stratomorph

Huh, that idea seems so obvious, now that someone else thought of it and did it. Interlaced video in two dimensions rather than one, with the number of fields potentially adjustable on the fly. Trivial to select the number of fields (and thus the max framerate) as any perfect square. A little more work to select it as any number from 1 to the total pixel count. Though you'd need a monster aperture or a very bright subject to get anything but solid black from a one-pixel image sampled at 25MHz.

Single page version: http://thetyee.ca/Life/2009/12/16/MakeLove/print.html

So, the author starts with an academic study of the sex lives of modern young people, which drew some conclusions that porn is not the devil: "pretty conventional, almost identical to their parents," and "pornography has been demonized and that its effects are negligible." Then, she spends more than a thousand words trying to refute that entirely by anecdotal evidence, capping it off with "porn is having a profound impact on our culture."

I know asking everyone to act like good scientists is too much. But I would like it if people would at least try to act like bad scientists, and selectively use studies that support their predetermined conclusions. What a world, where you strengthen your point by citing only studies that refute it.

I wouldn't say that people have "no problem" with it; plenty of people are terrified of flying. Jet fuel and hydrogen are worlds apart in danger and ease of handling, as jet fuel stays where you put it and will extinguish your cigarette. Finally, a jet engine is hardly an open flame; it's very well-contained for a dozen different reasons, not least to keep its own thrust from blowing the flame out.

I agree with your point about the hydrogen fear trigger, but your strawman caricature of the heavier-than-air aircraft industry weakens your argument.

Is there a Tetris AI that can play against this bastard? Has that been done already? Might as well let the computer try to outsmart itself.

While I agree that this guy is clearly a thief, I'd still disagree that there's no legitimate reason to modify a modem. I don't rent mine, I bought it, and it shouldn't be a crime to modify my own property. Maybe I'd like to change the firmware or remove the case to scavenge parts. Maybe I even want to change my MAC address. My old ISP made me re-enter my account info when I did that, and then it would work again. (Haven't tried it with the new one.) Nothing wrong with that.

Though it makes you wonder what the sentence would be if he had built a business on stealing Comcast vans and selling them, instead.

The "007" thing makes sense from the standpoint of preventing rogue launches. It's not intended to prevent the missiles from being launched without command authorization. Instead, no single person has all the information needed to launch, so there must be at least two people in on it.

Unfortunately, it can also be neither. It's easier to simplify than make it fair.

I'd like to note that those are two different adjustments. The claim is that pilots adjust the mix of fresh and recirculated air. The author is talking about adjusting the incoming flow volume of new air. Airplanes don't have "recirculate" the way a car does for max A/C, and so to talk about the mixture of fresh/recirc air is meaningless.

All those little air valves above the seats in a plane are letting in only conditioned air newly drawn from the atmosphere through the engines, with no recirculated air mixed in. The pilot can change the total amount of new air coming in, but that's not the same as somehow making only 20% of that incoming flow fresh air. The only place the air already in the plane is going is straight overboard, through valves run by the pressure controller.

(I'd also point out that the fuel savings from a low-flow setting will be minimal, because modern large high-bypass turbofan engines can bleed a LOT of air without much of a performance cost. The bigger the airplane and its engines, the smaller the savings.)

I think that would be a helpful factor in theory, but in practice would be too inconsistent to rely on. Using Reddit as an example (because I have no familiarity with HN's source) there is client-side javascript that intercepts clicks on links and appends story IDs to one of the Reddit cookies. Next time a request goes to Reddit, they get a list of recent clicks.

This can fail in a lot of ways, most obviously if Javascript or cookies are turned off. Also, the cookie isn't sent to Reddit until I load another page, so if I read an entire page of links and then close the browser without refreshing the page, the cookie doesn't get sent. Plus, the script clips the list around 20 elements, so even if I did refresh Reddit, it wouldn't know I'd clicked on more than 20.

