones could automatically go to silent/vibrate mode, or possibly only receive.
Most people's reaction was "who needs that?" with a smattering of "sounds like something useful to those planning a theater shooting".
Pretty much true. My first thought when I'm outside downtown and I see someone smoking is, "who still smokes?" Of course, the fact that you have to stand 15 feet away from the door -- which is usually far enough out onto a busy sidewalk that it just encourages smokers to travel three more feet to the relative peace of a dark, dingy alley -- probably doesn't do much for the appearance of coolness either.
Innovation is extremely overrated. Most of our tech-driven culture is not based on innovation. Not even close. All the innovating was done decades ago, when people started dreaming up what might be possible given phenomena they had only a slippery grasp of once they were leveraged into machines that hadn't yet been built.
No, our culture is driven by cost-reduction. Once something becomes cheap enough, we do it. If it's not, we put it on a shelf until it is. For the computing revolution, the internet bubble of the 90s, and the social web of today, the driving factors have all been about scale: quantity as a quality all its own. You could have done the same things decades earlier -- hell, we _were_ doing the same thing decades earlier -- but only when it's cheap enough that we increase the scale by three orders of magnitude or more did it become a game-changer.
There are plenty of cases in recent history of a product being invented "before its time". It exists in relative obscurity, figuratively collecting dust until it is brushed off to solve the problem that we only got to at just the present moment. You can't drive technology from behind, it has to be pulled along by the context of the situation. Technology by its very nature is very light on innovation, because it is firmly rooted in a practical context of costs and needs.
Now as to whether some technological innovation can be automated: definitely. All engineering is about working around the edges of a problem until you can describe what you need in terms of what you can do. You probe the problem, consider edge cases, and trace the general shape of a missing block until you can say, "what we really need here is some way to measure X and Y, figure out which is closer to Z, and then just give us that one." And then you have a block-level spec. And then you drill into that block as a device all its own, filling in the parts that are obvious from experience and education until you get to the difficult part, the truly novel part, and again say "what we need here is some what to measure X...." Once you get down to a block that only has things that have already been invented, you're done. Then you have your new block, in your new device, solving your new problem. That's what invention is: work.
Get a "smart" enough robot, one which is flexible enough in its model of the world that you can teach it roughly like a human, and you can certainly train it the way you could a junior engineer. A simpler robot will have more limits, but can also be trained to do simpler, smaller steps of the same process. TFA basically describes a system for making a bot context aware... by trawling through records of what humans have done, it can recognize problems that humans have solved before to help another human solve a similar problem (even if he doesn't know it's similar). It can recognize that a margarita machine, a cement mixer, and washing machine all have similar problems to solve on some level, even though no one human really looked at any two of those problems. It looks at your statement of "what we need here...," and chimes in "oh, like a ____ but for _____."
First, a small point: the laws apply to ALL transactions. The laws for MANDATORY reporting are at $10,000. If a financial institution suspects something weird -- which can mean a $9,999 transaction, 100 transactions of $100 each, a $5000 transaction where a teller noticed the customer also has another $5,000 in cash that he's not doing anything with yet, or a transaction where a customer said, "oh, wait, let me take that cash back and deposit a little less so I am below the $10,000 mandatory reporting limit" -- then they can, should, and probably will still file a report. This applies at banks, airports*, and numerous other places.
* Side note: ever wonder why you can't travel with more than $10,000 cash? Well, you can. Ever wonder why some people act like you can't? Because it means paperwork. It's perfectly legal to walk through an airport with $10,000 and say, "I'm going to Las Vegas to bet the farm." It just means at some point customs, your bank, and the casino cashier will have forms to sign saying they saw $10,000. Unless you actually are driving to the Nevada desert for a drug deal, it's really no skin off your back.
Second, I'm going to make this an, "I told you so," to posters on previous threads who seemed to believe that U.S. money laundering laws only applied to U.S. currency. It's most easily enforced at large, brick and mortar companies actually doling out greenbacks, but it's applicable always and everywhere something is a currency. If enough people were in a mood to transfer all of their cash in to WoW gold pieces, it would apply. It applies equally to Americans and in American jurisdictions to: U.S. dollars, mostly-defunct financial instruments like Bank promissory notes, to proxies like casino chips (and WoW gp), and non-federal currencies like Ithaca Hours, Chinese Yuan, and BitCoins.
Third, on a larger scale, let this be a reminder that there is no "cyberspace". The internet is not something apart from the rest of the world. The internet is just something the whole world is "doing" right now. There is no cybercrime, just crime. There is no cyberlaw, only law. The internet is not regulated differently than any other aspect of our lives, except that special provisions are necessary to disambiguate jurisdiction and to enable law enforcement to cope with the realities of the situation, much in the way "wire fraud" was created as a federal crime to allow enforcement agencies to cope with the jurisdictional questions of a crime committed in one state by a perpetrator in another. The internet is not special. All laws still apply.
While I agree with your sentiments, there are a few ways to read your example on green energy which may be incorrect.
First, all things being equal, cheaper is better... for consumers, for the environment, for everyone. Lower price means less effect on materials resources (from the environment), labor (from people fed by the environment), and profits (which are subject to a money multiplier effect and are then poured into other projects which can have more effect on the environment).
The trouble is, "all things being equal" covers a lot of non-realistic assumptions. To first order, you have the fact that we are arguably under-paying now. Some means of production make use of resources that are not immediately obvious: a factory that produces pollution essentially "consumes" clean air and water, so that there is a delayed cost in the public either cleaning it or paying for increased healthcare. If you cap emissions, you still basically have a subsidy that the government is awarding from the public trust to those industries. This is were the notion of trading comes in: the public decides how much clean air it can afford to lose (or arsenic and mercury it can afford in a gallon of water), it puts that amount up for public auction (the same as we do for electromagnetic spectrum), and the industries can set whatever price is fair by competing with each other to buy that finite resource. (It's actually surprising that this application of free market capitalism, invented by an American economist, applied to the environmental problem most Americans claim to care about has had such a tough time in the American political environment.)
