There's a new one for your nightmares.

Drowning in a thin-sheet of zero gravity water that slowly crawls over your head and face, that you cannot wipe away because you're wearing a space suit, that you cannot take off, because you are floating in space.

It's like something from fear factor. Imagine getting into a coffin with a window over your face, and you cannot move your arms/legs. And then you realize the coffin is full of tarantulas... because you feel them crawling up your body towards your face....

This guy keeping his cool is an excellent testament to the training they do back on the ground.

Reminds me of this article:

http://www.theonion.com/articl...

The original Kinect hardware was one of the fastest selling consumer electronics devices in history.

http://www.1up.com/news/kinect...

That was when it was an optional add-on.

My kids play X360 games via connect exclusively.

I mostly play FM4 on the 360, with a racing wheel. In fact, the only time a controller gets used is to navigate DVD menus.

The Standard Oil monopoly came about largely due to the efficiencies of Standard Oil.

Monopolies are probably not a natural result, but an exceptional case when some business leaders are just tremendously successful.

A monopoly, in and of itself, is not a bad thing nor harmful to consumers.

A monopoly being leveraged to over-charge its customers is bad. But is this situation sustainable?

Suppose that standard Oil had a 50% margin on its business.

Certainly someone else could have come along, operated on a 20% margin, and taken market share from Standard Oil.

This will happen in a free market.

It won't happen when Standard Oil is legally protected from competition.

In a free market, monopolies can happen, but they will not maintain predatory behavior unless they are legally protected.

You can read "Capitalism: The unknown ideal" for a longer explanation.

Streaming video is easier than downloading large programs

This is false. Another response to yours is worth reading, but I wanted to emphasize this point.

I don't have an expectation that once a program _starts_ downloading at a certain rate, that rate is maintained, _without interruption_, for 90 minutes.

That is precisely the expectation I have for video.

Think about all of the timeouts in the 7 layer OSI model. Can you even enumerate them?

If your goal is to deliver an uninterrupted stream of video, with no hiccups, a lot of things that the internet is designed to do can't actually take place. Say for instance your upstream ISP is multi-homed. Their current route to netflix is over route A. They also have a route B available. Route A dies. Does your movie start going over route B? Do you notice a hiccup while this happens? How long of a hiccup?

If I am building a video player, how much buffer to I put into the player to present the illusion that the stream was never interrupted and that the route change never happened?

Maybe I should blast down bits to you as fast as possible?

But that implies an unlimited buffer on the client device -- which is already a false assumption. And it means that I'm sending bytes that may not be necessary-- users can stop or fast forward playback.

When I was first reading the Stevens Book a long time ago, I was astonished by the UDP protocol. "Why wouldn't people want TCP all the time? It does more stuff for you, and has guaranteed delivery"

In fact, streaming media is precisely one case where udp is commonly used -- perhaps because controlling timeouts, and controlling which data you think is "current", requires more nuance than what TCP provides.

Actually, lets look at one of these in particular.

Let's look at "high crime rate"

Part of our current high crime rate is the rampant usage of illegal drugs in the US.

I think we can agree that there are negative outcomes here. General disregard for the law; some people don't manage their drug habits well; even people who manage their drug consumption well are doing harm to their body.

However, I'm of the opinion that what we do to police drugs is worse than any of the problems of the drug trade.

At this point, I would be willing to accept more drug usage (and some evidence indicate that doesn't actually happen when you decriminalize) because the enforcement of drug laws is so bad for our society.

So, in the case of drug crime -- the poison is better than the cure.

This, in essence, is why I am opposed to net neutrality. I hate comcast. I hate the government more. I can trust comcast to act in their self interest -- which is shaping traffic in a way that generates the least number of angry customers.

Contrastingly, I can't trust the government to do very much right. And I can be assured that whoever will work at the FCC that gets put in charge of policing ISPs will be one of two types of people:

1) won't have any idea how the internet actually works, and won't have any business trying to police practitioners of the evolving art/science of traffic management.

2) will be a former comcast exec, to try and get someone who doesn't suffer from the problems of #1. Of course, this will become yet another revolving door between regulation and industry, where regulation functions to protect incumbent interests

Basically, I look at the speed of innovation on the internet, and I look at the speed (and results) of federal government, and I don't see anyway for the latter to beneficially regulate the former.

As a side note, I do think that ISPs that benefit from locally granted monopoly powers (e.g. telco foo has a service monopoly for neighborhood blah) should come under local regulations in order to retain their legally granted monopoly privilege. And I think industry plays to crush municipal ISP/broadband should not only be laughed out of court, but the instigators of such suits should pay dearly for having brought them.

a post-Scarcity economic environment in the universe of Star Trek is impossible -- especially when you consider TNG and Cmdr Data.

