Comparing VSTs and Ableton are a great example of how too much of either can be a bad thing.
Although Ableton is generally a pleasure to work with, that is due to the way their interface works (especially the time/waveform navigation, I can't understand why nobody has copied that). The flatness of their UI has occasionally confused me (but not as bad as certain skeuoverdosed VSTs).
Cool, I usually kept quiet on these matters because I thought I hadn't really ever given a flat UI a good try. But Ableton definitely counts.
I think the main problem with Flat UIs is the lack of affordance: There is no shared visual language yet to signify the difference between an indicator and an input element. That could be either a switch-button vs a status indicator light (both coloured circles) or a text input box vs a info panel (both rectangles with text).
One way to maybe solve it would be the convention that things brighter than their environment are for input and darker things are for indicators/information. Or vice versa. Because there's no convention yet.
You are looking at only one type of violence, murder, and then assuming that murder rates are affected by guns.
Then you turn around and say that one country is possibly just naturally more violent than another and it has nothing to do with the deterrent affect guns have on violent crimes of any kind.
Murder provides a nice apples to apples comparison because, as noted elsewhere on this page, violent crime statistics for the US and UK is an apples to pineapples comparison.
No, I think he is just saying it doesn't make sense to start taking away guns from everyone because of this. It is not logical.
32,367 died in automobile accidents in the US in 2011, but no one is trying to take away your car.
If the Newtown tragedy happened differently and the killer used his car to run over 20 children. Would you want new legislation to limit your access to automobiles?
I understand this is an emotional time, but how is this so difficult to understand?
Let me put it a different way.
Good regulation: Drive drunk and you can lose your right to drive or end up in prison.
Bad regulation: Drive drunk and your neighbor gets his car taken away.
"32,367 died in automobile accidents in the US in 2011, but no one is trying to take away your car."
Plenty of new regulations related to cars and highways every year to make them safer.
"If the Newtown tragedy happened differently and the killer used his car to run over 20 children. Would you want new legislation to limit your access to automobiles?'
Are you really asking that if reality was completely different would I maybe believe different things then I believed in this reality? Maybe. The Newtown tragedy is not a singular event. It's just the latest event.
"how is this so difficult to understand?"
How is the empirical fact that gun control works and limits deaths in many countries so hard for you to understand?
"England has a complete ban on guns. No UK citizen can carry a gun. Period. Not a one. Result? UK violent crime rate is 3 1/3 times higher than America. The FBI reports 386 violent crimes per 100,000 in the USA. The UK Home Office reports 1,361 violent crimes per 100,000 in England."
Those statistics are not apples to apples. Notably the UK started classifying common assault (no injury) as a violent crime which more than doubled the "violent crime" rate.
You might ask why the people who fed you this talking point used a clearly deceptive statistic instead of an obvious one like murder.
the definitions for “violent crime” are very different in the US and Britain, and the methodologies of the two statistics he cites are also different...
First, it should be noted that the figures Swann gives are out of date...
Second, and more importantly, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a “violent crime” as one of four specific offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
The British Home Office, by contrast, has a substantially different definition of violent crime. The British definition includes all “crimes against the person,” including simple assaults, all robberies, and all “sexual offenses,” as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and “forcible rapes.”
When you look at how this changes the meaning of “violent crime,” it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the US and the UK. You’re simply comparing two different sets of crimes.
Yea, people see what they are interested in. At the same time, I am really stoked by what I am learning as the Ruby Community "remembers" classic OO design.
Here are a few recent examples hinting that the Ruby community is moving on from "Fat models and skinny controllers" to the beginnings of really teaching each other about classic OO...
From the video around :30 seconds in, "...this is when surprises might happen. Any day could be the day that changed the world."
I am still looking for an answer as to how the world could be changed by the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. What are some possible outcomes for society? I do not doubt that it will change, and I agree fully with it's value, however, I can't find any specifics in what ways it might change or what new technologies might be created with or without the Higgs Boson.
Also, at a 9 Billion USD price tag, how were our governments convinced? There must be something beyond scientific intellectual curiosity. Those of us with this curiosity may be happy to pay for it, but how were politicians convinced? What value will this provide to the governments of the world who made the decision to purchase this answer.
I'm sure it's not this...
Scientists: "We need 9 Billion to find out if the Higgs Boson particle exists."
Governments: "OK, here is your 9 Billion."
... 15 years later
Scientists: "The answer is yes. The Higgs Boson does exist."
Governments: "Oh, that's really great."
