fjorder · HackerTrans

hace 13 añosdiscuss

I've hated iTunes for over a decade now, and that's not just because it's horrible, bloated software with a terrible interface. Almost any other method of buying an album will send more money to the artist than iTunes does. If you like a band enough to buy their music, why not put a little effort into supporting them? (e.g. If they sell their album through their own website, use it!)

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

It is a nice shortcut, but I think they added it mostly because they belatedly realized how much metro sucks for accessing settings from the desktop.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

If you're a keyboard and mouse user working primarily in the desktop, it is very jarring to jump into the full-screen metro interface every single time you want to do something start-menu related. Metro isn't well optimized for keyboard & mouse users either. e.g. With the Win7 start menu, you could type in "computer management" hit enter and get that panel. In Win8 you must additionally mouse over and select the settings search category (I'm on a Win7 machine, so I'm not sure that computer management even shows up properly in metro without tweaking!). Effectively, for desktop users Metro is less efficient in addition to being jarring.

Install classic shell (classicshell.net) and your problems are over. It puts a start menu back into Win8, and it works pretty well. There are no search categories, and the cheese metro hides from you is in plain sight! Once this is on your machine Win8 is basically Win7, only better. Highly recommended!

If you're setting up a new Win8 box, classic shell is available through ninite as well, which is pretty handy.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

Here's an interesting line of reasoning:

Had Adria posted the photo of the two men and made her claims about their conversation anonymously, would they have been taken as seriously?

Probably not. How many people are fired over a harmless photo and unsubstantiated anonymous claims? It was Adria's reputation and position that lent weight to her claims and got mr-hank fired. Now, let's follow up with another question:

The next time Adria Richards makes a similar claim, will it be taken seriously?

Almost certainly not.

The negative effects of Richards' actions were only made possible by being tied to her identity, which is now basically discredited. This is interesting, because it shows that social media is really starting to settle down and behave like more traditional manners of human interaction. Completely anonymous interactions are still possible, but lack power. Conversely, identity carries power, but if that power that is misused it quickly dissipates.

When I first read the reactions to this incident, I initially felt sympathy for mr-hank and outrage over his firing. This naturally led to anger against Richards, and I had to wonder if this anger might cause people to overreact and shame her excessively. However, this is exactly what would happen in a traditional human social setting, and it's healthy. She abused her power and hurt another person, failed to show any form of remorse, and now this reaction by the community is disarming her so that she can't immediately harm others. She will have to earn that power back, and it's not going to be easy. This is as it should be. The HN community also appears to be rallying around mr-hank and trying to see that he's looked after. Again, this is very heartening to see.

Like nature in Jurassic park, established patterns of human interaction in a community setting seem to find a way.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

Interesting article. Allow me to add a few fun details...

Early agriculturalists actually had it much rougher than this article implies for a real kicker of a reason:

Wild plants suck as crop plants.

Maize was domesticated from a bushy grass called teosinte (Agriculture arose independently in the Americas a little later than in the Middle East). Google that and see how closely it resembles the big juicy corn-cobs you're used to. Where corn has giant cobs crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of big juicy kernals, teosinte has a miserly amount of sad, pathetic, and tiny little kernals. You'd have to grow an entire field full of teosinte to equal the output of a small patch of corn. If a modern farmer saw one of his fields being overgrown with teosinte he'd probably spray it with herbicide. If some contagion wiped out all of our crop plants and we had to go back to wild crops we would be absolutely humped as a species. Now, imagine how difficult it must have been to come up with the idea of settling down and growing crops to live on when the crops you could grow were basically weeds!