All wealth is the application of human ingenuity to natural resources.

Resources in the universe are already consumed faster than they are produced. The uranium we have now is billions of years old. We have only been using the uranium deposits on Terra for about 70 years.

The hydrocarbon fuels on earth took somewhere between 10e4 and 10e7 years to form. We've depleted a massive amount of this resource in the last 150 years.

The main resource that limits the speed at which we can extract and consume resources to create new wealth is the amount of human labor required to create the wealth.

In other words, if we wanted to, we could mine all of the remaining coal in the world in a short amount of time; limited primarily to how much human labor we could allocate to this task.

Humans continue to improve the speed that some resource can be consumed by building tools, machines, etc, that increase their productivity.

Cmdr Data is, in a sense, the culmination of this effort. He is a synthetic human; more capable than other humans, and with (presumably) the ability to replace himself.

He is the singularity. Once he exists, there is no fundamental limit governing the rate at which the remainder of the universe's resources can be extracted and utilized.

All higher-order matter in the universe, whether it is uranium or hydrocarbons or anything else, represents a chemical battery of the only fundamental energy source -- star radiation.

Post singularity -- when machines can replicate themselves by consuming resources, to build more machines to consume more resources -- it is theoretically possible that all of the star-energy "batteries" (all higher-order matter) will have been consumed. At that point, the agents within the universe will be limited to consuming energy at the rate it is globally emitted by the stars they have access to, less capture efficiency losses.

Human conflict still exists in TNG, and cross-species conflict also exists.

Humans consume resources more quickly than humans or societies that they are in conflict with, to give them an advantage.

The fact that human ships with life support systems exist in the same universe with a super-human artificial intelligence suggest that resource consumption and production are not unlimited. There is still a limiting function.

Thus, resource scarcity still exists. The resource extraction singularity has not come to pass in TNG, despite the many advantages it would bring to those entities that were in conflict with other entities.

It's interesting to me that you lump these two together as if they are close cousins. To me they are opposites:
liberty advocate == liberal
social conservative == authoritarian
As a non-American this confusion seems to me to be behind much of the futility of US political discourse. As with most political confusions there are those who actively promote it.

Ok. Here's what I assert it means in the US.

"Conservative" - someone who has a preference for tradition -- for the aspects of society, culture, and governance that have worked up until now. Wishes to see these establishments continue; sees tampering or tinkering with them as dangerous radicalism unless there is a pressing need. Values equality of opportunity

"liberal" - someone who has no apparently preference for tradition. Agent of social change. Looking to tweak the assumptions and institutions of society. Values equality of outcomes.

Sadly, in the US, both groups are very willing to use authoritarian methods to suppress those they disagree with.

I'm a liberal in the Hayek sense.

It is usually not worthwhile to think about political groupings on a 1 dimensional axis. The Nolan chart and the Pournelle chart are both more interesting and offer greater understanding. For instance, on a Nolan chart I'm a pure libertarian. Though I self-identified earlier as a social conservative, that is not my governing philosophy.

On a Pournelle Chart, I am on the far left ("state as ultimate evil"), but somewhat unsure of where I fall on the y-axis. I find aspects of both Objectivism and classical anarchy desirable and interesting, yet they are at opposite ends of the axis on the Pournelle chart.

Critically, Most liberal politicians are NOT against abortion.

The much discussed GOP "war on women" has abortion rights as a central prong. It wouldn't really reinforce that narrative if the talking points were, "democrats and republicans feel about the same way about abortion", now would it?

Yes, I'm aware of the difference between anecdote and data. Don't be so asinine.

The point here is that people -- especially those who aren't political activists -- often vote by party brand more than by policy positions. I think the original contention was that the republican party primarily has a branding problem -- a well deserved one -- and that the majority of its people and positions aren't intolerably stupid (at least as far as politicians go)

The fact that such an amazingly hyped incumbent like Obama didn't have a much wider victory margin over such an underwhelming disappointment like Romney, should give a sense of how NOT cut and dry the GOP disadvantage is.

The GOP needs to make up some ground, but the problems are entirely of their own making, and solvable by them if they are honest about confronting them.

And, of course, in 30-40 years everyone currently running the GOP will be dead. So, reform will happen one way or another.

It's based on conversations with people that run polls at state fairs, etc.

They run into lots of people that are apolitical, and don't necessary identify with anyone.

Remember, the broad positions of the republican party aren't necessarily what gets the republicans into the headlines.

Your reply is at least as problematic is whatever your issue is with what I wrote. You don't describe what "mainstream" is, and you don't specify what issues you think are GOP issues that are contentious. But if I read between the lines and guess, even your claim is false.