Update: I understand and agree fully with the value of this research. I am asking if there are any specific technologies that are expected to be advanced or if it is just added knowledge that could lead anywhere. I am also wondering how it was explained to politicians who don't have specific interest in science.
Understanding of how things work, so we can bend them to our will.
Better understanding of the standard model will buy us many things, most of which we don't yet realise will be interesting, useful, fun, exciting, and important. Better understanding of the standard model will possibly give us:
* Quantum computers
* Room temperature superconductors
* Substances strong enough to build a space elevator
40 years ago we had no idea how to build 'planes that were bigger, stronger, faster, and more efficient than the ones we had, and yet people did the basic research anyway, just because they thought it might be useful. They found composite structures, and we got the 'planes and other things. The metals used in car engines have improved enormously, in part because of what was seen at the time as being basic research that might not really go anywhere.
But in the end it's basic science, and we don't always know how - or whether - it will repay itself. For every advance that has gained us something there are other efforts that have led nowhere, but we never know in advance which will be which.
That's the nature of research -- you don't know
what in hell you're doing. -- 'Doc' Edgerton
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be
called research, would it? -- Albert Einstein
So who knows what will come out of this. The research could give us teleportation, or Star Trek-style replicators, or dirt-cheap solar energy harvesting paints that cars can run on, or electricity storage devices, or plastics that can be made without oil, or entirely new substances, just as plastics once were.
I have no idea how old you are, but I'm fifty, and stuff exists now that didn't when I was in my teens, partly because of people doing basic research.
I understand (somewhat) and agree fully with the value of this research. (Great specifics by the way.) I am hearing from you that we have no idea what we will discover, but it could be anything and likely something really cool.
The question I have is really how it was explained to politicians and decision makers who are not scientific. Was it really, "with this research we could discover anything from teleportation to a better way to make toasters", or was it something more specific?
I currently see our governments doing everything they can to limit discovery and creativity because they don't understand basic science or the Internet. It is interesting and heartening to me that a project like this currently exists and is mostly not questioned.
I don't think the top politicians in each country had to sign off on this. More likely the money was already allocated to scientific research and there were people in charge of deciding how to spend it.
<cynical rant>To the extent that politicians did have to be persuaded, they were probably persuaded by other means than that of elucidating the potential scientific payoffs. They were probably persuaded using political arguments, i.e. how it would play with their voters. Politicians are not, in practice, guardians of a sacred trust. They operate by their own rules and for their own reasons.</cynical rant>
> I currently see our governments doing everything they can to limit discovery and creativity because they don't understand basic science or the Internet.
The truth is that it's easier for politicians to buy votes with handouts than it is for them to fund research in the hopes that an enlightened public will appreciate them for their foresight. Looks like they're correct... unfortunately.
My guess is that the politicians were sold on the unlimited energy that successful controlled fusion would provide.
As somebody once said: Any problem on Earth can be solved with the careful application of high explosives. The trick is not to be around when they go off.
The benefit of this is we get something that is invaluable, discovery. We discover things that may have no practical application at all, but we discovered it, then someone might come along in 1, 100, 10000 years that has a use for it, but only because it's been discovered.
X-rays, electricity, penicillin we're all discoved with no practical application in mind.
Not even remotely true about penicillin, I'm pretty sure that when Flemming discovered penicillin, since he was a biologist and a pharmacologist he had a pretty good idea of its practical application.
x-rays, maybe, but even electricity im doubtful of. While it may not have been possible then to predict all the uses of electricity, i'm pretty sure someone had the idea of using it's power to, well, power things...
He did the research, he published, and the publication sat for 12 years until a couple of other people came along, and tried to build on it by making a practical product out of it.
Also after penicillin was discovered, researchers going back found evidence that other scientists had encountered it, and had failed to see that it had potential.
About electricity, Maxwell (who unified electricity and magnetism in one set of equations) when asked to justify the value of his work famously replied, "To tell you the truth we don't do it because it is useful but because it's amusing." In retelling the story he added, "Would it be any good to ask a mother what practical use her baby is?"
This is a clear demonstration that the scientists studying electricity in the early days did not know what practical utility their work would have. (Though the connection between electricity and magnetism today drives generators and electric motors all over the world, and the prediction of electromagnetic waves lead to the understanding of what light really is, and to the development of the telegraph, radio, television, etc, etc.)
For thousands of years the only application electricity had was that you could rub fur and amber together and then they would attract small objects. The word electricity actually comes from the Greek word for amber.
