Only one thing will fix our broken democracy at this point -- revolution.
I don't agree. Anyone who expect a generation educated by the state to be independent of the state deserves what they get. State-run education needs to stop. That's the real cancer thats been eating our core heritage.
They won't break like moving-part devices, but on the other hand, I highly doubt these beefy, net-connected TVs will have much in the way of software security. TV botnets, anyone?
It's a lack of marketing. If one gives away his product, he doesn't have money to market it. It's not shocking when you think about it. People have a serious mental block about things that don't cost money and aren't pushed by marketing.
Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bitarchitectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce.
Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.
When I read the Slashdot summary, I totally missed the point. The point is that some MIT folks have created a garbage paper generator and are mocking the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.
I am against global warming action because somehow all these anti-pollution movements want more government. I've no problem at all with a movement that tries to cut down on pollution as long as they don't try to do it top-down through the government. Call me cynical (I am), but I think there are two motivations for promoting warmingmongering: 1. Money 2. Political control The #1s will go away after the money dries up. I'm much more concerned about the #2s, because government bureaucracy tends to be immortal, and I've never heard of bureaucracy that expands freedoms instead of restricting them.
I agree that child labor regulations and safety regulations are necessary, but there's no reason to license so many types of manual labor. There's no reason to license tile-laying and roofing. But notice the glaring omission of electrical from my list. That is something that can seriously injure people and property if done wrong. We have to find a middle ground on these issues. I suspect most of the absurd licensing requirements exist because professional laborers want to discourage new competition, not because of safety.
Also, the minimum wage is a very bad idea. If Congress raises the minimum wage, it doesn't make workers' lives better. They just get laid off.
The government does not have the solution. It is the problem. In the old days, back before the introduction of the Federal Reserve, stock market crashes happened on a regular basis, but nobody ran around for the next decade crying about it. The market just purged itself of bad assets and risky practices and recovered in a few months. The Great Depression was caused by Benjamin Strong's fiddly experimentation with his brand-new central bank and his scheming with European investors (Google benjamin strong Britain gold). The Fed overheated the economy for too long and then cooled it down too fast. It was made even worse by the explosive tax burden FDR introduced. (See Bernanke's admission of Fed guilt on Friedman's 90th birthday.)
Nowadays, we make it far, far worse by trying to prevent the bad assets and insolvent businesses from failing by sucking solvent (good) assets out of the economy to prop up the insolvent (bad). The real solution is to simply let them fail. The Big Three auto mfgs. are in an impossible situation. They promised via union contracts to pay all their employees a comfortable sum for the rest of their lives. This is something that they simply cannot afford to do. What's the solution? Just let the company fail and the contracts dissolve. Someone else will buy the property and machines and start the company over.
Now, it's true that this will be hard for those employees who were supposed to be taken care of, but unfortunately life isn't fair (my mother's favorite saying). The Bill of Rights does not guarantee happiness, only the right to pursue it (Google obama's bill of rights).
If you really want to bail out struggling industries, try deregulating and cutting taxes. Now, I agree that some regulation is needed, but too much of it is just feel-good paperwork. The regulations that especially need to go are the ones regarding employment. I, as a high school student, ought to be able to go and flip burgers for a pittance. (Hey, I've an idea! Let's require computer techs to be licensed before they can run helpdesks or do house calls! That way we make sure people don't pay for bad work!) I also ought to be able to go and install a floor, furnace or pipe in someone's house, if they're willing to pay me. If I kill myself it's my own fault.
If you want a better economy, get the government off of it. We used to have the best economy in the world. Somehow we've come to think that government as god is better. It isn't, and it never will be. Even if someone hopes we can.
Is this why handwriting won't work? Fancy elderly handwriting is especially hard to read. OCR software is rather helpless against it. (I propose hiring retired people to write words sloppily and scan them!)
I use Bluehost and feel like I get my money's worth. They put tons of sites on fairly beefy linux servers, which is fine most of the time. The problem is that every now and them someone else's site or script runs out of control or the whole box gets DOSed (seriously, they attack the box's CPanel IP instead of a specific domain). There are also CPU limits (idk about RAM). I've only run into the CPU limits when batch resizing images with a photo gallery. Your account goes offline for 5 mins when that happens.