In fact, teosinte was so far from being a viable crop that some have proposed theories about intermediate steps. For example, consider the Beer (or chicha) theory of civilization! Somehow, somebody discovered that you can ferment teosinte into something that tastes weird and makes you act even weirder. Fun stuff! While teosinte was not a crop you could build a viable farm on, maybe some hunter-gatherers stumbled upon the process of making chicha. At first, collecting wild teosinte would have taken a lot of work. Far too much for the calories yielded. However, they probably had the time for the occasional novelty! Being lazy, these hunter-gatherers probably realized they could scatter some of the seeds they collected in a specific spot, continue their wanderings, and find a much denser patch of wild teosinte in the same spot a year later. They might even have started selecting which seeds to scatter, either fortuitously preferring the smaller ones for flavor or being smart enough to deliberately select the mutants with higher yields to sow for next year. Perhaps the first steps towards agriculture (in the new world at least) were taken by the paleolithic equivalent of frat-boys! Actually, no archaeologist would ever say that. They would instead say, "priests and shamans" used the beer for religious ceremonies. (Hot tip: If archaeologists have no clue what something they find is for, they usually say it has "possible religious significance".) It makes no real difference what their reasons were. In this theory, the selective breeding of teosinte to produce maize can start long before people actually have to rely on maize to supply much in the way of calories. Humankind's urge to get plastered may have ultimately led to civilization!

Wait! There's more! Proponents of this theory have also pointed out that beer solves a lot of problems early civilizations probably had. Take water quality for example. If a lot of hunter-gatherer's with no concept of germs or hygiene were to settle next to a river, you can bet that the river would be pretty deadly to drink out of before too long. Fortunately, if you take some water, combine it with grain and ferment it, the result is a tasty fermented beverage that is safe to drink thanks to the wonders of alcohol! (Early fermented beverages probably had a pretty low alchohol content and packed a healthy dose of calories. Perfect for quenching the thirst and nourishing hard working agriculturalists from dawn till dusk!) I could go on for a while...

TL;DR - Beer, rather than being an evil byproduct of civilization, may be what gave us both agriculture and civilization! Beer is good.

Ham-fisted attempt to tie this back into all-things entrepreneurial: The development of agriculture was a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You can't have agriculture without crop-plants, but how could we have developed crop plants without agriculture? Beer. Sometimes, something that looks like a total waste of time becomes the foundation of very serious things (TM), such as the whole of human civilization. Thanks to the adderall-fuelled march of progress we now get to see this process play out in a matter of years or even months! Keep your eye on frivolous crap!

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

Contrary to the claims of the extremetech article, they have not closed all loopholes in this experiment. Specifically, the detection loophole has not been closed. This loophole is caused by not being able to detect a high enough portion of the photons your source emits. A paranoid person might argue that the ones you do detect are not a representative sample. For example, some devious third party could be choosing which photons you detect in such a way that your results are skewed. Yes... This is a paranoid suggestion, but closing loopholes is all about satisfying the paranoid.

In this paper they invoke the assumption of "fair sampling". i.e. They assume what they do detect is representative. Ergo, they have not closed the detection loophole in this experiment. Fair sampling is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make and is very commonly used, so this should not be interpreted as invalidating their results. It just leaves room for improvement in the future, since single photon detectors with sufficient efficiency to close the detection loophole do now exist (They are very bleeding edge).

Note that the paper is correct and does not make the claim that "all loopholes" have been closed. The extremetech article got it wrong.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

They test a CHSH Bell inequality in this paper. This rules out local hidden variable theories. Non-local hidden variable (NLHV) theories are another matter entirely. Indeed, some NLHV theories may reproduce the predictions of quantum theory exactly.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

Hollywood is famous for playing so fast and loose with tax-loopholes that I just can't trust any of the numbers quoted. Practically every Hollywood blockbuster loses money on paper when it comes time to pay taxes, so you have to wonder if they're reporting those same cooked numbers to drum up sympathy. Let's also not forget that Hollywood films are filmed all over the place to save money, and usually in places where studios are heavily subsidized. Governments see a local film industry as a cultural gem, and pay through the nose to attract productions. I find it difficult to believe that all those free-rides aren't having an impact on the bottom lines of film companies.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

That article is not good. Biased reporting based on a biased study. Yes, all writing is biased, but sometimes evidence suggests it's worse than usual, and this is one of those cases. From the cradle of the study to the grave of your mind, everything in the chain producing this article has a clear bias.

Study: Published by the "Post Carbon Institute". They're not even trying.

Article: Written by an author whose only credentials are a pretty face and a B.Sc. in biology. Can she spot bad stats? Probably not. Is she likely to take any damning claim about the oil sands the study makes at face value without a second thought? Yes.