To second order, you get what Edward Tenner once called "the revenge effects of technology". One obvious example: things which are cheap and easy will be done more often because they are cheap and easy to do, eventually causing more time and money to be spent on them than otherwise would. Remember "cruising" when gas was cheap and there was nothing better to do? Or have you noticed that a lot larger percent of your time is spent on spreadsheets ever since software came along and made them "easier"? Similar principle. Applying price pressure can modify behavior in the other direction too. Part of the problem is that power production is inefficient, but a bigger part of the problem is that we just consume too much to begin with.
So the long and short of the above: charging "dirty" energy production isn't necessarily a crazy, horrible idea. If you believe we shouldn't be subsidizing private industry with public resources, and that we need to lower the overall level of consumption, it makes some sense. (Leaving the government to implementing such ideas leaves a lot of room for things to go horribly wrong, of course.)
The approach taken with green hour is similar to the "don't leave the water running when you brush your teeth" approach used in the 80s: convince people that a small change is not hard to make, that small changes multiplied out make a big difference, and that by getting used to these changes we can poise ourselves to make even _bigger_ changes later. It's not meant to accomplish anything in itself: it's a marketing plan for future action. And of course, like every marketing plan I've ever seen, it's overly optimistic, ignores the underlying reality of the situation, and builds up a lot of false expectations in "customers" who will probably never come back.
Fair warning: I program but am not a "programmer". That is to say, I have educational background in object oriented programming, STL constructs, and design patterns, but I'm not a software engineer so it doesn't get used much. What does get used is C, because in embedded systems it come sup quite a bit.
The issue I have with any argument about which tool is better is that the problems solved by C++ don't come up much for a large swath of problems, but they come up constantly for others. If the object-oriented version of your design would ultimately involve one uber-object, you shouldn't take an object oriented approach. If you're going to managing a lot of moving pieces in real time, you probably do want an object-oriented approach. If you want to tightly specify behavior at compile time so you know it will behave as expected at runtime, then templates are a good tool for bolting together well-tested parts to get a reliable new part. (When you're working with templated classes and methods, what you're really writing is a specification. You're not doing immediate work, but when work comes up you can put very tight bounds on how it is done. It's a different mindset than many other aspects of coding.)
Complaining about the lack of shiny new features in C/C++ is a lot like complaining that your MCU doesn't support an assembly STRCAT command, or that your Ethernet cable is bad about recognizing lost data and requesting it be re-sent. That's not their job. That's a higher-level problem for higher up in the stack. Trying to force features against type like duck logic only weakens the tool. When it rains don't ask your hammer to be an umbrella, use the hammer to build a house. Yes, that means you will often use non-C/C++ language to roll out an application. It also means that you need appreciate when those non-C/C++ languages create more trouble than going back to a rock-solid bit of C code would. Use the right tool for the job.
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
Henrich's approach to the ultimatum game seems flawed. He mentions that he offers the equivalent of a few days wages, which is probably too much. The game is usually played for significant, but smaller sums, such as the value of a free lunch. For a sufficiently large starting sum, even tiny portions are enough to be worth something. For example, if you were asked to decide on a split of $200 out of a total $2000, you would probably want to spite the splitter. But you would also probably be overruled by your desire to get a free $200. It's only when we start looking at a smaller total with similar proportions -- say, $2 out of $20 -- that we start to see small portions being worth sacrificing to spite the other guy.
Proportionality is a bad metric in this scenario, and he should probably use some thing like "hours of equivalent labor" instead. (And in that case, he better hope everyone is used to making equal amounts of money in such an hour, which is certainly not true in Western societies.) By sticking to proportionality as a metric long after it becomes meaningless, Henrich buries the signal in noise. He has made it too easy for the splitter to "buy off" the decider.
The Pacific Standard description of the game also misses the point when they say that (for Western subject) the game tends towards and average 50/50 split. The average isn't nearly as interesting as the highest refused split/lowest accepted split, which tells you exactly how much someone is willing to sacrifice to spite the other party/the minimum "fair" proportion. This figure tends to be down near 30%. (It is up for debate how the subjects are internalizing this number as fair... whether it is closer to, say, "half of an even share (25%)," or "half of what the splitter makes (33.33%)," or some other figure.)
He is correct in that it will be culturally influenced. That is a big part of the point. In fact, when the experiment was originally devised, it was considered surprising that people would refuse any split at all. It is, after all, free money split between anonymous parties in exchange for no work at all. The reason people behave in this "illogical" manner is because reputation has worth, and if you want to avoid being cheated in society, it pays to have a reputation for being spiteful and willing to take a small loss to inflict punishment on those who wrong you. No transaction happens in a vacuum. The point is that the social gaming conditioning "leaks through" into our behavior even though the experimenter has (usually) done his best to remove all social components that would reward such spiteful behavior.
Now, Henrich has spent a few years doing this sort of thing, and it's been looked over by plenty of competent people, so I'm presuming his team's understanding is really not so shallow as it is presented here. But still, it is a bit odd to look at this collection of anecdotes that seems to demonstrate "culture matters" and come away with the conclusion that Westerners, and especially Americans, are weird. This is especially true when so many experiments of the previous century were aimed at identifying cultural behaviors and disentangling them from basic human response... in essence, all experiments which prove both that humans are similar (because they respond similarly under highly controlled conditions) and that culture matters (because that what influences them to behave slightly differently under different conditions). An experimenter has to be keenly aware of the culture under test, because experiments can amplify subtle differences if it doesn't account for them.
There's no doubt that it's useful for something: the fact that standalone 3D applications exist is proof that it's good for something. And yes, it would be better to have a portable, universally-understood format for those applications to increase the utility of any such program. But that's not the question. The question is why it hasn't taken off for the web. I suggest that it is because 3D graphics can only harm most of the web-browsing experience.
First, recognize that those areas where it is necessary tends to be as embedded media or shareable, free-standing programs. It's good that you can get at them through the web, and it's great that you don't need to install specialized software, but they're not really web-native any more than a form-base calculator or a flash game is web native. It's just something that happens to be served up through a browser.
