Historically, the arts have been funded by patronage. The commercialization of the arts is a fairly recent phenomenon. Yes, many great artists have died penniless with their genius unrecognized. But that means they created out of love for their art and the need to express their genius not out of a desire for financial renumeration. In addition, original works of art are far more valuable than reproductions. So not only is there an innate desire in true creators to create, there is also an innate desire in others to reward this creation, after the fact. There is joy in the act of creation and there is joy in others when they appreciate what was created. I've been in movie theaters where the audience stood up and gave the movie standing ovation even though none of the creators were there to hear the applause. There is no doubt that at that point in time many people would have paid generously if making a payment was as easy as tapping a button on their phone. Films that moved people would be rewarded.

The notion that patronage does not work is only in the context of a world where the arts have been bastardized and exploited for monetary gain. Of course people who are embedded in the commercialization model will have a difficult time making the transition. This is a feature not a bug. It would be a benefit to have the exploiters weeded out so more genuine creation and genius can flourish. It is insane to for us to give the role of story-teller to Hollywood writers. They are not the people who should be teaching our children about relationships. Sex sells. Violence sells. But these are not the stories and myths we want our children to be raised on. The information we pass on to the next generation should not be based primarily on what is most titillating.

As the cost to copy, store, and transmit information continues to plummet, the commercialization model becomes less and less tenable, requiring draconian measure to give content owners more and more control over all aspects of information transfer and processing. It would require a fascist dictatorship over information.

OTOH, the patronage model becomes easier as information technology advances. It can be fueled by instant micropayments so everyone who chooses to can participate and vote with their wallets. In the long run it is the only sensible approach. But even in the short term, it is the only way I know of to stem the tide of cultural exploitation and destruction that the commercialization of the arts has caused.

Culture belongs to everybody. It is our birthright and it is the lifeblood of our civilization. It is crazy to lock it up tightly due to the fact that the cost of information transfer and storage is getting close to zero. The cost to our society and to our civilization for this lock-up is enormous because we are denying our children and our children's children their birthright. It is a form of cultural and societal suicide. The miracle of life is based on passing genetic information from one generation to the next. Human beings were able to supercharge this passing on of information by creating side-channels: art, language, history, science and the humanities, even religion. Evolution in these side-channel information transfers was staggeringly fast compared to genetic evolution. Stifling this form of evolution is the ultimate triumph of mediocrity over genius.

Devaluing content until mercenary content creation gets starved out would be a great service to our culture and to humanity in general. Right now a bunch of ass-hats are raping our culture based on the ridiculous notion that anything that makes a buck is good and virtuous.

For example, imagine if people paid for films (or other content) after having experienced it. Micopayments could be seen as a form of applause. There would be much less demand for massive misleading advertising campaigns since misleading consumers would result in lowering revenue. In addition, these payments would be a form of voting for what future content gets created. If some people choose to take a free ride and never pay for anything, that's perfectly fine. It does not harm anyone else and it removes the freeloaders from the content creation gene pool. It is a win win.

The real evil of these copyright extremist is not that they are ripping us all off (which they are) the real evil is they are destroying our culture, replacing things made from love with things made solely (or mostly) to exploit others. They thrive in an unfair and unfree market where consumers have to buy their products like buying a pig in a poke. When it comes down to it, what they are afraid of and what they are fighting against is to have their products evaluated based on merit instead of a rigged system that brain washes people with massive advertising campaigns. In our totally upside down society, advertising is a business expense so we are subsidizing corporations to gobble up our limited time and attention.

It should be the other way around. If corporations want a piece of my limited time and attention then they should have to pay me to get it, just like I would pay a lawyer or a doctor to get their time and attention. There is no reason for corporations to have free access to these valuable resources. Your time and attention are limited and valuable. It is ridiculous that we are subsidizing corporations to consume them.

Agreed. Have you tried Glances? In some ways it is like htop on steroids.

The first thing I install is a system monitor.

I like to keep a close eye on CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, and network usage. Without that information it feels like I'm flying blind. It is often important on a new system when I don't know what is running and consuming resources.

I talked about the problem of highly radioactive water spewing from Fukushima back in April 2011:

Of course I was called an alarmist and other things for bringing this up back then.

Clearly what they had discovered by April 1 2011 was just the tip of the iceberg. As I had predicted, it is the radioactive water that is the main cause for concern.

Einstein was wrong. DICE does play God with the Slashdot-verse.

Algorithmic information theory (AIT) explains very clearly and simply why we are still writing text-based code. AIT is based on the idea of measuring the amount of information in a series of bits (or bytes or however you want to chunk it) based on the size of the smallest possible program that can create the series.

There are simply not enough bits of information in a GUI based coding system to create the algorithms we want/need to create. Even though almost all programming languages have a lot of redundancy built-in in order to make them easier to understand, programs written in these languages still have a much greater amount of information than what is available by simple point-and-click which is equivalent to a series of multiple choice questions. For example 80 multiple choice questions with 100 options in each question only give you the information contained in a line of 80 ASCII characters.

I believe people have tried to make universal programming languages. I don't think any of them caught on in the sense of replacing coding in real programming languages. And for very good reasons. One problem is the conflict between simpler and more robust. Shorter programs require higher information density and hence less redundancy and robustness. If you want to make a language simpler by reducing the number of keywords and special symbols then you will force programs to be longer or harder to understand or both. In the limit of the shortest program possible, the program itself appears to be a random series of bits, every one of which is significant. If there is any pattern or bias in the bits then it is not the shortest possible program.