Publisher: insideclimatenews.org. They're a little more cagey about revealing their biases than the Post Carbon Institute, which is to say they're still about as subtle as a club to the head.

Now, don't get me wrong. I live close to the oil sands and will pay a greater price than most reading this for that oil. I am not in the O&G industry, but I have deep concerns about how the oilsands are being extracted. Specifically, groundwater seepage from tailings ponds is probably one of the nastiest local consequences. Perhaps even more concerning is that accountability is going down as foreign ownership climbs. Just as no Hollywood blockbuster makes money on paper these days, my concern is that once the oilsands are no longer commercially viable, parent companies will quietly abscond with the profits while the oilsands companies go bankrupt and fail to follow through on the long-term cleanup that will be necessary.

However, all this is no excuse for giving a pass to blatantly biased articles. When we give attention to articles such as this it detracts attention from well-researched independent studies reported on by people who actually have the chops to spot bad stats and tease apart biased studies. It makes those who are against oilsands development look like a bunch of clueless tree-hugging hippies!

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

Let me rephrase the question in way that is probably more likely to be thought about by a second-term president:

"Given that you obviously feel you can kill foreign citizens in their own countries along with an "acceptable" number of innocents without fear of reprisal, do you feel you can do the same in your own country where you have complete authority?"

While I feel many of Obama's policies are laudable, I think his wanton disregard for international law is reprehensible and ultimately doing more harm than good. Extraterritorial strikes are based on the classic notion of attrition warfare. i.e. If you kill enough of the enemy eventually there won't be any left. This strategy failed in Vietnam, failed in Iraq, and is in the final stages of failing in Afghanistan. What should make Pakistan any different? If it weren't for the Taliban's own atrocities (e.g. The shooting of Malala Yousufzai), anti-American sentiment and pro-Taliban support would be at an all time high due to outrage over the regular violation of Pakistan's sovereignty by drone attacks.

These strikes also set a very ugly precedent. As private use of UAV's begins to take off, it's going to become increasingly hard to prevent foreign interests from using them on U.S. soil. e.g. How will police be able to distinguish a tacocopter in San Francisco from a UAV packing a charge of explosives for an assassination? If foreign countries have the capability of killing U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who are inconvenient to their interests, what legitimate protest could the U.S. possibly raise against the practice at this point?

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

I sincerely hope Google keeps the cap where it is. That just might motivate copyright holders to reduce the number of erroneous take-down notices they issue.

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

It's a way to point out how wasteful spending on the TSA has become. People lack intuition for numbers on the scale we are talking about. Does $8.71 billion seem huge compared to $8.70 billion? (I'd sure like to be making $0.01 Billion a year!) By suggesting something specific be done with the funds one can give some impression of the potential that is being wasted.

For the record, I'm not disputing the fact that airport security is ncessary. I'm just arguing that it's only good in moderation. The TSA is both too intrusive for the security they provide and extremely wasteful. Back-scatter X-ray machines are a great example of this. The first models used were not adequately tested and proved to be easily defeated. The solution? Replace them, at tremendous expense, with a new generation of machines that have also not been adequately tested. At the same time, x-ray back-scatter vans are being rolled out on a truly alarming scale. It's a cash bonanza for someone!

fjorder

hace 13 añosdiscuss

The TSA's budget is just a tad short of half that of NASA's. Cutting back on the little-old-lady-molesting budget and giving the cash to space-explorers seems like a no-brainer to me. However, I'm not an American.

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

Re: Pricing Fairness

The article claims that if the Cable industry offered pricing based on what is fair, it would offer very cheap plans for little old ladies who barely use their connections. This definition of "fair" assumes that what you pay is proportional to how much you use it.

The real world almost never works this way.

Does a new car cost less if you drive it less? Perhaps a little in terms of maintenance and gas, but the initial cost is still the same. Does a banana cost less if you only eat half of it? Does a comb cost less if you're bald?

This leads us to the other definition of "fairness", which is also not often closely associated with real-world prices. i.e. What you pay is proportional to the cost of producing it. If Cable plans were priced this way, a Granny plan would be just a few dollars cheaper than the super-high-use plan. Why? Bandwidth is cheap compared to last-mile installation and maintenance costs. The cost of getting the first bit to grandma is astronomically more expensive than getting the last gigabyte to a heavy bandwidth user.