I run several mostly static domains and a moderately active forum, and I'm generally satisfied. The #1 problem is the server load bouncing around because there are so many sites on one box. The load usually hangs around under 8, but sometimes it will bounce from ~20 to 60 for a few hours for no apparent reason. My sites will be noticeably slower, but it's still responsive until the load goes over 80 or so.
The main reasons I keep them instead of switching to someone like NearlyFreeSpeech are CPanel 11 (with lots of drop-in scripts), the cheap storage (I host a lot of files), and the email hosting, which is pretty reliable and offers fast IMAP. Think of it as a nice apartment with lousy tenets.
I think you welcome it as long as it's outside the US. This sort of garbage going on in the US could be very damaging indeed, as a huge chunk of internet backbone and servers is located in the US. The US gov also has the resources to track p2p people down and throw them in jail. Just imagine a law banning p2p outright. Thankfully, the US has a Bill of Rights which still has pretty strong backing by an armed public, despite years of erosion and brainwashing.
'Internet information wars' are only fun when you have a stronghold to base your operations in. If the US loses its core freedoms, it won't be fun. At all. The moral of this story is to "Hang on to your Constitution" (Reagan).
Nice idea, except that this requires you to be running a supported environment. (And we all know how well banks support people using alternate software.)
The current crisis is largely the responsibility of unelected government bureaucrats (think GSEs). Small financial bumps used to be common, and they usually went away quickly when the credit market corrected to normal levels. This time around, we've got pseudo-government entities and unelected people like Paulson messing it up. If a company deserves to fail, it should just fail and teach its peers a lesson in moderation.
Don't try to put a anti-corporate plug in a story about petty theft.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
While I admit I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking or writing about this as Haselton has (he seems to have a great deal of time), I do like this paragraph particularly:
And that, I think, is how "censorship by glut" really works. It's not just the sheer amount of written content that censors small voices -- if you happen to know about a particular writer that you consider a fount of wisdom, then the existence of a billion other Web pages won't stop you from reading that writer's content. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of people who realize that success can be highly arbitrary. The problem is that as long as most people assume that the existing marketplace of ideas does a good job of sorting the best content to the top, then they'll be more inclined to stay with the most popular news sites and blogs, and even the minority who know that it's largely a lottery, will have no effective way of finding the best content among everything else, so they'll end up sticking with the most popular sites as well. Worse, as a secondary effect, most people with something useful to contribute won't even bother, if they don't already have a large built-in audience. I know plenty of people who could write insightful essays about social and technological issues, essays that would give most readers a new perspective such that they would definitely say afterwards: "That was worth my time to read it." But it wouldn't be worth it to the writers, because they know that their content isn't going to get magically sorted into its deserved place in the hierarchy.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of mob mentality and snowballing in Internet writing, but I think there are some external factors that are left out of his analysis. I think that the large chunk of people who 'can't be bothered' to contribute don't contribute because they have a personally successful life. I know it's gross stereotyping, but it seems as though the bulk of people who spend their time spouting ideals (Communists, OSS giants, pop stars, Obama) have done little to none of what society considers real work. These people have far more free time than personally ambitious, hardworking people who pursue personal success instead of a career in changing the world. Thus, these people who have too much time on their hands distort the written contents of the net. (Please keep in mind that this is a draft of a 5-minute theory, so it's sure to have some holes.)
As far as remedies go, I think rating algorithms need to be much more sophisticated. For example, 5-star scales could calculate the rating based on the mean of the mode star and its two neighbors' frequencies.
For simplicity, let's assume one person clicked 1, two people clicked 2, three people clicked 3, etc. This method would discard stars 1-3 and calculate a display rating of 4.5, instead of a simple mean of 3.6. By totally discarding far-out ratings, we might be able to keep ratings from all gravitating to the middle. This is another 5-minute theory, and I'm not a math whiz, so I'm sure there's a better/simpler way to implement a deviation scheme like this, but it's a thought.
Hmm, for added fun, try taking ALL ratings in a database and adjusting them all on a curve! But that's liable to guzzle server resources...