So your point about Penicillin might be correct, but you are completely wrong about X-rays and electricity.
At a 9 Billion USD price tag, what are our governments buying for us? There must be something beyond scientific intellectual curiosity. Those of us with this curiosity may be happy to pay for it, but how were politicians convinced? What value will this provide to the governments of the world who made the decision to purchase this answer.
False dilemma. When we spend trillions of dollars a year to kill people in the name of stopping violence, 10^-3 of that for curiosity is not something that is rational to attack. Particularly when exploration for curiosity's sake has led to plenty of demonstrably beneficial results.
"Your wasting a lot of money here, so you shouldn't mind wasting a lesser amount here"
Government funding needs to justify itself, not against other uses for the money. The bills have come due and we need to cut out what isn't vital. 9 billion could have paid a lot of health insurance policies.
I'm glad they valued this, but it needs to be valuable based on its own merit.
The actual value of a government program is a meaningless thing because the calculations you do depend entirely upon what you or your cohort personally value.
The American military's V-22 tilt-rotor "Osprey" helicopter program will cost approximately $36B. A cursory web search will show that it is considered a deathtrap that does not meet most of its design objectives.
So is the value of a program to build suicide machines worth four times more than knowing more about how foundational reality is constructed? Blark, argh, divide by zero. If you get paid to build suicide machines, it's a valuable program. If you get paid to fly a suicide machine, it both is and it isn't. If you are watching someone who is flying a suicide machine die, it probably isn't. If you like science more than you like watching people die, no. If you like watching people die more than you like science, yes. On and on and over and over in limitless permutations multiplied by every taxpayer.
All you can say with certainty is that someone or some party in the course of a government process valued that process at some point enough to make it happen.
I would bet "knowing more about how foundational reality is constructed" is probably worth less to a lot of people than say research into the top 10 cause of death by disease.
I'm glad they chose to fund this, but my original point is that no government funding these days should survive unless it can be justified. We cannot keep running deficits.
Your "cursory web search" might want to include actual statistics on accidents particularly compared to the CH-46 it is replacing.
My example was pure hyperbole. :) But I think my point stands: any government program can be justified by some party, deficit or not. Even deficit spending itself is a virtue for some.
There is no test to separate pork from fiber where there is no fundamental accountability. Spending programs exist because spending programs exist.
Are you suggesting that research into the top 10 causes of death isn't a lot more than the $9 billion spent on the equipment needed to discover the Higgs?
The NIH gets $30B/yr[1]. I don't know where the $9B figure for the LHC came from, but I bet it's total cost, over what, 10-15 years?
Nope, not saying that at all, I was saying that an additional $9 billion on the top 10 might have been prioritized higher. Once again, I am glad they funded the LHC, but my thesis is that government spending needs to be cut to the bone until the deficit and unpaid liabilities are dealt with. Much like we cut spending after WWII.
Im not saying that. Im saying if you care about waste, quit attacking minor inefficiencies when instead, there is a giant one right there. I have no problem talking about whether some money spent on science has value, right after we deal with the huge money sink in other places. It's basic triage. Don't waste our time worrying about pocket change when you're burning hundred dollar bills because the smoke is pretty.
The problem with most government budgets is that most of the problems are the pocket change. All the little things need to be cleaned up to get at the bigger issues.
I'm not a mathematician, but I am pretty sure you can go by a rough order of magnitude scale... If you have gross headings that are many orders of magnitude larger than others, your best bet is to look in those large ones for waste first. Scientific research would have to be eliminated tens or hundreds of times over to get to a level of savings that could probably be removed easier from waste in headings like defense and law enforcement and corporate subsidy.
Mathematically, sure. Math isn't the problem in politics, territory is. All the little things add to people's territory and patronage. It also keeps people from making the big cuts. We need a culture change to spend the money responsibly and it will only happen when "it's only a couple of million" is removed from our vocabulary.
As an aside in 2011, Defense and international security assistance is 20% of the budget. Social Security spending was higher than that (731 vs 718 billion). Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP was a bit bigger at $769 billion. The rest of the safety net style programs was $466 billion. $230 billion was spent paying interest on the national debt.
I updated my comment to communicate better what I was asking. I do fully support this kind of research. I am interested in the technological directions and discoveries for society that this research is expected to provide. It seems odd that politicians who don't necessarily have specific interest in theoretical physics are convinced to fund a project of this size and scope without tangible benefits.