For instance, republicans are lambasted by democrats for being anti-abortion. If you take at face value that republicans are anti-abortion, then it's a simple matter of asking, "ok, is that position against the mainstream" ?

Well, you can decide what the mainstream is, but on that particular issue, here is what one poll found:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/157...

The liberal position is often thought to be "abortion anytime, anywhere, any reason, all paid for by others"

There is very little support for that position according to gallup.

The republican position is _advertised_ as being "anyone who ever aborts for any reason should go to jail", but of course that's not the actual position. The republican position can best be described as "there should be some limits on abortion".

And that is the statement overwhelmingly the favorite on the gallup poll I mentioned.

If you write down a list of position statements and don't attach a brand/party to it, and then ask people what they agree/disagree with, republican _positions_ do pretty well.

Independent voters win elections. The politics that win in NYC don't win nationally.

The Republican brand is toxic, because of brand association with people like Akin. And the way you get Akin's and Akin like statements is that when you ask a republican to explain some particular policy/position, they double down with expressing some moral position that seems antiquated at best and offensive more commonly, or they wander off into insanity land.

These things just wreck the brand.

Furthermore, there is a huge struggle for the soul and the future of the republican party. The democrats have huge piles of young energized radicals. The active republicans are almost entirely senior citizens. The young, activist republicans are dominated by Ron Paul supporters -- who are much more socially tolerant than the rank and file, but who want much less government spending than the left can accept.

The party needs to take an active role in managing its brand better. When people like Akin open their mouths, the national party needs to excommunicate them loudly and immediately. "These views are not in keeping with the platforms and goals of the republican party or the republican vision for America". That kind of stuff.

Social conservatives (like myself) need to give up on ever being the majority party again. That ship has sailed. Republicans, liberty advocates, and social conservatives now must settle for the subset of things they want, because getting all of what we want is clearly off the table.

We're still arguing for what the right subset of things to go after is. The Tea Party, to its credit, mostly doesn't do moral/social advocacy or activism, and is mostly about the size of government and adherence to the constitution. That's good stuff.

On economic policy, the modern republican establishment is somewhere between democrat lite and corporo-fascist-enforcers (but, I repeat myself), and purging those elements of the party is going to be painful and take time, and result in lost elections due to infighting. But it has to happen.

I give Rand Paul a lot of credit for taking 80% of what people liked about his dad and making it palatable to 80% of the GOP establishment.

In a modern election, 80% support would be an unheard of landslide. So, say what you will about him, but he's saying the right things about the NSA, about drones, about limits on executive power, and a bunch of other things. He's one of the only republicans that is talking about cutting military spending -- consistently. He's been a huge critic of the TSA from the beginning. He's being wishy-washy on drug policy, but he has said a lot of the right things there as well.

If people could look past the tarnished brand, there's a lot to like about him.

Absent some other factor that is a deal-breaker, I'll support anyone who puts forward legislation to rein in the NSA and to tone down or stop the drug war.

The republicans could adopt these policies, stop talking about gay people and gay marriage, (or better yet, simply say, "we find no provision in the constitution that allows for a federal restriction on same sex marriage. Therefore, in the interest of promoting liberty for all Americans, we support complete government recognition of same sex marriage"), and adopt a "wait and see" approach on Obamacare ("we don't like it, we were against it, but the senate and the executive have rammed it through, so now we're going to focus on other matters while we see how it shakes out").

If they got rid of the things that kill their brand, and focused on the things the democrats aren't touching (drug war, civil liberties, military spending), I think there's some chance.

We have seen this before.

There is a vibrant, thriving CGM site. (CGM == community generated media).

An entity with money buys the site.

Things stay the same for a while. Invariably, the owning entity wants feature, UI, and usability changes made to their new property.

These changes aren't being made to serve the interests of the existing community.

Here's what happens.

Either, the community dissolves entirely, and something wonderful disappears and dies.

Or, the community mostly moves to a new site, which rallies around what people liked about the old site.

Here is a very specific example. There is a site called "Audiworld". It ran, for a very long time, a funny and antiquated forum software called "KAWF". Audiworld was the top destination on the English speaking internet for Audi enthusiasts. Absolutely excellent technical information about the cars, and many off-topic forums developed to serve the die-hard user community the site had.

Audiworld was bought by InternetBrands and converted to vBulletin. This was against the wishes and strong feedback from most of the cornerstone members of the community.

IB persisted and did the conversion.

Within a week or so, "Quattroworld" showed up as a competitor, and nearly ALL of the technical experts and cornerstone members dumped Audiworld and moved to Quattroworld.

Quattoworld simply chose to keep running the previous forum software.

Compare the two sites now:

The "converted" forum:
http://forums.audiworld.com/fo...