OTOH, some higher level-languages such as R or MatLab (Octave) do make it easier to express many algorithms. This is mostly because they have vector and matrix data types. Their forerunner in many ways was APL which has a fairly high information density partly because it uses a wider range of characters than are available in ASCII. Perhaps you should learn R or Matlab or maybe even Mathematica. These languages give you a high-level means of expressing algorithms in a way that computers can understand.

The summary reminds me of the lollipop Perlisim:

That is probably associated with the fact that 25% of them are forced to use it:

Given how obviously horrible the beta design is, this sentiment on the best way to test drive it is quite galling. OTOH, I am thankful they are not responsible for design airplanes or automobiles:

It has occured to me that maybe they trying to alienate the slashdot community

Welcome to the new USA-beta!

We've had only a few major redesigns since 1776; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta government that will control our country's future.

Excellent comment. OTOH, my cynical side is suspicious of how tone-deaf the site owners seem to be. It makes me wonder if the following item was on an NSA todo list somewhere:

AC opined:

Prime Minister John Key, who is in charge of GCSB said:

Key's office confirmed that Key was talking about the video that his lawyers had claimed was deleted.

AC opined:

Here are some links from the fine article showing that the government and the police have already admitted malfeasance:

Police Admit That NZ Spy Agency Illegally Spied On Kim Dotcom

NZ Prime Minister Admits That The Government Illegally Wiretapped Megaupload Employees

Oddly enough you are correct that these admissions of malfeasance do put the credibility of the police and the Prime Minister at risk although that is probably not what you meant.

And in conclusion: FUCK BETA!

The fine article claims:

I am a physicist and I don't think a useful quantum computer will ever emerge. The problem is very simple. In order for a quantum system to calculate exponentially faster than a classical system, it must contain exponentially more useful information which makes it exponentially more sensitive to noise. An early computer researcher (perhaps Jon von Neumann) used a similar argument to conclude that digital computers would eventually supersede analog computers because the precision of analog computers is limited by the noise floor which is very hard to beat back while you can make digital systems arbitrarily more precise by simply adding more circuits (or more time).

In simple terms, for every extra decimal digit you want to add to the size of a number you can factor with a quantum computer you need to reduce the effect of noise by roughly a factor of 10. I don't think this is greatly different from the limitation of classical computers where for every decimal digit you want to add to the size of numbers you want to factor you must multiply the time/size of computation by roughly a factor of 10.

Despite this reservation, I think we should continue funding research in quantum computing.

Saying freedom is more important than safety does not imply that safety is unimportant just like Saying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is taller than Shaquille O'Neal does imply Shaq is not tall.

Again, you are confusing heat and temperature. The input is energy (heat), the input is not temperature. No one who has grasped basic thermodynamics would take your argument seriously after that fundamental mistake. You seem to be just stringing together scientific jargon in a nonsensical way to reach a conclusion you like.

In a different post you claim that convection plays a significant role in the heat loss of the Earth. The upper atmosphere is close to being a vacuum. At a high enough altitude the amount of heat transfer due to conduction and convection is negligible. Do yourself a favor and Google(thermosphere).

You claimed the fine Nature article was wrong because it was based on radiative forcing yet you have never defined what you mean by that term. Your definition seems to be at odds with the definition given by the Wikipedia. The term was never used in the article nor was it used in the two references you gave to back up your claim that radiative forcing had been debunked.

Again, I ask, in the Earth-Sun system what is the "input" temperature if it is not the temperature of the surface of the Sun?

And BTW I do have a Ph.D. in physics. A Nobel Laureate was the chairman of my thesis defense and I've study thermodynamics with some of the leading experts in the world.

***click***

0) Requiring your arguments to be in accord with basic physics is not nit picking.

1) The Earth is not in thermal equilibrium with the Sun. If it were then it would be at the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. The only reason life can exist on Earth is because of the gradient caused by the Earth not being in thermal equilibrium with the Sun.

2) A black body is not the same thing as a perfect insulator. They are opposites in a way. A perfect insulator would block all radiative cooling (or else it would not be a very good insulator). My point is that the limiting temperature is a function of the insulating properties of the Earth. It is not an intrinsic property of the strength of solar heating.

If you treat the Earth as a black body you are explicitly ignoring all insulation effects. IOW you are ignoring all greenhouse effects. In simple layman's terms, how hot something gets when it is left out in the sun depends greatly on how well it is insulated. Even the temperature inside a conventional greenhouse is highly dependent on how well it is insulated.

3) When you say a black body in equilibrium radiates the same amount of energy it absorbs, you seem to be repeating the definition of radiative forcing, not debunking it.

If you believe there is a limiting temperature to the strength of solar heating that is much less than the temperature of the surface of the Sun, please tell us what that temperature limit is.

Neither of the fine articles linked to in the summary nor either or your two references even mention radiative forcing. If you have sources that don't conflict with basic physics which debunk whatever it is you mean by radiative forcing I would like to see them. Perhaps part of the problem is that your definition of radiative forcing differs from the definition given by the Wikipedia. So far you have given nothing more than your opinion that the authors of the Nature article made a serious (and probably job-threatening) mistake.