It's basic research. Some countries' politicians were convinced that you need basic research to do applied research. It's also a great international collaborative project, where subcontractors from many countries get actual money making contracts to build the required detectors, magnets, etc.
Without quantum mechanics exploration you wouldn’t have a transistor, which means no computer or television. Furthermore you can say goodbye to lasers and all the changes they brought to medical operations-for example all eye surgery today is done using lasers. So while the discovery of the Boson particle per se might not have a direct impact in our lives, the more we understand particle physics as a whole the better machines we will be able to build in the future which will definitely change the way we live.
Basically, we just keep discovering things like this until they flesh out our understanding of a whole bunch of interrelated domains enough to build a warp drive.
I am no physicist, but i have been following particle physics as a hobby. And as i understand it, there is this standard model which which describes how particles behave and groups them, and hence like periodic table (extreme simplification) helps predict particles that have not been discovered yet but that can be proved following the standard model and it's calculations. But There needs to be confirmation that standard model is itself correct. One way is to find particles that the model predicts. If they are found then we know that the standard model is in fact correct and the other implications can be that much more "correct". So Higgs boson will not only explain why/how matter has mass and hence makes everything possible but it will also re affirm that standard model is on track, for now.
> One way is to find particles that the model predicts. If they are found then we know that the standard model is in fact correct.
Actually, finding those particles doesn't tell us that the standard model is correct. Finding those particles just tells us that it doesn't have some specific errors.
One difference between science and math is that you can't prove anything "correct" in science.
One difference between science and math is that you can't prove anything "correct" in science.
To be fair, you can only prove something "correct" in math to the extent that it agrees with the underlying axioms. In broader scientific fields, an assertion is just as "correct" if it agrees with the underlying models.
In mathematics, you can challenge the validity of axioms, which is usually a pointless thing to do, or you can point out, as Goedel did, that some assertions will remain unprovable within any given framework of axioms. So the math guys know where they stand, at least.
In many areas of science, the experimental method is becoming less and less useful over time. Particle physicists need to know how well the Standard Model agrees with reality, because so much of their future work will depend on assumptions that can only be tested against the model. (We won't see a bigger-than-LHC facility constructed anytime soon, put it that way, and that was the case even before the recent global financial problems came to light.)
Similarly, the work of climatologists can be, and has been, attacked because it depends on models, and the map is not the territory. As with the Standard Model of particle physics, an assertion can be shown to be unequivocally true or false within the bounds of a given climate model, but not in reality, because we only have one Earth to experiment with. In both climatology and particle physics, the lab door is now locked. The models are all we have to go by, so it's really important that we get them right.
Well, mathematics is somewhat unique in that ultimately, it's purely detached from reality - it's purely conceptual.
When we can use it to model the things we percieve, that's great, but at it's most fundamental level, mathematics is not a natural science (if that's the right term) - it's a human construct - purely abstract.
But to be fair, when we say "prove" in common speech with regards to science, do we really need to say "science can't prove anything?" - every time? Most people get that on forums that discuss such things - "proven" in these things simply mean their theories checked out.
We'll never know what the universe really "IS" - we only know what we percieve, directly or indirectly,and what we can predict. It's still turtles, all the way down.
- not literally that it's an absolute truth - that's impossible, as you said, other than in mathematics.
I've had many dreams in which the rules of gravity no longer held, but I've never had a dream in which three things and four other things didn't make a total of seven things.
There's something more absolute and universal about math.
I've had a reality in which 0 (zero) things makes two things ... [particle-antiparticle pairs appearing in quantum fluctuations in vacuo in case that's too terse].
Similarly thousands of things can make up a single thing. [Like bosons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate].
Or in the case in point where you just stick various particles in a pot and pull out some other particles with corresponding energy. For example in beta decay a neutron changes to a proton emitting a W- particle which itself decays to an electron and electron-anti-neutrino (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beta_Negative_Decay.svg).
Ultimately maths is axiomatic, so not universal, and Godel shows that it's not absolute.
Yes, i think over simplification killed it. The existence of higgs will only tell us that the model was not wrong in it's prediction and will hence increase the credibility and chances of success of other predictions. I stand corrected.
We've reached the point in scientific discoveries where you can't expect an apple falling on a scientist's head to eventually lead to an explanation (I know this story isn't true). The proposed theory is more complex and therefore requires lots of money. You have no idea what this potential discovery could lead to 10, 20, 50, 200 years down the road. And neither does anybody, it could be a steal. How much is the truth worth (or a glimpse at why things happen)?