Second, recognize that the modern web is not 2D. it is more like 2.5D, or perhaps 2.ND for an arguable value of N. Content is not static, but updates (such as this page). Content is tailored to the specific user (such as facebook). Content on even a "static" page now leverages CSS-based drop-down menus, pop-ups, and forms that require user interaction to reveal information that already exist client-side. And these are the successful "2D+" technologies. I won't even touch the unsuccessful ones like entirely Flash-based websites.
We still recognize such things as "pages", and they have enabled new techniques, but there have also been tradeoffs. Some examples: 1) those CSS-based menus now keep you from finding information as quickly as you could have before. On the old web, if I wanted to find a phone number for a particular location of restaurant chain, I could load their page and cnt+F for my area code... and there it was. Now, I can try to use similar means to accelerate the search (cntl+F on "tel", "contact", "locations", etc.), but that will usually only help me find the specific link/menu quicker. In general, I now find the information every bit as slowly as someone who types 20 words a minute and doesn't know cntl+F exists. 2) On the old web, you could bookmark a page and be pretty confident that -- so long as the site itself remained live -- that information would ways be there and associated with that address. Now it is relatively easy to loose track of information unless you save a local copy, even when the information itself is still on the web. (The USPTO website is notorious for this, with it's ASP pages that serve up dynamically-named TIFF images of patents are live for 2 weeks or so.) This loss of functionality began almost two decades ago, so there are many who don't even remember what a reliable web was like.
The modern web is prettier, but also more mouse-dependent, less reliable in terms of finding old data, and a lot more dependent on our feudal web-lord of choice (i.e. Google) to glue the whole damn thing together
So given that we're talking about adding on a new layer of presentation, we have to ask what it would buy us, and what it would cost us, and whether the net would be better off for it overall. First, we'd be able to simultaneously take in a lot more data in one visual slice, but it would be less searchable. It may also only be really useful if each data point is itself visual. It will also be easier to construct pages where some information is pushed to the fore while other information becomes either peripheral, or completely hidden. So what is this good for? Street-view? Sure. Augmented reality? Sure, But we don't really have it yet. Niche content as describe above? Sure, but that's not going to drive the technology of the underlying web.
So let's take another step back. What is the problem that 3D attempts to solve for everyone? I would argue that that problem, by and large, doesn't exist yet. There are two technologies -- 3D printing and Augmented Reality (of the markup-a-picture-taken-with-my-phone variety, not the cyberpunk-HUD-in-glasses variety) -- which could give mor
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"Long read" periodicals, which rely on research or expertise are still worth reading. The Economist and Foreign Policy are tow that stick out in my mind.
Local news may or may not be good. When national coverage dominates, you're basically getting a watered down version of last week's CNN. When local coverage dominates, at least you know there was was probably no other source for that information.
Industry Journals probably cover esoteric topic no one else will, so those count if your are actually interested in the esoteric topics.
Sadly, the niche, hobby magazine is pretty much dead. Big players release news and content directly to the web, and the best commentary is spread around blogs and web-zines. In fact, if the bulk of a magazine can be described as "news about X", or a "a community newsletter for Y", then it's dead.
America's tech leaders are literally going to Washington with demands for "comprehensive immigration reform that allows for the hiring of the best and brightest".
I'm honestly surprised that more hasn't been said so far of this statement. I suppose it comes up rather frequently here when visas come up, but I think that it needs to be stated again: there is no STEM worker shortage. There is no lack of qualified people. American companies are just too cheap to train, and don't want to pay American workers proportionate to their talents and the cost of living in America. And I think it's worth repeating that again, and again, and again, because as near as I can tell policy-makers actually seem to believe the nonsense they are being fed.
First, my immediate response, as a Time Warner customer was, "well, we're canceling then. I literally would prefer to deal with Satan than Comcast." That's not an abuse of the word literally: I mean in all serious that the Morning Star, enemy of man, font of lies and evil has a better business track record than Comcast, and I would be more likely to extend him the benefit of the doubt. This means we're ditching cable, internet, and phone from Time Warner.
Second, AT&T still sells internet connections. As do others if we really need to move to a smaller firm. And that's just because we've so far been too lazy to set up either of our devices as a cell modem or link it to a larger screen. Mobile phones make the land line and the cable lines have a lot less value. Comcasts' proposition -- that cable is inherently valuable even with shitty service provided to relatively few true television-viewers -- is already on very shaky terms.
Third, the wife and I immediately re-evaluated how much TV we watch. We quickly came to the agreement that we DVR more than we ever watch, that most of those could have been received over-the-air from networks, and that we really aren't that interested in most of them anymore. Most of the time we ignore the DVR-ed material to binge on classics and series on Netflix, new releases on Red Box, or just plain, old-fashioned, 3-seasons-on-sale-for-$15 DVDs. We can do with a lot less in terms of cable.
In the short run, people who will be most affected are families that can't imagine ditching the Disney Channel. In families without adolescents yet, I think a lot more people will just be too cheap to ever -start- on the Disney Channel. Their strategy, like every Comcast strategy, is short-sighted.
Except that's not what the article accuses them of. The article mainly accuses them of editing badly.
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the high points:
* IBM was huge in computing, so why is it so poorly represented (in terms of article count, total kB of text, and editing quality) on Wikipedia, the self-appointed online repository of all human knowledge?
* people at IBM seem to be editing IBM-related articles, but not in any kind of organized way. (The article actually chastises them for FAILING to have any kind of organized method.) Mostly it's people editing articles about themselves or things that they have worked on.
* The person who worked on the Watson project is and admin on Wikkipedia, married to another editor and edited Wikipedia articles while on the job for IBM. (Almost as if she were passionate about it or something... and working on a project where her computer barfed up nonsense when it parsed a really poorly written article....)
* the three shadiest things that they mention are 1) a guy who created an article about an IBM award/title he won; 2) an editing fight about the relevance of a book that linked IBM to the third Reich (which went through the usual Wikipedia channels and ended up in favor of keeping the article); and 3) The guy who started BASH.org (and who happens to be at IBM) arguing that the page was relevant and should be kept (again, usual Wikipedia channels, this time not in BASH.org's favor)
So basically what we have here are the notions that: ...or for that matter any article, no matter what they happen to find odd if they found it while at work.