This study, sponsored by Blizzard, is indeed full of bias. It's also summarized to make it sound like stuffing your kids in a video game all day is a good idea. I think the real results are that online interaction is good in moderation, as it improves typed communication and computer skills. Big shock.
What I find more interesting is that some kids 'geek out'. I remember extracting and modifying the rules.ini files in numerous Command & Conquer games, as well as disassembling my PC for no reason. Does that count?
The US has a nice breed of imported wasps (from Africa I think) that aren't supposed to be here. They're much worse than normal wasps and will sting you for your mere existence. They also hurt a lot worse. We have good reason to run away or viciously counterattack with electric flyswatters (my personal favorite).
On the other hand, the only spiders that bother me are the poisonous ones. I tend to lump common wood spiders in with this group because they are hard to distinguish from the poisonous Hobos without a magnifying glass. (Jumping spiders make fun 5-minute pets; they'll jump from hand-to-hand or kill a Black Widow in a jar.)
Also, don't forget the military aspect of this - F4 Phantoms were intimidating, but they certainly wouldn't sneak up on anyone, even if the person was deaf they could feel an F4 coming. F16s are a huge improvement, noise wise. I've never heard a stealth fighter in person, but I assume their noise signature could be reduced too. A fighter jet capable of silent approach and supersonic response speeds would have plenty of applications.
I disagree. The Phantom can most definitely sneak up on you from behind. I took pictures of it at an airshow recently. Taking a picture and immediately plugging my ears afterwards was quite a trick, since it was flying very low and I forgot earplugs. You see it coming and then at about 30 yards hissssBOOM! I'd call that sneaking up. You don't have time to do anything but dive. There was also an F22 on display, but nobody was considerate enough to fly it.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Only one thing will fix our broken democracy at this point -- revolution.
I don't agree. Anyone who expect a generation educated by the state to be independent of the state deserves what they get. State-run education needs to stop. That's the real cancer thats been eating our core heritage.
But I'll still hang onto my guns, just in case. ;)
They won't break like moving-part devices, but on the other hand, I highly doubt these beefy, net-connected TVs will have much in the way of software security. TV botnets, anyone?
It's a lack of marketing. If one gives away his product, he doesn't have money to market it. It's not shocking when you think about it. People have a serious mental block about things that don't cost money and aren't pushed by marketing.
For you lazy folks, here's the garbage abstract:
Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bitarchitectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce.
The paper was generated by the SCIgen project at MIT. According to , the program is meant to generate garbage.
Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.
When I read the Slashdot summary, I totally missed the point. The point is that some MIT folks have created a garbage paper generator and are mocking the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.
It's just grant funding suicide.
I don't understand what motivates you.
I am against global warming action because somehow all these anti-pollution movements want more government. I've no problem at all with a movement that tries to cut down on pollution as long as they don't try to do it top-down through the government. Call me cynical (I am), but I think there are two motivations for promoting warmingmongering:
1. Money
2. Political control
The #1s will go away after the money dries up. I'm much more concerned about the #2s, because government bureaucracy tends to be immortal, and I've never heard of bureaucracy that expands freedoms instead of restricting them.
-It's trolling... check
Keep in mind that Islam has an actual printed ideology that tells it to trash other civilizations.
I admit to listing to Reagan speeches...
I agree that child labor regulations and safety regulations are necessary, but there's no reason to license so many types of manual labor. There's no reason to license tile-laying and roofing. But notice the glaring omission of electrical from my list. That is something that can seriously injure people and property if done wrong. We have to find a middle ground on these issues. I suspect most of the absurd licensing requirements exist because professional laborers want to discourage new competition, not because of safety.
Also, the minimum wage is a very bad idea. If Congress raises the minimum wage, it doesn't make workers' lives better. They just get laid off.
The government does not have the solution. It is the problem. In the old days, back before the introduction of the Federal Reserve, stock market crashes happened on a regular basis, but nobody ran around for the next decade crying about it. The market just purged itself of bad assets and risky practices and recovered in a few months. The Great Depression was caused by Benjamin Strong's fiddly experimentation with his brand-new central bank and his scheming with European investors (Google benjamin strong Britain gold). The Fed overheated the economy for too long and then cooled it down too fast. It was made even worse by the explosive tax burden FDR introduced. (See Bernanke's admission of Fed guilt on Friedman's 90th birthday.)