My point is not the numerous weaknesses of Reddit's approach. Instead, it's self-reported information that must necessarily be suspect and incomplete. If an article on an obscure programming language pops up here, and every single person who reads it uses Lynx with cookies turned off for security, there might be no opportunity to record any views.

In turn, why prevent Google News from making a deal to offer you free links to news in exchange for throttling (say) HN until your browser times out?

"Existing on the internet and nowhere else" is a typical way to categorize people, given the existence of global communication. Having never met either of you (as far as I know), you only exist on the internet to me, and to each other. The rest is opaque.

As for Vista, we're not dealing with it as it is, but as it is reputed to be. And it has a terrible reputation. The technical merits versus XP can be argued, but its poor image is hard to contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista.

We take that as a premise, because the technical bits don't matter any more, in the presence of Windows 7. The meat is the use of price as a tool to drive better initial reception of 7 than Vista. There's no need to analyze "Vista bad", because it is already widely believed to be bad.

I think circumscribing would be a better choice of word here:

"...without introducing a censorship architecture and circumcising constitutional freedoms."

The translation is fluent, and I shouldn't make fun of it, but that line made me laugh.

On a more salient note, it's good to see that these proposals are not proceeding without public notice. It's hard to fight the "FOR THE CHILDREN!" brigade, but fortunately the Germans are having the debate openly, paying at least lip service to constitutional process.

To be fair, network latency is both much higher and much more variable than hard disk latency, even if the bandwidth is higher. Design can change, but it's hard to get away from needing enough local smarts and storage to make an interface feel snappy.

Edit - To back up my otherwise unsupported assertion:

  --- ycombinator.com ping statistics ---
  5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4105ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 80.985/112.433/163.591/29.114 ms

So a little over 100ms with significant variance for the open internet, results fairly typical. (Edited to add: I can't reproduce these results; later attempts give closer to 450ms, so this is biased in the network's favor.) Hard drives (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE..., for lack of a better source) have latency around 5 ms.

You can solve bandwidth problems by buying more lines, but latency, once introduced by a slow network hop, can never be recouped by any amount of hardware.

If you only counted stable substances as "elements", an awful lot of things would have to get a different name. Uranium wouldn't be an element at all, because even U-238 (the most common isotope, more than 99% of the stuff found in nature, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium) will be reduced by half in a few billion years.

You could set some time limit of half life, below which is considered "completely unstable" and doesn't count, but what purpose would such an arbitrary division serve?

Yes, you can slam particles together in any combination, but the special thing about elements is that, for at least a few microseconds, it didn't need any external force or containment to hold together. A few microseconds is a long time at the subatomic scale.

I don't understand what that graph is showing. Which variable is independent, or supposed to be? It can't be buckets as a function of collisions. At first I thought he had his axes reversed (from the customary y as a function of x), but it's not a graph of collisions as a function of buckets, either, because reading it that way implies that a very small number of buckets produces a small number of collisions, which is obviously false with a hundred million inputs being distributed over ten or less buckets.

It looks like a graph of the moral equivalent of 1=1, by numeric methods. What am I supposed to see there?

It seems to me that the people likely to want to see this quantity of stuff are probably the people who already know how to use the download queue in their bittorrent clients.

I suspect the less computer literate, who are likely to get this bundled with something, will unknowingly let it run in the background until their network is unacceptably slow or their hard drive is unacceptably full, when they will have someone more knowledgeable "fix the internet", and this will just be one more program that gets taken out with the rest of the trash.

I speculate that the type of structure is the major factor causing the quality of social interaction to diverge. Wikipedia is people collaborating to make something, and only incidentally communicating with each other, on talk pages and user pages and so forth. Slashdot (and all its ilk, including Reddit and HN) is primarily people communicating with each other on comment pages. (I disregard story voting here because they don't have the same process, but also because voting is a relatively trivial input for a user, whereas writing a thoughtful comment/profane flame takes significantly more effort.)