* even relatively obscure people probably shouldn't edit articles about themselves to avoid bias (which strikes me as silly for biasing things hard in the other direction)
* that IBM needs to tackle Wikipedia in an organized way to make up for the lack of interest by anyone outside the industry in preserving this huge chuck of history...
* unless it stays away altogether, because they already have a huge company history page on their website.
* and that IBM-ers should not touch the articles that they are most likely to have specific knowledge on...
*
like most fights on and about Wikipedia, this is a tempest in a teapot by people who do a poor job articulating whether the collaborative encyclopedia of all human knowledge is actually suppose to be any of those things and why.
There are a couple of reasons.
As a starter, I remember an interview from way back in the aughties when where they asked an IE designer for his thoughts on the Firefox browser, which was at that point really cutting into IE market share. I remember one comment along the lines of "really good browser: the only thing I would change is to put tabs on top. The address bar and everything else only affects the current tab, so you want tabs on top to give the impression that each tab is like its own, separate browser." At the time, IE didn't have tabs, so he could say these sort of things without thinking he's shooting himself in the foot.
He did cite Microsoft usability studies (no specific study, just the nebulous term "usability studies") as part of that comment. Eventually Mozilla did it's own study and concluded pretty much the same thing. There was also an argument about how tabs would be easier to select now while using less screen space because of the "infinite space" of the tab. You see, if you scroll over a tab, and go too far, one of two things can happen: you either scroll past the tab and onto something else (miss), or you hit the edge of the screen and the cursor lands on the tab anyway. The argument was that this is in effect like having an infinitely tall tab, so it's easier to hit.
Now, some personal comments on why I hate that entire line of reasoning:
First, back at the time I found the initial comments from an MS employee to be odd, because that's exactly the opposite of how MS has trained users to think of tabs in every one of their products (except for this hypothetical "tabs on top" browser which didn't exist anywhere yet). Before the browser, you mostly saw tabs in OS preference dialogs, where sometimes the tabs were on top just because they were used as categorical dividers (you know, just like real tabs in a in a real filing cbinet were always meant to be). But just as often, there would be a small section of tabs embedded on some larger dialog pane. The only thing they had in common was the obvious "tabs are nested within windows". To the population of the time, window and browser were inextricably linked.
But that was then, and this is now. What about how people ten years later are used to interacting with the browser? Well for one, most still don't actually think of each tab as a "mini-browser". If anything they just expect the browser control elements to go away altogether to make room for the page. (In fact, the ease with which mobile browsers have hidden away such controls proves to me that taking up _any_ space within a tab is probably a losing proposition.) But where hiding elements isn't possible, the view is still generally that the window is a true "window" out to some slice of the internet. To me personally, arguing that each tab should contain "its own" URL bar and buttons is sort of like arguing that each window in your card should have it's own steering wheel and speedometer. It just doesn't follow for me to embed controls within content. But since the controls are being hidden away fast, it's largely a matter of choice.
So why should tabs-on-top be a good default choice then? They argue because it make tabs easy to select with minimum real estate. The "infinite space of the screen-edge tab". Unfortunately, I don't think I have ever had a browser end at a screen edge. Either I'm on a Mac or a Linux variant that has a bar on top, or I'm in Windows where I never use full-screen mode. (I'm having trouble even thinking of a time when I even would use full-screen mode for a browser now that the screens are all obscenely wide.) So the infinite space argument is DOA. And then there's the times where I'm on a half-foreign system (read: work laptop) where the touchpad cursor is slow and all I want is for the cursor to get there. Overshooting is not a concern. In these cases, making the tabs farther from center and shorter while trying to make up for it with pseudo-infinite space just makes them shorter and farther away.
And on a final, unrelated note, whe
When doctors or nurses use their knowledge of anatomy in order to torture or conduct medical experiments on helpless subjects, we are rightly outraged. Why doesn't society seem to apply the same standards to engineers?
Whenever I read something like this, I immediately think of Florman's "Existential Pleasures of Engineering" despite the title, Florman's book is rooted is actually a spirited apology for the engineering profession in an age where everyone was lamenting all the modern horrors that those damned engineers could have prevented if they had just be more ethical.
As Florman notes, there has been a large focus for the past half-century on making engineers more ethically aware, and it's mostly pointless. Despite what most people seem to believe engineers are not philosopher kings any more than Technology is some sort of self-sufficient, self-empowering beast working counter to the benefits human society. Both do exactly what the rest of society tells (read: pays, begs, and orders) them to do, and nothing more. And while you don't see many engineers saying this -- because when someone tells them that they run the world and hold the future of all man kind in their hands, people are disinclined to temper their ego and deny it -- we only do what the suits pay us to do, and if we don't do that they fire us and move on to someone else who will.
Let's ask this another way: why aren't business men considering the ethical implications of their investments? Why aren't militaries, bureaucracies, and governments considering the ethical implications of their orders? Why isn't the average person taking five minutes to understand a problem now so he doesn't demand government, the market, and God on high give him an answer that he's going to hate more than the original problem a year from now?
Every profession has ethical considerations. More ink has been spilled and time spent on the subject of ethics in engineering and practical sciences than any discipline save medicine. And yet it does not solve the problem and will not solve the problem because that is not where the problem lies.
I did some work with both Iridium and Inmarsat on a project a while back. It's been a while, so my comments are mostly qualitative, not quantitative.
Iridium offers a global array with redundant satellites (which is good since they lost a few a few years back), while Inmarsat uses a directional antenna relies on you being able to actually aim an antenna. If you're in the Inmarsat range of coverage (and pretty much everyplace habitable is), I'd recommend it. You can get a ethernet-ready single package antenna+modem (about the size of a thick laptop) that's pretty easy to aim (the unit provides some guidance). This assumes you're on foot, of course. If you have a dedicated vehicle you might invest in a tracking antenna. The data rates we got we in the 35 Mbps range.