Nowadays, we make it far, far worse by trying to prevent the bad assets and insolvent businesses from failing by sucking solvent (good) assets out of the economy to prop up the insolvent (bad). The real solution is to simply let them fail. The Big Three auto mfgs. are in an impossible situation. They promised via union contracts to pay all their employees a comfortable sum for the rest of their lives. This is something that they simply cannot afford to do. What's the solution? Just let the company fail and the contracts dissolve. Someone else will buy the property and machines and start the company over.
Now, it's true that this will be hard for those employees who were supposed to be taken care of, but unfortunately life isn't fair (my mother's favorite saying). The Bill of Rights does not guarantee happiness, only the right to pursue it (Google obama's bill of rights).
If you really want to bail out struggling industries, try deregulating and cutting taxes. Now, I agree that some regulation is needed, but too much of it is just feel-good paperwork. The regulations that especially need to go are the ones regarding employment. I, as a high school student, ought to be able to go and flip burgers for a pittance. (Hey, I've an idea! Let's require computer techs to be licensed before they can run helpdesks or do house calls! That way we make sure people don't pay for bad work!) I also ought to be able to go and install a floor, furnace or pipe in someone's house, if they're willing to pay me. If I kill myself it's my own fault.
If you want a better economy, get the government off of it. We used to have the best economy in the world. Somehow we've come to think that government as god is better. It isn't, and it never will be. Even if someone hopes we can.
Is this why handwriting won't work? Fancy elderly handwriting is especially hard to read. OCR software is rather helpless against it. (I propose hiring retired people to write words sloppily and scan them!)
I use Bluehost and feel like I get my money's worth. They put tons of sites on fairly beefy linux servers, which is fine most of the time. The problem is that every now and them someone else's site or script runs out of control or the whole box gets DOSed (seriously, they attack the box's CPanel IP instead of a specific domain). There are also CPU limits (idk about RAM). I've only run into the CPU limits when batch resizing images with a photo gallery. Your account goes offline for 5 mins when that happens.
I run several mostly static domains and a moderately active forum, and I'm generally satisfied. The #1 problem is the server load bouncing around because there are so many sites on one box. The load usually hangs around under 8, but sometimes it will bounce from ~20 to 60 for a few hours for no apparent reason. My sites will be noticeably slower, but it's still responsive until the load goes over 80 or so.
The main reasons I keep them instead of switching to someone like NearlyFreeSpeech are CPanel 11 (with lots of drop-in scripts), the cheap storage (I host a lot of files), and the email hosting, which is pretty reliable and offers fast IMAP. Think of it as a nice apartment with lousy tenets.
I think you welcome it as long as it's outside the US. This sort of garbage going on in the US could be very damaging indeed, as a huge chunk of internet backbone and servers is located in the US. The US gov also has the resources to track p2p people down and throw them in jail. Just imagine a law banning p2p outright. Thankfully, the US has a Bill of Rights which still has pretty strong backing by an armed public, despite years of erosion and brainwashing.
'Internet information wars' are only fun when you have a stronghold to base your operations in. If the US loses its core freedoms, it won't be fun. At all. The moral of this story is to "Hang on to your Constitution" (Reagan).
Nice idea, except that this requires you to be running a supported environment. (And we all know how well banks support people using alternate software.)
The current crisis is largely the responsibility of unelected government bureaucrats (think GSEs). Small financial bumps used to be common, and they usually went away quickly when the credit market corrected to normal levels. This time around, we've got pseudo-government entities and unelected people like Paulson messing it up. If a company deserves to fail, it should just fail and teach its peers a lesson in moderation.
Don't try to put a anti-corporate plug in a story about petty theft.
Mod parent up! US poor are middle-class by third-world standards.
How about the New York Times? Is that good enough?