In a nutshell, Wikipedia's product is not communication between users, so the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/) finds less purchase. Slashdot/Reddit/HN do produce such communication, and then micro-optimizations determine the course such communication will take, like the moderation details/ability to downvote/etc. That's my hypothesis, anyway.

Minor points in the comments:

The reason this doesn’t matter is that we don’t land airplanes with GPS really. We direct them down a path to the airport and then the pilot flys at minimum the last 200 feet with the runway in sight. If he can’t see it, he doesn’t land. Airliners are a different animal but they don’t use GPS for that either. (Mike C)

I couldn’t imagine anyone being silly enough to think that planes rely on GPS to figure out their altitude above the runway. (P)

WAAS-qualified avionics like Garmin’s 430W, 480W and 530W receivers are approved for precision instrument approaches based entirely on GPS. (Robert X. Cringely)

There's some truth mixed in with some misunderstanding there. While GPS is able to measure altitude, aircraft systems don't rely on it for a primary altitude measurement. They already have perfectly good barometric systems which measure air pressure and are adjusted for field conditions every hour (or so). On a GPS precision approach (that is, one with both horizontal and vertical guidance) the computer combines the (x,y) information from the GPS with the altimeter's data to produce ILS-type course and glideslope deviation indicators, showing how far from the desired approach course the aircraft is in the left/right and up/down axes.

So, while you can in fact fly an approach where your position data is based solely on GPS, that z-axis is still being measured by an altimeter. (Unless Mr. Cringely is certified to fly cat II or III approaches, in which case he needs a LAAS-certified receiver and suitably equipped airport, as unlike WAAS, it is ground-based: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Area_Augmentation_System)

I see a mention of what differentiates Jetpack:

No, that’s not correct. Jetpack has access to the browser chrome - that is, the stuff surrounding the page you’re viewing - with simplifying APIs wrapping the more complex native APIs add-on developers usually deal with.

This is about more easily authoring Firefox add-ons, not just tweaking page content. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/strap-in-mozillas-jetpa... [Edit: citation]

I still think adding that to Greasemonkey would have been more productive. It sounds like Jetpack users run Firebug just like Greasemonkey users do, so I don't see the added value.

It seems like their time would have been better spent forking and improving Greasemonkey, if they thought it wasn't user-friendly enough or whatever, instead of re-doing everything.

As I recall, there were significant problems with Greasemonkey's original approach of leaving privileged user scripts in the global namespace while untrusted scripts from the web execute, since it could wrap objects user scripts would later call, potentially turning any normal function call into a state-stealing XMLHttpReq. From a quick read of the jetpack site, it appears that user code does indeed remain accessible while untrusted code executes (since the jetpack.tabs object is noted to be "live"). I wonder how they deal with that problem of hostile-wrapped objects? [Edited for detail and clarity]

I agree that it's not boiler-plate, and I don't mean that I do it all that often, maybe every six months or so when I find something new I want my home server to do. (Like the last one, experimenting with port knocking) I am by no means a professional programmer, that's why I find myself making the same searches.

What Wolfram Alpha needed was to avoid the Spore-style overhype in the days leading up to release. It was nearly inevitable that a product touted as "the Google killer" would get slammed on the rebound, regardless of actual performance. As long as they manage to avoid getting a unit of measure named for them, or returning results about handing hamburgers to crying mimes while the universe abruptly fails to exist, they'll be doing better than some.

I like Google Earth as a platform, at least the general idea, mostly because of the unlimited zoom. Games like Sins of a Solar Empire benefit greatly from the ability to see arbitrarily large swathes of territory at once, while games with a more limited zoom, or none (like my old favorite Command & Conquer: Red Alert) are much harder to develop a coherent mental big picture for.