The rebellion forum:
http://forums.quattroworld.com...

Look at the information density in the topic listing on the KAWF based forum (the second one). The design is text heavy, information dense, not filled with ads and distractions.

It works on any device; it works on browsers from 10 years ago.

Now look at the vBulletin based forum.

Look at the quality of questions in the vBulletin form.

See any answers?

No, you don't.

Communities are the life of sites like slashdot. You piss off your community at your peril.

We are not interested in suffering so that you can expand your audience. We don't want an expanded audience. The people who should be here are here. The people who haven't found out about here yet will find out, and when they find it, they won't mind the design of the site.

How many other web forums does John Carmack post in? How many other forums get occasional visits from Linux developers? Where else do you see the occasional Microsoft and Apple employee talking about things candidly and without bashing each other?

Stack Exchange has excellent technical content and lots of very bright posters -- but it isn't a social community like this one.

When Classic is retired, and its inevitable replacement has lower information density and makes reading and participating more cumbersome, this community will leave.

Hopefully, it will go somewhere else that runs a fork of the classic code, and life will go on for us, the contributors.

But if not, then it will die entirely. The web will be a worse place; and I will consider myself worse off for the loss.

Your community doesn't need a site redesign. We haven't asked for it. We don't want it. So you're not doing it for us.

If you're not serving us, you've outlived your usefulness.

The internet routes around defects. You'd do well to remember that.

have you left any constructive comments in the Slashdot "blog" threads? That appears to be the official avenue by which they claim to want feedback, so duplicate your efforts over there.

I too am a classic user, and I don't much care for the beta interface. I left comments indicating what I wanted the UI to do that it wasn't currently doing, and why I still use the classic mode.

this is precisely how I use classic mode.

At one point, there was a newer mode where there was some kind of slider control that was supposed to be used to control what comments were displayed. I've never had that control work on any browser I've tried it with.

The ui showing on beta right now (as I write this comment) doesn't seem like an improvement. The outline boxes are distracting, the grey background is distracting. The lack of contrast in the UI makes it mentally taxing to navigate the structure of the conversation.

Can I get the following UI points ?
- black text on white background
- contrasting background color for comment "headers" (title, moderation score, etc)

Thanks for your non-hyperbolic response.

I'm something of an anarcho-capitalist, and so I am also more anti-regulation than anyone currently sitting in congress.

The problem is that, as you and others have noted, we don't have a free market for last-mile competition. I don't get to argue that "if the market is free, competition fixes all problems" because the market isn't free.

I just recently left a jurisdiction where there was one Telco provider and one cable provider. At least in the cable-co situation, they were given a local monopoly.

The phone co was an ILEC and under ILEC rules. The cable company was not. But even though the Telco was operating under ILEC rules, their DSLAMS were what they were. There was fiber in the ground they owned, copper to my house, etc, but there was no CLEC that could come in and somehow push more bits down that wire to me faster. Sure, I didn't have to put up with the Telco's rules as far as open ports or whatever if I used a different transit provider, but nobody could come and make that connection faster for me -- only the ILEC.

I've been in the situation before where my wire was provisioned by the local Telco and my IP transit was through somebody else. And to be honest, it sucked. The two companies perpetually blamed each other anytime I couldn't access the interwebs.

Anyway, local (and national) regulation has created a huge barrier for new market entrants that want to tackle the last mile problem. And that means anyone in the last mile business should expect to get regulated good and hard. They've been given a state-protected monopoly, they should enjoy some state-mandated ass-reaming.

Regarding the FCC -- I'm really happy the FCC lost in court. If there are going to be new laws, they need to be made by the legislature.

I think having this go through the congress is the right approach. I'm in favor of having ISPs that don't throttle the content I want or charge me / providers more for certain type of content, but I'm against Net Neutrality laws/regs as I understand them. I don't think injecting govt into this problem space, at this time, is a net win. I think it lets certain organizations get their claws into things that are generally working well enough, and we're going to bitterly regret it if we let them do that right now.

The bottom line, I guess, is this practical consideration: Who do you think works for the federal government that has any business telling Comcast how it should do traffic shaping?

My preferred outcome would be for more last mile competition, with mixes of public and private action according to the tastes of different communities.

I'll have an incentive to not be honest about the speed that my car broadcasts to your car.

If the system doesn't broadcast speed directly, but broadcasts position in such a way that speed can be inferred, I'll have an incentive to not be honest about that either.

Since I'm talking about older cars that will need retrofit units, what stops me from making a unit that is selectively dishonest about what it's doing ?

Why do you think it will be easy to locate someone that is jamming a signal? RF is hard, and, this claim seems to conflict with the claim you make that it will not be possible to use this technology to identify other vehicles.