So how does the real world work? In the overwhelming majority of cases, companies charge whatever people are willing to pay. This price frequently has little or no correlation to actual cost. This is why airlines typically lose money while cable providers do pretty well for themselves. The NCTA's claims that "fairness" is the motivation behind usage-based billing is complete BS. People who use more bandwidth are willing to pay more. That's the reason for usage based billing. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

Others have said it, and they're right. Skeuomorphism has become dated and Apple is now playing catch-up with Android and Windows. Apple has been playing catch-up with Android in terms of features for quite some time now, so this is not new.

This is, however, so new to Gruber that he is apparently still in denial. While it's far too early to say, one has to wonder if Apple is headed for a period of uninspired decline, similar to what they experienced in the 90's. Could Gruber end up like the mac-zealots of the 90's who proclaimed the superiority of OS9 when, in fact, it was inferior in every way to its competitors?

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

It bothers me when people say that science conflicts with religion. It certainly conflicts with specific religious dogmas, such as young-earth creationism, but the frontiers of science fall well short of proving or disproving the existence of any possible deity.

If you go strictly by evidence, agnosticism is a tenable position, but both theism and atheism require leaps of faith beyond scientific fact. As such, atheists who claim science is on their side bother me almost as much as young-earth creationists.

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

It is being used in commercial systems (e.g. idquantique). Practical implementations are prone to vulnerabilities, but none have been found that cannot be remedied. Some techniques such as device independent or measurement device independent QKD offer to make it far more difficult to come up with attacks in the future too.

The #1 advantage of QKD is not that the methods being used today will be immune to all attacks found in the future. It's that quantum states are unclonable, so there's no way to archive cipher-text for future attacks, as can be done with classically encrypted messages. e.g. If you send encrypt a message and send it via email today, the encryption method has to stand up to advances in algorithms and computational hardware for as long as the information remains sensitive. If you send something via QKD, an eavesdropper must break the protocol at the moment you send the message or it will be safe for all time.

Authenticating strangers, as in credit card transactions, is something that quantum computing may disrupt. QKD can be used safely by people who have met at some point in the past, but we probably have a bit of time before CC transactions need to be encrypted by QKD. i.e. While you should probably not send medical records or state secrets via many classical encryption protocols now, your CC info will change in a couple years so it's not as big of an issue if your transactions are cracked a few years after that.

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

I think it was Margaret Atwood who described civilization as the intelligent trading of "freedoms to" for "freedoms from". For example, you can trade the right for everyone, regardless of criminal background, to buy automatic assault weapons for freedom from the extreme violence that comes with that freedom to.

The U.S. already has some gun control laws, but the data presented here suggests they don't go far enough. However, gun control laws are always going to come down to how much people value their freedom to versus their freedom from.

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

The last I checked the MTBF on SSD's was substantially longer than for hard-drives. Barring firmware bugs you should probably strike that off your list of reasons for not using a SSD.

Even if you do think SSD's are horribly unreliable, they're so fast that they're still worth using. Just put your OS and programs on a SSD and store your data on a HD. If the SSD fails, you've lost nothing you can't reinstall easily. I started doing this a couple of years ago and there's absolutely no going back.

fjorder

hace 14 añosdiscuss

The author of this article seems to be very concerned about something, but I'm not entirely sure I understood.

He implies that, under Obamacare, doctors will be compelled to provide services to patients at rates far lower than is currently standard, similar to how the cardiac surgeon was trying to compel the author, as an anesthesiologist, to work at a rate he considered too low.

Under Obamacare, will doctors be compelled to do work at sub-standard rates, or will they merely have the option to do so? In Canada, the government pays doctors specific fees for each patient seen or each procedure performed. Doctors can therefore take on as much, or as little, work as they wish and are paid accordingly. This system does have its drawbacks, but nothing like what the author of this article is describing occurs.

If, under Obamacare, doctors had the option of taking as much work on as they want at government-set rates, supply and demand would soon force the government to offer competitive rates. If doctors are instead legally compelled to offer care at substandard rates, then there could be a problem as the author claims.

comments