I noted they plan to expand: "Ships" will become a small module in a much bigger game concept for which we seek investors. I wonder what that will be? I thought a cool game would be a multi-player Cold War-type sub-hunting game, where American frigates and submarines strive to track Soviet subs, and vice versa. The big "zoom-out" would include last-known positions and IDs, if known, surrounded by an ever-growing ring of possible range, until the target is reacquired. I don't know if such a game would actually be fun, and it would definitely take patience. Knowing that another human was controlling the submarine you seek and trying to predict his movements would be at least be diverting, I think.

I concur about the blurriness. It'll be a good day indeed when everyone has a 300dpi display and we can get rid of anti-aliased text for good. Anti-aliasing looks great for headlines at large point sizes, but for bulk text, that blurry look is bad for my reading speed, and a continual distraction, as well. I hate that about Linux, how hard it is to find a free font that looks good when hammered into the pixel grid, and it's nice to see some new ones from time to time.

I haven't tried this, but it sure looks handy. Writing a daemon is a common task, but not so often (for me, anyway) that it feels like copy-and-pasting the same boilerplate every time. So, I ignore the old rule that says "if you're going to do it more than once, write a program to do it for you". I always end up writing a one-off prototype for my own personal use, and then upgrading it to be a daemon, and I make the same Google searches every time. I'll have to try this next time.

The airplane system intrigued me. Most aircraft these days (save light aircraft that really only get flown in day VFR) already have a digital notion of pitch and bank, which is trivially repeated around the cockpit to the indicators and flight management system, among others. It would be simple (compared to most avionics upgrades) to add a pitch and bank port that you could plug something like that into. Two signal channels plus a few watts of 28 VDC aircraft power in some kind of standard interface.

I think wearing that would make it much easier to trust your instruments, the first and hardest challenge of instrument flying. Once disoriented, it takes an awful lot of discipline to ignore what your inner ear is telling you and steer by the needles. Even on a bright clear day with a beautiful horizon, looking to the side when you roll out of a turn a little too fast, maybe with a slight sub-1G pushover, and straight-and-level flight feels like a weird turn. At night, you end up with unfortunate accidents (like John Kennedy Jr's) that claim an awful lot of lives just because the horizon isn't visible and you don't trust the instrument that is proven to be wrong much less often than you are.

The FAA would be suspicious of such instruments, and rightfully so, but I think in time it would be an invaluable addition to a pilot's awareness. There would of course have to be a constant low-level stimulation, to make it immediately obvious that the device is powered, and an instant indication that the device is not receiving reliable information from the aircraft's attitude system (such as maybe "blinking" the pilot's wrists) as well as visible indicators on the instrument panel. With normal aviation precautions, and an injunction not to rely solely on such "newfangled contraptions", I think this would be a very valuable system. There would be less cockpit voice recordings of pilots who couldn't quite figure out why their instruments were "all screwed up."

True, but if they were getting anything like that level of activity, their plastic detector would have been swamped. If one in a hundred million neutrons produced by this process headed through the plastic, they could have reported thousands of "triple tracks", rather than a "small number". I realize that the experiment is a small step and not intended to generate energy by itself, but it strikes me as an awfully high magnitude to be counting individually with a microscope.

Interesting. I had never thought about the implicit assumptions behind the term "water wars". I figured that just because I couldn't think of a significant example off the top of my head, I wasn't thinking hard enough.

I am confused by their figures, though. "If they were to be self-sufficient in food, they would need ten billion cubic metres of water per year. As it is, they have only about one-third of that: enough to grow 15-20% of their food." Ten billion would grow 100%, but a third of the water grows no more than a fifth of the food? It shouldn't be that some of the current water supply goes to other uses; a couple of sentences later is a note that domestic and industrial uses should find rainfall alone to be enough.

How would tripling the amount of water available allow them to increase domestic food production by five or six times?

I imagine a fair number of people came here from Reddit, as I did, and I think this might interest some people. I came across this Greasemonkey script after months of frustration at the increasing clutter of Reddit. It makes the site a lot cleaner, visually, and easier to bear, as well.