Iridium is literally dial up over satellite. The service was designed for voice telephony, and it uses an analog signal until the satellite relays it to a base station with modems and an internet connection. It will be reliable, but very slow. The 0.0024 Mbps rate Spazmania gives below matches my recollection.
The two units are similarly portable: the Inmarsat unit is the size of a thick laptop, while the iridium modem is half that, but you have to get an antenna.
Here's the issue: either there is something out there we can't see (hence "dark matter") which is taking on more and more fantastical properties the more we learn about it, or our understanding of the universe's mechanics on a grand scale is wrong (and wrong in such as way that they line up pretty well at our small-scale understanding). Or for that matter, both could be true to some degree.
The scale is beyond the range of direct experimentation, so what can you do? In the former case, you can try to find some other way to observe the material. In the latter case, you can keep making observations until you have enough data to form a new understanding. That's about it. Until you have progress on one, it's very, very difficult to rule out the other.
At this rate, I am disinclined to believe in dark matter. Unfortunately, whether you believe in it or not you have to go through a similar search to determine what's true. This is the slog we're going through now.
You've failed me for the last time, Starscream!
What? Success? Oh. Well good then.
..and I just looked in earnest at the capabilities. It's basically a caseless computer. Which is ALSO an eval board. Which means that $200 seems pretty reasonable, really.
It's basically an MCU eval board: low PCB runs, low quantity orders for every part in the BOM, very generic capabilities. EVBs are expensive. Sure, the engineering time that goes into it is pricey, but on a per-unit basis it's the fact that these are very general-use, quasi-custom toys that increases the cost.
Every time I look at my old engineering texts taking up shelf space I think, "I wish that someone could take all these, cut out about half of the valuable material, dice up the remainder between 30 odd sites and apps, and then tie it to a device with a 7-year shelf life."
As anyone who's dealt education-oriented online media (such as Blackboard) can tell you, the products are not always stellar. You get less text, its usually structured in such a way that it takes longer to read, the access is spotty, and it will probably not work as well as that in a year. Even the number one benefit of digitization -- search -- tends to be awkward or incomplete.
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books. I can easily believe that, but it also means you don't get to buy used books, or re-sell your used books. They've streamlined the process in a way that either offers no benefit, or benefits suppliers more than students.
It did convince the university to buy their student's books for them, provided you don't consider being forced to buy an iPad as being the same as being forced to "rent" used books. Or for that matter, so long as you don't consider going to a free library as an option. And so long as you don't consider that buying an iPad and getting electronic copies of textbooks was always an option for most books. All the ways they've streamlined the process are for the primary benefit of the supplier of the material.
Overall, it seems workable for books that you no interest in keeping beyond one semester (electives). But that is exactly the case where you can generally benefit from being flexible, buying bog-standard books from any store you please, buying a digital copy, or going to the library as needed. If you're talking about material that will actually continue to be relevant after a single semester, it sounds like a bad idea, putting a random-valued timer on your reference material.
the problem has always been that you have to be of questionable morality to harvest this data, get data of probably low quality, and piss people off
It may not solve the "current" problem, since advertisers won't even use this if they don't feel it will help them - they already have their means. But that doesn't mean it's useless. Don't be myopic.
No one said it's useless. It's very useful, primarily to advertisers, who will definitely make use of it if it's available. And it aims to solve _exactly_ the "current problem" of advertising, couched in a language that presumes that there is surely some other use out there that we're going to presume is the primary use case once they figure out what it is. So far, their attempt to find another use case amounts to a news site that skips right to the sports section (or a site that knows that to you, news.tld really means news.tld/sports). At best (where the user is concerned) it's a solution in want of a problem. At worst, it's an attempt to obscure its primary purpose. And the morality of the purpose itself remains questionable.
Moreover, it could theoretically work for a lot more than just ads and marketing. It would basically permits third parties to be granted access to your data. So, for instance, you could grant your geolocation database to only certain mapping sites. Or your social media history only to a game site that will utilize it.
There are many applications that are appearing for this kind of information harvesting that aren't all malicious. Some of them are even exciting
Except that's not what's being proposed at all. It's a good idea that any data sharing should require explicit user approval on a party-by-party basis: history, geolocation data, anything. But they're not talking about parsing your geolocation or social connections or anything like that. Their proposal is not "sharing certain things with certain parties over the internet". That's pointlessly broad. They're talking about divining general categories of interests, Stumble-Upon-style, from your browser history -- the type of sites you'd like to see more of, and the stuff you're most likely to buy -- and sending that to designated parties. In other words, they propose giving you increased power to allow people to advertise to you. But, since they haven't fixed any other method of tracking, you don't have a corresponding increase in your power to disallow advertising. The benefits of this are 100% in the favorof the advertiser.
Um, they're proposing that you, the user, can tell sites what you want them to know. Nothing at all, or certain information for certain sites. This is an opt-in. It will be useless to we who don't want it. It will help those who aren't as hardline about ads.
Respectfully, no technology in the history of the web has actually panned out this way. The web as its consumed now is developer-skewed. Ultimately, you're looking to the developers to provide the medium, and often the content, for everything you consume. Your only ultimate freedom is to choose to participate on the developer's terms, or not. Everything else is either granted by a developer favor (perhaps because he actually cares about a democratized, user-empowered web), pried out of the service under false pretenses, or just a result of a blind spot. If the developers don't want to support IE8 anymore, they have the power to lock you out (unless you spoof the UA string). If they want to force javascript on a site that doesn't even need it, they can detect non-compliance and refuse to serve you (unless you run No-Script and essentially lie about having a browser that runs javascript). If they want to require GPS location from your phone and refuse to let you use their location-driven service otherwise, they can. This is generally in the name of offering a uniform experience (read: creating complex applications with minimal testing), but the fact of the matter is that you still lock people out of
This parallels the Mozilla "ping" fiasco of a few years back. In that case, someone at Mozilla labs came to the conclusion that people were always going to be tracked somehow, and all the gyrations of cookies, 1x1 pixel images and so on was just producing a lot of waste traffic. If it's going to happen anyway, why not make the tracking process as technically-efficient as possible? Thus they proposed that each site could have a meta link for a server to "ping" with minimal packets on a page load. Naturally, this would be opt-out: optional because they don't believe that they are evil, and opt-out because if it was opt-in no one would do it. Of course, users objected, the internet got angry, and it never happened.