By the way, what was the common man's response when Newton first explained gravity? Probably, "Things fall, what more do you need to know"
This is actually a pretty shortsighted perspective. The understanding of the mechanism responsible for giving all particles the property of mass will have far reaching consequences for further research and technology in the future.
I'm pretty sure that the invention of much of the communication technologies we have today were not readily predicted in the mid-1800's when Maxwell was developing EM theory.
Part of the answer is a conscious decision on the EU level to 'become the best at science'. That sounds awfully vague and usually is an empty promise in politics, but in this case there was broad support for such an effort (plenty of money was available, the USA seemed to be slacking off, CERN had proven its worth etc etc).
The genius of this is the realization that browsers do not send the named anchor (technically "fragment identifier"[1]) to the server. Using the named anchor as the cryptographic key enables users to pass around simple URLs to encrypted data. Data is stored on the server, but the server never has access to the complete URL with the key, so it cannot decrypt it.
As others have pointed out, this doesn't protect the data from a compromised server, but I think it has a different motivation.
It appears the purpose of this is to reduce the liability of whoever is running the server. Perfect for magnet links and such.
This is another step in the right direction of protecting the web and its maintainers from legislation.
> It appears the purpose of this is to reduce the liability of whoever is running the server. Perfect for magnet links and such.
PasteBin itself is a DMCA notice magnet already for some very litigious people, as I know from having read through more public DMCA notices than most people would bother reading through. So if you're worried about legal liability, consult a lawyer to make sure that your technical solution would actually help you in court.
There's something called "willful blindness" that you might want to understand if you plan to run a PasteBin clone where people could be expected to post magnet links to pirate content. You could also do worse than to have a lawyer explain your DMCA obligations to you, too. If people start posting pirated stuff to your site, you're going to want to be very clear about them, lest you find out that you technically don't have DMCA safe harbor because you flubbed one of the requirements.
Sort of off-topic, but on the subject of using fragment identifiers to pass around secrets, Ben Adida used them to secure session cookies from eavesdroppers:
He uses a token in the fragment identifier to authenticate every request; since the fragment identifier never gets sent to the server, a passive attacker never sees it -- it's a nice trick.
True, but this isn't where you are going to store your credit card information. My guess is that this is a defense against those who want to control the Internet through legislation.
Imagine a world where SOPA had passed, and everyone who ran a website was legally responsible for everything that their users did.
In that scenario, one way for website operators to protect themselves is to make it impossible to know what their users are doing.
The 3rd party URL shorting service is not storing or associated with the encrypted data and is also not responsible for it.
So this may not be about private data so much as it is about protecting the freedom of information.
It would be pretty easy to build a tool to route around that type of law. I create a service that encrypts blobs of data (encryptmyblo.bs), and uses a (publicly defined somewhere) postMessage API to communicate that blob to and from a key value store provided by a third party. I have my friend set up a key value store service provider that stores and retrieves blobs (storemyblo.bs), including the facility to search for stored blobs of data based on binary strings.
Because the services exchange those KVPs via a postMessage API, neither service is actually communicating with one another directly or have a formal association. The user is effectively (via the browser) moving the data from one service to another. Since EncryptMyBlo.bs doesn't store any data, and StoreMyBlo.bs doesn't have visibility into the data, neither service would be in violation of those requirements.
No, because the goal isn't to protect the user's data from being "leaked", it's to protect the user from the hosting site (zerobin) being forced to take down their posts.
Quoth the project page;
"Admins can still remove a document upon injunction or infringement notice… but have no way to tell if the same document has been posted again."
And run the entire server out of memory. 64GB of ram is cheap on servers now; you boot from a write-protected flash drive, and everything is done in memory. If you power the box down, anything stored in ram is lost.
I believe that in almost all cases, the LEO tasked with seizing equipment in an operation are going to be ill-equipped to execute this attack. Now, if its the CIA or NSA after you, you have other problems.
When I tutor beginners in Rails, I always make them walk through this tutorial first. Step by step. Without using copy & paste.
I really like tutoring and I am more than happy to help folks who want to build the next big thing.
However, first I make people write down their idea, set it aside, and forget about it. I tell them not to try to adapt this tutorial to their own idea, but just follow it to the letter and build the example application. It doesn't take that long.
Before anything, you need to know what you need to know. This tutorial has been and continues to be a great way to learn much of what you need to know... then you can go build the next big thing.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/Live_8_Screens...