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
Note the date on the article: September 30, 1999
While I admit I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking or writing about this as Haselton has (he seems to have a great deal of time), I do like this paragraph particularly:
And that, I think, is how "censorship by glut" really works. It's not just the sheer amount of written content that censors small voices -- if you happen to know about a particular writer that you consider a fount of wisdom, then the existence of a billion other Web pages won't stop you from reading that writer's content. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of people who realize that success can be highly arbitrary. The problem is that as long as most people assume that the existing marketplace of ideas does a good job of sorting the best content to the top, then they'll be more inclined to stay with the most popular news sites and blogs, and even the minority who know that it's largely a lottery, will have no effective way of finding the best content among everything else, so they'll end up sticking with the most popular sites as well. Worse, as a secondary effect, most people with something useful to contribute won't even bother, if they don't already have a large built-in audience. I know plenty of people who could write insightful essays about social and technological issues, essays that would give most readers a new perspective such that they would definitely say afterwards: "That was worth my time to read it." But it wouldn't be worth it to the writers, because they know that their content isn't going to get magically sorted into its deserved place in the hierarchy.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of mob mentality and snowballing in Internet writing, but I think there are some external factors that are left out of his analysis. I think that the large chunk of people who 'can't be bothered' to contribute don't contribute because they have a personally successful life. I know it's gross stereotyping, but it seems as though the bulk of people who spend their time spouting ideals (Communists, OSS giants, pop stars, Obama) have done little to none of what society considers real work. These people have far more free time than personally ambitious, hardworking people who pursue personal success instead of a career in changing the world. Thus, these people who have too much time on their hands distort the written contents of the net. (Please keep in mind that this is a draft of a 5-minute theory, so it's sure to have some holes.)
As far as remedies go, I think rating algorithms need to be much more sophisticated. For example, 5-star scales could calculate the rating based on the mean of the mode star and its two neighbors' frequencies.
For simplicity, let's assume one person clicked 1, two people clicked 2, three people clicked 3, etc. This method would discard stars 1-3 and calculate a display rating of 4.5, instead of a simple mean of 3.6. By totally discarding far-out ratings, we might be able to keep ratings from all gravitating to the middle. This is another 5-minute theory, and I'm not a math whiz, so I'm sure there's a better/simpler way to implement a deviation scheme like this, but it's a thought.
Hmm, for added fun, try taking ALL ratings in a database and adjusting them all on a curve! But that's liable to guzzle server resources...
I propose the 'bias' tag.
I agree.
But at any rate, for the corporate media spin on this, here are a few links:
Billion Dollar Charlie vs. the RIAA
Hmm, the story you linked on Slashdot's coverage refers to Slashdot's coverage. This must be some kind of trick!
This study, sponsored by Blizzard, is indeed full of bias. It's also summarized to make it sound like stuffing your kids in a video game all day is a good idea. I think the real results are that online interaction is good in moderation, as it improves typed communication and computer skills. Big shock.
What I find more interesting is that some kids 'geek out'. I remember extracting and modifying the rules.ini files in numerous Command & Conquer games, as well as disassembling my PC for no reason. Does that count?
The US has a nice breed of imported wasps (from Africa I think) that aren't supposed to be here. They're much worse than normal wasps and will sting you for your mere existence. They also hurt a lot worse. We have good reason to run away or viciously counterattack with electric flyswatters (my personal favorite).
On the other hand, the only spiders that bother me are the poisonous ones. I tend to lump common wood spiders in with this group because they are hard to distinguish from the poisonous Hobos without a magnifying glass. (Jumping spiders make fun 5-minute pets; they'll jump from hand-to-hand or kill a Black Widow in a jar.)
Also, don't forget the military aspect of this - F4 Phantoms were intimidating, but they certainly wouldn't sneak up on anyone, even if the person was deaf they could feel an F4 coming. F16s are a huge improvement, noise wise. I've never heard a stealth fighter in person, but I assume their noise signature could be reduced too. A fighter jet capable of silent approach and supersonic response speeds would have plenty of applications.
I disagree. The Phantom can most definitely sneak up on you from behind. I took pictures of it at an airshow recently. Taking a picture and immediately plugging my ears afterwards was quite a trick, since it was flying very low and I forgot earplugs. You see it coming and then at about 30 yards hissssBOOM! I'd call that sneaking up. You don't have time to do anything but dive. There was also an F22 on display, but nobody was considerate enough to fly it. :(