Now we have another proposal from Mozilla for making the user privacy/advertizing money trade-off slightly more efficient, but no more palatable. In theory there might be some benefit: sites wouldn't _have_ to collect browser history the old fashioned way, and maybe if enough people don't care enough to change, the advertizing wolves will jump on them while the rest of us pass merrily on our way. In practice, that won't happen: advertiser will use tracking cookies, images, history sniffing, _and_ web interests, and people who opt out will probably get a snarky message about how any given website is not available unless you upgrade to a modern browser and enable cookies, javascript, and web interests. Traffic will not decrease. CPU cycles and storage TB will not be saved. Users will have no more, and probably less control over their privacy. And as with every new web technology, you're only as free as your neighbors want to be.
There are other applications which would be valuable: a suggestion engine for movies as Netflix uses, for music as the iTunes "genius" feature uses, for products as Amazon uses, for friend's as Facebook uses, and for Dates as way too many sites use. In fact, in terms of making the web useful, suggestion engines are probably behind only search and the sheer act of being able to fetch data from another computer. But none of those are really what's being proposed here. All of those require deeper and more specialized connections than would be available through browser history. No, this proposal is just about going out of one's way technically to help advertisers, while in the long-run probably providing a net negative to the users and the internet infrastructure.
Yes, this is a more recent (on the scale of years) method: load a bunch of links, let the user's browser assign them properties based on whether they've been visited or not, then let the site's javascript read back the properties from DOM. This is in addition to more direct methods such as cookies (we know where you've been because some party we have an agreement with has been keeping a log for us), super-cookies (we know where you've been through cookie-like files from flashand other things that don't typically get cleared), and 1x1 pixel images images (we know where you've been because you've been phoning home to an image server with every page load).
It did. The idea as Lucas originally described it in his draft (back when it was called "Journal of the Whills") was that it was like picking a book off the shelf and finding it was the fourth volume of a history series. (While he said that later, it seems more likely that it was actually more like coming into a Buck Rogers serial halfway through.) Perhaps the original poster is referring to the way it was subtitled retroactively _on_posters_. That is, until Episode I came out, it was just "Star Wars", with sequels "(Star Wars:) the Empire Strikes Back" and "(Star Wars:) Return of the Jedi".
Episodes 1 through 3 are a lot more modern idea than Lucas wants many to believe. He never really talked about them until he was into his second sequel. There was likely no master design for a 9-part arc as he described. There was just a convenient gap left by an earlier gimmick.
None of this really changes the point though: Star Wars doesn't have a title problem. Well, other than the fact it keeps changing titles on movies that already exist, a problem this proposed scheme exacerbates. Nobody cares if a Star Wars movie follows the Skywalkers anymore than they care if every videogame, novel, cartoon, and comic follow them. Star Wars is not a brand. And while that makes it ever so slightly awkward for the movie to call itself "Star Wars 7", they never did that in the first place, and likely won't do it by the time the movie has a real title. So who cares? Star Wars: Number-free Title.
Microsoft actually filed a patent on this, for "courtesy-aware phones". Walk into a church or movie theater broadcasting the correct "quiet, please" alert, and cell phones could automatically go to silent/vibrate mode, or possibly only receive.
Most people's reaction was "who needs that?" with a smattering of "sounds like something useful to those planning a theater shooting".
Pretty much true. My first thought when I'm outside downtown and I see someone smoking is, "who still smokes?" Of course, the fact that you have to stand 15 feet away from the door -- which is usually far enough out onto a busy sidewalk that it just encourages smokers to travel three more feet to the relative peace of a dark, dingy alley -- probably doesn't do much for the appearance of coolness either.
Innovation is extremely overrated. Most of our tech-driven culture is not based on innovation. Not even close. All the innovating was done decades ago, when people started dreaming up what might be possible given phenomena they had only a slippery grasp of once they were leveraged into machines that hadn't yet been built.
No, our culture is driven by cost-reduction. Once something becomes cheap enough, we do it. If it's not, we put it on a shelf until it is. For the computing revolution, the internet bubble of the 90s, and the social web of today, the driving factors have all been about scale: quantity as a quality all its own. You could have done the same things decades earlier -- hell, we _were_ doing the same thing decades earlier -- but only when it's cheap enough that we increase the scale by three orders of magnitude or more did it become a game-changer.
There are plenty of cases in recent history of a product being invented "before its time". It exists in relative obscurity, figuratively collecting dust until it is brushed off to solve the problem that we only got to at just the present moment. You can't drive technology from behind, it has to be pulled along by the context of the situation. Technology by its very nature is very light on innovation, because it is firmly rooted in a practical context of costs and needs.
Now as to whether some technological innovation can be automated: definitely. All engineering is about working around the edges of a problem until you can describe what you need in terms of what you can do. You probe the problem, consider edge cases, and trace the general shape of a missing block until you can say, "what we really need here is some way to measure X and Y, figure out which is closer to Z, and then just give us that one." And then you have a block-level spec. And then you drill into that block as a device all its own, filling in the parts that are obvious from experience and education until you get to the difficult part, the truly novel part, and again say "what we need here is some what to measure X...." Once you get down to a block that only has things that have already been invented, you're done. Then you have your new block, in your new device, solving your new problem. That's what invention is: work.
Get a "smart" enough robot, one which is flexible enough in its model of the world that you can teach it roughly like a human, and you can certainly train it the way you could a junior engineer. A simpler robot will have more limits, but can also be trained to do simpler, smaller steps of the same process. TFA basically describes a system for making a bot context aware... by trawling through records of what humans have done, it can recognize problems that humans have solved before to help another human solve a similar problem (even if he doesn't know it's similar). It can recognize that a margarita machine, a cement mixer, and washing machine all have similar problems to solve on some level, even though no one human really looked at any two of those problems. It looks at your statement of "what we need here...," and chimes in "oh, like a ____ but for _____."
First, a small point: the laws apply to ALL transactions. The laws for MANDATORY reporting are at $10,000. If a financial institution suspects something weird -- which can mean a $9,999 transaction, 100 transactions of $100 each, a $5000 transaction where a teller noticed the customer also has another $5,000 in cash that he's not doing anything with yet, or a transaction where a customer said, "oh, wait, let me take that cash back and deposit a little less so I am below the $10,000 mandatory reporting limit" -- then they can, should, and probably will still file a report. This applies at banks, airports*, and numerous other places.
* Side note: ever wonder why you can't travel with more than $10,000 cash? Well, you can. Ever wonder why some people act like you can't? Because it means paperwork. It's perfectly legal to walk through an airport with $10,000 and say, "I'm going to Las Vegas to bet the farm." It just means at some point customs, your bank, and the casino cashier will have forms to sign saying they saw $10,000. Unless you actually are driving to the Nevada desert for a drug deal, it's really no skin off your back.
Second, I'm going to make this an, "I told you so," to posters on previous threads who seemed to believe that U.S. money laundering laws only applied to U.S. currency. It's most easily enforced at large, brick and mortar companies actually doling out greenbacks, but it's applicable always and everywhere something is a currency. If enough people were in a mood to transfer all of their cash in to WoW gold pieces, it would apply. It applies equally to Americans and in American jurisdictions to: U.S. dollars, mostly-defunct financial instruments like Bank promissory notes, to proxies like casino chips (and WoW gp), and non-federal currencies like Ithaca Hours, Chinese Yuan, and BitCoins.
Third, on a larger scale, let this be a reminder that there is no "cyberspace". The internet is not something apart from the rest of the world. The internet is just something the whole world is "doing" right now. There is no cybercrime, just crime. There is no cyberlaw, only law. The internet is not regulated differently than any other aspect of our lives, except that special provisions are necessary to disambiguate jurisdiction and to enable law enforcement to cope with the realities of the situation, much in the way "wire fraud" was created as a federal crime to allow enforcement agencies to cope with the jurisdictional questions of a crime committed in one state by a perpetrator in another. The internet is not special. All laws still apply.
While I agree with your sentiments, there are a few ways to read your example on green energy which may be incorrect.
First, all things being equal, cheaper is better... for consumers, for the environment, for everyone. Lower price means less effect on materials resources (from the environment), labor (from people fed by the environment), and profits (which are subject to a money multiplier effect and are then poured into other projects which can have more effect on the environment).
The trouble is, "all things being equal" covers a lot of non-realistic assumptions. To first order, you have the fact that we are arguably under-paying now. Some means of production make use of resources that are not immediately obvious: a factory that produces pollution essentially "consumes" clean air and water, so that there is a delayed cost in the public either cleaning it or paying for increased healthcare. If you cap emissions, you still basically have a subsidy that the government is awarding from the public trust to those industries. This is were the notion of trading comes in: the public decides how much clean air it can afford to lose (or arsenic and mercury it can afford in a gallon of water), it puts that amount up for public auction (the same as we do for electromagnetic spectrum), and the industries can set whatever price is fair by competing with each other to buy that finite resource. (It's actually surprising that this application of free market capitalism, invented by an American economist, applied to the environmental problem most Americans claim to care about has had such a tough time in the American political environment.)
To second order, you get what Edward Tenner once called "the revenge effects of technology". One obvious example: things which are cheap and easy will be done more often because they are cheap and easy to do, eventually causing more time and money to be spent on them than otherwise would. Remember "cruising" when gas was cheap and there was nothing better to do? Or have you noticed that a lot larger percent of your time is spent on spreadsheets ever since software came along and made them "easier"? Similar principle. Applying price pressure can modify behavior in the other direction too. Part of the problem is that power production is inefficient, but a bigger part of the problem is that we just consume too much to begin with.
So the long and short of the above: charging "dirty" energy production isn't necessarily a crazy, horrible idea. If you believe we shouldn't be subsidizing private industry with public resources, and that we need to lower the overall level of consumption, it makes some sense. (Leaving the government to implementing such ideas leaves a lot of room for things to go horribly wrong, of course.)
The approach taken with green hour is similar to the "don't leave the water running when you brush your teeth" approach used in the 80s: convince people that a small change is not hard to make, that small changes multiplied out make a big difference, and that by getting used to these changes we can poise ourselves to make even _bigger_ changes later. It's not meant to accomplish anything in itself: it's a marketing plan for future action. And of course, like every marketing plan I've ever seen, it's overly optimistic, ignores the underlying reality of the situation, and builds up a lot of false expectations in "customers" who will probably never come back.
Fair warning: I program but am not a "programmer". That is to say, I have educational background in object oriented programming, STL constructs, and design patterns, but I'm not a software engineer so it doesn't get used much. What does get used is C, because in embedded systems it come sup quite a bit.
The issue I have with any argument about which tool is better is that the problems solved by C++ don't come up much for a large swath of problems, but they come up constantly for others. If the object-oriented version of your design would ultimately involve one uber-object, you shouldn't take an object oriented approach. If you're going to managing a lot of moving pieces in real time, you probably do want an object-oriented approach. If you want to tightly specify behavior at compile time so you know it will behave as expected at runtime, then templates are a good tool for bolting together well-tested parts to get a reliable new part. (When you're working with templated classes and methods, what you're really writing is a specification. You're not doing immediate work, but when work comes up you can put very tight bounds on how it is done. It's a different mindset than many other aspects of coding.)
Complaining about the lack of shiny new features in C/C++ is a lot like complaining that your MCU doesn't support an assembly STRCAT command, or that your Ethernet cable is bad about recognizing lost data and requesting it be re-sent. That's not their job. That's a higher-level problem for higher up in the stack. Trying to force features against type like duck logic only weakens the tool. When it rains don't ask your hammer to be an umbrella, use the hammer to build a house. Yes, that means you will often use non-C/C++ language to roll out an application. It also means that you need appreciate when those non-C/C++ languages create more trouble than going back to a rock-solid bit of C code would. Use the right tool for the job.
How should official documentation be better redesigned?
It should exist.
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
Henrich's approach to the ultimatum game seems flawed. He mentions that he offers the equivalent of a few days wages, which is probably too much. The game is usually played for significant, but smaller sums, such as the value of a free lunch. For a sufficiently large starting sum, even tiny portions are enough to be worth something. For example, if you were asked to decide on a split of $200 out of a total $2000, you would probably want to spite the splitter. But you would also probably be overruled by your desire to get a free $200. It's only when we start looking at a smaller total with similar proportions -- say, $2 out of $20 -- that we start to see small portions being worth sacrificing to spite the other guy.
Proportionality is a bad metric in this scenario, and he should probably use some thing like "hours of equivalent labor" instead. (And in that case, he better hope everyone is used to making equal amounts of money in such an hour, which is certainly not true in Western societies.) By sticking to proportionality as a metric long after it becomes meaningless, Henrich buries the signal in noise. He has made it too easy for the splitter to "buy off" the decider.
The Pacific Standard description of the game also misses the point when they say that (for Western subject) the game tends towards and average 50/50 split. The average isn't nearly as interesting as the highest refused split/lowest accepted split, which tells you exactly how much someone is willing to sacrifice to spite the other party/the minimum "fair" proportion. This figure tends to be down near 30%. (It is up for debate how the subjects are internalizing this number as fair... whether it is closer to, say, "half of an even share (25%)," or "half of what the splitter makes (33.33%)," or some other figure.)
He is correct in that it will be culturally influenced. That is a big part of the point. In fact, when the experiment was originally devised, it was considered surprising that people would refuse any split at all. It is, after all, free money split between anonymous parties in exchange for no work at all. The reason people behave in this "illogical" manner is because reputation has worth, and if you want to avoid being cheated in society, it pays to have a reputation for being spiteful and willing to take a small loss to inflict punishment on those who wrong you. No transaction happens in a vacuum. The point is that the social gaming conditioning "leaks through" into our behavior even though the experimenter has (usually) done his best to remove all social components that would reward such spiteful behavior.
Now, Henrich has spent a few years doing this sort of thing, and it's been looked over by plenty of competent people, so I'm presuming his team's understanding is really not so shallow as it is presented here. But still, it is a bit odd to look at this collection of anecdotes that seems to demonstrate "culture matters" and come away with the conclusion that Westerners, and especially Americans, are weird. This is especially true when so many experiments of the previous century were aimed at identifying cultural behaviors and disentangling them from basic human response... in essence, all experiments which prove both that humans are similar (because they respond similarly under highly controlled conditions) and that culture matters (because that what influences them to behave slightly differently under different conditions). An experimenter has to be keenly aware of the culture under test, because experiments can amplify subtle differences if it doesn't account for them.
There's no doubt that it's useful for something: the fact that standalone 3D applications exist is proof that it's good for something. And yes, it would be better to have a portable, universally-understood format for those applications to increase the utility of any such program. But that's not the question. The question is why it hasn't taken off for the web. I suggest that it is because 3D graphics can only harm most of the web-browsing experience.
First, recognize that those areas where it is necessary tends to be as embedded media or shareable, free-standing programs. It's good that you can get at them through the web, and it's great that you don't need to install specialized software, but they're not really web-native any more than a form-base calculator or a flash game is web native. It's just something that happens to be served up through a browser.
Second, recognize that the modern web is not 2D. it is more like 2.5D, or perhaps 2.ND for an arguable value of N. Content is not static, but updates (such as this page). Content is tailored to the specific user (such as facebook). Content on even a "static" page now leverages CSS-based drop-down menus, pop-ups, and forms that require user interaction to reveal information that already exist client-side. And these are the successful "2D+" technologies. I won't even touch the unsuccessful ones like entirely Flash-based websites.
We still recognize such things as "pages", and they have enabled new techniques, but there have also been tradeoffs. Some examples:
1) those CSS-based menus now keep you from finding information as quickly as you could have before. On the old web, if I wanted to find a phone number for a particular location of restaurant chain, I could load their page and cnt+F for my area code... and there it was. Now, I can try to use similar means to accelerate the search (cntl+F on "tel", "contact", "locations", etc.), but that will usually only help me find the specific link/menu quicker. In general, I now find the information every bit as slowly as someone who types 20 words a minute and doesn't know cntl+F exists.
2) On the old web, you could bookmark a page and be pretty confident that -- so long as the site itself remained live -- that information would ways be there and associated with that address. Now it is relatively easy to loose track of information unless you save a local copy, even when the information itself is still on the web. (The USPTO website is notorious for this, with it's ASP pages that serve up dynamically-named TIFF images of patents are live for 2 weeks or so.) This loss of functionality began almost two decades ago, so there are many who don't even remember what a reliable web was like.
The modern web is prettier, but also more mouse-dependent, less reliable in terms of finding old data, and a lot more dependent on our feudal web-lord of choice (i.e. Google) to glue the whole damn thing together
So given that we're talking about adding on a new layer of presentation, we have to ask what it would buy us, and what it would cost us, and whether the net would be better off for it overall. First, we'd be able to simultaneously take in a lot more data in one visual slice, but it would be less searchable. It may also only be really useful if each data point is itself visual. It will also be easier to construct pages where some information is pushed to the fore while other information becomes either peripheral, or completely hidden. So what is this good for? Street-view? Sure. Augmented reality? Sure, But we don't really have it yet. Niche content as describe above? Sure, but that's not going to drive the technology of the underlying web.
So let's take another step back. What is the problem that 3D attempts to solve for everyone? I would argue that that problem, by and large, doesn't exist yet. There are two technologies -- 3D printing and Augmented Reality (of the markup-a-picture-taken-with-my-phone variety, not the cyberpunk-HUD-in-glasses variety) -- which could give mor